Latest News: From all Sources
W3C pulls former Novell CTO for CEO spot
Joab Jackson
Business Week – March 9, 2010: Filling a position left open since 2008, former Novell CTO Jeffrey Jaffe has taken on the role of chief executive officer for the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).
Jaffe will work alongside Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who will remain the organization's director. While Berners-Lee will concentrate primarily on the direction of the W3C's standards, Jaffe will look to streamline the W3C process of working with members.... ...Full Story
Industry Coalition Plans Interoperability Program with Certification
William Jackson
Government Computer News – March 8, 2010: The Initiative for Open Authentication, an industry coalition promoting
the use of open standards for interoperable strong authentication, used
its annual meeting at this week's RSA Security Conference to discuss
plans for an interoperability certification program.
...The OATH Certification Program is intended to provide assurance to
customers that products implementing OATH standards and technologies
will function as expected and interoperate with each other. This will
enable customers to deploy 'best of breed' solutions consisting of various
OATH 'certified' authentication devices such as tokens and servers from
different providers... OATH has taken a modular approach and intends to
develop the profiles to address the different OATH specifications as
applied to the identified components of the OATH Reference Architecture.... ...Full Story
The Art of Narrative and the Semantic Web
Kurt Cagle
DevX.com – March 8, 2010: ...the vast majority of content that is developed on
the web [today] falls more properly into the realm of messages rather than
documents -- Facebook and Twitter notifications, resources generated
from rapidly changing databases, documents in which narrative content
are embedded within larger data structures, RSS and Atom feeds, KML
(ironically, Google Earth and Google Maps) documents and so forth.
Thus, a URL no longer contains a static narrative -- it contains a
constantly changing message....XML technologies are now about a
decade old, XQuery and XML Database tools are just now really becoming
main stream. Semantic Web technologies are beginning to emerge, but
widespread adoption is likely to still be two to three years out. However,
publishing and journalism are definitely at the forefront of that curve,
because these areas in particular are most sensitive to the need to both
provide enjoyable news content and the need to make such stories
manipulatable and discoverable within the ever increasing sophistication
and scope of the web itself. The narrative thread has become a rich,
interwoven tapestry, illuminated by brilliant strands of meaning,
semantics and abstraction, turning our writings into conversations, and
from there into dialogs.... ...Full Story
nuBridges Forms Tokenization Standards Group
Press Release
nuBridges.com – March 5, 2010: nuBridges announced today that it is leading the formation of a Tokenization Standards Organization to develop industry standards for the tokenization data security model. With a growing variety of solutions being developed and implemented around data tokenization, nuBridges invites tokenization providers to work together toward creating a single standard that will ensure a high level of security and interoperability.
The need for a Tokenization Standards Organization is the result of a rapid increase in the acceptance of tokenization as a security model for guarding payment card information as well as personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI) during the past year. Another impacting trend is the use of tokenization to reduce scope for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) audits....The initial goal of the Tokenization Standards Organization is to define an interoperable standard to address the business processes associated with tokens and tokenization functions.... ...Full Story
Google, PayPal, Equifax, Others Form Open Identity Exchange
Thomas Claburn
InformationWeek – March 5, 2010: Google, PayPal, Equifax, VeriSign, Verizon, CA, and Booz Allen Hamilton
on Wednesday [2010-03-03] at the RSA 2010 Conference announced that they
have formed a non-profit organization to oversee the exchange of online
identity credentials on public and private sector Web sites. The
organization, The Open Identity Exchange (OIX), will serve as a trust
framework provider. A trust framework is a certification program that
allows organizations and individuals to exchange digital credentials
and to trust the identity, security, and privacy assertions associated
with those credentials....
With help from the OpenID Foundation and the Information Card Foundation,
OIX has been authorized to serve as a trust framework for the U.S.
government. It will certify identity management providers to make sure
they meet federal standards. Google, Equifax, and PayPal will be the
first three identity providers to issue digital identity credentials
as a way to enable privacy-protected registration and login at U.S.
government Web sites. Verizon is expected to be the fourth, once it
completes the certification process....This trust framework will enable
the American public to participate in open, transparent and participatory
government while maintaining full control of how much or how little
personal information they share with federal websites at all times.... ...Full Story
Novell's buyout and its effect on the industry
Matt Asay
Canonical – March 4, 2010: ...I've been arguing for years that the parts of Novell are more valuable separate than together....This makes it an interesting ante for Oracle or someone else to play in the enterprise software market.
Would Elliott sell? Almost certainly....Let the bidding begin. ...Full Story
Elliot Associates' worrisome Novell plans
Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols
ComputerWorld Blogs – March 4, 2010: Elliot Associates L.P., a hedge fund, which claims to already own 8.5% of Novell's stock made an unsolicited bid to buy the Linux company lock, stock, and code for $1.8 billion on March 2nd. This move may be good for Novell stock owners, but I fear it may be death for Novell's commercial SUSE Linux and community openSUSE distributions.
Some people in the know, like Canonical's COO Matt Asay think this deal could work for SUSE. In his view, Elliot would do well to sell off Novell's Linux division.
I wish I could agree with him, but I looked at Elliot Associates' past history of taking "an activist approach to investing, frequently amassing significant but minority stakes in distressed or under performing companies and attempting to foment change," and I don't like what I see.... ...Full Story
ANSI Submits Comments on Chinese Draft Standard on Inclusion of Patents in National Standards
ANSI.org – March 4, 2010: The American National Standards Institute (ANSI), coordinator of the U.S. standards and conformity assessment system, has submitted comments on a draft document concerning standards and intellectual property that was issued by the China National Institute of Standardization (CNIS), a non-profit national body that conducts standardization-related research activities.
Issued in January 2009, the CNIS document, “Guide for Implementation of the Inclusion of Patents in National Standards,” is a key element in a proposal put forth by the Standardization Administration of China (SAC) in November 2009, “Interim Provisions on Formulation and Revision of Patent-Related National Standards.” All interested stakeholders were invited to review and comment upon the CNIS document on or before March 1, 2010....In general, ANSI supports China™s efforts to address the inclusion of technology covered by patent claims in Chinese National Standards. But some portions of the CNIS Guide raised questions and concerns for U.S. stakeholders, including articles addressing patent-related disclosures from non-participants and language relating to “essential patents.”
In addition, U.S. stakeholders felt that the final CNIS Guide should appropriately balance the interests of those who will implement the standard with the interests and voluntary cooperation of those who own the intellectual property rights.... ...Full Story
Cloud Security Alliance To Tackle Cloud Standards
Charles Babcock
Charles Babcock – March 4, 2010: Novell and the Cloud Security Alliance have announced a vendor-neutral "Trusted Cloud Initiative" for developing standards and certification of cloud security, compliance, identity management and other best practices.
While cloud computing is a popular topic, it lacks a set of well-defined terms and standards that tell prospective users concrete information about the environment they're about to adopt....
If a prospective cloud user and a vendor talk about level three security in the cloud, one may have a completely different idea of what the other is saying. There are no defined levels of security in cloud computing, and it's difficult to get a discussion going when one party can't be sure of the terms that the other is using. The Trusted Cloud Initiative is aimed in part at creating a shared set of standards that can be verified by neutral third parties....The initiative will define a roadmap and certification criteria for secure cloud computing...."alliance will be responsible for "assembling the reference model and certification criteria from existing standards, and we we will complete it in 2010,"... ...Full Story
Admiral Ackbar
SFGate.com – March 3, 2010: On February 24th, this space reported that Admiral Ackbar, The Supreme Commander of the Rebel Alliance [AU: and, incidentally, a large squid-like alien] and designer of the B-Wing Star Fighter in Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi was the front-runner in the race for a new mascot for the Ole Miss Rebels. [Me again: the Rebels are the sports teams of the University of Mississippi]
The reason for the desire for a new mascot is simple: Colonel Reb reminds many of the Old South. The Empire. Slavery. And many other unpleasant things.
The idea of Admiral Ackbar as mascot is more than just a nod to popular culture, it's a subversive attempt to actually place a real rebel symbol as representing the university.
Admiral Ackbar by his very face and name is unconventional and his election as mascot for Ole Miss would speak volumes for how far "The South" has really come.... ...Full Story
First Test Labs for Next-Generation Internet Protocol (IPv6) Are Accredited
NIST Techbeat – March 3, 2010: The first two laboratories have recently completed accreditation to provide testing services for the USGv6 Program. The USGv6 Program, developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), provides the basis for expressing U.S. government requirements for Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) technologies and for testing that commercial products meet those requirements. The availability of commercial testing services is an important step towards the U.S. government™s use of USGv6 acquisition tools, beginning in July 2010.
The current Internet Protocol (IPv4) provides the basic communication service that inter-connects the global set of networks that comprise the Internet. Designed in the early 1970s, IPv4 is rapidly running out of unassigned, globally unique network addresses. IPv6 was designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a next-generation replacement for IPv4. With a vastly larger address space, IPv6 will enable the Internet to grow unbounded for the foreseeable future.
The USGv6 Program is intended to assist federal government IT users and acqusition authorities by providing a framework to express and test IPv6 requirements for U.S. government procurements.... ...Full Story
Freescale Places New Bet on the E-Reader Market
Brad Stone
NYTimes.com/Bits – March 3, 2010: Freescale Semiconductor, the chip maker, is introducing a new microprocessor on Monday that it says will improve the performance and lower the cost of black-and-white e-reading devices....All of that, of course, assumes that there still will be a market for devices with black-and-white E Ink screens, once more versatile color tablets hit the market from Apple and other companies....Mr. Burchers said the i.MX508 processor would be in devices by the end of the year. ...Full Story
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