Latest News
ANSI Accreditation to Support Smart Grid Testing and Certification FrameworkANSI.org February 3, 2012 - The American National Standards Institute (ANSI), coordinator of the U.S. standards and conformity assessment system, is playing a key role in the national push for a robust, reliable, and interoperable smart grid for the United States....
Taking the next step forward in the grid’s development, the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP)...released today version 2.0 of the testing and certification framework for the North American electric power industry. Developed with input from ANSI, the framework lays out a plan to enhance the quality of secure and interoperable smart grid products and significantly reduce their installation cost in the smart grid....ANSI has committed to support the implementation of the IPRM Framework as an internationally recognized accrediting organization.
ANSI accreditation offers a formal, third-party process for review and recognition of certification programs....
...Full StoryIETF closer to finalizing ID standard to secure mobile apps, APIs
John Fontana
ZDNet/Identity February 2, 2012 - By | January 23, 2012, 11:52am PST
Summary: OAuth 2.0, a key framework for securing native mobile applications and APIs, Monday moved a step from being declared an official Internet Engineering Task Force standard. The authentication/authorization framework, which aids in cloud security, lays out an identity access token exchange in lieu of username and password....The IETF is also working on standards to join OAuth 2.0 and the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) that is popular today in enterprise identity management installations and single sign-on between enterprises and software-as-a-service and other applications. ...Full Story
Google's SPDY Incorporated Into Next-Gen HTML, Offers TCP Enhancements
Joel Hruska
Hot Hardware February 1, 2012 - Google's efforts to improve Internet efficiency through the development of the SPDY (pronounced "speedy") protocol got a major boost today when the chairman of the HTTP Working Group (HTTPbis), Mark Nottingham, called for it to be included in the HTTP 2.0 standard. SPDY is a protocol that's already used to a certain degree online; formal incorporation into the next-generation standard would improve its chances of being generally adopted.
SPDY's goal is to reduce web page load times through the use of header compression, packet prioritization, and multiplexing (meaning combining multiple requests into a single connection). By default, a web browser opens an individual connection for each and every page request, which can lead to tremendous inefficiencies....Google has also fielded a proposal to accelerate and streamline the venerable TCP protocol.... ...Full Story
New Industry Collaboration Validates Need for Automated Demand Response Systems
Press Release
Z-Wave Alliance/Open ADR February 1, 2012 - The Z-Wave Alliance, the world's largest ecosystem of interoperable wireless control solutions, and OpenADR Alliance, a nonprofit corporation created to foster the development, adoption and compliance of a Smart Grid standard known as Open Automated Demand Response (OpenADR), today announced from DistribuTECH (Booth #1627) the signing of a liaison agreement to collaborate on compliance and interoperability programs to ensure successful market deployment of the OpenADR 2.0 standard....Z-Wave is an international standard for low-power RF mesh network communication and is used for building area communications enabling products such as; gateways, thermostats, lighting controls, window and shade controls, home energy displays, smart appliances and load controls to form intelligent networks. Z-Wave enabled products represent the world's largest ecosystem of interoperable smart products. ...Full Story
IBM to close down Symphony, its OpenOffice fork
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
ZDNet January 31, 2012 - In a brief note, Ed Brill, an IBM product line manager, announced that IBM has likely seen its last release of Symphony, its OpenOffice fork....
In his blog posting, Brill wrote:...This will also likely be the last release of IBM’s own fork of the OpenOffice codebase. Our energy from here is going into the Apache OpenOffice project, and we expect to distribute an “IBM edition” of Apache OpenOffice in the future. We have contributed the Lotus Symphony code into the OpenOffice project, along with human resource across development/product management/marketing organizations....What does this mean for users? If you’re a Symphony user, I see little reason to worry. Call it Symphony or call it Apache OpenOffice the IBM Edition, you’ll still have IBM office suite support. For other suite users, I see this as just one more bit of proof that LibreOffice, not OpenOffice, represents the future of open-source office suites. ...Full Story
EU draft guide standards and procurement aims to reduce vendor lock-in
EC Joinup January 31, 2012 - "The appropriate use of standards will help alleviate lock-in", says a draft guideline prepared for the European Commission, on the link between ICT standardisation and public procurement....According to a survey done in preparation to the guideline, around 40 per cent of public administrations report some degree of vendor lock-in. "This can prevent authorities from switching to optimal solutions and making best use of public funds."
IT systems designed for citizens’ use that are based on proprietary technologies which cannot be implemented by competitors, will restrict the choice that citizens have in the way they interact with the public authority, the guide explains. "For example, a public website that can only be accessed through a specific Web browser will oblige citizens to use that specific browser. This can have a number of undesirable effects, including limiting competition in the ICT market."
Symptoms of lock-in include the use of specific brand names of products in tender descriptions and requests for backward compatibility with proprietary systems, of which only a few suppliers have knowledge. These practices can limit competition in the IT market.... ...Full Story
Open public data can drive growth in all sectors
Guardian.co.uk January 31, 2012 - Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude recently argued that access to data can curb public spending; but it should also be an integral part of a more ambitious growth agenda for the UK....
The autumn statement, which announced the Open Data Institute, demonstrated the government's idea that public data – produced, collected or paid for by public bodies – can deliver economic and societal benefits.
The European Commission also published its open data strategy in December....Widening access to public data, regardless of origin or volume, is a necessary first step towards deriving insights to guide policy decisions and create business opportunities.... ...Full Story
France launches open data portal
The H Open January 31, 2012 - France has launched a beta version of an open data portal under the domain data.gouv....the web site, which launched on 5 December 2011, makes government data available to the public free of charge and without restrictions. The portal currently provides access to around 350,000 government records,...The data published at data.gouv.fr is released under an open licence (License Ouverte)French language link which allows the data to be used for any purpose....Businesses, researchers and citizens are being called upon to develop new uses for this public data.
The objective of the initiative is to increase transparency at government agencies by providing the public with access to the data that the government uses as the basis for its decision making.... ...Full Story
How Apple is sabotaging an open standard for digital books
Ed Bott
ZDNet January 30, 2012 - Apple has built its iBooks platform on the back of an open standard. With last week’s introduction of iBooks 2.0 and the free iBooks Author software for Mac OS X, Apple is deliberately locking out that popular open standard....If you read, write, or publish digital books, you should be concerned.... ...Full Story
Leading Email Senders and Providers to Combat Email Phishing through DMARC.org
Press Release
DMARC.org January 30, 2012 - Fifteen leading email service and technology providers are today announcing DMARC.org, a technical working group that has been developing standards for reducing the threat of deceptive emails, such as spam and phishing. DMARC.org draws upon a history of private industry collaboration with 18 months of dedicated work, to outline an enhanced vision for email authentication that can scale up to today's Internet needs. The group's work includes a draft specification that helps create a feedback loop between legitimate email senders and receivers to make impersonation more difficult for phishers trying to send fraudulent email....The DMARC specification addresses concerns that have traditionally hindered widespread deployment of an authenticated, trusted email ecosystem. Today, email receivers lack a reliable way to know the extent to which an email sender uses standards like SPF and DKIM for authenticating their messages. As a result, providers must rely on complex and imperfect measurements to separate legitimate unauthenticated messages sent by the domain owner from fraudulent phishing messages sent by a scammer.
By introducing a standards-based framework, DMARC has defined a more comprehensive and integrated way for email senders to introduce email authentication technologies into their infrastructure. For example, a sender could set policies to easily request a provider to discard unauthenticated email in order to block phishing attacks. The specification also creates a mechanism for email providers to send detailed reports back to email senders to help catch any gaps in the authentication system. This feedback loop raises the trust level within the email ecosystem and makes it easier to detect and stop phishing attempts....After gathering data and input from field usage of the technology, DMARC.org intends to submit its DMARC specification to the IETF for standardization. Interested organizations are encouraged to read the specification, join the dmarc-discuss mailing list at www.dmarc.org, and begin testing and deploying email authentication standards SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.... ...Full Story
