August 17, 2009 6:01 AM PDT
How 10 digits will end privacy as we know it
by Ari Juels (Guest columnist CNET News)

Internet denizens and urban dwellers alike need to recognize that an era of anonymity is ending.
The population of the world stands at about 7 billion. So it takes only 10 digits to label each human being on the planet uniquely.

This simple arithmetic observation offers powerful insight into the limits of privacy. It dictates something we might call the 10-Digit Rule: just 10 digits or so of distinctive personal information are enough to identify you uniquely. They’re enough to strip away your anonymity on the Internet or call out your name as you walk down the street. The 10-Digit Rule means that as our electronic gadgets grow chattier, and databases swell, we must accept that in most walks of life, we’ll soon be wearing our names on our foreheads.

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Glass Platform: Android Desktop Phone For Business
by Rob Jackson on August 19th, 2009

We’ve seen the consumer targeted Android Hub concept and although it hasn’t yet come to fruition, we’re sure it will. Take that same “next generation deskphone” idea to the business world and you have what Cloud Telecomputers is calling their Android-based Glass platform.

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Reciprocal interviews discussing social media, Victoria, BC.

Paul Holmes interview via Michael Allison’s Communication

Michael Allison interview via Paul Holmes Blog

HTML5 Canvas Experiment
by Sebastian Deutsch on August 3rd, 2009

Click here to launch the experiment! (beware: sophisticated browser needed)

HTML5 is getting a lot of love lately. With the arrival of FireFox 3.5, Safari 4 and the new betas of Google Chrome and Opera, browsers support some great new features including canvas and the new audio/video tags. Most interesting: modern mobile devices like the iPhone or Android-based phones also support new standards in favor of Flash. The future looks bright for HTML5.

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During our consultation phase with a client, we decide which solution will fit them best.
We like to choose good quality, widely supported software and it looks like our Drupal users are in good company.

{Original post Dries Buytaert, July 15, 2009}
Emmys using Drupal
Glamour, glitter, and champagne all around because Drupal has gone Hollywood. The Emmys website has just switched to Drupal in preparation for the announcement of nominees tomorrow, and the subsequent annual Emmy award ceremony later this year. The Emmys are annual awards to outstanding television programs and performers.

Emmys.com was previously a static HTML website, with a few custom PHP components. The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (the parent organization) migrated to Drupal largely because of the positive experiences various Academy members and other industry leaders have had with using Drupal.

The new Emmys.com is a joint project of volunteers from the Academy’s television industry leadership, its staff, and Emmy magazine — they built the site with the help of Metal Toad Media. In addition to migrating their main website, emmys.com, they’re also in the progress of converting some of their other related properties.

Riot police raid birthday barbecue for ‘all-night’ Facebook tag
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Four cars, van, helicopter storm 15-guest cookout
By Austin Modine •

Posted in Odds and Sods, 17th July 2009 17:44 GMT
Understand how application security is evolving
Riot police stormed a man’s 30th birthday barbecue for 15 guests because it was advertised as an “all-night” party on Facebook.

Four police cars, a riot van, and a force helicopter were dispatched to a privately-owned field in a small village near Sowton, Devon in the UK on Saturday, ordering the party shut down or everyone would be arrested.

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Neither shalt thou write on his wall
{original post by Philip Pullella, Reuters May 24, 2009}

You won’t get an e-mail saying Pope Benedict added you as a friend and you can’t “poke” him or write on his wall, but the Vatican is still keen to use the networking site Facebook to woo young people back to church.

A new Vatican website, www.pope2you.net, has gone live, offering an application called “The pope meets you on Facebook,” and another allowing the faithful to see the Pope’s speeches and messages on their iPhones or iPods.

The Vatican’s World Communications Day today is devoted to communicating the gospel with new technologies.

“We recognize that a church that does not communicate ceases to be a church,” said Msgr. Paul Tighe, secretary of the Vatican’s Social Communications department.

“Many young people today are not turning to traditional media like newspapers and magazines any more for information and entertainment. They are looking to a different media culture, and this is our effort to ensure that the Church is present in that communications culture.”

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Original Post Thursday, May. 14, 2009 by By Seth Godin

So, are you essential? Most of the best jobs will be for people who manage customers, who organize fans, who do digital community management. We’ll continue to need brilliant designers, energetic brainstormers and rigorous lab technicians. More and more, though, the need to actually show up at an office that consists of an anonymous hallway and a farm of cubicles or closed doors is just going to fade away. It’s too expensive, and it’s too slow. I’d rather send you a file at the end of my day (when you’re in a very different time zone) and have the information returned to my desktop when I wake up tomorrow. We may never meet, but we’re both doing essential work.

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Set to launch sometime this month, WolframAlpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com/) is a new kind of search tool. While traditionally search engines have helped you find pages that will give you the information you are looking for, WolframAlpha aims to give answers to specific questions that have been asked using natural language. That means questions like “What is the weather in London?” , “What is the world’s tallest building” or “What is the population of France”, will return actual answers, rather than links to pages that may contain the answer. That’s pretty impressive, and could potentially have a big impact on the way people search the web.

Read Stephen Wolfram’s blog post about the project:
http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/03/05/wolframalpha-is-coming/

Read more about WolframAlpha, how it works, and what it could mean to the way people search the web: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/08/wolfram-alpha-computes-answers-to-factual-questions-this-is-going-to-be-big/

An inside look at the kinds of things our senior technology director thinks about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_HgMduuE5s