Google turns to the spooks

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I know that cloud computing is wonderful, etc. but have you noticed this development?

Just the thought is enough to send an involuntary little shiver up your spine: Google — keeper of a vast repository of data on our activities, interests and connections — working hand-in-hand with the National Security Agency — the top-secret electronic surveillance specialists who have been known to go rogue from time to time. But according to sources who spoke to the Washington Post, there are delicate talks now going on to form such a partnership with the goal of fortifying Google’s defenses against the kind of espionage-oriented hacking attacks launched from China against it and dozens of other U.S. companies in December.

Google reportedly approached the NSA shortly after the attacks, but in an indication of the sensitivity of such arrangement, the talks have been going on for weeks. Reports the Post: “Google and the NSA declined to comment on the partnership. But sources with knowledge of the arrangement, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the alliance is being designed to allow the two organizations to share critical information without violating Google’s policies or laws that protect the privacy of Americans’ online communications. The sources said the deal does not mean the NSA will be viewing users’ searches or e-mail accounts or that Google will be sharing proprietary data.” What the agency would be do, as it has with other corporations, is help Google evaluate hardware and software vulnerabilities and gauge the sophistication of its attackers.

At face value, it all sounds reasonable, especially given the suspicions of state support for the Chinese hacking, but of the many things the NSA can tap, a deep reservoir of public trust is not one.

Amen.

The FT’s Gideon rachman spent the morning at the International Institute for Strategic Studies’s briefing on their annual survey of the ‘Military Balance’. He reports that

The briefing offered by the IISS experts ranged fascinatingly over a variety of topics from the Iranian nuclear programme, to Russia’s new military doctrine and the links (or lack of them) between al-Qaeda and Iran.

But the thing I found most interesting was the confirmation that cyber-security is the hot issue of the day. John Chipman, the head of the IISS, says the institute is about to launch a special study of cyber-security which raises all sorts of fascinating issues about hard power, about the responsibilities of states and about international law. What if a country’s infrastructure could be destroyed as effectively by a cyber-attack, as by an invasion of tanks? How do you defend against that? How do you identify the culprits? And what does international law have to say about the issue – might we have to revise our definitions of what constitutes an act of war? Chipman argues, plausibly, that we are now at an equivalent period to the early 1950s. Just as strategists had to devise whole new doctrines to cope with the nuclear age, so they willl have to come up with new ideas to cope with the information age.

And over at the Guardian Charles Arthur has an exhaustive (or should that be exhausting?) analysis of whether the UEA Climate Research Unit’s emails were hacked. His conclusion:

After the July incident, perhaps CRU failed to batten down the hatches, either through technical failings or because someone inside was subverting the efforts. So what happened in November?

Rotter blogged his theory last year. “In the past I have worked at organisations where the computer network grew organically in a disorganised fashion. Security policies often fail as users take advantage of shortcuts … one of these is to share files using an ftp server … This can lead to unintentional sharing with the rest of the internet.”

He added that files were perhaps put “in an ftp directory which was on the same central processing unit as the external webserver, or even worse, was on a shared driver somewhere to which the webserver had permissions to access. In other words, if you knew where to look, it was publicly available”.

If this hypothesis turns out to be true, UEA may end up looking foolish. For there will be no one to arrest.

In other words, the cock-up theory of history rules ok.

Through a lens, darkly

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This shows what happens when a Nikon F2 is hit by an AK47 bullet. It’s one of the images in a major retrospective of the work of the war photographer Don McCullin, and is a pretty good testimonial to the build quality of the brand. There’s a vivid slideshow of some of the pictures from the exhibition here. Each one is unforgettable. McCullin is one of the age’s truly great photographers, but it’s impossible to avoid the impression that his life’s work has taken a terrible toll on him. He sometimes wears an inexpressibly sad expression.

The uses of processed wood pulp

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There was a good deal of ballyhoo a while back when Amazon announced a deal with some fancy Ivy League schools (like Princeton) to give students free Kindles preloaded with textbooks. Well, guess what? According to The Daily Princetonian, things haven’t gone according to the Bezos script.

Less than two weeks after 50 students received the free Kindle DX e-readers, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices.

On Wednesday, the University revealed that students in three courses — WWS 325: Civil Society and Public Policy, WWS 555A: U.S. Policy and Diplomacy in the Middle East, and CLA 546: Religion and Magic in Ancient Rome — were given a new Kindle DX containing their course readings for the semester. The University had announced last May it was partnering with Amazon.com, founded by Jeff Bezos ’86, to provide students and faculty members with the e-readers as part of a sustainability initiative to conserve paper.

But though they acknowledged some benefits of the new technology, many students and faculty in the three courses said they found the Kindles disappointing and difficult to use.

“I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool,” said Aaron Horvath ’10, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy. “It’s clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.”

Horvath said that using the Kindle has required completely changing the way he completes his coursework.

“Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” he explained. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.”

One professor, Stan Katz, who teaches Horvath’s class, said he is interested in whether he “can teach as effectively in using this as in using books and E-Reserve material and in whether students can use this effectively,” adding that “the only way to find out is to try it.” One of Katz’ main concerns is whether students can do close reading of the texts with the new device.

“I require a very close reading of texts. I encourage students to mark up texts, and … I expect them to underline and to highlight texts,” Katz explained. “The question is whether you can do them as effectively with a Kindle as with paper.”

eReaders are a classic case of a technological solution looking for a problem. They are useful for some purposes — like avoiding RyanAir baggage fees. But they’re not a general-purpose solution to every reading need. The most interesting thing about the Princeton experience is that it rather punctures the widespread assumption that eReaders would at least be good for disrupting the expensive textbook market.

Tokyo asks Toyota to investigate Prius

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Hmmm…wonder if my local dealer knows about this. Just in from CNN — Tokyo asks Toyota to investigate Prius – CNN.com.

Tokyo, Japan (CNN) — Toyota's consumer woes deepened on Wednesday, and for the first time on native soil.

Japan's Transportation Ministry has asked Toyota to investigate brake malfunction complaints in Japan on its Prius, the gasoline-electric hybrid car which was the best-selling vehicle in the country in 2009, according to the Japan Automobile Dealers Association.

Ministry officials said 14 complaints regarding brakes in the new Prius model has been filed since July. Toyota officials said the Prius has received similar complaints from North American car dealers and that the company is investigating.

And now, ladies and gents, for Mr Jobs’s next trick — the MacPad

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Hmmm… This from Good Morning Silicon Valley.

Thought you were done hearing rumors about the tablet Apple is secretly developing? No such luck. Less than a week after the iPad was unveiled, there is already talk that a larger, more versatile sibling is in the works. Mind you, it’s just talk — a thinly sourced tidbit relayed by TechCrunch with the requisite grain of salt and appropriate hedging. But the gist of it is that Apple is well along on a second tablet with Intel inside, a screen possibly as large as 15.4 inches, and, instead of the iPhone OS, a version of Mac OS X, making for a more open device. MG Siegler suggests we keep an eye on Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June to see if Apple offers a peek at the upcoming OS X 10.7. Should the new version include some significant multitouch features, he says, that would bolster prospects for a more Mac-like tablet.

Actually, they could just rip the screen off my MacBook Air and use that.

Davos: the world’s smugfest

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If, like me, you’re irritated by the smugness and irrelevance of the WEF, then this post by Jeff Jarvis will strike a chord.

The theme of this year’s World Economic Forum meeting at Davos was “rethink, redesign, rebuild.” When a friend recited that list for me, I responded that given the institutions there, the more appropriate slogan is “replace.”

Last year when I arrived at Davos, I wondered whether we were among the problem or the solution. This year, I wondered whether we were among the future or the past. Well, actually, I don’t wonder.

We were among the disrupted. The only distinction among them is that some know it, some don’t. At Davos, I fear, most don’t.

I ran a session with international organizations about transparency and new ways they can govern themselves. I didn’t get far. “Oh, yes, we understand Twitter and all that,’ they said. “We have people who do that for us.” Don’t you want to read what your constituents and the world are saying about you? “We don’t have time.” Oy. I invited a young disrupter into the room who talked about his ability to organize efforts to help people quickly — not so much breaking rules but discovering new ones — but he didn’t get far either.

I sat in a session about the future of journalism that was set in the past. No fault of the moderator, the panel pretty much issued the same old saws: The internet is filled with trivia, sniffed one: “The stuff that goes on the web is just suffocating.” The free market will not support a free press, declared another. (How do we know that already?) Thus their conclusion: The only hope for journalism is state and foundation support, said a few. Oy again.

At the end of the week, I sat in on a session trying to brainstorm under WEF’s theme of the three re’s. They said the point of the exercise was to get soundbites (as they used to be known; tweets as they are now known) and that’s what they got: PowerPoint (actually, Tumblr) platitudes. There were good points: We need to change what we measure, said one table, for now we get what we measure (true from media to economies). But there was also insipidness: “We are what we allow to happen.” And: “Ecology means caring. Equity means sharing.” Put that on your T-shirt and wash it.

What’s nice about Jeff’s account is that he’s clearly not seduced by the complacency that seems to infect most hacks who receive an invitation to the Swiss smugfest.

So iPad 1.1 will have a camera after all.

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Well, it will if this can be believed.

Mission Repair, a company that fixes broken Apple products, apparently got their hands on some iPad parts. Their pictures showed off the internal frame, which curiously enough has a small hole on the top of the frame.

When the Mission Repair team took a camera out of a MacBook and placed it inside the iPad’s top hole, it fight right in. You can see a comparison of the MacBook camera and the iPad slot in the image above.

Toyota: how even the mighty can stumble

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As a Toyota owner, I have a particular interest in this.

The caller, a male voice, was panic-stricken: “We’re in a Lexus … we’re going north on 125 and our accelerator is stuck … we’re in trouble … there’s no brakes … we’re approaching the intersection … hold on … hold on and pray … pray …”

The call ended with the sound of a crash.

The Lexus ES 350 sedan, made by Toyota, had hit a sport utility vehicle, careened through a fence, rolled over and burst into flames. All four people inside were killed: the driver, Mark Saylor, an off-duty California Highway Patrol officer, and his wife, daughter and brother-in-law.

It was the tragedy that forced Toyota, which had received more than 2,000 complaints of unintended acceleration, to step up its own inquiry, after going through multiple government investigations since 2002.

Yet only last week did the company finally appear to come to terms with the scope of the problem — after expanding a series of recalls to cover millions of vehicles around the world, incalculable damage to its once-stellar reputation for quality and calls for Congressional hearings.

It’s sobering, this. Toyota has for two decades been the world’s best car manufacturer. But something clearly went very wrong. Success does strange things to organisations. And it leads to hubris:

At almost every step that led to its current predicament, Toyota underestimated the severity of the sudden-acceleration problem affecting its most popular cars. It went from discounting early reports of problems to overconfidently announcing diagnoses and insufficient fixes.

As recently as the fall, Toyota was still saying it was confident that loose floor mats were the sole cause of any sudden acceleration, issuing an advisory to millions of Toyota owners to remove them. The company said on Nov. 2 that “there is no evidence to support” any other conclusion, and added that its claim was backed up by the federal traffic safety agency.

But, in fact, the agency had not signed on to the explanation, and it issued a sharp rebuke. Toyota’s statement was “misleading and inaccurate,” the agency said. “This matter is not closed.”

We have two Toyota cars, and they’re the most reliable and efficient vehicles I’ve ever owned, with the possible exception of the old VW Beetles I had in the 1970s. Even so…