Showing headlines posted by Andy_Updegrove

When the New Year’s Day sun rose in Europe and the United States, the reality of what had happened was hidden to almost all. Only a hundred or so targets had been struck, and the smoke from the ruins that remained was already dissipating. What people did immediately realize was that certain things that they were used to working now did not.

So here's the challenge - can you find anything in this scenario that couldn't happen tomorrow? The bad news is that I don't think you will.

Everyone seems to agree that the Cloud is the place to go.Ten years from today, what percentage of all that matters will live within an increasingly smaller number of ever more enormous data complexes?  And what will have been done to protect them from physical, as well as cyber, attack?

On Tuesday, OASIS - the standards group that developed the OpenDocument Format - made an extremely rare announcement for an information technology consortium: that it has successfully completed the process of becoming accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).  

I’ve noted before that events in the real world involving North Korea have been closely tracking the plot of my book. But this morning’s news included a story that makes me seriously wonder whether my book has crossed the divide from predicting events to acting as a “how to” manual for real-world, state-supported cyber attackers.

Anyone who reads eBooks is aware that a number of content vendors are using proprietary platforms in an effort to lock you into their content libraries. But there is a way out, if enough vendors get on the bandwagon.

It was in September of 2010 that the formation of the Document Foundation was announced. It's now two and a half years later, and with the release of LibreOffice 4.0, its not only flourishing, but forging a path independent of its predecessor.

One of the more difficult issues the author of a self-published book faces is whether to pay others to help promote their book. Is it money well spent, or just dollars down the loo?

The big news in the tech world yesterday was the announcement by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that it was terminating its review of Google’s business practices without requiring significant changes to the search giant’s advertising practices. But a very important aspect of the FTC’s settlement has received little attention – Google’s agreement not to seek injunctive relief in the future in connection with any “standards essential patents” (SEPs) that it owns

If you haven't checked in on eBook publisher Smashwords (SW) lately, you're in for a surprise. The little business that Mark Corker started five years ago is now the biggest publisher of eBooks around.

2012 has marked another memorable year in the transformation of the book publishing industry. What does it all mean?

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you probably have an interest in 'openness' of some kind: open standards and open source software most likely, but you may also feel strongly about openness in other technology-enabled areas, like open data or open government - or openness as a guiding principle, no matter what the digital terrain.

Governments certainly have more than enough to concern themselves with these days – financial crises, natural disasters and terrorism, to name just a few. Given that’s the case, it’s surprising that so many are finding the time to worry about what kind of standards the products and services they purchase comply with. But they are.

According to a press release issued today by the Portuguese Open Source Business Association, the government of Portugal has decided to approve a single editable document format. And that format is not Microsoft's OOXML.

When Condoleeza Rice asked, "who could have imagined a terrorist would use a plane to crash into a building" after 9/11, people were quick to point out "Tom Clancy." Well, here we go again.

In case you haven’t thought about it lately, it’s a fair bet that everything in your life today depends to some greater or lesser extent (usually the former) on the Internet and the Web. And in case you’ve never thought about it at all, what makes those vital services possible has less to do with servers and fiber optics than it does with protocols and other standards.

In case you haven’t thought about it lately, it’s a fair bet that everything in your life today depends to some greater or lesser extent (usually the former) on the Internet and the Web.  And in case you’ve never thought about it at all, what makes those vital services possible has less to do with servers and fiber optics than it does with protocols and other standards. 

The concept of a standard is something of a paradox: competitors agree that they will all do one thing the same way - something that's ordinarily anathema to government regulators. But that's OK, because by doing so the resulting standard unleashes their ability to innovate in orders of magnitude more ways.

Last week I took something of a trip back through time. The transition began somewhere over the dark Atlantic on my way to Brussels, when the person sitting next to me struck up a conversation. Improbably, I found myself discussing ODF – the OpenDocument Format – with a former Sun engineer who had followed the ODF–OOXML contest with great interest back in 2005 - 2007.

We all know that the threat of cyber attack is growing dramatically (don’t we?), and that the most urgent duty of government is to protect the populace (isn’t it?) Assuming that’s the case, how are we to explain the recent collapse of an effort to pass essential cybersecurity legislation? And what, if anything, can be done about it?