The Data Sharing Summit is back, and bigger. Our purpose is to provide gathering spaces in which all parties can work together on the challenge of data sharing. We create the agenda the day it happens.

Data Sharing Summit

Six civil technologies offer the potential to enhance or degrade US power over the next fifteen years according to National Intelligence Council (NIC) sponsored contractor research. These include biogerontechnology, a energy storage technology, biofuels and bio-based chemical technology, clean coal technology, service robotic technology, and information technology devoted to increased connectivity of people and things.

Six Technologies with Potential Impacts on US Interests out to 2025

Run your web applications on Google's infrastructure.

Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications.

No assembly required. Google App Engine provides a fully-integrated application environment.

It's easy to scale. Google App Engine makes it easy to build scalable applications that grow from one user to millions of users without infrastructure headaches.

It's free to get started. Every Google App Engine application can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough bandwidth and CPU for 5 million monthly page views.

Google App Engine

This is a five minute video in which I was asked to make some predictions for the next decade about the Semantic Web, search and artificial intelligence.

A Few Predictions for the Near Future

Anyone playing in the "Web 2.0" domain, even if non-technical, has likely heard of such essential components of the Web applications style as AJAX and JSON. The 'J' in these acronyms stands for JavaScript, on which these standards are built. So the strengths and weaknesses of JavaScript are directly related to what can be built in the common Web 2.0 style, and therefore what business ideas can be implemented. Now there's another JavaScript related technology coming along quietly but quickly, and so far little noticed outside of developers' circles. It is called Caja, and it may have a major impact on what can and can't be accomplished by JavaScript-based Web 2.0 sites.

Pay Attention To Caja

Rising oil prices and concerns about energy security and climate change are pressuring automakers to produce vehicles with better fuel economy and reduced greenhouse-gas emissions. This Policy Insight discusses four innovations to fuel and engine technology that automakers will be developing over the next decade: gasoline-electric hybrid technology, advanced diesel technology, vehicles powered by a blend of ethanol and gasoline, and improvements to the traditional gasoline engine. Keefe, Griffin, and Graham highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each, drawing on a benefit-cost analysis in which they calculate the value of the three alternative technologies from a societal perspective, taking into account technology costs, fuel savings, performance benefits, pollution estimates, reductions in oil use, the cost of greenhouse-gas emissions, and other factors. They conclude that advanced diesels and gasoline-electric hybrids have a promising future but that policymakers appear to be favoring ethanol-fueled vehicles through a variety of regulations and tax subsidies.

New Engines and Fuels for Cars and Light Trucks

Anders Albrechtslund:

In this article, I argue that online social networking is anchored in surveillance practices. This gives us an opportunity to challenge conventional understandings of surveillance that often focus on control and disempowerment. In the context of online social networking, surveillance is something potentially empowering, subjectivity building and even playful – what I call participatory surveillance.

Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance

As the web and web browsers have matured, people have started expecting different things out of them. When we first released Firefox, few people were browsing with tabs or add-ons. I’ve written before about how web usage patterns have changed, so too have our strategies on how to effectively make use of system resources such as memory.

Firefox 3 Memory Usage

The IRS uses the Terminal Access Controller Access Control System (TACACS ) to administer and configure routers and switches. Users of the TACACS must be authorized by managers. The IRS had authorized 374 accounts for employees and contractors that could be used to access routers and switches to perform system administration duties. Of these, 141 (38 percent) did not have proper authorization to access the TACACS . Authorizations for 86 of the 141 employee and contractor accounts had been provided on some prior date, but the authorizations had expired at the time of our review. However, we could not find that the other 55 employee and contractor accounts had ever been authorized to access the System. We are particularly concerned that 27 of the 55 employees and contractors had accessed the routers and switches to change security configurations.

To authenticate users, the TACACS uses a security application that requires users to enter an account name and password. System administrators had circumvented this control by setting up 34 unauthorized accounts that appear to be shared-user accounts. Any person who knew the passwords to these accounts could change configurations without accountability and with little chance of detection. For this reason, the IRS requires that shared accounts be used only on a limited basis and that they be subjected to special authorization controls. However, during Fiscal Year 2007, 4.4 million (more than 84 percent) of the 5.2 million accesses to the TACACS were made by the 34 user accounts. None of the accounts were properly authorized.

Inadequate Security Controls Over Routers and Switches Jeopardize Sensitive Taxpayer Information

On Tuesday, the creators of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, a cryptographic protocol, and two of the creators of EMC security division RSA gathered onstage for the annual cryptographers' panel at RSA 2008 in San Francisco.

The BD security rumor propagates.

Cryptographers speak of threats, voting, and Blu-Ray rumors