Month: March 2014 | Page 2

March 24, 2014

Cisco’s Cloud Gets More Silver Lining

Cisco Systems Inc, a world leader in network hardware, announced today plans for the coming two years to spend $1 Billion to upgrade its fledgling cloud services. http://www.binarytribune.com/2014/03/24/cisco-systems-inc-share-price-down-shifts-focus-towards-cloud-computing-services-to-join-the-competition/

The key initial outlay for the Cisco’s ‘Cisco Cloud Services’ enterprise involves constructing state of the art data centers, the old fashioned brick and mortar structures that house boxy hardware, cables, and a few work-spaces for a handpicked collection of human technicians that oversee the mix. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/24/us-cisco-systems-cloudcomputing-idUSBREA2N09T20140324

To HFS analysts, the more interesting problem a new entrant such as Cisco faces concerns who it will likely meet in competition for customers who pay for the privilege of using the cloud’s services. Today in the first quarter of 2014, the top ten cloud competitors include a few well-knowns, but mostly a collection of never-heard-ofs. Here’s a top-10 list from Secpoint.com:

Amazon Web Services

3Tera

Force.com

Appistry Cloud Computing Middleware

Microsoft Live Mesh

AppNexus

Flexiscale

Google App Engine

GoGrid

Terremark

With its big dollar investment virtually upfront, Cisco expects to be added to lists such as this one within two years, just in time to tap into an exploding new business model. HFS analysts point out that the model actually arose in the 1960’s when computing first twinkled in some future geeks’ eyes and visions of how it might someday come together kept them talking with one another through the night. In other words, it’s what computer planners have considered the basic model from the beginning, and finally after a few decades of rapid maturation, that basic model has become recognizable.

So if you were one of the billions of people who wished they had gotten in on the ground floor of plastics in the 1960’s or computers in the 1980’s or dot-coms in the 1990’s and you missed the investment opportunity, now is the time to set aside a small investment for cloud computing. Some day it might grow quite large. The only problem is, who should one invest in from the list of leaders? Maybe Cisco would be a good candidate, or maybe not.

What do you think?

March 22, 2014

Chinese Civil War Brews in Xinjiang with Militant Muslim Separatists

Dissident Muslim Militants in China Seek Separation

China may become the next Al Qaeda target if militant Uyghur separatists in the Xinjiang region’s Islamic clergy keep protesting.

Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India border the Xinjiang region. Its separatists prefer to call it East Turkestan. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-26414016

The Xinjiang Province, China’s largest geographically, includes a population of almost 22 million, with more than half Muslim and about 43 percent of which share Uyghur ancestry. It holds undeveloped oil and gas reserves China sorely requires. In the 2,500 year written history of the region, it has been exchanged between numerous political dynasties, and since 1949 it has survived as an autonomous region within the Chinese empire.

Today many Uyghurs claim discrimination by other Chinese based on Uyghur ancestry . Two weeks ago at Kunming Railway Station in Yunnan, China, 10 black-clad militants wielding knives and machetes slashed and stabbed 164 people, of whom 34 died. http://thediplomat.com/2014/03/kunming-terrorist-attack-a-residents-perspective/

Uyghurs have been implicated in the Chinese press because East Turkestan flags found in the railway station and a video by Uyghurs before the attack warned Buddhists they were coming. Other brutal attacks in the region over the past 18 months have also been blamed on Uyghurs, despite protests from Islamic clerics alleging conspiracy. http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/515882-china-blames-extremists-for-xinjiang-violence-with-sketchy-report/

Most recently the lost Malaysian Boeing 777 MH370 flight from Kuala Lampur to Beijing has been tied by Chinese investigators to Uyghur hijackers who have used similar tactics in other more local flights in the region. http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/18/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/

To HFS analysts, the potential for civil war between separatist Xinjiang Muslims and majority government forces may produce unpredictable economic disruptions across China, particularly in the energy production sector.

What do you think?

March 21, 2014

Big Private Donations to Science

Yesterday here at HFS we posted an article about how money to fund new science might be drying up from government sources, but private sources such as rich individuals and companies seem to be coming of age in a big way. http://hamiltonfinanceservices.com/?p=2082

Today we note some specific names of those private funding sources.

The top three on our list today are Google, Microsoft, and IBM.

The first two, Google and Microsoft, have offered support for the US government’s climate initiative.

Google has donated a petabyte of cloud storage and 50 million hours of Google Earth run time to the intiative. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/20/google_microsoft_tackle_climate_change_as_ibm_seeks_cancer_cure/

Microsoft has given 800 terabytes and 180,000 hours of Azure run time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Azure

Not to be forgotten, IBM also has stepped up to the private funding plate with donations of Watson run time to match clinical data with genome data in efforts to find cures for cancers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)

If you have heard of other noteworthy science donations from rich individuals or wealthy companies, tell us about them here at HFS.

What do you think?

March 21, 2014

Memex To Hunt Human Traffickers

Memex … Have You Heard of It?

The US Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) has put out a solicitation for Internet searching tech. Why? Its heart is set on one thing: Track down and eliminate human traffickers, meaning people who sell other people as property.

Chilling, right? On one side of the equation, the Darth Vader of Internetdom, the US government, seeks greater power through bigger and better technology to find bad people, as DARPA defines ‘bad.’ On the other side of the equation, the Scum Of the Universe steals babies, overdoses sex slaves, and crates humans as sardines to transport them on ships that never seem to reach predictable ports. Almost makes one a little … uncomfortable about our world. And it’s really happening.

You can read the DARPA solicitation for yourself, but remember that some very big companies will offer their best and brightest in order to win the purse of $45 millions for offering the most effective machine.

Did you notice the name of the DARPA machine, by the way? Read the 1945 article by Vannevar Bush (a government scientist from an earlier age), As We May Think, to find the origins of a reference to advanced machines with fantastic functions. ‘Memex’ must have stuck in a DARPA clerk’s mind all these years as he or she dreamed of some application some day for that weird new name from an old science-fiction writer. Christopher White, the master scientist leading the DARPA effort to find Memex might even have come up with the name himself. Who knows? Chris promises that whatever machine they make and call ‘Memex,’ it will not be used to spy on the rest of us.

Do you believe Chris, the scientist over at DARPA? What do you think?

March 20, 2014

Teoman Dudak, New Turkish Hero Online

Westerner’s such as all of the analysts at HamiltonFinanceServices.com have never heard of Teoman Coskun Dudak, the latest social net hero of Turkey. If not for the data scraping services of Vocativ.com, most people throughout the world could never hear of him.

And what did Dudak do? He just did his job as a customs inspector at a Turkish airport. He refused to let a plane loaded with 1.5 tons of gold under false papers take off despite being offered a generous bribe by Iranian businessman Reza Sarrab. Sarrab called a Turkish politician, the then minister of the economy, Zafer Caglayan, who authorized take off of the gold laden plane. For his part, Dudak was immediately transferred south to a post on the Syrian border. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/88b881f0-af53-11e3-bea5-00144feab7de.html#axzz2wWxzdYcI

How do you and I know about Dudak today? Turkish citizens heard about Dudak when unidentified sources complained on various social networks about the unfair treatment of Dudak for being so honest. For his part, Dudak declined comment. However, as word spread throughout Turkey of Dudak’s honesty, the story was scraped up by data miners and now the world knows the Dudak story.

Why did Turkish citizens like the story in the first place? Apparently bribery among government officials runs so rampantly that many citizens feel frustrated and intolerant of such dishonesty. Dudak became a folk hero because he brought back a sense of honor in a nation sickened by its leaders’ lack of honor.

What do you think?

March 20, 2014

DeepFace by Facebook Is Better than FBI’s Best, Called NGI

Facebook, ever on the edge chasing dollars better than most, has announced DeepFace, its facial recognition program that more than 97% of the time gets it right. http://www.vocativ.com/culture/science/facebooks-facial-recognition-tech-now-better-fbis-heres-thats-scary/

Despite spending more than a billion dollars, the best the FBI’s new program, Next Generation Identification (NGI), can do is about 80%. Of course, Facebook’s commercial agenda differs significantly from the FBI’s law enforcement mission.

Nonetheless, analysts at HFS note that much of the planet is moving away from anonymity towards something never before known, at a rapid pace. Will the new Facebook tech be used by law enforcers through their Open Mind software? Of course it will.

What do you think?

March 20, 2014

Iran Does What Many Others Do by Convicting Babaei on False Charges

When Iranian authorities arrested, quickly convicted, and imprisoned Hamid Babaei in July 2013 for spying, no one in the airport openly watched although perhaps a few eyes glanced a look or two. No one there knew Babaei because he had been an Iranian academic, a doctoral student of law and finance who lived with his spouse, Cobra Parsajoo, in a flat near the University of Liege in Belgium. He and his wife had been in Iran during a semester break to visit family and they were returning to school through the Khomeni Airport in Tehran when he was singled out of the line of passengers, and that was the last most of his family and friends heard of him. http://www.amnestyusa.org/search/node/babaei‎

Was he really a spy? Not in the least, according to his spouse, but that’s where the story becomes more interesting. While in Belgium, Babaei had been approached by insistent representatives of the Iranian government who demanded, unsuccessfully it turns out, that Babaei report to them about any protest activities of other Iranian students that might be interpreted as against Iran. Cobra Parsajoo, at great risk to her own freedom, has launched a social net campaign to tell the whole story about how her husband had been falsely accused of spying by the same government that asked him to spy and that convicted him of spying precisely because he declined to spy.

To analysts at HFS, the story, while sad and distressing, seems part of a larger pattern. What similar stories might be less well told in the US, Russia, China, North Korea, South Korea, or anywhere else where governments aggressively press for information about their own citizens as well as their enemies? Obviously, no one has an answer to that question.

Is there any hope of getting more answers? Strangely, the answer might be ‘yes’ because of a news source just evolving called Vocativ. Like the secret weapon of law enforcers for the past ten years, Open Mind, a social net scraper that searches through millions of public posts across Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Google, Stumble, Tumbler, Reddit and…you get the picture, every other social net one might find, the Vocativ model uses a similar algorithm to scrape the same sources, but for the purpose of posting them for journalists worldwide who wish to follow up with research and writing. And Vocativ offers only one of several options for this service to journalists. Data mining companies have sprung up in every other place where the Internet functions.

So perhaps stories such as Hamid Babaei’s will reach many more. Will that change the tactics of aggressive governments that care little about small bits of collateral damage? No, not at all, but it might arm the rest of us a little more, and then who knows what would happen at the polls or on the streets?

What do you think?

March 19, 2014

Science Funded More With Philanthropy in US, Says NY Times

US Science Changes How It’s Funded

Government money paid to universities to conduct basic scientific research characterized the 20^th century way of funding US science. That science set much of the world’s science agenda. Not necessarily so in the 21^st century, as the US government and most state governments scrounge desperately for revenue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_policy_of_the_United_States

Perhaps government funding will increase in coming years if the US economy recovers from The Great Recession of 2008-2009, but today in 2014 the brightest funding source coming toward America appears to be private money from rich Americans. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/science/billionaires-with-big-ideas-are-privatizing-american-science.html?ref=science

Analysts at HFS note that at this moment, the US budget for all research & development through universities and government agencies totals about $140 B. So private funding of R&D, as of yet not calculated in any form that can be reasonably compared with the US federal budget for 2014, will not reach that level. Nonetheless, as discretionary funds decline for the US government, watching how R&D survives may prove exciting.

Private funding of basic science combines a focus derived from personal crises of philanthropists with the drive, persistence, and tenacity of successful business owners unmatched by historic government agencies driven under political agendas. The New York Times article cited above lists a few dozen philanthropists by name, but in coming years, perhaps the list will cover many of the additions to a list of new ideas that will change the world. Yet, as the Chinese economy grows in prosperity and world influence, their science agenda will certainly reflect different priorities than either private or government budgets in the US.

What do you think?

March 19, 2014

Flux in Net’s Back End

Flux In Net’s Back End

The Internet today provides billions of individuals across the planet with access to an expanding, changing array of information, which in turn serves as the foundation for the socioeconomic phenomenon known as the Information Age. The ‘back end’ of this electronic net delivers names and addresses for distinct sites operated by individuals, usually collected into a group to carry out the numerous functions of sites or websites. That back end now may change how it operates, or in other words, it is in a state of flux.

In late 2012 an initiative in the UN World Conference on International Communications pushed by Russia and China as a telecommunications initiative sought to wrest control of the net’s back end from the US. The proposal sounded innocent, even worth consideration, but fortunately the idea of change raised the hairs on someone’s neck. http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/9/3747402/countries-propose-greater-itu-influence The 2012 effort to let the UN politicize Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and domain name registrations failed, but interest in the idea persists.

So how are IP addresses and domain names managed today? The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) system began in 1998 when the early manager of IP addresses and domain names, Network Solutions, amended its organizing agreement. ICANN, under a contract the the US Department of Commerce, National Telecommunications & Information Administration, became responsible for the back end of the Internet with revisions to its charter as recent as 2009. Under a Registration Accreditation Agreement (RAA) made in 2009, enforcement of registration rules would be applied to all Internet users worldwide.

Now a powerful but small group of world governments seek to take control of the that back end process, with the clear purpose of imposing political criterion for how Internet names and numbers work in the background.

To analysts at HFS, the current state of flux in the net’s back end may determine for the foreseeable future how the world interacts electronically through the Internet. Further, as increasing political agendas flood the floor of debate and negotiations, alternatives to government controlled systems will become an urgent priority among those aware of the debate. With disclosures about NSA spying saturating the cyber world, the US has lost valuable credibility, and others now play on the uncertainty associated with lack of moral leadership.

What do you think?

March 18, 2014

Is Blogging Safe Where You Write? Not So In Viet Nam

Pham Viet Dao, a 62-year old blogger who was arrested nine months ago in Hanoi, will begin his trial tomorrow on charges of “abusing democratic freedoms” by writing comments perceived as critical of the Hanoi government under Viet Nam’s controversial Article 258. http://www.voanews.com/content/another-vietnamese-blogger-is-set-for-trial/1873933.html

He is the second blogger to be prosecuted under the new law. Several weeks ago Truong Duy Nhat received a two-year sentence for a similar blogging violation, after a trial court found him guilty. https://en.rsf.org/vietnam-blogger-truong-duy-nhat-gets-two-04-03-2014,45953.html

Pham Viet Dao promises to appeal any adverse decision by the trial court in his case. http://threatened.globalvoicesonline.org/blogger/pham-viet-dao-0

Analysts at HFS, while sympathetic to both Truong Duy Nhat and Pham Viet Dao, warn all bloggers everywhere by repeating our view of today’s Internet: The Internet exists only at the pleasure of the government where its servers exist, and no individual is fully free to express opinions or release information that threaten the government where that individual logs on. If you want to change the Web we have to the Web we want, consider how that might be done where you live.

One approach by those who consider grass roots efforts useful should read the blog at http://WebWeWant.org.

What do you think?