Eclectic Views

    
No need at the current pace to make it annual. This is a place to post
business & technology developments starting in 2009 (or in about the last
eight hours of 2008) and for a while afterwards.
  

    

   Fingered By Facebook

Whoa. I just ran across this at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook>:
"In December 2008, the Supreme Court of Australia in Canberra ruled that
Facebook is a valid protocol to serve court notices to defendants. It is
believed to be the world's first legal judgment that defines a summons
posted on Facebook to be legally binding."  That's based on a story at
<http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/12/16/1229189579001.html>.
  

    

   Quote Of The Day

Google founder Sergey Brin, discussing his company's book-search project:

"There is fantastic information in books."


   For I Looked Into The Future...

From a story at <http://tinyurl.com/9hxp5o> or
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/technology/start-ups/05venture.html>
about what newly-cautious Sand Hill Road venture capitalists are planning to
spend money on, a list of what's hot and what's not.

 - Web 2.0: forget it, it's over

 - Big corporate data-management software apps, ditto

 - "Cloud" apps that use less client hardware, let's talk

 - YAMPA (Yet Another Mobile Phone Application), go away

 - But carriers and the phones themselves, yes: "Pure mobile content is
overinvested, but hardware is underhyped".  Underhyped, I like that word.

 - Small green (monitoring energy use): good

 - Big green ("expensive projects like factories to manufacture solar panels
or biofuels"): bad

 - Personal health care, good: not bath soap but decoding your genes (I
*will not* make that joke about your sex is based on what's in your genes)
and managing health savings accounts.
  

    

   Readin', Ritin', and Data Minin'

A new third R seems to be generating a lot of buzz lately, per
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-
computing/07program.html>  or  <http://tinyurl.com/9qq8rg>.
R is described as "a popular programming language used by a growing number
of data analysts inside corporations and academia". An open-source product,
it seems to be of particular interest for analysis of large volumes of data
or "data mining" and statistical work. Like the open-source Firefox browser,
many add-ons (over a thousand) are presently available for R in the
financial, medical, and other fields. I was especially interested to read
that "The popularity of R at universities could threaten SAS Institute, the
privately held business software company that specializes in data analysis
software." And SAS's response? "We have customers who build engines for
aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet."
Sounds like someone at the Encyclopedia Britannica dismissing the upstart
Wikipedia. SAS regularly demonstrated that sort of insufferable arrogance
whenever I had to negotiate a software license with them. They were slightly
more pleasant to deal with than Computer Associates in that (unlike CA) I
never found them to be actively dishonest; but if that isn't faint praise I
don't know what is. Threaten them, R, threaten them.
  

    

   Don't Try This At Work

From <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/technology/7824939.stm>: "The US National
Security Agency has helped put together a list of the world's most dangerous
coding mistakes." The winners are (the envelope, please):

Improper Input Validation
Improper Encoding or Escaping of Output
Failure to Preserve SQL Query Structure
Failure to Preserve Web Page Structure
Failure to Preserve OS Command Structure
Cleartext Transmission of Sensitive Information
Cross-Site Request Forgery
Race Condition
Error Message Information Leak
Failure to Constrain Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer
External Control of Critical State Data
External Control of File Name or Path
Untrusted Search Path
Failure to Control Generation of Code
Download of Code Without Integrity Check
Improper Resource Shutdown or Release
Improper Initialization
Incorrect Calculation
Improper Access Control
Use of a Broken or Risky Cryptographic Algorithm
Hard-Coded Password
Insecure Permission Assignment for Critical Resource
Use of Insufficiently Random Values
Execution with Unnecessary Privileges
Client-Side Enforcement of Server-Side Security

P.S. This is my last post in pre.vue before the whole conference is frozen.
Well members can follow the thread in the <biztech.> conference.
Goodbye, pre.vue!