| Wave of the Future: Trusted Identities In Cyberspace On April 15 the Obama Administration released its official report on a plan to safeguard online identities across the Internet to protect individuals and entities and create secure backbone on which to do business on the Web. The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) will be a department within the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that will work with the private sector to give Internet users a secure identity. The idea is to create an "Identity Ecosystem" -- "an online environment where individuals and organizations will be able to trust each other because they follow agreed upon standards to obtain and authenticate their digital identities," according to the report.
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Will Hotmail Get Offline Storage Before Gmail? Microsoft is working on an HTML5-enabled version of its Hotmail Web application, according to a new report from ZDNet. The updated version will deliver offline storage capabilities, which means webmail users will be able to access their email even when an Internet connection is not available. A similar feature is supposedly in the works for Gmail, Hotmail's top competitor, as well. With Microsoft's initiatives in the area of HTML5 (the next major revision of the Web's core markup language), including its HTML5-enabled version of Bing search, and updates to Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 Web browser, it wouldn't be surprising to hear that Microsoft is indeed working on an HTML5-enabled Hotmail Web application, too. But will Microsoft actually release it before Google does the same for Gmail? That could make things interesting.
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Move Over Flipboard: Qwiki is the iPad's Newest Killer App
"It's clear that the future of media consumption is tablets and mobile...if there's anywhere to be experimenting as a company, it's in the acceleration of content off the desktop. It's a whole new world and now we need new tools." So says Doug Imbruce, founder and CEO of Qwiki, a mostly-automated multi-media content creation system that today launches what Imbruce calls its true potential, unleashed: Qwiki on the iPad (iTunes).
All I've wanted to do since seeing it is spend time wandering through this app. It's fabulous and it's just beginning. If the company can execute its plans then this is going to be some seriously disruptive stuff. Some people hate Qwiki; those people will pay a high price for their cynicism - they'll miss out on one of the most enjoyable information consumption experiences to emerge in some time.
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Check Out Library Books on Your Kindle Despite some of the challenges of lending library books in digital formats, many libraries are exploring the e-book option. However, although there are a number of choices for e-readers and digital content providers, the list of devices that let you check out library books hasn't included the most popular e-reader of all: the Kindle. That is, until today, with the announcement from Amazon this morning that it is launching a Lending Library "later this year" that will let Kindle owners check out books from their local library.
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Your iPhone Is Tracking Your Every Move Researchers have discovered that the iPhone is keeping track of where you go and storing that information in a file that is stored - unencrypted and unprotected - onto any machine with which you synchronize your phone. It is not clear why Apple is collecting this data. The discovery of a file called "consolidated.db" was made by data scientists Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, who were initially looking at mobile data and thinking about ways to visualize it. They'll present their findings today at the Where 2.0 conference. While it is not unusual for cellphones to track users' location, that information is typically kept behind a firewall and it requires a court order for others to be able to access it. This isn't the case with this particular file, raising serious questions about privacy and security.
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Skype for Android Brings 3G Calling to U.S., Plus Security Fix Skype released an update to its Android mobile application today which fixes the recently reported security issues in addition to bringing 3G calling to U.S. users. Earlier this month, reports of a security vulnerability in the Android version of the app were found which could compromise personal information, including a user's name, phone number, chat logs and more. According to Skype, no reported examples of malicious applications misusing this information have been found, but the company will continue to monitor the situation after the fix has been rolled out. However, the more exciting news for U.S. users of the Android application is support for 3G calling, which had previously been limited to select Verizon phones.
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Happy Birthday, ReadWriteWeb! A Look Back at 8 Years of RWW Designs Today, April 20, marks the 8th birthday of ReadWriteWeb. Like a self-titled debut album, the first post on April 20, 2003 was simply titled: The Read/Write Web. It began: "The World Wide Web in 2003 is beginning to fulfil the hopes that Tim Berners-Lee had for it over 10 years ago when he created it." I started ReadWriteWeb as a way to explore Web technology. The first tagline was: "Richard MacManus' weblog about the Two-Way Web." This was well before the term 'web 2.0' came along, so back then I used Dave Winer's term two-way web to describe my interest. I was really referring to what's next on the Web, which I had a passion for and wanted to write about. Ever wondered what RWW looked like 8 years ago? In this post I nostalgically look back on 8 years of homepage designs for ReadWriteWeb.
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Chinese Hackers Bring Down Change.org in Response to Ai Weiwei Campaign Earlier this month, Chinese activist and artist Ai Weiwei was arrested at the Beijing airport on his way to Hong Kong. Since his arrest, nearly 100,000 people had signed a petition for his release on social action platform Change.org. Today, the site announced that it had been temporarily taken down by Chinese hackers in response to the petition.
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Here Comes US Senate Expense Data...2 Years Later, in PDF! The United States Senate has announced that it will release expenditure data online for the first time ever, later this year. The release will be made by the end of November, two months after the six month period it covers has ended. Two and a half years after legislation requiring the data to be released was passed. In PDF format. (PDF is famously known as "where data goes to die.") When the UK government released hundreds of thousands of pages of expense reports from its legislators two years ago, the news organization The Guardian organized a public campaign to split up all the records and hunt for notable disclosures. The publication referred to the heavily redacted records as "Blackoutgate" and "the great sleaze-hunt" in which "we humble taxpayers continue to plough through the sorry trough that is the MPs' expense claims to find out what they've been spending our money on."
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Tut's Trumpets: Listen to 3,000-Year-Old Jazz Now if there's one oddball fixation we revel in here it's ancient sound. Whether it's Babylonian language, Shakespeare's accent or chirping Mayan temples, we're going to pull you aside like an irritatingly insistent music fan who just knows he can turn you on to Hawkwind. Well, it's that time again, folks. This time, it's the sound of the two trumpets, one bronze and the other silver, that were buried with the boy Pharaoh, Tutankhamum. They laid sealed away for over 3,200 years in the Pharaoh's tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, until that tomb was opened up by Howard Carter in 1922. It was played for the first time in for a BBC recording in 1939.
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