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BlackBerry out at US climate agency, iPhone in

February 11, 2012

BlackBerry smartphones are displayed at a store in Seoul Jan 18, 2012. — Reuters pic
TORONTO, Feb 11 — Research In Motion’s BlackBerry smartphone has struggled to win over US consumers but the Canadian company has long been able to rely on the loyalty of corporate and government clients who depend on its secure email. No more.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a US federal agency that studies climate and the environment, plans to replace some of its employees’ BlackBerrys with Apple iPhones and get rid of the servers that power RIM’s smartphones by June.

“It all comes down to economics,” Joe Klimavicz, NOAA’s chief information officer, said in a phone interview on Friday. “I’ve got a lot of pressure to cut our operating costs.”

RIM charges a fee for use of its servers and data centres, which compress and encrypt email and other sensitive data. The company’s early success was due to a reliance on BlackBerry smartphones by lawyers, bankers, politicians and bureaucrats.

But with budgets under pressure and competitors improving their security bone fides, BlackBerry is no longer the only game in town.

Earlier this week, oilfield services company Halliburton said it plans to switch 4,500 BlackBerry-toting employees to iPhones, saying that the Apple device is better suited to its needs. Several banks have already welcomed rival devices.

Klimavicz said NOAA’s move was made possible after it switched its desktop-based software to Google Apps for Government las December. Another US agency, the General Services Administration, has also moved to Google Apps, Klimavicz said.

Google’s enterprise business offers Web-based versions of word processing, spreadsheet and other common software applications in a direct challenge to Microsoft. For a set price Google includes mobile-device management capabilities similar to what RIM offers for its BlackBerrys.

When Google’s mobile management is coupled with Apple’s tightly controlled software, NOAA can enforce password policies and it can control who can gain access to what data, which is a major concern for a range of government bodies and corporations.

Klimavicz said that in the future his agency will be able to use devices using Google’s Android mobile software, but that it would have to approve each on an individual basis.

For now, the agency will buy iPhones to replace at least some of the 3,000 BlackBerrys used by its workers and is also using a small number of iPads, he said.

Klimavicz’s office oversees annual spending of around $600 million on information technology. He declined to specify how much money the move away from RIM would save.

In response to queries, RIM said its security remains unmatched and pointed out that its latest operating system for smartphones and the PlayBook tablet computer have received certification from US and Canadian authorities.

“RIM continues to work closely with its more than one million government customers in North America who rely on the unmatched security of the BlackBerry platform,” spokeswoman Tenille Kennedy said in an email. — Reuters

(Source: themalaysianinsider.com)

Wired Opinion: The Perpetual, Invisible Window Into Your Gmail Inbox

By Andy Baio
Email Author
February 10, 2012 |
1:26 pm |
Categories: Codeword, WiredOpinion

The other day, I tried out Unroll.me, a clever new service that reads your inbox to let you unsubscribe from mailing lists and other unwanted e-mail flotsam with a single click.

As I was about to connect my Gmail account, my finger hovered over the “Grant access” button.

Wait a second. Who am I giving access to my Gmail account, anyway? There was no identifying information on their site — no company address, no team page listing the names of its team members, and broken links to their privacy policy or terms of service.

For all I knew, it could be run by unscrupulous spammers or an Anonymous troll looking for lulz. And I was about to give them unfettered access to eight years of my e-mail history and, with password resets, the ability to access any of my online accounts?

I had to dig around online to find out who’s behind it, and fortunately, Unroll.me is a totally legit NYC-based startup providing a useful service. I spoke to Perri Blake Gorman, Unroll.me’s cofounder and CMO, who assured me they’ll add all the company information as they roll out their public beta.

But since Gmail added OAuth support in March 2010, an increasing number of startups are asking for a perpetual, silent window into your inbox.

I’m concerned OAuth, while hugely convenient for both developers and users, may be paving the way for an inevitable privacy meltdown.
The Road to OAuth

For most of the last decade, alpha geeks railed against “the password anti-pattern,” the common practice for web apps to prompt for your password to a third-party, usually to scrape your e-mail address book to find friends on a social network. It was insecure and dangerous, effectively training users how to be phished.

The solution was OAuth, an open standard that lets you grant permission for one service to connect to another without ever exposing your username or password. Instead of passwords getting passed around, services are issued a token they can use to connect on your behalf.

If you’ve ever granted permission for a service to use your Twitter, Facebook, or Google account, you’ve used OAuth.

This was a radical improvement. It’s easier for users, taking a couple of clicks to authorize accounts, and passwords are never sent insecurely or stored by services who shouldn’t have them. And developers never have to worry about storing or transmitting private passwords.

But this convenience creates a new risk. It’s training people not to care.

It’s so simple and pervasive that even savvy users have no issue letting dozens of new services access their various accounts.

I’m as guilty as anyone, with 49 apps connected to my Google account, 80 to Twitter, and over 120 connected to Facebook. Others are more extreme. Samuel Cole, a developer at Kickstarter, authorized 148 apps to use his Twitter account. NYC entrepreneur Anil Dash counted 88 apps using his Google account, with nine granted access to Gmail.

For Twitter, the consequences are unlikely to be serious since almost all activity is public. For Facebook, a mass leak of private Facebook photos could certainly be embarrassing.

But for Gmail, I’m very concerned that it opens a major security flaw that’s begging to be exploited.
The Privacy Danger

A long list of services, large and small, request indefinite access to your Gmail account.

I asked on Twitter and Google+ for people to check their Google app permissions to see who they’ve granted Gmail access to. The list includes a range of inbox organizers, backup services, email utilities, and productivity apps: TripIt, Greplin, Rapportive, Xobni, Gist, OtherInbox, Unsubscribe, Backupify, Blippy, Threadsy, Nuevasync, How’s My Email, ToutApp, ifttt, Email Game, Boomerang, Kwaga, Mozilla F1, 0boxer, Taskforce, and Cloudmagic.

Once granted, all of these services are issued a token that gives unlimited access to your complete Gmail history. And that’s where the danger lies.

Compared to Facebook’s powerful privacy controls, Google’s app permissions page is limited and hard to find.

You may trust Google to keep your email safe, but do you trust a three-month-old Y Combinator-funded startup created by three college kids? Or a side project from an engineer working in his 20 percent time? How about a disgruntled or curious employee of one of these third-party services?

Any of these services becomes the weakest link to access the e-mail for thousands of users. If one’s hacked or the list of tokens leaked, everyone who ever used that service risks exposing his complete Gmail archive.

The scariest thing? If the third-party service doesn’t discover the hack or chooses not to invalidate its tokens, you may never know you’re exposed.

In the past, Gmail’s issued security warnings to accounts being accessed from multiple IP addresses. I spoke to OtherInbox founder Joshua Baer, and he said that Google’s eased up on the warnings because of the prevalence of third-party services.

It’s entirely possible for someone with a stolen token to read, search, and download all your mail to their server for months, and you’d never find out unless they exposed themselves, or you were diligently auditing your “Last account activity” history.
Stay Safe

Clearly, we’re not going to stop using awesome new utilities just because there’s a privacy risk. But there are best practices you can follow to stay safe.

Clean up your app permissions. The best thing you could do, right now, is to log into each service you care about and revoke access to the apps you no longer use or care about, especially those that have access to Gmail. Finding the permissions pages can be tricky, but the nice folks at MyPermissions.org made a handy dashboard linking to every one.
Think before you authorize. Before authorizing an account, find out who you’re granting access to. Look for a staff page, contact address, and take a look at the privacy policy to make sure they’re not sharing or selling your info with third parties. Bonus points if they outline their security policies and offer a way to disconnect service from within the app. If anything seems off, don’t do it.
When in doubt, change your password. Have a feeling that someone might be reading your mail, but not sure which app is to blame? Changing your password instantly invalidates all your Google and Facebook OAuth tokens, though Twitter tokens persist after password changes.

Google could improve, as well. Their permissions page is too hard to find, even for experienced users, and it’s impossible to see which apps have accessed your account recently.

Facebook does an excellent job with this, but Google only shows you the IP address and the protocol it used to connect. Surfacing this information, as a periodic e-mail or on-site notification, would go a long way to averting a potential disaster.

(Source: Wired)

A Dollar For Your Thoughts: Silicon Valley’s Famed Single-Digit Salaries

By Mike Isaac
Email Author
February 10, 2012 |
8:30 pm |
Categories: Corporate, Economy, Silicon Valley, Social Media

Follow @MikeIsaac

Origins

The roots of the practice spread far beyond the fertile soil of Silicon Valley.

“As the U.S. geared up for World War II in the 1930′s and 40′s, increased military spending put millions of Americans — suffering from the effects of the Great Depression — back to work.

The problem was, the bureaucrats running the government weren’t properly equipped to oversee a major mobilization of the American workforce, redistributing huge swaths of labor into new industrialized positions. In order to run things more smoothly, industry moguls of all types across the private sector flew in from all over the country, effectively asked by the federal government to come in and volunteer their time in service of their country.

These men were indispensable. They brought expertise from their respective industries to the table in a time when the country needed help with the division of labor. But volunteerism without proper compensation from the government wasn’t legal. So in order to skirt this technicality, they were given salaries for their service. The amount? One U.S. dollar.

These “Dollar-a-Year” men, as they came to be known, brought with them a sense of civic duty combined with capitalistic self-interest, acting in service of the nation while still keeping in mind the best interests of their companies. The “cost-plus-a-fixed-fee system” of development — wherein the government assured full repayment for contractor development resources as well as an additional fee on top — incentivized private enterprise to cooperate. It was Democratic ideology at its finest; Business and government, working hand in hand, all in the name of nationalism.
The New Deal

The synergy between today’s top tech execs and the original “Dollar-a-Year” men is spot-on. Page’s and Zuck’s war isn’t one between nations, but of clashing companies struggling for market share, mindshare, and engineering talent. Yesteryear’s patriotism gives way to a new fealty — not to the state, nor even the user — a responsibility to keeping the company shareholders happy.

So let’s not kid ourselves — the salary isn’t really about the money. It’s a corporate strategy, a move that speaks directly to shareholders. In some ways, it’s a show of faith in your product.

“The assumption is that they stand to gain on the stock they own over time,” Dr. Charles Diamond, managing economic director at FTI Consulting, told Wired. “It’s a signal that they’re betting on the company.”

Think back to 1999, when Steve Jobs returned to an ailing Apple, a company being closed in on by the dominant PC consortium led by Microsoft’s Windows software. In his return as interim CEO (or iCEO, as he was popularly dubbed), Jobs became a dollar-a-year man, the most famous one of the past three decades. His return was not about the money; he had made his millions years ago. It was about building a company.

Indeed, Zuckerberg signals that he’s not only betting on his company, he has little intention of cashing out and running any time soon. In his founder’s letter — tucked into the body of the S-1 filing — Zuckerberg speaks of Facebook less as a company than a philosophy, a “social mission” to be propelled. “We often talk about inventions like the printing press,” he writes, aspiring to Gutenbergian levels of influence. “By simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society.”

Then comes the bombshell: “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services,” he writes. “These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.”
Do Not Be Fooled

These men speak of far-reaching aspirations with a sense of nobility, a manifest destiny of the internet age. The dollar-a-year salary is supposed to convince us that it isn’t about the money.

But almost antithetically, this sort of philosophy is exactly what shareholders want to hear.

Since the death of Steve Jobs, investors are starved for another visionary. Career CEOs who jump from seat to seat in the Valley without any true allegiance to any one company — think of the Scott Thompsons, the Leo Apothekers, even the Meg Whitmans of the tech world — they’re less attractive than someone like Jobs, like Zuck, founders that at least seem to have deep, emotional attachments to their companies.

In other words: Making it look like it’s never been about the money is the best possible business decision these founders could ever make. Especially in Zuck’s case, where his baby is just months away from becoming a publicly traded company.

For men like Larry Page, it’s turning into something else. The dollar-a-year salary was important in Google’s early years, when the search engine still had something to prove. AltaVista, Yahoo, Lycos — all were former threats that loomed over the infant Google.

But now Google is expanding beyond search, beyond PageRank, looking for different revenue streams as it experiments in myriad properties, from daily deals to mobile platforms to online retail. Yes, Larry Page is still tied to the company he started, the one he believes in. But Page doesn’t need supervision from seasoned Valley execs like Eric Schmidt anymore. Larry Page has grown up.

And as a grown up, he’s leveling with his investors. In most recent Google earnings call, he explicitly reassured shareholders that Google’s stock was in good hands. “We’re careful stewards of shareholder money,” he said in January, something we’ve never heard from Page before.
The Other Bottom Line

On a personal financial level, it’s almost smarter for a CEO to go with a buck a year salary.

Under today’s tax code, companies take a financial hit for awarding salaries above a million bucks. And what’s more, when your salary peaks in the multi-millions, you’re stuck in the highest income tax bracket. The trade-off, then, is forgoing millions in annual salaries for billions in vested stock options.

Or take a look at Steve Jobs. In 2001, he still received a $1 salary. But Apple awarded Jobs a “special executive bonus” that year — a $40 million dollar private jet, on which Apple paid another $40 million in taxes. Not bad.

To be fair, Zuckerberg plans to exercise a large number of options before the IPO. The money he earns will fall under the capital gains tax, sticking him with a bill from the government that could be up to $1.5 billion.

But this also seems like a form of good PR. The tax Zuckerberg pays will be a windfall for the state of California, which has been plagued with an increasing deficit for the last decade.
Belong to the 99 Percent

The public doesn’t see the tax benefits behind the scenes.

What we see is the dollar-a-year man, steering the company with no want or need for the fat kinds of salaries we see taken in by the one-percenters on Wall Street. We see the members of the club, men and women on a mission, ready to lead a company to success.

It’s the best PR money can buy.

Don’t ask me repeat the same answer for the many time, read this

I’m totally busy on weekday….I have to work: 8.ooam till 6pm @ office. Saturday i have to work: 8.00am till 1pm - sometime after 1pm I go lepaking with friends and sometime I back home directly due I’m totally TIRED. SUNDAY the only time that I spend to have enough sleep, enough rest, wake up on afternoon etc. This is my life schedule. I hope that I can spend my time lepaking on SUNDAY but I need my rest time for my self revive energy… Don’t ask me the QUESTION that I has answer it before. I dislike to repeat the question/answer that I already answer it before many time.

Report: Facebook Files for IPO Next Week

By Mike Isaac Email Author January 27, 2012 | 2:46 pm | Categories: Miscellaneous, Social Media

CEO Mark Zuckerberg at an event in 2011. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
After years of speculation and anticipation on Wall Street and across Silicon Valley, Facebook may file for its initial public offering as soon as Wednesday of next week, according to a report citing people familiar with the matter.

The social giant’s IPO could raise as much as $10 billion, with investment firms Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs as the lead underwriters, according to The Wall Street Journal. This would put the company’s valuation at approximately $75 to $100 billion, the highest IPO of any technology company in Silicon Valley history.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Facebook’s IPO is one of the most highly anticipated filings in Silicon Valley, a topic nearing obsession for the tech press and venture capital community at large. The company has swelled since its founding only seven years ago, with a user base of over 800 million people worldwide. The expansion of the social network has only fueled anticipation for an IPO.

But CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has been in no rush to take his company public, continually rebuffing questions of when Facebook would finally make its Wall Street debut. The 27-year-old CEO has had a number of exit opportunities in the company’s history, with tech titans as large as Yahoo and Microsoft offering billions of dollars to acquire the social network. Zuckerberg, then years younger, famously turned down both, instead opting to continue to grow and improve his company while continuing to accept venture funding.

If the company were to go public next week, Zuckerberg and a host of other shareholders would become multi-billionaires overnight. A filing next week would bring Facebook’s Wall Street debut in the summer, the piece de resistance in a string of major tech 2011 IPOs, including Zynga, LinkedIn, and social deals web site Groupon.

(Source: http)