Supreme Court Rules Sea...

The U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously decided today to uphold citizens’ Fourth Amendement rights in the GPS tracking case which would have allowed the U.S. government to track a suspects’ cars without a warrant. The court states that the Fourth Amendement’s protection of “persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” extends to vehicles. According to the ruling ( PDF version here ), a warrant is required “[w]here, as here, the government obtains information by physically intruding on a constitutionally protected area,” including a car. The case stems from a case involving the nightclub owner Antoine Jones, who was sentenced to life in prison for drug dealing before the appeals court overturned the ruling. The government had installed a GPS device on the suspect’s Jeep, which led to his later arrest. The government tracked Jones over four weeks in order as a part of its case proving Jones was distributing cocaine and storing it and money in a suburban house outside Washington D.C. In today’s ruling, five Supreme Court justices, Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, and Chief Justice John Roberts, agreed that attaching a GPS to a car would violate a person’s Fourth Amendment rights. The other four justices, led by Samuel Alito, agreed in the Jones judgement itself, saying that the move to attach the GPS violated Jones’ “reasonable expectations of privacy.” All judges agreed that GPS tracking should require warrants, which upheld the appeals court decision. The ruling will have a serious impact on police investigations going forward, as GPS tracking has become a common means of obtaining information on a suspect’s movements. The case had Big Brother -esque implications, however, despite the Justice Department’s argument that the government was not after “24-hour surveillance of every citizen in the U.S.” The idea that the government walk up to your driveway and plant a GPS device (originally a military technology) on your car, had left many with a feeling of unease.

Box’s Next Frontier: Cl...

For Box, 2011 was a huge year in terms of customer acquisition. Box ended the year with 77% of the Fortune 500 using the company’s cloud storage offerings. Procter and Gamble marked one of Box’s largest deployments for the year. While Box is still continuing to focus on cloud solutions for the enterprise in 2012, the company has set its sights on a potentially huge fish for the year—the federal government. Box CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie tells me that there is a huge opportunity for Box in procuring cloud storage options for government agencies. “There’s going to be a big shift in public sector using cloud services this year,” Levie explains. “With so many agencies having to collaborate with public and other organizations, it’s more efficient to do this in the cloud.” One of the obstacles to offering cloud services to the government are the high security requirements. For example, we’ve seen some of the early security hurdles Google faced with expanding cloud-based Google Apps to government agencies. But Box has recently started ramping up security for cloud storage, making controls more granular and giving IT administrators more control over user functions. It is expected that Box will add even more security and control for compliance with government agencies’ data. Levie says that the company is potentially tapping into the $70 billion market for providing technology and software to the government. Clearly, that’s a huge revenue opportunity for the company. And government agencies seem interested in making a move to the cloud. In November, President Obama has ordered federal agencies to improve their records management, encouraging them to ditch paper-based storage to the cloud. Already, a number of enterprise cloud-services companies are clamoring to appeal to the government for services. Amazon recently launched the GovCloud to provide a secure cloud computing environment for government agencies. IBM, and HP recently won a $250 million private cloud contract. And Salesforce is also eying public sector initiatives to help governments adopt cloud computing. Box is currently serving a number of local and state governments with cloud storage services, says Levie. At the end of the day, he explains, the government is dealing with the exact same problems as the enterprise. And that is an opportunity Box is not going to pass up.

Is Google a Public Comp...

I have been watching from the fringes as people squabble over the new offering from Google “Search Plus Your World”. All I can see that has been accomplished is that the Internet industry press is starting to look less like reporters and more like advocates for whatever constituency they are trying to impress. The worst offender is Apple’s mouthpiece, MG Siegler , who is fully convinced that Apple represents heaven and Google represents the powers of hell and he will tell everyone about it over and over and over. Ridiculous but it is how this has played out. What is really happening is that people are arguing whether Google and its search function should be allowed to operate in a free market sense or should it be “confiscated” by the government through regulation etc so that it can be fair. This is just ridiculous in a supposedly free market environment. For painfully obvious reasons (i.e his own income and influence), Siegler outlines how Apple avoids this mess without ever saying what is actually taking place. That is that, Apple produces a product that people can buy into of their own free will. There is a cost to get there and a barrier to entry. It is free market. Google on the other hand provides a critical service that would make life a bit more difficult (although not impossible since there are competitors like Bing etc which people also like to conveniently forget) that is FREE to the end user (if they have Internet access, of course). There seems to be some confusion around this whole free thing. It really forces common sense and reason to the back seat. You see, everyone seems to be pushing for the government to do everything for them. That’s fine if you want to go there. I am not here to make a political argument. But just because something is free it doesn’t mean that EVERYONE owns it! This is a company’s product / service just like Apple’s iPhone but it is offered to the masses for free. There is only one way to “own” it; buy some freakin’ Google stock! From a business perspective though, the government should not be involved in what Google has done here with Search Plus Your World. Not at all, but people like Siegler keep yelling into their megaphone that the government will be looking into the apparent injustice that Google is perpetrating on the unsuspecting world at large. His cries will get the attention of headline hungry politicians so it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nice work, MG. He even veils it in a conspiracy theory that this is part of some master plan to drag Facebook before the government before their IPO but I’m not buying that. What is really happening is that the idea of the open Internet actually is impossible to achieve in a free market. Why? Because if it were truly open then the big players of Google, Twitter and Facebook would be openly sharing their data with each other because everyone benefits. Guess what? That idea is BS because the only reason that Facebook and Twitter are not being used as true social signals by Google (meaning all data is available to the likes of Google to give people social influenced search results) is money. The guess is, Twitter wanted more than Google would pay for the access to the Twitter firehose so that went away. This happens in the free market. Companies have a right to pay what they feel is the fair amount for something and Google plus Twitter have made their positions clear so they are not doing business. Free market. Facebook doesn’t share their info with Google but they do with Bing because of their choice to be in bed with Microsoft. Once again, free market. They made a choice in business relationships and as a result Google has limited access to Facebook information to formulate a social influence result set based on their data. Really this is all a big joke. Why can’t we just get off the bandwagon that Google owes the world something? It gives the world something, it does it well and it is rewarded handsomely for a good service that is needed. It is doing it in a completely unique environment that we have no precedent for as well. If you asked the average guy on the street as to whether or not he gives a rip that Google makes a lot of money providing its service and if they think they should be limited in what they provide as a result, most would look at you cross-eyed and say “I could care less. I just want to search the Internet”. Then ask that person about social signals and the vast majority of the world (which Silicon Valley doesn’t have a single clue about) would once again say they will take what they can get for free as long as it works well enough to help them do what they want to do. In other words, this whole argument is happening at a level that the public, the majority, isn’t even involved in. This is a real funny thing that is going on here because the 1% are turning on their own! The average person cares about being able to search the Internet and get good information for free. They could care less about how much a company makes doing it. The people that “care” about this the most are the ones that will profit from it like Silicon Valley, the Siegler’s of the world, politicians and the like. It’s that simple.In the end this has nothing to do with something that is for the better good. It’s for the good of the 1%. Pretty ironic considering the usually liberal angle of the Internet set! This argument gets very circular and tiresome very quickly so I will be quiet for now. I wish opportunists like Siegler would go on radio silence as well. Now that would be heaven. Guess what? Ain’t gonna happen.

Indian Minister Wants W...

Another day, another government trying to figure out how to censor the internet. This time it’s India, where acting communications minister Kapil Sibal is meeting with officials from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook to pressure them to self-censor user content, the New York Times reports. The issue is that someone wrote something mean about a politician, Sonia Gandhi, on her Facebook page. That’s right. While other countries come up with broader excuses for trying to interfere with what people can post online — China says it’s trying to stop porn, the US says it’s trying to protect copyright holders — Sibal is openly just upset about politicians being criticized. His solution, the report says, is to have web companies use humans to monitor and delete objectionable content before it gets posted. Since TechCrunch has lots of readers in India, and uses Facebook for comments, I guess this means Facebook would be required to decide what comments people in the country are allowed to post here? Or would TechCrunch get blocked like it is in China if there are any comments by anyone that are negative about Indian politicians? Hard to say at this point. Sibal’s effort isn’t a law. But the government has already passed other laws recently that have successfully put pressure on web companies to self-censor. An October 2009 law requires web company executives to comply with take-down or site-blocking requests from the government or face a fine and seven years of jail. Sibal’s ministry issued a vague set of rules in April that forces web companies to delete content that politicians or citizens object to within 36 hours, and don’t provide ways for content creators to defend or appeal their actions. There are, of course, some good reasons for the Indian government to be concerned. Online postings can worsen existing religious and ethnic tensions within the diverse country. But democracies need to let citizens speak freely in order to be understood and represented by their politicians. The internet is a vital way for this to happen. Self-interested efforts like Sibal’s today need to be fought. Indian readers, let us know in comments if there are any campaigns against these actions that we can help promote, and I’ll update this post with links to them. In the meantime, Sonia Gandhi’s Facebook page accepts user comments, so you can go let her know how you feel there.

“All Your Shreds Are Be...

A San Francisco-based team has just won the DARPA Shredder Challenge. DARPA, the government agency whose work led to the creation of the Internet, challenged the public to reconstruct five shredded documents. The winning team, called “All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S.” completed the task in 33 days, spending nearly 600 man-hours building algorithms and piecing together more than 10,000 shreds. 9,000 teams registered to compete. The winning teams gets a $50,000 prize paid for by the U.S. Treasury. Dan Kaufman, director, DARPA Information Innovation Office says “the most effective approaches were not purely computational or crowd-sourced, but used a combination blended with some clever detective work.” DARPA Director Regina Dugan adds “The DARPA Shredder Challenge underscores the value of increasing the number and diversity of problem solvers. The varied methods used have potential implications for so-called ‘wicked problems,’ generally consider insolvable by conventional means, and offer the possibility of increased speed, agility and breadth in innovation.” I’ll say. The shredder challenge also suggests just because you shred something, that doesn’t mean it can’t be put back together. You can see the puzzle solutions and pictures of the winning submissions at www.shredderchallenge.com .