What's Next: Microsoft looks to throw back Razorfish
Monday's tech headlines
Federal Computer Week
• The movement to dismantle some of the Real ID program's broadest information-sharing requirements is gaining steam. DHS head Janet Napolitano has endorsed the Pass ID legislation that would supercede or roll back many of the previous system's provisions. Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) proposed the Pass ID bill, which will likely be considered afte the upcoming holiday break.
• Wyatt Kash, signing in from Government Computer News, covers a speech by Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the man whom Defense secretary Robert Gates has nominated to run the new cybersecurity command. Lt. Gen. Alexander told the conference held by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association's D.C. chapter that to make the system work, all service members who "operate in cyberspace" need to have "a common block of training," and the notorious mess around security clearances for network operations folk simply has to be cleaned up.
• WorldWideScience.org, the global science gateway sponsored by the Department of Energy's Office of Scientific and Technical Information, has added some nifty tools for sharing results via social-networking sites -- Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Delicious and the like. You'll find similar tools on other sites, but this installation looks like a nice collaboration tool for researcher.
Seattle Times
• Halo 3: ODST is nearing, and Brier Dudley gets a look in that "mysterious Kirkland bunker" where Bungie Studios is preparing the onslaught.
• The Swiss score an impressive takedown: A child-porn ring involving more than 2,000 people in 78 countries. It was hiding in a corner of an otherwise unrelated hip-hop site. Eww.
• You know about the Gates Foundation, but plenty of other former and current Microsofties are putting their tech-earned dollars into philanthropy. Kristi Heim tells about Scott Oki's SeeYourImpact -- think charitable giving crossed with Twitter- and mobile-phone-style reportage -- and Adnan Mahmud's Jolkona Foundation, which does something a bit similar with micro-investment projects.
The Register
• EMC's attempt to acquire Data Domain lurches along. Now EMC's lengthening the offer period for the firm, which has already accepted an acquisition offer from NetApp. EMC, however, didn't let a little fact like that stop them from acquiring Iomega last year, so this really isn't over in any sense of the word.
• There exist in the world people who steal koi fish from garden ponds, and apparently they're using Google Earth to find those ponds. Isn't it depressing to know that some folks are spending their threescore years and ten thinking up antics like that?
• A spate of fake death notifications posted on Twitter over the past few days hit, among other celebrity train wrecks, Britney Spears. How (*yawn*) imaginative.
New York Times
• Miguel Helft writes that Google is trying to make the case to would-be regulators and such that the company isn't a giant, and that the firm is "in an industry that is subject to disruption and we can't take anything for granted." Google should do a search and see how well that argument worked out for Microsoft in the 1990s.
• Brian Stelter (the former TVNewser editor-in-chief turned NYT reporter) says that "journalism rules [were] bent in news coverage from Iran." Hey, that's interesting. You know where else they were bent, Brian? In Iraq when the NYT's Judith Miller was on the WMD trail. Bent 'em right the heck over.