Tag Archive: open security


Airtight Online Security Against Identity Theft (discussion)

Filed Under: Discussion Forum, Hyper-convergence paradigm, Quipu Economic Forum
by staff — Leave a comment
June 10, 2009

How can we reach the state of affairs in which online activity is entirely secure against identity theft? Hyper-convergence means media and services of all kinds will be increasingly integrated across a broad-spectrum multi-media fabric, where one’s actions and interests, private information and financial data, will be increasingly widespread.

It is possible to ensure that such information is always available strictly and only behind tough state-of-the-art software or hardware firewalls, but with the current standard, identity theft as such is difficult to prevent or correct. The first clear step must be to ensure that the individual has maximum control over his or her identifying information, as well as the vast matrix of data linked to their personal identity.

Granting the individual such control means the need for some degree of centralization of data, which is, potentially, another security risk. But, the individual must have the ability to act in good faith and with expeditious urgency to reverse any incidence of identity theft in the quickest, most comprehensive manner possible.

The floor is open to debate on how we can best achieve this…

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Transparency Network for Dispersed Persistent Examination of Financial Institutions (discussion)

Filed Under: Discussion Forum, Hyper-convergence paradigm, Quipu Economic Forum
by Joseph Robertson — Leave a comment
June 9, 2009

The underlying problem in the financial system —which allowed banking institutions to hide bad debt in bundled assets, and resell it to trading partners who may not have been given full disclosure on the unsustainable nature of much of the underlying debt— is transparency. A fierce individualist ideology led to a convenient clouding over of the reporting mechanisms intended to make financial institutions more ethical, more stable, and more useful to those outside their walls.

One of the major innovations that could take place —either by collaborative effort now in a time of crisis, or over time, as everyday operators within markets work to adopt the most intelligent organizational tools— would be a vast network of open information, regarding the management of investment funds, securitized loan holdings, and lending practices at a given institution.

This system need not reveal any personal private information about individual investors or bank customers, but would be made available to the public so that the maximum possible amount of information be searchable for anyone wishing to vet the claims of in-house analysts. Part of the goal would be to facilitate the proliferation of new smart-reporting economic databases, and to allow competing points of view on the most complex investment-backup schemes to have an open hearing, as based on credible information.

What mechanisms would do best for ensuring that an open network of institutional transparency could provide stability and sustainability in high-end financial risk-taking?

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Transparency Network as Means of Restoring Financial Confidence

Filed Under: Hyper-convergence paradigm, Quipu Economic Forum
by Joseph Robertson — Leave a comment
December 10, 2008

It may be that “a few bad apples” got the ball rolling on what has turned into a massive international financial disaster. Or, it may be that a few bad apples got their names in lights, while the entire system conspired unwittingly in a spectacular collapse. Either way, the best expression of the problem might be to say that markets have stopped working, in part, because they have been comprehensively modified to stop working like markets.

With capital vanishing, nearly $7 trillion in stock losses in just a few months, and banks refusing to lend even the tens of billions they were given precisely to lubricate the lending process, we are facing a crisis of confidence and an inability to conceptualize shared interest. The idea that self-interest motivates markets somehow developed, irresponsibly, into the idea that self-interest is more important than the functionality of market dynamics.

With ever-larger banking interests concentrating power in fewer and fewer hands, they also began to rely on mystical assumptions about the wealth-generating power of certain financial risks. The obscurity of those financial gambles, the need to believe in their power of wealth-expansion, allowed financial institutions to use questionable deals, with even more questionable projected rates of return, to paper-over already measurable under-performance, both in their own businesses and in the markets generally.

The underlying problem in the system —which allowed banking institutions to hide bad debt in bundled assets, and resell it to trading partners who may not have been given full disclosure on the unsustainable nature of much of the underlying debt— is transparency. A fierce individualist ideology led to a convenient clouding over of the reporting mechanisms intended to make financial institutions more ethical, more stable, and more useful to those outside their walls.

One of the major innovations that could take place —either by collaborative effort now in a time of crisis, or over time, as everyday operators within markets work to adopt the most intelligent organizational tools— would be a vast network of open information, regarding the management of investment funds, securitized loan holdings, and lending practices at a given institution.

This system need not reveal any personal private information about individual investors or bank customers, but would be made available to the public so that the maximum possible amount of information be searchable for anyone wishing to vet the claims of in-house analysts. Part of the goal would be to facilitate the proliferation of new smart-reporting economic databases, and to allow competing points of view on the most complex investment-backup schemes to have an open hearing, as based on credible information.

One of the side-effects of this sort of banking transparency network would be to reduce the motivation for wrongdoing, be it small manipulations or distortions on a grand scale, because by its nature, the system would privilege the more reliable sources of information. Banks with better reporting would be considered superior institutions, in terms of viability and therefore smart investment choices. Grandiose claims would be far less relevant, because they would be measured by their truthfulness, not their dimension.

For many reasons, this may seem like pie in the sky; for one: we don’t know what sort of computing technology could do the work necessary to parse such large volumes of information in a timely fashion. But computer speeds are accelerating rapidly, with the Roadrunner super-computer at Los Alamos achieving petaflop speeds —one thousand trillion calculations per second— and nano-chemical computing on the horizon, potentially magnifying the processing power of traditional microprocessors by thousands or even millions of times.

And, that’s still without touching on the controversial topic of quantum computing, in which everyday substances —like 12 ounces of coffee— can be turned into massive computational neural nets capable of working out problems that require trillions of calculations instantly. The complications there are too many to go into at present, and there is no reliable quantum computer that can be applied to something with so many legal implications as a banking system, at the moment, but the work is ongoing.

Cloud computing may be the first major speed-related improvement that can allow the beginnings of a true banking transparency network. This is a major undertaking, and will require a daunting philosophical shift for many in the financial industry, but armed with computers working at thousands of times today’s computers’ top speeds, spread out over a dispersed cloud-computing network, it would be possible to optimize processing speed, memory allocation, memory recall, informational back-up, time-keeping and matrix cross-referencing.

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Zero-downtime Must Be a Standard of the Open Web

Filed Under: Hyper-convergence paradigm
by admin — Leave a comment
July 27, 2008

Freedom of information and the standard of net neutrality —connection providers not controlling content or access to content in any way— require that information posted online not be removed, blocked, or made unavailable to readers, so long as the publisher wishes to include that content. For content publishers and content consumers to shape the web experience they desire, not only do we need an ethical standard of total net neutrality, but we need a technical standard of zero-downtime bandwidth guarantees.

Zero downtime is necessary for providing fair service to online publishers and consumers for a number of reasons, not least of which is that some services require a wide-open uninterrupted secure connection. Online voice communications should fit into the net neutrality standard: some connection providers (ISPs) also provide voice telephony services, and would like to prevent low-cost or free voice-over-IP services, but a fair standard for managing basic web connection services cannot allow such interference with competition.

There are a wealth of breakthrough technological solutions that can revolutionize not only communications and mass media, but also the ability of the individual to achieve the self-empowerment of reliable information and to produce and secure data in ways that transcend the physical limitaitons of individual devices or storage centers, if we take advantage of the potential of “cloud computing”, or dispersed IT. Without a constant connection, devices and networking systems using cloud computing systems will be limited in their ability to provide the best quality of service to their users.

Achieving the zero-downtime standard would be in the interest of nearly all entities involved in the Internet business, except perhaps media giants that provide both access and separate telephony services, but increasingly, telecoms involved in the web connectivity business appear to be getting the hint that constant uptime and unlimited data, even unlimited anywhere web access, are good for business. If we reach the general standard of mass-market zero-downtime web connectivity, consumers should have a wide range of new options, both to achieve interesting new services and to protect their data.

As web infrastructure and connectivity standards evolve toward their optimal state, telecommunications should move toward inexpensive, flat-rate calling, eventually with global unlimited calling plans that cost little more than what we are accustomed to paying now for high-speed broadband Internet service. This will of course be a revolutionary moment in telecommunications and will spur a number of currently unimaginable media innovations, though it is likely that for sometime, quality of service considerations will prevent massive content downloads (like digital movie downloads direct to mobile phones) from being workable.

The zero-downtime question, coupled with net neutrality and consumer rights generally, raises important issues about whether media giants are required to facilitate or participate in the evolution of new technologies that capitalize on their services, but also surpass them and reduce their influence. In general, the United States has a unique media-innovation engine driving this debate, the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibits any laws that “abridge… the freedom of the press”, and “of the people to peaceably assemble”, both of which relate to consumers’ interests in expanding the online clout of the individual.

The individual is now also the press, the press consumer is potentially part of the press, legally speaking, and anyone can become a publisher in the online media environment. Their freedoms are covered multiple times in the First Amendment alone, while major media companies, traditionally permitted to engage in a certain amount of laissez-faire decision-making, have grown into utilities that are less information providers than they are purveyors of a piece of basic infrastructure.

The open web is a dream that will enable a number of vital new democratic processes to evolve, where consumers and content-providers spontaneously organize to change the manner in which information travels through the broader culture. It will also allow much better access to vital and sometimes esoteric information for the average consumer, and eventually, new forms of digital data security, related to revolutionary dispersed coding platforms and segmented-multiple-redundancy data storage systems.

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Relational Data, the Semantic Web & Key Security Priorities

Filed Under: Hyper-convergence paradigm
by admin — Leave a comment
July 2, 2008

As the population of users on the world wide web expands at still astonishing rates, and “web 2.0″ —the social networking phenomenon, the integration of real open source innovation, and the free-services standard being pushed by Google— becomes the communicative norm, powerful new realms of innovation could be emerging that will become the third-generation Internet, or web 3.0. We need to understand fully how the interrelation of data and vital security interests can come together to give end-users the richest possible experience.

In October 2001, Tim Berners-Lee —inventor of the world wide web’s foundational protocols— wrote an essay entitled “Business Model for the Semantic Web: Enterprise Application Integration and other stories“, in which he laid out some of the key problems involved in building an Internet that not only facilitates sharing data across distinct networking systems, but which can also “comprehend” and synthesize data for the benefit of the end user. 

Among the problems with executing such an information-blending service we face the following: consistent accurate repetition of data, consistent accurate relational linkage of data, data security, global virtual encryption, re-partitioning of geographical and personal data for the public side of such systems, and global access and control of data for the end user. Add to this the problem of compatibility not only of encryption format but of information layout and tagging, across systems, and we have a labyrinthine task of collaboration which large institutions are still ill-suited to carry out.

The strength, however, of the world wide web is open systems. As ideas and problem-solving solutions compete across a spreading community of researchers and commentators, the are refined, advanced, and innovations emerge which follow a logic not visible from within large, closed institutions with payroll development teams. Harnessing these communities, building their open format into what some web visionaries call “ideagoras”, open markets for ideas primed to produce optimal pace for innovation, will allow us to “fix” the likely gaps in any integrated semantic web system, before it is widely adopted.

According to Berners-Lee, these dispersed web communities are in fact the platform for the semantic web, and their integration and their application to relational data and personal data security are key to the process of standardization needed to enable a dispersed, de-centralized semantic web:

This is done with standards, which is what the World Wide Web Consortium is all about. We are not inventing relational models for data, or query systems or rule-based systems. We are just webizing them. We are just allowing them to work together in a decentralized system – without a human having to custom handcraft every connection.

We will begin to see tagging and labeling of tags, with multiple layers of categorization and author-committed relational presets, all of which will permit pro-active databases, searching for information to aggregate to their contents, to accurately scan and interconnect sites, products and services, based solely on the relative interest expressed by a given site or online operation’s other contents, tie-ins and tags. The semantic web will, at this point of mounting automatic interconnection, require dynamic new security solutions that ensure access to information without exposure to unwanted executable risks.

The semantic web, if properly imagined, will not need to be about “harvesting” information, but simply locating connections. If this is the case, then each individual user should be able to ensure a top level of security for sensitive information, so long as that information is properly identified by the user as sensitive and major online institutions (like banks, universities, government or corporate employers) do not expose sensitive information on their end. 

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Ziggurat Century: Global Civilization as the New Babel, with Reason for Hope

Filed Under: Crisis Policy Forum, Hyper-convergence paradigm, Intellectual Property Preserve
by Joseph Robertson — Leave a comment
May 17, 2008


We are living in a time of unprecedented global integration, where economies, security interests, legal systems, and languages and systems of learning have been dispersed and interwoven across the globe. There are obvious positive effects to this integration, along with certain overarching and seemingly intractable problems that cause real worry for even the most hopeful or studied observers.

Languages and cultures intermingle, yet seek to remain distinct and continuous, and individuals seek to enhance their own possibilities (requiring freedom of information, and freedom of movement), while seeking to prevent the corrosion of already structured social fabrics. The obvious problem is that some of our most vital human interests come into conflict more readily with those of others, when massive numbers of people mix and intermingle, individuals and cultures competing with one another for the spoils of a new global system.

But there is no reason this has to be a source of friction, suspicion or violence. It is also true that a more open system is more dynamic, more able to adapt to otherwise ‘trivial’ personal interests, and better able to establish truly just rules for negotiating tense competitive situations where decisions need to be made about whose interests are best served by what result. What is needed is devotion to that open system, and real pragmatic tools for helping that system recognize and address genuine situations of friction or crisis.

There are some 6,800 languages spoken in the world today, and more than half are expected to die off within the next 100 years, possibly much sooner, and possibly well over one-half. This rapid evacuation of global language culture —though some will say it brings the benefits of increased uniformity— robs us all of potential bridges across cultures where understanding can take place. As words disappear, so do ideas, comparisons, metaphors, symbols and the human element of perception.

And the degradation of the global culture, in this fashion, while it may be part of a process of integration which will deliver some much needed benefits for long-term peace and human wellbeing, is a stress on the sense of security or identity of those cultures which survive. A key focus at all times, in the new globalized civilization, must be to ensure that identities are not threatened by the mass expansion of media, rights, capital and movement.

The conflict of the Tower of Babel —a place where we presume too many distinct cultures and interests combined, and an empire collapsed— is a conflict of (abstract/thought-pattern) border tensions provoking animosity and rivalry. Actual border conflicts derive fuel and momentum from abstract border conflicts —visions of the world, racial prejudice, linguistic rivalry, competition for resources—, a tendency 21st century technologies, politics and societal developments must counteract.

Openness is part of the new era of information and communication, which has helped to make the world “smaller” or “flatter” or “come together”, if we think more optimistically. As interests and opportunities coincide across nations and cultures, limiting the degree to which geography determines the life choices of a given individual, we face the need to embrace or to fear and oppose the increased openness that offers the resources and the opportunities to meet our interests.

Similar to the way in which cloudscape-computing allows for much more resilient, secure, and super-fast computation, so a broad, integrated global society, if informed by and served by norms that protect the human individual as a creative and information-gathering entity, can achieve new dynamism and vastly more potent and timely means of problem solving, where needed. The new integrated web, the dawn of hyper-convergence, and the global hunger for digital technologies means human society itself is becoming a sort of universal library or information-store.

Technology can help us not only to communicate, but to share the work of solving basic human problems, and to transcend the nature of oppositional conflict. Productive adversarial systems can be woven into a broad social fabric that helps us to debate, confront and work through the challenges of our times without resort to armed confrontation: the ugliest and ultimately least productive of human talents.

The 21st century need not be the new fall of the Tower of Babel, but could be the agile and well-thought construction of an abstract ziggurat —a fortress, a temple, an storehouse of ideas and guidance— shared by the broad continuum of human societies and attuned to our need to communicate and co-create. If we understand the problem of our times is one of forging cooperative bonds that serve the individual and protect human rights, we will be best armed to persevere in the face of challenges to cultural and individual identity, and reap the rewards —as a species— of the information age.

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Openness May Be New Gold-standard for Government, Business, Technology

Filed Under: Hyper-convergence paradigm, Intellectual Property Preserve, Quipu Economic Forum
by Joseph Robertson — Leave a comment
May 8, 2008

The open-source movement has been a revolutionary phenomenon of startling proportions. It has changed the way software works for us in our daily experience, by bringing costs down far enough that now anyone with an internet connection can launch a web-based publication in literally seconds. Its efficiency, its appeal, its human element, make it a standard to watch as other sectors of economics and public life evolve to integrate the latest communications technologies, and aim for optimum end-user freedom and flexibility.

What has worked in software development may work as well in business and in government. Historically, industrial development, national security, intelligence gathering, and long-term strategy have been thought to benefit from being kept under lock and key, surrounded by a bank of armed guards and armored exterior walls, both literally and figuratively. But now we are seeing that openness has a tremendous long-term health effect.

So, openness should be considered as a way of mobilizing the voluntary talent of millions of interested and free-thinking individuals, but also as a means of creating a common interest, in defense of which a community of free-thinking, and free-acting individuals self-organize to prevent breakdown. This is, in some ways, an integral part of the revolutionary vision for a democratic society that the United States was founded on, and it is, in the spirit of the early 21st century, a source of promise and renewal in the future of human society.

Markets like openness. Though those who sit atop them often like to see things work specifically and consistently to their own advantage. Consumers like openness. It allows them access to information, which empowers them, and which dignifies their role in the economic fabric. Firms that produce products accompanied by honest information, and/or by a willingness to take responsibility for problems related to their products, tend to build a loyal customer base.

Governments that allow citizen participation tend to find community activism is more productive, less antagonistic, and that the political system itself remains more stable. The more direct involvement people have in the decisions that affect them, the more likely they are to feel they have a role to play, and they will contribute what they can and care about the outcome. This has a positive effect on the efficiency with which a society can adapt to major challenges, on the micro- or the macrocosmic scale.

It is already true that nations with more open media systems and more open forms of government have shown themselves to be more dynamic in social and political terms and more able to adjust to changes in political, social and economic climate, without suffering disintegration or collapse. Open systems are more natural, and more resilient in the face of threats.

“Globalization” is in part based on this phenomenon, in the hopes that opening economic borders will have a dynamic and stabilizing effect, over the long term. A very serious problem, however, with the current state of globalized trade is that it relies heavily on the idiosyncrasies of markets where the political system is corrupt, closed or highly-manipulated, creating great potential for human rights abuse or economic oppression.

The system of forced opening of borders is haunted by its actual lack of openness or citizen-involvement. Development initiatives that consider the real interests of “stakeholders”, local or foreign, are more able to adjust to the real facts of human existence, and therefore are more relevant and more sustainable. That dynamism comes from listening to the voices of those affected, and that involvement is about the openness of a process or a system.

We are likely to see, in coming decades, a far greater reliance on the productive capabilities of such open systems, be they a commons of intellectual property and innovation, a stake-holder-based approach to development, an ecologically-informed approach to economics, or the democratization of nations and regions, in the interests of long-term human wellbeing and sustainability.

  • As part of our Intellectual Property Preserve, this article contains some ideas that are more proposals than reporting. If you would like to collaborate with the author or seek further information for a potential partnership regarding the implementation of some of these ideas, please contact The Hot Spring at: think.media@casavaria.com

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The Commons May Eventually Replace the Firewall as Security Standard

Filed Under: Hyper-convergence paradigm, Intellectual Property Preserve
by admin — Leave a comment
May 2, 2008

As the world acclimates to digital technology, and its usefulness in everyday life becomes increasingly relevant to how we achieve a higher quality of life, higher quality of education, and more efficient means of deploying solutions to complex problems, the standard for securing data and ideas may shift from closed environments behind firewalls to a new open standard, where the commons guarantees provenance, and thereby, rights, when warranted.

How the open commons can serve the public and the private good in digital media is still a serious question, as much theoretical as technical or legal. The Creative Commons movement has given new life to the idea that individuals might be able to create, license and effectively and universally update the licensing of their work.

The reasoning behind the shift in copyright “licensing” for creative work, the concept of the commons, is to build a virtual space where creative people can benefit from the creative energies of their peers, of others forging ahead of them, and of people working in disciplines they themselves do not master. If applied optimally, the system allows for broader and more effective audience-outreach for creative works, as well as for the creative individual to judge what sort of licensing agreements, exclusivity or openness best suits their particular project.

As we advance beyond the strict binary distinction between copyright-protected and public-domain, we can fill in the spaces where recently created works are useful as fodder or structural bases for new creative works, with each iteration of the original shared work serving as publicity, and as potential income. There also exists the possibility that by placing a creative work into an operable commons, we can protect against its being pirated or plagiarized.

The technical specifics of such a system are difficult to work out. It has to work in part on the good faith participation of a wide range of users. And it is not at all desirable to extend central control to end-users’ machines: one of the great flaws of DRM is their invasive quality, which is not only a potential risk to users’ data security, but also a mode of persuading against using products that carry certain types of DRM constraints.

But the power of the integrated online community, and its dispersed computing and observation capacity, is such that works within a commons system can be protected by voluntary community organization, without the need for intrusive software solutions.

One major advance that will allow this sort of commons rights protection system to be deployed will be real image searchability, where actual visual images can be searched for exact or near copies, in varying sizes and color distortions, without having to rely on file titles, keywords or metatags. This may even become possible for actual video as well, though the computing power needed for such visual-comparison searches online is not ready for broad end-user contact just yet.

If we look seriously at the technology needed to be able to implement the best pro-creative solutions for user-organized communities and commons-oriented licensing services, we find that computing speeds are an essential component to fast-paced global spontaneous community integration. Molecular computing solutions, which may be able to give us from 16 to 256 to 1024 times as much simultaneous circuitry potential as today’s fastest processors, bodes well for reaching the necessary speeds to do real image searches, video-cross-checks, and self-organizing anti-piracy commons maintenance.

While much of this may seem antithetical to the commons movement —anti-piracy policing, cross-checks to warn of or block illegal or unlicensed copying, etc.—, it is in fact an integral part of ensuring that trust-based commons networks can be relied upon by creatives as spaces where a work’s provenance, purpose and licensing are established, referrable, and adjustable, thus empowering the commons as not only an information distribution paradigm, but as a security measure.

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