business

Windows directory services

business, security, tech help, tech in changing society, technology / /

From David HM Spector’s Unfinished Business Part 2: Closing the Circle (LinuxDevCenter: 7 July 2003):

… an integrated enterprise directory service does give network managers a much greater ability to manage large-scale networks and resources from almost every perspective.

Unlike most UNIX systems, Windows environments are homogeneous. There are three modes of operation in terms of user and resource management in the Windows universe:

1. Stand-alone.
2. Domain membership through a domain controller.
3. Organizational-unit membership in an LDAP-based directory such as Active Directory (or via a third-party directory such as NDS, but those are declining as more organizations switch to AD). …

Three major pieces of software make up the bulk of what Active Directory does:

* LDAP, the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol.
* Kerberos, the authorization system originally developed as part of MIT Athena (later, the basis for the security components in OSF’s DME).
* A SQL database.

These components interact with the Windows APIs to deliver a one-stop repository for any attribute that can be used to describe a system, a service, a device, users, groups, a relationship, a policy, an authorization, or another relationship in a computing environment. …

LDAP in AD is used to manage:

* DNS addresses
* Workstation and server descriptions
* Printers
* Print queues
* Volume mappings
* Certificates
* Licenses
* Policies (such as ACLs, security policies, etc.)
* Groups
* Users
* Contacts

All of these data are stored in one unified system, which can be broken down relatively easily (with some major caveats) by physical location (site), division, organization unit, or department and workgroup, and managed in a distributed fashion. These data can be replicated for redundancy and performance purposes. All Windows APIs must operate within this system if they are to participate in the network and have access to its resources. Repository data is wrapped up by and authenticated through the use of Kerberos Tickets, which makes the system (again, general Windows caveats applied) secure. …

The most interesting part of this story is that 95% of the hard work has already been done! Microsoft didn’t invent totally new LDAP schemas to make Active Directory as comprehensive as it is — as usual, they embraced and extended the work of others. LDAP schemas already exist, and are publicly available to cover:

* Contact management: The InetOrgPerson schema
* IP Addresses, Users, Server/Workstation Info: The NIS schema
* Kerberos tickets: IETF Kerberos KDC schema

Of course, Microsoft’s own schemas are available for perusal on any Active Directory server (or, if you happen to have a Macintosh OS X box, look in /etc/openldap, for all of Microsoft’s schemas are there). …

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Offshoring danger: identity theft

business, law, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Indian call centre ‘fraud’ probe (BBC News: 23 June 2005):

Police are investigating reports that the bank account details of 1,000 UK customers, held by Indian call centres, were sold to an undercover reporter.

The Sun claims one of its journalists bought personal details including passwords, addresses and passport data from a Delhi IT worker for £4.25 each. …

The Sun alleged the computer expert told the reporter he could sell up to 200,000 account details, obtained from fraudulent call centre workers, each month.

Details handed to the reporter had been examined by a security expert who had indicated they were genuine, the paper said.

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Prices for zombies in the Underground

business, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Byron Acohido and Jon Swartz’s “Going price for network of zombie PCs: $2,000-$3,000” (USA TODAY: 8 September 2004):

In the calculus of Internet crime, two of the most sought-after commodities are zombie PCs and valid e-mail addresses.

One indication of the going rate for zombie PCs comes from a June 11 posting on SpecialHam.com, an electronic forum for spammers. The asking price for use of a network of 20,000 zombie PCs: $2,000 to $3,000. …

To put a zombie network to work, an attacker needs a list of targets in the form of e-mail addresses. Lists can be purchased from specialists who “harvest” anything that looks like an e-mail address from Web sites, news groups, chat rooms and subscriber lists. Compiled on CDs, such lists cost as little as $5 per million e-mail addresses. But you get what you pay for: Many CD entries tend to be either obsolete or “spam traps” — addresses seeded across the Internet by spam-filtering companies to identify, and block, spammers.

Valid e-mail addresses command a steep price. In June, authorities arrested a 24-year-old America Online engineer, Jason Smathers, and charged him with stealing 92 million AOL customer screen names and selling them to a spammer for $100,000.

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Wynton Marsalis on recognizing your place

business, commonplace book / /

From Sam Dillon’s “Graduates Get an Earful, From Left, Right and Center” (The New York Times: 11 June 2006):

Wynton Marsalis

Musician

[Delivering commencement to] The Juilliard School

Realize that integrity is real, and so is starvation. Never let pay and the talk of pay occupy more time and space than the talk of your art. If you find that it is, go into banking or start a hedge fund or something.

Also, about pay, understand where you are. When I was 19, I was on a tour with Herbie Hancock and I started complaining to him before we walked onstage about what I was being paid. I said, “When am I being paid?”

He said: “Come here, man. Look out into the audience.” He said, “Now, do you see those people?”

I said, “Yes sir.”

He said: “They paid for these tickets. If you don’t walk out of here, how many of them are going to leave? Now, if I don’t walk out, how many will leave? That’s why you’re being paid what you’re being paid.”

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Tracking via cell phone is easy

business, law, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Brendan I. Koerner’s “Your Cellphone is a Homing Device” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2003):

What your salesman probably failed to tell you – and may not even realize – is that an E911-capable phone can give your wireless carrier continual updates on your location. The phone is embedded with a Global Positioning System chip, which can calculate your coordinates to within a few yards by receiving signals from satellites. GPS technology gave U.S. military commanders a vital edge during Gulf War II, and sailors and pilots depend on it as well. In the E911-capable phone, the GPS chip does not wait until it senses danger, springing to life when catastrophe strikes; it’s switched on whenever your handset is powered up and is always ready to transmit your location data back to a wireless carrier’s computers. Verizon or T-Mobile can figure out which manicurist you visit just as easily as they can pinpoint a stranded motorist on Highway 59.

So what’s preventing them from doing so, at the behest of either direct marketers or, perhaps more chillingly, the police? Not the law, which is essentially mum on the subject of location-data privacy. As often happens with emergent technology, the law has struggled to keep pace with the gizmo. No federal statute is keeping your wireless provider from informing Dunkin’ Donuts that your visits to Starbucks have been dropping off and you may be ripe for a special coupon offer. Nor are cops explicitly required to obtain a judicial warrant before compiling a record of where you sneaked off to last Thursday night. Despite such obvious potential for abuse, the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, the American consumer’s ostensible protectors, show little enthusiasm for stepping into the breach. As things stand now, the only real barrier to the dissemination of your daily movements is the benevolence of the telecommunications industry. A show of hands from those who find this a comforting thought? Anyone? …

THE WIRELESS INDUSTRY HAS A NAME FOR SUCH CUSTOM-TAILORED HAWKING: “location-based services,” or LBS. The idea is that GPS chips can be used to locate friends, find the nearest pizzeria, or ensure that Junior is really at the library rather than a keg party. One estimate expects LBS to be a $15 billion market by 2007, a much-needed boost for the flagging telecom sector.

That may be fine for some consumers, but what about those who’d rather opt out of the tracking? The industry’s promise is that LBS customers will have to give explicit permission for their data to be shared with third parties. This is certainly in the spirit of the Wireless Communications and Public Safety Act of 1999, which anticipated that all cellphone carriers will feature E911 technology by 2006. The law stipulated that E911 data – that is, an individual’s second-by-second GPS coordinates – could only be used for nonemergency purposes if “express prior authorization” was provided by the consumer. …

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iSee: online map of CCTVs in Manhattan

law, politics, security, tech in changing society / /

From Patrick Keefe’s “Camera Shy” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2003):

One extralegal solution is a project called iSee. Launched several years ago, iSee is an online interactive map of the locations of surveillance cameras in Manhattan. To use iSee, you simply open the map of Manhattan and double-click on your point of departure and your destination. After a few moments of computation, iSee generates the “path of least surveillance.”

iSee can be accessed through the website of the organization which created it, the so-called Institute of Applied Autonomy. IAA is a collective of artists, engineers, and scientists who design technologies for the “burgeoning market” of “cultural insurrection.” The organization presents itself as a tech-savvy civil libertarian answer to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a shadowy R&D wing of the Pentagon. DARPA has recently been in the news for developing the Terrorist Information Awareness project, headed by John Poindexter, which would monitor the everyday transactions of American citizens. Whereas DARPA uses what IAA calls “tools of repression” to take your autonomy away, IAA answers with another set of tools that are intended to give you your autonomy back. …

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The 80/20 rule

business, commonplace book / /

From F. John Reh’s “How the 80/20 rule can help you be more effective” (About.com):

In 1906, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto created a mathematical formula to describe the unequal distribution of wealth in his country, observing that twenty percent of the people owned eighty percent of the wealth. In the late 1940s, Dr. Joseph M. Juran inaccurately attributed the 80/20 Rule to Pareto, calling it Pareto’s Principle. …

Quality Management pioneer, Dr. Joseph Juran, working in the US in the 1930s and 40s recognized a universal principle he called the “vital few and trivial many” and reduced it to writing. …

As a result, Dr. Juran’s observation of the “vital few and trivial many”, the principle that 20 percent of something always are responsible for 80 percent of the results, became known as Pareto’s Principle or the 80/20 Rule. …

The 80/20 Rule means that in anything a few (20 percent) are vital and many(80 percent) are trivial. In Pareto’s case it meant 20 percent of the people owned 80 percent of the wealth. In Juran’s initial work he identified 20 percent of the defects causing 80 percent of the problems. Project Managers know that 20 percent of the work (the first 10 percent and the last 10 percent) consume 80 percent of your time and resources. You can apply the 80/20 Rule to almost anything, from the science of management to the physical world.

You know 20 percent of you stock takes up 80 percent of your warehouse space and that 80 percent of your stock comes from 20 percent of your suppliers. Also 80 percent of your sales will come from 20 percent of your sales staff. 20 percent of your staff will cause 80 percent of your problems, but another 20 percent of your staff will provide 80 percent of your production. It works both ways.

The value of the Pareto Principle for a manager is that it reminds you to focus on the 20 percent that matters. Of the things you do during your day, only 20 percent really matter. Those 20 percent produce 80 percent of your results.

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The history of the Poison Pill

business, history, law / /

From Len Costa “The Perfect Pill” (Legal Affairs: March/April 2005):

THE MODERN HISTORY OF MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS divides neatly into two eras marked by a landmark ruling of the Delaware Supreme Court in 1985. Before then, financiers like T. Boone Pickens and Carl Icahn regularly struck terror in the hearts of corporate boards. If these dealmakers wanted to take over a company in a hostile maneuver, break it into pieces, and then spin those pieces off for a profit, it was difficult to stop them. But after a decision by the Delaware court, directors regained control of their companies’ destinies.

The directors’ trump card is a controversial innovation technically called a preferred share purchase rights plan but nicknamed the “poison pill.” Its legality was affirmed unequivocally for the first time in the Delaware ruling of Moran v. Household International. By the unanimous vote of a three-judge panel, the court held that a company could threaten to flood the market with newly issued shares if a hostile suitor started buying up lots of its stock, thus diluting the suitor’s existing holdings and rendering the acquisition prohibitively expensive. …

Still, both sides agree that the poison pill is an ingenious creation. “As a matter of lawyering, it’s absolutely brilliant,” said Stanford University law professor Ronald Gilson, a longstanding critic who nonetheless considers the poison pill to be the most significant piece of corporate legal artistry in the 20th century. …

If a hostile bidder acquires more than a preset share of the target company’s stock, typically 10 to 15 percent, all shareholders-except, crucially, the hostile bidder-can exercise a right to purchase additional stock at a 50 percent discount, thus massively diluting the suitor’s equity stake in the takeover target.

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Paul Graham’s lessons for startups

business, technology / /

From Paul Graham’s “The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn“:

1. Release Early.

The thing I probably repeat most is this recipe for a startup: get a version 1 out fast, then improve it based on users’ reactions.

By “release early” I don’t mean you should release something full of bugs, but that you should release something minimal. Users hate bugs, but they don’t seem to mind a minimal version 1, if there’s more coming soon. …

I’ve seen a lot of startups die because they were too slow to release stuff, and none because they were too quick. …

Even if you had no users, it would still be important to release quickly, because for a startup the initial release acts as a shakedown cruise. If anything major is broken– if the idea’s no good, for example, or the founders hate one another– the stress of getting that first version out will expose it. And if you have such problems you want to find them early.

Perhaps the most important reason to release early, though, is that it makes you work harder. When you’re working on something that isn’t released, problems are intriguing. In something that’s out there, problems are alarming. There is a lot more urgency once you release. And I think that’s precisely why people put it off. They know they’ll have to work a lot harder once they do.

2. Keep Pumping Out Features.

Of course, “release early” has a second component, without which it would be bad advice. If you’re going to start with something that doesn’t do much, you better improve it fast. …

By “feature” I mean one unit of hacking — one quantum of making users’ lives better.

As with exercise, improvements beget improvements. … You should make your system better at least in some small way every day or two.

… Users love a site that’s constantly improving. In fact, users expect a site to improve. …

They’ll like you even better when you improve in response to their comments, because customers are used to companies ignoring them. If you’re the rare exception — a company that actually listens — you’ll generate fanatical loyalty. You won’t need to advertise, because your users will do it for you. …

If your product seems finished, there are two possible explanations: (a) it is finished, or (b) you lack imagination. Experience suggests (b) is a thousand times more likely.

3. Make Users Happy.

Improving constantly is an instance of a more general rule: make users happy. One thing all startups have in common is that they can’t force anyone to do anything. They can’t force anyone to use their software, and they can’t force anyone to do deals with them. A startup has to sing for its supper. That’s why the successful ones make great things. They have to, or die.

When you’re running a startup you feel like a little bit of debris blown about by powerful winds. The most powerful wind is users. They can either catch you and loft you up into the sky, as they did with Google, or leave you flat on the pavement, as they do with most startups. Users are a fickle wind, but more powerful than any other. If they take you up, no competitor can keep you down. …

The median visitor will arrive with their finger poised on the Back button. …

There are two things you have to do to make people pause. The most important is to explain, as concisely as possible, what the hell your site is about. … A startup should be able to explain in one or two sentences exactly what it does. … You probably shouldn’t even start a company to do something that can’t be described compellingly in one or two sentences.

The other thing I repeat is to give people everything you’ve got, right away. If you have something impressive, try to put it on the front page, because that’s the only one most visitors will see. Though indeed there’s a paradox here: the more you push the good stuff toward the front, the more likely visitors are to explore further. …

The industry term here is “conversion.” The job of your site is to convert casual visitors into users …

4. Fear the Right Things.

Another thing I find myself saying a lot is “don’t worry.” Actually, it’s more often “don’t worry about this; worry about that instead.” Startups are right to be paranoid, but they sometimes fear the wrong things. …

What you should fear, as a startup, is not the established players, but other startups you don’t know exist yet. They’re way more dangerous than Google because, like you, they’re cornered animals.

Looking just at existing competitors can give you a false sense of security. You should compete against what someone else could be doing, not just what you can see people doing. A corollary is that you shouldn’t relax just because you have no visible competitors yet. No matter what your idea, there’s someone else out there working on the same thing. …

And in any case, competitors are not the biggest threat. Way more startups hose themselves than get crushed by competitors. There are a lot of ways to do it, but the three main ones are internal disputes, inertia, and ignoring users. Each is, by itself, enough to kill you. But if I had to pick the worst, it would be ignoring users. If you want a recipe for a startup that’s going to die, here it is: a couple of founders who have some great idea they know everyone is going to love, and that’s what they’re going to build, no matter what.

Almost everyone’s initial plan is broken. If companies stuck to their initial plans, Microsoft would be selling programming languages, and Apple would be selling printed circuit boards. In both cases their customers told them what their business should be — and they were smart enough to listen. …

5. Commitment Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.

I now have enough experience with startups to be able to say what the most important quality is in a startup founder, and it’s not what you might think. The most important quality in a startup founder is determination. Not intelligence — determination. …

Time after time VCs invest in startups founded by eminent professors. This may work in biotech, where a lot of startups simply commercialize existing research, but in software you want to invest in students, not professors. Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google were all founded by people who dropped out of school to do it. What students lack in experience they more than make up in dedication. …

In a startup, there’s always some disaster happening. So if you’re the least bit inclined to find an excuse to quit, there’s always one right there. …

You have to be the right kind of determined, though. I carefully chose the word determined rather than stubborn, because stubbornness is a disastrous quality in a startup. You have to be determined, but flexible …

6. There Is Always Room.

… There is always room for new stuff. At every point in history, even the darkest bits of the dark ages, people were discovering things that made everyone say “why didn’t anyone think of that before?” …

The reason we don’t see the opportunities all around us is that we adjust to however things are, and assume that’s how things have to be. …

So for all practical purposes, there is no limit to the number of startups. Startups make wealth, which means they make things people want, and if there’s a limit on the number of things people want, we are nowhere near it. …

7. Don’t Get Your Hopes Up.

Startup founders are naturally optimistic. They wouldn’t do it otherwise. But you should treat your optimism the way you’d treat the core of a nuclear reactor: as a source of power that’s also very dangerous. You have to build a shield around it, or it will fry you.

The shielding of a reactor is not uniform; the reactor would be useless if it were. It’s pierced in a few places to let pipes in. An optimism shield has to be pierced too. I think the place to draw the line is between what you expect of yourself, and what you expect of other people. It’s ok to be optimistic about what you can do, but assume the worst about machines and other people. …

Shielding your optimism is nowhere more important than with deals. If your startup is doing a deal, just assume it’s not going to happen. The VCs who say they’re going to invest in you aren’t. The company that says they’re going to buy you isn’t. The big customer who wants to use your system in their whole company won’t. Then if things work out you can be pleasantly surprised.

The reason I warn startups not to get their hopes up is not to save them from being disappointed when things fall through. It’s for a more practical reason: to prevent them from leaning their company against something that’s going to fall over, taking them with it.

For example, if someone says they want to invest in you, there’s a natural tendency to stop looking for other investors. That’s why people proposing deals seem so positive: they want you to stop looking. And you want to stop too, because doing deals is a pain. Raising money, in particular, is a huge time sink. So you have to consciously force yourself to keep looking. …

VCs and corp dev guys are professional negotiators. They’re trained to take advantage of weakness. [8] So while they’re often nice guys, they just can’t help it. And as pros they do this more than you. So don’t even try to bluff them. The only way a startup can have any leverage in a deal is genuinely not to need it. And if you don’t believe in a deal, you’ll be less likely to depend on it. …

The way to succeed in a startup is to focus on the goal of getting lots of users, and keep walking swiftly toward it while investors and acquirers scurry alongside trying to wave money in your face. …

Paul Graham’s lessons for startups Read More »

Good description of Fair Use & 1st Sale

business, law, tech in changing society / /

From Scott Kleper’s “An Introduction to Copyfighting“:

I think a lot of people incorrectly assume that Copyfighters are people who believe that copyright should be abolished and that everything should be free. Copyfighters aren’t saying that all media should be freely distributed. We are saying that as consumers of media (film, television, software, literature, etc.) we have certain rights that we would like to protect. One of these rights is Fair Use. Fair Use means that you can reuse copyrighted work without permission as long as you are commenting on it, or copying/parodying the original. Fair Use is what allows you to quote song lyrics when writing a review of a new CD. Another right is First Sale. First Sale means that when you buy something, you own it and are thus entitled to sell it to someone else. First Sale is what allows you to buy a book, read it, then sell it on half.com for someone else to enjoy.

Most of all, we simply want the right to use the products we buy in the way that we see fit. We don’t want to be sued by a manufacturer for opening up a product to see how it works or sued by a media company for moving a file from one device to another. We believe that when we buy a CD, we should be able to convert it to another format to play on another device. We shouldn’t have to pay again to turn it into a ring tone. …

Songs bought on the Apple iTunes music store can be played only on a fixed number of devices that you have unlocked with your iTunes ID. Sounds reasonable, but after a few system reinstalls, maybe a replaced motherboard, a change of jobs, etc., all of a sudden, you no longer have access to any of your “authorized computers” and you have to get Apple to remove them all so you can start again. You can’t play iTunes purchased music on your non-Apple portable music player and you can’t play Windows DRM files on your iPod. Consumers are supposed to understand and care about this?

The worst part is that these schemes end up only hurting the people who are trying to be good. If you use a commercial downloading service, like iTunes Music Store, it means that you have rejected the dubious legality and poor user experience of the “illegal” services. You have paid your 99 cents and been handed something that is less valuable than what you could have gotten for free. You get a file with complex and arbitrary restrictions in a proprietary format. Meanwhile, the people who decided to keep on infringing aren’t suffering — they get unrestricted files.

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Subway’s frequent-eater program killed because of fraud

business, security / /

From Bruce Schneier’s “Forging Low-Value Paper Certificates“:

Both Subway and Cold Stone Creamery have discontinued their frequent-purchaser programs because the paper documentation is too easy to forge. (The article says that forged Subway stamps are for sale on eBay.)

… Subway is implementing a system based on magnetic stripe cards instead.

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The Creative Class & the health & growth of cities

business, commonplace book, politics / /

From Richard Florida’s “The Rise of the Creative Class“:

[The key to economic growth lies not just in the ability to attract the creative class, but to translate that underlying advantage into creative economic outcomes in the form of new ideas, new high-tech businesses and regional growth. To better gauge these capabilities, I developed a new measure called the Creativity Index (column 1). The Creativity Index is a mix of four equally weighted factors: the creative class share of the workforce (column 2 shows the percentage; column 3 ranks cities accordingly); high-tech industry, using the Milken Institute’s widely accepted Tech Pole Index, which I refer to as the High-Tech Index (column 4); innovation, measured as patents per capita (column 5); and diversity, measured by the Gay Index, a reasonable proxy for an area’s openness to different kinds of people and ideas (column 6).]

This young man and his lifestyle proclivities represent a profound new force in the economy and life of America. He is a member of what I call the creative class: a fast-growing, highly educated, and well-paid segment of the workforce on whose efforts corporate profits and economic growth increasingly depend. Members of the creative class do a wide variety of work in a wide variety of industries—from technology to entertainment, journalism to finance, high-end manufacturing to the arts. They do not consciously think of themselves as a class. Yet they share a common ethos that values creativity, individuality, difference, and merit. …

Most civic leaders, however, have failed to understand that what is true for corporations is also true for cities and regions: Places that succeed in attracting and retaining creative class people prosper; those that fail don’t. …

The distinguishing characteristic of the creative class is that its members engage in work whose function is to “create meaningful new forms.” The super- creative core of this new class includes scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and novelists, artists, entertainers, actors, designers, and architects, as well as the “thought leadership” of modern society: nonfiction writers, editors, cultural figures, think-tank researchers, analysts, and other opinion-makers. Members of this super-creative core produce new forms or designs that are readily transferable and broadly useful—such as designing a product that can be widely made, sold and used; coming up with a theorem or strategy that can be applied in many cases; or composing music that can be performed again and again.

Beyond this core group, the creative class also includes “creative professionals” who work in a wide range of knowledge-intensive industries such as high-tech sectors, financial services, the legal and healthcare professions, and business management. These people engage in creative problem-solving, drawing on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems. Doing so typically requires a high degree of formal education and thus a high level of human capital. People who do this kind of work may sometimes come up with methods or products that turn out to be widely useful, but it’s not part of the basic job description. What they are required to do regularly is think on their own. They apply or combine standard approaches in unique ways to fit the situation, exercise a great deal of judgment, perhaps try something radically new from time to time. …

The creative class now includes some 38.3 million Americans, roughly 30 percent of the entire U.S. workforce—up from just 10 percent at the turn of the 20th century and less than 20 percent as recently as 1980. The creative class has considerable economic power. In 1999, the average salary for a member of the creative class was nearly $50,000 ($48,752), compared to roughly $28,000 for a working-class member and $22,000 for a service-class worker. …

Chicago, a bastion of working-class people that still ranks among the top 20 large creative centers, is interesting because it shows how the creative class and the traditional working class can coexist. But Chicago has an advantage in that it is a big city, with more than a million members of the creative class. The University of Chicago sociologist Terry Clark likes to say Chicago developed an innovative political and cultural solution to this issue. Under the second Mayor Daley, the city integrated the members of the creative class into the city’s culture and politics by treating them essentially as just another “ethnic group” that needed sufficient space to express its identity. …

Why do some places become destinations for the creative while others don’t? Economists speak of the importance of industries having “low entry barriers,” so that new firms can easily enter and keep the industry vital. Similarly, I think it’s important for a place to have low entry barriers for people—that is, to be a place where newcomers are accepted quickly into all sorts of social and economic arrangements. All else being equal, they are likely to attract greater numbers of talented and creative people—the sort of people who power innovation and growth. …

Cities and regions that attract lots of creative talent are also those with greater diversity and higher levels of quality of place. That’s because location choices of the creative class are based to a large degree on their lifestyle interests, and these go well beyond the standard “quality-of-life” amenities that most experts think are important. …

When we compared these two lists with more statistical rigor, his Gay Index turned out to correlate very strongly to my own measures of high-tech growth. Other measures I came up with, like the Bohemian Index—a measure of artists, writers, and performers—produced similar results.

Talented people seek an environment open to differences. Many highly creative people, regardless of ethnic background or sexual orientation, grew up feeling like outsiders, different in some way from most of their schoolmates. When they are sizing up a new company and community, acceptance of diversity and of gays in particular is a sign that reads “non-standard people welcome here.” …

They favor active, participatory recreation over passive, institutionalized forms. They prefer indigenous street-level culture—a teeming blend of cafes, sidewalk musicians, and small galleries and bistros, where it is hard to draw the line between performers and spectators. They crave stimulation, not escape. They want to pack their time full of dense, high-quality, multidimensional experiences. Seldom has one of my subjects expressed a desire to get away from it all. They want to get into it all, and do it with eyes wide open.

Creative class people value active outdoor recreation very highly. They are drawn to places and communities where many outdoor activities are prevalent—both because they enjoy these activities and because their presence is seen as a signal that the place is amenable to the broader creative lifestyle. …

Places are also valued for authenticity and uniqueness. Authenticity comes from several aspects of a community—historic buildings, established neighborhoods, a unique music scene, or specific cultural attributes. It comes from the mix—from urban grit alongside renovated buildings, from the commingling of young and old, long-time neighborhood characters and yuppies, fashion models and “bag ladies.” An authentic place also offers unique and original experiences. Thus a place full of chain stores, chain restaurants, and nightclubs is not authentic. You could have the same experience anywhere. …

Even as places like Austin and Seattle are thriving, much of the country is failing to adapt to the demands of the creative age. It is not that struggling cities like Pittsburgh do not want to grow or encourage high-tech industries. In most cases, their leaders are doing everything they think they can to spur innovation and high-tech growth. But most of the time, they are either unwilling or unable to do the things required to create an environment or habitat attractive to the creative class. They pay lip service to the need to “attract talent,” but continue to pour resources into recruiting call centers, underwriting big-box retailers, subsidizing downtown malls, and squandering precious taxpayer dollars on extravagant stadium complexes. Or they try to create facsimiles of neighborhoods or retail districts, replacing the old and authentic with the new and generic—and in doing so drive the creative class away.

It is a telling commentary on our age that at a time when political will seems difficult to muster for virtually anything, city after city can generate the political capital to underwrite hundreds of millions of dollars of investments in professional sports stadiums. And you know what? They don’t matter to the creative class. Not once during any of my focus groups and interviews did the members of the creative class mention professional sports as playing a role of any sort in their choice of where to live and work. What makes most cities unable to even imagine devoting those kinds of resources or political will to do the things that people say really matter to them?

The answer is simple. These cities are trapped by their past. Despite the lip service they might pay, they are unwilling or unable to do what it takes to attract the creative class. The late economist Mancur Olson long ago noted that the decline of nations and regions is a product of an organizational and cultural hardening of the arteries he called “institutional sclerosis.” Places that grow up and prosper in one era, Olson argued, find it difficult and often times impossible to adopt new organizational and cultural patterns, regardless of how beneficial they might be. Consequently, innovation and growth shift to new places, which can adapt to and harness these shifts for their benefit. …

Most experts and scholars have not even begun to think in terms of a creative community. Instead, they tend to try to emulate the Silicon Valley model which author Joel Kotkin has dubbed the “nerdistan.” But the nerdistan is a limited economic development model, which misunderstands the role played by creativity in generating innovation and economic growth. Nerdistans are bland, uninteresting places with acre upon acre of identical office complexes, row after row of asphalt parking lots, freeways clogged with cars, cookie-cutter housing developments, and strip-malls sprawling in every direction. Many of these places have fallen victim to the very kinds of problems they were supposed to avoid. …

Yet if you ask most community leaders what kinds of people they’d most want to attract, they’d likely say successful married couples in their 30s and 40s—people with good middle-to-upper-income jobs and stable family lives. I certainly think it is important for cities and communities to be good for children and families. But less than a quarter of all American households consist of traditional nuclear families, and focusing solely on their needs has been a losing strategy, one that neglects a critical engine of economic growth: young people.

Young workers have typically been thought of as transients who contribute little to a city’s bottom line. But in the creative age, they matter for two reasons. First, they are workhorses. They are able to work longer and harder, and are more prone to take risks, precisely because they are young and childless. In rapidly changing industries, it’s often the most recent graduates who have the most up-to-date skills. Second, people are staying single longer. The average age of marriage for both men and women has risen some five years over the past generation. College-educated people postpone marriage longer than the national averages. Among this group, one of the fastest growing categories is the never-been-married. To prosper in the creative age, regions have to offer a people climate that satisfies this group’s social interests and lifestyle needs, as well as address those of other groups. …

Richard Florida is a professor of regional economic development at Carnegie Mellon University and a columnist for Information Week. This article was adapted from his forthcoming book, The Rise of the Creative Class: and How Its Transforming Work

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10 early choices that helped make the Internet successful

business, history, science, social software, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Dan Gillmor’s “10 choices that were critical to the Net’s success“:

1) Make it all work on top of existing networks.

2) Use packets, not circuits.

3) Create a ‘routing’ function.

4) Split the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) …

5) The National Science Foundation (NSF) funds the University of California-Berkeley, to put TCP/IP into the Unix operating system originally developed by AT&T.

6) CSNET, an early network used by universities, connects with the ARPANET … The connection was for e-mail only, but it led to much more university research on networks and a more general understanding among students, faculty and staff of the value of internetworking.

7) The NSF requires users of the NSFNET to use TCP/IP, not competing protocols.

8) International telecommunications standards bodies reject TCP/IP, then create a separate standard called OSI.

9) The NSF creates an “Acceptable Use Policy” restricting NSFNET use to noncommercial activities.

10) Once things start to build, government stays mostly out of the way.

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Early attempts to control phone usage

business, history, social software, tech in changing society, technology / /

From R. W. Kostal’s Law and English Railway Capitalism, 1825-1875 (quoted in Andrew Odlyzko’s “Pricing and Architecture of the Internet: Historical Perspectives from Telecommunications and Transportation“):

In Britain in 1889, postal officials reprimanded a Leicester subscriber for using his phone to notify the fire brigade of a nearby conflagration. The fire was not on his premises, and his contract directed him to confine his telephone “to his own business and private affairs.” The Leicester Town Council, Chamber of Commerce, and Trade Protection Society all appealed to the postmaster-general, who ruled that the use of the telephone to convey intelligence of fires and riots would be permitted thenceforth.

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Monopolies & Internet innovation

business, history, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Andrew Odlyzko’s “Pricing and Architecture of the Internet: Historical Perspectives from Telecommunications and Transportation“:

The power to price discriminate, especially for a monopolist, is like the power of taxation, something that can be used to destroy. There are many governments that are interested in controlling Internet traffic for political or other reasons, and are interfering (with various degrees of success) with the end-to-end principle. However, in most democratic societies, the pressure to change the architecture of the Internet is coming primarily from economic concerns, trying to extract more revenues from users. This does not necessarily threaten political liberty, but it does impede innovation. If some new protocol or service is invented, gains from its use could be appropriated by the carriers if they could impose special charges for it.

The power of price discrimination was well understood in ancient times, even if the economic concept was not defined. As the many historical vignettes presented before show, differential pricing was frequently allowed, but only to a controlled degree. The main con- cern in the early days was about general fairness and about service providers leveraging their control of a key facility into control over other businesses. Personal discrimination was particularly hated, and preference was given to general rules applying to broad classes (such as student or senior citizen discounts today). Very often bounds on charges were imposed to limit price discrimination. …

Openness, non-discrimination, and the end-to-end principle have contributed greatly to the success of the Internet, by allowing innovation to flourish. Service providers have traditionally been very poor in introducing services that mattered and even in forecasting where their profits would come from. Sometimes this was because of ignorance, as in the failure of WAP and success of SMS, both of which came as great surprises to the wireless industry, even though this should have been the easiest thing to predict [55]. Sometimes it was because the industry tried to control usage excessively. For example, services such as Minitel have turned out to be disappointments for their proponents largely because of the built-in limitations. We can also recall the attempts by the local telephone monopolies in the mid-to late-1990s to impose special fees on Internet access calls. Various studies were trotted out about the harm that long Internet calls were causing to the network. In retrospect, though, Internet access was a key source of the increased revenues and profits at the local telcos in the late 1990s. Since the main value of the phone was its accessibility at any time, long Internet calls led to installation of second lines that were highly profitable for service providers. (The average length of time that a phone line was in use remained remarkably constant during that period [49].)

Much of the progress in telecommunications over the last couple of decades was due to innovations by users. The “killer apps” on the Internet, email, Web, browser, search engines, and Napster, were all invented by end users, not by carriers. (Even email was specifically not designed into the ARPANET, the progenitor of the Internet, and its dominance came as a surprise [55].)

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Big companies & their blind spots

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From Paul Graham’s “Are Software Patents Evil?“:

Fortunately for startups, big companies are extremely good at denial. If you take the trouble to attack them from an oblique angle, they’ll meet you half-way and maneuver to keep you in their blind spot. To sue a startup would mean admitting it was dangerous, and that often means seeing something the big company doesn’t want to see. IBM used to sue its mainframe competitors regularly, but they didn’t bother much about the microcomputer industry because they didn’t want to see the threat it posed. Companies building web based apps are similarly protected from Microsoft, which even now doesn’t want to imagine a world in which Windows is irrelevant. …

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Paul Graham on software patents

business, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Paul Graham’s “Are Software Patents Evil?“:

The situation with patents is similar. Business is a kind of ritualized warfare. Indeed, it evolved from actual warfare: most early traders switched on the fly from merchants to pirates depending on how strong you seemed. In business there are certain rules describing how companies may and may not compete with one another, and someone deciding that they’re going to play by their own rules is missing the point. Saying “I’m not going to apply for patents just because everyone else does” is not like saying “I’m not going to lie just because everyone else does.” It’s more like saying “I’m not going to use TCP/IP just because everyone else does.” Oh yes you are.

A closer comparison might be someone seeing a hockey game for the first time, realizing with shock that the players were deliberately bumping into one another, and deciding that one would on no account be so rude when playing hockey oneself.

Hockey allows checking. It’s part of the game. If your team refuses to do it, you simply lose. So it is in business. Under the present rules, patents are part of the game. …

When you read of big companies filing patent suits against smaller ones, it’s usually a big company on the way down, grasping at straws. For example, Unisys’s attempts to enforce their patent on LZW compression. When you see a big company threatening patent suits, sell. When a company starts fighting over IP, it’s a sign they’ve lost the real battle, for users.

A company that sues competitors for patent infringement is like a defender who has been beaten so thoroughly that he turns to plead with the referee. You don’t do that if you can still reach the ball, even if you genuinely believe you’ve been fouled. So a company threatening patent suits is a company in trouble. …

In other words, no one will sue you for patent infringement till you have money, and once you have money, people will sue you whether they have grounds to or not. So I advise fatalism. Don’t waste your time worrying about patent infringement. You’re probably violating a patent every time you tie your shoelaces. At the start, at least, just worry about making something great and getting lots of users. If you grow to the point where anyone considers you worth attacking, you’re doing well.

We do advise the companies we fund to apply for patents, but not so they can sue competitors. Successful startups either get bought or grow into big companies. If a startup wants to grow into a big company, they should apply for patents to build up the patent portfolio they’ll need to maintain an armed truce with other big companies. If they want to get bought, they should apply for patents because patents are part of the mating dance with acquirers. …

Patent trolls are companies consisting mainly of lawyers whose whole business is to accumulate patents and threaten to sue companies who actually make things. Patent trolls, it seems safe to say, are evil. I feel a bit stupid saying that, because when you’re saying something that Richard Stallman and Bill Gates would both agree with, you must be perilously close to tautologies.

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