On the surface, we note those who favor the legislation and those who don’t. We would like to invite those who see flaws in the argument or have something to share about practical considerations. I’m no fan of recording industry, after a peripheral share of how it was handled for decades. Trademarks and publishing rights have also been routinely abused and now the whining from those who abused it is trying to pay off politicians to back their abusive pasts.

Let’s try to be objective but have your say and you’ll be rewarded.

In the First Session of the 112^th Congress, The Stop Online Piracy Act, H.R. 3261, (SOPA) was introduced by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) and was initially co-sponsored by Howard Berman (D-CA), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), Steve Chabot (R-OH), John Conyers (D-MI), Ted Deutch (D-FL), Elton Gallegly (R-CA), Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), Timothy Griffin (R-AR), Dennis A. Ross (R-FL), Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Lee Terry [R-NE]. As of November 15, 2011, there were 24 sponsors.

The legislation has broad support from organizations that rely on copyright, including the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, Macmillan Publishers, Viacom, and various other companies and unions in the cable, movie, and music industries. Supporters also include trademark-dependent companies such as Nike, L’Oréal, and Acushnet Company.

Both the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce support H.R. 3261, and many industries have also publicly praised the legislation. On September 22, 2011, a letter signed by over 350 businesses and organizations—including NBCUniversal, Pfizer, Ford Motor Company, Revlon, NBA, and Macmillan—was sent to Congress encouraging the passage of the legislation this year. This was taken directly from the Wiki and I sure hope anyone doing business on the Internet takes an opportunity to support this amazing resource before the end of the year.

Now, having said all of that, let’s look at those opposed. Besides the Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Internet groups, which have various points-of-view on the topic, we find, a reluctant participate, Microsoft, who apparently has a bit of skin in the game.

According to Declan McCullagh, over at CNET, Google, Twitter and Facebook also oppose SOPA. The Business Software Alliance, the lobbyist for Mr. Softy and many software companies has client list, apparently, pulled a switch on the bill after hearing from the folks in Redmond, and, undoubtedly, some others here in Silicon Valley.

Here is what Declan thinks: “While the wording of SOPA hasn’t changed over the last four weeks, the politics have. A person familiar with the situation told CNET that BSA’s volte-face came after Microsoft and, to a lesser extent, other members of the trade association had reviewed the bill and informed Holleyman of their displeasure.”

Declan also suggests that because Lamar Smith is the influential chairman of the House Judiciary committee, which oversees copyright law, they may have hedged their displeasure with the bill. In the CNET piece, Declan thinks, “SOPA is broader. Protect IP, which is awaiting a Senate floor vote, would allow courts to order AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and other ISPs to pretend that the domain names for targeted Web sites didn’t exist. (The Domain Name System, or DNS, translates alphanumeric domain names like CNET.com into the numeric IP addresses actually used by computers, in this case 64.30.224.118.)

“SOPA goes further by permitting the Justice Department and courts to order ISPs to block customers from visiting the numeric IP addresses of off-limits Web sites. It also appears to authorize deep packet inspection, which raises privacy concerns.”

The distinction is huge for privacy advocates because it gives power to the government, who many in the Internet world see as the kiss of death. Politicizing access in anyway, puts the power in the hands of people who have been dragging us backward with legislation that is half baked and counter intuitive.

Over at Ars Technica, Nate Anderson, senior editor, offers a different spin. “Whatever you think of the legislation, it unquestionably represents a sea change in the US approach to the Internet, one which explicitly contemplates widespread website blocking and search engine de-listing.”

Nate is privy to some new angles on this: “a draft seen by Ars Technica: online piracy from overseas sites will be taken away from the Attorney General and moved out of the courts. Instead, power will be vested in the International Trade Commission, which already handles IP disputes relating to imports (the ITC is heavily involved in the recent patent wars around smartphones, for instance).”

Here are politicians who favor this approach: Senators Wyden (D-OR), Cantwell (D-WA), Moran (R-KS), and Warner (D-VA); Reps. Chaffetz (R-UT), Campbell (R-CA), Doggett (D-TX), Eshoo (D-CA), Issa (R-CA), and Lofgren (D-CA).

We certainly favor any approach that provides a level playing field with copyright protection on a plain where artists’ interests favor those of lobbyists and hack politicians who will say or anything for a buck.

Here is a pretty hefty set of accusations from the boys at Mozilla whom we think understand the situation: http://youtu.be/UaauUSSepBs

Nowhere, however, is the message clearer than the message by Steve Colbert whose ironical interpretation of the politics demonstrates that even the FBI has zero data to back up its baseless predictions.

Here is a surprising video by Joe Biden telling it exactly as we see it. It remains to be seen how this plays out: http://youtu.be/Px_d6Kuel50

Here is what Anonymous posted on Youtube: http://youtu.be/9rbyk0h3yeg

In reality, many businesses like Microsoft simply can’t get past the notion of giving away stuff for free, so that their advertising model works. Ballmer, like Gates before him, never understood the true value of audience or community. They simply recoil at the fact that they believe Google is doing something wrong, but what it comes back as is jealousy and ineptness at the highest levels. The big traffic hunters like Facebook, Twitter and the downstream lot that is replicating audiences anew daily will most likely determine how copyright and sharing is achieved. Don’t think for a minute that legislation will change much.



Related posts:

1. Hacking Accusations: Myth Or Political Expedience?
2. 2011 Q1 Internet World Statistics
3. Security In the Golden Age Of The Internet

In an article over at Mashable, Jonathan Goldford, who is a partner at JG Visual, an Internet strategy company, shares the two main questions organizations face when developing an online presence:

1. How do we get the right people to our website?

2. Once they are on our website, how do we engage them in a meaningful way?

I challenged my design partner, Ali, to a little compare and contrast on how we look at the points Jonathan makes to see what is new and what we think may have been left out of the comparison. Maybe we can get some of our audience to share their views on the comparison, but, I warn you, Ali is the fellow who knows this stuff, and my view is based on ideas I’ve retained after nearly twenty years designing sites and marketing to IT audiences. In other words, have some sympathy with the oldtimer.

The first point Jonathan makes, “Forgetting about Conventions,” Jonathan points out that some web sites forget to follow long, and occasionally tired, conventions:

1. Make the logo at the top of the page a link to your home page.
2. Make the cursor reflect live links when you hover over one
3. Make all blue highlighted text linkable, or ask yourself what you’re doing in this business

Sorry if I inject my own comments but I’m a recovering Facebook addict, and it’s my sand box. So here is what Ali had to say in response to Jonathan’s #1 point:

“His 3 points are actually very valid. The first point simply suggests that clickable links should change the cursor from the arrow to the pointing hand, which is actually a very common mistake designers make. The second suggests that, if text is colored blue, and is underlined, it better be a hyperlink, which in just about every scenario it absolutely should. The third is actually a personal pet peeve on mine, where the logo of the site is not linked to the home-page or worst yet, not linked at all. To add to this, I actually believe using the logo as a homepage link should replace the traditional “Home” link that so many sites still use.

We are usually veritable ships passing in the night, where I get up early and read his work and reports on our development team, he usually works late and then a day job so I yearn for our weekend chats just to look for ways to disagree with him. It’s tough, but if you can’t argue both sides of a web site controversy, you can very bored in this business. My reaction to all of this is that people who have conventional web sites who don’t follow these conventions ought to be occupying an unemployment line. These are not only conventions, they are on the brink of becoming standards, the second worst “four-letter” word, after “proprietary,” to touch the Internet cognoscenti.

Standards reign up there with anarchy, and worse, to so many of the folks who build platforms. But I guess, I really do think these are things you should be punished for not using. Sort of under the term, “anti-marketing.” You pay a lot to some surly developer, and he forgets to check the basics? Not a good look. I would attach the usual rudiments to this list, privacy policy, contact information and security symbol as you never know how people scrutinize your business. If you’re serious about eCommerce, you ought to look at what the old crusty folks like us carry as a minimum. A simple cost/benefit analysis of what the basics cost, usually nothing, and a comparison of how leadership addresses these conventions, should save you tons in wasted marketing.

		10 Strategies for Choosing an ERP Solution

Okay, Jonathan’s point #2 says, slow web sites suck, and will not maximize your efforts, essentially. This goes back to my favorite web site of the nineties, that I tried to buy from AOL, but they decided to throw in the waste bin instead, and didn’t even move our offer to the right people. Web site garage was the coolest animation UI I’ve seen, and it was an old fashioned cartoon gas station where you “drove” your web site, represented by a cool car graphic, and gave them your URL, and they actually spidered it quickly and gave you back proper file formats so if your surly web developer didn’t pay attention to your editor, when resizing or formatting images for your site, all hell would break loose for your marketers. Jonathan give us some basics on when to resize and how different editors express input. He also provides links to good CSS practices that should be a good review for anyone as a check list. A good thing to keep handy and a good checklist for yourself as this continues to be a big problem for many sites.

Here is what else Ali had to say about #2, “It discusses some basic scripting do’s-and don’t’s, and, I for one, agree with just about all of them. For example, all the sites which I have been involved in (including NH.net, NH.tv, and the new TT/ET) actually resize images on the CMS side of the site, creating smaller versions for the blog list view, medium-sized ones for the blog post’s body, and keep the original for the lightbox, what you get when you click on an image to expand it to full size. Usually it dims the background when it pops up hence the name “lightbox”. (let’s add this definition to the glossary).”

Jonathan also addresses Java, and refers to other “OpenSource,” development applications, and if I’m still allowed to use that term, web site tools like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. These amazing programs have truly leveled the playing field for those able to exploit them, but, these guys are right, we can all be “guilty” if we don’t bother to take care of some regular housekeeping issues.

From Ali, “Loading JS in the header is something I’m actually guilty of doing sometimes (sure), but that’s because JS these days is often very light and loads within milliseconds. But for heavier JS sites, such as my employer’s site (www.gwos.com), I follow his suggestions and selectively load JS as needed, usually in the footer. Lastly, CSS in the body is just plain wrong in 2011 and any web programmer that does this needs to go back to school or start looking for a new line of work.” Ali is getting pretty stern in his demands. He’s been trained well.

If you are the CEO or owner of your site, the biggest thing to keep in mind, and, if you’re the guy paying the developer, and, if you’re assuming that these nifty little “Open” environments don’t need tending, gather some basic check lists to test for yourself, and, if you’re interested in re-developing Web Site Garage, let me know right away. If you aren’t doing your own self-tests and going over basics with your development team, your marketing budget will suffer, and your sales costs will increase steadily. These ideas are all costly to marketing, though I doubt they’re ever processed that way. The risk/reward test is something we’re sharing if you want to see how your web presence actually affects your bottom line.

The #3 point of Jonathan’s is that while these tools, like Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, often are programmed initially, but sites are dynamic, and, again, if you expand your site, as you surely will, things like CSS styles must be upgraded. Or you end up with default choices and not the really latest capabilities. Jonathan suggests keeping the Wiki’s close by, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG and checking to make sure that you get what you want.

Here is what Ali shared, “This is actually directly related with the state of our current TT/ET sites and is one of the primary reasons I’ve re-developed the sites from scratch. In a nutshell, developers often take shortcuts when tasked to do things/make changes to things. This results in many elements of sites being hardcoded into the actual framework, which makes modifying stuff extremely counter-productive. Sadly, 4 of 5 web programmers won’t think twice about these points, which is why a good one is so hard to find.”

A good web programmer is hard to find, like a good cowboy, but it seems the next generation of web sites will be sorted out by the mobil world, since they are far more interactive than the static world of business web sites. I can’t help but wonder why web sites are missing the basics, maybe they need to incorporate a governor to make sure you don’t publish if the basics aren’t check every time. After all, the Web Site Garage in my mind says there is a spider out there that can check this stuff quickly and we need to re-build that community.

Let us know what points you want to share, and what you think the next UI will look like and how the basics will be incorporated into them. I see a video screemcast of how each site works and how products represented on it work, to be the next big marketing bonanza. Video and screencasting are the future and they save a bundle in anti-marketing.

Related posts:

1. Set-Top Wars, Web 3.0 and Farewell Mr. Jobs
2. Hacking Accusations: Myth Or Political Expedience?

Here is what we know to date on the problem, and below you will read the issues that led to our investigation:

Bay Bridge fracture analysis
By Nathanael Johnson on March 31, 2010 – 5:16pm

Last fall (2009 that refers to), one of the eye-bars holding up the Bay Bridge cracked. Now we know why. A Caltrans analysis has shown that the problem was in the way the eye-bar was manufactured, said Bay Bridge spokesman Bart Ney on March 30th. And it wasn’t a mistake – every eye-bar was made this way.

They were all fabricated in accordance to a process established in the 1930s,” said Tony Anziano (http://eng-blogs.com/a/srb2ug ) , the full bridge program manager. That process creates a slight concavity on the outside edge of the eye-bar head, and the edges of that concavity form a thin edge. Anytime you have an outermost edge like that, it is susceptible to fatigue. (To understand this, imagine bending a piece of clay. It’s clear that in any circular formation, stress accumulates in the outer edge, and that’s where cracks start.)

Having that thin edge provided the opportunity for the crack to start, Anziano said, and it slowly worked it’s way inward over the course of a little more than a year. To solve this problem, workers have ground down the edges of the eye-bars, and painted them with dye to reveal any microscopic cracks. The dye is orange, and if you’ve been noticing that every eye-bar head looks rusty as you drive over the bridge – that’s not rust, but dye, according to Anziano.

The takeaway? This is a problem that seems to have been solved. Before people were being told that normal vibration caused the problem, and the implication was that it could cause a similar crack on any other eye-bar. And vibration is still thought to be key, but now that the analysis has revealed clearly that the manufactured ridge contributed, and now that those ridges have been eliminated, we can all breathe a little easier.

Earlier today we spoke with Assembly member Bonnie Lowenthal’s office to learn that a hearing will be held, and we intend to provide a more comprehensive background on that the history.  No one in government today can cover all the issues and history of every transportation issue we have in California.  We just hope that the folks who do hold the hearings will view all the facts and problems taxpayers and travelers face in the state.

In our earlier story we discussed the problems with Ricardo Ramirez and wondered why his problems were not part of the stories covered in the Bee.  We note here that after speaking with the San Francisco Chronicle, they are not covering the story.  We found this online and decided to track it back to its disposition.

US: Concrete contractor cuts deal with prosecutors by Jaxon Van Derbeken, San Francisco Chronicle (http://corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15068)

Two years ago (2006), San Francisco authorities blamed a local businessman for orchestrating a fraud scheme that resulted in tons of substandard concrete being used in public structures.

But the fraud case against Ricardo Ramirez crumbled earlier this year when prosecutors dropped those charges as part of a deal under which he pleaded guilty to a single environmental count. Ramirez will serve a year of home detention and avoid jail time as long as he pays $427,000 in fines and restitution.

Meanwhile, the public is stuck with his legacy. Substandard concrete from Ramirez’s now-defunct company was poured into a half-mile stretch of the Bay Bridge’s rebuilt western approach.

Some agencies say the material is not a problem. At the Bay Bridge approach, however, Caltrans and its main contractor will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep concrete from deteriorating decades earlier than it should. None of the money that Ramirez must pay to settle his criminal case will go toward shoring up the taxpayer-funded project.

With great fanfare in May 2006, San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris announced that Ramirez stood atop an empire of fraud.

We must ensure that our public projects receive quality materials and are not victims of fraud,” the city’s top prosecutor said. “We will continue to work with all these public agencies to protect the environment and to protect public safety.”

Ramirez, now 67, presided over several failed paving ventures before forming Pacific Cement in 1998. The company took advantage of government programs that help minority-owned businesses, and by 2003 he was supplying a third of the concrete that San Francisco used for public works.

Recycled concrete cheaper

But the company started having financial problems, and Ramirez turned to passing off recycled concrete, made from ground-up concrete debris, as the more expensive and durable product that is made solely from hard rock, authorities said.

San Francisco prosecutors originally charged him with 14 felonies and 14 misdemeanors, including nine counts related to the use of recycled concrete. They said Pacific Cement had supplied the inferior product for a 4-inch-thick decorative facade on a pylon that supports the arch over Fort Point at the Golden Gate Bridge. At the Burlingame sewage plant, the material went into a foundation of a control room building, prosecutors said.

At the time, authorities pointed to tests and accounts by workers indicating that Pacific Cement had delivered substandard concrete to a host of other major public works projects. But Ramirez was never charged in connection with any of them.

Then, in January, San Francisco prosecutors dropped 27 of the 28 counts they had filed against Ramirez and agreed to a deal in which he pleaded guilty to a single environmental charge of illegally storing waste oil at a concrete-production facility he leased from the city on Pier 80.

Harris’ office had no explanation for why it dropped the concrete case. It issued a statement stressing that Ramirez had pleaded guilty to the “most serious environmental charge” he faced and that he would pay restitution.

Ramirez’s attorney, Stuart Hanlon, said the deal was reached after prosecutors told him that the concrete Ramirez supplied to the Golden Gate Bridge and Burlingame sewage plant projects met strength standards set by the state.

Under the deal, Ramirez must pay about $56,000 to the Golden Gate Bridge district, $80,000 to the port for cleanup and $41,600 to compensate the city’s toxics division for cleanup and inspection of his plant site.

We decided to examine how these charges were exactly deposed and contacted both Stuart Hanlon, Ramirez’ attorney and, Evan Ackiron, the prosecutor who made the deal, with the blessing of Pamela Harris, now the California Attorney General.

According to Hanlon, and he said he takes credit for the deal, Caltrans provided an approval that the concrete was not a problem, except for the deception Ramirez used in claiming it was not recycled.  He said, Ramirez it turns out was ahead of his time in using recycled concrete.  We’re not sure what sort of recycled concrete was used, and we’ve yet to have our engineers examine the data used to let Ramirez off with a fine and being kept out of San Francisco work until 2012.  Other than that, Ramirez is operating his new business out of his home in Goleta:  (805) 683-0133 Ramcon Concrete Construction

We also spoke with District Attorney Ackiron who promised to provide details on the disposition and we will share those with you after our engineers examine their efficacy.  According to the Bee, and the office of Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, chair of the Committee on Transportation, a request by the Toll Bridge Program Oversight Committee state oversight committee announced Tuesday that it had requested a formal review of the foundation of the new Bay Bridge tower by the state’s Seismic Safety Peer Review Panel.

Here is a piece we found at an environmental site:

US: Concrete contractor cuts deal with prosecutors

Ramirez, who has been sued by the city for lease violations as well as by contractors over the allegedly inferior concrete he supplied, says he is nearly bankrupt. He has until Aug. 20 to mortgage properties to pay the fines and restitution, Hanlon said.

Bridge got biggest batch

The project to replace the Bay Bridge western approach, which is scheduled to be finished next year, appears to have gotten the single biggest infusion of substandard concrete from Pacific Cement of any public works job.

It is unclear why San Francisco prosecutors never filed charges against Ramirez in connection with the rebuild.

Tony Anziano (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/tony-anziano/12/796/821) , the Caltrans official in charge of the project, said his agency had been defrauded by Pacific Cement. He said that Caltrans had always cooperated with prosecutors and that he couldn’t explain why they hadn’t pursued charges.

Prosecutors said that they lacked evidence against Ramirez in the Caltrans project at the time they brought the case against him, and that over the next two years they never got what they needed.

Anziano says Caltrans will have to make the best of the situation.

“I’m not thrilled about the fact that we have recycled concrete in there,” Anziano said. Caltrans assumes that all of 27,000 cubic yards of concrete that Pacific Cement supplied for the project – enough to cover a football field 16 1/2 feet deep – was recycled.

The material went into a half-mile stretch leading to the Fremont Street ramp. Anziano stressed that the concrete meets building requirements for freeway structures, but said it may not last as long as it should – 60 years – because recycled concrete is prone to micro-cracking and moisture infiltration.

Anziano said Caltrans has ways of detecting substandard concrete before it hardens, but acknowledged that Pacific Cement had gotten around the safeguards. Still, he said, nothing has changed in how Caltrans deals with cement providers.

“You go into contracts assuming we are dealing with honest people – you have to,” he said.

Bay Bridge western approach: Based on tests it has performed on the new approach, Caltrans assumes that all 27,000 cubic yards of concrete that Pacific Cement supplied for the project was recycled. Caltrans and its main contractor, Tutor-Saliba Corp., are expected to split the cost of treating the concrete to make it last as long as it should. Ramirez was never charged in connection with the deliveries, and none of the restitution he must pay to resolve his criminal case will go to Caltrans.

In another story, Bridge Comes to San Francisco With a Made-in-China Label, this year from the NYTimes, we learned this about the process that Caltrans used and some other interesting tidbits that California residents ought to be aware of when it comes to their tax dollars. The most interesting part of this story are the comments from earlier this year which are still viewable.

California decided not to apply for federal funding for the project because the “Buy America” provisos would probably have required purchasing more expensive steel and fabrication from United States manufacturers.

China, the world’s biggest steel maker, was the front-runner, particularly because it has dominated bridge building for the last decade. Several years ago, Shanghai opened a 20-mile sea bridge; the country is now planning a much longer one near Hong Kong.

The selection of the state-owned Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries Company was a surprise, though, because the company made port cranes and had no bridge building experience.

But California officials and executives at American Bridge said Zhenhua’s advantages included its huge steel fabrication facilities, its large low-cost work force and its solid finances. (The company even had its own port and ships.)

“I don’t think the U.S. fabrication industry could put a project like this together,” Brian A. Petersen, project director for the American Bridge/Fluor Enterprises joint venture, said in a telephone interview. “Most U.S. companies don’t have these types of warehouses, equipment or the cash flow. The Chinese load the ships, and it’s their ships that deliver to our piers.”

Despite the American union complaints, former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, strongly backed the project and even visited Zhenhua’s plant last September, praising “the workers that are building our Bay Bridge.”

Zhenhua put 3,000 employees to work on the project: steel-cutters, welders, polishers and engineers. The company built the main bridge tower, which was shipped in mid-2009, and a total of 28 bridge decks — the massive triangular steel structures that will serve as the roadway platform.

Pan Zhongwang, a 55-year-old steel polisher, is a typical Zhenhua worker. He arrives at 7 a.m. and leaves at 11 p.m., often working seven days a week. He lives in a company dorm and earns about $12 a day.

“It used to be $9 a day, now it’s $12,” he said Wednesday morning, while polishing one of the decks for the new Bay Bridge. “Everything is getting more expensive. They should raise our pay.”

To ensure the bridge meets safety standards, 250 employees and consultants working for the state of California and American Bridge/Fluor also took up residence in Shanghai.

The story’s legs continue to grow and we continue to find bits and pieces that seem to have been overlooked. Once we see the data on the deal made on the concrete and how it was tested, we’ll be sure to share those and let our engineering folks tell us what they think.

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Immediately afterwards, I walked outside to see what had been done and saw bricks toppled off their anchors on old apartments and streets opened up with cracks that scared the hell out of the neighborhood. We, in my Cole Valley neighborhood, were the lucky ones that day. The marina district went up in flames, and people on their way across the bridge dove to their deaths into the level below and many were caught under the weight of the mass of concrete that supported the ancient bridge.

As I read the article by Charles Piller I searched to find how the dots were connected. Piller’s article focuses on, Department of Transportation technician, Duane Wiles. The $6.3 billion dollar, twenty year project’s responsibility, apparently, is being pinned to a technician with a history of problems:

Caltrans Accused Of Falsifying Bridge Safety Reports

A whistleblower within Caltrans told the Sacramento Bee that tests on bridges across the state were fabricated or measured with inadequate tools. In fact, test results for the La Sierra Road overpass were falsified three years ago, but the bridge was later retested and deemed safe.

The Caltrans engineer responsible for making those measurements, 58-year-old Duane Wiles, was disciplined for faking test results.

And… “Worker who did earthquake testing on Oakland Bay bridge is fired for faking safety tests on other projects”

‘There has been absolutely no evidence of any kind of any falsification of any data involving the Bay Bridge,’ Tony Anziano, the agency’s toll bridge programme manager said during a conference call with reporters Monday, the Associated Press reports.

Caltrans said it had reviewed all of Wiles’ work dating to 2004 and found he falsified data on three projects: a Los Angeles underpass on Interstate 405; a bridge in San Bernardino; and an overhead freeway sign in Oakland.

‘We’ve deemed all those facilities safe,’ Caltrans Acting Director Malcolm Dougherty said.

This last article goes on to quote several putative California lawmakers, whose reaction ranged from shock to surprise on these findings:

http://www.sacbee.com/2011/11/14/4054645/legislature-to-examine-caltrans.html

It’s a concern for anybody who sits behind the wheel. I was shocked when I learned about this mismanagement and I have a lot of questions about the issue and I expect to follow up and get a lot of answers,” said Bonnie Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, chair of the Assembly Committee on Transportation.

Senator Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, chair of the Senate Transportation and Housing Committee, said he would hold a hearing about the safety of the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge, and how the Caltrans testing process broke down. He said the focus would be ensuring that no similar problems emerge in the future.

“We’ll do our due diligence, and we have time before the bridge opens to make sure it’s safe,” DeSaulnier said.

And then from our illustrious Ms. Pelosi

		Monitoring Physical Threats in the Data Center

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, minority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, whose district includes much of the Bay Bridge, also expressed concern.

“Leader Pelosi believes that safety of our infrastructure must be the number one priority of Caltrans,” said Carlos Sanchez, Pelosi’s deputy press secretary. “Our office has already reached out to Caltrans and (the Federal Highway Administration) to seek a full explanation of what occurred and what will be done to assure the safety of the traveling public now and in the future.”

Here is the problem I am having. For years now many of us have been waiting for the construction to get approved, and then get completed. Along the way, we’ve read about all sorts of scandals, which Mr. Piller, in our conversation today, claimed were not related to his story. To top it off, where were our so-called, shocked, legislators on this topic? Did they forget these stories, or simply failed to grasp that when inferior concrete is used, the structure is compromised, and when welding within the structure is bad, the whole enchilada may come tumbling down with the next big temblor. Consider these and tell me if you think the latest should constitute a surprise, or if these should be included in any cursory investigation:

EMPIRE BUILT ON SAND / Businessman allegedly poured inferior concrete into key projects
July 09, 2006|Jaxon Van Derbeken, Chronicle Staff Writer

Ricardo Ramirez seemed an unlikely success story: At 57, the former Marine Corps judo instructor had spent more than 20 years as a paving contractor and had little to show for it but a long string of lawsuits, business failures and bankruptcies.

Then, in 1998, the struggling businessman appeared to hit upon a way to make it in a new venture. Taking advantage of city and state programs designed to help minority-owned businesses, Ramirez started turning out low-priced, locally produced concrete for projects that included earthquake retrofit work on the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge. By 2003, his Pacific Cement venture was supplying a third of the concrete used in San Francisco’s public works projects.

Prosecutors now believe it was an empire of sand.

Ramirez built Pacific Cement on a combination of moxie, deceit and greed, prosecutors say, only to have it crumble. Left behind, they say, was a costly and potentially dangerous legacy: tons of substandard concrete built into vital public structures.

Ramirez, now 65, faces charges of grand theft and fraud for allegedly passing off inferior recycled concrete — a cheaper material that is more prone to wear, cracks and water penetration — as meeting higher durability standards for the Golden Gate Bridge and a Burlingame wastewater treatment plant. He has pleaded not guilty.

He had given nearly $100,000 to state and local politicians since 1995, and twice had been fined for making illegal contributions. Some of his work for San Francisco had been criticized by city officials for its poor quality. Still, he was able to secure work on major state and city projects.

His fall finally came when former truck drivers for Ramirez told prosecutors that they delivered load after load of flawed product — recycled concrete made from ground-up construction debris, rather than hard rock — not just to the Golden Gate Bridge and to Burlingame, but also to the retrofit of the Bay Bridge’s western approach, the Muni’s Third Street light-rail line and a new parking garage in Golden Gate Park.

San Francisco officials say Pacific Cement’s concrete failed a “disproportionate” number of strength tests in 2004 and 2005 as the company began to run into financial problems.

We have no idea if Ramirez is still peddling bad concrete or if he ever was prosecuted. Prior to today, the San Francisco Chronicle did no follow-up we can find on any of it, including the latest accusations. But no one seems to want to include this misdeeds into the surprise that the Bay Bridge – and it sure looks swell as I look out over it – will withstand the next big one.

San Francisco Chronicle investigative reporters, Matier and Ross wrote back in 2009:

Questions over welds delay Bay Bridge project
January 26, 2009|Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross

Construction of the tower portion of the Bay Bridge’s new eastern span is running months behind schedule, amid questions over whether key portions being made at a Chinese steel plant are defective.

Inspectors hired by Caltrans to monitor the fabrication of steel girders that will support the tower’s roadway reported finding cracked welds last year, Caltrans records show.

The discovery has raised the question whether Bay Area taxpayers are getting a substandard product that could wear out prematurely and require costly repairs in a decade or two.

Caltrans and others in charge of the bridge construction say the welds are safe and that fixes have been made – but also say the inspectors interpreted the welding standards too rigidly.

Meanwhile, the inspection outfit that sounded the alarm has since been replaced.

How in the hell is it that this fiasco has taken so long to get a thorough investigation and it is clear that we need a special prosecutor to examine this, preferably one from another country, as no one expects anyone in our government to be able to connect the dots and come to a logical conclusion. Or we can wait until it collapses and kills even more people at which time I am certain that some in our government will have little problem feigning shock.

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In spite of the lock IBM once had on the computer, then Microsoft on the desktop, Apple moved the mountain top and made it cool to show off your texting skills. The advent of the iPhone, along with its accoutrements, the iPad and iTunes pieces offered the world another way to look at themselves. And now we are seeing Web 3.0 emerging in the form of the platform Jobs envisioned. I think of it is as the Jobs Window to the world. The Window is finally opening up some minds on everything. The iPhone being le pièce de résistance of Jobs portfolio and the hands down winner in the set-top wars.

Not only has the iPhone become the sine qua non of the UI world, the Steve Jobs nation nurtured an “apps” ecosystem where any idea you can think of can be played like a banjo. Never has such a cluster of traits, and tricks, swayed the egalitarian challenge of your access to prestige. A whole new world of heroes and heroines are emerging from this layer and no one expected this. This is an infinite garden for creativity and a whole new way to communicate, yet it has not quite begun. The fact that guys are getting dates because of their prowess with their phone skills remains a puzzle, but it would make Orwell really nervous. Performance art?

The thing that Apple has always understood is that it doesn’t matter what corporate America was choosing to operate business, their goals were to reach the next generation of tech brats who will want more, who will want to stretch boundaries and leap off the next mountain tops. For decades they quietly played and planned how they were going to take over the world, of technology. But is it time now for that to happen?

The big question we have all asked for years is when will the business veil be lifted, when will the enterprise be pierced? No one in the world of technology denies how amazing and how exciting it would be to run our country on the Apple platform, and share all that amazing brain power? Imagine the educational benefits of having all kids on one and having access to the many tools and schools.

Security options also avail themselves to iPhone apps that are secure in providing identity and they are challenging former ID security options. There are no doubt challenges but it is impossible to stop anyone who really wants to get through a network. Apple is a much simpler platform to secure, but standards? That would require standards and then you’re talking politics and contracts and jobs, and it gets messy quickly.

But cultural dictates may be the ultimate decider on how the “job” evolves to serve the community as much as the employer. In areas where employee appreciation is important, where flexibility was appreciated, productivity generally improves. That is how we’ve witnessed it around Silicon Valley, San Francisco or Emeryville. It’s hard to hire a bunch of really smart, really talented and independent people without emphasizing appreciation at all levels.

Steve Jobs is Web 3.0 and his imagination will continue to lead folks to dream big and work hard. The U.S.A. will be more successful and more productive if we heed the message of his achievements. If we consider the way Steve dealt with talent and managed teams to be their best, we may just may keep folks happy too.

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Brad and his team (http://www.thought-matrix.com) are students of the electronic transaction. They understand at the deepest levels that positive transactions occur electronically at all sorts of levels. In order to understand the online audience and the challenges a web community builder must face, it is essential to recognize the levels at which an average member responds to your user interface.

Brad provides the best kernel of analysis on the state of things when he says:

“Too often businesses and the design agencies that support their digital efforts take a very linear approach to problem solving. There is too much emphasis on the waterfall process (discovery, design, develop, launch) that while easy to manage doesn’t allow for enough cross-discipline pollination of ideas, iteration of design and validation with end users.”

The Waterfall is the perfect metaphor to describe how the linear approach can miss the mark completely if you happen to get caught without the requisite testing procedures and planning to make sure you complete the cycle. You can end up circling the eddies instead of standing out.

Linear thinking has served the software developer well but web design demands more today. Here is a tip you really should consider on the approach the leading guys take:

“We follow the practices of agile development and lean start-up practices which demand a focus on the minimum viable product. We create rough prototypes from the very beginning that can be tested and built upon feature by feature so that by the time a feature has been designed it has also been coded and tested. We use small teams of internal and external resources for testing and handle those tests ourselves giving customers early access as an incentive to participate.”

Testing is for me a usual culprit of bad design. Do you really think it’s smart to risk allowing your users to test every little detail? So many times, folks become enamored with their work without putting it to the grill. If you haven’t got strict protocols for testing and if you haven’t made sure to do a really solid analysis of your user satisfaction, you are just building for other developers and that is dangerous. Web design should not be about egos but if you aren’t careful, you can easily miss the mark.

Regardless of what your budget is, or where you fit in the business cycle, there are lots of ways to follow this sort of thinking and again I defer to my sage friend and his team:

		Proven Strategies to Fuel Your Design Team

Our goal here is open a dialog on design and hopefully help our audience realize some of the amazing resources that are out there. Great web design will always depend on team work and intuitive reasoning. The steps to take innovation and creativity to the next level will require solid processing and diligent testing and questioning. Users will always be a moving target, always looking to compare you to the top dogs out there. But the web is the great leveler of playing fields. There will always be some new guy who comes along and demonstrates excellence in design and thinking. If the Internet had to depend only on big budget enterprises to serve the global sphere, it would be a very lonely place. Listening and discussing the issues you’re having with our resources we hope will help you get to the goals you want to reach. Let us know what questions you have and how we can help you build more muscle and a leaner more agile way to approach your community building.

Here is link to the entire presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/bradgerstein/whats-next-for-ux

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Around 300,000 unique requesting IPs to Google.com have been identified. Of these, 99 percent, allegedly, originated from Iran.

The latest versions of browsers, including Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox, are now rejecting certificates issued by DigiNotar. Dutch web security firm, DigiNotar is one of many companies which sell the security certificates widely used to authenticate Web sites and guarantee secure communications between a browser and a Web site. A record compiled in an Excel file and posted on a blog shows that the security of the users of U.S. secret service agency CIA and UK’s MI6 Web sites was compromised by the fake security certificate.

		Monitoring Physical Threats in the Data Center

It seems a tad unrealistic that both the U.S. and U.K. intelligence agencies chose the Dutch firm to secure their biggest secrets, but I’ve yet to read an explanation on that point. I mean, we all know there are plenty of options here in the states and across the pond, so why go to The Netherlands to get a certificate? The claim that the Iranian government cooperated in the hacks has not been substantiated, but there is an implicaton that they were spying on dissidents and this emanated from those hacks.

From the NYTimes: “Technology experts cite a number of reasons to believe the attack is connected to Iran. Notably, several of the certificates contain nationalist slogans in Farsi, the language spoken by most Iranians. This, in combination with messages the hacker left behind on DigiNotar’s Web site, definitely suggests that Iran was involved,” said Ot van Daalen, director of Bits of Freedom, an online civil liberties group.”

Hopefully, they have more proof than language but often incidental evidence such as that is used to implicate the perpetrators. I would guess that Iranians know that they are under scrutiny and they aren’t the only nationals who speak Farsi.

Current browsers perform an Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) check as soon as the browser connects to a SSL website protected through the https (hypertext transfer protocol secure) protocol.

The hacking implies that the current network setup and procedures at DigiNotar are not sufficiently secure to prevent this kind of attack. In theory, a fraudulent certificate can be used to trick a user into visiting a fake version of a Web site, or used to monitor communications with the real sites without users noticing.

However, in order to pass off a fake certificate, a hacker must be able to steer his target’s Internet traffic through a server that he controls. Only an Internet service provider or a government that commands one can do it easily.

Although no users in the Netherlands are known to have been victimized directly, the breach has caused a major headache for the Dutch government, which relied on DigiNotar to authenticate most of its Web sites.

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Spaceship Apple the proposed structure for the quaint little town of Cupertino

The technology saw a market in preventing piracy, vis-à-vis, movies, shows and helping governments prevent images from areas off limits.  A camera’s image sensor — called a CCD — is retro-reflective, which means it sends light back directly to its origin rather than scattering it. Retro-reflections would probably make it relatively easy to detect and identify video cameras in a darkened theater.

	Does Your Cloud Have a Silver Lining?

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This week a notice was sent out from Freepress.net saying Steve Jobs’ Apple iPhone would be including a form of this technology in its newest versions.  Here is the way they explained how it might work:

“The system works by using off-the-shelf equipment to detect the image producing sensors used in digital cameras and then sends a small beam of white light at the sensor whiting out the entire image. One of the targeted uses is in movie theatres to prevent piracy.”

Freepress claims Apple’s addition of this technology is a pre-emptive strike against free speech.  “Apple says this new technology was designed to stop concertgoers from taking unofficial video at live events. But you can bet that governments and corporations will take full advantage of it in other more dangerous ways – to silence the voices of protesters, political opponents or anyone else they dislike.  As Apple CEO Steve Jobs obviously knows, smartphones have become extensions of ourselves. They are incredibly powerful tools for communication, education, political expression, community organizing and just plain fun.”

Why would Jobs and Apple take this step in altering their customers’ privacy to serve industry and others? Is it to protect Disney, Jobs alter ego, or does Jobs see this as something that will bring rewards to shareholders?  He claims the share price of his stock will take care of itself, but who am I to predict how the stock market works, and for whom it works?

I’m reminded of the great Seinfeld shows going back fifteen years where my favorite character, Kramer, is seen taping shows from the balcony.  But with zero demand from consumers, why would Apple risk losing momentum by casting the spotlight on the millions of users of their phone, or do they know a lot more about the market than we do?

Apple has been questioned before about its decisions to limit privacy and stifle how its technologies are used, but we wondered what you thought about this latest attempt to pre-empt use of “your” phone and will they hear it from their users?

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“Our systems remain secure; no customer, program or employee personal data has been compromised,” Company spokeswoman Jennifer Whitlow of the Bethesda, MD.-based company said. White House spokesman Jay Carney said, “Based on what I’ve seen, they feel it’s fairly minimal in terms of the damage.”

Back in March, Art Coviello, Executive Chairman of RSA, an EMC Company, said in statement, “the attack is in the category of an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT). Our investigation also revealed that the attack resulted in certain information being extracted from RSA’s systems. Some of that information is specifically related to RSA’s SecurID two-factor authentication products.” He went on to say, “While at this time we are confident that the information extracted does not enable a successful direct attack on any of our RSA SecurID customers, this information could potentially be used to reduce the effectiveness of a current two-factor authentication implementation as part of a broader attack.”

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		Classification of Data Center Operations Technology (OT) Management Tools
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Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) is a big deal, usually associated with a nation/state organization level. If cyber-security threats are on the rise, we want to trace them and the systems being threatened. EMC is reporting that remediation has been provided in the form of replacing the SecurID tokens. These memory stick- like units that generate random numbers used in combination with a personal identification number, to gain entry, may have lost the confidence battle: If intruders get the key, the seed that enables one-time passwords to be generated, then they may have the capability to break into networks that depend on such systems to authenticate users.

In the world of APT’s, confidence tends to be a bigger threat to product life cycles. If Lockheed throws out the bay with the bath water, and RSA too, this may lead to a new way to manage identities. For the nation’s defense contractors, this may already be happening.

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