Bluendo

Not a good period of Skpye: few days ago its network shut down (allegedly due to a massive update and reboot of Windows), now a worm is spreading trough its network.  These are two more hints about the importance of openess when adopting solutions that must deployed throughout the internet. 

I'm not saying that Skype is insecure and that, for example, Google Talk (which adopts XMPP, an open protocol for IM and Voip) is secure. Behind software and services there are people, and people may do errors and even stupids things. Many "closed" vendors have systems for assuring software quality which are far superior than any open source project. However in the closed world the risk of some bug remaining silent for a long time and being exploited by some attacker when it's too late is far higher. When you are buying a closed solution, based on closed protocols, you can't have any assurance but the reputation of the vendor.  In open solutions instead there often dozens if not hundreds of independent engineers reviewing code, specs, protocols. This is not bullet proof, for example SMTP is an open protocol and there are still many email clients spreading viruses and worms. However this is mainly due to poor client implementations or proprietary extensions (I bet everybody is thinking of Outlook...), not to SMTP itself (indeedm the design of SMTP can be blamed oly for spam).

Being SMTP open, you can chose among different client and server implementations, switch if you are not satisfied or experiment new solutions, and be sure that you will be always able to receive the email coming from any domain. 

XMPP gives the same value: though a rather novel protocol, you already have tens of clients, servers and libraries available, different implementations that must work together, accordingly to public specifications. This usually means fewer problems due to malformed or unpredicted input as it happens in closed solutions, and, therefore less risks of attacks exploiting these bugs. And, finally, it means that at any moment you can chose the option better fitting your security needs, and still be operating. 

Wired calls for freeing social networks: Slap in the Facebook: It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up,  PSA calls the Jabber community for offering an answer. We agree with Peter, but before starting we need to make coexist these two contrasting perceptions of Web 2.0 (and of social networks) I gave yesterday:

• users' point of view: anything enabling realtime sharing of data and collaboration

• businesses' point of view: anything making users spending more time on a website

Unless the second point is satisfied no site like Facebook will completely open, since  they run the risk of losing the main source of their revenues: advertisement. 

Today Slashdot has an interesting piece about a new patent in the field of geo-advertising. The basic idea is to sell advertisements and make the buyers pay only when customers visit particular locations. Here you can find the details about the invention: a plurality of means is used in order to determine mobile locations and billing the advertisers, such as GPS, wireless network addresses or some agents on the mobiles answering to location queries.

With this idea Pelago has raised 7.4M$ from Bezos and seems to be one the most promising startups.

Here at Bluendo we think that this piece of news has two good points for us:

• Geoadvertising matters, there is real interest about innovative ways for better targeting customers
• If this idea worths 7.4M$, there are great margins for improvements. We can't reveal the details yet, because we are patenting a possibly competing technology, but we think we have the answer to one fundamental question Pelago doesn't seem to answer: why would a user install a client or consent to be tracked just for being spammed? No, the answer is not: "because they are payed, or they receive special discounts"

Workers in the French president's and prime minister's office have been told their e-mails risk falling into foreign hands, Le Monde newspaper reports.

France's SGDN security service is worried because Blackberries use US- and UK-based servers, the paper says.

The article continues writing about the disappointment of some officials because the replacement doesn't work. Perhaps the should contact Bluendo if the need a solution with these features:

• push of data and events to mobile clients in realtime
• secure access to remote personal data (e.g. emails)
• own the system: have the server at home and don't allow your data pass through untrusted networks