First it was the EU looking at passing a law that would require bloggers to disclose their identity and affiliation. Now the AP is looking to enforce a new license that would require payments when a blogger puts an excerpt from an AP article in their blog.  My friend Kevin McLaughlin blogged on this over at Channel Web blog today. Basically the AP says that if you excerpt more than 5 words you need to start paying them fees.  Kevin reached out to me and I gave him my views on this one.

I think that it is a really short sighted move by the AP.  First of all it shows they really don't understand blogging.  Blogging is about taking an idea which often comes from another source and putting the bloggers own spin and ideas behind it. In this way topics are built on one blog at a time with each blogger adding a bit more to the conversation. Each additional blog on topic enriches those blogs and articles that preceded it.  As I said in the Channel Web article, it is like a jazz musician playing a riff on top of a line already laid down.

In real terms blogging on the AP content will only generate more views and interest in the AP content.  AP is just a dinosaur with this type of view and will soon go the way of dinosaurs if they try to enforce this. In the meantime bloggers can talk about an AP article, but don't link to it and don't excerpt from it. I suspect that the next thing is we will have a replay of the inbound links litigation we had 8 years ago.  In the meantime blogging will continue to march on with AP or not.

First it was the EU looking at passing a law that would require bloggers to disclose their identity and affiliation. Now the AP is looking to enforce a new license that would require payments when a blogger puts an excerpt from an AP article in their blog.  My friend Kevin McLaughlin blogged on this over at Channel Web blog today. Basically the AP says that if you excerpt more than 5 words you need to start paying them fees.  Kevin reached out to me and I gave him my views on this one.

I think that it is a really short sighted move by the AP.  First of all it shows they really don't understand blogging.  Blogging is about taking an idea which often comes from another source and putting the bloggers own spin and ideas behind it. In this way topics are built on one blog at a time with each blogger adding a bit more to the conversation. Each additional blog on topic enriches those blogs and articles that preceded it.  As I said in the Channel Web article, it is like a jazz musician playing a riff on top of a line already laid down.

In real terms blogging on the AP content will only generate more views and interest in the AP content.  AP is just a dinosaur with this type of view and will soon go the way of dinosaurs if they try to enforce this. In the meantime bloggers can talk about an AP article, but don't link to it and don't excerpt from it. I suspect that the next thing is we will have a replay of the inbound links litigation we had 8 years ago.  In the meantime blogging will continue to march on with AP or not.

Yes, transparent government is a pretty good goal.  I think the authors of Freedom to Tinker have forgotten that not all Government data is fit for public consumption.  The problem is one of sanitization:  how do you clean all of the PII out of data before you release it to the public?  Not only that, but because of the size of the data sets, most likely you need an automated method to sanitize it.  I think that because of the sanitization factor that the Government would not gain that much efficiency by outsourcing the data presentation to others.

As with all things in security, this is nothing new.  There’s a little-known project (First Rule of “Fight Club” being what it is…) known as Radiant Mercury that does exactly this with classified data.  You can check out the basic concept in quasi-official presentations here (.pdf caveat) and here.

If we were going to make all this data available, we would need an unclassified version of Radiant Mercury to filter out all the PII and “Sensitive but Unclassified” bits.

Now as far as letting second parties build interfaces into the raw data, I’m torn on it.  On one hand, private industry can provide access to data “Now at Web 2.0 Speeds!” but on the other hand, then the Government loses control over the presentation and, by extension, accountability for the content.

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If there was any doubt in your mind about how much the TippingPoint team wants to be part of 3Com, you should listen to this video of Brian Smith, chief architect of Tipping Point talking to SearchSecurity.com.  Brian comes right out and says that the original idea behind the 3Com acquisition was synergies of putting security into switches and routers.  After about a year of trying to do this, he says that he realized it was a "fools errand" because security is evolving so much quicker than networking.  I don't know, but that is probably not the opinion of Cisco, HP ProCurve, Foundry, Extreme, Enterasys and Juniper who all seem to be doing exactly that. Perhaps it had more to with a clash of personalities there than technology?

Later in the interview Brian states that after the expected synergies never materialized it was decided to spin TippingPoint off on its own IPO. Luckily they had retained their own identity which Brian says may not have been possible if they were acquired by Cisco or IBM. He basically says that the merger was a failure and they wanted to go their own separate ways.  Than the Bain deal put everything on hold and now post-Bain deal they are becoming more and more autonomous.  Though he doesn't come out and say it, his body language is screaming that he cannot wait to be spun out from 3Com.

My advice is to be careful what you wish for.  The security industry is not what it was before the acquisition and without someone's deep pockets behind you and the inability to move out successfully beyond anything besides IPS, TippingPoint may not find it as welcoming as they think.

If there was any doubt in your mind about how much the TippingPoint team wants to be part of 3Com, you should listen to this video of Brian Smith, chief architect of Tipping Point talking to SearchSecurity.com.  Brian comes right out and says that the original idea behind the 3Com acquisition was synergies of putting security into switches and routers.  After about a year of trying to do this, he says that he realized it was a "fools errand" because security is evolving so much quicker than networking.  I don't know, but that is probably not the opinion of Cisco, HP ProCurve, Foundry, Extreme, Enterasys and Juniper who all seem to be doing exactly that. Perhaps it had more to with a clash of personalities there than technology?

Later in the interview Brian states that after the expected synergies never materialized it was decided to spin TippingPoint off on its own IPO. Luckily they had retained their own identity which Brian says may not have been possible if they were acquired by Cisco or IBM. He basically says that the merger was a failure and they wanted to go their own separate ways.  Than the Bain deal put everything on hold and now post-Bain deal they are becoming more and more autonomous.  Though he doesn't come out and say it, his body language is screaming that he cannot wait to be spun out from 3Com.

My advice is to be careful what you wish for.  The security industry is not what it was before the acquisition and without someone's deep pockets behind you and the inability to move out successfully beyond anything besides IPS, TippingPoint may not find it as welcoming as they think.