Cody Taylor

Security and privacy have become so compromised that many experts believe it is time to start over.

Richard.Tao and a number of other readers sent in a NYTimes piece by John Markoff asking whether the Internet is so broken it needs to be replaced. “…[T]here is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over. What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a ‘gated community’ where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there.” A less alarmist reaction to the question was blogged by David Akin: “If you build a new Internet and you want me to get a license to drive on it, sorry. I’m hanging out here in v.1.”

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The New York Times is running a story about the criteria involved when Google scraps one of their projects. While a project’s popularity among users is important, Google also examines whether they can get enough employees interested in it, and whether it has a large enough scope — they prefer not to waste time solving minor problems. The article takes a look at the specific reasons behind the recent cancellation of several products. “Dennis Crowley, one of two co-founders who sold Dodgeball to Google in 2005 and stayed on, said that he had trouble competing for the attention of other Google engineers to expand the service. ‘If you’re a product manager, you have to recruit people and their “20 percent time.”‘ … [Jeff Huber, the company’s senior vice president of engineering] said that Google eventually concluded that Dodgeball’s vision was too narrow. … Still, Google found the concepts behind Dodgeball intriguing, and early this month, it released Google Latitude, an add-on to Google Maps that allows people to share their location with friends and family members. It’s more sophisticated than Dodgeball, with automatic location tracking and more options for privacy and communication.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.