Moore’s census involved regularly sending simple, automated messages to each one of the 3.7 billion IP addresses assigned to devices connected to the Internet around the world (Google, in contrast, collects information offered publicly by websites). Many of the two terabytes (2,000 gigabytes) worth of replies Moore received from 310 million IPs indicated that they came from devices vulnerable to well-known flaws, or configured in a way that could to let anyone take control of them.

On Tuesday, Moore published results on a particularly troubling segment of those vulnerable devices: ones that appear to be used for business and industrial systems. Over 114,000 of those control connections were logged as being on the Internet with known security flaws. Many could be accessed using default passwords and 13,000 offered direct access through a command prompt without a password at all.

via Pinging the Whole Internet Reveals Unsecured Backdoors That Could Tempt Hackers and Cyber Criminals | MIT Technology Review.

Read the whole thing.

A brief history of ecommerce can be summarized as this- 1995: The invention of the cookie. The end.

The browser cookie has reigned supreme for nearly two decades.  It has given rise to marketing empires like Double-Click (Google), Omniture, and nearly every imaginable advertising network of the modern web.  Cookies also provide context beyond ecommerce, since they help sites fine-tune the user experience and reduce friction for end users.

Cookies have become so pervasive that a contextualized web with out them would not be possible.  They’ve also extended well beyond context, as most cookies now actively track internet users, often without explicit permission.  With that backdrop, it’s hard to imagine that this atomic element of today’s web may soon fade away.

Perhaps because of how pervasive it is, and how invasive it is to personal privacy, the browser cookie is now under assault on many fronts.  The Europeans have taken to legislation as the primary vehicle to act against personal tracking technologies like cookies, Microsoft has gone as far as to ‘default‘ a do-not-track feature with their latest version of Internet Explorer, and there are at least a dozen such plugins for Firefox and Chrome.  Some ad-tech experts are actually predicting the complete collapse of the browser cookie in five years:

Five years at the most.

At my former company, my peers were the people who created cookies. We didn’t create them for this. It’s a very weak computing mechanism. It’s flawed, invasive, it’s got privacy issues, it’s going to go.

I think it will take five years to kill it. At that point, it’ll be like birds chirping and flowers blooming because we’ll find some kind of value proposition that allows consumers to trust us and opt into personalization. I term it, tailor don’t target.

via - The cookie has five years left says Merkle’s Paul Cimino | Ad Exchanger

It’s no surprise that ad-tech professionals see a paradigm shift away from cookies, but that shift isn’t being driven by a direct attack on the technology.  I can’t imagine that the ‘average’ internet user is proactively installing browser plugins to block cookies, so there has to be another reason why cookie usage has dropped precipitously.  At a prior point in the same blog post, Cimino reveals:

The second main reason is that non-cookieable devices – phones and iPads, Kindles and the like – are generating traffic somewhere between 35% and 40% of our overall traffic. So 35-40% of traffic is not from computers.

Consumer behavior has shifted away, which is forcing a shift away from cookies.  Although this might seem as a ‘win’ for privacy,  the ad-tech world has figured out even more invasive ways to target consumers:

I can’t cookie your iPhone or your Android phone. If you are at home or you go to the same place every day, I can see the IP and part of the user agent – enough information to reasonably identify you over and over and keep that good sync between the data – the first- and third-party data and the targeting opportunity that’s out there.

The takeaway here is that, as we see the value of cookies corroding, the technological fabric that has woven the modern web has produced even more invasive methods to track individual behavior.  At the same time, legislation and technology to counteract tracking technology is focused on the old cookie paradigm.  While the new tracking systems are relatively new, perhaps there is a window of opportunity for consumers to help shape a more balanced framework.

It is this balanced framework, that we are focusing on developing at Customer Commons:

Customer Commons holds a vision of the customer as an independent actor who retains autonomous control over his or her personal data, desires and intentions.  In this vision, each of us will act as the optimal point of integration and origination for data about us. Customers must be able to share their data and intentions selectively and voluntarily. Individuals must also be able to know exactly what information is being held about them by those who gather it, by whatever means. To achieve this, customers must be able to assert their own terms of engagement, in ways that are both practical and easy to understand for all sides.

I encourage you to join the conversation at Customer Commons.  Additionally, I will be devoting more time writing about how customer engagement in a modern marketplace will be significantly different, and how we call all help to shape that future, and more free, market.

If you are in the bay area during the week of May 6th, 2013, please consider joining the Customer Commons Salon that Monday evening.

These days, the customer journey has grown more complex. Before making an online purchase decision, a customer may engage with your brand through many different media channels over several days. This tool helps you explore and understand the customer journey to improve your marketing programs.

via The Customer Journey to Online Purchase – Think Insights – Google.

There are several interactive charts on that post, all of which reveal some interesting characteristics on how customer interactions vary based on the channel of engagement, by industry and region.

via New Techniques from Google and Ray Kurzweil Are Taking Artificial Intelligence to Another Level | MIT Technology Review.

As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore’s law. Now geneticists have extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by this measure, life is older than the Earth itself.

via Moore’s Law and the Origin of Life | MIT Technology Review.

Probabilistic programming languages are in the spotlight. This is due to the announcement of a new DARPA program to support their fundamental research. But what is probabilistic programming? What can we expect from this research? Will this effort pay off? How long will it take?

A probabilistic programming language is a high-level language that makes it easy for a developer to define probability models and then “solve” these models automatically.

via What is probabilistic programming? – O’Reilly Radar.

Bonus: The video at the bottom of the linked blog post serves as an excellent overview of where this technology is headed

In short, email was designed with the architecture of the Internet in mind. Email is decentralized and protocol-mediated. Email is open—not necessarily open-source—but open in that anyone can build clients and servers that speak IMAP and SMTP. As a result, email maximizes freedom and control for the user and minimizes the chance of disruption. The features and benefits that email provides are exactly the same as those we want for personal clouds. Designed right, any application built on a personal cloud would provide similar functionality.

Web 2.0 has given us a model that is exactly the opposite of email. The model encourages user data to be stored in separate silos. You cannot easily migrate from one service provider to another. And when a service provider goes away, you are abandoned and marooned. You are not in control. Of course, it doesn’t help that this is all in the service provider’s best interest. They make money from the fact that the predominant model for building online applications leaves their users powerless.

via IMAP as the Proto Personal Cloud.

There’s lots of activity underway in this space.  I’ll have my own thoughts in several subsequent posts.

We could start with the fact that only around 42,800 people in the country admit to an income of Rs 10 million or more to the income tax department. But almost everyone, the finance minister included, thinks that figure is laughably low. Here I want to talk about a more er…inclusive definition of the privileged.

Take a look at the map below. It maps the proportion of households in each district, who told census-takers that they own all of the following – a TV set, a phone, a computer and a vehicle (scooter/motorcycle or car). That number, for the country as a whole, is 4.6% (roughly 11 million households).

I leave you to draw your own conclusions about what it means to be ‘privileged’ in this country. I also leave you with this question: If the census takers had asked each one of these households, what ‘class’ of society they thought they belonged to, or where they fit in within the income distribution, what do you think their response would have been ( and by ‘their’, I also mean ‘our’)?

Post: We are the 5%

In another set of posts, the author dives into older census data to reveal that per capita income divergence between India and the west (especially the US) peaked at an unexpected time, the close of the ’70s:

In 1979, the difference between American and Indian per capita incomes peaked and India began a period of catch-up with not just the US, but with the West in general which continues today.  But that year also set in motion another divergence – between India and China which also continues.

Posts: 1979: When a Historic Shift went unnoticed, This is not about China or India

Each post on Data Stories provides another useful lens to apply on India’s census data.  I know I’ll be following Data Stories to see what else the census data reveal.

Expand the Value You Create for Customers

via The Big Goal Behind All that Customer Data – Bill Lee – Harvard Business Review.

The main browser-based application (there are iPhone and Android companion apps) displays some of the best web coding I’ve seen.  Fog Creek Software, the developer of Trello, is providing enterprise-class horsepower with a consumer level user experience, which is not an easy feat. 

Earlier this year, Joel Spolsky, CEO of Fog Creek Software, wrote that Trello was designed to be used by a wide variety of people:

The biggest difference you’ll notice … is that Trello is a totally horizontal product.

Horizontal means that it can be used by people from all walks of life. Word processors and web browsers are horizontal. The software your dentist uses to torture you with drills is vertical.

Vertical software is much easier to pull off and make money with, and it’s a good choice for your first startup. Here are two key reasons:

• It’s easier to find customers. If you make dentist software, you know which conventions to go to and which magazines to advertise in. All you have to do is find dentists.
• The margins are better. Your users are professionals at work and it makes sense for them to give you money if you can solve their problems.

Making a major horizontal product that’s useful in any walk of life is almost impossible to pull off. You can’t charge very much, because you’re competing with other horizontal products that can amortize their development costs across a huge number of users. It’s high risk, high reward: not suitable for a young bootstrapped startup, but not a bad idea for a second or third product from a mature and stable company like Fog Creek.

via Joel on Software

Fog Creek is aggressively developing the application, and has recently updated the Trello iPhone companion app (I can’t wait to see a native iPad app!).  So, a year in with a horizontal product, Trello marks the milestone with a great statistic: 

You’ve made 717,337 accounts. We hit 500,000 in July, so it’s going even faster these days.

via It’s Trello’s Cake Day!

Congratulations to the Trello team for a successful year!

One of these days I may post about my own workflows using Trello, but in the meantime I encourage you check out the application for yourself.