CRYPTOCHAOS

Mitch Lasky, general partner at Benchmark Capital and a longtime video game industry follower, said, “To quote my six year old daughter, barely looking up from her iPad: ‘What’s a Nintendo?’”

As was revealed today, the NSA also works with security product vendors to ensure that commercial encryption products are broken in secret ways that only it knows about. We know this has happened historically: CryptoAG and Lotus Notes are the most public examples, and there is evidence of a back door in Windows. A few people have told me some recent stories about their experiences, and I plan to write about them soon. Basically, the NSA asks companies to subtly change their products in undetectable ways: making the random number generator less random, leaking the key somehow, adding a common exponent to a public-key exchange protocol, and so on. If the back door is discovered, it's explained away as a mistake. And as we now know, the NSA has enjoyed enormous success from this program.

Anyone in business, of any kind, that hasn't read Clayton Christensen's "The Innovators Dilemma" is eventually doomed.  John Gruber of Daring Fireball points out this weakness in the Washington Post's article sympathetic to Ballmers demise... 

Seems to me Lee is in fact arguing that Microsoft’s decline was exactly Ballmer’s fault. His refusal to allow any other projects within Microsoft to disrupt Windows or Office made it inevitable that such disruptions would come from other companies. Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma was itself disruptive to standard business practices, but it came out in 1997. Did Ballmer not read it? Did he think Microsoft was somehow immune?

Via Daring Fireball

KEYNOTE: Forty Years of Trying To Play Well With Others

via agilealliance.org

Whoever gets credit for Apple’s plan to return more cash, the move shows Apple is no longer immune to shareholder pressure. The company now walks among the mortals.

via qz.com

[Sent from my iPhone 4S]