For added merit, check out the "ring-based security" mechanism which sounds suspiciously like the old Multics security system (which features if only vestigially in every 32bit x86 processor):

ISACA expert claims virtualisation dates back to 1960s

London, UK 2nd March 2011 - A leading IT security expert claims that, despite all the media hype, virtualisation is actually not a new technology, and dates all the way back to the 1960s. Professor John Walker, member of the Security Advisory Group of ISACA’s London Chapter and CTO of Secure-Bastion, said that, although it’s not a new technology, it has recently come to the forefront again and offers organizations many benefits to the enterprise IT environment.

Professor Walker, gave an online presentation in which he said that whilst virtualisation's benefits include reduced server sprawl and a quicker build time, there are clear security issues. As with any system, or application configuration, he said, control is vital to security, and its professionals should remember that this security principal applies to the on-line and off-line images alike. IT professionals, he went on to say, should take care to ensure that new builds are tracked, and that, again, as with conventional systems and applications, virtualised environments need to be patched up and fixed. "They also suffer from vulnerabilities," he told his audience.

Professor Walker also detailed his "ring security strategy", which defines the virtual environment as the operating system block and three rings: ring 0, ring 1-2 and user applications.

Despite the potential security headaches associated with virtual networks, Professor Walker said that VLANs have become a great security enabler for the enterprise and that VM environments are ideal platforms for IT testing.

VM systems are also ideal tools for the mobile security tester, he went on to say, adding that this is because they support the running of multiple operating systems, multiple applications and multiple tools. "And if you break it, you just recopy the image," he explained. The cloud, however, changes a number of things. Professor Walker said that the advent of cloud computing has seen¾and will continue to see¾the use of virtualisation advance. The question is, he added, are VM applications getting too expensive?

I have one question: why? Why is this news? Who thought sending this out was even approaching a good idea?

It wasn’t a big deal. Although I received such well-targeted material as “Lush hosts Mother’s Day parties nationwide!”, “Old Spitalfields - New Future” and “Vote Jack the Goat for Prime Minister 2010!” - exclamation marks and all - the quantity coming through was not enough to warrant getting them to change it.

Then Laureate Education appeared with some release about a deal with the University of Liverpool. Once again, it had no relevance to me but it was no worse than the other stuff that turned up on this distribution service. Then another one appeared. And another one. In total, I received about 15 copies of the same release.

It was probably a technical glitch but the rate at which they were coming through quickly became an irritation. The sensible thing to do was to contact Cision and tell them about it. But how? There isn’t even so much as an unsubscribe option at the bottom of these releases - that in itself is against EU rules on commercial bulk emails. They might be able to claim an exception for business use but it’s not a great position to take given the attention being given to PR spam today.

But there isn’t even an effective contact email or number unless you dig right through the Cision UK site. The most prominent contact page is simply the kind of form that routes to whichever intern was unlucky enough to draw the short straw that day. The only phone number goes to an automated phone system in which the only relevant option is to go through to the ‘research’ department, who have precious idea what Cisionwire is, let alone how to deal with a mailbot suffering a spasm.

The only questions they could resolve were whether my contact details were right and did I want to unsubscribe from everything. One of them was at least six months out of date. Actually, this is good going for Cision. It’s possible to go for years with the wrong details from my experience of dealing with their research department, and that’s if you actually take the time and trouble to find the right department and ring them about it. Trust me, I’ve tried.

The other record was the address being used by Cisionwire. They had no idea how they got this email, other than claiming “it came from the NUJ’s website”. That cannot be the case because the freelance directory does not publicly list email addresses.

Did I want to unscubscribe? You betcha. But for good measure I blacklisted the sending server for when their email harvesting bots (or interns) happen by at some point in the future. I can live with the other stuff that turns up in the inbox but Cision has demonstrated once too often that it’s just too useless to deal with.

“How it’s been reported: it’s like we haven’t noticed [the problems],” said Whitwell in a session on paid-for sites at the News Rewired conference yesterday. “We have been watching Twitter and the blogs saying this is going to be difficult: ‘Don’t they realise that their audience is going to drop?’

“My favourite was one that said if we believed all our free customers would convert to paid, we would make £2bn.” Whitwell let us into a secret: “We are not expecting to make £2bn.”

Whitwell stressed: “We are not underestimating the scale of this challenge. Eighteen months ago we felt we were at a fork in the road. We could carry on as we were or we could look at something different. The free option looks a lot less appealing that we had thought at first. We were making money but not an enormous amount of money [from having a free site].

“We looked at how we could expand the site. We looked at how much money that expansion would bring in and it would not be a lot more. And a lot would be drive-by, often overseas traffic.”

The push to serve a large, drive-by audience was forcing The Times and other newspapers into a race to the bottom. “We looked at how people were doing pile-high news. They were writing 20 different versions of a story during the day just to stay at the top of Google News. And we saw how far they were getting away from their brand.

“We wanted to do what The Times stood for,” he said rather than watching starlets getting out of cars to see if they had any underwear on. In the drive-by news world, stories were about celebrity and gruesome accidents, he said.

The need to get all the money from advertising had other problems: “The barrier between commercial and journalism was getting very thin.”

So there were clear reasons for moving towards the paywall. And one reason for not going there: “The other path was terrifying. It’s a real leap into the dark. We understood immediately that this would change our relationship with the audience. So we looked at what we can do on a site where we have a real relationship with the audience.

“We could have a site with the reader at its heart. With a free site, it’s all about trying to push up the pageviews to push lots and lots of ads. At Times Online we were getting five thousand comments a day. But we didn’t feel it was a real community.”

Whitwell was not going to discuss numbers at the session although he claimed that the “figures we are seeing are very encouraging”.

Alastair Bruce from Microsoft said paywalls could work but agreed with Barry Diller’s pronouncements that “it will take some time. There are enough large corporations going after them that they will work at some time”.

Bruce showed a table of the large media organisations that either have some sort of paywall or are about to launch them, which showed that there is a large range of charging options being tried while the market settles down.

If you factor in what is happening in the trade sector, the range of options multiplies again. Karl Schneider, editorial development director at RBI, talked about the four paid-for operations that the large, Sutton-based publisher, not including the paywall that New Scientist operates.

News is a part of a number of these but it’s often data-driven news that is provided along with the raw data itself. “It’s hard to come up with a powerful offering that is only about news,” said Schneider.

A prime example is ICIS, which is a site that provides price information for industrial chemicals. The news is often aligned with that pricing information. Schneider explained that it’s not enough to simply write a story about a plant catching fire in Osaka. You have to describe its capacity versus world supply and what that will do to prices, so that companies can use it in pricing negotiations.

“It’s news that you can use. News that you can act on. You have to write it in such a way that the user can pick it up and use it,” said Schneider.

The XpertHR site for humans resources people has less data but more about employment legislation. So it provides content such as model relocation policies that these people can download and use as templates for their own policies and ‘living features’ that are online equivalents of the old loose-leaf publishing business to cover updates in legislation. This avoids the traditional problem in trade publishing where you write a feature that covers the changes but you force people to go and dig around for the details. “You can find for free the information presented on XpertHR but it’s not packaged like this,” said Schneider.

The introduction of a paywall changes the relationship with advertisers as well, as newspapers like The Times found 40 years ago when they changed their approach to cover pricing. Bruce remarked on the irony that “as soon as you become a subscriber, you suddenly become more valuable to advertisers”.

Schneider said, because advertisers can treat a small but highly relevant audience as being more valuable, the ad rates per reader can vary wildly. “At one extreme you can easily charge less than £1 per thousand on a CPM model. But you can get £50 per person in some areas. The range of prices is absolutely huge.”

The trouble is that publishers have only just started to realise how different advertising models can bring much better returns. “Content is where we have done very well. But we have been a miserable failure in ads. Look at what we have been selling to the advertisers: stuff we sold in the magazines just stuffed on the web. That is where I am optimistic about the future, because of the range of opportunities that we have,” said Schneider.

No-one sings the praises of email much. It’s full of spam and over-CCed messages to let you know that a blue Ford Focus is clogging up the CEO’s parking space or that Kate in marketing has a pile of buns to celebrate her birthday. Yet, even for sites and campaigns that you’d expect to be flash-mobbed by a tweet from the likes of Stephen Fry, email is still one of the big sources of traffic for email.

For all the work that people put into search-engine optimisation, the search engines turn out to be pretty poor drivers of web traffic compared with the other means. It’s folks recommending stuff to other folks that drives the traffic.

“Not many people search for our website. It’s mainly people who were directed to it,” Mike Harris, public affairs manager of the Libel Reform Campaign.

Vikki Chowney, editor of Reputation Online, said: “Thirty to thirty-five per cent of our traffic comes from Twitter.”

But another third comes from email - mainly from the newsletters that the site sends out. “Our email newsletters are phenomenally popular and we still get a tremendous amount of traffic from them,” she said.

“The king will continue to be email,” said Tony Curzon-Price, editor-in-chief of Open Democracy. Although the traffic drivers are still changing - Curzon-Price went through a potted history of web traffic generators from listservs through to Facebook - he pointed out that some communities are still very focused on supposedly old-hat things such as web-based bulletin boards and forums.

In his afternoon keynote, Marc Reeves, editor of the Business Desk West Midlands, said: “Eighty per cent of our web traffic is driven in the hour-and-a-half after the email is sent, so we know it works.”

“Because we are not playing the SEO game, the headlines are really important. It’s the headline that drives the traffic through. We are not bothered with SEO juicing because the minority of our readers come from the search engines,” said Reeves.

If the Web 2.0 stuff worked for the site, Reeves would use them more, although it does have a Twitter feed and the other things you would expect. But, he emphasises: “Our readers are not Web 2.0-enabled so why force them down that path?”

The most glaring error - although it's probably more for the purposes of hyperbole than through ignorance - is that MIDI only transmits note-on and note-off messages. Even early MIDI synths respond to more than that. Yamaha was very keen to make the DX series synths respond to a breath controller because of concerns over expressiveness. The level of expressiveness was limited compared to an analogue synths for a long time but the basics were there. And hardly anybody ever bothered to use the breath controller input except for keen experimentalists such as Michael Brecker.

In an interview in the 1990s, Brian Eno asked for an instrument like the DX7, which he used heavily, that would have a lot more means of articulation but all that was possible with MIDI. No-one stepped up to make Eno's dream synth. The charts are, as Lanier complains, full of mechanistic music but this is due to artist and consumer choice - as evidenced by the seemingly endless litany of Ministry of Sound compilations. But in the margins, people have dealt with the limitations of MIDI and are beginning to transcend them.

A legitimate complaint against MIDI is its atrocious data resolution. Working in the 1980s, the designers had the limitation of a slow serial communications link to deal with. So all the controllers, other than pitch-bend, were confined to a resolution of 8 bits - just 128 discrete steps. That's pretty granular although the net effect is not as bad it seems.

Film composers are able to produce convincing soundtracks - augmented by live orchestras only in more lavish productions - using banks of MIDI-controlled samplers. Most of these are now realised in software so they work around the poor speed of hardware MIDI but the core protocol is the same. People who want to avoid some of the workarounds needed for MIDI are now using protocols such as Open Sound Control (OSC), which is way more flexible than MIDI ever was. It makes possible new instrument controllers such as the Eigenharp. It looks like Darth Vader's bassoon but it's one of a new generation of electronic musical instruments that don't seem at all affected by Lanier's MIDI lock-in, other than a lack of interest from commercial music producers.

The Eigenharp has its own problems. It provides an impressive array of sensitive controllers but needs some work in the usability department as it makes Boehm fingering on a woodwind instrument seem like a triumph of ergonomics. But it's hardly constrained by the tyranny of an 1980s hardware protocol.

Pointing to mechanical music, with MIDI at it's core, is an emotive argument. But that's all it is once you dig into the detail. That doesn't really bode well for Lanier's book even when I'm sympathetic to his core premise.

Despite an apparent trend driven by appointments of journalists by PRs that are not account-director roles, it's worth having a closer look at the examples of direct PR that Edelman cites. They are not dramatically different from the work already done by agencies where they expected just press coverage in the past or were creating material for user or sales meetings.

Although PRs might have grasped the idea that direct communication with consumers is worthwhile, there is a big question mark over whether their clients will like what they plan. The advantage for the PR of having the press in the way is, to an extent, deniability. They might be aware of the consequences of using a particular approach but if it goes pear-shaped, it's still possible to blame the journalist for "misunderstanding the message". If you take away that layer, the people in charge of promotion or engagement or whatever you want to call it are far more exposed.

So, in the short term, I'd expect the opposite of what should happen to take place. The trend in recent years, despite all the talk about engagement and two-way communication, has been to sell, sell, sell. Don't go off-message, no matter how dull that message might be. Because no-one is going to get fired for sticking to the pre-approved script. At least not until companies start to see their profiles become less and less prominent. Then they might have a go at proper communication.

This will have an effect on the way the media operates but learning to work around the relentless stream of dull, self-serving messages has been part of the game for a while.

Oh look, kittens.

…has wondered aloud whether inline links, the very stuff of blog-writing, are a good idea or not. Because they convince people to stop reading here and go reading there.

One post recommended a technological solution: get the reader to decide how the links should appear. (And if you go there, you should at some point find a lot of what appears below in a comment). But this is applying a technological solution to a cognitive problem.

People need to take a step back and consider why inline linking gets used. I have to write using a number of different styles which use either inline links or links at the end. The two styles of writing turn out to be quite different – and I’ve argued against house styles using one or the other in different contexts because of this issue.

Inline linking became popular largely due to blogging and is useful because it allows you to construct a post quickly – all I have to do is put in the link and assume if the reader is not up to speed on the subject they will click to find out. Those that are aware of what’s at the end of the link don’t have to read through yet another description of what the link’s endpoint says, which is what happens if you bung the links at the end (and then provide some more description to remind people what the links are all about).

So, I’d argue for someone who is aware of a thread of stories, the inline link format is less distracting because the knowledgeable reader does not have to wade through stuff they already know.

However, if you want to do long-form writing, and feel that there is an audience for it, then presenting the text link-free, maybe with a Javascript-assisted hiding scheme, is arguably the better bet. In that case, an inline link plus the description is arguably a form of tautology.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that authors play with distraction all the time in the interest of maintaining interest in a story by scene shifting. With inline links, you’re just inviting the reader to do their own scene shifting if they feel like it.

Thinking about the Javascript angle, perhaps what would be handy would be a flag button or “open in underlying tab” so you’ve got the links for the sections that most piqued your interest when you’ve finished reading. Think of it as the Getting Things Done approach to dealing with inline links - stop thinking about that link now, make a note, deal with it later with your full attention. (There’s probably some Firefox addon for this isn’t there?)

'Twas ever thus. Take this passage from Power Without Responsibility by media researchers James Curran and Jean Seaton, which shows that reading preferences haven't changed all that much in 40 years even though the choices have, in principle, massively expanded:

"The most-read stories in Sunday quality papers during the period between 1969 and 1971 were human-interest stories about ordinary people, followed by human-interest stories about celebrities - precisely the most-read stories in the Sunday People and the Sunday Mirror during the same period."

The sources for the statistics were the Sunday Times' own Marketing Research Studies during that period, according to Curran and Seaton.

Today, Bill Gates looks a little out of place on the cover of the edition I own but Rupert Murdoch far less so - and he is prominent on the cover of the latest. The News International decision to deliberately choke off high readership figures in favour of paid subscriptions also has a mirror in the late 1960s. And it has a lot to do with the way advertisers rather than readers view publications:

"Failure to respect these different market rules could produce bizarre consequences, as was demonstrated when The Times, under a new owner, Lord Thomson, went for promiscuous growth. Between 1966 and 1969 the paper increased its circulation by 60 per cent...However, a significant number of its new readers were indigent students, lower-middle class or even working class. Advertisers objected to paying premium rates for the privilege of attracting readers from outside their advertising target group, many of whom could be reached more cheaply through other publications...Thoroughly chastened, The Times reversed its policy by raising its price, adopting a more austere editorial policy and changing its promotional message in a successful bid to lose 96,000 unwanted circulation between 1969 and 1971..."

The quest to SEO the life out of every headline and standfirst to get page view figures to impress advertisers is not necessarily the way forward. As with the scramble to reclaim the high ground 40 years ago, having a known paid readership can pay dividends with some advertisers. However, there are important structural differences between the advertiser base of the late 1960s and the one we have today, which is far more focused on return on investment even if it does not have the tools to perform sensible analyses of those returns. But whatever the attitude of the advertiser, it subtly alters the way that the new paid-for papers (which are trying to regain an élite position) will function, as it did way back when:

"More far-reaching than advertisers' indirect influence on the market orientation of newspapers was their direct impact on the structure of the press. By 2002, five out of ten national dailies served the top end of the market, and accounted for 20 per cent of circulation...Under this bifurcated system, the only significant minority papers to survive were those that served advertising-rich audiences."

Curran and Seaton argue that this concentration of revenue in the top end of the newspaper business tended to reinforce the position of an élite clique in politics.

"Economic power was thus converted into ideological power. Yet this came about not through blackmailing pressure exerted by advertisers on editorial content - the usual concern of radical critics - but through an impersonal process in which influence was largely unsought."

What gets reinforced this time will be different but there is likely to be a very distinct difference between the mass-market, free publications and those that choose to erect a paywall.

You basically can’t get a project funding without some ethical component in synthetic biology on the basis that the Royal Society demonstrated that obvious public engagement, and lots of it, can’t go wrong.

Apparently, nobody told the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) that the Royal Society had successfully despatched concerns over the safety of nanotechnology in general. (However, I confess that I’ve been muttering darkly that the nanotechnology scare didn’t get killed off, it just went quiet for a while.) The strategy launched today by BIS should come sheathed in a high-vis jacket and plastered with signs about being careful not to slip up on its shiny surface.

It took a couple of hours for the report to appear. The BIS website took a sudden dislike to the content and decided to deliver a Fatal Error instead instead of a web page and download link. Maybe the document didn’t pass the web-safety test until it received another final going-over with the danger detector.

Open up the strategy — which could be the shortest-lived technology strategy ever if the polls are correct — and you find it uses pretty much the same approach as previous technological initiatives from BIS and its predecessors. Namely, set up a leadership council, encourage some communication between academia and industry — which the various Knowledge Transfer Networks (KTNs) are already doing — and report back in a couple of years to see how it’s going.

However, ladled on top of that is 'elf and safety and lots of it. The strategy document calls on the Nanotechnology Research Strategy Group to set up no less than three task forces to focus on safety, with a fourth to concentrate on “social and economic dimensions” — you guessed it, more public engagement. A fifth will work out how to spot stray nanomaterials in the wild.

Part of the problem is the way that nanotechnology as it exists today has become a catch-all phrase for modern chemicals. Although so-called nanomaterials take advantage of advances in chemistry and, in some cases, biotech, they are simply chemicals and materials — just with a greater focus on the intermolecular structure as that has a key influence on their chemical properties. If the government expects to be able to get to the end of this programme (assuming the electorate allows it to begin) with a declaration of “nanotech safety in our time”, then the ministers and civil servants involved are fooling themselves. Each one is different; just like your regular chemicals.

[The report] concluded that considerable progress has been made, but also highlighted that socially excluded groups often have complex needs and require a sophisticated and flexible response from service providers.

Really? No wonder it’s complex, you could spend ages wondering out how to spot the condition.

The latest victim of the symptom seems to be GlobalFoundries which decided to organise a tour of its Dresden fab this week for a small group of journalists while a larger group attending a conference on chip design just a few kilometres down the road had no idea it was going on. It was only a chance encounter in Dresden during the DATE conference yesterday that clued me in.

The weird thing about the Globalfoundries Secret-Squirrel trip to Dresden is that people who definitely weren’t going to DATE got the fab-tour invite. Those who had let the organisers know they were going to Dresden didn’t hear from Globalfoundries.

Why the company decided to organise a press event against a major conference attended by companies who Globalfoundries wants as customers — and therefore journalists writing for newspapers specialising in chip design — is itself a mystery. It would have been relatively simple to do it on the Monday so that people heading to DATE could do both or even do a press conference at the DATE venue. The Dresden foundry has been there for a while — all the new stuff iswas going into New York. The arrangement the company chose is just plain bizarre might be symbolic but it didn’t please a lot of people.

The timing may be related to TSMC’s recent Executive Forum in Japan. There is certainly a lot of propaganda being aimed at customers over whether the top foundries have made the right choice in how to build high-k, metal-gate transistors. Intel and TSMC opted for gate-last and TSMC is telling whoever will listen that everybody will pick gate-last eventually even if they’re doing gate-first right now. Globalfoundries, which has a pressing need to find a customer base as former parent AMD puts a break on its manufacturing spend, is in the other, gate-first camp. The last thing it needs is FUD.