standards

Deployments of smart grids should be slowed until security vulnerabilities are addressed, according to some cybersecurity experts, citing tests showing that a hacker can cause a major blackout after breaking into a smart-grid system.

The idea behind smart grids, a burgeoning energy sector in which even Google is playing a role, is that automated meters and two-way power consumption data can be used to improve the efficiency and reliability of an electrical system's power distribution. A washing machine in a household hooked up to a smart meter, for instance, could be set up to run only at lower-cost, off-peak … Read more

Open standards are good for an industry's development as they tend to create much more customer demand. In the growing cloud-computing market, standards are also critical to ensuring customers don't get locked into any particular cloud provider. Ironically, this is almost certainly why we're unlikely to see open standards widely adopted in cloud computing any time soon.

ZDNet notes that cloud-computing vendors are increasingly talking the open-standards talk. The problem is that each company, in a Prisoner's Dilemma sort of way, has an incentive to maximize lock-in of its customers while simultaneously encouraging open standards for … Read more

On March 5 Apple dropped a small bombshell on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards body, excluding one of its patents from the W3C Royalty-Free License commitment of the W3C Patent Policy for Widgets 1.0. The patent in question covers automatic updates to a client computer in a networked operating environment.

The announcement has generated no apparent response, yet could portend serious consequences. The Apple exclusion could mean that a W3C standard on widgets (or, really, any standard in the Web Application Group) at W3C that uses or includes something which touches this patent will either need to … Read more

By open sourcing Java Sun probably thought it had earned 'brownie points' with the open-source community. Instead, as a recent vote over Java Enterprise Edition 6.0 suggests, the community may be intent on teaching Sun that there's more to 'open' than source code, with the Apache Software Foundation (voted against) and SpringSource (abstained) siding against the pending Java specification, as reported by Gavin Clarke in The Register.

Apache is the only member of the 16-member Java Community Process to vote against the 6.0 specification, arguing that Sun "has breached the terms of the JCP's Java … Read more

Last week, Tim O'Reilly called for Amazon.com to open up its Kindle e-reader, or "Amazon will wind up another online pioneer who ends up a belated guest at the party it planned to host."

On Wednesday, Amazon demonstrated that it understands the value of openness, even if it's not yet prepared to embrace open standards for the Kindle, by providing an iPhone application that enables users to read their Kindle content on Apple's iPhone, as CNET reports.

This is a shrewd move. It's unlikely that many will want to trade the Kindle reading experience for the iPhone's, … Read more

I spent some time with a large software company last week. In the course of our conversation, it became clear that while open standards are great for facilitating cooperation between companies, open standards can also serve another purpose entirely: improving cooperation within a single company.

Granted, this is mostly a solution for big companies; small companies struggle less to make diverse product lines work together. Even so, it's interesting to think that some forward-thinking businesses sponsor open standards to help with internal problems, not industry interoperability.

Consider Oracle (not the company in question). After years of acquisitions, the company … Read more

O'Reilly Media founder Tim O'Reilly makes a provocative claim relative to Amazon's successful e-book reader, the Kindle: embrace open e-book standards, or be run over by them.

It's a bold prediction, considering what Apple has demonstrated with the iPhone. It may also be wrong.

Indeed, though I'd like O'Reilly to be right on this, I think that the iPhone, which he uses to prove his point, actually demonstrates against it. O'Reilly writes:

(Apple) seems to have a knack for balancing the benefits of both open and closed architectures that Amazon has yet to … Read more

The average person likely won't even notice, but Webmasters can rejoice that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have banded together to support an unofficial standard for steering search engines in the right direction.

All three on Thursday announced they'd support a technique by which a little extra code in a Web page can indicate the address of its "canonical" version--essentially, the original, primary URL. The move will make it easier to tell search engines what they should pay attention to and to avoid treating duplicative Web pages as different.

Today, the search engine bots that scour the … Read more

Facebook has joined the board of the OpenID Foundation and will host an OpenID Design Summit later this month, according to a post on the social network's developer blog.

This is a bit of a surprise because Facebook has developed its own universal log-in standard, Facebook Connect, which theoretically competes with the nonprofit OpenID standard. It should be noted that Facebook has not yet announced any official plans to make the two compatible, and that just joining the board and hosting an event might not quell the criticism from open-source advocates who say Facebook is still too proprietary in … Read more