I have a lot of respect for ex-Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, but when I saw that he'd taken to promoting a Clipper-Chip-style key escrow system, I was disheartened — I'm a pretty keen observer of these proposals and have spent a lot of time having their problems explained to me by some of the world's leading cryptographers, and this one seemed like it had the same problems as all of those dead letters.

Ex-Microsoft software genius Ray Ozzie's new mobile app Talko is all about reinventing telephony—voice messages and (gasp) conversations—as a collaborative tool; Steven Levy has the story at Medium.

Dan Gillmor has the news that Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's visionary Chief Software Architect, has left the company. Ozzie, whose P2P startup Groove was bought by Microsoft, is admired and well-liked in tech circles as someone who believes in the transformative power of technology to improve the world. — Read the rest

Wired has a fascinating feature on the way that Microsoft is changing gears as Bill Gates steps away from daily operations, leaving Lotus Notes inventor Ray Ozzie in his place. Ray is a friend of mine, and is nothing like the other Microsoft execs I've met — he's a grassroots, P2P, social software kind of guy, not a shouter or a swaggerer. — Read the rest

Microsoft's new data-centres are comprised of entire sealed shipping containers that are slotted into racks and left to run until a critical mass of their processor units have failed, then are swapped out.

Starting with a Chicago-area facility due to open later this year, Microsoft will use an approach in which servers arrive at the data center in a sealed container, already networked together and ready to go.

Here are my notes from Journalism 3.1b2, Dan Gillmor's talk at ETCON.

New choices for the subjects of journalism (the "covered")

* Judo journos — WashPo's post-9-11 series included an interview with Rumsfeld,
followed by Defense Dept posting the full interview with Rumsfeld.

Mitch Kapor, who cofounded EFF, has resigned from the board of Ray Ozzie's Groove, and the NYT says it's because Groove is being used by the Feds as part of its Total Information Awareness program.

Link

Discuss

Prompted by a thought-experiment from Ray Ozzie in which he imagines a company where all work-related inboxes are shared internally, and searchable with Google, Ben Hammersley is offering to make his journalism-related inbox available as an RSS feed, sharing all of his story notes, ideas and feedback with the world. — Read the rest