FiberGeneration

Who's Your CSO (Cloud Security Officer) ?

For all of us working daily with Web 2.0 and SaS tools in the Cloud, this article by Nick Cubrolivic of TechCrunch is a must read: How hackers can get all sensitive data on your company right from your Cloud-based IT system, by simply re-initializing your old Hotmail account (plus a few other steps)...

TED On The Fly, episode 1: "How social media can make history"

This post if the first of a series which is about the changes that are currently affecting the World, modifying it at an unprecedented speed yet with a mostly invisible manner.

With this series, I'll share with you some of the most stunning talks at the TED conferences.

As a starter, I'd like you to watch Clay Shirky, consultant, author of "Here Comes Everybody", and professor at the New York University, demonstrating how Facebook, Twitter and SMS help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing governmental 's censorship. Feared by most of the politicians all around the Planet, including here in the Land Of Democracy, aka France, the end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.

One out of many interesting stuff with Shirky 's speech: it has been recorded at the US State Department, Washington, DC., during the [email protected] event last June. I don't know of an equivalent here in France: we're too much scarred by changes...

Allow yourself a nice coffee break to enjoy the video: it's 17' long, but it's worth the
watch.

More by Clay Shirky at TED here.

By the way: I've entitled this series "TED on the fly" because when I'm traveling by air, I'm used to load my iPhone with 15 to 20 new TED videos, which I watch during the flight. That means I've plenty to share with you ;-)

FTTH Business Model, Or How Illegal Download Leads To New Jobs Creation

The Pau Broadband Country Fiber-To-The-Home network is truly *the* model for Muni FTTH. Here's one example, which I like to share with people in the Governmental sphere those days, in regards of the famous Hadopi law.

Just a few months after the launch of the network back in 2005, the 2.5Gbit/s high-speed links between Pau and Paris' Telehouse hubs became almost overloaded. In the upstream direction. Traffic analysis demonstrated that Gen Y fellows and geeks of all sorts were uploading gigabytes of more or less legal stuff: music, video, software, everything that makes Vuze and the likes so fun to use...

With the remarkable increase of fiber subscribers since begin 2008, an upgrade of these Pau-Paris links was mandatory. 10Gbit/s is now on its way. That makes the distance between the two cities totally transparent, allowing ultra-high speed communications for businesses who run operations in Pau, Paris, and elsewhere in the World, for instance... San Francisco and the Silicon Valley.

Guess what: since empty space is a scarce resource in Paris, new datacenters are popping up outside the capital city. One the very few towns out there able to host Green datacenters: Pau. Pau has all the know-how, skills and legitimacy to offer such high-tech facilities. Here's the beauty of the story: It is because of a band of young guys are playing with the law that Pau can host new businesses in a booming sector. If you are looking for a business model which works, here's one: let the Gen Y play at will.