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Is this how valuable MySQL is to Oracle?

Perhaps the most thorough discussion of the changes to privacy created by today’s Internet is carried out by Abelson, H. et al. (2008), Blown to Bits, Addison-Wesley. This book is written by three MIT and Harvard professors, one of them (Hal Abelson) a co-founder of the Creative Commons initiative. 

Its subtitle is Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness after the Digital Explosion. One of its most provocative chapter titles is Naked in the Sunlight: Privacy Lost, Privacy Abandoned.

Next time you do a search on Google, you may want to think just how much information you are revealing about yourself. As you are probably likely also logged into Google Mail at the same time, Google already has a pretty good picture of you. It’s a trade-off we face (see What the Web Knows About You). Can we live without search engines? Probably not. Social media sites are not that different in that light

The new BUGbase interface will be designed in collaboration between Bug Labs and IDEO. What excites me most about this collaboration is that the design will be carried out as an open source projects. CAD files for the initial design concepts have been posted to the project blog already. More information will be available from the project blog shortly. Stay tuned on this one.

Here is an example of one of the risks of tethered applications Zittrain discusses in The Future of the Internet. As posted on the ProgrammableWeb, Google just announced that it will shut down three APIs. The services affected are Jaiku, Dodgeball, and Mashup Editor. The code for Jaiku will be released as open source once the service is discontinued, Dodgeball will terminate without replacement, and Google will promote its AppEngine as replacement for Mashup Editor. While, of course, shutting down APIs is part and parcel of Perpetual Beta, this is a stark reminder that as we are building applications on top of the services of others, the very existence of those applications depends on the continued availability of those services.

Bug Labs announced five new module for their BUG platform at CES. Two excite me in particular. The BUGprojector is a mini-DLP projector and allows you to project the output of the BUG to a wall. And, finally, a WIFI module is available, which was perhaps the biggest omission from the platform when it was first introduced. Now I am looking forward to getting my hands on one.

The open source statistics package R is quickly advancing to a lingua franca for companies like Google (search) or Pfizer (pharmaceutics) that rely heavily on analytics. Today it made the New York Times.