Why Your App Design Doesn't Have To Be All Thumbs

The debate about app design largely centers around screen size.
What if designers worried about digit size instead
Luke Wrobleski, a respected designer who sold a company to Twitter and more recently founded Polar, an app maker, thinks it's time to reconsider mobile design principles. Instead of worrying about questions like whether to upsize smartphone apps for tablets, designers should start by asking how their users will physically interact with their devices when using an app.
The technical term for this is input type—keyboard versus touchscreen, one-handed or two-handed interactions, and the like. This requires designers to think about how a device is held, which fingers are used, and how the app in question can optimize the experience for users' dexterity.

The Beginning: Start With Responsive Design

For a smartphone, the primary input type has become a single hand with a single finger, typically the thumb. For tablets, it's two hands with two inputs, typically both thumbs. And for desktops, it's still restricted largely to the mouse, trackpad, and keyboard, but can branch out in rare circumstances, in the case of devices like the Chromebook Pixel or Microsoft Surface to touchscreen inputs as well.
Wrobleski's Polar makes an iOS app that lets users poll friends on any topic and then build communities around these topics. Just last week, Polar launched a desktop Web client that is designed to match not just the look but the functionality of the mobile app versions and the input types taken into account with each one. As you change the size of your window, the app morphs from the desktop version to the tablet/touchscreen computer version, and then down to its smartphone version.
If you resize ReadWrite in a browser window, you'll see a similar transformation. This is known as responsive design, and it's an increasingly popular approach to Web design. Last week, at its I/O conference, Google unveiled tools that promise to make it much easier to build responsive websites.
That way, Polar not only looks the same in-app for the iPhone and iPad as it does on the mobile Web, but it adapts for pretty much every platform for optimal use. It's not about scaling the layout of interface objects up and down; it's about scaling the whole experience up or down.

Next: Think About How We Hold Our Devices

But responsive design has largely been limited to these screen-size adjustments. Input type may be an even more important concept because it factors in both the physical limitations of the device from a display and functionality standpoint as well as how those limitations translate to our physical interactions with the devices.
Wroblewski detailed the input-type approach to design in a blog post on May 13 that covered the app's new Web client, which lets users quickly scroll through and vote on topic pages related to everything from Star Wars and Game of Thrones to Web design and photography.
"Topic pages on Polar were designed to adapt to not only different screen sizes but to different input types as well," Wroblewski writes. "The end result is a Web interface that aims to fit into the reality of Web use today. In particular, the human ergonomics of how people interact with different devices ..."
It turns out that thinking about ergonomics on mobile devices and adapting design accordingly is not a widely used approach. Steven Hoober, who Wroblewski cites as his primary source for input-type research, published a report earlier this year on UXmatters, "How Do Users Really Hold Mobile Devices?" that collected two months of observations on how more than 1,300 people used their mobile devices.
Hoober's report aimed to dispel the myth that designers should follow a "best practices" approach to app design that relies on assumptions that cast the widest net. Instead, Hoober advises that the approach should be far more customized, taking into account the constantly changing nature of mobile use that is contingent on factors like device type and screen size as well as physical location, be it standing or sitting on a bus or in a cafe.
"The way in which users hold their phone is not a static state," Hoober writes. "Users change the way they’re holding their phone very often—sometimes every few seconds."

While Hoober did verify the assumption that majority of smartphone use is done one-handed with the thumb—49% of the time—he also discovered that designing from that standpoint alone could lead users to alter their behavior and thus deemphasize the very reasons underlying the approach.
"What if a user sees buttons at the top, so switches to cradling his phone to more easily reach all functionality on the screen—or just prefers holding it that way all the time?" he explains.

Comfort-First Approach

Wroblewski stresses that Polar was designed primarily to be "comfortable to use," incorporating the ideas behind Hoober's findings into the app's design to cover the best input types for every device.
For instance, Polar's smartphone app contains no left-hand column because users wouldn't typically be able to access it comfortably using one hand and one finger. It does support keyboard use in the event someone is using a large-screen phone-tablet hybrid, also known as a phablet, that's more typically held with two hands.
By contrast, when using Polar on a full tablet, a browsing column is present to take advantage of two-handed use. That's placed strategically on the left edge, with voting options on the right to take advantage of quick thumb access to the left and right sides of the screen.
The desktop version of Polar mostly matches the mobile app experience. The main difference: When Polar detects a large enough screen, it adds keyboard support.
This type of comfort-first approach has its downsides.
"Looking at the Polar interface on a laptop can be a bit disconcerting because we’ve essentially left the middle of the page 'blank,'" Wroblewski says. This runs contrary to the fill-'et-up instincts of most Web designers, but it's the only way Polar could create something that easily scales down both aesthetically and functionally from a 27-inch monitor to a 4-inch smartphone screen.
While these methods are very much experimental, they showcase the implementation of a much more sophisticated approach for thinking about mobile app design. We know that the diversity of devices is only increasing. With responsive design, we've scrapped a one-size-fits-all approach to screen size. The next step is to discard one-swipe-fits-all thinking about how we interact with those screens.
source

Next-Generation Search: Software Bots Will Anticipate Your Needs

Contextual search and the Internet of Things are two key factors in how search is evolving from users actively searching for information to users receiving information as they need it.
But there is another key component that must be added to the search equation: the rise of intelligent software agents that will not only anticipate the information you need, but also act on that information to help manage your life.
(See also Forget Searching For Content - Content Is About To Start Searching For You and How The Internet Of Things Will Revolutionize Search.)

The Dawn Of The Bot Age

Call it artificial intelligence, software agents or even bots, the technology for search-related automated prediction and action has been in development for a long time. (In fact, I used to cover this topic when I was the managing editor for BotSpot.com at the turn of the century.)
(See also Futurist's Cheat Sheet: Artificial Intelligence.)
In those days, bot development was focused on creating automated software to handle the routine tasks that were proliferating on the then-fledgling commercial Internet. Web crawlers, software that actively seeks out and indexes websites for search engines, were one very popular use of software bots. But there was always a goal beyond the mundane world of Web crawlers and software trying to reasonably fake a Turing test to appear human: developers wanted the software to take specific tasks completely off the hands of humans.
Over a decade later, we may finally be getting to the point where bots can actually do that.
It is not that the development of intelligent agents stalled during the first decade of the 21st Century. Instead, we may not have been quite ready to implement them. Automating routine tasks just didn't seem like the top priority during the beginnings of the mobile revolution.
Now things have changed. First, and most obviously, mobile devices are everywhere. Second, there are now legions of interesting Web services to automate. The final ingredient is the most important: With the rise of Big Data, there is now enough information available for a software agent to actually use to perform anticipatory actions. In that context, the challenges of applying software agents and artificial intelligence to business solutions is nothing compared to the potential payoff to users.
(See also How The Internet Will Tell You What To Eat, Where To Go And Even Who To Date.)
Dr. Moshe BenBassat, CEO of ClickSoftware, it is fair to say, lives and breathes this stuff every day. BenBassat envisions a world where personal agents, which he calls “butlers,” manage the day-to-day planning and implementing of workflows.

The "Butler" Did It

BenBassat offers an example to illustrate: Imagine a service technician who logs into his smartphone’s service app and pulls up today’s schedule. His first appointment: the Acme Bank downtown. A few more swipes pulls the address from the calendar app and then brings up a map in the navigation app, and off the technician goes. When he arrives at Acme, he finds and calls the customer contact, who has to come down to the lobby and admit him into the building. Once arriving at the customer site on the 17th floor, the technician discovers he has left the replacement part in his vehicle, so he goes back down to get it.
In a scenario like this, BenBassat estimates the technician would spend 7-12 minutes just swiping and typing on the phone to find and use the data he needs. Over the course of the day, that adds up to a lot of lost productivity.
In a world staffed by BenBassat’s butlers, the scenario might unfold like this: The service technician logs into his phone’s service and is immediately informed about the first appointment: the Acme Bank downtown. The butler asks if the technician if he would like a map to the appointment, and after agreeing, off the technician goes, using the map to reach his destination. Just before he arrives at Acme, the butler autodials the customer contact and informs her the technician is about to arrive, so she can come down to the lobby and let him into the building. When the technician leaves his vehicle, the butler senses that the replacement part is not in toolkit the technician is carrying, and prompts the technician to grab it from the truck, saving the trip back down to the vehicle.
"Butlers" like the ones BenBassat describes promise to play a huge role in changing search - and by extension the way we work. Proactive software agents will reduce the need to waste time looking for information. Instead, information will be delivered right when we need it. As software agents get better at figuring out what we want, that information will become more useful and actionable.
We are almost there now: Contextual search tools like Google Now, which takes into account where you are and what you are doing to provide useful information, are the first big step towards anticipatory and responsive software agents.
(See also Google Now Knows More About You Than Your Family Does - Are You OK With That?)

The Interaction Issue

There is still a ways to go. Social interaction is seen as the biggest obstacle to effective software agents. Agents are only as good as what they are programmed to do, while humans have internalized a lot of common-sense tricks for interpreting reality. We know what we mean when we say, "find me some pizza," but the software agent might give you a map of nearby pizza places - or just call up pictures of pizza.
In the consumer world right now, Apple's Siri is the most well-known example thus far of how a software agent will interact with humans, though it has its limitations, both in speech recognition and plain common sense. As that interaction is smoothed out, though, it is not hard to imaging giving agents like Siri or Google Now's voice search more permissions to act on the information at hand, instead of just reporting it. Once that hurdle is overcome, all of that predictive and contextual information that the Internet is starting to finding for us will have a smooth, human-like interface and better able to help us manage our days.
(See also Who Has The Advantage: Siri Or Google Now?)

Why Search Anymore

Searching for anything - be it on the Internet, your inbox or on your personal devices and services - will be far less necessary, both in business and personal contexts. Search is not just firing up Google, after all - it also includes combing through your own data for relevant information. When your spouse has a last-minute meeting and can’t pick up the kids from after-school sports, for example, you won't have to go though a complicated dance of multiple phone calls, texts and emails as you re-arrange both your schedules and stress out over making sure someone gets there on time. Instead, your search agents could analyze and coordinate both your schedules and create a single suggestion to line everything up. All you'd have to do is agree to the changes.
The combination of automated agents, contextual search and a sea of data from our devices, services and the Internet of Things, search is poised to become vastly more useful and efficient than it already is. The pieces are getting there with agents like Siri and contextual search like Google Now. If it all works as promised, information we need will be delivered to us just when we need it, without our having to invest time and effort looking for it.
http://readwrite.com

The 20 craziest things you can do on Twitter

OK, we’ve heard all the great business success stories about connecting and learning through Twitter. But the human race is made up of all kinds of people and some of them have more important things to do. Like hooking their toilet up to Twitter.  I started collecting some of these random (and real) uses of Twitter and thought I would present this amusing list to my dear friends on {grow}.
Did you know Twitter can help you …
Tweet with vampires — The Twitter account @vampires will let you follow the adventures of the undead. Bloody great idea.
Befriend lactating cows — A dozen lactating bovines are hooked up to a monitor so you can read their teats er … tweets … after they’ve been milked by a robot.  The cows at a Buttermine Farms near Woodstock, Ont., has more than 2,000  tweets since the project began in December.
Tell secrets — Secret tweet allows you to post your secrets to Twitter anonymously.  Here was mine: I am writing this in the nude. Which means I probably broke some law in Singapore.
Rock out – Here is a list of the top 50 rock stars on Twitter.  The list includes Brittany Spears. I doth protest.
Let your pets make friends.  — Cats on Twitter is a site where cats can meet other tweeting cats and of course there is also the companion site, Dogs on Twitter.  There is one cat (@sockington)with over 1.5 million followers on Twitter.  Cat tweeting is apparently serious business. Really makes you take paws.
Water your plants — This device helps your plants tweet you when they need some H2O. When will  they make one for beer?
Be random — Twitrand lets you generate random tweets from your tweet stream. Why?  Why any of this really.

Learn the rules — The rules is a hilarious Twitter account which teaches you the rules of life in no particular order.  Today’s wisdom:  Rule No. 537: No speedos, please.

Get breaking news on Cheetos — I hate the orange stuff it leaves on your fingers but that doesn’t seem to bother Chester the Cheetah who tweets about a Cheetos wedding, the world’s largest Cheeto, snack impersonators and other tasty tidbits.
Watch the world poop — Everybody does it.  So of course somebody had to put it on Twitter.  TwttrPoop tracks the whole world pooping in real time. They should have called it Twitter Shitter right?  If you thought Twitter was a load of crap, well … now you’re right
Monitor a toilet — You had to know this one was coming. The HacklabToilet in Toronto has a Twitter feed.  Hacklab is a site for hackers in Toronto with a “a strong disdain for twitter” and an urge to wire things to the internet.
Say hello to PeeWee Herman — Hey, he has a new Broadway show now so let’s see what’s up with the ever-boy. Captain Carl rocked.
Follow an execution – In what may be the most distasteful use of Twitter (well, maybe tied with the poop thing) the Utah Attorney General announced the progress of a prisoner’s execution over Twitter.

Track the activities of Superheros — Holy Hashtags Caped Crusader!  You can now follow  Batman (my personal favorite), SpiderMan, and Superman on Twitter.
Get advice on bras — Your bra consultant claims that most women are wearing the wrong sized bra. I swear I had no idea.  So don’t be a boob — tune in for the web’s best bra advice.
Tweet while you drive — Ford announced they will produce a range of tweeting vehicles. The special app will allow the drivers to read their Twitter messages (huh?).  And you’ll be able to reply to tweets as a voice-activated function.
Secretly watch Steve — The Twitter bio description of the ShhDontTellSteve account:  “This is a Twitter page where I secretly tweet about what my roommate Steve is doing at all times.”  Hilarious.
Find people who are addicted to shoes — Here is a list of shoe freaks on Twitter.  A well-heeled group apparently.
Read headstones –@FindAGrave reports quotes from famous headstones each day. I wonder if they have ghost writers?
Follow your cat’s every move – Sony has developed a prototype cat tweeting device that has a built-in camera, an accelerometer, and a GPS so you will be able to tell when the cat is moving around, eating and sleeping.
So there you have it.  For better or worse, all the world’s showing up on Twitter.  Hope you had some fun with this list!

Geek and Poke

 http://www.businessesgrow.com

Facebook Pages vs Facebook Groups

Howard Greenstein is a Social Media Strategy and Marketing consultant, and President of the Harbrooke Group. He's also a national board member of Social Media Club.
“Should I create a group or launch a Page?” It's the eternal question that gets asked as often as, “What is Twitter?” at introductory social media training classes. Ever since Facebook launched their Pages product as part of their larger advertising strategy (along with the ill-fated Beacon) in November 2007, there has been confusion over which to use. Because Groups and Pages have an overlapping feature set, even senior social media marketing consultants are sometimes stumped as to what to tell their clients. And Facebook continues to make changes to how Pages function, complicating the matter even further.

What is a Page on Facebook?

In their own words, “Facebook created Pages when we noticed that people were trying to connect with brands and famous artists in ways that didn't quite work on Facebook…Not only can you connect with your favorite artists and businesses, but now you also can show your friends what you care about and recommend by adding Pages to your personal profile.”
So, when you become a fan of a brand, a band, a movie, or a person, that information is posted on your wall, and your friends might see it too. You can see which Pages your friends are fans of via the “Info” tab on their profile.

To create a fan page, one simply has to go to facebook.com/pages/create.php and create a new page. (I chose the categories “public figure” and “other public figure” and made one for myself at facebook.com/pages/Howard-Greenstein/70939380803.)

Of course, a single fan doesn’t make a fan page very valuable.

Value of Fan Pages

Facebook Pages can be thought of in much the same way as normal profiles on the site – brand or celebrity Pages have the ability to have friends, they can add pictures, and they have walls that fans can post on. Pages communicate by “updates” which show on the update tab or a person’s wall if they’re a fan and have allowed the page to show updates. Pages can have applications as well.
Here, for example, is the Mashable Page on Facebook: facebook.com/mashable

Pages have two walls, one of what the Page owner writes, and one just for fans to write their own messages. Like a normal Facebook profile, Pages have tabs that uncover more information.

What’s a Group?

Groups are a bit different than Pages. I administer an alumni group on Facebook. To create a group you go to facebook.com/groups/create.php and then fill in information about the type of group, and decide if it is open to a particular network (such as a University network) or all of Facebook. You can set join permissions on groups so that they are either open to anyone, closed (where users must get administrator approval to join) or secret (invite only). Groups have administrators that manage the group, approve applicants or invite others to join. Administrators can also appoint “officers” who are nominally in charge – however, being an officer doesn’t mean the person has the ability to administer the group.
Because of these privacy settings, Facebook's groups are analogous to clubs in the offline world. Administrators can invite members to join via Facebook mail and email, and public groups can be found via Facebook search.

Pages vs. Groups: How to know which to use

There are a number of factors you need to consider when choosing which is right for your project, a Page or a group.
Personal vs. Corporate:
Due to their security features, and size limitations (only groups under 5,000 members can send email blasts), Facebook Groups are set up for more personal interaction. Groups are also directly connected to the people who administer them, meaning that activities that go on there could reflect on you personally. Pages, on the other hand, don’t list the names of administrators, and are thought of as a person, almost like a corporate entity is considered a ‘person’ under the law.
Facebook considers groups to be an extension of your personal actions. When you post something as a group administrator, it appears to be coming from you and is attached to your personal profile. Alternately, Pages can create content that comes from the Page itself, so that content doesn't have to be linked to you personally.
Update: Also one key difference is that Pages are indexed by external search engines such as Google, just like a public profile while Groups are not.
Email vs. Updates:
As long as a group is under 5,000 members, group admins can send messages to the group members that will appear in their inboxes. Page admins can send updates to fans through the Page, and these updates will appear in the "Updates" section of fans' inboxes. There is no limit on how many fans you may send an update to, or how many total fans a Page can have.
User Control:
Groups offer far more control over who gets to participate. Permissions settings make it possible for group admins to restrict access to a group, so that new members have to be approved. Access to a Page, however, can only be restricted by certain ages and locations. Again, this makes groups more like a private club.
Applications
Pages can host applications, so a Page can essentially be more personalized and show more content. Groups can’t do this.
Moderation
Neither Groups nor Pages have great moderation features. They can both be a little granular as to how things get posted, who can post, and what kind of media can be posted, but that’s about it.

If someone posts spam on your Group or your Page, you have to remove it manually, and you can also remove specific members.
Ability to create events

Both Groups and Pages allow you to create related Events, which show up under the users' Request (and later in the upcoming events page on the sidebar of their dashboard if they've RSVPed). Neither have any added functionality beyond the generally available Facebook Events application.
Advertise
Ads can be purchased to promote either groups or Pages, but Pages can benefit from social ads that publicize the fan connection between a Page and a specific user.

The bottom line

Groups are great for organizing on a personal level and for smaller scale interaction around a cause. Pages are better for brands, businesses, bands, movies, or celebrities who want to interact with their fans or customers without having them connected to a personal account, and have a need to exceed Facebook's 5,000 friend cap.

thanks mr: Howard Greenstein
 mashable

How to Make Money on Facebook

Is your Facebook page a real snoozer? You won't make much money that way! Even the smallest business can make money on Facebook. Here's how.

 
As a small-business owner, you probably don't have the resources that a large corporation employs for online advertising campaigns, but social media consultant and author Brian Carter says that even solopreneurs with limited funds can gain the competitive edge in this vast cyber-arena.
"For years the Internet has provided us with the wildest opportunities that haven't been very competitive or expensive," says Carter. And with all of these options available to us, Carter is most passionate about Facebook advertising.  "It provides us with the biggest opportunities—it's a great place to profit," he says.
"Advertising on Facebook is the biggest opportunity for businesses large and small," Carter says.  "What Facebook advertising does, which is great, is to allow you to reach a TV-sized audience, locally, nationally and even internationally, and still target it the way you would in any internet marketing campaign, yet start with just five bucks a day. To me it’s revolutionary because businesses can reach an audience they couldn’t have ever reached before."
If you've jumped into the Facebook frenzy, like millions of business owners, by creating a Facebook page: congratulations—but that simply isn't enough. "There are a lot of problems with pages," Carter claims. Recently, he combined efforts with EdgeRank Checker and found that the average page across 4000 pages is only reaching 17 percent of their fans. So if you have 100 fans, you may only be reaching 17 people with all of your hard work! "The downside of the page is that you're not visible to all of your fans," says Carter.
Like any marketing campaign, it's apparent that you need a strategy before you launch your page. So how can a small business benefit from what Facebook has to offer? Here's what I learned from my conversation with Carter. And I'm learning much more from his most recent book release, The Like Economy: How Businesses Make Money With Facebook.

• Combine your Facebook marketing plan...
  ....with the strategies that you are best at. If you're good at e-mail marketing, for instance, use Facebook ads to get more e-mail subscribers. If your website converts traffic really well, use your page to drive traffic there. Always plug into what you already know works well for your business.
• If you're growing fans through Facebook advertising...
  ...get people to click "Like" right on the ad. You will get a lot cheaper fans that way than if you send them to a fan page through your ad. If you run an ad that sends people to a custom tab because you want to get an opt-in, that's the same thing as sending them to another website, and you may not want to do that. Not everyone will put in their e-mail and click like so you are dividing your efforts. Decide first if you want fans or e-mail subscribers. If you want fans, don't send them directly to a custom tab.
• Think of your page as a social e-mail.
  There's a chance that followers will see your updates in their feed, but you have to really capture them within your first few posts. There are parallels to e-mail in this strategy; not everyone will open them. If you get a 30 percent open rate, you're doing great. On Facebook you can use the same strategies to do really well. The difference is that with e-mail marketing you don't want to send out e-mails everyday or you will lose your subscribers.
• If you're not sure...
  ...whether the greatest benefit will come from sending people from your ad to your site, your Facebook opt-in page, or gaining fans through prompting them to click "Like" right on the ad, test them all! See how much it costs you to acquire a fan, and how much traffic you get from those fans, versus the cost of acquiring an e-mail and the ROI on that e-mail address.
• Engage with your fans in your posts.
  Don't make every post a call to action. You want to turn the folks who like your page into true fans of your brand.
• Boring Facebook pages won't get you far.
  If your business isn't something that most people would consider exciting, like culture, lifestyle sports, animals, dating, kids – or anything that people get gushy about—go the opt-in route rather than the fan marketing route.  If your business is attractive to many consumers, use pictures in your ads to entice them to click like. If your brand allows you the creative freedom to toss in a picture of a puppy, cat or baby, you’re golden! People will click on your ad.
• Remember one of the key differences...
  ...between using AdWords and Facebook advertising. That is, in order to generate revenue through online advertising, you must reach the right people, with the right message, at the right time, with the right offer. It's possible to do this with AdWords and Facebook ads. The main difference is that AdWords is about fulfilling demand: finding the small set of people who are ready to buy, or very close to it, and capitalizing on finding people at that stage of the sales funnel. With Google you are targeting people by what they are looking for. With Facebook  you are targeting them by who they are and what they like. These are people who are likely to buy from you at some point which is a larger group of people. There's more sales potential overall. But be careful not to spend too much money on people who are going to wait three or four years to buy, unless you have a sales cycle that is naturally that long. But you may be able to get them to buy sooner than they would have by posting enticing posts or with compelling conversion practices on your website.
• Facebook page insights...
  ...can be a great resource to learn about your audience. You'll find this tab on your admin panel on Facebook in the left hand column. Look at the graphs that tell you how many people are liking you per day, how many people are talking about you, sharing your posts, etc. Notice what type of posts get more engagement than others and create more like them. Know your audience, put yourself in their shoes and engage them!

In light of Google's new Search Plus Your World, I couldn't resist asking Carter if he thought Google+ will give Facebook a run for its money anytime soon. "Google+ can become big if it becomes more sticky—if we can enjoy using it more," Carter says. "Right now it's all the early adopters on Google+. It's not really an opportunity for most marketers because there is not enough of a general audience there. Google+ has to be more fun to use to attract that audience. Search Plus might be a strong-arm tactic to try to force it to happen faster."
He continues: "It certainly could be a big deal at some point but there are phases of adoption of something new—like Facebook was in 2009. There aren't enough people on it in this phase to do any real marketing. But once it reaches enough adoption the network effect happens. You can reach more than half of the United States with Facebook ads, and Google+ is just not there yet."

Join me on Monday, January 23 on Toginet Radio, where Brian Carter will join me to talk more about how small businesses can make money on Facebook. If you can't make the live Million Dollar Mindset broadcast at 2pm eastern, download the podcast anytime after 4 p.m
Marla Tabaka

CIA used pirated, inaccurate software to target drone attacks: lawsuit

They want to kill people with my software that doesn’t work,’ software exec tells court
The CIA used illegally pirated software to direct Predator drone attacks, despite apparently knowing the software was inaccurate, according to documents in an intellectual property lawsuit.
The lawsuit, working its way through a Massachusetts court, alleges that the CIA purchased a pirated and inaccurate version of a location analysis program, which may have incorrectly located targets by as much as 42 feet.

The allegation raises fresh questions about the CIA’s execution of drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are believed to have killed hundreds of civilians in the past four years.
And if the court decides to grant an injunction against users of the software, it could potentially halt the CIA’s drone attacks, at least temporarily, as the agency works to find a replacement.
Massachusetts-based Intelligent Integration Systems Inc., or IISI, has asked a judge to stop clients of IT firm Netezza from using software IISI says is pirated, reports The Register.
According to IISI, Netezza reverse-engineered a location analysis program called Geospatial and installed it on its own hardware, which it then sold to the CIA. Netezza had contracted IISI to build the software, but decided to create its own unauthorized version after the project suffered delays, the lawsuit alleges.
The CIA accepted the pirated software despite reportedly knowing it “produced locations inaccurate by up to 13 metres (42.6 feet),” reports The Register.
In a sworn deposition, IISI chief technical officer Richard Zimmerman said a Netezza executive pressured him to deliver the product before it was ready and told him it was their “patriotic duty” to build location software for CIA-operated drones.

Another Netezza executive reportedly asserted that the CIA would accept flawed software. “My reaction was one of stun, amazement that they want to kill people with my software that doesn’t work,” Zimmerman said.
According to court documents, Netezza delivered its reverse-engineered software to the CIA in 2009.
“The potential for a software malfunction to cause serious havoc with an unmanned aerial vehicle, such as a Predator Drone, is no longer a matter of pure theory,” writes Bill Conroy at NarcoNews. “Last month a Navy drone entered the airspace of the nation’s Capitol after being out of control for a half hour due to what the Navy called a ‘software issue.’
“If the CIA is using flawed software re-engineered by Netezza ‘to target predator drones in Afghanistan,’ as IISI’s pleadings in the lawsuit assert, then it is likely only a matter of time before innocent lives are compromised due to a ‘software issue.’ In that sense, IISI’s motion for a preliminary junction, if successful, could be seen as a lifesaver,” Conroy argues.
Last year, the New American Foundation estimated that Predator drones killed 750 to 1,000 people in Pakistan between 2006 and 2009. About one third — an estimated 320 people — were believed to be civilians.

5 keys to getting big data under control

Agencies will face a lot of challenges with forthcoming big data projects, but one of them will not be generating enough data. In fact, consulting firm Gartner Inc. recently reported that enterprise data growth rates now average 40 percent to 60 percent annually.
At the Commerce Department — parent agency for some of the government’s biggest data producers, including the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — those numbers might even be low.
“One thing that is not challenged is our ability to generate data,” Commerce CIO Simon Szykman said in remarks at the recent FOSE conference. “Our fundamental ability to generate data is growing tremendously and in many ways is outpacing our ability to process the data, to manage the data and to move it from one place to another.”
How to simply manage and move the agency’s data from one point to another is a big challenge.
Szykman also discussed some of the more important hurdles his department faces when working with big data. Here are five to keep in mind.
1. Data engineers
There are many scientists in the research community who are at work on sophisticated uses of big data, such as how to tap genome data in the fields of preventative medicine, drug design or pre-natal testing. What worries Szykman, though, is the limited number of people who really understand the technology infrastructures to support the use of big data in those areas.

 “We need to give some thought to big data and how we’re going to work with it … particularly since in many cases, whether it’s a direct application in our agency or just providing funding to the research community, in one way or another, the government is driving the cutting edge of big data today,” he said.
2. Confidentiality vs. integrity
For agencies with a scientific or a research brief, big data security is more than a matter of confidentiality. Instead, the more critical concern is long-term data integrity.
“This is one of those things that in the IT world we struggle with,” Syzkman said.  “Sometimes we aren’t always focused as much on security as we are in delivering results. People sometimes ask: ‘If we’re ultimately going to be sharing this data with the public, why is security so important?’”
The answer is best addressed by scientific agencies such as NOAA, which has been gathering benchmark data that is at the center of much of the debate about U.S. climate change policy.
“Those policy decisions have significant economic implications regardless of the political leanings,” Szykman said, including decisions about business regulation and investments. “If somehow the security of this long-term climate record were compromised, there would be far-reaching implications about it,” he said. “That’s something we need to worry about in the big data area.”
3. Think big, but plan early

In the move to open data, it has become more and more important to address requirements early in the system life cycle. 
“One thing that has not happened in the past is looking at open data requirements very early on in the life cycle,” Syzkman said. “I think there’s going to be less ad hoc modeling, sharing, informing of data and more systematic strategies that look end to end,” he said. “Now at early life cycle stages when we’re putting in place new systems or new mission apps, this is going to be part of what gets addressed early on.”
4. Data authenticity 
The importance of big data is not just the records created from the data; much of its value lies in the “reproduce-ability” of scientific results based on the data.
“From an academic perspective, that’s really how you prove the value of what you do: other people can reproduce the results as well,” Szykman said. On the other hand, he said, if you “lose the data on which research results are based, that undermines the legitimacy of some of those results over time.”
5. Laying down the baseline
Sometimes it’s difficult to assess the costs and risks of big data and other cutting-edge programs when few similar applications exist against which information can be drawn or comparisons made. Coming up with cost and risk baselines is a challenge for big data as well data centers, which have not been built with metrics in mind.
“The ability to do simple things like the measuring power consumption in the data center can be challenging if the data center is not constructed and instrumented to support that,” he said. “Baselining of big data — not just from the infrastructure perspective but also the data sets — needs to drive better planning for future resource planning,” he said.
 By Paul McCloskey