I've been playing around with Google Chrome. One feature, which was inspired by Safari and is also in IE8, is Incognito mode - a way of opening a new window such that no trace of the sites you visit is left in the history and no cookies are retained. Google puts it own spin on it with the warning they display:


This is a good list. While pretty much everyone is aware that web sites can collect information about their visitors, most don't know that ISPs routinely sell their subscribers' clickstreams to companies doing market research. And of course the most likely spying will come from the person looking over your shoulder.

Google's new browser, Google Chrome, launches tomorrow (for Windows - Mac and Linux will take a bit longer.)  In the meantime, you can take a look at the clever comic book which describes it.  They've written their own Javascript engine and done some clever stuff to improve browser performance, but my favorite part is how they describe some of the new security features:

Just when you thought it was safe to go outside...

Wired and Slashdot reported yesterday on The Internet's Biggest Security Hole.  This time it was a long-known problem with Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) which was given a new twist by Alex Pilosov and Tony "Xam" Kapela at the most recent DEFCON.

BGP, as you will recall, is the protocol that ties together the different networks making up the Internet.  While Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) famously described the Internet as a "Series of Tubes" he wasn't that far off.  The reason it's called the Internet is because it is made up of a series of interconnected networks.  These networks, referred to as Autonomous Systems (AS) have numbers (ASNs) and provide connectivity to a set of computers that are assigned a range of IP addresses. While both the ASNs and IP addresses are assigned by an official organization (ARIN in the US), the actual mapping between the two is done by a network owner using BGP to "advertise" to other networks what range of such addresses it contains.  Usually network owners are ISPs and large corporations, but we had our own AS at Convoq and used BGP so that our servers could be connected to the Internet via multiple, redundant links.  The problem is that since all such network owners are considered trustworthy, there is no widely used mechansim for verifying the validity of the advertisements.  Anyone can claim to own any range of addresses and cause the rest of the Internet to send it traffic intended for those addresses.  This happened last February when the government of Pakistan attempted to prevent its citizens from viewing a YouTube video by advertising a route for YouTube that led to a black hole.  While they probably intended that route to apply only within Pakistan it was automatically redistributed throughout the Internet and took YouTube off the air worldwide.

Something as dramatic as making a web site globabally unavailable is usually noticed and repaired fairly quickly, but what Pilosov and Kapela discovered was a way to take the traffic one purloined and then forward it on, unnoticed, to its legitimate destination, perhaps copying or moidfying it in the process.  They outlined a fix but as it will take a lot of effort and computing power to implement, most likely nothing will happen until there is a major attack and ensuing scandal.  In the meantime, it is wise to do as people in high-security government positions are taught to do, which is regard all your communications as being open unless proven otherwise.

Jules Pieri muses on her blog whether her startup Daily Grommet (for which I am an advisor) is "real" yet.  Given the progress to date (raising capital, hiring employees, renting office space) they are already real in the sense that multiple people are invested in their success.  They will only continue to become more real as they launch their site and, hopefully, go public or get acquired some day.  The question is a little like asking when one's children are grown - is it when they graduate, when they move out, when they have children of their own?

At this point it's the slope of the curve that matters, and they are certainly on an upward trajectory.

A few months after the Harvard Berkman panel on non-compete agreements in Massachusetts, Professors April Franco and Matthew Mitchell at the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management have published a study, Covenants not to Compete, Labor Mobility, and Industry Dynamics that shed further light in the situation, explaining how non-competes can help a region get established but limit its growth in the long run.  They show how in 1965 Boston's Route 128 had three times the technology emplyment of California's Silicon Valley, but by 1990 the proportions were reversed, primarily due to California's proscription against non-competes, which encouraged more spin-outs.  They cite previous studies which show that not only are spin-outs more successful than other new companies, but that the firms that spawn them are also more successful than their competitors.  The contribution in the new study is a model of the "contracting problem" between an employer who wants to retain its workforce and an employee who make more money by starting a new firm.  Since an employer can't know in advance which employees plan to leave, in an environment without non-competes, the employer must either pay them all more or see more of them leave.  Using more math than I can go into here (and unfortunately, more math than most politicians are willing to consider) the authors show how non-competes can increase profits of companies in the short term but decrease the growth of the enire region in the long run, hence SIlicon Valley's success.