David Cowan, General Partner with Bessemer Venture Partners, and frequent investor in security technologies, blogged how he phished movie tickets from unsuspecting kids at a movie theater in order to convince his wife that lots of work remained in the security space. It’s a very funny read that also, more seriously, illustrates very well that any new security structure opens up new avenues of attack.

This also servces as a great illustration to some of Bruce Schneier’s comments (on IT Conversations) that I listened to this morning, thanks to the wonders of Podcasting in iTunes.

Amen! Thanks for putting it so nicely and quotable! This is indeed one of the mega-trends of our age, and I’m really hard-pressed to still find domains where that is not true yet (speaking about the US, other countries are different).

Some examples off the top of my head: News: news organizations vs. bloggers. Healthcare: demi-gods in white vs. WebMD, Google and self-support groups. Trans-national companies vs. grass-roots pressure groups (however correct or misguided they might be). Competing mortgage offers from the same website. Windows vs. open source. The list goes on and keeps growing…

This mega-trend creates interesting ramifications from societal functioning to software architecture, on which I’ll have to say more in the future.

First there were the semantics, and then there are ways of rendering semantic information using things like HTML, or so established wisdom says. That’s why we have XSLT (to transform XML into HTML, for example, not the reverse), code and documentation generators (from UML, or from Java source code), and things like address book applications that can take machine-readable VCARD files and present them in a way that makes sense for humans.

Phil Windley now points to a range of new approaches that start with HTML, and add the semantics. Well, that’s charitable, but they do add enough tags and links (mostly using the HTML tags class, rel, and href), so that a piece of software could reconstruct the semantics it started out with from the HTML (except, of course, that this approach doesn’t start out with the semantics).

For somebody who’s been doing semantics for a dozen years now, this is fascinating. I have no idea whether this HTML-as-semantics will really work in practice, but this might allow us all to express semantics and presentation in the same document, using the same statements!

Technorati tags uses a very similar mechanism to derive a common vocabulary at least…

In the week after September 11, 2001, I wrote the following piece for the TEN newsletter. Hearing about today’s bombings in London, I feel compelled to re-publish.

Last week’s horrific acts in New York and Washington took the lives of thousands, cost untold billions for reconstruction and reportedly were committed by a network of middle-eastern extremists. The Oklahoma City bombing took more than a hundred lives, cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and was committed by a fringe American. In Japan, members of the Aum Shinrikyo sect repeatedly attempted to poison large numbers of their fellow citizens before their “successful” sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway system that killed twelve and injured thousands. And these are just some of the terroristic acts that are committed regularly all over the world.

What is it that drives these people to kill innocent individuals, injure families, paralyze companies, and destroy cities? As the examples show clearly, terrorism has nothing to do with religion, ethnic background, or even social status.

As a Silicon Valley entrepreneur whose very life is centered around building things, not destroying them, I watch in utter disbelief and complete incomprehension. How can anyone’s goal be total destruction? How can any of them believe anything will come out of these acts, except for more destruction? What sick world view is that?

There is a clear line. There are those who build, and those who destroy. Those who construct, and those who destruct. Deep down, I feel there is little middle ground. You are either with us pushing forward for positive, constructive change, or against us, killing and burning. There cannot be a compromise.

Many asked the question last week: “what can I do, how can I help?” My answer is simple: “Keep building.” Whether you are in high-tech, building new companies, products and markets; or a street sweeper, helping to build a beautiful city; or a parent or teacher, building understanding and new lives; or wherever you are. We, the builders, can build more than they can ever destroy. We can build better and stronger. And we will. We, the builders, will prevail, and there is no doubt about that.