Is the Flickr API a National Treasure?





The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) last night by a vote of 248-168. In the days leading up to the vote, opposition lined up drummed up awareness for the bill while the groups supporting the bill steadily pushed ahead. In the end, 112 Congress members cosponsored the bill. Major technology corporations also lent support along with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Did your representative support CISPA? See the list below.
Top photo, clockwise from top left: Benjamin Quayle, Michele Bachmann, Mike Rogers, Darrell Issa, Peter King, Sue Wilkins Myrick, Dutch Ruppersberger, Greg Walden.
Twenty major tech companies have sent letters supporting CISPA along with major U.S. industry trade groups including the Bay Area Council, TechAmerica, 11 financial trade associations and TechNet. These companies and groups represent billions of dollars in American industry, dollars that members of Congress will need to eventually be re-elected. Below we have aggregated the names of every single Congressional cosponsor of CISPA along with the links to their personal websites. The list is organized by date of stated support of the bill, starting with the first round of Congress members that supported the bill when it was introduced in November 2011. The first round had 28 official cosponsors. The majority of the 112 sponsors offered support from January 18 through April 17.
CISPA went through the mark up process in the Committee on Intelligence, of which the bills two primary authors, Representatives Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger, are members. Amendments included language the would protect citizens from damage caused by the sharing of information as well as adding the term “utilities” to the list of private sector industries that can share cyber threat information with the federal government. The addition of utilities, such as water, electric and gas companies, was seen as a boost to the bill as such utilities are part of the critical infrastructure of the United States and are targets of malicious hackers. The House of Representatives then voted for the amendments before passing the final bill and sending it to the Senate and ultimately the White House. Is your Congress person on the list? See who supported CISPA below.
Rep Ruppersberger, C. A. Dutch [MD-2]
Rep King, Peter T. NY-3]
Rep Upton, Fred [MI-6]
Rep Myrick, Sue Wilkins [NC-9]
Rep Langevin, James R. [RI-2]
Rep Conaway, K. Michael [TX-11]
Rep Miller, Jeff [FL-1]
Rep Boren, Dan [OK-2]
Rep LoBiondo, Frank A. [NJ-2]
Rep Chandler, Ben [KY-6]
Rep Nunes, Devin [CA-21]
Rep Gutierrez, Luis V. [IL-4]
Rep Westmoreland, Lynn A. [GA-3]1
Rep Bachmann, Michele [MN-6]
Rep Rooney, Thomas J. [FL-16]
Rep Heck, Joseph J. [NV-3]
Rep Dicks, Norman D. [WA-6]
Rep McCaul, Michael T. [TX-10]
Rep Walden, Greg [OR-2]
Rep Calvert, Ken [CA-44]
Rep Shimkus, John [IL-19]
Rep Terry, Lee [NE-2]
Rep Burgess, Michael C. [TX-26]
Rep Gingrey, Phil [GA-11]
Rep Thompson, Mike [CA-1]
Rep Kinzinger, Adam [IL-11]
Rep Amodei, Mark E. [NV-2]
Rep Pompeo, Mike [KS-4]
Rep Latta, Robert E. [OH-5]
Rep Quayle, Benjamin [AZ-3]
Rep McHenry, Patrick T. [NC-10]
Rep Frelinghuysen, Rodney P. [NJ-11]
Rep Yoder, Kevin [KS-3]
Rep Walberg, Tim [MI-7]
Rep Camp, Dave [MI-4]
Rep Eshoo, Anna G. [CA-14]
Rep Michaud, Michael H. [ME-2]
Rep McMorris Rodgers, Cathy [WA-5]
Rep Sullivan, John [OK-1]
Rep McKinley, David B. [WV-1]
Rep Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana [FL-18]
Rep Coffman, Mike [CO-6]
Rep Goodlatte, Bob [VA-6]
Rep Wolf, Frank R. [VA-10]
Rep Forbes, J. Randy [VA-4]
Rep Miller, Gary G. [CA-42]
Rep Stearns, Cliff [FL-6]
Rep Issa, Darrell E. [CA-49]
Rep Cole, Tom [OK-4]
Rep Turner, Michael R. [OH-3]
Rep Brooks, Mo [AL-5]
Rep Huizenga, Bill [MI-2]
Rep Carter, John R. [TX-31]
Rep Hartzler, Vicky [MO-4]
Rep Grimm, Michael G. [NY-13]
Rep Miller, Candice S. [MI-10]
Rep Guthrie, Brett [KY-2]
Rep Rogers, Mike D. [AL-3]
Rep Benishek, Dan [MI-1]
Rep Broun, Paul C. [GA-10]
Rep Lance, Leonard [NJ-7]
Rep Hastings, Doc [WA-4]
Rep Davis, Geoff [KY-4]
Rep Meehan, Patrick [PA-7]
Rep Shuster, Bill [PA-9]
Rep Olson, Pete [TX-22]
Rep Kline, John [MN-2]
Rep Bono Mack, Mary [CA-45]
Rep Bachus, Spencer [AL-6]
Rep Schock, Aaron [IL-18]
Rep Roe, David P. [TN-1]
Rep Fleischmann, Charles J. “Chuck” [TN-3]
Rep Baca, Joe [CA-43]
Rep Boswell, Leonard L. [IA-3]
Rep Noem, Kristi L. [SD]
Rep Wittman, Robert J. [VA-1]
Rep Hultgren, Randy [IL-14]
Rep Blackburn, Marsha [TN-7]
Rep Hastings, Alcee L. [FL-23]
Rep Hurt, Robert [VA-5]
Rep Johnson, Bill [OH-6]
Rep Smith, Adrian [NE-3]
Rep Crawford, Eric A. “Rick” [AR-1]
Rep Franks, Trent [AZ-2]
Rep Larsen, Rick [WA-2]
Rep Sires, Albio [NJ-13]
Rep Towns, Edolphus [NY-10]
Rep Bordallo, Madeleine Z. [GU]
Rep Ross, Mike [AR-4]
Rep Cooper, Jim [TN-5]
Rep Pitts, Joseph R. [PA-16]
Rep Runyan, Jon [NJ-3]
Rep Costa, Jim [CA-20]
Rep Cardoza, Dennis A. [CA-18]
Rep Woodall, Rob [GA-7]
Rep Bartlett, Roscoe G. [MD-6]
Rep Shuler, Heath [NC-11]
Rep Stivers, Steve [OH-15]
Rep Wilson, Joe [SC-2]
Rep McIntyre, Mike [NC-7]
Rep Kissell, Larry [NC-8]
Rep Scalise, Steve [LA-1]
Rep Bilbray, Brian P. [CA-50]
Rep Griffith, H. Morgan [VA-9]
Rep Peterson, Collin C. [MN-7]
Rep Owens, William L. [NY-23]
Rep Mulvaney, Mick [SC-5]
Rep Hall, Ralph M. [TX-4]
Rep Cuellar, Henry [TX-28]
Rep Lamborn, Doug [CO-5]
Rep Austria, Steve [OH-7]
Rep McKeon, Howard P. “Buck” [CA-25]

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Socrates: And you did not know, you never suspected, that they were goddesses?
Strepsiades: No, indeed; I thought the Clouds were only fog, dew and vapour.
Billions of words have been written about “the cloud” and its benefits, implications, and challenges. Hundreds of vendors have sprung up or re-positioned themselves as cloud companies, and there is a vast amount of real business change underway. However, I have seen very little that explains for the layperson what is actually new about the cloud that makes it so interesting and important.
The advent of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) with Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offering suddenly made it vastly cheaper and easier for anyone to provision a system in the cloud.
Previously, the primary options were:
With IaaS, you simply sign up for an account, enter a credit card number, and start launching servers from the control panel. These servers are available in minutes, and although they are “virtual” machines, they behave for most purposes as an entire computer system. They are persistent and they have their own public Internet address. The minimum commitment is an hour of server time, which can cost as little as a penny and a half on Rackspace Cloud. Consequently, while the idea of deploying a system “in the cloud” was not new, the ability to provision the required servers quickly, easily, with no human physical contact, and with virtually no commitment – that was entirely novel.
Two innovations have enabled providers to offer this capability: virtualization technology, which enables the creation of multiple virtual machine servers on the same physical server via a “hypervisor”; and orchestration technology, which fulfills provisioning requests by tracking the physical server pool and the virtual machines running on them.
Virtualization took a big leap forward in 2006, when both Intel and AMD added hardware virtualization capabilities to their processors. This both improved performance and made the hypervisor code simpler and more reliable. Popular hypervisors today include VMWare ESX, Xen, and KVM. Perhaps not coincidentally, Amazon built its orchestration system for EC2 around the same time, with the first beta release in mid-2006. Dozens of orchestration systems are now available, including VMWare vCloud, Citrix CloudStack (formerly cloud.com), and Eucalyptus.
While software-as-a-service (SaaS) is not new and has always operated “in the cloud,” the ubiquity of web browsers, broadband Internet and Wi-Fi has made them more responsive and easier to access. Improvements in web browser capabilities and the use of powerful Javascript frameworks and other RIA (Rich Internet Application) technologies have made it possible to build web user interfaces that rival the sophistication and interactivity of locally installed Windows or Mac applications.
As a result, new categories of applications for which a series of separate web pages is unsatisfactory – such as word processing and spreadsheets – can now be operated as SaaS, on any device that supports a full web browser. These seemingly incremental improvements have created a qualitatively different experience for SaaS, and that experience is new. The
But look at what all this means:
So it’s not really the cloud that’s new. It is the ease, convenience and value of using the cloud that has vastly improved. There was real innovation involved in making that possible: for IaaS, the virtualization and orchestration technologies; for SaaS, progressively improving connectivity along with more interactive browser technologies.
The cloud may still be just “a computer attached to a network,” but how that computer got there and how it is used is now very different from the days when those pictures of clouds first showed up on architecture diagrams.
Cloud photo by Jeff Ruane


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