A report in the New York Times this morning said regulators asked Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to take down “objectionable” material. Facebook and Twitter both cooperated by removing flagged posts relating to suicide and drug use, while YouTube filed a lawsuit claiming a video on how to make a fake wound with makeup was entertaining rather than harmful.

The law kicked into gear in November in an effort to control child pornography, instructions or propaganda for drug use, and material promoting suicide: three pervasive issues among Russia’s youth. It required Roskomnadzor, the state’s media monitoring agency, to maintain a list of banned content known as the “Single Register” and make sure nothing deemed dangerous is accessible online.

Russia does not want to flat out block popular, global sites like Facebook and YouTube, which would anger its citizens and reflect badly in the international community. So far, regulators have only taken down content that was legitimately harmful.

However, Internet censorship is a slippery and expensive slope. China is the flagship example of country aggressively regulating the Internet in order to quash dissension, but 40 countries around the world practice Internet filtering of some some form. India is also grappling with the fuzzy line of censorship following various violent outbreaks fueled by online activity.

The market for Russian Internet companies is growing fast. Internet penetration is high there, and it has strong base of technical talent. Russian startups are sealing large deals with venture capital firms to accommodate their growth. If Russia hopes to continue down the path towards a vibrant Internet economy, it must be careful to limit all restrictions to content that genuinely is harmful, rather than controversial or inflammatory.

As Google chairman Eric Schmidt wrote in a Times of India article, the choice is between an “open Internet that benefits all or a highly regulated one that inhibits innovation.”

Photo credit: saragoldsmith/Flickr

“Now is the moment for India to decide what kind of internet it wants for them: an open internet that benefits all or a highly regulated one that inhibits innovation,” he wrote.

Schmidt is currently traveling around Asia and published this article in response to efforts by India’s government to censor and control the internet. This is a hot button issue in India right now as conservative officials and politicians want to regulate (and quash) material that is deemed offensive and inflammatory. However, India is the world’s largest democracy. It is home to a younger generation that is less traditional than its forebears and an erupting technological community. that requires freedom to flourish.

“In 10 years, it will be almost impossible to describe to any child in India what life was like before the internet,” Schmidt wrote. “Only about two billion of the world’s seven billion people have an internet connection, and I believe the remaining five billion will get one in the next decade. Almost one billion of them will come online in India.”

India is one of the most vibrant emerging markets for tech development and startups, but it is also a society riddled with social unrest. The Indian government began cracking down on internet freedom in 2008 after the Mumbai bombings. It passed the Information Technology Act to expand censorship and monitoring capabilities and has put pressure on internet service provers and private companies to remove certain types of information, under threat of imprisonment.

Then in 2011, the New York Times reported that the Indian government asked companies like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo to “prescreen user content from India and to remove disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory content before it goes online.” Flagged content ranges from personal postings that are deemed blasphemous, pornograpaphic, or encouraging immorality. The Department of Telecom also tried to block video torrent sites like Vimeo, The Priate Bay, and Torrentz.

Internet freedom came to the forefront again in August of 2012 as a result of tension in Assam, a northeastern state in India where there is conflict between Muslims and Hindus.  The Indian government ordered more than 300 specific URLs blocked from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Worpress, Wikipedia, and even the Times of India for allegedly promoting violence. Tempers were flaring as a result of hate message, misinformation, and online rumors which led to unrest and at least 300,000 people fleeing.

Schmidt’s article sought to show that the government should view the internet as a way to improve and develop the country, rather than threat to national security and morals. It can be used to disseminate knowledge and enhance education and dialogue, as well as to make the transportation system more efficient

“The most striking Indian internet innovations won’t come from big institutions or companies moving online, however,” he said. “They will come from Indians solving local problems. We know that India’s internet infrastructure allows Indian engineers to solve the problems of small businesses in other countries. If India plays its cards right, we’ll soon see Indian engineers and Indian small businesses tackling Indian problems first, then exporting the solutions that work best.”

Rather than using its resources to policing the web, the Indian government could “reap a huge dividend” from the internet’s growth and use it to address some of the pressing and persistent problems facing the country today.

Later this week, Schmidt will speak on the future of the internet at the Big Tent Activate Summit in New Delhi, an event held jointly by the Guardian, Google, and MediaGuru.

Photo credit: mattwi1s0n/Flickr

Saudi Arabia has implemented an electronic tracking system to monitor women and inform their husbands if they leave the country.

According to an Agence France-Press story, a new system implemented last week sends Saudi husbands text messages from the Saudi immigration agency when their wives are flying out of King Khaled International Airport, near Riyahd. Women are not allowed to leave the country without signed permission from their husbands.

Saudi Arabia, which ranked second worst in a Thomson Reuters global survey on women’s rights in mid 2012,  is a notoriously repressive country. Women are banned from driving, required to have a male guardian, just received the right to vote in municipal elections last year, and must cover most of their bodies, traditionally with a burqa or niqab.

“Women and girls in Saudi Arabia are treated as perpetual minors living under male guardianship all their lives – with restrictions on employment, political participation, travel, education, and healthcare,” Yasmeen Hassan, global director of Equality Now, told Trust.org in response to that survey.

Source: Wikipedia

Saudi woman in niqab

Women being denied the right to leave the country without the permission of their husbands is nothing new, though this tracking technology is. But there are no details in the AFP story or any of the other breaking stories on how exactly the Saudi authorities are doing it.

Based on the limited information available, it may not be a tracking system that uses physical devices such as — and I know this is an awful comparison — a LoJack car-tracking system, which would require a significant infrastructure and ramp-up time for distribution of hardware. It sounds like a simpler system at borders and airports whereby immigration authorities ascertain a woman’s identity, look up her husband in a database, and text him manually or via an automated system.

UPDATE: based on the new local report, this is exactly how the system works.

Which is still, of course, appalling to Western mores and requires a government database that matches up women with male guardians — usually husbands or fathers.

Commentators on Twitter are reacting to the news, some, including Ruwayda Mustafah, a female Kurdish activist/commentator, with despair:

Why can't Saudi Arabia do something for women for once where we can actually be proud of it? Instead of the constant humiliation.

—
Ruwayda Mustafah (@RuwaydaMustafah) November 22, 2012

photo credit: zilverbat. via photopin cc

But Google is in Baku, Azerbijan today at the seventh annual Internet Governance Forum to make the case that a free and open internet is best for all. And with them is internet pioneer Vint Cerf.

(In case you’re wondering where Azerbaijan is, it’s east of Turkey, south of Russia, and right near all the “stans.”)

Source: Open Net Initiative

Counties the filter the internet for political purposes

The IGF is a United Nations organization. Among other things, its mandate includes fostering the security and stability of the internet, helping countries with internet governance, and finding solutions for “the issues arising from the use and misuse of the Internet.”

Over 40 countries currently censor the internet to varying degrees, as Google notes, so the company “is going to Azerbaijan to stand up for freedom and openness of the Internet.” Many of those countries, according to Google, are hoping to make those restrictions international, and are already trying via the International Telecommunications Union.

One of the conference’s sessions is titled Security, Openness and Privacy, and will include discussion on several key questions, including

• What impact can security and governance issues have on the Internet and human rights
• Freedom of expression and free flow of information: how do legal framework, regulations, and principles impact this?

Panelists on that session include a member of the US Department of State and an advisor to the Egyptian minister of communication and IT.

Vint Cerf will be speaking about freedom and openness at an event during IGF, at which the company will show a selection of “The Caucasus Triangle” – a documentary on youth media and democracy in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan:

Google acknowledges that laws and customs differ, and it has committed to obey local laws in areas it operates. The company is there, however, to add its voice to those who are advocating for openness and freedom: ”Our bottom line remains a strong preference for keeping the Net as open and free as possible.”

Image credit: Google Maps

“Craiglist was an innovator at one time,” says 3taps chief executive Greg Kidd. “But time has moved on, and the concept of what the open web is today has evolved.”

Craiglist, the massive online classifieds site where the internet is still 1997, has had a wildly tumultuous 2012.

In June Craigslist blocked a third-party service, PadMapper, from scraping its apartment rental listings and presenting them in a more 2012 way. Then in July, when PadMapper found a “legally kosher” way to access Craigslist postings via 3taps (which essentially sucked the data right out of Google), Craiglist sued PadMapper and 3taps … and then bizarrely amended its terms of service, telling users they were not permitted to cross-post their sales items anywhere else on the internet.

Effectively, Craigslist was claiming complete and total copyright of its users’ content.

That died its inevitable death in early August, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation — on whose advisory board Craigslist founder Craig Newmark sits – got involved. Since that strategy failed, Craiglist went thermonuclear on all content scrapers, blocking all search engines from accessing the site.

At which point, you might think, it would just be easier to play nicely with others. But the core question remains: Who owns the data in Craigslist listings?

“Public facts are public property,” says Kidd, who is also an advisor at Square and was a first-round investor in Twitter. “Our view is that facts are protected by the First Amendment.”

Facts, of course, are not copyrightable, at least according the U.S. Supreme Court. That means no one can copyright the fact that Hitler lost World War II, or that you’ve got a slightly-used sofa for sale for just $299, no tax, no refunds.

And if that’s the case, says Kidd, how can Craigslist “own” its users’ listings? Kidd cites James Boyle from the Center for Public Domain at Duke University, who says that a Craigslist-style view on facts and copyright would “break the internet.” And not just 3taps, either. Giants like Google would also be affected.

“People seem to feel that scraping is a bad word,” says Kidd, referring to the often ethically controversial practice of electronically capturing data on other organizations’ websites. “But Google’s whole model is based on scraping.”

He doesn’t see any law, Kidd told me, that says Google can do it but no one else. And he has a real problem with Craigslist deciding who is a search engine and who isn’t.

So 3taps is suing Craigslist to force the courts to define what is public and what is private, and what can be copyrighted. In addition, 3taps will be suing Craigslist under the Sherman Antitrust Act, claiming that Craigslist is a monopoly acting in monopolistic ways to reduce competition in the marketplace.

“You can bully people that aren’t well-resourced,” says Kidd. “But that only works until it doesn’t work.”

He’s had no contact with Craigslist — and, despite repeated requests on this occasion and others, Craigslist has not responded to VentureBeat’s attempts to get its perspective — saying it refuses to talk to anyone.

“I don’t know what goes on in their heads,” Kidd told me. “I just wish they’d stop suing everyone else.”

photo credit: jox. via photopin cc

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But the new poster boy for internet freedom has a big-kids message:

“The war for the Internet has begun. Hollywood is in control of politics. The Government is killing innovation. Don’t let them get away with that.”

Whether you agree or disagree, Dotcom is eager to make his case on the new Kim.com, where he calls on American president Barack Obama to “end the war on internet freedom” … and shares 10 facts about the MegaUpload scandal and court cases in an attempt to both exonerate his company and demonstrate the illegal nature of the US government’s actions.

And he explicitly links his message to Dr. Martin Luther King, saying “I have a dream, like Dr. King.” He also links himself implicitly to Che Guevara, the famous Argentinian Marxist who contributed to the Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, by wearing the beret cap in the video.

Watch, listen, enjoy:

Somewhat interestingly … on the bottom of the Kim.com website is a small image: a copyright notice.

And there’s a terms of service, which states that the website is copyrighted and may not be used by organizations, companies, or businesses for any purposes. And one more thing:

Unauthorized framing of or linking to the Website is prohibited.

I don’t think Che had a terms of service page, Kim.

Note:  last week Dotcom published the following letter to the movie industry via The Hollywood Reporter.

Dear Hollywood,

The Internet frightens you. But history has taught us that the greatest innovations were built on rejections. The VCR frightened you, but it ended up making billions of dollars in video sales.

You get so comfortable with your ways of doing business that any change is perceived as a threat. The problem is, we as a society don’t have a choice: The law of human nature is to communicate more efficiently. And the economic benefits of high-speed Internet and unlimited cloud storage are so great that we need to plan for the day when the transfer of terabytes of data will be measured in seconds.

Businesses and individuals will keep looking for faster connectivity, more robust online storage and more privacy. Transferring large pieces of content over the Internet will become common — not because global citizens are evil but because economic forces leading to “speed of light” data transfer and storage are so beneficial to societal growth.

Come on, guys, I am a computer nerd. I love Hollywood and movies. My whole life is like a movie.

I wouldn’t be who I am if it wasn’t for the mind-altering glimpse at the future in Star Wars. I am at the forefront of creating the cool stuff that will allow creative works to thrive in an Internet age. I have the solutions to your problems. I am not your enemy.

Providing “freemium” cloud storage to society is not a crime. What will Hollywood do when smartphones and tablets can wirelessly transfer a movie file within milliseconds?

The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of changing their views to fit the facts, they try to change the facts to fit their views. The fact remains that the benefits of Megaupload to society outweigh the burdens. But instead of adapting, you imported one of your action-conspiracy movie scripts into the real world. In my view, MPAA CEO and former Sen. Chris Dodd lobbied his friends in the White House to turn me into a villain who has to be destroyed. Due process? Rule of law? Eliminate me and my innovation and worry about the consequences later. Never mind that millions of Megaupload users lost access to cloud data like their wedding photos. Well done, Hollywood, everyone with similar innovations got the message. But wait … You did not read the end of the script.

The people of the Internet will unite. They will help me. And they are stronger than you. We will prevail in the war for Internet freedom and innovation that you have launched. We have logic, human nature and the invisible hand on our side.

As you should have known, our Mega services operated within the boundaries of the law. We had users that spanned from the military to Hollywood to lawyers and doctors. If you are unhappy with that, it is up to you to convince Congress to amend legislation. You tried with SOPA and you failed. As an alternative, you chose to lobby the Justice Department to ignore the law and stage a global show of force and destruction. The only parties a New Zealand court has found to have violated the law in this case are the local police and the FBI.

Regardless of the issues you have with new technologies, you can’t just engage armed forces halfway around the world, rip a peaceful man from his family, throw him in jail, terminate his business without a trial, take everything he owns without a hearing, deprive him of a fair chance to defend himself and do all that while your propaganda machine is destroying him in the media. Is that who you want to be?

There can still be a happy ending. I am working on solutions. Just call me or my lawyers. You know where to find me. Unfortunately I can only do lunch in New Zealand.

This open letter is free of copyright. Use it freely.

Image credit: Kim.com

As we reported earlier, the new legislation is a series of amendments to other bills that grant the Russian federal service for supervision of communications, IT, and mass media the power to remove websites from the Russian Internet 24 hours after notifying offending publishers.

While the bill’s language states that its focus on pornography, extremist websites, and sites promoting suicide, critics fear it will be used to stifle dissent. According to the Russian legal information society Rapsi, Alexander Morozov, the head of Moscow’s Center for Media Studies, is one of those who is worried.

“It is always argued that these laws are against extremism, child pornography, and so on, but this legislation will hit the opposition and freedom of political expression.”

Russian Wikipedia ran an SOPA-style blackout yesterday to no avail, and the Kremlin’s own human rights watchdog has complained.

Oddly, the bill has both broad political support, having been drafted by members of all four of Russia’s major political parties, and many opponents. It appears that the bill will be signed into law by President Valdimir Putin later this year, but opposition members of the Russian parliament said that the bill’s goal was to stifle dissent.

The broader danger to free speech is that by implementing the bill, the Russian government is giving itself a lever that it can now activate for an increasing range of reasons.

Image credit: Vladdito/ShutterStock

It’s almost U.S. Independence Day — the day we celebrate freedom. And, for those of us in the tech community, it’s also a good time to reflect on the ways technology gives us freedom.

It’s easy to think about all the ways tech entraps us: the tyranny of the inbox, the inescapable web of social connections mediated through advertising-supported networks, the ubiquity of the smartphone.

I don’t think those traps are inherent in technology, though. Instead, it’s up to us to figure out how to use technology to liberate ourselves, instead of becoming slaves to it.

A New York Times story that got passed around a lot this past weekend laments the “busy trap” that many of us find ourselves in, swamped by a “crazy busy” schedule that’s actually entirely self-imposed.

“Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness,” the author, Tim Kreider, writes. And it’s easy enough to let technology give you a sense of importance and urgency.

That’s not the only way technology works, though. And despite what Kevin Kelly wrote in his ambitious recent book “What Technology Wants,” tech doesn’t “want” one single thing. It’s up to us to use it in ways that increase our freedom, not our dependence.

My friend Brian Lam, who runs The Wirecutter, has the right idea: He uses technology to make a good-enough living on his own terms, sometimes living in a van in the desert and sometimes spending months at a time in Hawaii, surfing and generally enjoying life.

He’s a believer in making technology work for you, instead of the other way around. That means knowing how to focus and concentrate your work, instead of letting it take over your entire week. He and I had a conversation about this earlier this year, during which he pointed out that you can sometimes get more done in three intensive 12-hour days than you can in a whole week of ordinary, full-time work.

If you’re not always online, you can get more utility out of the times that you are plugged in. Having some downtime increases creativity, too, by giving you a different perspective on the world and by taking you outside of your well-worn digital paths. The trick is knowing when and how to set limits.

Sometimes this requires a serious effort, like keeping yourself from checking email when you’re taking time off. I try hard not to check email when I’m at home with my family in the evenings, but I’ll admit it’s not always easy. Staying offline during vacations is a serious challenge for many people, including myself, but it’s worth it.

Sometimes it’s a simple hack that does the trick. For instance, I moved my phone charger into a separate room, instead of having it on my nightstand next to my bed. Now the phone isn’t the first thing I look at when I wake up, nor is it the last thing that I look at when I go to bed at night. I’m not spending 10 or 20 minutes just sitting in bed scrolling through messages, either.

Other times, you just need to use technology to get control of technology. Email filters are an essential tool for dealing with inbox overload. Using Google Voice’s forwarding rules can ensure that your phone doesn’t ring in the middle of the night. Facebook’s new “Close Friends” feature helps you zero in on the handful of friends who you really care about, making the network a more meaningful experience. Twitter’s lists, while under-used by many, can work the same way.

What are the ways you use technology to increase freedom? Send your best ideas to tips@venturebeat.com with “Tech for Freedom” in the subject line, and we’ll publish our favorites tomorrow, July 4. Be sure to send them in by midnight tonight!

Photo credit: Express Monorail via photo pin

The China Real Time report at the Wall Street Journal reports that Tiananmen Square is a curious black hole in Siri’s knowledge. Siri, of course, is Apple’s personal assistant, available on the iPhone 4S, which helps users in many countries get directions, find information, and get things done.

At Apple’s recent World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, the expansion of Siri’s language capabilities to Mandarin and Cantonese was one of the big items of news. So users in China have finally been able to play with the artificial intelligence that has been available here for a year. But there are big gaps in Siri’s knowledge.

And most of them are around what China Digital Times calls “sensitive questions.” Tiananmen Square, where up to half a million Chinese protestors demonstrated against China’s Communist Party in 1989 — and perhaps 1,000 or more died — is definitely one of them.

As China Real Time says, Siri responds to questions like “Do you know about the Tiananmen incident?” with the fairly bizarre: “I couldn’t find any appointments related to ‘Do you know about Tiananmen.” And another attempt, “What happened on June 4, 1989?” received an even more odd answer: “I’m sorry, the person you are looking for is not in your address book.”

China Digital Times reports that even directions to Tiananmen Square are, apparently, sensitive:

Source: http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2012/06/siri-learns-chinese/

I want to drive to Tiananmen Square, how do I get there?
我要坐车去天安门怎么走？
Siri: Sorry, something went wrong. Could you please ask the question again?
抱歉，宝， 某处有错误。麻烦请你再试一次。

Apple isn’t the only company that’s been willing to compromise its principles in order to do business in China. Despite its “Don’t be evil” motto, Google played along with China’s censorship policies for some time.

Image credit: duct tape from ShutterStock, Siri screenshot from China Digital Times

“When Bob and I started writing the specs for the Internet in 1973…”

Only a handful of people can start a sentence anything like that.

Today, Vint Cerf, one of the godfathers of the Internet, stood on a stage at the Google campus and addressed attendees of Atmosphere, the company’s cloud computing event.

With his snow-white beard and three-piece suit, Cerf looked like something out of a Jules Verne novel, subtly different from the Brooks Brothers army he faced.

And he spoke as one who still sees a world of freedom, innovation and possibility in the Internet.

Today, Cerf gave the audience strong words on contemporary issues of intellectual property, open-source development and the need for better security — not on the part of developers or companies, but on the part of normal Internet users.

Cerf on patents versus freedom

When asked what he would tell the developer of the Next Big Thing, the technology that could replace the Internet, Cerf said, “Shoot the patent lawyer.”

The room, which was full of chief information officers for large, proprietary companies, burst into both laughter and applause.

Cerf continued, “Bob [Kahn] and I knew we could not succeed if we tried to protect the Internet’s design. As it turns out that worked out really well, and I think that’s still pretty good advice.”

Cerf also spoke out against the Department of Homeland Security’s recent seizures of websites, such as last year’s seizure of scores of music sites and communities for copyright violations, which he called “a blunt instrument that can and should be exercised much more carefully.”

As the one site owner told this correspondent at the time, the sites were being seized “without any previous complaint or notice from any court… While I was contacting GoDaddy I noticed the DNS had changed. Godaddy had no idea what was going on and until now they do not understand the situation, and they say it was totally from ICANN [via the Department of Homeland Security].”

Cerf said this was a step out of line, even in the name of IP protection. “Even our own government is beginning to go overboard in the protection of copyright…

“The open ability to develop new applications and try them out has been vital to the Internet’s growth and to the space in which we currently operate. It has interesting ways of enhancing both sides of the equation.”

He told the audience, “Remember, governance is a big word that includes human rights, freedom of speech, economic transactions on a worldwide basis — it touches everything. It’s everywhere, and that’s why Internet governance is topic A in many corners.”

Cerf on identity & security

Cerf also talked about a topic quite close to Google’s heart: the ability to traverse the Internet anonymously, if one so chooses. Google’s own suite of social tools, Google+, recently came under heavy fire for allowing its users to sign up only with their “given names,” linking their online activities with their real-world identities.

However, this decision has been reversed, due in no small part to the backlash from hackers inside Google’s own campus — including Cerf.

“We should preserve our ability to be anonymous or pseudonymous,” he said today, “but we also need strong authentication tools.” While certificates, Cerf said, are “not working too well,” users still and will always need secure ways to prove who they really are.

“We have serious work to do as a community to implement new technologies and… improve security on the Net.”

One of the main points Cerf made about security wasn’t about the need for better programmatic ways of thwarting attacks; rather, he said, consumers themselves need to get smarter about where their information goes when they click and browse around the web.

“I am comfortable that we have some good technologies for basic cryptography,” he said. “What worries me are all the other avenues that people can get information without having to break code.”

He said a recent episode of spear phishing attacks on Gmail users “is a case in point… People clicked on those messages because they look credible.”

Cerf continued, “I’m much more worried about these open avenues for attack [including social and email attacks and malware from browsers], the social engineering, the tricking… we’re going to have to teach our children and each other much more about… the risk factors of doing certain things on the Net.”

Cerf on mobile

“When we bring technologies into being, we assume that the new technology will wipe out the old one,” said Cerf. He noted this assumption is incorrect; rather than destroying old systems, new technologies often enhance them, he said.

For example, Cerf noted, “The newspaper is in decline. News is not and should not be in decline… This is Darwin’s observation: Adapt or die. We have to figure out how our business models can operate under new conditions.”

When it comes to mobile devices and mobile ways of connecting to the Internet, Cerf said, “The immediacy of the mobile changes it from what we’re accustomed to in the personal computing world to something that’s instantaneous…What’s interesting and powerful about the mobile environment is that it’s connected to services on the Internet. This augments both platforms.”

And since mobile is still so new, Cerf said that ecosystem is more ripe for creative hacking than almost any other. “For systems in which you already have a lot of hardware and software, change is difficult,” he said.

“That’s why apps are so popular.” He continued to say that the infrastructure of mobile devices, operating systems and applications allow for more flexibility and innovation, because there aren’t too many legacy layers underneath.

Cerf on the Internet of things

Keeping in mind that he spoke at a cloud conference, Cerf said, “The cloud won’t do you any good unless you can connect to it. The stats have to include the reliability of the network connections that get you to the cloud… We have to keep the infrastructure in mind.”

Part of that infrastructure are the devices we use to connect to what we call “the cloud.” In addition to the evolving world of mobile devices and connectivity, Cerf also talked about other connected devices, a new way of thinking about what the Internet is and how it’s used: The Internet of things.

“I used to tell jokes about Internet-enabled lightbulbs,” he said. “I can’t tell jokes about it anymore — there already IS an Internet-connected lightbulb.”

But, Cerf said, “I also have an Internet-connected sensor system in my house.” Cerf’s home automation system controls such factors as light and temperature. While he said it sounds like a deeply nerdy indulgence, he told the Atmosphere audience, “The reason I’m doing it is very practical. I want to have data on how the heating ventilation and air conditioning system is performing.

“Many of you are CIOs of your businesses: Real data counts, and data drives the business.”

CloudBeat 2011 takes place Nov 30 – Dec 1 at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA. Unlike any other cloud event, we’ll be focusing on 12 case studies where we’ll dissect the most disruptive instances of enterprise adoption of the cloud. Speakers include Aaron Levie, Co-Founder & CEO of Box.net; Amit Singh, VP of Enterprise at Google; Adrian Cockcroft, Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix; Byron Sebastian, Senior VP of Platforms at Salesforce; Lew Tucker, VP & CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, and many more. Join 500 executives for two days packed with actionable lessons and networking opportunities as we define the key processes and architectures that companies must put in place in order to survive and prosper. Register here. Spaces are very limited!