buylotrogold

I've just had arguably one of the highlights of my career this week when I had the honor of representing both my country and company keynoting the Westminster eForum in London. My trip was sponsored by the High Commission of Canada in the UK as well as Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada. Yup @ruv, Goodwill Ambassador for Cloud Computing, strange I know. For those of you unfamiliar with the Westminster Forum Projects in the UK, it is the predominant governmental public discussion Forum in Great Britain. It enjoys substantial support and involvement from key stakeholders within UK Parliament, government, regulatory bodies, industry, consumer's organisations and other interested groups. The forums organize senior level seminars on public policy in these sectors. Each Westminster Forum Projects forum is structured to facilitate the formulation of 'best' public policy by providing policy makers and implementers, and those with an interest in the issues, with a sense of the way different stakeholder perspectives interrelate. Usually this is through impartially-_frame_d, inclusive discussion conducted either in public or under the Chatham House Rule. Forum events are frequently the platform for major policy statements from senior Ministers and regulators, opposition spokesmen and leading opinion formers in industry and interest groups. Events regularly receive prominent coverage in the national media and trade press. During both my keynote and the ensuing Q&A session it became quite clear that the future of Cloud Computing is clearly found within the rise of regionalized cloud providers both from an economic standpoint as well as from a policy, compliance and regulatory one. A reoccurring theme had to do with the impact of geopolitical data governance and privacy as relating to remote cloud _base_d environments. It is also clear that the UK government is fully committed to embracing all aspects of cloud computing with the recent launch of data.gov.uk as a great example. But major issues still remain. One issue is that of the so called digital divide, something I liken more towards a information divide where the urban populations have much greater access to information via better Internet connections than the more rural populations. Like many established economies, the UK suffers from a legacy communications infrastructure which makes modernizing IP networks problematic at best. In direct contrast other areas of the world like South Korea where a significant portion of the population has fibre to their homes are at a distinct advantage when it comes to equipping their populations with latest and greatest cloud _base_d infrastructure, and more importantly applications. Another one of the points I raised during my keynote is Information is Power and faster you can collect, organize, analyze and utilize it

opposite - its an opportunity to show the strength of openness and interoperability in forward looking technologies of which Cloud Computing is one. Thanks for your efforts in this area with the Open Computing Alliance<http://www.opencomputingalliance.org/ . Sam

As a long time resident of China (both the mainland and Hong Kong) I can assure all that the West has nothing to fear about an information arms race; with China. The Chinese government is creating the worlds biggest Intranet which is intended to insulate China from the rest of the world. This touches on a far more important discussion that needs to be had - the various negative effects of ill-conceived Internet censorship on the fledgling cloud computing industry (indeed its hard to imagine a *positive* effect that filtering of any type can have). This would have been a far more important message to get across at this critical point in the negotiations than the selfish regional cloud provider pipedream. As an Australian expat planning to return at some point in the future I am very interested in the discussion taking place down under (as embarrassing as it is) and hope that serious consideration be given to our competitiveness both as an importer and exporter of cloud services. You too should be worried about this because western governments tend to track such advances closely (there are already widespread discussions underway as you can see from Wikipedias Internet Censorship articles) and those of countries like Iran are more than happy to use them to justify their own far-reaching censorship programs. That said I have little faith in our ability to come to a sensible decision with the War on [Terror|Child Pornography|Beastiality|...] well under way so I am glad that Electronic Frontiers Australia and the Pirate Party Australia are doing a great job on my behalf (as a member of both). Yesterdays eBay listing of Carrier Grade Filtering Technology - Barely Used is a light-hearted look at some of the issues, but nobody is talking about cloud computing and later it will be too late. Heres the relevant section from my recent post A word on the Australian Internet censorship scandal (which is worth taking a look at even if just for the pic of cute furry animals): Another consideration that has not been covered anywhere near enough is the performance impact on cloud computing services. Web interfaces like Facebook, Twitter and Gmail are extremely sensitive to latency introduced by proxies and raw computing services like Amazons S3 are sensitive to bandwidth limitations. Then you have the problem of platforms like Google App Engine, Google Sites & Microsoft Web Office which are both difficult to identify (they have many IPs which are not disclosed and difficult if not impossible to enumerate) and which host content for a massive number of customers. If even one person shares a document deemed obnoxious to their sensibilities then the performance will be reduced to unacceptable levels for everyone until it is removed (and then some). It is my contention that censorship is completely incompatible with cloud computing, and that this alone is reason enough to scuttle it. In the mean time Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) has just landed themselves a new life member and I encourage anyone who cares about their future and that of their children to join as well (my friends in the USA may want to take a look at the EFF and Europeans the FFII). I completely agree with your observation that: The Great Firewall of China as such is not a threat at all, quite the opposite - its an opportunity to show the strength of openness and interoperability in forward looking technologies of which Cloud Computing is one. Thanks for your efforts in this area with the Open Computing Alliance. Sam