Kingpin is a great primer on how criminals are using the Internet to collaborate in the electronic black market, especially credit card fraud, and how the Secret Service and FBI are fighting back. The story of hacker Max Ray Vision reads like a geek thriller but is fairly accessible to anyone interested in a great crime story.

Hope this becomes a movie.

Read the related Wired article or watch Poulsen discuss Kingpin at RSA Conference 2011:

In today’s world, we’re so focused on instant gratification and what’s up or down. After reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, what was so profound about his legacy was his ability to not get caught up in the daily hype. With both Apple and Pixar, he patiently let both grow in their own sustained ways. His style was simple and consistent.

It’s so easy to get distracted by the noise of the moment and get frustrated about the seemingly tedious work you’re doing today, building towards tomorrow’s great achievement. People may misunderstand you, think you’re contrarian or crazy, but, remember, “the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

From the eulogy:

He didn’t favor trends or gimmicks. He liked people his own age.

His philosophy of aesthetics reminds me of a quote that went something like this: “Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”

Steve always aspired to make beautiful later.

He was willing to be misunderstood.

“Today, we are the creators. We each have our own unique skills and talents to contribute to creating the kingdom of god. We serve god best when we do what we love for the greatest cause we can imagine. What the people in this room do is spiritual. It is profound. We are the leaders of this new religion. We have faith that people connected can create a new world. Each one of use is a creator, but together, we are the Creator.”

The documentary’s premise is based on a Nepali surgeon who is visiting to provide cataract surgery to 1,000 North Koreans. At the end, the praise each patient gives to Kim Jong-il after they realize they can now see is heartbreaking.

Chodron has written a number of books, including ones I recommend:

• The Places that Scare You
• Comfortable with Uncertainty

Happy New Year!

Part 1:

I peeped the idea to Lee and SF Giants pitcher Brian Wilson back in August, but neither one of them bothered to holla back.

The video features a t-shirt concept similar to the one I created (with designer Carlo Verso) as well as MC Hammer and Silicon Valley tech luminaries like Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and Google’s Marissa Mayer, among others.

Thank you, TechPresident, for the acknowledgement.

Creative:

Video:

NASA’s Ames Research Center sits in the heart of Silicon Valley, home to the world’s most influential technology companies and starry-eyed entrepreneurs, toiling away in garages and basements hoping to build the next new thing.

Ames itself has served as an entrepreneurial incubator for a number of tech luminaries, including Bloom Energy’s K. R. Sridhar, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Excite@Home’s Milo Medin, who now leads Google’s fiber initiative as Vice President of Access Services, to name just a few.

“There’s a long history of entrepreneurs that have left and been inspired to go and take the work they’ve done and benefit folks outside of the federal sector, outside of the NASA walls,” says former NASA IT Chief Technology Officer Chris Kemp.

Inspired by that culture of tech innovation, he hopes to add his name to that list. Kemp, who left NASA in March of this year, launched Nebula, Inc. in late July, a new entrepreneurial venture aimed at “democratizing cloud computing” through open source software and hardware. The venture is funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Highland Capital Partners.

Public (Sector) Cloud

Kemp began his public service career at NASA in June 2006 as a business development director. In November 2007, he was appointed Ames chief information officer and became NASA CTO of IT in April 2010.

During that time, he served on the Federal Cloud Computing Standards Working Group and led the founding of NASA’s Nebula Cloud Computing Platform. The project, started in October 2008, has cost $13.6 million to date according to the IT Dashboard and is still a priority for NASA, which recently released a white paper highlighting its successes.

“When I was CIO of Ames Research Center, I pulled together a small, scrappy group of civil servants and contractors and came up with the strategy and got the White House excited about it. Got the thing launched, and I came up with the name Nebula, and I made sure the project had some momentum, and I think the success of that project was very beneficial to NASA. It allowed us to internally appreciate the opportunity that cloud provided,” he said.

Kemp points to the work on NASA Nebula and the ‘cloud first policy’ outlined in former U.S. CTO Vivek Kundra’s ’25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management’ as instrumental in shaping NASA’s perspective on cloud computing. NASA recently announced it would cancel its Enterprise Data Center (NEDC) approach to a single consolidated data center.

Over time though, Kemp had ideas beyond the walls of NASA’s universe. In a blog post announcing his resignation as CTO, he hinted at its constraints:

“Whereas I thought I had the best of both worlds being a Headquarters employee stationed in Silicon Valley, I actually had the worst of both worlds… no influence when I can’t be in all of those meetings at NASA HQ, with no mandate to manage projects at Ames. As budgets kept getting cut and continuing resolutions from Congress continued to make funding unavailable, I saw my vision for the future slowly slip further from my grasp.”

And with that, he made the leap to the private sector “to find a garage in Palo Alto to do what I love.” These days he’s settling for the basement of Kleiner Perkins headquarters, where Nebula, Inc. resides, along with a second office in Seattle, Washington.

Private (Sector) Cloud

“The aha moment was when I started to realize the potential of the technology was. When I was at NASA we had over $2 billion we were spending a year on IT, and I looked across the entire agency when I was CTO, and I saw hundreds of organizations spending millions of dollars on data centers and infrastructure. This whole notion of a shared computing resource within NASA made a lot of sense. I started thinking about how this technology might benefit companies across the world.”

Nebula, Inc.’s Nebula Enterprise Cloud Appliance leverages open source cloud operating system Open Stack and open hardware project Open Compute, launched by Facebook last April. According to the Nebula Inc. Website, “any company can easily build out and automatically configure a flexible, massively scalable cloud computing infrastructure in minutes.”

“It’s a turnkey private cloud. What the appliance does is it automates all the challenging parts of building a private cloud,” said Kemp.

Cloud Conflict?

Kemp acknowledges his work at NASA Nebula is the inspiration for the name of his new venture, but insists there’s no potential for confusion between it and NASA Nebula. While Nebula Inc. and NASA Nebula are both cloud computing initiatives, the differentiation is in Nebula Inc.’s appliance and its integration of open source software and hardware.

However, his use of the term ‘Nebula’ has raised red flags. According to a NASA public affairs, NASA’s Office of General Counsel filed a trademark application on the ‘Nebula’ name on July 27 when it learned of the Nebula, Inc. announcement.

While NASA supports “commercialization of NASA technology,” NASA Acting IT CTO Tsengdar Lee said, “There’s a lot of discussion in the building. People supporting it, people against it. There’s confusion, but we generally don’t comment on private ventures. He has all the right to do the things he wants to do, and our interest is to protect our intellectual property, and also to make sure our mission and our work gets done. We just wanted to protect what we are doing.”

Open Innovation

“I’m a big fan of anyone who leaves government and works to commercialize and bring value to the American public out of government technology,” said Kemp.

Through NASA’s collaboration with Rackspace on the OpenStack Compute project, he praises its role in establishing an entrepreneurial foundation for emerging technology ventures such as his and cites NASA’s open government leadership, as stated in its open government plan, as a source of inspiration:

“The benefits of allowing the public to assist in development of NASA software include increased software quality, accelerated software development, and a higher rate of technology transfer both to and from NASA.”

This correlates with the NASA Open Source Agreement, an open source initiative approved license to allow public release of NASA-funded software, under which 60 software projects have been released. In that spirit, Kemp says Nebula Inc.’s investment in Open Stack contributions will support other ventures, including NASA’s.

“What’s happening is, with over a thousand developers contributing code to Open Stack, that’s code that won’t be written by taxpayers, at taxpayers expense, that NASA will directly benefit from,” he said. “A lot of people leave government and use their relationships to benefit themselves. I’m leaving government, and I’m bringing a bunch of private money in that will actually help NASA.”

“We’re feeling really proud of the heritage of the project. We’re a bunch of space geeks and the fact that this came out of NASA, the source code that was open sourced is not only the basis of our product but dozens of products which are being developed.”

Nebula, Inc.’s Nebula Enterprise Cloud Appliance will begin a pilot phase this fall, and it will begin taking orders in the first quarter of 2012. A requisite for any successful start-up founder, Kemp is optimistic and idealistic his idea will change the world.

His focus is the cloud, but he’s shooting for the stars.

In his 1996 business classic, Only the Paranoid Survive, Intel co-founder Andy Grove popularized the term ‘Strategic Inflection Point,’ a reference to his company’s extraordinary turnaround that became a tech mantra and inspired entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley and beyond.

“A Strategic Inflection Point is that which causes you to make a fundamental change in business strategy. Nothing less is sufficient,” Grove has said.

For the past two years, under the leadership of former U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, the federal government has witnessed an inflection point of its own, one that has energized the public sector IT community.

During his tenure as CIO, Kundra spearheaded a positive IT trend with regards to changing how government works. His ’25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management’ paved the way with progressive initiatives, including an aggressive review of agency IT strategies, a ‘cloud first’ policy, a data center reduction plan, creation of the open data platform Data.gov and regular TechStat reviews that hold senior-level executives accountable for moving this agenda forward.

Despite an uphill battle with organizational culture, antiquated technology, funding limitations and outdated procurement policies, his push to modernize, streamline and make government more transparent was considered genuine and successful. Industry organizations, watchdog groups and colleagues have applauded his efforts.

Open Source for America said in an open letter to Kundra, there’s been “a tremendous change in the way the government thinks about information technology, and how it manages information technology projects. For the first time, a Federal CIO was able to articulate the way forward for much-needed reform, and we were extraordinarily fortunate that you were able to assume that role, setting an extraordinary example for all Federal CIOs to come.”

If accolades don’t appease naysayers, then numbers should. Since the IT Dashboard was implemented to monitor federal government technology spending, an estimated $3 billion in savings have been realized. While that may be a drop in the federal government budget bucket, these days every penny counts, and it’s safe to assume the surface has only been scratched. Billions more are waiting to be saved, all with the help of smarter technology, procurement reform and leadership, all of which are outlined in the 25 Point Plan.

Despite the potential for “entropy,” as Kundra puts it, all signs point to an upward tick in the federal government IT Strategic Inflection Point.

Speaking for the federal CIO Council after Kundra announced his resignation, Homeland Security CIO Richard Spires wrote, “He has changed the dialogue and viewpoint of agencies of the Federal government – and we will not go back.”

Newly-appointed CIO Steven VanRoekel has received early praise for his work as Federal Communications Commission managing director, where he led technology operations, including a complete overhaul of FCC.gov. In breaking the news of his appointment, VanRoekel told The New York Times he would move ahead with the work Kundra began.

VanRoekel has even been given the seal of approval from his predecessor.

“He’s the perfect choice,” Kundra recently told attendees at a reception honoring his service.

Beyond VanRoekel, there’s a cadre of senior-level innovators, including Health & Human Services CTO Todd Park, Veterans Affairs CTO Peter Levin, Defense CIO Teri Takai and Deputy CTO of Innovation Chris Vein, to name just a few, that are willing and able to re-enforce the strategic momentum.

Reflecting on his time as CIO, Kundra said this:

“We have shown that it is possible to change the status quo. But we must remember that nothing is immune to the laws of physics, especially entropy. Left alone, things tend to move from order to disorder – and the hard work this Administration has done to reform Federal IT could fall back unless we keep our shoulder to the wheel.”

The subtitle to Only the Paranoid Survive is “How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company.” Given our current federal fiscal crisis, now is the time for America’s best and brightest public service technology innovators to exploit the points that challenge government.

There’s never been a better opportunity to own that challenge.

Only the Paranoid Survive is still a must-read for anyone who wants to change the status quo, especially for the thousands of incubating innovators inside the federal government. To quote Grove, “a fundamental rule in technology says that whatever can be done will be done.”

This moment is the federal government’s Strategic Inflection Point.

This can be done.

Originally published on FedScoop.

When he asked readers for feedback on working titles and covers for his upcoming book, Liars and Outliers, I spent 20 minutes designing a prototype of what I thought would communicate ‘security’ and still appeal to a broader audience.

I sent my prototype to Bruce, and he shared with his publisher, Wiley. To my surprise, they took the prototype and refined it.

Thank you Bruce and Wiley for the great honor in letting me contribute in this way.

My prototype:

Final: