Eideard

 
Networking giant Cisco was blasted by a Canadian judge for arranging for the criminal arrest of a whistleblower who was suing the company.

Peter Adekeye launched an anti-trust case against his former employer in the US District Court for Northern California and was giving his deposition where he lived in Vancouver when four coppers entered the room and interrupted the hearing.

According to Ars Technica. Adekeye was jailed while the legal mess was sorted out. Part of the problem was that the highly expensive legal team for Cisco had done its best to convince the Canadian authorities that Adekeye was a “sinister” Nigerian on the run from 97 charges of illegal computer hacking…

US prosecutors invoked “emergency provisions” of the Extradition Act to obtain the arrest warrant…

When the extradition documentation actually arrived, the judge would discover that it was a pack of “innuendo, half truths, and complete falsehoods.”

Throughout all of this, the judges and the Canadian legal system was apparently unaware that all the made-up crimes were part of the bigger anti-trust battle Adekeye was waging against Cisco…

Justice McKinnon was shocked that a trivial $14,000 civil case had been transformed into a criminal proceeding and engaged the full might and resources of two governments, with the aim of misleading one of Canada’s senior trial courts.

Cisco allegedly engineered it so that the arrest took place in the presence of a US High Court Judge, Special Master, George Fisher, with Cisco’s lawyers insisting on filming the entire arrest on the record. It was clearly an attempt to humiliate Adekeye and weaken his case.

McKinnon said that it all spoke “volumes for Cisco’s duplicity”.

What should be most alarming is that Cisco could use extradition laws and their buddies in the US government to have those who challenged their dominion locked up under American laws – in Canada.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Cisco Systems is considering offering Web-based alternatives to Microsoft’s popular Office software as the networking giant expands on the Internet.

Cisco Senior Vice President Doug Dennerline said his company may develop a service that would allow business users to create documents they could draft and share through its WebEx meeting and collaboration service.

Internet-based alternatives to Microsoft Office cropped up about five years ago, but corporate users have yet to embrace them. If the approach does take off, it could become big business: Microsoft’s Office division rang up sales of $60 billion in the software company’s most-recent fiscal year.

Google sells Google Apps, an Internet-based alternative to Microsoft Office that includes a spreadsheet, word processor and presentation software. Design software maker Adobe Systems Inc and privately held Zoho Corp offer similar products.

Dennerline, who manages Cisco’s online collaboration products, said he is interested in getting into that area.

“That is an interesting space. We are certainly thinking about that,” he said…during an online news conference. He did not elaborate.

He doesn’t have to elaborate. That’s why we have pundits and analysts.

This may stretch the geek attention span for my regular readers. I go all the way back to discussions of the semantics of programming languages in the early 1960′s. I’ve been online since 1983. I’m married to a banking IT maven. You get the idea…

Cisco Systems has announced its new blade server, first reported by us in March 2008, along with a Unified Computing strategy that converges storage, compute and networking into a single layer (thanks to virtualization technologies) that is managed by a specialized piece of software. Stacey has captured the intricate details of the news, while I have already posted about the imperative behind these moves.

This new comm-puting approach adopted by Cisco is unique, in that it is the first time a company is selling a single packaged offering so to speak. People have sold either storage related equipment, or network layer gear or just servers. So, what does Cisco’s announcement mean for existing vendors?

Prior to Cisco’s announcement, Sun Microsystems and eGenera, a Marlboro, Mass.-based early stage company have often talked about such a unified, network centric future. Even IBM takes a holistic view of the data center.

Cisco, by virtue of being a late comer to the market, has managed not only to lap them, but has also posed a serious challenge to two major blade server makers – Hewlett-Packard and Dell. You can put Rackable in this category as well, but it’s a small player compared to these behemoths. One of the main reasons these companies are at risk is because they have typically innovated on cost and performance metrics, not a whole 360-degree view of the changing data center infrastructure. Google, as a company, has reinvented data centers by building its own gear, and taking a holistic approach to the data centers.

RTFA. Click all the links. Knock yourself out.

Daylife/AP Photo by Paul Sakuma

Now that President Obama has signed the $787 billion economic stimulus package into law, the real hard work begins: using that money to create jobs. If spent wisely, this package has a chance at fundamentally reforming the U.S. health-care system, making our economy energy efficient and providing Americans with the training and skills required to succeed in a 21st century global marketplace.

But the country can’t accomplish these goals unless it has the infrastructure to support them. That’s why the funding for broadband was so vital. Broadband is the ticket for entry to participate in the world economy. It is a fundamental technology upon which other things are built. It enables collaboration, innovation and operational excellence, and positions the U.S. to compete on a global basis.

The impact of broadband has been similar to that of the national highway system in the 1950s. Until then, our nation’s roads were slow and the quality was unpredictable, which hindered commerce and travel. The modern highway system made our country accessible and in the process, created new industries — transforming our economy and by extension, our society…

Increasing our broadband speeds to 100 Mbps from the current U.S. median of 2.3 Mbps will have a transformative effect on our economy and our society. High-speed networking enables new human collaboration at a profound level, and such collaboration will radically change the way we think.

The inevitable comparison with South Korea is made. They’re averaging access at home of 49mbps.

The chuckle for me is that Korea’s broadband development was kicked off by an American consultant hired by their government almost a decade ago. Alvin Toffler [.pdf].

Thanks to Om