P2P : la Sacem relèvera les adresses IP des pirates

Le Conseil d’Etat a tranché : finalement, la CNIL donner raison, mais pas totalement, à la Sacem, représentant les auteurs, pour surveiller les réseaux d’échanges de fichiers musicaux ou vidéo par peer-to-peer. Les des internautes pourront être enregistrées et transmises à la justice.

La Cnil (Commission nationale de et des libertés) vient de donner à moitié raison aux ayants droit des auteurs-compositeurs et les éditeurs, en l’occurrence la Sacem, suivie dans cette demande par la SCPP (Société civile des producteurs phonographiques), la SPPF (Société civile des producteurs de phonogrammes en France) et la SDRM (Société pour l'Administration du Droit de Reproduction Mécanique des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs).

La décision n’a cependant pas été évidente puisque la partie a duré deux ans. En 2005, la Cnil avait refusé une demande semblable formulée par la Sacem. Ces organismes entendaient traquer eux-mêmes les internautes mettant à disposition les musiques et les vidéos de leur Disque Dur. Mais la demande allait plus loin. Il s’agissait aussi de récupérer auprès des fournisseurs d’accès à Internet (FAI) le nom des internautes pratiquant les échanges par de fichiers par peer-to-peer ( et dont les adresses (numéro attribué lors de la connexion à Internet) étaient repérées. La Sacem souhaitait également pouvoir envoyer des messages aux internautes fraudeurs pour les prévenir et les dissuader de continuer.

La Cnil avait estimé que ces actions n’étaient pas du ressort des sociétés de gestion de droits d’auteurs et qu’elles impliquaient une collecte de données sur les individus. Elle jugeait également que les moyens demandés était « disproportionnés par rapport à la finalité poursuivie ».

Bientôt un gendarme des réseaux

Après le refus de la Cnil, la Sacem, la SCPP et la SPPF s’étaient tournées vers le Conseil d’Etat. Celui-ci vient de rendre son verdict. Il a donné raison à la Cnil sur un point : les sociétés de gestion des droits d’auteurs ne peuvent pas intenter elles-mêmes d’actions envers les internautes. Mais, sous réserve d’éliminer cette possibilité, le Conseil d’Etat a estimé que la demande était valide et, en particulier, que la possibilité de relever les infractions était bien « proportionnée » au préjudice causé. La Sacem a donc fait une nouvelle demande qui ne réclame plus le droit d’envoyer des messages avertissements aux internautes et la Cnil n’a pu qu’accepter.

Société privée, la Sacem aura donc le droit de surveiller les réseaux P2P, de relever les infractions, de noter les adresses IP, de comptabiliser les fichiers échangés, de noter les adresses IP et monter des dossiers qui seront transmis à un juge.

Dans le même temps, la commission Olivennes, réunissant pouvoirs publics, FAI et ayants droit, a planché sur le piratage et sur les moyens de le réprimer. Il a abouti à un accord qui prévoit la création d’une autorité indépendante et publique. Celle-ci aura, elle, le droit de remonter aux noms des internautes et devrait leur envoyer les messages d’avertissement dont la Sacem voulait s’occuper elle-même.

L’accord, qui n’a pas encore été traduit en une loi, prévoit une riposte graduée, avec, en cas de récidive, la résiliation de la ligne (une demande déjà formulée en 2004 par l’industrie du disque) et l’enregistrement sur une liste noire nationale. Cet accord prévoit aussi des obligations pour les FAI, qui seront tenus de collaborer, sous peine de sanctions. Ils devront aussi expérimenter le filtrage des connexions Internet de leurs abonnés.

La mise en pratique est encore loin mais la piste est tracée…

Top 10 IT Management Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Working with IT managers on a regular basis allows me to see some great management styles and some really poor ones. There are ten major mistakes that I see IT managers make on a regular basis. Some of these errors have even cost some managers their jobs. Here they are:

1: Focusing on technology and not the business

The typical IT manager comes from a technical background in either infrastructure or development. Based on their technical roots, they tend to focus their efforts in their expertise when in fact they should be looking for ways to support, enable, and improve the business. In order to be successful, it is imperative that IT managers become a business leader and turn their focus and expertise on business issues and problems first.

2: Thinking "out of sight is out of mind"

It's important to remember that in IT, no news is not good news. IT managers tend to trudge along without ever looking at their progress. The most powerful task an IT manager could ever do is an assessment. There are several ways to do this. You can do a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis, or you could do a full blown formal IT Assessment. You can even use a scorecard system to track where you are as a department. See: http://techrepublic.com.com/5138-1035_11-5670861.html for a scorecard developed specifically for this purpose.

3: Thinking that your team has it covered

In the TV show "The Apprentice," so many teams ended up in the boardroom because the leader delegated a job, but didn't follow up to make sure it was done right. Following up is not micromanagement. It's your job as a leader to ensure that the task gets done correctly.

4: Not inspecting what you expect

This mistake has its roots in mistake number 3, but can be carried forward into other aspects of IT. For instance, you could possibly expect great performance out of your servers, but may not have a system to make sure they're running at peak capacity. This ultimately leads to poor planning, budgeting, staffing, etc. If you want to avoid this common pitfall, make a comprehensive list of your expectations for your entire department. This could include critical projects, network and server performance, client satisfaction, etc. Double-check the list to make sure you are inspecting all expectations on a regular basis. Keep a checklist or develop a daily disciplines worksheet to follow everything that needs daily inspection.

5: Not creating a partnership with business management

I find a great deal of IT managers reporting to operations and finance personnel instead of presidents and CEOs. The only way IT can be an effective and strategic element to business is through partnership with business executives. You must lead and influence your reports, peers, and leaders to have a maximum impact on the organization. The quicker you can get on the leadership team, the quicker you will have the ability to execute on number 1.

6: Burning yourself out

I can't tell you how many IT managers I coach that have not had vacations in a year or longer and routinely work over 70 hours per week. This is not only a mistake, but it's a formula for disaster. Sometimes the thinking is that your business can't live without you. The truth is, your business cannot live with you burning yourself out. It only leads to lowered productivity and, eventually, your giving up or getting disgruntled. Do yourself, your business, your employees, and your family a favor and take some time off.

7: Not testing your backup solution

I always tell my new IT managers that one of the most important aspects of their jobs is ensuring a reliable backup. Breakdowns in technology hardware are inevitable. The next best thing is fault tolerance, but I have even seen that fail. Don't think for a minute that if you have tapes and if everything looks OK in your system that everything is ok. Make sure you test backups regularly. Do test disasters and make sure you can recover.

8: Not asking for help

Too often I've seen costly mistakes made by managers and technicians who try to solve an issue alone without informing anyone or even reading the manual! This is a costly mistake. If you get in over your head, do the right thing and seek help. The key to successful IT management is not knowing the right answers; it's being able to find them and executing a solution as quickly and cost effectively as possible. Don't hesitate to bring in the experts where necessary.

9: Not devoting time to personal development

There's no excuse for this mistake. Personal development is not your company's responsibility -- it's yours. I can always tell a person's success potential by the last five books they've read and by the seminars they attend. Every IT manager should be devoting at least 30 minutes a day to personal development. The truly successful devote even more and, in some cases, in upwards of two hours or more per day. The most common excuse I usually hear is the lack of time or money. The answer lies in the successful management of money and time.

10: Not finding a mentor or coach

The quickest route to success is to find someone who has been there and emulate that person. The quickest road to pain, hardship, and failure is to go the journey alone. Whether you are in management or not, you should always have a mentor or coach and you should always be mentoring or coaching someone else. A coach will simply help you achieve more than you could by yourself by imparting wisdom, accountability, and crucial advice where necessary. By coaching or mentoring someone else, you're doing the same, but you're also solidifying your own concepts by teaching them to others.

Joey Smith

11/19/2007

Recrutez moins cher, mais mieux !

Le concept du low cost a permis à de nombreux consommateurs et
entreprises de bénéficier de prestations à coûts fortement réduits.
Mais ce principe, s’il a trouvé son public, se voit aujourd’hui
rattrapé par une nouvelle exigence, qui allie prix et qualité. Ainsi
sont apparues récemment (dans le secteur du transport aérien par
exemple), compagnies haut de gamme low cost, proposant des vols en
première classe Paris/New-York à des tarifs attractifs, et avec un réel
souci de confort. Elles démontrent que, si la qualité a un coût, il
n’est plus nécessaire de dépenser des fortunes pour parvenir à bon
port, dans des conditions équivalentes à celles des grandes compagnies.
Et cela marche ! Pour preuve, les exemples se multiplient dans de
nombreux secteurs : séjours touristiques, sociétés de location de parc
de véhicules, banque-assurance, fleuristes…

Respecter un double engagement

Le recrutement n’est pas en reste. En apportant un service efficace
au meilleur coût, se développent des sociétés capables de fournir aux
entreprises des prestations de recrutement haut de gamme, à un tarif
raisonnable. Tout comme les compagnies aériennes évoquées plus haut,
ces sociétés conservent l’essence même de leur métier, se focalisent
sur le cœur du service, et ont réussi à faire évoluer la profession. De
la même manière que les voyagistes proposaient à l’origine des offres
réservées à une population aisée, les cabinets de recrutement
orientaient les leurs vers des entreprises capables d’investir
fortement dans ce processus. L’arrivée d’Internet a révolutionné le
marché, en permettant une réduction des coûts de structure et une
gestion facilitée de l’offre. Les agences en ligne ont fleuri, et avec
elles les compagnies aériennes low cost.

Dans le recrutement également, l’essor des sites d’emploi a fait
changer la donne, et peu à peu démocratisé l’offre. Aujourd’hui, le
concept du haut de gamme low cost apporte l’assurance d’engagements
forts en terme de qualité, sur une équation alliant obligation de
résultat et obligation de moyen. Qu’on ne s’y trompe pas : pour ces
sociétés haut de gamme low cost, les outils, et les résultats, surtout,
sont les mêmes. Le pilote – responsable du recrutement - est
expérimenté, les avions – les principaux sites d’emploi – parfaitement
fiables, la promesse de destination – celle de présentation de
candidats –respectée, l’heure d’arrivée – la recherche effectuée en
temps – honorée.

Pour l’entreprise utilisatrice de ces services, l’intérêt de ces
prestations est le même que pour le consommateur : lui permettre de
bénéficier de prestations de qualité, et ce, même si ses moyens sont
limités. Le haut de gamme low cost en recrutement est un gage de valeur
ajoutée, au juste prix. Une belle occasion de combattre cette idée
selon laquelle seule une grosse facture est synonyme de beau voyage…

Eric Lecamus

Google Goes It Alone on 10 Gigabit Ethernet Switches

Datacenter managers face a dilemma: Should they write their own platform software, or farm it out? Different companies are taking different approaches to this problem.

Yahoo! Inc., which used to run an internally modified variation of FreeBSD, has since outsourced the job to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux team. Google, meanwhile, has been doing just the opposite — extensively customizing Linux and other open-source software for its own use, while generally refusing to contribute its work back to open-source projects. Google has also ordered custom motherboards from Intel Corp. that the search giant uses to build its own servers — a further indication of Google’s vertical integration.

Gordon Haff, senior analyst at Illuminata, has blogged about this issue for CNET and for Internet Evolution, where he wrote that Google “already intensely customizes ‘off-the-shelf’ components to its own purposes.”

This may not be the normal course of the tech marketplace, which tends to outsource even uniquely customized widgets — Apple’s iPhone, for instance, was made by 30 companies across three continents. But trends don’t determine Google’s path, as it has shown numerous times. "We're about not ever accepting that the way something has been done in the past is necessarily the best way to do it today," Douglas Merrill, Google’s director of internal technology, said in 2006 to a gathering of CIOs.

When Google realized that commercially available 10GbE (10 Gigabit Ethernet) switches couldn’t meet its high standards for power consumption and cost, it decided to make its own as part of a “secret internal initiative,” according to Andrew Schmitt of Nyquist Capital, which could have an “enormous ... disruptive impact” on the 10GbE supply chain. Schmitt had been trying to account for shipments of 10GbE components he had seen moving about the marketplace. Through his sleuthing, he tracked them to Google’s doorstep, where he discovered the search engine giant was building its own switches to interconnect servers within its datacenters. The costs related to designing and building its own switches to its specific needs were apparently less than modifying off-the-shelf alternatives. Schmitt speculated that Google based its design on Broadcom’s 20-port 10GbE switch.

Om Malik, of GigaOm, was quick to follow up on Schmitt’s Google scoop, and discovered that “these are early days for this particular core switch project.” Not only did GigaOm confirm Schmitt’s story, the widely read tech blog furthered the story by adding: "This is not the only [core switch project]” at Google, and that Fulcrum Micro may provide some competition for Broadcom in the end. Although Google has kept silent on the issue, its job page speaks for itself.

F STORY Irresistible Force Creates Moveable Object

Irresistible Force Creates Moveable Object

What is it that's said about the irresistible force?

Anyone encountering an engineer named Yukihiko Yaguchi might just find out first hand, for he's an irresistible force that's created a highly movable object.

Yaguchi is a very convincing, compelling guy, but he's also quiet and self effacing. Once he gets hold of you, you not only can't help but like him, you can't help but want to help him accomplish whatever it is that he's up to.

Plenty of people have learned that lesson, and there's solid evidence to support it. The evidence sits on four fat, sticky tires. It's called the Lexus IS F.

In order to understand the IS F and its genesis, the first thing that you have to understand is that Yaguchi is an enthusiast, a performance hard case who loves to drive fine, responsive equipment.

For the 30 years he's been at Toyota, he's wanted to build a car he wanted to drive, a car he'd love to own. During his tenure at Lexus, Yaguchi has worked on the first and second iterations of the Lexus LS luxury sedan, the turbocharged Toyota Supra and the first Lexus GS sport sedan. But none of those cars, however excellent, scratched his peculiar performance itch.

For the past 15 years, he's been thinking in terms of nothing less than an all-wheel-drive supercar with huge horsepower, racetrack-inspired handling and enormous stopping power.

What he had in mind was a take-no-prisoners premium sport sedan that would offer comfort, sophistication and performance to equal or beat the best of the class from Europe.

Finally, he got tired of waiting. He decided that he'd just go ahead and figure out a way to build it.

Yaguchi was ideally placed to ramrod such a project, as he was working at TMC's Lexus Center in the Brand Strategy department in preparation for the Lexus brand to expand globally.

Lexus is of course a well-organized company with carefully proscribed procedures for getting things done. But Yaguchi, the irresistible force, turned procedure on its head.

To begin with, in Lexus' careful way, it's not the engineers who make the decisions to design and develop a vehicle. It's the Product Planning Department. The experts there want to be sure that there's actually a market for a proposed vehicle, and that the finished product will fill the needs of that market.

So instead of the Product Planning people going to Yaguchi and saying something like, "Look, Yaguchi-san, we think that the market is ready for a high-performance sport sedan," it was the other way around. Yaguchi pitched his concept to Product Planning. Incredibly, after much convincing, he received Product Planning's approval to proceed.

But just because the project got the green light from Product Planning, that didn't mean that it had resources and budget allocated to it. It didn't. But that wasn't enough to derail Yaguchi. He developed the IF S when he wasn't busy with his Brand Strategy responsibilities, working informally, on the side, beginning in 2004.

In other words, in the best tradition of the factory-based hotrod, Yaguchi recruited his own special "Skunk Works," an under-the-radar operation populated by a team of speed-crazy rogue engineers who, working in their spare time between their regular assignments, developed their own vision for a Lexus performance vehicle.

Most chief engineers, when they are tasked to develop a new Lexus model, typically have between 1,500 and 2,000 people on their development teams. That didn't happen here. Instead, Yaguchi had between 100 and 300 people at any given time on the IS F development team. He designed and built the IS F with a team that was a fraction of the size of the usual engineering and development staffs.

Working outside the confines of Lexus' usual carefully planned corporate program, Yaguchi cherry-picked the very best people, folks he thought might want to have a hand in creating this special car. Because it wasn't possible to get them assigned full-time to his team, he convinced them to contribute their ideas and skills in their spare time, when they weren't working on their regular projects.

This approach didn't just apply to individuals. Yaguchi worked his wiles on whole departments. For example, a corporate subsidiary called Toyota Technocraft, among many of its special projects, builds packages for police cars and also builds the aero kits used on some Toyota models. Yaguchi reasoned that Toyota Technocraft would be perfect to help with the many specialized modifications of the standard Lexus IS that this car would require.

He pitched the idea to the division's leadership, and they went for it. The result is an engineering marvel with special aerodynamics, an 8-speed Sport Direct Shift transmission with paddle shifters and its own special performance profile, Brembo disc brakes that feature huge, 14.2-inch cross-drilled discs and six pistons per caliper up front, 19-inch wheels [4] and a specially tuned suspension system. Indeed, Technocraft's participation in the IS F project marks the first time the division has worked on the design of an entire production car.

But Yaguchi's determination didn't end there. He went so far, in fact, as to take his requests for help outside the company's confines. He knew that the IS F was going to require a really spectacular engine. So he went to Yamaha, which has a history of making engine components for Toyota and Lexus. He didn't go to just anyone, he asked his old friend Mr. Kimura, who worked on Yamaha's Formula One engine program and then general manager of the aftermarket project division, to help out. As a result of that request, Yamaha did most of the development on the IS F's DOHC 5.0L V8, making sure to pack it with more than 416 horsepower [1], enough to blast the IS F to 60 mph in 4.6 seconds[1] [5].

Eventually, none of this was done in secret. So well known did the project become, and so legendary was Yaguchi's persuasiveness, that the whole experience came to be known as Yaguchi-Go. In Japanese, today "go" is a suffix referring to a car, but originally it characterized a ship, the equivalent of a vessel making its unstoppable way forward. So this was Yaguchi and his project cutting a swath, and leaving a wake, through Toyota and Lexus. In this way, "Yaguchi-go" constitutes recognition of his leadership of, and ownership of, the IS F project.

To be certain they got the IS F exactly right, Yaguchi and his team tested the IS F at racetracks that count, at tracks that have challenge and heritage. Those test tracks include the legendary Nurburgring Nordschleife, in Germany's Eiffel Mountains; Circuit Paul Ricard, in the South of France; Circuit Zolder, in Belgium; Laguna Seca Raceway, in California; and Fuji Speedway, in Japan.

In fact, Fuji Speedway is the IS F's home circuit and its many turns the inspiration for the F-logo design.

In fact, by the time testing was concluded, there'd never been a Toyota or a Lexus production car that had been so heavily tested at race tracks all around the world.

The result of all this, of course, will be available to the public beginning in early 2008. And that means that Yaguchi can stop thinking about exactly the car he'd most like to drive. He can actually begin driving it... and so can every other enthusiast.