FROM the Telegraph

Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg to meet Barack Obama

Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg will be among the Silicon Valley executives at a private meeting with Barack Obama later today, according to reports.

The US President is flying to the West Coast this afternoon to discuss his budget and technology policy plans with business leaders including the Apple, Google and Facebook CEOs.

"The President and the business leaders will discuss our shared goal of promoting American innovation, and discuss his commitment to new investments in research and development, education and clean energy,” the White House said.

News of Jobs' attendance comes less than 24 hours after unverified claims by a US celebrity gossip magazine that his health has sharply detriorated. The 55-year-old, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004 and received a liver transplant in 2009, has been on medical leave from Apple since mid-January.

He was photographed entering a cancer clinic in Palo Alto, close to his firm's headquarters in Cupertino.

The Obama adminstration has close ties to Silicon Valley, especially to Google, with many of the firm's former employees in policy roles.

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FROM FAST COMPANY


Why You Should Trust Apple More Than the U.S. Commerce Dept. With Your Universal Online ID
BY KIT EATONToday


The U.S. Commerce Department is pushing a "National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace" plan, wherein passwords would give way to a single login on phones and computers. These logins would rely on  on biometric card technology, or something similar. This sounds a lot like Apple's NFC plans. Here's why Apple's idea is better.

The online password, we know, is a broken system. Gawker's database hack alone demonstrates how weak a security system it is, along with countless pieces of research (although, of course, not everyone is as juicy a target as Gawker). And when you add in the hassle factor of remembering a string of passwords to tap in to every site as we increasingly live our lives online, the password system sure becomes a giant pain in the you know where. (Hence the rise of Facebook's universal login--although that still relies on a password.) Some system that replaces all of this mess would be most welcome.

Enter the U.S. Commerce Department's National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), which has been around in draft form for a while but is now getting serious government backing. As BusinessWeek notes in it's piece about the idea, it's a "new online security system that experts say will eliminate the password maze and perhaps boost e-commerce." The article even quotes John Clippinger, co-director of Harvard's Law Lab at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and an "advocate" of the plan as saying it'll "be far more efficient and you'll control it a lot more."

The trick behind the NSTIC is that there will be some form of universal login system that replaces the password every time you flick on a PC or power-up your smartphone. It would be unique to you, and it would establish your identity in a secure, encrypted way that could be shared with online services--meaning you'd never need to remember another online password. The idea is that some kind of physical token, like an RFID card, would be waved over a sensor, possibly combined with direct biometric markers like a fingerprint.

It would make logins much easier, says the Dept. of Commerce, it could push online more services that are don't yet trust the Net (like medical records), and it could revolutionize online trading because it'd enable vendors to believe in the identity of their customers, while lessening the chances of fraud. One could even imagine an eventual reduction in the size of company help desks, as one of their biggest burdens is "dealing with lost passwords," according to Homeland Security spokesman Bruce McConnell.

The government has promised to get things off to a running start by pushing agencies to adopt NSTIC for taxes, veterans benefits and so on.

But all of this activity might be too late--and not good enough. Apple, along with a number of other companies, has long been exploring this kind of system, and Apple, seemingly above all others, has aggressively patented ideas in the field of NFC RFID tech. (That's Near Field Communication and Radio Frequency Identification, for those keeping score at home.) The ideas include logins at computers, ATMs, and so on--and they could revolutionize payment systems in stores in ways we can only barely imagine. If Apple does put NFC into its next-gen iPhone and iPod Touch (leveraging its global database of millions of iTunes subscriber credit cards), it could possibly encourage a paradigm shift in payment tech, in the same way it's transformed digital music and smartphones. An army of clone companies would follow.

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