Technology Futures

An article in today's Wall Street Journal (B1) discusses the growing trend, mostly among businesses, to take advantage of ability of VoIP to offer a choice of area codes. Area codes like 212 and 415 (New York and San Francisco) are very popular.

Some businesses are doing it to take advantage of the having a prestige area code. That's of limited value over the long term; as more businesses do it, your area code will have less and less meaning. But another reason some businesses are doing it is to give their customers a local phone number. If you had significant business in the San Francisco area, it is just good business to give customers a local phone number to call for service and sales.

Over the long term, area codes will become less and less meaningful as VoIP spreads and phone numbers become truly portable. What's even more likely is that phone numbers will disappear completely; VoIP actually maps phone numbers to an IP address, meaning that the phone number is just an extra and unnecessary step. Over time, IP addresses will be used instead of phone numbers.

Delta Airlines has announced plans to use RFIDs (Radio Frequency ID) to track and manage luggage. Finally--a great use for RFIDs that has no privacy problems (unlike proposals to embed them in clothing so that we can be tracked 24 hours a day by the Gap). An RFID on a luggage tag will allow the airline to be able to tell where a piece of luggage is virtually in real time. If Delta does its homework on the staffing and management side, the airline should be able to dramatically cut the cost of dealing with lost luggage and make customers much happier at the same time--a win-win for new technology.

In a troubling ruling, the 1st U.S. Court of Circuit Appeals has said it is okay to read other people's email while it is "stored" on a server. Yahoo! News reports on the legal case of Interloc, a company that read the email of its subscribers to find out what Amazon.com was sending to them, and why.

The ruling seems to rely on hairsplitting, rather than commonsense. Wiretapping of "live" communications has always been subject to rigorous oversight, but email is not "live" in the same sense that a phone conversation is. An email messages transits through several servers, and is stored, sometimes for long periods of time, on the email server used by a particular user. The courts are taking the view that it is okay to read the email while it is stored on a third party machine.

It is as if the court said it was okay to open and read a piece of mail while it is in the mailbox down the street from your house.

It is hard to understand how the judges could so easily trample what seems obvious--email is and should be considered private, and both commercial companies and law enforcement officers should be constrained from reading email without strict oversight.

Fortunately, there is a perfectly good solution to the conundrum--encryption. We have the tools today to encrypt email using public key encryption, and this ruling will hasten more widespread use of encryption for routine communications. Done properly, encryption of email can be nearly transparent, but will be very effective as a deterrent to casual snooping of the kind done by Interloc. Encryption is the equivalent of putting our email in a tamper-resistant envelope; it keeps most people out. Is it perfect? No--but then neither are envelopes, but we've used them for centuries without much fuss or worry.

Unfortunately, part of the problem here is the lack of interest in improving email clients. Most email clients are given away free, so there is little incentive to improve them or to make features like encryption easy to use. But it's a business issue for the private sector, and as the bigger companies demand it, easy to use encryption will spread.

In the meantime, it would be a good idea to check your email settings to make sure you don't leave mail on your server, where it can now, apparently, be read by anyone with server access. Google's Gmail has been attracting a lot of attention because it offers a gigabyte of server-based mail storage for free. But I've already written about my concerns there--Google admits they insert ads into your email by reading the contents. And now, Google has free reign to read all your mail stored on its servers, any time it likes. Analyzing that information and selling it is, in all probablility, not far behind.

Welcome to the Knowledge Democracy, whether you like it or not.

A ruling by the FCC's Office of Engineering and Technology is an echo of the Bristol, Virginia decision that "any" means "any."

Airports, malls, and condo associations, among others, have been trying to limit the use of WiFi, primarily for financial reasons. The mall owner or airport authority wanted the revenue sharing from providing exclusive access to the facility from a single vendor. It's a form of bandwidth aggregation that does not always benefit consumers because not everyone benefits equally--the WiFi vendor and the property owner have a controlling interest in setting fees and keep all the profits. Bandwidth aggregation as a thinly veiled monopoly rarely benefits consumers.

Airports, as frequent travelers know well, are notorius for high access fees, averaging $10/day for a typical fifteen or twenty minute use as you pass through. The FCC ruling says the FCC alone can determine who may or may not deploy unlicensed WiFi services. It's a victory for consumers, and the FCC deserves a tip of the hat for doing so.