Technology Futures

My hat is off to Microsoft for their extremely aggressive efforts to encrypt customer data. In the wake of the Snowden leaks that revealed NSA collecting data from companies like Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, and others, Microsoft has correctly recognized the serious impact that data collection could have on the company's bottom line, both in the U.S. and abroad.

Like most companies providing Internet-based services, the marketplace is global, and international customers are not going to be particularly happy that the NSA is collecting their email, text messages, and documents. Here is a snippet of what is being done, directly from Microsoft:

In light of these allegations, we’ve decided to take immediate and coordinated action in three areas:

• We are expanding encryption across our services.
• We are reinforcing legal protections for our customers’ data.
• We are enhancing the transparency of our software code, making it easier for customers to reassure themselves that our products do not contain back doors.

I never bought into the idea that these companies were actively cooperating with the NSA. It's just too easy to capture data streams from, say, a Microsoft data center somewhere else in the network.

There was a time when heavy encryption was processor-intensive and therefore expensive to do, but processing power is so cheap now it can be added without much cost or effort, and in the future, we will see nearly every personal and business communication that traverses the public Internet will be encrypted. It's just good business.

FastRoads is a Gigabit network designed and built by Design Nine for New Hampshire FastRoads LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Monadnock Economic Development Corporation. One of the surprises, as we add more customers, is the unexpected demand for the 50 Meg Internet service, which is turning out to be higher than expected. On the FastRoads network, every connection is a Gigabit circuit capable of delivering multiple services from several different providers.

A new report illustrates just how dire the situation is for the cable companies; Netflix and YouTube use half of all the bandwidth on the Internet. Cable TV is brain dead, but the body is still on life support. There is no future in cable, and satellite will be the next to go as more fiber is deployed into areas unserved by cable. This is not a matter of "if" anymore, it's all about the "when." I think it is safe to say that most of the country will have fiber connections by 2025.

I'm not even going to try to link to them, but a flood of privacy-enabled apps and services are already beginning to appear.....heavily encrypted email apps, encrypted VPN apps, Web browsers that automatically route queries through proxy services that mask your IP address....the Internet was designed to survive a nuclear holocaust. Snooping by the NSA....anything the NSA can do, geeks can probably route around without a whole lot of effort.