Technology Futures

Here is an interesting article that highlights what Apple might have planned for the Apple TV. Anyone that thinks the cable TV companies are going to automagically solve our broadband problems should read this.

The FBI says that you might want to leave your laptop home when traveling overseas. The latest scam is from criminals who set up bogus WiFi networks that look just like the real hotel network. When you fire up your laptop, you get what looks like the real hotel login page, but it is a fake one that immediately loads zombie malware onto your computer. Another trick they use is to have a fake "software update needed" window pop up. Everyone is now so used to getting these automatic software update notices that criminals are taking advantage of the fact that everyone automatically clicks "OK" for these upgrades. The same thing happens: instead of an upgrade, your laptop gets loaded with malware that starts capturing credit card numbers and login information.

Be careful out there.

Georgia Tech and Microsoft have released a study that confirms what most of us already knew: bandwidth caps discourage people from using broadband productively. Bandwidth caps are great for inflating the profit margins of the incumbents when someone runs over their limit and starts incurring more charges, but if you want your business community and your work from home business start ups to be as productive as possible, saddling them with outdated 20th century infrastructure that limits what they can do is not the way to go.

Design Nine helps our clients build modern broadband networks that can deliver as much bandwidth as any business or home-based worker might need--affordably. It's not that hard, but it does require the right business model, the right long term financial plan, and a network architecture that can deliver Gigabit bandwidth affordably without crippling economic development.

Adobe has announced Muse, "...a program for creating web pages without hand coding." Great. Except it costs $14.99 a month, or buy the CreativeCloud package for $49.99 a month. We're in the midst of a bubble where lots of companies think they are going to make lots of money by selling software as a service. But this bubble, like all bubbles, is unsustainable. No company or individual can afford to be paying what quickly adds up to hundreds of dollars a month for "cloud" services. It just does not scale. And expect many many disasters when most of these companies go out of business and a) you find that your data was stored in a proprietary format that cannot be easily moved to some other software, or b) all your data is just plain gone when the company goes belly up.

The cloud is extraordinarily useful for many kinds of applications, but there are two big assumptions: the network will always be there to access your data, and the company will always be there so you can access your data. As for the former, if some rogue state detonates an EMP device over the U.S. that takes out most networks and data centers, what do you do? If a major solar storm/EMP takes out most networks and data centers, what do you do? If you cloud company goes out of business, what do you do?

Backups, backups, and backups. Some of those backups need to be under your direct control. If all your backups are in the cloud and you can't access the cloud, what do you do?

We're building a house of cards here, and placing entirely too much trust in cloud-based services.