Technology Futures

We hear continually about the "problems" of the airlines. I had a few problems with an airline myself yesterday as thunderstorms buffeted the East Coast and snarled up traffic.

I was trying to leave Manchester, Vermont and get back to Roanoke, Virginia. Under normal conditions, the two leg journey (through Dulles in D.C.) takes just four hours. Yesterday, it took ten hours, mostly for no good reason.

Knowing the weather was causing problems, I showed up at the Manchester airport about four hours before my scheduled flight. At the ticket counter, United refused to book me on an earlier flight unless I paid $100 extra. I persisted, and I was told I could try standby for no extra fee, so I opted for that. I went through security and went up to the gate where the earlier flight was leaving, and discovered that the noon flight to Dulles was just getting loaded (four hours late...a bad sign).

I tried getting on, but the gate attendants refused to talk to several of us on later flights that wanted to get out. Talking among ourselves, we decided it was a lost cause, and a couple businesspeople left to go get some dinner. I lingered at the counter for another minute, and a different gate attendant walked up and asked if anyone else needed to go to D.C. I stepped up, and she said, "Oh, you need to go on this flight, because your flight is canceled." Huh? I'd been at this gate for nearly an hour, and no announcement had been made. When did they plan to tell me? She changed my ticket and put me on the plane, which had at least a dozen empty seats. They held the plane a bit longer, and filled all the seats. So far, so good, I figured...I'd get home tonight.

When I got to Dulles, I tried to repeat that. I went to the gate where an earlier Roanoke flight (late) was leaving. They had just started boarding, and I counted only about fifteen people getting on a fifty seat regional jet. Several of us tried to get rebooked on the flight, but the gate attendants ignored us. Finally the flight left, and I was able to get one of them to direct me to the gate where my flight was leaving.

State officials in New Hampshire have announced that they have "discovered" that chat, email, and other Internet services are "two way communication" and have decided that those services fall under the umbrella of a statute written in the early nineties (before the rise of the Internet) that taxes telelphone services.

I would venture to guess that the majority of my readers have broadband access, either at the office, or at home, or both. If you are someone that has to use both, you know what the differences are--for those that have broadband at the office and at home, it is easy to forget how slow dialup really is.

The Roanoke airport deserves kudos for providing free WiFi access while bigger airports like Atlanta and Charlotte still don't offer this service. Like it or not, WiFi in public places is fast becoming just another amenity, like rest rooms, water fountains, and sidewalks.

The owner of Budget Suites of America, Bob Bigleow, has had a secret operation at work for the past several years in Nevada, building a space hotel. Not surprisingly, one of his closest associates is Burt Rutan, owner and designer of SpaceShipOne, which flew into space just a couple of weeks ago.

Bigelow and Rutan together are creating synergy. Rutan's spaceships will attract a lot more paying customers if he has somewhere to take them, and Bigelow's space hotel needs an inexpensive (i.e. non-government controlled) spaceship to get folks to and from orbit.

Sound crazy? No, it's the global Knowledge Economy at work. The article is long, but well worth reading to the end, where Bigelow describes how he has cut costs ($200 million versus the $50 billion Nasa has spent) by shopping globally. Bigelow cited one example of a subsystem he needed; an American aerospace company wanted $100 million to design and build it. Instead, he bought it in Europe for $1.3 million.

Like it or not, we're at the dawn of a new age. No, it's not the Information Age; that was over 2 years ago. In the Knowledge Economy, as Bigelow is demonstrating, who you know is more important than what you know. Bigelow has been able to reach out globally, forge business relationships with firms in other countries, and design and build better and faster than NASA. NASA is stuck trying to make "old" relationships work; the government agency has had numerous failures and despite all the money it has spent, has not been able to advance its program.

What about your region? Are you still stuck trying to make "old," Manufacturing Economy relationships work? Are you helping your existing businesses learn to shop globally for the parts, products, and services they need to be competitive in a world market? Are you throwing away the rulebook and starting with a fresh sheet of paper to create your economic development strategy?

An article in today's Wall Street Journal (B1) details the success of Hutchinson Technology, a company with four plants in southern Minnesota. Hutchinson manufactures most of the world's supply of the support arms used to hold the read/write head in hard drives. Most of its output is exported to Asia, where most hard drives are manufactured now.

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.

The U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) issued an advisory last week warning about a major bug in Internet Explorer that allows remote Web sites to get access to your computer under certain circumstances. CERT has recommended switching to another browser, like the excellent Open Source (free) FireFox.

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.

The Register reports that China continues to be the world's primary source of spam Web sites--hosting the Web sites that show up in all that email spam. The U.S. continues to be the source of most email spam.

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.

The recently announced MeshCube is an immature product--the Web site needs more and better information--but it is the shape of things to come in the WiFi world. The MeshCube is three inches square. It can have two radios installed (one for local point to multipoint access--the typical hotspot use, and one for point to point longer distance access to an Internet feed). It can be powered by POE (Power Over Ethernet), meaning you don't have to run 120 VAC to it, just a simple low voltage Ethernet cable, making it easy to install outside.

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

An article in The Register provides a nice synopsis of the worldwide trend for municipalities to offer public WiFi. It's happening most often in the big cities first, where businesspeople congregate in public spaces more and expect Internet access.

The City of Spokane has rolled out a new wireless zone that covers most of the major downtown area (more than 100 square blocks). Rather than leaving the growth of WiFi entirely to the private sector, which typically leaves lots of dead zones in an urban downtown, the city mapped its own antenna sites and was able to cover the entire area with just ten antennas--a much more efficient design that provides virtually 100% coverage.

In a widely carried AP report, AT&T has announced it is getting out of local dial tone and long distance in several states, and may abandon most other states shortly. There are two things going on here, and only one of them was discussed in the article.

The article correctly notes that the proximate cause for the AT&T pullback is the FCC ruling that allows the local phone companies to charge higher wholesale rates for their antique copper telephone lines. AT&T has been leasing these in bulk to provide local dialtone. The higher rates make it unprofitable for AT&T to do so.

On the face of it, this looks bad for local communities, as there seems to be less competition, and puts the local phone companies back near their previous monopoly status for dialtone.

What was not covered well in the AP article is the fact that AT&T is making a major push for Voice over IP local and long distance services. The company has wisely decided to abandon the antique phone service market and concentrate on selling what is going to count in the future. It's a smart move.

Some of the phone companies are not standing still, however. SBC has announced it will spend billions on fiber to the neighborhood and fiber to the premises, although the latter will be done only in new neighborhoods for now. The new system will have the capacity for a single channel of HD TV--much higher capacity than existing DSL lines, but still not what will be needed in the future. But the fiber has the carrying capacity--SBC is reluctant to put in the electronics, probably because of cost and because they are trying to control access.

Communities getting these new systems may breathe a sigh of relief that they don't need to do that telecom planning after all, but their headaches are simply being deferred to the future. A monopoly is a monopoly, and it does not matter much if it is a legal monopoly (the old, pre-1996 approach) or a de facto marketplace monopoly.

I've been writing for some time about the looming battle over local and state telecom taxes. As more traditional telecom services move to the Internet, the telecom taxes that localities and the state have become so fond of just disappear. I've yet to talk to an elected official who A) understands this, or B) has a plan for dealing with it.

Florida state officials have knocked a telecom tax hornet's nest off the tree, and are about to start poking it with a stick, unless someone comes to their senses.

Day by day, new technologies add more and more complexity to our lives while simultaneously making things better.

Internet radio has extended the reach of many local stations to literally, a worldwide audience. Expatriates can listen to hometown programming and news from anywhere in the world. The radio stations benefit from a broader audience, which allows them to raise advertising rates. Advertisers are happy because Internet radio provides better information on how many people are actually listening to the radio.

So what's the problem? HD radio (High Definition), or digital radio, both broadcast over the air or over the Internet, offers higher fidelity. But the music industry is flummoxed because as HD radio becomes more common, it will be possible to make excellent, high quality recordings off the air (which you can do now with any good FM signal, but most people don't bother).

If that is not enough to give record company officials nightmares, the thought of having listeners then use filesharing to "share" all those recordings over the Internet is about to send them right over the edge.

This situation has been building since CDs first became popular twenty years ago, but the Internet, giving music lovers the ability to share music, has made it worse. Amid the smoke and heat of the discussion, there is a legitimate issue about what constitutes fair use. Unfortunately, we have two polarized points of view. The recording industry wants to take back fair use rights consumers have had since Edison started making recordings. In their ideal world, we'd have to pay every time we listen or watch anything (not a good thing). On the other side a a group of mostly college age music listeners who think there is nothing wrong with sharing copyrighted music with the whole world (also not a good or thoughtful thing).

In the middle are a lot of people who think that the music industry is going to have to face the fact that the world has changed, and how record and movie companies make money will have to change along with the world. In the meantime, the entertainment industry is trying furiously to buy the best laws they can afford. Some Congressional reps and Senators, desperate to fill campaign coffers, are all to eager to help out.

Congressman Rick Boucher (D) of southwest Virginia has a broad coalition of industry and consumer rights groups for his
reform of the DCMA law.

Congressman Rick Boucher (D) of southwest Virginia has a broad coalition of industry and consumer rights groups for his
reform of the DCMA law.