Technology Futures

Here is a very short article about the falling price of DSL service in the U.S. Usually, when prices fall, it is a possible indicator that people are not buying enough of whatever is for sale, or that they supplier has "too much" of something. In the case of DSL, both is probably true. The phone companies have been investing heavily in upgrading their local phone systems to handle DSL, but with limited success, apparently, or they would not be cutting prices.

Some crooks in England figured out how to steal credit card numbers from credit cards that have embedded RFID (Radio Frequency ID) tags in them. The RFID tags can be read at a distance.

Ireland's research and higher education network, HEAnet, is getting configurable lightpaths. What are configurable lightpaths? It means that ordinary network users can configure a single wavelength of light on a fiber network from their computer or server to another computer or server on the same network (the computers could be hundreds or thousands of miles apart).

Much is being made of the AOL security lapse, where they left millions of search records sitting in a file anyone could download if they knew where it was.

This importance of this article really has little to do with the NSA. It is an excellent reminder, however, that reliable and resilient electric power drives IT--literally. Substitute 'our local IT firm' for 'NSA' and read the article a second time. The NSA is facing expansion difficulties because it cannot get the power it needs to run its IT infrastructure.

A bill has been approved by the House of Representatives that requires K12 schools and libraries that receive Federal funding to block social networking sites, so that minors cannot access them.

This video of how to change the vote count on a Diebold voting machine is somewhat tongue in cheek, but illustrates how the vote count on a machine could be altered from inside the voting booth in a few minutes--no longer than some people spend pondering their votes.

Any community that has Diebold machines should be talking to the their lawyer right now.

The Open Voting Foundation has found yet more flaws in Diebold voting machines. A single switch on the motherboard allows someone to boot the machine from external memory. This would allow someone to change the way the machine counts votes. The machine can then be flipped back to the original memory, and no one would know the machine had been tampered with.

The City of Boston has decided to develop an open access wireless network for the city. This project might actually succeed where many other communitywide wireless projects have struggled. Boston has decided to do some things differently.

It is official. YouTube has overtaken MySpace as the world's biggest time waster. MySpace is primarily a playground for high school and college kids who place a high value on knowing too much about people they might meet before they actually meet them. YouTube, on the other hand, is an equal opportunity time waster, with something to offer everyone.

The FBI continues to lobby to try to force ISPs to snoop for the government. This is something the federal agency has been asking for for years, and has tried to get Congress and the FCC to go along with the plan.

What the FBI wants is for every ISP to provide private access to an ISPs entire network so that the FBI can just log in and snoop at its convenience. In theory, court orders would be required, just like wiretaps, but to have private backdoors is to invite abuse.

Prepare to be depressed. French Telecom has just announced that it is rolling out fiber service in major cities with download speeds of 2.5 Gigabits/second and upload speeds of 1.2 Gigabits/second. The cost? Seventy Euros, or about $85 US.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the heads of the major telecoms are patting us on the head and telling us we don't need superhighways to our homes, that DSL sidwalks are just fine. A typical DSL connection in the U.S. is about two thousand times slower than the Gigabit service being rolled out in France.

Many a science fiction novel has included a device that can spit out any kind of product automagically simply by feeding in design specs for it. Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age is just one example with that kind of technology. But in this case, gee whiz scifi ideas are fast becoming ho-hum reality.

We know exactly what will happen if the big telecom companies succeed in convincing Congress to let them partition the Internet. We have a perfectly good example of the mess we will be in, and it is called the cellphone industry. Read this article [link no longer available] to see how innovation is choked off, small businesses are forced out of the market place, and how consumers end up paying more, much more, for mediocre services.

A three year old Philadelphia project to turn waste into gas, oil, and minerals has been so successful that the EPA and private investors are putting money behind expansion of the effort. One of the new sites will be in Missouri, near a turkey processing plant. The energy recycling plant will turn 200 tons of turkey guts into 10 tons of gas and 600 barrels of oil. The gas is used to power the plant, which is 85% efficient.

If you want a perfect example of what is driving the likes of Verizon and Comcast crazy, take a look at CNet TV, which is currently in beta. CNet has a huge collection of video material that has been available on some cable systems for a long time, and they are now putting all this on the Web.

This article is a great summary of some of the new "Search 2.0" search engines that represent third generation technologies. The first generation of search engines were those that simply indexed the content of Web pages, with the venerable Alta Vista as the best example. Google defined second generation search technology, which looked at links to and from a Web page as a way of determining relevance.

The Mainstream Media (MSM) have consistently turned their backs on bloggers with portrayals as amateurs in "pajamas," among other characterizations. A lot of data on blogging has been self-serving, in one way or another. Sites like Technorati consistently overstate the importance of blog sites, and bloggers themselves often take themselves too seriously. On the other side, the MSM has usually tried to understate the impact of bloggers on the news and on the craft of journalism itself.

Rumors are flying that Apple will announce that the iTunes store will start carrying movies. Apple will hold its annual developers conference in a couple of weeks, and lots of people expect that Steve Jobs will show off the ability to download a movie and watch it at home. Supposedly Apple has struck deals with many of the major movie studios. What is likely is that the movies will have a time stamp that will allow you to watch them all you want for a limited amount of time (like a week or two). This would mirror going down to Blockbuster and renting a movie.

As Design Nine works with more and more communities on broadband development, I have become convinced that the only financial model that is going to work over the long term is the Open Service Provider Network (OSPN). What this means is that the network is designed, constructed, and managed specifically to allow and support a marketplace of service providers that compete for subscribers.