Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Chinese government competes with Google
Just weeks after news that Google "respects" the Chinese government's efforts to censor free speech, the Chinese have rolled out their own search engine, meaning that Google's efforts to suck up to the communists was all for naught.
The Accoona name, according to the Web site, "is derived from the Swahili phrase, Hakuna Matata, which means 'don’t worry be happy.'” In other words, the communist government has used a name popularized by a Disney character who, in the movie, went around saying, "Don't worry, be happy." Which kind of sounds, to me, like instructions to the Chinese people.
"Don't worry that we are cataloguing everything you look at. Don't worry that we are building a dossier of every single search you have ever made. Don't worry that we will throw you in jail and beat you for typing the word "freedom" in your browser. Don't worry that we can make you disappear if we feel the need. Just be happy."
Even stranger, the Chinese have hired Bill Clinton as a spokesperson. So now we have ex-presidents flogging communist-controlled search engines? What's next? U.S. Senators promoting Viagra?
I'll pass on this search engine. Hard as it is to imagine, this outfit will probably make Google look like good guys.
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Knowledge Democracy:
Maryland bans Diebold voting machines
Following on the heels of New Mexico, which recently mandated that all voting systems in the state use an auditable paper ballot, Maryland has banned the faulty and insecure Diebold voting machines. The legislature has required that the company retro-fit the machines with a paper record of each vote, and also specified changes in security and machine set up to reduce the possibility of vote tampering by those with physical access to the machines.
The Dieblold machines can have their vote count changed by someone with physical access to the machine, and without a paper trail, there is no way to detect the altered votes. It is a great relief that lawmakers have finally begun to make changes. What is unfortunate is that these very same lawmakers wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on faulty systems. Many security experts warned of problems long before the systems went into use.
Knowledge Democracy:
Debit card PINs stolen
As we move more and more of our financial transactions away from cash and toward end to end electronic transactions, our systems have to become more reliable and more secure.
But a lot of systems were designed and implemented prior to ubiquitous worldwide access via the Internet, and the security that worked okay then has to be regularly scrutinized and tested today.
Hackers figured out how to steal PINs and the encryption keys used to decode PINs from Citibank.. It is the latter that is the real problem. Merchants are apparently not erasing all of the data from a debit card transaction once it is complete, and hackers figured out to read the data, giving them access to thousands of PINs and the associated accounts. The Citibank problem is only with debit cards, but it is a warning to banks, merchants, and credit card processors that security reviews and testing have to be part of the normal IT budget.
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Say good-bye to the laptop
I think the laptop is a dying device. They will not disappear entirely, but ten years from now, you won't see them very often.
On the desktop, most of us will have something that looks a lot like the Mac mini--a very small, quiet, fast, and unobtrusive device. Or we will have something like the iMac, where there is no box at all. Windows versions of the mini are already appearing.
So where does that leave the laptop?
Most laptops will be replaced by smaller, much lighter flat panel computers that have no keyboard. CeBit, the big computer hardware expo, is , and we will see many more of these in the next year or so. Very few of us really need to lug around a laptop when traveling. These little devices will do most on the road jobs very nicely.
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There is still a lot we don't know
Scientists at Sandia Labs have created temperatures of 3.6 billion degrees Fahrenheit. To put that in perspective, it is only about 15 million degrees Fahrenheit at the center of the sun.
You should read the whole article, but they have been able to duplicate the results consistently. Even more interesting, they don't understand how it is happening. They just know that they can do it over and over again, meaning it's not some one time fluke.
Here is the really interesting part: At a certain point in the process, the machine is emitting more energy than it takes to get the process started. In other words, scientists have stumbled onto an entirely new way to generate energy. From the article:
"Sandia consultant Malcolm Haines theorizes that some unknown energy source is involved, which is providing the machine with an extra jolt of energy just as the plasma ions are beginning to slow down."
Yes, we are runnning out of oil, but we've got lots of other options that are going to replace oil, and will likely cost less and pollute much less. We have a bright future ahead of us--literally. My prediction--over the next hundred years, energy prices will actually drop. Plan for it.
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iTunes sells The Daily Show
Apple has signed a contract with Comedy Central to sell a whole month's worth of The Daily Show (16 episodes) for $9.99. That works out to sixty-two cents per show. That's not a bad price, but I think that long term, we need to see the cost per half hour go below ten cents for things that you are not likely to watch more than once.
But things are headed in the right direction. This allows you to cut the tether to the television completely if there are only a few shows you care about. With cable TV bills running close to $40/month, if you are selective about what you watch (of course, not everyone is), you can buy a lot of TV at about $1 per hour.
Not coincidentally, as I predicted long ago, Tivo is having problems. Everyone and their brother are rolling out digital video recorder (DVR) boxes, with the cable companies putting real pressure on the firm, but the ability to just download what you want to watch and store it on your computer completely negates the need for a DVR at all. And the high initial price plus the monthly subscription will buy you a lot of TV at the iTunes store.
The DVR market is dead. A wide variety of excellent open source (free) and commercial DVR software programs that run on your home computer will be available within a year, they won't cost anything to use, and it won't send all your viewing choices back to the company where they sell them to advertisers building massive dossiers on your life. There are already lots of choices, and the DVR software market is growing daily. Tivo is dead, dead, dead.
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Google click fraud costs $90 million
Google has chosen to pay advertisers a settlement of $90 million in return from protection from future lawsuits. Numerous advertisers have found competitors paying people to click on ads and/or using software 'bots to click through ads. Doing so brings more revenue to Google and can dramatically increase costs for advertisers.
Google has refused to talk about the problem much, leading to speculation that the company profits handsomely from the fraud. The company has detailed statistics on where clicks come from, and could certainly develop analytical routines that look for such fraud and throw away fraudulent click throughs. But that would reduce revenue. Google stock lost 3% after the announcement.
In other Google news, screen snapshots have leaked out on Google's "free" calendar application, which of course will be lathered with ads and will require you to provide personal information to Google to use. The company is probably drooling over the thought of getting whole families to use the application, because they can then capture young consumers and begin building dossiers on them at a very early age.
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Toronto announces wireless blanket
I am not a big fan of me-too municipal wireless projects. Wireless technology remains in flux, with new equipment and systems coming online constantly. Interference and bandwidth issues have to be considered very carefully when designing these systems. And you have to know how you are going to pay for the network management and maintenance.
In other words, a community should not be planning a big wireless initiative just because "that's what they are doing in Philadelphia."
The city of Toronto has just announced a big wireless project, and they have an interesting approach to making the system pay for itself--VoIP.
The city wants to create competition for the cellular companies, and wireless VoIP could be just the thing. From a technical perspective, VoIP is clearly superior (think BetaMax). But wireless VoIP phones are not very appealing because they only work where there is a hotspot. And we want our phones to work everywhere.
So the cellular companies have an inferior voice/data combo (voice and EVDO data service) that works with an infrastructure already in place (think VHS). Wireless VoIP phones won't catch on unless they work, but how do build out the infrastructure when you don't have enough customers to pay the bills?
It's a classic chicken and egg problem.
But if local government steps in and helps with the infrastructure part, everybody wins. Suddenly, lots of people can use VoIP phones throughout the city, and competition drives voice prices down.
What would be great is if the city of Toronto allows multiple service providers to sell VoIP over the city network--that creates a win-win situation that creates jobs and opportunities in the private sector while those service providers pay small fees based on income to the city, which pays for the investment and maintenance.
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SpaceX wants to compete with Russia
SpaceX, an American space technology firm, has decided to compete with Russia. Russia has been making a lot of money from the U.S. by hauling payloads and staff back and forth to the space station while NASA sorts out the flying foam problems of the Space Shuttle.
SpaceX just announced that they have been working on a reusable crew capsule that is a cross between the Soyuz and Apollo capsules. It is designed primarily to haul people and freight back and forth to the space station. The company has other space vehicles under development as well.
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Will XORP give Cisco heartburn?
Cisco is the biggest network equipment company on the planet. They sell lots of the equipment that powers the Internet, and many of these boxes are called routers, which act as traffic lights for Internet data. Routers route, to coin a phrase. The boxes, often not very big, sit quietly in closets and data centers all over the world and look at every single data packet passing through the box and decide where to send it.
From a certain distance, Cisco looks like an equipment manufacturer, but in fact, their primary product is the software that makes those boxes work. Routers have a specialized network operating system, and much of Cisco's income is derived from maintenance contracts that provide for upgrades, not to the equipment, but to the software installed in the equipment.
Open source routers have been around for a while; a cheap PC is used as the hardware platform. But the open source router software has typically been limited in utility and has required careful management. Lots of IT managers prefer the predictability and support that Cisco provides to trusting the company network to a loosely organized group of volunteer programmers.
But a new business, called Vyatta, has decided to take on Cisco by using open source router software. How do they plan to make money? By providing the same level of service and support Cisco does. But their R&D costs will be much lower because of the open source software they are using. It's a new business model, and it's where most software will head over the next decade.
In many cases, it simply does not make sense to spend money duplicating a piece of software to create a competitive product when in fact most customers are more interested in the service and support side. We will see more and more software companies providing outstanding service and support of free software.
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