'Net Insider

A surfeit of network neutrality legislation
05/13/08
Two proposed network neutrality bills are wending their way through Congress. They’re not bad but not perfect either, says columnist Scott Bradner.

Network managers: good worries, disappointing lapses
05/06/08
VanDyke Software recently published results of the fifth annual edition of its survey of network and system administrators the company hired Amplitude Research to conduct and analyze. Most of the survey questions concerned security.

The elusive third wire for Internet service
04/29/08
I wish network neutrality wasn't an important issue, but it is.

Online privacy: railing against the accepted
04/22/08
I frequently use this column to rail against threats to the privacy of Internet users, both from government and the private sector. I just found a survey published late last year by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that reports that people are coming to support, or at last not object too strongly to, some types of spying.

Telling Google and others to do less evil
04/15/08
Google, Yahoo and other search engine companies are in the data gathering business. The fact that they offer you and me the service of locating things on the Internet is a means to an end, and that end is data about what you and I do online. They are like the folks that hoard string - the more string they gather the better they feel even if there is little or no actual use for most of what they gather.

Telephony: creeping disconnection
04/08/08
Each new survey shows that the number of people who have forsaken their traditional landline phones keeps growing. This, coupled with changes in the way people use cell phones, is starting to impact a number of areas in ways that people might not have expected just a few months ago.

Comcast and Verizon: Foxhole conversions?
04/01/08
It's been a strange few weeks for us carrier-watchers. First Verizon announced it was going to open its cell network to all "approved" devices, then Comcast announced that it has become buddies with BitTorrent and would switch to a protocol-agnostic method of managing network capacity by year-end.

FCC: Consistent to a fault, but there is a (small) hope
03/25/08
FCC’s annual misrepresentation of U.S. broadband deployment status may change in the future

Irrelevant victories in the war on spam
03/18/08
On the surface it might look like there has been some real legal progress against spam of late. But don't be fooled; these victories, real as they may be for the people involved, don't mean much to you and me.

iPhone plus SDK: promise, threat and limits
03/11/08
Apple’s software development kit for the iPhone provides promise to developers, threatens competitors but may be annoyingly limited.

DRM: a slow clue train?
03/04/08
The New York Times reported on March 3 that Random House has decided to offer all of its audio books without digital rights management (DRM) unless a particular retailer or author objected. The Times reported that Penguin Group would soon follow. The realization that maybe exploring new business models makes more long-term sense than trying to make a model predicated on the distribution of physical objects work in a digital age has been slow, and far from uniform, but progress is being made.

Cold bits as a security bypass
02/26/08
Columnist Scott Bradner discusses how worried you should really be about a new disk-encryption bypass exposed by Princeton security researchers.

SCO Group: Prolonging death or what?
02/19/08
Earlier this year, it looked like The SCO Group was going down for the count. It had lost a key decision in its suit against Novell, declared bankruptcy and was quickly running out of money.

Slow motion wake-up call for Web accessibility
02/11/08
The latest step in the lawsuit by the National Federation of the Blind against Target played out in a Baltimore court early this year, with Target’s appeal being denied. So the case will proceed, and if the NFB prevails a whole lot of corporate Web sites will need to be updated.

What a fragile, tangled communications web we’ve woven
02/05/08
A ubiquitous Internet requires ubiquitous connectivity, and we are doing quite well in this arena. Of course, there are significant parts of the world and parts of the United States where there is far from enough transmission capacity, but those areas are shrinking every day.

The missing phone device and the IRS
01/28/08
The cell-phone-only trend has been slowed by the lack of the right device, and may be partially derailed by an IRS move to tax all employees for company-provided equipment -- such as cell phones.

Why the Internet is not today's CNN
01/22/08
The Internet is growing as a source for political news, but with many blogs being anonymously written, that's a bit scary.

Apple's MacBook Air: evolution, not revolution
01/15/08
As I write this it's a little after noon Eastern Time on Jan. 15. I'm sitting in front of my computer (a Mac of course) watching two different live blogs coming from people watching the Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld 2008. I'm watching to see what, if any, "big" announcements Steve will make.

Election (including security) madness
01/08/08
There's undercurrent of mistrust when it comes to the voting machines many people use. Could the machines themselves have a deciding impact on elections?

Apple's next mold breaker?
12/24/07
My editor pointed out that this issue has a forward/predicting theme and suggested I keep that in mind when figuring out what to write. After pondering that for a while I decided to write about what I'd like to happen rather than predict what may actually happen when Steve Jobs announces new Apple products at the Macworld Conference & Expo later this month.

NSFNET: The vibrant ghost of Christmases past
12/11/07
At the start of the Christmas shopping season 20 years ago the National Science Foundation announced that a group consisting of Michigan's Merit Network, IBM and MCI had won a contract to develop and deploy the T-1 NSFNET. This network led directly to the Internet of today -- the NSFNET was a gift that has kept on giving.

FCC: regulating through 3D glasses
12/04/07
I was going to lay off the FCC for a while but the events of Nov. 27 make that really hard to do.

Internet overload: painting tomorrow something like today
11/30/07
It seems like only yesterday that the press was talking about an Internet collapse, but it actually was more than a decade ago and happened because the press thought Bob Metcalfe was predicting the Internet was going to overload and collapse.

A step in the right direction away from credit abuse
11/20/07
I’m writing this just before Thanksgiving, and one of the many things I’m thankful for is that the major credit-reporting agencies finally understand they were a major part of the identity-theft problem.

Anonymity as a thing of the past
11/13/07
As is too often the case, the story's headline was quite misleading. Reading the AP headline "Intel Official: Expect Less Privacy" certainly got my attention, as did the second paragraph of the story: "Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people's private communications and financial information." But reading Kerr's actual speech and transcript of the Q&A session that followed it provides a rather different picture.

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