Tech Policy

Software as a Service - Hosted Everything

I've been working at a Software as a Service company in Hawaii now for the past year. The concept is pretty simple, instead of hosting software applications in your own data center over your local network; we host them on our servers and you access your software via the internet through a browser.

For many of us, accessing software over the internet has become second nature. We get email from Yahoo, maps from Google, share photos on Flickr, connect on Facebook. For the first time, consumer applications such as these has led the way in IT. Business applications such as hosted Microsoft Project have been stuck in the corporate data center for the last 30 years since the client-server architecture became popular in the early 80s.

The  famous Moore's  Law which says that computer processing power doubles every two years. Grove's Law says that bandwidth doubles every 100 years. So even though the computers and servers have been powerful enough for a while to serve business software online, the pipes haven't been fat enough. Ever since the fiber optic buildout of the late 90s, that barrier has broken down and all kinds of interesting possibilities are emerging.

A great book on this topic is The Big Switch by David Carr. David talks about all the possibilities that are opening up in the fields of Software as a Service and cloud computing. But even better, he traces the history of computing, and draws some striking parallels between the early days of another grid-based service: electricity. The slides below are from a talk I gave last week at the University of Hawaii's CyberPizza. Its just an outline of the speech, but draw heavily from this book.

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Net Neutrality Guarantees Scrapped

How long before our internet connection rates double? Triple? How much is google Video worth to you? Network Neutrality RIP?. Read Lessig testimony on Network Neutrality.

$100 Laptop

MIT and Cambridge Collaborate To Provide Free Wireless

Amen.

Your cell phone records on sale for 89.95!

AmericaBlog bought phone records of Wes Clark to show that your cell phone usage is far from private. What is important is not that Wes Clark's cell phone records can be bought easily, but that there exist several companies which have massive amounts of such information for sale. By law, the US government is not allowed to collect such information, but the government is not prevented from buying such information if it is collected by a private and independent company. I have mentioned Robert O'Harrow's book No Place to Hide a couple of times on this blog. I highly recommend it again.

New Wiretap Rules Are Out

Via Furdlog.

Renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act

Currently, I am reading Robert O'Harrow's book No Place to Hide. So, Patriot act has been on mind. Today, the Senate Judiciary committee began its hearing on the oversight of the Patriot act, which is slated for renewal this year. For me this will be one of the most important issues of the year, if not THE most important issue. Three useful resources for information on the USA Patriot act:

• Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) USA PATRIOT Act and Other Security Issues Page
• Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) USA PATRIOT Act page
• Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) USA PATRIOT Act page

This is not a political issue in my mind, but a fundamental look at how citizen's of this country will value their individual liberty, privacy, and freedom in the coming years.

Smart people are dangerous

From the truly neat and truly scary department, via Slashdot a ZDNet article on a new way to track a PC on the Internet.  A PhD student at Berkeley wrote a paper on a way to tell exactly which computers are making which Internet requests without knowledge of the user, regardless of the firewall or anonymising protections the computer and network may have.  The technique involves monitoring the "time skews" of individual machines, which are the small differences in a computers internal clock.

I haven't read the whole paper, but I would presume that for this to work the tracker would need access to all of the packets the travel over a subsection of the network, which from what I know is not easy to do unless you own the network.  (Presumably a Carnivore-like system would monitor this data, though).  Second, on the privacy front, for someone to be able to peg activity coming from a machine to a _specific_ machine would require some way of matching the unique time skew to the machine, which can be trivial or extremely complicated depending on the level of network protections.

At any rate, it is scary to see what smart people can do.  I've racked my brain to come up with a "good" use... but anything I come up with sounds straight out of DMCA or Patriot act.  I take comfort in the thought that it's only a matter of time before someone comes up with a simple piece of software that will randomly vary the microseconds on the outgoing TCP packet timestamp and render the tracking technique moot.

Video of Steve Jobs introducing the Macintosh in 1984

I know, this probably qualifies for aNother of Mike's commEnt, but I am willing to Risk it. This viDeo comes from January 24, 1984, the day Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh to public . Salon has a related article: Hallelujah, the Mac is Back. See also, Apple's 1984 superball commercial. Enjoy!

Artists Perspective on File Sharing

Barry and Frank at The Big Picture and Furdlog respectively are excited by the Pew report on Artists, Music and the Internet. I have only read the summary so far, but you can count on these two to provide further updates.