Public policy and privacy
Public policy issues such as privacy, technology industry economic development, education to support technology workers, and so on. Privacy in particular, whether or not strictly tied to public policy.
Who should Obama appoint as United States CTO/CIO?
During the campaign, Barack Obama promised to appoint a national Chief Technology Officer. Naturally, vigorous discussion has ensued as to who that should be. I’ve been right in the thick of it:
- Arguing that the CTO should really be a CIO, in line with Obama’s own description of the job. (That got Slashdotted.)
- Discussing which direct responsibilities the United States CTO/CIO actually should have.
- Recommending former IRS Commissoner and American Management Systems CEO Charles Rossotti for the job, both because of his accomplishments and his honesty. (Rossotti emailed me implying that he wasn’t interested. I shot back that this was the first time in our quarter-century acquaintance I didn’t precisely believe what he said.)
- Outlining my recommended list of Obama Administration IT priorities.
Much of the blogosphere and trade press discussion started out silly, speculating on Eric Schmidt for the job and so on. Richard Koman was one of the first to analyze the subject more sensibly. But now Dan Farber has weighed in with a great post, looking at the practicalities of the position in detail, which was quickly echoed by his old partner Larry Dignan.
Getting Federal IT straight is a VERY difficult job. It’s also utterly crucial. I hope the Obama Administration gets it right.
| Categories: Public policy and privacy | 5 Comments |
Technology highlights of the 2008 US Presidential campaign
I’ve been writing quite a bit over on A World of Bytes about the technology used in the 2008 Presidential campaign. Subjects included:
- A brilliant viral get-out-the-vote video (from MoveOn.org, actually, not the Obama campaign as I first thought). What was so innovative about it was the personalization inside the video. This is one to learn from in your own business.
- Obama campaign successes and failures at local targeting (that one also has links to a number of other posts on technology-in-the-campaign).
- Two appallingly dishonest site-specific search boxes.
I’m also writing over there about what I think the Obama Administration should do with respect to technology policy. First up is a ringing recommendation of Charles Rossotti for CIO/CTO. More to follow.
Good riddance to Secure Computing
McAfee has announced a takeover of Secure Computing, ending that company’s independent existence. To this I can only say: It’s about time! Early this century, I was asked to revive my old investment research career and find stocks to short. A promising candidate turned out to be Secure Computing, whose main product lines included:
- A high-end “proxy”-style firewall, which was widely used in the US intelligence and defense communities
- A two-factor authentication division
- A censorware division that, for example, had run Saudi Arabia’s web censorship since the late 1990s
- A firewall-on-a-board OEM deal with 3COM
The short idea was in large part that the firewall-on-a-board idea had caused great overoptimism, stoked by the company. On further digging, I found that CEO John McNulty’s resume, as stated for example in Secure Computing’s SEC filings, seemed inconsistent with his resume as stated in SEC filings of his prior employer. Nobody seemed to care much about correcting that, however. Read more
Richi Jennings changed physics, and I didn’t even notice
While ego-surfing, I found something I let slip by last April. Responding to my views on network neutrality, Richi Jennings pooh-poohed my claim that low latency is important. Specifically, he said:
Here’s the thing… Those of us that live the other side of the Atlantic live with 250ms latency every day, when we connect to services hosted in North America. I dare say the same is true for those on the other side of the Pacific. There’s not much getting around the speed of light.
Now, I’ll confess to not being the greatest of networking mavens, my networking startup and my various relationships with Network World notwithstanding. Truth be told, I dropped out of a physics major when the only uncompleted course was electronics lab. But before I dropped out, I did get the speed of light drilled into me. It’s 186,000 miles/second, aka 3 x 10^10 cm/sec. (“Not just a good idea; it’s the law!”). 186,000 miles, I’m quite convinced, is a lot more than 4 times the difference across the Atlantic Ocean. And the same remains true even when you knock off 50% or so because that light is traveling through glass rather than in a vacuum.
| Categories: Net neutrality | 2 Comments |
My Network World column and outside links on network neutrality
Oops! It turns out Network World ran my column on network neutrality and Tariff Rebate Passthrough on April 23, not April 30 as I previously believed. So I should have gotten my list of outside links together sooner. Sorry. Confusing matters further, my post on Jeffersonet vs. Edisonet got Slashdotted, without me having provided a link to the column itself. Well, here goes.
- Ed Whitacre, CEO of SBC/AT&T, kicked things off in late 2005, arguing that he should be allowed to discriminate between, say, Google and Yahoo based on how much they paid him. He later backed down a bit, but many people are unconvinced as to his sincerity.
- Verizon said similar things around the same time.
- Om Malik made an early attempt to cover all sides of the issue, albeit with a pro-neutrality orientation.
- Jeremy Penston had an article last week arguing that bandwidth is NOT “effectively free,” at least for video.
- Scott Cleland says my thinking is “seriously flawed” because I think there’s any need for neutrality regulation. He thinks no logical case has been made for neutrality whatsoever. Perhaps we need need to spell it out for him in smaller words. Anyhow, his one-pager that is admittedly sponsored by the telecom vendors does a good job of smashing some net neutrality strawmen nobody was talking about anyway.
- Errata Security argues that network neutrality is unworkable on the backbone, and links to my article, which was only about network neutrality on the last mile.
- Richi Jennings argues that we don’t need tiering, because the speed of light has dropped from 300 million meters/second to a mere 80 million or so. Or maybe less. Or something like that … seriously, it seems that he doubts the value of super-high QOS, because latency is an inescapable fact of life.
| Categories: Net neutrality, Public policy and privacy | Leave a Comment |
Link list for network neutrality
My April 30 Network World column is scheduled to be on network neutrality, with this post linked out as a guide to further research.
Some of my own writings on the subject include:
- This post today separating the Internet into “Jeffersonet” and “Edisonet”, where Jeffersonet needs extreme net neutrality but Edisonet can and must endure tiered pricing. I’d have loved to get that point into the column, but there wasn’t room.
- This post today calling for extreme net neutrality specifically in the area of search.
- Two posts last June (with links to additional prior ones) spelling out the Tariff Rebate Passthrough idea. These cover mainly the same material as the column, but are part of group incorporating to some discussion of the idea last spring among a variety of commentators.
I’ll supply some outside links on the subject later on.
| Categories: Net neutrality, Public policy and privacy | 1 Comment |
The two Internets, Jeffersonet and Edisonet, and why they need to be regulated differently
Edit: This post was Slashdotted, along with Richi Jennings’ reply.
In a way, proponents and opponents of network neutrality are both correct! That is, they are each correct about different aspects of the Internet.
Net neutrality is both necessary and workable for what I call Jeffersonet, which comprises the “classical”, bandwidth-light parts of the Internet. Thus, it includes e-mail, instant messaging, much e-commerce, and just about every website created in the first 13 or so years of the Web. Jeffersonet is the greatest tool in human history to communicate research, teaching, news, and political ideas, or to let tiny businesses compete worldwide. Any censorship of Jeffersonet – even if just of the self-interested large-enterprise commercial kind – would be a terrible loss. Net neutrality is workable for Jeffersonet because – well, because it’s already working just fine. Jeffersonet doesn’t need anything beyond current levels of bandwidth and reliability. So there’s no reason to mess with what’s working, other than simple profit-hungry greed.
Read more
| Categories: Net neutrality, Public policy and privacy | 14 Comments |
David and Richi on Cisco and Ironport
The Ferris Research lads offer a succinct analysis of the Cisco/Ironport deal. As an old software stock analyst, I was particularly struck by their estimates that A. Cisco paid over 10 times revenue for Ironport and B. Ironport’s revenues weren’t growing. Even more interesting in my opinion is what Richi said to me by e-mail in response to a query, namely (emphasis mine):
Yes, clearly IronPort’s reputation data is part of the prize for Cisco. …
An interesting question is what will happen (if anything) with SpamCop. IronPort deliberately ran SpamCop at arm’s length as a matter of policy. I wonder if Cisco will maintain that policy. SpamCop is of course part of the raw data feeding into SenderBase, along with the data phoned home by the IronPort boxes.
As we’ve seen with the BlackSpider acquisition by SurfControl, spam control companies that aggregate lots of data about spam sources are valuable, for reasons in addition to spam control. If a zombie is sending spam, it’s also probably a potential source of other bad stuff, such as worms and DDoS connections.
Quite possibly, one of Cisco’s goals (dreams?) for this acquisition is to put a whole lot of sender policing into the network infrastructure. Mainly, that’s a good thing — but like most kinds of internet policing, that technology also has the potential for abuse.
In that vein, I note that the Ferris guys say Ironport’s big competitor was Ciphertrust, acquired by Secure Computing. Well, in my opinion Secure Computing are bad guys, or at least were as of my research a few years ago. They have long helped enforce nationwide Web censorship in Saudi Arabia; they got dinged by the SEC for early for CEO stock hyping/selective disclosure; they in my opinion were guilty of a lot more hyping than that; and for the cherry on top of this ethical sundae, CEO John McNulty has a resume in Secure’s SEC filings that is inconsistent with the SEC filings of a previous employer.
| Categories: Computing appliances, Privacy, censorship, and freedom, Security and anti-spam | Leave a Comment |
Anonymizer – penetrating the Great Firewalls of China and Iran
Lance Cottrell of Anonymizer is one of those rare guys who make me believe he started a company in no small part to do good. And so his cloaking-technology company is providing free services to help Chinese citizens sneak through their national firewall, and is doing the same thing for Iran on a paid basis, under contract to the Voice of America. I think this is wonderful, and he reports that it’s working well now. Even so, I think there are scalability concerns. Right now only 10s of 1000s of users are covered. If there were a few more zeroes on that, standard spam-blocking techniques, currently ineffective, might work. What’s more, the Chinese bureaucracy, currently not highly motivated to shut the service down, might bestir itself to be much more effective.
| Categories: Anonymizer, Privacy, censorship, and freedom, Public policy and privacy, Security and anti-spam, Software as a service | 4 Comments |
Anonymizer — internet privacy through anonymity
I chatted today with Lance Cottrell, the founder and president of Anonymizer. They’re a little 30-40 person company, but even so they do three different interesting kinds of things. In increasing order of importance, these are:
- Provide anonymity services to ordinary individuals.
- Provide anonymity services to enterprises (aka enterprise sneakiness support).
- Help people get through the national firewalls in Iran and China.