Opinion: Rewriting Internet history
Rewriting history for political purposes used to be a favorite pastime in the old Soviet Union. In a neat turn of events we now see the Wall Street Journal doing the same thing.
Stories by Scott Bradner
Opinion: SMS a killer app at 20; irrelevant at 25?
The first SMS-capable mobile phones were approved for sale in Europe 20 years ago this month. By any measure, SMS has become a huge success, at least for the telephone companies, with more than 6 trillion SMS messages sent worldwide in 2010, generating more than $110 billion in revenue.
Opinion: Is Apple destroying the internet?
When The Guardian recently interviewed Google co-founder Sergey Brin as a teaser for its weeklong series of articles about the "Battle for the Internet," the publication got a good headline out of it: "Google's Brin: threats to web freedom 'greater then ever.'"
Opinion: RSA - Maximising customer harm
When news of the major RSA breach broke about two months ago I complained that the company was not being all that upfront in telling customers what the breach might mean to them.
Broadband speeds – the truth is out there
Graeme Samuel, chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission recently took Australian broadband ISPs to task over their failure to make it clear to potential customers just how fast their services are. The admonition should not be confined to Australia.
A different Big Mac index
FRAMINGHAM (11/07/2003) - Given my fondness for Apple Computer Inc. computers you knew I would eventually write about the Virginia Tech Mac-based supercomputer-on-the-cheap. I was waiting for some of the testing to be completed. Because the test numbers are beginning to come in, I guess it's time.
Reach for the stupid juice
FRAMINGHAM (10/16/2003) - Consider the following scenario: You are the CEO of a 3-year-old start-up company in the business of developing, according to your Web page, "entertainment technology that guards the content ownership rights of publishers, artists and record companies without getting in the way of the listening experience." Your product has just been adopted by a major company in your area and has started shipping to great publicity. The product seems almost too good to be true and, if the reports are to be trusted, everyone loves it. The future looks bright indeed.
Blow-by-blow coverage
FRAMINGHAM (10/03/2003) - I'm a motor racing fan. Well, at least a fan of some types of motor racing. Dirt track, Figure 8 and the IRL do not do that much for me. But Formula 1, CART, Le Mans style endurance, Isle of Man TT and NASCAR racing get my attention during the season, and I get a touch of withdrawal during the winter when most racing is gone from the tube. I have found that the experience of being a motor racing fan has changed dramatically over the last few years as motor racing has embraced the Internet.
Priorities: Greed before a functioning Internet
FRAMINGHAM (09/25/2003) - My hope and hopeful expectation is that by the time this column gets published common sense or the voice of authority will have won out over greed, and VeriSign will have stopped hijacking .com and .net. Even if my hopes are fulfilled, this episode has been an important lesson on the requirement to not trust the well being of the Internet to people who so easily put their greed in front of all other considerations.
Can AT&T learn to be stupid?
FRAMINGHAM (09/19/2003) - AT&T has been in the press quite a bit of late, and not just for its effort to derail - in an altruistic effort to support the public interest I'm sure - MCI's escape from bankruptcy and a pile of debt.
So why isn't it wireless?
Broadcom somehow has managed to trademark the official designation of the president's airplane and stuck it onto a temporally revolutionary product.
Is the spam battle joined?
It's been quite a few weeks recently on the spam front, and it looks like the good guys are losing big time.
More than full employment for lawyers?
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) finally recently released its new rules on facility sharing in the telecom world. As far as I can tell no one is happy with all of them other than the lawyers.
The spot of gold at the end of the wireless rainbow
The New York Times reported in mid-July that some of the big guys are now thinking seriously about hot spotting the wireless landscape. If their plans come to fruition, we could be well along to the future I wrote about last year.
Fast forward as theft
This is another column about the copyright industry. It might seem like I'm fixated on the topic and maybe that's somewhat the case, but it's because I fear copyright holders want to turn the internet into something that is legally limited to providing the services they think are okay.