TechTakes

Broadband Policy Failure: a Nation at Risk

A few days ago I wrote about Time-Warner's trial of bandwidth consumption charges – and closed with a comment that what the U.S. lacks is a coherent national strategy for broadband networks. Yesterday, Mark Lloyd of the Center for American Progress issued a report that faults the Bush Administration and the Federal Communications Commission for talking about the importance of broadband access in the United States but doing little about it. Lloyd argues that in the face of tomorrow's massive spectrum auction (created by the mandate that all TV stations convert to digital broadcast, freeing up additional bandwidth for other purposes such as national security and consumer use) the U.S. remains at risk and is "less competitive in the global economy . . . [and] ill-prepared to respond to national security threats and natural disasters." It's unlikely that any meaningful progress can be made in the last year of the current presidency. Let's hope that the next president has not only an understanding of how important high-speed communication networks are to the country's safety, health, education, and economy, but that the incoming administration and elected officials in all jurisdictions have a commitment to creating policies and market conditions that our vital to our future.

Time-Warner’s Broadband Test: Giving Less for More

You can read all about Time-Warner's bold new plan to test charging high-bandwidth users more for internet access in ComputerWorld, Reuters, and the original news item with excerpts from a leaked Time-Warner memo published in Broadband Reports. There's some irony in Time-Warner (a piece of the now-discredited AOL-Time Warner merger) breaking with the legacy of AOL's "all you can eat" internet pricing and the prevailing culture of free information that is a large piece of the Internet landscape. The generic term "high bandwidth users" masks several different types: file swappers exchanging music and video on peer-to-peer networks; home-based businesses; Netflix subscribers watching movies on demand. Missing from the discussion is a coherent national strategy for the U.S. that would define a framework for pricing and regulation in the context of national goals that define the importance of the Internet for the economy, education, security. While nothing has been accomplished in this area during the past seven years, the U.S. has fallen behind in terms of the percentage of the population with high-speed internet access and the cost of that access. Internet service – and this includes the cell phone networks that are increasingly providing internet access for mobile and location-based services – are neither the fastest, most widespread, or least expensive.

Put Some SPARQL in Your Life

After years in gestation, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published recommendations for SPARQL (pronounced "Sparkle"), its next-generation query language. You may think Google is the beginning and end of search, given its tremendous market share and dominance over rivals. But Google as we know it, with its advertiser-driven model, is just the beginning. Google is tremendously successful and a darling of investors, no doubt. But the Google search familiar to all is a relatively unstructured query of publicly available web pages that Google has indexed. It lists all web pages containing the search term(s) but does nothing to structure the results; that is left to the person conducting the search. Because it is driven by volume (the number of times a given web page is accessed or referenced by other pages, and the subsequent value to advertisers of a keyword search) it is a superb tool for generic inquiries, marketing, and merchandising.

Google on the web, however, does little for enterprise search (see my earlier entry on Microsoft's acquisition of ***) and is not able to execute a query that parses the search results into chunks of knowledge. For enterprise search, in which an organization wants to mine its own documents and web links in order to structure a knowledge base, there are many competitors, and because the market is so different and in many ways proprietary, there is less information about market share and the various competitors (of which Google is one). Now imagine scaling up the knowledge management aspects of enterprise search, in which, for example, a pharmaceutical company can discover and structure all of the work any of its employees have done on a particular topic, and applying that technology to the web as we know it, billions and billions of web pages and changing content. That's SPARQL.

It's the outcome of many years of effort by smart people in universities and companies large and small who understood the vision of Tim Berners-Lee when he first articulated his "Semantic Web" concept nearly a decade ago. Web 2.0 sites will no doubt be found in the results set of SPARQL inquiries more easily because they represent an advance in the structuring of data over first-generation web sites, and thus will be more friendly to SPARQL queries. But the big news is this: search is still in its infancy, and the goal of structuring all the knowledge contained in digital formats and having software agents able to act upon that knowledge is still far in the distance.

You can read more in today's news coverage in ComputerWorld.

IT Trends: Search and Knowledge Work

Microsoft's announcement that it plans to acquire Fast Search & Transfer for $1.2 billion reveals something about the rapidly changing IT landscape: a focus on finding and structuring a company's knowledge assets. Fast develops enterprise search software to sift through a company's digital assets; it's a critical tool to discovering the documents and sources for the knowledge produced by the company's employees.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. With document formats moving into XML and conversion tools such as Microsoft's MOICE or Office Migration Planning Manager, it's easy to see why IT service companies are moving into managed services to shore up their utility-like IT functions at commodity pricing so they can focus on higher value-added knowledge management. The norm is moving toward having a single point of contact integrating network and data management, backup, business continuity, and help desk assistance, all of which have predictable functions and repeatable processes that can be managed at a fixed cost. There is recurring revenue and repeat business for IT vendors in this sector, but competition and technology advances will continue to squeeze margins, and managed service providers will continue to put vendors whose business model is break/fix out of business.

What remains untapped in all but the largest or leading organizations is knowledge management and knowledge work. Even small companies can begin tagging their Microsoft Office documents once they have those documents in Office 2007's XML format. They also will benefit from reduced file sizes for storage management and eliminate many security risks associated with older binary file formats. But the real value – and the higher value to IT service providers – is in the ability to use enterprise search, collaboration, and other knowledge work components to streamline work processes, deliver new products and services to their customers, and to operate more efficiently and effectively.

It remains to be seen, if the Microsoft acquisition of Fast goes through, how they will translate the new technology into their software arsenal, and how effective they will in competing against Google and others in enterprise search. But it's a good move that both recognizes where IT is going and sends a strong signal to IT companies and specialists about the changing landscape of technology work.

Government web sites pose identity theft risk

An IDG news item published in Computerworld reports that Symantec found that web sites operated by local, state, and federal government agencies were responsible for 26% of security breaches that could lead to identity theft. This was for just the first half of 2007. Symantec's claim was bolstered by a dozen or so Government Accounting Office (GAO) reports over the past six months charging that federal agencies have been slow to implement the GAO's cybersecurity recommendations.

One of the most significant tasks in establishing security is asset management – knowing the number and type of devices accessing data. With the proliferation of laptops and other mobile devices such as Blackberrys, smartphones and PDAs, the message is clear: keep track of everything – and keep devices and software fully patched to reduce the attack surface. While accountability at the government level is weak, for businesses the loss of productivity, customer goodwill, and the expense of fixing a breach after the fact, including paying for identity theft protection for potential victims serves as a warning: have a plan, test it, and make sure frequent backups are taken.

See the IDG article here.

A spare battery for your laptop in your luggage? Ummm, sure, OK…. I guess. Not.

During the past week numerous articles and alarms were sounded about new rules concerning the transport of spare lithium batteries on commercial aircraft. You know, the batteries that have caught fire on several occasions over the past couple of years, and for which major manufacturers have announced recalls. Evidently they can't be put in checked baggage at all because fire suppression systems in cargo holds are not up to the task. But they can be carried onboard if they are put into plastic bags. Only they can't be larger than a certain capacity as determined by their actual lithium content. And you will have to rely on the knowledge and training of the Transportation Security Administration representatives at the airport checkpoint.

Sound confusing? Joe Sharkey of the New York Times thought so, and set out to get clarification. The result, as he writes in the January 8 New York Times, is clearly confusing. Read the article.

Laptops at the Border

Carrying a laptop into the United States continues to pose risk for travelers. Adam Liptak writes in the New York Times about a case in which the government contends that a laptop hard drive is no different than a suitcase, and that the contents of the hard drive should be subject to inspection and review. No matter what health information, trade secrets, client-attorney communications, or other private thoughts or materials are on the hard drive, the government argues that it is all subject to review. And they've won in a couple of court cases.

The Association of Corporate Travel Executives and the Electronic Frontier Foundation – unlikely partners under many other circumstances – have argued that the government's policy amounts to "electronic surveillance after the fact." Following the government's logic, the files contained on a flash drive, or the call history or contact list on a Blackberry or mobile phone could also be subject to review.

See "If Your Hard Drive Could Testify . . ." and think about your travel strategies when taking a laptop abroad. Even if you are only carrying those architectural plans for a new building or the first rough notes for a new essay on political freedom and the history of liberty, you might have an unplanned delay when the border agent wants to take a closer look.