Privacy is dead and here’s how

privacy-do-not-disturb

My friend Dave Taht, who battles bufferbloat for us all, pointed me today to a document from the Wireless Internet Service Provider Association. It’s the WISPA CALEA Compliance Guide, which details most of the rules that wireless ISPs are required to follow by CALEA — the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994. These rules, variants of which apply to all telcos and to ISPs of all kinds (not just wireless), say what those companies are required to do to comply with the law. More directly, it specifies how they can be required to intercept customer communications and relay that content to law enforcement agencies.

Read it if you have a moment. The document, which is […]

By |October 21st, 2013|2013, Government, Internet, Privacy and Security, Technology|56 Comments
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Breaking Moore’s Law

642px-Moores_law_(1970-2011)No law is more powerful or important in Silicon Valley than Moore’s Law — the simple idea that transistor density is continually increasing which means computing power goes up just as costs and energy consumption go down. It’s a clever idea we rightly attribute to Gordon Moore. The power lies in the Law’s predictability. There’s no other trillion dollar business where you can look down the road and have a pretty clear idea what you’ll get. Moore’s Law lets us take chances on the future and generally get away with them. But what happens when you break Moore’s Law? That’s what I have been thinking about lately. That’s when destinies change.

There may have been many […]

By |October 15th, 2013|2013, Computing, Cringely's Rules, history, Technology|53 Comments
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Abe fiddles while Fukushima leaks

fukushimatanksIn the middle of a pissing match between the President and Congressional leadership it’s good to remember that the United States isn’t the only government that seems to have lost touch with reality. I was reminded of that today when I read this story about the contaminated water problem at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. Now here’s a government that is truly paralyzed!

The story from Japan Times, if you choose to read it, says Japanese Prime Minister Abe is reaching out to foreign experts in an attempt to deal with the problem of radioactive cooling water that is accumulating in hundreds of makeshift tanks that are now beginning to leak. “We […]

By |October 7th, 2013|2013, Government, Health, Industry, Politics, Science, Startups, Technology|57 Comments
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The Secret of iOS 7

airplay1The Innovator’s Dilemma, a 1997 book by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, made the point that successful companies can lose their way when they pay too much attention to legacy products and not enough attention to new stuff. They are making so much money they either don’t see a competitor rising up or are too complacent to feel threatened. In either case the incumbent generally loses and the upstart (usually one of many) generally wins. The best way for successful companies to avoid this problem is by inventing the future before their competitors do.

We see this pattern over and over in high tech. Remember Lotus? Remember Word Perfect? Remember Borland? And it’s not just in software. […]

By |September 19th, 2013|2013, Breaking News, Companies, Computing, Gadgets, Industry, Phones, Product Development, Technology, Uncategorized|173 Comments
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Eisenhower, Snowden and the military industrial complex

eisenhower-farewellFifty-two years ago, three days before he left office and retired from Washington, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower addressed the nation on television with what he called “a message of leave-taking and farewell, and to share a few final thoughts…” This came to be called Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex speech and was unlike any other address by Eisenhower or, indeed, by any of his predecessors. You can read the entire speech (it isn’t very long) here, or even watch it here, but I’ve also included below what I believe to be the most important passage:

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares […]

By |August 14th, 2013|2013, Government, history, Privacy and Security, Technology|57 Comments
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