Cyber Rumble

There’s a global electronic battle going on, we’re told, between those who support Wikileaks and those who oppose it. Mastercard, PayPal, and Visa are under attack for refusing to process contributions to Wikileaks, their web sites periodically unavailable because of a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack by thousands of zombie PCs all over the world.  Nothing about this makes any sense to me. It’s stupid.

The so-called cyber war (more of a cyber rumble, really — one posse against another) is stupid because neither side can win as they are playing it and neither can lose. Pain can be inflicted, but mainly on innocent bystanders, rather than combatants. And those who caused the war […]

Dog Days

My good friend Ralph called this morning. “You are writing more than usual and responding more to comments, what’s wrong?” he asked. Ralph knows me too well. Gilmore the dog is sick.

Nine year-old Gilmore, whom some of you may recall from a column years ago about taking him (telepathically, no less) to the pet psychic, has canine autoimmune hemolytic anemia. His immune system is attacking Gilmore’s blood cells, which is fairly common in older dogs and occurs for no particular reason. We’re treating the condition with steroids and it is improving slowly (the survival rate is about 70 percent). But for the foreseeable future Gilmore and I are roommates, sleeping together downstairs. […]

Edifice Complex

Apple bought a huge piece of Bay Area property for a new corporate campus, promising to develop the land into an enormous project that would allow thousands of company employees to live, work, shop and play without ever having to leave company property. It would be the perfect community for staffers who are allowed to work any 80 hours per week they choose. This may sound a lot like Apple’s plan to redevelop the old Hewlett-Packard Cupertino campus about a mile from current Apple headquarters on Infinite Loop, but it isn’t. What I’ve just described was Apple Computer’s plan to develop 640 acres in Coyote Valley south of San Jose, circa 1985.

What goes […]

Verizon LTE iPhone4V

No insider info here, no leaked secrets, just an aging but wily geek putting himself in the place of Verizon Wireless and guessing how that mobile carrier will handle next year’s rumored iPhone introduction on its U. S. network. I’d go for a knockout punch and I think Verizon will, too.

Apple’s iPhone is coming to Verizon sometime early next year as AT&T loses its exclusive deal for the iconic smartphone. It could be as soon as January. Verizon will want to use this opportunity to grab disaffected iPhone users from AT&T because surveys have shown American iPhone users love their handsets, but not their carrier. So Verizon, which already appears to have the better network, […]

Follow the Money

There’s a dispute going on right now between Comcast and Level3 Communications concerning the peering agreement between those two companies. Comcast says the dispute has nothing to do with the fact that Level3 just got the Netflix video streaming contract while most observers think that’s all it has to do with.

I think so, too.

Peering is at heart nothing but restraint of trade. Peering came about when various Internet backbone providers noticed they were all connected to the same big data centers and points of interconnection, normally inside telco central offices. Simply pulling an Ethernet cable from one rack to another could interconnect millions of users from two different backbone providers, saving time, distance, router hops […]