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my big problem with this program in particular is that the Department of Homeland Security is notorious for not protecting its data (example #1, example #2). so even if you feel confident that they have a good reason for mining this data, you can't possibly have confidence that someone else isn't mining the DHS's data for their own uses.

I tried to get slashdot to cover the story of the FCC Commissioner member Michael Copps, who really slammed our American broadband policy here in this recent interview. But they rejected it. So here are some excerpts from the interview:

FCC Commissioner Says U.S. Broadband Effort Insufficient
Mar 1, 2005

ZDNet News via NewsEdge Corporation :

Michael Copps, one of two Democrats on the five-member Federal Communications Commission,

As a policy-maker, Copps is outraged that the United States isn't near the top of countries with broadband penetration. While admitting the difficulty in comparing the United States with Japan, Korea or Norway, Copps also voices the growing restlessness of government officials who fret about the private sector's ability to ensure that all Americans get access to broadband.

Big changes are reshaping the telecom industry. Giant mergers--SBC Communications acquiring AT&T, Verizon Communications swallowing MCI--raise huge questions about how consumers will be affected. More local-government efforts to create their own broadband networks are facing fierce resistance from the Baby Bells and cable companies such as Comcast.

Calling broadband "the most central infrastructure challenge facing the country right now," Copps is wrestling with how to turn the United States into the most connected country in the world. Can private industries do it themselves, or will it take a regulatory prod to get there? Copps recently spoke with CNET News.com about these issues, as well as the recent complaints of Internet phone service Vonage that it's not getting a fair shake from local phone companies.

Q: Looking at the state of broadband from the consumer perspective, is adoption at a good point right now?

A: Well, if I was a consumer I would say, "Why in the hell is the United States No. 13 and heading south in broadband deployment? Why are folks in Korea and Japan maybe getting 10 times the capacity at a half or a third or a quarter of the price? I am paying for the slow setup I've got--that is called high-speed broadband?"

I don't think there is that much satisfaction with the situation we're in...I think we may be probably the only industrial country on the face of God's green earth that doesn't have a national plan for broadband deployment. We recently got a commitment on a goal, on an objective. But an objective and a strategy are two vastly dissimilar things.

Q: What makes sense in terms of a national broadband policy?

A: I think Congress is going to have to work through that. If we are going to fix the Universal Service system, which is predicated on the idea that everybody should have access to comparable communications at comparable and reasonable prices, we have to ask, is our advanced telecommunications part of that or not? Is broadband a part of that or not? So before we start fixing every little problem with universal service I think we ought to have some kind of a philosophical or national purpose or national objective discussion about where does broadband fit in.

I think we may be probably the only industrial country on the face of God's green earth that doesn't have a national plan for broadband deployment. ...

At the same time, the state legislature in Indiana recently shot down a bill that would impose significant restrictions on municipalities for launching their own broadband infrastructure services.

It's not an easy thing if you're the leader of a hard-pressed, cash-strapped municipality--as all of them are in this day and age--to take on additional burden of providing broadband to your people.

I think we do a grave injustice in trying to hobble municipalities. That's an entrepreneurial approach, that's an innovative approach. Why don't we encourage that instead of having bills introduced--"Oh, you can't do this because it's interfering w

If this was real, there should have been an announcement from the California Public Utilities Commission. There isn't.

That was my thought as well, somewhat comforted by the link to a article from CNET that I posted in this comment. The CNET story is from June 11, which was what, Friday? Why hasn't anyone else said anything about this? Seems like pretty big news to me. I just found one more article online here which was just lifted from the CNET article and posted today... so that leaves us in the same place, which is hoping that it's for real but lacking an official word...

I have bad news for you my friend:

SprintPCS Pushes Instant Voice Into Beta

...the more they stay the same. The third-world telco monopolies have been fighting a similar battle against long distance "callback" companies for over five years now, and for the most part they've been losing badly. They've known for a while that VoIP services were the next big threat, but it doesn't look like they have any better idea how to deal with them.

One detail that usually gets left out of these articles, though: the "local third world telco monopoly" is not in any way a homegrown Panamanian entity. No, the citizens of Panama, like most of their neighbors in the carribean, are getting royally screwed by our dear friends at Cable and Wireless.

http://www.americasnetwork.com/americasnetwork/art icle/articleDetail.jsp?id=7957

Instead of trying to use the latest, most trendy technologies (e.g. using web based controls and XML to create the Joint Battlespace Infosphere Infrastructure) or opting for the cheapest method of getting things done, we should think about how these things might be attacked and design them to be infrastructure, and should design them to be resistant to attacks.

I've been waiting for this... TTC has been using Solaris in their Centest offerings for a while, and their TestPad 2000 series products actually run DOS and Windows(!). These are only test instruments, so their accuracy and ease of use are more important than uptime; customer traffic isn't affected.

Nortel runs HP-UX in some of their transport equipment, but again it's a non-service-affecting application. Failure of the overhead processor means that performance monitoring and protection switching are lost, but it doesn't immediately affect traffic. I don't know what the DMS-series switches run at the core, but the user interface looks the same as on their TransportNodes.

Tellabs runs their Titan series cross-connect systems on PowerPC processors. As in the Nortel equipment, the traffic itself is carried on dumb electronics; loss of the processor only affects fault recovery, system provisioning, and performance monitoring.

So far, nobody's using Linux for mission-critical stuff, processing customer calls in real-time. This is probably about to change! Slashdot readers know that Linux is more stable than the average desktop OS. But most people don't realize the extreme requirements of the telecom industry.

For instance: When a tornado ripped the roof off a central office and half the switch was soaked, the parts which weren't physically destroyed by water kept running.

This is an industry where there's (hopefully) no such thing as downtime. I've been in offices where data circuits have been functioning continuously since before I was born. A few bit errors here and there due to the occasional lightning strike, but no real interruptions. From the switches that actually handle your calls, to the transport systems that move data from one office to another, everything has backups. Commercial power fails? No problem, the office runs on batteries anyway. They go from charging to discharging, and you've got 12 hours to get the diesel generator running in case it doesn't start itself. After that, you've got a week's worth of fuel in an underground tank. Let's say some knucklehead throws a wrench into a power board. Instant pinkslip, but the customers never know, because everything has two power feeds. Down to the individual card level, every circuit in a piece of telcom equipment has a backup that takes over in the event of a failure.

In the PC world, RAID comes close to this level of reliability in terms of a drive failure, but how many of them can give you access to your data even if a controller or bus fails?

Is your desktop box ready for this?

HA Linux IS a significant development. I haven't had a chance to check out the specs yet, (Slashdotted -- how's that for availability?) but from the quick blurb here, I can say that this will seriously change some things in the carrier market. Your ESS or DMS or EWSD might not run Linux any time soon, but some enormous routers and call-processing systems might.