The question very much reminds me of what I guy I know said when his 15 people ICT security company were looking for a new guy: "All the good people already work for us, or we know who they work for. Now we're looking for the person nobody else has found yet". This will be the same with the ready made development team. They have a job somewhere, so unless they are a small contracting team that just happens to have an open spot in their schedule you're more or less doomed.
Managing this group is even tougher. The way you describe your company is that it is small, tightly knit, build around one person. Now you need to get new people to work with your group, to smoothen out differences in development philosophy, to get the leader to let go of parts of his baby etc etc.
The trouble is not that they do port blocking, the trouble probably is that they attack Skype at its core. The one thing Skype does do is when you want to sign on to authenticate you with their central server (Teledenmark?). So blocking this authentication is probably the way to go for these guys. On top of this they might block SkypeOut servers located at various data centers around the world, by just k-lining those IP-adresses. I read two papers on how Skype works and it does seem that it uses some easier to detect patterns in setting up connections.
So what to do: Trying to get around blocking of the interconnect to the PSTN is not easy. One could ofcourse route calls through another IP-adress (Supernode), but the question is how well this scales. Quickly alternating IP-adresses is also not a preferred option. However the main line of attack against Skype will run through their authentication servers, so could we just cut these out. If Skype generates a unique ID (some kind of hash) in a password protected file that you can just take away with you on a USB stick, they wouldn't absolutely need the authentication through the central servers. Just have the program search a node and let the unique ID propagate. Another way to work might be to do the authentication by routing it through other nodes.
I like the idea of hosted apps alot. I like it most for small (1 employee) to medium size enterprises (250 employees). Now that Fiber to the Businesses start to get some steam it is a logical step. If you're running a small to medium size company like a law firm, consultancy, factory, shop etc. the IT department is not the core of the business if it exists at all. Where it exists it only comprises up to 10 percent of the workforce which means too small an amount of people to actually have a clue of all the different branches of IT. (How many people do you know that have in depth knowledge of CRM, ERP, security, internet applications, databases, hardware, switches, archiving etc etc. You do know such a person? a SME can't afford her) So if you need several of these apps, you're in serious staffing trouble.
Outsourcing seems the way to go. Let a knowledgeable company or group of companies run and maintain your apps for you. However, who would you trust to do that? For general programs like Office, probably Microsoft or Google would be a good choice as any. For specialised/customized programs, like CRM and ERP, I would go for a 'local' guy that is approachable. I would most definitely not opt for a company that is as huge as Microsoft to run my customized programs, because I'll end up in Helpdesk HELL.
In my ideal world I would go to a company that offered me a subscription like model to a whole range of desktop apps (photoshop, acrobat, office, visio etc etc) and a company that runs my serverside apps and specialized apps) It could save alot of money on IT-people and specialized rooms etc. (And probably get me into trouble some other way)
Well, I work for the government, so for me it is required reading/watching. Yes Minister is a TV series from the early 1980's from the BBC. It shows all the politics in a Brittish governement department. It shows you how to deal with critical reports, Freedom of Information Act requests, failing projects etc.
There is a very simple reason why there is no sequel to railroad tycoon. There is hardly a profitable railroad company in the world, so it would have to be known as railroad hobo. On top of that, should one want to attain any level of realism, one should incorporate all the rules, regulations and politics involved with running a railroad. Such a complexity would require white mice to operate the computer.
What these kids did sounds like the battle happening between many corporate IT-departments and employees.
Corporate IT departments erect all kinds of barriers for users to use certain applications and generally don't explain why these barriers are there. The most common answer I have gotten was: "Security". ICT-security is in my jobtitle and I know these guys were bullshitting me. Other things you hear are maintence, complexity or my favourite one: "It is our policy" and "The department heads agreed on this".
This is a battle that has gone on ever since we started with computers in the workplace. Invariably the result was that people worked around the ivory tower that controlled IT and got what they wanted some way or another (PC's got bought on office supplies budgets in the early eighties, they were forbidden by the high priests of mainframes) Invariably after prolonged fights the users win.
I currently see the following problems around me, where corporate IT erects barries, that people go around. In most cases corporate IT should enable it in such a way it is safe, or explain very well why it is not allowed at the moment, or at all: - Banning of Instant Messaging - Filtering of websites beyond porn - Banning any Palm-like device, except the corporate one. - disabling USB ports. - disabling Wifi - banning alternative browsers and all kinds of utilities. - limiting the size of mailboxes - disallowing or crippling desktop search - disallowing or crippling streaming media - Creating lengthy processes for getting new software on your desktop
I can clear that up... It was on one of those days that the AFB is open to the general public. A kind of meet the neighbours occasion. This to stop them getting upset about jets flying over their house at a 1000 feet.
A Dutch F16 technician ones showed me the boroscope they were using to check the insides of the engine. He told me that a couple of weeks before a surgeon of the local hospital had been cursing when he saw the scope. The surgeon had been requesting a boroscope for three years already and couldn't get the funds allocated and here the local AFB had a couple on hand.
Ha, you're not the only one mate. There is two of us! Well, I am an MPA, but that had so much polsci in it that I might well be one (And a lawyer, sociologist and economist). Now working for the government. And yes doing internships at the government is great espescially here in Holland as they pay you some wage.:-)
Even though I have benefitted from warez myself and think they are one of the main reasons why big software still thinks about how high they price certain software, I do want to say: Good Riddens.
Good Riddens, because software piracy is as a whole supporting large crime organisations world wide. Don't believe me? Well in a previous job I had colleagues making an extra couple of hundred a month selling warez compilations (Twilight?). Word was that the group they came from was running trucks with a complete cd production factory in the back of a truck somewhere in Eastern Europe. Same goes for all the pirated stuff you find all over Asia, Latin America and Africa. Now those are not legitimate businessmen doing legitimate business. So the money ends up in the hands of mobs, who use it for other crimes.
Now the arrest of these morons (probably students) won't make a real dent in the problem and won't lead to a full sollution, but if the justice department doesn't do anything, it will continue to grow unchecked. The more it is criminalized, the less people will get on board with Warez groups and the more the justice departmen will be able to treat it like real organized crime.
I haven't been able to validate this myself, but it seems this is also the case with 0 degree meridian, which should run straight through the Royal observatory in Greenwich. It seems it doesn't and is off by as much as a 100 metres.
Snif, I still miss Slashdot Radio. But now, thanks to this technology we can get Slashdot video. We will be able to see Cowboyneal and CmdrTaco getting it on in one great geek lovefest on geek subjects.
But really, Slashdot Radio was one of those "programs" a group of people worldwide listened too, just because it was there and it appealed to them. This kind of technology makes this possible for others as well. Sure you might not be interested in the Dutch Open Student competition rock climbing, but a couple of hundred people might. Peer to peer makes it possible to distribute footage without reducing your upstream to one bit/second/customer.
BTW BBC makes use of Kontiki for their peer to peer distribution of their TV programs and I can see other public TV starting that as well. There is no other way you can easily let 1 million people download the 8 o'clock news beteween 20:10 and 00:10 without jamming your internet connection.
Good point. Layered networks in the end all result in one way of billing. A fixed fee for the connection and data, with maybe some differentiation in the amount of oversubscribtion. Say everybody would get a 100mbit line, 1:10 oversubscribed, but companies can also choose 1:2, 1:1 and 1Gbit or 10Gbit lines with appropriate pricing. The most cost effective way of building networks would then be one network operator and multiple service providers on that network. This might however lead to a lack of incentive for the network operator to improve the network. For more info:
Netflix would fit quite well with the range of products that Amazon has. Amazon has good relations with its customers already, now it could tie them up with a subscription service. If they do it well, the customer gets referrals to movies they might never have thought of and Amazon might use information on viewing habits to suggest books. If Amazon/Netflix are smart, they will also start video on demand.
I am also a proud owner of a Treo. What blocked me from using the internet/GPRS function completely was not the lack of sites, but the costs involved with getting a site. In the Netherlands I pay 1cent per KB. That quickly adds up with the googlepicture of the day etc. After having used it for a day, I was up to 10 euros in usage costs. The pricing for mobile data is outrageous and if that doesn't change then I will never use mobile data services.
Whenever I hear discussions on Wifi hotspots I get the idea that we're building wifi connections the wrong way round. We're building wifi on the open road, that sometimes reaches into our houses/businesses. We could do it from the bottom up, based on the wifi access points in peoples houses.
How hard would a standard be, which would make it possible to extend the official network of the ISP to a users access point, maybe with a VLAN solution. This way if I open up my laptop and there is an access point available of Joe User, I can only hook up to it by propperly logging in to the ISP's network or use the airport/credit card system. This will require many roaming agreements etc, but it would bring security and convenience at the same time. It should be done in such a way that the person opening up his network in this way can throttle the speed of the guest users and/or the times they can access. So I would like to see a rule like "Guests can only connect when I am not connecting" or "Guests only get 1mbit"
How to deal with "pictures."
on
Forensic Discovery
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The Dutch police has a huge database of all kinds of (child pornography) pictures. Of each picture they have a hash. When they confiscate the pc of somebody who is suspected of having child pornography, the first thing they do is run the hashes against the pictures on the system. This saves them from having to look at all those pictures, they can now focus on the unknown ones. Great thing is also that the hashes are admissable in Court as evidence.
Both AMS-IX and LINX staff can impress the girls/guys with having the bigger one. LINX's switches are pushing more data (71 Gbit total include private+public/49.23Gbit for public peering) Ams-ix is doing 49.7 (dunno if that includes private)
AMS-IX has more members 210 against LINX having only 169 members.
However they are both equally fun to party with.;-)
I AM Alive and other victim registration systems
on
IT and Natural Disasters
·
· Score: 2, Informative
One of the largest problems I currently see is in the area of victim and missing registration. I wrote twice about it in my blog. I first made the following analysis: Like everybody I am following the news on the tsunami and I noticed a couple of things that got me thinking. After a disaster there are generally two major questions that need to be answered. 1. Who survived, got injured, died, is missing? 2. What relief is needed, where and who provides it?
To answer the first question there are two systems that I found with a bit of googling: A Japanese group has build a system. Their presentation to ETSI can be found here. It has a great name: I Am Alive. This system seems to be currently in use by the Thai governement and Red Cross.
The Australian governement has a system which is described here by the Red Cross which is using it. The system is called the National Registration and Inquiry System (NRIS).
I have seen the results of the the I Am Alive-system and it looks like an excellent system. It would be great if they could get some global support to further develop this system. At this moment it seems only Japan is working on this system and a quick search on Google didn't point too many English language pages on the system. I'll see if I can find some information on it.
I imagine every ministery of Interior, or government emergency response organisation should have a copy always ready and available on a webserver. So whenever there is a disaster this system is already running and can be used to register all the countries nationals potentially involved and can then later be used to compare these data with the records of the country affected. Maybe the United Nations Reliefweb website could be used as a basis.
The United Nations Reliefweb is also a great resource on all kinds of relief efforts and it gives good information on what kind of resources and people are nescessary.
I certainly do think of cell phones and then more in particular the GSM, which does make it possible to switch providers. Actually I wouldn't mind a concerted effort by the industry/governments to come to a standard, like we now have with GSM. There have been many bad standards, but I think GSM is one of those examples where the cooperation among industry and the sanctioning of the standard by government has benefited everybody. Might be something for the EU to look into.
Yesterday I had a discussion on set top boxes with a couple of colleagues. It seems to us that the living room of the future will have its own rack full with set top boxes. A set top box for your digital radio, a set top box for digital tv, a set top box for internet/dsl connection, a set top box for video on demand, a set top box for I don't know what else for a kind of DRM protected content.
I can see all these set top boxes actually harming competition. Having to introduce a new set top box for a new service seems like a proper waste of money. The consumer might like a different provider per service but buying a new box just to make it work will be prohibitively expensive
It would be great if we would get systems that are modular, maybe work with a set of chipcards or something along those lines.
I would love to go to Japan, but simple calculations put a 20 day trip there beyond my financial limits and there are still alot of cheaper places in the world I want and financially can see. Just to give you a quote of the Lonely Planet.
Japan is probably the most expensive country in the world for travel
Well, I wrote some thoughts on Wireless and Security in my blog which I now copy here.
# setting up secure connections is too difficult for the lay person. We need standard Diffie-Helman key exchanges. I saw on the internet that it is available on some access points, but it just should be the standard of the IEEE. As far as I could find with Google it isn't yet. I can't understand why.
# Securing accesspoints should be mandatory. There are too many open access points available. There is no use for anonymous connections over a random family's access point, it only endangers them into being seen as cybercriminals.
# If people want to make it possible for neighbours and strangers to make use of their access point it should be done in the same way hotspots are now available at airports and Starbucks. Make it possible to extend the official network of the ISP to a users access point. This way if I open up my laptop and there is an access point available of Joe User, I can only hook up to it by propperly logging in to the ISP's network or use the airport/credit card system. This will require many roaming agreements etc, but it would bring security and convenience at the same time. It should be done in such a way that the person opening up his network in this way can throttle the speed of the guest users and/or the times they can access. So I would like to see a rule like "Guests can only connect when I am not connecting" or "Guests only get 1mbit/sec".
Slashdot Mirror
The question very much reminds me of what I guy I know said when his 15 people ICT security company were looking for a new guy: "All the good people already work for us, or we know who they work for. Now we're looking for the person nobody else has found yet". This will be the same with the ready made development team. They have a job somewhere, so unless they are a small contracting team that just happens to have an open spot in their schedule you're more or less doomed.
Managing this group is even tougher. The way you describe your company is that it is small, tightly knit, build around one person. Now you need to get new people to work with your group, to smoothen out differences in development philosophy, to get the leader to let go of parts of his baby etc etc.
Tough job ahead of you. Good luck.
The trouble is not that they do port blocking, the trouble probably is that they attack Skype at its core. The one thing Skype does do is when you want to sign on to authenticate you with their central server (Teledenmark?). So blocking this authentication is probably the way to go for these guys. On top of this they might block SkypeOut servers located at various data centers around the world, by just k-lining those IP-adresses. I read two papers on how Skype works and it does seem that it uses some easier to detect patterns in setting up connections.
So what to do: Trying to get around blocking of the interconnect to the PSTN is not easy. One could ofcourse route calls through another IP-adress (Supernode), but the question is how well this scales. Quickly alternating IP-adresses is also not a preferred option. However the main line of attack against Skype will run through their authentication servers, so could we just cut these out. If Skype generates a unique ID (some kind of hash) in a password protected file that you can just take away with you on a USB stick, they wouldn't absolutely need the authentication through the central servers. Just have the program search a node and let the unique ID propagate. Another way to work might be to do the authentication by routing it through other nodes.
now time for coffee
I like the idea of hosted apps alot. I like it most for small (1 employee) to medium size enterprises (250 employees). Now that Fiber to the Businesses start to get some steam it is a logical step. If you're running a small to medium size company like a law firm, consultancy, factory, shop etc. the IT department is not the core of the business if it exists at all. Where it exists it only comprises up to 10 percent of the workforce which means too small an amount of people to actually have a clue of all the different branches of IT. (How many people do you know that have in depth knowledge of CRM, ERP, security, internet applications, databases, hardware, switches, archiving etc etc. You do know such a person? a SME can't afford her) So if you need several of these apps, you're in serious staffing trouble.
Outsourcing seems the way to go. Let a knowledgeable company or group of companies run and maintain your apps for you. However, who would you trust to do that? For general programs like Office, probably Microsoft or Google would be a good choice as any. For specialised/customized programs, like CRM and ERP, I would go for a 'local' guy that is approachable. I would most definitely not opt for a company that is as huge as Microsoft to run my customized programs, because I'll end up in Helpdesk HELL.
In my ideal world I would go to a company that offered me a subscription like model to a whole range of desktop apps (photoshop, acrobat, office, visio etc etc) and a company that runs my serverside apps and specialized apps) It could save alot of money on IT-people and specialized rooms etc. (And probably get me into trouble some other way)
Well, I work for the government, so for me it is required reading/watching. Yes Minister is a TV series from the early 1980's from the BBC. It shows all the politics in a Brittish governement department. It shows you how to deal with critical reports, Freedom of Information Act requests, failing projects etc.
There is a very simple reason why there is no sequel to railroad tycoon. There is hardly a profitable railroad company in the world, so it would have to be known as railroad hobo. On top of that, should one want to attain any level of realism, one should incorporate all the rules, regulations and politics involved with running a railroad. Such a complexity would require white mice to operate the computer.
http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/archive/2004/0 4/27/120944.aspx
Follow the link for some history and yes you will find support for the claim.
The list of problems is not nescessarily what I experience in my workplace, but what I see and hear around me.
What these kids did sounds like the battle happening between many corporate IT-departments and employees.
Corporate IT departments erect all kinds of barriers for users to use certain applications and generally don't explain why these barriers are there. The most common answer I have gotten was: "Security". ICT-security is in my jobtitle and I know these guys were bullshitting me. Other things you hear are maintence, complexity or my favourite one: "It is our policy" and "The department heads agreed on this".
This is a battle that has gone on ever since we started with computers in the workplace. Invariably the result was that people worked around the ivory tower that controlled IT and got what they wanted some way or another (PC's got bought on office supplies budgets in the early eighties, they were forbidden by the high priests of mainframes) Invariably after prolonged fights the users win.
I currently see the following problems around me, where corporate IT erects barries, that people go around. In most cases corporate IT should enable it in such a way it is safe, or explain very well why it is not allowed at the moment, or at all:
- Banning of Instant Messaging
- Filtering of websites beyond porn
- Banning any Palm-like device, except the corporate one.
- disabling USB ports.
- disabling Wifi
- banning alternative browsers and all kinds of utilities.
- limiting the size of mailboxes
- disallowing or crippling desktop search
- disallowing or crippling streaming media
- Creating lengthy processes for getting new software on your desktop
I can clear that up... It was on one of those days that the AFB is open to the general public. A kind of meet the neighbours occasion. This to stop them getting upset about jets flying over their house at a 1000 feet.
A Dutch F16 technician ones showed me the boroscope they were using to check the insides of the engine. He told me that a couple of weeks before a surgeon of the local hospital had been cursing when he saw the scope. The surgeon had been requesting a boroscope for three years already and couldn't get the funds allocated and here the local AFB had a couple on hand.
Ha, you're not the only one mate. There is two of us! Well, I am an MPA, but that had so much polsci in it that I might well be one (And a lawyer, sociologist and economist). Now working for the government. And yes doing internships at the government is great espescially here in Holland as they pay you some wage. :-)
Even though I have benefitted from warez myself and think they are one of the main reasons why big software still thinks about how high they price certain software, I do want to say: Good Riddens.
Good Riddens, because software piracy is as a whole supporting large crime organisations world wide. Don't believe me? Well in a previous job I had colleagues making an extra couple of hundred a month selling warez compilations (Twilight?). Word was that the group they came from was running trucks with a complete cd production factory in the back of a truck somewhere in Eastern Europe. Same goes for all the pirated stuff you find all over Asia, Latin America and Africa. Now those are not legitimate businessmen doing legitimate business. So the money ends up in the hands of mobs, who use it for other crimes.
Now the arrest of these morons (probably students) won't make a real dent in the problem and won't lead to a full sollution, but if the justice department doesn't do anything, it will continue to grow unchecked. The more it is criminalized, the less people will get on board with Warez groups and the more the justice departmen will be able to treat it like real organized crime.
(There goes my karma)
I haven't been able to validate this myself, but it seems this is also the case with 0 degree meridian, which should run straight through the Royal observatory in Greenwich. It seems it doesn't and is off by as much as a 100 metres.
Snif, I still miss Slashdot Radio. But now, thanks to this technology we can get Slashdot video. We will be able to see Cowboyneal and CmdrTaco getting it on in one great geek lovefest on geek subjects.
But really, Slashdot Radio was one of those "programs" a group of people worldwide listened too, just because it was there and it appealed to them. This kind of technology makes this possible for others as well. Sure you might not be interested in the Dutch Open Student competition rock climbing, but a couple of hundred people might. Peer to peer makes it possible to distribute footage without reducing your upstream to one bit/second/customer.
BTW BBC makes use of Kontiki for their peer to peer distribution of their TV programs and I can see other public TV starting that as well. There is no other way you can easily let 1 million people download the 8 o'clock news beteween 20:10 and 00:10 without jamming your internet connection.
Peer to peer is the holy grail of networking.
Good point. Layered networks in the end all result in one way of billing. A fixed fee for the connection and data, with maybe some differentiation in the amount of oversubscribtion. Say everybody would get a 100mbit line, 1:10 oversubscribed, but companies can also choose 1:2, 1:1 and 1Gbit or 10Gbit lines with appropriate pricing. The most cost effective way of building networks would then be one network operator and multiple service providers on that network. This might however lead to a lack of incentive for the network operator to improve the network. For more info:
s tupid.html
Http://www.worldofends.com
http:/www.isen.com/
Netflix would fit quite well with the range of products that Amazon has. Amazon has good relations with its customers already, now it could tie them up with a subscription service. If they do it well, the customer gets referrals to movies they might never have thought of and Amazon might use information on viewing habits to suggest books. If Amazon/Netflix are smart, they will also start video on demand.
I am also a proud owner of a Treo. What blocked me from using the internet/GPRS function completely was not the lack of sites, but the costs involved with getting a site. In the Netherlands I pay 1cent per KB. That quickly adds up with the googlepicture of the day etc. After having used it for a day, I was up to 10 euros in usage costs. The pricing for mobile data is outrageous and if that doesn't change then I will never use mobile data services.
Whenever I hear discussions on Wifi hotspots I get the idea that we're building wifi connections the wrong way round. We're building wifi on the open road, that sometimes reaches into our houses/businesses. We could do it from the bottom up, based on the wifi access points in peoples houses.
How hard would a standard be, which would make it possible to extend the official network of the ISP to a users access point, maybe with a VLAN solution. This way if I open up my laptop and there is an access point available of Joe User, I can only hook up to it by propperly logging in to the ISP's network or use the airport/credit card system. This will require many roaming agreements etc, but it would bring security and convenience at the same time. It should be done in such a way that the person opening up his network in this way can throttle the speed of the guest users and/or the times they can access. So I would like to see a rule like "Guests can only connect when I am not connecting" or "Guests only get 1mbit"
The Dutch police has a huge database of all kinds of (child pornography) pictures. Of each picture they have a hash. When they confiscate the pc of somebody who is suspected of having child pornography, the first thing they do is run the hashes against the pictures on the system. This saves them from having to look at all those pictures, they can now focus on the unknown ones. Great thing is also that the hashes are admissable in Court as evidence.
Both AMS-IX and LINX staff can impress the girls/guys with having the bigger one. LINX's switches are pushing more data (71 Gbit total include private+public/49.23Gbit for public peering) Ams-ix is doing 49.7 (dunno if that includes private)
;-)
AMS-IX has more members 210 against LINX having only 169 members.
However they are both equally fun to party with.
One of the largest problems I currently see is in the area of victim and missing registration. I wrote twice about it in my blog. I first made the following analysis: Like everybody I am following the news on the tsunami and I noticed a couple of things that got me thinking. After a disaster there are generally two major questions that need to be answered. 1. Who survived, got injured, died, is missing? 2. What relief is needed, where and who provides it?
To answer the first question there are two systems that I found with a bit of googling: A Japanese group has build a system.
Their presentation to ETSI can be found here. It has a great name: I Am Alive. This system seems to be currently in use by the Thai governement and Red Cross.
The Australian governement has a system which is described here by the Red Cross which is using it. The system is called the National Registration and Inquiry System (NRIS).
I have seen the results of the the I Am Alive-system and it looks like an
excellent system. It would be great if they could get some global support to further develop this system. At this moment it seems only Japan is working on this system and a quick search on Google didn't point too many English language pages on the system. I'll see if I can find some information on it.
I imagine every ministery of Interior, or government emergency response organisation should have a copy always ready and available on a webserver. So whenever there is a disaster this system is already running and can be used to register all the countries nationals potentially involved and can then later be used to compare these data with the records of the country affected. Maybe the United Nations Reliefweb website could be used as a basis.
The United Nations Reliefweb is also a great resource on all kinds of relief efforts and it gives good information on what kind of resources and people are nescessary.
Think "cell phones."
I certainly do think of cell phones and then more in particular the GSM, which does make it possible to switch providers. Actually I wouldn't mind a concerted effort by the industry/governments to come to a standard, like we now have with GSM. There have been many bad standards, but I think GSM is one of those examples where the cooperation among industry and the sanctioning of the standard by government has benefited everybody. Might be something for the EU to look into.
Yesterday I had a discussion on set top boxes with a couple of colleagues. It seems to us that the living room of the future will have its own rack full with set top boxes. A set top box for your digital radio, a set top box for digital tv, a set top box for internet/dsl connection, a set top box for video on demand, a set top box for I don't know what else for a kind of DRM protected content.
I can see all these set top boxes actually harming competition. Having to introduce a new set top box for a new service seems like a proper waste of money. The consumer might like a different provider per service but buying a new box just to make it work will be prohibitively expensive
It would be great if we would get systems that are modular, maybe work with a set of chipcards or something along those lines.
I would love to go to Japan, but simple calculations put a 20 day trip there beyond my financial limits and there are still alot of cheaper places in the world I want and financially can see. Just to give you a quote of the Lonely Planet.
Japan is probably the most expensive country in the world for travel
Well, I wrote some thoughts on Wireless and Security in my blog which I now copy here.
# setting up secure connections is too difficult for the lay person. We need standard Diffie-Helman key exchanges. I saw on the internet that it is available on some access points, but it just should be the standard of the IEEE. As far as I could find with Google it isn't yet. I can't understand why.
# Securing accesspoints should be mandatory. There are too many open access points available. There is no use for anonymous connections over a random family's access point, it only endangers them into being seen as cybercriminals.
# If people want to make it possible for neighbours and strangers to make use of their access point it should be done in the same way hotspots are now available at airports and Starbucks. Make it possible to extend the official network of the ISP to a users access point. This way if I open up my laptop and there is an access point available of Joe User, I can only hook up to it by propperly logging in to the ISP's network or use the airport/credit card system. This will require many roaming agreements etc, but it would bring security and convenience at the same time. It should be done in such a way that the person opening up his network in this way can throttle the speed of the guest users and/or the times they can access. So I would like to see a rule like "Guests can only connect when I am not connecting" or "Guests only get 1mbit/sec".