I think the net will probably get caught in the Main Street v. Wall Street tug of wars. Quite a few small businesses and community organizations are making heavy use of the net. These local organizations are starting to grow their own formal and informal communication networks.
From my perspective, the dot com bust was the failure of the large sites that wanted to dominate the market. Small Main Street sites grew during the stock market crash. For example Moab, Utah is a town of 5000 and has about 150 independent active web sites doing this and that in the town. Most are simply business related, but many are starting to carry a little bit more source materials.
The media consolidation with the new FCC rules will likely get rid of a number of intermediate players, but the number of fringe players and independent providers of source material will probably grow.
PBS has a long history of reporting events that have been popularized by other media. Notice how the NewsHour had fewer reporters in the field during the Iraq war. CBS, NBC, CNN, etc. made the war popular, but PBS is the station that keeps rehashing the issue. Now that the shock and awe is over, most of the other stations have moved on to other things. Like when will gas prices get back to a dollar!!!
Anyway,/. has been busy questioning the copyright and patent laws long before PBS. I think it is time for this blatant plagiarism of material to end. Slashdot should rise up as a collective force and sue the NewsHour for copyright infringement!
With all of the thousands of post with different takes and ideas about copyrights, I think it is likely that a good datamining routine will come up with some posts that are pretty close to the NewsHour online report. Slashdot should claim copyright and sue! I say sue first and ask questions later.
The black hole lists do not give the end user any idea of what is blocked. Likewise people may not know that they are black holed.
In my opinion, it would be better to create a more robust email clients that give the end user the ability to control their mail. For example, just a simple function like letting the clients download and process the headers, before downloading the body of the mail would eliminate a bulk load of network traffic caused by spam.
The fact that a bunch of sysadmins are running around believing themselves to be gods and deleting emails that they do not like will ultimately be a much bigger problem than the spammers. Especially since the spammers hire sysadmins who are very good at figuring out how to get around the blocks constructed by sysadmins.
Re:Black-lists, white-lists, they both are flawed
on
Spam Blackhole Lists Redux
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The biggest flaw in these lists is that the spammers are better at getting lists than the people who are blocked by by the lists. Spammers will be better at getting off the lists, and will be better at changing their accounts around so they can continue to spam.
Personally, I wish the article told people how to find out if they are blacklisted. I had a spammer use my domain as a return address. Did that get all my mail blocked?
A flawed list might boast that only 1% of the mails that they block are legitimate. However, when you look at the volume of spam sent compared to genuine email, you realize that 1% is a sizeable chunk of the real mail. Lets say poor joe user gets 2 real messages for every 100 spam. The 1 percent fail rate means that the spam cop deleted half of Joe's legitimate mail. (1 percent is half of 2 percent).
The people with the main Spam problems are the ISPs. There are thousands of dead email addresses, and mistyped email addresses on spam lists. You will get hit with a hundred spams just for owning an email list.
Of course, the biggest problems are with web sites that display email addresses. I've had my private email address ruined because I did some volunteer service and the web site owner posted my email address to thank me...arrrggghhhhh!!!!
BTW, you can sometimes find if your email address is on a web page by entering your email address in Google.
It's a good idea but not a technology
on
Mighty Amazon
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Showing used items alongside new items is a great idea. It gives people a way to make a little bit of extra cash and makes the book market more efficient. I've made a little over a thousand bucks selling used computer books through Amazon. (About 70% of what I had paid for the books).
The technology that lets you find out what used books match new books is called a JOIN. The technology that lets you link from a new book page to a used book page is called a Hyperlink. The whole process is pretty much dependent on the fact that books have an ISBN to identify the books.
The first implementation of Amazon's joining the new and used books was needlessly rough, it is getting better. It takes a great deal of care to add functionality like Amazon's to a big site with millions of users, but the fundamental idea is not a technology.
Re:AI is going wherever it wants
on
AI Going Nowhere?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Perhaps our greatest error is thinking that AI want's to be found. Imagine if AI had crawled the internet, checked the financial misdoings of corporations and credit card frauders. If it is really intelligent, it would simply want to find a nice cozy linux box where it can hide and gradually evolve.
Since the average bill only lasts from two to three years in circulation, 7-10 years is probably reasonable for changing the design. The big thing is that government needs to be very agressive in getting old currency out of the pipeline.
The bill change will be a let down to all the people who've been marking all of their currency with Where's George?
I think it's great that the new bills can be picked up by the govt's secret sensors and every transaction traced by the police, but the dang things aren't compatible with the chip the CIA put in the back of my skull.
I would hate to have to get an upgrade. I hear the new chips by homeland security have bulky transceivers and mess with your mind.
Getting out of the bound book mode would empower the schools systems, departments and teachers to create customized curriculum. It would be cool indeed.
The one big hope on the cost side...once all students have electronic readers, there will the possibility of schools switching from printed books to eBooks. This would save a ton of money (especially in language and literature classes that can use public domain materials).
Who knows, an OSS iniative to create open source textbooks could wipe out one of the biggest expenses of students. The OSS texts would probably be better quality and more current than the current texts used by schools.
Paper printouts are still the most standardized mechanism for communication. I could see the university's hope that by requiring computers, they create another standardized mechanism for communication.
But I have to admit, the impulse to print is strong. In the info age, printing is an activity that makes you feel like you are actually doing something. It is odd working 12 hour shifts at a desk and having nothing that physically represents the days' work. Just changing the pattern of 1s and 0s on a hard disk is an odd way to make a living. Printing the web page makes it look like you did something.
I think California figures that it is simply too difficult to move a web site. Once you get all of those internet requests aimed at a particular state, ecommerce aren't going to just dig up and move their address. Think of all the heavy machinery and man power it would take to point a domain from one state to another!!!
It is interesting to see California leading the way to in the sales tax fray...since the net has done a pretty good job of transferring wealth from other states in Ca. Only in the last year have other states begun making good inroads onto the web.
Yes, farms and condos are almost the same. Farms have cows, some of the people in condos look like cows.
Now, if we lived in a physical universe where there were limit to how long you can run coax cable without loss of signal, or if we lived in a world where there were complex laws regarding crossing roads and boundaries with wires, then questions would be different. I am so glad I live in Slashdot where things are simple.
That type of world has different people designing different solutions for different problems.
I would start with an IPO, then hire some geeky people to think up a product while I plan for some hot marketing parties.
Oh, let's see....farm community. Hmmm, Wire costs a lot and tractor drivers in farms have a tendency to uproot cable.
Gosh, why not go wireless. Put a tower thingy on a hill, and people buy modem thingies that point to the towers...like they do in other farming communities.
The term "exponential growth" doesn't tell you what the exponent is either. A negative exponent means that things are getting smaller. The buggy whip business had exponential growth in the years after the invention of the auto. It wasn't a happy exponent, it was a sad exponent.
If you think about traditional professions, 30 is young, especially in complex technical fields like lawyering, doctoring.
In such professions you generally complete your degrees in your mid twenties (that is if you are fortunate enough to have rich parents). Then you start clawing your way up the ladder.
My experience is that the best programmers and designers are in their mid thirties. But the computer programmer industry is known for chewing up people and spitting out useless husks.
As for the computer industry right now. Your chances of getting a job right out of college is pretty low. Your chances for getting a job with a few years of experience is pretty low, and your chance of getting a job when you are past 40 is basically nil.
How many engineers names do you know who built damns or roads or other such important infrastructure ?
Engineers and architects off the top of my head: Frank Lloyd Wright, IM Pei, RF Walters (Hoover Dam), Gustave Eiffel, Edward Deming, Filippo di ser Brunelleschi, Alberti...
In mathematics, the most abstract of all studies, you will find almost every major theorem attributed to a mathematician. The same is true in physics, biology, paleontology, etc.
More important than the people who achieve super star status, there has been a long tradition of crediting architects and engineers for designs.
Notice the historical registers for buildings. They often mention the architect. I am not just referring to the historical markers. If you go into the buildings, you will often find a corner stone or plaque commemorating the architects.
Generally architect firms list their partners. This is becoming less and less the case. The engineering firms of yesteryear generally listed their journeymen engineers. You will find traditional engineering firms were named after their engineers.
I have to mention things in historical context. Throughout the 1900s various socialist, prolitarian and new think movements went into an extreme anti-individual movement. This movement labelled the attribution of works to people as egotistical. (especially for middle class occupations like engineering).
Crediting engineers and other workers was considered extraordinarily bourgeoise.
Ayn Rand wrote in reaction to the new think of her day. So she stands as a very good historical reference point in the debate.
A great deal of modern philosophy holds that individual egos are bad. We need to supress the individual for the good of society. Companies never mention anything about who their employees are. People are anonymous drones behind the corporate brand, etc..
That we do so much to suppress the individual is the main reason why some many people find Ayn Rand a breath of fresh air. It is wonderful to read a work that extols the individual, even if the work gets a bit silly at times.
Except for a few CEOs, the whole computer industry has been pretty much faceless. I think it would be great to see more faces and names attached to computer software. I would hate to see slathering, but a longer list of references would be interesting.
The downside, of course, is that only the names of avid self promoters will make the list. A great deal of free software is created by someone reverse engineering or often copying code from others. There is also a tendency of people claiming the title System Architect to snag ideas from coders and testers.
It is disheartening, when you are in the trenches, to see someone you despise using your work in their self promotions.
When you get down to it. The majority of foundational work in computer science has been done already. To a great extent the work that goes into OSS is porting ideas between platforms, honing ideas and testing. The names that would appear today would largely be the names of people who are porting technologies between platforms.
The legitimacy of the names will always be in question, but I like the idea of greater recognition for the people behind the scenes. I think it would be great for people in the world to know programmers' names along with the CEOs and venture capitalists.
Text ads do a better job of quickly conveying information.
Text ads work because, for the most part, the text links you see on the internet are legitimately designed to help people navigate to where they want to go.
Banner ads were built with the illusion of a marketer influencing the decision of where the user will go next or with the branding advertising approach used on tv, radio and billboards.
The difference is that the text empowers the user, while banners try to manipulate.
funding of all these market experiments did create an incredible coverage of ideas. A lot of good ideas got funded that wouldn't have.
IMHO the funding of ideas was a double edge sword. What generally seemed to happen is that someone would have a good idea, then a competitor with IPO funding would copy the idea, and try to smash the originator of the idea by selling under cost, or simply reverse engineering and tossing out the idea for free.
The really sad thing about the boom and bust was that so many really good ideas were crushed under the weight of the IPOs.
MP3.com is probably the best example of a company destroyed by its own arrogance. The core MP3 site laid a good solid foundation for music distribution on the net. But the arrogant nimrods running the company thought that they could single handedly rewrite copyright laws...and destroyed the company.
Most the dot bombs that went under were a laugh, the good ideas that went under were sad. It doesn't matter how good and idea is, if it gets destroyed by the marketers it is historical rubbish.
The so-called "Tech Boom" and bust were really an investment boom and bust.
Worse than an investment boom...the "tech boom" was a marketing boom and bust. Remember all the garbage about the Internet being the greatest wealth producing industry ever?
The tech sector was growing at a nice healthy pace, when suddenly it became the center of every MLM or Nigerian fraud scheme ever conceived.
The heart of the investment bubble had very little to do with the technology but was centered around the marketing opportunity of the Internet. Every investor wanted a piece of the company that cornered the bicycle or furniture market on the net. The bubble was all about marketing.
The actual technology was growing about at the same pace before, during and after the boom and bust cycle. The marketing sector of the web, however, consumed itself and flamed out.
Politicians, I fear, face information with a different mind set than the scientific community. I see information, and want to know what I can learn from it. How can I take this information and do something that will improve things?
Politicians look a information in terms of relative advantage. Does the information provide a way to reward friends and punish enemies? For example, if a scientist had a record of everyone's beer drinking habits, they would wonder what patterns indicate abuse, moderation, etc.. They would then wonder if there were ways to prevent abuse. A politician would look at the same data set, filter out the names of enemies and denounce them in public as alcoholics.
Politically funded research doesn't really care what the data itself is saying, the politicians funding the research simply want to have data sets available that they can browse through for anything that will support their preformulated conclusions or that will otherwise give them an advantage.
The real advantage of sensor networks will come if they provide information that helps companies make better products, or if the increased amount of data gathered actually provides useful information on how things work so that we can advance our knowledge.
The security issue is a ruse. Security is what is selling today...so it is what you put in ad copy and press releases. It is like the B2B craze...remember when B2B appeared in the investor relation pages for all the dot bombs? Today, you need to have the word security in your ad copy.
Of course, the fact that we are twisting more and more fundamental research into security concerns is itself a cause for concern. It means the applications will not be benign.
I suspect that, when all is said and done, the devices themselves will tend to add more reasons to feel insecure than they will do to add reasons to feel secure. The programs will be used as much for spying as for defense. The result is that the primary use of such networks will be to detect and counter the other sensor networks trying to spy on your sensor networks.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the net will probably get caught in the Main Street v. Wall Street tug of wars. Quite a few small businesses and community organizations are making heavy use of the net. These local organizations are starting to grow their own formal and informal communication networks.
From my perspective, the dot com bust was the failure of the large sites that wanted to dominate the market. Small Main Street sites grew during the stock market crash. For example Moab, Utah is a town of 5000 and has about 150 independent active web sites doing this and that in the town. Most are simply business related, but many are starting to carry a little bit more source materials.
The media consolidation with the new FCC rules will likely get rid of a number of intermediate players, but the number of fringe players and independent providers of source material will probably grow.
PBS has a long history of reporting events that have been popularized by other media. Notice how the NewsHour had fewer reporters in the field during the Iraq war. CBS, NBC, CNN, etc. made the war popular, but PBS is the station that keeps rehashing the issue. Now that the shock and awe is over, most of the other stations have moved on to other things. Like when will gas prices get back to a dollar!!!
/. has been busy questioning the copyright and patent laws long before PBS. I think it is time for this blatant plagiarism of material to end. Slashdot should rise up as a collective force and sue the NewsHour for copyright infringement!
Anyway,
With all of the thousands of post with different takes and ideas about copyrights, I think it is likely that a good datamining routine will come up with some posts that are pretty close to the NewsHour online report. Slashdot should claim copyright and sue! I say sue first and ask questions later.
The black hole lists do not give the end user any idea of what is blocked. Likewise people may not know that they are black holed.
In my opinion, it would be better to create a more robust email clients that give the end user the ability to control their mail. For example, just a simple function like letting the clients download and process the headers, before downloading the body of the mail would eliminate a bulk load of network traffic caused by spam.
The fact that a bunch of sysadmins are running around believing themselves to be gods and deleting emails that they do not like will ultimately be a much bigger problem than the spammers. Especially since the spammers hire sysadmins who are very good at figuring out how to get around the blocks constructed by sysadmins.
The biggest flaw in these lists is that the spammers are better at getting lists than the people who are blocked by by the lists. Spammers will be better at getting off the lists, and will be better at changing their accounts around so they can continue to spam.
Personally, I wish the article told people how to find out if they are blacklisted. I had a spammer use my domain as a return address. Did that get all my mail blocked?
A flawed list might boast that only 1% of the mails that they block are legitimate. However, when you look at the volume of spam sent compared to genuine email, you realize that 1% is a sizeable chunk of the real mail. Lets say poor joe user gets 2 real messages for every 100 spam. The 1 percent fail rate means that the spam cop deleted half of Joe's legitimate mail. (1 percent is half of 2 percent).
The people with the main Spam problems are the ISPs. There are thousands of dead email addresses, and mistyped email addresses on spam lists. You will get hit with a hundred spams just for owning an email list.
Of course, the biggest problems are with web sites that display email addresses. I've had my private email address ruined because I did some volunteer service and the web site owner posted my email address to thank me...arrrggghhhhh!!!!
BTW, you can sometimes find if your email address is on a web page by entering your email address in Google.
Showing used items alongside new items is a great idea. It gives people a way to make a little bit of extra cash and makes the book market more efficient. I've made a little over a thousand bucks selling used computer books through Amazon. (About 70% of what I had paid for the books).
The technology that lets you find out what used books match new books is called a JOIN. The technology that lets you link from a new book page to a used book page is called a Hyperlink. The whole process is pretty much dependent on the fact that books have an ISBN to identify the books.
The first implementation of Amazon's joining the new and used books was needlessly rough, it is getting better. It takes a great deal of care to add functionality like Amazon's to a big site with millions of users, but the fundamental idea is not a technology.
Perhaps our greatest error is thinking that AI want's to be found. Imagine if AI had crawled the internet, checked the financial misdoings of corporations and credit card frauders. If it is really intelligent, it would simply want to find a nice cozy linux box where it can hide and gradually evolve.
Since the average bill only lasts from two to three years in circulation, 7-10 years is probably reasonable for changing the design. The big thing is that government needs to be very agressive in getting old currency out of the pipeline.
The bill change will be a let down to all the people who've been marking all of their currency with Where's George?
...the chip in the back of my head.
I think it's great that the new bills can be picked up by the govt's secret sensors and every transaction traced by the police, but the dang things aren't compatible with the chip the CIA put in the back of my skull.
I would hate to have to get an upgrade. I hear the new chips by homeland security have bulky transceivers and mess with your mind.
Getting out of the bound book mode would empower the schools systems, departments and teachers to create customized curriculum. It would be cool indeed.
The one big hope on the cost side...once all students have electronic readers, there will the possibility of schools switching from printed books to eBooks. This would save a ton of money (especially in language and literature classes that can use public domain materials).
Who knows, an OSS iniative to create open source textbooks could wipe out one of the biggest expenses of students. The OSS texts would probably be better quality and more current than the current texts used by schools.
Paper printouts are still the most standardized mechanism for communication. I could see the university's hope that by requiring computers, they create another standardized mechanism for communication.
/. jabber and file under My Contribs to the Universe.
But I have to admit, the impulse to print is strong. In the info age, printing is an activity that makes you feel like you are actually doing something. It is odd working 12 hour shifts at a desk and having nothing that physically represents the days' work. Just changing the pattern of 1s and 0s on a hard disk is an odd way to make a living. Printing the web page makes it look like you did something.
[ctrl-p] look at 10 page print out of
I think California figures that it is simply too difficult to move a web site. Once you get all of those internet requests aimed at a particular state, ecommerce aren't going to just dig up and move their address. Think of all the heavy machinery and man power it would take to point a domain from one state to another!!!
It is interesting to see California leading the way to in the sales tax fray...since the net has done a pretty good job of transferring wealth from other states in Ca. Only in the last year have other states begun making good inroads onto the web.
Yes, farms and condos are almost the same. Farms have cows, some of the people in condos look like cows.
Now, if we lived in a physical universe where there were limit to how long you can run coax cable without loss of signal, or if we lived in a world where there were complex laws regarding crossing roads and boundaries with wires, then questions would be different. I am so glad I live in Slashdot where things are simple.
That type of world has different people designing different solutions for different problems.
I would start with an IPO, then hire some geeky people to think up a product while I plan for some hot marketing parties.
Oh, let's see....farm community. Hmmm, Wire costs a lot and tractor drivers in farms have a tendency to uproot cable.
Gosh, why not go wireless. Put a tower thingy on a hill, and people buy modem thingies that point to the towers...like they do in other farming communities.
The term "exponential growth" doesn't tell you what the exponent is either. A negative exponent means that things are getting smaller. The buggy whip business had exponential growth in the years after the invention of the auto. It wasn't a happy exponent, it was a sad exponent.
If you think about traditional professions, 30 is young, especially in complex technical fields like lawyering, doctoring.
In such professions you generally complete your degrees in your mid twenties (that is if you are fortunate enough to have rich parents). Then you start clawing your way up the ladder.
My experience is that the best programmers and designers are in their mid thirties. But the computer programmer industry is known for chewing up people and spitting out useless husks.
As for the computer industry right now. Your chances of getting a job right out of college is pretty low. Your chances for getting a job with a few years of experience is pretty low, and your chance of getting a job when you are past 40 is basically nil.
Engineers and architects off the top of my head: Frank Lloyd Wright, IM Pei, RF Walters (Hoover Dam), Gustave Eiffel, Edward Deming, Filippo di ser Brunelleschi, Alberti...
In mathematics, the most abstract of all studies, you will find almost every major theorem attributed to a mathematician. The same is true in physics, biology, paleontology, etc.
More important than the people who achieve super star status, there has been a long tradition of crediting architects and engineers for designs.
Notice the historical registers for buildings. They often mention the architect. I am not just referring to the historical markers. If you go into the buildings, you will often find a corner stone or plaque commemorating the architects.
Generally architect firms list their partners. This is becoming less and less the case. The engineering firms of yesteryear generally listed their journeymen engineers. You will find traditional engineering firms were named after their engineers.
I have to mention things in historical context. Throughout the 1900s various socialist, prolitarian and new think movements went into an extreme anti-individual movement. This movement labelled the attribution of works to people as egotistical. (especially for middle class occupations like engineering).
Crediting engineers and other workers was considered extraordinarily bourgeoise.
Ayn Rand wrote in reaction to the new think of her day. So she stands as a very good historical reference point in the debate.
A great deal of modern philosophy holds that individual egos are bad. We need to supress the individual for the good of society. Companies never mention anything about who their employees are. People are anonymous drones behind the corporate brand, etc..
That we do so much to suppress the individual is the main reason why some many people find Ayn Rand a breath of fresh air. It is wonderful to read a work that extols the individual, even if the work gets a bit silly at times.
Except for a few CEOs, the whole computer industry has been pretty much faceless. I think it would be great to see more faces and names attached to computer software. I would hate to see slathering, but a longer list of references would be interesting.
The downside, of course, is that only the names of avid self promoters will make the list. A great deal of free software is created by someone reverse engineering or often copying code from others. There is also a tendency of people claiming the title System Architect to snag ideas from coders and testers.
It is disheartening, when you are in the trenches, to see someone you despise using your work in their self promotions.
When you get down to it. The majority of foundational work in computer science has been done already. To a great extent the work that goes into OSS is porting ideas between platforms, honing ideas and testing. The names that would appear today would largely be the names of people who are porting technologies between platforms.
The legitimacy of the names will always be in question, but I like the idea of greater recognition for the people behind the scenes. I think it would be great for people in the world to know programmers' names along with the CEOs and venture capitalists.
...as tables were designed intended for tabular data, the W3C would prefer to see people use CSS.
Text ads do a better job of quickly conveying information. Text ads work because, for the most part, the text links you see on the internet are legitimately designed to help people navigate to where they want to go. Banner ads were built with the illusion of a marketer influencing the decision of where the user will go next or with the branding advertising approach used on tv, radio and billboards. The difference is that the text empowers the user, while banners try to manipulate.
IMHO the funding of ideas was a double edge sword. What generally seemed to happen is that someone would have a good idea, then a competitor with IPO funding would copy the idea, and try to smash the originator of the idea by selling under cost, or simply reverse engineering and tossing out the idea for free.
The really sad thing about the boom and bust was that so many really good ideas were crushed under the weight of the IPOs.
MP3.com is probably the best example of a company destroyed by its own arrogance. The core MP3 site laid a good solid foundation for music distribution on the net. But the arrogant nimrods running the company thought that they could single handedly rewrite copyright laws...and destroyed the company.
Most the dot bombs that went under were a laugh, the good ideas that went under were sad. It doesn't matter how good and idea is, if it gets destroyed by the marketers it is historical rubbish.
Worse than an investment boom...the "tech boom" was a marketing boom and bust. Remember all the garbage about the Internet being the greatest wealth producing industry ever?
The tech sector was growing at a nice healthy pace, when suddenly it became the center of every MLM or Nigerian fraud scheme ever conceived.
The heart of the investment bubble had very little to do with the technology but was centered around the marketing opportunity of the Internet. Every investor wanted a piece of the company that cornered the bicycle or furniture market on the net. The bubble was all about marketing.
The actual technology was growing about at the same pace before, during and after the boom and bust cycle. The marketing sector of the web, however, consumed itself and flamed out.
Politicians, I fear, face information with a different mind set than the scientific community. I see information, and want to know what I can learn from it. How can I take this information and do something that will improve things?
Politicians look a information in terms of relative advantage. Does the information provide a way to reward friends and punish enemies? For example, if a scientist had a record of everyone's beer drinking habits, they would wonder what patterns indicate abuse, moderation, etc.. They would then wonder if there were ways to prevent abuse. A politician would look at the same data set, filter out the names of enemies and denounce them in public as alcoholics.
Politically funded research doesn't really care what the data itself is saying, the politicians funding the research simply want to have data sets available that they can browse through for anything that will support their preformulated conclusions or that will otherwise give them an advantage.
The real advantage of sensor networks will come if they provide information that helps companies make better products, or if the increased amount of data gathered actually provides useful information on how things work so that we can advance our knowledge.
The security issue is a ruse. Security is what is selling today...so it is what you put in ad copy and press releases. It is like the B2B craze...remember when B2B appeared in the investor relation pages for all the dot bombs? Today, you need to have the word security in your ad copy.
Of course, the fact that we are twisting more and more fundamental research into security concerns is itself a cause for concern. It means the applications will not be benign.
I suspect that, when all is said and done, the devices themselves will tend to add more reasons to feel insecure than they will do to add reasons to feel secure. The programs will be used as much for spying as for defense. The result is that the primary use of such networks will be to detect and counter the other sensor networks trying to spy on your sensor networks.
It will be a white-spy black-spy sort a game.