"worries" entries
Failure Happens: Transcontinental fiber-optic submarine cables
The Guardian published a summary of the ongoing impact from the transcontinental fiber-optic submarine cable cuts along with a map from Telegeography.com: According to reports, the internet blackout, which has left 75 million people with only limited access, was caused by a ship that tried to moor off the coast of Egypt in bad weather on Wednesday. Since then phone…
One Laptop Per Child will succeed even if it "fails"
The way people are dismissing the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project this week reminds me of how people were treating Hillary Clinton during the five days between her Iowa defeat and her New Hampshire comeback. To many observers, the inevitable has become the disaster in record time. Some of the anti-OLPC notes that have appeared since Intel was kicked…
Does Facebook own this blog post?
Facebook, apparently, owns my birthday. Yours too. At least that's one way to interpret why blogger Robert Scoble got kicked off Facebook. While testing an upcoming version of Plaxo Pulse, Scoble scraped information on his contacts (name, address, and birthday, so he could move them to Outlook, he says), which turns out to violate Facebook's terms of service. Self-promotion is…
'Computing in the Cloud' workshop hosted by Princeton University – January 14-15
Marc Hedlund and I will be speaking at the 'Computing in the Cloud' workshop hosted by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton on January 14-15. The sessions look very interesting and registration is free. Panel 1: Possession and ownership of data – In cloud computing, a provider's data center holds information that would more traditionally have been stored…
"Privacy is protected because it is essential to liberty" – Senator Dodd blocks Telco Immunity
Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) defeated an attempt to pass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which provided immunity to telecommunications companies who cooperated with the Bush administration’s secret wiretapping program.
Condescending Customer Service
When Gmail recently added IMAP to its features, I sent a note to the customer service box of the web-based email service I use for personal mail to ask whether IMAP was coming to that service. I received the following reply: I understand that you are want to use IMAP. I welcome the opportunity to assist you with your concern….
Failure Happens: Taser-wielding thieves steal servers, attack staff, and cause outages at Chicago colocation facility
In the most recent incident, “at least two masked intruders entered the suite after cutting into the reinforced walls with a power saw,” according to a letter C I Host officials sent customers…. One report detailing an occurrence on September 23, 2005, recounts a “hole cut through the wall coming out onto the hallway of third floor.” During a September 20, 2006 incident, an intruder “placed a silver + blk handgun to [victim’s] head and stated ‘lay down on the floor.'” The victim, a C I Host employee, was then blindfolded, bound with black tape and struck on the head with a weapon, according to the report.
Disaster Telecom after the earthquake in Peru
The BBC is reporting that over 500 people were killed and thousands of people left injured and homeless after the earthquakes in Peru earlier this week. The 24 hour Skype outage started shortly after the earthquake and contributed to the initial chaos. Skype's Villu Arak has claimed that the problems are resolved and promised to provide details about the cause…
Your browser is a tcp/ip relay
I've been a longtime fan of fellow hacker Dan Kaminsky, best known for his work in tracking down the spread of the sony rootkit. Recently I spoke with him about his current work, and he summed it up by saying, "I can turn your web browser into an VPN concentrator." When I stared at him in disbelief he explained that…
Amazon Web Services and the lack of a SLA
I am interested in understanding the business tradeoffs that people make when they decide to host their data on S3 or run their service on EC2 instead of investing in their own infrastructure. Quoting from the Amazon T&C. We further reserve the right to discontinue Amazon Web Services, any Services, or any portion or feature thereof for any reason and…