Collateral Damage

blackoutThere was lots of good discussion last time about cyber warfare, cyber security, and U.S. policy, but what most respondents seemed to miss was the international nature of the IT business — all the outsourcing and offshoring that we were told was so great — and its implications for U.S. security.  The upshot is that any U.S. cyber warfare czar will have to effectively function as a WORLD cyber warfare czar, a fact that neither Republican nor Democratic Administrations have yet been willing to embrace, at least in public.

Forget for the moment about data incursions within the DC beltway, what happens when  Pakistan takes down the Internet in India?  Here we have technologically sophisticated regional […]

The Future of Television (part II)

predicta2My last column generated a lively debate on the prospects for various business and technical options for the delivery of Internet TV so it makes sense to continue this topic and build it into a more full-featured model.  I used to write quite a bit about this back when I was trying to get NerdTV going.  The core of what I’ll write here can be found in a couple dozen columns from back then — columns that would seem to have been for the most part forgotten given the direction last week’s discussion took.  You see the future of television IS Internet television.  There is no other in sight.

No business or technology exists in a […]

The Future of Internet TV (in America)

ocean_hulu1This column has a global audience so sometimes I have to defend my tendency to see things from an American perspective.  But I’m not sure there even IS a defense for this particular item so I’ll just jump into it, because I think even readers from Kazahkstan and Kuwait (my two big K’s) may ultimately find it interesting.  It’s about Apple and Hulu and the direction Internet TV is going in the United States.

It’s not headed where you think it is.

Hulu is the ad-supported video distribution site set up by NBC-Universal and Fox.  It’s where, in addition to the TV network pages, viewers can go to watch thousands of television shows, old and new, […]

The Global Village

susan-boyle-pic-itv-113257880

This week more than 20 million people watched on YouTube and other video sharing sites a single performance from the ITV show Britain’s Got Talent in which a frumpy spinster from Scotland sang like an angel.You can see her astonishing performance here.

It’s not the singing that makes me write this, though the singing was good.I lived as a boy in the north of England and knew ladies like this Susan Boyle.What makes me write about it is the effect she and her singing had on the Internet and the Internet in turn had on the performance and its aftermath.

The video file as presented on YouTube is just over seven minutes […]

Access Denied: How to Defend Your Systems from an Inside Job

access_deniedLast week a story broke about a former Fannie Mae IT contractor accused of planting malicious code that would have taken down systems and destroyed data right at the epicenter of today’s global financial crisis. The accused former employee has since surfaced claiming innocence so I prefer not to go into that specific case but rather use it to consider the likelihood that similar crimes could take place in other companies.

Well of course the probability is 100 percent simply because similar crimes HAVE taken place in other companies. It happens all the time at an annual cost of BILLIONS.

IT crimes go grossly under-reported because they are so embarrassing to their victims […]