Wednesday, October 16, 2002

Encrypt Everything Ray Ozzie on security: Encrypt everything. Software should just automatically encrypt everything that gets stored on disk, in case you happen to lose your laptop. Encrypt what goes over the wires. There’s no reason not to—computers are very powerful now. They have a lot of extra CPU power that could be going into encryption. I agree with him.  When I was working with the military in the early eighties we did this and we had a lot less CPU than we do today, with only 19.2 bandwidth.  Just makes sense (for our mobile data network as well). 10:48:38 AM

High-Tech Pessimists This kind of pessimism is not encouraging: "Maybe our current downsizing in the U.S. tech industry is a permanent downsizing and we are headed toward being a second-class industrial citizen in the world." - Patrick Gelsinger, Intel VP "We're talking in terms of years, not months." - Eric Schmidt, Google CEO "The tech industry is in danger of looking like Japan: it's down and out for a long time." - Rob Glaser, RealNetworks "We're in a real technology gridlock." - Peter Schwartz, Global Business Network It's critical that we get past this kind of thinking.  I am encouraged that we are making real progress in approaching a new level of intergovernmental cooperation in egovernment.  We need to continue to integrate information technology with other types of technology.  Web services are presenting new opportunities for efficiency and should free up creative thinking for new kinds of developments. 10:06:18 AM

Pop-up Ads Pop-up ads are the online equivalent of the Friday night telemarketer.  I have not taken the time to install software that would eliminate these annoyances, so I'm glad to see that AOL will at least begin eliminating some of them.  At the same time, I have had a request to create an enterprise project that would allow citizens to sign up online for a service to restrict telemarketers from contacting them.  I guess several states already have such a service. 9:24:39 AM

© Copyright 2003 David Fletcher.