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By Scott Bradner

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Bradner is Harvard University's Technology Security Officer. Reach him at sob@sobco.com.

All's well with U.S. broadband deployment (says FCC): 06/24/08; Earlier this month, the FCC finally got around to releasing the U.S. broadband deployment report it approved in March. This fifth in a series "examining the availability of advanced telecommunications capability to all Americans" is just as silly as its predecessors. But the report and accompanying order (and further notice for proposed rule-making) on data collection about broadband data services may mean, assuming that the data they get is reasonably analyzed, that future reports may be a bit less silly.
Broadband pricing: solutions that are orthogonal to any real problem: 06/17/08; Broadband pricing proposals by AT&T, Time Warner and Comcast to deal with Internet congestion fall short.
What will rule the "new" Internet?: 06/10/08; Exploring the impact Google, Facebook and Apple's iPhone will have on the Internet, along with what economic models will rule.
Free wireless Internet with an asterisk?: 06/05/08; A proposal floated by the FCC chairman that would result in a free nationwide Wi-Fi Internet service would come with some big strings attached, including censorship, says columnist Scott Bradner.
Maybe you did buy that software after all: 05/27/08; Judge’s ruling in AutoDesk case could have implications for buyers of software from Microsoft, Apple and others, columnist Scott Bradner writes.
Bleak prospects for privacy: 05/20/08; While Web surfing the other day I ran across a London Times story that described two shopping malls in England that individually track everyone who walks into their environs (as long as they have a cell phone turned on).
A surfeit of network neutrality legislation: 05/13/08; Two proposed network neutrality bills are wending their way through Congress. They’re not bad but not perfect either, says columnist Scott Bradner.
Network managers: good worries, disappointing lapses: 05/06/08; VanDyke Software recently published results of the fifth annual edition of its survey of network and system administrators the company hired Amplitude Research to conduct and analyze. Most of the survey questions concerned security.
The elusive third wire for Internet service: 04/29/08; I wish network neutrality wasn't an important issue, but it is.
Online privacy: railing against the accepted: 04/22/08; I frequently use this column to rail against threats to the privacy of Internet users, both from government and the private sector. I just found a survey published late last year by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that reports that people are coming to support, or at last not object too strongly to, some types of spying.
Telling Google and others to do less evil: 04/15/08; Google, Yahoo and other search engine companies are in the data gathering business. The fact that they offer you and me the service of locating things on the Internet is a means to an end, and that end is data about what you and I do online. They are like the folks that hoard string - the more string they gather the better they feel even if there is little or no actual use for most of what they gather.
Telephony: creeping disconnection: 04/08/08; Each new survey shows that the number of people who have forsaken their traditional landline phones keeps growing. This, coupled with changes in the way people use cell phones, is starting to impact a number of areas in ways that people might not have expected just a few months ago.
Comcast and Verizon: Foxhole conversions?: 04/01/08; It's been a strange few weeks for us carrier-watchers. First Verizon announced it was going to open its cell network to all "approved" devices, then Comcast announced that it has become buddies with BitTorrent and would switch to a protocol-agnostic method of managing network capacity by year-end.
FCC: Consistent to a fault, but there is a (small) hope: 03/25/08; FCC’s annual misrepresentation of U.S. broadband deployment status may change in the future
Irrelevant victories in the war on spam: 03/18/08; On the surface it might look like there has been some real legal progress against spam of late. But don't be fooled; these victories, real as they may be for the people involved, don't mean much to you and me.
iPhone plus SDK: promise, threat and limits: 03/11/08; Apple’s software development kit for the iPhone provides promise to developers, threatens competitors but may be annoyingly limited.
DRM: a slow clue train?: 03/04/08; The New York Times reported on March 3 that Random House has decided to offer all of its audio books without digital rights management (DRM) unless a particular retailer or author objected. The Times reported that Penguin Group would soon follow. The realization that maybe exploring new business models makes more long-term sense than trying to make a model predicated on the distribution of physical objects work in a digital age has been slow, and far from uniform, but progress is being made.
Cold bits as a security bypass: 02/26/08; Columnist Scott Bradner discusses how worried you should really be about a new disk-encryption bypass exposed by Princeton security researchers.
SCO Group: Prolonging death or what?: 02/19/08; Earlier this year, it looked like The SCO Group was going down for the count. It had lost a key decision in its suit against Novell, declared bankruptcy and was quickly running out of money.
Slow motion wake-up call for Web accessibility: 02/11/08; The latest step in the lawsuit by the National Federation of the Blind against Target played out in a Baltimore court early this year, with Target’s appeal being denied. So the case will proceed, and if the NFB prevails a whole lot of corporate Web sites will need to be updated.
What a fragile, tangled communications web we’ve woven: 02/05/08; A ubiquitous Internet requires ubiquitous connectivity, and we are doing quite well in this arena. Of course, there are significant parts of the world and parts of the United States where there is far from enough transmission capacity, but those areas are shrinking every day.
The missing phone device and the IRS: 01/28/08; The cell-phone-only trend has been slowed by the lack of the right device, and may be partially derailed by an IRS move to tax all employees for company-provided equipment -- such as cell phones.
Why the Internet is not today's CNN: 01/22/08; The Internet is growing as a source for political news, but with many blogs being anonymously written, that's a bit scary.
Apple's MacBook Air: evolution, not revolution: 01/15/08; As I write this it's a little after noon Eastern Time on Jan. 15. I'm sitting in front of my computer (a Mac of course) watching two different live blogs coming from people watching the Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld 2008. I'm watching to see what, if any, "big" announcements Steve will make.
Election (including security) madness: 01/08/08; There's undercurrent of mistrust when it comes to the voting machines many people use. Could the machines themselves have a deciding impact on elections?

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