Scott Bradner
Bradner is a consultant with Harvard University's University Information Systems. Reach him at sob@sobco.com. Bradner forum Get Bradner in your inbox.
IP Commission Report: Surprisingly clueful
If one were to believe the blogs, the recently released 84-page report from The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property is full of dumb ideas, proposed by people who have no idea about intellectual property. But the...
Federal requirement for open access: Seeing what you paid for
In early May President Obama signed an executive order that makes “Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information”.
Internet taxes: Is the inevitable about to happen?
Some things never happen the way that us pundits expect. Back on Independence Day in 1999 I wrote this about government taxing the purchase of goods over the Internet: "I fully believe in the ingenuity of the government when it comes...
OpenDaylight: the next Penguin?
It seems to be passe to be solid these days. The latest example of this is the just-announced OpenDaylight project, in which a bunch of the biggest names in computing and networking have gotten together to push an open source...
Cloud services: Computus Interruptus
I use Google Docs as part of my day job. On one recent morning I accessed a file and updated it but when I went back a short time later I got a "502" error page -- something had gone amok in Google land. Everything seemed to work when...
Privacy as product differentiation. Is it time?
One of the big problems standing in the way of getting anything that remotely resembles a concern among Internet companies for the privacy rights of their customers is that there has been no business reason for any such concern. That...
Critical infrastructure protection: Maybe thinking good thoughts will make us safe
Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) retired in January after quite a colorful two-dozen years in the U.S. Senate. One of the major issues he pushed for during his last few years in office was protection of the U.S. critical infrastructure. Along...
Apparently we can wait: Obama's online privacy effort
It has now been just about a year since the Obama administration put forth its online privacy blueprint. In spite of a title on the announcement that insisted "We Can't Wait," not much has happened since the blueprint was published....
The end of an extraordinary life: Aaron Swartz
I had already submitted my last column when I heard about Aaron Swartz's death. Some might say that it's too late to comment on this story since the crowd has moved on, but it's never too late to write about someone you knew.
Looking forward to a future Internet
Going into last month the future of the Internet, to borrow a phrase from the great film noir movie "A Touch of Evil," looked like it may have been all used up. The feeling of the traditional telephone folk and controlling governments...
Reminiscences of another Internet transition year
A good (or was it bad) chunk of 2012 in Internet-land was spent dreading and getting ready for the ITU World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai that will conclude about the time this column is published....