Honor Among Thieves
Ransomware is a pain. People open an attachment in an email, allowing a virus to infect their computers. The virus scrambles all their data and they get a notice from…
How Google fought back against a crippling IoT-powered botnet and won
From Ars Technica: “What happens if this botnet actually takes down google.com and we lose all of our revenue?” Google Security Reliability Engineer Damian Menscher recalls people asking. “But we…
Animating Rural Broadband
Subsidies aren’t going to alleviate rural America’s broadband woes all by themselves, but with a little planning and some new technology we can do a lot with a little.
FCC Course Correction
The FCC has made a number of expected decisions on pending issues and signalled a willingness to alter the course of network regulation in a more permissive, innovation-friendly direction. Here are some highlights of recent actions.
Is Net Neutrality Doomed?
Net neutrality is doomed by history and technology regardless of who sits atop the FCC. Neutrality is forced modularity, a losing proposition in every long run. Our reverence for for forced modularity comes from a fluke of history.
Internet Issues Front and Center in Ross Confirmation Hearing
Questions asked of prospective Commerce Secretary show how important the Internet is to American commerce: spectrum, broadband, and cybersecurity dominated the discussion.
Reimagining the FCC for the 21st Century
I read an intriguing article on Airbus’s plans for flying cars in Digital Trends. Before the end of the year, Europe’s aircraft maker will be testing both single-passenger and no-passenger flying…
Taking Wi-Fi to the Next Level
Once again, the Consumer Electronics Show highlighted augmented reality and Internet of Things devices and applications. Amazon Echo support was a common theme in IoT devices, and the headsets and…
The Year of Checking Facts
Washington is going to be consumed with confirmation hearings this week, with too many for me to count. Confirmation in the broad sense is going to occupy a lot of our…
FBI/DHS Security Report a “Jumbled Mess”
“No one should be making any attribution conclusions purely from the indicators in the [government] report,” tweeted Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer of CrowdStrike, which investigated the DNC hack and attributed it to the Russian government. “It was all a jumbled mess.’’