The Wayback Machine – A Year Ago in SNS
SNS: Enlightening and Frightening for Nearly a Fifth of a Decade!

The lead article in the September 10, 2001 SNS was The Right to Privacy?, which examined whether Americans really have a right to privacy. Given all that’s happened post-9/11, the question is more relevant than ever. The article pointed out that the word privacy doesn’t appear in the Constitution, a fact that has obviously not escaped Attorney General Ashcroft. He would do well to read the 1998 White House memorandum on Privacy and Personal Information in Federal Records, which states: “Privacy is a cherished American value, closely linked to our concepts of personal freedom and well-being. At the same time, fundamental principles such as those underlying the First Amendment, perhaps the most important hallmark of American democracy, protect the free flow of information in our society.”

The article ended with Sun CEO Scott McNealy’s quote: “You have no privacy. Get over it.” Is this our fate?

Also in that issue, Web Site Liability took a look at the liability you might face if your site is hacked. While such an event is a concern for your business due to lost productivity and costs of restoration, Margaret Jane Radin, director of Stanford's Program on Law, Science and Technology said, “there is a 'significant risk' that in the near future targeted Web sites will be held liable to their customers for harm arising from distributed denial-of-service attacks.”

At the time, I should have pointed you to an excellent article written in 2000 by M. E. Kabay called Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks, Contributory Negligence and Downstream Liability. Kabay, who is not a lawyer, sums up his point thusly: “Simply put, whom would you rather sue: some impecunious wretch sitting in a basement cackling over his latest DDoS attack or a real business with assets?” You can learn more about DDoS attacks here.

Get ‘Em While They’re Young was about a plan by Microsoft and the State of Arizona to offer MS Office applications to 850,000 students in all 1,200 Arizona schools using an Application Service Provider (ASP) model. Cable provider Cox Business Services, hoping that education is broadband’s killer app, planned to push high-speed cable modem service to the home to provide students with the required bandwidth. (In an irrelevant, but funny note, the Interim Executive Director of the Arizona School Facilities Board is named Ed Boot.)

Arizona is offering a long list of software titles via ASP, many of which use Excel or other Office programs to demonstrate techniques. Kids may have better luck using these apps at home than at school, however. There’s some sort of dispute with Qwest that has stalled network installations at many schools. Also it turns out that Cox is the ASP provider in addition to being a provider of home connectivity. You can get a tour of what they offer here. It’s pretty impressive.

In A Sneaky Way to Increase Wireless Revenue, I bemoaned a mistake by an Australian wireless provider: sending ads for their services to the cell phones of their users, and charging them for the delivery. For more on this topic, stay tuned for an article in an upcoming TaylorHarkins newsletter on Short Messaging Service (SMS) advertising.

Signs You Live in the Year 2001 could easily be retitled Signs You Live in the Year 2002.

The article, New Times, New Art, concerned the Surveillance Camera Players and speculated as to whether they were still a going concern. Apparently the New York branch is. In a post-9/11 essay, they decried the proliferation of surveillance cameras and citizens’ blind acceptance of their worth. They point out about the innumerable cameras in the WTC area that:

None of these surveillance cameras did what they were supposed to do: anticipate or prevent another attack; provide security; keep thousands of people safe from harm. Like the NSA's orbiting satellites, surveillance cameras are a colossal waste of money. [. . .] 11 September 2001 wasn't the first time that surveillance cameras failed to do anything but violate basic human rights. In countries such as England, where the authorities keep accurate and complete records of the number of arrests and convictions that can reliably be ascribed to the use of surveillance cameras, the results are clear. Either the criminals simply move out of the sight of the cameras or the police arrive on the scene too late to make an arrest.

A recent BBC report tends to support this contention.

In Loudcloud Makin’ Some Noise, I repeated my opinion that telecom companies will make lousy ASPs and won’t succeed. The article was about ASP Loudcloud and Baby Bell Qwest inking a five-year co-marketing deal. Despite my misgivings, I called it a smooth move for Qwest.

Well, a lot can happen in a year. Loudcloud (a stupid name) is now OpsWare (a bit better) and their focus has changed to Internet operations automation. The company, which had seen its debut stock price of $6 fall to $2 a year ago, now trades at 76 cents. (BTW, finance.yahoo.com now has this very irritating ad that flies a little arrow around your screen for about 20 seconds, during which you can’t do anything. Great idea! Prevent me from working while you advertise to me! I’ve no idea what was even being advertised.)

Anyway, Loudcloud sold its hosting biz to EDS and, along with it, I suppose, went the Qwest relationship. A year ago Qwest had a 1 percent share of the hosting business (EDS had 12 percent), in part due to hosting Loudcloud’s clients. Wonder what the EDS sale does to those numbers?

The article, VoiceXML 2 held up for intellectual property issues, chided the Voice XML Forum participants for not figuring out how to cross-license technology to one another. The problems were apparently hammered out by October 23, 2001, and Voice XML 2.0 is available for download at the Voice XML Forum Web site.

Finally, Report from Burning Man chronicled Alert SNS Reader Andy Stevko’s trip to the Burning Man festival in the middle of a stinking desert. Unfortunately, the photos are no longer online.