Saw an intriguing article last week, focusing on the development of a new security paradigm called “deperimeterization”. This is a term apparently coined by the Jericho Forum, and essentially describes a model where applications take a more proactive role to securing their own information and interactions, and rely less on the “wall & moat” model of today’s networks, with firewalls, DMZ’s, etc. The Jericho Forum envisions an environment where the “walls come tumbling down” and B2B, B2C, etc. interactions are done on open networks. Will it work? I sure don’t know, but the current model of security reminds me of the proverbial “Dutch Boy” with his finger in the dike, trying to hold back the network problem of the day. Read this article for an analysis, and be sure to read the Jericho Forum visioning white paper.

A popular question today is “how good is the wikipedia”? Can you really trust the information that you get from it? My own view is that it’s a reasonable compiliation, and generally speaking, folks do look at things and try to keep it on track. I find the technology entries to be consistently of higher quality that those of general knowledge, but I suspect that many of these articles are read and tweaked frequently. The Guardian newspaper in the UK has an interesting article where they had SME’s (subject matter experts) review a few entries. Check out what they said…

For those of you that subscribe to the Chronicle of Higher Ed, there’s a nice article in the subscriber access area about the pros/cons of podcasting lectures…

Interesting, short article in the NY Times (registration required) about the disconnected adults in the USA…the percentage of folks who are not Internet-connected has stayed roughtly the same between 2002 and 2005, despite the continued roar of technology all around us…

Well, I’ve often asked students when the first working “computers” were created, and watched their interest when I tell them about the Difference Engine of Babbage (Designed 1821-1833, first constructed 1837-1843 by Georg & Edvard Scheutz, based on Babbage’s design, but their own implementation) [Blaauw & Brooks, Computer Architecture, spring 1995 draft, and the Wikipedia]. Babbage’s work was based on ideas from Johann H. Muller in the 1780’s. However, I saw a blurb on Slashdot today that pushes the date of possible computers way back. I was unaware of the Antikythera mechanism, which is apparently an ancient Greek analog computer designed for celestial calculations. There is now a model (a best guess, of course) that has been constructed and is on display in Athens. Fascinating!

There is an interesting article in the technology section of today’s NY Times on Google map mashups. One that’s fascinating is the mashup that purports to locate an airplane in flight, listing the location, altitude, speed, and arrival time. I didn’t try it, as it appears to cost $10/month…but I love the combinations of technologies that are being pulled together via AJAX and other similar tools/philosophies. These somewhat organic combinations of widgets, API’s etc. are part of the Web 2.0 “movement.” Lots of good stuff out there! Of course, the facility that our kids have with technology can be surprising, and who knows what folks will think of next…

This program from Meebo is really interesting! This provides the “webmail” equivalent for IM. I saw this in Network World in the Mark Gibbs column. I have not used it extensively, just logged on and off a few times and sent some test messages between my AIM accounts. However, it seems to work as advertised! Try it!

Cool! Wireless power at last. Excerpt below:

“Splashpower wants to cut the charger cord

(InfoWorld) – You can use them while jogging, take them into the
woods, or ride with them on the open sea, but portable gadgets still
need to head back to base every time their batteries need recharging.
The power cord remains the final connection to the wired world for
many devices now that technologies like Bluetooth are replacing data
cables — but it too might be going away if a U.K. startup gets its
way.”

So, Friday the 7th, I saw a blurb go by on my screen that Google had introduced its RSS aggregator at the Web 2.0 meeting. I quickly tried it, only to find that everyone in the world was trying it too, and the performance was really bad, particularly for importing subscriptions (OPML files). However, over the weekend, things improved considerably, and I began to experiment with it. First, one thing that I really do like is that since it’s based on Google’s servers, I can read my subscriptions from multiple computers and it’s all synchronized. I’ve tried various stand-alone aggregators, the Sage Firefox extension, but having the ability to keep things in synch across multiple machines is great. Having said that, it’s taken me a while to get used to the way the Google reader works, and how to navigate. The more I use it, the more I like it…try it, your mileage may vary :-).

So, I’m catching up with various RSS feeds, trying to stay on top of things. There is so much information out there, it’s easy to miss important or interesting stuff. For example, I hadn’t realized that Level3 and Cogent had decoupled their peering arrangement this week. I read in a separate article in the Wall St. Journal that the impacts on average users are noticable…for example, Time Warner gets its IP service from Level3, and this meant that there was roughly 15-17% of the internet that was inaccessible to RoadRunner subscribers. Not good :-(. I found this really good article about the nascent hype about Web 2.0, in this article from the Register, Bubble 2.0. Incidently, this also mentions the Level3/Cogent issue.