Last week, I attended a conference in Washington, D.C. put on jointly by the Wi-Fi Alliance and the publishers of Government Computer News. One of the keynote speakers was Robert C. West, the Chief Information Security Officer of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Entrenched standards have a way of frustrating new efforts, even outside of technology. DHS began life as 22 separate organizations which were combined into one sprawling complex by Congress. Though there were nominally 22 organizations, many had no staff or budget; in practice, DHS was built from the six largest organizations: the Coast Guard, Secret Service, FEMA, INS, Border Patrol, and TSA. Six existing organizations meant six large legacy infrastructures to be tied together, and it’s not a stretch of imagination to think about the political problems associated with it.

To get the headquarters up and running, DHS re-used a TSA contract. The TSA hired an integrator to develop packages for airport screening systems, so an airport goes to the integrator and purchases the small, medium, or large airport package. DHS used a “large airport” package to get their D.C. headquarters running quickly, but soon found the TSA was not a useful template. Network re-use is hard (just like code re-use, I suppose). DHS had to spend time to separate out the headquarters infrastructure from the rest of the network so it could be more flexible than a TSA airport installation.

Wireless networks are a hot topic at DHS, just as they are in much of the rest of the world. The starting policy for wireless is that it was not allowed, period. No 802.11, no cell phones, nada. This changed when the advantages of wireless networks started to be appreciated. For all their faults, mobile telephones are often only the piece of equipment that first responder units will have which are interoperable. A second example came when a federal air marshal was able to thwart a kidnapping because of quick communications. Air marshals have PDAs, which are their main communications devices, in spite of the “no wireless” policy adopted by the department. The technology has been developed to the point where air marshals can be in contact with computer systems even while in flight at 30,000 feet. An air marshal was recently able to respond to an Amber Alert and rescue a missing child, thanks to the wireless system. With the advantages of wireless networks becoming clearer, the policy changed to allow wireless networks upon further review and analysis.

The Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) directs federal agencies to follow NIST recommendations on computer security. NIST’s wireless network recommendations, SP 800-48 was published in November 2002. West stated that he didn’t feel it was a useful document because it was too short on technical specifics. (I’m well aware of the development of wireless technology in the past two years, since I see a need to update another written work from 2002.) In absence of clear technical direction, DHS is currently defining requirements across the department, performing cost/benefit analyses, and developing network architectures and policies.

Additional note (added September 28, 2004): Washington Technology has run a story about the conference.

Related link: http://www.fcc.gov/telecom.html

For years, observers of the American telecom system were yelling for true competition in local phone service. Ever since the AT&T breakup in 1983, the local phone service industry was dominated by incumbent local exchange carriers—the companies that were the heirs of the AT&T network. But all that changed in the mid 1990’s.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 made it possible for Mom and Pop to own a local phone company. A flurry of startup ventures launched, competing with the incumbent phone companies in each local market. Suddenly, everybody who was in the networking business was also in the phone business. Guys whose offices consisted of a Volvo and a cell phone were taking orders for phone lines from the country club parking lot. The problem was, these startups didn’t own their own local service networks, and the government was, in effect, forcing the incumbents to procure service for these new competitors at a discount rate.

In a nutshell, the big local company did all the work while the competitor collected the revenue. A nuance of the dot-com bubble, the Clintonian era when anybody could make money doing anything, or doing nothing.
The dot-com melt-down resulted in a profit crunch for the big phone companies like SBC and Verizon. But even worse, the newcomers, like XO, ATX, and others, were lulled into thinking that they could compete on a national scale while building an ambitious network to contend with Ma Bell’s. But they couldn’t provide the customer service and uptime that the incumbent carriers were famous for. Since the newcomers were really just re-selling Ma Bell’s service, customers were often confused about who to call when there was a problem with their phone lines. An XO customer would call SBC’s service department, who would tell him to call XO’s. But, when called, XO would just send the customer back to SBC… and the problem would remain unresolved.

As a result, customers went back to Ma Bell in droves. Almost all of the big competitive carriers have made a few visits to the bankruptcy judge. And few telephone customers would argue that their service has never really improved.

“Out of all the other phone companies, we [ATX] were the only one who didn’t go chapter 11, so we finally said, back in January, let’s do it. All our competitors are doing it and coming out clean,” an ATX sales representative recently said. Surely, these outcomes weren’t the intent of the well-meaning politicians that designed the Act. Instead, what they got was a whole lot of lawsuit fodder and bankrupt operations looking for a bail-out.

Thankfully, part of the 1996 telecom act may soon become historical baggage, thanks to Voice over IP. Consider the glut of new VoIP-based telephone service providers: companies like 8×8 Networks, Vonage, and VoicePulse. They didn’t have to spend millions of dollars building fiber networks to compete with Ma Bell at such a high cost that it put them into chapter 11. No, quite the contrary: Vonage and Packet8 are competing quite handily with Ma Bell today.

It’s important that this remain the case. Without a health telecom industry, everybody suffers. The prescient lawmaker understands that regulation can do a lot of damage to a technology that’s still evolving, and never more so than with VoIP. The Telecom Act of 1996 over-regulated Ma Bell to the point of forcing it to purvey its competitors’ services. This amounted to a government-sanctioned venture against it, just like the venture against AT&T and the venture against Microsoft. Which of these ventures produced an outcome that improved the situation? Like many government-sanctioned business ideas, T-com 96 was a failure at spurring competition. Local service pricing didn’t really drop, and real consumer choice never became a reality, though T-com 96 did catalyze number portability. Ironically, this feature made today’s little VoIP industry even more successful than it could’ve been without it.

Gross legislative miscalculation could really screw up the fledgeling VoIP industry. America has too much at stake in the technology; it has a real opportunity to lead the world: American voice brands like AT&T are the most well-recognized on earth. The three biggest providers of VoIP equipment in the world, Cisco, Nortel, and Avaya, are American firms. The network that carries VoIP at the least cost—the Internet—is an essentially American invention. The innovation geeks of America want the government—federal, state and local—to keep its hands off of VoIP altogether.

Yet regulation supporters say there are benefits to regulating VoIP. One of them is a stated mandate of the FCC for the public telephone system: an old utopian idea known as “universal access” that guarantees a low-cost national network that is accessible by all citizens. Another is stability: though oil’s price fluctuates from day to day, there are no price controls on it. Just the same, the telephone system, whose price fluctuations are comparatively negligible, is regulated quite heavily in the name of stability. The fact that VoIP providers operate above these regulations is what the innovation geeks are calling its “freedom factor”. Yet, many telecommunication experts defend the telecom tariff system, citing the lack of central price control as a potential source of instability.

“There needs to be standards applied to all VoIP suppliers for commonality of transmission and, with the cost and magnitude of its use increasing exponentially, basic tariffs need established to control costs,” said Richard Shoemaker, a telecom consultant in Cleveland, OH. This exposes the regulation reality of a post-1996 telecom landscape: private operators justify regulations as a reason to keep their costs under control. Kind of like a high-tech minimum wage, if you will.

But the state PUCOs have an entirely different view on regulations: they provide a framework for fees that support public services such as 911 and universal access. So, the fewer telephone service providers they collect fees from, the more their budgets must shrink. The purpose of VoIP service providers is to make money by delivering an application using another network (the Internet), and not deliver the network itself. That’s the PUCO’s job. When the Minnesota PUCO ordered Vonage to collect regulatory fees to support 911 dispatching like those the state would collect from a traditional telephone company, it began to chip away at VoIP’s freedom factor.

Last spring, Senator John Sununu (R-NH) introduced an act that would treat VoIP service providers as interstate exchange carriers, allowing them to be regulated by the FCC. This act was drafted largely in response to a constituency of VoIP startups and technical interests: people who want VoIP left alone; people who probably want the current fee-ridden public network to die a quick death. But the big telecom industry has a powerful lobby, and it has significant interests at stake: billions in market cap and revenue, tens of thousands of employees, the experience of having worked within the rules of T-com 96 for 8 years, and the prospect of doing VoIP themselves. When you consider what the incumbent phone companies could bring to the VoIP table—good customer service, decades of experience, an existing regulatory compliance infrastructure, and a built-in 911 dispatch system—Sununu’s act doesn’t recognize these advantages.

The real questions are: Is independent VoIP service from Vonage or 8×8 still viable if FCC centralization doesn’t become the law of the land? How will the big regulated phone companies handle VoIP services if VoIP is exempted from tariffs? Will the public interest require VoIP service providers to deliver 911 services?

All of these questions, and more, must be answered—when the 109th Congress convenes next winter. Learning a lesson from the ill fallout of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, voice policy-makers should be a little further-sighted than they were during the dot-com bubble. This means taking great strides in understanding why VoIP is so appealing, and then catering to that appeal with open-minded, permissive, and lightweight public policy.

Should VoIP telephone service providers be regulated like SBC and Verizon?

Related link: http://businessweek.com/technology/content/sep2004/tc20040916_1040_tc056.htm

While I myself wrote a piece comparing Skype to iChat, I’m starting to weary of people freaking out whenever Apple’s products are bested by a competitor. The latest in this pattern is Business Week’s Alex Salkever, who thinks Apple ought to to turn iChat into a phone service by using Skype’s P2P approach. His comments seem driven by a dread of Apple’s lovely iChat software getting trounced by the competition. But just for fun, let’s indulge his idea. After all, Business Week printed it.

For starters, all iChat really needs is a built-in user directory. If that directory were centralized, unlike Skype, it would be reliable. Have you ever done a user search on Skype? For a 500,000-user system, the result counts are usually around 50 or so… It reminds me of searching a P2P file-sharing system for nearby files; of course, that’s what Skype is: a P2P network. So, a decent user directory, perhaps using a cluster of LDAP-equipped Xserves at Apple HQ, would give iChat an instant advantage.

But the “MacPhone” idea requires quite a bit more work in order to replace your trusty household phone. How about a digital keypad in the iChat UI and a gateway to the Public Switched Telephone Network? Problem is, a PSTN gateway of the size required isn’t chump change to set up.

Oh, by the way, don’t let anybody try to convince you that any startup VoIP network will succeed without compatibility with the PSTN. The old Ma Bell system isn’t going away for decades, if ever. The VoIP services that are making money are the ones who support dialing regular phones, and receiving calls at regular phone numbers. Skype does only outbound PSTN calling, and iChat doesn’t do either. Coincidentally, Skype and iChat generate very little revenue for their owners.

The suggestion that a P2P network be used to replace the public telephone network grows less and less absurd by the day. The public voice system must be centralized for a whole host of quality of service and regulatory reasons. So, if Apple took the P2P approach as Skype has done, without any idea how high it can scale, they’d be taking a risk. But it would be a risk no greater than the one Skype’s 1.5 million simultaneous users take every day. The real need for centralization comes when each user is going to be able to receive calls from a regular phone on the PSTN–and Skype’s already got that covered with Skype-Out and Skype-IN.

Mr. Salkever is also missing the idea that, to be a phone replacement, a VoIP service has to work with traditional phone equipment and non-Apple IP Phones. Somehow, as much as I’d love to use a Cisco 7960 SIP phone or my analog cheapy home phone with the iChat network, I doubt Apple will go this route.

So, here are the three problems iChat needs to address in order to have an advantage on Skype–

Problem 1 - Missing support for PSTN calls
Problem 2 - No dialpad interface or searchable user directory in iChat
Problem 3 - No interoperability

Solution 1: Apple buys 8×8 Networks or Broadvoice. PSTN support problem solved.
Solution 2: Easy enough to fix, probably with an AppleScript that talks to iChat and Address Book
Solution 3: And this is the crux of the matter; Apple would have to seriously consider opening its velvet box of propriety, and this would take a huge shift in Apple’s management.

Add to that the question of whether or not supporting a VoIP network as overhead adds to Apple’s core revenue. I don’t think it would, although it would make for a nice add-on to .Mac. Then I might not have such a begrudging feeling every time I fork over the $99 .Mac fee.

Honestly, though, I think Skype has bested Apple, and I don’t think Apple really wants to play the telephony game. They’re too good at other, more exciting things. So, in the time it takes for all my AIM buddies to migrate to Skype, I would just be happy with a searchable directory of iChat users built-in to iChat.

Should Apple become a phone company?

Related link: http://www.classicalvalues.com/archives/001446.html

CBS reported a few days ago that the President’s Air National Guard commanders were giving him special considerations under duress. Their evidence for this reporting was a group of 4 documents that were supposed to have been created by his then-commanding officer in 1972.

Interestingly enough, it seems the documents may have been actually created in Microsoft Word–quite a feat considering Bill Gates hadn’t even founded Microsoft until 1975.

It just happens that I saw the PDF versions of the memos prior to actually reading the news story. I didn’t know the story yet–and I thought these documents were somebody’s idea of a prank, the product of some nerdy college freshmen with a political sense of humor. They were so out-of-vintage that I automatically assumed they were fakes. Ironically, it’s quite plausible this really is a prank, and CBS got recklessly duped.

As content software becomes more advanced, will document forgery become easier?

Related link: http://www.hackcanada.com/hackcanada/media/stcb2.html

While researching the roots of the public telephone system for my book, I came across some rather interesting urband legends about Ma Bell and the travails of hackers past. Like the guy who pranked President Nixon, telling him he’d run out of toilet paper. Or the guy who discovered a phone number answered by the same lady no matter which area code he dialed with it–until the FBI showed up and hauled him off, never to be seen again.

I remembered my own days spent hunkered in front of a terminal that was plugged into a 2400 baud mode, thinking, “Wow, this thing is fast!” I secretly hoped a white surveillance van would park out in front of my mom’s place with ultra-narrow microphones trained on my bedroom window, just like War Games.

Of course, even then, 2400 baud wasn’t that quick if you could afford a T1, but, then again, who was using T1s for data in the 80s? Ma Bell herself was–and she was the perennial target of hacker anger. I remember commiserating with hacker buddies about how Ma Bell “hogged all the good connections” and other dimwitted conspiracy theories. Ah, if ignorance were bliss, I would’ve been in heaven.

That’s because, at the time, I knew very little about the Phone Company, but I was taught, by my buds, to be suspicious of them. Hacker Heaven will someday be filled with suspicious, untrusting intellects who spent a good part of the 1980’s and early 1990’s trying to figure out better ways of ripping Ma Bell off.

Cheating Bell was a prerequisite goal of every decent hacker, and using Bell’s network for unsavory things, like software piracy and trading bomb-making recipes, was considered “free speech”. People even built pocket-sized tone-generators, little devices that could trick a payphone into thinking a dime had been inserted–so the person could make a free call. Now, I may be a little late in making this observation now, twenty years later, but who really needed to save a dime? Seriously, if you had enough money to build a tone-generator, did you really need to save a dime?

Yet, an attitude of “watch what I can do” still prevails among hackers. This is actually a wonderful thing, but I’m convinced this is at least partially to blame for enterprise America’s rejection of such amazing but hacker-centric technologies as PHP and PostgreSQL. I understand why PHP, though better in many respects than VBScript, isn’t often accepted inside the corporation. Corporate dealmakers are usually more interested in hearing about what a technology has already done than in what it can do.

The reason is one of perception. PHP itself is awesome, but because its community of developers doesn’t hold with the same attitude as VBScript’s clean-cut, button-down DOT-NET marketing bonanza, enterprise decision-makers often dismiss PHP as a freeware fad. One is the hacker’s tool, and the other is the enterprise tool, right? Developers choose DOT-NET because it can be a full-time job. Decision-makers choose it be because it has a safe perception.

Enterprise America’s perceptions of hacker-types are sour, and they trickle to the tools of the hacking trade: GCC, Perl, Linux, PHP, etc. Of course, this sour perception isn’t entirely undeserved. When was the last time you saw example code for a root exploit written in C# or Visual Basic? You probably haven’t, as C# and VB aren’t kept in the underground hacker arsenal.

When I read 2600’s recent conference schedule, I saw a list that included ex-cons and people who are getting arrested at political conventions; people who cite Orwellian objections to the world around them. People like me when I was a teenager.

I remember myself at the age I had a 2400-baud modem. I was a high-school freshman. I was captivated by William Gibson’s “Neuromancer”; I was a skateboarder; I was addicted to cracked Psygnosis games for the Amiga; I was even a boardOp on a BBS run by this hot-shot around the corner–a guy who had, get this, THREE phone lines. At this rate, I would’ve grown into an ultra-pink 2600 techno-paranoid, for sure.

I would never have become the enterprise-minded, corporate sell-out I loathed. I might even have been waiting for an autograph when hallowed hacker Kevin Mitnick was released from jail. It’s possible I’d be the guy with three phone lines or maybe hosting a P2P mega-node out of my house. I might still even be living with my mother!

How have your ideas about hacking, cracking, and rebellion changed over the years?

Related link: http://www.appraisalinstitute.org/publications/periodicals/taj/taj_oc99.asp

Almost a year ago, I asked if there was any research on the value of a photovoltaic array on home values. One answer arrived in my mailbox this morning, as a reference in a mailing from a company offering to install a solar array.

According to the mailing, there has been some research into the financial value of the array. The mailing cites The Appraisal Journal, a publication of the Appraisal Institute, a professional association of real estate appraisers. According to the mailing, an article in the October 1999 issue found that a $1 reduction in annual utility bills added $20 to the home value.

If you follow the link to the October issue, you’ll notice that the text of the article isn’t on-line, so I haven’t read it. I’m assuming that the article titled “More Evidence of Rational Market Values for Home Energy Efficiency” makes the connection between utility bills and home value, but without the text of the article, I can’t be sure. Nevertheless, it’s a tantalizing data point. I wonder to what extent the value depends on the area of the country, or the size of a home’s utility bills. I would also expect the $1 reduction-to-$20 valuation increase relationship would also break down for extremely large arrays.

Related link: http://www.skype.com/download_pda.html

The PocketPC has so much novelty–you can run a tiny version of Doom on it. You can play small MPG and AVI files on it. You can even tote around MP3s if you like.
But novelty may be the best thing the PocketPC has going for it. Where’s the substance? I’ve often questioned the ultimately usefulness of the PocketPC platform. For all its smallness, it’s a rather inconvenient little beast, indeed. A combination of problems have combined to spoil the PocketPC’s promise when it comes to business apps. I tried two different SQL Server-based data collection applications designed for collecting field time sheets at a construction company, and I discovered:

• PocketPCs aren’t rugged enough. Don’t you dare put it in your butt pocket.
  
• That screen is just too small for any useful reporting. It almost always gave me a headache.
  
• These days, a lot of people who are candidates for a PocketPC already have a laptop, so why bother? Do they really need to carry two devices?
  
• With all that Windows bulk and API overhead, can a high-speed database application really run on a PocketPC? It would seem not.
  
• Handwriting recognition on PocketPC just doesn’t work unless you’ve the handwriting of a third-grade language teacher.
  
• TabletPCs do everything a PocketPC does, PLUS run win32 apps at a speed that puts comparable PocketPC software to shame.
  

So how useful can these pricey little trinkets really be?
It seems Skype and Xten Networks think PocketPCs could serve a noble purpose as VoIP endpoints, and they’ve developed softphones for PocketPC to prove the point. This could be a really cool thing, especially for enterprise VoIP over WiFi. Imagine walking around the building with a fully-programmable VoIP business phone the size of your wallet at your disposal.
Skype’s PocketPC softphone is proprietary, and Xten’s uses SIP, the prevailing open signaling standard for telephony. Skype is free and doesn’t offer two-way connectivity to the public telephone system. Xten’s is commercial and does offer inbound and outbound public network calling, by way of SIP proxies or SIP service providers like Voicepulse and Broadvoice.
Of course, there’s the inevitable issue of running a softphone on a PocketPC-based cellphone. Kind of like running Linux on VirtualPC for the Mac.

With 3G networks growing, 802.11b wireless VoIP phones, and inexpensive cellphones everywhere, is there really a use for VoIP on PocketPC devices, or is it just novelty like micro-Doom?

Related link: http://www.skype.com/download_osx.html

Disruptive technologies like VoIP are constantly improving, being optimized, becoming more useable. It should be no surprise that, all of a sudden, I’m somewhat down on iChat, my up-till-now favorite voice chat program.

You see, Skype, the voice-chat client from the makers of Kazaa, was released for OS X the other day, in beta form, and I eagerly downloaded it. It’s got a cute interface like iChat and looks very much at home on my Panther desktop.

The first thing I did was call my buddy in Detroit on iChat–and then call him again on Skype. Even my 8-year-old son noticed a difference in sound quality as the three of us talked about my friend’s upcoming auto-race. Skype was clearly higher-fidelity than iChat.
And while it lacks the text chat features and video conferencing of iChat, it was noticeably less laggy than iChat, and it appears to have superior echo cancellation and good-enough-to-use silence suppression, two things that iChat and other voice chat clients have always relied on a push-to-talk button for.

Now, putting aside Skype’s awesomely hi-fi (but proprietary) sound codec and its slick, candy-like interface, a video conference feature would be nice, and so would interoperability with other systems–especially those that use SIP for session management–so that calling to and from the public voice system can be routed through gateway servers.
Skype has another thing going for it that iChat doesn’t–it allows calls between Windows and Mac users!

Do you use iChat for voice chats? Is Skype good enough to replace it?