Several years ago, I was a regular participant in the Arizona Telecommunications and Information Council (ATIC), and still receive interesting information from that group from time to time.  This week, I received a link to the “Arizona Broadband Map“. This map was produced as a result of a federal grant to the Arizona Government Information Technology Agency (GITA):

The U. S. Congress has appropriated $7.2 billion to develop broadband in the U. S. for unserved and underserved areas.

…

This funding includes grants for broadband infrastructure, computer centers, sustainable projects that promote broadband use; and grants to the states for broadband planning and for mapping broadband in their respective states to use in the creation a national broadband map.

…

The broadband mapping project will collect and verify the availability, speed and location of broadband across Arizona. This information will be publicly available; updated on a semi-annual basis through 2011. Citizens, local governments, and related research organizations will enjoy a direct benefit from access to this new and additional information.

The following image is a snapshot of the highest level of the interactive map for Arizona:

A really interesting bit of information appeared when I specified my home address and chose the DSL coverage map.  The pink shade in the following image shows areas with DSL broadband coverage.  The tan area shows my subdivision – an DSL-free island in a sea of coverage in Mesa, AZ.  

I knew that we couldn’t get DSL from Qwest.  I just didn’t know how localized the problem was, and still don’t know why it is this way. According to this map, my neighbors on the other side of the street can choose DSL, while I cannot.

It is nice to know that our home is part of the “underserved” broadband area targeted by this study.

Perhaps this is just a symptom of the Cox Communications monopolistic conspiracy! Or more probably, an oversight in Qwest planning.

Thanks, GITA, for providing this insight.

As failures in Amazon’s Cloud Services (reported by Data Center Knowledge) extend into a second day, multiple companies are feeling the pain:

Among the most prominent companies affected were Foursquare, Quora, Hootsuite, SCVNGR, Heroku, Reddit and Wildfire, though hundreds of other companies big and small were affected. Luckily, one of Amazon’s most prominent customers, Netflix, didn’t experience problems because it’s built for the loss of an entire data center, while companies relying on Amazon’s four other global data centers didn’t experience too many issues. (from Mashable)

I suppose the first lesson we learn is that if you bet your business on the cloud, your fortunes are tied to that cloud.  Consider Foursquare’s announcement:

Even though they pointed out that Amazon EC2 was to blame, it was Foursquare’s reputation that took the first hit.

The second lesson?  Don’t be deceived by lots of good news.  All the green checkmarks on Amazon’s history dashboard mean little if you are affected by the red outage symbols:

The third lesson?  Cloud computing is not a panacea.  With all its promises, we must also consider its vulnerabilities.  Technology does break down.  We must be prepared for that inevitability.  Disaster recovery and business continuity principles still apply.

Thanks to my colleague Kevin Moulton for pointing out an excellent Yahoo! special report: In cyberspy vs. cyberspy, China has the edge.

According to U. S. investigators, China has stolen terabytes of sensitive data — from usernames and passwords for State Department computers to designs for multi-billion dollar weapons systems. And Chinese hackers show no signs of letting up. “The attacks coming out of China are not only continuing, they are accelerating,” says Alan Paller, director of research at information-security training group SANS Institute in Washington, DC.

Private enterprise is also getting hit big time.

The official figures don’t account for intrusions into commercial computer networks, which are part of an expanding cyber-espionage campaign attributed to China, according to current and former U. S. national security officials and computer-security experts. 

In the last two years, dozens of U. S. companies in the technology, oil and gas and financial sectors have disclosed that their computer systems have been infiltrated. 

In January 2010, Internet search giant Google announced it was the target of a sophisticated cyber-attack using malicious code dubbed “Aurora,” which compromised the Gmail accounts of human rights activists and succeeded in accessing Google source code repositories.

The political ramifications of this cyber warfare are huge. The US and China are the world’s two largest economies, both cooperating and competing on the world’s stage.  With China owning more than $1.1 trillion in U. S. government debt, destabilization of U. S. markets due Chinese cyberattacks would, in effect, be an attack on China’s economy itself.

The old Mad Magazine Spy vs. Spy comics were hilarious, with each spy destroying the other through nefarious means, and then getting up quickly to compete another day.   On the other hand, the China vs. USA cyberspy game is serious business – we play this one for keeps. 

I am anxious for the time when I can buy groceries or pay for a meal with my iPhone.  According to Juniper Research, that time may be be closer than you would think.

As reported by GigaOM, Juniper Research predicts that 1 in 5 Smartphones Will Have NFC by 2014.  NFC, or “Near Field Communication,” is a technology that allows a payment to be made by holding a device, such as a mobile phone, in close proximity to a NFC-capable point of sale terminal.

I think it would be great to use a mobile wallet on my iPhone, working in concert with an NFC chip embedded within my iPhone, to make a payment.

The GigaOM article states:

Juniper said the increasing momentum behind NFC, with a stream of vendor and carriers announcements in recent months, is helping boost the prospects of NFC. North America will lead the way, according to Juniper, with half of all NFC smartphones by 2014. France, in particular, is off to a quick start, with 1 million NFC devices expected this year.

Of course, there is more than just putting moble wallet apps and NFC chips on smartphones.

But the NFC ramp-up will still faces challenges. With so many players involved, from merchants, operators, manufacturers and web giants like Google, service complexity will be an issue. The industry also needs to work out business models around NFC while ensuring strong security for consumers unfamiliar with the concept of a mobile wallet, said Howard Wilcox, the author of the report.

Which smart phone vendor will be first to the races with a mainstream NFC-equipped device? Will the next iPhone be NFC-equipped?  I hope so, but I had also hoped for that in the iPhone 4.  Time will tell.  I’m just hoping for sooner, rather than later.

And, by the way, Identity Management and Information Security are crucial to an overall solution. Knowing who the user is and that user wants to do, and making sure their information is absolutely safe, are critical components of the mobile payments infrastructure that must be built. In that vein, its great to be in the industry that is making this all happen.

I was pleased to receive the following notice from Oracle product management in my email box this week:

Hi All,

As you might know, the transition of Corporate Single Sign-On (Intranet and Extranet) to Oracle Access Manager-11g is complete and the first production deployment of OAM 11g with a multi-million user population is now live. Starting Fri, Apr 1st, 2011, OAM-11g is now taking 100% of authentication load from extranet web properties of Oracle without any incident. All customers that access any Oracle service over the extranet like www.oracle.com, OTN, MOS, ARU etc. are now authenticated with Oracle Access Manager 11g.

It makes me feel good to know that we actually use our own products – even the latest version!

The key statistics for the Extranet deployment are actually quite impressive:

• Total user population: 12 M
• Avg daily authentication load so far: 350K users
• Expected peak daily authentication load: 800K users (around special events like Open World)
• Avg authentication latency: 120 milliseconds
• Avg CPU usage: under 5%

Other Highlights:

• This is the first production deployment of OAM-11 with a multi-million user population.
• Like the intranet roll-out, this transition to OAM-11 was done with zero downtime. 
• The gradual/phased ramp-up to 100% load allowed PDIT and dev team to triage problems and fix them before they impacted wider populations.

By the way, I’m not disclosing any secrets.  We were told we could spread this information around!  So have a piece of “virtual” chocolate cake with Fido and me.

We road warriors often grouse about the dumb stuff the airlines do and the weirdness of the TSA.  However, once in awhile, we can cheer about a big step forward in flying convenience.   The latest cheerable enhancement is the paperless boarding pass.  Other airlines have offered this perk for awhile, but US Airways has offered the option for the just the past few weeks.  I gingerly brought both paper and paperless boarding passes for a flight week before last, but today, I didn’t even bring a paper backup.

When checking in online, I specified which email address I prefer, and moments later, a link appeared in my email box, which I could access from my iPhone to display a boarding pass like the one to the right.  I presented the image on the phone and my driver’s license at the security checkpoint, and again showed the image on my phone at the gate.  It works great!

Thanks, US Airlines, for taking this big step in the right direction!

Tomorrow, Tuesday, April 11th, at 11am PST, Oracle is presenting a live webcast, Automating User Provisioning – A User’s Perspective, featuring Jim Moran,  CISO of Educational Testing Service (ETS) where he discusses ETS’s implementation of Oracle Identity Manager and their cloud deployment plans.

I always enjoy hearing people talk about their experiences in implementing software.  We can learn much from real experiences.

As I search for a decent blog editor, I am re-visiting ScribeFire, a brower extension which I used back in the Windows days before I found LiveWriter.  It seems to do a decent job, but I can’t find support for Technorati tags or Twitter messaging.  Image management is limited.  

I am posting this via the ScribeFire extension to Google Chrome.  We’ll see it the Safari extension works any differently.

A real surprise for me when migrating recently from Window to Mac is the dearth of good blogging clients on MacOS.  I have tried Ecto and MarsEdit, both of which are drastically inferior to the LiveWriter blog client for Windows by Microsoft.  Particularly, I miss the great image handling capability, with built in sizing, borders and alignment GUI that helped make blogging fast and effortless.

I am posting this note with Qumana, hoping it provides some relief.  Its image handling is a bit better, but it doesn’t appear to handle WordPress tags correctly.

Tags: blogging, Mac