One of the big projects I am working on right now is directory services for identity management. In these directories digital identities such as loginnames, addresses, access rights, etc. are stored. With an adequately structured directory service, the proper management of access rights becomes a lot easier, which translates into cost savings and better security. […]
Network neutrality has become the topic of intense discussion and legislative action.See the Washington Post , a Wikipedia article, and CircelID. What is the issue? On the one hand people argue for ‘universal service’ that say that one person’s bits should not be treated differently from another person’s. This compares to the idea that the […]
New technology brings new risks. We used to think that data was safe behind big walls in high-security datacenters. Then came the internet. I still remember when there was an internet without firewalls. Ah, those were the days. The universities and other users were not the only ones to profit from the new technology however. […]
A lot of my work involves consulting with organizations on the consolidation of their digital infrastructures. Recently for example, I worked with a client in a pan European telecommunications cost reduction effort. They were spending several million Euros a year across 27 countries. A substantial fraction of that cost was in mobile voice. With other […]
Wikipedia is just one of the new infrastructures for collective knowledge that are appearing. Others are flickr and del.icio.us, to name a few. I am using the word infrastructure here precisely because these are platforms on which multiple users converge, creating a collective value. These infrastructures are typically heralded as ‘a good thing’, for a […]
In most countries, if you buy a new mobile subscription the mobile phone company has an attractive offer for you. If you would just subscribe for a 2 year contract and commit to a monthly minimum spend, they will have a nice phone for you. Just how nice is this offer? Should you go for […]
Your online identity might reveal more about you than you can imagine. Howdoes it feel to be confronted with that? Today I visited a theatre festival (Festival aan de Werf,http://www.festivalaandewerf.nl/) where the Dat-a project(http://dat-a.z25.org/ partly in Dutch) examines this in a theatrical way.It can give you quite an uncanny feeling, even though their RFID liketechnology […]
This weekend, I was cleaning out old files, and came across some industry outlooks made by market research and consulting firms a few years ago. In it were predictions of the distant future (say 2005 …), you remember the inflated expectations people had back in de dot com boom days. It turns out that most […]
As you may have noticed from my writings, the main topic of this blog is Digital Infrastructures for (networked) computer applications. These infrastructures are the platforms on which computer applications are delivered to users, so that they can interact with each other. What are the major research questions around these digital infrastructures? How is the […]
(This post was updated in http://www.petersgriddle.net/2010/05/digital-divide-on-ip-addresses.html) Every computer connecting to the Internet has to have an Internet address. No problem, you would say, unless you realize that there are more people living on the earth than there are Internet addresses. Internet addresses are defined by the Internet Protocol (IP for short), which is currently in its […]