How reliable is e-mail? Read this revealing article by Bob Cringely. Apparently Gmail is good, and some ISPs have a 80% failure rate because their servers are overloaded. The article continues with some more observations on service level agreements in a networked world. I wrote a magazine article about these issues a while ago (in […]
In the region where I live, last year the electrical power was down on the average for 36 minutes, up from 29 minutes the year before. That constitutes an uptime of 99.996 %. Research I have been involved in indicates that the best banking websites have a hard time getting 99.967 % uptime, equivalent to […]
Last night, somebody broke into my house and took my mobile phone, wallet (with bankcards and credit cards), and some other valuable stuff (but little of emotional value). Curiously, a laptop and passports where untouched. It awoke me again to the risks that are part of our highly IT dependent life. Although the laptop was […]
Does it matter much how digital music is coded and compressed? Theoretically, more bandwidth leads to more expression and better sound quality. Of all songs, I could only hear a difference between the CD version of a song and the mp3 version in Bach’s cantata “Wachet Auf” (BMV 140), in the part where the orchestra […]
Last week the Dutch consumer rights organization ‘Consumentenbond’ proposed to make computer companies and internet service providers responsible for the security of home computers. The majority of home computer users has had security incidents in the past 12 months, and is not capable of accurately describing the most important computer security threats. See also my […]
Yesterday I met with a company in Paris to progress a business opportunity, on which I will report later. They are deploying a computing device in customer homes, which connects by wifi to the Internet. Some people call this ‘ambient intelligence‘. The connectivity is absolutely essential to the operation of the device. However, it turns […]
After having lunch in the spanish town of La Jonquera, I noticed a lack of standardised electronic payment infrastructure at the restaurant’s cashier. In the picture, four separate devices for handling card transactions can be seen. Apparently, the spanish banks have not yet been able to agree on a shared digital infrastructure.
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. […]
