The Federal Communications Commission or the FCC is a part of the federal government.  Its right there as the first word in their title - "Federal".  The government does a lot of things, some we like and others we don't like so much. But overall, we pretty much have a system in place where the taxes that are collected by the government pay for their programs.  It isn’t a perfect system, but it is our system for the moment.

So the FCC made a plan that does a neat little "end around" on that system that most government agencies must live under.  The agency wants to build a security network.  The purpose of the network would be to provide wireless nationwide emergency response so the country would be more prepared to act in the event of another 911 type of attack.  But instead of going through all that fuss and bother of getting the $16 billion network approved by Congress the old fashioned way, they are looking to impose a fee on all US broadband users that would help pay for the network.  And the really neat trick about that fee is that even after the network was built, it could stay in place so the people could be part of paying for the network to continue to operate.

The need for this kind of network came to light during the hours after the 911 attacks when fire fighters, emergency response workers and law enforcement were hampered from communicating with each other because of the lack of a good network.  Similar breakdowns in communications hampered the ability of public service agencies from helping people trying to survive during the hurricane Katrina disaster.

The fee that is to be imposed on broadband users is described as "nominal".  Of course, "nominal" is in the eye of the beholder.  But the purpose of the money is to…"ensure that this country's emergency responders have access to critical communications capabilities when and where they need them."  Now this plan does have to go to Congress for approval.  While it is not stated directly in the request, it could be that using the vast broadband network as a source of funding is a lot more appealing than trying to get a tax through with the budget being in the state that the federal budget is in right now.

The request for the funding is ready to go to Congress to encourage approval because… "It is essential that the United States establish a long-term, sustainable and adequate funding mechanism to help pay for the operation, maintenance and upgrade of the public safety broadband network."  The proposal goes on to state without qualification that the security of the country is at stake if we do not have the funding to build this network.  And because the broadband fee would be spread over such a large community of users, the proposal considers this methodology of funding to be a "fair, sustainable and reasonable funding mechanism".

The actual proposal is roughly 19 pages long.  So it is doubtful if a lot of detail was included in the proposal about how this network would operate and, above all, how it would be tested so the first responders would know without a question that communications would work in the more dire of emergency situation.  This raises a lot of questions.  If the network is nationwide and it will benefit everybody, why does a small community have to fund it?  Were 911 and Katrina not local disasters?  How would a nationwide network have helped them?  What does "nominal fee" mean anyway?

If we think about the situation in those towers during the 911 attacks, was the problem with the communications the lack of a network or the lack of communications tools that were in the hands of those going into the towers?  Or perhaps the problem was the inability of wireless tools inside those towers to communicate due to damage to the units because of the harsh conditions or because of the amount of interference that was going on as a result of the collapse of the towers.  How will first responders be able to access this nationwide network in a crisis and what good will it do for them to access it?

Similarly, in the Katrina situation, one wonders if sufficient detailed examples of communications breakdowns during the days that the disaster was at its worst were documented in the proposal for funding.  If this network was to be approved, it should be shown that the communications problems that occurred during the Katrina disaster were directly related to the lack of this kind of network and not something else. 

And there should be some detail available to demonstrate that the design of this wireless nationwide emergency response network was planned to address those particular failings and to deal with a wide variety of potential emergency situations in the future.  Without that kind of analysis, this proposal does not represent sufficient "needs analysis" to justify the fee on all broadband users, no matter how "nominal" that fee might be.

The language of the proposal is hard to argue with because of the emotional response almost everyone has to both of these terrible events in recent American history.  But appealing to the emotional response is no way to justify a new tax to build a network that has not been properly justified. 

If this proposal went before congress as a request for a new tax rather than as a "nominal fee", you can bet that kind of detailed analysis and justification would be required.  Just because the purpose of the network is to address problems we had during national emergencies in the past, that is no reason to wrap ourselves in the flag and fail to do our homework upfront to justify a network the old fashioned way, through hard work and good design plans.

On the surface this nominal fee is being raised to do something good.  But if we go back to basics, if it is a program that the government is organizing, should it not be paid for by tax money?  The language of the proposal would almost make one think that broadband users should and will be thrilled to contribute to this network, even though the fee would be imposed without asking them if they are that thrilled about it.  After all, 911 and Katrina, who wouldn’t pay a fee to assure we could handle the next such disaster better?  In many ways, the use of emotional appeals to get around solid reasoning for this network is sufficient cause to raise some suspicions. 

So in that the proposal has not been approved yet, it is to be hoped that the congressional bodies who must grant approval for the fee and the network will have enough scepticism to ask these kinds of questions and to recognize that a tax is still a tax, no matter what title you put on and no matter how wonderful the cause being addressed might be.

It seems the bigger and more successful Google gets, the bigger they want to get.  A company with as much financial and technical power as Google has is capable of some pretty amazing things.  Google already pretty much took over the search engine world in such a phenomenal way that the phrase "Google it" is a byword for performing an interent search for information.  In the last few years, Google has also begun to extend their grasp to try to take over the social networking world and to capture the YouTube fan base as well.

But the most recent Google venture seems to be the most ambitious and forward thinking of anything ever done before.   Most Google conquests were done by redefining something that had already been done before.  But now Google wants to invade your television which is something no internet company has done to any great extent.  Oh sure, internet companies often advertise on television.  And AT&T has integrated a few interent applications into their U-Verse packages but they really don't work that well.  But what Google has in mind is much more ambitious than that.

One reason to take this next big push by Google seriously is that they have forged a pretty impressive partnership team of some very powerful companies to help make it a reality.  Google will be working together with Intel, Sony and Logitech to make this vision of a television based internet a reality.  But the name they have chosen lets us know who is in charge here and which company created the vision in the first place. If it is successful, it will be called Google TV.

The goal of Google TV is as simple to express as it is ambitious.  Google wants to make it as easy to move around the internet on your computer as it is now for you to change channels.  In other words, in the same way you may now flip from MTV to the Golf Channel to Comedy Central, Google wants you to be able to jump to your Facebook account to YouTube or to Hulu.  And as incomprehensible as this may seem, Google and their partners have the technical power to pull it off.

Of course, Google TV isn't being put together just because Google dreams big dreams and wants us all to take another big step into a future designed by Google.  There is plenty of money to be made if Google TV is a hit.  Just as now, television advertising is big business, by putting the most popular website on TV and capturing that business to the Google partnership that made Google TV possible, there will be a volcano of advertising revenue that will surge toward Google and their partners and it will just keep on coming year after year after year.

Logitech is an outstanding addition to this partnership because they are a company that are well known for making affordable but high quality computer accessories like the keyboard and the mouse you may be using every day.  Already design is being done to provide a small keyword to Google TV users so you will be able to interact with cyberspace as you browse the web on your big screen TV.  The availability of accessories like this will be necessary for Google TV to be successful.  After all, what good would it be to be able to pull up your Facebook or Twitter accounts on your TV if you could not post a status or tweet to the world, "I am on Google TV"?

Initially Google TV will be marketed as a separate box that you will plug into your TV.  Exactly how that will work with your existing cable TV connection is not clear just yet.  But the box that can sit on top of your TV set is already under development.  It will utilize the power of Android and the most recent Intel Atom CPU chip.  Whether this service will operate under the authority of your existing internet service provider or if there will be a fee that will give you additional internet connectivity also has not been defined just yet.

One area of internet commerce that will be certain to benefit from Google TV will be internet access to video and movies.  Google TV could provide an alternative to conventional movie channels like HBO and Showtime by providing access to a huge online library of movies that could be accessed for a low monthly fee.  Netflix is already offering a similar service that allows users to either get their movies through the mail or watch them on TV.  Considering the success of Netflix, it makes sense that they will eventually partner with Google TV to migrate their service to your TV screen as well.

Another possible partner for Google TV is the Dish network.  This large television provider has already been doing some research into providing internet service through their satellite service.  This makes sense because a satellite feed could solve the ISP problem for Google TV.  Since the set up box for Google TV has already been under development, it is a natural next step to integrate that hardware directly into the Dish TV devices and eliminate a free standing set up unit.  Google TV and Dish are already in discussions about how to join forces on a project such as this.

This is an entirely new kind of technology for anyone to offer and it will take some skilled marketing and deployment experts to make it a success.  If the service is too expensive for customers, they will not see the value.  But the costs of hardware, internet access and support will have to be absorbed somehow.  If the advertising revenue alone can do that, Google TV may explode onto the cultural landscape like nothing ever before.  But there are a lot of questions to be answered before that can happen.  But with this kind of potent partnership and the visionary leadership of Google, we can be assured that the Google TV revolution is coming and it will not something to be ignored.

The term “Big Brother" comes from a futuristic novel by George Orwell named 1984 which envisioned a future where the government would have monitors everywhere that allowed them to watch every movement in society.  When Orwell wrote that novel and the year 1984 was the future, that was a ridiculous and scary proposition.  But technology has moved along tremendously since then.  Between increased security monitoring to fight terrorism and the good and bad uses of GPS technology, more than one doomsayer has been calling for a 1984 situation in our modern technological world.

If that bleak vision of the future had any basis in reality, the Japanese just took us one step forward with a technology that allows an employer to go much further than to just watch where an employee was on a moment by moment basis.  The Japanese system that was created by the KDDI Corporation uses motion sensor equipment that is resident in an employee’s mobile phone to know precisely where the employee is PLUS exactly what he or she is doing.  This is scary stuff.

The KDDI system takes employee monitoring to an entirely new level of detail and complexity.  Simply by recording and analyzing the movements that the cell phone tracker detects, a manager could tell by the minute if an employee were going up stairs, emptying the trash or walking.  If the employee was detected as being involved in an activity that did not fit with the managers expectation, that gives the manger all he or she needs to take corrective action.  Quite literally, the employee cannot make a move that their manager doesn’t know about.

Of course, those who are pushing the KDDI monitoring system say that the idea is to just give managers the ability to know what their employees are doing when away from the office and that information can be used to reward successful performance or punish improper behavior.  But this big step forward in employee has lots of ramifications for all kinds of job descriptions and the uses could easily become secretive and border on the "Big Brother" images that we are all afraid of.

Human rights advocates are already outraged by this next step in sophistication in human surveillance.  In theory, an employer should disclose to the employee when the cell phone is given to him or her that there is monitoring software at work in that cell phone.  The employer and the employee should sign an agreement that the employer would be monitoring the employees every movement and that those movements would be used to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the employee. 

Hopefully, if things were run correctly, those movement trackers would not be the only thing used to confirm that the employee is doing his or her job correctly and well.  And employees who need the work will sign just about anything for a paycheck.  But this level of monitoring brings real questions out about whether employer monitoring at this level of detail amounts to invasion of privacy and bullying of the employee which takes the place of good management methods.  One wonders if managers who have to use spying to manage their employees are just bad managers using toys to replace management skills.

Of course, if the employee were aware that the cell phone was being used to track behavior, it is easy to imagine the employee finding ways to "fool" the tracking software.  The cell phone could be placed on the body of another employee and two employees could tag team making the right movements to satisfy the corporate office while the other goofs off.  Or the employees together may decide to deceive the tracking software such as putting the phone on a dog or leaving it in a vehicle to convince the employer that the data they are gathering is unreliable.

There are good reasons to consider how deception enters into the employer/employee relationship because of automated movement monitoring.  It points to the fact that monitoring the movements of an employee reflects a basic distrust of the employee.  If the boss needs a machine to confirm that you are doing your job well, what does that say about the relationship between employer and worker?  You can sugar coat it all you want to but any system designed to electronically monitor employees is based on distrust and an expectation that you will catch the employee doing something wrong.

Naturally, KDDI balks at the image that they are setting up a "Big Brother" relationship with their employees.  So they came up with a nice spin on that image.  A Mr. Yokoyama of KDDI said it nicely in his prepared statement to the press. 

"But this is not about curtailing employees' rights to privacy.  We'd rather like to think our creation more of a caring, mothering system rather than a Big Brother approach to watching over citizens."

Whether it is caring mom or Big Brother could be just semantics.  Before this technology was developed, Japan had a pretty dismal record in regards to human rights and the rights of privacy for employees.  This technology will only push that envelope one step further.  It isn't like this is the first type of monitoring software that has been available to employers.  There are monitor tools to use webcams in employee computers to watch behavior or to use GPS to track movements.  It will not take a lot of innovation to create an integrated system to use all of these systems to completely take over the privacy of any given employee.

It also is not hard to see the government taking an interest in this kind if surveillance.  The concept of total government invasion into the privacy of citizens is just as feared today as it was in the days of George Orwell.  It does not take much imagination to see government monitoring being used to watch every move you make using these different surveillance tools.  Plenty of movies have been made to keep that image vivid in our minds.  KDDI has just given us one more tool to make that nightmare a reality.  The illusion that it will not be used to for such insidious purposes is at its very best naive and at worst tragically flawed.

There are very few businesses any more that do not depend heavily on their computer systems.  From a dentist's office to a large multinational oil company or bank, computers are the backbone of the company.  In many cases, many computers are networked together into a complex infrastructure that includes dozens of PCs that interact with very powerful midrange or mainframe computers.  From Human Resources to Accounts Receivable to Customer Service to the retail front end, if the computer system in a company goes down, that is a genuine disaster for any company.

To live day to day without preparation and protection against a computer disaster is tragically naive.  As much as you may shelter your computer inside a protected room with a good lock on the door, it is still vulnerable.  A power surge, a flood or a fire in the building put computers in as much risk as the people who work in your company.  In fact, those kinds of disasters are more dangerous for big computers because you really cannot evaluate them from an endangered building like you can your staff.

While you cannot prevent a tornado or an earthquake, many computer disasters can be prevented.  As important as the central computer is to many companies, it is surprising how often you find that crucial piece of hardware operating in a room that is not secured.  The computer that does your accounting and that runs your business should have a room of its own with a lock on the door.  Access to that room should be limited to executives and the employees who are charged with the care and maintenance of the machine.

Securing the computer that is the backbone of your business is not an insult to your employees.  If the computer is separated from employees, it is also separated from maintenance and cleaning people who could accidentally cause damage to that sensitive equipment.  Also take care that the keys or codes for gaining access to the computer area are secured and cared for correctly.  If someone leaves the business who knew the code to the computer room door, change the code.  Even if that person is honest and left on good terms, this is just good security.

Similar care should be taken for online access to sensitive corporate data.  Applications should be password protected and given to employees on based on the requirements of their jobs.  You would never give employees the chance to look at each other's pay checks.  So they should also not have the chance to look at each others personnel files stored on the internal network of the computer.

We all know that to be certain you will not see your home computer system destroyed by an internet virus or invaded by spyware, malware or advertising bots, you must maintain good security software that protects your computer every day.  Having a security policy in place for your office computer may be even more important. 

Maintenance and security of your office computer must be somebody's job.  However, not every business can afford to have an IT department or even a dedicated employee whose only job is taking care of the computers in the office.  But pick out your most technology savvy employee and make it part of his or her job description to make sure your computers are given maintenance regularly, that the internet security software is renewed and kept up to date and that all other computer related security  activities are managed routinely.  If you don’t have a technology savvy employee, outsource this job.  To leave it to chance whether your computer stays safe means it won't stay safe which is just asking for a computer crisis at some point in the future.

You buy insurance for your house, your car, your life and your health in your private life for a good reason.  You know that at some point, you will have an emergency which means you will need that insurance.  It is just as important to be prepared for a computer crisis or disaster.  It isn’t a matter of "if" a computer disaster will hit your business.  It is a matter of "when".

Computer disaster recovery and planning is an entire discipline in the IT industry and you can find volumes of information on it online.  The heart of being ready for an emergency is to have a plan in place to recover from any kind of emergency and then to test that plan.  Naturally, a strict schedule of backing up all of the data on your corporate computers is essential.  This should be a daily activity, not something you do once a month or when someone gets around to it.

Most corporate planners who specialize in disaster recovery planning advise backing up your corporate data to some form of media such as to tape or DVD and then storing that backup off site.  There are offsite storage services that will provide secure storage of those backups or you can use a safe deposit box at your local bank.  The important thing is that you get all of your crucial business information off site regularly.  In that way, if there is a crisis where your computer is destroyed, you can recover your business back to the previous day once you get your operation up and running again.

A plan is not reliable unless it is tested.  You should have a well thought out recovery plan that tests every aspect of your recovery program.  Large companies often have backup computers that are operated in the background by security companies that can kick in and take over the operation of the business virtually instantaneously if something disastrous happens to the business.  Even if that is not feasible financially, you should think through how you will replace your computer system in a crisis and then how you will go about getting a new system up and running and refreshed with your latest backup of system data quickly as well.

A good backup and disaster recovery program should be prepared as a written document by a task force of trusted leaders in the company.  The preparation of that report will necessitate the building of business relationships with vendors who can be on call to be prepared on a moment's notice to help you get your business operational quickly.

We spend a lot of time talking about how inept lawmakers are at passing laws that actually do something good for people.  So when they buy a clue and get one law right, its worth making some noise about.  They seem to be on a good roll with one particular piece of legislation called The P2P Cyber Protection and Informed User Act.  It’s a big, long and clumsy name for a piece of legislation that addresses one of the most problematic software utilities that people love to use on the internet which are P2P file sharing networks.

The law was introduced to Congress in February so it has some road to travel before it becomes law but when it does finally become the law of the land, it can go a long way toward neutralizing one more threat to computer security that is represented by P2P file sharing programs.  There are a number of features of The P2P Cyber Protection and Informed User Act that will go a long way toward improving the security of a network or even a home system. 

For one thing, the law would require that P2P file sharing programs could not be installed without the express consent of the user of the computer.  This would shut down the clandestine installation of P2P file sharing by hackers who would open up your computer to steal your private data. 

There is a lot of grey area about programs that can openly download code to your computer that begins to be executed without your permission.  This law is the first step in the right direction to actually make that kind of invasion of your virtual space illegal and punishable by law.  It may not stop hackers but at least they know they are criminals, which may cut down on the number of "casual" cyber criminals who just want to play around with other people's computers for the fun of it.

Another very helpful feature of this new law is that if a P2P file sharing program gets installed on a network or on a multiuser computer, it must send a notification if it makes your files available to the P2P network without your authorization.  By making it possible to deny access to your private files, that is a huge step forward in giving the power back to the individual to protect their digital information from hackers and identity thieves. 

P2P file sharing programs have been sited as the source of many of the serious security issues that plague internet users.  For one thing, piracy of music and video is easy to do using P2P file sharing networks.  People can get on one of these kinds of services and download entire catalogs of music or entire movies to enjoy for free on their home computers.  This kind of activity has created a genuine crisis in the music industry to the extent that major music labels and even big music artists have spoken out against P2P file sharing as the reason that the music industry is suffering with a huge drop in sales and profits.

This legislation doesn’t address illegal downloading of copy written material but it does isolate P2P file sharing programs as problematic and it puts these programs under some legislation.  As such, this bill could be considered the first warning shot over the bow to the P2P file-sharing world that the government is aware of the programs they cause and that action is going to be taken to rein in the havoc this kind of easy access movement of files can cause.

Another big problem that has been accelerated by P2P file sharing is the spread of computer virus software including spyware, worms, Trojan horse programs and Malware.  The design of P2P file sharing program is that it connects individual users or large amounts of users so that one user can download files directly from the hard drive of the other person's computer.  One of the most popular types of files that are spread this way is pornography, some of it of an illegal nature.  Because illegal files like this can move so quickly through file sharing, it becomes even more difficult for law enforcement to crack down on this kind of criminal activity.

Because P2P file sharing allows free and fast movement of unshielded data, it is a perfect venue for those who would like to spread damaging software like malware and viruses.  If someone opens the door to damaging or malicious software through a P2P file-sharing network, this legislation would send up a flare that the risk was present on your network or on your computer.  Businesses that run large-scale networks will benefit because they can isolate where the threatening software came from and eliminate the software and correct the behaviour of the employee who puts the company at risk downloading these kinds of programs.

This kind of legislation will be a huge help for companies running large computer networks that would be at significant risk from employees opening the door to the P2P file-sharing world.  It is far too easy for hackers to get into the file system of a large network and begin to "surf" from the point of entry to restricted directories where files containing passwords or financial data would be stored.  An unscrupulous person can do a tremendous amount of damage to a network with this kind of unrestricted window to a business network or to a personal computer system as well.  Unrestricted access to private access codes and financial links and information is an open invitation that yells "Steal From Me" to hackers who love to use P2P connections for evil purposes.

Some in the internet world will see The P2P Cyber Protection and Informed User Act as a restriction of privacy and the first step to shut down the freedom of the internet.  But freedom must be linked with responsibility.  The law only requires that if you are going to put the files and the network resources of a computer system at risk, the least you should be required to do is alert them of the risk.  This law simply makes that alerting mandatory.

Flying cars? Clones? Colonies on the moon? Other geeks and science fiction fans look for ward to these futures with stars in their eyes, but we work in tech gadgets. So our ambitions are going to be a little closer to home, a little more realistic, and a whole lot more practical. Here's the developments in the mobile Internet field which show so much promise, if they don't get fully realized soon, we'll hold our breaths and turn Blackberry blue.

Worldwide Wifi

Why is it that for the past 40 years you can get broadcast television anywhere in the world, even really dumpy places, and yet you can still go to a major city and still not find a hotspot? Television is supported by advertisements; and revenue from Internet advertising rivals that of TV, so we know it's not the money. Surely, having Google on tap from anywhere in the world beats a rerun of the "Beverly Hillbillies", so we know there's demand. We know better than to ask "What's the hold-up?" - spectrum assignments, reach, security, and channel pollution, we've heard it all before. But there has to be an eventual solution somewhere, hasn't there?

GPS and maps

We're already solving the Global Positioning Satellite problem; the solution is to just keep launching satellites. But now there's the problem of map-making and land-surveying. Too many stories are cropping up of drivers who were directed by the mapping software to dead ends as a result of faulty map data. We know that Internet services such as MapQuest and Google Earth are chipping away at this problem, but what if we helped the process along with the Wikipedia approach? Imagine if you could correct the map on the spot, at the moment you discover it's wrong, and then just like with Wikipedia's editors, a surveyor could come along later to double-check your correction and make it official. It could work!

Self-piloting vehicles

That's the next step after the mapping. Worldwide, 12 million people are killed every year in automobile accidents. Meanwhile, the military sector is testing out and even deploying self-piloting vehicles, including autonomous tanks and aircraft. So when is this going to trickle down into the private sector? We could eliminate traffic accident fatalities completely, simply by removing the only cause - pilot error. Vehicle systems are already using a great deal of technology to protect against accidents - but the next step would simply be having all the cars on a network. You'd hop in and dial your destination and away you go. At least in the city, this would be very practical. It's hard to argue with saving 12 million lives per year.

A word about input methods...

We're all happy with our styluses and handwriting recognition, and we understand that a QWERTY keyboard and a handheld device just isn't a match made in Heaven. That's why we look at stonographer's keyboards and wonder "What if?" Stenographers - court reporters in the United States - use a stenotype machine which has just 22 keys to take dictation at the speed of speech. The computer interprets the shorthand, and out comes perfect English. Could it work on a handheld? We just thought we'd put the inspiration out there. If blind users can use a PDA that uses just ten keys to type in Braille, maybe somebody out there could look into this.

Government

True, politics is a sore spot with many gadget geeks - and vice versa, it seems. But we can't help but notice that while our countries' populations advance into wired, tech-savvy, hip individuals and our businesses are falling all over themselves to embrace technology solutions, our governments just seem stuck in the era of powdered wigs and quill pens. Why, exactly, do we in democratic countries have to go somewhere special to vote? Why aren't our government officials blogging what they do? Why isn't the law-making process in G8 countries more open? We understand there's a hotbed of political debate about the pitfalls of direct democracy; we're not proposing anything that radical. But is it too much to ask that the guy or gal who's running for President or Prime Minister at least not act like he's afraid the computer is going to explode when he stands next to it for the photo-op?

Once upon the 20th century, we had the phreakers. Phreakers were phone hackers; they'd use various equipment and techniques to rig the public phone system, getting free calls, snooping on private calls, even running their own private network, and generally abusing the telephone system for naughty stuff. Then along came the computer age proper, and computer hackers used a technique called "wardialing", in which a programmed modem would be used to block-dial banks of phone numbers looking for a computer network online.

Our 21st century equivalent of these are wardrivers. Wardriving is the practice of driving around in heavily populated urban areas with a wireless laptop or other gear, with the purpose of sniffing out open, unprotected networks. This can be done with criminal intentions of penetrating them, or just for kicks. Note that we provide our information strictly for public education, and not for encouraging criminal activity.

How it's done:

It's surprisingly easy to do, and doesn't require much in the way of special equipment.

- A laptop, notebook, netbook, or UMPC.

- Some kind of wireless networking capability.

- An omnidirectional antenna.

- Software. 'Netstumbler' is a program with this purpose available for the Windows platform.

- A GPS unit, for mapping your hits.

- A car. No motorcycling for this trick!

Typically you will have a two-person team. One's driving and one's got the laptop open. Keeping the netstumbler (or other program open), you'll see that when you drive within range of a wireless access point, the software will display it on the screen, including such information as manufacturer, channel, AP name, GPS coordinates, and so on. That's it!

In practice, you will likely encounter hundreds of wide open points. A lot of 802.11 set-ups will just let anyone within broadcast range have access because it's just easier that way. A sizable number of 802.11 set-ups will just have WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) turned on and think they're protected. They are not; standard software tools can crack WEP in seconds. A handful will use WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) and WPA2. If anybody you encounter is serious enough about their security to use WPA2, you'd best not fool around with them. They'll also likely have somebody watching for mischief.

How to protect your own network:

In the case where you don't intentionally want to provide public access for the world, you'll want to secure your wireless network. Some steps:

- Even though it's easily cracked, you can use WEP anyway. It's a small step, and any step is a deterrent.

- Enable WPA. WPA provides far better protection and is even easier to use. Windows XP has it built-in, as does most wireless hardware these days. Full support of WPA2 is not yet there, but some day you'll have WPA2 accessible everywhere.

- Don't broadcast your Service Set ID (SSID). Just use it to set up your devices, but once that's done, turn off broadcasting.

- Reduce your wireless transmitter power! Nobody thinks of this, but if your wireless network only needs to encompass your office building, then why send the signal all the way across town? If you lower the power of your WLAN transmitter, you will reduce the range of the signal. Even if you can't control it so finely that its range perfectly fits your floor plan, you can at least minimize the chance that a wardriver will stumble upon it.

In any case, don't wring your hands over the insecurity of wireless networks. The Internet itself in insecure, and you're using that, aren't you?

Now that "cloud" computing is here, everybody is heaving a sigh of relief that they don't have to buy, download, or install as much software. We'll always need some, but isn't it becoming a nice bonus that you can offload a lot of tasks to the platform of the Internet itself, and use them just by using a web browser? Not big things, of course, but those little side items that are too important to do without, but not important enough to go to a lot of trouble for.

iGoogle's personalized home page service understands this very well. Recently revamped, it has become a sleek, attractive portal that you can customize by adding gadgets, most of which are developed by third parties. So you can build your own home page, create tabs and name them, and sort into many categories for work and play. It works for anything from a desktop machine to a smartphone.

Here, we'd like to share a selection of gadgets for iGoogle which we'd like to recognize for their usefulness. Whether you're a busy executive in a big company or a small-time entrepreneur on your way up, these gadgets will make you just a little bit smarter and more productive.

World Clocks

Does what it says on the tin. Track the time in numerous time zones, and you can add up to nine clocks to the same group, with labels, and switch between analog and digital. Absolutely necessary for the Internet worker who has a team scattered halfway around the globe.

To-Do List

Very simple. Type in whatever you want, hit 'add', set the priority to low, medium, or high, and delete an item at will. Useful and unobtrusive.

Translate

Again, very useful for the international nature of web business. You can edit the top field, and copy and paste from the bottom field which is the language you're translating to. It works with about 24 languages right now, but it doesn't have Latin yet, so you'll still have to pay your lawyer to understand that.

Currency Converter

Self-explanatory. Not only can you find between any two world currencies at the click of a button, but it even converts to and from precious metals and obsolete currencies. We don't know how many there are in the list; it looks like more than a hundred currency units in the menu. It's also continuously updated over the web, so it's right up to the minute.

Unit Converter

We also call it the "deal with the United States tool", since the United States is going to cling to imperial units forever. Converts between various units of length, weight (mass for you science majors), temperature, volume, bytes, and speed.

Google Finance Market Summary

Now, with the financial markets the way they've been lately, how many times a day do you go check the world market data online? We've caught ourselves doing it before we hit the sports news in the morning. This gadget gives you your choice of US (Dow, NASDAQ, S&P), Canada (TSX) and United Kingdom (UK FTSE, techMARK) market indexes, as well as currency and bond rates. Keep your aspirin bottle handy.

It must be tough to be Yahoo! They're trying harder because they're always number two - and constantly having to fight to keep from being bought out by Microsoft. That's when they're not trying to keep from being dismantled from the inside by billionaire investor and self-proclaimed fanatic Carl Icahn. And of course, the rest of the time they're fending off the US Department of Justice, who turns a blind eye to Microsoft but pounces on the Yahoo-Google advertising partnership like it was the crime of the century.

And the crowning insult: Google is the synonym word for Internet search - but Yahoo was here first!

Stacking up to Google

It's fascinating to see the way the two net portals have developed over the years. This image illustrates their different philosophies very clearly - Yahoo in the top row and Google in the bottom. While Google has deliberately kept things simple, almost to a fault, the Yahoo page, year by year, tries to cram everything in the world into the front page. In fact, Google has gotten simpler still than it was when it first started.

The two cultures have a striking difference that explains the ideas behind their design: GUI vs. CLI. GUI stands for "graphical user interface" and CLI stands for "command line interface". You use the GUI whenever you use the mouse, and operate menus and dialog boxes and icons. But anywhere you use a keyboard to type text into a box, you're using a command line. You don't think of the address bar or the search query box as a command line, but that's what it is! Command line interfaces are stark, simple, and fast, but they're more intimidating if you don't know what you're doing. Graphical user interfaces are rich, cluttered, and slow, but even a child could figure one out quickly.

Yahoo got started in January of 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, originally as a simple HTML page with a list of links, titled "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web". Consider that the World Wide Web itself didn't really get rolling until 1992, with the creation of the Erwise and ViolaWWW web browsers on the X Windows Unix platform, and you'll appreciate what pioneers Jerry and David were! The web portal was born.

Yahoo grew over the years, beating both Google and Microsoft to market in offering many web-based services which we now take for granted. Yahoo beat both its main competitors in offering search, a directory, a chat client, web-based email, and mobile services. They are also one of the few solely-Internet companies to bounce back after the dot-com boom and bust. Most web users today would remember having Yahoo as their first destination at some point in the 1990s, when the web was just becoming popular.

What Yahoo offers...

Through either their own innovation or companies they've bought out and merged, Yahoo's umbrella of web services includes:

- Yahoo Groups - For the longest time, they have been the leading mailing-list and online forum site for nearly a decade. The continued success of groups makes it one of the top 5 features which generates the most traffic for the Yahoo portal.

- Yahoo Games - Bet you forgot this one! Yahoo's games portal is so old, it predates Macromedia Flash! Started in 1997, they used Java and Javascript to allow gamers to compete online over chess, checkers, go, backgammon, and much more. Many Internet users remember this as their first online gaming experience.

- Yahoo 360 - One case where they were late to the game, this is their blog site.

- Yahoo Answers - So far a somewhat unique service, although imitators are creeping up. Yahoo Answers is a site where you post a question and others answer it, and answers are voted up or down by still others based on how helpful they were. It's currently one of the brightest stars in the constellation of social knowledge-sharing.

- Acquisitions Del.ico.us and Flickr - The premier social-bookmarking and image-hosting sites, respectively.

Despite what Carl Icahn and various stockholders who want Yahoo to sell out would have you believe, Yahoo is a company that's doing very well. They're a Fortune 500 company ranked at #412, they bank $7 billion USD in profits every year, and Yahoo sites attract 1.5 billion visitors annually. Look at it this way: if Microsoft's MSN.com domain were a stand-alone company without Microsoft to back them up, Yahoo would be acquiring them - not the other way around.

What with the concern over the proposed Internet filtering policy that is supposed to be put into place here in Australia, we thought this would be a good time to bring this subject up. Our point here is not to enable people to commit crimes, nor to say that they should commit crimes. Our point is that (a) filtering doesn't work, and (b) if honest, law-abiding citizens find Internet filtering interfering with a legitimate task, it should not only be their right, but their duty, to subvert the faulty measure.

This information will also prove valuable to those within schools, businesses, and other organizations that filter Internet usage. Although, we of course can't be held responsible if you get fired or expelled for using this information.

Who is currently filtering the Internet?

The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) currently lists 42 countries which censor Internet access for their citizens at some level. These are Afghanistan, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Burma, China (with Hong Kong), Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Libya, Malaysia, Moldova, Morocco, Nepal, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Tunisia, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen, and Zimbabwe.

What is being filtered?

The obvious target is sexually explicit content. When politicians speak of it, they always beat on "child pornography" as the whole culprit, as if the Internet were simply dripping in the stuff. The truth is, any content that would make a nun frown eventually gets lumped into the big pile of things you're not supposed to see. Eventually, the filtering tends to block access to content related to women's health, gay and lesbian rights groups, and teenage sexual education.

Social networks and social media sites are the next most-common target, usually blocked by schools and businesses. These include MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube, Digg, and Reddit.

After that, we have the bin labeled "other". These sites include Wikipedia under extremely totalitarian governments, blogs and personal websites dealing with political or religious content - particularly if it bucks the status quo, Google in countries such as China and Cuba, and of course, websites with information on circumventing censorship. Even a blog which merely has a post pointing out that there's censorship going on will get censored!

When is filtering considered "pervasive"?

International group Reporters Without Borders categorizes 13 countries as "enemies of the Internet", which are so pervasive in their censorship that they are grossly in violation of human rights.

One example is Cuba. Cuba has the lowest ratio of computers to citizens in all of South America, and the lowest rate of Internet access in the whole Western Hemisphere. To "surf the web" in Cuba, you have to go to a government-controlled access point, sign up, stand in line, and get your tightly-monitored access time - during which IPs are blocked, keywords are filtered, and your browsing history is checked! Reporters in Cuba have been sent to jail for the crime of reporting news from inside Cuba to others outside the border.

Iran is another high offender, which orders its ISPs to censor content relating to criticism of the government, pornography, political opinion, and women's rights. Iran has blocked access to YouTube, some blogs, and some commercial online magazines. Bloggers have been jailed in Iran for their Internet activity.

One last example is China. China has made itself really famous for its Internet censorship, so there's no need to go into too much detail. But they are known to filter content related to politics in general and independence in Taiwan and Tibet in particular, human rights, independence, religions including Falun Gong and the Roman Catholic Church, and many blogs expressing contrary political or religious views. China also limits access to Wikipedia. At one time, up to 52 individuals have been reported jailed in China for "cyber dissident" activity.