Hill Associates

NYC Pay Phones Upgrade

I had to laugh when I saw this article. NYC pay phones getting an upgraded with smart screens. I had to think, where are the pay phones now? I have often joked that this is why you do not see superman any more, there is no where for him to change into his costume. How many would they need to upgrade to do the whole lot? And then my thought went to "How tough is the screen going to be?".

I remember way back when in Australia when pay phones were being introduced into shops and the shopkeepers were getting a cut of the takings, the handsets were filled with lead to make them heavy and hence a customer would not be tempted to hog the phone for a long time. This strategy did not work with the pay phones outside as the handset was then used to smash things. Hence the now lighter handset along with restrictive metal cable. Now I don't think the Australian public is any more agressive than the New York public so I have to wonder about the life span of one of these new upgraded phones. 

The Dawn of Satellite Communications

It was 50 years ago today, July 10, 1962, that a Delta rocket lifted off to carry a payload that began a revolution in the way the world communicates. What was launched that day was Telstar - the first telecommunications satellite.

Telstar was small, only about 34 inches in diameter (although it actually had 72 sides). Solar panels occupied most of the faces and charged 19 batteries to power the electronics, protected inside a 20-inch aluminium tube, that consisted of an amplifier to boost the received signal about ten billion times before it was retransmitted. The original plans from Bell Labs called for the satellite to relay two channels of television, but weight restrictions of the Delta launch rocket meant this was cut back to a single channel.

One of the first Telstar broadcasts was President Kennedy's press conference across the Atlantic to Europe.  The name even sparked the name of an instrumental by the British Group, The Tornados and a video game that looked like a clone of Pong.

But it was Telstar and satellite transmission that allowed for instantaneous communication – such as long-distance phone calls and real-time international TV – to become an everyday reality. The phrase “live, via satellite” is only possible with Telstar and the machines that followed it into space.

Happy 50th birthday!

Happy 5th to the iPhone!

It is hard to imagine life without a smart mobile device these days.  (Although one might argue being always connected is not necessarily a good thing.)  You can thank the folks at Apple for that.  And it was five years ago this past Friday (June 29th) that the first iPhone went on sale.  What has been the impact of this marvel, other than the obvious?

Here are some thoughts:

• In 2007, Apple's revenue was $24 billion.  Today, it's $108 billion.
• Apple has sold more than 250 million iPhones (here is the visual on its rise)
• There are over 650,000 apps available to download and use.
• The has enabled startups like Instagram to go from zero to being valued at $1 billion in 18 months
• Before the iPhone most tech products were designed to engineers who made them.  Now it is a more "user-centric" design model.
• Cisco predicts that by 2016, there will be more mobile devices than people
• According to research by Larry Rosen, the author of iDisorder:  Understanding Our Obsession with Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us, nearly 1/3 of people born after 1980 feel anxious if they can't check Facebook every few minutes
• In the first quarter of 2012, AT&T wrote Apple a larger check ($3 billion) than it did for investments on its own network

The iPhone has definitely had its impacts - especially on the phone and software industries.

There are some interesting retrospectives on line:

CNET's, Wired's, PC Mag, and this great infographic - just to name a few.

Whether you have an iPhone, Blackberry, Android, or just a plain old mobile phone.  Happy birthday iPhone.

1Gbps? I Could Use Some of That!

Remember that experiment that Google announced last year to build a 1Gbps network in Kansas City?  (It is, in fact, underway.)

Well, it seems it's gotten some visibility in Washington.  The President has just announced a new initiative called US Ignite, a new national program that will partner corporate and nonprofit entities in 25 cities to "create a national network of communities and campuses with ultra-fast, programmable broadband services, operating at speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second." Read more here and here.

Perhaps this will improve our ranking on the global broadband delivery scales.  It is also my hope to get 1Gbps to my house soon, but I don't think we are one of the top 25 cities.  :-(

16 Scary Security Problems to Consider

Sorry.  I just can't help myself.  I saw another great article on cyber security this morning, and had to share this.  Sure, there has been lots of stuff in the news lately about Flame - a supersophisticated set of malware code that is now linked to the previously reported Stuxnet.  (That in and of itself might cause one to pause... how does this stuff get in out in to the press?  And why?)

Anyway, it is worth noting (again) that the Internet can be a dangerous place, and the state of IT security and their attempts to keep up is a struggle at best.  Just in case you may doubt this, here is some proof (which I've copied from the above article to save you some time):

1. More than 1 million computers are successfully exploited every single day. That's one every 14 seconds.
2. 39 percent of the world's computers are infected by malware of some type.
3. 90 percent of the world's companies have suffered network breaches in the past year.
4. One out of every seven adults has his or her online financial information, identity, or passwords compromised every year, according to Privacy Rights. That adds up to 280 million breached records in the last eight years.
5. 82 percent of malicious websites are hosted on hacked legitimate websites.
6. It's no longer unusual for a single hacking event to cause more than $100 million in damages. The attack against Sony is a fine example.
7. Hackivist groups such as Anonymous routinely break into the world's largest companies and have even hacked the global authorities investigating them.
8. Hacks resulting in millions of leaked passwords are so numerous, they practically go unnoticed. The successful attack against LinkedIn is a good example.
9. A single worm, SQL Slammer, was able to infect almost every possible unpatched computer it targeted in 10 minutes -- and this was back in 2003.
10. Malware is popping up on mobile platforms as though we've learned absolutely nothing over the 25 years of PC hacking.
11. Spam rates are still above 65 percent, nearly 10 years after passing the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.
12. One out of every 14 Internet downloads is malicious.
13. The annual cost of cyber crime is estimated at $114 billion.
14. Successful prosecution rates for Internet cyber criminals is less than 0.01 percent.
15. Hacking by nations is so pervasive that Google is now automatically alerting users of potential state-driven threats.
16. Stuxnet, Duqu, and now Flame prove that complex malware can bypass any computer security defense.

Just a lot of bad, scary things out there, eh?

Stunned to Learn that LinkedIn Has No CIO or CISO

Perhaps you heard about it in the news or saw some of the national headlines.  

This week, a file containing 6.5 million unique hashed passwords from LinkedIn accounts appeared in an online forum based in Russia. According to reports, more than 200,000 of these passwords have reportedly been cracked so far.  So, if you are on LinkedIn, and have not changed your passord, make sure you do so.  (You can check out our wiki for some guidance.)

As a business-oriented social network with 160 million users, this is frightening.  (Bad enough Facebook can be a security nightmare.)  But what is more frightening, and surprising - at least to me - was this report that while LinkedIn had senior Vice Presidents for Engineering and Operations, they did not have either a CIO or Chief Information Security Officer (CISO).  As a CISSP (#49990), I am always on the look out for reports like these, as well as global reports such as those just out this week from RSA, the annual Verizon Data Breach report and the annual Global State of Information Security report.  

All of these say the say thing - cybercrime is continually on the rise, social networks are notorious for risk, and one must be ever vigilant.

So remember, be careful out there.

The 2012 April Fool's Day Pranks from Google

April Fool's Day is always such an interesting time of year.  One never knows what to expect.  Especially if one looks to the Internet for inspiration.  And one of the best places to look is to an inspirational group of creative pranksters... the folks at Google. 

Go ahead.  Check it out.  We know you want to.

What Bugs me - Advertising in the Air

Being a frequent traveler, I am constantly bombarded with advertizing while traveling. From the bilboards on the freeways to the napkins in on the planes. Even the tray tables and escalator handrails have advertizing these days. Like most of us I have become acustome and now immune to most of it so here is something that really bugged me. When the pilot/percer of a plane gets on the overhead announcement and prattles on for ages about some purchase you can make or some rewards program you can sign up for. Isn't that announcement service meant for important things we should be paying attention to, for safety, or to alert us of change of conditions to keep us informed? If the practice continues I will undoubtably be tuning out to announcements which I do not think is a good thing. We constantly hear about FAA regulations that limit what an airline passenger is supposed to do, like using the first class toilets when not in that ticketed cabin (really? that is an FAA regualtion) but what about some regulations about what we are subjected to over the airline loudspeaker? 

The Mother of Invention

We're talking about Ma Bell, and specifically Bell Labs. Back before we broke up the phone company, the monopology's research arm was Bell Labs.

There are two points of reference to mention with regard to this story.  The first has to do with how, after 85 years, the research laboratory founded by AT&T in 1925 and responsible for an amazing array of inventions - from the transistor to the cell phone and the first laser - continues to innovate. I personally remembering going to the 1964 New York Worlds Fair and being captivated by the AT&T exhibition, especially with denonstrations of things like video phones.  How futuristic and Jetson-like.  Now we have telepresence technology we so often take for granted.

And in the same vein, we offer up "The Idea Factory," a new book out by author Jon Gertner, that chronicles the history of the labs as that incubator of invention and the birthplace of so many influential technologies.

Enjoy!

A Significant Date in History

Telecommunications, as we note in our wiki, is about communication at a distance. 

And so it is important to make mention of two things that happened on this date in history.  This first, in 1876, of Alexander Graham Bell receiving his patent for his new invention, the telephone, closing the communication gap and making it easy to reach out to talk with someone else.  In two subsequent forms - the rotary phone and the smartphone - the telephone also made the top 10 gadgets of all time that changed the world. Pretty amazing!

The second event happened on this date in 1926. Even though engineers from the Bell System were able to send the first voice transmission across the Atlantic, connecting Virginia and Paris briefly in 1915, and then a year later, the first two-way conversation with a ship at sea, it was not until 1926 that the first two-way conversation was made across the Atlantic on March 7th 1926. Then on January 7, 1927, commercial telephone service (using radio) began between New York and London.  Finally, on September 25, 1956, the first submarine Transatlantic Telephone Cable system (TAT-1) went in to service and forever changing our ability to communicate around the world in an instant.