Insider Outlook

Meatspace. No, it is not that shallow drawer in the fridge where you keep your plastic enshrouded deli slices. This is the world where human bodies actually interact, often poorly, in social and public spaces. A person can speak directly to someone else in real-time, and there is no editing after it is put out there. People with differing opinions talk and interact everyday, and it is not a big thing. People of different ethnic backgrounds, religions and political parties get work done all day long without any incidents.

There is a lot of buzz going on right now about encryption boosts being implemented in Apple products. Specifically, app and text data stored on these personal devices will now be encrypted, and the user will be the only one able to decrypt it. Yes, it turns out those are two different features. At the minimum, this dramatically increases the security of the devices as a whole, and it provides more legal oversight surrounding the ownership rights and access to that content. Naturally, the investigative arms of government are flapping like chicken wings over the BETTER protection.

Amid the recent saber rattling of Internet Transit vs Internet Content providers, a long-time rumble is finally getting detected on the public press seismometers. This is mainly because of the entrance of the big name players that bear weight of their public consumers. Back about four months ago, Verizon actually won a Circuit court judgement that basically said the FCC is overstepping it's authority. They believed the FCC had no business telling them how to operate their network, and the court basically agreed.

I have a few attitudes about "angel investors" and "venture capital" leftover from the days of the early web explosion. It was the rich getting the opportunity to get richer. That was all fine and well, until the investors started asking for returns on their investments. All of this is still going on today, but not at the feverish pace it was a few years ago. I do find it a little ironic that a lot of the technologies and business methods those early investors created have come full circle to open the field for a much wider market for investors.

Today, a groundswell of Internet users became activists as the threat of censorship and government regulation quivered in the shaky paws of ill educated legislators. The blogosphere, tweets, Facebook Shares and Google +1s were all over the story. Fortunately, the Office of the President recognized the obvious mounting outrage and voiced their lack of support for such measures, which extinguished the torches of the Senate Committee, leaving them standing around with just their pitchforks.

There has been a lot of discussion going around lately about Google and Facebook cracking down on pseudonyms and requiring their users to work under their real names. Big Brother/Company paranoia aside, I have come out on their side of this issue. That is actually a little shocking for those who know my position on network privacy. Maybe I should explain.

I admit, there are just a few things that crawl all over me. Insurance and Patents are two of them. While I would love to go into a longwinded diatribe about the evils of insurance, I have some thoughts on patent policy that I just need to put out there. I am absolutely all for corporate and individual innovations, and I firmly believe that any original innovation needs to be protected from rip-off artists and scammers. The people and products on the bleeding edge of innovation are bastards when it comes to pirating and intellectual property theft.

I have been watching the recent publicity stunts by the likes of Anonymous and Lulzsec. Publishing usernames and passwords, credit card numbers, and email addresses from some of the biggest names in technology. Entertainment companies, military contractors, banks. You would think the victims would know better, but I think the reality of the perpetrators advanced techniques and net stealth has shaken them to the core. This is digital terrorism, plain and simple.