Stories about: Bradner

Ethernet turned 35 last week. The official birth date of Ethernet is generally regarded as May 22, 1973, the date of a memo penned by Bob Metcalfe that laid out the basic concepts of Ethernet. To mark the occasion, I thought it might be fun to look back at another anniversary milestone.

Largely due to the continued dumb statements and actions of a few apparently PR-challenged carriers, the network neutrality issue is alive and well in the United States. Since any issue like this seems to create a legislative void that must be filled, we now have at least two network neutrality related bills for Congress to consider. If one liked legislation-based solutions, merging these bills and tossing out a bit of Federal Communications Commission make-work would not be too bad, but there would still be some questions left unanswered.

While no one predicted a "Mad Max"-style apocalyptic catastrophe, experts at FutureNet this week nonetheless said that Internet architecture will face stiff challenges over the next few years that could put significant strain on the Web's effectiveness.

In separate moves, Microsoft has released its Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack but discontinued extended support for the Visual Basic 6.0 IDE.

When the US Federal Trade Commission announced a US$2.9 million settlement with online marketing firm ValueClick this month, it was a record monetary settlement under the 4-year-old CAN-SPAM Act.

On the surface it might look like there has been some real legal progress against spam of late. But don't be fooled; these victories, real as they may be for the people involved, don't mean much to you and me.

Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced New York governor making headlines in the US this week for being linked to a prostitution ring, is perhaps best known for his aggressive takedown of unethical Wall Street firms during his days as attorney general. But the former prosecutor also played a big role in cleaning up the high-tech and network industries.

Earlier this year, it looked like The SCO Group was going down for the count. It had lost a key decision in its suit against Novell, declared bankruptcy and was quickly running out of money.

January is the best time of the year for gadget nuts: During the first week we get the madness of the Consumer Electronics Show, and that's closely followed by MacWorld, at which Steve Jobs and crew get up and try to outshine CES and gather all of the buzz in the world of gadgets.

It seems like only yesterday that the press was talking about an Internet collapse, but it actually was more than a decade ago and happened because the press thought Bob Metcalfe was predicting the Internet was going to overload and collapse.

Ross Anderson (www.nwdoc_finder.com/5143 and /5144) is one of the more interesting security folks writing these days. He is a professor of security engineering at University of Cambridge (the other Cambridge) Computer Laboratory and seems to come up with new and useful perspectives on a wide range of security-related topics.