Still thinking of ways to spend your business’s Stimulus money? How about a new server dedicated solely to tracking every bit of Internet traffic your company does for two years?
That’s the intent of proposed federal legislation requiring all Internet providers and Wi-Fi access points — that means your local coffee shop, your hotel, and yes, even possibly you — to keep records of all Internet traffic so you can turn them over to the police in the event of an investigation.
Bills introduced last week by Republicans in both the House and Senate state: “A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user.”
According to CNET, that means anyone with Wi-Fi access points or routers using the standard method of dynamically assigning temporary address (what we know as DHCP). It includes millions of homes as well as the big guys such as Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and the like.
Why even consider such a potentially costly and invasive requirement? One of the Senate bill’s sponsors, U.S. Sen. Johh Cornyn of Texas, said: “While the Internet has generated many positive changes in the way we communicate and do business, its limitless nature offers anonymity that has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children.”
If you’re interested, the legislation is Senate Bill 436 and H.R. 1076 in the House. Click here for a CNET News article.
A recent article in The New York Times presents some interesting “low-tech fixes for high-tech problems.” Among other hints, it covers what to do if you drop your cell phone in the toilet, how to extend your Wi-Fi reach and offers a clever remote car key trick. Speaking car keys, there’s an ongoing urban legend that you can unlock your car from miles away using a cell phone and your spare remote keyless entry. But that trick has been debunked at Snopes.com — because of RF versus cell phone frequencies and other scientific reasons.
You can read the NYT article here.
Any other low-tech tricks you’d like to share?
Talk about scary. You can’t even see the electrical anomalies transmitted right into your data center — the sags, surges, spikes, line noise, frequency variation and harmonic distortions — but the unseen can be phenomenally costly to business.
According to recent statistics from the U.S. Department of Energy, here are the price tags related to a single power outage in a typical data center: 33 percent of companies lose $20,000 to $500,000 when power is disrupted; 20 percent lose from $500,000 to $2 million, and 15 percent lose more than $2 million when an outage occurs.
If you had five minutes on stage, what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds?
I’ve never been myself, but I hear Ignite Portland is a cool event and not to be missed. With talks on subjects such as, “The Universe Story,” “How to know if you are a Narcissist,” and “How to kill three chickens in three years,” what’s not to like? Here are a few more details:
Ignite Portland
February 19, 2009
7:00 – 10:00 PM
Bagdad Theater
3702 SE Hawthorne Blvd.
Ticketholders get in at 5:15 PM
General Admission at 6:00 PM
Admission is always FREE
EasyStreet is proud to be sponsoring again this year. Tickets are available starting at 10:00 a.m. on Thursday, February 5. Click here for more information and to get your tickets when they’re available.
