Reference:
Japan has a government-imposed deadline to upgrade its information technology sectors to run on IPv6 by 2005. The mandate is expected to stimulate network upgrades and application development.

The U.S. Department of Defense said it will move to IPv6 by 2008. Department acquisitions taking place after October of this year must be IPv6-compatible in order to help the military gear up for the transition.

IPv6 promises both end-to-end security and quality of service, which aims to make sure packets traveling over the network arrive at their intended destination.
news.com

Notes:

Reference:
So even if someone isn't really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies.
Shirky

Notes:
Clay Shirky summarizing W.R. Bion. Iraq, anyone?

Reference:
It has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to defend themselves.

Now, this pulls against the cardinal virtue of ease of use. But ease of use is wrong. Ease of use is the wrong way to look at the situation, because you've got the Necker cube flipped in the wrong direction. The user of social software is the group, not the individual.

I think we've all been to meetings where everyone had a really good time, we're all talking to one another and telling jokes and laughing, and it was a great meeting, except we got nothing done. Everyone was amusing themselves so much that the group's goal was defeated by the individual interventions.

The user of social software is the group, and ease of use should be for the group. If the ease of use is only calculated from the user's point of view, it will be difficult to defend the group from the "group is its own worst enemy" style attacks from within.
Shirky

Notes:
This discussion mirrors any consideration of the end 2 end description of the internet. The pure e2e does not allow for a core group, the governing group, to exert control.

Reference:
Because VoIP blurs the lines between network and application, we weren't sure how to divvy up the work between the network and the server folks.
Network Computing

Notes:
Because voice is more dependent on performance than on accuracy, and the packet system Internet is designed to focus on accuracy over performance. Such is the limitation of end-to-end design, and therefore the extended social theory that is au courant.

Reference:
Mr Bush could have asked Congress to pass new anti-terrorism laws. Instead, he is setting up a shadow court system outside the reach of either Congress or America's judiciary, and answerable only to himself. Such a system is the antithesis of the rule of law which the United States was founded to uphold. In a speech on July 4th, Mr Bush rightly noted that American ideals have been a beacon of hope to others around the world. In compromising those ideals in this matter, Mr Bush is not only dismaying America's friends but also blunting one of America's most powerful weapons against terrorism.
The Economist

Notes:
And when the Economist questions the patriotism of the Bush administration, you know things are hinky.

Reference:
TR: Does the fact that devices are going wireless makes things more difficult?
RUDOLPH: Yes. Imagine a television set that can answer my telephone. I’m watching TV and the telephone rings. I answer the call using the TV, which activates my TiVo digital video recorder. Suppose that suddenly the TV starts ringing without stop, and I want to disconnect the telephone from the TV. How do I do that? If I’m lucky, there’s a plug on the telephone outlet in the wall going into the TV. So I could just disconnect that plug. Very soon, though, we’re not going to have wires anymore. The communication will all be wireless—802.11, Bluetooth, whatever. I might have to stand in front of an annoying, ringing TV fumbling with buttons trying to disconnect the telephone.

TR: Why didn't engineers think about failure-detecting systems before?
RUDOLPH: Before the Internet, people built systems that were very well engineered—the telephone network, for example. AT&T understood its behavior—and owned the whole system. Then things like the Internet came around. Now no one owns the whole thing—it’s too big, it’s too distributed. We are no longer able to engineer the whole world.
Technology Review

Notes:
Comparing the Internet with the Phone System is apples and oranges. The functional goals are entirely different as are the methods of acheiving them.

Reference:
Microsoft has succeeded mainly because of its developer recruitment and retention program. It has an awesome amount of resources. It has made millionaires out of thousands of people who never worked at Redmond, helping them get Windows applications rolling into the market.

The problem is that Microsoft has also killed many of those same developers. It has absorbed their capabilities into Windows (or Internet Explorer), it has entered and taken over their markets, sometimes developing clones of their technology, sometimes (as in the case of anti-virals) by buying a small player.

Everyone who writes commercial software now knows that building a Windows software business comes with its own sunset provision. Most Windows development today is either on "mainframe class" programs or within corporations. The former is still encouraged by Microsoft, the latter is an existance that is almost Linux-like in its devotion to the work rather than the money.

Windows development in the consumer market, in other words, is slowly drying up. Developers are basing their business plans on the Internet, or on Linux, while Microsoft itself goes to the top end, the old mainframe market. And every company that has ever gone into the mainframe market, and stayed there, has regretted it. Even IBM has regretted it. That's why IBM is driving toward Linux so hard.

Microsoft doesn't look like a company in trouble, but it is.
Corrante

Notes:

Reference:
Radio tagging of luggage could revolutionize the sorting and routing of luggage, the report said. If RFID technology were fully integrated into currently disparate systems, bags could be picked up from travelers' homes by courier, processed and then loaded into the aircraft without further involvement of the passenger, the report added.
news.com

Notes:
Would have to be a dual token system with matching tags, one on the luggage, one with the passenger. At a secure point, the passenger's token is scanned, and only then the luggage is released for loading.

Or the other way around. The token is scanned as the passenger enters the plane. If the token list from the passengers and the token list of luggage don't match, then react.

Reference:
And the Pentagon, preoccupied with the Iraq war and ideologically hostile to Syria, vehemently opposed a back channel.
New Yorker / S. Hersh

Notes:
Hersh's contention is that Syria was providing great intelligence about Al Qaeda and wanted a back channel to the Bush Administrtion to discuss other issues.

The Pentagon opposition points clearly to an agenda wherein the "war on terrorism" is simply a cover for a campaign of aggressive intervention into economically strategic countries, such as Iraq and Iran for the betterment of their non-government handlers, such as Bechtel and Haliburton.

Reference:
Science-fiction writer David Brin, in his influential non-fiction book The Transparent Society (1999), posited that it's impossible to keep most facts about ourselves private. We could sit and whine about it, he declares, or we could smarten up and realize that the most precious aspect of our very wealthy, very free Western world has never been privacy, secrecy, or anonymity. Rather, it has been a freewheeling openness, with information flowing everywhere. Brin believes that data must flow in all directions: not just from the bottom up but from the top down, not just to the state but about the state, not just through our bedrooms but from our courtrooms.
Reason

Notes:
In a word, access.