The recent disclosure of a data theft of massive proportions - 130 million credit cards - reveals the challenges insitutions face securing large stores of sensitve data in the face of sophisticated hackers determined to breach secured systems. The attacks demonstrate the weaknesses of traditional approaches to application and data security.
News broke today that Amazon remotely erased copies of some George Orwell books from Kindle devices. Putting aside the irony of Orwell's books being erased, the question we must all ask ourselves is what the ramifications are of putting our data on devices and systems controlled by others. In our increasingly connected world of always on, wired and wireless access to everything from our books to our pesonal information, we should all ask a very central philosphical question - who owns our data?
Whether the issue is Amazon deleting a book you paid for on a device you own, government workers improperly accessing private records, private industry workers improperly accessing records of public figures, companies attempting to assert ownership over data you place in their hands, or hackers stealing data from public and private databases, the twin issues of data ownership and security have become central themes in an emerging threat to the success of the Internet as a trusted medium. We believe that users own their data, and we are working on an exciting new product set that will address these fundamental issues in ways that put data ownership and security in the hands of users.
Michael Jackson's tragic death this past week created an unprecedented wave of traffic on the Internet that temporarily overloaded many sites and services. As CNN noted, the advent of social media has dramatically increased the amplifying effect of big news stories. Several years ago, news stories reported reactions from the blogosphere as the voice of ordinary people. Today, ordinary people all over the world can communicate to many people in real time using services like Facebook and Twitter. It seems as though overnight our collective ability to generate traffic on the Internet has spiked far beyond the capacity of current systems to deal with peak load in the face of dramatic events like Jackson's death.
More significantly, we are only just seeing the very beginning of the bandwidth-gobbling revolution known as social media. As AT & T is fast learning in the US market, mobile Internet usage will skyrocket as handsets and services become more sophisiticated and mobile bandwidth grows. Internet engineering experts have been predicting the saturation of the Internet for several years; it appears that we have now arrived at the saturation point during peak usage. How long will it be before Internet brownouts become a common occurence? The answer may depend on when the global economy recovers from its current doldrums.
