Networking

What started as rain last Thursday quickly turned into the worst ice storm in New Hampshire history. The Monadnock Region is wooded and hilly, and the ice-laden trees fell all over the power lines, disabling two thirds of the power grid in the Granite State.

We lost power for two days - and as time wore on our Comcast voice over IP (VoIP) and Verizon cellular phone service froze up as well.

Privacy groups have long worried about Google's privacy policies --- and now it appears that consumers have followed suit. Google has dropped off the list of the most trusted companies when it comes to privacy protection. Check out my blog for details, and to find out how other companies like Apple, Microsoft, IBM, and eBay fared.

Cisco is going to be finding out, the hard way, that open source isn't the same thing as free software.

Google's releasing the not-yet-baked Chrome as 1.0, rather than continuing to develop it as a beta, is the company's biggest blunder yet. It's also a disturbing indication that the company has started to emphasize marketing over technology --- always the first sign of a company in decline.

In Monday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches the Wall Street Journal "inaccurately" stir up a hornets' nest of net-neutrality controversy. Not to mention a merry BetamaXmas...

Microsoft certainly isn't making it difficult for its detractors to denounce their foray into iPhone Apps. Their first product, which ships today and is dubbed Seadragon Mobile, is fundamentally broken - or so they say in the iTunes description and on the company's website....but that doesn't mean it isn't a great app...

New Microsoft President of Online Services Qi Lu has given his first public interview, and it shows that the division may be headed in the wrong direction. Lu is taking dead aim at Google search, when he should instead be focusing on creating new services focused around Office and other Microsoft products. Microsoft will never catch Google, but it has a considerable lead it can build on when it comes to applications.

Google has said that it plans to soon to take Chrome out of beta and release it officially, but it better squash plenty of bugs before it does it. A software testing service has found that Chrome's beta is buggier than both the beta of Firefox 3.1 and Internet Explorer 8, with nearly 300 bugs that need to be fixed.

Welcome to a special IT Blogwatch EXTRA: as Richi Jennings watches the UK child-porn watchdog apologize for blocking Wikipedia. Not to mention why you shouldn't trust phone surveys...

Microsoft has apparently seen the light, and is readying versions of Office applications that will be available for free on the Web.

Pilot fish at this international organization gets a panicked call from a system administrator in Africa, who tells him the switch configuration is gone.

The Mumbai terrorists' most powerful weapon appears not to have been guns or grenades, but instead their handheld VoIP phones, which allowed them to get detailed, live instructions from handlers on how to evade police, and where to attack next, while the police where powerless to detect them. So reports the New York Times.

Six months after this network engineer joins the technology review committee, he's called into a meeting to introduce some new technology.

In Monday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches ISPs in the UK ban access to parts of Wikipedia, over child pornography concerns.^{[citation needed]} Not to mention geeky Christmas ornaments...

In choosing former Yahoo exec Qi Lu to run its online efforts, Microsoft chose exactly the wrong person for the job. Lu, an exceedingly accomplished technologist, has a superb background in engineering, and particularly in online search. But he doesn't appear to have a background in business strategy, and because of that, he won't be able to fix Microsoft's problems online.