Scott Bradner: 'Net Insider
Scott Bradner's weekly observations on the Internet.

• Apple's next mold breaker?
  My editor pointed out that this issue has a forward/predicting theme and suggested I keep that in mind when figuring out what to write. After pondering that for a while I decided to write about what I'd like to happen rather than predict what may actually happen when Steve Jobs announces new Apple products at the Macworld Conference & Expo later this month.
• NSFNET: The vibrant ghost of Christmases past
  At the start of the Christmas shopping season 20 years ago the National Science Foundation announced that a group consisting of Michigan's Merit Network, IBM and MCI had won a contract to develop and deploy the T-1 NSFNET. This network led directly to the Internet of today -- the NSFNET was a gift that has kept on giving.
• FCC: regulating through 3D glasses
  I was going to lay off the FCC for a while but the events of Nov. 27 make that really hard to do.

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• A step in the right direction away from credit abuse
  I’m writing this just before Thanksgiving, and one of the many things I’m thankful for is that the major credit-reporting agencies finally understand they were a major part of the identity-theft problem.
• Anonymity as a thing of the past
  As is too often the case, the story's headline was quite misleading. Reading the AP headline "Intel Official: Expect Less Privacy" certainly got my attention, as did the second paragraph of the story: "Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people's private communications and financial information." But reading Kerr's actual speech and transcript of the Q&A session that followed it provides a rather different picture.
• I guess truth is not an option for telcos
  If I wanted network neutrality laws passed I could not think of a better pair of allies than Verizon Wireless and Comcast. By their duplicitous behavior, both have been doing a very good job of showing lawmakers just why such laws may be needed.
• Internet on the road: good where cheap
  The fancier the hotel, it seems, the more expensive and the poorer the quality of its Internet service.
• The fallacy of short-term thinking about the Internet
  What she said got me thinking about the futility of quantifying the value of the Internet by measuring its impact on yesterday's business models.

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• Microsoft HealthVault requires suspension of disbelief
  Microsoft HealthVault healthcare data-collection service raises security, privacy issues.
• Control vs. usability: What’s DRM’s future?
  Digital rights management is a chimera that content owners use to pretend their content is not digital. As a technology, DRM has had an almost unblemished record of failure and as a business model the record has been just about as bad. About the only person who has made somewhat of a success with DRM has called for its abandonment, at least in a major area of current use. But this reality has not diminished the ardor that content owners have for the idea. Given all of the above, what is the future of DRM in the Internet?