mc-cf.org

In the short run, those concessions have probably paid off, as millions of customers switched from other carriers just to get an iPhone. But unless AT&T steps up its coverage sometime in the next six months, it is going to have a huge wave of cancellations when those two-year contracts end in late 2010.

Regardless, it’s not like I’m in the backwoods–Austin’s the state capital of Texas, the home of one of the largest universities in the country, and a major tech center.

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Apparently, there are still too many iPhones in town for AT&T’s network to handle the load. On Wednesday, my iPhone was rendered a useless brick for much of the day. I frequently got no data coverage at all, including inside the convention center and several music venues, and several times, I was relegated to AT&T’s slower EDGE network instead of the 3G network for which I’m paying close to $100 a month.

Here’s hoping that the company starts to make good by offering partial refunds to anybody with an iPhone and an SXSW badge.

With the exodus of the geeks, I’d imagine that the population of
iPhone users in the greater Austin area has declined since AT&T had its widely reported problems over the weekend.

I imagine that AT&T had to make some concessions to Apple to become the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the United States, such as not being allowed to sell music through its own store.

I had trouble completing voice calls, and on one, the person on the other end said I was almost incomprehensible because of the warbly modulation. (If you’re an iPhone customer, you’ve probably heard this.) I can’t even get the GPS navigation to work, though I don’t know if this is related to AT&T or a separate problem.

Meanwhile, I’m sure that Apple’s contract with AT&T is coming up for renewal sometime soon. I hope that it takes these complaints to heart.

South by Southwest Interactive has turned into SXSW Music. One attendee told me a funny story about watching the revolving door at a downtown hotel as techies were replaced by stereotypical rockers with long hair, beards, and tattoos.

(Credit:
Box.net)

Search results now go through your saved files to find words or phrases within. You also get a preview of what it found.

This is an important feature to add, and one that’s long overdue. For things like videos and image files it was not a big deal since the built-in preview tools made viewing the content within your folders quite simple. For documents, however, the only real quick way to go about hunting through them was to name them properly the first time, or use an appropriate OpenBox service to preview the file within your browser. For businesses or individuals with a large number of files stored on Box’s servers, both of these solutions break down quickly.

Box.net is rolling out a new version of its search engine that lets users search for information found within the files they’ve stored on the service. Previously its system only worked with file names and user-created tags. The new tool will index text within
Microsoft Office documents, PDFs, user descriptions, and Box.net’s recently-added Web documents service.

The company is rolling this out to users, both free and business accounts, over the next few weeks.

“Digital inclusion has traditionally been seen as a charity initiative,” The Knight Foundation’s Perry said. “But that is rapidly changing. Increasingly, cities of all types–urban, suburban, and rural–are linking universal digital access to economic development imperatives.”

(Credit:
Marguerite Reardon/CNET Networks)

“It’s not just about simply providing cheap access to broadband,” Goldman said. “It’s about delivering a total package and finding a suitable way to deliver that package. You can offer $15 a month DSL, but without the programs that provide a way for people to get the hardware, the training, and the technical support it won’t be successful.”

When EarthLink decided earlier this year that it was exiting the citywide Wi-Fi business, it looked like Wireless Philadelphia was doomed. But days before the network was to be shut down in June, a group of local investors swooped in and took over the network, promising a new business model and a revitalized plan.

Of course, there are many possible explanations for why I was getting these much slower speeds. Maybe the network was congested because there were a lot of users in the area. Or perhaps there was an issue with the Wi-Fi mesh or the backhaul. Or maybe the test was flawed. Whatever the cause, performance was not optimal.

“Wireless Philadelphia is dedicated to closing the digital divide and believes the movement to open white spaces can greatly assist this effort nationally,” the group said in an e-mail urging its supporters to sign the petition. “Continued technological innovation in this area will help make critical communications tools more open and available for everyone.”

From the beginning, Wireless Philadelphia’s goal has been to provide broadband service to families who have never owned a computer and have little or no online experience. The group believes that getting these families online will increase their access to educational, employment, and life opportunities.

Now under new management, the citywide Wi-Fi network that was originally funded and built by EarthLink will have a new business model, better coverage, and a new contract that should make it easier for Wireless Philadelphia to meet its primary goal of getting low-income families online.

“The new network owners are supposed to have a much more sustainable business model,” said Karen Perry, director of the Connected Communities team for the Knight Center of Digital Excellence. “The fact that they are also focused on wired and wireless access will also improve the quality of the network, which could be very important for providing the nonprofit a more vibrant set of options.”

Partnering for results

Overwhelmingly, these unconnected individuals tend to be minorities and people with low education levels. A recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that only 57 percent of African Americans and 37 percent of Hispanics have Internet access. And only 29 percent of people who have not graduated from high school are connected to the Internet.

“Reliable network access is key to our success,” Goldman said. “If our clients can’t reliably connect to the Internet and get consistent, speedy connections, they won’t use the services.

While EarthLink provided a good portion of the initial funding for Wireless Philadelphia to get off the ground, the restrictive exclusive contract in some ways hamstrung the nonprofit’s efforts and tied its success to the success of the network and the technology.

Network Acquisition Company, which acquired the network, hasn’t talked publicly about the details of its new plan, but it has hinted that its strategy will differ from EarthLink’s. For one, it will use wired infrastructure to provide backhaul capacity to the Wi-Fi network. This should help improve coverage and capacity issues. NAC also plans to sign up more business customers and city agencies as anchor tenants of the network, guaranteeing bigger chunks of revenue to keep the network up and running.

The package becomes an enticing incentive for welfare-to-work clients to complete their training, and it provides a long-lasting tool that clients can use long after the training program ends. Working with partners also means Wireless Philadelphia doesn’t have to deal with screening and qualifying clients for its program, reducing the cost and hassle of administering the program. It also integrates the broadband bundle with a specific need. And finally, it helps provide the necessary funding for the project to continue. Currently, Wireless Philadelphia has 30 funding sources and more than 30 community partners.

(Credit:
Marguerite Reardon/CNET Networks)

Defining the digital divide

But it will also have big benefits for the city, such as reducing crime and unemployment, improving public health and social service efficiency, and increasing educational excellence.

If the results of this assessment, as well as future assessments, can show marked improvements for individuals and eventually entire communities, it could help fuel the movement for a national broadband policy.

Philadelphia had big plans to bring broadband and the Internet to the masses when it announced in 2005 that it was building the nation’s largest Wi-Fi network spanning some 135 square miles. Wireless Philadelphia, a city-sponsored nonprofit, was created to provide the city’s poor with an entire package of services to get them online. This package includes not only low-cost broadband access, but computers, training, technical support, and new applications.

The implosion of EarthLink’s citywide Wi-Fi business may have been the best thing that ever happened to Wireless Philadelphia, the nonprofit charged with helping Philadelphia bridge the digital divide.

It’s difficult to gauge what the impact of this exclusion means. In the past, Internet access was viewed as an unnecessary luxury, a tool used to send e-mail and casually surf Web sites. But increasingly, the Internet has become an important tool for getting information about and access to just about everything from health care to social services. It’s used as a tool to engage parents in their children’s education. And as newspapers shed their classified listings, it’s become an important tool for looking for jobs.

So far, what is known about NAC’s approach is that the company plans to finish building out the network, which is 80 percent complete, within the next 12 to 18 months. And it plans to use a hybrid Wi-Fi and wireline technology to improve coverage and capacity.

But more importantly for Wireless Philadelphia, the nonprofit will no longer have to rely on one network provider for broadband access. Starting this fall, Goldman said that the group will approach other network operators about working with them to offer their broadband access as part of the Digital Inclusion bundle in areas of the city where it makes sense. If providers, such as Comcast and Verizon Communications, are willing to work with Wireless Philadelphia, it could greatly improve the reach and effectiveness of the program.

Wireless Philadelphia is also supporting Google’s petition to the Federal Communications Commission to open up unused wireless frequencies called “white spaces,” which sit between digital TV channels, to help expand the availability of inexpensive broadband access.

Independence Hall, Philadelphia

While Wireless Philadelphia’s ambitions have always been big, under the old deal with EarthLink, the nonprofit was tied to the partially built, and often unreliable, Wi-Fi network. From the earliest stages of deployment, EarthLink Wi-Fi users complained of poor signal quality indoors.

A key part of Wireless Philadelphia’s approach is its partnerships with other nonprofits. For example, Wireless Philadelphia offers its package to participants of a statewide welfare-to-work program. In exchange for completing the necessary requirements for the program, each individual receives a “digital inclusion package.”

These improvements, along with a new non-exclusive contract, could liberate the nonprofit and help it expand its reach and effectiveness in the community. And if Wireless Philadelphia can show successful outcomes for individuals and the city as a whole, it could serve as a model for policy makers looking to form a national broadband policy.

NAC, which now owns the EarthLink network, and Tropos, the company whose equipment has been used to build the network, declined to speak to me for this article. Instead, their spokespeople said the companies would talk more about the network later this month when details of the new business plan are ready.

“It’s nearly impossible to apply for an entry-level job today without having basic digital skills and Internet access,” Greg Goldman, CEO of Wireless Philadelphia said. “And there have been studies that show patients who access information online about HIV AIDS, hypertension, or diabetes have better health outcomes.”

But in the end, Wireless Philadelphia must prove that broadband access matters. As an initial step toward this, the group is working with the OMG Center for Collaborative Learning to conduct a “Rapid Assessment” of the impact of the Digital Inclusion program to date. Initial results should be available later this year.

Wireless Philadelphia has developed a somewhat unique approach to solving this complicated problem. For example, the group provides an entire package of services, which includes free or subsidized Internet access, a new or refurbished computer and modem, training, and technical support through nonprofit partners, which focus on specific needs, such as maternal health, job placement, or education.

Even outdoors, some parts of the network perform better than others. For example, on a recent visit to Philadelphia, I stood directly under an EarthLink access point and discovered I was only getting download speeds of 768 kilobits per second and uploads of 494 kbps when I ran a Speakeasy broadband test. EarthLink had advertised the service at 1.5 Mbps per second.

There’s been a lot of chatter over the years about the digital divide or the idea that there is a great chasm between people who have access to technology such as computers and the Internet, and those who do not. While some 68 percent of the U.S. population has access to the Internet via broadband or dial-up connections, there are still millions of people across the country who do not have any access at all.

Testing the Wi-Fi network in Philadelphia.

The site ModmyGphone is showing off a photo of a sleek gadget that it says is a joint effort of Lenovo, the PC heavyweight, and China Mobile, the largest cell phone operator in China:

The phone is likely to be a strictly domestic product, the reports say. China Mobile’s spin on the OS would give it the ability to commission customized phones and would give it leverage in profit-sharing discussions. The mobile operator reportedly had a falling out with Apple over whether China Mobile could make modifications to the iPhone.

The latest bit is, the phone is looking good and ready for testing. OPhone is a codename for phones that will be based on China Mobile’s OMS (Open Mobile System) which is essentially Android + TD SCDMA (China’s home-grown 3G standard).

Once there was just a single Android phone, the T-Mobile G1. Coming soon, in Australia, is the Kogan Agora. Now reports are pointing to an emerging gadget for China, known for the moment as the “OPhone.”

(Credit:
ModmyGphone)

China Mobile is a member of Google’s Open Handset Alliance, which just gained 14 members, including Vodaphone.

Another site, ITProPortal, says that the smartphone, with “iPhone-esque minimalist features,” is expected to debut in February or March.

The Lenovo-badged "OPhone"

(Credit:
Joystiq)

In an effort to prevent game piracy, Microsoft will be implementing zero-day piracy protection and server-side authentication, that hopefully will help prevent game piracy before a game’s street date, and include added protection for publishers and users by requiring authentication for online play.

To help users access additional game content in the most seamless way possible, GFWL is implementing a new marketplace API that, once implemented, will allow users to purchase additional game content while in-game, apparently without necessitating a restart.

Check out the Steamworks announcement made by valve today to see if you can pick out the similarities.

For those of us that call many places our gaming home, lastly on the list is Roaming. Users can now save their personal settings back to their GFWL account in the cloud, providing access to their settings on any compatible and connected Windows PC.

Game for Windows - LIVE (GFWL) is an online gaming service for “Games for Windows”-branded PC games. It functions much like an
Xbox Live, but for the PC. On Tuesday Microsoft announced a couple of updates to the service.

Even so, it’s good to see innovation in Microsoft Office again–even if it happening outside of Redmond.

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I’ll go one step further. I don’t think Microsoft’s heart is in its Live services, and it won’t be until it is forced by the market to take the cloud more seriously. Microsoft makes billions of dollars every quarter on its Office product: stodgy, offline Office. It’s not going to touch that revenue stream with anything that might jeopardize a cash cow.

Enter DocVerse, a stealth San Francisco start-up created by two former Microsoft employees that aims to make
Microsoft Office operate more like Google Docs, as reported by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. DocVerse provides a 1MB plug-in to Office 2007 that enables online-document collaboration.

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More than a decade ago, Microsoft won the office productivity suite war against WordPerfect, and arguably, Office has seen little innovation since.

Just as Mozilla Chairman Mitchell Baker has argued in the browser market–namely, that once Microsoft had beat out browser competitors, it failed to innovate for years–so, too, has Microsoft rested on its Office laurels for far too long.

However, as DocVerse co-founder Shan Sinha tells Foley, Microsoft’s efforts so far leave much to be desired: “Office Live Workspace doesn’t provide a feature set that comes close to what we offer, making it a poor user experience (and in our estimation the cause for its lack of uptake).”

As ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley points out, this functionality is not actually new. After all, Microsoft, too, is offering similar functionality in Office Live Workspace.

So it makes sense that Office innovation will happen outside of Microsoft. Unfortunately, DocVerse is going to find out that innovating on a closed platform is likely to be an exercise in frustration. Microsoft owns Office. It therefore owns the types and scope of innovation that can happen on the platform.

Of interest on day one is a talk by Dan Kaminsky, director of penetration testing at IO Active, who will provide additional details on the DNS flaw he disclosed earlier this year. Other talks will touch on crimeware, profiling using the Internet, cascading style sheet (CSS) injections, visualizing software security, and how to use code characteristics to find security bugs.

Day one features a select group of security researchers, with team members from Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) presenting on the second day. It is an opportunity for Microsoft engineers to hear first hand from leading security researchers. The last Blue Hat conference was held in April.

Microsoft’s eighth Blue Hat conference will take place on Thursday and Friday at the software giant’s Redmond, Wash., campus. Entitled “C3P0wned,” the invitation-only conference features two full days of sessions.

The complete Blue Hat schedule is posted here, and Microsoft has a related blog here.

Day two kicks off with a keynote from Scott Charney, corporate vice president of Trustworthy Computing. Other sessions that day include talks about threat modeling, “fuzzing,” concurrency attacks on Web applications, analyzing threats before writing code, and how Microsoft mitigations currently work. Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group will be heavily represented, with department members heading up several of those talks and panel discussions.

Another frequently used method is that of “full disclosure”–in which a researcher will post complete details of a vulnerability to a public forum (typically a mailing list dedicated to security topics). This approach is often used by researchers when they have discovered a flaw in a product made by a company with a poor track record of working with researchers–or worse, threatening to sue them. For example, some researchers refuse to provide Apple with any advanced notification, due to its past behavior.

I can personally confirm this experience, after I discovered a fairly significant flaw in a number of commercial
Firefox toolbars back in 2007. While Mozilla and Yahoo replied to my initial e-mail within a day or so and kept the lines of communication open, Google repeatedly stonewalled me, and I didn’t hear anything from them for weeks at a time. Eventually, Google fixed the flaw a day or two after I went public with the vulnerability, 45 days after I had originally given the company private notice. As a result, I have extreme sympathy for those in the research community who have written Google off.

Question: You’re a multibillion dollar tech giant, and you’ve launched a new phone platform after much media fanfare. Then a security researcher finds a flaw in your product within days of its release. Worse, the vulnerability is due to the fact that you shipped old (and known to be flawed) software on the phones. What should you do? Issue an emergency update, warn users, or perhaps even issue a recall? If you’re Google, the answer is simple. Attack the researcher.

If Google can criticize Miller at all, it cannot be for not warning the company, but perhaps for not providing them with enough warning. However, given that Google shipped known-vulnerable software to hundreds of thousands of users, and that fixed versions of the vulnerable software packages have been available for some time, it is difficult for this blogger to sympathize with the folks in Mountain View.

Regarding security-flaw disclosure, Mr. Merrill says Google hasn’t provided much because consumers, its primary users to date, often aren’t tech-savvy enough to understand security bulletins and find them “distracting and confusing.” Also, because fixes Google makes on its servers are invisible to the user, notification hasn’t seemed necessary, he says.

With the news of a flaw in Google’s Android phone platform making The New York Times on Friday, the search giant quickly ramped up the spin machine. After first dismissing the amount of damage to which the flaw exposed users, anonymous Google executives then attempted to discredit the security researcher, Charlie Miller, who’s a former NSA employee turned security consultant. Miller, the unnamed Googlers argued, acted irresponsibly by going to The New York Times to announce his vulnerability instead of giving the Big G a few weeks or months to fix the flaw:

Furthermore, given Mr. Miller’s previous mercenaryish history of selling software vulnerabilities to the National Security Agency (which presumably used the flaws to break into foreign government computers, and not in order to fix the vulnerable software), we should be happy that he is at least now sharing the existence of this flaw with the public. At least this way, developers have a good chance of finding and fixing it.

A rather unimpressive vulnerability
Once we actually look into the details of the vulnerability, and Miller’s disclosure, the situation looks even worse for Google.

Second, companies do not have a right to expect “responsible disclosure.” It is a mutual compromise, where the researchers provide the company with advanced notification in exchange for some form of assurance that the company will act reasonably, keep the lines of communication open, and give the researcher full credit once the vulnerability is fixed.

What the Googlers are talking about is the idea of “responsible disclosure,” one method of disclosing security vulnerabilities in software products. While it is an approach that is frequently followed by researchers, it is not the only method available, and in spite of the wishes of the companies whose products are frequently analyzed, it is by no means the “norm” for the industry.

Google’s poor track record
First, consider the fact that security is a two-sided coin. If Google wants researchers to come to it first with vulnerability information, it is only fair to expect that Google be forthcoming with the community (and the general public) once the flaw has been fixed. Google’s approach in this area is that of total secrecy–not acknowledging flaws, and certainly not notifying users that a vulnerability existed or has been fixed. Google’s CIO admitted as much in a 2007 interview with The Wall Street Journal:

Advanced notice: While the anonymous Google executives criticized Miller for not following responsible disclosure practices, it is worth noting that the researcher did provide Google with early notice–informing the company on the 20th of October. It is also important to note that Miller and his colleagues have yet to actually provide full information on the vulnerability or a working proof-of-concept exploit to the security community. Thus, it can hardly be said that Miller followed the full-disclosure path.

A third method involves selling information on the vulnerabilities to third parties (such TippingPoint and iDefense)–who pass that information on to their own customers, or perhaps keep it for themselves. Charlie Miller, the man who discovered the Android flaw, has followed this path in the past, most notably when he sold details of a flaw in the Linux kernel to the U.S. National Security Agency for $50,000 (PDF).

Google executives said they believed that Mr. Miller had violated an unwritten code between companies and researchers that is intended to give companies time to fix problems before they are publicized.

Google’s track record in this area leaves much to be desired. Many top-tier researchers have not been credited for disclosing flaws, and in some cases, Google has repeatedly dragged its feet in fixing flaws. The end result is that many frustrated researchers have opted to follow the full-disclosure path, after hitting a brick wall when trying to provide Google with advanced notice.

A known vulnerability: The Android platform is built on top of more than 80 open-source libraries and programs. This particular flaw had been known about for some time and already fixed in the current version of the open-source libraries. The flaw in Google’s product only exists because the company shipped out-of-date software, which was known to be vulnerable.

Disclosure: In the summer of 2006, I worked as an intern for the Application Security Team at Google. Furthermore between 2003-2005, I was a student at Johns Hopkins University and was advised by Prof. Avi Rubin, who is one of the founders of Independent Security Evaluators, the company that employs Charlie Miller. A couple of my former colleagues also now work for ISE. I have not spoken with them (or anyone at Google) about this article.

Vendors should provide very low entry points, charge for setup and deployment at cost, and let the users themselves prove the value of their services. Vendors would not incur additional costs because sales would be quick, and deployment would be sold at cost (which for software as a service is minimal)…This approach would also help define the value of an application: the vendor that is confident that an application will spread, once deployed within an organization, projects a different image than the one that tries to lock in all revenue up front, no matter whether deployment is successful or not.

I have news for Le Nestour: enterprise IT already has this pricing model widely in use. It’s called open source.

Disclosure: I work for Alfresco and am an advisor to Openbravo.

Le Nestour suggests that the “potential is big” for his idea. I couldn’t agree more. I just wouldn’t call it new. We’ve had open-source pricing models for many years now, and they’re paying off in spades for the companies that use them.

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Agreed on all counts. Open source derisks IT investments for enterprises and, going one step further than Le Nestour’s recommendation, prods open-source vendors to continually innovate and deliver value to customers through a subscription model that allows the customer to walk (but keep the software), if the vendor fails to provide adequate value through support, software upgrades, and other processes.

Instead of charging less per user, as more accounts are purchased, vendors should charge more as more accounts are purchased…Using a volume-increasing scheme would accelerate customer acquisitions, new pilot projects, and the number of deployments that could potentially scale.

Schlumberger manager Julien le Nestour offers an innovative new pricing model to drive “enterprise 2.0″ software like Twitter-for-the-enterprise: instead of offering volume discounts, start with a superlow up-front charge, and scale up fees as more users start using the software.

Reading Le Nestour’s description of his proposed model sounds exactly like the pricing models used by Openbravo, Pentaho, Alfresco, Hyperic, and others:

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By law, every phone in the U.S. must be capable of reporting its location for E911 services. The ability to locate someone who calls for help is obviously a desirable and necessary feature for public safety providers, but the flip side can lead to abuse. We have far surpassed the capabilities that were dramatized in 1984. While we are lucky that we have these sophisticated capabilities, we must also be vigilant as to their use. Presently, there is little legislation dealing with GPS applications to surveillance. I am quite sure that when lawmakers realize that their whereabouts can be instantly tracked, legislation will be enacted, just like when their cell phone call logs were obtained.

The proliferation of GPS already affects many facets of our mobile life. Although the integration of location-based technologies is almost endless, it does not come without risk. The potential to track the movements of a person and his or her vehicle can seriously erode rights of privacy. Already, spouses are placing store-and-forward or real-time tracking devices in
cars to spy on their wives or husbands. Best Buy sells a system called Zoombak, which is a small package that can be implemented by anyone to instantly ping the location of a target and display the data on any computer that is connected to the Net.

I interviewed Todd Morris, president of Brickhouse, with regard to the current state of the art and two of his company’s products. Brickhouse offers a device for tracking kids, up to 500 feet. It is simple and clever and can also be used to keep an eye on elderly people with dementia. The other system is the P-Track Pro, which uses a CDMA cellular link on Sprint to report the location of an embedded tracking device that can be placed virtually anywhere.

(Credit:
Marc Weber Tobias)

The integration of sophisticated electronics, RF and transmission technology, optics, and RFID is all a matter of course now, which perhaps was the most incredible aspect of the show. However, the event did not present a wide enough view of the available security hardware and truly unique applications that I saw three weeks ago at Security Essen in Germany. For those of you that are responsible for keeping abreast of the incredible array of technology and applications that are available, Essen is one of the prime venues every October. Virtually everyone is there, representing every security and software vendor in the incredibly diverse security sector.

Brickhouse Security’s local tracking system for kids, up to 500 feet range

Law enforcement has been able to take advantage of GPS technology for tracking and catching criminals and terrorists. Almost everyone who uses a cell phone that was manufactured within the last few years is carrying a personal tracking device. The options available to investigative agencies are awesome, and I believe the public would be more than concerned if everyone realized the extent to which their “personal communicator”–first characterized in the Man from U.N.C.L.E. TV show in the 1960s–has evolved and come to fruition.

I was disappointed because the conference and expo offered more of the same; nothing really innovative caught my attention, or that of my associates. It seems the industry is focusing on video technology: cameras, DVRs, IP, wireless, remote surveillance, and many flavors of software that all essentially accomplish the same result. There were a few lock manufacturers, alarm distributors, monitoring centers, and access control providers, but I thought the number of exhibitors was relatively slim.

I spent several hours at ISC East in New York last week to see the latest security hardware and software.

Government has employed GPS and Assisted GPS for quite some time for tracking criminal suspects. In fact, Nextel was an early provider of location-based services for the trucking industry and, in so doing, also developed sophisticated mapping capabilities that were used by federal law enforcement agencies for determining the precise location of cell phones. The technology was so good, even five years ago, that the specific floor within a building where a suspect was located could be determined.

At ISC East, there were several vendors that specialize in the implementation of GPS technology for use in both the private and public sectors. One of those companies is Brickhouse Security, located in New York. It has been a leader in supplying and implementing this technology in a wide array of products for businesses and police. GPS can provide efficiencies in personnel and fleet management, asset tracking, and employee location and protection. Perhaps as important is the prevention of theft, which is a significant problem and is likely to increase as the economy slows down. Brickhouse also has developed hardware for video and audio surveillance, countermeasures, wireless solutions, biometrics, and other restricted applications.

Cellular telephones and personal privacy are anathema to each other, especially if there are abuses by government agencies in exploiting the capabilities of the technology.

Brickhouse Security’s P-Track device can be placed anywhere and will report its location via CDMA link.

(Credit:
Marc Weber Tobias)

What did intrigue me at ISC East were the number applications that involve GPS technology and how it is being applied to anticipate and solve security issues. Location-based service, utilized by commercial and government sectors, will dramatically increase in the future. Already, there is a proliferation of this technology in phones, computers, vehicles, watches, cameras, communications hardware, tracking devices, and a host of other implementations.