US ill-prepared for Net disruption?

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From WSJ.com…

The U.S. is poorly prepared for a major disruption of the Internet, according to a study that an influential group of chief executives will publish today.

The Business Roundtable, composed of the CEOs of 160 large U.S. companies, said neither the government nor the private sector has a coordinated plan to respond to an attack, natural disaster or other disruption of the Internet. While individual government agencies and companies have their own emergency plans in place, little coordination exists between the groups, according to the study.

“It’s a matter of more clearly defining who has responsibility,” said Edward Rust Jr., CEO of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., who leads the Roundtable’s Internet-security effort.
Other companies with leaders active in the effort include FedEx Corp., International Business Machines Corp., Dow Chemical Co., Hewlett-Packard Co., CA Inc., Alcoa Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Pfizer Inc.

The study points out that a massive Web disruption could potentially paralyze banks, transportation systems, health-care providers and voice calling over the Internet.

The chief problem: There are so many public and private institutions that handle security-related tasks that their responsibilities often overlap, creating inefficiencies that can bog down an emergency response, according to the study.
Security officials at some banks and other companies have established groups to swap data about Internet threats. Companies that make the technology behind the Internet itself have an informal group of their own to discuss security issues. Meanwhile, a government body called the National Cyber Response Coordination Group is meant to manage a response to Internet emergencies.

Yet those groups’ roles are often unclear, and no system is in place to coordinate their efforts, the study says. It cited “serious problems stemming from the lack of consolidation, including the fact that these organizations are not accountable for their actions.”

Surprise, surprise: planet is hotting up

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From Environment News Service

WASHINGTON, DC, June 22, 2006 (ENS) – The Earth is hotter today than it has been in four centuries and likely warmer than it has been in the past 1,000 years, according to a review of surface temperature research released Thursday by the U.S. National Academies of Science.

The 155 page report provides additional evidence that “human activities are responsible for much of the warming,” the authors said.

The study, written by a panel of 12 climate experts, assesses the state of scientific efforts to reconstruct surface temperature records for the Earth over approximately the last 2,000 years.

Widespread reliable instrument records of global temperatures are available only for the last 150 years, leaving scientists to estimate past climatic conditions by analyzing proxy evidence from sources such as tree rings, corals, ocean and lake sediments, cave deposits, ice cores, boreholes, and glaciers.

Committee chair Gerald North said the panel’s review of instrument and proxy data affords “a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries.”

Cheese!

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An astonishing proportion of the Japanese tourists who visit Cambridge want to be photographed against the backdrop of the apple tree in front of Trinity College. Wonder if this is because of the legend about Newton and the apple? (His rooms overlook the lawn on which an apple tree stands.)

Which reminds me of one of my favourite cartoons. It shows Newton sitting under the tree, rubbing a bump on his head. He is looking meditatively at the offending fruit lying at his feet and saying: “Now comes the difficult bit — getting a research grant to write it up”.

Etherial music

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Here’s an idea to restore your faith in humanity.

Luke Jerram, a sound artist, working with international hot air balloon pilot Peter Dalby and composer Dan Jones has developed The Sky Orchestra, an ongoing research project that explores how one can perceive a sonic experience while asleep. It is an experimental artwork bringing together performance and music to create visual audio installations within the air and within the mind.

Seven hot air balloons, each with speakers attached, take off at dawn to fly across a city. Each balloon plays a different element of the musical score creating a massive audio performance that many hundreds of people experience subconsciously as the balloons fly over their homes.

Many hundreds of people experience the Sky Orchestra event live as the balloons fly over their homes at dawn. The airborne project is both a vast spectacular performance as well as an intimate, personal experience. The music is audible, both consciously and subconsciously, to all those in the balloon’s flight paths….

The residents of Stratford-upon-Avon, Will Shakespeare’s home town, were treated to this delight this morning — with the added attraction of Royal Shakespeare Company actors reading bits of the Bard’s works. One resident emailed the BBC Today programme: “If music be the food of love, I’ve got indigestion”.

easyBully loses legal action against Easypizza

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Hooray! In a rare setback for the preposterous “Sir” Stelios Loadsamoney Haji-Ioannou, the ludicrous legal action launched by his group against the tiny Easypizza company has failed.

easyGroup IP Licensing Limited, the company that holds intellectual property belonging to companies controlled by the controversial Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the founder of easyJet, has abandoned its High Court action against Easypizza Limited and its directors. Easypizza Limited currently operates in Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Haringey, Islington, and began trading in 1997 where it has developed a steady business in supplying its freshly baked pizza and Italian food and drink products to customers under the Easypizza brand. In 2004, Stelios’s company started its own similarly named easyPizza business serving re-heated frozen pizza on a delivery-only basis to certain parts of the Milton Keynes area and has since expanded in partnership with Famous Moes Pizza into Brighton, Portsmouth, Southampton and Worthing.

Easypizza Limited were represented by Memery Crystal Solicitors and easyGroup were represented by Claire Algar of Collyer Bristow Solicitors.

The case became increasingly acrimonious and bitter and a High Court trial of the matter was originally due to commence in February 2006, but easyGroup served a Notice of Discontinuance shortly beforehand. Easypizza Limited then withdrew its own Counterclaim bringing matters to an end although not before the expenditure of several hundred thousand pounds in legal costs on both sides.

Bloggers and the Democratic Party

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Interesting piece about the effect bloggers are having on the Democrats…

Joe Lieberman has a fight on his hands. Until very recently, the three-term Democratic senator and former presidential candidate was cruising to re-election in Connecticut, his home state. But the 64-year-old grandee now finds himself in sudden danger of falling victim to a new political life form: the internet candidate.

Ned Lamont, a cable television entrepreneur, has come from nowhere to pose a serious threat, with the help of internet fundraising and anti-war bloggers outraged at Mr Lieberman’s gung-ho support for the Iraq invasion.

Reconsidering Bill Gates

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David Pogue has a thoughtful post about BillG. Excerpt:

Some people won’t be happy no matter what Mr. Gates does. They say he made the decision for P.R. value, or even as a plot to boost Microsoft’s software sales. “Interesting theory: ‘Buy Windows Vista. Do It for the Children,’” writes one critic online. “Ah, Bill, you are a shrewd weasel indeed.”)

But despite all this, and even despite Microsoft’s history, I find it almost impossible to remain cynical about Bill Gates’s intentions. I think he’s changed. Maybe when you’re in your 50’s, you start to think about how you’ll be remembered.
It’d be one thing if he were retiring to enjoy his fortune, or if he were using it to buy football teams or political candidates.

But he’s not. He’s channeling those billions to the places in the world where that money can do the most good. And not just throwing money at the problems, either–he’s also dedicating the second act of his life to making sure it’s done right.

In fact, when you step back far enough, Mr. Gates’s entire life arc suddenly looks like a 35-year game of Robin Hood, a gigantic wealth-redistribution system on a global scale.

I know this is going to earn me the vitriol of Microsoft-bashers, but I’ll say it anyway: Bill Gates has the money, the brains and the connections to really, truly make the world a better place. I admire him for the attempt. And I believe that if anyone can succeed, he will.

He just might be right. David also links to Bill Moyers’s remarkable interview with Gates.

Later… One of the comments to David’s post contained a link to an interesting New Yorker article about the Gates Foundation’s work.

Homeless connectivity

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Amazing Wired News story…

Living in a squalid, Woodstock-style bus parked in a Fillmore, California, orange grove, the 53-year-old homeless man charges a power generator from a utility shed and uses Wi-Fi from a nearby access point. From this humble camp, he’s managed to run a ’round-the-clock internet television studio, organize grassroots political efforts, record a full-length album and write his autobiography, all while subsisting on oranges and avocados.

He claims he created one of the first handheld computer scanners and played a major part in the data transmission industry in the early 1990s. “I’ve always been trying to stay up on internet technology,” Ivy said.

Ivy isn’t the only homeless person who makes it a priority to keep gadgets handy even when a cooked meal is hard to come by.

Many of those now living without a permanent roof over their heads have cell phones in their pockets or laptop computers at their hips. While people living in shelters and alleys have found it difficult to cross social divides, the digital divide seems to disappear on the streets. Nearly all homeless people have e-mail addresses, according to Michael Stoops, director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. “More have e-mail than have post office boxes,” Stoops said. “The internet has been a big boon to the homeless.”

Helping the homeless get e-mail addresses has been a priority for years at shelters across the country. And in an age when most every public library in the nation offers internet access, the net has proven a perfect communication tool for those without a firm real-world address.

“Because of technology, people are able to keep in contact with their families,” Stoops said. And perhaps most importantly, they are able to get some footing in society regardless of how removed from it they may feel…

Thanks to Cory & BoingBoing.