Lordy, Lordy, the Internet’s 40!

1969. The year of Woodstock. The Moon Landing. Abbey Road, the last Beatle album. Another milestone took place that year, as well. A milestone that few of usf can live without…. Here’s the story…

There are millions of people being disrupted out of their jobs thanks to the Internet. Is it a good thing? I think so…

Let’s take a look at its beginnings:

The first command typed in was “lo” which crashed the entire Internet – all two machines. Internet Reaches 40th Birthday Milestone

Undergraduate Charley Kline was given the simple job of logging on remotely from UCLA to the SRI machine; his one command was “login”.
The first attempt, however, proved too much for the “interface message processor” or IMP for short – the system crashed as young Charley reached the letter “g”.

… 12 years on, only 213 computers being linked up to the network.

The Guardian is collecting stories for its “A people’s history of the internet.“

To mark the 40th anniversary of the first stirrings of the internet we asked you to tell us your experiences of life online. Hundreds of you responded, and here we present an interactive documentary of your stories and videos, alongside our own research and interviews with key figures (About this project)

Without doubt, the Internet is the most significant collection of technologies ever created. It enables huge numbers of new types of businesses and services, many of them replacing pre-Internet businesses.

Anything, any service, business, that can be digitized is now open to disruption because of the Internet. The Internet devalues everything it touches.

I define “devalues” in a monetary sense, dollars and cents because clearly it creates tremendous amounts of value. But that value often cannot be quantified or measured, or recovered, in a financial sense. For example, look at the transition to online journalism — it creates tremendous amounts of value because huge numbers of people read online journalism but we don’t have (yet?) a good way to recover the value of that work in dollars. And journalism is not the only sector being disrupted in this way because of the Internet.

The challenge for Internet based companies is to figure out how they can transform the value that they create into dollars and cents.

The challenge is that competitors can continually undercut each other because the costs of providing Internet based services is relatively inexpensive and it is difficult to lock up customers. Switching costs are very low for customers.

It helps if you are government regulated. The Telcos, for example are able to make use of VOIP and other advances in communications technologies to reduce their costs of doing business yet they are still able to raise the price of their services. Being a government regulated industry helps them keep competition away.

But if you are in the music industry, movie industry, journalism, software services, cloud computing, if you are a software engineer, if you are a web designer, if you design logos, if you do any kind of digital work you are exposed to a huge amount of competition, you are exposed to the lowest cost provider in your sector — thanks to the Internet.

It’s interesting that countries spend billions of dollars to protect their living standards by limiting immigration because they know that low-cost labor hurts the living standards of their citizens. Yet there are no controls on exporting jobs via the Internet.

That will change or at least there will be efforts made to change this and other aspects of Internet use, because of the disruptive effects that it enables. It’s not a good thing but some governments will try to do this.

I believe the Internet will eventually enable a new golden age but getting there will be messy.

These are interesting times. Happy birthday Internet.

Net Neutrality-Bad for Business?

Net neutrality. Doesn’t sound like something that could have an impact on our daily lives, does it? Yet we read about it and hear soundbites discussing net neutrality more and more each day…

What exactly is this discussion all about? Let’s find out in this story from cnet news…

AT&T enlists employees to oppose Net neutrality

by Marguerite Reardon

Advocacy groups say AT&T has gone too far in its lobbying efforts to oppose the Federal Communications Commission’s new proposed Net neutrality regulations.

This week AT&T’s top lobbyist Jim Cicconi sent a memo to managers urging them to encourage their families and friends “to join the voices telling the FCC not to regulate the Internet.”

Over the past few weeks, the battle over Net neutrality has heated up as the FCC is set to start the ball rolling on a process that will make the agency’s existing open Internet principles official regulation.

AT&T has been one of the biggest opponents of the new regulation, along with Verizon Communications and cable company Comcast. On the other side of the debate are consumer advocacy groups and large Web-based technology companies, such as Google and Amazon.

The phone companies have rallied support among some congressional leaders, both Democrat and Republican, who have sent letters to the FCC opposing new regulation. And the advocacy groups and big Internet companies have done the same.

But many advocacy groups say that AT&T has crossed the line by suggesting to its employees that they use their personal e-mail addresses to post comments opposing Net neutrality regulation. These groups believe that AT&T is deliberately trying to create the appearance that average citizens oppose the Net neutrality regulations.

“AT&T is practiced in spending money on so-called astroturf groups to give the appearance there is widespread support for their agenda,” said Timothy Karr, campaign director for the advocacy group Free Press.

AT&T defended its actions by saying that it is merely rallying support for its cause.

“We were providing important information to our employees,” said Michael Balmoris, a company spokesman. “And it was up to them to respond personally. If they use their company e-mail that is fine, too. It was not a mandatory business request.”

Balmoris argued that groups such as Free Press and Public Knowledge also mobilize people on the Web. They send e-mails to thousands and provide talking points and even form letters that they can send to congressional leaders or post as comments.

This is true. But Karr argues the main difference is that Free Press and other advocacy organizations do not pay the people who post those comments and send those letters. What’s more, their Web campaigns are built around people who have specifically asked for information on the subject and are generally already in support of Free Press’ positions.

“Our activists aren’t on our payroll,” he said. “And they come to us looking for information. When a letter like this is sent to every manager from one of the company’s most senior executives, it’s hard to imagine AT&T employees thinking the memo was merely a suggestion.”

Art Brodsky, a spokesman for Public Knowledge, another advocacy group supporting Net neutrality, also took issue with AT&T’s letter to its employees. Brodsky said that not only are the talking points AT&T uses in its memo questionable and debatable at best, but he said that AT&T is subtly threatening employees by describing the FCC as “poised to regulate the Internet in a manner that would drive up consumer prices, and burden companies like ours while exempting companies like Google.”

“When you send a letter to employees and say that our business will suffer if you don’t do this, it’s very misleading especially in this economic environment,” he said. “People are afraid of losing their jobs. But the fact of the matter is that AT&T has already laid off 20,000 employees , and it’s had nothing to do with Net neutrality.”

The FCC is expected to begin the process of creating rules for Net neutrality regulation at its monthly meeting on Thursday. The FCC has extended the period for receiving comments until Thursday.

It’s All About the News

Forget Twitter and Facebook. Sure, they are significant, but where do most of us go on our wireless devices? You may be surprised, as we read in this opnion from Renay San Miguel…
OPINION
The Wireless Burden: Our Never-Ending Thirst for News

By Renay San Miguel
TechNewsWorld
10/09/09 4:00 AM PT

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski recently commented that because of the rising popularity of mobile devices, the U.S. will be starring down a wireless network traffic jam soon if better management tactics aren’t implemented. The foundation for this growth — the reason so many people are buying and using all these data-hungry gadgets — is our constant, insatiable appetite for news.

There’s a perfect storm building in the technology world, and as we know, that world keeps spilling over into that other world — you know, the one where real people live.

This storm will manifest itself in the media, of course, thanks to the forces driving its increasing wind speeds: The rise of social networks, the increasing number of gadgets vying for our discretionary income, the need for more wireless bandwidth.

But the biggest factor? The real wind beneath the tech industry’s wings? Despite recent polls showing low rankings for journalistic credibility, this news just in: It’s all about the news. The public is demanding more of it in text and video form — whether it’s about healthcare More about healthcare reform, breaking news regarding a plane landing in the Hudson River, NFL coverage or the Hollywood celebrity outrage du jour. And there are more and more media outlets only too willing to feed that addiction, with both straight news and either tongue-in-cheek or politically biased reactions to said news items.

So when FCC chairman Julius Genachowski weighed in this week at the annual CTIA wireless industry trade show in San Diego about the need to boost bandwidth because of the massive growth in mobile phones and the applications that ride on them, he’s really talking about that news addiction.

With carriers already building out 4G networks, the situation demands immediate treatment. People aren’t just flocking to their mobile-phone providers of choice to grab smartphones for email and text messaging (how 20th century). They’re stuffing their Facebook More about Facebook, Twitter More about Twitter and Flickr More about Flickr accounts with on-the-go updates, photos and videos. They’re accessing links to news items delivered to them by their trusted media filters — I’m sorry, did I say trusted media filters? I meant to say friends — when they’re not taking news-based quizzes and playing social media games like “Mafia Wars.”
A Real News Feed

Those social networks are evolving into news ranking systems, for better or worse. Check out Muckrack.com during your Web travels. I’ve written before about this site that tracks what journalists are saying on Twitter; it may give you a sneak peek at a major daily’s front page or an evening newscast’s first segment. At the very least, it’s a way to track news themes as well as the interests of those who bring you the news.

As I write this, the trending topics on Muckrack are Herta Muller winning the Nobel Prize for literature, British politician David Cameron and a meeting of that country’s conservative party, Michelle Obama, Philadelphia (the baseball team and the city in general), Windows software Manage and grow your business with Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Business Edition, Aghanistan, David Letterman’s sex scandal and the Republican party. Take one complete, updated story from each item, add photos, arrange them on a big sheet of hammered wood pulp, and you’ve got what my mom and dad used to call a “daily newspaper”; national and international news, sports, features and entertainment.

Many of the journalists filing tweets for their outlets do so via mobile devices while covering stories. More people are reading or viewing those tweets, not to mention the finished stories on media outlet Web sites, via smartphones or laptops hooked up to WiFi networks or sporting their own network cards.

Genachowski mentioned the rapid deployment of iPhone applications — roughly 80,000 at last count — and all those downloads clogging up the wireless frequencies. One of the newest is the CNN iPhone app, now on sale for $1.99 per download, thereby becoming one of the first examples of paid content in this new media paradigm. For your two bucks, you get access to video and text news, but you can also play citizen journalist with the iReport feature. Use the new camera in your iPhone 3GS to capture breaking news video and send it along to Wolf Blitzer and company. You can also send comments via Facebook or Twitter to CNN producers waiting for your feedback on the top stories of the day.

My big hope is that Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and MySpace More about MySpace stop watching as broadcast and cable networks and local TV stations take advantage of their newsgathering and crowdsourcing abilities, and start to build out some news-based strategies of their own. The “newsfeed” option on your Facebook page could be just that: a stream of news-related links and photos that send you off in a multitude of directions for information on breaking news and thoughtful news analysis, if your “filters” are oriented in that direction. Of course, your “filters” could also be rabid ideological partisans sending you off to like-minded “news” source sites, but then again, they’re your friends, so you probably wouldn’t mind that at all.
Feed the Beast

My point is that there needs to be Twitter News, Facebook News, Flickr News — all collated, curated and filtered by the people, some of it generated by the people. And my guess is that some of those people wouldn’t mind sitting through a 15-second pre-roll commercial in video or looking at a banner ad on the Twitter News page as long as they continued to get the content for free.

The makers of the new FLO TV Personal Television, coming in time for the holiday shopping season, actually used the news to pitch me on the usefulness of what is essentially one more gadget for first adopters to consider in a recession. The company’s director of product management said that more people would consider FLO’s US$249 personal TV device (plus $8.99 a month) for the ability to watch live breaking news and sports from their office cubicle or car. He used the examples of the Obama inauguration and the “miracle on the Hudson” to indicate how you could watch all that on a FLO TV without enduring buffering or pixilation, as you would if watching Web-based streaming video. The FLO TV uses a multicast signal, which is supposedly more reliable, but it’s still made up of signals flying through the air, bumping up against others on wirelsss broadband networks, helping to create the “looming wireless spectrum crisis” that Genachowski spoke of to the CTIA audience.

The winds are blowing in more media-centric devices like smartphones and tablet PC’s, as well as e-readers like the wireless Kindle. More apps that will serve as enablers for the public’s media addiction are no doubt being brewed up in home offices and company conferences right now. Information sickness, as described in cyberpunk science-fiction, looms as much as the wireless spectrum crisis. (In my case, it’s a pre-existing condition, and I just hope that any new healthcare reform package approved by Congress will cover my treatments.) But that crisis is as much a product of our all-news, all-the-time media universe as the growth of smartphone sales Download Free eBook – The Edge of Success: 9 Building Blocks to Double Your Sales and the rise of alternative news sources.

Tennessee Health Records at Risk?

Like your privacy? Of course. We all do. What about your medical records?  If you are a Tennessee resident, it seems as though there has been a minor mix-up as — a wrong fax number involved. Can you say a violation of HIPPA laws? Here’s the lowdown from The Tennessean…

Tennessee gave doctors wrong fax number in privacy breach

Patients’ private medical records faxed out of state

By Chris Echegaray
THE TENNESSEAN

The Tennessee Department of Human Services said it accidentally sent the wrong fax number to 100 medical providers across the state, leading them to erroneously send sensitive patient information to an Indiana businessman.

“We’re extremely embarrassed, and we’re working to remedy the situation,” said Michelle Mowery Johnson, spokeswoman for DHS. “We hope it doesn’t happen again.”

The state sent an e-mail blast to 29,000 medical providers with the correct toll-free fax information on Monday.

The problem was first reported by The Tennessean.

Bill Keith, owner of SunRise Solar Inc. in Indiana, has been receiving hundreds of confidential medical faxes from doctors’ offices and other medical providers in Tennessee for three years.

Keith was, on Monday, still receiving patient information meant for the Tennessee Department of Human Services in Nashville. Keith has tried to correct the problem with the state and doctors’ offices but to no avail.

On Friday, state officials blamed doctors’ offices, saying that the toll-free fax numbers for Keith’s business and the state nearly match. But Monday, Mowery Johnson said the state was taking some responsibility for the problem, which stemmed from a typing error.

It was a new caseworker in the Disability Determination Section, under DHS, who sent a cover sheet with the wrong fax number to medical providers, Mowery Johnson said. Also, the state can’t change the fax number because it belongs to the Social Security Administration, which handles the disability checks, Mowery Johnson said. Changing the fax number would affect thousands of people, state officials said.

Keith said the state suggested that he change his fax number but he can’t because he fears it would negatively affect his business.

“People in Tennessee ought to be concerned, and there will probably be a public outcry,” Keith said. “This shows the inefficiencies in our system. Doctors’ office have been rude to me on this issue when I try to point out the problem.”

E-records would help

To reduce the risk of private medical information faxed to the wrong place, medical providers should switch to electronic record keeping, said Mark Frisse, director of regional informatics at the Vanderbilt Center for Better Health.

This would leave an electronic footprint, making medical staff accountable for the information they are sending or receiving, Frisse said. It’s more perilous, he said, to have paperwork floating around.

“It’s a sloppy world with faxes and paper,” he said. “People by far pay more attention to the electronic than in the fax world.”

Most Tennessee medical providers have electronic records but 4,500 of them still use the fax machine, Mowery Johnson said.

Problems aren’t rare

Confidential medical information sent to the wrong place is not uncommon.

Just this summer, Louis Hoyt, a Nashville businessman, received at least seven faxes from a Birmingham, Ala., lab meant for doctors’ offices here.

Hoyt, co-founder of Berkeley Tandem Inc. in Nashville, realized the faxes were not meant for him. He called the Birmingham lab in July to let people there know he had received faxes for patients. Hoyt discarded the information and said the lab promised to rectify the problem.

“I wouldn’t be happy if I were the patient,” Hoyt said. “It’s an honest mistake, nothing malicious. I wonder how many times this happens with the volume of medical info that’s out there.”

In East Tennessee, Pat Gutshall has received hundreds of faxed pages of medical history accidentally sent by doctors’ offices to her son’s auto dealership, Victory Motors, in Johnson City.

Gutshall’s fax machine is routinely tied up with hundreds of pages, including 20 to 30 pages on one patient. Gutshall called hospitals and doctors’ offices to let them know about the mishap. Still, the faxes intended for state labs kept rolling into the auto shop.

Privacy laws questioned

Debi Buttram says medical privacy laws are useless.

Buttram moved to Murfreesboro from Indiana after experiencing a security breach at a hospital several years ago. A staff worker was able to access her records and disseminated the information.

Buttram told the hospital to seal her medical record and never release it to anyone. She tested the hospital by faxing a generic note without a Social Security number and signature, stating to release her records. The hospital faxed them right over, she said.

“There is no way to protect yourself,” Buttram said. “People need to be aware of what is going on with our records. The HIPAA laws are useless.”

Patients who have had their medical records disseminated can file a complaint under HIPAA, the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Each doctor’s office has a medical privacy officer, and patients may file HIPAA complaints with those officers.

Also, patients can file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Civil Rights, at www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa.