From the I-have-to-laugh,-otherwise-I'd-cry department:

With all the hoopla lately about credit card processors being hacked and banks sending customers' personal information via common carrier (and getting stolen or lost), people are finally starting to wake up to the fact that maybe corporations are not the best entities to trust with your personal information.

The free-market capitalists argue that the solution to this problem is to not patronize companies that don't have adequate security of personal information. "The market will take care of itself." But there is a problem with that argument for the near term. As long as there is not a choice of a more secure alternative, there is no incentive to change. So consumers have to choose between surrendering personal information and giving up what have become common necessities. For example, it isn't impossible to live in the US without a bank account, but it's difficult. Fortunately, banks are highly regulated. Unfortunately, many of the companies who provide outsourced services are not. Hence the most recent theft of credit card data wasn't from the regulated companies, but from an unregulated processing company.

Some service companies have historically requested sensitive personal information because they need to extend some form of credit to you. Utility companies, telephone, and cable frequently require your SSN. However, they don't really need your social security number, they just want to be able to do a credit check. And they want a credit check so they can have some certainty that you will pay your monthly bills. However, you can give them this same level of certainty by giving them a nominal deposit (around $100) that they can hold onto for 6 months until you have proven your credit-worthiness. To me, the lost interest on the $100 (especially at the current rates) is well worth not giving my SSN to yet another entity that probably will not safeguard it to the extent that I think it should be secured. Not every company will give you this option, and those that do certainly don't advertise it. But it is done. You just need to ask for it and make it clear that they won't get the sale without it.

But what about other information such as middle name, phone number, address, driver's license number, date of birth, etc.? Believe it or not, these elements of information are also important in helping establish your identity, and if stolen from a company's database, can be paired with information stolen from another database to capture all of the relevant data needed to impersonate you and open accounts in your name (for which you are legally liable). As information becomes easier to obtain, and as more and more databases are made available online, single elements of information about you become more and more valuable because they are more likely to be the "missing piece" that someone needs to steal your identity.

Try this little exercise, the next time that you are trying to buy something, pay attention to what personal information these companies try to collect. Often they claim to "need" certain information like your date of birth or even a copy of your driver's license. But ask yourself "why do they need this information?" If you can come up with a good reason, then hand it over. From what I've noticed, though, most times they are collecting the information because someone back at "corporate" wants it in order to get a "better view of the customer" (read: we can make more money if we have more demographic information). The problem is that these companies don't/won't/can't properly safeguard that information once it is "given" to them. Unfortunately, if you say "no you can't have it" some companies say "then we won't sell it to you", whatever it is. That's all well and good if there is an alternative available that doesn't require you to give out this information, but as consolidation and collusion occur, the availability of these alternatives becomes seriously diminished.

In the last century, we needed unions to protect workers from the companies that were exploiting them. Now we need a union to protect consumers from the mega-corporations.

From Slashdot 6-16-05
antdude writes "Mobile Magazine tested companies' technical support
for their notebooks/laptops. Each test had three calls to each of ten
major notebook manufacturers (added three additional vendors since last
year). Also, called three third-party providers of PC help. On the
whole, what they found was a sea of ignorance -- and annoying fixation
with pinning down our name, address, and serial numbers. Things haven't
gotten any better since our 2004 test -- and most of the vendors we
tested have actually gotten worse..."

Technical support for the consumer market is, for the most part, horrific. Everyone has a war story to tell about what terrible support (or lack thereof) they got for their laptop, PVR, PDA, phone service, bank service, etc.

The main problem with the consumer market vs. the business market is that consumers think that their time is "free." They may have to wait on hold for 85 minutes with <insert manufacturer's name here> only to be told that it's a Microsoft problem. (These folks are almost always using Windows) Then they chase that avenue down. Three trips to the local major retail chain later, they might finally get a solution. But, they don't see the eight hours they spent on this as a loss. To them, therefore, spending more money on better and faster support doesn't make sense.

Businesses do understand this concept (usually). For them, time that the laptop is not working is time that is not spent on producing or selling their products and services. Most larger businesses will either have a dedicated staff or outsourced company providing support, or they will buy the best level of support available.

The problem comes for the business people who are on their own for tech support (self-employed, very small company, branch office, etc.) who may not be able to afford the gold-plated support options, but who still value their time and are given the unfortunate choice sucking it up with the consumer masses or having to pay through the nose for business level support.

We believe that this category is only going to get larger over time, so we have set out to solve this problem. RoamingSystems SLA is designed to provide the same type of IT support and asset management you would normally have in a larger enterprise. So for the entrepreneurs leaving the large organization to strike out on their own, there is a comfort level in knowing that someone else is taking care of making sure they have a working computer when and where they need it.

The interesting thing about security is that you don't want it until something bad happens. It is like insurance, until you have been caught without it, you don't understand what you have being paying for. Security is the same thing, and VoIP security is double so. Most people we talk with say, "I don't care if someone can listen to my conversation."

The amazing thing to remember is that not only can they listen to it, they can record it and then piece it together to "make" you say something else. While not a big threat at first blush, imagine that we have a "fast computer" in a few years, and someone has been slowly recording other people's conversations. This fast computer could pretty easily handle the computing cycles needed to be able to simply "speak" words typed in your "voice". Can you image what it would/could say? Now imagine that it gets into the hands of a crime syndicate that wants to do nefarious things with it.  Anyone thinking about using VoIP needs to think about securing it.

IAX is a VoIP protocol that is used by Asterisk (an open source telephone platform). It provides two key advantages over SIP. One is simplicity. IAX does everything it needs through one "packet" type. Two, it allows for MUXing calls together. What I mean by that is that you can "trunk" calls together as we did in the "original" days of the web. multiple channels are delivered in one IAX packet. This allows for us to have higher call volume in the same amount of bandwidth. IAX also provides for a robust security infrastructure using PKI or username/password. The one port means that it is easy (read: cost advantage) to run IAX on the WAN since there are none of the issues with having to "synchronize" two port sets. Finally, IAX provides for a better use of bandwidth since it use "mini-frames" to send the realtime media. I am not saying that IAX will "beat" SIP. However, we found that in the trials we did, SIP is more cost efficient for LAN traffic (since the hardware is much cheaper due to scale) and IAX is more cost efficient in the WAN due to reduced support tickets and better use of bandwidth.

Here is a better write-up of what I am talking about :-) ZDNet Ou Blog

The tricky thing about creating an entirely new industry is that it takes a while for your ideas to filter into the global consciousness. We are committed to our vision of how work and life will change in the Information Age (compared to the Industrial Age), but it is only recently that what we have been saying for the past 10 years is finally starting to get the mindshare that we've been waiting for.

We are on the cusp of another economic revolution. Despite the flame-outs of the dot-com bubble, the people who were talking about a New Economy were right... they just got some of the details wrong.

Just as we moved from an agrarian economy (where most of the population worked on a small farm) to an industrial economy (where most of the population worked away from the home in a factory or office), we are now moving towards an information economy. Once again, the costs of the means of production have changed and with that change, entire infrastructures must change as well.

Think about what a farmer in the agrarian economy needed to produce -- a piece of land, some farm equipment that he was able to make or purchase himself, possibly with the help of a loan, and livestock. Most farmers owned their means of production. This is because the agrarian economy was 'human-scaled.'

The industrial revolution took this notion of individually owned means of production and separated the owner from the worker. Owners provided the capital to acquire the much larger assets required to produce in the industrial age and hired workers to run and manage those assets. Workers had to congregate in locations outside the home so that they could all have access to these assets required for production.

In the information economy, the means of production have come back to being human-scale again. Productivity and technology gains are such that an individual can produce millions of dollars worth of value with the individually owned assets of their education and productivity tools such as a personal computer or a telephone.

Here's where the dot-com ebullience got it all wrong.

The information economy is as different from the industrial economy as the industrial economy was from the agrarian economy. This means that a fundamental change in culture, investment structures, government regulation, and other infrastructure is needed in order to make the information economy work.

The reason the dot-com bubble burst was due to a fundamental mismatch between the structure of investment and the nature of information-based business. The current investment structures are dandy for creating large industrial scale-based organizations that need expensive physical assets, but they don't make sense for intellectual property based ventures. The very thing that makes these companies valuable is that they do not need lots of employees and physical assets to be successful, and yet, this is exactly what the investors, the managers, and the market were forcing on to the company. Everyone wanted to have their cake and eat it too.

By creating new financial instruments for investing in intellectual property, we can give these information age companies the capital they do need without requiring them to take on assets that they don't need.

All this does not mean that manufacturing will go away. Just as there are still farms in industrialized countries, there will still be some factories and manufacturing in information economy based countries. The difference is that the industries that remain in these countries will most likely need some form of government subsidy and the choice of what remains will be a strategic choice on the part of the country. For example, it is unlikely that the United States will completely outsource the manufacture of high-technology weaponry, but it might be comfortable outsourcing all clothing manufacturing.

What does all this mean for the average worker? The importance of education becomes paramount. The information economy will be brutally competitive because, unlike in the industrial economy, workers will be unable to count on inefficiencies in transport or the location of natural resources to defend a competitive advantage over a worker in another country. The most valuable natural resource will become the ability to innovate. The more a country can empower its citizens with the knowledge, tools, and support they need to do this, the more competitive that country will be in the global marketplace.