Today’s blog post – not that there are many of you out there reading this in the “dead zone” between Christmas and New Years – but today’s post was going to be on the ridiculous travel restrictions that they put into place after the averted attack on Christmas, how taking away blankets weren’t adding to security and just making people uncomfortable. Its security theatre, I know, but security theatre is only theoretically worth something if it actually makes people feel safer.

Scanning people’s shoes doesn’t really help with security, but it does make people feel safer. The security measures put into place these past couple of days seemed arbitrary, and didn’t really seem like there was a reason to do it at all, except to make people uncomfortable. That, in turn, actively works against the façade of security theatre, making people feel uncomfortable knowing that the people who were supposed to be looking out for us didn’t know what the heck they were doing.

And I was going to write something or another about network performance – going to tie in the message that network security is important, but too often, it seems like a lot of corporate security restrictions are in place that don’t really make people’s networks more secure – but do slow down the network’s performance.

According to the New York Times Bits Blog, professor David Anderegg of Bennington college suggests that the words “nerd” and “geek” are “damaging, like racial epithets, and should be avoided.” Yet the meaning of words often evolves as the social context changes. I noted that in Manhattan’s elite high schools being called a “cool nerd” [...]

One of the key selling points of Amazon’s EC2 capacity is its ability to turn CAPEX costs into OPEX costs.  Or, for those of us who didn’t major in business in college, to pay for computer hardware with the “Pay For Services” budget, instead of the “Buy Stuff” budget.  This is generally a good thing [...]

The Kevin Rudd-led Australian government has put forward a Fiber-To-The-Home, or as the Australians call it, “Fibre-to-the-Home” initiative, including an open-access network which supposedly will provider 100Mbps connections to 90% of Australian homes and businesses.  This is presumably in order to diversify the Claudia Black based-economy, which, sometime in the 1990s, became Australia’s primary export. [...]

IT professionals are often familiar with the Network/Server/Application blame game.  “Whatever the problem, it’s never our problem.” The avoidance of this blame game is one of the key reasons network monitoring and network managementproducts exist; to avoid the blame game and get straight to the root cause of a problem.

But if you were to give an award for the mother of all network performance blame games, a good candidate for the honor would be the spat AT&T and Apple are having regarding whether Apple’s iPhone design, Apple’s iPhone users, or AT&T’s network are the cause of problems like dropped calls and slow data transfer speeds.

In the midst of all of this, satirist, “The Fake Steve Jobs,” a.k.a. Newsweek’s Dan Lyons, proposed to his users that in order to protest “AT&T’s bastardly behavior over bandwidth usage,” that users should attempt to overwhelm the AT&T 3G data network at Friday, December 18^th, at noon PST, by using the most data-heavy apps possible.