Well caught up with Greg Ferro today and went for a walk around London while having a chat. It was very enjoyable actually and one of the topic of conversations was Wifi and its impact. Greg was of the opinion that it was completely overrated whereas I think that it could be the thing that really changes the face of technology so long as they get over a few current obstacles, like speed and standards. In particular I think that if you can access a network, of any description, it doesn't even have to be the Internet, from anywhere in the world that a LOT of things will change. In particular it seems to me that the abililty to search and lookup information on the move will radically change things like street directories and mapping services, but thats just the tip of the iceberg.
Imagine for a moment what things you would be able to do if you had no bandwidth limitations (or perhaps more accurately limitations that you weren't likely to run into in "normal" usage) and that you could access it anywhere. In my opinion some very fundamental things would change about our society. Increasingly it seems that more and more people rely on computers for their job, now obviously I am biased in this observation because it is all I do for a living, but I think its not unfair to say that as a generalisation the prevalence of computers is increasing. If you agree to that then in almost all cases the ability to do that from anywhere challenges our current conceptions of the "workplace" and what it means to be at work. Already I would argue that I can do my entire job remotely, gone are the days of not having full, secure remote access, not only to the computers themselves but to their powersupplies and every little function of their environment (air conditioning, lighting, electricity phases etc). Given that kind of access I could work from anywhere provided I had the ability to connect. Now my own belief as to why that is not already the case for many people, in particular for people in positions like me, is that the mindset of everyone involved is not ready for it. Think about it, not only is management still very wary of people "working from home" but even the people involved actually quite enjoy working with other people on the whole, we are after all social creatures. Still, at least personally, I find I am more productive at home in my own environment then I am at work and there would be direct benefits for any employer of me to allow me to work away from the office and I don't think I am alone in this matter. All of this is just one way in which I think real, effective ubiquitous communication would change our society. The changes go a lot deeper then just the technology. In that line of thinking I saw an interesting article that seems to suggest we are heading down that road already. Of course with our current technology I don't think it will change things that much, but give the technology an iteration or two and I think it will be a very different story. Poor telco's will have to rethink how they are doing business, already there are skype phones available, fairly soon phone numbers will be a thing of the past and instead everyone will be using IPs to address each other (of course these will be made presentable by some nice username interface).
Another thing that caught my attention recently was TOR. This is something that I think is incredibly interesting and from a security standpoint could seriously challenge the established paradigms. I pick this concept, maybe not this implementation, but the concept, to be the biggest thing in security for some time to come. Not only does it enable truely anonymous Internet usage but its secure! Finally to add insult to injury to various governement agencies around the world you can now anonymously host services. Of course the media will focus on the bad uses for such technology, and don't get me wrong as a powerful tool it can be used for both good and bad, still the obvious benefits of what it can do for everyone should ensure its survival.
On a different note I am getting really sick of so called professional, IT savvy companies fucking up basics. I have this week off work to study and sit the CISSP exam. You would think that a certification system that targets security professionals and is trying to establish a worldwide repurtation as leading the field would make sure that their web presence and its functionality is flawless. I just sat the "practise exam" (with no studying, was curious as to just how much study I had ahead of me) and it seemed to work ok, though it was a tad slow, but when I got to the end and went to submit my final answers it broke with some stupid IIS error and asp warning. The reason it would seem is that it didn't like firefox. How can you possibly take anyone seriously at this point in time who doesn't deal with Firefox sanely (I won't even start about them running an ASP site or using IIS as the webserver). I look forward to having the opportunity to tell one of their staff personally what I think of their site :)
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