The reason the Telcos are so opposed to things like net neutrality is because they’re not technology companies. They are essentially opposed to innovation, which is obvious when you look at their research budgets.

Business Week is running a fascinating essay that highlights all the reasons why the telcos hate innovation. They’re not technology companies, which is highlighted by how little they spend on research. They’re in the business of extracting as much money as they can from their network right now — which is a short-sighted and eventually self-destructive plan. They view real innovation as a threat, not an opportunity, because tech innovation is usually about driving down the cost of infrastructure. That doesn’t help them squeeze more money out of it. As the writer of the essay points out, this is evident in the telcos continued fight against things like muni-WiFi, even as they quietly get involved in muni-WiFi projects themselves.

The article also highlights how this lack of technological innovation from within the telcos means that even in areas where they have every opportunity to innovate, such as IPTV, all they’re doing is catching up to what the cable providers already deliver. They’re missing the opportunity to do much more. In fact, this is a great way to view the net neutrality issue. If the telcos were really about promoting innovation (and the author makes fun of AT&T for claiming it needs to merge with BellSouth to be able to innovate), then network neutrality wouldn’t be an issue at all. The company would focus on making its platform (the network) as accessible and as fast as possible — to encourage more innovation and development from third parties. Instead, the telcos focus, not on encouraging innovation, but on setting up roadblocks. The roadblocks give them the power to squeeze more money out of the network — but at the expense of actual innovation that would make their networks that much more valuable.

Dude, check this out.

Space Invaders done with people as pixels in a theater. Excellent.

So, for this client install we’ve been working on, we procured a pile of network gear to extend their existing setup in order to accommodate our equipment. This is standard operating procedure.

What wasn’t standard was the minimal nature of this client’s infrastructure, and the distance to the desired work site from the office implied cable runs in excess of the limits of ethernet (for the record, about 100m). We thought about fiber — which was, until recently, the only real option — but the costs were high, and throwing that kind of tech at a small firm with no IT employees sounds like a pretty bad idea. But there’s wifi, right?

Right, so we went that route. Knowing they needed a new router anyway, we included some network refitting in the deal, and bought a fancy pre-N Linksys we figured would reach to where we needed to be plus an access point (essentially a wireless ethernet jack) and an 8-port switch. We planned to drop in the router in as a direct replacement for theirs and hang all our gear off either the network in the office or the “extension” network in the work area, connected via the aforementioned access point. Easy!

Well, no. In the interim, they opted to acquire some replacement gear of their own, none of which from identifiable manufacturers. (Seriously: in a world of commodity Linksys/Netgear/DLink gear available in every electronics and office supply shop, whoever they hired to do IT went off-brand.) And they had some ports forwarded to internal resources, none of which was documented, and their IT consultant guy was incommunicado on vacation, both of which mean we couldn’t possibly just do the “drop in our router” plan. Further complicating the picture was the presence of more brick than we initially realized, which shortened the already meager range of the off-brand wireless gear.

Fine. We tried to rejigger our gear into the new world order, but with no success. Finally, we hit upon getting a range extender, and the of using our fancy router (Linksys WRT54GX4) as just an access point (disable its DHCP, etc.). We dropped by Fry’s en route to dinner, and planned on regaining lost time in the morning.

The next day, the “use the Linksys as a wireless only device” plan went off more or less without a hitch. Using the extender — a WRE54G, also from Linksys — however, was a major problem. We could get a much better signal in the far location than before, but we still needed a bit of a boost; the only resource that could connect was my Powerbook. However, no matter what the configuration, the network went south as soon as we powered on the extender. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot?

I called Linksys. After being on hold for half an hour and getting bounced around a bit, I finally got an answer: The extender isn’t compatible with the router.

Um, what?

Right. Two pieces of Linksys kit from the same model year, the same shelf, the same store, will not interoperate despite notionally supporting the same protocols. Now, we acknolwedge that the router is a bit of a hot rot; we assume that they’ve made the call to sacrifice compatibility — even with their own gear — in favor of range and bandwidth. Fine. But it would be a really good idea to note this on the box of the router, which they didn’t bother to do.

So, Linksys? Kiss my ass. You’re jackasses. We do give some recognition to your tech support drone, though. He actually had the stones to start a sentence about “returning the router and getting instead a Linksys blah blah blah….”, whereupon we asked “If we have to go back to the shop and return this, do you really think we’re going to buy MORE Linksys gear after this experience?”

Some attention-grubbing nutbirds in Europe are whining about RFID virii, saying things like:

“Everyone working on RFID technology has tacitly assumed that the mere act of scanning an RFID tag cannot modify back-end software and certainly not in a malicious way. Unfortunately, they are wrong,” wrote the trio in their research paper.

How many times can you be wrong in ONE sentence?

1. In fact, simple scans CANNOT modify back-end systems. There’s no way. So-called “SmartLabels” are just data storage devices that respond to radio fields. When a reader hits the tag, the tag echoes back its data. The DoD- and Wal-Mart-mandated tags hold only 96 bits, so we’re not talking about much data, either. By the time a tag read reaches any back-end code, it’s just data.

2. That said, like any input, RFID input must be validated and examined to prevent overflow attacks, injections, etc. Scanning an RFID tag and naively assuming it’s a safe data source could create trouble — but that’s true of any input. In this regard, RFID is no different than a form on a web page. In many poorly-designed systems, it’s possible to do damage by putting in malicious code in web forms — that’s almost certainly how the old Heathen site got hacked, for example, via a flaw in WordPress. No developer worth a damn will ever assume his inputs are safe, at least in systems like web tools and (yes) RFID. Whole libraries of code exist to isolate data and ensure information gleaned from inputs doesn’t contain exploits. It’s a known problem, and one that all competent people know how to avoid.

That’s why this is a total non-issue. It’s especially stupid that people are saying “virus” here; a virus is actual malicious computer code that knows how to replicate and infect. Here, they’re talking about a system vulnerability and carefully tailored data injection attacks. It’s a security problem (if you’ve hired idiots for your RFID development), but not one that has much at all to do with viruses. You may as well speak of “bar code viruses,” since that makes just as much sense.

In a nutshell, what these fools are whining about — and, apparently, spending a lot of time and money demonstrating — is that under carefully created circumstances, it’s possible for information from a system input (in this case, RFID) to carry a damaging payload if the system assumes the data is known-safe. Way to go! We eagerly anticipate their next study, which probably covers such earthshaking assertions as “you should not give your online banking information to the nice people in Nigera.”

(This isn’t to say there aren’t areas of legitimate concern in the RFID world; just that this story isn’t one of them.)

Excellent summary, geared for the lay reader. If you’ve ever wondered if it’s true that essentially unbreakable cryptography exists that even the Feds can’t hack, here’s your answer: you bet your ass. That’s why they’ve been trying to restrict its use. Thank god they’ve failed so far.

BoingBoing reports that some folks have produced a brand new Atari cartridge based on an old Commodore64 game. Awesome.