Today, the US Air Force awarded a $35 billion contract to build the next generation of air refueling planes to Chicago-based Boeing Company.  The contract calls for producing 179 new tankers based on the 767 aircraft.

I find it ironic that the new Air Force tanker will be based on the same airframe as that of the Gimli Glider, an Air Canada airliner that ran out of fuel over Canada in 1983. 

From Wikipedia:

The Gimli Glider is the nickname of the Air Canada aircraft that was involved in a notable aviation incident. On 23 July 1983, Air Canada Flight 143, a Boeing 767-200 jet, ran out of fuel at 26,000 feet (7,920 m) altitude, about halfway through its flight from Montreal to Edmonton via Ottawa. The crew was able to glide the aircraft safely to an emergency landing at Gimli Industrial Park Airport, a former Canadian Air Force base at Gimli, Manitoba.

I hope the Air Force remembers correctly whether to measure fuel in liters or gallons (which goes to the root cause of the Gimli Glider fiasco).

I guess this all goes to prove that even old things (and people) can arise from the dust and be reborn into something great.

The NASA Picture of the Day site featured this incredible view of the Milky Way galaxy captured earlier this month over Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

The words of Psalm 8:3-5 come immediately to mind:

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.

NASA: ISS Crew in space observe national moment of silence.

Great to see that respect for the victims of last Saturday’s violence extends beyond our traditional boundaries.

In his provocative Scientific American article entitled, “Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality,” Tim Berners-Lee concludes, “The Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity—and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending.”

I don’t agree with all Tim says in the article, but enjoyed reading the article and considering what he had to say.

Some of my favorite excerpts:

The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights.

It was the subject of “threat” that caught my eye first. I know that government regulation is a threat, but how does Facebook threaten the Web?

Social-networking sites present a different kind of problem. Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster and others typically provide value by capturing information as you enter it: your birthday, your e-mail address, your likes, and links indicating who is friends with whom and who is in which photograph. The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site’s pages are on the Web, but your data are not. You can access a Web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site.

So what?  Why is that a problem?

Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend. The Web is also vital to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation. The Web is now more critical to free speech than any other medium. It brings principles established in the U.S. Constitution, the British Magna Carta and other important documents into the network age: freedom from being snooped on, filtered, censored and disconnected.

I like the focus on personal freedom.  I do believe that governments have difficulty oppressing their citizens if the right to communicate openly is assured – a philosophy the Web supports – if remains an open, easily accessible medium of information interchange.

Speaking of open-ness and closed-ness:

Open standards also foster serendipitous creation: someone may use them in ways no one imagined. We discover that on the Web every day.

In contrast, not using open standards creates closed worlds. Apple’s iTunes system, for example, identifies songs and videos using URIs that are open. But instead of “http:” the addresses begin with “itunes:,” which is proprietary. You can access an “itunes:” link only using Apple’s proprietary iTunes program. You can’t make a link to any information in the iTunes world—a song or information about a band. You can’t send that link to someone else to see. You are no longer on the Web. The iTunes world is centralized and walled off. You are trapped in a single store, rather than being on the open marketplace. For all the store’s wonderful features, its evolution is limited to what one company thinks up.

So what about net neutrality?

A neutral communications medium is the basis of a fair, competitive market economy, of democracy, and of science. Debate has risen again in the past year about whether government legislation is needed to protect net neutrality. It is. Although the Internet and Web generally thrive on lack of regulation, some basic values have to be legally preserved.

This is an area where I may differ a bit with Tim.  It seems to me that we could have an Internet with different classes of service with different price tags, just like we have an automobile industry with different levels of luxury in the cars we buy.  It certainly is a timely topic and Tim’s comments are definitely worth reading.

One area where my thought’s converge closely with Tim’s are in governments’ violation of due process of law …

Totalitarian governments aren’t the only ones violating the network rights of their citizens. …

In these cases, no due process of law protects people before they are disconnected or their sites are blocked. Given the many ways the Web is crucial to our lives and our work, disconnection is a form of deprivation of liberty. Looking back to the Magna Carta, we should perhaps now affirm: “No person or organization shall be deprived of the ability to connect to others without due process of law and the presumption of innocence.”

All in all, a great article by a giant in our industry.  Thanks, Tim, for taking the time to write it.

About the Author:

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Today he is director of the international World Wide Web Consortium, based in the U.S. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a professor of engineering at M.I.T. and a professor of electronics and computer science at the University of Southampton in England.

Father to young son, “If you eat any more ice cream, you are going to explode!”

Son to Father, “Pass the ice cream, and stand back!”

That is about what I feel like right now, although I am ingesting Information Security information rather than ice cream.  If I try to stuff one more arcane detail about encryption algorithms, security models  or communications protocols into my brain, I think it will explode.

So … pass the information and stand back!

It is was fitting today that as I studied the subject of encryption in preparation for my CISSP exam, I stumbled upon information about the newly-formed United States Cyber Command, a US armed forces sub-command subordinate to United States Strategic Command. The command was officially activated May 21, 2010 and is slated to reach fully operational readiness by October 2010.

The Cyber Command:

“ … plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries."

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, stated in the official June 23rd announcement:

“Cyberspace and its associated technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to the United States and are vital to our nation’s security and, by extension, to all aspects of military operations. Yet our increasing dependency on cyberspace, alongside a growing array of cyber threats and vulnerabilities, adds a new element of risk to our national security. To address this risk effectively and to secure freedom of action in cyberspace, the Department of Defense requires a command that possesses the required technical capability and remains focused on the integration of cyberspace operations.”

OK.  This sounds like a good thing to do.  But what was really intriguing and fitting for me today was to learn that the command’s handsome new emblem contains an encrypted message its inner gold ring: 9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a.

Can you figure out what it means?  The Wikipedia article for the command states:

“The text "9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a", which is located in the command’s emblem, is the MD5 hash of their mission statement.”

This is consistent with a statement from a command spokesman quoted in an article by John Cook of Yahoo! News.  However, something is not quite right.  John explained:

“We tried encrypting that entire statement using an MD5 hash generator, and we didn’t get a match to the logo code. So it looks like just a portion of the statement has been encoded.”

Wired Magazine has launched a contest to see who can crack to code.  Can you do it?  You can win a t-shirt from Wired or a ticket to the International Spy Museum.

Even better, rumor has it that the Cyber Command wants to hire 1,000 new cyber specialists over the next few years.  Maybe this game is part of the recruitment process.

Or … maybe this will remain another obscure mystery destined to someday being mentioned in a novel by Dan Brown.

I think that Kerberos (or Cerberus), the three-headed dog from Greek mythology that guards the gates of Hades, ought to be proclaimed the mascot of the CISSP exam.  I think studying for the exam (including Kerberos, the computer network authentication protocol) is going to eat me alive.

An interesting ZDNet article by Larry Dignan yesterday described Songdo, South Korea, which is aiming to be a global business hub and a sustainable city. This new city is being developed on 1,500 acres of reclaimed land in South Korea along Incheon’s waterfront, 40 miles from Seoul.

Songdo is also being wired by Cisco as a “grand telepresence experiment.”

According to Marthin De Beer, senior vice president of Cisco Systems’ emerging technology group:

Every home will have a Telepresence unit built in like a dishwasher. And it’s the developer that is putting those into those apartments as they get built out, because that is how education, health care and government services will get delivered right into the home. It will come to you. You don’t have to go find it. And that is how they will reduce traffic congestion and pollution in the cities. …

Until you’ve tasted it, it’s hard for me to explain to you what it’s like. But you can literally sit back on the couch and see your friends and family in life-size, full high definition, right in your living room, and interact with them. It’s not a small computer screen. You get a full view of everyone. And it’s very different.

But that is just 10% of why I’m excited about it, because the other 90% is that I believe it will do what the browser did for commerce into your home. You used to drive down the street to buy things. Today you go online, and it arrives at your doorstep once you’ve purchased it.

Home telepresence would do the same for services. Today, you still go to see your banker, your lawyer, your accountant, your tutor, etc. Well, what if these services can come in a virtual model right into your home and you can consume them in that way?

OK.   Sounds cool.  I have an appointment to visit my doctor on Monday afternoon.  It would be nice to visit him electronically.  But in order to make that work, it would need to accommodate things like weight, temperature, O2 and blood pressure measurements – all by remote control. How would that work?

It will be interesting to see how this works in South Korea … I’m looking forward to getting on the bandwagon in Mesa, AZ.

Thanks to Mike Waddingham for sharing the link to an article in the Canadian National Post on Monday:

“Telus announced an electronic health service yesterday that will give patients instant online access to all their medical files.”

Telus chief executive Darren Entwistle said this move will "revolutionize" health care:

"Now, Canadians will have the ability to create, store and manage their personal health information across their computers and smartphones and, in the future, TVs," Mr. Entwistle said in an announcement at an e-health conference in Vancouver.

"In a world where wireless network technology has enabled powerful mobile computing, their health information can be right at their fingertips, wherever their lifestyles or business travels take them because their smart-phone will accompany them."

The article further states:

In a demonstration, Telus officials showed how a patient could start a personal health record, inputting their own information — from childhood vaccinations, to allergies, to blood pressure readings — to share with their doctors, pharmacists and other health-care providers.

In turn, patients would have access to their medical records, so if they move, see a specialist or end up unexpectedly in an emergency department, vital health information would be instantly available.

Parents would be able to start and maintain health records for their children.

I applaud this type of automation that puts more control of personal health information in the hands of consumers.  While it certainly demands necessary privacy and security controls, this move recognizes the need to make health records from multiple sources more available, which should lead to improved health care and reduced costs.

It will be interesting to seek how quickly this type of system become available in the US.

Pretty cool to see what can be done with Legos if you put your mind to it!

We have built lots of neat stuff with Legos at our house, but nothing quite this complex.