Military and Web 2.0

When it comes to military preparedness and communication, it really boils down to two things -- speed and security. Speed, especially over great distances, can make the difference between success and failure of a campaign. From the marathon runners of ancient Greece to smoke signals to horseback couriers to the telegraph to radio to satellite to the Internet itself, getting messages where they need to go quickly is key.

However, the messages must also get there securely, lest the enemy know your plans and communiques. Encrypting technologies are as old as communication itself -- invisible ink, replacement algorithms, the Enigma machines of WWII are but a few examples. In today's world of military communication, speed is easy -- security is not.

Web 2.0 technologies truly make moving information over the Internet even more efficient than ever before. In older parlance, we used to refer to Web 1.0 as a "pull" technology, meaning the user had to actively go out and find the needed information. Now, Web 2.0 technologies such as RSS, blogs, Tweets, wikis, etc. actually "push" the information to the end user. For example, I have an RSS subscription to BBC's news site on my browser. When I want to see the headlines, I click on the subscription, and all of the headlines are revealed. They change on a regular basis, so only the newest headlines are available. If I see an article I'm interested in, I click on the feed and am taken to the BBC website with that article.

Combining this with AJAX can make a truly useful, dynamic web portal for all sorts of information. The term "mashup" represents the sense of a dashboard -- all of the feeds that you want to see, on the screen at one time, updating at fixed intervals. Adding AJAX into this mix makes everything even more efficient, as only those parts of the screen that need to update will do so -- the entire page need not refresh at the same time!

While speed is easy in this scenario, I would be much more concerned about the security issue. It seems that in today's world it is much easier to be the person breaking the code than the one making the code. Black hat and gray hat hackers abound, and not all of them have our country's interests at heart. I would suggest that a new military-only network might be a solution. This network can be designed from the ground up to be hardened, secure, fast enough for streaming audio and video anywhere in the world, and with the right protocols to help the military branches work in unison. This network would have limited interfacing with today's Internet, probably at specific, highly secure locations. Personal emails from military personnel would pass through these interface locations, be scrubbed, and then passed on to the open Internet. Tweets and blogs most likely would work the same way -- this way IP addresses could not be used to track the locations of military units and the contents of all posts would be subject to scrutiny. (This may seem a bit severe, but there have been stories coming out of Iraq about missions being compromised by Tweets.)

Starting out with the new blog!

Just set up the new blog for class. A few notes about the first part of the lesson...

I know by many of the posts that several of us are FireFox users. If so, you might already know that FireFox has an RSS reader built right in! You have the ability to subscribe to feeds directly on the Bookmarks Toolbar. Once you have the subscription set up, just click on the tool for that feed, and you will see all of the latest "pushed" feeds from that source! I have BBC News, National Review Online, and even my local small town (Azle TX) set up with RSS feeds directly on my browser page. It makes using RSS much easier than going to an external reader!

I can also tell you that the whole "cloud" computing thing is running into some real-world roadblocks. Most of these tend to revolve around security. Many businesses are not comfortable allowing some other business to host their data "in the cloud," thus giving up all control over securing the data. I work for a financial services company -- and I can tell you that we would never allow our data to be hosted outside of our firewall. Our IT folks are so paranoid (rightly so!) that our computers are programmed to ignore jump drives -- you cannot download information from one of our computers without permission.