Minneapolis suffers the heartbreak of leafage: Leaves are popping in Minneapolis, and Star-Tribune columnist Steve Alexander writes that residents are seeing some Wi-Fi reception problems on that city's Wi-Fi network. This is the only big-city network that can be currently described "successful," even though its long-term success has to be proven out. The firm responsible, USI Wireless, told Alexander they're working on adjusting about 5 percent of antennas to cope with the pesky greenery.

St. Louis Park sues ARINC over Wi-Fi network: The Minnesota town says the network never worked, and had earlier discussed a lawsuit. The city wants the value of the contract ($1.7m) plus a very modest amount in damages and fees ($50,000). The city plans to start removing gear if ARINC doesn't sometime in June. But they have to deal with 490 poles erected to hold the nodes and solar-charging gear--sunk into concrete. More recent testing showed that the network worked well in some areas, but the majority of the network did not, according to the Star Tribune.

Verizon builds out fiber in AT&T territory: Interesting sign of competition in otherwise monopoly-per-provider-type world. Verizon is using AT&T's hard-won statewide video franchising rules in Texas to build competitive fiber in Dallas suburbs. They're apparently not bringing telecom; they're acting like a cable TV firm with data. Verizon owns chunks of territory all over due to it encompassing GTE in a deal years ago. GTE serves suburbs west of Portland, Ore., and east of Seattle, for instance, while Qwest serves most of the rest of each state.

Foster City Wi-Fi dies on June 20: MetroFi is unlighting its cities, and Foster City opted not to spend the nearly $200,000 asking price MetroFi put on its equipment. MetroFi might still find a buyer, but June 20 is the network's current final day. Naperville, Ill., also expects a June 20 shutdown. They, too, were offered the network hardware for 200 grand.

Chehalis lights up: A small city in southern Washington votes to put in Wi-Fi hotzones. The cost is about $53,000 and annual fees $15,000. Funds will come from existing tax and grant sources. The city chose to install service to make sure they're not missing a checkbox on the amenities list for visitors and businesses rather than for a particular, measurable goal.

Nearby Centralia pulls its Wi-Fi: A pilot project in the larger city of Centralia, Wash., a bit north of Chehalis, is shut down when poles used to mount Wi-Fi radios are removed as electrical wires are buried. (The reporter here confuses broadband over powerlines (BPL) with broadband wireless.) The system might be restarted later.

Craig Settles writes up Pennsylvania's Cambria County wireless success: This is a network built for particular municipal purposes, part of Settles's long-time drumbeat about having applications first and then networks built for those networks second. He notes that Cambria built a 700 sq mi network that sounds nearly cost neutral through efficiency and cost conservation--it's cheaper to get much more service with this network than it was for a smaller array of services with incumbent-provided networks.

Santa Fe residents oppose Wi-Fi in the library on health grounds: You know what I have to say about how provable this has turned out to be in clinical studies. I am, however, as always, concerned about these people's health, even if I don't believe that Wi-Fi (or EMF) causes their problems. The group opposed to library-Fi is citing the ADA in this case, uniquely I believe. Six libraries suggested that EMF triggers seizures in epileptics, something I've never heard cited before; maybe CRTs (flickering), but EMF? Wired is substantially less kind than I am, pointing out that EMF other than Wi-Fi produces vastly higher signal strength. (They're sort of ignoring signal strength at a given point where an individual stands in relation to a transmitter, however.)

You can then use the framework to assign priorities and phasing for Information Security actions. So instead of letting the random auditor and their everpresent checklist that the final four assigns you drive your program, use a framework that incorporates the business and its goals. A number of people commented on my post on GRC -

Rich Mogull

Much of what we call GRC should really be features of your ERP and accounting software. ... It’s an additional, very highly priced, reporting layer. ...A GRC tool provides almost no value at the business unit level, since it doesn’t help them get their day to day jobs done.

Mike Rothman succinctly gets to the point with a one liner I am sure will become part of my repertoire:

It's about serving the business, NOT THE AUDITORS. If you protect information effectively (which is a key imperative for the business), then the auditors should be kept reasonably happy. And if not, screw them and fight them. Yes, the auditor can make your life a bit harder, but you don't work for them. Keep that in mind.

So my GRC post seemed to tap into a fair amount of GRC blogohostility , fair enough, but the main point is not slamming GRC, just the overfocus on GRC and substituting misdirected marketecture for real world architecture Hoff got to the heart of the point of what i was saying - its about assets

As I think about it, I'm not sure GRC would be something a typical InfoSec function would purchase or use unless forced which is part of the problem. I see internal audit driving the adoption which given today's pressures (especially in public companies) would first start in establishing gaps against regulatory compliance.

If the InfoSec function is considering an approach that drives protecting the things that matter most and managing risk to an acceptable level and one that is not compliance-driven but rather built upon a business and asset-driven approach

So I submit that you should not start with a compliance checklist, but instead build a security architecture blueprint that captures your stakeholders goals. Assess this against your policy and standards, and your security architecture capabilities. Out of this comes risk management decisions. And off we go into actually building and operating something - hopefully making some profits along the way.

So build blueprints, minimize time spent doing checkbox Olympics. The blueprint I worked on is just generic framework, you may have a different one. I know that the one that I designed is in use in many organizations and in each case I know of it has been tailored to local purposes. So its a beginning not an end, but those two things are more related than you think as someone from the financial services industry once said

In my beginning is my end ... in my end is my beginning

Where you start your security architecture and design matters, and directly effects where you end up.

Anyway, the conference was a lot of fun, I rarely get to do conferences in MN. I got meet Anton Chuvakin for the first time, and went to the presentation on the local OWASP Minnesota chapter - Robert Sullivan, Joe Teff and Kuai Hinojosa did a great job doing an overview of what OWASP is all about, demoing WebGoat and so on.

Here's what mystifies me. First, someone from the business he's crouching near spots him viewing the porn, and instead of calling 911, reports him to the cafe's manager. Then, the cafe manager shoos the guy away instead of calling the police. Only when the man returns three weeks later does the manager call police.

If you ever see someone viewing images of clearly underage individuals engaged in sexual acts or having those acts performed on them, you call the police. There are times when it's unclear whether the images are against the rules of an orderly society in which we protect its weakest members, but I believe with most of this category of pornography, there is a bright line. There's not much subtle child porn, from the reports issued by the police.

The broader issue of whether one should ever look at images of consenting, legal age participants in naked gymnastics in public places is also pretty clear (no).

In Minnesota, St. Paul and Minneapolis may stand as poster children for two trends in broadband: On your left, Comcast offers 50 Mbps/5 Mbps in the home; on your right, a working urban Wi-Fi network.

The same day Julio's article appeared, his colleague Leslie Brooks Suzukamo filed an article about the challenges of leaves, something that's a big issue in Minneapolis, covered with the leafy menaces: 200,000 of the suckers that Gipper said caused pollution (as an allergy sufferer, I agree with him). Trees leaf out and reduce signal propagation, and that's something that US Internet Wireless has had to deal with. They upped their density of nodes from 26 to 42, which appears to be about the norm for both starting and ending points in muni netwrk planning.

This article goes into a little more depth about the problems with dead areas due to absent or problematic utility poles (it's always about the poles). USIW plans to install some of its own poles to fill in those areas.

Nearby, Steve Alexander notes a pioneering wireless network at the University of Minnesota has become obsolete. The U of M is replacing its 7-year-old 802.11b network with an 802.11n system. As is true in most older networks, they've got a melange of gear that's a headache to keep running and in sync. They'll spend $3.5m to cover about 40 percent of the campus with N, replacing a current similar coverage area. They may expand the network and add VoIP in the future.

The university and USIW are discussing interconnecting their networks for roaming.