That's an insanely large percentage of riders using the service, so it's possible ridership has increased even more than the mid-May figures indicate, or the commuters are really intense computer and handheld users. Also, note that the FAQ for the authority's overall Wi-Fi service requires you to be 18 years or older. It is Utah, after all--a minor might do something dirty with the service and the transit authority would be held responsible. The authority offers Wi-Fi on some buses, too.

The network is backed by fiber that runs alongside the track, which can make a huge difference in the ability to bring in backhaul. Other train lines have to work with either or both cellular and satellite backhaul, although Nomad typically uses fixed WiMax, as they are in this deployment. They're finishing up a 600 km London to Glasgow route for Virgin in the UK, which will be vastly larger than any other Internet-equipped route in the world.

This is one of the first major production service launches of train-based Wi-Fi in the U.S. VIA Rail in Canada is the only other in-production system offering in-transit Wi-Fi on a train line in North America. There are several trials, pilots, and phased-in plans underway. I thought 2007 would be the year that train-based Internet access took off; looks like it will leave the station worldwide in 2009, perhaps due to better 3G cell cover and improved antenna designs, as well as new commuter rail systems like FrontRunner that are designed with the idea of connectivity.

• Mailing notification letters to all 2.2 million patients and guarantors;
• Providing free credit monitoring and restoration service to patients whose records included Social Security numbers;
• Providing a toll-free information line at 1-866-581-3599 to respond to questions; and
• Establishing a website at healthcare.utah.edu/billingrecordstheft that provides information and resources.
  

Cablevision's already started its rollout: An observant tri-stater at the Cable Rant site spotted Cablevision installers putting up BelAir gear on their cable line. He took some photos.

Taking the bot controller offline may kill a botnet. As a result, many bots use a Dynamic Domain Name System (DDNS) or have a list of backup IP addresses to survive such an event. Bot technology is rapidly evolving, often aided and abetted, unfortunately, by the open-source movement. [Emphasis Matt's.]

So Matt does his due dilligence and cannot find any evidence to back up what McAfee says. On top of this Matt remembers that McAfee said in in a recent financial statement that open source licensing is a threat to its business (again these are Matt's words). From there Matt looks up botnets in Wikipedia or some other such place and finds out that botnets are mostly installed on Windows machines. Well that is all this open source watchdog needs to get him going! Of course Windows gets more botnets, after all it is not as secure or as good and the people who use it are not as smart as Linux, the darling of the open source crowd.

So here is my problem with Matt's positions. Number one on the white paper, I don't think McAfee was talking about Linux versus Windows at all (as much as Matt would like to think so). I think McAfee is referring to open source applications like dynamic domain name systems (DDNS) and other open source enabling technologies. There is more to open source than Linux Matt. McAfee is saying that hackers are using the same open source components and network enablers that many legitimate applications are using, to make more effective and dangerous malware. The open source crowd is not doing it on purpose, but it is being used. What is the big deal here. Matt don't you agree that people can use tools for good and bad. Just because it is open source does not mean it cannot be abused or used for malicous purposes. Stop being so sensitive Matt!

Further on McAfee's earlier statement about open source licensing being a threat. Come on guys. It was boiler plate provisions that some of the applications and products that McAfee itself sells contain open source components. Depending how and when a real court ever interperts OSI licenses like the GPL it could have a profound impact on McAfee's business. It could have a profound impact on a lot of businesses for that matter.

Bottom line Matt, I think you are barking up the wrong tree here. Why not head back to the doghouse and wait for the next unsuspecting stranger to walk by and who tries to say anything bad about open source. Me, I think I will appreciate all of the good that open source brings, but realize it can be used as an agent for evil as well.

In an interview recently, Dr. Torrens, an assistant professor at Arizon State University in the School of Geographical Sciences, said that he used his extended family to help him gather the data necessary to draw real conclusions. "Any time they were going anywhere, I got them to stick the rig to their car."

Dr. Torrens said that he decided to attack Wi-Fi because it was hard in the geographic field to find a subject area that hadn't been throughly explored, and that his interest in patterns and process over a landscape led him to Wi-Fi. His exploration looked at Wi-Fi as a topology overlaying population, demographics, and architecture.

In examining the literature to see if scholarly research had been carried out, he found a lot of wardriving details, but not a lot of accuracy or analysis. The maps of Wi-Fi coverage that are out there "rely on people going out and wardriving and submitting the data to some sort of online repository," Dr. Torrens said. While they may use GPS for timestamping and logging samples, "Unless you really know what you're doing with it, it provides very weak spatial accuracies [and] positional accuracies."

Dr. Torrens said, "I was able to come up with a much better accuracy." Some of his work is patented, and he said that while the university assembled the materials to file against his work, he remained a bit quiet about it. (As with most universities these days, ASU actively seeks to patent and license research as one means of funding the university's future.)

The data that he found in wardriving databases didn't account for quality, very few samples had timestamps, and where he found huge clusters, it didn't account for the timeframe, and thus was hard to tell whether the clusters existed at the same point in time. Dr. Torrens was collecting his data in 2005; wardriving databases may have improved in that time.

Dr. Torrens said that using techniques from the field, he could associate samples together, determining whether a cluster was legitimately such, or an abberration in the data--"whether a cluster is a cluster," in other words.

The research revealed some expected results, such as an extremely high number of access points in the most densely inhabited parts of town, but Dr. Torrens said he didn't expect to find that less-populated parts of town would also have a nearly ubiquitous spread of nodes. One area "that's relatively underpopulated is a whole warehouse district," he said, and they had lots of access points.

In the least-covered areas of the city, about seven access points were "visible"; in some places, that number was as high as 43 access points.

Also interesting to note was that security was most frequently enabled on Wi-Fi nodes in the parts of town dominated by students, who obviously had the technical jobs and understanding to prevent others from gaining access to their networks.

Dr. Torrens may carry out more Wi-Fi related geographic research, but that partly depends on having the resources or capability to gather information on a large scale. He'd love to gather live data that would allow him to show patterns as they change across the time of day or over a period of time.

"What I would like to do is to look at a temporal snapshot of the city, to look at how the Wi-Fi cloud is changing over time, over the course of a week," he said. "What is the temporal topography, the space-time topography of a city."

"To collect this kind of data set in real time would require a couple hundred thousand people with iPhones, citizen volunteers," he noted, but that might be possible with the capabilities of an iPhone software toolkit, promised by Apple in June, or through data sets gathered by firms like Skyhook Wireless.

No, I did not give him a cell phone. Didn't want to lose it. And no, I didn't trail him, like a mommy private eye. I trusted him to figure out that he should take the Lexington Avenue subway down, and the 34th Street crosstown bus home. If he couldn't do that, I trusted him to ask a stranger. And then I even trusted that stranger not to think, "Gee, I was about to catch my train home, but now I think I'll abduct this adorable child instead."

Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.

Long story longer, and analyzed, to boot: Half the people I've told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It's not. It's debilitating -- for us and for them.

It's amazing how our fears blind us. The mother and son appeared on The Today Show, where they both continued to explain why it wasn't an unreasonable thing to do:

And that was Skenazy's point in her column: The era is long past when Times Square was a fetid sump and taking a walk in Central Park after dark was tantamount to committing suicide. Recent federal statistics show New York to be one of the safest cities in the nation -- right up there with Provo, Utah, in fact.

"Times are back to 1963," Skenzay said. "It's safe. It's a great time to be a kid in the city."

The problem is that people read about children who are abducted and murdered and fear takes over, she said. And she doesn't think fear should rule our lives.

Of course, The Today Show interviewer didn't get it:

Dr. Ruth Peters, a parenting expert and TODAY Show contributor, agreed that children should be allowed independent experiences, but felt there are better -- and safer -- ways to have them than the one Skenazy chose.

"I'm not so much concerned that he's going to be abducted, but there's a lot of people who would rough him up," she said. "There's some bullies and things like that. He could have gotten the same experience in a safer manner."

"It's safe to go on the subway," Skenazy replied. "It's safe to be a kid. It's safe to ride your bike on the streets. We're like brainwashed because of all the stories we hear that it isn't safe. But those are the exceptions. That's why they make it to the news. This is like, 'Boy boils egg.' He did something that any 9-year-old could do."

Here's an audio interview with Skenazy.

I am reminded of this great graphic depicting childhood independence diminishing over four generations.