Ultra High Speed Communication

Written in response to this article.

Recently researchers at Alcatel-Lucent were able to transmit data at 16.4 Tbps over an optical connection. As another reader of the article pointed out, that's fast enough to transmit the entire contents of the library of congress (20 TB) in under ten seconds. The applications have not yet been written and the hardware not yet created that can take advantage of such speeds. Possible applications would be telepresence, streaming video in its original format, massively multiplayer action games, and remote robotics. Unfortunately the dark side of the Internet would also be taking advantage of the new speeds to distribute spam and launch attacks. Like all good tools, the better our Internet connection is, the more of both good and evil it can accomplish.

Public Secrets

If the door is ajar, do I have the right to enter? In the 13 years that I have been using the Internet, and especially in the earlier years, there have been many opportunities to take advantage of back doors that were left wide open. It has been my personal ethic to always pass up the back door and enter through the front, but did I in fact have the right to enter through the back if I chose to do so?

One school of thought says that any data that has not been secured is automatically free to everyone. This thinking is flawed. If I leave my laptop alone in the library while I search for a book, is it free to the first person who comes along? They might take it, but they can expect penalties. A peeping Tom also takes information that is publicly available, but they can expect punishment as well.

There is an ethical right to take information that was intended to be given. If the intention was for the information to remain private, then ethically the public has no right to it. In most cases the intent will be obvious, but where it is not, the tie should go to privacy.

The Future of Genealogy

Will the work of genealogy ever be completed? There are an estimated 100 billion people who have ever lived on the Earth. In 1998 there were 13 billion names in the largest genealogical database. Supposing, perhaps optimistically, that by 2008 this has increased to 20 billion names, 1 in every 5 people who have ever lived on the Earth are accounted for. How much farther can computers and existing records take us? Where will future data emerge to help us track down the other 4/5ths of the Earths inhabitants? How can we ever hope to track down those who lived in societies without records, or societies of which we have no knowledge? Perhaps the answer is in our genes. Is it possible to study genetics and infer ancestors that must have existed? For this, I have no answer, merely conjecture.