It was 50 years ago today, July 10, 1962, that a Delta rocket lifted off to carry a payload that began a revolution in the way the world communicates. What was launched that day was Telstar - the first telecommunications satellite.

Telstar was small, only about 34 inches in diameter (although it actually had 72 sides). Solar panels occupied most of the faces and charged 19 batteries to power the electronics, protected inside a 20-inch aluminium tube, that consisted of an amplifier to boost the received signal about ten billion times before it was retransmitted. The original plans from Bell Labs called for the satellite to relay two channels of television, but weight restrictions of the Delta launch rocket meant this was cut back to a single channel.

One of the first Telstar broadcasts was President Kennedy's press conference across the Atlantic to Europe.  The name even sparked the name of an instrumental by the British Group, The Tornados and a video game that looked like a clone of Pong.

But it was Telstar and satellite transmission that allowed for instantaneous communication – such as long-distance phone calls and real-time international TV – to become an everyday reality. The phrase “live, via satellite” is only possible with Telstar and the machines that followed it into space.

Happy 50th birthday!

Remember that experiment that Google announced last year to build a 1Gbps network in Kansas City?  (It is, in fact, underway.)

Well, it seems it's gotten some visibility in Washington.  The President has just announced a new initiative called US Ignite, a new national program that will partner corporate and nonprofit entities in 25 cities to "create a national network of communities and campuses with ultra-fast, programmable broadband services, operating at speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second." Read more here and here.

Perhaps this will improve our ranking on the global broadband delivery scales.  It is also my hope to get 1Gbps to my house soon, but I don't think we are one of the top 25 cities.  :-(

Sorry.  I just can't help myself.  I saw another great article on cyber security this morning, and had to share this.  Sure, there has been lots of stuff in the news lately about Flame - a supersophisticated set of malware code that is now linked to the previously reported Stuxnet.  (That in and of itself might cause one to pause... how does this stuff get in out in to the press?  And why?)

Anyway, it is worth noting (again) that the Internet can be a dangerous place, and the state of IT security and their attempts to keep up is a struggle at best.  Just in case you may doubt this, here is some proof (which I've copied from the above article to save you some time):

1. More than 1 million computers are successfully exploited every single day. That's one every 14 seconds.
2. 39 percent of the world's computers are infected by malware of some type.
3. 90 percent of the world's companies have suffered network breaches in the past year.
4. One out of every seven adults has his or her online financial information, identity, or passwords compromised every year, according to Privacy Rights. That adds up to 280 million breached records in the last eight years.
5. 82 percent of malicious websites are hosted on hacked legitimate websites.
6. It's no longer unusual for a single hacking event to cause more than $100 million in damages. The attack against Sony is a fine example.
7. Hackivist groups such as Anonymous routinely break into the world's largest companies and have even hacked the global authorities investigating them.
8. Hacks resulting in millions of leaked passwords are so numerous, they practically go unnoticed. The successful attack against LinkedIn is a good example.
9. A single worm, SQL Slammer, was able to infect almost every possible unpatched computer it targeted in 10 minutes -- and this was back in 2003.
10. Malware is popping up on mobile platforms as though we've learned absolutely nothing over the 25 years of PC hacking.
11. Spam rates are still above 65 percent, nearly 10 years after passing the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.
12. One out of every 14 Internet downloads is malicious.
13. The annual cost of cyber crime is estimated at $114 billion.
14. Successful prosecution rates for Internet cyber criminals is less than 0.01 percent.
15. Hacking by nations is so pervasive that Google is now automatically alerting users of potential state-driven threats.
16. Stuxnet, Duqu, and now Flame prove that complex malware can bypass any computer security defense.

Just a lot of bad, scary things out there, eh?

Perhaps you heard about it in the news or saw some of the national headlines.  

This week, a file containing 6.5 million unique hashed passwords from LinkedIn accounts appeared in an online forum based in Russia. According to reports, more than 200,000 of these passwords have reportedly been cracked so far.  So, if you are on LinkedIn, and have not changed your passord, make sure you do so.  (You can check out our wiki for some guidance.)

As a business-oriented social network with 160 million users, this is frightening.  (Bad enough Facebook can be a security nightmare.)  But what is more frightening, and surprising - at least to me - was this report that while LinkedIn had senior Vice Presidents for Engineering and Operations, they did not have either a CIO or Chief Information Security Officer (CISO).  As a CISSP (#49990), I am always on the look out for reports like these, as well as global reports such as those just out this week from RSA, the annual Verizon Data Breach report and the annual Global State of Information Security report.  

All of these say the say thing - cybercrime is continually on the rise, social networks are notorious for risk, and one must be ever vigilant.

So remember, be careful out there.