Burlington Vermont’s experiment in municipal fiber was once thought to be shining example of why muni-fiber broadband was such a great idea. Those dreams have now turned into a $50 million nightmare for the tax payers of Burlington Vermont the majority of whom don’t use the service.

Municipal fiber is seen by many as the holy-grail of broadband utopia, but like utopia it hasn’t had much success in the real world. This paper examines the challenges of implementing community owned fiber and why tax payers are getting stuck with a huge debt.

I generally admire the work coming from the SANS Institute, but Alan Paller’s call for software liability (via Deb Shinder) for security vulnerabilities just doesn’t make sense.  That’s because software security is like a bank vault which are rated by the time and effort required to break, but none are rated unbreakable.
While SANS is right to point out the sloppiness of the software industry, calling for software liability is irresponsible.  Even the most secure software in the world can be hacked if there was a sufficient reward.
I can understand holding …

One of the standard arguments for government subsidies of tomorrow’s media is that as the news moves online, advertising is not following so journalism will need new sources of funding. But the research company Outsell this week predicted that digital marketing will outpace print ads for the first time in 2010. Smart media companies will adapt their business models to seize their share of the ever-expanding online ad pie.

Randolph J. May writes that the health care public option and what he calls the “Internet public option” share similar threads.

The FCC yesterday announced its plan to create a volunteer “digital literacy corps.” But based on the government’s track record in implementing a similar technology-oriented volunteer plan, the National Emergency Technology Guard, the idea will never meet the FCC’s lofty expectations. Congress authorized NET Guard in 2003, but it took five years just to launch a pilot program.

Amtrak is actively blocking downloads and video streams – going so far as to prevent YouTube embeds in pages you load, and redirecting links to downloads.

A lot of people like to claim ISPs are only interested in network management as a pretense for preventing competition with their video offering. Yet here is a perfect example of a privately owned network choosing to manage congestion by limiting downloads and video – absent any competing video service.

Conventional wisdom says that more innovation for applications on the Internet must involve much more bandwidth. But once we understand the economics of video on the Internet, we quickly begin to understand why applications will never be high bandwidth.

The FCC and the John S. and James. L. Knight Foundation today are hosting a “digital inclusion” summit in order to draw attention to America’s push for expanding high-speed Internet access. The summit is being held a week before the FCC’s scheduled release of a national broadband plan. Speakers will include: FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski; Commissioners Meredith Attwell Baker, Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn; and members of Congress. Keep a browser open here for live updates.

The shift to the Internet video distribution presents a formidable engineering challenge for the Internet because of the massive bandwidth requirements of unicast video distribution.  Unlike broadcast communication technologies where data is transmitted once to many people, unicasting requires a new data transmission for each recipient.  So while a 15 megabit per second (Mbps) HD television show being broadcast to 100,000 people in a city only requires 15 Mbps of network capacity, a 2.25 Mbps YouTube video being unicast to 100,000 people over the Internet would require 225,000 Mbps which is …