CALEA compliance
Back in May 2006, you will recall, the FCC issued an order saying that facilities-based broadband Internet access providers and providers of interconnected VoIP services were subject to CALEA. A legal challenge to FCC's statutory acumen had been filed, but (inexplicably) failed in June 2006. (FCC apparently read CALEA while standing on its collective head — many posts on that here.)
The deadline for compliance is May 14, 2007, but no one knows what compliance means.
I've seen messages from the askcalea.net industry forum (access to which is controlled by the FBI) that indicate that some vendors of “trusted third party” compliance services think that all providers have to work through them — and some think that merely capturing packets and sending them to law enforcement will fulfill the statute's requirements.
Okay, so this may seem like narrow inside baseball, but it's not. If law enforcement isn't content with a stream of packets, but instead forces small providers and VoIP companies to work through third-party vendors, that's a big cost-shifting exercise. The big guys are fine with this, I'm sure. So are the vendors.
The Act does say that the government is not authorized to require “any specific design of equipment, facilities, services, features, or system configurations to be adopted by any provider …” and is not authorized “to prohibit the adoption of any equipment, facility, service, or feature by any provider …”. But it's all up in the air.
Big wiki day
Today all of my students (in two classes) simultaneously tried to post to a class wiki. I think, all in all, things went rather well. There were a few problems — someone accidentally put their comment in the navigation bar — but more comments were posted than not. So that's a victory.
Next: commenting and linking! I'm looking forward to the time when more of my students discover they can comment directly on someone else's post (politely, in italics or different fonts), and that they can link to anything online from the wiki. And at some point someone will figure out how to reformat the entire thing so that it looks a lot better. Perhaps someone will want to do a podcast about each class and link to it from the wiki.
We're on our way. This is a good moment to point to AboutUs.org and the Wikipedia List of Wikis.