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Worm Shuts Down CNN, ABC and New York Times

The Zotob worm shut down Windows 2000 operating systems around the country today, including the computers at CNN, ABC, and the New York Times.

Take a look at this article from Outside The Beltway Blog. Here is an excerpt.

A computer worm shut down computer systems running Windows 2000 software across the United States on Tuesday, hitting computers at CNN, ABC and The New York Times. Around 5 p.m. computers began crashing at CNN facilities in New York and Atlanta. ABC said its problems began in New York about 1:30 p.m. The Caterpillar Co. in Peoria, Illinois also was reportedly affected.

David Perry of Trend Micro said that the attack seems to have been triggered by a new worm, called worm--rbot.ebq. He said the symptoms -- computers repeatedly shutting down and rebooting -- was consistent with that virus. Johannes Ullrich, director of the Sans Institute, a network security firm in Jacksonville, Florida, said the outage also may have been caused by the Zotob worm, which was released last weekend. "It will connect to a control server to ask for instructions. It scans network neighborhoods and tries to infect them, as well," Ullrich said.

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Telecom Watch

Ted Glanzer is one of the newer additions to the TMC team and has been covering service provider news and regulation for us for a few months. He is doing a great job and has a Telecom Watch blog you should definitely subscribe to. As an attorney he has a great way of talking complex issues and distilling them into every day words that are rapidly digested. He has a great sense of humor that is great to have in this business so while you are learning you can also have a chuckle or two.

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A9 Maps

You know what a great map idea is? To go out and take photos of lots of different buildings and tie them to a mapping service so that people looking for directions will also get visual cues so they know they are on the right track an better yet will recognize their final destinations. A9 recently unveiled such a mapping service and it is awesome!

You can go to an address or pan a magnifying glass over a map and the images pop up on the right hand side of the screen. They then start to pan, giving you a full view of both sides of the street – a full 360 degree view.

I already envision people being upset that they are in these photos and the lawsuits that may follow.

Some Views of 46th Street in Manhattan

A9 is a division of Amazon.com that does search. It has a small fraction of the search market and looks for ways to differentiate its service as opposed to hitting Google and Yahoo head on.

The service currently only has photos of some of the larger cities at the moment which may limit its usefulness. I will definitely try the service out the next time I need to get directions to New York.

You may also want to check out Microsoft’s Virtual Earth service if mapping interests you.

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WiFi Telephony

Years ago I saw the future of VoIP as being wireless and WiFi in particular was curious to me. To my amazement URLs like VoWiFi.com and WiFiTelephony.com were available and I registered them. At the time, VoIP was so out of favor it was ridiculous. I looked up the exact date, it was May 2, 2002 to be exact. At this time a number of other magazines covering VoIP went out of business and closed down completely. TMC’s Internet Telephony Magazine was the only pub left covering the VoIP market and we were first by the way.

All the communications show owners other than TMC had bailed on the market as well selling their assets to Key3Media. This included VoiceCon/BCR and VON. This company subsequently went though bankruptcy and is now MediaLive. TMC’s Internet Telephony Conference & Expo remains the only show in our space that was never sold off.

It was a lonely place covering the VoIP space and many had their doubts that anyone would ever use IP telephony for anything. At least that is what I kept hearing from industry “experts.” I knew they were all wrong.

Now everyone has a VoIP magazine or seems to be focusing heavily on it. The most exciting thing I see is when general interest pubs and information technology magazines in particular spend up to 40% of their editorial space covering VoIP. I just can’t believe it.

The premise for this piece is that VoIP is going wireless and getting back to that idea, Instat, today sent a release out that says that Dual-mode cellular/WiFi handsets will be the key driver to mass consumer adoption of VoIP. By 2009, In-Stat forecasts that over 66 million cellular/WiFi handsets will be in operation.

“Wireless high-speed broadband access, unified messaging, video, and dual-network cellular/WiFi services are making the mobile triple play a consumer market reality,” says Keith Nissen, In-Stat analyst. “The key to successfully capturing the market for these next-generation personalized services is control of the end-point device.”

Here are some bullets from the release.

* Worldwide, consumer VoIP subscribers using wireless IP phones will grow from 2% currently to 73% in 2009.

* Based on competition from mobile carriers without wireline operations, Europe will be the largest initial market for dual-mode smartphones.

* While mass production of dual-mode sets is not scheduled until 2007, an In-Stat market survey found that over 80% of businesses have an interest in the technology.

Interesting a few months back I moderated a VoIP security panel for N+I and when I asked about WiFi telephony very few people in the audience were interested. Either I had a shy audience or Instat is way ahead of the curve. I have no doubt that WiFi telephony will be the predominant way we communicate in our homes and offices one day but it may take some time to work out the kinks.

I received a package from VOX Communications yesterday (a company that I own shares in) and it includes a new WiFi phone that I am looking forward to testing.

What excites me the most and gets me out of bed in the mornings is seeing all the different things I foresaw happening, actually happening. When I told vendors in the industry back in 2002 that WiFi telephony was going to be the wave of the future, they told me their situations wee so dire that they can’t even think about investing in this area. They further went on to say that perhaps the ROI wasn’t there. There was lots of pessimism in the industry at that time.

Everyone is getting into WiFi telephony. It is amazing how this technology has reached 100% acceptance in the market. I am still waiting of course for my dotcom moment… When someone comes along and tells my one of the URLs is a must have and writes a big fat check for the ownership privileges. Until then, I won’t quit my day job – And when I finally retire on that tropical island, I promise to make sure it has WiFi and will take my WiFi telephony handset with me.

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