Monthly Archives: November 2005

Monoculture Byproducts

Three and a half years ago, I remarked:

In the late nineteenth century an aphid-like insect, Phylloxera vastatrix, destroyed most of the world’s vineyards, leading to the little-known fact that most French wines today are actually grown from Texas grapevine stock. The company that knows where to get disease-resistant vine stock will be in demand.
— Monoculture Considered Harmful, by John S. Quarterman, First Monday, volume 7, number 2 (February 2002),

Well, it turns out that back then, something else became in demand, as well:

In 1874, the French sipped 700,000 liters of the stuff; by the turn of the century, consumption had shot up to 36 million liters, driven in part by a phylloxera infestation that had devastated the wine-grape harvest.
— The Mystery of the Green Menace by Brian Ashcraft, Wired, Issue 13.11, November 2005.

That something else, the Green Menace, was absinthe.

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Historical Amnesia

At a recent talk Dan Geer mentioned that CERT no longer keeps archives of vulnerabilities or incidents since 2003. Apparently they thought the data they were getting was not good enough anymore. This is very unfortunate, since it makes tracking trends and correlating them with other data impossible for years after 2003. It’s hard to handle risk if you don’t know what’s happening.

-jsq

Wireless Cook County

A densely populated county goes wireless:
Cook County, Ill., is among the local governments jumping on the wireless bandwagon in a big way – in fact, it may well be the first county in the United States to go all wireless for its public safety communications system with help from IBM.
The suburban Chicago county has tapped IBM Global Services technology and systems to build a wireless government communications system that covers the county and all of its 128 municipalities.
“Their desire was to be the first wireless county in the country, and I believe that is the case,” says Diana Hage, director of wireless services at IBM.
— Cook County Goes All Wireless with IBM, By Karen Brown, WirelessWeek, November 1, 2005
That last part isn’t true; since as we’ve seen multiple counties in Oregon participate in a wireless network. Funny how big metro regions always think they’re first, even if a rural area has already done it. Nonetheless, it’s good to see a densely populated county doing this. They plan to use it for emergency communications. And for video from patrol cars, which raises various interesting questions, such as whether individual citizens will start doing video from their cars.

-jsq