Tweets a plenty were posted announcing that Wikipedia and LinkedIn were down, but one tweet wondered what would happen if Twitter also went down! We are so dependent on these Social Media tools that when these sites go down the communications also disappears….except probably text messages, phone calls, or even face-to-face conversations. If Social Media sites going down for a short time cause shock waves just image what would happened if the President flipped the “Internet Kill Switch?” Or if a Cyber War totally disabled the Internet and Social Media? These events only re-enforce how vulnerable the Internet is and how critical it is that our government does everything possible to protect the Internet.

We All Know that Computers Will Fail

After working with computers for more than 40 years one thing is absolutely clear to me, every computer will fail since that is the inherent design…that is, every component will fail at some point since each component has a mean time between failure. So Internet system designers take into account system failures to avoid Internet down time, or at least minimize down time. Because of the nature of computer technology and its inherent design that they will fail it’s not really much of a surprise that Wikipedia, LinkedIn, and other Social Media sites are reported down from time to time. However we have become so dependent upon Social Media that we are all at a loss about how to communicate during down times!

Good News – More US Broadband

Recent reports announced “that $795 million in grants and loans for broadband deployment projects across the US in all 50 states from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the US Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS). The Texas Department of Agriculture recently announced that “More than 96 percent of Texas households have access to home broadband service; however, a quarter of a million households in the Lone Star State – more than all of the households in Vermont – lack access to this critical service.” However if that were really true then it’s unlikely that the NTIA and RUS would be spending so much money. Rural Texas and US do not have broadband services as I know my own personal experience in central Texas, just check the ConnectedTexas.org website to see. We will have 100% broadband coverage in the US someday, and it’s great that the federal government is helping expand broadband.

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