I recently read a New York Times story on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that traced the history of the attempts to rebuild Ground Zero and all the varied interest groups lobbying to get their way. In recounting all the sordid details and political brinksmanship, the story came to a conclusion: There was no one just making it happen, no leadership, despite all the leaders in the room.

That's how I feel about the health of our telecom network. All the well-lobbied interests are getting their way - TV is coming to a telco near you, if you fit the demographics. If you are in Maine, New Hampshire or Vermont, forget about it - Verizon wants to sell you off. If you live in rural areas, you may not even get broadband.

I live in Maine, so I'm going to get hit there by Verizon's moves. I also live in rural Connecticut, where I trade off rustic tranquillity for the fact that my cell phone hardly works and I cannot get DSL.

But I have a cable modem, and each day it tries to send me all sorts of things I don't want in the form of spam. Like everyone else, my company has installed all kinds of gear to deal with spam. The latest is a tremendous piece of hardware from Barracuda Networks that stops spam cold from coming into the corporate e-mail servers. We feel protected with our TippingPoint/NetScreen/Barracuda Networks front line - pretty much the cream of crop, according to our research.

Then one of our test servers for applications got hacked. Turns out a software update in the Web server was never set properly and allowed a hole to open. Shortly thereafter, I got a call from Mu Security, which briefed me on its new offering that will hammer at your systems to see if they fall over. Our systems are mission critical, so we'll probably be talking to Mu some more to see how many holes we have that we don't know about.   

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