Scott Bradner

Last month, Japan became at least the third country after Israel and Finland to have more people subscribing to mobile phones than fixed-line phones.

I just got back from the Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Adelaide, Australia, where I went fully wireless for the first time. This stuff actually works, but can be a great distraction.

The information is only just coming out, but it seems like there has been another massive theft of credit card information from an e-commerce site.

More than a few people made a pilgrimage to Tokyo on the first weekend in March. Most of them were only after the most realistic way to cut up a monster and see blood splatter. But at the same time, they may have seen a big part of the Internet's future.

Every Internet user survey I have seen says that the thing users worry about most on the Net is not losing their credit card number, but losing their privacy. This concern among users is not a secret. So why do we keep seeing announcements of yet another company going out of its way to make sure Internet users continue to worry about this?

I got a call from a reporter the other day. He wanted to talk about the denial-of-service (DoS) attacks on prominent Internet sites, including Yahoo Inc., CNN and eBay Inc. He did have some idea what was going on (not always the case when I get such a call), but he seemed to want me to say that the architecture of the Internet needed to be changed to deal with such attacks. I declined to do so.

A week before Christmas, Toys 'R' Us Inc. announced that it was not going to be able to deliver all the toys that had been ordered over the Web in time for Christmas morning. The TV news shows played the story for all it was worth - and more - giving Toys 'R' Us quite a black eye. But if I put on my conspiracy theory hat, this sequence of events makes a lot of sense.

The beginning of a new year, decade and century seems to get we pundits looking back to history while at the same time trying to predict the future, and I am not immune.