Internet

The UW has decided to go to VOIP. The plans aren't finalized--or very far along, from what I hear. There's a deadline for contract renewal for the old system, and it isn't going to budge whether we're ready or not.

Pretty much everything else runs on the net, why not the phones too?

That makes the net a single point of failure. I hope yesterday's attacks suggested something to the powers that be. We have dumb phones, but also have a tablet, which doesn't handle phone calls but which can handle Skype. Provided the net is up. At least mobile phones aren't run over the net yet.

All the wonderful ideas: pay your bills with smartphones, pay bus fare with smartphones, use smartphone for ID, use smartphone for RFID key entry--do the inventors have any notion how fragile their system is?