Weather maps (we had a big storm here a while ago - SkyWarn was all over it) are interesting - the old ones are not useful and you really almost want to stream/multicast new ones. We have not tested multicast on our systems. One idea is to stream the weather feed to a local server and then let folks share it locally. It would seem another weather application is to upload streams of remote observer weather- the actual wall cloud etc.
The one thing we see- people are used to "live" updates on breaking news events and live video streams.
On the firewall question, modern expolits seem to utilize outbound sessions. Conflicker attemps to contact several hundred out of several thousand possible domains? On a thin network, Windows Update is also a problem as 80 meg of updates @90kbs is a big issue. And what does a firewall do when one of your partners brings an infected laptop and plugs it in behind the firewall as happens to us annually.
The philosophy we have is to find out what the actual public service job is, and do it with different tools than the agencies already have.
