digiblade

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Julian Bleecker: Manifesto for Networked Objects

Julian Bleecker has finally posted his "Manifesto for Networked Objects" in which he discusses "Why Things Matter". Julian elaborates on a variety of issues connected to the "Internet of Things", populated by "Blogjects" or "Spimes" that collect and disseminate information, making us eventually rather live "in" than "on" the internet.
Besides being highly recommended reading in this case, a manifesto is something that is published to incite debate about the subject. What's your take on the networked world of objects? Will things become relevant in the creation of "meaning", will they become elevated to agents with the status of "first-class citizens", even advancing "trans-species dialogue"? Or is the creation (and consumption) of relevant information exclusive to human agents (read: bloggers)?
What's for certain: it is always good for artists, designers and researchers to write a manifesto when they feel that something big is in the air.
Related: Bruce Sterling's "Shaping Things", Too smart objects, LIFT06.

Monday, February 27, 2006

Communal Shareholding and the relationship of P2P

Michel Bauwens takes us further in this explorative journey into better understanding the true nature, characteristics and potential value of peer-to-peer (P2P). In particular, communal shareholding and the relationship of P2P with the concept of a gift economy are explored. Finally, relationships between authority, hierarchy and effective forms of P2P and participation are analyzed providing fascinating insight into the relations between hierarchy, co-operation and autonomy. As he concludes: "The use-value created by P2P projects is generated through free cooperation, without coercion toward the producers, and users have free access to the resulting use value. The legal infrastructure that we have described above creates an 'Information Commons.' "
P2P and the Other Modes of Production The framework of our comparison is the Relational Models theory of anthropologist Alan Page Fiske, discussed in his major work Structures of Social Life.
The fact that modes of production are embedded in inter-subjective relations -- that is, characterized by particular relational combinations -- provides the necessary framework to distinguish P2P.
According to Fiske, there are four basic types of inter-subjective dynamics, valid across time and space, in his own words: "People use just four fundamental models for organizing most aspects of sociality most of the time in all cultures. These models are" :

  1. Communal Sharing

  2. Authority Ranking

  3. Equality Matching

  4. and Market Pricing
Communal Sharing (CS) is a relationship in which people treat some dyad or group as equivalent and undifferentiated with respect to the social domain in question. Examples are people using a commons (CS with respect to utilization of the particular resource), people intensely in love (CS with respect to their social selves), people who "ask not for whom the bell tolls, for it tolls for thee" (CS with respect to shared suffering and common well-being), or people who kill any member of an enemy group indiscriminately in retaliation for an attack (CS with respect to collective responsibility).
In Authority Ranking (AR) people have asymmetric positions in a linear hierarchy in which subordinates defer, respect, and (perhaps) obey, while superiors take precedence and take pastoral responsibility for subordinates. Examples are:
  1. military hierarchies (AR in decisions, control, and many other matters)

  2. ancestor worship (AR in offerings of filial piety and expectations of protection and enforcement of norms)

  3. monotheistic religious moralities (AR for the definition of right and wrong by commandments or will of God)

  4. social status systems such as class or ethnic rankings (AR with respect to social value of identities), and rankings such as sports team standings (AR with respect to prestige).
AR relationships are based on perceptions of legitimate asymmetries, not coercive power; they are not inherently exploitative (although they may involve power or cause harm).
In Equality Matching (EM) relationships people keep track of the balance or difference among participants and know what would be required to restore balance. Common manifestations are:
  1. turn-taking

  2. one-person one-vote elections

  3. equal share distributions

  4. and vengeance based on an-eye-for-an-eye, a-tooth-for-a-tooth
Examples include:
  1. sports and games (EM with respect to the rules, procedures, equipment and terrain)

  2. baby-sitting co-ops (EM with respect to the exchange of child care)

  3. and restitution in-kind (EM with respect to righting a wrong).
Market Pricing relationships are oriented to socially meaningful ratios or rates such as prices, wages, interest, rents, tithes, or cost-benefit analyses. Money need not be the medium, and Market Pricing relationships need not be selfish, competitive, maximizing, or materialistic -- any of the four models may exhibit any of these features. Market Pricing relationships are not necessarily individualistic; a family may be the CS or AR unit running a business that operates in an MP mode with respect to other enterprises.
Examples are:
  1. property that can be bought, sold, or treated as investment capital (land or objects as MP)

  2. marriages organized contractually or implicitly in terms of costs and benefits to the partners

  3. prostitution (sex as MP)

  4. bureaucratic cost-effectiveness standards (resource allocation as MP)

  5. utilitarian judgments about the greatest good for the greatest number, or standards of equity in judging entitlements in proportion to contributions (two forms of morality as MP)

  6. considerations of "spending time" efficiently, and estimates of expected kill ratios (aggression as MP).
Every type of society or civilization is a mixture of these four modes, but it can plausibly be argued that one mode is always dominant and imprints the other subservient modes. Historically, the first dominant mode was kinship or lineage based reciprocity, the so-called tribal gift economies.
The key relational aspect was 'belonging'. Gifts created obligations and relations beyond the next of kin, creating a wider field of exchange. Agricultural or feudal-type societies were dominated by authority ranking, that is, they were based on allegiance. Finally, it is clear that the capitalist economy is dominated by market pricing.
Thanks again to Robin Good


My earlier post is : HERE

Alarming Phishing Trends

Remember:NO REPUTABLE ORGANIZATION WILL EVER SEND YOU AN EMAIL THAT INVITES YOU CLICK A LINK TO IT.
A legitimate email will invite you to browse yourself to their website.  it will not provide a shortcut.
When you get such an email, block the sender.
The number of phishing Web sites skyrocketed in December, as did the number of sites designed to spread password-stealing badware, according to the most recent report from the Anti-Phishing Working Group.
The number of unique phishing sites jumped from 4,630 in November to 7,197 in December, a 55 percent increase. Online scam artists also targeted a wider range of companies in their phishing sites. One scam found at the end of 2005 targeted customers who shop at Wal-Mart's Web site, telling recipients that their accounts had been compromised.
Another notable phishing attack in December went out in an e-mail impersonating the Internal Revenue Service, linking to a bogus IRS site that claimed to offer recipients a way to check on the status of their tax refund. We've seen IRS phishing attacks before, and we are likely to see more of them in the weeks leading up to April 15.
December also brought a massive increase in phishing-based Trojan horse programs as well as keyloggers -- nasty programs designed to intercept sensitive information the victim enters into banking, e-commerce or Webmail accounts. According to the APWG, the number of Web sites using browser vulnerabilities to attempt keylogger installs exploded to at least 1,912 in December, up 83 percent from November.
That growth was spurred in large part by the discovery of two critical security flaws in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser -- MS05-054 and MS06-001 -- that allowed malicious Web sites to install software on the visitor's computer. The APWG report said its members spotted hundreds of sites using exploits for those vulnerabilities to install keystroke-logging software.
By Brian Krebs

More Commentary on Network Neutrality

By Martin Geddes
I’ll shut up about network neutrality some time, but the craziness of the whole think just gets me riled.
Imagine that a ‘neutrality’ rule is imposed in the US. Verizon and at&t’s regional market power goes unchanged, and the cablecos are the only competition. Continued artificial spectrum scarcity is bought with some skillful lobbying. Don’t expect any price competition, because game theory tells you that you need a minimum of 3 players to de-stablise a cartel (even if an unspoken one).
If I’m Ed or Ivan, what should I do next? Easy. Raise prices for “Internet” access. And put in place a system not interconnected at the IP layer, where every service has to get through a gateway. Sell this “Web + mail” Net at a reduced price. (It looks just like the restricted GPRS gateways we live with today, so everything’s off the shelf and the regulatory rules are predictable and favourable). Want to run Vonage? Fine, $5/month, we’ve cut a deal with them, and know how to proxy their SIP traffic. Want to run Skype? Tough, they don’t support our proxy.
Note that they ARE NOT SELLING ‘INTERNET’. Your neutrality rules don’t apply: it’s entirely a private IP network with some application layer gateways. Unless you believe that such network architectures should be illegal, too. Whaddayamean, you didn’t think of this in your “interconnected Internet Protocol network” definition? ;)
I suspect that decreasing the number of people with “Internet” access isn’t the intent of neutrality advocates. The assumption seems to be that the incumbents won’t react to the obvious incentives placed before them. Lots of mini Chinas.
By the way, does the ‘no application discrimination’ rule mean my Tesco Mobile data service is illegal (ignoring the 4000 mile jurisdictional leap)? Their main selling point is cheap circuit voice minutes. The data offering is a minor feature to their users. It’s built on IP, but the only destinations allowed are those on the ports for HTTP/HTTPS. Do you think a neutrality rule would make Tesco open up full Net access? Or just junk the whole data side? Why do you feel that I should be prevented from buying such a service from Tesco, presuming the limitations are made clear?
Is the Internet the only networked good deserving of a neutrality rule? There’s a lot of network-effect industries out there. Should the makers of USB-enabled goods not be allowed (by force of law) to set license fees that depend on the application? Why doesn’t this ‘neutrality’ logic stop at exchanges over Internet Protocol? At what size of player does neutrality no longer apply?
What evidence have “neutrality” proponents have that it is better to treat the symptoms rather than causes of uncompetitive connectivity markets? Why is it so important to prevent a price signal of “MONOPOLY RENTS — OVER HERE! COME AND GET IT!” leaking out? How come the forces that scream blue murder when it comes to freedom of speech fall silent when it comes to freedom of contract?
Now there are some things that could be done that would be fair and constructive. There should be “full disclosure” rules, much like with credit card offers. I would also suggest that some “regulated terms” be used that compulsarily be included in all marketing material, e.g.:

  1. “Full Internet access”. Does what it says on the tin. Servers, VPNs, pr0n, whatever you like. Any default filters can be turned off by the user (a sensible compromise, IMHO).

  2. “Partial Internet access”. Anything less than full Internet access where end-to-end IP connectivity is in place. Filters can be at the IP layer, or in Terms of Service.

  3. “Restricted Internet access”. Access is provided via proxies to selected services, and not end-to-end IP connectivity.
(There would be common exceptions for illegal content, protection of networks from attack, etc. And some special rules would apply to content delivery network caches.)
Other progressive, constructive suff to campaign for? Switch all Universal Service funds from one application (landline PSTN) to connectivity. Unbundle the identity space (E164) from the telephony service using some cunning privacy-enhanced version of ENUM (I’ve got a few ideas…). The usual spectrum stuff. Oh, and give the FCC commissioners a big bonus package if they manage to abolish themselves ;)
But the last thing you want is a neutrality rule. As Vint Cerf’s Senate testimony said:
nothing less than the future of the Internet is at stake.
Indeed. But in the exact opposite way to which he suggests.

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

How to Get Rid of DRM: Content as a Utility

Sell the Hardware \ Give Away the Content
If only I could've been there to stand up and clap:
"Why are you such a bunch of big girls?" asked Birch. "Why don't you tell the content owners to just get stuffed?" He continued unabated: "You're too seduced by the content industry, Hollywood is not even a $10 billion industry. Hollywood is small compared to the telecom industry. Why don't you take a stronger line? Consumers don't want DRM at all. You can't sell DRM."
Thus the EET reports the outburst of audience member David Birch, who stood up during the Q&A part of a panel on DRM at the 3GSM conference in Barcelona and let rip at the telecom industry panelists. David Benjamin, who filed the story for the EET, reports that Birch also told the panelists that telecommunications industry is 15 times the size of the content industry.
In a later column at the EET, Spencer Chin approvingly cites the story of Birch's outburst, and manfully (though not entirely successfully) attempts to laud Birch for "stirring the pot" while simultaneously censuring name-calling at professional conferences.
I say bring on the name-calling. In fact, if Mr. Birch happens to read this post, we'd like to formally offer to let him have the mike for a moment so that he can preach, heckle, and harangue a bit more in a guest editorial on content vs. the carriers. Just drop us an email.
For my part, the coverage of Birch's rant definitely got me thinking. The total cost of Peter Jackson's King Kong was somewhere north of US$200 million. That's quite a bit, but such big-budget blockbusters are rare, and you can make and market a Hollywood movie for well under half that figure. Indeed, Brokeback Mountain had a production budget of only US$14 million.
In the tech industry, the price of a new fab is currently around US$5 billion, a price that puts such facilities out of reach for all but the biggest players like Intel and IBM. Still, that's 25 King Kongs, or over 350 Brokeback Mountains, or 1,000 five million dollar episodes of a big-budget HBO series like Rome or The Sopranos. My point is that, for even just half the price of a single 65nm fab, the tech industry could buy a few small studios and just start throwing tons of free content at the world. Or, for the full price of a fab, they could fund almost a decade worth of low- and medium-budget content to give away as an inducement for people to buy hardware.
Intel, IBM, and other tech companies with large investments in Linux know full well that you can sell a lot of hardware by giving away the software. Why not give away the content too? How many dollars worth of media center, home networking, and home network attached storage hardware could you sell if consumers knew that there were terabytes of free, unencumbered, high-definition, processor-intensive, storage-hungry, bandwidth burning, digital content awaiting them on the Internet—content that they could copy, share, and shuffle around among as many newly purchased media devices as they like?
I'll freely admit that 90% of what I know about the cost of Hollywood movies and TV shows I learned from Google over the past two hours. I'll also admit that drawing big-picture conclusions about how the tech industry could crush the movie industry based on a comparison of the cost of a fab to the cost of some movies and TV shows has a certain "late night dorm room bull session" quality to it. Nonetheless, I stand by my general claim that, for the price of what a single tech company invests in a single new fab, the hardware and telecommunications industries as a whole could dump enough free digital content on the world to fuel a very profitable explosion in consumer hardware purchasing.
So c'mon, tech industry. Why let Hollywood push you around and, even worse, hold hostage tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars in potential sales? If investments in open source can pay off in server hardware sales, why couldn't investments in free movies and music pay off in home entertainment, networking, and storage hardware sales?  

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Another Take on Network Neutrality on the Same Day Online Open Television Platform Launches

Paul Kapustka strips the Network Neutrality issue down it its real core:
The RBOCs and cable will use all their firepower to try to keep video captive, to make money off it the way they did off voice.
Americans love TV. They even had to invent the TiVo to extract the 0.1% precious metal from the toxic sludge. Just as Lessig lamented his Grokster framing as being too abstract, maybe this neutrality issue is getting too academic. OK, you and I know it’s really about applications not yet invented. The 2040 fridge DNA sensor that takes a quick peek at the week-old chicken, sequences the genomes on its surface and refers the whole lot back in real-time to biohazard central for an opinion, or whatever.
For now, it’s all about TV. Will the goggle box become the Google box, or not?
Why not call a spade a manual trench digging utensil and point out that the “triple” play involves telcos selling captive video over duopoly lines, which is direct competition to alternative Internet-based suppliers (whom they would like to cut out of the picture (pun intended). (Of course, “triple” play is itself an idea caught in legacy telco-think, in that there isn’t a total unbundling of all the stages of consumption, and fragmentation into a zillion aggregators, filters, distributors, etc. enabled by the uber-flexible Stupid Network.)
Full disclosure: I went cold-turkey on the medium in 1999, don’t own a TV, so I don’t know what I’m talking about. And if you are still reading, Today is indeed the official launch day for the newest and final piece of Participatory Culture democratic television platform. The platform includes four key components:
1) The Democracy Player (formerly DTV for Mac)
2) Videobomb
3) Broadcast Machine
4) The Channel Guide
The new Participatory Culture platform is fully open-source and built on open-standards in the true open and interoperable spirit of the Internet. This could be the beginning of something very big.


Google Says Beware of Google Desktop Beta

It’s official, Google admits that the latest version of Google Desktop is a security risk to organizations. Businesses have been warned by research company Gartner that the latest Google Desktop Beta has an "unacceptable security risk," and Google agrees.
On Feb. 9, Google unveiled Google Desktop 3, a free, downloadable program that includes an option to let users search across multiple computers for files. To do that, the application automatically stores copies of files, for up to a month, on Google servers. From there, copies are transferred to the user's other computers for archiving. The data is encrypted in transmission and while stored on Google servers.
The risk to enterprises, according to Gartner, lies in how this shared information is pooled by Google. The data is transferred to a remote server, where it is stored and can then be shared between users for up to 30 days.
Gartner said in a report on Thursday that the "mere transport (of data) outside the enterprise will represent an unacceptable security risk to many enterprises," as intellectual property could be transported out of the business.
Google told ZDNet UK on Monday that it recognized the risk, and recommended that companies take action. "We recognize that this is a big issue for enterprise. Yes, it's a risk, and we understand that businesses may be concerned," said Andy Ku, European marketing manager for Google.
Google confirmed to ZDNet UK that data was temporarily transported outside of businesses when the Search Across Computers feature was used, and that this represented "as much of a security risk as e-mail does."
"Theoretically any intellectual property can be transferred outside of a company," Ku said. "We understand that there are a lot of security concerns about the Search Across Computers feature, but Google won't hold information unless the user or enterprise opts in (to the feature)."
Google said that security was the concern of individual businesses. "The burden falls on enterprises to look after security issues," Ku said. "Companies can disable the Search Across Computers facility."
Gartner said that sensitive documents may be inadvertently shared by workers, who may not have specialist knowledge of regulatory or security restrictions. Gartner has recommended that businesses use Google Desktop for Enterprise, as this allows systems administrators to centrally turn off the Search Across Computers feature, which it said should be "immediately disabled."
Companies "must also evaluate what they are allowing to be indexed, and whether they are comfortable that they can adequately bar the sharing of data with Google's servers," said Gartner.
Google agreed that Google Desktop Enterprise would better mitigate security risks. "If you're given a choice, choose Enterprise," said Ku.

Monday, February 20, 2006

P2P it’s more than a Software Distribution Model

As a matter of fact,  As political, economic, and social systems transform themselves into distributed networks, a new human dynamic is emerging: peer to peer (P2P). As P2P gives rise to the emergence of a third mode of production, a third mode of governance, and a third mode of property, it is poised to overhaul our political economy in unprecedented ways. Not since Marx identified the manufacturing plants of Manchester as the blueprint for the new capitalist society has there been a deeper transformation of the fundamentals of our social life. But, this is more of a tech blog than a political one (although the two increasingly interact). I will focus on:
P2P and the Netarchists
Peer to peer processes contribute to more specific forms of distributed capitalism. The massive use of open source software in business, enthusiastically supported by venture capital and large IT companies such as IBM, is creating a distributed software platform that will drastically undercut the monopolistic rents enjoyed by companies such as Microsoft and Oracle, while Skype and VoIP will drastically redistribute the telecom infrastructure. In addition, it also points to a new business model that is 'beyond' products, focusing instead on services associated with the nominally free FS/OS software model. Industries are gradually transforming themselves to incorporate user-generated innovation, and a new intermediation may occur around user-generated media. Many knowledge workers are choosing non-corporate paths and becoming mini-entrepreneurs, relying on an increasingly sophisticated participatory infrastructure, a kind of digital corporate commons.
The for-profit forces that are building and enabling these new platforms of participation represent a new subclass, which I call the netarchical class. If cognitive capitalism is to be defined by the primacy of intellectual assets over fixed capital industrial assets, and thus on the reliance of an extension of IP rights to establish monopolistic rents, (as the vectoral capitalists described by Mackenzie Wark derive their power from the control of the media vectors) then these new netarchical capitalists prosper from the enablement and exploitation of the participatory networks. It is significant that Amazon built itself around user reviews, eBay lives on a platform of worldwide distributed auctions, and Google is constituted by user-generated content. However, although these companies may rely on IP rights for the occasional extra buck, it is not in any sense the core of their power. Their power relies on their ownership of the platform.
More broadly, netarchical capitalism is a brand of capital that embraces the peer to peer revolution, all those ideological forces for whom capitalism is the ultimate horizon of human possibility. It is the force behind the immanence of peer to peer. Opposed to it, though linked to it in a temporary alliance, are the forces of Common-ism, those that put their faith in the transcendence of peer to peer, in a reform of the political economy beyond the domination of the market.

This is fascinating stuff written by Michel Bauwens  and expanded well beyond what I have posted above in a paper called: The Political Economy of Peer Production

In addition to the highly recommended article hyperlinked in it’s entirety above, Lets look at these points as well provided by Mr. Bauwens:
P2P does not refer to all behavior or processes that take place in distributed networks: P2P specifically designates those processes that aim to increase the most widespread participation by equipotential participants. We will define these terms when we examine the characteristics of P2P processes, but here are the most general and important characteristics.
P2P processes:

  1. produce use-value through the free cooperation of producers who have access to distributed capital: this is the P2P production mode, a 'third mode of production' different from for-profit or public production by state-owned enterprises. Its product is not exchange value for a market, but use-value for a community of users.

  2. are governed by the community of producers themselves, and not by market allocation or corporate hierarchy: this is the P2P governance mode, or 'third mode of governance.'

  3. make use-value freely accessible on a universal basis, through new common property regimes. This is its distribution or 'peer property mode': a 'third mode of ownership,' different from private property or public (state) property.
The Infrastructure of P2P
What has been needed to facilitate the emergence of peer to peer processes?
The first requirement is the existence of a technological infrastructure that operates on peer to peer processes and enables distributed access to 'fixed' capital. Individual computers that enable a universal machine capable of executing any logical task are a form of distributed 'fixed capital,' available at low cost to many producers.
The internet, as a point to point network, was specifically designed for participation by the edges (computer users) without the use of obligatory hubs. Although it is not fully in the hands of its participants, the internet is controlled through distributed governance, and outside the complete hegemony of particular private or state actors. The internet's hierarchical elements (such as the stacked IP protocols, the decentralized Domain Name System, etc...) do not deter participation.
Viral communicators, or meshworks, are a logical extension of the internet. With this methodology, devices create their own networks through the use of excess capacity, bypassing the need for a pre-existing infrastructure. The 'Community Wi-Fi' movement, Open Spectrum advocacy, file-serving television, and alternative meshwork-based telecommunication infrastructures are exemplary of this trend.
The second requirement is alternative information and communication systems which allow for autonomous communication between cooperating agents.
The web (in particular the Writeable Web and the Web 2.0 that is in the process of being established) allows for the universal autonomous production, dissemination, and 'consumption' of written material while the associated podcasting and webcasting developments create an 'alternative information and communication infrastructure' for audio and audiovisual creation.   The existence of such an infrastructure enables autonomous content production that may be distributed without the intermediary of the classic publishing and broadcasting media (though new forms of mediation may arise).
The third requirement is the existence of a 'software' infrastructure for autonomous global cooperation.
A growing number of collaborative tools, such as blogs and wiki's, embedded in social networking software facilitate the creation of trust and social capital, making it possible to create global groups that can create use-value without the intermediary of manufacturing or distribution by for-profit enterprises.
The fourth requirement is a legal infrastructure that enables the creation of use-value and protects it from private appropriation. The General Public License (which prohibits the appropriation of software code), the related Open Source Initiative, and certain versions of the Creative Commons license fulfill this role. They enable the protection of common use-value and use viral characteristics to spread. GPL and related material can only be used in projects that in turn put their adapted source code in the public domain.
The fifth requirement is cultural. The diffusion of mass intellectuality, (i.e. the distribution of human intelligence) and associated changes in ways of feeling and being (ontology), ways of knowing (epistemology) and value constellations (axiology) have been instrumental in creating the type of cooperative individualism needed to sustain an ethos which can enable P2P projects.
The Characteristics of P2P
P2P processes occur in distributed networks. Distributed networks are networks in which autonomous agents can freely determine their behavior and linkages without the intermediary of obligatory hubs.
As Alexander Galloway insists in his book on protocollary power, distributed networks are not the same as decentralized networks, for which hubs are obligatory.
P2P is based on distributed power and distributed access to resources. In a decentralized network such as the U.S.-based airport system, planes have to go through determined hubs; however, in distributed systems such as the internet or highway systems, hubs may exist, but are not obligatory and agents may always route around them.
P2P projects are characterized by equipotentiality or 'anti-credentialism.' This means that there is no a priori selection to participation. The capacity to cooperate is verified in the process of cooperation itself. Thus, projects are open to all comers provided they have the necessary skills to contribute to a project. These skills are verified, and communally validated, in the process of production itself.
This is apparent in open publishing projects such as citizen journalism: anyone can post and anyone can verify the veracity of the articles. Reputation systems are used for communal validation. The filtering is a posteriori, not a priori. Anti-credentialism is therefore to be contrasted to traditional peer review, where credentials are an essential prerequisite to participate.
P2P projects are characterized by holoptism. Holoptism is the implied capacity and design of peer to peer processes that allows participants free access to all the information about the other participants; not in terms of privacy, but in terms of their existence and contributions (i.e. horizontal information) and access to the aims, metrics and documentation of the project as a whole (i.e. the vertical dimension).
This can be contrasted to the panoptism which is characteristic of hierarchical projects: processes are designed to reserve 'total' knowledge for an elite, while participants only have access on a 'need to know' basis. However, with P2P projects, communication is not top-down and based on strictly defined reporting rules, but feedback is systemic, integrated in the protocol of the cooperative system.
The above does not exhaust the characteristics of peer production. I will post more when it becomes available to me. Special thanks again to Robin Good.

Microsoft to Offer Free VOIP ?

Microsoft has developed a Skype-style free internet voice service for mobile phones that City analysts believe could wipe billions off the market value of operators such as Vodafone. The service is included in a mobile version of Microsoft Office Communicator due to be released this year. It will take the form of a voice-over internet protocol (VoIP) application that allows Office users to make free voice calls over wi-fi enabled phones running Windows Mobile software. It uses the internet as a virtual phone network as well as accessing e-mail, PowerPoint and other Office applications. Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer dropped his bombshell at the mobile operators’ annual 3GSM show in Barcelona last week. The significance of his remarks was missed because of his effusive and eccentric delivery. Continue At Source

Saturday, February 18, 2006

You Must Purchase a New Copy of Windows if You Replace the Mothorboard !

WTF ! Microsoft recently made a change to the licence agreement saying that a new motherboard is equal to a new computer, hence you need to purchase a new Windows licence. THis is just simply wrong. Here is what Microsoft has to say: “An upgrade of the motherboard is considered to result in a “new personal computer” to which Microsoft® OEM operating system software cannot be transferred from another computer. If the motherboard is upgraded or replaced for reasons other than a defect, then a new computer has been created and the license of new operating system software is required.” The reason Microsoft gave for this term is that “Microsoft needed to have one base component “left standing” that would still define that original PC. Since the motherboard contains the CPU and is the “heart and soul” of the PC, when the motherboard is replaced (for reasons other than defect) a new PC is essentially created.” Microsoft sent a memo to its OEM partners asking them to enforce this new policy, every time they upgrade a computer for a client. From the Microsoft License FAQ, question 11: Rather than purchase completely new PCs, my organization performs in-place upgrades to the hardware on many of our computers. We often times only replace the motherboard, processor, and memory. Since the COA is still on the case and the OS is still installed on the hard drive, this computer is still licensed, right? Generally, you may upgrade or replace all of the hardware components on your computer and maintain the license for the original Microsoft OEM operating system software, with the exception of an upgrade or replacement of the motherboard. An upgrade of the motherboard is considered to result in a "new personal computer." Microsoft OEM operating system software cannot be transferred from one computer to another. Therefore, if the motherboard is upgraded or replaced for reasons other than a defect then a new computer has been created, the original license expires, and a new full operating system license (not upgrade) is required. This is true even if the computer is covered under Software Assurance or other Volume License programs.

Net Neutrality is Bad for You

WHAT ?
The calls for a US “network neutrality” rule get louder and louder and louder. I’ve covered this topic at length before. So now I’m going to try something completely different readers. I’m going to become a HERETIC !
Soooo… here we go and don’t hate me
Think of this scenario: Would you want to make it illegal for at&t to offer a $5/month plan to poorer households that only allowed access to services by Yahoo!?
The proposed neutrality rules would do just this, hurting the weakest in society most. (Personally, I’d prefer to make typographically-challenged corporate identities illegal first!)
Network neutrality rules, apart from being a fuzzy undefined concept, throw out the best of price discrimination and entrench the false “natural duopoly” for access.
There are deeper, more philosophical reasons too for being suspicious of such rules. Underlying the idea of “neutrality” is the idea that Internet Protocol embeds no assumptions or values, and the mesh of interconnect agreements we call the Internet is likewise “neutral”.
I don’t see a common understanding of what ‘Net Neutrality’ actually is. Despite many of the Internetorati demanding it by law (myself included). Whatever.
There appear to be several different camps, which you could paint as “bottom of IP”, “middle” and “top”.
The bottomistas would see enforced Internet Protocol itself as a premature optimisation and violation of the end-to-end principle. Unhappy that you only get IPv4 or IPv6? Still grumpy that you only have IPv4 and not even IPv6? Really miserable that your VoIP packets are staggering under the poisonous load of IPv6 headers? You’re a bottomista.
I suspect there are some fundamentalist bottomistas who would object to your service providers not giving you a choice of Ethernet, ATM or roll-you-own-L2-protocol. We’ll pretend to be out and not answer the door when they knock.
The middlemen draw a distinction between “raw IP” (before the ISP gets ahold of it), and “retail IP”, which is what you and I get to experience. This kind of suggests that the OSI 7-layer model got it horribly wrong, because there’s a fundamental cleave right in the middle of layer 3, where IP sits. Fair comment, but sounds pretty radical to me. Although I’ve never really got layer 6, so maybe they’re onto something.
Then you might be a “top of IP” kind of girl. You can cope with the discrimination creeping higher up the stack to the next layer, where particular TCP and UDP ports and flags are screened off. But you only get queasy if particular commercial service providers or applications are targeted. Blocking off port 25 is OK to you, since it doesn’t discriminate against any particular email service provider.
Sadly, these are all hogwash and bunkum.
Net Neutrality is a dead end, because as Searls and Weinberger correctly noted, the Net isn’t a thing, it’s an interconnected set of agreements. These are bilateral and freely entered into. And since those agreements weren’t modelled off a viral template such as the GNU General Public License, they are all unique (this argument works both ways and used freely by those in favor of neutrality). There’s no contagious clause that insists the Internet becomes a “thing” by virtue of everyone having to agree to freely and neutrally pass packets in an ever growing pool of Neutraldom. So to impose neutrality you’re going to have to interpose yourself into a lot of contracts. (Another reason why “Internet Governance” is an oxymoron when referring to anything beyond IP address allocation and routing, which do require some central agreement and co-ordination.)
There’s no grand “first principle” from which you can derive network neutrality as an economic argument. No public choice, competition, game theory or otherwise construct that leads us there. Indeed, saying that the public would benefit if there was a transfer of wealth from providers to users isn’t good enough. You’re playing with matches in the oil refinery when you start messing with property rights. Yes, those networks are mostly funded by risk capital. The local loop copper of a fixed operator may still be hangovers from monopoly days, but generally those assets were brought into the private sector on clear rules, the stockholders took a punt, and some of the better informed ones who saw the long-term potential of DSL etc. got to reap a windfall. Of course in parallel the telcos have done a superlative job of lobbying for rules that keep competition out, but that’s a different issue.
But wait a moment, it gets worse.
What if I wanted to allow people in the street to access my WiFi? But I only want to offer web and email, so as to make P2P filesharing tricky. As a good public-spirited citizen I put up a splash page so they know exactly what’s going on. Am I allowed to? Or is Net Neutrality only for the mythical mystical “them”?
When in deploying my network do I need to “design-in” neutrality? Concept, build or operation? Should we be outlawing the deployment of PSTN-specific GSM networks because they’re “unfair” to non-PSTN voice applications like Skype? Am I allowed to deploy non-technological measures for neutrality, such as contract terms? Am I allowed to read the packets, but not block them, in order to enforce my contract (repeat - freely entered into by both partners)?
What level of jitter and congestion is perceived as “neutral”? What if I deploy technology like Qualcomm’s 1xRTT, which separately supports voice and data, with PSTN-only voice, but the data is a bit lousy for VoIP? Is that being unfair, or merely a realistic response to the limitations of technology?
Is neutrality a wholesale or a retail problem? What if the access infrastructure owner offers “neutral” IP connectivity, but no retail provider chooses to pass that on directly to the public without layering on some filtering and price discrimination?
Oh, and what’s so special about the Internet? Do other IP-based networks need neutrality principles? Do any networks? Should more network industries be forced to forego “winner takes all” rewards? Google looks awfully dominant at adverts, doesn’t it… I wonder if that ad network needs a bit of “neutrality”?
I think you can make a stand on Network Neutrality on political and free speech grounds, but that requires a very different policy approach (i.e. not one that confiscates the proceeds of private capital investment).
And if the users value a neutral connection so much, perhaps it’s time for them to self-organise a bit, build their own networks, or tender for connectivity together — rather than rolling over and accepting whatever the local telco can cableco provide by default. But that would burst the illusion that government is here to save us from ourselves and we’ve no need to take personal responsibility for our connectivity freedom.
Beware demanding net neutrality as a blanket principle, rather than a scalpel to excise particular local anti-competitive acts. Khrushchev declared the corn harvest was great, too — but it didn’t create the incentives for more corn to be sown and for the system to succeed on future iterations. And net neutrality rules are also likely to have the exact opposite effect of that intended. Net neutrality messes up freedom of contract, freedom of association, and property rights.
You probably won’t fall off your chair with surprise if I tell you this is nonsense. The Internet is riddled with design and political assumptions, and we should be open to competing architectures emerging.
Exhibit A. The Internet takes the “end-to-end” philosophy of distributed intelligence well beyond the application layer. There is no equivalent of the GNU General Public License for the Internet that you have to agree to in order to join. Repressive, filtering China can happily peer with anyone else. Everyone is free to negotiate their own interconnect at the financial and political layers.
You might want to contrast this with the PSTN, where common carriage agreements flatten the possible set of interconnect agreements. There are plenty of “managed” networks in telecom with standard rulesets to be abided by. The resulting networks have a more homogenous nature. This might be a good thing, or it might not. Let the customers decide. Would an “IMS-net” with universal rules for interconnect create more value than the deliberate emergent, chaotic Internet? I have an opinion, but I certainly don’t want to make the experiment with other people’s shareholder capital illegal!
Exhibit B: The semantics of IP addresses follows a particular “lowest common denominator” format. The databases held by ARIN, RIPE etc. allow you to trace back from an IP address the ISP to which it is assigned. This is probably the minimum possible assumption that can be embedded in the network, so follows the “end-to-end” philosophy, although is outside the scope of its original concept. But we can imagine networks where these databases offer much greater detail on the nature of the end nodes. Is it a good anti-fraud device for me to know you’ve been personally assigned that address for 3 years? For me to be able to verify with your telco (for a fee) that the delivery address you gave for the plasma TV is the same as the premises address of your IP address?
Exhibit C: The Internet doesn’t allow “topological introspection”. OK, protocols like BGP in principle allow this. But you don’t get access to that data as an edge node. Yes, you can traceroute your way around all day. But as a matter of universal fact, you can’t from the edge determine the real topology of anything in the middle. Internet Protocol assumes the world is, indeed, flat. Which is fine, until you hit the limits of that abstraction. I’d rather stream my P2P IPTV from someone else the minimum possible number of hops away. We have kludge it, but it’s not pretty.
In fact, there are lots of ways in which the current Internet design could be improved, and many people working on doing that just now.
Having a “two tier” network is something we should look forward to. We want more Internets! Plural! They may continue to interconnect; they may decide that the Internet Mk1 is more a source of digital pollution than valuable content. I just can’t see how any “stop the clock — we’re all just comfortable as we are!” neutrality rule helps us reach new and better places. Even monopolies have an interest in deploying new and more valuabe (monopoly) stuff. Kinda hard when by law you’re only allowed to offer Net service as experienced via dial-up modem c. 1997, only faster.
Indeed, this is all reminiscent of the arguments about socialized medicine. “We must spend more on the National Health Service to prevent a two-tier system emerging!” Yet lots of people who can afford it opt-out and hit private medical care. Likewise, ossifying and constricting the Internet’s rules of engagement will just result in a hidden transfer of traffic onto other, completely private networks outside of the neutrality rules. Do you really think the Baby Bells won’t be able to buy some finessing get-out clauses? This is a much easier lobbying problem that undoing the whole unbundling regime of the ‘96 Act!
So neutrality rules that entrench our “Internet Mk1” as somehow sacred, hallowed and for all time are just totally counter-productive. Better to allow Verizon to screw over their customers and make it worthwhile for someone to bypass them entirely using newer technology. Or just swallow your pride and copy the unbundling rules that work just fine where implemented. BT (UK) can deploy a two-tier walled IMS garden, if they like. Just they have no way to make me buy it unless it creates some compelling value.

Friday, February 17, 2006

The End Of VOIP Already ? Nokia's New Phone

There is certainly a lot of action going on in the VOIP world with almost all the internet players churning out their own brand of phone replacements.
But, could it be all for naught ?
Read on,,,
"The new Nokia 6136 may spell the end of the road for Skype & other VoIP companies. Although the technology has been around a while, this phone allows you to make calls over your home or office Wi-Fi network in a very elegant way.
UMA, or unlicensed mobile access, is the mobile operators' answer to the threat of VoIP - and now it's reality.
Many of Nokia's mid-range and high-end phones will feature Wi-Fi, and UMA allows the user to keep one phone number, one handset, and receive one bill at the end of every month."
I’ll keep watching this new technology as it emerges. One thing seems certain, Wi-Fi based phone calling will be THE way to talk.

Gizmo Area 775 Launches a Nevda Broaside against Skype Estonia

You’ve got to hand it to Michael Robertson.  He certainly has a sense of humor.  Area775 is his new calling service for SIPPhone and Gizmo customers.  The press release hit the wire about an hour ago.  Sign up today, and you can have a free phone number (in area code 775, hence the name) and a host of nifty features so people can call you on your Gizmo or SIPPhone number. 
Michael dropped me an email last night, and in it he wrote:
Tomorrow we’re launching an innovative service called Area775. It’s the first service to give you one number that will reach you on your computer or your mobile phone. It can even transfer calls between the two locations (answer on your PC, click a button and you’re talking on your mobile or vice versa). There are loads of other features like call screening, SMS notification, etc. but the big picture is that this is the first VOIP service to combine the PC calling world with traditional phones making it all seamless. One number for both worlds.
Sounds good! There are three plans:
The free plan includes a free 775 area code number, dual ring on a PSTN (celllular or landline) and SIP phone, call screening (you can listen to callers leave voice mail messages, and interrupt if you want to take the call), call transfer (mid call, from one device to the other!), voice mail to email, personalized greetings and SMS notification.  The catch?  If you want to answer the call on your PSTN device it costs $2/call. 
The basic plan includes everything in the free plan, plus you can choose your own area code and answering calls on your PSTN line is included at no extra cost.  Basic is $3.95 per month.
The premium plan includes the basic plan features, plus a fax line, and toll free access to your voicemail.  It costs $7.95 per month. 
I think most people will find the basic plan the best choice.  When I compare this to the services I currently use:

  1. Vonage costs me $25/month, and doesn’t include the features that area code 775 includes.  Furthermore, they charge me extra for the softphone, and it has a separate phone number.  I’ve been planning to cancel it for some time.  This is the nail in the coffin.  Bye bye Vonage. 

  2. Packet8 costs me $25/month.  It includes a lot of good features, but has no softphone, no call screening, no call transfer.  Packet8 is getting cancelled too.

  3. Mint Telecom, which offers me cheap long distance rates to the US, just got eclipsed as well.  Again, I’ve been meaning to cancel this since SIPPhone started offering 1 cent long distance.  Today’s the day!
What it boils down to is more features for less money, and one number for all calls.  I think that’s what consumers want.  It’s certainly what I want.
This move is also a pretty fair broadside against Skype.  When you compare, Skype-In costs about the same at 30 euros per year. Skype doesn’t offer features like call screening and transfer. Skype will charge you standard Skype-Out per minute rates to answer the call on your PSTN line too. However, Skype is more tightly integrated with Outlook, and has more sophisticated call forwarding capabilities.  Overall, from a value and call quality perspective, I think Area775/Gizmo is ahead.
The negatives (and they seem to be few):
  1. No international phone numbers available.  Skype has these.

  2. No international credit card support.  Gizmo can take PayPal, so I am not sure why Area775 doesn’t.  I’ve written to Michael and Jason Droege (president of SIPPhone) and pointed this out.

  3. Some of the features require you to navigate to a CallWave website, who presumably is the partner SIPPhone is using for the service. 

  4. Early reports indicate that you may not be able to terminate your call on an international number.  This is a service that only a few frequent travellers would want, but it would be nice to have a US phone number that forwarded to Europe, for instance.
Area775 has a feel about it as if it was released a little early.  To me it looks as if the back end systems integration just isn’t finished yet.  Someone made the (probably correct) call that "we’ve got enough — let’s ship it!". The minor flaws I’ve pointed out won’t stop early adopters from jumping on board.  Jason and his team at SIPPhone have a pretty good track record of frequent new releases, so I expect this will be completed shortly.
Net net: I think the SIPPhone gang has a winner here. 
And now the joke:  Area code 775 is a real area code, encompassing (drum roll please) all of Nevada except for Las Vegas.  Presumably it also encompasses the US Airforce Base at Groom Lake known as Area51.  Whoops!  I think I just saw a UFO — an Unidentified Fone Origination.  (Oh… that was bad.  Talk about reaching for it…)

Thursday, February 16, 2006

Apple to ditch OS X for Windows

John C. Dvorak has made a career out of posing novel hypotheses and occasionally surprising everyone (including, one supposes, himself) by striking gold with an accurate one. This time Dvorak says he's convinced that Apple is going to ditch its much-loved Mac OS X and switch to Windows for its shiny machines. He puts together a bit of evidence here and there, most especially Apple's recent Intel switch, and argues that Apple has said all along that it's a hardware company and that it has seen the error in trying to maintain its own OS. Dvorak postulates that since it's OS X's slick GUI that makes the Mac distinctive, Apple could "preserve its slick cachet" by grafting an "executive software layer" on top of Windows to make it feel more Mac-like. As Dvorak points out, the real trouble would be keeping the cult of Mac from rioting, but while he thinks Jobs could smooth out any dissent among the Mac-faithful, I'm not so optimistic. More here but it was down earlier (I wonder why ?)

High Speed Internet Access At Sea Coming Soon

High-speed Internet access, Just the thing for the ideal boating experience? As part of Microsoft's attempt to make the Web omnipresent, the company announced a new service Thursday that will connect boaters to the Internet. Seafaring Web surfers can stay connected 25 miles from land thanks to a partnership struck between Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft and antenna maker KVH Industries. KVH's Mobile Internet Receiver will connect users of MSN TV service, a customized version of the MSN TV 2 Internet and Media Player, to the Web. Under the plan, customers can access Microsoft Windows Media player, MSN Mail, MSN Messenger and MSN Radio, to name just a few applications. "Today's consumers expect to be able to stay connected while they're on the go in their vessels," Sam Klepper, MSN TV's general manager, said in a statement. "Consumers will now be able to communicate, access information and enjoy digital entertainment where their travels take them." The service was configured to allow people to use it on televisions, since most boats over 25-feet are already equipped with color TVs. Microsoft also offers a wireless keyboard so they can log on anywhere from stern to starboard. "KVH's Mobile Internet Receiver with MSN TV service will also include WiFi output to provide Internet connectivity to any WiFi-enabled laptop or other product," the companies said in a statement. From CNET

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Free Exchange email ?

mail2web LIVE Free Exchange email? Seems too good to be true. I poked around their site and couldn't figure out their business model - it must be some sort of upsell to another service. You can check out their FAQ for more details. Yes, I did sign up !


"Get your FREE mail2web.com email account today! Based on Microsoft Exchange, the world’s top messaging solution is now available for free from mail2web.com. This may be the last email account you will ever need. This incredible messaging solution travels with you where ever you are, making sure you always have your email, contacts, private calendar, tasks and much more. Use ActiveSync to make sure compatible mobile devices* are kept up to date or use our email aggregator to automatically gather email from other accounts. It’s simple, easy and free. Nothing to install on your PC. Just sign up and in minutes you’ll be enjoying the best messaging solution in the world."

Here is a Great Reason NOT to use Automated Chatbots for Customer Service

Or shall we call this tale: Overstock.com Actually Understocked and Manned by Soulless Robots A Valintine story not to be missed !

Monday, February 13, 2006

Cell Phone Tracking in the USA

I wrote about this last week, but now it’s looking serious:
By Declan McCullagh:
There are times when knowing your exact location is useful, of course. It would be handy for a phone to help you find a gas station in a pinch, or bleep when you're about to take the wrong highway exit.
But the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice have seized on the ability to locate a cellular customer and are using it to track Americans' whereabouts surreptitiously--even when there's no evidence of wrongdoing.
A pair of court decisions in the last few weeks shows that judges are split on whether this is legal. One federal magistrate judge in Wisconsin on Jan. 17 ruled it was unlawful, but another nine days later in Louisiana decided that it was perfectly OK.
This is an unfortunate outcome, not least because it shows that some judges are reluctant to hold federal agents and prosecutors to the letter of the law.
It's also unfortunate because it demonstrates that the FBI swore never to use a 1994 surveillance law to track cellular phones--but then, secretly, went ahead and did it, anyway.
FBI officials swore never to use a 1994 surveillance law to track cellular phones but are doing it, anyway.
When lobbying for that law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, then-FBI Director Louis Freeh assured the U.S. Senate that location surveillance would never take place unless there was evidence of wrongdoing.
"It does not include any information which might disclose the general location of a mobile facility or service, beyond that associated with the area code or exchange of the facility or service," Freeh testified. "There is no intent whatsoever, with reference to this term, to acquire anything that could properly be called 'tracking' information."
So much for promises from politicians.
Nobody is saying, of course, that police should be denied the ability to locate a felon-on-the-run in an actual emergency. Current law allows agents to do precisely that because there would be ample evidence of wrongdoing, or probable cause, that they can present to a judge.
The problem is that the Justice Department's current official position--a flip-flop from its previous official position--says police should be able to secretly monitor your whereabouts as long as they claim that tracking could possibly be "relevant" to some investigation. Not only is that insufficiently privacy-protective, it doesn't track what the law actually says.
Some judges are courageous enough to point this out. U.S. Magistrate Judge William Callahan in Wisconsin last month denied the Justice Department's request to track a suspected drug user through his Cingular Wireless phone. The feds were helping out on behalf of the Wisconsin narcotics bureau, which claimed in court documents that "by obtaining cell site information for (the target's) cellular telephone, it may be able to determine (his) source for cocaine."
Nobody is saying, of course, that police should be denied the ability to locate a felon-on-the-run in an actual emergency.
Citing Freeh's testimony, Callahan said it was abundantly clear that "the language which found its way into the law was predicated on the director's assertion to Congress that (the law) would not be used to secure location information for the cellular phone user." But, Callahan noted, prosecutors are relying on "precisely" that language today.
"I cannot find any contemporaneous understanding by either Director Freeh or the Congress that the government had the capability that it now has to ascertain the location of a person using a cell phone," Callahan added.
It's true that in the case before Callahan, prosecutors were asking for the location of Cingular cell towers being used by the cell phone only when calls were being made, not when the handset was idle. That yields only a rough approximation of a location, depending on how many towers there are nearby.
But given the Justice Department's logic, there's nothing stopping prosecutors from asking for more data next time. Thanks to regulations from the Federal Communications Commission, wireless handsets must know their locations within a few hundred feet, regardless of whether their owner wants it. Some newer gadgets, such as the Hewlett-Packard's iPaq hw6515, have built-in GPS (Global Positioning System) receivers that are far more precise.
Those detailed data streams are potentially available to police. In one court document (click here for PDF), U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia claims, "A cell phone user voluntarily transmits a signal to the cell phone company and thereby assumes the risk that the cell phone provider will reveal to law enforcement the cell site information."
Consider the implications. If you voluntarily transmit your exact GPS-derived location to a cellular provider--so you can get information returned about nearby restaurants or driving directions--the Justice Department apparently believes that your location should be available without a warrant.
That's not what Louis Freeh promised, that's not what Congress wrote, and that's not what a majority of federal judges who have looked at this have decided. But for now, there's nothing stopping prosecutors from shopping around and finding a sympathetic judge who will find some way to interpret the law in their favor next time.
Biography
Declan McCullagh is CNET News.com's chief political correspondent. He spent more than a decade in Washington, D.C., chronicling the busy intersection between technology and politics. Previously, he was the Washington bureau chief for Wired News, and a reporter for Time.com, Time magazine and HotWired. McCullagh has taught journalism at American University and been an adjunct professor at Case Western University.

What is Web 2.0 ?

Point them to:
The Complete List of Web 2.0 Products and Services ?

Sunday, February 12, 2006

Mozilla News

The folks at the Mozilla foundation have announced the finalists in their Extend Firefox Contest. The judges are looking for the Firefox extensions that are the most useful, the most innovative, and the easiest to use. Extra points go to the extensions that integrate with web services like map tools, weather tools, RSS and search. The list of finalists includes the almighty Web Developer Toolbar, the Deepest Sender blog tool, and the Reveal history browser.Winners will be announced by the Firefox team in mid-february. [link via digg]
The next release of the Opera browser will feature integrated BitTorrent functionality for file transfers. According to Norway's Opera Software and ZDNet, the second preview release of Opera 9 is due tomorrow. Widgets, sort of little floating browsers that run dedicated web services, are familiar to anyone who runs the latest version of Mac OS X. Widgets can be used for things like stock tickers, webcams, weather and traffic reports, and news aggregators. The nice thing is, these widgets will not be as resource hungry as the ones that run on your desktop locally. But it's the BitTorrent integration that really exciting. Users will be able to download and share torrents through the browser's downloads manager. Maybe the rest of the planet will see how useful torrents are (like RSS) by having this integration. Opera Software developed the BitTorrent support alongside BitTorrent, Inc., as noted in Opera's press release from today:
BitTorrent's technology will be made available to users of the Opera browser in two ways: first, users can search for torrent files in the Opera browser's integrated search field, and second, when a file has been selected, Opera's Transfer Manager feature will handle the download. As a result of integrating BitTorrent into the Opera browser, users no longer need separate software for the searching and downloading of torrent content.
Look for other browsers to pick this up really soon. We'll be keeping an eye on AllPeers and MozTorrent for Firefox, as well. [link via digg]


RSS does not stand for Really Simple Stupid

Ok, so I can’t spell.
But, a lot more people just don’t get RSS feeds and all the wonderful things that come with it.
Several recent posts from the likes of Fred Wilson, Dave Winer, and Dion Hinchcliffe are furthering the debate about how to turn RSS into a universally adopted web technology.
The whole point of RSS is to make syndication really simple, not only for publishers, but for subscribers/users as well. That's the rub — most users aren't aware of what RSS is, let alone how to subscribe to feeds, how to use a feed reader, or why either of those things are worth their trouble. As Winer argues, getting RSS to "bust out" is a two step process. First, make RSS feeds even easier to find. Second, create a subscription service that's public, centralized, and has OPML integration. This would allow users to collect all of their feeds in one place and access them from any browser.
Strong theories. I'm sure that the big net companies would be willing to adopt a framework that allows that kind of functionality with a little bit of goading from the RSS big-wigs. Personally, I can see browser-based RSS tools becoming the magic link that will draw a lot of the casual users in. The browser, being a tool that everyone on the web is already familiar with, is the ultimate pathway for mass adoption of web-based technologies. Marry a strong RSS experience in the browser with a killer web service that makes feeds portable and searchable, and you can get RSS over the hump. Or, maybe the key is further standardization. Most non-web-savvy users will adpot a technology more quickly when there are only two or three choices for software/service instead of forty.
Either way, I'd wager that the release of Internet Explorer 7 will open a great many eyes to the glory of RSS.
Posted by michael calore

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

So, What do the Chinese do on their 'Censored' Internet ? (The answer is quite surprising)

Martijn de Waal, journalist and independent media researcher, made an interesting wrap up of the Chinese blogosphere and how people are using the internet in China.

He started his talk with an animation called iRepress.

There's over 100 million users of internet in China, making it the country with the most internet users in the world. The typical net surfer used to be male, urban, high-educated, in his 20-30. It's becoming less so. Active bottom up. Now more women and less educated people are catching up.
How people use the internet: in China there's a very lively amateur culture. What's different in China from other parts of the world is the huge sense of humour when writing about daily life and world/national events.
Many people make and exchange flash movies, swap lots of files. Commercial portal are thriving (big portals dealing with celebrities for example) but e-commerce hasn't taken off yet.
The Middle Landscape. The internet has become a middle landscape between the public sphere and the commercial sphere. These two separate realms merge on the internet. On blogs and bulletin boards that mostly discuss commercial matters, someone might start a discussion on a recent event (like a murder hidden by the authorities) and a long discussion will start.
The Middle Landscape in another sense: the internet as a middle landscape between the private and the public sphere. Bloggers and wikipedians against the governement. Governement is loosing control over the private domain (in the past, employees had to get an authorisation to get married, it's no longer the case.) The internet is very hard to control although there are rules to restrict what people can write. If you want to open a blog you have to give your name and address. Companies like Google, Microsoft or Cisco, help the governement to shut up the voices and restrict the new freedom.
On the other hand, Chinese have now a service they didn't have before. For each new rules imposed by the government, bloggers and wikipedians make a counter attack.
The Social Brain Foundation is inviting people in the West to adopt a Chinese blog on their personal web server to make it harder to control or block the blogs (only information i found).Are public sphere and civil society emerging? De Waal asked several actors whom have different perspectives.
Jack Qiu: no, we’re not seeing this promised new freedom. In China, internet is given as a toy to people to play with, not to provide them with more possibilities of expression.
Michael Anti (who had his weblog shut down by the governement): yes, there's a gradual development. People are willing to see things change even if the governement doesn't agree.
Webloggers: maybe. People start to organise themselves on the web, give out opinions on small environmental issues for example (government issues are still too taboo). So maybe we're witnessing the beginning of a new civil society.
If you haven't kept up with the news about Google censoring itself in China, these side-by-side screen shots are worth the proverbial thousand words (or should it be two thousand?). Or see for yourself by doing a Google Image search for "tiananmen" here in the U.S. verses Google in China.

Monday, February 06, 2006

Is there a future in Independent And Autonomous Local Access To The Communication Infrastructure ?

Will internet access be controlled and monopolized by a handful of global internet access providers?  We’re getting ready to find out in the United States.
As previously posted January 22nd here.
If it’s not too late, perhaps there is an alternative in the making:
Hundreds of municipalities are recognizing that facilitating internet access is part of their responsibility towards citizens, and they are planning to bypass traditional internet access providers, opening access to the net in a more direct way. According to an article of DMeurope.com, over 400 cities world wide are currently planning to deploy broadband networks in their areas, and 2006 should see a doubling of the numbers.
Rome, along with New York, San Francisco and Paris, is among the major cities planning to provide citizens and visitors with widespread internet access, choosing between fibre or wireless broadband networks using wi-fi hotspots, mesh networks or pre-WiMAX technology.
Mesh networks are a natural candidate for constructing a resilient, locally networked access to communication infrastructure. The Times in the UK has an article that explains how New Orleans could have profited from such a network to facilitate hurricane relief and how some of the most unlikely places are linking up with the internet by installing networks of little radio boxes that start communicating with each other, as soon as they find peers within reach, forming an autonomous network.
Mesh networks are rugged and self-configuring. They are normally established by municipalities, by upstart internet providers or by co-operatives of users.
Those linked in can communicate directly with each other and also access the larger internet, normally through a leased-line access point that is shared by the network's users. Some networks allow users to contribute by sharing unused access bandwidth with others.
Not only will local networks allow more easy access to the main information pipeline, on which we depend more and more, but their spreading will proof the internet itself against catastrophic occurrences.
An internet braced by a myriad of local peer-to-peer networks will be less influenced by either catastrophic disruptions or the more subtle commercial decisions and content restrictions operated by today's access providers, as well as government censorship and military intrusions.
One could even imagine a scenario where the information that now sits on servers is redundantly backed up - stored on a myriad of personal computers that are linked up with each other through P2P networks - eventually forming a second tier of the net, one that could survive the most harsh conditions life may confront us with.
Here is the Times article republished in full by Health Supreme independent blogger Sepp Hasslberger:
Connecting the world, one mesh at a timeby Holden Frith
Other Relevant Links:

  1. LocustWorld

  2. Speednet Scotland

  3. WiFi Co-operatives

  4. Wikipedia on wireless mesh networks

  5. Are Big Communication Companies Privatizing the Internet?

  6. Prague Seeks City-wide Free Internet ZoneJanuary 2006 By Katya ZapletnyukPRAGUE, Czech Republic -- The government here wants to allocate $4.1 million to create a free wireless network citywide, which has the country's largest telecom providers crying foul.

  7. How the telcos and cablecos plan to strangle the citizens' InternetJeff Chester, who has been in the media analysis and activism field for some time, has written a chilling article for the Nation about the possible end of the Internet as a medium where amateurs and citizens are free to create news media, organize political action, start companies from their dormitory rooms...

  8. Software-defined radio could unify wireless worldIreland's communications regulator Comreg has issued the licence for publicly testing a "software-defined radio" device, which has been developed by researchers at the Centre for Telecommunications Value-Chain Research (CTVR) in Dublin. The device can impersonate a multitude of different wireless devices since it uses reconfigurable software to carry out the tasks normally performed by static hardware...

Sepp Hasslberger - - Health Supreme [ Read more ]


And while we are at it, maybe we can throw in this persons vision of the new internet.

Sunday, February 05, 2006

How to Track Anyone With a Cell Phone (a stalkers confession)

For the past week I've been tracking my girlfriend through her mobile phone. I can see exactly where she is, at any time of day or night, within 150 yards, as long as her phone is on. It has been very interesting to find out about her day. Now I'm going to tell you how I did it. First, though, I ought to point out, that my girlfriend is a journalist, that I had her permission ("in principle ...") and that this was all in the name of science, bagging a Pulitzer and paying the school fees. You have nothing to worry about, or at least not from me. But back to business. First I had to get hold of her phone. It wasn't difficult. We live together and she has no reason not to trust me, so she often leaves it lying around. And, after all, I only needed it for five minutes. I unplugged her phone and took it upstairs to register it. I ticked the website's terms and conditions without reading them, put in my debit card details, and bought 'Credits'. Almost immediately, my girlfriend's phone vibrated with a new text message. "Ben Goldacre has requested to add you to their Buddy List! To accept, simply reply to this message with 'LOCATE'". I sent the requested reply. The phone vibrated again. A second text arrived: "WARNING: [this service] allows other people to know where you are. For your own safety make sure that you know who is locating you." I deleted both these text messages. On the website, I see the familiar number in my list of "GSM devices" and I click "locate". A map appears of the area in which we live, with a person-shaped blob in the middle, roughly 100 yards from our home. The phone doesn't go off at all. There is no trace of what I'm doing on her phone. I can't quite believe my eyes: I knew that the police could do this, and telecommunications companies, but not any old random person with five minutes access to someone else's phone. I can't find anything in her mobile that could possibly let her know that I'm checking her location. As devious systems go, it's foolproof. I set up the website to track her at regular intervals, take a snapshot of her whereabouts automatically, every half hour, and plot her path on the map, so that I can view it at my leisure. It felt, I have to say, exceedingly wrong. By the time my better half got home, I was so childishly over-excited that I managed to keep all of this secret for precisely 30 seconds. And to my disappointment, she wasn't even slightly freaked out. I don't know if that says good or bad things about our relationship and I wouldn't want you to come away thinking it's all a bit "Mr & Mrs Smith" around here. Having said that, we came up with at least five new uses for this technology between us in a few minutes, all far more sinister than anything I had managed to concoct on my own. And that, for me, was the clincher. Your mobile phone company could make money from selling information about your location to the companies that offer this service. If you have any reason to suspect that your phone might have been out of your sight, even for five minutes, and there is anyone who might want to track you: call your phone company and ask it to find out if there is a trace on your phone. Anybody could be watching you. It could be me. Or...The LAPD: The LAPD will outfit cars with a device that propels and sticks a GPS onto a fleeing car.
The department will mount the StarChase LLC device in the grill of some squad cars. "Officers in the car would control a green lazar light, similar to an aiming device that fixes on your target," said LAPD Lieutenant Paul Vernon on Friday. "A small dart-like device is propelled from the officer's car. The officer also will have a remote unit, about the size of a device that unlocks a car, when they're outside the patrol car.
Each StarChase unit can fire two GPS tracking devices in case the first one misses or does not stick to the vehicle. The GPS device consists of a battery and a radio transmitter embedded in an epoxy compound.
The GPS tag activates at impact. It transmits the car's exact position via a wireless modem. An encrypted cellular backbone delivers continuous position updates to the StarChase server that pushes location-based information to authorized users through a password-protected Web portal.