Is 2003 the year when Smart Mobs enabled by technology reach a tipping point with regard to political issues? In the last few weeks we've had:-
- Trott ousted from political office in the USA. This is generally being credited to the Blog community. It does seem as though the Bloggers kept on digging and pushing until the mainstream media couldn't ignore it any more. If they hadn't done this, then Trott's racism would have been forgotten in hours. His resignation has forced Bush's administration into publicly disowning the more extreme segregationists.

- South Korea elects a liberal moderate government after a sustained and huge grass roots campaign by digital activists. The fact that South Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world perhaps explains why they were the first country where an election was decided as a result of wired campaign methods.

- The USA and DoD are making noises as if they are extremely worried by the growth of an uncontrolled WiFi net that parallels the net controlled by business. But it's also very hard to see how a government can criminalise activity that is implicit in the widespread use of a commodity technology available from Walmart. [from: JB Ecademy]

I couldn't pass this one up. The Register : Don't photocopy your bum this Xmas. Use a camera phone instead It seems that photocopier glass is not designed to stand the weight of the average drunk office worker and breakage is a surprisingly common occurence at this time of year. El Reg also offers this useful advice. "Obviously do not sit on the phone or there could be other health and safety concerns."

And not a word about getting stuck in the stationary cupboard with Sandra from accounts till the next morning. Surely a much more likely event than sitting on a photocopier.
[from: JB Ecademy]

OReilly has published a new book on 802.11 Security. "If you are a network, security, or systems engineer, or anyone interested in deploying 802.11b--based systems, you'll want this book beside you every step of the way." [from: JB Wifi]

Study: Mobile messaging use increasing in U.S. Well, well, it seems that the USA is finally getting with the program and using SMS, along with downloadable ringtones and games. And the reason is that it's finally possible to send SMS across networks, pricing is coming down and SMS charging is switching to sender pays instead of receiver pays. Well, Doh! Europeans and Asians will be rightly amazed that it's taken them so long considering that SMS is a huge success and a major part of cellphone company's revenues in those regions.

And this after years of industry execs telling people, "There's no business model", "People want email", "160 chars isn't enough", "nobody will use the tiny keyboard", "Nobody can read messages on the tiny screens", "we need to lock our consumers into our network", "It's a premium service and people should be charged for the ability to receive messages", "our customers haven't asked for it". [from: JB Ecademy]

Well some times the magic works and some times it doesn't. :(

This morning I discovered that invoices and welcome emails hadn't been going out to Ecademy Power networkers. So I attempted to do a one time run to catch up. I still can't see anything wrong with the script but it appears that it sent 10 copies to each power networker. So please accept my apologies for filling your mailbox.

To confirm, you have not been charged 10 times. You have not been billed 10 times. The error was at my end and had nothing to do with Paypal.

[from: JB Ecademy]

This one's important. Watch it. The Creative Commons getcreative animation explains what the Creative Commons is all about. [from: JB Ecademy]

Fortune.com - On Tech - : Because of a rate war, ADSL high-speed Internet access in Japan now costs as little as 2,123 yen a month -- about $17 at this morning's exchange rate. That's for download speeds of up to 12 (twelve) megabits per second. Seventeen bucks for broadband access? Where I live, the cheapest ADSL is $39.95 a month, and that's for download speeds of up to 1.5 megabits per second. No wonder Japan is ahead of the United States in broadband deployment.

Sounds like an essay question. Compare and contrast the broadband market and pricing between Japan, the USA, and the UK.

Meanwhile El Reg reports that Linx (the London Internet eXchange) is now peaking at 21 Gbps which is a 100% year on year rise. To put it another way internet traffic is still at least doubling every 12 months. This damn thing keeps on growing. [from: JB Ecademy]

Reports all over the news today that Intel postpones Wi-Fi chip Intel is building support for 802.11 protocols into it's next generation laptop processor so that WiFi can be included cheaply into laptops with the addition of only one or two chips and an antenna. On the surface this looks like a good thing and is at least related to Intel's investment in Cometa. However, this announcement suggests that they were aiming for combined 802.11a/b support but are pulling back to support only 802.11b initially due to chip availability issues and FCC certification. What bothers me here is that I don't think the standards are yet mature enough to justify building the support into the motherboard. If you compare it with wired ethernet, 10/100 ethernet really is a commodity now so including it on the motherboard should be a no brainer. But WiFi is still moving from b to a+b to a+g. It's going to be pretty irritating for owners if they have to add a PCMCIA card to their laptop and turn off the internal device shortly after buying the laptop because the built-in device is a generation behind.  [from: JB Wifi]

The EFF is maintaining a Wireless Friendly ISP List for the USA. I've been searching for something similar in the UK without success. Does anyone know of one or should we start it here? I think it should be split into two. a) ISPs that have an AUP (Acceptable use policy) that allow sharing inside the home. And b) ISPs that allow sharing outside your home to guests.

Here's a start
NTL Cable residential. a) yes, b) no. Allows sharing inside the home with up to 3 PCs that are wholly owned or leased by you. Do not allow sharing outside the home with guests. [from: JB Wifi]

The Creative Commons project has just gone to V1.0 of it's license system. They provide a series of licenses in full legal language that can be used to appropriately protect intellectual property. They also provide a mechanism to deliberately dedicate your IP to the public domain. What is interesting that each license also has a human readable summary and a machine readable link. So it's possible to specify as part of an electronic distribution that the IP is associated with one of the licenses in a way that is unambiguous.

So which of the licenses ought to apply to text on the Ecademy site that is entered by Ecademists? I would favour, this. "Attribution. The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work. In return, licensees must give the original author credit. Share Alike. The licensor permits others to distribute derivative works under a license identical to the one that governs the licensor's work." For a period of 5 years, after which the work should enter the public domain. [from: JB Ecademy]

Excellent Oped piece from Lawrence Lessig in the FT. A threat to innovation on the web : But increasingly, the providers of internet connectivity are pushing a different principle. US broadband companies are trying to ensure that they have the power to decide which applications and content can run. Under such a regime, if Microsoft wants to sell Xboxes to run on the broadband network then it will have to pay the network providers for that privilege. Or if Disney wants to stream movies on the internet, it too will have to pay the network tax.

This is exactly why it's wrong for BT Openworld to indiscriminately block port 25 or for NTL to ban VPNs. And it's exactly why "No Frills" broadband is probably the future. [from: JB Ecademy]

Photos of the Personal Telco Van A mobile WiFi hotspot from the Personal Telco folks. [from: JB Wifi]

A report from In-Stat/MDR says Hotspot Prices are too high : To get there, the report says business models must shift so prices can realign to fit the expectations of end-users. Those expectation, like it or not, are set by the cellular phone service market. Costs for regional and local hotspot providers could be $20 a month, while national providers like Boingo are around $70 a month. The bull's eye would be around $30 to $40 for national coverage -- that's what the business travelers that will drive the market expect services to cost. [from: JB Wifi]

This article explains the plans that Megabeam has for Building Europe's Hotspot Infrastructure Here's how Wi-Fi public access start-up Megabeam plans to beat the big boys in the battle for Europe's hotspot market. [thanks, 802.11 Planet] [from: JB Wifi]

A new UK magazine just dropped through my door. Wireless Networking at Work. It's got some pretty meaty technical articles and actually looks quite good. [from: JB Wifi]

A bit of research. If anyone's used one of the commercial hotspot systems, could they tell me what systems and ports were available? Maybe the question should be, did you try to use anything other than just web and if you did was it available? I'm thinking of IRC, FTP, SSH, NNTP, IMAP, Netmeeting, IM, and so on. ie anything not through a web browser. [from: JB Wifi]

We all should know by now that WEP is fundamentally insecure. But now it appears that Windows XP Wi-Fi access  makes it even less secure due to a complex set of interactions between XP and base stations.  [thanks, the INQUIRER] [from: JB Wifi]

Reiter has got a detailed analysis of pricing and costs of WiFi hotspots with comment from Andy Syebold and Sky Dayton (of Boingo). Like him (and them, and the whole industry) I'm still trying to work out exactly where the added value is in running a hotspot or network of hotspots and so where the settling point is for price. One problem wiith this is the tension I've mentioned before between the Mom and Pop operation where WiFi inernet access is given away fro free as a loss leader and the commercial organization that needs all the infrastructure and hence has to charge "business" rates to cover their costs. One other issue is the lack of any obvious added value that can be used to justify "business" rates. So far I've only been able to find two both of which are threatened by other sources. The first is an email system that makes it possible to send and receive emails without exposing your passwords. The second is a VPN from the consumer's laptop to some secure point on the net. This is not to provide complete security because onwards from there would be insecure but it does at least make WiFi access no more dangerous than a fixed line into the internet. The threat to these as a business model justification is that they are both easily replicated using first or third party services from someone else.

Right now the WiFi hotspot market feels like the early days of cellphones. There's no market leader. There's no roaming agreements. There's wild variations in pricing. The BigCos are throwing capital investment at it in the hopes of grabbing all the land and mindshare. And the early consumer adopters are finding it very difficult to get through this and are making it up as they go along. What makes this interesting and which will make it play out rather differently from cellphones is the low barrier to entry at the bottom end and the lack of enforced regulation from government or national level bodies.

Given all this, it would be easy for me to recommend to the big players that a traditional approach of "business pricing", lock in and corporate deals is a dead end and a better approach would be to swamp the market with a dirt cheap, franchised model. And I have done this. But I also know that this is probably never going to generate the return measuring tens or hundreds of million dollars that they're looking for and so it's not an option. So they'll go down the easy well trodden path and in the process most of them will probably never get the return they're looking for and will have spent untold millions on capital costs in the process that they'll never recuperate.

There's also some marketing comment in the article. He points out that typical WiFi deals involve two parties. So we have T-Mobile linking with Starbucks or BT linking with Costa. The industry is young enough that there is a major element of education needed here. This means that the venue needs to be well stocked with information, signs and notices, knowledgeable staff and so on. Reality is that all too often there's one sign on the wall or a bunch of leaflets near the chocolate sprinkler station and that's it. So the marketing from the venue organiser is essentially failing. Now look at the web sites from the network organisers. The information is thin and often misleading. So that I'm not accused of bias (we have links with OpenZone) take a look at T-Mobile, Megabeam, and Openzone. I'm in the business and even I have trouble working out what their respective offerings are, what the risks are and what I have to do to connect up. Now imagine yourself into the shoes of their prospective customer. Say a moderately tech savvy businessman who spends a lot of time on the road. Are they going to be able to work it out, or deliberately seek out one coffee shop or hotel over another so they can use it?

This all reminds me of many many sponsorship and marketing deals I've been involved in over the years. All too often the deal is all that matters to both parties and little work is done afterwards by either side to make the most of it. It's as though both sides are expecting the other to do all the work. And where some work is done, it's passed down the chain of command to someone who is more interested in keeping their job than maximising return. A horribly cynical view, I know, but that's my experience.  [from: JB Wifi]

Some examples of where Software Patents in Action are inhibiting software development. This is particularly relevant now as the EU is debating their approach to software patents and proposing an enlargement of what would be covered. [from: JB Ecademy]

With all the talk at the moment of the next enlargement of the EU and whether Turkey should join, maybe it's time to ask what the natural boundaries of Europe are and just how big it should grow?

What if the EU mirrored the old Roman Empire? Let's set the borders as the Arctic to the north, Sahara to the south, Urals to the North east and the Persian gulf to the south east. That would mean admitting Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, a bunch of Russian republics and possibly even Iran.

Well why not? I usually ask 1-2-5-10 years for these questions, but I think this time it better be 10-20-50-100 years. My feeling is that this is inevitable, so would you care to put a date on it? [from: JB Ecademy]