Clay Shirky ran an experiment in computer augmented brainstorming. O'Reilly Network: In-Room Chat as a Social Tool : The setup was quite simple. We were working in a large open loft, seated around a ring of tables, and we connected a WiFi hub to the room's cable modem. Most of the participants had WiFi-capable laptops, and ARSC works in a browser, so there were no client issues. We put a large plasma screen at one end of the room. We created a chat room for the event, and asked the participants using the chat to log in using their first name. In addition, we created a special username, Display, which we logged into a machine connected to the plasma screen. The Display interface had no text-entry field, suppressed control messages, and had its font set very large. This maximized screen real estate for user-entered messages, and made them readable even by participants sitting 10 meters away (though it minimized the amount of scroll-back visible on the plasma screen.)

I've got some experience of doing something like this using a more structured anonymous tool combined with wireless and WinCE devices. One key factor is that this sort of approach enables even the quietest, shyest member to participate. Clay notes that "Indeed, one of our most active participants contributed a considerable amount of high-quality observation and annotation while saying almost nothing out loud for two days."

If you get the opportunity to try something like this in a business setting I'd strongly encourage having a go. [from: JB Ecademy]

A new site has appeared on the horizon with some familiar names involved. The Wireless Commons Manifesto | The Wireless Commons : We have formed the Wireless Commons because a global wireless network is within our grasp. We will work to define and achieve a wireless commons built using shared spectrum, and able to connect people everywhere. We believe there is value to an independent and global network which is open to the public. We will break down commercial, technical, social and political barriers to the commons. The wireless commons bridges one of the few remaining gaps in universal communication without interference from middlemen and meddlers. [from: JB Wifi]

Cool. The book, Smart Mobs - The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold now has a weblog [from: JB Ecademy]

BW Online | December 30, 2002 | Some Home Truths about Wi-Fi This article is from a relatively clueless journalist who has a DSL line, a home computer and a work laptop. He's tried to install a Linksys WiFi router so he can work on the deck at the back of the house and use the DSL line from the laptop without laying loads of cable. This has to be the classic home use or a typical average person. After a lot of hassle, he's finally got it working except that the signal doesn't reach all over the house and particularly not the deck. He's also not using any security because it's too hard to understand.

We've (ie the manufacturers and software developers) got to make this stuff easier. I've been following alt.wireless for the last few weeks and it's full of similar stories, problems and misconceptions. [from: JB Wifi]

the internet continues to amaze. Here's a blog from Iraq brining you a little taste of current Iraqi life. Where is Raed ?

When the Afghani episode was happening, some of us made a conscious effort to seek out local news sources to get some perspective from central Asia that didn't come via CNN. It looks like it's time to do the same thing for Iraq. [from: JB Ecademy]

There's a discussion happening on alt.wireless about the morality and legality of wardriving. Here's some of my input.

>One partial solution may be for genuine users seeking public access points to only use recognised SSIDs;
Sorry to pick just one piece from your post. This suggests some conventions beyond just NYCWireless saying "Use nycwireless for your SSID".

My position is something like this. I want Wifi and Internet access to be ubiquitous. We're just not there yet. Microsoft seem to agree with me because they ship consumer grade software that just uses what it finds.

To enable ubiquitous internet access I want to see people make a *conscious* decision to play out one of various scenarios.
1) Home secured bandwidth
2) Home with shared bandwidth
3) Commercial but free shared bandwidth (eg a cafe)
4) Commercial charged bandwidth (eg Boingo, Wayport etc)
5) Commercial secured network

Now given that all these exist, I should be able to open my laptop in a Starbucks in Oxford St London (say), see what's available, and if I get a connection, DHCP IP, gateway IP and DNS just use it. It seems a reasonable assumption that I'm in a public area and I seem to be able to see public access so the access is deliberate. It may be from T-Mobile and they just haven't started charging yet, or it may be the cafe across the street who choose to try and kill T-Mobile's business model. And unless the SSID is "GoAway" or something else obvious I don't see any way that I can verify the situation.

But now take another scenario. I'm sitting at home and I spot another network that again is wide open. I'd probably be doing nothing legally wrong to use it, but it's likely that it's someone who simply doesn't have a clue. At least for now. But if it became common for people to set up there network in scenario 2) It would again be reasonable to assume that I'm being invited to use it but to play fair and not get them into trouble or use their whole pipe.

So now we get back to "wardriving", whatever that is. Despite the explosive growth in shipments of wifi hardware, this is still early days. My feeling is that the majority of wardriving is done by interested parties who are mapping wifi space for academic or commercial reasons. There are only a very few crackers who are doing it to see what they can steal or break although they undoubtedly exist. So I'd rather we separated the two activities and condemned the crackers without lumping the academic Wardrivers in with them. [from: JB Wifi]

Great post by the Doc. One more reason to be your own ISP   In the ultimate world of ends (which the end-to-end Net continues fundamentally to be), ISPs become nothing more than storage and pipes. Stupid things, as David Isenberg correctly says.  Because if they're not stupid, they get all smart like Verio and start shutting down whole sites and communities.

I'd go a little further and say that ISPs should be nothing more than pipes. I'll find my storage, email services, web hosting, news services and so on somewhere else thank you very much. And I'd like an AUP that says I can do what I like with my connection as long as I obey the laws of the land, take reasonable care with my setup and play nicely. Where reasonable care means not running an open smtp relay or allowing my web server to be infected with a worm. And where  play nicely means not cracking my fellow users with port scans and MS network neighbourhood connections.

I don't have a problem with ISPs offering value added services if they think they can make a business of it. I do have a problem with ISPs that restrict access in order to prop up these value added services. I also have a problem with ISPs that restrict access to prop up uncompetitive business units elsewhere in their organization.

So let's make a plea for Stupid ISPs, where stupid means no frills.

As an aside, I have a personal example of this. NTL use transparent web proxies to keep their upstream bandwidth costs down. Which is not a problem in itself except that they seem to be unable to keep their Inktomi proxy servers configured and working reliably. The end result is that I have to mess around with explicitly set Proxy server addresses to keep my web access running. All too often web access disappears or only cached pages are displayed until I switch to one of their other proxies. I foolishly thought I would get transparent port 80 access for my money but unfortunately not. [from: JB Ecademy]

An article from the author of Kismet. A WiFi sniffing utility for Linux. Linux 802.11b and Wireless (in)security [from: JB Wifi]

If you like cyberpunk science fiction, you'll love JURY SERVICE-PAGE 1 this is a joint effort between two authors who've never met, live half way round the world from each other and collaborated via email.

Or maybe you'd prefer Samuel Pepys diary reformatted into a weblog complete with commentary, comments, trackback and RSS. [from: JB Ecademy]

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]