Golden Shield v1.0 | Beijing Blocking Blogspot Corporations and the Development of Surveillance Technology in the People's Republic of China, "China's Golden Shield", Greg Walton

It looks like China is blocking all blogs on the popular blogspot system.

So Blogs are now officially politically dangerous.

Of course it could never happen here. [from: JB Ecademy]

UK ID card consultation : Hands up everybody who's really excited about the introduction of universal Identity Cards for every man, woman and child in the country!

As you've all still got your hands down, wander over to the site above and make your voice heard. [from: JB Ecademy]

Warchalking goes official with an industry body that wants to promote WiFi hotspots with and official looking logo.Wi-Fi ZONE Overview

They should just use chalk, right? [from: JB Wifi]

This is so sad. Oolong, the most famous rabbit in the world, has passed away to that great rabbit hutch in the sky.

Oolong was mostly famous for being able to balance small objects on his head (such as biscuits or pancakes) while his Japanese owner took very high quality photographs of the tableau for publication on their website.

Rest In Peace - Oolong [from: JB Ecademy]

Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor's eJournal - Defining Broadband in Only One Direction : Implicit in this story, and the attitudes of the reporter and the companies mentioned, is the idea that broadband is solely about the delivery of "content" to consumers. This is little more than television, updated for online.

Think for a moment about BT's recent broadband adverts on TV. The implication is that huge quantities of stuff can be found on the internet and downloaded to you. We should take note of the last few frames where the guy says "Get Back In The Pipe!". I'm just as interested in stuffing huge quantities of stuff up the pipe as sipping from the firehose of stuff coming down.

So why do we get so much less bandwidth upstream compared with down? And why do the Broadband ISPs put so many restrictions on what we can send upstream? Is it (as Gilmor suggests) just a matter of control? [from: JB Ecademy]

OpenP2P.com: LazyWeb and RSS: Given Enough Eyeballs, Are Features Shallow Too? [Jan. 07, 2003]

Did you ever have a programming idea that "should exist"? And you didn't worry about making money from it. You just wanted it to exist? The Lazyweb is an idea from Matt Jones whereby you just publish the idea and hope some programmer somewhere picks up on it and decides it's an itch they want to scratch. The problem is the connection one of getting the idea in front of likely programmers. So now Ben Hammersley has created the Lazyweb blog. And with all the lovely bloggy goodness of RSS, trackback, weblogs.com and so on, lots of people can keep in touch with the latest lazyweb requests. [from: JB Ecademy]

This has already been blogged on the main Ecademy site but I'd like to bring out one piece here as well. Shirky: Customer-owned Networks and ZapMail : The wireless ISPs are likely to fare no better. Most people do their computing at home or at work, and deploying WiFi to those two areas will cost at worst a couple hundred dollars, assuming no one to split the cost with. There may be a small business in wiring "third places" -- coffee shops, hotels, and meeting rooms -- but that will be a marginal business at best. WiFi is the new fax machine, a huge value for consumers that generates little new revenue for the phone companies. And, like the fax network, the WiFi extension to the internet will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but it will not be built by a few companies with deep pockets. It will be built by millions of individual customers, a hundred bucks at a time.

This looks like a great opportunity and I'm a firm believer in the social benefits of having a very large number of privately owned hotspots that freely share their internet access for little or no money. To get there we need a number of changes.
- More ISPs that allow sharing in their AUPs. Right now most ISPs seem to have accepted that people should be able to run LANs on the end of broadband. Reluctantly they are accepting that these LANs may be WLANs but they still have wordage that prohibits sharing with people outside your house, while providing no guidance on how to control this. For this and other reasons we need to shift them to a model where they don't care what the line is used for.
- Either the WAP manufacturers, the big software suppliers, new software ventures or the community software writers need to come up with packages of software and hardware that make sharing safe for guests, AP ownwers and the ISPs. At the moment, it's way to easy to simply leave an AP wide open unless you know exactly what you're doing. We need to make it easy for home AP owners to make a conscious, deliberate decision to provide free bandwidth in a safe and secure way.
- Culturally we need to get away from the idea that using bandwidth you find out there on the road is "stealing". If you find available bandwidth you should be able to use it without wondering if you should or not. In the current climate there are legal, moral and ethical issues with this.
- There's still enormous potential in mesh networking APs together into a cloud of connectivity that runs in parallel with the internet and connects to it at multiple points. But at the moment this is a pipe dream with no implementation.
- This is all too horribly anarchic and bottom up for some governments to accept. We can expect the existing entrenched interests to take advantage of this to lobby governments to outlaw some aspects of this. To some extent we can do nothing but hope that there are enough enlightened politicians to see the danger of excessive legislation in this area. The recent suggestions from the US that open WiFi is a threat to Homeland Security don't bode well in this area.

So I believe that in the long term, Clay is right and I share his vision. But in the short term, boy there's a lot of work to do. And there's an awful lot of points where the existing entrenched interests can de-rail it. WLANs will indeed be built a hundred bucks at a time in very large numbers. Whether they're available for guest use and so represent an alternative to the Telcos is another matter entirely. [from: JB Wifi]

Fortune.com - Technology - Making Pay Phones Pay : Making Pay Phones Pay by converting public pay phones into terminals for "Wi-Fi" Internet connections.

Last year BT OpenZone asked Ecademy for ideas for Hotspot locations. Several of us came up with the idea of converting BT pay phones and internet kiosks into WiFi hotspots for all the same reasons. These sites already have power, connectivity and solid hardware boxes to protect equipment. Converting the phone line into an ADSL line should be trivial. If you can reduce the size of a hotspot WAP and control hardware to a small black box and a small omni antenna that can be stuck on the roof then creating a hotspot should become trivial and cheap. As the article points out, the downside of course is the business model. There's no there, there to charge for providing the service so the internet access has to stand on it's own. If the public hotspot providers are serious about rolling out large numbers of access points, then this approach looks like a complete no-brainer. But if all they want to do is fleece business customers when they are a captive audience stuck in a hotel, conference, station or airport, then it's not going to happen. [from: JB Wifi]

Straight Dope Message Board - If LotR Had Been Written By Someone Else!? :

Gandalf, Gandalf! Take the ring!
I am too small to carry this thing!"

"I can not, will not hold the One.
You have a slim chance, but I have none.
I will not take it on a boat,
I will not take it across a moat.
I cannot take it under Moria,
that's one thing I can't do for ya.
I would not bring it into Mordor,
I would not make it to the border.

-excerpt from Dr. Suess's FOTR.

Many others here, including Hemingway, Orwell, Lovecraft, Milton, Jjames Joyce. [from: JB Ecademy]

Networking and Wireless Solution / Strengths, challenges, recommendations - ZDNet Tech Update This is quite a good article that sums up the current state of play.

This surprises me though. "The 802.11b standard will be the dominant technology for the next three years, so vendors should dedicate their near-term resources to improving on 802.11b products." I feel that 802.11g trumps 802.11b completely. The products coming out are the same price with the functionality but with 54Mbps and still with compatibility with the older standard. I also feel that this makes 802.11a irrelevant except maybe for point to point links that need freedom from interference.

But then there's this. "Wi-Fi is still a technology for the early adopter. Consumer-targeted vendors are quickly learning to position their products for less tech-savvy users." Absolutely. It's all too damn hard at the moment. And the proliferation of standards is not helping. And as they say the vendors are doing a poor job of explaining why you should buy one product over another. [from: JB Wifi]

Make a not for your diary and click on the Meetup logo on the right.
It's the WiFi Meetup. Marquis of Granby, 2 Rathbone Street, London, on Wednesday, January 8 @ 7:00PM [from: JB Wifi]

Can we try and get away from this word "stealing". There's been quite a lively debate on alt.wireless about this. I've been trying to argue that if an AP has WEP off, provides DHCP which provides an IP, gateway and DNS, then as a guest I'm both morally and legally justified in assuming bandwidth is being offered. As a good citizen, and out of self interest I shouldn't abuse it, but I can't see anything wrong with using it. Others are arguing that I ought to get more formal authorization first and make some effort to find out who and what is providing the bandwidth. And that just because I can use it, doesn't mean I should.

The problem I have with all this is the practicalities. Windows and particularly Windows XP will just go ahead without me doing anything. We know that there are lots of open hotspots out there that are not deliberate but there are also lots that are. We've got no convention for SSIDs that imply free sharing. And the most difficult problem is that it could be very hard to find the owner. The example I gave is Bryant Park. If I'm in the park, and I see WiFi with an SSID of NYCWireless I can guess what it is. If I'm in London and see "ReadyToSurf" what do I do? How about the SSIDs I'm seeing round London "UK-LON" with no WEP, DHCP and DNS? I have no idea who's running them or what they are. And I can't think of any way of finding out.

My concern is not really for us insiders. It's for the average laptop user who doesn't know an SSID from their nose. If they open the laptop, Win XP gets a connection and they read their email, who's at fault?

We should also recognise that the whole debate is happening because the industry isn't providing the tools or guidance to allow AP owners to make a deliberate choice over whether to share or not. Aberdeen is predicting that the home- residential market will get the lion's share of shipments this year. An awful lot of those WLANs will be setup using factory defaults on the AP and be connected to ADSL or Cable thus inadvertently sharing their bandwidth. This is *NOT* a problem until somebody abuses it and gets them thrown off their ISP for violating the ISP's AUP. The failure was that we didn't give them the tools to make a deliberate decision. The result will be a load of Government-Media noise about how free internet access will bring down western capitalism! And that doesn't actually help anyone.
[from: JB Wifi]

For all you conspiracy buffs, revel in the AlterNet: Top Ten Conspiracy Theories of 2002 For the rest of you, it's pure entertainment that should be taken with large pinches of salt. I mean none of this could possibly be true, could it?

One piece seems to be missing from this list. That's the one that says that Senator Graham said that one or more foreign governments were involved in the 911 attacks. There seems to be a collective blindness from the world's media on this issue. [from: JB Ecademy]

Three URLs for your amusement.

Stigmergy and the World-Wide Web is a fascinating article about all the internetworking happening in the blog world and how it's building loose but enormously complex social links between large numbers of independent Blog websites.

Blog Tribe Social Network Mapping is a short project to map the social networks of 1,108 blog nodes taken from the blogrolls of Ryze blog tribe members.

Hep Message Server is an attempt to build a relay server that will move messages between almost any messaging system. It plans to include:- RSS Feeds, Pop3 mailbox, weblog entries, email, jabber and maybe others. Read news in your email, post to your weblog from jabber etc etc.
[from: JB Ecademy]

Testing the Wireless Waters With WiFi (TechNews.com) : The typical domains of wireless networks are college campuses, major airports, high-end hotels, trendy coffee shops and tech-heavy neighborhoods. But Forrest C. "Woody" Wheat sees a new horizon for this increasingly popular technology: the near-shore waters of the American coast.

Nice. They plan to provide wifi internet access over the coastal waters of the whole USA to a range of 20-30 miles. It's currently definitely targeted at commercial cruise ships with charges around $500 pm. I would think there's plenty of potential here to also sell a private service aimed at pleasure boats. Particularly on the eastern seaboard from Boston to the keys, there are a large number of high net worth individuals who spend holidays and weekends on their private boats and I'm sure they'd pay for internet access.

I wonder if there's a market here for the UK? We've got an awful lot of shipping within 25 miles of our coasts but most of it is commercial. The equivalent private use is in-shore canals and marinas, but we've got plenty of those and plenty of people with boats in them. After all one of the national past times is "messing around in boats". I did have this cunning plan to WiFi enable the canals. Since they tend to be built in straight lines, you could build a mesh from lock house to lock house with some simple directional antennas and this would also provide coverage for the 20-30 yards across the canal. [from: JB Wifi]

Intersil Provides WPA for PRISM :
This article is actually about Iintersil making WPA available to Prism chipsets. But the interesting bit is this.

(Home and residential Wi-Fi networks will beat out enterprise and hotspot deployments as the dominant area for WLAN growth in 2003, according to Aberdeen Group's 2003 Information Technology Outlook.)

So it looks like it will remain the people selling shovels who will make the money in this gold rush for some time to come. Now how do we turn all those home and residential networks into hotspots? Unfortunately there are a whole series of roadblocks here from ISPs who outlaw sharing bandwidth, to the governments seeing it as a security risk, to the absence of software to share and control the hotspot. [from: JB Wifi]

It's still got rumour status but this AOL said ready to boost blogging suggests that AOL will have blogs and blog software with an announcement in February. Assuming it happens, it'll be interesting to see what current blog functionality they include, eg RSS, trackbacks, comments, blogger API, etc etc. [from: JB Ecademy]

Danny O'Brien has a piece today about Lee Felsenstein and his project to bring WiFi based internet access to Laos villages. It's a condensed chatty version of the pieces in New York Times and Irish Times. The first 5 village network needs $25,000 and the international grant looks like being late, so Lee is looking for donations. Danny has asked for people to spread the meme, or as he says:- 

Mr Blogger, meet Mr Felsenstein. [from: JB Ecademy]

A short end of term report on WiFi.

Hardware. Christmas 2002 will be seen as a turning point in WiFi technology as 802.11g (more or less) hardware came on stream at the same price as 802.11b This will kill the market for "b" hardware in a matter of months. Meanwhile the competition in the hardware market is leading the manufacturers to play fast and loose with the standards by each introducing their own incompatible enhancements. As long as they still interoperate within the standard this doesn't actually matter. What does matter is that the rush to market is leading to buggy, hard to use firmware and driver support. We really shouldn't have to put up with still buggy internet downloaded upgrades immediately after loading the CD that came in the box, but maybe that's what it takes. And we ought to have pre-configured, pre-installed defaults on the gateways that don't just leave everything wide open.

Software. Um. What software? Where's the home WiFi gateway software that works like NoCat but runs on Windows? Where's the universal use of SSL for email? Where's the WiFi router-firewall configuration that does what's actually needed to safely share your bandwidth? Where's the open source mesh networking software? Damn, there's still a lot of code to write.

Hotspots and WISPs. All the BigCos have now leapt on the bandwagon. And they're all repeating the same mistakes they made with cellphones; Excessive pricing targetted at the notional business customer; No roaming agreements; Flaky marketing; Flaky websites; No clear business model; But a press release aimed at keeping their shareholders quiet that declares an intent to become the market leader by covering the nation (pick a nation, any nation) with very large numbers of access points. Meanwhile, small outlets are discovering that they can install WiFi for their own use and offer it to their customers for free as a marketing loss leader. I actually think both will survive for a time with the BigCos being able to exploit the captive audience that finds itself stuck in a Radisson or Airport lounge. But that the free model will win out as groups like Hotel chains start offering free access because they have to in order to compete.

One things for sure. We can expect even more noise about WiFi in 2003 than we had in 2002. [from: JB Wifi]

Another data point in the continuing debate about whether it's morally OK to use WiFi internet access that you happen across. Stanford Law: Using wireless networks "moral and legal" A Palo Alto Online article about wireless networks includes this tidbit: Jennifer Granick, director of Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society, sees the unauthorized use of open wireless connections as moral and legal. A practicing lawyer and lecturer at the Stanford Law School, Granick said considering unauthorized wireless use a terrorist act amounts to idiocy. [thanks, Warchalking]

More from alt.wireless:
David Taylor  wrote:
>> OK. So I'll turn it around. If I was deliberately sharing bandwidth for
>> whatever reason, what should I do to make it clear to potential users
>> that they can use it?
>
>I agree but I guess the answer is "advertise".  Same way any other
>transmitting station makes itself available.
>
>You could ask the same questions about the cell phone providers and just
>about any radio transmitters.

I'm hardly going to take out national advertising and sponsor Ferrari to advertise
that WLAN internet access is available for 300m round my house. Now if I'm running
a pub in St Albans that offers free WiFi, I'll put up signs inn the pub and
scatter leaflets around explaining what's happening and how to use it. But I
probably won't do the same in the cafe across the road. As a user in the cafe I
can see the signal. Should I use it?

Damn. This is turning into some sort of academic exercise in Ethics. I'm much more
interested in the practicalities. I *want* to see a world where I turn on my
laptop and if it finds internet access, to be able to use it without feeling
guilty. And I *want* a world where the AP owner makes a deliberate and conscious
decision about whether to allow guests and how much access to give them. What I
don't want is the current situation where the guest has to make some sort of moral
decision because the AP hardware defaults to wide open and the majority of private
individuals installing them don't know what they're doing.
[from: JB Wifi]