The next "Stop the war" march in London is on Feb 15. Details here.

Now I don't want to get in to a huge debate about whether the proposed military action in Iraq is correct or not. But I'm sure there are people here who feel that War is not the best course of action in this case. If you do feel like this, then make the effort and add your presence to the protest.

Don't be concerned about being linked with the far left or radical Muslim groups. Even though the media will undoubtedly spin the coverage to make it look like the protest is purely from these groups, the reality will be that there will be many other reasonably well informed, moderate, and concerned people there from all walks of life. It doesn't matter what your reasons are, only that you turn up.

There have been some suggestions that if there is a war in Iraq this year, it will happen around Feb 18-19. This makes the timing and size of the march particularly important.

Let's make this march the biggest there's ever been. [from: JB Ecademy]

The Guardian | Revolution? It's all go on the western : Frustrated at the slow roll-out of broadband access, people all over the UK are clubbing together to do it for themselves in the hope of building a free network for all.

Detail about free WLAN network efforts in Kingsbridge, Cardiff, Loch Lomond along with consume.net [from: JB Wifi]

Here's the relevant part of the AUP.

user policy :

(h) in excess of "normal use" bandwidth limits set out in this section.

ntl: home's broadband and dial-up services are intended for normal recreational or educational use by individuals and families and our pricing and network architecture have been designed accordingly. Customers who use the services more heavily than a normal home user will reduce the performance of the network for other customers.

"Normal use" of the service is defined as up to 1 gigabyte downstream of data transfer daily (which equates to approximately 200 music tracks, 650 short videos, 10,000 pictures or around 100 large software programmes downloaded per day).

1 gigabyte per day download, even on NTL's 1Mb service is going to take some doing. I think you'd have to build an automated robot to suck files off Kazaa or something like that to break this. Interestingly, they don't propose any cap on upstream data transfer. So providing you don't break any copyrights, it seems to be entirely within the AUP to run a P2P file sharing node and have that max out your upstream connection continuously. of course if you did that, you can bet they would change the rules again.

The other bit that's worth noting is the restrictions on LAN and particularly Wireless WLAN.

The residential broadband internet service ("Broadband Services") is designed for connection to a single PC. If you connect more than one PC at any one time to the Broadband Service you agree that this shall be entirely at your own risk. ntl will not support your PC's, the network used, or their configuration and technical support shall remain limited to your Internet connection only.

You must not connect more than three (3) PC's to the Broadband Services at any one time.

You are permitted to use routers, and the connection of a dedicated hardware router or firewall shall not be considered a PC for the purposes of this section.

In connecting to the Broadband Service, you must only use a PC you own or lease, and you must not attempt to connect your PC to the Broadband Services from outside your home. This includes the use of wireless or non-wireless networking technology to connect your PC or any other PC to your Broadband Services from outside your home or the connection of your PC to anyone else's Broadband Services.

So your allowed to have a WLAN. But you're only allowed to use it with your computers within your home's boundary. So no sitting in the car in the road then! Clearly this is designed to stop you sharing with your neighbours. And clearly it's also completely unenforcable. So should you do this, ahem!, you'd be well advised to keep quiet about it. They don't say anything about putting appropriate controls in place to ensure that you don't inadvertently break the AUP, but I guess you'd be sensible to at least use WEP.
[from: JB Ecademy]

Are you a power networker?
Have you filled in your fifty words?

Then you can find people like you!

This does a full text match of your fifty words on the fifty words and profile notes from everyone else and then orders the results according to how many matches there are. [from: JB Ecademy]

Check it out. Where is Raed ? is a blog from ground zero in Baghdad. Iraq doesn't seem so far away now, right? [from: JB Ecademy]

Early days and a bit thin, but here's a web site Kingsbridge Link - Community Mesh Network about a 5 node mesh being built with Locustworld's technology. [from: JB Wifi]

In my continuing quest to wean myself off Internet Explorer, I've gone back and looked at the bookmarklets I was using for posting to Ecademy Weblogs. Just a reminder, load this registry hack and you get an extra right click entry. Just highlight some text on a web age you're viewing, right click, choose "Ecademy Blogit!" And a new window opens up with the Ecademy blog entry screen. The URL, Title and you're highlighted text are already entered waiting for you to add some pithy wisdom for us all.

I've now got a set of bookmarklets as an alternative. Just drag these to your "Links" toolbar and they do the same thing. Highlight some text, click on the link in the toolbar and the same thing happens. Cool, huh?

IE Bookmarklets
Ecademy: Blog It
Wifi Ecademy: Blog It

Mozilla-Phoenix Bookmarklets
Ecademy: Blog It
Wifi Ecademy: Blog It

Notice that I've also got a second set for Mozilla and Phoenix. If you've got the time I'd recommend taking a look at these two as I reckon they are now realistic alternatives to IE.

The other project I've been messing around with is the buttons above the textarea data entry on Ecademy. These provide a very lightweight way of entering html. I'd been stuck using an IE specific way of doing this which also meant that I had to keep using IE as I spend so much time in Ecademy text data entry. I finally worked out how to do this with Mozilla as well and in the process improved the way IE works. There's a test rig and source code for this here. You should note that this depends on a bug fix for Mozilla that went in Jan 8 and hasn't made it through into the mainstream builds yet so if you want to take advantage of it right now you'll need to install a recent nightly build.

Let me know if you like, dislike or improve these. [from: JB Ecademy]

BT Wholesale is about to roll out an SDSL service. This gives up to 2Mbps both up and down over copper telephone wires.

"Two lists of the exchanges involved in each rollout can be seen in our Announcements forum, March 2003 and April 2003."

I've been unable to find wholesale or retail prices for this. Anyone? [from: JB Ecademy]

Excellent Analysis: SQL Slammer

Here's a few Q&A

This infects corporate servers running SQL Server 2000
Most victims were infected through MSDE 2000, a lightweight version of SQL Server installed as part of many applications from Microsoft (e.g. Viseo) as well as 3rd parties.

"Companies need to take applying patches against new security threats seriously" - Graham Cluley, Expert at anti-virus company Sophos
How seriously? Making sure that 99.9% of all patches are applied? That's what they are doing already.
...
The main problem here is not patches but hardening. Port 1434 was unnecessary to almost everyone. When application vendors embedded MSDE, why didn't they close down port 1434? Most importantly, my FIRST and LAST step in hardening a system is looking at ‘netstat' and closing down ports I don't need. My personal website http://www.robertgraham.com/ has been running on an unpatched Windows system for 5 years with no problems. I don't need to bother patching it because I have hardened it. Patches solve the "known" vulnerabilities, hardening solves the vulnerabilities that are there, but haven't been discovered yet.
[from: JB Ecademy]

BT Wholesale is about to roll out an SDSL service. This gives up to 2Mbps both up and down over copper telephone wires.

"Two lists of the exchanges involved in each rollout can be seen in our Announcements forum, March 2003 and April 2003."

I've been unable to find wholesale or retail prices for this. Anyone? [from: JB Ecademy]

Amazingly complete in 15 pages. 802.11g NTK - Part 1 : Small Net Builder : Real Help for Your Small Network from Tim Higgins [from: JB Wifi]

Announcements of lots of hotspots in Ireland including ElectricNews.net:News:Dublin museum launches free hotspot Also,

The intensity of the race among Ireland's telcos for public Wi-Fi dominance is evident. On Tuesday, O2 Ireland said that it had signed up 12 locations for its Wireless Zone paid Wi-Fi service. Esat BT will also make its first foray into the market at the end of February with a hotspot in Dun Laoghaire Harbour, as part of the BT Openzone network. The company is also rolling out a WLAN in the Imperial Hotel in Cork.

Meanwhile, BT Northern Ireland has switched on Northern Ireland's first public WLAN with the launch of a network in the Europa Hotel in Belfast, as well as in three other Hastings Group hotels in the region.

[from: JB Wifi]

Is VoIP (Voice over IP) the killer app for broadband? What will it take to encourage people to routinely use their broadband connection for phone calls rather than the phone?

This was prompted by seeing a bunch of articles recently in this area. In the USA, Vonage partnering wth Earthlink and one of the baby bells. Work on SIP to provide you with a single "phone number" for your VoIP connection regardless of location. Rumours of stunning growth (67% per qtr!) in Japan for Yahoo Broadband when they started bundling a VoIP service with their DSL offering. Another unsubstantiated rumour that 10% of all international calls are now via the internet (really? That sounds really high).

I can see this tipping into mass adoption really fast once a small set of problems are overcome.
- It's got to be really transparent so you don't need to think too much about what's happening technically
- We have to solve all the problems of getting voice through NAT firewalls. this is all just too hard at the moment.
- We need something that looks, feels and works just like a phone but attaches either to the PC or directly to ethernet. And at the same sort of price as a dumb phone is now.

It's time for another of my time questions. How long will it be before 10% of all fixed line phone conversations involve VoIP at one or other of the end points? 1-2-5-10-20 years? [from: JB Ecademy]

blogging ecosystem lists the top 500 blogs in terms of who links to them. In parallel with this, the top 500 blogs in terms of number of people they link to. Then we have a new system on Technorati. A list of the top 100 interesting blogs in terms of new links to them in the last 24 hours.

I'm constantly in awe of just how much stuff there is out on the Net. [from: JB Ecademy]

In the Ecademy Clubs, after one week we've got:-
- 80 clubs
- 52 Club Moderators
- 219 members
- 427 Forum messages

This is great, but it doesn't happen by itself. It's time to take another look and put a little more in to it. For instance:-

- The Regional clubs are getting a lot more interest for their meetings than for their clubs. One example, Bristol had more than 30 registrations but only 15 in their club. Did you register or go to the meeting? Well join the club then!

- 52 people run a club but the "Club for club moderators" only has 10 members. If you run a club, go and join up.

- 209 people voted in the recent poll on running your own weblog. 26% said they run their own so go and join the Bloggers club

- At least a few of you ride motorcycles. Join the Ecademy MCC.

And so on. But this is not just a plea to get people to join my clubs. ;) It's also a reminder that there are like minded Ecademists with all sorts of interests. The Clubs provide another route to find and get to know them. [from: JB Ecademy]

Take a look at Wildgrape NewsDesk. If you need to keep informed and you read a lot of sites on the web every day, you really need a news reader. There's plenty to choose from here. [from: JB Ecademy]

BigChampagne - Online Media Measurement is producing charts for the music people are sharing on all the big P2P networks. Notice that despite the complete lack of payola, chart rigging and radio playlist manipulation there's a very strong correlation between the online and offline charts. So whatever it is that music companies do, it seems to be working in terms of guiding public tastes. [from: JB Ecademy]

Pretty detailed analysis of the The Spread of the Sapphire/Slammer Worm : The Sapphire Worm was the fastest computer worm in history. As it began spreading throughout the Internet, it doubled in size every 8.5 seconds. It infected more than 90 percent of vulnerable hosts within 10 minutes.

Wow! [from: JB Ecademy]

Wonderfully detailed description of the trials and tribulations involved in getting a Wireless link over Bristol Harbour for an Art project involving actors at one end speaking lines dictated to them by IRC at the other end, videoed and then streamed back to the "controllers". Done and performed by the Easton Community Wireless Network (CLAN) project.

"Always test all cables and connectors before going on site. Nine times out of ten, it is these that are at fault if something does not work properly.".

I'll repeat that. It's always the connectors. [from: JB Wifi]

Ross Mayfield has some updated results from his work on Networks and links in the blog community This ties together Ryze Friends, FOAF and Blogs. It's still a fairly small sample of 180 but shows definite small world characteristics where the average distance between people is only two hops. [from: JB Ecademy]