I just loved this quote as it made me laugh. The Register : So if you know a middle-aged sociopath, for heaven's sake, point him to a computer and show him how to start a weblog. At least it will keep him off the streets.

The rest of the article is another rant from Andrew Orlowski against the cult of blogging and can probably be ignored. [from: JB Ecademy]

I'm really annoyed this morning because I've caught a nasty case of malware. I'm tempting fate here but I typically run Mozilla Firebird instead of IE and Turnpike instead of Outlook so I never catch these things and am more immune to viruses than the average user. But I upgraded MSN Messenger last night to do some testing and installed Messenger plus. It may be unconnected but at about the same time my machine caught C.Lop. This adds a load of entries in the IE bookmarks and inserts a toolbar that's really hard to get rid of.

Two tools I can recommend for clearing out this stuff are Adaware and SpybotSD.

Even with these tools, I still had to do a safe mode boot to remove one file, remove an entry in the registry and clean out the bookmarks by hand.

Several rude words!

Incidentally, one of the biggest reasons for switching to Firebird was the built in popup protection and an extension that blocks advert images. [from: JB Ecademy]

Ben Hammersley.com reports that there's a new hosted Blogging service called 20six Some interesting twists in this. First it's European which makes a refreshing change, and second they've got built in support for blogging and posting pictures from the latest crop of cellphones and PDAs that have built in cameras.

He also reports on Yet Another Community Networking Site (YACNS!) This one's called It's not what you know.com. This is all beginning to feel horribly like 1999 all over again. Lots of bandwagon jumping, silly URLs, and silly dotcom names. I guess the difference this time around is that they're all built with minimal resources, cheap hardware and software and nobody is spending all that VC money on Superbowl ads. [from: JB Ecademy]

Several copies of this story on the net today. this is as good as any. EE Times UK - UK consortium wins BFWA deployment project ahead of 3.4GHz auction

"A consortium including Cambridge Broadband Limited, Cotares Ltd and a group within Cambridge University's communications engineering department has been awarded a contract by the UK Radiocommunications Agency (RA) to characterize the operation of a commercial fixed broadband wireless access system operating in the 3.5GHz band.

The move comes just days ahead of the RA's auction of licenses to run FWA services in the UK in the 3.4GHz band, and, surprisingly, Cambridge Broadband, which is a global supplier of carrier class, point-to-multipoint broadband wireless equipment, has registered an interest to win one of the licenses."

In this and other related stories there are some harsh words for the RA, government approach, auctions of 20Ghz as well as 3.5Ghz spectrum and the general approach to rural broadband delivery via wireless. It's almost as though they don't actually want anyone to do this and would like to see anyone who tries fail dismally. Very bizarre. I've said before that we should be looking to learn lessons from the success of 802.11 and encourage a bottom up approach. We probably do need some formal licensing for this sort of work, but it doesn't have to be the sort of huge auction that just copies 3G and gives specific suppliers exclusive rights in large regions of the country. The licensing should be purely to identify responsible people in the event of interference problems not to create an artificial market or to protect players by creating a more or less temporary monopoly.

Surely what we really need is for a group like Edenfaster to be able to use the tehcnology in one valley in Yorkshire and for another group to be able to deliver in the next valley. If market forces mean they end up competing, merging or failing then so be it. [from: JB Wifi]

Own your own aircraft carrier for only $4.5m. Is this the ultimate gadget, or what?

Snowcrash, anyone? [from: JB Ecademy]

Excellent analysis from Glenn Wi-Fi Networking News: My Rebuttal to Qualcomm's Strawmen : Jeffrey K. Belk, senior vice president of marketing at Qualcomm, makes many excellent points in his open memo (republished on Alan Reiter's blog)

Their is consensus though that the current lack of roaming between networks is hurting the WiFi hotspot model. Unless you go to the same venue repeatedly (and can expense the cost), subscriptions don't make any sense to this observer.

One of the most interesting points is in the comments. It compares the cost differences between a 3G card for your laptop and a WiFi card. WiFi is so cheap now that people will buy it as an experiment.
[from: JB Wifi]

A lot of people in the west have been wondering what people would actually use their camera cellphones for. Of course the Japanese don't actually have this conceptual problem, they just get on and use the technology. Then we have reports of people using them to photograph the whiteboard before leaving the meeting thus proving that there is actually a business use. Anyway, I was waiting for the Matrix:Reloaded to start last night and we had a Kodak advert followed by a cellphone-camera ad. I started thinking that maybe we have this whole thing back to front.

In the future, every camera will have a built in cellphone.

Because of course you will want to show other people the photo you've just taken. Of course, you will want to post the photo to your website. But before any of that can happen you have to take a decent photo in the first place. Which means megapixel CDDs, flash and optical zoom. [from: JB Ecademy]

Buffalo are coming up with a hotspot AP designed for free hotspots. The Register : FREESPOT equipment differs from vanilla 802.11b technology in three important respects. There's pop-up technology so users are greeted with an advert of the day when they first log on and a 'privacy seperator' in access equipment prevents consumers sharing their hard disk contents. Last, there's a timed access facility so WiFi access is only available when a business is trading.

Meanwhile, Toshiba working with BT Openzone in the UK has another model. This is the area Toshiba is targeting. Its £400 public wireless LAN hotspot needs an broadband connection - which is where Tosh's reseller channel comes in, says business development manager Gary Evans - and then connects into a BT Openzone-powered wireless ISP which takes care of authentication and support. All the site owner has to do is sell £5 scratchcards valid for 24 hours access at any Tosh hotspot. Having bought the scratchcards from Toshiba at a third off, the site could discount them or even give them away as an incentive to get you to use their coffee shop instead of someone else's, say.

The analysts can't seem to work out what to make of this with reports ranging from the usual X big by Y years hype to shock horror reports that nobpdy will ever be able to make any money. The more sensible comments are that the market is veering towards ad hoc useage rather than subscriptions. [from: JB Wifi]

Simon Woodside : Wi-Fi for rural communities: from open, to internet, in three acts

Simon also hosts the wireless longhaul mailing lists. This is full of people bridging communities in Nepal, building infrastructure in Ghana and other such projects. [from: JB Wifi]

Mercury News | 05/23/2003 | Kazaa claims 230 million downloads For those who don't know yet, Kazaa is the leading music sharing software. By comparison,

Kazaa's success even dwarfs the most highly publicized software introduction in history -- the debut of Microsoft's Windows 95 computer operating system. It sold 40 million copies in the first year, making it the fastest-selling software ever.

Which leads to an interesting thought. Why hasn't Microsoft produced its own version and bundled it with XP? Surely they can't pass up such a successful product category?

And given the sheer scale of the success, you have to think that the RIAA is tilting at windmills trying to stop it.

Music uploading and downloading via Kazaa is a great way of using broadband bandwidth continuously. Which has another side effect. It costs the ISP too much in upstream bandwidth fees.
They generally share bandwidth between subscribers at anything up to 50:1 contention on the assumption that we were all doing web and email only. That assumption is beginning to look rather less definite leading them to impose bandwidth caps or payment per Gb. [from: JB Ecademy]

1. Don’t go it alone.
2. Get your ‘Elevator Pitch’ right.
3. Find a mentor and work closely with them.
4. Concentrate effort on getting your first customer.
5. Grow organically.
6. Watch your cash like a hawk.
7. Avoid litigation. ‘Don’t litigate, negotiate.’
8. Know when to grow.
9. Enjoy it.
10. Make sure your people enjoy it too. [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

The Times Online has copy of today's supplement produced in conjunction with UKOnline on Broadband for Business.

I guess it will be useful to someone, but it looks like a lot of fluff to me. They are at least raising questions about ADSL and recommending SDSL. [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

BeyondBricks Mailing List
An open list for discussion about the Beyond Bricks SIG.

List home: http://www.ecademy.com/mailman/listinfo/beyondbricks [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

I was just reading a piece in The Register about flexi-working for contractors and IT staff. I noticed that there was an ad from bCentral at the bottom.

So has anyone any experience with bCentral? care to tell us about it? [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

I'm trawling for suggestions of news sources that are appropriate for the Beyond Bricks SIG.

- What news sources-websites do you read regularly for this area?
- Are there any weblogs that are specifically aimed at this area?

Tell me what you find, and I'll try and add it to Dailenews. [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

The Register : UK Internet firms lack "business brains", according to first national IQ test of small business entrepreneurs. The UK's "dotcommers" came second to bottom in the test - only managing to beat those in the retail sector.

This looks like one of those surveys that sound nice but mean nothing until you notice it was organised by the Cranfield School of Management who have a pretty good reputation. [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

How do you start a small business in the UK? And it's not "Buy a big business and wait" but allegedly to go to nationalsmallbusinessweek.co.uk [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

All-Party Parliamentary Small Business Group [APPSBG] Freelancer briefing: Background : The APPSBG is carrying out a briefing on freelancers. This will take evidence on-line and at a public hearing on June 11th 2003.

This seems to be particularly relevant if you're in the Hemel Hempstead or Hertford & Stortford regions. There's also an online survey. [from: JB Beyond Bricks]

Distinctly strange explanation for why the latest generation of WiFi chips from Broadcom and Intel have no Linux support.

Linux-Kernel Archive: RE: Broadcom BCM4306/BCM2050 support : Don't expect specs or opensource drivers for any of these pieces of hardware until these vendors figure out a way to hide the frequency programming interface.

Ie. these cards can be programmed to transmit at any frequency, and various government agencies don't like it when f.e. users can transmit on military frequencies and stuff like that.

Hmm??? [from: JB Wifi]

Wireless-Doc (the Weblog) has some photos of using WiFi to access his weblog while walking through New York: started off at Battery Park (southern tip of Manhattan), and worked my way past the Verizon store across from Bryant Park, to Times Square. Cool! [from: JB Wifi]