Spam to email ratio soars in 2003 : MessageLabs expects that by next April about 70% of email traffic will be spam.

Email is terminally broken. So what next? [from: JB Ecademy]

del.icio.us. A social bookmark manager. With an especially tasty RSS feed. [from: JB Ecademy]

Wifi Planet has got a tutorial on implementing the NoCatAuth Gateway Server (via dailywireless)

Now aybe we can get all this packaged as a consumer friendly add on to a commercial AP. Like the Linksys WRT54G. I'm convinced that this is the way to go to do deliberate and controlled broadband sharing. Shame it's so hard. [from: JB Wifi]

Daily Wireless - Barbie's Wireless VideoCam The mind boggles! Now that Jennicam is going, has anyone got barbiecam.com? [from: JB Wifi]

Business week - U.S. Programmers at Overseas Salaries. I'm not sure I should even be pronmoting this idea as it feels like cutting off my nose to spite my face. Whatever, the story is about a startup who could potentially halve their programming costs by using offshore (India) programers. Instead he offered the work at the same rate to US programmers and was flooded with quality applications from out of work programmers. Two of the contractors have now become full time employees at normal US rates so the story does have a happy ending.

There's some serious implications here.

First is that the lack of hassle of using onsite or at least onshore contractors is worth a signififcant amount. So the savings from going offshore need to be large for it to be justifiable.

And second is that we're rapidly heading into a global employment market if we haven't already. Which means Western salaries dropping to match offshore salaries without the same drop in cost of living. That has serious consequences for global economics. And a lot of personal pain. This is one of the drivers behind the current US (and UK) decline of the middle class. [from: JB Ecademy]

The focus so far on public hotspot access has been all about a client (laptop) getting access outwards to the internet. Indeed some hotspot vendors have gone to lengths to restrict the laptop's vision of other clients connected to the same AP. Is anyone doing any work on software and facilities that are deliberately aimed at getting hotspot connected machines to talk to each other? Since they're all on the same local WLAN, it should be possible to share disks, printers, run multi-user games, remote control presentations, check presence and so on.

As I typed "Printers", I wondered why there's never a printer a public hotspots. I've already had a time when it would have been handy to be able to print a paper downstairs at Cafe Grandprix. [from: JB Wifi]

Mozilla Thunderbird V 0.4 has been released. This email an news client is looking better and better. Even tough it's only 0.4, it's impressively stable.

If you absolutely must have a calendar as well before you can switch from Outlook, try the Mozilla Calendar project.

And of course there's Firebird as well for browsing. [from: JB Ecademy]

10 hottest wireless applications for 2004

1. Multimedia messaging
2. Voice over WLAN
3. Localized content
4. Multicasting
5. Group press-to-talk
6. Remote networking
7. Wireless printing
8. Mobile blogging
9. Mobile community services
10. Industrial productivity

IMHO they missed one. P2P comms. That's Phone 2 Phone comms. We're seeing the first inkling of this in Bluejacking. Now if my phone has Bluetooth, and maybe Wifi, why shouldn't it connect direct to phones that are physically close to share music, ringtones, games and act as a walkie-talkie? Conceivably some of these functions could also work via GSM/GPRS/CDMA/3G. There's a prize here to the first phone manufacturer that starts building this stuff in even if it does impact the carrier's revenues. [from: JB Ecademy]

Slyck News - Sharman Exterminating Kazaa Lite K

Ah, the horror, the horror... I can't even begin to express the irony of this. Sharman Networks, which is the commercial arm of the Kazaa file sharing network, has used the DMCA to force the Kazaa Lite program off the web. Using a ridiculously powerful Copyright protection law (for the protection of dinosaurs from small mammals) to protect a program who's sole purpose is the circumvention of copyright.

For those who don't know KazaaLite was a hacked copy that eliminated all the spyware. It looks as though KazaaLite is now dead. While it still works for the moment we can expect Sharman to increasingly isolate it via upgrades to the main program and network protocols. Personally, Kazaa is so laden with Spyware that I won't use it on it's own so I've just downloaded DietK that appears to do a least some of what KazaaLite used to do. We'll see.

I think the net effect of this will be to increasingly fragment the music sharing networks. It won't go away but each one will be smaller and less effective. Looked at like that this action looks counter productive. But then Sharman has shareholders and investors just like the music companies. [from: JB Ecademy]

mbites - The Big Bluejack Heist at Waterloo This is a fairly balanced story about the practice of bluejacking or using bluetooth to send messages between phones. What interests me about this is the possibilities for phone to phone communications. It wouldn't be hard for phone manufacturers to start building in features for P2P Phone to Phone communication. Everything from swapping ring tones, MP3s, multi-user gaming to walkie talkie direct voice comms. Bluetooth is one way of doing this but at least some of it could use the normal GSM and GPRS channels or even WiFi for Wifi/GSM/Bluetooth enabled PDAs. The downside is obviously that it would affect revenue for the carriers and some of those swaps are dubious from a copyright point of view. But technologically this shouldn't be hard. [from: JB Wifi]

Esther Dyson on Social Networks Worth reading. [from: JB Ecademy]

Here's an idea. Schedule a time when your club will collectively join the Ecademy chat channel and meet online.

Ecademy chat, irc://irc.freenode.net/ecademy [from: JB Ecademy]

Two links I've been meaning to post.

3 styles of ethics. This is a paper on the three styles of ethics. Information, Commercial, Guardian. The Information ethic is the one that says information wants to be free" and values cooperation above personal gain. Commercial ethics are appropriate for business and trade, which seek to increase value to all parties involved. Money is the lifeblood of commerce. Innovation and efficiency are more useful than tradition, and the use of force is severely frowned on. Guardian or Government ethics are appropriate for governments and police forces, organizations that defend laws and land. In such a group, betrayal can cause disaster; force is frequently necessary; tradition is valuable; and loyalty is more important than money. In short, Information - Spread Innovation, Commercial - Improve the Status Quo, Guardian - Maintain the Status Quo.

The problems come when one set of ethical values are applied to a situation that is normally handled by another and this goes some way to explian the constant tension between the three areas

The second link is to The Political Compass. This is an attempt to change our view of politics by adding a second axis to the normal left-right, communist-capitalist axis. The second dimension is Authoritarian-Libertarian. Hence they've added a social scale to the normal economic scale. This gives a new look onto some traditional problems. In particular Fascism can be seen to be an extreme authoritarian position that can be either left or right wing . [from: JB Ecademy]

GNER Mobile Office is the launch of a Wifi service on GNERs trains. Principally Kings Cross to Doncaster, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen. They claim it is First class only, but I can't see anything that would restrict it.

If you use the service, please report back here. [from: JB Wifi]

DailyWireless - One-piece Access Points is one of their typically link rich and complete articles about various devices that can function as access points, from PC code to hotspots-in-a-box. On interesting little tidbit in there is that the Nocat crew have succeeded in adding nocatsplash to the Linksys WRT54G. This is still quite a long way from real security. In theory it would let a consumer set up a captive portal page to slow down guest users coming on to there home WLAN. Apart from the Linux geeky fun of hacking a commercial box that has software based on Linux, there's a point here which is that consumer grade equipment should really have this sort of capability built in so that people can share their broadband in a more organised manner.

From a recent brief war-driving session, my perception is that home WiFi use is growing rapidly but that 90% of the home boxes are installed with everything on default. There's an awful lot of APs round me called Belkin54g or Linksys that are clearly connected to NTL or BT. They've got a working system, they're pretty unlikely to be abused and they are of course breaking the ISPs T&Cs. But regardless of all that, free ubiquitous internet access is happening anyway.

One of the things I've been hoping for on wifi.ecademy.com is a guide to setting up your home LAN so that you deliberately share with guests but in a controlled fashion. I can see the need but I don't have the knowledge to write such a guide. If you do, why not get in touch. [from: JB Wifi]

4pm is chat room time. Come on in. [from: JB Ecademy]

Now we've got the Chat more or less working, the next trick is to try and get a critical mass of people in there. There's nothing worse than arriving to discover there's only one other person online and they've gone away for 10 minutes. I'd like to suggest that all those that are vaguely interested make a point of trying to open the chat client at 4pm GMT each afternoon.

If you'd prefer to use a real IRC client, take a look at the Google Directory. I can recommend Chatzilla if you have Firebird. mIRC is the most respected Windows client but it's pretty intimidating to set up. The URL for the Ecademy chat room is at irc://irc.freenode.net/ecademy on the standard IRC port 6667.

People new to IRC should look at one of the many tutorials on the web.

[from: JB Ecademy]

Those of you paying attention may have noticed that their network just got smaller. What's happened is that we've made a subtle change to a lot of the lists of networkers. People are only included in the list if they've returned your message. So there has to be at least one message in each direction for the network contact to be "real" (Connected).

When you are looking at your network contacts list you'll see a new option "Unconnected". This shows the list of people where there's only been a message in one direction.

This has no effect on your ability to network message anyone. And it has no effect on the 10 outgoing contacts limit for non-power networkers.

It also has no effect on your ability to rate people up. You can still only rate people up if you have sent them at least one message.

Hopefully this will make the networkers lists more effective and more accurately reflect actual links between people.

If you see any odd behaviour associated with this, please let me know.

BTW. I've had a little feedback about the Block Contact functionality. As expected people generally appreciate that the function is there, but don't expect to ever use it. I've had one person who intended to block 20-30 people but this should be the exception. [from: JB Ecademy]

It's taken a while but I've finally found a half way decent embedded IRC chat client. The URL is http://www.ecademy.com/chat.php Let me know how you get on.

If you have a full chat client (like mIRC), try irc://irc.freenode.net/ecademy

The next task is to try and arrange for archiving of the messages. [from: JB Ecademy]

Compare this DailyWireless - Jukebox Cloud with this, WiFi Ghetto Blaster One's a commercial exercise from the people who brought you the Cloud. 2million MP3s delivered by broadband to a Jukebox device. The other's a stripped and hacked boombox with a fat hard disk, running Linux. Using WiFi anyone within range can up or download MP3s, and change the running order via a web interface.

The Jukebox is mostly interesting because of a hidden piece in the press release about selling MP3s via email. If they've got the music library, and delivery method, they've clearly also got the potential for an iTunes competitor. What would be really neat would be to have a USB, Firewire and Wifi interface on the Jukebox so you could just plug your iPod in the side and buy some more music. [from: JB Wifi]