What other Business (and social) networks do you belong to? I'm mostly interested in offline groups, though online are of interest too. Have you encouraged people to join Ecademy when you've been to one of their meetings?

So far we've got the following. Can you add to them?

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About Entrepreneurs
Aurora Women's Network
BOOBnight (Bring Our Own Beer)
BNI
BRE
Brint
Business Link London
Businesslink
CAIM (for Cambridge Business School Alumni only)
CassCreatives
CityZone
Chambers of Commerce
Chartered Institue of Marketing
Chinwag - UKNM
Chinwag - UKWireless
Classmates.com
CMI
Communities of Practice Yahoo Group
Company of Friends/Fast Company
Digital Eve
Digital People
e-consultancy
Enterprise Network Alliance
Everywoman
Fashion Capital
Financial Mail Women's Forum
First Tuesday
FreepintIOD
FriendsReunited
Freshminds
FSB
Girlguiding UK
Homeworking.com
IOD
Last Wednesday Of The Month
Linkedin
Magenta Circle
Maxmedia Communications
Mindstore
Netimperative
New Business (Business Forum)
New Business Voice
Online Facilitation Yahoo Group
Ryze
Six Degrees Network
SmallBusiness.com
SpeedNetworking
Sullivan Executive
Sunday Times Enterprise Network
Teleworkers Association
These4walls
TopConsultant
UK Business Forums
w2forum
Webmaster World
WIT (Women in Technology - eg BRITWIT)
Women in Management
WIM Dorset
YEO "Young Entrepreneurs Organisation" [from: JB Ecademy]

Flight Sim enquiry raises terror alert
A mother's enquiry about buying Microsoft Flight Simulator for her ten-year-old son prompted a night-time visit to her home from a state trooper... ...At one time it was rare to find US citizens, in the safest and most prosperous country in the world, jumping at their own shadows. Now we only note how high.

What with the terror alerts, biometric passports, fingerprinting, incarceration of foreign journalists, air marshalls, end of Visa waivers, and so on, I don't think I'll be going to the USA again.
[from: JB Ecademy]

BT Openzone - Wireless Broadband : BT CALLS ON WI-FI INDUSTRY TO JOIN FORCES FOR FIRST FREE NATIONWIDE WIRELESS BROADBAND WEEK

BT today called on other wi-fi operators to join forces and support the UK's first-ever Wireless Broadband Week early next year.

Between January 26 and February 1 2004, anyone with a wi-fi enabled laptop or PDA will be able to register online with BT Openzone and enjoy wireless broadband without time limits for a week free of charge.1

Which sounds good. If Openzone sites were free during this week that would be a good thing. And maybe we can get T-Mobile and the other operators to join in. Except that there appears to be a catch.

This offer applies to existing and new users for seven days from January 26, 2004. Users will be able to access BT Openzone free of charge for a duration of seven days from registration during Wireless Broadband Week. For example, if a new user registers for an account on February 1, 2004, access will be free for seven days from the date of registration.

So I assume that this doesn't apply to people who buy a pre-pay hour voucher for £6 or a day voucher for £15 or who simply turn up to an Openzone site and want to try them out. It's really a free week trial for new Openzone subscribers, in which case why limit it to just the last 7 days of Jan? Of course, if I've read this wrong, perhaps BT could enlighten us?

Also covered here. [from: JB Wifi]

This just turned up on wrt54g@yahoogroups.com

OpenWrt is a fully open source project for the WRT54G. Read about the project goals here: http://openwrt.sourceforge.net .

After much grief working with the flash on this beast, we have now reached a stable point, and are releasing beta 1.

Most of the chatter regarding OpenWrt is located at irc.freenode.net #wrt54g

Highlights of the package are as follows
- 2m jffs2 read/write file system on flash
- busybox 1.0pre5

The goals of OpenWrt are somewhat different than most of the hacking on this beast to date. While most are working on a basis of the linksys/cisco provided systems, we tossed it all out, and have built a truely open system.

We are now looking for more developers to join this project, and help with the task of adding various packages to the system.

Full sources will be on the sourceforge CVS later this week.

[from: JB Wifi]

4pm GMT is Ecademy Tea Time. Get yourself a cup of tea, a couple of biscuits and join Ecademy Chat or click on irc://irc.freenode.net/ecademy [from: JB Ecademy]

I've just come across a message on the MeshAP mailing list asking for ideas for applications to run on community WiFi networks. In this context, a community WiFi network is anything from 2 houses linking their WiFi together to a full blown multiple AP mesh across a whole village or town. What we're looking for here is something beyond simple internet access.

Here's a few ideas, has anyone got any more? The key here is to think in terms of what happens when a large group of households are connected at LAN speeds to each other rather than simply connected to the Internet. We're looking for apps that take advantage of the 10-100 times greater bandwidth of LAN speeds over Internet speeds.

- Local VoIP. When your key friends are on the same LAN, why use the phone?

- Burstable bandwidth. Aggregate together the bandwidth of all the Internet connections on the mesh. If you need to download a Linux distribution, you can get a full 20Mbps download for 10 minutes. With some bandwidth shaping this would be transparent and wouldn't affect everyone else. Perhaps it could be scheduled.

- Local multi-user gaming. All the houses in one street can play Unreal Tournament at LAN speeds.

- Peer to Peer backup or a local Backup service. Everybody is bad at backup. Run a community backup service with a big tape jukebox for a minimal fee. The really cool way to do this would be to distribute the backups across spare disk space on all the connected machines with enough crypto to secure it and enough redundancy so you could retrieve your data even if most of the machines were temporarily down.

- Run a community News server. This is really just internet technology but there's some benefits from running internet systems that are only locally available.

- Local web proxy servers. Retrieve web pages at local speeds.

- Hook up some big printers for high volume, high quality printing. Perhaps the local copy shop could offer this as a service.

- Media Servers. We're heading into dangerous territory here! But what happens when music and content are shared but only available on the local LAN. Instead of walking round to my friend's house to borrow a CD I just connect to her shared music folder. Stream whatever's playing on your stereo so that it's not just the next door neighbour who complains about your taste in music. Perhaps the local Video library shop could start streaming 2 or 3 videos.

- High speed web cams all round the village. A real Neighbourhood watch.
[from: JB Wifi]

Another legal question I'm afraid.

How much responsibility does the owner of the wireless LAN have for damage done by one user to another?

The typical possibility here is that one guest user has a Windows virus that damages the disk of network shares it finds. It attacks the unsecured laptop of the second user who mistakenly left a windows network share in place. To step this up a bit more, make the first user a hacker who deliberately (or by accident) damages the disk of a second user.

Common sense says that the Wifi lan owner is an innocent party in all this and couldn't do much about it anyway. It's been suggested to me that if you're running a deliberately open WLAN (in a cafe say) you need not just some T&Cs and preferably a signature from your users but also to put in the sort of high end WiFi gear that can completely isolate each incoming user. Now we're talking about wireless here so there are limits but I understand that this sort of gear can prevent normal TCP/IP and UDP connections between wireless LAN users. If this is a real legal requirement in the UK, EU and USA (say), that means that building your own little WLAN for your customers just got significantly more expensive. [from: JB Wifi]

Technology Review: MIT's Magazine of Innovation : Another Open Wireless Network (mine) gets closed

This story is from a serious computer security consultant (Simson Garfinkel is the author of O'Reilly's PGP : Pretty Good Privacy, Practical Unix and Internet Security and numerous other articles on information security) who was deliberately running an unsecured Apple Airport. His next door neighbour's son was connecting to it, running Kazaa and caught a Windows virus. His ISP threatened to cut him off due to the virus and he runs the risk of being sued by the RIAA (this was all in the USA). Having studied the logs, and diagnosed what was actually happening, he's now put in some serious security. Some thoughts:-

- This makes me really sad. I really want to see a world where there is more or less free, more or less open internet connectivity everywhere. But this requires a certain level of trust. We're seeing more and more reasons from government regs to ISP T&Cs to the RIAA, to the proliferation of spam, viruses, worms and trojans where we have to prove we're not at fault are guilty until proven innocent.
- At a rough guess, 98% of the consumer grade WiFi routers out there are installed with default wide open settings. Somebody somewhere is going to get burned. As Cryptonomicron puts it. Do you really want to be the legal test case that determines whether the "someone else was using my WiFi network," is a valid defense?
- This stuff is hard. It's hard to properly secure a WiFi network and with the current tools may not even be possible without additional firewall hardware. It's also damn hard to diagnose what's happening and what happened.

We're going to see and hear more of this. [from: JB Wifi]

Can anyone help build a list of UK broadband providers who don't mind end users sharing their bandwidth with guests. The target market is both SMEs (coffee shop, pub) and private individuals.

What's the real story on the current UK legal situation. If a coffee shop or pub (ie commercial) shares access with their guests are they really a provider who has to keep logs and satisfy all the other ISP regs? How about a private individual? [from: JB Wifi]

In the last 2 weeks the WRT54G hacking community have found a way to compress the file system in the box. This means considerably more space and so more linux utilities and apps can be fitted in. Most of the work is being done around the Sveasoft who have a forum for discussions and anouncements. We're really close to having a binary firmware upgrade with:-
- A bunch of linux utils like vi, top, sed, wget etc.
- client mode
- ntp time updates
- wondershaper bandwidth management
- telnet and ssh into the box
- nocatsplash captive portal
- power and antenna control adjustment
- Frottle hidden node control
- improved dhcp control
- VPN support

So now the question is what should be put in there? My interest is to come up with a low cost consumer grade AP that can share bandwidth safely so that the owner isn't exposed. So I want to be able to separate out wired connections, known WLAN connections and guest WLAN. Then to give different policies for each. The Guest WLAN connections should be bandwidth limited. They should be forced through some minimal captive portal. And some ports like SMTP should be blocked so that there's no possibility of them abusing your upstream provider. What have I missed here? Apart from ISP's T&Cs of course.

I'm hoping that all this hacking can be fed back into the Linksys-Cisco development. This is the benefit they get from using GPL open source. Let's hope that it's two way and they play fair. The community is effectively saying "keep to the GPL and release the source and we'll do your development for you".

It's become very apparent that one big problem here is the limited RAM and Flash ROM space available. This stuff is dropping in price all the time so let's hope that the V1.2 of the hardware puts in lots more of each. As an alternative, using sockets instead of soldering the memory direct on the board would have opened up all sorts of possibilities.

Are you listening to all this, Linksys? [from: JB Wifi]

My Amazon wishlist brought me a Linksys WRT54G for christmas. Hooray! At £85 this is a steal. Here's some of the things I've found out so far.

Disclaimer: Some of this is questionable. Some of it breaks my ISPs T&Cs. Some of it breaks the ETSI regs on Wifi. If you copy it, you might end up with a useless doorstop instead of a WiFi router. Don't try this at home kids, YMMV. Anything you do is not my responsibility, etc etc.

Initial Install: This was actually extremely easy. Take it out of the box, plug into the mains, connect the supplied ethernet cable to the NTL cable modem, connect another ethernet cable to the laptop. I had to power cycle the modem once and the router and laptop got dhcp and I was on the net. This is all probably made easier because NTL use DHCP to control access rather than PPPOE. With that (used by most ADSL ISPs) I'd have had to put in the user and password.

I pushed in the laptop Buffalo WLI-PCM-L11GP card and it found the network. I also got a 54g Buffalo card for xmas. Plugged that in instead, XP found it and that connected straight up at 54Mbps. It also looks as though Netstumbler works with this though I haven't given it a good test yet.

The next thing to do was to connect to the router on http://192.168.1.1 For some reason this only worked in IE6 and not Firebird. I later found out that this sometimes happens and the solution is to connect to https:192.168.1.1 now I can use any browser. The first thing to do was change the password on the admin pages. Next I changed the SSID to "1trinityrd-open" so if people see it from the outside, they'll know which door to knock on. For the moment, I've left WEP and MAC filtering off. Under security I've left the default firewall in place which blocks incoming (from the internet) connections. Under Admin I set logging to on.

So with that all done I connected up the three computers in the house to direct ethernet connections and they all connected first time. My old Buffalo card went into my daughter's laptop.

Improvements: The first thing I noticed is that my 54G wouldn't wake up properly after the laptop had been suspended. Buffalo have some newer drivers and that seems to have cured it.

Next stop was the router firmware. Linksys have a V1.1 of the hardware. The only indication I had this was the label on the corner of the box. It came with v1.42 of the firmware. There's a UK page of downloads but they only show the same releases. The US page shows a V2.00.8 so I grabbed a copy of that and used the attached upload system to install it. These are always a bit nerve wracking but again it all just worked and I had the latest release installed. I found out later that the only real difference is that the EU versions allow channels 12-13.

Now we get to the fun bit. The whole point of getting this model was that it runs Linux internally and there's a community of people hacking at it. These are mostly around Seattlewireless who have a large page of information. These people have now worked out how to install some Linux utilities and in particular the NoCatSplash system. It turns out that most of this hacking involves assembling a cross compiler and tool chain on Linux before pushing the results up to the router. A lot of the work is also being done with old versions of the firmware. While looking through the FAQ I came across a French guy, Huy Bang VU, who's produced hacked binary versions of the latest firmware. These have the busybox set of utilities built in.

So I got a copy of the hacked EU V2.00.8 and with my fingers firmly crossed, uploaded it using the web interface. It worked for me, but you're modifying the internal ROM so this is the point where you could turn your box into a heap of junk if it goes wrong. Don't blame me, ok! Apart from the Linux utils, this adds a few fields and modifies others on the web interface. Key is transmit power control and a Telnet daemon. So now I telneted to the box, using id=root and the admin password and I'm in and wandering around the file system.

Tuning and Tweaking:
- I've given my main machine a static IP and told the router it's in the DMZ. This means that all incoming ports are forwarded to this machine. That should make things like VoIP and Video more reliable as that machine is effectively direct on the net.

- I've set up a DynDNS account as the router has direct support for this. Now I can contact my home machine from anywhere using a consistent domain name.

- For the moment, I've left the transmit power at 15dBm(30mW). There are people apparently running 17dBm with no problems but also reports of the boxes burning out when run at higher rates. It goes up to 19.25dBm (85mW). Note that the legal limit in the UK is 15dBm.

Wishlist:
- What I'd like to do is to block all use of SMTP port 25 from the WLAN. I use our own SSL controlled SMTPS so this wouldn't affect me. The wired machines can use NTL's SMTP server but stopping use on the WLAN would stop occasional visitors from getting me into trouble over spam. This is almost possible with the built in firewall but you can only address machines by IP address. So that would mean giving all the wired machines static IPs. I shouild be able to do this by manipulating the iptables directly over telnet but I haven't yet figured out the correct commands. I think it would be a good thing if Linksys allowed you to setup rules for "All wired" and "All Wifi" in their user interface.

- Nocatsplash is still too hard to install for us desktop windows users. I'm really hoping that someone puts together a binary firmware upgrade for this based on recent Linksys firmware. This would then mean that Wifi incomers would be presented with a web splash screen and maybe I could arrange that they've got to knock on my door to get a password to get passed it.

- As far as I can see the incoming logs (Internet to local LAN) simply don't work. Assuming this is actually a bug, linksys ought to fix it.

Anyway, so far so good. I'll let you know more as I discover it. [from: JB Wifi]

How to Save the World is one of those blogs with just too much content. Lots of good stuff here. Thanks for the pointer, Accordian Guy. [from: JB Ecademy]

On die puny humans:, my current favourite SF author Cory Doctorow nails it in an end of year commentary. He say it better than I can so I've quoted his post in full.

The last twenty years were about technology. The next twenty years are about policy. It's about realizing that all the really hard problems -- free expression, copyright, due process, social networking -- may have technical dimensions, but they aren't technical problems. The next twenty years are about using our technology to affirm, deny and rewrite our social contracts: all the grandiose visions of e-democracy, universal access to human knowledge and (God help us all) the Semantic Web, are dependent on changes in the law, in the policy, in the sticky, non-quantifiable elements of the world. We can't solve them with technology: the best we can hope for is to use technology to enable the human interaction that will solve them.

On that note: I have a special request to the toolmakers of 2004: stop making tools that magnify and multilply awkward social situations ("A total stranger asserts that he is your friend: click here to tell a reassuring lie; click here to break his heart!") ("Someone you don't know very well has invited you to a party: click here to advertise whether or not you'll be there!") ("A 'friend' has exposed your location, down to the meter, on a map of people in his social network, using this keen new location-description protocol -- on the same day that you announced that you were leaving town for a week!"). I don't need more "tools" like that, thank you very much.

An important note for 2004: stop trying to build an Internet without malefactors, parasites, freeriders and inefficiency. There is no such thing as a parasite-free complex ecology (thank you Kathryn Myronuk for this formulation). Some organisms lamented the existence of mitochondria. Others adapted to exploit them and integrate them. Some lament the existence of spammers. Spammers will always exist: stamping your foot and demanding their nonexistence won't change that: adapt or die.

ps. If you've never seen it check out Cory's (and Mark's) main blog, bOING-bOING.

Die Puny Humans also had this post from Mark Eris from Wasp Factory Records (one of the more interesting independents),

The year (2004) in which all intellectual property (All? No. One small village in Gaul still.....) goes digital, and thus becomes thievable within 5 seconds of being available. Download the record of the book of the film of the comic and the delete it after one view, because it`s a crock of shit and you`re glad you didn`t pay any money for it anyway. The robber baron cartels find themselves having to run fast enough to keep up with people, as sitting on the sidelines calling the consumer a thief won`t cut it any more, no matter how many 5 year olds they take to court. And they can`t take it. It`s been too many decades since they had to go outside the house, and all that rich food, slave girls from the ghetto and colombian health products have taken their toll. Come off the accelerated culture curve for a second and listen. Really strain your ears. And you can hear them wheezing, coughing up blood, collapsed to the floor shouting abuse at the customer who is always right from somewhere back in the last decade.

Quite! [from: JB Ecademy]

This is so cool!

Molecular Expressions: Science, Optics and You - Powers Of 10: Interactive Java Tutorial : View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons. [from: JB Ecademy]

Auto-aggregating RSS from Blogrolls
A request to anyone who runs a Blogroll management system or code. eg Blogrolling.com, bloglines.com, Typepad.

When a new site is added to the blogroll, use RSS Auto-discovery to capture the corresponding RSS feed. From this, generate three things.

1. An aggregated html view of the feeds
2. An OPML list of the feeds
3. A single composite RSS feed of all the items.

A lazyweb request

The real cost of offshore outsourcing : THERE APPEARS to be a general assumption that dramatic savings can be made by sending software development to countries where IT salaries are 10% or 20% of similar IT professionals in the USA or Europe. That assumption is quite invalid according to those who have tried it, in fact they claim that savings rarely reach 30% and it can take years before even that level of savings materialise. According to them, a multitude of other costs, beyond the obvious cost of salaries, are often forgotten when considering sending work offshore.

So remember Stubbs, keep it local. [from: JB Ecademy]

Slashdot | Spain, Morocco To Build Undersea Rail Tunnels

The immediate question this brings to mind is when Morocco will join the EU. I happen to think this would be a *good* thing. I'm all for extending the EU to N Africa round both ends of the Med. [from: JB Ecademy]

David Weinberger: The Dean Campaign and the Internet (IT Conversation)

I can highly recommend these interviews. Doug has got a whole range of experts talking for 20 minutes or so and is then streaming the interviews over the web. It's like having a radio program specialising in Net Gurus. That makes it a great example of the democratising nature of the web. [from: JB Ecademy]

Mobitopia reports on GNER on train Wifi All Change to WiFi, Please, All Change... Looks like it almost works.

There's some good stuff on Mobitopia so I've added it to Dailenews. [from: JB Wifi]

iStumbler is a netstumbler clone for Macintosh. They've got one good suggestion which is that if you deliberately open your access point to the public add ".public" on the end of the SSID. This seems like a good plan to me. Please note though that their recommendations include:- get a good dsl provider which permits bandwidth sharing I'd hate for anyone to get into trouble with BT or NTL because they shared their bandwidth outside the ISP's T&Cs. [from: JB Wifi]