Rupert Goodwins talks about using the GNER Wifi train from London to Scotland and back. On the way up he has almost uninterrupted internet access, rigs up a webcam piinting out the window and at fellow passengers. On the way back signal failure means the wrong train, no Wifi and a 1 hour wait outside York "while the train in front of us is abducted by aliens from Doncaster."

Sounds about right. [from: JB Wifi]

We had some fairly strange explanations last night on TV as to what might happen today, but the gist of it seems to be true. Maybe there's actually no connection between the MyDoom virus, Denial of service attacks on sco.com and Microsoft, and poor network performance. But this morning I am seeing major packet loss on a whole range of networks. NTL-LINX-Globix-Ecademy looks particularly bad, but I'm also seeing drop outs on Level3 and a few other routes. Curiously the NTL web proxy servers seem to be holding up as the Ecademy website looks ok to me, but picking up my email is almost impossible as there are so many timeouts. MSN Messenger keeps dropping out or failing to connect.

Hey-ho. The Internet seems to be broken. If this is being caused by MyDoom, it's worse than people thought. [from: JB Ecademy]

As seen on Orkut.

Bad, bad server. No donut for you

We're sorry, but the orkut.com server has acted out in an unexpected way.

Hopefully it will return to its usual helpful self if you give it another chance. If it still refuses to play nice, please send an email to help+errror@orkut.com and help us modify this poor behavior.

We apologize for the inconvenience and our server's lack of consideration for others.

I guess it is in Beta ;-)

As well as gnews2rss.php there's also

Perl

here --> http://googlenews.74d.com/files/getgoogle.pl

and in python

here --> http://www.muselog.net/download/googlenews.py

My current favourite radio station is Monkey Radio. What is Monkey Radio? Well, some call it "Trip-Hop." And some call it "Acid Jazz." Some call it "Downtempo" or "Abstrakt Beats." Now take the intersection of all these. Stir in groove. Dust with sexiness. Simmer. Voila.Serve chilled.

You can listen to it with the highly recommended Winamp 5 [from: JB Ecademy]

Number of WLAN APs in London trebles in a year But 1 in 4 are still unprotected by WEP or other security mechanisms. [from: JB Wifi]

833786 - Steps that you can take to help identify and to help protect yourself from deceptive (spoofed) Web sites and malicious hyperlinks : Do not click any hyperlinks that you do not trust. Type them in the Address bar yourself.

Has it come to this? I kid you not. This is a genuine MS knowledge base article telling us not to click on hyperlinks. Come on guys, this is ridiculous.

This link is completely safe. It goes to the Mozilla Firebird project page. ;-)

Incidentally, Robert Scoble had a post asking what Microsoft should do with Internet Explorer. Most of the vast number of comments asked for standards support and specifically fixing all the CSS bugs. But my favourite solution was to rip out the rendering engine and replace it with Mozilla. I now it's a ludicrous suggestion but MS could do worse than just ship Firebird and Thunderbird. After all if you go all the way back IE was originally based on open source code so it's not as if they've never done it before. [from: JB Ecademy]

The Times today has a 2 page spread on Wifi. I'd give you a URL but I can't find it. [from: JB Wifi]

Here's a few use-cases to do with linking SNs and other sites.

1) Alice signs up to a new site. She tells the site to get her details from her Personal Identity Server URL(PIS). The site gets a profile file in XML(RDF) from the URL and populates a new user record. It also gets a list of "Friends" identified by a hashed email address. It looks for existing
users with the same hash and builds an initial network in the site for her
record.

2) Bob tells a site to use authentication from a managed Personal Identity Service he uses. It redirects to the PIS login form. This authenticates him and then redirects back to the site. Tokens (nonces) are passed back and forth, and Bob is now logged in on the site. He's going away for 2 weeks skiing so he logs out on
the PIS service and is automatically logged out of the 50 sites that use the service.

3) Carol uses an SN site for a while and builds up a big network and lots of profile data. The site passes the data back to her PIS where it updates her profile and merges with the standard data she maintains. So new data is mirrored and synced between her personal store and the SN site.

4) Dave posts entries on 25 sites at various times. His personal weblog picks up all these posts and presents them as an aggregate blog automatically with links back to the originals. this drives traffic in both directions and increases pagerank for all concerned.

5) SNorati, aggregates both FOAF and RSS data from multiple sources including synthetic data derived from posting habits on IRC, Usenet and mailing lists. It's building a searchable map of the most active networkers on the planet. Within weeks, it's aggregated 2 million identities growing at 100,000 per day and
accelerating. People say it's amazingly useful but so slow as to be unusable.

6) RateMyFoaf.com proves stupidly popular. It grows extremely rapidly before getting slashdotted and blogdexed resulting in a huge bandwidth bill for it's student owner.

7) Bill and Miriam create a Perl based Personal Identity Server that requires only FTP and CGI access called "Fixed Class". In parallel they set up a managed hosted version supported by subscriptions. Matt duplicates and extends the code using Python. phpPIS is started on Sourceforge. Fixed Class compatible code is built into Drupal to act as both a PIS Server and Client and gets implemented in Deanspace. phpBB and phpNuke quickly follow suit. Blogger and Livejournal announce support for the Fixed Class protocols. Ryze and Ecademy support it, while Tribes, LinkedIn, Friendster, Spoke, Plaxo, Orkut refuse to comment. A huge flame war breaks out when Andy, Simon and Matt start a Wiki to produce a pure XML version
that is incompatible. A consortium of companies including Intel, EDS and Ford produce a hugely complex industrial-strength version that only gets one customer and that's Amex.

Microsoft announces PSI.NET which is Passport compatible and available 1st qtr 2007. Early betas seem to have major security holes and the code requires Longhorn AS and Exchange 2005.

So.

Is this blowing in the wind? Is the problem actually annoying enough that developers will want to scratch this itch? Are the use-cases strong enough or is this just a non-problem?

It must be a political day today as this my third post on political issues. Our World Our Say is a petition campaign in the UK calling for a full judicial inquiry into whether Parliament and the British people were misled over the threat from Iraq. [from: JB Ecademy]

Slick little flash animation from Ben Cohen explains how a little off the top of the US military budget could solve world hunger among other things. [from: JB Ecademy]

Higher Education Bill - 27 Jan 2004 - Division No. 38 - Public Whip is an analysis of MPs voting in yesterday's tuition fees debate. How did your MP vote? Do you agree with them? How will you tell them? [from: JB Ecademy]

Jan 26 - Feb 1 BT Openzone - Free Wireless Broadband Week. Looks fairly simple. There's a one page registration form after which you get an ID+Password. You have to give your postcode, phone number and email. I'll see later what the experience is like in a hotspot. [from: JB Wifi]

WSJ.com - InterContinental to Offer Free High-Speed Internet Holiday Inn, Best Western, Marriott have all announced free internet access (a mix of wired and Wifi) in their mid and low priced hotels in the USA. It seems that this is just another cost of doing business and attracting business customers. Inevitably, at the top end of the range it's still charged, but their moving to a flat fee for unlimited net and phone.

It'll be interesting to see how much of this filters over to the UK and elsewhere. [from: JB Wifi]

The Mysociety project is an attempt to come up with low cost high value internet projects for UK Politics. This one looks interesting.

YourConstituencyMailingList - mySociety.org Wiki : The User's View 1) User enters postcode (zipcode) & email address. 2) Site IDs their MP. 3) If their MP is already using a mailing list, they are added. If not, they are added to a 'waiting list' database. The MP is email notified when 10, 50, 100, 500 users have signed up as interested. 4) MPs are allowed to post simply by emailing a secure address (i.e. ds78fd78gfd@mpmail.com). Their email goes to an announcement list. 5) Reply to all is disabled - BUT every email they send has a custom URL at the bottom. It links to an auto-created forum thread where the first post is a copy of the email. Then anyone can respond via the forum thread.

I can imagine constituents wanting to talk to each other. I find it harder to imagine MPs getting involved as well. [from: JB Ecademy]

I got a call a couple of days ago from someone who wanted to offer free WiFi internet access in a couple of Cafe-Restaurants on the South Bank in London-UK. I realized that I really haven't a clue about what to recommend or who to ask. so:-
- What should they do?
- Who should they ask?
- What regs will they have to comply with?
- What hardware/software should they buy?
- Where should they go and what will they need for backhaul bandwidth? [from: JB Wifi]

moblogUK is... an... open Mobile Phone Weblog for people in the UK.

Gosh! [from: JB Ecademy]

Jeremy Zawodny's blog: My Yahoo! RSS Beta Launched

If you're a Yahoo user, you can now add RSS feeds to your MyYahoo! page. Now Ecademy generates lots of RSS so you can add Ecademy headlines to your MyYahoo! page. Just copy the link from the glyphs and paste it into the form here. [from: JB Ecademy]

O'Reilly Network: Wireless Mesh Networking [Jan. 22, 2004] is a summary and overview of open standards for mesh networking. Unfortunately it glosses over what is probably the biggest issue with Mesh, which is IP allocation to mesh nodes.

With Mesh used to provide Internet access we've introduced another layer at the edge of the network. So we have:-
- Internet
- ISP gateway
- Mesh Nodes
- Home Gateways
- Home Clients
The problem is how we assign IP addresses to the mesh nodes and home gateways. And we really need to do it in a global way so that when we add more nodes or merge meshes, we don't get IP number collisions. As Locustworld and others have discovered it's pretty much impossible to get a block of addresses to use. In theory, the answer is to use IPv6 but amazingly it's very difficult for a small organization or not-for-profit to get a block of IPv6 addresses. So now you're forced back into using NAT on the edge between the ISP and the mesh and using local 10.x.x.x numbers. But now there's no global control to avoid clashes and the home client is almosty certainly going to go through two NAT gateways to get to the internet.

And all this is before we ever get to issues of making the mesh routing work or thnking about what business case there is for mesh in the first place.

The big players like Intel and others have now started a group in the IEEE to try and come up with some Mesh standards at the Wireless level. But I don't see any evidence of people trying to solve the IP address problem.

The real solution here is for IPv6 to be used at the edge and to have a clear and cheap/free method of global allocation. Then we can go back to the idea of everything connected to the Internet being globally addressable and get rid of NAT once and for all. just don't hold your breath! [from: JB Wifi]

Findory.com News: Personalized News is a very curious site. It's as close as anything I've seen yet to "The Daily Me". It adjusts the list of articles shown according to which articles you click on to "read more". All this is done without a login and via a tracking cookie, although yu can login so that you can use the site at multiple or public computers.

My concern is that inevitably it doesn't yet have a wide enough set of sources; it's quite US biased; and sport=basketball.

Now if I could just get this via RSS...

[Updated to add] The parent website, is Memigo. They do something very similar (the databases may be linked) and have customised RSS feeds. [from: JB Ecademy]