A VC: del.icio.us : The question everyone asks is "what is the business model". To be completely and totally honest, we don't yet know.

Lovely!

PBS | I, Cringely . April 14, 2005 - A Cup of Bandwidth : By Robert X. Cringely

Bob describes connecting to three neighbour's WiFi simultaneously to get fast reliable internet access. In each case he's borrowing a cup of bandwidth! Now to do this he says he's got three patch antennas on a pole on the roof connected to three Linksys WRT54G running Sveasoft firmware and set to client on 3 channels. Then there's a proxy server/router with three ethernet cards linked to those and running on an old Mac G4. Finally there's a local DNS server also running on the mac.

I can't help thinking that there's some potential shortcuts here. What you need is an OS like Linux that can support multiple connections to multiple networks with multiple DNS. And a box with 3 USB ports for USB wifi cards and one ethernet connection to the local network. In fact a baby Soekris box or perhaps a MeshBox from Locustworld could do this. Or any old Intel based PC running Knoppix as long as it's got the USB connectors.

Hidden in here is what I think is the holy grail USP for local mesh networks. It's not to extend internet connectivity off the edge of the broadband network, but to aggregate internet connections for a whole street. Let's say that my street has 5 houses with a broadband connection from multiple vendors. Another 5 houses have networks but no internet. We should be able to create a local WiFi cloud so that anyone in any of the 10 houses can get a connection. And if one of us needs short term high bandwidth (like a big bittorrent download in the middle of the night) we should be able to get 5 times the normal speed. [from: JB Ecademy]

Daily Wireless - T-Mobile Brings WiMax to Trains is a good roundup of T-Mobiles experiments with providing WiFi on trains from Brighton to Watford. It also covers the work GNER are doing with providing WiFi on the London to Edinburgh line. [from: JB Ecademy]

Bloggerheads (UK) - A way forward gave me pause for thought.

There's something I don't really get about the current Election campaign from Labour. And I don't understand why the opposition parties aren't making more of it. It goes like this.

Why should we vote for, and how can we vote for, someone who has already announced they are going to resign?

Let's say Labour get into power. Some time during the course of the next parliament, Tony Blair is going to resign. If past history is anything to go by the leadership challenge and change will be bloody and messy. And there's no guarantee that it will be in 5 years or 3 years or even one month.

So Labour is asking us to vote for something that we have no hope of predicting and with an uncertain outcome. This makes no sense to me. So wouldn't it be better if Tony resigns now, the election is called off until Labour can agree on a new leader and we start again? Which is all about as likely as Veritas forming the next government.

Blair Out - Labour In.

grat.uito.us
me too [from: del.icio.us]

How to Make a Simple Curry "Anything" : Joe Grossberg
Me Too. Found on del.icio.us bookmarked on del.icio.us [from: del.icio.us]

Looks like linkedIn have introduced a feature to mass message all your contacts. That'll upset a few people.

See the left box Grafitti. Does Ajax get round the traditional problems with refresh on web based chat systems? Are we about to see a renaissance of web chat all over the place?

The usual approach is to use IRC which then means a Java or Flash IRC client and they're all pretty nasty.

Uncle Davey gets a new MP3 player...? : I want a device that interfaces as a hard disk through USB, so I can use it on any computer I like, and add and remove music using operating system commands. ... And [MS] iTunes sucks! It really is awful.

This is a perfectly reasonable request. Why don't the iPod fanatics understand this? Let's face it, Apple is now part of the content distribution industry as much as the technology industry and their pact with the devil means they are deliberately hobbling their products to keep the other content industry players happy. Why? It's time a few more people stood up and said Apple aren't wearing any clothes. And he's absolutely right, iTunes on Windows does suck.

RollingStone.com: The Long Emergency

I'm not going to even attempt to precis this. Just go and read it. It's a study of the implications of 2005 being the year that oil production peaks. [from: JB Ecademy]

A Different CD For Every Person On The Planet says that CDDB has just identified it's one billionth unique CD title.

If there are 1 billion CD titles, why are there only 1 million tracks on iTMS?

Here's the "it should exist" request. I want to see a mainstream legal download service using the AllOfMp3.com model. Any flavour of encoding you want with no DRM and charged by the Mb. Charge $1 a track for the first 3 months after release. $0.50 for the next 9 months and $0.10 ever after. (for 192Kb VBR encoding). Then digitise and make available every bit of audio ever recorded. You want to bet this wouldn't make a ton of money?

So where's the Project Gutenberg for audio? For those that don't know, Project Gutenberg is a project to digitise every out of copyright book.

and finally:

Just Say No To DRM [from: JB Ecademy]

Not Apathetic AKA none of the above
A site for those who choose not to vote or to spoil their ballot slip to explain why. [from: del.icio.us]

The Berkeley mailbox format for storing email in text files is as old as the hills. So why doesn't Outlook import and export to this format? Or does it?

I kind of expect this from Micro$oft. But what about Thunderbird/Mozilla? Surely they should support this format for import/export? or do they?

Every so often the blogerati have a moan about your data being stuck in their system, for instance Yahoogroups is notoriously difficult to get email archives from so that you can do somethig else with them. Or your favourite YASN won't let you get at your network and all your network messages. But how much more of a lock in is it when your email program doesn't provide any way to import or export your email except to a select few alternate programs.

This seems like an appropriate time to relaunch the UK Politics Club.

ps. would've been better with the link. Doh! [from: JB Ecademy]

If you were buying a DVD player to go under the TV, you'd be crazy not to buy a Multi-region machine and they're readily available even from reputable mainstream stores in the UK like John Lewis.

But what if you buy a DVD player built into your laptop? Or you buy one of those neat little portable DVD players for the kids in the back of the car or to watch on the plane? My understanding is that you can't get these (ahem) modified for Multi-region. On most laptops, you get 5 chances to change the region encoding before it simply stops working completely. How about accessory DVD players for fitting in a desktop PC?

Let's face it, this stuff sucks! Exactly why shouldn't I buy a DVD in the USA while on a business trip and play it on my machine at home back in the UK? Why shouldn't I go down to Forbidden Planet and buy some import Anime and expect it to work on my UK machine?

Just Say No To DRM [from: JB Ecademy]

tagging.pagina.nl
Everythingb folksonomy. Lots of lists of tagging tools. [from: del.icio.us]

NTL have started rolling out more speed upgrades but they've been fairly quiet about it. If you have NTL Cable broadband then go to http://www.ntlworld.com/data-feeds/editorial/microsites/tierMigration/ The old 750Kbps service has been boosted to 2Mbps for the same price. It looks like the upload speed has gone from 128Kbps to 200Kbps. Which is better but still a right pain. We used to get 512-128 so a factor of 4 between up and down. Now it's a factor of 10. I guess they're still trying to limit file sharing.

Note that there are usage limits. 2Mbps gets you 1GB per day and there's 3GB per month on their entry level 1Mb service. Which is not good. 1GB a day is fairly reasonable. And they haven't actually started enforcing it yet. Customers with the existing services or 2Mb & 3Mb (1GB per day) Ntl reserves the right to contact customers who regularly exceed their daily usage allowance, where such excessive use impacts the quality of service for other ntl broadband customers.

But as we all start downloading episodes of Alias from the USA via BitTorrent it could get irksome. I understand why they do usage limits but I still don't have to like it.

The throttle seems to be in the cable modem. What would be good is if the speed limits were controlled in the network. So you could have ethernet speeds on your local cable segment, 10Mpbs and upwards within NTL and 2Mbps for the wider internet. This would still help NTL keep down their peering costs, but let me share my entire machine with my friend up the road. Just an idea, although I don't expect it to happen.

The Horizon Project :: View topic - ver 054 download link and instructions.
Video add on for Skype [from: del.icio.us]

On Ecademy there's a club called Attention as a product. run by Ronald Wopereis. Over on the other side of the world, Steve Gilmor is involved in attention.xml. So Ronald sends me a Linkedin request to put them in touch. Except that the only way for me to do that is via Jason Calacanis. Now I don't Jason well, and I don't know Steve at all. And passing this request reflects on me and I don't think I want to become known to these sort of people as someone who blindly forwards LinkedIn requests.
Now since attention.xml has a wiki, probably has a mailing list, and Steve probably has contact details available on the web, it would make far more sense for Ronald to just call him direct like we always used to.

I reckon this whole 6 degrees thing for deliberate networking is a load of old rubbish. It's an interesting statistical analysis but it's not actually useful. We all say "Could you introduce me to X": A-B-X. We sometimes say "Do you know anyone who could introduce me to X" A-B-C-X. but IRL we never say "Do you know someone who knows someone who could introduce me to X": A-B-C-D-X. The big problem with this and with higher orders is that C has no skin in the game and doesn't know A or X. They're just a postman. Now maybe you like being a postman and have built a reputation for being one. But most people don't like this and are uncomfortable with it.

Scripting News: 3/30/2005

It's always fun watching my good friend Dave Winer develop an argument. It starts with a big contentious statement that is obviously missing the justification. In this case, this would be "The problem with the EFF psosition is that in order to remain consistent, they have had to say that copyright doesn't exist" This looks and smells like a traditional usenet troll.

So rather than dive in and flame Dave unmercifully, I've become used to waiting for him to get to the point and elaborate a little. So today we get a pair of test cases ad absurdam. Both involve taking content from the EFF and Cory Doctorow and suggesting...

I'd add links to their content, and see if they object. If that isn't a problem, I'll start changing the words, and see if that works for them. Then I'll put my name on their work, I imagine that would be okay too. Why not? I'm just being creative! Then I'll change their positions to be more in tune with the entertainment industry. Somewhere in there, there's got to be a line.

I'm thinking of mirroring Cory Doctorow's Creative Commons-licensed book and crossing out his name and replacing it with mine. Then I think I'll go to a printer and print up a bunch of copies of my book and stand on a corner in Times Square and sell copies. Maybe a book publisher will offer to distribute it for me. I'll be interested in talking with them.

So I thought I'd check the licenses on each. The main page of the EFF has an "Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0" license. So Dave is not just allowed but encouraged to produce derivative works of their content. Just as long as he provides attribution and doesn't attempt to sell it. So the only problem with his suggestion is "Then I'll put my name on their work". And this is only a problem if and only if he removes their's.

Cory's Eastern Standard Tribe is licensed with Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0
This again is completely clear and it's completely clear that every suggestion Dave makes is completely against Cory's wishes. In fact, Cory goes to pains to spell out what this means well beyond the Creative Commons license.

Now hidden away in these two posts is an inkling of what might be happening and what the real issue is. "add links to their content", "Cory". So really, I think this is about Dave's dislike for Google's Auto-Link toolbar and Cory's noisy defence of it.

Over time I expect this to rise to the surface and for a real argument to emerge. So rather than argue about whether the EFF want to destroy copyright or not (I think they don't), let's go back to arguing about what happens when you put text on the web in plain old html. My position is that the moment you do that all bets are off. You may want to have it seen in only one style, but by the time I've changed all the proper nouns to wikipedia links, all ISBNs to amazon links, changed the style sheet, used a different browser, blocked all the ads, taken the result and scraped it into RSS so that I can read it offline on my ipod it will be completely unrecognizable[1]. And there's not a damn thing you can do about it. If you really don't like that then lock it up in PDF at which point I'll simply stop reading you.

But even when I've said all that, why were MS Smart tags evil and Google's auto-link not? Is it just that a few years have past and we understand a bit better what's possible and what isn't? Dave keeps talking about a line as though there is some qualitative difference between adding a link and changing a style sheet for accessibility. I keep seeing quantitative changes in bits sitting in someone else's computer and little more. But then I don't have the reverence for the written word and free speech that Americans seem to have. I prefer the situationists, post modernists and detourne. Derivative works? Hell yes! Tag it, photocopy it, spray paint it and slap it with glue on the side of the Bastille.

[1] Yesterday had a great example of this. Start with del.ico.us, view it in Firefox, add the greasemonkey extension, add some custom javascript accessing del.icio.us web services. And what you get is auto-suggest layered on top of the form that Josh wrote.

ps. To any #joiito denizens reading this, I apologise unreservedly for invoking He Who Shall Not Be Named. I'll just have to blame the Imp of the Perverse sitting on my shoulder and whispering in my ear.