The Blog
14 Apr 2008 "This net neutrality thing is a load of bollocks," he said, adding that Virgin is already in the process of doing deals to speed up the traffic of certain media providers.
So. We give a local monopoly to cable companies to encourage them to build out Cable TV with considerable tax incentives. Then we turn a blind eye while the inevitable shake out happens until there's a single nationwide monopoly. Then they start to abuse that monopoly. It's not the same situation but the end result feels remarkably similar to BT. In BT's case we forced them to resell wholesale bandwidth to 3rd party ISPs at a fixed rate and forced them to allow 3rd party ISPs access to their Local Loop. Ironically Virgin Media take advantage of both of these requirements. So isn't it time that the monopoly cable provider was forced to do the same thing? Then we can get on with the next infrastructure requirement. By granting a limited local monopoly and tax incentives to anyone who wants to build out Fibre to the home. 04 Apr 2008 Microsoft extends XP through 2010 for ultra-low-cost laptops | The Industry Standard : Microsoft confirmed Thursday that it will extend the sales of Windows XP Home to OEMs beyond the current deadline of June 30, 2008, to accommodate a new class of ultra-low-cost PCs (ULCPCs) that are just beginning to pepper the market.
And then today I also get an email from VMWare As a blogger the VMware Fusion team considers important to the Mac community, I wanted to let you know about a new customer contest, both video and blogging, we're launching today. So I guess the question is whether Parallels, VMWare or VirtualBox count as an "ultra-low-cost PC" ;) MS will still apparently be dropping XP retail, but XP OEM is easy to obtain quasi-legally from eBay and loads of other suppliers. The important thing here is that this should continue as quite a number of OEMs and white box suppliers will still be able to obtain them legally from MS. And of course, the announcement is recognition that there's a growing market for very low end PCs that are designed to have most of their applications on the web. Like the eeePC, Cloudbook and Intel Classmate. And this is a real double edged sword for Microsoft. 01 Apr 2008 Something really quite strange is happening over at OpenSocial. Here's my reading of it.
It started as Google's reaction to Facebook. They already had a gadget spec aimed at iGoogle and wanted to compete with Facebook. But Orkut and iGoogle weren't getting the publicity and traction that Facebook were getting so they played the politics card and turned it into The World vs Facebook in the hope of creating a critical mass of App developers and Container developers that could compete. The first spec was very much Google driven and based on what Orkut and iGoogle does. There were quite a few oddities about this. For instance, fairly obvious missing fields because they were also missing in Orkut. It used Google technologies like GData and AuthSub. But having roped all the non-Facebook people in then faced push back from people saying they didn't want GData and AuthSub in a global standard. Then in the space of a week, we get OpenSocial Foundation, Yahoo supporting OpenSocial, MS announcing Live Contacts and Google announcing the Contacts API. Viewed in the context of the MS-Yahoo buyout attempt, this begins to look like poison pills and more political posturing. Now we have the OpenSocial spec being passed over to the OpenSocial Foundation and being treated as a community developed spec in the style of Atom. It's very much based on the first Google proposals but is losing it's Google flavour in favour of a more open, vendor neutral approach. The big drivers here are Apache with the Shindig container project and MySpace as a major player and implementer. The big question now for me is to what extent the open-speced version of OpenSocial gets rolled back into Google and implemented there. There's really quite a lot of overlap between things like the OS People Data API and Google's Contacts API. Or between OpenSocial's Gadget API and the iGoogle gadget API. And proprietary AuthSub (and BBAuth) vs oAuth. The push to open up the spec to compete with Facebook is going to feed back into Google's own APIs and mean they lose control of them to some extent. This isn't entirely new since Google makes extensive use of Atom and are very much involved in the creation and development of that standard. They're walking a difficult line here between open-ness and closed-ness. There's quite a few areas here that are core to data portability and DataPortability. Moving profiles and contacts lists is one of DataPortability's key use cases. Having contacts APIs multiplying is both good and bad. It's good that APIs are appearing. It's bad that there's so many of them and they're all different. 31 Mar 2008 From out of the wild wild east, the internet just got dirty again. In the last week I've had,
A huge increase in spam making it past greylisting, spamassassin and my other filters and mostly aimed at postmaster at ecademy.com. The fact it's beating greylisting means this has to be botnets using machines with valid email sending mechanisms. For while there we were keeping spam under control by just throwing it away or refusing to accept it. Looks like they just escalated the game again. 5 machines in China hammering away at Ecademy.com. They don't read robots.txt, they're on Chinese broadband IPs and they have a user agent that looks like a standard windows XP install. Why? What is going on here? Is it some great wall of China thing that is positively encouraging me to just deny all for the entire Chinese IP ranges? Bots that ignore 403 forbidden and robots.txt and just keep on requesting pages when they never get anything. Why? I'm looking at you here voila.com and voilabot A big increase in hand input spam into web signup forms. What is the point in trying to advertise blue pills by putting the Ad into an RSS feed suggestion form for a site that aggregates UK political blogs? The only person to see it is going to be me. Same thing for the signup form for a website specialising in recumbent motorcycles that is moderated so every signup has to be approved. Both of these are completely and utterly pointless and do nothing but waste the time of the moderator. 27 Mar 2008 Way cool project. A new public wireless interface: Hivenetworks successfully launch 'Street Radio' in Southampton | The Next Layer
10 low power FM transmitters with spoken word descriptions of their immediate vicinity on a loop. This reminds me of William Gibson's VR art idea. VR art pieces that can be seen overlaid onto physical locations. Like a virtual River Phoenix lying on the pavement outside the club where he died. The advantage of using FM radio is that the barrier to entry to view the art piece is so low. I feel like this could be combined with QR Codes and a wiki mentality to allow another form of graffiti tagging of physical locations. 26 Mar 2008 I think what we're seeing here is a land grab. The need for APIs and data import/export has finally hit mainstream and the big players are now jockeying for position. What's somewhat sad about all this is that the existing open formats are being pretty much ignored. So we have
User Authentication: AuthSub, OpenID, Cardspace, Facebook App Authentication: AuthSub, BBAuth, Windows Live ID Delegated Auth, oAuth and Facebook. Google has said they'll move from AuthSub to oAuth but the recent Contacts API uses AuthSub. Contacts Schema and API: Google Contacts API, OpenSocial People API, Live Contacts API, Plaxo Sync API, Yahoo API (unannounced but used by LinkedIn) Gadgets API: Facebook, OpenSocial So what we have is the Google led Opensocial consortium trying to grab the Gadget development and Gadget hosting standard. While the MS led Live Contacts consortium try and grab the Authentication and Contacts API standard. But this gets confused because OpenSocial was always supposed to include a RESTful API for contacts and was supposed to use AuthSub for authentication moving to oAuth. OpenSocial is actually in the same space as the MS Live Contacts group, it's just less complete. OpenSocial has more momentum with more players signed up. Some people like Hi5 are in both camps. MySpace is unilaterally extending the OpenSocial API but are aware of the dangers of doing this and are part of the OS Foundation. Facebook is out on the edge in most of this, but has committed to MS for Contacts. Any bets on how long this all takes to play out and for the dust to settle? In the short term there's room for a business built on producing libraries to hide all these differences. Small and medium sized web sites are really going to need that, because implementing all of it takes just too much time/money/resource. 25 Mar 2008 Good to see somebody mention Twype.exe. James asked if it could have a proper install, but of course I don't need that. Just run it and add it to the Windows Startup menu.
James Woodcock » Twitter - Waffling Online in Mini Blogging Style Surprisingly Useful and Rich with Integration : With decisively concise Twitter messages appearing, the next obvious implementation was then to discover a method of changing the Windows Live Messenger status and Skype mood automatically using the submissions as I update Twitter. Happily, there are already applications that help here such as Twessenger for Windows Live Messenger (MSN) and Twype for Skype. 24 Mar 2008 See here http://brainstorm.tribe.net/thread/34fb1a79-351d-4251-8318-829623c1c9cb
Tribe was one of the early SNs to support and produce FOAF. The founders left. An aggregator appeared that read that data and republished it. Tribe members got upset about their data appearing elsewhere on the web. The Tribe developers decided to deal with the storm by simply removing the code. There are similarities here with Facebook. FB introduce the Activity Feed. They put in RSS. The RSS gets read, aggregated and republished. FB members kick up a storm about the perceived loss of privacy. FB kill the RSS. My view on all this. - It's hard to explain to members what exactly is happening. They're just beginning to understand RSS, but FOAF is confusing. - If it's visible publicly in HTML, then it ought to be visible publicly in a more structured form. - If it's not visible publicly in HTML you have to be very careful about what is exposed in structured form. - You need to give members an opt out, some times at field level from having their data visible. - Private data used by the individual concerned can leak out and become public. See here Private RSS feeds ending up being globally searchable in public readers. - Getting the licenses right and enforcing them is hard. What does "re-publish" mean? We're happy with Google to index our pages and show abstracts and cached versions. But apparently we're not happy for an unknown site to index our contacts and profiles and show abstracts. There's a polarisation here between Privacy denyers and Privacy Fanatics. One group relishes the exposure and actively uses the lack of privacy for personal branding and reputation development. The other wants to be able to participate in internet based services but remain effectively anonymous. Obviously there's shades of grey in the middle. But it's sad to see the second group forcing decisions that ultimately reduce the value of those services largely because they don't understand what's happening and had a mistaken view of how much privacy they had in the first place. 23 Mar 2008 » The Credit Crisis, Illustrated » The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century : Joey deVilla's Personal Blog
Brilliant. A simple explanation in pictures of how a few thousand people driven by greed managed to take down the world's economies. 19 Mar 2008 YouTube - Hey Ma - Its Now 5 Years In Iraq
Is it really over 5 years since we marched against the war? 14 Mar 2008 We've now got Yahoo OpenID fully working to log into Ecademy.
1. Go to My Settings, Manage OpenIDs 2. Type in "yahoo.com" into the "Add a new OpenID" field and hit "Sign In" 3. After a moment and perhaps an intermediate screen, you'll be presented with a Yahoo screen asking if you want to log in to Ecademy.com. Click on the "Let Me In" button. 4. You're returned to Ecademy and your Yahoo OpenID is associated with your Ecademy account. Now when you need to log in to Ecademy, the process is very similar. 1. Go to the login screen at Ecademy. Scroll down to the "Login with OpenID" 2. Type in Yahoo.com and click Sign in. 3. You're redirected to Yahoo asking if it's ok. Click "Let Me In" 4. You're back on the Ecademy home page and logged in. [from: JB Ecademy] [ 14-Mar-08 4:40pm ] 13 Mar 2008 I've been working on support for OpenID 2.0 in Ecademy. That all works now but when using Yahoo! as a provider they put up a scary warning saying that Ecademy is not validated with Yahoo! To get rid of the warning you have to have a valid YADIS file on the Openid Consumer side containing a returnto service that matches the one sent to Yahoo. but I and others couldn't get this exactly right. After contacting Yahoo by email I got a message back from Yu Wang with the final piece in the puzzle.
Here's what's needed. I'll describe it for Ecademy. http://www.ecademy.com needs to return an http header X-XRDS-Location:http://www.ecademy.com/yadis.xrdf http://www.ecademy.com/yadis.xrdf needs to return a header Content-Type: application/xrds+xml http://www.ecademy.com/yadis.xrdf needs to look like this <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <xrds:XRDS xmlns:xrds="xri://$xrds" xmlns:openid="http://openid.net/xmlns/1.0" xmlns="xri://$xrd*($v*2.0)"> <XRD> <Service priority="0"> <Type>http://specs.openid.net/auth/2.0/return_to</Type> <URI>http://www.ecademy.com:80/account.php</URI> </Service> </XRD> </xrds:XRDS> Notes. 1) Yahoo are not reading in the section of http://www.ecademy.com They're only doing YADIS discovery via the http header. I fixed this in my index.php by putting header('X-XRDS-Location:http://www.ecademy.com/yadis.xrdf'); at the top. I think this is a bit mean! 2) Even when Yahoo successfully GET the yadis file they don't do anything with it unless apache returns the right header. I added this line to my /etc/mime.types file and did an apache reload application/xrds+xml xrdf Yu Wang said they would be relaxing this requirement in a future release. 3) The URI for the entry in the yadis file should exclude all parameters. On the Yahoo approval screen, it shows the returnto so strip all parameters from that and put it in the yadis file. In my case, I've copied the JanRain example consumer which includes the port number. The actual returnto is http://www.ecademy.com:80/account.php?op=login_openid&remember=on&janrain_nonce=... so the entry in yadis.xrdf is http://www.ecademy.com:80/account.php I've got three different op= for different scenarios. signup_openid, login_openid, add_openid luckily the same yadis entry works for all three. Hope this helps someone. 11 Mar 2008 A second virus email has appeared with text about Ecademy, Subject: "ECADEMY will close work in April 2008". It appears to be from info@ecademy.com
One copy we've seen was sent from a Korean home broadband PC using Outlook Express. This makes it look as though it's being sent by a botnet of infected PCs round the world. Needless to say this is not from Ecademy, and is in no way connected with Ecademy servers, systems or people. Ecademy never sends emails with attachments. Ignore it. Don't open it. Delete it. Julian Bond Chief Technology Officer Ecademy ps. Here's the text of the email Hello! Dear postmaster@ecademy.com members, clients and guests of our portal, Over the last few years our portal has helped you to organize your business, find new partners and increase sales. However, all good things end. Many of you know that we have experienced legal problems over the last year. Our competitors from other social networks are trying to take over our client base. Our website has been hacked and our database was stolen. After that we were taken to court because of identity theft. Unfortunately, legal expenses and unfavorable court verdict with following closure of our bank accounts will lead to closure of our website. All paying members will receive refund starting from March 14th. Please check attached file for legal information in regards to your account. Best regards, The Ecademy Team Ecademy - The Social Network for Business People Company Registration:7382702 VAT:718 0377 36 [from: JB Ecademy] [ 11-Mar-08 7:55pm ] 04 Mar 2008 Over the last couple of days and again this evening we've had some problems with our database server.
It looks as though a request for an RSS feed was being made very frequently and this particular request was launching a database query that was inefficient and slow. The combination was overloading the database and leading to the site being extremely slow or unavailable. This particular problem has now been dealt with and should not arise again. Please accept our apologies for the outage. Julian Bond Chief Technology Officer Ecademy [from: JB Ecademy] 03 Mar 2008 There's a virus email doing the rounds that appears to be a message from Ecademy support. It's a Virus or Trojan. At least one copy that we've seen appears to have come from an ADSL broadband line in Chile. The headers are forged and made to look as though it's from a fake Yahoo email address with a fake Yahoo message ID.
Needless to say this is not from Ecademy, and is in no way connected with Ecademy servers, systems or people. At first glance the message could be taken to be designed to be a malicious attack on Ecademy but I'm inclined to think that it's actually just an example of clever social engineering. It wouldn't surprise me if there are or will be very similar emails apparently about other social networks just as there are already about all the banks. Ignore it. Don't open it. Delete it. Julian Bond Chief Technology Officer Ecademy [from: JB Ecademy] [ 03-Mar-08 8:25pm ] 29 Feb 2008 Blue Tit
Great Tit Long Tailed Tit Sparrow Blackbird Wren Robin Chaffinch Goldfinch Collared Dove Wood Pigeon Magpie Starling Swifts Seagull Heron Kite Falcon Crow Rook Owl (heard not seen) Brown Mouse Toad Frog Hedgehog Black Cat Black Cat with white socks Snails Ants Worms Beetles Damsel Flies Dragon Flies Too many other insects to mention 26 Feb 2008 We're at some sort of crossroads. If you're buying a new laptop or computer now, there are too many (bad) choices for what operating system to run.
For most people, there are a bunch of windows programs that it's hard to do without. For a few people there are some Apple Mac OSX programs they can't do without. The classic case is if you're in music production. But beyond that, every application area you probably want to run is available across Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. So the first question is what base operating system you need. 1) XP. It's going to become obsolete in a few months and hard to get, even though MS will go on supporting it with patches for some time to come. It works but it's irritating. And does your lovely new hardware have XP drivers? If your new hardware came with Vista on it, are you going to buy an OEM XP at £75 or a proper legal copy at £275 or maybe you've got an OEM copy lying around from the last PC. 2) Vista. Way too many horror stories. Maybe one day it will ok, and the hardware will have caught up. But right now it feels worryingly flaky. But of course, your new hardware probably came with it installed. 3) Mac OSX. If you buy into the whole Apple ethos, I'm sure it's great. but there's a cost. Not just in monetary terms. 4) Linux. Hooray! Complete Control! But sadly you need complete control to make it work. That's fine if you're smart. And even though it's pretty good now, there are still problems with fonts, graphics hardware, drivers that are not completely resolved. Ask yourself punk, do you feel comfortable with a command line? Now that virtual operating systems are becoming reasonably mature, you then have the next choice. Do you dual boot, and/or run a virtualisation system? If it's the second, which one? So now we're into combinations. Dual Boot is really a bad option. It's ok for very occasional testing but you really can't use it every day. 1) XP + andLinux. So what Linux programs do you absolutely need that don't already have a windows equivalent or port? 2) Vista + andLinux. Same as 1) 3) Mac OSX + Parallels + XP. See above about the Mac ethos 4) Ubuntu + VirtualBox + XP. Lovely bleeding edge. Can you have USB 2.0 support in the XP system? Who knows. Maybe. With some work. At least you've got a base system that is solid. And I didn't mention running OSX on an OEM Intel box. An option that is actually real now. I have a highly tailored XP system right now that's just about stable enough to do useful work on. It only occasionally (once a week) makes me want to scream. For years I've been walking up to work colleague's machine and recoiling in horror at their default XP install. Recently they've been saying things like "I think I'll get a Mac next. I can't stand Windows breaking all the time any more". I'm expecting to actually find them with nice new Vista machines with default Vista setups and I'm going to walk up to the machine and want to weep. So which of all those options do you recommend? I'm pretty sure I'm going to go for Ubuntu + VirtualBox + XP on a Dell Laptop. Am I insane? David Weinberger is blogging the FCC hearing :
I left this comment. We've had this discussion before, I think. but I'm pleased to see the argument above. "Net neutrality is important but it is only a partial solution to the failures of the market that is at beast only weakly competitive. We need to make the Net competitive all the way through." I find it deeply ironic that in a country that makes such a song and dance about free markets and free market capitalism, internet provision is a government mandated and controlled duopoly. This is anything but a free market. And in a marketplace owned and dominated by one or two incumbents, it's completely inevitable that they will abuse their position and offer less that you thought you were going to get for more money than you thought you were going to pay. The solution to this is emphatically not more control over what the existing duopoly can and can't do. It's to break the existing control and to turn it into a real competitive (free) marketplace. There is another solution of course. And that's the socialist route of the government owning and building the infrastructure for the good of the whole society paid for out of taxes. But I doubt the USA has the stomach for that. That's the answer that is easy to say but hard to implement. And it reaches into much deeper arguments about national infrastructure and how to handle infrastructure with high capital costs and where the final branch of the tree reduces to a single provision. eg water, sewage, electricity, roads. Over the last 150 years most developed countries have built 10 or 15 of these and governments have played a major role in creating the market conditions to help build them. Now we're facing one more which is to build very high bandwidth fibre to the home. So rather than get bogged down into whether Comcast (or BT or Deutch Telecom) should be allowed to filter packets, let's talk about how we build a fibre infrastructure for our citizens. 
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