Net4Nowt :: News Story : WiFi hotspots in every library on government agenda says E-Commerce Minister Stephen Timms

My local library has got a WiFi setup, but it's restricted and WEP encoded. [from: JB Wifi]

I've been playing with iRate this morning. It's a music download system with a difference.
- All music is copyright free and collected from web sites that are giving away songs.
- You rate each song on a 5 way "This Sux" to "Love it!" scale.
- The system suggests downloads based on your ratings via collaboration with the preferences of other users. It's the same idea as Amazon's "People who bought this also liked that".
- It's almost like a radio where it's downloading the next song while you'e listening to the last one.
- It's open source and has versions for all major operating systems.
- There are currently >2000 users
- It's V0.2 and still a little clunky but works well enough to see that it's got real potential.

[from: JB Ecademy]

As an experiment, I've started an Ecademy chat room on MSN. Come and say hello. [from: JB Ecademy]

RIAA keeps 12-year-old quiet with $2,000 bill

So here's the RIAA sueing a 12 year old living with her single mother in a housing authority apartment. Rather than simply drop the lawsuit, they're settling out of court for $2000 that the family can surely ill afford. As the Reg says we now have some points on the graph. $2000 for pre-teens, $15,000 for college students. Want to take a guess at what they'll want from a middle class adult in full employment?

Is this an example of "Ready, Fire, Aim" or is it "Click, BANG, OWWW, my FOOT"?

For some satire on this absurdity, try this report on the "RIAA's massive detention facility in Mojave, CA."

For those of you disgusted by this and determined never to give the record industry another penny, can I recommend iRate. It's a download system for public domain music only with a built in collaborative rating system to help you find public domain music you're likely to enjoy.

As we speak there are 2,903,824 people logged into Kazaa but the USA is still asleep. [from: JB Ecademy]

There's a new hotspot directory and news magazine on the block. )( JIWIRE - your guide to wi-fi : Hotspot Directory and Glenn Fleishman, Mr Wi-Fi Networking News, is on the staff.

Most impressive for a US site is that I put in Hertford, UK and it found the 6 IBG hotspots nearby. The maps are from Mapquest and not great, but hey, it works. [from: JB Wifi]

Hard to believe but it looks like they really went ahead and did it. Yahoo! News - Recording Industry Sues File Swappers

There's some curiously strange statistics in this story. "the (261) people who were sued as "major offenders" who distributed about 1,000 copyrighted music files on average." Now 1,000 songs is about 67 CDs and it's about 5Gb. Which is a mere 12.5% of the latest Apple iPod My own modest collection is 4000 files in 12.5Gb of which 90% were legally obtained by ripping them from CDs I'd bought. So having 1000 songs on your hard disk is not exactly unusually large.

Meanwhile "Apple also noted today that it has sold more than 10 million songs through the iTunes Music Store, the company's popular music service. The iTunes Music Store enables Mac OS X users to buy and download commercial music for $0.99 a song through iTunes, Apple's music playback software."

Now I don't want to get into the legalities, ethics or realpolitique of all this. I just want to ask a question. Can anyone think of a single other industry that sued it's biggest and most enthusiastic customers? Apart from the Government of course. [from: JB Ecademy]

Times Online - Newspaper Edition : Number of wi-fi hotspots to treble. Britain’s network of “wi-fi” hotspots is set to treble in size, making it far easier for travelling business people to make use of high-speed wireless internet access.

Britain was forecast to have 4,000 wi-fi hotspots by the end of the year. But The Cloud, the leading wi-fi provider, has reached a deal with NWP Spectrum, which operates 8,000 pay phones in airports, universities and other locations, to install wi-fi equipment at as many of these sites as it thinks make sense.

The Cloud have a roaming agreement with BT Openzone. I've been trying to find a press release from The Cloud or Openzone but haven't spotted it yet.

This approach of adding WiFi to internet kiosks and public payphones makes complete sense to me. [from: JB Wifi]

I've just discovered the UK Gov Forum for discussion of the Proposed EU Constitution

Gosh. A public forum for the people to discuss what the politicians are up to. It's a little slow and clunky, but I guess the fact that it exists at all is a cause for celebration. [from: JB Ecademy]

Here's another mainstream AP that appears to run Linux. Frottle on Linux on the WRT54G? :

Also the Netgear WG602, it is a mips running linux, but instead of a broadcom (ugh) based radio it has a Prism GT.

One of my clients got into one pretty quickly (easily?), and reported the following;
1) Intersil Prism GT based
2) kernel 2.2.14 with open RG (damn, catch up)
3) MIPS 32bit, 150mhz, 3.3v
4) 149.50 bogomips
5) /proc/cpuinfo thinks it is a DECstation 2100/3100!!
6) OEM Zcomax XG-600 MiniPCI card
7) Seems to check who has 192.168.1.69 on boot (tftpboot?) [from: JB Wifi]

More Linux bits for the WRT54G. Here's a set of utilities in an easily downloadable set. The goal is a full nocat portal. That and reverse engineering some Broadcom Linux drivers.

Meanwhile the Atheros Linux/BSD drivers are available. [from: JB Wifi]

OK. This is an unabashed scare story. It hasn't happened yet. It's always possible that it will never happen.

So that's the disclaimer over. Now take a look at the series of articles here. This is a collection of speculations about SOBIG.G which hasn't appeared yet. If the history of the SOBIG series is anything to go by, then it's quite likely to appear on Sept 11th. Hmmm. Interesting date. It's also very likely that SOBIG.G will be further debugged and enhanced using the lessons learnt from the F infection. I'm really expecting SOBIG.G to spread extremely fast and to do some real damage. The really scary bit is that even if SOBIG.G gets stopped, the same will be true of SOBIG.H

One of the interesting tidbits is an answer to a question I'd been asking. How did SOBIG.F spread so fast initially? This is the first suggestion I've seen that the initial injection used SPAM techniques to get a few tens of millions of copies of the initial email out into the world in a couple of hours.

Some person or group of persons appears to be working pretty hard on this and they appear to be pretty damn clever and definitely not stupid. Which doesn't exactly square with the usual virus writer/hacker image of the confused loner teenager. Which then begs some difficult questions. Just exactly what are they aiming to achieve?

This may be a technological war that nobody wins and ends up as a stalemate. In the short term, there are some things that can be done. I've been thinking a lot about what went wrong with SOBIG.F and how it could have been less bad than it was. Here's some suggestions:-

- ISPs routinely block port 25 to anywhere but their own relay server. This stops viruses using their own smtp engine to spread. This is already happening.

- ISP relay servers should use authentication. This stops viruses from using the relay server directly to send email out. This is something that ISPs should do anyway. I really don't understand why they don't.

- Outlook and Outlook Express are changed so that you have to save an attachment to disk before opening it outside the program. This actively discourages users from "just clicking" on attachments. Don't hold your breath for this one.

- People stop using auto-responders. Anti-virus programs stop trying to notify the forged from addresses of virus emails. This cuts down the number of completely useless notifications.

- Mail servers only send back bounce messages to the envelope from address and not to the from: address. And when they do they send headers and first lines only. Not completely sure about this one. But in theory it sends bounces back to the legitimate sender only. And if there's no obvious legitimate user, then it dumps it in /dev/null instead of clogging up the system.

- ISPs start offering anti-virus and anti-spam filtering as a premium service. This takes some of the onus off the end user and rewards the ISP with some extra money to pay for the cost of running it. I really think that BT, AOL, Freeserve, Blueyonder and all the others ought to think seriously about this. Especially as we see more broadband services provided as "Wires only".

In all that, for "ISP", read "Corporate IT" as appropriate.

And if you manage or run an Anti-virus system TURN OFF THE AUTO-RESPONDER. If you don't you're part of the problem. [from: JB Ecademy]

The Opodo presentation from Wednesday's event is now available for download.
opodo.zip 5Mb

You'll be able to watch the presentation very soon in the events area here. [from: JB Ecademy]

We've got nearly 200 clubs with less than 3 messages. Many of these have also got less than 3 members. If you own one of these clubs and you're not likely to do anything with it, how about closing it down and deleting it.

I'm pondering doing this automatically and just expiring old clubs that are clearly not going anywhere, but I figured I'd give you the opportunity to do it for me first. [from: JB Ecademy]

Square 7 - Wireless Hotspots, Locations, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth

I'm having trouble understanding exactly what's going on here. Square 7 appear to be a virtual WISP with roaming across ther hotspot networks which appear to include BT Openzone. Their costs are higher than anyone else's at £6.99 per hour, £59.99 per month. The interesting bit is the additional services they're pushing such as VoIP, SMS and Wireless printing. they also seem to have a tie up with Regus.

Even with the extra services I can't believe the model is sustainable at those prices. [from: JB Wifi]

So old-skool it's cool. drx: Teletext Babez = German Teletext Porn in 40*25. Probably not work safe unless you're working as a programmer for a startup targeting cellphone porn in which case you can put it down to "research".

[from: JB Ecademy]

DaveNet : Tips for Candidates re Weblogs : The Dean campaign made a big mistake, imho, by getting into the software business. (my link which appears in the same para on Davenet)

While I agree with the majority of Dave's points in this piece, I'm not sure I understand what point Dave is making here. The Dean campaign is aleady making excellent use of Wikis, Movable Type, Blogger, Meetup.com and many other existing technologies. Meanwhile a small group of programmers have taken it upon themselves to extend Drupal with modules specifically to support local Howard Dean campaign chapters. Drupal is GPL. It's widely respected. It supports all those good technologies like RSS, trackback, Blogger API. The code being written as modules is downloadable and useable by other Drupal sites.

So who's being excluded and who's stopping Dean (or other candidates) supporters from using their own tools? I can see a clear need for a packaged community news/forum/group weblog software suite with some common branding. They could have chosen PHP-Nuke, Scoop, Slash or several others but they chose Drupal. And whichever platform they'd started with, you can just about guarantee that they would have found some function that was missing and needed adding. At least whatever they do is GPL, freely downloadable and could easily be used later by a Republican or even a Christian Democrat movement in Germany or Libe-Dem movement in the UK.

I think there's a bigger issue here that I keep stumbling across. There are situations where centralization is necessary and where a group community website makes more sense than a loose collection of weblogs or websites. This is why the slashdot style community news site and the PHPBB or vBulletin style Forum site refuse to die even as many of them spin off individually managed weblog sites. We keep adding function to weblogs (trackback, Typepad and so on) to make loose groupings of them work almost like community news sites. We keep adding weblog and individual customization functionality to community software to make them more like individual weblogs. All this is good until you need to tr and make it generate some money. At that point the centralized approach wins hands down.

Pretty good fluff piece with several good quotes from David Hughes about Our sponsors BT Openzone. BT is ready for WiFi explosion [from: JB Wifi]

Labor Day weekend is over, America is just waking up and turning on their PCs.

And the Virus and Spam emails have just started up again with a vengeance.

Grrrrrr! [from: JB Ecademy]

According to The Register who are reporting a poll by BT! Yahoo! Broadband! : one in ten Net users would even be prepared to dump a boyfriend or girlfriend to stay online

The mind boggles. [from: JB Ecademy]

If you're interested in VoIP over the Internet, check out these links

http://www.freeworldialup.com Directory
http://yabb.pulver.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi Forum
http://listserv.pulver.com/archives/fwd.html Mailing List
http://freeworldialup.meetup.com Meetings
http://www.voipwatch.com News
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/voip Forum
http://www.voxilla.com News
http://www.thevoipforum.com Forum
http://www.xten.com/ Free client

This is an extremely disruptive technology that challenges the existing Telcos. It's moving fast and is already throwing up legal problems as states in the USA try to deal with "Virtual" VoIP based Telcos such as Vonage and their relation to the large amount of Telco regulations.

What's quite puzzling is why MS removed the ability for MSN Messenger to use free VoIP services between v4.7 and v5. In V5 and V6 there is support for VoIP links to the POTS but only via paid premium services. BT had a service to do this and were an MS favoured link in MSN Messenger. But as of Aug 25, they are no longer accepting new customers.

One of the big problems with the growth of VoIP is how hard it makes phone taps. Needless to say, many governments don't like this at all.

One of the fastest growing areas is international VoIP. This has traditionally been an extremely lucrative market for national Telcos. More disruption.

Whenever I raise VoIP someone starts talking about quality of service (QOS) guarantees or the lack of them. Well my experience is that right now quality is at least as good as cellphones. And as bandwidth availability increases this will only improve. Frankly it's good enough for non-emergency calls and close to being good enough for business calls where cost is an issue. Perhaps what's still missing is ease of use and widespread availability. If we can combine an always on client in the PC/Laptop with a bluetooth connection to a cellphone so that you're using the same device, that will happen as well.

Is the killer app for Broadband and WiFi hotspots actually voice? If it is it's going to upset a few applecarts. [from: JB Ecademy]