Ken Novak: General networking

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 06:38:40 GMT

IDC: Server shipments slow on spread of virtualization: "Growth in the x86 server market revved slightly in Q4 2006, growing 7.0% in the quarter to $7.2 billion worldwide, its fastest growth rate in five quarters, but unit shipment growth continued to moderate with growth at 1.1% year over year, to 1.85 million servers as customers continued to consolidate their IT infrastructures, .. "For the first time in more than 10 years, average selling values in the quarter increased year over year as IT managers move to consolidate IT workloads. This shift toward a shared compute infrastructure is driving additional scalability, memory attachment and I/O needs, which in turn, lead to higher average selling values." ..

Microsoft Windows servers .. revenue grew 9.4% and unit shipments grew 5.1% year over year. Quarterly revenue of $5.3 billion for Windows servers represented 34.9% of overall quarterly factory revenue, the single largest revenue segment in the server market, IDC reported.

After two consecutive quarters of single-digit revenue growth, Linux server revenue growth accelerated once again, growing 15.3% to $1.8 billion when compared with Q4 2005. Linux servers now represent 11.9% of all server revenue, up more than one point over Q4 2005. But Linux server shipments declined 0.8% year over year after 18 quarters of double-digit shipment growth, as IT consolidation extends its reach into the open source domain...

Unix servers experienced 2.8% revenue growth year over year when compared with Q4 2006. Worldwide Unix revenues were $5.1 billion for the quarter, representing 33.5% of quarterly server spending." Itanium, z/OS and blades sold about $3.5B combined."

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 05:15:03 GMT

Introduction to Power Line Communications: Simple and short intro, mostly about in-home use, with mention of BPL (broadband over power line) utility applications.

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 15:34:46 GMT

Coltan and Your Mobile: Disturbing effect of a key electronic material on the ongoing disaster in the Congo. "Columbite-tantalite (from here on referred to as Coltan). On its own it looks and feels like a very fertile soil, but when refined you get a highly heat-resistant metal powder called tantalum. Once refined, coltan has myriad uses, all of which pertain to its particular properties of being a dense mineral with the ability to withstand high temperatures and stress.To the high-tech industry this tantalum is a magic dust that is essential in making computer chips, stereo’s, VCR and DVD players and mobile phones. As such, coltan derivatives are used as capacitors in devices such as mobile phones and even complex missile guidance systems. ..

Coltan is mined by hand in the Congo by groups of men digging basins in streams by scrapping off the surface mud. They then “slosh” the water around the crater, which causes the Coltan ore to settle to the bottom of the crater where it is retrieved by the miners...

While a fair majority of the worlds tantalum supply comes from legitimate mining operations in Australia, Canada and Brazil the recent demand for tantalum has caused a more sinister market to begin flourishing in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where 80% of the world’s known coltan supply is subject to “highly organized and systematic exploitation.” There, warring rebel groups - many funded and supplied by neighboring Rwanda and Uganda - are exploiting coltan mining in the Eastern DRC to help finance political and human oppression, child enslavement, torture and war. The mining area is also within one of the main ranges of the threatened Eastern Lowland Gorilla .. In April of 2001 the United Nations issued a report on the rape of resources from the DRC. In their findings field investigators reported that Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundian rebels had looted and smuggled thousands of tons of coltan from the Congo into their countries to export to the global market, using the profits to finance their militias. ..Coltan smuggling has also been implicated as a major source of income for the military occupation of Congo which is also linked to forced child enlisting, rape and the rampant spread of HIV. ..

Manufacturers rely on their “suppliers” which are Tantalum capacitor makers like Kemet of Greenville, S.C., the world’s largest tantalum capacitor maker and on the companies trading the minerals. .. some 80 percent of the worlds Coltan comes from the DRC and most of that passes through several black market hands before its finally delivered to the refineries it what appears to be legitimate means."

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:44:26 GMT

The endowment effect, the 9X problem and collaboration: Nice summary from HBS. "the "endowment effect" [is when] we value items in our possession more than prospective items that could be in our possession, especially if the prospective item is a proposed substitute. We mentally compare having the prospective item to giving up what we already have (our 'endowment'), but because we're loss averse giving up what we already have (our reference point) looms large.

And Gourville points out three factors that make the situation worse for product developers who want their offerings to succeed. First is timing: adopters have to give up their endowment immediately, and only get benefits sometime in the future. Second, these benefits are not certain; the new product might not work as promised. Third, benefits are usually qualitative, making them difficult to enumerate and compare. ..

Because of all of the above, Gourville talks about the '9X problem' -- "a mismatch of 9 to 1 between what innovators think consumers want and what consumers actually want."1 The 9X problem goes a long way to explaining the tech industry folk wisdom that to spread like wildfire a new product has to offer a tenfold improvement over what's currently out there...

Email is a channel technology. It creates a private conduit between the sender and receiver. Other parties don't know that the email was sent, and can't consult its contents. Wikis, del.icio.us, Flickr, Myspace, Facebook, and YouTube, on the other hand, are all platform technologies. They accumulate content over time and make it visible and accessible to all community members. [They also foster emergence, where structure emerges rather than being imposed by "groupware" products.] .. So the new tools are not direct substitutes for email; instead, they're intended to provide capabilities that email can't. Will they succeed? It depends heavily, I believe, on whether companies and their managers want technology platforms for collaboration. This desire will be an important factor in solving email's 9X problem. "

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 18:44:53 GMT

On the Reliability of Hard Disks: Summarizing research papers: "there was no correlation between disk failure rates and utilization, environmental conditions such as temperature, or age. This means that high disk utilization or age of the disk have no significant impact on the probability that it will fail. .. the expected remaining time until the next disk failure grows with the time it has been since the last failure...

They did find a strong correlation between manufacturer/model and failure rates. They observed that older disks had a much lower failure rates then newer disks, where the newer disks in general were less expensive. Basically you get what you pay when you talk about disk reliability. ..

The only exception to the lack of correlation was that infant mortality rate for disks showed a correlation with high utilization: if a new disk is really crappy you can detect this by putting a high load on it. ..

Both papers report disk failure rates in the 6%-10% range: in a datacenter with about 100,000 disks you will need to replace up to between 6,000 and 10,000 disks per year. "

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 16:49:16 GMT

EPEAT: "EPEAT is a system to help purchasers in the public and private sectors evaluate, compare and select desktop computers, notebooks and monitors based on their environmental attributes. EPEAT also provides a clear and consistent set of performance criteria for the design of products.. On January 24, President Bush signed Executive Order 13423 that mandates federal agencies to buy EPEAT registered products."

Sun, 14 Jan 2007 23:03:32 GMT

Goodbye, 9 and 25 pins: I just unplugged what is probably my last serial connector. After 35 years of dialup and printing at speeds from 75 baud to 115kbps, I no longer own a non-USB serial device. I haven't used an external modem in years, and when my internal laptop modem broke two years ago, I never replaced it. The second-to-last serial device I had was a Palm cradle, also dropped years ago. Today, I finally unplugged an ISDN adaptor I had at home. I had used the ISDN line for fax and an extra phone line, and a last-ditch backup when the cable modem went out. It was easy to keep it around, but the phone charges weren't cheap, and I used it less and less. I got a Sunrocket SIP phone for the fax in December, and once I finally got SBC/ATT to transfer the number to Sunrocket, I cut off the ISDN. Unplugging the ISDN adaptor's 9-to-25 pin cable got me nostalgic, for slower times, for plugging in six cables and three devices and making several dialling attempts to do half of what my cell phone does from my pocket every minute of the day. (This picture was taken by that phone, 'natch).

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 07:51:39 GMT

d y n e : b o l i c -- a free multimedia studio in a GNU/Linux live CD: "You don't need to install anything, you don't even need an harddisk .. Download the ISO-image, burn your own CD, reboot your machine and you'll get back true love ;^)

dyne:bolic is shaped on the needs of media activists, artists and creatives as a practical tool for multimedia production: you can manipulate and broadcast both sound and video with tools to record, edit, encode and stream, having automatically recognized most device and peripherals: audio, video, TV, network cards, firewire, usb and more; all using only free software ..

It is optimized to run on slower computers, turning them into a full media stations: the minimum you need is a pentium1 or k5 PC 64Mb RAM and IDE CD-ROM, or a modded XBOX game console - and if you have more than one, you can easily do clusters.

dyne:bolic is RASTA software released free under the GNU General Public License. This software is about Digital Resistance ina babylon world which tries to control the way we communicate, we share our interests and knowledge." Integrating many multimedia tools, running with minimal system installation, doing automatic clustering for quick render farms: sounds real interesting.

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 18:09:57 GMT

Linksys pocket wireless extender WTR54GS: Geek heaven: this linksys pocket device looks handy for travellers. Converts wired hotel access to wireless, for example, or could extend home network. [Thanks, Scott!]

Sun, 01 Oct 2006 05:55:29 GMT

Windows XP Multiuser Remote Desktop: With a couple file renames and a registry change, XP can run three remote desktop sessions (normal desktop plus 2 more).
Combined with the $20-30 terminals that are available from outlets like www.surpluscomputers.com, and the $150-250 LCD screens, you can extend an ordinary PC to multiple users (with very low power and zero noise to boot).

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 07:57:48 GMT

SSH for Java: Lots of implementations of SSH clients in Java, under proprietary, GPL, or BSD lisences.

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 05:59:39 GMT

Powerline Ethernet Adapters: Current (Sept 06) situation appears that residential powerline standard is around 14 mbps, but that different vendors extend it up to 200 mbps max. Carrying HD signals at 28 mbps is an important threshold, with conventional digital video of 20 mbps also important. Netgear does well, as does Zyxel. Both are $100-120 per adaptor. Linksys has older models at 14 mbps only selling for $65 per adaptor or used down to $30. Both Linksys and Zyxel have adaptors for USB at about the same price as Ethernet.

Sat, 19 Aug 2006 07:48:52 GMT

AllMyData: Interesting peer-to-peer storage "grid" in which copies of each users's data are encrypted and scattered among many peers for backup. Service is free if you agree to house 10 GB for every 1 GB you back up. If you pay a modest fee, you may store data without providing corresponding storage yourself. It makes sense for many broadband users with excess bandwidth and much empty disk space. It will be interesting to see if they can make the business model work.

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 18:52:09 GMT

Cringely shoots HD: Details on how he chose digital HD recording and encoding for internet-downloadable TV.

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 09:02:27 GMT

Jyve Pro: "Everyone's an expert at something .. How to make money by talking on Skype." Service that integrates billing and directory listing for voice-based services, like translation, coaching, computer help desk, etc. Via Skype Journal. I wonder if Nuance's latest, well-reviewed Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 software could be integrated for some services as well. (NaturallySpeaking 9 is the first version of any voice recognition program that seems to get good results without having to train the program to each user's voice.)

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 08:34:17 GMT

Hacktivismo releases secure IM for dissidents: "to communicate across oppressive national firewalls, [consider] ScatterChat, a secure IM application developed by an international group of hackers, human rights activists, lawyers and security experts. .. [It] is based on the open source Gain IM client and uses the anonymous Tor network to offer secure end-to-end encryption for both chat and file transfers, the developer group Hacktivisimo said on Friday. Installers for Microsoft Windows, as well as the software's source code, are available now, and packages for Linux and Mac OS X are listed as "coming soon."

It's designed for "nontechnical human rights activists and political dissidents" but could also be also useful for corporate environments and other settings where privacy is important, according to the groups Web site. .. The anonymity and encryption provided by ScatterChat ensures that [obscures] both the identities and messages of users". Good techincal doc on their site.

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 05:05:05 GMT

Skype Journal: eBay, PayPal, Skype by the Numbers: Cogent summary of statistics and other info about the three companies today.

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 04:51:16 GMT

VoSKY: Vendor of Skype-certified extension hardware, including a model for small offices. Their personal one-line gateway was favorably reviewed in the NYT. Features:

Call skype destinations, including skypeOut, from your usual phone set at home.
Call into your home number (for example, from your cell phone) and have skype connect the call through to a skype destination.
Forward incoming calls from skype to your cell phone or other PSTN destination.
Call return: If a skype destination does not answer, you can get an automatic retry of the call when skype destination returns online.
About $60 for the personal edition, $900 for the 4-line gateway.
Downside: needs XP computer connected by USB and running to function.

Tue, 28 Mar 2006 20:54:05 GMT

ENIAC plus 60: Nice series on the very first computers. " The scientists knew that they had created something that would change history, but they weren't sure how to convey their breakthrough to the public. So they painted numbers on some light bulbs and screwed the resulting "translucent spheres" into ENIAC's panels. Dynamic, flashy lights would thereafter be associated with the computer in the public mind."

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 16:49:03 GMT

Jesse Sullivan, the World's First Bionic Man: Groundbreaking use of nerves to control artificial limbs, so that thought controls the device. Amazing video. May be applications for other machine control. "In May 2001, working as a high-power lineman 54 year old Jesse Sullivan was electrocuted so severely that both of his arms needed to be amputated. ..

Doctors take nerves that used to go to the arm and move those nerves onto chest muscles. The nerves grow into the chest muscles, so when the patient thinks “close hand,” a portion of his chest muscle contracts and electrodes that detect this muscle activity tell the computerized arm when to close the hand. Thus, the patient thinks “close hand” and his artificial hand closes. ..

While previously moving his artificial arms was slow and cumbersome, today he is able to do many of the routine tasks he took for granted before his accident, including putting on socks, shaving, eating dinner, taking out the garbage, carrying groceries and vacuuming."

Tue, 31 Jan 2006 07:52:07 GMT

IM Interoperability matrix: Useful reference to features and connections among AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Google, Skype, and a few others.

Sat, 28 Jan 2006 06:59:40 GMT

My Outsourced Life: Funny article on individual outsourcing. I wonder how close to true it is?

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 16:30:58 GMT

111m surfers in China: "The number of Web users in China, the world's second largest Internet market, grew by 18 percent in 2005 to 111 million, the Economic Daily reported on Wednesday. Some 8.5 percent of the country's 1.3 billion people now had access to the Internet, the newspaper reported, citing a survey released by the China Internet Network Information Center. .. The 2005 gains represented an acceleration from 2004, when the number of Internet users grew 16 percent to 94 million. More than half of China's Web population -- or about 64 million people -- accessed the Web via broadband connections, suggesting a 50 percent increase versus 2004 as China strongly promotes the development of its broadband networks. ..

China is the world's No. 2 PC market, with nearly 16 million units shipped in 2004 and the number expected to have grown another 13 percent last year, according to data tracking firm International Data Corp."

Fri, 09 Dec 2005 23:31:54 GMT

Ogre to Slay? Outsource It to Chinese: "from Seoul to San Francisco, affluent online gamers who lack the time and patience to work their way up to the higher levels of gamedom are willing to pay the young Chinese here to play the early rounds for them. "For 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, my colleagues and I are killing monsters," said a 23-year-old gamer who works here in this makeshift factory and goes by the online code name Wandering. "I make about $250 a month" ..

[There are] hundreds - perhaps thousands - of online gaming factories here in China. By some estimates, there are well over 100,000 young people working in China as full-time gamers .. The Chinese government estimates that there are 24 million online gamers in China, meaning that nearly one in four Internet users here play online games." Good slideshow.

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 22:27:39 GMT

San Diego Night: With cameras that take pictures up to 4000 megapixels, The Gigapixl Project makes amazingly detailed images. The images expand the scope of "plain sight," and thereby reduce our zone of privacy. [Thanks, Scott ]

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 16:55:21 GMT

Parallel ATA and SATA 1: A quick comparison.

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 06:09:14 GMT

Mind-machine communication: "Recognizing that many people who have lost the ability to move their limbs due to spinal cord, nerve or muscle damage have intact brains, Donoghue and his colleagues devised a way to translate thoughts into computer commands. In Cyberkinetics’ BrainGate system, now being tested in two patients, a silicon array the size of a baby aspirin is implanted into the brain’s primary motor cortex, which is responsible for limb movement. The chip--which contains 100 gold electrodes, each thinner than a human hair--is wired to a computer that interprets electrical signals from the neurons, allowing the subject to control a cursor and, by extension, other equipment.

Within two months, the first subject, a 25-year-old who had become paralyzed three years earlier, was able to open e-mail, channel surf on a television and turn lights off and on. By enabling the man to control a computer merely by thinking about it, Donoghue and his team provided him with increased autonomy. .. “Someday, the technology may allow the paralyzed to move their own muscles,” says [fellow Brown professor Roy] Aaron."

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 18:39:40 GMT

Hackers Admit to Wave of Attacks: "An Ohio computer hacker who served as a digital button man for a shady internet hosting company faces prison time after admitting he carried out one of a series of crippling denial-of-service attacks ordered by a wealthy businessman against his competitors. " Quite a story: Hackers used an Ohio ISP to discover vulnerable windows machines. One found 15,000, and used spybot to take them over. A Los Angeles business man hired the ISP manager for $1000 to orchestrate a DoS attack on his competitors. "The FBI described the ensuing attack as a tenacious, 10-day deluge that tracked RapidSatellite through three ISP changes, and briefly blocked Amazon.com and the website of the Department of Homeland Security, which had the poor luck of sharing service providers with Echouafni's rival. "

The businessman liked the results so much he bought the ISP and went after other targets. "Jay Echouafni, the 38-year-old satellite TV mogul who allegedly ordered and funded the cyberhits, went on the lam last year, and remains a fugitive from a federal indictment out of Los Angeles. .. Echouafni skipped out on $750,000 bail secured by his house in Massachusetts last year. Law enforcement officials believe he's now living in his native Morocco. " [Via Scott Lemon]

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 16:22:12 GMT

Keylogger Threats Rise 65%: " Threats from keyloggers, the stealthily installed programs that record computer keystrokes to help steal personal information, grew 65 percent this year, a study said Tuesday, marking a growing trend in hackers using malware for financial gain. About 6,191 keyloggers were recorded this year, up from 3,753 in 2004, said iDefense, a security intelligence provider that is part of VeriSign. iDefense recorded 3,753 keyloggers in 2004, a huge leap over the 300 released in 2000."

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 07:19:26 GMT

History's Worst Software Bugs: Cool story of software bugs with bad effects. First, why "bug"? In 1945, "engineers found a moth in Panel F, Relay #70 of the Harvard Mark II system. The computer was running a test of its multiplier and adder when the engineers noticed something was wrong. The moth was trapped, removed and taped into the computer's logbook with the words: "first actual case of a bug being found."

My favorite story was an intentional bug placed by the CIA in 1982. The background refs are worth reading. "Operatives working for the Central Intelligence Agency allegedly (.pdf) plant a bug in a Canadian computer system purchased to control the trans-Siberian gas pipeline. The Soviets had obtained the system as part of a wide-ranging effort to covertly purchase or steal sensitive U.S. technology. The CIA reportedly found out about the program and decided to make it backfire with equipment that would pass Soviet inspection and then fail once in operation. The resulting event is reportedly the largest non-nuclear explosion in the planet's history."

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 06:57:13 GMT

Discover Music - Pandora: Neat service that generates a radio station by picking music that resemble a single artist or song. Way cool. An outgrowth of the Music Genome Project: "Over the past 5 years, we've carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists - ranging from popular to obscure - and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world." [Thanks, Scott]

Fri, 11 Nov 2005 18:47:04 GMT

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET Web Hosting: Hosting with "long tail" pricing. "no contracts and no commitments .. If you'd like to talk to one of our sales reps to get a quote, you're out of luck. We don't have any. We also don't have any commissions, referral payments, or kickbacks. With NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, your money goes straight to the services you actually use"

Data Transfers (Bandwidth): $1.00 per gigabyte
Disk Space (Storage): $0.01 per megabyte-month
DNS at $0.02 per registered domain per day, no matter how active your domain gets.
Domain registration at $7.45 for a one-year .com and $7.68 for .net or .org.

Wed, 09 Nov 2005 04:11:15 GMT

New Worm Plupii Targets Linux Web Service Holes: "The three vulnerabilities it attacks through are the XML-RPC for PHP Remote Code Injection vulnerability; the AWStats Rawlog Plugin Logfile Parameter Input Validation Vulnerability; and the Darryl Burgdorf Webhints Remote Command Execution Vulnerability.

When Plupii is successful in infecting a server, it then sends a notification message to an attacker at a remote IP address via UDP port 7222 or 7111. .. Next, it opens a back door through one or the other of these ports. This enables an attacker to gain unauthorized access to the compromised system. Once in place, Plupii generates a variety of URLs .. in an attempt to find and infect other vulnerable systems.

The worm itself is easy to destroy. One need only delete the file: /tmp/lupii. The more significant problem is what the attacker may have downloaded to the server while it was active. Indeed, Symantec's Deepsight Alert Services recommends that, "Due to the ability of the remote user to perform so many different actions on the server computer, including installation of applications, it is highly recommended that compromised computers be completely reinstalled." "

Wed, 09 Nov 2005 04:07:35 GMT

Mobile Comms Satellite Launches Into Orbit: Inmarsat bGAN broadband network nearly complete. "The second step in a $1.5 billion program to create a mobile broadband communications network spanning the globe for users at sea, in the air and on land roared into space today. .. When [The Inmarsat 4-F2 satellite] enters service from geostationary orbit 22,300 miles (35,888 kilometers) above Earth next year, the craft will join the Inmarsat 4-F1 satellite that was successfully launched on Lockheed Martin's Atlas 5 rocket in March from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Together, the two craft will deliver broadband communications to 85 percent of the world." Connections are expected at around 400 kbps in each direction.

Also interesting is how it got there. It was launched SeaLaunch, a private company using a floating platform and Ukranian and Russian rockets.

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 18:00:38 GMT

The Federal Government Isn't Ready for Avian Flu. Are you? An trade magazine for CIOs asks if corporations should have their own avian flu plans. Actions to consider:

"Work remotely. In a flu pandemic, the fewer people who are physically together, the better. Create a virtual private network or add new employees to it.
Demand a plan. Once public health officials have established a plan, communicate it throughout your company.
Automate. Online transaction functionality for customers and vendors keeps people isolated.
Assess demand for raw materials and supplies in advance. If a supplier is hobbled and transportation networks are down, just-in-time inventory arrangements will falter. "

One BellSouth facility is "planning a mock emergency drill based on a flu pandemic scenario. Lathram's 19-person hazardous-materials team completed a mock emergency event for an anthrax outbreak shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. He says that team would be ideal to respond to a pandemic flu outbreak. "We would have them don their protective gear and enter a contaminated area or a quarantined area to do maintenance on our computers and other critical infrastructure," he says. "In that way it would be similar, but that would also be dependent on a healthy hazmat team." "

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 18:22:01 GMT

Diary of Disaster: Riding Out Katrina in the Data Center: Interesting stories of how some companies dealt with disaster recovery. Concludes with a few lessons:

"PEOPLE FIRST. The first effort should be focused on locating your employees and ensuring their safety.
DISTANCE MATTERS. Put your backup data center in a locale far enough away from your primary center to ensure continuity, but close enough to get employees there.
PRIORITIZE YOUR BUSINESS. Focus on the information systems that matter most, such as customer support and manufacturing.
EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED. No matter how well documented your business Continuity plan, the disaster is likely to throw you an unexpected curveball. Account for the worst possible scenario."

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 07:44:11 GMT

The Year of Rewards: Penestanan 2: When I travelled in Africa and Asia in the 80s, I shot a lot of slides. I dreamed then of a digital future where my camera would record sound as well as pictures, and where I could annotate the recordings and beam them out to my friends at home in real time. Even in 1983 you could see it would come, eventually. Now, here's a fine example from my friend David Lincoln. Today he's in Bali, taking a walk with villagers in their rice paddies.

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 07:56:01 GMT

Hurricane Katrina Relief: IT providers like Microsoft, Novell, etc, are providing assistance to businesses recovering from Katrina. "For businesses, organizations, and institutions whose computing systems were adversely effected by the hurricane, InsynQ and a community of ASP, technology, and software providers are donating various virtual computing solutions to help them transition to recovery. .. "

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 07:41:56 GMT

U3 USB Devices Launch at DEMOfall: Sept 2005: "Several device manufacturers on Monday unveiled the first USB drives based upon the U3 standard, a method that enables users to carry, store and launch applications directly from a USB flash drive without installation. The U3 technology was first introduced at CES 2005 in January, supported by a host of software and hardware vendors. However, missing from the list is Microsoft, which has not committed to backing the standard.

In the United States, SanDisk, Kingston, Memorex and Verbatim will be launching smart drives for U3 and several popular applications are announcing software support for the standard. .. Software support includes AOL's Winamp, Cerulean Studios' Trillian, McAfee Antivirus and Skype among others. This support by high profile vendors is helping U3 to gain momentum and spur possible widespread adoption, according to Gartner Senior Analyst Joseph Unsworth. ..

U3 drives will begin to ship from various vendors beginning on October 15 in sizes ranging from 256MB to 2GB. The U3 group also announced it had signed a deal with I-O DATA of Japan to begin producing drives for that market beginning early next year."

Sat, 01 Oct 2005 07:45:13 GMT

Engadget 1985: Nostalgia for computing 20 years ago.

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 20:58:35 GMT

Current BPL Internet Service Plenty Fast: An early user of BPL (Broadband over Power Line) Internet service from Current Communications over a local Cincinatti power company, Cinergy. "To use the service, you get a BPL modem. It looks like a largish wall-wart power plug with some LEDs on it. It has an RJ-45 jack on it to connect to a computer or a router. That's about it. We opted for the Cadillac level service: 3mbps up, 3mbps down, and a dedicated IP. That runs $49.95 a month, but the price decreases as more people in my neighborhood sign up (my current price with >3 neighbors signed up is a paltry $42.46)" Measured performance: 3.5 mbps downline, 4.2 mbps uplink (!).

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 20:05:41 GMT

Update your Linksys router with Sveasoft's firmware: "In its GPL Code Center, Linksys provides the source code for most of its devices. However, unless you're a programmer, this isn't going to do you much good. What can help you out is what Sveasoft has done with that source code. Based in California, this company has taken Linksys' source code and created new versions for replacing factory firmware. Basically, installing this firmware takes a limited functionality $50 consumer router and adds many of the features of an enterprise router. ..

Sveasoft actually sports three different families of firmware: Sveasoft firmware for Linksys WRT54G and WRT54GS routers, Alchemy firmware that works with a list of routers (which is free and adds a lot of the features listed above), and the aforementioned Talisman firmware."

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 06:07:21 GMT

CineMatrix: Neat simple system for audience participation in synthetic environments or games or polls. Examples abound.

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 16:41:00 GMT

VoiceStick: Interesting package of VOIP software on a USB device, allowing calling from any PC with broadband and a USB port.

Thu, 01 Sep 2005 07:36:54 GMT

The Monopoly Factory: How and why the patent office grants many spurious patents, with examples of the costs to society, and how to fix the system.

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 21:08:19 GMT

FTC Message Switching Systems: A blast from the past, the project I worked on 20 years ago. "The Sombers Group built the company's fault-tolerant Tandem Computer-based switching systems, which were installed both in the U.S. and overseas. " By "overseas" they mean Cameroon, where I installed the message switch at Intelcam in 1983. I also upgraded the switch in 1986, and then hosted their staff for TCP/IP training in 1995 in California.

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 17:09:02 GMT

Irreplaceable Exuberance: Henry Blodget reviews tech booms: "The growth of the Internet has paralleled that of most industries based on revolutionary technology. Canals, railroads, telegraphs, telephones, cars, radios, personal computers - all progressed (or are progressing) through four phases of development: boom, bust, mature growth and decay. .. Sometimes, industry life cycles last a century or more (circuit-switched telephones); sometimes, only a few decades (Polaroid). But the repetition of the pattern - as well as its resemblance to biological evolution - suggests that the boom-and-bust phases should be viewed as far more than repeated examples of human folly. Rather, they should be seen as natural, inevitable bursts of trial-and-error adaptation, the mechanisms through which industries are formed.

A precursor to the Internet boom and bust, for example, was the personal-computer bubble of the early 1980's. The Netscape of that era was Apple Computer, which went public amid the same sort of pandemonium that surrounded Netscape's I.P.O. 15 years later. .. Like Netscape, Apple came in an era of first-day "pops" in stock prices, instant paper millionaires and bull-market optimism. Lotus, Compaq and other companies followed, along with Seequa, Kaypro, VisiCorp, Altos, Gavilan, Victor and others. An ecosystem of supporting companies sprang up - distributors, retailers, trade-show producers, investment banks, law firms and public relations consultants - and the press reveled in rags-to-riches stories. ..

By late 1984, it was over. The stocks had tanked, former moon-shots had gone bankrupt, and thousands of people lost their jobs. Projections of perpetual fantastic annual growth had been hastily revised, and humbled survivors were preparing for a bleaker future. Eventually, however, as with the Internet, the personal-computer industry proved larger and more profitable than even early boosters had predicted. And some of the biggest winners were those that went public after the shakeout - Microsoft in 1986, Dell in 1988. ..

[We should] take solace in knowing that our exuberance helps build industries, however boneheaded it may later seem."

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 20:48:47 GMT

Customers of new UK ISP get to share all Sony music: "PlayLouder MSP, an ISP in the UK, has secured a license from Sony that allows its customers to legally share any song in the Sony-BMG catalog with any other PlayLouder MSP customer, and to download these tracks from any ISP customer in the entire world. .. PlayLouder MSP DSL costs about the same as comparable DSL offerings in the UK. For their money, PlayLouder MSP customers get their regualr DSL lines, as well as the right to share any song in the Sony-BMG catalog, even if it's out of print, in any file-format, using any file-sharing software, at any bitrate..

PlayLouder MSP is using audio-analysis software provided by Audible Magic to analyze the P2P traffic that it can detect on its network and count approximately how many times each track is traded, and will deliver that, along with a cut of its revenue, to Sony. They're also filtering traffic to the Internet to prevent Sony music tracks that Audible Magic recognizes from leaving its network via recognized P2P protocols and going to ISPs whose customers have not paid a license fee. However, they will not be stopping any tracks that Audible Magic fails to recognize, nor will they be resticting traffic using unrecognized protocols.

PlayLouder MSP has deals with many indy labels as well as Sony, and those labels will also get a proportional cut of the money that PlayLouder MSP takes in based on their network monitoring. The ISP says that it is negotiating with other major labels and hopes they'll come into the fold soon. .. PlayLouder MSP is live at the end of September if their schedule holds"

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 06:35:13 GMT

Global University Phone System: "The GUPS Initiative provides universities with a voice over IP (VOIP) system they can easily install and configure to connect their phone networks with other academic institutions around the globe. Calls are routed over the internet using VOIP thus bypassing traditional telecommunication charges for phone calls "

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 17:08:34 GMT

Akamai monitors news activity: Web page shows spikes in news reading, by story: "It's debatable how big a deal any specific news event is compared to all the other human mayhem that occurs each day. .. A news mapping service introduced on Thursday by Akamai Technologies Inc. promises to give unprecedented insight into the relative hunger that millions of Internet users have to learn of breaking events minute-by-minute. Akamai, which helps speed delivery of 15 percent of the world's Internet traffic over its network, is looking to count the sum of page requests across 100 major news sites it serves to rank interest in major events on a scale never seen before."

Fri, 12 Aug 2005 19:23:21 GMT

Security Watch: Major Cisco router flaw: "Until recently, the idea of penetrating the Cisco Shellcode via remote access was fanciful. That was before security researcher Michael Lynn stepped up the lectern at this year's Black Hat conference, and after first stumbling through a deliberately faux presentation on VoIP security, proceeded to describe some (but not all) of his research to a skeptical audience. During his presentation, Lynn offered a quick demo of how he could access the root of a Cisco router remotely. ..

by remotely attacking the Cisco IOS Shellcode, you could destroy the instruction set on the hardware that tells the router to turn on again... Following Black Hat, Cisco issued an advisory detailing how flaws in the way older Cisco IOS system process IP6v packets could allow a remote user control of the router. ..

by April, Cisco rolled out a patch via software upgrade. Problem was, neither Cisco nor ISS really explained why the patch was necessary. Applying a patch on a network router often requires that the router be shut down for a given length of time; on a busy network, this requires scheduling, to say the least. Thus, many Cisco clients may not have applied the patch .."

Fri, 12 Aug 2005 19:12:31 GMT

Internet Scammers Keep Working in Nigeria: "In Festac Town, an entire community of scammers overnights on the Internet. By day they flaunt their smart clothes and cars and hang around the Internet cafes, trading stories about successful cons and near misses, and hatching new plots. Festac Town is where communication specialists operating underground sell foreign telephone lines over which a scammer can purport to be calling from any city in the world. Here lurk master forgers and purveyors of such software as "e-mail extractors," which can harvest e-mail addresses by the million. Now, however, a 3-year-old crackdown is yielding results, Nigerian authorities say.

Nuhu Ribadu, head of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, says cash and assets worth more than $700 million were recovered from suspects between May 2003 and June 2004. More than 500 suspects have been arrested, more than 100 cases are before the courts and 500 others are under investigation, he said."

Sat, 06 Aug 2005 04:56:35 GMT

MP3300 Tekkeon myPower ALL Universal Rechargeable Battery: Extender battery kit with multiple plugs and power levels. 11.8 oz (330g), 3.28” (W) x 6.80” (L) x .92” (D), lithium polymer battery, 3 hour charging time, claims 5 hours of play time for portable DVD players or 3 hours for notebook computers. $ 99.

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 17:59:46 GMT

Michael Helfrich's Weblog: PodCast Pilot: Recommends the MXL 990 cardioid microphone for quality recording, combined with the USB-powered M-Audio MobilePre preamp.

Sat, 16 Jul 2005 00:08:11 GMT

France Telecom offers ''Big Screen'' Video EyeWear to Mobile Phone Users: "MicroOptical's video eyewear contains two Kopin full-colour, QVGA-resolution (320 x 240) CyberDisplay 230K microdisplays. The sleek eyewear allows users to privately view large-size video or pictures equivalent to a 12-inch screen as seen from three feet away, yet simultaneously view their surroundings thanks to the small size of the frame and MicroOptical's patented optics which allow the user to see around the screen. ..

Orange SA, one of the world's leading wireless companies with 52 million customers in 16 countries, will bundle a MicroOptical binocular video eyewear with Samsung's SGH-D600 cell phone as part of its new "Orange World" wireless multimedia service. The bundled package, unveiled at the recent European Research and Innovation Exhibition in Paris, will be made available to Orange subscribers in October 2005. ..

Built with nanotechnology, the CyberDisplay 230K .. operates at traditional video speeds and consumes only five milliwatts of power." I find the power figure amazing. Display size and power consumption are big limitations to many applications. Looking geeky is a small price to pay for portability.

Fri, 15 Jul 2005 07:26:26 GMT

Google invests in BPL developer: " Google Inc has invested, alongside Goldman Sachs & Co and The Hearst Corp, in Current Communications Group LLC, a privately held company that develops technology for broadband over power lines, BPL. Current declined to confirm the amount raised in the investment, but a story in yesterday's Wall Street Journal said it was $100m... BPL is clearly gaining momentum, as first the US government's Federal Communications Commission in February proposed rules to facilitate the deployment of BPL over the electric power grid, then this week the IEEE announced it has begun work on a standard to define the nature of the communication channel to be used with AC power lines. The proposed standard is the IEEE P1901, "Standard for Broadband over Power Line Networks: Medium Access Control and Physical Layer Specifications" that is expected to be completed by early 2007."

Sat, 18 Jun 2005 16:32:47 GMT

FreeNX and NoMachine: Fast and secure remote desktop system, like VNC or LTSP but faster and with many features:

Runs single applications remotely
Carries sound as well as screen and keyboard
Has many clients - Linux, Solaris, Windows, Mac OS/X, PXE, Mozilla
Can servers for several OS and can proxy to extend VNC and Windows Terminal Server
Tight compression for fast service over dialup
Uses SSL for end-to-end encryption
Easy to install and demo in Knoppix

(As always, John's got the scoop...)

Mon, 16 May 2005 17:10:14 GMT

Piracy is Good? A long piece on a business model for BitTorrent "hyperdistribution" of video programming. "Per capita, Australians are the most profligate downloaders of television programming in the entire world, followed closely by the British. While the Americans lag behind, they're still on the chart, in third place. The sea change has already taken place - undoubtedly sped along by the monopoly position of the commercial broadcasters, who, in many cases, act as barriers rather than conduits for television programs. If a commercial broadcaster doesn't show a program, or delays it for years, that's no longer of concern to television audiences: they'll just download it from the Internet. ..

As yet there are no viable economic models connecting the television producer directly to the audience. Industry pundits talk about audiovisual downloads through some system like Apple's iTunes Music Store, and perhaps we'll see something like this in the near future, but this works against the simple fact that people do not expect to pay for television programs. .. [Also, thanks to PVR's and fast forward,] 30-second ads are not a part of television's future. They're too easy to edit out of the viewing experience. ..

the "bug," the smallish, semi-transparent station ID which has become the constant on-screen companion to all television broadcasts [can carry an ad instead, as it does on some sports broadcasts today]. the technique is already in use, and advertisers understand its value. .. advertisers are ready for this. .. As the advertisement-as-interruption disappears, we will see a series of advertisements — perhaps running five minutes apiece — embedded into the programmme itself. This is easy to achieve technically, and will be palatable to most major advertisers.

if those advertisers are paying between $250,000 and $500,000 for thirty seconds of advertising (in the United States), just a handful of advertisements would cover hyperdistribution [BitTorrent] costs. It's a numbers game: if enough viewers watch a hyperdistributed television program, it is cheaper for advertisers to work with producers, and handle the distribution themselves. Furthermore, if the program is widely popular, it is far, far cheaper to do so. In other words, the higher your ratings, the cheaper the advertising. That's precisely the reverse of broadcast television, and one big reason that advertisers will find this model so appealing.

Although no formal surveys have been conducted, it's reasonable to assert that at least four percent of Australians, two percent of Britons, and one percent of Americans are already using broadband hyperdistribution to get some percentage of their TV programs. Based on my own research, I have found television downloading to be widespread among men 18 to 25 years old, precisely the demographic most coveted by advertisers."

Sat, 14 May 2005 06:52:02 GMT

Motorola Debuts First Ever Nano Flat Screen: "Motorola Labs today unveiled a working 5-inch color video display prototype based on proprietary Carbon Nanotube (CNT) technology.. Optimized for a large screen High Definition Television (HDTV) that is less than 1-inch thick, this first-of-its kind NED 5-inch prototype harnesses the power of CNTs to fundamentally change the design and fabrication of flat panel displays.

The development of such a flat panel display is possible due to Motorola Labs Nano Emissive Display (NED) technology, a scalable method of growing CNTs directly on glass to enable an energy efficient design that excels at emitting electrons. ..

“Motorola’s NED technology is demonstrating full color video with good response time,” said Barry Young, VP and CFO of DisplaySearch, a leading flat panel display market research and consulting company. “And according to a detailed cost model analysis conducted by our firm, we estimate the manufactured cost for a 40-inch NED panel could be under $400.”

Motorola’s proprietary CNT growth process provides excellent precision in designing and manipulating a material at its molecular level – enhancing specific characteristics – and, in the case of flat panel displays, producing high-definition images. .. Motorola’s industry-first working prototype demonstrates:

• Operational full color 5" video section of a 1280 x 720, 16:9, 42-inch HDTV
• High quality brightness
• Bright, vivid colors using standard Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) TV phosphors
• Display panel thickness of 3.3 millimeters (about 1/8th of an inch)
• Low cost display drive electronics (similar to LCD, much lower than Plasma)
• Display characteristics meet or exceed CRTs, such as fast response time, wide
viewing angle, wide operation temperature "

Fri, 13 May 2005 17:33:31 GMT

LaserKey: Nifty - a projection keyboard that communicates via Bluetooth to PDAs or smartphones. Advertised at $129.

Fri, 13 May 2005 17:10:58 GMT

Interesting use for the Mac Mini: "A few weeks ago I was visiting another one of my portfolio companies. They are in the process of rolling out the beta of their enterprise software product. But rather than risk any difficulties with download and installation, the company was shipping its beta as an appliance by simply loading the software onto the Unix shell of a mini and shipping the mini to its beta customers. Configuration of the beta at the customer premises then consisted of simply plugging in the power and the ethernet cable. Couldn't be easier.

Sure, I know that there are cheaper machines to be had running Linux on Intel processors. But the combined power, simplicity and beauty of the Mac mini can not be beat. I suspect we'll be seeing them popping up all over the place -- in the home and in the office -- in the coming months and quarters "

Tue, 10 May 2005 07:57:32 GMT

Telepocalypse by Martin Geddes: The telecom earthquake: Ruminations on SIP and Skype. The comments and trackbacks are also interesting. I like the comparisons. Skype's CEO says that if Skype were a spreadsheet, it wouldn't be VisiCalc or Excel, but Lotus 123 -- the first package that broke open the market to large numbers of users, but still short of the mainstream. Similarly, a commenter regards Skype like AOL: a mass-market closed garden, far larger than the niche players before it, but smaller than the ultimate, hopefully open, system. See also VoIP and ENUM on the possible "death" (or at least, "burial") of SIP.

Fri, 06 May 2005 21:45:58 GMT

Hackers attack IT conference: Clever, nasty, and far too easy. "Hackers infiltrated an IT exhibition last week and attacked delegates' computers with a new type of wireless attack. Security experts attending the Wireless LAN Event in London last Wedesday found that anonymous hackers in the crowd had created a Web site that looked like a genuine log-in page for a Wi-Fi network, but which actually sent 45 random viruses to computers that accessed it.

Spencer Parker, a director of technical solutions at AirDefense .. said that the hackers walked around the exhibition carrying a Linux-based laptop running software that turned it into a wireless access point. Initially, they labelled the hotspot "Free_Internet_Access", then "BTOpenzone" and then "T-Mobile". .. . "It downloads 45 different randomly generated viruses, worms and keyloggers so antivirus software doesn't protect it. It doesn’t recognise the signatures." .. Parker, whose computer was infected by the attack, believes that the Web site was up for half an hour."

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 18:54:17 GMT

5% of Google Visitors Offered Gmail: Interesting comment on how Google is managing a rollout to maximize control and buzz: "According to this PCWorld.com story, on a random basis, every twentieth visitor to www.google.com is being offered a Gmail account. It's an interesting phased roll-out that Google is using for their email service. First by invitation only. Then existing users, based on their own usage, got an incremental number of accounts to offer to friends, colleagues etc. Now this. It gives them the ability to scale in a controlled way and address issues with some control. It's also a clever PR mechanism to keep Gmail in the news. Rather than blowing an announcement all at once, they're trading on the industry's media focus on Google which means they get good coverage whatever and whenever they do it."

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 05:51:41 GMT

Google cuts appliance cost: The Google Search Appliance is "a box containing both hardware and software .. The company cut to $2,995 from $4,995 the license price on the Google Mini -- a search appliance for small businesses that was released in January. That license includes one year of support and allows holders to search up to 100,000 documents versus 50,000 documents previously. .. Google's "licensing and other revenues" accounted for roughly 1 percent of the company's 2004 revenue of $3.19 billion"

Mon, 04 Apr 2005 17:58:25 GMT

U3 - New USB memory/device standard: "U3 makes the promise of anywhere, anytime, any PC computing a reality. By combining the widely adopted storage capabilities of today’s UFDs (USB Flash Drives) with the ability to transport and run applications from a small UFD, U3 ensures truly personal and portable computing. The U3 standard enables developers to create easy to use applications that minimize the complexities of today’s digital life. From your own email folders to healthcare history to fully functional work applications, U3 makes everything available anywhere without having to access multiple devices or lug around a laptop."

Memorex, Kingston, and Verbatim have promised products: "Called a smart USB flash drive, these drives enable consumers to carry all of their personal computer settings, applications and data for use on any PC wherever they go. The new Verbatim smart Store ‘n’ Go USB flash drives will be availabe worldwide [in 2005]. .. The U3 platform includes three components. U3’s hardware specification gives manufacturers the core technology to build their smart USB flash drives. The U3 software developer kit includes sample code, a standard set of application programming interfaces (APIs), and thorough documentation. The U3 Launchpad is a friendly graphical user interface that is used to access and run applications."

This could improve the utility of internet cafes: users can keep an offline personalized environment and secure information store for a small purchase price. Many of today's UFDs play and record sound; with U3, they could rapidly download and upload voice mail at an internet cafe to extend VOIP services (e.g., in developing countries). The U3 could be added to an entertainment device, like an MP3 player, radio, game machine or camera, making the net cost per user negligible.

Thu, 24 Mar 2005 17:23:44 GMT

Ourmedia.org: "We provide free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches." Appears to build on the Internet Archive.

Thu, 24 Mar 2005 17:22:45 GMT

Podcasters get sponsors: Warner Brothers "will sponsor podcasts of the Eric Rice Show and provide exclusive audio content from one of its bands. The Eric Rice Show, which is produced by Rice and three of his colleagues, features audio musings on entertainment, technology, and culture. .. The agreement calls for the label to give Rice exclusive interviews, banter and impromptu jams featuring "The Used," which were recorded on the band's current tour... RSS marketing firm Pheedo, which brokered the dea [said]. "It's basically paid placement. The music becomes the advertisement. The way I sold both these sponsorships is [that they're] enhancing what someone's already doing and adding value to it, as opposed to the interruption mode" [of paid ads]. ..

In a separate sponsorship facilitated by Pheedo, software provider Citrix has paid for a product placement on blogger Chris Pirillo's podcast. Listeners will be encouraged to register for a trial of the sponsor's GoToMeeting platform using a unique code announced specific to that podcast. That sponsorship will break on March 31." [Thanks John!]

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 06:55:10 GMT

Solar SeV Finetex Shell: Updated geek jacket, now with solar charger: "The Solar SCOTTEVEST (SeV) combines the benefits of our signature jacket and removable solar panels. The solar panels enable you to recharge most USB compatible devices on the go, either while wearing the jacket or with the panels removed. When attached, the solar panels compliment the jacket’s design. The solar panels charge a small battery - about the size of a deck of cards. The battery powers your device almost immediately after the solar panels are exposed to sunlight. Once the battery is fully charged, the panels can be removed and your portable electronic device can tap into the stored power. Typical charge times in direct sunlight range from 2-3 hours, but direct sunlight is not required." Geek cargo pants also available, teflon coated (but no solar panel...).

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 06:31:01 GMT

Opentopia webcams: 1130 webcams available, at random or by location, with an option for animation of a few recent shots.

Fri, 11 Mar 2005 09:06:48 GMT

Powerline connectivity: "Three Japanese consumer electronics giants have created a new technology to transport Internet and media signals around the home via the electricity network. .. Sony, Mitsubishi and Matsushita-owned Panasonic have set up the SECA powerline alliance. They have developed a system to transfer 170 Megabits per second of data through the power lines of a home, Panasonic researcher Ingo Chmielewski told journalists at the electronics trade fair CeBIT"

Sat, 05 Mar 2005 19:30:33 GMT

Fingerprinting PCs wherever they connect to the Net: ". A doctoral student at the University of California has conclusively fingerprinted computer hardware remotely, allowing it to be tracked wherever it is on the Internet. In a paper on his research, primary author and Ph.D. student Tadayoshi Kohno said: "There are now a number of powerful techniques for remote operating system fingerprinting, that is, remotely determining the operating systems of devices on the Internet. We push this idea further and introduce the notion of remote physical device fingerprinting ... without the fingerprinted device's known cooperation."

The potential applications for Kohno's technique are impressive. For example, "tracking, with some probability, a physical device as it connects to the Internet from different access points, counting the number of devices behind a NAT even when the devices use constant or random IP identifications, remotely probing a block of addresses to determine if the addresses correspond to virtual hosts (for example, as part of a virtual honeynet), and unanonymising anonymised network traces. .. One could also use our techniques to help track laptops as they move, perhaps as part of a Carnivore-like project [or to] obtain information about whether two devices on the Internet, possibly shifted in time or IP addresses, are actually the same physical device."

The technique works by "exploiting small, microscopic deviations in device hardware: clock skews." In practice, Kohno's paper says, his techniques "exploit the fact that most modern TCP stacks implement the TCP timestamps option from RFC 1323 whereby, for performance purposes, each party in a TCP flow includes information about its perception of time in each outgoing packet. A fingerprinter can use the information contained within the TCP headers to estimate a device's clock skew and thereby fingerprint a physical device. .. Our techniques report consistent measurements when the measurer is thousands of miles, multiple hops, and tens of milliseconds away from the fingerprinted device, and when the fingerprinted device is connected to the Internet from different locations and via different access technologies. Further, one can apply our passive and semi-passive techniques when the fingerprinted device is behind a NAT or firewall. .. For all our methods, we stress that the fingerprinter does not require any modification to or cooperation from the fingerprintee." Kohno and his team tested their techniques on many operating systems, including Windows XP and 2000, Mac OS X Panther, Red Hat and Debian Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and even Windows for Pocket PCs 2002. ..

Although the paper says that "It has long been known that seemingly identical computers can have disparate clock skews," it goes on to conclude that "the main advantage of our techniques ... is that our technique can be mountable by adversaries thousands of miles and multiple hops away." " [via Mitch Kapor]

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 17:11:01 GMT

iPod Radio and Skype: "This post provides a "how to" on creating a personal iPod Radio that you can use in your Skype calls or simply leave running for your friends to call. The implications are disruptive, and the "ease of use" likely to further Skype's adoption when solutions are available for effectively using Skype as a broadcast service. It's perfect for low volume delivery of recorded messages off websites. Perhaps another zone for convergence between music, media and voice?" see also SkypeCasting: How to Record Skype Conversations

This builds on Skype's low latency, its high quality (if higher-bandwidth) codecs, and its ability to run in several instances on a single desktop. It's not just VOIP telephony, and beats streaming technology in having fast call setup and no server (being peer-to-peer). IP telephony seemed to me to be economically important but not functionally important, unless it could enable new functions. Up to now, making your own conference calls, keeping a line open for long periods, or integrating with other collaboration tools were valuable, but relatively minor, new functions. Skype's approach of adding high quality audio was intriguing ("the medium is the massage"). With recorded apps and closed user groups, we have SOIP, Sound over IP, with many apps, such as:

personal or party-sized radio
low-volume simulcast of events (I'd happily pay $5 to hear the music from my favorite jazz club when I can't make it; and I'd like to listen in on community or political meetings when I can't be there)
recorded announcements (school reports, ski reports)
intercom/surveillance: listen in on microphones anywhere
PA systems: make an announcement from your PC, or PDA
personal online dictation or transcription

Especially interesting is the ease of access from a telephone. Motorola is adding Skype to mobile phone handsets, and third parties can give a public phone number address to an SOIP destination. So any service you make on a PC can be accessed from phones, as well. Carriers may now reuse the phone numbers that used to connect to modems and faxes, and can carry calls from conventional phones into the new applications.

As noted by former BT CTO Peter Cochrane, unbundled VOIP like Skype has become as practical for road warriors as modems did in the 90s, and the results may not be pretty for the phone carriers. New applications may soften the blow a little.

Sat, 26 Feb 2005 07:02:29 GMT

The Intimate Planet: Skype brings live conversations with strangers from around the world to John Perry Barlow. He gets calls from a Vietnamese and a Chinese student practicing English, an Australian joking around; unmediated, no government minders, no commercial message (at least for now). The free arrival of random voices, like meeting strangers on a train, carries a shock. Like the first exposures to email and the web, the world comes even closer.

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 20:09:29 GMT

O'Reilly: Open Source Paradigm Shift: A restatement of Tim's thesis of the last few years. Some points I want to remember: "My premise is that free and open source developers are in much the same position today that IBM was in 1981 when it changed the rules of the computer industry, but failed to understand the consequences of the change, allowing others to reap the benefits. Most existing proprietary software vendors are no better off, playing by the old rules while the new rules are reshaping the industry around them.

I have a simple test that I use in my talks to see if my audience of computer industry professionals is thinking with the old paradigm or the new. "How many of you use Linux?" I ask. Depending on the venue, 20-80% of the audience might raise its hands. "How many of you use Google?" Every hand in the room goes up. And the light begins to dawn. Every one of them uses Google's massive complex of 100,000 Linux servers, but they were blinded to the answer by a mindset in which "the software you use" is defined as the software running on the computer in front of you. Most of the "killer apps" of the Internet, applications used by hundreds of millions of people, run on Linux or FreeBSD. But the operating system, as formerly defined, is to these applications only a component of a larger system. Their true platform is the Internet. ..

Sites such as Google, Amazon, and salesforce.com provide the most serious challenge to the traditional understanding of free and open source software. Here are applications built on top of Linux, but they are fiercely proprietary. What's more, even when using and modifying software distributed under the most restrictive of free software licenses, the GPL, these sites are not constrained by any of its provisions, all of which are conditioned on the old paradigm. The GPL's protections are triggered by the act of software distribution, yet web-based application vendors never distribute any software: it is simply performed on the Internet's global stage, delivered as a service rather than as a packaged software application. ..

And the opportunities are not merely up the stack. There are huge proprietary opportunities hidden inside the system. .. We saw this pattern in the PC market with most PCs now bearing the brand "Intel Inside"; the Internet could just as easily be branded "Cisco Inside". ..

[On open source style collaboration as a generator of value:] those that have built large development communities have done so because they have a modular architecture that allows easy participation by independent or loosely coordinated developers. The use of Perl, for example, exploded along with CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, and Perl's module system, which allowed anyone to enhance the language with specialized functions, and make them available to other users. ..

an observation originally made by Clay Shirky in a talk .. entitled "Listening to Napster." There are three ways to build a large database, said Clay. The first, demonstrated by Yahoo!, is to pay people to do it. The second, inspired by lessons from the open source community, is to get volunteers to perform the same task. The Open Directory Project, an open source Yahoo! competitor, is the result. (Wikipedia provides another example.) But Napster demonstrates a third way. Because Napster set its defaults to automatically share any music that was downloaded, every user automatically helped to build the value of the shared database. .."

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 17:45:46 GMT

FM radio from your PC: "PCI MAX 2005 is a computer card that will .. change your PC into a FM radio station. You will be able to play your audio files (CD, wav, MP3, real audio etc.) from your PC through radio waves directly to your household radio receiver in the next room, in the living room, across your yard, in whole block of flats....or for the entire village/small city. .. The included software (also available at the link below for a quick DL) lets you set the frequency and the output power. " Discussion of alternative products on technocrat.net.

Sat, 12 Feb 2005 17:54:52 GMT

dorkbot-sf: A local chapter of the international network of dorkbot groups, "people doing strange things with electricity." Just in the last month in SF: cool wierd constructions of robots, dystopian security systems, and real life laminar design tools for anyone to build the object they model in 3d in their computer. Spime builders international. (Thanks for the tip, Scott!)

Mon, 07 Feb 2005 08:12:32 GMT

Sun Grid: $1/cpu-hour, with storage at $1/GB/month. Maybe they have a future after all :)

Sun, 06 Feb 2005 18:26:34 GMT

NexTag: Interesting comparison shopping site, esp for used and refurb computer gear. They show graphs of the price over the last few years, kinda like stocks except the slope is always sharply down... for example, an Acer Notebook.

Sun, 06 Feb 2005 07:08:28 GMT

Phone Scoop - database of cell phone specs & features: Nifty search & compare by carrier and many attributes of phones.

Fri, 28 Jan 2005 17:34:48 GMT

BEEP framework for building application protocols: Well written FAQ, technical intro and examples (like a reliable syslog protocol). Used in the xGrid system that runs on OS X.

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 02:00:33 GMT

Soaring global warming 'can't be ruled out': Results from the world's largest climate modeling experiment, reported in Nature. "The Earth may be much more sensitive to global warming than previously thought, according to the first results from a massive distributed-computing project. The project tested thousands of climate models and found that some produced a world that warmed by a huge 11.5°C when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations reached the levels expected to be seen later this century. This extreme result is surprising because it lies far outside the 1.4°C to 4.5°C range predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the same CO2-level increase..

"We have anecdotal evidence that people tend to tune their models to be similar to other people's," says David Stainforth, from the University of Oxford, UK. "Nobody wants to have a model that's terribly different, particularly when there are only 8 or 10 in the world," he explains. Stainforth and his colleagues set up www.climateprediction.net to see what happened when models were not tuned in this way. "

About the calculations: "From Uruguay to Uzbekistan and Sierra Leone to Singapore, 95,000 people from 150 countries are taking part in the climateprediction.net experiment to explore the possible impact of global warming. By downloading free software from www.climateprediction.net on their personal computers, participants run their own unique version of Britain's Met Office climate model. While their computer is idle, the program runs a climate simulation over days or weeks and automatically reports the results to Oxford University and other collaborating institutions around the world. Together, the volunteers have simulated more than 4 million model years, donated 8,000 years of computer time and exceeded the processing power of the world's largest supercomputers. The first results of the continuing experiment are reported in the latest edition of the science journal Nature." My computers have been running these models since the project started. Amazing how well-behaved the software has been, running imperceptibly in the background.

Sat, 22 Jan 2005 07:07:21 GMT

'Inch of snow' shuts down air marshals: "Hundreds of federal air marshals were grounded and unable to access critical information to pinpoint potential terrorist activity for eight hours on the eve of President Bush's inauguration after snow paralyzed the Mission Operations Center in Washington, said several air marshals and a supervisor. .. hundreds of flights were rerouted because of the snow, and marshals seeking information on reports of a dirty bomb in Boston were unsuccessful. ..

"The guys in the field were stuck and didn't know what was going on, other than they were not to call MOC because they did not have enough people staffing it," the supervisor said. "The president's inauguration was the whole purpose of increased coverage. If they can't handle one inch of snow, what if it is truly an emergency? It was just a total meltdown," the supervisor said. .. When told the "meltdown" was caused by weather delays in Washington, the air marshal said: "It's called the Weather Channel. They should watch it and be prepared to staff for it." " Michael Helfrich sees an IT opportunity: "the tactical edge of the Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS) relies heavily on the phone and PDA as a form-factor. Given the complete availability of HTTP services through WIFI, CDMA, and GSM-enabled devices, there is a huge opportunity for the distribution of information and other services for organizations like FAMS."

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 06:54:04 GMT

World Wide Panorama - Brooks Leffler - Refuge on the California Coast: Great site at Berkeley for panoramas, starting with Asilomar.

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 06:38:42 GMT

Wired 13.01: The BitTorrent Effect: Nice intro to the software and its effects. "One example of how the world has already changed: Gary Lerhaupt, a graduate student in computer science at Stanford, became fascinated with Outfoxed, the documentary critical of Fox News, and thought more people should see it. So he convinced the film's producer to let him put a chunk of it on his Web site for free, as a 500-Mbyte torrent. Within two months, nearly 1,500 people downloaded it. That's almost 750 gigs of traffic, a heck of a wallop. But to get the ball rolling, Lerhaupt's site needed to serve up only 5 gigs. After that, the peers took over and hosted it themselves. His bill for that bandwidth? $4. There are drinks at Starbucks that cost more. "It's amazing - I'm a movie distributor," he says. "If I had my own content, I'd be a TV station." [Update: It just passed 1 TB.] ..

[In] November Jon Stewart made a now-famous appearance on CNN's Crossfire. Stewart attacked the hosts, Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson, calling them political puppets. .. Delighted fans immediately ripped the segment and posted it online as a torrent. Word of Stewart's smackdown spread rapidly through the blogs, and within a day at least 4,000 servers were hosting the clip. One host reported having, at any given time, more than a hundred peers swapping and downloading the file. No one knows exactly how many people got the clip through BitTorrent, but this kind of traffic on the very first day suggests a number in the hundreds of thousands - and probably much higher. Another 2.3 million people streamed it from iFilm.com over the next few weeks. By contrast, CNN's audience for Crossfire was only 867,000. Three times as many people saw Stewart's appearance online as on CNN itself..

"Blogs reduced the newspaper to the post. In TV, it'll go from the network to the show," [and for that matter, MP3 reduced the album to the song]

The P2P technology company Kontiki produces software that, like BitTorrent, creates hyperefficient downloads; its applications also work with Microsoft's digital rights management software to keep content out of pirate hands. The BBC used Kontiki's systems last summer to send TV shows to 1,000 households. And America Online now uses Kontiki's apps to circulate Moviefone trailers. In fact, when users download a trailer, they also download a plug-in that begins swapping the file with others. It's so successful that when you watch a trailer on Moviefone, 80 percent of the time it's being delivered to you by other users in the network. Millions of AOL users have already participated in peercasting - without knowing it."

Tue, 18 Jan 2005 06:23:12 GMT

Griffin RadioShark: Looks nifty. $70. "The RadioSHARK can record any AM or FM radio broadcast in real time. You can also program it to record a scheduled show, or to ‘pause’ live radio so you can return right where you left off .. The RadioSHARK connects to and is powered by USB. The fin-shaped device acts as an antenna and can be positioned for best reception and recording. Any recorded broadcast can be transferred to an iPod or any other AIFF-compatible digital music player to replay on the go."

Sat, 08 Jan 2005 18:21:49 GMT

Attack of the Killer Xanga: How a blog entry on Xanga turned into a denial-of-service attack on another website (in this case, slashdot search). The comments about and by the hackers involved give a view into their motivations.

Wed, 22 Dec 2004 16:54:55 GMT

The Broadband Daily: BPL Hype: A summary of skepticism about Broadband over Power Lines. Links to stories saying that it generates high levels of radio noise that disrupt other spectrum users; it has been tried by many utilities but only one is going commercial with it; and that industry engineers think it won't scale.

Sun, 19 Dec 2004 08:34:53 GMT

Presentation Tips for People running Virtual PC or VMWare: Good tips for tech demos, even if you aren't running VMs.

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 16:47:18 GMT

torrentocracy - about prodigem: "Prodigem is a content hosting service. It uses Bit Torrent peer to peer (p2p) filesharing to enable you to distribute extraordinarily large media files at an extraordinarily low cost. In fact, the service is currently free (but probably will not be forever). Prodigem is currently in a limited testers phase and will be opened to wider availability shortly. In the meantime, you can download content and see what's available from the Prodigem Torrent Tracker.

What is revolutionary here is that Prodigem completely automates the entire process of setting up bit torrent sessions for the distribution of your content. You simply upload your content via the web and with the click of a few buttons, the Prodigem servers are hosting and seeding your torrent for your content."

Sat, 11 Dec 2004 08:58:55 GMT

Why this brain flies on rat cunning: "a [rat's] brain nurtured in a Petri dish learns to pilot a fighter plane as scientists develop a new breed of "living" computer.. The "brain", grown from 25,000 neural cells extracted from a single rat embryo, has been taught to fly an F-22 jet simulator by scientists at the University of Florida. They hope their research into neural computation will help them develop sophisticated hybrid computers, with a thinking biological component. ..

The brain-in-a-dish is the idea of Thomas DeMarse, 37, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Florida. His work has been praised as a significant insight into the brain by leading US academics and scientific journals. The 25,000 neurons were suspended in a specialised liquid to keep them alive and then laid across a grid of 60 electrodes in a small glass dish. ..

In the most striking experiment, the brain was linked to the jet simulator. Manipulated by the electrodes and a desktop computer, it was taught to control the flight path, even in mock hurricane-strength winds. "When we first hooked them up, the plane 'crashed' all the time," Dr DeMarse said. "But over time, the neural network slowly adapts as the brain learns to control the pitch and roll of the aircraft. After a while, it produces a nice straight and level trajectory."

Previously, scientists have been able to monitor the activity of only a few neurons at a time, but Dr DeMarse and his team can study how thousands of cells conduct calculations together. But it is still a long way from a human brain. "The goal is to study how cortical networks perform their neural computations. The implications are extremely important," Dr DeMarse said"

Tue, 07 Dec 2004 20:25:25 GMT

Cap Harnesses Human Thought to Move PC Cursor: Study published in the Proceedings of the NAS: "Scientists have developed a non-invasive brain-computer interface that enables a person to move a cursor across a computer screen just by thinking about it. .. Before the new finding, many researchers previously assumed that only invasive brain-computer interfaces, in which electrodes are surgically implanted into the brain, could control complex movements. ..

Of the four people who participated in the study, two had severe physical disabilities. The subjects wore the electrode caps, which analyzed electroencephalographic (EEG) activity (brain waves) recorded from their scalp. The electrodes, small metal disks about a quarter of an inch (three-fifths of a centimeter) wide, were placed over the sensory motor part of the brain.

At first, participants learned to use their thoughts to direct a cursor on a computer screen by imagining specific actions, from running to shooting baskets. As they became more comfortable with the technology, the subjects began to rely less on such imagery to direct the cursor. Eventually, the participants couldn't tell what they were thinking about to move the cursor; they simply moved it. ..

Each session lasted 24 minutes. It took participants two to three sessions to begin to acquire control of the cursor movement. After ten sessions, participants were able to hit the target on a computer screen about 80 percent of the time.

The two study participants with spinal cord injuries performed better than the uninjured participants, possibly reflecting greater motivation or injury-associated brain changes. ..

"The computer automatically adapts to the person using the system," Wolpaw said. "It is an interaction between two adaptive controllers—the system and the person using it." Wolpaw predicts future improvements of the non-invasive brain-computer interface will focus on three-dimensional movement. In the future, users may be able to operate a robotic arm that could pick things up, or they may be able to control a neural prosthesis in which electrodes implanted in a paralyzed limb may be stimulated to get the muscles to move."

Tue, 07 Dec 2004 00:09:17 GMT

Bio interfaces to games: Wow. "Biofeedback has been around for a while... it was inevitable that it be married to video games. Another example of video games are getting more physical..." The promo clip for The Wild Divine is trippy new age, with endorsements by Deepak Chopra. More comments online, including links to games for correcting dsylexia and ADD.

Tue, 30 Nov 2004 01:01:48 GMT

Urban Atmospheres: A research project at Berkeley/Intel Labs. There are slides from a July 2004 meeting. "Street Talk is a one day event to be held at Intel Research Berkeley focused on understand how the rapidly emerging fabric of mobile and wireless computing will influence, disrupt, expand, and be integrated into the social patterns existent within our public urban landscapes. Urban Computing captures a unique, synergistic moment – expanding urban populations, rapid adoption of Bluetooth mobile devices, and widespread influence of wireless technologies across our urban landscapes. The United Nations has recently reported that 48 percent of the world's population currently live in urban areas and that this number is expected to exceed the 50 percent mark by 2007, thus marking the first time in history that the world will have more urban residents than rural residents. Current studies project Bluetooth-enabled devices to reach 1.4 billion units in 2005 alone. Nearly 400 million new mobile phones are scheduled to be sold worldwide this year alone. WiFi hardware is being deployed at the astonishing rate of one every 4 seconds globally."

Fri, 26 Nov 2004 07:53:47 GMT

Blog Torrent - Simplified bittorrent by Downhill Battle: "A greatly simplified bittorrent experience." Said to be suitable for sharing home videos, or other large objects.

Wed, 24 Nov 2004 18:50:12 GMT

Microsoft Takes Lead in PDA Software: "Microsoft Corp.'s software platform for personal digital assistants took over the market lead from PalmSource Inc. for the first time in the third quarter.. Microsoft's Windows CE operating system accounted for 48.1 % of the quarter's 2.8 million PDA shipments worldwide, up from 41 % the previous year, according to Gartner. The Palm OS, developed by PalmSource, took a dramatically steep drop, representing 29.8 percent of the market, down from 46.9 percent in the year-ago period. "

Tue, 23 Nov 2004 17:51:37 GMT

Linux backdoors: Scott Lemon points to a paper on how to introduce back doors into Linux kernels, and speculates that as its popularity grows, Linux may become a more attractive target for hackers. I imagine uncontrolled distribution of hacked distro's (via bitTorrent, etc) providing a slow vector for the spread of hackable operating systems.

Wed, 17 Nov 2004 07:39:56 GMT

World Community Grid: "World Community Grid's mission is to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity. Our work is built on the belief that technological innovation combined with visionary scientific research and large-scale volunteerism can change our world for the better. Our success depends on individuals - like you - collectively contributing their unused computer time." First project involves protein folding. Backed by IBM and others (like the earlier smallpox project).

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 19:01:31 GMT

Korean Cyworld - commercial blogging: "Cyworld is a popular site that provides personal homepage services. As of yesterday, the site surpassed 10 million members, or more than a quarter of the South Korean population. Within just a few years of launching, it has become an important part of mass culture. Cyworld's main feature is a type of Web log called a "mini hompy," short for mini homepage. Like other blogs, users can create various Web boards, produce online photo albums, and upload other content. Its specialized content includes a "mini room," which users can decorate with items from a cyber shop. Arcade games and music can also be bought to be included in one's hompy. These are bought with acorns, which cost 100 won (9 cents) each. Currently, Cyworld earns about 150 million won a day from acorn sales."

I was a Cyholic: Good description by a young user, with screen shots and insights into the social processes cyworld builds on (vanity, status-seeking, and even the pleasures of being stalked).

A recent essay by Clay Shirky provides a valuable counterpoint. Looking at mailing lists and SlashDot, he notes how a focus on personal computers and individual users obscures what they are used for. Networked computers are less like "boxes" than "doors" into a social space. Simple means and rapid experimentation can create a lot of value.

Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:47:40 GMT

ME2TV for television over Internet: How some systems are working to encode ordinary TV and stream it in realtime over the Internet, anywhere in the world. Uses 384 kbps with a 10-second buffer.

Thu, 28 Oct 2004 06:18:13 GMT

JointVenture's Index of Silicon Valley: In depth assessment of the economy and quality of life in the valley. Some highlights:

has lost 15% of the jobs it had at the peak in 2000, down to 1996-97 levels
average pay has dropped about 20% from 2000 levels, back to 1998 levels after three consecutive years of decline
still has a much higher concentration of innovation and high-paying jobs than the US average
per-capita income remains stable and very high compared to the US average ($53k vs $32k)
value added per employee never dropped, is now $188k vs the US average $88k
household income dropped more for high income than median, and both are still above 1998 levels (80th pctl is $150k down from $160k, median is $85k, 20th pctl is $45k vs $28k national)
26% households can afford the median home, compared to 41% in 1994 and 56% nationally today
commercial rents have fallen to levels below 1998's, dropping 2x-3x from 2000 peaks
venture capital funding has dropped 6x, back to 1998 levels (under $6B/yr)
15% of people are obese compared to 20% nationally

Most data ends full year 2002, some 2003. [Found from John Furrier's blog. Thanks John!]

Wed, 27 Oct 2004 00:58:11 GMT

pulver.communicator: New version of "Free World Dialup" SIP-based software for peer-to-peer VOIP, with additional features:

multiprotocol multiparty instant messaging (AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN)
filtering incoming comms by contact lists
"social networking" - sharing and distribution of contact lists with your contacts
"call-me" links that can be sent to non-subscribers

Wed, 27 Oct 2004 00:41:15 GMT

Freenet VoIP in BC: Community free network in Victoria, British Columbia, that supports VOIP. Possible model for developing areas.

Tue, 26 Oct 2004 23:37:05 GMT

OQO: Nifty little handheld with laptop functions, and a cradle to use it as a desktop. Review available. $2000.

Fri, 22 Oct 2004 18:47:09 GMT

Cringely gets it about BPL: The recent Fcc approval of "broadband over power lines (BPL) is going to totally shake up the Internet industry. .. One thing to remember about electric utilities is that they are very slow and deliberate. They move like glaciers, so it will take awhile for these services to be available at your house. But like glaciers, they are also impossible to stop.

The appeal here to an electric company isn't that $20-30 per month they'll charge for becoming your ISP. What matters to them and what makes this whole thing so important is that it will lead to your electric meter being monitored 24/7. That means utilities can start to offer true dynamic pricing, with electric costs dropping in low demand time periods and dramatically rising with high demand. While that sounds bad, the end result is actually good, since for the most part, profits from electricity sales will be regulated. The real end result is that demand will be better controlled by dynamic pricing, and the utility may just be able to forego building that $2 billion power plant they've been planning and saving for over the past 20 years. Dropping $2 billion to the bottom line has to appeal to any board of directors and, in a tightly regulated environment, will probably lead to overall power rates going DOWN, not up.

So this BPL stuff is mainly about getting smart electric meters and only partly about offering Internet service. But having made the effort to build the network, offer it they will, generally through unregulated subsidiaries." This is particularly interesting for developing and newly industrializing countries that are still building their grids and can design BPL in at the start.

Wed, 20 Oct 2004 03:50:51 GMT

NSF Awards on Information Technology Research for National Priorities: A large batch of projects with "total estimated funding of more than $130 million over five years. Projects cover a wide range of topics, including interactive ocean observatories and deep-sea exploration; stress corrosion cracking in materials; protection of critical infrastructures; improvements to healthcare processes; and secure access to confidential social science data. .. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University received a $2.2 million award to develop new approaches to modeling and controlling the electric power grid. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, are leading a $3.4 million effort to monitor and protect the Internet's Domain Name System, key to maintaining the reliability and stable evolution of the Internet. And in a $2.3 million project at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, researchers are working to develop new collaboration technologies for disaster relief and recovery in urban settings... " Health care, business processes, and large databases also get attention. (Thanks to Roland Piquepaille, who provides more coverage on the undersea Internet instrumentation project.)

Tue, 19 Oct 2004 06:56:19 GMT

Strong Angel II: Lessons Learned. Several points of advice from Cmdr Eric Rasmussen. Also online: Video emphasizing Groove, and some presentations with excellent notes. "If there was a single core statement that emerged from the week of collaborative integration and post-conflict reconstruction design, it would be “COMMS FIRST”. Whether the communications was language translation, data transmission, voice-over-IP, reference library accessibility, or cultural explanation, the overarching concept of communication proved far more valuable than political, diplomatic, or religious statements. .. Bring the best and most inclusive language, communications and collaboration tools you have, incorporate everyone into your comms sphere daily with a constant expansion of service, teach the locals – especially police, fire, and medical – what they need to know to keep it all running when you leave, and then give them everything when you walk away. " Great demo of important features:

Babylon Chat, a multilingual realtime chat tool within Groove
Recording and distribution tool for local emergency radio, allowing monitoring from anywhere on the Internet
Jeep-mounted wifi "pony express"
VSee (good photos on their site) for video-conferencing, whether p2p, air-to-ground, sea-to-shore (!) or integrated into Groove workspaces
Various disaster-specific reporting and coordination tools, some with GIS mapping

Sat, 16 Oct 2004 16:21:10 GMT

AOL Offers RSA SecurID: "AOL customers can sign up through the company's Web page for the premium service and will pay a $9.95 one-time fee to receive a keychain token by mail. The company will charge $1.95 per month to secure one screen name through PassCode, and $4.95 a month for up to seven screen names, AOL says. "

Thu, 14 Oct 2004 17:04:36 GMT

ChampionChip: Cool RFID tag application - runners attach it to their shoes and they're automatically timed at several points along a race. Used in the Chicago marathon where 40,000 runners compete. "The ChampionChip is a high-tech, easy to use timing device. It can provide accurate net and split times for every individual athlete. Once you buy your own yellow chip, you can use it all over the world in almost any event we time."

Thu, 14 Oct 2004 16:54:56 GMT

Joi Ito's Web: Will the tail wag? Excellent discussion on the implication of Chris Anderson's article, The Long Tail: "Will there always be producers and consumers of music and other content, or does the amateur revolution really take off and completely blur the consumer and the producer of content?" See also Charles Leadbeater's Amateur Revolution, where "From astronomy to computing, networks of amateurs are displacing the pros and spawning some of the greatest innovations.. These far-flung developments have all been driven by Pro-Ams -- committed, networked amateurs working to professional standards." (Ref my earlier posts on "open production").

Mon, 11 Oct 2004 16:55:40 GMT

RAID 1 on Linux: Some of the fine points of configuring disks on Linux.

Mon, 11 Oct 2004 16:38:50 GMT

Mount St. Helens VolcanoCam: The official park photo, updated every 5 mins.

Sat, 09 Oct 2004 16:00:45 GMT

EFF: Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music File Sharing: A clear description of a subscription clearinghouse for p2p music sharing, modelled on radio's BMI and ASCAP.

Fri, 08 Oct 2004 19:26:07 GMT

Spam: Leave it to the sender: Interesting concept: instead of sending the messages, send a notice that it is available for pickup. This leaves more control in the receiver's hands, makes broadcasting anonymous messages much harder, allows for interesting filtering options.

Fri, 08 Oct 2004 02:06:11 GMT

Terrorism & Security: Review linked to many stories about Al Queda's and Zarqawi's use of the net. "Al Qaeda has a "virtual university" that teaches "electronic jihad." .. 'They lost their base in Afghanistan, they lost their training camps, they lost a government that allowed them do what they want within a country. Now they're surviving on Internet to a large degree. It is really their new base,' says terrorism expert Peter Bergen." .. [It gives] new awful meaning to the words 'online community.' " Specific example of use of YouSendIt file transfer service for videos.

Wed, 06 Oct 2004 16:51:38 GMT

The Protocol Informatics Project: Application of bioinformatic algorithms, which decode DNA sequences, to computer protocols, allowing the discovery of protocol structure from captured data. Could be useful in network debugging, generating test data, or even discovering hackers. Other info: article in Wired, excellent presentation with diagrams.

Tue, 05 Oct 2004 18:39:54 GMT

Expand offers DSL-scale accelerator: List price $1995.

Sun, 03 Oct 2004 20:43:16 GMT

getNoCatInfo.pl - mrtg script: Performs wget to scrape web pages for values and passes to MRTG for tracking and analysis. From Scott Lemon.

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 17:33:41 GMT

Open source networking: Wireless for TV-on-demand, VOIP, and broadband, on a neighborhood scale in Canada, all with iopen-source software. One PDA acts as thin-client PC, TV remote control, and roaming phone (home, work, mobile). A community PVR server records and plays essentially everything from wholesale cable sources. Interesting future vision, to be sold by the Canadian company as a futuristic WISP. Could be a model for new developing country infrastructure.

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 08:20:34 GMT

P2P Traffic Analysis: Great presentation on the amount of P2P traffic in a recent sample: over 50%, compared to about 10-20% for HTTP. BitTorrent is about 2/3 of the P2P. [via Hugh Pyle and boingboing]

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 06:17:52 GMT

Halloo - Small Business Communications: 800 Service, Auto Attendant, Internet Voicemail: Interesting computer-based telephony solution that builds on whatever voice services you currently have.

Mon, 27 Sep 2004 16:22:25 GMT

ipodder.org: There are groups active in turning iPods into TiVo-like radios, filling up with content served in RSS.

Sat, 25 Sep 2004 05:33:08 GMT

bemused.sourceforge.net: "Bemused is a system which allows you to control your music collection from your phone, using Bluetooth." Interesting how some people want to use their cell phone as a universal remote control.

Thu, 23 Sep 2004 18:15:54 GMT

Nurses Bid Online for Extra Shifts: Using auctions to fill off-hours work schedules.

Wed, 15 Sep 2004 17:50:49 GMT

Let Your Mobile Do the Pointing: Magnetic sensors make an electronic compass, at low cost. Added to GPS, you can point at things and get info about them.

Wed, 15 Sep 2004 17:17:31 GMT

Spyphones: Collection of phones that support eavesdropping: "The telephone is programmed with a telephone number and when anyone calls the spyphone, it rings and operates as a normal telephone but when the phone is called using the previously programmed spyphone number, it automatically answers without any ringing or lights and the display appears as if it is on ordinary standby"

Wed, 15 Sep 2004 16:58:40 GMT

Unpatched PCs compromised in 20 minutes: "According to the researchers, an unpatched Windows PC connected to the Internet will last for only about 20 minutes before it's compromised by malware, on average. That figure is down from around 40 minutes, the group's estimate in 2003.

The drop from 40 minutes to 20 minutes is worrisome because it means the average "survival time" is not long enough for a user to download the very patches that would protect a PC from Internet threats. .. The time it takes for a computer to be compromised will vary widely from network to network. If the Internet service provider blocks the data channels commonly used by worms to spread, then a PC user will have more time to patch

[One] school is now checking the status of computers before letting them connect to the Internet. If a machine doesn't have the latest patches, it gets quarantined with limited network access until the PC is back up to date. "

Wed, 15 Sep 2004 16:53:47 GMT

A Model for When Disclosure Helps Security: "Open Source and encryption [communities] view that revealing the details of a system will actually tend to improve security, notably due to peer review. In sharp contrast, a famous World War II slogan says loose lips sink ships. Most experts in the military and intelligence areas believe that secrecy is a critical tool for maintaining security .. this Article provides the first systematic explanation of how to decide when disclosure improves security, both for physical- and cyber-security settings..

many computer and network security problems appear different from the traditional security problems of the physical world. The analysis focuses on the nature of the first-time attack or the degree of what the paper calls uniqueness in the defense. Many defensive tricks, including secrecy, are more effective the first time there is an attack on a physical base or computer system. Secrecy is far less effective, however, if the attackers can probe the defenses repeatedly and learn from those probes. It turns out that many of the key areas of computer security involve circumstances where there can be repeated, low-cost attacks. For instance, firewalls, mass-market software, and encryption algorithms all can be attacked repeatedly by hackers. Under such circumstances, a strategy of secrecy - of security through obscurity - is less likely to be effective than for the military case." It seems to me this model also applies to many types of public facilities where probes and attacks can be rehearsed.

Wed, 15 Sep 2004 16:49:57 GMT

Shred, Burn, Erase: "I've purchased thrift-store PCs and junk-shop hard disks [and] I've scanned through their contents before repartitioning the drives. I've seen personal letters and business correspondence, contracts and legal papers, Social Security numbers and other customer data. All you need is to scan a few recycled hard disks to gain a healthy paranoia about junkers that contain valuable information. .. I've also seen the results of projects by researchers such as Simson Garfinkel at Sandstorm Enterprises, who found high-tech vendor source code, financial information from investment firms, thousands of credit card numbers and even internal Microsoft e-mails on secondhand hard disks he bought at swap meets and used-computer stores and on eBay. ..

Then there are recordable CDs and DVDs, the bane of any IT shop that's trying hard to keep from leaking data. They're high-capacity, unerasable, tough to destroy and easy to drop into the wastebasket -- which makes them easy pickings for anyone who decides to dig through your Dumpster. " The author recommends both in house erasure and use of a commercial recycler that charges $10-30 to erase, to elminate single points of failure.

Wed, 15 Sep 2004 16:41:48 GMT

Website offers Caller I.D. falsification service: "Slated for launch next week, Star38.com would offer subscribers a simple Web interface to a Caller I.D. spoofing system that lets them appear to be calling from any number they choose. .. Caller I.D. spoofing has for years been within the reach of businesses with certain types of digital connections to their local phone company, and more recently has become the plaything of hackers and pranksters exploiting permissive voice over IP systems. But Star38.com appears to be the first stab at turning Caller I.D. spoofing into a commercial venture. The service will charge a twenty-five cent connection fee for each call, and seven to fourteen cents per minute.

SecurityFocus took the site for a test drive, and found it worked as advertised. The user fills out a simple Web form with his phone number, the number he wants to call, and the number he wants to appear to be calling from. Within two seconds, the system rings back, and patches the user through to the destination. The recipient sees only the spoofed number displayed on Caller I.D. Any number works, from nonsense phone numbers like "123 4567" to the number for the White House switchboard. ..

Jepson and his partners believe that collection agencies in particular will find the service invaluable for getting recalcitrant debtors to answer the phone. .. The service does not appear to violate any federal criminal law, says Orin Kerr, a law professor at the George Washington University Law School, and a former Justice Department computer crime lawyer. "It doesn't violate the Wiretap Act or the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act or anything like that," say Kerr. But Rozanne Andersen, general counsel at the Association of Credit and Collection Professionals, believes collection agencies would be barred from using a Caller I.D. spoofing service under two federal civil laws: the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, which prohibits false or misleading representations and unfair practices in collecting debts, and the FTC Act, which outlaws deceptive trade practices in general."

Mon, 13 Sep 2004 07:03:18 GMT

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC): "A software platform for distributed computing using volunteered computer resources." An outgrowth of SETI@Home, it now supports 4 volunteer grid projects: SETI, Climate Prediction (which used to have its own client framework), a protein predictor, and the group designing CERN's latest accelerator. Participants can enroll in more than one project.

Sat, 11 Sep 2004 06:50:06 GMT

Microsoft's Virtual Server coming Oct 1: "The technology will ship on 1 October, according to Microsoft officials, and a 180-day evaluation copy will be available next week. Virtual Server 2005 runs on Windows Server 2003 ..

The analysts firms consistently say we are anywhere from 18 months to three years ahead of Microsoft," says Michael Mullany, vice president of marketing for VMWare. "There are a lot of features and a lot of work to be added to this virtualisation layer over time to take the technology where it can be and we are trying to push the envelope in terms of technology innovation." Other people in the market include SW-Soft, which develops a product called Virtuozzo and will deliver a version for Windows this month, the Xen open source project and User-Mode Linux. ..

Virtual Server 2005 features Multi-threaded Virtual Machine Monitor to isolate virtual machines from each other, CPU and memory resource allocation, virtual networking, Active Directory integration, a Web-based management interface and a COM API, which includes 42 interfaces that let scripts control every aspect of Virtual Server 2005. ..

Virtual Server 2005 ships in a Standard Edition that supports up to four processors and is priced at $499. An Enterprise Edition that supports up to 32 processors costs $999. Both versions will be licensed on a per-physical server basis and support an unlimited number of virtual machines. "

Fri, 10 Sep 2004 18:14:48 GMT

Lantronix XPort and WiPort : Tiny interfaces that contain an embedded web server. Xport converts a serial device to ethernet; WiPort does wifi. Parts cost $100-150 qty 1 from distribution, developer kits $350.

Thu, 09 Sep 2004 08:24:05 GMT

Spammers given boot by net host: "US firm Savvis was allegedly earning up to $2 million a month from 148 of the world's worst spammers, a former employee had claimed. .. in January it bought C&W US, the American arm of the British telecommunications company Cable & Wireless, for $155 million (£87.4 million). Along with C&W US's 3,000 business customers, Savvis inherited 95 major spammers who make their money by sending out millions of unsolicited e-mails a day with the standard mix of Viagra and porn offers." Savvis says it is now committed to kicking out their current list of 148 spammers.

Thu, 09 Sep 2004 06:30:42 GMT

Internet prods Asia to open up: "in China, where the government has mounted a huge effort to filter Internet content. The "Great Firewall of China" is manned by at least 30,000 censors who blocked as many as 50,000 websites in the first half of 2002, according to a US State Department report on China's human rights. Just this week, Beijing introduced stringent penalties against purveyors of Internet pornography, including life imprisonment for those behind major sites that receive more than 250,000 hits. "Pornographic" is left undefined. ..

China's massive firewall is already showing cracks under the weight of the Internet's expansion. The pressure has come from innumerable sources, including an onslaught of weblogs, open-source directories, and projects like Wikipedia, an "open-content" encyclopedia. Five years ago in China, most Western newspaper websites were blocked from viewing. Today, the Chinese censors who watch the Internet target more specific sites - chat forums on ultrasensitive topics like Tibetan liberation and the Falun Gong religious movement.

So while the average Chinese still can't walk into an Internet cafe in Ningbo and pull up the homepage of the Taiwan government, he can read The New York Times. Even some sensitive topics, surprisingly, are readily available in China. A quick browse through Wikipedia's Chinese-language version for the "June 4, Tiananmen" entry offers a broad look at the Democracy movement of 1989 and its violent end. Without using any special software or proxy servers, a Chinese web user can view the famed photo of a lone man facing down tanks outside the square 15 years ago in Beijing. ..

Despite its firewall efforts, the Chinese government is not stopping people from buying PCs or signing up for cheap Internet access. The country has an estimated 87 million Internet users this year, nearly four times the number in 2000, according to the data website www.internetworldstats.com." Of the world's internet users, 32.1% are now estimated to be Asian, 28.1% European, and 27.9% North American.

Wed, 01 Sep 2004 22:11:09 GMT

Philly considers wireless Internet for all: "For about $10 million [to install and $1.5m/yr to operate], city officials believe they can turn all 135 square miles of Philadelphia into the world's largest wireless Internet hot spot. The ambitious plan, now in the works, would involve placing hundreds, or maybe thousands of small transmitters around the city, probably atop lampposts. Each would be capable of communicating with the wireless networking cards that now come standard with many computers. Once complete, the network would deliver broadband Internet almost anywhere radio waves can travel, including poor neighborhoods where high-speed Internet access is now rare. And the city would likely offer the service either for free, or at costs far lower than the $35 to $60 a month charged by commercial providers.. [Similar efforts include:]

Chaska, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis, began offering citywide wireless Internet access this year for $16 a month. The signal covers about 13 square miles.
Corpus Christi, Texas, has been experimenting with a system covering 20 square miles that would be used (for now) only by government employees.
Over the past year, Cleveland has added some 4,000 wireless transmitters in its University Circle, Midtown and lakefront districts. The service is free, and available to anyone who passes through the areas. Some 1,016 people were logged in to the system at 2:20 Tuesday afternoon, said Lev Gonick, chief information officer at Case Western Reserve University, which is spearheading the project and paying for a chunk of it. "We like to say it should be like the air you breathe, free and available everywhere," Gonick said. "We look at this like PBS or NPR. It should be a public resource."
In New York, city officials are negotiating to sell wireless carriers space on 18,000 lampposts for as much as $21.6 million annually. T-Mobile USA Inc., Nextel Partners Inc., IDT Corp. and three other wireless carriers want the equipment to increase their networks' capacity.

One part of the 15-year deal is cheap Wi-Fi phones for neighborhoods where less than 95 percent of residents have home phones. IDT, which has agreed to market the cheaper phone service in those neighborhoods, would pay lower rates for poles there than other companies would in wealthier areas. .."

Wed, 01 Sep 2004 08:20:11 GMT

Must-download TV: "In recent months, a host of developers and TV enthusiasts have been working on ways to improve the TV trade online -- they're building sophisticated trading networks to record and encode and distribute shows, and they're improving peer-to-peer transfer systems to make downloading easier. The hottest new improvement is made possible by the merging of two of the Internet's newest innovations, the p2p protocol BitTorrent and RSS, the popular Web syndication standard. Together, these systems allow a computer to automatically find and download a user's favorite shows -- something like having a TV station designed just for you. " Examples: TV RSS Linux Client: "Gtk2-Perl Torrent RSS feed reader for linux."; and Buttress: "will be a Application to automatically download and run .torrent files from RSS feeds, without user input"

Mon, 30 Aug 2004 18:10:56 GMT

Axis Network Camera HTTP Authentication Bypass Vulnerability: Amazing securty hole: Axis makes widely used networked surveillance cameras. They have an onboard website for administration -- and that website is easily compromised. Furthermore, it's reported that many of these cameras are open on the public internet and can be found with google (not even a robots.txt file to prevent indexing). Incredible that a security products company would release such a buggy product. And it's also reported that the company didn't respond to hacker reports (normally companies issue info and an update before the hacker goes public.) "A vulnerability has been identified in several Axis Network Cameras, which can be exploited by a malicious person to bypass user authentication. Normally a user is required to input a username and password before access is granted to "http://[victim]/admin/admin.shtml". However, by sending a HTTP request with an extra "/" before the "admin" folder, it is possible to bypass the authentication completely."

Mon, 30 Aug 2004 08:09:49 GMT

Made to Order - How industrial design became a weekend hobby: Many examples of customization (and "wrangling"), like fitting computers into other cases, modifying cars, playing The Sims, using rapid prototyping machines, and vendors like cafepress.com. About rapid prototyping machines (aka "3D printers"), check out the Solidscape: T66 ($50k), and Z-corp (with a cool GIS application).

Fri, 27 Aug 2004 18:14:05 GMT

Cringely visits Englebart: A short retelling of a classic innovation story. Interesting that Englebart says he envisioned his famous 1968 demo in 1950, and talked about it with very few people in fear of ridicule.

Fri, 27 Aug 2004 02:25:38 GMT

iChat AV at 35,000 Feet: Nice screen shots of an in-air commercial videoconference.

Thu, 26 Aug 2004 18:12:23 GMT

802.11b/g Signal Booster: Interesting - $120 for a small replacement antenna that puts out 500 mw instead of the 30 - 200 mw typical.

Thu, 26 Aug 2004 00:52:21 GMT

EFF: Best Practices for Online Service Providers: "In this paper, EFF offers some suggestions, both legal and technical, for best practices that balance the needs of OSPs and their users' privacy and civil liberties. "

Wed, 25 Aug 2004 17:13:16 GMT

70% of virus activity due to one hacker: "A report published by Sophos, a world leader in protecting businesses against viruses and spam, has revealed that 70% of virus activity in the first half of 2004 can be linked to a German teenager.

Sven Jaschan, 18, is the self-confessed author of the Netsky and Sasser worms which hit internet users hard in the first six months of the year. Just two of Jaschan's viruses, the infamous Sasser worm and Netsky-P, account for almost 50% of all virus activity seen by Sophos up until the end of June. Counting Jaschan's other released variants of the Netsky worm, the total figure accounts for over 70%.

"For a single German teenager to have such an impact on computer security is simply staggering," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "If one of Jaschan's friends had not informed Microsoft about his identity then the situation may have been even worse." .. his viruses continue to infect computer users and have an impact. .. "However, because Jaschan was under 18 at the time he released the viruses it's possible he will escape a stiff sentence if found guilty."

The Sasser worm hit home computer users and companies worldwide, including the South African government, Taiwan's national post office, and the UK's coastguard service. "

Tue, 24 Aug 2004 22:25:27 GMT

Sophos 'Dirty Dozen' Spam Producing Countries: Sophos, a virus/spam filtering company, says its research shows the top twelve spam producing countries are:

     1. United States            42.53%
     2. South Korea              15.42%
     3. China (& Hong Kong)      11.62%
     4. Brazil                   6.17%
     5. Canada                   2.91%
     6. Japan                    2.87%
     7. Germany                  1.28%
     8. France                   1.24%
     9. Spain                    1.16%
     10. United Kingdom           1.15%
     11. Mexico                   0.98%
     12. Taiwan                   0.91%

Others 11.76%

And, "Zombie computers -- PCs that have been compromised by hackers or virus writers -- are sending out approximately 40% of the world's spam, and many users who fall victim are unaware."

Fri, 20 Aug 2004 00:54:27 GMT

Network Monitoring Tools: Extensive collection both commercial and free tools, maintained by SLAC.

Fri, 20 Aug 2004 00:31:17 GMT

NIST Net: "The NIST Net network emulator is a general-purpose tool for emulating performance dynamics in IP networks. The tool is designed to allow controlled, reproducible experiments with network performance sensitive/adaptive applications and control protocols in a simple laboratory setting. By operating at the IP level, NIST Net can emulate the critical end-to-end performance characteristics imposed by various wide area network situations (e.g., congestion loss) or by various underlying subnetwork technologies (e.g., asymmetric bandwidth situations of xDSL and cable modems).

NIST Net is implemented as a kernel module extension to Linux .. In use, the tool allows an inexpensive PC-based router to emulate numerous complex performance scenarios, including: tunable packet delay distributions, congestion and background loss, bandwidth limitation, and packet reordering / duplication. " Last modification 2002.

Fri, 20 Aug 2004 00:26:50 GMT

The Network Simulator - ns-2: "Ns is a discrete event simulator targeted at networking research. Ns provides substantial support for simulation of TCP, routing, and multicast protocols over wired and wireless (local and satellite) networks. " It supports Network Emulation, "The simulator acts like a router allowing real-world traffic to be passed through without being manipulated. The ns packet contain a pointer to the network packet. Network packets may be dropped, delayed, re-ordered or duplicated by the simulator. Opaque mode is useful in evaluating the behavior of real-world implementations when subjected to adverse network conditions that are not protocol specific." Tutorial available.

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 15:40:06 GMT

Bruce Sterling SIGGRAPH 2004 speech "When Blobjects Rule the Earth": Fastastic speech connecting memes from all over (open production, new media, sci fi, cluetrain, sustainability) into a new techno vision. An update of Bucky Fuller, maybe an "As We May Think" for this generation. Too much to summarize, I'll quote just a few bits that stuck out for me.

"We are facing a future world infested with digital programmability. A world where our structures and possessions include, as a matter of course, locaters, timers, identities, histories, origins, and destinations: sensing, logic, actuation, and displays. ..

[There were products, then gizmos, now spimes] A spime is a users group first, and a physical object second.. A Spime is today's entire industrial process, made explicit. That is the whole shebang, explicitly tied to the object itself. A Spime is an object that ate and internalized the previous industrial order. Some of this information might be contained inside the Spime, and some of it might be conjured up on the Web by, say, a barcode or an RFID chip -- but in practice, you wouldn't notice the difference ..

The natural world should be better for our efforts and our ingenuity. It's not too much to ask. You and I will never live to see a future world with those advanced characteristics. The people who will be living in it will pretty much take it for granted, anyway. But that is a worthy vision for today's technologists: because that is wise governance for a digitally conquered world. That is is not tyranny. That is legitimacy. ..

The question we must face is: what do we want? We should want to abandon that which has no future. We should blow right through mere sustainability. We should desire a world of enhancement. That is what should come next. We don't need more dead clutter to entomb in landfills. We should want to expand the options of those who will follow us."

Tue, 17 Aug 2004 23:59:36 GMT

Groove and other P2P hassles with XP SP2: Service pack 2 limits bandwidth for users with multiple simutaneous outbound connections. When running a P2P package like Groove, all network applicaitons slow way down. No resolution is posted yet.

Tue, 17 Aug 2004 23:52:28 GMT

m0n0wall: "m0n0wall is a project aimed at creating a complete, embedded firewall software package that, when used together with an embedded PC, provides all the important features of commercial firewall boxes (including ease of use) at a fraction of the price (free software). m0n0wall is based on a bare-bones version of FreeBSD, along with a web server, PHP and a few other utilities. The entire system configuration is stored in one single XML text file to keep things transparent. m0n0wall is probably the first UNIX system that has its boot-time configuration done with PHP, rather than the usual shell scripts, and that has the entire system configuration stored in XML format."

Tue, 17 Aug 2004 23:49:54 GMT

What ist fli4l?: "Fli4l is a single floppy Linux-based ISDN, DSL and Ethernet-Router. You can build it from an old 486 based pc with 16 megabyte memory, which is more than adequate for this purpose. The necessary boot-disk can be built under Unix, Linux or Windows."

Tue, 17 Aug 2004 01:18:54 GMT

The Wisdom of Crowds: A popular new book sheds light on the earlier post about Open Production. The publisher's notes provides an outline; the Amazon reader's comments are interesting, not least in noting examples (like intelligence failures -- reminding me of the movement to open source intelligence). "While our culture generally trusts experts and distrusts the wisdom of the masses, Surowiecki argues that "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them." To support this almost counterintuitive proposition, Surowiecki explores problems involving cognition (we're all trying to identify a correct answer), coordination (we need to synchronize our individual activities with others) and cooperation (we have to act together despite our self-interest). His rubric, then, covers a range of problems, including driving in traffic, competing on TV game shows, maximizing stock market performance, voting for political candidates, navigating busy sidewalks, tracking SARS and designing Internet search engines like Google. If four basic conditions are met, a crowd's "collective intelligence" will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts, Surowiecki says, even if members of the crowd don't know all the facts or choose, individually, to act irrationally. "Wise crowds" need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions. The diversity brings in different information; independence keeps people from being swayed by a single opinion leader; people's errors balance each other out; and including all opinions guarantees that the results are "smarter" than if a single expert had been in charge."

Mon, 16 Aug 2004 07:44:56 GMT

Open production: I talked with Brewster Kahle briefly in 2001, and got the idea that the degree of collaboration is a spectrum. At one end is the conventional commitment to play a role in a team; at the other is the incidental activity that leaves a trace that can be datamined in an implicit collaboration. At the implicit end, we see Google mining the links I make as though I were collaborating with all other web authors; and Amazon mines my purchases and makes recommendations on my behalf to similar buyers. Howard Rheingold sees this as part of a broader pattern, and ends up sounding like Buckminster Fuller:

Besides Google and Amazon, "there's open source [software]. Steve Weber, a political economist at UC Berkeley, sees open source as an economic means of production that turns the free-rider problem to its advantage. All the people who use the resource but don't contribute to it just build up a larger user base. And if a very tiny percentage of them do anything at all -- like report a bug -- then those free riders suddenly become an asset.

And maybe this isn't just in software production. .. The dogma is that the two major means of organizing for economic production are the market and the firm. But [Yale law professor] Yochai Benkler uses open source as an example of peer-to-peer production, which he thinks may be pointing toward a third means of organizing for production.

There's also Wikipedia [the online encyclopedia written by volunteers]. It has 500,000 articles in 50 languages at virtually no cost, vs. Encyclopedia Britannica spending millions of dollars and they have 50,000 articles. .. [Rheingold also mentions unliscenced wireless "open" spectrum] ..

If I was a Nokia or a Hewlett-Packard, I would take a fraction of what I'm spending on those buildings full of expensive people and give out a whole bunch of prototypes to a whole bunch of 15-year-olds and have contracts with them where you can observe their behavior in an ethical way and enable them to suggest innovations, and give them some reasonable small reward for that. And once in a while, you're going to make a billion dollars off it."

Mon, 16 Aug 2004 06:08:12 GMT

3D Holograms Detect Fake Signatures: Scanning handwritten text with lasers can measure the 3D structure of the writing. From that it's possible to infer the pressure and direction of the writing. With those attributes, identification of the author is much better than 2D analysis, approaching 100%. Ancient manuscripts could be easier to identify; and maybe there's new life in the signature as a biometric ID? [Thanks again Roland! I'm catching up on a whole summer's worth of your excellent work!]

Mon, 16 Aug 2004 05:49:54 GMT

RFID in Japanese Restaurants: Finally, RFID in the sushi bar -- I've been talking about this for 2 years, finally RFID has gotten practical: At a Tokyo restaurant, under each sushi plate "was a small square shaped bump, barely visible under blue lacquer. It was an RFID chip implanted in the plate. Different chips for different prices. Cool. The tallying up of over 18 plates literally took less than 5 seconds. "

Sun, 15 Aug 2004 17:49:13 GMT

Bluetooth phones are hackable: Recent tests have expanded the list of issues. "Adam Laurie of A.L. Digital Ltd. discovered that there are serious flaws in the authentication and/or data transfer mechanisms on some bluetooth enabled devices. .. Confidential data can be obtained, anonymously, and without the owner's knowledge or consent, from some bluetooth enabled mobile phones. This data includes, at least, the entire phonebook and calendar, and the phone's IMEI. .. Access can be gained to the AT command set of the device, giving full access to the higher level commands and channels, such as data, voice and messaging. " Dozens of models are affected. Combined with new long range antennas, many demonstrations have been done with hundreds of phonebooks harvested, calls made remotely (allowing listening in conversations at a distance), and messages sent impersonating the owner of the phone. The likely fix will be to reduce the time the devices keep Bluetooth open.

Sun, 15 Aug 2004 16:59:47 GMT

Goatse at Defcon: Nasty wifi attack demonstration (with hilarious and disgusting images). A program running on a machine with 2 wifi nic's can inject responses to HTTP (browser) requests, thus impersonating web sites. New vector for phishing? Linked from Bruce Schneier.

Sun, 15 Aug 2004 15:51:16 GMT

Computer Couture: Nifty review of electronics in clothing, like wearable displays, fabrics that change color, and medical or other sensors.

Sat, 14 Aug 2004 16:31:09 GMT

NeroSoft TimeTrax: "TimeTrax is an application for the XM Satellite Radio XM PCR PC-based radio. This radio, available for under $50, plugs into a USB port on your PC and lets you tune into over 120 digital audio satellite channels, featuring music, talk, comedy and news. Using TimeTrax, you can now record directly from your XM PCR radio onto your PC's hard drive in WAV or MP3 format." Software automatically breaks songs into separate MP3 files and collects metadata (artist, title, etc). Can be scheduled to retain all songs by an artist, for example. Software free (registered for $20), hardware $50, service $7/mo.

Sat, 14 Aug 2004 08:57:27 GMT

Habitat Chronicles: You can't tell people anything: How do you explain what you can't demonstrate? "When people ask me about my life's ambitions, I often joke that my goal is to become independently wealthy so that I can afford to get some work done. Mainly that's about being able to do things without having to explain them first, so that the finished product can be the explanation. I think this will be a major labor saving improvement."

Sat, 14 Aug 2004 08:31:11 GMT

Shirky: The Possibility of Spectrum As A Public Good: Very readible and clear explanation of the open spectrum position.

Wed, 11 Aug 2004 06:23:30 GMT

Nokia Lifeblog: Nokia's got the concept that's been around since the 80s Media Lab, of recording your life online -- using their all-singing all-dancing Nokia 7610, of course (has 1 mpixel camera, video, real and mp3 player, voice recorder, triband, bluetooth, smtp and pop3, games, java, etc.)

Tue, 10 Aug 2004 21:44:53 GMT

Main Page - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: I hadn't visited Wikipedia in a long time, and it's looking much nicer than I remember. The Random page link is a nice touch.

Sat, 07 Aug 2004 08:06:14 GMT

EFF: Liberation Digital Television Front: EFF wants people to stock up on HDTV cards and computer systems now, before the broadcast flag takes effect: "Responding to pressure from Hollywood, the FCC has adopted a rule requiring future digital television (DTV) tuners to include "content protection" (aka DRM) technologies. Starting next year, all makers of HDTV receivers must build their devices to watch for a broadcast "flag" embedded in programs by copyright holders. When it comes to digital recording, it'll be Hollywood's DRM way or the highway. Want to burn that recording digitally to a DVD to save hard drive space? Sorry, the DRM lock-box won't allow it. How about sending it over your home network to another TV? Not unless you rip out your existing network and replace it with DRMd routers. Kind of defeats the purpose of getting a high definition digital signal, doesn't it?

The good news is this mandate doesn't take effect for another year. We have until July 1, 2005, to buy, build, and sell fully-capable, non-flag-compliant HDTV receivers. Any receivers built now will "remain functional under a flag regime, allowing consumers to continue their use without the need for new or additional equipment." [PDF] Any devices made this year can be re-sold in the future. .. Since machines you've already built will still work in high-def next year, we'd like to make HDTV tuner cards easy to use now, while they can still be manufactured."

Fri, 06 Aug 2004 18:14:02 GMT

Zimbabwe prepares Internet controls: "The Zimbabwe government is planning to acquire high-tech equipment from China for the purpose of bugging the internet. This is to enable it to interfere with the flow of information it considers subversive as well as the operations of independent internet based media outlets. Authoritative sources within Posts and Telecommunications (PTC) and government circles revealed that the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) is already looking into ways of controlling internet communication as soon as the equipment arrives.

The whole of Zimbabwe has during the past weeks been experiencing intermittent internet break-downs, which PTC management had failed to explain, according to sources at the PTC. 'They merely said that there was work being done in upgrading or some security measures being implemented. There are CIOs [agents] that seem to have been permanently stationed at Tel One (the state owned hub for internet providers) and were carrying out some surveys in the past weeks. We understand that there are some Internet Service Providers (ISP) who have agreed to cooperate with the CIOs and let them use their domains for the tests with samples of equipment brought from China,' a PTC source said.

Sources within the CIO said that the equipment from China is expected to be delivered next month. Government would push for the promulgation of a law allowing it to bug the internet for security reasons. President Robert Mugabe announced during the opening of parliament last week that government would introduce a bill in the house to give it powers to control communication systems for the sake of 'tightening state security'. .. Tel One recently asked ISPs to sign commercial contracts obliging them to take 'all necessary measures' to prevent the transmission of illegal material on line."

Fri, 06 Aug 2004 08:24:09 GMT

Movie-swapping up; Kazaa down: "Over six months of surveying, [CacheLogic] found that Kazaa use had slipped far behind rival BitTorrent, which accounted for 53 percent of actual peer-to-peer network traffic. It found also that overall traffic has not been falling, as some have suggested. By June, an average of 8 million users were online at any given time, sharing a petabyte (10 million gigabytes) of data.

"The overall level of file sharing has increased," said Andrew Parker, CacheLogic's founder and chief technology officer. "Users have migrated from Kazaa onto BitTorrent." The company's observations add to what have been growing indications of a generational shift under way in the peer-to-peer world, with computer users increasingly downloading big files such as movies and software, and reducing reliance on onetime file-sharing king Kazaa. "

Fri, 06 Aug 2004 08:08:32 GMT

About IP Fabrics: "IP Fabrics’ technology stems from the premise that future networks will demand three attributes that are often at odds with another: 1. True wire-speed performance; 2. Much more intelligence directly in the network; 3. Readily extensible to new protocols, new threats, and new silicon. We believe highly parallel NPUs (network processors) present the best opportunity for satisfying these objectives.. The radically different approach consists of a very-high-level packet processing language and a virtual machine environment for it. The language and environment are well suited for any application based on IP technology, including firewalls, VPNs, security gateways, intrusion detection, content switching, application-layer firewalling, SPAM filtering, traffic monitoring, and many more. "

Thu, 05 Aug 2004 02:03:45 GMT

24HOURDOTCOM: "Our mission is to build a dotcom in 24 hours. We will then sell the company on eBay and get rich... " This was at the Wizards of OS conference in Berlin, as "a performance art/business project. The mission is to create a dotcom business from scratch in 24 hours. That means designing and programming a complete and useful web application, recruiting people, doing marketing, creating investment programs and much more. After 24 hours, the complete business will be sold on an eBay auction, and everyone involved will be rich!" Pretty funny - and they got $2026 on ebay.

Thu, 05 Aug 2004 00:54:12 GMT

Quantum crypto network debuts: "Quantum cryptography has the potential to guarantee perfectly secure communications, but until now all of the prototype systems have been point-to-point links rather than networks that share connections. BBN Technologies, Harvard University and Boston University researchers have built a six-node quantum cryptography network that operates continuously "

Wed, 04 Aug 2004 20:00:38 GMT

Microsoft to implement SPF checking: "The company is strongly urging e-mail providers and Internet service providers to publish, by mid-September, Sender Policy Framework records that identify their e-mail servers in the domain name system. Microsoft will begin matching the source of inbound e-mail to the Internet Protocol addresses of e-mail servers listed in that sending domain’s SPF record by October 1. Messages that fail the check will not be rejected but will be further scrutinized and filtered, says Craig Spiezle, director of Microsoft’s Safety Technology and Strategy Group." However, a comment says that MS has not yet published SPF records themselves for any of their domains.

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 17:53:04 GMT

RSA Security - The Blocker Tag: Selective Blocking of RFID Tags for Consumer Privacy: Clever scheme for allowing consumers to block scanning of tags on items that they have purchased (eg, while in public places), and allowing scanning of those same items when desired (eg, in a medicine cabinet or refrigerator at home).

"One may think of a the RSA® Blocker Tag as "spamming" any reader that attempts to scan tags without the right authorization. (The RSA® Blocker Tag manipulates the reading protocol with the aim of making the reader think that RFID tags representing all possible serial numbers are present.) When a Blocker is in proximity to ordinary RFID tags, they benefit from its shielding behavior; when the Blocker tag is removed, the ordinary RFID tags may be used normally.

Thanks to their selective nature, RSA® Blocker Tags are designed not to interfere with the normal operation of RFID systems in retail environments. They help prevent unwanted scanning of purchased items, but do not affect the scanning of shop inventories. Thus RSA® Blocker Tags are designed not to be usable, for example, to circumvent theft-control systems or mount denial-of-service attacks -- only to protect the privacy of law-abiding consumers."

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 07:40:40 GMT

Sveasoft Firmware Documentation Site: Firmware Guides and Manual for their modification of the Linux in the WRT54G Linksys Router.

Mon, 02 Aug 2004 23:31:32 GMT

Linux on the WRT54G: "This is a mini Linux distribution for the Linksys wrt54g. In about 20 seconds, you can install a small set of Linux tools to your access point's ramdisk. The distribution is geared towards those who are curious about casually exploring the internal workings of this device. The installation is strictly to the ram disk of the box. No permanent changes are made. If you mess something up, power-cycle the box.

Upon completion of the installation, you'll be able to telnet into the box and have a system with basic tools such as syslog, httpd (with cgi-bin support), vi, snort, mount, insmod, rmmod, top, grep, ls, ifconfig, iptables, ssh, iptraf etc. " The author also has tools for accessing the Linux running in the Linksys NSLU2 network storage/USB device. Like the WRT54G, it costs under $100.

Sun, 01 Aug 2004 06:33:53 GMT

Reporters sans frontières - The Internet under surveillance 2004: "Obstacles to the free flow of information online," reported by country for about 40 countries. Also, in the article On a Filtered Internet, Things Are Not As They Seem, RSF reports that many countries have gone beyond blocking web sites: "The past year has brought a rise of new filtering methods that, intentionally or by happenstance, are considerably more confusing. Try using Google in China : Most searches work fine.. But run a search on a controversial policy area, and Google will stop working for perhaps half an hour. ..

Still more subtle are the "modified mirrors" sometimes used in Uzbekistan. Rather than simply blocking access to sites of political dissenters, Uzbek authorities make copies of the controversial sites - then change the copies to undermine or weaken the unsanctioned positions. The key step : When Uzbek users request the controversial sites, they automatically receive the altered copies in place of the authentic originals. Experts might realize something is wrong, but this tampering is exceptionally difficult for ordinary users to notice or detect. "

Wed, 28 Jul 2004 01:09:01 GMT

Telecommunications market access regulation licensing and VSAT authorizations by Access Partnership: "We provide an experienced, multi-disciplinary, multilingual staff to devise and implement a strategy for resolving regulatory, technical, and other trade-related restrictions on five continents. "

Sun, 25 Jul 2004 09:34:14 GMT

Audioblog.com: Audioblog.com is an audio publishing service that puts your voice in your weblog or online journal.

Record over the Web user BlogRecorder™
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Upload an MP3 or WAV file
Organize your audioblogs with playlists
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Starts at $5/mo for up to 1 GB of transfers.

Sat, 24 Jul 2004 16:58:40 GMT

Global Relief Technologies: Combines GPS, GIS, and field data gathering on PDA's. "Global Relief Technologies’ integrated solution contains two basic service components – the SMART™; (Satellite Mapping and Rapid Telecommunications Software) and the Virtual Internet-enabled Network Operations Center (or VNOC) information management capability.The SMART™ software currently reflects humanitarian standards as established by the United Nations and the US Agency for International Development and can be modified to suit other field data collection requirements. "

Fri, 23 Jul 2004 07:08:10 GMT

LocustWorld Mesh Access Points: "The MeshBox is a box about the size of a small video recorder. It has a number of ports for connecting other devices and one or more on-board WiFi radios. It is a multi-purpose device, but its core function is creating wide area wireless broadband. This means that each MeshBox communicates with other MeshBoxes nearby and the internet signal is passed from one box to the next, over the air, until it reaches the final destination. ..

There are no plans to commercialize the core LocustWorld MeshAP device, this will always be available to download from the website as an open product. "

It's a linux application. The standard box has Prism2 wireless, 32mb CF boot media, 128mb ram, 500mhz CPU. Small form-factor and battery-powered boxes available. Example hardware models: standard, outdoor (each about $400).

Wed, 21 Jul 2004 10:11:36 GMT

A new social convention for email? "Early in June, Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School, found himself confronting an extreme version of a problem familiar to many of us-an overflowing e-mail box. .. One of Lessig's mail folders [is] called Reply To, stuffed with messages from strangers he felt deserved some kind of response-had ballooned to intolerable proportions.

By June, Reply To contained almost a thousand messages. That's when Lessig had an epiphany. 'I realized I wasn't ever going to be able to reply to it all,' he says. 'I have a son who's 10 months old. I saw that I could spend the time answering e-mail, or I could spend the time with my son.

So .. he gave up. .. 'Dear person who sent me a yet-unanswered e-mail,' Lessig wrote in a rueful form letter to each of his would-be correspondents. 'I apologize, but I am declaring e-mail bankruptcy.' Under the terms of this 'bankruptcy,' Lessig explained, he would ignore all the messages in his brimming folder, but he would allow the senders to write back to him if they really, truly wanted to get his attention. 'It was an extraordinarily liberating act,' Lessig says now. He mailed out hundreds of the bankruptcy notices, and only about 30 people sent back further missives." Hmmm. Could be a lot of potential bankruptcy cases out there. "

Wed, 21 Jul 2004 09:54:27 GMT

T-Mobile UK Gets It: One card and one service for mulitple radios: "T-Mobile's selling a PC data card for GBP 199, then for GBP 70 per month, users get unlimited 3G and GPRS mobile data, and unlimited use of T-Mobile's Wi-Fi hotspots. Not only is T-Mobile significantly undercutting Vodafone and Orange's 3G data plans, which charge GBP 100 and GBP 75, respectively, for 1GB, but it's done the smart thing and thrown Wi-Fi into the mix. Although the system can't hand off from the mobile network to Wi-Fi hotspots, giving users the ability to access the highest-speed option, regardless of location, without having to worry about price is the best way forward.

Users aren't interested in keeping track of separate logins and pricing plans, or having to swap out a 3G card for a Wi-Fi one, and they certainly aren't interested in keeping track of their usage to make sure they don't go over their alloted amount of data in a month and pay overage fees."

Wed, 21 Jul 2004 09:47:13 GMT

Real-Time Tracking of Parolees Taking Off: "Portable Tracking Devices (or PTDs) have long been used by law enforcement to keep tabs on parolees and house-arrest prisoners, but most don't operate in real time. Instead, they upload location data periodically, typically at the end of each day. These "delayed reporting" systems are less expensive to use than real-time devices, because they don't need to make as many mobile calls. But local and state governments are beginning believe that the value of real-time tracking devices, particularly when used to monitor violent offenders with poor impulse control, outweigh the costs. Such devices can instantly warn police when a wearer comes close to a park, schoolyard, or other predetermined "zone of exclusion." Just how costly is real-time tracking? In Tennessee, it'll run about $290 per month per felon."

Wed, 21 Jul 2004 09:43:59 GMT

The Bluetooth Burglar Alarm: "Bluetooth, after some initial stumbling, is now shipping over 2 million chips per week. While there have been some random security issues, it looks like some researchers are coming up with unique and unexpected ways of using the technology now that it's gone mainstream. Researchers at Leeds University have worked out a way to determine the distance between two Bluetooth-enabled devices, which they believe can be useful as a cheap theft prevention .. (or, realistically, movement-prevention)" mechanism.

Sat, 10 Jul 2004 13:19:44 GMT

Cringely improves broadband: How to get the most out of broadband -- using both a cable modem and a DSL line. "[A] Xincom XC-DPG402 TwinWAN router allows me to simultaneously use both the Comcast cable modem and Megapath ADSL. In theory I have 4.5 megabits-per-second downstream and 640 kilobits-per-second upstream, but what I really have is both a belt and suspenders. At $99, the Xincom is no BGP router, but it gets the job done. It offers downstream load-balancing of a sort, pretty fair security, puts the mail server on a DMZ and makes the network feel significantly snappier. Best of all, when Comcast fades to black for a minute or two I don't even notice." He also uses old 3com linux-based network appliances, now resold on ebay for about $100.

Wed, 16 Jun 2004 05:58:58 GMT

Comcast shuts some port 25: "On Monday, the company began targeting certain computers on its network of 5.7 million subscribers that appeared to be sending out large volumes of unsolicited e-mail. Spokeswoman Jeanne Russo said that in those cases, it is blocking what is known as port 25, a gateway used by computers to send e-mail to the Internet. The result, she said, was a 20 percent reduction in spam. "We're taking a precision approach . . . against the top talkers of the day," Russo said, referring to the computers being blocked. ..

For years, anti-spam activists have been pressuring Internet providers to block port 25 for all users, because it allows e-mail to be sent directly to the Internet without passing through computers operated by the service provider. Recently, spammers have infected tens of thousands of machines with malicious software code, turning them into "zombies" that operate as mail servers and launching pads for spam. Legitimate owners of these machines usually don't know their computers have been commandeered. More than 40 percent of all spam now comes from zombie machines, according to some industry estimates...

Large Internet providers vary in their approaches. America Online Inc. and Earthlink Inc. require that all residential e-mail be run through their own servers. Businesses can open accounts and process their own e-mail after being vetted. Verizon Communications Inc. also allows business customers to process their own mail.

George Webb, a group manager of Microsoft Corp.'s anti-spam unit, said getting more aggressive on blocking port 25 "can have a large impact in a short amount of time." He said the company's MSN network is reliant on cable or phone-line partners to provide its broadband service, and Microsoft is "working with them" on the problem. Webb said he thinks port 25 should be blocked by default, and customers should be required to apply for an exception. "

Tue, 15 Jun 2004 00:31:18 GMT

The desktop terabyte drive: $1200 list.

Sun, 13 Jun 2004 15:50:29 GMT

Onion Networks: WAN Transport, Swarmcast, WebRAID, Antflow: Products for enterprise and wide area content distribution. Originally commercialized through OpenCola, now reorganized into this company, that has some fast transfer technology and plans a new version of Swarmcast soon.

Fast parallel Scatter/Gather transfer (often 10x faster than FTP)
Automated data transfer with drag-and-drop Hot Folders.
Users are automatically notified by e-mail when a new file arrives.
Secure, firewall-friendly, encrypted data transfer

Sat, 12 Jun 2004 08:34:35 GMT

DEJA VIEW: First commercial wearable video camera. Buffers last 30 secs as you (er, your glasses) saw it, and preserves it at the press of a button. $399.

Sat, 12 Jun 2004 07:21:03 GMT

True value labels: Interesting idea for camera cell phones as bar code readers. "A label similar to the nutritional facts one on food items in the super market was proposed. It should list all raw material, labor, pollutants, air, miles of transport, ... that went into that product. I think it would be shocking for people to find out how many miles are driven for just a simple strawberry yogurt. ..

There is a service where you can send your smart phone camera picture of a barcode and it sends you back the product number. We don't need the label on the product, with these technologies we can bring the information into the hands of the interested consumer? "

Sat, 12 Jun 2004 06:03:04 GMT

digital be-in 13: Bummer, I missed the 13th Digital Be-In, which was on May 29. Gotta tune in next year...

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 07:51:37 GMT

Zuse's Z3, the World's First Programmable Computer: "Several years before the Colossus in the U.K. and the ENIAC in the U.S., the Z3, built by Konrad Zuse in 1941, was crunching numbers in Germany. In a short article, the Register says the Z3 was the first programmable computer. "

Thu, 10 Jun 2004 01:07:54 GMT

Apple - AirPort Express: Nice new wifi gizmo. Plug it into the wall, it'll find wifi, repeat it, provide it via ethernet, use it to share a printer over its USB port, and use it to provide iTunes audio (e.g., to a stereo). Currently $130.

Sun, 06 Jun 2004 21:34:30 GMT

Linksys Sells Enterprise Security by Subscription: Linksys is reselling a service for authenticated and managed-key wifi access, priced at $4.95 per user per month.

Sun, 06 Jun 2004 18:29:49 GMT

I have created a new category in this blog to carry notes culled about virtual computing, including virtual machines, virtual storage networks, and distributed and grid computing. Earlier blog entries on grid and distributed computing have been spread between General Networking and Network Software categories. I have a backlog to blog in the new category today; my apologies to subscribers to the whole blog if this isn't your cup of tea...

Sun, 06 Jun 2004 16:46:08 GMT

Damn Small Linux, 50 megabytes of penguin power: "Damn Small Linux is a business card size (50MB) bootable Live CD Linux distribution. Despite its minuscule size it strives to have a functional and easy to use desktop." Pretty neat; could be useful for embedded systems or for virtual machines. Many applications included.

Sun, 06 Jun 2004 16:29:55 GMT

Why I am obsessed with Operating Systems: Funny story from a virtualization nut. "Thus, my interest in operating systems and computers was born out of spite rather than anything else. "

Sun, 06 Jun 2004 06:49:23 GMT

Camera Phones Help Buyers: Brilliant - use a cell phone camera to scan bar codes in stores to get info about a product. "With the camera-phone scanner, "you can aggregate a lot of different information from different sources just by scanning something. You can do that on your own or at a desktop computer, but then you have to look up a bunch of sources and go looking for all the individual sites and so on." You might get competitive price offers, consumer reviews, or dietary information about a product. Other codes (named QR for quick response, or Semacode) are in use in Japan for transferring business card info, getting directions and local event info, etc.

Sun, 06 Jun 2004 06:37:37 GMT

Cellsocket: "Connect the Cellsocket to any regular wired phone through Cellsocket’s phone jack. Drop your cell phone into the Cellsocket, and start making and receiving phone calls from any desktop, cordless, or extension phone in your home or office using your wireless phone service." The conventional phone is more comfortable (e.g., may have speakerphone) and the cellsocket's antenna improves reception while recharging the phone. Interesting for people who do without a conventional line and only use cell or VOIP phones.

Sat, 05 Jun 2004 16:47:21 GMT

BMW's Easter Egg: Cars get more like software and video games: "To our knowledge, it's also the first automotive "Easter egg," though—with increased reliance on computers—it would seem just a matter of time before they become standard fare, much like the hidden features in PC games and DVD movies. .. For lucky drivers of this hot car, here's how: Switch off the stability system and select shift program six. Switch the engine to sport mode. With the hand shifter in drive, hold it in the downshift position and press the gas pedal. The engine will rev to the preprogrammed rpm and hold. Now release the shifter. The car will launch forward violently and the engine's revs will climb quickly, so be prepared to upshift. "

Fri, 28 May 2004 07:22:56 GMT

Embedded Linux marches on: "One of the cheapest Linux computers you can buy brand new (not at a garage sale) is the Linksys WRT54G, an 802.11g wireless access point and router that includes a four-port 10/100 Ethernet switch and can be bought for as little as $69.99 according to Froogle. That's a heck of a deal for a little box that performs all those functions, but a look inside is even more amazing. There you'll find a 200 MHz Intel processor and either 16 or 32 megs of DRAM and four or eight megs of flash RAM -- more computing power than I needed 10 years ago to run a local Internet Service Provider with several hundred customers. But since the operating system is Linux and since Linksys has respected the Linux GPL by publishing all the source code for anyone to download for free, the WRT54G is a lot more than just a wireless router. It is a disruptive technology. ..

it isn't what the WRT54G does that matters, but what it CAN do when reprogrammed with a different version of Linux with different capabilities. .. Linksys, now owned by Cisco, not only doesn't mind your hacking the box, they are including some of those hacks in their revised firmware...

Probably the most popular third-party firmware you can get for the WRT54G comes from Sveasoft .. [whose] head techie is James Ewing.. If you have a WRT54G, here's what you can use it for after less than an hour's work. You get all the original Linksys functions plus SSH, Wonder Shaper, L7 regexp iptables filtering, frottle, parprouted, the latest Busybox utilities, several custom modifications to DHCP and dnsmasq, a PPTP server, static DHCP address mapping, OSPF routing, external logging, as well as support for client, ad hoc, AP, and WDS wireless modes. .. The parts of this package I like best are Wonder Shaper and Frottle. Wonder Shaper is a traffic-shaping utility that does a very intelligent job of prioritizing packets to dramatically improve the usability of almost any broadband connection [by prioritizing voice and optionally a particular user's traffic. Frottle also prioritizes traffic.] .. Neither Wonder Shaper nor Frottle are the most elegant solutions, but they work well and they work together on the Sveasoft firmware. ..

The result is a box [that] automatically attaches itself to an OSPF mesh network that is self-configuring. In practical terms, this mesh network, which allows distant clients to reach edge nodes by hopping through other clients en route, is limited to a maximum of three hops as the WiFi radios switch madly back and forth between sending and repeating modes. If you need to go further, switch to higher-gain antennas or gang two WRT54Gs together. Either way, according to Ewing, his tests in Sweden indicate that if 16 percent of the nodes are edge nodes (wireless routers with DSL or cable modem Internet connections), they can provide comparable broadband service to the other 84 percent who aren't otherwise connected to the Net." Cringley then speculates on how to take on phone companies with this.

Sun, 23 May 2004 20:02:06 GMT

Monetize your website with affiliate programs, advertising, banners, ads, etc.: A blog of current techniques for monetizing content sites.

Sun, 23 May 2004 13:41:56 GMT

Watching Rats Abandon Ship: Transcript of Bruce Sterling Lecture/Rant of the Moment in support of The Zenith Angle Book Tour. Crazy fun. "My situation is quite serious. It really is a conundrum. It's a security problem. It's a societal problem. It's a social, cultural, literary problem. It's a personal problem of my own. My credibility is at stake here. Although I've written a book about computer security which goes into agonizing detail of the intractability of some of these difficulties, I can't solve the problem within my own damn home. I have no solution. And who's got it?"

Sat, 22 May 2004 05:59:34 GMT

Wi-Fi Provider Cometa Closes: "Less than 18 months after it was created in a well-publicized bid to bring about nationwide wireless access in the United States, Wi-Fi wholesale network operator Cometa Networks has announced it is suspending operations, citing a lack of money."

Fri, 21 May 2004 00:41:25 GMT

WWW conference mulls Web as personal memory store: "In a keynote speech to the conference, Microsoft's Rashid described what consumers might do with a terabyte of data storage that costs around $1,000 .. "You can store every conversation you have ever had, from the time you are born to the time you die," Rashid said. A person could have snap picture with a 180-degree fish-eye view of one's surroundings for every minute of every day for the rest of one's life. Microsoft researchers in the United Kingdom have built prototypes of such a life-recording device called SenseCam. They are gearing up for a second generation of photo capture systems no bigger than a necklace pendant, Rashid said"

Mon, 17 May 2004 22:57:51 GMT

SMTP SPF: Sender Policy Framework: Considerable progress on this anti-spam protocol: software available for many MTAs; a wizard for generating new DNS records; supported so far by 14,000 domains. "SMTP has a security hole: any connecting client can assert any sender address. This flaw has been exploited by spammers to forge mail. The result: your mailbox fills up with bounces to messages that you didn't send. Close the hole, and we can easily block spammers by sender domain."

Mon, 17 May 2004 19:57:31 GMT

IDrive - Online Storage Network Drive: New service from iBackup. "IDrive maps your IBackup online storage account as a local drive on your computer allowing you to drag-n-drop, open, edit and save files in your online backup account as if they were on your local computer. Recommended for most users for its ease of installation and 128 bit SSL support.

IDrive Plus is another variation of Network Drive technology (available only for XP and 2000) with ability to support Concurrent Operations for Access, Act! and many other applications in addition to all the features of IDrive. IDrive Plus is the recommended Network Drive application if you have a need to directly edit large office files such as Access and Act!. It is more efficient as it sends only changes over the network, and reads only what is necessary for direct edits and saves. Unlike Network Drive solutions from competing services, IDrive Plus does not do background downloading of files first. It is a true Internet Network Drive technology."

Sun, 16 May 2004 19:11:14 GMT

802.11b wireless flaw identified: ""In order to exploit the vulnerability potential attackers only need a common wireless adaptor which retails for about US$35 and instead of using it to enable their computer to access a network, they can change its coding to interfere with transmission. "With this adaptor you can basically totally disrupt any wireless network that uses this technology within a kilometer of its operation in anywhere between five and eight seconds.".. [Professor] Looi said any computer, PDA or notebook could send out the signal if the wireless adaptor was programmed accordingly. ..

Wireless technology is gaining traction and in some countries is used to control infrastructures such as railway networks, energy transmission and other utilities. QUT's School of Software Engineering and Data Communications deputy head, associate professor Mark Looi said the discovery of the flaw should send a warning to high levels of government and industry worldwide. "Any organization that continues to use the standard wireless technology (IEEE 802.11b) to operate critical infrastructure could be considered negligent," Professor Looi said. "This wireless technology should not be used for any critical applications as the results could potentially be very serious.""

Sun, 16 May 2004 18:55:01 GMT

Map24: Nifty interactive international street mapper.

Sun, 16 May 2004 16:19:20 GMT

Palm Gphone: SIP VOIP for the Palm OS, turning any online Palm into a phone.

Sat, 15 May 2004 16:54:16 GMT

Google Groups 2: Usenet Atom Feeds: "Hey, just noticed that the Google Groups 2 BETA offers Atom feeds for each group. To see feeds for a specific group, use this format: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/NAME-OF-GROUP/feeds, [eg] http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.www.webmaster/feeds "

Thu, 13 May 2004 22:10:32 GMT

Fly the Wi-Fi skies: On May 17, 2004, Lufthansa will become the first airline to offer in-flight Wi-Fi to passengers. "For the time being, only non-stop flights from Munich to L.A. will offer the service, but Lufthansa plans to roll it out to the entire fleet over the next year. The service will be provided by Boeing's wireless broadband service Connexion, which is being eyed by several U.S. airlines. Yet none of the cash-strapped U.S. airlines have ordered it, crying poor mouth. Lufthansa will charge $30 for access for the entire flight or $10 for 30 minutes. "

Thu, 13 May 2004 22:07:30 GMT

Vircom White Papers on Spam: Background info, and an interesting profile of 3 successful spammers.

Thu, 13 May 2004 22:04:08 GMT

Stretch Your Signal: Options for extending wifi's range in a difficult or large house, including directional antennas and home wiring systems.

Thu, 13 May 2004 22:02:29 GMT

How Akamai is like Google "one other company that gets a lot of mileage out of a large number of computers [is] Akamai Technologies. Akamai's network operates on the same complexity scale as Google's. Although Akamai has only 14,000 machines, those servers are located in 2,500 different locations scattered around the globe. The servers are used by companies like CNN and Microsoft to deliver Web pages. Just as Google's servers are used by practically everyone on the Internet today, so are Akamai's."

Thu, 13 May 2004 21:51:25 GMT

Phatbot arrest throws open trade in zombie PCs: "The arrest of the suspected author of the Phatbot Trojan could lead to valuable clues about the illicit trade in zombie PCs. .. This expanding network of infected, zombie PCs can be used either for spam distribution or as platforms for DDoS attacks, such as those that many online bookies have suffered in recent months. By using compromised machines - instead of open mail relays or unscrupulous hosts - spammers can bypass IP address blacklists. Phatbot was been used to spam, steal information or perform DDoS attacks..

Networks of compromised hosts (BotNets) are commonly traded between virus writers, spammers and middlemen over IRC networks. The price of these BotNets (DoSNets) was roughly $500 for 10,000 hosts last Summer when the MyDoom and Blaster first appeared on the scene. "I have no doubt it's doubled since then as hosts are cleaned and secured," Andrew Kirch, a security admin at the Abusive Hosts Blocking List told El Reg. By his reckoning, non-exclusive access to compromised PCs sells for about 10 cents a throw. "

More background from April 30 2004: "MessageLabs reckons two thirds of the spam it blocks originates from computers infected by viruses such as Sobig-F or Bagle. Spam volumes are growing. More than two thirds of the email passing through MessageLabs systems so far this month was spam compared to 53 per cent for March as a whole."

Thu, 13 May 2004 21:40:33 GMT

Spam protocol changes: Intro to Sender Policy Framework, email CallerID (from Microsoft), and DomainKeys (from Yahoo).

Wed, 12 May 2004 16:50:43 GMT

Spammer wins restraining order against Spamcop: "mass e-mailing firm OptInRealBig.com was successful in the first phase of his lawsuit against anti-spam group Spamcop: The organization for now is barred from sending complaints to ISPs other than its own as well as removing email addresses from such complaints. The temporary restraining order is critical for Richter's business and will be in effect until May 20. Spamcop's complaints often resulted in the cancellation of Richter's contracts with ISP's and limited his bandwidth and connectivity to send out his campaigns.

OptInRealBig.com claims that its emailings stays within the law and are sent out only to people in the US who sign up for the service. According to Richter, more than 100 million emails are sent every day from his servers which are all located the US. Representatives from Ironport, which operates Spamcop, will appear before the United States District Court .. Ironport as well as other email marketers were surprsied by the judge's decision. If upheld, it would be first case of a spammer barring an anti-spam group from reporting unwanted commercial emails. "

Sat, 08 May 2004 07:02:40 GMT

India's secret army of online ad 'clickers': "A growing number of housewives, college graduates, and even working professionals across metropolitan cities are rushing to click paid Internet ads to make $100 to $200 (up to Rs 9,000) per month. "It's boring, but it is extra money for a couple of hours of clicking weblinks every day," says a resident of Delhi's Patparganj, who has kept a $300-target for the summer"

Sat, 08 May 2004 00:07:34 GMT

How Secure Is Secure? Simple description of 802.11 and other signal processing, and how more advanced signal processing like direct-sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) can enhance security. In effect, the signal can disappear below the noise level, and only be detected by knowing where to look (which frequencies and time slots) in advance.

Tue, 04 May 2004 23:27:37 GMT

Lloyd's satellite constellations: "These pages form an index to useful web information discussing [Low Earth Orbit or LEO] satellite constellations. You won't gain a complete picture of what any proposed constellation is capable of, or really in-depth technical details, but you will gain an idea of what the developments in this area are, where the industry and technology is headed - and you will pick up background knowledge of satellites along the way. "

Mon, 03 May 2004 22:11:10 GMT

Smart Mobs: Phones, Radio, Elections in Ghana: "Ethan Zuckerman of Geekcorps notes at etcon panel that the last Ghana election "went considerably more smoothly than the last US national election" due to the use of cellphones and radio to report voting fraud: Whenever someone at a polling place reported fraud, the called the radio station, which broadcast it; the police had to check it out, not having the excuse that they didn't receive a report."

Mon, 03 May 2004 21:44:44 GMT

Pac Manhattan: "Pac-Manhattan is a large-scale urban game that utilizes the New York City grid to recreate the 1980's video game sensation Pac-Man. This analog version of Pac-man is being developed in NYU's Interactive Telecommunications graduate program, in order to explore what happens when games are removed from their "little world" of tabletops, televisions and computers and placed in the larger "real world" of street corners, and cities. A player dressed as Pac-man will run around the Washington square park area of Manhattan while attempting to collect all of the virtual "dots" that run the length of the streets. Four players dressed as the ghosts Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde will attempt to catch Pac-man before all of the dots are collected. Using cell-phone contact, Wi-Fi internet connections, and custom software designed by the Pac-Manhattan team, Pac-man and the ghosts will be tracked from a central location and their progress will be broadcast over the internet for viewers from around the world. "

Mon, 03 May 2004 21:12:15 GMT

"Inverse Surveillance" -- What We Should Do With All Those Phonecams: Steve Mann's ideas of citizen "sousveillance" predated the cameraphone phenomena by nearly a decade. [He has] reknown as the longtime online cyborg. He started wearing computers and sent his "eyetap" camera images to the Web way back in 1994. His first reference to his activities as a new kind of newsgathering date back to the day in 1995 when he followed a fire truck to a fire and sent the pictures from his head-mounted camera to the Web ..

In 2000, Mann and his students streamed images directly to the Web when violence broke out at a demonstration by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. If you think about it, this kind of journalism is a breakthrough in at least one dimension: whenever police abused their power in past political demonstrations, they made a point of breaking or confiscating cameras. Whether you are a violent demonstrator or an abusive police officer, it doesn't do a lot of good to disguise your misbehavior by trashing a camera if it has already sent images to the Whole Wide World. ..

"Surveillance" is French for "watching from above," but Mann's ["sousveillance"] is French for "watching from below." If you think about it, there really is little that citizens can do at this point to prevent others from watching, listening, and tracking us – but we are beginning to get the tools to watch the watchers. Mann notes that surveillance is about authorities watching from on high, but sousveillance is a down-to-earth human's eye view; surveillance cameras are usually automatic devices statically mounted on the ceiling, but sousveillance is human-situated and eye-level; activities are surveilled by authorities but sousveilled by participants; surveillance is secret but sousveillance is public."

Here's a practical application: People For the American Way Election Protection: "Volunteer poll monitors make EP an effective advocate for voters and a powerful deterrent to those who would try to deny voters their rights. Trained by attorneys and armed with cell phones that connect them with a lawyers hotline, EP volunteers distribute the 'Voters Bill of Rights at the polls and identify and solve problems as they happen -- not after Election Day has passed." They say they will use cameras in cell phones when possible.

Mon, 03 May 2004 21:03:22 GMT

A Fine Mesh: "public safety organizations such as police and fire departments have emerged as the primary early market for mesh wireless systems. These organizations need instant, secure mobile data connections, but today they are stuck with multiple incompatible legacy systems that don't even provide the necessary capacity. With homeland security a pressing concern throughout the US, public safety agencies are in a position spend money on emerging technologies that solve difficult problems. Corporate and residential deployments may take longer,"

Mon, 03 May 2004 20:55:34 GMT

The Triumph of Good Enough: Converged devices make headway: "Smaller form factors, better performance, lower prices, and miniaturization of components all play a role. My Treo 600 will never be as good a wireless email device as the single-function Blackberry, nor will it compare to an iPod as a music player. Yet, with a 512 megabyte SD expansion card for those MP3 files, it's quite serviceable for both functions. The same goes for its prowess as an organizer, camera, and Web browser. Moreover, because the Treo runs a real operating system with storage and downloading capabilities, it's more adaptable than the single-function devices will ever be. Shortly after buying the Treo, I added an application to read RSS syndication feeds from my favorite Weblogs, and an MP3 player than can pull in live streaming audio from the Web-based Shoutcast service. Try that on an iPod! My point isn't tied to the particular product. Sony Ericsson's P900, Nokia's Communicator line, Danger's HipTop, and PocketPC phones from vendors such as Samsung and Hitachi are also closing in on converged nirvana. "

And, personal radio too: "Using a Palm application called Pocket Tunes, I can now tap into Shoutcast streaming Internet radio stations from my Treo 600. There is something incredibly cool about this. It's a hideous hack, linking together a series of elements that were designed for other purposes:

Radio Station --> MP3 files --> Shoutcast server --> Internet --> SprintPCS network -- > PalmOS application --> Treo

But that's what's so great about it. The end-to-end architecture and open standards of the Internet means that new applications can take advantage of existing networks and services.. Right now this is mostly an indulgence for early-adopters like myself, but why shouldn't every mobile phone also be a personal radio? "

Mon, 03 May 2004 20:49:52 GMT

Nigerian Mobs Alerted By Texting: From Nov 2002 Howard Rheingold notes "the reported use of texting to summon rioters in Nigeria.

Ironically, the blasphemous story published against the prophet has tended to unite the nation's muslims who have not only been unanimous in their condemnation of the story, but have also been sending solidarity text messages on their GSM phones to alert one another on the blasphemy since last Sunday.
AbdulHameed Daramola, a Lagos Muslim told Weekly Trust that he alone alerted over seventy Muslims across the country about the blasphemy through text messages on his GSM since last Sunday when he became aware of the issue"

Mon, 03 May 2004 20:45:22 GMT

Electoral Smart Mobs in Kenya: "For the first time, we Kenyans have more or less agreed that this time we have had a fair election with the highest number of voters turning out to vote. One key instrument has been the mobile phone." Uses: Planning, Campaigning, and Results Dissemination.

"We in the ICT field know this is a best practice on how ICTs can help curb rigging, enhance transparency and keep people together. The two cell phone poviders were licensed less than five years ago and cover most of Kenya and have outstripped fixed lines government provider by more than 300% in that short period. Incidentally, no fixed lines were working in all the polling stations I visited further proving the maxim..Africa telecommunications development will be more wireless than fixed. "

Mon, 03 May 2004 10:05:48 GMT

The Secret Source of Google's Power: Fun read; their long-term comparative advantage may be scale: "Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application. While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming. .. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system? " More on Google architecture: a note, a paper, and a presentation.

Mon, 03 May 2004 02:48:12 GMT

coLinux: Linux for Windows Without Rebooting: Yet another virtualization layer, for running Linux on top of Windows. Also mentions user mode Linux for Linux-on-Linux.

Mon, 03 May 2004 02:10:50 GMT

Google files for unusual $2.7 billion IPO: "The amount of the $2.7 billion offering contains an inside joke for the math-minded. The exact offering, $2,718,281,828, is the product of "e" and $1 billion, where "e" is the base of the natural logarithm--a logarithm especially useful in calculus--and equals about 2.718281828." And, e is an irrational number...

Sun, 02 May 2004 17:54:17 GMT

The Wi-Fi Positioning System: " Quarterscope has developed a Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) that can complement or, in certain cases, replace the traditional Global Positioning System (GPS). .. [GPS fails if] you're indoors, or in a skyscraper-filled urban canyon.. But WPS uses the 5 million Wi-Fi hotspots that are scattered around the United States (which some esitmates say will grow to 10 million in the next 12 months) to pinpoint the location of any device that has a Wi-Fi chipset in it. As long as a Wi-Fi access point in range it’ll figure out where you are.

Several companies have developed indoor Wi-Fi location-based services (for museums and the like), but they are used in tightly controlled conditions. Quarterscope's WPS is the first outdoor [software-only] Wi-Fi location detection system.. WPS takes advantage of the fact that almost all access points are configured to transmit their unique IDs whenever a Wi-Fi client sends out a scan request. Quarterscope exploits this capability (which doesn't drain the resources or compromise the security of access points) by combining it with the data collected by wardrivers, who use GPS systems and laptops to discover and map out access points in towns and cities. .. Quarterscope says it can locate a device to within 20 feet, and that improvements in the coming months will allow for even better positioning. The company hopes to launch the product commercially later this year, and plans to charge a monthly subscription fee to use the service. It says it'll have 90% coverage throughout the top 25 cities in the US.

Because WPS is interoperable with any application that can use GPS, it can be put to use right away in applications such as Microsoft Streets and Trips and Delorme Street Atlas. Quarterscope is also working on several in-house applications. One, called, WhereIsIt, will give you directions to the nearest gas station, ATM, hotel or restaurant. Another application provides a more general local search for different kinds of businesses and attractions. It can also add a location stamp to digital photos and documents. One intriguing application for WPS is a "LoJack" for laptops. (Notebook theft is a big problem -- 1.6 million were stolen in the US in the last three years, and only three percent were recovered.) WPS could be used to quietly send e-mail with your laptop's coordinates to a special address. If the laptop is ever stolen, you can find out where it is and track it down. "

A related effort is Intel's Place Lab: "a software base and a community-building activity that facilitates widespread adoption of low-cost, easy-to-use user positioning for location-enhanced computing applciations." It's open source with a whitepaper on privacy.

Fri, 30 Apr 2004 06:12:52 GMT

Using a Hosts File To Make The Internet Not Suck (as much): Clever little file to defeat ad and spyware servers, and to allow shorthand domain names for favorite sites.

Thu, 29 Apr 2004 18:32:14 GMT

Is One-Fourth of Your E-Mail Getting Lost? High false-positive rates are cutting into corporate customer email. "A new report shows that most major Internet service providers (ISPs) shunt into end users' Junk Mail folders — or simply delete — about one-quarter of the corporate opt-in communications that their customers have requested. .. The study monitored 30,000 e-mails [in Jul-Dec 2003] from more than 100 Return Path clients, many of which are Fortune 500 companies. All of the e-mails that were counted in the statistics were either opt-in newsletters that individuals had specifically requested or "transactional messages," such as confirmations of orders, according to Return Path executive George Bilbrey. No unsolicited e-mail or "spam" was counted in the study..

The average "false positive" rate across all 16 ISPs was almost 19%, the report says. .. In a January 2004 scorecard of desktop spam filters, PC Magazine found that the best products misidentified legitimate e-mails only 1.6% of the time or less. ..

Thu, 29 Apr 2004 09:45:08 GMT

Why Study Rome When You Can Build It?: " John Seely Brown, the media innovator who helped make XeroxPARC such a center for creative thinking in the 1990s, has interesting things to say about [online] games, narrative, and education .."

Thu, 29 Apr 2004 09:01:19 GMT

'Laser vision' offers new insights: "US firm Microvision has developed a system that projects lasers onto the retina, allowing users to view images on top of their normal field of vision. It could allow surgeons to get a bird's eye view of the innards of a patient, offer military units in the field a view of the entire battlefield and provide mechanics with a simulation of the inside of a car's engine. The system uses tiny lasers, which scan their light onto the retina to produce the entire range of human vision, reported the journal of the Institute of the Electrical and Electronics Engineers, IEEE Spectrum. .. The first generation product, called the Nomad Expert Technician System, consists of a wireless computer and a hi-tech monocle, costing around $4,000. "

Thu, 29 Apr 2004 01:22:48 GMT

Send Jobs to India? Some Find It's Not Always Best: Examples when programming work was returned the US after trying India. "Indian programmers required more detailed instructions to write the software code than would a programmer here, who would be more familiar with the customer's needs. This slowed the process, which was a major drawback because this technology is new and changing very fast. .. "Whenever the pace of innovation is very rapid," he said, "is when the work should be done closer to the client." .. [India's] Infosys announced that it would spend $20 million to set up a consulting company in the United States."

Wed, 28 Apr 2004 16:59:02 GMT

Nano-Hive: Nanospace Simulator: "Nano-Hive is a modular simulator used for modeling the physical world at a nanometer scale. The intended purpose of the simulator is to act as a tool for the study and development of nanotech entities." Version 1 is for a single-user desktop, version 2 is planned to be distributed, possibly using Globus.

Wed, 28 Apr 2004 14:43:27 GMT

Internet-based Distributed Computing Projects: Directories of active and completed projects. Among them is a designer for circuits with Built-In Self-Test (BIST), such as ones used in space or medical applications where reliability and fault detection are critical. It uses Genetic Algorithms (GA) and Evolutionary Strategies (ES) to derive and simulate alternate designs.

Tue, 27 Apr 2004 17:22:22 GMT

Giving It Away (for Fun and Profit): Music meets shareware. "Vilhan is making money because he hosts his songs at Magnatune.com, an Internet music distributor that replaces standard "all rights reserved" copyright language with "some rights reserved" licenses drafted by a Silicon Valley-based nonprofit organization called Creative Commons. Magnatune and its artists make MP3s available for free to play or download. But they still demand payment when the music is used for commercial purposes, such as inclusion in advertisements or in films released to theaters. ..

When composers upload songs on MacBand.com, they're presented with the option of choosing a Creative Commons license. The result is that nearly every song on MacBand functions as raw material for new songs. The sharing not only spurs activity on MacBand, but also builds demand for Apple software and hardware. ..

Lessig wants to integrate Creative Commons into the tools used to create digital art. The licenses now come in "machine-readable" form, which means that smart CD players can display a song's license as it plays. There is also a plug-in for Adobe's Photoshop that recognizes licenses embedded in image files. The open-source Mozilla project plans to put a Creative Commons search tool alongside one for Google in its Firefox 1.0 browser, due out this summer, making it easy to search the Web for, say, photos of the Empire State Building that are cleared for noncommercial use. A Japanese Creative Commons license is already available, and Lessig hopes to introduce 24 more country-specific versions by the year's end. A $1.2 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation should help the six-person Creative Commons staff complete the project. " Related: Free Culture: Lawrence Lessig Keynote, Aug. 15, 2002

Mon, 26 Apr 2004 18:31:42 GMT

Compiling hardware from C++ code: Maxeler is a New York city company that supplies a product called ASC: A Stream Compiler for Computing with FPGAs. "ASC is fully embedded in standard C++, and as such, ASC programs are compiled by a conventional C++ compiler. The concepts of timing and architecture of the circuit are expressed by ASC hardware types and operators. The ASC system facilitates design space exploration by providing three levels of abstraction: architecture level, arithmetic level and gate level. Since each intermediate representation is human readable C++, it is easy to optimize implementations at each of these levels and explore such optimizations within the ASC framework. Conceptually, ASC follows the philosophy of the C programming language. The objective is to offer the capability to optimize the program for maximal performance, and at the same time provide a language interface that increases productivity. "

They claim typical 30x improvements in performance. Key factor is optimizing the data types to the bit representations to the data, rather than using standard int and float. Varying the mantissa and exponent to fit the problem saves a lot.

"ASC provides a software-like interface to programming FPGAs and enables rapid exploration of the design space for FPGA implementations. This increase in productivity of up to 10x can result, for example, in 20-30 implementations of an algorithm in the same time it otherwise takes to develop 2-3 implementations. The advantages of ASC for an architecture that supports reconfiguration, or customizable architectures with a large number of (FPGA) nodes, have the potential to change the way we think about computing."

IP also developed: "Maxeler Technologies utilizes it's programming technology to develop state-of-the-art, flexible, parametrizable arithmetic modules and IP blocks implementing entire algorithms. Examples for our IP blocks are FFT (fixed point and floating point), Reed Solomon Code, IDEA encryption, and IDCT for video coding. " Makes me think about linking this to genetic programming for IP generation.

Sat, 24 Apr 2004 17:45:53 GMT

Wi-Fi service, product news: "Public IP Services of Pine Beach, New Jersey, has developed a solution specifically designed for small restaurants, hotels, laundromats and bars that want to differentiate themselves or encourage patrons to stay longer .. The ISP charges businesses US$69.95 per month for hotspot access. The service includes Netopia's 3-D Reach 3347W ADSL wireless gateway, which features an ADSL modem, Wi-Fi certified access point and Ethernet switch on one box. ..

Rich Mironov is AirMagnet's vice president of marketing. The Framingham, Massachusetts-based company has found that high-tech, education and government sectors have been quickest to deploy Wi-Fi, followed closely by healthcare, manufacturing and telecom. .. His company's [sells a] line of analysis and management products, which patrol Wi-Fi network perimeters for security and performance issues. "

Sat, 24 Apr 2004 17:37:04 GMT

Wi-Fi Networking: Fast Food Nation: "QSR Magazine has a list of the top 50 quick-service restaurants (QSR) chains by dollar volume as of 2002. Only two of these chains, Starbucks and McDonald’s, have a comprehensive Wi-Fi plan. Panera and Schlotzsky’s have Wi-Fi in some locations with plans for expansion. The total number of chain stores in the top 50 are 117,468, a staggering number, of which about 15 percent are committed to have Wi-Fi within a couple of years."

Sat, 24 Apr 2004 17:18:07 GMT

34% Americans have broadband, 24% have broadband at home: "Also, 68 million Americans - or 34% of all adults - have access to high-speed Internet connections either at home or on the job. 48 m or 24% have high-speed access at home. Home broadband adoption is up 60% since March 2003.. DSL now has a 42% share of the home broadband market, up from 28% in March 2003. For the first time, more than half (52%) of college educated people age 35 and younger has broadband connections at home. Only 10% of rural Americans go online from home with high-speed connections, about one-third the rate for non-rural Americans."

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 16:49:26 GMT

Cringely on search and digital archeaology: ""MeaningMaster isn't a search engine, but a search technology.. [with a] lexicon -- a computer dictionary that is purported to understand the meanings of more than 200,000 English words IN CONTEXT.. MeaningMaster is hand-coded, a process that took 175 man- and woman-years."

I like Cringely's general observation: "What has changed is that, through the relentless passage of Moore's Law, computers are on average 16 times faster today than they were back in 1998. Today, MeaningMaster claims a server can process 50,000 queries per hour, though they are careful not to specify either the power of the server or the complexity of the query, though with modern brute force approaches like Google's swarm of PC servers, it probably doesn't matter. Where [the 1990's] Inquizit was interesting, but probably not competitive, MeaningMaster is now competitive. .. This makes me wonder, in fact, whether there aren't hundreds of promising technologies from the late 1990s that are worth another look today. It would probably be worthwhile to start a company just to specialize in this type of digital archaeology."

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 00:30:33 GMT

Expand compression now available as software product: "The Accelerator Server is a Linux-based software solution that ports many of the Application Traffic Management features of the new Expand Accelerator appliances like application acceleration and bandwidth efficiency tools that reduce wide area network (WAN) costs and improve application response times."

Wed, 21 Apr 2004 16:52:45 GMT

Earthlink Spyaudit: New tool free from Earthlink. "When you browse the Web, spyware programs can sneak onto your computer. As a result, Web sites can track your browsing habits, corrupt your data, or even steal your identity. To scan your PC for spyware, just run a quick EarthLink Spy Audit.* This free service examines your computer and lists spyware results in minutes. It will not change or harm your system in any way." This doesn't clean your system; you'll need some other tool like Ad-Aware for that. They also offer anti-phish software.

Wed, 21 Apr 2004 01:42:07 GMT

TCP Vulnerable: "The vulnerability stems from the fact that TCP sessions can be reset -- in other words, shut down, if only temporarily -- by sending maliciously-crafted RST (reset) or Syn (synchronization) packets to either end of the session's connection. Although this is an intended feature of TCP -- as in the infamous phrase, not a bug -- an attacker who spoofs the source IP addresses on the packets can terminate the session, resulting in a denial of service.

Although a denial of service attack using TCP packets has long been known as a weakness of the protocol, experts believed that a successful attack wasn't practical, since the attacker would have to guess the an identifying sequence number in the next packet; the odds of that are about one in 4.3 billion. But researcher Paul Watson, who runs the pro-hacking blog on terrorist.net, has discovered that the “probability of guessing an acceptable sequence number is much higher because the receiving TCP implementation will accept any sequence number in a certain range. [That] makes TCP reset attacks practicable,” said the NISCC in its advisory..

Ultimately, router vendors will have to issue patches. Not all had done so by late Tuesday afternoon, although leading router makers Cisco and Juniper Networks had posted advisories, and provided either patches or software to mitigate the risks of an exploit. But even those companies and organizations relying on routers for which patches are available shouldn't be completely comfortable, said Rouland. “These are pretty significant changes to the IP set, and they're non-trivial patches that will require a lot of testing,” he said.

Other tactics that enterprises could employ until patches were available and deployed, said Oliver Friedrichs, the senior manager of Symantec's security response team, include implementing their routers' MD5 Signature Option, another level of authentication that should stymie attackers. “MD5 adds a hash to each request for BGP,” said Friedrichs, “so the attacker would have to try to calculate the hash as well. That should make it much more difficult to inject a packet into the TCP session at the router.” "

Tue, 20 Apr 2004 05:37:59 GMT

'Spyware' Eludes Easy Answers: "Internet security firm McAfee today reported that the number of "potentially unwanted programs" on its customers' computers grew from 643,000 in September 2003 to more than 2.5 million this March. In a survey released earlier this month by Internet service provider Earthlink and privacy firm Webroot Software, the companies found close to 30 million spyware programs on more than 1 million computers in a three-month period -- nearly 28 programs for every computer. " It uses a broad definition of spyware. In another report "Microsoft estimates spyware is responsible for half of all PC crashes. Dell says 12 percent of its tech-support calls involve spyware, a problem that has increased substantially in recent months. "

Sat, 17 Apr 2004 22:48:21 GMT

Army Awards $32 Million Contract to Improve iRobot's PackBot: Nifty remote control "toy-like" tank. Uses WiFi, Linux, compact flash memory and video camera. Soldiers use it to examine and detonate bombs or mines. iRobot also makes the Roomba vacuum cleaner. The military spec version (400 G of force, sand and mud, 15 mph, etc) sells for $50,000 and up.

Sat, 17 Apr 2004 22:42:00 GMT

Creditel PowerSwipe: "Mobile sales pros, small businesses, and flea marketeers, take note: You can now use a cell phone to take credit card payments anywhere you have access to Nextel's wireless network. The Creditel PowerSwipe is a phone-based credit card machine that frees you from needing a landline to process transactions. .. Creditel claims its security technology makes the system more secure than an ATM machine." $250 plus $12/mo plus .15/transaction.