At last, something to do when you’re stuck on the M25

Log onto the Net using WiFi and do your email. How? Well, according to this report,

“The U.K. government is planning to upgrade its roadside telematics system with a wireless network designed to blanket the country with low-cost wireless Internet access.

At this week’s Wireless LAN Event here, a small Exeter-based company called Last Mile Communications (a trading name of five-year-old TIVIS Ltd.) launched the patented technology the government is eyeing for its massive roadside infrastructure upgrade. Under Last Mile’s scheme, contractors would install about 150,000 inexpensive wireless broadband transceivers in such equipment as street lights and traffic lights, which will run off available power or even solar energy.

These units will self-configure into a network capable of passing signals from one node to another until it reaches an Internet uplink, a technique known as multi-hop or mesh networking. Anyone within about 250 meters (about 820 feet) of a node will be able to access a wireless connection of 40M bps to 400M bps, although the connection will probably initially be made using standards such as Wi-Fi or WiMax, which are considerably slower. A typical consumer broadband connection runs at about half a megabit per second.

The network is designed to connect to the broader Internet via any sort of uplink, including a standard T1 line or satellite broadband connection, the company said.

If Last Mile’s scheme is successful, it would make wireless dramatically more prevalent than it is now, with Wi-Fi hot spots currently limited to places such as airports, coffee shops and convention centers. It could also be a solution to the problems carriers have faced in bringing high-speed Internet access to remote areas that aren’t serviced by cable broadband or DSL.”

Listen to this year’s Reith Lectures on your iPod

Just seen on Dan Hill’s CityofSound Blog that this year’s BBC Reith Lectures will be available in MP3 format as a free download — and with no hidden DRM either. Great stuff! It’s why I am happy to pay my licence fee. Public service broadcasting creating high-class material for the public domain.

Another reason why P2P technology is important…

…is that it provides a way to bypass the kind of governmental censorship and mass-media myopia which is becoming increasingly common on the Net. Useful BBC Online article summarising Ross Anderson’s views on this.

“Those who would forget history…

… are condemned to repeat it”. Can’t remember who said that, but I was reminded of it when reading a terrific column by Niall Ferguson in today’s Sunday Telegraph [NB: free registration required.] Here’s an excerpt:

“There was amazement last year when I pointed out in the journal Foreign Affairs that in 1917 a British general had occupied Baghdad and proclaimed: ‘Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.’ By the same token, scarcely any American outside university history departments is aware that within just a few months of the formal British takeover of Iraq, there was a full-scale anti-British revolt.

What happened in Iraq last week so closely resembles the events of 1920 that only a historical ignoramus could be surprised. It began in May, just after the announcement that Iraq would henceforth be a League of Nations “mandate” under British trusteeship. (Nota bene, if you think a handover to the UN would solve everything.) Anti-British demonstrations began in Baghdad mosques, spread to the Shi’ite holy centre of Karbala, swept on through Rumaytha and Samawa – where British forces were besieged – and reached as far as Kirkuk.

Contrary to British expectations, Sunnis, Shi’ites and even Kurds acted together. Stories abounded of mutilated British bodies. By August the situation was so desperate that the British commander appealed to London for poison gas bombs or shells (though these turned out not to be available). By the time order had been restored in December – with a combination of aerial bombardment and punitive village-burning expeditions – British forces had sustained over 2,000 casualties and the financial cost of the operation was being denounced in Parliament. In the aftermath of the revolt, the British were forced to accelerate the transfer of power to a nominally independent Iraqi government, albeit one modelled on their own form of constitutional monarchy.

I am willing to bet that not one senior military commander in Iraq today knows the slightest thing about these events. The only consolation is that maybe some younger Americans are realising that the US has lessons to learn from something other than its own supposedly exceptional history…”

Spring is sprung

Taken in Nicci’s and Sean’s Suffolk garden this afternoon.

Google’s email sca…, er, scheme

Google plans to finance its new ‘free’ email service by smart advertising. I had naively assumed the targeting would be done by reading the message headers. But no: it seems the company plans to machine-scan the content of messages. This makes Gmail a non-starter for people like me. And a consortium of privacy activists have written to the company to express a similar view.

In the words of this report,

“A coalition of 28 privacy and civil liberties groups wrote Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page a letter Tuesday urging them to think again about the service, which they said sets potentially dangerous precedents for the automated scanning of private communications. The service may conflict with European privacy laws, and should be suspended until privacy issues are addressed, they wrote.

The letter’s signatories include the World Privacy Forum, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Bits of Freedom, the Consumer Federation of America, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Foundation for Information Policy Research and Privacy International.

When Google announced the Gmail service on March 31, the Mountain View, Calif., company said it will scan the text of all incoming e-mail in order to place appropriate advertisements. This is a bad idea, according to the privacy campaigners, because ‘The scanning of confidential email violates the implicit trust of an email service provider’.”

Broadband’s impact on TV

From an article in The Register:

Nights in front of the TV could become a thing of the past as more and more people get hooked up to broadband.

More than half of those quizzed in a recent survey said they spent less time in front of the goggle box since getting broadband. Instead, they’re staring at a monitor all night and doing stuff online.

Strategy Analytics surveyed 800 European broadband users and discovered that 56 per cent spent less, or a lot less, time watching television since subscribing to broadband.

In its report Broadcasters Beware: Broadband Is Stealing Your Viewers, the firm warns that TV broadcasters are losing millions of viewers to broadband Internet services.

“Television is clearly suffering the most from the rapid growth of broadband,” said analyst David Mercer. “A growing number of viewers are now choosing to spend their spare time communicating online and finding entertainment on the Internet, rather than sitting in front of the TV set. TV companies need to face up to this reality and start preparing for the brave new world of broadband entertainment.”

Our skewed perceptions of risk

From yesterday’s Independent:

“Professor Gerd Gigerenzer, an expert on the psychology of risk at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, has published a new study into how travel behaviour of Americans changed in the months after the 11 September attacks. Domestic air-passenger miles fell roughly 16 per cent in the final quarter, compared to the previous year, according to the Air transport Association, the trade organisation of US airlines. Americans switched from flying to using the roads to avoid the risk of being taken hostage by terrorists on planes and sent crashing into buildings.

Professor Gigerenzer demonstrates that, as a direct result of this switch, the number of fatal car crashes increased significantly in the last three months of 2001 compared with the same period in the year before. Because of the extra road traffic, 353 more people died in traffic accidents than would otherwise have done, a rise of 8 per cent.

‘This number of lost lives is an estimate of the price Americans paid for trying to avoid the risk of flying’, Professor Gigerenzer says. It is sobering to consider that the risk the millions of Americans were trying to avoid in not flying, and driving instead, was that of the fate suffered by 266 passengers and crew members on board the four flights that crashed. In other words, more people died in trying to avoid the fate of becoming victims of terrorism than died on board the ill-fated planes”.

Two terrific, plain-English explanations of the GPL

The GNU General Public License (GPL) was one of the great ideas of the late 20th century. But when you read the coverage of the SCO case, it’s clear that any commentators don’t understand the GPL. (Nor, apparently, does SCO — but in that case the misunderstanding is wilful.) So here is a plain-English explanation by Robin Bloor for IT-Director.com. And here’s another by Ben Kremer.

Symmetrical days

Today is 04.04.04. Isn’t that nice?