Why organisations are right to ban Skype

Posted on by

Fascinating post by Bruno Giussani about the hidden underbelly of Skype. Excerpt:

Skype’s design is based on peer-to-peer, distributed networking principles. This means that the core functions of the system are decentralized, as is the database of Skype users (the tool that lets you look up other Sykpers and tells the system where to forward a call). The calls are set up and passed on among users, flowing through a chain of computers around the world without traversing any central infrastructure.

That’s good for robustness and scalability — and for Skype, which can avoid massive investments and add new users at near-zero marginal cost. For the system to work, however, some users have to take over its vital functions: routing traffic and holding portions of the database. In Skypeville, these tasks are farmed out to those users with the most powerful computers and the biggest bandwidth, such as CERN. Skype turns them into supernodes.

Only a fraction of users are elevated to this function–currently some 20,000, according to research presented at a recent conference in the Netherlands by Philippe Biondi and Fabrice Desclaux of EADS. And only a small portion of their bandwidth is supposed to be shared. Skype CEO Niklas Zennström explained it to me in an interview last year: “When you become a supernode you share some of your resources and a little bit of bandwidth, but very little; you won’t notice.”

But some do notice. San Diego-based venture capitalist and TV host Paul Kedrosky, for example, complained on his blog in January that while he was traveling his computer “was sending out enormous amounts of traffic.” The IT people at his firm discovered that the machine was routing Skype traffic as a supernode. Computerworld magazine found that “in supernode mode, Skype is reputedly able to saturate 100 Mbit/second connections.” In layman’s terms, those are fast connections. The average Skype user’s PC is much less taxed than this, obviously. The possibility of becoming a supernode is written into Skype’s end-user license agreement, but not explicitly: The word “supernode” is never used. The license speaks of “permission to utilize the processor and bandwidth of your computer for the limited purpose of facilitating the communication between Skype Software users.”

This brings up two considerations. First: Skype is using some people’s computer power and bandwidth at an amazing rate. Sure, they agreed to it when they installed the software. But since most people pay for their bandwidth, some of them may come to the idea of ask Skype to share the cost. Second: In the interview, Mr. Zennström–while acknowledging scaling issues–said Skype could basically grow indefinitely without the need for a central infrastructure. But as traffic grows, and should the current scattered grumbling by supernode users turn into more vocal complaints, Skype may have to start deploying its own supernodes. That would completely transform its business model.

Nicholas Carr adds some pithy comments of his own to this:

It’s a very nice set-up for Skype. By building its network on users’ machines and pipes, it’s able to “avoid massive investments and add new users at near-zero marginal cost,” Giussani writes. And in the past, its free-riding business model didn’t meet with much resistance. As a renegade operation – the Kazaa of telephony – Skype had an emotional connection with users that turned them into willing collaborators. But now that it’s an arm of a multi-billion-dollar profit-making company, eBay, one wonders if users will continue to happily make charitable contributions of processing power and bandwidth. Already, corporations are banning Skype from their networks.

IP madness — on stilts

Posted on by

This is complicated but Ed Felten’s post is worth the effort. It’s about the content industries’ submission to the US Copyright Office (which is currently pondering the question of what should be exempted from the DMCA). You really need to read the entire post, but here’s the nub of it:

In order to protect their ability to deploy this dangerous DRM, they want the Copyright Office to withhold from users permission to uninstall DRM software that actually does threaten critical infrastructure and endanger lives.

I’ve always thought that the arrogance and stupidity of the copyright thugs was extraordinary, but this really takes the biscuit.

Yahoo’s hypocrisy

Posted on by

Admirable rant by Rebecca MacKinnon. Sample:

Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang continues to spew excrement, echoing his shoulder-shrugging of earlier this month, which essentially amounts to saying: So sorry we assisted in human rights violations, but there’s nothing we can do if we’re going to bring the Internet to the Chinese people. One recent quote:

“You have to balance the risk of not participating,” he said. “And people don’t realize that being in the market every day there, and being on the ground, we are seeing changes, on the whole, for the
positive.”Tell that to the family of Shi Tao who is in jail for 10 years.  Jerry Yang should meet with them and tell them to their faces just how sorry he is, but that Shi is being sacrificed for a noble cause. I’m sure they’ll understand…

Yahoo! executives keep framing this issue as black and white: Either you’re in there and do everything the Chinese authorities tell you without question, or you can’t do business in China at all. That is false. Companies can and do make choices. You can engage in China and choose not to do certain kinds of business. Yahoo! has placed user e-mail data within legal jurisdiction of the People’s Republic of China. Google and Microsoft have both chosen not to do so. Why did Yahoo! chose to do this?  Either they weren’t thinking through the consequences or they don’t care…

Écoute et répète: Nous ne donnerons pas des secrets d’état au Français.

Posted on by

Er, or words to that effect. You may have noticed that a French company called Alcatel SA is merging with Lucent, the company that used to be called Bell Labs. So what? Well, Lucent does a lot of work for the Pentagon — and you know what the Yanks think of the French. Even the chips in the DoD canteen have been renamed “Freedom Fries”. Somehow, I’ll be surprised if this corporate marriage works out. After all, Congress got into a lather about a Dubai company owning American sea ports…

Headline courtesy of Good Morning Silicon Valley btw.

Apple@30

Posted on by

From the Melbourne Age…

If, at the beginning of 2001, an investor had ignored some noted Wall Street analysts and had bought 1000 shares in Apple, maker of iPods and Macintosh computers, they would have paid about $US7500.

Today, four years later and on Apple’s 30th birthday, that $US7500 investment is worth around $US280,000. There have been two two-for-one stock splits and the shares have ranged this year between $US70 and above $US80. Had the shares been sold last January, for example, the return would have been more than $US340,000.

Google PageRank Checker

Posted on by

Hmmm… Here’s a site that claims to be able to estimate the Google PageRank of any web-page. Memex comes out at 6/10. Statusq gets 5/10. BBC Online gets 9/10 — higher than Amazon.co.uk (8/10) but dead-level with cnn.com (9/10) and BoingBoing.net (9/10). Google.com, needless to say, has a PageRank of 10/10.

I’m not sure I believe these results, because I can’t see how they’re calculated. And since the site is independent of Google and the details of the PageRank algorithm (as distinct from the general principles embodied in it) are secret, it’s difficult to see how one could check the computation.

The Ennerdale Webcam

Posted on by

Here’s something interesting — a webcam showing one of the more remote parts of the Lake District — Ennerdale. It’s run by a partnership between BBCi Cumbria and the YHA [Youth Hostel Association] and is located in the Common Room of the Ennerdale Hostel at Gillerthwaite about 3.5 miles up the valley from Bowness Knott. The camera shows the view from the common room looking up the valley with Pillar and Pillar rock in the background. The image is currently updated every 2 hours from 8am until 4 pm.

Why the slow refresh? Well, because there’s no broadband in Ennerdale — the webcam is “probably one of the most remote webcams in England” — it’s 18km from the nearest telephone exchange.

But that’s not the really interesting thing about it. The Ennerdale cam is the only one I know of that gets its electricity supply from water. The hostel has had its own hydroelectric generator since 2003. In its first year of operation, the back-up diesel generator was only needed for two days.

Thanks to Boyd Harris for the link.

What’s wrong with Microsoft?

Posted on by

This is a serious question, not a rhetorical one. (I raised it tangentially in today’s Observer column.) It’s sparked by clear signs of stress in Redmond, with serious managerial restructuring and the announcement that Vista is going to be late — again. A few days ago, Steve Lohr and John Markoff asked the question in an article in the New York Times.

The company’s marathon effort to come up with the a new version of its desktop operating system, called Windows Vista, has repeatedly stalled. Last week, in the latest setback, Microsoft conceded that Vista would not be ready for consumers until January, missing the holiday sales season, to the chagrin of personal computer makers and electronics retailers — and those computer users eager to move up from Windows XP, a five-year-old product.

In those five years, Apple Computer has turned out four new versions of its Macintosh operating system, beating Microsoft to market with features that will be in Vista, like desktop search, advanced 3-D graphics and “widgets,” an array of small, single-purpose programs like news tickers, traffic reports and weather maps.

So what’s wrong with Microsoft? There is, after all, no shortage of smart software engineers working at the corporate campus in Redmond, Wash. The problem, it seems, is largely that Microsoft’s past success and its bundling strategy have become a weakness.

Lohr and Markoff say that the explanation is that Microsoft is hamstrung by its past success as a monopolist — that it has to make sure that its new operating system is “backwards compatible” with older versions of Microsoft software running on millions and millions of PCs.

I’m sure there’s something in this. But it’s not entirely convincing. After all, Apple has some of the same problems (albeit with a smaller consumer base and a more uniform hardware platform). So it was interesting to read Eric Raymond’s comment on the NYT article. He says that the authors have described only symptoms, not the underlying problem.

Closed-source software development has a scaling limit, a maximum complexity above which it collapses under its own weight.

Microsoft hit this wall six years ago, arguably longer; it’s why they’ve had to cancel several strategic projects in favor of superficial patches on the same old codebase. But it’s not a Microsoft-specific problem, just one that’s hitting them the worst because they’re the largest closed-source developer in existence. Management changes won’t address it any more than reshuffling the deck chairs could have kept the Titanic from sinking.

Apple has been able to ship four new versions in the last five years because its OS core is open-source code. Linux, entirely open-source, has bucketed along even faster. Open source evades the scaling limit by decentralizing development, replacing top-heavy monoliths with loosely-coupled peer networks at both the level of the code itself and the organizations that produce it.

You finger backward compatibility as a millstone around Microsoft’s neck, but experience with Linux and other open-source operating systems suggests this is not the real problem. Over the same six-year period Linux has maintained backwards binary compatibility as good as (arguably better than) that of Windows without bloating.

Microsoft’s problems cannot be fixed — indeed, they are doomed to get progressively worse — as long as they’re stuck to a development model premised on centralization, hierarchical control, and secrecy. Open-source operating systems will continue to gain at their expense for many of the same reasons free markets outcompeted centrally-planned economies.

The interesting question is whether we will ever see a Microsoft equivalent of glasnost and perestroika.

Leviathan and the ID Card

Posted on by

In all the stuff that’s been written about the Blair government’s ID card project, the best single piece was this Guardian column by an Oxford academic, Karma Nabulsi.

She begins by highlighting the extent to which the government’s approach to security in the post-9/11 world derives from Hobbes.

Hobbes portrays a dangerous world filled with unknown enemies perpetually striving to murder one’s family and destroy one’s property, a nation filled with untrustworthy neighbours, isolated individuals who live in fear of each other, and only the power of the state to protect society from the evils inherent in human nature. How much of your liberty do you yield to your protector? As much as he says he needs to provide you with protection.

This grim bargain is on offer today, and can be measured in every aspect of public life in Britain. If the primary purpose of the state is to provide the individual with security, this gives the state exclusive power to define the gravity of the security threat. At that point, enter the security and terrorism experts. It also allows the state to define civil and individual liberties, since these must be surrendered according to an assessment made behind closed doors. More fundamentally, political liberty is possessed entirely by the state, for in such a framework the state determines what liberties to grant to individuals. The source of sovereignty resides entirely in the state, not the individual.

This conception of the social contract, Nabulsi argues, is a totally undemocratic one. And it runs completely counter to an equally venerable (and mostly British) tradition.

The theory of the democratic state describes the nature of a social contract in the opposite way to Hobbes. Defined by British writers such as John Stuart Mill, RH Tawney and GDH Cole, among others (and continental Europeans such as Rousseau and Kant), the purpose of the contract is to protect a citizen’s liberty. Its preservation – especially the preservation of political liberty – is the supreme good. In this version of the social contract, the sovereign citizen does not surrender sovereignty, but only specific powers and functions to the state. As political sovereignty is not transferred to the state, not only are civil rights inalienable but so are political liberties, above all the right to determine and to deliberate laws. It is not simply participating in these decisions, it is actually making them.

Nabulsi points out that Hobbes made his argument to answer a specific problem of exceptional insecurity. But, she says, the trade-off he suggested is flawed.

This formula will never provide us with the security we need; instead it increases our need for it. By restoring the purpose of government as one that serves its people through preserving freedom as the supreme good, one restores citizens to their role in deliberating these decisions and cedes the public space back to its owners.

This is a very good essay because it goes right to the heart of the problem. The trouble is, it also highlights the depth of the malaise. Our democracies have been flawed for a long time by this underlying Hobbesian contract, but it took Osama bin Laden to peel back the camouflage and display in its naked illiberality. I used to think that it was partly a weakness of the British (unwritten) constitution, with its implicit embodiement of the state as the ‘Crown Prerogative’ — and that republics would be relatively freer of the disease. But the behaviour of the US in recent decades suggests otherwise. The Bush regime is Hobbesian to the core of its being.

The Tories say that, if elected to power, they will scrap the ID Card, and so they might. But I can’t see them abandoning the Hobbesian contract, for all David Cameron’s spouting about liberty and freedom. We’re screwed, basically.

The changing media landscape

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column…

The Miglia and the Slingbox illustrate how our media ecosystem is changing. They provide early glimpses of the future. Or at least of how the position of TV is changing. Bill Thompson, BBC Online’s resident blogger, has a nice way of putting this. He says that today’s kids will never buy a TV set in the course of their lives. That doesn’t mean they won’t watch TV or video; just that they will access it via a plethora of devices, of which computers and mobile phones are just two examples.

This is why the BBC was lucky to get one final instalment of licence fee income. At the end of the current Charter period, the media landscape will be unrecognisable…