The Missing Internet
Extraordinary, insightful article. An excerpt:

“There is a tendency to confuse artifacts with concepts. More important than the current Internet is the concept behind it [^] extreme simplicity. Traditionally telecommunications is defined in terms of services such as telephony and television. The Internet itself just carries packets of bits and doesn’t even guarantee that they will be delivered. The Web and, for that matter, telephony and television, are applications that are created outside of the transport network itself.”

And:

“You can think of the bursting of the so-called Internet bubble as a pileup as we hit a wall. While much of the value of such companies was indeed fantastic (in the sense of a fantasy) there was reality in the idea that anyone can innovate and create something new. After all, if the Web was so easy why stop there? But most of the innovation was about new ways to use the Web for commerce. What was less obvious but more important was the difficulty of creating new innovations like the web and email. We have been simply mining just one small vein when there are so many others.”

Broadband access better in China than in Cambridge UK!

A friend in Seattle has just forwarded me this snippet from some news service or other…

Cambridge, rapidly becoming recognised as a world leader in wireless technology, is suffering from cobbler’s shoes syndrome.

While places such as China are enjoying fast broadband access to the internet, courtesy of technology and equipment invented and developed in Cambridge, Mid-Anglia itself is still in carrier-pigeon mode.

A recent report in the Cambridge Evening News pointed out that Cambridgeshire was lagging behind the rest of the UK in adopting broadband access, with only 37 per cent of the county’s 37,136 businesses currently having broadband access.

This compares with an average of 60 per cent nationwide, and 99.7 per cent in Greater London.

Broadband access means ‘always on’ internet connection and much faster response to commands.

The report brought complaints from would-be subscribers who said they simply could not get broadband.

One reader said: ‘We have been trying to get a connection for over a year to our business premises, where there are both BT and NTL termination boxes dotted all up and down the side of the road, with no success.

‘BT agreed to provide one, checked the line into the building, then announced two weeks later that they didn’t even have the necessary hardware in the local exchange.’

Similar reports have come from NTL customers who have tried to subscribe to broadband.

Meanwhile, Cambridge Broadband, the company in Cowley Road that is shipping its state-of-the-art broadband equipment to China, says the situation at home is grim.

Peter Wharton, CB chief executive, said: ‘There are not many places worse in terms of cost and speed than Cambridge.

‘We pay £10,000 a year for a service that is a lot slower than in China, and the options are zero in Cambridge.’

Cambridge Broadband has its own on-going trial in the city, involving Cambridge University, the AT&T Laboratory and about a dozen others, but the chances of the whole area benefiting from this super-fast technology look a long way off.

As far as China, in fact, where the government has said it intends rolling out broadband access to all 22 provinces by 2008.

Cambridge Broadband’s latest shipment to China, a contract worth many millions of pounds, is ideal for extending the reach of existing networks as well as for setting up new ones.

The row between Hollywood and the computer industry breaks cover!
New York Times report

Michael D. Eisner, the Walt Disney Company chairman, told the Senate Commerce Committee on Feb. 28 that he was tired of being “finessed.” Citing leading technology companies including Apple Computer, Dell Computer, Microsoft and Intel, he suggested that they had failed to develop adequate protection for digital media because piracy helps sell computers.

That brought an angry retort from Andrew S. Grove, the chairman of Intel. “Is it the responsibility of the world at large to protect an industry whose business model is facing a strategic challenge?” he said in an interview. “Or is it up to the entertainment industry to adapt to a new technical reality and a new set of consumers who want to take advantage of it?”

Never thought I’d find myself in agreement with Andy Grove, but clearly there’s a first time for everything.

The strange story of the 1901 Census site
BBC Online story. It seems that the first online census in England has crashed on its first day after 1.2 million people tried to search for relatives.

Computerworld: Wireless LANs gain over cellular. Anderson isn’t alone. A growing number of U.S. localities, including the California cities of Glendale and Oakland and counties of Orange and San Diego, have embraced Wi-Fi technology as the high-speed wireless backbone of their networks. [Tomalak’s Realm]

What happens when the law of the land is in direct opposition to mainstream consumer behavior and desires?
What indeed? Thoughtful Salon article about the impending collision between the corporate and public interests.

“Hollywood is on the march. Adding copy protection to CDs is just one tactic in a comprehensive onslaught. Media behemoths like Disney, Sony and AOL Time Warner are seeking full control of all methods of entertainment distribution; if their vision is realized, digital television sets, hard drives, personal video-recorders and wireless devices will all have some form of copy protection. In the most dire incarnation of the digital entertainment future, consumers of music and movies won’t be able to make any copies at all without explicit permission; you might not even be able to move, for example, a recorded version of “The Simpsons” from the digital VCR in your den to the one in your bedroom.

Many critics are convinced that copy-protection technologies are doomed to failure. No system is perfectly secure, and anything that works too well is bound to annoy consumers. Veterans of the consumer industry recall the late 1980s, when many software manufacturers abandoned various copy-protection schemes as bad for business. That cycle, they argue, is set to repeat itself.

But there are signs that the digital future will not resemble the past. Not only do the content companies enjoy access to much more sophisticated technology, but they also have a new tool at their disposal: Congress. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 makes it illegal to distribute or even discuss anything that circumvents digital copyright control. And last month, Sen. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, D-S.C., threatened to launch another bill — the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA) — that will mandate the inclusion of copy-protection technology in all digital devices.

Computer-savvy geeks will likely find a way around every technological advance delivered by state-of-the-art copy protection. But what happens when the law of the land is in direct opposition to mainstream consumer behavior and desires? As the content companies accelerate the deployment of every legal, political and technological weapon in their arsenal, that is precisely the showdown that looms.”

A note from Dave Winer: “BTW, another reason I blog is patents. My weblog is my “lab notebook.” I keep track of my art here, lest someone someday take a patent out on an idea I came up with. I also try to point to other people’s innovations so they get on the record too. Keeping a public weblog helps protect our power to innovate.”  [Scripting News]

The UK music industry has been told it must rethink the way it tackles digital music or face long-term decline.
BBC Online report.

“If record companies do not make their own digital music services more attractive to fans, they could continue to lose out to music piracy over the internet, a DTI report has said. ”

Scientific American: Tragedy of the Cyber Commons. Q&A with Lawrence Lessig. This freedom is increasingly under threat. The danger is that one class of property owners will use the legal system to veto certain kinds of innovation that no longer accord with its business interests. These owners will have the power to choose what kind of innovation is permitted–and that’s inconsistent with the innovation commons. [Tomalak’s Realm]

There’s a bug in the idea that the govt could require the computer hacks that the entertainment industry wants. At some point the govt will realize that it would render its own computers unusable. Of course they could put exemptions on their computers. Then we could all get government jobs. We’ll need them, because there won’t be any computer industry jobs except to make computers for the government.   [Scripting News]