Nice Technology Review piece on the idea of wireless broadband as a community resource.

“This isn’t just some techno-utopian notion — it’s today’s reality. Of course, there’s not much incentive to set up towers and deliver free wireless broadband to homes that can’t get high-speed Net access through cable modems or digital subscriber lines. But many businesses and universities are doing their part right now by making wireless Internet service available without restriction in their buildings and nearby public areas.

The other day, for example, I was at the Boston University school of journalism to have lunch with a friend, but he wasn’t there. Realizing that I was half an hour early, I took out my laptop and discovered that I was getting an excellent signal from the school’s wireless network. But I didn’t just get a signal — the university’s network helpfully gave my laptop an address on the Internet. Within moments I was downloading my e-mail and surfing the Web. When I shut down my computer 30 minutes later, the address was automatically returned to the university. And since the J-school’s network wasn’t running at full capacity at the time, even my minor use of bandwidth had no impact on other users. Total cost to Boston University: zero. (The same thing happened a few weeks later when I was at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.)”

At last — a real, working 3G network!
Guardian Online report.

Shhhh — don’t tell anyone, but the Isle of Man has the world’s first operational 3G mobile network. And according to this report, ” it is easy to see the attraction of 3G for laptop users: with 3G, suddenly you could have a mobile connection substantially faster than the one you have at home, as fast as the one in the office. But while Manx Telecom refuses to talk about pricing – all the trial users are on a free tariff for the first three months while their usage is monitored and analysed – it is likely that 3G will not be priced to rival fixed broadband services. Plug-in 3G PC cards for laptops are likely to be popular ways to use the technology, for travelling business people who need their corporate email or presentations from a central server, or online games players who need a quick deathmatch on the move. “

Just as I always thought: the main use for 3G is really as a fast modem.

More on wireless broadband — a downbeat assessment, this time
Salon story.

Wi-Fi Nation is on indefinite hold, at least until computer-carrying consumers can roam beyond the invisible tether of the base station at the office, or the AirPort in the family den. With tens of millions of customers ready to be wireless by next year, and the price of a Wi-Fi laptop dropping below $1,000, why isn’t AT&T setting up antennae for us, instead of shutting down its Digital Broadband service?

The answer is less about technology than the shifting flows of capital in the 21st century. The wireless Internet won’t be rolled out telecom-style, like DSL or cable modems. In the wake of embarrassing failures to create top-down networks, it will be built from the ground up, by a patchwork quilt of players. Imagine the gradual knitting together of cellular roaming service in the ’90s, but with 10,000 antenna owners rather than 10 giant carriers. Rather than risking billions of investors’ dollars on a ubiquitous rollout, entrepreneurs will play for smaller stakes in more proven local or niche markets: When we come, they will build it.

What the broadband industry doesn’t get — Internet users are not couch potatoes

WASHINGTON, D.C.-As Americans gain experience online, they use the Internet more for their jobs, to make more online purchases and carry out other financial transactions, and to write emails with more significant and intimate content.

A new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project compares a group of Internet users’ online behavior between March 2000 and March 2001. The report on these findings, called “Getting Serious Online,” shows that over time Internet users become more purposeful, efficient, and self-assured in using the Web and email to support some of life’s most important activities.

“The Internet has gone from novelty to utility for many Americans,” says Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. “They are beginning to take it for granted, but they can’t imagine life without it.”

See here for full text of the report.

Global noose tightens on copyright
Financial Times story.

A landmark international treaty reinforcing the protection of copyright in cyberspace comes into force on Wednesday amid controversy in the US and Europe over whether tougher copyright rules stimulate or inhibit creativity on the internet.

The copyright treaty, negotiated by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (Wipo) in 1996, and a sister treaty protecting sound recordings that comes into effect in May update copyright law for the digital age.

They have added some controversial features, which have already led to a string of legal challenges in the US, one of the first countries to introduce implementing legislation.

The treaties outlaw attempts to circumvent encryption and other techniques designed to prevent unauthorised copying and ensure royalties are paid.

After LANs and WANs come NANs — Neighbourhood Area Networks. For those of us who have long thought that 802.11b wireless networking is the truly disruptive networking technology, here’s a New York Times piece which suggests that even the establishment is beginning to realise that there might be something in this — and in particular that a mesh of 802.11b systems might be the way that broadband actually reaches the masses. Fascinating stuff.

Another good piece on the copyright land grab.

The main message of Heather Green’s excellent Business Week piece is that Congress’ continual extension of the protection period — under publishers’ tenacious lobbying — has all but ended fair use.

“To create a safety valve so that copyright wouldn’t clash with the First Amendment’s protection of free speech and to recognize fair abridgments, a fair use doctrine was established, granting individuals certain rights over how they use copyrighted material. Now, though, that balance is being upset. The threat of the Net sent the publishing industry scrambling, and fair use and public domain are being crowded. That’s putting innovation at risk. The first side of the squeeze on innovation comes in extending the delay in allowing works to fall into the public domain. That’s what’s at issue in the case the Supreme Court will hear in October. Congress has extended copyright terms 11 times since 1962, compared to only twice from 1790 to 1962. A big contention of the current Supreme Court case is that lawmakers are simply turning limited copyright protection into endless protection by continually extending the terms. That trend negates the intention of the limited copyright. ”

When I wrote a column in the Observer about spam I had a huge postbag (well, inbox) in response — more than I ever remember about any other subject. It felt as though I had touched a raw nerve. But I also had messages from readers claiming that I was going overboard — that spam was a nuisance, certainly, but a tolerable one. In vain have I tried to explain that, if unchecked, spam will lead to a tragedy of the digital commons which we will all one day rue. So I was pleased to see that someone else takes it seriously. “On Feb. 18 and 19”, this Business Week piece begins, “e-mail delivery to thousands of AT&T WorldNet customers slowed to a trickle. Some messages took as many as 24 hours to arrive — an eternity in Internet time. The reason? Spam — those irritating, unwanted e-mail messages that clog your in-box hawking everything from hot sex and Viagra to interest-free loans. WorldNet, which processes 15 million to 20 million messages each day, was suddenly besieged by millions of junk e-mail pitches — just as one of its sophisticated anti-spam filters went on the blink. It was the first time that spam brought a large Internet service provider (ISP) to a virtual standstill. “

An intruder broke into the New York Times intranet recently. Not that it was difficult, it seems. He managed to gather all kinds of confidential information about Times op-ed contributors etc. but did no real damage — and alerted the newspaper to the vulnerability he’d been able to exploit. But what if he’d got to the website and subtly altered Times copy? This highlights the risk of what Bruce Schneier calls ‘semantic attacks’. It means that we may need to become more vigilant about what we read online.

More on copy-protected music CDs.

Useful round-up article in today’s New York Times. The story, however, underplayed the computer industry’s hostility to the demands of the copyright thugs. Basically, they are demanding that Congress legislates to ensure that every computing device sold conforms to their requirements — that, in effect, we should have to get a government licence to own a general purpose PC — just as you have to get a licence to own a gun in the UK. The Intel rep (the only tech spokesman available, it seems) pointed out mildly that this would, er, slow down innovation in the computing industry. What he ought to have pointed out to the somnolent legislators is that the computing and technology industries are orders of magnitude more important to the US economy than the recording industry. So legislators will have to decide where their priorities lie — crippling a huge strategic industry in order to feather-bed a smaller one.

Footnote: according to figures published by Salon, the computing industry dwarfs Hollywood in size — US domestic spending on technology goods and services totaled $600 billion in 2000, according to government figures, while Hollywood receipts equaled $35 billion.