Long-Distance Wi-Fi

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Hmmm… This looks promising for those of us interested in ICT for development…

Intel has announced plans to sell a specialized Wi-Fi platform later this year that can send data from a city to outlying rural areas tens of miles away, connecting sparsely populated villages to the Internet. The wireless technology, called the rural connectivity platform (RCP), will be helpful to computer-equipped students in poor countries, says Jeff Galinovsky, a senior platform manager at Intel. And the data rates are high enough–up to about 6.5 megabits per second–that the connection could be used for video conferencing and telemedicine, he says.

The RCP, which essentially consists of a processor, radios, specialized software, and an antenna, is an appealing way to connect remote areas that otherwise would go without the Internet, says Galinovsky. Wireless satellite connections are expensive, he points out. And it’s impractical to wire up some villages in Asian and African countries. “You can’t lay cable,” he says. “It’s difficult, expensive, and someone is going to pull it up out of the ground to sell it.”

Already, Intel has installed and tested the hardware in India, Panama, Vietnam, and South Africa. Later this year, the company will sell the device in India, with a target price below $500. The point-to-point technology will require two nodes, which could provide “full back-end infrastructure” for less than $1,000, Galinovsky says.

One node is usually installed at the edge of an urban area, wired to a local-area network cable, he explains. Using a directional antenna, the device shoots data to a receiving antenna as far as 60 miles away. Any farther away, and the system encounters problems due to the curvature of the earth. Practically, most links will be set up less than 30 miles away from one another. Once a node is installed in a village, the connection can be dispersed using standard cables and wireless routers, Galinovsky says.

Anthony Minghella RIP

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Rats! A great talent snatched away…

Anthony Minghella has died aged 54.

Minghella’s films included The English Patient – which earned him an Oscar for best director in 1997 – as well as Truly, Madly, Deeply and Cold Mountain.

He had an operation for a growth in his neck last week and the operation seemed to have gone well. But he had a fatal haemorrhage at 0500 GMT on Monday…

The English Patient was one of the best films I’ve ever seen.

Tim Berners-Lee on Phorm

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From BBC NEWS…

The creator of the web has said consumers need to be protected against systems which can track their activity on the internet.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee told BBC News he would change his internet provider if it introduced such a system.

Plans by leading internet providers to use Phorm, a company which tracks web activity to create personalised adverts, have sparked controversy.

Sir Tim said he did not want his ISP to track which websites he visited.

“I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that’s not going to get to my insurance company and I’m going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5% because they’ve figured I’m looking at those books,” he said.

Sir Tim said he did not want his ISP to track which websites he visited.

He said: “It’s mine – you can’t have it. If you want to use it for something, then you have to negotiate with me. I have to agree, I have to understand what I’m getting in return.”

Obama

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From Andrew Sullivan

I see no clear reason why the Michigan and Florida primaries should be re-done. Why should a party switch the rules halfway through a game? If Clinton were ahead by the amount Obama is, no one would give the argument for a re-do any credence. Just because the Clintons do not believe the rules ever apply to them, we don’t have to acquiesce to their self-serving arguments.

Obama has essentially won this thing already. He should use the next few weeks to demonstrate what a tough campaigner he can be; to broaden his appeal as he has done in every major primary as the campaign has gone on. The good news about the kitchen sink is that you can only throw it once. He just won Wyoming after being battered by a barrage of negativism and refusing to throw a much larger kitchen sink back. He should now focus on Mississippi. And on reality.

The Clintons just got into our heads. We need to get them out. Keep going; keep focused; remind people why only Obama can provide change in a way the Clintons never have and never will.

The longer this thing goes on, the more I dislike Hillary Clinton.

Tony Dye RIP

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Tony Dye, the only fund manager to talk sense during the first Internet bubble, has died. He withdrew his clients’ money from techbubble shares and put it into real companies and cash. For which service he was duly, er, retired. David Livesey pointed me at a generous obit in the Telegraph.

In March 2000, with the FTSE index at 6,400 and with Dye’s clients estimated to have lost some £8.5 billion in potential bull market gains, P&D finally lost patience. It was announced that Dye had taken “early retirement”. By this time the firm’s funds under management had fallen from £60 billion to less than £35 billion.

But Dye was – albeit belatedly – proved right. Within a month of his departure, and before P&D had had the chance to change its strategy, the stock market turned. Internet and telecom shares plunged, and the firm found itself rocketing from the bottom to the top of the pension fund performance tables.

The irony was that the hundreds of fund managers who had followed the herd and been proved disastrously wrong kept their jobs, while Dye paid the price for his independence of mind. Yet he remained philosophical, taking wry comfort from Keynes’s observation that “worldy wisdom teaches that it is better to fail conventionally than it is to succeed unconventionally”.

The Phorm letter

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The Foundation for Information Policy Research has written an Open Letter to the Information Commissioner on the legality of Phorm’s advertising system. FIPR has also issued a Press Release which says, in part:

The controversial Phorm system is to be deployed by three of Britain’s largest ISPs, BT, Talk Talk and Virgin Media. However, in FIPR’s view the system will be processing data illegally:

* It will involve the processing of sensitive personal data: political opinions, sexual proclivities, religious views, and health — but it will not be operated by all of the ISPs on an “opt-in” basis, as is required by European Data Protection Law.
* Despite the attempts at anonymisation within the system, some people will remain identifiable because of the nature of their searches and the sites they choose to visit.
* The system will inevitably be looking at the content of some people’s email, into chat rooms and at social networking activity. Although well-known sites are said to be excluded, there are tens or hundreds of thousands of other low volume or semi-private systems.

More significantly, the Phorm system will be “intercepting” traffic within the meaning of s1 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA). In order for this to be lawful then permission is needed from not only the person making the web request BUT ALSO from the operator of the web site involved (and if it is a web-mail system, the sender of the email as well).

FIPR believes that although in some cases this permission can be assumed, in many other cases, it is explicitly NOT given — making the Phorm system illegal to operate in the UK:

* Many websites require registration, and only make their contents available to specific people.
* Many websites or particular pages within a website are part of the “unconnected web” — their existence is only made known to a small number of trusted people.

The full text of the open letter is here.

Bear Stuffed

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Charles Arthur has come up with an inspired analogy for the sub-prime credit syndrome

But here’s the thing: all the reselling and leveraging of debt, in some cases producing up to $60 of “debt” from $1 of assets (and those assets not always too certain – how much is a house worth? Only what you can get someone to pay for it), was a way of feeding back into the system things that were already contaminated.

Which reminds me of the story that I covered in great detail in the late 1990s and early 2000s: BSE. Cows, fed ground-up cows. Any trace of disease (especially a brain-rotting one, which may have been endemic) gets transmitted throughout the (thundering) herd.

BSE turned out to be very, very hard indeed to eradicate – I’m not sure it’s gone away even now. (I’ll check the stats in a bit.) I think that the financial BSE in the system now is going to prove just as hard to get rid of; only when you flush all the crap that the banks have been feeding each other out of the system can you be sure it’s OK. And how long exactly will that take?

Going phishing

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Aw, isn’t this sweet. My bank is anxious to safeguard my account.

It’s nice that they appreciate my ‘bunsiness’. And amazing that people fall for this stuff. But they do. They should take our course.

Detecting PhotoShopped fraud

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Interesting research by Micah Kimo Johnson at MIT. Abstract:

The compositing of two or more people into a single image is a common form of manipulation. We describe how such composites can be detected by estimating a camera’s intrinsic parameters from the image of a person’s eyes. Differences in these parameters across the image are used as evidence of tampering.

Full paper (pdf) here.