Mute but moving

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Every day, for as long as I can remember, there’s been a lone Falun Gong demonstrator outside the Chinese Embassy in Portland Place. Here is this morning’s protestor. It’s an impressive, quiet display — all the more so when you see someone sitting motionless in the freezing cold for hours on end. Meanwhile virtually every UK university and FTSE company is sending people to China, touting for business like tarts on the road from Milan airport. And of course Google China (and Yahoo and MSN) block access to search results for ‘Falun Gong’.

Wearing iPods in public to be outlawed?

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From wcbstv.com

First it was cell phones in cars, then trans fats. Now, a new plan is on the table to ban gadget use while crossing city streets.

We all seem to have one — an iPod, a BlackBerry, a cell phone — taking up more and more of our time, but can they make us too distracted to walk safely? Some people think so.

If you use them in the crosswalk, your favorite electronic devices could be in the crosshairs.

Legislation will be introduced in Albany on Wednesday to lay a $100 fine on pedestrians succumbing to what State Sen. Carl Kruger calls iPod oblivion.

“We’re talking about people walking sort of tuned in and in the process of being tuned in, tuned out,” Kruger said. “Tuned out to the world around them. They’re walking into speeding cars. They’re walking into buses. They’re walking into one another and it’s creating a number of fatalities that have been documented right here in the city.”

Pedestrians have been hurt and killed in the manner Kruger describes. Not surprisingly, though, iPod users are less than thrilled with the senator’s proposal…

Hmmm…. I’ve written about this phenomenon before, musing on the way the iPod has redefined the notion of social space.

Joyce and Beckett below par

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Hilarious film short imagining James Joyce and Samuel Beckett having (well, actually, not having) a game of golf. Funded by the Irish Film Board (Bórd Scannán na hEireann ) and not for those of delicate sensibilities.

Who was it who defined golf as “a good walk spoiled”?

Later… Just wondering what their respective handicaps would be. Joyce’s would be that he talked too much; Beckett’s that he talked too little.

Thanks to Gerard for the link.

Picture of the day

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Lovely panoramic image…

On January 26, people from Perth, Australia gathered on a local beach to watch a sky light up with delights near and far. Nearby, fireworks exploded as part of Australia Day celebrations. On the far right, lightning from a thunderstorm flashed in the distance. Near the image center, though, seen through clouds, was the most unusual sight of all: Comet McNaught. The photogenic comet was so bright that it even remained visible though the din of Earthly flashes. Comet McNaught continues to move out from the Sun and dim, but should remain visible in southern skies with binoculars through the end of this month.

Thanks to James Miller for the link.

Mesh networking: another disruptive technology

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Jon Hannibal Stokes has a thoughtful piece on ArsTechnica about Meraki Networks, a start-up which is commercialising networking technology that emerged from the MIT Roofnet project.

In a nutshell, MIT’s Roofnet allows people in and around Central Square in Cambridge to gang together their wireless access points into a kind of wireless cloud that anyone with a WiFi device can access if they’re in range. There are some specifics I’m leaving out—you have to use a particular model of router, and you have to sign up for the program—but you get the general idea.

There are two ways to participate in Roofnet as a wireless access provider: as a node on the mesh, or as a gateway. If you participate as a node, then all you do is put the right model of wireless router running the right software in your window and turn it on. The router connects to other, nearby wireless routers, and it routes packets for the network and acts as an access point for end users. Of course, there have to be wired connections providing Internet connectivity somewhere in the mesh, and that’s where the gateways come in. If you participate in Roofnet as a gateway, then you’re sharing your own personal cable or DSL bandwidth with the rest of the network.

Meraki Networks plans to commercialize this mesh network model by offering a small, cheap ($50) wireless router, the Meraki Mini, that comes pre-loaded with the mesh network software. You can use the Mini to launch your own wireless network by just plugging it into your own broadband connection. The Mini’s software lets you do traffic monitoring and shaping, branding, and billing, so that you’re essentially reselling the bandwidth of a company like Comcast or AT&T. (Yeah, the telcos are gonna love that idea, but more on that in a moment.) Other users with Minis can connect to your router and extend the network outwards, choosing to participate as nodes or as gateways. With enough of these devices, you could cover a whole apartment building, or a whole block, with wireless… that is, if they don’t step on each other.

As Stokes points out, there are lots of interesting potential problems here. Some are technical — e.g. what happens when the mesh becomes very dense and interference starts to become a real problem? But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to spot the other, more intractable, problems.

As for the legal challenges, everyone from the federal government to the RIAA to your broadband provider are going to want a piece of you the moment you hang out an ISP shingle and start billing customers. Will you be obliged to comply with CALEA if you choose to route VoIP traffic? Will your (quasi?) official status as an “ISP” grant you immunity to RIAA lawsuits while making you the target of subpoenas instead? Is Comcast really going to sit still while the number of wired Internet connections in an apartment block drops by half or more, with their remaining customers acting as competition by reselling Comcast’s own bandwidth to former customers?

Of course, not all ISPs are like Comcast and Verizon, which forbid sharing your wireless connection with others. Speakeasy, for instance, actively encourages their users to share their connection with the public. I think ISPs could get creative and ask for a cut of the proceeds that users get from reselling bandwidth, in effect making their end users authorized bandwidth resellers. But that idea makes sense, and when it comes to anything that smells of “P2P” and “grassroots,” rationality rarely prevails in the boardroom.

There’s an extra angle to this in the UK, in that I think that it’s actually illegal under the provisions of one of the Communications Acts for an ordinary person to sell bandwidth. (I can freely share my wireless network with my neighbour, but I couldn’t sell him airtime.)

Of course the guys who set up Meraki know all this, which is where the interesting bit comes in. The NYT reports that Google and Sequoia Capital have invested in the company.

Stay tuned.

Magnatune Records

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John Buckman explains Why I created Magnatune Records…

# Radio is boring: everyone I know is into interesting music, yet good music is rarely played on the air. I’m into everything from Ambient, Industrial, Goth, Metal to Renaissance, Baroque, Tango, Indian Classical and New Age (and many other genres!), and so are many of my friends. Yet, these genres are barely visible in record stores, and totally absent from the airwaves. Radio is mostly about Country, Pop, and Rock, with a little bit of dull, safe classical thrown in.

# CDs cost too much, and artists only get 20 cents to a dollar for each CD sold. If they’re lucky. And, most CDs quickly go out of print: I buy more CDs from EBay than Amazon.

# Online sales (such as over Amazon.com) often cost the artist 50% of their already-pathetic royalty (due to a common record contract provision). International sales and mark-downs often net the artist no royalties.
# Record labels lock their artists into legal agreements that hold them for a decade or more. If it’s not working out, labels don’t print the band’s recordings but nonetheless keep them locked into the contract, forcing them to produce new albums each year. Even hugely successful artists often end up owing their record label money.

# Napster, Gnutella and Kazaa proved that people love music, and they want to share it. Lawsuits may shut Kazaa down (and Kazaa obviously promotes copyright violation), just as Napster was shut down. Clearly there’s a huge public demand for Open Music.

# Using the Internet to listen to music is usually tedious: there are too many ads, too many clicks, and the sound quality is usually bad. It’s too much work, not enough reward. A well run Internet radio station (such as Shoutcast, or Spinner) solves that, but the entrenched record industry wants to kill that too, with onerous licensing terms and odd “rights limited” playback schemes.

# I read this article by Courtney Love six months after starting Magnatune, and was stunned by how much I have in common with her vision and understanding of the music business. And, she’s much more eloquent than I am.

And his solution?

# I thought: why not make a record label that has a clue? That helps artists get exposure, make at least as much money they would make with traditional labels, and help them get fans and concerts.
# Magnatune is my project. The goal is to find a way to run a record label in the Internet Reality: file trading, Internet Radio, musicians’ rights, the whole nine-yards.

Good stuff. Interesting site. Smart guy.

A new approach to identity management?

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From Technology Review…

As more services migrate online, and as tactics of identity thieves become more sophisticated, people will need better ways to manage their information, says Nataraj Nagaratnam, chief architect of identity management for IBM Tivoli.

Nagaratnam and other IBM researchers have developed open-source software that they think can help. Called Identity Mixer (Idemix), the digital identity management software lets people make online transactions–from filling out forms to purchasing plane tickets–without disclosing personal information. The software lets a person use artificial identity information, in the form of digital “tokens,” to make online transactions. Using these encrypted tokens, which are issued by trusted sources such as the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) or a bank, a person can effectively be anonymous to Web services such as Amazon.com or Expedia, never giving out his or her information.

In a typical online purchase, Idemix could obviate the need for a person to fill out a form or reveal her credit-card number. Instead, she could use a token that vouches for her, verifying that she is who she says she is and that she has the appropriate funds and credit to make a purchase.

In addition, these tokens would provide only the information that is needed. For instance, if you’re renting a car online and need to verify that you’re older than 25, a token from the DMV could verify that you can legitimately rent without divulging your birth date, license number, or address. Otherwise, you reveal more than you need to about yourself, says John Clippinger, senior fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. “It’s like using a passport when you buy a Coke.”

Politicians and technology: oil and water

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This morning’s Observer column…

When New Labour came to power it was terribly gung-ho about IT, which it equated with modernity, and there was a lot of pious vapouring about e-business and making Britain ‘the best place in the world’ in which to do it. Much of this rhetoric was emitted by one Anthony Blair, who spoke about these matters with the sublime ignorance with which teenage boys lecture one another on sexual technique. But then it emerged one day that the Prime Minister had tried to order flowers for Cherie over the internet and had made a hash of it. There was much sniggering in Daily Telegraph circles when this became public. So in best New Labour spin-doctoring style, it was decided to turn the gaffe into an opportunity, and Blair enrolled for an ‘IT for beginners’ course, accompanied by the usual horde of minders and TV crews…

Tools for thought

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Computers are all very well but when there’s some serious thinking to be done, A3 paper and a pen are the things I reach for first. The only computing tools that help at this stage are outliners (like OmniOutliner and Dave Winer’s incomparable More 3.0 of blessed memory), Mind-mapping software (like Novamind), the Stickies (virtual post-it notes) program that comes with OS X and a very nice journal program called Journler.

Photographed in my university office during a particularly baffling day recently.