Smart Mobs - : Supermarket Cards: Tip of the Retail Surveillance Iceberg

What if everything you bought (and I do mean everything) had an RFID chip installed. These are the grain of rice sized, passive radio devices that contain a unique serial number. Walk into a Gap store wearing some Gap clothing and the store could recognise you as you walked through the door based on the RFID and a match to the transaction record from when you bought it. And then greet you by name and suggest new purchases.

Who needs ID cards when you are tracked by your purchases? [from: JB Ecademy]

Glenn's got a good summary of the state of play in 802.11g here. The Wireless Networking Starter Kit: 802.11g Update (AirPort Extreme, Linksys, Belkin, Buffalo, D-Link)

"We're bullish on 802.11g because it's backwards compatible, and because it doesn't rely on unproven technology. Faster speed at about the same price? Count us in." Couldn't agree more. I reckon that at similar price but 4 times the real speed, G devices will push B devices out of the nest in short order.

I just hope Netstumbler or someone comes up with a sniffer for the new cards. [from: JB Wifi]

Need To Know 2003-01-17 : At time of writing, with over 4000 new responses in one week, we'd estimate it's now something like 80% anti, 20% pro. David Blunkett, who was tipped to announce growing public support for the project at a conference on Wednesday, instead talked of cabinet splits, and "not wanting a revolution" over the proposals. Isn't it always a surprise when you log in to check your inbox after the weekend?

Surprise, surprise. It would seem that all the previous support for ID Cards was whipped up by the suppliers bidding for the project. [from: JB Ecademy]

A Wireless Security Disaster : I couldn't believe my ears. There I was sitting across from a PR representative for a major peripherals manufacturer when, in response to a standard but important wireless networking ease-of-use question, she told me I could find the answer "in our [company's] 70-page manual." Unbelievable. I mean, really. Thanks for nothing. I mean...

Great article berating the manufacturers for making their WiFi APs so damn hard to configure. We get wizards to do almost everything except configure WEP and change the SSID. So it's hardly surprising that so many APs get installed not just wide open but advertizing that they're wide open. The client end is just as bad. Most of the client managers I've seen also make it hard to configure WEP and to connect to whatever hotspot is available in the current area.

And that's before we get into berating them for buggy and broken firmware, driver updates hidden on websites and all too frequent updates.

Come on guys. We've got to do better than this.
[from: JB Wifi]

Just keep clicking on the links. Boing Boing remains my favourite blog by a long way. It's mixture of Whimsy, Sci-Fi, EFF activism and weirdness is the pick me up for a grey January morning. [from: JB Ecademy]

I keep seeing this link around the place.
CNN.com - Phones lose millions of text messages - Jan. 15, 2003 A study in the USA shows that anything up to 7% of SMS text messages there fail to arrive. And if you're on T-Mobile the figure may be more like 14%. I find this absolutely astonishing. Has anyone got figures like these for Europe?

It's also really strange to see news stories about SMS in the USA as if it's something new. But then "adoption of the service has been slower in the United States, where users were not able to send messages to networks other than their own until last year."
[from: JB Ecademy]

We've been having trouble finding a UK supplier for Lucent connectors and Lucent to N-Type pigtails. These are the connectors and short leads to work with the tiny antenna socket on Orinoco, Avaya, Dell, Lucent, Buffalo PCMCIA cards.

If anyone can help source these in the UK, please get in touch. [from: JB Ecademy]

Somebody's photographed streets in London so that you can find the shop when you can't remember it's name. Camden High Street, Camden - shops, bars and restaurants Just down Inverness st between Virgin and Offspring is my favourite Tapas Bar "Bar Ganza". There's another 11 streets on the site with more to come. [from: JB Ecademy]

I've been footling around with FOAF in my spare time ;) and one of the experiments is a FOAFspace navigator.

Based on the work Paul Baranowski did on a FOAF parser for PHP

There's a link to the source which is GPL

It uses a fairly dumb DOM parser

It handles all the Person properties in the http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/ spec but makes only token attempts at handling other RDF

It requires MHASH, XML-DOM, CURL extensions in PHP

Feel free to publicise it. But don't expect it to get fixed or even to be there at any time in the future.

FOAF is an RDF (XML) "standard" for encoding data about people and the links between them. It's very easy to produce but rather harder to read.

FOAF is also a classic example of a web technology with the centralization vs de-centralization problem. Imagine the scene 6 months down the road. centralised sites like Ecademy, Ryze, friends-reunited, friendster, buddynetwork, livejournal etc, etc all publish their internal representations of people and their networks as FOAF RDF. Another few thousand bloggers handcraft FOAF RDF on their sites. Now we've got an incredibly rich cloud of data in a machine readable form on the net. This ought to provide some rich potential for creating tools to exploit that data. Some of those will be client side tools for managing your own copy. Some will be clever server side tools for navigating it. Some will be server side services that take an ASP approach to creating and managing it.

The really fun challenge is going to be building an extension to the Ecademy networking tools that can move outside Ecademy and work across and into FOAF data held by individuals and on other sites.

BTW. If you don't see your name in the network, make sure you have enabled FOAF data exposure in your account settings. [from: JB Ecademy]

Yesterday was the most extraordinary day I've ever seen on Blogdex. For those of you who don't know Blogdex is a site that attempts to track what the Blogging world is currently thinking about and linking to. Yesterday we had two events that have completely dominated the top 25 entries.

1) John Le Carre's piece in the London times that rips into the US Political-Military-Industrial complex already blogged here by Charles. It's controversial and almost guaranteed to excite Americans.

2) The Supreme court's decision (7 to 2) to uphold the Sony Bono Copyright Extension act. The best piece I've seen on this is Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor's eJournal - Supreme Court Endorses Copyright Theft The Supreme Court was deciding not on whther the act was good, but narrowly on whether Congress has the constitutional right to decide the term of copyright. Unfortunately though, the US Congress is so in hock to the entertainment pigopoly that this effectively means they can continue to increase the term indefinitely. Which then incidentally means that Mickey Mouse will never enter the public domain. Lawrence Lessig's essentially private one man battle against the Entertainment Complex captured the imagination of the blogging world. This turned the fight into one with a real sense of Us and Them; where Us is the humble customer and Them is the faceless monster trying to separate us from our money and using every technique available to them regardless of any moral view. So we've felt the loss personally although nothing like what Lessig must feel.

But as Doc Searls says "It's a long road, but we are a powerful and growing group. Here's Larry again:
But if there is any good that might come from my loss, let it be the anger and passion that now gets to swell against the unchecked power that the Supreme Court has said Congress has. When the Free Software Foundation, Intel, Phillis Schlafly, Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase, Kenneth Arrow, Brewster Kahle, and hundreds of creators and innovators all stand on one side saying, "this makes no sense," then it makes no sense. Let that be enough to move people to do something about it. Our courts will not.
In any statement with a "but" in the middle, what matters is what comes after it.
Larry's done a helluva job leading this thing. Now more than ever, the rest of us are still behind him.
Let's move on." [from: JB Ecademy]

There's a pretty extensive review here of one fo the first 802.11g Access Point's . Tom's Hardware Guide Networking: Buffalo Technology WBR-G54 AirStation 54Mbps Broadband Router

The firewall looks comparable to other combo boxes on the market. And it looks like there's almost enough power here to allow safe home bandwidth sharing to guests with some fiddly setup.

Anyway, here's the bottom line.

802.11g is a pretty impressive technical feat, and is currently capable of producing maximum usable throughput of around 20Mbps. But it appears that this first implementation has a "throughput hopping" "feature," which cyclically moves the maximum throughput down to 12Mbps -- a 40% drop. I suspect that this "feature" will be common to all Broadcom-based products, but since I haven't yet seen the Linksys products, I can't say for sure.

The first bullet reinforces my point that there will be a number of firmware releases between now and a stable, standards-compatible product. Anyone buying now should be prepared to deal with debugging and performing multiple firmware upgrades.

Although there is no guarantee that any draft 802.11g product will conform to the 802.11g spec when it is finally released toward the beginning of Q2 2003, it's a reasonably sure bet that you won't end up having to junk your draft-11g products and buy new stuff when the standard is released. But I'd like to see draft-11g manufacturers provide the missing guarantee, so that consumers don't get stuck holding products that don't work, come mid 2003. It looks like BuffaloTech is stepping up to the plate on this
[from: JB Wifi]

An attempt at the Top 100 weblogs based on the number of incoming links to each one.

So how many of these do you read every day?

This came from an interesting article which reviewed 2002 and predicts 2003 based on types of information encoded in bits. [from: JB Ecademy]

Golden Shield v1.0 | Beijing Blocking Blogspot Corporations and the Development of Surveillance Technology in the People's Republic of China, "China's Golden Shield", Greg Walton

It looks like China is blocking all blogs on the popular blogspot system.

So Blogs are now officially politically dangerous.

Of course it could never happen here. [from: JB Ecademy]

UK ID card consultation : Hands up everybody who's really excited about the introduction of universal Identity Cards for every man, woman and child in the country!

As you've all still got your hands down, wander over to the site above and make your voice heard. [from: JB Ecademy]

Warchalking goes official with an industry body that wants to promote WiFi hotspots with and official looking logo.Wi-Fi ZONE Overview

They should just use chalk, right? [from: JB Wifi]

This is so sad. Oolong, the most famous rabbit in the world, has passed away to that great rabbit hutch in the sky.

Oolong was mostly famous for being able to balance small objects on his head (such as biscuits or pancakes) while his Japanese owner took very high quality photographs of the tableau for publication on their website.

Rest In Peace - Oolong [from: JB Ecademy]

Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor's eJournal - Defining Broadband in Only One Direction : Implicit in this story, and the attitudes of the reporter and the companies mentioned, is the idea that broadband is solely about the delivery of "content" to consumers. This is little more than television, updated for online.

Think for a moment about BT's recent broadband adverts on TV. The implication is that huge quantities of stuff can be found on the internet and downloaded to you. We should take note of the last few frames where the guy says "Get Back In The Pipe!". I'm just as interested in stuffing huge quantities of stuff up the pipe as sipping from the firehose of stuff coming down.

So why do we get so much less bandwidth upstream compared with down? And why do the Broadband ISPs put so many restrictions on what we can send upstream? Is it (as Gilmor suggests) just a matter of control? [from: JB Ecademy]

OpenP2P.com: LazyWeb and RSS: Given Enough Eyeballs, Are Features Shallow Too? [Jan. 07, 2003]

Did you ever have a programming idea that "should exist"? And you didn't worry about making money from it. You just wanted it to exist? The Lazyweb is an idea from Matt Jones whereby you just publish the idea and hope some programmer somewhere picks up on it and decides it's an itch they want to scratch. The problem is the connection one of getting the idea in front of likely programmers. So now Ben Hammersley has created the Lazyweb blog. And with all the lovely bloggy goodness of RSS, trackback, weblogs.com and so on, lots of people can keep in touch with the latest lazyweb requests. [from: JB Ecademy]

This has already been blogged on the main Ecademy site but I'd like to bring out one piece here as well. Shirky: Customer-owned Networks and ZapMail : The wireless ISPs are likely to fare no better. Most people do their computing at home or at work, and deploying WiFi to those two areas will cost at worst a couple hundred dollars, assuming no one to split the cost with. There may be a small business in wiring "third places" -- coffee shops, hotels, and meeting rooms -- but that will be a marginal business at best. WiFi is the new fax machine, a huge value for consumers that generates little new revenue for the phone companies. And, like the fax network, the WiFi extension to the internet will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but it will not be built by a few companies with deep pockets. It will be built by millions of individual customers, a hundred bucks at a time.

This looks like a great opportunity and I'm a firm believer in the social benefits of having a very large number of privately owned hotspots that freely share their internet access for little or no money. To get there we need a number of changes.
- More ISPs that allow sharing in their AUPs. Right now most ISPs seem to have accepted that people should be able to run LANs on the end of broadband. Reluctantly they are accepting that these LANs may be WLANs but they still have wordage that prohibits sharing with people outside your house, while providing no guidance on how to control this. For this and other reasons we need to shift them to a model where they don't care what the line is used for.
- Either the WAP manufacturers, the big software suppliers, new software ventures or the community software writers need to come up with packages of software and hardware that make sharing safe for guests, AP ownwers and the ISPs. At the moment, it's way to easy to simply leave an AP wide open unless you know exactly what you're doing. We need to make it easy for home AP owners to make a conscious, deliberate decision to provide free bandwidth in a safe and secure way.
- Culturally we need to get away from the idea that using bandwidth you find out there on the road is "stealing". If you find available bandwidth you should be able to use it without wondering if you should or not. In the current climate there are legal, moral and ethical issues with this.
- There's still enormous potential in mesh networking APs together into a cloud of connectivity that runs in parallel with the internet and connects to it at multiple points. But at the moment this is a pipe dream with no implementation.
- This is all too horribly anarchic and bottom up for some governments to accept. We can expect the existing entrenched interests to take advantage of this to lobby governments to outlaw some aspects of this. To some extent we can do nothing but hope that there are enough enlightened politicians to see the danger of excessive legislation in this area. The recent suggestions from the US that open WiFi is a threat to Homeland Security don't bode well in this area.

So I believe that in the long term, Clay is right and I share his vision. But in the short term, boy there's a lot of work to do. And there's an awful lot of points where the existing entrenched interests can de-rail it. WLANs will indeed be built a hundred bucks at a time in very large numbers. Whether they're available for guest use and so represent an alternative to the Telcos is another matter entirely. [from: JB Wifi]

Fortune.com - Technology - Making Pay Phones Pay : Making Pay Phones Pay by converting public pay phones into terminals for "Wi-Fi" Internet connections.

Last year BT OpenZone asked Ecademy for ideas for Hotspot locations. Several of us came up with the idea of converting BT pay phones and internet kiosks into WiFi hotspots for all the same reasons. These sites already have power, connectivity and solid hardware boxes to protect equipment. Converting the phone line into an ADSL line should be trivial. If you can reduce the size of a hotspot WAP and control hardware to a small black box and a small omni antenna that can be stuck on the roof then creating a hotspot should become trivial and cheap. As the article points out, the downside of course is the business model. There's no there, there to charge for providing the service so the internet access has to stand on it's own. If the public hotspot providers are serious about rolling out large numbers of access points, then this approach looks like a complete no-brainer. But if all they want to do is fleece business customers when they are a captive audience stuck in a hotel, conference, station or airport, then it's not going to happen. [from: JB Wifi]