Guy Kewney writes in The Register a much better article than I can about Locustworld.

Very interested in his comments about Oftel. "was the decision by Oftel, allowing people to share their broadband with up to 20 others." Is this saying what I think it's saying that Broadband providers (presumably BT) are required to allow their customers to share with 20 other people?

The second interesting option is where two or more ADSL lines are shared among a mesh of two or more mesh nodes. So now my neighbour and I can each get ADSL and share it between us and with the people across the street. So then we can all have occasional 1Mb access instead of each having 512Kb. [from: JB Wifi]

I've made some small changes to the display layout of the weblogs.

This is mainly to support "Trackbacks". If this means nothing to you then you can ignore it but if you run your own weblog you may recognise the concept. If you're posting a blog entry about a post you've seen on someone else's weblog (Either on Ecademy or elsewhere), look for a link called Trackback URL or something similar and drop it into the trackback field in the form. Ecademy will then ping the weblog to tell them we've commented on them and Ecademy will turn up in a list somewhere.

Conversely, if someone with a trackback enabled blog writes something about a post on Ecademy, they can use our trackback URL to ping us and their post will turn up in a new list on Ecademy.

If you've got any comments or suggestions about the function and layout, feel free to email me. [from: JB Ecademy]

Nice to see the Linksys NTL Promotion. Where NTL is pushing Linksys wired and wireless Wifi networking products to NTL cable Broadband subscribers. The actual deal is being provided via Global Direct.

What amuses me is that there is nothing on the site about security or the effect on NTL's AUP which says that you may not share with computers outside your house or that you do not own.

Couldn't help laughing at the photo here. Dad is wearing an office shirt and tie at home. 7 year old and 10 year old sons are messing with his laptop while teenage Big Sis looks thoroughly fed up and appears to be making a sandwich only inches away. But then as Big Sis has no tattoos or interesting piercings maybe Dad got lucky and it's actually Mum. Ah, bless. The joys of the well connected nuclear family as seen by marketing. [from: JB Wifi]

Jabber now has > 3m users and over 100,000 servers deployed according to Jabber News

This is still a long way behind MSN, AIM, Y! but it's getting there. Impressive for what is a completely open protocol and system with a de-centralized server approach.
[from: JB Ecademy]

I've been looking at what LocustWorld are up to. Where it starts is some Linux software that does adaptive mesh networking over WIFi. Take a general purpose PC with a WiFi card installed and their Linux image on CD-rom turns the box into a WiFi AP that talks to other similar devices to build a mesh network of APs. Now they've taken this and applied it to a cut down PC box for £250 that turns the whole thing into a plug and play Mesh networking AP. The box is fanless and diskless and runs the entire Linux OS and software from Flash memory. The latest version has all your favourite Linux software pre-installed so as well as being an AP, it also has X, browsers, ssl, ssh, and so on.

What this means in the real world is that you can scatter a few of these round a village with Omni or directional antennas. Connect one of them to an Internet line and then cover a wide area with WiFi access.

But this approach got me to thinking. All the current APs from the WiFi vendors and especially those with built in gateways, NAT, firewalls and Ethernet switches are built on proprietary hardware. I think I'm right in saying that there are no SDK or API available for independent developers to produce customised firmware. So each vendor has to write or contract out there own software development. And so as customers we're stuck in an endless cycle of buggy firmware and upgrades.

Now imagine that a vendor came out with a box somewhat like the Locustworld Meshbox but with a 4 port Ethernet switch built in and a PCMCIA slot for a WiFi card or two. As with Locustworld, the software could be built on Linux with all our favourite Linux tools and utilities. Now we've got the ability to start including NoCat for bandwidth sharing, IPTables for NAT and routing but mostly, the ability for other Linux developers to start building interesting applications on top of this. Meanwhile the vendor has avoided having to maintain and produce the software. And with replaceable WiFi cards, the whole device is future proofed from changes in WiFi standards (such as moves from b to a/g). In fact these cards could be cut down and more of their processing offloaded onto the PC as has been suggested by Intel. With some general purpose processing on board we can also link into more complex authentication schemes such as PEAP simply by loading new software.

So how about it, Cisco, Netgear, Linksys, Buffalo, D-Link, Avaya et al? When are you going to get out of the AP business and into the Linux driven, custom PC optimised for WiFi, business? [from: JB Wifi]

ZDNet |UK| - News - Wireless - Story - Starbucks keeps up Wi-Fi rollout : The company has installed wireless local area networks (WLANs) at four more stores. Three are located in London -- at Farringdon, Fenchurch Street and Soho's Wardour Street -- and one on Colmore Row, Birmingham.

And still free, at least for the moment. [from: JB Wifi]

There's another Anti-War march coming up on Feb 15. Having been on the last one I'm thinking seriously about doing my bit again. But I'm very uncomfortable with the company I'd be keeping. No matter how much you stretch your imagination, I'm not left wing let alone the extreme left wing that always turns up to these things. Neither am I a crufty old CND fanatic. I'm not pro-Intifada or pro-Palestinian. I'm not necessarily pro-Iraqi regime change unless that's the only way to get human rights improved in Iraq. I'm not Anti-American. I'm not automatically anti-globalization although I'm also not pro some of the things that global companies do around the world. I'm not a Guardian reader.

I just don't believe that War and killing people changes anything and apart from a very, very few instances there are better alternatives to improving any particular situation.

And I'm deeply suspicious of the real motivations of Bush and Blair in this case.

And I'm fairly sure I'm not alone in this.

So how do I stand up, be counted and make my voice heard without being lumped in with the list of loonies above?

Maybe it's time to start a campaign.

"Ordinary, reasonably well adjusted, reasonably well off, reasonably well informed, reasonably intelligent, middle class people, against the War".

The other belief I have is that War is bad for business. Not for the War industries of course, but for the average Joe who suffers the resulting recession, tax increases and divertion of attention from more immediate and local problems with schools, health, the fire service and so on. So here's the other banner.

Capitalists against the War [from: JB Ecademy]

WirelessReport - Opinion & Editorial - Uncommon Markets: T-Mobile's elusive Starbucks exclusive

Interesting analysis of what happens when a high priced "business" Wifi hotspot is next door to a low priced or free community WiFi service. This particularly affects T-Mobile with Starbucks and BT Openzone with Costa as coffee shops tend to be in densely populated areas with several competitors in the near vicinity. In the UK, hotspot density is nowhere near enough for us to have hit this problem yet. However, I've sat in the Starbucks at the Tottenham court road end of Oxford St and used the free WiFi access from the Internet kiosk just up the road, so it is real.

In the long run, I don't believe that the business rates being charged by T-Mobile, Megabeam and BT Openzone are sustainable if and when creating a hotspot becomes a pure commodity business. But even in the short run, they may not be acceptable unless they really do have a captive audience. And that's the business traveller that is stuck in an expenses paid Hotel or at an airport with no other alternative. [from: JB Wifi]

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]