We're getting a burst of activity from people who want to meet up locally with other Ecademy members. I know I'm going to miss somebody out, but here's some of the things going on now.

Bristol
Dave Hodgkinson
Club
Next Event 30 Jan

Essex
Sunil Prabhu
Club
Next Event 18 Feb

Midlands
Donato Esposito
Club
Next Event 11 Mar

Sussex Downs
David Rosam and Ben Davidson
Club
Next Event 18 Feb

Glasgow
Andrew Poodle
Club

High Wycombe
Bruce Wallace
Club

East Midlands
Michael Handley

Some comments:

If you're in the area, please support these people. Join their clubs, attend the events and invite others to do the same.

If you're going to an event, invite some non-Ecademy people as well

If you'd like to see something happening near you, start a club, post a blog to advertise it and see what happens.
[from: JB Ecademy]

This just in.

Open Content public swarming download net launches Justin Chapaweske, who developed SwarmCast (a "swarming" parallel download tech) for OpenCola, has started a new company that's building on his work, called Onion Networks. Onion's tech turns the Slashdot effect into a cooperative effort, where everyone downloading a popular file becomes a host of part of the file, so that the more popular a file is, the easier it is to get. To show off Onion's stuff, he's started the Open Content network, which allows the whole world to put its popular, high-demand files into the mesh to make 'em easier to download. Link  [thanks, Boing Boing Blog]

My highlight. This is one of those technologies and approaches that Cory calls "Sheep shitting grass". And one aspect of this is that upstream bandwidth from your home PC ought to be just as important as downstream. [from: JB Ecademy]

Found on alt.internet.wireless, Michael Erskine has posted a brief Locustworld Review Here's the bottom line.

---

All in all I would suggest this unit as an alternative to a commercial
AP for anyone who has an old laptop or 486 PC sitting around. It
looks to me like the data on the link between the WET-11 and the
Locust network is probably not encrypted. Certain data on the Locust
network is encrypted but not all data. I have not dumped the wireless
traffic and probably won't for some time. This is a very nice self
annealing, mesh network that has some very interesting possible
applications. Range is no more an issue with this hardware than with
standard AP's given the right card, and external antenna this unit
will achive the same ranges as any AP can achieve. The unit has been
running all night. The links are still up. I have not run heavy
traffic thru it and have not tried to test performance. The locust
network is based upon Linux and once again Linux demonstrates complete
mastery of the state of the art in networking.

Bottom line, this is an AWESOME bit of software. Is it ready for
prime time? My test was not extensive enough, but my suspicion is
that it IS ready for prime time, at least his release hardware, and
that this technology will greatly facilitate the creation of AdHoc
community networks which will be able to share MULTIPLE gateways and
thus ***AGGREGATE AVAILABLE GATEWAY BANDWITDH*** in those networks.

Sweet. Very nice work Jon. Very nice.
[from: JB Wifi]

More Links from the Pico Peering Site | The Wireless Commons Pico Peering is an approach to agreements between nodes in a free network to formalise the sharing of resources and the passing of packets between nodes. See also the Pico Peering WiKi.

See also some of Todd's pieces such as this one that argue for an economic basis for sharing between nodes in a free network. [from: JB Wifi]

I don't think I need to add anythig to this. Read it and weep!

Moore's Law + Good Ideas = Democracy FaxYourMP, an amazingly effective tool that lets Brits slashdot their Members of Parliament (and has been instrumental in killing the RIP Act and the national ID card campaign) is run off an aging server in someone's spare room in a London flat. Yesterday, the flat's ceiling caved in, and Yoz had to drive around London to get the government back up and running. Holy crap. Just imagine that. Some code, a good meme, DSL, and a few hundred bucks' worth of hardware adds up to a tool that moves governments. I am agog. Also, the flat they relocated the machine to is one that I crashed in last June, while Richard "GNU" Stallman was crashing in the flat below (a total, mind-croggling coincidence). I configured the WiFi router. There are some really hot politico-nerds in London, and no doubt about it. Link Discuss [thanks, Boing Boing Blog] [from: JB Ecademy]

JD Lasica has got a great article out about using RSS to read more news quicker. If you're not already reading your news via RSS, then take a look at this because firstly, you can never be too well informed, and secondly RSS is the most successful XML format and the richest source of web services out there.

But JDL went and broke all the normal journalism rules with this article. He's published complete transcripts of all the interviews he did while researching it. The two pieces together represent a very interesting experiment and approach to Journalism.

They point out a truth that the research, notes and tape recording, combine with the resulting raw article which is then further refined by sub-editors and finally given an abstract and headline. If there's a photo attached then that is likely to be just one of hundreds of photos that were considered.

Wouldn't be interesting if you could click through mainstream articles and see all this? Now given that modern journalism works almost entirely in the digital domain, exposing all this is a question of code and storage space. And of course it leads to difficult questions about privacy, copyright and confidentiality. [from: JB Ecademy]

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]