One of the best sound bite analyses of the recent O'Reilly Emergent Tech conference. WERBLOG

1. Contrary to popular belief, innovation hasn't stopped. There are exceptionally exciting technologies and companies out there. Some are solving new problems, while others have new approaches for big old problems that haven't gone away. Why did we ever think the NASDAQ index was a proxy for the health of the technology industry?

2. The exciting innovations are inter-related, in ways we don't yet have words for. Social software, Weblogs, rich Internet applications, Web services, unlicensed wireless, grid computing, digital identity, broadband media. We keep seeing more connections pop up everywhere. I believe decentralization is the most useful prism with which to understand these developments, but it's not the only one.

3. We're experiencing a generational shift. "Yesterday" now means the emergence of the Web, not the PC industry. It's time for a new crop of innovators, leaders, and conferences. Of course, some of those who grew up in the prior era will make the transition and offer their valuable experience. But the reference points have changed.

My highlight. [from: JB Ecademy]

Quoted in it's entirety. Here's some antidote to the Register and Guy Kewney's downbeat comments about Westminster Council's plans to roll out WiFi across Soho, London.

Techdirt Wireless : In the US, it's always been good news when a local municipality tries to set up a "WiFi Zone" in order to attract more people or businesses. However, in the UK, it appears that people look at it differently. They complain that the Westminster council is being too aggressive in their rollout schedule and (even worse) are going to cause overlap problems between their own WiFi access points and those of other hotspot providers, like Starbucks. Of course, some of the complaining sounds like what you might expect from someone who feels that the government backed WiFi is going to compete with their own plans.

That last comment may be uncalled for, but in principle I think we should be celebrating this, not poking holes in it. [from: JB Wifi]

Revealed: How the road to war was paved with lies. Intelligence agencies accuse Bush and Blair of distorting and fabricating evidence in rush to war

The Independent is one of the few quality papers asking the hard questions about the Iraq War. Like where exactly are the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" (tm) that were the main justification we were given for the war? [from: JB Ecademy]

A quick update on my experiments with WiFi antennas. I've been working my way through the designs here.

The first attempt was the Cantenna I've already talked about here. This worked well and was dead easy to make. Recommended.

The Double Quad was amazingly successful. It's a little fiddly bending the wire into a figure of 8 of exactly the right dimensions but it appears to have almost the same gain as the cantenna in a much more compact form. I used some sheet tin from an old oil can for the backplane and I've ended up putting the whole in a tupperware box. Recommended.

The next attempt was the Patch antenna. Again using the steel-tin sheet from an oil can. Very compact, very easy to build and with a 70 to 120 degree beamwidth. Recommended. It's so small that it can go in a laptop bag and be used for getting hotspot access when you're a little out of range.

The toothpick and 5db Omni were less successful. The omni was fiddly to get the coils right and doesn't appear to give enough gain over the built in card antenna to be really worth it. It does mean that you can have the laptop on the passenger seat of a car and still get coverage by putting the omni on the roof or dash. But the actual improvement in gain doesn't really help in getting extra distance.

The final attempt was putting a cone on the front of the cantenna. I did this with aluminum foil covered cardboard held together with duct tape. It's all huge and unwieldy but gave the most gain of all of them.

I've been doing my testing against a home AP run by a neighbour 3 or 4 streets away. I've no idea what he's running or even exactly where he is. I can't get a signal from the built in card, however using any of the antennas from our bedroom window on the 2nd floor I seem to have enough line of site to get a signal. The patch, quad, cantenna and coned cantenna can all get a useable signal. The coned cantenna is rock solid with a best of 25db SNR. While I've been doing this I've had DHCP turned off and tried to avoid associating fully. I tried it once and discovered that they're running on NTL and successfully sent and received email. There's a lesson here that I've stumbled across someone who has their AP set with all the defaults and no obvious security in place anywhere. If I could find exactly where they are I might say hello. But without walking the streets and pointing cans at houses, I can't work out exactly which house it's coming from. The NTL T&C specifically say you shouldn't share your connection outside your home and with PCs that you don't own. Purely from a wireless connection point of view this is clearly difficult as the signal leaks out to a few streets away. [from: JB Wifi]

Some more on Linux APs

I guess what I was hoping for was something with the power of Locustworld, but with the price of current APs and that was no harder to setup than current APs. The current combo boxes are so nearly there. But the manufacturers have created closed systems that cannot easily be extended or fixed by 3rd parties. Or even examined. They're also buggy and the firmware upgrade process is awkward.

I'm concerned that one of these days a major exploit is going to be found in say the dominant Linksys AP and an exploit does actually get written. If there are very large numbers of these being used as home firewalls this could be as nasty as Slammer. I've got considerably less faith in Linksys (or Dlink or) being able to cope with this compared with say, Microsoft or the Sendmail community.

That all leads me to wonder why these companies want to be in the software business selling critical systems that sit in that crucial position on the boundary between Internet and internal LANs. And to do it with closed, proprietary software where they can't get any help from the community at large.

But mostly, I want to see some stupid cheap, stupid easy APs that make it trivial to put up a safe WLAN for one's own use, while also giving guests some access that is safe for you and your ISP. I don't believe we have this yet from anyone (except of course the infamous "Default Linksys Community Network!).
[from: JB Wifi]

After the recent discussions here about legal use of antennas in the UK and EU it seems clear to me that the current controls are broken.

- The restrictions take no account of the higher directivity of high gain antennas. Using a narrower beamwidth should reduce the likelihood of interference not increase it.
- The restrictions are limiting the use of the 2.4Ghz band for last mile broadband distribution since it makes it almost impossible to get enough distance to be useful.
- The restrictions are being widely flouted by both individuals and organizations using both commercial and homebrew setups.
- They are limiting the commercial exploitation of the band both in terms of setting up deliberately limited hotspots and exploiting distance connections. It may be ok to allow a situation where a blind eye is turned to non-commercial setups, but any organization that answers to shareholders cannot take this risk.

So the big question for me is how to fix this broken situation. Does anyone have any ideas or knowledge about how the restrictions can be made more realistic and opened up? Who should we lobby and who would have the lobbying weight to have some effect? [from: JB Wifi]

Lazywebbing a challenge to port Linux to a commercial WiFi AP.

The current crop of mainstream APs aimed at the home market typically consist of WiFi (b, g or a+g), 1* ethernet in, 4*ethernet out, Router-NAT-DHCP-Simple firewall. Sometimes they include an ADSL/Cable modem. These are available from Linksys, Dlink, Buffalo, Belkin et al for ~$100

As well as the WiFi and Ethernet hardware, they've typically got quite extensive software which implies non-trivial processing power and memory. The question is how much and is it feasible to port Linux to
them? The big thing missing is something equivalent to iptables/ipchains. I don't think the built in firewall capabilities on any of these are powerful enough to properly share bandwidth with guests, let alone run a community or mesh node. But it's so close it must be worth hacking them. So the rationale is to create a programming environment for their firmware that allows us to start porting in things like Nocat, hostap and meshap.

This has been discussed a few times. But I'm not aware of anyone world wide actually doing anything apart from Sputnik.

So I think this needs a challenge like the Xbox-Linux challenge to drag in the clever hackers and make something happen.

Getting an article published on Slashdot might do the trick. So that's the first task to document the target in a form that could get on Slashdot. Then to build a wiki/weblog to track progress.

Am I blowing smoke? If not, is anyone up for this? [from: JB Wifi]

For the People, By the People... is a website devoted to mapping WiFi in Manhatten. It does go further than a simple map because the mission statement is "To PROMOTE open access to the Internet for the benefit of all people."

We really ought to do something like this for London. Anyone up for it? [from: JB Wifi]

There's some new club functions. These mostly affect Club owners rather than members.

1. Clubs can be defined as "Private" This means that the forums and membership can only be viewed by club members. The club is still listed in the All clubs list. And it's web pages are still visible to everyone.

2. Clubs can be defined as Approved Membership. This means that after you join you still can't do anything until the club owner approves you. Club owners will get an email when people attempt to join. They will also see a "Pending" menu option on the Club and "My Clubs" pages. From there they can approve or deny the applications.

3. Clubs can be defined as "Business". All this means is that the Terms and Conditions entry that says "Do not sell or advertise goods or services" is waived JUST FOR THAT CLUB and it's forum. It's a decision by the club owner that this sort of behaviour is ok in their club. It DOES NOT MEAN that this is OK anywhere else on the site and doesn't give you carte blanche to do this anywhere else or to spam the members.

These definitions can be set when creating a new club or by choosing Admin from the club home page. [from: JB Ecademy]

And this is as good a place as any to start. WEBLOGSKY - industrial-strength weblog See also Joho, O'Reilly, Kottke.

You can tell this conference is bottom up rather than top down when digerati Esther Dyson and Howard Rheingold are sitting on the floor in the packed O'Reilly presentation. Could you imagine Alan Greenspan sitting on the floor of some financial conference? [from: JB Ecademy]

The "white stripes" twins of the weblog world,Six Apart: Six Apart Ltd. Announces New Weblogging Service, Investment, Executives and Board. They've taken the best weblog software and with some added VC created a hosted weblog service to rival Pyra and blogger.com. Good luck to them. [from: JB Ecademy]

Always On interviews Google's Eric Schmidt in three parts. The first touches on Google's acquisition of Blogger.com.

I believe that this notion of self-publishing, which is what Blogger and blogging are really about, is the next big wave of human communication. The last big wave was Web activity. Before that one it was e-mail. [from: JB Ecademy]

WiFi Speed Spray

It's an old joke but a new laugh. And not even April 1st.

The patented formula in WiFi Speed Spray™ is the result of years of scientific research and testing. Simply spray the area around your computer. Usually five or six sprays is all it takes. As your computer sends data, each bit also carries hundreds of invisible WiFi Speed Spray™ "scrubbing" molecules. It works at the speed of light. and even penetrates lead walls (not even Superman can do that!). Within .0025 seconds, the entire path between you and the receiver is cleaned, scrubbed, polished, and sanitized. You'll notice the improvement immediately as your productivity soars!. [from: JB Wifi]

Bandspeed Boosts WLAN Range

Bandspeed’s technology differs from other wireless "switch" solutions in that a basic level of packet switching takes place at the AP, where up to six independent 802.11 a/b/g sectors converge.

This sounds like Vivato's approach but by using 6*60deg sector antennas rather than a steered phase array panel. It should be possible to get nearly the same effects but at a cheaper price. [from: JB Wifi]

We English are so great we don't need to tell you about it (requires free registration).

We invented practical democracy (Magna Carta, Parliament); the greatest language on the planet; English literature (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, etc); popular culture (the Beatles); America (the Pilgrim Fathers, etc); the post-coital cigarette (Sir Walter Raleigh); Australia (convicts); suspension bridges, and probably lots of other cool sorts of bridges too, only I don’t know about the subject (Brunel); recreational drug use (De Quincey); we ran the world’s largest, richest and most benign empire; we produce its doughtiest explorers, its finest, most resourceful soldiers, sailors and airmen. And not for a moment am I suggesting that we managed all this without the help of the Welsh, Scottish and Irish because I have no need. Being English, one never has to feel chippy about anything.

And I haven’t even got on to sport. We invented almost all the world’s games: rugger, football, tennis, cricket, darts. Yet such is our modesty that, rather than hanging about, crowing about how good we are and dominating the field, we have generously allowed other, less inventive, nations to get better at these games then we are.

Truly, it’s all I can do to stop a shy tear coursing down my cheek. But stop it I must, for it’s only St George’s Day — for an Englishman, a day like any other.

So being an Englishman, I don't have to prove anything because I already know I was born and raised in the best, most sane country in the world. I know we can't run a train service. I know our health and education systems don't work. I know we're home to some of the most bigoted drunks in the world. I know the concept of the home counties white anglo saxon protestant as representative of England is a joke in a racial mix that was actually born from several thousand years of immigration, never mind the last 50. I know that far too many of us are concerned, vaguely left of centre, people who read the Grauniad and worry and chatter about things that will never affect us. And I know we're still struggling with a class system that has one half of the country sure that they are somehow inherently better than the other half of the country because their great grandparents were better at exploiting the poor than those around them. And I know the weather isn't all that great, but then it's never all that bad either. And if we actually wore the right the clothes for the prevailing weather instead of the same things year round, we wouldn't notice so much. And I know we haven't got a manufacturing industry any more but that's ok because we still manage to own everyone else's via the City. And I know we have a tendency to wag our fingers and say "You shouldn't do it like that" which results in our politicians saying "Don't do that like that or we'll lock you up", and we all meekly agree saying "You shouldn't break the law, no matter how daft it is". And I know we've got too many people and too many cars in too little space. But we did invent the Balti, while also putting our own spin on cheap take away food that is cheap, cheerful and mostly completely inedible. And despite having the best raw materials in the world, we still manage to produce some of the worst food you can buy for money compared with anywhere in the world. And I know our idea of IKEA is MFI which pretty much sums up our almost complete lack of taste. And I know we feel a bit guilty cheering on our side on the very few occasions when they actually win. And our sense of inherent self-worth means we can be rude to everyone else in the world equally, because we don't really mean anything by it.

Still. Mustn't grumble.

I know that that's just another expression of our determination to be stoicly mediochre. We'll get by, muddle through, bodge something together, without making a big song and dance about it, or bragging about it, or being stuck up, or braying to loudly about our success, or being too full of it (or doing any planning). Because when the chips are down, when our backs are against the wall, when that old Dunkirk spirit is needed, we'll find a way to come out on top despite the odds because there's no more determined or resourceful person than the bloody English.

Dammit, I can't think of anywhere else I'd rather live or have been born. So on St George's day I probably ought to wave a flag or something, or sing a few patriotic songs or have a march but instead I'll...

I'll...

Well not much of anything really. Maybe I'll go down the pub later. I'll see how I feel.
[from: JB Ecademy]

The UN is hosting the The WiFi Opportunity for Developing Nations conference.

On June 26 , 2003, the Wireless Internet Institute will join forces with the United Nations Information and Communication Technologies Task Force to host "The WiFi Opportunity for Developing Nations" at UN Headquarters in New York City. [from: JB Wifi]

Checkout Lindsey's blog and Guy Kewney's write up, about Wireless mesh networking from an antique bus rally. [from: JB Wifi]

Have you ever heard some music on a TV programme and wanted to buy it? It's almost impossible to go back later and find out what was played. So here's a business idea for the TV channels.

Put up a page on your websites with listings of all the music played in the background of your TV programs. Link these through to an Amazon affiliate page where you can buy it.

With the number of databases on the web and you own internal program scheduling software, it should be possible to largely automate this. [from: JB Ecademy]

Warchalking || First War Stroll in Croydon : Best catch of the day and warranting further investigation is a BTOpenZone covering much of the central Croydon Area. Does anyone know if BT are testing new Wireless hardware in Croydon(UK). Will post further info when available. Griff@myzaurus.co.uk

So what's going on here then? And why Croydon? [from: JB Wifi]

I'd recommend keeping an eye on The Daily Wireless. They post far too much quality content with far too many links! Take for example this piece DailyWireless - Tri-Mode Last Mile It covers the current state of the art on 802.11a and b access points with particular relevance to backhaul bandwidth distribution. There must be about 50 links in the article. Then there's the list of links down the lhs side of the page. It's as comprehensive as anything I've seen.

Altogether a very good site for WiFi and Wireless specialists. [from: JB Wifi]