One for the cypherpunks. Crank the paranoia level up to 10, combine weblogging software with GPG and the Mixmaster anonymous remailing system and you can post in relatively complete anonymity. Not even the site owners know who you are. Great for whistleblowing or political activism in repressive regimes.

invisiblog.com (beta) - anonymous weblog publishing [from: JB Ecademy]

A little while ago it came to light that the Linksys 54G series run Linux. Here's a report at O'Reilly Network: Linux on the Linksys [July 16, 2003] that Rob Flickenger and the NoCat crew are getting close to adding utilities to it, but need some tech information from Linksys to be able to upload their code to the box.

Rob's absolutely right when he says "If the open source community were provided technical details about your
firmware file format, I believe you would see an unprecedented interest in your 54G line. The ability to run custom Linux software on a commercial access point would certainly make it one of the most desirable access points on the market"

The question I have is whether there's enough ROM and RAM on the box to do anything useful. A lot of Locustworld's early work was similar to this but at the time the boxes that could be hacked didn't have enough resources so they went down the route of using a more general purpose PC instead.

So come on Linksys, do the right thing. You've kept to the letter of the GPL. How about making the upload parameters open as well? [from: JB Wifi]

CYBERFROST.net | Business News and Technology Reports reports on Yahoo! BB in Japan. 12Mbps for $21 per month. With dirt cheap VoIP thrown in and Video on demand over IP just starting. And they're getting 7000 new signups per day. [from: JB Ecademy]

Yesterday we had Smart Posses. Today it's Smart Flocks at FlockSmart.com

Beaahh! Beaahh! Why am I thinking about sheep with brain electrodes and laser guns attached to their backs, rampaging round the countryside? Of course, it's the feral Smart Sheep(tm) you really have to look out for. [from: JB Ecademy]

Vivato have a very interesting product. It's an electronically steerable high gain antenna combined with a switch. It effectively means that each client is served by it's own high gain antenna at the access point. In a recent demo in Spokane, they covered most of the downtown area with just 6 antennas. This ought to be very interesting to people trying to provide metropolitan WiFi access. There's quite a few of these now in Europe.

On one of the mailing lists, I recently asked whether Vivato's switches would be legal in the UK and Europe given the EIRP restrictions of 100mW. I've just been contacted by one of their people to say that approval under ETSI looks very unlikely in the next two years at least.

Yet another example of how the excessively tight ETSI regs are holding back development and deployment of WiFi in Europe.

If anyone out there can help Vivato get through ETSI or can help get ETSI relaxed, contact me and I'll put you in touch. [from: JB Wifi]

Jim Moore's Weblog writes about an idea called "Smart Posse". You've maybe heard about Smart Mobs; technologically facilitated mobs that come together quickly at short notice. You've maybe also heard of Meetup.com; a system to manage regular club meetings worldwide. Put the two together and you'd have a system for getting a handful of like minded people for some purpose at short notice. Another one in this area that never really took off was local2me; a mailing list system where you send and receive messages based on how close your zip codes/postcodes are.

Not sure if there's really something here, but I like the name [from: JB Ecademy]

The Register has a story about MyZones. These guys were at the Olympia Wifi show. They have a managed access point that lets you share your Broadband connection with neighbours. "A typical MyZones customer would have full always on 512K broadband service for two people sharing at £17.62 per month, three people for £11.74 per month, four people for £8.81 per month (all charges include VAT)." The equipment comes from Netgear and the package includes "a Wi-Fi broadband starter pack including an ADSL modem, Wi-Fi access point, a USB wireless adapter and the MyZones client software" There's also an upgrade pack for existing broadband customers but they need to "check with their existing broadband service provider if their broadband terms and conditions allow sharing" and they pay extra to use the MyZones software.

I still think there's something in here that doesn't quite ring true. [from: JB Wifi]

I hate PDFs. It seems Jakob Nielsen agrees as he's just released PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption

So please don't use PDFs if you could do the same thing with HTML.

By the way, did I tell you I hate PDF?

Next on my set of pet hates, "People use Flash for things that could perfectly well be done with HTML". [from: JB Ecademy]

I'm still looking for a WYSIWYG HTML editor to use in web forms that is a direct drop in replacement for TEXTAREA. I don't mind if it's only for one browser or one browser family, but it must be a direct replacement for a TEXTAREA and must not require any other changes to the form. It would also be handy if it was:-
- Open source
- Generates good, valid xhtml
- Could limit the html tags that are allowed
- Is client side only
- No Java, thank you very much
- Ideally it ought to use standard cross browser javascript and CSS but like I said it's ok if it's for one browser family only.
- Having said one browser, I'm only really interested in IE and Mozilla (Firebird). Opera and Konqueror would be a bonus but are not necessary.

This is an old request but it's coming up again. After 10 years of browser development, I can't believe I'm still asking this question. [from: JB Ecademy]

Pirate CDs top one billion worldwide and "In 2002, the sale of pirated CD copies rose 14 percent to 1.1 billion units, and has more than doubled in the past three years, turning a street-corner trade into an estimated $4.6bn (£2.82bn) business, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said in its annual piracy report."

So why are the RIAA threatening to sue their end customers?

Could this be the reason? [from: JB Ecademy]

The Register : BT set broadband demand trigger levels for another 500 exchanges (PDF list) today. Revised targets mean means 56 exchanges will go straight into BT's ADSL upgrade programme

Which is nice. [from: JB Ecademy]

You need to see this one. Sue All The World Music Video (from the Napster Bad! Cartoon Series on Camp Chaos)

There's some nice little touches in it, like Dr Dre whispering in Eminem's ear before each line Eminem raps.

In related news, "Man bites Pig". [from: JB Ecademy]

The Supernova 2003 conference is running right now and as usual all the great and good prime movers are there.

Supernova (along with O'Reilly's recent conferences) is turning into a showcase for just how connected and wired a conference can be. Needless to say there's plenty of WiFi and the attendees are all using it. And here's what they're doing:-
- An official organiser's weblog
- A group weblog driven by trackback
- A conference Wiki
- Confab: an ad hoc conversational space
- A PhotoWiki
- Chiki: A chat session auto-archived to a wiki
- A bunch of IRC channels
- Group document editing via Hydra
- A blogroll of Speaker weblogs
- Numerous RSS feeds of all this.

Some of this is pretty experimental, but I wonder if all the tech could be bundled into a distribution and then sold to conference organisers as a managed package? [from: JB Ecademy]

I've just read Irina's post about Britney with a reference to the Russian Club in her signature. This was posted at 9:28. At 9:50 Google had these ads showing.

Kremlin Gifts Catalogue
1000's of Russian gifts by talented Russian artists. Secure, low prices

M. Lysenko "Best works"
Arias, cantatas, choir music of the famous Ukrainian composer on a CD.

How do they do that? It looks as though they're indexing pages with ads on them either as they are shown or very soon afterwards. Is this introducing a 2 tier web in the index? Pages with Google Ads are grabbed much quicker than the rest of the web? [from: JB Ecademy]

More Like This WebLog: Necho Feed - Tuesday, 08 July 2003

Look! A necho feed in the wild. Excuse me if I'm distinctly underwhelmed. It looks almost exactly like an RSS 2.0 feed with all the element names changed. Is this what all the fuss is about? Surely, there's more to it than this?

DON'T MESS WITH RSS. DON'T MESS WITH CITLD.

[edited to add]Maybe there should be a challenge. "Show something you can do with necho that you can't do with RSS 2.0"

Things to make you go hmmm? The Speedpass-enabled Timex watch is a watch with an RFID tag in it. On the surface this looks great. By giving you an electronic personal ID in the real world you can use it to pay for stuff just by waving it past a sensor. The bad news is when you get mugged. "No, you don't understand. You are going to give me the watch" [from: JB Ecademy]

I've added a feature where you can add a link to a FOAF file that is off Ecademy. If you have one, you'll know what this means. You'll also want to turn on Ecademy FOAF so that your Ecademy network can be picked up.

If you don't currently have a FOAF file and want to create one, take a look at FOAF-A-Matic.

To see the results, try my FOAF viewer or Jonathan's

If you're concerned about security with all this I'm careful not to expose anyone's email address or details unless they specifically enable it in Ecademy. [from: JB Ecademy]

The Times has an interesting piece today on Compassionate commerce that looks at SMEs and entrpreneurs who are running businesses with a special focus on social causes. The Times section on SMEs is well worth a look too. [from: JB Ecademy]

The Register : Wireless rural BB service names the day from WRBB

WRBB says it will have coverage within 10km of the main centres. 10Km is quite a way to go with 802.11 under ETSI power limits. Interesting. [from: JB Wifi]

Two events in the Linux world with 802.11g

- Linksys release source for the GPL bits of their WRT54G This is less significant than it looks as the really useful bits like the Broadcom drivers are binary and closed source. But it's still interesting that a major AP is linux based and this may well ope up possibilities for some interesting hacking.

- The first linux drivers for the Atheros A/B/G chip set have been released. At last the Linux world can start playing with 802.11g hardware. [from: JB Wifi]