The Opodo presentation from Wednesday's event is now available for download.
opodo.zip 5Mb

You'll be able to watch the presentation very soon in the events area here. [from: JB Ecademy]

We've got nearly 200 clubs with less than 3 messages. Many of these have also got less than 3 members. If you own one of these clubs and you're not likely to do anything with it, how about closing it down and deleting it.

I'm pondering doing this automatically and just expiring old clubs that are clearly not going anywhere, but I figured I'd give you the opportunity to do it for me first. [from: JB Ecademy]

Square 7 - Wireless Hotspots, Locations, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth

I'm having trouble understanding exactly what's going on here. Square 7 appear to be a virtual WISP with roaming across ther hotspot networks which appear to include BT Openzone. Their costs are higher than anyone else's at £6.99 per hour, £59.99 per month. The interesting bit is the additional services they're pushing such as VoIP, SMS and Wireless printing. they also seem to have a tie up with Regus.

Even with the extra services I can't believe the model is sustainable at those prices. [from: JB Wifi]

So old-skool it's cool. drx: Teletext Babez = German Teletext Porn in 40*25. Probably not work safe unless you're working as a programmer for a startup targeting cellphone porn in which case you can put it down to "research".

[from: JB Ecademy]

DaveNet : Tips for Candidates re Weblogs : The Dean campaign made a big mistake, imho, by getting into the software business. (my link which appears in the same para on Davenet)

While I agree with the majority of Dave's points in this piece, I'm not sure I understand what point Dave is making here. The Dean campaign is aleady making excellent use of Wikis, Movable Type, Blogger, Meetup.com and many other existing technologies. Meanwhile a small group of programmers have taken it upon themselves to extend Drupal with modules specifically to support local Howard Dean campaign chapters. Drupal is GPL. It's widely respected. It supports all those good technologies like RSS, trackback, Blogger API. The code being written as modules is downloadable and useable by other Drupal sites.

So who's being excluded and who's stopping Dean (or other candidates) supporters from using their own tools? I can see a clear need for a packaged community news/forum/group weblog software suite with some common branding. They could have chosen PHP-Nuke, Scoop, Slash or several others but they chose Drupal. And whichever platform they'd started with, you can just about guarantee that they would have found some function that was missing and needed adding. At least whatever they do is GPL, freely downloadable and could easily be used later by a Republican or even a Christian Democrat movement in Germany or Libe-Dem movement in the UK.

I think there's a bigger issue here that I keep stumbling across. There are situations where centralization is necessary and where a group community website makes more sense than a loose collection of weblogs or websites. This is why the slashdot style community news site and the PHPBB or vBulletin style Forum site refuse to die even as many of them spin off individually managed weblog sites. We keep adding function to weblogs (trackback, Typepad and so on) to make loose groupings of them work almost like community news sites. We keep adding weblog and individual customization functionality to community software to make them more like individual weblogs. All this is good until you need to tr and make it generate some money. At that point the centralized approach wins hands down.

Pretty good fluff piece with several good quotes from David Hughes about Our sponsors BT Openzone. BT is ready for WiFi explosion [from: JB Wifi]

Labor Day weekend is over, America is just waking up and turning on their PCs.

And the Virus and Spam emails have just started up again with a vengeance.

Grrrrrr! [from: JB Ecademy]

According to The Register who are reporting a poll by BT! Yahoo! Broadband! : one in ten Net users would even be prepared to dump a boyfriend or girlfriend to stay online

The mind boggles. [from: JB Ecademy]

If you're interested in VoIP over the Internet, check out these links

http://www.freeworldialup.com Directory
http://yabb.pulver.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi Forum
http://listserv.pulver.com/archives/fwd.html Mailing List
http://freeworldialup.meetup.com Meetings
http://www.voipwatch.com News
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/voip Forum
http://www.voxilla.com News
http://www.thevoipforum.com Forum
http://www.xten.com/ Free client

This is an extremely disruptive technology that challenges the existing Telcos. It's moving fast and is already throwing up legal problems as states in the USA try to deal with "Virtual" VoIP based Telcos such as Vonage and their relation to the large amount of Telco regulations.

What's quite puzzling is why MS removed the ability for MSN Messenger to use free VoIP services between v4.7 and v5. In V5 and V6 there is support for VoIP links to the POTS but only via paid premium services. BT had a service to do this and were an MS favoured link in MSN Messenger. But as of Aug 25, they are no longer accepting new customers.

One of the big problems with the growth of VoIP is how hard it makes phone taps. Needless to say, many governments don't like this at all.

One of the fastest growing areas is international VoIP. This has traditionally been an extremely lucrative market for national Telcos. More disruption.

Whenever I raise VoIP someone starts talking about quality of service (QOS) guarantees or the lack of them. Well my experience is that right now quality is at least as good as cellphones. And as bandwidth availability increases this will only improve. Frankly it's good enough for non-emergency calls and close to being good enough for business calls where cost is an issue. Perhaps what's still missing is ease of use and widespread availability. If we can combine an always on client in the PC/Laptop with a bluetooth connection to a cellphone so that you're using the same device, that will happen as well.

Is the killer app for Broadband and WiFi hotspots actually voice? If it is it's going to upset a few applecarts. [from: JB Ecademy]

I'm on the second and worst day of a bout of flu. I'm cold, shaking, achey and not entirely here.

Why is the influenza virus so unpleasant? [from: JB Ecademy]

A couple of reporters went on a tour of London's hotspots and wrote up their findings. ZDNet UK - Special Reports - Hot (spot) in the city - a Wi-Fi tour of London. Curiously I've used almost all the hotspots they did and can report similar success. Here's a couple of additional notes.
- Benugo's system needs an always open IE6 window. Once this was in place, I could use Firebird as well but if you close the IE6 window you have to re-login.
- The variation in pricing is interesting. £6 per hour, £5.50 per hour, £5 per day and 30 minutes per £2 sandwich.
- If you go to the IOD, ask reception for the WAP key. They have SSID turned off so you have to put in the detail blind but it then just works. It's free to members or people leaning against the wall outside.
- The Media Centre have WiFi downstairs in the bar. Go and hassle the IT people to let you use it.
- There's a free hotspot near the Starbucks and Pret a Manger just north of Soho Sq on Oxford St. This is believed to be from the iLink kiosk put up by Westminster Council.

So what's people's favourite cafe or location for using WiFi Internet in London? Can anyone fill in more details? [from: JB Wifi]

Very interesting article in Kuro5hin about private currencies. Here's a couple of bits that caught my eye.

kuro5hin.org || The future of money: private complementary currencies :

I am afraid that if the United States had to live by the rules that are imposed on, say, Brazil, the United States of America would become a developing country in one generation.

...

We can produce more than enough food to feed everybody, and there is definitely enough work for everybody in the world, but there is clearly not enough money to pay for it all. The scarcity is in our national currencies. In fact, the job of central banks is to create and maintain that currency scarcity. The direct consequence is that we have to fight with each other in order to survive.

It's almost enough to make you think that usury (the lending of money for profit) is evil. [from: JB Ecademy]

Here's a big old article from Doc Searls in the Linux Journal that's a must read whther you're into Linux or not. Linux Makes Wi-Fi Happen in New York City. Particularly interesting is a discussion with a Verizon Architect about their plans to WiFi enable public telephone boxes. The service is free to Verizon's business and residential DSL customers. This is something that ought to be attractive to Telcos worldwide. BT, are you listening? [from: JB Wifi]

Taking cover. BANG, BANG innit! Is this sad or hilarious? A real life renactment of The Getaway complete with side by side pictures from real life and from the game.

Shame more of them weren't dressed as Reservoir Dogs. Playing a gangster in a white cheese cloth shirt hanging out of your trousers just doesn't cut it. There should have been a gratuitous "White Merc with Fins" as well. [from: JB Ecademy]

A few people have had problems logging in to the site post the move.

If you see "Untitled document" instead of "Ecademy - Connecting business people" in the title bar of the browser window, then you are viewing the site though a redirect page and not direct. This is happening because your ISP has not yet picked up the DNS changes. This apparently causes a problem with IE accepting the login cookie.

The simple answer is to wait until the DNS is picked up correctly. You may be able to solve this temporarily in IE6 by going to Menu | Internet Options | Privacy tab and setting privacy to minimum "Accept all cookies".

If you end up in a state where everything looks ok, you've changed your password and you still can't login, then send a message to webmaster@ecademy.com and I'll reset your password. [from: JB Ecademy]

Unwire Destination Home announces a free wifi day in the USA with participating hotspot providers. Now there's an idea for the UK. How about it BT? [from: JB Wifi]

AOL launches blogging service Just one catch. You have to have an AOL account. So that's Google, AOL, and coming soon Yahoo. Wot? No Microsoft? [from: JB Ecademy]

Danny has a good analysis here. Assuming they can solve the problems this is one of the most amazing things I've heard in months. Here's the key part of Greg Dyke's speech.

We intend to allow parts of our programmes, where we own the rights, to be available to anyone in the UK to download so long as they don't use them for commercial purposes.

Under a simple licensing system, we will allow users to adapt BBC content for their own use.

But then it's not really our content - the people of Britain have paid for it and our role should be to help them use it. [from: JB Ecademy]

Frequently Unanswered Questions about the recent SOBIG.f virus outbreak.

- How did it spread so fast? It was first seen on Tuesday 19th and by Thursday was a huge proportion of the world's emails. It doesn't particularly exploit MS email readers beyond encouraging people to click on it. And it's ability to spread via network shares was broken. I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere, but was this actually a case of previously exploited machines (perhaps by sobig a-e) being woken up and given new code to run?

- Why do Anti-virus server gateways persist in sending notifications to the sender? The SOBIG series, Klez and several other of the recent email viruses spoof the sender so there's no point in notifying the apparent sender any more. These notifications are nearly as bad as the virus in generating useless email Traffic.

- What was it going to do? At 8pm GMT on Fridays and Sundays until Sept 10, SOBIG.f wakes up and tries to connect to a set of internet machines to collect it's next mission statement. The first event was prevented by removing those servers from the internet. So nobody's worked out yet what that mission was.

- SOBIG, like several other viruses, contains it's own SMTP engine that sends email direct. This could have been blocked by ISPs banning port 25 to anywhere except their own email server. I don't like this because I don't like restrictions on my access but I can see the sense in it. At the same time, many viruses just use the SMTP settings in the machine to send to the ISPs server. So here's the question. We're perfectly happy with using Authentication on POP3. Why don't ISPs use authentication on SMTP? If the email reader can keep athentication ID/passwords secure from code running on the PC, then this combined with blocking port 25 would have stopped viruses propogating.

- One of the few market application segments that Microsoft have stayed away from is AntiVirus tools. Almost every other segment has been embraced and extended usually by MS offering a free minimal app which gets progressively better until the existing encumbents can't compete. Why doesn't MS install a basic anti-virus system in the operating system? They've already got the mechanism to do the automatic updates. They've got the coders. They could get some brownie points from the market for doing it. So why don't they do it?

- The big web based email systems now include hefty anti-spam and anti-virus functions. So it's clearly possible to run hefty filtering systems on high volume email handlers. So why do so few ISPs run antispam and anti-virus functions on all the traffic through their servers? With the spread of "wires only" broadband there's a market niche developing here for boutique "email-only ISPs". These provide a full email service including authenticated SMTP, SSL encryption, anti-spam, anti-virus, web access and have the huge advantage that they are usable from anywhere regardless if you're connected to the net from a WiFi hotspot, hotel room, work, home or whatever. This is a premium service that the big broadband ISPs could provide relatively easily as they already have most of the infrastructure in place.

- After all this time, why is it still so easy to execute code by just clicking on it in Internet Explorer, Outlook and Outlook Express? Every application has bugs in it. And some of these bugs will inevitably lead to exploits. And those exploits will inevitably lead to viruses and trojans. no matter what we say, MS is no more or less guilty of making these mistaes than any other ISV. We expect them to do a bit more quality control, but even that is a little unfair. But we have a situation where the dominant end user applications encourage the naive end user to run bad code insecurely. Simply arranging that the code had to be saved first (as in Mozilla and Firebird) would dramatically reduce the number of accidental infections.

- Klez, Slammer, Blaster, Lovesan, SOBIG.f. What's next? [from: JB Ecademy]

It's the Friday before a bank holiday. Is anyone still working?

While you're waiting to go down to the pub, how about downloading and installing some non-Microsoft software. You could start with Mozilla Firebird as an alternative to Internet Explorer. When that just works and works better, you can start turning your attention to another email client and a complete Office suite. After that there's instant messaging and many others.

Just because it came free with your machine, doesn't mean it's the best solution. [from: JB Ecademy]