US Independence day means that I can enjoy a day of good internet bandwidth to US sites, a drop in the number of spam emails and some peace and quiet on the mailing lists. It's going to be another scorcher in London with high humidity. So maybe I should just kick back and relax.

"Independence"? So exactly what is it that the US is celebrating being independent from? Today? It's so tempting to say "Good Riddance"... Maybe what they really need is a revolution. R.U.Sirius?

Excellent article in yesterday's Times from Anatole Kaletsky. Recession? What Recession? It looks as though the Analysts and Prognosticators (great word) got it seriously wrong. Their portents of doom were nothing more than commentary on today's stock movements, not the future's. Perhaps we should listen to Donald Sutherland's proto-hippy in the film Kelly's Heroes, "Enough of your negative ways".

Excellent article at OpenP2P about Morpheus, KazAa comparing then and contrasting them with Napster and gnutella.

With the current worries about MS copy protection and the XP "Activation" process this link deserves to be re-blogged. It's John Gilmore of the EFF explaining what's wrong with copy protection. Doesn't anyone remember the mid 80s?

Dave writes, But the UK is pretty fucked up too. [Scripting News] regarding Dan Gillmor's piece about London in 2001.

Yes, folks the Panopticon is here. As a counter point, try the "19 ideas for a revolution" link.

P2P business models

Media Discovery Kit to Help Firms Hide Scams?. Media relations are sometimes geared towards creating false company profiles, but the internet is helping to spread information otherwise not publicised . Now a very cool software kit help to track down coverage, but their marketing motives stink 2 July 2001, 11 am GMT [Content Wire via NewsIsFree]

"The reputations and brand names of the world's biggest companies are increasingly under threat from individuals or groups of people using the Internet as a medium to air their grievances. With companies such as Nike, Gap, GlaxoSmithKline and Shell all suffering from dedicated protest sites, which encourage boycotts and continually launch accusations against these companies, it's easy to see how gossip is born on the web. These rumours circulate online, often developing into a media crisis with the potential to influence public opinion, deter customers and devalue a company's market value if identified too late."

Telescreens Going Up in Tampa -- New Camera System Spots People With Outstanding Warrants [Plastic]

The Panopticon is slowly but surely arriving. Videos everywhere. Speeding cameras in catseyes. Videoed Bus Lanes. Echelon.

But auto face recognition in crowds for known offenders? That's pushing the tech limits isn't it?

Applications over Freenet: a Decentralized, Anonymous Gaming API?. Linux Journal Jul 3 2001 12:31AM ET [Internet Europe news]

If you happen to like using a system that is not real time and does not guarantee the accessibility or permanence of its data to write distributed, anonymous, secure applications, then you'll probably like Freenet.

What does P2P have to do with Hailstorm?. OReilly Network Jul 2 2001 5:11PM ET [moreover...]

Contrast this article about MS Hailstorm and the benefits it might bring to P2P with The Register on reverse engineering Hailstorm

Michael Swanwick (author of quite a lot) has set himself a microfiction challenge: write one sci-fi short story about each element in the Periodic Table. At the rate of one a week. New entries appear Fridays. Found at Memepool.

The Times tells a story about Journalistic Integrity.

The New York Daily News do an investigative piece about the awful state of public health in New York supermarkets. Several chains threaten to pull their advertizing, so they publish a fluff piece in a four-page pullout focusing on the wonderful social contributions supermarkets make to the community.

There's been a lot of ranting lately about freedom of the press and journalistic integrity. This is how it really is and has been for years.

Drop In Soap Message Board. First of its kind, claim developers, 2 July 2001, 2 pm GMT [Content Wire via NewsIsFree]

A message board provided as a SOAP Web service to web sites who want to add forum software to their site to try and create a community. How cool, how very 2001. Read to the end of the article and it's built by wrapping SOAP round the well known open source PHP message board Phorum. Really quite neat approach. www.unifiedconsulting.com are finding a new way to monetize open source.


Bikeweb went live yesterday. It's an attempt to combine aggregated news headlines with a community journalism site (like Kuro5Hin) but aimed at a niche market. In this case, "Motorcycling with Attitude" is not so niche. This follows my previous experiment at B2BSlash. The real issue with these sorts of things (like every web based project) is getting from live to critical mass and momentum.

The http://www.voidstar.com/blog/ site is currently in the middle of a re-vamp as I try and move away from using http://www.roguemoon.manilasites.com for hosting of the blog. I'm hitting some barriers in Radio Userland and it's support for FTPing. I'm seriously thinking of building a PHP template so I can get control back with the longer term view of replicating all the blog tools in a self contained system. I love the ideas in Radio Userland. I'm just more and more irritated by the implementation.

What does P2P have to do with Hailstorm?. OpenP2P.com Jun 29 2001 7:15PM ET [moreover...]

There's something I don't get about the recent announcements from MS that they are releasing some code as "open source". .NET and Hailstorm always were based on SOAP with published interfaces. There are plenty of SOAP toolkits available now. Which means that people can write code that interoperates with MS. The announcement only says that they'll have a C# compiler and a C runtime available on other platforms. Well haven't we already got plenty of C++ compilers already?

Road accidents claim 2 young lives in area. Providence Journal Jul 1 2001 8:46AM ET [moreover...]

Injury can land you far from choice of doctor. Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Jul 1 2001 11:54AM ET [moreover...]

I've been trying to find motrocycle related news feeds. At the moment, I'm picking up Moreover queries. The problem is that all their data comes from mainstream newspapers and the examples above are typical of the sort of things the mainstream considers to be news. Really quite depressing!

I've been trying to use ftp to upload my blog to a faster server. Radio is proving a bit resistant. But then it just happens. I guess I'm hitting on an Asynchronous process and some cacheing somewhere.

Getting Paid for Content
Getting Paid for Content: from micropayments to shareware models. Discussion of online payment for content tends to be techno-centric: "If we only had micropayments, everyone could get paid for their art." via [kuro5hin.org]

After P2P Business models yesterday, we have content business models today. if it's art we're talking about, then the Patronage model has worked for centuries. Is this really so different from the "Sponsorship" model we have today?

Which country has 4% of the world's population but consumes 25% of the world's resources and generates 27% of the world's pollution?

I've just listened to a radio interview with a typical Californian housewife. "The Taco (sp?) is America's number one sport utility and I'm proud to be an owner", "but it gets 14 mpg. I've been driving a hybrid compact that gets 70mpg. Do you think these will be successful?", "I couldn't comment on that. You see I'm a Type A personality...". Bizarre. A weird combination of Brave New World and a life spent immersed in advertizing. I'm a Beta. I'm glad I'm a Beta. Alphas are too stuck up. Gammas are so stupid. Betas are the best...

You Hate the IT department, and They Hate You Right Back

A look at Consilients Sitelet P2P workgroup solution. OpenP2P.com Mar 31 2001 4:52AM ET [moreover...]
More P2P in B2B

B2B Internet Yellow Pages to Go Live Next Month.

This is the announcement that UDDI has going live. There's a mistaken belief that it allows products to be searched as well as services that is being repeated again. "Right now, there are so few software tools available for suppliers to build Web services that the directory can't be used to its full potential, analysts said." This refers to the current SOAP and is exactly why Dave Winer's attempts to keep SOAP open and to promote validators and toolsets is so important.

What if Anne Frank had had a Weblog instead of a diary... Great Rant about the small mindedness of the current Journalism industry. Could Watergate even happen now?

P2P MemeBag. OpenP2P.com
Excellent. A Glossary of ideas coming out of the P2P Community.

Weird WebVentures in Advertising

NY Times: Corporate Sites Seem to Skimp on the Facts. A new study indicates that corporate Web sites often fail at what might seem most important: getting out the corporate message. It found that in many cases, reporters could not use the sites to get information as basic as a company's phone number. [Tomalak's Realm] This is way too common. It's particularly bad in high end consumewr products. Hey we can't have our users answering back! What do they know?

You've got to see this.
http://www.ebxml.org/news/pr_20010308.htm
It refers to the use of SOAP 1.1 in the ebXML Business standard. MS and IBM offer (!) to license the use of SOAP 1.1 and SOAP Messages with attachments. What the hell? And this is an open standard? The document is dated 8th March.

ebXML B2B standard ready for scrutiny. Computer World Mar 27 2001 12:03PM ET [Vertical portals news]
"The Unix/Windows debate is still alive, and one of the things we want to do is drive the standards discussion to make it go away,"
"More than 2,000 people from 30-plus countries have helped develop the ebXML specifications"
"The ebXML organizing body last month agreed to incorporate the transport sequence for the Microsoft-backed Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), making it far easier for businesses to swap information. SOAP is Microsoft's sole contribution to date."
ebXML is due to be ratified in May.

UK PLC leads US on corporate Web sites. Elcom UK Mar 27 2001 10:47PM ET [Internet Europe news]
58% of UK companies have a web site compared with 57% in the US, Ovum says.

Majority of Britons Now Use Internet. Reuters via iWon Mar 27 2001 7:52AM ET [Internet Europe news] But mostly from home?? And not enough for MS to deploy bCentral.

Microsoft and UK e-government unveil progress. Netimperative Mar 27 2001 10:49AM ET [Internet Europe news] "there were no details as to how much the government has paid to licence these technologies", "the Government Gateway is the largest deployment of its BizTalk Server 2000 in the UK", "This evening, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is expected to outline how the project is to reach its goal to have 100% of the government’s transactions online by 2005."
Your tax pounds at work...

Microsoft says UK not ready for bCentral. Netimperative Mar 27 2001 2:29AM ET [Internet Europe news] So there you have it. The lack of always on internet and general apathy in SMEs in the UK mean that MS can't be bothered to implement bCentral in the UK, Germany and Italy. Oh Well.

Salon is now worth $3.1 million. [Scripting News]

Seems about right for a moderately interesting magazine that refuses to syndicate it's news.

British Study Says Fourth Gunman On Grassy Knoll Killed Kennedy [Plastic]
I thought everyone knew there were 5 gunmen from 5 separate conspiracies. Only Justin Case (The world's first quintuple agent) saw what was really going down. cf Robert A Wilson's Illuminatus trilogy. From the same source, anyone who understands how Oswald can be in the book repository, seen outside it and seen on the other side of Dallas at the same time understands the true nature of reality.

Space Fungi. So Mir was inhabited with space fungi. Perhaps they shouldn't have brought it back! Shades of Quatermass, or perhaps Schismatrix (Bruce Sterling).

Oi! Fat Corporate Bastards. Listen up. We want
Cheap, unlimited flat-rate international communication
Hands off: No censorship, no advertisements, no lawsuits
Respect
Privacy

And

Email, WWW, Usenet, IRC, FTP
Explicit adult material
Access to government and corporate information for oversight purposes
Educational services
Free networked multiplayer games

And you know what? We've already got it.

Internet + English = Netglish. BBC Mar 23 2001 7:02AM ET [Cyberculture news] Which is to say that English as she is spoke is the lingua franca of the internet. But in 2008, more than 50% of the internet users will be native Chinese speakers (c Accenture). Given how much they're spending on .net infrastructure in China I wouldn't bet against it.

Apocalypse Cow -- Nevada Researchers Suggest Using Napalm On Diseased Cattle [Plastic] The current British approach to Foot and Mouth is positively mediaeval. This puts a nice 20th century spin on it.

VeriSign screws up. Via /., Microsoft: Erroneous VeriSign-Issued Digital Certificates Pose Spoofing Hazard. "Do you wanna install this Active-X control? It might have been signed by Microsoft!" [Flutterby!]
I wonder if this is one of those old stories that has just resurfaced? I remember something almost exactly the same when ActiveX and Signing first appeared. What, 4 years ago?

From the "Caught in a Hailstorm" Desk

White paper at http://www.microsoft.com/net/hailstorm.asp

Initial Thoughts
1. What? No MyFavoriteSongs? After Napster?

2. Anyone can write software on whatever platform they feel like to
interact with Hailstorm via SOAP. But who gets to run the server side? In Federated Hailstorm they say "In particular, this is designed to allow enterprises to run local instances of applicable services. Future Microsoft products will support corporate federation, making it simple for a corporation to run local instances of appropriate HailStorm services." I foresee a concerted effort to reverse engineer the centre and distribute it. Why should Microsoft have all the fun?

If this happens, I'll further predict that the cost of using non MS
Hailstorm services will drop to zero.

- It's the Drug-Dealer/Pimp business model. The first one's free, the next one's on me, after that you pay.

- MS will actually make their money the way they always have. By selling clients that are factory installed by the PC Manufacturers.

- It's actually client-server all over again. All MS Products will be clients. The communication protocol and callable services are open so anyone else can build clients. Many people will do this on all sorts of different platforms. But the server will be big and complicated and few, if any, will attempt to build one.

- The VCs won't fund server farms any more. But MS will. Perhaps this should be seen as the most extreme case yet of "Volume is its own reward" as a business plan.

- The whole exercise is the most Centralized thing since the Central
Centralizer ran the Central line from CentrePoint.

Since the earliest days of Napster, the prevailing trend has been
towards greater and greater de-centralization. Full marks and a loud
raspberry to MS for bucking this trend.

Those of you still under NDAs can prove me wrong...

Maybe the only good thing that will come out of this is wider acceptance of SOAP.

UK Firms Discover Collaborative E-Business - Report. Newsbytes Mar 19 2001 9:34AM ET [Internet Europe news]
Hmm. I'm sure it's a valid report. But it's curious that it's a joint effort from SAP and Aberdeen.

LA Times: US corn supply hoplessly tainted with StarLink gene [Robot Wisdom]
Oh Boy. So those tree hugging commies and the Damn EU were right. If you grow a monoculture and then let Big Business play with it's genes, accidents happen. Maybe we should just all go back and read John Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar"

P2P in B2B A Standards-based, P2P Approach to Marketplaces and Exchanges