I just came across an amazing statistic. "Of the 300,466 books published in the U.S. from 1927-1956, only 9,240 are currently available from publishers at any price." The relevance of the 1956 date is that the Sonny Bono copyright extension bill in the USA makes these books copyright rather than public domain. So that's 291,226 out-of-print books that you cannot buy anywhere because the book industry is hoarding it.

This reminds me of Janis Ian's proposal to the record industry. What if the book industry and the record industry created a site where their entire back catalogue of unpublished work was made available for download at a really cheap price? Like a few pence for each song and maybe a few tens of pence for each book. Does anyone think that wouldn't make a ton of money for them out of content that they're not exploiting anyway at the moment? I can think of a whole string of books and music from that canon that I would buy if I could. Like John Shirley's early work; Lewis Shiner's early work; anything by Bob Shea; the albums from the Grateful Dead spin off bands in the mid 70s; Reebop Kwaku Baah & Ganoua, the record of moroccan drummers that I stupidly leant to someone. The dub versions of Rico's Man from Waraika; And so on. [from: JB Ecademy]

Guy Kewney's been using Free WiFi access in St Albans pubs. The deal is pretty good, after all. The pub gets broadband installed, without having to do it all themselves (they pay the broadband) and they get "behind-the-bar" laptop computer for visitors who didn't know there was Internet access, and who will now come back and use it another time. If they sell three extra pints a day, they're breaking even. [from: JB Wifi]

David Reed has a large collection of links to papers on Open spectrum and scaling limits of wireless. [from: JB Wifi]

Very cool map of access points in Estonia covering both free and commercial hotspots. This is a great model of how this should be done in other countries and follows on from my ranting here about the lack of a definitive map for the UK and USA. [from: JB Wifi]

Wonderful, official WiFi Warchalk in Estonia. [from: JB Wifi]

Looks like Blogdex has been bombed by a German domain registry scam. The top 25 is packed with entries each with 8 links. Hopefully they'll all disappear soon.

A new player has appeared in the WiFi market in Agatal.  (full article). They've got an interesting twist in targeting two specific markets, hospitals and high density housing (HDUs) such as apartment blocks. Both these have some common characteristics. in that there is often a common owner and they pack a large number of potential customers into a small area. The aim is to provide broadband access site wide by leasing a conventional high speed T1 line into the site and then distributing internet access via WiFi. This works out dramatically cheaper for both customer and owner than running lots of broadband ADSL direct to each outlet or by running Cat5 everywhere to wiring closets. [from: JB Wifi]

Taj to offer wireless broadband service : HindustanTimes.com The Indian Hotels Company is planning to equip it's 60 most prestigious in India with WiFi. [from: JB Wifi]

A little while ago I blogged an entry here about an article in The Times about Internet access in hotels. There was a reply yesterday saying that The Thistle Hotel group intended to provide broadband access in hotel rooms in 400 hotels round Britain. There's just one catch, the cost is 50p per minute with a ceiling (£25?) per day if you use enough. Now either I'm hopelessly out of touch with the bright world of expense account travel or this is extortionate. Working purely from memory you understand, it would seem therefore that 10 minutes internet access in your hotel room is roughly equivalent to one unimaginative soft porn movie on the pay-per-view. A bargain then ;) [from: JB Ecademy]

Seems as good a time as any to remind people of William Burroughs' Thanksgiving Prayer.

CNN.com - WiFi activists on free Web crusade - Nov. 29, 2002 : An article loosely based (ahem!) on an interview with Consume.Net's James Stevens. I loved this bit. Wireless networks use microwave radio adapters, known as WiFis, which can be arranged to form a continuous "cloud" of connectivity. This loop goes by the pan-European name "elektrosmog." Elektrosmog. Right.

There's also a picture that rivals the BBC's efforts. It's the Pope looking at what appears to be a Dell laptop with the caption "A broad church: More and more people are logging on" :)
[from: JB Wifi]

For those of you who run a GPRS PDA, Do you run a firewall (like Zonealarm) and can you access TSL/SSL secured sites ? Just curious. [from: JB Ecademy]

Here's an interesting web service: PGP Keyserver Service - WSDL v1.1 This service allowes you to query the PGP key domainserver for keys and retrive the result in XML. You can also retrive keyblocks from the server and submit new ones. Bet you can think of interesting things to do with this one. [from: JB Ecademy]

ZDNet |UK| - News - Story - London opts for WLANs : A poll of 20 big-city organisations has revealed that half are deploying wireless LAN networks over the next 12 months Companies in the City of London are increasingly using wireless LANs for high-speed data networking but the "perceived lack of security" is still the main barrier to their uptake, according to the latest research. A poll of 20 IT security managers at financial services and energy-related organisations in London's financial centre showed half are deploying WLANs over the next 12 months.

Ninety percent of those polled said security will be as good as today's wireline LANs over the next three to five years but replacing the crackable WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) security standard -- encryption software which ships with most 802.11 WLANs -- is still a factor for IT managers.

The first half is good news. I find the the second half deeply questionable. I don't believe that WLAN privacy will be as secure as a wired LAN any time soon. And any IT security manager at a large financial services company in the city who's relying on the inherent security of the network ought to be fired. And if you've installed strong security on top of the network, why does it matter how insecure the network layer is. [from: JB Wifi]

So what exactly is 4G mobile networking? See here. 4G (i.e IP-based cellular systems)
huh? [from: JB Wifi]

New get your war on.

East of England Wireless broadband trial : Using wireless broadcast technology, each mast has a range of up to 25 miles and can deliver speeds of up to 1.5Mbps. I'm curious to know what technology they're using that can get 25 mile coverage from a single tall mast. I tried to find the press release on the EEDAs website but without success. [from: JB Wifi]

Sifry has created Technorati: Web Services for bloggers. It's a site that uses various web services from Google and others to data mine the blogosphere. Try this one for instance to see who's linking to Ecademy. [from: JB Ecademy]

It's been a while since I was following a "hot" area of technology and I'd forgotten how stupid the analysts predictions can be and just how many "news" sources there are that do nothing but repeat them. It seems like every day there is a report that the X market will be Y billion dollars big by Z (some date roughly 5 years in the future). This then gets picked up by the news wires and repeated verbatim by roughly 50 technology news columns or magazines world wide. If you use something like Moreover or Google news to track the area, you get swamped with stories for a few hours that all have the same headline, same content and precisely zero added value.

So if you want to know what's really going on, you need to follow the blogs and the very few journalists who actually write something original.

I guess the good side of this is that since there are constant stream of analyst reports about WiFi, it must be important! [from: JB Wifi]

Telia, BT Form WLAN Pact Telia and BT Openzone have linked up to provide a roaming agreement for each other's WLAN hotspot networks. This gives BT Openzone users access to 480 sites around Europe.

Expect to see more of these roaming agreements between WISPs. [from: JB Wifi]