Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

Smart Phone Skeptic

Sunday, October 30th, 2011

America’s National Broadband plan seems predicated on the idea that smartphones can serve poor people. The cellcos are telling Wall Street’s financial analysts and the policy makers in Washington that there are more cell phone-based internet connections in the world than fixed wireless or wireline connections. But skeptics are starting to show that those cellphones may be underused, overpriced, and come with caps. Meanwhile, cellcos’ core businesses are threatened. Prices will rise and service caps will fall. Washington — and policymakers around the world — should allocate more resources and spectrum to services that deliver true internet, not the restricted walled garden of the cellcos.

This debate was central to the fascinating discussion at the State of Telecom event at Columbia’s Instititue of Tele-Information, held in mid-October. I attended the afternoon sessions.

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Fiber News from the Telecom Exchange

Friday, July 1st, 2011

Major fiber industry players gathered on Wall Street at the Telecom Exchange to do business at the very elegant Cipriani. Wall Street is demanding faster speeds and lower latencies than any other industry in the world as companies build their notorious high frequency trading platforms. If the internet is a railroad, Wall Street is becoming a test bed for the newest and fastest trains.

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Rockbox at NYLUG: Will Software Replace Hardware? Will Apps Replace Software?

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

NYLUG member Robert Menes presented the Rockbox open source jukebox software at the most recent meeting. The software project started in late 2001 when Bjorn Stenberg became fed up with his ARCHON MP3 player and the software was first released in 2002. The software is designed to be installed directly onto MP3 players and to add to rather than replace the existing firmware, but there are many many different MP3 players, and the project supports them to varying degrees (details on the Rockbox website).

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Citysearch Allowing Fake Reviews

Saturday, May 7th, 2011

http://newyork.citysearch.com/profile/39424270/new_york_ny/york_carpet_cleaning_specializing_in_oriental_rugs_carpet_upholstery_cleaning_.html

Check out the 1 star reviews for this company. Avoid them.

And shame on citysearch for allowing fake reviews.

Quick Note: A Great Google Analytics Tutorial

Monday, April 18th, 2011

I have to explain Google Analytics to a client, and found this great video.

Time Management for System Adminstrators at NYLUG

Friday, March 18th, 2011

Thomas Limoncelli is the author of the O’Reilly book Time Management for System Administrators and his talk at the New York Linux Users Group was less technical than most but no less important.

Every system administrator lacks the time to do everything that needs to be done. “I’m not good at time management,” Limoncelli said, “but I’ve created many coping mechanisms to deal with the problem.”

“It’s not your fault,” he added.

Part of the problem is evolution. The human brain may be suited to surviving in the wild, but it is not suited to time management. For example, one key time management skill is memorizing long lists, a skill not suited to the neocortex, which is roughly the most recently evolved part of the human brain. However, the neocortex is good at making tools. So use them: paper, pencils, smartphones.

Another part of the problem is infrastructure.

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Updated: Diaspora at NYLUG

Friday, February 18th, 2011

Daniel Grippi and Raphael Sofaer, two of the four founders of the Diaspora open source social networking project, spoke at NYU this week. They said that the project was started by members of the ACM club at NYU and was inspired by a speech by Professor Eben Moglen called Freedom in the Cloud.

In an earlier interview, Grippi said, “it was the first time it made us think of the violence of those that use your data, and of how, behind the scenes of someone who offers you something for free, there’s always someone that uses the data you exchange with your friends. We deleted ourselves from Facebook and we started to think about an alternative. People don’t really understand the risks they’re taking, but even those that understand them don’t know where else to go to.”

Before starting Diaspora, the club had built a MakerBot and had completed other projects together, such as having the door to the club room tweet every time it was used.

The group decided to build a decent social network for nerds. They went to Kickstarter, whose founder is also a graduate of NYU. Kickstarter allows anyone to raise money for any project through very small donations, as little as $5 per person. The group posted what Grippi called “a pretty terrible video.” The goal was to raise $10,000. In fact, they raised $200,000, which at the time was a record for Kickstarter.

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Privacy in Context: A Speech at Fordham Law School

Friday, February 18th, 2011

Professor Helen Nissenbaum has made a career out of putting philosophy to work. In a CV replete with honors (and also filled with impressive grants), she has turned a doctorate in Philosophy from Stanford University into a career researching the privacy implications of the internet. She is currently professor of “Media, Culture, and Communication & Computer Science” at NYU. I heard her speak at the Fordham University Law School, where her talk focused on her latest book, Privacy in Context; Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life.

Nissenbaum said that she thought this would be the easiest book she’s ever written, because it was simply synthesizing many papers, but that in fact it was the hardest, and it took two years. In the book (and in her current work) she is building an analytical framework that would identify the aspect of an online transaction or interaction that causes social anxiety.

The miracle of the internet is about the rapid dissemination of information. This has delivered powerful economic benefits, and it has delivered freedom.

The internet has also enabled massive data repositories that have caused concern. Nissenbaum mentioned Choicepoint and you can see the concerns of the Electronic Privacy Information Center here. Nissenbaum also mentioned the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program of the federal government. Of TIA, EPIC wrote, “TSA has failed to meet its legal obligations for openness and transparency under the Freedom of Information Act and has violated the spirit of the Privacy Act for the protection of privacy rights.”

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How The FCC Killed VoIP

Sunday, February 6th, 2011

Many people in the U.S. use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone service today. But I contend that the FCC has killed the technology. How can I make this assertion? After all, there are over 20 million VoIP subscribers in the U.S.

However, the VoIP services that exist today are a shadow of what the technology makes possible. VoIP has been choked so that it no longer disrupts telephone service. VoIP has been fenced in by the FCC so that it offers no more than telephone, a move that was intended to protect cellular and wireline phone companies.

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Wikileaks Shows: They Should Have Feared The End of Journalism

Saturday, January 22nd, 2011

Corporations and politicians have been assaulting journalists and journalism with the full force of their political and financial fury during the past two decades. For a time, a prostitute was invited to pose as a journalist in the sanctum sanctorum of U.S. journalism, the White House press room.

And so journalism declined.

The Federal Trade Commission, worried about the decline, considered trying to stop it by subsidizing newspapers, a move that many on both the left and right said confused “newspapers with journalism.”

In fact, there are journalists, but they no longer work for newspapers, and news is no longer broken by newspapers. News breaks on the internet.

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