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.

Wall Street’s vision

Simon Flannery, managing director at Morgan Stanley, described the challenges that are eroding the margins of the cellcos. Of course, the top two cellcos are doing better than the rest. Flannery said that margins at Verizon at about 45 percent, while margins at Sprint are about 16 percent. Apps that are eroding core revenues include free text messaging and free calling.

Meanwhile, cellcos are selling advanced services that require more bandwidth. “Backhauling fiber to towers requires a massive build,” said Flannery. “Smaller carriers lack the cash flow to reinvest, and there is no financing for newtowkrs that are without returns.”

The market is trending towards a duopoly.

Craig Moffett, senior analyst at Bernstein Research, said that the services that people pay for are the easiest to provide: internet access, phone calls, and so on. “People are less willing to pay for information and entertainment, which are services that cost more to provide.”

Voice may require 9.6 Kbps and people will pay $50 per month for it. People will only pay about $30 per month more for the next generation services that multiply data usage by 10 or 100 times. “The sale price per bit is falling faster than the cost per bit.”

At the bottom end of the market, Moffett said, there is the “poverty problem” where households whose net income is negative after paying for food, clothing, and shelter account for perhaps 40 percent of all homes. “Retailers can depend on the upper two quintiles, but telcos have to sell to the full 100 percent of the population,” Moffett claimed.

The consumer advocate concurs

Mark Cooper of the Conumer Federation claimed that he disagreed with everyone on all sides of this debate. He said that in some poor countries, there are 75 cell phones per 100 people. “People who have no electric power at home may have cell phones.”

If a cellco is just adding voice customers, it’s easy to grow. “It is easy to add subscribers but it is expensive to add capacity. Users, uses, and usage all add costs to wireless mobile networks.”

He agreed with the Wall Street analysts that the marginal sale price of bandwidth drops rapidly.

He added, however, that unlicensed wireless spectrum is the great success story of the past two decades. Even AT&T is now selling Wi-Fi. “Unlicensed has no champion in the scrum for spectrum.” Cooper said that at most 10 percent to 20 percent of spectrum should be sold to the cellco monopolies, so that the Washington can avoid the next monopoly and the next “100 year mistake.”

The Economist Magazine has the data

In an article entitled The Limits of Frugality, The Economist magazine warns that those rural cellphone users who have no electricity in their homes will soon be paying higher prices. “Sunil Mittal, the boss of Bharti Airtel, the mobile-phone operator … said the extra cost of servicing rural customers, and their low usage levels, had made things unprofitable. Prices are now expected to go up across the industry, after two decades of decline. India’s low-cost telecoms revolution has, it seems, reached its limit.”

Buildouts will now focus on the urban rich. “Today perhaps 17 percent of India’s population has half of its spending power, according to the Asian Development Bank …. One proxy for the difference in profitability between the urban rich and the rural poor is the price paid for mobile-telecoms spectrum. In the 2010 auctions for 3G telecoms licences, operators bid ten times more for a slice of the airwaves in affluent Delhi, with 18m people, than in east Uttar Pradesh, with 120m people.”

Washington, D.C.’s policymakers should expect fixed wireless and wireline internet to connect the rural poor at an affordable price. The true price of cellular broadband is going up fast, worldwide, and like all price rises, it will harm the poorest the most.

Finland fines people for speeding based on their income, so very rich people can pay over $100,000 for a single speeding incident. Some are worried that other EU nations will refuse to enforce Finnish fines, breaking the European Union. The idea is controversial and is unlikely to be applied here in the U.S., but it deserves consideration. If we cannot make fines fair based on income, perhaps we can base them on the price or class of car.

Even the tax system is not as fair as many believe.

Social security tax takes in 15.3 percent of a self-employed person’s income (employers pay about 60 percent of that for those who work for a company). The rich pay less of this tax, and the injustice is obvious to many. One newspaper letter writer recently said, “Because no Social Security tax is paid on earnings above $106,800, the highest earners pay a smaller portion of their wages for Social Security than most workers. This is just the opposite of our progressive income tax system.”

If everybody paid the tax on all their income, the tax could be lowered substantially. Many say that the limit ensures that nobody pays in more than they get out, but in fact nobody’s contributions pay for their own future payouts. Instead, current contributions cover current payouts. Most who are now receiving social security did not pay enough to earn their payouts, and that’s the way it should be. Inflation ensures that someone who earned a dollar a day eighty years ago gets enough money from social security today to avoid starvation . Their payouts are according to average needs, not according to their contributions.

Those slightly richer are hit by the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), which maxes out at 28 percent. As inflation hits and the numbers remain unchanged, the AMT is increasingly applying to the affluent middle class while failing to touch any billionaire. Meanwhile, the billionaires are unaffected because most are already paying more tax than 28 percent. Your tax bracket is the highest rate at which any of your income is taxed, as explained on this nifty web page. Depending on filing status, you get an actual tax rate of 28 percent at between $300,000 and $400,000 in income. So if you have a $1 million windfall, it’s better to take it all at once, paying the AMT in one year instead of two or three.

A single, self-employed person making $100,000 would pay $21,617 in federal taxes plus $15,300 in social security taxes for a total of $36,917, or 36.9 percent.

A single, self-employed person earning $1 billion would pay 349,977,314 plus (15.3 percent of $106,800 = $16,340) = $349,993,654 or 34.5 percent.

I don’t have all of the numbers, but it is possible for someone caught at the lower end of the alternative minimum tax to pay an actual tax rate of 38 percent or higher, after social security and medicaire taxes.

If you, like Warren Buffett, are a billionaire who earns most of your income from investments, you’ll pay much less. Buffett’s tax rate last year was 17.4 percent.

Losing your home

If you are a poor person, the legal system is less likely to defend your right to stay in your home. Most poor people who own their home are old. In 2005, the supreme court ruled in Kelo v. City of New London that a city could take an old person’s home for purposes of economic development. After all, the old person is no longer creating jobs. They’re retired.

The city did agree to pay Ms. Kelo above market rate for her home, the place she loved. The blurb for the book about her story, Little Pink House, says, “Suzette Kelo was just trying to rebuild her life when she purchased a falling down Victorian house perched on the waterfront in New London, CT. The house wasn’t particularly fancy, but with lots of hard work Suzette was able to turn it into a home that was important to her, a home that represented her new found independence. Little did she know that the City of New London, desperate to revive its flailing economy, wanted to raze her house and the others like it that sat along the waterfront in order to win a lucrative Pfizer pharmaceutical contract that would bring new business into the city. Kelo and fourteen neighbors flat out refused to sell, so the city decided to exercise its power of eminent domain to condemn their homes, launching one of the most extraordinary legal cases of our time, a case that ultimately reached the United States Supreme Court.”

One commentator drew a simple conclusion from the case: “Maybe governments just shouldn’t be allowed to steal.”

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor warned in her dissent, “Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.”

Where should old people live? Kelo was already living in a poor area and was improving the home she lived in. But the government decided to take her home from her. Had Kelo been living in a wealthy neighborhood, the economic development argument would have been less powerful. Thus, this decision allows the taking only of poor people’s homes while protecting the homes of the rich.

But the law harms poor people in many other ways, simply by valuing their property at market rates.

As the case of Peevyhouse v. Garland Coal Company shows, poor people have less rights. Willie and Lucille Peevyhouse owned a farm containing coal deposits in Oklahoma scrubland. In 1954, they agreed to let a coal company mine the coal as long as the company restored the land afterwards. The company mined the coal and did not restore the land. The difference in value between the strip mined land and actual productive farmland was only $300, but the cost of restoration was $25,000 in labor. The Peevyhouses sued. The court awarded them the difference in value of the land, $300, not the cost of restoring their home. Had they lived in an area where land values are high, the law would have defended them. It chose not to defend them precisely because they lived in an area where land values were low. The Oklahoma legislature eventually intervened to ensure that it could not happen again, but this case was decided according to legal principles that determine the allocation of damages. These principles do not usually take into account the value of a person’s home to themselves, a value that is beyond money. In the Kelo case, they tried to take that value into account, but could only offer Ms. Kelo more money to get out of the way of the Pfizer bulldozer.

Pfizer, by the way, left New London in 2009. Economic development contracts, like employment contracts, are often one-sided, with the city giving up too much and the corporation promising nothing.

Modern times, discredited economics

The root of the problem is the sort of economics that caused our current economic problems. The Tiebout Model is popular among legal theorists and planners. It says that municipalities are like markets, each offering different services at different prices, as if anyone could move and take their home with them. It absolves bureaucrats of the blame for unpleasant decisions, because if you don’t like a service cut, then you can leave. It simplifies decisions by removing the blame for those decisions. You can see why it became popular, but you can also clearly see why it is so unfair.

Economics always assumed that people are “rational” and act only in ways that can be of benefit to them. Any psychologist, advertiser, politician, or propogandist could tell you that’s just not true. You don’t have to be insane to behave irrationally. Fear and greed disrupt the stock market in ways that traditional economics ignores. Acknowledging our shared humanity makes decisions by people like Greenspan, author of the housing bubble, more difficult. It forces them to deal with the real world, which offers less certainty than the sterile economic models that the right loves so much.

Economic policy makers need to acknowledge the consequences of their decisions, however unpleasant. Judges and lawmakers should too.

Another commentator noted that France is a lynchpin of Euro rescue efforts. If France were downgraded, it might not be able to contribute to the European Financial Stability Fund, or EFSF. That might explain why S&P does not want to downgrade France: doing so might break the Euro. For the English commentator, the current markets are reminiscent of the breaking of the pound out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992.

The treaty of Maastricht, signed in 1992 called for governments to maintain an annual deficit of 3 percent or less and to have debt no higher than 60 percent. Although Japan leads the league in government debt as a percentage of GDP at 225 percent, EU members Italy and Belgium are at close to 100 percent. France is at 83 percent. These countries have violated the rules of the treaty for years, and as a a result, they cannot call on today’s problem nations to be forced to adhere to the terms of the treaty.

The problem countries spend a lot and also fail to collect taxes, such as Greece and Italy (whose prime minister is dangerous) and Spain (where unemployment is over 20 percent). Right wing commentators like to call attention to half the problem — that of spending — while failing to point out how a failure to collect taxes is as important as spending problems.

Jobs

As rioters burn the poor parts of London, every nation in Europe (and Israel too) is grappling with the problem that there are no jobs for young people. Just heard from Nadia El-Imam and Alberto Cottica, who believe that members of disenfranchised groups who have been successful need to have their stories recorded and forwarded to those who fight an uphill battle in the job market. They are designing an open and collaborative system that would encourage the sharing of success stories. It is an excellent initiative aimed at the disempowered.

I think that those in power need to do more. In this internet age, those in power need to understand that they have an ongoing responsibility to explain their actions to the people who elect them. It’s not just once every four years or so. To that end, politics needs to be open, televised, and recorded.

Investment

Right now, says one CNBC commentator, investors are panicking. To them, “safety is more important than yield and liquidity is more important than safety.” Investors are trying to avoid losing money. They are avoiding stocks because companies might fail.

Many no longer dare to invest in the future. The pessimists are buying gold and government debt.

Policy and anger

As banks lose value, those who blame criminal activity such as that reported recently on 60 minutes, where banks forged documents in order to complete forclosures, may feel that justice is being done. The town of Ithaca, NY has just decided to never borrow money from JP Morgan Chase because of Chase’s foreclosure policies and procedures.

Stanford Economics professor Nicholas Bloom says that the U.S. is due for a short but significant recession. The Economist magazine says there’s higher odds of a second recession, known as the double dip, as noted on its cover. In its cover article, the magazine writes, “Barack Obama or one of his Republican challengers may yet discover the courage to tell the truth about the American economy in next year’s presidential election. But given the politicians’ current uselessness, the only institution with the power to avert danger is the Federal Reserve. With interest rates so low, that means more quantitative easing. Printing more money is justifiable in the circumstances, but still a tool offering diminishing returns. Fiscal help would have been much better.”‘

Many feel that the rich are benefiting as the rest pay for the problem. The latest New Yorker cover, S.O.S. by Christoph Nieman, neatly captures this. It depicts Monopoly-game tycoons drinking champagne as the Titanic sinks in the background, with the Titanic sunk by a falling stock market.

The Republican Party has already ruled out tax increases to solve the national debt, opting instead for cuts to medicaire, medicaid, and social security. In promoting the cuts (but not the tax breaks) GOP leader Boehner said, “I think it’s incumbent on us, if we are serious about dealing with the big challenges, that we go out and help Americans understand how big the problem is that faces us.” But the GOP won’t be taking the problem seriously until it admits that tax increases are needed. The majority of Americans want tax increases, but the Tea Party does not.

The rich must pay more than the poor. Failure to act will mean more riots like in England. Some will blame their lack of opportunities on the openness, freedom, and diversity of our nation and will commit violence like Oslo.

Neutral exchange

Paolo Gambini, CMO of Tinet (formerly part of Tiscali), announced that his company has formed an alliance with PCCW of Hong Kong that will give PCCW access to North America and Europe and give Tinet access to Asia-Pacific.

Gambini also said that the company is growing its own EtherCloud platform, which he descrbed as an alternative to ethernet exchanges.

Transatlantic cable

Hibernia Atlantic announced that it will be laying a new transatlantic cable by the middle of next year and offering service on it in Q3 of 2012. The cable aims to reduce latency between the London and New York exchanges by at least 10 percent, to less than 60 ms.

Automated quotes

Greg Hough, CTO of Global Capacity, announced that Lattis Global, its tarriff quoting system, had likely saved 150,000 man hours of work last year by transforming a task that could take hours into one that took several clicks.

The company has added a new offering, One Marketplace Access, whose first customer is MegaPath (which also owns Covad and Speakeasy). OMA delivers specific price quotes for access to specific circuits, making buildouts easier, especially in areas where an ISP does not already have facilities. “We have reduced MegaPath’s SG&A and can help them reach tier 2 and tier 3 markets,” Hough said.

Fiber in New Jersey

Vincenzo Celemente, the very young CEO of Cross River Fiber of Isselin, N.J., announced that it is extending its fiber to the major internet exchange points across the state. The new build will reach important points in the following New Jersey towns: Secaucus, Clifton, Nutley, North Bergen, Newark, Cateret, Edison, Piscataway, Somerset, Rochelle Park, and Totawa.

A great duct system

Hunter Newby, CEO of innovative fiber builder Allied Fiber, praised the contruction of DuPont Fabros‘ Piscataway, N.J. data center as the two companies announced they had connected. Allied Fiber promises to break open its fiber every 3,000 feet as it builds a network across the U.S. (phase one, which is nearing completion, forms a triangle between New York, Chicago, and Ashburn). Allied Fiber found that DuPont Fabros’ data center was only 1,000 feet away from Allied Fiber’s route, which runs along railroad rights of way.

Newby said that the duct system in the Piscataway data center made it very easy to connect to the data center. “The physical infrastructure, multiple points of entry, and the building ducts made this data center unique. As I go across the country, costs vary widely, and costs are mostly determined by landlords, who also vary widely.”

Vinay Nagpal, director of carrier relations for DuPoint Fabros, said that his financial industry customers are using SAN technologies for instant replication of critical data between New Jersey and Ashburn. “Some are able to run SAN applications for up to 180 miles without regeneration.”

Connecting the Toronto exchange

Colleen Gallagher, vice president of business development at First TelecomServices, said that her company has recently lit the last leg of fiber connecting Toronto to its network. The company is a former subsidiary of an energy company and has fiber assets (see map) that connect Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York and has points of presence in eleven states. “We now offer industry leading low latency connections to Toronto,” she said.

A fiber blog

Metro NS announced that they have launched an ethernet-centric blog.

A version of Rockbox for a particular MP3 player is deemed stable if it meets all of the following conditions: it supports the latest version number of Rockbox (currently version 3), it can be installed with the Rockbox install utility, and it has a manual. An unstable version lacks any one of these (sometimes just a manual) but it will generally work fine. An unusable version is in development and can crash.

“Can you brick your MP3 player,” one NYLUG member asked. Menes said that there is a risk when using most MP3 players, except that iPod software is “unbreakable” because iTunes can reset the player to its original state.

Menes used a very small SanDisk Sansa MP3 player running Rockbox which allowed him to use it as a clicker to control his presentation. He said that this Human Interface Device (HID) feature had been added by a student during a Google Summer of Code and then perfected by a Rockbox developer.

The Rockbox project is committed to being free GPL software and it therefore does not support DRM and can never support DRM because DRM requires that the software not be open source.

The software supports over 30 different audio formats, far too many to list here.

It is optimized to run on machines with very little power and with weak CPUs, machines running on battery power using CPUs as weak as 12 MHz.

The end of hardware?

This software project is designed for hardware that will soon cease to exist. In the future, people will use Rockbox on their laptop, netbook, or cellphone. The latest development in the Rockbox project is a port to Android that is not complete. How much hardware will be replaced by open smartphone architectures?

The port to Android is slimmer than the software that is installed on an MP3 player or PC. “We did not need to install a TCP/IP stack because the phone already has one,” Menes told me.

Developers unpacked the Rockbox software, which was a self-contained OS-to-software stack, and built universal connectors for it. Thus a stack of software was cut into pieces and the essential functions received software connectors to other parts of the phone’s OS. I think that in the future, many other pieces of software will be cut into pieces the same way.

Features

Like many open source projects, Rockbox has many more features than any closed source competitor. It can record FM radio, it can speak menus, it can deliver sound effects (including sound effects for each song), it can fade songs in and out, search files by name or by any of several tags in a surprisingly powerful database, and it can do many other things too.

The speakers (and some sophisticated software to go with them) were from Viewsonic of Arlington, Va. Douglas Boyce, composer of the first piece to be performed, told me that the software has a fantastic GUI that allows musicians to move music around in a circle from speaker to speaker and add speakers as necessary.

displacements 1b

Boyce’s piece, “displacements 1b”, showed off the speakers to great effect. The music began with acoustic stacatto, a rustling and tapping of string instruments, like wind and air that was around us, the audience. It moved in circles, like a dance or a breeze, calming and peaceful.

Then the speakers were turned off. The music moved away. The musicians were located down a long galley, and the sounds were more distant, and we could no longer hear the human sound of the touch of the strings and the fingers against the woodwork. It felt like a person walking away, a hand taken from your shoulder.

Then the sounds returned. It is difficult to describe what the speakers do for a concert to anyone who has not experienced them. Boyce says that if you are at the exact center of the speaker array, the music will appear to go through you, but at the moment at which your brain would locate sound within you, it process the sound as coming from infinity, because the brain knows that the music is not from inside you.

Boyce was exploring the nature of place with his piece, and found a magnificent quote from Aristotle to describe the process.

Incises

Frankly, I don’t like the music of Boulez that much, but that made Steven Beck’s performance of the work all the more impressive. This was a ferocious virtuoso performance that appeared to break some sort of sound barrier, and Beck told me later that the composer calls for it to be played even faster. I am not sure that it can be played faster. I also doubt that it could be played better.

road, river, and rail

Composer Jorge García del Valle Méndez explored the potential of the speakers differently. He mixed live performance with pre-recorded sounds. I felt that the role of the sounds was more to describe place than to participate in rhythm or melody, and they succeeded in transforming a small gallery just South of Forteenth Street into a massive vaulated stone structure. The music that played within the structure created by the space reminded me of the best music from film or video games (after all, most people first meet modern music while watching film).

I am a fan of computer games and I think that this music and music like it would be ideal for immersive, first person computer games that depict mysterious, massive spaces in worlds that never existed.

The composer wrote that he was exploring the interaction between real and the virtual, actual performers and digitized sound, but I felt that he was also creating imaginary space within real space.

scatter 2.0

The program concluded with scatter 2.0, another piece that played with the potential of the speakers while also using percussion to locate the music in front of the audience. It felt more like a sketch piece, exploring potential, than an actual final work, much as some early modern music explored timbre to such an extent that it sometimes felt like a series of experiments with sound instead of a single body of coherent work that could be one piece of music.

conclusion

I hope that counter)induction continues to embrace the spirit of play and a sense of humor, along with its strong intellectual background. I know that the musicians will remain top notch, performing with aplomb whatever tricks, whistles, and technology the group’s composers can think of.

I asked several people whether the ensemble would consider adding visual elements to its music, but such a transition would require more equipment, more people — and a bigger budget.

The company’s next performance will be at Bargemusic on June 3, 2011.

afterword

A review in The New York Times of Counter)Induction’s subsequent performance at Bargemusic.

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

And shame on citysearch for allowing fake reviews.

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.

If you are your own boss, then you made some tough decisions about infrastructure and you have to compensate for your own lack of investment. Limoncelli remembers a time when he had to persuade companies to adopt trouble ticketing systems.

In his speech, he posted a funny graphic: a trouble ticket that said, “The worst has happened. There’s no coffee!”

Limoncelli added that he has worked at makeshift desks, computer rooms that were too small, and with monitoring systems that could not parse the data they were gathering.

“How many people here have worked at a company that tried to save money by purchasing consumer grade networking equipment instead of professional grade equipment,” he asked. Many in the room raised their hands.

Recommendations

Limoncelli recommended keeping a written To Do list. It can be as simple as a Notepad text document. For Emacs users, Limoncelli recommended Org-Mode, a powerful To Do list system that can be partially automated.

Part of your job is getting rid of interruptions — which is as much about dealing with people as it is about dealing with technology. Limoncelli recommended writing down a request — with large and highly visible hand motions — rather than interrupting what you’re doing and allowing someone else to set your priorities.

Limoncelli recommended what he called “the 4 PM check.” That’s the point in the day when you know whether or not you will be able to do everything that you had planned to do. If you cannot get it all done, he said, you have three options: negotiate an extension, delegate the work, or work late and complete the take.

“Stop working late every night,” he advised.

If you are managing desktops, you should be patching and cleaning machines, backing them up, and making sure that you can restore from backups. Limoncelli referred to the Evard Life Cycle of a Machine.

This is common advice, but Limoncelli had powerful stories about the consequences of not following it. He said that he once came into a company, as a consultant, and found that a key machine was generating a tremendous quantity of security problems. When he walked into the administrator’s office, he did not have to ask why the problems were occurring: he could see, on the desk, in pristine, unopened packages, all of the patches that should have been implemented. The company refused to pay for a test environment for this vital piece of hardware, so the administrator refused to patch it for fear that the patch could take down the machine.

If you have systems, they have to be useful. Limoncelli had several stories about the consequences of burdensome security and backup systems. The result of a burdensome system is that users will avoid it and it will therefore not serve its purpose.

Be a leader

Limoncelli said that administrators must be leaders as well as managers. A manager sets priorities and allocates resources; a leader is the person who goes first and makes it possible for others to follow.

Sometimes leadership means helping others do their job. Limoncelli told the story of a security consultant who was brought in to a company that was growing so fast that machines were being added faster than security issues could be fixed. So the security consultant did what the IT department should have done: she automated many IT tasks so that the IT department could do both tasks: fix security issues and also add new machines.

Limoncelli recommended documenting what you do. He said that the documentation could be bullet points. It could be simple. He recommended documenting the tasks that you least like to do. Eventually, you will be able to delegate them. Also, the documents will allow you to occasionally take a vacation.

Eventually, when your department grows, you can recommend that the company hire a cheaper, junior person who you can mentor. When the company asks you what they will do, you can read from the list of documents you have created. You will be delegating all of the tasks you least like to do.

With good documentation, you may also find that you can automate some of these boring tasks.

People skills

Let’s say you’re approaching your boss. Which of the following do you think would be more effective:

“We need a faster and better server”

or

“I figured out how to reduce the time that our salespeople spend uploading data to the CRM system so that they can spend more time selling.”

If people start e-mailing you instead of using the trouble ticketing system, Limoncelli advised that you be firm but polite. “I always say that it’s nice that they e-mailed me but that I’ll get the message if they use the system and that I’d hate to think that their problem could go unnoticed for a few weeks if I was on vacation.”

Conclusion

Limoncelli is a fantastic speaker. In this schematic summary of his talk, I’ve left out most of the anecdotes that give weight to his recommendations. If you have the chance to attend a speech of his, take it! His tour schedule can be found on his website.

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.

Raphael’s brother Michael was a key part of subsequent development. Michael works at Pivotal Labs, which is now an investor in the Diaspora project and which provides the project its office space in San Francisco (Pivotal also provides breakfast to team members).

Diaspora today

The team has been working on the project for seven months now. Its code base is stored on Github and the project’s public face is the Join Diaspora website.

The project now has 106 contributors. It is AGPL3 compliant.

It is federated. This means that anyone can set up a Diaspora seed (the word “diaspora” is ancient Greek for “scattering of seeds”). Each seed houses the accounts of its subscribers. When people communicate with subscribers of other seeds, the message passes between seeds seamlessly. Currently, the project’s founders operate the largest installation but other large seeds include one in Seattle and another in Germany.

The interface for a user’s profile allows the user to maintain their contact list, aspects, connections, and to connect an account to Twitter and Facebook. The user interface is still in development and is subject to change. An account description is like an e-mail but it is not an e-mail at this time. The structure is username@pod.

Grippi said that where possible, the project tries to avoid reinventing the wheel and instead uses existing protocols, such as Webfinger, hcard, and Salmon.

Sofaer explained that with the hcard protocol, a user can decide whether an image is searchable or not.

For security, the project relies on another trustworthy public protocol: the open SSL RSA library.

The Salmon protocol helps distribute comments. Unlike other social networks, a user cannot see a friend’s comment on a wall if they are not a friend of the person on whose wall the comment was made.

The project currently runs on the Rackspace cloud and stores software images on Amazon S3.

It uses Splunk for log analysis. The group also tracks virtual machine statistics and is especially interested in the time required for specific queries. If a query requires too many milliseconds, there’s an error in the code that must be fixed.

Diaspora in the Future

“Moving forward, we will stablilize and formalize Diaspora,” Sofaer said. He explained that the team’s initial goal was to create software that worked. Now that it’s working, the team needs to formalize how it works in order to ensure that it can scale.

“We wanted to get something up and running without debating protocols for two years,” Sofaer said.

“I want my sister to use it because it’s good for her,” said Grippi. “We want to see many users of free software.”

The eventual goal is that as seeds proliferate, they will compete with each other. Some will offer better privacy, for example.

The team wants to make an API. They want to bring Diaspora to cellular networks with a mobile API. They want to work with existing trust communities, for example by supporting OAUTH.

NYLUG members asked whether Diaspora is ready to participate in the Web of Trust, but the team noted that the technical requirements may be beyond the managers of some seeds. Grippi said that although Diaspora was built for nerds, many people who are not very technical want to participate. He said there are currently about 100,000 members and a waiting list of about 300,000 e-mail addresses.

One part of the task of making Diaspora easy to use is nearly complete. The project has tools called Sod and Chef that are designed to automate the deployment of a seed. Chef is made by OpsCode, and Sod was built by Michael Sofaer.

A user can buy a domain from Rackspace and deploy in three clicks, Sofaer said.

“We’re all developers and no sysadmins, so we needed auto provisioning,” said Sofaer.

Conclusion

The NYLUG group had many tough questions. What happens if someone malicious tries to participate in the project or tries to deploy a bad seed?

But overall, the NYLUG group was very impressed by the project. Attendance was high for NYLUG and the speakers were mobbed after they spoke.

One of Sofaer’s comments stuck with me. He said, “we wanted to make social networking more contextual and to give users more control over what they’re sending and who’s receiving it.”

Before NYLUG, I had attended a speech on the importance of context in the preservation of privacy (see Privacy in Context: A Speech at Fordham Law School).

An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that the Diaspora project team members built Sod and Chef. Thanks to Sofaer for the correction.