Internet Statistics by Alex Goldman

Fred Benenson, currently of Kickstarter, presented the history and current state of copyright law to Evan Korth’s Computers & Society class at NYU. I was lucky to be allowed to sit in.

Prof. Korth noted that Benenson started the Free Culture chapter at NYU. After college and an ITP masters degree, Benenson joined Creative Commons.

“Copyright law is a balancing act,” Benenson said. “It balances fair use and the rights of the public with the private rights granted to copyright holders.”

Continue reading ‘The Public Good: Fred Benenson Explains the Rights and Wrongs of Copyright’ »

Doug Washburn of Forrester Research brought together two opposing viewpoints concerning the best way to reduce energy consumption in a large enterprise and the result was an interesting session with constant back and forth arguments that remained polite and on topic.

Sumir Karayi, CEO of 1E, runs a company that makes software that will turn off your PCs when they’re not in use. He says it’s easy to implement and delivers rapid ROI, always within 12 months and sometimes even within 6 months.

Jeff McNaught, chief marketing and strategy officer for Wyse, says he co-invented the thin client. His company helps organizations remove PCs from the office, replacing them with terminals accessing a cloud computing suite. The system takes longer to implement but can deliver larger savings.

Continue reading ‘Interop NY: Strategies to Reduce PC Energy Consumption’ »

This is the text of the speech I gave at NYU on OneWebDay. I want to thank OneWebDay and the Internet Society of New York for their support. Streaming video includes the Q&A session, which was excellent. The Q&A starts at 25:28.

Thanks to Joly MacFie for the video.

Text of the speech:

Today, on OneWebDay, we want to urge the FCC to assert its right to protect the three key principles of the internet, principles that have made it friendly to innovation and competition. We want the FCC to insist that the internet be open, that computers be connectible from end to end without interference, and that internet management be open and transparent — not secret and in the service of the companies who pay for it to be the way it is.

OneWebDay was founded in 2006 to celebrate the internet, a uniquely organized piece of infrastructure that has become critical to all of our lives, directly for those who use it, and indirectly for those who use the services that now depend on it, such as education and banking and healthcare.

Continue reading ‘The Internet’s Three Principles’ »

Big businesses that depend on government money, such the phone company, have large and well paid staff to handle the quirks of government rules, changes, and deadlines — but small businesses do not.

Grant opportunities are all too often funded late, and the rules fixed close to the deadline for grant submission. This puts small business at a disadvantage. Yes, you have a few weeks to get the grant written, but you also have a small business to run, and unlike Verizon, you don’t have $400 per hour lawyers and accountants to do the work for you.

So it makes sense to prepare for the grant writing process before the rules are fixed.

Continue reading ‘Preparing a Small Business Wireless Internet Service Provider for Grant Writing’ »

Ryan Naraine reports that the Verizon DBIR report again has some nifty clues.

I had a lot of fun with last year’s.

This year’s report is here. And, oh yes, it will also contain fascinating information as last year’s did.

Here’s an excellent video showing the rate of increase of unemployment, and its spread by U.S. county.

The solution is obvious, build basic infrastructure (from roads to broadband to paying nurses’ salaries).

“We can’t say this enough,” writes David Isenberg.

In February, professor Eben Moglen inspired the creation of the Diaspora open source social networking project when in his speech to the Internet Society at NYU, he said:

Facebook is the Web with “I keep all the logs, how do you feel about that?” It’s a terrarium for what it feels like to live in a panopticon built out of web parts.

And it shouldn’t be allowed. It comes to that. It shouldn’t be allowed. That’s a very poor way to deliver those services. They are grossly overpriced at “spying all the time”. They are not technically innovative. They depend upon an architecture subject to misuse and the business model that supports them is misuse. There isn’t any other business model for them. This is bad.

I’m not suggesting it should be illegal. It should be obsolete. We’re technologists, we should fix it.

Last night, it was the turn of Rob Spectre, community evangelist for Boxee, who dropped by the NYLUG in order to grow the community.

Spectre pointed out that while open source technology is widely deployed throughout the internet from the largest core data centers to the newest cell phones, it is absent from the living. This is due largely to the monolith in the living room, as in, “my god, it’s full of patent lawyers!”

Continue reading ‘Boxee at NYLUG’ »

A widely publicized study by the FCC on users’ perceptions of their broadband speeds (.pdf) found that 80 percent don’t even know what those speeds are supposed to be.

Also, a clear majority believe that the broadband provider should always “deliver the promised speed” — they clearly don’t know that the contract they signed but did not read merely promises a “best effort”.

Only a third of cell phone customers are pleased with the price and speed they get, though a majority are happy with the cell phone as a phone.

It is not clear at this time how or whether the survey will influence FCC policy.

Crumb! I never knew he was so good.

On May 21, 2010, we attended the latest performance of counter)induction. The first piece, “Ikhoor” by Xenakis, a piece for string trio, was greatly enhanced for me by a conversation I recently had with my friend Ken, a violinist. I had said that classical music does not have distortion and he described several methods by which violinists can obtain unusual sounds.

One involves turning the bow on its side, a method that Xenakis used very well in this piece. Another involves lifting the strings and letting them fall against the bridge of the violin, which produces a sound that is very different from plucking.

This was followed by Pascal Dusapin’s Trio Rombach, a piece I did not like.

All of this was a prelude to the meat of the performance.

Continue reading ‘counter)induction’s “the child is father to the man”’ »

Melissa and I attended a Games For Change workshop, a brainstorming session to kick off the 2010 Games For Change Festival here in New York and hosted by the Non Profit Commons in Second Life (NCSL).

Many of those attending had built games for nonprofits (including the World Bank!), and some represented organizations such as IBM that are interested in the idea.

The portion of the discussion that I felt I could contribute was this: what can games do for a non-profit? Nancy Goldstein phrased the issue this way: many remember having to teach organizations the difference between a blog and a press release. Many remember organizations that simply published press releases on blog, a colossal failure and a missed opportunity to engage people. So what can a game do that a press release cannot do?

Continue reading ‘Thoughts on Games For Change’ »