February 16, 2008
DAEMON
18:19 UTC » Books - Games - Network Technology
A few weeks ago, Stewart Brand emailed me asked if I was still playing World of Warcraft and if I had read DAEMON. I was still playing World of Warcraft and hadn't read DAEMON. A few days later, thanks to Amazon, I was reading DAEMON.
Years ago, I remember thinking about Multi User Dungeons (MUDs) and how much they affected people in the real world. I knew people who were obsessed with MUDs, the first Multi-User Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). I was obsessed. (I think the first time I ever appeared in Wired was in 1993 when Howard Rheingold with Kevin Kelly wrote about MUDs and mentioned my obsession.) In MUDs, people got married, people got divorced, people lost their jobs, people shared ideas... The MUDs I played touched the real world through all of the people in the game.
Unlike the World of Warcraft and more like Second Life, MUDs allowed players to create rooms, monsters and objects. When you entered a MUD, it was like entering the collective intelligence of all of the people who played the game. There were quests that were designed by people using their knowledge of Real Life™. Playing in their worlds was like walking through their brains. These worlds merged and collided as people from everywhere collaborated in creating MUDs of various themes with various objectives.
At some point in the evolution of MMORPGs, MUDs forked and we ended up with most of the people who liked creating objects and worlds in places like Second Life where, while you CAN make games, most of what happens is world creation. The "gamers" ended up in games like World of Warcraft where the game play aspect has been honed to a fine art, but the player content creation aspect has been completely lost. (Although most of the developers are former obsessive players.)
What I envisioned back when I was playing and hacking MUDs more was that if you turned the world a bit inside out and imagined that YOU were the MUD, the people who played your game were like little pawns or interfaces for you in the real world. They inputted content and created worlds and taught you about the real world. They promoted you to their friends. They played obsessively increasing experience points and commitment to the game so that they would forever feed you and keep you alive. They would set up servers and pay for hosting just to feed their obsession and protect their investment. If you became extremely popular, a group of your players would spawn a new MUD with your DNA-code and there would be another one of you.
The hardcore players would hack your open source code and keep you evolving. The Wizards would educate and add character to each instance of your code. The players would be your footprint in Real Life™.
When most of the gamers moved to corporation owned closed source games designed by a team of developers, I stopped having this dream. The games were no longer "alive" in the same way I had envisioned them evolving.
After reading DAEMON, this dream is back. Leinad Zeraus depicts a world where a collosall computer daemon designed by a genius MMO designer begins to take over the world after his death. In many ways, the vision is similar to the vision I had, but the author adds a macabre twist and many many more orders of scale to make this one of the most inspiring books I've read in a long time. The author is "an independent systems consultant to Fortune 100 companies. He has designed enterprise software for the defense, finance and entertainment industries." He uses his experience to make the book extremely believable and realistic and still mind-blowing.
It was super fun to read and is a book I'd recommend to any who loves the Net and gaming. I'd also recommend it to anyone who doesn't. It's a great book to learn about the importance of understanding all of this - before it's too late.
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January 31, 2007
Going off grid
10:59 UTC » Eating and Cooking - Ecology - Economics - Energy - Hardware - Network Technology
Yesterday, we started planning our veggie garden and started a compost bin. I'm trying to figure out what percentage of my total food intake I can grow at home. We have a relatively large yard by Japanese standards so most of this will be a matter of personal energy. I'm going to start small this year but try to increase my nutritional independence from commercial networks every year.
My goal is to be able to cover nearly all of our fertilizer needs through the composting of all of our biodegradable garbage this year.
Thinking through the various scenarios, I realized that I could significantly reduce inputs and outputs from our house by going this route. When I imagine walking over to the garden every morning, picking my veggies, then chucking the waste into the compost bin, I get a happy feeling inside. I realize this is pretty simple and not so significant, but "just add water and sunlight" is very appealing.
I think that I can also make a significant impact on my energy inputs through photovoltaics and maybe some day get off of the power grid. This requires a larger financial investment but is an area that I've already done a bit of work in this area from my time at ECD.
In my lab/office/Tokyo pad we just finished setting up (thanks to the folks at WIDE) a dark fiber connection to the WIDE box at the Japanese Internet exchange. It is currently a 1G connection. WIDE is a research project and I'm only paying for the dark fiber. WIDE is routing for me. I am not going through a single licensed telecom provider for my Internet connectivity. Consequently, going from 1G to 10G is just a matter of buying more hardware and has no impact on the running cost. More bandwidth is just about more hardware. The way it SHOULD be.
It's exciting to think about making my footprint smaller and smaller in nutrition and energy and thinking about nutrition, energy and bandwidth more and more as assets that I operate rather than services from big companies.
I was going to Twitter this as I was sitting here drinking my morning tea, but it turned into a blog post. Thanks Twitter. ;-)
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December 28, 2006
Major damage to Asian Internet access from earthquake
14:33 UTC » Network Technology
news on sina.com.cn, in which China Telecom, one the biggest ISP in China, release an official statement( with my rough translation)This really throws the notion of "cyberspace" into the physical world. My sympathies to everyone affected. Hope they figure out how to fix those cables quickly.中国电信称，据我国地震台网测定，北京时间12月26日20时26分和34分，在南海海域发生7.2、6.7级地震。受强烈地震影响，中美海缆、亚太1号、亚太2号海缆、FLAG海缆、亚欧海缆、FNAL海缆等多条国际海底通信光缆发生中断，中断点在台湾以南15公里的海域，造成附近国家和地区的国际和地区性通信受到严重影响。
China Telecom has confirmed that, according to China institute of earthquake monitoring, at Dec 26, 20:26-20:34 Beijing Time, 7.2 and 6.7 magnitude earth quake have occurred in the South China Sea. Affected by the earthquake, Sina-US cable, Asia-Pacific Cable 1, Asia-Pacific Cable 2, FLAG Cable, Asia-Euro Cable and FNAL cable was broken and cut up. The break-off point is located 15 km south to Taiwan, which severely affected the International and national tele-communication in neighboring regions.
据悉，中国大陆至台湾地区、美国、欧洲等方向国际港澳台通信线路受此影响亦大量中断，国际港澳台互联网访问质量受到严重影响，国际港澳台话音和专线业务也受到一定影响。
It was also reported that communication directed to China mainland, Taiwan, US and Europe were all massively interrupted. Internet connection to countries and region outside of China mainland became very difficult. Voice communication and telephone services were also affected.
中国电信称，受余震影响，抢修工作遇到较大困难，加之海缆施工具有一定难度，预计影响还将持续一段时间。
China Telecom has claimed that due to the aftershock of the earthquake, the repairing works would be very tough. In addition undersea operation is also not easy to handle with. So this phenomenon is going to exist for certain period.
UPDATE: Xeni just picked this up on Boing Boing and linked to the Wikinews article and to the image above.
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July 13, 2006
A Series of Tubes
12:09 UTC » Internet Policy - Music - Network Technology
I DID NOT KNOW that the Internet was a series of tubes.AlterNetSenator Ted Stevens: The RemixPosted by Melissa McEwan at 6:57 AM on July 11, 2006.
Last month, Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) gave a rather stunning speech on the issue of net neutrality, in which he made such clueless statements as: "I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday," and "[T]he internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes."
Now, the good folks at Boldheaded have turned his "skillful fusion of political doublespeak and perplexing ignorance on how the Internet works" into the DJ Ted Stevens Techno Remix: "A Series of Tubes." [Stream or Download above]
All I can say is just go listen. And then laugh and laugh and laugh.
Very funny. ;-)
You can download it from the Bold Headed Broadcast site.
via Scott via Deb
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June 12, 2006
SMS in Japan
12:34 UTC » Network Technology - Wireless and Mobile
I just got a new Vodafone Japan phone to mess around with the network. In particular, I'm curious about how SMS evolves or fails to evolve in Japan.
So here's what I tested. I have a T-Mobile US SIM in a Nokia phone and was able to send and receive SMSs over both the Vodafone 3G network and the NTT DoCoMo 3G network. I was able to send an SMS to my Vodafone Japan phone, but not to my NTT DoCoMo phone. However, I was NOT able to reply to the SMS. As far as I can tell, but Vodafone Japan and DoCoMo disable sending SMSs to any other network than their own, but Vodfhone Japan allows you to receive an SMS from outside the network. This is for people with accounts on those networks. Their networks DO allow people who roam on their networks to send and receive SMS freely.
I am going to Finland tomorrow so I will try to use my Vodafone Japan phone there and see if it still blocks my SMS. I have a feeling that since the SMS server is probably where they block it, that it probably won't change anything.
The good news is that the 3G networks in Japan allow 3G phones and 3G subscribers from outside of Japan to roam on the Japanese networks. The bad news is that the Japanese networks are bringing their old-fashioned closed network philosophy and crippling connectivity between their networks. How stupid.
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December 1, 2005
Will Digital Communication Undermine NGOs?
02:43 UTC » Activism - Health and Medicine - Human Rights - Information and Media - Media and Journalism - Network Technology - Social Software
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November 10, 2005
Bloggers Investigated for Inciting Paris Riots
08:19 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Network Technology - Podcasts
In France bloggers have been investigated by police for inciting the riots.
Also, my audiocast on the riots for the New York Times website. (My first podcast-style effort)
Blogs and sms messages were apparently used to coordinate violent action on a large scale.
What should authorities do?
Is there an alternative to censorship?
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October 10, 2005
Web x.0
10:00 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Games - Network Technology - Open Source Software - Technology Controversy
As the Web 2.0 bandwagon gets bigger and faster, more and more people seem to be blogging about it. I am increasingly confronted by people who ask me what it is. Just like I don't like "blogging" and "blogosphere", I don't like the word. However, I think it's going to end up sticking. I don't like it because it coincides with another bubbly swell in consumer Internet (the "web") and it sounds like "buzz 2.0". I think all of the cool things that are going on right now shouldn't be swept into some name that sounds like a new software version number for a re-written presentation by venture captitalists to their investors from the last bubble.
What's going on right now is about open standards, open source, free culture, small pieces loosely joined, innovation on the edges and all of the good things that WE FORGOT when we got greedy during the last bubble. These good Internet principles are easily corrupted when you bring back "the money". (As a VC, I realize I'm being a bit hypocritical here.) On the other hand, I think/hope Web 2.0 will be a bit better than Web 1.0. Both Tiger and GTalk use Jabber, an open standard, instead of the insanity of MSN Messenger, AOL IM and Yahoo IM using proprietary standards that didn't interoperate. At least Apple and Google are TRYING to look open and good.
I think blogging, web services, content syndication, AJAX, open source, wikis, and all of the cool new things that are going on shouldn't be clumped together into something that sounds like a Microsoft product name. On the other hand, I don't have a better solution. Web 2.0 is probably a pretty good name for a conference and probably an easy way to explain why we're so excited to someone who doesn't really care.
While we're at labeling the web x.0. Philip Torrone jokingly mentioned to me the other day (inside Second Life) that 3D was Web 3.0. I agree. 3D and VR have been around for a long time and there is a lot of great work going on, but I think we're finally getting to the phase where it's integrated with the web and widely used. I think the first step for me was to see World of Warcraft (WoW) with its 4M users and the extensible client. The only machine I have where I can turn on all of the video features is my duel CPU G5. On my powerbook I have to limit my video features and can't concurrently use other applications while playing. Clearly there is a hardware limit which is a good sign since hardware getting faster is a development we can count on.
Second Life (SL) is sort of the next step in development. Instead of trying to control all real-money and real-world relationship with things in the game like Blizzard does with WoW, SL encourages it. SL is less about gaming and more about building and collaboration. However, SL is not open source and is a venture capital backed for-profit company that owns the platform. I love it, but I think there's one more step.
Croquet, which I've been waiting for for a long time appears to be in the final phases of a real release. Croquet, if it takes off should let you build things like SL but in a distributed and open source way. It is basically a 3D collaborative operating system. If it takes off, it should allow us to take our learning from WoW and SL and do to them what "Web 2.0" is doing to traditional consumer Internet services.
However, don't hold your breath. WoW blows away SL in terms of snappy graphics and response time and has a well designed addictive and highly-tuned gaming environment. Croquet is still in development and is still way behind SL in terms of being easy to use. It will take time for the more open platforms to catch up to the closed ones, but I think they're coming.
Web 3.0 is on its way! Actually, lets not call it Web 3.0.
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July 11, 2005
The internets
14:28 UTC » ICANN - Network Technology
I don't know how much deep thought was involved when George Bush called the Internet "the internets" but this reflects a real risk that we face today. If you look at the traffic of many large countries with non-English languages, you will find that the overwhelming majority of the traffic stays inside the country. In countries like China and Japan where there is sufficient content in the local language and most people can't or don't like to read English this is even more so. I would say that the average individual probably doesn't really notice the Internet outside of their country or really care about content not in their native language.
Physical mail inside of these countries is delivered with addressing in their local language. It's not surprising that on the issue of International Domain Names (IDNs) there is a strong and emotion position inside of these countries that people should be able to write URLs in their native scripts. Take my name for example, the same Chinese characters for my name can be transliterated into English as either Johichi Itoh or Joichi Ito. This problem is aggravated in languages such as Chinese where there are more dialects and many more readings for the same set of characters. Why should these people be forced to learn some sort of roman transliteration in order to access the company page where they know the official Chinese characters for the names.
Similarly, there are people who don't like the policies of the Internet and either want to censor or otherwise manage differently THEIR internet. Others who don't like the way DNS works, have proposed alternative roots. This is possible and easy to do, but you end up with "the internets".
It is the fact that we have a single root and that we have global policies and protocols which allows the Internet to be a single network and allows anyone to reach anyone else in the world. Clearly, allowing anyone in the world to reach anyone else in the world with a single click introduces a variety of problems, but it creates a single global network which allows dialog and innovation to be shared worldwide without going through gateways or filters. This attribute of the Internet is a key to the future of a global democracy and I believe we need to fight to preserve this.
Since more and more people are using the Internet, there are more and more diverse views about the policies and control. This is clearly making consensus more difficult and ICANN is one of the groups which is having to adapt to the increasing number of inputs in the consensus process. This is all the more reason to work harder to keep everything together. Please. Lets fight to keep the Internet and not let it turn into the internets... It is a difficult process with various flaws, but if we give up, it will be very difficult if not impossible for all of to talk again very soon.
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July 4, 2005
Grokster...
17:10 UTC » Intellectual Property - Network Technology - US Policy and Politics
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July 2, 2005
Municipal networks, the great equalizer
14:18 UTC » Activism - Global Voices - Network Technology - Wireless and Mobile
Micah Sifry has written a nice piece about why wifi and cheap broadband is an essential enabler and more important than direct aid for communities which need help. He references various examples and source. I completely agree. I remember speaking to a UN diplomat who said that the Internet has changed the face of global policy making. He told us that the Anti-Personal Land-mine Treaty would not have happened if it weren't for email and the ability for NGOs to get information, organize and pressure governments and the UN using the Internet. I believe that at every level, it is essential to empower individuals and communities with a voice and the Internet is in a position to enable people for the first time at a reasonable cost. It is about global voices.
I believe that it is easy enough to run a basic Wifi, Internet and Voice over IP network that in many cases municipal governments can run them. I realize this hurts competition and this is what Verizon argued when they tried to stop Philadelphia for setting up their own Wifi network, but I think it would be better than what we have now. In many places broadband is controlled by organizations that are effectively monopolies anyway. See for example the new ruling in the US that cable companies don't have to allow others to provide access through their network. Would you rather have the network run by a monopoly that is controlled by a bunch of greedy shareholders or a local government that the people at least have some control over?
People will argue that allowing local governments to operate networks will stifle innovation because of lack of competition. I think that the benefit is worth the cost of providing cheaper and more universal access. The network is becoming less and less a "service" and more and more a "thing". You can buy a bunch of routers and hook them together and you have a pretty good network. You do need maintenance, but you don't need some huge company with a bunch of bell-heads running the thing. Simple access is more like a road than a full-service hotel. It just has to be cheap and work.
I agree that this isn't for all municipal governments, but I think the central governments of the world should try very hard not to give in to the pressure of the telco lobbies and stifle the attempts of municipal governments to provide network services including voice. I also believe that non-profits and NGOs can play a huge role in helping provide access in addition to municipal governments as well as helping municipal governments set up such networks.
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June 14, 2005
Some Japan Internet stats
14:23 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Network Technology
At the Internet Association Japan meeting yesterday, the folks from Impress gave a summary of their 10th annual Internet survey.
I took notes based on a verbal presentation so there could be some mistakes. If anyone notices any, please let me know.Impress 2005 Internet White PaperThere are 32,244,000 broadband households which is 36.2%.There are 70,072,000 Internet users.
72.5% of people have heard of blogs, up from 39% last year.
25% of women in their teens and 20's have blogs.
9.5% of Internet users use RSS Readers.
46.5% of Internet users have decreased spending in physical shops because of online shopping.
29.6% of offices have wifi up from 10.7% last year.
2.8% of companies have corporate blogs and over 50% express no intention of ever having corporate blogs.
5.5% of companies have corporate web pages for mobile phone users.
UPDATE: PDF of press release summary of white paper. (includes charts / Japanese)
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May 20, 2005
BitTorrent Goes Trackerless
08:03 UTC » Network Technology - Software
I'm sure everyone knows what BitTorrent is, but it is the most popular peer-to-peer file sharing protocol for sharing large files. Before you had to have a tracker to create "torrents" which coordinated this sharing, but now you don't. This should make it even easier for people to make BitTorrent enclosures in blog entries and otherwise use BitTorrent to share files. Having said that, there are value added trackers like Prodigem which I'm sure people will use to charge for and otherwise track their files.
BitTorrentBitTorrent Goes Trackerless: Publishing with BitTorrent gets easier!As part of our ongoing efforts to make publishing files on the Web painless and disruptively cheap, BitTorrent has released a 'trackerless' version of BitTorrent in a new release.
[...]
In prior versions of BitTorrent, publishing was a 3 step process. You would:
1. Create a ".torrent" file -- a summary of your file which you can put on your blog or website
2. Create a "tracker" for that file on your webserver so that your downloaders can find each other
3. Create a "seed" copy of your download so that your first downloader has a place to download fromMany of you have blogs and websites, but dont have the resources to set up a tracker. In the new version, we've created an optional 'trackerless' method of publication. Anyone with a website and an Internet connection can host a BitTorrent download!
[...]
Although still in Beta release, the trackerless version of BitTorrent, and the latest production version are available at http://www.bittorrent.com/
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May 3, 2005
Earthlink R&D shows that IPv6 can be easy
20:06 UTC » ICANN - Network Technology
This may be a bit geeky for some people, but for anyone who's been worried about how we're going to get IPv6 everywhere, this should be good news. Congratulations Earthlink R&D! I'm going to get a WRT54G router and try this out right away...Mr BlogPractical IPv6We finally released a project we've been working on in EarthLink R&D for some time now. I was not the lead engineer on this project but it's perhaps one of the most exciting things we've done in R&D to date, if not the most exciting thing.
Basically it's a demonstration of a practical IPv6 migration strategy. There is a sandbox that allows users to obtain their own /64 IPv6 subnet of real routable addresses (Goodbye NAT -- YEAH!)
Here's how it works: Simply get an account at http://www.research.earthlink.net/ipv6/accounts.html to get your own personal block of 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IPv6 addresses; install the firmware onto your standard Linksys WRT54G router, and blamo, you have IPv6. With this special code installed on your Linksys router, your IPv4 works as normal; you'll still have your NAT IPv4 LAN. But in addition to that, any IPv6 capable machine on the LAN will get a real, honest to goodness, routable IPv6 address too. It couldn't be easier. This works for Mac OS X, Linux/UNIX, as well as Windows XP. You don't have to do anything special on the machines on the LAN. They just work, as they say.
So with this code installed on the router and your IPv6 accounts setup, nothing breaks. You continue to use your LAN as before, but you suddenly also get real IPv6 addresses. Easy migration. No forklift required.
Technorati Tags: IPv6
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February 23, 2005
Shinkuro
15:46 UTC » Network Technology - Software
I had dinner with Steve Crocker last night. I met him before through David Isenberg, but since he is the Security and Stability Advisory Committee Liaison to the ICANN board, I am getting a chance to hang out with him more these days. Among other things, he's well known for being the author of RFC 1.
His explained the software that his company Shinkuro produced and I tried it today. It solves a BUNCH of needs that I had. It's basically a very cryptographically robust, cross-platform collaboration tool. It allows you to create groups and share folders of files, has a shared chat space (like IRC) and allows you to share your desktop screen with other members of the group (yes, across platforms). The shared files are transfered in the background and edits to files are sent as diffs which can be accepted into the original by the recipient. There is also standard IM with your buddy list. The great thing is that all of the traffic is encrypted. 256 bit AES and 2048 bit RSA keys. Each message is encrypted with a unique key, and the key is transmitted under the RSA key. This is very important since I know for a fact that people sniff IM and other traffic at many of the conferences and public places.
The folder in the groups is really nifty. You drop files into a folder and you can see who has received the files and see any changes that are waiting for you. This seems so much more organized than the tons of attachments and updates I receive before board meetings and conference calls.
It seems similar to Groove in some ways, but is more lightweight and most importantly cross-platform. (Mac, Windows, Linux.)
You can download it at www.shinkuro.com and for now it's free. If you register it, you will get all of the features. My id is jito!shinkuro.com if you want to invite me to be your friend or into a group. As I've said before, I think email is dead and I'm always looking for things like this that help me survive the post-email era.
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February 17, 2005
Real-time streaming is stupid
00:16 UTC » Network Technology - Video
I'm listening to Andrew Odlyzko giving a talk right now about why Quality of Service (QoS) and real-time streaming is stupid. He showed a slide showing that P2P and other traffic are generally transmitting files at faster speeds than their bit rates. Basically, if you cache and buffer, you can have outages in the downloads and you'll usually be fine. I agree. I can see why carriers would want to spread the rumor that QoS is some feature that we have to have, but it's strange that so many researchers seem to think we will need QoS supported video streaming. Maybe they need to stop watching cable TV.
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December 9, 2004
AIM account suspended
14:47 UTC » Network Technology
I'm getting an error that says "Your account is currently suspended" when I try to log into my joiitosk AIM account. Does anyone know what this error means and how I resolve it?
Update: Article in eWeek about this, but it doesn't say whether AOL is going to give us our accounts back. Thanks to Cours for the link.
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October 28, 2004
BT appears to be blocking third-party VoIP
20:37 UTC » Network Technology - VoIP
If this is true, this is VERY bad behavior. 5060 is the port that SIP uses. I can understand why a phone company wouldn't want "free phone calls over the Internet" running on their system, but this is exactly the kind of behavior that makes Internet folks dislike telephone company control.David BeckemeyerBT appears to be blocking third-party VoIPI've been biting my tongue on this since I first ran across it several months back. But now I have to say something. If someone can prove me wrong on this, fine, I'll post a retraction, but now I'm going to say it: British Telecom appears to be explicitly blocking VoIP for their DSL subscribers.
I've worked with an associate to examine the situation and all signs point to an explicit blocking of VoIP. In Cisco ACL-speak, it appears there is a rule somewhere in the BT network being applied to inbound packets of the form:
deny udp any eq 5060 any
Can anyone else corroborate this fact?
VoIP stands for "Voice over IP" and SIP is the open standard "Session Initiation Protocol" used to set up calls over the Internet
UPDATE: Looks like it is a customer router issue, but still may be BT driven. Update on Mr. Blog.
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October 13, 2004
Panel Consensus
06:59 UTC » Creative Commons - Global Politics - Intellectual Property - Marketing - Movies - Music - Network Technology
I'm sitting in the Italian Parliament (I think.) The panel I was on was dealing with the impact of digital/Internet on content creation and distribution. It started yesterday and continued today. I think it lasted about seven hours or so in total. I found myself in violent disagreement at the beginning because they kept talking about piracy. The interesting thing about this panel (probably more common in other cultures, but new for me) was that we had to come to a written consensus by the end of the session and present it in the Parliament building. It would then be distributed to politicians across Europe as a recommendation.
I found myself negotiating like some UN diplomat.
In the end, here is where we ended up on a few of my "hot buttons".
Organized, for-profit, commercial piracy was different from P2P file sharing by individuals. We could not agree on the impact of P2P file sharing, but we agreed that punishing file sharing was not the only/best way to deal with the issue. I pushed for a stronger stance, my position being that as Chris Anderson says in The Long Tail, it's a matter of price and convenience. People will pay if the experience is better. That was not included in the statement, but "education" was used instead. Blah. I just made a statement that I disagree with this and that there is not enough evidence that P2P filesharing of music is really bad for the music industry.
It appeared that people had a VERY bad image of Creative Commons. For some reason they thought that CC was trying to force people to share and was anti-copyright. I explained the CC was built upon copyright and was trying to help artists choose their copyright.
This part turned out quite well in the statement. They said that CC was a tool, not to steal from artists, but to give them the choice to share and lower the parasitic costs (legal) of choosing a license. They concluded that CC was NOT a threat as they had originally envisioned, but a complimentary and a good thing. The tone was very pro-artist and less tolerant of distributors, the idea of giving more control to artists seemed to be quite attractive.
I'm about to have a chance to object to some of the issues I see in the statement and give an address about my thoughts. I'm going to talk about the value of the Long Tail and Creative Commons.
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October 12, 2004
Why ICANN
03:03 UTC » Joi's Diary - Network Technology
I've just been nominated to the board of ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers) and will be officially joining already seated members at the conclusion of the ICANN Meeting in Cape Town, South Africa, December 1-5. ("Nominated" technically because I officially join in December, but the selection process is completed.)
This is the end of a two or so year process of people telling me I should get involved and others warning me against it. Some of my wisest advisors urged me not to join saying things like, "you will make 3 mistakes in your life... this is one of them..." or "friends don't let friends do ICANN."
ICANN has its share of problems and a negative image associated with it in many circles. I've even taken my fare share of cheap shots at ICANN.
I am joining ICANN for two reasons. ICANN is changing and it's critical that ICANN is successful.
I've talked to on the phone and met a great number of people involved in ICANN in a variety of capacities. I realized that ICANN today is not what ICANN was a few years ago. Please reset your biases and pay attention to what they are doing. Yes. There are still problems, but they are being addressed by an extremely committed team of people who are doing amazing work. Also, take a look at the board. It's very geographically and professionally diverse. It's not some puppet of the US or special interests.
Why is ICANN important? If ICANN is not successful in proving that it can manage some of the critical elements of the Internet such as the name space and IP addresses, ICANN will be dissolved and the ITU will step in. Why would that be bad? I am generally in favor of multi-lateral approaches, but in the case of the ITU, I believe it is biased towards the telephone monopolies. The ITU was built by telcos to set technical standards for telcos. That suits the telephone system architecture, which is highly centralised and is structured as a patchwork of geographic monopolies. The Internet is decentralised, and there are many small companies and individuals working at the peripheries to develop new applications for the overall network. The governance process has to reflect the diversity and the needs of these companies, as well as the needs of the network providers.
I believe that many of the things that ICANN is doing are important, but the single biggest factor leading to my decision to try to participate in ICANN is to try to prove that the people of the Internet can govern themselves without direct involvement from nation-states and to try to help build an organization that can deliver that promise.
The official press release is on the ICANN site. For more information on the nomination process, please see the NomCom page.
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October 9, 2004
Do you know where your data is?
09:25 UTC » Global Politics - Media and Journalism - Network Technology
People have been reporting about the FBI ordering a hosting provider, Rackspace, with offices in the US and the UK to seize at least two servers from Indymedia's UK datacenter. Indymedia is a well known edgy alternative news site which was established to provide grassroots coverage of the WTO protests in Seattle. It has grown into a multinational resource for some hardcore journalism including a lot of work on the Diebold and the Patroit Act issues. The reports as well as Indymedia's page on this story say that the FBI has not provided a reason for the seizure to Indymedia. The statement from Rackspace says:
In past, Indymedia has done stuff like posting photos of undercover police officers. However, according to Indymedia, the "FBI asked for the Nantes post on swiss police to be removed, but admitted no laws were violated". This time the FBI has not told them what they've done wrong and Rackspace is under a gag order so they can't even tell Indymedia exactly what hardware they removed.RackspaceIn the present matter regarding Indymedia, Rackspace Managed Hosting, a U.S. based company with offices in London, is acting in compliance with a court order pursuant to a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT), which establishes procedures for countries to assist each other in investigations such as international terrorism, kidnapping and money laundering. Rackspace responded to a Commissioner’s subpoena, duly issued under Title 28, United States Code, Section 1782 in an investigation that did not arise in the United States. Rackspace is acting as a good corporate citizen and is cooperating with international law enforcement authorities. The court prohibits Rackspace from commenting further on this matter.
This implies that some non-US entity had the FBI force an action in the UK under MLAT. This means that Indymedia is being suspected of engaging in international terrorism, kidnapping or money laundering. I've seen some extreme reporting on Indymedia, but terrorism, kidnapping or money laundering? I guess the definition of "terrorism" has been expanded to meet popular demand these days, but come on... really?
This reminds me of toywar. A group of Swiss artists established in 1994 who are Golden Nica award winners from my Ars Electronica jury in 1996 call themselves etoy. Later, Etoys, founded in 1998 tried to take the etoy.com domain by force. They got a temporary injunction against the web site because a judge in LA agreed that it was confusing to customers of Etoys. Network Soutions complied and went beyond their call of duty and shut down etoy.com email as well for good measure. Swiss artists can be sued in a US court and having their email shut down by a US registrar.
My point is, be careful where your data lives...
UPDATE: nyc.indymedia.org is speculating that it is because Indymedia published the identities of the RNC delegates.
UPDATE2: It appears that maybe it wasn't the RNC, but the photos of the police officers according to Cryptome.
UPDATE3: imajes has an written a letter to his MPs. Maybe others should do the same.
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September 16, 2004
P2P over SIP
22:49 UTC » Network Technology - VoIP
Dr. Mark Petrovic and David Beckemeyer at Earthlink R&D have developed a proof of concept P2P application using SIP called SIPshare. SIP stands for Session Initiation Protocol and is one of the key technologies for the open standards around Voice over IP (VoIP). This application is pure P2P use of SIP. It is completely decentralized. According to David Beckemeyer this project is quite important.
SIP has been waylaid in regulatory and execution problems in the past and many people have written it off as a non-starter. I'm seeing more and more companies who are actually using it for cool stuff and proving that it's ready for prime time now. If you written off SIP and haven't taken a look at what people doing with it for the last six months, I suggest you take another look.David Beckemeyer in emailThis may not sound like that big of a deal, as file sharing has been done, but I think this is a really big event. It's not about file sharing. Nobody is really going to use the demo app Mark built. It's about demonstrating that pure P2P can be done over SIP and that SIP is about more than just voice and video.In some sense, the SIP wars to me are about sneaking in some aspects of the original "stupid network" baack into the NAT hell we've created. If we can do what it takes to get NAT boxes to support SIP (be consistent in how they do NAT so the edges can use STUN et al), then we have reclamied the ability to have individually addressable nodes, where we use SIP as the new IP network almost. This may be getting carried away, but anyway...
via David Beckemeyer
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July 30, 2004
BitTorrent public tracker needed
15:47 UTC » Cool Web Sites - Network Technology
I want to start playing with BitTorrent and integrating it into blogging more. I think I need a BitTorrent tracker. Can anyone recommend a respectable public tracker or does anyone have a machine they'd be willing to run a public tracker on? I want try to experiment with a variety of legal uses of BitTorrent.
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May 10, 2004
Developer of Japanese P2P system arrested
18:10 UTC » Japanese Policy - Music - Network Technology - Reforming Japanese Democracy - Software
Today, an associate professor at the most prestigious university in Japan, Tokyo University was arrested today for developing a tool that enables piracy. The program is a P2P system cally Winny. Previously two of the users had been arrested. I got a call from Asahi Shimbun (Japanese newspaper) today asking me for a comment for the morning news tomorrow. I hope the print it. I think it's an absolute disgrace to Japan. While the US is fighting in congress, Hollywood pushing to ban P2P and Boucher et al are fighting for DMCRA, Japanese police go and arrest someone developing P2P software with a VERY sketchy case. The thing is, it's quite likely he will be found guilty.
I once served as an expert witness on the FLMASK case. FLMASK was a program that could be used to allow password protected scrambling of areas of an image so that porn sites could post pictures that passed the Japanese censors, but allowed users to unscramble them. The police were so upset that they cracked down on the hardcore porn sites with the argument that even with FLMASK'ed "clean" images, they would be deemed hardcore. The problem was, this left the developer of FLMASK free from claims that his software enabled anything illegal. So they busted him for LINKING to these porn sites that got busted as users of his software. They deemed linking to a porn site as the same as actually running a porn site. I was the chairman of Infoseek Japan at the time so I obviously had a lot to say about that. The amazing thing is... after overwhelming evidence of the stupidity of the allegations, the guy was found guilty.
Anyway, Japan is yet again leading the world in stupid Internet policing.
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April 24, 2004
Essay about trends
17:41 UTC » Creative Commons - Intellectual Property - Network Technology - Technology Controversy - Wireless and Mobile
Here are some thoughts on where I think things are going in the mobile and content space.
I wrote this essay before reading Free Culture so I'm saying a lot of stuff that Larry says better...
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January 31, 2004
Dean Campaign Hires Bellhead
01:36 UTC » Network Technology - US Policy and Politics
David Isenberg blogs about the "Bellhead" background of Roy Neel, Howard Dean's new campaign manager.
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November 28, 2003
Docomo phones will become your wallet
13:44 UTC » Network Technology - Wireless and Mobile
Sony and Docomo have announced that they are working together to put contactless IC chips in phones. Sony's FeliCa (type C contactless IC chip) is slowly becoming a defacto standard in Japan. (The government is backing a different standard, type B.) Currently the Japan Railways, AM/PM and others are using it for payments. Many companies use it for company ID's. The problem is that you can't see how much is left in your card and it's a pain to "charge" the card with more money. Putting it on a phone lets you download money from your bank and see how much is left. I worry about the privacy and security issues, but connecting an RF payment system with a phone totally makes sense.
I have a theory that Docomo has to become an identity/payment company and dump the voice and other bit-pushing businesses and go flat rate or free on the network. Docomo should buy a credit card company and use the bit-pushing business as a stick when collecting money. There are some regulations regarding payment businesses that make it difficult, but I'm sure the government would waive this if there was enough of a social need. Right now, the transaction business that credit card companies do doesn't make money. This has driven credit card companies to become loan companies that lobby the government to allow them to charge crazy interest rates. These interest rates cause people to end up in debt hell and commit suicide. If Docomo replaced credit cards as the primary non-cash transaction, credit system and could use network service termination to lower the collection costs, I bet they could make enough money on the transaction business to cover the bit-pushing.
Docomo is Japan's biggest mobile carrier that does about $8B / yr in data revenues.
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November 17, 2003
SurfControl protects you from viewing this site
10:33 UTC » Network Technology - Technology Controversy
Dan Gillmor writes about how censorware blocks his site. It's blocking mine too.
Dan GillmorSimon Phipps alerts me that one of the big censorware outfits, SurfControl, is blocking this and other blogs as a default setting for some customers. He points to Jon Udell's report of a surrealistic conversation with a company salesdroid upon his own such discovery. Good grief.SurfControl puts all blogs under Usenet, a fairly bizarre characterization of the genre, but par for the course for the censorware mavens. They tend to sweep big categories into their filter, and then let you try to find your own way to escape.
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