October 2002 Archives

So Steve Sakoman pulled it off. $11mm in stock for Be Inc. was a good deal for Palm. Great news for BeOS fans, although most have already moved on. Too bad my Be Inc. stock options aren't worth anything though. :-) Good luck Steve!

The Register USA

PalmOS 6 details emerge
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 10/30/2002 at 14:20 EST

PalmSource has offered us a glimpse of the next milestone for PalmOS, version 6.0 due for release next year.

Version 6.0 will be as dramatic a change for the platform as OS X was for Apple, or NT was for Microsoft, and represents the culmination of work from the former Be team Palm acquired last year.

The new OS will feature multimedia and graphics frameworks drawn from BeOS, PalmSource's Michael Mace told us. Mace says this is real BeOS code, but Steve Sakoman, the team's former leader at Be Inc, and now PalmSource's "chief products officer" has denied that Be code would be incorporated into the new OS. More likely, we suspect, the new OS will inherit some algorithms and architecture from BeOS.

InfoWorld

WiFi eyes better wireless LAN security

By Stephen Lawson
October 30, 2002 11:37 am PT

THE WIRELESS ETHERNET Compatibility Alliance (WECA), which certifies IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN products with the WiFi label, on Thursday will announce a new set of mechanisms to combat the security problem that has plagued wireless LANs.

A WECA official did not provide details of the mechanisms but said they are intended to replace the current security system based on WEP (Wireless Encryption Protocol).

WEP, which is built in to products that use the IEEE 802.11b and 802.11a standards, is easy for intruders to break into, according to many analysts and other observers. A task group within the working group that administers 802.11 in the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Inc. (IEEE) is developing a new security specification that would require equipment to support several different strong algorithms for encrypting traffic. That work is not done yet, and products using it are not expected until the second half of next year.

Duh... This is a pretty big problem. People think that having a WEP key is actually secure. You can crack normal WEP keys in a few minutes by sniffing traffic and using programs such as wepcrack which is available on the web. There are some chipsets out that have better security, but most of the AP's we all use are completely vulnerable. On the other hand, if you aren't worried about people hijacking traffic and if you encrypt everything you do internally, you're fine. Just don't for a moment think that just because you set a WEP key that you're secure. (Kudo's to Chris for telling me about wepcrack. ;-) )

You may have seen this, but this is great news. Yet ANOTHER service I have to sign up for. m.m.m.more...

InfoWorld

T-Mobile in Wi-Fi pact with United, American and Delta

By Juan Carlos Perez
October 30, 2002 1:10 pm PT

MIAMI -- MIAMI (10/30/2002) - T-Mobile USA Inc. plans to add so-called Wi-Fi hot spots for high-speed wireless Internet connectivity in about 100 U.S. airport clubs and lounges over the next year through an agreement with Delta Air Lines Inc., United Air Lines Inc. and AMR Corp.'s American Airlines, the wireless carrier announced Wednesday.

Elizabeth Lane Lawley writes about her thoughts on the aoling of blogspace. What a scary thought. What a likely scenario.

Looks like "reaching critical mass" is becoming synonymous with "succumbing to the great unwashed masses."

Had another breakfast of the World Economic Forum Blueprint for Japan 2020 team. I suggested that we meet at 7am every week since I doubted most people were busy at 7am. People grumbled, but I was amazed at the turnout. We had a lively discussion. It was sort of funny sitting in the Hotel Okura Orchid Room (a famous power breakfast place for the Japanese elite) discussing radical reform in English. Yu decided to conduct all of the meetings in English because the English language is more clear than Japanese. Which is fine with me and probably helps prevent the establishment from overhearing our radical views. Or maybe it draws more attention to us... hmm... Anyway, we're obviously not going to be able to hide so I guess no use trying.

A poll done by Oki Matsumoto and Monex shows that 86% of people polled support Takenaka. The LDP, the opposition, the banks and the Japanese media are picking on Takenaka. The foreign are focusing on the "injection of public funds" rather than the most important point which is the fact that Takenaka is trying to force banks to mark down their bad debt. He's getting it from all sides and I don't think Koizumi is sticking up for him enough. The amazing thing is, the public (at least those who go to Monex's site) supports him. It is so typical for the Japanese media to be taking mean swipes at him and making him look weak and stupid when he is really the main person trying to get people to face their problems. I hate to say this, but if all of the people who voted on the Monex site had blogs, maybe the media wouldn't be able to get away with the horrible spin doctoring. How can they say people don't support him when at least one poll shows him having major public support. Bah!

We talked about spam filters earlier. I use TMDA which is based on whitelisting. The controllable regex multilator is a technical filtering technology. These technologies keep getting smarter. It sort of reminds me of the convolutions we used to go through at Infoseek to get rid of spam sites from our indexes. I remember that some site used to produced different pages to the infoseek search bot by looking at the id... Anyway, this "CRM114" looks interesting.

CRM114 - the Controllable Regex Mutilator

CRM-114 is a system to examine incoming e-mail, system log streams, data files or other data streams, and to sort, filter, or alter the incoming files or data streams according to whatever the user desires. Criteria for categorization of data can be by satisfaction of regexes, by sparse spectra, or by other means. Accuracy of the sparse spectra function has been seen in excess of 99 per cent, for 1/4 megabyte of learning text. In other words, CRM114 learns, and it learns fast .

Erik Bloodaxe... how Chris USED to look. ;-)

Chris Goggans posing next to the safe in my office. (The little Samurai thing is Jun's)

Had drinks last night with Chris. Chris used to go by the name of Erik Bloodaxe and was one of the co-founders of the "Legion of Doom", a notorious group of hackers, many of whom ended up getting arrested. He was also the editor of Phrack, a journal by and for hackers. Chris and I met at "Hacking In Progress" in 1997. Lucky Green convinced me to go and I think Chris was there with Bob Stratton. HIP was quite exciting. It was this amazing hackers conference with thousands of hackers in the middle of a forest near Amsterdam hacking in tents with ethernet strung around the whole place. We didn't have enough water, but there was IP everywhere... Anyway, Chris was there and it was the first time I met a hacker with real groupies...

Since then Chris and I have kept in touch and worked together several times where he broke into computers for me. (With permission of course.) He's become a regular in Japan since we started working together and now I get to see him a lot more. He has become quite well known in Japan for his practical manner and his skill. He has a great balance between being extremely professional and loving to break into computers. It's hard to find Japanese with this combination. It's either usually professional with no imagination or childish and imaginative... but I guess Chris is not entirely "unchildish"... Let's call him... "neotenous."

Anyway.. we go drinking occasionally and talk about "the old days", breaking into computers and other things that old hackers always talk about...

Having said that, both he and I have settled down QUITE A BIT since we first met. He's married and sits around watching movies and stuff... ;-)

A blog referrer spam site... from Veer

And I thought blogs were going to be a solution to spam...
http://referrer.mastodonte.com/

Welcome to Mastodonte Referrer Advertising

You are seeing this page probably because your found us among your weblog's referrers or because a blogger linked to us as a result of our ongoing referrer campain.

We are doing referrer marketing: adding your URL as a referrer in the logs of thousands of weblogs. If you are seeing this page, referrer advertising worked with you.

You might also see it as a PR tool for bloggers.

Q: How many weblogs can you reach?
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We think it's our customer's best interests to keep our database clean of blogs that prefer not to receive our ads.

Governor Domoto

Posing in front of the prefectural headquarters elevator hall with my daikon

Went to Chiba and had lunch with Governor Domoto of Chiba with whom I've become quite friendly lately. Chiba is the prefecture where William Gibson's Neuromancer starts out. Narita International Airport and Disneyland are also in Chiba. It is kind of a long train ride out, but I was able to pass the time having an IM chat with John Patrick on my i-mode AIM client that Neeraj made.

Domoto-san was her usual energetic self. I talked about some ideas I had for projects in Narita and Makuhari. I talked to her about ECD and renewable energy. Domoto-san is an environmentalist and she got very excited about the idea of the Hydrogen Economy. I also talked about blogs. Domoto-san was an independant who won with a rather grassroots election effort that leveraged the Net. She liked the idea of blogs and promised to try it out. I promised to dispatch someone from the Neoteny Blogging Team to help her out.

I often talk to her about how Mizuka and I only eat organic vegetables now. She gave me an organic daikon (Japanese Radish). It was a bit strange carrying it in the crowded train back to Tokyo... I'm looking forward to eating it. ;-)

Click play... you need flash...

Saw this on Marc Canter's Blog.

Rick Lehrbaum (updated Sept. 11, 2002)

Intel embeds Linux in home digital media adapater
A key component of the Extended Wireless PC Initiative's media distribution architecture is a new PC peripheral called the digital media adapter, which provides an appliance-like link between PCs, TVs, and stereos. The device, which is based on an XScale microarchitecture PCA210 'applications processor' and runs an embedded Linux operating system, receives digital media from the PC via 802.11 wireless networking and UpnP technologies, and connects to TVs and stereos using standard audio/video cables -- much like a DVD player. Using a simple remote control, consumers navigate through menus on a TV screen, selecting the PC digital media they wish to receive.

Marc Canter

The 'magic sauce' is something called UpnP (universal plug and play) which was originally designed for plugging cards into a PC bus or USB devices (such as keyboards or mice.) But now they have a 'stack' to route A/V info to the Digital Media Adapter. I wonder is UPnP can sense out I.P. addresses like Apple's Rendezvous (otherwise known as ZeroConf) and make setting up Home LANs easy to do?

This reminds me of my SliMP3 that I wrote about earlier, but that doesn't have wireless or video. It also reminds me of my Sony Airboard which has 802.11, ethernet, dialup Internet, TV and a browser. The Airboard is less of a "hub" and more of an "all-in-one". I guess the key to the Intel thing will be low cost and open standards. If they can help orchestrate a bunch of devices without trying to make their device do everything, it might work. I still don't like the idea of "fat" home servers. I am hoping that, at least in my house, I can use everything I already have. My PC hard disk, my audio amp and speakers, my plasma display and my digital satellite dish... Having said that, there may be a market for small all-in-one's...

Eric Myer Photography Stereotypes

A very cool site that lets you build faces from a variety of stereotypes.

Photo from Mainichi Shimbun

When politicians who speak up against corruption get stabbed to death in front of their homes, you know you are in trouble. I NEVER trust the press on this sort of thing. We'll see what they end up saying REALLY happened. Japanese politicians are regularly pushed around by the media and gangsters. How can we expect politics to get better if the job of being a politician in Japan is so un-rewarding and so high-risk? There are some politicians who are smart and honest, but most end up becoming merely a mouthpiece for some ministry or local interest. How do you get people to play in a game where the bad guys win?

Governor Tanaka has shown that you can win, for now. I think his case is really important in getting more people to have the courage to stand up. I think the Ishii case is a blow in the other direction. We really need to support good politicians and punish the media when it does not report the truth.

I don't know if the Ishii case is as simple as they say or whether there is more behind it, but I do know for a fact that the media often covers up murders committed by the powerful. I once heard that 50% of deaths reported as suicide are actually murders. The media is often used by politicians and bureaucrats to strip opponents of their public image. I think that the corruption of the mass media in Japan is directly responsible for a great deal of the corruption in Japanese society, but I don't really know how we're going to change this. Blogs?

I'm sorry if this entry sounds like media bashing or if it sounds like I'm questioning the reporting of this particular murder. I have no idea whether the reporting of this incident is correct. It just reminded me to beware of the media on issues like this.

Anyway, Ishii-san, may you rest in peace.

Articles from Mainichi Shimbun:

• Slain legislator remembered as anti-corruption hero
• Ishii killer 'egotistical'

All of the pictures of Shanghai Crab that I could find that were good were on people's diary's and I felt guilty "fair using" them so I decided to grab this kind of ad-like one from http://www.sannmei.co.jp/. I should have taken my camera...

Today Mizuka and I had Peking Duck and Shanghai Crab for lunch. On the last trip to Beijing, Mizuka had Peking Duck and Shanghai Crab with Yanai-san. She discovered that in Beijing, they put minced garlic in the Peking Duck and it tasted great. Today, we asked for minced garlic in our Peking Duck and it did indeed enhance the flavor immensely.

As for the Shanghai Crab... YUM! It's become quite popular in Japan. I don't know how well known it is in the US. The best Shangai Crab comes for a specific lake near Shanghai. It is very round and small and the best part is the egg inside of the female crabs. It is quite expensive. One chef, when asked what the difference between good Shanghai Crab and no-so-good Shanghai Crab was answered, "the price." Crabs that look the same can be totally different weights. Good crabs are stuffed with yummy egg. The meat is also very good, but it takes a good 30 minutes to get the approximately two mouthfuls of crabmeat out of the crab. The season for Shanghai Crab has just started so I look forward to some more during the months ahead.

Gosuke sent me this interesting link. It is about the dangers of Aspartame. Nutrasweet in the US and "Pal Sweet Diet" in Japan are Aspartame. Aspartame is an active ingredient in Diet Coke which I drink A LOT of. I am going to definitely take dive into the links on this page. If what this page says is true, I probably should stop drinking Diet Coke today...

I have attached some of the highlights from the page below, but I would go to their page which has a lot of links if you currently drink a lot of diet soda products.

Barak said, "but let's not call it blogging..." and Frank said, "but they won't call it blogging." What is it about this word? I think we will call it blogging. I often say, "wait, I'm blogging" or "I just blogged that" or "did you see my blog entry about that?" It is an activity that is new and can't be called anything else easily ("wait, I am posting an item to my web page about this...?") and it is taking up a significant share of time and minds of people who are addicted. So, my bet is that we will call it blogging even after 10 year old kids are doing it in the backseat of their parents cars...

I'm at Casio right now trying to get them excited about blogs... Casio makes such great digital cameras and digital cameras are SOOO important for blogs... Pleeeze give me a blog-camera.

I can't believe Japan is #29. I think it should be lower... but I guess they don't kill reporters in Japan... they just co-opt them. I guess it depends on what you call "press freedom"...

Reporters Without Borders

Reporters Without Borders is publishing the first worldwide press freedom index

Reporters Without Borders is publishing for the first time a worldwide index of countries according to their respect for press freedom. It also shows that such freedom is under threat everywhere, with the 20 bottom-ranked countries drawn from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe. The situation in especially bad in Asia, which contains the four worst offenders - North Korea, China, Burma, Turkmenistan and Bhutan. The top end of the list shows that rich countries have no monopoly of press freedom. Costa and Benin are examples of how growth of a free press does not just depend on a country's material prosperity. The index was drawn up by asking journalists, researchers and legal experts to answer 50 questions about the whole range of press freedom violations (such as murders or arrests of journalists, censorship, pressure, state monopolies in various fields, punishment of press law offences and regulation of the media). The final list includes 139 countries. The others were not included in the absence of reliable information.

Rank Country Note 1 Finland 0,50 - Iceland 0,50 - Norway 0,50 - Netherlands 0,50 5 Canada 0,75 6 Ireland 1,00 7 Germany 1,50 - Portugal 1,50 - Sweden 1,50 10 Denmark 3,00 11 France 3,25 12 Australia 3,50 - Belgium 3,50 14 Slovenia 4,00 15 Costa Rica 4,25

Rank Country Note - Switzerland 4,25 17 United States 4,75 18 Hong Kong 4,83 19 Greece 5,00 20 Ecuador 5,50 21 Benin 6,00 - United Kingdom 6,00 - Uruguay 6,00 24 Chile 6,50 - Hungary 6,50 26 South Africa 7,50 - Austria 7,50 - Japan 7,50 29 Spain 7,75 - Poland 7,75

This is yet another example of where things are headed. Although this is a "mistake" on eBay's part, the natural direction of the copyright laws and technologies is to make it difficult or impossible for individuals or independants to share their content using the tools provided to us by corporations against public domain. This "chilling effect", I believe, will just drive artists and consumers further and further away from these channels. Hopefully, blogs and other non-mass media will help other forms of entertainment to become popular which have more liberal attitudes towards copyright. I hope that stuff like The Sims continue to support and nurther fan sites and the idea of public domain "skins". They are so much more clued in to the needs of the market...

Wired News

Band Can't Sell Own Music on EBay
By Brad King
02:00 AM Oct. 24, 2002 PDT

George Ziemann didn't have delusions of grandeur when it came to selling his band's CD.

He just wanted to promote the album -- and hopefully sell a few copies -- on a higher-traffic site than his own. So he turned to eBay, the Net's largest marketplace.

But the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a law meant to limit people from distributing content illegally over the Internet, foiled him.

The reason? He used recordable CDs (CD-Rs) to distribute his albums.

The discs allow people to record data files -- music and movies, for instance -- and they are often used to record and sell pirated wares.

As a precaution against enabling thieves to sell stolen merchandise on the site, eBay launched its Verified Rights Owner program, which allows copyright holders to send eBay take-down notices for auctions that violate copyright laws.

The problem in Ziemann's case, he said, is that he's selling his own music.

(AP Photo) A dark shadow passes over the land as the forces of evil group and unite in the war of the copyright

The Associated Press

Microsoft, Disney Unveil Release of Upgraded MSN Internet Service Stocked With Disney Content

Utsumi's wife Fujiko just had a baby girl! Congratulations! I got the blow-by-blow from Reiran via IM. ;-)

Utsumi is one of my best friends and the CEO of Genec. He also made the Halloween JOI ITO WEB logo...

IM with Reiran

reirannihei: hi there
Joi: Hi Reiran
reirannihei: hi
reirannihei: fujiko chan just began to feel labor pains this morning
reirannihei: tanoshimi desu!
Joi: Yes. Definitely!
reirannihei:
reirannihei: it's a girl !!!!
reirannihei: ....ojama shimashita.....
Joi: Wow! Great! Thanks for the news!
reirannihei: you're welcome!

Veer just added a RSS feed discovery feature on blogstreet. You can search for a blog and it gives you the RSS URL and shows the RSS feed. It's very cool. RSS feeds are really significant I think. They tie so many things together... They also make banner adds sort of irrelevant. ;-)

Veer Bothra

RSS Discovery

Launched today is a new feature on BlogStreet called RSS Discovery. It finds the RSS feed of a blog if its mentioned in the blog page and then parses the RSS to display it in HTML. This can serve two purposes.

Many times for not-so-tech-savvy users finding the RSS feed of a blog for adding it to a RSS aggregator becomes difficult. RSS Discovery can take care of this by finding the feed for that blog.

Another use can be to read the RSS feed of a blog in HTML from the web when the RSS Aggregator is not available. Of course you can directly go to the blog and read it but you cannot post to your blog then. You will be able to do that using Blogger API from BlogStreet shortly.

RSS Discovery becomes the first in a series of features planned to make BlogStreet a utility provider in this space.

Today was the regular press conference of the New Business Conference. The New Buiness Conference is an organization affiliated with the small and medium sized company section of the government. I am a director and chairman of the New Business Forum Committee. I was called to the press conference to make a presentation about this year's forum. This year, the conference will be December 2 at the Tokyo International Forum. The Keynote is the Kawabuchi-san, the head of the Japan Soccer Association. A lot of my good friends such as Mikitani-san of Rakuten, Oki Matsumoto of Monex, Takeuchi-sensei of Hitotsubashi, Hasegawa-san of Global Dining, Matsui-san of Matsui Securities, Kanemaru-san of Future System Consulting and Kurokawa-sensei of Tokai University will be speaking. The opening address will be given by Prince Takamado. I am a bit nervous since I have to introduce him using Imperial formal Japanese which is only used to address royalty and I can't screw it up...

The press conference today was very disturbing. Even though I am a director of this organization, I didn't know that they were going to issue a position statement. I disagreed with one of their statements which said that the government should give $160,000 to 10,000 companies and that "experts" should distribute the funds. This sounds like pork barrel politics to me. I can't imagine that these so-called "experts" will distribute the funds fairly or intelligently and can only imagine abuse. Also, these statements were most likely prepared by bureaucrats and caused some how to be announced by the NBC so that they can say, "See, we need budget..." Phewy. I don't want to be associated with such random stupidity and possible corruption. I'm going to announce my resignation after my responsibility to deliver a good conference. Ooops. I just blogged it.

Eno-san and Moriguchi-san meet for the first time...

Today, I went to see Eno-san and talk about blogs and other things. My good friend Hiroko Moriguchi was there working on a project (secret for now...) with Eno-san. It was the first time they had met. I love it when two people I really like meet for the first time. ;-)

Hiroko Moriguchi is very smart and very funny. It will be interesting to see what happens when we mix her taste with Eno-san who is weird, funny and smart in his own way as well. I look forward to seeing how their project goes.

Eno-san promised to help me recruit bloggers and to work on his own blog. I think we should get Hiroko to do a blog too. I didn't get a chance to talk to her about this, but next time I see her I will...

Today was the second meeting of the WEF Blueprint for Japan 2020. Oki and I reported on our presentation in Geneva.

Richard Koo, the chief economist of Nomura Research Institute talked about some of the macroeconomic issues regarding the Japanese economy which was really staggering to think about. 85% of the value of the land disappeared after the bubble. This is 3 years of GDP. That's huge when you consider that the great depression in the US was only 1 year of GDP drop in assets. The savings and loan problem in the US was only a 20% drop in the value of assets. The scale of the Japanese problem is gigantic and unprecedented. On the other hand, this could happen to any country such as Taiwan, Thailand, China or even the US. The huge drop in asset value is causing another very unique situation where 70%-80% of companies are paying down debt when interest rates are basically 0% because they are so highly leveraged against assets that have lost so much value. The fact that the economy is even functioning is amazing.

We talked a lot about the issues and how to communicate our point. We decided to focus on how diversity enables markets and democracy since this point of view is rather unique and core. We decided to start a blog about this project. ;-)

Had lunch with Dr. Fiorella Terenzi. She is an Astrophysicist / Recording Artist / Author. She recently created a line of jewelry based on astrophysical phenomenon. She is selling them on QVC. She said that some of her colleagues mocked her, but that reaching the masses and trying to appeal to them about the beauty of science was an important mission. I totally agree. I admire Fiorella and her desire and courage to break out of the ivory tower of academism and try to communicate. I feel that the art community, the science community and academic community in general shuns the popularization of their fields. I think that with the communications technologies of today, it is an utter waste to not try to communicate to the public, what is going on in art and science. It takes a great deal of courage, but I think people like Fiorella should be encouraged and supported by both the public and people in their respective fields. Fiorella has made space the theme of her music and other forms of public expression that she has been engaged in and is truly an ambassador from the field of astrophysics.

An article in the BBC News about hikikomori a common form of mental illness in Japan where kids lock themselves up in their room and don't come out. They say it is a unique Japanese phenomenon. I think we should look at the mental illness issue in Japan generally. As I keep writing here, suicides are among the top in the world as well. Many people have the misconception that just because Jap