Hyperconnectivity: January 2009 Archives
Lawrence Lessig first defined it a decade ago in his groundbreaking book; code is the law of cyberspace.
Code being protocols and architecture.
Just as in the physical world, the law/code defines the structure and rules that in their turn allow or restrict possibilities. Therefore it is vitally important to choose the right law/code to get the best possible society/Internet.
The most vital choices are if something is restricted or free, if something is public/common or privately owned.
The Obama governement understands this apparently.
As Tom Evslin reports, the latest stimulus bill includes money for demonstration projects for smart electricity meters for smart grids.
The catch is in these lines.
"The Secretary shall require as a condition of receiving funding under this subsection that demonstration projects utilize open Internet-based protocols and standards if available."
And
"The Secretary shall establish and maintain a smart grid information clearinghouse in a timely manner which will make data from smart grid demonstration projects and other sources available to the public. As a condition of receiving financial assistance under this subsection, a utility or other participant in a smart grid demonstration project shall provide such information as the Secretary may require to become available through the smart grid information clearinghouse in the form and within the timeframes as directed by the Secretary."
As Tom correctly observes, enforcing open protocols instead of allowing walled gardens will create a different universe of possibilities and freedom.
I hope that they can withstand the pressure from Big Energy.
It is not just us in the Western world who want to have high bandwidth connectivity, the demand is everywhere. People will use any possible route to get what they want, leading to unexpected developments.
Brough Turner reports in his weblog about junknets in Pakistan (Lahore) and in Romania (Bucharest).
(Lahore) Access to neighborhood rights-of-way is governed by local relationships rather than by official government license. As a result, there are extensive local broadband networks (fiber and Cat 5 cable) providing excellent local connectivity (typically up to 100 Mbps symmetric), including high speed access to local content caches. Actual connections to the Internet are still limited so, while one can download movies from a file server at 30 - 50 Mbps, connections to the real Internet tend to be limited to 512 Kbps each. On the other hand, the whole package costs roughly Rs 600 or about US $8, per month.
An insider explains how it works: no-nonsense, minimalist approach. And it works: customers complain if they do not get 5 Mbps download from a local media storage server.
If anybody ever questioned if people want hyperconnectivity and high bandwidth, here is your answer.
The recent study by TNO and SEO showing that filesharing increases (!) our wealth is only days old. And the next piece that shows that sharing increases value becomes available..
Mashable points out that the recent availability of many clips on Youtube of Monty Python's work has boosted their sales of DVD's on Amazon by 23,000 percent.
I guess the Pythons never expected this. How many more examples do we need before the content people come to their senses?
The possibilities created by hyperconnectivity and new tools confound our lawmakers.
The High Court in Germany has asked the EU-court (search for "Google Bundesgerichtshof" ) in Luxembourg to rule on a quite interesting case.
Google Ads is widely used tool. If a certain searchword is detected by the Google search engine, specific advertisements are displayed next to the screen with search results. It is a do-it-yourself (DIY) tool, the advertiser can define the trigger words (and a lot of other things) himself.
Clever entrepeneurs have used this tool in an unexpected manner. They define specific brands (like a farmaceutical branded medicine) as triggerwords. The advertisment displayed is for a cheaper unbranded alternative , designed to redirect the customer from buying the original brand.
The case in Germany apparently has been dragging on for years through various courts. The question is if this should be banned because the original brand must be protected or not. Now it is lifted to the EU-level.
I guess this will become a landmark decision. Personally I would hesitate to go this far to forbid this. Brands should be strong enough by themselves in the first place. Secondly you open up a "mer-a-boire" in litigation: where do you draw the line? In a Net where mashup's and links are daily routine?
(Quote from the original)
Seit Jahren entscheiden die Instanzengerichte in der für Internetanbieter wichtigen Markenrechtsfrage unterschiedlich. Die höchsten deutschen Richter in Karlsruhe haben am 22.01.2009 entschieden: Ist eine als Schlüsselwort benutzte Bezeichnung mit einer fremden Marke identisch - wie in dem vom BGH zu bewertenden Fall „Bananabay" für Erotikartikel - und wird sie zudem für Waren oder Dienstleistungen benutzt, die mit denjenigen identisch sind, für die die fremde Marke Schutz genießt, hängt die Annahme einer Markenverletzung in einem solchen Fall nur noch davon ab, ob in der Verwendung der geschützten Bezeichnung als Schlüsselwort eine Benutzung als Marke im Sinne des Markengesetzes liegt. Das ist eine Frage der Auslegung des Markengesetzes. Da die Bestimmungen des deutschen Markengesetzes auf europäischen Recht beruhen, hat der Bundesgerichtshof das Verfahren ausgesetzt, um dem Europäischen Gerichtshof diese Frage zur Vorhabentscheidung nach Art. 234 EG-Vertrag vorzulegen.
Fiber-to-the-Home (FttH) is the hotly debated step to replace the copper wires in the street, used for telecommunications, with optical fibers. We will see a lot of activity in the next 10 years : construction workers digging trenches and laying optical cables to our homes. But if optical fiber is so superior, why do we keep on using copper wires in our homes to connect our home gear? Some people believe all will be wireless in due time, but I have serious reservations about this projection. Wireless bits are always desperately seeking wires to continue their path. So will we see fiber-in-the-home?Recently Swisscom has announced their plans to deply FttH in Switserland, in an unprecedented manner: cooperation with their competitors to create the network, to be used by all of them in competition.
Hardly anybody has noticed that Swisscom has at the same time invested in Firecomms, a company delevering Plastic Optical Fibre (POF) solutions. Swisscom uses their products to offer a Swisscom-branded Fiber Optic self install solution to their customers.
" Firecomms home networking technology enables the quick and easy deployment of fiber optic cable in the home. Using low-cost, easy to use transceivers, like the company's proprietary OptoLock® plugless transceivers, Firecomms makes possible a reliable and future-proof connection between IPTV set top boxes and home gateways. Plastic Optical Fiber technology is widely used in millions of cars worldwide, so Firecomms devices have achieved the low-cost and high reliability required for use in home applications"
So already today optical fiber has become a viable solution to be used in your home, for very reliable highspeed connections over short or long distances. Given the fact that good highspeed copper cables like HDMI cabling for 1080p HD television can be really expensive (from Euro 20 to Euro 100 retail) and are limited in lenght the rise of optical fiber in the home may be much quicker than anybody expected.
"TinEye is a handy reverse image search engine. It finds where on the web an image comes from. You can use it to find where a photo of yours appears elsewhere, to find a higher res version of an image, or to locate the origins of a photo someone forwarded to you."A first test showed that their coverage of the web's content is somewhat lacking, but it is an interesting twist in search technology.
The company is using their basic technology to extend the possibilities. Like TinEye Mobile , which allows you to search for products using your mobile phone's camera. Just take a photograph to start your search and view pricing and reviews for products.
Idée's first mobile release is TinEye Music (take a picture of a CD and search on the web), for iPhones only.
A company to watch: somebody is going to think of a way to use this technology nobody would have imagined before.
Without much ado the tenders for the road-pricing system for the Netherlands have been started. (See this and here).
One of the hot topics in this system is privacy versus security/fraud prevention.
Having a unit in your car that tracks your whereabouts, stores that information for later use by the government triggers a lot of sensivities. Who can access that information? Is Big Brother watching you all the time?
At the same time you want to prevent fraudulent use (evasion of road charge, identity theft) and to be able to contest an incorrect charge in court succesfully.
The same professor that publicized the succesfull compromise of security of the Mifare chip used in the "OV-chipkaart" has now turned his attention on roadpricing, this time to propose a solution.
Bart Jacobs is one of a group of experts in the world who consistently warns us of the dangers of unsafe IT systems, like voting computers. Their main point is that the only safe IT-systems are the ones where the security design is publicized so experts can check and validate the security. Secrecy gives a false sense of security, only when the best minds cannot find a flaw or a way to compromise a system you can have some reasonable confidence in the system. And when bright minds find a flaw, at least you can take corrective measures. Otherwise you might be sleeping through years of fraud unknowingly.
Wiebren de Jonge and Bart Jacobs have published a very interesting paper (link here, download ETPprivacyFAST2008lncs.pdf) with a new approach.
This architecture allows a lot of flexibility while keeping the privacy level as high as you as an individual care for. You can even break up the calculation of the roadcharge in little pieces, to be executed by different providers as you choose it, so nobody has a complete picture but yourself. The system design can be with a "thick" onboard-unit (OBU) that does all the calculations, or a "thin" OBU that off-loads as much as possible to other systems. They present how a "granny", "gadgetfreak" or "geek" would create totally different solutions with or without the help of providers, suited to their wishes.
At the same time it is quite difficult to defraud the system. With a minimal number of spot-checks (less than 1 %) the authorities can verify that the roadcharges calculated are based on actual driving behaviour.
The actual design can be found in the paper (sending committed hashes of trajectories and seperately of roadcharges). In my opinion a very elegant solution. And above all something that can be subjected to the best test possible: of all the bright minds in the world.
(Continued after the break)
Continue reading Privacy and Road Pricing.
Over here you can find a rare treat: the transcript of a part of an long interview, and the full podcast. For anyone who is interested.
One small gem: The value of the SMS-market is.....over a hundred billion dollars per year and rising. Bigger than movies and music and games together.
As Odlyzko always says " Communication is king, not content".
Slashdot reports about the next escalation level of the war Big Content is waging.
The infamous "Valenciennes graduated response" tactic (3 strikes and you are out: a private organization can take your Internet connection away after 3 accusations of " illegal content" downloading) has been quickly adopted as the favourite approach by lobbyists in several countries. But why wait so long?
A Kiwi reports that :
" Next month, New Zealand is scheduled to implement Section 92 of the Copyright
Amendment Act. The controversial act provides 'Guilt Upon Accusation,' which
means that if a file-sharer is simply accused of copyright infringement he/she
will be punished
with summary Internet disconnection. Unlike most laws, this one has no
appeal process and no punishment for false accusation, because they
were removed after public consultation "
As Creative Freedom describes " As ISPs transmit data across their own network (for their users) they're open to
copyright infringement claims themselves unless they comply with [section 92].
ISPs are therefore put into the role of policing copyright infringement
accusations without judicial oversight against their customers, all while
risking their business if they get it wrong."
The implementation of this Act is probably the best way to show the madness of these approaches. How many PC's are infected with programs that somehow create traffic the owner is unaware of? What about young children who start a download which results in termination of the families Internet connection? How easy will it be for sophisticated hackers to target specific people and create an infringement with serious effects for the target?
The politicians will probably see an uproar of their voters before the economic effects will become visible. After all, making Internet a dangerous place to be is very, very bad policy.
Information is power (and money) , so let us limit and control the accessibility of information. Or at least, that is what many public transport companies think. The recent publicized row between Google and the Washington Metro is only the tip of the iceberg.
Google has quietly introduced Google Transit, an extension to Google Maps, making it possible to plan a trip including public transportation. The specifications for (feeding) the schedules have been made public and open for anybody to use. You can build your own online planner if you like using the available API's.
A perfect base for a rapid development of very valuable tools, one should think. Unfortunately many public transport companies are very reluctant to share their timetable, believing that this will undermine their position. Very old-school thinking: get linked, connect and share, that is where the money is.
They have missed apparently also a solid piece of research. Dr. Caspar Chorus has shown in his thesis that people are not willing to pay for travel information for public transport, while at the same time spending serious money on satnav systems. The psychology driving this difference is very straightforward: you are not in control when using public transport, you are being transported as a subject, you have to subject yourself to the time table. Paying extra for information is like adding insults to injuries.
In your car however you make all the decisions, you are in control, so information has value.
As public transport companies are rarely subjected to competitive pressures to win the hearts and minds of their customers, it will probable take a long time before they start to realize that they would benefit from freely sharing this information.
Reality often follows art, as Star Trek fans know. The now popular clam-shell phone was conceived as a flip-open communicator in this TV-series. We hardly could imagine that less than 20 years later more than half of the world population would have a mobile phone. In developing countries mobile communication has had an even bigger impact on the lifes of the population.
And this impact can evolve in unexpected directions, as a recent publication shows.
In the lab of UCLA electrical engineering professor Aydogan Ozcan, a prototype cell phone has been constructed that is capable of monitoring the condition of HIV and malaria patients, as well as testing water quality in undeveloped areas or disaster sites. The imaging platform, known as LUCAS (Lensless Ultra-wide-field Cell monitoring Array platform based on Shadow imaging), has now been successfully installed in both a cell phone and a webcam. Both devices acquire an image in the same way, using a short wavelength blue light to illuminate a blood, saliva or other fluid sample. LUCAS captures an image of the microparticles in the solution using a sensor array.Because red blood cells and other microparticles have a distinct diffraction pattern, or shadow image, they can be identified and counted virtually instantaneously.
