September 2004 Archives

The issue of network neutrality has received a lot of attention in the past year. The worry is that the broadband gatekeepers (the service providers who manage the networks) will somehow mess with and degrade the quality of services offered over those networks to harm competitors offering applications and services on those networks. Those who fear such a thing, want the FCC to mandate "network neutrality," making it illegal for a network provider to ever do such a thing. Network operators quickly respond by noting that, in a competitive market, they would be nuts to do such a thing. As soon as word got out that they were playing unfair, it would simply drive customers to competitors who didn't fiddle with the applications running over their network. Who's right may depend on how competitive the market really is. If, as some people clearly believe, the market for broadband is really a monopoly or duopoly for most users, then the providers' argument is hard to support. In the meantime, competitive providers are really trying to push the FCC forward. The latest is a VoIP provider named Nuvio that is warning the FCC that without a mandate for network neutrality, the local network operators will "have nothing to lose and everything to gain from degrading the connection quality." Again, this is only true in a situation where there really isn't that much competition -- which might just be the case right now in many areas.

Word from the Googleplex today that they've added some new features to Google Local. What's New? + Enhanced user interface - a new, cleaner design that now includes maps on results pages displaying the location of businesses in the search...

The press is buzzing today with news of the launch of Amazon's a9 search product. Battelle offers an overview. You'll also find stories in the NY Times, News.com, and the SF Chronicle. a9 launched as a beta last April 2004....

David Pescovitz:
It's time again for the annual ArtBots Robot Talent Show in New York City, September 17, 18, and 19. Orchestrated by Dorkbot founder Douglas Repetto, Mark Tribe of Rhizome.org, and Hunter College film/media professor Mary Flanagan , the free ArtBots show will feature 20 artists and groups from seven countries (including Leonel Moura's ink pen-wielding ArtSBot, left).





"The show celebrates the strange and wonderful collision of shifty artists, disgraced engineers, high/low/no tech hackers, rogue scientists, beauty school dropouts, backyard pyros, and industrial espionage that has come to define the emerging field of robotic art. Participants include robots that sketch, carve, float, wiggle, hum, ring, grow, wander, and sing, as well a number of works the form and function of which are not yet well understood"

Link

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The real reason (or at least one of the really big reasons) why Sony just dropped $4.85 billion on Hollywood movie studio MGM? To get extra leverage in their high stakes showdown with NEC and Toshiba over whether it’s going to be their Blu-ray format or NEC and Toshiba’s HD-DVD format that emerges as the high-definition successor to today’s DVD. For awhile it looked like HD-DVD had something of an edge there, but at the end of the day it’ll probably mainly come down to which format the movie studios release their films in, which is why Sony decided to simply buy another studio and guarantee that they used Blu-ray rather than HD-DVD.

I almost hesitate to post on this, because I'd like to keep it for myself. But: Rajat Paharia, who works in the Software Experiences group at IDEO, has published a framework for thinking about consumer reaction to RFID. The title of the post sums it all up: rootburn: No choice, no privacy, no benefit, no way....

There’s a great article in the New Scientist about the dangers in IP extremism. As it rightly notes,

THERE are some things in life we take for granted. Among them are the ability to lend each other books, record TV programmes, back up expensive computer programs, and sell on our old CDs when we’ve got tired of them. … That could change. New technologies are giving copyright owners the power to control the time and place we can view or play digital versions of music, films and text so tightly that we run the risk of losing these rights altogether.

There is currently some confusion over the status of Sender ID in the IETF's MARID working group which has been considering the proposed standard. NewsForge has gone to directly to the source to clarify reports that Sender ID is a dead proposal. It is not. It is very much alive. Here is what we've learned.

In Europe, DSL continues to post gains with an expected annual growth rate of 22% in the consumer/SOHO market through the year 2009, according to a new report from Probe Group. "DSL connectivity has only recently been launched in much of Eastern Europe with limited availability in most countries in that area," comments Probe Group Research Director Alan Mosher. This clearly would be good news for European DSL equipment vendors such as Alcatel, Nokia and Siemens along with Chinese companies such as ZTE Corp and UTStarcom. The chinese vendors are coming on strong in Eastern Europe, which is more price sensitive than US or other developed parts of the world. It would be rather interesting to see how Europeans' deal with ADSL2 and future mega-broadband versions of DSL technology!

Mark Evans writes today that some Wall Street analysts are questioning all the buzz around RIM's Charm.

The tech world is excited about the size and shape of the 7100T and - most important - its consumer-friendly US$200 price tag. That said, analysts are now pointing at the 7100T's weaknesses. In particular, there are issues about user frustration with RIM's innovative keyboard, which uses predictive technology to help create words. UBS analyst Michael Urlocker is also concerned about the lack of a digital camera and a flip phone feature, and the relatively short battery life. Granted, this is RIM's first crack at making a telephone, and it's an impressive first move. You would expect a smart company like RIM to address many of the analysts' concerns with its next-generation product.

The Mozilla organization has just released a new update of both FireFox, the browser, andThunderbird, the email client, which now integrate a full blog/RSS reader/aggregator along with a number of new features. Mozilla FireFox is a standards-compliant, open-source, free browser...

js7a writes "Colorado State University's Rocky Mountain Collegian reports that, "as of June [the price of wind power] dropped to 1 cent per kWh." Even without further expected improvements in turbine technology, the U.S. would now need to use less than 3% of its farmland to get 95% of its electricity demand satisfied by wind power. Plus, wind power is the only mitigation of global warming, because if the whole world converted to wind power in 15 years, the amount of power being extracted from the atmosphere would be more than the increase in greenhouse gas atmospheric energy forcing since 1600. Don't say goodbye to coal and oil, yet, though; unless cell technology increases substantially, when we run out of oil we will convert coal to synthetic fuel." Update: 09/15 13:40 GMT by T: Note: the "1 cent" figure refers to the premium paid for the power over conventionally supplied electricity, rather than the final per-kWh price.

Cryofan writes "A research study shows that American information technology industry 'lost 403,300 jobs between March 2001, when the recession began, and April 2004.' Over half of those jobs - 206,300 - were lost after the recession was declared over in November 2001. In all, the job market for high-tech workers shrank by 18.8 percent, to 1,743,500, between March 2001 and April 2004. And the bloodletting continues -- as reported here on Slashdot earlier this year, the number of employed Software Engineers fell by 15% from April to July of 2004 (from 856,000 to 725,000)."

carbolic writes "The Firefox browser is ramping up as fast as Internet Explorer is ramping down. According to these stats posted from the Engadget logfiles, IE has dropped to 57% of all browsers used to visit the site, while Firefox is up to an amazing 18%! The Engadget stats reflect an early-adopter consumer crowd and backing those up, this chart from w3schools shows the same trend. I guess CERT's recommendation and a mature product are finally paying off for the Mozilla project. Less than 2 years ago, IE had a 95% lock on the market. Anyone else see a trend here?"

The lastest from the good folks at the Pew Internet & American Life Project is How Americans Use Instant Messaging by Eulynn Shiu and Amanda Lenhart.

From the executive summary: “The 2004 Pew Internet & American Life surveys reveal that more than four in ten online Americans instant message (IM). That reflects about 53 million American adults who use instant messaging programs. About 11 million of them IM at work and they are becoming fond of its capacity to encourage productivity and interoffice cooperation.”

We thought the following stats might be of interest for media companies:
• 31% of IM users (about 16.5 million users) report using IM to send links to friends and colleagues about articles or web sites.

• 30% of IM users pass along photos or documents to other IM buddies.

• 14% use IM to link buddies to streamed web content or videos.

• 5% use IM to share music or video files.

And as this chart shows, these stats shift markedly when you look at it sliced by age groups.

For more information, download a PDF of report (532k)

AMD has grabbed the lead from Intel in retail sales of desktops in the US. Can AMD sustain the momentum that has carried them through the past year?

We knew it was coming sooner or later, but the guys behind Skype have let it slip that they’ll have a version of
their peer-to-peer VoIP software that’ll work on Palm handhelds ready sometime next month (a version for
Pocket PCs came out a few weeks ago). It will probably
require some proper WiFi action to work, but we’re hoping that maybe, just maybe, the 1xRTT connection on our Treo will
be just enough bandwidth to get this going, especially since Skype is only supposed to need up to 16kbps to get by (and
yes, we know that 1xRTT is burstable and all that).

[Via

Palm Addict]

Controversial stamps get licked

Just one month after launching its custom postage service, Stamps.com scaled back the program on Monday in an attempt to deter controversial images from being affixed to the nation's mail.

The Los Angeles-based company said it will continue to offer the PhotoStamps service, whereby consumers can pay to have images of their choice printed as valid U.S. postage. However, the firm says it will focus on its two best-selling categories, babies/children and pets/animals. Stamps.com has banned any submissions bearing the likeness of adults or teenagers, but said it will continue to accept images including landscapes, nature, wildlife, business logos and charity logos.

Almost immediately after the company launched PhotoStamps, Internet pranksters began detailing their attempts to have postage with controversial or humorous subjects printed. One site, The Smoking Gun, successfully ordered stamps featuring images of controversial figures including Ted Kaczynski, Jimmy Hoffa and Slobodan Milosevic, as well as postage graced by similarly notorious inanimate objects, such as Monica Lewinsky's famed blue dress.

"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd

all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to

repetitive electronic music." - Kristian Wilson, Nintendo VP, 1989

Found by Giorgio.

So it's not all roses for T-Mobile and HP's new iPaq h6315 Pocket PC phone. According to users on various forums who purchased the recently-released device, using the built-in GPRS connection to send email over 4k in size can cause a disconnection (and subsequent failure). Others are reporting issues connecting to other internet services over GPRS connection (and even Wi-Fi, although I think that's just a random issue). T-Mobile has acknowledged the issue (not publically, but to users reporting in the forums), and word has it there is a problem in the h6315 GPRS TCP/IP stack.

That should be fixable via software patch, which hopefully will hit the web soon.

Read - H6315 GPRS/EMail Problems [HowardForums]
Read - Tmobile 6315 Email Attachments Problem [PDAPhoneHome]

Related
iPaq Archives [Gizmodo]

No, it's not an iMac from an alternate dimension - it's the i-Mii monitors from Greenhouse. The new 15-inch LCDs have an XGA resolution, come in two colors, and have integrated speakers inside of the 'cat ears.' They'll be available for around $400, if you'd like to pick up a couple the next time you're in Japan.

Read - Morris the Cat: There’s a new feline on the block [AkibaLive]

TiVo should take solace in the fact that it invented a new product category, the personal video recorder. What it should worry about is how quickly it has gone from being a stand alone device to becoming a tack-on feature in other purpose devices. And if you though that was enough, wait for this new chip from ATI to hit the market. ATI's new Theater 550 Pro does audio and video decoding on the same silicon - a first for the Theater family - which ensures audio and video remain in full synchronisation. The 12-bit video decoder features 3D Comb Filtering for NTSC and PAL, and five-line 2D Comb Filtering. ATI wants to integrate this chip directly into the PC motherboard, especially for the lap-tops. Acer, Compal, Quanta and Wistron have committed themselves to building the 550 Pro into upcoming laptops, The Register says.

I think this is a brilliant move - add PVR right on the motherboard, and then you give those "download services" a chance to thrive. Why? Well lets assume you have a tiny 384 KBPS DSL connection at home, but a big fat pipe at work. You can quickly download all the stuff you want from one of the "video content" providers, bring it home and well play back on your TV. Of course, you could do the traditional PVR stuff as well, since it is after all a PVR on a chip. (So that you can watch last night's Baseball Tonight at work, fooling your boss that you are hard at work behind the closed doors. Oh.... now one needs to worry about storage capacity on the laptops. Sigh!

Lots of talk about downloading music over the air to your cell phones, and perhaps time for a little reality check, especially if you live outside of North America. If you download one 4 megabyte MP3 song over the air using a GPRS plan - and i am talking about purely in data size and not in minutes of use - it will cost you about $72 in Western Europe. And this is despite a 13% decline in pay-per-use GPRS prices since May 2003. Strategy Analytics director, Phil Taylor, notes "With over 85 percent of GPRS users on pay-per-use plans, operators need to find ways of making data services more affordable to the mass market." A Strategy Analytics study points out that carriers are beginning to recognize this pricing problem and trying to come-up with more simple plans. In this aspect, one had to give respect to T-Mobile.

And the winner of the MGM auction is Sony. Sure it cost them about $5 billion, but then MGM is a must have prize for Sony which is slowly and slowly losing its relevance in many hardware businesses and increasingly depends on software to save its sushi. Time Warner backed out of the auction and that means they must be getting serious about buying Adelphia. Makes sense... long term competitive edge is going to be with the company with maximum number of subs. Despite that Comcast is thrilled about Sony-MGM deal.

The Disney disaster not withstanding, Comcast wants to be a major content player. Lost in the details of the big merger, a tiny detail which might be overlooked. Comcast and the Sony group have agreed on an arrangement that will enable the cable giant to distribute Sony Pictures and MGM content on its VOD platform.  A joint venture will be created and managed by Comcast, with the aim of creating new cable channels that feature Sony and MGM content.  Finally, the deal with Sony reportedly gives Comcast the opportunity to acquire a minority interest in MGM for approximately $300M.  Comcast and Sony say they will move forward on their distribution deal, regardless of whether the MGM acquisition is completed. In real world it is called dipping one's toes. Comcast has done exactly that.[ Press release @ Yahoo ]

Here's a great visual reminder that you won't be able to build a linux-based HDTV personal video recorder after July 1, 2005, thanks to the broadcast flag.

Remember, if you wanted to make a computer-based PVR of your own, better buy that HDTV card before July 1st.

As Jason Kottke noted on his weblog: “Flickr is becoming a good place to find photos of notable events.” On Flickr’s weblog, Caterina Fake reports:

“As noted on Metafilter, photos of the Australian Embassy bombing in Jakarta appeared on Flickr before any of the major news services had gotten it up on their sites. It’s unclear if the original photo was taken by the person who posted it or not, but within an hour the photo pictured above, taken by Reza Anwar, was uploaded, and another one too (see all his pics here). Thank you, Jakarta Flickr users!

“Citizen reportage is on the rise, as we’ve seen here on Flickr with Hurricane Frances (143 photos) and the Republican National Convention (620 photos) in the past few weeks.”

For the first time, a team of scientists from Yale University has successfully coupled a single photon to a single superconducting qubit (quantum bit or "artificial atom"). In "Yale scientists bring quantum optics to a microchip," you'll discover that it is now possible to perform quantum optics experiments in a micro-chip electrical circuit using microwaves instead of visible photons and lasers. This is another important step towards quantum computers where bits of data are replaced by qubits, or atoms. Because it's now possible to couple qubits to photons, this could allow qubits on a chip to be wired together via a "quantum information bus" carrying single photons. Read more...

Potentially bringing much joy to tinfoil hat-types (and, well, also legitimate privacy advocates) eager to slow the
global introduction of the mark of the beast, a company called Intermec Technologies has started demanding royalties
for use of a protocol related to the new standard that is being created to improve compatibility and interoperability
of RFID devices (like tag readers and stuff like that). This sort of thing happens all the time in the sue-happy workd
of technology, but now there’s some concern that with the new standard (known as Electronic Product Code Generation 2)
about to be finalized next month that everyone with a related patent is going to start demanding royalties as well,
potentially mucking up the whole process and ruining the prospects of a royalty-free standard which would have driven
adoption of RFID technology. Up until this point pretty much everyone involved had been playing it cool and had agreed
to donate their IP in the interests of moving things forward (we love it when big corporations get all lovey-dovey like
this), so it remains to be seen whether how much this’ll impede RFID’s relentless march forward towards world
domination.

Originally Verizon was set to expand their new high-speed EV-DO service to the San Francisco Bay Area as well as Sacramento (last week we had the dirt on which cities were next due for EV-DO service), however it looks like they’ve delayed the launch in both areas as coverage (read: EV-DO towers) isn’t quite where they wanted it to be yet. Delays also may affect Tampa, FL and NYC as well since they also don’t have enough infrastructure in place, but rollout is still scheduled to happen in each city before 2005. And plans to introduce Verizon’s first EV-DO handsets, the LG VX8000 and the XDA III, are supposedly on hold now. 

The subway may be hitting centennial and ol' Times Square clocking the same years, but our smallest 'picture element' has a birthday coming, too. And this time, it won t be overlooked. In 1954, Princeton researchers created the first computer graphic, and consequently, our first pixel. 2004 marks the pixel's 50th birthday, and pixelgala.org intends to celebrate.



A timeline depicting history in all its pixilated glory, pixelgala.org curates pixelart submissions for each year of the pixel - from its Jersey birth to its ubiquitous middle age. The release of Windows95, Tupac's death, and the millennium bug are milestones of the last decade. In its entirety, the pixel timeline is akin to the Academy's lifetime achievement award, or an A&E biography, just a bit more squared around the edges. Sixteen countries and 24 artists currently represent pixelgala, and the timeline still needs stuffing. The template for submissions can be found online at the gala. Call for work expires on Sunday 28th November 2004 12pm GMT. - Alyssa Wright

http://www.pixelgala.org

The The New York Times runs an article on the growth of Technology > Let a Thousand Ideas Flower: China Is a New Hotbed of Research" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/13/ technology/13china.html">R&D in China: In recent years hundreds of them [multinational corporations] have set up laboratories here, and Chinese officials claim the number is growing by 200 a year. The labs vary in size and ambition, but as they multiply and expand they may help China grow from mostly a user and copier of advanced technologies developed elsewhere into a powerful incubator of its own, industry executives and experts say. And the shift may eventually reshape applied research, jobs and policies in the United States and other developed countries. But it is far from certain that China will reap the full rewards of this flowering. Planting and nurturing corporate labs is a delicate business, and in China they are buffeted by concerns about protecting patents, retaining and training researchers, and managing the distances - physical and cultural - between here and headquarters. Multinationals are opening research centers in China for two big reasons: skilled scientific and technical labor is cheap there; and companies calculate that they need local research to tailor their products to the booming Chinese market. The article suggests that there are still some pretty basic tensions and uncertainties that need to be worked out-- companies worry about weak IP protection, and the Chinese government worries that "foreign labs may become isolated enclaves, siphoning off China's best talent but creating few beneficial spillovers." Still, it's another data-point in the growing global distribution of R&D and the challenge to America's decades-long dominance of scientific and technical research....

The perennial underdog is challenging Intel with a new class of microprocessors [Business Week: Technology]

'-- AMD Chief Executive Hector de Jesus Ruiz has grabbed the momentum from his giant rival in recent months and left Intel scrambling to catch up. -- AMD is making the most of its newfound edge. The Sunnyvale (Calif.) company has grabbed 7% of the low-end server market, up from almost nothing two years ago. It passed 50% of the U.S. retail store sales for desktop PCs in recent weeks. And the company is using new manufacturing techniques in the memory-chip market to outgun rivals both on cost and technology, analysts say. -- Its success is due in no small part to Intel's missteps. Intel announced it was working on a rival 64-bit chip, Itanium, back in 1994, about five years before AMD announced plans for its own version. Itanium, however, didn't hit the market until 2001, two years late, and even then was a huge flop. Intel released a second version of Itanium in 2002, but it was never the hit Intel expected because it required companies to rewrite their existing 32-bit software to take advantage of the new architecture. --'

Gee, maybe the dominance of the colossus Wintel dynasty is peaking.

...John

The presidential campaign is not the only race that's being hotly contested these days. Consider the battle of titans underway as the two largest computer hardware firms in the world -- IBM and HP -- duke it out to become the "most favored vendor" of the burgeoning community of Linux users. Late last week IBM notified news organizations -- under an embargo effective until today, September 13th -- of yet another line of Linux-powered servers. The new offering is called OpenPower and is based on IBM's 64-bit POWER 5 hardware platform. Almost on the heels of the embargoed news came an offer from HP to talk to them about why IBM's newest Linux offering is not all that.

Federal Communications Commission today provided an additional twenty megahertz of spectrum that can be used to offer a variety of broadband and advanced wireless services (AWS), potentially including “third generation” (3G) wireless services. This is a nice chunk of spectrum...

JabbaTheFart writes "The Guardian is writing that something strange is tugging at America's oldest spacecraft. As the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes head towards distant stars, scientists have discovered that the craft - launched more than 30 years ago - appear to be in the grip of a mysterious force that is holding them back as they sweep out of the solar system. Some researchers say unseen 'dark matter' may permeate the universe and that this is affecting the Pioneers' passage. Others say flaws in our understanding of the laws of gravity best explain the crafts' wayward behaviour."

Zocalo writes "The MARID working group at the IETF responsible for deciding on which extensions to SMTP will be used to try and prevent spoofing of the sender has made their decision. At issue was whether Microsoft's patent encumbered Sender-ID would be eligable for inclusion in an Internet standard. An initial analysis of the text of their decision, available here with a brief analysis, would suggest not. Unless Microsoft is going to make any dramatic concessions out of desperation, that pretty much clears the way for Meng Wong's Classic SPF to become the standard and hopefully make Joe-Jobs at thing of the past."

A cellular to WLAN roaming specification (dubbed UMA - Unlicensed Mobile Access) was published last week by a group of 14 noteworthy vendors and wireless operators (Alcatel, AT&T, BT, Cingular, Ericsson, Kineto Wireless, Motorola, Nokia, Nortel Networks, O2, Rogers Wireless, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, and T-Mobile USA).  This represents a first important milestone in establishing seamless roaming between the 2.5G/3G network and an 802.11 WLAN.  The key goal is for subscribers to be able to rely on the ABC  (Always Best Connected) model, which should enable their handsets to always attempt first to seek out an 802.11 connection (be it from an enterprise/home WLAN or a public WiFi hotspots) before attempting to connect to a carrier's wireless network.  Of course, from a consumer viewpoint, the goal is savings: access via a WLAN should typically be cheaper (or sometimes even "free") than via the mobile network.  But from the vendors and carriers' perspective, this new standard should pave the way for the inclusion of WiFi in most cellular packages and support for seamless roaming in future handsets.

As far as pricing models go, I expect that the wireless operators will initially bundle the WiFi minutes, albeit at a cheaper rate.  Therefore, a typical monthly package will have X minutes worth of GPRS/CDMA access and Y minutes worth of WiFi access (where Y>X).  But eventually, competitive pressures will probably drive some service providers to offer unlimited WiFi access for an extra monthly flat fee (which could cost anywhere from $5-7 to $15-20).

Nancy Gohring had a noteworthy post on her Wi-Fi Networking News blog.  The article talks about a study conducted by the University of Georgia Mobile Media Consortium, which examined large WLAN deployments in the US.  I would suggest downloading the PDF, as the report's findings are quite interesting.

The study is careful to distinguish between a WiFi zone (a group of cooperating hotspots sharing a single management system) and a WiFi cloud (offering continuous coverage over a significant portion of a city's or town's geographic area, utilizing multiple hotspots).  Unlike a zone, a cloud offers contiguous and unified coverage.  A total of 38 clouds and 16 spots were examined.  The study looked at who was deploying the clouds and zones (city, company, economic development group / non-profit organization, property owner, tenant, university) and what was the purpose behind these initiatives (broadband service, economic growth, general promotion, safety, experiment, cost savings, bridge digital, education).

The research suggests that major purpose for clouds is to provide broadband capabilities to a community, whereas for zones, the raison d'etre is to stimulate economic development.  Most initiatives are owned by either a city or a company, however the majority of clouds are owned by a single entity, as opposed to zones, half of which have multiple owners.  802.11b is still the dominant technology supported, but a significant portion (almost a quarter) uses other radio systems (including 802.11g, WiMax, QDMA, and 900MHz).

Cory Doctorow:

The Aquadom is the world's largest cylindrical aquarium. It's in the lobby of a multi-use development, stretching 5 storeys up, with a glass elevator down the middle of it.

Link

(Thanks, kokogiak!)

David Pescovitz:
MIT researchers looked at why some scientific data shows that ginseng promotes blood vessel growth while other studies report the opposite.

Chemical fingerprints of four different varieties of ginseng—American, Chinese, Korean and Sanqi--show that each has different proportions of two key ingredients. Additional studies showed that a preponderance of one ingredient has positive effects on the growth of blood vessels; more of the other component tips the scale the other way.

Xeni Jardin:
In his Cool Tools newsletter, Kevin Kelly says:

The most savvy travellers I know log onto Thorn Tree as they vagabond. Thorn Tree Travel Forum is where you get the latest, greatest, most dependable travel advice for exotic destinations. Originally set up by Lonely Planet as an online way for readers to update their guidebooks, this bulletin board now bypasses and surpasses the guidebooks altogether. Reliable travel info has been completely revolutionized by the ubiquity of internet cafes around the globe.

Let's say you want to know whether the border between China and Kazakhstan is open this October, or whether its safe to visit Katmandu, Nepal, or where the newest climbing spots in the Peru Andes are. You log on to the appropriate Thorn Tree "branch" where a traveler who is in Katmandu, or who has just arrived in Almaty yesterday after a harrowing 11 hour border crossing from China can tell you all the specific details of what is true and what is not. Someone else might post that the popular beach shack on Lombok island, Indonesia you were headed for is now closed. And, to complete the circuit, you may be on the road yourself, at a dusty internet cafe in Morocco, when you read this. It's true real-time advice, from real folks who've done it. Thorn Tree is a remarkably efficient way to score hard-to-get facts from and to the field. And for armchair planners at home, the sheer details available at a distance is heavenly.

I've found that the third world locations, rather than Europe and the US, are best served by the forums; but these after all are the very places instant ground-truthing is so badly needed. Thorn Tree is also a great place to connect up with others bent on long-term Around the World tours, and up-to-the-latest tips on long haul travel.

Xeni Jardin:
Following up on an earlier BoingBoing post about fuel-cell powered UPS trucks (Link), we present a roundup of links related to alternative energy vehicles submitted by BoingBoing readers from around the world.

Robert in Australia says, "Transperth has acquired 3 Daimler/Chrysler fuel-cell buses for trial. This trial is being done in conjuction with a number of European trials." Link

Paul says, "UPS has been using alternative fuel vehicles since the 1930's (electric vehicles in NYC). 95% of the company's Mexico City vehicles burn propane. The company's earned 26 environmental awards." Link

Max says, "[San Francisco Bay Area public transportation system] AC Transit has been running a fuel cell bus since June. It is very eerie when it glides silently by. Brakes still screech, of course." Link

Matt says, The Hysun 3000 is a hydrogen fuel-cell-powered recumbant bike that began a 3000km tour yesterday, from Berlin to Barcelona. The vehicle is projected to use 3kg of hydrogen -- roughly equivalent to 1022 miles per gallon. Link to bike info, Link to tour diary, and Link to a good image.

Peter says, "Honda's hydrogen scooter might be the seed that grows a third world hydrogen fuel infrastructure for future cars and trucks." Link.

And Tim emails, "This site says that 'RunAbout Cycles go twenty miles an hour, as regulated by a new federally mandated classification for electric bicycles and tricycles. They have a forty mile range on motor alone, and the more you pedal, the further and faster you can go.' Available early 2005." Link

Brad says, "I have a friend in London who has spotted many fuel cell buses and has some pictures of them in use here: Link."

Robert Kim strikes again. On his blog he reveals that EVDO coverage has been started in a couple of more cities, unofficially. While San Diego, and DC have had EV-DO coverage for a while, Las Vegas joined the list only recently. Now there is word that Tampa and New York City have had unofficial coverage. Boston, Chicago, and Houston are in the works now. Some one posted a comment on my site.

Yes, I can Confirm that VZW has been upgrading all their cell sites in the NY/NNJ system to add 1900Mhz PCS channels for Both voice & EV-DO, & they have "areas" where EV-DO & PCS voice is online & in "testing." It is expected that most of the area's 1900 system will be "up & running" by the end of the year....

Dublin, Calif.-based Sybase, the veteran IT company best known for PowerBuilder and a score of middleware products, has joined a growing list of companies in releasing open source databases and other software to lure more customers to their premium products. To the company's credit, it is not releasing a second-hand piece of software, as IBM did last month with Cloudscape, a leftover from the Informix catalog.

After storming into the Linux software market with its acquisition of Ximian and SUSE Linux, Novell decided it's finally time to show off. The Novell Linux Day roadshow began its 11-country tour in India last month, sending a clear signal of the South Asian country's importance to big open source players like Novell.

Andy who is @ Demo Mobile writes: Skype passed out a press release in the press room about Skype on the Pocket PC featuring WiFi and SkypeOut so calls can terminate to PSTN. The key is the aspect that Skype Out will be part of the 1.0 release. Add ...

Current computers don't have a clue about what their users feel or think. This is about to change, with ATHEMOS (Automatic THErmal Monitoring System), a device developed by Ioannis Pavlidis, a computer science professor at the University of Houston (UH). This news release from UH says that ATHEMOS is a physiological device which performs touchless measurements of your vital signs, such as blood flow, pulse or breathing rate. During the three days of Wired Magazine’s Nextfest, where ATHEMOS was featured, over 500 people had their vital signs measured at a distance of about 10 feet. So maybe one day, our computers will warn us to get some rest or to go jogging. Read more...

The Office of Communications (Ofcom), the U.K. telecom industry regulator, announced earlier this week that it is establishing a new area code (056) for VoIP numbers with no specific location. This new batch of phone numbers can be assigned to accommodate the emerging market for cheaper VoIP calls, including, for instance, subscribers running softphones on a laptop and connecting anywhere via a wireless broadband or 3G link.  Moreover, the new VOIP-only area code is more efficient because it frees up the trunks normally utilized in the call forwarding scheme that BT employs to route the calls of defected subscribers. 

Ofcom will allow consumers to either switch from their existing 11-digit telephone number to a new 11-digit broadband number or take a new 11-digit number starting with the more recognizable regional prefixes "01" or "02".  Some customers will have the option of keeping their existing 11-digit number after switching. 

Ofcom also mentioned it would run a public consultation (until the 15th of November) to determine what service guarantees and consumer protection guidelines new SPs must stick to.  Adherence to the traditional "PATS" (Public Available Telephone Services) set of provisions can become an expensive proposition, since a VoIP SP would incur the added cost of having a gateway to the public PSTN network.  Furthermore, requirements such as support for emergency calls and service continuity after a disaster would also need to be met.  Thus, it is not surprising to see organizations such as ISPA (Internet Service Providers' Association) lobbying that VoIP services should not be require to be PATS compliant.

The existence of bandwidth-intensive applications is one of the key drivers for fiber to the premise, be it for consumer (FTTH - Fiber To The Home) or business (FTTD - Fiber To The Desktop) applications. Bandwidth demand varies by application and customer type. At the low end, a couple of G.729 calls entail only roughly 48 kbps (assuming 8 kbps of data and 16 kbps of overhead, or a total of 24 kbps for each). At the high end, a consumer application such as HDTV can chew up 19.2 Mbps worth of bandwidth.

One of the key determinants for both the business and consumer market is the cost of the “endpoints” (i.e. connectors and the electronics). Currently, there is a significant pricing differential between fiber and copper for connectivity items such as NICs.  As the price gap becomes narrower, fiber gets to be more attractive.  This NWFusion article, for instance, shows the trend: Foundry was the first to ship a pre-standard 10 Gig port on its BigIron switch in 2001 at a price tag of roughly $80,000 for the module and the optics.  By contrast, nowadays, vendors such as Cisco, Extreme, Force10 and Foundry have products at the $4,000 to $7,000 price range for a fiber-based Gig Ethernet port.    

The future development of new bandwidth intensive applications can also favor the fiber, particularly once the bandwidth demand reaches a point where copper can no longer meet it.  That said where is the "killer app"?  Probably not out there yet.  But still, there are enterprises that are deploying fiber as a means of future proofing their networks.  Similarly, fiber is being deployed in new high-end residential projects (with the cost typically being passed on to the owner) and the retrofit market (fiber is being rolled out in homes being remodeled and also passed on to the owner).    

But a true disruption can happen with the advent of new copper specifications. The emergence of the 10 Gigabit copper standard (please be sure to check the IEEE P802.3 10GBASE-T Study Group Public Area Index) can pose a threat to the fiber optic cable market, because it will push the bandwidth threshold further up, thereby taking away the “future proofing” case for fiber deployment. 

One company to watch for in this space is SolarFlare, an Irvine (CA) startup that is backed by VCs such as Sequoia Capital, Foundation Capital and Intel Capital (Anthem Partners and Intel came on board on the second $17.5 million round secured by the company in early 2003).  SolarFlare is trying to replicate the success that Level One had in the 10BASE-T segment or Broadcom and Marvell had in the 100BASE-T space.  The company has a strong IP (Intellectual Property) portfolio, consisting of over 9 patents in process (and counting). 

SolarFlare believes it can solve the limits of the "conventional wisdom" Shannon model and achieve a 10GBASE-T copper solution via its unique approach.  The algorithms used in the chipset include sophisticated media-optimized signal processing and customized DSP engines.  These algols effectively reduce the noise levels, and therefore increase the channel capacity. 

The University of Georgia's New Media Consortium recently conducted a study examining large Wi-Fi deployments in the United States: The study differentiates between what it calls Wi-Fi clouds, which have continuous coverage and Wi-Fi zones, which offer interrupted coverage. The researchers found 38 clouds and 16 zones. The study examines who owns the networks and what the owners hope to gain from building the networks. It's a thorough report on the intentions of hotspot builders today.

The next step will be trying to figure out if the intentions of hotspot network developers are being met. For example, 43 percent of cloud developers cited stimulating economic development as a motivating factor for building the network. But it's not clear if large Wi-Fi networks in small towns actually succeed in stimulating economic development [link via Rushton].

Itanium sales have fallen short of Intel's expectations. Will next year's Montecito boost its fortunes?

Cory Doctorow:
Nicholas sez:

Save Betamax, is a new Downhill Battle project to bring together all the opposition to the INDUCE Act into one big Congress call-in day on September 14. The RIAA and MPAA are making a big push to get this thing through, especially since they lost the Grokster case, and it could come to the Senate floor at any time. Sending emails and faxes is great, but we need to show that opposition to the INDUCE Act or whatever variant is being devised, is very broad. We think working to defend the Betamax decision is a good rallying point for people to come together on.

Link

(Thanks, Nicholas!)

In previous posts I've talked about the confluence of imperatives that will drive robotics in the coming decade: defense, and aging populations. This post accumulates a few links to data supporting this point of view.

Note that I'm appropriating and using the robot/bot concept in a way that may or may not be common to readers. I am not talking about Star Wars droids, Blade Runner replicants or I, Robot humanoids. I'm talking about something more limited here, a little closer to the remote controlled machines of Robot Wars, perhaps. They will often have a human in the command loop, and will almost always have one available for override control or priority setting. I don't particularly care about humanoid form - the 'bot functionality can be constructed of arbitrary physical or software components, often physically distributed. And 'big AI' is not on the critical path; a lot of this is the combination of cheap sensors and interconnect, lots of cycles, control theory and a limited operational context.

Let's start with man-machine interface. The most provocative thing going is the monkey-machine interface at North Carolina. This allows a trained macaque to remotely control a mechanical arm by thought. This project was partially funded by DARPA, and as noted in the second article (by blogger Carl Zimmer), it's dual use technology: it could be used as a prosthesis for injured soldiers, or perhaps eventually to control other systems.

Speaking of those other systems, here's part of DARPA's borg project, powered exoskeletons for humans. Being implemented in part by those noted militarists up at Berkeley. In its existing form, you could get a SOF soldier hauling huge pack loads (once you figure out the energy source). Integrate that monkey/machine technology, and you get the beginning of a fully integrated mobility prosthetic for the wounded, or the aging.

Whoops, the Japanese are already partly there, too. Stretching the form factor a little further, we've got a robotized bathtub for the elderly. (Not hard to believe, once you've seen Japanese cybertoilets.) This is all part of a broad trend towards robotic assistance for the aging in Japan [reg req'd, see BugMeNot]) - providing both physical and emotional aid. And I'm hardly the only futurist blogger noticing the demographic imperative for robotics.

Meanwhile, back at the fun loving DOD, their advanced semi-autonomous combat aircraft have progressed to multi-aircraft formations, and dropping dummy bombs (see the Block 2 videos). And just to make things even tougher, there's now a program to build an autonomous aircraft that can land itself on an aircraft carrier, no mean feat for the most skilled human pilots. This is also part of the distributed control system that I've blogged before. Now step back one, forget that the 'effectors' of this particular system are combat aircraft, and think about the sophistication of control system required to pull this off when the human intervention is often via lagged satellite link, or unavailable due to task overload. Then think 'dual use'.

Parallel and synergistic efforts. Fueled in both cases by the most fundamental driver out there: survival.

We know what you’re thinking. A robot that totes around human sewage, digesting living beings for energy? What, you’re not inexorably excited about this? The EcoBot II (ah, what a benign, nonthreatening name) is fed flies into 12 sewage-based bacterial fuel cells, which break them down, digest them, and use the electrons released as current. And we don’t wanna hear no jibberjabber about how it’s only a matter of time before these bots turn on their human masters, because if you’re gonna go, what’s so bad about being slowly digested in human feces by giant robot oppressors?

Since the emergence of the World Wide Web in the early nineties, there has been an ever growing necessity for "trust" and "security". Commerce and the exchange of vital information are increasingly migrating online. Particularly in the areas of privacy and access, problems of "trust" and "security" have been solved thus far by the employment of cryptography. Encrypted passwords are the virtual "keys" to the doors of the world wide web.

The Guardian Reports that mathematicians may be close to solving the Riemann Hypothesis:

"If they are right - still a big if - and somebody really has cracked the so-called Riemann hypothesis, financial disaster might follow. Suddenly all cryptic codes could be breakable. No internet transaction would be safe."

Even if the Riemann hypothesis has not yet been cracked, it is probably very likely that it ultimately will be. So, the model of virtual "keys" to virtual "doors" hiding all of our personal and financial information is most likely bound to be obsolete. Is there any sustainable solution to the problems of online security and trust?

Some are suggesting that the answer may be found in a system of reciprocal transparency, and reputation systems.

The co-chairs of the MARID Working Group, Andrew Morton and Marshall Rose, have sent an email to the MARID list, stating their opinion that there is no consensus on using Sender ID: "It is the opinion of the co-chairs at this time (before the end of lastcall) that the MARID working group has no consensus regarding thedeployment of Sender ID. This lack of consensus centers around the IPRassociated with the PRA algorithm."I asked Yakov Shafranovich what it means that they can't reach consensus, and here is his explanation: "Sender-ID appears to be probably dead in its current form. It remains to be seen whether Microsoft will continue pushing the current form of Sender ID or agree to the compromise proposed by the MARID co-chair."It appears that Sender-ID cannot be approved because of IPR issues, due to the lack of consensus. Of course, if Microsoft were to change their license, the story could change.

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securitas writes "BBC Technology correspondent Ram Dutt Tripathi reports on India's Uttar Pradesh state where authorities plan to use solar energy to power computers in rural village schools. The cost to run the solar panels is anticipated to be £1,000 per school. According to the report, up to 80% of homes have no power and most government-run primary schools have no power at all. In 2003 the Uttar Pradesh state government bought '1,000 computers for selected primary schools in all 70 districts' with another 1000 to be purchased this year, 'but most of these will not work because there is no power available.' The project is similar to a solar-powered school computer lab on the Isle of Wight."

Cory Doctorow:
The CEO of Danger, Inc., makers of the Hiptop wireless PDA-thingy, has done an embarassingly rotten interview with Engadget, in which he admits that his company is selling out its customers and locking down development for the platform. Last year, I wrote a public apology to everyone that I recommended this device to, because I'd been fooled by a presentation given by Danger at a PC Forum conference where they made a bunch of now-broken promises about the openness of the Sidekick. A year later, we have more broken promises and a device with even worse policies. My Sony-Ericsson P900 has many failings, but at least I can install my own ringtones and software without having to go through the company's politburo to get authorization.

Can customers upload their own ringtones?

No. There’s an effort by the industry to make people pay for the content on these devices...

What about allowing developers to create user-installable applications for the Sidekick?

Not user-installable. We’re a gatekeeper in that sense. they use our developer kit, they reach an agreement with us, and then through us they can have access to our user base.

Link

(via Wendy Seltzer)

Cory Doctorow:
BearShare, a P2P file-sharing too, has added a voter registration mechanism to its latest client:

Now, BearShare has teamed up with YourVoteMatters.org to encourage voter registration. According to BearShare's press release, 800,000 individuals have already registered. The goal is to reach 1 million before the November 2nd elections.

"BearShare users can register by clicking on a link located on a web page only accessible to BearShare users. The link takes them out to the online voter registration site hosted by YourVoteMatters.org. In the short time this program has been live, we have seen great success which we hope will continue through the voter registration deadline."

Link

(via Waxy)

David Pescovitz:
The Data Fountain is an ambient display that translates streaming currency rates to streams of water. From Koert van Mensvoort's description of the project:

"In the morning paper, I can read the weather report as well as the stock quotes. But when I look out of my window I only get a weather update and no stock exchange info. Could someone please fix this bug in my environmental system? Thanks."

On the heels of Fritz Attaway's antagonistic comments about P2P the other week, there was an interesting Q&A in CNET last week with Mitch Glazier, head DC lobbyist for the RIAA. I found this exchange particularly illuminating:

There has been speculation that the original Induce Act could make Apple Computer liable for selling like the iPod. Could it?

No.

Why not?

The original Induce Act focused on the totality of the circumstances. There's no way that a company that produces great digital rights management for a licensed product is ever going to be shown to want to profit from piracy.

In other words, the RIAA intends to use INDUCE as leverage to pressure companies into incorporating DRM. If you incorporate "great digital rights management for a licensed product", they won't sue. Leave out the DRM, however, and well.. you enter the marketplace at your own risk.

Also, it appears that Mitch is confusing his Apple products. Apple's iTunes Music Store does put DRM on each of its songs, but the iPod can handle an unlimited number of DRM-free MP3 files without any restrictions. Apple could have designed the iPod to only handle DRM-protected content, but it didn't. Does the fact that it enforces DRM rules for some songs but not for others still mean it can't INDUCE?

Copy-art-net is a copyright-free website, a curatorial project that aims to create an online platform to exchange works between artists, curators and the public and give the audience free access to works of art.

Artists have been invited to submit work to Copy-art in any medium that will then be available online and without copyright, making it possible for visitors to use these works in any possible way and without restrictions.

This project intends to challenge the idea of intellectual property and test its limits in a copyright-free zone. [ via Rhizome.org ].

Wednesday's Wall Street Journal has two articles on the changes occurring in the over-30 mobile handset space, one discussing the new Blackberry 7100t and the other looking forward to the latest Nokia bricks; the 9300 and 9500 ("now with refreshing WiFi"), as if anyone beyond their marketing department cares about the name. One of the most telling lines is from the end of Mossberg's 7100t review. But, for many users who just want basic phone and e-mail in a light, inexpensive form, the BlackBerry 7100t may be just the ticket. It brings BlackBerry functionality to the phone-loving masses. The same reviews are destined to show up across the print media (bloggers can't beat the print media in this space since print writers are privileged users and get early access - tres unfair) in the coming weeks, but I expect them all to toe the same line. Blackberry is better email. Treo is Palm. Both are good phones (honestly, making a bad GSM phone is much harder than companies make it out to be). "If you are an Outlook user then..." What I find most depressing is that these devices are simply .revs on the Blackberry I had in 1999 and the early Treo that my friends bought. These devices are spending iterations simply becoming usable. And yet their customer base probably doesn't realize this since, to be brutally honest, the over-30 crowd isn't pushing the envelope in terms of mobile data. If you talk to the under-30 community, IM is king, blogging is pervasive, Outlook is a nice app that is matched by a plethora of other apps / services, and the integration of these features into the device they carry is HUGE. Danger gets this, few others do. Just today I was accosted by a suit at Reverie who asked me what I was typing on (Danger next to my skinny VAIO). She noted that the shape alone was more seductive and ergonomic for her than the Blackberry she was carrying. But it was when I showed her the two IMs I had open along with the elegant interface/interaction model that she totally lit up. "This is exactly what I want!" She then broke down and admitted to me that the Blackberry was her work phone but that it was so butt ugly that she had a really elegant Samsung that she swapped the SIM into when she wanted to use the phone. And the email, while truly superior, was only part of her life, the other part being IM and reading her friends' blogs. Amen! Who needs full convergence when small mobile devices have such a personal value -- the under 20s all seem to be carrying an iPod, a cell, possibly a Danger, a memory stick, and as many other devices as it takes to have the ultimate experience on each. Where am I going with this? Ok. iPod won. Video is next. Danger won. There is not current competition for the core mobile data users. Anyone over 30 is probably too old to be reviewing these devices. If you really want to dig where things are going, offer to buy that teen a drink and ask her to tell you what she did today....

I've been reading about Sender ID and the flap about Microsoft's difficulty in playing nicely with others. It's a story that refuses to stand still. For three days, I've had an article ready, and then pulled it at the last minute when something new happened. Now I've decided to just tell you what I know so far and suggest you stay tuned for breaking developments. There is a lot of information, so feel free to skim. The last call period for Sender ID ends on Friday, which means the IETF must make a decision then on what to do about all this. Sender ID, as you no doubt know, is a proposed IETF email standard that combines Microsoft's Caller ID with Meng Weng Wong's popular SPF. The combo is designed to make it difficult if not impossible to spoof an email sender address. It's also an anti-phishing technique. The problem is that Microsoft evidently -- at least so far -- believes that because it is offering to contribute a portion of the standard, and it has applied for a patent on the PRA algorithm, it should be able to control all of the standard by attaching restrictive licensing terms to their contribution, terms that would exclude GPL software from being able to use the standard. Sounds fair to them.

NewsForge recently learned of some behind the scene negotiations between Microsoft and Larry Rosen of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) regarding its controversial licensing of Sender ID. I had the chance to speak briefly this morning with Rosen about those negotiations. He quickly brushed aside a couple of my misconceptions about the issues, and about prior art, then further enlightened me with his first-hand take on these ongoing-negotiations.

Ever since I posted the little piece about Verizon building a massive infrastructure for the Republican National Congress, I have been thinking about the whole contribution business. Today, I finally got a handle on everything. According to OpenSecrets.org, Republicans get a disproportionate amount of contributions from the telecom industry. Of the total $6.65 million in contributions, nearly 62% has gone to the GOP, while Dems got 38%. The biggest supports of GoP are Bells. SBC gave 67% of its dollars to GoP while Verizon and BellSouth kicked in withy 62% and 59% of their total contributions . BellSouth's contributions were nearly $1.12 million, twice the $551,000 that AT&T kicked in. The way the numbers are laid out, it seems the telecom business doesn't trust Democrats much. Not that I blame them. Look at the 1996 telecom act debacle. On the flipside, the recent regulations show that GoP can be, how shall I say politely, easily *managed.*

Venture capitalists have a new found passion: convergence chips. (Okay there is no such thing as convergence chips, but it is a generic phrase I am going to start using to describe silicon that is used in audio, high-definition television and video devices of all shapes and form.) Earlier this month, Cisco Systems invested in Equator Technologies, a start-up that is developing programmable system-on-a-chip processors for networked video entertainment and communications.

Today, Silicon Optix, a San Jose fabless semiconductor company focused on advanced digital video and image processing nailed $40 million in Series C financing from investors such as Interwest and Apax Partners. Silicon Optix chips can be used inside virtually every projection display, HDTV and high-end DVD player.  The company's chips perform digital signal processing (DSP) functions that convert and enhance incoming signals to improve image quality and overall system performance - for example, the per-pixel video image conversion from NSTC and PAL to High Definition (HD). 

I think the situation here is pretty much like the early days of communication revolution, where we saw a lot of dollars flow into network processor makers. A few of them thrived, a couple survived and well we know how this story ends. Having said that, I think the convergence revolution is a "mega trend" and offers a major opportunity for start-ups. Consumer Electronics Association expects 2004 sales for consumer electronics to gallop past $108 billion in total sales for 2003 mostly from the sales of MP3 players and digital television. And all those damn devices, well they will need chips!

moby11 points to this Reuters story carried by Yahooo!; it begins "California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said on Tuesday he would sue electronic voting machine maker Diebold Inc. on charges it defrauded the state with false claims about its products."

David Pescovitz:

A sheet of LSD blotter paper printed with this approprately psychedelic optical illusion is up for auction on eBay. Click the image for the full effect. Presumably, the paper has not been dipped. I've also seen "blotter art" printed with M.C. Escher illustrations. Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne!)



UPDAPTE: BB reader Carlos Poker points out that the optical masterpiece borrowed for this blotter was created by Akiyoshi Kitaoka.

Xeni Jardin:
Following up on last week's post about the city of Philadelphia considering free wireless 'net access for all, BoingBoing reader cyphunk says, "Pfff. Jerusalem (Israel) is already rolling out free wifi for the ENTIRE city -- starting with major commercial areas." Link to news story.

Xeni Jardin:

Following up on this earlier BoingBoing post about an online image gallery of faux vegetation that disguises cellphone towers, here's the website of one of the companies that makes cell tower concealers. And if you thought this was all about saguaros and palm trees, think again: the crosses shown here were erected in Sprint's name. Can you hear me now, o Lord? Good.

Link to Larson Utility Camouflage (Thanks, Mike)

Mark Frauenfelder:
James Fallows has a good introductory article about Skype, a VoIP service that has 10 million users in 212 countries. As Cory mentioned earlier, an OS X beta is available.

You can also reach people who don't use Skype, through a new service called SkypeOut. This allows you to dial nearly any cellular or land-line telephone number in any country and talk. Though it isn't free, it's really cheap. Skype's prices are in euros - its founders are Scandinavian, the main programmers are Estonian and its headquarters are in Luxembourg - and they average two or three American cents a minute, at any time of day. With a credit card, you buy calling time in units of 10 euros ($12.18), which are deducted automatically as you talk.

I started with 10 euros. After my wife talked to her sister in Italy
for a half-hour and I made one quick call to the Philippines and five
more within the United States, we still had 9.10 euros left.

Link

Mark Frauenfelder:
The Los Angeles County Superior Court ordered James J. Jackson, vice president of legal affairs at Sony Pictures Entertainment, and his wife, Elizabeth, to pay $825,000 to 60-year-old Nena Ruiz, who says she was kept as an indentured servant in the couple's home.

[Ruiz claims she was] emotionally and physically abused and forced to work 18 hours a day at virtually no pay for a year ... she said that Elizabeth Jackson had frequently slapped her and pulled her hair.

During her year at the Jacksons' home, Ruiz said she slept in a sleeping bag on a "dog's bed" on the living room floor and ate days-old food, while she prepared fresh food for her employers' pets.

Link

We'll likely have some more here @ Copyfight on the Copyright Office's "consensus" draft of the misguided Induce Act, but in the meantime we have a choice quote from Will Rodger (culled from Declan McCullagh's updated CNET piece):

"First it was the Hollings bill, then Induce, now the Copyright Office's bill. They look different, but they all revolve around the same thing: Giving content (providers) veto power over all new technology. Who decided that holders of government-granted monopolies should determine the future of high tech? I don't remember reading that memo."

We’re not trying to fuel anyone’s paranoid fantasies (well, maybe we are…), but according to the  New York
Times plenty of frequent business travelers are starting to suspect that the hotels they’re staying at are using
cellphone jammers to force them to use phone lines in their rooms. Yeah, it’s totally illegal (and trust us, you don’t
want to get thrown in FCC jail), but hotels do rely on jacked up rates on phone calls for part of their revenue
and people using their cellphones instead has cut into profits (just imagine how screwed the hotel industry would be if
in-room porn-on-demand was banned). Not that that means anything since we all know how spotty cellphone reception is in
general and it’s not like most hotels would have to do anything special to ensure you have crappy coverage.

Dell has a long history - regularly documented in these pages - of not quite getting behind Linux on the desktop. Dell Linux machines do pop up every now and again, but what desktop efforts there are find themselves first consigned to obscure corners of the operation, then disappeared, no doubt because of lack of demand. Why is this? One can surmise that Dell's closeness to Microsoft has something to do with it, but one now has less reason to merely surmise, because Linspire CEO Michael Robertson has broken cover with a few claims, and a few numbers. [The Register]

'-- Microsoft soft money "kickbacks", he estimates, could account for up to $200 million, "or more than 25 per cent of Dell's profitability." --'

Gee, maybe Dell is a 527.

...John

Three quarters of U.S. firms do not consider spyware to be a problem, and most do not see unauthorized employee use of peer-to-peer file sharing services or instant messaging (IM) as major problems. A survey conducted for Secure Computing found that only 25 percent of US businesses recognized spyware as a major problem, despite widespread warnings about software which can covertly gather user information. [TechNewsWorld]

Stupid, just plain stupid!

...John

Microsoft's omission of WinFS from the Longhorn version of Windows may open options for open-source competitors to the forthcoming operating system. [Technology News from eWEEK and Ziff Davis]

'-- Enterprises frustrated by Microsoft's plan to delay key features of the Windows upgrade to meet a rollout schedule of 2006 for the desktop and 2007 for the server say they may now put open-source systems on the table. Developers including Novell Inc., Red Hat Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. are all too eager to help them along. --'

...John

Every fourth summer, IT trade pubs write about the technology that powers the Olympic Games. It's always an interesting topic, but apart from an enhanced focus on security, the Athens 2004 stories were little changed from their Sydney 2000 counterparts. And yet, this Olympics was utterly transformed, for me and for a few million other viewers, by TiVo.



Thanks to this cheap, Linux-based appliance, I was able to compress all of the events that interested me into a fraction of the time it would otherwise have taken to watch them. I'll always remember the Athens games as the first TiVo Olympics. Now I'm thinking about ways to make the next one even better.

...

In our world -- where blogs, Wi-Fi, and computer-attached video cameras are the norm -- we've begun to redefine the art of event coverage. If you want to see how the Beijing Olympics should be covered in 2008, visit a tech conference next year. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

I’ve never really bought the conspiracy story surrounding the Diebold voting machine stuff. I’ve been happy that the issue has been raised (and even happier that the battle about copyright that Diebold’s effort at censoring criticism created also created the Free Culture movement at Swarthmore, and now spreading).

But if this story is true, I will have to rethink my view. As reported at Blackboxvoting:

By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.

Is this really true?

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China has been the one shining star of the mobile firmament. Many executives across the world have been counting on China's 3G buildout as a way to prop up their sales, earnings and of course the stocks. Well it looks like the frenzy which was expected to start in January 2005, might be pushed back to July 2005, or even further. Mark Sue, the wireless analyst for RBC Capital Markets has been spending a lot of dollars on long distance calls and has learned " the awarding of 3G licenses will now be pushed back from early 2005 to July 2005 and possibly into late 2005."

This cannot be good news for companies like Nortel, which gets 50% of its revenues from wireless. Nortel has 3G trials in Guangzhou with China Unicom for both WCDMA and CDMA2000. Lucent that rakes in 45% of its sales from wireless is also on a sticky wicket. China accounts for an estimated 9% of Lucent's total revenues. Lucent has a CDMA2000 trial with China Telecom in Guangzhou along with a WCDMA trial with Netcom in Shanghai. " Ericsson, Motorola and local vendors Huawei and ZTE are currently best positioned to grab a large share of the 3G builds. While the China opportunity appears large, we note that equipment from essentially all the major vendors are installed in the Chinese carriers' networks with the environment ripe for continued pricing competition," Sue writes in a note to his clients.

Vulture: large birds of prey of the New World family Cathartidae or of the Old World family Accipitridae, characteristically having dark plumage and a featherless head and neck and generally feeding on carrion. Also corporate undertakers likes Enron CEO Stephen Cooper. Reuters reports that Stephen Cooper wants four equal payments of $6.25 million or about $25 million for his hard work in trying to help Enron come-out of bankruptcy. They call it hardship fee. WHat hardship given that his firm has already collected $63.4 million in fees from Enron through June 30.

TheLawyer.com reports that working on bankruptcy of the three big broadbandits - WorldCon, Global Double Crossing and Enron has proved to be a windfall for a bunch of law firms. Heading the list is the Weil Gotshal & Manges whose bankruptcy practice now accounts for 20 per cent of the firm’s business – about $160m of a total 2004 turnover of $801m ($439m). The firm has lead roles on MCI (formerly Worldcom), Enron and Global Crossing. and has billed $39.8m for work as chief debtor’s counsel on the MCI bankruptcy, billed $93m for its work on Enron and reaped $11.7m from its work on Global Crossing, The Lawyer adds. Others roosting on WorldCon miseries include Jenner & Block ($21.7m), and Kirkpatrick & Lockhart ($18m.) In comparison, two accountancy giants KPMG and Deloitte & Touche, which claimed a combined $314.4m in fees.

Chips holding 10 terabits of data? Copper as strong as steel? Ceramics tough enough to be used in car engines? All this will be true in five years, thanks to two new methods to create self-assembling 3D nanostructures. These methods used pulsed laser deposition to create layers of nanodots organized in a matrix. These arrays of nanodots are consistent in shape and size -- 7 nanometers with nickel for example. But the real beauty of these methods is that they can be applied to almost any material, like nickel for data storage or aluminum oxide for ceramics. These methods also reduce drastically imperfections, leading to future superstrong materials. Read more...

"In stark contrast to the U.S., where VoIP providers may be stifled by wiretap costs, the UK telecoms regulators seem to be welcoming the technology. The BBC is reporting that a block of phone numbers have been assigned to VoIP users -- and that Ofcom, the regulators, have said 'Our first task as regulator is to keep out of the way.'

vincecate writes "In their 10-K filing, Microsoft says that Linux server units rose slightly faster on an absolute basis than Windows server units in fiscal 2004. To project the trends it is helpful to look at the percentages. Some Gartner Inc. statistics report Linux server unit shipments are up 61% giving it 9.5% of the overall market share. Windows has a much larger base, so it can get the same absolute unit growth with a much lower percentage. Gartner expects Linux to continue growing faster and have more than 1/2 of the new server shipment market by the end of 2008."

With the US Presidential Election coming up, we've had a lot of story submissions that we would like to post, but they don't fit very well on the Slashdot main page. To address this, we'll be running special political coverage between now and the election in our new Politics subsection of Slashdot. Please submit stories directly to the section for consideration. As with all sections on Slashdot, there will be stories available within that section that don't get posted to the main page, so please visit the section if you are interested in more coverage. We'll do our best to be fair with story selection. We think we can do a good job since the Slashdot editors represent a diverse spectrum of political ideologies. The discussions are up to you guys. Here's hoping the experiment works!

LM Ericsson (NYSE:ERICY) announced earlier this week that it decided to halt its Bluetooth development.  The Swedish based telecom vendor is shutting down the operation of its wholly-owned subsidiary which invented Bluetooth and became the driving force behind the wireless technology.  The move follows other companies similar exits from this market, including some that happened much earlier, such as Nortel.  However, this is not a complete pullback, as Ericsson is expected to carry on software technology development via its Mobile Platforms unit (another subsidiary). Moreover, the company will assemble a small, dedicated Bluetooth unit to support its existing customers.

PC World's October issue brings an article about the current growth of file-sharing despite heavy attack from the MPAA and the RIAA. Also has a list of bills that Congress is busy trying to pass.

S 2560 (Inducing Infringement of Copyright Act) would hold technology and service companies liable if their products or devices were found to encourage or"induce" copyright violations, such as by making illegal copies of songs or movies. This legislation paints a virtual bull's-eye on P-to-P software vendors, but also could have far-reaching consequences for other copying technologies. The bill could go up for a vote this year.

HR 107 (Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act) would allow consumers to make backup copies of DVDs, an activity currently prohibited under the DMCA. It would also allow companies to create products that enable lawful copying or backing up of copyrighted content. The bill remains far from a vote, but could figure into the final crafting of the Induce Act.

S 2235 (Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation Act)-better known as the PIRATE Act-would enable the Department of Justice to bring civil suits against suspected copyright violators. Civil actions have a lower burden of proof than criminal proceedings, making meaningful penalties against violators much more likely. This act was recently passed by the Senate.

HR 4077 (Piracy Deterrence and Education Act) , now in full committee, lowers the bar for proving criminal misconduct in the sharing of copyrighted content by electronic means. Individuals who "with reckless
disregard" make more than 1000 works.

Forbes has a fascinating look at NTT DoCoMo and the changes inside the company, and its decision to embrace open standards. The story is about Kei-Ichi Enoki, an executive vice president at the company and how he is pushing I-Mode into new markets. "Consumers don't care about standards," says Enoki. "It does not matter so much if it runs on Wi-Fi or some other technology; what matters is the content and the services." DoCoMo's I-Mode has been a non starter in the US despite a 17% stake in AT&T Wireless, but apparently it is doing well elsewhere. Docomo has licensed the I-mode system to carriers in Taiwan and seven European nations, including Germany, with service beginning soon in Australia, Forbes says. "Mobile phones are going to become personal controllers for anything humans come in contact with. They will control the TV set and other electronic equipment. They will let you into the subway system, act as corporate ID, replace money when shopping, turn on your car and interact with anything else humans deal with," Enoki tells Forbes.

Business Standard reports that Tata owned Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL) is going to roll out retail broadband in 30 cities over next 24 months. The first cities to get the high-speed connections will include technology-hubs Hyderabad, Pune and Bangalore. It has already test marketed the services in Mumbai. The company expects broadband access to become a $65 million a year business. Amitabh Khanna, chief financial officer, VSNL, said, “We are expanding our broadband operations to the retail segment -- including homes -- in 30 cities.”

Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata group, said that “It will be a major thrust area for the telecom carrier.... the company will look at providing best broadband connectivity at competitive rates in the domestic and overseas markets.” VSNL will use cable infrastrucutre to provide broadband. The company is going to charge $8 a month for a 512 megabits per second service using the assets of Dishnet, a company the group had acquired earlier. “We will pursue the triple play - voice, data and video in this changing scenario,” Tata said. India's consumer broadband market is about to get a jump-start. Reliance Infocomm is working on wiring up the country with fiber and wants to offer triple-play services as well in coming months. Sify Broadband and Zee Broadband are current players, and have a horrible track record with consumers. State-owned BSNL has also indicated its seriousness about triple-play services but is banking on DSL technologies.

Jupiter Research and Others High On VoIP says Andy. A story today from eMarketer, an aggregator of research, points out how VoIP will be at the center of convergence and will account for 12 % of all telephony revenues by...

RevKa writes "InternetNews.com has a report of a new Internet2 land-speed record. The old record was nearly cut in half: the two parties, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), 'transferred 859 gigabytes of data in less than 17 minutes.' InternetNews goes on to say, 'This record speed of 6.63Gbps is equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD movie in four seconds.' Various scientific purposes were mentioned 'as well as commercial applications from entertainment to oil and gas exploration.' The article ended with hardware specs 'S2io's Xframe 10 GbE server adapter, Cisco 7600 Series Routers, Newisys 4300 servers using AMD Opteron processors, Itanium servers and the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003.'"

misterfusion writes "Looks like the IEEE is warming up to cold fusion with the latest story "Cold Fusion Back from the Dead". This has been a good year for this field with several leading science journals (Physics Today, MIT Technology Review, etc) contributing stories. Things are warming up and if science Research & Development funding can be stimulated with a positive DoE report (due soon), it might be an interesting rebirth."

Xeni Jardin:
Interesting piece in today's NYT about NYPD crowd control tactics at the Repulican National Convention. If I'm reading this correctly, the prevailing logic seems to be that a lack of wanton violence makes the protests less worthy of air time and serious media coverage?

[N]early 1,800 protesters had been arrested on the streets, two-thirds of them on Tuesday night alone. But for all the anger of the demonstrations, they have barely interrupted the convention narrative, and have drawn relatively little national news coverage.

Using large orange nets to divide and conquer, and a near-zero tolerance policy for activities that even suggest the prospect of disorder, the New York Police Department has developed what amounts to a pre-emptive strike policy, cutting off demonstrations before they grow large enough, loud enough, or unruly enough to affect the convention. The demonstrations, too, have thus far been more restrained than many recent protests elsewhere; five years ago in Seattle, for example, there was widespread arson and window-smashing, none of which has occurred here. Lacking bloody scenes of billy-club-wielding police or billowing clouds of tear gas, the cameras - and the public's attention - have focused elsewhere.

"It is almost easier to explain what you are not getting here," said Ted Koppel, anchor and managing editor of ABC's "Nightline," when he was asked why news organizations have given little time to the protests. "What you are not getting here is a replay of 1968 in Chicago."

The media continues to react to yesterday's 3rd quarter teleconference, and they are almost unanimous. Everyone (with two exceptions) understood it as loss, gloom and doom. Here, for your enjoyment is a bouquet of snips from the reports to add to yesterday's collection. Without a doubt, Motley Fool wins for style ("a management team that's put this company into a stumbling, deathlike trance"). The creativity award goes to CBSMarketwatch for finding a way to report SCO's results as positive news, as Forbes did yesterday. Imagine if you only got your news from those two. Why, you'd probably go out and buy SCO stock or something.Also, just so you know, SCO has announced a city-to-city tour. The tour will run from September 22 through October 7, visiting 12 cities across North America. "Qualified attendees will receive sample copies of all SCO products through NFR kits, as well as other valuable giveaways. The seminars are free and will visit Minneapolis, MN; Montreal, QC; Vancouver, BC; Irvine, CA; Sherman Oaks, CA; Chicago, IL; Dallas, TX; Toronto, ON; Atlanta, GA; New York, NY; Orlando, FL; and Boston, MA."

Direct and Related Links for 'Another One Bites The Dust'

Adults are picking up instant messaging in record numbers, with 50% of those over 35 using various systems. This study was funded by AOL, which has a major stake in the instant messaging market through its popular AIM software. But most people who use IM in the workplace are still using free and unsecured systems, despite the availability of secure versions in enterprise software and products like IM Secure.

The Daily Camera has an astonishingly good, detailed and comprehensive report on the state of VoIP, and who are the real players in the business. "Will Stofega, a senior analyst on VoIP services for IDC, another research firm, says the...

pbranes writes "Microsoft has opened their online music store today with 1 million songs and it will be officially opened tomorrow when Windows Media Player 10 is released. Music costs $0.99 and $9.90 for albums ($0.09 less than iTunes). Also, music is at a higher quality - 160kbps VBR. You can browse the site with Mozilla, however, ActiveX is required for full functionality so IE is required to use the store. Also, Microsoft takes a hit at Apple for not licensing iPod functionality to third parties (kind of ironic when ActiveX is required to use the site).... If you are an iPod owner already and unhappy about this policy, you are welcome to send feedback to Apple requesting that they change their interoperability policy."

evenprime writes "Hurricane Frances may end NASA's space shuttle program. John Logsdon, a member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board and the head of George Washington University's Space Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., has said: 'If there were serious damage to one or two of the orbiters or the facilities needed to process and launch the orbiters, I think it would raise a very large question about the continuation of the shuttle program.'"

Om Malik asks a question that surely is on every techie and Microsoft investor's mind: how is Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) spending its colossal $7 billion R&D budget?  He was able to find a few hints on a recent Bill Gates speech at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, held in early August.  While I enjoyed reading the speech, I must confess that downloading the slides did not give me too much info, other than a few universities with which Microsoft is cooperating, including MIT, Harvard, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon and Illinois.  For good measure, Robert Scoble dropped in and left a few hints, including the Channel 9 video tour of Microsoft Research or the Windows Embedded Lab Tour.

That said, the home page for the event itself (the Research Faculty Summit) was also packed with links to various research initiatives including the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL), DateLens (an information visualization project) and Piccolo.NET (a toolkit to help build 2D graphics that users can interact with).

David Pescovitz:
Researchers at the University of Zurich have shown that revenge is, well, sweet. Their experiment, described in Scientific American, was based on a game where one player was given the opportunity to punish another player for financially screwing him. PET scans revealed that when a player contemplated revenge, his striatum, a "reward center" in the brain, became energized.

This sort of causal relationship may explain why people are willing to discipline a stranger even when there is no immediate gain in it for them. "Emotions play a proactive as well as reactive role," remarks Brian Knutson of Stanford University who penned an accompanying commentary (to a paper about the study in the journal Science). He notes that "passionate" forces may need to be included in economic models because, as this research shows, “people show systematic deviations from rationality."

David Pescovitz:
A fertility scientist at the Kentucky Center for Reproductive Medicine, Panayiotis Zavos, claims to have taken cells from dead humans and cloned them. He stopped short of implanting the embryos, but the scientific community is in an uproar. According to New Scientist, one of three cases used DNA from a young girl killed in an automobile wreck. Apparently her parents kept the tissue in the refrigerator for a few days until sending them along to the maverick scientist.

“This man preys on the strong desires of the most vulnerable people in society - giving them false hopes,” says Robin Lovell-Badge, head of developmental genetics at the UK's National Institute for Medical Research. Other scientists argue that, even if cloning a person were possible, the risk of major birth defects is huge.

Cory Doctorow:
Here's the video of Dennis Hastert calling George Soros a druglord. What a dirtbag that Hastert is. I mean, I don't know where he gets his money from. He's a dick, so maybe he gets his money by selling little children to trolls to bake into pies. Can we be sure he doesn't?

900k WMV Link

(via Joi)

Cory Doctorow:
The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has brought down a verdict in the "Skylink" case. That's a DMCA case whereing a garage-door-opener company asserted that another company, which makes interoperable clickers (in case you lose yours or want a spare for your spouse) violated the DMCA by circumventing the protection on the copyrighted software in the garage-door-opener. Yeah, you read right. Copyrighted garage-door-openers.

Anyway, the court delivered the clearest and most ringing condemnation of the overbroad application of the DMCA yet:

The DMCA does not create a new property right for copyright owners. Nor, for that matter, does it divest the public of the property rights that the Copyright Act has long granted to the public. The anticircumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of the DMCA create new grounds of liability. A copyright owner seeking to impose liability on an accused circumventor must demonstrate a reasonable relationship between the circumvention at issue and a use relating to a property right for which the Copyright Act permits the copyright owner to withhold authorization-as well as notice that authorization was withheld. A copyright owner seeking to impose liability on an accused trafficker must demonstrate that the trafficker's device enables either copyright infringement or a prohibited circumvention. Here, the District Court correctly ruled that Chamberlain pled no connection between unauthorized use of its copyrighted software and Skylink's accused transmitter. This connection is critical to sustaining a cause of action under the DMCA. We therefore affirm the District Court's summary judgment in favor of Skylink.

Link

I wrote a bit recently about the difficulty of "counting the bodies" in the copyfight -- e.g., quantifying the damage to our culture when access to all manner of "information goods" depends on whether you can pay the rental fee. Below are excerpts from two articles that underscore the difficulty of asserting the social value of activities that don't have a direct relationship to making money but are nevertheless extremely important: scholarship, research, and library stewardship/cultural preservation.

USA Today, quoting a letter from 25 Nobel Prize winners to Congress in support of open access to scientific research:

"Science is the measure of the human race's progress. As scientists and taxpayers, too, we therefore object to barriers that hinder, delay or block the spread of scientific knowledge supported by federal tax dollars -- including our own works."

[Why] does the First Amendment speak so forcefully to protect pornographers yet barely whisper when librarians or film restorers complain that copyright regulates their speech, too? Both porn regulation and copyright law seek to promote important governmental ends (protecting kids; protecting artists and commerce). Both do so by restricting speech (speak no porn without verifying the age of the recipient; copy no creative work without securing a license from the copyright holder). Yet while the First Amendment demands that porn regulation reach no further than is absolutely necessary, it is oblivious to unnecessary burdens of copyright. Thus, regulation designed to protect kids has to jump mile-high hurdles, while regulation designed to protect Disney survives with the most idiotic justifications imaginable.

By now you might have heard about Scott MacLean and all the potential fun he could be having with the XM Radio legal department and the RIAA. See he wrote a little program called TimeTrax that took XM Radio broadcasts and dumped them directly onto his hard drive, neatly cut up into nicely tagged MP3’s. Then, figuring that lots of people would love such a useful program, he started selling it. Silly Scotty. Guess he didn’t realize that the RIAA frowns on anything that can “permit listeners to transform a broadcast into a music library.” Guess they’re not such big fans of the record button then. Or the fact that by extension TV lets viewers transform a broadcast into a video library.

Direct and Related Links for 'Caller ID: Do you really know who’s calling?'

By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location in the Diebold voting machine, a second set of votes is created. "This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks."

The Associated Press is running an story about Philadelphia's city goverment seriously considering creating the world's largest hotspot. "For about $10 million, city officials believe they can turn all 135 square miles of Philadelphia into the world's largest wireless Internet hot spot....the city would likely offer the service either for free, or at costs far lower than the $35 to $60 a month charged by commercial providers"

David Isenberg highlighted in his blog (Isen.blog) a recent article from Business Week about how the U.S. has lost its broadband position vis-à-vis other OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries.  The authors mentioned a troubling statistic: the U.S. broadband penetration dropped from the third spot (among OECD countries) in 2000 to the 10th spot (in 2003), behind not only Japan and Korea, but also countries such as Canada and Belgium.  As an interesting comparison factoid, a previous article in TF pegged the U.S. broadband penetration at 51 percent of home Internet users in July, versus 91 percent for Japan (in June). 

What's worse, the article points out, is that because of the loss of competitiveness in broadband, there could be a trickle-down effect in the applications space as well, since broadband access will be sine-qua-non for the development of technologies such as video conferencing, tele-medicine, IP telephony and even online gaming.

What is the chief culprit for the weak performance according to BW?  U.S. policy and the judiciary - more specifically, the Bells' victory of an eight-year battle to stop competitors from using their networks at deep discounts, forcing AT&T (NYSE:T) and MCI (Nasdaq:MCIP) to leave the consumer markets.  What was the consequence of that victory?  An oligopolistic market, which helps explain the imbalance between what U.S. consumers pay ($35) for a 1.5 megabit-per-second connection versus their Japanese counterparts ($25 for 26 megabits with Yahoo! BB).

So what is the catch-up plan?  Well, the article is a bit gloomy.  For instance, it does mention the promise of WiMax, but it claims that the better chunk of radio spectrum for wireless broadband is already taken up by TV broadcasters.  It also discusses some legislation that is being introduced and some RBOC plans to deliver FTTH and deploy more broadband infrastructure.

My own take on this story is that some tidbits of legislation are helpful - for instance, the Japanese and the Koreans already have created policies to promote the development of IPv6 products (IPv6 is the next-gen protocol for the Internet), whereas there has been no such initiative in the U.S.  That said the real force behind any catch up effort is competition.  If anything, the triple play threat from the MSOs will force the RBOCs to accelerate their plans to deploy FTTH or at the very least, FTTN and better DSL (via ADSL 2+).  Fierce rivalries are the key: the better the competition, the better the prospects for progress.  A lot of Japanese DSL and cable service providers are trying to emulate the success of the Yahoo! BB model, bundling VoIP with broadband Internet and other value-added services.  The uptake of WiFi in Japan has also been impressive: Softbank BB (a unit of Softbank Corp. and Yahoo Japan Corp., which jointly own Yahoo BB) announced in mid-July that it is increasing the number of Yahoo! BB public-access WiFi hotspots to 5,000 by March 2005, making it the largest hotspot network in Japan.  J-COM is undertaking a similar initiative.  The U.S. can regain the edge by developing VoIP applications built around SIP (the Session Initiation Protocol), such as conferencing.  It would also be nice to see more operators (wireline, wireless and cable) rely on SIP to provision VoIP - such a move is all about flexibility and cost efficiencies.   

Apparently BitTorrent has some competition trying to make money out of the same principle. The catch? DRM. A startup called Atzio came up with a new term called "data swarming" that seems to be exactly what BitTorrent already does.

[Digital swarming] works by splitting a large video file (such as a movie) into many digital "chunks." Each chunk will be distributed to peers (the IMRs of end users who have paid for the specific video file). Each peer will then "propagate" its chunk of the video file to another, using a portion of the upstream bandwidth available to each peer. Atzio's technology then reconstitutes the chunks into a whole file in a relatively short time. This technique creates an extremely efficient "large pipe" that allows content providers to serve the network with fewer servers, reducing their distribution and administrative costs.

Sue Carpenter, author of 40 Watts from Nowhere, files an article for the LA Times on the decentralized network of pirate stations that will carry the audio webstreams out of NYC:

Beginning today, RNC protesters plan to use wireless phones to call in live, in-the-trenches reports that will be streamed over the Internet and picked up for rebroadcast nationwide on community-based micro radio stations — some licensed, most illegal.

"It has become sort of a thing that whenever there's a big protest like this, someone sets up a pirate radio station the same as someone setting up the food truck or the sound system," said Pete Tridish, a longtime activist and founder of the Philadelphia-based Prometheus Radio Project, an advocacy group for legal, noncommercial micro-radio broadcasters. "Someone knows how to start a radio station, and so someone does it."

• A-Noise Sound Collective is a NYC-based coalition bringing reports from the streets. If you can't get one of the streams listed on their site, try one of the relay feeds at radio.indymedia.org.
  
• The Critical Mass Radio Network is hosting a coordinated broadcast with content from Internet and pirate stations around the country, like Freak Radio Santa Cruz and Kill Radio.