Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

I get a lot of press releases in my email. And by "a lot", I mean "A LOT".

That's not a bad thing. I'm a journalist, and they're one of the tools of my trade. If I didn't get them I wouldn't get some of the ideas I use for stories and features.

However (and it's a big HOWEVER), sometimes I get press releases that are, well, annoying and wrong. They're usually trying to shoehorn something completely unrelated into an anniversary of sorts, and they're certainly trying.

Today is one of those anniversaries. It's the day that CERN has chosen to celebrate 20 years since Tim Berners-Lee persuaded his managers to give him the time and funding he needed to explore some little hypertext ideas he'd had. It's an important day for all of us who read and write on the web, as it's the foundation of everything we do.

It's a pity then that I've been receiving a string of press releases proclaiming that today is "The 20^th Birthday Of The Internet". Now that's one thing I'm pretty sure it isn't. I sent my first email message in 1984, and my first USENET message in 1987, and I'm a relative newcomer to the nets.

If we're going to have a birthday for the Internet, it's got to be October 1^st 1969, when the first two routers were finally in place, one at UCLA and the other at Stanford. This year is not the Internet's 20^th birthday, it is its 40^th.

So, as an educational tool, here are some historical photographs:

This is a BBN Interface Message Processor. It was one of the first routers, that hooked up the first few sites on the ARPANET, the predecessor to today's Internet.



It is substantially older than this NeXT Cube, which was Tim Berners-Lee's machine at CERN. It's the machine that ran the first web server, which itself was built on protocols that evolved from those used by the IMP.



Still, Happy Birthday Web!

I'm guessing that most of you (at least of my EU readership) have already emailed your MEPs with a message roundly condemning the stealth attempts to pass legislation that will allow media companies to disconnect ordinary people from the Internet permanently just for the suspicion that they may be filesharing.

If you haven't may I join my voice to those urging you to do so? It won't take long and it will help preserve your rights online as well as saving the small and medium sized ISPs that do so much to keep Internet access prices competitive.

Here's my letter, which I've based on texts I've seen around the net (thanks to perlmonger for the opening and closing sections which are where I was getting stuck...):

I am writing to you as a constituent asking you to exert whatever influence you have with members of the IMCO and IMTR committees of the European Parliament to vote against amendments 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 that have been introduced into the Telecoms package.

These amendments were introduced under the influence of industry lobbyists whose interests are in the attempted maintenance of obsolete business models that have become unsustainable; not only that, but they are an attempt to subvert earlier rejection by Parliament of explicit legislation to the same ends. The proposed measures are disproportionate, unworkable in practice, violate privacy and personal data security and would lead to entire families being denied access to the internet through the presumed guilt of one member. The European Parliament has already voted against them - they should not be passed by hiding them inside other important and much needed legislation.

Not only are they disproportionate, putting the onus on ISPs to detect and implement the measures required by the amendments is both an unfair measure and technically unfeasable. Many UK ISPs are small or medium sized businesses, and do not have the funds required to invest in wholesale tracking of their users' actions. The amount of work required to implement these measures is large, and the techniques complex. The only organisations able to do this will be the incumbent carriers, reinforcing what is a de facto monopoly by putting small ISPs out of business.

There is, in fact, no way of identifying the difference between legitimate and illegitimate traffic in the manner described in the amendments. Many users use the same tools that are used to download copyright violations to install Linux, or get updates from Microsoft. If the tools proposed by the legislation aren't perfect these innocent users will be tarred with the same brush as anyone violating copyrights. Even if it is possible to determine the type of data being accessed, it's impossible to determine the actual state of the rights associated with it, or the intentions of the rights holders.

Innocent users also face the risk of having their home networks hijacked by third parties without their knowledge - and losing access as a result of third party actions. I'm more technically aware than most people, but it still took several weeks for me to find that someone elsewhere in my street was using filesharing software over my wireless network. Most home users don't have access to the tools or the skills to find and identify these situations, yet the proposed legislation will make them liable for whatever happens on their home wireless networks.

I'm a technology journalist by trade, but I come from a technical background and helped found one of the UK's first national ISPs, and also helped build the online presences of many major high street brands. The Internet has provided a boost to the economy, and these measures will reduce access to the Internet and by closing down small ISPs will increase the costs to the very users the European online economy needs.

The committees are scheduled to vote on this package tomorrow, 7th July, and I urge you to do what you can to have these amendments rejected and, failing that, to vote against the package yourself should it be presented for a vote by the Parliament as a whole.

I'm sorry that I'm sending this message with less than 24 hours to go, but I only found out about this today myself: so please do what you can to prevent these egregious and dangerous measures being codified into European law and to ensure that the European Parliament continues to represent the interests of its electors, even where those conflict with the short-term advantage of multinational corporations and their lobbyists.

Yours sincerely,

Simon Bisson

Remember you have a voice and a point of view, and it's one that deserves to be heard.

Yes, there is still a Veronica^*, Santa Claus^**...

...which means there are still people using Gopher! There also appear to be a bunch of Jughead servers out there, too.

Now, I wonder what happened to WAIS?

^*I suspect the link will only work in Mozilla browsers, as they're pretty much the only ones that still support the gopher:// protocol.

^**And yes, I know the original quote was “Yes Virginia, There is a Santa Claus”...

Looking at the current rash of social networking sites, Twitter seems quite interesting, as it's just a tool for notifying your network of friends what you're doing...

There are some interesting concepts that this fits into, the idea of copresence, or even the Maori idea of the whanau or extended family. Tools like Twitter are a new form of social glue that helps bring distributed intentional groups of people together, wherever they may be. I know I'm not unusual in having close friends many time zones away, that I see in the flesh maybe once or twice a year - and using tools like LJ to keep in touch with them and their lives. Twitter looks as though it could simplify part of that equation.

So how do you use Twitter? The site is as simple and as bare bones as possible - after all, it's a tool for keeping in touch quickly, You just post up simple one line descriptions, using the Twitter web site, IM,or mobile phone - and notifications come back to you the same way. I suspect it could come in quite useful when we're at CES next month...

You'll find me there as (surprise surprise) sbisson.

Yesterday I hooked up a Slingbox to our Sky+ system.

The Sky+ lets us time shift our TV watching, and the Slingbox adds a new dimension: place shifting. It turns the video output from the Sky+ into a stream of IP data that we can watch anywhere in the house, or anywhere there's an Internet connection (once I punch the appropriate holes in the firewall). It also means I don't have to run extra cabling round the house, or spend money on additional Sky subscriptions.

It's a fine example of appliance design - simple software, easy to understand instructions, just a few connectors, and underneath it all a device that's doing something rather complex.

All I had to do was plug the box into the house network, hook up a couple of IR emitters, and plug the Slingbox into the Sky+'s S-video output. Once I installed the software on a PC (Mac and mobile versions are available), a wizard walked me through configuration and video stream optimisation, and, well, there it was, working.

One neat feature is the on-screen remote, which looks just like, and works just like, a Sky+ remote. So I can use the EPG, and even watch stored programmes (even if I keep trying to click on the screen). I'll even be able to program the box when we're on the road...

...just the same.

Welcome, my friends, to Area 404.

According to this (and other) news articles it appears that Sky is looking at buying Easynet, who bought UK Online, the national ISP I helped start in an old brewery in Shepton Mallet.

The chain goes on.

I wonder if the ducks are still there...

...as we can connect to the Internet through Google's free wireless connection in San Francisco's  Union Square simply by sitting near the window. No need to pay the hotel $12 a day then.

Municipal wireless is a good thing.