Category Archives: Internet

This is fun: If I dig a very deep hole, where I go to stop?

Bell South now offers three classes of DSL service, with three different maximum download speeds. Legacy customers got put in the middle tier; upgrading means paying extra every month. So far, I’ve resisted upgrading. Most of what I do is text, so after a point download speed isn’t that big a deal for me. It may get worse as the kids spend more time on line though. Until then, my major constraint is latency — especially DNS lookups — not throughput as such.

I’m reminded of this by this excellent illustration of the difference between latency and bandwidth.

But what do I know about tech? After all, I don’t have a Ph. D in it.

Berkeley’s SIMS is offering what sounds like an interesting seminar. Xiao Qiang and Howard Rheingold will be leading a seminar in “Participatory Media”:

The purpose of this seminar course is to become familiar with the latest developments in information and communication technologies in regard to their potentials to enable political collective action and reshape patterns and structures of power in the physical world. In addition to analytic readings, the class will directly engage in collective knowledge-gathering and construction of a public good. Students will engage in social bookmarking and collectively construct a resource wiki on class topics. Students will start from a pool of potential resources via the smartmobs.com blog and smartmobs del.icio.us tag, and will be encouraged to find and tag new resources that are not already in that pool. Students will post links and brief descriptions of their selections on the wiki, explaining in the first comment attached to the wiki page why this entry is valid and useful; others can comment subsequently, and edit the page if necessary. By permission of instructors, participants who are not physically present at class sessions can participate online. At the end of the semester, the wiki will be open to reading and writing by the public.

If I just had the time, I’d find out if they’d have me…

Meanwhile there’s an intriguing syllabus.

In It’s a fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud world, my ISP, DreamHost, gives a shocking statistic:

Nowadays, about 20% of our daily sign ups are with stolen credit cards (or stolen paypal accounts), and are for the express purpose of spamming, conning, storing ‘warez’, or cracking (our system or somebody else’s).

DreamHost is responding by using spamassassin-like techniques to weed out the bad guys; it claims under 1% false positives, and false negatives, and says another 2% fall into a gray area that get flagged for — error-prone — manual review.

There’s an enormous amount to consider, and the slightest whiff of marketing-speak, in Jim Moore‘s
Fifteen reasons why DIY Web Superservices will transform the landscape.

But there’s one point in there that was an aha! moment for me:

We are experiencing the return of the command line in computing.  The URL has become a the command line for open superservices.

The classic Google interface, for example, is now seen by web superservices hackers as a command line generator.  The Google interface is code generator.

Here is an example:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=geocode&btnG=Google+Search

This command causes the Google machinery to perform a search and render the results in a particular manner.

I am in Orlando today, attending yet another we-hope final meeting of the Florida Supreme Court's Committee on Privacy and Court Records, being held in the beautiful Orange County courthouse. It's nice to see a building buck the trend towards cheap and ugly public buildings, a trend most visible in the ghastly prison-like high schools dotting the landscape.

The court building, or at least the conference room, has a wireless network, but outsiders are firewalled out from it. I found a plug and jacked into it. Internet access! But even there, there's a “Websense” proxy or firewall. Why would the court want to prevent its employees from using gmail?