Net Neutrality Reaches Ireland
Interesting point picked up by Adrian Weckler at the 12th annual TIF charity ball.
The director of Eircom wholesale spoke about the development of broadband infrastructure in Ireland. Among the many points, he loudly approached the topic of Net Neutrality and about whether it would be “fair that these publishers should pay at least part of the cost of building, operating and maintaining these networks”.
To be fair, the customers pay their bills for a contented service and the publishers pay for usually expensive backbone connections. Does this not achieve this purpose already?
What would be their proposed business model for getting support from publishers? Would their be a threshhold of traffic traversing the operators network above which a publisher gets charged? Would their be an attempt to get big publishers to sign deals so traffic can reach customers in a timely manner? Or would they try something like the TV licence approach (“its theoretically not feasible to administer such a billing scheme so we just charge everyone”)?
While they’re currently within their rights to try to govern the traffic on their network, I can’t imagine the average home customers or publishers liking it too much. The customers could move to another network and the publishers could block traffic going to the network that levies them with additional charges.
Old School Cryptography
Auguste Kerckhoffs (apart from having a very long name ) is credited with writing about the concept of secure systems in an attempt to improve the practice of encoded message passing in the French Military. Even today, his essay “LA CRYPTOGRAPHIE MILITAIRE” makes for a fun read (even through the fog of Google Translate). It includes some handy principles anyone looking at crypto-systems should consider:
- The system must be substantially, if not mathematically, undecipherable;
- The system must not require secrecy and can be stolen by the enemy without causing trouble;
- It must be easy to communicate and remember the keys without requiring written notes, it must also be easy to change or modify the keys with different participants;
- The system ought to be compatible with telegraph communication;
- The system must be portable, and its use must not require more than one person;
- Finally, regarding the circumstances in which such system is applied, it must be easy to use and must neither require stress of mind nor the knowledge of a long series of rules.
He also cites a cipher system from Francis Beaufort at the end of the paper, another very interesting character from history.
Longer Evenings
Taking advantage of the brighter evening by walking the dog with Anna on local beaches.
Anna and Elvis
Vanity and Identity
Having read this interesting post about the upcoming vanity URL nonsense, I couldn’t help but agree totally. Having discussed this briefly over lunch recently, I think that while its great that people are starting to use these services, they are
- nothing we haven’t seen before (IRC anyone?)
- ok – the usability of the trending UI is nice but there are a lot of users who simply use it to stay on the bandwaggon all the time and gather followers, etc.
- and as was pointed out in the post above, you can own your own personal domain, etc…
Phew – rant over…until the next time. 
Test Post
please ignore – cheers.
I work here…
It always nice to see the place you work in the newspaper for a good news story.
A quantum of water
It was pointed out to me that drinking water is becoming a more finite resource globally. My initial reaction (from living in Ireland, where it literally falls from the sky almost every day) was “not around here it isn’t”. But then I was reminded that there’s wide scale pollution of the water tables, problems with existing drinking water delivery systems and while it hasn’t seemed likely for the last few years, every once in a while, a drought could cause serious problems. This is exacerbated by the fact that we do little as a nation to store rain water for non-drinking purposes.
So I was interested to see news of this device. I wonder how it would compare on John’s power consumption table. While it would be a great solution in countries where there is little water in the air, Ireland has plenty of it. I’m sure there is more discussion related to this.
A patent from Google related to wireless carriers
While Damien got to it first, I spotted this patent in Techcrunch. I hope they consider contributing it to the Open Innovation Network because an idea like this could be really useful in the long term. Also worth noting that Google apparently joined OIN in August 2007. Either way, work has started in this area already on this side of the world in the form of Perimeter.
ahoy hoy
Interesting post from Jay about Asterisk/Adhearsion development. I encountered pretty much all the issues listed here and went through many of the arguments.
In a slightly related note, Paul passed on this link on Monday. I thought the story was a little out of the blue as version 0.8 was due at the end of last year but I’m guessing since Jay moved things over to GitHub, that he’s back to the business of developing nice software.
Interesting Thoughts
Miguel has nicely summarised IETF72 which I attended for an introductory session last week. A lot of people with some good ideas for the(more immediate) future of the net.
These guys also have some interesting thoughts on what the future might hold and how to get there. But at parts, it sounds more like a conspiracy theory. I don’t think I’d agree with Laurence Lessig all the time, but some of his work is relevant and worthy (i.e. Creative Commons isn’t all bad 
).