Hanan Cohen points us to DIMES (Distributed IUnternet Measurements and Simulations), a distributed project similar to SETI@home that runs on your machine during slow times, pinging sites and reporting what it finds back to a central server: “What we ask is not so much your CPU or bandwidth (which we hardly consume), but rather, your location.” It’s a project of Evergrow, a consortium of 20 universities.

The management is not responsible for any problems you may encounter… — The Management

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Billy Hoffman wondered what was encoded in the mag stripe inside his various cards. A friend had a reader, that he got from Germany for about $300. He discovered that some encoded his social security number for no apparent reason.

a mag stripe is PVC, magnetic particles and glue. The particles are arranged in magnetized vertical strips. There are 3-4 tracks on each. Stripe 1 can have 100 characters, stripe 2 can have 40, and stripe 3 is journalized. (I’m not sure why journalizing it is useful.)

There’s nothing available for reading cards except expensive, proprietary models. So Billy wrote stripesnoop that displays the contents of a magstripe. You can build a reader for $10-15. They’re developing a writer that will write to all three tracks, for about $75, instead of the $900+ you’ll pay for a proprietary model.

It was an informative talk. Billy’s going to set up his reader and let us see what’s encoded on our cards. (The stripesnoop site has most of the information if you want to get more than this sketch.)

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Today at the Berkman Center, Dewayne Hendricks of the Dandin Group led a 1.5 hr presentation/discussion of California’s Gigabit or Bust Initiative and the general state of massive wifi connectedness. Dewayne has been setting up large (really large) wireless networks in Tonga and Mongolia where the regulatory environment is – let’s say – looser than here in the US. Thus, he can put technologies to the test that are caught in political bear traps in this country. Fascinating.

The gigabit initiative intends to deliver 1 gigabit access to all Californians by 2010. Dewayne is convinced that only wireless will do it because the wire-based infrastructure is dominated by incumbents who don’t much like the idea that citizens will use, say, VoIP via wifi instead of their services. But Dewayne thinks it’s going to happen and it’s going to happen fast: citizens and municipalities will create wireless networks bringing high-speed connectivity at low costs. He seems especially excited about the bottom-up networks. Yeah, who isn’t, but this is a guy who’s providing services aross island archipelagos and thus has a bit more experience than people like me who hang a wifi box outside their 2nd floor window and feel like they’re now a People’s ISP.

Afterwards, there was a spirited discussion of how the clouds over municipalities will connect. Within the cloud, people are sharing data peer to peer at tremendous speeds. But to go from my cloud to your cloud, we either need an intermediary cloud (which may take a while to develop) or some sort of backbone. How’s it going to work? Dewayne thinks that there is technology on the way that will span enough distance to let clouds talk to clouds. (Cue Joni Mitchell.)

A couple of interesting Nuggets o’ Fact: Apparently 66% of global Net traffic is p2p, and 60% of that is video. in the US, 80% of traffic is video. Globally, only 11% of traffic is the Web.

Some urls I jotted down from Dewayne’s talk:

HPwren

sflan

SocialFreeNet

Note: All mistakes in the above characterization of Dewayne’s ideas are due to the denseness of the filter between him and you.

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From Dan Gillmor comes a link to Enkoder, a site that creates JavaScript you can put on your Web page that will display a link to your email address in a way that spam harvesters can’t find it. If it works, you should see the phrase “My email address” expressed as a link here:

…We interrupt this blog entry and remove the script that was here because, although the script worked, it also made my RSS un-parsable. Ack. (Thanks, geodog, for letting me know.)

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Philadelphia is considering investing $10M to blanket 135 square miles with wifi coverage.

Some people for whom I have the highest respect, and from whom I’ve learned a lot, I anticipate are going to denounce this. Their argument is that the government is exactly the wrong entity to make decisions best made by the market. Why? Because:

Government agencies are ill-equipped to make technical decisions.

Governments are corrupt. The incumbents have too much influence.

Even if Philadelphia makes the right decision, it will lock the city into one technology that will be hard to displace.

There is no such thing as “the” right solution. That’s why markets propose multiple solutions.

Providing government subsidized access kills innovation. New ideas won’t be able to compete.

Access prices are already dropping. The market will solve this problem without the corrupt and leaden hand of government.

If people want access, generally they can get it. Most of the country already is within range of a broadband access provider, and most people could afford it if they thought it were worthwhile.

No, providing broadband access is not like building highways. The nature and economics of real property are far different from the nature and economics of bits.

These are serious arguments (which I’ve abridged too much) and I find them persuasive. And yet, both my head and my heart say “Woohoo! Go, Philadelphia!”

I agree with my friends that free markets work better than governments when it comes to creating and delivering innovative technology. I take that as a rule of thumb, not a principle: It’s what we should assume is the case unless there are reasons to think otherwise, but there’s no taint to violating it when it makes sense to do so.

And in this case, I think delivering free (or very cheap) wifi to Philadelphia for $10M makes too much sense.

It would knock one rail off the fence of the digital divide. It would hurt the market’s ability to innovate at the infrastructure layer but give a huge boost to citizen innovation at the creative works layer. And, by the way, I bet there would still be market innovation in providing services that are economically feasible only if wifi is made a part of the assumed infrastructure of a city…just as the market will start providing infrastructure innovation that, yes, competes with free. Most of all, once a physical metropolis has virtual connectivity as part of its geography, we will see unpredictable, emergent effects, especially in group-forming.

I am certain that Philadelphia will make a sub-optimal decision about how to deliver on the promise. I am certain that the decision will be tainted by political considerations, including some marginally corrupt ones. I am certain that within 2 years, the market will have advanced significantly beyond how Philadelphia has implemented wifi. But the potential benefits are big enough to make this worthwhile. And I have enough faith in the market to believe it will jump in at the first chance to improve and extend the government-issue connectedness Philadelphia may provide its citizens.

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Why is Zell Miller, who prominently links to his idiotic “Beethoven for Babies” bill that says more about his willingness to sell out to Sony than about his grasp of science, a Democrat? His site touts his exempting two Georgia counties from EPA regulations because it would have “a negative impact on the sitting [sic, I think] of new industry and the procurement of federal transportation funding…” He wants to push Bush’s right-wing extremist judicial appointments through. He has a barbaric attitude about our treatment of Abu Ghraib prisoners that blames having men and women serve together in “these kinds” of military missions — this piece is sickening.

So, any guesses about the conversation Miller had with President Bush:

Miller: Well, Mr. President, I’m ready to make the move. Make it official. Switch sides of the aisle.

W: That’s great Zelly-Belly. Let’s do it up big. You ever strap on a six-shooter? Just for the fun of it, I mean? Maybe we could…

Karl Rove appears from behind curtains.

Rove: Not so fast, Senator Miller. You’re of more use to us as a Democrat.

W: But don’t we need him to vote our way in the Senate?

Rove: Done. Now imagine him as a Democrat giving a keynote at our Convention.

W: Are we letting Democrats in?

Rove: No, Mr. President. We’re letting Senator Miller in. And he’s going to show the sort of bi-partisan support you have.

W: Like the Log Cabin boys? A lot of them are bi, too.

Rove: Yes, like the Log Cabin boys. And then after the election, Senator Miller can become, oh, I don’t know, Ambassador Miller? How’s that sound, Zell? Maybe something with the word “Secretary” in it.

Miller: Sounds as nice as sweet potato pie.

Rove: Ehhhhexcellent.

Miller: Hmm. Do I smell sulfur?

Rove: Yeah, um, it’s my, um, anti-perspirant. You’ll get used to it.

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I got an email from Hilmar Schmundt at Der Spiegel about the status of Open Spectrum:

Who or what institutions are active in that field in Germany? Is there any country where open spectrum policies have already been instituted (except for the W-Lan spectrum)?

If you know anything about this, you can write to Hilmar by interposing an a_t sign between hilmar_schmundt and spiegel.de

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The drives can be large, but this drive imager, Snap shot, is only 130K. It comes highly recommended by Miles at TinyApps, which is a very good sign. I’m trying it out now, and if it all goes as it seems like it will, I’ll be plunking down my 40 euros for the unrestricted version. (The restriction is that after 30 days, you can’t read the backups. [Correction: Nope. You can read the backup, but can’t make any new ones after 30 days. Sorry.])

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Clay has posted the clearest, sober-est explanation of why it’s time to regulate spectrum as a public good and not as property. It’s a brilliant piece of writing in which every sentence tells.

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I did what seemed like a pointless driver upgrade for my ATI Radeon card to get rid of the Doom III dandruff (a swarm of bright specks) that was making the game difficult to play. But what really seemed to have done the trick was upgrading to DirectX 9.0C. Of course, that (or perhaps the Radeon driver upgrade) mysteriously locked all the icons on my desktop. No, “Lock icons” wasn’t checked, and setting it and unsetting it only made my icons blink angrily (truly). For some bizarre reason, going into Display Properties > Desktop > Customize Desktop > Web and clicking “Lock desktop icons,” applying, and then unclicking it worked.

XP. Go figure.

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