lnx4n6.be (get it?) is a Belgian site that has a Knoppix based forensics CD with a fascinating variety of tools. They can be used on both Micro$oft and Unix boxes — extremely useful for data recovery.

I think it’s worth reprinting Doc Searls’ latest comment on the sclerotic nature of U.S. internet connections at the local level. Incumbent telecom carriers continue to impede market growth by offering crippled, asymmetric internet service, and by subordinating internet connectivity to older technologies.

Searls’ comment:

Local cooling

The U.S. continues to lag in Net connectivity. Right now it’s down to 15th, according to one among a variety of discouraging surveys. Kevin Barron:

While I admire the desire to drill down into the details, no matter how you count the lifeboats, the fact is the Titanic is still going down. Unless we wake up and realize how critical the Net has become to every facet of society, including our economy, we will wake up in icy waters instead.

Meanwhile, House Bill 1587 in North Carolina, misleadingly titled “The Local Gov’t Fair Competition Act”, would effectively prevent local governments from offering public services that “compete” with the barely competitive private phone/cable duopolies that currently offer Internet service as a side dish to their legacy offerings.

This legislation is nowhere informed by the realization that Internet service should be as much a public utility as roads, water, electricity and waste treatment.

What we really need is opening up of data connectivity to all kinds of enterprise and grass-roots initiative, with government help in the form of easements to both private and public network build-out efforts. We need the market to open up for other parties to do what the incumbent carriers will not do.

What we don’t need is more pro-incumbent carrier legislation that will further lock out not just competition at the connectivity level, but prevention of countless businesses and public services that can only thrive on a wide open and ubiquitously deployed Internet.

In more hopeful news, my ISP, Sonic.net, lead by CCSF alumnus Dane Jasper, has applied to be a phone company. No doubt Sonic is being forced to do this due to the monopolistic machinations of our local oligarchy.

The San Francisco Chronicle published a rather bone-headed analysis, User revolt at Digg.com shows risks of Web 2.0 (bylined Verne Kopytoff, Thursday, May 3, 2007) of the recent 09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0 dust-up on Digg.com.

09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0 is allegedly an encryption key that unlocks high definition media content encrypted using the AACS standard. It was cracked and posted to a web news group, Digg’d by others, and Digg was then hit with a DMCA ‘take-down’ diktat by the MPAA (The Digital Millenium Copyright Act is an unfortunate piece of legislation passed by the U.S. Congress that is the equivalent of outlawing kitchen knives because they could be used to commit crimes. Worse, the DMCA is being used by the MPAA and the RIAA to deny citizens fair-use copyright of media those citizens have legitimately purchased. Want to back up that DVD collection? Can’t do it in the not-quite-so-free United States of America).

Digg obliged the MPAA by censoring posts containing the AACS key, but users persisted, and Digg relented.

The Chronicle’s take on the controversy? Such shenanigans are the inevitable outcome of naive Web 2.0 companies’ loose reigns on the unwashed masses of the internet. It’s such a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the internet, the web, ‘Web 2.0,’ and this whole technological arena as to be an embarrassment.

According to the Chronicle,

The dust-up underscores both the power and the danger of what has come to be known as the Web 2.0 movement, a loosely defined group of Internet sites that foster online social networks and rely heavily on purely democratic principles to promote everything from news stories to music to photographs.

In truth, ‘Web 2.0′ technologies, which revolve around delivering a desktop PC-like, rich application experience to users via web browsers and the internet, have nothing at all to do with the democratising reach of the internet and the web. If anything, the development of centrally managed locations for posting material under the control of proprietary companies such as Flickr and Digg represent a step back from ‘democracy.’

What the SF Chronicle’s author fails to grasp is that the source of the internet’s democratising power is the nature of its underlying protocols, which make all hosts present in a single space (that is, a ‘cyber’ space) with zero distance between them. This is quite unlike traditional broadcast or print media, where delivery is expensive and slow, is overwhelmingly centralised, and ‘consumers’ of media contribute very little content in return.

Kopykoff continues:

Examples of Web 2.0 sites include the video-sharing site YouTube, the user-written online encyclopedia Wikipedia and the photo-sharing site Flickr. The movement also includes wildly popular social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, on which users can interact with each other in a virtual setting.

Digg’s problems this week are just the latest example of Web 2.0 growing pains. Wikipedia is routinely buffeted by inaccurate or self-serving information, while YouTube is flooded with pirated videos.

Kopykoff has conflated so many different technologies it is difficult to know where to begin to parse the misapprehensions apart.

MySpace could hardly be called a Web 2.0 utilising site, nor would Wikipedia be put into this category. Web 2.0 makes applications such as Google Earth possible — applications that draw data from net repositories, but behave like an application residing on a local computer’s hard drive, such as Microsoft’s suite of office applications, which grew up on stand alone PCs, before there was a net.

Wikipedia’s woes — and its tremendous, novel breadth — stem directly from the ability of each host machine to talk directly to every other host machine on the internet, but again, its web presentation has probably zero of what one would call Web 2.0. Its failings are those of any mob scene, and that’s something that we learned how to cope with long before internet technology came onto the scene. Parliamentary rules of order, editors in news rooms such as Kopykoff’s, meritocratic universities, rules of civil service, and representative democracy all serve to improve the output of the ordinary human lot. Wikipedia chose to run itself as a mob would, and this has precious little to do with the medium that conveys it.

Identifying which communications are valid and sound and which are merely rumours, or the rantings of a hothead, or a mob of them, is a task little changed from the print and broadcast era.

I could continue to parse the article, but you probably get the idea. Kopykoff badly misunderstands the beast he (or she) has been sent to report on.

Sadly, the kernel of a story was there, but somehow Kopykoff missed it. It is this: why are so many people unhappy with the DMCA, the MPAA and the RIAA? Is outlawing all copying, or banning all technologies such as peer to peer communication — or strings of characters and computer programs — a legitimate means for dealing with crimes committed with those tools?

Two posts I made in a discussion on traditional newspapers’ employees’ and investors’ confusion around linking vs. copying, the nature of the web and the internet, and copyright law (discussed by Doc Searls here and by Calcanis.com here. The Washington Post story that set off the discussion is entitled Zell Wants End to Web’s Free Ride, and is bylined: “By Frank Ahrens and Karl Vick, Washington Post Staff Writers, Saturday, April 7, 2007; Page D01″. My replies are here and here.):

This comment from an earlier poster is truly an example of tilting at windmills:

“Google ignores copyright. But it’s not just Google. The entire Web is still set up this way because Congress hasn’t understood the implications yet. Eventually, they will. And this will change with the laws.”

The web is not print, nor is the internet a broadcast medium. The juridical, political and social arenas will have to adjust to this reality. Posting on the web inherently means that one has given away content. There is nothing comparable to the immediacy of the hyperlink in the print world. The primary usefulness, indeed the very definition of the web, stems from linking. Tim Berners Lee, author of http and html, clearly articulated this in _Weaving the Web_, and Zell, the reporters at the Washington Post, and David Lazarus would do well to read Berners Lee’s book.

Linking, of course, is not the only novel aspect of the internet. Tcp/ip also make it so that zero distance exists between hosts, thereby breaking the broadcast model — or, more correctly, making it so that broadcast is but one protocol that fits nicely into the tcp/ip suite.

Again, journalists and investors from the print world do well to dwell extensively on these facts. To take another approach, anthropologist Benedict Anderson’s book, _Imagined Communities_, examines the similarly disruptive character of an earlier innovation: the printing press. I highly recommend it as an excellent primer on what we’re seeing unfolding now.

***

I wanted to clarify two things that I said in a post above.

First, I said: “Linking, of course, is not the only novel aspect of the internet.” I think it’s more accurate (thought a bit awkward) to say: “Linking is not the only novel aspect that occurs ON the internet.” Links, after all, are only one way to represent information, and protocols other than http use other metaphors: bulletin boards, mail correspondence, etc. Just as there is a significant difference between colloquims, symposiums, forums, dialogues, monologues, drama, etc., so too does presentation’s form affect information’s character.

Second, I should make it clear that I believe that there is a distinction between linking and copying. I suspect that linking will eventually (hasn’t this already happened in legal precedent?) fall into the area of copyright that permits either limited quoting or creative re-use. Google News almost certainly falls within the bounds of acceptable limited quoting (but the old legal framework still doesn’t quite fit the new reality, does it?).

Newspapers are going out of business not because of Google News, but because of Craigslist. Craigslist doesn’t reproduce any newspaper content; to the contrary, it competes with newspapers fairly. Zell looks rather like a sore loser.

It is a little surprising that Sam Zell and the Washington Post reporters seem to be unfamiliar with this legal and technological terrain.

I attempted to reply to this column by Doc Searls, Linux for Suits - The World Live Web, but the reply appears to have disappeared into the net ether, so I’ll try to restate it here. Searls outlines his conception of a “live web” in the article’s concluding paragraphs. To me, this idea sounds very much like Wiliam Gibson’s vision of a “consensual hallucination” (which is not necessarily a pejorative term — any human constructed social framework could be called a ‘hallucination’ of sorts), for which he coined the term “cyberspace.” I also wish(ed) to point to the concrete need for a juridical construction of a civil society in cyberspace, which I think parallels Searls’ calls for what he terms “identity,” as well as the “right” to “network neutral” access to the internet. I tend to frame these issues, following after Gibson’s realization that the franchise of civil society will move largely into cyberspace, in juridical and civil terms first, and technological terms only incidentally.

First, Searls’ concept of a live web, then my discussion of Gibson’s idea.

Searls:

Is it possible that “live” will join “free” and “open” in our pantheon of adjectives? Possibly. Whether or not it does, I’d like to thank my son Allen for being the first to utter “World Live Web”, providing me with a perspective I never knew I lacked, until I heard it.

His original vision of the World Live Web was a literal one: a Web where anybody could contact anybody else and ask or answer a question in real time. When he first encountered the Web, as a researcher, he saw it as something fundamentally deficient at supporting the most human forms of interaction: the kind where one person increased the knowledge of another directly.

We’ve moved a long way in the live direction since Allen first introduced me to the concept. VoIP alone is a huge live category. Mobile Web progress will all happen along its live branch.

Where it goes exactly is anybody’s guess. All we can say for sure is it’s headed toward the sky.

My discussion (that I attempted to post in reply to Searls’ column):

The “World Live Web” sounds like the conception that William Gibson had of the then germinal internet. He foresaw that it would become a space into which the entire politico/socio franchise of society would move. In Neuromancer, Gibson coined a term for this new “place:” cyberspace.

And quite unlike the many Pollyanna-esque visions of the web that have followed, Gibson’s was dystopian. In the tradition of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, the net can serve as the a tool of “universal surveillance,” to use Michel Foucault’s description of the “dark side of the enlightenment.” It needn’t necessarily be so, but that is up to us, the hopefully vigilant citzenry.

To wit, patents must not be overly broad, and must not apply to ideas (as Thomas Jefferson argued), copyright must guarantee the right of individuals to benefit from their ingenuity within reason (and for a reasonable length of time, not a corporate lifetime, but rather a human person’s lifetime). Citizens must have a right to access civil spaces to express political opinion — whethor those spaces be cyber’d, shopping mall’d, or public square’d. Yes, that means that Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, or whomever, cannot block port 25 or forbid the use of servers. Access to the internet will be instrumental to civil liberty in the future, as were postal service and free libraries in the past

Does anybody know if Earthlink’s service is to be of the typical consumer flavor? That is, will the terms of service permit Earthlink to block ports such as 25 and 80 (or whatever their whim dictates)? Also, will Earthlink define the service as an “information service” rather than as mere provision of bandwidth, as a common carrier would? Will hosts connected via this network experience true network neutrality by being permitted to send packets without restriction to other hosts?

[Note: I had posted this question earlier in response to an sfist.com article.]

The San Francisco Chronicle has run an article entitled “Free wireless a high-wire act: MetroFi needs to draw enough ads to make service add profits.”

I’m profoundly skeptical of anything that regards the real-estate between my head as “free,” as advertisers do, and so MetroFi’s so-called “free” wireless service immediately raised my suspicions, given that it subjects users to a barrage of ads in a one inch strip atop browsers. After a little bit of digging, I turned up an excellent post on dslreports‘ site, “MetroFi is a badly broken Internet experience.”

The reviewer reports:

MetroFi executives describe their service as the same as normal broadband “as long as users can accommodate a one inch ad bar atop each WEB page.” That doesn’t tell the story at all.

The big problem is that MetroFi advertising scheme all but completely “breaks” your browser’s ability to bookmark pages, and it “breaks” other aspects of the browser as well.

I have always followed the rule that one need know only the funding behind propositions and candidates to know what to vote against: the side with the laughably small funding probably best represents the interests of the vast majority of the populus. The oligarchs, as always, have their shills. Telco (telephone company) funding of front groups opposed to internet network neutrality, as reported by Common Cause, should, therefore, come as no surprise (Wikipedia network neutrality introduction).

The Common Cause site provides a revealing look at each of the front groups. For example, there is a description of the deceptive advertising of HOTI (Hands Off the Internet), a group that includes BellSouth, Cingular, and AT&T:

With its pithy name, viral web cartoons, high profile spokesman (former White House press secretary Mike McCurry) and barrage of print and television advertising, HOTI has been effectively injecting the telephone industry’s arguments on net neutrality into the public debate in recent months.

And they manage to do it while hiding their relationship with their corporate backers. K Street Confidential columnist Jeffrey Birnbaum wrote in The Washington Post that “no one can determine who is supporting Hands Off the Internet by looking at its ads alone. To find out, one must dig into its Web site.”[1]

Not surprisingly, the Common Cause report continues, HOTI poses as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and fundamentally misrepresents the issue at hand:

HOTI ads “are the epitome of doublespeak,” according to Birnbaum.[4] For example, one print ad attempts to frame the Hands Off the Internet message in pro-consumer terms. “Net neutrality means consumers will be stuck paying more for their Internet access to cover the big online companies’ share,” the ad claims.[5] But every major consumer group supports net neutrality, and opposes HOTI’s plan to give telephone and cable companies gatekeeper status over the Internet.[6]

HOTI’s web-based advertising campaigns look and feel like something a consumer or grassroots group might publish. Their catchy, flash animation web videos try to persuade citizens that the government and Google are trying to control the Internet through net neutrality. The benefits that would accrue to the telephone and cable industry if telecom legislation passes without net neutrality language are never discussed, of course.

Learn more: visit Save the Internet’s FAQ.

An excellent column by Robert Cringely proposes bypassing the telcos altogether in the last mile, thereby mooting the question of “Network Neutrality” (the proposal is in the context of a discussion of Microsoft’s future).

Cringley outlines the problem:

To Bob Frankston’s way of thinking this all comes down to who owns the infrastructure. The phone and cable companies own the wire outside our homes but we own the wire inside. (It didn’t used to be that way, you know. There was a time when the phone company owned the wire in our walls even though we paid for its purchase and installation.) The Internet has been a huge success to date specifically because nobody much controls the electrons. This is as opposed to services like broadcasting where some perceived scarcity of spectrum allowed governments to determine who could give or sell us entertainment and information. The ISPs (by which I mean telcos and cable companies) would very much like to go back to that sort of system, where they, not you, are the provider and determinant of what bits are good bits and what bits are bad.

No thanks.

Cringely describes Frankston’s solution to the Telco’s anti-capitalist, anti-entrepreneurial, and anti-social tendencies:

This would be a real marketplace not a fake one. Today’s system is a fake because it depends on capturing the value of the application — communications — in the transport and that would no longer be possible because with the Internet the value is created OUTSIDE the network.

“One example of the collateral damage caused by today’s approach is the utter lack of simple wireless connectivity. Another is that we have redundant capital-intensive bit paths whose only purpose is to contain bits within billing paths,” Frankston explains. “In practice, the telcos are about nothing at all other than creating billable events. Isn’t it strange that as the costs of connectivity were going down your phone bill was increasing — at least until VoIP forced the issue.”

“We have an alternative model in the road system: The roads themselves are funded as infrastructure because the value is from having the road system as a whole, not the roads in isolation. You don’t put a meter on each driveway. Tolls, fuel taxes, fees on trucks, etc. are ways of generating money but they are indirect. Local builders add capacity; communities add capacity and large entities create interstate roads. They don’t create artificial scarcity just to increase toll revenues — at least not so blatantly.”

“I refer to today’s carrier networks as trollways because the model is inverted — the purpose of the road is to pass as many trollbooths as possible. We keep the backbone unlit to assure artificial scarcity. Worse, by trying to force us within their service model we lose the opportunity to create new value and can only choose among the services that fill their coffers — it’s hard to come up with a more effective way to minimize the value of the networks.”

A model in which the infrastructure is paid for as infrastructure — privately, locally, nationally, and internationally can create a true marketplace in which the incentives are aligned. Instead of having the strange phenomenon of carriers spending billions and then arguing that they deserve to be paid, we’d have them bidding on contracts to install and/or maintain connectivity to a marketplace that is buying capacity and making it available so value can be created without having to be captured within the network and thus taken out of the economy.

So why not do it? Well the telcos and cable companies would hate it. Who made them gods?

Thanks to Doc Searls for the link.

According to a March Netcraft article, botnets are abundant on the net. Says the article:

“Botnets” of compromised computers launched 226 distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on 99 different targets in a three-month period from November to January, according to new research from the Honeynet Project.

The Honeynet Project paper states that the scope of the activity is rather impressive:

The project tracked more than 100 active botnets, including one containing 50,000 compromised “zombie” machines. In the three-month tracking period, Honeynet detected 226,585 unique IP addresses joining at least one of the IRC channels being monitored. Since the project sees only a portion of active botnets, the report

said that even by conservative estimates, “this would mean that more then one million hosts are compromised

and can be controlled by malicious attackers.”

Worse, according to Honeynet (as quoted in the Netcraft article), the activity seems increasingly well-organized and adept:

“Our research shows that some attackers are highly skilled and organized, potentially belonging to well organized crime structures,” the report concludes. “Leveraging the power of several thousand bots, it is viable to take down almost any website or network instantly. Even in unskilled hands, it should be obvious that botnets are a loaded and powerful weapon.”

My refrain of late to everyone I’m in contact with has been: ‘You’re nuts if you connect a Microsoft Windows box to the net. Consider your financial information already gone if you’ve done so. Worse is connecting with no firewall. If you do so, may the Great Kavod help you (or flush you from this mortal coil expeditiously).’

I arrived at the Netcraft article on the Honeynet paper via this May 4th Netcraft post on botnet controlled DNS nameservers.