San Francisco fiber
Someone emailed me this afternoon, saying “To get web access in a way that supports your 'don't support the telephone monopolies' campaign, where do I go? Whom to tell my friends to switch to? (I've had it with my Verizon dsl — too slow for my kids videos on YouTube), but aren't the cable companies just as problematic?”
Well, there really isn't anywhere to go — although Verizon is not the same as AT&T, and Verizon FiOS might be a good solution for my email correspondent if it exists in his neighborhood.
There's interest today in a feasibility study [warning, enormous PDF] for city-wide municipal fiber in San Francisco. It's expensive ($560 million) but bold. Oren Sreebny says it's fascinating, and I agree.
But it's not clear that fiber is necessarily neutral — indeed, this article suggests cities think fiber networks would have to be prioritized in order to pay off.
I share my email friend's despair at speeds here; from my school connection I can't use VoIP or watch streaming videos of hearings and arguments. Maybe we'll all be moving to San Francisco.
NYC wireless efforts and the police
Sascha Meinrath says it would cost $15-20 million to provide all of NYC with a wireless network. It hasn't happened for a long list of reasons — problems with contracts, turf wars, vendors, all kinds of reasons.
According to the NYT, NYC just spent $140 million to build a super-duper hub-and-spoke wireless system for the police to use in the subways, and the city isn't done. It will cost another $60 million to make it operational. And it won't work. So the police on the street won't be able to communicate with the police underground.
Sascha says the reason it's not working is that the super-duper underground wireless network has many many hubs. With lots of hubs, there's lots of interference. Putting all the intelligence in the hubs also leaves the receivers as dumb, lonely boxes — if the hub stops working, the receiver is done for. Sascha's saying that NYC could have a cheap underground wireless network if the city was willing to let the receivers be intelligent parts of the architecture — a mesh, in other words.
I've written before about Sascha's mesh adventures, which I find quite inspiring. I'm confident he knows what he's talking about. But the clash of cultures won't work — public safety people want hard-wired, centralized, hierarchical, stable solutions, not ad hoc networks they don't quite understand.
It's too bad - $200 million for something that doesn't work, and two mindsets that can't understand each other.
More here from Tom Evslin.
Online access
Say you're over 70, you've never typed, and you're generally afraid of technology. What would it be like to try a computer for the first time?
It's daunting. I saw the process tonight. The letters on the keyboard aren't in any useful order (”where would I find an R?”); the idea of dragging a cursor around is perplexing; and everything is too small and too light-colored to see properly. The notion of an inbox almost makes sense, but embedded replies and the “sent messages” file don't. A trackpad is even worse than the impenetrable keyboard, because for no reason things seem to just disappear from the screen.
After the initial email lesson was done (too much to attempt web access during the first lesson), a visiting 9-year-old showed the 70+ his web site. “See?” he said, “Here are my pictures, and here's more about me, and….” He's part of the We Generation – comfortable with technology, likes online videos, ready to look things up. The 70+ looked a little tired.
We warned her not to stay up all night with the computer. “It's safe with me,” she said. She said earlier in the evening that she was afraid of “losing her soul.”
I'm hoping that being able to send messages to her friends and grandchildren will be worth it. Right now, it seems like a very steep learning curve for her.
Please support OneWebDay: Sept. 22, 2007
OneWebDay is about eight months away. Here's a video that tells the OneWebDay story. And features Craig Newmark!
There are lots of ways to get involved. Be a local organizer of OneWebDay events — start having brainstorming meetings in February. Adopt an assisted-living center, or a local school, and work with them on access/learning projects that can culminate in September. Find people around the world who would like to work on some kind of artistic online project with you — an enormous collage, an emergent symphony, whatever.
And, yes, we'll take donations — the OneWebDay.org site has a “donate” button. We need help with the costs involved in getting the word out around the globe.
Thanks.
Frozen
Very cold evening in New York tonight. In Times Square the steam from the constant construction was blowing sideways, and tourists were running awkwardly down the boulevards to get out of the icy blasts.
Two lasting images from today:
the Yale Center for British Art, not visited exactly, but thought of (prompted by an excellent lecture on Louis Kahn) — it would be nice to visit:
and Bill Nighy, now performing in The Vertical Hour, a play that seems to be a vehicle for him — he's all angles, as if he were being played by some cosmic puppeteer.
Being a gravel pit is great
So the large telephone companies in this country don't want to be commoditized. To avoid this fate, they're vertically integrating, calling Google names, and claiming that net neutrality opponents want to regulate the internet. And worse.
Someone should tell them that being a gravel pit can be a great way of life, and can unlock broad economic growth for the rest of us.
Here's a 2006 presentation from Bear Stearns that was sent around recently. The presentation makes the point that last-mile internet access can usefully be compared to water, gas, and electricity — it's a utility. It's difficult to replicate, it attracts regulation, and it's essential to ongoing growth.
Being a utility is a good business. The report notes that “utilities trade at a premium to telecoms” because of their “stable, predictable returns.” And structurally separating last-mile access from retail “services” would unlock great value, according to Bear Stearns, as well as being in a country's national interest.
China blocking
The OpenNet Initiative says that 30 or more countries are actively engaging in internet censorship now.
According to ONI,
“China has earned the dubious distinction as the world leader in filtering Internet content. The Chinese state-run Internet censoring system is without parallel, both in the technical sophistication of the filtering apparatus and in the breadth of topics subject to blocking.”
This PBS posting from last April describes how filtering works in China:
Government filtering occurs at the nine Internet Access Points (IAPs) where China connects to the global Internet. These IAPs provide bandwith to hundreds of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which must register with the state and censor the Web sites on their services. “It's not a single organization building these lists [of blocked addresses, domains and keywords],” says [Nart] Villenueve [Univ. Toronto]. “Each ISP is required to block bad Web sites, but they decide themselves how to implement this requirement.”
Cyber cafes are also required to register and monitor users, and citizens with home Internet access must register with local authorities.
Here's a recent story about a Canadian's experience with the Great Firewall.
China is tightening controls on internet news content. According to ONI:
The three most significant changes implemented in [a recent law] are adding categories of prohibited news Web site content (inciting illegal assemblies or conducting activities on behalf of illegal civil organizations), banning non-government opinion and analysis pieces, and greatly increasing requirements for individuals and small groups posting news.
The two new categories of banned material aim to discourage use of the Internet for political organization and mobilization, which are viewed by the Chinese state as subversive. Thus, for example, the increasing use of mobile phone messaging to organize protests not only violates these new regulations, but also falls under several established categories of prohibited content: harming the interests of the nation, disrupting the solidarity of peoples, and disrupting national policies, at least. Rather than changing the legality of using the Internet for “subversive” organization, these new regulations fortify state control over expression on the Internet and serve as a powerful reminder and warning against using the Internet for purposes the state views as threatening.
Banning non-government news commentary primarily affects major search engines and portals that are licensed to publish governmental news and certain types of approved, independently-gathered news. These sites must now stop posting commentary and analysis –except pieces generated by state news agencies — effectively limiting Internet news to government-created or sanctioned news.
The blocking of internet sites is a human rights issue, and ONI's information is crucial.
CALEA compliance
Back in May 2006, you will recall, the FCC issued an order saying that facilities-based broadband Internet access providers and providers of interconnected VoIP services were subject to CALEA. A legal challenge to FCC's statutory acumen had been filed, but (inexplicably) failed in June 2006. (FCC apparently read CALEA while standing on its collective head — many posts on that here.)
The deadline for compliance is May 14, 2007, but no one knows what compliance means.
I've seen messages from the askcalea.net industry forum (access to which is controlled by the FBI) that indicate that some vendors of “trusted third party” compliance services think that all providers have to work through them — and some think that merely capturing packets and sending them to law enforcement will fulfill the statute's requirements.
Okay, so this may seem like narrow inside baseball, but it's not. If law enforcement isn't content with a stream of packets, but instead forces small providers and VoIP companies to work through third-party vendors, that's a big cost-shifting exercise. The big guys are fine with this, I'm sure. So are the vendors.
The Act does say that the government is not authorized to require “any specific design of equipment, facilities, services, features, or system configurations to be adopted by any provider …” and is not authorized “to prohibit the adoption of any equipment, facility, service, or feature by any provider …”. But it's all up in the air.
Big wiki day
Today all of my students (in two classes) simultaneously tried to post to a class wiki. I think, all in all, things went rather well. There were a few problems — someone accidentally put their comment in the navigation bar — but more comments were posted than not. So that's a victory.
Next: commenting and linking! I'm looking forward to the time when more of my students discover they can comment directly on someone else's post (politely, in italics or different fonts), and that they can link to anything online from the wiki. And at some point someone will figure out how to reformat the entire thing so that it looks a lot better. Perhaps someone will want to do a podcast about each class and link to it from the wiki.
We're on our way. This is a good moment to point to AboutUs.org and the Wikipedia List of Wikis.
Notes on internet security
I'm giving a talk in a few months about Internet Governance and Security. A useful way to organize this topic (with many thanks to Steve Crocker) might be to look at different categories of internet security threats and try to figure out who deals with them.
The bottom line seems to be (1) that there aren't numbers of governance structures that exist as forums for the discussion of security issues and (2) that most of the money looks backward instead of forward. (ICANN's role in internet security is very limited — it works on the DNS and IP address coordination only. The root list changes on average once every two days, and there are hundreds of copies of it around the world, so it's not a high risk operation.)
There are infrastructure issues — lines, switches, physical assets. These are handled pretty well by individual companies who build in redundancy. When the World Trade Center buildings collapsed, IM conversations around the world continued even though there were plenty of communications lines that were severed.
There are potential issues with hostile acts that cause packets to be deliberately addressed in ways that disrupt the routing fabric of the internet. There isn't a single natural forum for these issues, as I understand it, but network operators and ISPs around the world worry about routing. And building into each router authentication methods for all source and destination addresses would add enormous computational weight and delays. There is likely a role for ISPs to check at the point of entry into their networks whether the source address for a given packet is authentic, but I'm not sure whether that can be more than a suggested best practice. This should probably be a focus of attention — but in what forum?
There are issues about denial of service attacks, but it's not clear how to tell a denial of service attack from traffic experienced by a popular web site. I know CERT is out there, but I don't think it agitates for changes in practices.
So — what needs to be governed? There's a vast landscape of interactions out there. ICANN works on a small subset of these interactions, but comes in for a lot of attention because it's the only barn standing in that landscape. When it comes to the “governance” part of this topic, it seems as if there could be encouragement of forums for discussion of particular issues — like routing — that don't fall into any natural discussion place.
The intersection between network neutrality and internet security is interesting. I think ISPs should be able/encouraged to look for viruses, trojan horses, DDOS attacks, and routing mischief. Arguably, this kind of inspection is part of transport — inspecting for “content” isn't.
But it is true that the distance between content and security can be defined out of existence. For example, if DOJ feels that in order to achieve true CALEA surveillance capacity it has to work with vertically integrated, constantly-inspecting broadband providers that allow only a subset of “approved services” to cross their networks, I suppose it would oppose network neutrality. That seems like a shortsighted approach to me — as I've argued in the past, there are much better ways for law enforcement to get the information it needs.
Network neutrality advocates will need to figure out how neutrality intersects with security. My own view is that there isn't a conflict between these two values.