1. Emergency & electronic presence

    November 27, 2008

    In the wake of the attack yesterday in Mumbai, a couple of thoughts picked across the twitterverse pointed me to a note referring to the use of Twitter in emergency conditions (via @timoreilly); people in India are active users of Twitter, Flickr and YouTube - the short note states the use of immediate/real time/near real time application and services during/just after the Mumbai attacks: learn from use of Web 2.0 in Mumbai. It delivers a realtime information of what’s happening. It is not only a ping that let the beloved know that one is fine (electronic presence) but it is also a raw information source for rescue team. Unfortunatelly, it could lead also bad intentionned people to monitor the same pubic channels.

    How about a special kind of 999 where you could send any crucial information to authorities? Many information visualisation have been developped so far that could help authorities stay on top the instant huge flux such use could create.

    Via my domain name provider: the .tel new TLD is a new extension for domain name. You can’t use it to link to a website - it means http://mywebsite.tel is not a web address, it is not WWW based. Instead, the DNS (Domain Name Server) is used to store you contact information and the whois is updated in real time. It means it is a container to host your information and one can imagine storing his/her own geolocation information as well as a new contact telephone, or a new snail mail address, or anything else using custom. The interest is the real time aspect of the thing. It gives you (or your device) a URL - somewhere on the internet where someone can ping you and see your status: online, offline, busy, … alive. (see also: Ambient post on Capacity)

    It is clearly some of the first manifestion of the coming internet of things as previously described and explored by many peoples - see more reference on the wikipedia page: Internet of Things.

    * ping: it is a reference to a UNIX command, a basic network command, that checks your machine can reach another network node from your local host. If your machine is connected to a network, any machine on the network can ping it in order to make sure your machine is part of the network.

    ** TLD Top Level Domain: this is the usually three leters that ends the URL of a website; most common are .com, .net and .org. Telnic is in charge of the administration of .tel domain name; they have a .tel FAQ

    *** Twitter an instant messaging service. It is based on the notion of microblogging - blogging using text-only messages limited to 140 characters. It allows the very fast diffusion and replication of memes across networks of people.

    Categories: electronic presence, network, technology, thinking loud
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  2. World Wide Web, Sharing and the Internet

    September 10, 2008

    lhc2.jpg

    A very interresting set of radio show on BBC about the creation of CERN; CERN happens to be also the place where World Wide Web has been invented, incidentally when one of the laboratory needed to access informations dispatched on many different computers - from then Gopher quickly got replaced. History will ever remember Sir Tim Berners Lee. It quickly has been legally declared Public Domain - CERN could then not claim ownership but nobody else either.
    There’s a very nice part of it which summarize quite perfectly the generosity behind the open source, and its root one can still find in the Science community.

    I quite love this quote: Francis Farley

    This [the Internet] usefull thing was a totally unexpected byproduct; you cannot plan the usefull part of science. What you can only do is to support the right guys let them do what they think is important - and out of that will come usefull applications

    * thanks to Dodeckahedron for pointing out to me that today (10th september 2008) was the frist beam at CERN.

    ** picture: The Globe of Innovation in the morning. The wooden globe is a structure originally built for Switzerland’s national exhibition, Expo’02, and is 40 meters wide, 27 meters tall. (Maximilien Brice; Claudia Marcelloni, © CERN) via BostonGlobe.

    Categories: info hub, network, open source, politic
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  3. A possible future without Net Neutrality

    October 31, 2007

    It sounds pessimistic, i know - but facing reality is sometimes good to draw a better future:

    The internet as we know it is about to die.

    To make it short and simple: net neutrality is the fact that any information transiting on the network is equal to any other. This simple principle ensure people that no information would be considered pre-eminent by any of the internet gatekeeper. You can read a better definition of the Net Neutrality on Wikipedia

    This simple principle is at risk.

    There has been some warning since the early 2000’s - some said it was not relevant, some said it was… but let’s face it: big organisation want to be the gate keeper of the internet - what could possibly stop them from doing discrimination? People reaction, of course. But we can see day after day that such political action is far from reaching its own set goals.

    And what if net neutrality was not going to be the decisive topic of the next us elections (there is a very few chances that this notion of neutrality grab the mind of the average american) - is there really a front here in Europe which could politically oppose such move (and understand it)?
    What would be left to normal people?
    More important: how would we be able to rebuild what would have been destroyed?

    The only alternative I can see today has been suggested last night; there was a meeting of Node London at Gasworks and someone was speaking of the implementation of a wireless alternative to the wired internet as we know it.
    No tips on by who or how this global wireless network would be run - but the suggestion just caught my attention and my imagination for the rest of the meeting and a part of the night.

    netneutrality-31102007(002).jpg

    Here is the picture as I imagine it - this is simply a very basic scenario and is intently thought provoking:
    Wireless technology let us set-up had-hoc network for a very cheap price. More and more machines comes with descent software allowing their user to share documents on a local network - simply put: running an Apache server is a few click away on an OS X machine, for example, and most Windows are coming their IIS server.
    From that point we could perfectly imagine super local network, with content you would provide to your immediate neighbours, and little by little to their neighbours, and theirs, and theirs, and theirs…
    Cities could be connected just by the good will of people - actually not sharing something they are paying for, but sharing a connection to someone else. And also the content could be very handpicked in the sense that it is addressed in a more tangible manner to people they know.

    Of course it sounds quite irrealistic technically at the moment, but…
    How would IP addresses be assigned? Also there would be geographic gaps; it’s easy in a big urban area to imagine such a high density of nodes that it could cover a whole city and why not its suburbs - of course in rural parts it would be harder to connect the dot and make a descent grid.Nonetheless I can remember some experiments in Lausanne, Switzerland were creating network bridge over hills (up and down could be the second name of Lausanne) on quite big distance… I guess there’s not only in Lausanne that people are crossing geographical gaps with wireless network.

    Let’s also consider the experience gained by P2P developer’s in the fields of had-hoc networking; if a few people could get their hands on such a project - it could be a nice alternative to the internet.

    Future is bright and it finally doesn’t have to be Orange.

    The concept is not new and has many echoes in the network history; lots of people have thought on this for quite a long time and Pierre kindly suggested a few links:

    Wireless Mesh Network which examines more precisely the feasibility of such had-hoc network on a large scale.

    Net Equality is an organisation in the US which aim is to provide ‘free internet access for low-income communities. We provide planning, deployment resources and internet mesh products worldwide and install free network hardware in qualified communities in the Pacific Northwest.’

    It’s also the topic of a novel by C. Doctorow, “Someone Comes to Town, Someone leaves Town” -you can download it from: http://craphound.com/someone/download.php

    Categories: medias, network, politic, project, thinking loud
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