Column for December
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07 Links
for column of November
30 The European Central Bank has a secret project to put RFID tags in Euro banknotes, according to this report. Here's an extract: "The European Central Bank is working with technology partners on a hush-hush project to embed radio frequency identification tags into the very fibers of euro bank notes by 2005, EE Times has learned. Intended to foil counterfeiters, the project is developing as Europe prepares for a massive changeover to the euro, and would create an instant mass market for RFID chips, which have long sought profitable application. The banking community and chip suppliers say the integration of an RFID antenna and chip on a bank note is technically possible, but no bank notes in the world today employ such a t echnology. Critics say it's unclear if the technology can be implemented at a cost that can justify the effort, and question whether it is robust enough to survive the rough-and-tumble life span of paper money. A spokesman for the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt, Germany confirmed the existence of a project, but was careful not to comment on its technologies. At least two European semiconductor makers contacted by EE Times, Philips Semiconductors and Infineon Technologies, acknowledged their awareness of the ECB project but said they are under strict nondisclosure agreements." The Guardian ran an interesting article about how RFID tags on Gillette blades in Tesco's Bar Hill (Cambridge) store are used to trigger video cameras. Wired is reporting that aluminum foil will block the signals emitted by the radio tags that will replace bar-code labels on consumer goods. Some quotes: Makers of RFID (or radio frequency identification) tags, along with the retailers and suppliers who plan to use them, are saying the technology they spent millions of dollars developing is too weak to threaten consumer privacy. Metals, plastics and liquids, they say, all block radio signals before they reach RFID reader devices. "Any conductive material can shield the radio signals," said Matt Reynolds, a principal at ThingMagic, which develops RFID systems. "There are all kinds of ways to render the tags inoperable." That means Coca-Cola, which eventually wants to put an RFID tag on every can of soda it sells, will have a hard time getting around the metals, plastics and liquids that block the radio signals from the tags. Reynolds was speaking this weekend at MIT's RFID privacy workshop, where privacy advocates squared off with companies planning to replace bar-code labels on their goods with stamp-sized RFID tags. He was one of several speakers downplaying the threat to consumer privacy posed by the tags, which assign a unique identifying code to each item. Engineers at the meeting also presented proposals for devices that could deny RFID readers access to a tag's information, or disable the readers by overwhelming them with useless data. They also demonstrated a device that could be used to disable, or "kill," RFID tags at store exits. Links
for column of November
16 Lovely piece by Steven Johnson on the implications of 'Search Inside'. Some people, however, are a bit sniffy about it. For example, the Seattle Times has a report that trade book authors (many of whom do pretty well out of Amazon) don't like the new Search Inside facility because it might enable users to get the key piece of information they are seeking without having to buy the book. "The feature is particularly troubling to reference-book authors who think they may lose a sale if a user can find "the best place to hike in Chaco Canyon" or "where to find the best airfare to Cuba" by using Amazon's search feature instead. The new feature may have other problems: Each search allows the user to see the full-text of the page where the keyword appears, plus two pages forward and two backward. But savvy searchers can actually read more of the book. In an e-mail to its members, The Authors Guild, the country's oldest and largest society of published authors, said it was able to print out 108 consecutive pages from a best-selling book by using key search terms. An attempt to use the method yesterday successfully called up more than 150 pages of a travel book." Yeah! And I can also dig my garden with a teaspoon. According to Wired, "Amazon.com's new book-searching feature does not allow users to print pages from within books, soothing authors who feared the tool could give users too much free content at the expense of book sales." Later: I'm still coming to terms with 'Search Inside'. So is my friend and colleague Quentin Stafford-Fraser, who did a 'search inside' on himself and found that he appears (as a hapless extra, I hasten to add) in Frederick S. Lane's book Obscene Profits: Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age. (The reason is quite innocent, BTW: Quentin invented the webcam.) He should cheer up -- there are worse fates. For example, I've discovered that I appear in Colin Jarman's The Nasty Quote Book! [I described Radovan Karadzic, the infamous Serbian politician as "a rambling, inconsistent, sentimental, bouffanted crook". Nasty, perhaps; but also true.] Links
for column of November 09 The Economist had a nice piece about the prospects for Google. The New York Times broke the story about the approach by Microsoft. Links
for column of October
26 The NYT story about Microsoft's proposed marketing spend on Office 2003 is here. For some details about incompatabilities between the new software and older versions see here and here. Michael Robertson, the founder and CEO of Lindows, has an even more sinister interpretation of the design 'features' of Office 2003. Links
for column of October
19 Lots more on the Web about Dean and his Net campaign. Dan Gillmor spotted the significance of the strategy early on, and is admiring but not uncritical. Likewise the Guardian. There has been a lot of comment on the dangers for Dean of having a networked strategy in which people at the fringes have complete independence -- see this piece from Slate, for example. Mainstream media are beginning to notice Dean's money-raising capabilities. The Dean campaign has also sussed the importance of Blogging and makes great use of its 'Blog for America' facility. The UK think-tank, DEMOS, has just published a specially-commissioned pamphlet by Rouglas Rushkoff about the potential of the Net for revitalising democracy. Column
of October
05 Column
of September
21 Column
of September 14 Links
for column of September
07 The Hutton Inquiry Web Site is here. Links
for column of August
31 Full text of Greg Dyke's Dunn lecture is here. For more information about Larry Lessig's The Future of Ideas, see here. My Relevant Knowledge programme at the Open University runs an online course on the problems addressed by the book. For more information about the course, how to register, etc. see here. Links
for column of August
10 Useful briefing on Internet Telephony here. Lots of links to stuff about VoIP here. What made me think about VoIP this week was a report that MP3.com and Lindows founder Michael Robertson is launching a new start-up aimed at shaking up the old technological order, focusing this time on providing free Internet-based phone service. Robertson's new self-funded venture, called SIPphone , was unveiled Wednesday morning after nearly a year of preparation. SIP stands for "Session Initiation Protocol," a technology that lies at the heart of the fast-growing Internet voice business. Column of August 03 Column of July 27 Links
for column of July
20 This CBC News piece was just one of many on the security hole in Windows 2003 Server. The iSociety report on e-Government is available (as a PDF file) from here. Links
for column of July
13 Ed Felten's Great Idea Ed writes: "A Modest Proposal: Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that Congress can condition Federal funding for libraries on the libraries' use of censorware (i.e., that a law called CIPA is consistent with the constitution), it's time to take a serious look at the deficiencies of censorware, and what can be done about them. Suppose you're a librarian who wants to comply with CIPA, but otherwise you want your patrons to have access to as much material on the Net as possible. From your standpoint, the popular censorware products have four problems. (1) They block some unobjectionable material. (2) They fail to block some material that is obscene or harmful to minors. (3) They try to block material that Congress does not require to be blocked, such as certain political speech. (4) They don't let you find out what they block. (1) and (2) are just facts of life -- no technology can eliminate these problems. But (3) and (4) are solvable -- it's possible to build a censorware program that doesn't try to block anything except as required by the law, and it's possible for a program's vendor to reveal what their product blocks. But of course it's unlikely that the main censorware vendors will give you (3) or (4). So why doesn't somebody create an open-source censoreware program that is minimally compliant with CIPA? This would give librarians a better option, and it would put pressure on the existing vendors to narrow their blocking lists and to say what they block. I can understand why people would have been hesitant to create such a program in the past. Most people who want to minimize the intrusiveness of censorware have thus far done so by not using censorware; so there hasn't been much of a market for a narrowly tailored product. But that may change as librarians are forced to use censorware. Also, censorware opponents have found the lameness and overbreadth of existing censorware useful, especially in court. But now, in libraries at least, that usefulness is mostly past, and it's time to figure out how to cope with CIPA in the least harmful way. More librarian-friendly censorware seems like a good start." The MIT Government Information Awareness project is here. Wired had a good background article on the project.
Links
for column of July
06 According to this source, spam is 25 years old this year. The BBC reported on last week's 'Spam Summit'. The (not terribly enlightening) web site of the All Party Internet Group is here. For details of the background to the European Directive on spam, see here. Some estimates put the economic cost of spam (in terms of lost productivity etc.) at $874 per employee per year. Brightmail did a snapshot of all the spam it detected in a day. One organisation did an experiment to find how long it took between posting a new email address on the Net and receiving the first piece of spam directed to it. The answer: eight hours! Microsoft and some other large technology companies have finally decided to tackle the problem. Here's John Patrick's thoughtful essay on spam. Links
for column of June
29 The DEMOS report on Mobilisation by James Harkin is available as a pdf file from here. The Neil Postman book referred to is Technopoly: the surrender of culture to technology (Vintage, 1993). Lots of commentary on this all over the Web -- for example this. Howard Rheingold has also written an interesting book in which he tries to divine the implications of the mobile revolution -- Smart Mobs: the next social revolution (Perseus, 2003). Column
of June
22 Links
for column of June
15 There's lots of stuff online about collaborative filtering -- e.g. this commented list of papers. The big problem, of course, is the risk of violating user's privacy, and any political use of the technology would have to solve that problem before it could be used safely. Some people -- e.g. John Canny at Berkeley -- are working on that. Update: Fascinating feedback from readers about uses of the Net to encourage action in meatspace -- like Meetup.com. Links
for column of June
08 Clay Shirky has a lovely essay on the power-law phenomenon as it relates to Blogs. For an introduction to the normal distribution, see here. Bernardo Huberman has written an excellent book, The Laws of the Web: patterns in the ecology of information (MIT Press, 2001) and lots of accessible articles, including this one, which reads, in part: "The reason that power laws are interesting is that unlike the more familiar bell-shaped Gaussian distribution, a power law distribution has no 'typical' scale and is hence frequently called 'scale-free'. To understand the notion of scale-free, imagine for a moment that the order found in the Web was described by a Gaussian, or normal distribution, rather than the power law one. In that case most of the sites on the web, for example, would be of a given size, given by the peak of the bell-shaped curved, and that size, which is the most common one found among all sites, would set the 'scale' of the distribution. But a power law distribution, which is the one that accurately describes the properties of the web, does not have a peak, and therefore most of the sites do not have a given size, but come in all sorts of sizes, with few having many pages and many having few. That is why power law distributions are called scale-free, which means that if one were to look at the distribution of site sizes, for one arbitrary range, say between 10,000 and 20,000 pages, that distribution would look the same as that for a different range, say between 10 to 100 pages. In other words, zooming in or out in the scale at which one studies the web, one keeps obtaining the same result, i.e. an inverse power law in the probability of finding a given feature. It also means that if one can determine how something is distributed over a given range, one can then predict what the distribution will be for another range.
The inequalities produced by power-law distributions are startling. Huberman again: "If one concentrates on the number of visitors to sites, a proxy for their commercial value, it turns out that the top 0.1% of all sites in the World Wide Web capture a whopping 32.36% of user volume. Moreover the top 1% of sites capture more than half of the total volume." And the implications of all this? Basically, winner takes all. "From an economics point of view", writes Huberman, "such a disproportionate distribution of user volume among sites is characteristic of winner-take-all markets, wherein the top few contenders capture a significant part of the market share. In a winner-take-all market the rewards are proportional to relative performance rather than absolute one, and imply a very skewed distribution of income to those participating in the market." Lots more stuff in the specialised literature. For example, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's book Linked: the new science of networks, (Perseus, 2002). Lots of email about power laws, including this from an academic colleague: "One
of the areas where this sort of distribution is wholly familiar The implication is that nobody should be surprised if power law distributions show up in information-related networks. Links
for column of June
01 The Abstract for Nunberg's article is here. It will cost you $2.95 to get any further. Dave Winer wrote a nice background piece about all this in his Blog. Andrew Orlowski's Register piece is here. Later: Lots of email coming in complaining that I've been unfair to Nunberg, who it turns out is a NYT op-ed columnist rather than a professional hack. There's also a more detailed analysis of the issue by Doc Searls. And my colleague Quentin Stafford-Fraser points out that "If you do a Google search for the title of his article, 'As google goes, so goes the nation', you don't find a direct link to the pay-to-view NYTimes site, but you do find a free copy of the article on his Stanford home page". To which one can only reply: !!!!!!! There is a temporal dimension to all this which is important. It may be, for example, that the Blogs turned up by a Google search on a hot topic turn out to be pointing mainly to 'mainstream' coverage of the topic (thereby apparently lending credence to the professionals' view of Bloggers as parasites). But a month later, many if not most of those links to pro coverage will have broken, because the articles will have disappeared behind for-pay firewalls, and are therefore of limited use. Personally, I'm not much interested in Blogs simply pointing to mainstream media sites, but ones which add value to a subject by taking mainstream coverage as a jumping-off point for further thought and analysis (often of an expert kind). Column
of May
25 Links
for column of May
18 Thomas Fuller was the lucky recipient of the Microsoft document cache. He made excellent use of it. Microsoft responded the next day, admitting the existence of the 'sweetener' fund but arguing that it was entirely lawful. No doubt the European Commission will take a view about that, in due course. In the meantime, here is an example of what is getting the Microsofties so worked up -- a western region of Spain called Extremadura, a mostly rural expanse of olive trees and small towns with 1.1 million inhabitants where last month the government launched a serious campaign to convert all the area's computer systems, in government offices, businesses and homes, from Windows to Linux. Links
for column of May
11 Place
to Space:Migrating to eBusiness Models by Peter Weill and
Michael R. Vitale, The BBC Online report of John Lewis buying the UK arm of Buy.com is here.
Links
for column of May
04 Apple's new iMusic strategy Good report of Steve Jobs's presentation in San Francisco. Karen Lillington has a credit card with a US billing address (lucky gal) and has been testing the Apple music store's offerings. One of her commentators points out, though, that at 99 cents a song it would cost over $7,000 to fill the new iPod! Sigh. A very thorough review of the Apple Music Store by David Pogue of the NYT -- including a comparison with the brain-dead downloading sites offered by the music industry at present. Sometimes you have to hand it to Apple -- complex stuff made easy and elegant. There are reports that Apple sold 275,000 tracks in the first 18 hours the Music Store was available. Links
for column of April
27 NetNewsWire runs only on Mac OS X and is available from here. There are lots of news aggregators available for other platforms, however. For example, this. There's also this useful introduction to the concept of RSS news feeds. Links
for column of April
20 Bruce Schneier's newsletter about denial-of-service attacks via the Post Office is here. Links
for
column of April
13 Details of the original quotation for my PC system as follows (we modified it slightly later):
The quotation of £339 + VAT for Office XP Pro came from Dabs. Links
for column of April
06 The Work Foundation's MobileUK report can be downloaded from here. There's a nice page about Martin Cooper (and the first mobile phone handset and call). And here is a page about Joel Engel. Links
for column of March
30 John Robb's Weblog is here. The so-called 'Baghdad blogger' was first noticed in the mainstream press by the Guardian, which concluded that he was not a hoaxer, now people are wondering if anything's happened to him. Hmmm... Meanwhile, media interest in War Blogs continues to grow. Dave Winer was interviewed about them and posted this list of what he regards as interesting ones. And the Warblogging site is compiling an Index of Evil, tracking the numbers of weblogs which refer to Ashcroft, Saddam, bin Laden or Poindexter. Inside VC [stands for Ventura County, by the way] is now running a war blog. And, best of all, BBC war reporters now have a rolling web log in which they post stuff which often seems better than their polished news reports. There's a strange Blog called Strategic Armchair Command. And a useful Warblogs portal. Links
for column of March
23 David Pogue wrote about the pros and cons of Centrino in the New York Times. And here is Intel's description of its new wireless technology. Intel is clearly also planning to get into the business of providing Wi-Fi 'hotspots'. After all, it's a way of selling more Intel processors. From what the Guardian's Neil McIntosh discovered when looking for a hotspot, though, this particular new business opportunity is not exactly mature yet. And the first UK airport to set up a commercial Wi-Fi service is...? Birmingham International Airport, actually. Well done, Brum. For a map of current hotspots, see here. Links
for column of March
15 There's a useful overview of the Information Society Directive in GigaLaw. And Bernt Hugenholtz's critique is here. Links
for column of March
09 The American Library Association maintains a useful CIPA Web site. The Los Angeles Times thinks that the Supremes are likely to be sympathetic to the Act (free subscription required). CNET published a useful piece (with lots of links) about the decision of the Supreme Court to take the case, and also an interesting interview with Judith Krug, the feisty Director of the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom. Links
for column of March
02 The Guardian broke the story of the Home Office's ambitious plans for increasing the population of licensed snoopers last June. And here's last week's story about the apparent change of heart. The Foundation for Information Policy Research's criticism of the original proposals is here. And here is the column I wrote about it last June. Links for column of February
23 Reactions to the Google-Blogger deal Dave Winer is, predictably, somewhat cynical. (After all, he sells a rival product.): "What did Google buy? Pyra claims to have over 1 million Blogger users, with 200,000 active users. But Google didn't buy their content, because Pyra doesn't own it, the users do. They didn't buy access to the content because they already had it. The purpose of Blogger is to publish stuff, in other words to make it publicly available. Google's search engine routinely indexes Blogger sites, along with Manila, Radio UserLand and Movable Type sites. It doesn't know the difference. Blogger is not open source, in fact ordinary people can't even purchase a binary license, so there's probably the reason they did the deal -- to get the source for Blogger, which is now written in Java, and to license it to their corporate users, along with the Google search appliance, which goes for about $25K per box. If this is true, then you will be able to add, say, $1K to the price of the box and get a copy of Blogger along with the search engine, allowing people to create weblogs on a local network. This is very important for business use of weblogs, which is growing now at a fast clip. However, Google will find this is already a competitive market, UserLand already offers a deeper product, Manila, as does Movable Type, another leading competitor....". Forbes thinks that "that the blogging as a cultural phenomenon is about to enter a new phase in its growth. Those who last year had never heard of it will start handing out personal blog Web addresses alongside with their e-mail addresses. And that means that along with nearly everything else about the Internet, the mild cachet that came with being among the first to publish a blog will quickly evaporate with the mass stampede that follows....". Dan Gillmor sees it as a big boost for Blogging. Other comments here and here plus an interview with Evan Williams (Blogger's founder). Douglas Rushkoff is not entirely delighted. Links for column of February
15 Some stuff on Roger Needham:
Links for column of February
09 There's an entry in my online diary quoting a remarkable essay by Doc Searls about language and the political debate about copyright. Doc also points to an interesting site on "Metaphors, Morals and Politics". Column of February
02 Column of January
26 Links
for column of January
19 The Supreme Court decision The Court has decided it isn't entitled to constrain Congress over the continuous extension of copyright terms. Here are Larry Lessig's sombre reflections on his defeat: "So I've got to go get onto a plane to go to my least favorite city (DC). My inbox is filling with kind emails from friends. Also with a few of a different flavor. It's my nature to identify most closely with those of the different flavor. David Gossett at the law firm of Mayer Brown wrote Declan, 'Larry lost Eldred, 7-2.' Yes, no matter what is said, that is how I will always view this case. The constitutional question is not even close. To have failed to get the Court to see it is my failing. It has often been said that movements gain by losing in the Supreme Court. Some feminists say it would have been better to lose Roe, because that would have built a movement in response. I have often wondered whether it would ever be possible to lose a case and yet smell victory in the defeat. I’m not yet convinced it’s possible. But if there is any good that might come from my loss, let it be the anger and passion that now gets to swell against the unchecked power that the Supreme Court has said Congress has. When the Free Software Foundation, Intel, Phillis Schlafly, Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase, Kenneth Arrow, Brewster Kahle, and hundreds of creators and innovators all stand on one side saying, 'this makes no sense,' then it makes no sense. Let that be enough to move people to do something about it. Our courts will not. I will always be grateful to Eric Eldred, and our other plaintiffs, for putting his faith in this case. I will always regret not being able to meet that faith with the success it deserves. What the Framers of our constitution did is not enough. We must do more." More comment... Disney Wins, Eldred (and everyone else) Loses. News.com's brief take and more from AP. Doc Searls describes the decision as: "Just another example of government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations." The Shifted Librarian is unimpressed, asking the obvious question: "What I'd like to know is if the Bono Extension doesn't exceed constitutional limits, what does?" You can tell the author isn't a lawyer. If Congress keeps incrementally extending copyright at intervals in discrete amounts, then it will be granting 'perpetuity on the instalment plan' while staying within the Constitution. The NYT published a sombre editorial headlined: "The Coming of Copyright Perpetuity". Links
for column of January
12 For information about Keynote see the Apple site. Steven Johnson (a shrewd commentator and author of Interface Culture) was impressed, but not uncritical. 'My only real beef', he writes, 'is with the included "themes." They're all very polished -- clearly put together by actual designers. But what's interesting about the range of designs presented -- and this is true of iDVD's themes as well -- is that none of them have Apple's design sense. There's no presentation theme in Keynote that looks of-the-moment the way the new iMac or the iPod does. There's no translucent plastic or titanium in any of the designs: it's either folksy chalkboard or upscale sandstone. Which creates a strange kind of disconnect: the professionally-designed presentation on your screen doesn't have as fashionable a design as the box it's created on. I say Apple should let the rest of its design team loose with Keynote for a week: I'd shell out another 20 bucks for the Jonathan Ive collection of themes in a heartbeat....'. [Note: Ive is leader of the i-series design team.] Courtesy of the wonderful Arts and Letters Daily, comes a flood of insightful pieces on the same topic: Here, for example, is a lovely essay by Julia Kelly published on January 22. Thomas Stewart is calling for PowerPoint to be banned. And presentation guru Edward Tufte has even entered the fray with a scathing piece on PowerPoint graphics. Quote: "The original table, so effective, collapses into incoherent chartjunk. ... Everything is wrong with these smarmy, chaotic graphics: scaling, low resolution, color codes, breaking data into pieces, branding, an indifference to data and evidence. Poking a finger into the eye of thought, these graphics would turn into a particularly nasty prank if used by cancer patients seeking to discover their survival chances. " Meanwhile, if Lincoln had had PowerPoint here's how the Gettysburg Address would look. Links
for column
of January 5 The text of one of the Groucho letters is here and in the incomparable Oxford Book of Letters. And here is the New York Times story about the Microsoft/Lindows spat. |
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© John Naughton 1999,2000,2001,2002, 2003. Nothing in this Web page should be construed as offering investment advice. Information is posted here to supplement my column in the London Observer in the hope that additional links and background will be of interest to readers. If you are seeking advice or information about online investment, pay off your credit card bills first and then consult The Motley Fool. If you want to know where the World Wide Web is headed, buy a crystal ball.