Category: Computers

It’s already received wisdom that the right way to build an enterprise WiFi network is with a small number of smart switches and a large number of dumb (and cheap) access points that do little more than act as remote radios for the switch. Symbol pioneered the concept, and now everybody else (especially switch and router companies like Cisco, Extreme, and Juniper,) has climbed on board. Is the industry ready to standardize a management protocol for dumb access points? These folks say yes:

Engineers from Airespace, Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO – message board), and NTT DoCoMo Inc. (NYSE: DCM – message board) have presented the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) with a memo proposing a standard protocol for controlling 802.11 “lightweight” or “thin” access points via a wireless LAN switch.

Following the trend towards wireless LAN switching that is happening in the industry, the authors are proposing a “standardized, interoperable” lightweight access point protocol (LWAPP) that can “radically simplify the deployment and management of wireless networks.”

But others, like Trapeze, the Extreme spin-off in Pleasanton funded by kiss-of-death VC Accel Partners, think not:

Like most draft standards, this one already has its critics. Trapeze Networks Inc., for example, questions the need to develop a lightweight protocol at all. “If you architect your system correctly? then why do you need it?” asks George Prodan, senior VP of worldwide marketing at Trapeze.

Prediction (worth what you paid for it): Cisco, Airespace, and NTT will win, Trapeze and Accel will lose, and this isn’t the end of wireless engineering, by a long shot. Airespace’s Systems Enginnering director, Bob O’Hara, has been a long-time leader in the 802.11 standards process, from the early days when Greg Ennis and Phil Belanger presented the DFWMAC amalgam of wireless protocols (including my Plink II) to the committee for approval, so this would be slam-dunk in that arena. He doesn’t have that kind of weight in the highly-political IETF, but Cisco does, and the idea has the added benefit of actually making sense, which still counts for something these days.

UPDATED 2008: This is a silly post, isn’t it?

InfoWorld reports that Google is already using Blogger internally:

Craig Silverstein, Google’s director of technology, told an audience here at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference that the company has started using Pyra’sblog tool for internal communications and product development.

Good for them, blog tools make for good intra-company communication for a lot of reasons.

At the other end of the Blog Toolosphere, Six Apart’s (Movable Type’s) announcements this week were one step forward and two backwards: giving Anil Dash a job in Business Development was a good move, because he’s got all the qualifications to do well in that kind of job: lots of connections, understands the technology, and people like him. Taking on the idiotic Joi Ito as an investor will damage them much more than Anil can help them, however, because he’s the kind of guy who will end up trying to run the company, and he’s not nearly smart enough to do it well. He’ll bowl Ben and Mena over, and it’ll be up to Anil to face him down. Soap opera in the making.

The UN is going to hold a meeting to talk about wireless networking in the Third World, with help from The Wireless Internet Institute:

On June 26 , 2003, the Wireless Internet Institute will join forces with the United Nations Information and Communication Technologies Task Force to host “The WiFi Opportunity for Developing Nations” at UN Headquarters in New York City. The conference will create the conditions for informal dialogue and brainstorming among industry practitioners, government representatives and international development experts. It will feature plenary sessions and structured brainstorming workshops to establish strategies to overcome obstacles as well as develop environments favorable to the broad deployment of WiFi infrastructures. Conference conclusions will serve as a blueprint for national consensus-building programs, spectrum-policy reform and infrastructure deployment.

Maybe now that Hans Blix is out of a job, he can inspect Third World nations for strategies to overcome obstacles to Internet connectivity, like, um, no computers and stuff. At least that’ll keep him out of real trouble.

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m trashing the UN, not WiFi. I love WiFi, and not just because I invented most of its MAC protocol for Photonics back in 1992 (beacons, segmentation, RTS/CTS, and addressing). WiFi is a great solution to the “last 100 feet” problem, but it’s not a backbone or wide-area mesh solution, because: a) there aren’t enough channels in the 801.11b spectrum for that, and b) 802.11a doesn’t go far enough. So we need some better solutions to the infrastructure problem than 802.11, and we even need better solutions to the “last 100 feet” than the standard allows. As originally designed, the MAC supported the kinds of Quality of Service mechanisms needed for telephony, but the trio that shoehorned the standard dropped this feature, and now we’ve got a mess on our hands.

So 802.11 is nice, but it’s time to go to the second generation before we get too hog-wild about implementing it everywhere. And you already knew that anything the UN’s up to these days is likely to be crap.

And just incidentally, if there’s no such thing as RF interference (as David Reed and David Weinberger claim), then why should the FCC free up more channels for WiFi?

The Washington Post published some especially clueless remarks on WiFi and Iraq recently:

Will Wi-Fi — wireless networking technology — be the answer to reconstructing Iraq’s devastated telecommunications infrastructure?

“By using Wi-Fi,” USA Today reported this week, “parts of Iraq could skip the build-out of traditional phone and cable networks altogether. The situation is similar to how cell phone technology enabled huge swaths of the Third World to avoid regular land-line phone systems. Wi-Fi equipment makers such as Cisco Systems, Proxim and Nomadix are talking to government agencies and non-profits about possibilities for Wi-Fi in Iraq.”

Nobody likes WiFi more than I do (I invented the largest part of the MAC protocol that WiFi uses), but I have to say that this article is nonsense. In the first place, Iraq’s telecom infrastructure isn’t “devastated”; the coalition went out of its way not to damage infrastructure, and even if it had destroyed some telecom switching centers, the bulk of the cable plant is obviously still intact. So the question is whether any reasonable person would substitute WiFi along with something like voice over IP as an alternative to a telecom network with shiny new switching centers. Gee, what a comparison: with wired telecom, you get as many interference-free channels as you have pairs of wires, or millions. With WiFi, you get three. With telecom, your conversation is digitized nearby, and all parts of it arrive at the other end within microseconds, intact and in the right order, while with VoIP and WiFi, some of it gets there, some of it doesn’t, some gets there pretty quick, some not so quick, and some in the wrong order and it’s all dependant on what your neighbor or the other guy’s neighbor or some other neighbor is doing. With telecom, you can connect to the system with a $10 analog phone, and with WiFi you need a computer, a WiFi NIC, a whole boatload of software and a headset, and your battery better be charged.

There’s a lot of nice things you can do with WiFi, but replacing the phone network isn’t one of them.

Tim O’Reilly is probably the only man in the known universe who’s actually making money off of Open Source, and that’s because he publishes all the books that tell how to use the motley stuff, which is actually pretty smart entrepreneuring. This week, he’s holding his annual snake-oil rite, the Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara. One of the panels is on warblogging, and predictably, there are no actual warbloggers involved.

Why am I not surprised? After all, the conference is priced at rock-bottom levels, with a ticket to the exhibits and the panels going for a measly $1600.00. For that, you can’t really expect to hear experts on any subject more meaningful than the latest open source Personal Information Manager, or maybe Dildonics. It’s your money.

Discover magazine reports on a process for turning agricultural and human waste into crude oil, minerals, and water:

Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 175-pound man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water. While no one plans to put people into a thermal depolymerization machine, an intimate human creation could become a prime feedstock. “There is no reason why we can’t turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil,” says engineer Terry Adams, a project consultant. So the city of Philadelphia is in discussion with Changing World Technologies to begin doing exactly that.

It’s 85% efficient, and plants are already on-line that process 200 tons of turkey guts a day, producing 600 barrels of oil. Processing all 600 million tons of America’s agricultural waste would produce 4 billion barrels of crude, essentially what we import each year. Bad news for the House of Saud, good news for America. And oh, yeah, no more messy toxic waste either.

Bye-bye, Osama.

This article by Dan Gillmor gives me an idea:

The deployment of “honeypot” snares to trap and study malicious computer hacking is gaining credence in the networked world. But the practice, however useful, raises legal and ethical issues.

The idea is to set up a server that holds no crucial data. Then you wait for the bad guys to invade — it typically doesn’t take long — and figure out what they’re doing, so you can prevent them from doing it to more valuable machines.

Spammers, as we know, harvest e-mail addresses from the web, which is why people go to great pains not to make their e-mail addresses known except in some form that requires a bit of translation. So what would happen if every blog and personal web site was to sport a few hundred completely bogus e-mail addresses? The spammers would harvest them as well, and their mailing lists would grow longer and longer, with a noise-to-signal ratio going in the right direction. It seems to me that spammers probably limit the number of e-mails they send out at any given time to certain number that is somewhat less than the size of their entire database, which means that the likelihood of a given spam reaching a real address would decline.

So this would be the equivalent of releasing sterile fruit flies into the environment to prevent real ones from reproducing. It may not be completely successful, but it couldn’t hurt.

Update: this page generates bogus e-mail addresses to screw-up the address harvesting activities of spammers. It would be better if it used valid domains, but this is a good start, and somebody else did it already.

Here’s a couple more scripts a little more subtle.

Chicago Tribune reports on efforts to roll back the H1-B visa program that’s put so many Californians out of work:

As Congress prepares to reauthorize the controversial program for another three years in the fall, foes are calling for safeguards to stop the wholesale replacement of U.S. workers. They also want the annual cap on H-1Bs to return to the 65,000 limit established in 1990. The tech industry successfully lobbied for an expansion to 195,000 in 2000.

A fellow named Pete Bennett (no relation) is on the case.

Dave Weinberger’s Salon article claiming RF interference is a myth hasn’t gone over too well, according to Weinberger’s source, David Reed:

And of course, there are the usual angry letters that seem to think I’m claiming to have discovered the earth is flat, or that relativity is wrong (someone actually thought I was arguing that!)

Reed is most famous, perhaps, as one of the co-authors of the 1981 paper arguing for an architecture-neutral Internet. (If we’re going to start enumerating technical myths, I’d start with architecture neutrality; the Internet’s initial design wasn’t neutral, it was crippled with respect to real-time data transfer, but if you read this blog at all, you’ve seen that already.)

The weakest parts of Reed’s theories about RF signalling relate to non-informational sources of interference such as barriers, reflection, multipath, and entropy. Other than that, it’s a fine way to look at signalling in a vacuum, covering all the considerations that should be taken into account by the FCC the next time they deal with metaphysical policy.

Sometimes I think I could edit an entire blog devoted to nothing but debunking pseudo-technical BS.

TiVo and Replay were inspired by the servers created for video on demand trials in the mid-90s. These servers held massive libraries of movies and TV programming that could be served-up individually to customers, who could control them like videotapes with fast forward, rewind, pause, and that sort of thing. These servers were hard to build, because the server was located at the head end of a cable system far from the customer’s remote control, so moving the clicks up stream quickly was a challenge. Moving the video streams down to the customer’s set top box was also a challenge, because each box needed a separate feed, and the head-end typically serves 300 customers on a cable with about 100-200 channels of capacity.

The upstream challenge was solved by a deeply buffered, asynchronous API developed by my colleague Rich Rein and I for HP, and the downstream challenge by compressing the video stream into MPEG and decoding it in the set top box, enabling the cable system to squeeze multiple feeds into a single analog cable channel.

These technologies gave rise to PVRs like TiVo and Replay, which combined a pint-sized video server with a set top box, to digital cable and to digital satellite TV with pay-per-view. Each of these three technologies falls short of the entire set of features provided by the server trials, but each helps create market awareness of what’s possible with full-scale video servers and the right consumer equipment in the home.

Some of the companies who got their feet wet with the trials got distracted by the Internet bubble, and tried to shoehorn media onto its inadequate infrastructure, hoping that broadband would solve the delivery problem for them. Of course, it hasn’t, and the Internet has proven itself very resistant to progressive upgrade, even before our tech-topian Internet Amish started screaming that the Internet should never be upgraded for video delivery.

The solution for video content providers is to bypass the creaky, marginal Internet, and instead to roll out video servers on their cable systems. AOL/Time Warner is finally catching on, according to this piece in the New York Times:

The essence of AOL Time Warner’s Mystro TV is a technology that uses a cable system itself to provide viewers capabilities similar to computerized personal video recorders like TiVo: watching programs on their own schedules, with fast-forward and rewind. But it also lets networks set the parameters, dictating which shows users can reschedule, and it also creates ways for networks to insert commercials.

This technology has also been wrongly described as a “TiVo killer” by Boing-Boing, who doesn’t know better, and by Tim Oren, who really does. AOL/TW has no reason to fear TiVo – it’s a niche product, mainly owned people like me (I have two TiVos and a Replay), geeks who love gadgets and don’t mind bugs – not a mass market.

AOL/TW’s competition is Satellite TV, because it’s causing them to lose cable subscribers for the first time ever. DirecTV has a deal with TiVo that allows a specialized PVR to record the MPEG stream from the satellite direct to hard drive, with no loss of quality. Satellite has great economics, because new customers don’t require new infrastructure except in the home, and it doesn’t cost that much, at least compared to the cost of running cable in neighborhoods.

But the weakness of satellite TV is the lack of any ability to personalize services, because the same satellite serves everybody, and when its channel capacity is gone, it’s gone for good. Cable systems are isolated around head ends on the ground, and as long as the system can serve up customized feeds to all customers on each given head end, it can grow and scale nicely. So the logical way to provide customized services is with a server per head end and an MPEG decoder in each home, which is already there for people with digital cable.

The Mystro TV system takes just this approach, and it’s got one huge advantage over TiVo: access to a content library many times larger than anyone can ever have in his own home. AOL/TW can digitize all the stuff it owns onto the equivalent of DVDs. When you want to watch some movie from 1955 that you can’t get at Blockbuster, or first season of the West Wing, or last week’s Friends, your neighborhood video server plays it for you immediately if it’s on its multi-gigabyte RAID array. If not, it sends a message to New York which causes a robot to mount the DVD in the library and spool it down to your neighborhood server, probably on some of that dark fiber that’s all over the place. Then you watch it, and when your neighbors want to see it, it’s already there.

So they’ve got a larger library than your TiVo or your Blockbuster, a more personalized service than your satellite provider, and more reliable delivery than your Internet connection.

And you can keep using your Replay or stand-alone TiVo with it (perhaps in even more interesting ways, heh heh), so what’s not to like?

AOL is basically taking the advice I offered them a few weeks ago, so I’m not going to complain:

So maybe what AOL/Time-Warner needs to do is forget about the Internet and broadband, and get themselves some nice Tivo-type property to really make the synergy work. Then they can upgrade the book value of their “good will” instead of sending out bad vibes and like, bumming everybody out, you know.

Just send me my check, dudes.