Project Kleinrock: Harnessing the crazy

I've been thinking about Kleinrock Routers. The reasons are crazy: The President is not going to shut down the internet.

But the method to the madness is pretty awesome. We've flooded our urban centers with IP-routing radio boards, owned and operated by regular folks. So if we (the people) wanted to, we could just set up our own internet!

Ironically, in more forward thinking nations the wi-fi is free and controlled by the government. If everything goes to hell and we actually need a Kleinrock network, it will work a lot better in places where the free market was the only law. 

Leave the wiki out of the wikileaks [Updated]

Yglesias says,

I have mixed feelings about a lot of different aspects of this, but there are two key points. One is that the leaker here (presumably Bradley Manning, but that’s not yet been proven in a court of law) has broken the law and needs to be punished. The other is that the ability to republish leaked secrets is integral to the operation of a free press. Creating a new standard of harassing not leakers, but the publishers of leaks, is a very dangerous precedent whose implications go far beyond whatever you may think of the particular circumstances.

I think this is actually pretty well understood. Nobody's proposed any new legislation. The Department of Justice hasn't unveiled any actual charges against Assange or Wikileaks. And while it's very unseemly to see a United States Senator throwing his weight around to get Amazon, Twitter, etc. to drop Wikileaks, at the same time he is not getting the same info pulled from the New York Times.

So everyone instead wants to make this a story about the person of Julian Assange, or the technology of the Internet. (Verbally) attacking Assange is fine, but mostly irrelevant.

And over on the technological side, it's amazing how few people get it. I understand that most of the people I listen to on NPR or whose words I read in the paper are over 50, and probably do not think about the internet as much as I do. But take Josh Marshall, a youngish guy whose whole enterprise is built on the web. He writes:

Let's say that the Wikileaks cables hadn't been State Department cables but rather the final tracks of Lady Gaga's next album or perhaps each episode of next season's Mad Men? How long do you think they would have stayed online?

Say what? There's no difference. That content would have stayed online forever, as the wikileaks will. To miss this important point is to completely misunderstand the current state of the internet.

Wikileaks is alive and well. You can go there, you can donate to them if you so choose, and the "poison pill" insurance file is sitting on many servers around the world, waiting for you to pull it down to your hard drive.

So Joe Leiberman gets to look like a national-security tough guy by bullying Amazon. And it's distressing that Amazon, Twitter, Paypal, etc. have caved. But, in strictly technological terms, it doesn't matter. 


"You can't stop the internet, bitches." -Monkey


Updated Monday @ 10:30. This from the Guardian

Attempts to railroad WikiLeaks off the net quickly failed. Removing its hosting servers has increased WikiLeaks' ability to stay online. More than 1,300 volunteer "mirror" sites, including the French newspaper Libération, have already surfaced to store the classified cables. Within days the WikiLeaks web content had spread across so many enclaves of the internet it was immune to attack by any single legal authority. In some respects, WikiLeaks has never been safer or as aggressively defended.

iPad stuff

Paul Thurrott opines:

Put simply, when you use an iPad, you're typically not contributing to anything, as you can on a PC. Instead, you're simply consuming. And this is how I think the iPad should be compared to the PC: Consumption vs. contribution. Yes, you can do things like answer emails (using the virtual keyboard) on the iPad; there will always be exceptions to any vague generality. But for the most part, that's what this is about. Consumption vs. contribution. 

When you go out and about with just an iPad, you're sending a message that you're not going to contribute. You're just there to consume. This is why the iPad is, to my mind, uniquely unsuitable in the workplace. Knowledge workers don't just read documents. They comment on them, edit them, send feedback. They contribute. And contributing means using a device that not just allows editing, but makes that capability a central point of the entire experience. (Multitasking wouldn't hurt either.) The iPad is not a business tool. In fact, for most people, it never will be. (And those who contort their workflow to make this possible are, of course, simply trying too hard to justify their vanity purchase.)

I can't completely disagree with this. The big problem that Apple hasn't solved with the iPad (at least for me) is efficient text entry. I'm typing way faster on my iPhone in landscape view than I can on my pad. It makes writing--everything from blog posts to work emails to shopping lists--on the pad quite impractical. (Yes, I could use a keyboard with the pad, but by that point it makes more sense to just use my MacBook Pro, with it's trackpad and it's power.)

But I really disagree with his somewhat prickish tone regarding the iPad. "When you go out and about with just an iPad, you're sending a message that you're not going to contribute." Do tell. When I go out and about with a book, what message am I sending?

And speaking of the "workplace" (which it's not clear that he was, since we were just "out and about" in what we English teachers like to call the "topic sentence" of his paragraph), he's got a pretty narrow view of the "workplace." I think the iPad, or devices like it, will be fantastic as:

* Moblie cash registers (iPhones are already used for this, the pad will be better).
* To view medical information, including records, xrays, etc.
* To enter common, discrete information rapidly (think, almost anything clipboards are used for in  actual workplaces.. there will be apps for that!).
* Replacements for all sorts of bulky tablet computers already used to replace clipboards (think, cable installation guys, mechanics, etc.)

I also know a realtor who loves it for checking MLS on the fly for availability and pictures, and then handing it to her clients.

Anyway, I like it for myself. It's just about perfect, ergonomically, for reading books or websites. Absolutely wonderful for restaurant menus when you need to hand it around to decide where to go.

One minor quibble I have with my pad is that, when I don't have a case on it, my thumbs are so fat that I sometimes engage the multi part of multitouch without meaning to. And I assure you, dear reader, my thumbs are  not fat.

img credit

I probably would not have been so persistent

... but this guy--who happens to be a colleague of mine at work--used the new "find my iPhone" functionality (discussed in a previous post) to track his phone down, somewhat aggressively.

We parked along Medill and hopped out. It was a Puerto Rican neighborhood. On the south side of the street, an outdoor birthday fiesta was convening, and some of the participants eyed us three honkeys questioningly. Now at this point I had no fricking clue how we would find the phone; did I think I'd find it under a bush? I certainly didn't plan to go door-to-door, nor did I expect the cops to regard a blue circle around the entire block as sufficient cause for a search warrant. I sent a third message to the phone that I'd been formulating in my head: "We have tracked the phone to Medill St. and are locating it. Please call 512-796-xxxx to help us and claim a reward." Short version: WE KNOW WHERE YOU ARE.

And now his little story has been posted on Daring Fireball, which, at our workplace, will make him quite the bees knees.

Privacy is as privacy does

Two items of note on the privacy front.

A new frontier for the invasion of personal privacy, drumroll, please: the City of Bozeman, Montana wants access to job seeker's Facebook accounts. This local government employer asks those soliciting positions with the city to supply a list of social networking sites they frequent, as well as log–in details and passwords as part of a comprehensive background check. | the guardian, via chat from my sister |

Way to go, Montana.

Second, version 3 of the iPhone software--along with a Mobile Me account--let's me locate my phone if I've lost it. Or my wife's phone. Even if she hasn't lost it.

In other words, I can now track my wife's movements throughout the day:

Not that I'm going to do that. That would be rude. As I've stated before, I think it will be a whole generation before our social norms are sufficiently adjusted to this new technology.

via veegle,

The computer mouse turned 40 years old in 2008. Gartner Group analyst Steve Prentice says the mouse will be obsolete in three to five years. - The Week Magazine, 8/15/08

In other news, I would like some of what Gartner Group analyst Steve Prentice is smoking.

Knows who your Loopt friends are, too

Spin on crazy rainbow wheel

Here's an odd thing. Lately I've been experiencing web browser crashes -- whether using Safari or Firefox -- when using a number of websites. In particular, ESPN.com and SLATE.com consistently cause browser hangs, and other sites cause crashes from time to time. In general, it seems that the common denominator is multimedia content. Thankfully, my preferred pornography gateway hasn't been affected.

Any idea what's going on? My default answer, namely that Safari is an unstable piece of shit that just happens to be a great browser along all other dimensions, is stymied by the fact that similar crashes seem to be occurring in Firefox. Could it be a hardware problem? Or is there some common plug-in, maybe Java or Flash, clogging my tubes?

Addendum:: Interestingly, Safari scores only 39/100 on the Acid3 Standards Compliance Test. By way of contrast, Firefox scores 100/100 and then crashes.