intensional networking....new idea?

so we have a LOT of examples of people doing stuff on the net (whether fixed or mobile, web or games) - could we not codify the patterns of use and then just optimize the hell out of the common cases - a bit like robot car painters (which are basically playbacks of tapes of humans) -

in the mobile case, for example, if you see someone's journey is the same as one of a small set of previous journey's by themself or other people, then all the congestion control, routing, handovers and radio signal stuff could just be replayed from those journeys in all the routers and switches and hosts...

mapreduce on the protocol stack...with cache prewarming:)

meanwhile, I was wondering if one could do IP over chattering teeth (i.e. people blue with cold, signalling IP packets by clicks) - blueteeth?

why do americans write to me with a return address without USA?

indeed, why do US university and business headed notepaper not include +1 on phone/fax or USA at the end of addresses? is this arrogance or stupidity, or just that they treat these channels (like many treat email) as write-only?

compareyourparents.com

new social network idea for kids - forget bebo; forget upyourstreet; forget freindsreunited; this is for kids to find out whether they ar e being shortchanged in the chores/pocketmoney stakes compared with their peers - fully anonymous, but culture/location are all taken into account - i think this'd be a must have for all 10 year olds:)

One Laptop Per Soul, proposal

we propose that there should be one laptop per soul - persons not carrying a laptop
shall be deemed to have no soul, and therefore can be terminated at anytime.

personas with more than one laptop may operate as terminators

persons termianting persons with laptops will have there laptops shutdown, and maybe subject to
a kill -9 at any time.

persons with non-sugar GUI laptops will be sent to bootcamp to learn better ways.

persons with laptops running any variant of Mac OSX or Windows shall be subject to
15 years kernel hacking in Siberia.

[* any similarity to an idea by Philip K. Dick, the UnPersons, is entirely intentional]

social net/recommendations, and turning tests

here's an idea

a turing test (like a capcha) should be based on whether someone can recognize a joke that a particular other person would find funny

oldcastle....in southwest crete - well networked...

i've been going to various parts of greece since 1967 - most recently, though, a frequenter of crete - way back when, we had a number of network projects and the Institute of Computer Science in the University of Crete (Heraklion and Chania but also a lab called Forth - chap called Stelios) as they had a technical clue - this shows up today as internet access on Crete is extremely good and seems to survive even power outages (the commercial ISP they started is forthnet:) - coz of this, people find time to have web sites and blogs about all sorts of news and views
and foods in a fave summer spot we are heading for in just 1 week - only worry this year is being blown away by the
current reported high winds - on the other hand, maybe we can go to some different drinking, swimming, walking and eating (not necessarily in that order) places because of this...

pointless networks

so i just upgraded my mac and now I have a bluetooth wireless mouse and keyboard on my desk - great - 2 less wires:-)

but then I have to reboot the mac whenever the batteries go flat and i replace them, coz it can't auto-rediscover the devices:(

so the uni just upagraded the entire phone net to cisco VOIP kit - and now instead of 1 wire on my desk fro mthe phone, I have 3 wires - what is worse is the phone is now inline in the ethernet between my mac and the department's switch, which means if it fails, my net access breaks.
what is worse still is I cannot "login" to the phone and upload/download my address book (or synch the address book between my cell phone, my email and the voip phone.

progress? I think not.

reasoning about intentions, in communications protocols

so we've seen a lot of work on trading packet headers for protocol state. indeed, we've also seen predictive state (for compression or estimating retransmit timers etc) based on past data.

and in mobile systems, we have seen work on predicting mobility based on past location or proximity or even mobility patterns of a set of nodes (related or otherwise by organisation or by transportation/geography)

but what about the next level, intention? nodes can publish their intentions easily (say in a tuple space or even in the mobile tracking service) - hence a car or phone with GPS/satnav, can publish its intended route - this means we can do not only geo-routing, but we could pre-plan handovers, retransmit timers and even radio power.

it would be interesting to generalise the idea of intention-based communication over other domains too -

webcam, webmike, and webprivacy?

so dominic and i were shoooting the breeze in burham overy staith, and
thoght to ask why are there so many webcams but almost no webmikes?
why do people regard being seen as less of an invasion of privacy than being
over (or under) heard?

eh?

gene pool diversity and stuff of all kinds

so cycling into the computer lab today i noticed that there are
no two bikes the same in the cycle rack outside. this is remarkable. indeed, I noticed in gatwick airport last week that (aside from little old couples of american tourists traveling around) there were no two bags the same on the whole carousel.
then I relaized that on 5th avenue last week in NYC there were no two tourists with the same camera!

And yet I notice in the conference that almost all the laptops were from a gene pool of 3 (macbooks, ibm thinkpads, and dells).

then thinking back a couple of weeks, i recall that there were no two tents the same in glastonbury.

why is that, peg, I pray? what makes laptops special??? eh?

his facebook fell on an eyewateringphone

so today I notice "11 of my friends have added the face book applcation to their iphones"

amazing - so 11 people i have as "friends" on faceboo kobviously just bought iphone 2s and there's a sucker born ever hour:)

cool

nationalize congested resources?

vint cerf has mused - he suggests thinking about
nationalizing or at least thinking about
nationalizing the internet - wahay!!

I am a fan - i think we (the british) should nationalize the whole internet - we could definitely run it better than the americans. actually, more seriously treating the transmission infrastructure as a common good, like spectrum, and allowing licensees to operate it might not be a bad model at all, but the main problem is what I saracstically refer to above - that of under whose jurisprudence/diction ???

meanwhile, heathrow airport has never let me down - that is to say it has never allowed my flight to land on time - the claim it is congested seems to be the standard excuse - how can a circuit switched, hard deadline scheduled resource be congested? come on - get real guys - BAA over sold the resource - this is basically a criminal offence as I understand it. we have mathematical proofs that this must be what they are doing. time to shut them down and let someone more competent (the NHS, the british navy, the european commission - hey no-one could be worse) run it.

piracy hysteria in the EU

today the eu meps vote on the Telecom Packet bill thing - this is a barking mad set of measures to increase regulatory controls over what can and cannot be done on the Internet. Aside from the usual waste of time and money this involves, it is symptomatic of the government agencies wishes to be "seen to be doing something" rather than "actually being effective" about things. As has been commented elsewhere,
if there was any evidence that a musician had actually gone broke because of online music distribution, one might have more sympathy, but when one is bombarded with unskippable advert for unscrupulous agencies that support profiteering music and film companies, every time one lawfully buys a cd, dvd, or goes to the cinema, one is hardly likely to be sympathetic to these scum.

breach of copyright is not theft. repeat after me. Unless you can prove a loss (either of an item you had before, and don't have now, or of possible revenue) then copying
may constitute a crime, but it is not theft in the sense of the English language common understanding of the word. P2P is not piracy. P2P users might be software engineers using bit-torrent to send out new versions of Linux or other commercially viable products (even Cisco IOS:) or they might be ~attoo or iPlayer or other legitimate users of P2P for media distribution.

use of anonymization and encryption are not terrorism. I might just want privacy. just like I do when i want to do banking on line. or whistle-blowing.

It is not up to a government agency to decide when an activity constitutes illegality by looking at my content to do so. but that is not the main issue - the problem here is that the governments here want to legitimize the routine spying on my activities by commercial agencies to protect them against possible (rare) commercial losses.

pretty soon now I will have to disguise all of my network activities as tax returns (and MPs expense claims) so that there is enough cover traffic from accidental government data privacy breaches to cover my legitimate private communication:)

write only: BBC Have Your Say Glastonbury bias!

I just got back from Glastonbury and look at the BBC's "Have your say" audience participation web feedback site - it is astounding - it is massively dominated by people who clearly hadn't actually gone to Glastonbury - for example, t he discussion (if one can glorify a bunch of rants about Amy and Jay-Z as such)) is almost 100% dominated by an agenda set by the press before the event - let me list stuff that I talked about afterwartds with friends who went

1. free unicycling lessons for kids

2. pedal powered phone recharging

3. Pint of Wherry for 3.20 (40p cheaper than London or Cambridge pubs)

4. Fine (cheap) local Cider, and pasties. And Thai, and French and Mexican food (typical lunch for 4 pounds). All in English breakfast (Sub-Aqua club) for 4 quid.

5. Hilariously bad (not Amy who was ok) - Brians Jonestown Massacre - several songs had to leave out band members as they obviously hadn't heard them before - violin player and welsh wife were bemused to say the least.

6. stuff that was just neither here nor there - e.g. Amy, Jay-Z, Neil Diamond (actualy, I'm a Believer was a really nice suprise - forgot he wrote that too!) - just not arguable

7 completely brilliant stuff people didn't mention on the bbc site: The National, Manu Chau, Suzanne Vega, Eric Bibb, Joan Armatrading, the Subways, the Raconteurs, Groove Armada, Vampire Weekend (actually I dont like the last two, but I have to admit they were good) + stuff about 2 people mentioned that was stellar: Leonard Cohen's entrance reciting the opening lines of Dance me to the End of Time, Mark Ronson, Massive Attack (lite show, and both with some good guest vocals) and the zutons - also pretty repsectable performances from the Kings of Leon (even if I dont like them) and Goldfrapp....and the Verve and ....oh i dunno it just beggars belief people stood at a stage and watched stuff they didn't like when there were more than 10 other things to do elsewhere in less than 5 mins from the same place -not even including the dancing til 5am, oh and crowded house getting the whole of the audience to do a wave to knock down the band from back of pyramid amphi to the front....oh, and buddy guy, oh, and....and...and ...

8. Shangri La rock n roll revival bar in wrecked aeroplane, Trash City art

9. Avalon Cafe all day fine pizza and other homemade and folk music and jazz

10. the weather.

and a lot of other good stuff (amusing side shows almost everywhere all day

for 155 quid - this is awesome - people whingeing about 2 bands they didn't like or see had 9 other stages to go to and no mud to stop them. what idiots. or liars (e..g if they weren't there).

freedom of information and CCTV and mobile phone location

more on location services:

couldn't we use CCTV footage in the UK?

all we need to do is to have people blog where they are roughly(as per cell info, as in the Barabasi et al Nature paper of infamous repute), and then demand CCTV footage under the freedom-of-information act
this would do 2 things.

1. really annoy the CCTV owners2
2. allow people to video blog their lives for free

wouldn't that be cool?

network convergence - less is more

so i have put in a wifi router and I have cordless phones and now instead of having 1 wire to get a phone line throughout the house for voice calls and internet dial up, i have
no wires for data or voice, but every dect phone and every laptop has to have a power supply

not only are all the power supplies on all day unless I go around turning things off, but the
system wont work if there's a power failure. ALso the wires are a LOT thicker than old twisted pair telephone cables.

what a stupid world

The IT crowd's main failing is...

...too much customer facing hair...

one of these days, though, they might get lucky on mice pace.

XevEN Deadly Xins

Xust (Latin, luxuria) so many cores, so little xpu time
xluttony (Latin, gula) all the operating systems you can run before breakfast
Xreed (Latin, avaritia) all the data centers in the world are not enough
Xloth (Latin, acedia) the xidle loop?
Xath (Latin, ira) - guest OS overstayed its welcome?
Xenvy (Latin, invidia) - not being vmware?
Xide (Latin, superbia) - so much better than VM 360?

latin & greek, literacy and numeracy, and the rest

so i suppose that geo. Bush is unaware
that when he counts
(e.g. votes, or American soldiers dead in Iraq)
he is using arabic numerals

just a bit ironic, in the style of the amusing San Quayle mis-speak
when touring central and south America, and apologizing that he
did'nt speak their language as he'd never studied Latin...

such is the stuff that Empires fall by

oh, gimme a break - back to xkcd

"but what has this got to do with the Internet?", I hear you cry.

Well once upon a time (true story) they we renumbering the telephone numbers
for london (once again, around the same time that they were
re-opening the shipyards, once again)
and a women wrote to the times and pointed out
that if only they'd kept the old dial phones
with letters and numbers on,
then 7 digits would have able to address
36^7, rather than just 10^7 phones

So if only we'd kept using those old IBM denary computers,
then the 32 digits in an IPv4 address
would let us reach 10^32 hosts. Easy as ABC :-) :-) :)

Of course, with our new
Sourceless Network Architecture, we will save the world. Well, ok, the Internet.
Well, ok, the NATted bits of the Internet. Well, ok, only if we can persuade several thousand geeks in the IETF to care. Well, ok, only if Microsoft and Cisco do it.

Oh, ok....what was that, I hear you cry?

What if Cisco did Hosts and Microsoft did routers?

what would the world look like
if Cisco had done DoS then Windows
and Microsoft had done IoS then MPLS?

probably exactly the same!

your answer on a postcard ...

e-books seem to be getting there!

someone here in madrid just showed me their cy-book - this is around 300 euros, and stores a whole bunch of opensource standard books, and uses e-ink and has a very nuice screen/formfactor - and is amazingly light AND lasts (literally) months on a battery charge - being eink, the screen works as well as paper in bright sunlight

awesome

I will be getting one of these as soon as the price hits around 100 bucks (or pounds or euros, whichever is best)

[oh, and he had a copy of accelerando on it!:)

capacity of multihop networks...

We are interested in this as multihop networks may be built in an ad hoc way by consumers (same as P2P networks) and so the question is how much cpacity per user do you get as you scale up the number of users in a given area (or volume).

most useable radio frequencies mean we are not in near field (where there are really cool scaling results due to very fast fading) so as soon as you forward a signal more than one hop, you are causing interference with other nodes, and the question is
partly just geometric - increasing the number of nodes in a volume, with (say) a uniform random set of traffic between sources and destinations, the path length increases, so the number of hops that receive your signal (and therefore cannot receive someone else's signal) increases. However, the power needed to get the signal to a neighbour decreses (or the capacity increases at that shorter distance for the same power) - so there's a race between increasing capacity at each hop, and decreasign capacity because of the number of hops - the simplest answer is that the capacity of the system grows slower with N than the number of senders, so you get
a net that eventually has no capacity.

so there's a growing body of work on this topic - stemming, I guess, from the original work by Gupta/Kumar (1/srt(n ln (n)), then moving through the various modifications that allow for mobility (Grossglauser/Tse) (2 hop relaying has overall increasing capacity at expense of eventual diverging delay!), fading (various models, but typically still decreasing capacity with N), fading and mobility (has a worse lower bound than just mobility but better overall capacity in the system so growing with N), variable traffic demand (non uniform random traffic matrix, or multicast traffic).

All these are under the assumption of transmission on a "hop" being to one receiver, and all other senders to that receiver contributing noise, and all other receptions of that transmission being interference at other receivers. Of course, then one can add diversity (i.e. receive the signal from multiple diverse transmissions, and forward similarly) and there's constructive schemes for cooperative diversity (again due to Tse and others), which show you can increase the capacity again, including systems that have effectively fixed capacity per user no matter how many users, but require very good clock synch (well, perhaps similar to WCDMA).

so diversity is one trick - but I was wondering about _deliberate_ fading

can we take a simple 1D scheme with a set of nodes on a line at uniform (or random) distances from each other, and construct a transmission schedule where nodes relay in one direction in phase and nodes further "back" away from the forwarding path, re-relay out of phase. This is not quite the same as diversity - what we are trying to do is to build a "noise cancellor" from the previous hop to the current node. I have no idea if this is practical - but pretend the previous hop acts like a perfect radio mirror. we measure the distance between us and next hop, and previous hop and our next hop and any intermediate hops and we setup a reflection that is perfect multipath interference at the hops we dont want to receive our signal

Now re-do this in 2D (tricky) or 3D (trickier!)

problem (very bad) is that unlike diversity, this creates a massive growth in thermal (i.e. pure random) background...which will eventually swamp everything (except that it is also subject to some types of fading and path loss)...

E-mail Decrepitude: "You'll have to speak up, I'm getting old and a bit deaf"

I've noticed more and more that people are responding to e-mails without having read them properly - either this is the ever advancing attention span deficit disorder, or else people are so overwhealmed with the sheer quantity of e-mail (that is, people that still use this obsolete technology) that they don't have time to absorb what was originally written. This response is, of course, counter productive as it generates more email for the sender, and then for them.

I propose a simple rate limit per to: field implemented in all MTAs. In fact, there should probably be two.

Rate limit 1 is an overall limit to the rate one can generate messages from a given
O/R name (sorry, posh, X.400 old fashioned terminology for originator or from:).

Rate limit 2 is a mean+peak (i.e. leaky bucket) rate applied to To: fields from a given from: one can trade between rates so that the sum of means is no more than rate limit 1, but by going slower to some people, can go faster to others for "chatty" conversations. Perhaps a check on the length of the email could be based on typical reading/writing speeds to make sure that the "new text" in each message is a plausible product of the interval since the last message...

This is not intended as an anti-spam technology per se, just a help....

of course it could be implemented by recipients to some extent but only if they collude

Reference: Deaf Sentence (novel) by David Lodge (2008).
See also a recent article in the
Intl Herald Tribune of all places, which seems to make some sense

RF propagation and cray's law- useful children's metaphors

so my kids helped me paint the kitchen and various other things around the house that were not entirely intended for a clean slate - the distribution of paint reminded me of the black magic that is radio propagation - it so often goes where you dont want it, and not all where you do.

in the procedss of having a nice clean redecorated kitchen, i was reminded of Cray's statement (or is it amdahl's) about optimisation - now we have a clean kitche, the bathroom (that looked ok before) looks decidedly shabby...

oh well....optimisation is the name of the game (or is it
always look on the bright side of the pipeline?)

Euroclue meter

traveling a bit in europe as I have been,
i have visited hi tech labs in many countries
and what is remarkable, is not that there is much
variation in smartness of researchers, or
even in facilities, but in how
aware of what is going on in the rest of the world
a given lab is.

There seems to be a very strong variation in clue - not just a perctange difference - literally orders of magnitude -
a few examples

thomson labs in paris, MPI SWS in Sarbrucken, Ericsson research in Kista in Sweden, all showed increibly up to date knowledge of who (whether in japan, australia, US or within europe) was doing what that was cool - to the extent that (for example) I gave a tak in one lab and mentioned a talk I had seen the day before in Microsoft research 1500km away, and they commented on it as one of them had got slides and worked on related stuff....oh, add to this TID (Telefonica research lab in Barcelona) - really amazing set of people given how short a time it has been up and running!

on the other hand, there are people that write papers that don't appear to be aware of work done 2-3 years before...

it does seem to co-rrelate somewhat with the organisation of (national, not EU) funding and whether there is good evaluation of how national work compares with internatonal work....as well as (and this is just the histrical luck of the draw) whwther the local language is spoken in other parts of the world where one can recruit lots of cool PHD students ....

I don't want to list the negative experiences as I dont think that helps anyone:(

robot vacuum cleaners - dalek free zone?

so its bad enough people want to sell us (homeopathic-like) devices to clean vacuums, but to enslave perfectly good robots and have them spend their whole lives cleaning a perfectly good spanking-clean vacuum seems adding virtual insult to virtual injury

mow that lawn, clean that window,
dust that broom, tote that shopping,
now, about greening the planet... ... ...

Percentage of humas that write books

lets say that there are about 20M books (18M in the British Library)
and about 10B people
if the population doubles every generation, then, since you Adam and Eve it,
there's 20B people

if eachauthor only ever writes 1 book, ten that is 1 in 1000 people that are auhors

if an author tends to write (say) 10 books, then it is one in 10,000 (sounds plausible)

how many books do you read (I have about 10,000 books I guess)...???

I am thinking of writing a new book about Kinky Dictators
called
Mao's Strap

would you give me an Advance?

nobody ever dies on facebook

There are allegedly 70M people on facebook

How many of the facebook pages belong to dead people?

Do the math.

I see dead social networks, everywhere.

Will Self would love this - the cyberdead are here. Talk about zombies (half dead unix processes) and orphans (memory that is not referenced from anywhere). Hollywood has come to deadwood.

What we now need is a mortuary for the socially deceased. Perhaps (like in Evelyn Waugh's awful Loved One) they live on, ever accreting more friends - but are their friends all dead, or just mostly dead?

Given the political times in which we live (in), perhaps the Dalai Lama could go home and with the Chinese, set up a profitable startup running the
Tibetan Facebook of the Dead.

CSI Web, to appear on a flatscreen near you real soon. Slow motion action replays on youtube of how the site owner met their sticky end...(and remember, there is no resurrection this side of Cyber Heaven).

city route finding sites

in the last 7 months I've had the opportunity (nay, reader, necessity) to use route planning systems in 3 big cities: London, Paris and Madrid.
Google maps- forget it:)

in London, Transport for London run a pretty good site that covers all modes of transport including cycling (with fairly useful advice on routes for that most difficult mode)
http://journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk/user/XSLT_TRIP_REQUEST2?language=en

weirdly, though, if i ask how to get from (say) King's Cross (St Pancras Innterational) to Heathrow Aiport, it offers tube+Heathrow express, when in fact the Picadilly line (if you limit it to tube only) involves no changes and is actually the same journey time and 26 pounds less return:)

So in paris, I recommend the Via Michelin site
http://www.viamichelin.com/viamichelin/gbr/direct/map/Paris-map
which is excellent, and includes cycling as an option (as above) with accurate info.
only downside was airport advice which was a bit odd (in terms of RER to gare du nord being fine but thence, connection advice was a little lumpy:)

Finally, Madrid has a very good web site for visitors using public transport (which is possibly even better than Paris!) - see
http://www.ctm-madrid.es/
but again the advice on getting to the airport from (say) Leganes (where I am on sabbatical at UC3M/IMDEA Networks). They said take the metro the whole way as it is only 2 euro (awesome) and 1.30mins, but the train from Leganes to Atocha, then train to Nuevos Minesterios, then metro line 8 is in the working day, way faster - it could just be they compute some average (out of working day, train waiting time could make it same journey!)....I will test this later in the week!

Anyhow, traveling across all 3 cities is really quite amazing (actually, was in Tokyo and Kyoto last summer and I should do a comparison with them, as they were cool too, although cycling in tokyo might be mad, it looked fine in Kyoto).

becoming less human through GPS

so in a taxi in madrid yesterday, i felt concerned that the satnav
system the driver used took all the skill (the "knowledge, as
london Hackney CarriageCab Drivers will tell you) out of the job
thru dumbing down.

then I thought "ah, but at least the driver cannot cheat me, as I can tell
that he's asked the satnav box for the right destination"

then I thought " ah, but if he's really smart, then he could hack the map
or algorithm to lie to me..."

then i thought "nah, if he was that smart, he'd either not have a satnav,
or he'd work for Nasa or Galileo or Garmin"...

either way, its demeaning...

uploading humans 1.0

consciousness! interesting stuff...not, as some think, the stuff of magic, but really a feature of reflection (CS idea) applied to indirection (CS idea) and abstraction (CS idea) - basically, humans have evolved the ability to consider multiple levels of intentionality - but even only 2 layers ("I think the he believes that she does X because") is sufficent if applied to oneself ...

ok, with that little hurdle out the way, then, one has a thread observing the other threads. Pause all the threads, save the state, and upload (think Xen Migration).

SO now you restart on different bare metal (metal! wow - post human!). Now, you have continuity (so ok, there's a pause, but it could be pretty quick so you might not notice more than a few missing interrupts). But....why is the old you not there anymore? surely (stop calling me shirley) just as with teleporting real stuff, tele-loading self() is copying - the old you has to be terminated (kill -9 old me - no, wait, the new me didnt copy right and the checksum() integrity check reported a missing memory:)

so this is interesting philosphically anyhow - so the locus of consciousness moves around a bit (a little bit of thinking in the past, some experience of NOW[], and a little prediciton about future. So halting self(), is a temporary death. restarting self) on new hardware , is that resusciutation or rebirth? memories of the way we were on the old hardware, they aren't actuall memories - they are restored backups of memories....

what ae the legal implications? coptyiright? right to die of corrupt self->old()?
patent on error correcting migrate(self())? etc etc

succesful protocols are useful with only 1 end

just reading the iab's
What Makes For a Successful Protocol?
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-iab-protocol-success-03.txt
example 1: the first mobile phone was sold because you knew you could call any one of
600 million fixed fonrs from it (to think that last year in 12 months alone, more than
1 Billion cell phones were sold:)

example 2: www browsers could do ftp, gopher/ wais so you could get content immediately

example 3 skype - had voip but had PSTN call out capability from day 1, so you didnt
need another skype user to call

example 4: social nets - integrate web pages and youtube and mp3 sharing...

examples of doing it wrong -
noone used IPv6 coz the first code didnt do IPv4 intereworking from day 1.
noone uses sip as telephone people jumped on the sip bandwagon but didnt want to lose
business so noone did a sip client/proxy with skype style cal out

so all these things are complex....and call LOTS of stuff even when only 1 person deploys them

they all also breka postel's principle (badly) it seems to me...

Learning to Lose L in ItaLian...but why...

can anyone say when the Italians lost the L in Florence (and Flora - e.g.
firenze and fiori) - it was sure there in Latin, and is still there for most latin
rooted languages...

lost letters are fun (look for cedillas in french- they indicate missing s...from old
french or even langue d'oc i believe) - of course, I might just be being naive
missing umlaut) - perhaps these letters were stolen by alients who had an increibly
advanced culter but no alphabet, and needed to make one up, but didnt have the
creativity to invent their own... or else perhaps the dolphins took them to put in a
museum to remember the best bits of earth...

ah, now what do the missing letters from all those languages spell?

oh, wat, i have it...they spell
"the secret to eternal life and happiness is.....arrghhhhhhhh!!!!"

you know, patently speaking, if you started now, the Internet would never happen

so fighting patents (defending and attacking) is very like fighting a PhD (examining or
defending:)

There's a bunch of novelty required, and someone else has to be able to reproduce the results from the document (dissertation), and some of the intellectual tricks of the debate are similar - indeed, for people familiar with UK vivas (an almost uniquely sadistic approach to the game), one even sees people with documents full of yellow postits - the whole gladatorial style of experts in the dock being deposed (US terminology) or CXed (in UK) is also a bit like the Scandinavian defense where other peple than the actual examiner and candidate fight it out.

the process is simliar too, to an academic conference programme committee meeting - various people have reviwed a paper - not all are in the room - there are advocates of the paper and there are opponents = proponents (provendus in ductch PhD defenses) might argue novelty then an opponent will counter with insufficiency, or a proponent might argue sufficiency, and another oppoenent might argue prior art (unoriginal).

Here's an idea - why not HIRE programe committees to judge patents (see another posting on another blog on peer to patent) ? they have the skills and they have the time. and academics are so much cheaper than lawyers coz they love talking for free (my better half tells me som as do my kids).

Meanwhile, I quite like wikileak thing, but even more relevant is
http://trolltracker.blogspot.com/

Why? well people submit pointless papers to conferences (papers they know will be rejected) just to get feedback - for thoughts on this and related problems of checks and balances (and cheques and bank balances) see a forthcoming paper Keshav, I and Nick McKeown have been cooking up on aligning incentives in academic conferences - a lot of simular work is going on in trying to revise and reform patent law.

I can see a new conference (indeed I might apply for a patent on it)... ... ...

Gender difference in strategies for getting un-lost

so there's this old cliche about what men and women do differently when they get lost while driving in unfamiliar territory. Stereo-typically, women stop and ask someone, and men don't.

Here's a possible explanation based on a talk I saw at Ecole Polytechnique last week in Paris.

Hunters use a search strategy for finding prey (I suppose hunter gatherers do too for finding nts and berries and stuff), which entails alternating between local accurate surveillance of a small area, with a levy walk (random walk with path length eponentially distributed, not uniform). So in evolutionary terms, you might expect male humans to have such a strategy, whereas female humans might be in the village looking after kids (look, this isn't a proposal, so don't assume I believe in biological determinism as a prescription for social organisation:)

Anyhow, so assume a male car driver is running such a strategy. Stopping and asking the way would mess up where he had got to in the algorithm, and I can imagine there is a cognitive burden to searching like this, which would map into annoyance if interrupted.

If the population density had been higher when there was survival value in finding onesway, hen presumably the strategy of stopping and asking the way would perhaps have dominated both genders, but once people got to be "post-darwinian"
(i.e. where most people survive to breed irrespecive of "fitness"), then such selection doesn't happen, and we need to acquire better strategies through nurture...

An interesting question: Is there a sweet spot in population size where communities are more likely to be helpful to strangers finding their way, and larger, where alienation kicks in and people don't help? anecdotally, this seems reasonable to me...when lost in africa, I've had lots of help. when lost in NY, Paris, Munich, TOkyo, Sao Paulo, not a lot:)

9 plots and Dunbar's number - computer science, anthropology and literature

It has been said that there are only nine different plots (lots of people claim seven, but I think this is just for mystical reasons), and after hearing and Robin Dunbar talk about the social structure of human societies, I think I can explain this.

Social groups organise in a hierarchy of trust of degree (3+epsilon), so you get a social group of size (3+e)^n (1, 3, 9, 27, 81, 243) roughly - the epsilon varies with smartness and species. Dunbar also observes that the neocortex size of primates directly correlates with effective maximum group size (chimps 40, humans 150), and that this shows up in human societies in may many organisations (villages, armies, companies that are succesful). The explanation is that this is the maximum size that a group can maintain complete cohesion over, since everyone in the group has a model of everyone else - this reflects a species ability to infer intentionality (humans can do 5 levels reasonably well) and therefore trust relationships. One aspect of this is that humans have spoken language which abstracts, and therefore accelerate (expand, in graph terms) the range of grooming (essentially, by being able to gossip) rather than relying on physical grooming as a mechanism to achieve pairwise (or indeed, (3+e)-wise) cohesion.

OK - so now consider how we encode (neurologically speaking?) a simple description of another person's behaviour? We can use the distributed systems folks' model- BAR (Byzantine, Altruistic, Rational) - this has a game theoretic interpretation - but is also (I think) respectable in anthropology terms -

- Rational is basically selfish (think, selfish gene) and is just what Nash said. selfish is not bad since it is predictable, but it isn't "nice" in the normal selnse - it is also how naive economists describe the "market" and claim it is good - bah humbug

- Altruism is what happens (often, not always) when an individual behaves for the "greater good" at a disproportionally negative cost to themselves.

- Byzantive is mad/bad/sad - bonkers, people that do random harm - in network terms, hackers, script kiddies, whatever, that don't do it simply for personal gain.

Interestingly enough, one can reasonable assume that anyone can choose any of these behaviours, but that various incentives keep one in a particular state (kinship keep you mostly rational, occasionally atruistic), and social pressure will keep most people rational, but, and here's an observation about cities and the internet and the p2p systems and online games and facebook, once a group size is too big, there are enough places for people to go to other social groups, that there are ways one can be a serial byzantine bad person, and still survive - alienation, disaffection, etc, we all know about this - at a certan scale, if the rate of such behaviour is high enough, one sees social collapse...

ok - so in literature, (plays books films) many stories have 3 main characters. A plot consists of social dynamics. Lets think "eternal triangle", or "three princes" or any other archetype (or if you like, shakespeare tragedy, or wuthering heights or lord of the rings).

So 3 characters, 3 states- change 1 state
(gollum helps or hinders, heathcliff loves or hates, othello trusts or doesn't trust)
gives 9 plots.

QED

indeed, classes of literature (jacobean tragedy - everyone starts luvvy, everyone dies) can be captured in this simple, elegant and ultimately futile and reductionist model:)

digital signatures and bots...

here is another really really bad idea that I really should patent, not.

I am forever being faxed documents which I then sign and fax back, thus wasting 2 copies (the blank input at the originator end and the signed input at my end)

what we need is a robot arm driven by a robot glove, and a fax protocol between the glove end and the robot end - then the document originator puts said document into the
faxsignator (TM), and I get a "ding" at my end, put my hand in glove, take up a pen, and "sign in the air", driving the bot at the originator end to reproduce my signature accurately on the original piece of paper.

Green and legal...surely?

gerrymandering the news...

I just finished the Nick Davies work Flat Earth News - see also
http://www.flatearthnews.net/

quite a few of the arguments about PR are actually
previously extremely well analyzed in the book by
Jerry Mander (real name!) on TV
viz:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimination_of_Television

I was surprised this wasn't cited as it was written by an insider and
is very incisive...and around some time ago!

I thought the best material was the analysis of the construction of a
misinformed public awareness in US and UK on the buildup to war with iraq -
having just finished Alastair Campbell's fairly obviously carefully edited
diaries, one has to wonder at the brazenness of it all!

For me, what a lot of people working on traditional channels of information
vastly underrate is the accuracy, timeliness, and evidence of provenance
available on wikis and blogs and related content - for info, I recently put in a
proposal to the research councils in the UK to get funding to be a "media fellow"
(to improve public understanding of computer science) and proposed using
myspace/facebook + wiki/podcast- the reviewers all said "oh this is fun but i
should get a production company and do it on radio and TV 'properly'"!!
I was amazed - gven I was proposing something to reach "yoof" who watch/listen
to virtually no documentary programs on the legacy media, I thought my model was
relevant and plausible.

I guess the traditional media's continual assertion (without decent evidence) of the inaccuracy of information on the Net (as opposed to on TV, Radio, Newspaper) is because of their fear that with the right search tools and a little discernment, the average punter can find out a whole lot more about what is Really Going on via Cyber space, than via any of the PR, Security Agency and Corporate mindspeak that dominate the legacy media....

Alas...

Mr Davies writes quite readably, albeit a tad repetitive (I guess quite a lt of the material was edited from other sources - I'd ask for minor corrections if it was a PhD dissertation:)

primeval knowledge - when anomalies are commonplace...

so when you get an anomaly every day, surely it isn't anomalous anymore? eh, eh?

so what is with primeval anyhow? it looks more and more like a battle of boy and girl bands.

the "=" symbol should be read as "is easily confused with"
is a nice quote in John Day's new book on Communicatiosn Architectures (patterns thereof)

founders at work - possibly re-imagining transformational government?

Founders at Work is a fantastic book with a huge array of internet talent on display, discussing the way their startups worked (and in some cases crashed and burned) in fascinating technical, social and economic detail. This is essential reading for anyone in the area - a few (amazon) reviewers commented that the book lacks analysis - it is true there's no pontification, but all the interviews are structured similarly, so that the analysis is emergent by seeing different gurus give their respective answers to similar questions.

For me, one crucial area is how these folks often didn't have insight into their own success (reasons for) until afterwards! e.g.

how many of the cool companies built 3 (or more) things before they
actually found the thing that made it big? often they didn't even
realize or understand what it was they had that made the thing succeed!

examples:
paypal's fraud detection, (not the e-cash)

hotmail's bottom of email banner viral advert/market, not the firewall busting

gmail too: auto-completion, not the search (wasn't even new - i was using
glimpse to search my mail and desktop/file systems for years before)

yeah, even google's click-thru advertising (not page-rank, which was only
marginally better than altavista at stoping people artificially boosting their site)

and, landsakes, RIM started by building realtime LANs before realising Mobile Email might be quite big:)

awesome:)

crossoverlay optimisation

new idea - combine cross layer optimisation and overlays - whaddya get -
crossoverleyisoptimality

a true history of wayback web browsing

so i live and work in about 6 places right now (2 labs in Paris, plus apartment, 1 London, 2 Cambridge) and typically am not in any one for more than a few days at a time. Flipside is that it is sometimes a few days between visits to any given place - so I tend to leave myself logged in (perhaps lock screen) on a Mac at each place - and so when I next show up, I have a bunch of tabs or windows open on activities that are a few days stale - e.g. news.bbc.co.uk, my facebook account my gmail account, a hotmail spaces and myspace - so on each of these, i see a snapshot as of 3,4,5 days ago - fascinating stuff - espeiclaly to se lcalization (sites dont show same thing - depends on your locale yur client ip address reverse looksup to...)

sexual rejection and journalism....and life

so andrew marr, in his fine book about the trade of journalism, says that being fired in a journalism job is like sexual rejection - it occurred to me to ask (since he said journalists are frequently fired) how often he had been rejected sexually. Then it occurred to me that this is actually quite an interesting question to ask anyone (especially any male one:) - how often do people "get it wrong" and chat up someone, only to be told no? I imagine some people are really accurate at picking people for whom attraction is mutual, and some might be really bad....and are men and women different in the average accuracy of their guesses.

while reading this book, the chap next to me on eurostar was reading a manuscript for a solo violin piece, and reading a book about it too - very distracting - it occurred to me that reading music is very like dancing about architecture, or watching star trek movies on french TV with Klingon translated into french - furthermore, someone was talking to someone on their cell phone in french, and i swear the conversation was one of those "so I says to him, i says, ...then he says to me, then she said, oh you never, you aint never gonna believe this..." blindiingly awful...

luckily, i was able to finish my book, read my email and get some fine beer

fashion diffusion

the web is to diverse and decentralised to really see much in the way of diffusion - in fact, the thing that makes the web (2.0, and all, facebook, myspace etc) is the opportunity it gives to the bottom dwellers on the long tail

but eurostar between London St Pancras and Gare Du Nord, Paris, is certainly causing rapid diffusion of culture - last nite i bumped into some folks I know in London getting on to the 7pm to paris - I didn't recognize them, there were so chic and cool and frenchified

on arriving at 10.20 pm in paris and getting on to a train on the RER B, I was dismayed by the grottiness - just like 1960s suburban railways in England, I thought

You win some, you lose some...

more on flocking helicopters

i just bought some picoo helicopters - really cool things for about 15 bucks a piece - fly like an arrow ....very nice. but here's the thing - for the price of a US airforce UAV, I could buy about 1Million of these things - now, imagine they can flock, and have a decent payload - could we organise some sort of mesh of them with a web/weave suspended above them (e.g. have a fixed spoke through ythe spindle to the rotors, and rest something on there -??

with enough of them, we could construct a dynamic carpet, possibly with enough lift (even with person standing above blocking some of the air in from above (could we arrange some to come in from the side?) so that we would have a flying carpet...

can you imagine how cool this woould be - ? how much cooler, say, than a flying saucer?

you could dress up as aladin, and fly over persia (if you were some megalomanic UK or US general).....or just have a LOT of fun in parties:)

The Pong of Pingsta

i just got 13 (yes 13) new year invitations to join pingsta this morning. This is a record - its a record with a scratch. what a pain - social networks are anathema to a sane existence. The Snark is a Boojum

faecbook=usenet+graphical sugar coating

so i've been social networking - i admit it - i've got acounts on half a dozen ,and have tried lots of the fancy applications (e..g compare the length of your )

about 10 years ago (or more) I tried a different experiment - i tried to read the last ten posts on all of the usenet newsgroups (a.k.a. bulletin boards_ that were live at UCL at the time - and then respond meaningfully to at least 1 message per board, in a 24 hour period. I got a lot of flames. Nevertheless, the experiment worked, and I have never read or contributed to a bboard knowingly since (oh, sure some email lists are also mirrored on newsgroups - that doesnt count)

Not only is the signal to noise on news (and facebook) very very bad - the interrupt rate just for meta-data is completely insane - noone could seriously have a RL and take part in more than a modicum of things in these spaces. Basically, though, the main conclusion I Have is that facebook (and all the others) add very little to Usenet beyond a fancy Graphical User Interface (a bit like
the web didn't add a whole lot to the Internet except nice brosers, at least until the advent of search engines)

For budding entrepreneurs out there then, what is the "search engine" killer app for social networking sites??? it aint obvious. of course we already have nearly unbrearable amounts of advertising:)

the true age of the internet?

so lots of people have varying views on the age of the internet - people date it from the victorean steam telegram, or from the first IMP-IMP message, or the Queen sending the first email to the pope (oops, no, it was the US president) - and then they have X anniversary celebrations (latest one is the 25th anniversay of the DNS...).

But Internet time is not driven by the earth's orbital period around the sun, and the internet is not the same as it was - it goes through phases of life more like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly (replacing the command line with the browser) or like a snake (replacing the NSFNet with the multi-tiered relationship between ISPs), or like an ecosystem (punctated equilibrium - everyone's doin social networks now - what will the craze be in 2008)


So in my humble opinion, the internet doesn't have an age (and so it shouldn't get a capital letter either)...its a situation, not a thing or a process:)

me and mrs marconi

I'll tell you the story of Marconi, and Crippen...and me

Prepare to be amazed

I helped a recently completed PhD student, Rex Hughes, in Cambridge, who comes from Seattle, with his research and after his graduation ceremony, he gave me (along with some very good champagne) a signed copy of a book entitled Thunderstruck, by an American author who lives in Seattle called Erik Larson who was a friend of my student's mother.

Thunderstruck is essentially a history book about two true stories that strangely intertwined, and, rather oddly (ah, the interconnectedness of all things), both link co-incidentally with me.

Dr Crippen was a famous turn-of-the century murderer who had come to live in England with his wannabe Music Hall actress/singer of a> wife. He fell in love with a north London working girl, and decided that his (apparently rather awful) spouse had to go.

Guglielmo Marconi was a half Italian, half Irish inventor who created the idea of using radios for communication, and demonstrated their use at around the turn of the century, to successfully send messages across the Atlantic (between Cornwall and Newfoundland, initially). Marconi's success was instantly turned into a thriving business, particularly for ship-to-shore, and was immediately seized on almost like the early Internet, by the public who created news papers especially for ships (the various shipping lines had their own reporters and editors). Marconi is a role model for the entrepreneur.

Crippen did away with his wife, and eloped with his girlfriend first to Belgium, and then took a ship to the US to try to vanish in the vast reaches beyond the long arm of the law that was Scotland Yard.

Unluckily for him, a rather fine detective (called Dew) realised what had happened and "put out an APB" - this had never been done before, as the idea of radios had simply not impinged on anyone's consciousness back in 1907.

The captain of the ship noticed that Crippen and his girlfriend were on (his girlfriend was
disguised as a young boy - almost Shakespearean in its weirdness- oh, and she was completely innocent about the wife's dreadful fate), received a notice, and realised that this man and his "son" seemed a bit oddly intimate. He tipped of Dew of the Yard (again by radio) and Dew caught a faster boat across the Atlantic. Of course in those days, boats took 5-10 days to get from
Europe to North America, and every day, the reporters on ships and on all the countries i
the world wired progress reports. The only people who did not know (ah, the delicious
irony of it all) were the people on board the boat that Crippen and his girlfriend were on, because the radio or "Marconi set") operator was told by the captain not to pass on those parts of the news to the ships editors/printers.

On arrival in the US, Crippen was met by Dew and (apparently) Dew said "I would like you to accompany me to answer some questions" and Crippen actually said something like "I will
come quietly"!!!

Why should this have any connection with me?

Well, my Chair in Cambridge was endowed by Marconi's company exactly 100 years after this all happened, when they donated (with Marconi's daughter's approval) 3M pounds to the University of Cambridge. So my job title is "Marconi Professor". But that's not all. Crippen lived with, and killed his wife in 32 Hilldrop Crescent in Kentish Town, about 100 yards from where I was born and now live. And that's not all. Marconi was not only half-Irish, he also married an Irish woman. so am I married to an Irish woman.

The Marconi company, sadly, went broke buying another company in the height of the Internet
dot com madness, called Fore Systems, founded by two people I know. Marconi was then bought by a Swedish Company, Ericsson, after I advised them of future directions. Marconi's daughter, Degna, sadly passed away in 1998, and the Marconi Villas in Bologna and Rome have been turned over to the Italian National Museums. There is a Marconi room at UCL (where I used to work) and it has several instruments that were used in radios in 1907. My grandfather (father's father) used some in his work in building radar kit in the 2nd world war.

Crippen, a homoeopathic doctor, was found guilty of murdering his wife who went by the stage name of Belle Elmore, and hanged in 1910 - his girlfriend was found completely innocent and emigrated, changed her name (sadly, as her name was the rather amazing Ethel Le Neve), and lived for a long time and had a fairly normal life.

And another thing. And this really takes the biscuit for bizarre coincidences. My great great aunt on my mother's side was one Marie Tempest Etherington (actually made a Dame!), and was a light opera singer and comedy actress, who my mother remembers. Well, Dame Marie was a close friend of Belle Elmore, and was one of 3 people who tipped off the police, by talking to inspector Dew about her suspicions of Dr Crippen.

For a lovely picture of Marie, see
Wikipedia entry on Marie

Now how about that as a story? you wouldn't believe it if it was in the newspapers:)

Late breaking news - apparently, DNA testing reveals that
the body wasn't that of Mrs Crippen after all!

The plot thickens

wiiphone for sociophiles - yes, you heard it here first

so y'know how anyone with cool technology (apple ipod, google, ) wants to hack the cellular industry

so here's nintendo's free gifthorse of an idea - the wii-phone - with accelerometers (like the chumby too - why isnt that an ansafone and skype box anyhow), you
call your friends with gestures

to make this _ultra_ sine qua ultra cool, it uses your social net as the space, rather than the classical trimphone 0-9 dial interface - so what you do is
swim to the person you want to call through a visual sea of contacts

if you prefer, you can overlay shelob's web, and fight, sam gamgee like, your way to phone your frodo,

soon all astronauts on mars will want to call home with one over Nasa's interplanetary telephone net....which will, of course, run haggle software:)

ofcom + bt = less bandwidth

why is it that ofcom and bt are so conservative when it comes to bandwidth and business models? this is yet another head-in-the-sand set of statements about the lack of business case for fiber to the home roll out - fact is that if they started now it would only just be in time by the actual time the got any decent fraction of the population covered. why? because lots of people want to do
peer-assisted video and i) symmetric and ii) higher capacity than 25-50Mbps (e.g. HD) and iii) latency and equipment costs at the exchange buildings will all mean that fiber is the only sensible way forward -what annoys me is that the statement from Ofcom is purely based on business too - the UK economy as a whole might benefit even if margins for bit-carriers and music and film publishers are pushed even lower by a fiber roll out, and ofcom is a government regulator, not a spokesbody for industry- it isn't just supposed to profit maximize for the telecom sector . it should include public benefits in its considerations. fiber (and some high bandwidth wireless) should be a UK priority - we have a massive underground industry of media, digital film production, games software and smart phone software companies - we need to connect up the dots...:)

greenflying the internet

so this post recently on greening the internet (a popular topic since I promoted accepting a paper at sigcomm a couple of years back which lots of others didnt seem to want then:)
at
is partly wrong

a couple of problems here
1. optical isn't cheaper powerbudget necessarily - lasers take a lot of power and
dissipate a lot of heat needing a lot of aircon -
2. decentralising resources (e.g. into people's homes) removes need for aircon
which reduces power needs and means a lot of requests can be satisfied locally
reducing load on net, reducing net power budget
3. people dont like putting resources in central sites - attacks,
latency, ownership, censorship and other problems abound
4. the issue isn't the price of power, its the nmber of KWatts -
one obvous thing about putting resources in everyone's home is that everyone needs hot water, so one can
use heath exchange to cool computer to pre-heat water - this sort of thing is very good karma
and cheap technology...

so i disagree with the blog!!! in fact, i take a diametrically opposed viewpoint.

but thanks to bill for posting all the usual useful stuff at
his canadian net news site

we need a Free Hard (Sci) Fi Training Manual

readng lotsa hard sf, particularly stuff about post human societies (e.g. stross, accelerando, but also older stuff by sterling, and really classic stuff like feersum enjin by banksm or blood music, by greg bear) one cant help but feel that there is a standard set of knowledge one needs to acquire before embarking on writing this stuff

obviously cybernetics, compsci #101 (recursion, macros, language processing), and a smattering of lifesciences (ecologies,
dna as code for machine, conway etc)m plus some retro geek joke material based on older knowledge than the author could possibly have personal experience ("Oh, a spaceship run by an IBM 3090 600, how unspeakably quaint"), plus the obligatory smattering of historical and classical references (hieroglyphs as an efficient way to interface people and computers - get real - we don\t use PL/1!!!)

charset drawn from aescylus, plot from norse legend by way of wagner, sets from brecht and weill opera, soundtrack from dowland, and special effects courtesy of jacobean tragedy....whatever next ? you'll accuse me of being a closet Farscape addict (which i am)...

HMRC fiasco and risks

so i've heard two unbelievably ignorant comments by senior politicians in the wake of the fiasco where HMRC accidentally "lost" 2 CDs with 25M people's children names, addresses and parents bank account details

1. biometrics wont have this problem
ok so what if the passport office accidentally released the database with 60M people's biometric data? well, according to experts, it is crypted doing a 1 way function so you can't reverse engineer someone's Iris or fingerprint from the data.
But what if there is 1 single bug in the way they'v done this? just 1. d it can.
everyone's biometric is compromised, once and for all and for ever. game over. doh.

2. encryption would have meant the problem with the 2 CDs wasnt a problem.

ok so how was the NAO (or KPMG) going to read the data? magic? no, they had to have the leys (and password) too. SO how were those sent? securely? do we know they aren't the same key and password as are used for loads of other data bases inside HMG's various termianly ICT challenged departments? no we dont, nor do they.

anyhow, both these are irrelevant - the fact that junior (and therefore large numebrs) of staff have access to the entire database means that it is effectively open to all and sundry (as with polis databases) who can afford to find any bribably or blackmailable or just careless person in a large population of junioer clerks.

"all the eggs in one basket" appears to be a phrase that wasn't part of Darling's education (or browns).

HMRC incompetence beggars belief.

Everyone's aware that the HMRC (british tax and customs government agency) accidentally shipped a plaintext file on disks in the ordinary post with 25M people's national insurance, bank account and other personal information, in response to a request from the Govermnet audit office for some sample data.
Ross Anderson and Ian Brown (and others) appeared on Newsnight last night to very good effect, and it was quite clear that the government spokesperson failed to understand the real nature of the problem which is not the "one off" nature of the error in sending a file unencrypted (this is an operational error of fairly huge proportions) but is the fact that this is symptomatic of a government that allows low level staff the ability to even create a copy of the entire database - this should not be possible, by design. Any decent system of mission critical data will have methods to control the damage that can be done - have they never heard of the idea of "need to know"??? As was pointed out, the fact that they are so ignorant of the simplest principles of data based access control means that they are unfit to propose other systems in this space (ID cards, NHS spine, etc etc) since they will make the same, criminally negligent, mistakes.

I'd like to point out that if I now claim someone has withdrawn money from my ank account, or masqueraded as me using my NI (national insurance == social security ID), they have no course but to believe that it is from this leak. we could run a massive denial of service attack on the bank accounts of many people now by simply observing that ID is virtually worthless.

pathetic, no - more - someone should go to jail.

oh, another note: someone seems to think (brown?) that they've "lost" the records!!!
they havnt - dont they understand that they have still got them - what they have done is PUBLISHED the records, by making a copy widely available. when wil lpeople understand that "sending" a datum is not "sending" - it is making a copy, and transmitting the copy...and if you send to persons unknown, you are publishing.

anti-social networks

great article on how to kill off community networks - should be mandatory reading for comms #101 startup wannabees and software engineers...:) this has a lot of good other points about standards, APIs and how not to make innovative technology succeed.

on the other hand...

now everyone (i.e. cory doctorow) is on the case about the built in contradictions of social nets - apparently, they will evaporate - so this is a bit like a "hawking radiation" model of black holes- unfortunately the likely model is far more like diffusion (social diffusion and memes are well understood at least statistically) where basically people will slow down in atttrachtion towards each social net hub until there's a stable equilibirum established....

on the tip of your tongue....and recall yet takes so long

so you know when you are trying to remember something (name of film, actor in film etc) and you know you know it, and your conscious effort tells you you know it, but not what it is - indeed, sometimes, it seems, the harder you try, the less you are able to recall the item - so how does this work? then you get distracted (perhaps for a long time, but sometimes just for a shortish while) and then suddenly, in an inappropriate moment (sleep awakeinging in extremis) the datum/factoid comes flooding back


so that is weird right? I mean the neuroscience of the brain says its a set of synapses that are slow, but not that slow, organised into some sort of (very high degree) holographic, or swarm storage....so retrieval might be slow - each "hop" in the net needs lots of time by silicon standards, and you need quite a few hops...

I am guessing that the memory is also partitioned, and there's only so much resource between the clusters of memory items and those resources are used to statmux requests for retrieval - if some region is currently isolated because you are
busy using the "links" to it for soemthing else, then is just like "call blocking" in a telephone net - it takes a while...and then, when you have re-organized things due to task switching, the pathways are freed up and a queued request (call) gets thru - this also helps explain the patchy way memory loss works - if you actually lose "pinout" from a region, it might all be still holding info, but you simply can't route to it....without re-training some other component - a lot of this reminds me of large scale P2P systems where request routing is slow and complex and re-org of nodes (known as "churn" in systems like pastry or kademlia) leads to some possible loss of info, and certainly to potential long periods (compared with single node performance) of no access....

curt cobain said something about memories...and I dont have a gun, which wasnt true

so where do metro drivers live? start or end of line

and how does it affect the schedule where they live eh? thats what I want to know

Hands off is also an odd expression when you think about it....as is hands-on (experience) - surely brains connected would be more useful?

copy protection and payment

so hollywood screenwriters are on strike because they don't get extra payments when
productions are released on other media according to the bbc story on WGA . Irony, isn't it that when users copy DVDs and MP3s hollywood runs around getting the RIAA on the case to sue them, but when hollywood copies material written by authors and makes more money, it isn't prepared to share it iwith the original creators. Classic hypocrisy in big business in action. why should we have any sympathy at all? send them all to Iran (no, wait, Friends is the most popular soap in Iran - dont send them there!!!)

animated evidence

there was this incident in london where a brazillian was shot dead (deliberately ) by
armed police shortly after the london suicide bombings....the chattering classes beat
themselves up about it a lot out of guilt, but the police have been largely let off
although recently found guilty collectively under health and safety law (bizarrely)

the bbc has assembled a fairly detailed flash animation of the events - see
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/629/629/7073125.stm

it would be interesting to know if anyone uses tools like this in court cases -
if done right, it could simply jury's work quite a bit

newsbabyreaderavatars - they're here: be afraid!

The bb asked kids to come up with newsworthy gadgets which to receive stories via - my idea is to have a bunch of people re-enact the news via a real=time, generated screen play - the remote news feed will give them the script and stage directions via smart phones (internet audio for the hard of thinking, and pictures and so on for the less smart ) and the group of kids will then interpret the news in their own local physical way - e.g. they will show and tell how the queen greets the king of saudi, and how the suicide bomber in iraq was funded. they can replay with graphic detail the effect of the failed negotiations about sudan, and the treachery of the janjaweed, whilst showing the imact news has on young people that is hidden when we merely let them see it on TV in between Blue Peter and the Simpsons, and in between walking home from school scared of somali gangs in north london, to play Halo 3 on their Xboxes.

Now that would be an interesting device and experience.

file sharing versus piracy

there seems to be some serious confusion in the UK government, and I think the ISPA shoudl http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7059881.stmadvise them better - in a recent quote (and it may be a misquote) on the bbc, a
spokesperson said that they dont want to come down on 14 year olds file sharing ,but they do want to stop people making money out of piracy. So one of the glaring errors in this is that people who are doing a lot of UPLOADING from P2P systems are NOT MAKING money - if they were it would be easy to prosecute them as there would be evidence of this from a payment system (bankaccounts receipts etc) and often they'd probably also not be paying tax (e.g. VAT etc) and could also be done for that - the problem is that frequent uploaders are just downloaders with LOADS of uplink capacity (e.g. students) and often have no money.

If they had a means to do DRM and Payment, then they would also have a means to make LOADS OF MONEY like the record companies, because if someone had a cool way to do online music distribution for profit and not just fun, they'd LICENSE the technology to official record companies to replace the RUBBISH DRM currently around.

Fact is there isnt a decent system, so the ONLY reason for a government to clamp down is to
a) protect unreasonable profits from music business (which is dying)
and
b) delay people working on solving this lack of a decent technology which protects
only Big Record Companies, and not indies or artists, and doesn't actually protect consumers or large numbers of artists or create a platform for innovation.

If the government wants to get in on the loop on piracy, follow the money is sufficient - you don't need special laws. they only serve to delay a better world.

You heard it hear last.

more diamond age wizradry

there's a nice piece in the Diamond Age (neal stephonson) about aerial nanotech defensive systems - one throwaway remark about them is that the attacks they have to withstand are from more nanotech distributed nodes, and so any system cannot operate an "impermeable shield" (shades of star wars) but instead must "hack the mean free path"
and its left as an exercise for the reader to figure out what this means (basically, the defensive net has to be long enough that for a set of random walks (c.f. Einstein: Brownian motion) the probability of any attacking node making it through the defensive nodes (i.e. the number of variances of the path length) is vanishingly small - like
Hiro Protagonists "usual car chase" in Snow Crash, this is a masterpiece of minimalism...

another interesting point is the throwaway remark about forensic geeks carrying cards to help identify which "species" of cookie cutter has been used on a victim, by looking at the arcs of intersection of the shockwave (circular, or part of solid angle intersecting a sphere?) with the skin, leaving a set of curves - given the shockwave does most its damage at a fixed distance from the two "epicenters", this means the radius of curvature of the intersection with skin is fixed, so you can tell the initial velocity (assuming its largely mass independent - I suppose the slowdown is dependent mainly on the size of cookie cutter fragments and viscosity of humans, rather than the interital mass:)

doesn't really bear close examination near breakfast:)

london dungeon is genuinely quite scary!

not that it has much to do with the internet...but I thought it was rather fine - the useof mix of son et lumiere/live actor, and smelly "underneath the arches" locale was very good - the actors were very nice to kids and did the whole mockney/interaction thing very well - i guess the nearest link/seguay would be conspiracy theory - there were a lot of those in the stories they tell, and, of course, we all know that the Internet was only put in place to support consipracy theorists:)

anyhow, the dungeon is a fine place, and almst all politicians should be sent there.

riaa outrage...hm - so why do music biz behave the way they do?

It is often said that one should be quicker to suspect human stupidity for certain classes of corporate and government behaviour, than conspiracy - so right now, lotsa people expressed amazement at the fine levied a poor file sharer in the USA, but then the backlash starts - then there's the backlash, then there's the not quite so simple meta-para-backlash...

Andrew Orlowski writes that instead of whinging, we should get behind proposals (of which he mentions quite a few very plausible looking ones) to change the face of the music business = the claim is that, if only they could see, they would make more money "our way" (cue Frank Sinatra singing that music).

Well, while the proposals sound good, I'd assert that if they did work out right, several people would have just done it (oops, did i just infringe some footwear sweatshop's trademark?:=)

So given the power of shareholders, not A&R men, is what determines the behaviour of big business mostly, one has to ask "why havnt they done it yet?".

I don't have an answer (and I've spent a large part of the last 5 years looking at disruptive technologies and how they alter business, so I am qualified, but stumped!

I guess just maybe, just maybe this once (cue Liza Milleni Cabaret toon)
it is a conspiracy after all!!!

So here's another thought - I think this is a classic tipping-point type situation - shareholders have their eye on the bottom ine each year, but only have a horizon of 1 year - disruptive technologies (think IP breaking PSTN, or VOIP on WiFi breaking cellular) like mp3 on the net instead of CDs in the shops, grow from small beginnings - the growth is mirrowed by a fall in sales of CDs but until the scale of the business falls below a certain point, it is worth the incumbent industry (legacy technology)_ spending more and more on defending itself against the newcomer - at some point, the cost of defense exceed the revenue, and Madonna resigns and Radiohead say they will only charge people what they want to pay, and people start to ship albums for free on myspace etc etc

so the point when this happens can be in less than 1 year, and the only outcome can be bancruptxcty for the traditional business - repalcement (e.g. subscription or
listen for free but you have to see these **** adverts*** o nthe web page when you download (e.g. facebook and google's revenue models) work fine - but only when the old guys DIE is this gonna stop being fought tooth and nail. but they will die very sudddenly (other exampls I give above like VOIP on wifi or on IP on 3G, have already happened).

Tip, tip, tip: don;t by shares in EMI, don't buy shares in people making a noise at BPI or RIAA, they are the people about to lose big time: prediction: most music will be subscription or paid by adverts and other stuff (as in live gigs making money on T-shirts) by 2010. no, 2009. no wait, 2007.

de-face book application idea

here's an idea for anonymity in facebook - for why, see
this spoof ad or cory doctorow's article on googlevil...

So the defacebook ad is basically a Chaum Mix plus Onion Routing applied to the social net - what you do is for each person running the application:
a) create a whole bunch of fake people
b) create a set of communities by mixing interests, groups, affiliations from other people running the application, with a deliberste plicy of skewing the statisitcs away from the small worlds in the "true" data (Max entropy is your friend, just like Max Headroom used to me)
c) build an overlay of links with obfuscation/crypto hops, to keep the "real" relationships (note average "path" will be way longer but thats ok:) its not internet time we are working on here) - the beauty of this is that facebook encouragem nay, even PAY you to write apps!

and bob is no longer your uncle - in fact, he has plausible deniability that he ever met your aunt.

Ho ho!

INRIA PhD on Securing Coordinate Systems...

Yesterday I attended Dali's defence of a very nice thesis on securing internet coordinate systems (viz, ACM SIGCOMM 2007 paper he has on it for a good summary:-).
Meanwhile, I had some very nice food, firstly in a place in Antibes called (I think) Brulot, where I had a great Soupe de Poisson and a very nice moules farcie, and then in a place near Sophia called Le Bois Dore, where I had a really great salad (see photos) and an excellent pintardeau (argh, sp? - guinea fowl, in english)

One of the salads looked a bit like Dali's algorithm, see if you can guess which:)

poor excuse for online banking servie

Some pundits have explained the options for banksto avoid their service crashing under load and rightly point out that this can be done with dynamic provisioning, which is commercially available (e.g. via virtualised servers in data centers) but does take some money (which usually banks aren;t exactly short of ironically:)

I'd just point out that for all every hit the Northern Rock site took, the BBC must have taken 100 - ok so the BBC doesn't run a transaction service, but it does have a b**dy good response time - and it is a public service - so a Bank that can't be bothered to provision its online business properly deserves to lose. Frankly, even the guys selling Led Zeppelin tickets did better (and that IS a transaction service) logging 20M registrations in a day. Northern dodo doesn't haev 20M customers.

yrs, not impressed frankly. I suppose Egg and HSBC might suffer a bit if they were hit bigtime by a run, but I am guessing that (given egg especially, but also First Direct) prior experience, they might actually cope a bit better - my feeling is that in the 21st century, we have a right not only to demand money from our bank branch from our current account (sneject to suitable ID proof of course) but we ought also to be able to demand our moeny from any online bank's service to accounts with the same conditions (yes, i understand many of the northern doodad's customers had deposit accounts which don't give the same guarantees or response and thats fine as that is how stability and interest rates are meneat to operate).

cones of intersecting sounds of silence

so we see people talking across a crowded room using cell phones or mikes - if we had phase array speaker and microphone system, one could have overlapping sets of people having conversations in the same physical volume!

that'd be cool!

turning japanese, I think so

I think I'm turning japanese - visiting tokyo and kyoto for
sigcomm 2007 has been a wonderful experience. Starting with NTT labs, and hanging out in Shinjuku area of Tokyo, then moving to Kyoto to check out Ashai Dry (a bar as well as a beer), some amazing Eel dishes, a japanese beer garden with Geishas and an eclipse of the moon, and the temples at Nara (giant climb thru buddhas) and Kodaiji, with spooky Shakahuchi flute music and a fabulus garden. Doing Karaoke with mad PhD students from all around the world! really, generally, quite awesome - I know prefer Miso soup for breakfast and a bowl of Ramen last thing after dinner by the river!

In the OO session last night, I played (thanks to Kenjiro Cho, for loan of lovely silent clasical guitar) (and spoke) this tune and someone asked me to post the modified lyrics:

Apoligies to Ella Fitzgerald and Cole Porter:

AbM7 DbM7
Everytime
AbM7 DbM7 AbM7
we submit to sigcomm
Fm7 Bbm7 Eb7/9
I die a little
AbM7 Bbm7 BM7 Bbm7 (Eb7/9) AbM7 Ab7
Everytime we submit to sigcomm
DbM7 F#7
I wonder why a little
AbM7 Bb7 Eb7/11 Eb7
Why the gods above me
Ebm7 Ab7 DbM7
Who must be in the know
Dbm7 Cm7
Think so little of me
Bdim Bbm7 Eb7/9
but yet they allow your papers to go, in.

AbM7 DbM7
When it's near
AbM7 DbM7 AbM7
There’s such an air
Fm7 Bbm7 Eb7/9
Of spring about it
AbM7 Bbm7 BM7 Bbm7 (Eb7/9) AbM7 Ab7
I can hear a berkeley grad student somewhere
DbM7 F#7
Begin to sing about it
AbM7 Bb7 Eb7/11 Eb7
There’s no conference finer
Ebm7 Ab7
But how strange the change
DbM7 F#7
From scott shenker to paul francis
AbM7 Fm7 Bbm7 Eb7(b9) AbM7 DbM7
Everytime we go to sigcomm

( I transposed it up a semitone as Am is a whole lot easier than Abm :)

The T-Shirt was a reference to the brilliant "Blink" episode of Dr Who in the last series.
Mark Handley took some wonderful pictures of the
Kodai-Ji temple where the conference banquet event started later that evening! quite a few others
also took pix

ninja cats and quantum computing

i just heard the best explanation so far for how quantum computing will work - its like ninja cats in manga making clones of themselves - if you've seen the movie Next, with Nicholas Cage, you'll get the idea


awsomeless!

vanishing cell phones: truly hands free (the walls have ears)

so why do we carry cell phones ? with iris recognition and fixed infrastructrue, the environment should be the phone - any device nearby that can pick up your voice, and has a speaker, should be enlisted as part of the phone net - we then just "speak into the air" and "listen to the voices"

it would look less loony than wearing those STUPID BLUETOOTH HEADSETs, and would be much cooler in terms of battery life:)

the walls have ears - even on a beach, this should work (suitable sub ocean woofers could modulate the remote speakers voice and generate the sound in the surf).

true ubicomp, like nature, will be made of 1 trillion weird hacks like this, just to get around the problems with recharging and pollution from nicads etc...

two internet ideas and a story

patrick is 9 - here are his internet ideas today:
1/ Internet Shower - you read your email while having a show - a laser projects a keyboard onto the shower water as it falls and projects a display too and detects your typing....very japanese, very cool, very keanu reeves (without the full length blacsk leather coat)

2/ the internet in a bag - get the very big bag and hold it over the internet for 5 hours, then quickly put a big plate on top to stop the web pagesfrom falling out, and voila -you have the internet, pret a porter...

3/ a story: when I was born, my writing was like I was clinging to a cliff top with a finger nail. then a finger, then later one hand, then finally to hands, and I pulled myself up to the top of the cliff and lay tyhere panting to see my pareents walking away. In the distance was shakespeare - he never fell off the cliff in the first place

patrick mckeever crowcroft, 15.8.2007

look behind you!

The things in this blog entry are all behind you
-------------------------------------------------

I dont the best I can and now I want my blog back

Please mr google sir, can I have my blog back?

remember that awesome moment a while back when after a year of experimentally allowing the world to down load the ITU standards for free, there was this announcement on their website saying
"THE EXPERIMENT HAS FINISHED. NOW PLEASE RETURN ALL COPIES OF STANDARDS THAT YOU HAVE DOWNLOADED"

it was a moment that revealed the complete cognitive failure of the ITU to "get it" about the Internet.

Well, I've just had one of those moments myself. I have seen the light and I want my blog back here where I can change it not out there where you mr and ms google boss can

so what abaht it? like I can migrate my phoen (with number) to another telephone provider - i can even up and move my web site to another place, so lets say I want to have someone else run my blog but have all the links and alerts still work? why not

BLOG portability now - you know its fair

file sharing is communist, declares congress

http://news.com.com/Congress+P2P+networks+harm+national+security/2100-1029_3-6198585.html?tag=nefd.lede>p2p is unamerican and clearly must be suppressed, but the congressmen were dismayed to find that despite billions of dollars of subsidy to DARPA and BBN and Lockheed and so on, the Internet has no off button. The vice president has no clothes.

give away secrets? i dunno, perhaps they ought to pay us for inventing the web:-)

the internet of tings

so we now have a full fledged conference on
internet of stuff and i suppose there's probably on on the internet of nonsense too, but what abut the internet of tings - we had the Internet of Pings (planetlab) and the internet of nothings (well, ones and nothings), but what would the Internet of Tings consist of? or rather,
of what would the Internet of Tings consist?

a quick consultation with the OED and we find that a Ting is

. The sound emitted by a small bell, or other resonant body, as a thin glass vessel, as the result of a single stroke; a thinner or sharper sound than that expressed by TANG.

so then, the interne of tings would be somewhat musical - and could be accompanied by an internet of tangs, too.

next week, we'll take a look at the Internet of Mings.

the atlantic auction

can we offer eBay on eBay?
e-z money, or e-king out a living?

RAND survey on self regulation for the internet

the RAND corporation, who have some claim to being the inventors of the internet (paul baran's report possibly predating al gore by some 30 odd years) are running a survey on internet self regulation which seems like a usefully tautologous thing for us to fill in:)

complexity/diversity at multiple bio-scales

a lot of cosmology nowadays is about linking up between scale at quantum/particle, and galactic/cosmic, as well as very short and long time scales to explain the structure of the universe. this is where all the work on the standard model, and univifcation of the 4 forces etc is all coming into focus

meanwhile, i just read an interesting book on Life: An Introduction to Complex Systems Biology, and previously read Kaufmans's work on The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution by Stuart A. Kauffman

so again, we see something similar , but not in the simplicity, as in the physical world, but in the complexity of biological systems - DNA appears to be a very crazy search engine, which finds literally millions of molecules/proteins to make us out of, and finds millions of different ways (species) to make out of these proteins - this is interesting as it implies that life is very easy to construct - it isn't as if DNA and natural selection is a subtle design - its a blunt instrument (although, admittedly, programmes are run for a very long time, and are very wasteful in terms of wrong outputs (things that end up dead and extinct), but it is also very succesful - i'd say somewhat surprisingly so....

yet another proof of the existence of 42?

Crowcroft's 10 Laws of Startups

1. Start with two founders, both technical. One must be prepared to move to management (e.g. do MBA) - they can then decide on equal but different footing. Three (unlike stools) is unstable.

2. You need to realize that your first idea is not going to make money. Nor is the bigger, better system you build after you get money. Something very dull and boring based on lots of perl scripts and mysql that you write to make ideas 1 and 2 work may very well turn out to be the winner. If you can GPL the first idea, give away the second, then make money o nthe third, you are probably in good shape.

3. you need to have either very small or very large first round funding - otherwise 2nd round will result in an unsable stock split, and endless arguments, and probably a new CEO

4. Hire a CEO who understands technology, not one who relies on secretaries to read their email and work their voicemail.

5, Do not split over more than 4 hours of timezone differences between sites.

6. Do not waste time and money on IPR (patent,copyright) - write that code faster so the competition are getting further behind.

7. You have 3 exit strategies that are good, one that is ok, one soso, and one that is bad
i) get acquired
ii) IPO
iii) stay a profitable business, but never big
iv) pay off the seed money and go dormant
v) fail to pay back the VC.

8. laugh at your first marketeering and white papers when talking to technical customers about them.

9. eat your own dog and cat food.

10. Computer scientists start lists with zero.

a battery of broken dreams - wireless senseless networks

sensor nets, whats that about then eh? wireless sensor nets. so look at the trends in battery life and the proposals (smart dust, speckled computing etc) for more and more resources distributed in the environment - aint gonna happen - we just looked at a 1 month experiment simply logging where all of a high school population is - we need 2000 devices with either 2000 batteries changing every 10 days, or else being recharged.

its all fantasy - cloud cuckoo senseless vapourware.

but some cute algorithms of course (wicked grin)

self organisation is so much more fun than command and control