practical ad hoc networks in rural areas: man-made-meteor(ng)

many areas of the world where there is poor infrastructure also suffer from strife

during strife, there are lots of handy airplanes (often unmanned aerial vehicles conveniently supplied by the US) flying overhead as well as many people on the ground in possession of handy ground-to-air missiles

so if you want a good coverage radio net with better than line-of-sight, one way is to use meteor showers - of course, pesky meteors don't always show up when you want them,
so the solution is DIY - make your own meteor storm out of a few SAM missles and a few UAVs, then bounce your 802.11 WILD signals off those, and, voila, half of sudan covered in 11Mbps capacity unlicensed radio and no complaints from the telco

of course, the UAVs also make it less unethical since no pilots are hurt, although the wreckage hitting the ground may cause some minor problems

packet switching in the air

steve hailes just pointed me at this beautiful animation of flights over the USA....

now thats what I call public understanding of science!

endless-to-endless debate about pointless-to-pointless things

the end-to-end interest list is sometimes a place for interesting information (e.g. discussion of congestion control etc, was there in 1980s - see also comp.protocols.tcp-up etc etc) - but the current haranguing about architecture versus economics really takes the biscuit - in amongst the noise, there is some signal, but its pretty hard to find (you need to have a lot of spare time on your hands). one thing for sure is that a lot of arm-chair amateur economists (most of whom, in line with the usual cliche, seem to be techno-libetarians) wont get us anywhere , especially when even if they are right, they may not actually be in any position of power to influence things - i dont want to bet my shirt on the market being the best way to choose the next steps in Internet technology, especially since
i) there's no such thing as a free market (or lunch, although there's not necessarily a connection between those two facts)
and
ii) the market didn't choose IP (or cellular telephones) they were pushed (IP by DoD and cellular by the European Commission) so in this area at least, the argument is bogus.

someone said "the only things that are inevitable are taxes and death" - actually, for many hunderes of years, many people didn't pay tax, so they were only 50% right, but there's probably only two things that are evitable: IPv6 and IPmulticast, no, wait, three things, IPv6, multicast and mobile IP, no, wait, 4 things, IPv6, multicast, mobile IP and QoS, no, wait, no (argh - no-one expects the end-to-end inquisition...thud thud thud)....

the discussio nappears to have moved on to variable length addresses in much the manner of high school kids discussions of variable length willies...

the quantum distance between EE and CS...

wen it comes to talking about circuits, i heard the following phrase yesterday in an EE department, several times...

"...and them some holes leak in..."

something do do with creating excitons

hum - in my world, things leak out of holes, not vice versa:)

google announces the G-phone...

google's global hegemony took one step closer to reality today when
they announced their new open wifi hotspot voip service, dubbed the
G-spot. only avaialble to customers who have purchased the g-phone, these will have unlimited world wide calls for free.

The first customers will be the feds, or g-men as they have become known - often visible talking into hidden microphones built into their grey suits to avoid making the public jealous, g-men will now save the US governemnt millions of cents in AT&T bills

asked whether the FBI should trust google not to spy on their voice traffic, the director dwayne edgar hoobler said "oh yes, we trust google - we use them to spy on you after all"

you will be able to purchase g-phones soon, as seen on G-TV, so long as you have a Gisa credit card.


this has been unreal, and i am not serious, no really. no i am not. i mean it. stop it.

Press Freedom, and what Pops?

Today's Topic: Which freedoms do you want?

Time: May 14, 2007: 20.00 hrs.
Venue: Roger Needham room, Chancellor's Building, Wolfson College

press gangs of people talk about really fun stuff frequently at my college - i hope to be there to learn from them (but it deep ends on the weather!)

as i've advocated, it 'd be neat to have censorship proof publication channels - one can always use social nets to express disapproval of libel and slander and anyhow, what do sleezier magazines want in the world anyhow?

think how much less bad things would have been for Kelly if the Bliar stories had been allowed a bit more airtime before Government Central Spin took control - more importantly, perhaps, think how many less dead iraqis there might be (contentious, moi?)

was pretty interesting in the end - one idea popped up - China now has a Class Based Society!!! !!! Mao will be turning in his groove...

tilda, home at last,

so i just learned that the french word for "~" is
"pas de probleme" - this, above all else, will make me feel
at home in France!!!

virtualisation of networks, systems and users:)

was discussing virtualisation (in the context of GENI, a US programme, much of which appears to be proposing to use Xorp on Xen, both largely work done by Ian Pratt et al from Cambridge England, and Mark Handley (and Atanu Ghosh et al), from UCL England, but nevermind. We're proposing virtualising lots more things - I guess every home should have a virtual internet, plus we should virtualise handsets (since that way, we can actually programme the stupid things, and do an end run on the terminal stupidity of the people who write most handset "OSs", which are ab embarasment to Computer Science.

Aside from Red and Black nets and Red and Black sandboxes for "service provider approved" handset applications versus downloaded stuff playpens, we can have red and black set top boxes too for iptv and p2p. We can also (hopefully) start to give some stability to application developers - in the games world, they have to live with writing to the sony playstation, or nintendo wii, or microsoft XBox world, but in cellphone smart phones, they have at least 11 awful environments to write to, NONE of which has a decent market share or has tipped the world, so there's no real incentive to innovate (unless you make heroic efforts like RIM to write entire systems or are as big and patient as microsoft to just outwait everyone).

up town top spam ranking

a majority of spam i see is marked as spam these days and refiled into folders (to be later deleted) - in our case, spam assasin seems to be okish at catching most stuff so long as the rules are kept up to date.

so if i posted this spam (its in an MH folder) to a web page, say using mhonarc, titled (say, to avoid confusion) spam, linked off my home page, which is indexed by google, and i then also link to other people's spamhauspages, assuming i can pursuade people to do this, then I could use this to compare, contrast, and improve the spam rules of different systems. of course, there's a sort of equilibirum it would reach (spammers would use the rue sto build spam that would get thru the rules, but then we'd post the new rules next day and the filters would all update....i wonder what the stable level of spam would be if this was done?

reason i suggest this is that, curisoul, google's gmail spam stuff aint that good (it is NOT as good as my spam assasin config, either in terms of false positive or negatives) so maybe cooperative diversity is the solution (well a step, of course, there are no @solutions@ per se:-)

4G whither IP?

attended 4g forum in london today ... interesting panel session with lots of people making cool visionary predictions - but why, oh why, do people assume we have to make money:-) what if it was a public service as well as spectrum being a public good?

wireless internet causes cancer and attention disorder scare:-)

Someone had left a copy of yesterday's Daily Mail on the train open to an article by their "Science
Correspondent", Fiona Macrae, about the "possible health risk for pupils" of WiFi in the class room.

The article quoted several pressure groups, and some unnamed "scientists", and asserted that sitting in a room
with a WiFi station could be like being in the direct beam of a GSM Cellular tower at 300meters. This, it was
claimed, could lead to ADHD, Cancer and premature senility.

Firstly, the guilt by association simply by being "radio" annoyed me - WiFi uses the ISM (Medical and
Scienticic Instrument band) around 2.4GHz, not the GSM Cellular bands which means even the vaguest idea that it
might resonate with certain common energy levels in certain molecular links common in biological systems (one of the
pet theories about how GSM might be a problem) is wrong, because its a completely different
frequency/waevlenth. Secondly, its a completely different power level that the user is exposed to:
you don't hold the laptop to your head, and the laptop's WiFi card and the WiFi Access Point (AP)
are roughly symmetric in power terms, whereas a GSM cell tower is much more powerful than a handset.
Thirdly, there are on the order of 100M such systems in the
world, and if there was a significant problem it would have shown up (the article points to increasing levels
of ADHD - this predates WiFi in any case, and is strongly associated with people using computers whether they
have wireless nets or not, and is far more likely to be a symptom of the type of kids that use computers too much,
not of the idea that the computer (or the network) directly cause attention deficit disorders.

I get very annoyed by this sort of article, particularly
because the author has failed to seek any balancing view from an actual, named scientist
which simply smacks of lazy journalism, especially when a few seconds with Google and Wikipedia would find
plenty of information rather than hearsay and supersititon, and might elicit a quote from a neutral person who
has a clue.

By all means, have a further investigation (although there have, contrary to the article's assertion, been
checks on the problems with 802.11/ISM band health risks)....but unsupported allegations are not really
"science" journalism.

Sometimes, I get the impression that people who write these columns in those types of newspapers are
like the PE teachers who used to (in the bad old days) end up being landed with taking the geography O-level class.

wombling: wireless overlay multicast basic long-term internet next generation

plunderground, plover-ground, wombling free....how to avoid top-downitis in next generation architecture research? just don't fund it:)

neutrality on old blog paper

the grauniad has an article on neutrality which I kind of agree with....at least its not bi-polar:)

talkin bout carbon feetprints now - the semantic web tax

so in these days of sustainability, we should consider the damage done to the environment by spam - it requires processing (85% of email I send is spam, that means that 99% of email you get from me is spam - that means 99% of CPUs in the world are consuming spam) and generates (as do cows) much heat due to the lack of optimisation of todays processors - we should either
i) demand that intel, amd etc build processors for which spam is a no-op and can be removed by the instruction scheduler
ii) fine the spammers for causing us t oreach the heat death of the universe sooner than we would with more meaningful electronic communication

indeed, this might be achieved by
i) minimum entropy coding of instruction sets
ii) a negative tax on meaning.

0wning the air - new mobile threat

batnets, flights of radio controlled helicopters with wifi, gsm and UMTS and wimax transceivers , descend like locusts (or like vampire bats) and 0wn the airpsace, physically AND virtually.

coming to a community wifi and 3G Provider near you real soon now. the
Vampire batnet phenomenon - remember, you saw it here first.

[perhaps this will also be known as a denial of surface attack]

science finction and the canon

So I just went to the first half of this - and jolly good it was too - congrats to the organiser for putting together some great speakers and fun people!

SF & the Canon at Anglia Ruskin University. Alas I had to bail (to go help clear out a library in london of a couple of thousand old SF books, by bizarre coincidence), but the first 1/2 of the talks were very informative, thought provoking, and, compared to a lot of "pure" old SF events I used to go to, human. Several thoughts of interest from discussions (not mine - I'm just noting them):

1. was Asimov a closet marxist - maybe (looking at the later Grand Unification of Gaia and Robots and Empire, he was - psycho-history is far more Das Kapital than Beyond the Pleasure Principle) - btw, harry harrison has a great throway line in one of his books about how "free markets were some mad social scheme tried in the dim past along with nazism and christianity, that noone can remmeber why anymore because its so clear they are bad ideas)

2. interstial joke - someone needs to do that trick that Lewis Caroll did with the ultra-short chapter (and it really was a kitten after all), and neal stephenson did in Snow Crash with a epic phantasy space opera between 1 volume and the next should be an ultra-slim volume with one line "and then there was the usual odessey"...

I misread the title "the past is an acid planet", and was disappointed it wasn't all about Lord of Light...

3. the asimovian speaker had spotted my cheeky blog and did a riff on it - he was spot on!

4 a paper on Sparrow (which i realized half way through, i had actually read!), was very very moving - I hadn't appreciated how powerful it was and will now go re-read it! makes my sf structure as joke look a bit weak in fact (even if its mostly harmlessly true)

5. a paper about the genealogy of cyborgs was interesting - the only one i had the nerve to make an observation about - that

• cyborgs in ancient times were gadgets vought to life with magic (ichor) and runes ("meth/emeth", for golem on/off).
• cyborgs later were monsters given some of the elements of life by unethical scientists (viktor)
• cybermen were people who gave up part of their humanity (the borg)
• but there are nore democritised cyber-folks (extropians) who take a wider view of the use of technology to enhance the human condition
• often, the view of the cyber-organism reflects the superstitions of the time - magic creats robots, but they may be random liek the ancient gods. eldridtch science may bring dead cadavers back to life, but it is a Bad Thing and will lead to No Good, and even the Monster will be Pissed Off...especially when he has to float around in the melting polar sea.
• but then science may remove your soul, which would be even worse (Dr Who, Seven of Nine etc etc?), on the other hand, it might be even better if the soul was just some illusion that caused confusion and made you remove somethign actually useful, whereas with out it you might just add something (like a keyboard, mouse, cell phone, pda, noise cancelling headphones and nanotech muscle toner).
• oh, on afterthought/discussion with speaker, i think John Sladek's Roderick book, especially th first one, contains a LOT of good material o nthe difference between robots and cyborgs and where we perceive the difference too...remember to be unafraid of robots may be just as dangerous as to be terribly afraid, jung and annafreud as they say.
  

I hadn't thought what a clever clogs pun it is to call Arnie (the termiantor) the "governator" ( as in Gubernator or kybernetes) - some americal gags are quite erudite (and amusingly e-it-rude)

6. great paper about the pastoral (as in elizabethan literature such as Arcadia) and the way le Guin (especially in Always Coming Home) is an interesting angle on pastoral - i wondered if one might view anares in the dispossessed as an allegory of the early Kibbutzim in pre-UN sanctioned Israel - also, the Canticle for Leibowitz looks pretty pastroal in the first half.

gaming the shareprice spammers to death?

so has anyone done a study of the correlation between spam on share price predictions and actual stock market behaviour? a colleague suggests this ought to be easy to game - that'd stop people doing it pretty fast...or if not would make for interesting world depression:)

Science Fiction is no laughing matter

There's a pile of work about the nature of satire. Basically the "modern" view is that satirical writing is inherently reactionary. Essentially, satire uses exaggeration to ridicule, and in doing so, re-enforces stereotypes, and preaches to the converted. Typically it works within the comfort zone of the reader.

Satirical work in science fiction goes back to Lucian (satirical sketches includes a trip to the moon) and forward until now. Dystopia is a common feature of the genre (whatever that is) and many dystopic visions use satirical mechanisms to present aspects of society to good or bad contrast. (Think Swift, Laputa etc). Again, SF lives in the comfort zone of the reader (or viewer in film, TV, or even music).

More specifically, SF often uses the form (particularly in short stories) of a joke - quite literally in the case of some writers such as Norman Spinrad, Robert Sheckley, Fred Pohl/Cyril Kornbluth, Philip K. Dick and similar, particularly in magazines of the 1950s and 1960s - where the structure is often extremely closely modelled on the "shaggy dog story" or other extended joke - viz Freud's Jokes&the Unconscious and other sad attempts to explain poor humour. At its height one can see this very clearly in the snappy Twilight Zone tales of Rod Serling - one story that one could home in on, though, is The Joker, by Isaac Asimov. This is a self-referential tale (somewhat like the Lottery of Babylon, the Library of Babel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller etc etc), but also echos back to the Ancient Greek (viz Lucian, above) with the motif of a Theos Ex Maxina (deus Ex Machina- sorry for lack of Greek font and spelling:).

So what's the point here - well I guess I am going to make some sort of terrible faux pas when it comes to post-modern criticism, as I am making a value judgement - this sort of SF is poor. There is other writing (such as Vonnegut, some Arthur Clark, and Dorothy L. Sayers and one early Mervyn Peake) which attempts to examine this aspect of life without falling into the reactionary trap - I am thinking of the play, Comedians, by Trevor Griffiths (a fairly harrowing experience if you ever get a chance to see it - there is a fairly good film of the original stage production) - it is NOT funny.

So you want a joke: well, all I can say is that I take humour very seriously and Science Fiction is no laughing matter. But if you want something funny then how about this:

An Englishman, a Welshman and a Scotsman go into a bar, and the barman says:
"Is this some kind of a joke?".

A Martian, a dolphin and a robot go into a bar, and the Earthman says
"Twighlight Zone is next door, we only serve people here"
"OK it'll be a human for me, and the robot and dolphin will take an oil cheque"

QED.[]



A possible form for the dissertation (based on something radical a friend of
mine did in the alternative English faculty in Cambridge in 1981 - his
dissertation was about TS Eliot's "The Waste Land", and was written entirely
using quites from critiques of Eliot's work, and more specifically, by
juxtaposing writings that agreed with each other, where my friend agreed with them,
and disagreed with each other, where he disagreed with them, and the context of
the pome made it clear who was "wrong".

I propose to write at least one version of the dissertation as an annotation
in the same manner, of "The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams,
showing where the
original version of a joke (e.g. 42 versus the mystical significance of the
number 23 in the Illumianatus Trilogy; also, overly friendly doors and
depressive robots in Sheckley (actually also the bathetic character
of Slartibartfast == GoD)).


Thesis Outline
--------------

Introduction
Satire and Futurism
Gods and Aliens
Jokes and the Clairvoyant

Motivation and Background
The Liberal Ethic in Speculative Fiction
The Liberal Ethic and Humour
The Structure of Some Jokes
The structure of the classic 1950s SF short story
Combat Liberalism, and the Reactionary Nature of Satire
Combat Liberalism, and the Reactionary Nature of Satire

The Joker and other Self Referential Concepts in SF Writings of the Period
Form
Function
Gods and Alients - Deus ex Machine revisited

Film and Text
Dr Feelgood and the Bomb
Dr Strangelove and the Joke
How I learned to live with depressed robots

Exaggeration in One Dimension
In Humour
In Satire
In Speculative (Science) Fiction
Exaggeration as a tool for Bisociation

Conclusions and Remarks
How was it for you?
How many science fiction writers does it take to change a light bulb?
Why are there no cell phones in SF movies?
Towards a radical chic for true SF satire.

reactobad glasses and DASERs

so you've seen reactolite glasses that turn shade on as the sunlights up your day, and are quite cool - but wouldn't it be cooler still if you had shades that reacted to the scene you were in ? say things turn bad, you need to look cool even if its dark - think bruce willis crawling thru the aircon ducts in the airport at nite in die hard XVII, or sigourney weaver about to combat a googleplex of aliens on the moon with no name, or vin diesel in pitch black....then when things lighten up metaphorasmically, you wanna look innerlecktual and smart, your glasses revery to full on transparency...presto, Professor Indiana Jones, voila, ecco ergo cogito

of course, silly of me to forget that dna invented something quite similar...so how about this as Another Bad Idea: Rechargeable Glassses - these use sunlight to charge up and then show you things in the dark that were there earlier - these things may not be there anymore, but at least you can feel like there's an element of visual stability about the scene. brings a whole new meaning to the after dinner speech announcement: "gentlemen, re-charge your glasses"....

The DASER Is a new device that we have come up with at the Institute. It is an aronym which stands for "Darkness Amplified by Stimulated Evasion of Radiation", and it (like noise cancelling headphones) is not hard to imagine, but is quite hard to get right. There is a short story in the cunningly crafted collection of cornucopia by Arthur C. Clark called "Takes from the White Stag", which describes how noise cancellation (a.k.a. zone of silence) can go horribly wrong. Try to imagine the end of the universe and bacon sandwiches at the same time, and you will understand how bad a DASER could be in the wrong hands.

Engendered Species and SF

There's a sub-genre of SF where a world with some gender variance is envisaged - e.g. Left Hand of Darkness, where people are hermaphrodite, or Maul, where (most) males are dead - so most of these are proto-feminist literature trying to examine societies without male dominance arrogance and aggression, and are often very fine (and frequently (all?) by women authors...

so its about time we had one where all women died out - the speculation i would have is that society might not become either spartan (gay buddy+violence) or particularly random (mad max, random acts of senseless violence, escape from new york) - without women to SHOW OFF to, men might become civilized:)

as one of trician sullivan's excellent character's says, why werent the wives, mothers and sisters of the concentration camp commandants tried too? They stood by while their husbands, sons and brothers committed those crimes - perhaps if they hadn't been there, the crimes might not have happened...

oh, ok so we need to figure out cloning and stuff, but thats just the standard SciFi McGuffin (backstory)....easy peasy - the hard bit is how socieity would switch as
People of a Pure Chromosomic Nature (women) start to die off...