calm networking

so some people live event driven lives - the internet just makes this worse, and the fact that people have an order of magnitude more "friends" on facebook, than in Real Life, just means that the interrupt rate soars and attention span withers and noone gets anything done anymore - this is the True Cause of the recession, not stupid greedy bankers at all...

anyhow, so if we all revert to old (uucp style, for the older readers) connectivity and make delay tolerant use of the interweb, then noone can expect us to see an email (let alone answer it) until the next day - this would also allow perfect statistical multiplexing (and resource pooling) of the network - people are already timeshifting when they watch TV programs (via netflix/lovefilm, or via iPlayer in the UK) - so this is timeshifting when you deal with what USED to be asynchronous communication....

I think we could charge people more money for this apparently less reliable service... ... ...

maybe call it calmail or the retreat from realtime

Funding 4G deployment...

so there's a common thread in current stories in the regulatory, economic and technical community concerning the deployment of 4G very fast wireless/cellular data services).

It goes like this:

1.demand is growing exponentially

2.revenue only grows linearly with number of users

3. ergo, we can't afford to deploy 4G

there's a couple of things wrong with this argument.
1. cost of deployment doesn't necessarily grow exponentially with capacity - there are
a) aggregation factors; b) energy cost savings with newer kit; c) new tricks (cooperative relaying from multiple masts).

2. revenue does grow - lots of users pay a lot more for unlimited data service contracts on than they did for voice/txt message contracts and also for very limited 2.5G (GPRS/Edge) typical volume limited services - If 35M people in the UK were paying a typical unlimited data contract, of, currently around 30 pounds per month, that is 12billion pounds per year - that is quite enough to deploy LTE.

3. revenue from the other side of the net also grows (if more people download more video, youtube and the BBC etc have to buy more high speed services from fixed net providers - these are non trivial income streams

someone is telling porkie pies.

why the interweb in 201 has become pandora's box

almost literally- the legend was that when Pandora's box was opened, many things escaped but the lid was shut just in time to stop Hope getting out.

So as the Internet gives away all our privacy and lets people share TOo Much Information in ways that erode the weak social walled gardens that let different viewpoints coexist in some sort of vague harmony, governments start to put the lid on the one Hope, that the Internet might also let us know What is Really Going On and Have a Say in it instead of having our lives run and our intercourse mediated by creeps in suits.....as the East demands RIM give them access to all blackberry mail, and CHina blocks this that and everything, what Hope is left?

Answer's on a blog comment (we know where you live)

Towards a New Theory of Social Mind

It's clear that collective minds can be better than single minds, but its clear to me this only really worse when they start to behave like committes or like mobs - so
this is when social structures break down (alienation) - so is this once you get above Dunbar's magic number 150? Does technology help people do group-mind thinking with larger groups ? I think it does (the IETF spent 10 years working well (til 1990:-)
before it went pear-shaped and became less than any of its parts (not just less than the sum of its parts)

if we don't solve this problem, then the human race is doomed to fail (to fail to solve climate change, population, or any other world scale problem)

we are human stumble-bums who' lurch from one random mix to another, and occasionally, some cascading idea leads to herding behind some new thing (enlightenment - good; fascism - bad)

Alien's will land and find our remains and say "could do better"....

why havn't we seen aliens?

because they look at our group mind and say "how dumb is that"....

the future of the interweb is dark, dark, dark

just read this note about who publishes what on bittorrent portals and why

much like a lot of the dark underbelly of the internet, its a bit of a sordid mess...

if it isn't fake content by copyright protectionista, it's likely to be
self-advertising by big sites or porn or malware perveyors....

http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.2327

privacy, the cloud, and what really matters

I attended the Ethics and the Cloud workshop at the Royal Society yesterday, sponsored by the EPSRC under the digital economy programme,

was on twitter under #cloudmatters

anyhow, I was thinkin about privacy and psychology and wondering why people are so negative about some times of monitoring

1. monitoring car speed
i) we have averaging speed cameras (viz M1 right now)
ii) tomtom log speed/location over 3G from cars - why not put this data in a black box for analysis in the event of an accident too (instead of waiting for someone to subpoena tomtom's wenb service for the data) - liability would then be much easier to find evidence for
iii) if you run a phone with GPS (android, iphone etc) and latitude, then surely the data on google's service is also exactly such evidence anyhow? Could we ask to see how fast our MPs drive under an FOI? :-)

2. monitoring health
i) Tesco's keep our buying data as part of clubcard stuff for optimsising their profit and our basket - if this info went to our GP they might use it to warn us about our diet
ii) Nokia has sports phones that log heartbeat etc when you run/cycle (and upload to serice with map) - this too could go to GP as part of evidence based mediciine and prenvetive healthcare
iii) a micropayment system being used for bar bills (e.g. freedom phone style) could be used to interact with 1/ to tell you not to drive and 2/ to tell you to lay off the booze

why would people mind this?

answers on a postcard :-)

[The question above is rhetorical]

bell heads v. Internet: energy systems, transport and communications

So we kind of won the war between Bell-Heads of the phone companies and the Net-Heads of the Internet in the communications area - indeed, now we made peace and we are very happy to work with each other on better inter-domain routing, delay bounds, congestion exposure, traffic engineering etc etc etc

Meanwhile, Frank Kelly spent time at the UK's Department for Transport as chief scientific advisor. More recently, David Mackay is acting as same role for the Department of Energy and Climate Change

Why is this interesting (in the context of the Net)?

Well, this week, I am attending the Energy Systems week at the Newton Institute in Cambridge and the talks have fallen in to the same pattern of three sides of the picture that we saw in the net, and transport: Energy is dominated by a shall number of energy producers and grid companies (mostly private nowadays). THe move to local generation
(i.e. "user contributed" energy) and the move to using prices as "signals" to users to see if that will alter their (consumer and producer) behaviour have been things we've seen in the net (p2p content versis Content Distribution services, congestion charging and congestion explosure as well as Inter-domain policy routing/peering policies), and in Transport (congestion charging, toll v public good roads).

Glen Vinnicombe gave a great talk about why distributed control with local rules for interaction is sufficient to organise a globally stable system. Alas, it was clear from many responses that the industry (i.e. people that have outrageously expensive systems invested in command & control - 100M pounds software for running LP and IP solutions for optimisation was one quoted figure!!!), have no understanding of why we might need to move to this decentralised world.

What we really need is a subtle political move that shifts the ground under their feet, as was done in the Transport case (allowing local decisions to innovate for example so that people could introduce smart pricing, smart control independent of the business dominated by near monopolies). This move needs to happen soon for energy - it is not at all clear how to lay out a vision and road-map for this that could engage the incumbents - in the case of the internet, we just ignored them (as Americans say, we did an "end run" on their game:).

Putting in constraints (simple things like Kirchhoff's laws is trivial compared to the complexity that is the Internet. I was amused that people think the electricity system is harder than a global packet switched system with over 100,000 providers. (Other things like the fact that we have different kinds of packets (VOIP/Video v. Data), the fact that intra-domain TE runs on timescales faster than spot markets (as do CDNs, who buy electricity dynamically and spin up/down disk farms and whole city datacenters already based on current supply cost/reliability, and buy wind farms) seems to have slipped the attention of some of the old school....

Anyhow, thanks are due to the Newton Institute event organizers for bringing together a set of people to make this clear.

Some brief other notes-

Some of the economics people were still citing Chicago school work on pricing and perfect markets - having heard of Cascading failures in grids, you'd think they'd have heard of Cascades and herding in trading behaviour and move on a bit to worry about whether you can actually treat users (and providers) as selfish rational players and rely on this for stability alone - the last 2 years recession (toxic debt and trust failure epidemics) ought to have been another small clue.

Thatcher mentioned as a contribution - its true the pool idea was cool, but society was a loser compared to some more balanced (nuanced) inclusion of welfare as well.

Glen's demo of the lego robot segway was absolutely brilliant:-)

Dinosaurs are not extinct

Andy Hopper is right - Computing for the Future of the Planet actually has something serious to offer here.

There was some interesting discussion later in the week on large scale microgeneration and stability, but there still seems to be a misunderstanding of the sorts of scale (millions of providers) and the types of business relationships between them (P2P, customer provider, laissez-fair etc) - BGP has many lessons here potentialyl of use

there was some discussion of the unpredictability of weather (for wind & solar) - in fact systems are self-similar and the same math used for rapid estimation of the H parameter for a self-similar arrival process (lots of papers on fractional guassian random/brown noise etc etc) could easily be used to provide input to an "admission process" of local generation to the grid, or whetehr to diffuse the generated power locally (e.g. into bufffers in the form of electric cars parked in a neighbourhood, or to spin up disk farms for a decentralised local cache for the InterWeb).

I've always said that the Internet is a predictor for where other utilities might end up (given its scope, scale, low operating costs, competitive nature, and flexibilty to a wide varieity of ever evolving business models)

simple smart grid idea - turning down power consumption via missing NAT state:)

If you're home is not currently represented by NAT state, then surely all your internet kit should be OFF :-)

An ethical question about live user internet research

we're running a complicated experiment to see how people react to information about
their social group and their locale during an epidemic if you give them live information about who (and potentially where) there is some level of infection - this had to go through an ethics committee because it involves health.

now the next phase (or a next phase) involves running an enhanced version of the programme which no longer logs whether a person has a disease, but instead, emulates a set of diseases and a set of values for parameters for Susceptibility, Infectiousness and Recovery, and (still telling the user - but now its a game) tries to see if people will alter their behaviour (i.e. where they go; who they meet) depending on the severity etc - the idea of the latter experiment is that we can run live experiments with hypothetical values for the disease vector and SIR values - the reason we can't just run this on trace data is that there are feedback loops between the disease and the social network dynamics, so whether a given virtual epidemic collapses, stays endemic, or goes pandemic (or some other mode) will be highly dependent on actual users' behavioural dynamics (and might include other facets of behaviour like peer pressure etc)...

Anyhow, the question is this: do we still need formal Ethical approval for this latter experiment?

Internet Addressing - making a hash of it several times

Dear Sir, Lord, Reverend, Almighty Internet,

I've been wondering how you should be addressed.

The powers that be (wise old men) say we should have 128 bits of stuff
allocated either geographically or topologically, or organisationally (provider centric)

I say we should declare IPv6 Bloomsday and have three hash functions and addresses should be allocated with fields set from all three types, by doin a cryptohash of the ID of a node (sim or mac) ...

So the new type of address is the bitwise inclusive OR of the results of all three hash functions:
Hg(id) v Ht(id) v Ho(id)

The properties of this are neat - a router can decide to apply a match on any one of the three hashes, so if a node moves, we can see whether geo, topo, or provider based routing will cope with the migration best - we can also NAT or re-assign permanentally for a node, any 2 of the hashes, and still get a match - provided we dont change all three (or the id)...

This ought to work fairly well, since most nodes execute Levy flights over the net (returning to the nest at end of day, trip, vacation)....

Jaron Lanier & The Internet & Grumpy Old Geezers saying it isn't what it used to be

they are all wrong - the internet is still wonderful - here's some random stuff just loked at in the last 10 days:

retro eastern european album covers

awesome time lapse photo work

last day in einstein's office

pattern recognition?

Logorama

pigeon detective

seriously pixilated universe

and there's loads more where that came from

zero cycle future

civilization can be counted as starting with the invention of the wheel (not fire - fire was discovered)

but most civilizations made do with four wheel devices for millennia

(sounds off stage left of animal farm):
Now, the civilized thing is to go on two wheels.

but the segay has made the unicycle almost practical

so what is the next step for the wheel world? clearly, no cycles - zero wheels - is the logical next step

roll on the nadabike, I say

of course, it will still be known as a bike, just like people still talk about records or phones in some places....

Compelling Application of Multicast Building Rss (or twitter) Internet Distributions of Great Expectations....CAMBRIDGE

so twitter - funny app, eh? odd stuff - why would anyone wanna use it, eh?
stalking, really - that's what its really all about.

On the other hand, the s/w "architecture" for twitter sucks bigtime - its kind of like, someone looked at SMS and went, hey, texting is so cool - lets rebuild an accidentally useful thing that is only good on mobile phones before the iPhone because there wasnt a proper keyboard and screen, and lets build it for the internet, eh?
how cool is that, like, er, not?

well anyhow, so noone relies on twitter really - its a 140 byte payload, with a 1-to-many service model, and no especial casual ordering between tweets from different sources. so it is ideally suoted to UDP/IP multicast - scales really nicely from a server perspective - 1 sender with a million followers - indeed, who needs servers - stephen fry could tweet to a billion people direct from his iPhone (assuming the 3G IP service did native multicast...) - indeed, some cellular networks implement broadcast services (for radio and tv channels in Korea and Japan for example) so one could even use the ethernet hack of mapping ip multicast groups to broadcast subnets locally, and get receiver efficiencies as well as sender side scaling improvements from O(n) to O(1)....how about that eh?

reflex

interesting discussion with david evans just now about
how you learn a reflex

started with me saying how hard I find it to make a pot of coffee correctly
until I've had a coffee

he then said how the physio people at addenbrooks had made much of the fact
that it is so hard to figure out how you "learn a reflex"

this bootstrapping problem is made all the weirder
when you ask people about "simple" things like
learning to ride a bike
learning to do vibrato on violin/guitar
learning to programme
add your experience here...

there's the skills/technique thing which is incremental and easy to see
then there's some transformative/phase shift somehow (dodgy bogo-science metaphor there) in the brain - would be wonderful to do functional MRI on someone
learning to stop falling off a bike
and see if this is so!

almost steampunk come true - making broken ipod useful via antiques

so i have an old ipod nano which has a broken stereo out head socket and
thought about throwing it away

but then i realize i also have a device in my car which is one of the 21st centuries most awesome hacks - it is so baroque as to be worthy of a song or something out of some
bruce sterling/william gibson/neal stephenson 10 page eulogy or even a threnody

which is to say i have one of those gizmos for 10 quid which
plugs into a cigarette lighter to charge, and then has an FM transmitter
and then you dock your pod-u-like into it
using the awesomely apple-uber-scart-like moron designed docking socket thing
and lo, your ipod tunes arrive on your car speakers
via your FM car radio
and electronics replenish the power in the i-pod
via the gadget for setting fire to cancer-stick

how weird is that?

turning broken ipods into useful sources of soothing sounds
by means of multiple obsolete tech!!!!

what's not to like?

I'm so Bored of the Future Internet

today I am going to BIS to talk about the Future Internet
this is Yet Another Initiative which is the
Future Internet Strategy Board of the UK.

The Internet has a great future behind it, of course. However,
my thesis is that the
Future Internet is about as relevant as
Anthropogenic Global Warming
It is not necessary to invoke all the hype and hysteria - it
is both necessary and sufficient to talk about
sustainable energy (c.f. David Mackay)
and
good technical communications research, develeopment, deployment and operations -
What we really don't need is yet more climatologists
(or ethnographers studying internet governance) - we do need some solid engineering
to address a number of problems the Internet has - but this is happening and wouldn't stop happening if the entire Future Internet flagship was kidnapped by aliens.

we don't need no government agency doing top down dictats about what to do when -
it won't work and it will be a massive waste of time, energy and other resources - i.e.
like AGW, it will be a load of hot air:)

my slides are linked off my home page in the usual way...

There are a number of deeper lessons from the Internet architecture which might prove useful in other domains, and in my talk I give examples of these (applying the Postel and End-to-end principles to transport, energy, government information/servies)

telco-mpare.the.research.com

{AT|B|D|F|I|T}telco-mpare-the-research
i.e. what are thre relative merits of
AT&T research
BT Research
Deutsche Telekom (t-labs)
France Telecom research (actually telecom paris tech:)
telecom italia
telefonica

ask me in a pub:)

did you know vint cerf is...

vint cerf...only 3 years older than Patti Smith

now reading Just Kids about her life with Robert Mapplethorpe, who took that iconic pic for the cover of Horses....awesome - a true 20th century (and 21st) Rimbaud....

Jesuit 2.0

I'm trying to reason about religion

doh - time to acquire
jesuit 2.0
and see how it stacks up
against
islam 1.7

I don't know, but maybe it was the roses

the internet: the death of distance and the price is poverty

the internet is sposed to bring the death of distance

but on the internet, content is king
and content is zipfian

so popular content is, in all liklihood
from far away

yet content is about somethign real - a band, a play, a beach, a cause

yet if the band don't play near you, the play is in a foreign tongue, the beach is washed by tides from a different ocean, and the cause is not yours to wonder why
then it impoverishes you - it does not enrichen.

the internet is going to be the greatest cause of poverty since
the church burned people for translating and printing the bible