Not the net at all - just a blatant plea for sponsorship for this ride we;re doing in just over a week's time:)
https://www.justgiving.com/JonAndTeam
https://www.justgiving.com/JonAndTeam
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
ACE Talk by Brian Carpenter
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Dice and Decideability
Dice and Decideability,
or Just a Minute at the Institute for Advanced Studies
with apologies to Jane Austin
"It is a fact universally computed that a single man in possession
of a small fortune wheel, might not actually be in search of a
wife".
ALbert looked at Mrs Einstein over the breakfast table in the warm
Prince Town sunlight of late august with admiration.
"You're talking about Alan again aren't you my dear?" he asked her.
Alan Mathison Turing was the talk of the town, since he arrived
with his small travelling show in tow. Everyone had become addicted
to the game, where you had to discuss one of the 23 famous Hilbert
Challenges for 1 minute, without any hesitation (the halting problem),
repetition (the loop), or dangling pointers (relevance).
The Elephant in the Room was the undeniable fact that Alan had
already solved one of them, but had not had space on the limited
stone tablet that was all Cambridge University could afford him, to
write down the proof.
Mrs Einstein was pleased that Johnny von Neumann had finally
settled down and was getting on with that huge birdsnest of glowing
tubes that looked like it was going to make a great Christmas
Lights, or maybe decorate the Founders Hall for the Alumni Ball -
what fun that was, with old students and colleagues dressed to the
nines (often wearing leopard skin pillbox hats and accompanying
tails in satin). Even Albert usually brushed his hair for the
occasion, although Alan would probably make himself scarce. A few
thousand people was a lot to cater for, when counting Austrain
Pastries, but was a vanishingly small number when it came to
counting the number of ways that their gene's could combine, or
indeed, just the time it would take to fly to the stats in the
relativistically challenged Wright Brothers' phantastic new
machine.
What fun. All the fun of the fair. And with Alan's new infinite
wheel of fortune (or non-deterministic mill, as he rather strangely
called it), even if God didn't, Albert would be playing Dice once
more.
of course, all the best stories end after happily, ever tale recursive
or Just a Minute at the Institute for Advanced Studies
with apologies to Jane Austin
"It is a fact universally computed that a single man in possession
of a small fortune wheel, might not actually be in search of a
wife".
ALbert looked at Mrs Einstein over the breakfast table in the warm
Prince Town sunlight of late august with admiration.
"You're talking about Alan again aren't you my dear?" he asked her.
Alan Mathison Turing was the talk of the town, since he arrived
with his small travelling show in tow. Everyone had become addicted
to the game, where you had to discuss one of the 23 famous Hilbert
Challenges for 1 minute, without any hesitation (the halting problem),
repetition (the loop), or dangling pointers (relevance).
The Elephant in the Room was the undeniable fact that Alan had
already solved one of them, but had not had space on the limited
stone tablet that was all Cambridge University could afford him, to
write down the proof.
Mrs Einstein was pleased that Johnny von Neumann had finally
settled down and was getting on with that huge birdsnest of glowing
tubes that looked like it was going to make a great Christmas
Lights, or maybe decorate the Founders Hall for the Alumni Ball -
what fun that was, with old students and colleagues dressed to the
nines (often wearing leopard skin pillbox hats and accompanying
tails in satin). Even Albert usually brushed his hair for the
occasion, although Alan would probably make himself scarce. A few
thousand people was a lot to cater for, when counting Austrain
Pastries, but was a vanishingly small number when it came to
counting the number of ways that their gene's could combine, or
indeed, just the time it would take to fly to the stats in the
relativistically challenged Wright Brothers' phantastic new
machine.
What fun. All the fun of the fair. And with Alan's new infinite
wheel of fortune (or non-deterministic mill, as he rather strangely
called it), even if God didn't, Albert would be playing Dice once
more.
of course, all the best stories end after happily, ever tale recursive
Saturday, January 14, 2012
The DNS is not a right. Oh yes It is. Oh no it isn't. Oh yes it is...
There has been a debate in the public recently about this. On the one
hand, the Interweb evangelist for the Houyhnhnms Corporation
has claimed that the DNS is not a right. On the other hand
Lord Waterloo of Sandwich has claimed that it is. On the other hand (if
you're a monkey like me) I claim this is just a bit more subtle than
either of these thinly disguised gentlemen admit.
Cory Doctorow of Boing-Boing fame has made a passionate plea
to comprehend the nature of arbitrary restrictions that various
agencies are trying to impose on General Computing, and, by extension,
on the end-to-end services of the Internet, in the name of Security or
DRM.
See this link for the video of his talk
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-purp.html
at the Chaos Computer Convention at the end of 2011.
The core of his argument is that computers embody Turing machines,
which of course are, as Alan Turing pointed out, capable of arbitrary
computations. Placing extreme (e.g. remove any arbitrary recursion or iteration, or simply remove ability to re-programme) restrictions on these (reducing them to a mere
appliance capable of a single task) throws away their fundamental
value (adaptability/shared use). Anything less in restriction will
always be surmountable.
By analogy, the Internet is the most general form of communications
network one can envisage. The famous hour-glass model partly illustrates this. Previous attempts by vested interests (i.e. telcos) to control the vertical stack led to stovepipe monopolies with a tip of a pyramid. By contrast, the narrow waist of the hourglass allows arbitrary channels below, and an arbitrary inverted pyramid (a very wide divergence) of heterogeneous applications above.
Recently, various aberrations caused both by bad luck (lack of IPv4 address space) and bad design (lack of decent end system security) have appeared in the deployed internet. Because the core must still maintain some end-to-end services, workarounds for these aberrations (NATs, Firewalls, other broken-middle-boxes) always manage to appear. As (I believe) J. Noel Chiappa once said,
the Internet will route around damage.
So the only way that the Internet can be restricted as a right is to
make it a narrow pyramid structure rather than an hour glass - i.e.
remove the "Turing Complete" nature of the service.
Now, there are arguments for the agencies policing laws and carrying out intelligence services doing various things on the net to make sure that other human rights are not abused. However, these do not require the stunning of the Internet technology so that it can't provide an arbitrary range of technical communication activities. Such laws (and ethics) require those agencies to look at what people say (write) and do, in the same way they always have. And the require all of us as users to behave responsibly too.
So why have I titled this piece "The DNS is not a right". Well because
this is a reductio ad absurdum. It is well known that one of the most
extreme ways to route around damage is to run IP over DNS queries and
build a DNS server that de-capsulates the (Unicoded) IP packet from
the DNS Lookup and forwards it on native. To remove this capablity
would require an agency to own all the DNS servers in the world. Or to
remove the DNS itself.
To illustrate another aspect of the problem, lets think about
TCP-friendliness. TCP-friendliness is not a right. That is true -
you can send traffic in an uncontrolled way. However, pretty soon,
your ISP might disconnect you. or charge you a lot of money. Its not
that you can't send TCP-unfriendly traffic. Its just irresponsible.
And that's no joke.
You'll notice that I have not gone on to discuss different
notions of what a "right" is. There are some pretty important, but
subtle differences between what is considered a right in the
Bill of Rights that the US employs, versus other notions of Universal Human Rights such as those in the
UN declaration on same topic. US rights are operationally encoded
in the constitution, and crucially controlled by a set of checks and
balances. These are sufficient to understand that the same approach
can be taken to providing a TCP-friendly, Human Readably Named
Internet, that can embody the abstract notion of the Right to
communicate freely with whomsoever we wish on any subject they care to
hear about, in a concrete technology that is the communications
equivalent of a Turing Complete Difference Engine.
Reference
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
hand, the Interweb evangelist for the Houyhnhnms Corporation
has claimed that the DNS is not a right. On the other hand
Lord Waterloo of Sandwich has claimed that it is. On the other hand (if
you're a monkey like me) I claim this is just a bit more subtle than
either of these thinly disguised gentlemen admit.
Cory Doctorow of Boing-Boing fame has made a passionate plea
to comprehend the nature of arbitrary restrictions that various
agencies are trying to impose on General Computing, and, by extension,
on the end-to-end services of the Internet, in the name of Security or
DRM.
See this link for the video of his talk
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-purp.html
at the Chaos Computer Convention at the end of 2011.
The core of his argument is that computers embody Turing machines,
which of course are, as Alan Turing pointed out, capable of arbitrary
computations. Placing extreme (e.g. remove any arbitrary recursion or iteration, or simply remove ability to re-programme) restrictions on these (reducing them to a mere
appliance capable of a single task) throws away their fundamental
value (adaptability/shared use). Anything less in restriction will
always be surmountable.
By analogy, the Internet is the most general form of communications
network one can envisage. The famous hour-glass model partly illustrates this. Previous attempts by vested interests (i.e. telcos) to control the vertical stack led to stovepipe monopolies with a tip of a pyramid. By contrast, the narrow waist of the hourglass allows arbitrary channels below, and an arbitrary inverted pyramid (a very wide divergence) of heterogeneous applications above.
Recently, various aberrations caused both by bad luck (lack of IPv4 address space) and bad design (lack of decent end system security) have appeared in the deployed internet. Because the core must still maintain some end-to-end services, workarounds for these aberrations (NATs, Firewalls, other broken-middle-boxes) always manage to appear. As (I believe) J. Noel Chiappa once said,
the Internet will route around damage.
So the only way that the Internet can be restricted as a right is to
make it a narrow pyramid structure rather than an hour glass - i.e.
remove the "Turing Complete" nature of the service.
Now, there are arguments for the agencies policing laws and carrying out intelligence services doing various things on the net to make sure that other human rights are not abused. However, these do not require the stunning of the Internet technology so that it can't provide an arbitrary range of technical communication activities. Such laws (and ethics) require those agencies to look at what people say (write) and do, in the same way they always have. And the require all of us as users to behave responsibly too.
So why have I titled this piece "The DNS is not a right". Well because
this is a reductio ad absurdum. It is well known that one of the most
extreme ways to route around damage is to run IP over DNS queries and
build a DNS server that de-capsulates the (Unicoded) IP packet from
the DNS Lookup and forwards it on native. To remove this capablity
would require an agency to own all the DNS servers in the world. Or to
remove the DNS itself.
To illustrate another aspect of the problem, lets think about
TCP-friendliness. TCP-friendliness is not a right. That is true -
you can send traffic in an uncontrolled way. However, pretty soon,
your ISP might disconnect you. or charge you a lot of money. Its not
that you can't send TCP-unfriendly traffic. Its just irresponsible.
And that's no joke.
You'll notice that I have not gone on to discuss different
notions of what a "right" is. There are some pretty important, but
subtle differences between what is considered a right in the
Bill of Rights that the US employs, versus other notions of Universal Human Rights such as those in the
UN declaration on same topic. US rights are operationally encoded
in the constitution, and crucially controlled by a set of checks and
balances. These are sufficient to understand that the same approach
can be taken to providing a TCP-friendly, Human Readably Named
Internet, that can embody the abstract notion of the Right to
communicate freely with whomsoever we wish on any subject they care to
hear about, in a concrete technology that is the communications
equivalent of a Turing Complete Difference Engine.
Reference
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
some SF MS found in a 3rd party cookie
1. Cache
boy from a primative tribe is playing in the woods and finds a
strange bulbous hand sized box which, when knobs are pushed, shows
funny poictures and sounds on the screen.....
after years of this, one day the battery falkls out (of the soloar
panel wears out) and the words "Psion 5a NC" fade for ever
the young man and his memories are now the sole remaining wireless web
Cache active on the planet
2. Stability
A tribe worship the route of all things, the ring that binds them,
the end to endless truth, but they get blackholed by a passing gibson
3. the end 2 end and hop by hop principles of go-betweens, young
lovers and their triangles
4.Connectivity
rashevskys number is the number of possible neural interconnects
in the human brain (permutations) - it is more than enough to number
al the atoms in the known universe and give their (floating in the
sky, point-less) position to the nearest heartbeat or caress, but not
both at the same time
Seven, 7, is the number of people it takes to reach across the human
population from any hermit to any recluse, mailman by rider, pony
express by next door neighbour
what have these two numbers in common except this story?
5. The Protocols of the Elders of ARPA, wearing Mitres, walking tall,
and Society of Blind CIDRs have written, on whatever it is that they
write it on up there, that
wot is writ is rot
wot is done is achieved
and what is recorded is restored
but never can the PCBs and TCP
be removed from the O-Zone
6. A Moo, is an ever changing world of the imaginmation, limited only
by your vocabulary and syntax ....
for many years, one moo sings louder and brighter than all others
and is a focus of strange attraction....one set of interactors become
the high priests of virtual personality fashion...
one day, the participants discover that in fact, they are all also
working in the day at the same chicken factory, canning mutant
salmonella (a safe, and highly nutritious form of something that used
to plague the poultry industry, until they reversed the role of
disease and foodstuff)....
7. statelessness is next to godliness
after e-mail, f-mail
f-mail is fumigated, and powered by certificates, but people develope
a yen for a new form of mail, c-mail. c-mail is clean, and uses only a
working set of 300 words, all harmless...
one day, the world is invaded by aliens, who have no trouble taking
over because noone can remember the word for
boy from a primative tribe is playing in the woods and finds a
strange bulbous hand sized box which, when knobs are pushed, shows
funny poictures and sounds on the screen.....
after years of this, one day the battery falkls out (of the soloar
panel wears out) and the words "Psion 5a NC" fade for ever
the young man and his memories are now the sole remaining wireless web
Cache active on the planet
2. Stability
A tribe worship the route of all things, the ring that binds them,
the end to endless truth, but they get blackholed by a passing gibson
3. the end 2 end and hop by hop principles of go-betweens, young
lovers and their triangles
4.Connectivity
rashevskys number is the number of possible neural interconnects
in the human brain (permutations) - it is more than enough to number
al the atoms in the known universe and give their (floating in the
sky, point-less) position to the nearest heartbeat or caress, but not
both at the same time
Seven, 7, is the number of people it takes to reach across the human
population from any hermit to any recluse, mailman by rider, pony
express by next door neighbour
what have these two numbers in common except this story?
5. The Protocols of the Elders of ARPA, wearing Mitres, walking tall,
and Society of Blind CIDRs have written, on whatever it is that they
write it on up there, that
wot is writ is rot
wot is done is achieved
and what is recorded is restored
but never can the PCBs and TCP
be removed from the O-Zone
6. A Moo, is an ever changing world of the imaginmation, limited only
by your vocabulary and syntax ....
for many years, one moo sings louder and brighter than all others
and is a focus of strange attraction....one set of interactors become
the high priests of virtual personality fashion...
one day, the participants discover that in fact, they are all also
working in the day at the same chicken factory, canning mutant
salmonella (a safe, and highly nutritious form of something that used
to plague the poultry industry, until they reversed the role of
disease and foodstuff)....
7. statelessness is next to godliness
after e-mail, f-mail
f-mail is fumigated, and powered by certificates, but people develope
a yen for a new form of mail, c-mail. c-mail is clean, and uses only a
working set of 300 words, all harmless...
one day, the world is invaded by aliens, who have no trouble taking
over because noone can remember the word for
Saturday, November 12, 2011
Cyverjaw - The Real Challenges
Yesterday I went to a fascinating event organised by the CSAP and students organisation, Conenctions - at http://dcsa.dar.cam.ac.uk/info/talks-lectures/connections/
In the talks, the speakers outlined their various views of the challenges - current mainstream dogma is split between the view that cyberwarfare takes place in a new dimension (not just land, sea or air), and the view that it is an additional aspect to the existing dimensions. This is real naval gazing (pun intended). For me, you need to consider the real, potential attacks, countermeasures, and whether you can even recognize cyberwar as such at all - so for example:...
You finally realized the fact that we are in the midst of World War III, and its a Cyberwar - the characteristic signature of a cyberwar is that you can't identify the assailant, and you probably wont get a chance to retaliate. So who bought down the government of iceland,force portugal, italty and gree to form governments of unity against the wish of the democratic peoples' majorities, imposed austerity...its budgets on half of the richest area of the world (the EU) causing unemployment to rise (hence wages to fall) at no risk to themselves? persons unknown in the IMF and the international globalized financial services community are running roughshod over sovereign states. This has all the hallmarks of warfare. so why aren't nation states fighting back? well, the Icelandic people did, but that's it. the Greeks tried, and failed. Not too big to fail: democracy. you know, communism fell before capitalism. Now we are all Chinese.
Some more thoughts:
1. you wake up tomorrow and your phone, radio, tv, internet dont work.
what are you going to do? what is your backup net? what is your reboot
plan? have you even tested how you would cold start everything safely.
2. what if the chinese already launched a cyberwar on Europe, and
bought down the Icelandic, Greek and Italian government by economic
market manipulation? how would you tell? who would you pin it on? how
would you retaliate (if at all)? Globalization trumps democracy, and allows a few small non-accountable agencies to override nation states' populations wishes.
3. the interconnectedness of everything (pace, douglas adams and dirk gently)
means that we live in ahypergrap$a(the hypernet, if you like) -
Once we had separate networks, now we have
information systems all connected to communications systems and to
banking systems. Now what if we connect them to things (sensors+
actuators) - for example, heating, lighting/ac systems are connected
to the net. energy systems are connected to the net. we have a
hypergraph where information and action flows over the system -we
understand how software and content update, and viruses flow over
the internet. we under stand how power flows from generators to
consumers via the grid. we understand how vehicles flow over
transport networks. Now link them. what do we understand? how
Frank Kelly's models of the internet interact with David Mackay's
models of the energy systems, interact with road systems and food
chains? I don't think so. this would represent several PhDs efforts
alone.
The body of network science (aka internet science, or web science) now is quite large and provides a tool chain from graph theory, diffusion/percolation/edpidemic/gossip processes, control theory, and other modelling, and a plethora of papers that show practical application of these models, not just to describe and understand processes in graphs (including games/markets/opinion dyanmics, graph growth/shrinkage) but also to design rules (e.g. agent behaviours) to achieve goals (viral marketting, distributed, reactive innoculation of software against malware, analysis of week spots, etc etc)...
We'd need economists and epidemiolgists in the loop too....
Some other thoughts from the meeting:
1. we should have a law requiring reporting of attachs similar to the notion of "Notifiable diseases" (highly infections, high mortailty)
2.We need a treaty that controls selling people weapons (e.g. population surveillance tools) but allows selling defensive measures (firewalls, IDS, and anonymizer technology like TOR).
3. We need treaties immediately that tell our allies, if they are attacked and turn off their external Internet, please don't turn off our defnses (e.g. Windows, Apple IOS, Cisco IOS, Linux, Blackberry and other software updates all run over CDNs rooted in the US - if the US was to disable external access (and it could easily do this at Internet Exchange Points), we'd cease to get bug fixes at the moment when we most need them - the UK (and anyone else, but thats there problem) should factor this in to the NATO (or the UK-US special relationship) immediately.
In the talks, the speakers outlined their various views of the challenges - current mainstream dogma is split between the view that cyberwarfare takes place in a new dimension (not just land, sea or air), and the view that it is an additional aspect to the existing dimensions. This is real naval gazing (pun intended). For me, you need to consider the real, potential attacks, countermeasures, and whether you can even recognize cyberwar as such at all - so for example:...
You finally realized the fact that we are in the midst of World War III, and its a Cyberwar - the characteristic signature of a cyberwar is that you can't identify the assailant, and you probably wont get a chance to retaliate. So who bought down the government of iceland,force portugal, italty and gree to form governments of unity against the wish of the democratic peoples' majorities, imposed austerity...its budgets on half of the richest area of the world (the EU) causing unemployment to rise (hence wages to fall) at no risk to themselves? persons unknown in the IMF and the international globalized financial services community are running roughshod over sovereign states. This has all the hallmarks of warfare. so why aren't nation states fighting back? well, the Icelandic people did, but that's it. the Greeks tried, and failed. Not too big to fail: democracy. you know, communism fell before capitalism. Now we are all Chinese.
Some more thoughts:
1. you wake up tomorrow and your phone, radio, tv, internet dont work.
what are you going to do? what is your backup net? what is your reboot
plan? have you even tested how you would cold start everything safely.
2. what if the chinese already launched a cyberwar on Europe, and
bought down the Icelandic, Greek and Italian government by economic
market manipulation? how would you tell? who would you pin it on? how
would you retaliate (if at all)? Globalization trumps democracy, and allows a few small non-accountable agencies to override nation states' populations wishes.
3. the interconnectedness of everything (pace, douglas adams and dirk gently)
means that we live in ahypergrap$a(the hypernet, if you like) -
Once we had separate networks, now we have
information systems all connected to communications systems and to
banking systems. Now what if we connect them to things (sensors+
actuators) - for example, heating, lighting/ac systems are connected
to the net. energy systems are connected to the net. we have a
hypergraph where information and action flows over the system -we
understand how software and content update, and viruses flow over
the internet. we under stand how power flows from generators to
consumers via the grid. we understand how vehicles flow over
transport networks. Now link them. what do we understand? how
Frank Kelly's models of the internet interact with David Mackay's
models of the energy systems, interact with road systems and food
chains? I don't think so. this would represent several PhDs efforts
alone.
The body of network science (aka internet science, or web science) now is quite large and provides a tool chain from graph theory, diffusion/percolation/edpidemic/gossip processes, control theory, and other modelling, and a plethora of papers that show practical application of these models, not just to describe and understand processes in graphs (including games/markets/opinion dyanmics, graph growth/shrinkage) but also to design rules (e.g. agent behaviours) to achieve goals (viral marketting, distributed, reactive innoculation of software against malware, analysis of week spots, etc etc)...
We'd need economists and epidemiolgists in the loop too....
Some other thoughts from the meeting:
1. we should have a law requiring reporting of attachs similar to the notion of "Notifiable diseases" (highly infections, high mortailty)
2.We need a treaty that controls selling people weapons (e.g. population surveillance tools) but allows selling defensive measures (firewalls, IDS, and anonymizer technology like TOR).
3. We need treaties immediately that tell our allies, if they are attacked and turn off their external Internet, please don't turn off our defnses (e.g. Windows, Apple IOS, Cisco IOS, Linux, Blackberry and other software updates all run over CDNs rooted in the US - if the US was to disable external access (and it could easily do this at Internet Exchange Points), we'd cease to get bug fixes at the moment when we most need them - the UK (and anyone else, but thats there problem) should factor this in to the NATO (or the UK-US special relationship) immediately.
Saturday, October 01, 2011
Attention Definict Social Disorder
We note that facebook (reported in recent F8 conf) are moving from "status" to "timeline" (presumably to better align with the mobile/twitter style user experience).
This means that even less will we be "blogging" (a la web log, a la old-school diary, in its ancient, worth, respectable and useful way of making our memories both more persistent and more personal), but we will be instead, merely living in the moment.
This is a diabolical imposition of global amnesia - just as the WWW obliterated all memories of "stuff" pre 1992 (until some heroic efforts by various archivists to scan/ocr/upload as much history as possible fixed that), this threatens to obfuscate everything from more than 3 minutes ago with a flood of social trivia.
It will be like collective alzheimers - imagine 500M people suddenly living like Memento!
This means that even less will we be "blogging" (a la web log, a la old-school diary, in its ancient, worth, respectable and useful way of making our memories both more persistent and more personal), but we will be instead, merely living in the moment.
This is a diabolical imposition of global amnesia - just as the WWW obliterated all memories of "stuff" pre 1992 (until some heroic efforts by various archivists to scan/ocr/upload as much history as possible fixed that), this threatens to obfuscate everything from more than 3 minutes ago with a flood of social trivia.
It will be like collective alzheimers - imagine 500M people suddenly living like Memento!
Tuesday, August 02, 2011
TSB KTN Future Internet Report
The Technology Strategy Board has a Knowledge Transfer Network in ICT and it has a Future Internet Strategy Group which published a little noticed report on the "Future Internet" in May 2011 - there's been a lot more meetings of the TSB and its new
TIC (Technology and Innovation Centers). It is a bit of a mystery why these are not one and the samew with the three Digital Economy Hubs created a couple of years back such as Horizon, since those have a lot of industry traction already, but there yo ugo - joined up government seems like another oxymoron for our times.
See articles here and the report itself for background.
For me the report fails to deliver 3 things one would hope for, even in a white paper format such as this.
1. There is no coherent list of challenges which the UK specifically has the knowledge and skill base and economic frameworks to deliver - the DE Hubs all have lists of comanies they work with or would like to - these come with lists of size of companies, profits, employees, etc - this is the sort of thing we'd need in an actual government policy document on future UK internet strategy.
2. there is a mix of level of detail (e.g. mixing up comments on needs for IPv6 with comments on capacity needs for HD video, with vague generalities like "Internet of People and Things" and "Machine2Machine" networking. These are completely different layers of ideas and have quite different constituencies - the IPv6 deployment is a totally different beast from the need of the BBC and Sky for Internet capacity fo HD video. and there is absolutely no notion of the problems of latency for M2M or estimation of the (almost certainly very low) capacity needs for the Internet of Things.
3. Crucially, though, there is no real attempt to make the future
a) Real
or
b) Personal
a) Making the Future Internet Real - lets look at what the UK is good at - we have:
i) good infrastructures for many things
ii) very good software businesses in games, entertainment (graphics, CGI, etc)
iii) very good software businesses in middleware and applications for cloud, web and mobile devices
iv) lots of bio medical and medical instrument outfits
These first three are distribtued over very very many tiny companies (cottage industry) - don't let that fool you - some people estimate as many as 500,000 people, earning a LOT of money (and a lot of UK GDP)
v) a few specialized and vital largeish companies in aerospace and in mictoprocessors (BAe Systems and ARM)
What we don't have is an innovative telecom sector (please do not mention BT or Vodafone here ever:)
We do have the very fine BBC (and their shrinking but excellent research wing....)
So if one was to do this properly, there'd be a brealdown by Sector and by Opportunity (and risk/strength/weakness, if you like SWOT analyses)
Sector:\Opportunity: Optimisation, Behaviour Change, Analogy, Replacement, Other
Transport x y z w q
Energy
Education
Health
Entertainment
Retail/wholesale
Defense a b c d e
etc
So for example, can we use a future internet to optimise transport (obviously, both in terms of efficiency and in terms of safety). Can we usea future internet as an alternative to transport - yes, obviously video conf, teleworking etc
Or can we change people's behaviour in energy use using the Internet - of course we can
Or can we alter a utility (e.g. the energy grid) by analogy with the Internet (yes, we could, if we think of microgeneration and a p2p network instead of a centralised energy production system with a distribution net). See Keshav's work on energy systems for example
b) Making it personal
The biggest problem facing all these wonderful synergies of convergence and removal of silos that everyone mentions in these TSB docs is the personal
Here the problems are many, but are beautifully covered by the Digital Economy hubs (see dot rural and
horizon just for example), dealing with
accessibility,
digital divide
privacy and personal footprints
Most of the challenges of convergence are (as was discussed by the Communications CMI project with MIT and Cambridge for 5 years) not purely technological - so in a) we've looked at the tech side and in b) the DE hubs are looking at the human interface to the tech, the context- the reasons why pie-in-the-skie ideas like Tony Blair's broken NHS cradle to grave centralised database for personal health records was doomed from day 1. But what could (in a Future Internet true decentralised philosophical, technical and human centered way) work properly to achieve a coherent and affordable and sustainable vision.
So, TSB, Marks out of 10? I'd say 3 for effort.
TIC (Technology and Innovation Centers). It is a bit of a mystery why these are not one and the samew with the three Digital Economy Hubs created a couple of years back such as Horizon, since those have a lot of industry traction already, but there yo ugo - joined up government seems like another oxymoron for our times.
See articles here and the report itself for background.
For me the report fails to deliver 3 things one would hope for, even in a white paper format such as this.
1. There is no coherent list of challenges which the UK specifically has the knowledge and skill base and economic frameworks to deliver - the DE Hubs all have lists of comanies they work with or would like to - these come with lists of size of companies, profits, employees, etc - this is the sort of thing we'd need in an actual government policy document on future UK internet strategy.
2. there is a mix of level of detail (e.g. mixing up comments on needs for IPv6 with comments on capacity needs for HD video, with vague generalities like "Internet of People and Things" and "Machine2Machine" networking. These are completely different layers of ideas and have quite different constituencies - the IPv6 deployment is a totally different beast from the need of the BBC and Sky for Internet capacity fo HD video. and there is absolutely no notion of the problems of latency for M2M or estimation of the (almost certainly very low) capacity needs for the Internet of Things.
3. Crucially, though, there is no real attempt to make the future
a) Real
or
b) Personal
a) Making the Future Internet Real - lets look at what the UK is good at - we have:
i) good infrastructures for many things
ii) very good software businesses in games, entertainment (graphics, CGI, etc)
iii) very good software businesses in middleware and applications for cloud, web and mobile devices
iv) lots of bio medical and medical instrument outfits
These first three are distribtued over very very many tiny companies (cottage industry) - don't let that fool you - some people estimate as many as 500,000 people, earning a LOT of money (and a lot of UK GDP)
v) a few specialized and vital largeish companies in aerospace and in mictoprocessors (BAe Systems and ARM)
What we don't have is an innovative telecom sector (please do not mention BT or Vodafone here ever:)
We do have the very fine BBC (and their shrinking but excellent research wing....)
So if one was to do this properly, there'd be a brealdown by Sector and by Opportunity (and risk/strength/weakness, if you like SWOT analyses)
Sector:\Opportunity: Optimisation, Behaviour Change, Analogy, Replacement, Other
Transport x y z w q
Energy
Education
Health
Entertainment
Retail/wholesale
Defense a b c d e
etc
So for example, can we use a future internet to optimise transport (obviously, both in terms of efficiency and in terms of safety). Can we usea future internet as an alternative to transport - yes, obviously video conf, teleworking etc
Or can we change people's behaviour in energy use using the Internet - of course we can
Or can we alter a utility (e.g. the energy grid) by analogy with the Internet (yes, we could, if we think of microgeneration and a p2p network instead of a centralised energy production system with a distribution net). See Keshav's work on energy systems for example
b) Making it personal
The biggest problem facing all these wonderful synergies of convergence and removal of silos that everyone mentions in these TSB docs is the personal
Here the problems are many, but are beautifully covered by the Digital Economy hubs (see dot rural and
horizon just for example), dealing with
accessibility,
digital divide
privacy and personal footprints
Most of the challenges of convergence are (as was discussed by the Communications CMI project with MIT and Cambridge for 5 years) not purely technological - so in a) we've looked at the tech side and in b) the DE hubs are looking at the human interface to the tech, the context- the reasons why pie-in-the-skie ideas like Tony Blair's broken NHS cradle to grave centralised database for personal health records was doomed from day 1. But what could (in a Future Internet true decentralised philosophical, technical and human centered way) work properly to achieve a coherent and affordable and sustainable vision.
So, TSB, Marks out of 10? I'd say 3 for effort.
Saturday, June 04, 2011
crowdsourcing the source of the german e-coli outbreak - and finding friends
So i am trying to find someone I knew in france in the 1970s who went by the unlikely first name of Bronte (aka bobo) and looked like this
meanwhile, the source (not spanish cucumbers) of the german awful E-Coli outbreak seems to defeat traditional CDC methods - html>here's a note on why crowdsourcing isn't quite as easy as you might think
for me, the telling point is the 8 day incuation - that means the trail of data you have to look through is huge - on the other hand perhaps looking at location of users' search terms on google might help (and see how many of these people do online shopping - out of 2000, a lot must come from households where one could get that data)
note: privacy is not an issue in a notifiable disease outbreak..in most countries
meanwhile, the source (not spanish cucumbers) of the german awful E-Coli outbreak seems to defeat traditional CDC methods - html>here's a note on why crowdsourcing isn't quite as easy as you might think
for me, the telling point is the 8 day incuation - that means the trail of data you have to look through is huge - on the other hand perhaps looking at location of users' search terms on google might help (and see how many of these people do online shopping - out of 2000, a lot must come from households where one could get that data)
note: privacy is not an issue in a notifiable disease outbreak..in most countries
Monday, December 20, 2010
Slow Start and Congestion Control for a Snowbound day
I am supposed to be en route to paris via the normally excellent and affordable Eurostar train. As it happens there has been some quite awful weather including temperatues hitting -10C on the northen french bit of the route yesterday, so there were some speed restrictions and some problems with trackside kit etc etc - this is not unreasonable, except that it is probably one of the busiest weekends in the year.
I'm guessing that during a normal holiday day,
they haveabout 6 operational trains on london<->paris,
given there's about 1 train an hour and
its 2.5 hours + buffer/turnaround...
So yesterday, what we had here could be modelled as a massive TCP
congestion event (rather than packet loss, we got train loss)
with > 1/2 a windows worth of trains cancelled, plus a sudden increase in RTT.
So now today (correctly) the window is down to 1 train per RTT,
whichis 6 times less than normal, and slow start is happening,
so in about ln(6) (say 3) RTTs we'll be back up to speed -
so thats 18 hrs.
In that time, some of the latent demand will fade
(people like me probably cancel trip as we have no alernative,
or some people postpone (e.g. "cancel christmas" or "convert to Islam", since they seem to get less snow, or
perhaps find alternative...
If i was desperate, I'd use this old
Boat Train service, although the crossing might be pretty dreadful at this time of year.
There don't appear to be any flights from anywhere today, and practically none tomorrow either.
I'm guessing that during a normal holiday day,
they haveabout 6 operational trains on london<->paris,
given there's about 1 train an hour and
its 2.5 hours + buffer/turnaround...
So yesterday, what we had here could be modelled as a massive TCP
congestion event (rather than packet loss, we got train loss)
with > 1/2 a windows worth of trains cancelled, plus a sudden increase in RTT.
So now today (correctly) the window is down to 1 train per RTT,
whichis 6 times less than normal, and slow start is happening,
so in about ln(6) (say 3) RTTs we'll be back up to speed -
so thats 18 hrs.
In that time, some of the latent demand will fade
(people like me probably cancel trip as we have no alernative,
or some people postpone (e.g. "cancel christmas" or "convert to Islam", since they seem to get less snow, or
perhaps find alternative...
If i was desperate, I'd use this old
Boat Train service, although the crossing might be pretty dreadful at this time of year.
There don't appear to be any flights from anywhere today, and practically none tomorrow either.
Friday, December 17, 2010
A New Internet Theory
As many of you know,
I have been striving to apply a number of more
scientific approaches to networking in general,
and the Internet specifically.
To this end, I ended up teaching the final year
undergrads this year
(who of course may not be as final as they think
given the impending part III option)
a whole bunch of underpinning theories, including
Information, Graph, Control, Queueing, and Optimisation
Now, these are all fine theories,
but they all have the twin massive disadvantages of:
1. being to hard to apply in any realistic scenario
2, being empirically falsifiable
What we need truly to model the Internet is a
simple, powerful, and incotrovertable Grand Unified Theory -
in Physics, they have such a theory and it is String.
So can we apply string theory to the Internet?
Yes, I think we can.
Firstly, obviosuly, the Internet looks a lot like string.
But (as physicists like doing) we can play cats cradle with the string.
Thus we can model the static and dyanmical evolution of the Internet
Lopology.
Closed Loops of string could be used to model packets.
Forwarding packets would be like "throwing someone a line".
Indeed, fowarding table entries, Link State Advertisement packets, AS
Path announcements, and packets themselves would all be elegantly
caputured using the same flixible little ring-like structure.
Elasticity ("how long is a piece of string" == QoS)
can finally be used to model traffic control and pricing
in a pleasingly coherent way.
String is a veryful thing in models.
Although Robust Operational Parameterized Estimators
are thicker, string is very quick to apply. And of course it
can offer a perfectly good model for multiplexing, as well as
giving straightforward explantory and predictive techniques for
understanding Kandinsky Network Operational Tantrums
which have resisted all previous analysis.
If nothing else,
when under persistent cyberattack,
the whole Internet unravels,
we can use the residue to help
wrap up christmas presents.
I shall be working on this over the break
and hope to bring convincing results
back from the brink in the new year.
I have been striving to apply a number of more
scientific approaches to networking in general,
and the Internet specifically.
To this end, I ended up teaching the final year
undergrads this year
(who of course may not be as final as they think
given the impending part III option)
a whole bunch of underpinning theories, including
Information, Graph, Control, Queueing, and Optimisation
Now, these are all fine theories,
but they all have the twin massive disadvantages of:
1. being to hard to apply in any realistic scenario
2, being empirically falsifiable
What we need truly to model the Internet is a
simple, powerful, and incotrovertable Grand Unified Theory -
in Physics, they have such a theory and it is String.
So can we apply string theory to the Internet?
Yes, I think we can.
Firstly, obviosuly, the Internet looks a lot like string.
But (as physicists like doing) we can play cats cradle with the string.
Thus we can model the static and dyanmical evolution of the Internet
Lopology.
Closed Loops of string could be used to model packets.
Forwarding packets would be like "throwing someone a line".
Indeed, fowarding table entries, Link State Advertisement packets, AS
Path announcements, and packets themselves would all be elegantly
caputured using the same flixible little ring-like structure.
Elasticity ("how long is a piece of string" == QoS)
can finally be used to model traffic control and pricing
in a pleasingly coherent way.
String is a veryful thing in models.
Although Robust Operational Parameterized Estimators
are thicker, string is very quick to apply. And of course it
can offer a perfectly good model for multiplexing, as well as
giving straightforward explantory and predictive techniques for
understanding Kandinsky Network Operational Tantrums
which have resisted all previous analysis.
If nothing else,
when under persistent cyberattack,
the whole Internet unravels,
we can use the residue to help
wrap up christmas presents.
I shall be working on this over the break
and hope to bring convincing results
back from the brink in the new year.
Friday, November 26, 2010
The Terrible Internet Buffer Overrun Disaster of 2012
Jim Gettys was visiting here recently and we spent most of the day discussing the terrible Buffer Overrun Disaster of 2012 - Young folks probably wont remember this, but back in those days, we used to overprovision buffers everywhere, and I mean everywhere, even between a socket and a protocol wrench, a bolt and a spanner , and the nick and the stack. This meant TCPs all around the world would get all pumped up and full of themselves, which was ok when there were just those old internet creeks which you couldn't fit a paper boat down, but as soon as the floodgates opened on the old fiber to the hip, everything went pearshaped, and I mean without a paddle.
The congestive flu-like collapse of 1987 was as nothing to this - noone could get their mutter feeds, everyone was stalled on their 3HDIPTV Christmas participatory viewing of Avatar III, and the world economy tanked, again.
This was a classic xen-koan story - less is more - by simply introducing the deliberate-memory-leak virus in her TCP-Budapest, Magda (von) Kiss was able to "take out" all that unnecessary buffering at one swell foop. Later upgrades to the hardware recovered the now-wasted DRAM, and recycled it as Casino tokens in Vegas and Reno, closing the loop on a very, very old joke.
The congestive flu-like collapse of 1987 was as nothing to this - noone could get their mutter feeds, everyone was stalled on their 3HDIPTV Christmas participatory viewing of Avatar III, and the world economy tanked, again.
This was a classic xen-koan story - less is more - by simply introducing the deliberate-memory-leak virus in her TCP-Budapest, Magda (von) Kiss was able to "take out" all that unnecessary buffering at one swell foop. Later upgrades to the hardware recovered the now-wasted DRAM, and recycled it as Casino tokens in Vegas and Reno, closing the loop on a very, very old joke.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Homeopathetic Order Logic
HOL proposes some proof techniques based on the dysmal logic, but extending it to include
proof by dilution (e.g. the 7% solution)
proof by inflation (a universal technique)
proof by surprise (creep up on the proof and exclaim)
proof by diabolization (a fiendish geometric technique)
proof by familiarity ("our old friend...")
proof by indignation ("how can you not realize...")
proof by deformation (if we just twist this a bit here...)
proof by defamation (oh, your one of those people)
proof by descent
proof by geology (that's been known since the pre-cambrian era)
Other techniques are also on offer
for example Adenoid's theorem allows the use of a nerdy american accent, while Mellencamp's method entails loud hard rocking, an the Baker's theorem makes repeated use of the equivalence between 12 and thirteen, while La Mirror's method involves deep reflection. Monroe's doctrine is a died-in-the-wool surefire approach for even the dumbest of people. Finally Gillette's Razor can be employed to separate the sheep from the goats.
Recently I was reading Jorge Luis Borges Imaginary Beings, which refers to the 'Celestial Empire of benevolent Knowledge' in which animals are taxonomised thus:
(a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame,
(d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous,
(g) stray dogs,
(h) included in the present classification,
(i) frenzied, (j) innumerable,
(k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
(l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher,
(n) that from a long way off look like flies.
roll over linaeus
much better than Fire, Women and Dangerous Things
proof by dilution (e.g. the 7% solution)
proof by inflation (a universal technique)
proof by surprise (creep up on the proof and exclaim)
proof by diabolization (a fiendish geometric technique)
proof by familiarity ("our old friend...")
proof by indignation ("how can you not realize...")
proof by deformation (if we just twist this a bit here...)
proof by defamation (oh, your one of those people)
proof by descent
proof by geology (that's been known since the pre-cambrian era)
Other techniques are also on offer
for example Adenoid's theorem allows the use of a nerdy american accent, while Mellencamp's method entails loud hard rocking, an the Baker's theorem makes repeated use of the equivalence between 12 and thirteen, while La Mirror's method involves deep reflection. Monroe's doctrine is a died-in-the-wool surefire approach for even the dumbest of people. Finally Gillette's Razor can be employed to separate the sheep from the goats.
Recently I was reading Jorge Luis Borges Imaginary Beings, which refers to the 'Celestial Empire of benevolent Knowledge' in which animals are taxonomised thus:
(a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame,
(d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous,
(g) stray dogs,
(h) included in the present classification,
(i) frenzied, (j) innumerable,
(k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
(l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher,
(n) that from a long way off look like flies.
roll over linaeus
much better than Fire, Women and Dangerous Things
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
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
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
Monday, September 13, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
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)
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)
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
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"....
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"....
Monday, July 19, 2010
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
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
Wednesday, July 07, 2010
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]
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]
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
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
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)
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-
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)
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- jon crowcroft
- misery me, there is a floccipaucinihilipilification (*) of chronsynclastic infundibuli in these parts and I must therefore refer you to frank zappa instead, and go home