Thanks to a house move I have been trapped on dialup at home - at least for the next week or so - and I have been reminded about just how painful using the Internet is when you have to do it at less than 10Kb/s. All Internet users are definitely not equal in their ability to get things done. It has taken me 20 minutes just to check my email and read a minimal number of pages very slowly. By contrast once my broadband is installed, £5/$10 a month will get me a scorching fast (up to) 8Mbps (because it is bundled with my satellite TV). I can hardly wait!

Just found out that the reason my wife’s PC wouldn’t connect to the Internet is that I had entered the WEP password wrongly. But Intel’s software reported a good connection to my router! Would it have been so hard to code in a “physical connection good but password is wrong please try again” dialog box? Billions of blue blistering barnacles!

Later And to compound the annoyance, I nearly thought my connection had broken again but then I realised that if you fix the password on one user account it doesn’t fix it on any of the others. Mightn’t it be a good idea to allow administrators to change all the passwords for wireless access to a given point at the same time?

For ages now I have only been able to connect two of our three computers to the network at the same time (though there were four addresses available via the DHCP server on our Linksys router). So I upgraded the router to the latest software and reconnected everything. The Mac and my desktop connected fine. My wife’s Dell laptop? Blue screen of death with a helpful “driver IRQL not less or equal” message. I upgraded the Intel Pro 2200BG wireless card software in the Dell (which was two years old) but still no joy. Now waiting (in the doghouse) for a call from Dell tech support. I wish I could say this rarely happens but in my experience wireless networking almost never goes smoothly - and if it does, G*d help you if you change anything!

“A home for all your digital media”:http://ourmedia.org/ - for free and forever. A very exciting prospect! See my posting on the LSE group weblog for more details.

I just added a “post about global broadband penetration”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=20 and a few days ago I posted about research on “hit counts as a predictor of the number of citations”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=14 for academic articles published online. There have also been some recent postings by other blog members on “literature reviews”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=13 and the “use of the Internet for politics in the UK”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/index.php?p=18. I have some postings yet to come there about search engines (you should look there for any future information on search engines - especially as one of my colleagues there is studying them for her PhD)…

P.S. If you want an easy-to-remember address for the site (which does not yet have its own ‘proper’ domain) you can get to it by typing “http://get.to/lseblog”:http://get.to/lseblog.

Ethan Zuckerman “posts”:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ethan/2004/06/13#a222 about a thought-provoking lecture by “Guido Sohne”:http://sohne.net/ on the limitations of open source development in Africa. It’s worth reading his whole post but I will just note that Guido suggests open source development is limited in Africa because African programmers are too busy trying to earn a basic living to donate their time to creating open source code. Similarly, providing free wireless Internet access as many are doing as a volunteer effort around the developed world is much more difficult when the cost of providing that access relative to income is much higher in Africa.

In other words a lot of the benevolence we often take for granted online and consider part of the Internet culture actually relies on a certain economic base where programmers have free time and energy to work on projects they consider worthwhile and bandwidth and computing resources are ‘too cheap to meter’.

For a more optimistic view check out Dan Gillmor’s eJournal - Open Source a No-Brainer for Developing World.

Thanks to “Boingboing”:http://boingboing.net/2003_09_01_archive.html#106356200472733745 for the latter link

I wish I had the time to do a proper write-up of the NotCon session I attended featuring Brewster Kahle, the man behind the Internet Archive whose mission is nothing less than to provide universal access to all human knowledge. Here is some stuff I noted instead.

Some interesting factoids from his presentation:

* There are 150,000 people using the Internet Archive per day. It stores 3-400Tb of data and recently upgraded to 1Gbps bandwidth.
* There were 300,000 to 600,000 scrolls in the Library at Alexandria. Only around eight of them are left.
* You can store the contents of the Library of Congress as plaintext (if you had scanned it all) on a machine costing $60,000.
* The bookmobile he produced that is connected to the Internet via satellite, travels the world and produces complete bound books from a collection of 20,000 public domain works cost just $15,000 - and that includes the van itself.
* He says that it costs him $1 to print and bind a public domain book - I assumed the books produced would be very rough and ready but he brought some along and they were almost as good as the kind you’d buy in a shop. I suspect he may be stretching the truth a bit - I believe the $1 a book cost he quotes is for an 100 page black and white printed booklet. It’s still impressive though especially as:
* He notes it costs US libraries $2 to issue a book. He suggests they could give people copies of public domain books for $1 instead and pay another $1 to the author to compensate them.

Like many geniuses he just doesn’t know when to stop and thankfully he has a private income from a dotcom or two he was involved with that enables him to try out lots of projects. Aside from archiving the web, movies, books and music he’s:

* taking the US to court to try to get their boneheaded copyright laws changed
* working on mirrors of his San Francisco-based archive in Alexandria and Amsterdam (hosted there by XS4all)
* encouraging anyone to upload anything to his archive (copyright permitting) offering unlimited bandwidth indefinitely (though the site doesn’t make it very easy to figure out how you are supposed to take advantage of this generous offer) including performance recordings of bands that have given their permission.
* Trying to collect and save old software (he got special dispensation from the US copyright office to do this for the next three years but can’t make it available). He does want your old software however so if you’ve got some he would like you to send it to him - in physical form with manuals where available. He’s even
* Trying to provide fast, free wifi across all of San Francisco.

He’s so hyperactive my fingers get sore just typing in all of the projects he is involved with! I worry that he’s taking on too much and that some of it may fall by the wayside if something happens to him. But his enthusiasm and his optimism are infectious. I am pleased to have been able to shake his hand.

P.S. Ironically, I recorded his presentation and have it in MP3 format but because it was 21Mb I can’t serve it myself and so far nobody has stepped forward to host the file. I finally found how to upload it but then discovered I deleted the original file once I passed it on to someone else to upload! So I hope someone still has them - if it does get posted I’ll tell you where.

According to “CNET”:http://news.com.com/2100-1034_3-5193926.html?tag=nefd.lede The Mayor of Salt Lake City declined to provide support for a plan for an open broadband network infrastructure in the city, saying:

“I just don’t see the social good in using taxpayer money to fund a network that provides more television and bandwidth for illegally downloading files”

Fortunately here in the UK things policy makers are somewhat more receptive…
Thanks to Werblog and “BoingBoing”:http://www.boingboing.net/2004/04/20/mayor_of_salt_lake_c.html for the links.

It’s good to see the UK government has ambitious plans to ensure its citizens have Internet access. Recently British Telecom (responding no doubt to government pressure) announced it will guarantee that all of Britain will have “broadband availability by 2005″:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3276621.stm - possibly to be accomplished using new “radio broadband”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3323681.stm technology it is testing.

More impressive still, it now seems the Government is promising “home access for all”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3320967.stm - ‘every home in the UK should have a connection to online services through a digital network by 2008 - whether through a personal computer, digital television, mobile phone or other device’.

Of course this is not as marvelous a promise as it seems since it is not a commitment to provision of the full Internet - only nebulously-defined ‘online services’ - almost certainly limited at the margins to email and basic government services. It also says nothing about likely user costs or incentives for use (without which the theoretical capacity to connect will likely languish unused in the third of UK households who don’t already have Internet access).

A new neighborhood aimed at young middle class folk in Orange County seem to have benefited from a neighborhood intranet [article in LA Times - requires registration]. It brought people together by giving them an easy way to find common interests and solve common problems (like babysitting) without having to go knock on people’s doors. What is not clear is how beneficial such an intranet would be to existing neighborhoods and to neighborhoods with a mix of rich and poor in the same area.

Thanks to “Keith Hampton”:http://www.mysocialnetwork.net/index2.php?p=37&c=1 for the link (he did an influential academic study of the building of social capital in an earlier experiment outside of Toronto).