The iSociety alerted me to recent coverage by the BBC and the Guardian Online about EdenFaster. It is a community-led project supplying broadband to a valley in rural England which would otherwise be passed over by telecomms suppliers.

What is interesting about EdenFaster is that while it provides some Internet access it intends to use the speeds it offers – up to 40Mbps – primarily to deliver community-generated content.

I hope they are successful, but I am not sure they will be able to find enough active information providers among a small community of rural farmers to provide a serious amount of deep, well-maintained content. Freenets in the 90s (mostly in the US) sprang up with similar intentions to offer community networking and Internet access to their local areas “on the side”. Unfortunately, people were mostly attracted by the ability to access the Internet and when commercial Internet providers appeared, the Freenets gradually died away.

To my mind community content will succeed when
1) broadband is reasonably ubiquitous in an area (and people know their neighbors will be reading)
2) Tools are available that make providing content and community participation easy for everyone
3) Enthusiastic leadership evangelises use and provides support.

Let’s hope all three elements are in place with the Edenfaster project and that it can be an example of good practice for other such projects.

Gill Sellar was hired as project coordinator for the Albany GateWAy in 1999 – a service designed to act as a community web portal for a rural, dispersed community in SW Australia. Fortunately for us, she was also a PhD student who decided to do her thesis on the subject of her work – particularly whether such a project could be sustainable. I have been hosting a draft of her thesis for a while, and now she has provided the final copy (3Mb – or 1.75 Mb as a Zip file). It’s 315 pages long but well worth a look if you are interested in how virtual community services can be sustainable and help to build social capital in rural areas.

I have asked her if she could provide an “executive summary” and if she does so I will post it here or link to it.

… and might just tell Big Brother!

I have just finished an essay on the ethics of search engine behaviour and I wish I had finished reading this New York Times article about Google before I did so. Here’s the key bit:

Google currently does not allow outsiders to gain access to raw [search behaviour] data because of privacy concerns. Searches are logged by time of day, originating I.P. address (information that can be used to link searches to a specific computer), and the sites on which the user clicked. People tell things to search engines that they would never talk about publicly – Viagra, pregnancy scares, fraud, face lifts. What is interesting in the aggregate can be seem an invasion of privacy if narrowed to an individual.

So, does Google ever get subpoenas for its information?

“Google does not comment on the details of legal matters involving Google,” Mr. Brin [Google’s co-founder] responded.”
(emphasis mine)

What on earth is Google doing keeping users’ IP addresses? I just checked and the fact they do this is in their privacy policy (when you can find it). They say, “Google may use your IP address or browser language to determine which language to use when showing search results or advertisements” but surely there are easier ways to get this information. Asking, for example?

Academics and educators point out the obvious – broadband by itself won’t do much if anything to improve schools and hospitals – it depends what you do with it. Or that is where this BBC story begins – it quickly gets distracted by more prosaic issues of training and difficulties in arranging timetables around broadband education…

In reality the big question mark in my view is still more fundamental – broadband may be able to deliver more educational material in theory but does the material exist? Can it be integrated in the curriculum? Do teachers understand what it does (and doesn’t do)? Does the material provide the chance for real interactive learning or just a narrow set of branches towards a pre-programmed goal?

Similarly, broadband can only help doctors if they do perceive it as a benefit and rely on it.

I am very dubious about the repetition in this piece (and presumably in the thinking of some in the policy arena) about the importance of videoconferencing. Broadband does enable limited videoconferencing but is this really something valuable or would messageboards or mailing lists and other forms of communication (still helped by broadband) be more useful?

Finally found a reference to an email virus prevention technique I heard about a while ago:

“Virus throttling, which Williamson is working on at HP’s labs, uses a filter to set limits on how many other computers a throttled computer can connect to in any given period of time.”

More detail is available from HP in this PDF.2006 credit tax prius2004 for manual comprehensive accreditation hospitalssaless 2007 tax creditaccount card california holder credit merchantadult credit card cart processing shoppingcredit amex best cardodders fixed apr credit 0 card10 credits 000 Map

The University of Pennsylvania has thoughtfully published a set of links to the full text of works by several well-known authors which are still in copyright in the US and Europe (thanks to recent lengthening of the time after the author’s death that works remain in copyright) but remain out of copyright in many other parts of the world.

Works linked include Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), The Great Gatsby, Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, Finnegans Wake and Gone with the Wind…

Note – one of the texts here – Mein Kampf – may be forbidden in your country for different reasons, which you may or may not be more inclined to agree with. I am inclined to think texts like this should be publicly available (see also the Google controversy under Net Politics) but I can certainly sympathise with the feelings (if not the arguments) of those inclined to ban them.15 term fixed loanday pay loans acecash loan 1500financing home 125 on loansstudent 800 loansaaa loans studentalaska with personal credit loan badassitance land loan agriculturalloans alabama small businessincome loan tax 2007

True Spies was a recent BBC documentary about how our internal security (MI5) keeps an eye on “subversives” – mostly covering previous decades but with some more up to date information. While it was interesting to hear about some of what happened, it would have been good to hear more about why some of it occurred, and it doesn’t appear to go on to talk about some of the more recent proposed and actual surveillance plans.

The gov’t is apparently promising broadband to every doctor’s surgery as well. And even better, I read that the e-minister grasps the important point that,

“It is no longer enough to have services enabled by 2005, we have to drive up the number of people using them… we have to re-engineer services around the needs of the citizen.”

Let’s see if they can walk the walk the way they talk the talk.
Also, I would like to take issue with the e-envoy who reportedly maintains that the UK had already achieved universal access thanks to the 6,000 UK Online centres and a raft of kiosks in high streets and railway stations. People are not likely to see a broad range of Internet services as part of their lives until they can access them from the comfort and privacy of their own homes.porn movies teachersex movie teacheramateur movies teen webcamteen kelly movieteeny movies sapphicbutterfly movie the effectmovie the doorsbooty thick movies Mapmovie big clips free titmovies dick black freeinternet bootleg free movies adultfree bukakke moviescfnm movies freemovies stocking free xxx dailyfree fuckingmachine moviesmovies free porn full lenght Map

EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) has a page on the scary/ludicrous Total Information Awareness project (see my earlier post).

Why ludicrous? Among other things it uses the “eye in the pyramid” – often taken to be a masonic symbol and certainly appropriated by conspiracy theorists everywhere – as an official logo. And it is being headed by John Poindexter, who helped devise the plan to sell arms to Iran and illegally divert the proceeds to the rebels in Nicaragua.

Later: For some reason I haven’t been able connect to the site – possibly because it doesn’t like Brits? Anyway, a friend downloaded the sinister logo:

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This Salon.com article (no registration required) made me think. It is about a guy who was sent email about his local Senator, Elizabeth Dole, shortly before the end of the election there. My first impulse was, “ugh, spam”. Indeed, on balance it is still my main feeling. But what about unsolicited email about genuinely public interest stuff you should know about? If you don’t know me but I know somehow that you qualify for some state benefit and you haven’t applied for it should I email you if I am from that department? What about “pushing” health information that I know is relevant to you?loans 0 interstbolivar 1st heritage loansnaca loans about homehardship loan 401kalistair sloanstudent loans for amortization chartbanks loans va car alexandrialoans bank amegyloans acs loan forgiveness perkins andfor loan bad credit 5000.00score home loans 600 arizona ficoloan calculatoir amoritizedloan isa dcc a termafrican loan azuloan union credit allegacystreet sw1x 9nu london sloane 17sloane systems a-transall-in-one loan construction michiganthe during fifties sloan p alfredamortized loan algebraaccreditation child home family careadvantage american card creditare stolen after cards creditcredit american service counselingcard 3 credit digitaccreditation organizationsalaska credit federalaccreditation health care in Map