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Dale Dougherty's Weblog |
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Tuesday, October 31, 2000 Wireless Ethernet Taking OffThe standard for the wireless ethernet, 802.11b, is really beginning to take off, writes John Markoff in his New Economy column in the New York Times, Airborne and Grass Roots. He writes about having a wireless LAN available at the Agenda conference -- something that was available at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, thanks to the Perl Mongers. True, people sometimes stop paying attention to the program that they've paid for, only to sit doing what they do at their desk.But Markoff is right about wireless Ethernet and the emergence of community wireless LANS, which people are setting up to provide reasonably high speed access into neighborhoods such as SFlan, organized by Brewster Kahle. We've set up a wireless LAN to serve three buildings at O'Reilly, allowing us laptop users to move around, even to the coffee shop across the street. At the recent Intel P2P Working Group meeting, a guy from IBM told me that people are setting up wireless LANs on apartment building near freeways. He said you'll find someone pulled off to the shoulder in areas where they can get access; they read their email before moving on down the road. The wireless ethernet gives us mobility, and once you have it, you can't imagine going back. I've set one up in my home so I can sit anywhere in the house -- or outside -- and be connected. It also means you don't need to re-wire your house to use LAN-based Internet and printing services. The big change in wireless is that the 802.11b standard is finally taking hold in the market. Before you had to buy the PC cards and the access points to be sure they worked. Now you can mix and match these components. At home, I have an Airport card in my daughter's iMac that works with the Wavelan access point. My Wavelan PCMCIA card connects me at home to the network and the same card makes the connection to an encrypted network at the office.
Going wireless has seemed liked the most significant thing that's happened to my computer in years.
Saturday, October 28, 2000 Privacy, Anonymity, Authentication: Udell on SchneierJon Udell succinctly separates privacy from anonymity and emphasizes the importance and the limitations of authentication in his review of Bruce Schneier's new book: "Secrets & Lies." Udell says we all have to be able to authenticate each other to interact in the real world, and this will be necessary online, but there are serious flaws in PKI (public key infrastructure). Schneier, the author of the tome "Applied Cryptography", writes that he is willing to buy things online "because the security comes from credit card rules, not from the SSL."Link | 1:19 PM |
Jabbering on SourceForgeGood news for Jabber. They've signed a deal with SourceForge and the Open Source Developers Network to feature instant message as part of their offerings.Link | 11:54 AM |
Friday, October 27, 2000 Microsoft: big hack attackTroy Mott notes that hackers used QAZ Trojan software to get into the Microsoft network. The story is detailed on CNN.Link | 10:36 AM |
Thursday, October 12, 2000 First Report On Intel P2P Working Group MeetingZDNET: P2P Developers Stand Up to Intel. Deborah Gage writes about Intel's attempts to organize a standards body to define P2P architecture and many in a crowd of 300 were turned off by their "highly centralized" proposal.Link | 7:06 PM |
New US Government Portal Raises FlagsThe launch of the site has not been without problems. CNN reported that there had been insufficient security precautions taken before launching the FirstGov site. There is also some concern whether government-backed Internet initiatives such as FirstGov are at odds with market-based solutions. Some feel the government is acting as an investor and it should step back and let the market provide such services. There may be some truth to that view but
it's good to see experts like Brewer get involved in helping the government tackles these problems. The government has been rather slow
to apply the Internet effectively to improve services and increase the availability of government information. It's hard to know how much is
a result of insufficient resources, a perpetually slow development process or simply a lack of vision. It is also true that some classes of information are not available online because this information is managed by commercial companies who have been making good money selling
this information over the years. It is important that the US government demonstrate a true commitment to opening up its information with respect
to the public interest and without much regard for competing commercial interests.
Thursday, September 14, 2000 The Scent of a WebsiteIt sounds preposterous to add smell to a web site. I read about Digiscents.com and their iSmell technology yesterday in the New York Times. It consists of a peripheral device that it calls the "Personal Scent Synthesizer," which looked rather conspicuous in the NYT photo. ("What's that box on your desk? Do you have asthma?") It's an output device for smells. iSmell is also software that indexes smells by their chemical makeup and organizes them on a scent spectrum. Together, the device and its software can produce a unique smell from a library of "primary" scents. Its initial use is expected most widely in computer gaming, providing new ways to gross out or engage users. So if the Personal Scent Synthesizer is an output device, can an input device be far behind?Link | 6:49 AM |
Wednesday, September 13, 2000 Abandon conservative Web site development practices?You wonder how a market research company such as Jupiter really supports claims such as those below, made in a press release? Or are they being funded to legitimize such claims?"Not even one in five online retailers deploys well-accepted and widely supported Web technologies such as Java, Flash, or chat functions to enhance online shopping experience and close sales--according to a new report from Jupiter Communications, Inc., (Nasdaq: JPTR - news). Jupiter's report advises that online retailers abandon conservative Web site development practices and optimize their interactive real estate to match the technical capabilities, of most online consumers that can support a rich interface adequately."Do consumers necessarily want a "richer" shopping environment? They might say yes if you ask them but is that really borne out by actual experience? Web developers, in my view, have become conservative because they've been burned by adding new technology that isn't widely supported. Client-side java was a big lesson, and I still find myself refusing to download Flash animations, even though I have the player installed. Adding new technology to a site just because it is new is a big mistake, if for no other reason than it is hard to do it right. Many users can't use it; the technology is usually buggy or inconsistently supported, or plain confusing. Developers have learned to stick with the basics. Link | 6:16 PM |
Tuesday, September 12, 2000 Computer InsecurityBruce Schneier, author of "Applied Cryptography", revises some of his earlier assumptions in his newest book "Secrets and Lies". He's drawing a much bleaker picture that no amount of world-class cryptography can change. "As Schneier sees it, the wired universe is plagued with hard-to-fix vulnerabilities." Expect things to get worse, says Schneier in this Salon article, Ain't no network strong enough.Link | 1:18 PM |
Who Owns You?More and more companies have put key Open Source developers on the payroll, usually giving them free reign to work on their project. However, there's always the question of how much influence a company might exert on the developer, and sometimes even the perception of influence is enough to create distrust among other developers and users. Simon Cozens looks carefully at this issue in Who Owns You?.Link | 12:33 PM |
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