internet

developing technologies: himalayan mesh

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Even if wireless cities in the developed world are a questionable prospect, wireless certainly has a role to play in other contexts, be they localized networks such as the wireless systems in place in many universities or in parts of the developing world. One system, mesh networking, in which information passes in a distributed fashion from node to node is really too slow for application in places with broadband available, but is a possible solution for areas in developing countries. 

Given how much Tibet has been in the news lately, I thought it appropriate to cite the example of the Dharamsala Wireless Mesh network which was covered by Xeni Jardin in Wired a couple of years ago. In Dharamsala, a community of Tibetian exiles have set up a mesh network to provide Internet connectivity and VoIP services.  

 

A solar panel atop a shrine provides power for the mesh network. 

[image from the Tibet Technology Center https://tibtec.org/] 

 

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so long, wireless cities

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I have always been deeply skeptical of the wireless cities idea. The business models of cities teaming with ISPs to give away free access to the Internet via city-wide wireless networks never made sense, the idea always seemed incompatible with the desires of law enforcement for tracking and surveillance, and the need to upgrade routers every couple of years seemed insurmountable (oh, you live in an 802.11b city…). Moreover, having lived in a dense urban area for a decade, I can attest to the difficulty of having wireless cross one floor of an apartment building, let alone an entire city block. Given current technology limitations, there is just too much interference in dense urban environments to make the wireless city a reality. The most naive ideas suggested that giving away wireless services in cities would somehow lead to economic booms. But urban boosters are given to such ideas (remember the Bilbao-effect?), so it’s no great surprise. 

So now it’s over, at least in the United States. Read this article at the New York Times. 

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Developing Technologies: Take the Bus to the Internet

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Many researchers in networking technology spend their time trying to dream up future uses of the Internet and yet, many the ideas already out there are just so amazing that the make anything we think of seem tame. So for another semi-regular project, I’d like to institute a series titled "Developing Technologies" in which I will look at the rich ways that technology is being harnessed in developing countries.*

Take for example, this story from the BBC (or this one from Australia’s the Age). In rural areas of developing countries such as India, Paraguay, Costa Rica, Rwanda, and Cambodia, Internet access is hard to come by. In response, United Villages Corporation has created a store-and-forward system based on kiosks, Wi-Fi units, and buses. Kiosks in villages allow workers to regularly check their e-mail, request information, or place on-line orders for a small fee. Busses that regularly come through the villages are outfitted with Wi-Fi units . When the bus stops, the kiosk and Wi-Fi unit connect. Outbound information is uploaded and inbound information is downloaded to the kiosks. Over 100,000 people now access the Internet in this time delayed fashion. It may not be the experience we are used to, but it allows villagers to have access to a world they otherwise would not be linked to.        

*Yes, I know, I need to get back to some of the other semi-regular features I’ve initiated this year. I will, I will. Soon.

 

 

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on the press catching up

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Yesterday, within the space of five minutes two stories from the major media outlets struck me as hilarious.

The first was from Wired. Some five years after the first show I had at CLUI about One Wilshire, they have a gallery of photographs of the place at Wired.com. Seems like little has changed. Seems like they didn’t bother to do anything with the copy of Blue Monday we sent them except get a good idea or two for a somewhat belated photo piece. Seems like they couldn’t get any better shots even with their professional team. Wired’s looking tired. What’s up with that, Chris? I mean really, at least they could have asked Nicholas Carr and me to talk about One Wilshire and the future of such data hotels. THAT would have been interesting. Ah, but you have to love the media. That’s why we academics do believe in searching for prior art on a topic and citing it. Even if it means we have to try harder to be original, it makes what we do write about so more interesting.  

Here’s a standing offer to Chris and other editors of major technology magazines: give me a theme issue to edit and I’ll give you something worth grabbing off the newsstands, not a rehash of five year old work. 

The second was from the New York Times and was entitled "How the Bubble Stayed Under the Radar." In trying to account for the longevity of the bubble, this piece had a bit more content, but its first premise—that nobody saw the bubble coming—was strange. I think I’ve been talking about it since 2003 or so. Has nobody else noticed? I guess this blog’s readership is only in the thousands…

Anyway, this was a classic bubble: only the very deluded believed otherwise (or the very calculating—on a foreign exchange basis, there is no bubble…an American house that has doubled in price since 2002 has seen no gain vs. its value in Euros…but if then that leads you to think of what happened to salaries in the US under GWB). Everyone else (and this means you, real estate agents and bankers) knew it would collapse, they just wanted to cash out first. (financial disclaimer: I got rid of all the REITs in our 401k’s a couple of years ago and put them into global equities).

It’s still rather surprising to me that Manhattan continues its bubbley behavior. Maybe when the Europeans realize just how little their fabulous investment is netting them given the falling dollar, they’ll wise up. Maybe when the most interesting and talented Manhattanites begin to flee in droves to other cities (but where? not many candidates in this country? probably to Europe), it’ll begin to happen. 

Most of all, however, I’m amazed by architects. Due to the time involved in making buildings and the heaviness of the capital needed, architecture is traditionally a slow profession. Still, can it really be that architects haven’t noticed that the boom is over? Sure, China and Dubai have kept the system on life support, but construction in the former is going to cease the moment the Olympics start and the latter is merely another mad boom economy, entirely fueled by debt (see here). When collapse comes it will be grim and sustained. All too well I remember the recession of the 90s (or that of the 80s) when architects had great opportunities to work at the local café.  

But those of us who have been diligently working in the field of the expanded architect will still be here, welcoming your new ideas with open arms. Now more than ever, working on the periphery to expand what architecture is and what architecture can do is critical for the future of the profession.   

 

 

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the techno-utility complex or, the end of the distributed

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I’m en route to Vilnius for the weekend and then to Limerick for final reviews but I thought I’d still manage to get a blog entry in. It’s a recurring theme of mine that the notion that the Internet is a distributed entity in which nodes communicate in a non-hierarchical manner is largely a matter of ideology. Still, take a look "Red Shift Meets Event Horizon" by Phil Waineright and "The Techno-Utility Complex" by Nicholas Carr. Boarding is in a few minutes so I don’t have time to recount the entire argument now (well, I tried and stupidly I closed the window, losing the text). We’re moving rapidly toward greater consolidation at the level of data centers.

What implications does this have for privacy and surveillance? For cities (remember that the emergence of the contemporary data center went hand-in-hand with the development of the global city…and, correct me if I’m wrong, but these new data will  largely be located outside of urban conditions)? For regions (what does physical and telematic distance from these data centers mean, what does it mean if a country doesn’t have access to them)?

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architecture is politics

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I’m reworking part of the Networked Publics book and ran across a post by Mitch Kapor titled "architecture is politics." Compare this with my earlier post about Lawrence Lessig’s use of the term architecture in his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Again, as any reader of Mark Wigley’s The Architecture of Deconstruction knows, such references are far from idle.

As readers of this blog now, I’m thoroughly bored by idle speculations in architectural form (as if we still needed that). Kapor’s post is useful in reminding us that architecture has a much more important role to play in society and that its future is tied to how we think of the Net.

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First Impressions: the iPhone, Proficiency, and the Internet as Appliance

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Being the Director of the Netlab means that I have to try anything being touted as a fundamentally new way of networking, right? Of course, it doesn't mean that the Netlab pays, unless by that you mean that I pay!

So what are my first impressions?

To be sure, this is a paradigm shift. The gestural aspect of the Interface seems to work well. Assigning some rough values to proficiency, I would say that I am about 70% proficient with it now, whereas I might be 98% proficient with my Mac's interface and ever only reached 95% with my Treo.The difference between 95 and 98 may be small, but it's big enough that whenever I used the Treo, I felt like I wasn't at home. That was significant. In contrast, there's something about drawing pens that doesn't work for me. Whenever I use one, my hand cramps up and I've never been able to get beyond 75% on them. In other words, they're unusable. The first big test of the iPhone is how quickly I will get used to the interface.

In certain ways the interface is contradictory: on the one hand, web pages are rendered as exquisite miniatures that you zoom in on to read, on the other hand, settings pages have inordinately large text for such a small device, making it necessary to navigate multiple menus to accomplish a task.

An obvious solution would be for the user to have some access to the settings, but this isn't possible. There is definitely a locked-down feeling on the phone compared to my Treo. On the Treo I was limited in my options, but I had them. For example, I could set up my screen as a set of icons or as a list. Not so on the iPhone. The most frustrating aspects of the Treo was the phone application which was impossible to configure. The iPhone is entirely like that, which is disappointing, except that unlike anything Palm has done in the last few years there is some sense of design here.

Now on to another, serious issue that has larger implications beyond the iPhone. Over the last few years, it's become rather common to see the Internet as a place of media convergence and the web as the means by which this will happen. In particular, open APIs such as Google Maps, Amazon, or Flickr have allowed programmers to build applications that remix online content in a plethora of way, some ludicrous, some, like hopstop.

The iPhone's interface undoes this completely. If you go to a YouTube site in iPhone's Safari, a notice that you either have javascript turned off or an old flash player appears instead of a video. Quicktime videos from Apple's web site work great (perfect for watching trailers from Apple's web site!), but flash doesn't play. And of course you can't download anything so forget about trying to install Skype or Google Earth.

To be fair, I still remember the bad old days when every architect had to have a flash site built. All of these were equally wretched and I welcome another nail in that coffin. But the the iPhone has reinscribed the isolated nature of flash sites. The widget based nature of the device suggests that Apple sees a future in single purpose applications for the web. Really the weather and stock applications (who needs the latter, really?)—front ends to Yahoo! services—aren't much different. So what's next, Wikipedia and Flickr widgets? Certainly I have nothing against such projects when they make Internet resources easier to access, but in the iPhone's closed architecture they suggest that Apple will lock down the web into a series of discreet applications with Apple the arbiter of who gets to be a provider (read provides a sexy widget and good corporate sponsorship).

The iPhone is less than a day old and Apple was scrambling just to get it out the door, but the device clearly will make the Internet a true mobile platform for the first time. How this will play out, however, is far from certain.

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Visualizing Internet Traffic

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From Read/Write web, we find that AKAMAI technologies now has tools for visualizing current Internet traffic on-line. AKAMAI hosts a huge amount of Internet traffic by acting as a host for images, videos, and other large files for large corporate sites such as CNN and Apple. AKAMAI's strategy is to house these images locally so that if you are in the New York area and you pull down a site half way across the country, AKAMAI delivers the byte-hefty content from servers in the city rather than 1,500 miles away. Since long distance pipes are more costly than local connections, AKAMAI can save money for sites while improving download times.

Obviously keeping track of Internet traffic is part of AKAMAI's business and they have recently made available online applications showing such data in near real time.

Visit these tools here.

internet traffic

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