Slashdot Mirror

videophones have been around for a while in the UK and in other countries(seems to be broken?). The quality still isn't brilliant but Orange(I think) have started to offer Soccer highlights over the latest phones.

moon colonies, ok, we chose to put a space station up there first, and then realised it costs a lot of money for little (commercial or military) value. Moon colonies are sadly not as sexy as say a Mars colony, or even a Mars mission, which ESA has planned in 25 years, NASA tried and continues to test methods of producing enough food,air and water, other countries,notably India and China have planned Moon landings so we are going back. Space is unfortunately used as a pissing contest between nuclear neighbours, when this stops then some more science can get done(e.g. Hubble, Galileo, Beagle 2)

food in pills. You can get food in pills, just not the calories, vitamins will give you nearly all of the trace elements you need to live. Calories are a lot harder, to get 500 Calories into a pill means eating something with 40 times the energy concentration of sugar or twenty times the concentration of fats, I doubt the human body would have much success digesting such complicated food. You can however get protein and creatine supplements which are in tablet/powder form, and sugar sweets( those silly energy sweets which taste of really sour orange) have more calories than their equivalent weight in sugar. (The protein supplements also tend to taste bad and are fed to animals instead. )

cars that drive themselves; power steering has been around for a while, as has ABS and cruise control, that is about as much as the current laws will allow on the public roads. intelligent cars have been developed, which, when combined with other intelligent cars, are actually safe. It's the human drivers who freak out at the sight of a driverless car that's the problem :-)

jet packs; Jet packs appeared in Thunderball (James Bond). You can buy them if you have enough money, or you can build them if you want. They're not used much because, much like the Segway, there are easier and cheaper way of getting around.

moving sidewalk's are in most airports now, as well as some metro stations. There have also been "moving stairs" around for just as long.

This post brought to you by Google.com, paid for by Google For America, Inc.

To verify this, quoted from Europemedia: "From the first of next month, a new EU directive will be enacted, forcing all internet companies to impose VAT (value-added tax) on all digital sales. This amounts to a tariff of between 15 and 25 per cent on items such as software or music downloads, any transactions as part of online auctions and subscriptions to internet service providers, sold over the internet anywhere within the European Union."

In other words, the tax is on services and digital products sold to EU citizens on the Internet. It's still annoying (and hellish for small shareware shops to deal with!) but at least it doesn't affect the cost of physical goods... yet.

And in the case of online auctions, this means that the EU will tax the service eBay provides, not the actual product supplied from seller to buyer.

Jouni

For a healthy dose of opposition opinion, check this out.

Alternatively you can throw a wrench in the system. You know, line up in a circle with people
of similiar shapes. Pass your pants to the left, and your shirt to the right. Jumble it all up real good. Or just develop a taste for thrift store clothing.

It works for the Italians,
"Telecom Italia to use IP network for 50% of European calls".

There is also VoIP-over-cable, and VoIP-over-cellular, and VoIP-over-Ethernet.

The fundamental problem with ATM is that it doesn't go anywhere -- you can't get ATM over Ethernet, over cable, over satellite, over 802.11, and so on.

So, with ATM, when all is said and done and you have built a big Voice-over-ATM network the end result is the same closed, designed-only-for-voice network that is the PSTN today.

I, for one, would like any-to-any TV-quality videoconferencing, exactly like I have with any-to-any voice today -- I can call anyone in the world with a phone. I can't call anyone in the world with video. From there, there are lots of interesting services - read some scifi to get a fill of cool ideas.

The WiFi pilot at the Gare du Nord uses prepaid cards. The cheapest card costs 5 euros and provides 20 minutes of access (about US$5.65).

Here are some news stroies (Google is your friend):
* Palast, BBC journalist, says war is profit-maker for Bush allies
* Post-war carve-up to benefit CDMA standard, record industry
* Journalist says media is biased on war

I encourage you to check out Greg Palast's site. He is the BBC reporter that the original article mentions and the author of "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy". Interesting read.

GSM is a digital standard in Europe, and many other countries. "GSM for Iraq!" by the way :-|

GSM.
SMS/MMS.

Some of my tutors have seen the logic port prototypes of the first GSM phone, and that took several trollies to cart around.
Then they were able to make a portable version. Well, portable, I guess it weighed over 10 kg, and was carried in a "backpack" configuration. Like those field radioes you see in Vietnam war movies, only twice as big and heavy.
I saw a picture of one guy on a testing trip with that thing on, and cross country skis, visiting a cabin in Norway. He'd better stay on his feet. Ouch! Not to mention all the damaged tech.....

Microsoft purchased 23.6 percent of the British cable TV company Telewest for $2.6B a few years ago. The current price of telewest shares values the whole company at about $100M. Considering Telewest is billions in dept I think it is still overvalued, zero would be closer to the mark.

http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID= 13703

Thompson, Tivo's manufacturer is the one that pulled out - Tivo is still looking for new manufacturers.

We telecom related privacy violations very seriously in Finland.

Under the DMCA just creating the tool is illegal. It doesn't matter if everyone or no one uses it.

Isn't the DMCA a USA law ??? Sklyarov did all his programming in Russia ..

Is copyright protection realy worth living in a world where a foreign national can sue a individual/company in another country for breaking laws in his country ? Like THIS ?

According to the United Nations Stastics Division in 2001 9.71% of the world's population had internet access.

Last spring nua reported the figure went over 10% (news coverage).

Some sources like eMarketer give more conservative estimates, but the essential fact is that the internet continues to grow. By the time this nvo thing goes live considerably more people will have internet access.

The internet does provides access to info and educational opportunities for hundreds of millions of people. Don't be too cynical.

Whoa there a second.

There are several big problems with the treatment of internet access in the modern world.

One issue is that telcos and cable companies imitating telcos are in control of the market. These companies take the physical asset cost saving approach of assuming certain peak loads and usage patterns per customer per hour of the day. The problem is that internet service is not a static one use service like the telephone was originally. As deliverables and uses change and grow, so do the bandwidth needs. This messes with those lovely assumptions about how much time and how much data each customer will expend while using their connection. In fact when people started using modems in large numbers the telcos started crying about how it was screwing up their careful usage calaculations because a modem user staid online for hours when the usage rates were calculated for the average 3 minute phone call. The internet is not a bloody phone system. Deal with it. There is a ton of dark fiber laying around out there that is not being used despite having already been paid for and having the hardware to connect it all. Give me the fiber link to my bloody house and light all the fiber out there before you start charging me more based on poor customer usage predictions.

Another issue is that american buisness has a horrible case of short sightedness (encouraged greatly by the reactionary and short sighted tendencies of the stock market). Bandwidth does not incur huge ongoing costs. Bandwidth incurs a huge initial cost (the laying of fiber/copper, routing hardware; etc) followed by rather reasonable maintenance costs (in most cases cheaper than regular telco lines). There are three ways to recoup your losses from the initial setup:

1) Charge a huge amount of money for use of the service because (in a wonderful self fulfilling prophecy arrangement) you have decided that not enough users will purchase the service.

2) Charge a very low amount of money for the service in the hopes that you will gain enough customers fast enough to reduce cost of operation per customer.

3) Charge a moderate amount of money to attempt to get as much back initially as possible while not alienating an overly large chunk of your customer base with prohibitive rates.

For a while now providers have been going with option number 3 (which makes the most sense) and charging about $50 a month for high speed access.

The recent moves towards usage caps is mostly in reaction to hemoraging money from failed or miscalculated ventures elsewhere and is an attempt to belatedly go back to option nubmer 1. Option number 1 being a huge reason why ISDN never really took off despite being around for a long time.

Now this trick (basically a big bait and switch) of hooking customers at a moderate pricing scheme and then swapping it out for an expensive one will work in the short term, but it is ultimately going to wind up less profitable than charging a lower amount for services and increasing your customer base by nearly 10 times. Right now the US is way behind other countries in terms of broadband deployment. And it is not so much because the infrastructure isn't there. It's because the costs are still outside the comfort levels for most consumers.

Leave broadband unlimited at $50 for decent (read higher than 512Kbps downstream/128Kbps upstream) connections and add lower cost plans at $12-$20 per month for low speed (below 512/128Kbps) and you will see a huge jump in subscribers that will also even out your bandwidth usage per customer (most people don't eat nearly as much bandwidth as gamers and the like do) and allow you to expand services.

The below is way oversimplified, but helps illustrate the point a little.

Current US households with broadband is estimated at ~15 million. 15 million households with broadband now at $50/month = $750 million.

Assuming you would keep those subscribers (with no usage caps) but offer the lower speed (again with no caps)at around $20 and you can add the remaining US households (85 million of them) for an addition $1.7 billion a month.

This brings the theoretical total to $2.45 billion per month or $29.4 billion per year.

Political News from Wired News - Cybercrime Treaty Finally Ready. After four years of haggling over the language, several countries including the United States will sign a cybercrime treaty.

WildernessCoast.org - Cybercrime Treaty Bibliography -- By Date. A wide collection of links that talk about the Cybercrime Treaty Same info sorted by title.

Council of Europe - Convention on Cybercrime.

The Convention on Cybercrime has been adopted by the Committee of Ministers during its 109th Session, on 8 November 2001 and will be opened for signature, in Budapest, on 23 November 2001.

The Convention will be the first international treaty on crimes committed via the Internet and other computer networks, dealing particularly with infringements of copyright, computer-related fraud, child pornography and violations of network security. It also contains a series of powers and procedures such as the search of computer networks and interception.

Its main objective, set out in the preamble, is to pursue a common criminal policy aimed at the protection of society against cybercrime, especially by adopting appropriate legislation and fostering international co-operation.

The Convention is the product of four years of work by Council of Europe experts, but also by the United States, Canada, Japan and other countries which are not members of the organisation.

It will be supplemented by an additional protocol making any publication of racist and xenophobic propaganda via computer networks a criminal offence.

[ ... ]

But Fred Eisner, a consultant for the Dutch government and private companies, said the draft made unfair demands on Internet service providers by asking them to track Web users' online movements.

"This draft convention lacks balance," Eisner told the assembly. "The convention explicitly gives much more power to law enforcement agencies and it has no system of checks and balances."

Bruce McConnell, president of McConnell International, a Washington-based consulting firm, said the treaty should be more forceful in protecting the privacy of Web users who are already worried about being spied on.

"There is concern that the powers of surveillance ... are not balanced by comparable protections for individuals' privacy," he said.

Maybe you trust the law-enforcement chiefs in D.C. to do the right thing. But here's the catch. The same new powers given to the United States will also handed over to Bulgaria, Romania, Azerbaijan, and other Council of Europe nations that-although officially democratic now-don't have a strong traditions of checks and balances on police power.

Do you want investigators rummaging around your clients' computer systems on warrants issued by former Soviet bloc nations?

That's the prospect that has pushed AT&T Corporation and other high-technology companies into feverishly trying to stop or at least soften the treaty. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Information Technology Association of America also oppose it.

Stewart Baker is one of the chief lobbyists for the treaty opponents. As a former general counsel of the National Security Agency and recipient of the Department of Defense Medal for Meritorious Civilian Service, he's got street cred on these issues in corporate America.

What worries Baker and his colleagues? Consider the following hypothetical: A Los Angeles screenwriter corresponds by e-mail with a neo-Nazi in Germany while researching a script. Shortly after, he finds federal agents examining the files on his home computer. The agents also visit America Online Inc. to retrieve records of the screenwriter's AOL usage.

The agents are fulfilling a warrant issued by German authorities allowing them to search for Nazi propaganda. Such material is unlawful in Germany but not in the U.S. They framed their warrant in terms of "suspected terrorist activity."

LAW.com (requires cookies) - International Treaty on Cybercrime Poses Burden on High-Tech Companies.

Maybe you're a civil libertarian, and maybe you're not. Maybe you worry about how the United States exercises its vast investigative and prosecutorial powers, and maybe you don't.

But if you counsel U.S. corporations on computer-related issues, you should be concerned about a new proposed treaty known as the "Convention on Cybercrime." The Council of Europe, a 43-nation public body created to promote democracy and the rule of law, is nominally drafting the treaty. Curiously, however, the primary architect is the U.S. Department of Justice.

The Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation are using a foreign forum to create an international law-enforcement regime that favors the interests of the feds over those of ordinary citizens and businesses. Their goal is to make it easier to get evidence from abroad and to extradite and prosecute foreign nationals for certain kinds of crimes.

Maybe you trust the law-enforcement chiefs in D.C. to do the right thing. But here's the catch. The same new powers given to the United States will also be handed over to Bulgaria, Romania, Azerbaijan, and other Council of Europe nations that -- although officially democratic now -- don't have a strong tradition of checks and balances on police power.

[ ... ]

Stewart Baker, a partner at Washington, D.C.'s Steptoe & Johnson, is one of the chief lobbyists for the treaty's opponents. As a former general counsel of the National Security Agency and recipient of the U.S. Department of Defense Medal for Meritorious Civilian Service, he's got street credentials on these issues in corporate America.

Slashdot | Implications Of The International Cybercrime Treaty.

SiliconValley.com part of San Jose Mercury News - Pioneer cybercrime pact tightens privacy rules.

MS-NBC - Pioneer cybercrime pact tightens privacy rules. PARIS, May 25 -- Stiff criticism from the EU and pressure groups has prompted drafters of the world's first treaty against cybercrime to tighten provisions protecting privacy online, the final text showed Friday.

[ ... ]

Against EU objections, it also limits the right of a country to reject a request from abroad to store and hand over data in potential crime cases if the requesting country thinks it could be misused.

The text says states should make sure that systems operators or other people who know how to use a certain system can be ordered to cooperate in any such a cyberprobe.

PARIS (Reuters) - Stiff criticism from the EU and pressure groups has prompted drafters of the world's first treaty against cybercrime to tighten provisions protecting privacy online, the final text showed on Friday.

The Council of Europe, a 43-state human rights watchdog, has amended the text to ensure police respect privacy rights when they follow digital trails to fight online crimes such as hacking, spreading viruses, using stolen credit card numbers or defrauding banks.

''The guarantees in the treaty have been reinforced,'' Peter Csonka, deputy head of the economic crime division at the Council's headquarters in Strasbourg, told Reuters after the Council posted the final text -- version 27 -- on its Web site.

But the treaty, which has aroused heated debate in cyberspace since its draft text became public last year, ignored calls by Internet service providers (ISPs) for fewer costly requirements on preserving data that could be linked to a crime.

It still accorded police wide powers to chase suspected cybercriminals -- powers some critics say go beyond what is legal in some Council member states or in observer countries like the United States, Canada and Japan due to sign the treaty.

ZDNet - Internet founder worried over EU cybercrime plans.

BRUSSELS --Vint Cerf, a founding father of today's Internet, said on Thursday that European Union plans for new rules to fight crime on the Web risked clashing with existing EU privacy regulations.

Cerf, who helped develop the Internet in the early 70s shortly after graduating from Stanford University and now works for WorldCom, said more secure network systems were an immediate priority for the successful development of the ubiquitous Web.

He told Reuters in an interview that Internet traffic should be retained only for billing purposes and was too cumbersome to be stored for police investigations.

Changes to a controversial treaty on cybercrime have done nothing to improve it, say civil liberty campaigners.

Next week, the Council of Europe will vote on the treaty, which has been redrafted 26 times before reaching its final version late in May.

The most recent changes were made to take into account the fears of civil liberty and privacy campaigners. But cyber-rights groups say the latest changes are purely cosmetic and have not diluted what they describe as its most pernicious sections.

The groups say that, if adopted in its current form, the treaty could lead to changes in legislation that would stifle rights to privacy and do little to curb the activities of law enforcement agencies.

[ ... ]

In December 2000, 23 organisations, banding together under the banner of the Global Internet Liberty Campaign (GILC), signed a letter condemning the 25th draft of the treaty as "appalling", and warned that it handed law enforcement agencies sweeping powers to snoop and could seriously erode online privacy.

Now, three civil liberty groups, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Privacy International, have sent another letter to the Council of Europe outlining their "continuing concerns" over the wording of the treaty and saying that their fears have not been laid to rest.

The letter chastises the Council of Europe for refusing to open up the redrafting debates to non-governmental organisations and for, it says, ignoring the human rights and privacy concerns of organisations such as the GILC.

It goes on to say that the original criticisms still stand, and that the treaty does not pay enough attention to existing laws which safeguard human rights. It says the treaty's recommendations on protecting privacy are vague and do not go far enough.

IT industry gurus have branded the Council of Europe's Convention on Cybercrime 'foolish, unworkable and a legal con trick'.

The controversial treaty provides a blanket legislation to deal with all forms of internet crime from hacking to online pornography.

Caspar Bowden, director of internet think-tank FIPR, said: "The Convention is essentially a legal con trick, drafted in secret by a handful of nameless bureaucrats. It equates the internet - a network of private networks - with 'cyberspace', a metaphor from science fiction.

"By this sleight of hand, the internet is defined as a public space over which law enforcement should be granted unfettered powers of surveillance and extradition," he added.

International policy-makers this week ended a round of talks aimed at setting common rules affecting online trade and commerce, but they made little progress in bridging divisions that threaten to delay the pact.

In the works for nearly a decade, the Hague Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments is still almost unknown outside international policy circles. Nevertheless, it could have broad implications for consumers and businesses by setting new rules for online copyrights, free speech and e-commerce--if it is approved.

Opposition to the treaty heated up Wednesday, when a two-week drafting session wrapped up with few concessions to critics, primarily from the United States, who say the pact threatens free speech and could force Internet service providers to become global content police.

"In a nutshell, it will strangle the Internet with a suffocating blanket of overlapping jurisdictional claims, expose every Web page publisher to liabilities for libel, defamation and other speech offenses from virtually any country, (and) effectively strip Internet service providers of protections from litigation over the content they carry," Jamie Love, director of Ralph Nader's Consumer Project on Technology (CPT), wrote in a report after the meeting.

The treaty is one of several efforts by the global community to grapple with a complicated legal issues on a borderless Web.

Four years ago, nations including the United States signed onto a World Intellectual Property Organization pact to protect copyright in the digital age. And several countries, including the United States, are hammering out the world's first cybercrime treaty, which would provide a standard for fighting online crime.

The Hague treaty differs from those efforts because it would not outline specific laws participants must follow. It's much broader, requiring participants to agree to enforce each others' laws on a variety of topics. As it stands, the treaty would require courts to enforce the commercial laws of the convention's 52 member nations, even if they prohibit actions that are legal under local laws.

BRUSSELS - The blueprint for a global code on Cyber-crime was agreed on in Strasbourg, France, Friday, paving the way for international rules governing online copyright infringement, online fraud, child pornography and hacking.

The 41 members of the Council of Europe (CoE), plus the U.S., Canada and Japan, signed on to a draft convention on cybercrime that is set to be rubber-stamped at ministerial level in September.

"Once adopted, the Convention will be the first international treaty on criminal offenses committed through the use of Internet and other computer networks," the Council of Europe said in a statement.

In September, the Council of Europe approved the Convention on cybercrime, a historic treatise that lays the foundation for legislation allowing for a greater sharing of information between countries to combat the rise of cybercrime.

The treatise isn't binding, but instead would have to be adopted into law by its 43 European member states and five outside countries including the United States, Canada and Japan.

The treaty is broad, covering crimes committed on the Internet such as fraud, child pornography and violations of computer network security. It also sets up global policing procedures for conducting computer searches, interception of e-mails, and extradition of criminal suspects.

More details on the CyberCrime Treaty can be found in the Privacy Digest archives dated September 26,2000, September 27,2000, October 09,2000, October 16,2000, October 18,2000, October 19,2000, October 25,2000, November 14,2000, November 20,2000, November 22,2000 and March 24,2001. This is not all the information at Privacy Digest and other sites so if you want to know more try a search

Hmm... no links in the news? Dodgy, if you ask me...

Germany:
Provider: RWE
- Power line internet access launched by Germany's RWE - Quote: "The power line technology will mean that RWE PowerNet can deliver data at a rate of two million bytes per second."
- Shocking Concept: Internet Over Electrical Lines

Sweden:
Provider: Sydkraft Bredbånd - provides up to 8mbit/s downstream.
- Sweden Using Electricity For High-Speed Connections

continue list at will. I just know it will take forever before I can get anything but forced AOL crap connections where I live in France :(