Lessig started a project called Creative Commons to assist media producers that want to share their works under open licenses.
Myself, I volunteer technical support and media production to my local Independent Media Center. In addition to running an open publishing website where the community can publish stories and multimedia, we host talks, film screenings, work with the local radio station station, and do media trainings.
You are wrong. Reread that bit about channel width in the story intro.
If there's a topic that you don't understand, try to learn before posting copiously.
loosen the floodgates
on
As the Spam Turns
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
'member when Usenet admins stopped filtering spam to get some attention to the problem? That sure as shooting got people to pay attention, what with all the servers that went up in flames from the load. Maybe that's what we need with email, it feels like we're building to that kind of standoff.
Bet we'd see some real legislation and enforcement then, eh?
Creative Commons is an effort to develop technical standards which will allow various flavors of "free" content to be identified.
The file sharing networks themselves are agnostic on the matter of how the owner of a work intends for it to be distributed. The software justs see files and shares them, it can't tell the difference.
I know I spent a lot of time looking for mirrors of RH8, all of the published ones were overloaded. You could actually look at the mirroring network for free software distros as an inefficient P2P network.
P2P networks like Edonkey and Freenet have the property that it becomes easier to download a piece of information and its more likely to be closer to you the more it is downloaded, rather than the reverse with a centralized server.
Paying for bandwidth to host large digital content is not always feasible for some information distributors. A group that I work with that produces freely redistrutable media is considering how to make full resolution video available. Sometimes even for the low res video we now make available we have peaks over 40mbps when a piece of info is popular. If we can't find a donor for a substantial amount of bandwidth then we'll probably use a P2P network.
It would be more efficient bandwdith-wise if ISPs implemented P2P nodes for their customers, rather than the customers doing it themselves. They recognized that this was the case a long time ago with newsgroups and more recently with Akamai. Maybe when there's more freely redistributable content available they will do so.
Digital signatures take care of the security concerns you raised. You can download them from authoritative website and check the file after you've downloaded it. Freenet and Edonkey use digital signatures natively.
CD's of info from where? From local resources or from the Internet? If from the Internet, someone is paying for that pipe. You can hide that cost under the rug for a while by getting government money, user donations, subscription fees, corporate donations. It still costs money.
Well, I volunteer with the Independent Media Center, we're a network of grassroots media activist groups and produce a lot of video, we'd have a lot of full res video to make available on copyleft terms. I would also make a mirror of a few of the free unix distributions.
But on the more general point, of course someone will have to have an Internet connection. As I said, just about anyone at this point who will be able financially and technically to play around with wifi has a broadband connection already. Odds are they are already downloading stuff from p2p networks. That part is taken care of already.
But that's just the short term for a few hobbyists, its not, as you point out, a sustainable model for connecting a large number of people to broadband. The model that these Bristol folks is useful, they are sharing a fast connection amongst a number of users. Since its more efficient to buy bandwidth in bulk they could adopt a co-op model. It would likely not take long for the investment in hardware to be payed off by the savings.
In addition to the benefit of increased efficiency in sharing the connection that another person posted about, there's the benefit of users of the network being able to communicate with each other at high speeds. That is a service which cannot be bought for a reasonable price. And as the adage goes, the utility of a network goes up with the square of the number of users connected to it.
A captive portal with a MAC address whitelist and registration is the way to solve the first problem, nocat is pretty close to implementing that for free.
The second problem is one of physics so the FCC is the only recourse there.
You can get load balancing with OSPF which is a dynamic routing protocol. It doesn't perfectly distribute traffic, its more concerned with route stability and redundancy. Gated and zebra have implementations for your favorite unix-like OS.
Just about everyone that is able to fiddle around with wifi already has an internet connection and most likely a broadband one on top of that. So I doubt that a bbs will be the killer app for community wifi, you can just have one on the WWW.
File sharing, of course, will be the killer app. The ability to download CD's worth of info in 10 minutes seems pretty compelling.
Cost is a big reason for wanting wifi. It costs a lot to wire a building and an impossible amount if you want to compete with the local cable or telco incumbent by wiring a city.
Convenience is the other factor. The importance of this right now is relatively small, but I'd say in a year or 2, handhelds with wifi will be able to break through the chicken/egg conundrum.
Beyond a few hundred feet wifi requires line of sight because it is low power and the high frequencies do not penetrate solid objects easily. The Maine setup you linked to requires line of sight between the two points. The antenna arrays described in the article do not, or at least are able to counteract not having it to a significant extent.
Getting line of sight is a large barrier to using wifi to provide broadband service in cities, so yes this is a big deal.
Hopefully the consumer watchdog groups around will pick up on this. Groups like Consumer Federation of America and Consumer's Union (publisher of Consumer Reports do some good work. They are a little slow and behind the times in some ways but they are some of the few groups that confront the cable industry, mostly over the issue of rates. They've been involved in the open access issue which has been important.
You could also organize your community to be your own consumer advocates, rather than hope these organizations will do it for you. Since its an Internet related issue you'll have a much easier time organizing because the people you want to reach are mainly online. Get in touch with the public utility commission, city council, the local news media and the cable company itself. Usually these people here nothing at all from the public on issues like this, if they get 10 calls they'll piss in their pants. Mail the local Linux Users Group, Internet Society Chapter, and other computer related fora and suggest people do the same.
What I like most about this question is premise must strike fear in the hearts of the MPAA and other big media goons that are reading it. The premise is a recipe for a p2p video experience. The MPAA and the perpetrators of the DTV fiasco are hoping to eke out some more life for themselves by trying to convince people they need better quality and they want to pay more money for it, oh, ignore the chains that come with it.
But your question demonstrates that you don't value what those hucksters are trying to sell you, you want flexibility. And it just so happens that flexibility means you can download video in a reasonable amount of time and store it on cheap media, ala mp3.
I had a Dr Who hankering the other day, hadn't watched it in years. I don't own a TV, I probably watch a sitcom every 3 months or so and am blown away by the crap on TV, I've never been in a household with cable. I downloaded maybe 15 vhs-ish quality Dr Who episodes as divx over a couple nights and watched them over the course of a week, haven't felt the need to watch them or other movies since. Now that's an experience that big media has no interest in providing me.
Migration for the purpose of seizing political power frequently results in violence. Its ironic that Kansas is mentioned considering the history of "bloody Kansas".
Brief recap, Kansas was going to have a vote on whether or not to allow slavery, which would also determine the delicate balance of political power between those for and against slavery in the Congress. Partisans on both sides rushed in to qualify for the vote, low intensity civil warfare ensued.
Not all junk mail is third class. Plus, even if the post office throws it away they still have to deal with it. If enough people make them deal with it they'll pass that on to the junkers.
In general this is a good strategy for dealing with junk mail. Individual returns usually get you taken off the mailing list. It costs the post office more to send it back, if a large enough percentage of junk mail gets returned they'll raise the bulk rate for the junkers. And dealing with the returned mail costs the junkers as well. Just throwing junk out keeps their costs down.
The big unasked question was "How will this save you money?". The drive manufacturers all said that the vast majority of drive returns happen within 1 year. If that's true how can they save a significant amount of money by changing the warranty period?
The most reasonable conclusion for the motivation for changing the warranty period is that it cuts an economically significant number of people off from getting a replacement for a failed drive. Perhaps there is another explanation, its not obvious to me what that is. Tom's didn't ask a direct question on this point and nothing else in the article provides good evidence for any other conclusion.
That's not the conclusion that the article draws. It says the hard drive manufacturers have razor thin profit margins and that is their motivation for doing this. The implication is that cost savings will not be passed on to the consumer, they will be used to support larger profit margins.
They have used modems, 802.11b, and the Internet to do the actual link, I'm not sure what they are using right now.
I strongly suggest you get in touch with the Prometheus Radio Project. They work with the above groups on this project and they help out LPFM's with all aspects of their stations, from the FCC process, to transmitter tech, studio setup, community outreach. They travel around the country holding radio "barnraisings" with the new crop of LPFM licenses that have been granted, I've been to one and it was fabulous.
This is the funniest post I've read in a long time, thanks so much for it. The irony expressed about you getting out of paying as much of your taxes as possible and profiting as much as possible from living here and then taking this bounty and indigantly leaving the country had me in stitches.
The Consumer Project on Technology does a lot of work around patents, particularly business methods patents and patents that restrict access to medicine. They aren't well funded.
Public Knowledge is a new group that does work in the IP area. They are more focused on copyright at the moment but work on patent issues as well. They are better funded and more focused on IP issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Lessig started a project called Creative Commons to assist media producers that want to share their works under open licenses.
Myself, I volunteer technical support and media production to my local Independent Media Center. In addition to running an open publishing website where the community can publish stories and multimedia, we host talks, film screenings, work with the local radio station station, and do media trainings.
I could be wrong though
You are wrong. Reread that bit about channel width in the story intro.
If there's a topic that you don't understand, try to learn before posting copiously.
'member when Usenet admins stopped filtering spam to get some attention to the problem? That sure as shooting got people to pay attention, what with all the servers that went up in flames from the load. Maybe that's what we need with email, it feels like we're building to that kind of standoff.
Bet we'd see some real legislation and enforcement then, eh?
Creative Commons is an effort to develop technical standards which will allow various flavors of "free" content to be identified.
The file sharing networks themselves are agnostic on the matter of how the owner of a work intends for it to be distributed. The software justs see files and shares them, it can't tell the difference.
I know I spent a lot of time looking for mirrors of RH8, all of the published ones were overloaded. You could actually look at the mirroring network for free software distros as an inefficient P2P network.
P2P networks like Edonkey and Freenet have the property that it becomes easier to download a piece of information and its more likely to be closer to you the more it is downloaded, rather than the reverse with a centralized server.
Paying for bandwidth to host large digital content is not always feasible for some information distributors. A group that I work with that produces freely redistrutable media is considering how to make full resolution video available. Sometimes even for the low res video we now make available we have peaks over 40mbps when a piece of info is popular. If we can't find a donor for a substantial amount of bandwidth then we'll probably use a P2P network.
It would be more efficient bandwdith-wise if ISPs implemented P2P nodes for their customers, rather than the customers doing it themselves. They recognized that this was the case a long time ago with newsgroups and more recently with Akamai. Maybe when there's more freely redistributable content available they will do so.
Digital signatures take care of the security concerns you raised. You can download them from authoritative website and check the file after you've downloaded it. Freenet and Edonkey use digital signatures natively.
OSPF is a dynamic routing protocol which can do what you have suggested that is in common use within AS's. Seattlewireless uses it.
CD's of info from where? From local resources or from the Internet? If from the Internet, someone is paying for that pipe. You can hide that cost under the rug for a while by getting government money, user donations, subscription fees, corporate donations. It still costs money.
Well, I volunteer with the Independent Media Center, we're a network of grassroots media activist groups and produce a lot of video, we'd have a lot of full res video to make available on copyleft terms. I would also make a mirror of a few of the free unix distributions.
But on the more general point, of course someone will have to have an Internet connection. As I said, just about anyone at this point who will be able financially and technically to play around with wifi has a broadband connection already. Odds are they are already downloading stuff from p2p networks. That part is taken care of already.
But that's just the short term for a few hobbyists, its not, as you point out, a sustainable model for connecting a large number of people to broadband. The model that these Bristol folks is useful, they are sharing a fast connection amongst a number of users. Since its more efficient to buy bandwidth in bulk they could adopt a co-op model. It would likely not take long for the investment in hardware to be payed off by the savings.
In addition to the benefit of increased efficiency in sharing the connection that another person posted about, there's the benefit of users of the network being able to communicate with each other at high speeds. That is a service which cannot be bought for a reasonable price. And as the adage goes, the utility of a network goes up with the square of the number of users connected to it.
A captive portal with a MAC address whitelist and registration is the way to solve the first problem, nocat is pretty close to implementing that for free.
The second problem is one of physics so the FCC is the only recourse there.
You can get load balancing with OSPF which is a dynamic routing protocol. It doesn't perfectly distribute traffic, its more concerned with route stability and redundancy. Gated and zebra have implementations for your favorite unix-like OS.
Just about everyone that is able to fiddle around with wifi already has an internet connection and most likely a broadband one on top of that. So I doubt that a bbs will be the killer app for community wifi, you can just have one on the WWW.
File sharing, of course, will be the killer app. The ability to download CD's worth of info in 10 minutes seems pretty compelling.
Cost is a big reason for wanting wifi. It costs a lot to wire a building and an impossible amount if you want to compete with the local cable or telco incumbent by wiring a city.
Convenience is the other factor. The importance of this right now is relatively small, but I'd say in a year or 2, handhelds with wifi will be able to break through the chicken/egg conundrum.
Beyond a few hundred feet wifi requires line of sight because it is low power and the high frequencies do not penetrate solid objects easily.
The Maine setup you linked to requires line of sight between the two points. The antenna arrays described in the article do not, or at least are able to counteract not having it to a significant extent.
Getting line of sight is a large barrier to using wifi to provide broadband service in cities, so yes this is a big deal.
where's the firewire?
Hopefully the consumer watchdog groups around will pick up on this. Groups like Consumer Federation of America and Consumer's Union (publisher of Consumer Reports do some good work. They are a little slow and behind the times in some ways but they are some of the few groups that confront the cable industry, mostly over the issue of rates. They've been involved in the open access issue which has been important.
You could also organize your community to be your own consumer advocates, rather than hope these organizations will do it for you. Since its an Internet related issue you'll have a much easier time organizing because the people you want to reach are mainly online. Get in touch with the public utility commission, city council, the local news media and the cable company itself. Usually these people here nothing at all from the public on issues like this, if they get 10 calls they'll piss in their pants. Mail the local Linux Users Group, Internet Society Chapter, and other computer related fora and suggest people do the same.
What I like most about this question is premise must strike fear in the hearts of the MPAA and other big media goons that are reading it. The premise is a recipe for a p2p video experience. The MPAA and the perpetrators of the DTV fiasco are hoping to eke out some more life for themselves by trying to convince people they need better quality and they want to pay more money for it, oh, ignore the chains that come with it.
But your question demonstrates that you don't value what those hucksters are trying to sell you, you want flexibility. And it just so happens that flexibility means you can download video in a reasonable amount of time and store it on cheap media, ala mp3.
I had a Dr Who hankering the other day, hadn't watched it in years. I don't own a TV, I probably watch a sitcom every 3 months or so and am blown away by the crap on TV, I've never been in a household with cable. I downloaded maybe 15 vhs-ish quality Dr Who episodes as divx over a couple nights and watched them over the course of a week, haven't felt the need to watch them or other movies since. Now that's an experience that big media has no interest in providing me.
Migration for the purpose of seizing political power frequently results in violence. Its ironic that Kansas is mentioned considering the history of "bloody Kansas".
Brief recap, Kansas was going to have a vote on whether or not to allow slavery, which would also determine the delicate balance of political power between those for and against slavery in the Congress. Partisans on both sides rushed in to qualify for the vote, low intensity civil warfare ensued.
Not all junk mail is third class. Plus, even if the post office throws it away they still have to deal with it. If enough people make them deal with it they'll pass that on to the junkers.
In general this is a good strategy for dealing with junk mail. Individual returns usually get you taken off the mailing list. It costs the post office more to send it back, if a large enough percentage of junk mail gets returned they'll raise the bulk rate for the junkers. And dealing with the returned mail costs the junkers as well. Just throwing junk out keeps their costs down.
The big unasked question was "How will this save you money?". The drive manufacturers all said that the vast majority of drive returns happen within 1 year. If that's true how can they save a significant amount of money by changing the warranty period?
The most reasonable conclusion for the motivation for changing the warranty period is that it cuts an economically significant number of people off from getting a replacement for a failed drive. Perhaps there is another explanation, its not obvious to me what that is. Tom's didn't ask a direct question on this point and nothing else in the article provides good evidence for any other conclusion.
That's not the conclusion that the article draws. It says the hard drive manufacturers have razor thin profit margins and that is their motivation for doing this. The implication is that cost savings will not be passed on to the consumer, they will be used to support larger profit margins.
Check out the Flow Studio to Transmitter Link project. It is being developed by the Philadelphia Independent Media Center and Radio Volta who are using it to feed audio to WPEB 88.1FM, a low power station in West Philly.
They have used modems, 802.11b, and the Internet to do the actual link, I'm not sure what they are using right now.
I strongly suggest you get in touch with the Prometheus Radio Project. They work with the above groups on this project and they help out LPFM's with all aspects of their stations, from the FCC process, to transmitter tech, studio setup, community outreach. They travel around the country holding radio "barnraisings" with the new crop of LPFM licenses that have been granted, I've been to one and it was fabulous.
This is the funniest post I've read in a long time, thanks so much for it. The irony expressed about you getting out of paying as much of your taxes as possible and profiting as much as possible from living here and then taking this bounty and indigantly leaving the country had me in stitches.
The Consumer Project on Technology does a lot of work around patents, particularly business methods patents and patents that restrict access to medicine. They aren't well funded.
Public Knowledge is a new group that does work in the IP area. They are more focused on copyright at the moment but work on patent issues as well. They are better funded and more focused on IP issues.
NYT contrasted I2 with AMD's upcoming 64 bit offering quite prominently.