Martin Varsavsky writes about his experience launching FON, a network for wi-fi users and AP owners that allows them to share their bandwidth. Check Technorati, he’s gotten great coverage on Spanish-language websites. Martin is a great telecomms engineer and I think this is going to be something really big.
Are things getting better? Or are they getting worse?
Well, according to evidence Ethan has put together from UN sources, it looks like things are definitely getting worse.
The web is becoming three-dimensional
Joi Ito has spent three weeks playing animated 3-d online role-playing games. He says he has seen the future, and he says it has depth.
Digital Rights Ireland
John Kennedy writes about the foundation of Digital Rights Ireland. (I am on the board of this organization.)
A mind-blowing presentation about ‘Identity2.0’
Some of the issues around identity, authentication and personal on-line security explained in this entertaining presentation by Dick Hardt
(via edwardtufte.com)
IT disaster in the Irish Health Service
Silicon Republic tells thesad story of the payroll system that went bad on the Irish Health Services Authority. Basically, it was supposed to cost EUR 8 million, and has ended up swallowing EUR 120 million so far. They will need to spend that much again to finish the project.
Why do these things go so badly wrong?
Getting VoIPed in Ireland
I got set up for VoIP yesterday. It was surprisingly painless. I ordered a little box and a month’s subscription from Blueface, which costs me 69.99 + 9.99 per month. I plugged one side of the little box (the Linksys PAP2 into a network socket (I use eircom broadband, the low-end package), and plugged a regular phone into the other end. Everything was ready-configured and it works great. I get 5 hours of free calls a month to landlines for my money. What I really like is that this extra ‘line’ gives me an extra phone number to use for business purposes. Also, I can see the cost of the calls, as I make them.
The Greening of Google
According to this article by Mart?n, the guys running Google are very concerned about the impact of computing on the environment. Larry Page believes the biggest constraint on Google’s growth is going to be availability of electricity.
There is an obvious short-term remedy to this issue: move Internet server hardware to temperate or cool climates. Server farms in warm climates expend a lot of energy on cooling. The same heat that computers generate could potentially heat buildings in a cold country!
Of course, this isn’t much good to reduce the consumption of client PCs, which must consume far more energy than Google’s clusters.
So Google is already building a dark fiber network. Will the company now turn its attention to building its own power grid based on renewable energy?
The road to safety is paved with good intentions
According to the paranoid-sounding Spy Blog, the EU wants to introduce a telecomms-based system to improve car safety.
There are big problems in terms of privacy. The biggest issue is that it threatens to create the largest concentration of real-time information about innocent private citizens that has ever been created anywhere, even in a totalitarian state.
Skype as a payments platform
Mark O’Neill, who knows more about the realities of Internet security than anyone I know comments on the eBay/Skype takeover and the strategy behind it.