Wireless Mesh Networks, The NSA, And Re-building The Internet

One of the bitter lessons we learned from Snowden's leaks is that the Internet has been compromised by the NSA (with some help from GCHQ) at just about every level, from our personal software and hardware, through ISPs to major online services. That has prompted some in the Internet engineering community to begin thinking about how to put back as much of the lost security as possible. But even if that's feasible, it's clearly going to take many years to make major changes to something as big and complex as the Net. 

On Techdirt.

Bill Gates (Hearts) Openness a Bit More

Here's an interesting project: the Open Course Library. These are its goals:

* design 81 high enrollment courses for face-to-face, hybrid and/or online delivery
* lower textbook costs for students
* provide new resources for faculty to use in their courses
* our college system fully engages the global open educational resources discussion.
* improve course completion rates

Here's some background on the project:

All of the information about the project is online on a wiki. A big part of this project is for our system to figure out what it means to share our digital educational resources. What does it mean to work with publishers in new ways and get them to reconfigure their content into affordable and modular formats? What does it mean to go out and find open textbooks and evaluate them and modify them? What does it mean to understand the different types of Creative Commons licenses vs. copyright? And what do we have to understand re: the legality around how those licenses mesh or don’t mesh? And then how does that affect the final digital thing that we release at the end, and put out in Rice University’s Connexions [repository]?

We’ve been trying to be very open about the process, so we’ve got this wiki online with all the [project] information. You’ll see the project budget up there with the goals and the timeline for the project. We’ve been having town hall meetings this fall—not only going out to the colleges and meeting directly with faculty face to face, but we’ve just finished our third online town hall meeting. We use Elluminate and anybody in the world is welcome to come [to these meetings which] are archived and put up on the wiki as well. As questions [and] concerns come in, we address those and put the answers up on the wiki.

As you can read, there's an awful lot of open goodness in there. That's great news, of course, but it's also rather remarkable because of the following little fact [.pdf]:

The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) proposes a partnership between the Washington State Community and Technical College System (CTC) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to improve access to and completion of higher education for low income young adults in Washington State.

...

The SBCTC requests $5.295 million to implement the Washington State Student Completion Initiative (WSSC). This initiative includes four multi-college student completion projects that will yield long term results by breaking down key barriers to completion throughout the Washington community and technical college system.

One of those projects is the Open Course Library. So good to see Bill supporting all that openness...

MakeHuman Makes Open Source More Human

One of the canards about open source is that it only produces hardcore hacker programs - dev tools, infrastructural stuff etc. - that have little to offer the general, non-technical, *normal* user. While that may have been true ten years ago, things have moved on.

For example, here's MakeHuman, an amazing program that lets you create photorealistic 3D humanoid characters:

MakeHuman is an open source (so it's completely free), innovative and professional software for the modelling of 3-Dimensional humanoid characters. Features that make this software unique include a new, highly intuitive GUI and a high quality mesh, optimized to work in subdivision surface mode (for example, Zbrush). Using MakeHuman, a photorealistic character can be modeled in less than 2 minutes; MakeHuman is released under an Open Source Licence (GPL3.0) , and is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

The MakeHuman 0.9.1 Release Candidate was published in December 2007, prompting considerable community feedback.

Development effort is currently focused on the 1.0 Release, based on a new GUI and a 4th generation mesh. This release also incorporates considerable changes to the code base which now uses a small, efficient core application written in C, with most of the user functionality being implemented in Python. Because Python is an interpreted scripting language, this means that a wide range of scripts, plugins and utilities can be added without needing to rebuild the application.

Even the alpha version is incredibly impressive - real drag and drop 3D humanoid manipulation (*very* eerie), with a simple-to-use interface. If you think that free software is only about important but boring stuff, try out MakeHuman, and be amazed.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

How Will Microsoft Cope with Clouds?

One of the central questions for future computing is: How will Microsoft cope with clouds? In other words, when the PC platform becomes almost an adjunct, how will the company maintain its vice-like grip on the market? A typically thorough post here from Mary Jo Foley about Microsoft's Live Mesh provides some important clues. Here's one part that I found particularly interesting:

Even though the Live Mesh team went out of its way to emphasize that Microsoft sees Live Mesh as an open platform, and not just one designed to appeal to the Windows/.Net choir, both Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere (Silverlight) are key elements of the Live Mesh developer stack (a diagram of which — here on the left — can be enlarged to full size by clicking on it). Support for Flash, Cocoa, JavaScript and other non-Microsoft-centric technologies is there, too. But given Live Mesh is from Microsoft, I’d wager Silverlight applications and services will look and work better as Live Mesh endpoints than apps/services built on and for Mac OSX/Safari, Linux and Mozilla ones.

This is standard lock-in: provide a nominally "open" platform, but make sure it works better with Microsoft products - a variant on the old "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run." Some things never change....

OLPC's Founding CTO Mary Lou Jepsen

OLPC's XO has been much in the headlines recently. If you want to find out it all from someone who knows, there's a good interview on Groklaw with the ex-CTO, Mary Lou Jepsen. And no punches pulled, either:

Q: The world is now very aware of the spoiler role that apparently Intel tried to play. Can you though talk to us about the differences technically between the Classmate and the XO?

Mary Lou Jepsen: Where to start: Classmate is more expensive, consumes 10 times the power, has 1/3 the wifi range, and can't be used outside. Also, the Classmate doesn't use neighboring laptops to extend the reach of the internet via hopping (mesh-networking) like the XO does. So not only is the XO cheaper than the Classmate, the XO requires less infrastructre expenditure for electricity and for internet access. In Peru we can run off of solar during the day and handcrank at night for an additional $25 or so per student – this is one-time expense – the solar panel and the crank will last 10 or perhaps 20 years. Just try running electricity cables up and down the Peruvian Andes for that cost while making sure it's environmentally clean energy. The Classmate isn't as durable as the XO, and its screen is about 30% smaller, the batteries are the type that can explode and only last 1-2 years and can't be removed by the user and harm the environment. The batteries are expensive to replace: $30-40 per replacement. The XO batteries last for 5 years and cost less than $10 to replace. Finally, the XO is the greenest laptop ever made, the Classmate isn't – this matters a great deal when one proposes to put millions of them in the developing world.

Mashup 2.0: Inheriting the Mesh

I've written before about how mashups need meshes. Typically that mesh will be geographical, but another obvious one is time. Time is interesting because it's often linked to people's lives - or rather several interlinked lives. That's the insight behind this new startup, AllofMe:

Founder Addy Feuerstein has described AllofMe in the following way:

“The idea is that if I or someone else has a picture that includes my son, alone or with friends, I or anyone else will be able to tag the people in the picture and transform these digital assets into part of my sons. When he grows up and takes control over his own timeline, he will have a timeline of tagged material from his childhood…We will also transform the timeline created by each person into a video movie, through a widget on an internet site [and] enable comparison of your timeline with that of your acquaintances, or chronological data files. For instance, you will be able to compare your own timeline with historical events of Time, and see where you were when some important world event occurred.”

I'm not sure about the company, but I think the idea is important, because it hints at a further key property of Mashup 2.0, where it becomes possible to use pre-existing meshes in richer ways.

Heavenly Mashups

One of the most important innovations of the Web 2.0 era has been the mashup. As I've noted before, mashups really need underlying meshes, and geographical ones are an obvious type. But the amazing Wikisky shows that in many ways heavenly mashups are even better than earthly ones:

The main purpose of WIKISKY is to consolidate astronomical, astrophysical and other information about different space objects and astrophysical facts.

We hope to achieve this purpose using the principle of visualization. When a person reads an article about a star, the star is only the abstraction for that reader. The person cannot emotionally feel the reality of the star without actually seeing it. We strive to create an extremely detailed sky map to help everybody to better understand the information gathering about any space object and various phenomena connected with those space objects.

Aside from the joy of being able to zoom around and into the sky just as you would over Google Earth, and the awe-inspiring sight of thousands - millions - of major structures there (the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is simply gob-smacking), where Wikisky really comes into its own is in its annotation.

As you mouse-over objects, a pop-up gives you basic information. Clicking on that object takes you to a page with links to detailed images and - most importantly - to relevant papers. This is one reason why the heavenly mashup is superior to mundane ones: there is already a huge quantity of relevant, neatly-packaged information available for the objects on the mesh in the form of published scientific papers.

The only problem is that not all of this information is freely available (though often the preprint versions are): some of the papers requires subscriptions or one-off payments. This shows, once more, why open access to research papers is vital if we are to get the full benefit of such amazing sites as Wikisky: without it, mashups are frankly messed-up. (Via Open (finds, minds, conversations).)

Infoethics, Open Access, ODF and Open Source

Now here's something you might not expect from UNESCO every day:

The Infoethics Survey of Emerging Technologies prepared by the NGO Geneva Net Dialogue at the request of UNESCO aims at providing an outlook to the ethical implications of future communication and information technologies. The report further aims at alerting UNESCO’s Member States and partners to the increasing power and presence of emerging technologies and draws attention to their potential to affect the exercise of basic human rights. Perhaps as its most salient deduction, the study signals that these days all decision makers, developers, the corporate scholar and users are entrusted with a profound responsibility with respect to technological developments and their impact on the future orientation of knowledge societies.

It touches on a rather motley bunch of subjects, including the semantic Web, RFID, biometrics and mesh networking. But along the way it says some sensible things:

One primary goal of infoethics is to extend the public domain of information; that is, to define an illustrative set of knowledge, information, cultural and creative works that should be made available to every person.

Even more surprising, to me at least, was this suggestion:

UNESCO should meanwhile support open standards and protocols that are generated through democratic processes not dominated by large corporations.

The use of OpenDocument Format and other open formats should also be encouraged as they help mitigate lock-in to certain technologies. Other initiatives to consider include pursuing free and open software, as well as the “Roadmap for Open ICT Ecosystems” developed last year.

(Via Heise Online.)

Turning up the Heat on Google Earth

Interesting use of heat maps for data representation. This shows how Google Earth and similar could become a really useful mesh for showing all kinds of statistical data with a geographic component (Via Ogle Earth.)

Finding Our Way to a Third Life

Talking of geography, here's geograph, which "aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of the UK and Eire". That's nice, but I'd like to see this go further.

Imagine if pix were available for a much finer mesh - say, every ten metres (or something). Imagine, then, using some software like Photosynth, a seriously cool piece of software that is sadly closed source (and Microsoft's, to boot), to stitch all those images together into a complete, three-dimensional world - our world - that you could navigate through, while able to see everyone else there doing the same.

Third Life, anyone? (Via Open (finds, minds, conversations)...)

Wikipedia in Google Earth

As I've mentioned before, mashups are all about the underlying mesh. And what better mesh for knowledge than Google Earth? And what better to mash it with Wikipedia? Here you are, then. (Via Openpedia.org.)

Opening Up Google

Google exerts its fascination in part because it so opaque. A quintessential Web 2.0 company, owner of Blogger, it also has few outward-facing blogs - and none really worth reading. So any insights into what makes the company tick are always welcome, especially when many of them hinge on software issues, as they do in this Information Week piece.

This is particularly interesting because much of the code that makes Google tick is open source. Surprisingly, this turns out to mesh with that desire for opaqueness rather well:

In fact, one of the things Google likes about open source software is that it facilitates secrecy. "If we had to go and buy software licenses, or code licenses, based on seats, people would absolutely know what the Google infrastructure looks like," DiBona says. "The use of open source software, that's one more way we can control our destiny."

The Open Source Mesh Begins to Mesh

I'm a big fan of open source meshes, with their potential to offer alternative ways of accessing the Internet. I'd not heard of the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network before, but this story on GigaOM about serious NSF backing for work on an open source mesh network looks promising.

A Time There Was

I've noted before how mashups depend upon the existence of some kind of mesh; typically this is geographical (which is why so many mashups draw on Google Earth), but time is another obvious option. A good example of how that might be applied can be seen in the new site The Time When.

The idea is beautifully simple: anyone can write short descriptions of why certain dates are important to them. Alongside the entries, there is information about what happened that day, who the monarch was and so on. But as Antony Mayfield astutely observes, you could go much further:

the application could be used in all sorts of ways - I guess some bright spark there is already mashing it up with Google Earth or some such so the memories can start to hang out in space as well as time, as it were

adding extra dimensions to the mesh.

It's worth pointing out that this idea comes from the BBC, which is fast emerging as a real hotbed of creativity when it comes to applying Web 2.0-ish technologies. And if you want to see want kind of stuff people put in their entries, you could always try this.

Wireless Meshes and Net Neutrality

The recent brouhaha over net neutrality has emphasised how important it is to have a completely independent way of accessing the Internet. The obvious approach would be to use a wireless mesh: linking thousands of disparate wireless networks together to create a larger, wide-area coverage. TechDirt has an interesting meditation on this idea, pointing out that there are various obstacles to be overcome.

Nobody said it would be easy.

Wiki + Google Maps = WikiMapia

As I've said before, every good mashup needs a mesh, and you can't beat a map as a mesh. So here we have the obvious next step: a wiki based on the mesh of Google Maps - WikiMapia, which describes itself modestly as "a project to describe the whole planet Earth". Not much there at the moment, so you know what you have to do.... (Via C|net).

The Mesh Behind the Mash

Great article by Jack Schofield on mashups. The journalistic detail it brought to this amorphous and currently very trendy Web 2.0 idea helped me understand something that I'd vaguely realised before, but hadn't fully been able to articulate.

The reason that so many mashups use Google Earth (aside from the fact it's a clever application and freely available) is that to bring together information from different sources you need something in common - a kind of peg on which to hang the data. Location is a very natural peg to choose, since everybody carries around in their heads a representation of the physical world, which they use to navigate through it. Moreover, we instinctively use it for our own mashups - the experiences and knowledge of life that are tied to locations. Google Earth therefore provides a convenient and very natural mesh for mashed-up online data.

In fact, it's hard to think of any other mesh that combines such fine granularity with this ease of comprehension. Perhaps something similar could be done with time (which, anyway, is simply the fourth dimension, and very similar to space) or Wikipedia entries (or subsets of them), since the latter are effectively a mesh for the non-physical world of ideas.

Update: I've now come across this interesting matrix of mashups. It shows that Google Maps is indeed the most popular mesh; others include Amazon, Del.icio.us, Flickr and Technorati.