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Tuesday, June 13, 2006 |
Those of you following really closely here know that TMTTLT and this blog have had some dialogue over the $100-dollar laptop (or one laptop per child) project. It's kept me thinking. Here's something from today: PCs to developing world ‘fuel malware’ | The Register.
PCs to developing world ‘fuel malware’ | The Register :
Programs to send PCs to third world countries might inadvertently fuel the development of malware for hire scams, an anti-virus guru warns.
Eugene Kaspersky, head of anti-virus research at Kaspersky Labs, cautions that developing nations have become leading centres for virus development. Sending cheap PCs to countries with active virus writing cliques might therefore have unintended negative consequences, he suggests.
——–
the law of unintended consequences…..
[Too many topics, too little time.]
Yeah, there's that. Of course, those would be potentially negative consequences of educating citizens, too. But it's an interesting point, and I'll mull . . . .
4:53:23 PM 
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Remittances.
In some African countries, Christopher Lydon reminds us on his show Radio Open Source, money sent home from abroad now makes up a quarter of the Gross National Product. We're covered remittances before (and some of the innovations being tested to make helping the homeland easier), but this show is a fabulous introductory overview of the concept and the controversies:
Migrant workers will remit more than $232 billion to their families this year. The money migrant workers earn — harvesting produce in California, cleaning houses in Singapore, and tending children in Kuwait– is meager by the standards of the developed world, but it means everything for their families back home. $232 billion is twice what the world paid out in international aid last year; in Latin America it was more than aid and foreign direct investment combined. This is big business, and economists are just starting to take notice.
This year, the LA Times has been running a series of articles on remittances, calling them “The New Foreign Aid.” Policy makers like this line– they like to shrug off questions about the slim foreign aid budget by coupling those numbers with the huge sums of money that workers are remitting home. It’s all going to the same place, right?
[WorldChanging: Another World Is Here]
6:52:50 AM
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Mass personalization.
"For a peek at what's cooking behind Google's research lab doors,check out this plan to get your computer to listen in to what you're watching on tv",the New Scientist technology blog says."By using its microphone to listen in and then connecting to an online database it could identify the show,and how far through you are.The next step is where it gets interesting.One application would be to automatically set up a chatroom for everyone watching the same thing at once,like a virtual tv couch.I think Google's bigger interest is in using this for advertising though, since it would be hard to make money from otherwise."[C]ontent providers or advertisers might bid for specific television segments",the paper says.Your computer might browse to your local video store when a film trailer was on,or show you where to buy a film star's outfit when they appear on a chat show.Of course,you'd have to be either very keen to see this advertising,or to have no choice".
Google's tv eavesdropping plan [Smart Mobs]
6:51:58 AM
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Welcome to the Stupid Internet
At least Tom Giovanetti, of the Institute for Policy Innovation , a Bell-Funded Tank, writing in Friday's Mercury News, didn't call it a "dumb" network when he wrote the following science fiction . . .
Fast forward a few years to 2009 . . . Suddenly, the TV image goes pixilated, and then dark. The phone call drops. You hear yelling from your teenagers' rooms. But that's not all.
Across town, police on the beat suddenly can't reach headquarters on their radios. In an ambulance, the EMTs are trying to call in vital signs for a patient they are transporting to the hospital, but they can't get through.
Is it an alien invasion? A convergence of planets or some other astral phenomenon? No, it's a convergence of a different sort. Turns out that tonight is also the night of the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, as well as the night Coldplay releases its latest song online. And YouTube has just released embarrassing video of a major Hollywood star having a "wardrobe malfunction." Extremely high demand on the Internet is overwhelming available bandwidth, and regulations passed back in 2006 make it illegal for network operators to differentiate and prioritize content.
Welcome to the world of network neutrality, where all content is treated exactly the same . . . where somebody decided that a stupid network is better than a smart network.
Actually, Tom, I *noticed* that a stupid network was better than a smart network. I looked at "reality." I saw email, and the Web, and eCommerce, and Mapquest, and blogging, and Instant Messaging, and streaming audio on demand, and multiplayer online games, and many other miracles too numerous to list here, miracles that never arrived via "intelligent" networks.
Too bad Tom G didn't hear about what Internet2, the premier U.S. post-Bell-Labs network research effort found [.pdf]. (Research is how we learn about "reality.") Let's hum a few bars of Internet2:
. . . our engineers started with the assumption that we should find technical ways of prioritizing certain kinds of bits . . . we seriously explored various “quality of service” schemes . . . [but] all of our research and practical experience supported the conclusion that it was far more cost effective to simply provide more bandwidth. With enough bandwidth in the network, there is no congestion and video bits do not need preferential treatment.
In other words, when Tankers like Tom Giovanetti or Austrian-style economists like Alex Jacobson ask who decides how to allocate scarce bandwidth, they're asking the wrong question. Most of the cost of a network is obtaining right of way and constructing the poles, conduits, towers, antennas, cables, etc. Whether you provide a kilobit or a terabit is rounding error. Nobody needs to decide how to allocate scarce bandwidth. It is more expensive to allocate it than to simply provide more. Again, heed the research findings of Internet2 [.pdf]: Simple is cheaper. Complex is costly.
In fact, Internet2 finds that GigE with reasonable service decisions is 10x more costly than simple GigE where the user decides what service to buy. GigE is enough bandwidth to run a telephone network for a city of 100,000 people, yet we have GigE interfaces on our computers. We could have GigE in our houses for little more than we now pay for 1000 times less capable services. Backbones are even cheaper than access networks.
Thus, the only reason to ask, "How do we allocate scarce bandwidth?" is if we're behind on technology. Even then, it is far more reasonable to ask, "How do we get ahead on technology?"
And if the telcos and cablecos won't get us ahead on technology, we should be asking, " How should we replace the telcos and cablecos? "
Technorati Tags: Astroturf , F2C , NetworkNeutrality [isen.blog]
6:51:58 AM
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Way to enable an academic's coffee habit, researchers!.
Two of the common props of the archetypal philosopher are alcohol and coffee. (Existentialism throws in berets and cigarettes.) New research from Kaiser Permanente Oakland suggests that the coffee might offset some of the alcohol's potential harm.
From the Oakland Tribune:
[Adventures in Ethics and Science]
For heavy drinkers, the more coffee they drank, they less likely they were to get the diagnosis of cirrhosis, said Dr. Arthur Klatsky, investigator with Kaiser's Division of Research and lead author of the study.
Researchers followed more than 125,000 Northern Californian Kaiser members between 1978 and 1985. Participants, none who had liver disease at the outset, filled out a questionnaire that included their alcohol, coffee and tea-drinking habits.
By the end of 2001, 330 participants had been diagnosed with liver disease and of those 199 had alcohol-related cirrhosis.
Those who drank one cup of coffee per day were on average 20 percent less likely to have alcohol cirrhosis, despite heavy drinking. Drinking two to four cups of coffee reduced risk by 40 percent.
6:30:34 AM
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Stanford prof sues James Joyce estate for right to study Joyce.
A prof at Stanford University is suing the estate of James Joyce over the estate's long practice of destroying documents vital to Joyce scholarship, and of intimidating academics and creators who want to study and extend the works of Joyce. Carol Shloss, a Joyce scholar, has worked for 15 years on a book about the ways in which the book Finnegans Wake was inspired by Joyce's mentally ill daughter. Joyce's grandson, Stephen Joyce, have allegedly destroyed documents relating to this to undermine her book.
This isn't the first time that Stephen Joyce has hurt the cause of scholarship about his grandfather. . . . .
Most tragically, there was a brief moment when Stephen Joyce was irrelevant. The works of James Joyce were in the public domain until the EU copyright directive extended copyright by 20 years, putting Joyce's books back into the care of his capricious grandson for decades.
. . .
Link (Thanks, Vidiot!)
[Boing Boing]
6:30:23 AM
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