Now here's something for the big kid on your holiday shopping list - from LaCie, in 160GB (white), 250GB (red), 300GB (blue) and 500GB (red). Stackable, with USB 2.0. What more could you ask for - wonder if you can by them by the bucket?

I spent a bunch of time this week working my way through Doc Searls' long article in Linux Journal titled Saving The Net, where Doc lays out in some detail how the ever consolidating major carriers (both telco and cable) are working to recreate the internet in their own familiar image, into a "content delivery" system instead of the freely open space for exchange of all sorts that it has evolved into. It's a great rant, and if you haven't read it, you should.

Dave Weinberger, commenting on the piece, thinks Doc's too optimistic about the possibility of having an impact on these trends, and invites us to join him "in his trough of despair". But Dave does note that the Berkman Center's Charlie Nesson "made a case for universities becoming such a bastion of the open Internet and the intertwingling of knowledge that they make it impossible to close our Internet. They could be champions of our Net."

We shouldn't forget that the current Internet evolved in universities and other research institutions (like CERN, where the Web was born) and that much of the real innovation on the net has been created to serve the research communities that live in higher-ed institutions around the globe. Having just taken a turn around the exhibit floor at SC05 last week, I can say that the continued drive for innovation in high performance networked computing among the research communities has not abated a bit. The demonstrations on the show floor were nothing short of breathtaking. And the engine that makes this research work is the network - it's noticeable that at SC05 the Pacific Northwest Gigapop provisioned the show with more than half a terabit per second of network connectivity.

One thing's for certain - the telcos and cable companies, and their partners in the mainstream entertainment industry, who together are relentlessly focused on building networks to satisfy the demand for music, movies, games, and porn, are not going to be primarily interested in providing lots of unfettered bandwidth to support creativity, innovation, or connectedness.

And what can we do about it? Well, thinking about all of this over the course of the week has sure given me new insight into and appreciation for the sheer audacious chutzpah of folks like Tracy Futhey, Tom West, and Ron Johnson, who have gone out and actually bought and provisioned a new high-speed national network of dark fiber. This new network, called National LambdaRail is owned its members, which are universities, research labs, and regional research network providers. The true brilliance here is not these partners are running their own network - universities have been running the Internet2 network for some years now, running on leased fiber - but the fact that with NLR the members actually own the physical layer that the network is built on.

While the focus of NLR today is to "to provide a national scale infrastructure for research and experimentation in networking technologies and applications", I have to think that these far-sighted folks are at least thinking about how to provide for continued innovation and creativity across the board, as the commodity Internet is pressured to become an ever more controlled environment. I particularly like this statement on the NLR home page:

NLR puts the control, the power and the promise of experimental network infrastructure in the hands of our nation’s scientists and researchers.

It's enough to give you at least some hope for the future, which on Thanksgiving Day 2005, feels pretty good to me.

Boy, does this ever look like an interesting conference for those concerned with what's going on with the intellectual property wars:

On March 11-12, 2006, Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society will host a symposium to explore the development and expansion of the metaphor of "cultural environmentalism" over the course of ten busy years for intellectual property law. We've invited four scholars to present original papers on the topic, and a dozen intellectual property experts to comment and expand on their works.

Molly Van Houweling explores voluntary manipulation of intellectual property rights as a tool for cultural environmentalism. Susan Crawford extends Boyle's analysis to the age of networks. Rebecca Tushnet, looks at the ways in which the law's impulse to generalize complicates the project of cultural environmentalism, and Madhavi Sunder looks at how the metaphor affects traditional knowledge. Professor Boyle will also offer some remarks, as will Stanford Law School's Professor Lawrence Lessig.

Thanks to Donna Wentworth for pointing this out!

Geoff Arnold points out this fun test at the New Humanist - Michele says it has me pegged to a T:

Haymaker

You are one of life’s enjoyers, determined to get the most you can out of your brief spell on Earth. Probably what first attracted you to atheism was the prospect of liberation from the Ten Commandments, few of which are compatible with a life of pleasure. You play hard and work quite hard, have a strong sense of loyalty and a relaxed but consistent approach to your philosophy.

You can’t see the point of abstract principles and probably wouldn’t lay down your life for a concept though you might for a friend. Something of a champagne humanist, you admire George Bernard Shaw for his cheerful agnosticism and pursuit of sensual rewards and your Hollywood hero is Marlon Brando, who was beautiful, irascible and aimed for goodness in his own tortured way.

Sometimes you might be tempted to allow your own pleasures to take precedence over your ethics. But everyone is striving for that elusive balance between the good and the happy life. You’d probably open another bottle and say there’s no contest.

What kind of humanist are you? Click here to find out.

I went to go read Doc Searl's new essay in Linux Journal, Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes and got this:

Linux Journal Is Currently Unavailable Due to a Denial of Service (DoS) Attack
Sorry for any inconvenience.

wow.

CNET is reporting on a study commissioned by AOL that finds that teenagers are preferring instant messaging to email even more this year than last.

Nearly 66 percent of 13- to 21-year-olds say they send more IMs than e-mails, compared with 49 percent last year, according to an America Online-commissioned study of instant messaging trends.

Overall, 38 percent of users say they send as many or more IMs than e-mails.

I don't do anywhere near as much IM'ing as email, but if you want to chat, I'm orensr on Google, AIM, and Yahoo, oren.sreebny on .mac, and oren@cac.washington.edu on MSN.

I was thinking it might be time to move to a new mobile phone, so I went over to Cingular's site to see what phones they're currently carrying. I clicked through the process saying I wanted to upgrade a device on an existing service plan as a former AT&T Wireless customer, and then it asked for my mobile number and the last four digits of my Social Security Number!

All I wanted was to see the list of current phones and features - whassup with having to provide personal data to see the catalog? A perfect example of bad marketing at work.

Of course what I really want is the not yet available Nokia E61 - wow, looks like a phone that does it all. That probably means the US carriers won't have it.

Boy, I look at these photos of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and I think to myself - why, there's a spot that's just crying out for some oil wells.

And it's too bad those poor oil companies don't have any other places in Alaska to drill.

Sometimes cheap sarcasm is all that's left.

Update

Late breaking news:

WASHINGTON -- In a stunning victory for environmentalists, House leaders have dropped a plan to drill in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The plan -- which is a pet project of President George W. Bush -- was in the huge budget bill that will be voted on Thursday. There was so much opposition that House leaders feared it could jeopardize the overall bill.

House leaders also dumped another plan to drop the moratorium on oil and gas drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. States would have had the authority to approve such drilling.

The battle over ANWR drilling isn't over yet. The Senate's budget bill includes a provision for drilling there, so the difference will have to be worked out in a conference committee.

Comcast has been advertising 6 megabits connection speed lately - my experience sure doesn't feel like that, so this morning I ran some tests.

Here's what I got. First, using the test at dslreports:

2005-11-09 09:18:00 EST: 6197 / 736
Your download speed : 6197 kbps or 774.6 KB/sec.
Your upload speed : 736 kbps or 92 KB/sec.

And then using CNET's test:

644 Kbps - You 644 kbps

Am I experiencing problems, or is this typical?

Update
Brian points out that the dslreports test above actually did show that I was getting 6 megabits per second download speed, and he's right. I should've seen that myself, though why the discrepancy between that and the CNET test?

Today I'm getting:

(from dslreports):

2005-11-11 11:49:23 EST: 3058 / 302
Your download speed : 3058 kbps or 382.3 KB/sec.
Your upload speed : 302 kbps or 37.7 KB/sec.

Cnet reports 1758.6 Kbps.

Ed Felten's got a post where he tries to clarify the debate over the EFF's recent report on the state of the RIAA suing individuals for file sharing.

Ed, along with others, are trying to make a point that it's not proper to criticize the RIAA for bringing these suits without offering some alternative techniques for taking action to prevent widespread copyright violations on the Internet.

People who don’t like the RIAA’s litigous agenda need to come up with a workable alternative. Too many people on the anti-RIAA side like to criticize every attempt to enforce current copyright laws without suggesting alternative enforcement mechanisms, and without proposing an alternative legal regime. I’m not comfortable with simply shrugging at wide-spread piracy and telling the RIAA to lower their prices and stop whining.

I think that to some extent this approach ignores a couple of important points.

The first is that the law (in this case the DMCA) gives copyright holders a complete methodology for how to stop individuals they find who are engaging in illegal sharing of files through the "take down" provisions. All they have to do is complain to an ISP about specific instances of file sharing and action will be taken, no questions asked (at least if the ISP wants to be able to avail themselves of the DMCA "safe harbor" from liability). The Act also requires ISPs to terminate accounts for repeat offenders.

This set of provisions is a far more effective and less costly means of actually stopping the activity of gross infringers than lawsuits will ever be. I know the RIAA hasn't been shy about using this method with universities. I don't know to what extent they use it with commercial ISPs.

The second point I'd make is that right now the evidence is that online file sharing is probably not costing the RIAA's members much in lost sales. Take a look at yesterday's post in Chris Anderson's Long Tail blog, examining recent sales statistics in mainstream media:

Down:

* Box Office: down by 7% this year (tickets per capita have fallen every year since 2001).
* Newspapers: circulation, which peaked in 1987, is declining faster than ever and is down another 2.6% so far this year.
* Music: Sales are down another 5.7% this year; although digital downloads (still just 6% of the business) are climbing nicely.
* Radio: down 4% this year alone, continuing a multi-decade decline.
* Books: down by 7% in 2004 (but see comments below for discussion)

Mixed:

* DVDs: sales growth is slowing dramatically, from 29% last year to single digits this year.
* Magazines: Ad revenues are up a bit although the number of ad pages is flat (they're charging more per page). Circulation is also flat, while newsstand sales are at an all-time low.
* Videogames: it's the final few months of the current generation of consoles, which tends to the trough of the buying cycle. Sales were down 20% in Sept, but will probably pick up by Christmas with the launch of the Xbox 360.

Up:

* Internet advertising:
--Banners: Up 10% this year
--Keywords: Google revenues up 96%

This would seem to indicate that people are consuming less of the mainstream media, and that the drop in the level of music sales is in line with the drops in other forms of media. That suggests that some larger economic and/or cultural forces are at work here.

My feeling is that the amount of effort the RIAA is spending with these high profile legal actions is just not worth it for them, much less the trouble it causes others.

Hey, Apple -

I like iTunes - it's an elegant user interface, it works on both my Macs and Windows boxes, the Music Store has a good selection and is nicely integrated with the software, I like the fact that you can write scripts and Automator actions using iTunes.

BUT -

Your DRM is getting in my way. My personal way. This is not about abstract rights. It's about the ways I want to use my music after I purchase it from your store.

It's also not about wanting to share music over peer-to-peer networks. I don't want to do that. I *don't* do that.

But I use other devices that aren't made by Apple. I use a Squeezebox to stream music to my home stereo. I am on the verge of ordering an Olive Musica. I will probably convert at least one of my Windows machines to Ubuntu soon. And none of those environments can play music as it comes from the iTunes Music Store.

Up until recently this hasn't been a problem, as I've been able to use JHymn to strip the copy protection off the files. Yeah, it's been a hassle to have to go through the extra step of doing the stripping every time I purchase music from iTunes, so in some sense it probably has had the effect of limiting my purchasing.

But now JHymn doesn't work on the new iTunes version (6.0 and above) at all. Luckily I thought to check first before upgrading iTunes on my machines. If I cared about getting video content from the iTunes Music Store this would probably be a serious drawback. But I'm really not interested in video - just the music.

I don't know enough of the details to know what made JHymn break with this new upgrade - but I suspect it's not accidental.

So the ultimate deterrence to innovation here is that I'm not upgrading iTunes from version 5 until I can either get JHymn to work or Apple provides me the equivalent functionality. So come on, Apple - show some real leadership here!

Today's the last day of this year's Earshot Jazz Festival, and it's been a great one!

Last night Michele and I ended our festival attendance hearing the fabulous Gangbe Brass Band - ten strong, from Benin, playing brass and percussion, sounding like a cross between a New Orleans brass band and all the best African grooves - I kept trying to count some of the rhythms and then just gave up and felt the pulse.

Earlier in the festival we heard the World Saxophone Quartet (plus friends) do their tribute to Jimi Hendrix - contrary to Paul DeBarros' review in the Seattle Times, I thought the Quartet sounded in some of the finest form I've ever heard them, and the accompaniment was wonderful, particularly the virtuoso electric bass from Matthew Garrison.

We heard Dafnis Prieto, a young Cuban drummer, and his quartet playing really fiery Latin jazz, and Olu Dara did a show that was a tour de force demonstration of just how deep the rootsy combination of blues, funk, and West African rhythms can go.

The festival did have a couple of disappointments for me - Omar Sosa and his quartet didn't live up to the billing, and Joey DeFrancesco, while certainly competent and entertaining, just didn't grab me as much as I expected.

The Triple Door was a great venue for the festival - good sound, good sight lines, and great food from Wild Ginger upstairs.

Thanks to John Gilbreath and the whole Earshot crew for a fantastic festival - and here's looking to next year!

I originally came to the UW in April, 1994 - more than a decade ago - to manage the Client Services group for Computing & Communications, the UW's central computing and networking organization.

After we did some realigning of C&C organizational structures last year, we ended up with two large client support units in different parts of the department. While the two units have managed to coordinate activities without letting too many things slip through the cracks (thanks to the hard work of many people), this bifurcated organizational structure has felt to many of us like a piece of unfinished business.

Yesterday we announced to our staff that on January 1 we will be combining the two organizations (Client Services and Customer Care) under the able leadership of my colleague Tammy Stockton. This will allow us to really focus our client support efforts in ways that will provide better and more integrated services for the faculty, staff, students, and others that we serve.

It's a great move, and one that serves the institution well. There is definitely a part of me, however, that will miss being intimately involved in the day-to-day operations of supporting the users of the computing and networking services we provide.

It's been a remarkable decade in customer support - when I started the Web browser was brand new, email was a text-only tool, and things like streaming video and instant messaging were just a project in some research lab. Over this period of time we've seen the use of Internet-based computing move from being the province of a few thousand alpha-geeks to something that's used (and abused) in most households in the developed world. It's been remarkable to be a (very small) part of such a fundamental shift in how the world works.

At the local level, we now support almost 300,000 active UW NetIDs, around 2,000 Nebula workstations, and a growing array of services and products for an increasingly diverse and technology-savvy set of people. This support is done by a small group of very dedicated and talented folks, and it's been a real pleasure and an honor for me to be a part of that effort.

So what will I be doing?

I'll be spending more time working with the other parts of C&C and EPLT I am engaged with (MyUW and Catalyst) looking at the array of services offered by C&C, evaluating and promoting new UW technology services, working with the institutional technology advisory structures we've put in place over the past two years, and furthering strategic technology efforts, like our work in evolving calendaring standards.

One thing for sure, it won't be boring!

This is a remarkable report from Pew - (warning for Mac users: use Adobe Acrobat Reader instead of Preview to view the full report):

American teenagers today are utilizing the interactive capabilities of the internet as they create and share their own media creations. Fully half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered Content Creators. They have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations.

Teens are often much more enthusiastic authors and readers of blogs than their adult counterparts. Teen bloggers, led by older girls, are a major part of this tech-savvy cohort. Teen bloggers are more fervent internet users than non-bloggers and have more experience with almost every online activity in the survey.

Teens continue to actively download music and video from the internet and have used multiple sources to get their files. Those who get music files online believe it is unrealistic to expect people to self-regulate and avoid free downloading and file-sharing altogether.

Susan Crawford has an all too accurate post on the ultimate meaning of the mergers between major telephone companies approved yesterday by the FCC:

Today's mergers signal that the big carriers are now even bigger, and it's increasingly difficult to imagine real competitors for broadband internet carriers emerging (although I keep hoping -- go, BPL!). They're becoming confident that complete dominion over the internet, complete control, is possible. That's the big news from today.

I'm adding Susan to my list of regular reads.