June 2006 Archives
I'm very (VERY) happy to say that the new mail filter handling has been installed on the central UW mail servers.
Why am I happy to say this?
Because it means that when you set up a vacation message on the servers, you can tell it when to turn the message off! No more will I be getting messages from people that say "Did you know that your vacation message is still on?"
Yay!
The best way to get to the vacation message setup screen is to login to MyUW and pick Vacation Service from the Email channel.
David Berlind has an intriguing post on his Between the Lines blog about how wikis with RSS notification of changes are set to become the standard collaboration platform within organizations.
David has some spot-on observations about the use of proprietary systems (including email systems like Notes or Exchange) for collaboration:
When you strip collaboration down to its bare essence, you have people, you have some record of their collaboration (eg: documents), and generally, there's some way of letting those who are collaborating know when something has happened or is about to happen (notification). The problem was, and to a large extent, still is that there are different and proprietary systems and protocols to technologically support all the activities associated with collaboration.
Collaboration is often too formal. In other words, you don't collaborate until someone says, "OK, let's collaborate." In order to say "Let's collaborate" you need to schedule a meeting with a proprietary group calendaring system. Letting everyone know that you're about to collaborate requires notification which 99 times out of 100 depends on email. Then once you start collaborating, a record of that collaboration has to be documented using a proprietary documentation technology (eg: word processors, spreadsheets, or presentation applications).
Even worse, there's another proprietary system (a content management system) for storing, searching for, and retrieving those documents; something that happens in the course of collaboration. Something else that happens in the course of collaboration is someone improves those documents at which point, they must be passed around again for another round of collaboration. Passed around on the proprietary email system using oft-forked threads of e-mail that resulted in out-of-synch document changes. To add insult to injury, the e-mail feedback loop which may or may not have involved revisions was completely out of context of the collaborative activities themselves and required tools that were overkill given the requirements. At the end of the day, collaborating involves a bunch of walled gardens of technology that all too often, are retrofitted to the art of collaboration and that end up being manually integrated.
He goes on to observe that the use of wikis and notification can replace much of the use of email and content management systems:
With RSS as both the notification mechanism and the content subscription mechanism, you basically have a single technology that takes e-mail, e-mail attachments, and far too many round-trips (of email, to fully facilitate the collaboration) completely out of the equation.
With wikis, which can notify you when their content is changed via RSS, not only can the collaborators use 95% standard technology (there is no standard wiki markup language, yet), any and all virtual expression of the collaborative activities (new content, revisions to that content, annotations, comments, approvals, etc.) happen in the context of the collaborative environment. It's all in the same one — one that involves almost no proprietary parts.There's no jumping back and forth between systems or even integration of multiple systems. No word processor. No special content management system. No e-mail. No strapped-on transfer stations to get it all working together.
You open a Web page on your browser, you review it's content, you make changes to the content, record the reason for those changes, press the submit button, and in one fell-swoop, a document is revised, a record of who revised it (and why) is made, and everybody else whose watching that document gets notified of the change through RSS.
It's worth reading the whole article.
Technorati Tags: email, collaboration, social-software
I've been playing around a bit with Google Maps and Windows Live Local and Virtual Earth.
When we were in Utah last week (in the 117 degree heat!) we rented ATVs and went up on some back country roads with some family who know the terrain. At one point one of our party took a GPS reading, and I wanted to create a map that pointed out that location on a satellite photo.
The recording of the reading I had was in the form of degrees and decimal minutes for latitude and longitude. Google Maps took that as a search term and converted it into decimal degrees, which is what it uses to actually display the map.
But for the particular area of the desert I wanted, the satellite photos on Google Maps didn't get as detailed as I had hoped.
Microsoft's Virtual Earth had the same resolution color satellite photos, but when I continued zooming in they had more detail available in black and white.
Windows Livc Local has good tools for remembering a map and sharing it via email, but that service doesn't offer a way to embed a map into a web page that's not on MSN Spaces.
So I turned to using Virtual Earth, which is the service that underlies Live Local, and that worked just fine.
I have to say that the documentation for Virtual Earth is truly excellent, particularly the Interactive SDK, which offers usable code snippets along with detailed API reference in tabs right along with the working examples. A great exemplar of a useable Web 2.0 kind of site.
There are a number of basically impossible quests in my life: the search for the perfect mobile communication device; looking for the most powerful yet lightweight laptop (preferably one that runs OS X); finding the perfect martini (lately I'm given to Grey Goose vodka, with a twist); etc.
But probably the most impossible of these impossible quests is the maddening desire to find a small, lightweight speaker cabinet that sounds good for playing bass. Given that the wave size of the fundamental frequency of a double bass or bass guitar is somewhere around eleven feet, it's not surprising that it usually takes a lot of oomph to move enough air to amplify the sound.
For most of the late '70s and early '80s I played in bands using a huge speaker cabinet that had two fifteen-inch speakers in it, custom designed for me by Porpoise Audio in Bellingham. It sounded terrific, but took two guys to move it anywhere.
In the late '80s I moved to using a single fifteen inch Peavey cabinet. It doesn't sound anywhere near as good as the behemoth, but I can move it by myself, as long as I don't have to go up too many stairs - it still weighs somewhere around 70 lbs.
I've been starting to play some duo gigs around town with Tim Lerch, a fine jazz and blues guitar player, and realized that I had to come up with a smaller cabinet more suited to playing in coffee houses and book clubs as opposed to the loud and rowdy taverns of my misspent youth.
Today I took delivery of an Epifani UL110 cabinet like the one pictured above, and I couldn't be more pleased. It weighs 22 lbs - I can easily lift it with one hand. And the sound, powered by an Ashdown Bass Magnifier amp head, is nothing short of astounding. It reproduces my upright bass with incredible fidelity - the lows are rich and full, and the definition of the midrange and high end is fully present without being grating. I have no idea how they get so much sound out of something so small and light.
This is the best sound I've had for an amplified upright bass yet, and I can't wait to try it out on a gig, which I'll get a chance to do on July 29 at Soul Food Books in Redmond - come on out if you want to hear how it sounds.
It turned out that the substantive details of the day's discussion at Microsoft last Thursday were under an NDA, so I couldn't blog the sessions.
I can say that it was a terrific day of sessions (thanks, Walt!) with the program managers of the various Windows Live application areas, and that I came away very impressed with the talented and capable group of folks working on the Windows Live family and the passion that they bring to their work.
While most of today's tangible WindowsLive@edu program is centered on identity management and email, I was particularly impressed with the directions we heard presented by Todd Biggs for the WindowsLive as a platform for developers and mashers, and from Karen Luk on what they're planning for future work on Spaces as it transitions from MSN to Windows Live.
One of the telltale moments of the day was hearing Omar Shahine, the Lead Program Manager on Windows Live Mail, quoting the 37 Signals guys from Getting Real on releasing software often in an iterative style as being the way to build the best software. One doesn't expect to hear that kind of development style being evangelized at Microsoft, but it's good to see.
There's lots of good stuff going on in the Windows Live world, and it will be exciting to watch it develop.
Technorati Tags: Microsoft, windowslive@edu
We're staying this weekend at the Best Western Coral Hills hotel in St. George, Utah, while visiting some of Michele's family who have retired down here. Like most moderately priced hotels I've been in lately, they provide free wireless Internet access - why is it the expensive hotels charge guests for Internet access, while the cheaper chains include it free of charge?
At any rate, when one of our party went to post some photos on her MSN Spaces account she found access to the site blocked. Sure enough, the hotel is using something called InfoWest Clean Internet, which not only blocks access to all MSN Spaces, but also all of MySpace and Facebook. Interestingly, they don't block access to Google Pages, at least not yet.
There's a site where InfoWest explains why they're blocking MySpace:
Here are the simple reasons we block MySpace.com:
1. It contains suggestive and pornographic images
2. It allows for the easy posting of way too much personal information
3. It is a context for dating and personal ads
4. It can be and has been used to exploit children and teenagers.
We welcome your comments.
I gave them my comments on blocking the social networking sites in their entirety. Might as well block the whole Internet while you're at it. Sheesh.
Technorati Tags: broadband, puppy, social-software
I'm down in Mountain View, California, for a day long meeting on Thursday with Microsoft and representatives from a bunch of US colleges and universities about the needs of higher ed that might be met by some of the Windows Live offerings - specifically we'll be talking mostly about mail and calendaring services. I've said previously that I think the Windows Live folks are starting to offer some nice services, and I look forward to the opportunity to discuss the directions with the development teams.
I'll blog as much as I can from the meeting.
Technorati Tags: microsoft, WindowsLive@edu
I finally got Outlook 2007 to connect to the UW's IMAP servers.
To do so, I had to set the type of encryption connection to use SSL - not TLS on port 993 in Account Settings/Change Email Account/ Internet E-mail Settings / Advanced.
Stupidly enough, if I set the Root Mail Folder to be mail, which is where all the user folders reside by default on the UW's email service, Outlook doesn't see the Inbox, which lives above mail in the hierarchy. If I don't set a root folder it sees the Inbox, along with all the non-user folders that are their for processing purposes. This seems seriously broken, in a way that previous versions of Outlook were not.
Well, maybe I spoke to soon - now I've gotten a message saying Microsoft Office Outlook has stopped working - Windows is collecting more information about the problem, followed by a dialog box offering to turn on diagnostics, which just sent a bunch of info off to Microsoft.
Sigh.
I'm installing beta 2 of Office on my new Vista machine, and when I download the file and go to run it I get a Security Warning that says:
The publisher could not be verified. Are you sure you want to run this software?
Name: OPPLUS-EN.EXE
Publisher: Unknown Publisher
Right hand, meet left hand.
Lately it feels like I'm awash in good music coming in from all sides - more than I can even absorb!
The KEXP Blog continues to offer downloads (many in straight MP3 format) and all sorts of insight into great new music. Thanks to Kevin for turning me on to Under Byen and to Andrew for Velella Velella! Someday I'll have the time to catch up with the latest on the blog.
I also recently became a customer at emusic
- they've got a huge selection of music available in non-locked-up mp3 format, using good encoding (192 kbps VBR on the LAME encoder). I'm not sure I prefer the commit to a certain number of tracks per month business plan to the a la carte pay per track model, but we'll see. You get 25 free tracks for signing up, with no further commitment - so why wouldn't you? I grabbed Alvin Youngblood Hart's Down In the Alley and McCoy Tyner's Supertrios.
It's really great to see new sources of good music being shared in formats that aren't locked up and limited to single platforms!
Ed lent me T-Bone Burnett's latest, The True False Identity, which is terrific. Nice to see that someone can survive working in Hollywood, art intact.
I think Dan Gillmor has the best (and shortest) take on Bill Gates' announcement that he'll be focusing on the work of the Gates Foundation rather than Microsoft.
I also admire the great work that the Gates Foundation has been doing.
I also think that Ray Ozzie is a smart fellow who is undertaking some brave work in trying to orient Microsoft to the emergence of the open nature of the Web. I'll be down in Mountain View next week for a meeting with the Windows Live Mail and Calendaring teams, so I hope to get some first hand info on how that effort is coming.
So it took several hours to download and install beta 2 of Windows Vista on a brand new Dell Optiplex GX 620.
When Vista finally boots, the first thing I get is a message telling me that an unknown program (netfx?) is trying to access the network, and asking if I want it to have that access or not. I tell Windows no, even though I have no idea what that program is.
Next it tells me that I'm successfully connected to Network, and asks me to choose between a public network ("Use for networks in public places where you don't want people to access your computer") or a private network "Use for your home or personal network where you want to share files and devices"). I have no idea which to choose - I don't want random people accessing my computer, but I do want to share files between my PC and my Mac. There's no real information here about what I'm choosing. I randomly pick public network, figuring I can change things later (I hope) if I need to.
Now I get a Windows Security Alert telling me that Windows Firewall has blocked some features of the googledesktopindex program. I think Dell installed Google Desktop on the box when shipped (I know I didn't put it there), so I tell Windows to unblock it. I immediately get a User Account Control telling me "A program needs your permission to continue" and blocks the desktop until I hit "Continue" - when Zephyr comes in to chat. While we're chatting, the desktop suddenly clears itself up with no input from me. What's up with that?
Vista detects my two monitor display situation just fine and takes me automatically to the control panel to set that up.
The first task I undertake in Vista is setting up the new Windows Mail program. So far it looks a lot like Outlook Express. The Remember Password box is still checked by default in the setup wizard - that doesn't smack of enhanced security. Somehow while working through the configuration I manage to lock up the Mail program, but restarting after killing it in the Task Manager I mange to get it configured.
When I finish configuring the Mail program it asks me if I want to download a list of my IMAP mail folders - I tell it yes and immediately get a message saying "The server your are connected to is using a security certificate that could not be verified. The target principal name is incorrect. Do you want to continue using this server?" I assume that's because it doesn't like the wild-card certificates we use, so I tell it Yes. The download of folders is blazingly fast, and the following collection of my over 3,000 message Inbox doesn't take very long either.
More later...
Recently we had a presentation from Turnitin.com, a company that markets an online service that claims to detect possible plagiarism in student works. While there was some interest in the service here, I think we came away with more questions than answers, at least from that particular session (which was led by a representative from the company who did not seem to really know very much about the products he was hawking). But several of the faculty did comment at that presentation that cheating is a real problem.
Now Alex Halavais, who did his graduate work here at the UW and served on the Student Technology Fee Committee during those years, is now a bona-fide academic, faculty member (recently at Buffalo and soon at Quinnipiac University), and blogger, has a great post on just how bad many students are a plagiarizing, under the title of "How to Cheat Good".
3. You Google, I Google
How do you think I check suspicious work? It’s not like our state university is shelling out for TurnItIn. I am pretty good with that Google thingy. And changing two words won’t send me off the trail. So copy from something a bit more obscure. Or—and this is really tricky—try making up your own stuff.
I particularly like his ending:
And what if you follow all eight points and still get caught? Here’s your “get out of jail free” card. Simply say this to your teacher (no, no one has tried these exact words on me yet), and you are off scot free:
“Like a postmodern version of Searle’s Chinese Room, I am able to re-articulate existing knowledge through my command of its (re)presentation and manipulation. Any claim to originality ignores what I like to call our ability to stand on the shoulders of giants. By this, I mean that there is a well-known correlation between book sales and height, and we should use their height to our own advantage, to avoid mud and small dogs.
“Also, is it really all that original to give me an F? After all, I’ve already received an F from two other profs this semester alone. Be an original: give me a C.
“By the way, I don’t know who this ‘John Rawls’ guy is—is he even in our major?—but I think it’s possible he cheated off me.
“Finally, and I think this is most vital, my plagiarism in this case is a clear indictment of the educational system. After all, I’ve been failed by my high school and by three years of university, while continually passing. I don’t think it can be entirely my fault if I’ve gotten this far by plagiarism, and in this, my last class, you decide that it is somehow ‘wrong.’ Clearly, you should use this outcome as a way of evaluating your own teaching and expectations.”
You have my permission to use the above excuses, verbatim and without attribution, in any discussion with your respected faculty. I don’t guarantee their success, but would be happy to hear from any of you who employ them as to their efficacy.
Nice post, Alex, and good luck on your new gig!
In an article in eWeek titled "Beyond the Valley: 10 Blooming U.S. Cities for Tech", Deborah Rothberg ranks Seattle at the top of the list to become the next technology epicenter.
Seattle • City population: 570,430 • Companies that call it home: Amazon, RealNetworks, AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile • The details: The June 2006 Dice Report ranks Seattle No. 10 in available jobs, with 1,901 listed, up over 300 from one year ago. Indeed.com ranks Seattle No. 4 in number of tech jobs per capita, with 13 jobs per 1000 people. And a WashTech/CWA report issued this week calls Seattle a "bright spot" of technology growth in a recovering market.
I wonder what that means for the already over-inflated housing prices...
Technorati Tags: technology, puppy
For the past year or two I've mostly settled in to using the native Mac OS X mail program, which I like pretty well (keeping in mind that all my email is stored on the UW's central IMAP servers, not on my Mac). There's a lot to like about the Mac mail app - it does nice graphical things with keeping mail threads together, it handles forwards of multiple messages right (which Thunderbird doesn't do), etc.
But every once in a while I go back to using Pine, and I'm always amazed at just how it's got features which are so far ahead of any other mail program I've seen.
Today I was searching for someone's mail address - I had searched through the From field in several folders with no success, when I realized that the person I was looking for had probably been copied on some group emails. Pine allows you to do a search on all of the "participants" in an email - so that searches the From, To, and CC fields at once - and sure enough that brought the address right up. How sensible can you get?
Today I saw a report that yesterday the machines which process email external to the UW handled a record 2.1 million messages (in one day!), and that our spam detection software scored 65% of those messages as having a 50% or greater possibility of being spam.
That means, if we take it as a given that those messages scored greater than 50% really are spam, that we processed 1.36 million spam messages in one day. In one day. That's more than fifteen spam messages per second all day long.
The implications of this activity when multiplied on a global scale are staggering.
Well, after almost an entire day in my office working with the new Microsoft software, I can report some successes and some problems.
Obviously, the blog posting from Word works (obvious because you’re reading these posts), though I haven’t yet gotten Word to recognize my categories, and it doesn’t seem to know about tagging posts.
The Outline function in Word seems much improved from previous versions, which is making it easy to work on the outline for my ECAR research bulletin.
On the other hand, IE 7 crashes every time I try to open a PDF file link, which has made it much more difficult to work on my ECAR research bulletin (grumble grumble…that’s what you get for trying new beta software on a project that matters that you’re already behind the deadline on).
I managed to successfully import my bookmarks from Firefox into IE (once I actually located where the Firefox bookmarks were). IE, however, seems to have put them in a different order than they were in Firefox – that’s confusing. I wish I could use Foxmarks with IE – seems like it’d be possible for somebody to write that as an extension. IE 7 also doesn’t seem to have the equivalent of the Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox – it has a sidebar that you can open your favorites in. Since I don’t want to keep a sidebar open all the time, that just means my heavily used bookmarks are one more click away.
When I imported my bookmarks from Firefox it added them to the already existing IE favorites, most of which were years out of date. I couldn’t figure out how to efficiently edit and manage the favorites from within IE – it would only let me delete one bookmark at a time, for instance. Once I opened up the Favorites folder, however, I could manage the bookmarks and folders just like any other Windows folder.
Interesting note about blogging from Word – so I publish the post to the blog server. Then should I save the document in Word? What good would that do? Will Word know if I try to republish an document with edits, like Ecto does? Seems unlikely, but I’ll try it out at some point.
There’s lots of new software on its way to coming out for Windows - new versions of Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, and, of course, the looming new version of Windows itself, Vista. I’ve decided it’s time to try out some of the new stuff for myself. Since I’ve been mostly a Mac user over the past couple of years, I’ve been at least somewhat out of touch with what’s happening on Windows, so this should be an interesting exercise.
Our local Microsoft rep got me set up on the beta program (thanks, Frank!), so I’ll have access to the latest and (hopefully) greatest releases.
It turns out that in order to take advantage of all the new eye-candy advanced graphics features in Vista I had to order a new system with a dedicated graphics card and lots of memory (my current office Windows system is several years old), so I can’t test Vista just yet.
In the meantime, though, I’ve installed the beta release of Office and IE 7. I’ll be trying to use them for several real-world tasks and reporting on how they work for me.
The first thing I notice is that the new Outlook doesn’t work for me. I don’t mean it’s poorly designed or has bad UI – it just never finishes opening my Inbox on the UW Imap server. I should ‘fess up at this point – I’ve totally bought into the Google Mail paradigm of keeping most everything in my Inbox and finding things through searching, with the predictable result of ending up with an inbox that’s got more than 10,000 messages in it at this point. So perhaps it’s no wonder that Outlook chokes on my mail – but I can’t be the only person working this way. Perhaps I don’t have enough memory on my computer for Outlook to handle it – this box only has 512 MB of RAM (a megabyte just ain’t what it use to be).
The next thing I notice is that the Word user interface looks very different than previous versions. Lots of other folks have written about the tabbed “Ribbon” interface, so I won’t attempt to describe it here – but I was sure shocked by the lack of a File menu – it takes a lot of chutzpah to do away with what is probably the most basic navigational mechanism common to GUIs since the original Mac was introduced (I thought it went back to the Xerox Star, but I can’t find any evidence of that). Time will tell if this is new interface style is a good idea, but I’m sure it will confuse lots of people at first.
The new Word supports blog posting, using the MetaWebLog and Atom publishing protocols, so I’m trying that out for the first time with this post. It was fairly easy to configure Word to publish to my Movable Type blog – assuming that this post actually works.
I’m working on writing a Research Bulletin for ECAR, so I’ll be trying to use the new Word for that – we’ll see how it goes. More later!
The President of the University of Washington, Mark Emmert, is going to China on Monday. At the same time a group of UW faculty are heading out on a bus to tour the state of Washington on the annual UW Faculty Field Tour. Both Mark and the Field Tour want to record and communicate their experiences by blogging along the way. How cool is that? What better way for these highly articulate folks to communicate directly with people who are interested?
I've worked with Gina Hills and Harry Hayward, my colleagues in UW Media Relations, to get these blogs set up and going. Mark's blog is at http://www.presblog.washington.edu, and the Field Tour blog is at http://depts.washington.edu/fldtour/wordpress/.
For those interested in the technical details, these blogs are set up on the web servers that the UW provides for faculty, departments, and courses. The blogs are using the popular open source Wordpress blogging software, with MySQL as the database. We've used UW NetID for authenticating blog authors. Instructions for how to do this are available on the web.
While the instructions make it easy enough for your garden variety Unix geek to get up and running with a blog, it's clear to me from setting these two blogs up that it's not anywhere near easy enough for your average staff or faculty person to get blogging on our infrastructure - and it's also clear to me that the demand for blogs at the UW is increasing rapidly, so we'll have see if we can't figure out some ways to make the setup process easier for folks.
In the meantime, it will be interesting to read what Mark and the faculty on the Field Tour post from their travels!
In case anyone thought that PDF is really an open standard, this from Brian Jones of Microsoft's Office group:
About 8 months ago we announced to our MVPs that we would provide PDF publish support natively in the 2007 Office system. We made the move due to overwhelming customer demand for PDF support, and it was received really well. The blog post I made around the announcement was probably one of my most widely read posts of the year.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like we're going to be able to do the right thing for the customer now. There was a news article in the WSJ today (and now on CNet) indicating that Adobe didn't like that we provided the save to pdf functionality directly in the box, and so they’ve been pushing us to take it out. I'm still trying to figure that one out given that PDF is usually viewed as an open standard and there are other office suites out there that already support PDF output. I don't see us providing functionality that's any different from what others are doing.
It looks like Adobe wanted us to charge our customers extra for the Save as PDF capability, which we just aren't willing to do (especially given that other companies already offer it for free). In order to work around this, it looks like we're going to offer it as a free download instead. At least that way it's still free for Office users, but unfortunately now there is an added hassle in that anyone that wants the functionality is going to have to download it separately.
This really is one of those cases where you just have to shake your head. Adobe got a lot of goodwill with customers, particularly in government circles, for making PDF available as an open standard. It’s amazing that they would go back on the openness pledge. Unfortunately, the really big losers here are the customers who now have one extra hassle when they deploy Office.
I'm a huge fan of the work Susan Crawford is doing on net neutrality and other Internet governance issues. If you're not reading her blog, you should be.
But I was surprised to read a post titled What's the Internet2 Connection yesterday. In that post she reproduces some speculation that Internet2 might be up to some nefarious activities, and that use of the term "commodity Internet" to refer to the commercial Internet infrastructure could be taken to mean something bad, and might specifically relate to Internet2 conspiring to insert something like a Broadcast Flag technology into the core of the network to please the RIAA and MPAA.
I wrote to Susan with the following comment, which she kindly posted on her blog:
I think you've got the intent of at least the historical
context of Internet 2 almost exactly backwards.
When the NSF got out of the business of running the backbone network
of the Internet in the mid-90s, major research universities who
already depended very heavily on the net for not only common
communications functions like email but also for increasingly high
bandwidth research applications started to get very nervous,
especially when the telcos who took over running the backbone
networks started talking about charging by the bit instead of by
capacity of hookups.
Internet 2 was formed as a consortial effort, initially among those
top research institutions, to have a strategy of providing some level
of guaranteed, consistent connectivity among the institutions that
would provide for a safer haven in an uncertain world. It turns out
that the Abilene network that Internet 2 has operated has been very
successful at providing that consistency, and provided very high
bandwidths at far better pricing than individual institutions
could've gotten by themselves.
But, of course, it turns out that in the end Internet 2 still is, at
least theoretically, at the mercy of the telcos, as the bandwidth
provided is, in the end, leased from the telcos.
To that end, there is a newer consortial effort among some research
institutions that has actually bought its own fiber and is operating
a new backbone network - this effort is called National Lambda Rail,
which is attempting to provide a national scale infrastructure for
research and experimentation in networking technologies and
applications. (see www.nlr.net).
So I wouldn't read too much into the term "commodity Internet" - it
was merely meant as a way of distinguishing the at-that-time-new
commercialized Internet backbone from what the research institutions
saw they needed, which was a way to get some dedicated connectivity
among themselves to support research efforts.
I also followed up with an email to Susan on the relationship between Internet2 and the content industry:
Hi, again, Susan -
I realized as I cycled in to the office this morning that I hadn't addressed the whole issue of the RIAA and MPAA membership in Internet 2 and what that's all about.
From my viewpoint, (I'm not on the inside track at Internet 2, though I am friends with a bunch of folks who work very hard on some of the initiatives, so this is interpretation, not revelation) it's mostly about trying tto protect the reputation of organizations including Internet 2 itself as well as the member institutions.
The institutions that are Internet 2 members route traffic between themselves over the Abilene backbone provided by Internet2. That backbone is pretty high speed (10 gbps) and reliable.
Unsurprisingly, some enterprising students (in this case at U Mass Amherst) put together a new peer-to-peer application built to take advantage of the Abilene connections. This application, called i2hub (there's a wikipedia entry with more info) gathered a fair amount of attention, as might be expected, from the RIAA and MPAA last year. Predictably, this got played out in various hyperbolic pres releases from the industry that made it look like Internet 2 was somehow behaving irresponsible by allowing this trading to happen (for example, see the RIAA press release at http://www.riaa.com/news%5Cnewsletter%5C042705.asp, which talks about "an emerging epidemic of music theft on a specialized, high-speed university computer network known as Internet2." sheesh).
The folks who run Internet 2, as well as the Presidents and Provosts etc of the member institutions were worried about the activities of the students and the reaction to them by the content industry besmirching the reputation of a network that they had worked very hard to fund and build. So they opened up discussions with the RIAA and MPAA that eventually led to them joining Internet 2 as corporate members.
I don't know the extent to which they've been active members in any of the Internet 2 activities. I do know that there are people within Internet 2 who believe that there are possible avenues for discussion on coming up with open standards for digital rights management technologies that would offer some hope of interoperability in that contentious world. I know these folks are primarily interested not in the development of such standards for the entertainment world as much as they think they hold promise for allowing individuals to do things such as control the extent to which they want their private information released on such things as electronic medical records. My own opinion is that we'd be much better off furthering the use of rights expression languages for all these types of situations and dealing with abuse of the expressed rights as needed, but it's probably an area where reasonable folks can differ.
That may be more than you wanted to know :)
Cheers -
- Oren
Technorati Tags: academia, internet2, net-neutrality
