Today is a lousy day: a demo I was doing on some new technology was a disaster. The same setup works fine before the demo but somehow, it just refused to work on the critical moment. And we have some very senior folks within the group! I feel pretty crappy…:-(

This feeling wasn’t really new to me.

Like in 1994, we tried to do a Singapore National Day broadcast using Mbone (multicast) over the Internet. It was really cool and it allows Singaporean (mostly students) overseas to watch it over the Internet! Mbone was a pain to setup and we put the whole thing together in barely 2 weeks. While we send out emails to our users not to flood the bandwidth (we only on 128kbps then) and the local TV crew in place, the video comes out pixelated and audio barely audible. It was a nightmare and we never do it. Yet looking back, this set the stage for the Internet craze¹ in Singapore. If nothing else, it gots people thinking about what Internet can do.
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Internet Peering is one of the stuff that has been on the back of my mind. I have several long conversations with many people, such as Bill Woodcock and Bill Norton, over the last year trying to get a grasp of the issues. The problem is easy to frame but the solution is not so simple.

In a paper published by ITU-T SG3¹ (via ITU Newsblog), it says:

Interconnection in telecommunications will continue to be an important and difficult problem facing policymakers and regulators. But like many difficult problems, the solutions are not simple and cannot be neatly summarized.

Remember that Internet is is a networks of networks. These networks are connected either transit or peering. If you are a small network (e.g. home or office), you are likely to buy transit from a service provider (e.g. subscribe to a broadband, or leaseline etc). Your service provider would buy transit from a larger service provider and so on. But as you reach the top with all the Tier-1 ISPs, who do they buy transit from? They aren’t going to buy transit from each another…so they peer. They exchange their routes so that their customers can reach each another but (usually) no money exchanged.
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I wrote MT-Bayesian as a quick hack last year because of my dislike of MT-Blacklist. I still don’t like Blacklist concept (been-there, done-that in Email) but I have to admit there are serious problem with MT-Bayesian.

1. Bayesian is extremely CPU intensive.

Bayesian algorithm isn’t complex but it suck up a lot CPU resources. This is okay in a mail environment but in MT where you need to rebuild often, this is enough to crash some slower machines.

And it doesn’t help I wrote the whole thing in Perl.
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The Road Ahead by Bill Gate

In my previous entry, I discussed about the changes in the telecommunication industry to a world where data, IP Packets particularly, is the main revenue generator¹ and Voice would become just one of the many application/service provided on top of the data world.

Now, such radical change is extremely disruptive even though it is likely to span across many years. The fixed wired industry just barely started on the transition; In Singapore, you can find a pure IP access provider like Pacific Internet² who owns no infrastructure but carry their data over other infrastructure providers. But the mobile industry is still a happy family in their wall-garden with voice in the center.

Now imaging what happened on the fixed wired industry now been pushed onto the mobile industry. (In certain ways, it’s already started with 802.11 challenging 2.5/3G) and the havoc it will create, with mobile industry crying fouls (“I paid so much for the spectrum and spend billions on the infrastructure! You have to protect me!”) and the service providers and consumers on the other end demand open access!
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Skype secures $18.8m funding (via Dave Farber IPer).

Skype, a London-based company that is enjoying strong growth with software enabling free phone calls over the internet, has secured $18.8m (?11m) in second-round funding.

Okay, I am a happy user of Skype. But would I invest in them without bottomline? Sure, if it is a “sell to a greater fool” play.

Blogging have slow down: work, work and work. That’s what I get for been traveling for the last two weeks. :-(

Oh, my baby girl just has its first month celebration. A local tradition where relatives and friends come to your place to admire your baby, make a lot of noises and then leave with two red eggs and four kan ku kuen. (Sorry, I dont know how to translate the latter but it’s a kind of dessert). To commence the event, my wife decided to start her blog :-)

China has ordered a blogbus.com, a blogging service in China, to shutdown it service. It is the annual season that China’s Parliament held session. (via Joi Ito)

Singapore is also having our Parliament debate right now and I am glad there is no gag order on the Internet (at least none I am aware of). If nothing else, Singapore Government is seeking feedback via the Internet IRC although with pretty disappointing results. (Sorry, cant find the news article link).

I blame the lack of understanding of the tools to use then the Internet specifically. I mean, what do you expect from someone who spend a few hours online per week, was told that IRC is the best way to get feedback from public, and walk away disappointed after giving it a try? Maybe they should learn from their kids on how to use IRC…

This is unbelievable: a magnetic motor that consumed almost no electricity

Next we move to a unit with its motor connected to a generator. What we see is striking. The meters showed an input to the stator electromagnets of approximately 1.8 volts and 150mA input, and from the generator, 9.144 volts and 192mA output. 1.8 x 0.15 x 2 = 540mW input and 9.144 x 0.192 = 1.755W out.

Think you are safe if the site you visit have a “lock”? Think again (via Slashdot)

Scammers can also configure their web server so that deceptive SSL certificates won’t trigger an alert in the user’s browser. “One of the SSL encoding methods is ‘plain text’,” Neal Krawetz from Secure Science Corporation noted in the SANS post on the issue. “Most SSL servers have this disabled by default, but most browsers support it. When plain text is used, no central certificate authority is consulted and the user never sees a message asking if a certificate should be accepted (because ‘plain text’ doesn’t use certificates). Keeping that in mind, the little lock icon may not even indicate an encrypted channel. The little lock only indicates an SSL connection.