August 28th, 2005

Stories behind .XXX

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I wrote about the Fiasco of .XXX few days ago. A casual observer might conclude the following:

1. ICANN board approved .XXX
2. US government (DoC) halt .XXX delegation
3. GAC stepped in one day after (2) to give US governments it some legimitacy

However, there is another different explaination of the realty which is also very plausible.

1. ICANN board didn’t really like .XXX but couldn’t find any ground to reject it.
2. Some GAC members began to express concerns about .XXX only as the delegation date approaches
3. GAC Chair decided to write letter to ICANN which of course, has to be circulate among the members first for approval
4. US DoC decided to send letter one day before GAC does to claim credit for halting .XXX and score some brownies points with the conservatives at home.

Which is the truth? Make your own guesses.

Note: Regardless which version of the truth you believe, it does not change my observation that the fiasco is a lose-lose for ICANN.

Posted on 11:34 am in ICANN

August 25th, 2005

More about Google Talk

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I did some packet sniffing and look at how Google Talk works.

1. Google Talk is Jabber (XMPP) compliant. Here is what it send for authentication

<stream:stream to="gmail.com" version="1.0" 
  xmlns:stream="http://etherx.jabber.org/streams" 
  xmlns="jabber:client">
    <stream:features>
      <starttls xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-tls"/>
      <mechanisms xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-sasl">
        <mechanism>X-GOOGLE-TOKEN</mechanism>
        </mechanisms>
      </stream:features>
    <auth xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-sasl" 
      mechanism="X-GOOGLE-TOKEN"<(Some hash, presume Google Token)</auth>

Then followed by the standard presence information etc. Interestingly, the precense exchange indicated that Google Talk assume everyone in your Gmail addressbook is your friend…Hmm.

IMs are also standard compliant :-) 

<message to="xxxx@gmail.com" type="chat">
  <body>testing now..pls accept then we hang up =)</body>
  <active xmlns="http://jabber.org/protocol/chatstates"/>
  </message>

Note: talk.google.com does not seem to support s2s. This means you cant use gmail jabber server to talk to other friends who is on other jabber system :P
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted on 11:48 am in Technology, VoIP

August 24th, 2005

Google Talk

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Google just launched their Google Talk!

First, I have to eat my own words – I predicted that Google will enter VoIP space focusing on their search capability but instead, they revolve it around their Gmail expanding the communication capability instead.

Now, on to the good news, Google embraced Open Standard! Not only the IM capability is based on Jabber, their VoIP apparently is also based on SIP, at least according to ZDNet. Two birds in one stone wohoo!

ps: My Jabber account is james.seng.sg (or james.seng@gmail.com) so add me :-)

Update: Tom said Google isn’t using SIP…

Posted on 11:18 pm in Technology, VoIP

August 23rd, 2005

APAN Day Zero

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Someone left a comment asking me what’s APAN or Asia Pacific Advance Network. It is a meeting where AP network researchers get together to discussing advance networking issues and also a place where Advance Research and Education Network (AREN) (and also the GRID lately) people gather to discuss network collobration. SingAREN is the representative for Singapore in this area which is one of the reasons I am here. In fact, SingAREN is going to host APAN next year in Singapore so we have quite a big team here this time.

But like APRICOT, a lot of side meetings are also held concurrently. Just yesterday alone, I have to switch between APSTAR, IPv6 Summit and also chairing APEET and JET-Internationalized Email Address.

Incidently, for those who is interested in Internet statistics in Taiwan, you should look at the presentation Ching Chiao did at APSTAR. 14.6M Internet users, E-Commerce NTD 35b (~1b USD), 2.2M Skype, 400k blogs and 108% Mobile penetration. The last one 108% is interesting because it means many people are holding two mobile plans or more.

(Speaking of werid statistics, do you know that Japan actually has a higher broadband penetration then PC ownership? That’s a story for another day)
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Posted on 2:02 pm in APEET, APSTAR, IDN, IETF, Technology

August 20th, 2005

APAN Taiwan

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Had a great lunch meeting with my fellows editors of Tomorrow.sg. Now, we need to go back do some more thinking on the next step.

And now, I just checked into Howard Plaza Hotel for APAN Taipei.

Posted on 11:40 pm in Travel

August 19th, 2005

Where is FCC heading?

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Scott Bradner’s latest article is a must-read. I come to similiar observation, that FCC seem to be moving further and further right ever since the new Chairman is in. The last few critical rulings on 911 on VoIP, Naked DSL has sided towards the incumbents and less on the consumers.

I know FCC is basically a highly political but still, can we have a little balance here?

Posted on 2:39 pm in Technology

August 18th, 2005

Fiasco over .XXX

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By now, everyone in the industry already know about the .XXX fiasco. If you don’t, here is a quick summary.

– ICANN approved the .XXX delegation to ICMRegistry on 1st June. ICMRegistry announced it will be operational on 16th August.

– Michael Gallagher requested Vint Cerf to delay .XXX delegation on 11th August. Michael Gallagher is the Assistant Secretary to DoC and NITA appointed by Bush.

– Chairman of GAC, Sharil requested ICANN to delay .XXX delegation on 12th August.

– Bush administration scored some brownie points with Pro-Family Group (dated 17th August).

Milton Mueller’s thoughts is also a must read although I am not so certain David Sampson is the invisible-hand behind the fiasco. IMHO, the Bush administration is generally right-wing so with or without Sampson involvement, they probably do what they did anyway.

But the fiasco left me thinking over a few questions:

1. How could a single government unilaterally halt a decision made by an international community? I know ICANN isn’t exactly independent yet but would you expect Tony Blair to be able to do what Bush did?

Unfortunately, ICANN is in this lose-lose position.

If they decide to go ahead with the .XXX delegation (technically they couldn’t anyway without the sign-off by DoC) or they condamn Bush administration over this, they would risk a fallout with US DoC. That’s not a good thing right now given ICANN is trying very hard to demostrate to DoC that they should be independent.

If they decided to halt .XXX delegation (which they did), then the message they send to the international community is never doubt US is ultimately incharge of the DNS, all the TLDs including the ccTLDs that many considered a souvernity right. This will give a lot of ammunitions to those who wish the control of the DNS to be transferred to UN or ITU and at the very least, swing some who is on the fense in this tug-of-war.

I pity ICANN and the losers are all those who believe in industry self-regulation of the DNS.
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Posted on 10:01 pm in ICANN

August 15th, 2005

mplayer tricks

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Several months ago, I mentioned I was looking for mplayer documention. My wife has a bunch of wma files which she ripped using Windows Media Player but can’t play on iPod or iTunes now. We could probably rip again but being OSS geek, we like to inflict pain upon ourselves to look for the most obscure ways to do things. So the answer is obviously mplayer (with lame)

Actually it wasn’t so bad. It can be done using two command line:

mplayer original.wma -ao pcm -ao temp.wav
lame -V 5 temp.wav final.mp3

But this is not enough and I have to write this into a shell script allow conversion in batch. Batch is important, of course, since my wife actually has a lot of wma files to convert..okay, not so many, just 8 of them but hey, the final wma2mp3 script is definitely worth the effort.

Save it in your directory, do a chmod +x wma2mp3 and there you go. It works on Mac too! I know, I know, there is EasyWMA but did I mention I like to inflict pain on myself?

Incidently, mplayer also comes with a incredible tool called mencoder which does transcoding, resizing, encoding, and all sort of filters using command line. It is a perfect tool to downsize my VideoCD or AVI files to watch it on my Zaurus.

mencoder -oac mp3lame -lameopts mode=3:preset=24 -ovc lavc -lavcopts
  vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:vbitrate=384:keyint=250 -vop expand="320:240" 
  -o output.avi input.avi

See? It is so simple! One line does it all. It only takes about 30mins to encode 60mins of video (most windows program I tried takes nearly 3hours for 60mins of video) and the final output is barely 120mb. Here is the fitzaurus script if you are interested.

Posted on 8:13 pm in Open Source, Technology

August 11th, 2005

Korea gets 10Gbps KR-US and KR-CN circuits

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Just read the latest GLORAID update:

The first major step of the six-country GLORIAD effort to establish a lightpath-enabled ring around the northern hemi-sphere is being taken in a few short
weeks – thanks to the efforts of partners at the Korea Institute of Science and
Technology Information (KISTI) and to the substantial funding commitment obtained
from the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of Korea.

Academic network research always leads the market in demand on bandwidth. I was told Japan academic consume 3x more international bandwidth than all the commercial (including Yahoo! BB). Scary huh?

Posted on 2:00 pm in Technology

August 9th, 2005

Fun with Panorama

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paronoma-lourve-small.jpg

Took some photos of Louvre Museum and had some fun making paronomic view of it, using Open Source Software of course!

Tools used (1) Hugin to align the photos and (2) Enblend to stitch the align photos together and optionally (3) Autopan-SIFT to generate control points for Hugin.

Bob Park has an excellent instruction on how to create paronoma view using these tools.

Posted on 4:10 am in Open Source, Travel
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