November 10th, 2005

Virtual Property

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Just saw this news on Slashdot

A gamer who spent £13,700 on an island that only exists in a computer game has recouped his investment, according to the game developers.

The 23-year-old gamer known as Deathifier made the money back in under a year.

Wohoo!

November 9th, 2005

What the heck did he just said?

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Just saw this at the world of warcraft forum with a damn funny subject title!

blizzard-complain.jpg

I bet the folks at Blizzard must be scratching their head wondering what this guy just said. Muhahahaah.

November 7th, 2005

What if…

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Everyone knows “wireless” has been the catchphrase in this decade – cordless phone, mobile phone, laptops, wifi and moving forward, wimax, uwb, etc etc. Wireless isn’t just a multi-billions dollar industry, it is has also change our way of life.

But I am sure we have friends or families who tell us how they feel giddy near a microwave; Or how they are concerned about turning on their mobile phone near their babies; Or they wont have wifi at home near their kids.

Many of those are urban myth. Power emission on wireless are regulated even in so-called “unregulated” ISM band at a level which is considered safe for human. Some people may be more sensitive but generally it is safe.

But what if urban myth is true? What if wireless is indeed harmful to human except the effects are unnoticable until decades later? I am not a doctor so I don’t claim to know the truth but as a technologist, it is an interesting scenario planning excerise. Ignoring the health disaster at hand, or that you have to forgo your mobile phone and doing wireless surfing, we will have class action suits against the whole wireless industry (handphone manufacturers, wireless operators), angry mobs at government regulators etc etc. It isn’t a pretty picture.

And this is why lawsuits like this scares the hell out of me…

November 4th, 2005

Two sides of a Coin

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A few days ago, while discussing WSIS, ICANN, DNS, and all stuff that is geeky over lunch, he commented: “Wow, the Internet is a messy place, isn’t it?”

To which I responded: “Yes. But this is the mess that gives us email, web, p2p and all things that is wonderful about the Internet”.

October 31st, 2005

Is P2P TV Legal?

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I have a great morning at work! I am feeling the same excitement I had two year ago when I first started working on VoIP except this time is on another technology. As a matter of principle, I dont blog about my work but just wanted to spread the joy :-)

On another topic, I noticed my entry on P2P TV generated a lot of interest. Someone left a comment : “is this legal?” This is actually a 2-dimension question : (1) are you asking about the technology or the content (2) which jurisdiction?

Lets ignore the jurisdiction for a moment but generally speaking, I don’t see whats legal or illegal about the technology despite what RIAA/MPAA wants you to think otherwise. Just like a knife can be use in both good and bad things, any technology can be used for good and bad things. Do we outlaw TCP/IP because IP packets may be used to help criminals? Do we ban HTTP because it can be used to distribute child pornography? Do we regulate cars because it can kill people? So why are we having this debate on a technology like P2P?

As for the content, I am not a lawyer but let me share a story:

In 1948-52, there is a big mess in the TV spectrum allocation in US and many (small) towns are unable to get any TV signals as FCC stop issuing licenses to re-examine its framework (aka, “The Big Freeze”). During that time, along came a new technology known as “cable”. Entrepreneurs started putting up antennas on hilltop, lay cables through these small towns and then re-transmit over-the-air TV channels through their cable to the homes (charging a fee of cos).

As expected, the TV stations/copyright owners sued the cable for copyright infringement. The US Supreme Court ruled in 1968 in the landmark lawsuit Fortnightly Corp. vs United Artists Television that there is no copyright infringement. And the cable companies went on to become what they are today.

I am not saying this is the same as P2P TV altho it sound similar. What is significant is that with a little tolerance, a whole new industry can be created from a little technology. What’s more important is that eventually the cable companies did find peace with the content owners and in fact, makes more money for them.

October 19th, 2005

When will we run out of IPv4?

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A month ago, I mentioned about a paper by Tony Hain regarding IPv4 allocation status. The paper was recently published in the Internet Protocol Journal which sparked a debate on Slashdot. Particularly, Tony’s paper suggested that IANA will run out of IP addresses in 5 years or less.

However, there is another paper written by Geoff Hutson which predicts that we have enough IPv4 address until 2022. The differences got most people confused. So who is right?

Actually, both are right, or rather, not too far apart. Remember, Geoff Hutson’s paper looks at the complete exhaustion of IPv4 address by 2022 whereas Tony’s paper looks at exhaustion only at IANA pool. If we examine the IANA allocations, then both of them are (somewhat) consistent with Geoff’s 2013 projection and Tony’s 2010 projection. The explaination for the 3 years difference is actually in the data used for the projection: Geoff uses IANA allocations after 1995 whereas Tony’s uses those after 2000.

But whichever you believe, 2010 or 2013, it is pretty certain IANA will eventually run out of /8 to allocate to RIRs in the next X years. In fact, many are concerned that Tony’s paper will expediate the exhaustion as many ISPs (esp. the larger ones) have not asked for allocation for quite sometime, because they have overprovisioned during the dotcom days. They might not need it for the next one or two yeaers, later but with the alarm ringing that IANA may run out of addresses to allocate, it won’t be surprising that many will start to horde IP address.

Afterall, when IPv4 address becomes harder to get, don’t be surprised to see people ebay’ing their IP address in the future.

October 12th, 2005

Google Starts Up Philanthropy Campaign

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Washington Post reports (also see google.org):

Google Inc. is launching an unusual corporate philanthropy campaign that will focus on fighting poverty and disease in Africa, addressing energy and environmental issues, and assisting nonprofit groups by giving away free online advertising.

Not that I am against it but given that Google is now a public company, I wonder how Google is going to justify doing this to their shareholders. Three Cheers to Google nevertheless.

October 10th, 2005

Starwars IV in ASCII-art movie

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I dunno how old is this but I just found this: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl. Someone converted the whole Starwars into an ASCII art-movie :-)

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October 6th, 2005

World of Warcraft Economy

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wow-epic-mount.jpgLet me introduce my World of Warcraft character. As you can see, I just spend 1000 gold pieces (900 after discount) on an Epic Mount (the mechnical bird) which allows me to travel twice as fast. 1000 gps is really a lot of money which tooks me several months to accumlate so I am pretty proud of my bird. (no pun intended :-)

How much is 1000 gps? Well, according to Game USD, a site that keeps track of online game currency “exchange rate” to USD, based on transaction on ebay and other site like IGE, 1 gp = 0.1 USD. In other words, I actually just spend 100USD on this virtual bird!

The fact there exists a mechanism for me to convert my WoW gold pieces in real cash and vice versa via the likes of IGE (they buy/sell games currency and probably making a decent profit) has far more implications then the 100USD I spend on my bird – like money laundering or currency control. I know a 14 years old kid who has more then 5,000gps…and I am pretty certain he does not have 500 USD in his saving bank account. (Does that makes WoW a bank?)

Or how about thief? Can you report to the police if someone steal your sword? What if the sword is worth 8000gps (some do) which is nearly 800USD? Apparently, someone in China did but the police shoove him off…and he went back and killed his friend who stole his sword (and sold it). Yes, thats a real story that happen a few months ago.
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October 3rd, 2005

Neustar and .GPRS

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Ever since Neustar announced they signed a deal with GSMA to oversea global database for the mobile operators last week (see also Washington Post), there are many debates about the deal online.

“Neustar, a company that should certainly know better, has announced that they’re going to create a .gprs TLD to serve the mobile phone industry This, of course, requires creation of a private root zone, against the very strong warnings in RFC 2826” said Steven Bellovin.

To the more supportive John Levine: “This isn’t quite as stupid as it seems. The GSM industry needs some way to maintain its roaming user database, the database is getting considerably more complicated with 3G features, and it looks to me like they made a reasonable decision to use DNS over IP to implement it rather than inventing yet another proprietary distributed database.”

Even Paul Vixie who has been one of the most vocal opponents of alt. root chipped in, albeit in a slightly positive tone to many people surprise: “oh and one more thing. a small technical matter, insignificant next to the democracy-related points you raised. neustar isn’t doing anything wrong– the “root” they’ll operate will only be seen by GPRS cell towers, not by end-user handsets.”

Let’s start by clarifying what Neustar is doing1: they are providing a global distributed database for SIP URLs, especially for mobile operators who have implemented IMS (which is essentially modified SIP) using DNS technology. Specifically a variation of ENUM known as Infrastructure ENUM2 that differs from (User) ENUM in its policies: the numbers are delegated to carriers & operators and not end-users . The controversial is that they are using a new TLD called .GRPS using their own alt. root server and many people jumped at the word new TLD and “alt. root”.
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