Last week, I attended Unconference organized by the local Entrepreneur27. Others like Kevin has covered the event so I won’t but I share some thoughts instead.

Unconference (and also BarCamp a few weeks before) is unique in many ways. It is close to what you get in the typical “cool” or “geek” event in the Silicon Valley. Very loose and informal, but always have great fun meeting people and listen to speakers talking about their thoughts, cool companies and what they are doing. This is a sharp contrast to the other tech conference in Singapore which is usually pretty boring.

More importantly, it is organized by grassroots and not by some in ivory tower up there thinking it is cool to have such event in Singapore. It is put together by students and recent graduates who sincerely believe that such event would be useful (and it is). Many of them spend a 12-18 months in Bay Area thanks to the EDB programme so they are trying to bring the culture back to Singapore.

Now, some may criticize that these events are badly organized or with weak content. While those are true to a certain extend, but bear in mind that these kind of events are non-existence in Singapore before. Regardless, I am sure (a) it will only get better and (b) there will always be complains, however well-run it is.

It is the first of many to come. And I am really glad to see this happening.

This morning, I received an unsolicited request to link to a website. Normally, I just dump them aside but this is an exception. First, it is an article on dailywireless.com, a site that I read occasionally and second, it is a pretty good guide to securing wifi network.

How-to: Secure a Wireless LAN

By now you’ve renamed your Wifi so that hackers won’t see the default name as they sweep for unprotected Wifi setups. But wouldn’t it be even better if hackers and curious neighbors didn’t know you had a Wifi setup at all? Usually, your access point or router is programmed to broadcast the network name (SSID) over the air at regular intervals. While broadcasting is essential for businesses and mobile hotspots to let people find the network, it isn’t needed at home, so eliminate it.

Alcatel, one of the major submarine cable builder in the world, has an interesting resource page on submarine cables like an animation on how to repair submarine cables cut. (via Ben Frankes)

The animation looks easy. Detect the cut, pick up one cable, then the other and then join them back. Even considering it takes time to find the cables, it normally dont take more than 48 hours to fixed the cut.

So what did it takes so long to fixed the cable at the recent cable cut with some estimates going up to nearly 3 weeks?

Well, in an earthquake, the cables are displaced from its original expected position. Not only the cables are displaced, earthquake also causes landslides, which means the cables may be potentially buried. In a massive earthquake, there could also be multiple cuts. Displaced, hidden with multiple cuts, locating the sever submarine cables is like finding needle in the haystack.

Found this “comic” in the newspaper. It is more real then funny tho.

I have a fun time reading various predictions for 2007, e.g. Wired, Wireless, Funny, Google and Information Week.

Some sample includes:

– Internet Traffic Doubles to 5,000 petabits per day by the end of 2007. And 80 percent of it is peer-to-peer file sharing, mostly Skype video and BitTorrent.

– Google GDrive will finally be launched

– Navigation becomes rather more important on mobiles. Mobile search doesn’t.

Some of the funny ones includes

– RFID and Web Services by Information Week [JS: hahahahahahahaha….thats so 2004]

– Nokia releases the mxx2115 cell phone incorporating an MP3 player, video games, digital camera, digital camcorder, text messaging, calendar, GPS, calculator, satellite radio, e-mail, downloadable video clips, web browser, voice recorder and digital thermometer before realizing that it neglected to include the ability to make phone calls. [Hint: Nokia 770]

I am tempted to add my own set of predictions but nay, I leave it for another day.

Happy New Year

As we start on a new year, lets look at the 2006 IPv4 Address Use Report

The current (jan 1st, 2007) figure for 2005 is 175.52 million addresses. Together with adjustments for earlier years, this brings the total addresses available to almost exactly 1.3 billion, down from 1468.61 million a year ago. This is out of 3706.65 million usable IPv4 addresses, so 2407.11 million addresses are currently given out to either end-users or Internet Service Providers.

Lets also put a stop the myth that “MIT has more IP addresses of whole of China”, something that is no longer true for a couple of years. Yet sadly, some still chant it, as recently as a couple of weeks ago by a NUS lecturer that I immediately put a stop to.

China is the 4th largest IP holder now after US, JP and EU.

We are slowly recovering from the disaster submarine fiber cut due to the earthquake in Taiwan. It is definitely one of the worst I remember…the last time a fiber cut affect us that badly is in 1994.

First, lets clarify a few misconceptions: submarine cables are not under the seabed. It is just lay across the sea. It is only when it crosses major shipping lines and fishing zones (mostly near the coast) that it is lay (5 to 10m below) under the seabed. Therefore, it is not unusual for submarine cable to be cut, mostly due to deepsea fishing.

So when one submarine cable is severed, the operator generally have “restoration”, either on their own (self-healing cables) or using their competitors cables. This minimized the disruption. What is unusual is that this earthquake in Taiwan sever all the major cables (see above for the fibers near Taiwan).

As far as reports goes, SeaMeWe-3, ACPN2, C2C and EAC (ANC) (link) are severed. In other words, all the major submarine cable at the same time. Under other circumstance, when SeaMeWe-3 cuts, we can fall back to APCN2 or C2C or EAC. But when all of them are cut at the sametime, there is really nothing to fall back upon.
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Saw this on slashdot today: Chinese student arrested after making 150 million yen selling items for online RPG

Wang Yue Si, 23, came to Japan on a student visa in April 2004. He started selling items such as weapons and currency for online games through an Internet auction site in April this year, without obtaining the appropriate residency status…

Police suspect that Wang has sold a total of 150 million yen in virtual items and sent more than 100 million yen to China. (Mainichi)

The title focus on the student being deported after making US$1.3M. I think the real story is the fact that someone can actually made US$1.3M buying and selling virtual weapon and currency in online games.

Incidently, Blizzard step up its effort to ban farmers and sellers in the world of warcraft recently. A friend also informed me that Chinese game-farms are also seeing lower yield from their investment; an average account gets banned in a month as compared to 3-6 months before. This means they have to recreate an account and re-level a new character to level 60, wasting 10-12 game time.

The result is that the price of the in-game currency jumped nearly four fold, from US$50-60 per 1,000 gold to over US$200 per 1,000 gold now. The virtual black market is exactly like real black market, increase in policing only increase the black market price but never kill it.

I related this to Joi in the game over the weekend and he replied “Blizzard should just “legalized” it”. I agree.

It is a strange morning to wake up and to read the following two news:
– Lack Of telecom infrastructure drives WiMAX adoption in AP; and
– WiMAX Will Not Dominate in the Short-Term, Analysts Say.

Arent analysts fun? One say “Yes yes, WiMAX will grow in AP” and the other say “No no, WiMAX wont happened until 2010”. If you are confused, fear not, I will add to the confusion and say “Both are right!” :-)

There are several business case for Mobile WiMAX. Broadly speaking, (1) ADSL/Cable replacement and (2) personal mobile broadband.

When most people think of broadband in Asia Pacific, they generally look at Japan, Korea & Singapore and then forgot that for the rest of the developing countries in Asia Pacific, most if not all are struggling with broadband pentration. Therefore, as an ADSL/Cable replacement or competitor, Mobile WiMAX is a pretty good alternative.

But when you look at the more advance countries where ADSL is cheap and in abundance, there is a trend that users are using internet where-ever they are, on the train, on bus etc. Japan definitely leads the thrend here and in this personal mobile broadband game, the short time is likely to be win by the mobile alternatives like HSPA, Ev-Do etc.

However, most of the mobile operator are still voice centric – most of the 3G operators are on R5 which is still a voice/data hybrid network, leaning towards voice more. Therefore, as personal mobile broadband subscriptions grows, it is not certain the existing mobile technology is going to support a large number of subscribers since it was never planned as such. So while the short term personal mobile broadband looks bad for Mobile WiMAX, the long term is a different story*.

So I guess it depends which market you are after and in which country. This is why I am not so gungho on Mobile WiMAX in countries like Japan, Korea, Singapore but spending most of my time in Malaysia and Indonesia instead.

*My personal take however is that mobile technology is likely going to evolve and embrace OFDMA. It is going to be more WiMAX-like which will compete with the pure Mobile WiMAX we see today.

A couple of news caught my attention today. With the impeding Microsoft IE 7 support of IDN, the industry has renewed its interest in IDN. Already, CircleID is buzzing with articles on IDNs in the last couple of weeks and various commenters noted that IDN registrations is expecting to go up. Look no further, it is going up. My visit to CNNIC last month confirmed they have increased the Chinese Domain Names registration by a significant portion to 300k registrations. At a prenium price (20 USD a name), Chinese Domain Names is generating as much revenue for CNNIC as the English domain names (a lot more but a lot cheaper too).

But what catch my attention is this wonder article written by Geoff Hutson on Internationalization of Internet. It is definitely a great summary covering various events surrounding IDNs.

Just two note:

1. On DNAME, I wasnt a big fan of using DNAME. I think ICANN is misguided that the DNS infrastructure cannot support too many TLDs and that using DNAME adds a level of complexity than it needs to be.

A label is a label, does not matter if it is on the 2nd level or the top level. If we dont use DNAME on 2nd level, I dont see why we need to use DNAME on the top level.

But I wont stand in the way for ICANN to experiment with DNAME IDN TLDs. Any little step forward is a step forward.

2. The article didnt mention RFC 4690 : Review and Recommendations for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). It covers a great deal of the technical complexity of IDNs, what we know works and some of the potential technical pitfalls we are concerned with in the existing system.

I wrote to Patrik and John a few weeks ago and here is what I said:

I agreed with issues raised in the doc, many of them are already
well-known before the original set of IDN RFCs was publish.

However, I think it would make sense for the system to implement a bit
longer to see whether the problem mentioned is real or just a
theortical possibility. It might also hurt the IDN progress if IETF
undertakes a review at this moment in time, as more likely then not,
implementors will then wait for the completion of the review before
further implementation gets done.

Other the minor disagreement with the timing, I applaud the work done
on RFC 4960 :-)

Patrik replied to say they have taken the timing into consideration so I left it as that.