Just a warning to all, it seems that my previous posts attract Scientology ads. Scientology is not an organisation I support. Actually my opinion of them is quite negative, espescially for their continued lawsuits in the Netherlands to restrict free speech. Just look up Fishman Affidavit on the internet. I do like this case for one reason only and that is that it has generated good solid jurisprudence, which is still benefitting us all now. For more info
Scientology has all the traits of a cult and therefore has appeared negatively in the press on an almost continuous basis. It has been accused of brain washing, harassing, misinforming etc etc. It also has major problems with dealing with criticism. All in All something to stay away from. The ads are for Scientology Volunteer Ministers, which seems to be a latest way of getting into the public view positively. Make up your own mind, but I have made mine!
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Avantgarde and the Fringe
The Rotterdam Film Festival is now happening in Rotterdam. Last Sunday I saw a poster there for a debate on whether it was nescessary in the movies that there is such a group of people as an avantgarde. One of the guys on the panel was the Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovsky. He is responsible for the movie 4, which for some reason or the other brought him in conflict with the Russian authorities (we're almost back to the good old days). Friends of mine have seen the movie at the festival and reported that it was dreadful and that a large part of the audience walked out during the movie (these are art festival people, they can stomach something). All in all the movie shows Russia is a crap place to live in. This we knew already, so sorry for spoiling the ending, but be glad I saved you from the movie.
The debate got me thinking. In it's own, the debate is irrelevant, yes we need an avantgarde, plain and simple. We need people to do new stuff that we later on want to immitate and improve upon. Avantgarde is the military term for the advanced troops. It are the people you want to follow, the elite, the Navy Seals, Golan Troups, Green Barets of the art world. They do the stuff the normal army grunt would want to be able to do. In art terms, the avantgarde are those directors, actors, painters , sculptors, dancers who do stuff you and I wished we would do and think off.
Next to the avant garde and us grunts, there are two other groups. The guys at the rear, the cowards, they are uninteresting loosers, best left for painting gyspy boys with tear and filming teenagers movies. And then there is the fringe. The fringe are all those people who sit in the bar bragging about theirwar stories and how they should be, could be, have been an avantgarde Green Baret, Special ops artist. Even if they ever were, now you wouldn't want them to be your buddy in the fight. They are the most pitiful people always talking, never performing. The trouble is how do you recognize the bragger from the real deal. In my opinion it is this: If other people and artists talk about your work for its contents, your avantgarde, if they talk about it because of the uproar you created with politicians etc. you're fringe.
The debate got me thinking. In it's own, the debate is irrelevant, yes we need an avantgarde, plain and simple. We need people to do new stuff that we later on want to immitate and improve upon. Avantgarde is the military term for the advanced troops. It are the people you want to follow, the elite, the Navy Seals, Golan Troups, Green Barets of the art world. They do the stuff the normal army grunt would want to be able to do. In art terms, the avantgarde are those directors, actors, painters , sculptors, dancers who do stuff you and I wished we would do and think off.
Next to the avant garde and us grunts, there are two other groups. The guys at the rear, the cowards, they are uninteresting loosers, best left for painting gyspy boys with tear and filming teenagers movies. And then there is the fringe. The fringe are all those people who sit in the bar bragging about theirwar stories and how they should be, could be, have been an avantgarde Green Baret, Special ops artist. Even if they ever were, now you wouldn't want them to be your buddy in the fight. They are the most pitiful people always talking, never performing. The trouble is how do you recognize the bragger from the real deal. In my opinion it is this: If other people and artists talk about your work for its contents, your avantgarde, if they talk about it because of the uproar you created with politicians etc. you're fringe.
Thursday, January 06, 2005
There are systems that record victims
Well I finally did a bit of searching and there are systems available that record victims. It was ofcourse presumptuous of me to think there might not be. A Japanese group has build a system. Their presentation to ETSI can be found here. It has a great name: I Am Alive. This system seems to be currently in use by the Thai governement and Red Crossat this moment.
The Australian governement has a system which is described here by the Red Cross which is using it. The system is called the National Registration and Inquiry System (NRIS).
I have seen the results of the the I Am Alive-system and it looks like an excellent system. It would be great if they could get some global support to further develop this system. At this moment it seems only Japan is working on this system and a quick search on Google didn't point too many English language pages on the system. I'll see if I can find some information on it.
I imagine every ministery of Interior, or government emergency response organisation should have a copy always ready and available on a webserver. So whenever there is a disaster this system is already running and can be used to register all the countries nationals potentially involved and can then later be used to compare these data with the records of the country affected. Maybe the United Nations Reliefweb website could be used as a basis.
The Australian governement has a system which is described here by the Red Cross which is using it. The system is called the National Registration and Inquiry System (NRIS).
I have seen the results of the the I Am Alive-system and it looks like an excellent system. It would be great if they could get some global support to further develop this system. At this moment it seems only Japan is working on this system and a quick search on Google didn't point too many English language pages on the system. I'll see if I can find some information on it.
I imagine every ministery of Interior, or government emergency response organisation should have a copy always ready and available on a webserver. So whenever there is a disaster this system is already running and can be used to register all the countries nationals potentially involved and can then later be used to compare these data with the records of the country affected. Maybe the United Nations Reliefweb website could be used as a basis.
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
System to help out after disaster
Just sent this to Ask Slashdot. Don't know if they are going to pick it up, but you never know. I might work out the idea in a later post.
Like everybody I am following the news on the tsunami and I noticed a couple of things that got me thinking. After a disaster there are generally two major questions that need to be answered. 1. Who survived, got injured, died, is missing? 2. What relief is needed, where and who provides it? My question is, does anybody know of easy to use information systems that support the answer to these questions? It seems there are no good systems around/being used to support helping out with the first question. The second one I hope the UN has something, though I have an idea it could do with some helping out/updating.
At this moment I notice that the missing persons website in Thailand has a girl I know twice on record, once with a typo. It is very slow and doesn't seem linked to the hospitals because her husband who is injured in a hospital is listed on another website. Each countries Ministry of Foreign Affairs seems to keep its own list of missing persons. This is not only a problem with big transnational disasters, but also was a problem with 9/11 or even airplane crashes and smaller scale national disasters.
I think an easy to set up off the shelve system might have great benefits to help solve the first question and help all the relevant authorities and put peace to the minds of parents and friends. If it is build in an open source kind of way with the possibility to run it on a variety of databases/systems and also be easy to adapt to all kinds of national languages. While typing I get all kinds of ideas on how I would want to design it, but that might be something for my Blog.
Like everybody I am following the news on the tsunami and I noticed a couple of things that got me thinking. After a disaster there are generally two major questions that need to be answered. 1. Who survived, got injured, died, is missing? 2. What relief is needed, where and who provides it? My question is, does anybody know of easy to use information systems that support the answer to these questions? It seems there are no good systems around/being used to support helping out with the first question. The second one I hope the UN has something, though I have an idea it could do with some helping out/updating.
At this moment I notice that the missing persons website in Thailand has a girl I know twice on record, once with a typo. It is very slow and doesn't seem linked to the hospitals because her husband who is injured in a hospital is listed on another website. Each countries Ministry of Foreign Affairs seems to keep its own list of missing persons. This is not only a problem with big transnational disasters, but also was a problem with 9/11 or even airplane crashes and smaller scale national disasters.
I think an easy to set up off the shelve system might have great benefits to help solve the first question and help all the relevant authorities and put peace to the minds of parents and friends. If it is build in an open source kind of way with the possibility to run it on a variety of databases/systems and also be easy to adapt to all kinds of national languages. While typing I get all kinds of ideas on how I would want to design it, but that might be something for my Blog.
Sunday, December 12, 2004
Thoughts on wifi
Well, I finally managed to get my hands on one of the scarce laptops in the organization which do have Wifi. I needed it a week for a conference I went to in Washington DC. This blog-entry is a compilation of some thoughts that occured to me when using it.
- Hooking up to public accesspoints is not always easy. Attingo's signup at Schiphol Airport is pretty straightforward, but finding the page where you could sign up with a creditcard wasn't. Notified them. No complaints further, good connection in the United Business lounge.
- T-mobiles setup at Washington DC's Dulles Airport is a regular pain. You need to enter three secret codes: Creditcard number, user name password and something else. Pain is, that when you make a mistake it doesn't remember either. Which means you have to reeenter it again, and again and again. Whenever you forget something it forgets all. Can't they just build something that at least remembers the stuff you got right first time around?
- STSN aka Ibahn who provide wireless at Marriotts are best to be avoided. Wireless only worked in with the hotel lobby access point, which kind of reached my room, but that was shere luck. It turned out that even though they provided conference rooms with wireless, my 9,95 didn't pay for a connection there. This according to them had to do with different security arrangements. Yeah right! specifying a v-lan isn't that hard. It was just a way for them to try and make money from the conference organizers. "if you don't buy conference access from us, your attendees will not get a W-lan connection, even if they pay 9.95 in the lobby". Oh yeah, I tried it in the hotelroom, using the high speed ethernet connection and a cable, but that didn't work either, but that just might have been me. So basically 9.95 allowed me to sit in the hotellobby, which I consider a huge pain in the behind, which is a quote they can use on their testimonials page!
- Wireless is to be had in the area of business class/first class lounges. Wireless doesn't care if you actually are first class :-)
- setting up secure connections is too difficult for the lay person. We need standard Diffie-Helman key exchanges. I saw on the internet that it is available on some access points, but it just should be the standard of the IEEE. As far as I could find with Google it isn't yet.
- Securing accesspoints should be mandatory. There are too many open access points available. There is no use for anonymous connections over a random family's access point, it only endangers them into being seen as cybercriminals.
- If people want to make it possible for neighbours and strangers to make use of their access point it should be done in the same way hotspots are now available at airports and Starbucks. Make it possible to extend the official network of the ISP to a users access point. This way if I open up my laptop and there is an access point available of Joe User, I can only hook up to it by propperly logging in to the ISP's network or use the airport/credit card system. This will require many roaming agreements etc, but it would bring security and convenience at the same time. It should be done in such a way that the person opening up his network in this way can throttle the speed of the guest users and/or the times they can access. So I would like to see a rule like "Guests can only connect when I am not connecting" or "Guests only get 1mbit/sec".
Sunday, November 28, 2004
Promiscuous wireless information
Promiscuity is generally frowned upon, and rightfully so. Before you know it you're infected with all kinds of viruses and/or is your reputation down the drain. When applied to wireless information it should be regarded as having the same problems, but that doesn't mean it should be frowned upon, actually the promiscuity I am promoting here could be beneficial to all.
What I am proposing is a way to deal openly with information, which can be openly available and shared with all. What it should accomplish is that various devices openly communicate with each other data they have available. The result is that a device can "know" more than might be possible with its physical components. A simple example is a GPS receiver. If it is equipped with a radio transmitter, it could just broadcast the current coordinates and maybe even an adress, without restricting who can be the receiver. If it did this openly other devices could use this information for their own benefit.
More and more devices get an antenna. The current way we deal with communication between devices is that we try to restrict the access others have to the information that is available from the device. Bluetooth and Wifi both try to encrypt the data and keep it hidden from anybody but those with whom a trusted a relation has been established. However much of the information is not secret, nor privacy-sensitive. Coordinates are only privacy-sensitive when they are used in conjunction with an identifier. Without an identifier a GPS is broadcasting only a fact (as it perceives it); the coordinates of here are x,y,z and the street is this. Such information could be interesting for other devices that don't have the technical possibility to receive such information directly. Now if cars already have a GPS, then why would my PDA need to be linked to a GPS I own, when it can also get that information from a car which is close by enough?
Other information I can think of that could be broadcasted in such a way is: time, weather information, news, restaurant information, sights, advertisements, coupons etc. There is so much information that people and organisations want to make available for others to freely look at and that we currently don't have a format, nor a way to communicate for. This should not result in a system that just keeps on pushing data to our devices, clogging them and making them unusable. No this would require on the one hand transmitters that transmit data (continuously or provoked) and for users a device that can be configured to say yes and no to information to know the difference between what we want and what we don't want. So I would configure my Palm to always get all the GPS data that is being broadcasted. This way I can know where I am. Information on sights and restaurants I would only enable when I really need it and am in places where I normally don't go. News I would only allow to be transmitted to my device when I enter a railwaystation, much like receiving a free newspaper at the railwaystation entrance (think Metro) . Supermarkets could inform their shoppers this way of the location of bargains or just a map of their store.
So how should this work then? I personally think it would best work with a network technology like Wifi. This because Wifi works at distances of at least 10 meters, but probably more. It is already ubiquitously available and so doesn't require new radio technology, transmitters and receivers are already available. On top of this we need an XML-like information format, which is easy for various programs to interpret. You wouldn't need a full connection to networks like the internet, because the information is already coming to you. I do foresee that people combine it with partial or full internetaccess (you get info on a touristic sight, with an URL leading to the official homepage) . All in all I feel this could work with just every device that nowadays already has Wifi built in, so it would be more a question of maybe reconfiguring some drivers, defining a standard and building software that can do something with the information.
Would this be succesful? Well maybe, maybe not. It really depends on how it is implemented, but because of the short range that the information is being send and the fact that users can define which information they want, it might be a better way then some of the proposals I have seen for location based services, which are very much push based. Plus that the short range of the transmitter makes it more localized.
What I am proposing is a way to deal openly with information, which can be openly available and shared with all. What it should accomplish is that various devices openly communicate with each other data they have available. The result is that a device can "know" more than might be possible with its physical components. A simple example is a GPS receiver. If it is equipped with a radio transmitter, it could just broadcast the current coordinates and maybe even an adress, without restricting who can be the receiver. If it did this openly other devices could use this information for their own benefit.
More and more devices get an antenna. The current way we deal with communication between devices is that we try to restrict the access others have to the information that is available from the device. Bluetooth and Wifi both try to encrypt the data and keep it hidden from anybody but those with whom a trusted a relation has been established. However much of the information is not secret, nor privacy-sensitive. Coordinates are only privacy-sensitive when they are used in conjunction with an identifier. Without an identifier a GPS is broadcasting only a fact (as it perceives it); the coordinates of here are x,y,z and the street is this. Such information could be interesting for other devices that don't have the technical possibility to receive such information directly. Now if cars already have a GPS, then why would my PDA need to be linked to a GPS I own, when it can also get that information from a car which is close by enough?
Other information I can think of that could be broadcasted in such a way is: time, weather information, news, restaurant information, sights, advertisements, coupons etc. There is so much information that people and organisations want to make available for others to freely look at and that we currently don't have a format, nor a way to communicate for. This should not result in a system that just keeps on pushing data to our devices, clogging them and making them unusable. No this would require on the one hand transmitters that transmit data (continuously or provoked) and for users a device that can be configured to say yes and no to information to know the difference between what we want and what we don't want. So I would configure my Palm to always get all the GPS data that is being broadcasted. This way I can know where I am. Information on sights and restaurants I would only enable when I really need it and am in places where I normally don't go. News I would only allow to be transmitted to my device when I enter a railwaystation, much like receiving a free newspaper at the railwaystation entrance (think Metro) . Supermarkets could inform their shoppers this way of the location of bargains or just a map of their store.
So how should this work then? I personally think it would best work with a network technology like Wifi. This because Wifi works at distances of at least 10 meters, but probably more. It is already ubiquitously available and so doesn't require new radio technology, transmitters and receivers are already available. On top of this we need an XML-like information format, which is easy for various programs to interpret. You wouldn't need a full connection to networks like the internet, because the information is already coming to you. I do foresee that people combine it with partial or full internetaccess (you get info on a touristic sight, with an URL leading to the official homepage) . All in all I feel this could work with just every device that nowadays already has Wifi built in, so it would be more a question of maybe reconfiguring some drivers, defining a standard and building software that can do something with the information.
Would this be succesful? Well maybe, maybe not. It really depends on how it is implemented, but because of the short range that the information is being send and the fact that users can define which information they want, it might be a better way then some of the proposals I have seen for location based services, which are very much push based. Plus that the short range of the transmitter makes it more localized.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
