To those who have inquired and anyone else interested in why Listics has been silent so long, I’m okay. The first quarter of 2024 has been difficult, but things are looking up. Two months ago I had a mild heart attack, but everything now is groovy. The cardiologist has given me a handful of pills and a clean bill of heath. Thanks for your concern. On with the show…

The internet is both complete and never will be. The geeks encrusted around the edges—pontificating, pushing product, trapped in a meta narrative that will not die, though it longs for a brave soul to stand up and shout “Put a fork in it, fer Chrissakes”—the nerds, the wonks, the technoid dweebs continue to pick away at the surface revealing new shiny bits. The mob, like a murder of crows flapping and cawing, stealing the bright shiny objects, claiming them as their own, flutter along, or wander, or strut, bedazzled by the gadgetry, the handhelds, the laptops, the notebooks, the netbooks—yes, and even the Wii—the people whose attention (whose cash!) the entrepreneurs seek to corral are really happy to have an ever changing landscape of pastimes available, from online Scrabble to Hulu TeeVee, from Java juiced gaming to online shopping. They differentiate themselves into the “Mac community” and the “non-Mac so what” community, but really all they seek is the connection, the celestial hook-up. Anything else is superfluous.

Down below, in the boiler room, the huge, powerful engines pump bits around the globe. It’s here the real work has been done. Paving the information super highway, cabling, routing, maintaining the infrastructure, is a subterranean task that the gaggle of geeks up top quite rightly consider to be beneath them. And it’s fundamental. All else is SMOP—Simply a Matter Of Programming.

Somebody wake me for intermission.

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On a lighter note, Leslie recently linked to ADA Online, reminding me that time passes… hard to believe that I first read the book forty years ago. The online thing, begun in 1992 and annotated in frame sets, reminds me of the Pynchon wiki.

Her notes from Vint Cerf’s presentation here.

People using BitTorrent can experience response time delays of from 2 to 4 seconds while uploading files because of buffers filling up in their communications equipment. This makes impractical the use of other applications such as games and real time communications (applications requiring sub-second response times) while files are being uploaded.

The paper suggests that vendors (ISPs) support P2P applications by improving caching, cache discovery (peer selection), and congestion control. It concludes,

Our μTorrent client, with 35M active installs, is one of the most popular and probably the most popular is the U.S. We’re looking forward to implementing standard ways of making it work better for the users and the ISPs and we believe that the vendors of other popular BitTorrent clients would follow because this would improve the experience of the users of their clients.

(Shalunov twitters fun things like, “Bob became evil because he sat next to my raincoat in a restaurant: he subverted TCP fairness by opening two Firefox tabs at once,” and “When I have a spare decade, I’ll write the Sucklopedia, which will document the ways in which everything, alphabetically, sucks.” You can follow him here.)

[tags]BitTorrent, Shalunov, Sucklopedia, P2P[/tags]

Go the site, take the census, and do the speed test. Drew Clark introduced us to this new “crowdsourcing” application this morning at F2C. Grab a button for your blog.

[tags]crowdsourcing, broadband census, drew clark[/tags]

But then, I also found this stealth recruitment flash animation…

I guess you takes the good with the bad.

net2

A decent, far more legible image is available on Peter’s FlickR site.

Web 1.0 was all about linking and searching, publishing and presenting, and of course there was commercial activity from online banking to retail sales and auctioneering.  Web 2.0 is not here yet but some think it is emerging out of the fog of the future through ripples of Skype and MMPORGs, rapids of BitTorrent and foamy drifts of tags.  It seems self-serving of someone to aver that Web 2.0 has anything to do with a Technorati feed on Newsweek.  It seems in fact sort of, I dunno… retro?  Web 2.0 seems more about progress toward that Isenbergian ideal of dumbing down the center and smartening up of the edges of the net.  Never mind that infrastructure pieces that route Gigabit ethernet over MPLS or SONET or whatever are hairy smart components…  what the Weinbergerites and the Isenbergians are talking about is not having a bunch of databases in there driving authentication and billing.  All that infrastructure provides a commodity and the commodity is called throughput.  Don’t be inspecting my packets Mr. Bell.  That’s content and that’s all you need to know.  You pipeline it, we’ll use it.  We’ll bundle up and unbundle the content at the edges.  You just provide the transport.

Thus we have the vision of a vast peer to peer network that comprises Web 2.0.  I must ask, "What’s Newsweek got to do with it?"

Compumentor is a non-profit outfit that distributes tech tools to other non-profits and NGOs. They are planning to "Internet empower" those customers.  This will potentiate freedom of speech, freedom of virtual assembly, empowerment writ large, writ global. 

This has the potential of empowering communities that have never had a free press.  It’s exciting and I’m in.  The NetSquared site says there are 209 days to the event.  How many blawgers, journalists, teachers and techies and geeks have the stones to offer up a little pro bono service for a good thing?

Incentive? You want incentive?  April 26th there’s going to be a "blow-out party… entertainment, food and drink."    I think there might be music and dancing and stumbling around in the parking lot.  At least that is what I would expect.  On the 27th they promise aspirins and wi-fi and comfort food and a chance to deepen those relationships….