I have found a public transportation system worse than the Parisian RATP. In total there are more lines affected than non affected.. : ]. It's totally out of control this Underground.

These are photos of the Transport for London website..

(to get from here to there I might just book a flight.. .... euh, that is if the travel agency doesn't go bankrupt and BAA doesn't go on strike* at the same time (as another volcano ash rainfall ?). ... .. gosh it's not easy getting around in this country.)

A few years back I heard quite a few times things like "What do I need a website for ?", some would add things like "Why would I ever post photos of my last vacation, family and/or pets online ?". Today, almost everyone I know has a social network profile (orkut, friendster, myspace, facebook, twitter, etc etc). Of course there is one major difference; Everything is neatly centralised and completely out of the control of those who create all the content. A few side effects are:

• Communications between 2 peers always goes through a third party (and their sometimes partners) system, and stays there
• Loss of publishing freedom
• Limited formats/method of communication (videos, image sizes, things like that)
• Censorship
• Terms of service - nobody ever reads this stuff ! Why ?
• Copyright issues - because this is not a private space and we must all obey United States laws
• Targeted advertisement, because of course it is not free (IMHO having advertisements in a "private" space can be slightly annoying)
• Personal data and anything you do on the site can be used for marketing studies.. up to you to weigh the good/bad

So what now ? Well this situation has created a need for something more Internet-relevant and voilà, 4 guys have decided to dedicate their summer vacation to creating an open platform that will allow people to be their own part of the social web. The idea is to provide a CMS type application that people can install wherever they want, just like a personal web site. This means you would have control over your stuff and communications would not go through a central 3rd party service and get read/analysed, altered, moderated, censored or any such thing.

This is not even about being against social networking sites but more about the limits of their design, a commercial website must follow rules/laws/regulations etc, in short they have to take some responsibility for the published content as well as the interactions between users of their service. Of course you can (and should) also add the fact that the main interest of most (if not all) of these social networking sites is revenue by advertisement, this kind of means that the user is not the real client and hence is not the most cared for.

Because each node runs completely independently the whole network is never directly connected, meaning if you wish you may completely isolate your node from the public eye, restrict access to it to specific nodes or even run a set of nodes on a private network for some kind of intranetish activities.

This project should hit the first usable stage somewhere in September so stay tuned to: Joindiaspora.com.

Some images from the OpenNight event last night..

More about King James Hyperfuck.

Get source code, debs and live iso to play din, program software by Jag.

I just read a sad piece of technical journalism from Charles Arthur for the Guardian. I'll resume his rant; he blames p2p (file-sharing) usage for the new "no more unlimited mobile networking" policy that apparently O2 is moving into. He cites an O2 blog post which actually makes no mention of this.

According to the very imprecise graphic 97% of the users consume less than 500MB a month, the average would be 200 and 0.1% use more than 690MB. In short, very very few people tend to exaggerate IP (data) usage. If that caused any real nuisance to the network that would mean that either the operator's network is insufficient and/or they do not have the knowledge to implement simple QoS regulations (example: slow down the speed when network usage goes up so that all traffic can be on the move). So what is the real deal here ? Why are operators no longer happy to offer unlimited data for a fixed price ?

My conspiration theory is as follows: Now that you can access the Internet via your mobile device you can trade limited "text messages" (SMS) for unlimited text via realtime chat (irc/msn/aim/icq/etc) or email, you can trade phone calls for VOIP (skype, etc). And all this being on The Network (Internet) means that there is no difference between local and long distance communications. This is precisely, in my opinion, the real part where the operators may feel cheated. Users can escape the overcharges of calls and text messages not included in their plans, and why not even get a minimal call/text deal and just go for the unlimited mobile internet.

In reality the very few who actually do use p2p networks (illegal or legal btw) are not a real nuisance for the network, they are instead, AS USUAL, an excuse to change policies, pricing and laws. In this case, it's actually a "technology journalist" ranting about this, as if 0.1% of the data/phone users stole directly from his pocket.

Oh, and one more thing, I'm pretty sure those statistics include users who bought the mobile Internet dongle thing, you know the 3G usb device intended to connect computers to the Internet, in that case it's more than normal to go over 690MB in one month..

If you are reading this there are chances you already know how to use the Interweb, when you are given an address (url, webiste link, etc) you know how to get there the proper way. However, so many people, and I mean many many many just get it completely wrong. So I thought maybe an image could help explain.

As you can see, when you have the actual address for a site you don't need to use a search engine to find it, you already have it, you may enter it in the "address bar", that is the bar on top circled in green. That is one of it's main uses, the other being that it indicates where you currently are. Would you lookup in the phone book a number you already have ? So why do that with an URL ?

I took some photos for a performance Tsuneko Taniuchi did. I'm bad at explaining so for more info visit Tsuneko Taniuchi's website.

The other day I was running some tests because it seemed that my VPN traffic was being slowed down quite alot. One of the tests was plain FTP, that went at about 1mbyte/sec, then FTP via VPN, that seemed capped at around 200kbytes/sec. Some say "overhead because encryption", and I believed it, until I tested between two weak machines (VIA 2ghz) on a LAN:

• FTP: 10Mbytes/sec
• FTP/VPN: 6.5Mbytes/sec

obviously 200kbytes is a joke.

I of course suspected one of my ISPs (ADSL or dedicated server provider) of doing something uncool.. this lead me to discovering two things:

• Some ISPs openly cap VPN traffic like PlusNet. They actually have a whole timetable with various speed limits for various services ! You might have noticed P2P gets the lowest speed ever and youtube is way up there.... ..in short, the client's needs are not important, what is important is who's paying.. anyway.
• a cool tool called shaperprobe. This tool helps detect if there is any packet shaping happening on your network.

I soon after figured out where the issue was, my ISPs who say they don't throttle or shape etc are correct. : ] The issue was with this WAG54GS I hooked up temporarily that has this super cool option called "SPI Firewall", it's sole purpose is to slow down your VPN traffic, that's all it does.

In the end I learned that there are many bad ISPs nowadays that decide what's good for you, I am glad mine(s) don't, but how long will this last ? As they say, it's the consumer who decides, so if this matters to you, pick an ISP that doesn't shape their bandwidth.

Every so often OpenLab organises an OpenNight where people can try out there work in front of an audience. The works should be produced using open source technologies. There is much creativity to be seen and heard.

More information here.

I'd like to add a word about a program developed by one of the members of Cunbucket (Jag), it's called DIN (Digital INstrument). It's a very intriguing instrument that reminds me of the theremin.

You can get some of the media files from this podcast

Today I notice a new bot called "turnitinbot" crawling my site and not for a new search engine.. this one is different. There is a new site called turnitin.com which sells a service to students and schools to prevent plagiarism, the idea is that students submit their work to Turnitin who then verifies it against their databases. According to the Wikipedia/Turnitin page the databases are composed of:

• content from, books, newspapers etc
• already submitted work to Turnitin
• anything submitted to "other" sites like GradeGuru
• etc etc
• Result's from spider crawling

For me this whole things seems very dirty, the only small part I can do is add this to robots.txt User-agent: turnitinbot Disallow: / I don't want people to take credit for my work but I even less want a company to push the education system into their control and make big money out of it. Is Turnitin paying you or me for our work ? No. Are they making money out of it ? Yes.

For those who submitted their work to GradeGuru and are regretting it, please understand that when you submit content to a third party you should always read and agree with their terms of service, I'm sure they mentioned that one day the free service will benefit themselves alot more than yourself.

Actually, here goes Article 14 from the Terms of Service http://www.gradeguru.com/sps/communitystandardmessagenlu.htm?tandc=tandc : Proprietary Rights in GradeGuru Content. GradeGuru does not claim ownership of the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") that you may post to the GradeGuru Services. By posting any Content on or through the GradeGuru Services, you hereby grant to GradeGuru a non-exclusive worldwide perpetual license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute all or part of such Content on and through the GradeGuru Services and through GradeGuru and its affiliated entities, other off-line services and products and to charge for access to and/or use of Your Content. This license granted by You to GradeGuru to use Your Content (including that supplied prior to the version date of these Terms) includes (without limitation) the right for GradeGuru supply Your Content to providers of anti-plagiarism tools at our discretion, so that such providers may, amongst other things, check the integrity of Your Content. I was going to put the important/shocking part in bold, but then I figured the whole article should be bold, emphasized and blinking...

Today I realised something was missing, an image on my site (from an external source) wasn't showing up in my browser. I'm using Iceweasel, but not only, so I check with my other browsers, Arora, Icecat, Konqueror, no issues there. I switch off NoScript, reload, nothing. I realise via Firebug that there is a "display: none" on the img tag... . AND THEN, someone points out that it's AdblockPlus that did that.. .. . .

My point is, many years ago I ditched Windows and one of the many reasons I talked about was I don't see the point in having a system that requires so many addons and such just so I can safely and comfortably use my computer and today, when I opened the Addons window in Iceweasel and I saw how many addons I had (one's that deal with security and anti-add/spam/etc) I realised that I am going through a Total Fail Moment™. I am running Microsoft Iceweasel with Norton Anti Advert, Zone Alarm Flashblock and Kapersky Noscript...