Archive for December, 2006

The long expected merger of AT&T with Bell South has been approved, making the new company the largest telecommunications company in the country. From a March 7 article on MSNBC:

The new company would be the country’s largest phone company — with nearly half of all lines. It also would be the largest cell-phone carrier and the largest provider of broadband Internet service.

But also from that article, little mentioned so far today, is the estimate that the new merger will result in the elimination of up to 10,000 jobs. It waits to be seen if the new company will pass on any cost savings to customers or improve service in any way. Given the recent fiber break in this area and the lack of any public response from the company, I am not expecting anything much.

One positive result of the FCC agreement to allow the merger was a new set of conditions from AT&T which includes a commitment to uphold the principle of Network Neutrality. According to Ars Techinca, the letter was exacted by a couple Democrats on the FCC who were holding out for more commitments from AT&T.

Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu has a good analysis of the agreement. It appears that while the agreement is a big step forward for supporters of Net Neutrality, it is not as complete or as long lasting as we would like.

Redwood Coast Rural Action has formed a work group made up of people from Humboldt, Del Norte, Trinity and Mendecino counties who are involved in telecommunications issues. The group has begun a dialogue on telecommunication needs for the region. Among the goals will be to provide clear and valid information to Rollin Richmond and Peter Pennekamp who are members of the Governor’s Broadband Task Force.

The formation of the work group and the Task Force starting to meet (in the next couple weeks) along with the telecommunications blackout in Humboldt County couldn’t be more timely. It’s clear that for our region alternate fiber is a priority.

The AT&T fiber failure, as traumatic as it may have been was the best thing that could have happened to move the alternate fiber initiative foward. Many folks who had been complacent about our fragile connection to the rest of the world have now been awakened to the reality that a high wind or a shift in the earth or an errant backhoe can cut us off from the world, shut down normal business acitivity. In addition, an alternate fiber can bring competition and lower prices for broadband delivery and make new services available.

It all just takes some vision and the will to carry it out.

Just like what happened in Asia where an earthquake destroyed fiber connections and thus shut down Internet access, Humboldt County was cut off by a mysterious failure yesterday. It began in the afternoon and lasted well in to the night. Not only was Internet access cut for everyone, but long distance calls were also unable to get through.

The Times-Standard article this morning was unable to come up with a cause. But The symptoms all point to a failure in our single fiber optic cable that carries all the Internet and long distance phone traffic in and out of the county. Whether it was a break caused by weather or slide, or a hardware failure, the story out of Asia and the one right here point to the fragility of a system we all have come to rrely on for both trivial and vital communications.

Time to kick that alternate fiber project in to high gear!

Update: I understand the Eureka Reporter has confirmed that it was a problem with the AT&T fiber line as I suspected. Details to appear in tomorrow’s ER.

Apparently there’s a new study that assigns a name to the anger engendered by visiting badly designed web sites. You know, the kind that load really slowly have a lot of ugly ads and annoying pop-ups. I’d like to add that just down right ugly sites or sites where the information you’re looking for is hard to find can be a terrible waste of time and a source of frustration. But do we really need to give this ’syndrome’ a name? Isn’t it the same anger I get at slow moving or broken ATMs or black holes in cell phone coverage? It’s the frustration caused by the expectations that technology will make our lives simpler and run more smoothly when often it’s just the opposite. We’ve been trained to rely on computers and other gadgets and when they don’t work correctly or even create roadblocks in life it can be maddening.

Still I guess it’s good to recognize this sub-genre of tech frustration: The crappy web site! There are far too many of them.

You might have heard that Time’s Person of the Year is: You! And me! That is, all the folks out there contributing to the online, ongoing dialogue: Blogs, YouTube, MySpace, all the stuff that is variously called user created content, social networking, Web 2.0, etc.

My most recent Tech Beat article tried to explain how organizations should be capitalizing on this trend by making their sites interactive, inviting people in, building a community. Me and the editors of Time. We think so much alike. I tried to skip the hype and the jargon, though.
But there is a cloud in this silver lining. One that You (if you are one of the people with a site where people can contribute content such as comments) might want to become aware of. In a bill that has not had much press, introduced by Sen. John McCain, web site owners could be subject to fines of up to $300,000 for failing to report ‘illegal’ material posted on their sites by others. While I certainly don’t condone child pornography, and applaud attempts to catch predators, the over reaching of bills like these do more harm to the public than any good they might produce by chilling open discourse. An example of this over reaching from the article:

The other section of McCain’s legislation targets convicted sex offenders. It would create a federal registry of “any e-mail address, instant-message address, or other similar Internet identifier” they use, and punish sex offenders with up to 10 years in prison if they don’t supply it.

Then, any social-networking site must take “effective measures” to remove any Web page that’s “associated” with a sex offender.

Because “social-networking site” isn’t defined, it could encompass far more than just MySpace.com, Friendster and similar sites. The list could include: Slashdot, which permits public profiles; Amazon.com, which permits author profiles and personal lists; and blogs like RedState.com that show public profiles. In addition, media companies like News.com publisher CNET Networks permit users to create profiles of favorite games, gadgets and music.

So, basically web sites that allow profiles would have to be policing all the profiles and try to figure out if any are associated with a sex offender. Huh? Who has time for that? And does a sex offender who has served time not have the right to participate in any social discourse? Beware the do gooder on behalf of the children.

More and more people are getting online and more of them are on broadband. Not big news, eh. But where people go, there goes people trying to rip off those people. Not news, OK. But according to a report by McAffee (they’re one of the big cyber security companies that sells virus protection software so maybe they have a vested interest in scaring you), cybercrime continues to get more sophisticated, using mind games, recruiting young hackers, employing KGB style tacticts. In spite of its source, the article is worth reading as it provides a nice summary of the dark side that is made possible by the open network.

This article indicates that some action and money may really support the new Broadband Task Force created by Governor Schwarzenegger a few weeks ago. $460 million dollars will be committed to improving high speed access throughout the state. Most of the money will be provides by bond passed for education but will be tageted to telemedicine. the article doesn’t explain how the two are related.

The $60 million dollars was raised from a stipulation in an agreement that allowed the merger of AT&T with SBC and Verizon with MCI. the companies had to pledge the money to an Emerging Technology Fund. As Andrew Cohill points out, lots of the people on the Broadband Task Force are industry insiders so it may be that lots of the moneyh will go right back to the industry that coughed it up in the first place. However, rural California has two non-inustry insiders on the Task Force in HSU President Rollin Richmond and the head of the Humboldt Area Foundation Peter Pennekamp. We’ll see how successful they will be looking after our interests.

The article indicates the Task Force is charged with coming up with at least a preliminary plan for expanding California’s high speed network within the next 90 days. Given that they haven’t even met yet, this could prove a daunting task.

Make Magazine has a great list of open source toys for the geek on your Christmas gift list. I saw this list a couple weeks ago but I just couldn’t get in to the Christmas spirit that soon. I think there might be time to get some of these things if you have someone in mind.

If anyone is thinking of me, I kinda like the Linux based media center from Neuros. It’s a little pricey ($229), so for those with a small budget for bloggers  or anyone else, I really like the free home networking software (you just need some cheap x10 hardware to make a complete gift.

3 police shootings this year and buildings burning. The latest building to go down in flames is the old building at 3rd and G that housed Eureka Wholesale Meats and was about to house Avalon’s new venture, a wine tasting room. Since our office is in the Carson Block at 3rd and F I thought I better run down and see what was what.

Our building was fine, the fire stopped at the firewall wall of the building next door. But our offices still smell of smoke. The landlords had been there all night and were still pumping water from the fire hoses out of the basement.

On top of that, while the fire was going on. There was a fight at the corner of 3rd and F and some guy got thrown through a large window at the Discovery Museum. The Greg Gehr from Northern California Indian Development Council (owners of the Carson Block) was on hand and boarded up the window while he was busy pumping water from the basement.

So, I took a few photos of the burned building for the record. While I was there, I ran in to Paul Dixon from New Life Services Company (we just recently redesigned their web site so there’s the tech angle!). They do storm and fire restoration. The ground floor of the building next to ours suffered a great deal of smoke and

water damage and housed a wonderful antiques store. He said they should be able to clean and restore 40%-60% of the antiques and help with cleaning the damage to the building.

I have had a few requests for help on getting Mail (the Mac OSX email client) working with Suddenlink’s system. I thought the best way to help people would be to post screen shots of my configuration. So here is what I have. I don’t guarantee it will work for you. But I configured two machines with it.

Suddenlink seem to be having serious problems with its mail server. I have not been able to get mail through a POP connection since late last night. Trying to check mail through their web mail system doesn’t seem to work, either. Combined with the problems people are having with Mac OSX support, this is not a good start with this service.

Update: Looks like their mail server is back up. Sure hope this isn’t a sign of things to come.

I have a Tech Beat article in the Times-Standard today. It’s my attempt to indicate where the web has been for quite some time, but where many small business site owners have not followed. Originally, most web sites were just presentations of information. Eventually, e-commerce created a level of interactivity for many sites. But with new easier to use applications and development tools, much of the web has gone far beyond buy and sell interactions. Dynamic content, user contributed content and tools for getting things done have made the web a platform for communication and collaboration. I tried to keep the article simple with some concrete examples and avoided jargon such as Web 2.0, RSS and social networking.

Let me know what you think!