Copacetic

This looks bad for Eircom. If its true they have inadvertently created Ireland’s largest free WIFI network. Good man Eircom!

(via Damien) 

Damien linked to this excellent video talk given by Van Jacobson entitled “A New Way to Look At Networking“. In it Jacobson gives a lightening history of the birth of telephony networks (its all about wires), the advent of packet switching (a way to evade circuit setup times) and our modern Internet (a mechanism for information dissemination).  He then predicts how the web will have to change and how existing content will no longer have an authoritative location but will live “everywhere” on the web.

He then points out that all existing security models depend on securing the route, but say nothing about the content, which is why spam and phishing attacks are so successful. In the future the content itself will be secured, hence the ability to live anywhere rather than being delivered by a authoritative host (e.g. nytimes.com) or its proxies.

He concludes by pointing out some of the issues around incentivising the “content everywhere” model of operation.

Important lessons for anybody involved in developing modern web applications. I’ll be watching this one again.

If ISPs (e.g. GoDaddy, Network Solutions) supported a REST API to DNS then applications like Google For Domains wouldn’t have to throw users to the wolves when it comes to configuring CNames and aliases.

Instead you could just give your credentials to Google and they could update your DNS entries directly. Most ISPs discourage direct fiddling with users DNS entries (for good reasons), but with the ability to customise your URL now a feature of Google for Domains, the need for non-skilled users to access this data is becoming more important.

Robert Cringely (in his new blog format) talks about IPV6 as the way the world is moving. Most particularly how China has moved to IPV6 as a way of escaping the addressing constraints imposed by the limited amount of addresses it was allocated using IPV4.

As a result this a federally mandated move afoot to move the US to IPV6 which has cost implications for backbones based on ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode).

There is a huge opportunity for Ireland to steal a march on our natural competitors in the IT space (India, Rumania etc.) by moving to an IPV6 platform. We are small enough that the costs would not be huge and we could reap several significant benefits,

• Clearly identify ourselves as a global technology leader
• Create invaluable IPV6 expertise in Ireland that can be exported overseas
• Create an environment for where companies with technology based around IPV6 can thrive
• Create an environment where startups can grow based around the IPV6 expertise garnered during the conversion process

Who do we call to get this started?
IPV6 tutorial gives the dirty details.

I downloaded Hamachi today. What is hamachi? A very simple, secure way to connect a group of PCs together in a shared, private network. Its very slick, has good installation help and works just as expected.

Now we can all connect together and also connect with our (small number) of PCs and servers that live in the office.

You create a network, members join the network by entering a password and once they are on the network you have as access to their machine in an identical fashion to a machine on the same subnet. You can also access a web-server if they happen to have one running.

Its another piece of the jigsaw that includes hosted subversion, hosted servers, hosted email and calendar and hosted DNS management.

I recently gave a dig out to somebody by registering a .ie domain for them. Total time from initial application to finally getting the domain up and running (e.g. getting the IEDR to update the nameservers) was 40 days!! Even I can’t believe it when I count it up.

Even if I generously lop of ten days to allow for some delays on my part in responding, this really is atrocious, and we pay a premium price of €95.59 for this service.

They farcically recommend you use a reseller, but when I tried to register initially via hostireland, I got bounced straight back to the IEDR, who required me to fax (yes fax, not email) in a justification.

My advice, stick to godaddy.com and register any kind of domain you want for $9.95, in seconds.

Michele exposes the IEDR in a excellent post. I register domain names pretty regularily (well once every six months or so). On GoDaddy I can whip up a name in next to no time, no questions asked. But for our IEDR no amount of bogosity is a bridge too far.

Their attempts to police the Internet for Ireland have meant that I only ever register a .ie domain when there is absolutely no other alternative (and there is usually an alternative).

The IEDR policy is a classic example of optimising the process to handle the exceptions rather than the common case. So everybody has to jump through the same mind numbing justification process to register names that in any other jurisidiction would be a click away.

How many Irish specific services have .com names just because its cheaper and easier to do it that way?

Blacknight provide an Irish ISP speed test for broadband users. Its pretty good in terms of user interface (requires Java as it’s an applet).
What I’d really like to see (and blacknight may provide this, I just haven’t found it yet) is a comparison across vendors and exchanges so that you can see how fast you are at home and in work and also compare your speed with neighbours, friends, colleagues etc. Then we could really see how the different broadband vendors compare in the trenches as opposed to on the marketing brochures.

Netgear (via eHomeUpgrade) have today announced pre-order availability of a WIFI mobile. Retailing at $250 in the US and offering free mobile connectivity to the skype community when in WIFI range.

Once WIMAX takes off we can  expect similar devices to encompass this emerging technology (and as we know the devices will only get cheaper). Is it any wonder the mobile incumbents are scrambling to get into the broadband space.

I won a free wireless router at the Irish Blog Awards a few weeks ago. Its a Linksys WRT54GL, but came with FON software pre-installed. I have nothing against FON and their aims but I found the software hard to use and configure. So this week I reflashed the router with the original Linksys software.

This is a straightforward process. First connect the router to a PC via a bit of ethernet cable. Now boot the router and login via http://192.168.0.1 (it might have been http://192.168.1.1). Go to the system table and look for the upgrade dialog. This upgrade dialog allows you to select a local file to upgrade the router. You can download the Linksys firmware from the linksys website. So download that file and feed it to the upgrade dialog.

The upgrade screen will print out some messages about unpacking the file and once it prints done you have completed the upload. The final step is to press the button on the front of the router to reboot the system. The light behind this button will flash furiously for a few minutes and when it settles down you have a fully configured and working original Linksys router.

Full docs are again available on the Linksys page.