When firms avoid fibre, it hurts us all.  When fibre is cheap, firms can use it to roll out super-fast broadband to their users, using the sort of technology that facilitates connections tens or hundreds of times faster than a typical UK home enjoys.  It also allows service providers to increase the capacity of their network edge, and to improve the robustness of their network – for instance by building more links between their network points.  Improved robustness also means better business continuity planning options, improving the availability of their services.  This tax kills faster access, and better services.

The fibre tax also worsens the conditions for international networks looking to build into the UK, for instance in order to bring their content and services to the UK market .  This is not a hypothetical risk, it is a game-changer that has destroyed the business cases of several projects that we have been contributed to last year.

This morning, George Osborne was on BBC TV explaining that he saw an advancement in next-gen broadband (based on fibre optic cabling) as a priority. If this is the case, then he must commit to repealing the 21st Century Window Tax. To date, they have only considered repealing the 50p per month tax on telephone lines that has been suggested by the hugely flawed Digital Britain study.

We are just not competitive with this tax.

They all show that the effects of scarsity of IP addresses will be felt before the final few addresses become assigned to end users.  All consumers of addresses will feel constrained, which means all businesses trading online, whether they are a traditional ISP, a growing e-commerce shop, or a datacentre/hosting firm.  The policies under consideration are :

• 2008-06 – Both new and existing organisations requesting IPV4 addresses shall be given addresses only to support transitioning technologies (i.e. infrastructure services which enable access to IPv6 addressed resources.)  They will only be given one block of IPv4 addresses, and this shall be the smallest possible range of addresses as decided by the community at large.  This is the only range of addresses which shall be given to the end user, even if their needs justify more.
• 2009-03 – From summer 2010, any organisation shall only be given enough new addresses to cater for anticipated need for nine months.  By summer 2011, this will change to three months.  Organisations (registries and end users) MUST have used more than half of their address space within six months of assignment or allocation.
• 2009-04 – Organisations must demonstrate that they are implementing an IPv6 transition policy (RFC5211) in order to be given IPv4 addresses.  Allocations from the RIPE NCC will be /27 (32 addresses for the entire registry, e.g. ISP)

This also means that the effects of black market trading in address space will be seen before the ‘anticipated’ IPv4 dry date in 2011.  There are no magic bullets, you (and your customers, suppliers, and partners) need deep pockets, decades worth of existing resources, or an ipv6 transition plan.  The only sensible option is to plan your v6 deployment today.

Before boxing it up, I did some research though – the iPhone Battery life information on the Apple site explained that my experiences should have been different, I should have seen “5 hours of talk time on 3G, 5 hours of Internet use on 3G, 6 hours of Internet use on Wi-Fi, 7 hours of video playback, or 24 hours of audio playback and up to 300 hours of standby time” (from Apple site).  The mistake I had made was to assume I could charge it from the USB port on my computer, since the cable supplied with the phone is a usb to iPhone cable.  A few weeks of exclusive charge on this cable means that you are guaranteed to have poor battery performance, whereas charging from the mains on the supplied adapter leads to better performance.  I wish someone had pointed that out to me explicitly.

Empirically, I also found that reducing screen brightness was the most effective way of preserving battery life when the phone is in use, and turning off bluetooth and 3g is the best way to preserve life when you are using it infrequently.

Firstly, I like the Bounce handling and web-interface to Mailman, so this is why I don’t just run Majordomo for lists any more.  Its worth pointing this out, in case you wonder why I still use tool B, even though I have to do lots of work to make it work like tool A !

After running newlist, I recommend the following configuration changes (defaults which are changed assume you are running the Debian packaged Mailman) :

• General Options – make the administrators email address a role account that you will not subscribe to the mailing list. This is basically so that if you bounce an administration message from Mailman, due to your spam filters or an error, Mailman wont decide to unsubscribe you from the mailing list!  I have had this happen to me before when I used to hand-check spam directed at uknot.
• Decapitalise public name of the list – to make it look neater, and more like the output of the ‘lists’ command in majordomo.  Don’t forget to decapitalise the subject line tag if you do this.  I also tend to make the subject line tag very small so that on little displays, it’s still possible to scan a folder and read threads of interest on subject alone.
• Disable monthly reminders – they are really annoying to your subscribers, and Debian’s default position is disabled, but some implementations do not disable subscription reminders.
• My users get confused by the Filter out duplicate messages to list members option.  When a list subscriber is cc:d to a list post, users tend to expect to see a copy of the mail in their inbox, and their mailing list archive.  I turn the filter off so that this happens.
• I tend to enable the Should administrator get notices of subscribes and unsubscribes option, so that I can track whether promoting a list in a certain place has worked!
• In “Non Digest options”, if I am migrating for a Majordomo list, I empty the box for message footer, and also tend to remove it when its a geek mailing list, as to most high volume mail readers, its obvious when an email has been posted to a mailing list, because its filtered into the correct mailbox !  For low volume lists that are intended for low volume mail readers, the footer might be useful.
• Check the reply to option, so that mailing lists that are intended to promote on-list discussion have a header that directs conversation back to the list, and mailing lists that will yield a high proportion of off-list mail do not have this header.
• Be slightly annoyed with me that the only English option in ‘Language Options’ is English (USA) when there is no English (UK).

Happy list-administration!

And you may find the following lists interesting to your work :

• mailop, for those who work in the field of mail systems administration.
• experts, for those who work in expert e-commerce roles.
• uknof, for those who work in network engineering roles, or systems/ISP environments.

I disagreed on the grounds that unicast IP is a fairly bad way to broadcast large volumes of data.  When wrapped with TCP to guarantee delivery and ensure quality, the infrastructure to handle the volumes of viewers for major tv series or live events, makes it hard to imagine it being possible to deliver real-time internet TV. This is before we consider the bandwidth requirements for high-definition video and audio.
So why the change of mind ?

I previously assumed internet delivery was the Raison d’etre for Net Video.  Its not.  The internet might not have proved itself as the most viable platform for broadcast video, but it has proved itself time and again as the perfect platform for publishing content.  Internet TV is going to mean that “TV” gets some of the “wisdom of crowds” treatment, and that organisations with interesting things to say will be able to launch video content to worldwide audiences.  Previously, content makers would have needed to work with a huge machine of tens of organisations before video hit the airways, and they’d need to work with hundreds if they wanted to distribute to a worldwide audience.  Today ?  All you need is a bit of content, a bit of tallent and some hosting.

The second benefit to internet video is how portable it is.  I have syndicated three shows from Revision3 (Diggnation, Systm, and Scam School), Scobleizer TV, and some other geeky video stuff.  It is downloaded to my laptop, and copied to my iPhone.  I can watch this on a normal TV at home in high quality, via a cheap phone to tv cable, or on the move via laptop or phone.  I can watch my usual TV if I am staying away by plugging the phone into a tv in a hotel room.
In the future, I expect to watch niche stuff that is downloaded, and popular things that are spooled to disk via a broadcast system.  I would like to see some really neat devices shipping this year which allow me to combine recorded broadcast TV with downloaded Internet video, and let me carry broadcast TV in the same portable manner.

Also would love to hear what internet TV people are watching via the comments on the blog!

Lee’s premise is that “Certainly Skype is not a walled garden. All things being relative, it’s certainly not overly closed either.”  Lee claims that the accusations of closeness are unfair, because they are levied by commentators who advocate SIP based addressing and dialing rather than any other system.

This is not my premise.  I claim that Skype is closed because calls are signalled and completed using protocols that are entirely secret as a matter of policy.  Skype’s founder presented at Spring VON 2007 and stated that if Skype did not keep their protocols entirely secret, then Skype would be full of spam and attack like email is.  I think this is a poisonous claim, telephone networks have been interconnecting around the world since telephony was conceived.  By not allowing telecoms firms to interconnect between the skype namespace and other networks, Skype have prevented openness to develop and maintain a monopoly position. That’s perfectly acceptable business, but it is not in the slightest bit open.

Randy Bush googled Walled Garden for a recent presentation and found this cartoon.  I like this definition because it’s correct.  Is Skype a Walled Garden ?  Lee says a Walled Garden is a commercial restriction, for example, “sharing of ringtones via Bluetooth, using WiFi from a PDA, having access to all Web sites“.  I think that only allowing interconnection with the purchase of an upgrade like SkypeOut is a restrictive or practice that suggests Skype is a Walled Garden.  Worst of all a call between two VoIP networks using this method requires default PSTN routing, which harms signal quality, and prevents the expansion of next-generation services such as Wideband/High Definition audio.

The meshing of networks, whether they are traditional voice or IP networks, leads to higher audio quality and increased reliability.  Keeping telephony systems and protocols secret in order to prevent meshing may well be a viable business model, but it is not an open business model.

• IPv4 addresses are scarse, and at current consumption rates, the IANA pool of free v4 addresses will be gone at the start of 2011.
• This starts a “Post IPv4 world” where the IPv4 internet continues to function as before (certainly initially), but obtaining new addresses becomes harder and expensive.  This inhibits expansion of existing firms, and new entrants to the market.
• Address trading is likely to lead to a larger routing table, meaning that failure-recovery times increase, and the risk of blackholes on the internet increases.
• Large broadband providers may not have enough v4 addresses to give one address per customer.  This means protocol translation techniques need to be used, which break the end to end model.  We rely on the end to end model when innovating new services on the internet.
• If services and consumers gradually roll v4 and v6 (dual stack), the negative impact of markets for addresses, routing problems, and translation can be mitigated.
• Service providers are enabling v6 in the core.  Enterprises need to move next in order to get the world v6 ready.

The advice I gave was :

• Today’s market leaders are already learning v6 lessons in their labs, (e.g. ipv6.google.com).  They are doing this to help them retain market leadership.  If you want to retain your market position, start labbing your applications and service provision with v6.
• Write a policy stating all new purchases of infrastructure and services need to be from providers with v6 support, or a well defined v6 road map.  In other words, make v6 a “life cycle upgrade”.
• Share information, and learn information from your industry peers.
• I also listed some advice to developers with regard to v4 and v6 differences.
• I then delivered a very quick primer to those who have not seen v6 deployed before.

My hope is that this talk is improved upon and delivered internationally to enterprises.

All successful internet protocols are elegant and simple by design. This makes it possible to retro-fit great ideas someone has one. Internationalisation was proposed in 1992, and it eventually became possible to register Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) in the .com space in 2003. Standards move slowly on the internet!

IDN is up for discussion again at the 31st ICANN meeting on Monday. This time, the world’s registry community are meeting in New Delhi, one of the most significant IT regions of the non-Latin world, to discuss the remaining “glitch” in the IDN system. An IDN might look like this: .com. Therefore any user still needs to be able to type .com in order to reach the resource they request. There is a proposal at the ICANN meeting to add Internationalised top-level domains, actual complimentary TLDs to .com, that will mean that resources can be reached in any supported alphabet.

This is interesting stuff. One school of thought is that this could significantly assist the development of electronic enterprise in many more pockets of the world. The supremacy of Silicon Valley as the web’s main economy would then be broken. I think differently – I think that .com is now too established as the main ecommerce ‘brand’ TLD, and attempts to localise the meaning of .com will be fruitless. .com means “I trade online”. Despite .biz and similar TLDs being equal in technical terms, they are not equal in the eyes of shoppers or traders. .com now has specific global meaning, and can’t be diluted.

Today, if you want to port your number from one service provider to another, it relies on two major coincidences – firstly that your old and new provider have an agreement in place to manage the technical transfer between the two networks, and secondly that your old provider remains fully willing to forward all calls destined from your old number, to your new service provider.

There are several issues with such a system – the first is that your old provider are still very much involved, so their technical or commercial failure causes a problem long after you have ported away, another is that the process is slow and manual, and a third is that not all service providers have agreements to permit number porting (called a Mutual Porting Agreement in the industry).

Vodafone are concerned about the costs of the new system, even though an industry group UKPorting has only just begun to gather information about how the system should work.  I think that it’s a flawed premise to argue that a system is too expensive before a system is selected (and associated costs are announced).  Instead Vodafone should get involved with designing a perfect system.

The UKporting system to facilitate fast, reliable, and simple porting must happen, and must succeed.  We have to protect consumers who port their number from failures caused by their former service provider.

I am concerned that the system may mean all multihomed telephone networks will need to move to any all-call-query model that’s run by one natural monopoly.  If a single entity holds the industry to ransom, we have not moved forward – there’s still a single commercial or technical position that can fail to break your port.  The single All-Call-Query model also lends itself well to governments having access to a single point where recording of most call attempts can be made.

One silver lining is that the issue of Information Security is now at the front of the minds of IT decision makers everywhere.  If you store any information about customers, suppliers, or any people whatsoever, and you don’t already have a plan for how you will move this data securely, permit access to it by your staff, and destroy the data when it’s nolonger needed or the holding assets are destroyed, then you will be tomorrow’s headline about data loss.

Secondly, this catalogue of failure will contribute to burying the enforced ID card scheme, or rather, the associated single database which is planned to hold all medical, criminal, and financial records about you, for use by civil servants.  Civil liberty concerns aside, if the government show little regard for the safety of our data when it’s in a de-aggregated form, then how will their IT systems and policies cope with the sort of attack that would follow putting everything the government knows about British people in one place?

Unfortunately, the Government have not taken the data loss stories at all seriously. Ruth Kelly is on record explaining that the loss of 1.5 million learner drivers is “not substantial.”  This means that she does not understand the risks of Social Engineering, a process where confidence tricksters use any trivial information that they know about you, to fool an individual into giving more information.  Claiming that the DVLA data loss is unsubstantial because bank details were not included in the data that is lost shows that the department have no understanding whatsoever of the motivations for stealing personal data. If you take a call starting, “Hi, I am calling from the DVLA about the test you took on the 3rd of December in Cardiff, which you failed – would you like to rebook a test?” then following the potential loss of your records as a driving student, you may have been telephoned by a thief.  Further more any con-man could use the data they have stolen as ‘pretext’ – sharing enough data about you with you in order to make you believe the call was genuine.