I’ll be speaking about Book Sprints, cc-licensed books and the developing world at a Free Culture event in Copenhagen this Sunday. It’s a joint project of Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke (ActionAid Denmark) and Creative Commons Denmark.
It’s arranged by my recent acquaintance (soon to be friend?), Henrik Chulu, and I’ll be sharing the stage with the amazing Solana Larsen from the amazing Global Voices project.
It’s Sunday at 15.45 in Fælledparken.
After a week of booksprinting, we finished what looks to be an amazing book on bypassing internet censorship.
It’s available for purchase as a print book from lulu.com, here, and can be read on-line at flossmanuals.net, here.
Big shout out to Adam Hyde from FLOSS Manuals, and the entire Book Sprint crew. You all rock!
I’m immensely proud to be associated with this book, and the crew who wrote it.
Despite having kept a low profile, and done next to no development-related work in the past 2 years, a old journalist contact of wire.less.dk gave me a call yesterday, and today there’s a couple of decent quotes on danish on-line computer mag version2.
It’s an article (in danish) about Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Foundation, and his claims that we need to focus on extending the web to those 4 billion people who still aren’t properly on-line. His is a hard point to argue with, and i got away with spewing some very un-controversial answers to the usual questions, i.e. Do they really need the web? and what do they need it for? isn’t it hard when there’s no clean drinking water and no electricity?
I’m not going to bore anyone here with the obvious answers, but all-in-all the journalist did a decent job, only misspelling my name once in 4 mentions, and getting almost the entire name of our non-profit correct (it’s wire.less.dk rather than just wire.less).
perhaps this means i’m forgiven, not forgotten?
We’re looking for some new colleagues here at AllAfrica, where, in case you missed the memo, I’m now Director of Technology. It’s a great place to work, especially if you dig Africa the way i do, and you want to work with cool web technologies like mapping, mashups, ajaxy stuff etc.
I’ll be speaking at the Copenhagen Linuxforum on March 3rd. An entirely new presentation entitled:
“Free Software in Developing World Projects – Before the OLPC and Beyond”
In january this year we released the first book in what has just become a series.
The book was written by a team of wireless experts working closely with each other over the space of 3 months. We call this concept a “Book Sprint”, and I am somewhat proud that the original idea was mine.
Just this week the “Book Sprint” proccess proved it’s worth again, as Rob Flickenger, my good friends Marco and Carlo at the ICTP and a handful of experts from all over the world managed to release “How To Accelerate Your Internet“.
Production time: 3 months (Now that’s what I call a sprint!)
The book is freely downloadable (cc Attribution-ShareAlike) in pdf from the website, and can also be purchased on lulu.com
Here’s a blurb from the books website.
Access to sufficient Internet bandwidth enables worldwide electronic collaboration, access to informational resources, rapid and effective communication, and grants membership to a global community. Therefore, bandwidth is probably the single most critical resource at the disposal of a modern organisation.
The goal of this book is to provide practical information on how to gain the largest possible benefit from your connection to the Internet. By applying the monitoring and optimisation techniques discussed here, the effectiveness of your network can be significantly improved.
We hope that you find these materials and this website useful. Please feel free to contribute your own experiences on the wiki and mailing list, and help make the next edition even better.
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I am currently back in Trieste, with my good friends Marco and Carlo, and this time the topic is Bandwidth Optimization. More info here: ICTP-SDU: Lowbandwidth Optimization Techniques
I’ve given lectures and had lab sessions on Traffic Shaping, and Bandwidth Monitoring, as well as some very basic linux firewalling stuff.
There’s about 40 colleagues here from all over sub-saharan africa, as well as Bolivia, Cuba, India, Rumania and probably a lot of countries i have missed.
There are some amazing participants, and some brilliant lecturors here.
Richard Stubbs from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, is a fountain of wisdom on overall strategies fro managing bandwidth in a large university setting (12,000 students) with way too little bandwidth (about 18 Mbit/s).
Olatunde Abiona, from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, adds another experienced voice to the fray, and is another new acquaintance for me to add to my growing list of gifted tehnology trainers.
Duane Wessels is just teaching a class on Web proxying with Squid, and for those of you who don’t know who Duane is, take a look here. Duane is the original author of Squid, which in turn is the most widely used web proxy anywhere. He also wrote one of the definitive guides on webcaching, and he happens to be a great teacher too.
Les Cottrell from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, was here until this morning, and he is an authority on ultra-high bandwidth applications, as well as being one of the brains behind the pingEr project, which measures latency over time to as many universities as possible, and uses it to estimate the quality of connections around the world.
Of course this is just a small sample of the great people that have made it to Trieste. Many of the lectures are on-line in QuickTime format here.
In any case, This is the first ICT workshop I’ve done since coming back from Africa Source 2 last winter, and it’s a timely reminder of how much i’ve missed this type of work.
Let me just repeat this here for future reference. Just in case, i end up forgetting…
I love to teach at technology workshops, especially when some of the participants are from the developing world and have developing world problems. It is what I do well, it is my passion, and in this world I have found some of the most intelligent, fascinating and fun friends a person could ever ask for.
**Disclosure**: I am currently in the proccess of interviewing for a job with [Fon](http://fon.com/) and this piece is largely a result of me spending time (for the first time in years) on the challenges of shared wireless in the rich countries of the west (rather than thinking mostly about the challenges in the less developed countries). *
The following are my pretty unstructured notes on how a hotspot sharing service such as [Fon](http://fon.com/) could help deal with some of the, real and imagined, security issues of hotspot-based networks. In many ways it doesn’t seem to matter to _the average user_ whether a security threat is real or imagined, as most people will never actually lose data or get atacked in a way that has actual consequences, it mostly the awareness of the threat that needs to be dealt with, rather than perhaps th threat itself. In many cases the way to deal with the awareness of the threat, is of course to remove the threat itself, however unlikely it is to ever be a problem.
Here we go….
There are 2 main security challenges that emerge from a system of shared wireless. Both are essentially the result of not having a stable trust network between the owner of the wireless network node, and the user of the network.
1. The risk of someone abusing your network for unethical (or perhaps even illegal) activities, including access to unethical materials on-line or attempts to access personal data over the local network.
2. The risk induced by the need to trust the owner of whatever Access Point you happen to connect to when away from home, and the ability of that trust to be abused top access your personal data and attempt to steal passwords to services such as e-mail or on-line banking services.
