Internet matters – Page 45 – a sibilant intake of breath

Improving energy efficiency through very smart metering

With existing technology, it is entirely possible to build houses that allow their owners to be dramatically more energy aware. For instance, it would be relatively easy to build electrical sockets connected to a house network. It could then be possible to see graphically or numerically how much power is being drawn by each socket. It would also be easy to isolate the energy use of major appliances – furnaces, dish washers, refrigerators – thus allowing people to make more intelligent choices about the use and possible replacement of such devices. In an extreme case, you could have a constantly updating spreadsheet identifying every use of power, the level being drawn, the cost associated, and historical patterns of usage.

Being able to manage electrical usage through a web interface could also be very helpful. People could transfer some of their use of power to low-demand times of the day. They could also lower the temperature in houses and have it rise in time to be comfortable by the time they got home. Such controls would also be very useful to people who have some sort of home generating capacity, such as an array of solar panels. A web interface could provide real-time information on the level of energy being produced and the quantity stored.

While all of these things are entirely possible, there do seem to be two big barriers to implementation. The first is in convincing people to install such systems in new houses or while retrofitting houses. The second is to make the systems intuitive enough that non-technical people can use them pretty well. The first of those obstacles would be partially overcome through building codes and carbon pricing. The second is mostly a matter of designing good interfaces. Perhaps an Apple iHome is in order.

Foregoing WEP and WPA

Bruce Schneier, the security guru and internet sensation, has been suggesting that people unlock their wireless networks. Given the constant and well-justified anxiety that exists about computer security, it is unconventional advice. That said, he argues effectively that the risks are fairly limited and that it is a neighbourly thing to do. Who hasn’t benefitted once or twice from the availability of an open wireless network? They were invaluable during my early weeks in Ottawa: allowing me to access Craiglist, Google Maps, and other vital apartment-hunting data while I was out there searching.

I am going to try leaving my wireless network open for a couple of weeks. If it doesn’t seem likely to burst my 200GB monthly bandwidth cap, I will leave it that way indefinitely. Hopefully, it will transpire that others have done the same when I start hunting around for a quieter flat in a more interesting neighbourhood this spring.

1024 by 768 does not a pretty 4 x 6 make

Partly because of concerns about archiving digital files in the long term, I am hoping to make prints from some of my digital files. Unfortunately, there is an issue of aspect ratios. My digital photos all have an aspect ratio of 4:3 – different from those used for 4 x 6″, 5 x 7″, and 8 x 10″ photographic prints. I don’t especially want black bands on two sides of each image, and I definitely don’t want them arbitrarily cropped.

Is there anywhere online where I can order digital prints on photographic paper in native digital resolution? Albums capable of holding prints with that aspect ratio would also be required. The alternative – manually cropping hundreds of photos to minimize the unwanted aesthetic effects of switching to the 4 x 6″ format – is something I only want to do as a last resort.

Leguminous illustration

A comic in which Emily’s artistic talents have been combined with my egregious printing is now on her beanhead site. It is also mentioned on her blog. Tristan has produced a video about the whole beanhead phenomenon, featuring exclusive footage of Emily and I walking around in Vancouver’s Chinatown and inventing silly answers to silly questions.

Fibre jam

Some people are predicting that 2008 will be the year when the internet slows down. The cause is expected to be massive amounts of video traffic, partially driven by social networking sites. All those voice-over-internet phone calls will naturally add to the flow of packets that need to be routed around the world.

All this makes me wonder whether it might be better to allow a bit more discrimination in routing. Sending and receiving video is fun, but rarely essential. Having the more prosaic uses of the internet suffer unduly because of such things seems improper. I could probably surf text all day using the bandwidth required to watch a few minutes of television online.

I don’t really know enough about internet architecture to be able to say whether such filtering could be accomplished, whether it would be cheated very easily, or whether it would cause additional problems. That said, you can certainly expect such questions to get asked more often if predictions of slowly loading websites and jerky video calls prove correct.

Hacking Nintendo hardware

If you want proof that allowing people to tinker around with commercial hardware can produce cool results, take a look at this video. It shows a Wiimote mod done by Johnny Chung Lee that allows head tracking for the simulation of a three dimensional environment on a flat screen.

I wonder when we will see the first game that uses this approach. It could probably have some more serious applications, as well.

The sheer hackability of Ninendo hardware is making me seriously consider getting a DS. My brother has a card that lets you store dozens of games on a micro-SD card, as well as run homebrew applications.

[Update: 5 January 2008] I finally managed to track down a DS. I have put in an order for a device that will allow it to play ROMs from a micro-SD card, as well as run a web browser and other goodies.

[Update: 9 January 2008] For a very long time, I thought no Zelda game could top A Link to the Past. While it is too soon to know for sure, I can say that The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is in the running. Playing with just the touch screen works surprisingly well. The DS is the most entertaining system I have used since the original Playstation.

[Update: 11 January 2009] I received an M3 DS Real Nintendo DS storage device in the mail today from EchoStore.com. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have been properly manufactured and only functions intermittently. A number of web forums discuss making them a bit thicker by taping on pieces of paper. While this does seem to improve the success rate, it isn’t perfect and I would prefer one that works properly. As such, it seems destined to be returned to the manufacturer for exchange.

Impressions of Leopard

When I upgraded by Mac to Tiger (Mac OS 10.4), I wrote a bit about it. Now, it is Leopard‘s (10.5) turn.

The big new features are Time Machine (backup utility) and Spaces (multiple desktops). There are also incremental improvements to lots of prior features: Dasboard, the Finder (Coverflow added), Mail, Preview, Quick Look, Safari, and Spotlight. Time Machine is a good idea and seems to work well. The graphics strike me as a bit overdone. A simpler interface would use fewer system resources and might well be easier to use. That said, making backups a lot easier is a very welcome move. Startlingly few people have even a single comprehensive backup of all their data, much less the kind of rolling, iterated backup Time Machine produces. It also manages to do so in a far quicker and less obtrusive way than free options like Carbon Copy Cloner. Spaces is too clumsy to be of any use on my iBook. The F1-F12 keys already have too many demands made of them by screen and volume controls, Expose, and Dashboard. As such, I only briefly enabled this feature before rejecting it as essentially unusable. The new firewall also seems more confusing and troublesome than the old one.

Is Leopard worth the $100? Some of the little improvements are certainly nice. I like the Stacks feature that has been added, as well as the way the wireless network icon in the menu bar now shows which networks require passwords. That said, the improvements are relatively minor. I would not run out to buy this upgrade again. That will situation will probably change when common pieces of software begin to require it and developers begin to make better use of the new under-the-hood features.

One of the best things about a new operating system release is that it gives you the chance to prune things down. With Tiger, I used the option that simply replaced the operating system, leaving applications and data intact. That worked brilliantly but couldn’t be done this time, since it was a complete operating system failure that provided the immediate impetus for the upgrade. Backing up data, erasing everything, and starting over has left the computer running noticeably quicker. That is especially welcome on a system that is getting on in years and having increasing difficulty running applications smoothly.

I have taken this opportunity to abandon some more Microsoft software. Previously, I used Entourage (the Mac version of Outlook) because it was compatible with all the emails from my old PC. On the PC, I chose it originally because it would sync easily with my Palm Pilot (which has spent about four years collecting dust in a box in Vancouver). Switching to Mail and iCal was pretty straightforward, since I decided not to transfer over my old emails and to simply synchronize iCal with my Google Calendar. I don’t really like the Mail interface very much, but it does integrate better into the OS than Entourage did, as well as using fewer system resources.

All told, the Mac does feel as though it got a new lease on life. It will need to endure until I can justify redirecting sufficient funds from student loan repayment to buy a shiny MacBook.

Defending bike lanes over the web

MyBikeLane is an interesting concept in distributed social law enforcement. The idea is that people take photos of cars parked in bike lanes and then upload those to the site along with details on when and where the incident occurred. Since they can be sorted by license plate, the worst offenders can be easily identified. New York has by far the most active community, followed by Toronto.

Since I carry a digital camera at all times anyhow, I will keep my eyes peeled for possible contributions once I resume biking. For now, my small hybrid tires and the recollection of my nasty Halloween fall are keeping my bike in the basement.

I learned about the site from this interesting blog.

Rejecting Canada’s new copyright act

As a student, I was constantly being called upon to support various causes, through means ranging from making donations to attending rallies. Usually, such activities have a very indirect effect; sometimes, they cannot be reasonably expected to have any effect at all. Not so, recent protest activities around Canada’s new copyright act: a draconian piece of legislation that would have criminalized all sorts of things that people have legitimate rights to do, such as copying a CD they own onto an iPod they own.

Defending the fair use of intellectual property has become a rallying point for those who don’t want to see the best fruits of the information revolution destroyed by corporate greed or ham-fisted lawmaking in the vein of the much-derided American Digital Millennium Copyright Act. At their most controversial, such acts criminalize even talking about ways to circumvent copyright-enforcement technology, even when such technology is being mistakenly applied to non-copyrighted sources: such as those covered by the excellent Creative Commons initiative or those where fair use is permissive for consumers. Watching a DVD you own using a non-approved operating system (like Linux) could become a criminal offence.

For now, the protests seem to have been successful. Of course, the temptation for anyone trying to pass a controversial law is to hold off until attention dissipates, then pass it when relatively few people are watching. Hopefully, that will not prove the ultimate consequence of this welcome tactical victory for consumer rights.

Problems with government databases

By now, everyone has probably heard about the data loss debacle in the United Kingdom. The British government lost the child benefit records for 25 million people. These records include addresses, dates of birth, bank account information, and national insurance numbers. In total, 40% of the British population has been exposed to the risk of identity theft.

Obviously, this should never have happened. One government agency requested some anonymized data for statistical purposes. Instead, a different department sent them the whole dataset in an unencrypted format. Encrypting the discs would have made it nearly impossible for thieves to access the data; anonymizing the data would have made such theft unprofitable. The failure to do either is the height of idiocy, but it is probably what we need to expect from the civilian parts of government when it comes to data security. Security is hard; it requires clever people with good training, and it requires oversight to ensure that insiders are competent and not cheating. People who are naive and naturally helpful can always be exploited by attackers.

In response to this situation, two sets of things need to be done. The first is to correct the specific failures that cause this kind of problem: require encryption of sensitive documents in transit, limit who has access to such sensitive databases, and tighten the procedures surrounding their use. The second is to limit the amount of such data that is available to steal in the first place. That could involve using paper records instead of digital ones – making mass theft dramatically harder to accomplish. It may also involve not creating these kinds of huge databases, as useful as they may seem when working properly.

It is fair to say that there will always be people out there able to break into any information that a large number of civil servants have access to. This would be true even if all civil servants were capable and virtuous people, because a lot of the best computer talent is applied to breaking flawed security systems. Given that bureaucrats are human, and thus subject to greed and manipulation, the prospects for keeping a lid on government data are even worse. Acknowledging the realities of the world, as well as the principle of defence in depth, suggests that limiting the volume of data collected and held by all governments is an appropriate response to the general security risks highlighted by this specific incident.