Networking

Jan 14 2009   7:26AM GMT

IPv6 addresses - how many is that in numbers?

Posted by: Ivy Wigmore
Internet, IPv6, communications, CIO, quiz

IPv6 is our Word of the Day today. The big difference between it andIPv4 is the increase in address space. IPv4 addresses are 32 bits; IPv6 addresses are 128 bits. That’s a lot more, for sure, but what does it look like in numbers? What could we compare it to in real-world terms?

DevDevin did the math:

How many IP addresses does IPv6 support? Well, without knowing the exact implementation details, we can get a rough estimate based on the fact that it uses 128 bits. So 2 to the power of 128 ends up being 340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 unique IP addresses.

How do you say that, though?  340 trillion, 282 billion, 366 million, 920 thousand, 938 — followed by 24 zeroes.  There’s no short way to say it in numbers without resorting to math. 

Here’s how Wikipedia expresses it:

The very large IPv6 address space supports a total of 2¹²⁸ (about 3.4×10³⁸) addresses - or approximately 5×10²⁸ (roughly 2⁹⁵) addresses for each of the roughly 6.5 billion (6.5×10⁹) people alive today. In a different perspective, this is 2⁵² addresses for every observable star in the known universe.

 Steve Leibson takes a shot at putting it in real world terms. It’s big — grains of sand don’t even enter into it. No, he’s got to take it to the atomic level. Here’s his conclusion:

So we could assign an IPV6 address to EVERY ATOM ON THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH, and still have enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths. It isn’t remotely likely that we’ll run out of IPV6 addresses at any time in the future.

Rob Elamb takes a shot at expressing the number of possible IPv6 addresses in words:

First of all, he’s more precise with his numbers: 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456

And he shows us how to say it:

340- undecillion
282- decillion
366- nonillion
920- octillion
938- septillion
463- sextillion
463- quintillion
374- quadrillion
607- trillion
431- billion
768- million
211- thousand
456

So, all words, that would look like:

Three hundred and forty undecillion, two hundred and eighty-two decillion, three hundred and sixty-six nonillion, nine hundred and twenty octillion, nine hundred and thirty-eight septillion, four hundred and sixty-three sextillion, four hundred and sixty-three quintillion, three hundred and seventy-four quadrillion, six hundred and seven trillion, four hundred and thirty-one billion, seven hundred and sixty-eight million, two hundred and eleven thousand, four hundred and fifty-six.

That’s a big number.  

IPv4 allowed for four billion IP addresses, which must have seemed like plenty at the time. I guess the assumption was that not everyone on the planet would want an IP address and nobody’s coffee maker or toaster would need one. Just goes to show you, you never know.

Oct 22 2008   5:44AM GMT

Joel Maloff on SIP trunking

Posted by: Ivy Wigmore
VoIP, Networking, wireless, Web 2.0, communications, cloud computing, Mobile Computing

“For a service that was forecast by Gartner last year to be part of a more than $2 billion market segment by 2011, SIP trunking remains one of those technical phrases used in vendor circles that is marched out with pride to prospective distributors and customers and received by the marketplace with bewilderment.”

I’m always extremely impressed when marketing people actually demystify terms, instead of spinning hype and building the “baffle ‘em with BS” model to new levels. In this article, Joel Maloff, VP of Marketing for BandTel, explains SIP trunking. Here’s an excerpt:

In a survey commissioned by my company earlier this year, we discovered that even so-called industry experts — analysts, reporters, and others — could not agree on a definition for SIP trunking, nor could they consistently identify the leaders in delivery of SIP trunking services. However, it is not hard to understand the confusion in the general marketplace. For example, a February 2008 Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) draft document entitled “What is aSession Initiation Protocol ( News - Alert) (SIP) Trunk Anyway?” provided the following definition:

A SIP trunk is a virtual sip entity on a server constrained by a predefined set of polices and rules that determine how to process requests. (J. Rosenberg, 2008, http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-rosenberg…)

No wonder there is confusion!

The same draft also describes SIP trunking in more mainstream circles as a service for enterprises that allows connection to the PSTN as a displacement for circuit-based connections, and as a replacement for costly leased lines connecting distributed telephone systems within an enterprise.

So let’s cut through the mystery and confusion. SIP trunking, simply put, is a way for organizations to accomplish something that they already do, but for less money, with equal or better quality, and with greater functionality. It is also a way for enterprises that were too small and could not afford leased line services to achieve comparable benefits as the big boys but for much more attractive fees than previously. All of this is now achievable because of the underlying packet-switched technology of the Internet as opposed to circuit-switched architecture from the past. SIP is simply the framework that vendors and service providers have agreed to use to accomplish the completion of telephone calls and much more.

Another challenge is that SIP trunking providers differ from one another, and can roughly be grouped in the following three categories: SIP trunks via dedicated lines, SIP trunks in conjunction with hosted services, and pure SIP trunking providers.

Read the rest of the article.

Jun 15 2008   11:27AM GMT

What is Twitter? Is this distributed microblogging platform ready for the enterprise?

Posted by: Alexander Howard
messaging, Networking, wireless, small business, business, Mobile, applications, news, Web 2.0, enterprise, software, IT marketing, media, Technology, Web services, fun, video, new media, Internet, innovation, useful, aggregator, cool, culture, free, interesting, exploration, reviews, Silicon Valley, resource, collaboration, forum, wiki, conversation, community, social, interactive media, Web analytics, widgets, tool, tutorial, howto, trend, social networking, blogging, service, buzz, communications, Web applications, buzzword, word meanings, geek, conference, enterprise 2.0

Given that I’ve become an avid user of Twitter, I’m frequently asked what, exactly, Twitter is and what in the world it’s useful for.

Isn’t it just it a presence messaging on steroids? What about a free global SMS addressbook? Or a hyperlink-enabled persistent chatroom? To be fair, I don’t hear that last often, but summing up what Twitter is and what it does is challenging — especially in 140 characters or less. Twitter’s own “social messaging utility where people can communicate in real-time” comes close. Twitter’s creators know better than most what they’ve created and how it works.

Other takes on Twitter range far and wide:

• Caroline Middlebrook described Twitter as “an incredibly powerful marketing & community building tool.”
• In a long post that describes how he discovered Twitter and how SocialText is using it, Ross Mayfield called Twitter “mobile social software that lets you broadcast and receive short messages with your social network” aka, “Continuous partial presence.”
• Wendy Boswell writes that Twitter is a “mini-blogging platform that you can use to send messages of 140 characters or less to family, friends, or just the general Web community.”
• Dave Winer explains Twitter as a network of users on a microblogging platform with its own open-identity system and ecosystem.
• Ed Kohler posted that Twitter is “a social networking site based around text messaging.”

WhatIsTwitter.com is addressing the question by hosting a contest that asks you to explain Twitter in 140 seconds. (It runs through 6/23/08, if you’d like to enter.)

When I tweeted the question to the Twitter community, Robbert replied that Twitter was “a great way to get in touch and ‘meet’ very interesting people!” and Liz tweeted back that “Twitter is a window into other people’s worlds. Scholars can get insulated so it is nice to hear the ups & downs in other fields.”

In the end, however, I think a shade on Wikipedia’s current definition comes closest: a free distributed social networking and microblogging service that may be updated from the Web, IM, cellphone or a desktop client.

The question of what, exactly, you can DO with Twitter is something else altogether. The session at Enterprise 2.0 devoted to microblogging addressed exactly that question. The discussion was lively, both in person and on Twitter itself, as we could all see on the screen as Laura Fitton (@pistachio) Twittered about the event.

Even though at least one member in the audience questioned the etiquette of such an embedded distraction, with respect to her engagement with the rest of the panel, the bulk of the conversation between the other Twitterers in the audience and those present was inquisitive, supportive and engaged. You can see the various streams of conversation around the session and the conference in general at Twemes.com by using the hashtags #e20, #en20 and #ent20.

With the notable exception of Loren Feldman from 1938Media, the panelists supported the idea of Twitter or something like it (call it “X enterprise microblogging platform”) being both useful and present within an enterprise in the near future.

So what’s the story? Have I lost you yet? Do many of the terms above need further explanation? A colleague looked at me recently with a quirked eyebrow and asked me if I seriously expected her to ask conference-going IT professionals to “Tag their tweets on Twitter” and all I could do was grin.

Like so many emergent services and ecosystems on the Web, Twitter has evolved its own lingo. I’ve blogged about Twitter for WhatIs.com before, of course, but it’s worth reviewing the basics. Here’s a quick guide to get you started and give you some of your own”Twitter-fu.”

The Basics: For the novice Twitter user

By now, the story of how Twitter came to be has been extensively documented, so I’ll leave it to others to tell the tale. Check out this great video from Common Craft, Twitter in Plain English:



You can update Twitter from Twitter.com, which is how the majority of users access the service, from instant messenger or by texting to “40404″ with a cellphone registered with the service. If you do use a cellphone, remember that there may be associated charges for text messages of .10 or .15 per message. Early adopters of the Twitter and the iPhone discovered to their chagrin that thousands of texts got quite expensive. If you’re planning on using your cellphone to tweet, seriously consider investing in an unlimited text messaging plan.

No matter what, you’ll need to register first. Choose the username that fits you, your brand, your company, service, product or simply your whim. Try to make it as short as possible; you want to reserve as much space as possible for others to use in replies, since they’ll need to include your username in a reply.

Here’s where one of the conventions that Twitter has introduced into the Web comes into play. Instead of remembering both a username and a domain name ( johndoe at yahoo.com), all you have to do is remember a username (@johndoe). Just type in go to twitter.com, add the user name to the url and click “follow.”

If you want to publicly reply to a tweet from another user, just include @johndoe in your message and he or she will automatically see it. Just click “replies” on your Twitter page to see how has responded to you. You can also direct message another user by typing “d johndoe” — but only if they are following you. This is quite useful for conversation you don’t want the entire Web to be involved in.

There are other etiquette concerns, paralleling netiquette on the rest of the Web; read Chris Brogan’s post Considering Social Media Etiquette and Grammer Girl’s Twitter Style Guide to get a flavor of the conventions at play.

Ready to go? Start at the Twitter homepage, which includes a useful Twitter FAQ TwitterFeed. Each time you post to Twitter, it’s called a “tweet.” Each tweet has its own URL, just like a “normal” blog post has a permalink. Twitter’s 140 character limit means that brevity is crucial, so using URL shorteners like TinyURL.com is a must. You can make your first update just like a blog post on Blogger or Wordpress. “Hello World” would work, if you’re stuck for inspiration.

Twitter isn’t much fun, however, if you’re just twittering into the ether. To get the most from the service, you’ll need to find some friends or find interesting feeds to follow, like @MarsPhoenix or @BarackObama. MC Hammer is out there too, by the way. You can always just search for people you know on Twitter or go to a user’s profile page if you already know someone you want to “follow.” Once you get rolling, you can use a service like WhoShouldIFollow.com to find more friends.

Following means that you’ll get all of that person’s updates, so choose carefully. If you choose to follow top Twitterers, expect to see a lot of messages. This is a great way to discover interesting new people, however, so even if you don’t follow @Scobleizer, @LeoLaporte , @JasonCalacanis, @KevinRose or other A-list bloggers or “cewebrities,” make sure to check their profiles to see who they’ve discovered. You can always unsubscribe if someone posts content or links you don’t want to see in your feed.

The other symbol you’ll see often is the hashtag, which is the Twitter version of a social bookmark. Think of them as a way to add your tweets to niche conversations, specific events or around products or services. Learn more at hashtags.org. I mentioned them earlier when I listed the various hashtags for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. By adding a # sign and then a series of numbers and letters afterwards (try #beatLA, for Celtics-lovers) your tweets will be aggregated into the great conversation.

Twitter has opened its application programming interface (API) to the development community , which has responded by creating many desktop clients that you can use to update the service, manage your messages and friends.

To use my favorite client, Twirl, you’ll need to download Adobe AIR and install Twirl as a desktop client. Twirl includes a URL shortener and many other features that, in my humble opinion, richly enhance your Twitter experience. Twirl can also be configured to post automatically to Pownce and Jaiku, two other popular microblogging services. If you use a Mac, Twitterific might be a good fit, too.

Rafe Needleman has posted a terrific “Newbie’s Guide to Twitter” over at Webware.com, which I highly recommend if you’re still having trouble getting started.

Getting into the conversation: For the intermediate Twitter user

Now that you’ve gotten your feet wet, here are some more services to expand your horizons.

You can monitor whatever keyword you choose, like your name or your company’s brandname, at Tweetscan. Even if you don’t choose to use Twitter actively, this is an important component of brand and reputation management.

You can see threaded conversations with Quotably. This is a useful tool if you want to see an entire back and forth between users in one place.

Similarly, Summize helps you track Twitter conversations in real-time.

Use Mobile Twitter if you have a BlackBerry, Treo or other smartphone with a browser or try out Hahlo.com if you have an iPhone.

There’s a dedicated BlackBerry client called TwitterBerry too, which is worth looking into if you’re a “CrackBerry Addict.”

Quakk, Tiny Twitter, TwitToday and Twobile all work as clients for Windows Mobile 5.

Facebook has a Twitter application that embeds your tweets in your profile and allows you to tweet from within the social networking environment.

You can display your latest tweets automatically on your blog with an embedded widget, like this Twitter widget for Wordpress or the Twitter Widget for Blogger.

Or, if you want to hook up your blog’s feed to Twitter, Twitterfeed will be helpful.

Watch Twittervision to see a mashup of a global Google Map and location-specific tweets.

Use TwitPic to share photos on Twitter.

For the Advanced Twitter User

If you’ve gotten this far and have been nodding your head all the time, waiting for something new, congratulations: Your Twitter-Fu is strong. The Twitter Fan Wiki should be your resource of choice, where new applications, services and software is aggregated and vetted by a strong user community. If you’re an alpha geek, make sure to check out the scripts page, which is chock full of geeky goodness.

I’m far from the first to try to explain what Twitter is an how it works, of course. Make sure to check out Tweeternet.com for an excellent explanation and outstanding list of Twitter tools.

If you’ve mastered the basic and intermediate tools and technologies, consider the following ways that Twitter has been put to good use:

• As a social justice tool, where people in critical situations can get the news out quickly
• As a crisis response and management tool (check out @RedCross)
• As a presence tool for emergency workers or individuals in a natural disaster zone

If you have questions, thoughts, additional resources, uses or any other response to this post, please use the comments. And, of course, Twitter about it. Do you think Twitter — or a client like it — is right for your business or enterprise? Let us know!

Jun 13 2008   1:45PM GMT

What is Unity? Lockheed-Martin’s implementation of a social computing platform wows Enterprise 2.0 conferees.

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Google, Microsoft, Networking, business, applications, Web 2.0, enterprise, software, Technology, search engine, search, innovation, feeds, portal, social bookmarking, social publishing, interesting, invention, collaboration, wiki, community, tool, howto, information, trend, social networking, CMS, blogging, communications, Web applications, buzzword, software development, conference, enterprise 2.0

One of the unexpected hits of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference this past week was a presentation by Lockheed-Martin on Unity, its social computing platform. One of the world’s largest defense contractors would seem an unlikely candidate for early adoption of enterprise 2.0 technologies, or at least that was the impression when the session kicked off. By the end of the hour, audience members were asking “Where can I buy it?”

[Image credit: TechLuver.com]

Shawn Dahlen and Christopher Keohan talked at length about what they’d learned over the course of eighteen months developing the platform, kicking off their presentation by noting that there was a compelling need in government sector to collaborate through social media. Chris noted that embracing social computing at Lockheed Martin a major component of recruiting talented Generation Y IT workers, the so-called “millenials,” as showing the company’s prowess in the adoption of cutting edge tools was a key differentiator.

Before Unity was implemented, the state of collaboration at their enterprise should be quite familiar to most corporate workers : email, meetings and office docs like Powerpoint presentations emailed around as attachments. “Project Unity” was conceived as a way of applying Web2.0 technologies for “mission success.” To that end, the team resolved to provide a user experience employees would love, address “what was in it for them” and balance the need to share vs the need to know — crucial in a defense contractor. Unity’s designers wanted to foster a social computing ecosystem around a standardized platform, integrating blogs, wikis and other documents into their current platform. Over time, they added discussion forums, a social bookmarking tool called “uBookmark” and weekly activity reporting to capture usage and adoption patterns. They included a suggestion tool to solicit community insights on the project as it rolled out and created an internal homepage to aggregate popular content. Unity’s internal team of developers also made a priority of maintaining a cohesive user experience and to ensuring that all information could be both feed-enabled and integrated.

How did they pull it off? By integrating Google enterprise search appliance (GSA) , Microsoft’s Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) and Newsgator’s Enterprise Server. Take a look at this demonstration of Social Sites 2.0 to get a feel for what this looks like. They Unity development team took a close look at how to use social computing tools in an everyday business context and took the time to understand how they would integrate and evolve from the existing email/Powerpoint/meeting model.

The crucial question, asked over and over again this week, was addressed head-on by Unity’s designers: “What is the value of social networking in the enterprise?”

Their answer was, in the end, simple: Being able to watch what other people are doing, easily, and then being able to search it and ask questions raises productivity and leads to improved collaboration and knowledge exchange. Instead of tracking what your friends are doing on, say, Facebook with a “friend feed,” an enterprise derives value from tracking an activity stream of interconnected colleagues. At any point, a worker can see what others are working on, access shared documents and ask questions on shared virtual workspaces or directly to the relevant decision maker or technologist.

Lockheed-Martin built the basic Unity platform in 07 and then ran a beta pilot of it over the course of the year with 40 engineers building, testing and experimenting with the release. After the initial release, it took just six months for a second iteration that addressed both information security and legal issues.

A crucial question that they were asked to account for again and again will be familiar to CIOs: How did they quantify the return on investment (ROI) for the dedication of internal resources and purchase of software? Each time, the traditional productivity savings of a user finding information was a factor. What really sold them, however, was the soft case of customers interested in their social computing initiative. Unity helped in Lockheed-Martin’s bidding process, especially proposals that involved knowledge managememt.

As the project rolled out, a crucial component was the in development and distribution of a “collaboration playbook.” New standards for playbook and best practices were laid out in its pages. For instance, as a team member, you should ask questions on a group page, not wander over to ask or send a broadcast email; this helps to capture questions and answers for everyone. Adding to documentation whenever possible was crucial, along with teaching people the power of linking and understanding which communication type made sense for different business cases: blog posts, wikis, email, virtual conferences or in-person meetings. In the end, the Unity team created the playbook as much for themselves as they worked as for the company as a whole, “eating their own dogfood.” They used a project management office (PMO) blog to keep colleagues up to date about what the dev team was doing.

One of their other key discoveries was that pervasive enterprise search is key to keeping documents both relevant and accessible.

What’s next for the team? Adding filters to content that depend upon the clearance of those accessing it. In highly classified work, user-assignable taxonomies are crucial for opening up content for collaboration while maintaining information security. Also in the works are adding recommended content, similar to the Digg-model of social news, employee profiles, export control filters and network-based search.

If you’re looking for a great case study for enterprise 2.0 adoption, look up Unity.

Jun 10 2008   12:16PM GMT

What is enterprise 2.0? Cloud computing proponents mix with social software vendors in Boston.

Posted by: Alexander Howard
open source, Microsoft, Networking, business, interoperability, news, Web 2.0, enterprise, software, Technology, Web services, video, new media, Internet, innovation, useful, social bookmarking, social publishing, interesting, invention, event, entrepeneurship, startup, collaboration, participation, Development, wiki, conversation, streaming, productivity, spreadsheet, trend, social networking, buzz, communications, Web applications, interface, buzzword, software development, cloud computing, the cloud, word meanings, conference, demonstration, enterprise 2.0

The question of creating an agreed upon definition for enterprise 2.0 continues to come up here on the Boston waterfront, as hundreds of software executives, CIOs, software vendors, media and curious technologists mix and explore the latest in enterprise collaboration technologies at Enterprise 2.0. Zack Church and I collaborated last month to formulate this:

Enterprise 2.0 is the strategic integration of Web 2.0 technologies into an enterprise’s intranet, extranet and business processes. Enterprise 2.0 implementations generally use a combination of social software and collaborative technologies like blogs, RSS, social bookmarking, social networking and wikis. Most enterprise 2.0 technologies, whether homegrown, free or purchased, emphasize employee, partner and consumer collaboration. Such technologies may be in-house or Web-based. Companies using YouTube for vlogging or a private Facebook group as a modified intranet, for instance, are implementing a form of enterprise 2.0.

The conference organizers have formulated the following definition, loosely based upon Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAffee’s definition for enterprise 2.0:

Enterprise 2.0 is the term for the technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email. It provides business managers with access to the right information at the right time through a web of inter-connected applications, services and devices. Enterprise 2.0 makes accessible the collective intelligence of many, translating to a huge competitive advantage in the form of increased innovation, productivity and agility.

So what’s the story? Buzzword akin to Web 2.0 or something “real?”

In a session exploring the state of Enterprise 2.0, however, Dion Hinchliffe offered up one of the best, most succinct definitions to date that moves beyond the specifics to a more overarching purpose:

Enterprise/Web 2.0 is made up of “networked applications that explicitly leverage network effects.” — Tim O’Reilly.

In this case, a network effect is “When a good or service has more value the more that other people have it too.” (Wikipedia)

Here at the conference, over 60 different vendors are demonstrated different kinds of communication and productivity software that creates such network effects by helping workers to collaborate more easily, efficiently and socially. We’ll be posting videos, articles, interviews and other content over the next two days, as long as the wifi allows. Livestreaming has been balky, due to heavy network use, but you can check in on WhatIs.com’s live conference coverage of Enterprise 2.0 at uStream.com to see if we’re online. Check back here for more coverage on cloud computing, Dan Bricklin on SocialText’s new social spreadsheet or demonstrations of new social software like Newsgator’s Social Sites 2.0, a plugin that turns MSFT Sharepoint Server into a Facebook-like environment.

If you’re at the conference floor and would like to demonstrate your software or talk about enterprise 2.0 and social software, feel free to email me at ahoward@techtarget.com or send me a tweet at @digiphile on Twitter.

May 22 2008   2:14PM GMT

What is the history of the ARPANET? A 1972 documentary tells the story of the birth of the Internet

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Networking, data, Technology, Internet, innovation, learning, academics, invention, collaboration, community, network, science, fundamentals, history, communications, government

“The Heralds of Resource Shaping” on Google Video tells the story of the origins of the Internet. At thirty minutes, this documentary is a bit longer than the average online video (or attention span) but well worth the time for anyone interested in learning more about the ARPANET. The speakers interviewed in the embed below  are listed in the Wikipedia entry for the “The Heralds of Resource Shaping.”

If you’d like to learn who invented the Internet — as opposed to the man who “took the initiative in creating the Internet” — you may be disappointed. In fact, as Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn wrote, “

No one person or even small group of persons exclusively “invented” the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community.

The Computer History Museum created this high resolution image of an ARPANET logical map circa 1977, for those interested in a visualization of the early network.

May 19 2008   10:29AM GMT

What is the future of the Internet?

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Networking, Web 2.0, data, Technology, Internet, commentary, education, college, learning, courses, academics, books, futurism, event, copyright, collaboration, forum, wiki, conversation, community, information, election, blogging, communications, law, government, conference, Berkmanat10

Do you think much about the future of the Internet? Last week, the academics and technologists who consider the matter professionally gathered at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts to hail ten years of achievement in cyberlaw and digital activisim . Check out this timeline to see how the Berkman Center has grown.

[Download a special report on 10 years at Berkman (PDF)]

Berkman at 10 combined conference with celebration, as Harvard professors, staff, alumni and guests convened for sessions that included presentations from distinguished professors, a discussion with the co-founder of Wikipedia, a panel featuring Viacom’s general counsel, a former FCC chairman and venture capitalist Ester Dyson — all within the course of the first day. Dinners, sessions in the style of an unconference, a talk about the future of journalism from TalkingPointMemo’s Joshua Micah Marshall and seminars that addressed net neutrality, netizenship and much more continued the second day, followed by a gala that honored the achievements of those who have made outstanding contributions to the Internet’s impact on society over the past decade. Winners included the founders of MideastYouth.com, Connexions, FreeRice.com, PublicResource.org, Worldspace.com. Highest honor went to Jeffrey Cunard and Bruce Keller for their pro bono work.

[Watch the archived webcasts of Berkman at 10]

The men and women considering the future of the Internet used the medium itself to meet, greet, intermingle and collectively think about the topic at hand. As you might expect at a conference packed with cyberluminaries, computer scientists, engineers, journalists and assorted digerati, the two days were an exercise in hyperconnectivity. Conferees listened in the audience, watched live video feeds from overflow rooms or participated remotely using uncommonly robust social media tools.

“The question is not freedom of speech, the question is freedom *after* speech.”
- Esther Dyson, quoting an unnamed Russian

The Berkman Center created a Berkman at 10 wiki where you can find much more information about the conference, its agenda, attendees, the sessions and the Center itself. Projects founded, funded or organized by Berkman and its Fellows have been far-reaching in their influence and are frequently grounded in the entrepreneurial focus and intellectual rigor of its founders. They include:

• Open Net, which investigates and analyzes the various filtering and surveillance practices around the world.
• The Publius Project, which features essays and conversations about constitutional moments on the Net.
• Global Voices Online (GVO), which focuses on highlighting global conversations in blogs that exist outside the world of TechMeme, the “A-list” and Silicon Valley.
• A new project of GVO is Voices Without Votes, which covers what is being discussed about the US elections throughout the world’s blogs.
• StopBadware.org, which identifies Websites infected with spyware or malware and, with Google’s help, interjects warnings when users try to access them.

The conference was kicked off by the Dean of Harvard Law School, Elena Kagan, who announced that the Berkman Center for Internet and Society now a university-wide research center at Harvard. She also urged the crowd to lobby Jonathan Zittrain to come back to Harvard and led an impromptu chant to urge him to consider the invitation. Professor Nesson, cofounder of the Berkman Center, then introduced Professor Jonathan Zittrain, aka “JZ,” to the conference.

Professor Zittrain’s thesis is that the “generative Internet,” the combination of a programmable computer and an open, “writable” Internet, is in danger from tethered appliances like the iPhone and TiVo or walled gardens of non-portable data like Facebook. Doc Searls posted the following graphic within his “Understanding Infrastructure” article for Linux Journal:

In the PC and the network, the narrow point in the hourglass is where the generative power rests, in the Internet Protocol and the operating system. During the session, Zittrain repeatedly referred to this power as the “dark energy” of the Internet and raised concerns that the means to contribute could gradually be abridged or blocked in the future by corporations or governments through changes in the network or locking down the OS. The iPhone and other appliances like the Chumby or XBox are examples of the latter.

Further thoughts and analysis of the session can be found from Ethan Zuckerman, David Weinberger, Patrick Philippe Meier, Andy Sellars, Daithí Mac Sithigh, Dan Farber and Jim Rapoza. Zittrain’s book, “The Future of the Internet,” is available at futureoftheinternet.org.

Professor John Palfrey, the executive director of the Berkman Center, followed with a session on the impact of the Internet on politics and democracy. The presentation reached much further than the U.S. Presidential election, though the impact of YouTube, socially networked fundraising and the netroots has been far reaching domestically. He also presented three crucial arguments, each of which may be viewed and commented upon related ideas at the wiki at Berkman and is quoted below:

1. The Internet allows more free speech from more people than ever before, but states are finding ways to filter and limit that speech.
2. There is greater autonomy of the individual because of the Internet.
3. The formation of online groups will alter the form and function of existing organizations and institutions with unknown impacts on democracy and governance.

Palfrey’s talk reflected many of Zittrain’s concerns: the very openness and disruptive change that a generative Internet presents for free speech may be dangerous enough to repressive regimes that technological steps, like the Great Firewall of China, may be taken to limit access or the ability to publish freely.

Palfrey presented a map of the Farsi blogosphere (above) and noted, however, that the Iranian blogosphere is the fourth largest in the world, including a range of conservative, religious, secular and liberal views. The map was produced by John Kelly and Bruce Etling for their paper, “Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere.“

One of the more intriguing notions that came out of the session was the concept of “flashdrive democracy,” where Palfrey used the example of Cuban dissidents who smuggled contraband video of student protests out of Cuba using a sneakernet and published them to YouTube.

Session notes are available from Professor Palfrey. More analysis and notes from David Weinberger’s post, Micah Sifry’s post and Daithí Mac Sithigh’s post.

In the third session of the day, Yochai Benkler, professor and author of the Wealth of Networks, interviewed Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia. The two men deconstructed the sprawling online encyclopedia and discussed different models of peer production.

Dan Farber reported on the session and posted a transcript of Wales’ remarks on his blog. Adam Oran also wrote at length about this session at Radar.OReilly.

“The threat is not the money, the threat is the authority over knowledge.”
- Yochai Benkler

The links above are far from the only reactions to the sessions, of course. See the Center’s collection of online coverage of Berkman at 10 for more information about the unconference, panels and seminars.

Throughout the conference, participants near and far chatted over IRC, Twittered about memorable moments or useful links and used a dynamic online question tool as a live discussion board during each presentation. Hallmark technologies of “Web 1.0″ like IP, IRC, HTTP, WWW and HTML were enhanced by social media from the Web 2.0 world, like blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, microblogging and live videoblogging. Conference participants chatted live there on the IRC channel or in the virtual 3D hall on the Berkman Center’s island in Second Life. Some participants, however, still passed notes.

Berkman at 10 was chronicled using what Professor David Weinberger might term a folksonomy, a user-defined taxonomy for classifying digital content. Participants assigned digital content to the Berkman folksonomy on whatever platform they were publishing to using a #Berkman hashtag or “Berkmanat10″ tag or category.

Here are the different aggregations.

• Images tagged with Berkmanat10 on Flickr.
• Blog posts tagged with Berkman on Technorati.
• Berkman-related tweets on Twitter, aggregated on Twemes.com.
• Berkman conferees and fellows on YouTube
• Boston’s own Steve Garfield was the official videographer for the event. Watch all of his Berkman videos at Qik.com. Steve uses a handheld Nokia95 to stream live over a broadband wireless connection.
• For those interested in seeing how Yahoo! Pipes can be put to good use, check out the full feed of the Berkman at 10 proceedings.

Apr 18 2008   9:46AM GMT

Wireshark helps you to determine if your ISP is throttling traffic

Posted by: Alexander Howard
open source, Networking, applications, Internet, blog, commentary, event, downloads, freeware, forum, tracking, traffic, controversy

Download Squad to the rescue! The popular and useful downloads blog from Weblogs Inc. posted about a utility that can help you monitor your own network.

Wireshark is a free network protocol analyzer that’s available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD and many others. Download Wireshark here.

Wireshark is long since well-known to networking professionals, perhaps under its previous name, “Ethereal.”

In fact, our colleague Sue Fogarty posted about SHARKFEST over at The Network Hub, an event about protocol analysis specifically for developers and users of Wireshark.

Sue says that Vint Cerf wowed ‘em at SHARKFEST. No shock there — the “father of the Internet” is well-known for that sort of thing.

In his post on Download Squad, Ian Dumych also links to a white paper posted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Detecting packet injection: a guide to observing packet spoofing by ISPs. Check in there if you want to learn more about the practice and how monitoring your own connection can help others.

Apr 18 2008   9:16AM GMT

Video: Sir Tim Berners-Lee on Net neutrality

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Networking, video, YouTube, Internet, commentary, free, academics, IPTV, traffic, streaming, politics, controversy

You might remember this fellow — he invented the Web, after all. Sir Tim Berners-Lee offers some thoughts on the issue of Net neutrality in this video.

You can read Lee’s post on Net neutrality, which largely mirrors his statements on camera, over at his blog. You’ll note that the post and video date back to 2006, when the issue first entered a wider conversation online. These days, the U.S. presidential candidates have taken stances on it (Clinton and Obama are both for Net neutrality, McCain opposes it). Accusations of traffic shaping and the uglier-sounding “bandwidth throttling” are flying at ISPs like Comcast, sometimes justified and other times based upon mistaken conclusions.

We’ve asked you before — have you opinions changed? Private networks and corporations have good reason to restrict bandwidth to memory hogs like like IPTV. On-demand streaming of this year’s NCAA basketball tournament caused massive traffic spikes, for instance, resulted in massive traffic spikes. The security risks and bandwidth challenges presented by employee use of P2P networks like Bittorrent are an issue as well.

Once Internet use leaves the office, however, the question remains: Should ISPs be able to institute a two-tiered Internet for private citizens?

Let us know what you think in the comments or by writing in to editor@whatis.com.

Apr 17 2008   10:00AM GMT

Video: Van Jacobsen describes a new way to look at networking that focuses on a data-centric perspective

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Google, Networking, video, YouTube, Internet, innovation, learning, invention, history

Van Jacobsen knows networking. After all, he is is one of the primary contributors to TCP/IP, the protocol that underlies the modern Internet.

This Google TechTalk features Jacobsen describing the concept of data-centric or content-centric networking. The central principle of data-centric networking is that a given communications network should enable data retrieval from where ever it exists, similar to the P2P model, as opposed to references a specific, physical location for retrieval.

Watch the video below to learn more.