daily espresso, FOR TECH FANS BY TECH FANS

Back in January 2004, the IEEE (Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers) formed the 802.11 taskgroup to develop an additional amendment to the 802.11 standard for WLANs: 802.11n. The maximum theoretical speed for this standard is supposed to reach up to 540 Mbit/s. According to this Wifinews article, the 802.11n proposal was just accepted this week! Now, the new standard will be able to move forward relatively rapidly to ratification, even if the process of finalizing details could take until 2007. That’s Good news for corporations that are waiting for an high speed wireless access. I don’t think 802.11n will matter very much to home users since people don’t need that much speed at home, unless you are planning to share your internet access with your entire neighborhood!

Background For quite some time it has been possible to access the Internet using mobile phones, although the role of the phone has strictly been that of a client. Considering that the modern phones have processing power and memory on par with and even exceeding that of webservers when the web was young, there really is no reason anymore why webservers could not reside on mobile phones and why people could not create and maintain their own personal mobile websites.

Goals

A desire to show in practice that personal mobile websites are feasible triggered the birth of the project that started in the beginning of 2004. The primary goals were to bring a full-fledged webserver to S60 and to make a webserver running on a mobile phone accessible from the Internet using any web browser.

Apache

To underline that modern phones really are quite capable we decided, rather than writing a small webserver from scratch, to port Apache httpd, the most widely used webserver in the world. There were naturally concerns with this choice; not only is Apache typically used on rather big computers but also the S60/Symbian platform is quite different from pretty much everything else.

Fortunately, Symbian does have a so-called Posix layer that provides a fair amount of typical Unix functionality. Consequently, the Symbian port of Apache is based on the Unix version and although there certainly were a few hurdles along the road, the porting of Apache still proved to be more straightforward that what was initially anticipated.

We have also ported mod_python and integrated it with Python for S60 so we can now create content using both Python scripts and PSP (Python Server Pages), which is a great deal more convenent for experimentation compared with writing custom Apache modules in C/C++.

Access from the Internet

Being able to run Apache on a mobile phone is rather interesting in itself but still not much more than a quirk unless it can be accessed from a browser outside the device itself. Our target was to make it possible to access a webserver running on a mobile phone, equipped with a standard operator SIM, from any browser on the internet, at any time.

Initially we utilized a Bluetooth PAN network but although that already is useful – it provides for the possibility of accessing functionality on the phone using a big screen and proper keyboard – it is quite limited compared with what access over the cellular network would imply.

Providing access to a mobile phone from the Internet was a challenge as operators typically employ firewalls that prevent access from the Internet to phones inside that firewall. By implementing a custom gateway we could circumvent that limitation and we are now able to provide a webserver on a mobile phone with a global URL than can be accessed from any browser. In a sense, the mobile phone has now finally become a full member of the Internet.

Content

As a mobile phone contains quite a lot of personal data it is straightforward to semi-automatically generate a personal home page. And contrary to websites in general, a website on a mobile phone always has its “administrator” nearby and he or she can even participate in the content generation. For instance, we have created a web-application that prompts the phone owner to take a picture, which subsequently is returned as a JPG. That is, on a personal device the website can be interactive.

Further, that a website becomes mobile implies that certain properties of websites that hitherto have been mostly meaningless now need to be taken into account. As long as a website resides on a stationary server the physical location of that server lacks meaning, because it will never change. With a mobile website it does change and it is meaningful as the content that is shared may depend upon the current location and context. For instance, if you browse to a mobile website and ask the “administrator” to take a picture, the image you get depends upon the location of the website. Current search engines that update their indexes rather rarely may need modifications to be able to cope with the dynamism introduced by mobile websites.

Implications

We believe that being able to run a globally accessible personal website on your mobile phone has the potential of changing the Internet landscape. If every mobile phone or even every smartphone initially, is equipped with a webserver then very quickly most websites will reside on mobile phones. That is bound to have some impact not only on how mobile phones are perceived but also on how the web evolves.

The software is currently used inside Nokia as an experimentation platform.

I will not start playing any video game after 2 am.
I will read a book that’s neither sci-fi nor fantasy.
I will only make insightful, relevant posts in forums.
I will spend more of my waking hours away from the computer than on it.
I will stop correcting friends when they refer to Star Trek as Star Wars and vice versa.
I will only patch my software when I need to.
I will not make any expensive hardware upgrades just to get a 5% performance increase.
I will not talk about my awesome computer system at non-geek social events.
I will only blame Bill Gates for things that are actually his fault.
I will always show tolerance for people who don’t know the difference between memory and hard drive space.
I will not deface your website just because you disrespected my level 60 Night Elf druid.

Microsoft Corp., the world’s biggest software maker, will spend $120 million a year on an advertising campaign to fight its image as “a huge American company.”

The campaign, using television, print and the Internet, highlights Microsoft’s education and economic development projects in 32 countries, including France and Taiwan, according to group advertising manager Mike Lucero. Actor William Macy of the movie “Fargo” narrates the ads.

“We are often perceived as a huge American company,” Lucero said Friday in an interview.

“We wanted to be very specific about what we are doing in each country in education, innovation, economic opportunity and security,” he said.

The campaign, being run by McCann Erickson, a unit of Interpublic Group of Cos., is an extension of Microsoft’s “Realizing Potential” advertisements that started in 2002.

“That was a global campaign in the traditional sense, with half a dozen ads pretty much the same in different countries,” Lucero said. “We had to get very local.”

The ads have started to air in some U.S. regions and will appear in all target markets in coming weeks, with advertisements for the Olympic Winter Games, the Academy Awards and TV shows including “24,” “ER” and “The West Wing.”

Redmond-based Microsoft made almost one-third of its $39.8 billion in fiscal 2005 revenue outside of the United States, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The company’s 63,000 employees are based in 102 countries, 37 percent of them outside of the United States.

By REBECCA BARR

It’s interesting to see how many news sources mistakenly report that the current government vs Google case is about child porn. It’s not. If anything, it’s about children looking at pornography – i.e. webmasters not ensuring their sites are sufficiently blocking minors from viewing harmful content. Or more specifically, it’s about a proposed law requiring those sites to restrict access to minors, the Child Online Protection Act, which just didn’t get through in the past, and which the Bush administration now wants to revive (and for that reason, asked different search engines to hand over search logs and indexed URLs to prove the law is needed).

I wrote to the author of the original article at the Mercury News while preparing and editing my first blog post on this, realizing this isn’t about child porn – indeed the error is quick to make, and I was confused too at first – but the Merc’s error was never corrected. From there, it spread like wildfire into blogs and mainstream news sources alike. Following are some of the statements that are making their rounds (my emphasis):

“The Justice Department is asking Internet search giant Google to turn over search records in an effort to defend a child pornography law”
– CNN

“The company has refused to turn over the data, which the Bush Administration claims it will use in its fight against child pornography.”
– Forbes

“The US Department of Justice wants the information to help it to establish how much child pornography is available on the internet”
– Times Online

“However, the Supreme Court invited the government to either come up with a less drastic version of the law or go to trial to prove that the statute does not violate the First Amendment and is the only viable way to combat child porn.”
– Mercury News

“The government doesn’t need Google’s data to go after child porn (KP) sites.”
– Make You Go Hmm.com

“The Supreme Court invited the government to either come up with a less drastic version of the law or go to trial to prove that the statute does not violate the First Amendment and is the only viable way to combat child porn.”
– Slashdot (itself citing Mercury News)

“Trolling through two month’s worth of random results at the world’s leading search engine, as the government’s original subpoena requested, presumably would give Justice Department investigators a good read on what percentage of those searches were for child porn.”
– MarketWatch

by Philipp Lenssen | http://blog.outer-court.com/