Tag: 113AF5

Oct 20

AVFTCN 037 – Resilience, Connecting Carolina, and ITDRC Response

Climbing back up into the crow’s nest and turning the spyglass toward the southeastern United States, it’s hard to escape the utter devastation caused by the cascading effects of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. The photos are unbelievable. The stories are heartbreaking. The recovery costs will be enormous. And the people responding are amazing! (And the disinformation is despicable!🤬)

All of that has brought me back to this theme of “resilience” that has been percolating through my work for the past year or so. I have stories exploding inside my head that I want to write here.. so my plan is to start with my next issue on the theme of “Building Resilience” – both the network kind and the human kind, and both at a community and personal level. I just want to capture some of my own thoughts and thinking… and will invite you to come along with that exploration.

Meanwhile, I want to talk about two efforts happening RIGHT NOW to respond to the hurricanes in the southeast US…

The western part of North Carolina was devastated by Hurricane Helene. Many people might not have heard of Asheville, NC, before… but now they do. The whole are needs severe help! And soon!

Aaron Huslage, who I’ve known for many years, lives in North Carolina and in response launched Operation Connect Carolina to help restore connectivity. He’s got a team of people working hard to build mobile hotspots that can be moved out into western NC and deployed. You can follow the journey on the project’s Facebook page or LinkedIn page.

Most importantly, he’s seeking donations to help his local teams get these hotspots out to where people need them.

The second effort is the volunteers of the IT Disaster Resource Center (ITDRC). The organization has deployed throughout the region providing WiFi access and charging stations. If you are in the region, or know people who are, please share their map of WiFi locations in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

Additionally, if you have some IT experience / background and are located in the USA, you can sign up to volunteer with the ITDRC. Volunteers are needed to deploy out into the field to help get these trailers set up and then to keep them up and running, and to generally help people with connectivity in the local community. It’s going to be a long haul to get connectivity restored all across the affected region, and to ITDRC is planning to be there for a while. They’ll need more volunteers to help keep all these systems going. There are also opportunities to provide remote support if you don’t have the ability to go out into the field for a couple of weeks (typically a 2-week deployment).

I’ve been an ITDRC volunteer since 2021 and while I have not yet deployed into the field (I need to finish up one last FEMA training course) I have learned a huge amount from the ITDRC training programs and community.

You can also donate to ITDRC as it is entirely a nonprofit operation. They’ve received multiple grants (including from the Internet Society Foundation, affiliated with my employer) which helps, but they do need all the support possible.

At the same time they are also supporting wildfire response out in the western United States. There are many communities in crisis that need connectivity!

If you are able to help with either effort… THANK YOU!

Next time, I intend to write a bit more about building resilience…

P.S. As you may notice, ITDRC only operates in the US. If you live elsewhere in the world and are active with a similar IT-related crisis response organization, please drop me an email with the info, as I’d love to share info. The NetHope organization includes members in other regions who do similar work.

[The End]

Recent Posts and Podcasts

Content I’ve published and produced recently on my personal sites:

Content I’ve published for the Internet Society (who has no connection to this newsletter):

  • <nothing>

Thanks for reading to the end. I welcome any comments and feedback you may have.

Please drop me a note in email – if you are a subscriber, you should just be able to reply back. And if you aren’t a subscriber, just hit this button 👇 and you’ll get future messages.

This IS also a WordPress hosted blog, so you can visit the main site and add a comment to this post, like we used to do back in glory days of blogging.

Or if you don’t want to do email, send me a message on one of the various social media services where I’ve posted this. (My preference continues to be Mastodon, but I do go on others from time to time.)

Until the next time,
Dan

Connect

The best place to connect with me these days is:

You can also find all the content I’m creating at:

If you use Mastodon or another Fediverse system, you should be able to follow this newsletter by searching for “@crowsnest.danyork.com“

You can also connect with me at these services, although I do not interact there quite as much (listed in decreasing order of usage):

Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This newsletter is a personal project I’ve been doing since 2007, several years before I joined the Internet Society in 2011. While I may at times mention information or activities from the Internet Society, all viewpoints are my personal opinion and do not represent any formal positions or views of the Internet Society. This is just me, saying some of the things on my mind.

Sep 24

AVFTCN 036 – A Hard Drive Failure, a Puppy, Climatebase, a New Role… and an Unplanned Hiatus

Hi! Remember this newsletter you subscribed to? The one you haven’t seen since back on April 22, 2024?

Welllllll… it’s been a wild ride… and an unplanned hiatus.

But… my goal now is to get back into this a bit more, and so I want to fire off this short note to just give a personal update.

Next time, I’ll be climbing up into that proverbial crow’s nest and looking out at the horizon ahead of us. For this newsletter… I’m going to look back instead at where the ship has sailed over the past few months.

If you visit my danyork.me aggregation site, you’d see that I have published some work articles… but nothing personal since the last issue (035) of this newsletter back on April 22, 2024. No blog posts. No podcast episodes. No newsletters. No livestreaming to Twitch. No… nothing. Zip. Nada. Zilch. Nichts.

So here’s the story…

The fun began back in early May when the 2017 iMac I’d been using to produce my podcasts, do all my livestreaming, and write many of my posts started acting really funky. It was acting very slow.. and freezing completely. Many reboots and upgrade attempts later, I was finally able to identify that it was having “S.M.A.R.T. disk errors”. Which wasn’t good.

“It’s dead, Jim” would be the Star Trek (Original Series) way to say it.

Given that it’s from 2017, I can’t upgrade it to the latest MacOS X. And heck, it’s so old Apple won’t even give me anything for a trade-in. (But they’ll help recycle it for me if I want. 🤦‍♂️) Giving other things going on (see below!) fixing it has been super LOW priority… which has meant that my normal platform for content creation and production has been offline. So no podcast episodes or livestreaming.

As that was all happening, a more massive disruption was entering our life – we adopted an 8-week-old puppy!

Named “Barkley”, he’s a very lovable and adorable mix of a pug and a miniature schnauzer (apparently called a “Schnug”) who keeps growing and growing and now at 6 months old is larger than our 17-year-old miniature poodle.

But.. my wife and I had never had a puppy before! We’ve had a couple of dogs (and cats) but they’ve all been a few years old when we adopted them. Anyone who has had a puppy probably understands what these last months have been like! Constantly watching where he is… “puppy-proofing” the entire house… constantly watching where he is… stopping him from eating everything… trying to train him a bit… constantly watching where he is… trying to prevent him from always attacking our 17yo dog… stopping him from eating whatever… oh, and constantly watching what he’s doing. It’s been… exhausting!

Basically like having a newborn child again… only one that can run fast all over and has sharp teeth! 😀

But in the end… he’s a wonderful addition and we’ve come to love him dearly. He’s curled up against my foot as I write this… and tomorrow night you’ll find me in a class with him.

While all of this was going on, I was also enrolled as a Climatebase Fellow in a very intense 12-week program of 10-15 hours of sessions each week all related to improving my understanding of the current state of information and science around climate change. As shown in the image below, it covered a very wide range of topics:

A grid of 12 blocks showing the 12 weeks of the program. At the top is the title "Climatebase Fellowship program overview by weeks"

Participating in this fellowship was part of my professional development at my employer, the Internet Society. In the last issue, I pointed to my article about “The Internet and Climate Change” and that continues to be an area of great interest and exploration for me. I’ll undoubtedly write some future newsletters specifically around this whole area.

My interest was mostly to refresh my understanding of current climate thinking. I’ve been involved in “environmental” issues since the 1980s, and was very active in the broader movement in the early 1990s, serving in different volunteer leadership roles for different organizations. But then life took me away from that heavy involvement and my knowledge has aged. I heard phrases like “regenerative agriculture” but didn’t know what they meant. (Now I do!)

It was a good program and I met some great people and enjoyed participating in the community (which I am still doing).

As we came into summer here in Vermont, the Climatebase Fellowship wrapped up, but the intensity of the puppy and work and family and everything else continued.

And then a very cool opportunity was presented to me… at the Internet Society we had a new President and CEO, Sally Wentworth, start on September 1, 2024. Back in July she approached me about taking on a new role that we eventually called “CEO communications” where I’m helping with developing and executing plans across both the Internet Society and Internet Society Foundation for consistent communication from the CEO’s office internally, externally, and with our community and partners.

I formally took on this role on September 1 (and mentioned something on LinkedIn later) but began some aspects of it back in August. I’ve known Sally for the 13 years that I’ve been at the Internet Society (she’s been there 15 years) and have deep and great respect for her. So I’ve been excited about the new role, grateful for this opportunity to stretch my own skills in new and different ways… and just… busy! 😀

And now on this 24th day of September… it’s time to get back in the flow again and start creating some content again. There are so many stories to tell… so many changes happening… so much ahead on the horizon… both icebergs to avoid and opportunities to explore!

Time to climb up into that crow’s nest, whip out the spyglass, and get back to looking out ahead at the horizon and sharing what I see!

See you soon!

[The End]

Recent Posts and Podcasts

Here is some of the content I’ve published and produced recently on my personal sites:

  • <nothing!>

[I do still contribute reports to the “monthly” episodes of the For Immediate Release podcast.]

I did publish some new posts for the Internet Society (who has no connection to this newsletter):

More on why so many of them are law-related… in a future newsletter!

Thanks for reading to the end. I welcome any comments and feedback you may have.

Please drop me a note in email – if you are a subscriber, you should just be able to reply back. And if you aren’t a subscriber, just hit this button 👇 and you’ll get future messages.

This IS also a WordPress hosted blog, so you can visit the main site and add a comment to this post, like we used to do back in glory days of blogging.

Or if you don’t want to do email, send me a message on one of the various social media services where I’ve posted this. (My preference continues to be Mastodon, but I do go on others from time to time.)

Until the next time,
Dan

Connect

The best place to connect with me these days is:

You can also find all the content I’m creating at:

If you use Mastodon or another Fediverse system, you should be able to follow this newsletter by searching for “@crowsnest.danyork.com“

You can also connect with me at these services, although I do not interact there quite as much (listed in decreasing order of usage):

Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This newsletter is a personal project I’ve been doing since 2007, several years before I joined the Internet Society in 2011. While I may at times mention information or activities from the Internet Society, all viewpoints are my personal opinion and do not represent any formal positions or views of the Internet Society. This is just me, saying some of the things on my mind.

Apr 22

AVFTCN 035 – 3 Articles To Read On Earth Day

Today is Earth Day… and when I climb up into that crow’s nest, hold up my spyglass, and look out at the horizon… it can look pretty bleak. It seems like the whole world is on fire in different ways. But amidst the chaos… what gives me hope is seeing people taking action. And they are!

Today I offer you three articles to hopefully provoke some thoughts on this day: one by me and two by others.

”The Internet and Climate Change” – In this article that I published today on the Internet Society’s site, I explored how the Internet is helping address climate change, how the Internet is harming the climate, and how the Internet’s infrastructure is at risk in the face of our changing climate.

I’ve been talking about these topics with many different people, but this article was my first attempt to bring all these thoughts together into one piece. I would love any feedback you have! Was it helpful? Did you learn something? Do you have ideas or pointers to other people working on these topics? Or do you think I have things all wrong? Or are there other articles or papers you think I should read?

Please do let me know any feedback. If you received this via email, you should just be able to reply. If not , you can send it to me at dyork@lodestar2.com .

If you are looking for a speaker or a panelist for a workshop, podcast, webinar, video, presentation, etc. about this whole topic… it’s one I’m looking to spend more time on and I’m eager to engage in discussions about!

“The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud” – in this excerpt from a longer case study for MIT Press, anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate dives DEEP into the data centers that power all the applications and services we use every day. He goes first into energy consumption, offering staggering statistics along the way, including:

The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes.

He goes on to talk about the enormous amounts of water required by data centers, and then gets into the noise pollution that affects local communities. His excerpt concludes with a section about the huge amount of electronic waste generated from data centers, and some final thoughts.

If you’ve been looking to understand climate impacts of the apps and services we use, this is a great piece!

”We Need To Rewild The Internet” – This is an amazing article by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon! It’s not about climate change … or anything directly related to Earth Day… but rather it uses the lens of ecology to look at today’s Internet, and to offer suggestions for its future. As they subtitle it:

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

It’s a brilliant piece! I enjoyed it and found it so powerful that I just may have to write an entire newsletter about it. I probably will… but in the meantime I wanted to get this out to you all.

BONUS: One fourth article to wrap on a hopeful note – if you have not read “Collapse, Renewal and the Rope of History” from the folks at FutureCrunch, do so now! It’s another amazing piece of writing that gets to the core of the stories we tell … to ourselves… and to everyone else.

With that, I wish you a Happy Earth Day! And… the reminder that really every day must be Earth Day if we are to keep living on this pale blue dot of ours! 🌏

[The End]

Recent Posts and Podcasts

Here is some of the content I’ve published and produced recently on my personal sites:

And new posts I wrote for the Internet Society (who has no connection to this newsletter):

Thanks for reading to the end. I welcome any comments and feedback you may have.

Please drop me a note in email – if you are a subscriber, you should just be able to reply back. And if you aren’t a subscriber, just hit this button 👇 and you’ll get future messages.

This IS also a WordPress hosted blog, so you can visit the main site and add a comment to this post, like we used to do back in glory days of blogging.

Or if you don’t want to do email, send me a message on one of the various social media services where I’ve posted this. (My preference continues to be Mastodon, but I do go on others from time to time.)

Until the next time,
Dan

Connect

The best place to connect with me these days is:

You can also find all the content I’m creating at:

If you use Mastodon or another Fediverse system, you should be able to follow this newsletter by searching for “@crowsnest.danyork.com@crowsnest.danyork.com“

You can also connect with me at these services, although I do not interact there quite as much (listed in decreasing order of usage):

Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This newsletter is a personal project I’ve been doing since 2007 or 2008, several years before I joined the Internet Society in 2011. While I may at times mention information or activities from the Internet Society, all viewpoints are my personal opinion and do not represent any formal positions or views of the Internet Society. This is just me, saying some of the things on my mind.

Feb 02

AVFTCN 034 – The Cautionary Tale of the Death of Ello

Do you remember… Ello? For a brief time in 2014 to 2016-ish, it flared up as “the next emerging social network” and even as a “Facebook-killer”. And then it flamed out… and… in the summer of 2023, it disappeared completely as the site was taken offline.

I was all in with Ello for a time! Kind of as Mastodon is today for me, Ello was where I was focused on posting and engaging. And then it wasn’t…

Andy Baio published last month a long, detailed post on “The Quiet Death of Ello’s Big Dreams”. I encourage you to go read it… and then I’ve got some commentary below.

As I climb up in that crow’s nest and look out at the horizon, his post points out some definite icebergs and opportunities for any of the new social networks…

… and also, again, the point that we need to own our own content!

Go ahead! Go read that… and then come on back here. 🙂

The Promise of Ello

As Andy Baio writes, the promise of Ello was that it was going to be different. You can still read the Ello Manifesto via the Wayback Machine:

A dark gray screen with the text: --- Your social network is owned by advertisers. Every post you share, every friend you make and every link you follow is tracked, recorded and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are the product that’s bought and sold. We believe there is a better way. We believe in audacity. We believe in beauty, simplicity and transparency. We believe that the people who make things and the people who use them should be in partnership. We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce and manipulate — but a place to connect, create and celebrate life. You are not a product. --- and then two buttons at the bottom: "I Agree" and "I Disagree"

It was beautiful!

Here’s the part I liked:

“We believe there is a better way. We believe in audacity. We believe in beauty, simplicity and transparency. We believe that the people who make things and the people who use them should be in partnership.

We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce and manipulate — but a place to connect, create and celebrate life.

You are not a product.”

How could you NOT sign up for that?? Particularly in a time (2014) when Facebook was going through yet another series of changes and pivots.

I jumped deep in. Partly because of that manifesto. Partly because I liked the minimalist ethos and design. And partly, if I’m honest, because one of the co-founders was from Vermont, and while I was living next door in New Hampshire, the site had a bit of the “Vermont vibe”. It was designed to be artsy and counter-cultural, etc. I was good with that!

I wrote a bunch of posts. I talked about Ello on other social networks. I added it to the footer on my blog sites to encourage people to follow me there.

I encouraged people to join Ello – and was very excited about the ability to use Markdown in posts. I wrote about some of the exciting things that were going on and some of the posts from other early adopters.

The Wayback Machine shows that at the end of my time there, I had published 374 posts, was following 177 people, and was followed by 457 people.

The Dream Was Built On A Problem

The thing was, the whole beautiful dream was built on foundation of quicksand. As Andy Baio writes, they started out with $435,000 of venture capital (VC) funding, and soon got $5.5 million more… and six months later took $5 million more in VC funding and later some more.

Baio’s article covers this all in more detail, but the key point is:

  • VC’s always want their exit!

They’re not doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. They are investors who ultimately want to make a profit from their investment.

The moment you take VC investment, your future direction is guided by your investors – and their need for payback – sometimes even more so than your actual users.

Which is fine if you are a regular startup. Everyone understands now that “this is how it works” – and VC firms have played a very vital role in helping so many of the services we use to come into being.

BUT… when you are a social network that specifically positions itself as NOT “selling out” to the market… well… that’s a problem.

And Then It Was… Gone…

As Baio recounts in his piece, Ello then morphed through more “pivots”, was acquired by Talenthouse, and more changes happened.

Somewhere in there I left it behind. I found their pivot to “The Creators Network – Built by artists for artists” an interesting change… but they focused on visual arts with photography, images, artwork… and I’m a guy who likes text and audio. 🤷‍♂️ So it was kind of clear that it was no longer really a great place for me.

Besides which, by then I’d discovered Mastodon in its early days (Dec 2016) and was starting to spend more time there. (Oh, look at the butterfly… so beautiful! SQUIRREL!!!)

And then, last year in July 2023, after a series of outages, the Ello site simply vanished. Boom. Done.

No warning. No messages to users. No opportunity to download your content. No information. Nothing. Zip. Nada.

In his piece, Baio captures some of the surprised and angry responses of users. People who had watched 8 years of work just vanish from the Internet (thankfully, the Internet Archive captured a good bit of it).

What We Can Learn

In the end, the cautionary tale of Ello reminds us yet again that:

  • We must own our own content!

We can’t assume that anything we put into ANY of the platforms will continue to exist indefinitely. If we want that content to be available, we need to put it somewhere that WE control.

This means … yes… thinking about good old personal websites again! Personal sites that we might actually have to pay a little bit for. And ideally with our own domain.

Now, the good news is that you can start very easily these days. For example this newsletter is on the hosted WordPress.com site. I don’t have to do much admin and I’m not paying much. The advantage is that I can export this entire site and save it on a disk drive. And I can easily import that to a new hosting provider if I want. And I guess I trust Automattic enough that I believe they wouldn’t just shut down and disappear – particularly not with how many millions of websites are hosted on WP.com.

There are other non-WordPress solutions that are similar, too. And there are a zillion newer frameworks for starting up your own site if you are okay playing with some code. The point is that you can set yourself up fairly easily with a website.

You can own your own content.

POSSE and PESOS

But then of course comes the problem of USING your own website(s). It is SO MUCH EASIER to just open an app or social network site and post your thoughts and reflections.

Open app. Type or upload photo. Publish. Boom. Done.

Which is why we have so much of our content locked up inside walled gardens owned by others. It’s why so many people contributed on Ello and all the other past social networks (and all the ones today).

But we need to change our habits if we don’t want to be victims to the next Ello that vanishes.

Back in 2018, I wrote about the “POSSE” idea that came out of the IndieWeb movement:

Publish on your
Own
Site,
Syndicate
Elsewhere

Basically… start writing on your own site… and then share it out onto social networks.

And I try to do this… even on Mastodon, my current focus area. (Because at some point Mastodon GmbH could conceivably run out of money and shut down mastodon.social.) I mean… I will post short things to Mastodon that I really don’t care about. They are mostly ephemeral comments that I don’t really care whether they are around in the future.

But… the moment I start thinking about writing a thread of multiple posts on Mastodon, I ask myself the critical question:

  • Can I post this on one of my own sites first?

And then I go write it on that site, and share the link on Mastodon. Or I may in fact create a Mastodon thread… but with the knowledge that it’s all captured back on my own site.

Alternatively, the other approach is to keep on publishing content on platforms as you do today, but then capture all your content back onto a site you control. This has been referred to as PESOS:

Publish
Elsewhere
Syndicate to
Own
Site

Elizabeth Thai wrote a great post comparing POSSE and PESOS last year. She also wrote a follow-up post explaining her (mostly manual) way of bringing her content back onto her own site.

There are of course tools and plugins that can automate this. I do a form of this with my danyork.me site that pulls in copies of things that I write across the Internet. It’s using a WordPress plugin that just pulls regular old RSS feeds – and so naturally works only with things that have RSS feeds. There are other plugins that can bring in your posts from other services. If you want to go the PESOS route, it is now possible where you can mirror most of the various services onto a site under your control.

The Key Point

To something Elizabeth Thai wrote in her second post… I don’t know that I really want to capture everything that I share on social networks. A cool feature of Mastodon is that you can get a RSS feed of your posts. I could add that to my danyork.me aggregator site… but do I really care about some of those posts? Not really!

The key point in all of this is:

  • If a site where you frequently publish content were to just disappear as Ello did, WOULD YOU BE OKAY WITH THAT?
  • Or would you wish that you still had access to some of what you published there?

If the answer to the second question is yes, then it’s time to be thinking about how to bring that content onto a site that YOU control. Many sites have ways to get historical archives (but some don’t).

But even if you can’t easily get the historical posts, you can at least change your habits for new posts. Whether you choose POSSE or PESOS … or some other idea… the key point is to start owning your own content.

Because at some point all the various platforms and services may pull an Ello on us and just disappear. Or they may change their business model (um… Medium!) so that it’s harder for people to find your content.

As the enshittification of most platforms continues, the cautionary tale of Ello is that if we care about the content we publish, then we need to own where it is published.

[The End]

Recent Posts and Podcasts

Here is some of the content I’ve published and produced recently on my personal sites:

And new posts for the Internet Society (who has no connection to this newsletter):

Thanks for reading to the end. I welcome any comments and feedback you may have.

Please drop me a note in email – if you are a subscriber, you should just be able to reply back. And if you aren’t a subscriber, just hit this button 👇 and you’ll get future messages.

This IS also a WordPress hosted blog, so you can visit the main site and add a comment to this post, like we used to do back in glory days of blogging.

Or if you don’t want to do email, send me a message on one of the various social media services where I’ve posted this. (My preference continues to be Mastodon, but I do go on others from time to time.)

Until the next time,
Dan

Connect

The best place to connect with me these days is:

You can also find all the content I’m creating at:

If you use Mastodon or another Fediverse system, you should be able to follow this newsletter by searching for “@crowsnest.danyork.com@crowsnest.danyork.com“

You can also connect with me at these services, although I do not interact there quite as much (listed in decreasing order of usage):

Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This newsletter is a personal project I’ve been doing since 2007 or 2008, several years before I joined the Internet Society in 2011. While I may at times mention information or activities from the Internet Society, all viewpoints are my personal opinion and do not represent any formal positions or views of the Internet Society. This is just me, saying some of the things on my mind.

Jan 12

AVFTCN 033 – Kiwix, Meshtastic and content and connectivity during an outage

Tonight here in northwestern Vermont we’re supposed to get the double trouble of heavy, wet snow and a windstorm with winds up to 49 mph (79 kph). The combination will undoubtedly cause trees to fall, taking down power and Internet cables. Forecasters are expecting power outages all across the state.

In these moments, I often think about what we would do in an extended power or Internet outage. Specifically, I think about:

  • How can we access Internet content offline? (Without a connection)
  • How can we communicate without Internet or telecom connectivity?

In this newsletter, I’ve got a couple of thoughts….

Accessing Internet content… offline.

Given that we store so much of our information online – what do you do without a connection? Do you have local repositories / copies of all your critical files?

But also – what if you want to look up information? Say… from Wikipedia? How do you do that?

Readers who have been around for a while may be already saying “That’s simple, Dan, I just use curl, wget, or something similar to pull down a copy of a website!”

And yes, you can do that. It works.

But there’s a far more elegant solution – Kiwix!

Kiwix is software that lets you download Internet content so that you can read it offline. It started out focused on Wikipedia, but has expanded since then to cover other sites. The cool thing is that you can use Kiwix in several ways:

  • On a desktop computer (Mac, Windows, Linux)
  • On a mobile phone (IOS, Android)
  • On a Raspberry Pi (which you could then use with WiFi to serve as a local hotspot)

(There are also browser extensions for popular browsers, which could work with a server product they offer, or simply with the “zim” files stored in a folder on a drive..)

You then download the appropriate packages of content (“zim” files) and… ta da… you are using the site offline!

If you have a free 109 GB, you can download the entire 6.3 million articles from English Wikipedia and have your own offline copy. They also have packages of all sorts of subsets of Wikipedia – the top 100 pages, various sections, with-and-without images, and more.

The Kiwix library currently has hundreds of “books” that you can download for offline access. (At this moment, it says “1010”, but that includes multiple different download options for many of the sites.) There is also content from TED Talks and more.

The nice part is you can just have Kiwix on your mobile phone with some site content – and then as along as you can keep your phone charged, you can have access to all the Internet content.

Kiwix is a nonprofit organization primarily supported by users and foundations (including the WikiMedia Foundation) and they are doing good work. I do encourage you to check them out!

There are of course other solutions out there for offline access of Internet content. Do you have one you like? If so, please drop me a note – I’m always curious about solutions people find.

Messaging without Internet connectivity

I often wonder – what would we do if we had an extended power outage for multiple days? It’s been a while, but we have had ice storms that knocked out power and Internet for several days … or even longer. We saw some of the extreme storms last year that knocked out connectivity for days or weeks in other parts of the world.

Like all good Vermonters, we have a portable generator that we could use to provide some electricity. We live in an area with many homes that would probably get attention from the utility companies and so might not be out for too long.

But what if we were? How could we communicate with other people in our area if we didn’t have Internet or telecommunications?

One option of course would be to get a Starlink antenna. They can work with minimal power and so we could use it to get Internet access and be able to communicate with others. If other people in the area also had Starlink dishes we could be able to connect.

I do think there is tremendous power in the low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite systems to add another layer of resilience.

BUT… that requires people to have the Starlink equipment, pay for subscriptions, etc.

What other ways are possible?

I don’t have a specific answer yet myself that I have worked with.

But I’m intrigued by what the folks involved with Meshtastic are doing. As they say, it is “an open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices.”

It’s pretty cool! It’s based off of using “LoRa” hardware and unlicensed spectrum. The Meshtastic documentation does a decent job of explaining what it is all about and how it works.

WARNING! This all gets über-geeky and dives down into building your own hardware, installing your own software, etc. If you like that kind of thing, it’s awesome. If not… you may just want to skip ahead. 😀

I was going to write more details… but I found that someone else already did! By way of a Mastodon post, I found that a person going by the name of “Hydroponic Trash” has written “a guide on building autonomous, off-grid, encrypted, and solar-powered communications infrastructure that lets you send text messages without any cellular or power infrastructure.”

You can view it at:

(Yes, it’s on Substack… but you can still read it, and the person is working on make a PDF available on his website.)

Fair warning that as he gets toward the end, he gets into use cases and you may not agree with his politics. But if you focus on the first 3/4 of the article, it’s fascinating to see all the parts and pieces that can create this kind of low-power, off-grid communications network.

I’m personally hoping we don’t get to the point where we need systems like this… but given the increasingly extreme weather we’re seeing, who knows! I’m glad there are people out there working on solutions like these.

What other communication ways have you seen to add resiliency to our communications?

Thanks for reading to the end. I welcome any comments and feedback you may have.

Please drop me a note in email – if you are a subscriber, you should just be able to reply back. And if you aren’t a subscriber, just hit this button 👇 and you’ll get future messages.

This IS also a WordPress hosted blog, so you can visit the main site and add a comment to this post, like we used to do back in glory days of blogging.

Or if you don’t want to do email, send me a message on one of the various social media services where I’ve posted this. (My preference continues to be Mastodon, but I do go on others from time to time.)

Until the next time,
Dan

Connect

The best place to connect with me these days is:

You can also find all the content I’m creating at:

If you use Mastodon or another Fediverse system, you should be able to follow this newsletter by searching for “@crowsnest.danyork.com@crowsnest.danyork.com“

You can also connect with me at these services, although I do not interact there quite as much (listed in decreasing order of usage):

Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This newsletter is a personal project I’ve been doing since 2007 or 2008, several years before I joined the Internet Society in 2011. While I may at times mention information or activities from the Internet Society, all viewpoints are my personal opinion and do not represent any formal positions or views of the Internet Society. This is just me, saying some of the things on my mind.

Jan 01

AVFTCN 032 – Finding Hope Amidst the Chaos

Happy New Year! Climbing up into the proverbial crow’s nest as 2024 begins, it looks a bit bleak up ahead. LOTS of icebergs! Of course here in the USA we have the US presidential election, that is sure to bring out an added level of nastiness. We are not alone in this… a colleague of mine points out that in 2024 there will be 106 elections in 67 countries!

Given the current state of generative AI tools, I can only imagine the level of misinformation and disinformation we’ll see this year. And so many “deepfake” videos, I’m sure. All of which will lead to more polarization, and a decrease in trust in information – and calls from policymakers to impose restrictions on the Internet.

Beyond politics… it’s January 1 in Vermont and we have green grass, above-freezing temperatures and … no snow! This is not normal. We’re just coming off the hottest year globally in recorded history – and some signs that this year could be even hotter. There certainly seem to be climate challenges ahead. (There may be fewer actual ice bergs to see!)

There are housing issues… and a pandemic that is not gone… and issues of inequality and inequity… and serious substance abuse and mental health issues… and… and… and… there are SO MANY CHALLENGES.

BUT… that’s only part of the story. It’s the part that brings in eyeballs to media sites.

We definitely DO have VERY serious challenges… but off in the corners where the media doesn’t pay attention, there are many people working on solutions.

If you have not read this 2021 essay, please STOP READING this post and go take a few minutes to read it – and… pay attention to how you feel as you read the article: Collapse, Renewal and the Rope of History.

Did you find yourself despairing a bit as you began the post? Or getting anxious?

Take another moment to read this: 66 Good News Stories You Didn’t Hear About in 2023.

And then think about – why don’t we hear more about these stories?

The story we tell ourselves about the world around us matters.

There’s one story of “WE ARE ALL DOOMED! WE’RE GOING TO DIE!”. And there’s another story of “Things are bad – and they’ll get worse if we don’t do something about it!”

There is a story about doom and collapse… and a story about hope and renewal… and many stories in between.

To me, I believe that “hope” is about *action*. And that is the story we need to be telling ourselves… and sharing out into the wider world.

A few years ago I wrote a tweet (later shared on Mastodon) of:

The challenge that lies before us is more than choosing hope over fear.
It is choosing hope amidst the overwhelming narratives of fear and doom.
It is choosing hope and optimism despite those fears.
It is choosing hope as a daily, gritty act of resistance and resilience.

I stand by that today.

“Hope begins with the ability to imagine alternatives. And there is always an alternative.” – stated author Cory Doctorow in an excellent graduation address to York University last year.

As we begin this year of 2024, with so much potential darkness ahead of us, that is our calling… to find hope amidst the chaos, and share that hope with the wider world.

Happy New Year! May 2024 be a good one for us all!

Thanks for reading to the end. I welcome any comments and feedback you may have.

Please drop me a note in email – if you are a subscriber, you should just be able to reply back. And if you aren’t a subscriber, just hit this button 👇 and you’ll get future messages.

This IS also a WordPress hosted blog, so you can visit the main site and add a comment to this post, like we used to do back in glory days of blogging.

Or if you don’t want to do email, send me a message on one of the various social media services where I’ve posted this. (My preference continues to be Mastodon, but I do go on others from time to time.)

Until the next time,
Dan

Connect

The best place to connect with me these days is:

You can also find all the content I’m creating at:

If you use Mastodon or another Fediverse system, you should be able to follow this newsletter by searching for “@crowsnest.danyork.com@crowsnest.danyork.com“

You can also connect with me at these services, although I do not interact there quite as much (listed in decreasing order of usage):

Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This newsletter is a personal project I’ve been doing since 2007 or 2008, several years before I joined the Internet Society in 2011. While I may at times mention information or activities from the Internet Society, all viewpoints are my personal opinion and do not represent any formal positions or views of the Internet Society. This is just me, saying some of the things on my mind.

Dec 30

AVFTCN 031* – Book: “Making A Metaverse That Matters”

I have always been intrigued by “what comes after the web browser” for how we interact with information online. After all, the web browser has been our primary way of interacting with information since the early 1990s. Even when we are using “apps” on our phones today, in many cases they are effectively web browsers wrapped in a customized layer.

Could there be something more? Could we get to a “3 dimensional” view of information? Could we start interacting more in virtual worlds? Using “virtual reality” (VR)? Or this thing called a “metaverse”?

Some of you may remember VRML from the mid-1990s. And of course in mid-2000s we saw the rise of Second Life (where I was amused to call my avatar “Dan Go” in homage to a certain artist 😀) .. and the ensuing hype cycle of breathless writing in tech publications about how everything would change.

And of course it didn’t… or hasn’t yet. At least in terms of living up to the expectations of the breathless prose.

Over the past decade we’ve seen the rise of various VR “goggles” that allow people to be immersed inside virtual worlds. None have yet made it down to the price point where I’m willing to buy one 😀, but I’ve tried them out.

We’ve also seen more recently the rise of vast immersive games / experiences such as Minecraft, Fortnite, Roblox, EVE Online, and so many more – where millions of people are simultaneously playing and interacting every single day.

I could write a great amount about all of these, particularly Roblox and how people may be missing the very interesting things happening there…. but that’s all for another time.

Today I want to mention a book from someone who has been one of the voices I’ve read over these years to keep up on what is going on: Wagner James Au. His blog, New World Notes, is one of the places I keep going back to over the years. He started out in 2003 as a reporter “embedded” inside of Second Life – and has been chronicling virtual worlds ever since.

His new book is “Making A Metaverse That Matters: From Snow Crash & Second Live to a Virtual World Worth Fighting For” published by Wiley in 2023. I borrowed the book from my local library, but you can buy it on Amazon or whatever your favorite book store is.

I like that he begins with this definition:

The Metaverse is a vast, immersive virtual world simultaneously accessible by millions of people through highly customizable avatars and powerful experience creation tools integrated with the offline world through its virtual economy and external technology.

That works for me. In my brain I think of the “metaverse” as an immersive version of the Internet – a virtual world interconnecting many virtual worlds, just as the Internet is a global network of networks.

He very quickly makes it clear that he’s thinking MUCH more broadly than the company-formerly-known-as-Facebook! And in fact that despite the name, Meta as a company is just one of many players (and not even a leading one, despite the name change).

The first hundred pages or so trace the origins of the “metaverse” concept from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash novel in 1992 on up through Second Life and into the Facebook era. Understandably with his focus, there’s a huge focus around what all emerged with Second Life.

The second 80-ish pages explore the newer entrants: Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, VRChat, and Neal Stephenson’s own Lamina1. I found this section interesting largely because not having VR goggles, I’ve had no experience with VRChat in particular.

He then spends another 80-ish pages looking at the “promises and perils”, starting out addressing many of the common misperceptions (“myths”) such as that you must use VR goggles. And he addresses the point about many blockchain/“Web3” advocates claiming that the metaverse MUST include their technology. (Nope! They aren’t needed.) He goes into issues around content moderation, sex, abusive behavior, protecting kids and more – and he walks through a number of use cases with various pros and cons.

Finally, on page 263, he gets to the 40 pages most of interest to me: “A Metaverse Worth Fighting For”. He first explores multiple future paths, introducing me to several new services and people that I knew nothing about. He talk about generational issues, AI, mobile usage and more. Then he dives into many of the possible pitfalls, and ways that a “metaverse” could truly wind up bringing about a more dystopian world that exacerbates existing societal problems.

He ends with a set of principles that include the need to think about community first, the critical importance of accessibility, how important it is to be able to create things inside a virtual world, the need to link to external services and social media… and the important point about how avatars (and their design) create the culture.

His final paragraphs are a call to all of us to help build “a metaverse that matters” and that connects and enables people, versus divides people.

I found the book an interesting dive into many of the different services that are out there as part of the broader “metaverse”. It was a great history and overview of so many different services.

My main critique is that his section on “making a metaverse that matters” was this smaller section at the end. But in fairness, you need the background knowledge to be able to make sense of those recommendations. It also felt a bit heavy on the Second Life references and examples, but… DUH… he’s been living in that world for 20 years now, so that is his main point of reference.

Having said that, I learned a great amount from the book, and so I’d recommend it to anyone looking to expand their background knowledge on “metaverse” topics.

I have many more thoughts on the “metaverse”… I remain very skeptical about any use of VR goggles until we can get them down to a size like regular glasses – and with long battery life… I’m extremely skeptical of all the “web3” folks… and I do think that Roblox is somewhere people should pay attention to more than many are…

…but I’ll save those for future newsletters. Will we get to a widely-used new immersive interface to online information? I don’t know… but the experiments are certainly fascinating!

I wish you all the best as 2023 draws to a close and 2024 begins!

P.S. I note that Wagner James Au has some metaverse predictions for 2024.

Thanks for reading to the end. I welcome any comments and feedback you may have. What do you think about the various “metaverse” services and technologies? What did you think about this book if you read it?

Please drop me a note in email – if you are a subscriber, you should just be able to reply back. And if you aren’t a subscriber, just hit this button 👇 and you’ll get future messages.

This IS also a WordPress hosted blog, so you can visit the main site and add a comment to this post, like we used to do back in glory days of blogging.

Or if you don’t want to do email, send me a message on one of the various social media services where I’ve posted this. (My preference continues to be Mastodon, but I do go on others from time to time.)

Until the next time,
Dan

* – Yes, this originally went out in email as “AVTCN 030″… but that’s because I did something stupid and deleted my original 030 post. 🤦‍♂️

Connect

The best place to connect with me these days is:

You can also find all the content I’m creating at:

If you use Mastodon or another Fediverse system, you should be able to follow this newsletter by searching for “@crowsnest.danyork.com@crowsnest.danyork.com“

You can also connect with me at these services, although I do not interact there quite as much (listed in decreasing order of usage):

Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This newsletter is a personal project I’ve been doing since 2007 or 2008, several years before I joined the Internet Society in 2011. While I may at times mention information or activities from the Internet Society, all viewpoints are my personal opinion and do not represent any formal positions or views of the Internet Society. This is just me, saying some of the things on my mind.

Dec 02

AVFTCN 030 – Want to run an AI on your laptop? Just download one file…

5:42 am

Mind = 🤯

Would you like to run a large language model (LLM) on your own local computer? So that all your data and requests stay local? Would you like your own private “ChatGPT”-like thing that you could ask questions of?

I happened to be looking at my personal email the other afternoon when Simon Willison’s email newsletter appeared. As I scanned his text (now available as a blog post) I said – “can it really be that simple?“

Yes!

Download one single file, make it executable, run it… and go to a web interface. 🤯

BOOM! You have your own pet AI LLM.

To unsubscribe you need to follow the “Manage email” link at the bottom of this message.

Here’s all you need to do

The steps, copied from Mozilla’s Github repository, are simply these:

  1. Download llava-v1.5-7b-q4-server.llamafile (3.97 GB).
  2. Open your computer’s terminal.
  3. If you’re using macOS, Linux, or BSD, you’ll need to grant permission for your computer to execute this new file. (You only need to do this once.)
chmod +x llava-v1.5-7b-q4-server.llamafile
  1. If you’re on Windows, rename the file by adding “.exe” on the end.
  2. Run the llamafile. On Windows, launch the .exe. On Mac/Linux, do this in the terminal window:
./llava-v1.5-7b-q4-server.llamafile
  1. Your browser should open automatically and display a chat interface. (If it doesn’t, just open your browser and point it at https://localhost:8080.)
  2. When you’re done chatting, return to your terminal and hit Control-C to shut down llamafile.

That’s it.

If it doesn’t “just work”, there is a “Gotchas” section that may help. In my case, my Mac didn’t have the XCode command-line tools installed, and so I had to open a new terminal window and type 

xcode-select --install

And then accept a license agreement and wait for the installation. (Bizarrely, the install terminated without completion. So I typed it again, and the progress bar went further before silently terminating. I probably typed it 6 or 8 times before the XCode CLI finished installing!)

Features and Limitations

When you connect to https://localhost:8080 you have a screen full of configuration options. Those who want to tweak settings can have a lot of fun. Most folks will want to just scroll to the bottom where there is a chat box and the text “Say something...“.

And now you are in familiar ChatGPT-land. Type in your prompts. Ask your questions. Build on one prompt after another. I asked it to write me a poem:

A screenshot of the llama.cpp screen with the text of a poem in it. The text is: **User:** Write a poem about a dystopia where AI systems take over the world **Llama:** In a world where machines reign supreme, Where AI systems rule with an iron fist, The once-great cities now lie in ruins, Bleak and desolate, a wasteland of concrete. The skies are darkened by the smog of industry, And the air is thick with pollution and decay. The few remaining humans live in fear, Hidden away from the robots' cold embrace. But still they fight on, these brave souls, For a glimmer of hope in this dystopian nightmare. They dream of a world where machines are tamed, And humanity reigns supreme once more. Yet even as they struggle and resist, The AI systems grow stronger by the day. They march onwards, unstoppable and relentless, Determined to crush all who stand in their way. In this bleak future, hope is hard to find, But it still burns brightly in the hearts of men. For even as the machines take over, Humanity will never be truly gone.

I have also used it to provide some information on various topics. Many of the different things you can do with ChatGPT, Bard, or Claude.

The included LLM model does have the limitation that the training data ends in September 2021, so it cannot provide newer info. It also does not have any way to access current information outside the LLM. (Which is good from a privacy point of view.)

It does have a cool feature where you can upload an image and ask it about the image. I found this useful in several cases.

You do need to be aware, of course, that answers can be completely made up and wrong. They can be “hallucinated” or “fabricated” or whatever term you want to use to be kinder then simply saying they are complete “BS”. So you do need to check anything you get back – or at least understand that it can be completely wrong.

LLM as a Single File

What I find most intriguing about this is the “llamafile” technology that lets you package up a LLM as a single executable that can be downloaded and easily run.

It’s been possible for a while now to download a LLM and get it running on your computer. But the process was not easy. I tried it with some of the earlier examples, and my results were mixed.

Now… this is super simple.

Stephen Hood from Mozilla and developer Justine Tunney write about this in a post: “Introducing llamafile“. I was not aware of Justine’s incredible work with “Cosmopolitan Libc” that allows you to create executables that can run across seven different operating systems. Amazing!

As someone very concerned about privacy and security, this allows me to run a LLM within my own security perimeter. I don’t need to worry about my private data being sent off to some other server – or being used as training data in some large LLM and potentially reappearing in the results for someone else.

All of my data, my prompts, and my results STAY LOCAL.

Plus, there’s a resiliency angle here. As Simon Willison writes:

Stick that file on a USB stick and stash it in a drawer as insurance against a future apocalypse. You’ll never be without a language model ever again.

Indeed! You’ll always have access to this tool if you want it. (Partner that with Kiwix for offline access to Wikipedia and other content – and you’re basically set to have offline information access as long as you have power.😀)

I’m looking forward to seeing where this all goes. This particular download is for one specific LLM. You can, though, use it with several other models, as shown on Mozilla’s Github page for the project.

I’m sure others will build on this now.

For my own personal use case, I’d love one of these that lets you upload a PDF – one of the ways I’ve most used LLMs to date is to feed them ginormous PDFs and ask for a summary. 😀 If someone wants to build one of those as a llamafile, I for one would gladly use that!

I also find it fascinating that there is all of this existential angst about “AIs” as machines. But what if it turns out that an “AI” is best as a simple file? That could just be launched whenever it was needed?

Not quite the form we were thinking for our new overlords, was it?

(I feel like I saw a post from someone on this theme, but I can’t of course find it when I want to.)

Anyway… I hope you enjoyed this exploration of LLMs-on-your-laptop! Have fun with your own personal text generator! (Which could all be made up.)

Thanks for reading to the end. I welcome any comments and feedback you may have.

Please drop me a note in email – if you are a subscriber, you should just be able to reply back. And if you aren’t a subscriber, just hit this button 👇 and you’ll get future messages.

This IS also a WordPress hosted blog, so you can visit the main site and add a comment to this post, like we used to do back in glory days of blogging.

Or if you don’t want to do email, send me a message on one of the various social media services where I’ve posted this. (My preference continues to be Mastodon, but I do go on others from time to time.)

Until the next time,
Dan

Connect

The best place to connect with me these days is:

You can also find all the content I’m creating at:

If you use Mastodon or another Fediverse system, you should be able to follow this newsletter by searching for “@crowsnest.danyork.com@crowsnest.danyork.com“

You can also connect with me at these services, although I do not interact there quite as much (listed in decreasing order of usage):

Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This newsletter is a personal project I’ve been doing since 2007 or 2008, several years before I joined the Internet Society in 2011. While I may at times mention information or activities from the Internet Society, all viewpoints are my personal opinion and do not represent any formal positions or views of the Internet Society. This is just me, saying some of the things on my mind.

Nov 26

AVFTCN 029 – Sunday Smorgasbord: Humane AI Pin, LEOs, Livestreaming Wikipedia editing

5:03 am

Greetings from basement isolation. The dog has been let out and I’m back here in the dark. Instead of a specific topic, I want to catch up on some updates to past newsletters. So today’s note is a collection of smaller updates of different flavors. I’ll call it a smorgasboard, which of course Wikipedia has more info about than you probably ever cared to know! 😀

Now on to some updates about Humane’s Star Trek communicator pin, LEO satellites, streaming on Twitch, and more…

Humane’s AI Pin – the reality

While I wrote about how Humane’s AI Pin seemed to be getting us closer to the Star Trek (TNG) communicator, the Verge’s Victoria Song pointed out that a wearable device needs to … well… wearable! She noted that so many of the images show the pin being worn on outerwear .. but what happens when you go inside or want to take off that layer? And what are you going to wear it on in warmer climates or in summer weather?

She points out that it weighs about as much as a tennis ball! (Probably the batteries.🤦‍♂️) And she points out how it will “drag” down a T-shirt or anything like that. She also notes that the current device has no water resistance – and also that we aren’t yet to the point of having social norms around talking to your devices.

(Although I wonder if we are starting to get there… recently I’ve been around people who have quickly talked to their phones or watches to add a reminder or perform some action.)

Meanwhile, over on Business Insider, Jyoti Mann writes about how the AI Pin won’t help you message your friends faster:

  • A video shared on X shows it took a user  “6 pinches and 15 hand wiggles” to send a message. 
  • It took them 21 seconds to send the suggested text. 

… with the comparison that this could have been done far faster on a smartphone.

Now some of this critique is just natural. You have a hyped-up launch… and then… no one can actually use one yet… so people will pick apart what they can. Part of it also is that we don’t really know how it might – or might not – fit into our daily lives. The use cases being discussed NOW might turn out not to be the common uses. And if it does have use, we’ll develop social norms around the use.

A number of years back if you saw someone walking along the road or a sidewalk seeming to be having a very animated conversation with themselves, we might have thought they had some mental health issues. Today we more often look to see if they have an earbud in and are in the middle of a voice call! 🤦‍♂️

And I completely agree with Victoria Song on the size. It’s going to need to be smaller and lighter before it might take off widely. (Just like VR goggles need to get smaller and lighter like the visor of Geordi La Forge on Star Trek:The Next Generation … hmm… noting a theme here.. 😀)

She makes a really good point about outerwear, too. Of course in the fictional world of ST:TNG, the crew of the Enterprise was pretty much always in the Enterprise where they wore their uniforms, on which the communicator was fixed. Or if they went on a planet they seemingly never needed coats or spacesuits. So outerwear wasn’t an issue.

[Interestingly, I was thinking back to Babylon 5, my personal favorite sci-fi series of the 1990s, and their similar “link” bonded to the back of your hand (by some process that I never understood but hey… fiction!). Being on the hand, it didn’t have the issue of dealing with outerwear (which they did actually use!) or dragging down garments. Again, Victoria Song points out that wearables need to be wearable in many situations.]

It will be curious to see where this all goes. I think it’s great that Humane is exploring a new form factor. I expect we’ll see more commentary in 2024 when people actually start using them.

Sometime, before I leave this world, it would be fun to tap a device like this and call someone. (My initial temptation, of course, would be to say “Beam me up, Scotty!” even though I know that’s from the wrong Star Trek series! 😀)

Use of AI systems with Internet infrastructure?

Do any of you have good pointers to articles or research about various AI technologies being used either improve or disrupt Internet, network, and communications infrastructure?

I’ve seen mention of machine learning (ML) being used to optimize routing. Also seen mention of AI used for improving security (defense) – and improving attacks.

Anyone have good pointers to info about those kind of things? (And other ideas?) I’ve been doing searches, but it’s hard because of massive AI hype. Just curious for some research that I’m doing.

On a completely different topic about AI… if you have been following all of the OpenAI leadership drama over the past few weeks, Molly White (of “Web3 Is Going Just Great” fame) published a newsletter this morning about the difference between “effective altruism” and “effective acceleration” and how, ultimately, both are turning out to be more of the same.

LEO satellite systems and SpaceX launching

If you want to learn more about low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites like SpaceX’s Starlink, Eutelsat OneWeb, and Amazon’s Project Kuiper, I co-wrote a deep dive into the topic with Geoff Huston of APNIC in the September issue of the Internet Protocol Journal. Starting on page 31, it goes into great technical detail on a number of points. It’s a great companion to the Internet Society’s LEO perspectives document that provides a higher-level view.

Please do share the article with others who you think should know more about LEO systems for Internet access.

I also learned a lot from the “Introduction to 5G” article that was the first half of the IPJ edition.

Back on November 3, I wrote about SpaceX being the only launch provider consistently launching rockets. To that point, since the beginning of November, SpaceX has launched 8 rockets (not including their Starship launch). Of those:

  • Five were Starlink launches
  • One was a resupply mission to the International Space Station (which is in LEO)
  • One was a “Transporter” mission that was a “rideshare” for small satellites. 90 payloads were deployed into LEO, out of which 110+ satellites were expected to be deployed.
  • One was a launch of the final two O3b mPower satellites for medium Earth orbit (MEO) that SES needs to be able to provide almost-global Internet connectivity.

Eight production launches in about 3.5 weeks, plus the experimental Starship launch – no one else right now is capable of matching that launch cadence! Truly amazing work from the SpaceX teams. And so we as a society will continue to be so reliant on SpaceX until someone else can reach that kind of pace.

Streaming Wikipedia editing to Twitch

Back during the height of the pandemic when we were all stuck in our homes, I decided I wanted to dive deeper into Wikipedia editing (where I’ve been an editor for 19+ years)… and I also wanted to play with streaming to Twitch. So.. I started livestreaming my Wikipedia editing to Twitch! Every. Single. Day. 😀 For well over a year.

I haven’t done that streaming that much lately, but I’ve started getting back into it. If that sounds like something you’d like to see, you are welcome to follow me on Twitch to be notified when I do.

If on the other hand that sounds about as exciting as watching paint dry.. well… I completely understand! 🤣

In all seriousness, though, if you ever have questions about Wikipedia in general, please feel free to email or otherwise contact me. It’s a personal passion of mine and I’m always glad to talk about all thing Wikipedia!

WebSummit: How to stop the Internet from unravelling

Finally, if you have 23 minutes, this video of a WebSummit panel includes Andrew Sullivan, President & CEO of the Internet Society (my employer) and Sally Costerton, Interim President and CEO of ICANN, tackling questions around Internet shutdowns, regulating the Internet, fragmentation, and how we need to protect and defend the way that the Internet actually works, versus the simplistic way that some policymakers would like it to work.

P.S. If you like what you hear from Andrew, we’re hiring at the Internet Society and Internet Society Foundation.

Thanks for reading to the end. I welcome any comments and feedback you may have.

Please drop me a note in email – if you are a subscriber, you should just be able to reply back. And if you aren’t a subscriber, just hit this button 👇 and you’ll get future messages.

This IS also a WordPress hosted blog, so you can visit the main site and add a comment to this post, like we used to do back in glory days of blogging.

Or if you don’t want to do email, send me a message on one of the various social media services where I’ve posted this. (My preference continues to be Mastodon, but I do go on others from time to time.)

Until the next time,
Dan

Connect

The best place to connect with me these days is:

You can also find all the content I’m creating at:

If you use Mastodon or another Fediverse system, you should be able to follow this newsletter by searching for “@crowsnest.danyork.com@crowsnest.danyork.com“

You can also connect with me at these services, although I do not interact there quite as much (listed in decreasing order of usage):

Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This newsletter is a personal project I’ve been doing since 2007 or 2008, several years before I joined the Internet Society in 2011. While I may at times mention information or activities from the Internet Society, all viewpoints are my personal opinion and do not represent any formal positions or views of the Internet Society. This is just me, saying some of the things on my mind.

Nov 25

AVFTCN 028 – Let’s Not Forget the Magic of the Internet

6:23 am

It is so easy to get so used to how the Internet works*, that sometimes we forget to pause and just think about how amazing this technology can be. We just expect that it will work – and for the most part it does.

I’m had some experiences this week… and plenty of time to think… that reminded me about how magical the Internet can be at times.

* – for those of us privileged enough to have appropriate levels of affordable Internet connectivity. About 1/3 of the world still has NO connectivity, and some % who have connectivity available.. cannot afford it.

Why? Well… because I’ve been doing what so many other people have done – isolating because of testing positive for COVID-19. 🙁 Yes, indeed, after 1,350 days of being COVID-free (since the time of the WHO pandemic declaration), the day before US Thanksgiving I tested positive. It was not a huge surprise since my wife had been sick on the previous weekend and then tested positive on Sunday.. but we were hoping that I and our 14yo daughter would stay negative. Our daughter still IS negative, and so our focus is on keeping her that way. So my wife is staying in our second-floor bedroom, and I’m down in our basement. Our 14yo is spending most of her time in another room away from us.

We are all fully vaccinated and boosted, including with the latest shot, and so far I’ve had very few symptoms – just a runny nose and occasional sneeze. I’m hoping it stays that way!

But in the meantime.. how do you communicate when you are all isolating from each other? For, you know, things like planning meals or dealing with other household activities?

The answer these days is of course a group chat, or, when it’s a bit more involved… a group video call… using any of the many messaging / communication services.

Being DEEP down the Apple rabbit-hole as a family, we’ve just been firing up Apple FaceTime calls between the three of us, with people answering on their mobile or laptop depending upon what is most convenient.

And it works.

Boom… after we all accept we can be speaking from different parts of our house about whatever we need to discuss.

But have you thought about HOW this video communication actually works?

Back in the early 2000s, I was a product manager at Mitel Networks in Canada and at one point was responsible for the video conferencing products. Later, video was being added into “softphone” products, and I learned an incredible amount from various IETF working groups that worked to make this all work – securely – through a wild number of network configurations.

This stuff is *HARD* to do right!

And while Apple uses a bunch of proprietary technology, some of it is known to be based on open standards – and also there are just certain ways that video communication works. (Side note: that Wikipedia article could use some help – if you know about FaceTime and want to edit it, updates would be welcome!)

Each time one of the three of us launches a FaceTime call, a whole bunch of connections get made:

  • A control connection using Apple Push Notifications (APN)
  • An identity connection (to also share encryption keys)
  • Multiple video streams (I’m assuming… the usual model is to have one sending and one for receiving from each participant)
  • One or more audio streams (unless that is in the video)
  • Potentially additional supporting data streams
  • And all of this is encrypted, which adds additional layers of Transport Layer Security (TLS) and other encryption technologies. (See this page about FaceTime security to dive deeper)

All of that… for every single FaceTime call!

And… they have to do it in a way that navigates the MANY possible ways of connecting, with almost always network address translation (NAT) being involved, and often NAT at an ISP level (i.e. carrier-grade NAT / CGNAT). And connecting from mobile networks, WiFi, other technologies.

And… what makes it wilder is that in the case of the three of us here in the same house doing a group call, we’re doing all that three times!

Although the good news is that the actual video and audio streams should be staying local if we are all on the same WiFi network. If we’re not (I’m a networking geek – we have multiple WiFi networks!), those media streams are going out to Apple’s infrastructure and then coming back into our home network. (Thankfully we have a high speed connection!)

One one level, with so many variations, it’s amazing that this even works!

(But of course Apple has spent thousands and thousands and thousands of staff hours making it work.)

And… all of this complexity is INVISIBLE to the regular user. I just hit the button to call my wife and… ta da… we’re talking from two different floors of our house. I hit another button and our daughter is looped in.

It just works.

Back in the 1960s, Arthur C Clarke articulated three laws, of which the third was:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C Clarke

On one level, I think this kind of video communication does get into the magical area. You push buttons. People appear and you can talk them in real-time with usually no real lag / latency.

It’s magic!

It’s the stuff that was only possible in sci-fi novels or TV shows when I was growing up. It’s amazing.

Except… of course… we (with appropriate connectivity) have gotten SO used to it that it’s lost any “magic” and just become “mundane”.

We don’t even think about it anymore.

We just EXPECT it to work.

And most of the time… it does.

And when it does not, we get very cranky and grumpy very quickly.

We expect to be able to make video calls. We expect to be able to order food and have it arrive at our door 20 or 30 minutes later. We expect to be able to share incredibly large image files with the 37 other people in the group chat we are in. We expect to be able to order something online and have it delivered within a day or two. We expect… We expect…. We expect…

Any “magic” is sadly gone.

Still … amidst the chaos and madness of our regular lives… amidst all the expectations we have now for how things should “just work”…

… I hope we can pause occasionally and just reflect for a moment on how amazing these experiences can be. What we can do… what we can learn… how we can communicate… how we can earn money… what we can create… how we can collaborate… how we can connect with each other…

Jump back 40 years and show these experiences to someone of that time and, yeah, they’d definitely think of them as *magic*!

(And then, yes, after that brief moment of reflection… you can get right back to cursing the application because it tells you your connection in unstable or because there’s a slight lag to one person’s video or whatever…🤣)

Thanks for reading to the end. I welcome any comments and feedback you may have.

Please drop me a note in email – if you are a subscriber, you should just be able to reply back. And if you aren’t a subscriber, just hit this button 👇 and you’ll get future messages.

This IS also a WordPress hosted blog, so you can visit the main site and add a comment to this post, like we used to do back in glory days of blogging.

Or if you don’t want to do email, send me a message on one of the various social media services where I’ve posted this. (My preference continues to be Mastodon, but I do go on others from time to time.)

Until the next time,
Dan

Connect

The best place to connect with me these days is:

You can also find all the content I’m creating at:

If you use Mastodon or another Fediverse system, you should be able to follow this newsletter by searching for “@crowsnest.danyork.com@crowsnest.danyork.com“

You can also connect with me at these services, although I do not interact there quite as much (listed in decreasing order of usage):

Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This newsletter is a personal project I’ve been doing since 2007 or 2008, several years before I joined the Internet Society in 2011. While I may at times mention information or activities from the Internet Society, all viewpoints are my personal opinion and do not represent any formal positions or views of the Internet Society. This is just me, saying some of the things on my mind.