Monday 9 November 2009

The Wind of Change

Perestroika all around

Twenty years ago today, the Berlin wall finally fell, thus uniting two Germanies which, in my childhood I had been taught were East Germany and West Germany - an aberration of dividing a country of same people into two distinct countries finally vanishing.
Perhaps of the many stories out there on the Internet, of events leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall, is one of Wolfgang Kleinwächter, who was one of the people in St. Nicolaï Church in Leipzig, a location widely believed to be the origin of the protests that re-shaped politics in Europe.

His article can be found on: http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/31/31019/1.html

and if you don't read German, a Google English translation into is found here.

Of course, this change was not possible without the help of visionaries like Mikhaïl Gorbachev who had recognised and decided to follow the policies of "Perestroïka- Перестройка" and "Glasnost - Гласность", meaning "restructuring" and "transparency", as defined a few years earlier by intellectuals like Alexander Yakovlev.
But change was seen my many as being a scary thing - because it announced a period of unrest and an uncertain future. Indeed, history showed us that such fears were warranted in the short term, but in the longer term, we can venture to say that the end of the iron curtain was better for everyone.

Of course, an iron curtain is still present in many countries around the world. A week ago I made a point to use the last day of my trip to Seoul, to visit the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between South and North Korea.

The North is still under the control of one of the most oppressive communist regimes - very much like the kind of regime that was in place in East Germany. Seeing the DMZ with its rows of barbed wires and an estimated 1 million land mines in the no-mans-land separating the two sides, I could not help but feel sorry for those people only two kilometers ahead of us who had never been allowed out of their country and were definitely living in another age. Change, it seemed was still far, far away.
In the hope that another 9 November 1989 happens soon, South Korea has already built a huge infrastructure at Dorasan, just across the border, ready to receive thousands of commuters, but for the time being, the place looks like a ghost town. I felt really humbled to be able to walk the earth of one of the potentially most technically advanced countries in the world (ICANN Seoul with native IPv6!), and being within eyesight of a country stuck in 1953, one which proudly displays its big accomplishment of "The tallest flagpole in the world" in Kijong-dong, and which I saw in the distance with my very own eyes, towering at 160m.

The air in the DMZ stood still, but how much did I wish for a "Wind of Change"?

It is precisely a Wind of Change which is currently blowing over the rest of the world, and the Internet is right in the middle of it.

Three strikes and you're out

Take illegal downloading of multimedia content, for example. The blame is put on Internet downloading when downloading is only a small part of the puzzle, a significant part of pirated music and movies being transfered from person to person on USB keys. The young generations are quite blatant about that.
As I have mentioned publicly at EURODIG, Copyright died the day we moved from analogue to digital. Analogue reproduction introduced a natural boundary thanks to loss of quality at every generation of copy. Digital made it all eternally and recursively duplicable. Radically new business models are required, and if it means less profit and overall, music producers and artists will earn less money, then so be it. The industry is changing and "Major" music and film production may have gone through its golden years. (Graphic source: RIAA)
Note that "alternative business models" are proposed as well. The trouble is that any downloading of music will pinpoint the "bad" music which was traditionally mingled with the "good" music. i.e. an album containing 9 tracks had 4 good tracks and 5 tracks which weren't really good (they were pretty awful actually). So now that you can mix and match yourself, you download the good tracks and leave the bad ones, which adds-up to less profit for the record company. Independent music labels can now cover the whole globe, and Web sites like MySpace have also taken a huge chunk of business from Major music companies. Today's youth enjoys downloading music from unknown artists - not only the big promotion stuff. All of these factors erode the profit for the Majors. They value-add has decreased dramatically in the music business ecosystem. That's what I call a Wind of Change.

Prior to the internal combustion engine, an industry of horses, blacksmiths, horse-drawn carriages and roadside inns and barns existed. It was perhaps one of the most significant industries pre-dating the industrial revolution. It disappeared within 30 years of the first self-propelled vehicle roaming the roads.

To see which jobs have disappeared over time, I suggest a look at:
http://flare.prefuse.org/apps/job_voyager

The Internet Catalyst

At ICANN Seoul, a group of us "old-timers" from all backgrounds, scientists, civil society activists, social researchers, lawyers, engineers and government people went out to have a beer or two together and started asking ourselves: if the Internet was and still is a catalyst for change, have we created a monster? Yes, the Internet has destroyed some jobs by overturning some industries, but it has also created different types of jobs, and yes it has sped business up and the Internet tidal wave is likely to change every aspect of our society yet even further.

We might just be witnessing the beginning of this change. One technical aspect is the introduction of IPv6, which will make every electrical and electronic device a directly addressable device. What changes are we likely to see thanks to this new barrier being torn down? What new challenges are we likely to face? What opportunities for new activity will arise out of this technical revolution? Will the Internet of things increase the rate at which the world is changing?

Since change is something which most of us humans inherently dislike, perhaps is there a limit to the rate of change that we can accept or adapt to. Is there a physiological limit to change, one where a human mind can just about make sense of things, before qualifying change as complete chaos?

The current worldwide recession has affected countries around the world to different extents. The speed at which the world went into recession startled many people, starting with bankers caught off guard by a very abrupt financial crisis. Of course, the finance world had been sped up thanks to the "Big Bang" of 1986, when trading went on-line. The spread of the Internet has sped things up even more. News travel faster than ever before thanks to social networks. Markets change and technology evolves so quickly that it is often obsolete by the time it comes in production. So my question is, how much faster can the world go? And could part of the current paradigm shift, the recession and unemployment being only but a symptom, be in fact a cranking up in gear to reach the next "level" in the rate of change?

Let me say this again: the Internet is a catalyst for change, and the rate of change is increasing. Perhaps the biggest problem facing the music industry, and other industries as a whole is that the current rate of change has increased beyond the maximum rate of change that the industry can reach. This results in a condition by which a corporation rapidly becomes obsolete.

Something economists should ponder about quickly.

Adapt like a Starfish

In the book that he co-wrote with Ori Brafman, Rod Beckström describes the ability of "Starfish" to adapt to change a lot faster than "Spiders". Starfish are likened to distributed bottom-up processes with no centralized power, whilst the Spider architecture is a conventional top-down hierarchy. Do Spiders need to convert to Starfish to survive, how much time is required for Spiders to convert to Starfish, and will they succeed in time?

Last but not least, we are seeing a new type of Governance arise through consensus. Currently used only in Internet circles, this "experiment" is proving itself to be quite robust and sustainable, and to embrace change rather well. It is a Starfish.

If industries are having trouble keeping up with the rate of change, is there any possibility that at some point, governments will have difficulty keeping up as well? In this case, what can government do to be ready and embrace our changing world in the smoothest of ways when it will be time to do so?

Many challenges lie ahead of us, but together as a multi-stakeholder society, we have more than an ample capacity in collective wisdom and brainpower and skills to succeed in gearing up to the next level of change and to rise up to success.

Monday 31 August 2009

GIH servers suffer sustained DoS attack

After spending a couple of days off-line, I found out on Sunday 30th August that our servers in London had been hit by a denial of service (DoS) attack through mail-bombing from different sources.

This happens every now and then. The last time, it took place when I was at the ICANN conference in Cairo, and another European participant's systems had been hit at the same time. Thankfully the GIH servers in London survived then, and thankfully, they survived (barely) this time.
The strength of the attack this time round was higher than before since every time there is an attack, I find out what the weak point is in our network and upgrade it. I'm glad that the servers actually manage to recover each time, but it is still very disruptive indeed.
So this time round, the main mail hub got attacked with 360 emails per second from zombie computers all around the world, for a very sustained amount of time, starting at 8:00pm on saturday night. As a result, the server ran out of memory+swap (500Mb + 500Mb) and froze by going into some kind of panic recovery mode, thus sending the attack to our backup route, and this then sent the emails to our back-end machine via another path, in a more controlled manner (aka - via UUCP over IPv6, the new with the old working very well together). As a result, the back-end stored 28 000 emails, all but 200 being spam sent to wrong addresses.
I managed to reboot the main mail-server remotely in a short window of time that it allowed me to log in. It took 30 minutes to shut down, so clogged were its processes, running at a load of 58. I spent sunday afternoon trying to find out how to process the backlog of emails, bearing in mind, more was coming in. It felt like dealing with a flood.
Finally, I commissioned a third computer running Linux, which I had kept running for the past 4 months as standby and which has now taken the load off the front and back end machines and is shifting through the now 24 000 remaining emails. All in all, the GIH computer systems in London have filtered 98 000+ spams in 24h. That is a lot more than at any time before. If this is a taste of things to come in the near future, we're going to have to beef those servers more with a lot more processing power.
When I remember that the first computer system for GIH.COM was a 20Mhz 80386 running linux & 4 Mb memory, downloading emails via UUCP and sending them via SLIP/PPP through a half hourly telephone call using a 9 600 baud modem, and it was running smoothly, even when downloading a few USENET newsgroups that I enjoyed reading...

...I just wonder where this spam is leading us to.

...sigh...


Sunday 9 August 2009

Green Networking - Google's Data Centres

Google's released an interesting set of documents and videos out detailing their set-up in their brand new Green Data Centres.

You can check it out on:

http://www.google.com/corporate/green/datacenters/summit.html

Whilst other industries have been under intense pressure to reduce their Carbon emissions, the ICT Industry has, so far, not done that much. Of course, the energy rating of computers and telecom equipment has been in the spotlight and most hardware manufacturers have displayed Energy Star ratings, but our ever increasing thirst for information has asked for faster and faster data centres. And that means more servers, more speed, more energy consumption and more heat to get rid of.

As other industries have complied with a reduction of carbon emissions, so will the ICT industry. Google's current initiative is pioneering. Others will no doubt follow. The physical topology of the Internet network might be changed radically, as data centers located in the middle of towns make way for out of town more secure mega-facilities built close to cheap and clean energy, and expandable at will.

NGN - clean slate or not ?

Attending meetings about Internet Governance, I keep on hearing how so many things will influence the architecture of the Internet. A lot of the heated discussions tackle the short term instead of the long term. Furthermore, some governments are under the impression that a "Next Generation Network", aka NGN, will be a Clean Slate approach to networking.

For the record, let me say here that these are pipe dreams.

Apart from increasing control of the next generation network by governments and multi-national corporations, I cannot see a single reason why a next generation network should be created out of a Clean Slate approach. The Internet might not be perfect, but its imperfections are being worked on. At the very least they are known!

Currently, there are thousands of engineers around the world who are working on ways to remedy the Internet's Achille's heels. The experience which has been acquired thus far by running an international network spanning the whole world, is more valuable than any theoretical study that will ever be conducted. The amount of "known knowns" and "known unknowns" is vastly superior to the amount of "known knowns" and "known unknowns" in a Clean Slate approach. In fact, I'll venture out to say that the danger, as we all know, is the amount of "unknown unknowns", which the Clean Slate approach is full of.

So what do we really know about the Clean Slate approach? Nothing. In fact, at the time of writing, I suspect that the people proposing the Clean Slate approach don't know either.

How will it perform? How reliable will it be? Will it be hacked? Will it be secure? Will it encourage innovation? Will it encourage democracy? Will it be embraced internationally?

Perhaps should we find answers to these questions before launching into huge development costs for a programme which might yield little more than few gigabytes of presentations and writings.

TOOL: Google Wave

Taking part in working groups both at ICANN, ISOC, but also IETF, I spend a fair amount of my time in conference calls.

Each organisation has its own preferred tool for online collaboration. Whilst some of them involve contracts with a commercial provider, others are "free" - as in they might be test systems or freeware. If all else fails, we sometimes use Skype. But finding a proper tool that can let you share documents and presentation material, speak to each other in a meaningful way, interface with the real world, as well as allow for simultaneous text input is easier said than done. The bottom line is that we've *always* has a problem with communications.

The VMEET working group at IETF has been formed specifically to find a solution to this problem, whether it is evaluating what's out there, or drawing up specifications for a new set of tools. Its findings risk being very helpful for other organisations, since an increasing amount of collaborative work is required if the Internet model of governance is to be sustained. For more information on this exciting challenge, go to: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/vmeet

That said, Google seems to have come up with its own version of online collaboration. Not quite ready yet, but there's a preview on:

http://wave.google.com

It looks like it has potential, especially with extensions, since it follows the Open Source concept.

50 great examples of data visualization

The following link is a particularly well researched/documented blog entry about data visualization.

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/06/50-great-examples-of-data-visualization/

It has links to many very interesting visualization engines and concepts. If, like me, this sort of this fascinates you, I recommend setting aside a few hours before you embark on looking at this page. :-)

Visualisation is, of course, a major part of our cognitive processes and we, as humans, will probably require increasingly complex visualization tools to enable us to make a more complex world easier for our limited minds to understand. But looking through many of these examples, it also struck me that a great deal of analysis often took place before visualization was even possible, and I wonder whether some of the examples are not merely enabling our mind to understand, but also open the door for machines to understand each other.

How? By searching for ways to format data in a form which can be read and displayed by a machine (after all, graphical display tools are run by computers), we are stumbling on the possibility of that formatted data to be used in other ways than just being displayed on a graph.

Another thing which struck me is the worth of data visualization in reminding us of the past. I had lunch earlier this week with a French philosopher who advised me that unfortunately, one common human trait is the ability to forget the past too easily. As a result, mistakes are repeated and only a fraction of knowledge is transmitted in the long term. Trend patterns are completely obliterated.
Take a piece of software like "Flare", for example, used by some of the data visualization examples above, but not directly referred to by the article I point to above. One example which I was particularly impressed about was their "Job Voyager":

http://flare.prefuse.org/apps/job_voyager

Can you see which jobs you should avoid because they are, literally, dead ends? :-) Yes, reminding us of the past can point us to the future.

I hope you enjoy the visualizations.