Gnothi Seauton

Multi-stakeholder governance

2011-02-20T11:41:00.001Z

I have recently made a presentation at the "Internet and Democracy" conference in Kiev, Ukraine, on 18 February 2011.
Please find it enclosed.

Multi-stakeholder governance

View more presentations from Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond.

IPv6 Matrix Projet Presentation at INET London, 29 Sept 2010

2010-10-20T17:41:00.006+01:00

This is the slide deck used for the presentation which I made at INET London on 29 September 2010.
The project is an ISOC community funded project named IPv6 Matrix. More on this soon.

IPv6 Matrix exec summary

View more presentations from Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond.

The Internet in 2020 ukraine 20100904

2010-09-08T00:18:00.001+01:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation which I made at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Ukraine in Kiev on 4 September 2010:

The Internet in 2020 ukraine 20100904

View more presentations from Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond.

Introduction to ISOC and ICANN

2010-09-08T00:17:00.001+01:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation, which I made at IGF Ukraine in Kiev on 4 September 2010:

Introduction to ISOC and ICANN

View more presentations from Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond.

A Study of Internet RFC Authors using NetDraw and yEd

2010-01-13T09:07:00.001Z

This long paper started out as a small experiment which was supposed to last an afternoon - a play-around with softwares NetDraw and yEd.

It ended up being a huge paper - too long to publish in a printed publication.

Results are not that significant, in that in the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) community, it appears that people really mingle a lot with each other, but the matter of interest is to discover the power of the analysis which can be performed using the software used.

I really believe that Social Network Analysis using Netdraw, yEd, and other SNA and visualisation software, should be mandatory for any bottom-up organisation. I also think that corporations and organisations would really benefit from:
1. having their internal social networks analysis in the same manner.
2. using this type of analysis on their external professional social networks

This pinpoints who are the movers and shakers in the organization. This also pinpoints areas/departments where information flow might not be optimal, thus having a lesser contribution to the organization as a whole.

Feedback/discussion very welcome.

Check it out on SlideShare:

A Study of Internet RFC Authors using NetDraw and yEd

View more documents from Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond.

The Wind of Change

2009-11-09T17:50:00.018Z

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.

GIH servers suffer sustained DoS attack

2009-08-31T22:31:00.002+01:00

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...

Green Networking - Google's Data Centres

2009-08-09T18:03:00.003+01:00

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 ?

2009-08-09T17:44:00.004+01:00

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

2009-08-09T17:26:00.004+01:00

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

2009-08-09T17:14:00.005+01:00

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.

One Web Day

2008-07-25T10:05:00.000+01:00

Today, Friday 25th July 2008, I have accepted to be a "One Web Day Ambassador" for the day, promoting its cause by publishing a story at:
http://onewebday.org/stories/?p=40

It tells the story of how the Internet has changed my life over the past 20 years and I encourage you to read it because it might stimulate some reflection in your mind about a network of networks that we take for granted but is under threat.

OneWebDay is an Earth Day for the Internet that takes place each Sept. 22.
Its main Web page is: http://www.onewebday.org

This year, 2008, is the third OneWebDay. Around the world, we're focusing attention on the importance of the internet to political participation - that's this year's theme. We're also encouraging people to talk about (and do something about) internet issues they're worried about - censorship, the digital divide, inadequate connectivity generally.
The idea behind OneWebDay is to create a platform for a global constituency that cares about the future of the internet. We make progress when we make things visible, and with OneWebDay we're showing this global constituency that it exists.

To start brainstorming about possible actions on 9/22 itself, see:
http://www.onewebday.org/base/index.php/OneWebDay_in_a_box

I highly encourage you to get involved: http://www.onewebday.org

Olivier

One Web Day: Living the Internet

2008-07-25T09:48:00.000+01:00

Living the Internet is my contribution for One Web Day Stories, as found on
http://onewebday.org/stories/?p=40

Foreword

I first heard about the OneWebday project a few years ago and always felt too busy to contribute in any meaningful way, be it by becoming an ambassador, or by writing an actual story for the event.

Since I’ve lived the Internet (as I’d like to say) since 1988, it occurred to me that perhaps this year was the right time to write. That’s nearly 20 years of Internetting. Naturally in 20 years, the Internet has changed my life not once but many many times and in my contribution, I’ll focus on 4 main stories which might be of interest to everyone.

Each story contains a lesson. I hope you’ll find them an interesting read but most of all, I dearly hope that we’ll all remember those lessons.

1. Discovery

The story of my first week on the Internet.

VAX 11/785

I first discovered the Internet in late October 1988. I was at university (King’s College London) and was logged in one of these (now) antique computers called a VAX 11/785 running an operating system called VMS.

The first distribution list I subscribed to was the Virus-L Discussion list, a discussion about computer viruses. I had an interest in the subject ever since I had heard the story of the (C)BRAIN Virus. Although the concept of a Computer Virus had already been imagined over 40 years earlier by John von Neumann, I wondered whether such a critter could be applicable to this network of networks that I had heard so much about.

Amazingly, 3 days after I joined (2nd November 1988), the Internet crashed as a result of a worm written by Robert Tappan Morris, a 23 year old Cornell Graduate Student. In short, Morris had miscalculated the speed of the Internet. Re-infection of computers that had already been infected took place at a much higher rate than he originally imagined. Multiple reinfection meant a sudden peak in traffic and slowdown to a halt. Being located in the UK and accessing the Internet through a local academic network called JANET (Joint Academic Network), our computer systems were not really affected because TCP-IP was not running in native mode on JANET.

However, I had access to the Internet through a gateway at University College London. We got immediately cut off for a while. Then a flood of emails came in from the Virus-L Discussion List, with on the spot reactions from system managers all around the United States. It was like watching a movie, “victims” e-dying, a task force forming itself, a counter-attack being spontaneously set-up and a final defeat of the rogue code. I was also reading messages on USENET - which still used UUCP dial-up, so it was a resilient path to have information distributed.

My first week on the Internet showed me how amazing a communications medium this was, how much of a giant it was going to be, but also how fragile this giant was. It was a lot to learn in a full week. Today there are fewer resilient channels of communication than there used to be. USENET has all but faded away. TCP-IP rules everywhere. This might be its strength and its weakness. Beware of Achilles heel…

Lesson 1: the Internet is a fragile resource. Take care of it.

2. Chinese Dreams

A story about Freedom.

On 9th June 1989, I received a forwarded message in my mailbox. It was an email that had originally been sent by a Sun Microsystems employee in Beijing on May 23rd 1989, relating the situation on the ground in Tiananmen Square. The message was both reassuring and (now we know) naive, signaling that everything was fine in Beijing and the dream of democracy was finally coming true. We all know what happened on 5 June 1989.

I am including an excerpt of the original message here.

> From: GROVE::ZDEE042 “Princess Leia” 9-JUN-1989 11:57

> To: ZDEE036,ZDEE038,ZDEE041,ZDEE699,ZDEE762,ZDEE763,ZDEE764,ZDAP808,UDEE705,ZDAC128,ZDAC131,ZDAC161,ZDAC166,ZDCA717

> Subj: illusions of students in China. anybody knows what happened after!!

>

> From: zmacv61@uk.ac.ic.doc 7-JUN-1989 21:57

> To: ZDEE042

> Subj: letters from china

>

>

> Date: Wed, 7 Jun 89 21:47:04 BST

> From: zmacv61@uk.ac.ic.doc

> To: zdee042@uk.ac.kcl.cc.elm

> Subject: letters from china

> Message-ID: <8906072148.aa10542@flamingo.doc.ic.ac.uk>

>

> the header to this makes just as interesting reading as the letter! it has

> got around, quite a bit, i can tell you!

> ============================================================================

Further Headers deleted - for reasons of confidentiality.

The path taken to reach me from the other side of the world was roughly:

Beijing -> Hong Kong -> Japan -> Palo Alto -> Rest of Silicon Valley -> MIT -> Princeton -> Edinburgh -> Oxford and then London using UUCP, as well as TCP-IP and several other email protocols to go from China to my desk.

We pick it up at Hong Kong. I have replaced all addresses/names by [XXX].

> >

> > The network is a wonderful thing. This was sent “this morning” at 4 am (Beijing

> > time). Much more interesting than anything I’ve read in the Chronicle.

> >

> >

> > - XXX

> >

> > - —– Begin Included Message —–

> >

> > > From XXX@XXX Tue May 23 09:57:25 1989

> > To: XXX@XXX, XXX@sun.com

> > Subject: A Beijing status report

> > Status: RO

> >

> > [ XXX ] and [ XXX ]

> >

> > I thought I would share this personal account of what’s happening on

> > the streets of Beijing. The writer is our own [XXX] . The “XXX”

> > referred to is [ XXX ].

> >

> > I apologize to members on both lists for receiving duplicates of this.

> >

> > - [ XXX ]

> >

> > - ———————————————————————

> >

> > > From sunhk!sunbj!XXX Tue May 23 04:39:34 1989

> > From: sunhk!sunbj!XXX (XXX - Sun Beijing XXX)

> > To: sunhk!sun!sun!XXX

> > Subject: Re: hello??

> > Cc: sunhk!XXX

> >

> > Yes, I am all right. Thank you, my friend.

> >

> > The situation here seems getting better and better. All army members

> > are blocked outside Beijing city. The people’s life in the city looks

> > as normal as usual. You may not able to see any difference than

> > ordinary life on the streets or in the shops now. Although the

> > students direct the traffic instead of the police, the accidents are

> > less than before. The buses started to work yesterday. Many people

> > went to their work unit this morning.

> >

> > There are still thousands of students in Tan’anman square. They said

> > “we will not end until our aims are reached”. The student area is

> > circled and controled by the students. There are alot of people

> > demonstrate to support them outside the area and on the Chang An street

> > which is in front of Tan’anmen.

> >

> > Beside Tan’anmen, the crowded areas are the places where the armies

> > are. The PLA rounds the city but the people round them. Hundreds and

> > thousands of people and students block at all the gateways. They

> > circle the soldier cars, the gas cars and the armoured cars. They tell

> > the soldiers the truth, they give them news paper, water and food.

> > Some soldiers droped their tears. They said that they did not know

> > what is happenning in Beijing and what to do here. A group of BeiDa’s

> > students and teachers went to “convey greeting to people’s son and

> > brother army” yesterday.

> >

> > So right now, the life in Beijing is very peaceful, there are no any

> > reason for the army to entry the city. The soldiers themselves don’t

> > want to get in to face to the students and the people there. But just

> > in case, a lot of people go to the streets in the evening and wait

> > there all night - they are ready to block the army’s cars using their

> > bodies, in the meantime, they are talking about the jokes of Li Peng,

> > shouting him abuses in the street.

> >

> > The martial law while was signed by Li Pang totally failed, nobody even

> > pay any attention to it. The demonstrations are still going on. The

> > government hasn’t done, even said anything to this after the martial

> > law was declared. The government already lose the control. I think

> > China is in a turning point and they have to fill the requests of the

> > people. I believe that the students and the people will win the

> > struggle.

> >

> > It is very very quiet this morning, it is said that there will be a big

> > demonstration this afternoon.

> >

> > I went to Tan’anmen very often these days. I have spent almost a night

> > with the hunger strikers there last week. I wish we had a “Sun

> > Microsystems supporting group”. Don’t worry please, I am no problem

> > here. We got a command from HK yesterday, it asked all foreign staffs

> > go to HK. [XXX] said it is not necessary. I think so too. The status

> > here is not so bad, “it is the best status during these 40 years”, [XXX]

> > said. He is going to stay here. In fact, he is one of people who

> > blocked the army’s cars in the nights. [XXX], do you wanna go with me

> > to see what type of guns the soldiers have if you are here?

> >

> > I can understand that how worry you were when you heard about the

> > martial law in Beijing. I hope I can tell you how strong the people

> > are and how great the students are. I am proud of them.

> >

> >

> > Xie Xie Ni, Wo De Peng You,

> >

> > - -[ XXX ]

> >

> >

Although this message was published in a discussion list at the time, I have not found it archived anywhere on the Web. I hope that at a future One Web Day, I will be able to publically show the full message with all of its headers and all identities, without fear of putting its originator in trouble.

Back then, I learnt how the Internet could be a medium for free speech, how it could bring freedom of speech to the world, how it gave a voice to the people in the street.

China did not have Internet in 1989 (it was first implemented in 1993), but UUCP email dial-up was already in place and email was somehow uncensored.

Lesson 2: the Internet is a warrant for your freedom.

Make sure it stays that way.

3. Creation of the .PS domain

A story about Internet Politics.

On 18 August 1996, having been the maintainer of the “Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)” document on International E-mail Accessibility for several years, I tracked Internet Connectivity worldwide, a bit like those people tracking twisters in the US Midwest. My list was referenced using the ISO3166 International Country Codes, some of which were used as Country Code Top Level Domain.

I received a message from someone close to the Palestinian Authority, asking for my input to create the .PS domain for the newly created Palestinian Territories. It had just been a short span of time after the signing of agreements between Israel & the Palestinian Authority. Palestinians wanted to establish a symbolic presence in cyberspace.

I pointed them to ISO (International Organisation for Standardization, a United Nations funded Organisation), then liaised with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA - namely Jon Postel) to create the domain etc.

The problem was that ISO had noted .PS as “reserved” and it therefore had not yet been officially created as a confirmed country code. But IANA needed issuance of a Country Codes that had been confirmed and published.

I pointed out that .AC had also been on the “reserved” but not published list and it had already been given a ccTLD. Call me a smart alec…

My pro-bono help landed me in the middle of a “flame” war between militant jewish & palestinian groups and I received hate email. Correspondents obviously thought I had more to do with the whole procedure than I really had. Events which I saw in the TV news had now entered my mailbox. Oh boy…

The whole process of creating a new Country Code Top Level Domain took time and I felt the heat after making this suggestion, was accused of taking sides, was even asked to “revert my decision” (uh? what decision?). I wondered if this was the true life of a politician…

Ultimately, .PS was created on 22 March 2000 (and I had absolutely no authority in the matter whatsoever).

I learnt that the Internet had become political. What I had considered a communication resource was now an instrument of geopolitical power. Little did I ever imagine how even more political it would become in the future!

Lesson 3: the Internet is a powerful political force. It is feared but also used by governments and militants. It is used by various stakeholders with strong political agendas.

For better? For worse? Only time will tell.

4. 911

A story about communication.

WTC image from wikipedia

On 11 Sept 2001, I lived in Manhattan. 7 minutes after the first aircraft struck the twin towers on that horrific day, my father called me from France. I lived midtown and was therefore thankfully safe and out of danger.

This is the last call that I received for nearly a week.

As the news of the emergency spread worldwide, telephone coverage was overloaded. The Mobile Phone network is the first medium that went dead, requisitioned by emergency services. “No network”, it said. Then it was the turn of landlines. You would pick up the handset and had a busy signal. A while later, I could dial all Manhattan numbers only. As the Island was closed to the outside world, we lived times of total isolation, whilst we had so much emotional outpour to tell.

But the local dial-up number for my ISP still worked. Although very slow (due to overloading), the Internet was my only means of telling all my friends worldwide about what was going on, and for the first three days after the disaster, I wrote a daily summary of what I had done/seen/lived. I wrote it while breathing the stench of burning plastic and grilled flesh that blew our way when the winds blew in our direction.

I learnt how resilient the Internet could be in times of disaster, be it 911, an earthquake, a tsunami. I learnt how important it was to have a connection to the outside world because believe it or not, being isolated in Manhattan, we felt alone. You have to understand how empty Manhattan was below 34th Street to understand what I mean. I had read about this kind of feeling when, a few years earlier, I received daily email updates from a friend of mine living in Anguilla in the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo.

This time, I was on the other end of the line.

To me, the Internet was a lifeline to my family and friends around the world. To emergency services, it was a means of communicating with a lot of people when the infrastructure was overloaded.

Lesson 4: with times of turmoil appearing on the horizon, we as a people need to be more and more in touch with each other and with the rest of the world. In order to survive, our civilization needs the Internet.

No Internet, no future. That’s all.

My experiences are no different than those of thousands and thousands of other Internet users. But I’ve come to realise that the Internet (and by that, I obviously also mean the Web) was shaped by the millions of experiences lived by its users.

This is what I would like to celebrate on One Web Day.

Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond, PhD.

http://www.gih.com/ocl.html

Welcome

2008-07-13T23:17:00.000+01:00

Welcome to my new Blog.

In this first message I would like to answer a few questions which you, the person reading this, might be asking yourself.

Why a Blog?
For many reasons, but mostly to express myself as well as taking part in a personal experiment that hundreds of thousands of other people worldwide have already taken part in. Writing a Blog is a worldwide cultural development and I did not want to be left-over not taking part in this, not experiencing this part of electronic life.

Why now?
Perhaps because this year is the 20th year that I have been using the Internet. Perhaps because July 14th is Bastille Day. Perhaps because the sun is shining out there and today is the first day of the rest of my life? To tell you the truth, it's been years since I've wanted to start something like this, but I've never had the time to do it. Today, I do.

What are you looking to achieve through this Blog?
Nothing and everything. I have entitled this Blog "Gnothi Seauton" - Know Thyself.
Could this be a purely hedonistic experience?

In reality, I hope to be able to stimulate thinking in a reader's mind, to stimulate their imagination, to allow them to bring the Best of themselves and why not, to stimulate their appetite for writing their own Blog. I am fully conscious that I might fail miserably at that exercise.

I also have opinions on a number of issues related to the Internet. I've seen this baby grow. I'd love to see it grow further. In 1988, I felt the Internet would revolutionize the world. It did, even though in this length of time, I came across dozens of powerful people deciding on my future, laughing at the concept that the Internet was something Big. "This is a hobbyist network", they said. "If you're lucky, there will be a maximum of 3000 users in England". "Banks and corporations will never want to be connected because it will be a security risk". "Our government will never allow access because it will destabilize the area". "Our culture is unique and we need to protect it" etc. etc.
What we all need to understand is that the extent to which the Internet will further revolutionize the world in the future will greatly surpass what's happened so far. We are still at pioneering stage. We have a tool in our collective possession that will either lead to World Peace or to World Destruction. How it turns out, is what we will make it to be. With my experience of "living" the Internet, I hope that I shall be able to, from time to time, make helpful suggestions which will benefit the Internet as a whole.

If all else fails, this will be a place where I can vent my frustrations and angers. I am looking forward to succeed but am also prepared for failure. Are you?

Who are you?
Find out by clicking on the relevant link.

How much time will you spend writing here?
I don't know.

Are you not concerned that some people will take your writings against you?
Are you not concerned that you'll die mute? God has given you a brain and a mouth to express yourself. Respect others and they will respect you. To those who will show no respect, forgive them, for they do not know what they are missing in Life.

Do you accept suggestions?
Of course. Dialogue is the whole point of this exercise. I've realised that thinking about a subject alone, one tends to focus on immediate pre-channelled cognitive processes already established in one's mind. Dialogue brings new ideas to mind. You like what I write about? Say it! You hate it? Say it too! You don't care? Well, please care enough to say it. Thanks! Just remember one thing: this is my Blog, so please respect my space and don't vandalise it. The line is thin, but it's there.

I'll stop here - this Welcome message is already too long. Enjoy the experience!