Status-Q

The core of the network neutrality debate is whether the people providing the ‘pipes’ – telecoms operators, in general – should be able to charge the big online companies, the Googles & Yahoos, for delivery of their content. If Youtube wants smooth playback of their videos on your screen, they may have to pay your broadband provider for a special quality of service.

Much of the controversy comes because this violates the ‘end-to-end principle’ which made the internet successful in the first place: the fact that you gave the network some data, and it did its best to deliver it, without any reference to what that data might actualy contain. Much of the innovation around the internet has only been possible because of this. Skype could not have become Skype if it had needed to ask permission from the network operators. The telecoms companies are now, partly because of the outcry, claiming that they’re really talking about better delivery of new services, not about restrictions on existing ones, but many people see this as a slippery slope to a bad place.

This week’s Economist has a good section on telecoms convergence, and I particularly liked this comment by Andrew Odlyzko:

The telecoms firms could even find that the boot is on the other foot, says Mr Odlyzko of the University of Minnesota. Referring to companies such as AT&T and Verizon, he asks: “What makes them think that they are going to charge Google, as opposed to Google charging them?” Cable companies, he points out, have to pay for the television shows and films they deliver over their networks.

It’s a good point. I’m lucky in that it would be fairly easy for me to switch broadband provider, and one thing that would make me do so very quickly would be if my current provider became unable to deliver Google’s services.

In the mobile world, of course, changing provider can be rather easier. My new T-Mobile 3G connection, for example, allows me almost unlimited data but includes a specific clause that allows them to downgrade my data connection if the use of VOIP protocols is detected. They offer a noticeably more expensive connection that doesn’t include this restriction.

Interesting…

David Linhardt, a notorious Chicago-based spammer, is suing the anti-spam organisation Spamhaus for nearly $12M in lost earnings.

This is ridiculous enough, but his suit is made more complicated by the fact that Spamhaus is based in the UK. Hurrah!

Now, however, thwarted by the fact that the UK seems to be outside the jurisdiction of the Illinois courts, it seems that Linhardt is trying a new tactic. Mmm. How to win friends and influence people in the 21st century…

ScanR is a lovely service. Take a picture of a document, whiteboard or business card with your digital camera or mobile phone. Email it to ScanR:

• to wb@scanr.com if it’s a whiteboard image – you’ll get back a nice clean PDF version
• to doc@scanr.com if a document – you get back a clean PDF that has supposedly been OCRed – the OCR didn’t really work for me, though the image was good.
• to bc@scanr.com if it’s a business card, and you get back not just an image but a .vcf file as well, which you can just double-click to put into your address book. On the card I tried, the text was OCRed perfectly but not put into the correct fields – however, all the data was there in the comments section, so I could find the card by searching for any of it, and copy and paste it into the right fields if wanted.

The nice thing, of course, is that you can do all of this directly from your phone. If you have a phone with a camera in it, which at present I don’t…

I don’t know about you, but I’m always sending Google Maps locations to people who are coming to visit. I usually type in my postal code and send a link to the resulting map, with a bit of explanation:

“Here we are. Well, actually, we’re not quite here, we’re at the end of the street and on the other side of the road, but this should give you an idea of how to find us.”

I wanted to do something better than this, and while I knew all kinds of sophisticated things were possible with a bit of Javascript and the Google API, I just don’t have the time to play with this at present, much to my chagrin. So here’s my quick guide on how to create a useful, short URL that will really tell people where you live, and will take them to something like this:

Here’s how I got this:

1. If searching for placenames or postal/zip codes doesn’t give you a good enough location, you need to use latitude and longitude. If you have a GPS handy, you can just step outside your front door and take a reading.
2. If not, then you need to find your location some other way. In the UK, I suggest going to Streetmap and getting an approximate fix using your postcode. You can click on the map to move the pointer to the right place. Then, at the bottom of the page, find the little link saying ‘Click here to convert/measure coordinates’. This will give you the location in a variety of forms. Make a note of the decimal version of your Lat and Long. For me these were 52.194421 and 0.107796.
3. If you’re in another part of the world, or Streetmap doesn’t work for you, you can find your Lat & Long on Multimap.com at the bottom of the page. Click to zoom in and it will show the position of the last point you clicked.
4. OK, now you’re armed with your approximate location, head back to Google Maps and in the search box type the lat and long separated by a comma or a space. This should take you to something that looks pretty familiar.
   
5. I wanted to get a more accurate fix, so I switched into Satellite view and tweaked the numbers until the arrow pointed pretty much at my front door. (We’re blessed with nice high resolution images here in Cambridge.) Remember, increasing the frst number will move the pointer up, and increasing the second will move it to the right. Keep your changes small – you probably want to play with changes around the 4th decimal place or so.
6. Now, add the label you want, by putting it in parentheses after the coordinates:
   52.194405, 0.1074 (Quentin and Rose)
7. Choose the view you prefer. For this purpose I like the Hybrid one, which overlays the road names on the satellite view.
8. When you’ve got it how you want it, use the ‘Link to this page’ link at the top right of the map to get a URL that represents the current state. On my Mac, I just right-clicked it to copy the link.
9. For a final neat touch, go to TinyURL and paste this URL, which may be rather unwieldy, into the box on the TinyURL front page. That will give you a nice short address like this: http://tinyurl.com/ps2xw, which does the same thing. Make a note of it, or store it as a manually-created bookmark.

After this you have a handy URL short enough to memorize, that you can email to friends, dictate over the phone or even send in a text message, and that will bring them right to your front door!

Here’s a site which does a simple job but does it rather nicely:

World Meeting Planner

It helps you work out the best time for phone calls or videoconferences which span multiple timezones. You just enter the location of the participants. It’s not too hard to do this in your head for a simple phone call, but when you get more participants and you don’t know the timezone of some of the countries, it can be more challenging!

Thanks to Mike Pearson for the link. He’s in New Zealand.