Into Tech

With green motoring all the rage, there’s always interest when a new non-fossil fuel method of getting from A-to-B crops up. This time it’s air, or compressed air to be precise, which the Taiwanese are hoping will help it deal with its chronic pollution problems.

Researchers Yu-Ta Shen and Yean-Ren Hwang of the National Central University in Taiwan have developed an air-powered motorcycle, which swaps gas for compressed air. Around 20% of the air pollution in Taiwan is caused by motorcycles, the most popular form of transportation.

Hwang explained:

For quite some time, we’ve been pointing out that all the fear mongering from lobbyists and politicians about a coming “exaflood” of bandwidth that will wipe out the internet unless ISPs are allowed to double charge for the same bandwidth, is something of a myth. Instead, it turns out that traffic appears to be slowing its growth trajectory somewhat. The latest to agree with this is Cogent, who supplies plenty of bandwidth, but actually found overall traffic decline last quarter. Apparently, the unstoppable march of bandwidth consumption isn’t as threatening as some would have you believe.

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A few years back, with the help of some pressure from US gov’t officials, Sweden tried to shut down The Pirate Bay. It worked for about a day until the site was back up. And, of course, the resulting publicity from the failed raid only brought The Pirate Bay much more attention. Earlier this year, a court in Denmark tried to get major ISPs to block access to the Pirate Bay. And, once again, all that really did was generate much more interest in the site.

At some point, you might think that officials would recognize that every time they try to shut down or block The Pirate Bay, it just ends up getting the site that much more traffic. But it looks like we still have a long way to go until that day comes. A prosecutor in Italy has told ISPs that they need to start blocking access to The Pirate Bay. Of course, such bans are totally ineffective, as The Pirate Bay has already set up routes around the blocks. So, nice work Italy. You’ve now helped to promote The Pirate Bay by trying to “ban” access to it.

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Remote control (RC) cars are dime a dozen these days so it’s nice to see a nice RC motorbike crop up, like this 1:12 scale Ducati from Silverlit. What’s really cool is that thanks to an in-built gyro, the rider can lean from from side to side when cornering fast, just like those lunatics at Donnington.

The throttle response can be adjusted to allow for fast, middling and gentle acceleration, which is handy if you’re a beginner and you don’t want to send your £50 investment hurtling out into traffic. There are spring suspensions too, allowing you get all Evel Knievel with some jumps. The key features are:

We’ve already explained why it’s rather silly for Congress to pass an outright ban of talking on mobile phones in-flight, but that probably won’t stop the effort from going forward. However, new research is showing how this may be even less necessary than many assume. First, contrary to the idea that most people are worried about in-flight phone use, most younger users seem to actually support it.

As for the concern that it would just be really “annoying”? It turns out that when you look at actual tests (what a concept), this turns out not to be a problem. Passengers develop their own etiquette for keeping quiet and not pissing off other passengers. In other words, social pressures can handle most of the worst scenarios without the need for any sort of law that bans it in all situations. But, of course, this is Congress we’re talking about. They’re not huge fans of basing laws on what actually happens, but on what will generate the best headlines.

Also, just to respond to some of the misconception in the comments to the previous post: the potential ban has absolutely nothing to do with the technology issues related to using mobiles on airplanes. It’s entirely about the etiquette/annoyance issue. Most of those technical issues have been worked out by putting a “picocell” on the airplane itself to redirect the voice traffic in a more efficient manner, rather than having the phones try to connect directly to towers on the ground.

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When it comes to talking cars, that smug KITT from Knight Rider comes to mind but the European Union has just reserved a chunk of the communications spectrum because we could all soon have talking cars.

The EU has reserved 30MHz of spectrum to allow cars to talk to each other about road conditions in an effort to reduce road deaths.

The thinking is that cars will be equipped with technology - yet to be decided on and standardised - that can detect poor road conditions and then wirelessly alert other cars and drivers via wireless communications. The system would also allow traffic management systems to alert drivers to dangerous roads, accidents and traffic delays via transmitters placed along roadsides. Special roadside warning signs would also be able to communicate with cars.

We’ve already explained how ridiculous it is for DHS to say that border patrol agents need to search laptops to prevent dangerous information from getting into the country. Obviously, if that was the intent of the individual, they’d just send the info electronically and not have to deal with any customs agents. Slashdot points us to a blog post by Steven M. Bellovin where he takes that same thought and flips it on its head, noting that, based on the DHS’s statements, DHS may believe that it also has the right to scan any data entering or leaving the country. On top of that, he points out that this could potentially mean that if you encrypt that data you send over a border (say, via a VPN), you could potentially be violating laws that bans “hiding” goods that you send over the border. While the courts have not at all ruled in this way, you could pretty easily see the government making this sort of case.

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While consultants, telco lobbyists and politicians keep insisting that the internet is on the verge of collapse as more high bandwdith apps and services move online, we continue to rely on the folks who actually understand what’s going on (and have access to real traffic reports) to give us a more accurate picture. The most reliable on this subject tends to be Andrew Odlyzko who has been calling the claims of a coming broadband crunch a myth for quite some time.

Broadband Reports points out that Odlyzko is back with his latest analysis of internet traffic (and he actually makes his data available). And, once again, he’s quite skeptical of any broadband crunch, noting that internet traffic appears to be growing at a rather predictable pace that can easily be handled by standard technology upgrades.

Actually, he notes that there’s even some evidence of that internet growth is actually slowing down. If anything, he suggests that broadband ISPs would probably be better served encouraging greater usage, because it looks like the growth rates aren’t keeping up with what they once were. He also notes that in other countries, where there’s much greater broadband than in the US, there isn’t necessarily a huge corresponding growth in internet usage — suggesting that, unlike what some claim, there is a point of bandwidth saturation (at least until new apps come along). So the next time you hear a politician or lobbyist insist that the internet is on the verge of collapse, point them over to Odlyzko’s data, and suggest that we should be focusing on ways to encourage more internet usage, rather than limiting it with silly and totally unnecessary things like metered broadband usage.

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You may have heard a lot about Google’s Knol recently, but you have probably never heard of HubPages. This is a pity, because while Knol is based on the same idea - inviting users to create pages on topics they know about - HubPages looks better, reads better, and is better organised.

I am being a little unfair to Knol, of course. The service was only announced in December, and opened to the general public on July 23. It will certainly improve. HubPages, by contrast, is already two years old, and Squidoo - another site based on exactly the same idea - is even older. But by learning from these pioneers, Google could have done a much better job with Knol.

Most of us have compared Knol to Wikipedia: they could have called it Googlepedia. But both Knol and HubPages do two things very differently from Wikipedia. First, they identify their authors, who take full responsibility for their own pages. Second, they provide a way to make money, though I suspect most contributors won’t make much.

Writing knols or hubs is therefore a competitive rather than a collaborative sport. A thousand people can all create pages about the same topic and hope the best one wins.

But there are also differences. Knol has a desperately dull home page with text links to articles about Upper Gastrointestinal Bleeding, Evolving Trends in Laparoscopic Surgery, and so on, and most of the featured articles are very academic. HubPages has a colourful invitation to “Publish your passion”. It features articles about Beatles album cuts, the Top 10 Most Expensive Items On eBay, How to Identify Poisonous House Spiders, and so on. It takes a populist approach.

Hubs are easier to browse than knols. HubPages uses tags to create subject categories such as Love, Health, Finance, Shopping and Business. You can also browse by author, request a hub if you can’t find what you want, and chat with other hubbers in the online forum.

In these respects, HubPages is more of a social networking site. If you like one of Shalini Gupta’s hubs, for example, you can vote for it, leave a comment, browse her other 260 articles, download some of her ebooks, and become a fan - she has more than 600 already. She’s popular partly because one of her subjects is writing hubs for profit.

So far, HubPages has published more than 50,000 hubs and attracts more than 5 million unique visitors per month. It also makes more than 90% of its revenue from Google Adsense advertising, and Google features HubPages as a case study. For a small start-up, this is success. Can that success continue now that Google has invaded its turf?

HubPages gets most of its traffic and almost all its money from Google, but what if Knol’s pages appear consistently higher in search results than those from HubPages, Squidoo and similar sites? Google’s search is closed and proprietary, so we have no way of knowing if it favours Knol unfairly. But we’re watching.

While I don’t think that passing laws in favor of net neutrality is necessarily the right way to go about things, it really is amazing to watch anti-net neutrality types completely make up bogus arguments in favor of their position. We pointed this out exactly two years ago, when lobbyist Mike McCurry wrote a blatantly bogus editorial, claiming that Google didn’t pay a cent for its broadband bills, and that it was arguing in favor of net neutrality to avoid having to pay for broadband. This was an outright lie — and I challenged McCurry to agree to pay Google’s bandwidth bill. Not surprisingly, McCurry declined — though, the organization he represents, Hands Off The Internet, has shown that it reads Techdirt and doesn’t mind quoting us out of context when it furthers its telco-funded argument.

Yet, here we are again, with anti-net neutrality supporters are making completely bogus claims about how net neutrality somehow prevents them from charging more. The Wall Street Journal is running an anti-Kevin Martin editorial, claiming that his decision to sanction Comcast for traffic shaping is a victory for net neutrality supporters, and then stating:

Net neutrality proponents…. would prohibit Internet service providers from using price to address the ever-growing popularity of streaming video and other bandwidth-intensive programs that cause bottlenecks.

That’s simply untrue. No one is saying they can’t charge more for bandwidth. Again, does anyone really believe that Google isn’t paying a ridiculously large bandwidth bill? Instead, as Tim Lee describes, net neutrality has absolutely nothing to do with price. What the telcos are really trying to do is get you to pay twice for the same bandwidth. That’s because internet connectivity has always been about paying for the connection from your home to the “cloud.” We each pay for that connectivity from the ends, to the middle of the network. So, note, all of those connections are fully paid for.

What the telcos are trying to do with breaking net neutrality is also get companies providing services to pay again for connectivity from that middle out to users. As you’ll recall, those users have already paid for that bandwidth themselves. So, the telcos are, in effect, looking to double charge for bandwidth already charged for.

This has huge implications when you think about it. After all, if everyone providing content and services to the middle also has to pay to deliver that to the ends, then it makes the initial connection that much less valuable. Telcos may be shooting themselves in the foot by trying to do this. In double charging companies for the bandwidth consumers are already paying for, they may make it such that consumers are a lot less willing to pay for it, since it will be a lot less useful. Note that none of this says that the telcos can’t charge what they want for the initial bandwidth — from the customer to the middle. Net neutrality advocates are simply saying it doesn’t make sense to then charge again to send content from the middle outward. After all, it’s already paid for, and who pays for “half a connection” anyway? The reason you pay for a connection is to get on the net. Not to get to the middle where the next tollbooth exists.

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