SellASAP

Earlier this week Renee Blodgett was in town on her way back from PopTech and organized a gathering of some interesting people, including Burton Bruggeman, Vadim Yasinovsky, and a number of friends. Her PR Business has some interesting clients, including VideoEgg who recently announced a deal with Six Apart to add video to TypePad. I used it on my Typepad blog to upload the first two minutes (the maximum length) of a video of Convoq's forthcoming integration with Salesforce.com.

VideoEgg provides a 379 KB program which, when installed, allows uploading a wide variety of video formats, including 3gp, 3gp2, avi, dv, mpg, mpg4, mov, mqv, wmv, and asf. The videos are automatically converted to Flash using the codecs on the uploading computer. Take a look.

Breakfast with Dana Mead

I had breakfast this morning with Dana Mead, the Chairman of the  MIT Corporation, and a dozen other alumni of that distunguished institution.  In addition to the usual discussion of MIT's endowment and finances (it takes a lot of cash to keep places like that going) I learned a few really interesting facts:


- 47% of the entering students are women

- The Nuclear Engineering department is growing (maybe those sophomores know more than we do about where our energy is going to come from)

- There is a growing appreciation from the life sciences people of how they
need help from computer science and other engineering disciplines.

Video iPod

I just got one of the new color iPods.   Although Apple hasn't changed the name since they added video, they do refer to it on some of their tech support pages as "Fifth Generation"  I ordered it from the Apple Store and paid the $19.00 for overnight shipping.  Little did I know they were shipping it direct from Shanghai.

Like all recent Apple products, just opening the package was a beautiful experience.  The unit itself is slight wider and a lot thinner than its predecessor, holds 60 GB, and has a bright color display.

Bedsides the expected music videos, the iTunes store also sells episodes of a few TV series, such as Lost and Desperate Housewives and offers free video podcasts.  Some of them are quite amusing, although not all are in the MPEG4 or H.261 format required by the iPod.  You can convert them (or make your own videos) with Quicktime Pro, but conversion takes f o r e v e r - a twelve minute video took almost three hours to convert on a 2.1 GHz Pentium, but looks really good when it's done.

Level(3) vs. Cogent

The recent spat between Level 3 Communications, Inc. and Cogent Communications, Inc illustrates how the Internet is more fragile than most people would suspect.  In this case the problem is not technical but turns on the often obscure business arrangements that keep the bits flowing around the world.  In a story that got little coverage in the press except for a brief article in The Boston Globe and Slashdot, Level(3) decided it no longer wanted Cogent among the exclusive club of Internet service providers who share traffic without demanding payment from each other.

On October 7, Level(3) decided to disconnect their peering connections with Cogent.  While they may have been privately negotiating for months, Level(3) did not give any advance notice at all to its customers.  As a result, many people woke up to find that parts of the Internet were no longer connected to each other.  For example, customers of Time Warner Roadrunner (which was serverd by Level(3)) suddenly got errors when they tried to connect to Web sites that were on Cogent's network.

Why did this happen?  If you are a user of the Internet, the money you pay for your service goes for two things:  the transport provided by your local cable or phone company, and the cost for that company to connect to the Internet at large.  The latter cost gets passed up to increasingly larger companies until it reaches an exclusive club of Tier 1 Service Providers  who are so big that they don't need to pay anyone above them.  Rather, they trade traffic amongst themselves with no exchange of money.  Although these "peering" arrangements are really a bunch of seperately negotiated bilateral agreements, it all works out fairly well as long as each party thinks it is getting a fair exchange.  In the Level(3)/Cogent case, Level(3) apparently thought it was getting the short end of the stick.

While none of the players are talking publicly about the details, the conjecture on The North American Network Operators' Group was that Cogent has signed up lots of content providers while Level(3) had lots of content consumers.  Because of the hot potato routing used in the Internet, most of the cost is born by the ISP receiving the traffic, in this case Level(3).  This imbalance was doubtless more aggravating becuase Cogent was underpricing Level(3) in the marketplace.  What resulted was a poker game in which both sides gambled the the other side's customers would complain more loudly.  In the first round Level(3) blinked first and turned the connection back on, but they promised to disconnect Cogent again on November 9, so stay tuned for more details.

Full disclosure: Convoq uses Cogent as one of its providers.  We have our own AS and use Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) so most of our customers were not affected, but we do appreciate the way declining bandwidth prices allow us to support voice and video in a way that would not have been possible a few years ago.

Upgrading our home wireless network

This weekend my son Eric and I replaced our aging Apple Airports with a new Linksys WRT54GX2, allowing us to upgrade our home network from 802.11b to 802.11g and upgrade the encryption from WEP to WPA2.

The Linksys box does an amazing amount of stuff for under $100.  In addition to being a wireless access point it includes a router, firewall, DHCP server and 4-port switch, all in a small package with management via a web page or SNMP.

Unless you don't need encryption at all (e.g. a public access point) you really should upgrade to WPA.  WEP has been around long enough now and so throughly hacked that there are numerous programs any kiddie can download that will grab your packets until it has enough to figure out your encryption key.  See www.wardrive.net/wardriving/tools for some good examples.   One note of caution:  the passphrase that you are asked to enter is used to create the initial encryption key.  The term "passphrase" may lead some people to think that this should be an easily remembered set of words that you can find in the dictionary.  On the contrary, you will only need to type it in once per computer so you can pick a random string of characters.  This will prevent some hacker from using a dictionary attack to guess your key.  Just type in a good amount of gibberish and copy it to a USB flash-disk or put it in a text file you can access via your (wired) network.

The above advice is for WPA-PSK, as in "Pre Shared Key" - sometimes called WPA-home).  If you are setting up a wireless network for a business, you should set up WPA for authentication via Radius - a feature found on most servers.  That way you don't need to distribute the keys to each machine but can hand them out when users log in.

If you have relatively recent hardware, you can use WPA2 which supports even stronger AES encryption.  You may need to upgrade your software.  For Windows XP this means downloading support.microsoft.com/?id=893357 which is not offered on Windows Update .  The Linksys router allows you to turn on WPA and WPA2 simultaneously.  Don't be tempted to enable WEP and the same time, as your network is only as secure as the weakest link.

For further reading, I recommend:

opetus.stadia
www.wifialliance.org
www.wi-fi.org
www.drizzle.com
Microsoft
Microsoft Windows Server

Finally, if you want to get an idea of why WiFi is not limited to a short distance around your house, check out www.usbwifi.orcon.net.nz.