Category Archives: Technology

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Once upon a time it used to be easy to find free wifi. If you needed to check your email or do a bit of work while on the go it just used to be a matter of popping into the nearest coffee shop.

But increasingly these pools of signal seem to be drying up, sometimes being replaced by costly pay-for-access hotspots, sometimes vanishing entirely.

The few free (as in beer) access points still around are increasingly not free (as in freedom) to access. Many force you to enter personal details, which is, at best, time consuming if you just want to read your email while drinking your coffee, and, at worst, downright invasive. Others, like the one at my former favourite office away from home, are now requiring you to ask for an access token – again, not something you’re going to do if in a hurry or if you are just there for a coffee.

Some coffee shops (Costa I’m looking at you) have even gone to the point of requiring you to join their rewards club and / or turning off all the power points so you can’t recharge.

All of these measures give a sense that they don’t really want their customers to use the wifi they’re providing.

What could be the reasons behind this trend I wonder? Here are a few off the top of my head…

People aren’t drinking enough coffee

One possibility in the above coffee shop example is that people are setting up with their laptops, monopolising a table, and not drinking enough coffee. I think this is probably because they are engrossed in what they are doing, or are unwilling to leave valuable laptops unattended while ordering, rather than necessarily scamming the store for the free wifi.

Regardless of the reasons it is obviously a problem, but one I’m pretty sure could be solved by having table service, and the availability of accessible wifi and readily available coffee and tasty nibbles brought to your table while working would certainly make me spend more money.

Times are hard

Thanks to government overspending, the collapse of the banking system, and a few illegal wars, times are hard and we’re all feeling the pinch. Perhaps the idea of giving away something for nothing (even if that something costs nothing to provide) may not seem as attractive a prospect as it once did.

Collecting user details seems to also be a bit of a cynical attempt to monetise the customer in new ways.

The Digital Economy Act

I think that it is more than just a coincidence that the decline in open wifi started happening after Labour’s disastrous digital economy bill was bullied through parliament by the BPI.

This bill transfers liability for anything illegal that an internet user does to the person who pays the bill, meaning that a coffee shop would be responsible for any copyright infringement performed by their customers.

This is obviously a strong disincentive for anyone wanting to run open wifi in their place of business, and runs counter to the stated aims of the bill (the real aims of course being to further entrench established monopolies, but that’s a subject for another rant blog post).

Myself, I’m thinking about just getting a Mifi on Giffgaff and giving up on the whole ubiquitous wifi concept, but that seems like admitting defeat. This doesn’t seem to be a problem elsewhere in the world, what are your thoughts?

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The Raspberry Pi is a tiny, solid state, and ludicrously cheap hobby ARM based computer designed in the UK (but thanks to insane UK tax laws needs to be built in China). It has a USB port, video, sound, an Ethernet port, 256MB RAM, and can run 3 distinct flavours of Linux.

Ostensibly the device was developed with the aim of getting kids to code, and as someone who grew up with the UK hobby computing scene of the 1980s and cut their programming teeth hacking games together on the ZX Spectrum, this is something I can thoroughly get behind.

The blurb from their website:

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming.

Coming out of Cambridge and with a decidedly hobbyist feel to it, the Raspberry Pi could almost be the spiritual successor to the humble and much loved Speccy. If it can get more kids coding then that’s all for the good, especially if it gives the UK tech scene a much needed shot in the arm.

This is not the reason why I’m excited.

Small. Capable. CHEAP.

The Raspberry Pi is tiny, which means it can be put in tiny things. It is low power and solid state, which means it doesn’t need much juice to run (4 AA batteries will do the trick) and it can take a fair amount of abuse.

Above all, it is cheap, and this is why I’m really excited. They are certainly something you can afford to buy more of than a traditional computer, even on a modest budget. I’d go further and say that they are so cheap that they can be thought of as practically disposable general computing units… this is game changing.

The reason I am really excited about this is that all these factors combine to make them the perfect choice for the control computer for any number of appliances or devices, and it reduces the barrier to entry for the home hacker to start putting some really cool things together.

I don’t think it will be long before we start seeing countless hobbyist developed bits of hardware; from internet radios, to cheap NAS appliances, right through to remote sensor platforms, robots, drones and maybe even spacecraft. Given the number of bits of Lego sent to the edge of space recently I don’t think this is too far off!

Increasingly you don’t need to wait for a company with a massive fabrication plant to see a market for a product in order to get one, but now micro-manufacturing is something you can do in your own home. I can think of hundreds of gizmos I could spend countless afternoons building with a Raspberry Pi at the centre.

I can’t wait to get my hands on one!

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The Domain Name System – which much of the internet is built on – is a system of servers which turn friendly names humans understand (foo.com) into IP addresses which computers understand (111.222.333.444).

It is hierarchical and to a large extent centralised. You will be the master of *.foo.com, but you have to buy foo.com off the .com registrar.

These top level domain registrars, if not owned by national governments, are at least strongly influenced and increasingly regulated by them.

This of course makes these registrars a tempting target for oppressive governments like China, UK and the USA, and for insane laws like SOPA and the Digital Economy Act which seek to control information, and shut down sites which say things the government doesn’t like.

Replacing this system with a less centralised model is therefore a high priority for anyone wanting to ensure the protection of the free internet.

Turning text into numbers isn’t the real problem

It may not be an entirely new observation here; the problem of turning a bit of text into a set of numbers is, from a user’s perspective, not what they’re after. They want to view facebook, or a photo album on flickr.

So finding relevant information is what we’re really trying to solve, and the entire DNS system is really just a factor of search not being good enough when the system was designed.

Consider…

  • Virtually all modern browsers have auto complete search as you type query bars.
  • Browsers like Chrome only have a search bar
  • My mum types domain names, or partial domain names, or something like the domain name (depending on recollection) into Google

For most cases, using the web has become synonymous with search.

Baked in search

So, what if search was baked in? Could this be done, and what would the web look like if it was?

What you’re really asking when you visit Facebook, or Amazon or any other site is “find me this thing called xxxx on the web”.

Similarly when a browser tries to load an image, what it’s really saying is “load me this resource called yyyy which is hosted on web server xxxx on the web”, which is really a specialisation of the previous query.

You’d need to have searches done in some sort of peer to peer way, and distributed using an open protocol, since you’d not want to have to search the entire web every time you looked for something. Neither would you want to maintain a local copy of the Entire World.

It’d probably eat a lot of bandwidth, and until computers and networks get fast enough, you’d probably still have to rely on having large search entities (google etc) do most of the donkey work, so this may not be something we can really do right now.

But consider, most of us now have computers in our pockets with more processing power than existed on the entire planet a few decades ago; at the beginning of the last century the speed of a communication network was limited by how fast a manual operator could open and close a circuit relay.

What will future networks (and personally I don’t think we’re that far off) be capable of? Discuss.