Category: Technology

Gopher

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Kottke on Gopher:

Gopher, developed in 1991 at the University of Minnesota, is a text-only, hierarchical document search and retrieval protocol that was supplanted by the more flexible WWW in the mid-1990s. Some servers running this old protocol are still alive, however. The WELL, an online discussion board and community that started back in 1985, is still running a Gopher server. If you’ve got a recent version of Firefox, you can check it out in its original Gopher-y state at gopher://gopher.well.com/ or with any web browser at http://gopher.well.com:70/.

I remember using Gopher (and being quite impressed by it) in the early 1990’s via a UW supplied dialup internet account.

This was before the growth of local ISP’s (Internet Service Providers). The UW told non faculty/students/staff to move on once the internet started to take off (1994?).

The Hard Disk That Changed the World

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Steven Levy:

The RAMAC, designed in Big Blue’s San Jose, Calif., research center, is the ultimate ancestor of that 1.8-inch drive that holds 7,500 songs inside your pocket-size $299 iPod. Of course, the RAMAC would have made a lousy music player. The drive weighed a full ton, and to lease it you’d pay about $250,000 a year in today’s dollars. Since it required a separate air compressor to protect the two moving “heads” that read and wrote information, it was noisy. The total amount of information stored on its 50 spinning iron-oxide-coated disks—each of them a pizza-size 24 inches—was 5 megabytes. That’s not quite enough to hold two MP3 copies of Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog.”

Yet those who beheld the RAMAC were astonished. “It was about the size of two large refrigerators, about as tall as a person stands, and though it used vacuum tubes, it was always running,” recalls Jim Porter, who worked at Crown Zellerbach in San Francisco in the mid-’50s and would proudly take people to the basement to see what he claims was the very first unit delivered by IBM. “It really turned the tide [in the Information Age],” he says. “It was the first to offer random access, whereas before you would have to wind a tape from one end to the other to access data.”

Google Knows Who You Really Are

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Scott Lemon:

It’s always fun to learn whole new layers of technology. What I’m posting about here is probably known by a lot of people, but my recent involvement in two new start-up companies has really started to have me think about the breadth and depth of data mining occurring on the Internet involving personal behavior and habits. And one of the largest harvesters of all of that personal information is Google. There are already others who cover this much better than I … Google Watch is one … however I still wanted to blog about this.

A Look at the UW’s “Broad” Stem Cell Patents

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Antonio Regalado & David Hamilton:

The broadly worded patents, which cover nearly any use of human embryonic stem cells, are held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, a nonprofit group that handles the school’s intellectual-property estate, managing a $1.5 billion endowment amassed during 80 years of marketing inventions.

John Simpson, an official at the foundation bringing the challenge, says WARF’s efforts to enforce its patents are “damaging, impeding the free flow of ideas and creating a problem.” Mr. Simpson’s group got involved in the dispute earlier this year after Wisconsin officials said they would demand a share of state revenue from California’s voter-approved stem-cell initiative.

WARF doesn’t charge academics to study stem cells, but it does ask commercial users to pay fees ranging from $75,000 to more than $250,000, plus annual payments and royalties. So far, 12 companies have licensed rights from WARF to use the cells, and more than 300 academic laboratories have agreements to use the technology without charge. WARF spokesman Andy Cohn declined to say how much the organization has earned from the patents so far but says it is less than what it has spent funding stem-cell research and paying legal costs.

FBI Plans New Net-Tapping Push

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Declan McCullagh:

The FBI has drafted sweeping legislation that would require Internet service providers to create wiretapping hubs for police surveillance and force makers of networking gear to build in backdoors for eavesdropping, CNET News.com has learned.

FBI Agent Barry Smith distributed the proposal at a private meeting last Friday with industry representatives and indicated it would be introduced by Sen. Mike DeWine, an Ohio Republican, according to two sources familiar with the meeting.

Manure Power

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Claudia Deutsch:

In fact, more utilities are thinking of buying the gas outright. Pacific Gas and Electric has agreed to transport gas from a big digester that Microgy, a digester manufacturer, is building in California. Right now Microgy plans to sell the gas on the open market, but Robert Howard, vice president for gas transmission and distribution, said P.G.& E. may buy some gas itself. “This technology provides pipeline-quality gas and reduces carbon emissions, so of course we’re in favor it,” he said.

The environmental boons are many. According to Agstar, digesters are already keeping 66,000 tons of methane from escaping each year into the atmosphere, while generating enough energy to power more than 20,000 homes.

And technologies, some of which have been around for decades, have finally grown more reliable. “There’s been a lot of time and energy spent on making these as effective and efficient as possible, so anaerobic digestion will be a growing business,” said Daniel J. Mannes, vice president of Avondale Partners, a securities research firm that recently initiated coverage of the Environmental Power Corporation, the company in Portsmouth, N.H., that owns Microgy.

Verizon’s 100mbps Broadband service

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This would be funny if it weren’t so sad – at least those of us stuck with very slow telco service:

The Actiontec router’s 100 Mbps capability allows Verizon to continue to provide higher data speeds to the customer, as they become available in the future, without having to install a new router or other equipment in the customer’s home. Verizon’s FTTP network is capable of providing such speeds. In addition, the new router allows Verizon to remotely assist customers in configuring it to meet specific needs within the home. Verizon also provides customers a business-class Internet firewall on the router.

“The ability to remotely diagnose problems and help the customer configure the router was a key goal for us,” Wimsatt said. “In-home networking can be complex, but we have the right people — and now the right equipment — to help the customer.”

Verizon is the only major telecom company building fiber-optics directly into customers’ homes, paving the way for an array of advanced and reliable voice, data and video services. The company is currently building the network in parts of 16 states. By the end of last year, Verizon had passed some 3 million homes with the new technology and expects to pass 3 million more this year. The company began building the network in 2004.

Where’s SBC/AT&T in all of this? They don’t seem to be spending their money on infrastructure….

BioPassword

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BioPassword (Authenticates computer users based on the way they type on a keyboard.):

BioPassword offers the only multifactor authentication software that combines the user’s login credentials (userID and password) with the behavioral biometric of keystroke dynamics (unique typing rhythm) to provide a low-cost accurate security solution that is specific to the user, requires no change in user behavior, monitors and authenticates credentials and is immediately deployable across the organization and the Internet without the need for expensive hardware tokens, cards or other security devices.

Net Neutrality

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Larry Lessig:

Apparent there are now allegations that SBC and Verizon forced the deals through DoJ when the designee for head of antitrust was on Senatorial hold for too activist an enforcement bent. DoJ cleared the deals and the hold was lifted. DoJ then ignored the amended Tunney Act and let the companies close the deals even before the judge did the Tunney Act review.

This is sleazy stuff, and it forms the real basis for being concerned about the games the network owners would play if free to play games. The really striking part of this (to me, a constitutionalist) is how the legislative branch keeps passing laws that the executive branch just ignores. And why ignore the laws? Corporate influence. That’s what this case reeks of.