Vox is a service operated by 6Apart, and except for a brief period this morning it has been working fine all day, including at the time I am writing this (obviously!)
Livejournal is another service owned and operated by the same 6Apart, yet with the exception of a brief hour or so in the late afternoon it has been down all day, and is down again now.
Interesting, then, that if the one company operates both services it chooses to only 'keep live' the one it is presently launching, rather than the one which has hundreds or thousands of paying users ...
During the last four days I've been attending the IGF conference in Athens, Greece organised by the United Nations to discuss the future of the internet. Sadly, however, I wasn't there in person but was an on-line attendee. There are, however, benefits to this like not having to queue for lunch or coffee (I can retrieve it while 'in the room') or, indeed, having to get out of bed in order to be in the main conference room and get a question put to the panel! Instead of sitting on an uncomfortable chair I am in my big comfy swivel one at home watching the proceedings via a full-screen video stream @ 331k with concurrent translation when I need it. I've also got access to an IRC-like chatroom where there are other remote participants plus some people in the room, and the interaction there has been very useful, with technical asides and political discussions taking place alongside the presentations. http://igf2006.intgovforum.org/ was the conference website.
As I have commented there on a number of issues and need somewhere to 'archive' them, Vox will do the job!
-----------------------------
So I'm watching the 'live stream' from the conference and looking at the mix of empty seats and people actually attending in person. To attend a conference online is nothing new for me, I seem to regularly do so for a range of meetings (and it means I can get unlimited good coffee too) but I am already very aware that the attendees are majority white, majority male, and, dare I say, majority well older than the average internet user.
I was at a conference last week where the subject of "Citizen's access to information in a globalised world" was a main topic (The 2006 Belgo-British Conference) and there too there was lots of discussion around the area of management and control of the people who have access to post their thoughts, rather than ideas of how to enable an increasing number of people to have completely free and open access. So far the IGF seems to be of the 'restriction' side rather than the 'open it up' side.
I shall hope that improves ...
It is an interesting list of options that are being presented here as alternatives, when most of us would surely agree that all are issues which need to be dealt with for the betterment of the internet and the user community.
However, is not "Spam, phishing, security" something more for the end user (and writer of end-user browser software) than for the management of the internet itself? and aren't "Freedom of speech", "Governance", "Copyright" and "Access" the more general issues that will affect growth and reach?
The annoyance of spam (and that is all it is, an annoyance that can be dealt with) would probably be welcomed by those who currently have no access whatsoever ...
(followed by a reply from Ivor Deacon)You wouldn't expect that a newspaper takes responsibility for every small ad, that a telephone carrier has responsibility for every conversation that takes place on its lines, etc. so why should the internet infrastructure be required to have responsibility for what is carried on the IP traffic across that network?
It is for every individual in the world to caveat emptor, not for the ISP, ICANN or whomever to do it on their behalf.
---------------------Wed 1 Nov | Security
The DNSSEC and rootserver discussion just finished was highly interesting, albeit losing some its edge by being audio-only. Part-way in I noticed I'd lost connectivity to this website though, but as I still had the audio stream thought little more about it, there not being a chatroom for the workshops.
The Register, however, at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/01/un_site_dies/ has just commented that the site fell over, allegedly because of too many users! Could I express my surprise if that was the actual reason given as, from my direct experience over the last few days, the number of users in the chatrooms and blogs has been remarkably small (indeed I could suggest that the UN would be better off if it had covered the costs of people 'attending online' like myself to attend in person instead of supplying this web-based facility! nudge, nudge ...)
My own view though is that these remote participation facilities have been very useful, if limited in certain areas, and I for one appreciate the efforts that UN and local conference staff have made to enable such participation.
----------------------
Whenever there is an intersection between engineering and politics there will be issues over the detail. McTim suggests that it would be a kludge, inherently complex and an overhead on the control of the system, and of course s/he is correct. However as we are all aware, technical issues exist for the enjoyment of engineers to overcome them, and even if there were start-up issues they would not appear to prevent this idea from happening.
But the politics is the thing. Some countries - notably the USA - believe that they have put a majority of the effort into creating the internet and should, therefore, maintain a level of control / co-ordination / supervision over its future management. Others, not surprisingly, believe that this could become a threat at some point in the futre and, whilst neither side is wrong, neither side is completely correct either.
Someone once said "You can't get there from here" and it probably applies to the way we have DNS routing under IPv6 currently, in that we need some organised method of determining those inter-node routes. Either this is a SPOF solution close to that we have currently, or we go to something with more resilience and less likelihood of failure (accidental or externally intended). But whilst we can - technically - create a sensible, secure, verifiable and maintainable solution to this problem and which would also accept the multi-lingual improvements that we so need for the next expansion phase of the internet, persuading the current vested political interests will, in my opinion, very sadly prevent that from happening, or at least delay it significantly.
Week after next I'm heading to Brussels and Frankfurt for meetings, and whilst the first will be on the Eurostar the second will be by plane from London City. But it got me checking the new requirements ^H^H^H^H demands on hand luggage, and I realised that they have become - effectively - sexist.
As a very frequent flyer on business in years gone by, I used to do the 'get everything into the carry-on bag' so that I didn't have to wait anything up to an hour for someone to get the luggage off the plane, transport it to the terminal, put it on the wrong conveyor, and then wait for it to hit a carousel, This could be a saving of at least 30 minutes at each end, so making the trips less tiring (and being first to the taxi rank!)
Now though, while most men can still do this, most women cannot!
Because we have makeup (foundation is a liquid so banned) and toner/cleanser (more liquids), and keep our nails trimmed/cleaned (sharp objects are banned), etc. Yes, I supposed on each trip the first thing one could do on arrival is go shopping, but that would cost time and be wasteful of money too.
Seems to me that these new rules help the men get out the airport first ...
According to a report today based on a YouGov survey for BT [1], "Women over 50 will be the best bosses in the future because they understand the importance of flexible working, according to research from BT."
"The emphasis put on trust and strength of relationship between employers and employees points to the fact that women, and in particular women over 50, are the ideal management role model in this increasingly flexible business world."
Well, I can find that a resonable concept and I've certainly had 'flexibility' throughout my working life, being office-based, home-based and 'laptop & mobile phones'-based at different times.
I'm also 50 (alledgedly!) and wide-open to offers!
(Find my résumé at http://www.alisonwheeler.net/ !)
I've been reading this for quite a while now. I've loved RAH's works since I first discovered them when I was around 8 or 9 (the first book I actually bought for myself was his Red Planet and I still have it) but although I knew this was coming out last year I managed to miss buying it, then couldn't find it anywhere. One sunday though I mentioned the book to my ex (who now owns a bookshop in Scotland) and received a copy in the post a week later!
Although I stormed into it at first - it being absolutely wonderful to find 'new' writing from Uncle Bob - it is actually a very difficult book to wade through, and I've slowed right down. The reason, basically, is that this was actually his first ever book. Before the short stories; a full novel. It was never published way back then though (easy to see why!) but for the lover of Heinlein you can spot throughout the book the ideas and concepts that you've since learnt to love, along with the humour and the view of the interaction between the sexes!
So here we are, or rather here I am although, given the multiple personalities I have demonstrated on other blog services (around 14 LJ personal accounts, plus Wordpress, Moblog, MySpace etc) maybe I should stick to the "we". Anyway, whilst I have tended to use my <username not based on my 'real' name> LiveJournal for most things instead of my <username like this one is> on the grounds that I don't want to have to log off then on again repeatedly during the day and prefer not to run multiple browsers at the same time just for the purpose (or stand-alone clients) then maybe having two reasonable services able to be open at once might solve that issue.
We shall, as they say, see.
... or read ;-P
We didn't choose to "keep live" one or the other. Vox is a new service and as such has the... read more
on Services Apart?