Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

I've been writing a bunch about transportation of late, and I got the chance to have lunch with Robin Chase, founder of Zipcar, and talk about the economics.

She proposes that we really need to make the true cost of our transportation visible to solve many of our problems (congestion, pollution, etc.) It's often been described just how much of a subsidy the U.S. and in particular California gives to the car driver, but to most people it's not too visible.

She's particularly interested in changing the rules on parking. We subsidize parking a lot. Most people are aware of the use of roadsides for free or cheap parking on public land. Robin proposes getting rid of the requirements that force building developers to provide adequate parking for their building. Most people think these are a good idea, because otherwise developers would not provide parking, and the cars coming to the building would suck up all available parking in the area and there would quickly not be any.

I get a lot of party invites by Evite, and it's very frustrating. I've missed some events because they refuse to improve their interface.

When I get event invites, I save them to a mail folder. Then I can browse the mail folder later to check dates. If I am not in front of my calendar (which alas is not available everywhere) I can go back and enter items I save.

TONIGHT, April 20th, there will be a debate on the issue of per-message charges for E-mail, sparked by the recent debate over Goodmail and AOL.

The debate will feature former EFF Chair Esther Dyson, who has become a surprising supporter of pay-to-send E-mail, and EFF Activist Danny O'Brien, NTK author and coordinator of EFF's involvement in the efforts against Goodmail. Esther is also publisher of Release 1.0, host of the PC Forum conference and former chair of ICANN.

Earlier, when proposing the term Schizophonic to describe people who wander the streets, waving their arms and apparently talking to themselves, I said the only difference between those folks and crazy homeless folks was the earbud.

I suggest we get manufacturers of phone headsets to donate the defective ones to the homeless. Then, they can wear and earbud and it will be much harder to tell the difference.

These days a lot of conferences are being recorded and even live broadcast on the net. So they make a rule that people asking questions must wait for the microphone, causing long pauses that ruin the momentum of a debate or discussion.

I recommend conferences doing this get one of those small parabolic microphones if they can (mount it on the video camera if there is operator controlled video) or give it to an assistant. They can point it at the asker, and then they can talk until a better microphone arrives.

Most people use wireless access points to provide access to the internet, of course, but often there are situations where you can't get access, or access fast enough to be meaningful. (ie. a dialup connection quickly gets overloaded with all but the lightest activity.)

There already are some drive-by-wire cars being sold, including a few (in Japan) that can parallel park themselves. And while I fear that anti-terrorist worries may stand in the way of self-driving and automatic cars, one early application, before we can get full self-driving, would be tele-operated cars, the the remote driver in an inexpensive place, like Mexico.

Now I don't know if the world is ready, safety-wise for a remote chauffeur in a car driving down a public street, where it could hit another car or pedestrian, even if the video was very high-res and the latency quite low. But parking is another story. I think a remote driver could readily park a car in a valet lot kept clear of pedestrians. In fact, because you can drive very slowly to do this, one can even tolerate longer latencies, perhaps all the way to India. The remote operator might actually have a better view for parking, with small low-res cameras mounted right at the bumpers for a view the seated driver can't have. They can also have automatic assists (already found in some cars) to warn about near approach to other cars.

The win of valet parking is large -- I think at least half the space in a typical parking lot is taken up with lanes and inter-car spacing. In addition, a human-free garage can have some floors only 5' high for the regular cars, or use those jacks around found in some valet garages that stack 2 cars on top of one another. So I'm talking possibly almost 4 times the density. You still need some lanes of course, except for cars you are certain won't be needed on short notice (such as at airports, train stations etc.)

The wins of remote valet parking include the ability to space cars closely (no need to open the doors to get out) and eventually to have the 5' high floors. In addition, remote operators can switch from vehicle to vehicle instantly -- they don't have to run to the car to get it. They can switch from garage to garage instantly, meaning their services would be 100% utilized.

Read on...

I've blogged several times before about my desire for universal DC power -- ideally with smart power, but even standardized power supplies would be a start.

GPS receivers with bluetooth are growing in popularity, and it makes sense. I want my digital camera to have bluetooth as well so it can record where each picture is taken.

But as I was drivng from the airport last night, I realized that my cell phone has location awareness in it (for dialing 911 and location aware apps) and my laptop has bluetooth in it, and mapping software if connected to a GPS -- so why couldn't my cell phone be talking to my laptop to give it my location for the mapping software? Or ideed, why won't it tell a digital camera that info as well?

April 1, 2006, San Francisco, CA: In a surprise move, Department of Justice (DoJ) attorneys filed a subpoena yesterday in federal court against the National Security Agency, requesting one million sample Google searches. They plan to use the searches as evidence in their defence of the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act.

Next week (Mon-Tuesday) I will be speaking at David Isenberg's "Freedom To Connect" conference, on an open net, in Silver Spring, Maryland (Washington DC.)

April 10 I will be at UCSB's CITS conference (Santa Barbara, obviously) on growing network communities.

The next week April 19-21 sees the annual Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop, always a good time.

See you there.

Today many services offer MRI scans for a fee. DNA testing services are getting better and better -- soon they will be able to predict how likely it is you will get all sorts of diseases. Many worry that this will alter the landscape of insurance, either because insurance companies will demand testing, or demand you tell them what you learn from testing.

Jeff Pulver is a giant fan of the SlingBox, a small box you hook up to your TV devices and ethernet, so you can access your home TV from anywhere. It includes a hardware encoder, infrared controllers to control your cable box, Tivo or DVD player, and software for Windows to watch the stream. The creators decided to build it when they found they couldn't watch their San Francisco Giants games while on business trips.

And I get that part. For those who spend a great deal of time on the road, the hotel TV systems are pretty sucky. They only have a few channels (and rarely Comedy Central, which has the only show I both watch on a daily basis and which needs to be watched sooner rather than later) as well as overpriced movies. But at the same time you have to be spending a lot of time on the road to want this. My travel itineraries are intense enough that watching TV is the last thing I want to do on them.

But at the same time it's hard not to be reminded of the kludge this is, especially hooked to a Tivo. And if you have a Tivo or simliar device, you know it's the only way you will watch TV, live TV is just too frustrating. I don't have Tivo any more, I have MythTV. MythTV is open, which is to say it stores the recorded shows on disk in files like any other files. If I wanted to watch them somewhere else, I could just copy or stream them easily from the MythTV box, and that would be a far better experience than decoding them to video, re-encoding them with the SlingBox and sending them out. Because of bandwith limits, you can't easily do this unless you were to insert a real-time transcoder to cut the bandwidth down, ideally one that adapts to bandwidth as the Slingbox does. And I don't think anybody has written one of these, because I suspect the MythTV developers are not that too-much-time-on-the-road SlingBox customer.

(Admittedly the hardware transcode would be useful, but a 3GHZ class machine should be capable of doing it in software, and really, this should just be software.) For watching live TV, if you cared, you probably could do that in Myth TV. If you cared.

So the SlingBox...

Two thoughts today related to global warming.

Many people fear that as the developing world starts developing more, it's going to want more fossil fuels, and will burn them like crazy and add more CO2 to the air. China is the country feared the most. As you can see in my many pictures from there they burn a lot of coal there and the air is most often hazy from it.

As I've written before, Google's Adsense program is for many people bringing about the dream of having a profitable web publication. I have a link on the right of the blog for those who want to try it. I've been particularly impressed with the CPMs this blog earns, which can be as much as $15. The blog has about 1000 pageviews/day (I don't post every day) and doesn't make enough to be a big difference, but a not impossible 20-fold increase could provide a living wage for blogging.

I've done a few threads on eBay feedback, today I want to discuss ways to fix the eBay shipping scam. In this scam, a significant proporation of eBay sellers are listing items low, sometimes below cost, and charging shipping fees far above cost. It's not uncommon to see an item with a $1 cost and $30 in shipping rather than fairer numbers. The most eBay has done about it is allow the display of the shipping fees when you do a search, so you can spot these listings.

For some time in my talks on CALEA and VoIP I've pointed out that because the U.S. government is mandating a wiretap backdoor into all telephony equipment, the vendors putting in these backdoors to sell to the U.S. market, and then selling the same backdoors all over the world. Even if you trust the USGov not to run around randomly wiretapping people without warrants, since that would never happen, there are a lot of governments and phone companies in other countries who can't be trusted but whom we're enabling.

New York, March 22, 2006 (CW) Bell South and AT&T, two of the remaining Baby Bell or "iLec" companies announced today, in conjunction with GoodPackets Inc., a program to charge senders for certified delivery of internet packets to their ISP customers.

William Smith, CTO of Bell South, together with AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre, who will be his new boss once the proposed merger is completed, made a joint announcement of the program together with Dick Greengrass, CEO of GoodPackets.

Very technical post here. Among the children of Unix (Linux/BSDs/MacOS) there is a convention that for a program to open a TCP or UDP port from 0 to 1023, it must have superuser permission. The idea is that these ports are privileged, and you don't want just any random program taking control of such a port and pretending to be (or blocking out) a system service like Email or DNS or the web.

This makes sense, but the result is that all programs that provide such services have to start their lives as the all-powerful superuser, which is a security threat of its own. Many programs get superuser powers just so they can open their network port and, and then discard the powers. This is not good security design.

While capability-based-security (where the dispatcher that runs programs gives them capability handles for all the activities they need to do) would be much better, that's not an option here yet.

I propose a simple ability to "chown" ports (ie. give ownership and control like a file) to specific Unix users or groups. For example, if there is a "named" user that manages the DNS name daemon, give ownership of the DNS port (53) to that user. Then a program running as that user could open that port, and nobody else except root (superuser) could do so. You could also open some ports to any user, if you wanted.

The phone companies failed at the fiber to the curb promise in most of the USA and many other places. (I have had fiber to the curb at my house since 1992 but all it provides is Comcast cable.)