June 29, 2006
U.S. Supreme Court Rejects Military Tribunals at Guantanamo
Score one for the rule of law. See Reuters article (spelling seems OK).
Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 16:43 under Politics
No Comments
News Travels Fast
Wow! Let’s take a look at where that news item about the Mobile Web Best Practices has gone as of yesterday evening. You can tell which are based on the Reuters article and which are based on the original W3C Press Release by how my name is spelled.
www.cio.com (They’ve unfortunately reenforced the cookie misquote.)
physorg.com (Hey — it looks like these guys may have read some of the actual best practices document! Bonus points for Physorg.com.)
Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 9:10 under Mobile Web, W3C
No Comments
June 28, 2006
Reuters Misspelled My Name
Reuters did a great article on the Mobile Web Best Practices. Too bad they misspelled my name, misquoted me and got about 2 out of 4 facts wrong. Now I know that I have a name that invites misspelling, but honestly I expected better from Reuters. BBC news didn’t seem to have any problem with it, although they did quote me out of context and in opposition to (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee, which was a bit irksome. On the factual side, the W3C has 405 members - maybe Reuters meant the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices working group, but I guess that’s too subtle a distinction for professional journalists. Also, I didn’t say that “cookies do not work on cellphones.” I said that cookies do not work on some phones (oh - there’s that subtlety problem again). There are some good parts of the article though. The word “mobile,” for instance, is used correctly.
Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 11:51 under Mobile Web, W3C
3 Comments
June 10, 2006
W3C to Help the NSA Snoop Social Networks?
Here’s an interesting article on the unintended consequences of social networking. Basically, it is reported that the NSA is snooping social networking sites (with the juicy twist that it plans to do so using Semantic Web technology - more on that later). This seems to fit into the category of “examples of why it’s important to have some kind of user-controlled trust / privacy layer in the fabric of the Web.” Who should be able to see information you put online (including your links to others and the nature of these links) and who shouldn’t? P3P addressed some of these issues but it was never widely adopted. Liberty Alliance has built some interesting technology standards around federated identity, but they are not user-centric, they are provider-centric and they do not really cover privacy. An interesting effort called Dix seems to blend the two approaches, but after a quick read of some of their use cases, it doesn’t seem that they cover “prevent the government from snooping my network.”
Or is laying ourselves open to government surveillance the price we pay for living more of our lives in the digital realm?
Discuss!
By the way, on the whole Semantic Web issue, I think the link they are drawing in this article is tenuous at best, but it is true that the Semantic Web architecture is likewise lacking a coherent identity and trust mechanism.
Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 19:32 under Politics, W3C, Web 2.0
8 Comments
June 6, 2006
GoGo MoMo
Mobile Monday is really hitting its stride. We held our 8th event last night and the turn-out was good (we filled the space), the speakers were fantastic, the demos were… interesting, and the “vibe” during the reception was great. We tried to capture that feeling for the podcast by roving around with a camera and interviewing various attendees. Can’t wait to see how it turns out!
Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 9:28 under Mobile Monday
No Comments
June 5, 2006
Laptops in the Tube
Here’s an interesting trend: I am seeing more and more laptop usage in the Tube these days. To the New-Yorker in me, it would be unthinkable to get out my laptop and start typing away on any kind of public transport — the rest of the passengers in the car would start fighting over who got to keep your hard drive. But hey — this is London and people are little more polite I guess. Anyway it got me thinking about how to bring WIFI connectivity underground. I figure you could do it with a kind of wireless mesh network set up in the tunnels. The Tube drivers know when to stop and go because of signal lights that are placed set distances from each other along the track. You could put a network node on each signal light and voilá — ubiquitous connectivity underground. I wonder if this could be done with “off-the-shelf” equipment?
Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 9:14 under London, Mobility
1 Comment
June 1, 2006
Blackberry Wishlist Item #459
I want the ability to prioritize email when I read it on the Blackberry. Whenever I read my email on the blackberry (say when I’m on my way to work on the Tube), there are always a few that I want to flag for later review or reply. For example, I might read something and say: “Oh! That’s really important. I have to reply to that, but in order to do so I’ll have to reference some document or call someone or otherwise do something that can’t be easily done on the Tube.” In these cases, right now all I can do is leave these emails in an unread state - and hope I’ll remember when I get in to work. It would be great to be able to flag them - it would be even better to be able to annotate those flags with notes or tags.
Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 9:13 under Mobility
3 Comments
I'm an American Ex-Pat living in London, I'm
a father of two and husband of one, I work for 