Author: David Solomonoff

#SharetheNet: Support Cuban Net Freedom, Community Networks on #GivingTuesday

Posted on by David Solomonoff
 #GivingTuesday

The Internet Society New York Chapter (ISOC-NY) is now supporting other organizations that share our vision of open technology for social good.

Today, Tuesday, December 1, ISOC-NY sponsors our first crowdfunding campaign as part of #GivingTuesday, a global campaign for charitable giving as an alternative to Black Friday.

#SharetheNet will fund Apretaste, an initiative that brings Internet access to Cuba, and NYC Mesh, a wireless community network in NYC.

This is a critical point in the evolution of the Internet:Will the Net remain open and accessible to all – or locked down by repressive governments and corporate monopolies?

The ISOC-NY answer to that question is:

Empower Internet users to build their own Net and share it!

We’re asking your help to raise $152,000 in 24 hours to to make this happen.

Every dollar you give helps the open Net.

For Apretaste:

  • $6 provides one Cuban Internet user access that bypasses government censors
  • $120 connects 20 Cubans to the Net
  • $480 funds 80 Cubans to the Net as well as the development of an online encyclopedia, maps, store and weather service

Help Apretaste now

For NYC Mesh:

  • $65 buys a router with open source software for an NYC resident so they can cut the cord to monopoly ISP’s
  • $480 buys an antenna and sector radio to improve WiFi reception in lower Manhattan and the North and South side of Brooklyn
  • $2400 creates a supernode that connects one neighborhood to the next

Help NYC Mesh now

This is also a critical point for ISOC-NY – we’re asking for your help so our Chapter can take the lead in building an Internet that is truly for everyone.

There are many ways to get involved in #GivingTuesday. I encourage you to join the movement and visit www.givingtuesday.org to learn more about how you can make a difference.

Thanks!
David Solomonoff, President ISOC-NY

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What infrastructure is needed for positively disruptive technology?

Posted on by David Solomonoff

Cosponsored by Disruptive Technologists

and the New York Chapter of the Federal Communications Bar Association

Infrastructure in this sense could be physical (fiber in the ground) – or open source software, legal/policy, etc. – more broadly any type of support structure.

This will be the beginning of ongoing initiatives to address the issues raised and follow with hackathons afterwards. A major component will be the development of standards and protocols for new Net-connected technologies with consideration of the social and ethical issues as machines become intelligent. We’ll also explore innovative funding methods for these projects using digital currencies.

David Solomonoff, President, Internet Society of New York

November 11, 2014

Brooklyn Law School

Fell Hall, 205 State Street, Brooklyn, New York

10:00 am to 8:00 pm

Admission: $20.00

Students with valid ID admitted free of charge

RSVP here

Zephyr Teachout, New York gubernatorial candidate, organizer, educator, and scholar

Teachout is a constitutional and property law professor at Fordham Law School. She is a deeply experienced leader in the fights for economic and political equality and against concentration of wealth and control in the hands of the few. She is one of the leading legal experts on corruption.

Timothy Karr, Senior Director of Strategy, Free Press

Timothy builds on Free Press’ grassroots and policy work to promote universal access to open networks and protect free speech everywhere. Before joining Free Press, Tim served as executive director of MediaChannel.org and as vice president of Globalvision New Media. He has also worked extensively as an editor, reporter and photojournalist for the Associated Press, Time, Inc., the New York Times and Australia Consolidated Press. Tim critiques, analyzes and reports on media and media policy for the Huffington Post.

Serene Han, Ideas Engineer, Google

Technological initiatives to help people confront threats in the face of conflict, instability, and repression

Dave Burstein, publisher, DSL Prime:

Wireless Engineers predict 50x improvement in capacity; How do we make it so?

Spectrum should be WiFi and less licensed. WiFi wiil do more and more, becoming increasingly crowded. Mobile carriers, using existing spectrum, can increase their capacity using MIMO and more with little or no increase in capex. Logical policy: All newly available spectrum go to WiFi/unlicensed.

Bob Frankston, Ambient Connectivity – merging wired and wireless telecom infrastructures

Co-creator with Dan Bricklin of the VisiCalc spreadsheet program and the co-founder of Software Arts, the company that developed it. In recent years, Frankston has been an outspoken advocate for reducing the role of telecommunications companies in the evolution of the internet, particularly with respect to broadband and mobile communications. (remote)

Sander Rabin:  Neurosecurity, National Security and Cognitive Liberty

Sander Rabin, a physician-attorney, is the executive director of The Center for Transhuman Jurisprudence, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is education in human enhancement and the development of policies and model rules of law for human enhancement that protect our rights to our minds, bodies and genomes, while minimizing human enhancement’s potential for divisiveness and harm.

Nate Heasley, Executive Director, Goodnik

Goodnik has developed a labor-backed digital currency for information workers to share resources with non-profits and for-profit companies with a social mission.

Nate has been working as a manager of and consultant to  non-profit and technology related companies for 20 years. Nate also founded GrassrootsCamp, an organization that provides free training seminars to non-profit organizations and social entrepreneurs. It is from that experience that Goodnik started as a way to broaden the impact of those events and ideas from that community. Nate holds a BA from St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD and a J.D. from Fordham University School of Law where he was a Crowley Fellow in International Human Rights and a Stein Scholar for Public Interest Law and Ethics.

Jim Dutcher, CIO, State University of New York, Cobleskill

How broadband is transforming rural America and what is needed now

Panel: Bitcoin and related cryptocurrency-related technologies

• Margaux Avedison, Moderator. Co-founder of EvotionMedia, a “Crypto-Media” production and finance entity. She is on the advisory board of the Bitcoin Shop and organized the first Bitcoin Education Day on Capitol Hill as an Advisor for the Chamber of Digital Commerce.She also consults for banks, individuals, large corporations and venture capitalists on Bitcoin and Blockchain 2.0 technology.  She is an early entrepreneur in the digital currency space and relaunched the first American Bitcoin Exchange, Tradehill, in 2012.

• Erik Anderson, Chairman, WC3 web payments group. Lead/Senior Software Engineer for much of Bloomberg’s Charting, Technical Analysis, Trading Strategies, Data Science, Interactive Data Visualization, Backtesting and Technical Analysis Screening, Core Graphics Infrastructure, math/Quants Developer, Financial Services

• Attorney Jeffrey Alberts, Partner in Pryor Cashman’s Litigation Group. Head of the firm’s White Collar Defense and Investigations Practice. Jeffrey’s practice focuses on government investigations and prosecutions and related regulatory proceedings, asset forfeiture and money laundering litigation, victims’ rights representation, and complex civil litigation. Jeffrey is an experienced trial lawyer who has served as lead counsel in numerous trials, including civil and criminal federal jury trials, state jury trials, and state and federal bench trials. Jeffrey has represented clients in disputes involving virtual currency. He also has been quoted by the media concerning criminal prosecutions of virtual currency service providers and government seizures of bitcoins. Immediately prior to joining the firm in 2013, Jeffrey spent six years as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, where he investigated and prosecuted a wide variety of white collar criminal offenses, including money laundering, securities fraud, bank fraud, mail and wire fraud, and bankruptcy fraud.

• Adam Krellenstein, Co-founder Counterparty. Lead developer of counterpartyd; chief architect of the Counterparty Protocol. Counterparty is a free and open platform that puts powerful financial tools in the hands of everyone with an Internet connection. By harnessing the power of the Bitcoin network, Counterparty creates a robust and secure marketplace directly on the Bitcoin blockchain, extending Bitcoin’s functionality from a peer-to-peer payment network into a full fledged peer-to-peer financial platform.

  • Patrick Deegan CTO, ID3 Chief Architect. ID3 is developing a new social ecosystem of trusted, self-healing digital institutions. This endeavor seeks to address the severe structural limitations of existing institutions by empowering individuals to assert greater control over their data, online identities and authentication.

Panel: Hear Me, Touch Me, See Me, Feel Me: Moving Natural User Interface (NUI) to the Mainstream

This panel discussion will explore the world of NUI and what it will take to move today’s emerging NUI technologies (voice recognition, Kinect, haptics, facial recognition, etc.) into widespread adoption and make them accessible to all.

  • Deb Benkler, Moderator. Co-founder of NUI Central – NY, the largest NUI group on earth and is known as NYC’s leading NUI evangelist. She is a practitioner of lean and logical UX focusing on best practices in the broader context of CX (customer experience). In 2012, she won a User Experience Award for her work on the Maryland Transit Administration Interactive Maintenance Kiosk, which incorporated facial recognition.
  • Ken Lonyai Co-founder of NUI Central and is known as the other NYC leading NUI evangelist. He’s a 15+ year veteran of user centered interactive project development including some of the industry’s most unique experiential systems. His skills span the on-line world and nearly every realm of human/computer interface used by brands and retailers – mobile, interactive kiosks, experiential displays, etc. He is a User Experience Award winner.
  • David Melville is a Research Staff Member at IBM. He has worked in the area of semi-conductor fabrication and nano-technology, exploring meta-materials and techniques for optimizing illumination and patterning masks for photo-lithography processors before making a jump to developing visualization and interactivity solutions for smart-grid projects. Most recently, he has been exploring what it means to interact with learning systems and working to establish a new era of computing experience.
  • Sean Montgomery is head of hardware at Ringly, the first fashion ring to manage your mobile device. He’s an engineer, professor, and new-media artist in New York City. While finishing his Ph.D. in neuroscience, Sean began to consider the fact that from the perspective of a neuron inside the human brain, both a cold winter day and the embrace of a loved one feels like a sequence of electrical impulses. Sean co-founded SENSORSTAR Labs, an agile R&D consulting group in New York City.
  • Tanya Kraljic is a Principal Designer for Nuance’s mobility division. Her work focuses on the strategy and design of speech experiences in mobile, wearable, in-home, and other emerging technologies. Prior to joining Nuance in 2010, Tanya earned a PhD in cognitive psychology, with an emphasis on adaptation in interactive spoken dialog.

ISOC-NY and Disruptive Technologists cosponsor events

Posted on by David Solomonoff

We’re excited to cosponsor two events with the Disruptive Technologists!

Details on the first below. We’ll follow with an all-day event at Brooklyn Law on November 11 with panels providing a more in depth look at a wide variety of new technologies to be followed with hackathons to fill gaps in their realization.

Please join Disruptive Technologists for a panel discussion moderated by:

Bruce Bachenheimer, Professor & Director, Entrepreneurship Lab at Pace University, NYC

Panelists:

1. David Rose, VC & Serial Entrepreneur, New York Angels, Gust.com

2. Jessica Singleton, Digital Director at Office of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio

3. Chez Mee, Brand Innovation Strategist & Serial Entrepreneur

The financial crisis of 2008 was an inflection point where Mayor Bloomberg was widely credited for reinventing the traditional Wall Street Economy through technology entrepreneurship. Yet some criticized his success as having been more of a wealth creation model for a narrow section of the City.

Are we now at a second inflation point? At the recent press conference in Dumbo to announce Digital.NYC, the City’s new hub for tech and startups, Mayor Bill De Blasio talked about his new technology initiatives. So this brings up the question: Will things get worse or will they get better? What will happen to the gains made by the Bloomberg Administration? Or will there not even be a new inflection point, and things will remain the same? What does it take to make a successful tech ecosystem?

Disruptive Technologists is an organization dedicated to finding out what makes Disrupters tick – what they are thinking, how they do what they do and then inspire, promote, support, mentor and advise  in order to future Disruption in NYC through tech. We do this through the weekly publication DisruptiveTechnologists.com, monthly panels through our organization Digital Technologists in NYC and through our monthly newsletter. We also report on and cover new Disrupters and attend the hottest events in order to spread their Disruptive words.  We offer an intimate look at this new breed of tech entrepreneurs and their innovative products and services.

Join us for the event to hear from some of the most qualified, dedicated, and passionate Disrupters in the business.
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Internet Society Board of Trustees Seeks Input on Strategic Planning

Posted on by David Solomonoff

Please add your input in the comments. I’ll compile and forward – David Solomonoff, President, ISOC-NY

At its 13 April meeting in Beijing, the Internet Society Board of Trustees finalized a framework of strategic guidance to help steer the direction and objectives of the organization:

Advance the Internet Society as a leader on Internet policy/governance, technology, and development on a global, regional, and local basis, achieved through:

  •     Strengthening and defending the open development and evolution of the Internet, including open Internet standards, technology & infrastructure development, deployment and innovation
  •     Advancing the open, participatory, multi-stakeholder model of Internet governance and policy approaches that support Internet principles and user-centricity
  •     Bridging the digital divide by growing Internet connectivity and capabilities throughout the world, with special emphasis on developing regions
  •     Advocating for the open, global Internet for all the world’s people

In addition, the Board also agreed that the overall thrust of ISOC’s current vision, mission, values and principles remain relevant to the organization today and provide a useful grounding for the organization and its strategy going forward.
Process

They are working on an accelerated timeline to meet the objectives and milestones for the strategic and business planning approved by the Board of Trustees.  Objectives include to:

  •     Identify key trends likely to impact the future of the Internet over the next 5-7 years, and possible implications on the Internet Society’s work and mission.
  •     Identify options for how the Internet Society can deliver the most impact on its mission into the future, including identifying potential gaps, new opportunities and strategic choices for the organization.
  •     Using the Board Strategic Guidance and these trends as context, define key impacts and related goals for the organization.
  •     Propose to the Board strategic options and alternatives for achieving key impacts.
  •     Recommend high-level resource allocations to implement strategic options approved by the Board
  •     Incorporate robust community consultation into the process.

Where or on what Internet issues and challenges do you believe the Internet Society is having a significant impact?  (If possible, stories or examples of how the Internet Society has made a difference would be appreciated.)

Why do you believe the Internet Society has been successful in addressing those issues and challenges?  What are the unique attributes, strengths, assets, or capabilities of the Internet Society that have contributed to that success?

Looking 5 – 7 years out into the future, what do you believe will be the issues and challenges that the Internet and the Internet Society will need to address or be prepared for, including in your particular region or location?

What attributes, strengths, assets, or capabilities do you believe the Internet Society will need to be successful in meeting those future challenges?

Are their any other considerations we should take into account moving forward?

 

In Brief

Posted on by David Solomonoff
  • CircleID reports on Vint Cerf’s views regarding Government’s Role in Internet Broadband Access: “Perhaps the Internet should be treated more like the road system. You don’t have multiple roads going to your house for example. Instead, it is a common resource.”
  • ars technica discusses how bandwidth caps could lead to ISPs benefiting from piracy. But they predict that the profits to be made from charging high bandwidth users a premium will also create an incentive for ISP’s to filter content suspected of copyright infringement. They also cover the recent survey results by the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Internet and American Life project suggesting that the US broadband market is edging towards saturation. The study suggests that there are still significant untapped
    markets for broadband – but they would require significant investments in
    infrastructure or lowered prices. 14% of those surveyed said they simply couldn’t get broadband in their area. By contrast, British Telecommunications (BT) claims more than 99% of British households have access to broadband, although speeds remain an issue for those in rural areas.
  • Dan Brickley talks about how the recent court decision requiring Google to turn over YouTube user logs in the Viacomm infringement suit has broader privacy implications. With the Social Graph API, a new Google service, personal information from YouTube accounts that
    was already public is increasingly accessible to automated processing.

FCC Announces Public Hearing on “Broadband and the Digital Future”

Posted on by David Solomonoff

The Federal Communications Commission today announced a public hearing to be held on Monday, July 21, 2008. It will be held at 4:00 p.m. (Eastern Daylight Time) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The hearing is open to the public, and seating will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Continue reading →

FCC requests comments on plan for free, censored broadband

Posted on by David Solomonoff

We previously reported that the FCC plans to provide universal wireless broadband with content filtering. In a press release on Friday, June 20th they request comments on the plan to license access to the 2.1GHz Advanced Wireless Spectrum (AWS). The winning bidder must use 25% of the spectrum for free two-way broadband Internet service at a minimum rate of 768kps downstream. They must be able to provide the free service to 50% of the U.S in four years and at least 95% by the end of the 10-year license term. Continue reading →

Supreme Court to review case of independent ISP vs. AT&T

Posted on by David Solomonoff

US Supreme CourtThere’s been some discussion on the ISOC-NY discuss list as to whether a free market solution or government initiatives are best way to improve broadband access in the U.S. Part of that discussion is the question as to whether there actually has been an open and competitive market for broadband services.

A case where an independent ISP, Linkline Communications, alleged that AT&T charged excessive access fees that prevented them from competing in the broadband market will now be reviewed by the Supreme Court. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco had ruled against AT&T but the Bush Administration’s Office of U.S. Solicitor General sided with AT&T, maintaining that federal antitrust laws don’t cover the LinkLine claims. Continue reading →

Paris ICANN meeting to discuss reform of representative structure

Posted on by David Solomonoff

Some reforms may be made at the the upcoming Paris meeting of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) on June 23 – 28 which could greatly improve ICANN’s representative structure. In a nutshell, representation of noncommercial users (public interest groups, NGOs, and individuals of a public interest bent) will be increased from its current 14%, possibly to 25% or one-third. This will also involve a change in the nature of noncommercial interest representation in ICANN.

ICANN’s Noncommercial Users Constituency (NCUC) is inviting all civil society organizations with an interest in the Internet and its global governance to be aware of this and take advantage of it.

The Internet Society of New York is a member of the NCUC and has also applied to become an At-Large Structure (ALS), which participates in the appointment of members of the At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC). Continue reading →

ICANN accepting comments on PIR’s implementation of DNSSEC for .ORG

Posted on by David Solomonoff

PIR logoThe Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is opening a comment period on the Public Interest Registry’s (PIR) proposed implementation of DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) in .ORG. The Public Interest Registry (PIR) is a not-for-profit corporation created by the Internet Society (ISOC) and is a major source of funding.The Internet Society of New York is a Chapter of ISOC.

DNSSEC digitally signs DNS records but doesn’t encrypt DNS traffic. DNS responses are validated as legitimate and not hacked or tampered with. This ensures users don’t get sent to phishing sites when requesting a legitimate website. DNS security has increasingly become a concern, with DNS being prone to this type of attack, as well as being vulnerable to distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks such as the one that temporarily crippled two of the Internet’s 13 DNS root servers last year. Continue reading →

IPv6 finally coming to root DNS servers

Posted on by David Solomonoff

The current IPv4 protocol used on the Internet is running out of the addresses needed to accommodate the growing number of users online.

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the organization responsible for giving out IP addresses in North America, says that 19 percent of the IPv4 addresses are still available, while 68 percent have been allocated and 13 percent are “unavailable,” whatever that could mean. There are 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses, or 2^32. IPv6 has 2^128 addresses, or 16 billion-billion.

There have been efforts to get more mileage out of IPv4 by using tricks like conversions to IPv6 or using duplicate IPv4 addresses within a firewall. This has helped extend the lifespan of IPv4 but it only prolonged the inevitable.

Until now the biggest obstacle to IPv6 has been the fact that IPv6 address information is not included in most of the root DNS servers that power the Internet. DNS (Domain Name Service) is the Internet service that translates domain names such www.example.com into the numeric IP (Internet Protocol) addresses such as 198.105.232.4 that are actually used to connect computers on the Internet.

Starting on February 4th, at least one of those adoption barriers will be addressed as records for IPv6 addresses are added to four of the key root DNS servers. The inclusion of the IPv6 records could make the adoption and operation of IPv6 a more viable option for network operators.

Former CTO of the OLTP project describes challenges to providing connectivity in developing nations

Posted on by David Solomonoff

In an interview with ACM Queue, Mary Lou Jepsen, former CTO of the One Laptop Per Child (OLTP) project describes some of the technical challenges to providing Internet connectivity in developing nations:

The whole machine is a different class of computing environment, and it’s aimed at a different set of users. You can’t get there by taking a classic office productivity laptop and cost-reducing it.

It’s pretty hot in much of the developing world, so we’ve designed a laptop that can take extreme heat …. half the kids in the world don’t have electricity at home. Half the kids. Eighty percent of the schools that we’re going into don’t have electricity. So we had to design a laptop that was also the infrastructure. It has mesh networking …. solar repeaters and active antennas …. If one laptop in a village is connected to the Internet, they all are.

There’s truly so little power in the developing world. If a school is wired, it tends to be on a generator, and there’s one 60-watt light bulb per classroom. Generators make really weird power. Usually what comes out of the wall in most countries is 50 or 60 hertz, or somewhere in between. With generators, the frequency of the AC power can go down to 35 hertz. We therefore had to do really interesting power conditioning on the AC adapter. The laptop itself can take between negative 32 volts to 40 volts, and work well with anything from 11 to 18 volts. You can plug a car battery into it. You can plug a solar panel into it. A hand crank can produce enough energy to power the battery for some time, as can a bicycle or a windmill. India has this cow-dung system that creates methane that drives a generator. Even that will work.

Via Slashdot