The Mandelbear's Musings

Feels like it's been a long week. Um... ok, it's been a long, tiring week. Not enough self-care -- I need to walk more, and practice. Like most things that I know I'll enjoy and I know will be good for me, I don't do enough of them.

Spent quite a lot of time expanding my connections on LinkedIn and Facebook. I can see how that kind of thing can easily become an addiction. Neither, unfortunately, will import connections from LJ; I find myself duplicating a lot of effort. On the other hand, I'm finding people from my past. Can't complain, except about the number of hours in a day. At least this isn't Jupiter.

Also in the job search direction, took a lot of online courses on the LHH web, and one onsite.

Friday and Saturday we talked with people at our bank about our rollover IRAs. We can certainly get better yield on one of them; they're looking into the other. The side conversation proved that it's not just me -- salaries in general have not kept up with inflation since around 1970, and of course taxes have gone up at least twice as fast as inflation. So my buying power is probably only 75-80% of what it was when I entered the job market. :P

See all the pretty links.

Almost five years ago, we wrote about a project in Burlington, Vermont to bring fiber optics to residents there. The idea was that, rather than a traditional "municipally-owned" network, this would actually be owned by the residents themselves. The article focused on the work of economist Alan McAdams, who (it needs to be admitted) was the guy who not only sent me down the path of better understanding the economics of information over a dozen years ago, but also convinced me to start Techdirt in the first place. McAdams has been pushing for the idea that if the end users actually owned the network itself, you would end up with much greater broadband, in part because you might still end up with a single fiber network, but there would be significant competition of service providers on that network. And, indeed, it appears that's where the Burlington fiber project has gone. A more recent case study on the project suggests that, with a slow and deliberate pace, thousands of residents in Burlington now have access to the fiber network, and can choose their own ISP, if they want.

Tim Lee has now written about another example as well, where there's an effort underway in Ottawa (which is only about 170 miles from Burlington), to string up 400 homes with fiber, but where the individual home owners will pay for and own the "last mile" connection to their homes. This is definitely a test on a small scale, but it's a similar situation to what McAdams has been pushing for all along. Let the customer own the connection itself, and then get to choose the service provider. In the Ottawa case, once again, service providers would no longer have to worry about wiring up your home (the most expensive part), but just need to offer service at various peering points, and each individual could choose who to get service from.

This New York Times article (soul-sucking registration probably required) and this blog post that refers to it seem to have a wrong view of wireless networking:

There are two problems highlighted here, I think:

• We haven't done enough to make it clear why encrypting your wireless network is important.
• More importantly, wireless routers need to be secure out of the box. Users will not change their behavior unless the barrier for wireless network security is lowered as far as possible

Wireless networking is inherently insecure. I would much rather see wireless routers come out of the box with the wireless network wide open and just exactly as isolated from the wired network as the WAN port is. When I connect to an unsecured wireless network (and I won't allow any other kind in my house) I expect it to be exactly the same as connecting to the wild, wild Internet. I connect through a firewall on my laptop.

I'd go further and make it clear, legally, that an unsecured wireless connection is available for free public use. If you don't want the public to use it, encrypt it. Just as an encrypted network says "No Trespassing", an open network should say "public property -- please don't litter".