Author Archives: Scott C. Lemon

About Scott C. Lemon

I'm a techno futurist, interested in all aspects of humanity, sociology, community, identity, and technology. While we are all approaching the Singularity, I'm just having fun effecting the outcomes of the future!

Getting back into the conversation …

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It’s funny how some conversations come and go. I am getting back
into the Digital Identity conversation since the universe is obviously
prodding me to do so.

I was talking with Phil Windley last month at his CTO round-table and he was preparing to go to Digital ID World.
He invited me to go, however I just didn’t find a way to fit it
in. He mentioned that Craig Burton was going to be there … man
o’ man … what a hard choice to make … what a conference to
miss. I truly enjoy talking with both Phil and Craig about
identity.

Well … post conference, I have been hearing bits and pieces. I started to look at Craig’s blog, and he indicated that Kim Cameron started to blog about identity. Reading his blog, I found Dick Hardt’s blog, and his company Sxip.
Sxip seems to be doing some very cool stuff … and along the same
lines as what we were exploring with digitalMe at Novell.

I downloaded the various whitepapers about Sxip … and I’ll be posting some of my thoughts on what they are doing …

I enjoy getting back into the conversation …

FreeID.Org … My thoughts on Digital Identity

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I am returning to one of my topics of interest … Digital Identity.

Digital Identity is a subject of much discussion these days. It seems like
every company on the Internet is interested in digital identity, your identity,
collecting your identity, profiling your identity, or protecting your identity.
What is “Digital Identity”?

History
FreeID.Org was created by Scott C. Lemon to fully explore a new model of “digital identity”. Scott was the
original researcher and architect of Novell’s digitalMe initiative working for Mike Sheridan.
During his research he found a tight coupling between identity and community,
communications and collaboration. Soon after the announcement of digitalMe,
Novell executives chose to alter the path of the project and Scott took his
research outside. During the ensuing year he evolved his framework for
digital identity into whole new dimensions, and FreeID was born.

FreeID … identity can not be held by any one entity!
With
a small group of developers, FreeID has been taking
form. We actually slacked of for quite a while, but I
have a new interest in Digital Identity as I have found numerous
companies that are beginning to see the light. FreeID is a
directory-based solution to gather your entire lifetime of identity
information, and to distribute this information in an automated fashion
… including keeping this information up to date with the various
organizations that a person is related to.

The coming FreeID application is one which works around a set of distinctions
of digital identity that form a framework of individual interaction, and
interactions with organizations and communities. This application will be
released for free to anyone that would like to experiment with digital identity
in a whole new model … so stay tuned and check back!

Hardware virtualization layer …

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This article reminded me of the original Microsoft presentations on NT
and the Hardware Abstration Layer (HAL) that they were creating.
This is a good interview that covers a topics that is very important to
the coming virtualization products. It is projects like this that
are going to continue to push virtualization to be more and more real.

Interview with Philippe Gerum. This is an interview of Philippe Gerum, co-leader of the Adeos project.
The purpose of Adeos is to provide a flexible environment for sharing
hardware resources among multiple operating systems, or among multiple
instances of a single OS. [Advogato]

More NetWare to Linux conversion

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This last weekend I completed a one year project to migrate my core
mail services from Novell NetWare.  And it ended up going
amazingly smooth!

I run a mail server that is hosting e-mail for a number of domains, and
a large number of personal friends.  Over a year ago, as spam
became more and more of an issue, I realized that I was going to have
to move to a more “main stream” operating system and e-mail service to
gain the latest features.  I had been running the Mercury mail
server for years … however it lacked many things.

I started to look at the services that I wanted to support, and one of
those was the option to easily run TMDA.  From there … I found
qmail.

I was told that installing qmail was a pain, however I quickly located
the “LazyInstaller” for qmail … and it worked smoothly.  It
fetched the packages, built and installed the code, and even added
various options and patches that I wanted on the server – anti-spam,
SSL, IMAP, Web Management, etc.

As of Friday, I rolled the MX records on my server to the new qmail
server … there were a few hitches that I had to fix.  By
Saturday I rolled the CN records to point to the new server.  As
of Monday of this week … I am now running on qmail … with almost no
spam coming in … and all of my users in business.

I’ll post more of my experience from this week …

WISP.Org Forums are coming on line …

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We have the initial WISP.Org Forums
taking shape on our web site.  Please stop over and take a look at
the topics that we are creating.  Again, our goal is to create a WISP information resource
…  a place to discuss more than just the technical subjects, but
even more on the business choices and options … and impacts.  We
are also looking for any good tutorials that can be added to the site
to assist WISPs in learning more about upcoming solutions and business
opportunities.  We have already added WiMAX and MANET/Mesh forums
to provide information on how these solutions might contribute to an
overall WISP network.

We are also actively looking for moderators and contributors.  If
you want to lead discussions and have some expertise in a particular
topic, let us know!  If you just want to jump in and start a good
conversation, please feel free.  We also have a variety of authors
who are looking to contribute articles for the home page.  If you
would like to submit an article to be posted, please forward it to us.

We are open to ideas and assistance … we want WISP.Org to truly be a valuable resource.

WISPCON VI in Las Vegas

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WISPCON VI
was held last week – October 27th-29th – in Las Vegas, Nevada. It
was a great show, and demonstrated the constant evolution of the WISP
market. There were course during the show that covered a broad
range of topics, and the Trade Show provided vendors with a place to
show what they are up to.

One of the biggest things that I noticed at the show is that the sizes
of WISPs continues to grow with more and more customers signing up for
Wireless vs. DSL or Cable. There were numerous WISPs present that
had 1000+ customers … a sign of serious networking. And that
led to the next thing that I noticed: WISPs are growing up and
getting serious about business.

There have always been the larger serious players, however more and
more of the smaller WISPs are now moving to new classes of wireless
equipment, and adding new back-office capabilities. WISPs are
getting serious about FCC certified equipment, and the quality of
service they deliver to their customers. They are automating
network management, billing, and customer service.

All of this is great news for WISP.Org … as we continue to move
forward to our December 1st roll out. We are looking to provide
the broad range of business information and expertise to assist the
growing WISP to better understand the market, and their options!

The real game of bin Laden

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There are few people that can really understand the breadth of the
campaign that al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden are waging against the
United States of America.  This CNN article, about bin Laden’s newest message,
is a good indicator of what we are up against.  We are living in a
day and age where he is using extremely powerful patterns of attack …
not against us as individuals or our armies … but against our economy
and overall will as a nation.

Every time that I hear people minimize the value of being in Iraq, or
even our efforts in Afghanistan, I can’t believe that they realize who
we are up against.  We are living in an age where a group of
people felt that it was “appropriate” to issue “a warning” to our
country by flying jetliners filled with human beings, into skyscrapers
filles with human beings … killing thousands of them.  I have no
idea what people are thinking … a warning??  This was flat out
murder.  It was a blatant attack, and one that occurred on our
lands.

The amazing thing to me is that few of the American people seem to see
the long-term economic impact that the attacks on the World Trade
Center has caused.  There are the occasional news blurbs on the
victims being paid for their losses.  There are also the issues
that we see from time to time about the American airlines and their
negotiations with government and unions.  But few people are
really aware that the attacks of 9/11 caused differences in our
country, our freedoms, and our economy that will never be
corrected.  My children will never experience the world that I
grew up with … not that I expected that the world would not be
different … however I have to admit that I did not think they would
grow up in a world where the attacks of 9/11 would be diminished so
quickly in the press and the minds of the average American.  We
are now living in a new age where there are going to be more of these
acts of brutality … unless someone takes aggressive moves toput a stop to it.

Our way of life is under attack … I am not a person who feels that
falling back into a defensive position is how to deal with these
attacks.  We are going to see more of them … until we choose to
destroy the source of them.  If we don’t destroy it … it will
destroy us.  For those of us who believe that “destroy” is too
harsh a word … then consider the possibility that the consequences
for behavior that generates attacks like 9/11 have to become too severe
for the behavior to continue.

WISP.Org … coming soon …

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Several companies in the Wireless ISP market have all realized the
value of building community to increase the sharing of knowledge. 
80211.net L.L.C., working with TenX Networks, is glad to announce the coming of WISP.Org!

WISP.Org will be the on-line resource for Wireless Internet Service
Providers. Using current generation Open Source software (phpBB),
WISP.Org is going to create an on-line community that will tap into the
minds of leading providers of wireless products and services.

Stay tuned … look for updates … our planned rollout will be December 1, 2004!

Utah storms, and various outages

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We apologize to ur Wasatch County, Utah customers as we had quite a
week of storms … and problems … up here.  It turns out that
some of out new outdoor wireless equipment was not as waterproof as
they had hoped.  With the large storm system that came to the
county a week ago Sunday, we lost a total of three new pieces of
equipment due to water leaks.

The vendor was great about things.  We lost our main wireless
tower at our headquaters on Monday morning, after the initial front hit
us.  We exchanged this device with a spare that we had on
hand.  The next night – Tuesday – we lost that spare, and the Wing
Pointe apartments location.

On Wednesday, we were able to get the repairs completed with assistance
from the great folks at Euclid Timber Frames.  The vendor has
determined the problem and replaced our units.  We are back up and
running, and continuing to upgrade the network.