Category Archives: The Brain

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Peer to peer and community proxies will wipe this out …
If you read this article, you might get the idea that people can track down your geographic location accurately when you are cruising the web. Although this is true for now, it is becoming easier to “mask” your location with simple peer to peer or community proxies.

A proxy is a machine that someone places on the internet which allows you to “relay” your web requests through. Any web site that you then visit will see the requests coming from the proxy, rather than your computer! In the example in the article, if you were to locate a proxy in the UK, you would be able to visit the UK gambling sites since they would see the traffic coming from a UK computer … not yours in the US.

This entire situation gets more and more complex as more people allow for the sharing of computing resources on their laptops and home computers. As the desire for more privacy increases … at least among groups of computer users … I believe that people will begin to install proxies to share for a variety of purposes …

Geolocation will not have a chance against these types of proxies and relays …

Geolocation Enables Internet Borders [Slashdot]

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Continuous connectivity … even in the air …
As I continue to look at the ways that we will be “always connected to the net” I can see that the number of “gaps” in conmnectivity is constantly decreasing at an ever quickening rate. We are now going to have Internet connectivity while flying!

I have recently been leaving my laptop – equipped with an Orinoco/Lucent 802.11b wireless card – on all of the time. As I go from home, to various offices, and to friends houses, I am starting to observe the amount of connectivity that I have. And the “gaps” in my connectivity – the time that I am “off the net” – are getting smaller and smaller. I even noticed lately that it is becoming a “driveway to driveway” experience … I don’t lose my 802.11b access till I am driving on to my street, and I regain access in the parking lot of one of my clients!

With the purchase of my new generation of wearable computers I am looking at the new cellular data services to see how I can cheaply have “low speed” access almost all the time. What’s cool about this project at Boeing is that I’ll now be covered while traveling on the various airlines.

An always connected world is not too far away …

FCC Approves Airline Internet Service. The Federal Communications Commission has approved Boeing’s Connexion service, putting high-speed Internet at the fingertips of flying passengers one step closer to realization. [Product News]

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A very cool proxy/redirection script …
I have recently been working on learning Perl. It’s a fairly amazing and flexible language, there is a ton of open source code written in Perl, and it’s available for almost every platform out there.

In looking around recently, I found this Proxy script that is a very powerful script. It provides a flexible proxy for HTTP and FTP that can strip various content, manage cookies, and provide nearly anonymous browsing. There are a whole slew of things that I can think of possible using this code. The author even added a number of features similar to the Crowds proxies with groups of proxies.

I’m going to install this on a couple of my servers and do some experimentation. If you want to see a demo of this, visit the authors homepage and he has a demo version up and running!

CGIProxy 1.5. Anonymizing, filter-bypassing HTTP proxy in a CGI script (in Perl) [freshmeat.net]

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802.11b Bundle includes VPN software …
This is a very interesting bundle, since it is one of the first that includes some VPN software to provide security over 802.11b WLANs.

VPNs are one of the best solutions for security in these scenarios, since they provide security of communications over ANY medium … both wired and wireless!

Palm Targets WLANs. Offers bundle with WLAN card [allNetDevices Wireless News]

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Distributed memory spaces for distributed applications …
One of the key requirements for an effective distributed application is a distributed memory space … something discussed by David Gelernter in Mirror Worlds.

This particular implementation has some interesting twists … an XML version tuplespace, implemented as a SOAP service. A very cool idea!

Rogue Wave release XML tuple space implementation. Ruple
is a technology that allows disparate applications to collaborate,
and is an implementation of Linda tuple spaces. [xmlhack]

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Art and Music … very cool article and site …
This is a “must keep” web site … this guy is extremely creative. Not only is he modifying toys and other sounds producing devices in artistic ways, he is adding jacks and pitch controls so that they can be used by bands! You too can plug a noisy kids toy into your amp and add a whole new dimension of sound to your bands music!

Tech Toys Become Modern Instruments [Slashdot]

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Web Services and Information availability …
I really liked reading about this project since it truly shows the level of information that can be obtained via the web. This raw information, and making raw information available, is what will allow wide ranges of web services to be made available … and whole new generations of distributed applications to be created.

Imagine the web service that uses this weather data to automatically suggest outdoor (or indoor) activities in a city based on the temperature and weather. Or even forecasting the likelyhood of star gazing that evening, and suggesting what to wear.

Web services are going to be massively distributed applications which build on the raw data, and eventually provide a user interface – through a browser or other visual/audible notifications. In between these two ends will be more services built on top of other services and raw data … massive networks of objects communicating with each other using standardized protocols.

So this is a cool raw data source … 😉

GoWeather 2001.10.24. Graphically displays current conditions and 5-day forecast for a location. [freshmeat.net]