Iran: A nation of bloggers from Mr.Aaron on Vimeo.

“On June 12, 2008, Earthlink Wireless plans to disconnect their municipal WiFi service in the City of Philadelphia. For the sake of being timely, I am releasing my unfinished documentary about the joint program between Earthlink Municipal WiFi and the local non-profit, Philadelphia Wireless, forgoing further editing and technical corrections.”

its too bad that this initiative didnt go anywhere. the digital divide is a hard subject to grapple with. giving people wireless access is one thing but what if they dont have anything to use to connect to the wireless. was there sufficient support for users? connecting a windows machine to a wireless network can be hella annoying sometimes, well any device for that matter on that network. the OLPC was for third world countries, laptops were still pricey and the eeePC wasnt on the horizon yet when the intiative launched so was there a need for such a large rollout, not to be classist or anything but trying to be realistic. the goal of covering an entire city in wifi is a lot to bite off especially for a company that doesnt know the city all that well. how much penetration does earthlink DSL have in this area? look at verizon a major player in the area cant even get their FiOS going to a degree to compete with comcast. and to be blunt what major initiative has the city been able to pull off successfully lately anyways. single stream recycling?

movie below

Change is in the Airwaves: A Documentary about the Philadelphia Wireless Initiative from George Rausch on Vimeo.

official NASA image.
yea i am a nerd. what?

its easy to diss on earthlink and the failed philly wifi initiative but history shows this is a huge undertaking. if silicon valley couldnt pull it off i think that should raise an alarm. covad, a major provider of bandwith, is “is hoping to cover one square mile of downtown San Carlos, California for three months, and during the test period it will gauge just how lucrative such an initiative is.” the key word being lucrative. providing wifi isnt cheap but being a bandwith provider already i think should help things along. as scary as this is to say, who in philly is in the position to pick up philly wifi and run with it? comcast? verizon? both very hated companies in the region.. should be interesting especially with the wide roll out already in place in philly who will come and rescue the project.

during the day it is funny to see who is broadcasting what they are listening to via their IM status. this little piece of information leaked a few guilty pleasures on my ipod to the world. a few eagle eyed people caught me listening to the gogos. yea so. bite me. anyways,i was thinking how funny it would be to take this technology and apply it to web browsers and the front most tab. broadcast what you are currently viewing on the internet. yea people would get caught lookin at pr0n or whatever but it would also be another way to learn about new sites. bring the idea of stumbleupon to another level of sorts. anyways. i just want to see what dirty sites my friends look at.

stumbled onto this article outlining a feature/flaw in the itunes rental schema. according to the post unless your new HDTV is capable of decoding HDCP (High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) it will be unable to play the movie you just rented from the itunes store. this is another case where people trying to legitimately purchase a digital download but will be forced by the content industry to “pirate” it instead. this sucks cos i just bought an appletv over the weekend and am unsure as to whether my tv is HDCP compliant.

the library of congress took a $3mill “grant” of technology and services from microsoft in return for placing kiosks with the vista OS and redo the website using silverlight. this makes me sad. vista is a piece of crap. silverlight is only compatible on vista. an institution such as the library of congress should not be wrapping public works in proprietary and non-interoperable locks.