Google has announced that it is backing HTC and Android in the patent feud between Apple and HTC. Google wasn’t named in the suits, but HTC builds its Nexus One device.
A patent expert is warning that if Apple wins its patent suit against HTC, HTC could be forced to remotely cripple some of its smartphones. [...]
By Jonathan Fildes
Technology reporter, BBC News, Oxford
Crack teams of volunteers keep the net online and functioning, according to leading internet lawyer Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard University.
The way data is divided up and sent around the internet in many jumps makes it "delicate and vulnerable" to attacks or mistakes, he said.
However, he added, the "random acts of kindness" of these unsung heroes quietly keep the net in working order.
Professor Zittrain’s comments came at the TED Global conference in Oxford.
Incidents such as when the Pakistan government took YouTube offline in 2008 exposed the web’s underlying fragility, he explained.
But a team of volunteers – unpaid, unauthorised and largely unknown to most people – rolled into action and restored the service within hours.
"It’s like when the Bat signal goes up and Batman answers the call," Professor Zittrain told BBC News.
Blind faith
The fragility of the internet’s architecture was largely due to its origins, said Professor Zittrain.
He said it had been conceived with "one great limitation and with one great freedom".
"Their limitation was that they didn’t have any money," he told the TED audience in Oxford.
"It’s like dark matter in the universe. There’s a lot of it, you don’t see it but it has a huge impact on the physics of the place"
Professor Jonathan Zittrain
Harvard University
"But they had an amazing freedom, which was that they didn’t have to make any money from it.
"The internet has no business plan – never did – no CEO, no single firm responsible for building it. Instead it’s folks getting together to do something for fun, rather than because they were told to or because they were expecting to make money from it," he said.
That ethos, he suggested, had let to a network architecture that was completely unique.
"As late as 1992, IBM was known to say that you couldn’t build a corporate network using internet protocol."
Internet protocol (IP), the method used to send data around the internet, was first described by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1974. Data is broken into chunks – or packets – and sent around different parts of the network, often owned by different corporations and entities.
Professor Zittrain likened it to how a drink may be passed along a row of people at a sporting event.
"Your neighbourly duty is to pass the beer along – at risk to your own trousers – to get it to its destination."
"That’s precisely how packets move around the internet, sometimes in a many as 25 or 30 hops with the intervening entities passing the data around having no contractual or legal obligation to the original sender or to the receiver."
The route the data takes depends on the net’s addressing system, he said.
"It turns out there is no overall map of the internet. It is as if we are all sat together in a theatre but we can only see in the fog the people around us.
"So what do we do to figure out what is around us. We turn to the person on our right and tell them what we can see to the left and vice versa.
This method, he said, gives network operators a general sense of "what is where".
"This is a system that relies on kindness and trust, which also makes it very delicate and vulnerable," he said.
"In rare but striking instances, a lie told by a single entity within this honeycomb can lead to real trouble."
Bucket brigade
One example, he said, was an incident in 2008 when Pakistan Telecom accidentally took YouTube offline.
At the time, the Pakistan government asked Pakistan’s ISPs to block the site, reportedly because of a "blasphemous" video clip.
However, a network error caused a worldwide blackout of the site.
"This one ISP in Pakistan decided to [institute] the block for its subscribers in a highly unusual way," said Professor Zittrain.
"It advertised that … it had suddenly awakened to find it was YouTube."
Because of the way that the network spreads messages between neighbours, the announcement quickly reverberated around the world.
Within two minutes, YouTube was completely blocked.
"One of the most popular websites in the world, run by the most powerful company in the world, and there was nothing that YouTube or Google were particularly privileged to do about it," said Professor Zittrain.
However, he said, the problem was fixed within about two hours.
This was down to a largely unknown group known as the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG), he said.
NANOG is a forum for distributing technical information among computer and network engineers.
"They came together to help find a problem and fix it," he said.
Despite being unpaid volunteers they were able to put YouTube back on line, he said.
"It’s kind of like when your house catches on fire," he said.
"The bad news is there is no fire brigade. The good news is that random people appear from nowhere, put out the fire and leave without expecting payment or praise."
The same social structures – and in particular kindness and trust – are also responsible for websites such as Wikipedia, he said.
"It’s like dark matter in the universe. There’s a lot of it, you don’t see it but it has a huge impact on the physics of the place," he earlier told the BBC.
This year’s TED Global conference runs from 21 to 24 July.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
By Jonathan Fildes
Technology reporter, BBC News, Oxford
Crack teams of volunteers keep the net online and functioning, according to leading internet lawyer Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard University.
The way data is divided up and sent around the internet in many jumps makes it "delicate and vulnerable" to attacks or mistakes, he said.
However, he added, the "random acts of kindness" of these unsung heroes quietly keep the net in working order.
Professor Zittrain’s comments came at the TED Global conference in Oxford.
Incidents such as when the Pakistan government took YouTube offline in 2008 exposed the web’s underlying fragility, he explained.
But a team of volunteers – unpaid, unauthorised and largely unknown to most people – rolled into action and restored the service within hours.
"It’s like when the Bat signal goes up and Batman answers the call," Professor Zittrain told BBC News.
Blind faith
The fragility of the internet’s architecture was largely due to its origins, said Professor Zittrain.
He said it had been conceived with "one great limitation and with one great freedom".
"Their limitation was that they didn’t have any money," he told the TED audience in Oxford.
"It’s like dark matter in the universe. There’s a lot of it, you don’t see it but it has a huge impact on the physics of the place"
Professor Jonathan Zittrain
Harvard University
"But they had an amazing freedom, which was that they didn’t have to make any money from it.
"The internet has no business plan – never did – no CEO, no single firm responsible for building it. Instead it’s folks getting together to do something for fun, rather than because they were told to or because they were expecting to make money from it," he said.
That ethos, he suggested, had let to a network architecture that was completely unique.
"As late as 1992, IBM was known to say that you couldn’t build a corporate network using internet protocol."
Internet protocol (IP), the method used to send data around the internet, was first described by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1974. Data is broken into chunks – or packets – and sent around different parts of the network, often owned by different corporations and entities.
Professor Zittrain likened it to how a drink may be passed along a row of people at a sporting event.
"Your neighbourly duty is to pass the beer along – at risk to your own trousers – to get it to its destination."
"That’s precisely how packets move around the internet, sometimes in a many as 25 or 30 hops with the intervening entities passing the data around having no contractual or legal obligation to the original sender or to the receiver."
The route the data takes depends on the net’s addressing system, he said.
"It turns out there is no overall map of the internet. It is as if we are all sat together in a theatre but we can only see in the fog the people around us.
"So what do we do to figure out what is around us. We turn to the person on our right and tell them what we can see to the left and vice versa.
This method, he said, gives network operators a general sense of "what is where".
"This is a system that relies on kindness and trust, which also makes it very delicate and vulnerable," he said.
"In rare but striking instances, a lie told by a single entity within this honeycomb can lead to real trouble."
Bucket brigade
One example, he said, was an incident in 2008 when Pakistan Telecom accidentally took YouTube offline.
At the time, the Pakistan government asked Pakistan’s ISPs to block the site, reportedly because of a "blasphemous" video clip.
However, a network error caused a worldwide blackout of the site.
"This one ISP in Pakistan decided to [institute] the block for its subscribers in a highly unusual way," said Professor Zittrain.
"It advertised that … it had suddenly awakened to find it was YouTube."
Because of the way that the network spreads messages between neighbours, the announcement quickly reverberated around the world.
Within two minutes, YouTube was completely blocked.
"One of the most popular websites in the world, run by the most powerful company in the world, and there was nothing that YouTube or Google were particularly privileged to do about it," said Professor Zittrain.
However, he said, the problem was fixed within about two hours.
This was down to a largely unknown group known as the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG), he said.
NANOG is a forum for distributing technical information among computer and network engineers.
"They came together to help find a problem and fix it," he said.
Despite being unpaid volunteers they were able to put YouTube back on line, he said.
"It’s kind of like when your house catches on fire," he said.
"The bad news is there is no fire brigade. The good news is that random people appear from nowhere, put out the fire and leave without expecting payment or praise."
The same social structures – and in particular kindness and trust – are also responsible for websites such as Wikipedia, he said.
"It’s like dark matter in the universe. There’s a lot of it, you don’t see it but it has a huge impact on the physics of the place," he earlier told the BBC.
This year’s TED Global conference runs from 21 to 24 July.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
By Jonathan Fildes
Technology reporter, BBC News
Leading thinkers in technology, design and science are gathering in Oxford to share their ideas about the future.
TED Global (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is the European cousin of an already established top US event.
The invitation-only conferences are dedicated to "ideas worth spreading" and have seen talks by former US presidents and Nobel Laureates.
This year’s event will explore questions in neuroscience, astrophysics and economics.
"It is about all the hidden, invisible, not yet discovered or fully explored parts of our lives, society and the world," said Bruno Giussani, European director of TED.
"For example, the human brain; how do you make sense of what I am thinking"
Other questions to be explored include whether life is a mathematical equation, where motivation comes from and whether it is possible to design the air that we breathe.
‘Dark matter’
The invited speakers, who are each given 18 minutes in front of the audience, are drawn from an eclectic backgrounds.
This year’s line up includes an aphorist, a wireless electrician, an underworld investigator and a high-altitude archaeologist.
Professor Jonathan Zittrain, a cyber-lawyer at Harvard University, is also one of this year’s presenters.
His theme is "ways to tackle problems that do not rely heavily on governments or markets".
"Something I will talk about is how the internet deals with trouble; and by internet I mean the actual fabric of the internet.
"How when there is trouble or outright abuse there are people who come to the rescue urgently, who are not paid top do it, who aren’t asked to do it and that don’t have any particular authority to do it."
"It’s like dark matter in the universe. There’s a lot of it, you don’t see it but it has a huge impact on the physics of the place."
A similar diversity is represented in the audience of 700, who each pay $4,500 (£2,700) and go through a rigorous application process – including essay questions – to attend the event.
The audience – known as Tedsters – acts as a crucial selling point for the organisers in attracting big-name speakers.
"You can watch the videos, download them, burn a CD and give it to your friend, whatever"
Bruno Giussani
"Following my round the world balloon flight in 1999, I gave several hundred speeches, mainly to big corporation and business circles," Swiss adventurer Bertrand Piccard told BBC News.
Mr Piccard, one of this year’s speakers, recently unveiled a prototype of a solar-powered plane he hopes eventually to fly around the world.
"The organisers of TED invited me saying I would never find elsewhere a better and more receptive audience. I don’t know if it is true, but we’ll see."
According to Erik Hersman, a previous Ted speaker, he won’t be disappointed.
"The pull of the TED conference lies not just in sitting in on riveting talks, but on the ability to turn in any direction and have a conversation with a person doing something truly remarkable," he told BBC News.
Mr Hersman is one of the team behind Ushahidi, an open source project for collecting crisis information via mobile phones. The project began after the 2008 post election riots in Kenya.
To balance the exclusivity of the event, the organisers record the talks and distribute them online for free.
"They got the idea that giving it away would be more valuable," said Professor Zittrain.
More than 400 TED talks have been made available for free online and have been viewed by more than 15 million people.
"We want to spread [the talks] as broadly as possible," said Mr Giussani. "It is the only model we have found to keep these great speeches and push it out to the world.
"You can watch the videos, download them, burn a CD and give it to your friend, whatever," he added. "And not only that, you can do it in 40 languages."
Talks are translated by teams of volunteers. Currently, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic are the most common languages for translations.
Popular talks include a scientist using statistics to debunk myths about the developing world; a researcher showing how the Nintendo Wii games console controller can be hacked for educational uses and a brain researcher showing how her own stroke happened.
This year’s conference runs from 21 to 24 July in Oxford, UK. </p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
