tech.am

Today, I received a nice email from Martin Varsavsky of FON, telling me that they have activated the Bills mode. This means that, in theory, you can resell your excess bandwidth to other users via your WiFi router, sharing the generated revenue with FON. People passing by can open their laptop, connect to your signal, and purchase access packs for $5 $3 $2 or 2$ a day – yes, the revenue model has been changing that much over the last few weeks.

In theory I say, since many ISPs have very restrictive terms in the service contracts you sign with them, some in the US even going as far as classifying sharing your broadband with others as a federal crime. So, one of the first items in FON’s Ts&Cs is that you must have your ISP’s permission to resell your broadband. So far, very few ISPs have signed up for this sharing model, one being Jazztel, a company started by Martin himself.

The email also states, this time in size 8 font, lest anyone notice it, the following:

“We would like to inform you that from now on it will be FON WIRELESS, LTD., the entity providing the Service, instead of FON TECHNOLOGY, S.L., and that we have made some minor changes to the Terms and Conditions”

The new Terms and Conditions [PDF] are a further developed version, no doubt washed down with plenty of lawyer juice. The point that most interests me is section 6.6, where the contract states that “As a Linus or Bill, you agree to keep the FON Hotspot active during 24 hours 7 days a week in order for the other Linuses and Aliens to be able to connect thereto.” Additionally, FON USA’s shopping conditions state that you have to keep the router active for one year.

So, apart from FON, who are the big winners? The ISPs of course! Martin was right in saying that FON is good for ISPs, as they are forcing FON members to keep their routers online all year round. Nowhere in the contract one can find what the penalty for not complying is, but some posts suggest they will charge you around $50 to cover the cost of the router they sent for $5.

The only way that you can prove to Fon that your hotspot is active is by allowing the router to phone home on a regular basis, which means that you must have a broadband connection with an ISP for this to happen. If you cancel your broadband, you will automatically violate FON’s terms, and thus be liable to whatever charge they want to levy. Fair?

Since I first started tinkering with the Linksys WRT54G router a couple over a year ago, replacing the stock firmware with OpenWRT, I have been thinking about making something special with it.

The router itself is a great piece of hardware, having a WiFi adapter, and two wired LAN interfaces. OpenWRT allows hackers to do almost anything with the device – there are plenty of mods, such as the dual serial ports, SD card to add storage space, and more.

I tried to look for a GSM/GPRS mod, which would add a module to the router, allowing it to communicate with the outside world using data and SMS – but there was no such thing, at least integrated into the router’s casing. So, the challenge was born, to design a PCB that would hold an SD card reader, a GSM/GPRS engine, and a GPS receiver. What could you do with this device? Here is a short list:

• An autonomous wireless IDS with logging and SMS alerts. This could warn you when a pirate is trying to break into your network via WiFi. It would be completely autonomous, only needing a power source to run.
• Self-contained wardriving box, which can save logs to the SD card, and be controlled via SMS messages. It could also periodically send you a status report to your mobile phone.
• Mobile hotspot – by bridging the GPRS data connection to the WiFi signal in AP mode. Not very fast, but wait until 3G modules come out…

Here is a first picture of the PCB mounted onto the WRT54G. It doesn’t show the mess of cables that covers it, but gives an idea of what it will look like.

So, my new 17″ MacBook Pro has been delivered today by TNT, curiously one day late, as Apple shipped it with…no address. Still, I’m very happy. I hope the date is not a premonition, as Tuesday 13ths are as unlucky as Friday 13ths in english-speaking countries…but I digress.

The laptop looks fantastic. From the moment you take the box out of the wrapping, you realise you’re in for a different experience – this is my first Mac since I had an SE when I was a kid. The reason for getting it was partly fueled by the ability to dual-boot Windows. Yes, I do most of my developing in Windows, and until they invent decent circuit design software for Mac, I’ll be stuck there. The Dark Side has been defeated…partially.

My first observation: the keyboard is too far back towards the screen. The reason that this may be a problem? If you’re like me, and wear a watch with a titanium strap, when you rest it on the laptop, it makes this most uncomfortable screech, plus it’s likely that the nice aluminium finish will get scratched in the long run, ruining the cool Apple style.

A few hours into it, none of the reported problems with early versions have been noticed. No noises, whines or heat buildup. I have yet to stress it, but I have to say it looks good.

One curious bit of info the TNT driver gave me – he was surprised that the MacBook had been sent from Shanghai, as most Apple hardware he delivers comes from the U.S. Can anyone confirm where the first-gen MBPs were coming from?

The most common access approach involves separately querying each server of interest, via a direct tcp/whois connection. However, there are currently a number of active projects concerned with improved interfaces to these servers, either by more intelligent client software, or by standardization of the server behavior. Eventually, this should eliminate the need for end users to have the complete collection of server names; at this point, though, distributing the server list to individual Internet users is still worthwhile.

The procedure for accessing the whois servers will vary depending on your host’s operating system, and on what software is installed. On UNIX systems, the preferred method is

    whois -h _server_name_ _name_of_person_

If there is no whois program, sometimes it will work to type

    telnet _server_name_ 43

and then type the “name of person” on a separate line. (The usefulness of this will vary depending on the details of the telnet client implementation installed on your system.)

I ordered a Fon router when they dropped the price to 19$ from the usual 25$, to try the service and see how it performs. My feelings right now are mixed, as had I waited one day, I could have purchased it for 4$.

This ‘rubbery price’ approach was explained a few days ago in Martin Varsavsky’s blog, as a demand elasticity test. Basically, you drop the price, and see if hordes of people jump on the offer. Yesterday, after having been back at 25$ for a few days, they changed the price to 1$, but only for a few hours.

I have recently been following Fon, a movement that aims at creating a worldwide WiFi network, with Bills, Linuses and Aliens sharing their broadband with others, some for free, others for profit – split with Fon. The basis of Fon is that you connect a Linksys WRT54Gx WiFi router running special firmware to your broadband internet connection. This firmware turns the router into a captive portal, which then allows you to control access to the internet.

During the last couple of weeks, there has been some noise at Fon about having finally achieved production of their own WiFi router – they call it La Fonera. The move may seem obvious, as right now, they are buying the Linksys routers at full reseller price, in turn reselling them heavily subsidized at $25 a piece $1, as I’ve just read a minute ago. What I still don’t get is the title of the recent post in Martin Varsavsky’s blog, ‘Fon, the Social Router’.

A few days ago, Fon announced the purchase of 1.000.000 (literally!) of these new routers from the taiwanese manufacturer Accton. This company already manufactures WiFi routers, amongst other devices, and so it’s perfectly plausible that they can manufacture a customized router for Fon.

The main reason for manufacturing anything in China or Taiwan is the labour costs are extremely low. The electronics aren’t cheaper over there, and as a matter of fact, most of the core components are sold by western companies, such as Broadcom, Intel and Atmel. Labor conditions in chinese plants vary, from outright slavery to pretty good, but even then, one thing is a fact: they work all year round, including all weekends, only having ten days off for the Chinese New Year.

Reading Accton’s site, it appears that they treat their workers very well, and I applaud that. But this also means that they cannot produce as cheaply as the sweatshop-style manufacturers. A WiFi router with the horsepower required to run Fon’s platform is not cheap – let’s estimate roughly $22 per unit, for a purchase of 1 million units. If this estimate is correct, Fon would have blown on these routers a tad more than the entire funding they got from Skype, Sequoia, Index and Google.

If they were to give away the routers, to recoup this investment Fon would have to sell approximately 11 million 24-hour access packages, at $2 each. That is assuming Fon takes 100% of the money – with the Bill model, they would only get 50% of the income, as it is shared with the person providing the broadband and maintaining the hotspot. If they were to sell the routers at cost, they’d still have a huge logistics nightmare in their hands. Failure rates in mass-produced electronics range between 1% and 3%, meaning they could have up to 30.000 returns, costing them $1.32 million in hardware, plus logistics and other costs. One thing is to be a promoter of social WiFi – another is to turn into a hardware manufacturer – be it by ODM contracts, or by making the devices yourself.

So, I leave some open questions: has Fon chosen a company that respects human rights, treats its workers with dignity, but won’t give them a good deal as they could have gotten somewhere else, thus affecting their ROI expectations? Does investing in 1 million routers make economic sense with their current business model?

If you’ve done a more expensive one, I’d like to hear it!

Today I had to get to the center of Geneva from the airport, and in a bit of a hurry as the meeting I had to attend was getting close. I decided to take a taxi, which would also allow me to do a quick wardrive using my Qtek and a Bluetooth GPS. Finding almost 80 WiFi access points on the way was great, but the bill was painful! In all, the round trip from and back to the airport cost me 60 euros, some quick math makes each AP cost 75 cents (around $0.96).

Tomorrow, I will post some stats and a quick map of the captured APs. The stats will of course go to WiGLE, and the map will be made using an updated version of StumbVerter I’m working on – this will use MapPoint as usual, but you will also have the option of creating maps in Google Earth format. However, they will not look like the usual 2D icon maps that can be made using existing scripts, but will feature the traditional Netstumbler towers in 3D. How to show the signal strenght is being worked on, any suggestions?

The inside of Athena Unix

A. Course Outline
   1. Advanced use of the UNIX shell
   2. The internal workings of the mail system
   3. The notes teleconferencing system
   4. Networking
   5. Distributed File Systems
   6. Security
   7. Kernel
   8. The Ingres Database
   9. System Administration

B. UNIX from the system’s point of view
1. Jobs, Programs and Processes

a. What is a program?

A program is a sequence of instructions or commands which tell the computer how to accomplish a given task.  Under UNIX, this can either be a program which has been compiled, or it may just be a sequence of commands that you would normally issue to accomplish the task.  The latter type of program is often called a shell script.

b. What is a process?

A process is an invocation of a program.  If you run finger twice, each time you ran it, a new process was created.

c. Programs and processes encountered when logging in

1. getty
This process sits watching a terminal until someone  types something.  When someone does, it starts a login process.  Getty runs underneath another process                called init.

2. login
 When login is first called, it is given the username which you typed into getty.  It then asks for your password, checks it, and if correct performs the  steps of logging you in.  These include updating the wtmp and utmp files (Who is loged in), starting a shell (or whatever is listed in you /etc/passwd entry), giving your process the correct groups, and setting ones UID correctly.  If the password was incorrect (or if the user ID is invalid), login will  ask for your user id again.

3. init files
Once your shell has started, it reads several files from which it executes commands.  If you are running the cshell, .login and .cshrc are executed.  If you are running the bourne shell, .shrc and .profile are run.
      
d. What is a job?
The definition of job is not very clear.  In many cases you will see the term used instead of process.  Another common use of the term job is as a “session”.  In other words, everything being done by a given user from a given terminal.

 
2. Programs v. System Calls

One distinction which I want to make clear that is very important in understanding UNIX (or any other operating system for that matter) is the difference between a command and a system call.  A command in UNIX is usually a program which does something.  The command, in turn, executes system calls which actually perform the actions. 

D. The Shell

The following commands are built into the shell.  They are different than must Unix command in this respect since command such as cp and rm are actually separate programs.

1. Shell Commands
. alias    – Declare an alias for a command
. bg       – Run a process in background
. cd       – Change directory
. eval     – Evaluate an shell expression
. exit     – Exit the shell (killing it – must not be login shell)
. fg       – Run a process as your foreground process
. history  – Display recently executed commands
. jobs     – List processes which are children of the shell
. kill     – Kill a process
. logout   – Log out
. nice     – Run a command with a higher niceness     
. rehash   – Reinitialize table of commands
. set      – Set a shell variable
. setenv   – Set an environment variable
. source   – Take commands from a file
. stop     – Stop a process
. suspend  – Stop the shell
. umask    – Set default value for protection
. unalias  – Remove an alias
. unset    – Unset a shell variable
. unsetenv – Unset an environment variable