I wasn't sure how I would respond to the Wikipedia blackout today (#wikipediablackout). I decided to have a look at their website, and I like what they've done. After skimming the SOPA initiative page  and the EFF's page "How PIPA and SOPA Violate White House Principles Supporting Free Speech and Innovation," I decided to do my part.

I see that Rep. Lamborn isn't on Twitter. Fine, we both know how to use the phone. His staff picked up, and I was asked for an email address. I'll be curious to see what kind of email I start receiving. (I gave him a unique address.) I called Sen. Udall and got his voicemail. There was an offer to speak to a person. I declined. He asked for my email. I gave him the same one. Then I called Sen. Bennett. Same offer to speak to a person or leave a message, but he asked for my zip code and didn't ask for my email. I gave it to him anyway.

So what does this mean for democracy? Well, it's certainly a good example of netizens organizing. I know, there are plenty of other examples, but this one hit home for me. I'm a Wikipedian and a card-carrying, dues-paying member of the EFF. It will always takes considerable time and effort to do democracy right. I'm glad technology helps so much. We have a long way to go, though. One last thought: The Sunlight Foundation is an excellent resource. I'm surprised I don't see SOPA or PIPA on their home page, but the search results (click on the hyperlinks) look helpful.

I was listening to TM Forum talk about the growth of machine to machine (M2M) services. That got me thinking about how Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are missing the boat as central players in identity authentication. I have already raised this point at TM Forum a couple times. A password is single-step authentication. It's something you know. But the second step is something you have. Our phones are being under-utilized for authentication. (You can use "something you have" without "something you know." The oldest example is the key to your front door.) I have been using Google two-step authentication since they introduced it. (Do you realize how much of your personal information is in your Google account? Don't trust it to password-only security!)

Anyway, this morning I was wondering what's available from the open source community to support two-step authentication. I started today by googling "open source" sms callback security. That led me to a couple interesting resources. @mnxsolutions looks like it's an organization populated by "my" kind of people. Linux command line. C instead of Java. They blogged about Two Factor SSH with Google Authenticator. That might be useful. And there's Kannel, which looks like a handy component if I wanted to create an M2M SMS system. Next I searched for anyone talking about Kannel at Twitter, and that's how I found @romboke's stream. Interesting guy. I love Internet serendipity!

Update: Added how M2M and CSPs fit into my morning serendipity.

"Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills. You know, like nunchuck skills, bowhunting skills, computer hacking skills..." -- Napoleon Dynamite. I love the way LinkedIn categorizes skills! Just made a first pass at adding mine. View my skills at LinkedIn.

Aside: I am not impressed with the way LinkedIn shares status updates. See how it looks on Twitter. But I love how Posterous allows me to share across Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. LinkedIn #FAIL, Posterous #FTW.

I should be writing other things today, but some friends on Facebook are getting all nostalgic about the early days of the Web. That set me off like a dog after a squirrel, and here I am. Didn't help that yesterday I saw a tweet mentioning an article commemorating a website that went up 20 years ago. I responded to that with a tweet of my own, but now I see I was off by a year. (I forgot I'd written about my introduction to the Web on Google+ six months ago.) So now I'm going to write my little story once and for all. It all started nearly 31 years ago [1]...

I was issued an account on a computer with Internet access in January, 1981. I was a freshman at MIT studying Computer Science and Engineering. I explored what one could do with the Internet. It was basically file sharing and email. I subscribed to mailing lists. That's the only social medium we had. There were a couple years after I graduated that I lost Internet access, although I could dial-up my MIT account via modem from work. We were sending email via UUCP (UNIX to UNIX copy). HP Labs was on the Internet. In the late 80's I persuaded our HP division to connect to the Internet through the Labs.

In the early 90's I subscribed to the HPCWire newsletter, distributed via email. Tim O'Reilly was the publisher. He announced the Global Network Navigator (GNN) in 1993. That's when I became aware of the Web's existence. GNN said you had to download this thing called Mosaic to experience it. I stayed up all night and surfed the entire Web, including every Yahoo link. That's how small the Web was.

[1] I have one earlier story about being in middle school and having teletype access to an HP 3000 minicomputer. Thanks to my grandmother, a photo survives. I'll blog about that after I scan it.

I was inspired by email from TM Forum today. I think membership is free (please correct me if I'm mistaken), but you have to register to read it: #65068868. Let me summarize for my Twitter and Facebook friends. The editor Anita Karvé starts by acknowledging two ways to get expanded TV options. There's the newer satellite TV option (I'm with DIRECTV), and then she talks about "the long history of cable" and says they are "frantically trying to roll out new services quickly." So true. But the other alternative that can't yet be counted out is whoever ends up owning our old telephone landlines.

My landline phone company (Qwest) was bought by CenturyLink. Their roots are in telephones. They entered the mobile phone business in 1983 and exited in 2002. They're focused on wired service, and this year they began dabbling in "entertainment services." I look forward to benefitting from the competition with satellite and cable, because all I really want is a single "fat pipe" into and out of my house for Over The Top (OTT) services on the Internet.

Both of the other businesses risk thinking about domestic data delivery as a broadcast problem. Telephone companies, on the other hand, have always understood that houses want to both send and receive data. Cable has shown ability in making the wire run both ways. Satellite has no future with OTT.

There's another wire and pipe to think about: How will energy delivery fit into the future with two-way data transport? Electric companies are in a position to buy back power from those with wind generators today. Imagine a future with safe, local energy production. Maybe pebble-bed nuclear reactors. Probably something that isn't radioactive at all. Natural gas seems more similar to a satellite one-way delivery business. And the U.S. natural gas boom simply allows such organizations to get complacent. Electric companies are hungry, though. Their infrastructure is aging, and you can google to see the movement toward a "smart grid."

Ignoring energy for now, I won't be satisfied until I can pay a single company for all my domestic data needs over one wire – telephone, Internet, and video. Why should we need anything besides the Internet? I want a reliable, high-speed network connection for two reasons. I still want to make phone calls (including video phone on the rare occasions when I care), and I want to watch all my video the same way – television shows, movies, and any other new art forms that evolve in my lifetime. In my neighborhood, it's either Comcast of CenturyLink. I'll let you know who eventually gets all my business.

And then there's wireless. LTE (sometimes called 4G) could change the landscape. We'll see. Why can't we live in a world where the WiFi hotspots in our homes are seamlessly part of the wireless network that everyone shares? That would free up mobile towers to be in places where WiFi is not practical. Join that conversation on the blog of my favorite industry insider, Tony Poulos.

Remembering Geoffrey Chaucer today, the anniversary of his death, I read a summary of the Franklin's Tale. I'm struck by the role honor - in the sense of keeping one's word - has had on the shape of Western civilization. "My word is my bond," the noble have declared throughout the centuries. "On my honor," I pledge as an Eagle Scout.

This, in turn, reminded me of how a weak cousin of honor, trustworthiness, is examined in Matt Ridley's book, The Rational Optimist, which I recently finished reading. His thesis is that human progress has been driven by our unique ability to specialize our production, which then frees us to expand the variety of our consumption. He opens with a quote from Adam Smith. Condensed, it reads, "The division of labour is the necessary consequence of the propensity to barter and exchange one thing for another." Ridley presents the entire history of trade, starting with archaeological evidence, reaching all the way back into prehistory. One quote, from Chapter One: "Exchange is to cultural evolution as sex is to biological evolution."

The word "honor" spawned the word "honesty." Today we think of an honest person as a trustworthy person. Oddly, neither "honor" nor "honesty" appear in Ridley's book. Not once. Believe me. I searched the ebook. However, he does emphasize how trust is essential to make a system of exchange possible. Trust is fleeting. One can trust for the duration of a transaction. But honor runs deep by definition. It invokes images of legacy that spans generations. We inherit the honor and priviledge of a family name such as Windsor or Kennedy. Or we suffer under the dishonor of a name such as Madoff.

So visit the link above to read a summary of the Franklin's Tale, and take a moment to remember the contribution of Chaucer to our concept of honor.

Last night I walked in the rain with an umbrella. I stepped onto a covered sidewalk. One side was a wall of foliage, and the other side was interrupted by poles supporting the canopy. This made it too narrow to walk with the umbrella open, so I stepped down and walked along the quiet street for several seconds before it occurred to me that I could close the umbrella and travel unobstructed on the sidewalk. Seriously. Do I have brain damage? This isn't like me, and I'm concerned.

I got this chain mail today. Wanted to share it with my readers. Made me laugh out loud when I caught the gist. I've done this at times over the years, but in the current economic climate maybe it's time to get serious about it. Seems like a clever way to punish junk mailers and help out a national institution at the same time. Curious what others think. Any killjoys who see a serious downside to this?

The post office is going broke because fewer and fewer people (like many of you) are using electronic means to send messages, pay bills, buy things, etc.  We can make up for this loss of mailings with just a little bit of effort - and NO outlay of money.
 
Quit throwing away those offers for life insurance, car insurance, RV parking spaces, medical digests, timeshares and whatever.  Take a couple of seconds to open the envelope and take out the PREPAID POSTAGE ENVELOPE.  The marketing masters who sent this garbage to you don't pay for that PREPAID POSTAGE until it goes back to the post office.  So, to keep the post office viable, send all of these envelopes back.  Empty is OK, but they pay more postage if you load up the envelope with the junk from a different company. 
 
If you are retired, this is also a great way to waste a few minutes every day.

I am standing across from my church. I turn past the U.S. Post Office to face the Antlers hotel to the west, rebuilt yet retaining the General's vision, focusing one's attention on God's solid mountain behind. I hear the carillon of First Pres' echoing behind the multi-generational architecture of the city government. There's the steeple of the First Baptist Church, and the microwave array of the old phone company. Now I've made a circle and face my church again. The autumn sun is still warm today, but the snow on Pikes Peak warns that the season is changing.

I write standing in the sun on the edge of the wide avenue behind my car, typing with my thumbs, adjusting words and phrases effortlessly with a tool smaller than Captain Kirk's communicator so I can polish this text for quick publication. Sundays in Palmertown are quiet compared with other urban streets. That quiet suggests peace. Restfulness to prepare for the work ahead. Shalom.

Our pastor is sixty-two. He knows his work is far from done. Who alive can say what God intends? We have no thus-saith-the-Lord prophets to guide us. But we pray, we interpret the signs, we test our interpretations against the standard of Scripture, and we follow.

This is work we all must do. This is praxis - expressing our beliefs through our actions. If we say we hold a certain belief but we have no work to show for it, then our belief is of little value. The value it has is in its power to move us to action. But not so much today, our day of the week set aside for resurrection celebration, worship, communion and rest. Shalom.

Congratulations! Colorado Springs-based MindMeld Software was in the news today. Read the article in The Gazette for details. I like to follow local entrepreneurs. These are the people taking risks. You can't create a job without taking a risk. But one must have a thick skin. The comments attached to the article vary greatly in civility.

Social media commentary. I think there's a lesson to be learned in community dynamics. The newspaper online community is in a silo. Which is why I'm blogging about this instead of commenting there. And by blogging I reach Twitter and Facebook, too. #SoMe, #SoMe everywhere, and not a drop to drink. I have high hopes for MIT's Center for Civic Media.