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ICANN, in turn, operates under a mandate from the US government — which requires regular renewal. So essentially the US government is in ultimate control of a vital piece of global infrastructure, as a result of the Internet’s history. There has been intensive lobbying at the UN to globalise control more — without progress so far. There is, however, an obvious problem of how such control would be realised — since such a global decision-making authority would need to be to make, well, decisions — and decisions which are technically optimal. But I think the case is pretty clear that more global control is ultimately the “correct” solution, once an effective model can be designed.

The debate has been turned up a notch with the decision of ICANN to refuse the .xxx domain — since it’s pretty clear that it was largely motivated by US government interference. This turns ICANN control from largely a moral question into something that is clearly a practical issue.

There is another issue in global internet “fairness”, however: IP address allocation (the other half of the addressing system). For historic reasons, the US has a hugely disproportionate share of IP address in the current system (IPv4). This is why South Africa, say, has so many more subnets, as IP address are that much scarcer and expensive. Currently growing in implementation, however, is IPv6, which will expand the length of addresses from 32 to 128 bits — or over 10^28 per person. So clearly address shortages won’t be a problem for quite some time, once it gets fully adopted.

But I was very surprised to see earlier today a breakdown of how IP addresses in the new system are currently apportioned. Surely a new system is a great time to make a truly equal distribution of addresses? But no, while the US-EU inequality has been ably corrected, the system is HUGELY skewed in favour of addresses for the developed world — I can’t even see the African portion on the breakdown! Indeed, address allocations are FAR less equal even than GDP differences between countries.

While the size of the address space means this isn’t a practical issue, at least for a long time to come, it’s really disappointing to me that the decision-makers apparently can’t be bothered to even make the Internet look like an equally-shared resource. For shame.

EDIT: I’m now a little confused. Further reading has led me to two conclusions: firstly, I don’t understand IPv6 routing at all; and secondly that the graph MAY in fact be reflecting currently active IPv6 connections — in which case it largely reflects big backbone routers getting ready for the conversion. Or it may indeed reflect actual assignments. Anyone know?

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But thinking of OpenOffice.org’s dilema made me realise just how much intellectual capital the human race has invested in learning the interface of Microsoft Office-type software. There are hundreds of millions, or maybe billions, of people who have had to learn the idiosyncrasies of the menu layout; what the little icons mean; or which of the boxes on the ruler correspond to margins and which to indents in just the first line of paragraphs.

For the sake of argument, lets do some back-of-the-envel…. uh, -blogpost calculations. A quick online search suggests a conservative cost of around $200 for a basic Office training course. Advanced courses can go WAY beyond this cost. Many people are of course self-taught — but I’ve certainly spent much more than $200-worth of my time learning Office’s tricks (and lost years of my life in stress, but let’s forget about that for the moment). Companies routinely send people on Office courses, so this cost is really a basic, required investment in personnel intellectual capital.

Now Office 12 claims to be revolutionary — doing away with menus and completely redoing the toolbar. So easily half of our hard-won knowledge will be written off as soon as we upgrade — $100 value per person. Assuming around 500 million Office or Office-clone users in the world, that means that Microsoft’s release of Office 12 will immediately write off $50 billion in knowledge capital around the world — compared to Microsoft’s total annual sales of about $40 billion.

So yes, change and even improvement does have a cost. But anything is better than Word as it currently is.

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The group recently revealed a prototype. The design is very rugged, with a tough rubber case, and an AC adapter that doubles as a shoulder strap. The display is LCD-based, with two modes: normal colour, and a much brighter monochrome for outdoor use. Apparently it’s also ridiculously cheap, but still very high-resolution. The processor is 500MHz, and the fragile and expensive harddrive has been replaced with 1Gb of flash memory.

The machine has 4 USB ports, and Wi-Fi connectivity which will use a novel “mesh” networking model, where computers will also forward data to other machines, so that each computer extends the reach of the wireless network without needing more base stations. To further enhance portability, they come with a hand-crank which can be used in the absence of AC power. And, of course, it’ll be running a trimmed-down version of Linux.

This isn’t the first idea of its type, but it really seems to be taking off — apparently Brazil, China, Egypt, South Africa and Thailand have all said they will buy over a million units, and the governor of Massachusetts wants to buy them too. Making that many is of course a huge undertaking, but there a number of big name companies involved: AMD, Brightstar, Google, News Corporation, and Red Hat, for example. OLPC hopes to ship the first orders by the end of next year, or early 2007.

There are, of course, many projects to get computers into classrooms around the world (like, say, this one), and many have been very succesful. But each child having a laptop is a somewhat different proposition, with new opportunities. So I’ve just started thinking about what potential applications or ideas this sort of thing could open up.

The first thing that came to mind was textbooks. It would be great if the machines could come pre-installed with a selection of textbooks, or those books could come on cheap USB flash drives. This would make them updateable, and allow them to include internet links. It would also make textbooks affordable to children everywhere. There are already projects underway to write open source, free textbooks — a South African project, Free High School Science Texts, has the bulk of the text of a physics textbook, as well as much of a biology, maths and chemistry book. They’re working now with WikiBooks, a project using the Wikipedia engine to allow the creation of free books. So with a last push to get these through, it shouldn’t be hard to create a really useful package of textbooks that can be easily distributed — so avoiding one of the biggest problem with free textbooks, namely how you pay for the printing.

Being laptops, the children will of course take them home, which means all sorts of opportunities to use the availability of internet access in many more homes. As an example, the South African Post Office has some computers in some branches that allow people to use a community services portal that gives access to simple email, a job application (resumé) generation program, access to the paperwork required to get various government social security benefits, entrepreneurial advice, listings of university scholarships, and so forth. Often the people who could really benefit from this sort of information don’t get it, so this could really help social programs reach those that most need them.

But there are also all sorts of interesting applications one could add — think of cheap USB soundcard and small flash drive, in the shape of a phone handset. Throw Skype onto it, and you’ve provided every child with free phone calls to any other Skype-enabled computer (and each other), or very affordable calls to any other phone in the world — that is, cellphones without the hideous costs.

I’m quite excited by it all — and the textbook project, say, is quite approachable. Now I just need to find the relevant people to contact to get OLPC and the textbook consortium talking…

Exercise for the reader: Think of another killer app for universal laptop access. Then let’s see if anyone’s interested in making it happen.

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There is another side to it though: would I be happy? I imagine one would spend the day working, maybe farming, and a lot of the rest of the time writing books and trying to invent stuff. But there would be no email, no websites, no blogs, no TV, no movies, no magazines, few books, infrequent music — no information-rich entertainment. Ok, there would be people around the village, but conversation wouldn’t have the constant input of new social memes, or news stories from around the world, or the mixing that is inherent in a big city of well-travelled people — all in touch with a thousand different new ideas every day. Think of what that would mean for your conversations.

Clearly, humanity survived this state of affairs just fine, for most of history. But we’ve grown up with information all around, and to us entertainment means constant injection of new information, of a hundred different forms. Has this changed the way our minds function? Clearly we’ve developed all sorts of skills in handling new computer interfaces easily, and filtering information very rapidly, even when it arrives on many channels simultaneously. (Indeed, general intelligence tests have showed an average increase of 3 points per decade, around the world — which may have something to do with our increasing familiarity with graphical interfaces, which are somewhat similar to many intelligence tests). So I suppose my question is: has our information-rich environment changed the way that we can relax, too?

I’m reminded of experiments (I believe by the Nazis) that showed that if babies were completely deprived of human attention, they got sick and even died. We’re “wired” to be social animals, and so to need human contact. Is it possible that the environment in which we’ve spent our lives submersed has “rewired” us to need high-information entertainment?

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So yes, I checked my laptop, and found it didn’t have a spare slot. About a week later, I ordered the memory, having forgotten the actual result of step 1. I now have an unopened and entirely useless 256MB RAM chip, and a particularly bad mood.

What’s the moral of the story? My memory sucks. Clearly, I need to make it better. Which, if you refer to the title of this post, is what got me into trouble in the first place…

*Assuming sales tax of 8.25%. And that you have an Acer Travelmate 530 series laptop. And that prices haven’t changed. And that your zipcode is 91125, or similar. And that you buy the RAM from Crucial. And that you don’t get cash rewards on your credit card. And that your credit card is issued by a US bank. And that Taco Tuesday still offers tacos for 33c plus tax.

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Oh, and I’d better explain this post’s title: the word “spam”, attached to internet junk mail, apparently originally came from a Monty Python skit. The skit in question features a war-time diner, full of vikings who occasionally break into chanting, “Spam spam spam spam …”, whenever prompted. The main characters, a couple, descend from the ceiling (if memory serves) and set about ordering breakfast. Being wartime, most of the menu features one or two items, plus lots of spam (which is, for the uninformed, processed corned or salted pork. Mostly). The husband finally orders, “Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam and spam, but can I have baked beans instead of the spam?” Cue the vikings chanting, past the proprietor trying to yell them into silence, and one gets the picture of unstoppable quantities of unwanted stuff — rather like internet junk mail. This post is about preferring the baked beans (metaphorically).

Exercise for the reader: Create a temporary/fake address, for example using spamgourmet. Post it on a maximum of 5 websites. First person to get a mortgage offer to that address wins!

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