Technology Futures

A giant of the community broadband movement passed away a few weeks ago of a heart attack at his home in Texas.

Gene was a dear friend and I am now very glad that I was able to have dinner with him this past April at the Broadband Communities conference in Austin.

The article provides a summary of Gene's influence and his accomplishments better than I ever could. I met Gene in the nineties at one of the Association for Community Networking meetings. We became fast friends and I spent many days in Texas working with Gene over the years. Gene's passing is a reminder of the other giants of community networking we have lost, including Steve Snow and Steve Cisler.

Today, more than ever, the original goals of community networking remain fresh and largely unfulfilled. With the rapid commercialization of the Internet in the late nineties and early 2000s, most community network projects closed their doors, and the industry viewed the whole effort as largely unimportant.

But the hegemony of Facebook, Google, and the many other commercial enterprises that have largely ignored privacy considerations and created information service monopolies, independent, privacy-protecting community-focused services are critical to preserving our privacy and our freedom.

According to this story, so many New Yorkers are losing AirPods in the subway that it has become a major issue for subway maintenance workers, who are often called to retrieve them from the subway rail tracks.

The tiny cordless ear buds apparently fall out of a user's ears easily in the sweaty hot environment of the subway. One woman bought a broom and duct tape to create a make shift "sticky stick" to retrieve her AirPods.

The first time I saw AirPods, my immediate thought was, "Those are going to be too easy to lose or misplace." And apparently I was right. One person in the article claims they have lost "ten pair" of AirPods. That is somewhere between $1600 and $2000, depending upon what model he has been buying.

The over-use (yes, over-use) of ear buds is really dangerous. On the way home from work last night, I encountered someone jogging along my side of the road, back to oncoming traffic, with earbuds plugged in. Not only should they have been on the other side of the road, but they could not hear oncoming traffic. And in this college town (Blacksburg), I constantly see students riding bikes with earbuds--ditto on not being to hear traffic around them. For these people, has listening to music become more important than their own life? Apparently so.

Broadband Breakfast has a story on the FCC's proposed changes to the way broadband availability data is collected on what is known as Form 477.

ISPs complete a Form 477 every year, but the data has often been unreliable for several reasons, but the biggest problem has been that if a single address in a census block is "served" by an ISP, then every address in that census block is deemed served. In many rural areas, this cuts off large areas from being eligible for Federal and state grant funds.

The proposed changes include requiring ISPs to indicate where they have service, and eliminating the use of census blocks. Crowdsourcing data (e.g. self-reported speed tests) have also been proposed.

The changes are badly needed, and will benefit many rural communities.

The Technology Futures Web site has been moved to its own domain (technologyfutures.info) and has been upgraded. The old news site was using very old blogging software that needed substantial upgrades and security improvements. I've been blogging for nearly twenty years, and it turned out that safely moving thousands of news articles was by itself a major effort.

I will resume writing more regularly now.

Best regards,
Andrew Cohill