IPv6 down

It being a 'season'able few days where one isn't necessarily pushed to do work stuff, and not being at home for a few days, I hadn't checked that some of my services were running.

I just did :-(

Seems that my London gateway server's IPv4 connection is all happy and content but its IPv6 one is not. Doing the SSH thing suggests that I can't resolve it remotely as the external tunnel turns out to depend on the live state of the internal interface. Somewhat weird and unexpected behavior, but the drop in IPv6 connectivity appears to be the same time I turned off the internal routers (which I do if I'm going to be away a while).

Guess I'll never be turning them off again then!

breathing matters

I just read about a hackday in Amsterdam this weekend on the matter of developing cheap personal testing of air quality.

And I love this idea. Absolutely. And here's why: London is built within a bowl, and among the line of hills forming the northern side of that bowl you can find Highgate, where I live. In fact I live on the south-facing side on the top floor of a block of flats which are in almost exact line with the inversion layer we often have, trapping the fumes and particulates over the city.

And most days — especially in summer — I cannot only smell them but see them, as layers of dark and muddy colours, just as I would regularly see over many of the world's cities when I was a frequent flier.

When it gets really bad I walk down my four flights of stairs to road level, and the air is notably more breathable there than in my room. When it gets *really* bad I go and stay out of town, in the country where vehicle fumes are replaced with farmyard smells (but sadly I'm still under a flight path, just of a different airport.)

There are two things to improving air quality and making our cities breathable again (and in so doing reducing the many premature deaths which are directly attributable each year.)

One of those is stopping the uncontrolled production of gases and particulates harmful to human health. But the first is knowing more about the enemy: what is there 'out there' doing us harm? Where is it? What heights are worst (do little kids suffer differently to basketball players? how can we tell when all existing sensors are up high out of reach?)

I'm looking forward to following what comes out of this (and almost certainly getting building stuff in my workshop)

Where next for Wikipedia

Once upon a time there was an idea, and the idea was new and untested, but they went ahead and decided to 'be bold' by doing it anyway.

Within a few years the idea was demonstrably a very good idea indeed and welcomed around the world by lots of different sorts of people.

And the people contributed to the idea with their time and knowledge and, then, with their money if they didn't have the time because they saw that it was good and deserved to get bigger and better.

But the people who had started this weren't sure that it was sensible to keep doing it themselves, for they were sorely in need of a break, so they decided to pay someone to do the 'behind the scenes' work for them.

And it worked. Except that the idea had got SO much bigger that they realised they needed more people. And yet more people, and soon the cost of continuing to make the idea available was costing very much more that the people thought it would.

And the idea became 'professionalised'. And some thought that it was good. And some worried that it wasn't really the idea they'd supported it at the start and wondered why they were still giving of their time to do stuff.

And the Chapters — which were comprised of volunteers all over the world — became increasingly disassociated from the "central office" and wondered what would happen next.

—-

In the BBC television political comedy Yes Minister, Sir Humphrey Appleby — a Permanent Secretary (very senior civil servant) — points out to his Minister Jim Hacker that 'the enemy' aren't the opposition party, but the Civil Service itself. Whereas ministers may believe that they set the policy and direction of their ministry the civil service will tend to try and do things their way, no matter what.

I believe that that 'idea' of ten years ago — Wikipedia — has led to a bureaucracy every bit as separated from the early contributors, many of whom still believe in the original concept, as is a civil service. And that 'civil service' will, by its very existence, tend to pull away from the volunteers' beliefs as it seeks to maintain its own position, whether intentionally or not. It can't really help itself. Wikipedia — for many years as it expanded into other projects and became Wikimedia — relied on committees to process ideas and set its direction. Now, those same committees still exist, but have been reduced to feeding ideas to a central office where decisions will be taken, rather than making that decision and getting the office to carry it out.

There are many quotations about committees. "A committee is a thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour" (Elbert Hubbard) has a strong element of truth to it, but ignores the point that a body of people can, and will be, more aware of the ramifications of taking that step. Where a staff might decide, for example, that to mention an outside organisation in a fundraising banner will not be a problem, a wider decision-taking group will be aware that thos who contribute time or money might see it very differently, indeed might take the view that Wikipedia has started accepting advertising.

Sir Barnett Cocks suggested that "A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled" and I'd argue that this is a very good thing: any organisation should seek to strangle ideas where a majority (or even a minority) of people believe it is the wrong thing to do, whereas an individual might have taken that dangerous decision without a second thought.

Sir Humphrey (in an unattributed quote of Fred Allen) says to his Minister "A Committee is a group of people who individually can do nothing, but as a group decide that nothing can be done." I'd suggest changing that slightly to 'but as a group decide that nothing should be done'.

The growing pains of Wikipedia and Wikimedia won't affect a lot of people directly, but the people they will affect have been responsible for making it what is has become. Changing that process and restricting that responsibility has the possibility to slowly strangle what has been achieved so far and, eventually, stunt any further growth.

Issues in 2012

One of my ISPs, entanet have posed the question "Which of the following issues will most greatly affect the Internet market in 2012?" Options range from Ofcom’s latest plans to abort net neutrality and BT’s PIA pricing announcement for duct and pole access, through The DEA – three strikes rule, website blocking plans, etc and one close to my heart, The lack of adoption of IPv6, but the top one, in my view, is The court order to force BT to block Newzbin2.

Each of those issues is important, but I'd suggest that it is the court blocking of a website which bodes worst for the market and internet users next year. Putting it simply, if people cannot access every website, every service, every IP address (v4 or v6!) then there is censorship and that, surely, destroys the freedom of access we presently have.

Internet access is now considered by many (including, aiui, the EU) as a 'necessity', in the same way as a fresh drinking water supply, a roof and four walls, etc. are. But we don't permit the state to tell us we may only use our water supply to make coffee and never tea, or that we may only sleep in our homes during the hours of local darkness and never take an afternoon nap.

I may disagree with the perceived 'rights' of Newzbin2 to publish and be damned (and I do), but court-sanctioned censorship for what is, at root, a civil copyright matter, is not the way to go.

b0rkken

Yes, I discovered earlier today that I had broken my install here. Mea Culpa.

I hadn't realised earlier as I hadn't tried to add anything here for a while as I've been so busy and, not too surprisingly I suppose, I hadn't gone seeking any of the other pages on the site.

Anyway, when I updated the security setups on each of my machines — as part of a general upgrade of everything to be IPv6-compliant — I'd locked-down some of the options available within Apache, believing that none of the sites I operate required them. Seems I was wrong, however!

I've taken a temporary measure to make things available again and will find a different solution later to sort the original issue.

Oh, and yes, every site is now available through IPv6 as well as IPv4. Yay!