So I have been experimenting with Rimfaxe which is a new oss web server servlet engine from my home town of Aarhus in Denmark.
I have to say that I am very much impressed. I immediately liked the idea of using it for various parts of the NeuClear architecture that require very high availability.
The first and most obvious difference in Rimfaxe is that it uses GCC’s GCJ Java compiler and environment. What this means is that Rimfaxe runs like a true native application offering very high speeds and lower theoretical overhead.
How does this affect writing servlets then? Do you need to know how to build using gcj??? For the simplest applications no. You place your servlet source code in the WEB-INF/rws/src/ folder and Rimfaxe automatically builds the source code with gcj and places a .so called libservlets.so under WEB-INF/rws/lib/. Basically Rimfaxe ignores the contents of WEB-INF/classes/ ( and I think WEB-INF/lib/) and sets up its own structure under WEB-INF/rws/ but the only one I know what to do with is src as jars appears to do nothing. (I shall ask the mailing list and report back)
The same goes for JSP’s. Rimfaxe uses Jasper (like tomcat and more or less everyone else) to generate the java sourcecode on the fly, then dynamically runs gcj to compile them into a .so shared object file into the WEB-INF/rws/jsplib directory. It even reloads them exactly like normal jsp’s do. The lag on the first load was very short as well, propably faster than javac’s compilation anyway.
Now the tricky bit is the external libraries. There are very few web applications now a days that just rely on the servlet api and nothing else. I may have misunderstood something, but from what I can see you need to compile them into linux shared objects and places them in the /shared directory of your Rimfaxe distribution directory.
Rimfaxe provides downloadable libraries for common libraries such as GNU JAXP and JDBC Drivers for MySQL and MSSQL.
To create your own, what I would do is to use the directory structure of one of these and edit the make files. This is a pain in the ass, but doable if desperate. It would be easier if rimfaxe would let gcj compile the contents of each jar in WEB-INF/lib to a shared object automatically. I am guessing that that is in the plans (or maybe its already there, but I dont know how to use it).
The second interesting feature of Rimfaxe, besides it’s use of gjc, is its use of SEDA technology to create a massively scalable web server. This uses non blocking IO and various clever queuing pipelines to be able to handle vast amounts of traffic safely. I did a lot of reading up about yesterday and Matt Welsh the guy behind SEDA has put some serious research into it, this counts as seriously cool technology. If you are interested in massively scalable web applications have a look at some of the papers on his site.
All in all I can say that Rimfaxe has taken a refreshing approach to servlet engines. It is definitely not for everyone, in particularly I dont think it would be of much use for inhouse applications, but for large public web services it shows some real potential.
Last week the 32g drive in my aging Dell Inspiron 5000e died on me. I had had some strange errors and thought it might help to rebuild my kernel. Then it started coughing on loading kernel modules during boot up. I was thinking what the f***. In the end the annoying knocking sound that has accompanied the drive got more and more intense and I realized that it was finally dying.
Neither MultiMax nor Panafoto could help me out, prefering instead to try and sell me keychain flash drives, which I patiently told them was not what I needed.
So Saturday I mounted a taxi to take me to my favorite pc store in town. Planet Computer in the suburb of Eldorado between Felix Maduro and Sol de la India (if you’re in town and need components quick). I got a 40G fujitsu drive for $167, which I didnt think was really too bad at all. As usual the Chinese owner allowed me to haggle and gave me good insights into various info.
I also got an external USB2 harddrive enclosure which doesnt actually fit my old drive, but thats what screwdrivers are for anyway. I managed to save my entire home directory thank good, even though it was screeching like you wouldnt belive, while it was copying it.
So since Saturday, my notebook has been building Gentoo with Linux 2.6.1 and KDE 3.2rc1, hopefully tomorrow it should be ready. Living on the bleeding edge as usual I have had a spat of strange build errors slowing it down, but hey it looks like its cooking now.
BTW, to get started I used an old Cluster Knoppix bootable live cd that I had lying around, which is the coolest thing in the world for demonstrating cheap linux clustering.
Just caught this report which basically sums up the opportunities in Panama and why I am here, but also hints (not too loudly of problems).
Panama Telecom report No 1, 2004
Panama is the new strategic location for Internet Data center and telecommunications companies in Latin America due to the burgeoning technology industry in the area and the country growth as a technology hub with the best submarine Fiber Optic Connection in Latin America. Leading Internet companies and Carrier are already leveraging the benefits using Panama as the gateway for the region.
(PRWEB) January 28 2004
Panama is the new strategic location for Internet Data center and telecommunications companies in Latin America due to the burgeoning technology industry in the area and the country growth as a technology hub with the best submarine Fiber Optic Connection in Latin America.
Leading Internet companies and Carrier are already leveraging the benefits using Panama as the gateway for the region.
Important players like Global Crossing, MCI, Sky Online, new world communication, Cable & Wireless and Nautilus have decided to install Network Operation Centers in Panama, taking advantage of the geographical location providing an abundant supply of submarine fiber optic communications circuit on both coasts and which makes possible interconnection close to north and Latin America, Asia, Europe, Africa and the world over redundant routes.
Panama has become an increasingly important technology hub for Latin America,” said Nils Petterson, the founder of ALTEC1 the first internet data center in open two years ago in the City of Knowledge Tecnopark in Ft Clayton a US military base converted in a Tecnology park, research center and Education Campus, the vision of Mr. Petterson open the door for company as DELL, Telecarrier, Spherion, MCI, Unicef, Isthmus Crossing, open a presence in Panama and establish.” Network Access Points (NAPs), Data Centers, Call Center aimed at supporting and serving the growing demand for those services in Latin America and a prime choice for company from anywhere in the World in need of a secure place to keep data and secure communication based on the availability of fiber optic cables, the geographical location, the fiscal incentives granted by the local government, the dollars base economy and the social stability of the country. This year Altec is opening the first Carrier Hotel were the Incumbent Telecom Company and start up find the best location and pricing to start the business to compete in the local market or to use Panama as the gateway to transit traffic to other Latin American Countries.
Most of the data transmission technologies found in developed countries like ADSL, Cable modem, ISDN, wireless , frame relay , Ethernet and ATM with support for high speeds and broadband services are widely available in Panama from several supplier including Cable & Wireless, Tele Data, Telco Virtual, GbmNet, Sky on Line. Union Fenosa, ACP (Panama Canal Authority) Isthmus Crossing and Etesa have built Telecommunication Network to compete again the main operator and offer connectivity across the Isthmus of Panama.
“Panama Internet Data center’s and Carrier Hotel gives the region’s technology companies the ability to choose from the premier telecom companies to optimize their Internet presence and improve business performance and revenues the best infrastructure, security, scalability, performance, connectivity, reliability and convenience for web site an E-Business in a Tax Free environment. Response times for end users, is among the fastest in the industry, thanks to the direct access to all the mayor submarine Fiber Optic cable including Pan American, Global Crossing PAC & MAC, Maya 1, and Arcos 1.
A good news for the consumer, on january 16, 2004 the Government abolish a 1$ tax on every International call and replace the tax by a 12 % value added tax, reducing the cost for the consumer in 50% or more, this new tax apply to call using any Tecnology available including Internet .
Panama’s population is estimated at 3.1 million. Approximately 72% of Panamanian households have a telephone line. Local calls represent 73 % of total traffic, and the mobile market is growing very fast with 810,000 customers
The telecommunications sectors have great potential to contribute to the economic development of Panama via direct investment in technology and infrastructure. Other sectors with growth potential are depending in technology as tourism and transportation, through the multi-modal transport infrastructure that includes the canal, ports, highways, railroad and telecommunication.
The telecommunication market open in January first 2003, and a legion of company with and without experience have receive a license from the Ente Regulador de los servicios publicos the local FCC who have grander more than 1419 licenses to 176 operators, the primary objective for most of the new players is International long distance and the use of services such as VOIP (voice over Internet) and VON (voice over the net). During 2003 the price of international call get down to 0.10 a minute and will go down to 0.05 when new operator start operation, especially using VOIP.
In 2003 The Regulatory Authority has ruled that in order to provide these services a license needs to be obtained. In an apparent attempt to stem telephone company revenue losses due to Internet telephony, the news operators TELECARRIER, CLAROCOM and CABLE & WIRELESS who use the technology for reducing their cost of operation but try to block the access to the free world ask the government of Panama to block 46 UDP ports by all Internet service providers. The ports include ones that are commonly used for voice over IP as well as some that are used for other purposes, apparently with the idea that these, too, could be used to circumvent the POTS (plain old telephone system, a term of art) in making telephone calls
According to the largest local telephone company, the amount of traffic generated by VON or VOIP represents a market of approximately US$30 million. VOIP future is still unclear because the Ente Regulador must rule on the use of VOIP.
On january 16 ,2004 the National Assembly approve the Law No 98 to eliminate a $ 1.00 tax on every International Call and replace by a 12 % tax on all International Call using any Tecnology : legacy Telecom, Internet, call back, prepaid card, This steep is the first intent of the Government to reduce the lost of around $ 30 Millions dollars the Traditional carrier are leaving to the Informal carrier as Net2Phone, Internet Telecom, DowNetwork and more 100 Internet café selling Internet call.
19 licenses has been issued for Call Centers since The government of Panama agreed to eliminate a US$1 tax on international calls in order to make call centers competitive with the rest of the world The principal participant are DELL, Health Link Networks, Language Line, Sitel, Spherion , and 5500 jobs have been already created.
Panama has passed its fully regulated Internet Gaming laws. This makes it the only regulated jurisdiction in the world issuing licenses now to those operators wishing to stay on the good side of US law. Panama’s laws are of the same high standards as the Isle of Man, Nevada’s large casino-resorts’ choice for I-gaming. Until now a very few company have apply for the license, mainly for the huge paperwork and the cost of the license. Costa Rica is still the success story with more 6000 casinos on line and gambling site.
The expectation of a large exodus of company from other Central American country as Costa Rica and several Caribbean island were the situation is unclear and the price of bandwidth is astronomical compare to Panama as not been a success yet, Panama must review the Business model and the cost of the license in order to actively participate in this market.
Two authorized operators Cable & Wireless and Bellsouth Panama are fighting each other to gain customer but the price is still the higher in the region because of this dual monopoly .Total cellular phone users reached 810,000 in 2003 with good prospects for continued growth in the future, especially pre-paid services. Approximately 85 % of the estimated total market for wireless services (US$133 million) comes from Pre-Paid Services. The remaining 15% comes from Post Paid services, oriented primarily to corporate and personal high consumption users. Bellsouth, the largest cellular operator, accounts for 55% of the market. The other 45% is controlled by Cable & Wireless Panama. In 2003 Cable & Wireless mobile launch its new GSM/GPRS platform on 850 MHz, launched to upgrade its current TDMA platform, with capability for data transmission services. Bellsouth also launch a new platform (CDMA) which was operational in December 2002. Market growth due to the new platforms is expected to be at least 16% over the prior year.
A challenger Tricom, based in the Dominican Republic, which is offering cellular-look alike products based on Motorola’s IDEN digital radio trucking technology is trying to enter the market and resolving the legal issue be resolved by the Supreme Court, regarding the services directed to the corporate market to reduce the high cost of cellular and a new company is already been sued by MultiHolding the largest share Holder of Bell South. At this moment, however, the penetration of Tricom does not go beyond 6% of the total market and they are negotiating the exit of the market.
Voice Services include local, domestic, international long distance and public pay phones. Since the privatization of the government-owned operator (INTEL), Cable & Wireless has been offering basic services on a five year exclusive concession. This market condition granted by law ended on January 2nd 2003, when the market was opened to competition. With 420,000 lines installed (around 12.6 lines for each 100 inhabitants) and 365,000 customer on a digital platform installed by ALCATEL and Ericsson, Panama offers first class service compare to most of the Latin American countries. The total voice market in Panama is estimated at US$ 424 million. Local Services, including domestic long distance, represent about 80% of the total.
As of january 20, 2004 , over 15 new operators have applied for Basic Service concessions. Operators such as Bellsouth, Telecarrier, Cable Onda, Galaxy Communications, Tricom, one world communication, cable Onda and Advanced Communications are already in operation and a price war help the customer to get a choice a services and price. Most of those concessions are only targeting the most populated zones of the country, mainly Panama City and Colon, leaving the rest of the country to be served by Cable & Wireless. This situation is largely due to the investment required not only to provide the service but to comply with the service standards set by the local telecommunications authority. The local Player with the best position will; be cable Onda who is already offering cable TV and Internet and will be offering Local, Long Distance and International telecommunication services soon..
26 licenses have been issued to operators that are going to provide Domestic Long Distance. Most of the operators currently own network infrastructure being used to transport data and to provide Internet services and last mille with Cable & Wireless, the price a an National long distance call was reduce from 0.15 to 0,10 by Telecarrier, and the Ente Regulator Fine $ 200,000 Cable & Wireless for not interconnecting other Carrier.
53 licenses have been issued to new operators of ILD This use to be the most profitable market segment, requiring lower infrastructure investment… Most of the new players are relying on third party network infrastructure as Altec Carrier Hotel and Telco Virtual and local loop provider to transport voice traffic. Interconnection agreements, service level agreements and local loop availability is the most important issues being faced by new entrants in this segment, and the Dominant operator is still trying very hard to not facilitate the entry of new carriers who will be waiting on line for the next two years in the Ente Regulator take a serious look of the situation and facilitate the intercommunion process between the company, for example a intercommunion agreement with Telecarrier or Bellsouth take 2 or 3 Weeks and with Cable & Wireless at least 9 months.
15 operators have obtained licenses to offer services representing a $ 50 million dollars market mostly in the largest city, leaving the largest part of the country without telecommunication services due to the high cost of installation and operation, cable & Wireless already asking a fair treatment from the Ente Regulator for universal access.
42 operators have been granted licenses to offer private voice circuits since January 2003.
At least 47 companies have licenses to offer services for last mile and Internet dedicated access solutions the widespread use of wireless technologies such as Spread Spectrum and LMDS solutions, fiber optic and ADSL targeted to corporate and private users has been evolving since 2002…
The leaders is TELECARRIER who take over several companies including Alianza viva, TeleData, net2net and Fuzion telecommunication and still trying very hard to resolve technical issue cause by a wide range of disparate equipment from several manufactures, a other incumbent player is Optynex Telecom who use existing fiber optic cable from UFINET, ACP and Global Crossing and agreement with System One World communication to resale telecommunication value added service , other smaller players are GBnet, Sky On Line( Diveo &Teleglobe) Commnet,
Data services, account for a market size of US$75 million, with approximately 9500 point-to-point private circuits in operation.
79 providers are trying to survive with 145,000 paid internet accounts and an average 3 users per account, and more than 4000 direct connections through leased lines and other dedicated links, Public kiosk have been install around the country by SENACYT a Government sponsor institute , and INTERED a public peering point . The number of Internet dial-up connections kept growing in 2003 with the introduction of new prepaid services and charges per minute of connection.
Cable & Wireless launched in 2003 an aggressive campaign to penetrate the Internet market with ADSL technology. The Kilobyte price for dedicated Internet access dropped significantly, as the main providers such as Cable & Wireless, Telecarrier and Cable Onda lowered their rates. The new pricing structure benefited both residential and corporate markets, reaching a level of $39 per month for a dedicated 128K connection. Internet access, hosting and first tier IP services represented approximated a US$27 million market, showing an increase of 18% over the prior year.
US$ Million 2000 2001 2002 2003
Population 2.9 3.0 3.0 3.1
User POT Line 429,135 381,912 386,904 365,100
Mobile user 410,401 475,141 525,845 810,00
Local call 1,241 1,146 1,099 1,068
International 39,3 39,5 39,4 39,5
National Call 397,2 378,3 416,1 394,8
call POT Line 1,677 1,593 1,554 1,5003
Data Revenue 55,0 60,0 65,0 75,0
Internet 29,0 31,0 35,0 40,0
DENSITY PER 100 HAB
FIX LINE 14,6 12,7 12,6 11,7
MOBILE 13.9 15.8 17.2 26.0
Source : Ente Regulador de los Servicios Publicos
The telecommunications sector offers excellent growth opportunities for the immediate future with very low investment using the existing infrastructure provided by Cable & Wireless and other incumbent enterprise.
IDC (Internet Data Center) and carrier Hotel, disaster recovery center, Collocation, Hosting, Data transmission and data switching, Internet access, internet Kiosk, value added mobile services.
The most growth potential is Voice over IP (VOIP) Over the last year VOIP has been considered an illegal activity by the telecommunications regulatory office but this solution is already offer by more than 40 company and the market leader is NET2PHONE who have more than 6000 customers and 90 % of the Colon Free zone customer who use to be the largest international long distance customer segment, the Ente regulator if trying is best to fine the companies without any success and is under severe pressure from international and local organization to eliminate the decision to block the 24 internet port who will create a regional chaos in the industries because of the submarine fiber optic cable carrying the traffic to the region.
On the positive side, VOIP is a reality and the new law may facilitate the use of the internet to make cheap phone call , several official carrier are using the Tecnology and Telecarrier CEO , Luis La Rocca quit is job to work with VOIP Panama one of the first legal carrier using this Tecnology to reduce the cost .
In Panama It very easy and inexpensive to apply for a license from the Ente regulator at this date more than 1,419 licenses as been issued and is no limit of the quantity of new operators. However the market tends to be highly concentrated, as 6 operators controlling 80% of the market and the red tape impose by cable & Wireless cause already several casualties with the new Carrier trying to make a “Bingo”, without experience and investment, for example Telecarrier is losing $ 675,000 monthly to enter the market and the only success story is ClaroCom who take over 32 % of Cable & Wireless International Business in the last 6 month.
The remainder are small companies operating long distance switch , trunking radio services, paging, Internet services, data transmission, fax store & forward, teletex, and many” paper company” without money or real intention to participate actively just trying to make money selling the licenses to new investors.
For complete Information related to the public services is available from the Ente web page: www.enteregulador.gob.pa that at the moment is only available in Spanish and if you are interested to enter the market without to many red tape you may use our service to speed up the process and reduce your cost, we have expert in every field including legal, technical, local support and the best location in a tax free environment in the City of Knowledge TecnoPark www.telcovirtual.com
SSL and TLS suck badly at many things. Most of those things are to do with the reliance on X509 Certificates and Verisign. For a good rant check out Ian’s SSL considered harmful
Tyler Close has a great simple solution to this called HTTPSY, which I actually think lends it self more to web services than to web browsers.
It is a self authenticating scheme, where the url includes a sha1 hash of the signers public key. An example URL is this:
httpsy://+cl7h3f7jwyj3fvmw7jpnjfvf2xlcmayi@yurl.net/
The great thing is that you can use the security of TLS in your web applications, without having to purchase versign certificates all the time.
Ofcourse you could also hardcode your application to accept the certificate of a known server. But the httpsy approach makes it a lot more extendible.
To simplify developing for this. Tyler has helpfully created a drop in java url handler which should make client development simple.
Tyler has his own open source web server, which uses his very cool yet non standard API’s. This server supports httpsy out of the box if you follow these instructions.
As far as I can see you should be able to use any tls enabled web server such as tomcat, apache, orion etc. Follow the same general procedure as in Tyler’s instructions, just configure your server to use the generated transient key.
This the latest build of my favorite IDE is the first for a while, that I would say is relatively stable. I’ve been using it heavily since Friday both on my work machine Linux 2.4.22 and my home machine 2.6.1.
Under linux 2.6.1 the annoying resource copying bug still shows its ugly face, allthough it lists them as compilation errors instead of showing error dialogues as it did before.
The settings screen continues to be cleaned up. Now the project settings are on top of the global settings. At first when the new mac like settings screen was introduced I wasnt sure I liked it, but I have now grown used to it.
1108 sees an improved path editor for adding external libraries to your sub projects. It is now a lot cleaner. Generally speaking I really like auroras new project layout with one master project and many sub projects. It is pretty cool. What I would like to see, would be a way to convert a regular java project to one of the J2EE projects.
Anyway keep up the good work JetBrains and for the love of God fix error #15198
Just had a diversionary trip to the brand new Mac Store in Panama. It was a very pleasant experience. The store is laid out l am guessing in a similar way to US Apple Stores (Not that I have ever been in one).
Emilio showed us around and gave us a good demonstration of the 12 and 17 inch Power Books as well as the 2GHz G5 Dual. He even gave me a peek inside.
They had just received a new 17”, so he took us through the whole 5 minute setup process.
I am still drooling. My notebook at home is close to dying and my work PC isnt in the best of shape either, basically I am sick and tired of having to fix stuff, which I always find myself doing on Linux and Windows. I just want to code… please. Once we actually start earning a bit of money in our company, we will more than likely get a pair of 12” as it suits the way we work best.
Anyway, good job to the Mac Store (and give Emilio a raise).
I was really glad to see Thomas Response to my comments on the article Pirates of the 21st Century that he wrote about me and various other CypherPunk wannabes.
I should update my original response, which I forgot to do when I read the translation. Thomas DOES mention that it is mentioned as a joke. Sorry Thomas.
The comments are good and I am glad to see that it was written with German Sarcasm in mind. (Thomas, thanks for the link, I love that site).
My main annoyance right now with IDEA is this bug. I can not imagine it being hard to fix.
What happens is if you run IDEA on a machine that uses a linux 2.6 kernel, IDEA simply refueses to copy files.
So when you start up and IDEA wants to copy over all the jar files it horks out an error message for each one. This you can kind of fix by appending the following to your idea.lax file’s lax.nl.java.option.additional property:
-Didea.jars.nocopy=true
But there doesnt seem to be a fix for the more annoying problem, where it refuses to copy over system resources from your source classpath to your build classpath.
Please investigate and fix. I and Im sure others are willing to help out here if you want.
I now have a full translation of the article in Die Zeit the large German newspaper, who did an article on amongst other people us.
I was misquoted in the article, see my detraction Am I a Pirate of the 21st century for what was wrong.
Fighting against terror, police and secret services are establishing the surveillance state. But a group of computer geniuses is waging data war on authorities. A report from the world of encrypted messages.
By Thomas Fischermann (translated by Veronika Leluschko)
The art of power is the art of disappearing. (Paul Virilio)
The computer in the ZEIT office just reported the reception of a town clerk’s e-mail. That man is an important informer for this story. One who has a certain reputation among the cryptographers, the inventor and user of electronic hiding and encrypting techniques. But that town clerk’s e-mail cannot simply be opened by clicking on it. It took a couple of minutes until the computer was accepted in the “Lasseiz Faire City”, an underground network, hiding deep underneath the surface of the internet, only to be entered with the right code words.
On first sight, the Lasseiz Faire City doesn’t look different from many other websites on the internet. One may send e-mails, post messages on a message board and visit chatrooms. But here, different form the usual internet, surfers can be assured of their anonymity. Nobody will intercept their messages. A series of techniques, some 25 years ago only available to secret services, encrypt electronic messages beyond recognition, let them dash around the globe as supposedly meaningless data dust, covering over all traces on their long journey.
The town clerk’s message starts with “aANQR1DBw04D/NSEz31qI+8QEADwytY”, that’s “Cyphertext”. A mathematically encrypted message, only to be read by its receiver. A few mouse clicks, a password, and finally something readable appears on the screen. “Thomas, let me think about those questions. I”l get back to you tomorrow.”
Welcome to the mysterious world of Cypherpunks! It was in May 1992, when Eric Hughes went to see his friend Tim May in Santa Cruz, California - and ended up staying there for three days, chatting away. That time, Hughes was in his late 20s and a gifted mathematician from UC Berkeley; May was 10 years older, a former physicist at the Intel chip company, having “retired” a couple of years ago thanks to a huge shareholder package. It was obvious that the two scientists got along together well: they shared a similar taste for Western gear and cool sunglasses, a fascination for computer techniques and more than a healthy amount of paranoia. Most of all, they shared political convictions.
Both regarded themselves associated with the libertarians, the supporters of an ultraliberal ideology, quite widely spread among the white American middle class. Libertarian Americans are facing the state in a particularly sceptical way, which concerns police as well as tax-collectors. Many of them would like to completely abolish states including their taxes and authorities and leave the power to the free market. That was the vigorous subject the two friends were discussing during their talk marathon that month of May. It wouldn’t be worth mentioning if the duo hadn’t been convinced of holding the key to their political dreams in their own hands.
In fall 1992, May and Hughes created a loose association of like-minded people which lead to one of the most unusual — and most obscure political movements of all times. They called themselves Cypherpunks, based on a science fiction style that had become popular around the end of the 19th century. They were a conglomeration of highly decorated scientists and dreamers, computer geniuses and political activists, lawyers and also criminals. They wanted to be rebels in cyberspace, those guys in sneakers and T-Shirts wanted to change the world, using their laptops as weapons. They would gather for fortuitous “physical meetings”, their Cypherpunk mailinglist would raise to one of the hottest internet debating places with almost 2000 subscribers. They wanted to be the technical elite, creating the infrastructure for a utopian, lawless cyberspace. And today, just 10 years later and after the terror attacks of 9/11, some of them see their hour come: as the last bastion against a society of surveillance.
In the early 90s, the internet economy as we know it today, was still in its infancy. But among the technicians’ avantgarde Hughes and May frequented, visions of a a digital future had already quite progressed: People on the American west coast were already discussing how electronic mail would replace all paper mailings in and between companies, that all money and shares transfers should be moved from classical banking to cyberspace, that products such as music, movies and news should, one day, only be delivered via data processing. More and more parts of our work and spare time would happen in front of a screen.
That time, a hand full of books and essays appeared, like “The sovereign individual”, describing someone who organizes his life and business in cyberspace, allowing no state to govern him. An organization called Laissez Faire City opened a provisional office in Costa Rica, wanting to offer some sort of virtual citizenship. Political terms like cyberanarchy and virtual regions managed to make their way into seminars of political sciences and law schools. Wasn’t it a children’s game to smuggle all those data, messages and products past governmental eavesdroppers and controllers, past all those police, tax-collectors and customs officials? Would such an unregulated, lawless cyberspace be able to force the hated states to their knees?
One might have thought about such ideologies what he wanted. Tim May once openly declared that cryptography would also be advantageous for murderers and terrorists, for racists, kidnappers and hijackers. That would be the inevitable and necessary evil side of the new freedom, he said. ‘Cypherpunks break the laws they don’t like”, the founders autocratically wrote in one of their pamphlets. But, one way or the other, it seemed to be technically feasible to the experts and even unavoidable.
In the 70s and 80s, methods for extreme data encryption had already slipped out of the hands of the secret services. Powerless, military and police could only watch how programmes like Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) were spread all over the world in the 90s, unable to be hacked with acceptable effort and expense - not even with the help of the secret services’ own supercomputers. “Cypherpunks will write programs”, so Eric Hughes’ battle cry which he wrote in a manifesto of the newly founded group. They would establish secret electronic mailboxes, found electronic banks and deal with electronic money, simply create a network of highly encrypted communication. “The change will not arise in a political but in a technical way” co-founder Tim May added.
“Governments in the industrial world, you tired giants made of flesh and steel”. This is how, a couple of years later, John Perry Barlow began his Declaration of Independence in Cyberspace. The rancher, former Grateful Dead songwriter and passionate fighter for civil rights had become an icon of the movement. “Where we gather, you have no sovereignty anymore.”
Lima, May 2003. Caryn Mladen had prepared her trip to Peru perfectly. Her luggage looked quite unusual for a Canadian tourist, though: laptops, adapters, computer software. A list with names of groups of the civil rights movement that have gotten in trouble with police or political opponents. “Peru has a history as a particularly well organized surveillance state”, says the 38-year-old lawyer from Toronto, telling about her 2.5 week long undercover trip. “Although it’s now a democratic country, many old forces are still working. Nobody knows if the old surveillance systems are still in use and who uses them.”
Ms Caryn is a computer expert with extensive knowledge of data protection. She has written books about computers and is the author of a news column. She has hitch-hiked through Africa and travelled Syria during the first Gulf War (“I felt safer there than in New York City”) and studied massage techniques from the Far East.
Recently, she says, “I just needed something new, a new challenge. Then, in December 2001, it just happened.” They were five like-minded people, all of them fascinated by data protection and encryption techniques. Three lawyers, a medical doctor and a computer specialist with contacts to the Cypherpunk scene. They called themselves Privaterra and wanted to do foreign (development-) aid in an unusual way. They would provide civil rights fighters in developing countries with modern instruments of encryption techniques - the weapons of the Crypto movement.
Meanwhile the group has been to several countries in South- and Central America, like-minded people in various African countries. “The needs are often very different,” says the activist, “many groups have such little technical knowledge, they first of all need things like a virus protection program.” Computers, e-mail and the internet have, for a long time, become an indispensable tool for human rights fighters all over the world - an indispensable tool in the search for political prisoners and for coordinating campaigns. The disadvantage is, though, that these organizations’ computers now host the addresses of activists, confidential mail and other body of evidence.
Ms Caryn and her friends have taught dozens of civil rights fighters how to encrypt such data, how to hide them on the hard disk or stock them in a safe place in the far cyberspace - just in case that a computer gets confiscated by the police or disappears in a “burglary”. They taught civil rights fighters how to protect themselves from being attacked by hostile hackers who often also work for secret services. They taught them how to encrypt messages and how to find their way into secret communication networks, cleverly installed underneath the surface of the internet by crypto activists, instead of sending a regular e-mail that can be read by everybody like a postcard.
“Who are the opponents we’re fighting against?” A question Ms Caryn has asked frequently. She didn#t always get an answer. Sometimes it’s governments, sometimes former governments’ loyal members who continue working underground. Privaterra is helped by amnesty international, Human Rights Watch and other human rights movements when choosing their “clients” to make sure that the instruments aren’t handed over to the wrong people.
About ten years after the Cypherpunks’ foundation meeting some of their political dreams have come closer to reality than ever before. Data encryption that no curious state official can hack anymore, in Peru or at the American snooping service NSA? Many such techniques are today available for everybody on the internet. Software forges like Martus Software or Hacktivismo have even written custom-made programs on the internet for political activists and civil rights movements. Nonetheless Caryn and her traveling data rebels had to make a painful recognition: The technology might work, but a much bigger problem is the application. “Those people are no computer experts, and we can’t make them computer experts” says Caryn. “But these groups cannot risk to make mistakes - their communication has to be 100% bugproof.”
“Most of the people we work with have extremely good reasons for privacy” she says. Death threats, unannounced raids in dawn, unexplained burglaries in the organizations’ offices. A Privaterra “client”, “somewhere in Central America”, was later found murdered. Only a couple of weeks ago, the Vietnamese activist Pham Hong Son was sentenced to 13 years in jail for “espionage” because he had exchanged e-mails with international democracy groups. “This is not an amusing adventure, most of all we have to be careful not to harm anybody”, says one of Caryn’s co-workers. A couple of years ago, when China built a wall around the entire Chinese internet and had police control all internet cafés in Peking, a team of Cypherpunks immediately wrote a program to break through the virtual wall. But after a short time of enthusiasm they withdraw it, because the use of the program left suspicious traces on the internet - which represented an even bigger source of trouble.
Las Vegas, August 2003. Once a year the walls of the Alexis Park Congress Center are covered with black cloth. Bouncers guard the doors, the police sends out special forces and allegedly even international secret services reconnoitre the terrain. A motley crowd of hackers invades the Nevada desert: it’s DefCon, the biggest convention for all those who know about penetrating others’ computer systems. Hordes of computer geeks populate the congress halls and the deck chairs around the swimming pool, pale guys in T-Shirts and enormous sandals, trendy hipsters with fantasy haircuts. Many of the guests still have quite pimpled faces. Computer kids.
The speaker entering the stage is in his late 30s. Wearing a suit and T-Shirt and a gray floppy hat he may not quite fit into the surrounding. Also his public is older and more serious looking than the huge amount of computer kids. In the middle row a few FBI agents have mingled with the public, expectantly folding their arms. No surprise considering the title of his speech: Punish the collaborators! is Bill Scannell’s subject. He is a veteran on these meetings: a confessed Cypherpunk, although not very knowledgeable in technology. The power-speaker and chainsmoker Scannell has become famous as the mouthpiece of a bunch of cryptography companies - for example The Bunker, the company who bought an entire nuclear blast-proof bunker in the West of England and, since then, extols it as a particularly safe data storage place. Today he is playing his preferred role: the self-declared civil rights fighter and troublemaker. “We must prevent George Bush and John Ashcroft from making the US a society of observation and surveillance’ says Scannell. He quickly talks himself into a fury and receives mixed reactions - defiant applauding, a few outraged listeners are leaving the conference hall. “We must make life hell for those who want to take away the freedom of our constitution from us!”
Maybe it’s due to Bill Scannell’s personal history that he is so concerned about privacy and data protection. Scannell has worked as a spy in East-Berlin, then as a journalist in countries formerly belonging to the Eastern bloc. He claims having experienced “how things are going in totalitarian countries. I was always proud of the freedom an American enjoys in America.”
When, in February, the American airline Delta offered to test an extensive passenger surveillance system of the American government “I blew a fuse”, says Scannell. A few days later he started a protest-website, requesting boycott and attacking personally the Delta chief manager; he toured American talk shows and attended the Delta general meeting. The company ended up withdrawing its original plan. At the moment he is working on a similar website against the flight booking system Galileo. “These things don’t help at all to fight terrorism” Scannell says. “They are an instrument of prosecutors for all kind of goals.”
Scannell claims it a “fundamental right” to travel through the country without being detected. This has become more difficult since the terror attacks, but, when he has enough extra-time for his check-in, he quarrels with the security staff; he gets a kick out of buying a bus- or railway ticket under a false name (“Joe Cypherpunk”). “Recently I was at the airport, talking to my sister on the phone, about politics, and I spoke out clearly some personal points of view” he says. “Then I noticed everybody was staring at me as if I were a terrorist. That moment I realized that, in this country, we are beginning to be afraid to speak out freely what we think.”
The early Cypherpunks considered it a law of nature that the internet era will simply deprive the authorities of power, that, one day, they will just capitulate and be quiet. But two years after 9/11 the “tired giants of flesh and steel” are regaining their strength. Only a few weeks after the terror attacks Bush arranged for new laws. He even established an “Administration for Cyberspace Security”. Rumors could be heard that encryption techniques deriving from hacker and cypherpunk forges had helped bin Laden’s kamikaze pilots plan their attacks, that people like the Cypherpunks were even partially responsible for 9/11.
It is, of course, an old contentious issue in the debate about data protection if encryption techniques are in fact a civil right or only a support for terrorists, rascals and drug dealers, if they are a modern equivalent for a sealed envelope or a “product equivalent to weapons”, as the US government decided at times. Is there a perfect balance between freedom and security? The core around Tim May and Phil Zimmermann, the inventor of the encryption program PGP, stuck to it after 9/11: protection for criminals and terrorists is a necessary price to pay. Nobody could stop the movement anyway. And weren’t there enough legitimate applications for the new technology? Protection for “cypher dissidents” in China or Burma - and even in America, where, for example, some groups are planning to publish the names of “missing people” in Guantánamo Bay, fearing political repercussions, who knows whether they are right or wrong? “If cryptography is prohibited, then only the criminals have cryptography” Phil Zimmermann occasionally declared succinctly.
After 9/11 and the following hunt for more security, such remarks hardly found sympathizers. Many law keepers and security services sensed their chance to create facts. Step by step the rights of police and secret services to tap phone calls are extended, authorities connect their data banks, more and more they are given the right to access data banks of private companies - in America, in Europe and in other parts of the world. “Few people have understood that a surveillance like in Orwell’s Big Brother isn’t reduced to the world of books and movies anymore” says Barry Steinhart, the data protection expert of the civil rights movement Civil Liberties Union.
However, it was not the first shock of 9/11 burying the Cypherpunk founders’ mantra of the “inevitability” of unlimited privacy. It was the technical development itself. The explosive spreading of computer technology and internet in the industrial countries was followed by an explosion of spying programs, an explosion of surveillance cameras in streets and on airports, biometrical recognition techniques and loads more of other technologies. More and higher performing computer systems apparently became the snoopers’ advantage.
Never before companies, national authorities and obstinate internet researchers could find out so much about anyone - thanks to the internet that once should bring unlimited freedom, as Cypherpunks had been dreaming. “You have zero privacy anyway”, Scott McNealy, head of the Californian computer company Sun Microsystems said a couple of years ago. “Deal with it.”
New York City, October 2003. The head waiter lifted his eyebrows for a second as Jo, John and Sean entered his noble seafood restaurant in sneakers and casual outfit. The three people in their mid-thirties and with gawky Westcoast attitude look a bit different from the serious business people who usually have lunch here. But how can the waiter know that he is confronted with three future government leaders?
“Has the dream of an anonymous, stateless Cyberspace burst?” That’s the question Sean asks. Leaning back, he repeats the sentence, then takes a moment of reflection. Sean is clearly the man for the big answers, he’s the leader of the group. A stocky young guy with a fat, round face. “It’s all there, burglar-proof mathematical proceedings, anonymous e-mail-programs, anonymous websurfing, even anonymous exchange platforms. But one of the big problems is: Nobody uses these things! They are only reserved for a small elite.”
When Sean Hastings speaks about a small elite one thing is clear: he himself and his friends count among them. Hastings is a Cypherpunk. None of the sworn founding members, but a gifted young computer programmer with a rebel’s heart, who would just love to scare the hell out of the nation-states. “But, don’t write that I’m a Cypherpunk” he corrects immediately. “I don’t like to be put in a drawer. Just write that I sympathize pretty much with the Cypherpunks’ philosophy.”
Hastings has reached cult status. In the late 90s he found an old book called How to start your own country. A couple of months later he bought a number of computer servers and installed them on a rusty air defense station from WWII, a few miles from the East coast of England (in the middle of the North Sea), opening the “first public data paradise in the world”. Hastings claimed that these computers were not controlled by anybody. In 1967, the retired officer Paddy Roy Bates “conquered” and declared independent the deserted military station. Bates once expelled the Royal Navy with well-aimed shots across the bow. (here is a pun which cannot be translated. T.F. writes “Schüsse vor den Bug”, which literally means “shots against the bow”, but mainly “to severely offend someone”.)
Since then, Bates considers himself “Prince of Sealand” and, for a couple of years, Hastings was his official national entrepreneur. Hastings, his wife Jo and a hand full of seamen hackers squeezed themselves into windowless cabins, and they all were very discreet. The Prince kept his paws off the computers and Hastings told nobody who used his servers to stock data base and websites.
After all, Sealand was supposed to guarantee absolute data inviolability for the first time in history.
“Throughout many discussions we had agreed that an anonymous cyberspace needs a certain amount of physical safety,” says Hastings. It may be more and more difficult to hack encrypted messages, electronic “magic hats” may become more and more efficient. But somewhere in the world, on some computer, all these secret data must be stored and be fed into the internet. Somewhere out there the world’s mystery-mongers are sitting in front of their computers, knowing how to get to see their messages in plain text - discreet and secluded entrepreneurs from Kiev, tax evaders from the USA, secret online gamblers from Brussels, unfaithful guys from Vienna, dealers of illegal nude pictures from Bogotá and drug dealers from Lucerne. And everywhere unpleasant states can cut off lines, confiscate hard disks or sentence their owners to hand out keys. When a couple of years ago, during the Internet security fair RSA, a young blasé programmer was listing all the “ultrasafe” protection programs of his computer, one of the police representatives blew his top: “So what if I kick down your door and hold a gun to your head? Are your data still safe then?”
Even Sealand, says Hastings, couldn’t have made the Cypherpunks’ dreams safe and secure. “It only really works when we have computers all over the world and distribute encrypted data in little bits on all those systems.” That’s why he is already planning a new data paradise: a gigantic swimming island in the international waters near Gibraltar. “Maybe we establish a completely new form of life down there” he dreams. He has created a website about “Life on the sea”. Details about the business plans are not yet available, but Hastings says he has already hired engineers and found financing sources. The young nation would also have “arms for self-defense” on board. “Water-to-air-rockets” she will employ, says his wife Jo and laughs. A joke? That’s not really clear.
“By the way, I’m not gonna move there” Jo adds, and Sean nods with a sour grin. Obviously this is not the first time the subject is discussed controversially at the Hastings’. “She’ll probably come to visit, Sean says.” Back in the Sealand cabins, the stateless guys had to shower with caught rain water for months, for security reasons they never could sleep on deck and the steady buzzing of the diesel generators made sleep almost impossible. “After Sealand I’ve got all I ever needed concerning life on weird marine constructions” says Jo.
How about crypto rebels who don’t live on far-away islands or rusty platforms in the ocean? What do they do? Several of his colleagues say that Tim May has withdrawn from public and now lives as a bearded hermit, owning an impressive arsenal of weapons — a statement May neither denies nor confirms. A well-known crypto-pioneer from the American East coast is said to do additional work for the Mafia, providing them with programs for highly encrypted and unforgeable betting systems. The Cypherpunk founding member Jim Bell from Vancouver even became the first official “crypto criminal” in 2001: A judge decided that Bell’s confused essay with the title “Assassination Politics” was tantamount to a call for attacks. Bell had developed an encrypted betting system with digital currency and guaranteed anonymity. Participants could guess the decease of certain tax officers in the Vancouver area; the one who came closest to the actual time of death won the jackpot.
“Many (Cypherpunks) aren’t even connected anymore to the libertarian ideology”, says an insider. “The only thing they have in common seems to be the conviction that data protection is a good thing.” Numerous Cypherpunks don’t even call themselves Cypherpunks anymore, also for the weird self-portrayal of some of the founders. Some of the rebels even seem rather bourgeois today.
There are a couple of companies offering programs and systems for anonymous websurfing and e-mailing, safe from being spied by authorities and employers and protected against the maniac data collecting as it is done by advertising companies. Those systems are developed with the crypto rebels’ technologies and sometimes operated by confessed Cypherpunks. They have names like Zero Knowledge, Hushmail, Anonymizer or ZipLip. A New Yorker company called iPrivacy even wanted to anonymize the trade of goods on the internet; the clients could have done their shopping on the internet without delivering their identity, with iPrivacy organizing the transactions and shipment anonymously. Not even the delivering companies would have known a client’s identity. But meanwhile iPrivacy has gotten bankrupt, many of such companies are having severe economic difficulties, due to the low demand for their supplies.
Due to that situation, a number of activists associated with the Cypherpunks have, during the last years, switched from programming to debating. “Many Cypherpunks have become missionaries, seeing themselves as educators, their task being the enlightenment of the public,” says a founding member.
Meanwhile there is a huge amount of academic projects, such as the OpenNet initiative at Harvard, Cambridge and the University of Toronto: they regularly produce a summary about internet censorship all over the world.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), founded in 1990 by a hand full of encryption activists, is today a political think tank and one of the loudest voices when it comes to debating data protection in the USA. The group also employs lawyers to help hackers, data protectors and encryption artists - and forced American secret services to hand over encryption techniques or to take them off their list of “weapons” banned from export.
For most private users the data protection programs are still too expensive and too complicated. The company Anonymizer in San Diego asks $30 or more per year for “anonymous websurfing” — with the disadvantage that web pages take longer to load, in many situations a couple of extra clicks are necessary. Easy to use music exchange programs like Napster and Kazaa have enormous success, whereas complicated Cypherpunk alternatives like Moio Nation never really caught on. Is the data protectors’ cause rather a cultural than a technical task? “Most people still accept the internet the way it is” says John Perry Barlow, author of the above mentioned “Decleration of Independence in Cyberspace”. “We still don’t have the killer application” adds Lee Tien, a law expert at EFF.
Panama City, October 2003. Sandy Sandfort’s office is located in a white painted apartment building with rows of balconies. Sandy’s balcony can easily be made out from the sidewalk: the one with the gigantic satellite dish in front of the window. Sandy Sandfort is in sunny Panama City for work, not for vacation. “Verax Inc.” says the sign at his door. Inside the bare room a few desks, a couch, a number of computers, a buzzing fan. “We’re a post-venture-capital-business”, says the director of the company and laughs. A company that has got no starting capital except for the money Sandy raised on a private basis. If things go as planned, Sandy Sandfort expects to make history in his spartan office. A new payment system for online purchases is supposed to arise in Panama City. A kind of central bank with a new kind of electronic money, permitting superdiscreet, supersafe payments via internet. One of the oldest dreams of the Cypherpunk community is planned to become real - economic freedom on the internet.
Sandy Sandfort is today 57 years old. He has worked as a lawyer in Arizona and as an English teacher. In Costa Rica he was the star of a soap opera (“I was the bad guy”). He was also part of the first members of the Cypherpunk movement. Since last year he lives in Panama, and he had good reasons for moving there: The payment system he intends to create could never be run legally in the USA.
New payment systems for the internet - for activists of encryption techniques this has always been considered the royal discipline. Loads of web pages have been filled with concepts for a new currency, with the Internet-Dollar and eGold, with pre-paid internet currency to be bought at kiosks and elaborate money laundering methods. They were supposed to put an end to the control by tax offices and other authorities. Numerous elegant schemes for virtual exchange circles and digital cash have been developed for a long time, many of them are considered more elegant and better thought-out than Sandy’s Neuclear system. But: they never were of economic success.
Sandy sees his advantage in a different aspect: beside the payment system, his Verax Inc. includes its own “killer application”. Sandy Sandfort also knows quite well the gambling scene - not the traditional Roulette or Canasta in casinos, but cyber-gambling on the internet. For many years gambling websites have been part of the most important income sources in the digital economy, but they have one problem: in many countries they are illegal.
Many criminal prosecutor offices, among them those in the USA, search their citizens’ credit card billings for suspicious transactions with cyber casinos. No surprise that many gamblers all over the world are longing for an alternative.
“We want to become the new payment system on the internet”, says Sandy Sandfort, rocking back and forth on his rickety desk chair as if suddenly he couldn’t wait for things to happen. “A system people don’t have trouble with when purchasing gambling chips, weapons or whatever it may be.” Simply spoken: clients will transfer money to Verax, via bank, postal money order or even in cash. Verax grants them funds and, from this time on, they can start gambling in online casinos. In Panama there is no law prohibiting this procedure. Only Sandfort and his colleagues will know a gambler’s real identity; new crypto-technologies will make sure that the gambler’s anonymity is guaranteed and prevent from fraud.
But what happens if, one day, the American authorities forbid money transfers to Verax as they forbad transfers to casinos in the past? Sandy laughs. “That’s why we want to make sure as soon as possible that our payment system is accepted by as many online dealers as possible, also by hotels, travel agencies, maybe one day even by Amazon.com. Our system will make it impossible to retrace on what exactly a client spent his money. He always can deny having spent it on cyber gambling.”
Once the payment system is running, Sandfort perhaps wants to licence it for other providers. His programmer, Pelle, a 33-year-old Dane, has already developed plenty of ideas on the subject. “Neuclear works like very old exchange systems, but is operated with high-tech-methods”, he says. “Theoretically, you can create any kind of currency with this system. If you want to, create a cyber currency, based upon gold as security. Or, even better, on opium. I would laugh my head off if someone would try that”. A joke. Pelle is already working on a version of his banking program that isn’t placed on only one computer, but distributed on many, many single computers all over the world. Once that works, which banking laws could be applicable here after all? Is this the hour of birth of perfect digital financial oases in cyberspace? Parallel economic areas, where all trade and gambling business can be hidden for good?
“Well, you know, that’s the problem with all Cypherpunks,” says Sandy Sandfort. “They have this vision of totally disappearing in a parallel world. Most of the time the world doesn’t work that way.” Sandfort walks over to his desk and points at the ceiling: “Look, I could sit right here with the best and most secure software in the world — and then some spy or the police could have built a tiny little camera in the lamp, recording everything I write. Believe me, we will continue making progress, but you’ll never be completely invisible in cyberspace.”
© DIE ZEIT 12/04/2003 No.50
Panama has pretty good cellular services. GSM/GPRS 850 from Cable and Wireless and CDMA 1xRTT service from Bell South Movil .
But where the technical side is good, the sales and marketing is horrible. Both of them have excellent advertising, but as we all know that aint everything. Both have made it as hard as it possibly could be to get information about the products and even buy it. Now why would that be? I have no idea, but let me step you through the situation one by one.
Bell South and Cable & Wireless both started their newer high end services around spring to summer 2002. Now go look at their web sites today and look at the models… What do we find? (Hint “Equipo” means Equipment in Spanish)
Bell South has not updated the phone models on their site since they day they went live in 2002. How embarrasing? What happened did they down size the web site department?
Cable and Wireless arent a lot better allthough it seems like they just updated their site with the models of half a year ago. The SonyEricsson T616 which they do sell is not on their site, neither are the T316 or T306 which they have been selling for more than 6 months. The T306 featured in a little ad on their front page, but no where in their product listing. However this is a definite plus on their site 2 months ago, when they were no better than Bell South.
Now besides information on what phones are available, what other information might be usefull from a mobile phone operators web site? Perhaps up to date rate plans? Both sites have personal rate plans available, but do we get any real description of what they include? Not really. I dont know what they tell you when you go to Bell South, but at C&W they always recommend the business plan as the best deal. However this isnt even listed on their site.
Prices of phones you ask? Besides their special offers that they may splash at times on their front page, nothing.
Now one thing is for the latest “cool” movie site not to work in my favorite browsers, another is a multinational telecommunication companies. C&W’s site does not work in Opera , Konqueror nor I’m guessing Safari neither, due to their funky dhtml menu system. I can verify the site works in IE and Mozilla. Why dont we just add a non funky menu system as well or debug the one there is to follow standards, for some of us non Windows users, who would like to spend money on new phones?
Ok lets say I’m tired of finding 2 year old information on the web. I might get impatient and start calling customer service. I remember once calling 3 times the same day in October asking about availability of the T616 (I am a geek after all).
I have a phone on CW Movil, which is why I have no experience calling support for Bell South.
So how does this Eldorado of Phones “Movil Shop”, which is a secretive yet fountain of knowledge of mobile phones, work? Do you go in to the shop and see all the phones available in the shop for display, with prices handly available for each rate plan, like you might see in any mobile phone shop in Europe?
Are you kidding me? In both C&W and Bell South, they have a wonderful collection on display of 1 year old phones without prices. To get prices and actual information of available phones, you have to request a ticket and wait and wait and wait and wait… zzzzzzz Uh, where was I? Thats it … and wait. Oh, when you get there they dont always know of the products available.
The only way to get information is from the old fashioned way of filtering it through sales people, who of course make you wait. It is a very old fashioned way of thinking, that your products are so bad that you can only entrust the actual facts with the sales people and not with the public at large. Are they that insecure of that problem.
C&W historically bought Intel the old public company, and have in many carried on the culture of a government agency. But they are private now and need to change if they want to make money. Bell South??? Last I heard they were a public company NYSE:BLS in the US, why would they they think like that???
Hmm, here is hoping that they might learn about proper modern marketing. Not think their customers are simple peons, but actually people who might want to enjoy the experience of shopping for a new phone.
My favorite paper La Prensa today had a disturbing article about the excavations of a mass grave in the island of Coiba here in Panama.
They currently believe there to be at least 140 corpses burried there. Victims of Noriega and Omar Torrijo’s miitary dictatorship which ended in 1989 with the US invation.
Almost all the victims that have been analyzed so far have evidence of brutal torture.
One victim was found with 2 huge syringes left in his rib cage. They are guessing that the syringes were used to slowly fill the victims lungs with an unspecified liquid.
Another victim was found with 60 fractures and several were believed to have been hung and shot.
They believe that they will be able to identify many of the victims by dna. One which has allready been identified was Floyd Britton a 32 year old university student, who was brutally tortured by amongst other things ripping his toe nails out and eventually killed.
Many of these discoveries have been done as part of Panama’s thruth comission, which aims to let people move on from that era by finding out what actually went on.
For people who are planning on coming down here as tourists or otherwise you might be worried by all of this, just remember that these things happened a long time ago. Panama has been a democracy since 1989. We have elections in May and the democratic process is going strong, with satirical TV programs like the Cascara openly taking the piss of politicians in a way that probably would have gotten them killed in the eighties or seventies.
I’ve been using IDEA for close to 2 years now and have hardly ever used any external plugins. I liked the plugin system for Eclipse, which to me is one of the few parts of Eclipse, that I kind of managed to grok.
This morning installing the latest build 1071 of Aurora the beta version of IDEA 4.0, I was just changing a few settings, while I stumbled upon their new Plugin Manager.
What can I say, excellent. It has 3 tabs:
So basically you can see which plugins are available from the IntelliJ Community web site. Then you can add them to your shopping cart and go to the Shopping Cart to install them all in one go.
My only annoyance is the need to restart IDEA for the plugins to work. Shouldnt it be possible in this Java world of dynamic class loading to load and initialize plugins without restarting?
My good friend Will, just put me onto a great little web browser called Dillo, which doesnt have lots of bells and whistles, but is super fast.
Currently it has very little support for css, but who needs that for when youre quickly trying to find something in a JavaDoc somewhere.
So now I’ve set it up as the default web browser in IntelliJ IDEA (You can do that in the “General” button of the Options Screen.
Now if I want more than basic ctrl-q style javadocs, I just hit shift-F1 and the javadoc is on my screen in about 2 seconds.