Serendipitous altruism

Have you tried one more time to convince you parents to switch to web feeds to get updates from the family ? Do you cringe when you see your colleague clumsily wade through a collections of sites main pages instead of having them aggregated in a single feed ? Or did your technophobe girlfriend miss the latest photo album you posted ? With a wide variety of source acknowledging that web feeds ans web feeds readers being perceived as too technical, many of us have scaled back this particular evangelization effort to focus it on users ripe for transitionning from basic to advanced  tools.

Breaking through that resistance outright is beyond our power, but we can get around it. Electronic mail is a mature tool with well understood use cases with which even the least competent users feels comfortable thanks to how easily it maps with the deeply assimilated physical mail model. This is why Louis Gray has started mailing Google Reader items to promote the use of that web feed reader. But we can do better than that by building a fully automated bridge from web feed to email.

Our hope for plugging the late adopters into the information feeds is named rss2email. As its name suggests, Aaron Swartz’s GPL-licensed rss2email utility converts RSS subscriptions into email messages and sends them to whatever address you specify. Despite the name, it handles Atom feeds as well, so you should be able to use it with just about any feed you like. And of course rss2email is available from Debian.

The nice introduction to rss2email by Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier is all the documentation you need – and rss2email is so simple that you probably don’t even need that. I now have some of my favorite late adopters each plugged into his custom subset of my regular information distribution feeds. The relevant news stories get mailed to them without me having to even think about it. And the best part is that they now read them !

I had explained the etymology of the title and where the seagazing ostriches come from, but that still left the mistery of how I chose the title. So here is an explanation.

In their 1997 article “Browsing is a collaborative process” Twidale, Nicols and Paice coined the term “serendipitous altruism” to describe a willingness among online database searchers to assist one another whether or not they were directly responsible for the search outcome or had a direct interest in each other’s performance. In each case, the users acted as information conduits and filters on behalf of their respective audiences.

This paper had a significant influence on me at that time when I was employed at France Telecom to research cooperation issues in collaborative systems. The meme did not spread very widely, so I appropriated it as a slightly obscure yet meaningful blog title !

I just finished reading “The Strongest Tribe – War, Politics and the Endgame in Iraq” by Bing West. Once the author’s own ideas about the relationship between the nation, the media and the armed forces are set aside, what remains is an account of reference on the civil war in Iraq from 2003 to 2008.

Bing West’s military experience gave the author an excellent relationship with the troops, and that granted him access to a variety of sources in theater throughout the whole period. He provides a comprehensive view from the bottom to top about what the US forces experienced in Iraq and how they adapted to overcome the challenges of counter-insurgency in a very muddy political environment.

Communicating the complexity of this conflict is incompatible with the mass-media formats. This book offers the volume necessary to describe how the invaders went through the messy process of stumbling upon new problems, trying solutions, gaining understanding and then building doctrine from the ground up. Bing West’s work is the first one to my knowledge that exposes the whole process and articulates it into a coherent narrative.

We follow the troops as they are dealing with duplicitous Iraqi politicians, struggling to build trust in a lawless society, sustaining morale while working with thankless partners, sticking to western due process standards in a country with no reliable judiciary, overcoming the impulse to stick to search and destroy, living among the locals to stop commuting to work from large bases, learning how to seize and hold sectors in a sustainable way, turning a population terrorized by campaigns of murder and intimidation, and finally getting it all together to find how to get the local potentates to stand for themselves. With the authors eyes, these problems are seen through the prism of the Vietnam war, and we discover what connects to the historical lessons learned in Vietnam and elsewhere, and how the Iraqi mix created original challenges.

The Strongest Tribe stops almost entirely short of the political territory of why the United States went to war in Iraq – and that is a good thing. Bing West does an outstanding job of explaining how the military in Iraq and its chain of command dealt with the fighting, and I extend my praise to him for sticking within that perimeter, apart from a handful of gratuitous mentions of Senator John McCain.

All in all, a recommended read for making sense of Iraq from the local point of view – provided you understand the bias of an author strongly connected to the culture of the US armed forces. Hats off to Bing West for his in-depth work, and hats off to the ingenuity, flexibility and sheer dedication of the troops who navigate in the dangerous unknown.

I have become a user of Brightkite, a service that provides situational awareness in the geographical context. Once its relationship to user location information sources such as Fire Eagle improve, it may become a very nice tool, especially in mobile use cases where location reporting may be partly automated.

But even if they add technical value in the growing world of geographically aware applications, theses services are actually not innovative at the functional level. For example, in the ham radio universe, APRS is already a great system for real time tactical digital communications of information of immediate value in the local area – which includes among other things the position of the participating stations. And there is also TCAS, which interrogates surrounding aircrafts about their positions, and AIS which broadcasts ship positions and enables the entertaining Vessel Traffic Services such as the one provided by MarineTraffic. All these radio based systems broadcast in the clear and are not satisfying the privacy requirements of a personal eventing service. But that problem has also been solved by the Blue Force Tracker which even though it is still a work in progress has already changed how a chaotic battlefield is perceived by its participants.

“Where am I, and where are my friends ?” is not only the soldier’s critical information – it is also an important component of our social lives, witness the thriving landscape of geosocial networking. Geographic location is a fundamental enabler : we are physically embodied and the perimeter of location based services actually encompasses anything concerning our physical presence. So we can’t let physical location services escape our control. Fire Eagle may be practical for now, but we need to make geographical information part of the basic infrastructure under our control and available on a standardized, open and decentralized basis. The good news is that much thoughts have already been invested into that problem.

Physical location is part of our presence, and as you may have guessed by now, this means XMPP comes to the rescue ! We have XEP-0080 – User Location, an XMPP extension which is currently a XMPP Foundation Draft Standard (implementations are encouraged and the protocol is appropriate for deployment in production systems, but some changes to the protocol are possible before it becomes a Final Standard – as good as a draft standard RFC and therefore good enough for early adopter use). It is meant to be communicated and transported by means of Publish-Subscribe or the subset thereof specified in Personal Eventing via Pubsub. It may also be provided as an extension of plain vanilla <presence/> but that is quite a crude way to do it compared to the Publish-Subscribe goodness.

The rest of the work is left to the XMPP client. Of course, the client can show them on a map, just as Brightkite currently does. But I can also easily imagine an instant messaging contact list on my PDA where one of the contact groups is “contacts near me”. I would love to have Psi do that…

There was the Discovery Channel commercial, and then its graphical interpretation by XKCD while it went strongly viral with a heap of covers of wildly varied quality. The music was a bit tame to my taste so I was wholly taken by this punk rock rendition of the song with the XKCD lyrics by talented XKCD fan Sober. This puts me in a great mood – don’t you love the whole world ?

Some people notice I am quite dogmatic about open networks. And they are right : to me, open is everything and the rest is details. But even my zeal has its limits : I don’t gratuitously shove tools in the face of people who can’t use them in practical conditions. I have been advocating jabber among my technically minded friends since 2001 and running my own server since 2003, but it took Google joining the XMPP network in 2006 to actually make it a viable option for pushing open instant messaging to the masses of people I don’t want to support myself. Before that I could understand the necessity for joining proprietary networks and run multiprotocol clients to reach people I could not decently drag to Jabber or IRC. But now I can tell them that getting presence information and instant messenging from me is just a Google account away – and since it is a mainstream service offered by an established and well known service provider they can hardly anymore label me a techno-excentric for using it. So – no I will not join your proprietary instant messaging network.

Today we have the same situation with social networking. And while the technological prerequisites for open microblogging have been almost there for a while, they have not yet cristalized into something that can be fed to the masses. That day will come – and we are all pushing toward it. Until then, I have a Facebook profile. But soon I know that I’ll be able to tell the world that my social networking tool is my blog, or whatever other tools I fancy moving to and from thanks to data portability efforts. And it’ll be easy for others to do the same because interoperable services will blossom at the hands of mass-market providers – maybe even Facebook if they ever reach enlightenment. And when that is about to be ready for massive adoption, you know where I’ll be – and you know where I’ll not be anymore !

To me there is an element of religion in those choices. But the techno-apathetic average user can make the same choices out of pure self-interest. If there are a number of comparable offerings on the market, one of which lets the buyer choose between different suppliers and move between them at will, you can bet that the one-time cost of moving away from the proprietary offering will be more than offset by the future value of the open solution. If we look at the history of technologies, examples of such migrations are plenty. Let’s just take e-mail for example : what is the current weight of closed mail systems ? They still exist, but they are insignificant niches and many of them use e-mail for notification…

Stumbing on an article by Jeremy Allison about why Free software and open formats are increasingly important as our lives are turning digital, I was suprised to read the following :

If I haven’t convinced you yet that Linux is going to take over the appliance world, I strongly suggest you look at Sony’s web site. There you can find a page full of television models going back to 2003, all of which run on Linux (for those essential moments when you must have the source code to your television, naturally).

Sony is such a big group that the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing – so I am not surprised that Free software is being used, although Sony‘s attitude toward it has had both highs and lows in the past.

Free software on a television is quite intriguing. Some of those televisions not only run the kernel, but also well known user environments such Bash, Busybox and Freetype. Would they be powerful enough to run a thin client with RDP or X11 ? Could they even run a media player ? I would not be suprised : as far back as 2003, Sony President and Chief Operating Officer Kunitake Ando said that “the TV will replace the PC as the center of online entertainment, running on a Linux-based platform for connected home electronics devices“. If Sony implements that vision with adequate hardware running Free software, Sony televisions may one day be a tinkerer’s device of choice for the home entertainment projects that currently most often use a dedicated computer to display on the television screen.

With the profusion of tools, our online presence is all over the place… Here is a quick tour of where fragments of me can be found. I’m focusing on tools – I won’t list mere static pages (of which I still have a few dusty instances in various aging places). The goal of this article is to draw a quick taxonomy of the tools I’m using.

My original content publication outlets :

• My english speaking blog
• My french speaking blog
• My link blog
• My bookmarks
• My Photo Gallery
• My family blog
• My other family blog
• My favorite daily reads

Places where I echo my own content web feeds, track people and engage actively:

• Facebook
• Identi.ca
• FriendFeed
• Flickr

Places where I track people and participate :

• LinkedIn
• Brightkite
• Last.fm

Places where I infrequently participate :

• Dopplr
• Digg
• Stumbleupon

Places where I just echo my own content web feeds and/or status messages in case people there are tracking me there :

• Plurk
• Plaxo
• Rejaw
• Tumblr
• Technorati
• Kwippy
• Bebo
• Hi5
• Storytlr
• Koornk
• Multiply
• Swurl
• YouAre

Not only is this list not exhaustive, but I have not even bothered to count the forums and blogs where I lurk or contribute comments. Don’t think that I’m a normal user though : maintaining a watch over online tools is part of my trade, so I’m the sort of person who’ll create an account on every site in sight if just to take a look at it.

But in any case, the profusion is food for thought about meta-tools.

While FriendFeed is the efficient geek hangout, it is Facebook that provides the social middle ground that bridges the gap between early adopters and the mainstream. What makes Facebook useful is that it attracts mainstream users and entices to publish content – something most of them would never do anywhere else. As Regular Geek puts it : “These are people who thought AOL was the internet“. They only visit a few mainstream sites and to them the Web is almost as read-only as dead tree media. That Facebook manages to turn them painlessly into content producers makes it useful for keeping in touch with everyone who does not know what web feeds are. Be aware that even though Facebook is not a dedicated photo sharing site, it beats them at their own game : with ten billion pictures posted, it is now the site with the most pictures shared.

But with mainstream users comes much cluelessness. Those are the people who mindlessly click the default option on every pop-up dialog in sight and then bring you malware ridden computers for healing while wondering why it is so slow and whether they should buy a new one – all they get from me nowadays is a kind word, an Ubuntu CD and offer to install it. Those users have shown time and time again how the path of least social resistance leads to a torrent of application spam.

Some applications such as are a useful addition to the social framework – among them I particularly like Friend Wheel. Many other are just games or even purely decorative trinkets but they should not be dismissed offhand: they have an important role in evangelizing social tools and in promoting use, and they have the social role of fostering playful interaction that reinforces social links. But if you look below, you’ll probably conclude that the quantity of shiny fluff is a tad overwhelming – this is the list of applications that my Facebook account blocks… And it was gathered in less than two years of activity !

• Absolut Vodka
• Addicted to NCIS
• Addicted to Two and a Half Men
• A la Antillean
• Alice Blind Test
• Amazing Wishlist
• Animated GIFTS
• A quel(le) star ressembles-tu le plus physiquement?
• A quel X-Men ressembles tu ?
• AREPAS and Venezuelan Food
• Are you a great lover ?
• Are You Lucky?
• Are you Moroccan?
• Are you romantic?
• Art
• ATTACK!
• aWizard
• Bathroom Wall
• Be a Billionaire!
• Because You’re Special
• Become Rambo
• Best Friend Contest
• Best Match!
• Best Wishes
• Birthday Alert
• Birthday Calendar
• Birthday Cards
• Blackjack
• Bless You
• Blow A Kiss
• Books iRead
• Booze Mail
• Borat / Ali G Photos, Quotes and Trivia
• Bowling Buddies
• BrainFall.com Quiz Results
• BrewSocial
• Bubble Town
• Bumper Sticker
• Bumper Stickers [Photo Gifts]
• Call Me on Skype
• Card for Africa
• Car IQ
• Cat Breed Collection
• Causes
• Chanel Gifts ?
• Characteristics
• Check Your Dudeness
• Chinese Horoscope
• Circle of Friends
• COMINGSOON
• Comment finirez vous ?
• Comment s’appellera l’homme de ta vie ?
• Comparaison
• Compare People
• Coolest Friends
• Coolest Person Contest
• Crushes
• Cute vs Sexy
• Define Me
• Delux Christmas Tree
• Denzel Washington
• De quel arrondissement parisien ètes-vous ?
• Do people secretly hate you?
• Drunk Survey
• ePresident
• Es-tu fort en histoire ?
• Etes vous un minimum cultivé ?
• Etre Marseillais
• Eurosport – Liste des 23 pour l’Euro 2008
• Family Guy – Blue Harvest
• Family Tree
• Famous Christian Quotes
• FB Addict – are you hooked on FB?
• FFR Supporters
• Fine Wines
• Flirtable
• Fortune Cookie
• Free Gifts
• Fresh Prince
• Friend Hug
• Friends For Sale!
• Fun Cards!
• Funnest Person Contest
• Funny Cards
• Fun Toys
• Genius Test
• Gifts Gallery
• Good Morning
• (Green) What fruit are you?
• Growing Gifts
• Guerre des gangs
• Hatching Eggs
• hello kitty
• High School Trivia Test
• Holiday Shoppe (Christmas Tree)
• Hotness
• Hot Potato
• Hottest Person Contest
• How gangsta are you?
• How Indian Are You?
• how smart are u?
• How stupid are you?
• How will you die?
• Hug Me
• Hug Me
• Hugs
• Hug Time
• Iframer
• iLike
• Instant IQ Test
• IQ Test
• IQ Test (Advanced Level)
• is cool
• iSmile
• Japanese Foods
• Japanese Sweets
• Jedi vs Sith
• Jetman
• Jeu de Séduction
• JungleBook
• Kisses
• Kisses!
• Kiss Me
• Knighthood
• Language Exchange
• Likeness
• Likeness UNRATED
• (Lil) Green Patch
• Local Picks
• Love Friend
• LX Champions League
• LX College Football
• LX World Cup Football
• Mario Kart RPG
• Meet New People
• Mesmo TV
• MeteoSun
• MindJolt Games
• Mood Ring
• Most Creative People
• Most Eligible Singles
• Most Gorgeous Person Contest
• Most Wanted Valentine!
• Mountain Climber
• Movies
• My Angels
• My Aquarium
• My Boxofun
• My Drunk Friends
• MyFlirt
• My Hebrew Name
• My Heroes Ability
• My Music
• My Personality
• My Questions
• MY SEXY FRIENDS
• MySpace
• MySpace Link
• NAB Smart Cookies
• Name Analyzer
• NBA Challenge
• Nicknames
• Nova Music
• OneTrack
• Optical Illusions Challenge
• OUIFM
• Owned!
• Passe Ton BAC !
• Personality
• Photo Quizzes
• Pieces of Flair
• Pillow Fight
• Pillow Fight!
• Pink Ribbon
• Portrait Chinois
• Pour quelle boîte Corse es-tu fait(e) ?
• Pour quelle époque êtiez-vous fait(e)?
• Pour quelle ville êtes-vous fait(e) ?
• Pour quelle voiture es-tu fait(e)?
• PrayLive
• Premier Football
• Pro League Rugby
• PuzzleBee Jigsaw Puzzles
• Q??l Pa?f?? E? T? ?
• Que fuyez-vous le plus ?
• Quel alcoolique êtes vous?
• Quel chroniqueur du grand journal êtes-vous?
• Quel écrivain êtes-vous?
• Quel est ce défaut chez toi qui fait craquer les hommes?
• Quel est ton degré de connerie??
• QuEl EsT tOn MeC IdEaL???
• Quel est ton niveau d’anglais?
• Quel est ton niveau sexuel ?
• Quel Festival es-tu?
• Quel genre de pute es-tu ?
• Quel joueur de rugby etes vous?
• Quel joueur du PSG 2007-2008 es-tu ?
• Quelle citation êtes-vous?
• Quelle couleur es-tu?
• Quelle desperate housewife êtes-vous ?
• Quelle icone glamour es-tu?
• Quelle ligne de métro êtes vous?
• Quelle mec te correspond ?
• Quelle paire de chaussures de créateur êtes-vous ? (pour filles)
• Quelle princesse de Walt Disney êtes vous?
• Quelles Vacances VIP es tu?
• Quel Maman est tu ?
• Quel mannequin es-tu?
• Quel méchant de Disney es-tu ?
• Quel nageur connus es tu ?
• Quel personnage de desperate housewives es-tu?
• Quel personnage de FRIENDS es-tu?
• Quel personnage de KAAMELOTT es-tu ?
• Quel personnage de la Révolution êtes-vous ?
• Quel personnage des BRONZES êtes-vous ?
• quel qualité êtes-vous?
• Quel séducteur (trice) etes-vous ?
• Quel sorte d’enfant étais-tu?
• Quel sous-vêtement êtes-vous?
• quel star es tu ?
• Que pensent les autres de toi en secret?
• Que vas tu faire de ta vie ?
• Quizzes
• RAYMOND DEMISSION !!!
• Rock Paper & Scissors
• R U CUTE!
• Save An Alien
• Say Happy New Year!
• Say-it-with-Flowers
• SceneCaster
• ScoreMe
• Secret Admirer – CRUSH on ME (PERFECT MATCH)
• Send Beer
• Send Chocolate
• Send Diamonds
• Send Good Karma
• Send HOTNESS
• Send Love Hearts
• Send Luck
• Send Sunshine
• Send Teddy Bears
• Send Tiaras
• Send Tux
• Send Veggie Tales
• Sexiest Person Contest
• Sexy Friends
• Sexy Pillow Fight
• Sexy Poke!
• Shots!
• similaire
• Six Degrees
• Sketch Me
• Skiers vs. Snowboarders
• Slayers
• Slide FunSpace
• Smiles
• Snowball Fight
• Snowball Fight!
• Social Profile
• Sparkey
• SpeedDate
• SpeedDate
• SpeedDate
• SpeedDate
• SpeedDate
• SpeedDate
• Sports Fan
• Status Competition
• Stickerz
• Sticky!
• StyleFeeder
• Sudoku
• Suomi-ilmiö
• Superlatives
• SuperPoke!
• Super Slot Machines
• Super Wall
• Sweetest Person Contest
• Tarot
• Test ton niveau de culture
• Texas HoldEm Poker
• The Brain Game
• The Legend of Zelda Fan
• The Official 100 Question Geek Test
• The Sex Compatibility Test
• The Unofficial Desperate Housewife Quiz
• The World’s Smallest Political Quiz
• Top Friends
• T.O.T. Effect
• Tower Bloxx
• Travel Brain
• Traveler IQ Challenge
• Trend Setter
• True Match
• Truth Box
• TuneSocial
• Twirl
• Twist me!
• U.S. Citizen Test
• Vampires
• Wanna Dance?
• Water Globe Gifts
• WC 2010 Euro Predictor
• We’re Related
• WereWolves
• What Beer Are You?
• What Color Is Your Heart?
• What Does My Birthday Mean?
• What Drink Are You?
• What flower are you?
• What football player are you?
• What Is Your Ideal Job?
• What is Your Secret Sexual Fantasy?
• What is Your Supermodel Personality?
• What kind of candy are you?
• What Kind of Cat Would You Be?
• What kind of hair best suits you? (for girls)
• What Kind of Mom Will You Be?
• What Lost Character Are You?
• What Mythological Creature Are You?
• What serial killer are you?
• What song are you?
• What’s Your Stripper Name?
• Whats you true name? (Girls only)
• What type of person do you attract?
• What type of warrior are you?
• When will you get married?
• Which Disney Princess Are You?
• Which Disney Song Describes Your Life Right Now?
• Which Fashion Designer Would You Be?
• Which Festival best suits you??
• which F.R.I.E.N.D.S character are you???
• Which Friends Character Are You?
• Which Grey’s Anatomy Character Are You?
• Which Hot Celeb Are You?
• Which Rockstar Are You?
• Which Sex and the City Character Are You?
• Which Simpsons Character Are You?
• Which WaterAid Country Are You?
• Who Has The Biggest Brain?
• Who is Watching You ?
• Who’s Online
• Who’s the Coolest Cat?
• Will you KISS me?
• Winnie the Pooh
• Word Challenge
• Word Twist
• YES or NO?
• Your Birthday
• You’re a Hottie
• You’re Cute
• Your Sexyness
• YouTube Video Box
• Zombies

You too can escape this minor pantheon of horror – and you can do it without the tedium of blocking each application as it spams your Facebook newsfeed. As you may know, Greasmonkey enables the customization through JavaScript of the way a webpage displays. Auto-Block Facebook Apps is a Greasmonkey script that will block application invitations sent to you by Facebook contacts. After the facebook profile page is loaded, it finds all the applications that your friends have invited you to and blocks them. Whenever you need you can go to the Facebook applications privacy controller and unblock the ones that you find somewhat valuable. With applications spam out of the way, Facebook will remain the neat social watering hole that makes it valuable for interaction with non-geeks.

I just finished reading “The Chopper Boys: Helicopter Warfare in Africa” by Al J. Venter, Neal Ellis and Richard Wood. The contextual introductions will feel like fluff if you are already familiar with Cold War era conflicts in Africa, but it does not matter as the core of this book’s value more than makes up for it : the chapters covering operations in Rhodesia’s and South-Western Africa are gems. First hand testimonies paint captivating tactical vignettes with a substantial level of technical detail. This book provides unique insight in those pivotal development of heliborne operational doctrine in the countrer-insurgency role.

From my French perspective the Chadian and Algerian conflicts seem skimmed over, but I don’t mind as enough French sources have them well explored. On the contrary, I had seldom found such impacting accounts of the airmobile units that operated alongside such legendary troops as the Koevoet or the Selous Scouts – so the Southern African bias is more than welcome. After a read, jargon such as G-car, K-Car, dakadaka, paradak, fire force, Golf bomb and reaction force will feel familiar, along with impressive pieces of hardware such the Puma, the Alouette or the 20 mm Matra MG151 among others whose specific scope of employement is unveiled.

The use of helicopters to emplace small units as blocking forces (“stop groups” in South African parlance) reminded me of “Bear Went over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan” edited by Lester Grau. The contrast between the swiftness of Southern African operations and the blunt Soviet air assaults that most often occured in Afghanistan is not without interest.

The US often hears echoes of worldwide hostility against the application of its foreign policy, but seldom are they reached by the voices of those who experience first hand how close we are to the USA. In spite of contextual political differences and conflicting interests that generate friction, we do share the same fundamental values – and when push comes to shove that is what really counts. Through the eyes of that French OMLT (Operational Mentoring Liaison Teams) infantryman you can see how strong the bond is on the ground. In contrast with the Americans, the French soldiers don’t seem to write much online – or maybe the proportion is the same but we just have less people deployed. Whatever the reason, this is a rare and moving testimony which is why I decided to translate it into English, so that American people can catch a glimpse of the way European soldiers see them. Not much high philosophy here, just the first hand impressions of a soldier in contact – but that only makes it more authentic.

Here is the original French article June 2011 update : the site of the original article is long dead – it disappeared not long after this translation was published and I was therefore unable to satisfy those who wanted proof of source. I just found out that Archive.org has captured a snapshot of the site as it was in September 2008 – so there, you can now read the original !

Here is my translation :

“We have shared our daily life with two US units for quite a while – they are the first and fourth companies of a prestigious infantry battalion whose name I will withhold for the sake of military secrecy. To the common man it is a unit just like any other. But we live with them and got to know them, and we henceforth know that we have the honor to live with one of the most renowned units of the US Army – one that the movies brought to the public as series showing “ordinary soldiers thrust into extraordinary events”. Who are they, those soldiers from abroad, how is their daily life, and what support do they bring to the men of our OMLT every day ? Few of them belong to the Easy Company, the one the TV series focuses on. This one nowadays is named Echo Company, and it has become the support company.

They have a terribly strong American accent – from our point of view the language they speak is not even English. How many times did I have to write down what I wanted to say rather than waste precious minutes trying various pronunciations of a seemingly common word? Whatever state they are from, no two accents are alike and they even admit that in some crisis situations they have difficulties understanding each other.

Heavily built, fed at the earliest age with Gatorade, proteins and creatine – they are all heads and shoulders taller than us and their muscles remind us of Rambo. Our frames are amusingly skinny to them – we are wimps, even the strongest of us – and because of that they often mistake us for Afghans.

Here we discover America as it is often depicted : their values are taken to their paroxysm, often amplified by promiscuity lack of privacy and the loneliness of this outpost in the middle of that Afghan valley. Honor, motherland – everything here reminds of that : the American flag floating in the wind above the outpost, just like the one on the post parcels. Even if recruits often originate from the hearth of American cities and gang territory, no one here has any goal other than to hold high and proud the star spangled banner. Each man knows he can count on the support of a whole people who provides them through the mail all that an American could miss in such a remote front-line location : books, chewing gums, razorblades, Gatorade, toothpaste etc. in such way that every man is aware of how much the American people backs him in his difficult mission. And that is a first shock to our preconceptions : the American soldier is no individualist. The team, the group, the combat team are the focus of all his attention.

And they are impressive warriors ! We have not come across bad ones, as strange at it may seem to you when you know how critical French people can be. Even if some of them are a bit on the heavy side, all of them provide us everyday with lessons in infantry know-how. Beyond the wearing of a combat kit that never seem to discomfort them (helmet strap, helmet, combat goggles, rifles etc.) the long hours of watch at the outpost never seem to annoy them in the slightest. On the one square meter wooden tower above the perimeter wall they stand the five consecutive hours in full battle rattle and night vision goggles on top, their sight unmoving in the directions of likely danger. No distractions, no pauses, they are like statues nights and days. At night, all movements are performed in the dark – only a handful of subdued red lights indicate the occasional presence of a soldier on the move. Same with the vehicles whose lights are covered – everything happens in pitch dark even filling the fuel tanks with the Japy pump.

And combat ? If you have seen Rambo you have seen it all – always coming to the rescue when one of our teams gets in trouble, and always in the shortest delay. That is one of their tricks : they switch  from T-shirt and sandals to combat ready in three minutes. Arriving in contact with the ennemy, the way they fight is simple and disconcerting : they just charge ! They disembark and assault in stride, they bomb first and ask questions later – which cuts any pussyfooting short.

We seldom hear any harsh word, and from 5 AM onwards the camp chores are performed in beautiful order and always with excellent spirit. A passing American helicopter stops near a stranded vehicle just to check that everything is alright; an American combat team will rush to support ours before even knowing how dangerous the mission is – from what we have been given to witness, the American soldier is a beautiful and worthy heir to those who liberated France and Europe.

To those who bestow us with the honor of sharing their combat outposts and who everyday give proof of their military excellence, to those who pay the daily tribute of America’s army’s deployment on Afghan soil, to those we owned this article, ourselves hoping that we will always remain worthy of them and to always continue hearing them say that we are all the same band of brothers”.

Bruce Schneier brought to our attention the performance and ease of use of off-the-shelf data-mining tools for social networking analysis. With a few million CDR that sort of tool can identify user communities in the physical, temporal and social dimensions. ThorpeGlen’s graphical user interface screenshots are particularly impressive.

Needless to say that SIM swapping does not work as the IMEI is still available – that is old news. But swapping both SIM and teminal is not the solution either anymore as behavorial analysis can nowadays still yield a match. This may be the end of  the road for communications security in durable networks by pure compartimentalization. Instead of acquiring random prepaid accounts, clandestine operators should now focus on creating sufficient decoy activity so that the social signal is drowned in enough misleading connexions – and maybe only stolen accounts provide enough credible noise to evade profiling. Doing that without a single mistep is going to be difficult, especially under the sort of pressure that justify such precautions.

But whatever the performance of  the analysis system, casual mobile phone use in a clandestine context is getting more risky – if  this is an off-the-shelf system, just imagine what custom systems can do for the most advanced nations.

I just realized that Chrome does DNS prefectching and I would like to have that in a Firefox plugin. On fast links and older versions of Firefox, I used to enjoy Fasterfox – a plugin that among other speed optimizations prefetches link targets. Of course, that is a network intensive process that may not be suitable for general consumption. But proactive DNS resolving is a pretty harmless tweak that I would settle for – and the Fasterfox precedent shows that it is quite doable. Of course the paranoid prudent among us won’t like it, but that segment of the population knows how to turn off that sort of feature.

Who these days has not witnessed the embarrassing failure modes of Microsoft Windows ? Blue screens of all hues and an assortment of badged dialog boxes make each crash into a very public display of incompetence.

I will not argue that Windows is more prone to failure than other operating systems – that potential war of religion is best left alone. What I am arguing is that failure modes should be graceful, or at least more discreet.

A black screen is neutral : the service is not delivered, but at least the most trafficked billboard in town is not hammering everyone with a random pseudo-technical message that actually means “my owners are clueless morons”.

Even better than a black screen : a low level routine that in case of system failure may display something harmless. Anything but an error message.

With so many information screens in the transportation industry, automated teller machines of all sorts and a growing number of advertising screens on roadsides, a properly and specifically configured system is necessary. What about “Microsoft Windows – Public Display Edition” ? Of course, users of Free Software don’t have to wait for a stubborn editor to understand the problems its customers are facing.

When the stakes are high enough, the costs of not managing risk through graceful degradation cannot be ignored. But let’s not underestimate the power of user inertia…

Since version 1.4, a Jabber module is available in Asterisk. If you know me, then you probably wonder why it took me that long to discover it. I began playing with it tonight and the short story is that it works, it is simple to configure and it makes telephony aware of presence.

Of course this is still far from the holy grail of a presence-centered converged synchronous communications platform, but it is a start and anything is better than today’s stupid mass-market telephony.

Here is my /etc/asterisk/jabber.conf :

[general]
;Auto register users from buddy list
autoregister=yes

;Jabber service label
[asterisk]
type=client
serverhost=jabber.grabeuh.com
username=asterisk@jabber.grabeuh.com/kisangani
secret=my_password
port=5222
usetls=yes
statusmessage="Watching the telephone"

Yes, that’s it : Asterisk is now registered as a Jabber client. There are other ways to do it using external modules, but this one is the simplest – and since it is now part of the main trunk it is probably the most stable. In particular you should be careful with class.jabber.php which is not maintained anymore and in the process of being replaced with the much more modern XMPPHP.

Now let’s declare a macro for taking full advantage of that. This one takes a look at the user’s presence and routes the call accordingly : if he is online or chatty the call goes to his desk phone – otherwise it goes his mobile phone.

[macro-reach_user]
; ${ARG3} is a destination such as SIP/whatever
exten => s,1,jabberstatus(asterisk,${ARG2},STATUS)
; presence in will be 1-6.
; In order : Online, Chatty, Away, XAway, DND, Offline
; If not in roster variable will = 7
exten => s,2,gotoif($[$[${STATUS}]<3]?available:unavailable)
; GotoIf(condition?label_if_true:label_if_false)
exten => s,3(available),jabbersend(asterisk,${ARG2},"Call from
 ${CALLERID(name)} at number${CALLERID(num)} on
 ${STRFTIME(,GMT-1,%A %B %d %G at %l:%M:%S %p)}")
exten => s,4,Dial(${ARG1})
exten => s,5(unavailable),Dial(${ARG3})

Since we have declared a macro, we have to call it in the context of our choice and assign the relevant values to the macro’s variables :

[whatever_context]
; ${ARG1} is the destination when at desk
; ${ARG2} is a jabber address used at desk
; ${ARG3} is the destination when not at desk
exten => 05600047590,1,Macro(reach_user,SIP/jml-desk,
 jim@jabber.grabeuh.com, SIP/freephonie-out/0666758747);
; repeat last line for each user

That’s all folks ! That is all it takes to have your calls routed to the right phone according to your presence status. It is really that easy.

Why no service provider is offering that is beyond me. The big ones are all waiting for the IMS systems they are going to deploy with a five years roadmap. But if you want the future right now there is no need to wait : all the technology is here today waiting for you to play with it ! And of course it is 100% Free software…

Ever since the Linux Advanced Routing & Shaping HOWTO introduced it, I have been a big fan of the Wondershaper, a traffic shaping script that drives Linux‘s class based queuing with stochastic fairness queuing (SFQ) in a pretty effective attempt at maintaining low latency for interactive traffic while at the same time maintaining high throughput. There is even a ‘wondershaper’ Debian package that includes some additional polish. This script is key to the joy of perfectly responsive SSH sessions while peer to peer file sharing traffic saturates the uplink.

Some people have even concluded the resulting quality of service is good enough for voice traffic. But even with the Debian Wondershaper ruling my ADSL link I noticed that SIP and IAX still suffer too much packet loss with the saturating traffic occupying the background. I needed better traffic control.

As usual, being a late adopter I am not the only one to have hit that obstacle, and solutions have already been put forth. After rummaging through various mutations, I found Robert Koch’s version of the Wondershaper for the Asus WL-xxx documented on the Wondershaper package page of the WL-500G wiki to be quite promising. Compared to the standard version it prioritizes VOIP traffic by source port for idiot proof configuration, but also by type of service which is much more flexible and can be used thanks to Asterisk being capable of correctly setting TOS fields. As a bonus, using TOS also makes this version of the script capable of distinction between console interactive SSH traffic and bulk SCP traffic using the same protocol and port. And to top it all, it is based on the better hierarchical token bucket (HTB) discipline which is standard since Linux 2.4.20 while the Debian Wondershaper version uses the more based queuing which used to be the more widespread one.

The first shortcoming I found is that it prioritizes SIP and RTP but not IAX and others which I’ll have to add using the SIP stanzas as templates. The other is that taking lists of low priority ports as arguments could make the command line messy and configuration puzzling for the inexperienced user, so I prefer to have this configuration item as a documented variable allocation inside the script. But those are trifles compared to the new VOIP support, enhanced SSH discrimination and overall upgrade.

Hacking on the script I couldn’t resist reorganizing a few things. I originally intended to provide a diff, but that would be pointless since I ended up touching most of the lines. Also be warned that I do not understand why putting ‘prio 1’ everywhere makes the script work whereas other ‘prio’ values at various places made traffic end up in the wrong class and did not make sense at all. In effect, I think that by putting ‘prio 1’ everywhere I just eschewed the use of priority bands inside the classes, which is just fine with me for the intended use. But this show that my tc fluency is still limited and that there are therefore surely ways to enhance this script. I’ll also welcome feedback – whether it works for you or not.

Anyway – it works ! I had a few VOIP conversations across an IAX trunk with lots of background traffic on the uplink and no perceptible effects on voice quality. Life is good. Now that I have removed the last obstacle to taking full advantage of VOIP at home. Soon all my traffic will be routed through Asterisk and there shall be no more RJ11 nor their French T-sockets alter ego in my home.

Here is my modified wondershaper script in all its glory – contrary to Robert Koch’s version it is a drop-in replacement for Debian’s package. Inheriting from the original Wondershaper it is licensed under the GPL so enjoy, modify and share !