They gave us a short intro in their current network and their philosophy which is mostly fixed on team-play. We were impressed what technically impressive network they have built. They run “only” 35 nodes but they are mostly interconnected with high-capacity links which means they have about 13 Megabytes(!) per second transfer rates in their network.

Some hours later also Ramon and Jordi from guifi.net finally arrived after an over 30h flight from Barcelona. Normally they would have arrived yesterday evening as we did. But they were lucky to catch a flight via Atlanta from Barcelona where their original plane could not depart because of some technical problems. So they had to wait for a machine coming over from Rome. As this caused several hours of delay they weren’t able to catch any connection to Baltimore on the same day any more. As we had informations how big their network was we needed to get confirmation on that – and, yes they really have over 2000 nodes. They’re going the KISS way of freenetworking. Resulting in partners in the commercial sector who sell their packages (Router, Antenna, T-Shirt). Great work indeed.

At the same time the Commons Strategy Workshop was held with kc from CAIDA. As i was very interested in this project it was great to have all the people involved in this project there. There were several groups formed according to their topics. We joined the group Peering and Privacy which we thought would be most beneficial to be participating in. There was also Steve Mansour from Canada, Josh from CUWiN and Daniel from CUWiN which i remember. We held some talks about the current problems with data retention laws coming up in Europe. Mostly i remember that we should keep out privacy issues from the Peering Agreement itself because peering agreements are about the interconnection. I’m not so sure if this is the case, but agree that it comes to misunderstandings between providers and community networks here. Therefor i would suggest to choose another name like Community Connection Agreement which covers this topics and probably reference to the Pico Peering Agreement in it. Just a first thought.

After our small workgroup discussions we dropped in the big round where Steve was presenting our talks. I guess everyone was most amused about the Dutch “Anti-Data-Retention demonstration” which is already kind of a legend in Europe.

However kc’s talk caused most controversational positions. As far as i remember there was one big point in there which can be given back as like Privacy in the 21st century where there were some voices saying something like “As everyone gives his data to Google, flickr, co. we should think about privacy in our century” – i hope i don’t lay any unappropriate words in someones mouth here. My oppinion is that it’s something absolutely different if someone is registering for a Google Account and therefor should know that this data will be used in some way for profit of Google too and if we’re logging data from our networks and provide researchers with them. Even if the user knows about it, it would be hard to make them agree on that. So i suggested to think about a transparent entity which can be placed between the researchers and the network providing this data. To achieve faster processing in this entity it would be necessary to have standardized formats for the anonymous or aggregated data. As kc mentioned there is already a proposal on that out there. I’ve looked at the CAIDA homepage, but couldn’t find any details on this, if someone could provide me with these i would be very happy.

Another point was privacy and people who think that everyone who is not encrypting his mails, etc. is a fool himself – because the internet is insecure. I tried to point out why the postcard comparison here is not sufficient. Postcards are kept private by law – which does not mean that no one will ever read them (and i’m sure that people from postal service do) – but, and that’s the main difference they are forbidden by law to give this information to someone or use it in what kind of context ever, except the address for delivery purpose. For me this means, in the closed way a postcard has to travel it’s kept private (as long as everything works right, which i assume here). In the internet i don’t see this currently. However i think people who say that “Everyone should know that the internet is insecure” are right – but the accent lies on should. Think for some non-techie you know of and try him to use current encryption methods – he or she will just fail, because it’s way too complicated. As he or she don’t see so much sense in that topic they will also not further investigate. From my view there are two possible solutions:

• Regulate it by law,
• Make encryption as easy as everyone could use it.

In the evening 3 keynotes were held and so the Summit was officially started. The first panels would start at the next morning 10am. Our panel What’s happening in europe is one of the first. Looking forward to it.

The evening social at Green Turtle was not my kinda thing. We already have been there yesterday and i was kinda surprised that it was described as Irish style. However i had a very nice talk with Laura Forlano from NYCWireless there which made the evening way more comfortable (thanks Laura!).

I really look forward to meet Sascha Meinrath and KC Claffy from CAIDA again. Also i hope to get a lot of new input from other freenetwork initiatives. Current considerations are that Andreas Marksteiner and Aaron Kaplan will also attend. Probably Aaron will give some workshop or presentation about OLSR NG which he is currently working on. Andreas and me will probably go for a presentation of our FunkFeuer Housing project which finances the bandwidth for FunkFeuer in Vienna currently. I assume this as a good way to get the necessary financial backing to keep the freenet really free of any charge. At least in Vienna this is working quite smoothly now.

Flight to San Diego & Excursion in La Jolla
DatCat Workshop in San Diego
Extraworkshop Activities
San Diego – Vacation Time
San Diego to NC

After we’ve reached the other side of the campus we thought about heading to the beach. We crossed down a street to some kind of gliderpoint. The first thing which came in my mind when i saw it was the old pc game named summer games. The view from up the cliff was great and sun was giving us about 25 degree celsius. There was a small path leading down to the beach which we surely followed to find out that this is a nudist beach. So we headed down the beach for a while and found out that the water will still take some time to get appropriate temperature. At least felt temperature on right teeth was cold.

When coming back from the beach somewhere at La Jolla farms we wanted to head right over to downtown La Jolla. We’ve not fully lost our orientation but we didn’t exactly know how far it would be. So we just started walking … and walking … and walking … after about 2 hours we were pissed of the long distance. So we considered taking a taxi, but wait – where is our sidewalk? Hmm strange we thought – till we found out we’re on some kind of freeway. Dude! Good for us, there was a traffic jam on it and an empty taxi stuck in it. So we just jumped on it to find out that both was illegal – walking on a street without sidewalk and jumping on a taxi while it’s not inside a parking lot. He dropped us at downtown La Jolla at a restaurant which he considered to have good meals. So we headed there and took our first meal in the states. Meal was not that good but also not too bad i guess. Nearby the restaurant there were some kind of cliffs inside a cove. On this cliffs there were hundrets of pelicans and they all used it as a toilet. Therefor the rocks had a little white color touch and well the smell was disgusting. I choose to take a little break and lie down in a nearby park while Teemu choose to head down the cove a bit.

As Teemu had no shorts with him (weather report?) we had to look for some clothing stores and so we went up to Prospect which is the main street in downtown La Jolla. There we grabbed sunglasses (well, ok – i grabbed two of them) and found some khakis and sneakers for Teemu.

Shopping makes thirsty and so we headed for an irish pub named Bull and Bear straight on Prospect which offered us a fine range of cold beer.

In the evening we went to Pacific Beach which is a part of San Diego like La Jolla as the girl in the sunglass shop gave us the tip. I personally didn’t like that college party town that much. So we finished our first night at about 1am and headed back to our hotel.

The flight itself was seemingless. We catched both connections and that even though we had very tough transfer times (1 hour in Paris – which means a mission impossible for Paris CDG). The fear of Teemu regarding Air France however came to be true. It’s amazing how flying changed in the last few years. On one hand you have cheaper prices for inner european connections now. But you also have increased prices (you know – security …) on long distance (especially the United States). However although the prices raised the service on board and also at the airports decreased dramatically (maybe it’s just my subjective opinion). At the airport in Vienna i was very astounded about the incompetence and rudeness the woman at the checkin desk had. I was just asking about the connection in Los Angeles to United and she just came up with “i don’t care about that”. At least they brought us to LA on time.

But for sure the flights couldn’t be without any problems at all. When we arrived at LAX we were astouned that the immigration and luggage pickup were working fast (about 20 minutes). So we headed over to the terminal our flight with United should depart from. A nice woman at the checkin desk (Air France someone) made a fast and competent checkin and even explained us the way to the gate (Air France huh?). So we headed over to our gate took a coffee at Starbucks and grabbed our first US Dollars from a nearby ATM. The boarding was done in some minutes and so we jumped on our plane to San Diego which was a Brasilia EMB-120 (according to the onboard brochure). I’ve been on such kind of “airtaxi” my first time it only had place for about 10 people and was really nice to fly with. The flight to San Diego took just 35 minutes and so we arrived there on time at about 7pm. I’ve already been a little bit tired then. So we waited for our bagges … and waited … and waited … and waited. While i … waited … Teemu went out to call our hotel for the pickup shuttle. After waiting for a while i headed over to the United desk and guess what? United lost our bagges from LA to San Diego. But the girl at the information desk was really nice and beyond helping us with our lost luggage she gave us some tips for San Diegos nightlife. A little later we arrived at La Jolla (speak: La Hoya) which is about 20 minutes ride from San Diego airport.

Now we’re going to grab our first american burger here and then fall asleep. It’s about 10pm here.

We’re currently sitting in the boarding area waiting to get on our plane to Paris. I’ve had a party with some friends yesterday and made the night through. Therefore i have already my 3rd mocca inside. I hope to catch at least some hours of sleep on our way to LA. *tired*

The currently planned flight schedule is as follows:

Vienna VIE (10.03.2007 10:10 ) – Paris CDG (10.03.2007 12:15)
Paris CDG (10.03.2007 13:15) – Los Angeles LAX (10.03.2007 15:50)
Los Angeles LAX (10.03.2007 17:55) – San Diego SAN (10.03.2007 18:43)

Los Angeles (17.03.2007 16:30) – Paris CDG (18.03.2007 11:05)
Paris CDG (18.03.2007 12:40) – Vienna VIE (18.03.2007 14:40)

We’ve choosen to take this chance to do a little holiday down in california and therefore will stay the days after the workshop in Los Angeles.

In January 2007 CAIDA was one of the institutes behind the Day in the life of the internet. This project was one of the first steps in trying to gather more research data for the future development of internet technologies. I as an operator of ORSN node B have provided them with PCAP data of this node.

Now CAIDA came up with the idea to make a workshop for future contribution of data. They have already invested a lot of time in the DatCat database therefore. The focus of this workshop is to get data providers and researchers together to find a way to provide enough metadata to make the data useful for researchers while still keeping it that simple so data providers will use it. Workshop attendees are also being introduced in DatCat and it’s background.

I’m looking forward to join this workshop in March …

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