Since I am still in the middle of my Wi-Fi survey (you should take it if you haven’t done so already) that focuses on these issues of sharing, usability and legal implications, I won’t comment on the topic now but just provide some pointers and “interesting” quotes. I am also preparing a case study on FON, big municipal Wi-Fi initiatives like San Francisco TechConnect and the likes.
It is amazing what people will say to defend one or the other position of this topic. Especially the analogies!

From the New York Times story titled Hey Neighbor, Stop Piggybacking on My Wireless (Mar 5th 2006)

For a while, the wireless Internet connection Christine and Randy Brodeur installed last year seemed perfect. They were able to sit in their sunny Los Angeles backyard working on their laptop computers.

But they soon began noticing that their high-speed Internet access had become as slow as rush-hour traffic on the 405 freeway.

“I didn’t know whether to blame it on the Santa Ana winds or what,” recalled Mrs. Brodeur, the chief executive of Socket Media, a marketing and public relations agency.

The “what” turned out to be neighbors who had tapped into their system.

(…)

But they soon began noticing that their high-speed Internet access had become as slow as rush-hour traffic on the 405 freeway.

“I didn’t know whether to blame it on the Santa Ana winds or what,” recalled Mrs. Brodeur, the chief executive of Socket Media, a marketing and public relations agency.

The “what” turned out to be neighbors who had tapped into their system.

(…)

Many home network owners admit that they are oblivious to piggybackers.

Some, like Marla Edwards, who think they have locked intruders out of their networks, learn otherwise. Ms. Edwards, a junior at Baruch College in New York, said her husband recently discovered that their home network was not secure after a visiting friend with a laptop easily hopped on.

“There’s no gauge, no measuring device that says 48 people are using your access,” Ms. Edwards said.

(…)

Most people just plug the thing in,” he said of those who buy wireless routers. “Ninety percent of the time it works. You stop at that point and don’t bother to turn on its security.”

(…)

When Ms. Ramirez asked the man what he was doing, he said he was stealing a wireless Internet connection because he did not have one at home. She was amused but later had an unsettling thought: “Oh my God. He could be stealing my signal.”

Yet some six months later, Ms. Ramirez still has not secured her network.

(…)

Beth Freeman, who lives in Chicago, has her own Internet access, but it is not wireless. Mostly for the convenience of using the Internet anywhere in her apartment, Ms. Freeman, 58, said that for the last six months she has been using a wireless network a friend showed her how to tap into.

“I feel sort of bad about it, but I do it anyway,” Ms. Freeman said her of Internet indiscretions. “It just seems harmless.”

And if she ever gets caught?

“I’m a grandmother,” Ms. Freeman said. “They’re not going to yell at an old lady. I’ll just play the dumb card.”

(…)

For the Brodeurs in Los Angeles, a close reading of their network’s manual helped them to finally encrypt their network. The Brodeurs told their neighbors that the network belonged to them and not to the neighborhood. While apologetic, some neighbors still wanted access to it.

“Some of them asked me, ‘Could we pay?’ But we didn’t want to go into the Internet service provider business,” Mrs. Brodeur said. “We gave some weird story about the network imposing some sort of lockdown protocol.”

From the Slashdot comments on the story

I think a lot of people have an open WiFi connection for the rest of the world to use. This however is not only because they want to give some protest but also to simply add a other node to the ever growing number of open “uplinks”.

As more and more people are doing so at the moment it becomes easy for traveling laptop users to get online everywhere they want. Closing you “uplink” will become more and more rude in the global opinion I think. Sharing the connection will become more natural to people as they become more aware of the benefit they have from the open uplinks offered by other users.

WiFi will become eventually something like opensource code, sharing and be shared only here we are not talking about code but about internet access. You give access to users and those users give you access in return.

From a post on TechDirt Are You Liable If Someone Does Something Illegal On Your WiFi? (Mar 20th 2006)

For years, whenever the press has written one of their fear-mongering stories about open WiFi, they almost always include some tidbit about how if someone uses your network to do something illegal, you can be arrested for it. It’s one of the popular open WiFi horror stories — but is it true? Well, of course, you can be arrested, but it’s unlikely that there would be any legal grounds for the arrest.

(…)

While it is true that they can go after you, there are valid legal defenses for this — as has been discussed for years. If you are legally sharing your WiFi, then you are a service provider, and under current laws you are not liable for what others do with the service. That’s what it says in the Communications Decency Act, and it clearly applies here. In fact, we’ve even heard stories of people purposely leaving their WiFi open for this very reason — as it gives them a legal defense should the industry ever come after them.

In the comments of the post on digg.com (Mar 20th 2006)

You are right. If you don’t secure your wireless, you are asking for it. You deserve everything that you could get. If your grandma has wireless, and she doesn’t secure it, she deserves it too.

(…)

This article is false, to be a service provider you have to have contracts and the ability to release contact info of your subscribers to the authoritys should an electronic crime take place, other wise you are fully resposible for all activity of that connection… Having an open wifi connection does not mean no one useing that connection has to take resposibility for it.

(…)

Actually there’s nothing in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that says a service provider must have contracts or the ability to identify it’s users:

Definition: For purposes of section 512(c), a “service provider” is defined as a provider of online services or network access, or the operator of facilities therefor, including an entity offering the transmission, routing, or providing of connections for digital online communications, between or among points specified by a user, of material of the user’s choosing, without modification to the content of the material as sent or received.

Under that definition, any given person with an open access point is a “service provider”.

(…)

The analogy of an unprotected WiFi Network as an ‘open door’ is not very suitable. A comparisson to a porch light is much better. They both emit an EM signal when left running by the owner, and they both ‘shine’ in all directions unless screened.
So if someone sits in my driveway and uses the light from my porch to write a fake check, or to forge a document etc. Is the owner of the porch light responsible, only because he could have put up a screen that stops the light from reaching the driveway?

(…)

If the person enters your property line without permission than its trespass but if the wireless signal bleeds beyond your property boundaries into public areas and other peoples property then they are not committing a crime
.Its like a fruit tree that overhangs a fence if the tree has a piece of fruit that is accessible in a public area like a footpath than the person can take that fruit legally ,is it morally right to to take the fruit is another question.

(…)

Actually, the old way of thinking as far as “signal bleeding beyond the edge of your property line” simply does not work in the modern era, when it comes to technology. If that were the case, people could never be found guilty of trespassing when they hack into a private network. For example, you figure out the modem number to some government server. You dial in from home. Technically, you are at home and *not* at the government facility in question. The “signal” of their modem has crossed their property line and come into your home, by way of the phone line. Using your logic, a person couldn’t be held responsible for their actions, since they were acting upon something that was freely accessible from their own home. We all know that people get busted for this kind of stuff all the time, however.

You can let the radio waves pass over you all day long. As soon as you use those signals to actually become a member of that other person’s network, you put yourself at risk of prosecution.

The moral of the story is don’t take without asking, even if it’s an open wireless network that falls right into your lap.

(…)

I seriously hate analogies when it comes to this subject. Nobody ever seems to get it right. Nobody using your connection is really trespassing like they would be if they just walked into your unlocked house. I like to think of it more as that person is visiting.

If somebody knocks before they come in and another member of the family automatically lets them in, it would be REALLY hard to sue that person for “using your space.” If you can’t control your own family, it really doesn’t make sense to be suing other people for consuming your precious living space either, though. It does however make sense to sue that person if you tell them to get out and they stick around making it hard for you to get things done around the house.

Somebody who is just using their wireless card has a list of available access points and has the ability to simply click “connect.” The wireless card then asks the router for an IP address, and in most cases allows your card inside automatically. If you can’t control your own router, it really doesn’t make much sense to be suing people for using your precious bandwidth. If you can somehow find out who is physically accessing your network and tell that person to stop, and they continue to use your network, it would then be fair to apply the appropriate charges.

Simply making it illegal to enter any body’s property or wireless network without direct permission would be HORRIBLE. There is such thing as implied permission, people. I can cut through some body’s yard if I want to and there’s no fence there, if they want to stop me from ever doing it again all they need to do is tell me to stop. Those people wouldn’t be able to chase me down and sue me for doing it, the judge would just ask why they didn’t use a fence. Just because that person didn’t know what a fence is or how to install one wouldn’t be a valid excuse for the judge that knows better.

It is interesting to see how people try to explain and compare the situation of open Wi-Fi access to familiar activities and how much they disagree on how to see it in terms of both social norms and legal implications. Any opinion or first-hand experience you want to share with me?

Photo Credit: Combination Composition, originally uploaded by B Tal.

As part of the research project for my master, I am conducting an online survey on how people understand and use Wi-Fi technologies.

The goal of the survey is to help improve the design of Wi-Fi by collecting various user experiences.

Whether you have used it only once or use it everyday, every experience you had with Wi-Fi is valuable to this research and I will appreciate if you would take the time to answer my online survey.

The survey is 6-12 min depending on your experience with Wi-Fi and do not require any technical expertise to be answered.

Now that Fon has get major financial backing by company like Google or Skype, this changes the situation. Not only are they getting money but also a lot of free marketing with nearly any major publications talking about Fon. Glenn and OM Malik have posted a nice update on the situation.

I believe that we need to come up with a solution to offer an unified and enriched user experience in regard to wireless networking. The question that stands is not if it is going to happen (I believe it will) but how and when it will happen.

Fon has definitely an opportunity to get it right and has partners that can help it . But there are still major obstacles for it to become successful.

NETWORK SIZE IS NOT EQUAL TO VALUE

The number of hotspots is not directly linked to the value of the network. While Metcalfe’s Law

The value of a network equals approximately the square of the number of users of the system (n²) (Wikipedia)

So, yes the more hotspots Fon will get, the more valuable it will become to be part of the network (be a Fonero). But contrary to the telephone (for example), the increased value of participating to the network is not as clear. In the case of Skype, the value increases as more people join since prospective members will have more people they know on the network. But in the case of WiFi, all access points are not equally valuable to the network. In urban (and dense) areas, a hotspot can serve several people and will greatly enhance the value of the network. But in areas where the density is lower, the probability that an access point could cover more than 1 or 2 neighbours.

So, what does this mean?

1. In dense areas, the people may be tempted to set up Fon access and getting revenue out of it.(the Bill model)
2. In rural areas, the opportunity to make money out of one access is little. So, more people that will sign up as Foneros will probably choose the free roaming option (the Linus Model)
3. The people that will be paying for access will be the non-members of the network and the Bills when roaming

So what this creates is a multi-layered network:

• In metropolitan areas, the network could have a high traffic and bring revenue to Fon from visitors mostly. But a lot of users of these network will use it for free (people living in low density areas and part of the Fon network).
• In low density areas where broadband is available, the network will probably not generate a lot of revenue since most of the users could have an incentive to become part of the network as a Linus.
• People who don’t get access to broadband right now (like low-income neighbourhood) are not gaining much from this deal. They will have to pay to use the network in any case and the monthly fee will be higher than getting a connection at home. This does not really go with what FON founder, Martin Varsavsky, say about his dream to bring equal access to everybody.

Fon, as a movement, will probably succeed but it is not sure it can succeed as a commercial entreprise. This will depend of the growth of the interest for outdoor access to WiFi and also some of the rules that Fon sets on their members.

• If the population that is interested in WiFi access grow faster that the people joining the network as Linus, then Fon can generate more revenue.
• If most of the people interested in this kind of access join Fon or their competitors as members, then there will be less and less opportunities for Fon to charge these people.
• As more and more cities deploy wireless networks, the value of Fon in these cities will diminish as well

MEMBERSHIPS INCENTIVES?

Fon also need to make the rules for membership more clear. In his post announcing the support Fon received, Martin Varvasky talked about 120 days of membership. I am not sure what this means.

If you capture FON´s signal and you are not a fonero in 120 days you will have to pay to use the FON signal (Martin Varsavsky)

Unless I missed something, this could mean:

1. that somebody need to be a member of Fon for at least 4 months before being able to benefit from free roaming? OR
2. Does it mean that the people he calls Aliens can get away with not paying if they do register within 4 months of the access.

In both cases, this is something that could bother a lot of people.

• If you are trying to make money out of your acces point, (2) could mean you that you will have to wait 4 months before getting your first check and only then you will know for sure how much you made.
• If you want to get free roaming, (1) would mean that you have to setup and share your access now but you need to pay for roaming until the 4-month period has ended.

If I am right then the system don’t work as most people expects and the incentives to become part of the network become much lower.

And this is not the only problem that Fon is facing. I believe the 120 days rule may have been setup to limit freeriding on the network. Indeed, not only would Fon needs to monitor all these access points, but it may need to set a minimum threshold on hotspot usage to let users roam. I can setup today an access point with the Fon firmware and put it where nobody can access. Doing this, I bring no real value to the network but I can roam on it for free. Same thing with the account management. Since I don’t have to pay Fon to get an account if I am a Linus, what prevents me from sharing it with all my friends.
WI-FI AND THE LAW

Fon also needs to figure out clearly the legal implications for its customers and members. in several countries, operating a network requires the operator to log all connections and even in some case get a telecom operator licence. Laws are also not clear on whether a person sharing his/ her connection can be liable for the activities

No. As long as you have not actively participated in the commission of a crime or do not have knowledge that a particular individual is using your connection to commit a crime or illegal activity, it is our understanding that you are not responsible. Nevertheless, this may vary depending on the laws of each country. Furthermore, FON discourages any inappropriate use of your connection by making sure that each user of the FON Community has registered and is identifiable.No. As long as you have not actively participated in the commission of a crime or do not have knowledge that a particular individual is using your connection to commit a crime or illegal activity, it is our understanding that you are not responsible. Nevertheless, this may vary depending on the laws of each country. Furthermore, FON discourages any inappropriate use of your connection by making sure that each user of the FON Community has registered and is identifiable. (FON F.A.Q)

Fon say that its users are not liable but then says that it depends. This F.A.Q entry is really confusing and they shouldn’t state something in regard to the law if they are not totally sure.

And this does not include authentication, billing and other security issues that are going to come up shortly. Whether Fon succeed or fails, it will at least help advance the design of next generation wireless networks by forcing some of the issues to get figured out.

• How can we move from a device (or connectivity) centered approach (for ex: using a mobile phone, TV or Wi-Fi ) to a activity centered approach (watching a video, accessing securly a bank statement)?
• How can we help turn network connectivity consumers into producers (similarly to what has been done in digital media for example)?
• How can we help users have an optimal unified experience despite technologies like DRM, network neutrality,….
• How do we design networking technologies to better account for information asymmetry or bounded rationality..

Related:

• Network neutrality and the state of broadband
• Spanish company, Fon, wants to let wireless internet users share their connection
• Ubicomp 2005 video: Yellow chairs
• Yahoo! Research Labs–Berkeley and SIMS Garage Cinema

]]> http://www.iyne.org/2006/02/03/ithome-unraveling-complexities-of-networked-devices-in-the-home/feed/ 0 http://www.iyne.org/2006/02/02/chi-workshop-on-public-policy/ http://www.iyne.org/2006/02/02/chi-workshop-on-public-policy/#comments Thu, 02 Feb 2006 19:22:28 +0000 Riad Lemhachheche http://www.iyne.org/2006/02/02/chi-workshop-on-public-policy/ My position paper “Public policy impact on interaction design in networked environments” has been accepted for the workshop organized by the SIGCHI US Public Policy Committee (SIGCHI is the Computer- Human Interaction special interest group (SIGCHI) of the ACM). I need to make some changes to the paper but it basically talks about the possible changes on the Internet infrastructure that could affect the end user experience.

Some of the topics worth discussing:

• Network neutrality (see previous post)
• How network neutrality (or the lack of it) would impact user experience with his activities online
• the opportunity to give more information about the network connection and more control to the user
• Do we need new laws and what should these laws say?
]]> http://www.iyne.org/2006/02/02/chi-workshop-on-public-policy/feed/ 0 http://www.iyne.org/2006/02/02/network-neutrality-and-the-state-of-broadband/ http://www.iyne.org/2006/02/02/network-neutrality-and-the-state-of-broadband/#comments Thu, 02 Feb 2006 18:15:13 +0000 Riad Lemhachheche http://www.iyne.org/2006/02/02/network-neutrality-and-the-state-of-broadband/ There has been a lot of talk about the state and the future of broadband Internet lately. Since I am looking into the design of ubiquitous systems for my research and the legal perspective, I looked at the concept of network neutrality and its possible impact on wireless network infrastructure design. This year, the US Congress will probably enact legislation about network neutrality that could change the way Internet is, and not just in the US. Because of that, there has been a lot of activity and discussion about what network neutrality should be and how it should be protected.
But first, what is network neutrality?

[Network neutrality] suggests that (1) to maximize human welfare, information networks ought be as neutral as possible between various uses or applications, and (2) if necessary, government ought to intervene to promote or preserve the neutrality of the network. (Wikipedia)

Network neutrality basically means that whatever content you want to transmit over the network, this content will be treated in the same way as any other content by the network infrastructure. The Internet was built on a the principle of best effort delivery, which means it can guarantee you that it will deliver your content but it will do its best.

Best-effort delivery describes a network service in which the network does not provide any special features that recover lost or corrupted packets. These services are instead provided by end systems (Linktionary)

The 2 concepts of network neutrality and best efforts are usually associated to a third concept: common carrier.

A common carrier is an organization that transports a product or service using its facilities, or those of other carriers, and offers its services to the general public. (Wikipedia)

The best example of common carrier are post offices. A post office usually pick up and deliver letters and packages regardless of their content (unless the content is deemed dangerous to transport).

When Internet took off, telephone companies were considered common carriers and will transport the traffic from and to their clients to the Internet Service Provider (ISP) that the client has chosen.

When dial-up was still prevalent:

1. The phone companies like BellSouth, Qwest or Verizon would provide the phone line (the “pipes”)
2. ISP like Earthlink or AOL will provide the Internet service on top of the phone line.

But with broadband technologies like DSL, phone companies could better control both the pipes and the service .

And this is where the problem lies.

Since I have arrived in the US in 2001, I have been puzzled on how this country could have one of the most competitive marketplace for phone calls and one of the slowest and most expensive brodband Internet in developed countries.

The explanation came from Lawrence Lessig, in his post the fiction zone that DC has become

So while it is true that we have had both:

(a) common carrier like regulation applied to the Internet, and
(b) basically no effective regulation applied to the Internet

and it is true that we have had both:

(c) fast, fierce competition to provide Internet service and
(d) just about the worst broadband service of the developed world

it is not true that we had (c) when we had (b).

We had (c) when we had (a), and we have (d) now that we have (b). (Lessig)

From there, it all started to make sense.

Lessig then use a comparison between the price of Internet access in France and in the US.

Broadband in the US is “slow and expensive.” Verizon’s entry-level broadband is $14.95 for 786 kbs. That about $20 per megabit. In FRANCE, for $36/m, you get 20 megabits/s — or about $1.80 per megabit.

What he is not mentioning is that for this price, in France, people get also 100+ channels and unlimited national calling (excluding mobile). And since the beginning of this year, calls to some countries (including the US) are included too.

But it does not stop there. US providers (especially AT&T/SBC and Bellsouth) have claimed that they want to start charging content providers for delivering their traffic since it supposedly cost them so much to carry video and other kind of big files.

In Nov 2005, the CEO of the newly merged SBC/AT&T said in an interview

How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google (GOOG ), MSN, Vonage, and others?

How do you think they’re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! (YHOO ) or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts! (Business Week)

Bill Smith, the CTO of Bellsouth said something similar 2 weeks ago

Higher usage for broadband services drives more costs that we have to recover (via OM Malik)

And just 2 days ago, the CEO of AT&T talked again about it

“We have to figure out who pays for this bigger and bigger IP network,” said Mr Whitacre, who was in New York ahead of AT&T’s annual presentation to investors and analysts on Tuesday. “We have to show a return on our investments.”

“I think the content providers should be paying for the use of the network – obviously not the piece from the customer to the network, which has already been paid for by the customer in Internet access fees – but for accessing the so-called Internet cloud.” (Financial Times)

What bothers me is that they are trying to propagate wrong facts. Saying that content providers should pay for Internet is totally inaccurate. Content providers are already paying to get access to the Internet cloud. They even probably spend millions of dollars on their connection. And SBC,AT&T and Bellsouth gets a cut of this money, whether it is directly or not. For each customer request from Bellsouth for example, the data is transmitted on Bellsouth network until it got passed to the network where the servers of the content providers. And the more traffic get exchanged, the more money the telecom carriers will make even though it is not proportional to the amount of the data transmitted.

So, the following statement in the Washington Post article The Coming Tug of War Over the Internet is incorrect:

Companies like Google and Yahoo pay some fees to connect to their servers to the Internet, but AT&T will collect little if any additional revenue when Yahoo starts offering new features that take up lots of bandwidth on the Internet. When Yahoo’s millions of customers download huge blocks of video or play complex video games, AT&T ends up carrying that increased digital traffic without additional financial compensation. (Washington Post)

Of course, content providers payment to the carrier will not change immediatly if traffic increases since on the Internet cloud, traffic is paid on a link capacity in data per second instead of total data transmitted. In other words, content providers pay for a certain “pipe” size to transmit their traffic rather than paying for the exact amount of traffic that goes through. So if Yahoo! customers decide to download one more song or one more picture , it will have no immediate impact on the business of the carrier except to have more traffic going through their infrastructure. But if all customers of Yahoo! decide to download one movie instead on one song, it is highly likely that Yahoo! would have to buy more capacity to the Internet backbone to keep the level of service to an acceptable level, which will benefit probably all the carriers on the path from Yahoo! to the final customers via peering agreement.

And in case we forgot, these same carriers used the ability to download music (yes, I saw it in one of their commercials) and big files to sell broadband to their customers. So, now that they can’t find any new customer for their overpriced service, they turn to the contect providers to try to collect some more money!

The issue is much more complex that it looks and I am preparing a presentation for the SIGCHI Public Policy workshop at CHI 2006 in Montreal in April so I will have more on this topic soon.

In the meantime, some interesting readings:

• Just Say No(thing) – Om Malik
• Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes
• Conversation – Susan Crawford
• The self-owned internet
• The self-owned internet (II)

]]> http://www.iyne.org/2006/02/02/network-neutrality-and-the-state-of-broadband/feed/ 1 http://www.iyne.org/2005/12/20/workshop-at-chi-ithome-unraveling-complexities-of-networked-devices-in-the-home/ http://www.iyne.org/2005/12/20/workshop-at-chi-ithome-unraveling-complexities-of-networked-devices-in-the-home/#comments Tue, 20 Dec 2005 20:29:47 +0000 Riad Lemhachheche http://www.iyne.org/?p=90 A workshop at CHI 2006 in Montreal that matches my research topics. Submission deadline of position papers has been extended to Jan 16th.

IT@Home: Unraveling Complexities of Networked Devices in the Home
CHI 2006 Workshop

Call for Participation

The home is becoming a complex and hard to manage collection of
computers and digital lifestyle devices. The work to setup and
maintain a network of digital living devices in the home is similar
to the work of IT professionals. Indeed the growing complexity of
interconnected digital devices results in more and more time spent
solving problems with those devices and their configurations, an
important part of computer use that we call “IT@Home”. The workshop
will be structured to consider four areas of focus:

• Perspectives – How should we consider IT@Home? What theories
  apply to IT@Home?
• Problem Framing – What are critical problems in IT@Home?
• Empirical Study – Case studies and examples of effectively
  studying home IT.
• Design – What are some critical design issues for IT@Home?

Contributions to these conceptual areas that are illustrated through
data and case studies will be valued by researchers, designers,
product teams and market analysts through the coming years.

Individuals interested in participating in this full-day workshop
should submit a position paper on IT@Home that addresses one of the
four areas listed above. Position papers should be limited to 4
pages. Submissions in PDF or Word should be sent to David McDonald
dwmc at u.washington.edu by Monday, January 16, 2006. Notifications of
acceptance to the workshop will be made in early February 2006.

For more information on the workshop please visit:
IT@Home: Unraveling Complexities of Networked Devices in the Home
CHI 2006 Workshop

]]> http://www.iyne.org/2005/12/20/workshop-at-chi-ithome-unraveling-complexities-of-networked-devices-in-the-home/feed/ 0 http://www.iyne.org/2005/11/03/world-usability-day/ http://www.iyne.org/2005/11/03/world-usability-day/#comments Thu, 03 Nov 2005 19:04:48 +0000 Riad Lemhachheche http://www.iyne.org/2005/10/19/world-usability-day/

Today is World Usability Day. So we should think harder today (and every other day too) on how we can make things, systems, services … more useful and enjoyable to use.
For my part, I am:

• researching on how to make wireless networking more easy and natural to use
• searching and accessing information more efficient (especially multimedia)

What are you doing?

]]> http://www.iyne.org/2005/11/03/world-usability-day/feed/ 1 http://www.iyne.org/2005/10/16/interruption-and-multitask-oriented-life/ http://www.iyne.org/2005/10/16/interruption-and-multitask-oriented-life/#comments Sun, 16 Oct 2005 22:43:42 +0000 Riad Lemhachheche http://www.iyne.org/?p=78 Sunday’s story in the New York Times Meet the Life Hackers talks about interruption in the workplace and how information technology tools are now fighting for our attention.

Information is no longer a scarce resource – attention is. David Rose, a Cambridge, Mass.-based expert on computer interfaces, likes to point out that 20 years ago, an office worker had only two types of communication technology: a phone, which required an instant answer, and postal mail, which took days. “Now we have dozens of possibilities between those poles,” Rose says. How fast are you supposed to reply to an e-mail message? Or an instant message? Computer-based interruptions fall into a sort of Heisenbergian uncertainty trap: it is difficult to know whether an e-mail message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it – at which point you have, of course, interrupted yourself. Our software tools were essentially designed to compete with one another for our attention, like needy toddlers.

It talks particularly of the issues surroundings notification systems and ambient displays, that I have planned to include in my design.
It features research from Victor M. Gonzalez and Gloria Mark who presented their work at ECSCW in Paris. Mary Czerwinski, a Microsoft researcher, also worked on the subject to help the NASA with managing interruptions on astronauts conducting experiment.

She also collaborated with the HIP group at Microsoft Research that presented on Thursday at Oregon State Univ for a colloquim I had to attend for my Human Computer Interaction class. While their presentation was aimed at helping programmers with learning how to deal with large amounts of code and come to speed quickly on office practice, it could as well been re-used in other environments like general information workers.

]]> http://www.iyne.org/2005/10/16/interruption-and-multitask-oriented-life/feed/ 0 http://www.iyne.org/2005/10/10/ubicomp-2005-video-yellow-chairs/ http://www.iyne.org/2005/10/10/ubicomp-2005-video-yellow-chairs/#comments Mon, 10 Oct 2005 23:58:22 +0000 Riad Lemhachheche http://www.iyne.org/?p=77 The Yellow chair stories presented at Ubicomp related the interaction between people passing by and a wireless network connectivity materialized by a yellow chair placed in front of a house in london, UK.



For more details, see the Yellow Chair Stories – a live service design intervention and watch the Yellow Chair Stories video

See also:
Ubicomp 2005 demo: u-texture
Ubicomp 2005, Tokyo

]]> http://www.iyne.org/2005/10/10/ubicomp-2005-video-yellow-chairs/feed/ 1 http://www.iyne.org/2005/10/03/ubicomp-2005-demo-u-texture/ http://www.iyne.org/2005/10/03/ubicomp-2005-demo-u-texture/#comments Tue, 04 Oct 2005 02:09:06 +0000 Riad Lemhachheche http://www.iyne.org/?p=72 I had the opportunity to test the u-texture system that was on demo at Ubicomp 2005 conference in Tokyo.

Basically, u-texture is a home computing / entertainment system developed at Keio University, Japan. It is based on the concept of active furniture where the components are “blocks”. Each block has its own touch screen display and connectivity. Based on its relative and absolute position in regard to the rest of the system. It can perform different tasks, run different applications.

u-texture blocks can be setup in 2 modes: standalone and system. Blocks can be connected together through u-joints to provide interactions. Here is a description of a block:



More info is available at u-texture project page at Keio University

Here is a picture I took of the interaction between a music CD and a music player/ computer (a Sharp Zaurus I believe)




Ubicomp’05 – U-texture demo, originally uploaded by Riad Lemhachheche.

See also: Ubicomp 2005, Tokyo

]]> http://www.iyne.org/2005/10/03/ubicomp-2005-demo-u-texture/feed/ 0 http://www.iyne.org/2005/09/07/ubicomp-2005-tokyo/ http://www.iyne.org/2005/09/07/ubicomp-2005-tokyo/#comments Wed, 07 Sep 2005 09:07:58 +0000 Riad Lemhachheche http://www.iyne.org/?p=70 I will be attending Ubicomp 2005 in Tokyo, Japan from Sept 11 to 14 ( as a student volunteer).

Here are some of the presentations from the paper program I will be attending:

• From Interaction to Participation: Configuring Space Through Embodied Interaction
  Amanda Williams (University of California, Irvine), Eric Kabisch (University of California, Irvine), Paul Dourish (University of California, Irvine) — Sept 14th 10:45 am

• Scanning Objects in the Wild: Assessing an Object Triggered Information System
  A.J. Bernheim Brush (Microsoft Research), Tammara Combs Turner (Microsoft Research), Marc A. Smith (Microsoft Research), Neeti Gupta (Microsoft Research) — Sept 14th 11:10 am
• Control, Deception, and Communication: Evaluating the Deployment of a Location-Enhanced Messaging Service
  Giovanni Iachello (Georgia Institute of Technology), Ian Smith (Intel Research Seattle), Sunny Consolvo (Intel Research Seattle), Gregory D. Abowd (Georgia Institute of Technology), Jeff Hughes (University of Washington), James Howard (University of Washington), Fred Potter (University of Washington), James Scott (Intel Research Cambridge), Timothy Sohn (University of California, San Diego), Jeffrey Hightower (Intel Research Seattle), Anthony LaMarca (Intel Research Seattle) — Sept 13th 16:00
• Self-Mapping in 802.11 Location Systems
  Anthony LaMarca (Intel Research Seattle), Jeffry Hightower (Intel Research Seattle), Ian Smith (Intel Research Seattle), Sunny Consolvo (Intel Research Seattle) — Sept 13th 09:00 am

See also: Ubicomp 2005 demo: u-texture

The second one is about e-Plate, a British project to use active RFID tag to track cars.

The British government is preparing to test new high-tech license plates containing microchips capable of transmitting unique vehicle identification numbers and other data to readers more than 300 feet away.

The point of the test is to see whether microchips will make number plates harder to tamper with and clone, said U.K. Department for Transport spokesman Ian Weller-Skitt.

Many commuters use counterfeit plates to avoid the London congestion charge, a fee imposed on passenger vehicles entering central London during busy hours.

This project has similiarities with the ongoing ODOT research project here at OSU, so it will be interesting to compare the results of both experiments. I will need to look at a more detailled description of their system . For example, I didn’t see anything how they plan to manage privacy, like the use of a privacy bit or similar systems

For this special issue we solicit contributions that map and report on such developments, and highlight the effects of bringing ubiquitous computing to the real world:

• What are the limitations of ubiquitous systems implementation in the real world in terms of economics, regulation, business realities and market situation and can the cost be justified?
• Which systems can work outside the laboratory? Are the available infrastructures able to cater for the massive data flows created by auto-identification for example? What are the actual systems architectures that have been proven to effectively support the required workloads?
• When ubiquitous systems are deployed what are the changes that bring to people’s lives? What changes are effected in people’s private lives at a personal and family level and what are the changes to social etiquette?
• Is the ubiquitous computing world a utopia, which can never be reached because reality is messy? Can the vision of computing for all turn into a nightmare of surveillance and no privacy?
• Can we reverse decades of technology as conqueror to achieve “calm technology”?
• And above all, is the ubiquitous computing world a world which people seem happy to live in?

We are especially interested in systems that attempt to balance the different, frequently contradicting requirements of a real application environment, for example by catering to identified social needs while addressing specific regulatory constraints. In this, we take a particularly broad view of the terms “ubiquitous computing” as highlighted by the cases discussed above

This special issue aims to benefit both practitioners and academics with diverse backgrounds, from technologists to social scientists. It aims to collect in single place early experiences with real world implementations of ubiquitous computing systems and help develop a consensus regarding successful practice as well as to identify critical research questions for taking ubiquitous computing into the real world.

If I can get experimental results in time, I feel like my model could fit nicely in this special edition.

Source: Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Journal website

The Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) announces the launch of a new publication in the fourth quarter of 2005, the Journal of Usability Studies.
This publication will be a peer-reviewed, on-line journal dedicated to promoting and enhancing the practice, research, ethics, and education of usability engineering.

Authors are invited to submit manuscripts addressing various aspects of quantitative and qualitative usability studies that have a strong generalization value to other practitioners working with any human-interactive product.
This can include (but are not limited to):

• empirical findings of usability studies (but not the full usability
  reports),
• comparative studies between usability methods, approaches, methods,
  and techniques for planning and conducting usability tests
• newly defined and tested usability metrics,
• data analysis approaches,
• academic research that has strong practical and applicable
  implications to design and testing,
• critical or thought/discussion papers challenging and questioning
  practices and proposing innovative ideas and approaches,
• reporting the design and implementation of teaching or training
  approaches,
• descriptions and discussions of automated, computerized tools for
  usability data collection and testing, or
• the empirical development and implementation of usability standards
  and guidelines.

‘Usability studies’ can include:

• experiments,
• laboratory studies,
• field studies,
• contextual inquiries,
• ethnographic studies,
• remote testing,
• expert or heuristic evaluations,
• model-based evaluations
• and other techniques

The journal will appear online quarterly starting the last quarter of 2005

Source: SIGCHI mailing list

I will be attending the workshop “Supporting Appropriation Work: Approaches for the ‘reflective’ user” in addition to presenting a poster (Poster at ECSCW).

The title of my position paper is “Design for appropriation of ubiquity in information systems”.