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May 11, 2004
Self-Organizing Motes
I've been fascinated by stories of self-organizing network of miniature sensors. IEEE Spectrum has a story about researchers who use a host of small devices called motes to do research on a bird colony in Maine. The motes are shaped like film canisters:
Each cylinder holds a bit of circuitry capable of simple computation and communication, plus a few environmental sensors, a battery, and an antenna. Taken alone, it's nothing special. But scatter around a dozen or a hundred or a thousand of these film-canister-sized cylinders--called motes--and switch them on, and something amazing happens: within seconds, they will organize themselves into a powerful yet stealthy data-gathering machine. Their quarry? A small and secretive seabird known as the Leach's storm petrel, whose comings and goings bird-watchers have long puzzled over but have never fully understood.From Feature Article
Referenced Tue May 11 2004 09:46:15 GMT-0600
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Of course, the societal implications of these kinds of things are enormous. Right now, I expect that each on of these motes is both primitive and expensive. What is invariably true, however, is that within a decade Moore's law says you'll be able to buy a bag of 100 motes at Radio Shack for $25.
This is precisely the kind of things that David Brin was talking about in his book, The Transparent Society. Paraphrasing, what Brin suggests is that we probably won't get to choose whether or not these kinds of capabilities exist. Our only choice is whether everyone will have access to them or only the Government will have access to them. Its its the latter, things get pretty scary.
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SPF at IETF
The Internet Engineering Task Force has formed a group to create a formal standard around SPF, the Sender Policy Framework, designed to reduce Spam. The group, called MTA Authorization Records in DNS (MARID), will focus only on MTA authorization and only on DNS-based mechanisms. MTA methods are concerned with authenticating the domain that the mail comes from, rather than the sender individually. As a consequence, MTA methods aren't foolproof (Spam frequently does come from domains that can be authenticated), but it cuts off a large source of Spam with no need to even transfer or read the message the first. The good news is that its likely to move fast:
The group really began talking about things just about a month ago. According to the charter, there are major decision-making milestones in May and June and a working-group document submission in August. If the process only amounted to rubber-stamping the SPF specification, the schedule would be a breeze to meet, but as I have said, there are three major proposals with big differences among them. There's no question that someone's interests aren't going to be met.From SMTP Authentication Hits Standards Track
Referenced Tue May 11 2004 09:39:53 GMT-0600