Randall Biliki, 1963 – 2007

Dan McGarry

I just found out at Randall Biliki has died, apparently murdered in an attack on his family.

I met Randall for a brief time, when he came to Vanuatu to help get the ball rolling on our leg of the People First Network. He was a conscientious, quiet individual whose intelligence quickly made itself shown through the clarity of his questions and comments. He was always tactful and soft-spoken, so perfectly disarming that I thought he was one of those people who would always sail through smooth waters.

I’m going to Honiara next month for the annual PACINET conference, a regional ICT get-together sponsored by the Pacific Islands Chapter of the Internet Society (PICISOC). I was really looking forward to buying him a beer (he didn’t like the kava at all). Now I’ll have to go and pay my respects to his family, if they haven’t fled Honiara.

A note about PFNet – they were virtually the only media presence on the ground during the civil strife in the Solomon Islands, and their Internet café was for some time the sole means of communication with the outside world for a number of people.

Randall, David Leeming, David Ma’ai and many others created a viable nation-wide communications network using technology that most others thought beneath them. Comparing their approach[*] with, for example, an Asian Development Bank-funded telecentre (at USD 125,000 a pop) provides an object lesson in sensible, sustainable development.

People often toss about the phrase ‘He will be missed‘ when speaking of the dead. But Randall’s death does exact a price. It can be measured directly in the ability of people on some of the remotest islands of the world to speak with one another.

This is probably the final straw for the Vanuatu extension of the project. Randall was to have come in and help run things for the first six months. I honestly don’t know how it can get off the ground without him around.

Housework

Dan McGarry

Ever since I arrived in Vanuatu almost four years ago, I’ve woken every morning to the rhythmic shushing of the scrub brush as the women in the neighbourhood do the morning wash. It’s often the last thing I hear before sundown as well.

Anyone who’s ever washed their clothes by hand knows just how arduous the process is. Most of the women in Vanuatu have extremely well-defined arm muscles, and many of the older women on the islands are built like wrestlers. Laundry is one of the reasons why.

When Georgeline approached me some time ago with the news that she’d begun participating in a micro-finance scheme, I encouraged her to do so, and immediately began wracking my brains for an activity that would allow her to earn money and still take care of little Daniela full-time. I tossed out an idea or two, but nothing that seemed very compelling. Georgeline was patient with me, and waited for me to wind down before telling me that she already knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to buy a washing machine, and charge the local women to use it.

How very stupid of me not to have thought of it before.

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Inter-Islandism

Dan McGarry

Vila is quiet. The hospital gates are locked and guarded. There are about twenty officers lounging outside the police station. Most businesses are closed and the remainder are nearly deserted. Every passing group is scrutinised quietly.

Most of my family stayed with me last night, five of them in my house and about eight more in the storage shed across the yard. None of us wandered far, electing instead to fill up a plastic jug with kava and sit in my house watching movies.

To anyone not attuned to life in Vanuatu, things would appear perfectly normal, if a little cosy. Kids were being kids, the women prepared supper and chatted amongst themselves. A few of the men wandered off into the night, but most hid under the eaves, joking quietly and looking off into the rain.

The story goes like this: A Tannese woman died, apparently poisoned by her husband and his brother. The person who supplied the poison was a practitioner of nakaimas from Ambrym. Whether he was coerced or paid depends on who is telling the story.

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Gates vs Shuttleworth

Dan McGarry

Some childish name-calling recently erupted on a forum that I frequent, which resulted in a philanthropy pissing contest. Some people said Bill Gates is saving lives through his generousity; some said Mark Shuttleworth is building futures.

Some were silly enough to suggest that Ubuntu is just a bunch of geeks getting their rocks off playing with their tech toys.

I replied:

I work in development, in a country that’s internationally known as a malaria hotspot. Several people I know are employed by Gates Foundation money, and everyone here agrees that this is a Good Thing. But there’s a limit to how much good this kind of thing can do.

One friend of mine once politely mentioned to a Gates Foundation researcher that we don’t really need to know much more about malaria in this country. All we really need is trained and equipped medical staff within a day’s walk of every man, woman and child. Malaria isn’t a terribly dangerous disease if it’s treated properly. I’ve had it myself, by the way, so I know whereof I speak.

The big problem in disease prevention around the world is an almost unbelievable shortage of health workers and medicines. Very little is being done to address these fundamental issues. Here’s an interesting series of facts:

  • Number of new doctors sub-Saharan Africa would need for its per-capita number to match America’s: 3,900,000
  • Number of new doctors produced by sub-Saharan Africa’s universities each year: 4,000

(Source: Harper’s Index.)

Again, I respect the work being done by the Gates Foundation, and I’ve seen its benefits with my own eyes. But to assume that those people working to try and improve education and communications are not involved in something equally vital is a little silly. In fact, it smacks of a holier-than-thou attitude that tends to tarnish most donor-driven projects, and often results in people chasing sexy aid projects at the expense of boring things like making sure that the local nurse has enough pills for everyone, and can order more when he needs them.

Web Standards – A Rant

Dan McGarry

It’s very common on Slashdot and other, er, technical fora, to see people make assertions like the following:

“IE extensions [of existing standards] have proven to be a very good thing for the web overall. It has always been IE that has pushed the limits of dynamic web pages through the inclusion of similar extensions (primarily for the development of Outlook Web Access) which have given birth to the technologies that fuel AJAX and other modern web techniques.“

What an interesting viewpoint. I couldn’t disagree more.

The ‘Embrace and Extend’ strategy on which Microsoft has relied since about 1998 is designed to be divisive and ultimately to support Microsoft’s one interest: by hook or by crook, to land everyone on the Microsoft platform. They worked with little or no support or cooperation from any other body[*] and more often than not used their position to subvert the activities of others. They published competing specifications and duplicated functionality through their own proprietary implementations.

Now before we go any further, it’s important to remember that this strategy was dressed up nicely, spoken about politely in marketing euphemisms and was seldom openly disparaging of competing technologies. It is also important to note that very few of the people actually responsible for the creation and fostering of standards ever felt anything but frustration and animosity toward these efforts to subvert the process. I’ve seen such luminaries as Lawrence Lessig and Sir Tim Berners Lee stand up in public fora and state in absolutely unambiguous terms that ‘this MS technology is the single biggest threat faced by the web today.’ (WWW Conference, Amsterdam 2000, for those who care).

It’s true that there are some who have argued for accomodation, and while they’ve achieved short-term gains (RSS and SOAP, for example), the recent announcement of MS-only implementations and extensions of these standards offers further evidence that MS’ intentions are anything but benevolent.

Now, some may trot out the sorry old argument that a corporation’s job is to profit and damn the ethical/legal torpedoes, but the fact is that to most of the people working in standards, this is not the goal. Believe it or not, most of us actually care about the community, and feel that the way things are implemented is just as important as what gets done. So feel free to act as apologist for the soulless corporate machine if you must, but please, don’t pretend that that’s the only way things can be made to work.

Microsoft (and Netscape in its time) are not only guilty of skewing standards in their favour. They’re also guilty of something far more insidious: the infection of the application space with software designed to lock people into their proprietary approach to things. Often enough, the design is fatally compromised in the process. The example cited above, Outlook Web Access, is a prime example of how to break things in the name of lock-in.

Here’s a quick summary of just some of the ways in which Outlook Web Access, which encapsulates email access inside HTTP and passes it through ports 80/443 by default, is technically broken:

  • Caching proxy servers might or might not do the right thing – behaviour here is undefined
  • Traffic/network analysis is subverted
  • Security is compounded, as activity patterns have to be checked on more, not fewer ports (think about it)
  • Likewise, security audits are far more difficult, as traffic has to be disambiguated
  • Security is subverted, users can simply tunnel high volume traffic through to (at least) the DMZ with no guarantee that it’s being inspected (i.e. no one catches that the traffic is neither going to the web nor the Exchange server; each one assumes it’s going to the other and that it’s ‘okay’. Same goes with large volumes of outgoing information.)
  • Deliberate bypassing of firewall policies, promoting insecure configurations (e.g. pushing things through ports 80 and 443 as a matter of informal policy, reducing the firewall to an ornament)
  • Buggier software due to additional complexity
  • Non-standard, meaning (little or) nothing else will support it
  • Promotes software lock-in, which has cost and management implications
  • Promotes monoculture, which has cost, management and *security* implications
  • Protocols exist for this purpose already

That last point is the key. Why on earth would MS build an entirely new way to get one’s email when secure IMAP or POP3 already exist? Microsoft doesn’t particularly care about doing things better, they just want to make sure that their customers do things differently. Quality is seldom a concern, and as a result, it’s usually a casualty.

[*] It’s true that they were – and remain – members of such organisations as the World Wide Web Consortium.

NSA for Dummies

Dan McGarry

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about the NSA eavesdropping programme, which reportedly has been surveilling US citizens without first getting a warrant. In one of these discussions, someone asked:

What’s the worst case scenario? How big could it be?

That’s a really good question. It occurs to me that no one has really attempted to address this yet in layman’s terms, so here goes….

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Single Point of Failure

Dan McGarry

On January 14, 2005, the Intelsat 804 satellite suddenly lost its power source and began drifting helplessly in space. This satellite provided much, and in some cases all, of the communications lines for countries from Sri Lanka to Samoa.

The effect of this sudden loss of service was particularly severe on Pacific island nations, because in many places this satellite represented the only communication link to the outside world. As of January 21, some countries were still offline, and others were still experiencing problems.

International communications were badly disrupted. International telephone and fax traffic stopped. Internet access was gone. Banks and credit card companies could not conduct transactions, leaving tourists without cash and resort owners accepting debts on faith alone. Airlines and airports could not communicate easily. Most importantly, disaster early warning systems were severely impaired.

When reviewing the list of affected countries, one thing quickly becomes clear: the countries most affected by the satellite failure were those whose communications systems had a single point of failure.

Single Point of Failure. Every network analyst knows, and fears, this term. It’s simple enough in principle: when planning a communications system, always make sure that there’s no single part whose failure can bring the whole system down.

In practice, it’s not as easy as it sounds. The failure of the Intelsat 804 satellite continues to cause significant problems throughout the Pacific region, particularly among the small island nations. This is mostly because the cost of communications makes having back-up satellite access very difficult.

Because of the relatively small amount of traffic they buy, Pacific island nations are relatively unimportant to international satellite providers. Technicians working to fix the problem reported spending hours, even days, trying to contact Intelsat staff. They spoke of being given emergency space on an alternative satellite, only to be bumped off by other customers.

The money that a satellite provider makes from a small island country is, relatively speaking, very small. From a business perspective, we’re not very important to them. But for us, international communications are more important than just business.

What if there had been a natural disaster? At the height of the hurricane season, in a region prone to earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis, this is not merely idle speculation. In fact, shortly after the outage occurred, there was a strong earthquake in Micronesia. Had it caused even a localised tsunami, the loss of communications could have cost us many lives.

Looking at the list of affected countries, it quickly becomes clear that those who suffered most are the ones who had only one connection to the outside world. Several countries had separate contracts for data and voice communications. When voice communications disappeared, they were able to use their data lines to compensate. In one case, technicians were able to use Voice Over IP (VOIP) protocols to enable outbound telephone calls within twelve hours.

What lessons can we take from this incident? It’s clear now that those carriers who relied on a single source for their data and voice communications paid most dearly. Their customers paid dearly too, in terms of lost business. It was pure luck that no lives were lost. Next time, we might not be so lucky.

But what can we do to prevent this happening again? The answer is to remove single points of failure wherever possible. Satellite communication is expensive, and underwater cable even more so. Still, it’s been demonstrated that opening national markets to multiple data carriers usually reduces prices for consumers and increases revenues for the carriers. In New Caledonia, data use has increased by one thousand percent since it opened its communications market three years ago. Importantly, they were one of the least affected nations when the Intelsat 804 failed.

Opening the communications market is not an appropriate answer for every island nation. Some are simply too small to support it. In these cases, using separate providers for voice and data service at very least ensures that if the one is lost, the other is still available.

Single Points of Failure are a liability in every system. International communications is one area where such a liability can cost lives.

Cyclone Ivy

Dan McGarry1 Comment

[Amalgamated from a series of live blogging posts as Cyclone Ivy hit the village of Saratamata on Ambae island, where I was staying at the time.]

Imagine the worst storm you’ve ever seen. Double it. Double it again. Make it last 14 hours at its highest intensity. That’s how cyclone Ivy was for us. The wind stayed consistently in excess of 50 knots from mid-afternoon of the day before yesterday (the time of my last post) until late into the night. It gusted far above that.

There were four of us staying in a very small house. We made light of things as best we could, but it was a little hard to be entirely glib when the door blew off the front of the house, taking the sheets of masonite covering the windows with it.

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