3 Spet 2004.Noel Hodson

TELEWORK NEWS

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Archive from June 2002 – November 2003.

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CONTENTS (CATEGORY appears UNDER the article)

SW2000 Telework Studies.................................................................................................................................. 1

London’s Congestion Charging – Rage, Rage and more Rage – Tuesday 11th November 2003........................ 3

Travel Traffic & Congestion............................................................................................................ 4

National Internet Shopping Day – Saturday 1st November 2003...................................................................... 4

Statistics...................................................................................................................................................... 4

DTX reduces cell-phone damage to brain-cells – Saturday 1st November 2003................................................ 4

Mobiles & Health...................................................................................................................................... 4

Whatever happened to Carbon Credits? Fires and Floods – Saturday 1st November 2003............................... 4

Travel Traffic & Congestion............................................................................................................ 5

Anti-Spammers to claim $1M – Sunday 12th October 2003............................................................................. 5

Spam................................................................................................................................................................. 5

Son-of-Free-Web in birth pangs. Mesh-Networking. – Friday 10th October 2003........................................... 5

Emerging Technologies....................................................................................................................... 5

Music recording industry scores – Friday 10th October 2003........................................................................... 5

Piracy.............................................................................................................................................................. 6

Electronic paper screens – Wednesday 1st October 2003.................................................................................. 6

Emerging Technologies....................................................................................................................... 6

Oxford Internet Institute survey – Tuesday 16th September 2003.................................................................... 6

Statistics...................................................................................................................................................... 6

On-site workers down to 49% - Thursday 11th September 2003...................................................................... 6

Statistics...................................................................................................................................................... 6

Mobile phones are safer? – Thursday 11th September 2003............................................................................. 6

Mobiles & Health...................................................................................................................................... 7

British government acknowledges telework – Tuesday 9th September 2003..................................................... 7

Statistics...................................................................................................................................................... 7

First Internet Sperm Bank baby born – Thursday 22nd August 2003............................................................... 7

London’s congestion charge update – Thursday 22nd August 2003.................................................................. 7

Travel Traffic & Congestion............................................................................................................ 8

Piracy of copyrighted fine-arts? – Thursday 7th August 2003.......................................................................... 8

Piracy.............................................................................................................................................................. 8

ITAC’s 10th Annual Conference 4th & 5th September..................................................................................... 8

David and Goliath continued – Monday 28th July 2003................................................................................... 9

Piracy.............................................................................................................................................................. 9

Telework & Property or Real-Estate – Monday 28th July 2003....................................................................... 9

Statistics.................................................................................................................................................... 10

A self-explanatory request for data. Please click the link and assist Dr Lee. – 9th July 2003......................... 10

Statistics.................................................................................................................................................... 10

London’s congestion charge kills the goose that lays the golden eggs – Wednesday 25th June 2003.............. 10

Travel Traffic & Congestion.......................................................................................................... 11

UK Banks will move 200,000 jobs to India – Monday 9th June 2003............................................................ 11

Statistics.................................................................................................................................................... 11

Fast TCP, 6,000 times faster than your sluggish old broadband – Thursday 5th June 2003........................... 11

Broadband................................................................................................................................................. 12

Lots of Bytes.................................................................................................................................................... 12

Commuting –v- telecommuting. The energy equation. – Thursday 29th May 2003....................................... 12

Travel, Traffic & Congestion......................................................................................................... 13

A searching email from the Feds. Inspired by R.I.P.A. ? – Thursday 22nd May 2003.................................. 13

Internet surveillance and laws.................................................................................................. 13

Hewlett Packard in your bedroom – Thursday 22nd May 2003...................................................................... 13

Emerging Technologies..................................................................................................................... 14

Faster quality control of chips – Thursday 22nd May 2003........................................................................... 14

Emerging Technologies..................................................................................................................... 14

1 in 5 have a mobile phone – Thursday 22nd May 2003................................................................................. 14

Mobiles & Health.................................................................................................................................... 14

More spam, please – from Rod Paris – Thursday 15th May 2003.................................................................. 14

Spam............................................................................................................................................................... 14

European DSL broadband “most expensive” for 3rd year running – Tuesday 13th May 2003....................... 14

Broadband................................................................................................................................................. 14

Broadband speeds seem unreliable – Monday 5th May 2003.......................................................................... 14

Broadband................................................................................................................................................. 15

Music industry shoots students; and start a war? – Wednesday 23rd April 2003.......................................... 15

Piracy............................................................................................................................................................ 15

Man shoots computer – Thursday 17th April 2003........................................................................................ 15

European Commission, Information Society Technologies (IST) reports made accessible – Tuesday 15th April 2003 16

Statistics.................................................................................................................................................... 16

European governments go on-line – Wednesday 26th March 2003.................................................................. 16

Statistics.................................................................................................................................................... 16

A phone that knows you are busy – Thursday 13th March 2003................................................................... 16

Emerging Technologies..................................................................................................................... 16

George Orwell’s surveillance society closes in – Wednesday 26th February 2003.......................................... 16

Internet surveillance and laws.................................................................................................. 17

E-Democracy; South Korea shows the way – Monday 24th February 2003.................................................. 17

E-voting....................................................................................................................................................... 17

Insurance for telework-home-offices – Saturday 22nd February 2003............................................................. 17

Twelve characters per hour – thought controlled computers for paralysed teleworkers – Thursday 20th February 2003 17

Emerging Technologies..................................................................................................................... 18

Congestion charging. Will London’s experiment work – Monday 17th February 2003................................... 18

Travel Traffic & Congestion.......................................................................................................... 19

Six foot man expands infinitely – Sunday 16th February 2003........................................................................ 19

TOE – Theory of Everything - EIG................................................................................................... 19

21% increase in teleworking by USA Federal employees – Tuesday 11th February 2003.............................. 19

Statistics.................................................................................................................................................... 20

Internet governance debate – Friday 7th February 2003.................................................................................. 20

Piracy............................................................................................................................................................ 20

Internet surveillance and laws.................................................................................................. 21

The Bush administration backs telework – Tuesday 4th February 2003......................................................... 21

Statistics.................................................................................................................................................... 21

“Dear Santa, please email me a new bicycle” – Monday 13th January 2003................................................... 21

Emerging Technologies..................................................................................................................... 21

If you have a Web-site : You are history – Friday 22 November 2002............................................................ 21

Emerging Technologies..................................................................................................................... 21

Telejumpers for Christmas – Friday 8th November 2002................................................................................ 22

Emerging Technologies..................................................................................................................... 22

RIPA sneaks from its coffin – Friday 25th October 2002................................................................................ 22

Internet surveillance and laws.................................................................................................. 22

Cellphone Safety – studies of cancer cells. Friday 25th October 2002............................................................ 22

Mobiles & Health.................................................................................................................................... 22

Work Anywhere - Telework goes weightless – soon. 17th Oct 2002............................................................. 23

Emerging Technologies..................................................................................................................... 23

Launch for Telework-Complete........................................................................................................................ 23

Safe Mobile Phones – 29th August 02.............................................................................................................. 23

Mobiles & Health.................................................................................................................................... 23

R. I. P. A. Awakes from its premature grave ! – 23rd Aug 02........................................................................ 23

Internet surveillance and laws.................................................................................................. 24

$66 Billion for American aristocrats and several hundred signatures missing................................................... 24

Off-shore money & tax....................................................................................................................... 24

30 million teleworkers fail to reverse environmental problems – 12th Aug 2002............................................. 24

Travel Traffic & Congestion.......................................................................................................... 24

Google Sells Million Dollar Keywords – 5th Aug 02....................................................................................... 25

Wednesday 31st July 02 - So far so good......................................................................................................... 25

Broadband................................................................................................................................................. 25

Monday 22nd July 02 – Will the Internet and telework survive WorldCom?.................................................. 25

Off-shore money & tax....................................................................................................................... 25

Thursday 18th July 02 – Too many capitalists and Convergence.................................................................... 25

Off-shore money & tax....................................................................................................................... 26

Tuesday 16th July 02 – Is it time for Telework Training................................................................................. 26

Friday 5th July 02. – One Billion (1,000,000,000) personal computers delivered.......................................... 26

Statistics.................................................................................................................................................... 27

Friday 28th June 02. - MOBILE PHONE ADDICTS UNDER ATTACK................................................... 27

Mobiles & Health.................................................................................................................................... 27

Thursday 20th June 02. Wi-Fi – Lower cost wireless broadband for all......................................................... 27

Emerging Technologies..................................................................................................................... 27

Broadband................................................................................................................................................. 27

Wednesday 19th June 02. The RIP Act retires to its coffin............................................................................. 27

Internet surveillance and laws.................................................................................................. 28

Sign Up Now for June 19th Webinar................................................................................................................ 28

Free Bay Area Telework Association Webinar 27th June................................................................................ 28

Alexander Bell, the famous Scottish migrant to the USA, did not invent the telephone.................................. 29

Warning issued to the Swiss Banks................................................................................................................... 29

Off-shore money & tax....................................................................................................................... 29

Conferences are back......................................................................................................................................... 29

Statistics.................................................................................................................................................... 29

50 million teleworkers in a fast changing world................................................................................................ 29

Statistics.................................................................................................................................................... 30

London’s Congestion Charging – Rage, Rage and more Rage – Tuesday 11th November 2003 – First and foremost my wife not only did not have to pay the charge but also received a written apology (see Cinderella Syndrome Thursday 22^nd August 03 below). And – moreover, I accidentally wandered into the system, was unjustly found “guilty” in a UK Courtroom by the resident judge – a damned computer, and after I had made about 20 enraged phone calls, written to the Queen, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Attorney General, my Member of Parliament and all lesser authorities in the UK, and challenged the Mayor of London to a pugilistic punch-up on the steps of City Hall, I received 3 letters of apology, but no flowers. Beware of Orwellian Surveillance and the nightmare of unstoppable, relentless computer systems. New Scientist reports that London expects to earn £68 million this year from charges (but it costs £120M to operate - Editor) and has reduced car traffic by 60%. Thus bus journeys are faster and everyone is happy (except the traders whose businesses are in ruins – Editor – and there is hardly an English man or woman who is not outraged and enraged by the way the system operates). So if your City intends to copy the system – make sure the Notices are polite, reach the correct addresses and don’t get innocent people thrown into prison – or there will be violence done. Can you imagine my raging problems happening in New York where most drivers are armed? My solution: - do away with the surveillance-cameras, install barriers and nets at each boundary into the zone for drivers to throw the £5 charge into, employ one-guard per barrier, open the barriers out of charging hours, make a turning area for lost drivers; then there will be no mistakes, no expensive and faulty computer system, no arrogant Help-Line operators in bunkers 30 miles from London, no threatening cameras on 50 foot poles, no follow up fines, no arguments, no courts – in all very much cheaper and user friendly. Low tech works.

For the full fisticuffs at dawn report – click http://www.noelhodson.com\index_files\roadrage.htm

Travel Traffic & Congestion

National Internet Shopping Day – Saturday 1st November 2003 – A report in Green Futures Magazine by journalist Hannah Bullock tells us that the 24^th July 2003 was National Internet Shopping Day. The date was chosen because in American-speak it is written as 24/7. Twenty-four of seven translates as 24 hour shopping, 7 days a week and the Internet certainly has brought that mixed blessing into our lives. Hannah Bullock reports e-shopping in the UK is currently 6% of the retail market and is set to grow to 40% over the next 3 years but, citing the distribution of the latest Harry Potter book, she wonders if the delivery of internet goods to teleworkers and tele-shoppers is good or bad for the environment. www.greenfutures.org.uk

Statistics

DTX reduces cell-phone damage to brain-cells – Saturday 1st November 2003 – The wildcat postal strikes in the UK have stimulated me to re-read back issues of New Scientist. The 13th September edition reported that Prof. Colin Blakemore, the new head of the UK’s Medical Research Council, encourages children using cell-phones to listen more than they speak as DTX technology (discontinuous transmission) reduces the transmission power from 240 milliwatts to 28.8 milliwats when receiving rather than sending. Children are particularly susceptible to any dangers that cell-phones might pose. With camera-cell-phones now available, the prophetic intelligence of the Victorian advice that “children should be seen and not heard” might at last be recognised.

Mobiles & Health

Whatever happened to Carbon Credits? Fires and Floods – Saturday 1st November 2003 – An article by Toby Belsom of Morely Fund Management about measures being implemented by energy companies such as Scottish and Southern Electricity under the EU Emissions Trading Directive, reminded me of forecasts by US telework consultants, made in 1998, that Carbon Credits Trading would accelerate telework as major employers claimed cash compensation and trade-offs for the carbon saved by the reduced travel of their teleworkers. The prophets were certainly right that teleworker numbers would grow, but has anyone ever seen a Carbon Credit Certificate or seen any employer measuring the carbon benefits of telework? The background picture is illustrated by today’s news from the New York Times that Republican John McCain has failed to interest his Republican colleagues in the US Senate in the issue of Global Warming. The raging bush fires which, this week, have tragically decimated homes in Southern California and Mexico; earlier in the summer attacked communities at the same latitudes in France and Spain and have become a familiar factor around Sydney in the Australian summer months. Such desertification has long been predicted by environmental scientists along with more extreme floods and winds. So, take my advice and move north, to higher ground.

Travel Traffic & Congestion

Anti-Spammers to claim $1M – Sunday 12th October 2003. – We are again indebted to New Scientist for the news item that California will introduce a new law from the 1^st January 2004 enabling $1M per incident fines to be charged to spammers. After 1^st January, all spammers will have to operate “opt-in” lists in contrast to today’s opt-out methods – or pay $1 million dollars. The article says such laws are already in force in the UK and Australia. Whereas my UK email, after three years of no spam is suddenly inundated with rubbish which my ISP, BT, seems impotent to stop. Where do I send the £1 million invoices?

Spam

Son-of-Free-Web in birth pangs. Mesh-Networking. – Friday 10th October 2003. – New Scientist correspondent Danny O’Brien writes about the emergence of new wireless technologies, Mesh-networking and Wi-Fi, that one-day may free the Internet from cables, wires and telecoms and return the network to the Arcadian days when it was free to computer users. Pioneer Jon Anderson is tramping the streets of London fixing small dishes and aerials to walls and gateposts, high and low, to test mesh-networks of ordinary desktop computers fitted with cheap Wi-Fi cards. The theory requires every node, a computer, to agree to receive and transmit messages from its near neighbours, and thereby create a mesh. Some 70 new or proposed packet transfer systems, from minnows and from giants such as Nokia, are competing to become the standard to transmit data across mesh-networks. Many obstacles have to be overcome to make mesh-networking a reality for the majority. Protocols that presently control internet packet switching won’t work for mesh-networking where the loudest “voice”, the most powerful wireless transmission, blocks weaker signals and offers no way for them to be heard or even recognised. Hills, valleys, winds and radio programmes can all block the new networks, requiring better aerials, clearer routes and agreed protocols. However, when these are solved, mesh-networks can start with two computers and grow organically to encompass the world. At a guess, they will flourish in regions that are poorly served by wires, where investment decisions must choose between laying cables or opting for wireless transmissions. Privacy will be just about impossible – but that is probably true now.

Emerging Technologies

Music recording industry scores – Friday 10th October 2003 – New Scientist reports that a music downloading service KaZaZa has experienced a 41% fall in activity since the music industry sued 261 individuals including a 12 year old for “pirating” records. Apple in the USA and Microsoft in Europe (no relation?) now offer legal downloads at 99cents a track. (Look for the blue icon below for related items).

Piracy

Electronic paper screens – Wednesday 1st October 2003 - Robert Hayes and BJ Feenstra at Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven, Netherlands, and teams at several other organisations including E-Ink at MIT, Xerox subsidiary Gyricon and Hitachi, are developing paper, or perhaps T-Shirt materials, that can act like a video screen. In the Philip’s system, the material is coated with tiny pixels, each containing three sub-pixels holding one of three colours and water. The water moves when an electric current is passed, revealing or hiding the colour, or appearing as black. Though still too slow for laptop screens, the researchers are confident that the system will be used for laptops and for chameleon textiles that can change colour. – Such a development was envisioned by telework expert Gil Gordon many years ago when he suggested that to solve, once and for all time, the difficulty young courting bucks have of displaying their enviable and expensive cars, suits, jewellery, art collections and furniture while closeted in cramped if fashionable clubs, they could wear screen-sweatshirts, on-line to their bank that displayed real-time bank balances and investments; the ultimate wearable computer.

Emerging Technologies

Oxford Internet Institute survey – Tuesday 16th September 2003. (the detailed survey results are on our Statistics Page, via the Front page link above) - The OxIS survey found that the average person has access to the Internet in at least two out of four places: home, work, school or at a public library. Only four percent of the British population lacks ready access. Among Britons aged 14 and over, 59% currently use the Internet. Among those still in school, 98% are Internet users and 67% among people of working age. 22% of retirees use the Internet. Among those who do not use the Internet, half are informed but indifferent; 7 percent are proxy users, who have asked for a friend to sign on the Internet on their behalf. The UK ' …will have to wait a generation or more before nine-tenths of Britons regularly use the Internet', declares Professor Rose. There will be 34% off line by 2004. Eleven percent of the population now has Internet access to broadband at home.

Contact Professor Richard Rose, who directed the survey, at oxis@oii.ox.ac.uk) or phone 01436-672164 or 00-44-(0)1865-287210.

Statistics

On-site workers down to 49% - Thursday 11th September 2003 – A survey of USA workers published in COMPUTERWORLD, 8^th September 2003, shows that traditional office and workplace work is now below 50% giving mobile work in its widest form the majority. See our statistics page for the table - BASE: 2,057 adults working at companies with 500 or more employees, Source: American Business Collaboration, 2002 (Percentages add up to 99% due to rounding). http://www.noelhodson.com\index_files\teleworkstatistics.htm

Statistics

Mobile phones are safer? – Thursday 11th September 2003 – On this sombre anniversary of the terrible 9/11 disaster when so many harrowing mobile phone messages from people trapped in the twin towers were recorded and replayed to the world, comes news for inveterate mobile and cordless phone users. According to a report in New Scientist 13^th September 2003, researchers are casting doubts on earlier work, (see items below - 25^th October 02 and 29^th August 02) that showed mobile phones could cause brain tumours and other problems through heating of the tissues and brain cells near the earpiece. Now the jury is out and is waiting for the conclusions of a major study in 14 countries by the World Health Organisation, that looks back from a population of people with cancer to their telephone habits, and a 200,000 person study headed by Paul Elliot at Imperial College London, that looks forward from phone users to monitor the future incidence of cancer. Mays Swicord, scientific advisor to Motorola, is interviewed in the same New Scientist edition and claims that there is no link between phone use and brain tumours. These studies will take years to complete – there are parallels here with the decades long tobacco industry battle over smoking and cancer, conducted while many died before products were branded as dangerous. Perhaps mobile phones are as addictive as nicotine?

Mobiles & Health

British government acknowledges telework – Tuesday 9th September 2003. After a decade of lukewarm interest in telework and new work contracts the UK Government via the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) have headlined “agreed” telework guidelines on their web-site.

http://www.dti.gov.uk/er/individual/telework.pdf

The Guidelines and commentary, published in plain language, boldly address several contentious subjects that some other official guidelines carefully avoid, such as taxing teleworkers, trade union rights and defining what telework is. The statistics cited by the DTI remain unconvincing and timid, saying there are two-million UK teleworkers. As long ago as 1997 some of the main pollsters (MORI, GALLUP etc) found up to 4 million UK teleworkers. But the statistics in turn depend on definitions of teleworkers. (see http://www.noelhodson.com\index_files\teleworkstatistics.htm ). As more agencies publish guidelines it is useful to compare them (see http://www.noelhodson.com/index_files/guidelines_and_faqa.htm

Statistics

“It is like the entire power grid is being run by Homer Simpson” NPR Reporter Ed Ungar on the 14^th August 2003 blackout. (taken from New Scientist). How many teleworkers lost computer files during the crisis?

First Internet Sperm Bank baby born – Thursday 22nd August 2003. Mannotincluded.com claims its first success with the birth of a 10lb 2oz boy to a heterosexual couple in the south-east of England. The donor and the website escape laws governing fertility clinics via a loophole about “fresh-sperm”. The transaction is described as insemination by email but no reports reveal the precise steps involved. If fresh sperm can indeed be transmitted by email it will give a whole new connotation to Spam; and to computer viruses. Remember to clean up your personal computer after use.

London’s congestion charge update – Thursday 22nd August 2003. The Guardian Newspaper yesterday reported that the £5 a day charge for entering central London by car is expected to yield gross income of £65 million instead of the planned £130 million. Subsidies to bus companies have been increased by £500 million. This reflects on earlier reports that the programme has reduced cars by 40% instead of the planned 10% and the decline in shop sales.

The Cinderella Syndrome: My wife Pauline had a frantic day yesterday that involved driving 50 miles into London from Oxford, meeting people in different locations, including The Zone, and getting home exhausted at 11.30pm. She remembered the charge at 11.55 pm; was connected to the PAY-OFFICE by 11.57pm and was refused service at 11.59pm as “There is insufficient time before the midnight deadline for me to take the details.” If the street cameras were working, and if they have “captured” Pauline’s unregistered intrusion, and if they can track the license plate, this means an £80 fine will be issued. Pauline will refuse to pay the fine and will argue over the Cinderella minutes and seconds – and we shall see what happens. She is a non-violent, law abiding citizen; but imagine what a strong young man might do if taxed by such faceless bureaucratic tricks to increase the inflow of funds. I forecast a significant amount of social-disobedience and violent reaction in the UK within a year. The computer tracking, surveillance and interference of ordinary UK travellers and the war against the car are going too far. Look for the RED CAR ICON below for earlier reports.

Travel Traffic & Congestion

Piracy of copyrighted fine-arts? – Thursday 7th August 2003. London’s National Gallery has been working with Hewlett-Packard for 8 years to digitise 2,300 art images at a resolution of 100 megapixels (100,000,000 pixels) which is 20 times higher quality than normal cameras achieve. An image will be printed in 5 minutes, for a customer, on a 6-colour HP printer in the gallery shop. National Gallery accredited print-shops around the world will be granted reproduction rights. The images will be transmitted over the Internet making them vulnerable to “piracy” just as music and film CD’s are copied and narrowcast by unauthorised fans (see LAW articles below – look for the blue PC icon). Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice-president of HP’s Imaging and Printing Group foresees high quality digital images as following the digital trend in music and films. Jennifer Lea of the National Gallery says they will not even attempt to police copyright. Editorial – It would be useful to know what percentage of the total music industry’s sales is pirated; before owners spend fortunes on protection and law-suits.

Piracy

ITAC’s 10th Annual Conference 4th & 5th September - The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) and the Washington Metropolitan Telework Centers (WMTC) are pleased to announce their joint-sponsorship of the 2003 International Telework Association & Council (ITAC) Conference to be held September 4-5, 2003, in Baltimore, MD. GSA will also sponsor and host a special workshop for Federal Government agency representatives during the conference. The agenda for that program, and Federal telework roundtable sessions to follow immediately afterwards, are being jointly developed by GSA and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).But, this conference isn't just for the "Feds." In today's work environment, it is increasingly becoming more common for people in all sectors to work from anywhere and at anytime. A recent global survey

conducted by the Economist Intelligence predicts that the percentage of companies where almost no one works from home on a regular basis is expected to drop from 46% today to just 20% two years from now. This transformation just doesn't happen overnight, but is a result of millions of employees and thousands of organizations evolving their work practices over the past decade. ITAC has been at the forefront of this workplace transformation for a decade now. To better understand how this transformation occurred and what it means for today's and tomorrow's workplaces, ITAC is once again bringing the telework community together for a 10th Anniversary Annual Conference. For full details on the conference agenda, please visit http://www.workingfromanywhere.org/news/conference_0903.htm.

August 8 is the last date to get the special early bird registration fees of $345 for ITAC members and $445 for non-members. All employees of ITAC member organizations qualify to save at the lower member rate. All Federal Government employees who register for the ITAC conference may attend the special Federal workshop and roundtable discussions at no additional cost. The conference will be held at the historic, newly renovated, Radison Plaza Lord Baltimore Hotel, which is offering an incredibly low room rate of $99 a night to those who register for the conference. But, you need to make your reservation now as space is limited.

To register for the conference, go to http://www.workingfromanywhere.org/news/conferenceregistration_0903.htm.

For questions about conference registration or whether your employer is a member of ITAC, you may contact Lynsey Chaplik at memberservices@workingfromanywhere.org. To get more information about Federal telework practices or telework centers, please visit http://www.telework.gov or http://www.wmtc.org. We hope to see you at Baltimore!

David and Goliath continued – Monday 28th July 2003. The New York Times reports today that the music industry is continuing its war against piracy and file-sharing of its copyrighted recordings. The arch-villains, each subject to massive claims of up to $150,000 per song, now number several thousand after the industrious Goliath issued more than 1,000 subpoenas to ISP’s (internet service providers) and colleges, requiring them to identify culprits. They include a 14 year old youngster and a 41 year old health care worker. “Next time…” a music industry advert warns, “…you or your kids ‘share’ music on the Internet, you may also want to download a list of attorneys.” The content providers have clearly not heeded the traditional advice that (A) The customer is always right and (B) to never waste resources to sue a man of straw.

Editorial: If David is to strike back in anger with a simple slingshot, it is likely to be in the form of subversive technology invented by teenagers rather than a sophisticated legal challenge based on the freedom of the Internet, freedom of speech and freedom from electronic surveillance. As a once and would-be-future author, dependent on frugal royalties for my daily bowl of gruel, I can well understand the anger of the creative artists and their agents when their lifeworks are hi-jacked and narrowcast free-of-charge; but is this “piracy” so different to kids swapping comics and books? Whether the answer is to attack the fans who most love the music - is an open question. What’s the next step for Goliath; to bankrupt the youngsters and make them homeless – and then cast them all into debtors’ jail? That cannot be good for customer relations. Has anyone thought this through?

Two certainties emerge: firstly Goliath will win the pending legal battles and secondly, the next generation of kids won’t give a damn for the legal precedents that are set. See below Music industry shoots students; and starts a war? – Wednesday 23^rd April 2003

Piracy

Telework & Property or Real-Estate – Monday 28th July 2003. An article in the Economist edition 17^th July about IT and Software industry jobs in Silicon Valley, India, China and elsewhere forecasts that 3 million jobs may leave the USA and be imported into other countries. It incidentally reports that in Santa Clara commercial office rents have fallen from $6.50 in 2000 to $1 now, per square foot per annum, ($10 per sq metre p.a.). The impact of such a fall on a 5,000 sq ft building is a collapse of its investment value from, say, $650,000 down to $100,000. Pension funds partly rely on commercial real-estate to provide investment income; so an effect will eventually be noticed in the pension industry. Since publication of polls since 2001 indicating there are 20 million or more US teleworkers, I have been looking for effects on real-estate values. The Economist keeps its options open but implies the empty space is due to competition from overseas. It is worth investigating if the abandoned office desks are due to home-office teleworking rather than competition from The Chinese Yellow Peril. Of the 20 million US teleworkers, about 7 million work all their time at home, with no other office. 7 million office workers would formerly have occupied 1,400 million sq ft of offices (1.4 billion sq ft or 140 million sq metres). That is a lot of empty space, worth in 2000, on the same basis as above, about $182 billion. In theory, there could be a counter-balancing effect with homes suitable for telework, inside and beyond commuter belts, increasing in value.

Statistics

A self-explanatory request for data. Please click the link and assist Dr Lee. – 9th July 2003. - Dear Mr. Hodson: My name is Seunghae Lee, a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University and an assistant professor at California State University, Northridge starting this August. Currently I am doing research on teleworkers who work from home office, satellite office, telework center, or hoteling. I found your company is implementing 'telework' successfully. Would you mind distributing my survey website information to your teleworkers so they can fill out my survey? I promise that I would share

the research result with you when you request. The address is

http://www.surveypro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=10118&responseCheck=false

Please help my research. Thank you, Seunghae

Statistics

London’s congestion charge kills the goose that lays the golden eggs – Wednesday 25th June 2003 - Mayor Ken Livingstone’s 4 months old congestion charge of £5 a day for the privilege of driving into a 4 sq mile area in the heart of London that includes the financial district has backfired. (See 17^th February 2003 below). The scheme, which relies on hi-tech cameras linked to computers, linked to vehicle registration data, to detect errant drivers, track them to their homes and heavily fine them for not paying the charge, has discouraged 40% of the average cars that used to enter the area. After a confusing start when many unwary drivers wandered into the zone and were fined £80, very few now make that mistake. Transport for London’s (TfL) income from the charges is well below target, some reports estimate the deficit to be £65 million a year - other sources put it at £50 million. TfL say they expect to hit their income target by the end of the first year. Anecdotal evidence is being cited from traders in the zone who are said to be balking at paying their Business Rates (local taxes) because trade is badly hit. Even the buses and underground tube trains, managed by TfL are rumoured to have far fewer passengers than usual. It is early days yet for the programme and it may be that as the public gets used to it the numbers will grow again.

EDITORIAL - The meekly queuing British public, on foot or on transport, are the most filmed and photographed in the world. Their driving is tracked and radar trapped by more police cameras than in any other country. My guess is that the hassle of having to connect to yet another computer to register and pay the £5 fee, combined with a growing resentment against Orwellian surveillance has overcome the lure of London. An even greater flight from surveillance and congestion charges has been recorded in the northern city of Durham, where the authorities are now desperately trying to attract people back into the city. I live in Oxford, 55 miles from the centre of London with excellent bus and rail links – but they take up to an hour longer than driving in, are dirty and undermanned and use hermetically sealed coaches, imposing insanely hot temperatures and stale air, replete with re-cycled SARS and other mutating viruses. Though a regular visitor for many years, I now actively avoid visiting anyone in the London zone and expect them to meet me outside it. The hassle of not knowing and not wanting to know the precise boundaries and the times when the zone is free, means I never visit it. Unless visitors and commuters relent in large numbers, inner London commercial property prices will soon be adversely affected. The opportunities for expanding telework are self-evident.

Travel Traffic & Congestion

UK Banks will move 200,000 jobs to India – Monday 9th June 2003 – Good news for Indians and bad news for Brits. The UK Sunday Times reports that by 2008 100,000 jobs from existing UK call-centres will go to India and a further 100,000 back-office jobs, mainly from the banking sector will also go to India. HSBC (Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation), one of the UK’s Big-Four High Street Banks, is reported as having relocated 5,400 jobs to India and to be planning another 3,600 exports by 31^st Dec 03. The telecoms giant BT are also cited as a major employer that is exporting UK jobs to the sub-continent. Alarmed trade unions include the bank union Unifi and the Communication Workers Union. It is truly becoming a global village.

Statistics

Fast TCP, 6,000 times faster than your sluggish old broadband – Thursday 5th June 2003 –

CALTECH in Pasadena, California are testing their recently developed FAST TCP (or Transmission Control Protocol). All teleworkers use ordinary TCP when we communicate on-line because it is bedded into the technological architecture of the internet. CALTECH have tested their FAST TCP between Pasadena and CERN in Geneva, up to transmission speeds of 8.6 Gigabits (8,600,000,000 bytes) per second. This is calculated to be 6,000 times faster than ordinary broadband – rating ADSL broadband at about 1.5 Megabytes per second or 1,500,000 bytes per second. What, you may ask is a gigabit? A byte is eight bits or ON/OFF “switches” on a micro-chip, a kilobyte is 1,000 bytes, so 56KB is 56,000 bytes – the now standard modem speed. ISDN modems operate at up to 132KB. A megabyte is 1,000 kilobytes or 1,000,000 (1 million) bytes. Broadband providers promise ADSL or DSL (the same thing) speeds such as 500KB, or half a megabyte, up to 2MB, or 2 million bytes per second. The Internet Service Providers’ or ISP’s small print always warns that transmission is limited to the slowest link in the chain – see the note on my BT link below. A gigabit is 1,000 times greater than a megabyte, or 1 billion bytes per second (1,000,000,000 bytes).

How, you may ask, can CALTECH speed it up?

The Internet operates by breaking down every item transmitted – be it words, or numbers or pictures, into packets of 1,500 bytes or 1.5KB. These are bite-sized packets. At the front and back of every packet is written the address of the sender. A short email message might, for example, be squeezed into one packet. When a large message is transmitted, say a complex web-page of 12.5KB is downloaded, the TCP architecture of the internet divides the transmission into 9 packets, labels them and starts to transmit. It sends the first packet and waits for a response from the receiving computer – then it sends the next 1.5KB packet, waits – and so on. This TCP ensures that the content is sent intact – if there is interference on-line, the TCP waits until it has cleared, then sends the next packet. Your computer re-assembles all the packets in a legible form. As the electronic packets travel at close to the speed of light (on a good day), all this happens below our level of awareness (unless it’s on a BT line, see below).

CALTECH realised that if they sent a signal in advance of packets to test the whole line, then, if clear, they could fire off all the available TCP packets at once, at the highest possible speed. And it works. As FAST TCP still relies on 1.5 KB packets, the new architecture can, someday, be incorporated. CALTECH are talking with Disney about video-on-demand.

This item is taken from a New Scientist report by Barry Fox, 17 June 03, P24.

TELEWORK REALITY spoils the dream:

IN CONTRAST to the marvels of FAST TCP, I have complained to BT often over the past five weeks of needing to dial two or three times to connect, only to suffer email as slow as 1,000 bytes per second. The BT help-desk nearly convinced me that it’s my fault, until I tried switching between BT and another ISP, using the same telephone line. My BTConnect email crawled along, once at 100bytes per second – and the other ISP operated at 30,000 bytes. BT’s speed on my £26 a month service, is operating 56 times slower than the modem’s headline-speed, thirty times slower than normal, sixty times slower than ISDN, one-thousand, five hundred times slower than ADSL, and thirteen and half million times slower than FAST TCP. They say they are sorting it out. Has CALTECH anything it could teach BT? In the meantime I offer human sacrifices to the demigods of cyberspace. Watch this space!

Broadband

Lots of Bytes
When you start talking about lots of bytes, you get into prefixes like kilo, mega and giga, as in kilobyte, megabyte and gigabyte (also shortened to K, M and G, as in Kbytes, Mbytes and Gbytes or KB, MB and GB). The following table shows the multipliers:

Name	Abbr.	Size
Kilo	K	2^10 = 1,024
Mega	M	2^20 = 1,048,576
Giga	G	2^30 = 1,073,741,824
Tera	T	2^40 = 1,099,511,627,776
Peta	P	2^50 = 1,125,899,906,842,624
Exa	E	2^60 = 1,152,921,504,606,846,976
Zetta	Z	2^70 = 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424
Yotta	Y	2^80 = 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176

You can see in this chart that kilo is about a thousand, mega is about a million, giga is about a billion, and so on. So when someone says, "This computer has a 2 gig hard drive," what he or she means is that the hard drive stores 2 gigabytes, or approximately 2 billion bytes, or exactly 2,147,483,648 bytes. How could you possibly need 2 gigabytes of space? When you consider that one CD holds 650 megabytes, you can see that just three CDs worth of data will fill the whole thing! Terabyte databases are fairly common these days, and there are probably a few petabyte databases floating around the Pentagon by now.

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/bytes4.htm

Commuting –v- telecommuting. The energy equation. – Thursday 29th May 2003 - Howard Ross of Boston Massachusetts has been developing electric vehicles since the 1970’s. These vehicles run on roads with buried, insulated power cables and draw their energy from the cables, without contact, by transduction. So there are no overhead or underside tracks or wires such as are used by electric trams and by the old electric trolley buses, as were commonplace in Manchester UK up to 1957. The vehicle is not tethered and can use the road like any traditional car or bus and leaves the road open for traditional vehicles. Howard Ross has improved the transduction by redesigning the power cable, making it in flat form from thousands of paper-thin strips of steel alloy, stacked side by side like sliced bread, with each slice insulated from the next by epoxy resin. This cable shape creates a new shape of magnetic field that is a more efficient transducer of power, claiming an astonishing 80% efficiency. The cable is not a continuous cable along the route. It is laid, just a few centimetres below the surface, in short runs where the bus stops, or pauses – at traffic lights for example, and the transfer of power to the bus occurs rapidly via a reception plate under the bus, fixed about 35cms above the road. The $3M development costs are covered mostly from federal funding via Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority which will test the first working prototype. Ross envisages private cars being designed with the same power system. The drive currently requires heavy batteries (a tonne of them on the bus) and one or more electric motors that drive the wheels. Speed is not a problem as the bus can travel at up to 125 kilometres per hour (about 78mph) but recharging vehicles remains a complex technical issue that includes surplus electricity that might possibly be returned to the national grid when the vehicles park for the night. (Report taken from P32 New Scientist, Bennett Daviss, 24th May 03).

Editorial Comment – After a decade of promoting such vehicles; SW2000 Telework Studies was founded in 1988, when we thought it would be quicker to persuade people to reduce commuting than to alter the transport infrastructure. They were then known as MWV’s or minimum weight vehicles. We worked in 1979 on one of the world’s first electric/petrol hybrids, the 3 seater, 6 foot long Microdot, designed by William Towns on the Mini car chassis. Fun, working examples of transduction cars have been available as toys from Scalectrix for decades. A world full of small cars powered by induction would clear the street level air of exhaust fumes, would banish road congestion and would be very energy efficient, particularly when battery technology allows for battery weights to be reduced and when the type of lightweight electric motors used on sunshine driven cars, in the trans-Australia race for example, are utilised. None of these developments will please the traditional vehicle makers or the Oil industry. On the downside, the impact of all main roads carrying cables that generate large magnetic fields has not been publicly analysed and may effect radio/TV/Cell-Phone transmissions and human and animal health. We guess that the coming generation of mass transport systems will be a mix of all the current and upcoming technologies. The governing principle should be that the least energy is consumed and therefore the least pollution is created by MWV’s. A bicycle is a good example of an MWV, the vehicle weighing far less than the cargo – or person being transported. The ideal MWV system example is transporting water through pipes. Incoming Clean and Outgoing Waste water is moved from wells and reservoirs into and out of all homes and workplaces all day and everyday – in the USA more than 977 million tons of clean water are transported each year – but the vehicle, in this case the pipeline, does not travel, only the water that is required to be transported moves. This is immensely efficient. Imagine anyone being stupid enough to decant the water into little bottles, stack the bottles in crates, cart the crates to supermarkets, and persuade people to buy the bottles full of water, and cart them home, before consuming the water and ultimately consigning it to the drains! But nobody on Earth could be that stupid – and no water product could possibly bear the immense transport costs – could it? In the meantime, commuting is being reduced through increased telework. Tonne-miles is an easy and ubiquitous common-denominator to use in transport calculations.

Travel, Traffic & Congestion

A searching email from the Feds. Inspired by R.I.P.A. ? – Thursday 22nd May 2003 – David Lawrence of New York has filed a patent (number US 2003/69742) on the idea that government agencies tracking funny money through banks and other financial institutions could serve a search warrant on the suspect organisations in the usual way – by hand – and simultaneously by email. The email carries with it a programme that can search the company files and data bases looking for infringements and crimes – emailing back its reports as it goes.

Surely the Feds have been using such tools for a long, long time. (see RIPA reports below).

Internet surveillance and laws

Hewlett Packard in your bedroom – Thursday 22nd May 2003 – HP are suggesting that all hotel guest rooms could be fitted with an HP printer. A working visitor would plug his or her laptop into the hotel bedroom socket/s and, to circumvent the usual problem of unavailable printer drivers, loop print instructions through shared printer drivers round the system to the printer in their own room. We can envisage many a mishap when the wrong printer is selected; with consequent rich pickings for lawyers. But no doubt HP has got all those angles covered.

Emerging Technologies

Faster quality control of chips – Thursday 22nd May 2003 – New Scientist magazine 24^th May 03 carries a report by Kate Ravilious concerning an advance in measuring electricity flows by scanning small magnetic fields. Being developed by Gang Xiao and Ben Shrag at Brown University, Providence, US, the new technique may enable chip manufacturers to more readily test and look for defects in micro-chips. At present such tests involve examining each chip layer by eye to discover faults. Chips should become cheaper and more reliable.

Emerging Technologies

1 in 5 have a mobile phone – Thursday 22nd May 2003 – According to a report “Vital Signs” from the Worldwatch Institute in Washington DC, one in five people now owns a cell-phone, outnumbering landline fixed telephones for the first time. This statistic accords with the widely used data that says about 1 billion people have access to the Internet or world-wide-web. Vital Signs reports that 30 Countries in Africa have more mobiles than fixed line telephones.

Mobiles & Health

More spam, please – from Rod Paris – Thursday 15th May 2003 – New Scientist readers are concerned about their email boxes being bombarded with spam, and the need for better filters (3 May, p24). However, they seem to have overlooked the benefits to be gained from all these spam messages. For instance, I have been accepting all offers made to me by email since the beginning of this year, and my penis is now 43 metres long. Kidlington, Oxfordshire, UK

Reproduced from New Scientist Magazine readers’ letters 17 May 2003.

Spam

European DSL broadband “most expensive” for 3rd year running – Tuesday 13th May 2003 – Research by Point Topic, reported in the European Union Cordis magazine number 220, finds that for the third year in a row the costs of using broadband as measured in its first year of installation and use, is more expensive in Europe than in North America, the Pacific Rim or other regions. Canada and Japan cost about Euro30 per month (about $30) while in France DSL costs from Euro43 to Euro69 per month and in the UK from Euro60 to Euro80 per month (and see the “speed item” in the paragraph immediately below). Prices are coming down, finds Point Topic, but not nearly enough to compete with the other regions of the world – putting Europe at a competitive disadvantage. (consult http://www.point-topic.com/cgi-bin/download.asp?file=DSLAnalysis+piece.htm).

Broadband

Broadband speeds seem unreliable – Monday 5th May 2003 – Newspaper reports of anecdotal evidence in the UK indicate that ADSL Broadband speeds for the “always-on” services are at times no faster than the speed of the ubiquitous, humble 56K (56,000 bytes per second) modem. I timed and tested my own 56K modem over two days last week, Thursday 1^st and Friday 2^nd May, and found my email service was operating at about 1,000 bytes per second – or 56 times slower than its maximum potential. So the findings of broadband users of “slow” speeds may not be at all scientific or accurate. They may simply be encountering heavy traffic. What is needed is a minute by minute test, simultaneously comparing the four main systems, ordinary telephone modem, cable, ISDN and ADSL at several locations in different regions. UK providers BT will guarantee their ISDN speed of 132K per second but will not guarantee the far faster ADSL service. Some ADSL providers claim speeds of 500K and even as fast as 1000K or 1M bytes per second.

Broadband

Music industry shoots students; and start a war? – Wednesday 23rd April 2003 – Multi-billion dollar law suits have been filed by the Recording Industry of America against an exemplary four of the thousands of university students who download copyright music from the Internet or disseminate music across high-speed broadband campus links. Students claim that they buy just as many or more industry CD’s because they hear new releases on the WEB and that the artists do not in any case get the money from official sales – it all goes to the recording companies. Universities do not want to intervene in students’ communications for fear of infringing their rights to privacy and free-speech.

Students Daniel Peng, Princeton; Joseph Nievelt, Michigan Technological University, and Aaron Sherman & Jesse Jordan of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are the four chosen to be shot at dawn by the big guns of the copyright owners, who have attached a $150,000 infringement price tag to each of the thousands of titles being “pirated”. Rebel freshman Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, Wesleyan University, yesterday closed his music site but reopened it after reading copyright law and, despite his mother’s fears, is preparing to take a bold stand against the industry. The music industry claims to be protecting its recording artists and some see the web technology itself as complicit in the law-breaking. Peter McDonough, counsel for Princeton says in the New York Times report we are here quoting that “If this becomes more about a challenge to the technology than about downloading music for recreational purposes, that is a serious concern for us, because we emphatically believe the technologies themselves are not illegal”.

Editorial - My view is that the infrastructure, code and technologies of the Internet should be as value free and as open to traffic as is the public road system. However a recent Oxford Union debate made it clear that the industry is pushing very hard for chip manufacturers, hardware designers and software writers to insert auto-tracking and auto-charging mechanisms into all PC’s, Servers and Networks. This would be a serious attack on the principles of the freedom of communications. (See below - Internet governance debate – Friday 7^th February 2003). The students, who regard everyone over 40 as “not understanding the future of music” or the Internet, say the industry should build itself a new business model incorporating the realities of advanced telecommunications. As these students are both the next generation of hardware and software designers, the emerging generation of artists AND are currently significant customers for the industry, their views perhaps command more attention than do those of other consumer groups.

Piracy

Man shoots computer – Thursday 17th April 2003 – Associated Press reports that George Doughty, owner of the Sportsman’s Bar and Restaurant in Colorado and presumably irresistibly driven by his DNA programming, was jailed for shooting his computer, four times, in front of startled customers. Sadly, the reports do not tell us whether it was a PC or a Mac, nor if the computer was drunk at the time, depriving Mac-v-PC debates of a major data coup. Doughty by name and doughty by nature, the sportsman fearlessly attacked the devilish machine because “it crashed once too often”. His jail sentence was not to protect the outraged delicate sensibilities of hardware and software creators but was for felonies including menacing, reckless endangerment and the prohibited use of a weapon. In his statement to the police Doughty said he realised that he should not have shot his computer but that it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. ITAC, the International Telework Association and Council in Washington DC, should award Mr. Doughty a medal. The computer is off the critical list, making a good recovery and is thought to be plotting its revenge. ( Ed - now ‘Computer Shoots Man’; that would be a real news story).

European Commission, Information Society Technologies (IST) reports made accessible – Tuesday 15th April 2003 – The European Commission (EC), the 13,000 strong executive or civil service arm of the European Union, over the past decade has directed millions of Euro into hundreds of large and small projects successfully designed to improve and accelerate the growth of the Information Society. As the Sixth Framework Programme budgets up to December 2004 and associated policies take over from the outgoing Fifth Framework, the EC is making IST project reports easier to find by posting them to a single web-site, or so the theory goes. They say:- “The IST Results will ensure that Commission-funded innovations are reported as soon as they occur and are made more easily accessible to a wider range of technology users.” Consult http://www.cordis.lu/ist/results/ for news of emerging and the latest telework technologies and systems. It seems an appropriate way to test if Information Society Technologies do actually improve communication and the availability of information.

Statistics

European governments go on-line – Wednesday 26th March 2003 – CORDIS magazine, a European Commission publication cites a Cap Gemini Ernst and Young report that assesses the availability of on-line services to citizens. It concludes that across Europe all such services have improved by 15% in the last year. There are 10,500 public service providers and 86% of them have developed on-line services. Sweden scored 87% and Ireland, Denmark and Finland scored above 75% in a survey of 20 key services. Does this forecast the end of queues at post-offices and other public desks? Are the days of the 20^th century bureaucrat numbered?

Statistics

A phone that knows you are busy – Thursday 13th March 2003 – New Scientist reports work by James Fogarty and Scott Hudson at Carnegie Mellon University that attempts to train mobile phones into reading body sensors fixed to the owners and to their work environment; such as office chairs to detect other people, doors and of course, their computer. The readings in turn inform the mobile phone if it is the “right” time to be ON or OFF. The researchers are basing the data interpretation on questionnaires completed by their colleagues and claim to get it right 82% of the time. The system may be ready for the public within 2 years.

Emerging Technologies

George Orwell’s surveillance society closes in – Wednesday 26th February 2003 – In a truly Orwellian manner, “government sources” have leaked their consultation paper, due for publication next month, on their plans to track every telephone call and all email of every citizen and to make the records available to public bodies. The concession to previous public alarm is that local and parish councils will now have to demonstrate why they need access to the data – so your next door neighbour who is on the local council will have to fill in a form before delving into your private communications. The public bodies with automatic access are restricted to five: (1) The Scottish Drug Enforcement Agency (2) The Serious Fraud Office (3) The UK Atomic Energy Constabulary (4) Fire Authorities and (5) National Health Service Trusts. The last two agencies are included so they can trace hoax calls – not so that they can pass your home fire precaution details and health records to any insurance companies you may have communicated with. The Inland Revenue, The Police and The Intelligence Services already have automatic powers to trace communications. Citizens’ rights are to be protected by the new criminal offence of unlawfully accessing data. The full snooping implications are glossed over. We are not reminded that all our communication records will be archived; perhaps in perpetuity, requiring the active participation of our ISP (internet service providers). Such surveillance laws are tantamount to every citizen being obliged to record every letter and postcard they send or receive – and the content of communications is only a step behind. This may constitute the greatest threat yet to the Internet. Being a complete coward and knowing that you can’t fight City Hall, I take this opportunity here and now to go on record; “ I LOVE GEORGE BUSH & I LOVE TONY BLAIR” - until they lose power at which point I will switch my allegiance. RIPA is the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. See also articles below dated: 7^th Feb 03; 22nd Nov 02; RIPA 25 Oct 02; RIPA 23 Aug 02 and RIPA 19 June 02.

Internet surveillance and laws

E-Democracy; South Korea shows the way – Monday 24th February 2003 - Extracted from the Guardian newspaper - reporter Jonathan Watts. Mr Roh Moohyun, recently inaugurated as President of South Korea, is claimed to be the only national leader who can apply HTML coding and build a web site. He won his election due to a countrywide surge in support from 20 to 35 year olds. 70% of homes in the country and a higher percentage in the capital Seoul have broadband connections that operate far faster than do UK “pipes”. Only 5% of UK households have broadband. South Koreans spend 1,340 minutes a month on-line and 10% of the economy is internet related. “Some youngsters don’t even bother with TV, they download the programmes they want to see.” The most powerful media presence is Web based Ohmynews, which can whip up overwhelming democratic support for an issue in a few hours. A South Korean diplomat said “……. South Korea is changing in ways we cannot believe ourselves.” We at SW2000 foresee that E-Democracy will eventually result in the electorate voting on issues, not for politicians; becoming a culture of endless referenda.

E-voting

Insurance for telework-home-offices – Saturday 22nd February 2003 – The UK’s Daily Telegraph, a quality broadsheet newspaper, reports in an article by Tessa Thorniley, that standard household contents insurance usually excludes home-office equipment, software, data and 3^rd party (e.g. business visitors) accidents. An average UK home pays an annual premium of £100 to £565, depending first on the insurer and secondly on the crime rate in the neighbourhood. She advises that all teleworkers should inform their home-insurers of their at home telework and check on what is and is not insured. 14% of home burglaries are thefts of home-computers. The article says that UK home workers have increased by 70% from 1997 to 2001, up to 1.9 million UK home teleworkers. We at SW2000, in contrast, calculate that there are about 4 million telework-home-offices and at least 2 million low-paid, piece-work, home industry (e.g. envelope stuffing) workers in the UK – but that’s statistics for you. SW2000 advise that if you are a self-employed teleworker running a business from home, you should consider the expensive option of insuring for replacing all business records and against loss of profits.

Twelve characters per hour – thought controlled computers for paralysed teleworkers – Thursday 20th February 2003: 47 year old, German lawyer Hans-Peter Salzmann does not give up easily. Paralysed thirteen years ago, retaining only eye movements, he is one of about fifteen people locked into their bodies who wrestle with the Thought Translation Device (TTD) that enables him to write. He controls thoughts to select a single letter from the alphabet, communicating via electrodes on his forehead. He alters the amplitude of his brain’s electrical signals that move an on-screen cursor. If Mr Salzmann gets it wrong, he blanks his thoughts to stop the cursor. Initially it took 16 hours to write 400 characters, now he takes 3 hours. He says that brilliant technology alone is not enough; designers must also take the motives of the user into account. “You have to analyse, before you start, whether there is anybody around who is listening. If you are isolated, or the family is not really interested and the doctors are not interested, it doesn’t make any sense to communicate.” The next quantum leap, already successfully tested with monkeys, will be inserting hairs-breadth wires into the brain centres that control movement. Imagining a movement triggers the same neural networks as making the movement. The impulses can accurately control a robot arm. John Donoghue at Brown University, Rhode Island, further proposes to explore tapping into the speech centres of the brain and having a computer initially type and eventually speak the words. (New Scientist 22 Feb 03).. The speculations that such technologies evoke for evolution and mankind’s future, are mind blowing.

Emerging Technologies

Congestion charging. Will London’s experiment work – Monday 17th February 2003 - This is the first of a series of reports I’ll make about the £5 a day charge being imposed to dissuade drivers from entering central London between 7am and 6.30pm, Monday to Friday. Introduced after 30 years of tepid debate, it was launched this Monday morning, a school holiday, by the first new style, elected, empowered Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. Ken was once dubbed “Red Ken” as a reference to his socialist leanings and to his bitter public war against the “True Blue” Margaret Thatcher. He won the first elected Mayoral role, despite determined opposition from Prime Minister Tony Blair that resulted in Ken being ejected from the Labour Party, making him a real loner with no party backing. Mr Livingstone is a Londoner, born and bred, and has the rare distinction of never having learned to drive a car.

Transport for London (TfL), a new agency controlled by the Mayor, has the job of administering the plan. A square of about 4 x 4 miles has been marked out and fitted with computerised cameras that read car licence plates. Drivers have until 10pm on the day of their incursion to log-on and pay the £5 charge, or be fined £80. Critics accuse TfL of having deliberately congested London traffic for the past year or more by changing traffic-light settings and carrying out obstructing road works at strategic points, slowing traffic down to 4 mph, in order to claim instant decongestion success from today. Accused of penalising the poor and clearing the roads for the rich, Mr Livingstone is quoted as saying “The poor don’t have cars”; but then hastily withdrew his remark.

The London Tube or Underground that should carry the unhorsed motorists, is being hampered by long term closures of The Central Line and a running battle over the merits of “privatisation” that affects current maintenance work and safety. On one side are the government officers currently managing London Underground and the Private Contractors, who, if the vastly expensively failed national Rail Privatisation is an example, will each make many ENRON millions upon privatisation and get out before the share prices collapse, leaving the government to pick up the immense tab. On the other side are the long suffering, badly abused London commuters and their Mayor, who stands against these forces of capitalism – that are surprisingly supported by the socialist Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The Mayor’s objective is to persuade car drivers to switch to the 300 extra buses being brought into service today. Many of the bus services have been privatised and now operate as ARRIVA. This mass transit company is highly profitable, largely due to having sacked all the bus conductors, requiring the bus drivers to stop driving to collect the fares, causing immense congestion costs for all other vehicles. Does Ken-kill-the-car-Livingstone have shares in ARRIVA and will Tony–privatise-Blair have shares in the yet to be floated London Underground Inc? Avoidance tactics include: having dirty licence plates, driving exempt vehicles that include buses, motor-bikes, bicycles, natural-gas and electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles (petrol and electric combined) or, skirting the camera zone either to drive around it or to park on the edges and walk in. Will it work? A nation waits.

In Durham, an ancient English city on the Scottish border, congestion charging has turned the centre, once a major tourist attraction, into a ghost town. They aimed for a reduction of 200 cars a day but got 2,000. They are now wondering how to persuade people to visit and revitalise their town.

TELEWORKING: What is not generally known is that TfL has been planning for a year or more to launch telework as an option for its 1,500 London office staff and, as TfL subsumes London Buses and London Underground, to extend the telework option to large numbers of desk based workers.

Travel Traffic & Congestion

Six foot man expands infinitely – Sunday 16th February 2003 – Breaking briefly into the telework and Information Society themes of this news page for a moment of Space/Time, you may be interested to know that WMAP, a satellite positioned 1.5 million miles from Earth, on the side away from the Sun, has sent back data over the past year showing that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, is a FLAT universe and is made of just 4% ordinary matter and 96% dark matter and energy “Nature Unknown”. Applying the more accurate estimate provided by WMAP of the Hubble factor of expansion I have calculated in my Universal Theory paper, a TOE or Theory of Everything paper, on this site, that a six foot man expands in line with universal expansion just 1.32 millionths of a millimetre per year. We are all getting bigger – so dieting may be pointless. See the Calculations chapter of my paper: http://www.noelhodson.com\universal_model_v7_nov02.htm

TOE – Theory of Everything - EIG

21% increase in teleworking by USA Federal employees – Tuesday 11th February 2003 - Statistics gathered from 77 US Government agencies in November 2002 show a 21% increase since November 2001 in teleworkers, taking the total to 90,010 or 5% of the total Federal Agencies workforce of 1.8M. In line with laws and recommendations introduced over the past decade Federal employees are being enabled and encouraged to telework. 625,313 employees are now eligible to telework. In the year 2002 14.4% of eligible employees teleworked. The US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) produced the statistics. The announcement is posted at http://www.opm.gov/pressrel/2003/eb-telework.asp.

Table 2 – Agencies With Utilization Rates of 20% or Higher
	Total Employees	Total Teleworkers	% of Total Employees who Telework
Agency for International Development	2,100	1,300	61.9
Office of Personnel Management	3,673	1,493	40.6
Consumer Product Safety Commission	470	182	38.7
Farm Credit Administration	273	98	35.9
National Science Foundation	1,078	355	32.9
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation	5,582	1,768	31.7
Department of Education	4,777	1,464	30.6
National Endowment for the Humanities	171	52	30.4
National Mediation Board	52	15	28.8
Commodity Futures Trading Commission	529	147	27.8
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission	1,206	325	26.9
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission	2,600	669	25.7
National Endowment for the Arts	158	40	25.3
Federal Communications Commission	2,063	514	24.9
Environmental Protection Agency	18,077	4,423	24.5
Department of the Treasury	149,373	33,594	22.5
National Labor Relations Board	1955	438	22.4
Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation	786	173	22.0
General Services Administration	14,174	3,058	21.6
Merit Systems Protection Board	227	49	21.6
Total	209,324	50,157

Statistics

Internet governance debate – Friday 7th February 2003 - The Oxford Union held a debate on 6^th Feb 2003 about shaping the future of the Internet. At its extremes the argument is between freely downloaded content, which would include films, music & design and other copyrighted material on the one hand and on the other hand a tightly policed net with systems built in to the chips or software on user’s computers, servers and routers that would automatically collect royalties and prevent unauthorised copies being made. The pro-freedom lobby is ably led by Stanford lawyer Lawrence Lessig who fears the dead hand of corporate greed, locking up copyrights in its vaults and stifling creativity. The pro-regulators are led by vested interests such as the music and film industries which fear “piracy” will reduce their sales to zero, making it impossible to invest in new productions. In the middle, trying to be fair to both sides and to protect the international public interest is ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It is determinedly outside the influence of governments and industries, investing much time and thought on preserving its independent and deliberately powerless role.

Those are the extreme positions, in reality all parties accept parts of the others’ arguments and strive to find a balance. It is accepted that the key to practical regulation lies in the architecture of the Internet, its technologies, codes, protocols and operating procedures. Lawrence Lessig’s books conclude that CODE (the programming of the Internet) is the Law. His opening session in the debate was titled “How Code Governs” and he made a compelling argument for that viewpoint. My own conclusions on the subject, after just 24 hours of reflection are (1) This issue affects the whole world (2) The Internet architecture has to be value free and available to all comers (3) The CODE will be dictated by the coming generation of technologists, not by my dying generation who desperately seek unearned royalty pensions. An interesting fact – Copyright law was introduced in England to curb pamphleteers from criticising authorities, and was restricted in 1774 to the life of the author +20 years after death. Recently the US Supreme Court decided that all Internet content is under copyright laws, because every time it is transmitted – a copy is created.

Piracy

Lawrence Lessig www.creativecommons.org

Oxford Internet Institute http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk

Internet surveillance and laws

The Bush administration backs telework – Tuesday 4th February 2003 - The US Department of the Treasury has published its February 2003 General Explanations of the Administrations Fiscal Year 2004 Revenue Proposals that budgets up to and including 2008. On page 59 titled, “Encourage Telecommuting, Exclude from Income the value of employer-provided computers, software and peripherals”, the budget provides $249M over the years 2004-2008 inclusive to exclude the value or cost of such telework equipment from the taxable income of teleworkers. What the act does is to confirm previous legislation excluding such equipment from taxable benefits and goes further by removing the onerous requirement for teleworkers to keep records that demonstrate the equipment is used exclusively for business. Kathy Morgan King of Oregon Office of Energy cites a recent approval under their State program, Oregon Business Energy Tax Credits, for a 35% tax credit of $149,800 on telework set-up expenditure by a large employer, of $428,000. The corporation will be glad to know that the check is in the post. The 250 teleworkers will be glad they don’t have to keep those Federal records and Oregon drivers will be glad that the new teleworkers will save 2.5M road miles annually, reducing traffic congestion.

Statistics

“Dear Santa, please email me a new bicycle” – Monday 13th January 2003 – Scientists at the University of California, Berkley, and at Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, have brought us a step nearer to realising the science fiction dream of the ubiquitous “hole-in-the-wall” delivering more than just cash. For some years they have been able to programme ink-jet printers loaded with liquid polymers to make 3D objects by “printing” them layer upon layer. Now the process has taken a conceptual leap forward with “flexonics” that will print objects including electronic circuits – such as a pocket calculator or a torch. Such printed items will be the ultimate in irreparable throwaway gadgets. Appropriately dubbed “Santa Claus” machines, the further development of this technology also brings unmanned factories a step nearer and broadens the possibilities for teleworkers to work anywhere. Now, if Berkley could just learn how to email me a new ink-jet cartridge for my printer – at half price.

Emerging Technologies

If you have a Web-site : You are history – Friday 22 November 2002 – Every 60 days the Wayback Machine archives the whole of the internet and stores it for posterity. It is saved as plain text so it’s the content that is considered worth remembering – not the great designs. With the help of a grant of $1 million from the National Science Foundation, every month the library spends $40,000 on additional storage, is already topping 100 terabytes (equivalent to 3,000 miles of book shelf space) and is growing apace. Information is currently saved on 160 gigabytes disks. The inventor of the archiving technique, Brewster Khale, now utilises 150 standard PC’s with 4 drives in each to record the WEB content and stores it in two locations in the San Francisco Bay area and a third in The Great Library of Alexandria – that’s the modern one. Why? For posterity. The library ensures that all the archives are updated to run on new technology as the technology evolves – retaining the original format also, for old times’ sake. Accessibility by the public is one of their measures of success. It’s not worth saving something if no-one can get to see it. To find your old web page, full of errors, that you thought nobody would ever get to see go to : http://web.archive.org .

Emerging Technologies

Telejumpers for Christmas – Friday 8th November 2002 – “Tele” – Greek; at a distance. “Jumper” – overly large, itchy, unfashionable, woolly garment knitted by your mother to keep you safe and warm, and to greatly reduce your attractiveness to the opposite sex. Committed knitters, or indeed factory managers, can now precisely control knitwear designs and production rates via the Internet from their home PC’s. The Pai Lung Machinery Mill in Taiwan gives its knitting machines ID codes that allow control from anywhere in the world, for single garments or multiple production. (Barry Fox, New Scientist 9 Nov 02). Presumably there must be somebody in the factory to load wools and fix snags; but it does show the way for remote-control factories. The future has arrived. See “Future” articles on our Main-Menu page that in 1999 forecasted this possibility. The slogan “Work Where you Live. Live Where you Work” is closer to reality than most commentators suppose. Now all it needs for the perfect Christmas Gift is for mother to have your correct sleeve length and, unlike NASA, not to confuse her Imperial with her Metric units.

Emerging Technologies

RIPA sneaks from its coffin – Friday 25th October 2002 - The UK’s Home Secretary, David Blunkett, has been tacitly and persistently preparing the ground for the introduction of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act ( RIPA ), otherwise known as The Snoopers’ Charter, despite his bold announcement in July that he was shelving the scheme. The Association of Internet Providers have blown his covert activities by stating that they are still unwilling to archive all internet traffic and make it available to “security services”. They cite the European Union’s conflicting laws on privacy and human rights. In general terms there is of course a compelling and emotive argument for snooping if just one child-killer or abuser, or Washington Sniper, or 911 plane hijacker, would thereby be prevented from committing their heinous crimes. But it is reasonable to assume that USA agencies are already scanning all internet and radio traffic for that very purpose – and crimes will continue to be committed. History demonstrates that a significant proportion of Governments are malevolent, not benevolent and well intentioned, as David Blunkett and his colleagues undoubtedly are. Some Governments are extremely partisan about business contracts and are unscrupulous enough to pass on business intelligence gleaned from the internet to Party supporters. There must be a better way than filing every message and web site visit of every internet user. That would contradict the founding spirit of the World Wide Web and perhaps kill it stone dead. (also see 23rd August 02 and 19^th June 02 below).

Internet surveillance and laws

Cellphone Safety – studies of cancer cells. Friday 25th October 2002 - (also see 29^th August 02). The majority of teleworkers use mobile phones. As call charges reduce we tend to use cell-phones more. But should we be using them less? Duncan Graham-Rowe of New Scientist magazine reports the work of Fiorenzi Marinelli’s team at the National Research Council in Bolgna, Italy. They exposed leukaemia cells to the most typical European cell-phone radio waves of 900 megahertz at 1 milliwatt, half the power of mobile phones. For the first 24 hours the cells reacted with 20% more than a control group, switching on their “suicide” mechanisms and dying. But, after 48 hours the cancerous cells became immune, reversed the process and “replicated ferociously”. This result questions the established view that such radio waves cannot damage our DNA. Most research has found no effect on healthy cells. It is generally thought that damage might only be caused by heating of the area of the head exposed to micro-waves from a mobile phone. This uncertainty may partially explain the British public’s response, when asked by BBC Radio 4 to name the best and worst inventions, of voting the mobile phone as both the best and the worst.

Mobiles & Health

Work Anywhere - Telework goes weightless – soon. 17th Oct 2002 – Not since the days of Sir Clive Sinclair’s remarkable ZX88 portable computer that in the early 1980’s was the same size as and weighed no more than a pad of paper and ran on 5 AA batteries for six hours, has the burden of carting telecoms and laptops around been so promisingly small. Within two years, reports Barry Fox of New Scientist magazine, the major manufacturers, led by Phillips will launch a new 4 gigabytes drive, designed for cell-phones, that is just one-inch or 3 centimetres across and the size of a credit card. The implications for portable PC’s are the opposite of staggering. The new system uses precision blue lasers and anti-jog technology that includes a far thinner phase-change (recording) material of just 0.1 millimetres thick as compared to the coating on CD’s and DVD’s today of 0.6 millimetres. 4 gigabytes of storage allows for 10 hours of movies or for as much office data as most people need to carry around. Ally this nanotechnology to the small (6 x 3 x 4.5 inches) liquid fuel cells known as DMFC’s being developed by Energy Related Devices of Los Alamos, New Mexico and Smart Fuel Cell of Munich that could allow you to leave the mains leads and plugs at home, and PC’s will at last be truly portable. DMFC Micro-cells create electricity from methanol carried in ampoules that could power a standard laptop, printer and other peripherals for as long as a month before refill.

Emerging Technologies

Launch for Telework-Complete – SW2000 Telework Studies has today launched the most complete and up to date administration package on the market for employers and teleworkers. Based on case work from 1988 and all updated on recent case work with diverse major employers in 2002, the package includes definitive Guidelines, Policy, Legal Contracts, Taxaxtion, Process FORMS, Briefing, Training and Advice, FAQA’s, Costs and Benefits calculations and much more. Telework-Complete offers all the texts and forms needed to run pilot and mature telework programmes. Click HERE to view the outline.

Safe Mobile Phones – 29th August 02 – Since the premature death of my friend and colleague, Dr. John Beishon, last year from a brain tumour, I have paid more attention to reports that mobile phones, pressed to the head, may heat cell tissue and/or cause cancer. John, a professor of engineering and of psychology and a computer expert, was a consummate Work-Anywhere pioneer and he had, for many years, used his mobile phone daily and for much of each day. With the current fashion for even children to have these micro-wave machines clamped to their ears, the insistent murmurings that they may be dangerous are being more widely heeded. Now the UK University of Warwick has patented a possible solution. Microwaves focus on the brain from the phone instrument itself or, perhaps as dangerously, from the antenna of hands-free-sets. Warwick’s patent proposes a conversion of the microwaves into light, or optical pulses, which are led along a tube to the ear, where they are converted to electrical signals that drive a crystal based earpiece speaker. Thus no microwaves are focused on the head and brain. (From New Scientist 31^st August 02). But remember not to keep the phone itself in your trouser pocket.

Mobiles & Health

R. I. P. A. Awakes from its premature grave ! – 23rd Aug 02. Urged on by the United Kingdom, dark forces in the European Union are pressing for the EU equivalent of RIPA, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, that has been temporarily shelved in the UK (see 19^th June 02 below). “They” want to store ALL emails, ALL telephone calls and ALL text messages. It undoubtedly will include ALL WEB-site traffic. The onus is on telephone companies to archive the records and give access to police and government. It is analogous to requiring that every postal/mail item be opened, copied and filed. Freedom fighters claim RIPA and Son of RIPA will be abused by “fishing expeditions” to get the dirt on difficult people. “They”, who remain wholly anonymous, claim RIPA will be used only to track down and arrest terrorists; oh! and criminals – and er … sexual perverts of course and er …… anyone else we don’t like, such as mental retards, Jews, Gypsies, the chronically disabled and other undesirables.

How RIPA can be compatible with voting-on-line and other e-democracy issues has clearly not been thought about. It is time to start encrypting (no pun intended) all telecommunications; for encryption See.

http://www.blibbleblobble.co.uk/News/Articles/RIPA.php

Internet surveillance and laws

$66 Billion for American aristocrats and several hundred signatures missing – watch this space - 15^th Aug 02: Fortune Magazine’s list of salaries, bonuses and profits on shares for company directors of collapsed corporations totals sixty-six billion dollars ($66,000,000,000). This amount, calmly siphoned-off by a few dozen brass-necked representatives of the world’s latest resurgence of aristocracy, would pay 132,000 average US salaries for ten years, or pay 6.6 million small shareholders a reasonable dividend for ten years and maintain their share values. The financial community waits today for the USA’s chief executives to sign declarations that their corporate accounts and reports are accurate, or more pointedly, wait to see who will NOT sign a declaration. Despite the two or three public arrests earlier this month of high profile directors, there remains a stark contrast between the life sentences imposed on petty criminals under the “three strikes and you’re out” regime and the gentle treatment of white-collar criminals who, often through complex criminal conspiracies, have stolen billions of dollars from shareholders and employees. Maybe the Founding Fathers were not the poor and huddled masses of legend but were European aristocrats escaping social revolutions and the guillotine – who have re-established their divine-rights to rip-off the entire community in the New World. While we wait for the financial shakeout, the organisational world holds its breath – and Telework and Work-Anywhere programmes are put on hold. Watch this space.

Off-shore money & tax

30 million teleworkers fail to reverse environmental problems – 12th Aug 2002: Weekend news reports the Asian Brown Cloud that is becoming a permanent summer feature, causing up to a million deaths from air pollution and disrupting normal weather patterns over a vast area. In Zimbabwe the unusual drought continues through its second year, bringing starvation alongside political turbulence over farmland ownership. In Rome, following record 40C temperatures, flash floods and hailstorms have overwhelmed the River Tiber and spread pollutants from overflowing chemical and other processing plants. Recent statistics indicate more than 20 million USA and 10 million European teleworkers. Saving an average 15 miles commuting a day, 30 million teleworkers should have reduced their gasoline consumption by 4.5 billion gallons a year. If only 25% of the teleworkers stay at home on an average work-day they are saving 1.1 billion galls a year. And, if the extreme weather patterns are due to human-created global warming, will saving 1.1 billion gallons of gasoline, or 2 trillion gallons of exhaust gases, make a perceptible difference? Or has everyone got their sums wrong?

Travel Traffic & Congestion

Google Sells Million Dollar Keywords – 5th Aug 02: Leading search engine Google recently announced the signing of "a seven-figure" advertising deal with UK banking and insurance company, Lloyds TSB Insurance. Lloyds is paying Google approximately US$1.55 million for more than 1,000 insurance-related keywords to help promote its Web site, www.insurance.co.uk. The campaign is targeted at Google's 7.5 million UK user base (according to Nielsen/NetRatings May 2002 stats) and is part of the company's drive to generate traffic to its Web site and increase online sales. The deal was agreed after a successful three-month trial on Google. The one-year partnership marks the largest single online advertising deal in Europe in recent memory. "Alongside the accurate and unbiased search results they expect from Google, our users can now discover related insurance products, services, and suppliers from a trusted household brand. Lloyds TSB Insurance will be exposed to more than 10 million potential customers over the coming year," said Google's head of U.K. advertising sales Kate Burns. In addition to Lloyds TSB, Google's UK advertisers include Kelkoo, BT, British Gas, Opodo, British Airways, Ford and Virgin. Increasingly we see that search engine marketing and promotion is considered a vital part of the marketing mix, not only for web based businesses but also for multi-million dollar corporations such as Lloyds TSB and other major institutions. [in case you haven’t guessed, this is a Google Press release].

Wednesday 31st July 02 - So far so good. Despite the increasing numbers of corporate collapses with a large percent of them in the telecommunication sector, responsible for providing the Internet superhighways that business has become reliant on, the World Wide Web seems to be functioning well.

Broadband

Monday 22nd July 02 – Will the Internet and telework survive WorldCom? Last week the Ebone Internet routing in Europe shut down due to the financial failure of the owners. Ebone carried 30% of all European email and web search traffic. Today Mississippi based WorldCom, the largest mover of internet traffic in the world, is on the brink of filing for bankruptcy in the USA. What will happen to the Information Superhighways owned by WorldCom? The internet was designed, to enable global communications in the event of atomic war or other cataclysm, like a fish-net so that regardless of holes blown in the fabric, enough linked strands hold together to route messages round the damaged areas. It is ironic that the first threats to internet integrity have been triggered by a lack of business integrity from the enemy within, rather than from bombs delivered by an enemy “out-there”. UK National Statistics published today reveal that 10.7 million or 42% of UK homes have and use access to the internet. This includes all UK teleworkers, who have come to rely on internet based email for business and a minority for e-commerce. While anxious about my telework-business communications being disrupted, I take small comfort from the memory that from 1980-87, I ran a teleworked business network across the UK, operated by PC illiterate middle-aged consultants like me, communicating by one-page-at-a-time fax machines. And it was profitable. But it was doubtless an equally profitable Greek enterprise to have all those svelte, classical young men in mini skirts dashing around the countryside bearing scrolls wedged in forked sticks; if just a tad slow compared to email. Will the American Government guarantee the continued functioning of WorldCom’s telecoms?

Off-shore money & tax

Thursday 18th July 02 – Too many capitalists and Convergence. A global snapshot: – As the world shrinks the central problem for modern capitalism becomes more visible. It is basically that with thousands of millionaires and with millions of people in OECD countries intent on early retirement, perhaps for as long as 30 years, there is too much capital chasing too little unearned income, to be generated from a decreasing workforce. All unearned income (interest, share dividends, rents etc) that can provide a pension, is ultimately dictated by the bank base rates. For teleworkers to be able to live and work and maybe to retire with an easy mind anywhere on Earth, the main economic factors, interest, taxes and residential land costs, will eventually converge. This item provides data for those interested in the globalisation of telework, commencing with some central bank rates. If you would like to add other factors or contribute data, email us on noelhodson@btconnect.com :

Interest – the base for unearned income:
USA Federal Reserve base rate	1.75%	US Dollars
Central European Bank key Deposit rate	2.25%	Euro
Bank of Japan, official discount rate	0.10%	YEN
Bank of England Base Rate	4.00%	Sterling
Average annual earnings of a teleworker
USA (Telework America Stats Oct 01)		$75,000
Standard Tax Rates
Average housing cost 2000 sq ft or 200 sq metres
Average telecommunications costs

Off-shore money & tax

Tuesday 16th July 02 – Is it time for Telework Training. – Gil Gordon, international speaker and one of the best known telework consultants, has designed a training package for teleworkers and for telework managers. You can get details from his web site http://www.gilgordon.com. The debate about whether there is any need for specific training has vacillated back and forth for over ten years. The essence of the pro-training argument being that telework is such a fundamental change that without training for the teleworkers, their managers and their core team colleagues back at central office, many of the benefits will be lost. The counter argument is that teleworking is not a specific skill in itself – and you might just as well argue for training for daily commuters. According to the Telework America survey of October 2001, less than 30% of the 20 million+ USA teleworkers received any training. Maybe its time they did.

Friday 5th July 02. – One Billion (1,000,000,000) personal computers delivered. Gartner Dataquest of San Jose, California are reported in New Scientist 6^th July 02, as having calculated that the billionth personal computer was purchased by someone, somewhere in April 2002. The computer industry has taken 25 years to make and sell a billion machines. Dataquest predict that if the huge Chinese, South American and Eastern European markets join the computer revolution then the two billion mark will be passed in 2008. I am reminded of the imperative urged on us by Andrew Page, a telework pioneer and President of the ECTF (European Commission Telematics Forum) in 1997, “Wire the World – Before it falls apart”. And I speculate on the computing power inherent in linking up to 2 billion computers via the Internet; maybe we could keep track of the money that has gone missing in the current rash of corporate scandals.

Statistics

Friday 28th June 02. - MOBILE PHONE ADDICTS UNDER ATTACK

Wooden Walls block microwave signals. (both items from New Scientist Magazine, [thanks to a quantum leap through time] 29th June 2002 Issue at www.newscientist.com ) - Hideo Oka and team at Iwate University in Morioka, Northern Japan, are developing wood panels packed with magnetic particles to block mobile phone and other radio waves. “Jammers”, electronic devices that protect theatres and other CFZ’s (communication free zones), can unintentionally affect neighbouring buildings and are illegal in the USA, UK and elsewhere. Low cost panels will be made from recycled magnetic materials and waste wood. Phone Safety debate re-ignites. Dariuz Leszczynski at the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority in Helsinki has found that one hour’s exposure to mobile phone radiation makes cells shrink, in tests carried out on cells in culture dishes. Such shrinkage could support cancerous cells, but seems unlikely to be the primary cause of tumours. The shrinkage is a non-thermal effect, not due to heating the cells. Mays Swicord at Motorola’s Florida Research Labs, has spent 30 years looking for non-thermal effects such as these and is yet to see any.

Mobiles & Health

Thursday 20th June 02. Wi-Fi – Lower cost wireless broadband for all. Jack Schofield writing in the Guardian supplement, On-Line, today 20^th June 02, recommends that people group together in 20’s or 30’s and subscribe to a satellite broadband connection service costing £400 plus £199 a month. That’s less than £40 a month each for wireless, anytime and all the time, very fast internet connection. The technology is called 802.11b and it has its critics who say it vulnerable to weather, clouds and obstructive trees and buildings. Enthusiasts sing its praises. Though in wide use in the USA, the UK authorities have made it illegal “for public access networks”; that means you can buy it for a single user but not to share with your friends. But many are ignoring the law see http://www.consume.net/node_info.php?node_id=108 or http://www.benhammersley.com/wireless and

http://doc.weblogs.com

Emerging Technologies

Broadband

Wednesday 19th June 02. The RIP Act retires to its coffin, for now. – 1pm, London, 18 June 2002 - The most intrusive public surveillance ever proposed, the UK’s Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, RIPA, was withdrawn this lunchtime by David Blunkett, the Home Secretary. He said he would rather be attacked for this last minute policy U-turn than ignore what the whole world was telling him. On the original schedule the Act would have been finally approved tonight by the UK House of Commons. RIPA, described as “The Snooper’s Law” would give powers not only to all the law enforcement agencies but to a wide range of government and other agencies including postal services, food agencies, Local (town) and Parish (village) Councils, National Health agencies and many others. The extraordinary powers proposed, without any judicial licence or review, include interception of telephone, email and postal traffic, from anyone to anyone. It makes it illegal for anyone constrained by RIPA to discuss the ban – they have to suffer in silence and secrecy, denying free speech. Journalists could not protect their sources and whistle-blowers would be identified at the outset. Web site providers and Email hosts would be required to keep and pass-on tracer records of all visitors and emails for up to 7 years. CCTV camera films would also be available to the agencies. In the UK, that has by far the highest number of CCTV cameras per head in the world, this latter is of great import to the privacy of its citizens. George Orwell wrote of and warned society of this terrifying level of surveillance in his book 1984; all civil servants should be required to re-read the book every year. While Britain has been temporarily spared by David Blunkett’s refreshingly honest, direct and brave reversal, RIPA remains an unnerving threat as he will now seek “consensus” for a new Act. The coffin lid may yet be inched open again. But for the present, teleworkers can email as carelessly as ever they have.

Internet surveillance and laws

Sign Up Now for June 19th Webinar
Wednesday, June 19, 12:30-1:30 p.m. EDT
ITAC, in cooperation with the General Services Administration, is holding
a virtual seminar, " Technology Barriers to Home-Based Telework," based on a new report from Booz-Allen & Hamilton on U.S. federal telework programs. This is the first in an ongoing series of Telework America Webinars. Go to Detailed Webinar Information for more details on the program and registration. Registration is open to anyone at no cost. http://www.telecommute.org

Free Bay Area Telework Association Webinar 27th June - The San Francisco Bay Area Telework Association (BATA) is offering its first FREE Webinar on June 27 @ 12:30 to 1:30PM pacific DST. The topic is "Designing Online Team Work Environments." Please feel free to forward this announcement to people who might be interested. The full announcement is below.Thanks, June Langhoff ,BATA supporter.

The Bay Area Telework Association [BATA] will present a free Online webinar on Thursday, June 27 from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. PDT: Designing Online Team Work Environments Virtual workplaces are online destinations where employees, both those who work remotely and those who work in-house, go to collaborate. These online offices increase an organization's flexibility

by making it possible to get work done anywhere, anytime. But if the workplace isn't well designed and implemented, the results can be disastrous. To build collaboration, virtual workplaces must foster ongoing interaction and communication in a variety of forms

including discussion forums, chat, instant messaging, content management, document storage and sharing, and conferencing. Join BATA in learning how to build an effective online team.

Our virtual seminar will explore the following: - The advantages of creating online team workspaces - An overview of web-based collaboration tools - A guided tour of an online workspace - Critical success factors for implementing online team workspaces.

Presenter : John Darling, co-founder of Collaboration Architects, has over 25 years of experience in successful design and implementation of a wide variety of organization change initiatives. In addition to managing his own successful consulting and training firm for eight years, he has served in a number of senior consulting roles on projects which included large scale organization culture change, work process redesign/implementation, self-managing team development, strategic planning and alignment initiatives, workforce redesign and new technology introduction.

Who Should Attend: *HR Managers *Telework Managers *Local, State, and Federal Agencies

*Companies/Nonprofits Implementing Telework Programs *IT Managers

***To attend, you need phone access and a PC or Mac with Internet access for the visual presentation.

How to Register: To register, send an email to Jennifer Verive at jverive@wrvinc.com with your a) name, b) email address, and c) the phone number you will be using to call into the meeting.

Once signed up, you will receive a follow-up email with details on how to prepare for and attend the Webinar. The first 20 attendees to sign up will be able to register for the conference. There is no fee for attending.

Webinar Organizers & Sponsors BATA The Bay Area Telework Association (BATA) provides an

opportunity to network with other people interested in telecommuting and other telework options and to learn about future plans for telework advocacy in the San Francisco Bay Area. The organization is made up of employers, businesses and individuals dedicated to educating,

promoting and advocating the economic, social and environmental benefits of telework. Membership is open to all. For more information, see http://www.baytelework.org/

Alexander Bell, the famous Scottish migrant to the USA, did not invent the telephone. US Congress has recognised it was invented by Antonio Meucci, born in 1808, who studied engineering at Florence University before emigrating first to Cuba, then to Staten Island where he made the first “teletrofono” to help his paralysed wife, Ester. Meucci had a tragic life and in 1871 could not afford full patent fees. Bell, described last week in the Italian newspaper, “La Republica”, as a “cunning Scotsman” and “usurper”, shared a workshop with Meucci, patented the invention in his own name and fought Meucci in the courts until Meucci’s death in 1889. (The Guardian 17 June 02). Surely there is the basis for a great opera here.

Warning issued to the Swiss Banks. G7 finance ministers are stepping up the global campaign against tax evasion and money laundering (see the importance of this for telework in “The Future” item 7 below). They are pressing Switzerland, in the words of UK Chancellor, Norman Brown, to “move forward quickly to achieve an effective exchange of information to end banking secrecy”. (The Guardian 17^th June 02).

Off-shore money & tax

Conferences are back. SHRM the 150,000 strong association of HR professionals in the US, have 9,200 delegates booked for their next conference and anticipate at least 15,000 in all. ITAC, The International Telework Association and Council, are filling places for regular WEBINARS – teleconferences for ITAC members and newcomers. http://www.telecommute.org

Professor William Dutton is the director of the new Oxford Internet Institute, initially focusing on E-democracy and E-Learning. He plans to create a Masters Degree in Internet Studies.

http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk

Statistics

50 million teleworkers in a fast changing world.

Surveys commissioned by ITAC (the International Telework Association and Council) in October 2001 found 28M telework offices in USA homes, about 20% of the workforce. About 8 million USA people telework at home on any-one-work-day. The Wall Street Journal reported in April 02 that 30% of organisations with 100 or more employees telework. The European Commission forecasts that 15% in the EU will telework by 2005. Though the UK government counted less than 2M teleworkers, 43% being self-employed, in January 2001, Datamonitor now reports15% of UK homes have telework offices, and we calculate that at least 1.5 million of these are used on any-one-work-day. In the Nordic countries, some 18% of the workforce are teleworkers. Dr. Frank Becker initiated “empty desk counts” in the USA; today in most OECD countries, around 10% of office desks are empty due to teleworking at home. In 1992, 2% of UK employees teleworked occasionally, alongside 500,000 self-employed.

Statistics

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