The dated concept of 'network neutrality'

Tim Wu is a very clever and elegant Columbia University law professor whom I had the pleasure of meeting on one or two occasions. He is perhaps best known for coining the phrase 'network neutrality', now 20 years ago. This was at a time when it was not yet quite clear that the telecommunications firms would turn into simple dumb pipes and that a handful of content providers would be the kings and queens of the new media landscape. I understand that Tim has moved on to other things, including having served as a special assistant to the Biden administration. Somehow, the concept he gave birth to in 2003 lives on even though it is becoming more irrelevant by the day. I discuss this further in a guest blog at Strand Consult: Twenty years of ‘network neutrality’ – time for a break?

Wireless broadband will always be fixed more quickly

You will not see it on the official OpenServe outage map, but I have been in a home office without fibre for a day now and all I have is a promise that it will be seen to in "up to 48 working hours" which I assume means 6 working days, so 8 human days. The outage affects several households in my area and all of use are on Telkom's network. All of us are now using mobile data, obviously.

Why is wired broadband usually out for so long? Well, there are the physical reasons: it might not be obvious where the problem is and it might be underground.  In my area the cables are easily accessible and a vandal with kindergarten scissors could do a lot of damage. The problem might also affect only a few users so, frankly, not be very important. None of this is true on a mobile network where it is generally clear that the problem is at the tower and furthermore the problem will affect users over several square kilometres. Not only are there fewer places to go and fix the problem, the wireless broadband provider also has a greater incentive to fix it since it will always affect at least hundreds of users. On the level of longer outages (rather than shorter ones), wireless broadband must therefore generally be more stable than fixed broadband.

Hard truths about software

The global outrage about Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has also highlighted the extent to which modern society depends on software. More specifically, on software written by other people. Much of this software comes from open source projects or makes extensive use of open source libraries. This is true also for commercial software that might do so legally or (often, I suspect) surreptitiously by simply copying code from open source projects where these projects have licence conditions that do not allow use in proprietary software.

The Open Source Initiative reports that protestware has been included in many open source projects, some of it malicious – at least one case was uncovered where the code was introduced by one developer to delete all files on devices with IP addresses in Russia or in Belarus. An updated version simply displayed an antiwar message. This piece of code is used in another project and another (as detailed by Lyran Tal at snyk.io), eventually impacting Vue.js which is a commonly used JavaScript framework for building websites.

The complexity of modern software cannot be overstated. Everyone builds applications that rely on a multitude of libraries (even the simple computational models that I write in Python include many libraries about which I know very little and these models run only in a text terminal interface) and, indeed, on an operating system. This can be seen in the size of the executable files: the latest version of Microsoft Edge is a compressed download of over 100 MB. There is no way that a single person can have an overview of the entire source code of the browser and I doubt there is a team that would fit into a single room that does.

Furthermore, software is everywhere. Since computing power became cheap many decades ago, common electronic devices no longer contain custom control hardware but rather have a general purpose computer inside with specific software to handle the connected hardware components. This is true for everything from your car to your phone, via your dishwasher and your smart lightbulb.

With commercial software the user gets the ability to sue someone if things go wrong (depending on the exclusions in the agreement, and I suspect there are cases of "not my fault" on the record). However, the sad news is that it is not only a practical but also a theoretical impossibility to fully guarantee software behaviour.

In his 1951 doctoral dissertation, Henry Gordon Rice proved that no non-trivial semantic property (like, "it never hangs") of a computer program can be universally decided by another program. That is, given a specific property that software should satisfy (e.g. not contain a backdoor) and a program for checking it, that program will always fail to give the correct answer for some of the software to which it is applied. It is however possible to verify the behaviour of some software by a formal verification proof, for example the operating system CertiKOS. Formal verification requires somewhat complicated mathematical modelling but hardware companies such as Intel have been pioneers in using it.

In telecoms, the programming language Erlang was developed at Ericsson for high reliability in the 1980s and is in current use for much of the code of WhatsApp. Substantial work has been done on the formal verification of Erlang software. Advocates of Open RAN (Radio Access Network) technology and telecommunications operators will probably have to keep in mind the hard fact that software reliability for realtime systems (like cars or networks) is orders of magnitude more important than for the likes of the Candy Crush app. Mixing hardware and software from different vendors in a critical realtime application is likely to pose more challenges in terms of verifiable reliability than some think.

Termination Shock – a masked adventure

I have long been enjoying the novels of Neil Stephenson. This includes the sublime Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age: or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (probably my favourite) and The Big U, his 1984 novel about academic life. This year, summer holiday featured his latest speculative fiction, Termination Shock – a delightful romp from Texas to Indonesian Papua with local colour amply provided by Comanche, Punjabi, Afrikaans, Papuan and royal Dutch extras. It is set a decade or two in the future with the planet in chaos through climate change and semi-permanent waves of the viral infection that beset it in 2020, which will not be named here in an attempt to confuse the censor bots.

The treatment of climate change is, I would say, fairly nuanced. The main plot involves various parties' attempts to arrest it by seeding the high atmosphere with sulphur compounds and their opponents' efforts to stall any interference. 

There is more than a smattering of Texas and Dutch (colonial) history, with an emphasis on mining. It was probably fairly brave of Stephenson to feature epidemic control measures such as masks, border closures and warning apps as constant features of a future world. I am not sure whether this is primarily pessimistic, prescient or simply sarcastic. However, the book was the first work of fiction that I read which strongly features the masking situation.

Termination Shock is not one of my favourite Stephenson novels but it is generally well researched and entertaining. There is a minor point in the plot that I find very puzzling though. The Maeslant barrier at Rotterdam is destroyed during a storm, causing flooding in half the Netherlands, and the characters speculate about whether it could have been a freak wave. However, if you go online now, you will find plenty of live video footage of the barrier. How could it be that in future these cameras simply do not exist? If you are a fan of Stephenson's style of speculative fiction (or of Texas) you should definitely read Termination Shock.

Of cryptocurrency and chinchillas

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has alleged that the operators of Ripple (a distributed ledger based payment network) has been making an illegal unregistered securities offering through its sale of XRP, a cryptocurrency which is associated with some of Ripple Labs' established payments business. As described by Roslyn Layton on Forbes, the charge poses questions regarding fair process and regulatory overreach. Jurisprudence on securities offerings rely heavily on the case SEC v. Howey Co., 328 U.S. 293 (1946) involving an orange grove development to which I simply refer as Howey.

There are two easy outs from the purview of the SEC: an investment that is mainly for consumption (e.g. a house in a sectional title development in which one intends to live), or a currency – even if there is a clear expectation of profit on the part of the investor. Even the government has to admit that people generally do not buy things in the expectation of making a loss! Extensive litigation around what constitutes a security has taken place and, confusingly, various circuits of the US federal courts have taken slightly different views on this. The three parts of the Howey test on which they agree are that their must be an investment of money, an expectation of profit and that this must be solely through the efforts of a promoter or third party.

Maria, the Chinchilla.
Photographed by her proud
owner in June 2005

The fourth part of the Howey test involves common enterprise which means that there might be pooling of the resources contributed by purchasers of the contract or token being offered and a link between the putative investor's returns and the efforts of the promoter. The link is clear in the case of shares or, as the court determined, possibly chinchillas as in Miller v. Cent. Chinchilla Group, Inc. (8th Cir. 1974) which determined that offering chinchillas for breeding with a guaranteed buy-back of $100 per pair did indeed constitute a securities offering.

It seems clear that the operations of Ripple Labs are funded to a large extent through sales of XRP but on the other hand, XRP has been traded and used as an ordinary cryptocurrency on exchanges for many years. Its fluctuation in value has also been correlated to a significant extent (around 0,3) with that of Bitcoin. To me, this suggests that any expectation of profit from ownership is significantly related to the general view on crypto and definitely not solely to the efforts of Ripple Lab.

It is not at all clear whether the SEC's case against Ripple will fail and, certainly, certain token offerings definitely have the character of a securities offering. However, I can also see the possibility of a Ripple test emerging from this which covers instruments which 

• have some aspect of a currency (by behaving similarly to Bitcoin),
• are weak on commonality of enterprise (since there is no explicit claim, in the case of XRP, on the profits of the enterprise that arise from anything other than the promoters' possibly continued holding of some XRP themselves) and
• where profit is clearly not (therefore) solely from the efforts of the promoter or third party.

It would be a shame if great innovators like Ripple Labs were shackled by the fear of SEC prosecution through an overly zealous interpretation of the Howey test.

WhatsApp support lines and bots

 WhatsApp support lines and bots only work if your bot or mechanical Turk (human) can respond practically immediately. I have been entangled for about a week with my internet service provider who proudly announced that they no longer use e-mail (it is supposedly very 1990s) for customer support.

Now, is is great that you no longer have to call a telephonic support line (especially if you are hearing impaired!) but as the image above shows, a human (or named bot) responded yesterday after six hours at which time I was having a haircut and unable to respond to it. It then went away and I am back where I was, suspecting only that Melissa (the virus) has taken an easy job on the WebAfrica support line.

Privaatheid tydens afsondering

Dis coronavirus-afsondering en almal kan sien hoe deurmekaar jou huis is. Terwyl ons links en regs deelneem aan video-konferensies en registreer vir aanlynkursusse, hou gerus in gedagte dat iemand moet geld maak uit al dié gratis dienste. Almal se gunsteling blyk Zoom te wees en ek stem saam dat die gebruikerservaring besonder goed is. Ongelukkig, soos elders, geld die beginsel dat indien jy nie betaal nie, is jý die produk. Ek het onlangs opgelet dat die skakel om 'n webinaar in my dagboek te plaas, behels het dat ek blykbaar vir Zoom toegang gee tot my gehele Google-dagboek. Dit was maklik genoeg om te omseil maar laat my nogal ongemaklik voel. Verder het Zoom 'n geskiedenis van privaatheid- en sekuriteitskwessies. Dink maar aan die volgende.

• The Zoom conferencing app has a vulnerability that allows someone to remotely take over the computer's camera. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/07/zoom_vulnerabil.html (Blykbaar opgelos, maar dit is onlangs.)
• What Zoom’s current privacy policy says is worse than “You don’t have any privacy here.” It says, “We expose your virtual necks to data vampires who can do what they will with it.” https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2020/03/27/zoom/

Ek sou aanhou om Zoom te gebruik maar neem aan die vlak van privaatheid is soos in 'n gesprek in 'n koffiewinkel.

Solus – a good-looking operating system

I recently decided to try Solus, a Linux-based operating system with a nice, clean and fast desktop environment called Budgie. It installed easily on an older Dell laptop and the WiFi worked right from the start, which is not always the case on the particular machine.

Support for the Afrikaans language is not too bad and although I have not worked out which package manager it uses, the GUI Software Center is easy enough to use. It did hang on the installation of Sublime text editor though as did TeXworks and there is no obvious way to pause and/or restart the process. Synthing installed without trouble and I used it to copy about 40 GB of personal files from my OSX machine on the local network which was rather painless and fast!

Solus has a very pleasant appearance and I shall probably be using it for a while.

Holiday reading, book 7: Goodbye to Berlin (Christopher Isherwood)

The last of 2019/20 summer holiday reading was a wonderful little book about which I have known for a long time but was prompted to read it by a friend having recently mentioned it recently. The writing is wonderful, the stories whimsical and sad (since everyone knows what is coming in the 1930s) but also sweet and amusing.

The book consists of more-or-less separate stories with interrelated characters and plots. My favourite character is probably Bernhard Landauer, ostensibly based on the real-life Wilfrid Israel. The Landauers in the book own a department store (like the Israels in reality) in Berlin and one of the poignant scenes is where the main character goes to the shop in search of Bernhard just as the SA starts the boycott of Jewish-owned businesses. He describes himself and others entering the huge shop as the men stand outside with the placards, just as in the picture shown here, outside the Israel shop in Berlin. The SA men look faintly ridiculous, almost bored and definitely very boring. And then all of the rest happened.

Delightful details of pre-wat Berlin pepper the book, such as paying tolls on the AVUS motorway to Grunewald. This first motorway, the construction of which was started prior to World War I, was completed by private investors and remained private until 1940. Some of these details are in the German but not the English entry on Wikipedia. One of the innovations of the road was that it horses would not be allowed.

Read this book on holiday or on a rainy Saturday! In case you did not know, Isherwood was a cousin of the other wonderful English writer, Graham Greene.

Holiday reading, book 6: HATE – Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship (Nadine Strossen)

Nadine is a veteran president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and thoughtful and principled law professor whom I have had the good fortune to meet on a few occasions i.a. in New York at a reception in their beautiful apartment. Her stance on this topic is relatively well known but I am very pleased that she has written this book in which she brilliantly explains and champions the US view on "hate speech", based on the First Amendment. Over the past half a century, the ACLU has defended the free speech rights of some quite objectionable parties, for which they (and she) have my great respect.

She quotes former President Obama quite a few times and I am relieved to hear that he has such a solid comprehension of at least the First Amendment to the US constitution. Now, the statement that I have just made is an example of the kind of speech that would be absolutely protected in the USA but perhaps not in Singapore, the Soviet Union or either the South Africa of BJ Vorster or that of Nelson Mandela as I might be insulting the gentleman's dignity.

On several occasions the author refers to the abuse of hate speech (by which I assume she includes the abominable notion of crimen iniuria) in both old and new South Africa. She does not discuss this much further but what is interesting for me is that our special courts dealing with these issues now order perpetrators to actually pay compensation to the victims. Of course, the first order for compensation based mainly on the utterance of a specific word by a White person towards a Black one, was made in Ciliza v Minister of Police and Another in 1976 – on the basis of it constituting that very South African offense of crimen iniuria.

Fact is not a defense for crimen iniuria in SA but I learned from the book that several jurisdiction also disallow factuality as a defense in modern "hate speech" cases. In fact, in the Netherlands, there are verboten (I am, again, testing the boundaries) questions. Several other chilling examples from Europe make it into the book as does the somewhat silly (ditto) prosecution of poor Bob Dylan in France on the basis of a complaint by the Council of Croats in France in the same month that he was admitted to the légion d'honneur.

The dark history of "hate speech" restrictions is clearly illustrated in the book and the author points out that in Weimer Germany the prosecution of anti-semitic "hate speech" was in fact quite common. What I did not know is that in the past few years, US campus restrictions on speech have in fact frequently been used against racial minority groups.

In the US, it is clear that if the intention is imminent serious harm then the speech is not protected and furthermore restrictions should satisfy viewpoint neutrality. The book well explains the history of this in jurisprudence and for a lay reader like myself it is very convincing.

I loved the book but I have always been a fan of the US constitution and you have to be a bit legally inclined to make it through the book. It can easily be read in one day and would leave you ample time for other hobbies.

Image borrowed from somewhere – use here presumed to be allowed under SA copyright law.

Vakansieleesstof, boek 5: Secondhand Time – The Last of the Soviets (Svetlana Alexievich)

Twyfelagtige leesstof vir 'n vakansie, het ek gevoel na 20 bladsye. Maar ek wou nie die boek in my bagasie hê nie en ek kon nie ophou lees nie. Alexievich is 'n letterkundige Nobel-pryswenner wat aan die hand van 'n hele paar dosyn vertellings (hoofsaaklike eerstehands) die geskiedenis van die Sowjetunie, sy verval, die harwarjare en die opkoms van die nuwe orde beskryf.

Daar is nie baie snaaks daarin nie, met die uitsondering van 'n paar juwele van die Russiese galgehumor. Sy is ook nie skaam om te beskryf wat vir haar en ander lekker was in die sosialistiese tyd nie, ook nie om weer te gee dat mense (jonk en oud eerder as middeljarig) 'n hunkering terug het na die Stalin-tyd nie. Eerstehandse vertellings van selfs sy slagoffers se heldeverering vir hom is treffend. Tog is dit nie net 'n boek oor politiek nie. Dit vertel ook van die alledaagse (soms mooi) en gewone menslike stories wat afspeel teen die agtergrond van die Sowjet-stelsel.

Die woord "salami" kom verbasend dikels in die boek voor – ek skat minstens op elke vyfde bladsy. Die ander kleinigheid wat my sal bybly is dat die Russiese weermag tot in die tweede dekade van die 21ste eeu "portjanki" (basies, voetdoeke) gedra het eerder as kouse.

Hierdie boek is vir die sterk leser wat 'n goed ontwikkelde belangstelling het in Rusland en die Sowjetunie. Of vir iemand wat nodig het om te hoor dit was elders erger. Baie erger. Ek leen 'n foto by die New York Times hiervoor (ietwat uitgeknip) omdat die outeur oulik en gaaf lyk, in teenstelling met haar onderwerp.

Holiday reading, book 4: Bank 4.0 – Banking Everywhere, Never at a Bank (Brett King)

For anyone at all interested in banking or technology, this book is compulsory reading. I am normally easily bored by discussions of technological developments with which I am familiar but King takes it all and wraps it up in a narrative which is compelling and to the point. His intimate familiarity with the traditional banking business allows him to make astute observations about how organisations function and what the dangers are in failing to adept to the one-swipe-right-now world of the digital native.

The author is particularly clear about the best way for banks to work with FinTech's – cooperate (cheapest and fastest) or acquire rather than duplicate in-house. He mentions some sobering examples of the latter. There are also many fun things such as the Emirates NBD Shake n’ Save [sic] product which lets you put away a fixed amount for a rainy day by shaking your phone. Other interesting morsels included a reference to ERMA project at Bank of America in the early 1950s which introduced account numbers. Yes, account numbers.

One of the great questions King proposes should be asked in the banking "C-suite" is whether the head of digital outranks the head of branches. My feeling is that sometimes there is not even a head of digital delivery (experience) but there would be a head of branches. What this says, I do not really know. In his taxonomy, many banks are really stuck in "Banking 2.5" which means they do a lot of things on their app but the digital channel is still (except for challenger banks) a bit of an add-on.

Incidentally, he talks about "false positives" for branch use which does cover all branch use in my case – e.g. when you go there to pick up a card because it is going to simply take too long to give your address over the phone to the courier and the bank simply did not get around to giving your address to the courier. Why my bank does not get the delivery address form the app, I would not know... The head of branches probably decided that phoning worked well in 1985 so it should work now.

I took dozens of photographs from the book of things that I wanted to follow up or check. Like many modern books, the editorial quality is not what it should be – any author can write "Netflix" when they mean "Blockbuster" but it is the job of a good editor or critical reader to pick this up. Some of the graphs are not readable in grayscale and I had a hard copy so I do not know where one would find the original colour graphics.

If you are even remotely interested in banking, do read this book!

Holiday reading, book 3: Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis (Jared Diamond)

A heavy but attractively typeset and bound tome by an author that has really influence my thinking about the world and its history a fair bit. The author is now in his 80s and reflects on 7 countries which he knows well, mainly through having lived in them and learning the language. In this respect, it is very personal and touching since the wisdom and insight proceeding from affectionate observation transmit well.

The introduction frames the study well using the psychology of personal crisis with reference to the effect of the Cocoanut [sic] Grove fire in 1940s Boston on the development of crisis therapy. The author provides a theoretical framework for the historical discussion using the psychology of personal crisis management. Since we have all at some or other point had one, this makes it seductively easy to relate to the subject material.

For me, Finland was a particularly interesting chapter and only in part since I visited the country for the first time in 2019 and have so far been only casually familiar with the history of it. Diamond shares my appreciation for language and in this respect treats the role of the unique and somewhat complicated Finnish tongue very well. I also found his treatment of the United States helpful and interesting and those not familiar with some of the partisanship currently in vogue there, might find this a useful guide. On Japan, Indonesia and Chile, he has been excellent.

If I had two wishes about the book, it might be to have Germany disappear from it. The opposite was, incidentally, my view on the first book that I read on holiday – The Square and the Tower (Niall Ferguson). Diamond treats the socio-historical development of modern Germany well and sympathetically and I think these are all things that people need to know. However, I felt that it did not fit the framework and case studies of the remainder of the book.

My second wish would be to have Israel in it since the country has faced numerous crises (not least of all, at its birth) and I believe that it has adapted culturally and institutionally in unique and interesting ways. I think it would have fit well with the rest of the book.

The book is relatively light but pleasant reading and skipping chapters at will should not be a problem. Thank you, Jared!

Holiday reading, book 2: Talking to Strangers (Malcolm Gladwell)

This is the book by Gladwell that I enjoyed the most  – by far. I read it in one day, admittedly mainly during a medium-distance trip by bus from Bangkok to Siem Reap and I would have spent New Year's Eve in the hotel room, had I not finished it in time.

It is not about how to talk to strangers but what happens when strangers communicate (badly) and how that has changed over the years. The parts about the political conflicts of the 20th century are very amusing but what I found most valuable was the way the he explains the problem of excess police violence in the US (and probably other places) in terms of the background of dubious innovations in policing and in terms of tragic individual examples. He has greatly strengthened by conviction that in an era of standardised, tabulated and dashboarded administration (in large corporates as well as by the state) we should pay a lot of attention to the consequences of the small number of cases where things do go wrong, as they inevitably do.

Please read this book!

Holiday reading, book 1: The Square and the Tower (Niall Ferguson)

I really enjoyed this book. Nevertheless, compared to the author's other compelling works the pace is quite uneven. Parts of it can easily be skipped, in fact. Where it reviews the theory of networks, for example, I was quite bored and disappointed but possibly because I know the topic somewhat well. It is really very good in the main however and most of the conclusion is excellent.

Ferguson makes the point that our era of technological advance in communication is not perhaps that novel at all.I would differ from the author on three points though, in his conclusion and general approach.

1. I am not nearly as bullish as he is about the progress of AI. It could also easily be that it all ends up, if it even happens, as some kind of intelligence living happily and separately in machines and knowing and caring about us as much as we care about the cockroaches or beings on other planets. Moreover, I do not see a great leap forward between now and 2030 although I would not completely discount the possibility that by that time (or even now) it will only be the computers reading this.

2. Tall buildings as a symbol of power do not strictly belong to the past but are still a symbol of (now) consumption power for the rich of Manhattan, Dubai, Bangkok and (lately) even Johannesburg.

3. The current American president does not strike me as of immense importance in the long run but neither does his predecessor.

The author is an admirer of the political philosophy of Henry Kissinger and here I agree with him almost entirely. He very nicely describes the dangers in the near future that Kissinger had identified and I am afraid that these are very real. Further, I think that the book pays insufficient attention to modern Germany as an economic and cultural power, instead concentrating overly much on the UN Security Council countries. I would not have placed much emphasis on France but one of the nice things about the book is that South Africa features surprisingly frequently. I really enjoyed this and think that the country is an interesting case in the history of the world over the past few hundred years. French readers might have inverse sentiments.

Medical information confidentiality – little of it at Bonitas

Bonitas medical fund has for years now been sending me loads of confidential medical information regarding one of their members by e-mail. Presumably, an address had either been given incorrectly by the patient or captured incorrectly by Bonitas. Despite the fact that I have written to inform them of this, the e-mails have not stopped coming.

A recent one deals with a claim for OTHER SPECIFIED MISADVENTURES DURING SURGICAL AND MEDICAL CARE (codeY65.8) which leaves me wondering about the code for unspecified misadventures might be and why this is not something that the medical services provider should fix for their own account. Nevertheless, the privacy of the patient is being egregiously violated and (of course) she has no way of knowing this. Both the e-mail and the letter contain the following text.

This information is confidential and only intended for the beneficiary specified above, or in the case of a minor, the legal guardian or parent. The sender hereof cannot be held responsible for what happens if the recipient shares this information with any other person.

In other words, Bonitas cavalierly indemnifies themselves and me – surely a legal impossibility – from whatever happens to this information. In any event, service providers can avoid a lot of this mess by using the Yimi or Yimi1234 systems for obtaining patient information. Bonitas might want to get their house in order.

Banks should let customers input amounts as displayed

An older lady of my acquaintance recently had to drive 20km to visit the branch of a well-known South African bank in order to make a transfer to another account at the same bank even though she uses Internet banking. It was a somewhat larger amount than usual and her mistake was using the comma as thousands' separator. Why? Since that was how the bank also displayed numbers on the same page. Very recently, I had the same problem at another bank. If you include a space in the amount, it is rejected even though the bank displays the space itself, right at the next step. Now, since we officially use the comma as decimal symbol one can understand a reluctance to allow it as a thousands' separator when using the decimal point as most banking applications do. Why the space is forbidden, I do not know as it clearly makes the number more reasonably and a few lines of JavaScript can remove it when the transaction is submitted. The same is true for telephone numbers. User Experience: fail.

Skype for Business is nie Skype nie

Mense wonder soms waarom gewone Skype en Skype for Business nie met mekaar praat nie. Die rede is dat die twee eintlik min met mekaar te doen het – buiten dat beide tans deur Microsoft besit word. Skype is 15 jaar gelede begin in Estland en eers heelwat later deur Microsoft gekoop.

Gewone Skype het baie mense verlos van duur internasionale oproepe en vriende en familie nader aan mekaar gebring. Die sagteware en veral Skype se algoritmes vir die verspreiding van die netwerkverkeer het eenvoudig net goed gewerk.

Skype for Business is eintlik Lync, die opvolger van Office Communicator 2007. Dit is 'n Microsoft-produk wat gebaseer is op uibreidings tot die SIP-protokol. Dit is dus nie 'n diensuitbreiding van die gewone Skype-produk,  soos die naam dalk aandui, nie.

Bibliography tools for easy referencing of an academic paper

Nowadays, when I quickly need to write a report or paper with academic references, my methodology is to first complete a list of references and try to download all the papers and other sources that I think I might use. Since it is very convenient to write using the Markdown language and use BibTeX source files for citations (since this allows for later easy formatting and reformatting) it helps to first get the BibTeX references for each paper.

This is easiest using doi2bib which provides the BibTeX from a DOI number or address. The DOI is a generally used universal identifier for much technical literature. Incidentally, the easiest tool for obtaining the papers themselves is the cooperative or pirate (depending on your point of view) site Sci-Hub which uses the same DOI to get the paper itself from behind the paywall. Naturally, Sci-Hub is probably in serious violation of ordinary copyright but I think the users, especially if they are already entitled to access the material they seek but in a less convenient way, might consider it to be fair use and moderately unobjectionable.

The new Opera browser incorporates a crypto wallet that works

More precisely, an Ethereum wallet is included with the latest versions of the quite good Opera browser. Incidentally, the main thing not to like about this sturdy Scandinavian software is that the Android version on a default installation does keep throwing a lot of notifications which has to be they way they pay their way.

It was very easy to send ETH Ethereum coins from another wallet, which is to be expected and as it is, a transaction cost of ZAR 1 ensured that this happened within a few seconds. The way to start is actually to install Opera first on a mobile device and then link it to other installations of Opera (on your laptop, for example). Right now, I have the same wallet on several laptops as well as my mobile phone which is really convenient. This is a real wallet as the wallet itself stores the cryptographic private keys for the address and they can therefore be lost – unless backed up, for example by running the wallet on some other devices. Doing this with Opera is really convenient since you can use a QR code to transfer the private keys to a device with a camera or simply re-enter the back-up version of the key which is a twelve-word phrase that the wallet can display. This might be a topic for another blog but for now, I would say that the Opera wallet looks quite nice. Obviously, it also handles other crypto tokens that reside on the Ethereum blockchain so you can invent your own currency and run it right from this wallet.

Update on 10 May 2019: the private keys are not actually stored on other device but only on the phone. There is a complicated messaging going on because apparently Opera lets you use the phone version of the wallet from the desktop but the keys for signing are not on the desktop. I am no longer so sure how much I like it...