Ch. Tronche's blog

Tracking of internet users on the basis of their IP address seems to have some traction theses days (cf. for exemple the HADOPI law), at least in France.

With the coming exhaustion of IPv4 adresses, Internet Service Providers are putting together “transition” (permanent ?) mechanisms to make IPv6 works (when such a service do exist), with as little disturbance as possible for the existing users.

Part of these mechanisms may be to NAT IPv6 addresses distributed to their users to IPv4 adresses to keep the existing IPv4 services working. In order to do this, the ISPs will have to get the already distributed addresses back to feed the NAT mechanism.

The result: an IPv4 address will be used in succession by various users at different moments. The IP address (v4) alone won’t be enough to identify the user any more, only a set of dozens of clients.

Of course, there is a solution: to identify the user, the source port will have to be noted together with the IP address. This implies the ISP will store this information, a heavy and costly process, since the NAT associations are changed much more often than the IP addresses.

Simple technical difficulty or yet another risk of error ?

Timing can also be called into question: putting an authority like HADOPI in motion can take years, while the IP address exhaustion is predicted around 2012, forcing ISP into quick action.

From Peter Zura’s blog.

Previous note on the same subject.

Image via Wikipedia— Guy Kawasaki

Le billet de Pascal Rogard.

Image by alexkess via FlickrSi la commission ne veut pas prêter le flanc aux accusations d’opacité, il suffit qu’elle publie le détail de ses calculs.

L’UFC peut s’agiter tant qu’elle veut, les ayant droits ont la majorité absolue dans la commission dont la composition (collège) est fixée à l’avance. Difficile de voir alors dans le siège réservé à l’UFC autre chose qu’un alibi et, dans ces conditions, la politique de la chaise vide ne semble pas si bête.

Ne pas se méprendre sur mon discours: il faut bien que des artistes touchent quelque chose de leur art (non pas les artistes, sinon le moindre guignol artiste auto-proclamé va demander à l’état d’obtenir  une rente à vie), et le principe d’une vignette sur les disques durs pour rémunérer les artistes ne me choque pas, pas plus qu’une vignette sur les voitures pour améliorer le sort des retraités.

Mais je n’arrive pas à imaginer qu’un système aussi outrageusement anti-démocratique que cette commission, dont la légitimité ne tient guère plus que du discours de ceux qui en tirent profit, pourrait perdurer bien longtemps. Si on veut une taxe, qu’elle soit votée par l’Assemblée ou décrétée par le gouvernement.

Il est vrai que ce discours est peut-être difficile à accepter pour des héritiers de Chateaubriand…

(Image: télégraphe ou sac de noeuds ?)

J’aimerais me livrer ici à l’exercice périlleux de la prédiction.

Le choc en retour de la crise actuelle va continuer à se dérouler dans les années qui viennent de façon épisodique pour une raison que je vais maintenant un peu développer.

La plupart des parts dans des fonds de placement vendues ces dernières années par les institutions (banques et autres) aux individus, le sont généralement à capital garanti, les particuliers acceptant rarement le risque de perdre les économies de leur vie. Les fonds ont donc souscrit des assurances pour adosser cette garantie. La valeur des actions sous-jacentes auront fortement baissées dans la tourmente actuelle, et déclencheront des appels de liquidités vers les assurances déjà exsangues au fur et à mesure que les fonds arriveront à maturité.

Voilà qui nous promet une vie intéressante dans les années qui viennent…

This is part of the future of energy: distributed production coordinated by a sophisticated platform.

GridPoint home page.

I’ve been using Chrome for two weeks now, and I’m back to Firefox.

Chrome is good, but it doesn’t bring anything new to me.

I’m not sure the “one process per tab” gives as much performance as Google claims. It seems slow to me when Windows must bring things back into memory.

My opinion is that Chrome lags behind Firefox for now, so I’m back.

Will Google succeed in the market with Chrome or not ? I don’t know. Google guys are smart. But Microsoft never got out the OS+office software ghetto, in spite of having some smart  guys too.

This cool site let you manage a simulated portfolio using real-world stocks and quotes, exchange analysis and even win real money ! Your goal is to out-perform the S&P 500. I’m waiting for the one with futures and the french stocks.

The server’s overloaded today, which may  be a good sign (or not).

Their ultimate goal is to leverage “collective intelligence” to make money on real investments. Will it work or not, I’m not sure (you don’t behave the same when you know it’s a game), but the idea’s cool anyway.

First, I must tell that I’m a former FFII member (and a regular IPkat reader).

I understand that the somewhat dry style of the FFII release is uselessly offendant to IP lawyers around, and that this doesn’t add anything to the debate.

This said, I met many IP professionnals at FFII, so swpat involved people shouldn’t underestimate the depth of FFII analysis. It also means that not every IP lawyer is in favor of software patents, far from it.

I’m personally against software patent on the basis of economic arguments: software is fundamentally different from physical products in term of production (copy) and distribution time and cost: zero in the software world, most of the problem in the physical world. It thus makes no economical sense to grant a twenty years monopoly for software, much less an algorithm.

There’s however a thought I’d like to share about law firms (especially IP law firms), some light was shed onto by the derailing of the EC directive on the so-called computer implemented inventions, largely due to the FFII efforts.

Software patents essentially don’t exist in the EU law, and are under attack in the US. No one can predict where it will end. May be something close to the ill-fated directive on CII will be adopted eventually, may be software patent will finally be rejected in the US, hard to tell. To act in the best interest of their clients, law firms should make this clear, at the very least.

Unhappily, this is hardly the case, and I know of at least one IP counsel in France, not worse than any other, that took the adoption of the CII directive for granted (self delusion ?). Some of its startup clients, that I also know of, so advised, applied for patent on software terms. At least one of these startups were let down by its VC once the directive was rejected, on the basis the business plan was no longer sustainable with no way to protect the product. The point is that such episodes globally undermine the trust between startups and law firms, and this is never a sane situation.

If you’re a good IP lawyer, there’s ton of money to make in a world without software patents, so tell your client the truth: patents don’t make software defensible.

PS: I’m the happy owner of trade marks, and I’ve very good relations with my IP lawyers.

The original video is here.

You can see the subtitles on YouTube subtitler.

The full transcription.