One could say it is an all intellectual property edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads. How could one miss the outpouring of opposition to SOPA/PROTECT-IP? If that was an overwhelming story you might have missed the introduction of the Research Works Act that could end the open access mandates now at the National Institutes of Health and coming elsewhere. And because we need some good news, Internet2 announced a new electronic textbook pilot that could be really interesting.

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Support for Web Bill Wanes as Protests Spread

When the powerful world of old media mobilized to win passage of an online antipiracy bill, it marshaled the reliable giants of K Street — the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Recording Industry Association of America and, of course, the motion picture lobby, with its new chairman, former Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat and an insider’s insider.

Yet on Wednesday this formidable old guard was forced to make way for the new as Web powerhouses backed by Internet activists rallied opposition to the legislation through Internet blackouts and cascading criticism, sending an unmistakable message to lawmakers grappling with new media issues: Don’t mess with the Internet.

- Support for Web Bill Wanes as Protests Spread, By Jonathan Weisman, New York Times

The population of the internet became very familiar with the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT-IP Act (a.k.a. PIPA) today with major internet services like Wikipedia blocking access to its articles and Google placing a black rectangle over its logo. Advocacy sites like americancensorship.org and blacklist.eff.org and www.google.com/landing/takeaction sprang up to prompt U.S. citizens to call their Senators and non-U.S. citizens to petition the U.S. State Department to set in motion opposition to bills that once seemed inevitable. And all sorts of people took to Twitter to protest the fact that they couldn’t use Wikipedia to answer their homework.

It wasn’t all a one-way street, though. Former Senator Chris Dodd (and now MPAA chairperson) denounced the protests as “an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on [the sites] for information and [who] use their services.” House Judiciary Committee Chairperson Lamar Smith announced that his committee will resume consideration of SOPA in February. And PROTECT-IP Act sponsor Senator Leahy released a point-by-point rebuttal to some of the claims made by opponents.

At the end of the day, the protest clearly had an effect on the legislation as co-sponsors dropped their support of PROTECT-IP and others made statements opposing the bill. As this is being written on the evening of the 18th, the ProPublica lists 41 Senators supporting and 19 Senators opposing or “leaning no” (OpenCongress’ whip count lists it as 34 to 35 versus last night’s OpenCongress count of 39 to 16), so it is unclear whether there the 60 votes required to end debate and move for passage of PROTECT-IP in the Senate as promised by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

I’ve stated my objections to SOPA and my objections to PROTECT-IP, and reiterated them today by putting up an anti-SOPA/PROTECT-IP splash page on DLTJ. I also still think there is more to learn a few levels deeper than the anti-SOPA/PROTECT-IP advocacy. ProPublica has a project called Who in Congress Supports SOPA and PIPA/PROTECT-IP? that offers a variety of ways to categorize supporters and opponents of the legislation including an accounting of campaign donations by industry. On my own Stop-SOPA/PROTECT-IP page, I ask readers to look into Laurence Lessig’s #Rootstrikers movement. A big part of the disconnect and dysfunctional nature of public office holders is the role that campaign contributions play — or, at best, have the appearance of influence — in the public policy decision making. So while SOPA/PROTECT-IP opponents may have won the battle, there is much to do to win the war of undue influence that created SOPA and PIPA in the first place.

More Legislative Shenanigans: Research Works Act

In case SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, hasn’t given you enough heartburn, here’s another development on the legislative horizon to be concerned about–H.R. 3699, the Research Works Act. The Association of American Publishers has provided a summary of what they hope the bill will accomplish, which is a frightening read for those of us committed to the principles of Open Access. It appears that H.R. 3699 would seriously threaten public access to federally funded research and deal a critical blow to the Open Access movement, which has been buoyed by exactly the kind of activity H.R. 3699 seeks to curtail in the AAP’s view, namely public access mandates and the development of repositories for publicly funded research.

- More Legislative Shenanigans: Research Works Act (H.R. 3699), by Meredith Kahn, University of Michigan’s MPublishing blog

Yes, that’s right — more intellectual property legislation in front of the U.S. Congress. This time it is a bill that would protect the business interests of academic publishers by preventing the U.S. government from mandating open access to federally funded research. An article in The Guardian (U.K.) paper says academic publishers have become the enemies of science. The twist here is that one of the sponsors of the Research Works Act is none other that Representative Darrell Issa, one of the leading opponents to SOPA in the House Judiciary Committee. As you might guess, campaign donations are involved and so there is a call from #Rootstrikers to help fight “SOPA v2″.

Internet2, McGraw-Hill, Courseload, and Five Universities Implement eText Pilot in Spring 2012

Participating universities in the pilot get McGraw-Hill eTexts, the Courseload reader and annotation platform integrated with their Learning Management System, and can be part of a joint research study of eText use and perceptions. Through the Courseload software, students can print, use social annotation with classmates and instructors, and access their eTexts on any HTML5-capable tablet, smartphone, or computer. Students will receive their eTexts at no cost as the institutions are subsidizing the study, and students who prefer a full hardcopy book may optionally order a print-on-demand version of the eText for a $28 fee. Faculty interest at the pilot institutions has been very strong.

- Internet2, McGraw-Hill, Courseload, and Five Universities Implement eText Pilot in Spring 2012, Internet2 Press Release

This is good news for students and etextbooks. It sounds like a good experiment and I’m eager to see the outcomes of the pilot. And something that might make next week’s DLTJ Thursday Threads? The rumor that Apple is expected to delve into textbooks in an announcement today.

Back in the early days of this blog, I had a post on Buzzwords Galore and Bandwidth that May Rival Your Station Wagon. The topic was a “hybrid optical and packet network” being deployed by Internet2 in 2006, and in the tail end of the post text I explained the reference to the station wagon part of the post title:

When you think you have a really zippy network connection, someone will (should?) bring up an old internet adage which says “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.”

In the post comments, Walt Crawford asked “How about a 747 full of BluRay discs?” I must have been bored, because I calculated that bandwidth as 37Tb/s, and I even showed my work. Last week an internet citizen going by the name “Steveo” updated the table for an Airbus A38-800F. He (or she) and I arrived at different numbers (Steveo seems to have mistaken cubic feet for cubic meters in the calculation and didn’t update the maximum airspeed figure), so perhaps it is time to revisit this topic. (And while we’re at it, we’ll throw in numbers for Boeing’s latest freighter aircraft: the 747-8F.)

Boeing 747-400F Main Cargo Deck. How many rectangular boxes can we fit in a round space?

Now, by contrast, the latest notice I could find of high-speed data transfer over a network was a mention in December last year. In a press release from Caltech with the title “High Energy Physicists Set New Record for Network Data Transfer” is this paragraph:

The focus of the exhibit was the [High Energy Physics] team’s record-breaking demonstration of storage-to-storage data transfer over wide area networks from two racks of servers and a network switch-router on the exhibit floor [of SuperComputing 2009 in Portland, Oregon]. The high-energy physics team’s demonstration, “Moving Towards Terabit/Sec Transfers of Scientific Datasets: The LHC Challenge,” achieved a bidirectional peak throughput of 119 gigabits per second (Gbps) and a data flow of more than 110 Gbps that could be sustained indefinitely among clusters of servers on the show floor and at Caltech, Michigan, San Diego, Florida, Fermilab, Brookhaven, CERN, Brazil, Korea, and Estonia.

So, 110 Gbps from a network and 217,648 Gbps from a Boeing 747-8 Freighter. (We’re not counting yet the capacity of the theoretical Airbus A380-800F.) Only three orders of magnitude before the proverbial station wagon full of tapes is put to rest.

Updates

Footnotes

1. The original posting listed 159 as the capacity using a source that is no longer on the web. According to the Boeing site, 159 is the capacity of the lower deck, which doesn’t include the 605 cubic meters of capacity on the main deck. Go figure.
2. Converted from Mach to knots via Google.
3. “Maximum Level Speed” from specs converted from mach to knots via Google.
4. “Includes 15 minute bias”

Building on the shoulders of others — isn’t that how that quote goes? There has been a stack of printouts on my desk for a while now for various access management and service provisioning technologies. Rather than keep the paper, I’m putting the list here so I know how to get back to them if/when I need to. (Of course, along the way if you’d like to comment on them or suggest others to look at, please feel free to do so in the comments.) Note, too, that by listing them here I’m not proposing, or even sure if, all of these pieces come together to a coherent structure.

Grouper — Internet2 Middleware

Now at version 0.9, Grouper is part of a suite of tools from the NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI) that supports “development, testing, and dissemination of architectures, software, and practices in the areas of identity and access management.”

Signet – Internet2 Middleware

Now at version 1.01, released 29-Mar-2006. Could this kind of provisioning service be used to generate XACML files to drive FEDORA?

OASIS eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML)

Sun’s XACML Implementation (available at Sourceforge) is the access management engine embedded into the FEDORA repository.

Acegi Security System for Spring

Release 1.0.0 came out in May 2006 after nearly two years of development.

At the recent LITA Top Technology Trends gathering, Clifford Lynch spoke of an advanced network emerging from Internet2 that is built as a hybrid between optical-switched and packet-switched networks. Today’s Internet2 Newsletter has a description of the activities, excerpted below

Internet2 and Level 3 to Deploy Next Generation Nationwide Research Network

The new Internet2 Network, a dynamic, innovative and cost-effective hybrid optical and packet network, will provide next-generation production services as well as a platform for the development of new networking ideas and techniques.
http://networks.internet2.edu

Internet2 has entered into a partnership with Level 3 Communications, a leading national telecommunications carrier, to provide the U.S. research and education community with a dynamic, innovative and cost-effective hybrid optical and packet network. An extension of the Internet2 cutting-edge tradition, the new network is designed to provide next-generation production services as well as a platform for the development of new networking ideas and techniques. Internet2 is committed to ensuring community involvement in the development, implementation, and operations of the new network.

The new Internet2 Network will be deployed nationally over 13,000 miles of dedicated fiber, providing complete community control of the optical layer and highly granular lightpath services that can be provisioned dynamically. It will provide short-term and long-term waves, as well as on-demand or advanced reservation “lightpath” scheduling. The IP network, corresponding to the current Abilene footprint, will be built on the optical network. A basic connectivity package for direct connectors is expected to include two 10 Gbps waves, one for IP and one for point-to-point optical services.

Optical (Layer 1) network characteristics:

• Initial deployment – 10 x 10 Gbps wavelengths along network footprint
• Maximum capacity – 80 x 10 Gbps wavelengths
• Scalability – potential migration to 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps capabilities
• Flexibility – support for sub-wavelength (e.g., 1 GigE) dynamic provisioning across every wave on the network backbone.

The Level 3 carrier agreement provides reliability and unprecedented community control over the networking infrastructure, without taking on the risks of equipment sparing and obsolescence as well as the burden of substantial operational responsibilities. Level 3 will be responsible for meeting a Service Level Agreement (SLA). The buildout of the network will happen over several months, with a target completion in the fall of 2007. The transition to the new network will not disrupt existing connectivity and services.

The Internet2 Networks page has a description that is a little bit more approachable:

Internet2 and Level 3 Communications, Inc. will develop and deploy a new nationwide network and new services to enhance and support the advanced needs of the academic and research community. This new network initially will offer Internet2 members 100 gigabits per second (Gbps) of capacity, more than 10 times that of the current Internet2 backbone network, and will be designed to easily scale to add capacity as Internet2 members’ requirements evolve over time. Based on input and feedback from the research and education community, including experience gained with the Hybrid Optical and Packet Infrastructure (HOPI) project, the network will be designed to support a full range of production IP services as well as new on-demand, dedicated optical wavelength services to support the most demanding network applications and experimentation.

Okay, maybe that description isn’t all that more approachable either. The thing is this: the research and development community are pushing the raw networking capabilities farther and farther. “Optical wavelength services” may not mean much to you — perhaps about as much as the intricate chemical dance that turns petroleum into gasoline, plastics, chapstick and bubble gum ¹ — but the comparison is not too much of a stretch. They’ve figured out how to send multiple frequencies of light down the same piece of fibre-optic cable, effectively multiplying its capacity. The neat thing about the Internet2 work is that, should you need it, it sounds like you’ll be able to sign up for a point-to-point lightwave frequency to do with what you need. (You’ll probably need a pretty good reason, of course.)

Oh, and the stationwagon comment? When you think you have a really zippy network connection, someone will (should?) bring up an old internet adage which says “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.” (This, of course, shouldn’t be confused with the term “sneakernet” — the bandwidth speed and capacity at which you could walk your flash drive over to your colleague rather than trying to e-mail, FTP, torrent, webify, or send via carrier pigeon that document that the two of you have been working on.)

Footnotes

1. Butyl Rubber is in Bubble Gum and you need petroleum to make butyl rubber. gack