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As a follow-up to one of yesterday’s posts, BoingBoing reports that FON is offering 10,000 free WiFi routers to US residents. It’s not a mesh network scheme, but it is a free way to share WiFi.

The New York Times reports that a recent Chinese test of a space weapons system has left several hundred pieces of shrapnel in orbit. Unfortunately, the Chinese test happened at 530 miles above the earth’s surface. It’s likely that many of these pieces will never fall to earth.

This isn’t the worst accident in terms of space junk. According to Space.com, a US rocket exploded in orbit in 1996, spreading over 300,000 objects in the same orbit as the Hubble Space Telescope. Sections of the International Space Station (ISS) are armored to protect the station against very small orbiting objects.

But China’s recent test was irresponsible and may have long-lasting effects. It was the country’s first test of a space weapons system, which by itself is alarming. The explosion was a significant addition to to the field of orbiting debris that can disable current satellites and prevent the launch of new satellites. That’s a serious threat to the value chain of any company that depends on this data.

It’s unlikely that that some of these pieces will strike commercial communications satellites. It’s becoming more likely that a satellite will be damaged or destroyed as it launches through the debris field in the lower orbits, on its way to its permanent place in the sky. That includes weather satellites, GPS satellites, and other systems.
A 20-year old paint chip smaller than a punctuation mark in this blog almost blew out a window during an early Space Shuttle flight. The United States can track larger pieces of space junk, so that the Space Shuttle and ISS can avoid the objects before they strike, but the smaller objects are harder to track and almost as dangerous.

From the Associated Press, here’s a report that more high school students are using MP3 files provided by textbook publishers. Listening to Spanish lessons on an iPod beats sitting in a language lab, and it seems that students might spend more time on the lessons. According to a 2006 marketing survey, half of all US teenagers own a digital audio player. At some schools, students can borrow players to listen to lessons.
The article also notes that several universities have partnered with Apple to offer branded iTunes stores. These stores can integrate with a university’s web sites, including WebCT, to provide free hosting of MP3 files for college courses. The university receives an affiliate fee for any iTunes audio and video sold through the store.

As reported in today’s New York Times and BoingBoing, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has apparently changed his company’s strategy regarding digital music. He’s done it in a very public fashion - with an article on the Apple web site. (http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/)

The iTunes Store sells digital music files that are copy protected, using a form of digital rights management (DRM). DRM is a set of rules developed by publishers and enforced by software that limit how a digital file can be used. Apple’s FairPlay DRM makes it difficult to move music purchased on iTunes from one computer to another.

Jobs proposes two alternatives - the status quo and an industry-wide adoption of FairPlay - before recommending a third choice: selling digital without DRM, most likely in the popular MP3 format that almost every digital music player supports.

iTunes biggest legal competitor, eMusic, has sold 100 million songs without DRM. Jobs also provides calculations that indicate Aple has sold only 22 songs to the average iPod user, even though many iPods are “full”.

If the record companies really are selling 20 billion songs a year without any DRM at all, as Jobs claims, then the current iTunes model has to change.

Several European countries have sued Apple over the DRM used in iTunes. Last week, the major music publishers held a summit to discuss selling music without DRM. Jobs is telling these countries that Apple isn’t the impediment - it’s the music publishers that wanted Apple to use DRM in the first place. Of course, there’s more than one side to every story.

In my previous post, I mentioned .org domain names.

Domain names are organized into a few hundred TLDs or top level domains, such as .com, .us, .gov, .eu, and various codes for individual countries.

I had never heard of the .um TLD until I saw an article about its demise in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The .um TLD was intended for the United States’ minor outlying islands but hasn’t been used. So .um has been abolished.