Citizen.wired.net

How far back do you want to go today? EU now limits linking, P2P, and soon will likely have some stupid law banning VoIP/IM to protect their telcos. This is great. In another 10 years we won't have anyone to compete against globally but ourselves. The only surprise here is why the French aren't hatching these dumb ideas first.

BT Broadband accuses P2P users of copyright abuse. EU Copyright Directive to spawn wider bans? [The Register]

Next Step -- The Personal VPN

9:19:16 AM

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I'm off into another area I don't know anything about -- VPNs. Now that I have Remote Access working for Radio I want to take the next step -- establishing a personal VPN for connection to my home network when I'm away. Several questions:

What does this require?
Am I right in thinking a VPN would allow secure access to my entire network at home?
Don't I need some sort of VPN or RAS server sitting behind my firewall and acting as a gateway to my other computers?
Does W2K Pro have this built in?
If not, what is the easiest way to do it?
Doesn't W2K Pro have a built-in VPN client?
Is this going to take longer, cost more?

Head for the Hills, We Don't Need No Stinkin' Telco

9:08:23 AM

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Something to keep in mind when I move to my bunker in the mountains. Maybe I don't have to worry about whether or not the telcos serve my remote outpost anymore if I can get a few like-minded neighbors together. I already have a friend in Dallas who's spent the last five years doing high-speed spread-spectrum wireless for commercial networks. He says it isn't that hard or that expensive. Throw in a little Wi-Fi and who knows...

Do It Yourself DSL.
An article from Business 2.0 about a small town who got fed up waiting for the telcos to offer broadband in their community:

Oppedahl and about a dozen of his neighbors bought it last year for approximately $5,000. Then they scooped up cable modems, routers, and other equipment (usually for pennies on the dollar on eBay) and spent the past 10 months setting up the first subscriber-owned DSL co-op in America. While it all might seem unremarkable to outsiders -- it serves 12 homes at average DSL data speeds -- it does offer a compelling script for rural towns that don't want to wait until the next ice age to join the 21st century.

This isn't unlike the UTOPIA project in spirit, although UTOPIA is somewhat larger in scale (500,000 end users). [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]