I walked to Le Blanc Maison, a local five-star hotel, where

several delegations were waiting for the bus. When half an

hour had gone by without a bus, it became clear that actually

the ONLY bus of the day (7:30am) had already left. Three of

us split a taxi, which could only take us to about half a

mile away from the PalExpo. There, we tried to walk towards

PalExpo but were told needed to catch an authorized shuttle

instead. There were a really amazing number of police. After

we caught a ride on the shuttle, there were cops, some with

machine guns, about ever twenty feet. There were about ten

levels of spiked barriers before entering Kram, and we

passed by a pair of military helicopters at the ready and at

least one very visible sniper.

The lines were long but reasonably fastmoving. Security was

a joke; even though there were metal detectors everyone was

pretty much waved through. My laptop was not checked. In the

tent, kiosks provided surprisingly snappy net access and no

blocks, but the computers themselves were very tightly locked

down - the Start button was wholly disabled. It looks like

they may have been using a local caching proxy to accelerate

things; I cannot otherwise explain the speed, given that we

are at least 150-200ms from the US backbone. But kudos for

setting up a very professional Net drop here. Wireless is

pretty universal - you can see the APs dangling from the

ceiling about every 40 feet or so, so signal strength is high,

but AIM and ICMP are blocked. (I route around the AIM block

with IM Smarter; others can use meebo, too.) I'm periodically

booted from the Net but it's easy to get back on.

In many ways, this feels like an international version of

COMDEX. The complete lack of theme sensitivity on the part of some

organizations is stupefying - Vivendi Universal has a largish

booth replete with booth babes advertising their latest

video games. It's like the team got lost on their way to E3

and ended up in Tunisia but decided to set up anyhow.

Microsoft and Intel have very large booths, but so does Egypt

and the EU. Microsoft is demoing a free OS mod that can lock

a computer down for use in a heavily shared environment, such

as in schools. The only catch is that the computer has to pass

a "Geniune Windows" check - really, this is a play by MS to try

and up their sales revenues in the third world by use of

carrots that will end up proving essential. This seems like a

pretty reasonable approach, but if schools have to pay the full

legal cost of Windows, it will be interesting to see how well

MS can compete against Linux solutions. I've already been almost

forcibly handed two separate Linux LiveCD distributions.

Amazing.

The really interesting stuff is in the side stalls; this one

group based out of Namibia has been running kiosks for five

years, but found that everyone just wanted to play games on

them or check the news. This mapped closely to my own experience

in Ghana when kids (or the teachers) were left unsupervised. The

Namibia group (SchoolNet.na) came up with a clever solution;

they created a simple LiveCD setup of Linux with a huge bundle

of offline content, including a bunch of Wikipedia, slices of

Project Gutenberg, and online lessons in math, chemistry, and

physics. They then made series of engaging cartoons that explain

the benefits of the software, which apparently were released in

local newspapers. The technique worked, and students, teachers,

and parents all started calling in to ask for the software.

Since the Linux setup works to the exclusion of other distracting

software that tends to be Windows-based, this has the advantage

of focusing users on educational needs. When a lab is set up with

SchoolNet, it becomes much more productive. Ebben, a Namibian

representative, explained all of this to me and more with great

enthusiasm and vigor. It's all free, all out of love, and all of

very high quality. SchoolNet was sandwiched between Nokia's

megabooth and Vivendi's Spiderman-hawking booth babes.

Cuba had a large kiosk out with materials that proclaimed their

victories and advances in the face of "a genocidal blockade" on

the part of the US government. Most of the pamphlet exists as a

long and awkwardly worded rant against the United States.

As an interesting note, folks who don't actually want to see

anything get done try to "qualify and attach", as in "yes, issue

XYZ is important, but it cannot be attained without considering

ABC." Usually where ABC is something not really relevant at all

to XYZ. This tactic says to me that XYZ is a non-issue for the

presenting organization, or at least ABC is such a big issue

that it overshadows any real consideration of XYZ.

The language used in the documents and speeches here are very

typically UN. They sound good but say nothing. "We support the

inclusiveness of e-participation, encouraging all stakeholders

to engage in the advancement of the information society." Hey,

I actually just made that up, but that's pretty much the tone

of about 95% of the content here. Utterly devoid of real

meaning and real action. Ugh.

It's interesting how whole countries here have booths just like

Sony would have a booth at COMDEX. Rwanda, Ghana, Mali, UAE,

Canada, the US, even Israel are here. There were guards posted

by the Israeli booth, and the US booth, next door to the Israeli

one, was very small - several times smaller than the South

Africa, Canada, or even Bahrain. It's amusing to have whole

countries promoting and advertising themselves, for reasons I

cannot fully put my finger on.

ُSitting down now to Robin Gross's IP Justice talk.