BC Law IPTF Blog

One by-product of my recent trip to Southern Sudan is my renewed interest in sustainable use and design. The houses in the Yei bomas were of good construction, in stark contrast to the slipshod, slapped-together mud lean-tos I encountered too often in southern Tanzania.

But here’s a post off of Treehugger on the construction of a straw bale house. The construction references the Building with Awareness DVD on straw bale construction. Some of the ideas behind straw bale houses are to be solar passive (heated by facing certain sides and windows to the sun), well-insulated, reusing local materials, and to be overall energy-efficient.

I would love to bring some of these ideas into the construction of traditional, indigenous housing in developing countries. I know that some of the pushback, though, is the recommendations you can make aren’t “revolutionary.” For example, making a house solar passive doesn’t have the same “wow effect” as giving them a TV. Therefore, they look at you funny when you talk about things like insulation or longevity of building materials (see Tanzania).

ArsTechnica reports on some software that ISPs can use to block or throttle BitTorrent traffic:

ISPs fight against encrypted BitTorrent downloads

The claim is that BitTorrent traffic may amount to as much as 70-80% of ISP traffic. In a pre-reaction (because I don’t believe any ISP has installed this software yet), people are thinking about creating an encrypted, obfuscated BitTorrent client. I think Bram Cohen, initial developer of BitTorrent, has the proper response to this hypothetical exchange of threats.

I agree with Cohen that instead of fighting this throttling software directly, let people decide whether to choose ISPs who block BitTorrent traffic or those who don’t. This is best for the technology–it says, “Accept me for who I am–because I’m here to stay.”

I think more interesting is a little factoid that Cohen brings up: ISPs cache BitTorrent traffic. Woah. That means that ISPs are storing and distributing content on their servers. What if the content is copyrightable? Then aren’t they distributing bits and pieces illegally? Or at least aiding and abetting the pirates?