Why is Japan so far behind in terms of the Internet?

They claimed they did "The partial transcript from the 2009 trial still stands as the only extensive public record of CSIRO's outsized claims to have invented WiFi."

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...nvented-wifi-and-sued-its-way-to-430-million/

Their initial claim for being sole inventor was thrown out

https://plus.google.com/+ABC/posts/F1rhkVrmfb1

He didn't invent fourier transforms or their use. The odds are that there was prior art covered by official secrets act by some government (like GCHQ invented public key cryptography

http://www.gchq.gov.uk/History/Pages/PKE.aspx).

The case seems to be related to the 1997 company they created, which was bought in 1999 by Cisco and Broadcom. However this company got sued because the multi frequency violated another patent owned by Philips.

http://blog.patentology.com.au/2012/04/story-behind-csiros-wi-fi-patent.html

The patent runs out at the end of the year. I suspect WiLAN will go after the patent licenses that CSIRO takes when all the money is in.

This decision is only a legal one, based on paper work. The moral question about whether they had anything to do with WiFi is more important. So far they haven't needed to prove whether their work was copied or not. If IEEE came up with it on it's own or took some theoretical research (which is all their patent appears to be) and made it actually work then I don't believe they have any moral claim.

 

Couldn't have said it better, this feeling is very recognizable even though I haven't been there for almost seven years now!

 

That's all news to me, but it does seem like posturing rather than a meaningful claim. Thanks for the link.

From your Ars link: "When the IEEE adopted the 802.11a standard in 1999—and the more widely-used 802.11g standard years later—the group was choosing CSIRO technology. Now CSIRO had come to court to get the payments it deserved."

If the underlined part is the case (and it does look that way), then why shouldn't the people responsible for the research see a return on their investments? If they happen to use the US patent system to accomplish that end then so be it.

 

http://delimiter.com.au/2012/04/12/is-the-csiro-a-patent-troll-us-debate-turns-feral/

"However, as Mullin documented in his article, opinions differ drastically on to what extent the CSIRO was actually involved in creating the Wi-Fi technology which is in such common use today. The Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a standards-setting organisation, created a working group for the evolving 802.11 standard in 1990, three years before the CSIRO filed its first patent in the area, and one of the key Australian engineers involved in the CSIRO’s work, Terrance Percival, has acknowledged in court that the team hadn’t invented any of the constituent elements of its wireless strategy."

They didn't really invent anything. I'm not aware they built anything.

It appears they'll need the patent licenses to pay fines etc in their upcoming fraud case.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSIRO

"CSIRO–Novartis–DataTrace scandal On 11 April 2013, the Sydney Morning Herald ran a story on how CSIRO had "duped" the Swiss-based pharmaceutical giant Novartis into purchasing an anti-counterfeit technology for its vials of injectible Voltarin. The invention was marketed by a small Australian company called DataTrace DNA as a method of identifying fake vials, on the basis that a unique tracer code developed by CSIRO was embedded in the product. However, the code sold to Novartis for more than A$2M was apparently not unique, and was based on a "cheap tracer ... bought in bulk from a Chinese distributor". Novartis was contractually bound not to reverse-engineer the tracer to verify its uniqueness. The Sydney Morning Herald report alleges that this was done with the knowledge of key CSIRO personnel.[SUP][50]"

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/vial-behaviour-20130410-2hlw4.html

They appear to have lied quite alot in this deal.
[/SUP]

 

I have no problems with old or simplistic design webpages. For example, Hardcore Gaming 101, Chris Covell's and Yakumo's Segagaga Domain are great because they focus on the info and picture rather than design and any sort of gimmicks.

The ammount of hidden scripts, ads and all sorts of stuff being loaded on current websites is what annoys me. Makes both Adblock and NoScript mandatory.

 

And yet later:

"It looks to me like the CSIRO has definitely done some stellar work in aiding the development of the 802.11 Wi-Fi standard, and there is quite a lot of evidence that Wi-Fi as we know it today would not have been developed as quickly without the agency’s work."

So even the author of that piece agrees with me, that their contribution is some nonzero value, which is all I'm claiming too.

Seems more like DataTrace made a bunch of claims it couldn't back up. But that's getting quite off topic....

 

Indeed !

I was under the impression that home internet service there was quite pricey and capped in terms of what we are used to. Dunno where I heard this though.

 

They were probably being sarcastic - I was living in Tokyo 10 years ago, and I had 100Mb/s Internet service even back then - and it really was 100Mb/s, both up and down. There might have been maximum usage restrictions, but I never ran into them even when I was downloading all the time.

I understand that you can get 1Gb/s service in the big cities now.

 

Times New Roman font i like that font its not in the new Microsoft word plus i liked clippy in ms word 2000 and i even liked the dial up tone sound cool but when broadband is way faster.
I hate all this updating crap that's what slows everything down on any computer,

Like my p3 computer boots quicker than my windows xp with sp3 and all the updates.

So it shows update's that makes it take longer to boot they both have 7200rpm hard drives.

 

Interesting takes. Is there a right one? Probably not, but the one I've always subscribed to is that their internet connectivity's relation to the country being shut down for 250 years was eerily similar. The short answer: NTT's greedy (and stupid) board decided to "skip" ADSL, which meant Japan was on the track to use ISDN only until fiber was available. The result: Expensive as fuck internet as calls were metered. Browsing was not really commonplace until broadband came available to the masses which started in late 2000. This resulted in a lower online population, and the ones that were weren't so demanding of content. After NTT got sued and lost, the floodgate opened, but it was too late. Phones were already the main vehicle for email and browsing. You can probably blame a lot of this on the train lifestyle, too, though.

As for the aesthetics? This is no mystery. Japan simply makes things confusing. "Beauty in simplicity" does not exist... or the idea is totally missed. Just about any mundane task is an act of pulling teeth. Look at the fucking roads. Most web pages mimic other advertisements. Space = money = cram as much shit into it as you can.

Never heard of these but I have heard of ISPs checking your content for illegal shit if you're downloading say 10-20GB a day, daily for an extended period.

I think only in select buildings. It's been around a while now, actually, but it's never been in my hoods.

 

after I looked on the moderator avatar I just felt, wth is Yakumo mentioning his own website lolz but then I realized what is going on.

 

Funny, I had forgotten this until you made that comment - when I got that 100Mb/s connection the experience was ... interesting. First of all, there seemed to be many phases in getting it - you had to pay an initial deposit, then they came around and found a place to put the ONU (the connection was the "Mansion type" where there was a common ONU and each subscriber in the building got an Ethernet cable from it), then you had to fill out more paperwork, pay more money, then finally it got installed and they wired the cable to my apartment.

And it didn't work. It sort of worked - the connection was up, but nowhere on any of the documents was any mention of what IP address to use, and DHCP didn't do anything. NTT said I should ask "my ISP" for the details which was confusing, since I thought they were the ISP - but it turns out they weren't; all they provided was a connection, and if you actually wanted to use it for anything you also had to pay a separate company a separate fee for the Internet connection. Somehow, the entire rather complex process of getting this line installed had been carried out without anyone ever mentioning this.

Even better, when I asked them who could provide this service they said they couldn't tell me, and I would have to find the provider on my own (although, thinking about it, this might have been a result of the lawsuit that GajinPunch mentioned earlier) - so I ended up having to call up some ISP at random and ask them if they could provide service over NTT Hikari Premium - which they couldn't - but they did give me a list of companies that could.

 

somewhat related question - does anyone in Japan know if its possible to own 2 .co.jp sites without having to set up 2 companies?

I know .jp is fine for anyone in japan with no restrictions but .co.jp...

[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR="bgcolor: #eeeeee"]
[TD="bgcolor: #FFFFFF"]Any company registered in Japan is eligible.[/TD]
[TD="bgcolor: #FFFFFF"]1 .co.jp domain per company allowed.[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

I want to register a sub brand for my company (the company I work for)

 

This is true... and as confusing as it is, it is better this way. You get a choice of provider, and their services vary. For me, a global IP is a make or break deal, and only a handful of them provide it. I did some Googling, found out which one did, and voila, I have it. My last two places I lived were either connected to the mansion itself (no provider choice, but luckily for 400 yen a month I got the global IP greatly improved performance) or offered by cable... the latter of which was super awesome in every way.

I had a mansion I worked out of it. They didn't offer global IP, but I needed it even worse than home. It was a disaster, and I had two years of teeth pulling. Sucked so fucking bad. They were like, "we'll just set your IP to never time out" but of course it did. To boot, we were using some fancy Cisco routers which I don't know how to operate, so I couldn't just change it. It sucked. For a long time I used Squid and routed all of my web browsing through my home connection. So sad.

The lawsuit was the founder of Tokyo Metallic who, as legend states, was an NTT board member. He quit, sued, and won. Thus, ADSL was born in Japan. So sad that you have to pound people on the head to show them the way forward here.

Please don't tell me they actually regulate this to companies only.

 

http://www.jp-domains.com/info/faq.php

"for .CO.JP domains, you will require a Japanese company or Japanese branch company and provide us with a document issued from the Japanese government known as the toukibotouhon. "

in a way it is good as it stops cybersquatting

 

Wow, that is some strict regulation, but like you say, it makes sense in an odd sort of way. :S

Can't imagine that sort of thing being imposed over here...

 

Yeah, I have no fundamental issues with the idea of unbundling - it would just have been nice for someone to point out that it was how it worked, rather than just giving me a line that didn't do anything on it's own without ever mentioning it.

Maybe I was lucky, but the ISP I ended up using (Asahi.net - picked pretty much at random) supported static IPs, they even had a little box on the application from asking if you wanted static or dynamic. They also had all their docs in English, which was a nice change from NTT (at least back then - maybe it's changed now).

 

But it's poor for anyone that wants to open up a .co.jp account (which is a legitimate request) and hasn't gone through the pain and high cost of incorporation. You don't need these things to open up a shop.

Obviously the argument can go both ways, but I'll take this is another tick in the list of things of why Japan's business model fucks small business owners in the ass.

EDIT: Hard

 

Ofc you're not meaning to say that ALL japanese sites have phone versions?! It definitely has something to do with why sites look like crap. A shitty ugly web 1.0 low res site with only one version is easily done in like 1 minute and it's compatible with most devices out there even old WAP phones. No need to make a special phone version. It's easy to do, it's done superfast and it's dirtcheap to do too.