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stpeter's blog on jabber, technology, history, philosophy, et alia

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2004-11-30

Priorities

End-of-year Jabber goals.

Hmm, there is one month left in the year. Here are the Jabber work items I need to finish by then:

Work with Fabio Forno to add a "W3C Considerations" section to JEP-0072: SOAP Over XMPP (the SOAP protocol binding needs to be properly defined, just as the SOAP 1.2 spec does for the HTTP binding).
Finalize the changes to JEP-0084: User Avatars, incorporating feedback from ralphm and temas.
Incorporate all of ralphm's feedback into JEP-0060: Publish-Subscribe.
Make a few small adjustments to JEP-0133: Service Administration so that we can move it out of the Council Queue.
Complete a Last Call (and perhaps a Council vote) on JEP-0144: Roster Item Exchange.
Complete Council voting on JEP-0124: HTTP Binding.
Get final feedback on the XMPP URI I-D so that it can be submitted for consideration as an individual RFC.
Write the first draft of a JEP describing the threat model for XMPP (following up on JEP-0139); hopefully we can use this as the starting point for a small "XMPP security summit" at IETF 62 in Minneapolis next March.
Complete the first draft of a JEP describing how to encapsulate personal profile data in x:data (given that this encapsulation might be used by a wide variety of communities, it will need to be able to include much more than the small dataset specified by vCard, thus the desirability of using x:data).

Yes, that's just a lot of specs, but after all I'm merely a protocol geek. Hopefully next year (after all of this JEP/RFC work) I can begin to focus on other priorities, such as a certification testing program for Jabber/XMPP software.

Posted on 2004-11-30 at 15:23. File under jabber.

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Searching Forward

The other half of search.

Bob Wyman has posted some interesting thoughts on what he calls prospective search. Whereas Google lets you find out what is already known, PubSub.com helps you learn about what has just been discovered (thanks to the magic of content syndication and XMPP delivery). For instance, I have a standing search request at PubSub.com for any information related to Jabber or XMPP, and such information appears almost instantly in my Jabber client via the Mimir service (PubSub.com also has its own XMPP-based delivery engine, but it doesn't connect to other Jabber servers yet). It's all about the real-time Internet.

Posted on 2004-11-30 at 14:49. File under technology.

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Email Is Dying

Korea leads the way.

The English edition of Digital Chosunilbo reports that email is dying in Korea, and that the combination of IM and weblogs is rendering email obsolete, especially among younger Koreans (for whom "email is an old and formal communication means"). I still use email for all the discussion lists to which I subscribe (which I read in a newsreader via Gmane), but other than that I rarely use email these days -- well, other than to get my daily 300+ spam messages. ;-)

Posted on 2004-11-30 at 14:37. File under technology.

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Personal Connections

Friends online.

Some random notes about a few friends of mine:

My friend Bretigne Shaffer has two newish articles online: Kick the Habit: Politics Is Not the Answer and Searching for Purpose in a Brutal World.
My friend Mary Catherine Dodson has a blog.
My friend Jimbo Wales (who happens to have been born the day after me!) also has a blog.

Posted on 2004-11-30 at 14:21. File under personal.

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2004-11-29

Trickle Up

Changing the world, one micro-entrepreneur at a time.

Reading about the success of the private sector in Somalia reminded me of the Trickle Up Program, a charitable organization dedicated to helping the poorest of the poor by providing seed capital and business training so that such people can start their own micro-businesses. Somehow I lost track of them, but I think I'll start donating again, since they play a unique role in fostering self-sufficiency worldwide.

Posted on 2004-11-29 at 19:23. File under society.

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Anarchy and Invention

Private sector services in Somalia.

Perry Metzger pointed me to a fascinating study (published by the World Bank, of all things) documenting the provision of so-called public goods in Somalia. The introduction reads:

Somalia has lacked a recognized government since 1991 -- an unusually long time. In extremely difficult conditions the private sector has demonstrated its much-vaunted capability to make do. To cope with the absence of the rule of law, private enterprises have been using foreign jurisdictions or institutions to help with some tasks, operating within networks of trust to strengthen property rights, and simplifying transactions until they require neither. Somalia's private sector experience suggests that it may be easier than is commonly thought for basic systems of finance and some infrastructure services to function where government is extremely weak or absent.

Not even the most die-hard anarcho-capitalist would claim that Somalia is paradise on earth. But it's impressive how far the Somalis have come in the last 13 years, especially considering the plunder perpetrated by the former government of Siad Barre, the damage done during the civil war over who would succeed him, and the meddling of the United States and other outside powers.

Posted on 2004-11-29 at 19:07. File under society.

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2004-11-27

The Essence

The world's most valuable commodity.

Claire Wolfe has composed quite the ode to uninterrupted time. As a friend of mine used to say, time is not of the essence -- it is the essence. And you gotta love any essay whose epigraph comes from Yevgeny Zamyatin!

Posted on 2004-11-27 at 21:41. File under society.

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Labelling Patronage

Yet another model for supporting artistic creation.

It seems that composer Peter Maxwell Davies is being sponsored by Naxos Records to write a series of ten string quartets, to be entitled the Naxos String Quartets. Yet another creative approach to encouraging the creation of new art works.

Posted on 2004-11-27 at 21:16. File under music.

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Rather Not

Anchors away.

Although I don't watch TV news, I'm happy to see that both Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw are moving on. The Economist opines that these retirements are further signs that the old media are being replaced by something altogether more diverse:

The erosion of the old media establishment probably does entail some shift to the right, if only because so many of the newer voices are more reliably pro-Republican than Mr Rather. But the new media are simply too anarchic and subversive for any single political faction to take control of them....

Mr Rather's passing does not mean that the liberal orthodoxy is about to give way to a new conservative one. It means that all orthodoxies are being chewed up by a voraciously unpredictable news media, which is surely all to the good.

Hear, hear!

Posted on 2004-11-27 at 21:12. File under society.

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The Oort Cloud

A new way to philosophize?

In a recent blog entry, Roderick Long links to and comments on John Searle's paper Philosophy in a New Century. Searle claims that the undeniable growth of knowledge during the "present era" renders philosophical skepticism obsolete; instead, it is time for "a new kind of philosophy" whose starting point is "what we know about the real world". I agree with Long that Searle's argument is a bit weird, because it was possible to found a philosophy on the reality of human knowledge long before the present day: in fact, Aristotle did just that over two thousand years ago. The progress of science is not the hinge upon which turns the plausibility of the skeptical premise, and Searle's assumption that science matters in this way elicits from Long a charge of scientism.

Yet I would go farther than either Long or Searle: I think that the relentless march of science will eventually lead, not to a new kind of philosophy, but to the extinction of philosophy altogether. As I wrote many years ago in my journal, as the realm of machines and science expands, philosophy contracts. I see the discipline of philosophy as a kind of intellectual nebula or Oort cloud: a hot, gaseous region in which stars are birthed. Once upon a time, philosophy contained many disciplines that have since emerged as sciences unto themselves: astronomy, cosmology, economics, psychology, political science, logic, jurisprudence, and so on. With the advancement of science, we can expect further sciences to emerge from philosophy (a process already underway): decision theory, information theory, cognitive science, even (eventually) notoriously thorny fields like ethics and aesthetics.

A big question for philosophers is: what can they do to help those sciences emerge? Part of the work remaining for philosophers is to clarify what Long (following John McDowell) calls "constitutive conditions" (that which makes X what it is), which help determine what investigators need to look for in a certain field of study. Kurt Gödel calls this task a matter of defining the "primitives" of a discipline. For example, he says that "the beginning of physics was Newton's work of 1687, which needs only very simple primitives: force, mass, law" (Hao Wang, A Logical Journey, p. 167). Gödel looked for similar insights within philosophy itself: "philosophy as exact theory should do for metaphysics as much as Newton did for physics" (Hao Wang, From Mathematics to Philosophy, p. 85).

I think Gödel's search was overly broad. It's unrealistic to try to do for metaphysics what Newton did for physics. Better to work on more tightly-focused parts of philosophy, just as Gödel himself did in the realm of mathematical logic (which was once considered part of philosophy but no longer is). That's why areas such as decision theory seem ripe for the picking. Some claim that John Rawls obtained similar results with regard to a theory of justice (Gödel's colleague Hao Wang seemed to think so), but I have my doubts -- Rawls made some kind of progress toward a clearer understanding of justice as a "primitive" in social affairs, but he got enough wrong (especially from the more libertarian perspective of contract and other voluntary relations) that his work is not particularly helpful in moving toward a fully free society (if you want justice, work for freedom).

Another approach is what Hao Wang called "phenomenography": an updated pursuit of something like Francis Bacon's Great Instauration, which would map out the terrain of accumulated human knowledge and thereby move beyond analytic philosophy by doing justice to what we know.

I'm slowly working on an extended essay about Wang and Gödel, in which I plan to explore these issues at greater length. But I think we can safely say that, just as with the original Oort cloud (whose collapse formed the sun and planets), philosophy's contraction will be humanity's gain.

Posted on 2004-11-27 at 17:14. File under philosophy.

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2004-11-25

Rand to Goldwater

Toward a practical Objectivist politics.

On June 4, 1960, Ayn Rand wrote a letter to Senator Barry Goldwater, which is long enough to qualify as one of her more extended treatments of practical politics (earlier this month I noted some of Rand's public reflections on Goldwater's candidacy). The letter is fascinating in several respects. For one, it illuminates the conservative leanings of so many Randanistas. Commenting on Goldwater's book The Conscience of a Conservative, Rand equates conservatism with capitalism (Rand's preferred term for a fully free society) and liberalism with collectivism. Perhaps she was simply flattering Goldwater here, but it seems clear that Rand always hoped for a politically consistent conservatism (i.e., a truly free-market rather than corporatist or second-hand collectivist movement on the political right), even if those hopes were dashed throughout her lifetime (despite their individualist and libertarian rhetoric, she was bitterly disappointed by candidates such as Willkie in 1936, Goldwater in 1964, and Reagan in 1980). Why did she keep getting her hopes up? Her behavior doesn't seem very rational in this regard.

Notice that I say a politically consistent conservatism, not a philosophically consistent conservatism. Both in her essay "How to Judge a Political Candidate" (March, 1964) and in her letter to Goldwater, Rand separates the political realm from that of philosophy and religion. In fact, she takes Goldwater to task for mixing religion and politics in the first chapter of his book:

According to the Constitutional principle of the separation of church and state, religion is a private matter; it should not be brought into public issues or into the province of government, and it should not be made a part of political movements. Consider the implications of the attempt to tie Conservatism to religion: if such an attempt succeeded, it would make religion an integral part of our political system, in direct contradiction to the Constitution.

(What would Rand think of the current political scene, in which a supposedly compassionate conservative institutes a Presidential office of faith-based initiatives? Egads!)

Rand argues that Goldwater's proposal to "unite all Conservatives in a common cause" is "the most crucially important goal in politics", but that "it cannot be accomplished without ... a set of rational principles, which all those who join can accept with full understanding and conviction." Although Rand calls this a "philosophical base", she must mean a base of specifically political philosophy, not anything much deeper (e.g., she did not mean a philosophical base consisting of her own philosophy of Objectivism, since presumably not all advocates of a free society could accept her philosophy with full understanding and conviction). As she wrote in "How to Judge a Political Candidate":

One cannot expect, nor is it necessary, to agree with a candidate's total philosophy -- only with his political philosophy (and only in terms of essentials). It is not a Philosopher-King that we are electing, but an executive for a specific, delimited job.... we have to judge him as we judge any work, theory or product of mixed premises: by his dominant trend.... A vote for a candidate does not constitute an endorsement of his entire position, not even of his entire political position, only of his basic political principles....

Given Rand's early and clear statements on the relationship between underlying philosophical or religious theories and specifically political movements, it's puzzling why latter-day Objectivists have been so critical of the modern libertarian movement for its alleged lack of a consistent philosophical base (by which they do not mean the lack of a consistent set of basic political principles, but the lack of a deeper base in ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology). That's an issue I'll have to address when I write my planned essay on a practical Objectivist politics.

Posted on 2004-11-25 at 20:38. File under politics.

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2004-11-24

Aristotle's Children

Toward a history of Aristotle.

Yesterday I finished reading Aristotle's Children by Richard Rubenstein. I've long wanted to write a history of Aristotle -- the influence of his ideas throughout history -- and Rubenstein's book provides some material toward such a history, focusing mainly on the period 1150 to 1350 CE. Rubenstein argues that the Judeo-Christian tradition has been challenged in the realm of natural philosophy by three successive systems of thought: Aristotelian philosophy, Newtonian physics, and Darwinian biology. He also maintains that one must not confuse Aristotle's open method with the hardened positions that some latter-day Aristotelians clung to -- a distinction that precious few modern scientists make, but that was clear to Galileo long ago (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems):

Is it possible for you to doubt, that if Aristotle should see the new discoveries in the sky he would change his opinions and correct his books and embrace the most sensible doctrines, casting away from himself those people so weak-minded as to be induced to go on abjectly maintaining everything he ever said?

Posted on 2004-11-24 at 21:31. File under philosophy.

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2004-11-18

The Anglosphere Challenge

Worthy reading.

Thanks to a tip from Survival Arts, I've just discovered that Jim Bennett's book on the Anglosphere has been published. The table of contents looks positively mouth-watering if you go in for civilizational history and large-scale but well-grounded speculation about the near future. I don't buy many books, but I may run out and purchase this one! (Bennett has also started an Anglosphere Institute, it seems.)

Posted on 2004-11-18 at 11:58. File under society.

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2004-11-17

Generation Lap

Boomers vs. Gamers.

Man, Stowe Boyd is on fire these days. His latest examines the generational differences between boomers and the "gamers" of Generation Y. Fascinating.

Posted on 2004-11-17 at 16:47. File under society.

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2004-11-16

Real-Time Library Integration

Yet another Jabber application.

No, I'm not talking about software libraries, I'm talking about libraries with books. From this blog entry we learn that Open-ILS.org is using Jabber as the communications layer for integrating about 250 public libraries in the state of Georgia. Libraries rock!

Posted on 2004-11-16 at 09:06. File under jabber.

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2004-11-15

Tales from Cryptographic Oceans

First thoughts on securing the XMPP network.

As previously mentioned, I've started to investigate ways to more fully secure the Jabber/XMPP network. One of the design decisions made by the original Jabber developers was to use a client-server architecture, similar to but (hopefully) superior to email. The jabberd 1.0 server released in May 2000 included server-to-server functionality but did not verify hostname assertions in any way (basically what email does, which is why you receive email from spoofed addresses like bill@microsoft.com and president@whitehouse.gov). In the jabberd 1.2 server (October 2000), Jer and company introduced "server dialback", which is functionally equivalent to reverse DNS lookups (thus effectively preventing address spoofing at the domain level). Although it was possible to SSL-encrypt server-to-server connections, that was never done in the various server connection manager implementations released until recently. The XMPP specs we worked on in the IETF's XMPP WG (specifically, RFC 3920) defined a way to use TLS (successor to SSL) for channel encryption of server-to-server streams, so now we have an opportunity to make server interconnections more secure. It seems like a good idea not to blow that opportunity, not only because making the network more secure is the right thing to do but also because it might encourage more organizations to connect their servers to the network.

So, how to proceed? TLS likes one to use certificates in order to verify identity (or at least continuity) at some level, so immediately folks think "we need to get Jabber server hostnames into server certificates issued by widely-accepted certification authorities" or "we need to form our own CA for the Jabber network". Yet, conversations with my friends in the security mafia as well as my reading of various insightful web pages lead me to question the value or relevance of certification authorities to securing the XMPP network. Rather than jumping to the conclusion that we need certification authorities, let's first think about what problems we're trying to solve.

Certainly we want to encrypt server-to-server communications via TLS. (Whether this leads more servers to join the network is a secondary question, the answer to which is far from clear.) It is possible to do this today using self-signed certificates. This happens to be the way I connect to a large number of servers via ssh (the fancy name for it is opportunistic cryptography). As long as the key doesn't change, I tend to be happy. If I connect from a new machine, I check the key fingerprint against what I've seen before from that domain (yes, I keep track of the fingerprints). If I didn't keep track of the fingerprints, I might ask someone I know and trust whether that fingerprint is right. One potential problem is bootstrapping: how do I know that the fingerprint is OK the very first time I connect to that machine? Well, the odds of a man in the middle attack occurring at that moment are vanishingly small, so I pretty much take a leap into the unknown. (Yes, Mallory Is Totally Mean, but we also know that Mallory Is Truly Miniscule.) If in doubt, I could talk with someone else who has connected to that machine before, or someone who administers the machine. (For example, when Peter Millard set up a new mailserver machine for jabber.org, I could have asked him about the fingerprint for that machine's RSA key.)

A lot of this comes down to trust. I trust Peter and others who run the jabber.org, xmpp.org, and jabberstudio.org domains, because I know them personally. I also trust, albeit to a somewhat lesser extent, other people whom I have interacted with only electronically -- various JEP authors, administrators of certain public Jabber servers (e.g., Matthias Wimmer, though I met him in person once), contributors to various open-source projects, representatives of certain corporations, and the like. These are people with whom I have interacted over time, and their identities seem to be stable (at least, I don't think they've been fooling me all this time), so I rely on them to some extent.

Obviously, this kind of personal trust doesn't scale, so some people want to delegate measurement of some kind of trust to a "trusted third party", i.e., a certification authority. Yet it's clear that there's no special reason to trust the certification authorities, and I have my doubts that the Jabber Software Foundation would be extraordinarily better at this within the limited XMPP community than, say, Verisign, Thawte, or CAcert is on the broader Internet. The main reason is that there's no compelling reason to trust third parties. As Ian Grigg quotes ArticSoft at his PKI page, "The only people we can rely upon is us, unless we have it in writing. So what we need is a system where we can switch on and off who we are willing to do business with whenever we choose."

That's true, but I don't think it quite goes far enough. What are the factors that lead you to decide that you are willing to do business (or, in our case, open server-to-server communications) with someone else? Well, that might vary depending on your community. In the community of Wall Street banks, the criteria might be fairly stringent (promises to abide by SEC regulations, etc.). In the community of large ISPs (say, on the order of Earthlink and BellSouth), the criteria might be business-level agreements to interoperate. In the community of Jabber services run by volunteers (say, jabber.org and amessage.de), the criteria might be self-signed certificates issued by server admins who are known to each other in some fashion. But in all cases, trust is not outsourced -- it is something for which each administrator takes responsibility.

Given these facts, I tend to doubt that we will see promiscuous interoperability in the IM space, even within the XMPP community. While some bemoan this reality ("it should be just as easy to send an IM to someone as it is to send an email"), the fact is that promiscuous interoperability in the email community has led to many, many problems, to the point now that email is a slum. I think it's much more likely that different communities within the broader XMPP community -- financial companies, oil and gas traders, insurance companies and healthcare providers, manufacturers and companies in their supply chains, large ISPs and mobile service providers, etc. -- will first seek interoperability within their smaller communities, perhaps never opening up server-to-server connections with the public XMPP network (or only on a selective basis). We can debate whether this is good or bad, but it seems to be the most likely scenario.

The TLS technology we have in RFC 3920 enables all of these sub-communities to implement whatever policies they need: specialized certification authorities for their industries, mutual recognition of organizational CAs, secure exchange of public keys triggered by business-level agreements, or what have you. I doubt that many of these sub-communities would care if the JSF decided to become a root CA for the XMPP network -- no matter what the "XMPP CA" does, they still won't connect to other sub-communities because there is no compelling reason for them to do so, and plenty of reasons not to. Thus I suggest that we limit the problem space to the "public XMPP network" and don't try to address the needs of other sub-communities -- let the Wall Street banks and so on work out their own policies within the framework of RFC 3920.

So, how to proceed on the public network? Here we may ask: is there a need for communicating one's trust in other domains? Let us say that akl.lt (a server in Lithuania) receives a server-to-server stream from bulmalug.net (a server in the Balearic Islands). Well, it doesn't know bulmalug.net from Adam. But akl.lt may (in some sense) trust the "opinion" of bigger, more established servers (say, jabber.org and amessage.de) regarding the trustworthiness of other servers on the network (is bulmalug.net a good citizen of the public XMPP network? does it follow the protocols? have we received complaints about its users? etc.). Would it be good for akl.lt to be able to "ping" amessage.de and jabber.org about its rating of or trust in bulmalug.net? Quite possibly. This would be a way to transitively deliver distributed trust. Now, an XMPP CA could be seen as a way of doing that, but one advantage of delivering indications of trust in real time across the public network is that it overcomes (in part) the unsolved and perhaps insoluble problem of certificate revocation (which the Online Certificate Status Protocol is supposed to address, though again in a centralized fashion since one is still depending on the certification authority to update the status of certificates). Why not use the power of decentralized networks to distribute trust across the network in close to real time? This means I don't have to trust one central authority -- I need to trust only those near and known to me within the network. That seems to map much better onto the natural pattern of trust than attempting to centralize it in some faceless bureaucrats (and believe me, as Executive Director of the JSF I don't want to turn into a faceless bureaucrat).

How would such trust indications work? Perhaps each server rates the other servers with which it communicates. Servers on my whitelist have positive scores, servers on my blacklist have negative scores, servers I don't know about have a score of zero. If you ask me whether I trust example.com, I tell you what I think of that server (let's say within a range of integers from -128 to +127). When you receive a connection request from a server that is new to you, you ask a few of your more-experienced "friends" and if they all come back positive (or average positive or whatever), you allow the connection. If none of your friends knows about this new server (perhaps you're jabber.org and people connect to you first because you're a big node on the network), then you have a tougher decision to make, but perhaps you establish a server registry that administrators register with before going online (not a root CA for the network, just a registry). Would this work better than establishing a root CA for the public XMPP network? There are many reasons to think it would. But, as always, the devil is in the details.

(And oh by the way, the title of this long entry is indeed a Yes reference -- I couldn't resist.)

Posted on 2004-11-15 at 20:13. File under jabber.

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XTech

A conference submission.

I've just submitted a proposal to speak at XTech 2005 in Amsterdam next May. Here are the particulars:

Title: "Streaming XML with Jabber/XMPP"

Short Description: "Jabber (known as 'the Linux of instant messaging') is based on the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), an IETF-approved XML streaming technology. This session describes XMPP and the many XMPP applications beyond IM, from finance to gaming.

Longer Abstract: "Jabber is widely known as 'the Linux of instant messaging' -- an open alternative to closed IM and presence services. Less well known is that Jabber instant messaging is based on a core XML streaming protocol that has been approved by the IETF under the name Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). The XMPP RFCs (3920-3923) define a robust, secure, scalable, i18n-friendly architecture for near-real-time messaging and structured data exchange -- all of which is pure XML. XMPP is being used not only to build an open IM network with millions of end users, but also a wide range of XML applications in the areas of financial trading, content syndication, online gaming, network management, remote instrument monitoring, middleware, and much more. This paper provides an overview of core Jabber/XMPP protocols and technologies, as well as an introduction to the wide range of XMPP applications deployed today or currently under development.

Posted on 2004-11-15 at 15:49. File under jabber.

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2004-11-14

Anti-Empire

The death of the American ideal.

Thanks to a plug by Roderick Long, I've just discovered the writings of William Marina, who provides deep and depressingly accurate historical insights into the current predicament of Western civilization and the American Empire. Mining the vein staked out by Carroll Quigley in The Evolution of Civilizations (which I have previously discussed in a blog entry and applied to both world history and American culture), Marina explores what I, too, see as the issue of overarching importance in American society, Western civilization, and indeed world affairs today: the continued and seemingly inexorable transition of the United States from a republic into an empire, with all the implications of that descent for Americans and the world. Marina has discussed this issue from numerous angles: religious, military, social, historical, and political (the essays at some of those links are long but eminently worth absorbing). Given the momentum of this long-term trend (which, one could argue, began with the War of 1812 and accelerated with the Mexican-American War, Civil War, Spanish-American War, and every war since then), I sadly doubt that Americans will reverse course anytime soon. Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of the American descent into empire is that the historical legacy of political and economic freedom in the United States has made it an unprecedented engine of economic production and technological innovation, which yields seemingly boundless resources for the empire-builders and interventionists to misuse for their own purposes. It is enough to make one cry for the death of the American ideal.

Posted on 2004-11-14 at 16:46. File under politics.

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2004-11-10

Dead Rat

Another tyrant bites the dust.

Well, The Rat is finally dead. Can it be too much to hope that Castro will be next?

Posted on 2004-11-10 at 22:01. File under politics.

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Refs

XMPP in I-Ds.

Searching for the ietf.org URL of one of my own documents recently, I came across references to XMPP in some curious places:

I hadn't even known about some of those Internet-Drafts before.

Posted on 2004-11-10 at 21:27. File under jabber.

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Blue Moves

Internal migration within the US.

Over at Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux quotes reader Don Noone regarding migration of Americans from blue states to red states. Case in point: Denver, where most folks are "from away" (as we used to say back in Maine). Supposedly, the average American moves every five years. Many such moves are local, but many are long-distance, and a consistent trend over the last 30+ years has been migration of people from the Left Coast and Northeast to the South and interior West. Naturally, some people (mostly younger) are attracted to big cities like New York and San Francisco, too. Most likely there is an age factor here: people become more conservative as they age, and they may want to retire to safe, pleasant, and expensive places like the Colorado mountains or Carolina coast once they can afford to do so. What happens to the political outlook of such people? Do they soak up the more conservative values of their surroundings, or impose their more liberal values on the locals? Probably a bit of both. And let's not forget that those red-state/blue-state maps make American states seem more monolithic than they are in reality: there are plenty of blue areas within red states (e.g., Denver and Boulder within Colorado) and red areas within blue states (usually more rural areas in the far West, Northeast, and Upper Midwest). In general I'm getting rather tired of all the red vs. blue rhetoric -- if you ask me, much of it boils down to nothing more than what Dr. Seuss in his wisdom lampooned as Star-Belly Sneetches vs. Plain-Belly Sneetches.

Posted on 2004-11-10 at 21:16. File under politics.

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Revolution Y

The coming of the IM tribe.

Stowe Boyd is just piling it on the days: his latest missive examines Generation Y and the coming communications revolution (hint: it's all about real-time communications). Jabber: the choice of a new generation? ;-)

Posted on 2004-11-10 at 14:07. File under technology.

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Smarts

Aptitude tests and IQ.

Following a link from Doc Searls, I found this GRE to IQ converter, which says I have an IQ of 157 or 161, depending on how many points per standard deviation the IQ test uses. (It doesn't take into account one's score on the Analytical test, on which I didn't do quite as well as Verbal and Quantitative, though I took the GRE on a lark and didn't study or prepare, so who knows.) The main question is: does it really matter? I've known plenty of smart people who were jerks, bastards, and sonofabitches (not to mention uncreative, impractical, or just plain lazy), so I tend to downplay the importance of raw smarts in life.

Posted on 2004-11-10 at 14:01. File under personal.

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New Key

More security considerations.

OK, I've created a new OpenGPG key to replace the one I revoked a while back. Now we just need to figure out a replacement for JEP-0027 and I'll be all set.

Posted on 2004-11-10 at 13:53. File under technology.

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The Network

Making the Jabber world more secure.

I've started to think about how to make the XMPP network into the most secure messaging network on the open Internet. As far as I can see so far, there are several pieces to the puzzle:

We need to get the existing open-source server codebases in compliance with RFC 3920 regarding TSL and SASL for server-to-server communications. There are probably three or four main open-source server implementations, plus of course the commercial ones. Both jabberd2 and ejabberd are probably close to compliant. The venerable jabberd 1.4 codebase is the biggest challenge, but I've heard rumors that Matthias Wimmer has been working on its s2s security features.
We need to get XMPP addresses into standard certificates. This is easier said than done, even though RFC 3920 specifies where the address goes. I've been talking with the good people at CAcert about whether/how to do this, but that's only CAcert, which is not really a trusted source yet. I have not yet talked about this with Thawte, Verisign, and the like.
Do we use existing certificate authorities, or attempt to set up the Jabber Software Foundation (or a subsidiary thereof) as a root CA for the XMPP network? If we can't get XMPP addresses into standard certs, then we may need to set up our own CA and a web of trust based on that (e.g., using a concept similiar to Thawte's web of trust notaries). This might enable us to more quickly bootstrap certificates into the deployed base of XMPP servers, naturally with appropriate identity authentication and audit policies. Using existing certificate authorities would also cost money, which the JSF doesn't especially have a lot of and which most of the free public XMPP servers would not be able to afford.
This doesn't say anything about client-side certs or end-to-end encryption, just server-to-server communications. But I think that server-to-server is a good place to start, and perhaps we can build out the client side from there.

Posted on 2004-11-10 at 11:09. File under jabber.

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Gridlock and Logjams

More on progressive libertarianism.

Doc takes courage from Chris Nolan's analysis of the current political scene. Nolan (any relation to LP co-founder David Nolan, I wonder?) foresees a potential coalition of progressive libertarians, which might break the logjam in American politics. I've been using the term "progressive libertarianism" since early 2002 -- perhaps it is a meme whose time has come?

Posted on 2004-11-10 at 10:54. File under politics.

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Free Culture

Freedom starts at home.

Wired is running a good article about the Free Culture movement. As I've written before, I think a big part of freeing the culture is convincing people to put their own works directly into the public domain. And the best way to do that is to lead by example.

Posted on 2004-11-10 at 10:46. File under publicdomain.

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2004-11-09

Writing Standards

As usual, Lisa is right.

Yes, writing protocol standards is hard. Lisa's post is full of good advice that we'll want to incorporate in rfc3920bis and rfc3921bis.

Posted on 2004-11-09 at 15:01. File under jabber.

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2004-11-08

Revolt of the Engineers, Part IV

A few further insights.

Unfortunately, I have not yet gotten much out of Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin by Kendall E. Bailes (Princeton, 1978). Bailes mentions ever so briefly that "[d]uring 1918, the strikes by technical specialists and other civil servants against the Bolshevik regime largely ceased" (45) but does not explain why they started in the first place (reading between the lines, we can infer that the Bolsheviks were virulently opposed to the higher socio-economic position of the technical specialists, whom they seem to have regarded as yet another variety of bourgeois exploiters sponging off the labor of the proletariat).

Earlier (22), describing a congress of VSI (the All-Russian Union of Engineers) in 1918, it emerges from Bailes' quotations that the engineers in large measure saw themselves as (and were) consultants or employees, not entrepreneurs:

The majority recognized the impossibility of turning to the owners for a subsidy, even the smallest. If at a given moment, in the struggle to save industry, transport, etc., we find ourselves in agreement with the entrepreneurs, we should not forget that this has not always been so, nor will it be so in the future. The overwhelming majority of members in our union are people who sell their labor and are not entrepreneurs. The union of engineers has been created for the long haul, it has its own road to follow, and it is not necessary to become dependent on either organizations of entrepreneurs, nor on those of workers.

So said M.G. Evreinov, a prominent engineer of the time. Sadly, it soon became clear that the engineers could not truly travel down their own road, and were to be co-opted and corrupted by the Soviet regime, eventually with horrific consequences both for the engineers themselves (thousands of them were sent to prison camps, never to return) and for the workers who slaved on the gargantuan and misguided projects on which the engineers advised the government (especially the White Sea Canal, constructed through the forced labor of well over 100,000 "citizens", over 10,000 of whom died during the project).

Posted on 2004-11-08 at 21:54. File under society.

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Queries

More on XMPP URIs.

Today I fixed up the XMPP URI Internet-Draft a bit (mostly minor corrections to the text and examples to compensate for errors introduced during sloppy copy-and-paste operations) and this evening started work on a JEP defining a registry for query component actions and key-value pairs to be used in the context of XMPP URIs. I hope to have the proto-JEP done tomorrow if all goes well, so stay tuned.

Posted on 2004-11-08 at 21:29. File under jabber.

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WoTs Going On

Using security technologies.

Hardly anyone uses security technologies. Part of the problem is a lack of critical mass. And part of that problem is that the webs of trust are small. So I've decided to do something about that by becoming a "Web of Trust Notary" for Thawte personal e-mail certificates and an "Assurer" for the CAcert.org web of trust. A few folks over at PingID are also psyched about getting involved. This seems like a cool, grassroots effort that really doesn't take much time and helps make the Internet more secure. Once I have notary/assurer status (it may take me a few weeks given the paucity of existing Thawte notaries, and especially CAcert assurers, in Colorado), I'm going to work to get more folks signed up locally. Blogger meetups and other such IRL gatherings seem like a great time to get people notarized/assured en masse. Let's get busy!

Posted on 2004-11-08 at 16:16. File under technology.

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2004-11-07

This Blog Has No Title

Saying no to politics for a while.

I was going to blog some more this evening about the role of technology in the recent U.S. elections, lessons for future campaigns, big-government conservatism, proper priorities for Bush's second term and why they won't be pursued, even the impact of American demographic exceptionalism (not to mention moral and religious exceptionalism) on the next new few election cycles (hint: Hillary faces an uphill battle in '08). But then I decided that I'm tired of blogging about politics. So my apologies for the interruption -- we now return to our regularly scheduled programming...

Posted on 2004-11-07 at 20:43. File under politics.

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2004-11-06

Loonie Liberation

How the Canadians can save the world.

Funny maps have emerged in the last few days showing three nations in North America: (1) Quebec, (2) the rest of Canada joined to the Northeastern U.S., Upper Midwest, and West Coast, and (3) a sea of Red States forming a rump U.S.A. Well, that's amusing, but if the Canadians really want to save the world, they can sacrifice their country and join the United States. Among the provinces-turned-states, only Alberta might be "red", which leaves seven more states that would be overwhelmingly Democratic (yes, I know how many provinces there are, but P.E.I. is way too small to rate two Senators and would have to be added to New Brunswick -- or it could be preserved as a museum piece). So the Canadians could tip the balance of presidential politics back to the Democrats for a while (until demographic trends overtake the Democrats again). Therefore it's obvious that folks on the U.S. left need to brush up on their French and foment secession in Quebec, thus throwing the rest of Canada into the waiting arms of imperial expansionists in the U.S. (remember the War of 1812?), who will be surprised when those new states turn out to be a Trojan Horse for the left. Loony, eh?

But seriously, there is one little problem here: neither the Democrats nor the Republicans want to reduce the power of the central government. The welfare state and the warfare state go hand-in-hand. Democrats get all whiny when they are out of power, because they know they are culturally superior and would increase government power for worthy ends such as economic regulation, helping their union supporters, cutting the debt by taxing the productive class to pay for increased spending, and altruistic foreign interventions (i.e., assisting downtrodden places such as Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, and Haiti). Republicans get all whiny when they are out of power, because they know they have God on their side and would increase government power for worthy ends such as moral crusades, helping their corporate supporters, cutting taxes but not spending and thereby increasing the national debt, and imperialistic foreign interventions (i.e., installing puppet regimes in formerly authoritarian or leftist places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Grenada). Both parties think centralization is a beautiful thing and work assiduously to increase Federal power; but each one thinks that power is appropriate only when they wield it. Heaven forbid that the nefarious opposition should be elected: it will be the end of the world as we know it!

There is one business in American that never downsizes, that never has to fear being driven into obsolescence by some upstart innovator, whose employees never worry about mass layoffs, in which revenues are always up, for which the outlook is always positive, to which the normal laws of economics don't apply. It sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? In fact, it's too true to be good, because that "business" is the government headquartered in Washington, DC. And no matter whether the "reds" or the "blues" are in charge, that government continues to arrogate to itself ever greater powers, at the expense of the states, local governments, and the people themselves.

What's the solution? Is there really a third America (neither red nor blue), a radical middle? Don Boudreaux notes that the best red-state value used to be distrust of centralization. Now it seems that everyone loves centralization as long as their kind is in power. Yet I continue to maintain that we've built too much functionality into the kernel of our political operating system. Further centralization is not the answer, nor is joining with those Canadian centralizers north of the border. Rather than one nation of North America, we need many smaller political entities on this continent. Secession, anyone?

Posted on 2004-11-06 at 21:31. File under politics.

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2004-11-04

Showing Some Initiative

Political alternatives.

Charles Johnson (a.k.a. RadGeek) hits the nail on the head: it's time to think about avenues of reform other than electoral politics. One venue is the courts (a strategy pursued by the Institute for Justice, which I wholeheartedly support). Another is initiative and referendum: the ability for those who gather enough signatures to put issues directly on the ballot. Most of the time I find myself voting against such initiatives, but it seems to me that this provides a good (if imperfect) mechanism for bringing issues of reform directly before the voters. (Who needs political middlemen, i.e., politicians? It's time for some disintermediation in the political realm.) A good example from supposedly leftist Massachusetts was a referendum there a few years back on repealing the income tax. Amazingly, it almost passed! Those spearheading the initiative were pretty much hardcore libertarians, who probably polled the usual 3% at the ballot box that year but almost got the state income tax repealed.

Here are some possible topics to bring before state or local voters:

Repealing homeschooling regulations or even giving the schools to the teachers.
Ending licensing for certain occupations (e.g., hairdressers).
Getting rid of restrictions on certain industries (e.g., jitney services).
Recognizing the right of nurse practitioners to write prescriptions.
Eliminating estate taxes.
Restricting the use of eminent domain.
Outlawing the death penalty.
Decriminalizing victimless crimes such as marijuana possession.
Reinstating state militias (de-federalizing defense).
Allowing concealed carry.
Encouraging or recognizing neighborhood watch groups.
Introducing term limits on elected politicians.
Opting out of certain Federal laws, such as the PATRIOT Act.
Privatizing state universities (most of which receive perhaps only 10% of their budget from the state).
Making it easier to form land trusts, private nature conservancies, neighborhood gardens, and the like.

One good thing about such topics is that those who advance them and vote on them don't need to agree on everything under the sun, just the topic at hand, so it's easier to build coalitions. Why try to get candidates outside the mainstream (libertarians, greens, progressives) elected, or even worse try to influence candidates in the Democratic and Republican parties? That seems like an awful waste of time. Take your case directly to the people! Another good thing is that such reforms would put pressure on the government headquartered in Washington, D.C. (e.g., if all the states repealed their estate taxes, the Feds might have to follow suit).

Posted on 2004-11-04 at 21:22. File under politics.

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2004-11-04

Service, Please

Variations on a theme by Graham.

Adam Bosworth's latest entry is a variation on a theme originated (as far as I know) by Paul Graham back in 2001: it's better to offer an application over the Net than to ship an old-style software bundle. Both essays are well worth (re-)reading. Bosworth's thoughts are also connected in my mind with what I like to call the need for speed and the real-time Internet, because life is getting faster and software needs to keep up. Evolution in action, indeed!

Posted on 2004-11-04 at 14:21. File under technology.

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2004-11-03

Common Sense

Purity vs. practicality.

In his reflections on the 2004 elections, Ari Armstrong writes as follows:

Until recently I participated with the Libertarian Party, and I sometimes fell into reactionary rhetoric about taxes. This is a pervasive flaw in the regular libertarian approach, and one that spills into the fiscally-conservative Republican camp. Voters, skeptical of the pseudo-moralism of the religious right, understandably see anti-government reactionism as another variant of the same pseudo-morality. Voters don't like the tax-and-spend alternatives of the left, which is why many Colorado Democrats are fiscal moderates, but neither are voters comfortable with those who seem to hate government for its own sake. Thus, most people end up as economic moderates, who want limits on spending but who support ad hoc proposals to fund specific, sympathetic causes.

What's missing, of course, is a spirited defense of economic liberty based on individual rights and a sound economic explanation of the benefits of free markets and economic voluntarism. Most people seem keen on the idea of individual liberty in the personal or social realm. They don't want political controls on abortion, speech, sex, and so forth. Yes, they run from the socialist left, but they also run from the reactionary right on economic matters. Both Republicans and Libertarians have obscured the deeply American case for economic liberty, or, to use the old term: liberalism. So the task of those who favor individual liberty across the board -- in both personal matters and economic matters -- is to dump the dogmatic baggage and make a moral and practical case that rings true with the public -- because it is true.

Herewith a confession: although I think that most or all functions of government could be better provided through markets or charities, I'm not particularly anti-government in the way that most hard-core libertarians are (i.e., I really don't get all that worked up about plenty of government programs, because life is too short to spend my energy on being anti-government). Sure, I want lower taxes and less government, but if government spending were (say) 5% or even 10% of GDP instead of its current 20%, I'd see that as a major victory (especially if we returned government functions to state and local governments -- we've built way too much functionality into the kernel, if you will, and that doesn't work well). I think plenty of Americans are moderate libertarians: in favor of both civil liberties and free markets. But they're not offered that choice most of the time, so they polarize along party lines. I doubt that the Libertarian Party could reform itself along more moderate lines, but (having worked in the LP) I know how hard it is to start a third party. Yet I think a moderately libertarian party -- we'll call it the Jeffersonian Party in honor of old TJ -- could have a salutary affect on American politics.

To be continued...

Posted on 2004-11-03 at 21:53. File under politics.

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CPA

Instant messaging and the attention economy.

Stowe Boyd just posted some intriguing thoughts on what he calls "continuous partial attention" (what geeks call "context switching"). Some folks say that IM really stands for "interruptive messaging" and that interruptions cause productivity to decrease, but Stowe argues that once you average all those interruptions over a network of people, overall productivity increases. It'd be good to see some real studies of the matter, rather than just hunches and anecdotes. My personal style is to be interrupt-driven, so I have a direct interest in learning what works here.

Posted on 2004-11-03 at 10:01. File under jabber.

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2004-11-01

Responsibility and Reform

Havel and Kapor.

I'm going to re-quote Vaclav Havel:

If the hope of the world lies in human consciousness, then it is obvious that intellectuals cannot avoid forever assuming their share of responsibility for the world and hiding their distaste for politics beneath an alleged need for independence.

It is easy to have independence in your program and then leave others to carry out that program. If everyone thought that way, soon no one would be independent.

I think that Americans should understand this way of thinking. Wasn't it the best minds of your country, people you could call intellectuals, who wrote your famous Declaration of Independence, your Bill of Rights, and your Constitution, and who -- above all -- took upon themselves the practical responsibility for putting them into practice?

I was reminded of Havel's words after having dinner with Mitch Kapor (and of course the charming Lisa Dusseault) a few weeks back, right after the San Francisco Chronicle published his essay on the state of the American body politic (see also the AlterNet interview and Mitch's political weblog). Mitch seems to be a good example (another is Doc Searls) of what I would call a moderate libertarian: he talks about the importance of self-government and inalienable rights but doesn't offer revolutionary prescriptions or a radical critique of our current system of government, even though he knows that much is rotten in the state of America. Yet if weblogs are to the current revolutionary age what pamphlets were to the first American revolution, can we expect a radical shake-up of American politics in, say, 2008? LP founder David Nolan argues that American political history runs in cycles (1776, 1860, 1932, ????), and that we're due for a sea change soon (he originally thought 2004, but 2008 or 2012 seems more likely if a new era starts every 78 years or so; perhaps the time period is even correlated with generational shifts, in which case today's longer life spans might result in longer political eras, so don't pin your hopes on 2012). Mitch's blog is called "Of, By, and For" (as in Lincoln's "government of, by, and for the people" not today's "government of, by, and for the Beltway"). It remains to be seen whether all these polemical geeks and intellectuals active in the blogosophere can translate their criticisms and enthusiasms into actionable reform "of, by, and for the people", but Mitch is hopeful that the Dean campaign was only the crude model for something much more lasting and significant. One thing is for sure: we know that such a movement is going to have to bubble up from below, because it's certainly not going to emerge from the so-called leadership of our longtime two-party duopoly. So those who would take responsibility for reforming American politics and society (rather than merely standing aloof from the admittedly distasteful fray) had better get busy soon.

Posted on 2004-11-01 at 20:53. File under politics.

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The Question

To vote or not to vote.

I still haven't decided whether I'm going to vote tomorrow. Although I don't think that casting a ballot once every four years is the best way to reform society, I also don't quite think it's evil, either (as the voluntaryists insist). One approach to voting is to see it as a form of self-defense (e.g., voting against excessive taxation or draconian regulation). The problem is that voting is usually construed as a form of consenting to the results or at least the process, which troubles me because I don't think that most issues put directly before the voters are within the legitimate purview of even a constitutional goverment (e.g., funding the local "scientific and cultural facilities district", which is mostly a way to favor some charities over others).

I did read an interesting essay yesterday by my old favorite Ayn Rand, setting forth her suggestions for determining which candidates to vote for ("How to Judge a Political Candidate", The Objectivist Newsletter, March 1964). Herewith some salient quotes:

The political ignorance and intellectual disintegration of our age become appallingly evident in a major election year. They range from the lethargic passivity of those who ignore elections as of no consequence -- to the frantic hysteria of those who believe that the life or death of a nation is determined on a single Tuesday in November....

One cannot expect, nor is it necessary, to agree with a candidate's total philosophy -- only with his political philosophy (and only in terms of essentials). It is not a Philosopher-King that we are electing, but an executive for a specific, delimited job.... we have to judge him as we judge any work, theory or product of mixed premises: by his dominant trend.... A vote for a candidate does not constitute an endorsement of his entire position, not even of his entire political position, only of his basic political principles....

[T]he issue of freedom vs. statism -- or individual rights vs. government controls, or capitalism vs. socialism -- is the basic issue of political philosophy. It is the root, the start, the fundamental which is involved in every specific measure, by which all else is determined, by the side of which all other considerations are trivia. It is the basic -- and, today, the only -- issue by which a candidate must be judged: freedom vs. statism. If [a candidate's] stand is mixed, we must evaluate it by asking: Will he protect freedom or destroy the last of it? Will he accelerate, delay or stop the march toward statism?

Rand went on to describe why she thought Barry Goldwater was the only freedom-oriented candidate in the presidential race of 1964, since freedom was his major premise: even though some of his specific steps were wrong, his direction was right. She praised him as the first Republican candidate in thirty years (presumably since the Willkie campaign, for which Rand volunteered) who did not merely parrot the New Deal line of creeping socialism, but opposed it with a basic political philosophy of freedom and personal responsibility. She contrasted Goldwater with Nelson Rockefeller, a big-government Republican whose political philosophy consisted of a kind of "me-too" statism and whose direct intellectual descendents are George Bush senior and George Bush junior. Her arguments make all the more inexplicable the stand of those modern-day Randians and so-called Objectivists who stump for W with reckless abandon, unheeding of philosophical principles or the lessons of history.

So I may vote tomorrow, but you can be sure I won't vote for any candidate whose basic direction is toward statism, government controls, and creeping socialism or creeping fascism. Unfortunately, that doesn't leave many options....

Posted on 2004-11-01 at 17:49. File under politics.

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Ray

A night at the movies.

Longtime readers of this weblog will be shocked to hear that I went to the movies last night. My disdain for Halloween hoopla, combined with my love of music, compelled me to see "Ray", the seemingly biographical film about Ray Charles. It was great!

Posted on 2004-11-01 at 19:13. File under personal.

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