(Hat tip: Stowe Boyd)
Principle Six of the Mozilla Manifesto reads as follows:
The effectiveness of the Internet as a public resource depends upon interoperability (protocols, data formats, content), innovation and decentralized participation worldwide.
That's great as far as it goes, but interoperability is not enough. AbiWord is interoperable with MS Word, email is interoperable with SMS through suitable gateways, Ghostscript is interoperable with Adobe Acrobat Reader, OpenOffice is interoperable with PowerPoint, Ogg Vorbis is interoperable with MP3 through various audio converters, and Pidgin is interoperable with AOL Instant Messenger.
But the underlying protocols, data formats, and content are closed, proprietary, probably patent-encumbered, and under the control of large corporations and industry consortiums like Microsoft, Adobe, and AOL. The result? Text, music, video, and communications that are less free than they deserve to be, and an Internet that is less open than it needs to be for the continued viability of our open society.
When we talk about protocols and data formats, we are talking about standards. Standards needs to be open. Sure, MS Word and PDF and PowerPoint and MP3 and AIM or MSN are de-facto "standards", but they are closed. By contrast, HTML and email and OpenData and Atom and Ogg Vorbis and Jabber are truly open technologies and open standards.
The Mozilla Foundation can be a great force for good in the world by consistently adopting open standards in its projects, creating new Mozilla-based projects (or working with existing projects, such as Songbird and SamePlace) that use open standards, and working with groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the W3C, the IETF, XIPH, and the XMPP Standards Foundation to develop and extend the range of open standards.
The long-term health of the Internet is at stake.
(HT: Nÿco.)
Joe Hildebrand has moved to WordPress now that it has support for Atom 1.0. Maybe it's time for me to switch from the homegrown XML format I use. But given that I've been blogging quite actively since September 13, 2001, this would be a big migration!
After a few months' hiatus, I've started using Songbird again to play music on my Mac. It's still a memory hog and a bit on the slow side, but I assume the 'birders are working on that. Plus the Audioscrobbler plugin does a mostly reliable job of uploading my listens to last.fm. Hey it's not perfect, but neither was Firefox (in fact the old Mozilla browser starting around the M8 release) or Thunderbird or OpenOffice when I began using them. Better, methinks, to support open-source projects early on, when they need it most.
Doc saith:
The market points to a clear and wide opening both for product differentiation and for giving customers what they want.
Which is an open phone.
It is time for an equipment maker to not only make an open phone that is open to all kinds of development, but to turn their carriers into "dumb pipes" for their own good.
I would be far more likely, as a customer, to choose Cingular over Verizon if I knew Cingular supported open application development, "end-to-end" standards and the growth of intelligence and fresh new markets at the edges.
Amen, Doc. Telephony for edglings!
For a while now, I've been threatening to write a real spec for the MicroID technology that Jer cooked up last spring. Today I finally got around to making version 0.1. Expect further revisions soon. Send nits directly to me and substantive feedback to the MicroID discussion list.
For a while there I was on a crusade to rid myself of email, but it's easier said than done. I've been fighting the battle of the email bulge for weeks now -- I finally got down below 700 messages in my inbox but I need to go a lot farther. Plus it seems that I'm now receiving upwards of 3000 or more spam messages a day (and lord knows how many spams "stpeter@jabber.org" is sending). Truly, email is a slum.
I've been playing around with me.dium, the latest and greatest in social browsing technology. GigaOM has already reported on it (see also here and here) so I won't bore y'all with the gory details. I do wonder how well it will scale, though, especially if you're eventually able to import or integrate with your existing buddy list instead of setting up Yet Another Buddy List (YABL!) in me.dium. Heck, I have 1300 people in my Jabber roster and I don't know that I want to co-browse with them all... :-) I'm sure the good folks at me.dium are thinking hard about the problem.
BTW, if you're really interested in playing with me.dium, Jabber me with your email address and I'll see if I can send you an invite (don't email me, I still have 1500 messages in my inbox and I don't need more!).
As a mostly happy Thunderbird user I'm delighted to see that Qualcomm will be migrating Eudora to Thunderbird. Maybe some of the bugs and usability issues that have been bothering me will get fixed faster now. :-)
(Note: updated with corrected Jabber info!)
A while back, Dizzy and I decided to split a virtual private server (running Debian) from RimuHosting. While setting up yet another domain just now, I realized that I've forgotten to post about them, so herewith I correct the oversight. In short, they are great! Rock solid hosting, timely and knowledgeable service, datacenters around the Anglosphere, and great prices made even better by discounts for folks who contribute to open-source projects. My only complaint is that you can't IM them via Jabber, only AIM, MSN, and Yahoo (c'mon guys, get with open source and open standards!). And you can contact them via Jabber, too! (Their JabberIDs are of the form <friendlyrimupersonsfirstname@jabber.rimuhosting.com>.) If you are a looking for a hosting service, I cannot recommend RimuHosting highly enough. Kudos, Rimu!
In my continuing experiments with security technologies, I've obtained a new X.509 certificate, this time from the StartCom Free SSL Certification Authority. So I may be signing my emails with this new cert for a while, or switching back and forth between this cert and the one I received from CAcert a while back. Forewarned is forearmed. :-)
(Oh, and by the way, this page has helpful information about exporting certificates for publishing on a website.)
Thanks to a blog entry from Fred Stutzman, I just discovered ClaimID, "a service that lets you manage your online identity". The cool thing is that it uses the MicroID technology that Jeremie announced a few months back (this blog was probably the first website in the world to use MicroIDs). So naturally I had to sign up for a ClaimID page. Not only is this a cool service, but the website is simple, intuitive, and beautiful. Well done! But I wonder if ClaimID will mind that this blog now has two MicroIDs in the meta tags...
Heh. 666 in Roman numerals is DCLXVI. And wouldn't you know, DCLXVI.com is for sale. The price? $666.00. :-)
Although I prefer to sign my electronic communications with a digital signature, I also value anonymity when I surf the web (and I'm not the only one). In the past I've sporadically used services like Anonymizer, but recently I discovered something better: Tor. Tor grew out of Navy research on onion routing (though it now uses incremental path-building) and, based on my research so far, I think it's a pretty solid approach to anonymous browsing. It does slow down the web experience, but then I'm not particularly in a big hurry.
Although I'm still a fan of CAcert (I like the whole web of trust idea), I will note that I recently discovered an alternative provider of free certificates: StartCom. It looks as if they will be included in Mozilla soon, too. The more the merrier! I've started talking with StartCom about supporting the right bits for XMPP server certificates, so stay tuned...
I find the following freeware packages helpful just about every day and I need to send the developers some Paypal love:
Just a quick note to self. ;-)
I've been doing some reading on reputation systems. (I don't know that we want or need a reputation system in the Jabber world, but I'm doing that reading as background to thinking through the question.) On the web we have things like XFN to specify meta-data about links, but those do not explicitly provide appraisals of reputation. How does reputation emerge? PageRank and similar systems represent a kind of reputation. When I link to a page or a person or any other resource, is there a way to more explicitly tag the fact that I think that resource is valuable? I don't see quite such a mechanism in the semi-official microformats list or in a quick survey of various blog posts on the subject (such as this one). How about rel-whuffie, folks?
Tom Evslin explains why a great programmer is worth fifty good ones, and Anthony Presley extends the argument to all job functions. The hard part is discovering your core competencies and thereby figuring out the job at which you're not merely good, but great.
The folks at Freenet have released 0.7 alpha. From their release we find out that:
Freenet 0.7 represents a major new approach to peer-to-peer network design. To protect the network, and the user's anonymity, Freenet users will now have the ability to connect directly to other people that they know and trust, together forming a "global darknet" making it extremely difficult for any third party, whether a government or another powerful organisation, to determine that a user is participating in Freenet, let alone what they are doing with it.
And:
The new Freenet employs a simpler and more flexible routing model than previous versions, which in the future may allow diverse applications ranging from efficient search, to near-real time instant messaging and chat between anonymous participants.
So it seems that Freenet has absorbed the meme of "the buddy list is the center of the universe" (connect only to those you know and trust) and are looking into IM as well. Interesting...
I spoke at a telco-heavy event last week. Really I do not see what their future is, other than to provide fat pipes. Once WiFi (or WiMAX) is prevalent in the cities and people start using IP phones (Skype has announced one and rumors are that Apple is readying one for the market), the combination of fast 'net access and open standards will drive innovation to really take off at the edges in radical new ways. And the telcos are not known for innovation, so they will, I think, more and more be left behind.
Another challenging idea: the average time to pay off investments in the older generation of switching equipment was 30 years (according to one speaker at the conference I attended). The time to payoff is now 3 to 5 years but technology generations (read: software-driven innovations) are on the order of 18 months, and accelerating. So anyone who is deploying expensive infrastructure and expecting to reap the profits from their investments is deluded. What happens when technology generations occur every 6 months or less? (Yes, the time is coming.) Forget about all that centralized telco stuff -- only small, decentralized technologies will thrive.
Final thought: once IP phones take off, presence will indeed become the new dial tone (why call someone if they're not available?). So the buddy list will become the center of the universe, even more than it is today.
May you live in interesting times. :-)
I'm sitting here at DIA waiting for a flight to Dallas (thence to London), thinking about medieval tower clocks -- you know, those huge old clocks you see on central squares in places like Prague, Salzburg, and Munich. At the time, those huge clocks were hugely expensive, and in many towns the citizens agreed to special taxes to fund their construction. If there had been libertarians and advocates for the poor back then, I'm sure they both would have complained. After all, the clocks were municipal projects that benefited primarily those who needed to know the time of day before inexpensive pocket watches had been invented -- the burghers, tradespeople, and merchants who were at the forefront of economic and technological change in the 1300s and 1400s.
We could see free municipal wifi as a similar kind of investment. Sure, it benefits primarily those at the forefront of economic and technological change today -- the laptop-toting computer geeks, the PDA-wielding deal makers, the Blackberry-addicted business men and women who are out there making things happen. It doesn't benefit people the poor people who don't have laptops, PDAs, Blackberries, and other kinds of modern gadgetry. But you know what? Poor people don't pay taxes. So at this moment -- as I see a rapacious, aging monopolist called AT&T hit me up for $7.95 for 24 hours of access to the 'net via a hotspot named "Freedomlink" (!) while I'm waiting for my plane to load -- I don't feel like giving a lot of credence to the arguments about municipal wifi taking business away from the long-suffering network operators and not benefiting the poorest Americans.
Naturally there are many arguments against municipal wifi (not least that the cities would probably botch the job). But at least open up the field so that community groups, local businesses, and perhaps consortia of airlines can offer the service themselves. Government-enforced wifi monopolies in public spaces are simply highway robbery.
A chat with Jer today has gotten me interested again in microformats such as XFN and (the point of this blog entry) rel=tag. Since we last blogged about open or decentralized tagging (not centralized services like Technorati), the tag: URI scheme has been published as RFC 4151 and perhaps folks have gotten a chance to think more about how tag: URIs can be useful. I now see that tag: URIs are not hyperlinks to places; instead, they provide unique identifiers. So perhaps my old example was misleading:
<a href="tag:saint-andre.com,2005-08-05:open+tags" rel="tag">open tagging</a>
Well, I don't think so. We're not linking to anything here, we're identifying something. So you might think that <a name='tag:...'/> would make sense, but the 'name' attribute is used to identify page fragments, so that's not right, either. How about the XHMTL 'id' attribute? Well, that must be unique within a page, so we have the same issue I raised before: you can't use the same tag: URI in the same document multiple times (e.g., to tag multiple blog entries posted on the same day); besides which, URIs don't match the name datatype.
So how about the 'cite' attribute?
<cite cite='tag:saint-andre.com,2006-03-22:open+tags'>open tagging</cite>
Perhaps. We may have lost the rel='tag' semantics (though just about any XHTML element may possess the 'rel' attribute, so maybe not). Yet the meaning of the cite attribute seems more appropriate:
The value of this attribute is a URI that designates a source document or message. This attribute is intended to give further information about the element's contents...
If you twist your head just right and squint your eyes a bit, a tag: URI could be seen as a source document or message -- the tag identifies the context for the citation.
However, few if any browsers currently provide a way for users to actuate 'cite' URIs (even though they are supposed to). But perhaps that is to the good, since the point of open tagging (there, I did it!) is quite possibly automated processing rather than user clicking.
If folks don't like the presentational implications of the cite element, they can add the 'cite' attribute to non-presentational elements like span element. The result? A kind of invisible yet open tagging that smart browsers could render in intelligent ways, but that would be hidden from less savvy users.
And yes, the last paragraph included an example:
<span rel='tag' cite='tag:saint-andre.com,2006-03-22:open+tags'>open tagging</span>
It's worth considering...
Had a great time with Joe Hildebrand last night at the Denver Tech Meetup, hosted by Steve O'Grady of RedMonk. Although I didn't get to talk much with Steve, I did enjoy chatting with Mike Hostetler, Michael Coté (also of RedMonk, in from Austin), Danny Newman, and a bunch of other folks (sorry, didn't catch all their blogs). Looking forward to the next meetup already!
Today the IETF published RFC 4417: Report of the 2004 IAB Messaging Workshop. Thanks to Lisa Dusseault I was shoehorned, er, volunteered, er, willingly convinced to co-edit it with the ever-gracious Pete Resnick.
(Note to self: update the XML source and submit it to xml.resource.org.)
The jazz musicians used to say that people who really listen have "big ears". Unfortunately, in the world of digital music today, the various different audio players and social music sites don't listen to each other. Example: I recently signed up at last.fm (which is now dutifully keeping track of what I listen to in iTunes), but there's no easy way to share what I've listened to with anyone outside the last.fm silo. It needs to be much easier for me to publicize my musical favorites so that people who like the same kind of music can find me, so that smart people can build recommendation services, so that Google can spider the web for music favorites, and in general so that innovation can happen where it happens best: on the edges, not in walled-off little gardens. Thankfully, the good folks at Songbird are aiming to change that. I had a longish chat with chief nestminder Rob Lord today and he really gets it.
So I'm thinking: what can we do in the Jabber community to help out? As befits the real-time nature of Jabber/XMPP technologies, we already have a protocol extension for publishing your current tune -- the data format looks like this:
<tune>
<artist>Yes</artist>
<title>Heart of the Sunrise</title>
<source>Yessongs</source>
<track>3</track>
<length>686</length>
</tune>
As far as I can see, there's some information missing there. It would probably be helpful to include <composer/> (where "artist" is the person or group that performs the piece and "composer" is the songwriter or composer). More important is <playcount/> so that you can know how popular this tune is with me (wow, you've listened to "Heart of the Sunrise" 53 times? cool, that's one of my favorites, too!). Another possible field is <rating/> (e.g., on a simple 1 to 10 or 1 to 5 scale).
We also need a way to aggregate tunes into bundles -- either to publish my complete library of tunes (or parts thereof, e.g. by genre, artist, composer, or last listen time) or to publish a specific playlist. That may not be a task for Jabber technologies, because we're all about real-time communication whereas libraries and playlists are probably best retrieved as files since they could get quite big. But some standards here would really help facilitate communication about musical preferences.
The folks at SixApart have decided to pursue standardization of TrackBack through a TrackBack WG (see the proposed charter). It's a bad sign when attempting to view the proposed spec yields the message "You must be logged into use this page." It's another bad sign when the mailing list archives are private. If they're going to work on this through the IETF, they'll need to be open, open, open. As author of the XMPP RFCs, all I can say is: good luck!
I send a lot of spam. Or at least "stpeter@jabber.org" does -- just like "support@paypal.com" and other popular instances of faked From addresses on the email network (no, I'm not that popular, but heck, even I get spam from myself sometimes). So let me make it clear that when I (Peter Saint-Andre, the real person behind the address) send email from my stpeter@jabber.org account, I do two things:
(Don't get me started on why I sign my mail with both.)
So if you receive email ostensibly from "stpeter@jabber.org" but it is not digitally signed by yours truly, please do us all a favor and treat it with suspicion or, better yet, set up your procmail filters or other spam-fighting tools to throw it away, because it ain't legit!
150 years ago it was the hot thing in communications technology, today it has reached the end of its useful life: yes, Western Union has delivered its last telegram.
Today I assured Ron Thamert and Mark Zimmerman of Patron Systems within the CAcert web of trust, and last month I assured Mark Troyer and Brian Noecker of Jabber Inc., bringing my total number of assurances to 27. I'm currently ranked as the #105 assurer -- somehow I've never been able to break into the top 100...
Speaking of CAcert, I also "registered" my new OpenPGP key with them, which they have signed for me.
Stowe Boyd saith:
It's not a blog without comments, it's not social media without dialog.
Stowe, I think you're wrong about the comments part. This here is a blog and has been since 2001, but I didn't host people's comments then and I don't now. I welcome dialog via blog, IM, email, phone, postal mail, or face-to-face at the conferences I attend. But I don't think dialog requires me to be a hosting service for your comments.
I read Stowe Boyd religiously, so I've been wondering why Mimir hasn't been pinging me with his blog entries. Now I have the answer: Stowe's blog has moved to <http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/>. It seems that Stowe, too, has just learned the importance of becoming a citizen of the Internet.
BTW, Stowe's essay The Individual is the New Group is absolute must reading.
The news media is agog over reports that the Chinese authorities routinely block access to restricted websites and chatrooms, filter out bad words like "freedom" and "democracy", and so on (with Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Cisco, Google, and other big American companies lending a helping hand). The funny thing is that I receive nice emails from people in China about how much they enjoy my blog, and you know that I am far, far from being politically correct (heck, I sometimes wonder if the U.S. government will censor me, let alone the Chinese government). So I have to wonder about the effectiveness of the great firewall of China...
The aptly-named Samizdata website is running a controversial think piece entitled Governments Should Ban Linux. Is it truly a satire? Only you can decide. And remember, when Linux is outlawed, only outlaws will run Linux!
As if censorship were not enough, now it comes to light that Microsoft very probably installed a backdoor so that it could update your Windows 2000 or more recent computer without your permission, no matter how secure you thought your settings were. (Read the whole thing, it's chilling.) Yet another reason to boycott Microsoft.
The New York Times is reporting that Microsoft has, at the behest of the Chinese Communist regime, removed the weblog of Zhao Jing (who blogged under the pen name "An Ti") from its MSN Spaces service, without even providing him with the deleted files. A while back Microsoft was keen on calling Linux and other open-source software a form of communism -- I guess now we see who the true communist sympathizers are (perhaps it's because both Microsoft and the Communist Party are dinosaurs). Does Microsoft think that its much-touted freedom to innovate implies the freedom to censor? Stowe Boyd is right: it's time to boycott Microsoft.
Over the last two days I attended the IP4IT conference in Las Vegas. The folks at Pulver (especially Carl Ford) did a great job of gathering interesting speakers for the conference -- for instance, earlier today I was on a panel with both Matt Mullenweg of WordPress and my old friend Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia. I also much enjoyed the challenging thoughts of Paul Strassmann as well as a lively session on the meaning of Skype. Here's hoping Pulver continues to hold these events in the future.
Recently I came up with a few aphorisms, most related to protocol standardization, so I figured I'd write them down here:
For those who care, I just created a new CAcert certificate that includes my personal email address and revoked my old certificate that contains only my jabber.org email address, so if you sign/encrypt mail you may receive a notice about accepting the new cert...
The other day I upgraded to Thunderbird 1.5 Beta 2 and I noticed that the nice message security icons (key if message signed, lock and key if message signed and encrypted) were missing. A post to the MozillaZine forums yielded the information that this is bug #308451 and that it will be fixed in 1.5 final.
Open source rocks, and the Mozilla projects rock especially hard. (Now if only someone would write a kick-ass Jabber client on the Mozilla platform....)
I've posted a PDF version of the slideware I presented last Friday at the FutureVision 2010 conference. I'm not sure how much the faculty, students, and industry specialists got out of my presentation, but I enjoyed giving it. One of these days I'll turn it into an essay with proper references and such, since the slides are a bit cryptic.
It seems I forgot to mention that I'm giving an invited talk this Friday at the FutureVision 2010 conference being held on the campus of Colorado State University. Check out the program for details. The talk is not about Jabber or any specific technology, more about technology trends caused by ubiquitous computing and always-on connectivity. But you can be sure that presence, identity, real-time communications, security, and intellectual property will be part of the mix... :-)
The CAcert website is confusing so here's a mini-HOWTO on getting started with the web of trust.
There are more details to explain about how exactly to sign your email (depends on what email client you use, but I found it was quite easy in Thunderbird) and how the web of trust points system works (some assurers can grant you only 10 points, some can grant up to 35), but I'll leave those for another blog entry.
Oh, and if you get stuck, don't depend on the CAcert website, because it's kind of confusing. The wiki is much more useful right now...
Yesterday I initiated two more Jabber Inc. folks into the ways of CAcert: Danny Price and Chris Williams. The company is a real hotbed of CAcert activity these days!
This morning I initiated Bob Gilson into the ways of CAcert by assuring him (verifying his identity) in the web of trust. As of now I'm the #104 assurer. Gotta keep busy... :-)
This week I assured four more people at Jabber Inc.: Joe Hildebrand, Constantin Nickonov, Walter Domes, and Chris Newton. We now have four CAcert assurers at 1899 Wynkoop Street: me, Andrew Diederich, Matt Miller, and Joe Hildebrand. Finally, one-stop shopping for assurances in Lower Downtown! If you're in Denver, stop by sometime and we can get you all set up.
This morning I met with Carl Malamud in Denver (he's driving across the country to a new gig in DC as CTO of the Center for American Progress). He and I had a fascinating discussion with Joe Hildebrand about some projects Carl has cooking -- it's too early to say what they are, but I guarantee they are going to make waves! While we were at it, I assured Carl with CAcert. Perhaps he can spread the web of trust in the nation's capital. :-)
Earlier today I vouched for Andrew Diederich's identity with the web of trust at CAcert. It's still a goal of mine to recruit enough assurers in LoDo so that you can stop by a local landmark like The Tattered Cover or The Wynkoop and we can provide one-stop shopping for all your assurance needs. :-) Both dizzyd and pgmillard should have enough points to be assurers now -- anyone else interested?
The IESG has approved The Atom Syndication Format as a Proposed Standard. It's time to go forth and implement! (And yes, I now consider RSS to be a legacy format.) Once the Atom spec is published with a shiny new RFC number, we'll finalize the Atom-over-XMPP spec.
Doc recently posted some photos from OSCON 2005, including one of me and Dizzy and one of me and Miguel.
Last night I finally got a chance to upgrade my weblog feeds from Atom 0.3 to Atom 1.0. Special thanks to the FEED Validator and its downloadable version (open source rocks). Next I need to update the jabber.org feeds.
Following up on my recent post, I've been emailing with Bob Wyman about open tagging. Bob suggests that it would make sense for individuals or organizations in particular domains to maintain tagsets for tags in their domains. For instance, the JSF might create and maintain tags related to the various JEPs that we publish. Consider:
<a href="tag:jabber.org,2002-11-19:JEP-0060" rel="tag">publish-subscribe</a>
Here the domain is that of the maintaining organization, the date is that of the 0.1 version of the JEP, and the tagname is the official number of the specification in the JEP series.
But I wonder: what advantage does such a tag: URI have over the following http: URI?
<a href="http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0060.html" rel="tag">publish-subscribe</a>
Stowe Boyd outlines the problem with tagging blog posts by pointing to closed services such as Technorati, and outlines a solution he calls open tagging. Drummond Reed responds with an alternative solution using XRIs. I'm not yet convinced by Drummond's argument that XRIs are better than URNs for this purpose (though I probably need to do further research on XRIs), and I wonder why folks don't just use the existing tag: URI scheme instead. As Bob Wyman has noted, tag: URIs provide a mechanism for uniquely identifying an entity, which can be used to identify Atom entries but, perhaps, also specify the tags used in an entry. For instance, let's say that in this blog entry I use the tags "technology", "blogs", and "tagging"; thus I could uniquely identify the entry as "tag:saint-andre.com,2005-08-05:technology;blogs;tagging" and when I tag the term "tagging" I would do so with the following link:
<a href="tag:saint-andre.com,2005-08-05:tagging" rel="tag">tagging</a>
There are several potential drawbacks to this approach:
However, it would enable tag crawlers to look for properly-constructed tag: URIs, scrape off the tags from the end of each URI (keeping track of the publishing domain or email address), and begin to create collections of commonly-used tags as well as of those who are doing the tagging.
Speaking of conferences, it seems that I'm going to be on a panel discussion about grown-up community collaboration with my old e-pal Jimbo Wales at IP4IT this November in Las Vegas (as well as another panel about SPAM, SPIM, and friends). I've always sworn I'd never visit Las Vegas since I have zippo interest in gambling, but I suppose meeting up with Jimbo again is reason enough. :-)
I'll be hopping on a plane to Portland, Oregon in a few hours to attend the O'Reilly Open-Source Convention (a.k.a. OSCON). If all goes well I'll be running BOFs on Jabber and CAcert (though they aren't listed on the BOF page yet), participating in Dizzy's session on Passel, chatting with folks from the Mozilla project, and so on. If you're going to be there, look me up (I'm easy to spot) and I'll assure your CAcert credentials.
I never did solve the problem I was having with Mutt and S/MIME, so I've switched to Thunderbird (gasp, a GUI email client!), which is now happily signing my outbound email and reading the signatures on inbound mail (at least signatures of other folks who've received certificates from CAcert). A step in the right direction.
Over at Financial Cryptography, Ian Grigg outs Mozilla for the closed nature of its security discussions. Not happy reading.
(Hat tip: Stowe Boyd)
I've been saying privately for a while that Google is going to be the next Microsoft -- or, at least, that they're going to be perceived that way. Adam Penenberg certainly thinks so. Personally I have my doubts, but just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. ;-)
(Penenberg says that Google's name derives from "googol", but I still think it's a contraction of go ogle. ;-)
In one of the sessions at the CTC 2005 conference, Eugene Kim asked folks if they thought their company was especially good at collaboration. One person raised his hand -- a guy from Microsoft who said they were really focused on getting applications and people to work well together. What's hilarious is that this guy was an MBA intern who'd been with Microsoft for all of four days! How much Kool-Aid can you drink in four days? Or did they drop him in a vat of the stuff? Sheesh!
Also overheard at CTC: someone who said their company is so conservative, it puts the "no" in innovation! :-)
In a good session yesterday, Eugene Eric Kim discussed some of the features of what I'd call peak collaborative experiences, in which we can discern several several patterns:
Language note: Eugene used "emerge" as a transitive verb, as in "Smart organizations emerge best practices" (or whatever), which I'd never heard before.
In the latest installment of his critique of social networking applications, Stowe Boyd argues again for their integration into ways that people really work and communicate over the Internet, especially instant messaging and weblogs. He further observes:
MSN and AOL have fiddled around with integration of the most obvious social tools -- instant messaging and blogs -- but I am waiting expectantly to see something huge come out of Google and Yahoo in this area. Google is going to launch its own Firefox-based browser, and integrating instant messaging (from Picasa?), blogging, and son-of-Orkut friend of a friend stuff should follow. Ditto with Yahoo's integration of Flickr (which was an instant messaging tool before it was a social networking photo world), including it's blogging capablities, into the Yahoo Messenger and Groups world.
Well, that's all fine and I expect it to happen, but there are plenty of folks who don't necessarily want to get into bed with MSN, AOL, Yahoo, or Google. For them, decentralized solutions are needed -- and for that, we need integration of decentralized IM, blogging, and social networking technologies. My conclusion: we need a conversation between Jabber folks and WordPress folks (among others) to explore this space and build tools that are under the individual's control. I was chatting about this stuff the other day with one of the Google Summer of Code applicants and I think there are exciting possibilities here. Stay tuned...
To me, Jon Udell's post on Wikipedia and the social construction of knowledge points up some problems with the centralized construction of knowledge. Yes, Wikipedia is cool, but attempting to build one true centralized repository of knowledge makes that repository a more desirable target for those who would manipulate your understanding of the world. Better, I think, to pursue a more decentralized approach -- not one community of knowledge, but many communities of knowledge. After all, decentralization is the Internet way, no?
As mentioned, I'm participating in two panels at the upcoming Collaborative Technologies Conference. Unfortunately, it seems that the CTC folks will accept slides only in PowerPoint format (is PowerPoint the only recognized collaborative technology for presentations?). That poses a bit of a problem for someone like me, who uses only OS X and once in a while Debian GNU/Linux. Rumor has it that you can export Keynote files to PowerPoint format, and I have a trial version of Keynote that I haven't opened yet, so I think I'll compose my slides in DocBook Slides, transform them into Keynote's XML format using the stylesheet developed by Zveno, then export the Keynote slides to PowerPoint format. Wish me luck! ;-)
It'd be cool if smart search engines could automagically find web pages that are offered under one of the Creative Commons licenses (I prefer to place my works into the public domain, but CC makes that possible, too). For reasons unknown to mere mortals like me, CC recommends placing some RDF in an HTML comment as the proper way to "tag" a web page (Uche explains more here). Well, gosh, who thought that up? Are we not in possession of fine XHTML metadata technologies like the <meta/> tag? Some years ago, Simon Willison stated his preference for putting the following meta element in the HTML <head/> of your documents:
<link rel="copyright" href="some-license-url"/>
Makes eminent sense to me. I've added the relevant markup to all my blog pages, pointing (of course) to <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/>.
It looks like I'm going to be on two panel discussions at the upcoming Collaborative Technologies Conference in NYC:
It's a brief visit and I've already got a few other meetings scheduled, so if you want to get together let me know soon.
The twelfth person I've assured for CAcert is Peter Millard. That makes me the #117 assurer as of today. I do think I can crack the top 100 at this pace. ;-)
Over lunch, I assured Dave Smith and Mark Stang of Ping Identity -- that makes 11 assurances, and CAcert says I am now the #122 assurer out of 2000+ assurers. But I know I can do better. ;-)
Number nine, number nine, number nine... (Is that the worst Beatles song ever, or what?)
This morning I initiated Travis Shirk into the ways of CAcert certificates. And I might assure some more folks later today when I visit the worldwide headquarters of the Ping Identity Corporation.
For reasons known only to the good folks at CAcert, I've been temporarily bumped up to some kind of super-user status, which means I can grant 100 (or even 150) points at a time right now. Thus I can wave my magic wand and automatically grant you enough points to assure others, sign code, or get domain certs. But order by midnight tonight, because my special powers lapse on May 22!
I've been trying to teach an old dog new tricks by getting mutt to use the certificate I've received from CAcert. Following the notes gets me to the point where I can accept signed emails (even CAcert-signed emails after having added the CAcert root certificate to ca-bundle.crt), but I can't yet sign my own emails -- I get the following cryptic message:
unable to load signing key file
15905:error:06065064:digital envelope routines:EVP_DecryptFinal:bad decrypt:evp_enc.c:450:
15905:error:0906A065:PEM routines:PEM_do_header:bad decrypt:pem_lib.c:423:
Press any key to continue...
No output from OpenSSL...
As far as I can see, my signing key is in the right place, permissions are fine, and all the pieces are in place to sign my email messages, but it ain't happening. Further research required, I guess...
Last month I admitted defeat in my personal war against email. A few helpful folks like Hal Rottenberg suggested alternative approaches such as SpamBayes, but for now I've settled on Active Spam Killer, which my friend Dizzy uses. Unfortunately, it's not very user-friendly for those who send email to <stpeter@jabber.org> or <peter@saint-andre.com>, but I'm working to update the whitelist as fast as possible so that most folks won't be hit with those automated "please confirm" messages. With my spam volume at 300+ messages a day and rising, I'm not sure what else to do. At least I'm not yet to the Jer level -- he was up to 4 spams a second on his old jeremie.com address before he simply had to pull the plug!
This evening half a dozen folks got together at SoftPro Books in Centennial, Colorado for a CAcert assurance party. I assured five people: Steve Senator (who was up from Colorado Springs), Jeff Falgout and Jeff Brown (both of whom work for Jefferson County), Micha