As I May Think...

When the hackers warn that your machines are easy to hack, it is wise to listen.. ComputerWorld reports that the famous German hacker club, Chaos Computer Club, has gone to court to get an injunction against the use of electronic voting machines in German elections. They argue, quite sensibly, that as an organization of hackers, they are quite confident that they could hack whatever machines might be used. Hopefully, people will listen more to these people than they have to organizations of computer professionals like the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) who have consistently argued against the use of paperless electronic voting machines.

The Chaos Computer Club press release on this issues says, in part:

"There is a growing resistance stirring among the population against the use of the NEDAP voting computer, known to be vulnerable to manipulation", said CCC spokesman Dirk Engling. "After a virtually identical voting machine from the same manufacturer was recently completely rejected in the Netherlands, more and more concerned citizens have turned to the CCC. The voters do not understand why the same rejection cannot also be drawn in Germany. The legal path which has now been chosen is the last chance to save the transparency of the elections in Hesse."

I find it amazing that even though respected members of the computer industry have consistently argued against the use of paperless electronic voting machines, non-technical people and journalists keep suggesting that the industry might be able to build reliable machines that we could trust. Perhaps now that the hackers have spoken, the non-technical types will finally begin to realize that those of us in this industry understand what we do much better than they do...

bob wyman

Some blog posts (very few) are so brilliantely written that you know the instant you read them that you'll be seeing links to them for years to come. Such is the case with Mark Pilgrim's post "The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)" which will hopefully teach people an important lesson about copyright, DRM, and the future of authorship online.

Mark does a wonderful job of pulling quotes from a variety of sources.  By combining these purloined texts into a logical sequence he delivers a powerful message without actually ever writing a single word that is original (other than the title and section names). Mark's original contribution is all in the selection and sequencing of the texts -- a great demonstration of the power of "mashups"

My only criticism of his piece is that he didn't find a way to quote from Spider Robinson's "Melancholy Elephants."

bob wyman

It appears that the well-known Amazon "One-Click" patent has been successfully challenged in a re-examination by the USPTO. This patent has always intrigued me for two reasons:

• I've never been able to see anything in it that warranted a patent
• The One-Click patent references two of my patents (5204897,5260999)and I've never been able to figure out why there was any connection between my patents and the "One-Click" patent...

Now, I think we'll all be better off without this patent on the books -- but, I'll miss the links. Hopefully, when people see that it was possible for someone to challenge this patent and have it modified, they'll be encouraged to challenge more of them.

bob wyman

Today, I'm going to do something that becomes harder and harder every day. I'm going to add to the network some lines that apparently aren't already there. I'm going to write something original...

I can do this because the network is still only a few decades old. While billions of lines have already been indexed into the monstrous memories of Google, Ask, and Yahoo!, there still remains an ever-shrinking collection of billions of lines that have yet to be written for the first time. But, time is running out.

Someone first wrote: "Good Morning" and someone else first wrote: "A rose by any other name..." But, when they wrote those words onto the network for the first time, what they wrote could never again be considered "original" or "fresh." They permanently erased a tiny portion of the space of original lines. They made it harder for the rest of us to be original.

Given the above as context, I'll now get to it. My contribution to the original lines on the net is two of the four lines in the short poem below: (Written when I was in prep school -- exploring the similarities between "W", "Q" and "C"...)

Waiting...
Waiting quietly and without qualm
Never knowing why the end will come
Only wondering why

The first and last lines appear on the net today but the two middle lines appear here for the first time - -and the last time as "original" lines. Or, should I say "virgin texts": not yet copied, not yet plagiarized, not yet indexed.

Yet another sign that the world is changing comes from the recent decision by the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) to publish their standards openly and freely on the Internet. This standards body, through standards like X.25, X.400, X.500, etc., has had a great impact on the Internet and computing in general. However, they have always charged tremendous amounts of money to those who actually wished to read their standards. The result has been, I think, a lesser rate of adoption than would have otherwise been possible. It  is also quite possible that we might have fewer standards groups today if the ITU had been willing to make their content availlable earlier. (The high price of their standards has often been cited as a reason to avoid them as a forum for standardization.) For those looking to find out how X.25 was really defined or who wish to delve into the intricacies of ASN.1 (X.680), you can now find everything online, free at: http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-X/

bob wyman

Scott Adams, author of Dilbert, has discovered an essential truth of blogging: "Mention them and they will come." In a recent post on his blog, Adams challenges bloggers to identify things that are "Too frickin' cool" and offers his own opinion that Google Alerts fits the "Too frickin' cool" category. Adams, a recent convert to Google Alerts, is enjoying the pleasure of being able to receive a notification whenever he's mentioned on the blog of any one of his millions of fans. He says, in part:

Any time that 11-year old Vijay sits at his Dad’s computer in Lucknow, India, and blogs about his favorite Dilbert comic, Google finds it, and sends that link directly to my left front pocket. I reach in, pull out the Blackberry, click the link, and Vijay’s blog opens. ... From Vijay’s perspective, he’s writing about his favorite cartoonist who lives on the other side of the world. As soon as Vijay presses the “publish” button for his blog, it sets in motion a chain of events that ends with his words delivered to that author’s left front pocket. And in all likelihood, that author will read those words while his wife is scrolling up and down through the DVR’s online guide in some sort of shopper’s trance.

That is, of course, pretty frickin' cool! But, what's really cool isn't the technology... The cool part is the fact that the technology has enabled a radical restructuring of the traditional relationship between author and reader. Between "elite" and "public..." Today, we can anticipate that when we write about authors or any other actors in a public space, there is a reasonable chance not only that they will read our words, but that they will do so within minutes or hours of our having written those words. This low-latency access is enjoyed whether or not we know their private email addresses, are members of their social/professional circle or are otherwise known to them. The result is a democratization of access that is simply unprecedented in our history.

What will come of it?

bob wyman

Now that Second Life has released their client "viewer" code as Open Source (GPLv2), we can hope for all sorts of innovative enhancements to the interface. One that I would love to see would be the use of a MultiTouch interface in the Builder tools. To get some idea of how easy it might be to size, position, and shape Second Life prims using a MultiTouch interface, take a look at the Google Video below...

bob wyman

If you're a news junkie, I strongly recommend that you take a look at the freshly opened site Daylife.com. I've been using the beta since last summer and I really like it. I believe that it is really pushing the envelope for what can be done with using machine analysis to construct a useful and compelling new reading experience. It's also very pretty...

Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine has had a strong hand in getting DayLife up and running and it is clear that his many years experience with media and journalism were well used here. Jeff's thoughts on the Daylife release, as well as comments and trackbacks that link to both useful commentary and childish invective,  can be found on Jeff's blog.

bob wyman

On his blog, Drummond Reed riffs on some comments I recently made on the OpenID General mailing list concerning the persistence of identity. The upshot is that we should be more aware of the attribute "persistence" when discussing identity systems. This is particularly true when identity systems are intended to model "numerical identity" -- normally assumed to persist -- rather than the often more plastic attributes of qualitative identity.

To better illustrate the issues in this discussion, I propose that we update the well-known "Zooko's Triangle" and create a "Pyramid" that adds the attribute "persistence" to the attributes "Memorable," "Secure," and "Global" which are already included in Zooko's Triangle.

The argument made by Zooko's Triangle is that no naming/identity scheme can provide all three of the attributes Zooko considers essential metrics of identity systems. For instance, while you might be able to build a "Secure and Global" naming system, in doing so, you would undoubtedly need to use identifiers that were not "memorable" -- at least not by mere humans. The importance of these three system attributes and the difficulty of producing systems which provide all three is generally well accepted by those in the naming/identity business.

To the three attributes or axes of Zooko's Triangle, we need to add a fourth axis or dimension which is "Persistence" (i.e. that which relates to the difficult and controversial subject of Identity over Time). The result is a pyramid which allows us to better model constraints on the universe of achievable identity systems. For any of the three traditionally recognized attributes, we need to ask the question "For how long?" (e.g. For how long will an identifier be memorable? For how long will an identity system be secure? What determines the period of time during which a globally unique identifier can be considered "global?")

The debate over programming languages often seems to take on a near religious quality -- now the proponents of the Python language may have some history on their side... It seems that PyGod is the oldest known god of homo sapiens...

Science Daily recently reported that Sheila Coulson of the University of Oslo has discovered the oldest known "ritual" site in a region of Botswana known as Ngamiland and inhabited by the San people. Apparently, this site was dedicated more than 70,000 years ago to worship of a Python God...

Now, we may finally know the language used by the "intelligent designer"...

I can't help wondering if this means that truly dedicated Python programmers will have to prove their worthiness by making at least one pilgrimage to the land of the San people in order to pay respects to the PyGod. Will this help Botswana tourism? Perhaps we'll see the San, as current custodians of the PyGod's den, adopted by the Python community as a focus of charitable giving... Bill Gates' efforts to help Africa, as far as those efforts effect the San, may have results he did not expect. Why code in C# when the PyGod clearly would prefer Python?

bob wyman