Eben Moglen’s Talk – Freedom in the Cloud
A very insightful talk about how we lost our freedom and how to regain it
You can also read the full transcript linked from there.
Entries Tagged as 'The New Web'
Motivation and Background for the User Controlled Web
Here are some background pointers:
A list of projects in this space. The Diaspora project is listed under “deployable on commodity webhosting”. I was under the impression that they are actually more of a p2p application.
A set of ideas for this space on the GNU Social wiki.
Adriana Lukas talks about the user-controlled web and the mine project. (She coins a fun acronym: Relationships on Individuals’ Own Terms - RIOT. )
There seems to be quite a bit of activity with 20-30 projects, but the efforts are fragmented. Different projects have different goals and approaches. Some focus on a piece of the user experience and others focus on technology. For example, the Mine! project is a technology piece focused on rich sharing of data (including links, photos) with strong user control. OneSocialWeb is focused on messaging. With Elgg you can create social networks – but it’s not really user controlled.
Diversity is great, but one or two well-thought out efforts need to win. Critical mass is a must in order to win in this space.
The Diaspora Project and the User Controlled Web
I’m pretty excited about the Diaspora project generating a groundswell of support. They managed to raise $170K in two weeks through kickstarter (they asked for $10K).
Why am I excited? I’ve written before about walled gardens and user controlled Internet apps. It is crucial that we invert the control structure of the web if we want to be in control of our destiny.
There are some critical challenges that a user-controlled system must face:
- Secure software distribution – users will want to install applets inside their environments. Third party audit and signing of code will be necessary in order to keep the apps flowing, but without compromising users’ instances. Applets will also have to be firewalled from each-other – as some will be more trusted and some less. I’ve previously written a couple of posts about the challenges of secure software distribution.
- Peer to peer naming and search – it should be easy to find stuff, without necessarily knowing their URLs. A global, fully distributed naming and search system will be important.
- A distributed reputation system will be a natural fit for a distributed social network.
- Memory footprint – current web application frameworks are designed for high volume apps, and therefore take up quite a bit of memory to load application code. These frameworks can afford to do so, because they expect to amortize the memory over many users. However, a user-controlled system will have one user per instance. Clever memory sharing among instances will be necessary.
I can’t wait to see what the first prototype looks like.
There are some additional projects along these lines that are worth a look and are actually further along:
- http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/ – LAMP (PHP) based
- http://onesocialweb.org/ – Java/XMPP based
Maybe none of these will make it. But the $170K is a signal – that people care about this.
DNA not Patentable
Sanity prevails in federal court! News at 11.
Brain Preservation Tech Prize
As a Cryonics member, I became interested in a new initiative to fixate the brain in a plastic medium: brainpreservation.org
Would be excellent to have a high fidelity preservation procedure that doesn’t require maintenance (such as liquid nitrogen in the case of Cryonics).
Quantified Self: CMS50 Oximeter
After attending a couple of Quantified Self meetups, I was inspired to quantify various aspects of myself and my life. For example, I was wondering if I am breathing well while I sleep, since I have been waking up tired on occasion.
I bought the Contec CMS50-F oximeter from here.
The software that comes with the CMS50 could be more reliable and user-friendly, and only runs on Windows. I ended up spending a day reverse engineering the USB protocol and writing a Python program to acquire and graph the data. The software is on Gitorious.
Here are some of the charts you can get:
Blue Brain Project Documentary – Year 1
Noah Hutton’s company Couple 3 Films has released year 1 of a 10 year documentary project documenting the Blue Brain project. The project includes Henry Markham’s work on reverse engineering the brain, scaling up from rodents to humans by 2010.
The work is funded by the Swiss government.
$3000 Whole Genome Sequencing Cost
Life Technologies announces $3,000 marginal cost (later this year) for sequencing complete human genomes. This is after Illumina announced the same for $10,000 (now). So a $1,000 genome early next year?
Here comes personalized medicine.
Attack Scenarios on Software Distributions
I’ve been asked to outline specific scenarios after I posted a previous entry on the Google’s network compromise. Here are some, from most serious to least serious:
- Build host - the machines that compile the source into binary packages are compromised. In this scenario, code can be injected by the malicious party into the package just before it is signed and prepared for distribution. All clients that install the updated packages are affected. A software audit cannot identify the altered packages because the alteration happens after binaries are generated.
- Distribution host and Signing key – the machines that host the packages for distribution (web servers) are compromised and the package signing key is compromised. The effect of this is the same as a build host compromise.
- Source repository – the machines that host the software source-code are compromised. This allows code to be injected and all clients are affected. However, a software audit can uncover the injected code.
- Insider threats – an insider can insert non-obvious security holes into software they are responsible for.
- Signing key - the key used to sign the software distribution is compromised. This would allow the malicious party to compromise only specific targeted clients through a “man-in-the-middle” attack and DNS poisoning
How would multiple independent auditors help? If the auditors can verify that a binary was produced from certain source, the build host compromise would be much harder, since the altered binary would not signed by the uncompromised auditors. Similarly, a signing key compromise, if it is limited to a subset of auditors, would fail to get a full set of signatures on the altered package.
Source repository compromise and Insider injection of security holes would be more difficult to detect for subtle exploits, but again, multiple entities looking at the code increases the chances that the alteration would be caught.
(Note: verification that a certain binary was produced from certain source code requires a deterministic build system. Although such a system is relatively straightforward to implement, I have not run across one before I implemented Gitian. I did find mention of it by Conifer Systems.)
Doubling in Incidence of Malicious Data Breaches
CNet reports on Ponemon institute’s survey showing a doubling of data breach incidents.
Average cost per record in the surveyed group is around $200.
Operation Aurora and Software Distributions as Single Points of Security Failure
Operation Aurora (Google’s compromise by China) highlights the possibility that software distributions may be targeted for code injection by malicious parties. If Apple, Microsoft or a linux distributors are compromised, a large percentage of individuals, businesses and governments could be consequentially compromised when they install software updates.
One way to mitigate such a risk is to have multiple independent security auditors sign software distributions. This is more likely to be successful in an open-source environment, where source is available and can easily be inspected. I started such an initiative in late 2009 – Gitian.org.
Nasal flu vaccine
Alex and I got nasal H1N1 vaccines on Tue. I felt tired on Wed and Alex has a sore throat. Nasal is live-attenuated instead of dead virus.
Apparently symptoms are more likely with the nasal. On the up-side – no preservatives!
Does the nasal-spray flu vaccine LAIV (FluMist) contain thimerosal?
No, the nasal-spray flu vaccine LAIV (FluMist) does not contain thimerosal or any other preservative.
The computation market becomes more liquid
The Register tells us that Amazon will auction their excess capacity. We’re a couple of steps away from computation becoming a liquid commodity. The next step is for a couple of additional providers to arise (Google?). The step after that is for the APIs to be brought in sync by the providers or by a third party intermediary.
How I stopped worrying and learned to love technofixes
Peter Thiel writes regarding the failure of Democracy to preserve freedom and some possible technofix strategies. He includes are thoughts about creating freedom in Cyberspace, Outer space or on the high seas. I think it would be interesting to build certain distributed Internet apps that could change the dynamics of freedom, including reputation systems, gifting/barter systems and user-controlled Internet apps.
[Read more →]
Freedom is generative
I’ve been thinking about what we learned about freedom from the open-source movement.
I think one of the more important benefits of freedom is that it is generative. You can glue things together in ways that create completely new things. For example, you can take the Internet, existing computers and the ability to write software (originally the Mosaic browser) and create a whole new ecosystem – the World Wide Web.
What if you didn’t have the freedom to transmit arbitrary data on wires? You’d have the telco monopoly and no Internet. If you couldn’t talk to anybody you want? You’d get the original walled-garden AOL. If you couldn’t write arbitrary software?
But there’s nothing specific to software in this lesson. What if you couldn’t freely associate? If you couldn’t invest in arbitrary ideas? If someone else made the decisions for you?
Another question is how much could we go beyond the current state of affairs. I think we could have significantly more freedom in technology and obtain much richer outcomes.
For example, if reputations systems were not stuck in walled gardens, such as eBay and Amazon seller ratings, we could have a global reputation system. Such a system will be immensely more useful, since it could be used to guide us in every interaction rather than just the current 1%. I would guess that such a system could guide you to interesting content and interaction with uncanny accuracy. Such a system would have to be decentralized and user-controlled to protect the users’ interests.
Another promising direction is the Google Android phone OS. If you buy one of the unlocked ones (also known as dev phones), you can re-compile and install the OS and any applications you want. Google maps is one mobile killer app, but there will be more, and I would guess the truly groundbreaking ones will not pass the iPhone store gateway keepers. (see here, here and many others).
I sometime pay a price for being an early adopter and eschewing closed solutions. Yes, the iPhone is very slick and music from the iTunes store was tempting even when it was all DRM. But I think in the long term open solutions will be much more valuable. The original AOL was nice for the time, but it’s dead now.
Reputation Economies symposium
O’Reilly Radar has a blog post about the Yale symposium on reputation economies in cyberspace.
OpenSocial insecurity – no user to app authentication
I was pretty excited to hear about Google trying to set a standard for social network applications. I wasn’t so happy to notice a serious omission in the way security is handled.
Executive Summary: no user authentication! Any user can forge anybody else’s identity when interacting with any OpenSocial application. As it currently stands, it is not possible to write secure social applications on the platform.
OpenSocial vs. Facebook API – an analysis
Executive Summary
- OpenSocial applications will have diverging look-and-feel, from each other and from the containers. This is because the containers do not provide common elements to blend the application into the container.
- OpenSocial applications may not be vertically resizable, since they will exist in an iframe. However, Google has an API For resizing that some or all of the networks may implement
- Facebook has additional API functionality that is not present in OpenSocial
- The Facebook API is server oriented, whereas the OpenSocial/Google Gadgets API is client-side JavaScript oriented
[Read more →]
Stanford Delta Scan and Technologies for Cooperation
Stanford’s Delta Scan makes predictions similar to my take on Web 3.0, including:
- Trust over Social networks / Social accounting methods (i.e. reputation systems)
- the rise of computing grids
- Social mobile computing
- Knowledge collectives
- Mesh networks
Giving rise to:
- Adhocracies
- Faster innovation
- Faster/better decision making
- Increase in effectiveness of online economies
Crowdhacking
Wired latest issue has an article about the emerging arms race between rating systems (such as eBay, Amazon, Digg) and crowdhackers. Crowdhackers take advantage of the naive methods used to aggregate ratings in existing systems.
A crowdhacking proof system will have to use a transitive trust model rather than the naive averaging existing systems use.