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 'Social Networks'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 →]
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
Web 3.0, according to Miron
Here is what I think Web 3.0 will have:
- A global and open Reputation Network
- A distributed and open Computing and Storage Platform
Reputation Network
What does it mean for a Reputation Network to be global? Currently, we have propietary reputation systems, such as the reputation scores for sellers (and buyers) at Amazon and eBay. However, that reputation is not portable. This means that if an Amazon third-party seller wants to start selling on eBay, they have to start from scratch, as if their business is new. Trust is an integral ingredient to transactions. It becomes crucial on the internet, when a buyer and a seller are likely to never have heard of each-other. With portable reputations, a trust metric can be made available in all interactions.
What about the open part? A global reputation system owned by one entity is a non-starter. Why would one trust a single entity to provide basic infrastructure that affects all commerce and other interaction? Reputation should be like TCP/IP – based on open standards so that different vendors can provide different levels of service and create a robust overall system. The individual reputation systems can remain under the control of Amazon, eBay and others. However, they can inter-operate so that they can create a global reputation network.
Reputation should be subjective. End-users should be able to subscribe to different raters, and thereby compute different scores for the same target. End-users have diverse values and preferences. One number cannot capture this diversity.
Storage and Computing
What about storage and computing? Currently, people have presence on the Web through Blogs, Wikis, Storefronts, IM, e-mail, etc. . However, creating a new Web application faces certain barriers. The application creator has to acquire servers, manage them, ensure that the data is safe and face scalability issues as the application grows in popularity. Also, interoprability between applications is difficult. A standardized computing and storage abstraction will allow new application to be installed by the user into their virtual computing appliance. Users will have control of which application they run and how the applications communicate. Applications and data will migrate to physical hardware based on what the user is willing to pay and what scalability requires.
The division of labor is: the application provider does what they are good at – writing applications. The computing and storage providers provide efficient and reliable computing and storage (and if they don’t – the application can migrate easily or even automatically). The end-user does what they do best – connect the dots and provide content.
People Aggregator – unification of social networks?
Federated, single-signon, standards based. What’s not to like?
BroadBand Mechanics presents People Aggregator
Web site is not fully functional yet, so have to wait.
Blogged with Flock