Thought Palace

Brent “NetNewsWire” Simmons raises the idea of “an open protocol (and open source server) for syncing RSS/Atom subscriptions”:http://inessential.com/2010/02/08/idea_for_alternative_rss_syncing_system, that is, a way of keeping multiple local newsreader apps (like on a Mac and an iPhone) in sync with each other, so that they share the same set of subscribed feeds, and remember which articles have already been read. You can think of it as “IMAP for RSS”.

NetNewsWire already does this using Google Reader, and Apple’s PubSub framework (which is what Safari and Mail use) shares the read/unread state using MobileMe. But it would be nice to have an open protocol.

I have some experience with this, having implemented the sync system used by PubSub. It’s an interesting problem—you might think I would have just used Apple’s SyncServices, and it’s true that it would have worked great for the subscription list, but it doesn’t scale well to huge numbers of rapidly-changing “read/unread” flags.

I have two suggestions (which I would have made on Brent’s blog, except he doesn’t allow comments anymore.)

Farhad Manjoo writing in Slate about Google Wave:

The trouble is, everything you type into Wave is transmitted live, in real time—every keystroke was getting sent to Zach just as I hit it. This made me too self-conscious to get my thoughts across.

… Maybe I should just delete what I’d written and say, “Twitter works because it’s simple.” But I couldn’t do that, because Zach was watching me. He could see me struggling right now—he could see that I’d gotten myself stuck in a textual cul-de-sac and that I was desperately searching for a way out without looking foolish. Now I saw Zach beginning to type: “Don’t let the live-typing get you down!” The game was up; what was the point of making a point now? I ended my thought clumsily and then resolved never to attempt to say anything very deep on Wave.

The same thing happened seven years ago with the live-typing feature that I implemented in iChat 1.0 (which was only supported for Bonjour chats.) I thought it was an awesome idea, and I’d wanted to have it in a chat program since about 1997. But it turned out that, in actual use, people hated it, for exactly the [...]

Last year I wrote a series of blog posts about a peer-to-peer system called Cloudy that I was developing. I was going up the stack, from messaging to identity, but didn’t finish documenting all the layers I’d built. I mostly stopped working on Cloudy after I went back to gainful employment, but I keep thinking about this stuff.

“Lakitu”?

I’ve since heard about another unrelated project nicknamed Cloudy; and the whole term “cloud” has gotten so debased in the past year that it now stands for outsourcing to giant hidden server farms, which is the antithesis of what I stand for. So I’ve decided to use the name Lakitu instead. Nintendo fans will recognize Lakitu as a bit character in the Mario games—he’s a goggled turtle who rides a little one-seater cloud. This makes him an appropriate mascot for P2P technologies, I think.

[I’m sure Nintendo has a trademark on the character, but they don’t appear to have copyrighted the word “Lakitu”. He’s not even known by that name in Japan, where he’s called “ジュゲム” or “Jugem”. I have been unable to find out what “Lakitu” means or why they decided to use it in the English translation. I could also note threateningly [...]

AppleInsider reports on the iTunes 9 rumors:

“The social networking integration that we reported iTunes 9 would have seems to be part of a bigger social networking push by Apple,” the report states. “We’ve been informed that Apple has plans to tie iTunes 9 into a “Social” application that they plan to release in the future.”

This sounds like the kind of app (though separate from iTunes) that Jessica Kahn and I kept trying in vain to get Apple to build, circa 2003-2005. Maybe they’ll get some use out of our abandoned prototypes.

The report goes on to say that the new application would allow users to share their listening habits with friends [and] send music to friends”

Mike Estee and I had actually prototyped this in iChat in 2003, but the feature never got approved since there were so many more important things to add, like 3-way video conferencing. (Plus the fact that Apple execs turned white as a sheet if you said the words “send music” near them.)

Anyway, personal bitterness aside, I think it’s really amusing that Apple keeps shoving the kitchen sink into iTunes, since that has to be the single nastiest, hardest-to-extend codebase they have — it’s their last remaining [...]

The GameKit framework in iPhone OS 3.0 is very interesting to a Bonjour / P2P head like yrs truly. It basically provides a very easy-to-use API for ad-hoc group formation and many-to-many messaging on a local network. Great for games, of course, but also for many other types of social apps. (I just saw a report on a dev forum that somebody had whipped up a basic chat app in about 15 minutes.)

GameKit uses BlueTooth networking; that lets it work where there’s no WiFi, but it also limits the range. BlueTooth covers just a few meters, whereas a WiFi network connected to an Ethernet subnet can easily cover a whole floor of a building.

My MYNetwork framework seems like a good way to bridge that gap. The TCP connection classes provide the Bonjour discovery and makes point-to-point connections, and the BLIP protocol lets you send data blobs over those connections.

It should be pretty straightforward to build some classes that are plug-compatible with the GameKit network classes but use MYNetwork. Then iPhone apps could easily support both protocols, and compatible Mac apps could be developed. Anyone want to try it?

[Note: I’m only referring to information that was publicly discussed at Apple’s press [...]

So, Web 2.0’s heyday is over, and somewhere out there, Web 3.0 is slouching toward us waiting to be born. What will it be?

There’s really no such single thing as “Web x“, of course. And all predictions are really just wishes. That being said, my wish is that Web 3.0 will be about distributed systems. To oversimplify:

Web 1.0 built up big brand-name websites with their own content—things written by them, or repurposed from the media companies that owned them, or stuff to buy.

Web 2.0 embraced “user-created content” and interaction between users. The content creation has become less centralized, outsourced to whomever wants to register an account and post stuff, but the sites managing, storing and serving the content are still centralized.

Web 3.0, I hope, will take the decentralization to the software, and the storage. Monolithic web apps run by huge server farms—Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, Flickr, etc.—will be at least in part supplanted by apps that users run locally (or at least ‘nearby’) and which share data among each other.

Why is this important?

Centralization creates concentrations of power, and that’s dangerous. The people who run the servers have total control over your (and everyone’s) data. They can snoop at it (however private [...]

Brian Mastenbrook has discovered a really bad security hole in Safari RSS:

I have discovered that Apple’s Safari browser is vulnerable to an attack that allows a malicious web site to read files on a user’s hard drive without user intervention. This can be used to gain access to sensitive information stored on the user’s computer, such as emails, passwords, or cookies that could be used to gain access to the user’s accounts on some web sites. The vulnerability has been acknowledged by Apple.

All users of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard who have not who have not performed the workaround steps listed below are affected, regardless of whether they use any RSS feeds. Users of previous versions of Mac OS X are not affected.

He hasn’t released details yet, presumably to give Apple time to release a patch, so I don’t know what the bug is. But it’s my fault, since I either wrote the bad code myself, or at least didn’t notice a mistake a co-worker made. And since I’m not at Apple anymore I can’t help fix it.

Shit. I’m sorry, everyone.

I’m fooling around with Soup, a newish micro-blogging service I just discovered. I’ve never signed up for tumblr or its other clones, but I’m kind of smitten with Soup, so I set up my own:

beautiful snej soup, yum

I’ve got it aggregating stuff from my del.icio.us, flickr and last.fm accounts, as well as this blog. And I’m directly posting some things I’ve run across today, via its very nice bookmarklet.

Part of the reason I got sucked in is that Soup has the single best new-user experience I’ve ever seen on the web. You just click the “try it” button on the home page, and you get your own soup blog. No signup, no registration, just instant gratification. Then you can slide open the control panel (that slider itself is a beautiful piece of UI), import from your other social sites, and fool with the settings, all in privacy. Only after you’re hooked do you need to press the Create button and choose a username and password, whereupon your soup goes live. It’s brilliant — the web equivalent of the “untitled document” UI introduced in the ‘70s by the Xerox Star.

Anyway, please take a look and join me! (It’s not obvious [...]

Continuing from the previous Cloudy post …

The first time you connect to someone, how do you establish that digital identifier you’re communicating with is the human being you think it is? This is surprisingly difficult to do, because it’s prone to what cryptographers call the “man-in-the-middle attack”.

(Those of you already wearing tinfoil hats can skip past the general explanation, down to “What Cloudy Does”.)

1. A Quick Overview Of Verification Attacks.

First, consider the most obvious attack: simple spoofing.

Spoofing.

Let’s suppose there’s an instant-messaging UI, and while working at home you receive a message from someone with an unknown key, whose nickname is “AliceLiddell”, which happens to be the name of a co-worker.

“AliceLiddell”: yo, this is alice
You: hi alice, what’s up?
You add this identity to your friends-list.
Alice: i need the admin password to the web server to fix a template
You: oh ok, it’s wend4743kt
Alice: kthxbye

Fifteen minutes later your company’s website is pwned by the hacker who posed as Alice. All he had to do was create a new identity with her name as the nickname, and pretend to be her.

How do we get around this? You might think that asking questions before accepting someone’s claimed identity would help, and it does help [...]

I don’t want to make a habit of replying on my blog to posts on other blogs, because (a) it’s dorky in an autistic way, and (b) it only encourages the annoying practice of blogs that stick their fingers in their ears.

But I’ve seen a couple of references now to Dean Allen’s complaint about sites that offer multiple RSS feed formats, but no place to post a comment about it; and since it directly relates to my past job monkeying with feeds, I feel like I should answer.

There are two reasons why a web page would link to multiple feeds.

To support feed-readers that don’t understand every format. The XML-syndication-format field has a totally ludicrous history of incompatible versionitis, and the only format that’s actually sanely designed (Atom) is new enough that for a while some major clients, such as BlogLines, didn’t support it. So it’s reasonable during such a transition period to generate both formats.
Because there might be feeds with different content. Some sites offer headlines-only feeds and full-content feeds. Some blogs offer a feed of all the comments on one post, as well as the usual feed of all the posts. Some wikis offer a feed of revisions of [...]