Thought Palace

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 [...]

Here is the latest absurdity to come out of Apple’s deeply, endemically fucked-up App Store approval process: Jamie Montgomerie’s Eucalyptus app, an e-book reader that can download public-domain books from Project Gutenberg—about the most innocuous thing you could imagine, right?—gets rejected not once but three times for containing “obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content”.

Leaving aside the issue of whether Apple has any business deciding what constitutes obscenity (a task that’s driven grown Supreme Court justices to drink)—
And leaving aside also the fact that Apple’s censors have three times now been too dim to comprehend that the application does not contain any books, obscene or otherwise, but downloads them from the Internet much like Safari—
No, the really outrageous issue is that the supposed obscenity here consists of a text-only English translation of the Kama Sutra. Apple specifically called out some pages of steamy advice for “when a man wishes to enlarge his lingam“. (No, really.) [1]

Now, Richard Burton had to get his 1883 translation of this ancient text printed privately when no publishers would accept it, but that was in the Victorian era. The current authoritative translation is nowadays published by that infamous smut peddler, Oxford University Press. Much harder-core fare [...]

I just discovered that a number of commercial artists are really insulted that Google approached them to create artwork, without offering to pay for it. This did seem unreasonable to me … until I read further and saw that this is for the Chrome browser.

Now, Chrome is open source. (Technically the open source project is a separate thing called “Chromium”, but that’s mostly an organizational detail; the code is the same.) So when I compared this controversy to the rather different attitude of the many programmers who’ve gladly contributed to Chrome and WebKit (and thus also Safari) without pay … I went “hmm”.

There’s a long comment thread about this on the LiveJournal of the talented cartoonist Rebecca Clements. The craziest comment I saw was by one “Anonymous”:

“Good will never paid a bill or put shoes on my child. I admit there should be some caring people in the world. But Google being kind …so we all should be kind like them and give our work away? Come on give me a break. Someone in their executive chain of management has thought this through enough to realize it as a Public Relations “cool” thing to do to get more attention and [...]

“Some people have suggested that mental illness is a kind of adaptation to the sort of circumstances that will arise in the future. As we move towards a more and more psychotic landscape, the psychotic traits are signs of a kind of Darwinian adaptation.”—1998

Abstract.

Numerous studies have been conducted upon patients in terminal paresis (GPI), placing the author J.G. Ballard in a series of simulated auto crashes, e.g. multiple pileups, head-on collisions, motorcade attacks (fantasies of Presidential assassinations remained a continuing preoccupation, subjects showing a marked polymorphic fixation on windshields and rear trunk assemblies). Powerful erotic fantasies of an anal-sadistic nature surrounded the image of the award-winning novelist.

J.G. Ballard And The Conceptual Auto-Disaster.

J.G. Ballard died yesterday in his last car-crash. During his life he had rehearsed his death in many crashes, but this was his only true accident. Driven on a collision course towards the royal limousine, his car jumped the rails of the London Airport flyover and plunged through the roof of a bus filled with airline passengers. The crushed bodies of package tourists, like a hæmorrhage of the sun, still lay across the vinyl seats an hour later. Holding the arm of her chauffeur, the Princess Diana, with whom [...]

Roy Blount, president of the Authors’ Guild, writing in the New York Times, attempts to defend his groups assertion that the Amazon Kindle 2’s text-to-speech capability is cheating authors out of audio-book royalties:

“What the guild is asserting is that authors have a right to a fair share of the value that audio adds to Kindle 2’s version of books.”

And that assertion makes absolutely no sense. The creator of an item does not have a right to impose an arbitrary tax on anyone who adds value to the item. Otherwise we’d be open to all sorts of nonsensical scenarios, like:

The RIAA hits Apple with a lawsuit, claiming that the trippy visualizer component built into iTunes adds value to the music, and demands extra visual-performance royalties.

Movie studios take issue with the “up-scaling” feature built into current DVD players, which increases the resolution of the image to improve picture quality on HTDVs. They point out that the output resolution is comparable to Blu-Ray, making the consumers’ DVDs roughly twice as valuable, and demand the DVD manufacturers cut them a share of that.

The CEO of Exxon-Mobil asserts that his company has a right to a share of the extra value that the Prius adds [...]

The feelings created by music are so strong, for me, but so ineffable. The problem of perception is usually described using color — how can we know if the visual sensation I call “red” is anything like the one you call “red”? — but only gets worse as you ascend to higher order perceptions, where even names become harder to apply. What do you call the feeling incited by “Guernica”, and even if you find the same words I would, is it the same feeling? And yet vision is our strongest, highest-bandwidth, most describable sense. We struggle to describe sound without using the technical terms of musicians, or vague metaphors.

It doesn’t help that so much of the music I like is so inward-focused: the guitarist gazing (not at shoes) at effect pedals, the producer sliding waveforms around a timeline, the listener bracketed in headphones like my picture above.

Everyone wants their experience of music to be shared. To play an instrument or sing for others, to blast the song from car speakers. To identify with music meant to shock, and use it to shock others. To attend a concert and know that those around you are hearing and feeling the same [...]

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 [...]

I just had an interesting idea, brought on by a post to an Apple developer list asking about software-update mechanisms for Mac applications. The library everyone uses for this is Sparkle, which is wonderful in all ways except bandwidth usage: it updates the app by downloading an entire zip archive of the new version. With many apps nowadays being 10MB or even 100MB downloads, that’s pretty significant.

This could clearly be improved a lot by downloading a delta instead, then using that to patch the current copy of the app. In most cases, using a good algorithm like xdelta3 or zdelta, the data transmitted will be orders of magnitude smaller than the entire app. (Nothing new here; many app updaters already do this, especially for games, and Microsoft apparently has some sophisticated delta-based software update tools in Windows.)

Of course, the delta to be downloaded is specific to which version of the program you already have, as well as which one you’re updating to. This means the server will need to keep a number of deltas on hand, and it and the client need to negotiate which one to use.

An additional problem with using deltas for updating Mac applications is that, on [...]

Continuing from the previous Cloudy post …

At the root of Cloudy is the means for creating and establishing identity. A lot of peer-to-peer systems treat the peers mostly as interchangeable anonymous nodes, often deliberately so, but Cloudy is a social system.

Quick Crypto Recap.

The identity and security layers of Cloudy are tightly intertwined, because identity without security is useless. And security is accomplished entirely through cryptography, because the centralized alternatives like locking all of your servers up in a closet don’t apply. Cloudy doesn’t do anything new cryptographically (wisely so), but for the benefit of those who aren’t familiar with it, here’s a superficial overview of the off-the-shelf tools I’m using:

Cryptographic Hashes, or, Digests.

Like any hash algorithm, a cryptographic hash converts a block of data of arbitrary length into a short fixed-length output; the same input always produces the same output; and even the slightest change to the input should produce an entirely different output. Unlike a regular hash, two different inputs should never result in the same hash output. (That’s “never” in the practical sense: collisions are mathematically inevitable, but it should impractically long, ideally millions of years, to find one.) And it should be infeasible to identify anything [...]