I saw The Dark Knight last night (in IMAX, on the front row, by Crom). I don’t have to repeat how purely awesome the movie is, so many others have done so already.
But it took me until tonight to notice an ironic bit of casting. The Mayor of Gotham is played by Nestor Carbonell … who played a certain flying-rodent-inspired character himself, once upon a time. I bet somebody in casting had a chuckle at that one.
I just got an alert from Google that my website was on a danger list, that it included a link to some malware. (It’s gone now.) Sure enough, the Yahoo post below contained an IFRAME with a reference to Ghod-knows-what. After excising that, I found some link spam buried in two other posts, pointing to a gambling site. Also gone now.
I recently upgraded to WordPress 2.5, which I understand closed a major security hole. I hope that this closed that hole, and I’ll see no more of this evil nonsense.
Fucking parasites. Pardon my Anglo-Saxon, but this crap just makes me furious. Now my page is marked as “Evil! Unclean!” in Google’s index, until they get around to reviewing it again. And it wasn’t just someone having fun punking my site; this is how hackers build their botnets, using openings like this to subvert anyone unlucky enough to read a hacked web page.
(I repeat, the offending code has been removed, and if the programmers at Automattic know what they’re doing, it won’t be back. If you’re still worried, try switching to a more secure browser… like anything other than Internet Explorer. Like this or this or this.)
Despite my earlier, skeptical thoughts on the subject, I have been following Twitter (although not contributing a lot, I’ll admit) and starting to appreciate it.
Granted, it’s yet another time sink, and I haven’t found an actual productive use for it yet. But I still marvel at how spam-free it remains so far. Since you only follow people you want to follow, you don’t hear form complete strangers. Yes, a stranger can make a message appear in your feed by including @yourname, but that’s a one-to-one channel, not the one-to-gazillions type of channel that spammers feed on. It works as a way to say ‘hi’, but not as a way to mass-market.
We do need some kind of middle ground between the new proprietary walled gardens like Facebook, and the all-you-can-spam communications channels like email and Usenet. IM isn’t quite it, it’s too much hassle to set up anything other than ad hoc one-to-one conversations. IRC seems to have some kind of karmic “No Non-Geeks Allowed” sign on it, it hasn’t caught on in a big way.
Twitter has about the right social model: opt-in, but make it easy to make connections; but we need to supplement the microcontent format, and an economic model that can keep the servers running as the scale gets truly massive. And finally, it should not be tied to the fortunes and whims of any one company, no matter how enlightened they may seem.
What do you get when you cross Microsoft and Yahoo?
Microsoft.
Over at TechCrunch, Duncan Riley makes the case that people leery of the coming Microsoft/Yahoo merger are being unreasonable, and need to start thinking of Google, not Microsoft, as the Evil Empire.
The Microsoft is evil meme is alive and well this week as many digest Microsoft’s $44.6 billion takeover offer for Yahoo. There’s Flickr users protesting, talk of Yahoo teaming up with Google to block Microsoft’s bid, and general Microsoft is bad sentiment everywhere, even from Google itself. While Microsoft acquiring Yahoo may not provide the ultimate in happy endings to many, it’s really not as bad as some would have you believe.
My own objection is not so much because Microsoft is evil (and we’ll set aside for the moment whether Microsoft is evil). Rather, it’s over the fact that Microsoft is a desktop software company. Up to now, Yahoo has been a pure Internet company, like Google. They have not had any reason to care what platform its users run; they simply don’t have a horse in that race.
But a combined ‘MicroHoo’ has a vested interest in what software is running at the other end of the pipe. Even if the people running the ‘Yahoo Division’ say all the right things, there will always be a temptation for the Microsoft brass to use the Yahoo properties as instruments with which to promote Microsoft desktop software. That should be a concern for anyone who uses non-Microsoft alternatives to Microsoft products — not just Mac and Linux users, but users of Firefox and Opera, iTunes and Winamp.
Will you have to use IE to access del.icio.us or Yahoo Finanace? Will you have to use Windows Media Player to access Yahoo’s streaming media? Will you have to use Visual Studio to develop Yahoo plug-ins? Even if the answer to all of these questions is ‘No’ now, can anyone promise it will stay that way in the future? Even if Microsoft goes into debt with this deal, and has to justify its purchase to the stockholders, can we be sure that management won’t see this as a way to monetize their new properties?
And I don’t buy the parallel being drawn by some between Google’s domination of the net and Microsoft’s domination of the desktop. Microsoft gained its position by leveraging its relationship with IBM, and muscling PC vendors into exclusive deals, precluding them from offering pre-installed alternatives to Windows. Google, by contrast, is a textbook example of a natural monopoly, exactly the kind of company we should want to see more of: they built a better mousetrap, and the world beat a path to their door.
In practical terms, the only real stumbling block to this deal may be EU intervention, and even there, Microsoft can make a compelling case that the merger will increase rather than decrease competition, so I don’t see that as likely. So the deal is likely to go ahead. I just don’t see it as cause to celebrate.
Okay, I’m a sucker for musical mash-ups; hearing something familiar — better yet, several somethings familiar — cast into a new context, gives me a kick far out of proportion to the usual quality of the result. Some of them are pretty ragged, and novelty value is the only thing that saves them. The fact that I don’t keep up with popular music like I used to, and that I avoid rap entirely, limits my enjoyment somewhat; most of the time I don’t recognize the source material. But every so often, I find a real gem.
Last night, a link in my Google Reader feed from BoingBoing led me to the nicest, most smooth and elegant mashup I’ve ever come across. Evidently it’s been out for almost a year, so I may be the last one to this party; but in case you haven’t heard it, here’s the link to the MP3: “Every Car You Chase“, by ‘Snow Police’. (Actually, by San Francisco DJ Party Ben.)
Someone even made a lovely video mashup to go with it.
Much virtual ink has been spilled over the past day about Robert Scoble’s banishment from Facebook (temporary, it turns out) and the reasons for it, and whether he deserved it. One point of view, espoused by no less than Jeff Jarvis, is that the contents of Scoble’s Facebook address book should be kept in Facebook, not exported to a system of Scoble’s choosing. It violates one’s privacy, apparently.
This is a ludicrously naive position.
Facebook and others may say they will protect your data as if it were their own. They are lying. To some of us, this lie was transparent from the start; but if you still believed the lie after the Beacon fiasco, and stories of information leaks from even the most secure government agencies, then you are a fool.
Once you put information in Facebook, or any other website, and allow others to access it, it is out there, no take-backs. If you want it kept private, then keep it private; and putting it on the web and letting other people see it is not “keeping it private”.
Consider this: Scoble did what he did in broad daylight, blogging about it once he had permission to do so. And he did it with apparently noble intentions, willing to sacrifice his Facebook account for the cause of data portability. (At least, that’s how he presents it after the fact, though I have no reason to doubt him.) And he did it badly; his activity was detected because the Plaxo script was too fast; the simple expedient of slowing it down and adding a little randomness might have allowed him to evade detection.
Now, do you really think the Plaxo developers were the first ones to come up with this idea? Do you think maybe someone else might be doing exactly the same thing, but more quietly, more competently, and with less noble intentions? In view of that, do you really think it’s even theoretically possible for your Facebook data to remain protected?
Do not count on Facebook to do your information security for you; they can’t do it, even if they sincerely mean to. (And are you really sure they do mean to? No matter how much revenue it would cost them?) If you want privacy, you have to manage it yourself. If you don’t want your data out there, then don’t put it out there. Be judicious in what information you supply to the social network; and consider salting it with disinformation.
That, or stop caring so much about privacy: embrace the Transparent Society, learn to stop worrying and love the social. Seriously, that’s a perfectly legitimate stance; privacy is optional. Or find your own personal balance between hiding everything and revealing everything.
But don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can escape the fundamental tension between social networking and privacy.
Safari Books Online is a service by technical publisher O’Reilly and Associates, that allows subscribers to their service to access their books, and those of several other publishers, online. (Highly recommended, BTW.)
Anyway, their front page lists the most popular books on their service. For as long as I can remember, the top book was David Flanagan’s Java in a Nutshell; but today, it has been displaced by JavaScript, the Definitive Guide (also by Flanagan, as it happens).
It’s notable mainly in support of Steve Yegge’s proposition that JavaScript is the Next Big Language. It is certainly popping up everywhere, and it is, for now, the only Apple-approved method of developing for the iPhone.
UPDATE: Okay, now both of Flanagan’s books have been displaced by a C# book. Please forget I said anything. :)
No, I didn’t suddenly become a hundred times more prolific; I just went ahead and published a couple of articles that had been sitting on the back burner for a long time. For better or worse, they’re out there, and my list of things to do is (almost imperceptibly) shorter.
PragDave: The RADAR Architecture: RESTful Application, Dumb-Ass Recipient
I’d been thinking along similar lines for a new project (which is expected to be a sort of testbed for a web services architecture). It’s a web service meant for use by third parties.
I decided, after thrashing around a bit, that machines that reside outside our firewall should be treated like end users: the interface presented is presentation logic. The fact that it is a web service is immaterial; it is distinct from the bare RESTful API to our business rules that we present to internal applications.
The application layer is what makes a process “presentable” to outsiders. It may mean consolidating several actions that are internally seen as distinct into a single operation; or adding authentication and data validation; or conforming to externally-imposed specifications (e.g., presenting an external SOAP interface); or information hiding to allow for future changes to your model and business rules.
The OLPC project is laudable even on the basis of its stated goals; but I think there’s more going on here. As this article describes, the OLPC device is by its nature subversive. But why assume that that subversion will only take place in the underdeveloped countries that are the ostensible market?
After all, I want one. Don’t you? And if it really will just cost $100 — or even a smidge more — that makes it almost an impulse buy, at least as gadgets go. And what will happen when thousands of these are in the hands of gadget-fans here in the US, and elsewhere in the developed world?
Revolution begins at home.
Update: the Revolution marches forward. Applications as online services (e.g., Zoho, Google Apps) dovetail nicely with this trend. I remain convinced that Google Android is yet another manifestation of this, approaching the same destination by a different route.