Post Open Source

CodeCon Saturday

Sunday, February 12th, 2006

Delta. Arbitrarily large codebase triggers specific bug. Run delta, which attempts to provide you with only the code that triggers the bug (usually a page or so, no matter the size of the codebase) via a like algorithm (the evaluation function requires triggering the bug and considers code size). Sounds like a big productivity and quality booster where it can be used.

Djinni. Framework for approximation of problems, supposedly faster and easier to use than more academic oriented approximation frameworks. An improved simulated annealing algorithm is or will be in the mix, including an analog of “pressue” in . Super annoying presentation style. Thank you for letting us know that CodeCon is where the rubber meets the road.

iGlance. Instant Messaging with audio and video, consistent with the IM metaphor (recipient immediately hears and sees initiator) rather than telephone metaphor (recipient must pick up call). Very low bitrate video buddy lists. Screen and window sharing with single control and dual pointers so that remote user can effectively point over your shoulder. Impressive for what seems to be a one person spare time project. Uses OVPL and OVLPL licenses, very similar to GPL and LGPL, but apparently easier to handle contributor agreements, so project owner can move code between application and library layers. Why not just make the entire application ?

Overlay Anycast Service InfraStructure. Locality-aware server selection (to be) used by , easy to implement for your service. Network locality correlates highly with geographic locality due to the speed of light bound. Obvious, but the graph was neat. OpenDHT was also mentioned, another hosted service. OpenDHT clients can use OASIS to find a gateway. Super easy to play with a with around 200 nodes. Someone has built fileshare using OpenDHT, see Octopod. As Wes Felter says, this stuff really needs to be moved to a non-research network.

Query By Example. Find and rank rows [dis]similar to others in SQL using extension for , which uses a for classification (last is not visible to user). Sounds great for data mining engagements.

Friday
Saturday 2005

Posted in Open Source, P2P, Programming | 2 Comments »

Why SiteAdvisor must test with Internet Exploit

Saturday, February 11th, 2006

A Crawler-based Study of Spyware on the Web goes a long way toward explaining why must test sites with IE. Cited by Asa Dotzler:

“1.5% of the URLs we crawled in May exploited IE security flaws to install spyware without prompting the user. While this may seem like a small percentage, consider that 1 in 67 Web pages that we examined contained malicious content targeting browser flaws,” while for Firefox “only 0.08% of examined URLs performed a drive-by download installation, but all of these required user consent in order to succeed. We found no drive-by attacks that exploited vulnerabilities in Firefox.”

Amazingly still owns 87% of web users (or rather IE-hijacking malware does!)

SiteAdvisor presented yesterday at .

Posted in Open Source | No Comments »

CodeCon Friday

Saturday, February 11th, 2006

This year Gordon Mohr had the devious idea to do preemtive reviews of CodeCon presentations. I’ll probably link to his entries and have less to say here than last year.

Daylight Fraud Prevention. I missed most of this presentation but it seems they have a set of non-open source Apache modules each of which could make phishers and malware creators work slightly harder.

SiteAdvisor. Tests a website’s evilness by downloading and running software offered by the site and filling out forms requesting an email address on the site. If virtual Windows machine running downloaded software becomes infected or email address set up for test is inundated with spam the site is considered evil. This testing is mostly automated and expensive (many Windows licenses). Great idea, surprising it is new (to me). I wonder how accurate evil readings one could obtain at much lower cost by calculating a “SpamRank” for sites based on links found in email classified as spam and links found on pages linked to in spams? (A paper has already taken the name SpamRank, though at a five second glance it looks to propose tweaks to make PageRank more spam-resistant rather than trying to measure evil.) Fortunately SiteAdvisor says that both bitzi.com and creativecommons.org are safe to use. SiteAdvisor’s data is available for use under the most restrictive Creative Commons license — Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5.

VidTorrent/Peers. Streaming joke. Peers, described as a “toolkit for P2P programming with continuation passing style” I gather works syntactically as a Python code preprocessor, could be interesting. I wish they had compared Peers to other P2P toolkits, e.g., .

Localhost. A global directory shared with a modified version of the BitTorrent client. I tried about a month ago. Performance was somewhere between abysmal and nonexistent. BitTorrent is fantastic for large popular files. I’ll be surprised if localhost’s performance, which depends on transferring small XML files, ever reaches mediocrity. They’re definitely going away from BitTorrent’s strengths by uploading websites into the global directory as lots of small files (I gather). The idea of a global directory is interesting, though tags seem a more fruitful navigation method than localhost’s hierarchy.

Truman. A “sandnet” for investigating suspected malware in. Faux services (e.g., DNS, websites) can be scripted to elicit the suspected malware’s behavior, and more.

Posted in Bitzi, Creative Commons, Open Source, P2P, Peeves, Programming | 2 Comments »

Tiananmen photo mashup

Saturday, January 28th, 2006

This cries out for a photo mashup, so here it is:

tiananmen photo mash

That’s the first photo mashup I’ve ever done, so it’s very simple. I opened the photo in the , opened the photo in a second layer, then searched for filters that would allow me to combine them — Layer|Transparency|Color to Alpha accomplished exactly what I wanted.

tiananmen photo mash

I thought this JPEG export at zero quality looks kind of neat.

NB I don’t think has done anything wrong google.cn. The appropriate response is not anger with Google, but action to spread the information the Communist Party of China wants to suppress.

Posted in Blogs, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Source, Politics | 6 Comments »

Search 2006

Saturday, January 14th, 2006

I’m not going to make new predictions for search this year — it’s already underway, and my predictions for 2005 mostly did not come true. I predict that most of them will, in the fullness of time:

Metadata-enhanced search. Yahoo! and Google opened Creative Commons windows on their web indices. Interest in semantic markup (e.g., microformats) increased greatly, but search that really takes advantage of this is a future item. (NB I consider the services enabled by more akin to browse than search and as far as I know they don’t allow combinging tag and keyword queries.)

Proliferation of niche web scale search engines. Other than a few blog search services, which are very important, I don’t know of anything that could be called “web scale” — and I don’t know if blog search could really be called niche. One place to watch is public search engines using Nutch. Mozdex is attempting to scale up, but I don’t know that they really have a niche, unless “using open source software” is one. Another place is Wikipedia’s list of internet search engines.

On the other hand, weblications (as Web 2.0) did take off.

I said lots of desktop search innovation was a near certainty, but if so, it wasn’t very visible. I predicted slow progress on making multimedia work with the web, and I guess there was very slow progress. If there was forward progress on usable security it was slow indeed. Open source did slog toward world domination (e.g., Firefox is the exciting platform for web development, but barely made a dent in Internet Explorer’s market share) with Apple’s success perhaps being a speed bump. Most things did get cheaper and more efficient, with the visible focus of the semiconductor industry swinging strongly in that direction (they knew about it before 2005).

Last year I riffed on John Battelle’s predictions. He has a new round for 2006, one of which was worth noting at Creative Commons.

Speaking of predictions, of course Google began using prediction markets internally. Yahoo!s Tech Buzz Game has some markets relevant to search but I don’t know how to interpret the game’s prices.

Posted in Blogs, Computers, Creative Commons, Microformats, Open Source, Prediction Markets, Semantic Web | 2 Comments »

CodeCon 2006 Program

Thursday, January 12th, 2006

The 2006 program has been announced and it looks fantastic. I highly recommend attending if you’re near San Francisco Feb 10-12 and any sort of computer geek. There’s an unofficial CodeCon wiki.

My impressions of last year’s CodeCon: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Via Wes Felter

Posted in Computers, Open Source, P2P, Programming, Semantic Web | No Comments »

XTech 2006 CFP deadline

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006

I mentioned elsewhere that I’m on the program committe for XTech 2006, the leading web technology conference in Europe, to be held in Amsterdam May 16-19.

Presentation, tutorial and panel proposals are due in less than a week–January 9. If you’re building an extraordinary Web 2.0 application or doing research that Web 2.0 (very broadly construed) developers and entrepreneurs need to hear about, please consider submitting a proposal.

See the CFP and track descriptions.

Posted in Blogs, Creative Commons, Open Source, Programming, Semantic Web | No Comments »

Outsourcing charity … to Wikipedia

Friday, December 30th, 2005

Giving and asking for recommendations for worthy charitable donations seems to be popular this time of year, so I’ll do both, following my earlier unsolicited financial advice.

Excepting the very laws of nature (see arch anarchy), aging and its resulting suffering and death is the greatest oppressor of humanity. As far as I know Aubrey de Grey‘s Methuselah Mouse Prize/Foundation is the only organization making a direct assault on aging, so I advise giving generously. Fight Aging! is the place to watch for new anti-aging philanthropy.

The most important human-on-human oppression to end, in the U.S. at least, is the drug war (which directly causes oppression in other jurisdictions as well). I’ve only mentioned this in passing here. There’s too much to say. The Drug Reform Coordination Network is saying some of it. The seems to be spearheading state level liberalization initiatives. See MPP’s 2006 plan. I met MPP founder Rob Kampia a year or so ago and was left with a good impression of the organization.

is the current exemplar of the anti-authoritarian age and I love their .

Finally, you could help pay my salary at Creative Commons, more in these letters.

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I’d really prefer to give entirely outside the U.S. and other wealthy jurisdictions. However, I’m not interested in any organization that gives direct aid (reactionary, low long term impact), supports education (feel good, low long term impact), exhibits economic neanderthalism, has religious or social conservative ties, or is a shill for U.S. foreign policy in the areas of drugs, terror, or intellectual property. I am looking for organizations that support autonomous liberalization or any of the goals exemplified by the organizations I already support above. Suggestions?

I suppose supporting prizes is one means of donating without respect to jurisdiction. In cases were low cost is important, researchers in cheap areas will tend to win.

I’d also prefer to give via some innovative mechanism. We’ll see what the new year brings.

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Wikipedia chief considers taking ads (via Boing Boing) says that at current traffic levels, Wikipedia could generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year by running ads. There are strong objections to running ads from the community, but that is a staggering number for a tiny nonprofit, an annual amount that would be surpassed only by the wealthiest foundations. It could fund a staggering Wikimedia Foundation bureaucracy, or it could fund additional free knowledge projects. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has asked what will be free. Would an annual hundred million dollar budget increase the odds of those predictions? One way to find out before actually trying.

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Of course I expect all of my donations to have imperceptible impact, almost as imperceptible as voting. But it’s all about expression. I’ve increased my expressive value by including a donor comment — “in loving memory of Άναξιμένης” — with my Wikipedia donation. I got an expressive boost when my comment was chosen for highlighting.

( was a pupil or contemporary of and has a cooler sounding name. As a kid I’d dedicate donations to Alexander the Great, but I now know better.)

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Health, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Source, Prediction Markets, Public Goods, Wikipedia | 7 Comments »

Down and Out with the Macxs

Wednesday, December 28th, 2005

I expected to enjoy by and have a really hard time finishing by . The former includes cool stuff like , , and . The latter is set in an incredibly challenging environment (in terms of holding my interest)–a . I experienced the reverse.

Manfred Macx, an open source entrepreneur of the future (very approximately), has a kid with his IRS agent luddite wife. They and their descendents carry their family squabbles across the universe and singularity. As this incredibly non-interesting story unfolds, Accelerando takes every opportunity to reference , , and obscure political cliches and inside jokes, without any real depth.

Accelerando was originally written as ten stories, many of which won awards, and several of which I can imagine being enjoyable as shorts. The book is way too long.

If you can put up with lots of enjoy science fiction, you’ll probably like Accelerando. Everyone else, skim the to pick up any missing memes. Peter McCluskey has a better Accelerando review.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is short and concerns the fate of a theme park ride rather than the fate of the universe. Theme park rides are run by . The only way for an ad hoc to take over a ride is to have such an obviously better plan for it that nobody resists–but not everyone wants to play by the rules.

Much is left unexplained (e.g, how does cleaning bathrooms immediately boost one’s —?), but the core ideas Doctorow explores infect every page, making the book the most thought provoking treatise on Disney theme park rides ever.

What would an economy driven by open source concepts and (post-capitalist but not necessarily post-market?) look like? This is a concern of both books. Neither has concrete answers, but Down and Out does a fair job of toying with the question, cat-like, in its limited domain.

Both authors are trying primitive versions of these ideas in the real world, having released Accelerando and Down and Out under licenses. You can download the books here and here. I commend both authors for this and for even attempting to write human stories about such abstract and interesting topics.

Posted in Books, Creative Commons, Economics, Open Source, Public Goods | 4 Comments »

Darkfox

Tuesday, December 27th, 2005

I hate to write about software that could be vaporware, but AllPeers (via Asa Dotzler) looks like a seriously interesting darknet/media sharing/BitTorrent/and more Firefox extension.

It’s sad, but simply sending a file between computers with no shared authority nor intermediary (e.g, web or ftp server) is still a hassle. IM transfers often fail in my experience, traditional filesharing programs are too heavyweight and are configured to connect to and share with any available host, and previous attempts at clients (e.g., ) were not production quality. Merely solving this problem would make AllPeers very cool.

Assuming AllPeers proves a useful mechanism for sharing media, perhaps it could also become a lightnet bridge– as a Firefox extension.

Do check out AllPeers CTO Matthew Gertner’s musings on the AllPeers blog. I don’t agree with everything he writes, but his is a very well informed and well written take on open source, open content, browser development and business models.

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Songbird Media Player looks to be another compelling application built on the (though run as a separate program rather than as a Firefox extension), to be released real soon now. 2006 should be another banner year for Firefox and Mozilla technology generally.

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Lucas Gonze’s original lightnet post is now near the top of results for ‘lightnet’ on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, and related followups fill up much of the next few dozen results, having displaced most of the new age and lighting sites that use the same term.

Posted in Creative Commons, Music, Open Source, P2P, Programming, Semantic Web | No Comments »

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