Monday, July 11th, 2005
OpenID, a distributed identity system
Openid is a distributed, decentralized, uri-based identity system by livejournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick. It isn’t a trust system and it won’t prevent comment spam, but could be a foundation for building a decentralized trust system or improve interoperability between centralized systems. For starters it looks like an interesting way to introduce finer-grained controls over online self representation to the wider blogosphere. Anyone working on a wordpress plugin for this?
See also: Marc Paschal’s typekey-based openid implementation, public openid server.
project.ioni.st
project.ioni.st - inane url, interesting format, nice design. People call it a tumblelog. Reverse-chronologically ordered posts? Check. Links to interesting stuff on the web? Check. Feed? Check. Permalinks? Check. Sure looks a lot like a weblog to me.
More links, less blather
A while back i stopped posting links to stuff i found in my rss reader. It all started with the basic assumption that there’s really no point in linking to boingboing or /., because if you’re reading this you’re subscribed to these sites anyway and even if you aren’t, a million other blogs amplify them anyway and there’s no point in wasting your time with yet another quick link to the latest meme making the rounds. From there this very flawed assumption spread across the majority of my subscriptions. Looking back at i’m probably not reading you i finally see clearly how wrong this was.
I miss a lot of interesting stuff the first time around. Sure, there’re interesting things piquing your interest at first glimpse, but more often than not, interesting things don’t. But as soon as i find the third reference to some article i ignored the first two times during my daily feed glimpsing i usually take notice, mostly to good effect. If it hadn’t been for its ubiquitous uptake in the blogosphere, i might’ve missed the long tail when it originally hit wired, one of the more glaring examples of how valuable this kind of blogospheric amplification is to me. Echochamber, my ass - people i find interesting like the same things i do? That’s fine with me, and it’s still a lot less self-important than taking the stance that your voice is the only one worth being listened to, a stance that many big media outlets still take these days.
David Weinberger mentioned this during his reboot7 talk and really drove the point home for me: whereas bloggers are generous in directing their readers elsewhere, more traditional media outlets don’t link externally. Look at the new york times - only internal links or ads. Basically they’re saying that there’s nothing worth reading anywhere else on the web, oh, except if you’re paying them, then you’re worth their reader’s attention, too. Absurdly enough pretty much all the media sites grounded off the web are taking this stance and it’s easy to see where they’re coming from once you realize that most news outlets just copy news agency reports anyway. All the while bloggers are worried about sitting in an echochamber.
Anyway, i’m getting a bit carried away here. What i’m trying to say: expect more links, less blather, because links are what make weblogs great in the first place.
Sunday, July 10th, 2005
Get a Second Life
I’m kinda obsessing over massive multiplayer online games lately. Reading a bit about game never ending (the game flickr was extracted from) i suddenly remembered to check out second life and noticed that they are giving away free basic accounts until july 13th, so now’s a good time to join.
Also, some second life- and mmog-related reading: Second Life and the virtual property boom, Virtual World Business Brands: Entrepreneurship and Identity in Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming Environments, Wage Slaves.
Saturday, July 9th, 2005
Plan 9 from Outer Space
Plan 9 from outer space is an outstanding horror-scifi-b-movie and available as a free feature film download from archive.org. Some say it’s the worst movie ever, others say it’s the best bad movie ever.
Greetings, my friends. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future.
Highly recommended.
I’m probably not reading you
No, David Weinberger isn’t keeping up with your blog. Me neither. I recently went into an unsubscribing frenzy after massive feed overload. Personally i’ve found through many stages of varying levels of feed consumption that i can easily keep up with 80-100 weblog feeds or rather that anything less feels like info-deprivation. Anything more than 120 feeds tends to get very strenuous. A little less than 100 feeds, that’s my sweet-spot. But it’s not really that important to keep up with everything and everyone.
There are people you care about, that you know in real life or that you keep in contact with - people you don’t mind bitching about their flailing laptop or how they look like sonny in their new jacket. There are the metafiltering, trendsetting a-listers that you really can’t not read like boingboing or kottke. There are people who’re just doing interesting stuff like chris heathcote or matt webb. There are filter-, search- and tag-subscriptions like del.icio.us popular. And between all these constant streams of info it’s really hard to miss anything newsworthy, from the mundane going on in your beloved one’s lives to the earth-shatteringly cool stuff amplified by thousand voices in the blogosphere until it finally hits a hub you’re connected to.
So yeah, i’m probably not reading all you do, but chances are i’m just not all that terribly interested in it anyway and if i’d be, it’ll likely reach me sooner or later, one way or another.
Friday, July 8th, 2005
Virtual mail fraud
We’ve all heard of people paying real cash for virtual goods and we’ve all heard of gaming sweatshops delivering these virtual goods, but this is far more harmless and amusing:
There’s a mail-service in world of warcraft which works like the following: there are public mailboxes in towns and anyone can pick up his mail at these mailboxes and send mail to other players. Mails are pretty much like emails, they have a recipient, subject, message body and you can attach items to them. This is especially convenient for moving stuff around the world really fast (helping a guild-mate out and such) or to send someone an item who isn’t online. It’s also possible to send collect-on-delivery mails - before the recipient can get his hands on the attached item he has to pay a certain amount of money as specified by the sender. This is especially useful for doing business - you find a buyer on the public trading channels, but they’d rather have stuff sent to one of their other characters who isn’t online so you send it collect-on-delivery.
One nice, playful touch in wow is in-game gift wrapping paper. You buy wrapping paper in one of several colors at a vendor and wrap an item up as a nice surprise - the actual contents of the package are concealed until it’s opened.
So recently some guy gave a guild-mate and me a package with a fishing rod inside as a present for no particular reason. When asked for the reason he told us that he had bought 20 fishing rods (a not particularly expensive item), wrapped them up in gift wrapping paper and sent them to high-level characters with a cash on delivery-price of one gold-piece each (a rather hefty sum, at least for a fishing rod). In order to to open the packages they had to pay the price beforehand. Out of those 20 deliveries, only three were returned to the sender and we had just received two of these three. Virtual mail fraud - that thing had me laughing for several minutes.
Sunday, July 3rd, 2005
Backpack Spam
Anyone else getting backpack spam? I hadn’t checked out my reboot7 backpack page after the conference and just noticed that someone spammed it about a week ago:
Backpack handles email-posting by assigning every page a unique, randomly generated email-address. Any emails sent to such an address will be added to the corresponding page. Should your address be compromised, you can have a new random address assigned to your page (btw, wordpress is handling posting-by-mail similarly since v1.2). Zero authentication, all protection based on the assumption that nobody will find out your page-addresses in the first place.
So any spammer sending out a few million mails to random addresses because he might hit a few thousand actually existing addresses could taint your pages and refreshing your page-address offers zero protection against this since your address possibly hasn’t been compromised anyway.
Adding some sort of authentication to this could badly impair on the ease of use of posting by email, especially from mobile devices, as it would most likely involve adding some sort of token, username or password, with wacky separator strings between authentication data and actual content (wordpress handled posting-by-mail like this before v1.2). So how could you make this a little more secure? A simple approach would be to whitelist certain sender-addresses and discard any emails sent from an address which isn’t listed. Even though forging smtp-headers is easy (i recently wrote some java to do just that for a lab assignment and seriously, if you don’t know smtp you have no idea how easy it is - anyone with half a brain can do it), there’s now another authentication token that needs to be guessed/eavesdropped which means it takes a much more concerted effort to break in.
Messages from the lost continent
Gibarian, fellow viennese blogger of stormgrass fame, is blogging at messages from the lost continent, a fiction weblog in journal form. Looks like a lot of fun to me, unfortunately i missed the registration window. I’m still playing catch-up (these guys are churning out sentences & paragraphs like neal stephenson), but what i’ve read so far i like a lot. You’ll want to start reading this at the beginning, but you’ll have to scroll down to the bottom of that looong page because for some opaque reason they have permalink-pages instead of permalink-anchors, even though the latter would make a lot more sense for a weblog like this.
Book’s back
Islington returned yesterday with a new hdd and most anything i care about should be restored. Not that you should care, but i somehow feel like writing about this before going back to our regular scheduled programming, whatever that means. Oh systemwide spellchecking, how i missed you!
It’s nice being on a mint system install, the quick-’n-dirty tiger upgrade i had running before always felt a little muddy. Finally internet explorer is gone, it won’t be missed. Yeah, i could have removed that before, but somehow i’m reluctant to mess with pre-installed software, so it’s nice apple got rid of some old junk in default tiger installations. Note to self: when restoring mail out of a backed-up library folder with lots of emails in your account inboxes, set up your accounts first, then import your old mailboxes and move messages to their appropriate locations. Not that this is the best, fastest or most elegant way to go about this, but it worked ok for me.
Also: does anyone think that referring to your computer by its name is obnoxious/pathetic/whatever? Because if you do, i could possibly stop doing so. Not saying that i will, just that i could.