Paul Lindner

Vint Cerf speaks today at noon! Via VC or in MTV-1950

_We create digital content in enormous and growing quantities every day. Much of this content requires software to be displayed (images, videos) or manipulated (e.g. spreadsheets and text documents) or executed (e.g. video games). In some cases, specific operating systems and hardware are needed for support. We face a challenge to preserve digital content over periods of hundreds or years because the software and associated hardware may no longer exist. There are legal issues associated with copyright of content and licensing of software as well as business models that must somehow be sustained for long periods of time. This talk will outline some of the challenges and possible solutions._

https://liveplayer.googleplex.com/view/2016-10-27-43705620-31

Location: MTV-1950-1-Bodega Bay Tech Talk

Reserved VC rooms:

RES-EXPL-10-Mount Rogers
NYC-9TH-15A239-Raft of Otters
DUB-1GC-4-Fangorn
This talk will be recorded

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Yeah, I was there... Back in May of 2006 Typepad, LiveJournal and TuCows got taken down by a massive (at the time) DDoS.  I recall it was 2-4 GBps of reflective DNS traffic.  Scott Berinato covered it pretty well in the Wired article Attack of the Bots.

For the record we were able to get back up using Akamai DNS Hosting, MCI/UUNet DDoS mitigations, and a cleverly placed GRE tunnel.  Oh and a bunch of great Ops work from Lisa Phillips, Matt Peterson, Peter Wohlers and others.  I think I still have the commemorative t-shirt we did with TuCows.

And here we are 10 years later.  Same stuff, yet in many ways worse.

It's high time we get to fixing the underlying protocols and infrastructure to make these types of attacks a thing of the past.  It's time to Redecentralize.

 [Fancy graph from: Netcraft, Blue Security Shuts Down, Citing DDoS Attacks]

Would people be interested in attending a *Google Talk* about the *Long Now* projects 10,000 year clock[1] and Rosetta disk[2]? I'm in touch with their staff and they expressed interest and I'd like to know if it's worth my time to organize the event...

Also I recommend joining and attending their events. Lots of interesting people and viewpoints that you normally don't get inside the tech bubble. Plus it feels like you're a member of a secret society and their bar _The Interval_[3] serves up damn fine cocktails.

[1] http://longnow.org/clock/
[2] http://rosettaproject.org/
[3] http://theinterval.org/

http://longnow.org/about/

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Code Next Opens in Oakland, creating diversity through Constructionism

"From a design point of view it is a truly unique experience that very much leans on an educational theory known as constructionism. This codified curriculum will soon be available to the entire world as an open source."

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Reading this passage from Ready Player One¹ I was reminded of a major influence that I had all but forgotten:

It was a Friday night, and I was spending another solitary evening doing research, working my way through every episode of Whiz Kids , an early-’80s TV show about a teenage hacker who uses his computer skills to solve mysteries.  Ready Player One, Ernest Cline, Chapter 18.

So I was prepared when I was recently asked "What brought you here?" (in relation to technology). My answer? ... The Whiz Kids. I can directly trace my interest in online services to that white-hat hacking, war dialing, speech synthesizing, BASIC programming gang of kids².  I can only hope that today's teens have something as good or better.

Trying to find the video also made me realize that Youtube is providing a vital preservation service.  You see the Whiz Kids episodes were never released, not on DVD, not even on VHS. You won't find them in any library. Anywhere. But there it is, in 10 minutes chunks³, captured and uploaded off a grainy, noisy videotape recording.

Cultural Artifacts, preserved... for now.

1. RP1, soon to be a major motion picture from Steven Spielberg.
2. It was also probably the first time I ever heard about the NSA ("No one knows if they even exist")
3. Here's a full Full Playlist

Of course I couldn't have done it without the entire teams that wrote the code and these specific products:

Firefox Toolbars
Google Gadgets, iGoogle, and OpenSocial
Hotstuff
Google Buzz and the entire Focus Frontend
Chili
Tacotruck
Mercury
Kraken
... and Oz

And big shout outs to abandoned experiments, never completed features and my agent, Klippy.

https://deletestats.googleplex.com/plindner#1286694000..1474786800!cdd

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A reminder from Vint Cerf about the importance of digital preservation

It seems inescapable that our society will need to find its own formula for underwriting the cost of preserving knowledge in media that will have some permanence. - vinton cerf  - We're Going Backward

I've seen this firsthand. Albums from some lesser known bands I listened to in the 90s are not available in digital format. When the CDs finally bit rot the music will be gone forever unless someone rips and uploads them. Some content never made the jump from VHS, also at risk of loss when the tapes degrade.

Support the Internet Archive and other efforts if you value this. Also work towards a future self-archiving decentralized web where content can live beyond the data silos they currently occupy.

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*Remove the Kraken!*

https://critique.corp.google.com/#review/134834839

https://sites.google.com/a/google.com/opensocial/Kraken?pli=1

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Reported a bug in Matrix chat. Bug filed.... Via chat.

Wish Hangouts group chat had this...

Of course we could do this for G+ too. Plus mention a magic page named +Buganizer on a post and you'll get a bug filed.. Problem is that syntax errors are harder to process...

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Google Webmaster Tools lists links to all Chrome extensions that reference your domain...

Not sure which category id...

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My new favorite way to manage home directories with git

And you can avoid merge conflicts by adding entries to your .gitattributes file:

.bash_history merge=union

Original: http://www.1500wordmtu.com/2016/my-new-favorite-way-to-manage-home-directories-with-git

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A look to the past to guide us towards the future. This is a candid, level headed, and enjoyable talk about the way we've failed users.

_Harry Halpin and Blaine Cooke go through the history of standards for social networks and identity, and why they failed._

_The Augmented Social Network_ [1] 1995
RDF/FOAF
EmotionML
RSS -> Atom -> ActivityStreams
XRIs
XMPP
OpenID
OAuth
OpenID 2.0
OpenSocial
PubSubHubbub/Salmon
OpenGraph (HTML for Facebook)
ActivityStreams 2.0 (W3C Social)
Blockchains

[1] http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1068

http://redecentralize.org/conf2015/2016/09/07/13-ten-years-of-standards-failure.html

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There's been a trend where open source projects start a Slack for team communication.  I understand why.  The Slack UI is refined, you get searchable, synced conversions on all devices and even emails when you're away.  Nice!  Except the price you pay is vendor lock-in and a closed source code base.  Plus aren't you fed-up with creating dozens of slack accounts for each projects?  I know I am.

What if I told you there was an open alternative?  One that even included access to your favorite IRC channels? Well there is.  For the past month I've replaced Slack usage with Riot.im (aka vector.im) and Matrix.org and I am very, very happy with the results.  

Let's start with the UI.  Here's my Web UI right now:

On the left: rooms/channels. I've customized mine into high/low priority with full control over notification settings.

In the middle: the #ipfs IRC channel on Freenode.  Read/unread state is maintained on the server so I can easily switch to the Android or iOS app and participate there.

On the right: the member roster.  You can hide it, or use it to Initiate direct messages.

And look, here's the same UI, on Android showing the Matrix HQ Room:

As you can see Riot supports video/audio calls using WebRTC and file upload too.  Works really well!

Did I mention that these super high quality clients are all open source?

So what about the underlying service?  Well, we're in luck.  The matrix.org service is also well designed, fast, interoperable and open.  So what exactly is it?  From their FAQ:

Matrix’s initial goal is to fix the problem of fragmented IP communications: letting users message and call each other without having to care what app the other user is on - making it as easy as sending an email.

The longer term goal is for Matrix to act as a generic HTTP messaging and data synchronisation system for the whole web - allowing people, services and devices to easily communicate with each other, empowering users to own and control their data and select the services and vendors they want to use.

Bold and ambitious, and the FAQ has answers to some common questions like why not XMPP and more.

What all this means in practice is that anyone can run Matrix protocols using their own servers.   Want your own private internal system?  Run your own server disconnected from the network.  Want your chats to stay on your own server?  Run your own; with the benefit of interoperating and communicating with other servers in the mesh.  Want to bridge to another chat system, like IRC?  Yes, you can.

And the IRC integration is very, very good.  As you saw above identity and channel state is carried through, direct messages are supported. Offline for a while?  Scroll back to your unread indicator.  Or just check your email:

So there you have it.  An open system that enables chat.  A highly polished front end.  Full support for one to one and one-to-many conversations. Yes, it's beta, so there are some rough edges.

Give it a try.  You can find me at @lindner:matrix.org or just drop into some IRC channels, my nick is plindner.

Some notes on my #indieweb experience.

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I'm still pretty happy my indieweb publishing experiment.

Content is flowing in all the right ways.  Posts end up as Posts.  Photos are uploaded native with backlinks. POSSE via brid.gy just works.  You can see that Brid.gy polls Google+, and then saves what it finds back to the original post by sending Webmentions.  The result is a full archive of activity around this content.

Oh and cross posting to SoundCloud worked perfectly.  And so do embeds..

After a fix from the Known Team WebHooks are working.  I get a POST whenever content changes.  To test this out I send the URL to the Internet Archive Save Page.  Voila!  Instant archiving of my content.  [Next up, backups in IPFS]

I was able to set up the Known open source software on my own server.  Next step is to pull a backup from the hosted version I'm using so I can experiment further and contribute back to the project.

Mobile Posting via Chrome on Android is working well.  You can access the Camera and a rudimentary file picker.  HTML editing is workable, but not great.  I installed the Url Forward app so I can also have native sharing intents.

Bumps

Of course there are some issues encountered...

Spelling errors mean you Publish Once, Edit Everywhere.  Or if you messed up the URL, Publish Once, Delete Everywhere

I tried using a native web mention to reply to another post, but it didn’t appear on the target site.  There wasn't any visible UX feedback.

I found that there’s no UI support for backdating posts.  Okay, I’ll try Micropub to post.  Nope, very rough implementations, but Quill seems nice.  Eventually I wrote a stub post in Wordpress, exported, imported and edited.  Phew!

But.. it appears that brid.gy doesn’t syndicate to old posts like this.  Even when I went back and pointed links at each other.  I’ll have to followup on that.

Also, I lost the first version of this post due to a CSRF error since I left it sitting too long in the browser.  Oops.

TinyMCE still is a pain and loves using &nbsp; and CMD-9 is bound to <address>..   I might have to use Markdown instead.

I miss @ mentioning people, and wish there was a UI for that.

Native Google+ support in brid.gy needs an API.

But still overall quite happy with the way this is going.  I hope you're enjoying the journey with me.

Tagged: #indieweb #withknown

*Good*: Facebook killed the profile 2 minutes after I reported it for impersonation. Also a great way to get in touch with old friends as they ask 'was that you?'.

*Bad*: the grammar.

*Ugly*: 19 people had friended that profile before it was taken down.

Be vigilant out there....

https://plus.google.com/photos/107786897865850743842/albums/6325073859824754257/6325073857645853762?...

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Handwritten in pencil.

Yours truly,
Paul

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