Thinking About Independence Day
2011-07-04
I am in mid-America right on Independence Day. Some Californians would think negatively about this. I find that Kansas and its nearby states are full of people who are much like the people in LoCal (both areas lack the arrogant self-righteousness that is often found in “coasties” and especially in NorCal residents). In either place, people are not aware of the extent to which corporations have gained control over our lives and our political processes. Further, they lack awareness of just how important copyrights, patents, and proprietary software are to the corporate puppetmasters who are rapidly enslaving us.
Let me make it clear. The new corporate slave-masters are not concerned about your sex (“plumbing”) or gender (how you perceive yourself), or ancestry or ethnic background, except to the extent that they can use that to deprive you of legal leverage. Thanks to a recent court ruling, these things matter even less. Boilerplate language that deprives you of the ability to use the legal system again powerful corporations is now inviolable.
In this time, it is even more important to help awaken US-ians to the need to sacrifice if necessary, but by all means start to deprive the copyright cartels, mobile telephone network operators, cable television operators, broadcasters, and large proprietary software companies of financial resources. I intend to become more active here and elsewhere with long-form writings to inform, persuade, and propel people to use freedom-respecting / freedom-preserving software (open source / free software) to produce their own original, remixable media.
Finally, let us no longer be captivated by the conjoined twin political parties (Republican & Democratic parties). Neither one is for you and I instead of for-profit & non-profit organizations. Neither one is on our side.
Social Networking Vulnerable, Federate It To Protect It, Part 3
This is part of a continuing series. Parts 1 and 2 have already been written and posted. (NOTE: links point to Amplify, but this series also appears on Tumblr, Posterous, Xanga, Typepad, and WordPress.)
It is difficult to observe the events that have occurred recently (and are still occurring as of this date) in the Middle East without recognizing that social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook can be used to organize protests and other political activity. If the cause attracts sufficient interest and enough people believe the cause is urgent, those protests can topple governments.
Social networking is a tool that can be used to organize and coordinate the activities of large numbers of individuals. Whether your cause is toppling dictatorships or removing genetically-altered organisms from the food supply, these tools may be helpful to you.
But that comes at a price. We saw the wikileaks site chased off of its cloud-hosting service and we saw its payment processors sever their ties. We saw Tunisia blocking access to Twitter and Facebook. We saw Egypt cut off Internet traffic with the rest of the world (something which may have also occurred in Libya). Those who are in control can take action to prevent protesters from accessing any particular site or they can shut down the entire Internet.
Federation is a necessary mechanism to help prevent such blocking. It has limits, to be sure. When a nation’s Internet carriers shut down border gateway protocol with the rest of the world, nothing we can do will allow us to regain connectivity outside the country. When a nation’s Internet service providers completely shut down Internet access, even sites inside the country will be unreachable.
What federation provides is the first level of target dispersion. If 50% or more of protest organization takes place on Twitter and Facebook, blocking those two sites might possibly be enough to disrupt your group’s activities. If, on the other hand, you are using multiple sites which are members of federated networks, it is not as easy to disrupt your group. Recognize that federation is only the first step toward resilient networks.
Over time, we will have to evolve our networks to be resilient against the kinds of attacks we have recently seen in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Iran, China, and other countries. This is true whether your group seeks a political goal or not.
We must, however, start by moving much of our social networking activities to federated sites like Friendika (demo site at http://demo.friendika.com/), Diaspora (official alpha site at https://joindiaspora.com/ and other sites at http://diasp.org/ and http://diasp.eu/), and StatusNet (main site at http://identi.ca/ see also here).
It isn’t that centralized sites like Twitter and Facebook are evil. It is that they are an easy chokepoint for those whose agendas conflict with yours. If your small business threatens the dominance of a large and wealthy corporation, watch out. There will be ample incentive for some kind activity meant to disrupt your ability to organize and coordinate the group’s activities. If centralized sites like Twitter and Facebook are the hubs of your internal communications, they will find ways to bring it down.
If your group’s agenda threatens the agenda of some political group, there will be ample incentive for some kind of action meant to disrupt your ability to organize and coordinate your group’s activities.
Again, I cannot stress this enough: recent news out of the Middle East says that any activities that threaten someone powerful could lead to blocking access to sites, attempts to break into accounts (for impersonation and destroying reputations or as a way to prevent opposition from coalescing into an effective foe), or even nuking the entire Internet within a country or a part of a country. And since powerful corporations have the ear of politicians, it does not have to be a political issue.
In fact, that is the more important factor. Perhaps you wish to advocate on the behalf of farmers, particularly organic farmers, against corporations that sell gene-modified seed to neighboring farmers, then sue the organic farmers when the modified genes bleed over into their fields. Do not let yourself be fooled into thinking that you can’t be targeted by these same tactics. You don’t have to be against the government to become a target.
If your group’s organization and coordination activities are based around the use of a centralized service, you need to make sure to move most of your actions to a federated service such as Friendika or Diaspora, RStatus, or StatusNet. Now, don’t just move everything to another brand of central hub. Group members should use various sites that are members of the federated web, so that $BIG_COMPETITOR can’t stop your activities simply by preventing access to one or two sites.
Diverse networks of sites which all follow the same basic set of functionality (including common protocol suites, for the technically inclined) are harder to successfully target. StatusNet and RStatus, for example, both aim to fully support the OStatus protocol suite. This means that you can install StatusNet on commodity hosting and I can install RStatus on my laptop, and users of each system should be able to subscribe to updates from the other system.
There is much to do beyond federation. The entire Internet is designed more for efficiency than for resistance to these kinds of attacks. As more and more of our personal, business, financial, political, and governmental communications move online, we must pay even more attention to these unresolved issues. However, it starts with federation, encryption, and peer-to-peer. We will discuss more of these issues later in this series.
Social Networking Vulnerable, Federate It To Protect It (Part 2)
As we saw in Part 1, the information you share on social networking sites is vulnerable because they are subject to closure at any time. Site closure is not the only way your data can be lost leaked. When you sign up for a service, somebody is paying rent on a building, paying electricity to run a server, paying staff members, and paying for network service. As much as you may like to think that random companies like you so much that they provide all these things for free, that is really not the case. They are seeking to get paid by someone for something. Many sites are partially or entirely advertising-supported. This means that you are bait to enable them to catch advertising sponsors. Several years ago, this meant that they had to use pop-ups, pop-unders, and other unsavory techniques to try and divert your attention from the content that brought you to the site. In exchange, these advertisers would pay the site money. These days, advertisers want personal information to enable them to “target” their ads at groups to which you belong, in an effort to make you more likely to buy their products and services. Facebook is willing to help application developers access users’ names, usernames, genders, addresses and mobile phone numbers. (While this is a particularly egregious example, Facebook is not the only one doing such things). It is important to understand that if you don’t have a financial relationship with the company offering the service, you are not their customer. You are merely the bait they use to catch their customers. Now let us think about some scenarios.
The DeLorean Scenario: Person decides to start an ad-supported social network. Service never gains enough users to produce enough ad revenue, so person resorts to “desperate measures” in order to keep the doors open a little longer. In this case, person sells access to the user database. Ooh. Now “Scumbag Collectors LLC” starts calling you because someone you went to high school with owed their client some money.
The Leaker Scenario: Something you said angers rich and politically-connected people. Suddenly, your accounts at big, centralized social networking services are cancelled, and you have no access to your pictures or other data which you had uploaded.
The Cracker Scenario: That big social networking site suffers a security breach. They gain your information, including a password which you use for your e-mail and three other social networking sites and your bank. Before you know it, your money is gone and images of you are edited to show you performing disgusting acts with farm animals before being re-uploaded to your sites.
Shameful Scenario: The service chooses to accept advertising from companies, organizations, and causes you personally find distasteful. People who visit your online profile are greeted by extremist group recruitment ads featuring video of group members telling why non-members’ lives have no value to them.
Monopoly Scenario: The company behind the site makes so much money from ads that they stop responding to the needs of site users at all. However, your online data and veryone you know is on that site.
DMCA Scenario: Something you post brings a charge of copyright violation. Rather than allowing you to prove that someone else’s copyright is not being violated, the site decides to cancel your account. What each of these scenarios have in common is centralization. Centralization makes social networks vulnerable, more vulnerable than they would be otherwise. With centralization comes unequal power. With centralization, $BIGNETWORK can treat you any way they choose when everyone you communicate uses that network and only that network. With centralization comes the need for big data centers, big expensive data centers, with plenty of ad revenue to pay for them. With centralization comes the overpaid CEO who somehow believes he/she “deserves” to earn millions of dollars per year while the site which is paying that salary is unmaintained for years at a time. Lesson number two: With centralization, especially where you have no financial relationship with the company providing the central site, comes all sorts of abusive activities. With centralization, one company has its hands on the collective throats of its users’ social networking activities. Unless you pay for the site, you’re not a customer, and the company that owns the site will likely have no loyalty to you, nor much of an urgency to solve any situations you find problematic. Keep a watch on the things that are being done by the social networking sites you use. Try to be ready to jump off of those which are provided to you without charge in order to protect yourself from the anti-user activities such sites often engage in.
Social Networking Vulnerable, Federate It To Protect It (Part 1)
Social networking is the big thing these days. What happened to face-to-face interaction, people ask. As employers demand more and more of our time, as we increase the physical distance between where we live and where other people who are or have been important in our lives live, as we disconnect from the landline telephone system and broadcast television (replacing them with mobile phones and Internet-enabled communications devices), it is only natural that we would grab onto something that allows us to continue our existing relationships and to build new ones. Now, we have to understand that–as currently structured–the social web is extremely vulnerable, being in the almost sole control of a small number of vendors, including Facebook and its fading rivals MySpace and Bebo; Twitter and its weaker rivals Jaiku and Plurk; the for-sale or soon-closing Delicious and its rivals Diigo and already-closed Magnolia; the not-closing-yet Flickr and its rival Zooomr; Digg and its competitor Reddit; and even blogging sites (WordPress.com, TypePad, LiveJournal, Xanga). As was already the case with Pownce (a “better” Twitter which was purchased and closed) and (Ma)Gnolia and which will soon be the case with Yahoo! Video, those who post data to any centralized service are subject to losing that data when the service closes. If the service is sold or taken over, the new owners may have a completely different privacy policy than the original owners–your writings and photos may suddenly wind up being distributed and used without you having any say in the matter. As any economics student can tell you, monopolies and oligopolies, once they form, are not concerned about you and your needs at all. Your cable company is not concerned about making you happy, but with preventing you from purchasing services from others which they can sell to you instead (for a small added fee, of course). It does not have to be closing, nor being bought out. Users of Brightkite’s status updates and location services found they had mere days to try and retrieve their data before the service wiped the data from their old services as it transitioned to a “group texting” service. In fact, users who used external services or clients to post were caught off guard when they were no longer able to post. Lesson number one. Every service is subject to closure, even those run by the largest companies in the business. As we go on in this series, we’ll talk about how to reduce the impact you experience from any particular service’s closure. For now, just think about all the information you have posted to MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Blogsome, and so on. What happens if a particular service closes before you have had a chance to download your data? What happens if they are taken over by someone who changes the terms of service to give them the right to use or sell your data?
Untitled
I’m now using Amplify and Posterous (and soon, possibly Tumblr) as a way to begin unifying the various blogs and microblogs I use. I often have 12 or more tabs open in a browser in order to monitor and respond to everything. I’m hoping to slim that down.With Yahoo shutting down service after service, I think I need to ensure that no non-paid service hosts all my data. I want to move to paid accounts with the services that are most important (and which accept such accounts), such as the StatusNet Cloud, WordPress.com and TypePad.And hopefully, I’ll take more time during the current unpaid downtime to build and develop my skills and understanding even more.Note to Amplify.com, Posterous.com, and Tumblr.com: you should keep an eye on Diaspora and similar projects. The day that Diaspora offers a client API, you should begin implementing it. And same for Friendika, GNU Social, and other, similar projects.
How to buy a Dell WITHOUT windows (via life one degree north, one-o-three degrees east)
A couple of years ago, I spent about two months trying to buy a Lenovo laptop without Windows and then waiting for my refund when they wouldn’t accomodate me. (To this day, I don’t recommend anyone attempt to do business directly with Lenovo. They could easily have told me up front that the system I saw on their site was no longer available.)
I have purchased Dell’s N-series a couple of times, (by entering www.dell.com/ubuntu to get there) and have noticed that they are nearly always months behind the comparable Windows machine in hardware specs. But this intrigues me. I think I will attempt the same thing next time I have the funds and the desire to buy a computer. Either that, or I’ll head directly over to System76.
And by the way, if Dell were at all serious about Linux, they would make sure that everything they make has certified Penguin-compatible hardware. That way, even those who pay the "Windows tax" have the option of replacing it with a privacy-respecting, freedom-preserving operating system. My nephew and I have Dell lappies that were bought at retail stores. Both have Broadcom BC-4312 wireless cards that only work when they feel like it (using either the open b43 driver or the company’s binary sta driver).
Quick Thoughts On Diaspora
Important: Diaspora is still very early in its development process. Everything I mention could change at any time. I’d encourage you to try it out, but don’t expect a lot at this time.
A quick background. Last Summer, a team of college students (recent grads?) kicked off a project to build a federated social networking site similar to Facebook or MySpace. At the time, there was a lot of grumbling about Facebook’s odious anti-privacy policies, so the group was able to raise a little money to help them get started.
There is an official alpha (that means very early-stage, as in it may eat your data or leak it to the world; links and URLs may change, page layouts and functionality may change, and so on) at http://joindiaspora.com/. I received an invitation last night, so I signed up.
First impression: If you’ve used Facebook, you know that it offers a grouping feature, to help you direct your posts to the appropriate "friends" and away from inappropriate ones. This is to keep your boss from seeing photos of you puking after a night of drinking. But Facebook’s feature is difficult to use, so much that no one I know uses it, and many people aren’t even aware of it. Diaspora’s “aspects” grouping feature is right up front and easy to use. It quite naturally invites you to partition your "friends" into such groups, while making it absolutely simple to send a post to all your aspects.
Federation and control of one’s own data are issues of major importance today. I recently found some of my former home addresses (and a couple where I’ve never been… Atlanta, for example) showed up in a simple web search. Since I’ve been online (1997), I’ve never posted that information anywhere. I’ve been careful not to make said information available to anyone without a legitimate need. But when I think about it, plenty of information is available on sites like Facebook.
Now, that does not make Facebook evil. What it does mean is that you and I need to be even more careful about what information we allow sites like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Bebo, Brightkite, Orkut, and LinkedIn to obtain and to store. Facebook’s “real names policy” is, of course, the most dangerous thing on the Internet today, when you couple it with making your hometown, educational information, and employment information absolutely public with no way to protect it. But LinkedIn and sites like Monster.com also have dangerous amounts of information about you and exist to spread that information far and wide (with some potential benefit to you, I must say). By the way, I agree with many of Phil Windley‘s ideas about moving toward a “personal data store,” which sites and vendors would access with your express permission in order to obtain identity and other personal information, including the idea of controls on said data that prevents a vendor from disseminating it without your knowledge and consent. I intend to write more about identity management and the need for our legal system to institute a control framework that returns control of our information to ourselves.
My impression is that Diaspora is being more careful about collection and dissemination of personal information. For example, if you search for my real name online, there are at least two people who show up. Diaspora asked for (but did not require) that name. Facebook won’t sign you up without that name. (Actually, my online name "lnxwalt" is, so far, a more unique identifier than my real name or even my SSN.) Diaspora allowed me to sign up under the name I use for online activities, which is a major plus.
But I must say, if they are serious about federation, they need to prioritize work to connect with sites using the OStatus protocol (primarily Identica and other StatusNet sites right now, but that may also enable read-only connection with Google Buzz) as well as the long-proven XMPP. I’d also suggest talking with the guys at Buddycloud about ways to interoperate with them. (Not that I’m saying the Buddycloud article is right. That’s a lot of talk for a group that appears not to have a desktop-compatible interface.) They need to be explicit about plugin APIs, client APIs, and protocol suites, even if they have to say "This may change in the future," because that’s how they can get people to develop add-ons that make the product better.
Talk to the guys at Elgg about ways to enable Diaspora and Elgg sites to interoperate. I realize you’re not PHP-focused, but if you make it easy for others to help and contribute, you may be surprised at what comes up.
It is important to understand that federation may require more than just your company / ideas to make happen. Go ahead and see about working with others who are also doing federated social networking.
I would like to encourage the Diaspora devs to think about these things. Also: usernames—we already have a webfinger to specify how usernames should look in a federated social network; don’t ignore others' hard-earned knowledge. Restructure usernames to be @username@host, and use that to enable pointing messages to different users (and direct messaging, too).
All in all, I’m impressed with Diaspora. My suggestions above are made in the hope of making it even better. If you’re not yet part of a Diaspora pod and you’re interested in helping the developers find bugs and needed functionality, take a look at this list of Diaspora pods.
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