Cortland, and why we don't use free software all that much

1. Coding is fun
2. EULA's are a farce, people wouldn't ever buy something else under the terms & conditions attached to software
3. It's great to have your name on something good, something you made or contributed to
Ergo: create free software. Any questions?

Well, I do have a couple.
I like getting paid for my work. Lean software development is cool, getting leaner developing software is not. How to monetize?

Someone who can do something I can't, or can genuinely do it way better, is welcome to add to my code. Everyone else should bugger off. How to maintain quality & ownership of an idea / some software?
Nothing is ever truly perfect. Who is going to take care of support issues once I finish uploading this baby?
In Rand's The Fountainhead the story's famously egotistical protagonist agrees to design a housing project for free, his price is to see it erected exactly as he designed it. Subsequently, some less-that-stellar architects proceed to do a mashup job on his blueprints by adding their own 'enhancements' and the result is not at all what he intended.

What I understand is that creation can be its own reward, and when you're busy doing something great money becomes merely a means to secure the resources you need to keep creating, rather than the reward for the work you do.

What I also understand it that sometimes you got to have it your way or not at all. Especially when any alteration would detract from the whole.

In this vein of thought the GPL seems an evil thing that lets other people appropriate the fruits of your labor, mess around with them and go on the internet going all 'look what I made'. Terrible.
However, this is not the reality of free software. The reality is that great people do great things which are then made even better by other people. Why?

Because of the free market of free software leads to incredible competition and a very, very good insurance against quackery. People can't fork, edit, relabel and sell software they didn't make because they will be called on their bullshit instantly. Also, anyone who screws up your good code will not be able to distribute it as widely, because customers will favor your better product.

Now the major weakness here is technological literacy. If I'm a car mechanic such as a good friend of mine I'll buy a highly customizable car that I can trick out how I like it, and that will outperform cars many times its cost. However, if I am an average Joe I'll buy whatever requires the least maintenance, or the product that has highly available support. The same goes for software.

Once in a while I'll try a new Linux distro, feel all warm and Tuxy and nostalgically use all seven bash commands I know just to recapture the cool. However, as soon as I run in to a problem that requires me to debug spit-and-ductape solutions for playing video files or scare up obscure drivers from exotic repositories I tend to grab that OSX disk, real practical like, and restore my mac to it's rightful smooth usability. So even though I'm at least somewhat technologically literate, I tend to prefer forking over my hard-earned dough for good software, instead of free stuff that needs more attention.

Free software can and does perform flawlessly in many critical environments such as servers, but the wizards in charge of those systems are second to none in setting them up and maintaining them in such a good state. As long as your mom doesn't use free software on the house computer with the same ease as she uses any appliance, we're not where we should be in terms of usability and all our freely distributed creative efforts will see niche use at best. Granted, this is a higher standard than being merely as usable as Windows, but that was kind of the point of building something else in the first place. And given that 0900-FIX-MY-FREE-STUFF won't be answering your calls, free software cannot be the future until everyone, including mom, becomes more savvy about the stuff they (could) use.

Yes, there are seem to be some counterexamples with free browsers and such being built and working well. Their development is actually funded by multi-billion dollar corporations like AOL, Google, Microsoft and Apple. Mozilla too stays afloat on grants and cooperation agreements with the likes of Google. It is really properly organized and funded development by professionals, only the product is distributed for free. The development certainly isn't. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't fit in a discussion of romantic basement programming by clever peeps on a creative jag.

Recap: Making free software is fun and we should all do it for fulfillment and major kudos, using free software is at times not so great. Until we're all better hackers, free software is going to stay in its established niches. Shame.

The keys to the Kingdom

Privacy, or access restriction, is all about trust. Trust in the one guarding the access mechanism. The doors to heaven open but to the worthy, care of Saint Peter. A bank vault usually does not open until at least two different people get involved, each with their own key or code. The door to your home opens to yourself and perhaps one or two others you've given a key.

It's the same in the digital world. Computers and websites are accessed over connections, and these connections are vulnerable to trust-based attacks. Someone can easily get between you and your front door, so to speak. So called 'man in the middle' attacks involve a game of digital charades where a bad guy, Charlie, can spy on the exchange between Bob and Alice. Charlie simply pretends to be Bob when speaking to Alice and pretends to be Alice when speaking to Bob. Because it's all ones and zeroes, this works really well.

Now the common countermeasure is to encrypt the channel between Alice and Bob in such a way that a) Charlie has a tough time listening in and b) any attempt at impersonation is detected. This works by having a digital certificate, and some fancy non-invertible math. This approach is called the PKI system.

Basically, if I talk to you using the public key part of your digital certificate, only you understand what I'm saying. I would not get it myself if I heard it, post-encryption, but you do, because you can decode it with the private key part of your certificate. You can talk to me the same way, just look up my public key and encrypt your message with it. Only I will be able to reconstruct your original message. You're locking your message, and I have the only key.

Locks don't present much of a challenge to a locksmith. Digital locks like the PKI system I've just described have the same weakness, and this is where the trust comes in. Certificates are created by certificate authorities, and if you want to look up a public key, or verify that a sender is really the guy you think he is, you can check in with the authority. While surfing the web, your browser automatically takes care of this. The little lock symbol in your browser means that the connection is to the right entity and is secure.

This puts a lot of trust in the certificate authority. A certificate is only as safe as the authority is trusted. An evil or stupid CA could pass out your private key like candy, or lie to you about who you're connecting to, i.e. telling Alice she's listening to Bob when it's really our old pal Charlie, up to his tricks again.

The trustworthiness of authorities is the underlying issue of the recent discussion about certificates. Dutch CA Diginotar had the long arm of the Iranian secret service up where the sun doesn't shine, and was unaware of it. When they found out, they kept it mum while they were figuring out what to do. Bad idea. The only antidote to a compromised certificate or CA is to blacklist it immediately and install new, clean certificates. Anyone using the old ones is likely to have a Persian Charlie sitting in on his communications, and many did.

Diginotar is not just some two-bit CA. These guys have the keys to the Kingdom. Literally. Diginotar is one of the CA's who creates the certificates for the Dutch government, for major websites and services, and regrettably for a lot of Iranian dissidents too. They proved unworthy of this trust. The ramifications are huge. During the hack, a large number of certificates were created to compromise a wide array of websites and services. Browsers had to update their list of trusted CA's, the Dutch government stopped doing business with them (albeit late), and Diginotar's reputation is tarnished forever.  There's no knowing how much supposedly secure information has leaked while Diginotar was silent about the hack.

One benefit is that the security awareness of at least two countries was increased quite a bit. Now let's hope the government hires a better company instead of regulating the field some more. Trust is the coin of the cybersecurity realm, and it should be spent sparingly and wisely.

-

The (devastating) FoxIT report on the hack can be found here: http://www.rijksoverheid.nl/bestanden/documenten-en-publicaties/rapporten/2011/09/05/fox-it-operation-black-tulip/rapport-fox-it-operation-black-tulip-v1-0.pdf 


N.B. At the moment the site is down, probably due to the huge demand. Mirror here: http://tweakimg.net/files/upload/Operation+Black+Tulip+v1.0.pdf

OGD published a similar post in Dutch here:http://www.ogd.nl/blog/post/2011/09/leren-van-de-diginotar-inbraak/

ITSM-fu, beware the acquisitions!

IT service management is all about ensuring the warranty and utility of IT assets and services. Simply put, the IT has to support the company's main process well. Incident management, change management and so on are fairly standardized processes that help companies manage their IT environment.
Some changes to the environment are wholly out of scope of these regular, 'busines-as-usual' processes, because they do not originate from within the processes themselves. IT Service Management is a bit introspective.

A favorite activity of growing companies is acquisition: gobbling up big competitors, promising start-ups and maybe something more outré for diversification. These companies are bought for their valuable people and assets, and nowadays a lot of the value of a company is its data. IP, content, patents, customer data, research databases, what have you.

A lot of this virtual gold is in formats and systems which are different from, sometimes fundamentally incompatible with, the buyers own data and systems.

The positive impact of new purchases is therefore determined in part by the ability to absorb new data, and bring it in line with ones own databases, systems and procedures for access.

IT Service Management frameworks need to expand their focus beyond running business-as-usual IT services. Robust procedures and best practices for integrating new IT systems and large, diverse data sets need to be developed as part and parcel of IT service management in general. Running a series of technical projects every time an acquisition is made is less effective for bypassing the regular IT service management organization, because that is where, ultimately, all new systems and data end up being managed anyway.

Currently, a lot of knowledge resides within large companies. Some of them have very strict policies for this sort of thing, and have absorbed a new buy in six months. Others take forever as ponderous projects with lots of external expertise are sent up to digest acquired data. The technical know-how can always be found, however, all the management and governance level experience is currently not distilled into frameworks and best practices, and companies are poorer for it.

As long as an integration process is not properly managed from the perspective of the regular IT-organization, it will have a large and detrimental impact on regular ITSM processes because they are calibrated towards preserving the business-as-usual IT organization, not towards merging IT organizations while preserving the current warranty and utility of IT services. This is a hard thing to do.

The next iteration of frameworks like ITIL need to address the needs of large companies when it comes to adopting acquisitions to maintain their status as comprehensive IT Service Management frameworks.

The current set of processes needs to be expanded. Currently, change management and release management are originators of change in the environment, presuming that IT service management instigates change, rather than reacts to it. New processes have to be defined and integrated with the rest, which deal with imposed change and seek to absorb and integrate new data and systems. The knowledge is definitely out there, and it is up to platforms like the IT Service Management Forum to distill it into the current frameworks. I mentioned ITIL a lot, but certainly BiSL and ASL are up for the same improvement.

The bottom line is that the biggest changes in an IT environment often come from the outside, and the success of the company can hinge on how well these changes are dealt with. IT service management frameworks need to adjust from introspection to adaptivity: ITSM-fu.

IT matters

The central assumption of IT service management is that IT matters, that if it's worth running your business on computers it's worth doing it properly. 
Computers become really useless, really fast without maintenance, support, life cycle management and many other processes indispensable to a modern business.
All too often, the IT department is part of the facilities department, or seen as a necessary evil, a cost center populated by informally dressed nerds.

As information and communication have become indispensable to a modern organization, proper IT service management has become a must have and a significant competitive advantage. An IT department, ideally, is a true enabler. An enabler of productivity, of change, of control and optimalisation. An equal to and partner of every other part of the organization.

Proper IT service management enables companies to run their IT department as tightly and effectively as they run their central process and their HR and finance departments. 

The field is not fully developed, academically speaking, and continues to balance precariously between demand and neglect by large enterprises. Compared to the volume of academic work on HR management and finance management it is barely developed at all. There are great developments, however.

The most thorough approach to IT service management is the ITIL framework, which is has as many detractors as fans. The ITIL framework is commonly used as a set of best practices and followed loosely by many IT organizations. True ITIL experts or masters are few and far in between, customers usually demand practitioner (mid-level) certification and working experience. 

IT governance is the top of the ITSM pyramid and the hardest part for organizations to master. Great CIO's are even harder to find than other great executives, and it will be a while before seasoned IT executives are common. Because ICT is such a rapidly changing sector, it's hard to acquire the seniority necessary for an executive position while staying on top of the field. Fresh graduates lack the experience and power, and veterans can easily get out of touch with the latest developments such as cloud services and social media.

It is a great time to be an interdisciplinary IT and business expert, however, as companies make do with the expertise offered by the market. Universities like the TU Delft are turning out experts in business informatics, and large IT service companies like Cognizant are rapidly expanding their ability to be a partner in IT service management. 

In a few short years business science and business practice will have caught up completely with computer science and IT practice, and companies will look back and wonder how they ever got by with improvised IT service management and most of all IT governance.

IT matters too much for any other development.

Rickrolling the revolution

Modern dictators fear three things: Eagles in the white house, the muslim brotherhood on the streets and twitter. Social media have undoubtedly had a strong impact as a catalyst of change. 

What they didn't do is start a revolution by themselves, guarantee success or warrant a lasting change. We can't say that revolution is the new meme or that the recent events in North Africa and the Middle East would not have happened without social media.

What Twitter e.a. did do was make journalism a lot more personal. A nice politically correct editorial is to a tweet from the streets what a gentle tickle is to a punch in the face. Retweeted messages from people fighting and dying have made a very strong impression on me these past few weeks.

It will be interesting to watch special interest groups jump on the bandwagon and say, "Hey, what the Libians do to Ghadaffi we can do to fur!", trying to rickroll themselves a revolution by spamming PETA fursnufftubes. However, I don't think that is very effective. I feel engaged by a people's cries for freedom, but not necessarily by a hippie with an iPhone (oh the irony) spamming me for the cause.

In short, social media are a great conduit for personal and powerful messages. However, this is an emergent effect determined by the sympathy of the audience. Social media by themselves are not a panacea for instigating change, and trying to force their effect will most likely trigger a mass unfollow.

Playing massive multipayer online

Having written before about the trend towards web-based a.k.a cloud computing it's time to examine the green back of the issue: l'argent.

Business case: You are CEO of a large-ish software company. Your customers are twenty- and thirtysomething tech-savvy broadband users.

Option one is to go to the trouble of having plastic discs distributed with your software, including release-time bugs imprinted on them, and let users rip, I mean install and store them. One copy per customer, many users per copy. They pay you once, you bleed for years. Okay. You know this, you've been doing it for years, but it is a sub-optimal state of affairs to say the least.

Now option number two is to take a leaf out of the book of MMO games. You may distribute discs, but basically your software is either online or useless without a live connection. To use this software people pay a monthly fee. You now have subscibers, a.k.a. massively multipaying customers, tied in to your product for years to come. You invest once per version, and cash in for years. It requires a lot of upfront investment in datacenters, expertise and some reading up on how to protect your systems, but once your good to go you can start earning in earnest.

My oh my what to pick? Decisions, decisions... Option two!

Of course the above is a huge oversimplification, but the point is clear: delivering online is a very attractive model for software developers, because of the steady income of subscriber fees and the sterling piracy protection. No wonder everyone from Microsoft to garage startups are into this one: it's a sure thing. Everything from Office software to games (especially games) is now offered trough the internet for the low, low price of 1/Xth of a retail software DVD per month.
In other words, within x+1 months you, the kind customer, will have been skinned, used, abused, shaken out and taken for a ride by your friendly neighborhood software giant. On the other hand, if there is a significant upgrade around every x months you'll be better off, purely looking at the cost of owning software.

Fun detail: Software houses get to sue each other's socks off now that one has a patent for delivering gaming as a service¹.

But the multipaying doesn't quite end there. Two common species of tech company, the Internet Service Provider or ISP and the Content Delivery Network or CDN are waiting in the wings to go all Ebenezer on your wallet. You have to pay for your internet connection before you can use online software, that's where the ISP comes in. CDN's such as Akamai make sure the content you crave is delivered to a server near you^tm for easy downloading.

Now the ISP, thinking tuppence is tuppence, would like to charge both you and the CDN for the use of bandwidth, and/or would like to charge you a 'special rate' for using 'special services' such as online gaming, video and music. Instead of selling bandwidth as 'fast internet', ISP's want to sell the right to transfer a certain amount of data to and from your computer. As everything becomes more web based do you think your data usage will go up or down?

Now to be fair to the poor ISP's, when they started to attract customers with 'high-speed' a.k.a. broadband connections they didn't figure that people would actually use that bandwidth to have a very different online experience than they did using dial-up connections. So whereas the ISP thought it could sell it's capacity with a huge amount of overbooking, the reality turned out to be that their margins are threatened by people who live online and get everything, including their software and content, trough their broadband internet connection. Customers can and do use up a lot of what the ISP can give in terms of throughput by watching Bad Romance again and again while Skyping all their friends at the same time and listening to Grooveshark.

So who pays for what? Content providers pay content delivery networks who pay internet service providers. Customers pay content providers and internet service providers. Service providers win, customers loose, content providers and delivery networks do okay. Welcome to the internet, MMO-style.

The next step after the current death of net neutrality (it's nearly done, hippies, I'm sorry) is an internet fenced in by regulations and divided by selective bandwidth allocation. The government will let you watch wikipedia but not wikileaks, not without knowing proxy-fu. The ISP lets you watch youtube but not netflix, not without extra cash. Depressing, isn't it?

The good news is that the pendulum will swing back again. Especially once quantum computing and communication have been properly implemented, I cannot see a lot of censure going on by either government or commerce. Until then, the days of internet freedom are over for most of us, but, looking at the bright side: we do get to contribute a lot.

The risks and opportunities of regulation

Information technology is famous for changing faster than climate predictions. Once in a while new technology upsets the status quo, and impacts society quite a lot before being assimilated and 'normal'. Lawmaking is by nature a reflective craft, it must address societal changes after the fact. Its challenge is to be balanced in its approach to regulation: neither too slow to be effective nor too fast and restrictive, which would stifle innovation. This balance is seldom achieved, and often a new status quo is achieved trough litigation.

It presents an interesting conundrum to the early adopter: implement the bleeding edge and risk unknown future legal or compliance costs, or wait and watch the taillights of your competitors? Behavioral advertising such as Phorm quickly drew the public, and then the EC's ire, and had to tone it down a notch. Virtualisation technology is infamous for the complicated licencing issues it engendered. Social networks may be on the business end of a recast of Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data.¹ In short: it's a minefield out there.

For consumers, the emergence of the internet as a Valhalla of digital content distribution has completely changed several industries and led me to wonder what happened to people's idea of property.²  Napster came, saw, conquered, and was sued to pieces in a span of only two years. Apple stock went from 44 dollars at the last split in '05 to well over 300 nowadays, riding the wave of legal music downloading, always staying far behind the early file sharers, right behind the lawyers and regulators, and just in front of mainstream consumers, who perceive the company's products and services as the toast of consumer technology.

All IT companies still try to be Microsoft: to have the vision and entrepreneurship to establish an industry and reign supreme for a decade or two as Redmond did with the personal computer. However, consumers and lawmakers dislike monopolies, as much as they tend to create them by liking and adopting standard approaches to computing. It's a risky business, because you need a lot of investment to compete, and the dynamics of the industry, if not completely winner-take-all, are unfriendly to anyone not in the top three of their segment. Knowing what to expect in terms of regulation would be like a visitation from on high to the companies jockeying for position.

It's not all threat and doom what comes from lawmakers' efforts. The current European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes, is well known for her incisive decisions and has tangled with IT companies before during her time as Commissioner for Competition. These days she could be giving some of them a big break by harmonizing copyright legislation across member states.³ 
CDN operators such as Akamai and Internap will be watching with bated breath to know whether the floodgates of distributable content will open. A pan-European Netflix has yet to emerge, and Apple, Microsoft and Sony have compatible devices ready to bring it all to your living room.
Before that the Copyright Directive was a famous example of tech lobby winning big, although it was understandably unpopular with consumers. Now net neutrality is hanging in the balance as the FCC, the courts, and various companies and groups duke it out to determine what we will have the pleasure of paying for online. The outcome has the potential to be yet another game-changer, and might provide huge opportunities for service providers while punishing content providers and customers.

The takeaway here is that the legal implications of new technology cannot be foreseen, and can make or break companies, especially in the fast-paced IT industry where waiting it out is never an option. Lobbying lawmakers is only going to become more important as the stakes get higher, and centralized authorities in the US, Europe and Asia decide on the merits of new tech for vast numbers of companies and consumers.

KISS, or what computing is all about

Turn it on, get coffee, start Outlook, catch up on the gossip at the cooler, read first e-mail. This 15 minute sequence is what Monday morning, or any weekday, usually starts with for the vast majority of computer users. Many are still on Windows XP, running on machines with less RAM than the USB sticks the company uses as promotional gifts. If it takes too long or if they need anything beyond basic software such as the Office package they can call an IT person somewhere, who may or may not improve the situation.

The perception of computing in this case that of something you depend on but can't rely on. It's not there to assist you in being a lean, mean productivity machine. Rather, it is often perceived as the limiting factor in work performance, other than the quality of workplace coffee.

2010 is soooo over, and so is this type of computing experience. There are a number of highly interesting trends that will conspire to offer daily computer users ubiquitous computing: anytime, anywhere, but most importantly, very simple.

Apps have permanently transformed the mobile landscape, and mobile users expect fast & simple the same way they expect internet connectivity absolutely everywhere.

On the desktop, virtualization is making rapid inroads as the new must-have for enterprise environments, due to the lower cost of operating an supporting virtualized desktops. An interesting side effect for the end user is that software is on one side offered as a service in a browser window, and on the other side repackaged into conveniently distributable units that can be installed on these virtual desktops with a few mouse clicks. The effect for the end user is that desktop software becomes a lot like mobile apps: click, it's there, click, it's gone, and it has seamlessly saved your progress, menu layout and other settings for when you use it again.

The platform you use becomes a lot less important this way: virtual machines can be stacked a virtual mile high and still run some specialized software on top. Linux-based server clusters host VMware-based virtual servers which host Microsoft server software and virtual desktops which run application especially packaged for this purpose and which can be accessed from anywhere you can tie in to the company network.

With a bit of optimism one can imagine the desktop to become a larger, more capable iPad: simple to use, fast, stable, and you get what you need in a few clicks, whether that is new software, new e-mail, or news on the weather. The back end is managed by the large foreheads at IT, and the user has a package of rights enabling him to use his computer as he sees fit, within the boundaries of company policy, licence agreements and so forth. The company intranet provides tutorials on using the 'Apps' that people can install and use themselves with a few clicks. The main reason to call IT support is hardware failure, change requests etc. Now wouldn't that be the day?

My message is that before computing can really become an ubiquitous utility, it must be simple. Really simple, and really oriented to be used. I think OSX Lion will be a nice preview of things to come.

Read what Technorati are saying about virtualisation & consumer computing on http://www.anandtech.com/show/4042/virtualization-ask-the-experts-6.

Managing really clever people

The IT industry is famous for its composition of generally very intelligent people. Even technological scut work is commonly done by people with relatively high intellectual capacity. Now as someone who the words nerd, geek and similar epithets generally apply to, I can tell you that the industry is rife with situations in which a focussed intellect is managed by a more general intellect.

Note that I am not speaking of relative intelligence, merely to the organisation and application of brainpower in the individual. The specialist and the manager are different in this area, because of the nature of their jobs, one who has a highly defined problem domain, and the other who has a less delineated set of problems to solve.

This often leads to situations in which, for lack of a shared problem space, specialists and managers have very different views of the same issues, and a very skewed picture of each other.

Dan Pink (author of Drive and other works) has written extensively about motivation in knowledge work, the solving of nontrivial problems creative work. He hinges motivation on three basic aspects: a purpose, self-direction and the will to make a contribution, and backs it up with a bevy of research data.

The big takeaway here is that you can better manage really clever people by getting out of their way and letting them do really clever things. The organisation is better off contributing purpose and a suitable environment, instead of monitoring and incentivizing the living daylights out of its techies, or trying to maintain a hands-on management style with them.

My own challenge as I become increasingly responsible for fellow problem assassins is to strike the balance between letting them do their tech wizard thing, which they do very well, and making sure that the business environment they operate in keeps running smoothly too. I must be the pilot in uncertain waters and navigate the currents of business interests, budgets, goals and realities. The IT department of many organisations is essentially a black box where the inputs of budget and human resources (hopefully but seldom) result in the output of smoothly running IT assets to support the business. Giving my manager full understanding of what his people are doing is often impossible, as is explaining why the best solution to a given IT problem cannot be implemented because of broader concerns which have no bearing on the problem itself.

The key to this problem is building mutual trust. Every time either the IT department or management has to deny the other what they want it is for a damn good reason. To this end a skilled intermediary who has both deep technical knowledge and insight into managerial concerns is invaluable. This maintains as much freedom on both sides as possible, freedom to act as they see fit and solve problems in the best possible way.

Being in the loop is absolutely essential for such an intermediary. In order to properly represent my people I have to know what they do and how they do it. In order to properly manage my manager I also have to know at least something of his concerns and the broader interplay of forces within and around the business. Only then can I be a functional filter for information in either direction and prevent many issues before they arise. Again the key is trust. Trust in the understanding and discretion of the intermediary which can only develop over time.

The position between technology and business is a tenuous one, and it is quite hard to be Mr. current affairs on both fronts. As I spend more time managing and less time wired this will become harder, as the tech industry moves fast. Until I become such an old fart that I wouldn't recognize a brilliant hack if it bit me, I'll consider it my solemn duty to make life easier for my people and my manager. Wombats, hands-on managers and crawling horrors be warned.

Track & Trace

The Find my iPhone app was a godsend yesterday. I was dumb enough to misplace my iPad at a busy trainstation. A quick remote message containing my mobile number and a very welcome phone call later I was reunited with my mobile mind-extender. This totally proves that MobileMe is worth it: find your $600 device anytime anywhere for $99 a year including email, dropbox & website. Thank you Apple. Now I'm hoping the rumored free MobileMe¹ is on it's way, but I'll never be a grouch about the yearly fee again.

Meanwhile my traveling companion was flabbergasted at the quick and easy localisation, remote locking and messaging functionality of my iPhone and iPad combo. When I explained it works from any internet connected device with half a browser his esteem of Apple Inc. increased dramatically (it had taken a severe hit previously when his expectation of remote desktop trough Apple TV wasn't quite met by his new and expensive hardware). However we did note that it was a little scary.

In my work experience I've come across car tracking systems that were expensive and inelegant combinations of bricks installed in a car and a server-side application that ate more resources than the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. And here I was saved by a nice little consumer doodad doing the same thing fast & cheap, thanks to Apple's nephology.

The knowledge that some computer somewhere knows where I am at all times because I carry a cellphone is a fact of life. The scary part is encountering spooky reality of watching your gadget move trough a train station, live, on a Google map. While I might benefit from this functionality, I have no control over it's use. Sure, I have control over when I use the MobileMe service, but that's merely something built on top of a gadget that is location-aware and has an internet connection. What else is done with those features is beyond my ken. Maybe Apple is profiling me. Maybe T-Mobile is. Either way, there's not much I can do about it.

The social networks are eager to tap in to your mobile device to record the when & where in meatspace associated with your online activities. Twitter, Foursquare, Loopt and of course facebook Places all use your mobile device's location to provide the world a blow-by-blow account of your wheelings and dealings. Transparency 101: Do not skip your work/school/date and use any of these services! Full disclosure is already taken care of courtesy of your free user accounts at social networks. To qoute Google's Eric Schmidt "But with the mobile phone you could just ask. You could measure everything. And you might be surprised at to what people actually do versus what they say they do—one of the first rules of the Internet."²

Again I can only conclude that the possibilities offered by today's technology come with a price: secrecy. It's great that the advantages of the digital world include a bias in favor of honest people, as long as the people in charge of Minitrue are keeping it equally real. As soon as governments and/or corporations are turning 3v1l on us we are, to put it plainly, pretty screwed.

UPDATE: Apple made the Find my iPhone service free for iPad, iPhone 4 owners³

The next step

IT started with electricity. Then we started switching electricity to signal across large distances, and the telegraph was born. As our technological savvy increased we could modulate signals to transport voice and connected people in a much more immediate way than before.
Nowadays we manipulate electrons, light and airwaves to transport huge amounts of data for an array of purposes, many of which have brought people closer still in spite of time or distance. I can access the minds of legends past by looking up their works online. I can see and hear my parents across the Atlantic using voice over IP technology. There are virtual places where I can communicate with friends and acquaintances, and share news, thoughts, pictures and music with them.
I wonder what the next step is. What is more meta than a social networking tool built on top of the internet built on top of a lot of computer hardware, software and interconnections built on top of an unbelievable amount of basic infrastructure? What's the next layer on the technological cake here?
Because this cake is going to keep stacking up, and one day the internet will be as present-but-obsolete as is the telegraph system today, whose dits and dahs persevere in the form of ones and zeroes zipping around our networks, the basic switching principle remains intact. What technology will be fresh and 1.0 then? How close will it bring us?

Apped

With OS X Lion Apple Inc. is making Macs a lot more like its mobiles. Fortune Magazine's CEO of the decade has chiseled out a whole new web experience for the users of Apple products, one based around a highly controlled 'Apple' experience trough apps rather than trough traditional internet use. The upside of this is that Apple's quality control provides a seamless, pleasant, and relatively safe internet experience. The HUGE downside is that it leaves out anything that doesn't fit in Apple's vision of your online future.

Much of the debate about the pros and cons of a 'limited' internet experience is waged by my fellow loudmouths in the IT industry. "Users", meanwhile, vote with their wallets and make Apple stock a stratospheric phenomenon. Clearly, it works well for most people, in spite of its drawbacks.

I, for one, like what Apple is offering on weekdays and tinker around with Tux over the weekend, allowing me do have a much richer, albeit more difficult computing experience mostly for the sake of learning cool geeky things about computing. 

For my parents however, Apple's approach is a godsend. It allows them to have all the front end usefulness of computers and the internet, without having to worry about the complexities of the back end. That they lose a lot of the power that the technology is capable of is much less of an issue, as they don't miss what they've never had.

Although Apple is certainly pulling the App bandwagon, the popularity of this vehicle is increasing rapidly and there is no software or mobile devices company that refuses to hop on, and app stores are definitely the new business model in both industries. Nokia has the Ovi store, there is of course the Android Marketplace, and even old lets-screw-up-on-the-latest-trend Microsoft has the Windows Web App Gallery. I can only speculate what happens when this trend collides with the rapidly increasing use of virtualization in the enterprise sphere. More on that later.

Apps are here to stay, and computing will become more useful to more people yet again.

Omnibook

 

Facebook is consolidating all forms of communication by offering multiple modalities trough the same platform: facebook chat, mail and messages, and of course its regular mechanism of wall posting are now an ubiquitous communication framework across all things wired, from cellphones to desktops.

 

This is very similar to Google's consolidation of search: webpages, pictures, video, location and more are simply Googled. It seems the major uses of the web are slowly but surely being centralized. Wikipedia for example has definitely become the one stop shop for getting the 101 on almost any subject. If you want to see or hear anything you can probably find it on youtube.

 

And so, as the web's giants become bigger, the web becomes a lot smaller. There's no user waxing nostalgic about using Veronica to find some information trough the quaint gopher protocol, but it's very useful to wonder what the next step is. When will a few websites be all the internet most people will ever use? When will facebook become omnibook and be a completely self-contained online experience?

 

I think this has already happened for many happy-go-lucky netizens. Technology has done something marvelous: We've reached the simplicity on the other side of complexity. We've made what was once the purview of intrepid explorers of cyberspace the commonplace activity of billions. Yet along the way we've lost much of the diversity and magic that made the net a world of possibilities. It's become a small world after all.

 

Don't be evil

The alchemy of Google's motto lies in the vast possibilities offered to knowledge prospectors by the company's assorted search tools. Granted, Google tends to obscure valuable knowledge by the large influence of vox populi on it's PageRank algorithm, but such is the price of the tool, much like Harlequin books are the price of literature. 

 

As it is the true power of the eponymous search tools are tapped by few. Ruben Puentedura made some excellent presentations using mashups of search data and visualization tools. Most users are content whatever pops up first as a search result on a given keyword, and with finding the occasional easter egg like Google maps reporting that there is no possible route from Iran to the United States (though there is one from Tokyo to New York involving a kayak).

 

There is a higher price to pay than having popular search results confused with best search results, however. Our surfing behavior is deftly stored, surveyed and mined by companies staking a claim on our hearts, minds and wallets in order to provide the billions it costs to build these tools. This of course is part of a larger trend of trading privacy for value, which is a business model shared by that other giant of the web, facebook. Dissecting this trend is outside the scope of this post but something I'd love to discuss in the future.

 

Google redeems itself by performing brilliant alchemy turning knowledge of the world's pedestrian surfing habits into peerless tools for intrepid explorers. The fuzzy sciences haven't had such a treasure trove of information on human behavior since we started writing about ourselves. Turning adsense into insight makes up for a lot.