Separation of powers

There is a very interesting development in computing devices, namely the separation of interfaces from the rest of the computer. Cloud services, new devices like netbooks and new peripherals like Google Glass and Pebble smart watches divide the integrated computing devices of yesteryear into distinctly separate interface devices and processing devices.

Desktops, laptops and smartphones are all quite integrated, they are essentially complete computers in different sizes. Now that our computing is increasingly done in the cloud, our gadgets become focused on offering powerful, slick interaction with remotely hosted applications and content.

This trend has several interesting consequences. Interface devices like smart glasses, watches and portable screens can be upgraded separately from the silicon in the datacenter that provides muscle. Rather than shelling out for a Dell XPS or MacBook Pro with all the trimmings, it will soon be possible to buy an interface device like a tablet and use it for quite a while, without foregoing the benefits of regular increases in computing power.

Of course Apple and Samsung want everyone to buy a new flagship phone every year or two, but there has been a noticeable plateau of development in recent handsets. Adding gimmicks is not quite the same as new features, much to the dismay of Samsung's recently departed head of mobile design. It's high time that services and interfaces become the competitive differentiators, not the silicon underneath.

Using the same hardware for a longer time is also a lot more sustainable. Rather than tossing out a plasticy handset full of rare earths every year, having a trusty device to access online services for a couple of years saves tons of resources. Your 'internet device' could get a similar lifecycle to TV's, which have offered access to an ever wider array of services while being upgraded only once or twice per decade in most homes.

Service providers have a huge advantage over handset makers: customer data, workflows and online interaction with colleagues and friends become finely interwoven with the service over time. This builds very strong customer loyalty. I'm utterly useless without my Evernote and IQTELL subscriptions, for example. Also the R&D cycle of web services is a lot friendlier, allowing easy iteration of features and improvements with a constant revenue stream, rather than the billion-dollar gamble of developing a new device. There are good reasons to primarily sell services rather than hardware, and I wonder when the change of emphasis will occur. 

For now the iPhone remains a much more compelling product than iCloud, but only because the app ecosystem runs on the iPhone hardware rather than the iCloud platform. When Microsoft, Apple and Google have finished their current transformations there will be little to distinguish a desktop application from a mobile app from a web service, except the screen you view it on. That is when the time is ripe to complete the separation described here.

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.

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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/

I want my 3PO

Whatever happened to Robots? You know, humanoid metal friends that were once widely expected to be all over the place by now, but that didn't happen. Shame. I would have like to have one of those. I hate ironing.

This weekend OGD is organizing Technival, a wonderful collection of geeky and fun activities wrapped in Saturday and sunshine (or so we hope). One of the many cool things to do is fight virtual robot wars with real drones, using Parrot AR drones and iPads. However, it's still us at the controls.

There are actually quite a lot of 'robots', building cars, vacuuming houses and manipulating fuel rods. Most of these are basically automatons, with about as much interactivity as a coffee machine. Not really Asimov-grade R. Daneel Olivaw material.

In the virtual world there are also a lot of bots. Contrary to their meatspace co-inhabiting counterparts, these are highly interactive. While not quite capable of passing the Turing test, they are quite able to kill n00bs in MMORPG games, do some basic chat-based customer support on websites, and navigate virtual environments with some aplomb. Virtual bots are altogether much more sophisticated than the physical varieties. However, uploading Sansha Sleeper spawn algorithms into a Rhoomba vacuum cleaner will not produce an (evil) R2D2, not quite. The complexity gap between what we can program and what we can build is too great, and somehow programming the physical to perform at the level of the virtual bots is a lot harder.

Why the missing link? Is bipedal walking really that hard? Is there an energy-density problem preventing bots from roaming freely? Or are we just unable to program any simile of a spark into a lifeless creation?

All three are big factors leading to the dearth of robots on the streets today. Walking is pretty tough, batteries are expensive, heavy and weak, and however many cores we equip our computers with, they still lack originality. Topio, for example, moves well and plays table tennis, but is not much of a chess player, even though his hardware and processing capability could theoretically play the game. It simply wasn't built for this purpose and is unable to adapt.

Thankfully there are some promising trends. There are fairly mature navigation and collision-avoidance systems for cars, and parking-assist is gaining popularity. Ere long cars will be at least partially capable of driving themselves. The aforementioned Roomba vacuuming bot is popular and faces increasing competition, with models from Samsung, Phillips and others vying for your living room floor, and doing a good job of it. The Parrot drones at Technival are capable of hovering themselves steadily, maintaining equilibrium with their gyros and rotors, and are quite good at recognizing each other mid-flight.

One day I hope to have a metal man show up at my front door to deliver himself fresh from the factory into my service. I really do hate ironing.

--

Update: Concidentally, today's XKCD is hugely relevant: http://xkcd.com/948/

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.

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.

Assange

A post on this topic is as hard and controversial as it is overdue. Julian Assange is imprisoned. WikiLeaks is not. The whole WikiLeaks matter has more thorns than a hedgehog, and Assange's persecution is but a small part of it.

Governments owe their constituents transparency, honesty and diligence. The business of running a government, however, becomes nearly impossible if it is constantly scrutinized, because then every statement is made with accountability in mind, rather than factual correctness or intended effect. The whole idea of diplomatic communication is that, because it is privileged, it can give an honest picture of the situation abroad. If a diplomat cannot afford to slight a leader by assessing him honestly, he is of very little use to his home base in providing an accurate appraisal of his host.

Is the idea behind WikiLeaks a good one? Most certainly. A bit of proper journalism keeps even the best of governments just a bit more honest than they would be when completely unsupervised.

Is the publication of the diplomatic cables a good idea? Most certainly not. We can be all anarchist about it and celebrate proof that 'governments are evil' and 'diplomats are phonies and spies', but the fact of the matter is that the diplomatic service, and diplomatic secrecy exist to keep the peace and make sure that countries can communicate out of the spotlight, as is sometimes necessary, and it works rather well. Diplomatic relations have suffered a great deal for no good return: We know nothing about Medvedev or Karzai or Obama that CNN and BBC and what have you didn't already tell us many times.

Of course diplomats are covert operatives and used to gain every possible advantage abroad. Better to be completely infested with diplomats than with paratroopers. Of course things are secretly said about heads of state which wouldn't be misplaced on Saturday Night Live or The Roast. Better to call a crook a crook than to call him a good man and be cheated. Of course there are secret places, bases, people and plans. WikiDepartmentOfDefense doesn't work, nor does drawing attention to your weak spots.

WikiLeaks should cherish a world which allows it to exist, and never forget that the much lambasted American government and it's allies still allow them, and many of us, a lot more freedom than elsewhere in the world, and abusing this freedom opens the door to a system that is not so kind. Publish the helmet cams, the controversial statistics, and as many blacklists as you can find. Fight censure and misinformation. Don't publish these cables. It's does lot of damage to things that matter too much, in return for very little we didn't already know or could safely assume.

So what about this arrest? A smear campaign? Duped by a honey trap? It seems likely. The timing is just too damn convenient. However, what point and purpose does his arrest now serve? As if Wikipedia would stop working two days after Jimmy Wales gets busted for having a really penetrating gaze. As if the revelations are less important because the founder of the site is an alleged rapist.

An arrest on bogus charges would be strange move by the powers that be. Kick a bear, expect a swipe. In that sense it is not unexpected for governments to pursue Assange. But because it does not ease the sting of the publications nor stop their continuation, it is really rather pointless to arrest him.

And as unlikely as I think that is, maybe Assange did some things he shouldn't have done to some nice ladies in Sweden. If so, he should stand trial and do his time. If it is indeed a trumped-up charge, he will be free soon enough. I have that much faith in the judicial system.

Either way his arrest and persecution are now so public that it would serve everyone's best interests, including that of the United States, Sweden and the United Kingdom, to make sure Assange stays alive and well for very long time hence. If cablegate becomes killergate Assange will justly become a martyr for the freedom of information and WikiLeaks will be mirrored, imitated and expanded beyond all power of censure. That's why I think he is fairly safe for the time being.

Meanwhile the infowar continues, and brave servers everywhere are bearing the load of titanic efforts designed to take out WikiLeaks. It will be interesting to see what legal changes this battle engenders, as the issue of control over the internet is once again front and center in the minds of policy makers. Governments fear and mistrust the internet like never before. Assange's legacy is assured.

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.

The price of genius

Seen The Social Network? Zuck was not portrayed very kindly. Is being socially impaired the price of genius? I don't think so. Yet the typical portrayal of software wizards is generally concerned with making sure 'normal people' don't feel bad about their comparative lack of intelligence my gimping the coder with massive personality defects. We all love Sheldon Cooper, but we don't want his sex appeal. What's up with that?

Despite his reported lack of ethics in treating his business partners, Zuckerberg probably isn't quite as acrimonious a nerd as he is made out to be in the movie. He did something his business partners could not, at least not without him, whereas he might have made facebook without them, obtaining inspiration and support from other sources.

So why the sociopath portrayal? There's no need to make a fawning tribute movie to the world's youngest billionaire, but it is equally unnecessary to add insult to injury in what is, in effect, a blockbuster accusal of plagiarism, usurpation, backstabbing and a complete lack of ethics. Shark, fair enough, but why a mean shark?

It takes balls to create something like facebook, not to mention a whole lot of knowledge, skill and effort. All we can say after the fact is that he did it, mostly by himself, at a very young age.

Now I'm not a friend or admirer of Mark Zuckerberg. What I cannot stand is that his achievement, which I do admire, is now tainted by a morality tale in which he features a particularly lame villain. That should never be the price of genius. Do it better or shut up. Making this kind of Rita Skeeter movie is just low. The movie is well made but it's theme of vilification is it's moral undoing.

UPDATE: Zuckerberg is Time's person of the year 2010! The article is much more positive about Mark than about the movie, too.

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.

Costs to mindshares

The top 5 sites on the internet (Google, facebook, YouTube, Yahoo & Windows Live)¹ offer their functionality without direct monetary compensation by their users. The coin of the realm is information on online behavior, and we trade without a thought. Indeed, these five websites are such a large part of our average internet experience that the adsense way of thinking has become pervasive throughout the web. The has-beens of the internet snuggle up to these giants offering their supply of user data in exchange for a lease on life². Sites plug into Google analytics and facebook connect en masse. The information these sites gather on our surfing is primarily used to display targeted ads, and the economics of operating a major website are such that a single ad-click pays for hordes of freeloading visitors.
Taleb's Black Swan emerges again: No-one could have predicted to Tim Berners-Lee that the web anno 2010 would comprise of five gargantuan content providers (really four since Google owns YouTube) and 'the rest', nor that 'free' would be the norm and the subscription model obsolete
Of course there are exceptions: Apple's controlled internet experience is everything but free, and Rupert Murdoch is still a firm believer in making visitors pay for their time on his websites. Also, the impending demise of net neutrality can reverse this trend dramatically. For the time being, we'd rather be mined than milked. I wonder what the next wave will be.

UPDATE: Rupert Murdoch & Steve Jobs are reportedly teaming up to deliver News Corp. content trough an app.³

A most solemn duty

Social contract theory states that we humans sow discord and reap government. A government whose most solemn duty is to set the standards of accepted behavior and wield its monopoly on violence solely to maintain them. In our brave new and slightly shallow world of the internet governments are trying to establish the mores of digilife.

Now the newest and bravest among us would have the internet be a free-for-all where anything goes, and the only limits imposed on your online experience be bandwidth and latency. However, I think this belittles and underestimates the task of government to maintain a standard of propriety that allows full deployment of one's capabilities while safeguarding the rights of others. Property rights are a famous example of a terrain thoroughly plowed by one-click copying, and an area where governments are scrambling to determine new and proper delineations of mine and thine online. It is permissible and indeed proper for government to be much stricter than necessary in the realm of online property rights. Their duty is to uphold a universal standard both online and offline.

No individual is unformed by society. The most rebellious alternative is as defined by the mainstream as it's adherent. This implies that society is responsible for establishing many of our basic tenets, our internal sense of right and wrong. As society's appointed conscience a government is duty bound to set some standard throughout it's purview by which we can judge our deeds and those of others. A government allowing the online experience to be wildly different from life in meatspace is neglecting its duty as the steward of our moral integrity. As such, property rights, the protection of minors and certain, albeit minimal restrictions of the freedom of expression, are things that are and should be dealt with as stringently on the internet as they are in real life.

I know, I can get 'your' mp3 without you loosing it, something that is not possible with a physical object. However, that fact what is yours can so easily be mine does not mean it should be. A digital artifact originated somewhere, some amount of effort and value went into its creation. It certainly represents value to one who wants to have it. To refuse trading value for value and get what you want for free is an affront to common sense and economically destructive. It only works for you as long as you're the one who wants something, and ceases to be an attractive model of property rights as soon as you have something of value to trade yourself. Purposeful free content creation under the GPL or its kin is not a counterexample here, the activity is in many cases it's own reward. Neither is offering your own downloaded music for sharing. After all, something that didn't cost you anything to obtain won't cost you anything to share either.

Allowing all sorts of hate and deviancy online is not a sustainable proposition either. Why would it be all right to go jewbashing online when it would get you instantly and justly reprimanded in real life? Why would it be all right to watch intercourse between humans and animals online when the difference in power and control make it an immoral act under any circumstances? There can be no double standard. Right and wrong must be made clear and the difference proactively maintained by a society that wants to maintain its integrity. We can't allow a completely free internet for the same reason we cannot allow different standards of behavior at night versus in broad daylight: it dilutes the concept of what is morally objectionable and therefore dilutes the premise that some things are morally objectionable at all. 

As a solid house is built of solid bricks a morally healthy society is composed of morally healthy individuals. We cannot afford total freedom, it will cost us too dearly in people loosing their way and becoming morally compromised by their experiences. To spare the rod is to spoil the child. Locke applies to the internet as much as to real life. We must give up some freedom in order to establish a framework in which to enjoy the rest of it responsibly.

As a laissez-faire capitalist in the economic pane admitting the necessity of government intervention anywhere is something I do with great reluctance. However, the redeeming function of government is precisely in setting and maintaining standards that allow and enable ethical behavior. As such I see it's intervention in online property rights and very limited censure as its proper function and most solemn duty.

A little defensive, guys. Scared?

Apparently European carriers are a wee bit miffed at the prospect of an Apple phone with a built-in programmable SIM chip.¹

Technological evolution! A huge opportunity to embrace the new, to out-adapt competitors! But no, they're threatening to sue.²

That's right guys, declaring war on Apple is the smart move here. It really shows that you're prepared to change with the times, that you're companies on a mission to make communication better, customers happier and the market operate more efficiently.

It also shows that you're technological powerhouses with a contribution to make, that you can come up with a good alternative, or even something better. It really shows that this new technology is not the next big thing in mobile.

Way to go, guys. Lawyer up, let's see who is still alive three years from now and what kind of mobile will be in my back pocket.

I'm betting it's the early adopter company and an Apple simless phone.

A is A

Renaissance and revolutions, omnipotent governments and George Orwell used to give us a healthy aversion to being brutally honest. Of course the law of identity holds, and whether or not people know you do something doesn't change the fact whether or not you did it.

People being people will either go the whole anarchistic hog and refuse any abridgement of their privacy, or merrily write down all the information needed to steal their identity on the profile page of each and every social network they come across. Now the vast power of the internet to connect, communicate, find and be found also means that it's exceedingly hard to do something online and maintain plausible deniability. Of course you can be a darknet rebel but in practice you only raise the barrier to being found out, you don't prevent it entirely. In fact, nothing short of a complete disconnect will really avoid the pitfalls of being cached, logged, and data-mined.

As I've said in the post "Don't be evil", the power of internet giants to aggregate data on human behavior equates to a vast store of invaluable knowledge for the fuzzy sciences. This is a very good thing as long as we are able to find out more about ourselves in order to better deal with the complexities of our existence. However, and it takes a nasty repressive regime to fully appreciate this, it places a lot of power in somebody else's hands. The power to describe human behavior in general comes from tools that allow tracking an individual's behavior during every second they are wired, and that includes carrying a cellphone. It's the price we pay for being online at all.

We all know the stories of people being fired over facebook pictures, twitter posts and foursquare location data. As big Z pointed out, people's perception of the value of privacy is changing, and changing rapidly. The Stasi held sway over millions a mere two decades ago, and yet we are happy to share information with the world that is fully as revealing as the files of the Schild und Schwert der Partei.

The danger in this time of nice governments is mainly identity theft and the odd affair or creative sick leave leading to undesirable consequences. However, there will be rain after sunshine and the ground is well prepared for totalitarian control the like of which we have not seen before. This is not only because we so blithely share anything and everything, but because our nice governments mandate service provides to store all that we do for automated perusal.

The great firewall of China is reportedly circumvented with clever proxy tricks and the like. However, this doesn't change the fact that most people in China most of the time cannot be sure that what they do online doesn't lead to being branded as a criminal. Every state has the duty to draw lines in the sand about the admissibility of certain behavior. Under a nice and liberal state these are so drawn that we easily loose all sense of caution, whereas in a totalitarian state the lines are restrictive and very dangerous to cross. In either situation it is barely possible to cross them unnoticed. The promise of the internet as a brave new world has become the spectre of the telescreen.

In dealing with this phenomenon we cannot ignore that A is A, that doing something means accepting responsibility for doing it. This is the only mature way to live, online as well as offline. What we are obliged to ourselves and others is to make sure that the internet is used to enable rather than to stifle, to create rather than to control. Our governments and the giants of the internet must be led with scruple. Ensuring this is much more important and an activity on a much higher pane than arguing if the internet should veil the truth about how we use it. The real problem is not the records, but the consequences of their perusal, and that is what should give us pause when we do anything at all online, let alone publish the contents of our hearts and minds as I am doing here for the sake of the discourse. I will forever be the guy who blogged about the absence of privacy on the internet. So be it. A is A. And we've been warned.

UPDATE: The SSL encryption scheme is apparently compromised by a combination of man-in-the-middle attack hardware and (governmental) Certificate Authorities willing to fork over bogus certificates. Nice. http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/03/govts-certificate-authorities-conspire-to-spy-on-ssl-users.ars

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.