Social Software Posts

  • 04.26.08 Cloudy Verification (Social Software, Computers)

    The first time you connect to someone, how do you establish that digital identifier you’re communicating with is the human being you think it is? This is surprisingly difficult to do, because it’s prone to what cryptographers call the “man-in-the-middle attack”.

    First, consider the most obvious attack: simple spoofing.

    Let’s suppose there’s an instant-messaging UI, and while working at home you receive a message from someone with an unknown key, whose nickname is “AliceLidell”, which happens to be the name of a co-worker.… MORE

  • 04.19.08 Why They’re Doing This (Social Software, Web)

    I don’t want to make a habit of replying on my blog to posts on other blogs, because (a) it’s dorky in an autistic way, and (b) it only encourages the annoying practice of blogs that don’t allow comments.

    But I’ve seen a couple of references now to Dean Allen’s complaint about sites that offer multiple RSS feed formats, none offering comments, and since it directly relates to my past job monkeying with feeds I feel like I should answer.

    There are two reasons why a web page would advertise multiple feeds.… MORE

  • 04.17.08 Cloudy Networking (Social Software, Computers)

    Next I need to talk about networking; having an identity and minting certificates isn’t very interesting until you can connect to someone else.

    When one Cloudy peer wants to communicate with another one, it opens a TCP socket to its IP address —

    [Hang on, there are two issues I suddenly glossed over in that last phrase. First, how did this peer find out the others’ IP address? These are just random computers, not servers, so they don’t have their own domain names or even stable addresses.… MORE

  • 04.15.08 Cloudy Identity (Ideas, Social Software, Computers)

    At the root of Cloudy is the means for creating and establishing identity. A lot of peer-to-peer systems treat the peers mostly as interchangeable anonymous nodes, often deliberately so, but Cloudy is a social system. Your Cloudy identity is simply a public key, currently 2048-bit RSA, generated the first time you launch the program. (The matching private key is stored securely in the Mac OS Keychain.) From then on, that public key uniquely identifies you.… MORE

  • 04.13.08 Cloudy As Buzzwords (Social Software, Web, Computers)

    I have many ideas for applications, but most of them seem to rely on similar kinds of infrastructure, in particular a distributed, secure application-level messaging system. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really exist yet, at least not in any form that meets my needs.

    What am I talking about here? More colloquially, it’s a mechanism for letting applications all over the network send messages to each other, without requiring a central server, and without allowing messages to be eavesdropped upon or faked.

    Let’s take it one buzzword at a time…… MORE

  • 04.12.08 Unstealthing, Incrementally (Social Software, Me, Computers)

    I got about 14 minutes of fame back in January with a blog post, wherein I grumbled about (among other things) how I disliked Apple’s culture of secrecy, and announced that I’d left Apple to work on my own, unspecified, project. In the intervening three months, I haven’t said anything about what that project is, almost as though it were … secret.

    The irony of this is not lost on me.

    Admittedly, there are things about my … MORE

  • 03.26.08 Japanese Advertisers Discover Zooko’s Triangle (Social Software, Web)

    Cabel Sasser, of indie developer Panic, reports from Japan:

    “Within minutes of riding on the first trains in Japan, I notice a significant change in advertising, from train to television. The trend? No more printed URLs. The replacement? Search boxes! With recommended search terms!” [*]

    He goes on to note how common it is for people to type URLs or domain names into their browser’s search box instead of the address field. To American geeks this … MORE

  • 03.21.08 The iPhone Has Blinders On (Social Software, Computers)

    I bow to my esteemed colleague Craig Hockenberry’s greater experience in iPhone development; but I must disagree with his take on the infeasibility of background applications. He gives two reasons why networked apps shouldn’t run in the background — one technical and one user-interface.

    Battery life.

    The heart of the problem are the radios. Both the EDGE and Wi-Fi transceivers have significant power requirements. Whenever that hardware is on, your battery life is going to … MORE
  • 03.18.08 The Origin Of The iChat UI (Ideas, Social Software, Me, Computers)

    I had lost this historical document for a long time, but finally found it the other day on an old backup CD. It’s the original 1997 sketch I made of a chat user interface based on speech balloons.
    … MORE

  • 01.27.08 Dear Lazyweb: Certificates in RDF? (Ideas, Social Software, Computers)

    It seems to me that RDF ought to be a good way to represent cryptographic certificates, since it describes arbitrary types of relationships between entities (e.g. FOAF), and allows them to be composed in complex ways. Does anyone know of schemas or libraries for such a thing, or something related?… MORE

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