taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Tech: Bit of a long essay, this one.

World+dog have been linking to this interview with Flickr’s Stewart Butterfield on the O’Reilly Network, so I wasn’t going to bother. But I came across a great illustration of what I think is a very important point:

Koman: In the write-up for your web services session at ETech, you say, Capturing the creative energy of the hive can be scary. It requires giving up some control, and eliminating lock-in as a strategy. Tell me some more about that.

Butterfield: Ofoto is a pretty good example. I don’t want to pick on them too much, but they create a pretty artificial kind of lock-in. When you upload your pictures to them, you might upload a three- or four-megapixel image, but all you can get back from them is a 600-pixel image; if you want to get the original back, you have to buy it on a CD. There’s no way to get it out because if you got it out, then your friends and family could get it out and print it out at home, and they’re in competition with Lexmark and HP as well as the other online photo services. So that’s one aspect of it.

There’s also a tendency to want to capture all the value that’s being generated or will potentially be generated by new business. What I mean by that is, we don’t explicitly allow commercial uses of the API yet, but we definitely plan to. And we know that there are people working on products based on our API that we want to do, but outside developers will get to it first. What letting go in that context means is letting go of all the control you have over users by being the one who owns the database, because other developers can generate businesses and products that hook into you, and that takes some value away.

This is a point that still, to this day, most people miss.

The traditional viewpoint is that, if you’ve got something, you hoard it, and ensure you’re the guy who makes the money from it. So you do what Ofoto do — you keep the full-resolution images, and charge for access to them; or you don’t publish APIs, and keep the data to yourself; or in the world of source code, you hold onto the source so no-one else can see it, because it’s your ‘crown jewels’. Then, the idea goes, you can ensure that you’re the only one who can do prints, or add a feature to the source, or whatever.

But the problem is, you’re not always the one with the idea; or alternatively, every feature request has to go through you, and be implemented by you, on your time. And in the meantime, your users are considering the big question — ‘do I want to get locked in, here? what if he goes out of business? am I a small customer who’s going to be ignored?’

In fact, I’ve been guilty of this myself. When I started writing open-source software, I used the GPL as a license, which prohibits commercial use (mostly) — except by myself or through my explicit permission. I had no intentions of making it available for commercial use, because I couldn’t see the commercial uses.

But that was me being short-sighted — soon, people starting asking if they could license the code for commercial use, or hire me. I realised that I didn’t have the time, or inclination, to go the whole hog, and risk my livelihood on a piece of software — especially risky since I didn’t think that software could support me alone.

So when I wrote SpamAssassin, I picked the Perl dual license, a license that did permit commercial use, while still being an open-source license. By now, there are quite a few commercial versions of SpamAssassin, all making money (I hope!), I’m getting paid to work on SpamAssassin, and everyone’s happy ;)

Perhaps I should have kept commercial rights to myself. But I have no doubt that doing so would have ensured SpamAssassin remained a small-time solution, and would not have received the number of contributors, committers, and patches it has by now. (for example, Matt Sergeant, who was an SpamAssassin committer, joined the project explicitly to use that code in MessageLabs‘ product.)

Plus, at the time, there were already quite a few commercial competitors – and there’s a lot more to being a commercial success than the simple things required to be an open-source success; I’d be dubious that SpamAssassin would have been able to compete as a purely-commercial play, and I’m not sure I’d have been keen to risk my livelihood to do so, anyway. (I’m not really dot-com CTO material, anyway. I like hacking code too much.)

I think things have worked out well: the software’s better, I’m earning a livelihood from open-source software regardless, and the software’s usable for more people. As usual, Larry Wall was right ;)

Tags: api, bit, control, essay, image, ofoto, point, tech, upload, value, world

Web: http://ws/ . Nifty!

Tags: abi, analysis, company, control, display, file, genome, mail, nobel, software

eVoting: Success! The use of e-voting systems for the June elections in Ireland has been abandoned, after a severely critical report from the Commission on Electronic Voting. Take a look at the report here. Some bits:

• They particularly do not like the continual revision of the software, noting the ‘large number of new versions of the software since the original … review’ and ‘the fact that new versions of the software continue to be issued in the run-up to the June elections’.
• ‘as the software version proposed for use at the forthcoming elections is not as yet finalised, it is impossible for anyone to certify its accuracy’. (my emphasis)
• They were not given access to ‘the full source code’.
• They found a bug! ‘certain of the tests performed at the request of the Commission identified an error in the count software which could lead to incorrect distributions of surpluses’.
• ‘experts retained by the Commission found it very easy to bypass electronic security measures and gain complete control of the hardened PC, overwrite the software, and thereby in theory to gain complete control over the count in a given constituency’.
• And they raised the pre-arranged-transfer-pattern hack: ‘publication of ballot results in full is a valuable aid in checking the accuracy of the results but this can in theory reveal deliberate voter signatures of low-preference votes which could allow voters to identify themselves in a context of corruption or intimidation’.

The use of VVAT, and changes to the counting procedures to remove randomisation, was outside the terms of reference, unfortunately, so it’s not totally over yet. But I can’t see the government getting away with re-introducing e-voting without VVAT now.

Finally, the opposition political parties are calling on the Minister to resign.

I’ve got to say — nice work to all the concerned citizens who’ve achieved this, despite the government’s continual stonewalling and secrecy.

Tags: accuracy, commission, control, count, evoting, june, report, software, theory, use, vvat

Music: Ever wondered what the lyrics to Plastic Bertrand’s classic belgopunk tune really said? (Apart from ‘I am the king of the divan’, that is.) Wonder no more. (…ok, maybe these are a bit more likely. ‘Ey up!’, indeed.)

Mail: Google Mail front page. It has MXes — but they don’t answer yet. No SPF record yet, either ;)

Funny: XCP - the XML Control Protocol ‘is a drop in replacement for traditional Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP. With the advent of XCP/IP, connection-oriented networking will finally move from the legacy environment of inscrutable bits and bytes to a structured, human-readable world relying upon XML. XCP is the first 4th Generation Protocol, or 4GP. It is designed for a networking environment that is very fast and very reliable - the Internet of today!’

Tags: belgopunk, control, environment, mail, music, networking, plastic, protocol, tune, xcp, xml

Linux: wmctrl and Devil’s Pie — two nifty tools for window control. Both are command-line tools that use NetWM, a standard for X11 window managers, to hook into window manager policy and apply scriptable control to windows as they appear (in the Devil’s Pie case) or to pre-existing windows (in the wmctrl case).

I’ve just reverted back to sawfish from KWin recently, in order to get this control back; I probably wouldn’t have if I’d found these in time.

(In case you’re wondering why I reverted: specifically, sawfish allows the user to control window position very efficiently from the keyboard using corner.jl, and the KWin folks weren’t interested in a patch to do the same there. In addition, sawfish has wclass.jl , which allows windows to be controlled by name; it’s very handy to say ‘Show Mail’, and have xvoice de-iconify your mailreader in response. Both are killer features for rodent-free use of a UNIX desktop.)

Funny: Dr. Evil’s monologue about his childhood from the first Austin Powers movie. Sheer genius. ‘Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy, the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament.’

Open Source: Tim Bray goes through a couple of open-source studies; first is the clueless ‘Where do you want to go, Aiden?’ essay I mentioned here a couple of days ago, but the second is a study from a couple of French economists I hadn’t heard of. I’ll just reproduce the translation:

Choosing software is not a neutral act. It must be done consciously; the debate over free and proprietary software can’t be limited to the differences in the applications’ features and ergonomics. To choose an operating system, or software, or network architecture is to choose a kind of society. We can no longer pretend that free and commercial software, or Internet standards and protocols, are just tools. We have to admit at least that they are political tools. After all, fire and the printing press are ‘just tools.’

Ireland: Some new Irish weblogs:

• The Invisible Acrobat — who is this mysterious acrobat? hmm! A Goon Show fan, I’d reckon.
• Eirepreneur

Tags: case, control, couple, devil, kwin, linux, pie, sawfish, software, window, wmctrl

Tech: So, I just looked at NTK; it has a brief bit about Bram Cohen ‘having solved content distribution, (announcing) he was now tackling other simple problems: reputation systems, version control and perhaps after lunch the NP-complete set.’

Hmm, interesting! Let’s take a look at his diary — and what do I find but a whole load of entries on using trust metrics against spam. Bugger. Looks like I have my weekend reading cut out for me.

Also notable: Advogato has added native RSS support, which makes this pretty pointless; and they’ve also added an XML-RPC interface. Expect to see taint.org entries getting copied up there soon, as a result. ;)

Tags: bit, content, control, distribution, hmm, lunch, np-complete, ntk, reputation, tech, version

Wired: Hackers Put ‘Bane’ in Shadowbane:

‘Then we realized that somehow an insane god had taken control of our world and was out to kill us all.’

The population of an entire Shadowbane town was forcibly moved to the bottom of the sea, where they drowned. City guards turned feral and attacked town residents. Mobs of never-before-seen superpowerful creatures, seemingly spontaneously spawned from the ether, began to prowl the streets unchecked, killing characters in the most painful way possible.

Tags: bottom, control, god, hackers, population, sea, shadowbane, town, wired, world

A glowing review of Win4Lin 5.0 from ‘Open for Business’.

Gotta say, I use Win4Lin regularly, and it’s totally flawless. I had a bit of difficulty getting it installed — the installer didn’t like my kernel for some reason, if I recall correctly, and I had to go grepping through the install script (!). But it’s fantastic once it’s running.

The really impressive thing is when it boots Windows (in a window on your Linux desktop) much faster than Windows boots natively on the same hardware ;) Still haven’t figured out how it does that.

It does a nice job of a virtual network interface too; easier to admin than VMWare’s fake-net-with-DHCP thing. It just insmods a new network module, with a new ethernet address, and that responds to arp requests alongside your ‘real’ Linux interface’s address. Then all the control of IP address, network etc. is under Windows control.

I haven’t found an app that doesn’t work with it yet. (Mind you I hear Direct/X isn’t supported yet fully, so most games are probably out.)

I’ve even used it to watch Quicktime movies — which is pretty impressive when you consider that they’re displaying to a (Win4Lin) framebuffer, which is then displayed to another (VNC) framebuffer, which then displays to the hardware.

Tags: address, control, framebuffer, hardware, interface, linux, network, thing, win, windows

New Scientist: Alchemy with light shocks physicists:

Claims of ‘unexpected and stunning new physical phenomena’ are rare in the abstract of a reputable scientific paper. But the latest report by photonics crystal pioneer John Joannopoulos and his group at MIT, soon to be published in Physical Review Letters, does not disappoint.

The researchers document the ultimate control over light: a way to shift the frequency of light beams to any desired colour, with near 100 per cent efficiency. ‘The degree of control over light really is quite shocking,’ comments photonics expert Eli Yablonovitch at the University of California, Los Angeles.

If the effect can be harnessed, it will revolutionise a range of fields - turning heat into light, for example, or prized terahertz rays. Right now, the only way to shift the frequency of a light beam involves sending an extremely intense light pulse - with a power of many megawatts or even gigawatts - along next to it.

This interacts with the first beam and alters its frequency, but the technique is expensive, requires high-power equipment, and is generally pretty inefficient. But when Joannopoulos and his colleagues Evan Reed and Marin Soljacic investigated what happens when shock waves pass through a device called a photonic crystal, they discovered a completely unexpected effect.

I’m just posting this because I like the word ‘photonics’ ;) But this is apparently really cool new tech.

Tags: alchemy, beam, claims, control, crystal, effect, frequency, new, scientist, way

NYT: Internet Is Losing Ground in Battle Against Spam.

‘We have allowed these spam cops to rise out of nowhere to be self-appointed police and block whole swaths of the industry,’ said Bob Dallas, an executive of Empire Towers, an e-mail firm in Toledo, Ohio, widely cited on antispam lists used by many Internet companies.

‘This is against everything that America stands for,’ Mr. Dallas added.

‘The consumer should be the one in control of this.’

Wow, way to shoot yourself down in flames. Without a spam filter to detect unsolicited bulk mail and differentiate from the solicited stuff from their friends and legit subscriptions, the consumer has control how, exactly?

BTW, Empire Towers have a very impressive ROKSO listing. It says: ‘Empire Towers (ET) is a hard-line stealth spamming operation whose spams are illegal in most US states. ET goes to elaborate lengths to hide spam origins and obfuscate URLs. They operate by obtaining multiple class C netblocks on multiple ISPs known for lax handling of spam complaints, the class Cs serving to make their account more valuable to the ISP so in theory harder to terminate.’

Tags: class, consumer, control, empire, ground, internet, losing, nyt, spam, towers

The Reg: Do webcams break when Tony Blair walks by? A very interesting point; webcams, which provide perpetual surveillance by anyone who wants to, doesn’t quite fit in with modern political image control.

Tags: anyone, control, image, point, surveillance

Pentagon: US military forces have in their control a … US citizen:

All along, Americans have known there were Taliban sympathisers and supporters in their midst: the FBI has been focusing on little else for the past three months. However, it expected they would be of Arab descent, part of the huge wave of immigration from Lebanon, Yemen and Palestine of the past 20 years, living in one of the big, ambivalent Islamic communities, perhaps round Detroit or New York.

No one bargained on a 20-year-old white kid with a Swedish name, Irish descent, a strict Catholic father and a Buddhist mother.

Tags: citizen, control, descent, fbi, immigration, midst, part, pentagon, taliban, wave