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Frequent contributor Bennett Haselton writes: Facebook threatened to banish drag queen pseudonyms, and (some) users revolted by flocking to Ello, a social network which promised not to enforce real names and also to remain ad-free. Critics said that the idealistic model would buckle under pressure from venture capitalists. But both gave scant mention to the fact that a distributed social networking protocol, backed by a player large enough to get people using it, would achieve all of the goals that Ello aspired to achieve, and more. Read on for the rest.

At the end of September, "FacebookDragQueenGate" fell from the sky like a gift from the gods to the founders (and venture capital backers) of the Ello social network. The company promised not only to remain ad-free and to allow drag queen stage names, but even stated that they planned to allow pornographic content (something that received relatively little press, compared to the ad-free model). But critics such as Aral Balkan wrote that once Ello received venture capital funding, the backers would inevitably pressure the company to change its relationship with its users in order to make money. In an interview published in Forbes on Monday, Harvard Business School professor John Deighton was blunt: "The board will need to monetize the membership in whatever fashion ensures a profitable return of capital for the venture fund’s investors. So my advice, if they believe Ello is still viable by then, is to buy out [Paul Budnitz, the idealistic founder who came up with the 'no ads' idea]."

There is, in short, nothing to stop Ello from doing what Facebook does whenever they make a significant change to their Terms of Service: presenting users with a dialog box next time they sign in, saying, "These are the new rules, by checking this box, you are agreeing to abide by the new contract which you're not going to read." If Ello succeeds beyond its founders' dreams, then its ad-free nature might start to hinge on its founders all turning down buyout offers of tens of millions of dollars to stick to their ideals -- hardly a sure thing. Or the VCs might get enough seats on the board that they can outvote the founders and render their objections moot.

As Joshua Kopstein writes in an editorial for Al-Jazeera America, what really would have changed the game would have been a distributed, decentralized social network. I already wrote two pieces arguing that a distributed social network could work, and how -- a protocol that allows users to create profiles, "status" posts, groups, events, and other familiar social networking features as "objects" that live on their own server, but that can interact with users' profiles hosted on other servers. I don't want to re-hash all the details here, but the short version is that there seems to be nothing about social networks, as we currently use them, which would require all of the data to be stored in a single centralized system. In a distributed protocol, you could host your profile with any hosting company, and users could "subscribe" to updates from your profile, as well as the ability to receive invites to your events and your groups, and direct messages from you. Think RSS feeds, but with better support for well-defined objects like "event invites".

If your profile were linked to a domain name that you own, then if your existing hosting company ever deleted your profile (or threatened to), you could simply move your profile to a new hosting company, the same way that any person or company can currently switch their domain name between hosting providers. This, obviously, would instantly render moot any one company's policies about "real names" (or porn, for that matter) -- all you have to do is find at least one company, anywhere in the world, whose policies are permissive enough to host your profile, and that should be possible for all but the most extreme or illegal content.

This also renders moot all the worries about profile hosting companies trying to amass tens of millions of users and then stabbing them in the back, by changing the terms of service to allow them to sell user data or stuff unwieldy ads down their throat. When users can switch seamlessly between hosts, no one host is going to be able to "charge" more than the going market rate for hosting a profile (where "charging" could be in the form of monetary payment or displaying ads to the user). How much would it actually cost to host a profile for the typical user these days, complete with all their photos and status updates? It's hard to know, because other than university professors, nobody really has personal webpages any more, after they all went to MySpace and then to Facebook. But since the old days when people did actually host their own personal pages, hosting and serving data has gotten really, really cheap. For the average user, with a few hundred photos and a few hundred friends looking at them, $1 per year might be enough. Maybe they'd just have to watch one of those ads once a year that Youtube puts in front of a Beyoncé music video, and that would cover it.

Unfortunately, to many people the concept of distributed social networking is linked with the failure of Diaspora, the most ambitious attempt to create a decentralized protocol to compete with the likes of Facebook. But Diaspora didn't fail because the idea lacked merit; it almost certainly failed because people asked the same question that they asked of any other upstart Facebook competitor: Why should I join, when all of my friends are on Facebook instead? Of course people might reasonably asked the same question about Google+, but when Google launches a product, people join because they know the quality will be decent, they know that probably some of their friends will join because of the Google brand, and they know people will be buzzing about it anyway so they want to join in order to see what the big deal is.

And that brings up the story's second moral: Despite what you may have heard from your cousin who just read The Fountainhead, the products that are the most successful are not necessarily the best, by any objective measure; rather, they're usually the ones that had major backing (Google+) or were the beneficiaries of a staggering lucky break (Ello). Diaspora didn't take off, because it didn't have either one of these.

And since you cannot manufacture a lucky break, I continue to believe that the last best hope for truly free social networking -- with minimal censorship, and ads and costs kept to a minimum by market competition -- would be for a major player like Google to launch a social networking protocol, and to set up themselves as the default host for new profiles, but allowing the protocol to interoperate seamlessly with profiles hosted elsewhere. Either that, or if the system is launched by a startup or a nonprofit, make sure that you have a host of widely respected luminaries or organizations standing ready to help promote it -- if the EFF and the BoingBoing guys endorsed a new social networking system as the future of Internet freedom, people would join because it would seem uncool not to. As long as the product itself is functional, just have the right connections lined up when you launch it. Because that's what matters, and don't let the deluded ghost of Ayn Rand tell you otherwise.

onproton writes Northern Illinois University recently began restricting student access to web pages that contain "illegal or unethical" content which, according to University policy, includes resources used for "political activities...and the organization or participation in meetings, rallies and demonstrations." A student raised concerns after attempting to access the Wikipedia page for Westboro Baptist Church, and receiving a filter message informing him that his access of this page would likely violate the University's Acceptable Use Policy, along with a warning that "all violations would be reviewed." This has lead to questions about whether some policies that restrict student access to information are in the best interest of the primary goal of education.

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from BetaBeat: "The Department of Homeland Security appears to have shut down the ability to use Dwolla, a mobile payment service, to withdraw and deposit money into Mt. Gox, a Bitcoin trading platform. ... A representative for Dwolla told Betabeat that the company is 'not party' to this matter and encourages those with questions to reach out to Mt. Gox or the DHS. 'The Department of Homeland Security and U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland issued a 'Seizure Warrant' for the funds associated with Mutum Sigillium's Dwolla account (a.k.a. Mt. Gox),' he said. 'In light of the court order, procured by the Department of Homeland Security, Dwolla has ceased all account activities associated with Dwolla services for Mutum Sigillum while Dwolla's holding partner transferred Mutum Sigillium's balance, per the warrant.'"

The Wiki Weapon Project and its idea of making guns with 3D printers has already been mentioned on Slashdot. It has also been written up on Forbes.com and a lot of other geek and non-geek sites. Note that when some Wiki Weapon proponents talk about making "guns" with 3D printers, they may be talking only about lower receivers or other static parts, not barrels, firing pins or other parts that must be machined to close tolerances and are subjected to a lot of stress when the gun fires. But low-cost 3D printing and low-cost CNC machining technologies are both advancing at a rapid rate, so thinking about the intersection of firearm manufacturing and open source is both worthwhile and timely. There's been a strong debate about this topic on Eric S. Raymond's Armed and Dangerous blog that's worth reading. Also recommended: The Home Gunsmith.com and CNC Gunsmithing. Astute Slashdot readers will, no doubt, recommend many more. Meanwhile, this video is about licensing, distribution, and legal matters, not the actual manufacture of firearms. There's a transcript (we're finally doing transcripts of selected videos) below the video for those who prefer to read instead of watch.

theodp writes "BetaBeat reports that people are pretty much falling over themselves to mock Apple's cheesy new Genius ad campaign, using zingers like 'intellectually cheap,' 'cringe-inducing,' 'borderline smarmy,' and — perhaps the unkindest cut of all — Microsoft-worthy — to describe them. Apple's trilogy-of-terror ad lineup includes Mayday ('An Apple Genius shows a fellow passenger how easy it is to make great home movies with iMovie. All before the tray tables are returned to their upright position.'), Labor Day ('An Apple Genius shows a soon-to-be father all the amazing things he can make with iPhoto.'), and Basically ('An Apple Genius points out there are a lot of things that separate a Mac from an ordinary computer, like great apps that come built in.'). The Atlantic's Jordan Weissmann says Steve Jobs would be appalled by the new ads, which certainly don't fare well in a head-to-head comparison with Think Different."

Google has launched a pop-up dialogue box on YouTube that urges you to use your real name when trying to make a comment. From the article: "When you try to comment on a YouTube video, a box will pop up that displays your username as it’s currently seen, along with a side-by-side comparison to what it will look like if you let YouTube pull your name from Google+. You can choose 'I don’t want to use my real name,' but that will lead to another dialogue box that basically guilts you into agreeing. If you still insist on remaining anonymous, you have to tell Google why: 'My channel is for a show or character' or 'My channel name is well-known for other reasons' are two options. 'I want to remain anonymous, is–unsurprisingly–not one."

theodp writes "His old day job at Gawker entailed calling BS on tech's high-and-mighty, but Ryan Tate still found things to like about Silicon Valley. In The 20% Doctrine, Tate explores how tinkering, goofing off, and breaking the rules at work can drive success in business. If you're lucky, your boss may someday find Tate's book in his or her conference schwag bag and be inspired enough by the tales of skunkworks projects at both tech (Google, Flickr, pre-Scott Thompson Yahoo) and non-tech (Bronx Academy of Letters, Huffington Post, Thomas Keller Restaurant Group) organizations to officially condone some form of 20% time at your place of work. In the meantime, how do you manage to find time to goof off to get ahead?"

An anonymous reader writes "Daniel Brandt started his 'Scroogle' search engine because he wanted to provide increased privacy to people who searched online through Google. Unfortunately, while Google tolerated this for a while, they began throttling Scroogle queries. This, in combination with extensive DDoS attacks on Brandt's servers, has caused him to take Scroogle offline, along with his other domains. He said, 'I no longer have any domains online. I also took all my domains out of DNS because I want to signal to the criminal element that I have no more servers to trash. This hopefully will ward off further attacks on my previous providers. Scroogle.org is gone forever. Even if all my DDoS problems had never started in December, Scroogle was already getting squeezed from Google's throttling, and was already dying. It might have lasted another six months if I hadn't lost seven servers from DDoS, but that's about all.' Internet users who made use of the services will now need to investigate other options."

An anonymous reader writes "Eben Moglen, founder of the Freedombox project, has taken to yelling at journalists reporting about social networks. One wonders if this messaging will work to end proprietary, centralized social networks or not."

theodp writes "Betabeat's Adrianne Jeffries takes a look at the questionable young science of using social media to evaluate creditworthiness. As banks start nosing around Facebook and Twitter, Jeffries explains, the wrong friends might just sink your credit. 'Let's take a trip with the Ghost of Christmas Future,' she suggests. 'The year is 2016, and George Bailey, a former banker, now a part-time consultant, is looking for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage for a co-op in the super-hot neighborhood of Bedford Falls (BeFa). He has never missed a loan payment and has zero credit card debt. He submits his information to the online-only PotterBank.com, but halfway through the application process, the website asks for his Facebook login. Then his Twitter. Then LinkedIn. The cartoon loan officer avatar begins to frown as the algorithm discovers Mr. Bailey's taxi-driving buddy Ernie was once turned down by PotterBank for a loan; then it starts browsing his daughter Zuzu's photo album, 'Saturday Nite!' And what was this tweet from a few years back: "FML, about to jump off a goddamn bridge"?' So, could George piggyback his way to a better credit score by adding Larry and Sergey to his Google+ Circles?"