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Pervasive Computing: Microsoft, MIT And The Future
illuin writes: "There's an interesting article over on BetaNews with a potential take on Microsoft's vision of the future internet, and internet based applications. Of course, it sounds quite a bit like Project Oxygen (press release,) currently being pursued by MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science." The recent "dot-Net" announcement by Microsoft throws a new light on Oxygen, and on other distributed projects like Gnutella and Freenet. Project Oxygen and Microsoft may have radically different views on how all this diffuse computing ought to act and be organized (read "Who pays, how much, to whom?"), but the fact of widely disseminated files and an increase in ASP-style distribution seems inevitable.
I must say, good job. It's not often that we see Godwin's Law enter at the *beginning* of a thread.
So if all these wonderful services are brought to me by corporate providers and all my data is stored on corporate servers, what exactly do I own? And if I own nothing what kind of legal rights do I have should something happen to me or my data?
.NET to a room full of 'technology journalists' after several hours what hope do they have of convincing the general public?
Let's pretend that all my personal data is magically protected from 'hackers'. What's to stop the providers from using my information any way they want? This could be like many contests where the sponsor gets ownership of your creations as a condition of entry. Remember the flap when Geocities claimed to own or be able to use anything created on their site because you were using their services and resources? Will this be SOP in the ASP/.NET world?
What's to stop them from putting continual commercials in my applications that I use online? Like the recent Eudora release, applications could flash commercials or even track my movements as a condition to using the service. And if the service reaches critical mass where the penalities for non use are greater than acceptance (similar to using a word processor that cannot read/write the most recent Word format) what real alternatives do I have?
If the providers lose my information what legal recourse do I have? At least now I can back things up locally. If files are stored arbitraily on different servers can I still make my own back ups? I know I don't have much recourse in states that have passed UCITA, but who can I trust or blame should something go wrong?
And what benefit do I as a consumer actually get? Nothing really changes from my perspective. Am I forced to upgrade at the whim of my provider? Can I easily switch providers? Let's say I prefer an old copy of Freehand and don't want to upgrade to the latest version. Will I have a choice or will the upgrade be forced? Can I easily switch to Illustrator or am I stuck in a contractual obligation?
Let's not forget this won't happen for the next few years. I remember when push and interactive TV were going to be big. Unless consumers see some material benefit this thing will have a lot of hurdles to overcome. If the MS spinmeisters couldn't explain
This is the future? Can't we have something else? What are the alternatives?
For a very good, poetic rant against this vision, I recommend Dan Simmon's Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. Highly recommended reading. If you haven't read it, be warned of spoilers.
In brief, Dan Simmons paints a world where computers control everything, and are truly ubiquitious. With help of their invention, Mankind colonizes the stars, using farcaster portals. But there is a price for this technology. Humankind becomes enslaved, dependent on ubiquitious compuetrs. So much so that they cannot fight an interstellar war. What does the novel offer as an alternative? Real starships. "Real" tech in the form of FTL ships and weapons.
Regardless of whether you agree or not, this is but one of the many threads in the Hyperion story. For those overtly enamored about ubiquitious computing, thinking it will liberate us, this novel is a very good antidote against that.
But like all Sci-Fi, things will never truly happen this way. The novel may be presenting a false dilemma. A good read and interesting viewpoint, nevertheless.
"We must limit cross-platform connectivity and interoperability even at the expense of uptime and security!"
;)
Oh? So you're willing to sign an affadavit certifying that this virtual machine is absolutely free of security holes and cannot be compromised?
If I wrote it with that in mind, of course I would. What kind of coward won't stand up and take responsibility for the quality of his own work?
A secure virtual machine for making arbitrary calculations can be very simple indeed; you only really need a few operations. It would be like signing a statement that you totaled a column of numbers correctly; you'd want to check it over until you're certain, and charge extra for the time and worry of that, but it's a simple enough task that you can eventually be certain that you're correct.
How do you think hardware designers ever get anything done? There's no magical difference that makes bug-free hardware possible and bug-free software impossible.
No chance of somebody inserting malicious code into the machine so that when I say "What's the VA stock price" the car-computer gets sent "Set cruise control to 5 trillion miles per hour. Set steering to target that cliff over there. Lock controls, set unlock password to '!seineew era sreenigne droF'"?
I never said anything about that. I was very clearly responding to "I personally wouldn't want to be in charge of maintaining a machine which is set up to accept and execute arbitrary tasks from passing users." and talking about protecting the machine from the tasks (and the tasks from each other). I'm not talking about communications security (which, of course, can never be perfect, for physical reasons; all theoretical communications security models rely on the absolute physical security of certain things, which is impossible in real life), I'm talking about the security of one machine and the processes that run on it.
BTW, what kind of idiot would let their car be controlled by a distant server over a network? Lines get cut, solar flares disrupt communications, networks go down.
I don't know why this got moded up. You never made any arguments, just asserted that I was wrong, and threw in a few non sequitors.
What the hell are you talking about? The email bugs are due to MSFT's faulty security model. Shit, I have friends at MSFT who have admitted that the Outlook team got chewed out for not implementing a sandbox model after the I LOVE YOU virus got out. The virus wouldn't have spread if the developers at MSFT had chosen security over perceived usability. .NET .
Secondly, what exactly do you mean by internet Security Model? Do you mean a restructuring of TCP/IP with security in mind or the use of routers to block certain packets (how this would have stopped I LOVE YOU is beyond me). Frankly both your posts seems like the ravings of a clueless non-techie who is pro-MSFT simply because he has bought the hype. Watch this... I LOVE YOU, Melissa and the others were emails sent by users carrying attachments... No Internet Securiy Model will suddenly be able to tell between programmatically sent email and user created email, unless of course you believe some central authority will be able to direct all the mailservers on the 'net to filter certain emails dynamically. Then what happens when some other 'net protocol becomes widely used for proliferating viruses, e.g. MSFT's
Finally about your little crack about Joel Klein and billions of dollars, what exactly is your point? MSFT got where it was by commiting crimes and breaking federal laws. The fact that it was making money for a few investors should not change the fact that they should be punished for their crimes. If you're trying to pin the fall of NASDAQ on MSFT...Get a clue. The fall of NASDAQ can be blamed on the fact that the Dot Comm Bubble Has Officially Burst, film at 11.
Amen! Here are a couple of interesting scenarios for you. A couple of weeks ago Inacom declared bankruptcy and closed their doors, completely shutting down an outsourced help desk operation for a Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Michigan. Imagine your ASP failing to achieve critical mass, filing for bankruptcy, and leaving you without access to your applications, databases, etc. Your corporate masters will only want ASP's with deep pockets...like MS, AOL, or Oracle.
A more ominous scenario is the effect of a shift from the machine to the network to Open Source software. The Open Source movement is focused on replicating the functionality of OS and applications built for the desktop or server market. If you want to use an automotive analogy you could say that they build vehicles of various types and let you use them for nothing. What happens when the functionality is no longer in the cars but in the network of roadways? Where do the resources come from to maintain a parallel network of value-added roadways that can be used for nothing?
Of course, the .NET, AOL, and Oracle folks have to actually get some value added to the roadways first...
My wife is like Unix. Lots of commands. Lots of arguments.
I personally wouldn't want to be in charge of maintaining a machine which is set up to accept and execute arbitrary tasks from passing users. (Yes, you can use sandboxing and other such strategies, but every security protocol is vulnerable.)
This is sheer and utter nonsense. A virtual machine can easily be simple enough to be bug-free and handle every kind of overflow without hurting the machine it's running on.
Not every security protocol is vulnerable, just those ones where the expense of perfect security wasn't justified by necessity (for example, when you want to sell a "secure" system, but you can hire marketers to hype it as secure more cheaply and effectively than you can hire programmers to make it secure).
ASP model is all about piracy prevention. You can't pirate a service as easily as you can pirate a product. Will it benefit the consumer? Of course not. Thank the pirates. Welcome to the future, where you will here people saying "I can't use my word processor, the network is down".
You might want to thank the Free Software movement too. You can't really sell free software. You can sell a service. Software vendors pressured by falling values for software sold in the traditional manner will do what they can to follow the ASP model.
#VRML V2.0 utf8
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I can't believe no one has mentioned the privacy implications of this. 1) you an encode as much as you want during transmission, but there is currently no way to work on the data without decoding first. The main CPU (and the 'rented' progfgram) sees all your personal data, and it's not under your control 2) If you trust all commercial CPU cycle providers (I don't), what about cracked/compromised systems? But more importantly, what evidence do we have that commercial enterprises can be trusted in this fashion? Even EU privacy laws hace limited utility against a US server. 3) Consider this as well... if your apps are following you around, running on whatever machines are nearby, and those machines are programmed to configure themselves to your custom settings, then trojan/virus/macro checking becomes tougher. Each machine can only (at best) detect the known public viruses. Meanwhile that custom reporting macro your employer put in a 'petty cash' template, follows you from bar to bar, to the house of your college friend (who has had more social diseases than Don Juan's taste-tester; and eighteen misc. misdemeanor arrests for DUI, drug possession, disorderly conduct, and trolling /.) Etc. Etc. You can *know* the proper configuration on your home/office machine. An anonymous machine can't recognize what 'belongs' -- And (you heard it here first) what about a macro that is set *not* to load from the server to your home/work machine? One that effectively lives outside your door and follows you only when you're out? Sorry, I'll stick with my private hardware, running my privately owned copy of software -- and the PDA with electrical tape over the IR port
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
Sorry, I am too lazy to actually code html, so check out http://www.useit.com .
.Net as the dawn of a new era. It scares me that with so little information, and Microsoft's current track record that we all complain about, Nielen offers very strong support for this. As some have said, this can be a good idea, but at this point I don't trust MS to pull it off well. (I don't hate all of MS either, just the management. A lot of excellent programers and designers go to MS because that is where the money and security is.)
Jakob Nielsen heralds
More on topic, pay to play IMHO sucks. I personally prefer the system as it is now, pay once, play close to forever. Of course, this option won't go away, but it will cost a bloody fortune. OTOH, the idea that paying for what you use has been a dream of mine. To pull off these two ideas so that the consumer wins means one thing...pay once for only what you need and have the option to buy components later. Sounds a bit like the auto industry. And yet, the auto industry is setup to screw the consumer. So will the IT, IS, etc industry pull it off in a better fashion? Or are they slavering at the profits automakers are able to pull off?
Sig-"Out beyond fields of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there." Jelaluddin Rumi
The late Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC wrote an article for Scientific America in 1991 that defined much of the ground work for things like Project Oxygen. Give it a read, it changed my career.
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"I'd never want to join a club that would have me as a member" - G. Marx
I'm personally not convinced that voice-rec is the way to go for mobile computing. If I'm on the bus or anywhere else where someone can hear me, I don't want them to know what I'm saying to my computer. OTOH, if you're actually the one driving the car, it does make sense.
More importantly, though, is this vision that most mobile machines will stream all their data to nearby big iron which will crunch the numbers and stream back finished product. Let's pretend for a bit that the bandwidth issues can be worked out. Who's going to actually be running the machines that provide all these spare cycles? Are we going to have companies which simply maintain large computers for performing standard tasks like voice recognition and Web searching on behalf of mobile users? I personally wouldn't want to be in charge of maintaining a machine which is set up to accept and execute arbitrary tasks from passing users. (Yes, you can use sandboxing and other such strategies, but every security protocol is vulnerable.)
I did mobile-code research for a few years, and the resource question was always coming up. There were some papers written by a grad student with a background in economics, and some modeling was done, but it was never quite proven that this could work. (One can't really model all the various kinds of automated maliciousness that could occur.)
Finally, I'll add the standard gripe that I think ASPs are a step in the wrong direction. I don't want to be continually dependent on a manufacturer for access to an application. Let someone arbitrarily deny me word-processing services because they don't like what I write? Be forced to use a new version of software which adds features I hate and removes the ones I love? No thank you. If I want to take my laptop to Mars and do my word-processing there, I want to do so without interplanetary network lag.
Of course, if played right, this could be a big win for Linux and other free-software projects. I believe that once users get bitten by the ASP model, they will want to get away from it. Obviously, the big companies won't let them. If, however, they can just switch to a purely-local free-software office suite, we might see a large jump in the use of free systems.
The network is not the computer, the computer is not the network, and as far as this user is concerned, there are times when I'd like the network to fuck off and leave me alone with a completely functional machine.