If Microsoft's "trust us" data-in-the-cloud architecture is called 'Hailstorm,' then what we're about to announce at OpenPrivacy might seem more like a sunny day with a cool breeze.
We're still a fair ways off, but our design - as it says on the home page - is "an Open Source, cryptographically secure, transparent to the user, distributed platform for creating, maintaining, and selectively sharing profile information." Sorta like an Open Source Hailstorm running on Freenet.
Though the code (written in Java, XML and SOAP) is available for anonymous CVS download, it doesn't really run yet without a lot of tweaking (so no bug reports, please). But we'd love to get feedback and ideas how to make this free framework more solid - and more amenable to the business folk who we'd love to see jump on it.
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You've obviously never taken a course at MIT
on
Open Courses at MIT
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· Score: 1
The written coursework provides a basis with which to ground everything you're learning in class. The exams are always different, and in any case require a strong theoretical knowledge and understanding of the areas covered, without which you wouldn't know where to start.
I applaud this initiative. Few students will be able to use it as "distance learning" as the classrooms and TAs won't be there to answer questions that are sure to come. As they say, learning at MIT is like taking a drink from a firehose. And everyone at MIT has access to a computer.
IMO, one of the great advantages of this plan is that it will help other universities and professors in designing their coursework.
The "Daily Me" is something I've been working towards for twenty years, starting with NewsPeek in 1979. It will give people the right and capability to see only one side of things - so that they can live in a world of their bias if they so choose - and I believe they have that right. But these "tunnel vision" people - who's minds are not open - will die out and be replaced by a new breed that searches for Truth.
One of the great uses of a truely personalized system is the ease with which one can find quality opposing viewpoints. If today I wonder how anyone could believe Bush "has a mandate from the people," I have to piece it together myself. But with secure, anonymized and decentralized personalization, I can easily find the top-rated opposing viewpoints so that I can better understand those I oppose, for every in every war it's important to "know your enemy."
Finally, my "Me" would contain 85% stuff of direct interest, by authors and in a style I appreciate, and %15 would be from my chosen "serendipity" authors who point me to headlines I might not otherwise see, sort of like Slashdot.
They want to stretch all the RICO laws and all the Property Confiscation laws to the maximum.
Rarely do freedoms ever return. They are only taken away.
Verily. The CyberCrime treaty goes way beyond Carnivore in trashing freedom. Oh, and if you didn't get it, Carnivore would need to be deployed world-wide for this treaty to work.
As David Banisar (of EPIC) said at the recent Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, Carnivore is law enforcement's wet dream.
Before I ever sign an IP contract with an employer, I have always attached an "Exhibit A" which describes all the past, present and future projects that I am developing on my own. At times, there have been some conflicts (such as my long term work on 'broadcatch' personalized information systems when joining at General Magic) but the issues are always resolvable, and having them on the table up front makes everything a lot easier, not to mention adding a bonus point or two for you in the eyes of your future boss...
This is probably a good piece of advice for most Slashdotters...
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Re:Adventure Shell... old hat?
on
MUD Shell
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· Score: 1
Welcome to the Adventure shell!
You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike> fight shell
The shell hits! -more- you lose a file
EFF joined the committee and attended their meeting. If you care about whether your disk drives will conspire behind your back to murder fair use, you should too. See www.t13.org for how to join. Get a "voting" membership, you may need that vote.
$800 plus airfare and accomodations to two cities is a bit too steep for me, but I hope some slashdotters can make it and help steer the vote towards sanity. Otherwise, at least join the EFF (please!) and support their many efforts.
And in a related story: "The 120-page December 2000 International Crime Threat Assessment report - created by basically every federal law enforcement agency in the U.S. - is riddled with examples of how computer technology has advanced the cause of national and international crime. Modern telecommunications and information systems, state-of-the-art communications equipment, computers - they're all to blame."
I spent the years 1975-'80 hacking first Stallman's Teco ^R-macro-based Emacs on Dec-10's and then Bernie Greenberg's MacLisp Emacs on Multics. Moving to UNIX, I started playing with Gosmacs in 1981, and from 1982-'95 I worked on Stallman's GNU Emacs - one of the prettiest pieces of code I've ever seen.
Some history: I forked the base for what became GNU Emacs from Gosling's CMU thesis (on optimal redisplay algorithms - necessary stuff when talking through 300 baud modems) editor that later he sold to Unipress. (BTW, Gosling got the keymap idea from Craig Finseth's FINE (Fine Is Not Emacs) who got it from Stallman's.) Because Unipress claimed ownership of the code, RMS buckled down and rewrote essentially the entire thing. And what an amazing job he did!
(This is from memory of my old days of hacking emacs - things may have changed...) He created a 26-bit object space, with a 5-bit object descriptor and 1 bit for mark-and-sweep GC all packed into a 32-bit word. Then there's the DEFUN macro, which simultaneously defines C and elisp-callable functions, as well as setting argument limits, prompt and a documentation string. The doc string can be used interactively, via the (pre-web) hypertext info system, or run through TeX to create a printed manual! Sweet!
My Mac's been dead for a few months and since I don't have access to the excellent Mac Common Lisp (MCL), I play with elisp these days. And there's some killer elisp packages. Vi is great, but Emacs Rulz!
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How about a PDP8/e emulator?
on
PDP-10 Revival
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· Score: 1
There's a great Macintosh-based PDP8/e simulator here. It even has options to slow the CPU and I/O devices down to original speed. (I used to think that the 110-baud ASR-33 was blazing - sure could type faster than me!)
My Mac's been dead for a few weeks, but when it comes back up I plan to port the first game I ever wrote (er, ported), Lunar Lander, to it. That was back in '69...
Mojo Nation is creating a micropayment system with their concept of mojo, but they also plan to control the bank, which makes it too centralized for my taste. What may end up being more valuable than micropayments is profile sharing, for as the three trillion dollar direct marketing biz will tell you, information about you is worth mas mojo.
The trick will be to separate your identity from your profile and create a market in (possibly authenticaticated but) anonymous demographic information. Payments can get made to your pseudonymous persona that can collect or trade them with brokers to create quantities useful to convert to some useful form - or to barter back into the network.
Not quite, but you're on the right track. The problem with Google is it's centralized and centrist - when I search for "video card drivers" and I'm thinking about how to get my Matrox G450 to work with XFree86, and you search for "video card drivers" and you're thinking NVidea/Windoze, we both get the same results. This is the failure of centralized collaborative systems, in that everyone gets ranked the same, so that comments by Bill Gates get ranked equally both both of us (though we may disagree on his viewpoint).
We need to put the power of moderation in everyone's hands, so that my search directs me to Matrox's beta linux driver (kewl!) and yours brings you to what you want. This is the idea behind truly personalized media. But the problem with personalized media is that, up til now, you've had to surrender your valuable profile information to get it. The looming danger of Big Brother is why I called my 1981 thesis on a personalized newspaper NewsPeek (a peek at the news, and a play on the George Orwell-1984 term newspeak).
We need better filters, but Google as it stands won't cut it. A "my-Google" that blends my particular viewpoint with others of like mind is more like it, but privacy becomes a major concern here. (What happens when "my-Google" gets bought by Microsoft or Oracle, or what if its records are subpoenaed by the FBI?) Separation of your true name from your persona (what you do) becomes essential. As Bruce Sterling wrote way back in 1992, we need tools to direct our attention to what we want to see amongst all there is to see. And as we build these tools, we will need to be mindful of our privacy.
Private Essayist asks "Who decides what is factual?" to which JWitlock responded "We're all pretty good filters..." and ruminates "if all the Internet was on slashcode...". Indeed, moderators are needed to cull the wheat from the chaff, but who moderates the moderators? For example, Advogato uses a trust metric to certify moderators, but it depends on a seed of four trustworthy Masters that, well, you've just got to trust.
There are many on-line communities that are beginning to understand the need for reputations: Slashdot has karma; Mojo Nation uses mojo, a private currency; even SourceForge has implemented user ratings. And much more is being done in the private, closed source sector, unfortunately often driven by a requirement to more accurately target specific market segments.
The holy grail here would be an open source, fully distributed, open yet secure reputation system can satisfy this need. If in addition, this system put the user in full control over their personal information and how - and with whom - it was to be shared, then privacy could be assured while reputations at one site could safely cross boundaries into other sites.
As information begins to drown us, reputation-driven services that can accurately direct our limited attention to what we want to see when we want to see it will drive the new economy. We have the technology - let's build it!
just heard that the doj proposal is to split the company into os and apps. gates' televised threat is that this ruling will 'cripple the tech industry.'
sure it will - ms is the biggest single tech innovator. but what they've done is criminal and prevents innovation from open standards/interfaces. tech will take a hit in the short term, but innovation - which is what the doj is attempting to support with their ruling - will flourish.
Slashdot Mirror
This is surely the way of the future...
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We're still a fair ways off, but our design - as it says on the home page - is "an Open Source, cryptographically secure, transparent to the user, distributed platform for creating, maintaining, and selectively sharing profile information." Sorta like an Open Source Hailstorm running on Freenet.
Though the code (written in Java, XML and SOAP) is available for anonymous CVS download, it doesn't really run yet without a lot of tweaking (so no bug reports, please). But we'd love to get feedback and ideas how to make this free framework more solid - and more amenable to the business folk who we'd love to see jump on it.
--
I applaud this initiative. Few students will be able to use it as "distance learning" as the classrooms and TAs won't be there to answer questions that are sure to come. As they say, learning at MIT is like taking a drink from a firehose. And everyone at MIT has access to a computer.
IMO, one of the great advantages of this plan is that it will help other universities and professors in designing their coursework.
OK, so I'm biased.
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One of the great uses of a truely personalized system is the ease with which one can find quality opposing viewpoints. If today I wonder how anyone could believe Bush "has a mandate from the people," I have to piece it together myself. But with secure, anonymized and decentralized personalization, I can easily find the top-rated opposing viewpoints so that I can better understand those I oppose, for every in every war it's important to "know your enemy."
Finally, my "Me" would contain 85% stuff of direct interest, by authors and in a style I appreciate, and %15 would be from my chosen "serendipity" authors who point me to headlines I might not otherwise see, sort of like Slashdot.
--
As David Banisar (of EPIC) said at the recent Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, Carnivore is law enforcement's wet dream.
--
This is probably a good piece of advice for most Slashdotters...
--
You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike> fight shell
The shell hits! -more- you lose a file
--
John says: $800 plus airfare and accomodations to two cities is a bit too steep for me, but I hope some slashdotters can make it and help steer the vote towards sanity. Otherwise, at least join the EFF (please!) and support their many efforts.
--
And in a related story: "The 120-page December 2000 International Crime Threat Assessment report - created by basically every federal law enforcement agency in the U.S. - is riddled with examples of how computer technology has advanced the cause of national and international crime. Modern telecommunications and information systems, state-of-the-art communications equipment, computers - they're all to blame."
--
I spent the years 1975-'80 hacking first Stallman's Teco ^R-macro-based Emacs on Dec-10's and then Bernie Greenberg's MacLisp Emacs on Multics. Moving to UNIX, I started playing with Gosmacs in 1981, and from 1982-'95 I worked on Stallman's GNU Emacs - one of the prettiest pieces of code I've ever seen.
Some history: I forked the base for what became GNU Emacs from Gosling's CMU thesis (on optimal redisplay algorithms - necessary stuff when talking through 300 baud modems) editor that later he sold to Unipress. (BTW, Gosling got the keymap idea from Craig Finseth's FINE (Fine Is Not Emacs) who got it from Stallman's.) Because Unipress claimed ownership of the code, RMS buckled down and rewrote essentially the entire thing. And what an amazing job he did!
(This is from memory of my old days of hacking emacs - things may have changed...) He created a 26-bit object space, with a 5-bit object descriptor and 1 bit for mark-and-sweep GC all packed into a 32-bit word. Then there's the DEFUN macro, which simultaneously defines C and elisp-callable functions, as well as setting argument limits, prompt and a documentation string. The doc string can be used interactively, via the (pre-web) hypertext info system, or run through TeX to create a printed manual! Sweet!
My Mac's been dead for a few months and since I don't have access to the excellent Mac Common Lisp (MCL), I play with elisp these days. And there's some killer elisp packages. Vi is great, but Emacs Rulz!
--
There's a great Macintosh-based PDP8/e simulator here. It even has options to slow the CPU and I/O devices down to original speed. (I used to think that the 110-baud ASR-33 was blazing - sure could type faster than me!)
My Mac's been dead for a few weeks, but when it comes back up I plan to port the first game I ever wrote (er, ported), Lunar Lander, to it. That was back in '69...
--
The trick will be to separate your identity from your profile and create a market in (possibly authenticaticated but) anonymous demographic information. Payments can get made to your pseudonymous persona that can collect or trade them with brokers to create quantities useful to convert to some useful form - or to barter back into the network.
--
We need to put the power of moderation in everyone's hands, so that my search directs me to Matrox's beta linux driver (kewl!) and yours brings you to what you want. This is the idea behind truly personalized media. But the problem with personalized media is that, up til now, you've had to surrender your valuable profile information to get it. The looming danger of Big Brother is why I called my 1981 thesis on a personalized newspaper NewsPeek (a peek at the news, and a play on the George Orwell-1984 term newspeak).
We need better filters, but Google as it stands won't cut it. A "my-Google" that blends my particular viewpoint with others of like mind is more like it, but privacy becomes a major concern here. (What happens when "my-Google" gets bought by Microsoft or Oracle, or what if its records are subpoenaed by the FBI?) Separation of your true name from your persona (what you do) becomes essential. As Bruce Sterling wrote way back in 1992, we need tools to direct our attention to what we want to see amongst all there is to see. And as we build these tools, we will need to be mindful of our privacy.
--
There are many on-line communities that are beginning to understand the need for reputations: Slashdot has karma; Mojo Nation uses mojo, a private currency; even SourceForge has implemented user ratings. And much more is being done in the private, closed source sector, unfortunately often driven by a requirement to more accurately target specific market segments.
The holy grail here would be an open source, fully distributed, open yet secure reputation system can satisfy this need. If in addition, this system put the user in full control over their personal information and how - and with whom - it was to be shared, then privacy could be assured while reputations at one site could safely cross boundaries into other sites.
As information begins to drown us, reputation-driven services that can accurately direct our limited attention to what we want to see when we want to see it will drive the new economy. We have the technology - let's build it!
--
gates' televised threat is that this ruling will 'cripple the tech industry.'
sure it will - ms is the biggest single tech innovator. but what they've done is criminal and prevents innovation from open standards/interfaces. tech will take a hit in the short term, but innovation - which is what the doj is attempting to support with their ruling - will flourish.