SPEWS co-opts individual admins (via osirusoft, SpamAssassin, etc.) into a clearly documented process which bears many similarities to economic extortion. SPEWS (with justification) delegates responsibility for economic collateral damage to the indvidual admins whose servers act upon SPEWS RBL publications.
Some experienced sysadmins do not endorse SPEWS' wholesale blacklisting of entire netblock neighborhoods. Those admins choose not to use SPEWS RBL, but may choose to use RBLs that cause less collateral damage. Some experienced sysadmins use SPEWS RBL because they do endorse SPEWS' clearly documented process which bears many similarities to economic extortion.
Many inexperienced sysadmins use osirusoft (e.g via SpamAssassin) without knowing the difference between SPEWS and other RBLs aggregated by osirusoft. Without knowing that difference, these inexperienced sysadmins unknowingly endorse SPEWS' clearly documented process which bears many similarities to economic extortion.
One answer is a SPEWS whitelist + reciprocal blacklisting. Create a whitelist of SPEWS-blacklisted-but-collateral-damage IPs which have *never* been accused by SPEWS (or other RBL) of spamming. When an ISP causes collateral damage by enforcing the SPEWS RBL against a presumed-guilty-but-never-accused IP that exists in the SPEWS whitelist, ask the individual sysadmin to use the SPEWS-collateral-damage whitelist.
If an individual sysadmin uses the SPEWS RBL but chooses not to use the SPEWS-collateral-damage whitelist, they would be endorsing SPEWS clearly documented process which bears many similarities to economic extortion. Such explicit endorsement will earn such individual sysadmins membership in an IP blacklist of "sysadmins who support SPEWS' clearly documented process which bears many similarities to economic extortion". This blacklist would then be enforced by sysadmins whose IPs are SPEWS-blacklisted-without-spam-accusation .
This unbundling mechanism provides a technical means for individual sysadmins to endorse SPEWS valuable spam-fighting contributions without endorsing SPEWS' clearly documented process which bears many similarities to economic extortion.
Long-term, the solution is pseudonymnous, non-profit TLS certificates for SMTP servers with social (not economic or calendar) seniority (c.f. Apache Incubator). The economic variety exists at bondedsender.org, along with whitelist patches for popular open-source MTAs.
Former Xerox PARC'ers Kiczales and Simonyi are a dynamite combination.
In the superb 1985 book Programmers at Work, Simonyi talks about the loved and hated Hungarian naming convention, programming and meeting other famous programmers:
"...the guys at Apple, like Bill Atkinson [one of the Lisa programmers who later developed the MacPaint program for the Apple Macintosh computer] -- I think Atkinson is the greatest--and Bill Budge [who programmed Pinball Construction Set for Electronic Arts]. These guys are all great.
We don't have much to talk about. We feel good vibes and exchange three or four words. I know that if one of these guys opens his mouth, he knows what he is talking about. So when he does open his mouth and he does know what he is talking about, it's not a great shock. And since I tend to know what I am talking about, too, I would probably say the same thing, so why bother talking, really? It's like the joke tellers' convention where people sit around and they don't even have to tell a joke. They just say the joke number and everybody laughs.
It would be great to be able to work with all these guys, but we are business competitors. I think we could do incredible stuff together. Maybe the Martians will invade and we will have to do a Manhattan project in computers. We would all be shipped to New Mexico. Who knows?"
Czarnecki's 2000 book Generative Programming reviews work from both Simonyi and Kiczales on "intentional programming". Read the sample chapter to find out what Intentional Software (Manhattan Project of computing?) may be subsetting-for-future-supersetting. The subjet is domain-specific developent.
Review table-oriented programming for historical context. Then learn about TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving), a heuristic methodology created by Russian Genrich Altschuller. From Terninko's 1998 Systematic Innovation:
".. A patent was rarely given, so most inventors applied for an author's certificate. The Soviet government owned the intellectual property that the author's certificate documented, so the certificate was merely an acknowledgement of the inventor's contribution. Ironically, it is the simple, direct format of the author certificate that facilitated Altschuller's research into the inventive process... During the formulation of TRIZ, Altshuller and colleagues reviewed tens of thousands of author's certificates and patents.
In 1946, Altshuller decided that he must create a new science for the theory of invention... author certificates... included a cover sheet, a one-page sketch and a short invention description. This simple format made it easy to identify underlying patterns of the inventive process... Altshuller identified patterns frequently used in the more innovative patents.
... These patterns identified in the development of a design contain two major components: regularities in design evolution, and principles used in innovative solutions. Altshuller's observations led to an additional breakthrough; since the evolution of engineering design was a process governed by definable laws, it could be taught... a revolution in the field of inventive problem solving had begun.
... Altshuller and his boyhood friend, Raphael Shapiro... in a 1948 letter to Stalin... criticized the inventive process used throughout the nation and offered some measures to improve the methodology. Their proposed improvements were an embroyonic form of TRIZ. Unfortunately, their patriotism and valuable ideas were not rewarded. Altshuller and Shapiro were charged with "inventing with the purpose to do harm to the country." After a year of interrogation and torture, they were sentenced to 25 years in a prison camp above the Arctic Circle.
What would have been a hellish existence for most people became a time of significant intellectual growth and productivity for Altshuller. The prison camp contained dozens of professors, eminent scientists, musicians, and artists, all of whom were jailed during Stalin's great Purges. As a result, Altschuller's education continued. Because fellow prisoners were happy to have someone who was eager to learn and listen for hours, the prison camp became Altshuller's private university. The worst punishment for Altshuller was the prohibition on writing. A prisoner could be beaten cruelly and placed in a cell if he were found in possession of a notebook. Despite this considerable obstacle, Altshuller continued to develop the science of innovation.
Stalin died in 1953, and Altshuller and Shapiro were released one year later... publishing their first article on principles of their theory in a 1956 issue of a scientific magazine... Under the pseudonymn Altov, Altshuller wrote science fiction stories to earn his living. But here again he found an application for TRIZ in the creation of many of the ideas for his futuristic devices and creatures.
... During the 1970s, translations of Altshuller's books and articles circulated in Germany and Poland, eventually reaching Japan, the U.S.A. and other Western countries... Only two of Altshuller's books have been translated into English... key findings are explained in these books, which reflect his study of over 200,000 patents, focusing on 40,000 identified as containined the most innovative design solutions.
Traditional problem solving builds on past experiences... What if we have never encountered a problem analagous to the one we face? This obvious question reveals the shortcomings of our standard approach to inventive problems. A table of conflicts (Contradiction Table, Appendix D) between 39 design parameters (Table 1) answers this question of how we can face an unfamiliar conflict by offering 1201 generic problems that were solved using at least one of 40 generic principles (Appendix C and Table 2).
That's probably enough fair-usage citation of Terninko's book. Online, you can surf the contradiction table of principles/problems.
There are many caveats, but you can use 90% of the functionality of the Compaq RIB Lights-Out Edition boards on a non-Compaq server, e.g. I have one running in an ECS K7S5A. You have to modify the standard power switch cable to connect to the ATX reset pins. Be careful with the reset pin wiring, I fried a RIB (little puff of blue smoke) before getting it right. The Compaq board just replaces your video card, so disable any onboard video.
Caveats:
Virtual floppy didn't work for me, maybe more luck with other motherboards
RIB uses a lot of power, need the external power supply
Machine will hang if the Java console is active whenever the video mode changes. This means (a) during reboot, (b) change from BIOS screen to LILO, (c) change from LILO prompt to kernel messages.
Other motherboards may exhibit different or no issues with video mode changes. Once you identify the timing of video mode changes on your machine, just make sure the console isn't active at the instant of a change. For selecting kernels at LILO prompt, enter your command, press Enter and immediately hit the back button on the browser. That will disconnect the console session fast enough to let the LILO video-mode change occur without hanging the machine.
The video mode change after the LILO command prompt is the most inconvenient. Same problem exists with GRUB. Spent some time looking for the offending code in GRUB, but gave up after I figured out how to hit the back button fast enough. A LILO/GRUB hacker may be able to fix this in software.
Sounds worse than it is. You pick up the timing after a few tries. Worst case, just hit poweroff button (wired to ATX mobo reset) in the browser and try again. Once it works, as others have pointed out, it's a lifesaver. Subject to timing workarounds, you can access bios settings, LILO prompt and console with remote ethernet KV (and probably M, but I didn't need it).
If someone wants to risk a shiny RIB to repeat this with a non-Compaq mobo, I'll dig up my wiring diagram for the reset pins. Caveat hacker, etc.
> In the end, you would need to expose SSH, SSL > IMAP, SSL Apache, and CIPE servers. I am midway > through this deployment myself, but it has > stalled a bit because one of primary Internet > access points started disallowing outgoing SSH.
> Sounds just a little like the ol' recording industry debate, doesn't it?
And how. Days before PayPal's IPO, CertCo filed a patent lawsuit:
Observers were a bit flummoxed by the timing of CertCo's suit. It would seem that the company could get substantially more cash out of PayPal once PayPal had substanially more cash -- that is, after the company's IPO. But the suit has definitely put the kibosh on PayPal's stock offering, at least for the moment.
The suit delayed the IPO by a few days and dampened the IPO, but not substantially. Even by patent-mining standards, the timing of the lawsuit was strange. Who runs CertCo? Deutsche Bank AG and Bank One are both investors and directors. Chairman and CEO:
As senior vice president e-commerce at Chase Manhattan Bank, June headed up wholesale e-commerce initiatives for one of Chase's largest business sectors and led investment activities on a number of strategic e-commerce investments. June played an instrumental role in creating Spectrum, a for-profit joint venture between Wells Fargo, First Union and Chase focused on electronic bill payment and presentment (EBPP).
Unfortunately for the banks, the CertCo lawsuit did not derail PayPal's IPO. Next, they complained that PayPal was operating an illegal banking service, beginning with the fine state of Louisiana.
As a result, the FDIC (federal regulators) began investigating whether PayPal "was a bank". Their investigation concluded that "PayPal is not a bank", since:
PayPal began depositing customer balances into FDIC-insured bank accounts. The company had asked for an opinion from the FDIC on whether it could pass the insurance protection on to its customers. In its advisory letter, the FDIC said the insurance protections--up to $100,000 per customer per bank--would extend to PayPal customers, even when PayPal deposited the funds for them, PayPal said.
Score: Banks: 0, PayPal: 2
This brings us to attempt #3, the bank option of last resort: private regulation: impose costs on *their own customers* to achieve what could not be achieved through (a) free-market competition, (b) patent extortion, (c) federal regulation.
The case is currently stalled (01/18/02) pending appeal. Although the case is mostly about opening debit cards to Amex/Discover (instigated by Amex lobbyists?), the findings of fact and examples are relevant to the current discussion.
Having failed to compete with PayPal in the marketplace, the banks are resorting to regulation
Citibank is the largest issuer of credit cards, with 20% voting rights in
MasterCard and 10% in Visa. Wells Fargo (Billpoint), Bank One
(eMoneyMail) & Bank of America (Checkfree) have each exited their
respective P2P payment service. The remaining bank-owned service,
Citibank c2it, has a grand total of 350,000 customers to PayPal's 13
million members, even after spending a rumored $100 million for
exclusivity on AOL in Aug 2000.
A recent Hyperion whitepaper on identity management claims 20% of
credit-card fraud is due to fraudulent _merchants_ and only 2% is due to
credit-card theft by non-merchants. Aggregators like PayPal protect an
individual user from having to give their credit card number to a large
number of smaller merchants.
A free-market solution would compute risk profiles for aggregators, based
on their customer screening policy. Higher risk would mean higher rates,
providing impetus for better screening. Aggregators are a valuable
extension of the existing banking system, having greatly increased the
number of nodes in the online network (13 million for PayPal alone).
As David P. Reed points out, the value created by Group Forming Networks
(GFN) is exponential (he cites eBay as the prime example). It's not just
the number of nodes in PayPal's network - it's the fact that repeat
transactions are clustered around PowerSellers, effectively a "Group" in
the PayPal GFN.
The density of these clusters exists nowhere but PayPal. In other
networks (MasterCard, Visa, eBay), the PayPal transactions are lost in a
sea of unrelated transactions. Unique economic value that has been
created by PayPal would be lost (by *all network participants*) if these
transactions were forced onto a less-dense payment network.
Visit Mondex. What do you see in the upper left corner?
MasterCard International, because Mastercard owns a controlling 51%.
Mondex provides technology for e-cash via smart cards, pioneered in
Europe. Citibank and Mastercard intend to own electronic payment online,
but Mondex did not forecast the US emergence of PayPal prior to smart
cards.
PayPal now processes payments for more than one-fourth of all eBay
auctions. In 2001, they cleared more than $3 billion in payments. They
process more than 200,000 transactions daily. Although PayPal remains a
fraud target, they are the micropayment solution of choice for small
business, online service providers & many web communities.
The proposed rule by MasterCard would take effect on May 1st, so there are
30 days for MasterCard customers to comment on the proposed change.
No surprise that frameworks designed for the same market provide similar interfaces. J2EE and CLR compete for infrastructure ubiquity, so their goal is to be portable and invisible. The interesting work takes place at the layer below (operating system VM) and layer above (application-specific libraries).
The layer below will be done by Sun, Microsoft and assorted platform vendors. Over time, the VM's will be optimized up to platform limits. But the application layer will remain wide open for innovative, industry-specific libraries.
Vigorous competition will take place among Visual Basic and Java/J2EE components (ported to their web-services equivalent). To speculate on the topology of that landscape, one could interview domain experts (e.g. telecom, bioinformatics, finance, geodata, defence) about their investment in application toolkits.
A question worth asking -- at what stage of its
evolution will the Apache API gain "language" status?
... reconfigurable computers are uniquely fault-tolerant. If part of the hardware goes down, the remaining circuitry functions without it - a point Star Bridge has illustrated by shooting a hole in a circuit board and demonstrating that the computer continues to function without a glitch.
...
There are those who already believe in the inevitability of hypercomputing dominance. "This is eventually going to change the way everything happens in the computing world," said Ed Bradley, a senior engineer in the munitions branch for the Air Force Research Laboratory at Florida's Eglin Air Force Base. "In the not too distant future, people will be tearing down Bill Gates statues and replacing them with statues of Kent Gilson."
AirClic partners include Motorola, Symbol & Ericsson. A keyfob scanner, the $50 AirClicker will be available soon. Former Amex execs are chairman and CEO of AirClic. Their Scanlets are being "leased", a la domain names. High-level diagram of their tech architecture references a "switching core", probably from their acquisition of Stockholm-based Connect Things, a 1999 Ericsson spinoff.
Slashdot Mirror
Some experienced sysadmins do not endorse SPEWS' wholesale blacklisting of entire netblock neighborhoods. Those admins choose not to use SPEWS RBL, but may choose to use RBLs that cause less collateral damage. Some experienced sysadmins use SPEWS RBL because they do endorse SPEWS' clearly documented process which bears many similarities to economic extortion.
Many inexperienced sysadmins use osirusoft (e.g via SpamAssassin) without knowing the difference between SPEWS and other RBLs aggregated by osirusoft. Without knowing that difference, these inexperienced sysadmins unknowingly endorse SPEWS' clearly documented process which bears many similarities to economic extortion.
One answer is a SPEWS whitelist + reciprocal blacklisting. Create a whitelist of SPEWS-blacklisted-but-collateral-damage IPs which have *never* been accused by SPEWS (or other RBL) of spamming. When an ISP causes collateral damage by enforcing the SPEWS RBL against a presumed-guilty-but-never-accused IP that exists in the SPEWS whitelist, ask the individual sysadmin to use the SPEWS-collateral-damage whitelist.
If an individual sysadmin uses the SPEWS RBL but chooses not to use the SPEWS-collateral-damage whitelist, they would be endorsing SPEWS clearly documented process which bears many similarities to economic extortion. Such explicit endorsement will earn such individual sysadmins membership in an IP blacklist of "sysadmins who support SPEWS' clearly documented process which bears many similarities to economic extortion". This blacklist would then be enforced by sysadmins whose IPs are SPEWS-blacklisted-without-spam-accusation .
This unbundling mechanism provides a technical means for individual sysadmins to endorse SPEWS valuable spam-fighting contributions without endorsing SPEWS' clearly documented process which bears many similarities to economic extortion.
Long-term, the solution is pseudonymnous, non-profit TLS certificates for SMTP servers with social (not economic or calendar) seniority (c.f. Apache Incubator). The economic variety exists at bondedsender.org, along with whitelist patches for popular open-source MTAs.
Two more for that list:
3. Quick-paste crumb trail (Win freeware)
4. Social web cockpit (commercial R&D)
In the superb 1985 book Programmers at Work, Simonyi talks about the loved and hated Hungarian naming convention, programming and meeting other famous programmers:
- "
...the guys at Apple, like Bill Atkinson [one of the Lisa programmers who later developed the MacPaint program for the Apple Macintosh computer] -- I think Atkinson is the greatest--and Bill Budge [who programmed Pinball Construction Set for Electronic Arts]. These guys are all great.
Kiczales is the founder of aspect-oriented programming.We don't have much to talk about. We feel good vibes and exchange three or four words. I know that if one of these guys opens his mouth, he knows what he is talking about. So when he does open his mouth and he does know what he is talking about, it's not a great shock. And since I tend to know what I am talking about, too, I would probably say the same thing, so why bother talking, really? It's like the joke tellers' convention where people sit around and they don't even have to tell a joke. They just say the joke number and everybody laughs. It would be great to be able to work with all these guys, but we are business competitors. I think we could do incredible stuff together. Maybe the Martians will invade and we will have to do a Manhattan project in computers. We would all be shipped to New Mexico. Who knows?"
Czarnecki's 2000 book Generative Programming reviews work from both Simonyi and Kiczales on "intentional programming". Read the sample chapter to find out what Intentional Software (Manhattan Project of computing?) may be subsetting-for-future-supersetting. The subjet is domain-specific developent.
Review table-oriented programming for historical context. Then learn about TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving), a heuristic methodology created by Russian Genrich Altschuller. From Terninko's 1998 Systematic Innovation:
-
".. A patent was rarely given, so most inventors applied for an author's certificate. The Soviet government owned the intellectual property that the author's certificate documented, so the certificate was merely an acknowledgement of the inventor's contribution. Ironically, it is the simple, direct format of the author certificate that facilitated Altschuller's research into the inventive process
... During the formulation of TRIZ, Altshuller and colleagues reviewed tens of thousands of author's certificates and patents.
... author certificates ... included a cover sheet, a one-page sketch and a short invention description. This simple format made it easy to identify underlying patterns of the inventive process ... Altshuller identified patterns frequently used in the more innovative patents.
... a revolution in the field of inventive problem solving had begun.
... Altshuller and his boyhood friend, Raphael Shapiro ... in a 1948 letter to Stalin ... criticized the inventive process used throughout the nation and offered some measures to improve the methodology. Their proposed improvements were an embroyonic form of TRIZ. Unfortunately, their patriotism and valuable ideas were not rewarded. Altshuller and Shapiro were charged with "inventing with the purpose to do harm to the country." After a year of interrogation and torture, they were sentenced to 25 years in a prison camp above the Arctic Circle.
... publishing their first article on principles of their theory in a 1956 issue of a scientific magazine ... Under the pseudonymn Altov, Altshuller wrote science fiction stories to earn his living. But here again he found an application for TRIZ in the creation of many of the ideas for his futuristic devices and creatures.
... Only two of Altshuller's books have been translated into English ... key findings are explained in these books, which reflect his study of over 200,000 patents, focusing on 40,000 identified as containined the most innovative design solutions.
... What if we have never encountered a problem analagous to the one we face? This obvious question reveals the shortcomings of our standard approach to inventive problems. A table of conflicts (Contradiction Table, Appendix D) between 39 design parameters (Table 1) answers this question of how we can face an unfamiliar conflict by offering 1201 generic problems that were solved using at least one of 40 generic principles (Appendix C and Table 2).
That's probably enough fair-usage citation of Terninko's book. Online, you can surf the contradiction table of principles/problems.In 1946, Altshuller decided that he must create a new science for the theory of invention
... These patterns identified in the development of a design contain two major components: regularities in design evolution, and principles used in innovative solutions. Altshuller's observations led to an additional breakthrough; since the evolution of engineering design was a process governed by definable laws, it could be taught
What would have been a hellish existence for most people became a time of significant intellectual growth and productivity for Altshuller. The prison camp contained dozens of professors, eminent scientists, musicians, and artists, all of whom were jailed during Stalin's great Purges. As a result, Altschuller's education continued. Because fellow prisoners were happy to have someone who was eager to learn and listen for hours, the prison camp became Altshuller's private university. The worst punishment for Altshuller was the prohibition on writing. A prisoner could be beaten cruelly and placed in a cell if he were found in possession of a notebook. Despite this considerable obstacle, Altshuller continued to develop the science of innovation.
Stalin died in 1953, and Altshuller and Shapiro were released one year later
... During the 1970s, translations of Altshuller's books and articles circulated in Germany and Poland, eventually reaching Japan, the U.S.A. and other Western countries
Traditional problem solving builds on past experiences
TRIZ Applications:
- elementary school using TRIZ
- weapons technology, Kowalick
- Cringely on Kowalick updating TRIZ for GM and NASA
- more refs
Rich--
bay area colo w/remote console and reboot
open-source java
Caveats:
- Virtual floppy didn't work for me, maybe more luck with other motherboards
- RIB uses a lot of power, need the external power supply
- Machine will hang if the Java console is active whenever the video mode changes. This means (a) during reboot, (b) change from BIOS screen to LILO, (c) change from LILO prompt to kernel messages.
Other motherboards may exhibit different or no issues with video mode changes. Once you identify the timing of video mode changes on your machine, just make sure the console isn't active at the instant of a change. For selecting kernels at LILO prompt, enter your command, press Enter and immediately hit the back button on the browser. That will disconnect the console session fast enough to let the LILO video-mode change occur without hanging the machine.The video mode change after the LILO command prompt is the most inconvenient. Same problem exists with GRUB. Spent some time looking for the offending code in GRUB, but gave up after I figured out how to hit the back button fast enough. A LILO/GRUB hacker may be able to fix this in software.
Sounds worse than it is. You pick up the timing after a few tries. Worst case, just hit poweroff button (wired to ATX mobo reset) in the browser and try again. Once it works, as others have pointed out, it's a lifesaver. Subject to timing workarounds, you can access bios settings, LILO prompt and console with remote ethernet KV (and probably M, but I didn't need it).
If someone wants to risk a shiny RIB to repeat this with a non-Compaq mobo, I'll dig up my wiring diagram for the reset pins. Caveat hacker, etc.
Rich
--
SF Bay Area Colocation
- CERN management fabric, Jan 2001
- VA cluster manager for Intel boards with EMP
- Serial-to-network proxy
- Serial console howto
- Assorted switching gear
Rich--
SF Bay Area Colocation
> In the end, you would need to expose SSH, SSL
> IMAP, SSL Apache, and CIPE servers. I am midway
> through this deployment myself, but it has
> stalled a bit because one of primary Internet
> access points started disallowing outgoing SSH.
Which access point? Consumer or commercial?
Can you use alternate port numbers?
Rich
And how. Days before PayPal's IPO, CertCo filed a patent lawsuit: The suit delayed the IPO by a few days and dampened the IPO, but not substantially. Even by patent-mining standards, the timing of the lawsuit was strange. Who runs CertCo? Deutsche Bank AG and Bank One are both investors and directors. Chairman and CEO:
Unfortunately for the banks, the CertCo lawsuit did not derail PayPal's IPO. Next, they complained that PayPal was operating an illegal banking service, beginning with the fine state of Louisiana. As a result, the FDIC (federal regulators) began investigating whether PayPal "was a bank". Their investigation concluded that "PayPal is not a bank", since: Score: Banks: 0, PayPal: 2
This brings us to attempt #3, the bank option of last resort: private regulation: impose costs on *their own customers* to achieve what could not be achieved through (a) free-market competition, (b) patent extortion, (c) federal regulation.
This is not new. The US Dept. of Justice has prosecuted and partially won (10/09/01) an antitrust suit against both Visa and Mastercard, whose largest controllers are Citibank and Chase Manhattan. More context and history.
The case is currently stalled (01/18/02) pending appeal. Although the case is mostly about opening debit cards to Amex/Discover (instigated by Amex lobbyists?), the findings of fact and examples are relevant to the current discussion.
Having failed to compete with PayPal in the marketplace, the banks are resorting to regulation
Citibank is the largest issuer of credit cards, with 20% voting rights in MasterCard and 10% in Visa. Wells Fargo (Billpoint), Bank One (eMoneyMail) & Bank of America (Checkfree) have each exited their respective P2P payment service. The remaining bank-owned service, Citibank c2it, has a grand total of 350,000 customers to PayPal's 13 million members, even after spending a rumored $100 million for exclusivity on AOL in Aug 2000.
A recent Hyperion whitepaper on identity management claims 20% of credit-card fraud is due to fraudulent _merchants_ and only 2% is due to credit-card theft by non-merchants. Aggregators like PayPal protect an individual user from having to give their credit card number to a large number of smaller merchants.
A free-market solution would compute risk profiles for aggregators, based on their customer screening policy. Higher risk would mean higher rates, providing impetus for better screening. Aggregators are a valuable extension of the existing banking system, having greatly increased the number of nodes in the online network (13 million for PayPal alone).
As David P. Reed points out, the value created by Group Forming Networks (GFN) is exponential (he cites eBay as the prime example). It's not just the number of nodes in PayPal's network - it's the fact that repeat transactions are clustered around PowerSellers, effectively a "Group" in the PayPal GFN.
The density of these clusters exists nowhere but PayPal. In other networks (MasterCard, Visa, eBay), the PayPal transactions are lost in a sea of unrelated transactions. Unique economic value that has been created by PayPal would be lost (by *all network participants*) if these transactions were forced onto a less-dense payment network.
Visit Mondex. What do you see in the upper left corner? MasterCard International, because Mastercard owns a controlling 51%. Mondex provides technology for e-cash via smart cards, pioneered in Europe. Citibank and Mastercard intend to own electronic payment online, but Mondex did not forecast the US emergence of PayPal prior to smart cards.
PayPal now processes payments for more than one-fourth of all eBay auctions. In 2001, they cleared more than $3 billion in payments. They process more than 200,000 transactions daily. Although PayPal remains a fraud target, they are the micropayment solution of choice for small business, online service providers & many web communities.
The proposed rule by MasterCard would take effect on May 1st, so there are 30 days for MasterCard customers to comment on the proposed change.
Lots more OSS Java code & news.
More coverage at open-source java news.
Rich
Details in IEEE Computer March 2002, preprint here.
Working demo of 6000 sites related to 9-11-01.
Rich
No surprise that frameworks designed for the same market provide similar interfaces. J2EE and CLR compete for infrastructure ubiquity, so their goal is to be portable and invisible. The interesting work takes place at the layer below (operating system VM) and layer above (application-specific libraries).
The layer below will be done by Sun, Microsoft and assorted platform vendors. Over time, the VM's will be optimized up to platform limits. But the application layer will remain wide open for innovative, industry-specific libraries.
Vigorous competition will take place among Visual Basic and Java/J2EE components (ported to their web-services equivalent). To speculate on the topology of that landscape, one could interview domain experts (e.g. telecom, bioinformatics, finance, geodata, defence) about their investment in application toolkits.
A question worth asking -- at what stage of its evolution will the Apache API gain "language" status?
Don't miss the Feb 2002 article on the MIT Lightweight Languages Workshop.
Rich
More open-source Java projects at javaindex.org.
Rich
From pro-StarBridge (PDF) article:
... reconfigurable computers are uniquely fault-tolerant. If part of the hardware goes down, the remaining circuitry functions without it - a point Star Bridge has illustrated by shooting a hole in a circuit board and demonstrating that the computer continues to function without a glitch.
...
There are those who already believe in the inevitability of hypercomputing dominance. "This is eventually going to change the way everything happens in the computing world," said Ed Bradley, a senior engineer in the munitions branch for the Air Force Research Laboratory at Florida's Eglin Air Force Base. "In the not too distant future, people will be tearing down Bill Gates statues and replacing them with statues of Kent Gilson."
:-)
Rich
AirClic partners include Motorola, Symbol & Ericsson. A keyfob scanner, the $50 AirClicker will be available soon. Former Amex execs are chairman and CEO of AirClic. Their Scanlets are being "leased", a la domain names. High-level diagram of their tech architecture references a "switching core", probably from their acquisition of Stockholm-based Connect Things, a 1999 Ericsson spinoff.
Think DNS root server for barcode-to-URL mapping.
Rich