Author: Steve

We need a distributed social networking protocol…Could Opera Unite be a key?

 

(Written July 2007)

The digital dark ages is already a reality for a lot of people who grew up with hosted e-mail services like Compuserve and AOL. A lot of those users had no choice but to accept the loss of all their received and sent e-mail when they unsubscribed, the service went under, or their account was deleted from inactivity. Mark Pilgrim wrote about the challenge of long-term data preservation without open formats and source code:

Data readable by only one application is a big risk factor, because the application won’t be around forever. If that application only runs on one operating system, that’s even worse, because the operating system won’t be around forever either. If that operating system only runs on one hardware platform, that’s even worse still. No hardware lasts forever, and you may eventually need to resort to emulating the hardware in software. Emulation is the ultimate fallback. But if any or all of those layers are closed, emulation may be costly or even impossible. And if any of the layers are DRM-encumbered, emulating them may be illegal.

Most social network users don’t keep a copy of their data in any format, so how can we expect to preserve it? Will MySpace be around for 5 years? 20 years? People have already declared Friendster dead; all your testimonials and contacts of old friends could be gone any month now.

The next killer social networking application shouldn’t be another Friendster or MySpace, but rather an open standard allowing us to create and manage our own social data. And it is “our” data. Points of contact with old friends we’ve managed to track down, new friends made from shared interests, anecdotes and testimonials we’ve written for friends and loved ones, snapshots of our interests and personalities. Only by keeping this information in an open format, available for us to backup, can we expect for it to survive.

Let’s say that MySpace suddenly had an export feature. How much would it need to include to be meaningful in 50 years? Obviously you’d want your profile, pics, videos, and blog posts; your inbox and sent mail; probably comments you’ve made on friends’ profiles and blog posts. How much of your friends’ data would you want?

October 2009: We’re still not there. Google Wave will vastly improve the situation (at least having a permanent record for IM), but the real goal here is something trivially easy to install, letting users host their own personal and networking data. Big web providers could still carve out a business by caching copies of user data (to save bandwidth, or for backup) and concentrating on indexing, searching, and providing apps like those for Facebook.

When Opera released Unite (basically a webserver in the browser), I wasn’t sure what they’d get out of it, or what the use case was, but actually this the perfect platform on which to build a distributed social network app. The default storage location of all your data would be on your computer, easily backed up at any time.

Next best thing: SocialSafe, a Facebook backup tool. For three bucks you could be able to show your kids how their parents met, and what they were like then.

Smallest valid HTML documents

 

HTML4

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<title></title>
<p>

HTML5

<!DOCTYPE html>

Smallest “useful” HTML5 document

<!DOCTYPE html>
<link rel=stylesheet href=site.css>
<script src=site.js></script>
<title>Page Title</title>
<h1>Heading</h1>
<p>Content...

Check em if you want. To avoid problems in IE you might want an opening body tag, but you don’t need a closing one!

Thoughts on The Wire Season One

 

(From January 7)

Over the break Kathleen and I watched a bunch of movies, but season 1 of The Wire delivered beyond the hype it got from friends. It gives a crash course on the frustration and futility of local cops fighting drug gangs on the street level in West Baltimore. The police jump through major hoops to get an idea of the shape of the organization, and use civilians who risk their lives informing on the gangs, but there’s zero day to day effort made to actually keep drugs out of the hands of people.

The police would do more good just walking up and slapping drugs out of the hands of dealers directly all day. What you have instead is the slow methodical building of cases designed to put away upper level gang members. This takes a lot of time, and in the meantime people suffer from addiction and the added pressure applied to the gangs results in increased violence. In the end a few people designated to take the fall (or with the least information to barter with) get sent away, and the addicts remain potential customers, ensuring the business continues to attract new members. Continue reading  

Questions for Economists

 

(First of the series “Getting rid of all these draft posts”)

Should we really go back to the Gold Standard?

I gather only Austrian school (Mises, Hayek, et al.) economists really think a return to “sound” money would be possible or beneficial to the economy, and most prominent economists think it would be disastrous. Has anyone even written a practical implementation plan of how this could occur, (and what might go wrong)?

The Mises followers also seem to be infatuated with the harms of inflation inherent with fiat currency. Sean Malone produced a graphic of the rise and fall of the value of the U.S. dollar, which included this nice piece of trickery:

Now try to imagine what your life might be like if every dollar had bought you 20 times as much stuff… This is the cost of inflation.

This does not demonstrate the “cost of inflation”. To imagine a dollar buying 20 times as much stuff, you also have to imagine wages being 1/20th of what they are now. My guess is this was an honest mistake on Sean’s part, but the Mises folks seem to find it immoral to not tie consumer prices to some arbitrary dollar amount over time.

Who does slow, gradual inflation harm in the modern world? I’d guess the primary victims would be people who save large amounts of cash over many years earning no interest. Does anyone do this? So, yes, if you earned all your income before 1915 and stashed it all under your bed, then, yes, inflation has cost  you 95% of your wealth, but if you did nearly anything else with it, much of that value would remain and might have even multiplied. Actually the rarity of your currency might even make up for the loss.

The arguments for slow, steady inflation I find pretty compelling, particularly the stickiness of wages. Since employers and employees generally despise even tiny wage reductions, creeping inflation allows us to lower real wages when they really need to be; if the real value of a worker’s output goes down, not offering a raise is much more palatable for everyone than cutting his wage (even slightly) or, at some point having to fire him. Regular cost-of-living “raises” become required to keep real wages flat, but I don’t see big harm in that; it might even boost morale and real productivity.

Is a systemic collapse due to Fractional Reserve Banking possible?

Rothbard rightly points out that a massive run on the banks could lead to disastrous hyperinflation, but is this occurrence likely? My guess is that, in any scenario including a nationwide bank run, value of the dollar is likely to be the least of our worries.

Wouldn’t economic growth be stifled under full reserve banking?

Maybe I’ll find some of these answers in The Making of Modern Economics, which appears to cover all the major players including Hayek and Mises.

Skateboarding and the (Fake) Broken Windows Theory

 

Nike’s latest glossy skate video “Debacle” is stitched around several highly-realistic, faked acts of vandalism and assault, but none shocking if you’ve watched a lot of skate videos; I just assumed they were real until the disclaimer appeared at the end. I’ve seen pros show off how they cut chains to break into schools; accidentally break real windows and flee; verbally assault owners and security guards; scream obscenities and throw things in fits of rage; accidentally hit bystanders (hard) with 8 lb. boards or their bodies; and generally behave like drunken delinquents.

Along with fearlessness (healthy to a point), disregard for authority and the care for other peoples’ property is baked into the pop culture, and, although probably a very small percentage of skaters make any trouble, those that do make a real problem for cops trying to keep areas free of gangs of boys who want to emulate the pros in acts and attitude. Any criminologist will tell you the perfect recipe for crime is an unsupervised group of young males predisposed to rule-breaking.

So, unfortunately, incidents like this are common. On camera a cop threatens to brake the arm of a generally compliant but obviously tired kid. This is, of course, after the kid calmly calls the LEO a “fuckin’ dick” (twice) and several minutes after the group filming had apparently damaged city property (“It’s against the law to pry those up — you’re not a city worker”) and ticked off folks enough to call the police.

I love skateboarding and it’s a real shame it’s now apparently criminal in San Francisco (a classic collection of skate spots), but I understand why cops and property owners support these bans. It’s hard to vilify officers who’re asked to bust up active skate spots. The business owner that allows her property to become a regular spot is just waiting for damage, graffiti, reduced foot traffic from weary pedestrians, and potential litigation from parents/bystanders.

MTV star Rob Dyrdek has worked quite a bit to design and promote public skate parks, which are great for the vast majority of respectful skaters, but previews of his upcoming movie Street Dreams look like it will try to convince the public that skaters who insult business owners to their faces, make trouble in motels, and sand skate stoppers off school handrails are unfairly oppressed and just need their own parks. It will only “tell the story” of a minority of skaters and it won’t do the rest any favors.

Kleiman on Crime and Punishment

 

Remind your fiscally conservative politician that all these have severe public costs:

  • Crime
  • Prison cells
  • Disease spread in overcrowded prisons
  • Reduced number of working citizens
  • Broken families and lack of role models
  • Public fear of victimization

Evidence shows we can have a criminal justice system that actually convinces most criminals to give up crime while handing out far shorter and fewer jail and prison sentences, and without spending more money. Mark Kleiman’s new book shows how it can be done, and here’s to hoping smart-on-crime may someday overtake the dumb tough-on-crime rhetoric that got us into this terrible mess.

I highly recommend watching Mark’s recent talk on the subject. Here’s a summary:

Since the 1960s, the U.S. prison population has increased fivefold. Prisons today hold one inmate for every one hundred adults — a record rate in American history, and one unmatched by any other country. But despite the high prison population, crime has stopped falling. Punishments can seem random in their severity and implementation, minorities and the poor still disproportionately become victims and inmates, and enforcement — particularly of probation and parole — is haphazard. How can crime be controlled? UCLA Public Policy professor Mark Kleiman, author of When Brute Force Fails, visits Zócalo to offer a new strategy for cutting crime, reducing the prison population, and still enacting swift, certain, and fair punishment. [video]

Chrome Frame

 

The idea of a plugin that replaces one browser’s rendering engine with another’s has been floating around for years.

Google is going to give this crazy idea a shot with Chrome Frame. The idea is that an IE6+ user gets bugged that a site requires the Chrome Frame plugin. After she installs it, web pages can request that they be rendered by Chrome’s advanced layout and Javascript engines (enabling canvas, SVG, CSS animations and lots of other HTML5 goodies).

In the short run this could be a support nightmare for Microsoft and IT departments until the plugin is stable. Supposedly Google won’t take over the network stack nor any of the browser chrome (!), so it’ll just feel a little strange. On some pages right-clicking items may bring up different menus (Google will probably want to normalize this) and, notably, a few of IE8’s fancy new context-menu features won’t be available. Javascript guru Alex Russell is on the project so I have some faith that the integration will make sense.

This is the ultimate F.U. from Google to Microsoft. “We’re chewing away at Office, Windows in general, and now we’ll decide when IE gets new features.” Of course it’s also a shot over the bow of other browsers; lag behind Chrome feature-wise at your own risk.

Will this take off? There are, of course, hordes of IE users who can’t install plugins, and some who won’t, but web developers will be pushing this hard.

Javascript files don’t auto-update

 

On a panel of 4 Javascript library developers at Ajax Experience 2008, a question came up about how their libraries use browser detection. When John Resig suggested that libraries should strive for full feature detection (hardly used at all at the time) instead of browser/object detection, the other developers reacted like he was crazy. They mentioned the cases where this just isn’t possible, but none of the developers mentioned the huge, very good reason to do this whenever possible: There are pages using libraries deployed everyday that never get maintained. Yes, when a new browser changes behavior the libraries can quickly update their codebase, but many pages will never get those updates.

Note, there are autoloaders that may maintain the latest library version, but this doesn’t guarantee a stable library API over time. Feature detection (mostly) does.

Morning Edition is not the O’Reilly Factor

 

NPR Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep is often an excellent interviewer, but his behavior in this “interview” with Republican chairman Michael Steele was awful (and many commenters seem to agree). This morning I only heard the last 30 seconds or so and it was painful. I tried to listen again and could only stand a minute or so.

Yes Steele’s op-ed is ridiculous — “trust Republicans to defend Medicare!”, even NRO bloggers label it pandering — but Inskeep is clearly too close to this issue to conduct the interview respectfully. If Steele said contradictory/false statements, I was completely distracted by Inskeep’s badgering.

NPR needs an editor who’s willing to cut segments like this, not feature them on the home page!

Update: After listening again, what bothered me as much as Inskeep’s tone was his questions. He seemed to have an agenda to box in Steele as an anti-government ideologue (he is, but this isn’t particularly enlightening) and make the point that, since Steele agrees that Medicare is useful, that his opposition to another government plan is illegitimate. Much of the interview seemed like a jab at air.

Why Our Government Shouldn’t Kill

 

From a comment on a Radley Balko post about Troy Davis:

…the state can’t be trusted to sort the innocent from the guilty with the 100% accuracy necessary for executions to be morally defensible, even if death is a theoretically just punishment…

From what I read everyday it’s abundantly clear that this is true. The criminal justice system has corrupt prosecutors and judges, drastically inadequate public defender resources, corrupt forensic scientists, and plenty of bogus testimony and pseudoscience sold to juries as proof. The latest news could change everything: DNA evidence might be forgeable. If this can be done, a corrupt law enforcement individual will mostly certainly manufacture DNA evidence in the future.

From the ACLU’s Death Penalty Q&A:

Since 1973, 123 people in 25 states have been released from death row because they were not guilty. In addition, seven people have been executed even though they were probably innocent. A study published in the Stanford Law Review documents 350 capital convictions in this century, in which it was later proven that the convict had not committed the crime. Of those, 25 convicts were executed while others spent decades of their lives in prison. Fifty-five of the 350 cases took place in the 1970s, and another 20 of them between 1980 and 1985.

…Who gets the death penalty is largely determined, not by the severity of the crime, but by: the race, sex, and economic class of the prisoner and victim; geography — some states have the death penalty, others do not, within the states that do some counties employ it with great frequency and others do not; the quality of defense counsel and vagaries in the legal process.

…Poor people are also far more likely to be death sentenced than those who can afford the high costs of private investigators, psychiatrists, and expert criminal lawyers. Indeed, capital punishment is “a privilege of the poor,” said Clinton Duffy, former warden at California’s San Quentin Prison. Some observers have pointed out that the term “capital punishment” is ironic because “only those without capital get the punishment.”

…study after study has found serious racial disparities in the charging, sentencing and imposition of the death penalty. People who kill whites are far more likely to receive a death sentence than those whose victims were not white, and blacks who kill whites have the greatest chance of receiving a death sentence. … Minorities are death-sentenced disproportionate to their numbers in the population. This is not primarily because minorities commit more murders, but because they are more often sentenced to death when they do.

Setting aside all moral and emotional arguments, by using the few cases where there is indisputable proof of guilt to justify capital punishment, we guarantee it will be abused to execute many more innocent persons.