It's over 17 years since I first too a stab at e-Books, and while I was far too early, I must admit I had not predicted I would be that early. The market is now seeing a range of e-Ink based electronic book readers, such as the kindle, and some reasonable adoption. But I don't have one yet. But I do read e-books on my tiny phone screen. Why?
Dave Winer recently made a call for an open source twitter shell, which he suggests be perhaps done with a javascript framework to let any site act like twitter.com. Many people are interested in this sort of suggestion, because while the folks at twitter.com are generally well loved and felt to be good actors, many people fear that no publishing system that becomes important should be controlled by just one company.
For success, such a system would need to be as easy to use and set up as twitter for users, and pretty easy to set up for server operators. One thing it can't do so easily, alas, is use a simple single namespace the way twitter does. A distributed system probably has to make names be domains, like E-mail addresses. That almost surely means something longer than twitter names and no use of the @name syntax popular in Twitter to refer to users. On the other hand almost everybody already has a domain based ID, ie. their E-mail address. On the other hand most people are afraid to use this ID in public where it might get spam. It's a shame, but many might well prefer to get a different ID from their E-mail, or of course to use one at twitter, which would now look like user@twitter.com to the outside world instead of @user within twitter.
Naming problems aside, the denizens of the internet are certainly up to building a publish/subscribe based short message multicasting service, which is what twitter is using terms much older than the company. I might propose the name MSM for the techology (Multicast Short Message)
It was over 5 years ago that I blogged about a robot that would travel in front of a train to spot cars stuck on the tracks in time to stop.
I recently read a local story about an RV that was demolished while stuck on the tracks here. The couple had time to talk to 911, who told them to get out, and it's not clear from the story but it seems like a moderate amount of time may have passed (a couple of minutes) before their RV was smashed.
There are a variety of tools that offer encrypted filesystems for the various OSs. None of them are as easy to use as we would like, and none have reached the goal of "Zero User Interface" (ZUI) that is the only thing which causes successful deployment of encryption (ie. Skype, SSH and SSL.)
Many of these tools have a risk of failure if you don't also encrypt your swap/paging space, because your swap file will contain fragments of memory, including encrypted files and even in some cases decryption keys. There is a lot of other confidential data which can end up in swap -- web banking passwords and just about anything else.
It's not too hard to encrypt your swap on linux, and the ecryptfs tools package includes a tool to set up encrypted swap (which is not done with ecryptfs, but rather with dm-crypt, the block-device encryptor, but it sets it up for you.)
However, I would propose that swap be encrypted by default, even if the user does nothing. When you boot, the system would generate a random key for that session, and use it to encrypt all writes and reads to the swap space. That key of course would never be swapped out, and furthermore, the kernel could even try to move it around in memory to avoid the attacks the EFF recently demonstrated where the RAM of a computer that's been turned off for a short time is still frequently readable. (In the future, computers will probably come with special small blocks of RAM in which to store keys which are guaranteed -- as much as that's possible -- to be wiped in a power failure, and also hard to access.)
The automatic encryption of swap does bring up a couple of issues. First of all, it's not secure with hibernation, where your computer is suspended to disk. Indeed, to make hibernation work, you would have to save the key at the start of the hibernation file. Hibernation would thus eliminate all security on the data -- but this is no worse than the situation today, where all swap is insecure. And many people never hibernate.
Some recent searches have revealed unusual activity on twitter, and I wonder where it's going. Narcissus searches on twitter reveal a variety of accounts tweeting links into my blog and sites, for reasons not clearly apparent.
As digital cameras have developed enough resolution to work as scanners, such as in the scanning table proposal I wrote about earlier, some people are also using them to digitize slides. You can purchase what is called a "slide copier" which is just a simple lens and holder which goes in front of the camera to take pictures of slides. These have existed for a long time as they were used to duplicate slides in film days.
Long ago I described how I want my cell phone to let me command it to play a recording to a caller noting that I have answered but need some time before I can talk, and also how I want the phone to stop ringing once I start fumbling for it. I learned that a few phones do have the former feature in a simple form, and it is something that is within the range of an app in some OSs but not others.
I struck a nerve several years ago when I blogged about the horrible beep-beep noise made by heavy equipment when it backs up. Eventually a British company came up with a solution: a pulsed burst of white noise which is very evident when you are near the backing up vehicle but which disperses quickly so it doesn't travel and annoy people a mile away as the beeps do.
(Update: I had a formatting error in the original posting, this has been fixed.)
A few weeks ago when I wrote about the non deployment of SSL I touched on an old idea I had to make web transactions vastly more efficient. I recently read about Google's proposed SPDY protocol which goes in a completely opposite direction, attempting to solve the problem of large numbers of parallel requests to a web server by multiplexing them all in a single streaming protocol that works inside a TCP session.
While calling attention to that, let me outline what I think would be the fastest way to do very simple web transactions. It may be that such simple transactions are no longer common, but it's worth considering.
Consider a protocol where you want to fetch the contents of a URL like "www.example.com/page.html" and you have not been to that server recently (or ever.) You want only the plain page, you are not yet planning to fetch lots of images and stylesheets and javascript.
Today the way this works is pretty complex:
You may not be familiar with all this, but the main thing to understand is that there are a lot of roundtrips going on. If the servers are far away and the time to transmit is long, it can take a long time for all these round trips.
It gets worse when you want to set up a secure, encrypted connection using TLS/SSL. On top of all the TCP, there are additional handshakes for the encryption. For full security, you must encrypt before you send the GET because the contents of the URL name should be kept encrypted.
Consider a protocol for simple transactions where the DNS server plays a role, and short transactions use UDP. I am going to call this the "Web Transaction Protocol" or WTP. (There is a WAP variant called that but WAP is fading.)
The above transaction would take place incredibly fast compared to the standard approach. If you know the DNS server for example.com, it will usually mean a single packet to that server, and a single packet coming back -- one round trip -- to get your answer. If you only know the server for .com, it would mean a single packet to the .com server which is forwarded to the example.com server for you. Since the master servers tend to be in the "center" of the network and are multiplied out so there is one near you, this is not much more than a single round trip.
A proposal is being floated in Europe for computerized convoys or road trains within the next decade. This is a proposal for a system where cars can hand over control to a lead car and follow in a train or convoy, without physical connection.
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