Four short links: 19 October 2009

YouTube Bandwidth, RFID Visualization, Social Software Arms Race, Google Voice to the Laptop

1. YouTube's Bandwidth Bill is Zero (Wired) -- they buy dark fibre and peer with the major ISPs.
2. Immaterials: The Ghost in the Text (Vimeo) -- visualising RFID fields. See also the blog post about the work by Timo Arnall from Touch and Jack Schulze from BERG.
3. The Commercial Speech Arms Race (Bruce Schneier) -- Whenever you build a security system that relies on detection and identification, you invite the bad guys to subvert the system so it detects and identifies someone else. Sometimes this is hard ­-- leaving someone else's fingerprints on a crime scene is hard, as is using a mask of someone else's face to fool a guard watching a security camera ­-- and sometimes it's easy. But when automated systems are involved, it's often very easy. It's not just hardened criminals that try to frame each other, it's mainstream commercial interests. Bad actors game systems, and social software is just another system to be gamed. It's very difficult to create a system with no incentive to misbehave or to accuse others of misbehaving.
4. A SIP of the Future (Tim Bray) -- he connected Google Voice with Gizmo5 so his Google Voice number forwards to his laptop. FTW.

Four short links: 4 Mar 2009

1. Wall Street on the Tundra -- Michael Lewis's long but fascinating glimpse into Iceland's rise and fall as hubris-filled banker to the world. One of the many lessons is not to believe the post-hoc explanations for success: "Icelanders—or at any rate Icelandic men—had their own explanations for why, when they leapt into global finance, they broke world records: the natural superiority of Icelanders. Because they were small and isolated it had taken 1,100 years for them—and the world—to understand and exploit their natural gifts, but now that the world was flat and money flowed freely, unfair disadvantages had vanished. Iceland’s president, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, gave speeches abroad in which he explained why Icelanders were banking prodigies.". For more on the financial meltdown, also read The Real Cause of the Financial Crisis--it's spot on.
2. The Cult of Done Manifesto (Bre Pettis) -- magnificent call to arms for JFDI, Just Do It.
3. Twilio -- your web apps can trigger voice calls and respond to incoming calls through a simple REST and XML API. It's wildly simple. Using it, This Line Is Secure was able to launch very quickly. I'm still not able to think in terms of phones, unable to see when a voice-drop or numeric-key interface works for an app, but I'll bet that playing with Twilio will help me develop that sense without the cost of Asterisk hardware.
4. Let Startups Bail Us Out -- Reid Hoffman writes in favour of ensuring an adequate supply of startups. "Consider a few start-ups from the past century: Microsoft, MTV, CNN, FedEx, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Burger King. Each opened during a period of economic downturn. Today, these brands employ hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. We need to prepare for the next Burger King. By empowering individuals and small businesses, an innovation stimulus can help germinate stable industry players for the long term." (via Caterina)

Four short links: 16 Feb 2009

A lot of Python and databases today, with some hardware and Twitter pranking/security worries to taste:

1. Free Telephony Project, Open Telephony Hardware -- professionally-designed mass-manufactured hardware for telephony projects. E.g., IP04 runs Asterisk and has four phone jacks and removable Flash storage. Software, schematics, and PCB files released under GPL v2 or later.
2. Don't Click Prank Explained -- inside the Javascript prank going around Twitter. Transparent overlays would appear to be dangerous.
3. Tokyo Cabinet: A Modern Implementation of DBM -- ok, so there's definitely something going on with these alternative databases. Here's the 1979 BTree library reinvented for the modern age, then extended with PyTyrant, a database server for Tokyo Cabinet that offers HTTP REST, memcached, and a simple binary protocol. Cabinet is staggeringly fast, as this article makes clear. And if that wasn't enough wow for one day, Tokyo Dystopia is the full-text search engine. The Tyrant tutorial shows you how to get the server up and running. And what would technology be without a Slideshare presentation? (via Stinky)
4. Whoosh -- a pure Python fulltext search library.

You Become what You Disrupt - (part two)

Google's GrandCentral (Radar coverage) was down over the weekend resulting in missed calls and other phone problems for its users.

This is very similar to the the two day Skype outage last year where I said that "You Become what You Disrupt". I've spoken about this issue several times, most recently at the Princeton CITP "Computing in the Cloud" workshop.

The problem is that it's not particularly clear at what point a disruptive innovation becomes a utility. As innovators it's important that we recognize that this point will arrive and prepare for it. I believe that we have a responsibility to be good stewards of the technologies we create, and to take responsibility for protecting people who come to rely on those technologies to live their daily lives. When we fail to do that, we may find ourselves being cast as either fools or villains who must be regulated and controlled.

Ultimately, I think we will evolve a set of safety standards very similar to building codes. For instance, it appears that a multi-datacenter strategy would have prevented the GrandCentral outage. (As I've said many times before: Datacenters are a Single Point of Failure!)

Cofounder Craig Walker writes: "I wanted to write a quick note to all the GC users and apologize for the service interruption this morning. We had a power issue at our current colo facility and it knocked us off line for a few hours. Unfortunately I’ve been up in the mountains with the family this weekend and had no cell/internet coverage so couldn’t respond earlier. I did want to let you know that we were able to restore the service by noon today and are working extremely diligently to make sure this won’t occur in the future. We’ll do a better job keeping you informed in the future, not only about service related issues but also about upcoming features, soliciting your feedback, and generally making sure that you, the GC user, is well informed as to what’s going on with the service."

Will better industry standards, best-practices, and independent certifying authorities emerge for these new utilities without innovation-stifling regulation? I hope so.

(continue reading)