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The most important event, ever

March 25, 2015 in Business, Events, Future, Health, Ideas, Identity, Internet, IoT, marketing, VRM | 1 comment

IIW XX, IIW_XX_logothe 20th Internet Identity Workshop, comes at a critical inflection point in the history of VRM: Vendor Relationship Management, the only business movement working toward giving you both

  1. independence from the silos and walled gardens of the world; and
  2. better means for engaging with every business in the world — your way, rather than theirs.

If you’re looking for a point of leverage on the future of customer liberation, independence and empowerment, IIW is it.

Wall Street-sized companies around the world are beginning to grok what Main Street ones have always known: customers aren’t just “targets” to be “acquired,” “managed,” “controlled” and “locked in.” In other words, Cluetrain was right when it said this, in 1999:

if you only have time for one clue this year, this is the one to get…

Now it is finally becoming clear that free customers are more valuable than captive ones: to themselves, to the companies they deal with, and to the marketplace.

But how, exactly? That’s what we’ll be working on at IIW, which runs from April 7 to 9 at the Computer History Museum, in the heart of Silicon Valley: the best venue ever created for a get-stuff-done unconference.

Focusing our work is a VRM maturity framework that gives every company, analyst and journalist a list of VRM competencies, and every VRM developer a context in which to show which of those competencies they provide, and how far along they are along the maturity path. This will start paving the paths along which individuals, tool and service providers and corporate systems (e.g. CRM) can finally begin to fit their pieces together. It will also help legitimize VRM as a category. If you have a VRM or related company, now is the time to jump in and participate in the conversation. Literally. Here are some of the VRM topics and technology categories that we’ll be talking about, and placing in context in the VRM maturity framework:

Note: Another version of this post appeared first on the ProjectVRM blog. I’m doing a rare cross-posting here because it that important.

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A New Data Deal, starting today

June 23, 2014 in Events, infrastructure, Internet, Personal clouds, Technology | 11 comments

rn1There was a time when personal computer was an oxymoron: a contradiction in terms. That ended when personal computing got real in the ’80s.

There was a time when personal networking, where every person has status, reach and power equal to that of corporations and governments, was unthinkable. That ended when the Internet got real in the ’90s.

There was a time when putting both those powers, plus a zillion mobile apps, in everybody’s pocket, was a pie in the distant sky. That pie reached Earth in the ’00s.

There was a time when clouds were only corporate, and personal cloud was an oxymoron — or worse, just a new term for more data storage. That ends today.

Personal clouds level the market’s playing field by giving full agency to each of us: a place to stand where we can deal as equals with companies, governments, health care providers, lawyers, schools and everything and everyone else in the connected world. In your own ways, and on your own terms. They begin what @Petervan calls The Revolution of the Data Slaves.

You can self-host your cloud (which some also call a vault or a store), or use a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) that hosts your cloud it in an encrypted form that even they can’t see. Either way, your personal cloud (hashtags: #pcloud, #TakeBackControl) is an ideal box for any number of current and future VRM tools, including ones for:

Respect Network is has gathered together a bunch of Cloud Service Providers, along with other companies, development projects, organizations and individuals, for a world-circling launch tour that begins today in London. Tomorrow is an Immersion Day, for digging down into how personal clouds solve problems of privacy and personal empowerment. I’ll be at both, and giving the opening keynote tomorrow.

Next stops on the tour:

  • San Francisco — 30 June and 1 July
  • Sydney — 7 and 8 July
  • Tel Aviv — 14 July
  • Berlin — 21 July

The tour is also a campaign to sign up a million members, each claiming their own cloud name — a sovereign identity that’s yours alone. They explain:

The Respect Network is a collaboration of over 70 companies and open source projects from around the world who share this commitment:

  1. On the Respect Network, every member owns his/her private cloud and cloud name (your =name) that is completely portable for life and not dependent on any single CSP (cloud service provider).
  2. On the Respect Network every personal and business member agrees to respect each other’s privacy and digital freedom.
  3. On the Respect Network, you control your digital identity and relationships. You have the right to be forgotten—or remembered—by any other member.
  4. On the Respect Network you control when and where your personal data is shared and benefit directly from the value earned.
  5. On the Respect Network you are not the product, you are the partner—the network is supported directly by members investing in privacy for life.

I’ll add more here as the day goes on. It’s going to be an exciting one.

Escaping the Black Holes of Centralization

March 21, 2014 in Business, Events, history, Ideas, infrastructure, Journalism, Politics, problems, Technology | 14 comments

Turkey shut down Twitter today. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced, “We now have a court order. We’ll eradicate Twitter. I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic.” (Hurriyet Daily News) He also said Turkey will “rip out the roots” of Twitter. (Washington Post)

Those roots are in the Internet. This is a good thing. Even if Turkey rips the roots out of the phone and cable systems that provide access to the Net, they can’t rip out the Net itself, because the Net is not centralized. It is distributed: a heterarchy rather than a hierarchy. At the most basic level, the Net’s existence relies on protocols rather than on how any .com, .org, .edu or .gov puts those protocols to use.

The Net’s protocols are not servers, clouds, wires, routers or code bases. They are agreements about how data flows to and from any one end point and any other. This makes the Internet a world of ends rather than a world of governments, companies and .whatevers. It cannot be reduced to any of those things, any more than time can be reduced to a clock. The Net is as oblivious to usage as are language and mathematics — and just as supportive of every use to which it is put. And, because of this oblivity, The Net supports all without favor to any.

Paul Baran contrasted centralized systems (such as governments), decentralized ones (such as Twitter+Facebook+Google, etc.) and distributed ones, using this drawing in 1964:

Design C became the Internet. Except the Internet is actually more like D in this version here:

Because on the Internet you don’t have to be connected all the time. And any one node can connect to any other node. Or to many nodes at once. Optionality verges on the absolute.

The distributed model (C) appealed to military folks because it was the best design for surviving attack. Even in a decentralized system there are central points of vulnerability where a government could spy on traffic or knock out a whole service.

The “attack surfaces” of a distributed system are no larger than a single node or a single connection, so it’s much harder to bring the whole thing down. This is why John Gillmore says “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

No doubt this is happening right now in Turkey, just as it is in China and other countries that block sites and services on the Net. It might not be easy, but it is do-able by design. That design is not about hard, fixed and administrated lines, but on voluntary connections, or what Bob Frankston calls ‘DIY connectivity’.

Twitter’s centralized nature makes it a dot in the star-shaped designs of A and B. That dot becomes a black hole when powerful actors like the Turkish and Chinese governments “eradicate” it. We need to bear this in mind when we design and use centralized systems — and even decentralized ones, such as we have with Twitter, Google, Facebook and other “social” walled gardens, which together comprise something that looks and works on the model of B rather than C. But it is also essential to understand that D is what we have underneath it all, and it is based on Paul Baran’s distributed model (C).

It also helps to recognize that some things — such as being social with each other — do not require centralized systems, or even decentralized ones. They can be truly distributed, heterarchical and voluntary. Just as we have freedom of speech and association in any free society, we should have the same on the Net. And, at the base level, we do.

But this isn’t easy to see, for five reasons:

  1. We do need centralized systems for doing what only they can do
  2. Existing building methods and materials make it easy
  3. The internet is also a “network of networks” which at the backbone and “provider” level (the one you access it through) is more like a combination of B and C — and, because you pay providers for access,  it’s easy to ignore C as the virtuous base of the whole thing
  4. After eighteen years of building centralized systems (such as Twitter) on the Net, it’s hard for most people — even geeks familiar with the Net’s base design — to think outside the box called client-server (and some of us call calf-cow)

A great way to avoid the black hole of centralization is to start from the fully distributed nodes that each of us are, designing and building first person technologies. And I have a specific one to recommend, from Customer Commons:

This is Omie:

She’s the brainlet of Customer Commons: She is, literally, a clean slate. And she is your clean slate. Not Apple’s. Not Google’s. Not some phone company’s.

She can be what you want her to be, do what you want her to do, run whatever apps you want her to run, and use data you alone collect and control.

Being a clean slate makes Omie very different.

On your iPhone and iPad you can run only what Apple lets you run, and you can get only from Apple’s own store. On an Android phone you have to run Google’s pre-loaded apps, which means somebody is already not only telling you what you must do, but is following you as well.

Omie uses Android, but bows to Google only in respect of its intention to create an open Linux-based OS for mobile devices.

So Omie is yours, alone. Fully private, by design, from the start.

Omie needs crowdfunding. More specifically, she needs somebody who is good at doing crowdfunding videos, to help us out. We have the script.  If you’re up for helping out, contact me. I can be DM’d via @dsearls, or emailed via my first  name @ my last name dot com. Thanks!

 

 

Short Attention Spasm Theater

February 19, 2014 in Blogging, Business, Events, Fun, Geography, Geology, infrastructure, Internet, Journalism, Life, Politics, problems, Technology | 3 comments

This post is a hat tip toward Rusty Foster’s Today In Tabs, which I learned about from Clay Shirky during a digressive conversation about the subscription economy (the paid one, not the one Rusty and other free spirits operate in), and how lately I’m tending not to renew mine after they run out, thanks to my wife’s rational approach to subscriptions:

  1. Don’t obey the first dozen or so renewal notices because the offers will get better if you neglect them.
  2. See if you miss them.
  3. If you don’t miss them, don’t renew.

While thinking about a headline for this post, I found that searches for theater and theatre are both going down, but the former seems to be holding a slight lead.

While at Google Trends, I also did a humbling vanity search. Trust me: it helps not to give a shit.

Other results::: tired is up… stupid still leads dumb, but dumb is catching up… Papua New Guinea leads in porn. And Sri Lanka takes the gold in searches for sex. They scored 100. India gets the silver with 88, and Ethiopia settles for the bronze with 87. Out of the running are Bangladesh (85), Pakistan (78), Nepal (74), Vietnam (72), Cambodia (69), Timor-Leste (67) and Papua New Guinea (66) — perhaps because porn is doing the job for them.

Michael Robertson continues to invent stuff. His latest is Clock Radio, a Chrome browser extension that lets you tune in, by genre or search, to what’s playing now on the world’s Internet radio stations. Links: bit.ly/ClockRadio & bit.ly/ClockRadioVideo. Here’s what mine looks like right now:

I’m not surprised (and I don’t know why) that most of the stations playing music I like are French.

David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer at Google, will talk about The Fight for Internet Freedom tomorrow at Stanford. Register by 5:30pm Pacific, today. @Liberationtech is hosting. Oh, and Google Fiber may be coming to your city.

George Packer says Amazon may be good for customers but bad for books, because Amazon is a monopoly in that category. Paul Krugman meanwhile says the same kinda thing about Comcast, and the whole cablecom biz. He’s not alone. Nobody likes the proposed Comcast acquisition of Time Warner Cable, other than Comcast, their captive regulators and their big-biz amen corner in what’s left of the press. (Watch: it’ll pass.) FWIW, Quartz has some nice charts explaining what’s going on.

What’s the word for a business nobody dominates because basically the whole thing, as we knew it, looks like Florida a week after Chicxulub? That’s what we have with journalism. The big reptiles are gone or terminal. The flying ones are gonna be birds one of these eras, but for now they’re just flying low and working on survival. For a good picture of what that looks like, re-dig A Day in the Life of a Digital Editor, 2013, which Alexis Madrigal posted in The Atlantic on March 13 of last year. In it he said,

…your total budget for the year is $12,000, a thousand bucks a month. (We could play this same game with $36,000, too. The lessons will remain the same.) What do you do?

Here are some options:

1. Write a lot of original pieces yourself. (Pro: Awesome. Con: Hard, slow.)
2. Take partner content. (Pro: Content! Con: It’s someone else’s content.)
3. Find people who are willing to write for a small amount of money. (Pro: Maybe good. Con: Often bad.)
4. Find people who are willing to write for no money. (Pro: Free. Con: Crapshoot.)
5. Aggregate like a mug. (Pro: Can put smartest stuff on blog. Con: No one will link to it.)
6. Rewrite press releases so they look like original content. (Pro: Content. Con: You suck.)

Don’t laugh. These are actual content strategies out there in the wilds of the Internet. I am sure you have encountered them.

Myself, I’m very partial to one and five. I hate two and six. For my own purposes here, let’s say you do, too, and throw them out.

That leaves three and four…

You’re reading #4. Flap flap flap…

Speaking of trash talk, Polygon says NBA 2K14 gives you a technical foul for swearing at the game.

I like the Fargo2 model:

Want to know where your Internet comes from? Look here. While it lasts. Because what that describes is infrastructure for the free and open world wide Internet we’ve known since the beginning. Thanks to the NSA spying, national leaders are now floating the idea of breaking the Internet into pieces, with national and regional borders. That seems to be where Angela Merkel is headed by suggesting a Europe-only network.

Progress: there’s an insurance business in protecting companies from data breaches. No, they’re not selling it to you, because you don’t matter. This is for big companies only.

Finally, because you’re not here — or you wisely don’t want to be here — dig what parking in New York looks like right now, after two weeks of snow, rain, freezing, melting and re-freezing:

parking in NYC

Let’s hope it thaws before alternate side parking goes back into effect.

Fred Wilson’s talk at LeWeb

December 14, 2013 in Blogging, Broadcasting, Business, Cluetrain, Culture, Events, Future, infrastructure, Internet, Journalism, Live Web, News, Personal clouds, problems, Technology, VRM | 10 comments

Fred WilsonI’m bummed that I missed LeWeb, but I’m glad I got to see and hear Fred Wilson’s talk there, given on Tuesday. I can’t recommend it more highly. Go listen. It might be the most leveraged prophesy you’re ever going to hear.

I’m biased in that judgement, because the trends Fred visits are ones I’ve devoted my life to urging forward. You can read about them in Linux Journal (starting in 1996), The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999, 2000, 2011), this blog (starting in 1999), ProjectVRM (starting in 2006) and The Intention Economy (2012). (Bonus links: What I said at Le Web in 2007 on stage and in an interview.)

He unpacks three megatrends, with an additional focus on four sectors. Here are my notes from the talk. Some of it is quotage, but little of it is verbatim. If you want to quote Fred, go to the source and listen.

1) We are making a transition from bureaucratic hierarchies to technology-driven networks. The former is the way the world has been organized for the last two hundred years. Markets, government, businesses are all pyramids. Transaction and communication costs were so high in the industrial era that these pyramids were the best way to organize work and run systems. But now technology-driven networks are replacing bureaucracies. Examples…

Twitter. Replaces the newspaper. The old army of reporters that reported to divisional editors who chose what would appear in limited spaces and distribute through printing mills and trucked to your doorstep was slow moving and bureaucratic. Now all of us are reporters. The crowd determines what’s important. This is an example of a tech-driven network.

YouTube. TV was hierarchical. Now all of us are video creators.

SoundCloud. Anybody can create audio or music. No labels. No radio or music industry required.

We first saw this trend in media and entertainment. Now we’re seeing it in AirBnB, One Fine Stay. Creative industries like Kickstarter and VHX. Learning with Codecademy and DuoLingo for languages.

We are very early with all of these and more to come.

2) Unbundling. This has to do with the way services are packaged and taken to market. In the traditional world, you only got to buy the thing that had everything in it. Now tech is changing that. More focused, best of breed, delivered a la carte. Now on mobile and internet you get better everything. Best of sports, fashion, classified advertising.

Banking is being unbundled. Banks used to do everything. Now entrepreneurs are picking off services. Lending Club. Funding Circle. auxsmoney in Germany. Taking profitable lending franchises away. Working capital. c2fo. Management services. All new, all based on networks.

Education. It’s expensive to put a lot of students in a building with a professor up front of every class. You needed a library. Administration. Very inefficient, costly, pyramidal and centralized. Now you can get books instantly. Research is no longer as highly centralized and capital dependent. See Science Exchange: collaboration on an open public network.  All this too is also early.

Entertainment. Used to be that you’d get it all on cable. Now we get Netflix and YouTube on our phones. Hulu. A la carte. Airplay, Chromecast.

3) We are all now personally a node on the network. We are all now nodes on the network, connected all the time. Mobiles are key. If forced to make a choice between phone and desktop, we go with the phone. (About 80% of the LeWeb audience did, along with Fred.) In the larger world, Android is being adopted massively on cheap phones. Uber, Halo.

This change is profoundly impacting the world of transportation. Rental cars. Delivery. Payments. Venmo, Dwolla, Square. Peer to peer. You can send money to anybody. For dating there’s Tinder. Again, this is new. It’s early.

The four sectors…

a) Money. Not just Bitcoin. At its core Bitcoin is a protocol: the financial and transactoinal protocol for the Net. We haven’t had one until now. As of today it is becoming a layer of internet infrastructure, through a ledger called the blockchain that is global. All transactions are cleared publicly in the blockchain. Entrepreneurs will build tech and services on this. Payments and money will flow the way content now flows. No company will control it. Others’ lock on our money will be gone.

b) Health and wellness. Health care is regulated and expensive. Health and wellness is the opposite. It’s what keeps you out of the hospitals. (QS is here.) The biologies of our bodies will be visible to us and connected. Some communications will be personal and private, some networked, some with your doctor and so on. Small example: many people today gamify their weight loss.

c) Data leakage. When the industrial revolution came along, we had polluting. It took a century to even start dealing with it. In the information revolution, the pollution is data. It’s what allows Google, Facebook and the government spy on us when we don’t want them to. We have no control over that. Yet.

d) Trust and identity. We have allowed Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter to be our identity services. It’s very convenient, but we are giving them access to all we do. This isn’t good. Prediction: a bitcoin-like service, a protocol, that is distributed and global, not controlled by anybody, architected like the Internet, that will emerge, that will give us control over identity, trust and data. When that emerges I’ll let you know. I haven’t seen it yet.

Talk to me, Fred. 🙂

Revisiting the last great comet

November 25, 2013 in Events, Fun, Future, history, News, Photography, Science | 1 comment

With Comet Ison on the horizon (but out of sight until it finishes looping around the Sun), I thought it might be fun to re-run what I wrote here in 1997 (in my blog-before-there-were-blogs), about the last great comet to grace Earth’s skies. — Doc

 

Ordinary Miracles:
Start Your Day With Comet Hale-Bopp

Hale-Bopp

Graphic by Dr. Dale Ireland, whose excellent comet page is here.

By Doc Searls
March 6, 1997

It’s 5:15AM as I write this. A few minutes ago, after the kid woke us for his breakfast, I walked to the kitchen to fetch a glass of water. When I arrived at the sink, I looked up and saw the most amazing thing: Hale-Bopp, the comet, brighter than any star, hanging from the Northeast sky over San Francisco Bay.

I’ve seen five comets in my life. None have been more spectacular than this one is, right now. It’s astonishing. Trust me: this one is a Star of Bethlehem-grade mother of a comet.

Considering the comet’s quality, publicity has been kind of weak. Which makes sense, since I have noticed an inverse relationship between comet quality and notoriety.

KahoutekThe most promoted comet in recent history was Kahoutek, in 1971. Kahoutek was supposed to be the biggest comet since Halley last appeared in 1910. But after all the hype, Kahoutek was nearly invisible. I can’t even say I saw it. At least I can say Ilooked and that maybe I saw something. (But hey, I lived in Jersey at the time. Whaddaya ‘spect?)

Comet WEstIn fact, Kahoutek was such a big no-show that when Comet West appeared in 1975, it received almost no publicity at all. But it was a wonderful comet. First it appeared as a morning star with a bright little tail about one moon long, above the Eastern horizon. Then, after it whipped around the Sun and flew back out toward its own tail, the comet spread into a wide V that graced the evening sky like God’s own logo. At the time I lived in a rural enclave outside Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and every night for several weeks a few of us would wander out and marvel at the show.

HalleyThe next comet was Halley, in 1986. Astronomers had rightly mixed feelings about Halley. On the one hand, they knew this would be one of Halley’s least visible visits. On the other hand, they knew it would raise interest in astronomy. Well, Halley was nearly as big a bust as Kahoutek. At best the “Great Comet” was a tiny smudge in the sky. Can you see it in this picture? Right. My friend Jerry Solfvin and I had about the same luck when we joined a 3AM traffic jam of about 10,000 people who went to the far side of Mt. Diablo to look at this. By the way, this picture is from the Hyuktuke Gallery at the NEFAS (Northeast Florida Astronomical Society) site.

Comet Hyuktake showed up about a year ago, and enough time had passed since the Halley disappointment to allow the new comet a fair measure of publicity. And Hyuktake was a beauty. When it skirted the North Star, the comet’s tail stretched across a sixth of the sky. The best image I’ve found is this cool 3-D number by Dave Crum. Click on it to visit a larger version at the NEFAS site.

And now we have Hale-Bopp. Although Hale-Bopp won’t come nearly as close to Earth as Hyuktake did, it’s putting on a bigger show, mostly because it’s a bigger comet. A lot bigger. This thing is more than 200 times larger than Halley: about 40km across. You can actually see some shape to it, even with the naked eye. To spot it, look to the Northeast in the early morning, when it’s still dark. You’ll see it below and to the left of Cygnus (the Northern Cross), pointing straignt down toward the horizon. It’ll be brighter than any other star in the sky, and with a tail that stretches across the Milky Way. On the 6th you’ll also see the last sliver of moon down to the East, and on succeeding days the moon will move out of the way long enough for a great view.

Finally, let’s not forget the kid, who was born between Hyuktake and Hale-Bopp. In this context the miracle of his arrival (to parents our age) seems almost ordinary.

Anyway, it might be fun to find the publicity coefficient of modern comets that at least get a little press. If the relationship is inverse, as I suspect, consider this modest page a bit of publicity prosthesis.

And don’t miss it. This may be the last comet you ever see.

Bonus links from the present:

Come to VRM and Personal Cloud Day

October 21, 2013 in Events, VRM | 1 comment

Today is VRM and Personal Cloud Day at the Computer History Museum. Register at that first link. Or just show up. It’s free. (Registering gives us a better idea of head count.)

It’s the time and place to brainstorm about both topics, plus what we’ll be discussing and moving forward the following three days at IIW, also at the CHM.

More details here.

It’s all about leverage on the future. So be there.

IIW Challenge #1: Sovereign Identity in the Great Silo Forest

October 14, 2013 in Business, Events, Identity, problems | 6 comments

Who are you?

What are you?

If the answers come from you, they speak of your sovereign identity: that which is yours and you control.

If the answers come from your employer, your doctor, the Department of Motor Vehicles, Apple, Facebook, Google or Twitter, they speak of your administrative identity: that which is theirs and they control.

For as long as we’ve had identifiers in computer and network system namespaces, we have been talking about administrative identities, not sovereign ones.

All administrative identities are silo’d: isolated inside systems and their namespaces. The Internet, which cyber-utopians (me included) cheer for its decentralized peer-to-peer and end-to-end architectural graces, has become a vast forest of centralized systems, each a silo. This Great Silo Forest is a hall of administrative mirrors. Your reflection in each is not you, but an administrative version of you.

Want a sense of how bad this is? Go into your browser prefs and hunt down the place where your logins and passwords are kept. Every one of those login/password combinations is for a different you, that each different system knows separately, owns separately and controls separately.

Multiple silos can “federate” identifiers for their convenience, and sometimes that’s cool. But the problem that falls on you — coping with countless different administrative silos — is not relieved by administrative federation, because it’s an administrative solution for an administrative problem. Not a solution for you.

See, the main problem with administrative identity is centralization. And every centralized approach to the problem of centralization causes more centralization and worsens the problem.

Even “user-centric” identity (with its “identity providers” and “relying parties”) are framed in administrative terms. They do not start with the sovereign individual, and are  not driven by that individual.

Even the term “user” implies something less than sovereign control.

What we need ares personal systems for managing our sovereign identities, and for doing our own federation to the administrative systems of the world.

Devon Loffreto (@NZN) has done the most thinking-out-loud about this issue. A compendium of posts:

All this is right up the alleys of IIW — the Internet Identity Workshop, which is coming up next week. And this is the first in what I hope will be a series of posts that will provoke conversation and forward movement at IIW.

 

So some day they don’t have to

October 12, 2013 in Events, VRM | Permalink

tacmaCustomer Commons‘ invites you to a screening of Terms and Conditions May Apply, @CullenHoback‘s  award-winning documentary on the state of personal privacy online.

NOTE: The venue is now at Stanford University, in conjunction with the United Nations Association Film Festival, and will be followed by a panel discussion on the “Future of Online Privacy.” Cullen will be there as well.

Here is the UNAFF page on the screening.

Details:

  • DATE: Monday, Oct 21
  • LOCATION: Room 101, Ceras BuildingStanford University School of Education, 485 Lasuen Mall
  • TIME: 6:00 PM Reception with the filmmakers; 7:00 PM TERMS AND CONDITIONS MAY APPLY (USA, 79 min); and 8:20 PM Panel “Future of Online Privacy”
  • PRICE: Single tickets $10 cash only at the venue. First come, first serve. You can also buy advance tickets here. (Additional costs may apply.)
  • PARKING: Parking Structure 6 (beneath Wilbur Field) is closest. It’s free after 4pm in the lots and at the meters along the campus streets More info on visitor parking at Stanford http://transportation.stanford.edu/parking_info/VisitorParking.shtml.

COME EARLY. Since we are combining two showings into one, it’s possible this will sell out, and space is limited.

Notes from #SOTN13

May 31, 2013 in Events | 6 comments

Hashtags being used:

Gigi keynote

  • “Italian is the official language of music.” (It’s certainly far more musical than English. No offense.)

David Snowden (@Snowded) keynote

  • Responses to change: fascism or anarchy
  • “We need a few more ecologists around.” Not just engineers.
  • Wisdom of crowds is too often “tyranny of herds.”
  • We need theory for practice and not just theory from practice
  • Complex adaptive systems… The system and the agents co-evolve and modify each other over time. They are not causal but dispositional. They have dispositionality.
  • Sources (as many do, correctly) Daniel Khaneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow.
  • “Don t get involved in partial problems but always take flight over the whole single great problem even if this view is still not clear.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • “Every man lives only in this present time, which is an indivisible point, and all the rest of his life is either past or uncertain” – Marcus Aurelius. (Makes me think of Tennyson’s “All experience is an arch wherethrough gleams the untraveled world…”)
  • “There is a high degree of autism in university economics departments.” (I think that’s what he said. Not sure.)
  • “We are pattern based intelligences, not information-based machines.” Far too many people are tying to use the Net to replace human intelligence.” “Culture can replace biology within two generations.”
  • Hugh McCloud: “Information wants to be free. Perspective wants to be expensive.” (Don Marti: “Information doesn’t want to be free. Information wants to be $6.95.”)
  • “I’ve never seen a rusty snake.”
  • Low turnout in elections means fascists are running things.
  • There is far more to human communication than aural and visual stimulation. Scent counts too.
  • Aristotle: “Virtue then is a state of deliberate moral purpose consisting in a mean that is relative to ourselves…”
  • Mark 9:17: Nor do peope pour new ine into old windeskins. If they dom the skins will burst, the wine will spill out and hte skins will be ruined. nstead, they pouier new wine into freh wineskins, and both are preserved.”
  • Hugh: “One must listen to one’s own humanity.”
  • “I use twitter more than google to search for anything involving ambiguity.”
  • Great images about mapping and managing dispositions. In respect to these…
  • “Micronarratives are more useful than best practices in health care.”
  • Abandoning management is stupid. We need to co-evolve. Anarchism loses to fascism under conditions of control. Put humans at the front and the end.

Excellent opening report on the state of the net in Italia

  • Even though Twitter is down (and Facebook, Tumbler, Google+ and others are up), lots of reporting on what and when Italians are tweeting

Akamai talk

  • Great stats
    • The U.S. is #13 in broadband speeds. Asian and European countries are tops.
    • Mobile devices are replacing desktop devices in common usage. Our primary interaction is though mobile rather than fixed devices.
    • Security is a huge issue, especially lately.
      • A 3x increase in the number of attacks in 2012. These are attacks that require a human to intervene. Lots of others are deflected automatically. “This is getting bad.”
      • Attacks are getting easier to initiate, though still realtively easy to define and defend against…. SYN flods, HTP GET floods, etc.
      • Attackers are developing new techniques.
      • All sectors are being attacked.
      • Retail is the biggest target for attack within ecommerce
        • They are very susceptible to a DDOS attack
        • Their vulnerabilities are high, given the constant financial activity
        • Extortion is involved, often. “Pay up or we’ll bring you down.”
      • In enterprise, financial and business services are the top targets
      • Ababil
        • A range of DDoS attacks targeting us banks and onlin e apps
        • Many techniques being used… volumetric DNS, Volumetric layers 2/4 and 5-7, SSL resource attacks
        • Observed high volume bursts of traffic: upto 10k requests per minute per brobot node
        • Tuypically burst and go dormant.
      • Top ports. microsoft-DS, Sql server, RPC.
    • Sum-up
  • Note: connection speeds noted should be upstream as well as downstream.
    • From the personal perspective, we should be saying “instream” and “outstream.” Saying “upstream” and “downstream” is an old-fashioned centralized perspective. If the Net is a world of ends, our perspective should be end-based, not center-based.

Thoughts provoked by all discussions about the state of the Net (not just here):

  • The Net is not social media, Google, or what any company does. The Net is everybody and everything on it.
  • Yes, the Net is the “network of networks” over which packets fly from point to point, but the point of the Net is the boundless number and variety of points at its ends.
  • The Net has no billing model, which is why it succeeded. All due credit to the phone and cable companies of the world, they never would have built the Net we know now had building it been left up to them in the first place. Same goes for the governments of the world.
  • Confusing or conflating the Net with what big companies or governments are doing on it it is like confusing or conflating the Earth with a few buildings sitting on it, downtown.
  • In respect to the above, see WorldOfEnds. David Weinberger and I wrote that more than ten years ago. Not sure how much we’d change it if we were writing it anew today. Same goes for Cluetrain, I suppose.

Thoughts about business

  • The scale that matters is the user’s or the customer’s. Not that of any one company serving those people.
  • We cannot get scale that fully matters if we get it only from a single company.
    • For example, Facebook, Google and Twitter do not give me scale. They can help, but the scale is theirs, not mine, because they are not agents of me. That is, they do not work for me. It’s more like the other way around. They are B2B, not B2C. Their customers are advertisers, not you or me. In fact, you and I are the products being sold to advertisers.
  • Google, Facebook and Twitter have the same problem that broadcasters have had for the duration: their customers and their consumers are different populations. They are financially accountable only to the businesses that pay for their services, rather than to the consumers of those services. (Ever try to call Google or Facebook to solve a problem? Good luck. You’re just a consumer.)
  • The day will come when Google, Facebook and Twitter, or their successors in the marketplace, will deal with their users directly as customers, rather than indirectly as users or consumers. They don’t want to do this now because business is good enough without “going direct” to millions (or billions) of people. But once enough people start paying for privacy, or for personal services, that will change, because the changes can be rationalized financially.
  • A path in that direction is to go freemium: charge extra for personal service, or hand-holding. Right now, for example, I would gladly pay Google for help with Gmail. But there is nobody to call, so I can’t.

A request

  • If anybody here (in Trieste, or at #SOTN13) has a Canon SLR zoom lens, preferably an L series one, that they can rent or loan to me, please let me know. The old one I brought with me is jammed. Thanks.

Observations, learnings:

  • Italian is so much more expressive than English. I love listening to it, even though I only get about 1% of what people are saying.
  • “Twitter is our playground.”

Writing this, live, in Fargo. Some notes on that, as I go along…

  • I love being able to write this in outline form. It’s perfect for taking live notes. I think, in fact, that doing things like this will be a primary use case for outlining.
  • Need to remember to highlight the outline headline before clicking on the WordPress symbol to save it in the blog
  • This is great: I can add categories in WordPress without screwing up the outline I’m writing in another browser tab in Fargo.
  • Debug (note: Fargo is at v0.71):
    • I keep getting warnings telling me that I have a choice to save the current or a newer outline. I keep choosing the current one, and that works.
    • Need to avoid the em dash or this happens: —

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