Advogato blog for danbri

WHY MIGHT CONNECTING WITH ZANDER JULES BE A GOOD IDEA?

Mon, 5 May 2008 13:12:58 GMT

Or: towards evidence-based ‘add a contact’ filtering…

This just in from LinkedIn:

Have a question? Zander Jules’s network will probably have an answer
You can use LinkedIn Answers to distribute your professional questions to Zander Jules and your extended network. You can get high-quality answers from experienced professionals.

Zander Jules requested to add you as a connection on LinkedIn:

Dan,

Dear
My name is Zander Jules a Banker and accountant with Bank Atlantique Cote Ivoire.I contacting u for a business transfer of a large sum of money from a dormant account. Though I know that a transaction of this magnitude will make any one apprehensive,
but I am assuring u all will be well at the end of the day.I am the personal accounts manager to Engr Frank Thompson, a National of ur country, who used to work with an oil servicing company here in Cote Ivoire. My client, his wife & their 3 children were involved in the ill fated Kenya Airways crash in the coasts of Abidjan in January 2000 in which all passengers on board died. Since then I have made several inquiries to ur embassy to locate any of my clients extended relatives but has been unsuccessful.After several attempts, I decided to trace his last name via internet,to see if I could locate any member of his
family hence I contacted u.Of particular interest is a huge deposit with our bank in our country,where the deceased has an account valued at about $16 million USD.They have issued me notice to provide the next of kin or our bank will declare the account unservisable and thereby send the funds to the bank treasury.Since I have been unsuccessful in locating the relatives for past 7 yrs now, I will seek ur consent to present you as the next of kin of the deceased since u have the same last names, so that the proceeds of this account valued at $16million USD can be paid to u and then u and I can share the money.All I require is your honest cooperation to enable us see this deal through. I guarantee that this will be executed under all legitimate arrangement that will protect you from any breach of the law. In your reply mail, I want you to give me your full names, address, D.O.B, tel& fax #.If you can handle this with me, reach me for more details.

Thanking u for ur coperation.
Regards,

I’m suprised we’ve not seen more of this, and sooner. Youtube contacts are pretty spammy, and twitter have also suffered. The other networks are relatively OK so far. But I don’t think they’re anything like as robust as they’ll need to get, particularly since a faked contact can get privileged access to personal details. Definitely an arms race…

“totally obliterate them”

Sat, 3 May 2008 14:12:14 GMT

What obliterate means…

Semantic Web Interest Group f2f meeting proposal (during week of Oct 20-24 2008)

Fri, 2 May 2008 15:14:57 GMT

I’ve started a thread on the Semantic Web Interest Group list, proposing that we meet during W3C’s Technical Plenary week this coming October. If you like the idea and plan to attend, please jump in and say so. If you have other ideas, please let us know them!

In the past we have handled this fairly informally, mixing short talks, themed discussion, inter-WG liaison, and lightning talks. This year I would like to theme any meeting around the practicalities of mainstream rollout: obstacles, issues, opportunities that arise as these technologies find their way into wider use. But this is a broad topic. What would you all like to discuss?

Comments and suggestions here or on the list please; although of course you can always ping me privately if needed.

Hope to see you in October…

Opening and closing like flowers (social platform roundupathon)

Fri, 2 May 2008 14:10:48 GMT

Closing some tabs…

Stephen Fry writing on ’social network’ sites back in January (also in the Guardian):

…what an irony! For what is this much-trumpeted social networking but an escape back into that world of the closed online service of 15 or 20 years ago? Is it part of some deep human instinct that we take an organism as open and wild and free as the internet, and wish then to divide it into citadels, into closed-border republics and independent city states? The systole and diastole of history has us opening and closing like a flower: escaping our fortresses and enclosures into the open fields, and then building hedges, villages and cities in which to imprison ourselves again before repeating the process once more. The internet seems to be following this pattern.

How does this help us predict the Next Big Thing? That’s what everyone wants to know, if only because they want to make heaps of money from it. In 1999 Douglas Adams said: “Computer people are the last to guess what’s coming next. I mean, come on, they’re so astonished by the fact that the year 1999 is going to be followed by the year 2000 that it’s costing us billions to prepare for it.”

But let the rise of social networking alert you to the possibility that, even in the futuristic world of the net, the next big thing might just be a return to a made-over old thing.

McSweenys:

Dear Mr. Zuckerberg,

After checking many of the profiles on your website, I feel it is my duty to inform you that there are some serious errors present. […]

Lest-we-forget. AOL search log privacy goofup from 2006:

No. 4417749 conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period on topics ranging from “numb fingers” to “60 single men” to “dog that urinates on everything.”

And search by search, click by click, the identity of AOL user No. 4417749 became easier to discern. There are queries for “landscapers in Lilburn, Ga,” several people with the last name Arnold and “homes sold in shadow lake subdivision gwinnett county georgia.”

It did not take much investigating to follow that data trail to Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga., frequently researches her friends’ medical ailments and loves her three dogs. “Those are my searches,” she said, after a reporter read part of the list to her.

Time magazine punditising on iGoogle, Facebook and OpenSocial:

Google, which makes its money on a free and open Web, was not happy with the Facebook platform. That’s because what happens on Facebook stays on Facebook. Google would much prefer that you come out and play on its platform — the wide-open Web. Don’t stay behind Facebook’s closed doors! Hie thee to the Web and start searching for things. That’s how Google makes its money.

So, last fall, Google rallied all the other major social networks (MySpace, Bebo, Hi5 and so on) and announced a new initiative called OpenSocial. OpenSocial wants to be like Facebook’s platform, only much bigger: Widget makers can write applications for it and they can run anywhere — on MySpace, Bebo and Google’s own social network, Orkut, which is very big in Brazil.

Google’s platform could actually dwarf Facebook — if it ever gets off the ground.

Meanwhile on the widget and webapp security front, we have “BBC exposes Facebook flaw” (information about your buddies is accessible to apps you install; information about you is accessible to apps they install). Also see Thomas Roessler’s comments to my Nokiana post for links to a couple of great presentations he made on widget security. This includes a big oopsie with the Google Mail widget for MacOSX. Over in Ars Technica we learn that KDE 4.1 alpha 1 now has improved widget powers, including “preliminary support for SuperKaramba and Mac OS X Dashboard widgets“. Wonder if I can read my Gmail there…

As Stephen Fry says, these things are “opening and closing like a flower”. The big hosted social sites have a certain oversimplifying retardedness about them. But the ability for code to go visit data (the widget/gadget model), is I think as valid as the opendata model where data flows around to visit code. I am optimistic that good things will come out of this ferment.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting several of the Google OpenSocial crew in London. They took my grumbling about accessibility issues pretty well, and I hope to continue that conversation. Industry politics and punditry aside, I’m impressed with their professionalism and with the tie-in to an opensource implementation through Apache’s ShinDig project. The OpenSocial specs list is open to the public, where Cassie has just announced that “all 0.8 opensocial and gadgets spec changes have been resolved” (after a heroic slog through the issue list). I’m barely tracking the detail of discussion there, things are moving fast. There’s now a proposed REST API, for example; and I learned in London about plans for a formatting/templating system, which might be one mechanism for getting FOAF/RDF out of OpenSocial containers.

If OpenSocial continues to grow and gather opensource mindshare, it’s possible Facebook will throw some chunks of their platform over the wall (ie. “do an Adobe“). And it’ll probably be left to W3C to clean up the ensuring mess and fragmentation, but I guess that’s what they’re there for. Meanwhile there’s plenty yet to be figured out, … I think we’re in a pre-standards experimentation phase, regardless of how stable or mature we’re told these platforms are.

The fundamental tension here is that we want open data, open platforms, … for data and code to flow freely, but to protect the privacy, lives and blushes of those it describes. A tricky balance. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s easy, that we’ve got it figured out, or that all we need to do is “tear down the walls”.

Opening and closing like flowers…

Restarter martyr: sounds of Firefox 3b5

Fri, 2 May 2008 13:09:40 GMT

I use Firefox with a lot of tabs. I guess I’m a multi-tasker. Or I have surplus attention. Or they fixed enough memory leaks in Firefox 3 so that opening a new tab is almost cost-free. Until you restart your browser (is there a bug open for this? I couldn’t find one).

I’ve just made a quick movie from the unedited sound of Firefox 3 restarting this morning: Krafty Nacirema (multitasking mix).

Raw materials include: New Order’s ‘Krafty‘ and ‘Confusion‘; John S. Hall’s ‘America Kicks Ass‘ rant, and who knows what else. I liked how it all sounded, so here it is.

GraphPath

Fri, 2 May 2008 12:09:56 GMT

GraphPath …

… a little-language for analysing graph-structured data, especially RDF. The syntax of GraphPath is reminiscent of Xpath. It has a python implementation that can be teamed up with your favourite python RDF API (e.g. Redland, rdflib, or your own API).

Anyone tried it? Apparently it has a rule/inference system too (backward chaining). I don’t quite see how namespace abbrevations are handled, but guess there must be some mechanism for registering them in the API. Could be a candidate for transliteration into Ruby?

Nokiana: the one about the CIA, Syria, and the N95

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:10:59 GMT

Matt Kane resurfaced on Bristol’s underscore mailing list with this intriguing snippet, after some travels around the middle-east: ” … discovered N95s (not mine) cannot be taken into Syria”.

I asked for the backstory, which goes like this:

Quite a palaver. Got the train from Istanbul to Syria (amazing trip!). At the border they didn’t search the bags of “westerners” but asked us all to show our phones and cameras. They glanced at them all quickly, checking the brand (”Nikon, ok. SonyEricsson, ok”). One guy had an N95 and they led him off the train. His sister informed us that they’d said it wasn’t allowed in Syria, and that if she knew her brother he’d not give it up without a fight. Despite being on contract, he argued with them for an hour and a half, even calling the embassies in Damascus and Ankara. In the end he gave it up, with a promise that they’d send it on to the airport from where he was leaving. A few days later we’re chatting with a barman and spot his phone - an N95, and yes, he got it in Syria! A few days after that we found out the full
story from our hotel owner in Damascus. Apparently the CIA gave a load of bugged N95s to high-ranking Kurdish officials in Iraq, many of which were then smuggled into Syria and given as gifts to various shady characters. After the Hezbollah guy was assassinated in Damascus a few months ago, the Syrians set about trying to root out spies, which led to this ban on bringing N95s into the country. Apparently.

This is the first I’ve heard of it, but searching throws up a few references to rigged N95s as “spy phones”.

I don’t believe the relevant functionality is exposed in the N95’s widget APIs yet. I had trouble making it vibrate, let alone self-destruct after this message. But at least widget/gadget/app security is getting some attention lately. It can’t be too long before “spy widgets” on your phone become a real concern, particularly since the exposure of phone APIs to 3rd party apps is such a creative combination. I should be clear that AFAIK, Nokia’s N95 widget platform is free of such vulnerabilities currently, and any “spy phone” mischief so far has been achieved through other kinds of interference. But it does make me glad to see a Widgets 1.0: Digital Signature spec moving along at W3C…

from the SEO Rapper

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:19:10 GMT

Social Media Addiction Rap

“I surf the web, I used to watch TV
now I’m logged into Joost, it’s commercial free”[…]

Videos from SemanticCamp Paris 1

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 10:18:14 GMT

Spotted on the websemantique list, a Youtube playlist of videos from SemanticCamp Paris 1, 16 février. I think they’ve just had a second SemanticCamp already, but these five videos are from the earlier event. Lots of FOAF, RDFa etc.

L’objectif du SemanticCamp Paris est de créer les conditions pour que les développeurs, les étudiants, les managers et les chercheurs se rencontrent sur le thème du Web Sémantique.

BBC joining OpenID Foundation

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 19:17:30 GMT

The BBC have joined the OpenID Foundation. See blog post from Jem Stone for details. He cautions people not to get excited and expect too much too soon. However I can’t help but see this as a very healthy thing when thinking about the medium-term usability issues around OpenID. Talking of which, does anyone have pointers to real-world usability testing of OpenID?