What does ssh -t do?
Using the -t option allocates a pseudo-terminal for
ssh. This comes in handy when you want to "double
ssh".
Let's say you can reach the host bastion and bastion can reach internal but you can't reach internal. No problem, right? You can log into internal like this:
ssh bastion ssh internal
No joy: "Pseudo-terminal will not be allocated because stdin is not a terminal."
Now try that again with -t...
ssh -t bastion ssh internal
And it works.
What are the differences between open-source licenses?
Open-source licenses require different degrees of reciprocity from a licensee. In this list, each license category includes the same basic terms as the previous category. I'll leave out the corporate vanity licenses, since they aren't typically adopted by new projects.
No reciprocity: new BSD, MIT. These licenses simply grant permission to copy the software, and disclaim warranty.
Patent reciprocity: Apache. In order to redistribute software under this license, a licensee must offer a license to any of the licensee's patents that apply.
Partial copyright reciprocity: Mozilla Public License, Lesser GPL. A licensee must provide source code for changes to the original work, but can still add code that is somehow kept distinct from the original, and keep it proprietary.
Broad copyright reciprocity: GPL (all versions). If a licensee distributes a modified version that constitutes a "derivative work" for purposes of copyright law, that derivative work must be available in source code form.
Protections from complex legal schemes: GPLv3. Some patent trolling schemes and code signing systems have the effect of working around the reciprocity requirements of the GPL. This later version of the license closes some loopholes.
SaaS reciprocity: Affero GPL. The only commonly used license that requires a licensee to redistribute source even if the code is not actually redistributed. Offering AGPL-licensed software for use over a network also triggers the requirement to redistribute source.
Why did Linux succeed on servers?
Unlike the RISC Unix boxes from back in the day, a typical PC-architecture server is a Purchasing Manager's grab bag of cheap parts available on attractive terms. As an OS developer, you don't know what weird mix of hardware you're going to have to support, even if you're part of the OS team at the hardware vendor. ("Hey, it turns out that the new server is going to have RatBag 2000 Ethernet cards after all. That's not a problem, it it?") This situation was even worse when more parts were on PCI cards, not the motherboard.
So in order to make an OS that will run on all the bastard spawn x86 servers out there, you need to have either (1) the market power to make the hardware vendors code and test the drivers for you to support a stable driver ABI, as Microsoft did for Windows NT, or (2) the hacker chutzpah to break incompatible drivers frequently, so that in order to work at all, a driver has to "live in the tree" and be maintained as part of the OS. This is the route that Linux chose.
So the secret to Linux's success on servers is here: Stable API Nonsense
Why is git popular?
Projects outside the kernel began adopting Git shortly after its release. A key landmark in Git adoption came when Keith Packard, one of the lead developers of the X Window System, published two influential articles in 2007.
He saw Git as more robust from an administration point of view, which matters for open source projects that tend not to have a lot of infrastructure support.
After X moved to Git based on Keith's research, a lot of other projects outside the kernel started considering it more seriously as well.
Lanier on Flushrights
The Plumbing Clause of the US Constitution gives
Congress the power To promote the Installation of
Sanitary Plumbing, by securing for limited Times to
Plumbers the exclusive Right to their Fixtures.
Jaron Lanier has writen a powerful defense of the flushright system. Read the whole thing. The key points:
Flushing without paying flushright royalties ruins economic dignity. It doesn’t necessarily deny the plumber any form of income, but it does mean that the plumber is restricted to a real-time economic life. That means one gets paid to install or repair, perhaps, but not paid for plumbing one has done in the past. It is one thing to plumb for your supper occasionally, but to have to do so for every meal forces you into a peasant’s dilemma.
The peasant’s dilemma is that there’s no buffer. A plumber who is sick or old, or who has a sick kid, cannot work and cannot earn. A few plumbers, a very tiny number indeed, will do well, but even the most successful real-time-only careers can fall apart suddenly because of a spate of bad luck. Real life cannot avoid those spates, so eventually almost everyone living a real-time economic life falls on hard times.
Meanwhile, some third-party spy service like a social network or search engine will invariably create persistent wealth from the buildings and activities made possible by the plumbing. A plumber living a real-time career without the cash flow from coin boxes on stalls, is still free to pursue reputation and even income (through repairs, upgrades, etc.), but no longer wealth. The wealth goes to the central server.
The next time that you think about the hassle of being unable to flush the commode because your smartphone has an incompatible plumbing app, remember how the Framers in their wisdom gave exclusive rights to plumbers to protect them from misfortune. Similarly, local authorities have created exclusive rights to operate taxis. But as the global precariat grows, how can we give more workers the kind of automatic retirement and disability plan that flushrights can provide?
Finance, parking, and more
Attention people of the Internet. The links to EXAMPLES OF REALLY GOOD STUFF FOUND VIA RSS will continue until you quit it with the "RSS is dead, it's all about [chat site du jour]" posts. That is all.
Mike Masnick: Of Clotheslines, Black Swans And Bad Measurements
Mark Cuban: What Business is Wall Street In ?
Charles Marohn: Not efficient, but orderly.
Nicholas Carr: The prehistory of the MOOC
Sid Stamm: ownership and transparency in social media
Yarden Katz interviews Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong
David Gaughran: Self-Publishers Aren’t Killing The Industry, They’re Saving It
George Monbiot: Recipes for Disaster
Timothy B. Lee: Conservatives’ Reality Problem. Plus Nate Silver: In Silicon Valley, Technology Talent Gap Threatens G.O.P. Campaigns.
Sara Robinson: Bring
back the 40-hour work week - Salon.com 150
years of research proves that long hours at work kill
profits, productivity and employees.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick: Outward
and Visible Signs Stress has become, I think,
the contemporary sign of our salvation.
Alex Steffen: Move a little closer, please: ‘Carbon Zero,’ chapter 3
Yves Smith: Why Strike Debt’s Rolling Jubilee Puts Borrowers at Risk
Ann Patchett: The Bookstore Strikes Back
Joshua Foer: Utopian for Beginners (via TED Blog)
Seth Godin: The danger of starting at the top and Eleven things organizations can learn from airports
Jesse Drucker: Google Revenues Sheltered in No-Tax Bermuda Soar to $10 Billion - Bloomberg
Alastair Johnston: Opinion
Column: Why Won’t Helvetica Go Away? The
stark sans-serif look that had first symbolized
revolution in the hands of Russian typographers in
1917 became institutionalized as the bland face of
corporate smugness.
Tomi Ahonen: Kantar November Numbers: Suggest Decline in Windows Phone and.. Increase in Symbian? Nokia is so doomed
John Scalzi: A Self-Made Man Looks At How He Made It – Whatever Also: A Note to You, Should You Be Thinking of Asking Me to Write For You For Free (via Melville House Books)
Arnaud Lapierre's Doorknob Condition: Intuitive Privacy
Sheldon Richman: The Libertarian Case Against Right-to-Work Laws
Rand Ghayad and William Dickens: It’s not a skill mismatch: Disaggregate evidence on the US unemployment-vacancy relationship
Ryan Finlay makes his living buying, selling, and repairing appliances, using Craigslist: Opportunity is Often Dressed In Overalls, How to Buy a Used Washing Machine, How to Buy a Used Dryer.
Jeff Wofford: In Praise of Modern Board Games
Sheldon Richman: Libertarian Left: Free-market anti-capitalism, the unknown ideal
Liberating America's secret, for-pay laws - Boing Boing (via Sunlight Foundation Blog)
One Dad's Ill-Fated Battle Against the Princesses
BBC News - Japan's ninjas heading for extinction
Kas Thomas: Stop Stealing from Shakespeare
Why the Moon Landing Could Not Have Been a Hoax — It Wasn’t Technologically Possible to Fake It
Philip Greenspun: U.S. Limits Imported Cheese to Third of a Pound per American.
ROTFLMAO: The #MostDangerousGame by Jake Swearingen
Zócalo Public Square :: How Doctors Die
Paul Barter: Easing parking minimums is NOT war on cars (via Streetsblog Los Angeles)
Erin L. McCoy: What’s Cheaper than Solar, Slashes Carbon Emissions, and Creates Jobs in Kentucky?
Nate Hyun: The Direct Public Offering – The Original Securities-Based Crowdfunding Model
Team Hudson: Lessons from the Bounty — Pride
Erika Christakis: The Preschool Paradox
Tim Maly: The Corporation Who Would be King
QoTD: Ari Jacoby
We already have a situation where
most people don't click on ads, and the
ones that do are suspect people.
— Ari
Jacoby, CEO, Solve Media
The targeting game
We have an information gap for discussing the ad targeting problem. There are papers that, if you put them together, help substantiate the argument that adtech is bogus. But they're behind paywalls.
Here's a good one. "I'm not a high-quality firm, but I play one on TV" by Mark N. Hertzendorf. RAND Journal of Economics, vol. 24, number 2, summer 1991. $24 to download. I have a copy because I helped Doc Searls with some research for his book, The Intention Economy, but you probably don't. (I promise I'll get to the Open Access rant some other time. Yes, “closed data means people die” but we'll talk about that later.)
Advertising is a form of signaling.
Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of Ogilvy Group, said,
To a good decision scientist, a consumer
preference for buying advertised brands is perfectly
rational. The manufacturer knows more about his
product than you do, almost by definition. Therefore
the expensive act of advertising his own product is
a reliable sign of his own confidence in it. It
is like a racehorse owner betting heavily on
his own horse. Why would it be “rational” to
disregard valuable information of that kind?
But advertising can break down as a signaling
method when the medium is noisy enough that the
probability of an individual user seeing an ad is
low enough. Hertzendorf writes, Furthermore, the
noise complicates the process of customer inference.
This enables a low-quality firm to take advantage of
consumer ignorance by partially mimicking the strategy
of the high-quality firm.
That's in an environment
where the presence of many TV channels makes it harder
for the audience to figure out who's really trying
to signal. Noise helps deceptive sellers.
But what happens when we introduce targeting? Let's give the low-quality seller the ability to split the audience, without the audience members knowing, into marks and bystanders, with marks receiving the ad at higher probability. In that case, marks receive the signal of a high-quality seller, and the bystanders receive the signal of the low-quality seller.
Something that I just figured out from going over this
paper again is that the splitting of the audience
doesn't have to be accurate in order for adtech
to work. Rebecca Lieb, at iMediaConnection, points
out that her BlueKai profile is largely false, and writes,
If ad platforms aren't delivering the targeting
that advertisers are paying for, the emperor has
no clothes.
Au contraire. Ad platforms are doing their work just fine. Targeting works even if it's inaccurate, as long as it can reliably split the audience. Even the most basic cookie scheme will do that. An ad network can randomly call some users left-handed and others right-handed, or divide them by height, or whatever. The only important thing is to split the audience persistently, so that some have a higher probability of receiving an inaccurate "high-quality" signal from a deceptive seller.
Where sellers in Hertzendorf's scenario must rely on increasing noise in the medium in order to deceive, targeting lets them make the first move.
We're still in the early stages of the game, though. If an individual is aware that targeting is possible and doesn't know if he or she is mark or bystander, the signal is lost. So you get the effect that I think is happening in web advertising, with the value of the entire medium going down, even for advertisers who do not target.
However, some buyers are still unaware of the extent of targeting. One politician saw an ad for a dating site on a political party press release and attributed it to the party, not to the Google ad service used on the site where he read it.
From my point of view inside the IT business, a lot of the adtech stuff looks old and obvious, but some of the audience is still figuring it out. People already detest and block the email spam that the Direct Marketing Association worked so hard to protect, because that's obviously "addressed to me." Understanding web ad targeting is taking a lot longer, which is understandable because it's so complex. (see bonus links below for introductions to the current state of the art.)
The signaling power of an ad campaign is the seller's advertising expense as estimated by the buyer. Advertising that is itself costly, such as celebrity endorsements or signs in high-cost areas, has what you might call "creative signaling power." Advertising that is attached to a high-cost medium, such as Vogue magazine or the Super Bowl, has "media buying signaling power". And there's a multiplier effect from the quality of the ad itself, since some ads are more memorable than others and tend to make people think that they've seen them more often. (so quality does not map directly to "informative" or "entertaining".)
When an ad appears in a medium that facilitates targeting, the media buying signaling power tends to go away, depending on the accuracy of the targeting and the audience member's knowledge of the extent of targeting.
Brand advertisers, who Doc
Searls splits out from direct
response advertisers, seem to have
an understanding of the targeting problem. John
Hegarty, founder of the ad agency Bartle Bogle
Hegarty, said, I'm not sure I want people to
know who I am. I find that slightly Orwellian and I
object to it. I don't want people to know what I drink
in the morning and what I drink at night. I think
there's a great problem here - throughout history
we have fought for our freedom to be an individual,
and you're taking it away from us. I think there'll
be a huge backlash to that and Nike will have to be
very careful.
And Richard
Stacy writes, The great thing about advertising
is that no-one takes it personally.
On the audience side, we have the feeling of "creepy", which is hard to pin down, but that I think is an important notification from your inner economist about an information imbalance, which you would be mistaken to ignore.
So here, roughly, are the rounds of the adtech game. It would have been an interesting experiment to play them out in order, but this is a real-time strategy game, not a turn-oriented game. Some players have gotten to round 3, and others are still on round 1, or think they're on round 1 and are getting beaten at round 2.
Round 1: Targeting that partitions the audience without the audience's knowledge. Need not be accurate because a persistent split is enough to attract low-quality sellers. I'm using "low-quality" in the economics paper sense, not the "haha your phone sux and mine r00lz" sense. Most adtech people are not in it to deceive, but from a misguided quest for efficiency that follows from a lack of understanding of signaling.
Round 2: Audience begins to understand targeting. Ad blocking increases, value of web ads decreases. Increasingly crappy web ads drive demand for privacy tech.
Round 3: Privacy tech, such as stricter treatment of third-party cookies, makes targeting more difficult and less accurate. The value of advertising across the entire medium rises, and the sites that pay for original content are able to get more ad revenue and control, at the expense of adtech middlemen.
Just as targeting didn't have to work with total accuracy to give an advantage to deceptive signalers, privacy tech doesn't have to be 100% to push things back in the other direction.
Bonus links:
Retail Surveillance Is About To Make Your Online Targeting Seem A Lot Less Creepy
NewsCred Blog: How magazines can stay relevant in the era of branded content and digital marketing
Jim Brock: Would Do-Not-Track lead to “data oligopolies”?
Adam Lehman: Just Who Do The Data Paranoiacs Think We Are?
Scott Meyer: Why Is Another Browser Company Forcing Naive Decisions on the Internet?
Mike Daly: Today’s Burning Question: Firefox to Block Third-Party Cookies By Default
Doc Searls: How advertising can regulate itself
Advance look at post-adtech web ads: Village Soup Shows ‘Native’ Ads Can Work on Local News Sites
What everyone should know about ad serving
How and Why We Track: Confessions of an Ad "Tracking" Company
7 things you don't know about ad networks and are afraid to ask
Software patent links
I turned this in last week and forgot to link here: The America Invents Act: Fighting Patent Trolls With "Prior Art". The America Invents Act changes a bunch of what we took for granted about patent law. Disclose early! (Maybe the next step beyond continuous deployment is continuous defensive publication. What? It could happen.)
More on the patent mess:
Apple crushes Samsung in quest for global tech domination | Dan Gillmor
Eric Goldman: Preview of Our "Solutions to the Software Patent Problem" Conference
Mike Masnick: IBM Patent Lawyer Says The Patent System Works Fine Because... Hey Look Over There! and Some Thoughts On Fixing Problems In The Patent System
Joe Mullin at Ars Technica: Patent trolls want $1,000 for using scanners (via Deeplinks)
Groklaw - The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community ... Wait. What? Really? ~pj
Mark Radcliffe: 2012: Top Ten FOSS Legal Developments
Brian Seal and Tom Southard: How to Out-Nuisance a Bank Patent Troll
Joe Mullin again: How Newegg crushed the “shopping cart” patent and saved online retail (via O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies and Disruptive Competition Project)
Timothy B. Lee: Patent Lawyer: Software Patents “Restrict What Feels Like Our Treasured Personal Freedom”
Gervase Markham: An Introduction to Modern Open Source Licence Patent Clauses
Eric Schulman on the Google Public Policy Blog: Working together to reduce patent litigation (via Technology Liberation Front)
MARK CUBAN: I Sure Wish I Had Filed All Of These Uncompleted Patent Forms
Dorsey et. al. "Device independent message distribution platform": United States Patent: 8401009 (via TPM News)
Peter Schechter: Guest Editorial: Throwing Trolls Off The Bridge (via nonpracticingentities)
Daniel Nazer at EFF: Trolls and Tribulations (via ReadWrite)
software development link frenzy
Great stuff that the RSS reader dragged in, some going back quite a ways. Enjoy.
AlienVault OSSIM: The Power of All
Crowdsourced data analysis with Clockwork Raven
Artificial Intelligence Will Defeat CAPTCHA — How Will We Prove We’re Human Then?
BitZino And The Dawn Of ‘Provably Fair’ Casino Gaming (via The Monetary Future)
So long Drupal, hello WordPress
GitHub adds a command line, and so should you!
Planning Our First ShipIt Day at Caktus
Pull requests and other good practices for teams using github (via Reinout van Rees' weblog)
The MDN event reference, at last
Just Because HTML5 Was Bad For Facebook Doesn’t Mean It’s Bad For You
Android's smartphone OS upgrade issues need more than a quick fix | Dan Gillmor
Commons In A Box, ready to unbox
As Supreme Court Software Patent Ban Turns 40, It’s Time To Stop Ignoring It
Linux brings over €10 million savings for Munich - The H Open: News and Features
Why We’re Pivoting from Mobile-first to Web-first | philosophically by Vibhu Norby (via Disruptive Competition Project)
Why Nokia Lumia and Windows Phone 8 will fail - ie will never become the promised third ecosystem
How 4 Microsoft engineers proved that the “darknet” would defeat DRM | Ars Technica
Blue Beanie Day – Celebrate You!
A Primer on Cheap Software Defined Radios
On handling your pets and a CSRF protection that wasn't
Is TDD better than Apps Hungarian?
The Mathematical Hacker (via taint.org: Justin Mason's Weblog)
Samba - opening windows to a wider world
LibreOffice runs on the Raspberry Pi
Do Not Underestimate the Power of Convenience
Deciding which features to build for a big demo
I regret not learning some new tools sooner
End users are the new CIO: How Andreessen Horowitz, Box, Github, others view the enterprise in 2013
DARPA and Defense Department look to a more open source future
Git, clients, partners, and woes.
The conflict frontier of a nightmare merge
English Letter Frequency Counts: Mayzner Revisited or ETAOIN SRHLDCU
Why the Web is going to win Mobile
The New Kingmakers, The Book – Available Now
On Antifragility in Systems and Organizational Architecture
Geeks, Freaks, Nerds, & Programmers
Why Open Source Governance Matters: Vert.x Case Study
From SVN to Git: How Atlassian Made the Switch Without Sacrificing Active Development
[Book Review] Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (via P2P Foundation's blog)
Simplify Responsive Design by Embracing the Flexible Nature of the Web
Gitano – git hosting with ACLs and other shininess
Moore’s Law won’t kill passwords
Mozilla and Non-Copyleft Licensing
Is 2013 the year for DVCS domination?
Only compiler vendor customers, not its users, count
Linus Torvalds: we never ever blame user programs
SpiderOak's Analysis and Recommendations for the Crypto in Kim Dotcom's Mega, Part One
Lennart Poettering: The Biggest Myths
How FLOSS Software Became More Easily Accepted at Work
Dependency Graphs and Package Versioning
Distributed Issue Tracking with Git
App.net moves beyond its ad-free Twitter alternative, adding 10 GB of storage to share
Moore’s Law (Munitions Edition)
Git now fully supported and integrated into Team Foundation Service (via MSDN Blogs)
Stripping Referrer for fun and profit
Planet Gnome: Travis Reitter: Answering the question: "How do I develop an app for GNOME?"
MariaDB living in interesting times
Coding Horror: Civilized Discourse Construction Kit (via Rands In Repose)
Rethinking Cookies: originOnly
The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0
Everyone at Yipit is Now Learning to Code
Hello Chrome, it’s Firefox calling!
Greg Kroah-Hartman: AF_BUS, D-Bus, and the Linux kernel
mjg59 | Samsung laptop bug is not Linux specific
Ruminations on front end-centric webapps
Drupal 8 progress from my / MongoDB perspective: update #13
The New Amazon Elastic Transcoder
Open Source is the New Microsoft
Opera switching to WebKit: thoughts and guesses (via Adrian Roselli and Christian Heilmann)
I will miss the “Douglas Crockford of browsers” (via Brendan Eich)
A Few Signs That Your Project May Be In Some Serious Trouble
Branching Is Easy. So? Git-flow Is Not Agile.
What can we(Eclipse community) learn from Libre Office?
Don't use PHP libraries with known security issues
Exciting Stuff: Firefox 19′s Built-in PDF Viewer
Agile Anti-Patterns in Non-Blocking Development
KumaScript: Bringing scripting to the wiki bears
From PHP hobbyist to pro Ruby developer course – 1, Setting up the hipster blog
Wipe the Drive – Shmoocon 2013
The Magazine: now with full-article sharing, web subscriptions (via Felix Salmon)
Introducing Google+ Sign-In: simple and secure, minus the social spam
One (via Stuff Michael Meeks is doing)
Bypassing Google’s Two-Factor Authentication - Blog - Duo Security (via From the Treetops)
Converting Github issues into pull requests
The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0.1 (via Techrights) (via You can't take the sky from me.) (via Stuff Michael Meeks is doing)
RFC 6585 - Additional HTTP Status Codes (via taint.org: Justin Mason's Weblog)
its a bird, is it a space station? no its a display server
20 Rules of Software Consulting
Rendering Markdown, Asciidoc and Friends automatically while Editing
Joel On Software: Town Car Version Control
Kiln Harmony Internals: the Basics
Scripting News: If you're doing a new RSS reader... (via Planet Intertwingly)
Scripting News: Have you met your users?
Introducing SourceTree for Windows – a free desktop client for Git
Inner sourcing to open sourcing
Put Down Your Forks - Introducing Protected Branches
GitHub gains new prominence as the use of open source within governments grows (via Techrights and ReadWrite)
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
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