Web 2.0.11562 beta

OK I have never been a fan of Adobe flash, but never thought of it as something I would not allow to execute either. Adobe was never interested in web standards, they always chose to go the closed, proprietary route with Flash.

Now over time, javascript evolved to enable the same capabilities as flash, and yet it remains an embedded plugin on most people’s browsers. In fact niches have evolved, particularly in the advertising space, where flash is the best choice. When short animations or video clips need to be paired with transmitting data to and from the client, flash is the obvious tool of choice.

And this is really the basis for my complaint against flash. With javascript in charge there are real and quantifiable dangers. Any javascript code on a page can interfere, snoop on, change, and take data from anything else on the page. Javascript code on a web page cannot protect itself against other script or indeed the page itself, and vice versa.

However, this is a well understood issue, and browser vendors have the ability to shut it down at any time. They had better do so promptly.

But with flash, they’re dealing with an opaque agent. It can be limited in the same ways as javascript, so all seems OK right?

Well this week we heard of an exploit to flash that was very serious. A bug which enabled an attacker to gain control of your machine’s camera and microphone. Adobe shut it down very quickly. All’s well then, eh?

Hang on, how were they able to shut fix it so quickly? How many millions of flash plugins installed on how many millions of machines? Believe it or not, Adobe decided to design a system architecture in which access control is managed remotely by Adobe. Code running on THEIR servers decides if access to YOUR camera is allowed. If you care at all about where security decisions about your machine are made, I need say no more.

Domainers complain a lot about Google. Or at least some of the high profile domainers do. I think most of the old guard in this industry seems to have lost perspective on things, and this is one area where that really shows.

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you, Google did more than any other company to create a world where you can monetize thousands of domain names with little or no effort. They often mean the difference between having domain portfolios pay for themselves and having a carrying cost. They opened markets where there were no affiliate choices or direct advertisers for years, including foreign markets.

So why the disgruntlement? I think a lot of old-school domainers are living in the past decade. They moan and groan about dwindling returns from parked pages, when they’ve invested no effort to make their investment work for them. The Internet moves on, and leaves behind those stuck in old modes of thinking.

Same can be said for the core growth area of the industry, the center of what’s exciting and dynamic — new TLDs set to start appearing next year. The old guard, as well as most of the traditional marketing world seems to be depressed about the prospects for new TLDs. They couldn’t be MORE WRONG!

There’s a fundamental shift taking place in the domaining industry, and some veterans are starting to sense that they’re going to be left behind. The most exciting times yet are approaching; are you ready?

Facebook is everywhere. Does that mean you should be afraid of them? No.

Should you have concerns about Facebook and your privacy? Emphatically, yes!

Number one reason why => their poor track record of making the wrong decisions about privacy at pretty much every turn so far in their history.

First of all, they set use cookies – session cookies and tracking cookies. Most sites do. The session cookies were not being deleted upon logging out of facebook until a bruhaha earlier this year. Careless about privacy – it’s a recurring theme with these guys.
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Tonight I did a Git presentation for a local programmer group. I stole some of the images (just the few that are the very best ones!) from Scott Chacon presentations.

Here’s the slides, in case you’re having trouble falling asleep. Notice that there are way too many of them. here’s the slideshow => http://git.mikeward.org and here’s the files with images and all, on github (so feel free to clone it)
=> https://github.com/mdw/git_preso

It went very well but was long. I tried to hurry, but wanted to do live demos, and try to answer questions. But it turned out pretty well anyway. My only regret is that I did not get to demo rebase -i. It’s the coolest git command around, letting you rewrite an overly verbose history of small commits so you can push out a clean history of sensible commits. Commit all the time locally, then make the history easier for anyone looking later, then push it out there.
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The thing about the web is you can build to your heart’s content. Ever really thought about what you’d like to build?

Ancient peoples built stone artifacts that remain to this day – Stonehenge, Acropolis, the Pyramids. When better building techniques emerged in and after the renaissance people built wondrous and unique monuments like the Sistine Chapel, the Taj Mahal, the Grand Palace in Bangkok, and so many more. We’ve never stopped building more and more marvelous structures in the physical world.

It is possible to build things online which are different. We can build something which will likely never be observed the same way twice regardless of how often it is viewed.

It is easy to build something that generates new content every time someone views it. We should build more things online that generate new content each time they are viewed, where that new content depends upon who the viewer is.

And it certainly is possible to build elaborate shrines, like grand digital mausoleums. As the next generation of folks start dying, there will be more and more people with large collections of content about them. Photos, audio and video recordings, blog posts, even websites.

Surely the need will arise for digital memorials. Provide a website with a domain that will continue to be renewed for a specified period of time. Populate this website with aggregated content about this person, in a tasteful way, and voila!

Online, persistent tributes to loved ones – this should be a growing business opportunity.

It is not easy to tell how much information is on the Internet today. You must first define what you intend to count, be it kilobytes of stored data, number of unique web pages, number of web sites, etc. Next you must pick a strategy of counting or estimating and then extrapolating. This is of course, a moving target, so enumeration is not feasible.

Let’s say you want to count the number of websites reachable today without venturing inside any blocking firewalls. Counting this subset of websites, however you choose to define them, is easier than the other two examples of things to count.
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.GAY has plenty of people talking, yet it may face a tough ICANN evaluation. It’ll surely have applicants, but will it meet the criteria for acceptance by ICANN? We’ll find out early next year!

Dot Gay Alliance is a coalition preparing to apply for this proposed new TLD. They announced their intentions publicly and are led by Joe Dolce and Paula Ettelbrick. They seem to imply that they are the least commercially motivated applicants.

They have support in various quarters, including New York City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn. They are headquartered in New York City unlike the other applicant, headquartered in San Fransisco.

The other probable applicant for .GAY is a team led by Scott Seitz and Alexander Schubert, which seems to have a strong grassroots backing in the GLBT community. More info about this well developed effort at dotgay.org.
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In the early days it meant putting all the processing capabilities in central servers and accessing them remotely with “dumb clients.” The advent of the PC changed that paradigm. Now mobile devices are re-shaping it yet again.

This is a very old topic in computer science. And no I’m not referring to ignorant customers, I’m talking about clients in the sense of client-server computing.

As computers shrunk from room-sized devices to mainframes, it became possible to allow many people to connect using much cheaper client terminals. Early on they were simply text terminals, and were used to type commands to be executed on the real computer.
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In the early days storage was not persistent. Data was loaded together with program instructions, and resided in RAM during program execution, because external storage was expensive and error prone.

Using external hard disks became popular with the rise of mainframes and minicomputers, when the access times and prices became tolerable. This shift brought huge advantages; the ability to persist data and the operating system’s ability to treat it as virtual memory.

Now we store a lot of data on remote servers. Just as the dwindling access times made hard drives viable for computers, reasonable network latency and data compression makes remote server storage feasible.
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There are groups eager to bring new real estate related domains to fruition in next year’s new TLD application frenzy. Applications will be submitted in a few months, and the remainder of next year will likely be spent in the approval process.

ICANN must look at the qualifications, according to their guidelines, of the new strings. They will also qualify the applicants. There will also be some contention for some of the strings, which could result in deals being made, litigation, and ultimately auctions.

It looks like their will be some real estate related TLDs applied for, not surprisingly. Keep in mind that many would-be applicants are not disclosing their plans publicly at this point, and some that are simply state their intent with no detail disclosed in an attempt to dissuade others form applying for the same string.

With that in mind, let’s take a quick look at the current situation.
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