Arrington’s Email Address Unusable in Andromeda Galaxy?

Super interesting Gillmore Group podcast today, if a little hot-headed at times. This has to be my new favorite podcast. Link.

At one point, about 45 minutes in, the group starts talking about the now famous(?) incident-turned-thought-experiment where Mark Scoble had used Plaxo to scrape an email address off one of his friend’s Facebook profile (Michael Arrington’s).

The basic problem is this: If Arrington had his way, Scoble would be able to enter Arrington’s secret email address into Gmail, because Arrington trusts Gmail. But Scoble wouldn’t be able to enter the secret email address into Plaxo, because Arrington doesn’t trust Plaxo.

To achieve this programmatically, we’d want a data-sharing framework set up whereby the secret email address would be wrapped a protective permissions blanket that would automatically prevent unwanted people from seeing it and using it. Only too bad the Gillmor Group didn’t talk about how this permission system would work, because I think the devil is in the details. Such a system would be an example of Digital Rights Management (”Code is Law!”); and through this system Arrington avoids having to take Scoble to court because the secret email address manages itself. Don’t we all love DRM?

So what might the DRM permission system look like? I was thinking about one straw man proposal and it got me cringing: What if it were a white-list. Then Arrington could block Plaxo? But how would it work when Scoble wants to enter Arrington’s secret email address into some completely new web system that Arrington doesn’t know whether he trusts or not? ((i.e. Can he play his dvd on linux? no.)) It doesn’t work.

Worse, take the white-list straw man into the future with an analogy for distributed computer systems: What happens if Scoble leaves the galaxy with Arrington’s protected secret, and meets an alien email system that purports to be able to send email privately AND faster than light. Scoble trusts it, and boy, what a great way to call home! But is he allowed to enter Arrington’s secret address? Or does he have to wait 22 million light years to get an updated permission set from Arrington? The white-list straw man doesn’t scale, and it impedes progress.

Hopefully the Gillmor Group will be telling us about DRM that does work soon.

Seems to me that the most useful permission system would allow for a sort of weighted transitive trust network. Returning finally to the original incident about the facebook-scraped email, here are my two cents: If someone provides you with their email address, the typical understanding is one of transitive trust: “Here’s my email address, I want you to have it. Use whatever software you use, but protect my data like you’d protect your own.” In this light at least, Scoble wasn’t wrong; he was just using his address book software.

Privacy == Can of worms.

Larry Lessig for Congress

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/02/stanford-law-pr.html

A Nice Video Describing DataPortability.org

DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

DataPortability.org: Your Lifestream in the Metaverse?

According to this article today on ReadWriteWeb (great blog about the social web), it looks like the invitations from the technical working group DataPortability.org to Google and Facebook and Plaxo have been accepted. The basic idea behind DataPortability.org is that a user’s social profile data should be portable between systems. Profile data can include not only who you are, but what you do, and what you like.

One example of the emerging technologies affiliated with DataPortability.org is APML (Attention Profiling Markup Language). This is an XML encoding of what you are interested in finding on the internet, and what sources you trust for information. It’s an expression of your tastes, computerized. Just the sort of information Netflix and Amazon, etc., separately maintain about you today, in their own ways.

The question DataPortability.org raises is: What if you “owned” all this very useful formalized data about yourself, and could share it with whom and what you wish, when and where you wish? (More questions follow in all directions: Where is this information stored? How you make sense of it in ways that are also portable? How is this private information sharable and protectable at the same time?)

DataPortability.org technologies could change the internet tremendously. For one thing, instead of logging in to a social networking site to find out what your friends are doing, you’ll soon be asking something more like search engine, supplying as a parameter your identification and your friends list. Score one for Google, I think. For two, next time you walk into a bar, expect flashing lights around the heads of the people who’s interests match yours. Score one for…the metaverse?

New Year’s Resolution

I think my sister-in-law was joking when she suggested it, but I sort of like it, and with an iPhone it should be easy: My new year’s resolution for 2008 is to spend more time on the internet.

Link: Batteries an Order of Magnitude Better

This is great news. Lithium-ion battery life should soon be increasing tenfold thanks to the nanotechnology of Yi Cui and his group of Stanford researchers: Stanford Report

Link: Scholarly Articles on Social Network Sites

This month’s online edition of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication has some interesting articles on Social Network Sites.

Check out the fig. 1 graphic “Launch Dates of Major Social Network Sites” from Boyd and Ellison’s “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship”.

And since it is now a subject of scholarly debate, to those who wonder what killed Friendster, the deleting of the fakesters or the scaling problems, I would just like to submit that my cat was never deleted.

Link: GalaxyZoo.org

Is this a spiral galaxy, an elliptical galaxy, or a merger of galaxies? My best guess was that it’s a merger, so that’s what I told GalaxyZoo.org, a new crowdsourcing web application for classifying the galaxies that the computer vision algorithms could not. You make an account, run through a quick tutorial on how to recognize the different types of galaxies, and then they set you loose on their database. It’s pretty fun.

Graham Glass’s Destiny

This interesting guy I used to work for at webMethods, Graham Glass (blog), has a great idea for an epic sci-fi movie about life going digital. It’s called Destiny. He’s put together an awesome video movie pitch, and has this blog post about it. My prediction: ‘Destined to be renamed’. But seriously, it’s awesome: There’s digital life, low-gravity sex, and scene 14 is called “Moving Minds,” which is also the name of a 1997 song from my band, DRB.

Graham told me he’s left the ending open at this point. Here’s what I’d like to see: The door opens, and standing there in the film is the viewer’s own digital twin, custom rendered using Google image search while the movie was streamed to the viewer over the net. Well, you’ll just have to see it. And that’s no spoiler. Pass the link around, too, so this movie gets made.

Metaverse Roadmap

Wondering where all this new ubiquitous computing and 3D virtual worlds technology is leading us? Me, too. There is some interesting brainstorming and predictive work coming out of the Metaverse Roadmap project, which has just published the Metaverse Roadmap Overview (3.x MB).

Update, July 3: Mmmm movies! I just found some rad video interviews of the three main authors of the MetaVerse Roadmap Overview document, recorded by Elon University/Pew Internet’s Imagining the Internet Project in May 2006 at the Metaverse Roadmap Summit at Stanford Research Institute. These links open new windows for Jerry Paffendorf, Jamais Cascio, and John Smart.

About one of them, I know Jerry from Brooklyn, and he told me about a hundred awesome things, but I never heard him mention the 3D scanner cameras before. So brilliantly obvious, why didn’t I think of them the other day for AVSynth? Screw rendering 3D from disparate photos, we’ll just poke a second eye in the iPhones for stereoscopic imaging. Here’s news and a video from last August about a 3D live motion video camera that uses lasers. Hello mirror world.