Future plans for Silverglass

I've got two general plans. One is to move a chunk of the site over to Google Sites as a short-term measure. XMission's done a good job of hosting the web site and e-mail, but I'm wanting to do things I can't do on their service. I want to run my own e-mail server, for instance, so I can provide service to a few friends. I want an external shell server, and I want a Web server I can set up to host other domains if I want to. I need my own host under my control for all that. The problem is I can't set all of that up overnight, so I need a temporary place to hold the web site while I sort out all the rest.

Long-term I want to set up CMS and website-editing software that'll let me do a lot more with the site without having to mess with editing HTML directly, and move the site completely onto my own server. Google Sites is nice for content, but I can't run custom back-end applications on it. I've got a few webapps I want to play with, and I need a server I can run them on. I may start by keeping the text portion on Google Sites and using my own server only for the webapps, but long term I want to be self-sufficient. The trick will be to find software that lets me create page templates and fill in just the content without limiting me to only doing that. Oh, and a model that lets me create/edit everything locally and publish to the site only when it's all correct is a must. Live editing of the site is a no-no.

PC vs. post-PC

To me the whole argument doesn't make sense. The world simply isn't going to dump what we consider the PC, it's just too useful. To me the argument boils down to one of form factor vs. usage:

Desktop. A standard large-case PC with a separate keyboard, mouse and monitor. It's advantage is, to quote Tim Allen, "MORE POWER!". It can run pretty much the most powerful CPUs around full-bore constantly without overheating. It doesn't worry about draining a battery. It can have a lot of screen real-estate with multiple large monitors. It can have a full-sized keyboard and mouse. It's got lots of relatively fast local storage, and continuous network access. It's nailed down to a single location and tethered to the network via a wire, which makes securing it easy. And while that's also it's biggest downside, the spot it's at is also where most of an office worker's work is anyway. It's most useful when you've got a lot of text to type, data to enter, output to view. It's, quite bluntly, the full-sized pickup truck or van of the computer world.

Notebook. Not the ultra-light, the totable one you carry around in a bag. You plop it down on a table, plug it in to power and maybe a network jack, and you're good to go. It's got a smaller keyboard, mouse and display than a desktop, and not as much horsepower under the hood, but it's ideal when you need something you can plop down anywhere but not something you have to constantly carry around. Think a businessman at a hotel, or someone out at a customer site for the afternoon. It's literally a portable substitute for the desktop, not a mobile device.

Netbook. This is the ultra-light. It's small, low-powered and easy to carry. Ideal for when you need to do some stuff that involves a keyboard but need something you can carry around all the time. It's what you might take to the coffee shop when you expected to be doing some IMing or light typing, but didn't expect to be typing page after page. Typically has a wireless network interface, and connectivity is assumed to be intermittent.

Tablet. Something from about the size of a paperback book up to a clipboard. No keyboard, no mouse, it's based around a touchscreen interface. You aren't going to be doing a lot of typing of text on this, the interface just isn't suited to it. But you can browse the Web easily, and deal handily with applications that involve selecting things from what's displayed on the screen. It's network interface is wireless, and it can't assume a constant network connection. Great for a lot of floor work like taking inventory, and times when you need to view the Web but not enter a lot of data.

Smartphone. Sizes up to about the size of a paperback book. It's mostly a scaled-down version of a tablet, the much smaller screen size being the big distinguishing feature. Where a tablet might be able to get away with the same sort of presentation you'd see on a notebook or desktop system, there's no way that works here. The other big difference is that, since it's expected to be connected to a cel phone network, it assumes a more constant network connection. It may take advantage of a wireless network if one's available, but if no it's still got a data connection through the cel network. Where a tablet's used to a greater degree for processing data and doing things, the smartphone form factor's used more for communication. Voice, video, IM, it's a pocket-sized device for talking to other people that oh, by the way, can also display data. A tablet, OTOH, is a device that displays and lets you manipulate data and oh, by the way, can also probably be used as a phone.

You can see how different the various categories are in terms of what people do with them. I think people don't want a replacement for the standard desktop PC, unless it's to replace it with a laptop that can accept attaching a larger monitor and a better keyboard and mouse for desktop use. And even then a lot of people would wonder why bother, since they don't want to take their desktop home with them. They either want something else instead of the desktop, because they don't do the things a desktop is good at and spend all their time doing things the netbook, tablet or smartphone form factors are good at, or they want those other form factors as an adjunct to the desktop with data shared between the various units. In large part what they want is the way Google services work: I can tie my Google address book and calendar into my e-mail program and when I update a contact there or through the Web interface the changes automatically show up on my phone, and vice-versa. If I change a document on the tablet, I want to see the changed version on my desktop system. I may want to make up my grocery list using a tablet as I check the cupboards and freezer for what we're out of, and then be able to call up that shopping list on the pocket-sized smartphone while I'm shopping and all I'm doing is scrolling through the list and marking things off as I get them (I could carry the tablet along, but it's a little big to fit in a pocket conveniently).

But in the end, I don't expect people will give up their big desktop systems for things like gaming or typing long documents or working with large spreadsheets or all the other stuff you do at the office. And I sure don't see PC gamers giving up their systems, there's just too much stuff you can do with a full keyboard and mouse that console games don't have the input devices to match. We'll be in a post-PC world in the same way IT is in a post-mainframe or post-COBOL world, or the way computers have led us into a post-paper world, or the way nuclear reactors and solar power have led us into a post-steam-boiler world. Oh, that's right, nuclear reactors and most large-scale solar farms just... boil water using a new heat source. Mainframes and COBOL are still firmly entrenched. And paper, well, "It's the 21st century. Where's my paperless office?". I don't expect "post-PC" to be any different. We'll add new devices and new capabilities, and the PC will adapt to work with them without ever disappearing (or even becoming less of a central player).

Google+ (and other social-media sites) privacy issues

A lot's been said about the privacy issues of Google+. I'd note that there's a flip side, too. Robert Heinlein pointed out that one of the best ways to lie is to tell the truth, but not all of it. Sites like Facebook and Google+ can be turned around and used to lay down the trail you want other people to find. It doesn't have to be a complete trail, just convincing. When someone goes looking, they'll find the trail you want them to find. And since they have found a trail, often they won't go looking for other trails. And if they do and you catch them at it, you have a good case for harassment against them. After all, they'll have to admit that they did find the data on you, and that it all pointed to completely uninteresting places and results, and exactly what evidence do they have that there's anything more? None.

It's a piece of advice for the Evil Overlord's Accountant: keep 4 sets of books. The first set contains records that are completely and utterly clean and prove that the Evil Overlord is a saint and completely and utterly above suspicion of even littering. The second set, which you reluctantly let investigators find if they aren't buying the first set, contains records that match up with the totals for the first set but have some transactions that, while they appear illegal at first glance, turn out upon further investigation to be merely shady and embarrassing but completely legal. Any investigators will probably have stirred up some trouble with their efforts to uncover this second set, and after getting all excited about their initial findings will likely have egg on their faces after it all turned into duds on them, and their superiors will be more than happy to just drop the investigation before they're embarrassed any further.

Apply this tactic with social networks. If you have things to hide, set things up so you're easy to find and lay down a nice innocuous trail using those profiles. Then quietly do anything you don't want people finding out about under alternate identities that don't have any connection to your public profile. After all, it's easy on even Google+ to set up a profile under a fictitious name, as long as the name itself doesn't draw attention and you're discrete about what information you fill in. Just remember that these sites record IP addresses, so use some form of proxy to avoid linking profiles by "they're accessed from the same computer".

Google+ real-name issue

I can see the arguments on both sides, and they aren't mutually incompatible.

People want to be anonymous. They want to eg. criticize corporations and governments without necessarily opening themselves up to having government agents showing up at their workplace, or corporate lawyers contacting their employer. More innocuously, they want to have a private side of their life that isn't mixed up with their work and professional life.

Other people want continuity of identity. They want to know that when a given name speaks it's the same person, and that a single person can't trivially have a multitude of identities and turn themselves into a virtual crowd that can drown everyone else out or create the illusion of popular support for a position that lacks such support.

Google wants things tied to a single identity, so they can link activities to individual users in a coherent manner. They want to know what your search history is so they can correctly determine what's popular and what's not.

This can in large part be done by disconnecting your profile from your account. Your account gets verified, making it possible but non-trivial to create multiple accounts. Only Google gets to see your account. You can then create one or more profiles linked to that account. The profile can have any name you want, any other information you want, and the information doesn't need to match from profile to profile. They all tie back to the account so Google can audit and track things, but that link's invisible to the public. If someone thinks you're creating sock-puppet profiles, they can file a complaint and Google can verify whether the profiles are all linked to the same account or not without needing to let the world see the link. People can be assured that a given profile belongs to the same person over time, and a name can build up a reputation without people needing to know the exact person behind the name. The profile's identified by a unique identifier like a profile ID, not by the name, so you can see if a different profile's trying to masquerade as an established name. Most everybody's requirements are met.

The problem comes with anonymity. That depends entirely on Google's willingness (and legal ability) to say to someone showing up demanding the account information behind a profile "Do you have a court order? No? Then come back when you have one.". And that in turn depends on a more basic legal/political issue: requiring someone to show that the person behind the identity has in fact done something actionable before being allowed to demand their identity so legal action can commence. To me that sounds reasonable, and in fact the law technically requires charges to be supported before they can even be filed, but in practice the courts seem reluctant to tell a plaintiff or prosecutor "You haven't supported your charges. Go away until you can.". That's a political problem, one that needs addressed by pressuring the politicians to state explicitly that plaintiffs and prosecutors aren't allowed to file charges or commence legal action without solid evidence to support the claims already being on the table. Until that happens there's no way to both allow anonymity and be able to hold bad actors responsible for their actions, and you can't have a civilized environment without both of those.

Microsoft dumping .Net for HTML5/Javascript

Mike James wrote a blog entry about this. My immediate thought: what did you expect? Microsoft sets their roadmap based on their business needs and what'll benefit them, not what'll benefit their developers. And Microsoft is focused on one thing: insuring that Microsoft controls everything. When they think "cross-platform", they mean "across all Microsoft platforms". They want it to be easy to have apps run on all their platforms, from desktops to phones, and to be as hard as possible to make those things run on any other platform. If things do run on other platforms, they want to insure that Microsoft is a required part of the infrastructure anyway.

C# and .Net and Silverlight are problematic for Microsoft because they can run on other platforms, and when they do other Microsoft products and platforms aren't required. It's not easy but the Mono project has demonstrated that you can create a C# compiler and .Net runtime for Linux, and once it exists for Linux it's a lot easier to port it to any other Unix variant. Silverlight will likely fall into the same category. But HTML5/JS has one big advantage: it's limited enough that you can't create an entire complex application in it. You can do the UI part, but you're going to need a back-end to handle things that just can't be done in Javascript. Microsoft's hope is to use the standardized nature of HTML5/JS to sell management by making sure the "standards-compliant" checkbox is checked, while doing some things under the hood and in the client/server communication with the back-end to insure that you'll need a Windows system in the mix to successfully run one of their new apps. Think back to ASP and how it got tied into IE-specific bits of Javascript and HTML to the point where it was hard to make ASP webapps work right anywhere but in IE. How successful Microsoft will be with this is up in the air, but I think their goal is what it's always been: to make sure it's Microsoft and Windows everywhere, for everything, to the exclusion of everything and everyone else.

As a developer, make no mistake: Microsoft does not care about you. You are important only insofar as you buying into their roadmap is needed for it to succeed. Once that's no longer needed you're at best unnecessary and at worst competition to be eliminated (every sale of software you write is the loss of a sale of something Microsoft wrote or could write, and you selling your software at the expense of Microsoft doesn't benefit Microsoft).

Sony PSN compromise

We've all seen the news about Sony's PlayStation Network being compromised. It's bad enough the bad guys got personal information. It's worse that they got credit-card numbers. But it's downright unbelievable that they got passwords!

OK, first off: users are partly to blame. You shouldn't be sharing passwords between services. Whatever password you used for PSN shouldn't be used elsewhere.

But that doesn't excuse Sony. The passwords should never have been stored on the servers. Unix has handled that for years. It doesn't store your password, it stores a one-way cryptographic hash of your password. Remember that it doesn't need to know your password, it only needs to confirm that you know your password. So instead of storing your password it runs it through a cryptographic hash algorithm and stores the result. When you enter your password, it runs what you entered through the same algorithm and compares the result to the stored value. If you entered the right password, the two will match. If they don't, you didn't enter the right password. If you chose a strong algorithm it won't be feasible to take the stored hash value and reverse the process to get the original password, and there's no reason not to choose a strong (SHA-1 or better) algorithm since there's plenty of easy-to-use cryptography libraries out there (many of the best don't even cost money).

And credit-card numbers? In this day and age we should be able to do better verification of credit cards. Check ID for in-store purchases, for instance. But most fraud is on-line, you say? We can still do better. Requiring the CVV2 for all non-recurring purchases, for instance. Or linking your cel phone number to your credit card and using text messages to confirm the purchase. When a non-CVV2 charge is attempted, you get a text from the card issuer with details. You then have to text a charge ID code plus an authorization code (CVV2 or other set value) back to confirm the charge. No confirmation = charge declined. Now to make a fraudulent charge the bad guys not only need to get your card number, they need to clone your cel phone which means they need to know your cel phone number, SIM serial number and IMEI and they have to set up actual hardware. These guys operate wholesale, adding the time to do that work makes an 80-90% dent in the number of transactions they can run which pretty much hoses their business model.

Or better yet, for recurring payments go to a "push" or customer-originated payment system. So for PSN, instead of giving them your credit-card number and letting them initiate charges, PSN gives you a merchant account ID and transaction code. You go to your bank (or more likely to their Web site) and set up a payment to that merchant account for the amount required, using the transaction code as a reference number. Your bank then sends the money to PSN's account. End of most existing types of credit-card fraud, because merchants don't need to know any payment information anymore. The only thing you'd need a normal merchant-initiated charge for is over-the-phone purchases, and even then if you've got a cel phone the verification process above's possible.

So why are we still doing things the old-fashioned, fraud-prone way?

ASP.Net ViewState

Really really dumb idea: using a complex, high-overhead ViewState mechanism to set field values in the Web page returned from posting a form instead of simply setting the field values in the returned page. I mean, the posted page has the values populated, that's it's whole purpose. So when generating the response page, simply set the value attributes to what the fields' values were in the post request. Simple, no? Apparently not for Microsoft.

California stores can't store your ZIP code

A ruling came down from the California Supreme Court that's eminently sensible: your ZIP code constitutes personally identifiable information that can be used in conjunction with your name to determine where you live and exactly who you are, and California merchants aren't allowed to keep it on file. To me this is eminently sensible.

Now, the reporting on CNN is a bit hysterical. The reporting says retailers can't ask for your ZIP code. The ruling, OTOH, says explicitly that retailers can ask for it and use it in conjunction with authorizing your credit card, and notes that this is what the law explicitly says and not their interpretation. It's the recording of the ZIP code for uses other than authorizing a credit-card transaction that the law and this ruling prohibit. This ruling doesn't do a thing to compromise transaction security or identify verification. All it does is remind retailers (and the lower courts) that yes the law really does prohibit a retailer from building a database of consumers and their buying habits without the explicit consent of the consumer. I know retailers don't like that, but them's the breaks. Consumers don't like retailers doing it, and there's no particular reason businesses should always get their way regardless of how their customers feel. Businesses always say that if consumers don't like practices they always have the option of not patronizing those businesses. Well, if businesses don't like California's practices they always have the option of not doing business in California, no? Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

PS3 root signing key revealed

Apparently GeoHot has found and published the root key used by the Playstation 3 to sign and verify games. Not just the public key used for verification, mind you, which is the easy part. They've published the private key used to sign the game executables. With the private key, you can sign your own executables and they'll be accepted by the PS3 without needing any hacks, kludges or bug exploits. This is a big deal because the key's pretty firmly embedded in the hardware itself. A simple new firmware update can't change it. And if new hardware doesn't accept the old key, then all existing games simply won't play on the new hardware.

Frankly I don't see why the console makers are so bent on keeping anything but their approved software from running on the consoles. It makes no sense. Someone who wants to run, say, Linux on the PS3 still has to buy the full-blown PS3 console, there's no way around paying Sony for that. They may not buy any games if all they're interested in is running Linux, but then if they couldn't run Linux they wouldn't be buying those games either, nor would they be buying the PS3. They might use this ability to cheat at single-player games, but what's that hurt? They're still buying the PS3 and still buying the games, and there's nobody else to be affected by their cheating. Multi-player games... hacked games might be an issue, except that those games already have lots of ways of detecting cheating on the server side where it's safe from user intervention. For instance, to prevent target hacks simply don't send the client information about objects it can't see. Not even the best hack can target what doesn't exist.