2007-10-02»
Intermediaries»
I have had more vivid dreams, but the last one was a long debate between me
and my friends because I was using mutt 1.0.2.1 and it was calling "mailbox
deadlocks" on their servers. Nothing more draining than waking up after
dreaming an imaginary one hour conference call, especially when you realise
you have a real one hour conference call in a few minutes. So I shan't talk
about that.
I've been spending some time explaining in a hand-waving fashion my
instincts about moving to
the very edge. Usually I keep this stuff close to my chest until I've
thought it all out, for fear of looking like an over-obvious idiot. But over
time I've seen a lot of obvious idiots become fantastically smart just by
letting it all hang out online, so I will bore you with my half-baked, poorly
styled, not-very-viral ideas as they occur.
Brief summary of the thesis: I'm bored of this current revolution, so I'm
doing the cheap trick to help plot out a possible next one, which is to
reverse and take to its extreme one of the obvious contemporary trends. My
question right now: given that we're entrusting so much data and control now
to the cloud and the server-farm, what happens if we pull the other way, and
swing more power out to the edge, and the end-user? How far can we go with
that?
Intermediaries have been what I've been considering today. Browsing EFFish
issues, I see a lot of problems which are caused by the distance between an
intermediaries' goals, and that of its customers. When your hosting provider,
includes as part of their terms and conditions that they reserve the right to
take you down if you cause
problems with them (or even criticise
them)
Intermediaries don't have to be corporate though, nor middle-men. Pooling
resources in a communal way can have problems, too (witness my dream, where my
mutt process brings down everybody else's accounts on a communal co-loc). And even
having a home server doesn't seem to fit how I imagine protecting data and
providing user power. There are interactions and privacy that exist within a
home, and between friends.
I guess what I'm imagining is the single-person server: holding and
electively sharing your data with other single-person servers. I don't see
this as substantially different from people having their own phones. Indeed,
phones
are already powerful enough to support that.
(The 21st century question about this is -- what are the energy costs? I'm
not going to have that argument for a while, because I want to find out more
about the nature of decentralised energy systems.)
2007-09-29»
spooky»
I'm in the air, wheeling into San Francisco, having just finished William
Gibson's Spook
Country. I brought it with me on a trip to Canada, because you
should read later Gibson on airplanes and in slightly-foreign Western hotels,
just as you should read Ballard in airports and light industrial parks, and
William Burroughs off your face on purest horse.
I like Gibson in exactly the way you thought I would, so I'm not sure I can
say anything unpredictable here. The potted-review I came up with when I was
about twenty pages will do: This feels like Eighties Gibson, writing about our
recent past as his envisaged near future. Set in 2006, it has geohacking,
retro-fame, rogue states, cold war warriors gone white hot with rage: they're
all written about as though extrapolated from 1985, instead of marked back
from 2007. I feels like a 20th century dystopia, which sadly doubles up as
rather optimistic from our point of view.
There, gnomic enough for you? I'm trying to be awkward. I was mildly
irritated all the way through by a spoiler I'd read in a review -- which
turned out not to be a spoiler at all, but an inept phrasing by the critic.
No-spoilers are even worse than spoilers, because you don't even have that
grim sensation of following through. You just read to the end of the book, and
then go "Hey, wait, wasn't it supposed to turn out they were all otters all
along?"
I'm still having dreams -- which may, now I think about it, due to my
steadily worsening stomach (it may be horrendously nasty gut-rot, but I doubt
it: I think it's just IBS turned psychosomatically psychopathic. I'm seeing a
gastro in a fortnight. I'm sure he'll just recommend a change of diet.
Gastro! The menu!).
Last night I dreamt I was in a jeep in South America with Cory, planting
explosives to covertly excavate out a new, spare, Panama canal for the US.
The day before I was a sort of inept Professor Xavier, doing childcare for a
bunch of superpowered preschoolers and having to defend them from some bigger
supercriminal kids. Lots of soccer-coach encouragement of them to shoot
percussive sonic blasts while I cowered behind them. This is a parental
anxiety dream, but more exciting than most.
I was in Canada to meet with privacy activists. I
can't give you their names because obviously we all met in darkened rooms
wearing blindfolds. I did get to see Michael Chertoff
give a keynote though. Boy did he misread the audience. Never
ever tell an international conference of data protection and privacy
commissioners that you can scan a fingerprint at the US border, and match it
to a print on a document found in a safe house in Europe. Because while
you're sitting there thinking "hooray for l33t national security tricks!",
they're thinking: what the hell else are you doing with that tech?
I guess we're all in a fucking jeep driven by a science fiction author
now.
