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Oblomovka

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2007-11-14

how many nines does one person need?
Part of a series of blog posts:

  1. Independence Day
  2. Intermediaries
  3. Death by Boredom
  4. H-T-T-P, You Know Me
  5. Reachability on the Edge
  6. How Many Nines Does One Person Need?

In case you think this piece is more incoherent than usual, I should explain that you’re reading it as I write it. More on that when I finally write the final conclusion to the piece. If you’re looking at this in an RSS reader, and there’s about five million other earlier versions, I apologise. Your aggregator is doing something that I wasn’t expecting, and I think may be a little silly. As the old spammers used to say, “just hit delete!”

So the edge (which is to say, where you live: your home server, your cellphone even, whatever is closest to you on the Internet) seems to be getting more reachable than it was. But what about reliability? If you’ve ever run an important service on your home machine, you’ll know about the Vacation Effect. This is a mysterious force which causes the home computer that to handles your email to crash within hours of you leaving home for a three week vacation, causing you to have to advertise for burglars on Craigslist to break into your home and reboot it.

Even if you can imagine the hardware at your house to be somehow more reliable, there’s always your flakey Net connection, which is up and down like a sine wave’s drawers. Dynamic IPs dynamically change, cable modems reset every few minutes, DSLs are flippantly unplugged by backhoes and disgruntled CO engineers. How could you possible imagine you could run a reliable service on that?

So, as some of you might have guessed, I moved Oblomovka off its co-loc a few weeks ago when I started this series, and transferred the whole website to my Mac Mini (perversely running Ubuntu) that I have in my cupboard here at home. I haven’t heard anyone complain about its unavailabilty, but then again I haven’t invited comments. I’m pretty sure it’s been down a few times, and as its heaviest user, I know I haven’t been able to ping it on occasion.

But it hasn’t been a huge problem. Partly because I’m not really an essential service to anyone else. Oblomovka down? Oh well, I guess I only have a few hundred other blogs to search. Mostly, though, I think it’s down to my first major point:

Now, smart readers may have spotted the problem here. I began this discussion because I was confused and worried that we hand over our most private data to companies like Google, and SixApart and Amazon, when really the safest place to keep private data is on your own machine. Am I now suggesting that if somehow it’s okay that your edge server is flakey, because, hey, you can always use Google, and SixApart and Amazon. Aren’t I contradicting myself?

Yes. NO. Hold on. There’s a real difference between holding your data yourself and passing it to others in the event of emergency or changed circumstance. It would be better to think of these cloud services not as where you keep your data, but as temporary caches for the edge. I have an encrypted backup stored somewhere out there. I’m confident that only I have access to that. I’m not sure what I’d do if my home system did go down, but in an ideal world, I’d just feed that backup my key, have it float into operation on an EC2 machine, and then point oblomovka’s DNS to itself. When I had time to get things back to normal at home, I’d evaporate that EC2 machine. Oh, sure, evil gnomes from DoubleClick or the NSA might have pickpocketed that image while it was running, but I would at least have some intimation that was happening (just as the cops might break into my house and feel my pants, but I’d have a hair on the window if I was truly that paranoid). And if what we were talking about was truly just a cache of my current state (like a memcache of the last time my server was around), then it would not expose much deep knowledge of your precious life.

Especially as the benefits of being on the edge grew. For instance, for those of you peering at this from your RSS feed or on the Website before 12:20AM PDT, you’ll have noticed that I’ve been typing this directly into my home server. The words appear almost one by one on the site, as I tweak and update it. I could do that with a remote server, but it’d be a pain: the proximity of the edge to where I am gives the me the low latency and the reactivity to do these things. I feel nearer to the Net when it works like this. It feels more like I thought the Net would be, and more like how I think it will be soon.

Reached this point at:2007-11-15T00:11-0800. Keeping the message at the top to give an idea of how this might have felt to watch being typed at the time. Still under construction for typos and grammar fixes.

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2007-11-13

reachability on the edge
Part of a series of blog posts:

  1. Independence Day
  2. Intermediaries
  3. Death by Boredom
  4. H-T-T-P, You Know Me
  5. Reachability on the Edge
  6. How Many Nines Does One Person Need?

I realise that I left everybody on tenterhooks in that last post about why NAT and the unreliability of most consumer-quality endlinks. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting for my poorly-thought-out flailings so long. In my defense, my dreams have become far too weird to document here. Suffice to say they have included a dream that was half about falling in love in your mid-twenties, and half about being a prominent insect collector, and one stormer of a revery in which I dreamt that I was writing one of these blog entries about dreams. How self-referential can you get? As self-referential as this paragraph, is the answer.

Anyway, one of the problems with the edge is that these days it is largely behind NATs and unreachable for incoming connections. Usually we get around this by using ICE, STUN, and other horrendous hacks that you don’t want to stare at too long. But is this a problem these days? I think not for a couple of reasons.

Yeah, but what about availability? Aren’t consumer last-mile connections prone to zzzzzzzt NO CARRIER?

Tomorrow! I promise!

(If you enjoy these sorts of discussions, but wish it was a little less one-sided, let me here point you to Zooko’s vintage-yet-riproaring P2P-hackers list, where you can learn from people who actually understand these things.

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2007-10-30

never not blog if you have too much to say

Back from a whistle-stop tour (in that it lasted about as long as I can whistle) of University of Michigan-Dearborn, and Reed College, Portland, doing my regular speaking job explaining EFF issues to college students.

I do these gigs about once a month, so if you know any students (or perhaps turn into one after 11AM), contact Samara and get me to come talk at your school. All the monies go to EFF. I like the format; I have a standard pitch, but I have room to throw in extra material or explore topics the audience are interested in. At Michigan, the talk was organised by WUMD, and we had DJs play a set beforehand, so we ended up talking a fair bit about artists’ rights and distribution. At Reed, I was invited by the college’s Free Culture chapter, so we spent some time dissecting public policy. Both times, the audience was fantastic, and we all had a great time. It’s nice to do some more public speaking, after quite a few years of not much performance.

I also liked the more random questions after the main event. We spent a long time at Dearborn talking about Valley culture. In one of the city’s hookah bars (Dearborn has a really distinctive and self-assured arab community, from what I could glean), we meandered over mesh networks and data havens, mainstream game companies and whether it sucked to work for them, why Ruby was better than C++. “Is it true that the guy who wrote BitTorrent wants to live on an oilrig?”, they asked. I explained that was two different people, with entirely different livejournal accounts. The organiser at WUMD runs the radio station, studies at the college, works in his father’s video shop, and then at the weekend runs a clothing company with his cousin. He wants to study law, and is an EFF member. I still love the future, and glad I get to travel to meet it so much.

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2007-10-25

i’m in ur country, pollutin ur namespace

We should have had a plan to do something with the NTK site after we trailed off updating it, but I don’t think we could have come up with something as deeply wonderful as ntk.org.uk, part of the current No To Knives campaign in the UK.

Things I like about this site:

And I haven’t even started on my questions about why the Royal Armouries of all people want everyone to stop carrying knives. Is this like how only the Queen can own swans?

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2007-10-18

peking ducked out for a bit

Sorry about the extended pause: I just spent a week in Beijing. About the only thing wrong with Beijing is that everyone abbreviates it to “BJ”. Oh, that and the repressive and autocratic regime: which, incidentally, I am more optimistic about. (Understand that I could scarcely have been more pessimistic about it, given my formative civil liberties event was waking up to the Tianenmen Square massacre.)

Bear in mind of course that I am randomly extrapolating from barely a week of interaction, but There was a lot less respect than I was expecting. Lots of teasing and undermining of authority, from giggling waitresses teasing their stern boss, to extended, loudly gesticulated debates between hotel managers and bellhops, between out-of-town cabbies and bemused police officers. It felt more like New York than a cowering, centrally-planned potemkin Olympic village it’s sometimes painted.

Even experiencing the Great Firewall filled me with my perverse sense of hope. (At work, my self-given title is “World’s Most Conflict-Averse Activist”, but I am a also a fair runner-up for “Digital Rights’ Biggest Gap-Toothed Optimist”. At a Canadian privacy conference last month, a TV crew filmed me specifically because I was the only pro-privacy speaker who didn’t seem actively suicidal).

The Great Firewall, in brief, is appalling. Appalling enough for it to be one day abandoned, I hope. It damages the entire experience of the Internet — not just for obvious political searches, but for everyday business, too. DNS queries fall over regularly, connections drop for random but broadly discoverable reasons, searches are arbitrarily banned. A resident and I spent a few minutes whittling down the use-case for a new and frustrating Google block. It turned out the PRC was blocking any Google search with the Chinese pinyin syllable “zhēng” in it. That’s like someone blocking any search term that contains the English word “trip”. My colleague had discovered it because they were searching for a Chinese company that included that syllable – Zhēngtu Networks, local creators of the second most popular MMORPG in China. Google has been down in the last few days; so has YouTube. This isn’t just breaking Google’s service; it’s breaking the whole functionality and usefulness of the Net.

The Firewall divides China into a local domain with okay connectivity and rampant self-censorship, and the “foreigner” domain with crummy degraded performance and arbitrary blocking. As a policy, I don’t think that can work. You can build a walled garden as big as half a continent, and you’re still going to painfully suffer competitive disadvantage to your trading partners. If the US had declared itself a Net isolate from the rest of the world, the Net would have died on the vine. As everyone who has every tried to pick out what they thought everyone would need from the Internet has learnt, it’s not about having “enough”, it’s about having all of it. You don’t know which part of the Net you need, because everyone else is finding different parts that they need — and you need them.

I think far more sinister is the developing technology that silently drops parts of the Internet with little observable effect on even quite close neighbours. For instance, British Telecom’s Cleanfeed, which can block individual URLs within a domain, and leave the rest untouched. A manifestly broken Internet will provoke all kinds of debate, offline and on. A silently censored Net may encroach until the lack of debate becomes perfectly natural.

No narrative dreams in China, just lots of mental processing of my attempts to learn and understand Chinese ideograms. Like semantic tetris, you close your eyes, and the radicals leap up out of the visual noise.

Here’s the Chinese for Internet, or “cyber”:网际 (wǎng jì). It’s the image for “net”, appended to the ideogram for “edge/boundary/between”.

I like its X X eyes, as though the sign for Internet has its own embedded emoticon.

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2007-10-09

h-t-t-p, you know me
Part of a series of blog posts:

  1. Independence Day
  2. Intermediaries
  3. Death by Boredom
  4. H-T-T-P, You Know Me
  5. Reachability on the Edge
  6. How Many Nines Does One Person Need?

I’ve now had a few nightmares, I am sorry to report. Recurrent nightmares, or at least endless rehashing of the NIGHTMARE THAT IS MY BOURGEOUS LIFE was what led my subconscious to forgo the whole dreaming thing for the last few years. It’s not too bad, though – my last nightmare had dragons in it. We hid under the kitchen table; very effective. Then, Mike Myers turned up and filmed the new Austin Powers in my bedsit. He’s uch more humble in real life. And by “real life”, here I mean “in my dream”.

So, a lot of people smershed my mentioning of the old P2P revolution in the last entry with my general thinking about the future move to the edge. I hadn’t intended to make a direct comparison, but it’s worth noting, as many did, the changes in the network since the glory days of 2001, and how that would effect creating edge services now, as the P2Pers were trying to do then.

First, and most obviously, the massacre of dial-up users is proceding as planned. There are still plenty of them out there, but we no longer have to feel guilty if we do not care about them. More importantly, always-on Net connections are pretty much everywhere. Even dynamic IPs are generally fairly static in the medium term. Hooray!

Second, the realisation by most protocol-designers that it’s an HTTP world, and that we just try and communicate in it. HTTP was a fantastic fit for the early net, so good in fact the modern Net has now co-evolved to be a good fit with HTTP. Nobody cares a goat’s fig about NAT because it don’t mess with the HTTP — and that’s one of the main reasons the Internet is now so NATty. That makes everybody lean toward HTTP to work well in this new infrastructure. One of the reasons why REST stuff just works is that it lives in HTTP space, so there are no sudden moves. P2P protocols have always had HTTP elements, but I think it may be true that whatever develops next in the peer-to-peer realm will just look like local webservers talking in a RESTy way with other webservers – or to talk with humans or other userspace applications (I count humans as a “userspace application”).

A corollary of this is that I think you really have to just deal with everything else that comes with HTTP — including DNS. All the old P2P dances have sexy URLs of their own devising, and hashes, and DHTs, and all that jazz — but without popping up in DNS-land, these servers are just invisible to everyone. Even Microsoft’s own P2P DNS-a-like, PNRP, falls into this category. Sure, your machine may be announcing to other Microsoft peers that it’s My-Computer474342.pnrp.net, until Microsoft does the obviously sensible thing and starts resolving those addresses in standard DNS (please somebody write in and tell me they do) , those addresses are just burial plots in a walled garden.

(John Gilmore once proposed a decentralised solution to this problem, whereby the toppest level domain would actually determine which protocol the IP service should use to find the rest of the domain. The current TLDs would be grandfathered in as ‘.com.icann’, ‘.net.icann’, etc. You wouldn’t need to change any URLs, because search domain ‘.icann’ would be default. But ‘My-Computer743473.pnrp.’ would run using Microsoft’s P2P name-finding algorithm, ‘7a7898bef783ed731aaf.bittorrentilikehashes.bittorent.’ would find a bittorrent resource, and so on. Obviously this would reduce ICANN’s role to one Postel-looking geek adding a list of protocols onto a list and chatting to the BIND guys. Since that geek wouldn’t need a multi-million travel budget, it will never happen.)

But I digress. The key point here is that if you can control your own DNS, and your can control your own webserver, you’re pretty much ready to go as a generic everything server on the Net, whether you’re hanging off the edge, or partying in the affluent middle zones.

Oh, you say, but what about NAT! What about the unreliability of the edge! What about if the kitchen table was made of wood, and the dragon just went RAAAARGGGGH and breathed fire over the top of it?

These, and other nightmares, I will discuss after this word from my sponsors.

Stop the Spying!

The Democrats are currently considering caving to the White House on granting retroactive immunity to the telecommunication companies for breaking the law and spying on your phone calls. It’s all going to happen this week. If you haven’t already, please call the Congressional leadership and tell them not to give an amnesty for lawbreakers.

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2007-10-04

death by boredom
Part of a series of blog posts:

  1. Independence Day
  2. Intermediaries
  3. Death by Boredom
  4. H-T-T-P, You Know Me
  5. Reachability on the Edge
  6. How Many Nines Does One Person Need?

The two background themes of this blog conspire: my digestive problem is keeping me awake, and stopping my dreams. Well at least I’m not fitfully asleep, dreaming that there’s a small weasel biting the left side of my trunk or something.

Lots of great conversations with people about my ongoing flailing ideas here. I am awful at replying to email, because by the time I’ve found the reply button, there’s another email to read and oh, bright shiny blog thing, but I did read them all. Even the guy who said that I’d just rediscovered Ray Ozzie’s Groove (sorry if I was a bit rude in my reply, Andre).

What made me rub my hands with glee was that all of the replies were by people who I know are much smarter than me, which means I’d managed to fulfil my primary aim of expressing an idea so irritatingly vaguely that better heads will fill it in for me.

A telltale of my favourite smart people is that they don’t prematurely pessimize, which is to blindly announce “Well that would never work because X, Y, and Z”. Buzzkill. No, my kind of smart people go “Well, you’ll have to fix X first, which I think you could do by doing A, B, and — oooh, I bet we could solve ‘Z’ with some string and that doorknob over there! Let’s go!”

However, to speed things along, I’m now explaining to such people there’s a class of problems that I don’t even want to fix in this thought experiment (which, to remind everyone, is — what happens if we push to the edge everything that we’re currently throwing onto Google Documents and other Web-based services). Examples of this class of problem in my gedankenexperiment are:

These are examples of problems that I hand-wavily announce will bore themselves to death. That is to say, I don’t want to talk about them, because I believe they are very dull, and I am confident there are clever people who don’t find them quite as boring as me will solve them for me.

There is risk here. You do have to be careful of what problems you assume will die of boredom, because sometimes they turn on you and bore your entire future vision to death instead.

NAT traversal is a good example of that. NAT traversal is a tremendously dull topic that was far too boring for most of the people excited about P2P technologies in 2001 to think about for very long (although the ones that did find it fascinating kept the rest of us up until 4AM drawing funny diagrams). They had a revolution to lead! Endless opportunity lay just beyond the horizon!

P2P was what Web 2.0 was supposed to be, incidentally, five years earlier, almost literally (the Web 2.0 conference came from Emerging Technology which came from the ashes of P2Pcon). Sadly, P2P never developed escape velocity, and the entire fledgling industry collapsed more-or-less into BitTorrent and Groove, and that was that. NAT traversal was one of the problems that still hinders it, as is the fact that client PCs generally don’t act like servers, but vanished off and on the networks in irritating ways. By the time you’d coped with constantly self-dismantling networks and impossible to reach edge nodes, I understand most P2P developers wanted to gnaw their own legs off in tedium. The endless opportunity had to be endlessly postponed while everyone fixed this one last problem with getting the Network to work over firewalls, and with constantly changing dynamic IPs, and a whole rats-nest of other dull issues.

If you want a more modern way of thinking of the risks of a boring problem, think of the utterly dull issue of cross-platform JavaScript compatibility. An entire generation of AJAXian prototypes died on intranets because they weren’t cross-platform, and it took decent JS frameworks and know-how built by Stakhanovite miners in the dark pits of tedium.

But we prevailed! The problem, pinned down by the corpses of endless headslapping programming hours, finally died of its own boredom, and JavaScript ultimately came into its own. About seven years later than anyone imagined.

Boring problems can heavily delay the arrival of the future, but they don’t really change the game.

So because we are all Buckminster Fullerish futurists here, let’s airily discount them. Our problems with bandwidth, at least in the United States, are down to awful, creaking monopolies, that will slowly die choking on their own gorged subsidies and foul bellhead toxins (and if not, there’s always China). The fragility of harddrives isn’t going to last another generation.

The unreliability of consumer connections, though. Um. I don’t know whether this is a problem that will die or be fatal. One could argue that it was what actually *did* kill the P2P unboom. Certainly, unreliability is something that the Internet is supposed to deal well with, and when it doesn’t, we could certainly do with some deliciously generalisable solutions. It’s not like it’s not a problem if you keep servers where they’re supposed to be, in yonder cloud. When your main server goes down, what do you do? And can you do that when your edge server drops off the Net a couple of minutes every day, or a bunch of seconds every hour?

Oh, all right. Have your damn comments. You’re just going to pile on and say you don’t have the slightest idea what I’m talking about, and have I tried peppermint tea, aren’t you?

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2007-10-02

intermediaries
Part of a series of blog posts:

  1. Independence Day
  2. Intermediaries
  3. Death by Boredom
  4. H-T-T-P, You Know Me
  5. Reachability on the Edge
  6. How Many Nines Does One Person Need?

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.)

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2007-09-28

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.

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2007-09-23

tattoo and copyright, saints and pirates

Gikii, the UK day conference for law, tech, and popular culture, took place last week. The papers look fascinating, especially these slides about tattoo and copyright from ORG volunteer and past EFF intern Jordan Hatcher. It’s hard to make out all of the points he makes from just the slides, but towards the end you can see he’s asking some tough questions about the European principle of moral rights in creative works. If an artist has a inviolable natural right to control what is done with his artwork after it is produced, does that mean tattoo artists can sue to stop their work being erased modified (Thanks Ian for schooling me on the limits of moral rights)?

Also good is Ray Corrigan’s examination of the proto-copyright beliefs of Saint Columba, patron saint of bookbinders, founder of the Scottish Church, and cause of 3000 dead over the unauthorised copying of a manuscript in 6th century Ireland. Columba transcribed without permission a rare copy of the Vulgate Bible brought back by a colleague from Rome. The suit over the case went to the Irish court, where some familiar debates ensued:

Finnen first told the king his story and he said “Colmcille hath copied my book without my knowing,” saith he and I contend that the son of the book belongs to me.

“I contend,” saith Colmcille [Columba], “that the book of Finnen is none the worse for my copying it, and it is not right that the divine words in that book should perish, or that I or any other should be hindered from writing them or reading them or spreading them among the tribes. And further I declare that it was right for me to copy it, seeing the was profit to me from doing in this wise, and seeing it was my desire to give the profit thereof to all peoples, with no harm therefore to Finnen or his book.”

“Have attitudes to law and technology really changed a whole lot in 1400 years?”, Corrigan asks. For how the judgement goes and the rest of the story of the Battle of the Book, you’ll need to read the paper. A full list of papers from the conference is also online.

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