Oblomovka

2004-06-06»

It is the special privilege of con organisers (which I barely am) to not have any idea how the damn thing went. I really only saw Yoz and Sean’s report from the set of the Hitchhiker’s movie, and the launch, finally, of TheyWorkForYou. Everyone I spoke to seem to enjoy themselves, despite the trademark chaos.

Now. Need. Sleep.

P.S. We launched TheyWorkForYou, a *huge* effort by all the usual suspects to revamp Hansard, the official record of the UK parliament, in a more Web-a-like form. Help us beta test it! Subscribe to the RSS feeds of your local MP! Subscribe to our infrequent site updates! Play around with search! Still. Need. Sleep!

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2004-05-19»

Lee, NTK’s chief moral compass, wonders about mail he sends that ends up with a third-party *cough Gmail cough*. He suggests that if Google was trying to be truly not evil, it should perhaps work on a “Disposition-Notification” header that would optionally the original sender know what’s happening to their mail.

This reminds me of mails from Boogah, who is organising Layer One, and whose .sig reads, in part.

this email is: [x] bloggable [ ] ask first [ ] private

My second thought, which is playing on me a lot these days, is how openness is viral. When one lives or works with someone who is more open or free with their own personal information, you find yourself become less able to maintain your own privacy. Your information is part of their information.

How can we maintain high levels of privacy – or indeed, maintain high levels of honesty – when our associates disagree on those levels?

This isn’t a new problem, of course. But something is changing. I have friends who dive out of the way of cameras to protect their privacy when they are with me. The time when there is somewhere to dive might end someday.

(In the meanwhile, if you send me something with X-No-Archive: in the headers, it won’t get forwarded to my Gmail account).

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“A revised version of the Pratimoksha (Buddhist Monastic Code) was released on Monday March 31, 2003 in Seoul, Korea, which is one of the Mahayana Buddhist countries of Asia. This version has been compiled by the venerable Thich Nhat Hanh in the International Buddhist Practice Center called Plum Village in France. Thich Nhat Hanh and his monastic delegation are currently on a teaching tour in this country.”

44. A bhikshu who has his private e-mail account with the result that he spends an inordinate amount of time in making unnecessary communications or communications which foster attachment commits an offence for which he must express regret.

…

46. A bhikshu who plays electronic games including those on the computer, commits an offence for which he must express regret.

So many new sins, so many regrets.

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2004-05-18»

Let’s see if this works. I’m writing a small piece for the New Scientist on RSS, and I wanted to chat with people who read more than 400 RSS feeds daily. So – Robert Scoble? Frank Arrigo? Jay McCarthy? George Kelly? Phil Wolff? Are you guys really reading this, along with hundreds of others? Would you like to talk briefly about it today? Get in touch!

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So here’s what I’m doing with my gmail account: I’ve set the filters to archive everything as soon as it comes in, and I’m now forwarding all my mail to it. So it’s not so much a mail reader, as google for my mail archive. That’s something I’ve been after for a while.

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2004-05-17»

My favourite emails these days are the ones from a lady reporting transmissions from the Virgin Mary who prophesies (sometimes with her son, Jesus) really quite specifically about the dangers of flag-burning, the Unholy Ray, and the devilish communist threat of Russia.

Do not be deceived, My children, Russia is not free. It is a cosmetic act to delude you. Lenin and Stalin used the same tactics, My children. Why do you not learn from your errors? For it is their plan to subdue you, once they get the billions that they need in aid, to bring up the economy and buy more armaments. (Our Lady, June 18, 1992).

How sneaky is that? The cc: list for the people who get this includes loads of bishops and cardinals. Good god, think how much crank mail you must get if you’re an bishop. And how do you write a spam filter that catches this stuff, but wouldn’t give a false positive if you actually received an email from Jesus? I hope the Christ worked out some sort of secret sign before he ascended, because this false prophet business is just going to get worse and worse pre-rapture. Spam; a sign of the end-times. Mail.app for Apple discards this stuff as junk; Spamassassin isn’t so sure.

As the prophecies go, I like this one:

CHASTISEMENT DELAYED

Veronica – Our Lady said that the Chastisement has been delayed

It’s sort of like a rail announcement, isn’t it?

I think that will be the new open threat in our house. “Your chastisement has been … delayed. This time.”

I’m currently delaying a fair bit of chastisement myself right now. I’ve been working through a lot of the Lifehacks stuff. It was all supposed to be very anthropological and objective, but now I realise that my position as hyper-disorganised person peering in isn’t going to work out. Mainly because I’m currently being far too disorganised to actually get this done.

My horrible dawning realisation is that to do lifehacks stuff justice, I’m going to have to experiment on myself.

Our Lady of the Postponement, have mercy on me!

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2004-05-02»

I have no idea why I haven’t mentioned this before: I’m speaking at two conferences in June: London’s NotCon and Los Angeles’ LayerOne. Both are shaping up to be pretty fantastic.

First up is NotCon, which is the mutant monster one-day convention that sprang out of our post-Emerging Technology ‘ConCon’ summaries. I’m going to toss a coin about what I’ll be speaking about here. If I’m chicken, I’ll do an updated reworking of my Emerging Tech talk “Lifehacks”. If feel braver, I’m going to dredge through four years of trying to mentally inhabit Silicon Valley and the UK tech scene simultaneously, and see what horrors emerge. ConCon is on Sunday, June 6th at Imperial College Union. Price at the door, but it should be pretty cheap.

The Lifehacks stuff will be at the core of my LayerOne talk. This convention looks to be shaping up really well. Two of the smartest and most lateral-thinking security folk I’ve meant, Dan Kaminsky and David Hulton are speaking on their current secret projects. There’s presentations on at least four of my current and/or long term obsessions – emergency broadcast networks, the EFF’s current take on the DMCA, geek sub-culture viability, and Eldritch Global Banking Conspiracies. All for $40. I hope I can live up to the standards of the rest of the line-up.

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2004-03-24»

So there’s a guy who is sharing our home Wi-Fi connection. Which is just fine – we have, most seconds of the day, bandwidth to spare, our connections are pretty end-to-end secure (remember kids, trust no-one). We leave out AP open all hippy-style for exactly this reason.

I know he’s out there, because he shares his iTunes via Rendezvous and I have once seen him on my Rendezvous iChat Window.

There’s a reason I’ve only seen him once. He messaged me to say “Hi?” and I replied “Oho! Who is this hiding in my network?”. As everybody with a dash of social sense told me, that could be perceived as being a bit scary, and he immediately signed off. I’ve never seen him again, until today when I spotted his iTunes collection. His name’s Matt, and he’s the only person I know who bought the Daredevil soundtrack album. (Well, “know” is perhaps too strong a word, given that’s *all* I know about him.)

I’m trying to work out the politest way of saying “Hello neighbour”. So far, I’m sharing a bunch of fake music libraries called “Come say hi on ichat!” and “Are you across the street or next door?”. Still sounds a bit creepy, but can you do?

No response yet, but judging from the crappy streaming from his laptop, he’s got a pretty weak signal. We could probably fix that with some judicious aerial re-alignment. If only I could get in contact with him. And, dammit, I want to borrow that album. Or at least talk to the only other person in the world who liked Daredevil.

Practical upshots

Idea for Freshmeatable app: a program which scans DHCP allocations and tells you when somebody joins your network. For extra points, packet sniff their traffic until you’ve built up a reasonable profile of their email address, IM screenname, homepage, etc. Bounce all that into your favourite social networking app and pull out a picture, and other privacy-leaked data of who you’ve got on your network.

This is sort of like Kevin‘s wardating idea. Wardating involves sniffing for IM packets on shared wireless cybercafe networks, and then IMing the cutest people and ask for dates. Kevin is cute enough to get away with this.

My version is for people who don’t go out much, and lack the social skills to strike up conversations event with people who owe you a favour, and are already practically in your living room anyway. Warcocooning?

Maybe you could write it as a plugin forDashboard. Clues from strangers!

(Moral and legal conundrums of sniffing people who are using your network are left as an exercise for the reader.)

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2004-03-23»

So I’ve been considering getting a Vonage VoIP phone for home. They seem like a pretty good deal for $16.00 a month, and now I’ve found instructions for using your Vonage number via a softphone on the laptop when I’m not at home, the deal seems even better (I always felt I’d look a little stupid talking on a normal-sized wired phone at conferences. Sort of like bringing out one of those old candlestick models and yelling “OPERATOR!?” into it in a restaurant.)

The issue most mitigating against going Vonage, though, is that I get my connectivty via DSL – which means I’d have to keep my old phone anyway. It feels a bit like I’m being held in some awful Catch 22 by the phone company here.

So I was suggesting to Quinn that I get my revenge by getting a mobile phone with an all-you-can-eat data plan, getting a pocketPC softphone, and then just talking over that. Admittedly, it’s the sort of revenge that involves going to a lot of effort and actually paying your enemy rather more money in order to get some sort of artificial symmetry in how much you’re screwing each other.

But isn’t that what revenge is all about?

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2004-02-17»

ConCon rocked. Well, the audience rocked. I was my normal shambolic self, constantly asking the air whether the video and audio were working as people frantically tried to tell me by shouting and waving into my blind, unhearing compere’s face. We survived.

The speakers were great, too. Lightning talks are a lot harder than they look, but everybody seemed to have a good sense of when to get on, and when to get off. I even got an echo of the same kind of info overload that etech brings on from the post-talk discussion, as people stumbled around recovering from 12 dense talks in less than 90 minutes, meeting new and old friends, excitedly talking about Jonathan’s social networking security exploits (the guy from Orkut was very intrigued), and munching on the pizza and free food Marc commandeered.

Next up: ConConUK!

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