UserDriven

REAL Software

"REALBasic began as a Mac shareware product many years ago and has evolved over time into the current product, which is quite mature even if not enough people know about it. The company publishes a magazine and has user conferences just like the bigger boys do. Those who've tried REALBasic love it... Real Software is based in Austin, Texas, and is another of those little companies I want to encourage. And, as always, I have no financial interest in the company. What they are doing is, I believe, unique. Here is a cross-platform compiled language that has full XML support and can function as a very capable parallel to .NET for those who want .NET capability without buying into the Microsoft security model. Its backward compatibility exceeds that of Microsoft products, and the ability to deploy on Linux and Mac simply increase is attractiveness" (REALbasic - Create your own software for Mac, Windows, Linux via PBS | I, Cringely: "Getting Real, Yes, Virginia, There Is Life After Visual Basic")

Top Ten Privacy Resolutions for 2005

Electronic Privacy Information Center

The Karma Economy

"On the Web, a user's reputation is priceless... An economic system heavily reliant on reputation... is already showing up on the... Web, where singles and swingers rate one another's dates in chat rooms, buyers trade opinions about various vendors, and online auction prices are often as much influenced by the seller's character as by a product's monetary worth..." (Utne.com)

Out of Control: The Sequel

The net ALWAYS routes around damage. Users make certain of it. When will companies learn to flow with that instead of trying to fight it and thereby making it even worse for themselves?

"...SuprNova.org and TorrentBits.com each played host to thousands of BitTorrent trackers. When these sites went down the torrents went Poof!, as if they’d never existed. This evening the members of the MPAA must be feeling quite satisfied with themselves – they see this danger as passed; never again will BitTorrent threaten the revenues of the Hollywood studios.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

As Hollywood is so fond of sequels, it seems perfectly fitting that today’s suppression of the leading BitTorrent sites bears an uncanny resemblance to an event which took place in July of 2000. Facing a rising sea of lawsuits and numerous court orders demanding an immediate shutdown, the archetypal peer-to-peer service, Napster, pulled the plug on its own servers, silencing the millions of users who used the service as a central exchange to locate songs to download. That should have been the end of that. But it wasn’t. Instead, the number of songs traded on the Internet today dwarfs the number traded in Napster’s heyday. The suppression of Napster lead to a profusion of alternatives – Gnutella, Kazaa, and BitTorrent. Gnutella is a particularly telling example of how the suppression of a seductive technology (and peer-to-peer file trading is very seductive – ask anyone who’s done it) only results in an improved technology taking its place. Instead of relying on a centralized server – a fault that both Napster and BitTorrent share – Gnutella uses a process of discovery to let peers share information with each other about what’s available where. The peers in a Gnutella peer-to-peer network self-organize into an occasionally unreliable but undeniably expansive network of content. Because of its distributed nature, shutting down any one Gnutella peer has only a very limited effect on the overall network. One individual’s collection of music might evaporate, but there are still tens of thousands of others to pick from. This network of Gnutella peers (and its offspring, such as Kazaa, BearShare, and Acquisition) has been growing since its introduction in 2001, mostly invisibly, but ever more pervasively.

If Napster hadn’t been run out of business by the RIAA, it’s unlikely that any need for Gnutella would have arisen; if the RIAA hadn’t attacked that single point of failure, there’d have been no need to develop a solution which, by design, has no central point within it. It’s as though both sides in the war over piracy and file sharing are engaged in an evolutionary struggle: every time one side comes up with a new strategy, the other side evolves a response to it. This isn’t just a cat-and-mouse game; each attack by the RIAA generates a response of increasing sophistication. And, today, the MPAA has blundered into this arms race. This was, as will soon be seen, a Very Bad Idea.

Pointing up the single greatest weakness of BitTorrent – take down the tracker and the torrent dies – has only served to energize, inspire and mobilize the resources of an entire global ecology of software developers, network engineers and hackers-at-large who want nothing so much, at this moment, as to make the MPAA pay for their insolence. Imagine a parent reaching into a child’s room and ripping a TV set out of the wall – while the child is watching it. That child would feel anger and begin plotting his revenge. And that scene has been multiplied at least a hundred thousand times today, all around the world. It is quite likely that, as I type these words, somewhere in the world a roomful of college CS students, fueled by coke and pizza and righteous indignation, are banging out some code which will fix the inherent weakness of BitTorrent – removing the need for a single tracker. If they’re smart enough, they’ll work out a system of dynamic trackers, which could quickly pass control back and forth among a cloud of peers, so that no one peer holds the hot potato long enough to be noticed. They’ll take the best of Gnutella and cross-breed it with the best of BitTorrent. And that will be the MPAA’s worst nightmare.

Hey, Hollywood! Can you feel the future slipping through your fingers? Do you understand how badly you’ve screwed up? You took a perfectly serviceable situation – a nice, centralized system for the distribution of media, and, through your own greed and shortsightedness, are giving birth to a system of digital distribution that you’ll never, ever be able to defeat. In your avarice and arrogance you ignored the obvious: you should have cut a deal with SuprNova.org. In partnership you could have found a way to manage the disruptive change that’s already well underway. Instead, you have repeated the mistakes made by the recording industry, chapter and verse. And thus you have spelled your own doom.

It’s said that the best sequels are just like the original, only bigger and louder. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for one hell of a crash. This baby is now fully out of control."

(Mark Pesce: Out Of Control: The Sequel via Susan Mernit's Blog)

The Graphing Calculator Story

"I had none of the traditional power over others that is inherent to the structure of corporations and bureaucracies. I had neither budget nor headcount. I answered to no one, and no one had to do anything I asked. Dozens of people collaborated spontaneously, motivated by loyalty, friendship, or the love of craftsmanship. We were hackers, creating something for the sheer joy of making it work." (The Graphing Calculator Story via Anil Dash: The Graphing Calculator story)

American Red Cross International Response Fund

"You can help those affected by the recent tsunamis in South Asia, the humanitarian crisis in Sudan and Chad, and countless other crises around the world each year by making a financial gift. This fund enables us to provide immediate and long-term support through supplies, technical assistance, and other support to those in need." (American Red Cross - Credit Card Contribution)

Switching to Macintosh

With Windows users increasingly frustrated with security and stability issues, and also being exposed to the Apple Way through iTunes, iPods, and Apple Stores, is the tide turning from Redmond to Cupertino? (Wall Street Jouranl - Real Time Exchange)

SkyHigh Airlines

;-)

UserDriven Commercials

The Spec Spot - TV Commercial Production

Blogs: powerful people, or people power?

"...blogging’s great legacy is likely to not the individuals who sit at the top of the power curve, but the incomprehensible swarm: and, critically, the order that emerges from it... If we see the web as a collection of small pieces, loosely joined then these aggregators are a means of giving the web some cohesion for users (even the dumbest of users), without challenging its underlying fragmented nature... There is a lot of talk about Citizens media at the moment: which is all too often about creating centralised spaces where people can contribute to them... But, there are problems with this model: and they all stem from issues of scalability of communities and the tragedy of the commons. OhMyNews, is fantastic, but it still has an editorial staff of 53 (about the same as the NYT site). Even the Northwest Voice has a full time editor (both to give it shape and cover topics such as property). Wikipedia might have let anyone write or edit anything, but it takes a tightly defined social order and significant efforts from some very committed volunteers to keep everything in shape.. You can always cover much more ground by ceding traditional editorial control systems - or opening them up - but someone still has to stop it turning into anarchy. The aggregation of Blogdex et al, however is completely scalable: because it simply depends on individuals keeping their house in order: which they do out of self interest, rather than altruism (and, in my experience, it is always safer to rely on people acting out of self interest than altruism). Also, as the overall pool of blogging grows: both in quantity and quality, aggregation becomes simultaneously more necessary and more efficient." (SimonWaldman.net)

Good commentary on this at: Many-to-Many: Powerfully Powered by People