• Checking Your Bill for a New Charge Called ‘Oops’ – David Pogue writes about ‘stealth inflation’ via miscellaneous fees
• – Facing jail because his house is filled to the brim, a hoarder finds hope in a woman with a talent for organizing — and a big heart (lablogs/lablogs)
• Re: [SLUG] migrating accounts
• Re: [Lias] migrating users and their passwords
• Keep the Sex R-Rated, N.Y.U. Tells Film Students – “My thing is how we censor ourselves during the day when we’re not having sex.” — I guess the NYU administration felt the same way
• The Bad Sex award shortlisted passages – oh man, some great ones
• Remote Central: Universal Remote Control Reviews – there are some really tempting gee-whiz all-in-one remotes. The Proton iRemote iR800 is pretty neat looking, although pretty pricy (and w/ a funky screen apparently). The URC-8910 is a lot cheaper, and with JP1 programming could probably do all the wacky complex stuff as well
• Speaking of expensive electronic doo-dads, quite tempted to pick up a Squeezebox wi-fi MP3 player

Infrequent posting while schedule crushes me. Some shameless stolen links:

• For others that are interested in the Sun ONE software – including information + PHP script on letting iCal access the Sun Calendar
• Dating Design Patterns – I think is the nerdiest thing I’m likeliest to see today
• Teen dances to record after partner’s stumble – record breaking 37.5hrs of DDR
• tunA – a handheld ad-hoc radio device for local music sharing; social walkman; interesting
• MIT Media Lab: Research Areas
• flavorpill LA – arts events
• blogs@nifty – love that weird bear character sitting there
• The Back of the New $20
• Missing! – 5 pager on Bill Watterson (toread)
• The Twisted Network Framework – hmm, now a Freenet protocol implementation would be interesting…

For those interested, here’s what I presented in class last night: Next-Generation Distributed Social Software Networks: Designs and Applications

The numbers are a bit off. If I got a friend or two and we dropped everything else we were doing, we could probably make a working prototype in less than a year; most of the tech components are already there (dev in Twisted most likely)

The days blend together when you aren’t sleeping regularly. I’m currently doing some sort of schedule-enforced polyphasic sleep. Things will return to sanity after this week I hope.

• taint.org: Using a Web of Trust to stop spam
• Eric writes on open issues for DSS systems – yes, we’ve coined a TLA; I’ll be throwing in thoughts on segmented trust soon (rings, circles, pipes, wee!)
• PeopleAggregator Intranet
• Publishers bet on Friendster-like service – 2003-11-25 social networking funding update

• Friendster Usability Analysis – This is a usability analysis of the Friendster Internet service, collaboratively created by the students of MIT course 6.171 in November 2003.
• Where Are The Founders Of The Dial-Up Revolution? – /. discussion on the Hayes article
• Yahoo! Photos redesign – what Ernie’s been working on the past couple of months; OK, working, just intermittent server wonkiness
• Good lord that’s a huge DSL bill – and for transferring only 24.5Gb? That’s pathetic

• John Levine: Challenge-response systems are as harmful as spam – John is correct, C-R is useless without digitally signed envelopes. Although using a CA system could work, so could a simpler solution involving PGP/GPG signatures. PTP verification would probably be computationally prohibitive, but some sort of distributed or transitive trust model might be adequate
• Digital Sundials International – ok, this is even cooler than the Pimp Watch
• Unusable Web – D. Keith Robinson on bad web design

Recently it seems like everyone’s been getting in on the KnowSpam bandwagon. Somewhere down there on my todo list is getting CRM114 and TMDA all set up and doing their thing. Probably somewhere below getting all my mail piped into a single machine.

Now on how to solve spim…

A New Website for Harper’s Magazine – Paul Ford describes launching the new Harpers.org website, talks about why it looks so similar to Ftrain, and building a Semantic Web taxonomy. Exciting stuff.

A new month, a new file. I’ll try to get back to a non-prehistoric system over winter break, although other things may take precedence.

• Fantastic Pimp Watch – “trip the light fantastic” indeed – if I didn’t just blow my wad I’d pick one up… heck maybe I will anyway
• Alphabet 26 – Bradbury Thompson’s proposal for simplifying the alphabet
• 1976design w/ the latest iteration of Nice Titles
• America Tunes In for the Money Shot – Frank Rich sums up the MJ coverage; I’m so glad I don’t watch TV
• Firebird Ext – RSS reader Panel – eh, works so so
• GNUpod – GNUpod is a collection of Perl-Scripts wich allow you to use your iPod under GNU/Linux and many other Operating Systems with a useable Version of Perl 5 (+Modules).
• PodWorks – song copier w/ GUI
• Crooked Fingers: The Sounds – really good stuff; playing w/ Azure Ray this week; Ogg Vorbis downloads, cool
• Simon on PostgreSQL 7.4

I’ve been working on and off over the past couple months (hmm, since SXSW – wow, I’ve been slow on this) on what I’m labeling ‘distributed social software‘, sort of redundant one might think, except that ironically, besides the original social-software catylyst (blogs) no current generation social networking systems are distributed, and even with blogs, not formally so (not necessarily a bad thing, perhaps, but that’s another argument).

Anyway, sort of surprising that a Google search turns up exactly zero matches, but I was talking to a friend who had simultaneously invented the same term for a CS paper he’s writing, so at least we’re making up terms on the same wavelength. 🙂

Issues I’m currently tackling:

• Defining complex (typed, n-way) trust relationships
• Dealing w/ trust segmentation; trust transitivity across fragmented identity
• pseudonymity and/or double-blind transactions
• not re-inventing any wheels I don’t need to
• maximum simplicity, extensibility, compatibility
• surviving last week of classes (this may be the toughest thing)