So, I’ve only had layovers in Alaska and Missouri. Does that even count? In any case, yes, I’m due for a big-ass roadtrip sometime.

It may be time for me to write a paper, if only to find referers from people who are working/thinking about interesting things within the space.

• While I’ve been zoned out, Eric’s been writing good stuff and getting boku linkpop on the DSS. w00t w00t
• Xanadu Redux: Citizen Kane, Deep Hypertext & Interactive Authoring – April 22 @ DML, USC
• How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think
• procrastination diagram – blog of Karl Ramm, MetaCarta employee; interesting thoughts on social networking software
• WiredReach – the world’s first decentralized social networking software – have they done everything already?
• The Circle – australian P2P dark-net w/ decentralized hashtable (Chord), DRM privacy
• The Augmented Social Network: Building identity and trust into the next-generation Internet
  

  This paper proposes the creation of an Augmented Social Network (ASN) that would build identity and trust into the architecture of the Internet, in the public interest, in order to facilitate introductions between people who share affinities or complementary capabilities across social networks. The ASN has three main objectives: 1) To create an Internet-wide system that enables more efficient and effective knowledge sharing between people across institutional, geographic, and social boundaries; 2) To establish a form of persistent online identity that supports the public commons and the values of civil society; and, 3) To enhance the ability of citizens to form relationships and self-organize around shared interests in communities of practice in order to better engage in the process of democratic governance. In effect, the ASN proposes a form of “online citizenship” for the Information Age.

• Tree Hash EXchange format (THEX) – still toread
• The case for generating URIs by hashing RDF content (PDF)
• Hashing Spatial Content over Peer-to-Peer Networks (PDF)
• Ivy: A Read/Write Peer-to-Peer File System (PDF)
• [Csci551-talk] content-hashing in p2p nets
• Google: Merkle Hash Trees
• A distributed approach to high-performance information retrieval
  

  A distributed architecture and indexing algorithm for high-performance information retrieval has been developed. A prototype system has been built that achieves a throughput of 500 queries per second with a response time of less than one second on an 8-node network of workstations. The algorithm is robust in the presence of lost and duplicated messages as well as failures of nodes of the network. The architecture can be scaled up to larger networks and higher levels of service. The retrieval model allows for semantically rich queries and information objects.

• Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia – by Cory Doctorow, Aug 2001, on why metadata is intractible
• Social Bookmarks Manager Right-Click Context Menu
  

  Last night I hacked together a bit of JavaScript to add a right-click context menu posting option to Joshua Schachter’s Social Bookmarks Manager.

• How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web
  

  This follows Putting Facets on the
  Web: An Annotated Bibliography, and is the second paper I wrote for
  Prof. Clare Beghtol of the Faculty of
  Information Studies at the University of Toronto, who led me in a
  reading course named “Applying Faceted Classification in an Online World.”
  (It’s also available as a PDF (215K)
  which is formatted for printing.)

• PubSub
  

  PubSub Concepts provides real-time, content based publish and subscribe systems at internet scale. This site is a Beta version of our home page, which will provide a PubSub interface for weblogs and other information sources.

• Ontology, Metadata, and Semiotics
  

  The Internet is a giant semiotic system. It is a massive collection of Peirce’s three kinds of signs: icons, which show the form of something; indices, which point to something; and symbols, which represent something according to some convention. But current proposals for ontologies and metadata have overlooked some of the most important features of signs. A sign has three aspects: it is (1) an entity that represents (2) another entity to (3) an agent. By looking only at the signs themselves, some metadata proposals have lost sight of the entities they represent and the agents ¾ human, animal, or robot ¾ which interpret them. With its three branches of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, semiotics provides guidelines for organizing and using signs to represent something to someone for some purpose. Besides representation, semiotics also supports methods for translating patterns of signs intended for one purpose to other patterns intended for different but related purposes. This article shows how the fundamental semiotic primitives are represented in semantically equivalent notations for logic, including controlled natural languages and various computer languages.

Ha! Got a request to buy a text link on my blog from an SEO company. (and what’s the link you ask? a link is to search engine submittal service). Sorry, PageRank is supposed to be used in the service of finding what you want, not making the web less useful.

• MusicMobs – low-tech AudioScrobbler?
• Asus WL-330 listed, – $61.95, not in stock. /me wants
• RED#NET – RED#NET intends to be a multi-functional, permeable, portable surface that reroutes and reapplies public space. (heehee)
• The National Archives Experience – well designed, quite fancy presentation of the “Charters of Freedom.” Hey, where’s the Patriot Act here? (*snicker*)
• The Federalist Papers – cleanse your palate after choking on bile of DOJ newspeak

• Procmail Quick Reference Guide – useful summary of flags, scoping, flow control, etc

So, I got sent a link to a story about the Janet Jackson Super Bowl thing. First place I checked online to see it? Filepile. Already there with double digit votes, HDTV captures, and some great remixes.

In summary: violence ok, boobs ok, war on drugs double plus good, moveon.org terrorists

USC is a Pepsi campus. Who wants to set up cap-collection boxes around campus?

• Recycle some of your 100 million Pepsi Songs – /. thread on Tune Recycler BTW, as I’ve pointed out before, Menomena rocks. Oh, and so does Derek: CD Baby’s Digital Distribution – FREE! (see also Derek’s responses to DD criticism)

Personally, while the recycler is good for those that won’t/can’t redeem the iTunes, I think that a list of recommended artists/labels might be useful as well, for people who are looking to support the artists and find new music.

Some good reasons by iTunes is bogus. Remember, you own a CD you buy, but you get a EULA for your iTunes. You have no first-sale rights, no unregulated or fair use.

random: I like Bugzilla’s new restricting sessions to a single IP option. You’d think this would be something that’d be built into say PHP’s default sessiong handling (and how about signed cookies or noncing? that’d be nice too) TODO: look for or write secure session handling library

vim paragraph reflowing: gqip, more formatting/reflowing commands, changing spaces after periods

2 year anniversary of Bug 122445: Spoof prevention: Warn if username/password in link (url) looks like a hostname – nothing to protect anyone from phishing yet. Things I’m for:

• Dialog Box w/ suspicious usernames – understand that it’s YAWD, but in this case, I think warranted – if a user doesn’t ignore it, it’ll let them not load the site at all (a good thing) – however, users *do* just click through, so part two of the solution; a per-domain pop-up blocking type interface might make sense…
• Hostname (domain name)/username display – The urlbar should start w/ the hostname and then display the l/p after or separately (one option, another displaying full url, but w/ org info, text at the end), or not at all (I don’t like url chopping/mangling, but either (any! color and escape it all for all I care) solution is better than allowing phishing to go on)
• Links should start w/ [hostname] in status/mouseover – just as an additional FYI; however, if there’s no real way to prevent this being spoofed in JS, maybe not a good idea… (an inline warning might be interesting)

OK, I just got finished reading 150+ comments over the past two years on this bug. I’m feeling what slice1900 (original bug submitter) is saying:

——-
Additional Comment #159 From slice1900@*** 2004-01-28 13:31 PST
——-

Given that Microsoft plans to update to IE to complete do away with ALL
HTTP/HTTPS AUTH, rather than attempting to sanity check them in any way, all I
have to say is TFB to all your whiners who complained about how my original
idea in the bug report to only care about .’s in usernames because it might
inconvenience a dozen users at some obscure site or another using HTTP AUTH
that’s dumb enough to have usernames with dots in them.

Mozilla should now just follow suit and disable ALL uses of HTTP AUTH in the
browser because standard or not, now that MS is obsoleting it, the few
remaining sites legitimately using will cease soon enough when they have the
first reports from IE users with the patch that it no longer works and they
realize MS will no longer support it.

Of course I expect in reality that Mozilla will continue to do nothing, as
those same whiners that obstructed anything constructive being done, like
Adam’s patch that apparently was never considered by anyone with any power in
the Mozilla organization to do anything about it, to continue to whine about
how Mozilla should continue to support HTTP AUTH anyway, because it is the
“standard”, even though only sites used where no users use IE would continue to
use the brain-damaged HTTP AUTH option from this point on.

Thus insuring that not only did Mozilla not take the leadership on this
issue, despite my bug report being filed TWO YEARS AGO TOMORROW, it will
probably remain for quite a while as the only browser still vulnerable in all
its versions to the phishing scams. I’m sure those will go on for quite a
while since there will be enough vulnerable versions of IE out there for
several more years.

No wonder Mozilla never went anywhere, people were too worried about stupid
crap like themes and support for stuff no one uses like SVG and MNG, instead of
worrying about things that will benefit the average end user. Mozilla should
just give up any illusions it is for the average user, and just content itself
to be a geek browser for people who are already too smart to fall for such
scams, and those of us who got their friends and parents to use it when they
had one too many bad experiences with IE can send them Opera’s way instead
since even though it is closed source and costs money, they actually seem to
care about their users.

I will probably get flamed for this, maybe even kicked off bugzilla, but I
really don’t care. I’m just so disappointed and disillusioned by the whole
thing I probably won’t bother to ever waste my time contributing bug reports to
Mozilla again anyway.

Here’s the MS KB announcement: 834489 – Microsoft plans to release a software update that modifies the
default behavior of Internet Explorer for handling user information in
HTTP and HTTPS URLs