Entries by Guido Stevens

A flurry of activity on free software blogs addresses the losses of freedom brought about by cloud computing.

The Free Software Foundation is concerned, that:

the movement of software off of personal computers has reconfigured power relationships between users and their software and complicated questions of ownership and control in ways that free software advocates do not yet know how to address.

Cloud computing presents a centralization of resources, hence a centralization of power. The software you're using doesn't run on your own PC, it runs on a distant server. The documents you're creating aren't saved on your local harddisk, but somewhere on the intarweb. The combination of the two presents a major shift of control away from you, an individual, towards a few giant global technology corporations.

That's scary. Read on for countermeasures.

TomTom CEO Goddijn reportedly said:

The end of the era of paper maps is near.

Which is a perfectly sensible thing to say, if you're selling GPS devices. Apart from that, this statement offers a tantalizing bit of insight into the impact of ubiquitous computing on our culture.

the end of the era of paper maps

Could it be true? Are large groups of people happy to ditch those cumbersome folds of paper, navigating their way to their holiday destinations with a small computer sucked to their windscreens?

Think a minute about the security challenges involved in creating a health-centered social network. Or, more generally, any web application that has to handle sensitive user data. What if the database server becomes compromised? How do you make sure that, even if the database is stolen, your users' secrets remain confidential? How can any cloud computing application provide any significant measure of privacy?

At Clipperz they claim to have found the solution: they call it "zero-knowledge web applications". Since the term "zero knowledge" has a precise meaning in cryptography, that's a bit confusing. What Clipperz promotes boils down to evangelism for the "host-proof hosting" AJAX programming pattern.

client-side encryption

You still with me? It's a very simple concept, actually. Encrypt any sensitive data on the client-side browser before sending it to the web server. Data is never stored plaintext. Users can retrieve their data, in encrypted form, and only in their private browser is it decrypted and becomes accessible. Should the database server be compromised, an attacker finds only encrypted gibberish in the database.

Wow! Total privacy in the cloud computing age! Why don't we rewrite all our web applications to use this neat trick? Yes, why don't we? Read on to find several answers to that question.

A new green ethos is flowering on the ruins of the "old" environmental movement that buried itself in eighties-style gloom-and-doom sermons.

Note the ingenious change of spin. No more: you shouldn't do harm. Rather: you can and should do good. The message has become far more attractive and empowering.

I recently bought a laptop for my daughter. It came with Microsoft Vista pre-installed. I paid for this in the form of a compulsary Vista license (the infamous Microsoft tax). I carved out some harddisk space and installed Ubuntu Linux as a second option. Ubuntu is free.

This provides a perfect setting to compare the initial Vista and Ubuntu experiences.

• Which is faster up-and-running?
• Which is sponsored by spammy advertisements?
• Which contains more software?

NL online trends

OECD broadband penetration

This is probably a harbinger of a worldwide trend: The Netherlands has one of the highest broadband penetration rates worldwide (second only to Denmark). Expect everyone, everywhere to be online more (and watch less TV), as internet connections become faster, cheaper and more widely available worldwide.

Such a surge in internet usage cannot but translate directly in a surge in demand for internet services. The web development business is booming here. Now we know why

The war on spam is mostly waged between spammers and ISP's, invisible to the public.

Earlier I wrote about greylisting. That's a fairly minimal change in handling email, that reduces the spam volume on our mail servers disproportionately. How can this be? Let's take a look at the economics involved.

Green IT is all the rage.

60 percent of global executives view climate change as important to consider within their companies' overall strategy McKinsey report on ITstrategyblog.com

A sudden outbreak of tree-hugging planet-conciousness? Nah.

I think the real reason that most IT shops should be looking at going green is the sheer cost savings component of it SUN CIO Bob Worrell on Biz-tech 3.0

First and foremost, this new trend is powered by record oil prices. Second: green has become a magical marketing word. A green spin covers any sin.

Hot air has become big business.

At the NFG mail servers, we block about 10 spam messages for every valid email our customers receive. Even so, customers keep asking for more agressive spam filters.

Spam filtering requires a lot of system resources. Content filtering involves opening each message and matching its full contents against a database of spam patterns. This involves a lot of disk read/write actions and heavy number crunching.

In the graph above, our mail server was flooded with more spam than it could adequately handle. Of course, we could allocate more system resources or try and tune the server some more. However, the solution turned out to be much simpler: greylisting.

Paul and myself have started a new DBMail blog.

Read the full blog entry @blog.dbmail.eu about direct database access versus protocol-mediated data retrieval.

Virtualization is cool. Literally. Consolidating servers is a great way to reduce carbon emissions.

Running a multi-core Xen server nowadays is like having a mini-datacenter-in-a-box. Cramming a dozen logical servers into the rackspace and energy footprint of a single physical server, it's a geek paradise. And a boon for the bottom line.

So naturally, when Amazon keeps upping the ante in it's Xen-based EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) offering, that's a cool thing.

Which begs the question: make or buy? How does running your own server rack (make) compare to renting EC2 capacity (buy)?

In Why most things fail, Paul Ormerod gleefully attacks economic orthodoxy. Traditional economic theory fails to explain the complexity and dynamics of the real world. Much more promising is an artificial life approach. Here, unpredictable interactions between simple agents give rise to complex behavior of the system as a whole.

Creating a simple computer model of a software market in which some firms pursue an open source strategy turns out to be very instructive, and funny.

See the group of ooo.......> agents up top? That's the open sourcers, competing with the closed source xxxxx.........> firms. You can click on the image to see an animation, or download the model and run your own simulations.

Now here's a wacky idea: let's rule the planet by wiki. Quote metagovernment.org:

Metagovernment [...] is the system which will run a series of governments using a scored, versioned website as the medium for legislation and bureaucracy.

Huh? What have these guys been smoking? You don't save the planet by combining wikipedia-style proposal writing with slashdot-style voting.

And how, exactly, is this technocrat babble supposed to replace the tax-collecting, monopoly-of-violence apparatus of the State?

Open source governments begin with no power to use force or collect taxes. Periodically all existing governments at every level will be asked to cede power to the websites pertinent to their region.

And we'll all live happily ever after.... This stuff is just inane and counterproductive. Who wants to be ruled by a Wiki cabal?

The open source movement has a lot to contribute towards better functioning political systems: a culture of transparancy, proven patterns for decentralized collective action, and a substantial influence in, and understanding of, technology culture.

Of course open source is politically relevant. Reducing politics to an exercise in software version control is not, however, a valuable contribution to that debate...

Several Dutch sources confirm (in english) that Microsoft's Office XML (OOXML) has been approved as an ISO standard.

Amidst new reports of voting irregularities, this makes ISO the worst april fools joke in history.

Microsoft has succeeded, not only in pushing through a non-standard, but in effectively destroying the credibility of ISO. This is a serious blow to the concept of standardization.

The amount of dirty play exhibited around the OOXML effort reveals the PR talk from Redmond about "interoperability" as nothing but a sham. To quote Glyn Moody:

If the whole sorry OOXML saga shows anything, it is Microsoft's deep and utter contempt for the whole idea of an open, collaborative process based on mutual respect and consensus. Henceforth, members of the open source community must view with deep cynicism all - not just some - offers by Microsoft to work more closely with the free software world. If they don't, they could find themselves used and abused just like the once famous, and now former, International Standards Organisation.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogel's recent announcement of new high-availability features in EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) drew some attention. And indeed, being finally able to manage IP addresses for EC2 services removes one of the biggest drawbacks EC2 had until now.

Amazon reseller Rightscale even drew some nice diagrams explaining how the new EC2 features make renting a fault-tolerant hosting environment a breeze.

Some pretty interesting details got omitted somehow, though.