internet

Loadsharers: Funding the Load-Bearing Internet Person

Eric S. Raymond — Wed, 07 Aug 2019 23:00:00 +0000

The internet has a sustainability problem. Many of its critical services depend on the dedication of unpaid volunteers, because they can't be monetized and thus don't have any revenue stream for the maintainers to live on. I'm talking about services like DNS, time synchronization, crypto libraries—software without which the net and the browser you're using couldn't function.

These volunteer maintainers are the Load-Bearing Internet People (LBIP). Underfunding them is a problem, because underfunded critical services tend to have gaps and holes that could have been fixed if there were more full-time attention on them. As our civilization becomes increasingly dependent on this software infrastructure, that attention shortfall could lead to disastrous outages.

I've been worrying about this problem since 2012, when I watched a hacker I know wreck his health while working on a critical infrastructure problem nobody else understood at the time. Billions of dollars in e-commerce hung on getting the particular software problem he had spotted solved, but because it masqueraded as network undercapacity, he had a lot of trouble getting even technically-savvy people to understand where the problem was. He solved it, but unable to afford medical insurance and literally living in a tent, he eventually went blind in one eye and is now prone to depressive spells.

More recently, I damaged my ankle and discovered that although there is such a thing as minor surgery on the medical level, there is no such thing as "minor surgery" on the financial level. I was looking—still am looking—at a serious prospect of either having my life savings wiped out or having to leave all 52 of the open-source projects I'm responsible for in the lurch as I scrambled for a full-time job. Projects at risk include the likes of GIFLIB, GPSD and NTPsec.

That refocused my mind on the LBIP problem. There aren't many Load-Bearing Internet People—probably on the close order of 1,000 worldwide—but they're a systemic vulnerability made inevitable by the existence of common software and internet services that can't be metered. And, burning them out is a serious problem. Even under the most cold-blooded assessment, civilization needs the mean service life of an LBIP to be long enough to train and acculturate a replacement.

(If that made you wonder—yes, in fact, I am training an apprentice. Different problem for a different article.)

Alas, traditional centralized funding models have failed the LBIPs. There are a few reasons for this:

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Where the Internet Gets Real

Doc Searls — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 11:30:00 +0000

by Doc Searls

Local is the frontier of truth at the dawn of our Digital Age.

The internet showed up in our house in 1995. When that happened, I mansplained to my wife that it was a global drawstring through all the phone and cable companies of the world, pulling everybody and everything together—and that this was going to be good for the world.

My wife, who ran a global business, already knew plenty of things about the internet and expected good things to happen as well. But she pushed back on the global thing, saying "the sweet spot of the internet is local." Her reason: "Local is where the internet gets real." By which she meant the internet wasn't real in the physical sense anywhere, and we still live and work in the physical world, and that was a huge advantage.

Later I made a big thing about how the internet was absent of distance, an observation I owe to Craig Burton. Here's Craig in a 1999 interview for a Linux Journal newsletter that I sourced later in this 2000 column:

I see the Net as a world we might see as a bubble. A sphere. It's growing larger and larger, and yet inside, every point in that sphere is visible to every other one. That's the architecture of a sphere. Nothing stands between any two points. That's its virtue: it's empty in the middle. The distance between any two points is functionally zero, and not just because they can see each other, but because nothing interferes with operation between any two points. There's a word I like for what's going on here: terraform. It's the verb for creating a world. That's what we're making here: a new world. Now the question is, what are we going to do to cause planetary existence? How can we terraform this new world in a way that works for the world and not just ourselves?

In Linux Journal (see my article "The Giant Zero, Part 0.x") and elsewhere, I joined Craig in calling that world "the giant zero". Again my wife weighed in with a helpful point: the internet has no gravity as well as no distance—meaning we are not only placeless when we're on the net, but that prepositions such as on (uttered earlier in this sentence) were literally wrong, even though they made metaphorical sense. See, most prepositions express spatial relations that require distance, gravity or both. Over, under, through, around, beside and within are all examples. The one preposition that does apply for the net is with, because we are clearly with another person (or whatever) when we are engaged with them on (can't help using that word) the net.

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Linux's Broadening Foundation

Doc Searls — Thu, 06 Jun 2019 11:30:00 +0000

by Doc Searls

It's time to embrace 5G, starting with the Edge in our homes and hands.

In June 1997, David Isenberg, then of AT&T Labs Research, wrote a landmark paper titled "Rise of the Stupid Network". You can still find it here. The paper argued against phone companies' intent to make their own systems smarter. He said the internet, which already was subsuming all the world's phone and cable TV company networks, was succeeding not by being smart, but by being stupid. By that, he meant the internet "was built for intelligence at the end-user's device, not in the network".

In a stupid network, he wrote, "the data is boss, bits are essentially free, and there is no assumption that the data is of a single data rate or data type." That approach worked because the internet's base protocol, TCP/IP, was as general-purpose as can be. It supported every possible use by not caring about any particular use or purpose. That meant it didn't care about data rates or types, billing or other selfish concerns of the smaller specialized networks it harnessed. Instead, the internet's only concern was connecting end points for any of those end points' purposes, over any intermediary networks, including all those specialized ones, without prejudice. That lack of prejudice is what we later called neutrality.

The academic term for the internet's content- and purpose-neutral design is end-to-end. That design was informed by "End-to-End Arguments in System Design", a paper by Jerome Saltzer, David P. Reed and David D. Clark, published in 1980. In 2003, David Weinberger and I later cited both papers in "World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else". In it, we explained:

When Craig Burton describes the Net's stupid architecture as a hollow sphere comprised entirely of ends, he's painting a picture that gets at what's most remarkable about the Internet's architecture: Take the value out of the center and you enable an insane flowering of value among the connected end points. Because, of course, when every end is connected, each to each and each to all, the ends aren't endpoints at all.

And what do we ends do? Anything that can be done by anyone who wants to move bits around.

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The Digital Unconformity

Doc Searls — Wed, 06 Mar 2019 13:00:00 +0000

by Doc Searls

Will our digital lives leave a fossil record? Or any record at all?

In the library of Earth's history, there are missing books. All were written in rock that is now gone. The greatest example of "gone" rock first was observed by John Wesley Powell in 1869, on his expedition by boat through the Grand Canyon. Floating down the Colorado river, he saw the canyon's mile-thick layers of reddish sedimentary rock resting on a basement of gray non-sedimentary rock, and he correctly assumed that the upper layers did not continue from the bottom one. He knew time had passed between the basement rock and the floors of rock above it, but he didn't know how much. The answer turned out to be more than a billion years. The walls of the Grand Canyon say nothing about what happened during that time. Geology calls that nothing an unconformity.

In fact, Powell's unconformity prevails worldwide. The name for this worldwide missing rock is the Great Unconformity. Because of that unconformity, geology knows comparatively little about what happened in the world through stretches of time ranging regionally up to 1.6 billion years. All of those stretches end abruptly with the Cambrian Explosion, which began about 541 million years ago. Many theories attempt to explain what erased all that geological history, but the prevailing paradigm is perhaps best expressed in "Neoproterozoic glacial origin of the Great Unconformity", published on the last day of 2018 by nine geologists writing for the National Academy of Sciences.

Put simply, they blame snow. Lots of it—enough to turn the planet into one giant snowball, already informally called Snowball Earth. A more accurate name for this time would be Glacierball Earth, because glaciers, all formed from snow, apparently covered most or all of Earth's land during the Great Unconformity—and most or all of the seas as well.

The relevant fact about glaciers is that they don't sit still. They spread and slide sideways, pressing and pushing immensities of accumulated ice down on landscapes that they pulverize and scrape against adjacent landscapes, abrading their way through mountains and across hills and plains like a trowel spreading wet cement. Thus, it seems glaciers scraped a vastness of geological history off the Earth's surface and let plate tectonics hide the rest of the evidence. As a result, the stories of Earth's missing history are told only by younger rock that remembers only that a layer of moving ice had erased pretty much everything other than a signature on its work.

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Where There's No Distance or Gravity

Doc Searls — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 13:00:00 +0000

by Doc Searls

The more digital we become, the less human we remain.

I had been in Los Angeles only a few times in my life before the October day in 1987 when I drove down from our home in the Bay Area with my teenage son to visit family. The air was unusually clear as we started our drive back north, and soon the San Gabriel Mountains—Los Angeles' own Alps (you can ski there!)—loomed over the region like a crenelated battlement, as if protecting its inhabitants from cultures and climates that might invade from the north. So, on impulse, I decided to drive up to Mount Wilson, the only crest in the range with a paved road to the top.

I could see from the maps I had already studied that the drive was an easy one. Our destination also was easily spotted from below: a long, almost flat ridge topped by the white domes of Mount Wilson Observatory (where Hubble observed the universe expanding) and a bristle of towers radiating nearly all the area's FM and TV signals. The site was legendary among broadcast engineering geeks, and I had longed to visit it ever since I was a ham radio operator as a boy in New Jersey.

After checking out the observatory and the towers, my son and I stood on a promontory next to a parking lot and surveyed the vast spread of civilization below. Soon four visiting golfers from New York came over and started asking me questions about what was where.

I answered like a veteran docent, pointing out the Rose Bowl, Palos Verdes Peninsula, Santa Catalina and other Channel Islands, the Hollywood Hills, the San Fernando Valley, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Santa Anita Park and more. When they asked where the Whittier Narrows earthquake had happened a few days before, I pointed at the Puente Hills, off to the southeast, and filled them in on what I knew about the geology there as well.

After a few minutes of this, they asked me how long I had lived there. I said all this stuff was almost as new to me as it was to them. "Then how do you know so much about it?", they asked. I told them I had studied maps of the area and refreshed my knowledge over lunch just before driving up there. They were flabbergasted. "Really?", one guy said. "You study maps?"

Indeed, I did. I had maps of all kinds and sizes at home, and the door pockets of my car bulged with AAA maps of everywhere I might drive in California. I also added local and regional Southern California maps to my mobile inventory before driving down.

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Shall We Study Amazon's Pricing Together?

Doc Searls — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 11:30:00 +0000

by Doc Searls

Is it possible to figure out how we're being profiled online?

This past July, I spent a quality week getting rained out in a series of brainstorms by alpha data geeks at the Pacific Northwest BI & Analytics Summit in Rogue River, Oregon. Among the many things I failed to understand fully there was how much, or how well, we could know about how the commercial sites and services of the online world deal with us, based on what they gather about us, on the fly or over time, as we interact with them.

The short answer was "not much". But none of the experts I talked to said "Don't bother trying." On the contrary, the consensus was that the sums of data gathered by most companies are (in the words of one expert) "spaghetti balls" that are hard, if not possible, to unravel completely. More to my mission in life and work, they said it wouldn't hurt to have humans take some interest in the subject.

In fact, that was pretty much why I was invited there, as a Special Guest. My topic was "When customers are in full command of what companies do with their data—and data about them". As it says at that link, "The end of this story...is a new beginning for business, in a world where customers are fully in charge of their lives in the marketplace—both online and off: a world that was implicit in both the peer-to-peer design of the Internet and the nature of public markets in the pre-industrial world."

Obviously, this hasn't happened yet.

This became even more obvious during a break when I drove to our AirBnB nearby. By chance, my rental car radio was tuned to a program called From Scurvy to Surgery: The History Of Randomized Trials. It was an Innovation Hub interview with Andrew Leigh, Ph.D. (@ALeighMP), economist and member of the Australian Parliament, discussing his new book, Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Are Changing Our World (Yale University Press, 2018). At one point, Leigh reported that "One expert says, 'Every pixel on Amazon's home page has had to justify its existence through a randomized trial.'"

I thought, Wow. How much of my own experience of Amazon has been as a randomized test subject? And can I possibly be in anything even remotely close to full charge of my own life inside Amazon's vast silo?

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Book Review: Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

Petros Koutoupis — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 13:08:08 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

I don't know where to begin—and I mean that in a very positive way. I can best describe Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) as a "literary documentary". The book provides a sort of oral history of the Valley from the legends who built it.

The author, Adam Fisher, grew up in Silicon Valley. He continues to live in the Bay Area, so he's been exposed to many of the early technologies created in the region. He eventually became a computer programmer and writer, writing for Wired magazine and other publications. Valley of Genius is his first book, but he wrote very little of it—and he didn't need to do much more than piece together the many interviews he conducted to form a wonderful and continuous narrative that begins as early as the 1950s.

The story starts off with the very first computer that was more than just a super calculator created by Doug Engelbart. With a small team, he built a prototype: the oN-Line System, or NLS. It even was equipped with a "mouse"! The story continues on to the first video games manufactured by Nolan Bushnell and company in their pre-Atari days.

The book also details how, in parallel, Engelbart's prototype inspired the computers of the future developed at Xerox PARC, while the Spacewar video game would motivate a young Steve Wozniak not only to help Steve Jobs create video games for the later Atari, but also eventually to build the original Apple computer.

The narrative progresses with the birth of Apple, the company, was born and took the world of personal computing by storm—at least initially. What followed was an emotional roller coaster. The Apple II was a success, and up until Jobs looked to Alan Kay's visions preserved in the Xerox Alto, Apple continued to fail, but then later turned it all around with the Macintosh, as the story goes.

The book covers the evolving hardware (and software), and how the culture it nurtured evolved along with it. It explores how the early versions of the internet connected the youngest and brightest, and how ideas were shared—all of them centered around the concept of openness.

It looks at how passionate people started flame wars, and how publications, such as Wired, captured those times and emotions best. The book explores how Wired also rode the internet wave by shifting some of that focus toward its HotWired website. It considers the early days of the internet, at a time when it was all research and bulletin-board systems (or BBSes), and the problem of how to navigate this new World Wide Web. It describes how early web browsers, such as Mosaic and Netscape Navigator (the Mosaic killer or Mozilla), solved this need—and with it, helping to open the internet to more users.

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Thinking and Working Outside the Platform

Doc Searls — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 17:50:50 +0000

by Doc Searls

On the one hand, Facebook is on fire, and soon the whole surveillance economy will start burning down too (including publishers who depend on that economy no less than Facebook does).

On the same hand, lots of Linux wizards work in that economy, which is a lot larger than Facebook alone.

Also on the same hand, lots of wizards and muggles alike are wondering out loud how we can come up with alternatives to Facebook and other "social" platforms: ones that don't depend on surveillance-based advertising.

On the other hand, we can move beyond platforms. Let me explain.

See these guys?

Those are carpenters who worked for DW Griffith, the silent film maker, back around 1908. The head carpenter is the guy on the bottom right: George W. Searls, my grandfather.

In the early years of silent film, here’s what they built:

Theaters. With stage sets.

That’s because film makers in those days thought and filmed inside the box they knew, which was theater. They'd set up a camera pointed at a stage, where actors performed just like they did in theaters.

Griffith’s biggest pioneering move was to take the camera outside the theater, into streets and homes of Fort Lee, New Jersey, across the river from New York (that's where the shots above took place)—and then out to Hollywood and a West that was still wild. Look up DW Griffith silent shorts, and somewhere among the films that come up will be the steps on which Grandpa and his carpenters sat.

Those carpenters were the hackers that helped Griffith, and the whole film industry, think and build outside the theater.

In a similar way, we need the Linux geeks and allied wizards to help the tech industry think and work outside the platform.

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The Actually Distributed Web

Doc Searls — Tue, 08 Aug 2017 12:13:23 +0000

by Doc Searls

I thought my mind was through getting blown until I heard in mid-June 2017 that Brave raised $35 million in less than 30 seconds, though an ICO (Initial Coin Offering). I did know ICOs were hot stuff. I also knew Brave's ICO was about to happen, because Brendan Eich, the company CEO, said so over breakfast two days earlier. So my seat belt was fastened, but the acceleration of the ICO still left my mental ass on the pavement two counties back.

Since then, I've hyper-focused on cryptocurrencies, tokens, distributed ledgers, ICOs and the rest of it for two reasons. One is that there is a craze going on. See Figure 1.

Figure 1. Crypto Currency Market Capitalizations (from http://coinmarketcap.com/charts)

The other is that the investment here includes a measure of faith that we can once again imagine full agency for individuals as distributed peers on the internet, and that many positive personal, social, economic, political and other transformations will arise from that agency.

Phil Windley, who now chairs the Sovrin Foundation, told me yesterday that this is the third tech revolution of his lifetime. "The first was the PC, and the second was the Internet. This is the third", he said. I'm inclined to agree, simply because so many of us are seeing a wide open future where before there was just a wall of silos. I lamented that wall here in Linux Journal, way back in September 2011:

As entities on the Web, we have devolved. Client-server has become calf-cow. The client—that's you—is the calf, and the Web site is the cow. What you get from the cow is milk and cookies. The milk is what you go to the site for. The cookies are what the site gives to you, mostly for its own business purposes, chief among which is tracking you like an animal. There are perhaps a billion or more server-cows now, each with its own "brand" (as marketers and cattle owners like to say).

This is not what the Net's founders had in mind. Nor was it what Tim Berners-Lee meant for his World Wide Web of hypertext documents to become. But it's what we've got, and it's getting worse.

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Progress on Privacy

Doc Searls — Thu, 08 Dec 2016 11:30:36 +0000

by Doc Searls

The internet didn't come with privacy, any more than the planet did. But at least the planet had nature, which provided raw materials for the privacy technologies we call clothing and shelter. On the net, we use human nature to make our own raw materials. Those include code, protocols, standards, frameworks and best practices, such as those behind free and open-source software.

So far, our best privacy tech is encryption. But I won't dwell on that one, because I assume all Linux Journal readers are experts at that. Instead, I want to visit three others, all of which are new.

The first is agreements.

The most popular informal agreements in the physical world are called secrets. These aren't especially enforceable, but they are backed by norms, which are powerful constraints operating in a social context. For example, we trust that people, other than the intended recipient, won't open a sealed envelope, even if they can. The seal (such as the one shown in Figure 1) signals secrecy and has been in use for hundreds of years.

Figure 1. Seal Signaling Secrecy

More formal are the legal agreements we call terms. We encounter these every time we click "agree" to something that looks like what is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. The Legal Agreements We Call Terms

Did you read that? Go back and try reading it again.

These are "contracts of adhesion", defined (by the Legal Dictionary) as "a standardized contract offered to consumers on a 'take it or leave it' basis without giving the consumer an opportunity to bargain for terms that are more favorable". After industry won the industrial revolution, large companies needed to create legal agreements for dealing with up to millions of customers. Contracts of adhesion were the only way. Alas, this also sidelined freedom of contract, "which allows parties to provide for the terms and conditions that will govern the relationship" (says LawTeacher.net).

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