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Michael Boyle's weblog

I’ve neglected to comment

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on a whole bunch of stories lately that I think are important and/or interesting – chief among these being the Smart Tags feature that’s being deployed in new versions of key MS software. Some disagree, but I am of the opinion that this feature hugely oversteps the boundaries of what’s appropriate or acceptible for a software company to do, particularly in the browser where the software is responsible for presenting other people’s writing.

As one would expect, the gang at ALA have published an excellent analysis of the feature by Chris Kaminsky. To link or not to link, and to what, is an editorial decision, period. And the decision to do so rests with the people involved in the editorial process, and nowhere else. I don’t get what’s so hard about that concept for some.

I’ve been harping on this

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a lot, but in Declan McCullagh’s article on the Hanssen, the alleged double-agent for the Russians, he includes a quote which calls the whole accusation into question. On page two, he writes, “Freeh, who once lobbied for a permanent ban on the distribution of encryption software without a backdoor for his agency, could use this case as justification for restrictions that Congress would have to approve. In a statement, Freeh stressed that Hanssen used a ‘variety of sophisticated means of communication (and) encryption.'”

The problem for me is that these guys have shown for years that they’re not trustworthy. How do we know that Hanssen wasn’t a plant from the get-go who has been brought out now to further the anti-crypto agenda?

Update: The Times has posted an excerpt of the FBI affadavit about Hanssen. It doesn’t clarify much, but it’s fascinating reading.

The Zeldman mentions that

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The Zeldman mentions that Netscape 6.01 has been released, but also that it is incompatible with ATM on the Mac. From the release notes: “There is a known conflict with Adobe Type Manager, which causes windows to appear blank. Workaround: Uninstall ATM before you start Netscape 6.”

Uh, yeah. Hmmm. By my compass, releasing software that is incompatible with ATM is like releasing nothing at all. I don’t know of anyone who runs their Mac without ATM installed. Thanks guys, see you when you get that sorted out.

Look, look

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it’s another Montrealer who keeps a site like this one. luke.andrews.net, the weblog of Luke Andrews, who evidently does web work at Concordia, one of the universities I’ve attended. He wrote about the newly-launched Concordia site the other day, lamenting the “grand messy affair of interlinking files that reference each other”. If he only knew! I was tangentially involved with Concordia’s web development back in 95-96, when their grand plan was to give every department – not faculty, department – its own Mac with StarNine’s web server software on it – and each one was to develop its own site. Madness.

Yet another nay-saying

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article about peer to peer network applications in eCompany Now [via Scripting News]. I don’t know what SETI@home has to do with p2p, however. It’s a classic client-server app, no? A central server collates the results of the work of a distributed network of machines that send it processed data. The only difference is the relationship between the machines doing the crunching and the server. Maybe I’ve missed something?

P2P is something else entirely – it’s all about eliminating (or minimizing) the central server’s position in the mix. That’s its power – and its disadvantage. It is hard to see where the profits lie in deploying P2P schemes. No harder, though, than divining the profit-potential of the internet as a whole – and that certainly didn’t hinder its development.

For me, the power of P2P is more fundamental than whether or not anyone has figured out the business model to make it work. Think of something like the old Firefly music-suggestion site (which was very cool for its day, and anticipated a lot of stuff people are looking at now). Imagine if people had the option of running Firefly within their net-aware MP3 player. And think if you could make “buddies” lists (like in an IM program) and integrate their preferences to help suggest what you might like. Say you could tell the software, “give 100% weight to my preferences, 80% confidence to my buddies list, and 60% to people one degree away from my own buddies.” Etc.

The trick with p2p isn’t to hold off until the profitable way comes along, just as that wasn’t the case with the net as a whole. The trick is to recognize that it’s there, and that people love it. That’s the world – now people have to figure out how to live in it, commercially or no.

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