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Alex Jordan [email protected]

Seattle, Washington

17. FLOSS zealot. GitHub fan. Ultimate player. Stack Exchange addict. UNIX philosophy subscriber. Sysadmin. Conference attendee & speaker (thrice). High schooler.

  • THERE ARE NO STRINGS ON ME

    at 2016-06-10T04:05:05Z via Impeller To: Public CC: Followers

    Re-watched "Age of Ultron" tonight; was reminded I made this in a fit of code nerdity.

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  • Stephen Sekula at 2016-06-10T04:03:35Z via Impeller To: Public CC: Followers

    Mammals are coming for us: "Monkey stumbles into a power plant, sends Kenya on a nationwide blackout" http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/06/08/banana-republic/

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    As a reminder, in April "Large Hadron Collider: Weasel causes shutdown". http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36173247

    Stephen Sekula at 2016-06-09T07:17:49Z

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  • On Ruby

    2016-06-08T06:59:29Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers

    New opinion: I hate Ruby. I don't at all have a problem with people who like it (power to you!), but personally, I just really don't like it. :/ #noflames

    From what I've seen, +1 xD

    JanKusanagi at 2016-06-08T09:54:19Z

  • Reminder to web developers

    2016-06-08T04:38:15Z via Impeller To: Public CC: Followers

    Friendly reminder to web devs: JavaScript is turned off in EVERY SINGLE ONE of your users' browsers until your JS downloads.

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  • Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) at 2016-06-06T18:42:27Z via AndStatus To: Public

    I have come to think that federations should be at best frontends to decentralized systems. The concrete example is various web wallets for crypto currencies. I don't know enough about Red Matrix, but I suppose from what I know that it is an example as well.

    Identity is the key, as Moxie points out. You can start out on a federated service, which really means a super node in the P2P network, but then you need to be able to take your identity outside without losing your connections.

    So, you have a decentralized system at the bottom. Decentralized as in truly P2P. Anyone could participate by just having a client that interacts with the network, without relying on any one particular server.

    But people aren't going to do that ... you know, except the ones who are. So you have the situation with identi.ca vs OStatus, but with a third level. There's the big centralized federal entities vs the small self-hosted-with-friends or -with-orgs entities vs the P2P decentralized I'm-just-on-a-mobile-app entities. And they are all talking.

    Through the web and the big entities you discover the network. Through the big or small entities you start participating, and with your P2P client you find emancipation and the network lives on regardless of what happens to the big players. But the big players are needed. How many of the people on Facebook know about Twister or BitMessage or whatever? But if the "Facebook" of a P2P+Federation network, with distributed identity, would start censoring, people would really quickly find another federated peer to start publishing on, and if they were worried enough, they would finally take the step off the web and run a desktop or mobile client.

    I think there's a lot of amazing P2P social network apps out there, but if they are going to go anywhere in a big way, they need to be on DuckDuckGo, on Google, on Bing, on Yandex, on Baidu. We need searchable frontends and public content, otherwise it's just a niche for cryptoheads. But then we need inroads to heavier decentralization. Pump.io lets you run a client, but you're still reliant on a server being up.

    I want git over secure-scuttlebutt, forums over IPFS and SAFE, IM over Ring or Tox or whatever, but I want it discoverable for civilians. And easy onramps toward more decentralization, with clear benefits.

    It's not easy, because then people would have done it already.

    So, W3C WG Social, awesome that you exist and I hope ActivityStreams 2.0 becomes a thing because we need a vocabulary either way. The messaging revolution will need solid work to stand on, but somebody had better start working on the BitCoin of messaging, rather that a more open, more free, more accessible and sensible SWIFT network.

    Who am I? I am nobody, I didn't even finish the tent poles of my social network vaporware. But I can dream, can't I?

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  • Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) at 2016-06-06T18:42:26Z via AndStatus To: Public

    I have come to think that federations should be at best frontends to decentralized systems. The concrete example is various web wallets for crypto currencies. I don't know enough about Red Matrix, but I suppose from what I know that it is an example as well.

    Identity is the key, as Moxie points out. You can start out on a federated service, which really means a super node in the P2P network, but then you need to be able to take your identity outside without losing your connections.

    So, you have a decentralized system at the bottom. Decentralized as in truly P2P. Anyone could participate by just having a client that interacts with the network, without relying on any one particular server.

    But people aren't going to do that ... you know, except the ones who are. So you have the situation with identi.ca vs OStatus, but with a third level. There's the big centralized federal entities vs the small self-hosted-with-friends or -with-orgs entities vs the P2P decentralized I'm-just-on-a-mobile-app entities. And they are all talking.

    Through the web and the big entities you discover the network. Through the big or small entities you start participating, and with your P2P client you find emancipation and the network lives on regardless of what happens to the big players. But the big players are needed. How many of the people on Facebook know about Twister or BitMessage or whatever? But if the "Facebook" of a P2P+Federation network, with distributed identity, would start censoring, people would really quickly find another federated peer to start publishing on, and if they were worried enough, they would finally take the step off the web and run a desktop or mobile client.

    I think there's a lot of amazing P2P social network apps out there, but if they are going to go anywhere in a big way, they need to be on DuckDuckGo, on Google, on Bing, on Yandex, on Baidu. We need searchable frontends and public content, otherwise it's just a niche for cryptoheads. But then we need inroads to heavier decentralization. Pump.io lets you run a client, but you're still reliant on a server being up.

    I want git over secure-scuttlebutt, forums over IPFS and SAFE, IM over Ring or Tox or whatever, but I want it discoverable for civilians. And easy onramps toward more decentralization, with clear benefits.

    It's not easy, because then people would have done it already.

    So, W3C WG Social, awesome that you exist and I hope ActivityStreams 2.0 becomes a thing because we need a vocabulary either way. The messaging revolution will need solid work to stand on, but somebody had better start working on the BitCoin of messaging, rather that a more open, more free, more accessible and sensible SWIFT network.

    Who am I? I am nobody, I didn't even finish the tent poles of my social network vaporware. But I can dream, can't I?

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  • Creepy ads are creepy

    2016-06-04T05:40:51Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers

    Recently I've been running Firefox Nightly in Safe Mode, which means HTTPS Everywhere and Privacy Badger are disabled. I spent some time reading about Armor (just on their website, not even searching!) and I just saw an ad for them pop up on my family's shared calendar, which is about as unrelated as you can get.

    Freaking creepy.

    sounds really creepy yes

    Face at 2016-06-04T17:16:04Z

  • 2016-06-02T21:15:49Z via AndStatus To: Public

    I wish I could git reset --hard life decisions

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    Life outside the electronic world sure is --hard. No backups, no branches ... if I couldn't have resets I would settle for at least branches and merges.

    Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) at 2016-06-03T01:56:27Z

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  • LibrePlanet conference videos and slides online: Edward Snowden, Richard Stallman, Karen Sandler, and more

    Free Software Foundation at 2016-06-01T16:08:48Z via AndStatus To: Public

    Read this online: https://www.fsf.org/news/libreplanet-conference-videos-and-slides-online-edward-snowden-richard-stallman-karen-sandler-and-more

    Boston, Massachusetts, USA – Tuesday, May 31, 2016 – The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announces that recordings and slides from its LibrePlanet 2016 free software conference are [now available online][0].

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  • Stratic blog post

    2016-05-29T07:18:09Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers

    As promised, I've written a detailed blog post about the first part of Stratic. Whoo! Feedback appreciated.

    (Also, I discovered an off-by-one bug in the permalink generation code - yikes! I'm not bothering to do redirects because I only linked once to it, but that's why the last note's post link will 404.)

  • 2016-05-27T06:45:40Z via pump.strugee.net Web To: Public CC: Followers

    So as of a little less than an hour ago, I finally, finally have a working blog on my site! I am SO. EXCITED.

    I'll probably write up a longer post about it tomorrow, but in the meantime, you can check out the very first post I wrote about it.

  • Speaking of (the not so dead, not so irrelevant) Federation

    Freemor at 2016-05-25T07:36:13Z via Impeller To: Public CC: Followers

    Join us for the first Decentralized Web Summit — June 8-9, in SF



    The first Decentralized Web Summit is a call for dreamers and builders who believe we can lock the Web open for good. This goal of the Summit (June 8) and Meetup featuring lightning talks and workshops (June 9) is to spark collaboration and take concrete steps to create a better Web.


    Full info @


    https://blog.archive.org/2016/05/19/join-us-for-the-first-decentralized-web-summit-june-8-9-in-sf/

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  • utml to Jade in Pump.io

    2016-05-25T07:29:50Z via Impeller To: Public CC: Followers

    Sooooo I estimate so far I've spent about 7 hours working on Pump.io's utml to Jade conversion. Ugh.

    This is the kind of thing that's just *barely* too complicated to script. Or in other words it's mind-numbing and simple, but just interesting enough that I can't get the computer to do it for me.

    Update: this is up to about 9 hours now.

    Alex Jordan at 2016-05-25T18:29:30Z

  • Sean Tilley at 2016-05-24T20:17:25Z via Impeller To: Public CC: Followers

    "Because blockchain is consensual, after a certain point of centralization, the rules of the system depend on very few users. For example, the bitcoin “update” would be unviable if the two more Chinese mining organizations had refused to implement it. A network of nodes designed this way has a power structure with clear centralizers—the owners of infrastructure—that in the end presents a threat to the distributed future of the Internet."

    #^The blockchain is a threat to the distributed future of the Internet

    Image/photo

    The blockchain will be very useful for registering large corporate capital markets and making cross-border banking transactions, but as a system for the development of everyday applications on the Internet, it’s a danger to the distributed structure of the network.



    In effect, this particular distributed technology will essentially be beholden to relatively few actors - the few that can financially afford to run their own blockchains and hold a mass of data. Trying to depend on it as an end user unfortunately creates more problems than it solves.
    No doubt it'll be great for businesses and the finance industry. But for user-facing distributed communication systems, it will be next to worthless.

    Discovered via @Bob Mottram

    #blockchain #distributed

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    I agree that the bitcoin style blockchain is vulnerable to this. However, to say that it's because of "consensus" is wrong; there's a spectrum of consensus resolution methods, and bitcoin's method is just one.

    For example, Stellar's consensus protocol provides a path out of trusting actors who become untrustworthy while still providing a general consensus system.

    Christopher Allan Webber at 2016-05-24T19:40:09Z

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    That's all very well and good, but the larger problem with blockchains is that they're relatively heavy in terms of memory size. The article lists an example about Twister that is very compelling, in the sense that in order to use Twister, one has to download the entire blockchain to local memory first.

    In a sense, this is a very real limitation of leveraging the power of the blockchain to end users - if anything, only entities that could afford dedicated resources would be able to do anything with it. This is all very well for treating the blockchain as a banking ledger, which might inevitably happen, but for distributed communication networks that have any level of activity on them, this could actually end up causing more harm than good.

    Sean Tilley at 2016-05-24T20:46:18Z

    Take a look at SAFE, http://maidsafe.net/, which doesn't even have a proper blockchain and thereby sacrifices transparency and verifiability for performance, and the reason is exactly that they want to build not primarily a financial system, but "user-facing distributed communication systems".

    Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) at 2016-05-25T06:35:23Z

  • impatience

    2016-05-24T20:16:08Z via Impeller To: Public CC: Followers

    I sent a Pull Request not 10 minutes ago, and I'm already inpatient to get a response. *Wow*.

    Is it accepted yet? :p

    Arcee at 2016-05-24T23:50:27Z

    Only just saw this!

    No, but only because I haven't had time to fix everything that'd wrong with it :P

    Alex Jordan at 2016-06-03T06:00:05Z

  • 2016-05-23T21:25:30Z via pump.strugee.net Web To: Public CC: Followers

    sometimes these days i wonder if xkcd is still really a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language

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  • Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) at 2016-05-22T19:15:52Z via Impeller To: Public CC: Followers

    Says Moxie Marlinspike:
    I understand that federation and defined protocols that third parties can develop clients for are great and important ideas, but unfortunately they no longer have a place in the modern world.

    Ouch.

    https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issuecomment-217339450
    /via https://quitter.se/notice/5688952

    This relates to that whole "federation is dead" post also by Moxie:

    https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

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    Show all 10 replies

    To the apologists, be careful. Moxie's words were strong and clear. Also, at odds with reality (see for example all of the examples others mentioned above).

    It is better to say “Moxie is wrong about this.” than to pretend he did not say incorrect things. We all get it wrong from time to time.

    Douglas Perkins at 2016-05-23T03:43:18Z

    I read it as saying "centralization is the only way forward because federation is so difficult." A statement which overall I disagree with but certain parts of which have some validity.

    Alex Jordan at 2016-05-23T03:58:19Z

    Douglas, was that comment aimed at me? If so, I'm definitely not being an apologist for Moxie. I think his arguments have some merit, but as I said, I think his conclusion is incorrect and that his argument as a whole doesn't hold water.

    Alex Jordan at 2016-05-23T03:59:58Z

    Alex, not aimed at you specifically. A general note of caution about how not to frame things.

    On re-reading the comments, everyone (including you) here was fairly precise and accurate, which is pretty cool (and rare).

    Douglas Perkins at 2016-05-23T07:29:27Z

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  • Community meeting this Friday, 2016/05/20 @ 20:00 UTC

    Pump.io Community at 2016-05-18T19:49:59Z via Impeller To: Public CC: Followers

    Hello, dear pumpers!

     
    Everyone is invited to join the next Pump.io community meeting this Friday, 2016/05/20 at 20:00 UTC.
     
    Agenda is here: https://github.com/e14n/pump.io/wiki/Meeting-2016-05-20 (you can add topics too)


    The meeting will take place on IRC: chat.freenode.net server, #pump.io channel. It can also be followed via Jabber/XMPP in the [email protected] MUC room, and via web access.
     
    As usual, the meeting will be logged and we will REDACT the nicks of the people who ask for it; log/outcomes will be posted here and in the meeting wiki page.
     
    Have a look at our Community wiki page for further info.
     
    We hope you can join us!

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  • Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) at 2016-05-18T19:48:53Z via Impeller To: Public CC: Followers

    "Every time you decide that making users feel stupid is better than fixing your code, you're making an ethical decision."

    http://www.joelonsoftware.com/news/fog0000000322.html

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