The thesis is embedded below; it's a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license, for those who care about such things.
Mnikr: Reputation Construction Through Human Trading of Distributed Social Identities
]]>"He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he's arrived." ---Accelerando, Charles Stross
In a nutshell, my research proposal is to make the above quote possible. More specifically, the greatest lack in human-computer interaction is the lack of integrated personal networks that share not just a common networking protocol, but a common set of verbs. My research proposal would be to create a lightweight standard for verb-based interaction between discrete software and hardware agents.
It is probably most useful to examine the discrete steps in the overly concise sentence above, to see where current technology is lacking. We will assume, for the time being, that the devices share at their base a common network-- something along the lines of the MIT Media Lab 'MIThril' project's Body Network; obviously, battery and wireless functions have sufficiently advanced since their 2003 research that we could rely on discrete power sources to power our devices, and thus use a wireless standard, such as Bluetooth or XBee, for communication (XBee provides a better model from which to work, as it is not dependent on a master-slave setup, but either could work). So then, there are several discrete steps involved:
All of this can be done using current technology, of course-- but it's hundreds, if not thousands, of button and mouse clicks; first, I have to take the camera out. Then I have to click the button. Then I have to plug the camera into my computer. Then I have to tell the computer to get the photo. Then I have to open Photoshop to crop the image. Then I have to upload the photo to my website. Then I have to create a blog post incorporating the photo. 45 minutes later, this is no longer cool, or even vaguely interesting.
Using smartphones as universal devices has allowed us to cut some of these steps out; I can now take a photo, manipulate and tag it, and upload it to My Flickr Stream all in one iPhone program. I have to make some sacrifices to do so, however: first among them, I have to use the iPhone's tiny, mediocre camera. It's true that the iPhone camera will likely be upgraded soon, but even then, it will only be equal to a decent camera from eight years ago-- not, say, a modern DSLR camera. If I use a DSLR, I then am at the mercy of all the steps outlined above; even if I use a (really neat) Eye-Fi card, I still have to do the uploading and blogging steps manually, because nothing speaks all of those languages-- the photo upload, the blogging, the editing, and the camera.
Allow me, then, to propose an alternative. I take a photo with my camera, and it just dumps it on my personal network. My photo editor-- whether that's on my phone, my laptop, my wearable computer, or my neural net-- sees a photo on the wires (metaphorical) and grabs it; when it's done, it dumps it back on the network, with the instruction that something blog it. Then, a device who understands blogging can handle the upload and blogging of the photo; if it pushes it to Flickr, perhaps it can also send an AtomPub squirt out for the blog.
So, aside from a bit more convenience, what's the power here? The power is that we don't need direct integration. Currently, if you want everything actually to work, you buy Apple. Why is that? Because I know that my iPhone speaks the same language as my MacBook, and that if I want them to send a photo over to my TV, I can use an Apple TV box and it'll "just work." If I then want my photos backed up, my Time Capsule will (probably) handle it. And that's great; if I want to have my entire life handled for me, all I need is, say, $10-15 thousand dollars, and I can just have a wonderful iUniverse. What Apple has done here is not teaching one device to do everything: my Macbook doesn't know how to talk to a TV, and my TV doesn't need to know how to manage rotating backups from across my network. Instead, they've figured out the lesson UNIX people learned decades ago: make a bunch of small tools, each of which does something really well, and then just chain them together. Apple could be better about this, but currently, it's the best there is.
The thing is, while I'm a happy Mac person, I don't want to be locked in to the iUniverse. I want to have a MyUniverse, with MyTools and MyStuff, because while Apple stuff does indeed work, it's not always the best in its class; XBMC has more features than Apple TV, and a Drobo is a much better storage machine than a Time Capsule. To go toward our original example, if Apple ever makes a camera, it might be very nice, it will certainly be shiny and white (or brushed aluminum), but it may not be the best in its class, or it may just not be the one I want. It would be nice if everything-- Apple or not-- could speak this common language.
I would suggest, as a step toward the common language, to take a page from the Activity Strea.ms book, and use verbs as the common thread; that way, to swap in a device, all I have to do is teach it to respond to the same verb-- for instance, "blog this" or "play this" or "display this," and then everything can interact with it in just the same way. We have this in some systems already, of course-- the Internet has lots of really good standardizations of API, like the RESTful idea, which is indeed verb-based-- but not in the local field, and that's where we need to go.
Thus, if given a year to do a major research project in HCI, that's what I would suggest: that we figure out a common language for all these discrete things to speak, and then spend some time teaching the devices actually to speak it. That way, when we go from wearable computers to implantable computers, I don't need to teach my camera how to interact with its new semi-robotic overlord, or indeed, its new semi-robotic overlord what a camera is: they can both speak a common language for actions, and all will be well. This will enable human-computer interaction by letting the human stop messing with it, which is what most humans actually want in their computer interaction; they want the power of infinite flexibility, but the ability to have things just work, without comment or complaint or five thousand mouse clicks.
]]>Setting that aside, JHU Admissions wanted to collect a blog post from every major and minor at Hopkins, and so (since apparently I'm the only person with access to writing equipment, or maybe just a spell checker, in the department), I wrote a guest blog post for them; go check it out at http://hopkins.typepad.com/academics/computer-science/. I promise not to sound this perky in real life. :-)
I will soon return to the (surprisingly popular!) series on social networks; watch this space. Right now, I'm working 20 hours a day on Mnikr, making changes, fixing bugs, and adding fun new features. If you haven't tried it yet, get the Reputation Points Gift Certificate from here, then go check it out; buy shares in people you know, and grow the community.
]]>Mnikr is a system both to allow you to take advantage of the entire Distributed Social network (DiSo), and to allow everyone to build reputations online through a stock-market-like system. How does that work? Well, each person can buy up to five shares of another person's reputation (five shares in one person, not five shares total). As that person's reputation rises, the investor (and the person in question) receives dividends-- one could think of them as "goodwill," which can then be invested back into the community.
So there are a few core ideas here, that I think are interesting:
I'll be writing my Master's thesis on Mnikr's design and, with your help, some of the results we find together. Regardless, though, I've greatly enjoyed working on it, and I hope all of you will enjoy using it to explore your social networks. It has a fledgeling API as well; I'm hoping that some enterprising developers might enjoy using the reputation data Mnikr will provide.
As thanks for reading my blog, I'll give you a code to get some starter points with which to buy your first few reputation shares:
dpbjkuddzykfiponyafj
That will give you 50 points, which will be enough to invest in at least a few people around you. Again, find your friends using the Search tab, if they don't show up on the list of friends on your own page. You can enter the code on your Portfolio tab; it's displayed when you log in. Mnikr uses OpenID for logins, so you don't have to create yet another account!
Please feel free to leave comments here, or using the Feedback link at Mnikr (which will take you to Uservoice); I'm anxious to hear comments, critiques, criticisms, or suggestions for more features!
Once again, thanks for reading, and I hope to see you all at Mnikr!
]]>I had a hard time deciding whether to include Twitter in this Guide. After all, Twitter has hit the mainstream, with CNN citing it from its news program, and even the Daily Show making fun of it regularly. At the same time, it's often criticized as one of the most useless, most shallow forms of communication. That isn't a fair criticism, though, and so in addition to showing you how to use it today, I hope to explain why.
The concept of Twitter, as you may well know, is pretty simple: at any point, one just answers the question, "What are you doing?" To make things a bit more constrained, Twitter imposes a size limit of 140 characters. This seemingly arbitrary number has a pretty mundane rationale: it allows Twitter to fit your message, with your username and a shade of formatting, inside a 160-character text message, which at its start was the primary method of interacting with Twitter. Indeed, that was one of its big draws-- you could say what you were doing from anywhere you could use your phone, which for most of the world is everywhere.
These Tweets-- and yes, Twitter messages are called Tweets and NOT Twits-- are a small, beautiful form of expression. You only have a little bit of space in which to write your message, so you don't need to get too much into detail. Messages are designed to be by their nature ephemeral and fleeting; it doesn't have to be a koan, just a thought that occurs to you about your activities, or work, or whatever else you'd like. Tweets don't change the world.
And yet, somehow, they do. Twitter has just a couple of customs; to address another user, one writes "@someone," where someone is their username; for instance, to reference me in a tweet, you write "@USSJoin." If you'd like to reference an ongoing event or discussion, you can put a "hashtag" in your tweet as well; these make it easy for other people to see all the tweets on a particular subject. For instance, at the recent Transparency Camp 2009, all attendees used the hashtag "#tcamp09" on their tweets, allowing everyone to see they were commenting on the conference. The webpage for the event then displayed all these tweets in real time, which created a wonderful sense of community.
So with these very small building blocks, we have all the communication tools we need. And it's wonderful. One of the frequent criticisms of Twitter is that it's mundane-- that people don't care what you ate for breakfast, or that you're using the toilet. Honestly, though, most people (@greggersh aside) don't tweet about the bathroom-- but yes, these are not necessarily ideas that become full letters, or blog posts. The other criticism is that you broadcast this to all these people, whereas if you really cared about them, you could call them and tell them about your life over the phone. That, too, fails to see the point of Twitter. For instance, while filling out a form, I was asked to provide a list of people who knew me, at every residence I've had in the last decade-- a monumental task. I tweeted that I found the task insane, and slowly people started to respond that they, too, would find it daunting. This idea didn't merit a whole blog post-- it didn't merit even a whiny phone call to my parents. I did, however, tweet it, and I found more people with whom to connect in the community.
On Twitter, too, you can choose whom to follow (this means you choose whose updates display when you ask Twitter for your friends' tweets; unlike, say, Facebook, your friends' content never displays on your page). I follow 42 people, a combination of friends I've had for years (like @baroquebobcat), people I've met at conferences (like @chrismessina), and people I only hope I could one day meet (like @donttrythis, better known as Adam Savage of the Mythbusters). It's great to be able to get these little scenes from their lives; each of them introduces me to things I wouldn't've seen otherwise (for instance, Chris Messina regularly points out great articles on Social Web topics of great interest to me), and Twitter keeps me in contact with these people with whom I wouldn't otherwise have a connection. I might well call @baroquebobcat from time to time, but Adam Savage doesn't know me-- and yet, it's cool to know when he's excited about a new Mythbusters episode coming out.
Twitter also offers a wonderful search function, which allows you to see every tweet (sorted by time) on a topic. For instance, Skittles uses a Twitter search for, naturally, "skittles" as part of their homepage (click on the "chatter" link); indeed, it was their whole homepage for a while. Anyone can go to http://search.twitter.com to look for very current, very quick feedback on issues the whole world is thinking about. This can be especially useful when breaking news is occurring; I found out about the attacks in Mumbai hours before mainstream media began to report, and I got information from people in the city without the filter (and simple delay) of international reporting. All this while my family and I were at Universal Studios in Florida. So the potential for learning the thoughts of civilization really is unmatched; like any civilization, sure a few thoughts might be about poop, or sex, but the majority really is quite interesting.
So Twitter is, much like life, what you make of it. You can follow all celebrities (though I wouldn't, as most of them are boring), all politicians (even worse), or just people you see every day. But the advantage is that you can get a sense of the community as a whole, and you can keep in contact with people about whom you care. To me, it's a pretty great experience.
When you get started, you (naturally) won't have too many people you're following, so I thought I'd list a few of my favorites; feel free to follow any or none of them.
And, of course, two that I run:
There are lots of Twitter clients out there, but to get started, just try the web interface until you get the hang of it. If you decide you want more realtime updates, I personally use and hugely recommend TweetDeck for the desktop (Windows, Linux, or OSX), and I use Tweetsville on my iPhone.
]]>Back for more ideas, eh? OK then, let's move straight onto the next phase.
Google Reader doesn't look all that social at first, and that's because its social features have been added more recently-- but whether it's a social network or not, you need it. Let me explain.
As you wade out into the social ocean, you'll start to feel the riptide pulling you. At first it'll just be a little, but go deeper, and it'll grow strong, threatening to overwhelm you and steal all your time away with checking every site your friends have every eight seconds, on every network they use. After all, how can you keep up on my Twitter, Flickr, Dopplr, and blog posts (I have two blogs now!) without checking every single site? And you won't get the latest data unless you keep doing it!
Well, luckily, there is a solution, and it's called an RSS reader. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it was the first standard to do what it does and really make it big on the web-- allowing time-delimited content (like news items) to be "subscribed" to by hordes of readers, so that a machine could just grab all the content whenever it got posted, and the human could just look in one place for all their updates from everywhere. We don't usually use RSS anymore-- it's been left behind somewhat in favor of a better standard, Atom-- but you don't need to worry, as most RSS readers understand both and you don't need to bother about the details; you just give it a site, and it figures out subscribing.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of RSS readers available; some live on your desktop, others on your cell phone, and still others live on the web; Google Reader is one of the latter. Why is that the best option? That way, you can read updates whenever and wherever is convenient-- on your phone on the train, on your desktop at home, on a laptop in a cafe, etc.-- and have just one place keeping track of what things you have and haven't read. This is much nicer if, like me, you're neurotic enough to want to make sure you haven't missed anything. In addition, Google Reader has by far the nicest mobile interface (and a dedicated one for iPhone users), so that makes it more pleasant as well.
So then, once you've signed up at Google Reader, to what should you subscribe? Well, that's really up to you. A good rule of thumb is, "what sites do I read every day?" If you find yourself checking in for LOLcats four or five times a day, just copy their URL into the "add subscription" box and let the LOLcats come to you for noms. If you always read Slashdot to get your geek on, make sure you keep up your geek cred by not missing an item.
One thing to keep in mind is that some sites post more than others. For instance, while I post here at Times and Measures about weekly, on average, Engadget posts twenty to thirty times per day. Now, I love Engadget, but if you don't want to deal with that kind of volume, feel free to just hit the "mark all as read" button to toss the rest; that way, you can decide for yourself how much is enough, and you don't need to go there to find out what odd item just had a USB key implanted.
Something I personally always do is subscribe to my own feeds, which helps me keep track of my own actions over the web. Since you signed up for a Flickr account yesterday (you did do that, didn't you?), you've got a feed for that; just go to your Flickr site (for instance, http://www.flickr.com/photos/ussjoin/), then click the orange icon (occasionally blue, depending on your browser) at the far-right of your location bar (the thing you type the URL in). That'll give you the feed address (that's the universal feed symbol), which you can then hand Google Reader so that you make sure your photos always show up as soon as you post them!
In addition to reading your news items, if you find anything and say "gee, I'd really like to share that with my friends," hit the "Share" link Google Reader helpfully provides at the bottom of every post. That'll add it to your personal Google Reader feed, so anyone can see what you've shared; later in the week, I'll talk about making One Big Site with all your stuff, but for now, it's OK to have lots of little feeds around the web.
The best thing about a news reader, for me, is that while you might think "I don't have time to read all those sites," using a reader actually greatly cuts down the time I need to spend on them-- since the information is delivered to me, in a convenient format, whenever they post, I spend no wasted time just hitting all the sites I read looking for updates. (Since I subscribe to 70 feeds with an average of 4300 posts per month total, that would very quickly become impossible).
Looking for other suggestions for things to read? I subscribe to a range of sites, but I'll put a few here. Feel free to use as few or as many as you feel like, and remember, if you find them overwhelming, or just boring, you can always delete them. I'll just link to the primary sites here, and you can paste that URL into Google Reader to subscribe (it'll find the feed for you).
General Awesome News-Like Things
Sites of Particular Internet Glory
Some of my Friends and Acquaintances
Me (As long as you're here anyway... :-) )
Tomorrow, we'll attack something much more like a traditional social network; this one even lets you talk to people! Think of it!
]]>You are, in many ways, the coolest sort of professor. Who else would be willing to have thesis meetings with me in places both random and obscure? Who else would be willing to advise me on my fool's errand of a thesis?
And yet dear professor, you do have some holes in your otherwise perfect veneer of coolness. While we were able to get you moved up from a dumbphone to a smartphone (though not the right one), you aren't using it to its fullest potential-- and sometimes, I fear that your understanding of the social Interwebs hasn't advanced much from a series of tubes. Hence, this guide: "A Guide to Social Networks for the Tragically Uncool (AKA, over 26)."
Fear not, dear professor, for even though you might be of the uncool age, you too can learn both how to use these newfangled technologies and, what I think is more importantly, why one might want to use them (for reasons other than being a relentless narcissist). One thing I'm going to emphasize here is that the number you use is unimportant-- it's using them for their proper places in a connected and social lifestyle that I want to encourage, as that's what makes them fun, and motivates their further use. Yes, on http://ussjoin.com I have a startling 25 networks of which I list myself as a member, but that's a bit much for most people; let's cover just a few of the most valuable.
Flickr is one of the oldest websites I'll talk about today, but it's one of the most solid, having served photos to the masses since (according to its wikipedia page) February 2004. Its purpose is simple: you upload photos, and other people look at them.
"But Brendan," one might ask, "why would I do that? After all, I have a website; I can just put the photos there." Well, that's true, you can. Flickr, however, gives you some advantages that you don't really get on your own site. For instance, every photo is automatically available in a range of sizes, from small thumbnails up to your original size, without your having to futz with it every time you just want to make others jealous with pictures of the beaches at Maui. Also, people can comment on them, subscribe to a feed of your photos (more on this later), or mark them as their "favorites" so that other people who know them can look at them too. These aren't things you'd usually do for just your photos. All this functionality, of course, doesn't hurt your ability to put your pictures on your own site; indeed, Flickr even gives you the code to do it (if you're too lazy to code it yourself, which is also an option), and many blog and content systems have major plugins to make taking photos from Flickr even easier than uploading them yourself. This is a very nice thing.
"But I don't take photos often" / "but I suck as a photographer" / "etc!" No matter. I both don't take photos often and suck, and yet I post a couple things a month, on average. One of the preconceptions we're going to break today is that you need to post every eight seconds to every network; since each only does one thing well, why would you do that? Just post when you think "I'd like to share this photo," and that'll be fine. And if you don't do photos, perhaps there's other photo-like content you might share? Chris Messina (nee Factory Joe) mostly posts screenshots (with commentary) from interesting sites he's creating or using; check it out here. I even posted something similar recently, about (the horror!) an NRA member with a spelling problem. Everyone has something to share.
So as not to overwhelm anyone, we're going to take this slowly; check back tomorrow for the next site in our social odyssey.
Note: this is part one in my series, "A Guide to Social Networks for the Tragically Uncool." For Part 2, click here.
]]>One session I attended, though, was put on by the inimitable duo of David Recordon and Chris Messina, and was essentially a long discussion session about the uses and implications of OpenID, especially as it could be implemented by the government to allow citizens to comment on new ideas, regulations, or legislation. One representative from the Department of Defense was in attendance (in addition to people from many other parts of government), and was discussing using OpenID to log into one gateway server that could hold identity information for the entire government, allowing just one site to go through privacy protection screening, and just making assertions about the data there to the rest of the government.
While I disagreed with David and Chris on the utility of a gateway on face (I believe that OpenID should be used without names or emails, thus allowing people to comment on every government site without ever giving them personally identifying information, and thus removing the necessity for privacy protection screening entirely, whereas David and Chris noted the UX downsides of not being able to let users get emails on comments, or use their full names rather than URLs for identification), one point I raised seemed to resonate with many of the government attendees there, and I thought it was worthwhile to expand on it here.
The citizenry of the United States absolutely does not want one authority that contains all of their personal information, and is empowered to transmit it. On a slightly less Social Web front, we just confronted this issue as a country, with the complete rejection of the RealID act; when California and Texas (in addition to many smaller states, like Montana) rejected it outright, the program effectively collapsed, having been killed off by citizen outrage.
And yet, when we confront each new frontier, we seem to get the same idea again: "wouldn't it be great if I only had to go one place to get everything? That way, I'd only have to make one call, and parse one set of data, and I could just secure that one place." It does sound compelling, especially as I've spent quite a bit of time writing special cases to handle differences, from one social network to the next, in the way that different providers handle UserIDs (example: Flickr has a human-readable ID, for instance "USSJoin", that while it can be used to access one's photos on the web, cannot be utilized in their API calls to get, for instance, an RSS feed of the user's photos; instead, one has to make an authenticated API call to translate "USSJoin" into the much less friendly "24001683@N05"). So it'd be great to avoid all that.
At the same time, I think there's a huge amount of value in reducing the amount of identity data that can be leaked-- intentionally or unintentionally-- from one source. It preserves privacy by letting people determine themselves what they want others to correlate. As I wrote a few months ago (and related to the participants in the session),
... a friend of mine once bought two rolls of duct tape, twenty-five feet of rope, one box of condoms, and a birthday card; had he simply bought them at different stores or on different occasions, none of them would have been exceptional, nor would there be any particular thing to tie them together-- but their simultaneous purchase greatly horrified the saleslady at the store in question, even though he assures me they were for four different purposes.
So then, this demonstrates what I would refer to as "sharding." Just as with a shattered mirror, one can use small bits to useful purpose, without needing to have the entire collection assembled all in one place; I should be able to use whatever shard or combination of shards I want, to create whatever area of mirror (or representation of my digital self) I want.
We can see this idea in other areas, foremost of which is Chris Messina's own DiSo project, which is designed to enable a way for a site to pull content from a huge number of silos across the web. This is a great idea-- not just for photos or microblogging, but for identity data, and even more crucial things, like personal health information. I want to be able to give my doctor a coherent view of all my test results over time-- but I don't want other people to be able to query one source, or one group of crackers to attack one source, and get every blood test I've ever had. So I should be the only one who can assemble all these shards.
Chris raised the critique, in the session, that this is just security through obscurity-- that though I make it harder to rectify, all this data is still available, and could be pieced together. That's true, if it's all stored on the same identifier (e.g., my name). But it doesn't have to be, particularly on the Internet; if I use a different OpenID at each information silo, there's no unifying way to piece all that data together, unless I give someone the identifier-to-site mapping. That's the key that unlocks my data; one could consider it almost a sort of steganography, in that it's knowing where to look that makes the random splotches turn into meaningful data.
I don't trust the government-- or anyone-- with all my data. In this connected age, I no longer need to; it's not more convenient for me to do so. So let's resist the temptation to centralize data "just because."
]]>To: Edmund G. Skrodzki, Executive Director, JHU Security
Director Skrodzki,
I come to you on a matter of grave urgency, greatly dismayed by the conduct your officers are displaying on the campus I have inhabited for the last five years. I hope that you will see this, as I do, as a situation requiring a significant response within the JHU Security apparatus.
This evening, Sunday, February 8, 2009, I was walking to my car, which I keep in one of the Wyman surface lots. When I arrived in the lot, I noticed that a graduate student was testing a network deployment of sensor motes, using the lot as an interference-free zone on which to test on this unseasonably warm evening. I am familiar with the motes and with the challenges of testing them well, as I spent three semesters in the [Hopkins InterNetworking Research Group][], which is one of the nation's finest sensor networking research groups. Testing their networking capabilities is made extremely difficult on most of the Hopkins campus, as our campus-wide WiFi deployment is orders of magnitude stronger than their tiny antennas can transmit-- thus the student was lucky to find a clear, dry night on which to test his sensors.
All, then, would have been in order; our institution is one dedicated to the pursuit of research, and to see a graduate student thus engaged is one of the pleasures of working here. Unfortunately, this scene was marred by the JHU Security officer berating the student -- and I do not use that word lightly-- for having the audacity of attempting to conduct his research.
When I came upon the scene, the officer was attempting to order the student-- whose first language was not English, and who was having a great deal of trouble making clear his work-- to "get rid of all that crap," meaning, I would suppose, to destroy his careful research testbed and the several hours of test data he had accumulated that night. This despite the student identifying himself, as requested, as a JHU student, and having obediently handed over his J-Card to the officer. The student was understandably distraught that his work was being trampled, but his attempts to explain his experiments-- which, to be clear, were both sanctioned and required by his research as a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science, and which took place in an entirely empty parking lot on the outermost reaches of the Homewood campus, at a time when no employees use it-- were shouted off by the officer, who refused even to leave his vehicle to examine the network, let alone take the time to actually care about the work this student was performing.
As a member of the department and a student of Johns Hopkins, then, I intervened on his behalf; the officer immediately decided that I was a threat to his trampling the research of this graduate student, and refused to speak with me; I nonetheless persisted, explaining that the student was conducting research blessed by our department and the School of Engineering, and the officer had no grounds on which to interfere with someone he had already acknowledged was a student. The officer made some thinly-veiled threat, and made the universal demand of every hostile overseer, "papers, please!" I gave him my name, and gave him full leave to contact my department to check that I, too, am a student in good standing. I then took the student off to ask about his work, leaving the muttered threats of the officer behind.
What's shocking about this incident, to me, is that the officer saw fit to harass a student-- whom he had identified as such-- for literally no reason, and with no possible cause for concern. The student was using space not reserved by any group or individual, and indeed space not used for any purpose at the time at which he wanted it (since the lots are almost exclusively used by employees, a Sunday evening guarantees no one will be around-- and these devices were not going to be left in the area; indeed, lest one attempt to assert that they would have been, I will state that they could not have been, as they were not weatherized, and had bare circuit boards). This officer just wanted to pick on a student he knew couldn't fight back, as he wasn't able to speak English well enough to defend himself; the actions of a bully, if ever I have seen them.
I left the area, attending to the business for which I had originally sought my car; when I returned, approximately 45 minutes later, the student-- who had, at long last, been left to his work by the guard-- said that the guard had left, but subsequently returned, demanding my whereabouts. The student attempted to ask for what purpose they sought me, and they refused to answer his perfectly valid question.
Director Skrodzki, this incident is not an isolated one; your officers seem to want to create the environment on this campus of a police state, and random interrogations of students for no possible cause happen all the time, particularly at night, and particularly, in my experience, to the non-native English speakers. I am sure this is not a policy you espouse or endorse, and this is why I want to bring it to your attention-- so that you can put a stop to what is becoming a dangerous situation on this campus.
I hope that you will take this request to heart, and put a stop to this behavior by whatever means you deem appropriate to the gravity of the situation.
Thank you very much for your time, and your quick attention to this gravest of matters. Should I be able to provide more information regarding this incident, please do not hesitate to contact me.
---Brendan O'Connor
---Master's Candidate, Department of Computer Science
---President, Upsilon Pi Epsilon
[Hopkins InterNetworking Research Group]: http://hinrg.cs.jhu.edu/
I sent this letter, precisely as written, to the head of JHU's security contingent on February 8.
I had hoped to write this blog post, and after this letter, speak movingly of the drastic changes effected by the Director in response to the blatant racism in the officers under his command. Barring that, I hoped at least to report that the officer responsible had been disciplined.
Instead, this is what happened:
Well, dear readers, besides the unbelievable irrationality of the arguments presented here, which I'll let stand on their own, it's now February 27-- three business weeks later. I have not heard a single, solitary thing from JHU Security-- and indeed, I never expected to. What else is to be expected from a group of people that, in addition to their various problems with students, aided the illegal surveillance of antiwar groups?
I'm not surprised. I've spent nearly five years here at Hopkins, after all.
But what would have happened to this poor Ph.D student if I hadn't happened along? How many other students have had their work destroyed for no reason? And what on earth were those guards who came back to stalk me trying to do? (That little detail, by the way, does not show up in the official incident report-- which is particularly troubling.)
So no, I'm not surprised. I'm just saddened.
]]>Malice Afterthought is the new home of my software projects-- primarily because the space for software stuff on http://ussjoin.com was getting too crowded. One of the effects of this move is to give my software projects (particularly stuff like "look at the new MT plugin I just finished") their own blog and update stream-- so head on over there if you're interested. (In related news, I did just do another MT plugin, this one for http://blip.tv, so go grab it if you're interested.)
I've been working hard on Mnikr Prime, which is now up and doing some neat things. It's certainly not done-- or particularly polished-- yet, but go have a look around if you're interested in the project. It is dynamically creating internet Identities, which I think is pretty neat, and I'm working on making sure it gets the Action Stream data live and up-to-date (made more complex by nasty things like Twitter suddenly throttling me, hard, as well as one incident involving running my Linode completely out of memory-- my fault, but it reacted amusingly badly). When I get the next phase-- the reputation server-- online, I'll write more about it here; I may update in the meantime at Malice Afterthought.
I'm in a fun course on Algorithms for Sensor-Based Robotics, which is pretty far afield from my usual work, but counts as the math-like credit I need to graduate (Master's students need two "Analysis" courses in CS, among other things). The only reason I mention this is that since we're doing simulator work, I end up with shiny movies that people can watch and enjoy (and laugh at, as my robots make comic mistakes). They're over at http://ussjoin.blip.tv.
Yes, I gave up on the posting every day thing, just a few days into it-- mostly because it wasn't going well (I get boring even to me if I post that often). No, I don't regret dropping it. :-)
Lastly, I'll be attending TransparencyCamp this upcoming weekend in Washington, D.C.; I really enjoyed the last unconference I attended, and I hope this one will be interesting as well; a very different structure than the highly scheduled BlackHat, but I think each can be good.
So I spent two long days (I got up at 4:30AM each morning to get to the conference early enough to help set up) among some of the coolest people around. One of the neatest things about BlackHat DC particularly is that while it's filled with great people, it's very small-- just a few hundred attendees-- meaning there's lots of opportunity to interact both with other attendees, and with the invited speakers. As a room proctor, one of my jobs was to take many of the speakers up to the breakout rooms, where people who had more in-depth questions than could be accommodated in the lecture could ask and debate to their heart's content. This meant that I got to sit and talk with these speakers, as well-- which was quite fun, with some of them.
I got to meet Paul Syverson, who developed the Onion Routing protocol, and listen to his defense of its security (and his critique of Xinwen Fu, who had just presented an attack that turned out to be neither new nor interesting). I got to eat lunch with Dan Kaminsky, who in addition to being a rising security star, is an incredibly nice guy-- and a very emphatic (would be one word) lecturer. I got to help another rising star, Duc Nguyen, set up his four-laptop demonstration of how easy it is to fake "high-security" facial authorization (one laptop for each manufacturer that does it, plus one for his notes).
I also watched an insane and wonderful presentation entitled Satellite Hacking For Fun And Profit, where the presenter, Adam Laurie, not only set up a TCP/IP route from his friendly neighborhood TV satellite, but for an encore, demonstrated a Man-in-the-Middle attack against a passport, live. Wonderful stuff.
In addition, of course, it helps out my nerd cred immensely to be at a conference that's getting Slashdotted so often. This led to several conversations on Friday and Saturday of the form "Did you see that article about Joanna Rutkowska hacking TXT again?" "No, but I watched her deliver the presentation." :-)
Now, of course, I have to return to the real world, where not everyone I meet is an accomplished hacker. Some people are, of course, including one of my professors this semester, which makes things more interesting. I'm getting some neat things done, though; more on that in a subsequent post.
]]>I had a blast; both the kids and teachers seemed to enjoy the presentation, as well, despite my random tangents (which I think are important, but nonetheless).
Here's the Keynote stack from my presentation:
If you go here, you can view it with the presentation notes as well, which will add the context of what I was (generally) talking about.
In addition, I mentioned I would post followup links on some of the topics for the students, so here they are:
And, for the two kids in the back of the class that seemed to have the extraordinary neck issues ;-) :
To all of you in the class-- thanks so much for having me; feel free to contact me (bfo -some character- ussjoin -some other character- com) with questions on this or any other topic.
]]>Ah, the intricacies of living in Montana.
]]>Fun quotes from the day:
[A delegation from the House comes to the Senate]
"The House would like to report that it is organized."
"Yeah right! Good luck with that."
And during introductory floor speeches...
"I got involved about ten years ago, when I was doing meth."
[Ten-second pause, while the crowd is horrified at the Senator]
"Uh, doing meth-related work with the community..."
Yep, it's just different out here.
Now we're spending the night out beyond cell coverage (but thankfully, not beyond satellite Internet coverage; thank you, WildBlue) with some old friends of my family. Tomorrow, home, via messing around in Bozeman, MT.
]]>I find this to be very far from the case, and so when I read an article at Lifehacker on how three tasks might be swappable, I thought I'd advocate an even more extreme position-- the way I work.
On my desk (pictured here), I have three screens. The center, monster one is where I put whatever I'm working on directly-- websites, code, etc. On the left, I keep whatever I need to reference for my work; when I'm doing Rails work, that's things like the server logs, an SSH terminal, etc. When I'm writing notes on papers, that's where the papers are. And so on.
The right monitor is different, in that it contains (by design) nothing helpful. Instead, I fill it with distractions-- my Woopra monitor, a window on the Twitterverse with TweetDeck (my client of choice), my IM contacts window, and other things that tend to scroll fast and make noise; sometimes Digg goes in there, for instance. What's the point of all these shiny objects I can look at?
For my part, I find that I get lots of useful input from random things, and it's not always clear from where that will come. Keeping an ongoing stream of data-- email, Twitter, chatting with people who come to my website, etc.-- means that I get a lot more opportunity for ideas that might be helpful to what I'm working on; in the worst case, perhaps I'm a bit slower, but in the best case, I get much better results from the project at hand.
The other advantage to me is that I don't get as bored as quickly-- since I don't leave 100% of my focus on my primary task, I can work for longer periods of time. Ultimately, this translates into higher productivity, since the longer time more than balances out the time I spend looking at the newest kitten pictures. :-)
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