If you want to understand the basics of how encrypted communication works on computers, and why it should be easy to secure all your emails but often isn’t, it’s hard to find a better introduction than Bart Busschot’s on this episode of the Nosillacast. It starts at about 47 minutes.
Category Archives: Internet
Tweet archiving
I’ve just noticed that Twitter allows you to export your tweets, under your account settings. They come in both human and machine-readable form. Not sure how long ago they added this, but it partially addresses one of my chief concerns about the service: that users stick many years of their lives into it without necessarily knowing that they’ll ever be able to extract the information in future.
This is not easy to automate, though, so I’m still going to keep using Archive My Tweets for my own archive.
Keeping in touch in a post-Google-Reader world
As I hope everybody knows, Google Reader will close down on Monday.
This means that something like half of you lovely Status-Q readers have just a few days in which to make alternative arrangements, or you’ll find your supply of Status-Q posts, and indeed those from any other blog or similar feed, will suddenly go very quiet next week.
So, assuming you’d like to keep having sensational new content delivered to you regularly without having to keep visiting all those web sites by hand, what can you do?
RSS
Well, one option is to find another RSS reader. (RSS is a machine-readable format that websites can make available, saying which articles have been published recently and when.) There are lots of good RSS-reading programs out there, for every platform – things like Reeder, Flipboard, NetNewsWire… to name just three – and all you need to do is open your favourite one and tell it that you’d like to subscribe directly to:
http://www.statusq.org/feed/
and you’re away. If it’s a clever app, you may just be able to say ‘statusq.org’ and it’ll work the rest out for itself.
This is great if you have just one or two places in which you read all of your news. But the reason Google Reader was popular was that you could access it on multiple devices and from various apps, and it would remember which feeds you had subscribed to and which articles you had read, and keep them all in sync so you didn’t need to duplicate things everywhere. If you want that functionality now, you need to pick one of the alternative services that are springing up to take Reader’s place.
There’s an episode of the Mac Power Users podcast which looks into some of the alternatives (and will be relevant for non-Mac-users too). A quick summary is that the ones they liked most were probably Feed Wrangler and Feedbin but there are alternatives like Feedly discussed too. Which one works best for you will depend largely on whether you have a favourite feed-reading app which needs to support it, or whether you prefer to use a web interface. Many of these services have a direct ‘Import my feeds from Google Reader’ button to make life easy for you.
Here’s the bad news – most of them cost money. But it’s generally a very small amount, and by having lots of good stuff to read, you’ll probably save that much on iPhone apps you might otherwise be tempted to buy and then forget. And remember, you won’t be giving all that data about your personal interests to Google any more…
Social networks
I don’t tend to post here very frequently, so I automatically send out a message on the social networks with each new post. If you don’t already, why not follow me on Twitter, on App.net or on Facebook? That’s a good way to track other authors as well, but you’ll only see posts as they whizz past in the stream – it’s harder to find quality material to enjoy in a more contemplative fashion over coffee on a Sunday morning… so you may want to do the RSS thing as well.
Or perhaps you prefer such material in your email inbox…?
IFTTT
If you don’t know If This Then That, it’s a service where you can set up rules (‘recipes’) to do all sorts of clever things like “If I’m tagged in an image on Facebook, save it to my Dropbox folder”.
You can also connect to RSS feeds like this one and have it take action when there’s something new posted. If you have an IFTTT account, it’s really easy: here’s a recipe that will email you any new Status-Q posts.
Anyway, that’s a few ideas to get you started. Feel free to post other ideas for post-Reader alternatives in the comments.
But the important thing is to take action now…
A quick retrospective
It’s 12 years today since my first blog post — the first post, at least, on a publicly-readable system that we’d recognise as blog now. I had registered this ‘statusq.org’ domain a couple of days before, and started tapping out miscellaneous thoughts with no particular theme, and no expectation of an audience.
I was using Dave Winer’s innovative but decidedly quirky ‘Radio Userland’ software, a package which is long since deceased but was very influential in the early days of blogging and RSS feeds. Over the years I’ve moved the content through a couple of different systems but I think — I hope — that all the URLs valid in 2001 still work today! Most of my early posts do not have a title. The convention of giving titles to what we thought of as diary entries wasn’t yet well-established.
Things that caught my attention in the first couple of months included:
- An appreciation that Windows 2000 was really rather a good operating system. Certainly the best Microsoft had produced so far. (It was also — though I didn’t know it at the time — the last version I was to use on a regular basis.) Microsoft were pushing an idea called the ‘Tablet PC’, which was marketing-speak for what had previously been called WebPads, and something called .NET, which was marketing-speak for nobody-knew-what!
- The importance of this new thing called XML, which was giving the world a standard way to store and transmit structured data. I was at a conference where Steve Ballmer described the major revolutions in computing as The PC, The Gui, The Web, and XML. Well, the brackets have become a bit more curly since then, but it was indeed a major change.
- Astonishment that, with the upcoming launch of Mac OS X, the world’s largest Unix vendor was about to become, of all people, Apple! I’d been playing with the early beta versions. It’s been my operating system of choice ever since.
- The bizarre level of press coverage when we announced the impending shutdown of the Trojan Room Coffee pot.
- A survey saying that less than half of US college students were taking hi-fi systems to college, because they were now listening to music from their PCs instead! It was still nearly a year before an amazing thing called the iPod was to appear, and surprise us all.
Here’s a snapshot of Status-Q captured by the Internet Archive in early May 2001
Using multiple IP addresses at once
Ever needed to configure a network-based device using a web interface, but found that its default IP address doesn’t match the setup of your network? e.g. Your new device uses 192.168.1.* and you use 192.168.0.* ? Here’s an easy way to fix it: set up your machine to talk to both subnets at once. Here’s a little screencast to show how it’s done on the Mac.
Lots More Pots
Following on from the article mentioned yesterday, the World Service broadcast about the Trojan Room Coffee pot went out today.
Links to the programme, and a downloadable version here, if wanted.
Take control of your destiny with a new social network!
It’s almost impossible now to start a new social network and have it taken seriously.
This is partly because of Metcalfe’s Law. In the early 80s, Bob Metcalfe proposed that the value of a communications network was proportional not to the number of devices attached to it, but to the number of possible connections that could be made between those devices – which is (approximately) the square of the number of connected devices. So, he proposed, the value of your fax machine increases every time someone else buys a fax machine. And when a network becomes ten times as big, it becomes 100 times as useful.
Now, you could have all sorts of interesting discussions about the degree to which this is really applicable to social networks, but it’s clear that there’s an enormous challenge for anyone proposing an alternative to Skype’s 30M users, Twitter’s 140M, or Facebook’s billion or so. I think it’s arguable that these three can happily coexist only because they are so different.
Facebook may be horrible, but even the mighty Google has had difficulties making a significant impact with Google Plus because, I suspect, it’s not different enough. It needs a niche of its own.
So what hope is there for App.net? This new kid on the block is still in the very early stages of growth, but there’s some reason to believe it may have found such a niche, and this has been carved out a little more clearly by the recent changes at Twitter.
Twitter, in case you missed it, have realised that the things that helped them grow big – lots of cool iPhone applications, open APIs, ease of getting your tweets in and out – are not the things that are going to help them make money, and they now need to focus on making money more than on getting big. But some of the changes come at the expense of many of their existing users.
Here’s a simple example. The network service IFTTT allows you to set up all sorts of rules – to send a tweet automatically when you post up a new blog entry, for example, or to receive a copy of your tweets by email, or archive them to Dropbox. Very handy. At least, that’s what it used to do. But with the changes to Twitter’s terms, IFTTT have had to drop the facilities that depend on taking stuff out of Twitter. You can still use it to post tweets, but you can no longer use it to archive them.
App.net, on the other hand, is gambling on the idea that there are a significant number of users who would like an open and predictable long-term relationship with their social network. Their offering is based on a few basic principles:
- They won’t include advertising
- They won’t sell your data to others.
- You own your data, not them
- They support their APIs so developers can build stuff that will continue to work
Of course, they point out that they do still need to make money, so joining up costs $50 a year – about the price of a Starbucks latte per month.
I signed up early, just out of curiosity, but I’ve recently started using it more seriously, and it’s because of the issue that IFTTT have so nicely clarified for me on Thursday. If you spend significant amounts of time putting stuff into anything, whether it be a blogging platform, a word processor document format, or a social network, how sure are you that you can get it out again in future?
For many of us, these data streams are not just the equivalent of phone calls that disappear on the wind as soon as you hang up. They are more like diaries, to which we may one day wish to refer again. The search box on this blog becomes a more valuable resource to me with every passing year – perhaps that’s something to do with memory loss in middle age! – but I’m struck sometimes about how many of the links I’ve posted in the past to other services no longer work, because the URLs have changed, or the services have gone away.
With App.net, assuming it is successful, I can be reasonably confident that I will be able to access and manipulate my content in the future, and extract it if I want to move it somewhere else or stop paying the $50. I can use IFTTT, for example, to cross-post anything I put there to Twitter and Facebook automatically, so my friends still know about it. Many of you may be reading this post as a result of that facility. (Apologies to those who see it more than once as a result!)
Now, a network that charges $50 is never going to be as big as one that is free. At the moment, posts on App.net are readable by everyone, so the number of readers, at least, may be affected less by this. Here are my posts so far. But only time will tell whether the combination of being in control of your own stuff, and the ‘Don’t be evil’ policy of the founders, is enough to offset Metcalfe’s law.
Using Little Computers to control Big Computers
Here’s my latest Raspberry Pi-based experiment: the CloudSwitch.
I don’t discuss the software in the video, but the fun thing is that the Pi isn’t dependent on some intermediate server – it’s using the boto module for Python to manage the AWS resources directly.
I decided to build the app slightly differently from the way I would normally approach a little project like this. I knew that, even for this very simple system, I would have several inputs and outputs of various kinds, some of them with big delays, and I wanted to make sure that timing hiccups or race conditions didn’t ever leave the lights displaying something that didn’t represent reality.
So this is only a single python file, but it runs several threads – one that looks for button presses, one that monitors and controls the Amazon server, and one that handles the lights – including flashing them in various patterns. They interact with the main thread using ZeroMQ messages, which is a lovely way to do inter-thread communications without all that nasty messing about with semaphores and mutexes.
Update: Here’s the very simple circuit diagram. The illuminated buttons I used have LEDs which take a little more power than the Raspberry Pi can really drive, so I put a couple of NPN transistors in there. It really doesn’t matter too much what they are – I used the 2N3904.
Cloud Control
While computing in the ‘cloud’ brings us a lot of good things, there’s one area in which it is often not very strong: longevity.
For me this is most apparent as I peruse the archives of my blog — in which, for example, none of the Google Video clips can now be played — or look back at tweets from a couple of years ago which often linked to things using the cli.gs URL-shortening service, many of whose links already no longer work.
And my last company, Camvine, used Google Apps for Business. The company has now gone, and so, with its Google account, have all the associated documents and emails. Thousands of them.
It’s easy, at the time, to think “I can link to this safely, or store my documents safely here, because Google isn’t about to vanish overnight”. Well, all of the service providers I’ve been tripping over in looking through my archives are still around. But for one reason or another, the links no longer work.
It’s obvious, but it’s worth repeating: Using, or linking to, someone else’s service, may be a good strategy for today, but don’t rely on it for anything you might want to access tomorrow. The only data I can be sure of is on servers I run (and backup) myself.
Too Much Email
Nick Bilton in an article in the NYT:
A research report issued this year by the University of California, Irvine, found that people who did not look at e-mail regularly at work were less stressed and more productive than others.
Gloria Mark, an informatics professor who studies the effects of e-mail and multitasking in the workplace and is a co-author of the study, said, “One person in our e-mail study told us after: I let the sound of the bell and pop-ups rule my life.”
Ms. Mark says one of the main problems with e-mail is that there isn’t an off switch.
“E-mail is an asynchronous technology, so you don’t need to be on it to receive a message,” she said. “Synchronous technologies, like instant messenger, depend on people being present.”Although some people allow their instant messenger services to save offline messages, most cannot receive messages if they are not logged on. With e-mail, it is different. If you go away, e-mails pile up waiting for your return.
Avoiding new messages is as impossible as trying to play a game of hide-and-seek in an empty New York City studio apartment. There is nowhere to hide.
My two top tips for email, if you’re overwhelmed:
- Don’t have it on all the time, and for God’s sake don’t let it ping or beep at you whenever a message comes in. That way madness lies. For your loved ones as well as for you. I tend to check my emails in the morning and in the evening. Occasionally in the middle of the day…but don’t count on it.
- Email isn’t instant messaging. If people need an immediate reply they should be using some other technology to contact you. And one of the best ways to ensure you get more email is to keep responding to it promptly! Besides, I often read emails in a spare minute on my phone, when replying isn’t really practical.
I’ve often thought about creating an auto-reply system a bit like a voice menu:
“Thank you for your email. Your message is important to us and will be answered just as soon as one of our representatives is available. Your email is currently number 74 in the queue…”
But as we’ve discussed before, I really think email needs a small cost associated with each message…
Banish Mavis and Connect to the Future
I wrote a couple of days ago about making this blog accessible over IPv6. Most of my readers probably shrugged a gallic shrug and muttered ‘À chacun son goût‘ before moving on to more exciting things like emptying the vacuum cleaner. But wait! This stuff is actually interesting and important, and it will affect you, so here’s my attempt to explain what it’s all about…
You probably know the basics. Machines on the internet have an address which looks like 123.45.67.89 – those four numbers represent four bytes, and while four bytes provide rather a large number of addresses, it turns out that this internet thing is rather popular, and four bytes isn’t nearly enough. These addresses have been in short supply for some time, and so, while your broadband router will have one, the laptops, XBoxes, smartphones, etc on your local network can’t all get an address of their own. Your heating controller, your TV, your electricity meter will soon all want to be connected too. No way, Jose.
Instead, most networked devices use addresses that are only valid on your local network – a reserved group beginning 192.168… Think of 192.168 addresses as internal phone extensions, rather than proper phone numbers. Whenever your devices want to communicate with the outside world, they do so via a special bit of software on your router called ‘NAT’ – the ‘Network Address Translation’ system – that temporarily connects 192.168 internal addresses to real addresses in the outside world. It’s a bit like a telephone switchboard operator – let’s call her Mavis – who can connect internal phone extensions to a limited number of external lines.
In fact, we can push the switchboard analogy a bit further because, in general, the machines on your network can contact the outside world automatically by the equivalent of dialling ‘9’ to get an outside line. The outside world, however, can’t contact you without going through Mavis, and she’s very picky about who she’ll let through. There are no direct-dial numbers. This has some real benefits: it can keep pesky salesmen at bay. But it also makes it really hard for your spouse/lover/next-employer to get in touch with you for more delightful discussions. Mavis gets rather too involved in those… And remember, we’re not just talking about the office, here. Mavis is also in your sitting room at home.
The interesting thing is that we’ve been in this situation for so long that we accept it as normal. Most of us have had NAT for as long as we’ve had broadband connections, and it has fundamentally affected the way we think about the internet and what it can do for us. We’ll come back to that in a minute.
Despite all of the above, we might have gone on employing Mavis for quite a while, if it weren’t for a much bigger problem looming on the horizon: we’re running out of addresses even to give to the routers. Not much point in having an efficient switchboard operator if there are no outside lines! Your ISP has to manage the IP addresses it hands out carefully and make sure there aren’t too many unused ones lying around. If your internet connection uses DSL, for example, you may find that your router’s IP address – the phone number of your outside line – changes fairly regularly as a result, so there’s little chance of your spouse/lover/next-employer being able to talk to Mavis even if they wanted to!
This is the basic problem that IPv6 is designed to fix. In the future, internet addresses will be made up not of 4 bytes, but of 16, which gives a wonderfully huge number of addresses, and every connected device in the world can have one (or indeed, several, which often proves useful). IPv6 has some other useful features too, but this is the most important.
A quick aside – what do these new addresses look like?
IPv6 addresses are the equivalent of 39-digit phone numbers, so they’re less convenient if you actually have to type them in! To make them a bit more manageable, they are written as eight groups of 4 hexadecimal digits, which makes them look a bit strange and scary to anyone who’s just getting used to addresses like 192.168.0.1.
In reality, most people will almost never have to type, or even see, one, but I know that Status-Q readers are a smart and intelligent bunch, so to satisfy your curiosity, here’s an IPv6 address:
2a00:1450:4007:0802:0000:0000:0000:1014
By convention, when writing these, you can leave out any leading zeros in the groups, and also any single sequence of groups consisting entirely of zeros, so the above can be abbreviated to:
2a00:1450:4007:802::1014
There you are. Now you can recognise IPv6 addresses when you see them, but you’d probably much rather deal with
ipv6.google.com
which resolves to the same thing: the DNS can hand out IPv6 addresses in just the same way as the old IPv4 ones.
One last thing before we get back to the big-picture stuff: there are some address groups set aside for specific uses. Addresses beginning fe80::, for example, are the equivalent of 192.168 addresses – they are just designed to work on the local network. A device will have at least one of these automatically, as well as any global addresses it may have been allocated.
In fact, if you have a reasonably recent operating system, you’ve probably got one already on the machine you’re using now, though you may need to burrow a bit into your network configuration to find it. (On a Mac or Linux box, run ‘ifconfig‘ on the command line. On Windows, you need to enable IPv6 first and then use ‘ipconfig‘). So you can already use utilities like ‘ssh’ and ‘ping6’ to talk to other machines on your network using these addresses, even if not to the outside world.
I’ll do a more technical post about this soon for those who are interested. But for now…
Why is all this important?
Here are some things that we’ve just come to assume are a bit difficult:
- Backing up your computer to a hard drive on your sister’s machine, and allowing her to do the same to yours.
- Plugging in a networked webcam and accessing it from anywhere.
- Printing something on your office printer when you’re at home, or on your home printer when you’re at Starbucks.
- Logging in to your parents’ machine to help sort out a problem.
- Accessing that presentation you left on your machine at home from the conference centre where you’re supposed to be giving a talk in the morning.
- Making VoIP (internet-based telephone systems) work reliably.
- Running your own web server on a computer at home.
- Turning on your heating from the airport as you come home from holiday.
All of these things can of course be done at present, but they usually involve special expertise, or services like Dropbox, GoToMeeting, DynDNS or Skype, which have grown up largely to deal with the fact that, in general, you can’t just connect to other machines on the internet because they don’t have a globally-accessible address. Sometimes it’s a case of going and having a polite but firm word with Mavis to say that she really must allow certain calls through. In other cases, it’s much more complex. The electricity company could easily put a smart meter in your house, for example, so they don’t have to bother you so often, but they’d have to speak to every Mavis in the country. A daunting task, I think you’ll agree. And then there are other systems like uPnP that are used by games consoles, for example, to sneak behind Mavis’s back and do a little wiring of their own just to make it easy to play games with your friends. All rather messy.
In the early days, you could assume that two machines which were connected to the internet and switched on could just talk to each other. All sorts of things were much easier back then. Now, there may, of course, be many reasons why you don’t want people to be able to connect to all of your devices, even if they have passwords and firewalls, but the important point is that this should be something that you can decide: it should be a question of policy, not one of capability. At the moment, you generally can’t get an internet connection at all without employing Mavis, and that just makes everything so much more difficult. But when everything is connected by IPv6, a lot of things at least become possible, maybe even easy. (And a lot of businesses may have to think about their business models.)
This is why you want to encourage your ISP to support IPv6 as soon as they can. They’ve known about it for a long time, and it’s been rigorously tested. In a future post, I’ll write about how you can bypass both Mavis and your ISP if you want to start using this now. But at least, I hope, you understand why it is more important than simply a change of phone number.
Future-proofing my blog
Well, IPv6 has now been officially launched on the world, and this is a quick note to let you networking geeks know that Status-Q is now IPv6-enabled. You may be connecting that way already, and in theory you shouldn’t be able to tell, because www.statusq.org has both an IPv4 and IPv6 address and your browser will use whichever one it prefers. I’m going to write a bit more about IPv6 soon.
But if you want to check whether you have IPv6 connectivity to here, you can try going to
which is an IPv6-only address.
It probably won’t work yet for most of you. UK ISPs are being a bit slow on the uptake and, to be fair, with some reason: it’s a big change. So if you want to get IPv6 connectivity at home you may need to jump through quite a few technical hoops (and I’ll write soon about how I did it). But they’ll have to support it eventually, and most modern operating systems handle IPv6 out-of-the-box and have done for some time, so once the connectivity is there, everything just works.
A very handy site, if you’re playing with this is
which will tell you what your connection and browser can do.
More on this topic soon.
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