Two friends of mine, both engineers, in separate occasions in the past week:
@rk: “Software is a hypothesis.”
@nk: “The GPL dictated behavior, whereas the authors of the MIT license merely prescribed it, having faith it would succeed on its inherent benefits.”
This originally was a response to a message posted by Chris Messina to the OpenID mailing list.
Since the original conversation that spawned OpenID, I’ve observed the rise of real identity versus obscuring it behind a [nonsensical] username @ someservice.com.
The fact is, the OpenID non-pattern has overwhelmingly ignored in favor of standard email + password signup. Hearteningly, the user experience of registration has been largely normalized. There are observable and copyable best practices here, that require neither a spec nor educating the user.
Basically, OpenID—as it is now—is irrelevant.
There were major lessons learned, but they were social rather than technical. The original problem that OpenID was conceived to solve has been supplanted by services like Disqus, Intense Debate and TypePad Connect.
The non-problem that OpenID [2] was intended to solve was putting a user in charge of how (and if) their identity online was centralized.
I say non-problem because it was already solved. Most people overwhelmingly didn’t care, and the people who did—knew how to set up multiple email addresses or use different usernames/passwords.
If email was invented today, it’s not to hard to imagine that we’d grant permission for a service to send us email using a mechanism similar to OAuth. Communicating with someone (or thing) via their preferred channel is just another ACL.
So OpenID won—not because it was the solution, but because it helped us understand the fundamental interaction problems that previous auth systems failed to address.
We didn’t build a better horse, but we did make some good glue.
Earlier this evening, I received an NDA from a potential client. They’re a big company, so it came with some understandably bulletproof language, and was signed by an exec in their legal department (via a pasted-in scan of their signature).
The instructions that accompanied the NDA said I should sign and print two copies, mail one, and fax or email a copy back to them.
We don’t have a fax machine, let alone a landline, so we typically just paste in our signatures, create a PDF and send it back. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple. Fortunately, Adobe’s silly PDF protection was felled quickly by the OS X Print command.
Fail because of PDF password protection.
Open original NDA in Preview.
Fail because of character-set mangling.
Open printed PDF in Preview.
Fail because of charset mangling.
Create new multipage document in Adobe Illustrator.
Success!
George Lakoff on The Obama Code:
Empathy-based values are opposed to the pure self-interest of a laissez-faire “free market,” which assumes that greed is good and that seeking self-interest will magically maximize everyone’s interests.
(via my homie Case)
Shaft-drive, steel framed, 2WD, [bio]diesel powered motorcycle. Long Way Round trilogy? Bueller?
Earlier this month, my iPhone had a life-altering experience. The gist: it fell off my bed, bouncing off the railing before falling a few meters to an abrupt landing, face down on the concrete floor below. As of now, it still works—so I haven’t bothered replacing it. The reactions from people when they see it range from horror to dismay to incredulousness: “is that wallpaper?”
I think of it like an Advent calendar: Every day, a chunk of glass glass comes off to reveal a bit more iPhone underneath.
Now, you too can have the post-apocalyptic 3G on your desktop.
In roughly a decade, the children of the generation who grew up with the internet and social media will be coming online. They’ll be creating their own online identities, with greater ease and comfort than their parents’ generation.
This medium will be used to communicate with their peers—but more profoundly, and almost wholly unlike our generation—to relate with their parents. Our generation is amassing our experience on the internet, indexed and cross-referenced, annotated with comments and (sometimes ephemeral) edges in the social graphs we’ve created.
Our children’s generation will not have to suffer the same awkward slideshows of their parents’ youth. The data, our experiences, will be there for the taking, at their leisure, not buried in dusty scrapbooks in attics and basements.
Their generation will be the first with such direct accessibility to the lives of their immediate ancestors. Our children—and their children—will be able to learn and discover their history, the pain and the successes of their forebears. They will know these things not through dim recollection and hyperbole, and not mixed with parable or lessons.
Today, if there is one at all, the litmus test for posting something online is something like “will my future boss see this?” or “is this something I want my mother to see?” At a certain point the question will change to “is this something I’m comfortable with my kids seeing?” The potential of unvarnished personal experience as an implicit gifted advantage to our children is a wonderful thing.
Holidays at King Walter’s Castle—always baller. Photo courtesy the lovely JZ.
