No Such Weblog

While I’m usually comfortable using social networks of all kinds, I hadn’t ever joined Facebook.Well, the recent ruckus about their terms of service tickled my interest sufficiently that I finally gave in.

There really is no such thing as bad publicity for facebook.Now, what’s interesting about it for this latecomer? Beside not finding much actually useful or new on facebook (well, perhaps except for new lows in advertising

), two points really struck me: An incredibly simple user interface, literally going out of the way when it should, making it as easy as at all possible to let me do what I’d most likely want to do — and all that, of course, within the walled garden’s fences. As an exhibit, consider the exchange between Ann Bassetti and myself up there: With Twitter, I’d have linked to it. In Facebook, it seems like I can’t do that, so your only chance is going into the walled garden and trying to search for it. Second, a subtle persuasion that I’m safe and secure there. For the first couple of “friends”, I’m bothered with a CAPTCHA (which goes away eventually), to “make sure I’m legit”; when I “friend” somebody who isn’t in the “same network” as I am, I’m politely told that (and why!) I can’t see their profile. Nothing like letting your users softly run into limits if you want to convince them that they’re protected by these limits, and that you’re their friend, by enforcing these limits. Remember: Facebook is your friend, it is not scary, and it helps you keep your privacy. There is nothing that Facebook would ever do wrong with your data. It helps you keep your privacy.It’s almost fortunate, then, that Facebook also inflicted one of its little indiscretions on me…

I hadn’t quite told the world that I had given in to that particular temptation, yet, despite some misgivings on principles. Well, this takes care of that.So, what’s the conclusion? So far, Facebook indeed very much looks like Hotel California, with nice rooms, and a somewhat chatty concierge. Nothing to see here as far as I’m concerned, except for network effects in action, and some really neat persuasion packed into UI.(Good that I can use Twitter to update my status.)

Google is encouraging people to video their vote. That sounds like a good idea, in particular where difficulties with voting machines are to be expected.Just one caveat: I’d rather that voters don’t video who they vote for.Classical paper ballots are a fairly sophisticated security system with many important properties, and one of them turns out to be the inability of the voter to prove their choice to a third party: If a voter can prove to a third party how they voted, then selling one’s vote turns into a viable business model. That’s one of the reasons why absentee voting is problematic from a big picture perspective, and why it’s sometimes only permissible under exceptional circumstances. It’s also why people shouldn’t even be allowed to video their vote.If you think that videoing one’s vote is necessary to expose trouble with voting machines, think again, and look at the Chaos Computer Club’s excellent work in Germany: They’re sending volunteer observers to any computerized election that’s going on, they document problems as they occur (and failures to follow business processes critical to the voting system’s security), and they take their work to court where they need to.

ICANN has just published an exchange of letters with the US Department of Commerce, around a proposal to deploy DNSSEC in the DNS’s root.

• Letter from Paul Twomey to Meredith Baker, 2 September
• Letter from MEredith Baker to Paul Twomey, 9 September

Every once in a while, I’m at risk of falling for the iPhone — it’s a really nice device after all, and from day one, the user interface had something going for it. The first generation of the device was just too expensive for my taste, and it didn’t have either 3G or GPS. It was also a closed platform, but presumably, that was going away at some point, so I guess I was willing to compromise on that point.The 3G variant pretty much looks like the phone I’d take; the price range (including the one of the subscription that I’d need to change into) works for me, and the feature set (except for the camera’s resolution, but hey, it’s rare that any cell phone camera leads to great photos, so that’s not a big deal at all) is what I’m looking for; the UI looks like they have taken care of many of the subtleties that I heard others complain about (e.g., you can now navigate the address book by initials).But what really keeps me away from that phone is Apple’s attitude of keeping applications off the device for competing with Apple, or for having an interpreter built in, or for whatever other reason they come up with, depending on the phase of the moon.What we’re seeing in action here is an environment that’s tightly controlled, and in which innovators indeed need to ask for permission from some company that thinks it’s competing with them. So I’ll stick to Nokia for now, where I can run applications like Joikuspot to my heart’s content. (Now, if Nokia would just finally get its act together and release decent desktop software for any platform other than Windows…)

For no good reason in particular, I started looking into IPv6 this week-end. The quick summary first: It works. It’s not really difficult to set up. But it’s not easy enough, either.The first realization was that the Macintoshs on the network here had been hapiily chatting IPv6 among themselves while I wasn’t looking; link-local addresses had configured themselves, and multicast DNS had glued things together seamlessly. Kudos to Apple for that.Now, the first thing to try was of course telling the MacBook to open a 6to4 tunnel. That’s supposedly all that’s needed to connect a host to the ipv6 Internet, and it’s really easy. Except, well, you need a publicly routed IPv4 address, static if you want to get routed ipv6 addresses from one of the tunnel brokers out there. Bummer.Next thing to look at, the NAT box. It’s actually in a reasonably good position to set up these things, but, alas! — there’s a plethora of firmware options out there, some without IPv6 support, some with broken IPv6 support, some with outdated documentation. The firmware that’s installed doesn’t support IPv6, and I wasn’t in a device-bricking mood.The solution that I went for was two-tiered: First, IPv6-enabling the server that runs this Web site. Second, setting up Debian on a spare machine here and connecting it to that server through OpenVPN.

It seems like ICANN doesn’t have RSS feeds for its correspondence and minutes pages.Well, two quick screen-scrapers later:

• Correspondence RSS feed
• Minutes RSS feed

(These are updated hourly. If anybody on the ICANN webmaster staff reads this, I’m happy to send you the XSLT sheets that generate these feeds.)

Among the great privileges of working at W3C is the occasional geeking with people like Michael Sperberg-McQueen’s evil twin Enrique.Enrique’s latest is on what RDF gets us. In that blog item, RDF is characterized as an extremely thin semantic layer — interestingly, ignoring the RDF Semantics recommendation. The point of that recommendation is that RDF is — even when you ignore RDF schema, OWL and friends — more than just nodes, arrows, and URIs.

Wired.com reports that a US judge compelled YouTube Google to turn over its complete user logs – including time stamps and IP addresses, which might be used to discover the real life identity behind a request.Denied motions in the same decision include the disclosure of Google’s and Youtube’s search engine source code, private videos, and various database schemata.Leaving aside that Viacom’s demand for assorted crown jewels smells of an attempt to force YouTube into a settlement, the judge’s decision really is a staggering example of the limits of data governance: Building data avoidance into protocols and services makes privacy-threatening disclosures hard or impossible; it also limits the usefulness of some services. But approaches that accept (almost unlimited) storage and processing of data (and then rely on technology and procedures to enforce certain rules) are ultimately limited by the ability of the surrounding legal and social system to stick to these rules. That really means two things: On the one hand, the social context needs to hold data processors accountable for the privacy promises that they make. On the other hand, it must not turn into a threat to these promises itself.This case is a particularly spectacular example of the latter aspect, made worse by an environment in which little is ever forgotten.Food for thought when you next dump personal data into some Web 2.0 information silo.

Blogging has been light here for a while, though Twittering hasn’t.The past few months have seen a busy travel schedule and a number of talks; maybe time to quickly dump links to the various slide sets here:

• At RSA Conference in San Francisco, I spoke on a panel about security usability with fellow Web Security Context Working Group members Mary Ellen Zurko, Rachna Dhamija, and Phillip Hallam-Baker. No slides, but a reasonably nice discussion.
• At the Web Conference in Beijing, just two weeks later, I ended up on a panel on policy languages, with Renato Iannella, Piero Bonatti, and Lalana Kagal.
• Also at the Web Conference, I spoke about Widgets – Web Vulnerabilities for All, taking a look under the hood of some commonly found widgets, and explaining how they can be used to break into your computer. As much as I like that Widgets are making it easier to write portable network client applications, as much do I think that the current platforms’ security models make it far too risky to actually run these beasts. We’ve got some catch-up work to do there.
• In Web Application Security Issues at the same conference, I also talked about widgets, but then asked the question what the programming practices there tell us about the future of Web Applications, when ever more security critical code actually runs on the client. That outlook is rather dark right now, in terms of security. (Although it won’t get much worse than the current situation.)
• Finally, I went to nearby Ghent, to talk about HTML5 and what’s security relevant in there. Slides here: Would you like fries with that? In short, there’s a bunch of good work being done in that spec, but other parts need some serious attention from the security community.

… but before we return topics here to more productive things, let’s note that Apple’s support has so far been rather more impressive than IBM’s: After exchanging some e-mails with their service provider here in Luxembourg and a phone call on Wednesday, spare parts (a new top case assembly, for the case crack, and a new airport card) were waiting there when I brought the laptop on Friday. They were exchanged on the spot, and I took a repaired machine home an hour later. Also, quite mundanely, the service provider is, for once, a 10 minute bus ride from Luxembourg’s central station — instead of hiding in the countryside near Belgium, and even then only acting as a glorified post office.I’m not quite ready to declare victory, but so far, things look well.