Orcmid's Lair

Candling Phish

I'm soberly leafing through an Umberto Eco essay when Spanner Wingnut comes panting up the stairway from the lab, dragging his portable with him. I say dragging because it is some kind of souped-up Osborne sewing-machine crate running XPSP2 and trailing an extension cord that would have shorted my grandmother's teakettle.

Spanner (who looks more like Mr. Mole every day) peers at me through his bottle-glass spectacles while having some kind of Bob Golthwaite moment. "Look'cheer," he wheezes, pointing excitedly at the display on his rig.

"Stand still and stop drooling on the screen," I remark calmly, wondering if you can short a monitor that way.

Oh,

"Well you twit, you've been spammed and phished," I say knowingly. "At least you don't have an account with that bank. How often have I had to tell you, Use Protection!"

"No, no, look'cheer" as he elbows me working the trackball,

and then ...

well, would you look at that?

"Dunderhead! You didn't know that? How do you think teen-agers sneak homework answers to their pals using their parents computers? Everybody knows about that," I bark, wondering at how the little newt manages to come up with one after the other of these little cuties.

"And pick up that cord neatly. It looks like the rats have been chewing it."

As Spanner slouches back to his subterranean warren, I wonder if there is a patent attorney available on a Sunday and where can I announce the remarkable von Clueless phish-detector. First, I need a dated entry in my lab notebook. Oh, and I bet I can get Orcmid to give me space in exchange for Spanner cleaning up his blog messes. That's the ticket ...

Pent up Blogophilia

It has been difficult to withhold myself from blogging while I do some important scaffolding around being able to recover from a variety of misadventures here. It helped that I was in an 8-week on-line course that also demanded my attention. But that was then, and now I don't have to get a typing fix by spewing comments onto Scobleizer so much.

I did allow myself to accumulate drafts on Blogger.com, and now I have to see what I have. In addition to that material, I already thought of several new postings that I will be building somewhere around here:

A way of Living: Joi Ito and Tim Bray in common

What's Your Scoble Number? Something that the blogosphere has altered forever

Throw 'Em a Phish: I managed to decode a couple of phishes and they are indeed wonders to behold.

Personal Refactoring: How Do I Unravel this Knot?

ODMA Is Ten This Year: The little middleware bridge that could forges ahead.

Blogger: Here's a Good Thing. While I'm sulking over Blogger, they begin to fill in the blanks for people who want to do more and understand more, with a great update to their user Help and Support Status. There's just that little thing about privacy that nags me now.

Meme Mimicry. So, is it thought control or the hundredth monkey?

I will stop now before I overwhelm myself. These will show up here or over in Professor von Clueless's place. Oh, yeah. I need to get that blog up and operating before I get too carried away.

Later. Heh.

All-Clear #1

All Clear: End of Test

Any entries since the last

"Caution: Feed Testing"

announcement were part of the test activities.

Consult the Site Status
page for further information.

This confirms that the testing of incident-response preparations for the Orcmid's Lair blog are completed and the blog is no longer locked down. Although similar notices were placed in the site feed during testing, those manually-injected announcements are obliterated when the automated feed produced by Blogger.com is reinstituted. This message marks closure of testing and other preparations in the "permanent" feed.

As part of the institution of consistent incident-response procedures for Orcmid's Lair and related blogs, the URL for the Orcmid's Lair blog has been simplified to <http://orcmid.com/blog/>. That's all you need. It will be faster to use this than be redirected from the previous URL, so please update any shortcuts you have to this blog.

Microsoft Scores for Respecting Its Customers

Computerworld: Microsoft scores highest in customer-respect study. Linda Rosencrance's 2004-06-25 article describes a study by The Customer Respect Group. The study examines web sites for how they support successful customer experiences. Microsoft was found to lead the top 100 from that perspective.

Although I have had unsuccessful experiences with the sites, especially when dealing with a security-related concern, I must confess that the experience is still better than any I have found on other sites.

Today, there is announcement of a major transparency move (for Microsoft), putting its bug reports and feedback on line, so that there is visibility on the incidents that have been reported, the actions being taken, and any resolution. I would say that will raise the score considerably, at least in the developer community. You can't imagine (or maybe you can) all of the conversations that go on inside of a business about the importance of not doing that. It always feels risky, and I suspect that the lawyers are the most nervous about it. So that is a very good move in terms of willing to deal with any feeling of vulnerability out of respect for the customer and also out of recognition of what value that is to ones own business operations and customer relationships.

Watching and Listening:
Yoga Zone. Total Body Conditioning for Beginners. DVD edition, first 20-minute session. Yesterday I got back on the rowing machine, today is back to yoga. I maxed my lifetime weight and some serious intervention is called for. I am starting with light routines and building back up to the level I was at when I stopped this in April. You can see my gut in the photos from Kaua'i.
MSN Radio Plus. Yoga, Yoga, Yoga (theme station). Good cool-down music and relaxation while I am feeling a bit jangled this morning.

Difficulties of Wireless Mesh

ACM News Service: The Realities of Dealing with Wireless Mesh Networks.. The idea of wireless mesh networks appeals to me because of the possible utility for peer-to-peer bootstrapping and discovery. I am not so interested in the problems of wireless access that the techniques are designed to overcome, since I am happy to apply the same ideas to wired edge nodes, even wireless access points, that can form a mesh without heavy centralized support.

This is a 3-by-5 card placeholder for me to return and dig deeper, supplementing what I discovered earlier about this case.

The concern that this blurb raises for me is the item on the end that says coming out of sleep mode (that is, being detached or shut down for some period) "in a mesh network requires nodes to resynchronize with the network upon reactivation, a power- and time-consumptive process that involves considerable over-the-air network traffic."

I don't like the sound of that and I need to check out the full article, in the June 2004 issue of Sensor online.

What Is RFID Technology?

Now that I have stuck my neck out on how passive RFIDs are, and how the work of correlating the presence information is done elsewhere, I thought I should get something closer to the real facts.

The site RFID Talk: Discussion of RFID technology provides a discussion portal for matters RFIDian. There is an RFID Technology forum on the site. Many of the topics are about specific products. It is interesting that RFIDs are described as transponders. I am looking into some of the specific discussions.

It appears that the typical RFID returns something like an EPC, an Electronic Product Code prefered by Walmart and the US DoD. The passive tags are cheaper, can be polled indefinitely, and are the ones likely to be ubiquitous in the near future. These, like the Hitachi u-chip, have small (e.g., 128 bit) ROMs and are not alterable after manufacture. They are physically miniscule and the power for their response is derived from the scanner's UHF signal.

There are also active tags. The ones being used to monitor truck tires, with 8-kilobit memories and environmental sensors, can report temperature and pressure histories for the tires they are affixed to.

Zebra Technologies offers RFID Printing Solutions. An RFID embedded in a product label is programmed with its identifier, such as an EPC, simultaneous with the printing of visible identification (even bar codes) on the label itself. The distinction between the soon-to-be-ubiquitous passive tags and active tags is explained in another Zebra Fact Page:

"Information is sent to and read from RFID tags by a reader using radio waves. In passive systems, which are the most common, a Radio Frequency Identification reader transmits an energy field that 'wakes up' the tag and provides the power for the tag to operate. In active systems, a battery in the tag is used to boost the effective operating range of the tag and to offer additional features over passive tags, such as temperature sensing."

In all near-term cases, the information carried by the tag is limited, whether or not alterable. Some connection to a datasystem is required to correlate the current scanning, and collateral information (e.g., a cash-register feed for purchases) to any kind of global record. The requirements for the data-communication and database end are considered to be immense.

Hark, Is That an Arphid That I Smell?

RG News: The Smell Of RFID Tags. I notice that there is an assumption, in the scarier accounts, that RFID tags can be updated to carry complex information. For example, it is speculated that purchasing history can be carried by an RFID built into a credit card. My sense of the current technology is that the association is done behind the scenes and accomplished in massive data aggregation activities, not on the RFID (or the credit card). The impact might be the same, but the methodology is quite different. What I see here is a seriously overblown assumption about what the technology is capable of, in any reasonably-near future, and this over-generalization discredits accounts such as this summary on Robin Good's Latest News. It is likely to be regarded by legislators and decision makers as idiot radicalism.

I think the problem around this technology being intrusive is that it is near-invisible. While this article emphasizes this action:

Consumers must insist that RFID tags be easily visible, removable and turned off at checkout.

this injunction becomes meaningless if consumers are not equipped to verify it.

I do have a few modest suggestions that might be more effective as social action.

Whittier Daily News - Opinion. Robin Good's source is Lenore Skenazy's 2004-06-25 Whittier Daily News.com opinion piece. The article addresses RFID as a universal surveillance system. Here the description of an RFID as a "bar code on steroids" is more apt, although the leap into outrageous extrapolations almost qualifies this article as an urban e-mail hoax.

Again, the example of what the RFID reports is exaggerated. The RFID just reports what it always reports, it doesn't carry the history of its voyage from manufacturer to a garmet you are wearing. It is in the uniqueness of that identification, and its availability, that provides the basis of surveillance. That is all it needs. In the cinema, when someone places a tracking beacon on a vehicle, the beacon doesn't do the work, the trackers do. This might be a better way to view the situation.

Now, that does not alter the fact that a fine basis for surveillance is available, and that this is commercially valuable and potentially just as important to everyone's Department of Homeland Security and everyone who might be spying on them.

So the scary scenarios don't work as described. The RFID needs to be scanned repeatedly at different places, and the scanning point needs to send its information somewhere that it can be aggregated with other information from other scannings of that same RFID. This is not a trivial act, and yes, people are working on it.

It is more like my supermarket membership card. All it has to do is identify itself. The rest is handled by passing that identification, and my coincident purchasing information to a database system. The easy part for the supermarket is they issued the card. They are not just trying to scan anybody's any-kind-of-card, and connecting it to a data-collection and reporting system somewhere. With RFIDs, the problem is more complicated.

What is more important is that the RFID is a kind of passive technology. It responds to scans from any suitable scanner. So, instead of worrying about who is scanning RFIDs in your possession, why not look at the opportunity we have in being able to scan the RFIDs in our environment?

Questions to self: Is there any selectivity in the scanning and response? (Obviously, for intentional surveillance, different kinds of RFIDs and readers might be developed and used; but what about the current case). When the vet scans our cats and notices that they have been "chipped," what other objects respond to those same scanners? What other scanners would notice our cats, perhaps from a greater distance. How many flavors of this technology are there? If these are really equivalent to a homogenous system of very-long bar codes, I here point out that bar code scanners are now affordable enough to be consumer devices. For the kind of tracking that people speculate about, that means scanners will be at least that affordable. Probably more affordable than the video-recorder at the Rodney King beating. Heh.

Lady Bugs for RFIDs?

I'm chatting with Vicki over breakfast and I mention that I am gathering information on RFIDs (pronounced arphids). "I guess you're not talking about little green bugs that infest the rose bushes?" she responds.

I'm dumbstruck. Of course, what we need are lady bugs for RFIDs. What a great symbol. Little lady-bug lapel pins that eat arphids. This could be the greatest thing since the pet rock and lead-lined underware. I am thinking that we need a tasteful nano-lady-bug design with nice fluorescent sparkles when it is being scanned. It could even have, you know, an RFID jammer or virus build into it. Or, we could say it does. The stick-pin is the antenna. [Or it is an arphid and scanner spotter, an even more promising option for the executive model -- see the updates below.]

Stepping back into the aluminum-foil headgear department, I was wondering how RFIDs are discriminated. If they are all over the place, how does a sensor discriminate the responses? I need to see how they probe and deal with response collisions, but it makes me wonder if RFID congestion is a problem.

That has me thinking about RFID safety garments. We could collect RFIDs, and keep them like butterfly collections, stitching them into our underwear or creating something like RFID merit-badge scarves (and headgear). People can proudly wear their collections and claim records of various kinds. You know, confirmed RFIDs from Indonesian child-labor sweatshops found in your last pair of running shoes. When you have a healthy pelt of these things, wear it shopping. At, say, Wal-Mart.

It could happen.

[added 2004-06-27-20:20Z]: Arphid Accessorizing! Wait, there's more. How about affinity arphids, little lady-bug pins that have designs that express community identity: "John Q. Public," "Jane Q. Public," "Silent Majority," "I Gave at the Office," "Swing Vote," "Republicrat," "Demican," "Apathetic," "Bipartisan," "Independent Voter," "Librarian," "Homeless Neoconservative," and that great geek cloak, "Anonymous Coward." And every arphid for a single affinity has the same identity. Be the first in your neighborhood to collect and wear the entire set. Have meet-ups where what you have in common is the same arphid identification. You Are Legion. Heh.

This could be the greatest thing since cabbage-patch kids. I wonder who knows how to make these things . ... Do you think that, if I pull this off, I can be in the next Michael Moore movie?

[added 2004-06-27-20:47Z]: Then there's "The Borg," "Jane Doe," "Kinky,"and "Cruisin'" when you're on the prowl. Teens will love arphid scanners built into their video-cellphones. Ear-jewelry can be incorporated into whatever that 3-holes in the left, 1-in the right ear is intended to signify. Kids, make your folks crazy at a whole new level.

Think of it, treasure hunts for hidden arphids. Arphid Lotto!

Not to mention that if business firms let their product-tracking arphids into the wild, they may find that their operations are just a wee bit more transparent than intended. After all, it is just gigantic data aggregation, a great exercise of peer-to-peer computational grids. We have the technology. "Big Brother, we are watching you."

You gotta love it. Open-source arphid-defeating lady-bug grids.

OK, I'm done. The comment section is open. Keep it anonymous. This is a watchbird watching Google. This is a watchbird watching you.

RFID for Commerce is Surveillance?

RFID for Commerce

We're discussing RFIDs in my Security Engineering class and I am clipping some resources about it.

ACM News Service: Embedding Their Hopes in RFID. The economic realities of RFID employment, along with the privacy concerns, are featured in this blurb.

The Seattle Public Library seems to be using RFIDs in their automated check-out systems (similar to the automated check-out systems in some stores, except you just lay the library books down on an opaque surface).

Although there is a lot of attention on item-level tracking, most commercial use of RFID is for container, not item, tracking. The little RFIDs are still too expensive to put on everything, and reader/scanner range is limited. Those are all parameters that can only improve, though.

Jonathan Krim's 2004-06-23 Washington Post article (registration required) seems scarier to me. His first example is on gaming chips in a gambling casino. Prescription drugs are another example. This main article is extensive, and there are some accompanying links.

At home, our cats are tagged (the expression is "chipped"), and your dentist will chip your kids. In the article, there is an application to permit the subcutaneous tagging of people, initially as a kind of Med-Alert system. It is clear what the benefits of these applications are, and it is not for surveillance as much as for identification and a kind of protection. With RFIDs, one could plant chips on someone, and I think that is also how we are looking at the prospects for surveillance that the commercial use of RFIDs provides, in terms of the movement of products being tracked as we use them.

Future Now: Couple RFID-related articles. This short blurb links to two articles: One in Technology Review that requires a subscription (or a minimum $4.95 US and then you have to cancel it to keep it from going month-to-month). The other is from Economist.com and is free for now.

Impact of RFID and other monitoring has four entries that I gleaned on 2004-02-24.

No Hiding Place. A January, 2003, Economist article, involving science-fiction writer David Brin, on living transparently in the internet society.

I searched through this blog archive and I didn't find any other occurrences of RFID. I suspect that a search on "privacy" might be more successful.

Computer Pioneer Bob Bemer

I just learned of the death of Bob Bemer. I think he'd be pleased to know that he was slash-dotted. It is also odd the things people are remembered for, although Bob was tickled to make sure the ESC code was in ASCII, and other things. Only one person who knew Bob seems to have chimed up, and I added my footnote. I need to say it again in this quieter place.

I worked in one of Bob's teams while he was Director of Software at Sperry Univac in the 60's. He was a lot of fun. He kept calling me "Bub." I ran into him at standards meetings a few times after he moved on to GE and Honeywell, but we did not stay in touch. I re-encountered him later on the web, just prior to Y2K ,as the result of an article reporting that he was suggesting a Y2K repair that would not require people to remap existing file records. He wanted to pack the numbers tighter and intercept date accesses in running programs, buying some time.

I exchanged e-mail with him a few times in the last few years, and I had a chance to acknowledge the inspiration he was for me while he was still around. I don't know that he would hang out on slash-dot. When I last exchanged e-mail with him he was frustrated about what it took to maintain his web site.

I guess he was a geek at heart. I had produced a fast decimal-to-binary assembly-language algorithm for a character-oriented machine that didn't have a built-in converter but addressed in binary and calculated in decimal (making subscripting hard). He was the only one of his entire organization that worked it over and took more cycles out of it, and then I took out more using his ideas. He thanked me for giving him a chance to play.

Beside paying attention to those little details that can mean a lot, like character sets and extension techniques, he also worried about improving programming languages, training software developers, establishing software forensics, and making software engineering an activity that exploited reusable piece parts, anticipating components by a good 30 years. He funded Peter Landin and Bill Burge's work on Functional Programming in the US because he saw the possibility of applicative languages as the ultimate in piece-part composers.

Bob's web site is loaded with reminiscences. Some of Bob's recollections are a little off. When I arrived at 315 Park Avenue South, Al Paster was already there, working for C.L. McCarthy. Bemer hadn't shown up yet. I don't remember what the lag was. I know Bob was there in 1962, because I remember him talking to my wife, Bobbi, at an employee party that he initiated to have all of us become better known to each other. But who was already there in 1961 when I moved from Seattle to Manhattan was Bill Lonergan, one of the architects of the Burroughs 5000. Univac was definitely looking to make a move. (It was Lonergan's connections that led to my getting to work with Don Knuth in the summer of 1962. Along with building a Fortran compiler for us, Don said he had some ideas for a definitive book about programming.)

One thing I liked about Bob was he thought he hired me and he liked to tell people that. I was there ahead of him, but as far as he was concerned, I was his find.

Another fascinating thing is that he recreated his years at Univac by going over his expense reports for the time. Dang, I wish I had thought to keep mine over all this time. What a clever way to associate and recall events.

With regard to managing people, Bob didn't believe in burning out developers and he thought there was a lot of life to be had outside of the office. I'm pleased to learn that he was active to the end. I'll never forget him.

The key to immortality is living a life worth remembering.
-- end title to a Bruce Lee film
Who we are is the remembrance for the immortality of those who touch our lives
-- me

Cattle-Driving the Future

Phil Wainewright: Avalon - Microsoft's Microchannel, in his followup on Joel Spolsky's API Wars article, Phil compares Microsoft's Avalon efforts to IBM's PS/2 and Microchannel misfire. I suppose that makes Microsoft's Bob interface the mate to PC Jr.

Phil bases his speculation on Avalon GUI technology being delivered exclusively with Longhorn. Unless we are to believe that our existing applications won't run on Longhorn unless we convert to Avalon somehow, I don't see the danger.

I have no idea whether the sharp minds at Microsoft want to confine Avalon to Longhorn as an attractor. It's not that I'd be surprised that Microsoft is positioning to serve more than one agenda by developing a very high-performance graphical capability. I just can't see that as an area of concern for me. I think I'm going to pay more attention to integrative technology (.NET and Web Services) that is already available.

But I am left to muse about unspoken agendas and the Microsoft-IBM history.

Sometimes, unspoken agendas have us be wary. It's as if what isn't being said is shouted very loud on the human backchannel. I think it is natural to feel wary at those times.

Here, context is everything. When Heathkit advertised "We won't let you fail," it was heard quite differently than IBM's expression of that. IBM is known historically for aggressive maintenance of "account control," and the PS/2 might well have been seen as a way of re-establishing a "franchise."

I see in this a different insight than Phil's into the OS/2 fiasco. The breakup of Microsoft and IBM over OS/2 seems like a complements clash of the kind that Joel Spolsky has noticed: "smart companies try to commoditize their product's complements." From that perspective, we should not be surprised about the antagonistic breakups of partnerships where one company wants software to be nearly free and the other wants hardware to be nearly free. That the guy with the franchise on the operating system owns the toll-booth for that particular racetrack is also not surprising, nor is the effort of hardware floggers to break away from that rat-race for their own mercantile purposes.

In the game of "who do you trust" that customers are left to figure out, I think we should just notice where they put their money and where do they aggressively seek substitutes, realistically or not. I bet Avalon is not part of that equation.

Rich Client, Poor Client, Smart Client, Web Client

Joel on Software - How Microsoft Lost the API War. Joel Spolsky outdoes himself (and he'll do it again) in explaining what happened to the developer world and how the Windows API may have become irrelevant. This is a big deal, because the Windows API is as important to developers and Microsoft as the Wintel BIOS is to PC makers and Microsoft.

Here's how it looks to me:

There now are more APIs, of different kinds at different levels, increasing the platform's appeal.
For web-distributed applications, more has been done to ensure that Microsoft platforms fit naturally on one or both sides of those connections than for any alternative.
It doesn't matter which toolcraft prevails for choreographing the desktop user interface of web-serviced applications: It will be supported on Windows.

Here's how I see preservation of Microsoft platforms as the integrative technology of choice. [disclosure: My firm is a member of the Microsoft Empower ISV Program. On Wednesday, my four-pound DVD starter kit of all-the-software-you-can-eat-for-a-year arrived.]

Protecting the Cycle of Demand. Joel, in discussing what he calls the Raymond Chen [and here] model, acknowledges the tremendous effort that Microsoft has invested in supporting third-party legacy applications. Microsoft works diligently to make OS upgrades as painless for customers as possible; the company is very attentive to those people who buy the computer that has the operating system that runs the applications that are developed on the operating system that runs on computers that people buy. Microsoft owns the tollbooth (and the pit stops) on that particular Möbius-surfaced gerbil raceway and the ticket onto this ride for developers has been the Windows API (along with its companions, the Platform SDK and application-deployment model, all available at no cost on-line). Nothing illustrates the commitment to grandfather working applications better than the current desperation to put Windows XP SP2 out there and have it be installed successfully by everyone who tries it, creating a buzz that encourages nearly everyone else to try it too.

The Web, as in Freedom. Joel sees a dramatic change now that the ideal means for application deployment is the web. The competing protocol of choice is now HTTP, an open industry standard for connecting users and applications and services across platforms using the Internet. Now the client is your web browser, and the application is somewhere else. Anywhere else. I'm operating with that model this moment as I create this blog entry using www.blogger.com.

Wallpapering the Usability Divide. This is not a perfect arrangement because of browser incompatibilities (and the annoying tendency of developers to QA against only one particular browser). Along with that, browser-based applications can be pretty intrusive, and even when that is tolerated, browser usability is not that same seamless application experience found with well-crafted desktop-application surfaces. Joel provides a nice recap of the dissonance with your Aunt Tilly's desktop:

But there's a price to pay in the smoothness of the user interface. Here are a few examples of things you can't really do well in a web application:
Create a fast drawing program
Build a real-time spell checker with wavy red underlines
Warn users that they are going to lose their work if they hit the close box of the browser
Update a small part of the display based on a change that the user makes without a full round trip to the server
Create a fast keyboard-driven interface that doesn't require the mouse
Let people continue working when they are not connected to the Internet

to which I would add being able to work in multiple applications at once and blend between them while also providing for full accessibility. I have never considered substituting Hotmail and web-based distributed-learning applications for the fat-client Outlook and FirstClass on my desktop. I will be happier when I can operate my blogs from the desktop and not the browser.

Meet the New Game, Just Like the Old Game? It is not so clear to me that Microsoft is changing the game. With .NET, there is a new integration model that works with web-deployment and smartness on the client. In addition, the raw platform and a good chunk of the API has been contributed in public, freely-available specifications through standards processes of ECMA International. Two major tests of this new agility are GNU dot Net and the Mono project. Mono is coming along nicely with release 1.0, now sponsored by Novell, in beta. This suggests that Microsoft's offering of the baseline .NET facilities as a basis for heterogeneous, cross-platform distributed applications is serious. There is corresponding promotion of XML and Web Services that support platform-independent ownership and preservation of distributed data. That's effectively a new API, one based on XML for presentation data units (in the old Open Systems Interconnection -- OSI -- Model sense of presentation) and for protocol data units in the Web Services protocol stack.

Here a Stack, There a Stack, Everywhere a Stack, Stack. "Stack" is increasingly showing up in the language of Microsofties, and the relationship to OSI models seems to be no accident. It is, of course, completely possible, permissible, and encouraged to build proprietary layers atop an open stack and to wrap proprietary infrastructure as open-system access points. It is important to realize that Web Services (and XML) are for application-to-application communication and the stack provides for thin-client, client-server, peer-to-peer, component substitution, service-oriented architectures, distributed security, and who yet knows what other forms of distributed operation. On Microsoft platforms, .NET and the WS stack will be bolted in everywhere, with application access mediated by, you-guessed it, interfaces to objects supplied via .NET library classes.

Counting APIs. Beside the Windows API, we now have two more interface stacks: The .NET API on the platform and the XML/Web Services stack for cross-platform operation. Although .NET is still evolving and transforming (as are Web Service specifications and implementations) the picture is fairly clear. If you are in a position to use Microsoft libraries, then you will have their strong on-platform support libraries for offering and accessing Web Services.

Is It a Good Thing? It seems to me that there is more for Microsoft to gain in this approach than anything there is to loose. Their own developers require this capability in delivery of applications and services. I don't think external developers will find anything unwelcome here. There are now more layers of defined interface around which Microsoft may extend their platform reach, and third parties can do the same. With the .NET ability to easily define and substitute components both above and below the Microsoft-defined integration points, there is less reason to fear becoming captive to a platform-exclusive point-of-view.

Are You a Good Witch or a Bad Witch? While it may seem that these open interfaces don't bind developers so close to the Microsoft platform as before, it is definitely easier to develop and confirm applications using Microsoft client and server platforms. And on any platform, making sure that there is interoperability with the thorny cases of Microsoft's Web Service implementations will matter. In addition, developers will find it easier to integrate alien servers (running J2EE, say) and mainframe legacies into Microsoft platform solutions. I would say that Microsoft has done as much as anyone to enable platform interoperability and preservation of application code and design portability. They're not going to do it for us, and they're also not in the way. I like their confidence that this is a valuable way to compete.

In the Eyes of the Beholder. I see the interoperability features as evidence of Microsoft's eagerness to extend its platform's reach and availability in a world of competing user agents and service sources. I've ignored competing approaches to user-interface crafting and visual-development of applications. There isn't any experience to suggest that Microsoft will be at any disadvantage in those areas.

Listening to:
Duke Ellington Ellington at Newport (1956) Complete double CD, Columbia (1956, 1982, 1999). My high-school chum Ron Lougheed gave me my first LP of this concert performance, and I wore it out before the sixties got very far. It is great to have this fine expanded compilation.

Accountability and Transparency for Credibility

RG News: Critical Factors In Gaining Online Credibility. Here's a great checklist and some links on the conditions that have a web site be considered credible and trustworthy, at least as a provisional judgment by visitors. I am fascinated by how many of the items involve establishing some personal level of visibility along with accountability for the site itself and what is offered. The general thrust is toward transparency as a means to building a trust relationship.

A key aspect is establishing a track-record of dependability. I would add that the greatest test is how breakdowns are handled. What do you do when there's a mess, and what does that show you can be counted on.

I suppose that reputation building is a factor as well.

I'm redesigning my consulting-practice and ISV site, and these are matters I intend to address, especially as I shift my focus to more-personalized areas of computing.

In an ALGOL State of Mind

Anders Hejlsberg - Tour through computing industry history at the Microsoft Museum. If you are able to watch the video, you'll enjoy this story of the origination and development of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, VJ++, and C#. My favorite part: Anders' first programming language was ALGOL. Of course. I should have known.

The Ever-Shifting Tide of Communication and Civil Literacy

Smart Mobs: To the class of 2004.

Last night, at a small dinner party here, I took some time out as host to scan four photographs that a guest had kindly brought. The pictures are of petrographs that she saw while visiting Africa in 2000. I am touched by the eons that mankind has found expression for itself for whatever purpose, including none but for its own sake.

Petrograph and photograph: Each is ephemeral; all endure as connections and expressions of who we are and of what matters to us at the time, some evoking resonance in the human spirit across millennia.

I have been collecting material of this kind as part of a project that recognizes general literacy (and the communication of abstract concepts) as a recent phenomena. Wide-spread civil literacy is just today happening in the world.

We forget, in the immediate generations, how recent are so many ideas and discussions. Not much more recently than our time, those concepts had no existence. Neither pharmacology nor socialized medicine nor pharmaceutical industry would be recognizable on the public agenda one century ago. "Public agenda" wouldn't have much currency either. Neither neo-conservative nor AARP existed in the Great Depression, though their harbingers can be identified. Without the nascent civil literacy of the 18th century, it seems impossible that we would have had the revolutionary ideas of the relationship of people to each other and government to commemorate here every July 4th.

Philosophers and historians note that there has been perpetual tension between what we lately speak of as individual liberty and social cohesion. These are increasingly the subject of civil literacy, expressed both in concept and in deed. Along with that conversation is a new concern over the instituting of empire in forms and extent that were impossible before this age. One may well ask whether every reform in human affairs invites its own corruption, and has it been ever thus?

Today, Howard Rheingold delivered an address to the graduating class of Stanford University's Communication Department. This speech is being delivered at an institution that is barely a century old, named for a youth who died of typhoid fever during a visit from California to Italy in 1884. Herbert Hoover, in the first graduating class, studied geology and was known for his humanitarian efforts before he became the 31st President of the United States. Today, there will also be a commencement address by a 1950's Stanford graduate, the first woman ever appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

These are but a few reminders of the marvelous journey that we are swimmers in. Howard's charge is for these newly minted communicators and journalists to restore the civil conversation to its promise and preserve civil literacy for us all. David Weinberger has provided the nutshell summary.

What is at issue is the very nature of humankind, the image we have of our limits and possibilities. History is not yet done with its exploration.... of what it means to be human. - C. Wright Mills