Rubenerd

Doc Searls (RSS feed here) compared the current state of video conferencing tools to Microsoft’s web browser in the 1990s, in a post titled The smell of boiling frog:

What saved the personal computing world from being absorbed into Microsoft was the Internet—and the Web, running on the Internet. The Internet, based on a profoundly generative protocol, supported all kinds of hardware and software at an infinitude of end points. And the Web, based on an equally generative protocol, manifested on browsers that ran on Mac and Linux computers, as well as Windows ones.

But video conferencing is different. Yes, all the popular video conferencing systems run in apps that work on multiple operating systems, and on the two main mobile device OSes as well. And yes, they are substitutable. [..] But all of them have a critical dependency through their codecs [..] While there are some open source codecs, all the systems I just named use proprietary (patent-based) codecs.

It’s a similar situation to chat apps. We used to have Jabber and IRC. Now we have Slack, Discord, and the like. And as Doc says, this has turned us from being producers to customers. This isn’t an accident, the companies behind these tools explicitly use the latter term.

It reminds me of the first trip I took on a train in Sydney, when the automated PA said “Good evening customers”. It’s haunted me since why they don’t call us passengers. A reader of this blog back in the day—apologies, I forgot which one of you lovely people it was—said it was a way to control messaging and set expectations. Passengers use trains to get to a destination. A customer has merely paid to get through a turnstile. I think there’s something to that.

But back to video conferencing, I think this even goes beyond codecs. Like online advertising and tracking, I keep coming back to incentive structures, or what push and pull factors motivate businesses to behave the way they do. A closed chat app is easy to sell as a product—another term I’m beginning to distrust—to customers, which venture capitalists and IPOs reward. VC-funded projects with open protocols exist, but it’s a much tougher sell.

Just as I’ve said in the context of FreeBSD versus Linux, open protocols do exist, but they can’t hope to match the marketing budgets of these million dollar companies. Until these pervasive incentives can be tweaked, I doubt we’ll see this change. But Doc leaves us with another thought:

Do we have to [lose out here]? I mean, it’s still early. The digital world is how old? Decades, at most. And how long will it last? At the very least, more than that. Centuries or millennia, probably. So there’s hope.

And another point to consider: what has survived all these fads and changes in tools? The Internet itself.

I thought back this morning to the first American election map I ever watched. My high school friend Felix and I had my iBook G3 open at a Coffee Bean while we lived in Singapore, fingers crossed for John Kerry. It seemed all but assured given Bush’s international respect was non-existant, and his bumbling had become such a source of ridicule.

That’s when I learned that domestic popularity was entirely different. Ah, to be that young and innocent.

But I digress. I’ve tried hard to avoid news about the current election this time around. I already feel too emotionally invested in the outcome, especially in this Covid climate. But every now and then I refresh the Australian ABC’s graphic above, which I think does the best job of any I’ve seen putting all the electoral college votes into perspective.

Today I leaned a new word while reading John J. Nance’s Lockout. Wiktionary defines it as:

(archaic) Lacking confidence in others; distrustful.
Lacking self-confidence; timid; modest

And Microsoft Bookshelf 1991 for DOS on CD-ROM defined it on my retro computer tower next to me as:

diffident adj. Hesitant to assert oneself from a lack of self-confidence; timid. [ME < Lat. diffidens, pr.part. of diffidere, to mistrust : dis-, not + fidere, to trust.]

The pilot in the book was using the archiaic, mistrusting definition. It fits, given the archaic hardware I used to access the latter definition for pointless fun.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word before; it sounds more like a brand of toothpaste. Diffident: For when you don’t trust other brands.

It’s tempting in the consumer space to think certain technologies are done and dusted. Java, Flash, and IE on the desktop, for example. Beyond niche use cases, or software like Minecraft that bundle the runtimes in their packages, this is largely true.

(Java I’ll admit to missing; I’ll cop the hipster cred for that. Do people still say hipster? But wow I’m happy to put Flash and IE on that list).

Then you get into the enterprise, and all bets are off. On the one hand you have large corporate systems that were written specifically for a platform, and its scale, complexity, and technical debt ensure it won’t be replaced any time soon. Then in hardware you have servers with years of uptime with BMC controllers that need specific versions of outdated software to render their interfaces. So these things keep running, even when the rest of the industry has moved on.

Jackson Zed reminds us over at Serve The Home (RSS feed here) that just running outdated Flash isn’t tenable:

Adobe Flash Player will reach its planned end of life on December 31st 2020 and, while most public websites long ago moved away from Flash-based content, a lot of enterprise software still relies on Flash (particularly older software). Making matters significantly worse, Adobe added a date-based check to outright disable Flash Player starting in January and the major web browser makers—Microsoft, Google and Mozilla — will each be updating their browsers to prevent the future use of the Flash Player plugin.

The solution for me in these cases is to keep a few different VMs around of a certain vintage. It’s not new or unique; one of the jobs I did in high school was set up a small-scale SCADA system with a DOS VM so it could run on newer, supported hardware.

Will it become accepted practice to do this for Flash, on a VM with the time set to 2000? That would introduce so many additional problems such as certificate verification, but what other choice is there? There are Flash decompilers and open source viewers, but I’ve read there’s mixed success there. I’ve used that phrase a few times lately.

Anyone who could crack the enterprise IT nut with an easily-updatable system that can still tick compliance boxes and either automate or navigate tedious change management and verification could write their own paycheque.

If you want a well-researched, detailed, and useful distraction from the news today, check out Vasco Figueira’s microservices post; emphasis added.

Some recent backtracking from what we have been calling “Microservices” has sparked anew the debate around that software architecture pattern. It turns out that for increasingly more software people, having a backend with (sometimes several) hundreds of services wasn’t that great an idea after all. The debate has been going on for a while and much has already been said, but there are still a couple of things I’d like to say.

TL;DR “Microservices” was a good idea taken too far and applied too bluntly. The fix isn’t just to dial back the granularity knob but instead to 1) focus on the split-join criteria as opposed to size; and 2) differentiate between the project model and the deployment model when applying them.

I see parallels with the industry’s current infatuation with containerisation, or as a client once so elegantly put it, more leaky abstractions that break in new and wonderful ways. They both have their uses, but broadly if our aim was to simplify, secure, and optimise these ever more complex architectures, microservices and containers have been—at best—a mixed blessing.

(I say this as someone who uses FreeBSD jails and virtualisation at the drop of a hat, and wished the industry had broadly adopted Solaris/illumos-style zones instead. Nothing so perfectly encapsulates the industry’s hubris and self-justification than k8s. But that’s a topic for another post. Don’t email me!)

Even if all this sounded like word salad to you, this is the highlight of the whole article which could easily apply to every technical human endeavour:

Having a ready answer when the thinking gets tough is a soothing lie that just moves complexity about. There is no substitute [for the] application of cognitive power to a problem.

Speaking of friendly people with a specific last name, Rebecca Hales has been reading and commenting on this blog for more than a decade. Lately she’s taken a keen interest in our fitness since I mentioned that we were swimming again last year, and has given Clara and I advice which has been hugely helpful. Clara and I love hiking and walks, but we’re otherwise clueless vitamin D-deficient nerds when it comes to this stuff, so we’ve appreciated her insight.

I suspect her sending us cute fitness-related paraphernalia to buy is a surreptitious, mischievous, and entirely effective ploy to get us to keep these efforts up. Back in late September she sent us a press image, with no further comment beyond three exclamation points and two words: Manga cats!!!

From the gentleman’s jacket:

Arena heritage designs meet Japanese streetwear in our men’s Mizu Relax IV Team Jacket. Created in partnership with graphic designer Electric Peo, this black track jacket has logo stripes interspersed with an anime cat and oversize hiragana and kanji writing of the word water, ‘mizu’, across the back. Our signature raised emblem and logo zipper pull bring out this design’s retro spirit.

In case you didn’t see, look at the cats!

Unfortunately, just like with their last set of manga-themed costumes, Arena saves their coolest gear for Europe. Which makes sense, given the climate. Ah Ruben, that joke contained a veritable abundance of quality. Arena’s international site seems to only let you browse, and despite the awesomeness of this stuff we’re not in a hurry to use an expensive proxy service for something like this. Or, we are, but I wouldn’t admit to that here. Wait, damn it.

Please flick me an email or tweet if you know of anyone selling this range in Australia or New Zealand!

From Good Mythical Morning’s episode about a century of crisps.

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
my @comestibles = ( ['crisp'] );
print $comestibles[0][0];

Okay, he’s probably right.

I have two unrelated Hales folks who regularly post comments to me, which I always appreciate! Sorry Rebecca, I’m getting to yours soon too. Hales of Halestrom.net, which you should subscribe to, had a comment about my fake copper heatsync post. There’s enough good stuff that I’ll be splitting into a couple of posts.

(As an aside, I’m going to be quoting feed URLs directly for independent authors and bloggers going forward. I encourage everyone to do this if you publish online too… let’s get a movement going).

Today’s shamelessly-republished portion of his comment concerns greymarket electronics:

Reading your article: I’m getting some hints that you think the seller saying “Copper Tone Aluminium” will be different to the more expensive options. Beware the laws of greymarket electronics!

1. Law of packaging inertia. If it looks the same then it is the same, just with a different label attached.

2. Law of blind merchants. Found an item that’s the same price, but looks a bit different/nicer than the rest? There is a 50/50 chance they ran out of that stock and are too lazy to update the photos; so you get sent the same item as what everyone else is selling instead.

3. Law of dogs howling. Many apparently independent sellers are not; they’re either the same person or they don’t hold stock themselves, instead getting their items from the same guy.

4. Law of colour penetration. Colours and material descriptions are used interchangeably. Copper, silver, titanium, gold, crystal, glass, leather, etc.

Sources for these rules: Equals Zero for rule (1) and the rest from my experiences buying & using greymarket electronics. Fakes are fun in all forms.

These are brilliant. I replied that I had my first inkling of some of these when buying floppy emultors from eBay for some vintage computer projects. I bought a few, based on different photos and model numbers, only to get the same subpar device three times. It reminds me of Techmoan when he reviews modern cassette players, and they all use variations on the same crappy mechanism.

This is a slightly unconventional chapter in my long-running Music Monday series, but I was reminded of this while updating my RSS feeds this morning.

J.D. Lasica’s Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation was among the most important and influential books on my thinking growing up. I reread it at least a few times, but I have vivid memories first reading it with earnest on the MRT in Singapore on the way to my first job out of high school. Its warnings and lessons are as prescient now as they were when it was published in 2005.

J.D. raises the issue of online remix culture that had its roots in the origins of the World Wide Web and BBSs, but by the early 2000s included video and audio. Large studios had begun to take notice, with the RIAA and MPAA most famously suing average people for copyright infringement. He demonstrated this behaviour was counterproductive and harmful to all parties involved, and advocated for entirely-sensible reforms.

It was eye opening for a naive person like me who grew up putting Simspons and Sailor Moon GIFs on GeoCities pages that this would even be a problem. It was clear the legal frameworks for copyright were outdated and disproportionately favoured large content producers. The fact the famous “You wouldn’t steal a car…” advertisement had used music from an independent producer without permission laid bare this fundamental power imbalance. This was never about protecting content creators, it was a shameless attempt to retain power that had been so successfully consolidated during the twentieth century.

I still remember one of the more amusing rebukes by a large newspaper claiming the book was biased, and didn’t do enough to advocate for large media companies. Billions of dollars spent on lawsuits, lobbying to extend copyright durations, and advertising campaigns were fine, but letting an independent publisher make an alternative case? Heavens, we can’t have that! That was the final in a series of lightbulb moments when I realised: this is what we’re up against.

YouTube content matching, and Tumblr’s on again/off again filters are an evolution of the same fundamental challenges J.D. warned about. Large online streaming services have been touted as solving piracy, but still do nothing to help independent or small producers, and they continue to stymie remix culture by locking up copyright and making it just as inaccessible.

The ultimate irony is the industry saw copyright as a zero sum game, rather than a new way to connect with their fans, and ultimately their customers. We—and they—are still paying the price for this ham-fisted attitude now, though independent podcasts, books, and video channels are slowly but surely becoming more viable thanks to distribution channels in which these traditional media companies have less influence.

This book, Whole Wheat Radio’s advocacy for independent music, and Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons efforts were hugely valuable at countering the large media narrative for me, something I haven’t done enough work in since to help advocate for.

I accidentally left my hard copy of Darknet years ago at a coffee shop in Kuala Lumpur, but I’m tempted to source another one and give it a re-read. I love ebooks, but I keep really important ones on the shelf. This deserves a place.

J.D. writes about independent media, which you should subscribe to. He’s also released some new novels I need to check out.

Today’s my first day back at the office full time. I’m right back at the regular cafe I used to sit at before work, doing the same email and calendar prep, having the same iced long black, doing the same RSS catchup. I don’t subject myself to Twitter first thing in the morning anymore, but the entire circumstance could otherwise be transplanted to January.

Wait, no it couldn’t, Australia was on fire back then. Okay, late last year.

But that’s where the air of 2020 unreality blows in. Most of the rest of the world hasn’t handled Covid well enough for regular chumps like me to mostly go about their normal lives. Victoria only got to where the rest of us are thanks to a gruelling lockdown that had the talking heads in a froth. It’s a similar story across in New Zealand.

I unintentionally captured it in two operative words on Friday: it feels in equal parts unreal and undeserved. I also can’t shake the feeling that it’s also temporary somehow. Misinformation and lies spread Covid more effectively than any bomb, but so does complacency. Let’s not let it win.