Tech – Page 5 – Stuff Yaron Finds Interesting

Digging around the interoperable and peer to peer social landscape

I generally believe that open systems tend to win. They enable creativity and growth in ways that closed ecosystems can’t match. One area clearly rip for opening up is the social space. There is a ton of activity there and I have tried here to capture some of the protocols and open source projects that seem interesting/relevant.

[10/17/2013 - Added Refuge.io]

Open source projects to secure Internet traffic

In the beginning of the net the focus was mostly on getting packets safely from point A to point B. Anyone who knows the history of the early Internet knows how insanely hard that actually was (as a hint think: network of networks, oy). Later some thought was given to privacy and technologies like SSH and SSL show up. Now we are at the point where we need to think hard about traffic analysis. In this article I try to catalog what I think (based on little evidence) are the main types of open source projects trying to create traffic analysis resistant transports on the Internet.

Identifying basic security threats for Paeony

As part of evaluating potential technologies to use for Paeony I need a list of threats I can evaluate those technologies against. This document tries to capture the most basic possible scenario (two users sending messages to each other) and the attendant threats. I can then use this list in creating threat models for potential technologies to determine which are the best to choose.

Welcome to Paeony

I have registered the domain paeony.org and pointed it at an empty github site as a tiny baby step in investigating a question of interest to me - what would it take to make it falling off a log easy to create an open ecosystem web of interconnected, monitizable, services that run on user’s devices?

What about open licenses for specifications?

So you are starting on your new project and you decide (gasp) to write actual specifications for the network and API interfaces. Being a good ’open’ type you want to have a solid open license for the specifications. Below I look through what I think are the key terms the license needs and conclude that the Apache 2.0 License seems to have all bases covered.

Updating the web

When the web as we know it was originally designed the world was a very different place. In this article I look at the world as it was and the world as it is and explore what I think this means for the web.

A data web user’s bill of rights

Building a data web needs to start with a clear statement of a user’s bill of rights. This is the core of the requirements that should drive the technologies used. Below I list what I think are the four fundamental rights and then explore their technical implications.

Whatever happened to the open data web?

Once upon a time HTTP and HTML were trucking along nicely. This meant that we had a truly open, meaningfully interoperable framework to allow for rich human based web interactions. The next obvious step was to look into machine to machine web interactions. A bunch of work went into this area. XML, WS-*, POX, JSON, RSS, OData, etc. With the exception of RSS none of it came to much of anything, especially in the personal space. In this article I look at why I think the previous efforts to create an open data web failed.

Unicode, Windows and C++

Unicode, Windows, C++, it should all be good right? The answer seems to be that, well, actually, yeah, it is. But there are a lot of details. I do my best to walk through some of them below.

Peripheral Bandwidths – PCIe, Infiniband, QPI, SATA, SAS, DMI/ESI & Ethernet

I’m trying to figure out just how much data I can move through a modern computer. To grok that I need to understand the bandwidth capabilities of the various types of peripherals one can attach to a modern computer. I therefore run through below what appear to be the main peripheral types and what kind of bandwidth they can maintain. Wikipedia has a great summary of the bandwidths of various technologies. Note however that the bandwidths listed in that article are raw (except, confusingly, when they are not) bandwidth, not data bandwidth, below I try to find numbers that represent actual data bandwidth.