Stuff Yaron Finds Interesting – Page 5 – Technology, Politics, Food, Finance, etc.

HTML 5 Features Cheat Sheet (and the peer to peer web)

HTML 5 contains a dizzying array of features. Below I created a cheat sheet identifying features that I think are likely to have some relevance to the peer to peer web. This is mostly for my own reference. Note that not all these features are actually part of HTML 5. Some were standardized separately. Some haven’t finished standardization. But whatever, this gives me a sense of the landscape.

Synchronization and the peer to peer web

Services built on a peer to peer web inevitably run into the synchronization problem. How do you keep state on multiple peers in synch? Below I walk through the assumptions and requirements that led me to believe a multi-master eventually consistent model is the best base to work off of.

Solving my multi-master synch problem – Well Duh, Couch DB

I really need to synch both arbitrary structured data and blobs in in a multi-master peer to peer environment. Oh and I really don’t want to write the code to make this work and it has to work on a variety of mobile, desktop and cloud environments. And yes, I want a pony with that. Thankfully there are pony’s for everyone! The solution? CouchDB, duh!

Requirements and Scenarios for Paeony

To help me wrap my head around the peer to peer web I’m going to try and write out some requirements and scenarios. I am not going to worry about tightening up the requirements the way I would in a real spec or standard. My main focus here is to work through a variety of scenarios and get the lay of the land.

[Note: Updated on 9/5 to add section on web applications. Also note that everything to do with Paeony is NOT related to my employer.]

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.

Buying a new plastic free variable temperature Tea Kettle and the cost of corruption

Because FDA seems to work for industry and not the citizens of the United States I can’t trust that cordless variable temperature tea kettles for sale in the U.S. are actually safe. Is having BPA or other kinds of plastics in contact with boiling water o.k.? A functioning FDA would long ago have investigated and come to authoritative conclusions. So I’m stuck spending a ton of time and effort trying to find a kettle which seems as harmless to my family’s health as possible. When I first wrote this article in December of last year my choice of kettle was the Pino Digital Kettle Pro. Unfortunately all of four months later (but out of its 90 day warranty) it’s stopped working. I list below all the candidates, the final winner was nothing. I literally can’t find a variable temperature plastic free kettle that meets our needs.

Why I ran a-waze

Waze is a navigation app that you can install on your phone. It shares out your phone’s location and speed in order to create a real time speed map based on data from all the users around you. For that purpose Waze works really well. It was able, for example to route me around a traffic snarl in my local neighborhood in a really creative way. It’s really an awesome app for doing things like daily commutes if there are issues with variable traffic patterns. Given how well it works it was with regret that I uninstalled it.

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?