Filed under: cloud
By today’s standards, the office is not really where a lot of us work anymore. Work is more a mindset than a location than ever before, and especially in the Information Technology field, where collaboration and working with others takes place. There are amazing tools and programs that we all use to get our jobs done, especially when it comes to documents and spreadsheets. When going through the planning and writing stage, I’ve already highlighted how SupraSphere shines, but there is a wholly different aspect to the sharing and working together that can be achieved.
Much like email, adding an attachment to SupraSphere itself is really simple, and in doing so, you are left with several options after the upload. In compliance with internet standardization, SS automatically converts documents into .pdf format. This is a benefit for users without an office suite, and turns the document into an ultra-portable ‘read-only’ document. This especially closes the door on any malicious code (macros, anyone?) in a document form, continuing our philosophy of being secure.
But, what if what you attached to your sphere is something still in the process of editing? Well, as long as you don’t upload a .pdf, you can keep the original form as well. This then enables several options, opening the document, opening the document for editing, opening as a .pdf, saving it as a .pdf, a ’save as’ option, and a delete option. I really like the ability to open for editing, as it will open the default program installed on my computer (such as Microsoft Word or Open Office), and then I can edit it, and click save. Instead of saving to my hard drive, it saves as a reply attachment to the original on the sphere.
SS is transformed into a portable file cabinet/email/messaging/bookmarking/rss manager-thing. I love it. I’m sure you will too.
Filed under: cloud, security, sphere
There have been numerous announcements recently from Google and Microsoft related to storing health information on their servers in their grid. There has also been some controversy around these initiatives over privacy concerns, particularly because it comes from these two companies where they have already consolidated a lot of other information and leverage with respect to the IT infrastructure of both individuals and businesses.
So, let’s leave aside a question of whether it’s those two specific organizations that manage health records over any other, and whether it’s better to have any particular large corporation instead of a government entity, non-profit, or other-worldly organization in the first place. Let’s first start with abstract theory! :)
I’m going to begin by asserting that I don’t care what a company’s privacy policy is. If any organization were so good at codifying and following a particular privacy policy, why don’t they actually code it in code instead of in legalese? That way they can get specific and avoid any of the semantic dances to skirt around responsibility for which lawyers have become so infamous. Famously, possession is 99% of the law anyway, and letting others possess your data means they own it.
But I want to go even deeper than that. First, there is generally the issue of privacy. Is there any expectation of privacy in this digital age in the first place? Why should anyone need privacy if they have nothing to hide?
Well, I don’t need any privacy, but I want it. It’s that simple. Until I behave irresponsibly, defined in as context-specific and inter-subjective way as possible, then I deserve it and should have the right to it. Otherwise, we go down the slippery slope of starting with the assumption that everyone is a criminal until the individual proves otherwise, and the problem is that people over time and in aggregate generally behave about as highly as what is collectively expected of them.
There are people who think that having the oversight of some big brother who can read/monitor our thoughts will make us better as individuals and as a society. Then there are those of us who feel that the only path to true order and security in society rests with personal responsibility, and that the best the rest of us can do with respect to an individual is hope that eventually each person finds that sense within themselves with the help of loving external reinforcement. But, make no mistake about it, the external reinforcement is no substitute for personal responsibility; that type of substitution is a prostitution.
One of the highest hopes of society is that common, ordinary people will often do extraordinarily good things, and we are increasingly entering an age where unless that is the case, no amount of tracking, incarceration, punishment, deterrence, or stick will prevent people from doing stupid things.
Now that we have all that out of the way, I want to get back to technology. We are at a time where there is unprecedented research going on, with a convergence of so many disciplines, and as a result we are hitting a point where a lot of what we see with respect to the computer industry starts to become analogous to biology and life. So, who controls the PC, you or Microsoft, Apple, or the government? Is it ok for Microsoft or any other entity (RIAA) to be able to shut off your computer without your permission or control? How about delete files from your computer? What happens when computers start to become integrated?
Well, if you’re still with me and interested in seeing where I’m going with this as far as health records, access to health information is presumably of critical importance to patients. It seems to be of great use to doctors to have access to medical history from previous visits or other doctors (although sometimes I think it would be interesting to be able to get a “blind” opinion without access to *any* records…not sure that’s even an option), and part of the promise of some of these online medical initiatives is that it can be potentially very valuable to have that information readily available for things like sharing and collaborating around x-rays, or with emerging fields such as telemedicine.
So, what sort of rights do I then have to that vault of information created about me? What if a company wants to start charging me a lot of money for continued access to it, or changes that privacy policy to something that I don’t like, or shares it with people where I don’t approve, or won’t share it with people where I insist? What happens when there is an outage and my doctor(s) can’t access my information in a timely fashion?
Then, let’s suppose that sometime down the line (not sure how long, but it seems to be happening), a company develops a mechanism to monitor an individual’s vital signs and administer drugs automatically and accordingly. Who has control over that? Will it be more like ADT or like OnStar, where they either just monitor things remotely or start to exercise certain levels of remote control, such as changing doses? Will there be a kill switch? Will there be a black box in case anything goes wrong? These issues are directly and highly related to the problem of control and access to health information, because they reflect the growing trend of a SaaS world where data lives in the cloud, and individuals have no significant leverage once a certain level of monopoly or oligopoly becomes established. What good is choice, if there are only lies to choose from?
In order to avoid a situation where people and individuals have no practical choice in these matters, we need to establish a place in “the cloud” where the individual starts by having total control, where they can then require other individuals and external entitites come to them where the default will be privacy, if not secrecy, if not security;. At least then there will be an understood and practical alternative and reference point for what private and personal even means, where people can actually decide if they want to surrender or share a certain level of control with some external entity.
From an architectural and technological standpoint, we can relatively easily provide a private and secure place for the individual to store their own medical records. Then, if they want to give access to their doctor, they can do so. If the doctor requests permission to be able to reference their case in the future, they might provide that, providing that the doctor agrees not to share that with others. If that information somehow gets out, they will know that it was that particular doctor, and word will travel pretty quickly that the doctor didn’t honor the doctor/patient relationship.
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single organism that has succeeded/survived/thrived where the individual in the end didn’t have final say and control. Does anything remotely resembling the borg actually exist anywhere in nature? I don’t actually know, it’s a non-rhetorical question.
If not, then why are we heading further and further down the road where individuals, as a part of larger organizations, no longer have any real decision-making power? Have you ever talked to a cell phone company representative? You might as well be talking to the company’s computer system, where the representative can only really follow policies that have been set somewhere centrally by some sort of bean counter. I have thankfully not had to deal with a case of an insurance company overriding the judgment of a doctor, but I imagine it is quite the same.
We should start moving in the opposite direction, where people are in control of their own context, in their own community, without anything “above” them in authority that can sweep down from the sky/net and literally take their life at any time. Do we know that these behaviors have definitely made the world a better place? That question, on the other hand, is rhetorical. First, let us all do no harm.
Filed under: cloud, economy, sphere
I had an interesting meeting couple of days ago with Andy Lippmann of the MIT Media Lab. He had a hard time seeing the connection between the idea of a secure, private, “personal cloud” and currency, so I figure I have a lot of work to do if someone so esteemed as Dr. Lippmann does not see the connection as obviously and clearly as I do.
First off, there are different connotations of currency, many of which have nothing to do with quantification and numerical accounting, particularly in traditionally understood units and/or denominations. Most people have heard of the concepts of “social capital” or “political capital”, for example. In considering different ideas around currency, there is also a question as to whether currencies are “convertible” into dollars or exchangeable into other forms of currency in other communities and networks beyond those in which they originate. As an example, many people have heard of “Linden Dollars” from the video game “Second Life”, which do have an implicit conversion rate to US dollars. Compare them to World of Warcraft Gold, which, while it used to be purchasable on eBay before eBay explicitly banned the practice, has no implicitly set conversion rate.
Because of my background, I have a fairly good grasp of traditional money and how it works as a system. Most people know that SupraSphere has several installations in some financial services institutions, particularly hedge funds. This has afforded me a pretty in-depth look at how the financial system functions and how people who trade stocks and focus fanatically on increasing the amount of money they have actually think.
Everyone knows that money makes the world go round and is the bottom line. This is why I have been so fascinated by it. It’s more pervasive and prevalent, by far, than any single other psychological construct in the world. As a mindset, it far surpasses both television and organized religion combined in its ability to generate a unified and homogenized world view. So, having grown up in a fairly socially conscious and idealistic family, I was drawn to thinking of the structure and design of money as a particularly fun and challenging lever to pull in terms of changing the world. If there were one single underlying construct where changing its definition would have the single most substantial effect on the world, it would clearly be with money itself.
That said, banking and financial systems themselves are at the core actually very simple accounting systems that only really become complex by how people try to game them, all under the guise of “creating efficiencies”. You deduct from one place, you add to another. Transferring funds is really not that complicated a process. The overall point is that as it becomes more and more the case that money exists primarily a digital phenomenon consisting of overlapping interactions of accounts (in some ways actually a “social network”), how complex is banking really that people can’t have direct control over the overall process of issuing and managing currency? The most important thing to think of in this case is the creation/issuance of money and its underlying definition and value, which is already assumed when you get into the accounting stage. However, if people have their own set of servers (spheres) that can create intersecting relationships with other spheres (accounts), we might very well be able to enter into an era of “open source money”.
Before I get into specifics about how SupraSphere can help to “open source money”, I will provide some more perspective on my background for more context. I have long been a fan of free software, ever since I first compiled a Linux kernel on an old 386 at the Shiva Corporation in high school in the early 90’s. This was before Windows for Workgroups even, where DOS still ruled the roost and where Microsoft was just starting to enter the world of GUIs that Apple Macs had been in for 10 years prior. I had a simple thought. If DOS was more popular than Macs because it was more open, easier to tinker with and fix despite being ridiculously harder to use, then Linux would eventually be more popular than DOS for the same reason, which I incidentally think also applies to Windows NT.
While I loved Linux and tried to install it everywhere I could, my father absolutely hated how I couldn’t see that DOS and Windows were more important for business and that I was investing so much time in a hobbled platform with pretty much no important or critical applications. In fact, if you ask my two younger brothers, they would attest to how much my distaste for the Windows platform actually hurt my relationship with my father who would spend hours trying to lecture me into using Windows. The smart money went with Microsoft, but I didn’t care. It was too late. I had bought into this whole “freedom and openness” thing and was still a bit too isolated from the real world of bills and mortgages to think that I was potentially compromising my future earnings.
Instead, I started to think even more abstractly in terms of currency, value, and exchange. I thought it was really spectacular that GNU/Linux, when considered together, represents the largest collaborative engineering project ever undertaken by humanity, and was being built at the time mostly by volunteers who believed in a common cause of creating a better system than Windows. I know Linus has said that he has never wanted to destroy Windows and instead only focuses on making Linux better, but those of us who adopted Linux as a platform were drawn to a common cause that there simply had to be something better than Windows (particularly because we were the ones who had to fix it for all of our friends and family), not to mention that we hated the idea in principle of a company’s making computers intentionally incompatible or hard to work with, given how hard in general it is to get them to work right in the first place.
So GNU/Linux is a system comprising attributes of emergence, self-governance, anarchy, evolution, openness, freedom, and now with some Ubuntu thrown in. But, there is no real business model for it. There are some awkward ways for businesses to make money off of it, usually involving support and customization, but those have their own problems. Imagine instead if the profit motive could be directly aligned and intertwined with open source software production.
Another area that has no proper business model is digital music. Despite the success of iTunes, I have never bought a single song on it. I hate the idea that I could lose access to what I have paid thousands of dollars for just for moving to a different computer, not to mention that it doesn’t even run on Linux. My mother can’t use it in Hong Kong and many people don’t have access to it around the world. Why would I endorse such a thing as the “proper” solution to how music should be considered in the digital Internet age? Not to mention, I have used better systems, such as AllofMP3 and OINK, which were both actually better than Napster ever was, IMHO.
I think in both cases, GNU/Linux (and other open source systems, including suprasphere) and digital music, we need to think differently about money itself in order to come up with a solution to the problem of how artists will get paid and how to ensure freedom while still being able to make money on software. The key is to think of “creating money” instead of “making money”. Given that two gigantic forces are on a collision course, the financial system on the one hand, and the Internet, which comprises digitally distributed music and video, collaboratively developed free software, the web (both 2.0 and 3.0) ;) on the other, which would you bet will come out on top?
The truth is that the transactional efficiencies and network externalities of the web put the entire financial system to shame. There were hints of this back in the web 1.0 bubble days of the “new economy”. People thought that Internet companies didn’t need to conform to old concepts of “revenue”, “profit”, and “cost of goods sold”. Eyeballs were the new currency of the day. Well, I don’t think it’s as far from what the truth could be, assuming that people allow that the nature of money itself (as opposed to just the application of it) can actually be changed. Even as people talk about a new bubble, and people wonder how companies like Facebook will ever live up to their valuation, I think we can take steps to move the entire financial system on to the architecture of the Internet and the Web, and make it open source on top of it!
In fact, I have numerous times heard the semantic web referred to as an “information bus” (TechnicaLee Speaking), and we are starting to see the convergence of the semantic web and the activities of general financial services companies such as with Reuters Calais. What else is the financial system but a global information bus? Why else would financial services companies want to integrate instant messaging into the kernel of an operating system?
Even as suprasphere contains pretty amazing technology and is a very unique and innovative application, we are not proposing as a vision something that isn’t already happening. Instead, we are trying to suggest clearly what it all adds up to, and certainly hope that suprasphere serves as a reference point outside of just giving us some credibility to suggest this broader vision.
So, here we go. What if, each time an individual or group invents a new concept in a unique semantic namespace, a currency (stock) account for that unique new namespace was also simultaneously created? Such a namespace could represent a new music album, website, Linux module, or just about any project. As other people linked to that unique namespace, downloaded from that namespace, collaborated around that namespace, the stock of of that entity would automatically rise as more people used it and interacted with it. The more interest in the creative output of the group responsible for the project, the more interest would accrue in their account. This even has analogies in the “peer to patent” proposal for how to reform the patent system.
So as currency accumulates in an account/sphere, it can be spent just like with “normal money”, but every time it gets spent (on things like clothes, food, cars, etc.), it must get spent as a proportion of the interest and the principal. As soon as the principal is gone, it can no longer accrue interest. Perhaps if it’s invested in somebody else’s sphere as both interest and principal, it can accrue interest on both. There might be an expiration point where after accumulating interest for so long, the namespace itself becomes public domain.
Or not. That was my freestyle idea of how it might work, but the exact model and details are truly open for debate and dialog, which should at the very least feel exceptionally empowering in and of itself. At this point the details of how the system can work are not as important as achieving consensus around the overall premise, where we can start to set in motion the conditions where the exact attributes can emerge and evolve. Just like the financial system (and the credit system for that matter), one can’t design and manage it centrally in a command-and-control fashion, but we can set in motion the idea that people can be in true control over their own bank account and concept of “net worth” and allow a new system to emerge in true chaordic fashion.
I realize that this is in many respects a crazy idea. I have not only been thinking and talking along these lines for a long time, but also working extremely hard each and every day to help bring this about. However, every day that goes forward the greater the intellectual risk as I spend more social capital to keep the dialog open and the greater the possibility that someday I will wake up bankrupt, not just in my bank account but in the lack of people who care enough even to have a conversation about these concepts. I have sacrificed many, many years pursuing this core idea, and ask that you forgive the raw and unbaked nature of my presentation, and instead of only finding fault and poking holes and dismissing this outright, please give it a chance. We are at a tricky time in the world, with crises and problems of seemingly insurmountable proportion everywhere we look, and as a result I think we deserve the right to think openly and freely about the nature of money, and seize the opportunity to fashion it along lines that will support each of our grandest goals and ambitions.
Filed under: blogging, cloud, sphere
The New York Times recently published an article about Adobe Air and the blurring of traditional web and desktop application development:
Adobe Blurs Line Between PC and Web
and there is a nice FAQ from Adobe on the differences and advantages of the Air approach:
Adobe Air FAQ
I feel that we have a fairly deep perspective on the differences and advantages of desktop applications vs. web applications. SupraSphere, being first and foremost and new kind of web browser, is obviously a desktop application since it doesn’t necessarily make sense to think of a web browser as an AJAX application. ;)
However, we do have a web-only AJAX version of some of the features of SupraSphere, particularly some of the search and collaboration features. Desktop applications have a few distinct disadvantages, around management of updates, stability, and often privacy, where many people have gotten burned by desktop applications infested with spyware and adware. Furthermore, web applications are quite often much easier to use since all you can really do is click. The richness of certain interfaces, whether in Flash or on the desktop, often make it harder to use the applications because people often have a hard time learning new interfaces. Browser applications are often popular because it provides a “paradigm sandbox” where you can click and go back, often can’t “right-click”, and can’t bury too many options too deep in menu structures. Most people can figure out Flash navigation on a website, but as soon as you start developing applications in Flash, people are going to start to get lost.
As far as Adobe Air, it seems that the major innovation is that Adobe Air allows an application written with web technologies (javascript particularly) that uses a RIA Flash runtime, but that can operate on local desktop data, which also implies offline access. This is definitely interesting, but we have taken a different approach to unifying the web and the pc.
Our goal is to create a “personal cloud” (see the reference to “kevincloud” in the NY Times article). Ideally, this would involve multiple servers (or virtual servers) configured as peered instances, where all data is replicated across instances hopefully across data centers. This would provide automated backup and redundancy so that a person’s entire data environment is not dependent on any given provider, and we might look into a default configuration being an encrypted disk (with only one service on one port running to provide suprasphere services), so that if a virtual machine instance was “lost”, it wouldn’t be as huge of a privacy concern.
Then, all devices (including personal computers) would provide a view of the data stored in this “cluster” of personal servers. In addition, these systems will not be single-user. They are inherently network aware and multi-user, making it possible to collaborate inside with other individuals or groups, but where the underlying architecture will be distributed.
Essentially, rather than trying to move web applications back to the PC hard drive in order just to provide richer interfaces and private data access, we are trying to provide the equivalent to the PC hard drive that “lives in the cloud”. This should provide all of the attributes that people associate with cloud computing, such as data reliability and high availability, API’s for services integration and re-purposing, and multiple views of data from different interface mashups. In fact, it should accelerate these trends by providing a starting point for web services that are private to the individual and highly personal.
Posted on March 28th, 2008 by Andria LeBaron
1 Comment »