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There has been a lot of fuss about FireSheep, a browser plugin that show how easy it is to intercept packets on the internet, and masquerade as someone else. The idea is nothing new: EtherPeg—which intercepts wifi traffic and shows the JPEGs and other images passing by—is over 10 years old. Annalee Newitz wrote a Wired story on people packet sniffing in coffee shops back in 2004.

The underlying design of the internet means that you don't know who will be able to see any packets you send. If you care about not being snooped on, you need an encrypted connection from your computer to the one serving you at the other end. The best way to do this on the web is to use HTTPS, which all browsers support, and most servers support with configuration changes. It's not perfect, but it's good enough.

However, much of the advice following on from FireSheep was misleading or outright wrong. I saw several articles saying:

• Avoid Open WiFi
  
• Turn on WPA encryption
  
• Use a VPN to tunnel the traffic into a server elsewhere

These techniques may protect for a while against those nearby you in the Café, but by not securing the whole connection, they just change who is able to intercept your communications.

The security model here is the firewall one - the notion that there are trusted networks and untrusted networks, and as long as you're inside a trusted one, you'll be OK. This is an obsolete worldview. When computers were large fixed physical entities with software controlled by a specialist, and networks were wires under their control too, this had some correspondence with reality, but it was always tenuous - others within the firewall could be running compromised machines; outbound connections could still leak data.

If you VPN into a company or service to mask your outbound connections, that endpoint is an attractive point of attack, as it has collected a set of people who think their data needs securing. There's a clear example of this in this NYT article about a hacker who lured his friends to use an FBI VPN to track them down and arrest them.

This worldview connects with two other themes. The US Government is trying to pass a law requiring ISPs to enable your communications to be intercepted. The UK government is also working on legislation on retaining all email and web traffic. Similarly, many companies monitor internet traffic within and leaving their secure networks for legal compliance and employee monitoring. Such mandated backdoors, like the VPN tunnel, become attractive targets for other bad actors - remember the Greek government being spied on through a legally mandated interception backdoor in the phones they used?

This week, I spent a couple of days at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, hearing how open standards like Activity Streams and OpenSocial are being used to bridge separate business information systems both within and between companies, with OAuth used to enforce corporate policy.

This seems anathema to old-line IT managers who assume that they dictate who gets to see what, but the pragmatic realisation that many business people have more powerful and connected computing devices in their pockets as phones than on their desks from corporate IT was in evidence at E2.0 at least.

This brought to mind the great conversation we had with Josh Klein on TummelVision last week, discussing his book Hacking Work - breaking stupid rules for smart results:

one of the most common hacks we found: jumping IT’s firewall and working around their restrictions and tools in open computing environments, then bringing the work back over the firewall and presenting it to bosses as if the corporate tools had actually been used.

Ben Horowitz's article on enterprise sales in TechCrunch today tries to justify corporate practices, even as he recognizes the inversion of the innovation flow.

What this misses is the underlying economic justification for the existence of a corporation in the first place - the economic theories that build on Coase's work saying that firms exist because transaction costs are lower within them than external transactions mediated by the marketplaces. Pettifogging internal purchasing rules should be subject to this test: does the internal transaction cost of approving and purchasing something exceed the value of the thing being purchased?

Reading Ben's explanation of how corporate salespeople help institutions negotiate their own labyrinthine processes, I couldn't help but be reminded of John Hagel's Big Shift model, (also discussed on TummelVision), which continues to show a declining return on assets for corporations.

The challenge we have on the web is to maintain the kinds of open-to-all interoperable standards that empower us to work round these creaking bureaucracies. If we delegate our online identities to a few firms operating proprietary APIs, that they can revoke access to, or decide who can call them for reasons of corporate strategy, the lowered transaction costs suddenly get very high again.

Doc Searls's work on VRM (this week's TummelVision) is all about making sure that we can retain agency over our own information. I expect to discuss this in depth at Defrag next week.

I recently watched a film that dramatically evoked the disruption caused by geeky inventors, the difficulties they have getting funded, and the forces that combine to oppose them in the name of the status quo.

Sadly, this wasn't at last night's showing of The Social Network, but watching the 1951 Ealing comedy The Man In The White Suit on my phone while flying home.

The Social Network has zinging dialogue, tilt-shift rowing at Henley, and has lawyers as its most sympathetic characters. Most of its humour comes from heavy-handed prefiguring of Facebook's eventual success; clearly you can't spoil the ending, so the trailer just recaps the whole film:

The opening hacking scene, dramatized almost verbatim from Zuckerberg's blog at the time, is perhaps the best 'using a computer' scene in a movie yet - Mark should get a screenwriting credit. But the mythical girlfriend who dumped him and his reactions to that - 'cyberbullying', seeking fame, plaintively hitting refresh on the friend request - that frame the film are a disappointing narrative touch that duck the chance to try to explain his real motivation. Apart from the lawyer, all the women in this film are purely sex objects - when Zuck is asked 'What are the girls going to do?' and replies 'Nothing', that's clearly Sorkin talking.

In contrast, The Man in the White Suit has Alec Guinness inventing a monomolecular fibre that can't break and naturally repels dirt. To do this he has to get to work into labs at textile factories under false pretenses, and when he eventually succeeds, provokes a hostile reaction from both the factory owners and the unionized employees, who want to suppress his work. If you haven't seen it, Amazon and Netflix have it.

Here, the motivation to invent something new and exciting is expressed well, and the technology behind it is plausibly explained. Guinness inspires Joan Greenwood with his idea, and she researches it and champions him to get his work funded. The women in this sixty-year-old film are well-drawn characters, with motivations of their own. They are peers and colleagues to Guinness's Stanley, not sex objects; indeed that is directly challenged. The film is stronger and more emotionally powerful for it.

Both films capture the ascetic geek intensity and focus well, but Sorkin and Fincher want to tear it down, whereas MacDougal and MacKendrick see the Innovators Dilemma clearly 45 years before Christensen did. As Lessig says, The Social Network portrays a legal system that preys on invention, not supporting it; the Man in the White Suit has the inventor's notebooks establishing rights that he needs to be paid for.

Conversely, to get his invention out to people, Stanley needs to convince the very industry he is disrupting to adopt it, whereas the existence of the Internet and it's open protocols mean that Zuckerberg was able to get his idea adopted by thousands with a small loan from a friend.

Technology has made a lot of progress in 60 years, but judging by this new film, law and women's roles have gone backwards.

At the Google Instant Launch on Wednesday, I ran into my former colleague, the writer and internet famous video star Irina Slutsky. We sat together, and so naturally when we were trying out Google Instant during the launch, I tried typing her name in. And an odd thing happened - Google whited out the Instant search results.

Irina asked about this, and Johanna Wright of Google replied that they white out some words related to sex and hate speech, in case inappropriate results appeared for people who weren't expecting it. 'Slut' is one of these words, but it is not clear at all why 'Slutsky' is.

I already wrote about my concerns that Google's predictive words could narrow the range of searched-for terms into clichés - that as you type Google, in Stoppard's words, is

announcing every stale revelation of the newly enlightened, like stout Cortez coming upon the Pacific — war is profits, politicians are puppets, Parliament is a farce, justice is a fraud, property is theft… It’s all here: the Stock Exchange, the arms dealers, the press barons… You can’t fool Brodie — patriotism is propaganda, religion is a con trick, royalty is an anachronism… Pages and pages of it. It’s like being run over very slowly by a travelling freak show of favourite simpletons, the India rubber pedagogue, the midget intellectual, the human panacea…

At least these suggestions are based on integrating over the text of the web; the words that get the silent whiteout treatment seem to have been chosen by a committee though, and clearly an American one at that, as it whites out 'ass' but not 'arse, 'shit' but not 'shite', 'slut' but not 'slag' and so on (I didn't type every smutty British slang word in, life is too short).

However, the modern-day Bowdlers at Google don't white you out based on what you type, but on what they predict you're going to type.

If I type 'blue-footed' - it predicts I'm typing 'blue-foooted booby' and as 'boobies' is an Official Google Smutty Word, my search goes white (in fact 'blue-foo' is enough).

Similarly, typing 'turn again d' implies 'turn again Dick Whittington', and 'dick' is a an Official Google Smutty Word.

The same is true for Irina -so shocking is her last name that all you have to type is 'irina sl' and the Google whiteout erases her from results.

Weirdly, if you type 'who killed cock' it is completed to 'who killed cock-robin' with a hyphen inserted, which implies someone has edited the auto-complete list manually.

My worldview and sense of appropriateness is probably close enough to Google's committee that I'm not going to be too bothered by this, but I do wonder about them deciding what the norms of speech are for everyone in the world.

I wonder if Michael Frayn saw the launch of Google Scribe today, and smiled to himself. In 1965, Frayn wrote a book The Tin Men, which featured a mechanism that wrote newspaper articles by joining together clichéd phrases through a small number of rules.

There's an explanatory extract from it in this discussion of why you should avoid clichés when writing Poetry.

George Orwell, in Politics and the English Language, described this way of writing:

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier—even quicker, once you have the habit—to say “In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that” than to say “I think”. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry—when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech—it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like “a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind” or ”a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent” will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump.

Clearly, Google Scribe has been trained on the vast corpus of English language text that is also used for Google Translate to come up with plausible sentence fragments. Equally clearly, that means it is bound to be plucking phrases that have been written before out of the web for you, and favouring those that have been said most often. It won't come up with a crisp, resoundingly clear phrase for you, unless it has already been said many times before.

The most likely words to follow “clocks were” now, according to Google, are “striking thirteen”. I hope Orwell would appreciate the irony.

Now, this is amusing in itself, but it is also indicative of a wider problem. If you've done much web searching for, say, home maintenance tips, you'll see a lot of prose that has either been written by a machine of this type, or by poorly paid human writers who use a very similar compositional process. We have a kind of mutated Turing Test going on all around us, where robotic writers are trying to convince robotic readers that they are human, and their stilted prose is worth presenting to the real people searching. Of course, the robots are searching too, to get the source material that is fed into their word mills to create this shambling facsimile of human prose.

It may be impressive that computers can now write bad prose like so many people do, but I do wonder about Eric Schmidt's grand vision of Google predicting what we will want to do before we think of it ourselves. Will it in fact be what we wanted, or will it be a mishmash of expected behaviours, that we'll regret on our deathbeds?

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled.

A scene in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing sums this up well:

He’s a lout with language. I can’t help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration while building tower blocks is social violence, or that unpalatable statement is provocation while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech… Words don’t deserve that kind of malarkey. They’re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more, and Brodie knocks corners off without knowing he’s doing it. So everything he writes is jerry-built. It’s rubbish. An intelligent child could push it over. I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.

People are used to typing questions into a box on Google and getting a machine's suggestions. Increasingly though, they're typing emotions into a box on Twitter or Facebook, and getting a human response instead.

Yesterday's update of iTunes added Ping, a music-focused social network. When I tried it out early in the evening, it had Facebook Connect enabled, and both imported friends from Facebook, and notified me when new ones joined. Shortly afterwards, Mark Zuckerberg joined, and shortly after that the Facebook connection was missing.
This morning, neither company is talking on the record, though Kara Swisher reports that Steve Jobs complained about 'onerous terms' from Facebook.

This naturally reminds me of the problems we had with Google Friend Connect, where Facebook's accusation of a ToS violation was never backed up by an explanation of what would not violate the terms, leading to the "Data Roach Motel" accusations at Supernova. The underlying issue is whether you should give another company veto power over your application. Last time I wrote on this, it was Apple's veto I was warning about, though at the same time Apple was trying to avoid giving Adobe veto power over their platform again.

The thing is, we have been round this cycle before, and the answer is known too - the way to interoperate with another company without having to have a business agreement with them is to use open standards, not proprietary APIs.

Apple knows this - they have helped lead development of HTML5 and WebKit, along with many other standards in the past, including podcasting and MPEG4. Facebook knows this too, and they have been strong supporters of OAuth and Activity Streams, and even of Portable Contacts, when it's them doing the importing.

Clearly it good for us as users to be able to delegate our contact lists to an existing source - this weeks launch of conference sharing site Lanyrd shows that. It's also in our interests to be able to propagate the actions of playing, liking and purchasing music, videos and anything else between sites of our choosing, so that we can share with our friends, and so we can get more useful recommendations for the future (at minimum, not suggesting things we already have).

This was the core of the discussion at the VRM Workshop last week in Boston - that we should control over who sees what about us, and I think that with these common standards we can solve both problems - the individuals get to save having to re-enter their information everywhere, and control what flows to where, and the companies get the ability to interoperate without bizdev and single source lock-in. Activity Streams (and the associated standards they build on) are our best hope for this.

The word 'curation' has become popular recently in the tech world to describe what I call mutual media - the way, by reading many things and passing on a few of them, that we mediate the world of information for each other. As m'colleague JP Rangaswami says, "Curators add to relevance by stripping away the irrelevant and the unneeded and the shoddy."

However, there is a move to co-opt this useful term into a new form of centralised control. Sarah Rotman of Forrester defines 'curated computing' as:

A mode of computing where choice is constrained to deliver less complex, more relevant experiences.

At the D Conference last week, Steve Jobs embraced this term, referring to a 'curated app store'.

This definition moves the idea of curation from democratic to hierarchical - our choice becomes take it or leave it. As Jobs said

Things are packages, of emphasis. Some things are emphasised in a product, some things are not done as well in a product, some things are chosen not to be done at all in a product.

When choosing what features go into Apple Products, of course Jobs gets to decide this; it is indeed a great skill. However, when offering technology platforms for others to build businesses on, this is more problematic.

While talking about Flash on the iPad, Jobs said:

A more popular developer environment was HyperCard, we were OK to axe that[...] Hypercard was huge in it's day because it was accessible to anybody

Indeed it was - many people miss it; Dale Dougherty says he wants a HyperCard for the iPad. I don't think he does.

When Steve Jobs's Apple cancelled the HyperCard in QuickTime project, all the people who had built businesses on it could do was plead with Apple, to no avail.

As Jobs himself says, we have a platform to build on for the future - it is HTML5. It's an emerging standard that is not under the control of any one company, but is built on the Web as agreement. And even Steve Jobs can't stop it.