Security theater you should ask who we are hiding from. The sad and bad outcome of just about everything is only our friends – our enemies, the state and the #dotcons can almost always look behind the curtain. The rare exception of this is p2p encryption, never client server. Though the issue that makes most of security into a thin layer of cloth is the hardware and firmware our ”secure” apps run on. So many holes in these that it’s all academic, what we do next with social technology #4opens
Tag: 4opens
4opens review of NHSX track and trace app
WHAT DO PEOPLE THINK ABOUT THIS?
The app is from NHSX with contributions from Apple and Google obvs and Pivotal Labs and Uni of Oxford. All source code for front and backend on Github and open source.
What is the actual polatics behind this?
#4opens review. Think it duse 2 opens as it clearly fails openprocess and likely opendata? Its opensource? And kinda open “industrial” standard. So its at best a bronze 4opens project, try harder?
On outreach of OMN and indymedia reboot
Q. I’m not interested in doing that, as I don’t know what it is you are actually proposing. Apart from using hashtags and talking about #deathcult I don’t actually understand your plan?
What I haven’t heard is a practical way of hosting and distributing alt media.
Visionontv turned into a mess, just as Indymedia did. So what has changed?
A. What happened is a good question. The answer is simple the #Fediverse maybe start here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
Where we are now https://the-federation.info/ or https://fediverse.network/
From an activist tech prospective. The real opening we have is this was built outside activism outside #encryptionist amenders and for the #openweb and is thus #4opens
Our own tech in activism was ripped apart by the open/closed war, indymedia dies because of this, visionontv never went anywhere because of this. Outside activism this war has also been fought, the closed/encryptionists have been dominant for the last 10 years.
Around 5 years ago a handful of people said fuck this crap we need a spade. They created #openweb tools, and it has exploded from there to be a real UI friendly alternative. This is exactly the same outcome of the World Wide Web did to the silos of the early internet.
Am simply bring this explosion of affective DIY creativity into the ossified and dead depression of activism tech. Obviously, meany nay sayers are going to piss and shit all over this move. Activist tech died for very good ressions. This does not have to be a block, as I say this makes good compost so get your shovel ready and let’s plant some seeds. I hope that not to metaphorical
A simple video on the tech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S57uhCQBEk0 from this it’s clear this #openweb tech works and scales and people like it
What is also clear is that is people are getting seriously unhappy on the #dotcons
YES its going to be a mess of shit and piss and fuckups, that’s activism, and the #encryptionsists pushed “closed” ideas deep into our #fashernistas so it’s a uphill battle.
BUT we do not have a choice to stay in the #dotcons it’s poison and our ecosystem and social syteams are dyeing.
A realistic timeline, a year of dev and small scale roll-outs. During which there will be lots and lots of shit shovelling to stop it becoming a stinking mess that people will not go, nowhere near.
The tech is “easy”ish, it’s the shovelling shit that’s hard, non techs can help with this bit.
Help OMN indymedia reboot
* It easy to keep crossing wires with “media” vs. personal. Media should be open, with clear sources, except when protecting them. Whereas personal data should default to private
* #OMN is not about tech – all code is ideology – the OMN is a social solution to a social problem
* teach people the #4opens and review tools/projects they use/want to use by them.
* on the dev/organising site you can help by asking simple basic questions
#4opens reviews – Discord
The #4opens:
Are a simple way to judge the value of a “alt/grassroots” tech project.
Open data – is the basic part of a project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_data with out this open they cannot work.
* hard to say am assuming you can download your chats? but your contacts ect? Say ½ a open
Open source – as in “free software” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software this keeps development healthy by increasing interconnectedness and bringing in serendipity. The Open licences are the “lock” that keep the first two in place, what we have isn’t perfect but they do expand the area of “trust” that a project needs to work, creative commons is a start here.
* Discord is an American proprietary freeware instant messaging – No
Open “industrial” standards – this is a little understood but core open, it’s what the open internet and WWW are built from. Here is an outline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard
* No its propritery
Open process – this is the most “nebulous” part, examples of the work flow would be wikis and activity streams. Projects are built on linking trust networks so open process is the “glue” that binds the links together. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process
* nop its a private .com
Note: Discord uses the metaphors of servers and channels similar to Internet Relay Chat even though these servers do not map to traditional hardware or virtual servers due to its distributed nature
So to be generous that’s 1/2 a opens so it is not a #4opens project
What is the #geekproblem
400 new securaty problems have just been announced for 40% of the devices in our pockets. This same story happens every month or so… these problems are at the chip level and can never be fixed in the device in your pocket.
Our “phones” are as complex as anything built by human beings. Think the British or Roman empire level of complexity siting in your pocket feeding you social media updates.
The geeks have been lieing to themselves and to us that there code can be “secure” on these devices. This has been going on for 20 years, the #encryptionists fantasy has been built on top of this lie, as well as our banking and governance.
Take a moment to think about this mess.
The is a way out #4opens networks move us to a different place, and likely set of problems 😉
What is the Open Media Network (OMN)
The project is to decisively shift power from the geeks and admins to the producers and consumers of media. In this its about good UI and simple empowering #KISS tools to move content by categorising it with a bootum up folksonermy. This simple approach is balanced by shared site level higher languages for the complex crew.
“This is the Internet”
GET
PUT
POST
DELETE
–MERGE–
This Odata is the #4opens #OMN project.
People can get involved at a level they feel they can add to the project to reshape there world.
Consuming content
* simply on a portal/app (aggregation top site/app)
* on there own site as a sidebar or page.
* as a part of an admin team on a middle/bootem site
*
Producing content
* from a feed from there own site or #dotcons account
* writing linking articals as a part of a top/middle/bootm site
*
Aggravating content
* as a embed on there own site
* on a bootem/middle/top site
*
For the geeks the project is based on #4opens protocols
1) For bringing legacy content in – RSS
2) For talking to the fedivers – Activertypub
3) And for internal working – OData
Lets look at the last:
OData fundamentals (from https://blogs.sap.com/2018/08/20/monday-morning-thoughts-odata)
OData is a protocol and a set of formats. It is strongly resource oriented, as opposed to service oriented. There are a small fixed number of verbs (OData operations) and an infinite set of nouns (resources) upon which the verbs operate. These OData operations map quite cleanly onto the HTTP methods
| OData operation | HTTP method |
| C – Create | POST |
| R – Read | GET |
| U – Update | PUT |
| D – Delete | DELETE |
| Q – Query | GET |
If something is important enough it should be addressable in that elements should have addresses, not hidden behind opaque web services endpoint. In the case of an HTTP protocol like OData, these addresses are URLs. And the shape of the data can be seen in the way those URL addresses are made up.
OData goes back further than you might think, its a grassroots project.
TThe protohistory of OData
OData’s origins go back to 1995, with the advent of the Meta Content Framework (MCF). This was a format that was created by Ramanthan V Guha while working in Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, and its application was in providing structured metadata about websites and other web-based data, providing a machine-readable version of information that humans dealt with.
A few years later in 1999 Dan Libby worked with Guha at Netscape to produce the first version of a format that many of us still remember and perhaps a good portion of us still use, directly or indirectly – RSS. This first version of RSS built on the ideas of MCF and was specifically designed to be able to describe websites and in particular weblog style content – entries that were published over time, entries that had generally had a timestamp, a title, and some content. RSS was originally written to work with Netscape’s “My Netscape Network” – to allow the combination of content from different sources (see Spec: RSS 0.9 (Netscape) for some background). RSS stood then for RDF Site Summary, as it used the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to provide the metadata language itself.
Atom. Like RSS, the key to Atom was the structure with which weblog content was described, and actually the structure was very close indeed to what RSS.
An Atom feed, just like an RSS feed, was made up of some header information describing the weblog in general, and then a series of items representing the weblog posts themselves:
header item item ...
A few years later, in 2005, the Atom format became an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard, specifically RFC 4287, and became known as the Atom Syndication Format:
“Atom is an XML-based document format that describes lists of related information known as “feeds”. Feeds are composed of a number of items, known as “entries”, each with an extensible set of attached metadata. For example, each entry has a title.”
What was magic, though, was that in addition to this format, there was a fledgling protocol that was used to manipulate data described in this format. It was first created to enable remote authoring and maintenance of weblog posts – back in the day some people liked to draft and publish posts in dedicated weblog clients, which then needed to interact with the server that stored and served the weblogs themselves. This protocol was the Atom Publishing Protocol, “AtomPub” or APP for short, and a couple of years later in 2007 this also became an IETF standard, RFC 5023:
“The Atom Publishing Protocol is an application-level protocol for publishing and editing Web Resources using HTTP [RFC2616] and XML 1.0 [REC-xml]. The protocol supports the creation of Web Resources and provides facilities for:
- Collections: Sets of Resources, which can be retrieved in whole or
in part. - Services: Discovery and description of Collections.
- Editing: Creating, editing, and deleting Resources.”
Is this starting to sound familiar – OData is exactly this – sets of resources, service discovery, and manipulation of individual entries.
AtomPub and the Atom Syndication Format was adopted by Google in its Google Data (GData) APIs Protocol while this IETF formalisation was going on and the publish/subscribe protocol known as PubSubHubbub (now called WebSub) originally used Atom as a basis. And as we know, Microsoft embraced AtomPub in the year it became an IETF standard and OData was born.
Microsoft released the first three major versions of OData under the Open Specification Promise, and then OData was transferred to the guardianship of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and the rest is history.
Something that humans could understand, as well as machines. The resource orientation approach has a combination of simplicity, power, utility and beauty that is reflected in (or by) the web as a whole. One could argue that the World Wide Web is the best example of a hugely distributed web service.
OData has constraints that make for consistent and predictable service designs – if you’ve seen one OData service you’ve seen them all. And it passes the tyre-kicking test, in that the tyres are there for you to kick – to explore an OData service using read and query operations all you need is your browser.
Have a quick look at an OData service. The Northwind service maintained by OASIS will do nicely. Have a look at the service document and, say, the Products collection.
Excerpts from the service document and from the Products collection
Notice how rich and present Atom’s ancestry is in OData today. In the service document, entity sets are described as collections, and the Atom standard is referenced directly in the “atom” XML namespace prefix. In the Products entity set, notice that the root XML element is “feed”, an Atom construct (we refer to weblog Atom and RSS “feeds”) and the product entities are “entry” elements, also a direct Atom construct.
Today’s business API interoperability and open standards are built upon a long history of collaboration and invention.
Food for thought #OMN
Nourishment for action
A look at the internal mess of the uk indymedia project
The project i like to point to as an example. The indymedia project, an early alt-media network that spread the use of open source software and #4opens organizing around the world at the turn of the century. In the UK the was a #geekproblem vs #openweb fight that became nasty over what we would now understand as “activertypub” the #Fediverse vs more centralized silo approach. In the UK you can see this stress point fought as a proxy war over #RSS
The #openweb aggregation side were sold a dud by the #fashernistas being swayed by the #geekproblem It was obvious that the project had to change and move away from central servers to a more aggregation model. BUT the movement was torpedoed by an obviously pointless open-source project instead of implementing an existing standards based RSS they created their BETTER, BRIGHTER flavour which was of course incomparable with everyone else.
This is an example of a “better” but obviously pointless open source project and also destructive behaver. The #indymedia project in the UK was ripped apart internally from this same divide in the end. A bad “open source” outcome. You can find similar behaver today in the fediverse if you look.
It’s a interesting thing to look at. Actually you can see 3 active sides in the internal uk #indymedia mess and important to see the outcome that they ALL LOST in the end.
1) #encryptionists (being pushed by the #geekproblem)
2) #fashernistas (being influenced by the #geekproblem)
3) #openweb being sidelined by the rest
1) The first resisted and blocked aggregation and #RSS from privacy and “security” issues.
2) The second is a obviously failed compromise by keeping control of “their” own better, non-comparable RSS format.
3) The last, the one the whole project was based on, were ignored and sidelined.
The #IMC project soon became irrelevant and died.
The currency of the 21st century is information
What is the effect of #geekproblem, of privacy and encryption, and their fetishization of #cryptocurrencies?
The market (liberal individualism and private property that comes with it) provides information on value based on explotion greed and selfishness.
#Opendata and #metadata provides information on value based on connection, cooperation and altruism.
A #4opens approach spreads connection, cooperation and altruism into our social world.
A market approach (privacy, individualism and private property based on encryption) allows exploitation, greed and selfishness to be at the centre of our society.
This is an old ideological and political divide that is not talked about at all in the #geekproblem as the is “no such things as society, only individuals and their family’s ”.
Society is based on social norms, walking down the street in safety – soft
Code is hard norms. A policeman on every street corner – hard
The question that we need answers to is how can we talk soft (social) power to the hard power (code) of the #geekproblem when for them such norms are invisible. They can’t hear what we are saying.
Blind
Without a wider “ideological” world-view, you have no place to step away from your past mistakes. Everyone needs to look at the world from differing perspectives. The current neoliberal dogma in all its different fashionable clothes is just that, a failed dogma that we clearly need to step away from.
The world can be different, I have lived most of my life in a different world to the one that is swallowing everything around me.
I use the word “blinded” to describe meany of the people I meet in tech and grassroots movements. They are blinded for differing surface reasons, on the hippy side it is conspiracy dressed as empty spiritualism. On the liberal progressive side it is internalized neoliberalism feeding fear, cowardice and greed. Best not to mention the process geeks…
There are paths to step away from this mess, #openweb #4opens is one that would be empowering for both non geeks and the more technically minded.
What is the OMN
The #OMN its a anything in and anything out – mediated by trust database/network.
It’s up to “commernerty” what they do with this and up to the individuals what commerty they choose or if a bit geeky can be an individual. it’s just soup (data soup) of course my project is to build a media/news network out of this other people can build other things #OMN
The data soup is fed by folsonmeny flows of tagged data objects mediated by trust. The consumption is based on the same. All with a nice UI
Lossy, redundancy, trust are features, the #geekproblem seeing these as problems needs to be overcome.
Being based on the #4opens am looking at Odata as the rest API core https://www.progress.com/blogs/odata-faqs-why-should-rest-api-developers-use-odata as this is an outgrouth of #atompub and #RSS and comes from a long process of open development #indymedia What do you think?
The exciting bits are the “flows of trust” bulding commertys, the tech and code are just tools.
* Nothing new
* All #4opens
* Good UI
All code is ideology manifested
Q. Some interesting things, mostly the collaborative pad. As I said some time back, this is how I would (obviously) try running this effort – pads not threads.
In terms of general direction, the activitypub etc doesn’t inspire me in terms of rethinking media. I will continue my #postmedia project, which has quite different axioms, and release when ready.
In general I don’t see the linked info neither as theoretically(specs) nor practically(code) strong
A. Diversity of strategy is a good thing but the #geekproblem of everyone doing there own thing is a bad thing – riding the contradictions 🙂
* What’s your argument against activertypub exactly?
* What do you think of rebooting the indymedia project?
One thing I can say the desire to be king is pointless when it fails and dangerous when it rarely succeeds. If this is a main motivation then no good humain outcome is possible. Basic st
A. What is a #postmedia project? it sounds like a alt-right libatrean, which is simply incompatible with social #4opens?
linked info? is being done without coding – it’s a folksonomy. A trust based social project not a technological project. It’s not there on purpose, which is obviously why you cannot find it 🙂
The social nature of the project. Because there is no code as we are simply in every case repurposing existing codebases, existing social relations and existing processes.
it’s an interesting subject.
I am trying to get coders to stop doing pointless/dangerous things with their skills and time. This sums up why i talk a lot about the #geekproblem
* pointless, that’s just about everything they do have always done.
* dangurus, that’s when they push #dotcons and make it work.
Of course this is more complex than it looks, how do you define “useful” we can wank ideology at this point.
Tec in the post truth world
The #4opens are a kinda of constitution that keeps the “post truth world” at bay. As long as you keep the #4opens in place and respect the diversity they can hold in place.
It’s a chicken-and-egg issue.
The #OMN is a social technology held together by the #4opens that pushes into being digital commons. What we then do with this liberated space is up to us.
The rebooted #indymedia project is a radical media project motivated by the #pga hallmarks that can only be built as a trust based network in this #TAZ space.
Wikipedia is kinda your friend, arty view of #TAZ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Autonomous_Zone
And #PGA https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peoples%27_Global_Action