Fiat Lux

I got a closed beta invite for Tabula Rasa.

That’s about all I can say about it until the NDA goes away.

Scene: Our bedroom. Scott has loaded a flavor of Linux onto a thumb drive and is booting it up his laptop.

Scott: “Look at that. Kernel panic.”

Me: (looks at screen) “It’s not doing anything. Doesn’t seem all that panicked to me.”

Scott (pulling out the thumb drive, rebooting): “Very funny.”

Fast-forward a minute or two.

Me: “How’s that kernel panic doing? Has it been promoted to a General Protection Fault yet?”

Scott: “That is so. not. funny.”

Me: can hardly breath I am laughing so hard at my own joke.

Well, this is disconcerting. Consider yourself duly warned:

Users of Yahoo! Mail, MySpace and just about every Web 2.0 service take note: If you access those services using public Wi-Fi, Rob Graham can probably gain unlimited access to your account - even if you logged in using the secure sockets layer protocol.

[snip]

The hack caught our attention because it shatters a common assumption concerning secure surfing on public access points. Up until now, we felt relatively safe using hotspots to access email as long as we logged in with an SSL session. Yes, we knew that any subsequent pages that were not appended by “https” in the address bar were were susceptible to snooping, but intruders still had no way to access the account itself.

Now we know better. Any session that isn’t protected from start to finish by SSL is vulnerable to the hack. And because session IDs generated by most sites are valid for an indefinite period, that means intruders could silently access our accounts for years - even if we regularly change our passwords.

The only way …. to work around the vulnerability is to use Google and select options that automatically keep Gmail, Google Calendar and several other properties encrypted throughout the entire session.

So in cruising through Techmeme recently, one issue that keeps popping up is “Facebook bankruptcy”. Jason Calcanis has had enough. Om Malik thinks he has a point (although Scoble doesn’t). I think they are asking the wrong questions.

It seems to me the issue is not so much whether or not Facebook sucks — for the record, I don’t think it does — but the nature of celebrity in a connected world, and more specifically, of celebrity in a realm where the downside of fame is less a part of the mental map.

It’s expected that for an actor or a singer or even a sports star, part of fame is that people want to know you, in any way they can. You’ll be accosted by fans looking to shake your hand, get an autograph, or pose for a photo. Your phone number and home address (not to mention your e-mail) will be a guarded secret. I could go on, but this stuff is so widely known and accepted that I really don’t need to belabor the point.

On the other hand, only a tiny number of people in the tech world have ever had to deal with the fame effect on a regular basis. Until social networks came along, that is. Now, people whose day to day lives were previously normal are experiencing the Internet version of the fame effect. And no surprise, they don’t like it.

I suppose I don’t blame them. I’ve only been recognized once, years ago, on Long Beach Island the summer I was doing stock theater there. It was a weird feeling.

So I decided to give Twitter a try. I’ve added a badge to my Facebook and to the “Misc” section over on the right-hand column here.

I rather doubt that the world is going to care about the mundane details of my life, but what the heck, let’s give it a shot. Feel free to follow along, or if you Twitter too, let me know!

I’m settled in at WordCamp and feeling like there’s a big red “L” for loser on my forehead, because I’m using my clunky old Windows laptop instead of a nice sleek Mac, plus of course I’m typing this into MovableType.

Other than that, I’m stoked for the day. I’ll upload some photos later.

UPDATE 10:40 AM: Well, someone else already has photos online. I’m in this one.

UPDATE 11:15AM: Next up, Om Malik and John Dvorak. Funny opening:

Om: I’m a Mac, you’re a PC.
John: Yeah, whatever.

Although to be fair, Dvorak is much less of a ranty old guy in person than he is in his columns.

UPDATE 11:45AM:
This is an interesting discussion. Here’s a few more tidbits:

Om: Comments are what makes blogging. It is the biggest crucial difference from mainstream media. You have to engage (except for the morons). Moderating is the key to success.

(Me: In other words - FU Dave Winer!)

Om: You are responsible for the tone at your site. If you keep the discourse polite the readers will response. You have to go on the assumption that people are inherently nice.

John (to NY Times guy): if you can’t filter out profanity but filter in ‘Dick Cheney’ then your filters suck.

John: Rating comments is useless. unless you’re looking at restaurant reviews.

John: A writing tip - it’s really an old newspaper trick - read your piece out loud before you send it out. Really out loud, not just pretend. You’ll be amazed at the number of errors you’ll catch.

Plus, a really funny discussion of why it’s OK to call someone a douchebag but not a crook.

Update 2:45PM:

I didn’t post any notes from Lorelle VanFossen’s session, and now Jeremy Wright of b5media is up. Jeremy invited some audience members to join him, so now Eric from ICHC is up as well. Neat!

Got to be honest, so far this afternoon I am not hearing anything earth shattering, certainly not to someone who’s been blogging for a while. I’m also in need of more caffeine, which may account for my flagging interest level.

The side conversations have been fun though. I had a nice chat with Stormy of bargaintravel.com.

Update 5:15PM
Robert Hoekman’s presentation was quite good and I took a bunch of notes, but I’m hitting info overload in a big way, and Matt Cutts is talking. I’ll see if I can get some of the notes on later.

Had a rough day. Scott took a spill off his bike en route to work, so we spent a few hours in Kaiser Hell getting him checked out. All’s well now, but it was a long and draining day.

So, as I was cleaning out my overloaded e-mail in-box tonight, I found this jewel that Jason sent to me a few days ago.

Too funny!

Back about 7 or 8 years ago, I was in the lounge at an industry tradeshow — I think it was ISPCON, but I’m not sure — hanging out and shooting the shit with about a dozen assorted techies & entrepreneurs. At one point, someone looked around the circle and said, “gee, we could start a hell of a company with the talent right here.” Everyone laughed.

Years later, someone has taken that idea and run with it. And I really wish I’d known about it before it happened, because it sounds like an amazing experience.

Good luck, VoSnap!

As I write this, there’s roughly 73 hours left until the iPhone hits the streets. I still haven’t decided if I want to buy one or not, and if I do, I need to get serious about my line-camping plans.

I’m still on the fence, though.

A wave of reviews has hit the web this afternoon, and by and large they are highly positive. The virtual keyboard, considered by many to be a potential issue, sounds like it is a lot easier to use than expected. The biggest snafu seems to be the speed of the AT&T EDGE network itself, and sadly, it sounds like that’s not something that a software patch will be able to fix.

I want one, oh yes. But I don’t need one, and I do have a lot of other uses for the $600 or so an iPhone will cost me. Plus, for that much money, do I really want to live with slow data speed, when that’s one of the key features I’d be using the thing for?

Right now, I’d have to say no. If I am going to drop that kind of cash on a convergence device, I don’t want to spend the next 2 years cursing out my too-slow net access every time I use my iPhone.

And yet — I reserve the right to change my mind.

I’ve been mulling around a post on Facebook for a day or so. I signed up for Facebook sometime this past winter, but didn’t really do much of anything with my account there until April, when I realized that my 20-something cousins were using it heavily and that if I wanted to stay in better touch with them, that was a way to do so.

Since then, I’ve started checking Facebook more frequently and gotten more aggressive about adding friends. Along with LinkedIn and Flickr, I’m checking it more or less daily now. Sadly, though, my social circle doesn’t seem to be the Facebook target market, because after exporting my entire Thunderbird address book (more than 250 e-mail addresses in all) I found fewer than 20 of those people actually on Facebook. That was disappointing; especially as many of those addresses were classmates from USF. I don’t really expect that my old college friends or my relatives would be on Facebook, but I am a little surprised that so few grad school friends were there.

Aside from not finding a whole lot of my friends there, I like Facebook. It’s easy to use and entertaining, and it lets me share things about myself that I can’t or don’t want to share on LinkedIn. Nick O’Neill has some thoughts on this issue, and suggests that Facebook might “bury” LinkedIn, if they so choose. It’s possible, although if Facebook goes public and gets a big enough warchest, they might just as well buy LinkedIn instead.

This is a really good example of the never-ending dynamic flow between disintermediation and reintermediation, actually. How do you hit the right balance between the costs and the benefits of spreading your information across multiple social networks, versus having everything in one place?

Anyway, if you’re on Facebook and want to friend me, please feel free to do so.

UPDATE 7:30PM: After posting this, I ran across Danah Boyd’s excellent article on the class division developing between Facebook and MySpace. It’s well worth reading.