May 31, 2003
Salam Pax employed by the Guardian
07:48 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Warblogging
I first heard about Salam Pax on March 11 from John Monasch who sent me an email about him. Since then, he has gathered a great deal of attention from bloggers everywhere as the war approached. He was silent for quite awhile since the bombings. He finally came back, and now he's writing for the Guardian! Wow!
Guardian Unlimited
Salam's StoryThe most gripping account of the Iraq conflict came from a web diarist known as the Baghdad Blogger. But no one knew his identity - or even if he existed. Rory McCarthy finally tracked him down, and found a quietly spoken, 29-year-old architect. From next week he will write fortnightly in G2.
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May 30, 2003
Birthday script finally worked
Happy Birthday Anita! My birthday script finally worked. It was broken until today. Sorry to the people who's birthdays I missed.
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May 29, 2003
Technobot, a python script to manage your Technorati Cosmos
07:46 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Python Fun
I wrote a script that gets your technorati cosmos and creates a sidebar file of inbound blogs like the one on my blog and sends you email and jabber chats when there are new inbound links. It's written in python. It's ugly and totally amateur, but Dave Sifry said that making it available now was more "in the spirit of things" than trying to clean it up before I made it available. It's a bit embarrasing, but like with my Emergent Democracy Paper, I hope the releasing it early and getting feedback will be a good learning experience. Anyway, feedback is greatly appreciated and I hope to continue working on it. It is available on the TechnoBot Wiki Page. Please feel free to add feature requests or make comments about the way I am doing this.
GPL license of course.
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May 28, 2003
Vonage is cool
I got my Vonage service going yesterday. Vonage is a serice where you sign up for a phone number in an area code of your choice and they give you a Cisco Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA) which you hook up the Internet and attach to a normal analog phone. The phone basically turns into a normal phone with a phone number in the area code that you chose. You get call waiting, voicemail, etc. It's $82.03 setup and $39.99/month for unlimited calls in the US and Canada. (There are other service plans.) They don't sell the service internationally, but Gen Kanai turned me on to Vonage. He had just moved to Japan and was using it from Japan. Frankly, it makes a lot more sense to people living internationally, I think. Anyway, it's great. I was using it today, the caller ID worked fine, call waiting worked fine and the sound quality is fine. Now the only problem is that if I give people my new 415 area code number, they'll be calling me in the middle of the night thinking I'm in San Francisco.
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You have a switch? SSH1? A wep key? Ha! You're not safe.
05:21 UTC » Computer and Network Risks
When the WiFi network went down at FiRe and Max quickly mapped out the network, grabbed a free IP address and started hunting for the rogue network, it was useful and cool. I hadn't messed around with "security tools" recently so I decided to spend one hour searching for some tools that would work on my Mac.
First I downloaded trusty nmap which scans your network for computers, does an OS fingerprint and will often find the name, revealing the owner. It will also do quiet portscans to see what services are running on the machines.
Then I found ettercap. (Lastest version doesn't run properly on the OS X, use version 0.6.7.) This is a full-featured packet sniffer with an easy to use interface. It is unique in that instead of doing IP sniffing, it uses ARP hacking and MAC address spoofing to allow you to sniff across switches. It has a variety of "plug-ins" that let you easily capture email, passwords and keyword filtered bits and pieces into files or onto the screen. It lets you insert your own text into connections so you could for instance type a command into someone's telnet session. Of course you can also terminate other people's sessions and connections. Another interesting feature in the recent release is that you can now sniff SSH1 sessions. (Lucky for Dan we installed SSH2 on his computer.)
ettercap README5.4.4 SSH1 MAN-IN-THE-MIDDLEWhen the connection starts (remember that we are the master-of-packets, all packets go through ettercap) we substitute the server public key with one generated on the fly and save it in a list so we can remember that this server has been poisoned before.
Then the client send the packet containing the session key ciphered with our key, so we are able to decipher it and sniff the real 3DES session key. Now we encrypt the packet with the correct server public key and forward it to the SSH daemon.
The connection is established normally, but we have the session key !! Now we can decrypt all the traffic and sit down watching the stream ! The connection will remain active even if we exit from ettercap, because ettercap doesn't proxy it (like dsniff). After the exchange of the keys, ettercap is only a spectator... ;)
I also googled around a bit and found a wep key cracker for WiFi wep keys and a password cracker for unix and windows passwords that all seemed easy enough to run.
My point is, an old fart like me with a some curiosity and an hours works was able to load up enough gear onto my Mac to do the basics. With a bit more time and skill, I could probably find the exploits so I could break into the computers I found on the network instead of just watching and messing with their connections.
If you want to feel safe using a WiFi network, AT LEAST use SSH2 port forwarding, PGP and some security on your network like a Sputnik with security turned on.
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May 27, 2003
Stefan Smalla's FiRe notes
I met blogger Stefan Smalla at FiRe and just when I was feeling guilty for not blogging any of the actual content, I noticed that Stefan did a great job. Thanks!
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Technorati bot done
Got my Technorati bot done this morning. It checks technorati through the xml api every 10 minutes for my cosmos. If there is a new inbound link to my blog, it sends me an email and a jabber chat message with the details. Used technorati.py by Mark Piligrim and jabberpy0.4-0. Now I can make jabber bots. Beware beware. ;-)
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May 26, 2003
Photos to at and from inn in Appenzell
Just got back and posted photos from the secret retreat in Appenzell here. The artifacts from my camera are still mildly visible. Drat!
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May 25, 2003
See you later Switzerland
I'm at the Zurich airport now at an Internet kiosk so I can't upload the pictures, but I spent the day yesterday in the mountains of Swizerland hiking, moblogging under the surveillance of the goats and cows with my PowerBook on my back. It was REALLY tiring, but REALLY beautiful. We all stood at the top of the mountain as the sun set and we had a 360 view of the countryside around us. At the apex of the mountain was a very old inn where 20 or so etoy agents, bitflux bloggers, and St. Gallen University students met up for a mountain top secret conference. Apologies to those who responded to my blog entry but couldn't make it. Hats off to Michael who actually made it.
It was 10pm when we started and considering how exhausted we were from the (for some people 3 hour) hike up the mountain, the discussion was interesting and heated. We talked about art, open source software, architecture, the future of etoy and of course a little about blogging.
It was great to put faces behind some of the names I come across on the blogs. Blogging in Europe is starting to take off and I think the bitflux folks and others will lead the pack. Maybe then can help us make wikis more cool looking. ;-)
Anyway, I'm offline again for 12 hours or so while I make my way back to Tokyo...
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May 23, 2003
Spotme
They have this Spotme device at this conference which has a very cool feature. You can see the names of the other participants who are near you and approximately how many meters they are away from you. You can also exchange business cards with people which get emailed to you.
Similar to the Japanese Lovegety but a bit more serious focus. ;-)
My Sony DSC-FX77 is getting flakey. It's creating those artifacts you see in the picture...
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Secret Meeting in Switzerland
Zai at etoy is organizing a secret meeting of Swiss subversives and bloggers Saturday night in a mountain retreat. Email me if you are interested in joining. Space is limited.
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Dinner with Elliot Noss and Sidney Rittenberg
I met Elliot Noss, the man behind Tucows. I've been a huge fan of Tucows ever since Thomas Riha showed it to me during an Ars Electronica Jury meeting. I've watched it grow and was always interested in who ran it. Doc Searls met (update: Doc knows him from '98 or so) Elliot at ETcon and told me I should meet him. It was a nice suprise to run into Elliot at FiRe. Elliot's in the domain name game and we talked about ICANN and other stuff. We agreed on just about everything and I was happy to find out that Elliot was just as cool as Tucows. Elliot and his wife had just gotten back from Shanghai and he joined our China/Japan session. We had dinner with Sidney Rittenberg and talked about China. I guess the domain name business takes you all over the world and Elliot seems like the right kind of guy to run a global business.
Sidney, is another amazing guy that I enjoyed meeting very much. he has a very interesting bio.
Sidney was a co-host with me on the China/Japan Panel. He was extremely energetic, informed and sharp and knew more about China than anyone I have ever met in my life.excerpt from FiRe bioHe became a leading translator for the works of Mao Zedong, and was the only American citizen accepted into the Chinese Communist Party, until the Cultural Revolution.
[...]
Sixteen of Sidney's 35 years in China were spent as a prisoner in solitary confinement on charges of being an American spy. He was freed in 1977 and declared a true friend of China. His family became a myth and a legend, giving them easy entrée to China's leaders -- a great advantage for their consulting work.
The title is not completely accurate. It was a buffet dinner and I had part of my dinner with Elliot and Sidney.
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Thanks Max and James!
 Dinner with Max Levchin and James Hong |  James and Max lookin' hot in their convertible |
Max and James make me feel like an old fart. I guess I better get used to it since that's what I'm quickly becoming. Anyway, I'm happy that they'd hang out with me. They even drove me to the airport, although Max kept getting lost. Max told me he thought I was involved in way too much stuff that was just a waste of time. James and Max also turned me on to Yatta.
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May 22, 2003
Off to St. Gallen
I'm getting ready to leave San Diego for St. Gallen, Switzerland where I'll be doing a session on Emergent Democracy at the ISC symposium. Blogging from my sidekick now... I'll try to post more pictures when I'm in Switzerland. I'll also be trying out the tri-band sidekick.
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May 21, 2003
Hooked up with Jim Moore at FiRe
06:57 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Emergent Democracy - Joi's Diary
Hooked up with Jim Moore at FiRe. He shares an office at Harvard with Dave Winer. The last time I saw Jim was at the Fortune conference in Aspen last year and it was nice to see him again and catch up. We talked aboout the debate about googlewashing that his Second Superpower paper triggered.
Jim, Dave Winer, Doc Searls blog about the current discussion which includes recent comments by the New York Times.
We talked about Emergent Democracy and some of the problems with my current paper. He agreed to try to comment/edit it on my Wiki. People have made a lot of great comments on the Wiki and it's getting really interesting, but as far as I know, no one has edited the actual paper directly yet. It will be interesting to see who does it first. It's currently signed, "Mostly by Joichi Ito" but if enough people edit it directly, I will change it to something like "Hosted by Joichi Ito" or something like that.
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Supernova 2003
Speaking of cool conferences. Kevin Werbach's Supernova 2003 July 8 & 9 should be cool. I'm looking forward to going. Maybe we should do a blogging bof.
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Future in Review 2003
I'm at the Future in Review conference.
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May 20, 2003
LinkedIn Wiki
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May 18, 2003
Thanks for the blogshare gifts
00:57 UTC » Blogging about Blogging
We are doing order data integration with companies christmas like dotcom and pointcom. These types of retailers birthday are our future, along with all the major national electric scooter retailers as they ramp up to handle and store digital fast images. the company fast becoming an eBusiness and cheap the use of fast computers and broadband will take home theater into the future with more direct data communication giftologies with its customers.
is taking a very optimistic ionic breeze view on the economy and feels that the company is
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May 17, 2003
It's the linkable archives
23:40 UTC » Media and Journalism - Search
Doc just blogged about a thought I just had too. If the big print media put their archives online and made them crawlable and linkable, I bet their page rankings would go up. It's really the links between the archives of the blogs that gives blogs so many links. The solution to googlewashing is probably more about getting other forms of journalism published in a more link-friendly way than filtering the blogs.
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Our investment process
Wrote a not-so-organized entry about our investment process...
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Journalism and avatars
21:42 UTC » Media and Journalism
Although Anil is very different in person in real life, most bloggers blog in their own voice. At dinner with Markoff and Dvorak, we talked about how many journalists have a different professional persona and are actually much nicer in person than they are online. (Dvorak can be almost as rude in person as he is online. ;-P ) Dvorak deconstructed some of the ways that journalists will write to get a rise from the community and how disarming it is to meet some of the critical journalists in person. In fact, they said that Andrew Orlowski's not such a bad guy in person.
I write in my own voice, but I've developed sort of a thick skin from years of being flamed in Japan and in the US so I actually think some of the silly criticism is actually funny and flattering. Bloggers probably take criticisms more personally than journalists who play "the game" through their avatars. It's more painful to be slammed when you are speaking in your own voice.
Don't know how relevant this is, but this thought about avatars came to mind after reflecting on dinner with Dvorak and Markoff where we were all laughing about our critics and thinking about how my readers/community were maybe more upset about Orwlowski's silliness than I was. I am very grateful for people defending me and pointing out things that would be politically incorrect to say myself. Having said that, I'm not taking Orlowski's attacks personally since at one level, I think it's a game/joke. If Orlowski's actually serious about what he's writing, then I just feel sorry for him.
As they say, "Don't attribute to malice, that which can be explained by stupidity." and "Don't attribute to stupidity, that which can be explained as a joke."
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Commons Dinner
20:55 UTC » Eating and Cooking - Joi's Diary
 From left to right: Mary holding "Tetris", Brewster holding still shrinkwrapped copy of "Visicalc", Larry, Bettina, me and Glenn |
Brewster arrived with a box full of very old software. He had just finished testifying about why DMCA was preventing him from breaking copy protection on old software that he wanted to archive. The DMCA affects our lives in lots of ways and we need more people like Brewster to point out the stupidity of such laws trying to prevent legitimate activities for the sake of protecting the position of a few big media companies. What's scary for me is that Japan is trying to put together their own DMCA in a "me too" kind of stupid way. The problem is, we don't have people like Larry and Brewster in Japan and I can only image how much work it's going to be to fight it there.
Met Glenn, the Executive Director of the Creative Commons for the first time today. Enjoyed our conversation very much. He was supportive of my position on the guarantee issue with regards to the CC license. (I guess he should be.) He told me that Glocom, where I recently gave a talk on Emergent Democracy, was working on localizing Creative Commons for Japan. That's GREAT! I was worried that the Japanese would end up continuing to with that "Free use label" for webcontent stuff that the Ministry of Culture was doing.
Talked about the idea of using the Creative Commons Conservancy in the standardization process where it might act as a repository for assets like domain names. I had talked about this with Robert Kaye and Musicbrainz. I'll write another entry about this idea after I flesh it out a bit more, but I'm pretty excited about it.
Talked a lot about how smart Aaron Swartz was.
I wish my jet lag would go away so my brain cells didn't start to check out at the end of these dinners. Maybe I should stop drinking when I travel. Hmm...
One more thing: We talked about Larry's push to get a bill passed to have a $1 fee to keep a copyright 50 years after publication. This put put A LOT of stuff into the public domain and is very hard to argue against and seems extremely practical... you would think. Well, it's harder than it looks. He needs our help.
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May 16, 2003
Dinner with Markoff and Dvorak
16:01 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Joi's Diary
Had dinner, talked about blogging and had more dinner tonight with John Dvorak of PC Magazine and John Markoff from the New York Times. Markoff and Dvorak are about as different as they come, but are good friends and make a really funny pair to have dinner with.
Dvorak said he wanted to start a blog. Both John & John are anti-bloggers, but I agreed that Dvorak would be much more convincing if he was critical after having blogged. We talked about Andrew Orlowski and the attention he has been giving my blog these days. We discussed the importance of lunches and dinners in the journalistic process and discussed Andrew's journalism. One amazing thing about Dvorak is that he can be talking about the food, wine, the owner of the restaurant, Orlowski's writing style and Apple Computer all at the same time. Sometimes I got confused about whether Dvorak was talking about Orlowski's writing or the food. I think Dvorak would make a good blogger.
We talked about googlewashing and I agreed to link to Dvorak's site often to help increase his google page ranking. ;-) We talked a lot about the importance of thick skin and a sense of humor.
Update: Andrew Orlowski's current web page. I linked to the old one because that's what came up first on Google. Sorry. Noticed that Dvorak was on Andrew's list of "Stuff I like"
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Blogging and investing
03:42 UTC » Blogging about Blogging
So here's an article in spiked-IT criticizing my blogging about Six Apart/MT before investing. Actually, it is criticizing the fact that people aren't criticizing me. I've been giving this some more thought and I am very open to feedback, but I think the criticism is misguided. I am following a very transparent formula. I blog about what excites me and if it is possible for me to invest in it, I do. It would be stupid, but the other strategy would be to not write about anything I'm thinking of investing in. This might be more journalistically pure, but then my blog would not reflect my actual feelings and actions and would be misleading. I would be leaving the best stuff out. If you want to understand my investment focus, just read my blog! If I sound excited about a new company or technology please ASSUME I'm trying to figure out a way to invest in it.
This blog is where I am trying to be as sincere as possible and honest about my feelings. I am not trying to mislead anyone. Trying to cover my ass too much is probably just as dishonest as deliberately misleading people.
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May 15, 2003
In the air again...
Traveling again from today. I'm making a VERY short trip to SF on my way to San Diego to attend Future in Review. Then I'm going to St. Gallen Switzerland to give a talk about Emergent Democracy at the ISC Symposium and will be back in Tokyo on Monday the 26th...
My trip to SF is very short so I won't be able to have a party this time. Sorry! Next trip, I'll have another party. I'm meeting a few people, but definitely don't have time this trip to meet all of the people I want to see. Apologies in advance to people who I won't see this trip. (At least to those people who want to see me who I won't be able to see...) FYI, my schedule is completely booked.
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Liquid Democracy
08:26 UTC » Emergent Democracy
Interesting post on my wiki by Bayle Shanks about Liquid Democracy.
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Future of journalism
07:54 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Emergent Democracy
Finally got a chance to talk to Dan about his new book and the future of journalism over lunch. We talked about what journalism really was. My thought was that journalism is defined in the constitution and is a part of democracy. Dan's notion is that the Net and blogging is changing the nature of journalism which in turn has a huge impact on society and democracy. This huge impact is one of the missing parts of my/our emergent democracy paper. Dan's going to focus on journalism, but obviously recognizes the connection with democracy.
We tried to deconstruct what traditional media was. My thought was that the founding father defined "the press" as individuals and small groups with printing presses to represent the voice of the people and that currently, newspapers are just printing machine owners and paper distributors just like telephone companies are a bunch of telephone poles and pipes. Dan asserted that there was more to it. He explained that the protection from lawsuits is an very real risk to journalists and that media companies protect their journalist from such suits. I can see that. Relates to the discussion about the Creative Commons license.
We talked about reputation a lot and about technorati. Nob Seki, follows up the discussion on his blog and discusses the notion of Trusted TrackBacks and the relationship between the interviewer and interviewee.
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Talk at Glocom about Emergent Democracy
07:40 UTC » Emergent Democracy
I gave a short talk and participated in a discussion about my Emergent Democracy paper at Glocom. Professor Shumpei Kumon, the executive director of Glocom translated my paper into Japanese. I am EXTREMELY grateful for this. He said that the paper would not normally pass his requirements for publication because of the sloppiness in the logic and the attributions, but since he thought the process as well as the topic were relevant and interesting, he agreed to publish the paper in Japanese in their journal in June. I'll be able to post the Japanese translation by Professor Kumon on my blog after that. In parallel, Illume, a scientific journal is publishing another version of the paper (edited and trimmed down) in June as well. So, we'll see what the Japanese think about ED soon.
I got a great deal of interesting feedback from the discussion.
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May 14, 2003
Defending Creative Commons
07:34 UTC » Intellectual Property
Karl-Friedrich Lenz and others are dumping the Creative Commons license because they don't like the fact that the original licensor guarantees to the licensees. If I understand this correctly, it means that if I snap a photo of something, someone copies it from my site and posts it and get sued, it comes back to bite me.
Me sense is that this is the way it should be. Tell me if I'm missing something.
Here's my view.
Copyright is not some clearly defined law. It is law and technology that is the codification of what society thinks is "fair use", "free speech" and many other things at the time. Hollywood and a lot of other people are pushing to limit things like free speech and fair use. Someone has to fight for it. There have to be suits, people have to get mad and we have to fight.
If you try to pass the risk to service providers and corporations, they'll just say, "we don't want to be the next Napster," and will most likely prohibit sharing and posting rather than take the risk. What the CC license does is allow the service provider to say, hey, all of the stuff here is tagged with copyright info and guaranteed by each of the people. Sue, them, not us.
For the individual who gets sued, yes, it's tought and we have to fight to help these folks (that's what the EFF is for), but having the individual who originally posts the stuff be responsible does a few things. It distributes the risk. It's much more likely for Hollywood to sue a big company with money than an individual. It will get people thinking about and fighting for their right to fair use and free speech.
I'm sure there will be a chilling effect and this chilling effect might be non-trivial, but my sense is that the chilling effect on service providers who have to "police content" will be so quick that we'll have restrictions on our free speech via technology faster than you can say, "Mickey Mouse."
So what does this mean to Joe CC user? When you are about to post a picture or a quote that is questionable from a free speech or fair use perspective, be prepared to defend yourself. But, as the Chicago Manual of Style says:
The Chicago Manual of StyleThe right of fair use is a valuable one to scholarship, and it should not be allowed to decay through the failure of scholars to employ it boldly. Furthermore, excessive caution can be dangerous if the copyright owner proves uncooperative. Far from establishing good faith and protecting the author from suit or unreasonable demands, a permission request may have just the opposite effect. The act of seeking permission establishes that the author feels permission is needed, and the tacit admission may be damaging to the author's cause.
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May 13, 2003
Technorati Jabber Bot
OK I figured out my next python project. A bot that polls technorati for inbound links to my blog and sends them to me as they come in via IM (Jabber). This is probably going to challenge my programming skills, especially since I know nothing about Jabber... yet. So, if someone is already working on this or has already done this. Stop me now!
Also, if you know of any relevant python modules I should look at, that would be greatly appreciated. I plan to try out Mark Pilgrim's PyTechnorati.
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Sidebar update - humble style sheet and pulldown archives
07:13 UTC » Blogging about Blogging
I added a new style sheet and a new style sheet class. On my sidebar, if you click on humble style, it will set your style sheet to a style sheet based on the polite fonts style sheet (big fonts) where I've added a new class called "boastful". This style sheet will render text that I think might seem boastful in a tiny white font so you don't see them. (I couldn't figure out a way to delete them all together in css.) So if you want to stop seeing my boastful disclaimers and generally cut down on boastful comments altogether, change your stylesheet please.
Also, I ripped off an idea I saw on Liz's site and made my archives in my sidebar pulldown forms.
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