See here http://brainstorm.tribe.net/thread/34fb1a79-351d-4251-8318-829623c1c9cb

Tribe was one of the early SNs to support and produce FOAF. The founders left. An aggregator appeared that read that data and republished it. Tribe members got upset about their data appearing elsewhere on the web. The Tribe developers decided to deal with the storm by simply removing the code.

There are similarities here with Facebook. FB introduce the Activity Feed. They put in RSS. The RSS gets read, aggregated and republished. FB members kick up a storm about the perceived loss of privacy. FB kill the RSS.

My view on all this.
- It's hard to explain to members what exactly is happening. They're just beginning to understand RSS, but FOAF is confusing.

- If it's visible publicly in HTML, then it ought to be visible publicly in a more structured form.

- If it's not visible publicly in HTML you have to be very careful about what is exposed in structured form.

- You need to give members an opt out, some times at field level from having their data visible.

- Private data used by the individual concerned can leak out and become public. See here Private RSS feeds ending up being globally searchable in public readers.

- Getting the licenses right and enforcing them is hard. What does "re-publish" mean? We're happy with Google to index our pages and show abstracts and cached versions. But apparently we're not happy for an unknown site to index our contacts and profiles and show abstracts.

There's a polarisation here between Privacy denyers and Privacy Fanatics. One group relishes the exposure and actively uses the lack of privacy for personal branding and reputation development. The other wants to be able to participate in internet based services but remain effectively anonymous. Obviously there's shades of grey in the middle. But it's sad to see the second group forcing decisions that ultimately reduce the value of those services largely because they don't understand what's happening and had a mistaken view of how much privacy they had in the first place.

» The Credit Crisis, Illustrated » The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century : Joey deVilla's Personal Blog

Brilliant. A simple explanation in pictures of how a few thousand people driven by greed managed to take down the world's economies.

YouTube - Hey Ma - Its Now 5 Years In Iraq

Is it really over 5 years since we marched against the war?

We've now got Yahoo OpenID fully working to log into Ecademy.

1. Go to My Settings, Manage OpenIDs

2. Type in "yahoo.com" into the "Add a new OpenID" field and hit "Sign In"

3. After a moment and perhaps an intermediate screen, you'll be presented with a Yahoo screen asking if you want to log in to Ecademy.com. Click on the "Let Me In" button.

4. You're returned to Ecademy and your Yahoo OpenID is associated with your Ecademy account.

Now when you need to log in to Ecademy, the process is very similar.

1. Go to the login screen at Ecademy. Scroll down to the "Login with OpenID"

2. Type in Yahoo.com and click Sign in.

3. You're redirected to Yahoo asking if it's ok. Click "Let Me In"

4. You're back on the Ecademy home page and logged in. [from: JB Ecademy]

I've been working on support for OpenID 2.0 in Ecademy. That all works now but when using Yahoo! as a provider they put up a scary warning saying that Ecademy is not validated with Yahoo! To get rid of the warning you have to have a valid YADIS file on the Openid Consumer side containing a returnto service that matches the one sent to Yahoo. but I and others couldn't get this exactly right. After contacting Yahoo by email I got a message back from Yu Wang with the final piece in the puzzle.

Here's what's needed. I'll describe it for Ecademy.

http://www.ecademy.com needs to return an http header
X-XRDS-Location:http://www.ecademy.com/yadis.xrdf

http://www.ecademy.com/yadis.xrdf
needs to return a header
Content-Type: application/xrds+xml

http://www.ecademy.com/yadis.xrdf
needs to look like this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xrds:XRDS
xmlns:xrds="xri://$xrds"
xmlns:openid="http://openid.net/xmlns/1.0"
xmlns="xri://$xrd*($v*2.0)">
<XRD>
<Service priority="0">
<Type>http://specs.openid.net/auth/2.0/return_to</Type>
<URI>http://www.ecademy.com:80/account.php</URI>
</Service>
</XRD>
</xrds:XRDS>

Notes.
1) Yahoo are not reading

in the section of http://www.ecademy.com They're only doing YADIS discovery via the http header. I fixed this in my index.php by putting
header('X-XRDS-Location:http://www.ecademy.com/yadis.xrdf');
at the top. I think this is a bit mean!

2) Even when Yahoo successfully GET the yadis file they don't do anything with it unless apache returns the right header. I added this line to my /etc/mime.types file and did an apache reload
application/xrds+xml xrdf
Yu Wang said they would be relaxing this requirement in a future release.

3) The URI for the entry in the yadis file should exclude all parameters. On the Yahoo approval screen, it shows the returnto so strip all parameters from that and put it in the yadis file. In my case, I've
copied the JanRain example consumer which includes the port number. The actual returnto is
http://www.ecademy.com:80/account.php?op=login_openid&remember=on&janrain_nonce=...
so the entry in yadis.xrdf is
http://www.ecademy.com:80/account.php

I've got three different op= for different scenarios. signup_openid, login_openid, add_openid luckily the same yadis entry works for all three.

Hope this helps someone.

A second virus email has appeared with text about Ecademy, Subject: "ECADEMY will close work in April 2008". It appears to be from info@ecademy.com . Again it has a Yahoo Message-ID although it hasn't been anywhere near Yahoo's servers. The email has an attachment Ecademy_Instructions5164.zip which contains document.exe which may be a Trojan or Virus.

One copy we've seen was sent from a Korean home broadband PC using Outlook Express. This makes it look as though it's being sent by a botnet of infected PCs round the world.

Needless to say this is not from Ecademy, and is in no way connected with Ecademy servers, systems or people.

Ecademy never sends emails with attachments.

Ignore it. Don't open it. Delete it.

Julian Bond
Chief Technology Officer
Ecademy

---

ps. Here's the text of the email

Hello!
Dear postmaster@ecademy.com members, clients and guests of our portal,
Over the last few years our portal has helped you to organize your business, find new partners and increase sales.
However, all good things end. Many of you know that we have experienced legal problems over the last year. Our competitors from other social
networks are trying to take over our client base.
Our website has been hacked and our database was stolen. After that we were taken to court because of identity theft.
Unfortunately, legal expenses and unfavorable court verdict with following closure of our bank accounts will lead to closure of our website. All
paying members will receive refund starting from March 14th.
Please check attached file for legal information in regards to your account.

Best regards,
The Ecademy Team

Ecademy - The Social Network for Business People

Company Registration:7382702 VAT:718 0377 36
[from: JB Ecademy]

Over the last couple of days and again this evening we've had some problems with our database server.

It looks as though a request for an RSS feed was being made very frequently and this particular request was launching a database query that was inefficient and slow. The combination was overloading the database and leading to the site being extremely slow or unavailable.

This particular problem has now been dealt with and should not arise again.

Please accept our apologies for the outage.

Julian Bond
Chief Technology Officer
Ecademy [from: JB Ecademy]

There's a virus email doing the rounds that appears to be a message from Ecademy support. It's a Virus or Trojan. At least one copy that we've seen appears to have come from an ADSL broadband line in Chile. The headers are forged and made to look as though it's from a fake Yahoo email address with a fake Yahoo message ID.

Needless to say this is not from Ecademy, and is in no way connected with Ecademy servers, systems or people.

At first glance the message could be taken to be designed to be a malicious attack on Ecademy but I'm inclined to think that it's actually just an example of clever social engineering. It wouldn't surprise me if there are or will be very similar emails apparently about other social networks just as there are already about all the banks.

Ignore it. Don't open it. Delete it.

Julian Bond
Chief Technology Officer
Ecademy [from: JB Ecademy]

Blue Tit
Great Tit
Long Tailed Tit
Sparrow
Blackbird
Wren
Robin
Chaffinch
Goldfinch
Collared Dove
Wood Pigeon
Magpie
Starling
Swifts
Seagull
Heron
Kite
Falcon
Crow
Rook
Owl (heard not seen)

Brown Mouse
Toad
Frog
Hedgehog

Black Cat
Black Cat with white socks

Snails
Ants
Worms
Beetles
Damsel Flies
Dragon Flies
Too many other insects to mention

We're at some sort of crossroads. If you're buying a new laptop or computer now, there are too many (bad) choices for what operating system to run.

For most people, there are a bunch of windows programs that it's hard to do without. For a few people there are some Apple Mac OSX programs they can't do without. The classic case is if you're in music production. But beyond that, every application area you probably want to run is available across Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.

So the first question is what base operating system you need.

1) XP. It's going to become obsolete in a few months and hard to get, even though MS will go on supporting it with patches for some time to come. It works but it's irritating. And does your lovely new hardware have XP drivers? If your new hardware came with Vista on it, are you going to buy an OEM XP at £75 or a proper legal copy at £275 or maybe you've got an OEM copy lying around from the last PC.

2) Vista. Way too many horror stories. Maybe one day it will ok, and the hardware will have caught up. But right now it feels worryingly flaky. But of course, your new hardware probably came with it installed.

3) Mac OSX. If you buy into the whole Apple ethos, I'm sure it's great. but there's a cost. Not just in monetary terms.

4) Linux. Hooray! Complete Control! But sadly you need complete control to make it work. That's fine if you're smart. And even though it's pretty good now, there are still problems with fonts, graphics hardware, drivers that are not completely resolved. Ask yourself punk, do you feel comfortable with a command line?

Now that virtual operating systems are becoming reasonably mature, you then have the next choice. Do you dual boot, and/or run a virtualisation system? If it's the second, which one? So now we're into combinations. Dual Boot is really a bad option. It's ok for very occasional testing but you really can't use it every day.

1) XP + andLinux. So what Linux programs do you absolutely need that don't already have a windows equivalent or port?

2) Vista + andLinux. Same as 1)

3) Mac OSX + Parallels + XP. See above about the Mac ethos

4) Ubuntu + VirtualBox + XP. Lovely bleeding edge. Can you have USB 2.0 support in the XP system? Who knows. Maybe. With some work. At least you've got a base system that is solid.

And I didn't mention running OSX on an OEM Intel box. An option that is actually real now.

I have a highly tailored XP system right now that's just about stable enough to do useful work on. It only occasionally (once a week) makes me want to scream. For years I've been walking up to work colleague's machine and recoiling in horror at their default XP install. Recently they've been saying things like "I think I'll get a Mac next. I can't stand Windows breaking all the time any more". I'm expecting to actually find them with nice new Vista machines with default Vista setups and I'm going to walk up to the machine and want to weep.

So which of all those options do you recommend? I'm pretty sure I'm going to go for Ubuntu + VirtualBox + XP on a Dell Laptop. Am I insane?

David Weinberger is blogging the FCC hearing :

I left this comment.

We've had this discussion before, I think. but I'm pleased to see the argument above. "Net neutrality is important but it is only a partial solution to the failures of the market that is at beast only weakly competitive. We need to make the Net competitive all the way through."

I find it deeply ironic that in a country that makes such a song and dance about free markets and free market capitalism, internet provision is a government mandated and controlled duopoly. This is anything but a free market. And in a marketplace owned and dominated by one or two incumbents, it's completely inevitable that they will abuse their position and offer less that you thought you were going to get for more money than you thought you were going to pay.

The solution to this is emphatically not more control over what the existing duopoly can and can't do. It's to break the existing control and to turn it into a real competitive (free) marketplace. There is another solution of course. And that's the socialist route of the government owning and building the infrastructure for the good of the whole society paid for out of taxes. But I doubt the USA has the stomach for that.

That's the answer that is easy to say but hard to implement. And it reaches into much deeper arguments about national infrastructure and how to handle infrastructure with high capital costs and where the final branch of the tree reduces to a single provision. eg water, sewage, electricity, roads. Over the last 150 years most developed countries have built 10 or 15 of these and governments have played a major role in creating the market conditions to help build them. Now we're facing one more which is to build very high bandwidth fibre to the home. So rather than get bogged down into whether Comcast (or BT or Deutch Telecom) should be allowed to filter packets, let's talk about how we build a fibre infrastructure for our citizens.

I've just about decided which laptop to get next. But then there's the question of operating system.

I refuse to get drawn into the Apple straitjacket. For all sorts of reasons.

There's really no software on Ubuntu that isn't also on Windows that I really, really want. Well maybe Amarok.

I'm sick of Windows XP degrading over time. Both long term with bloat in the registry and startup programs and short term in that eventually you just have to reboot to get the thing to work again. And I'm sick of the monthly forced boot when MS issue yet another set of security fixes. But XP only has 4 months to run before it starts getting difficult to obtain. Meanwhile there's a constant stream of windows only software I want to play with. Or where the Windows version is leading edge and the Mac-Linux versions appear later, not at all, or there crippled in some way.

Vista continues to look like a really bad idea. I really don't want to have anything to do with it.

So then we get into hybrids. XP+andLinux would let me run Ubuntu programs but like I said, there's nothing I really really want. Ubuntu + VirtualBox + XP makes a lot of sense, but there's continuing horror stories about USB support. All the things like Apache, PHP and MySQL that I run locally could all run in Ubuntu. Leaving Windows really just for website checking with IE6 and 7, Skype, Winamp and that stream of windows only bits.

And just to make matter worse, a bleeding edge laptop is likely to have hardware in it that may or may not have drivers for XP and Ubuntu.

I'm almost persuaded that the solution is to get a proper desktop with an eeePC and to shift as much work as possible to web based systems. And to leave the desktop on all the time with an SSH tunnel so I can get at the disk from anywhere. But I don't like the idea of leaving a desktop running 24/7 because of the electricity/power draw.

Choices, choices. And no good solutions.

And the laptop choice? The top of the range Dell 1525. 2.0Ghz T7590, 4Gb ram, 250Gb hard disk, Intel Graphics hardware, 15" widescreen. It seems to be the cheapest with that class of hardware. Sony's are more expensive and have too much range engineering. The other manufacturers don't seem to have quite caught up with that processor. And it's less than half the price of the equivalent MacBook.

Somebody said to: On a side topic, anybody ever heard of landmark education???

Julian Bond says: avoid like the plague. It's a cult.

They said: my g/f just got out of it... she said it was torture

I said: It's the bastard son of Erhard Seminar Training or EST. It uses a basic mindwashing technique. Spend 2 days grinding people into nothing, then 2 hours building them back up again.

It turns people into apparently happy smiley people who look at your left ear while talking to you and trying to persuade you to join because it changed their life.

2 days convincing you how bad your life is and how good it can be by fulfilling these landmark education classes at some dollar figure

I think of all these cults as being the second oldest profession in the book. That of Shaman or Witchdoctor. Arguably it's the first because the first example was the snake. (In the old testament tradition). Convince gullible people they are worthless and the only person who can give them worth is you, and you'll only do it for food, lodging, sex and coloured beads. And there's a plentiful supply of suckers who'll fall for it. Because at 4am everybody feels worthless. Sorry to sound so cynical but I really think these things are evil.

Quick thought. What the hell happened last summer? Did somebody feed the monkeys? Because it feels like the web is exploding again. Huge numbers of web2/UGC sites, Facebook gadgets, OpenSocial, socialgraph, dataportability, FOAF, XFN, Microformats, OpenID, Wow, just Wow!

There's *so* much happening right now.

A comment on Linux Journal | The Original Magazine of the Linux Community

As well as VRM, here's another TLA to conjure with. CDA or Customer Driven Advertising. This takes Publisher Driven Advertising one stage further.

I would love to have an RSS/Atom feed of adverts specifically targeted at me. I leave enough traces round the web at places like Amazon, eBay, Last.FM, the gadget sites, doubleclick and so on that an advertising agency should be able to come up with a very tightly targeted feed. And I want to help refine it with Love,Skip,Ban buttons on every ad.

Doc Searls Weblog · On the continuing end of broadcasting as usual :

My wife is addicted to BBC Radio 4. Every couple of years, the portable radio gets dropped one too many times and has to be replaced. Each time the radio gets more features and works less well. The latest upgrade was to a portable Sony DAB that has less battery life, takes more batteries and requires a good signal with the antenna extended to work at all. If you change from mains power to batteries, it doesn't just switch power and stay on, it turns itself off. And all this for only a small improvement in audio over FM?

This household at least could do with an ultra low power radio that picks up Radio 4 and nothing else and has a sleep function.

The other half (ie me) is addicted to last.FM tag radio ('Chillosophy' tag). That's fine in the house, but there's no solution (yet) for listening in the car. And even in the house, I could do with some portable solution to this. A Chumby perhaps?

Totally awesome!

Marc's Voice - Dataportability.org video

But I was disappointed there was no Opera Singing. ;)

OpenSocial API Blog: Orkut is looking for a few good apps... : The directory will go live for Orkut's user-facing launch, coming up at the end of February.

So will we see an iteration of the data API at the end of Feb? And I guess this means there'll be another rash of PR from people like Plaxo, Hi5 and Ning that all those ClosedGadgets run on their platform as well.

I don't know what all the fuss is about Waterboarding. It doesn't seem nearly as bad as some of the things the Inquisition did, like Strappado or perhaps the Iron Maiden. Or that were common punishments for treason in the 17th century such as half-hanging, drawing and quartering.

If we're going to use torture, surely we should do it properly without any half measures?