Results tagged “rafecolburn”

Providing more evidence that blogging is something you can get better at the longer you do it, my friend Rafe Colburn put out a brilliant post the other day outlining a third kind of software freedom.

What Apple offers in exchange for giving up Freedom 0 (and they ask not only end users but also developers to give it up) is a new freedom for computer users — the freedom to install stuff on your computer without screwing things up. Freedom 0 is about giving you the right to screw up your computer in whatever way you see fit. Apple’s freedom is about giving you the opportunity to install any of thousands of applications with the knowledge that your phone will work just as well after you install them as it did before, and that you can get rid of those applications whenever you want.

The comments are generally pretty reasoned (funny how thoughtful people attract thoughtful responses), but one of the glaring omissions in the conversation was how much of this ground was covered in Microsoft's work nearly a decade ago around trustworthy computing. The seminal document of the initiative was written by Craig Mundie in 2002, in a white paper that Microsoft later made publicly available. I've embedded it below for review, but it's worth pulling out the few key concepts that Mundie identified as the pillars of trustworthy computing:

• Security
• Privacy
• Reliability
• Business Integrity

These are notable for a few reasons — while Microsoft was getting beaten up then for security to a huge degree, and reliability to a lesser but still significant degree, the issue of privacy in that pre-social networking world hadn't yet become as significant an issue with users as it is today.

Most importantly, though, the idea of business integrity was considered a core element of how much users would trust the technology that they use. Microsoft was still at its nadir in terms of its industry reputation at the time, and that mistrust of Microsoft led much of the tech industry to dismiss the principles of trustworthy computing almost out of hand, especially as they were linked to the "Palladium" concept that Microsoft was then advancing about hardware security and software certification.

Succeeding Despite Itself

Microsoft went on to make some technological decisions for their own platform work based on the trustworthy computing concept, ranging from halting development on Windows and Internet Explorer to perform massive security reviews, to architecting parts of the .NET platform to embody principles of reliability and trustworthiness. But on the whole, as evidenced by the meager offerings on the current trustworthy computing website, Microsoft has walked away from its effort to market the idea.

In interim, though, the idea of locking down an ecosystem with extremely rigid hardware controls, a centralized software approval or certification authority, and an appliance-like simplicity of experience have completely won the attention and focus of the tech industry. Nearly all of the precepts of Trustworthy Computing have been what the market decided it preferred, and have been the foundation of what technologists strive to create.

Except, perhaps, for the fundamental Trustworthy Computing tenet of business integrity. None of the major players of trustworthy, locked-down platforms seem to want to publicly address that the biggest danger to their own market success, once they've solved the problems of viruses and complexity and software crashes, is how people feel about doing business with them.

Trustworthy computing was truly a worthy vision. Hopefully we'll see new products that are announced with a bullet point saying "You can trust our company and here's why", alongside all the other compelling parts of a trusted experience.

The Docs

Below is Craig Mundie's original 2002 white paper on Trustworthy Computing. There are tons of good parts worth quoting, but I'll close with just one, from the section on Policy:

Once a technology has become an integral part of how society operates, that society will be more involved in its evolution and management. This has happened in railways, telecommunications, TV, energy, etc. Society is only now coming to grips with the fact that it is critically dependent on computers.

We are entering an era of tension between the entrepreneurial energy that leads to innovation and society's need to regulate a critical resource despite the risk of stifling competition and inventiveness. This is exacerbated by the fact that social norms and their associated legal frameworks change more slowly than technologies. The computer industry must find the appropriate balance between the need for a regulatory regime and the impulses of an industry that has grown up unregulated and relying upon de facto standards.

Many contemporary infrastructure reliability problems are really policy issues. The state of California's recent electricity supply crisis was triggered largely by a bungled privatization. The poor coverage and service of US cellular service providers is due in part to the FCC's policy of not granting nationwide licenses. These policy questions often cross national borders, as illustrated by the struggle to establish global standards for third-generation cellular technologies. Existing users of spectrum (often the military) occupy different bands in different countries, and resist giving them up, making it difficult to find common spectrum worldwide.

Related Reading

• Ignoring It Won't Make It Go Away
• Free Publicity: Who Do We Help?
• The Facebook Reckoning

I've really been enjoying the response to my recent blog posts — here are some more thoughtful replies.

Rafe Colburn, one of my favorite bloggers for a decade now, followed up my Apple and secrecy post with "Apple vs. my preconceived notions":

In one scenario, this is a bubble of sorts. Apple may be doing OK now, but they’re headed for a big crash when people get sick of their behavior. In another scenario — one that I think is, sadly, more likely, Apple continues as they are, adjusting when it must to address reality, but only in the most minimal way.

I've also really been enjoying watching Dave Winer's work recently. In the past we were both too young and stubborn to realize we're amused by a lot of the same things (There's my refrain of "We hate most in others that which we fail to see in ourselves" again!) but these days it is just plain entertaining to watch Dave go. My amusement is amply covered in "Anil's belly laugh", which mentions my response to Dave's latest bit of hacking. As I mentioned on my Twitter account, I also recorded an episode of the Bad Hair Day podcast with Dave and Marshall Kirkpatrick last week.

Speaking of podcasts, This Week in Google is a new one featuring Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis and Internet Hero Gina Trapani. This week, they had a very nice look at The Pushbutton Web towards the end of the show. I'm delighted how many people have told me they found that post valuable or useful in talking about this whole area of innovation. Since I'm a lousy coder, writing blog posts like that is the most helpful thing I can do.

Finally, as it's come up in several contexts lately, it's probably worth repeating the key point of a post I wrote two years ago, which attracted some attention then but is probably even more relevant today. The core concept is about "The Watery Web":

It's not true to say that Facebook is the new AOL, and it's oversimplification to say that Facebook's API is the new [MSN] Blackbird, or the new [AOL] Rainman. But Facebook is part of the web. Think of the web, of the Internet itself, as water. Proprietary platforms based on the web are ice cubes. They can, for a time, suspend themselves above the web at large. But over time, they only ever melt into the water. And maybe they make it better when they do.

Thanks, as always to people who've responded to what I've written, and especially to all of those who've taken these posts as starting points and expanded the ideas into some truly inspiring creations.

Today's Blog of the Year Picks: Some Bits: Nelson's Weblog and RC3.org.

These two are just for me, some real old-school-blogging nerd picks. Some Bits: Nelson's Weblog is the work of Nelson Minar. Formerly of Google (where he helped pioneer their API work), and lately assisting with Twitter, Nelson is a geek's geek, reveling in coding and gaming and exploring the edges of web culture. But honestly, there are lots of blogs that try to cover that territory. What I love is that there's a real humanity to the way Nelson presents his posts, and he frequently veers from the technical to the political or even the worlds of food and travel while retaining that characteristic warmth. Frankly, if you've been reading or writing blogs long enough, you can remember how blogging used to be, and Nelson's Weblog is old-fashioned in a great way, not least because he still calls it a "weblog". That the sidebar linkblog is so incredibly well-curated and consistently good is the icing on the cake.

In a similar vein, Rafe Colburn's rc3.org is a blog for people who appreciate code, sure. But it's also a rich discussion of politics, community, and culture. For those of you who are newcomers to the blogosphere (that means you showed up in this century), this is what most blogs used to be like. Now, neither Rafe nor I is posting 100 links a month like we used to 8 years ago, but the evolution into a more considered set of brief essays interspersed with interesting links is still satisfying to see done so well, and so consistently, for so long.

Pick of the Posts:

• I found Nelson's sympathetic look at Larry Craig from earlier this year to be particularly moving.
• There is nothing but good in Nelson's "bad" category of posts.
• Quality is the Killer Feature: Inspired by the shutdown of OINK, Rafe neatly sums up a key weakness of digital music marketing efforts thus far.
• And a must-read for anybody who deploys servers or server-based applications: When Deployments Go Wrong

If you like these, try: Hack the Planet. A full 30% of the time, I have no idea what the hell Wes Felter is talking about. Another 20% of the time he's either wrong or just infuriating. These are just two of the best things about his blog if you're a geek.

This is one in a series of posts about Blogs of the Year for 2007. They're my subjective picks about blogs that inspired or influenced me this year, and you can check out my introductory post to find more.

• Andre Torrez: “My little experiment in tossing links out of the main blog didn’t work out so hot. I like linking things, but I don’t like the lazy feeling of stuff just showing up here at some point in the day.”
• Rafe Colburn: “I still haven’t struck the balance I’d like between posting links and posting longer features here… So now my new idea is to post a wrapup of what I’m finding here every day or two in a more narrative form. This is the first attempt.”

Three’s a trend, too.