The future of the browser conference

I was very happy to take part in the future of the browser conference, along with my amazing colleague Jasmine. It was a different kind of conference and this was very clear from the introduction with Amber in the future! (amazing and well worth watching)

Each section started with a really different video from different artists. This was a great move with most conferences, generally starting with a keynote before the conference talks) This conference turned that on its head before jumping into number of deep dives around aspects of the future browser. All the videos are now up online, so go have a watch now.

Since the conference I have installed Brave on my Ubuntu machine now and also Puma on my mobile.

There was quite a few new developments I hadn’t really seen before.

Project fugu

Project Fugu is an effort to close gaps in the web’s capabilities enabling new classes of applications to run on the web. In short things like controlling Zigbee, USB and Bluetooth devices. I heard about this a while ago and thought Living room of the Future controlled via a browser.

Handshake

Handshake is a decentralized, permission-less naming protocol where every peer is validating and in charge of managing the root DNS naming zone with the goal of creating an alternative to existing Certificate Authorities and naming systems. Names on the internet (top level domains, social networking handles, etc.) ultimately rely upon centralized actors with full control over a system which are relied upon to be honest, as they are vulnerable to hacking, censorship, and corruption.
I think that says it all, something which many people have pointed out many times as a major problem with the DNS system.

Handshake is an experiment which seeks to explore those new ways in which the necessary tools to build a more decentralized internet. Services on the internet have become more centralized beginning in the 1990s, but do not fulfill the original decentralized vision of the internet. Email became Gmail, usenet became reddit, blog replies became facebook and Medium, pingbacks became twitter, squid became Cloudflare, even gnutella became The Pirate Bay. Centralization exists because there is a need to manage spam, griefing, and sockpuppet/sybil attacks.

Unlock protocol

As most of you know, I have webmontization enabled on this blog and also on my mixes site. But Unlock is aimed at subscriptions and memberships. This is great news, except its not a standard yet but looks promising.

The coming age of the 402

I had heard Matt talk previously during May’s Manchester Futurists. There is a lot of unexplored areas in the http status codes including 402, which could be used to do new and interesting things like WebMon, which was also covered in Manchester Futurists and the future of the browser.

Better ways to archive and save the page.

Saving the page has been a nightmare for a long while, and I found Webrecorder and ArchiveWeb.page quite interesting solutions. Its also interesting to think about the lengths we have gone through to stop people saving the page.

This is why I like these community driven conferences… Big thanks to @caseorganic, @anselm and all the speakers.

Public Service Internet monthly newsletter (April 2021)

Deep fake technology

We live in incredible times with such possibilities that is clear. Although its easily dismissed, seeing how Amazon won’t support public library systems and how good / prevalent deepfake technology is becoming.

To quote Buckminster Fuller “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

You are seeing aspects of this with fashion taking on surveillance, Google finally being called out for the not so incognito mode in Chrome and introducing a progressive tax-like system following Apples store changes.


Meet the disruptors at publicspaces

Ian thinks: From the publicspaces conference where you can watch all the talks. I personally found Melanie Rieback and post growth entrepreneurship quite inspirational for all those new startups. We need more of this!

Evidence disappearing right under your nose

Ian thinks: This short documentary from VPRO, highlights the problem with archiving and moderation in critical cases like war crimes.

TransCopyright realised with Micropayments?

Ian thinks: Delivered at Mozfest 2021, Amber got me thinking when she mentions the dream of Ted Nelson’s TransCopyright (co-creator of hypertext) realised using web monetisation for attribution.

Why the excitement over non-fungible tokens?

Ian thinks: March become the month when most people heard the term non-fungible tokens for the first time, likely for a piece of art which sold for the equivalent of 69 million.

Some of the facts and myths surrounding China & America explained

Ian thinks: Useful overview from Wired magazine on the clear differences between the two but also the misconceptions which are portrayed by the media and each other.

We all knew Facebook is hooked on mis-information

Ian thinks: Interesting to see Facebook time their AI fairness paper on the same day. Who are they trying to kid?

A bank is the last place I think about when thinking purpose and human rights?

Ian thinks: I’m not so sure how much is honest in this video but Paypal, are not just saying the right thing but actually doing. Such a important difference from a lot of the D&I efforts being talked about now.

Forget GDP, Its time for a new metric and the UN is engaged

Ian thinks: Its great to hear the UN is considering a move away from GDP to natural capital. Its about time the alternatives are taken deadly seriously, for the benefit of us all. Of course BBC R&D are researching Human Values in a similar mind.

The walled garden is the new security through obscurity?

Ian thinks: Feeling comfortable behind a walled garden can make you reliant on them for security, but like the MIT piece makes clear this can be a bad mistake for your own security


Find the archive here

Its Dyslexia week

80% of people do not get diagnosed with dyslexia

As a proud man with dyslexia, I’m always happy to talk honestly about it with people willing to really listen about my superpower.

If you spend any time with me, you will get a sense of how my mind will blend from one thing to another. Its that flow state which my mind feels comfortable in but others wonder how I made that leap? I actively have to stop myself from doing it. Thinking about what I should write for the week I just started writing as my mind works…

One important thing to say always is, each person is different and each person with dyslexia has different experiences and different ways of managing or thriving. Some struggle all their lives trying to fit into a neurotypical world. I remember when I heard Dr Jonathan review Disability: the book, there was a quote which stuck me.

“some people have physical impairments, but it’s society through exclusion, through stigma, through oppression that makes people disabled”

I found this quite powerful. Dyslexia is classed as a disability and the quote above summed up a lot. The stigma of dyslexia from a stereotypical society is what makes people with dyslexia disabled… Although its exactly right, I don’t feel disabled in anyway, except when I rub against societal norms.

All the thoughts over the weekend

Last year I asked at the Mozilla Festival in the brand new Neurodiversity space. What do people think of when they think about when thinking about dyslexia? The results were different from what I was expecting. Zero of them said disabled or indicated that. However I had put up a bunch of the M.I.N.D strengths straight out of the Dyslexic Advantage. A book I recommend and lend to other people with Dyslexia when ever I can.  I recently subscribed the dyslexic advantage site as it helps fund more academic research, which is very much needed.

When they asked me to be interviewed, I of course happily said yes!

I will never forget the conversation myself and Kate (two dyslexic minds in conversation) had for the listening project. A conversation which you could hear on BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio Manchester and finally in the national archive. Only half the dare/bet/conversation has actually happen with Kate taking me to Ireland in a bright yellow camper van.

Ian and Kate

We just bounced off each other and it sums up the good things which can happen when you have confident dyslexics in a room. Of course its not all positive as describe in the posts what is daily life like and what its like to love someone with dyslexic (something I was expecting a lot more criticism about, although I likely did most of the damage previously).

A lot comes from experiences and talking with other people with dyslexia. Lots cover it up or won’t reveal it to others, but they have good reason. Like lots of others I was finally diagnosed in University not junior school although they had thought I might be dyslexic. I do wonder about what might have been different if I was rightly diagnosed back in junior school?

Think about all those young people growing up (even now) not aware of their strengths. All those people who don’t understand how powerful it can be. Of course there is a petition for this.

The Quantified Self archive all in one place

Get inspiration and ideas from hundreds of self-tracking projects documented in our community archive, searchable by tools and topics.

Its great to see all of the quantified self videos, presentations and show and tells in one place. Its quite an archive of media and worth browsing through. I had the joy of seeing some of these live at the Quantified Self conference’s.

Here’s some of my favourite ones.

Three Years of Logging my Inbox

Mark Wislon notices that his inbox correlates directly with his stress level. After passively tracking this for three years, he decides to actively shift how he sees his inbox account and learns how he’s controlled (and been controlled by) this stream of angst. He also discovers a very important life lesson: he’s addicted to email.

Using Relationship Data to Navigate a Chaotic Life

Fabio Ricardo dos Santos is gregarious and likes to be around people. A lot of people. But he had a nagging sense that something was out of balance. To better understand why, he began to track his relationships and interactions. He soon found that out of the people that he knows, only about 14% are what he considered to be important relationships and that they made up 34% of his interactions. He felt that this number was too low and it spurred him to spend more time with that important 14%. But he didn’t just track his time with people and the number of interactions. He expanded his system to include the quality of his relationships and interactions. He found that this made him focus on face-to-face interactions and video chats over emails and texts.

Leaning into Grief

Dana Greenfield’s mom was a surgeon, professor, researcher, entrepreneur, blogger, tennis player, and a mentor to many medical students. Unexpectedly, she passed away in February, 2014. To help her process her mother’s death, Dana began tracking every time she thought of her mother by writing down what triggered the memory, the mood it inspired, etc. Watch Dana’s talk as she shares her experiences of using self-tracking to better understand her own grief and the role her mother continues to play in her life.

What I Learned By Building

Dawn Nafus, an anthropologist, reflects on some observations of what self-trackers actually do when they make sense of data. Dawn’s observations led her to ask: what tools might support more diverse ways of working with data? This short talk describes what she’s learned while engaging and building tools for the QS community.

Tracking Punctuality

Sebastien Le Tuan is a recovering “late-oholic.” He is typically always late to friends and family events. One day he had a conversation with his dad that made him realize what effects his tardiness has on his personal and professional life. In this talk, Sebastien describes how he started tracking his punctuality and what he has learned from the process.

Sleep Patterns

Laurie Frick is a visual artist that make work, objects, and installations that relate to brain rhythm. In the video, she presents her amazing work on daily activity charts and sleep charts translated to art. She measured her nightly sleep for over 3 years using a ZEO eeg headband and has almost 1000 nights of sleep data.

Can’t You See I Was Falling In Love

Shelly Jang used GMvault to look through 5 years of Google Chat logs to hunt for signals that she loves only her husband. She looked at whom she messages, the time of a day, and the words she uses. She was able to extract meanings from innocuous metrics like “delay in response” to show whether her or her future husband were “playing games” at the beginning of the relationship. In the talk, she shares what she learned from her project.

Grandma Was A Lifelogger

When Kitty stumbled upon her grandmother’s diaries and started to explore the daily entries, she was struck by similarities with her own life and habits. Kitty is a modern-day lifelogger. She tracks places, events, mood – a variety of different personal data streams. Reading the diaries, Kitty saw that her grandmother used her daily entries as logs – tracking the details of where she went, what she ate, even the boys she kissed. In this talk, Kitty shares what she discovered, and the lessons she learned.

A Photo Every Minute: One Year Later

Rob Shields has been wearing a camera phone around his neck that takes photos every minute. He has been doing this since August of last year. In this video, one year later, he talks about what has changed, what’s new, the things that have been working, and some of the stuff that haven’t been working. He also shares some data from his experiment.

Tracking Street Harassment

Valarie moved to San Francisco when she was 29 and she was not prepared for the city life. She was really freaked out by the trash on the streets, by the way the taxi drivers drove, and how expensive everything was. But the thing that freaked her out the most was street harassment. Street harassment is any action or comment between strangers in public places that is disrespectful, unwelcome, threatening, or harassing and is motivated by gender or sexual orientation. She was surprised with how many times she was harassed while walking around. To better understand what was going on she started tracking these instance.

We Are All Going To Die: How Is Our Digital Life Preserved

Mark Krynsky started a blog about six years ago. On his blog, he wrote about live streaming and impetus and how he was trying to aggregate social data into a single timeline. The blog evolved over time, and it wasn’t just about social data–it was also about life blogging. Since then, he learned about Quantified Self and started thinking about the future of his data, what’s going to happen after he dies? In this talk, Mark discusses digital preservation and how he created an action plan for his digital data after his death.

Tracking and Improving My Sleep

Quantified Self organizer and cognitive science researcher, Daniel Gartenberg, is interested in sleep and his passion is this idea of not just tracking sleep but actually being able to improve sleep. He also makes sleep apps. He started tracking his sleep after his business partner contacted him on a recent scientific finding, where basically one could enhance deep sleep auditory stimulation that replicates the frequency of one’s own brainwaves when in deep sleep. In this talk, he shares his tips on tracking and improving his sleep.

Owning My Quantified Self Data

After years of collecting Quantified Self data, Aaron Parecki began moving more of his data onto his personal website rather than letting it sit in someone else’s cloud. This insures that his data will stick around even after apps and devices go away.

The time traveling web

memento

I read about W3C’s project Memento a while ago but its become a reality recently.

The Memento protocol is a straightforward extension of HTTP that adds a time dimension to the Web. It supports integrating live web resources, resources in versioning systems, and archived resources in web archives into an interoperable, distributed, machine-accessible versioning system for the entire web. W3C finds Memento work with online reversion history extremely useful for the Web in general and practical application on its own standards to be able to illustrate how they evolve over time

Its smart, simple and great because it works on top of http, instead of creating a whole different way of doing the same thing.

I can already imagine memento powered twitter service or memento powered BBC redux service.

Google photos vs Flickr Pro for my image backup

Speeding car

It all started when I came back from Tokyo to find my Spideroak storage full. I decided a terabyte of photos which are hardly private in a super secure storage is a little crazy and its time to put them somewhere else so I can make use of the secure storage better.

Originally I did look at using Amazon Glacier but quickly found out that its really not for general use in any shape. I looked at trove again to find trovebox has been shutdown…  but there is a Github community project for those wanting to keep developing.

We’ll be shutting down the hosted Trovebox service on March 31, 2015. We may extend this deadline to help accomodate customers to obtain archives of their photos.

A few of my friends said why don’t I use Flickr, especially since I’m already a pro member and have been since 2004!

I thought about it, because I tend to use Flickr to only upload photos I actively want to share rather than a place to upload all my photos. Basically I never really trust the privacy options and only upload things which I’m happy being public. It was time to trust Flickr’s privacy model but to be fair I’m still only uploading stuff which it doesn’t matter too much if its public.

Started doing that then Google announced at IO 2015, a revamped photo service with unlimited storage (if you are happy with them converting them down a bit).

This has got me wondering, if I should switch?

Flickr Pro is $ 24.99 a year but Google is $1.99 a month for 100gig,

Economically it makes sense to stay with Flickr as its unlimited even on high resolution photos and I have most of my good photos already there (incumbency advantage). But the google space purchase would only be used for photos over 2048x2048px big. Which I guess is quite a few as I switched to 5mpx and above very early on . I guess there’s the option of trusting googles image compression. I guess having the extra space in google drive would be useful but its not a big deal yet.

I’m going to keep uploading the photos and let google photo shake out a little. When the next year of Flickr comes up, I’ll decide then. Even made a google task to remind me. Hopefully there will be flickr to google drive exports or I’ll have gigabit internet and can upload the lot super fast.

Geek history worth keeping

Early in the evening

While talking to Martin, Sam, Chris and others over the last few weeks. I have been thinking how things have been forgotten.

The history of geek culture seems to get forgotten too often. Recently a discussion about the tech community in Manchester with Martin raised a bunch of questions in my mind.

How much of geek history is still available now? What do I mean?

Great people have said….

“Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”

And to be honest I’m seeing the same thing over and over again in the limited time I’ve been around the geek scene. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing necessarily wrong with this… But no one seems to be documenting the past… Which seems crazy with the amount of social media or in the past user generated content created. But the issue seems to be putting it all together. For example if you search geekdinners on my blog, theres quite a few posts. But its a mishmash of stuff. Look for the same on Flickr (assuming you knew flickr was where most geeks uploaded stuff in the past and flickr had not gone dark) and you get a mishmash again. If your smart you might try the clusters and find the London geekdinners.

Geekdinners.com is actual up for sale at $2.5k. But this isn’t so much my point. In the past we would write blog posts about events (don’t get me started on the blogging) but this is a bit like throwing a pound in a tip jar. Whats need is something to aggregate the blogs, tweets, photos, videos, etc together. Tell the whole story in long form. This is what me and Martin were discussing, and the natural place seems to be wikipedia and archive.org.

I had a discussion recently with Tom Morris who is very knowledgeable about wikipedia. I was discussing the recent addition of a page about myself. But it got me thinking Wikipedia is a great place for the type of thing I was hinting at before.

So I’m going to start filling in pages on Geekdinner, LondonGeekdinners, BarCampLondon, BarCampManchester, Geekup and Over the Air. Hopefully people who go on to write pages about Technights, Social Media Cafe, Tuttleclub, etc will link and reference. Then we can start to trace back events and community efforts. Give attribution where its well deserved and encourage more people to get more involved in shaping the future of geek culture.

BBC Merseyside Upfront feminism debate, to be continued…

Its 2014 and one of the fun things I’ve been doing in 2013 is joining Nguana’s radio show Upfront, on BBC Merseyside. Partner in crime Jody, keeps the whole thing turning into a Ian vs Nguana and friends verbal wipping. Trust me it would turn that way…

This time the debate was “has femisim gone crazy?” Not exactly what it was planned to be but go with it…

As I said in the post previously…

I have already declared myself a feminist in the blog post my crisis with masculinity and how feminism set me free. I originally was expecting lots more push back than I actually got but not being far from a good debate.

So it went really well, the debate was more about common decency to not just women but all humans. We did slowly get into more feminist topics but we ran out of time before we could get going. It was clear that a part 2 is needed. Hopefully some of the other guests will be on too, so they can add to the debate.

You can listen to the whole show for another 6 days on BBC iPlayer on Demand (about 90mins in for 25mins). Otherwise and for the international readers/listeners you can listen to a clipped version I created for archive purposes without the music.

The Height debate on BBC Merseyside

BBC Merseyside's Upfront

Third time on BBC Merseyside’s upfront with Ngunan and Jody. This time the topic centred around the height issue.

You can find the show on BBC iplayer for another 6 days.You need to start about 1hour 6mins in the stream.

I have also added it to archive.org and removed the music.

Its a good fun debate and although were laughing most of the way through, there is the serious side which only hits Ngunan when Jody pointed out how it works in online dating. You rule out a massive selection of potential people just because they are not your ideal height. It was also great to have Ngunan’s other guests who were a gay couple and gave us a view from the gay perspective.

Don’t worry we’ll be back on Upfront in the new year with other topics of interest

Archiving your social media

Found Recollect via Imran

We archive everything you do online.

There are a lot of great places to share your life online; we know because we use and love most of them. But this means our digital lives are spread across many different services.

It’s easy to get lost trying to find old memories. That’s why we built Recollect, the best place to archive and explore your digital life.

From a Data portability point of view it looks pretty good but its quite limited right now as it only supports Flickr, 4 Square, Instagram and Twitter. 2 of which I don’t actually use and to be honest I don’t really need the Flickr one because I have everything backed up already and I pay another service to archive my tweets.

I am interested to find out what format it saves them all in (I know its Gzipped or Tar’d, but the base format) and also in Twitter’s case how far back the timeline goes back? Does it include Retweets, @replies, Favoruates and other things.

Guess theres only one way to find out…?

Want to explore the BBC archive?

Film cans

From Backstage

The BBC is looking for people to join a six-month trial in which 20,000 UK residents will get free access to hundreds of programmes from the BBC archive, including reports of historic events as they happened, ground-breaking documentaries, soaps, action-packed children's shows, sumptuous dramas, and comedy shows that thrilled the nation.

Interested? then you can now register your interest on the BBC Archive site

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Visual mixing with creative archive footage?

BBC Radio 1's Superstar VJs

So finally the BBC has launched its first lot of creative archive licenced material. There will be some kind of major vj competition to follow. I think this is all good stuff, except a couple of things.
1. UK only? this is a real shame for the billions who happen to live outside of the UK.
2. No P2P downloads of the files. I thought there would be somewhere on the site where you could download everything in one go. But nope it looks like a click and browser type of affair. I did look around to see if anyone had hosted a torrent for this, but I cant find one. Its tempting to do so myself and try and restrict or at least inform the downloaders of the licence rights. I'm sure under the creative archive licence I would be in my rights to do so? And wasnt this the point of a creative commons type licence? I would be interested to hear if the BBC are using Geo-ip type blocking for downloads or relying on the licence conditions. Found out there using Geo-IP

I know Bit Torrent has a bad rep when it comes to most mainstream businesses. But the simple fact is that it works. You can distribute large files around the net without hammering one server farm. I even believe its possible to tell the Bit torrent tracker to use Geo-ip type systems when deciding who should and shouldnt beable to download the files.

Till number 2, the distribition of the files are handled differently, superstar vjs is going to require alot of clicking and browsing. So close, but so far…

Update – It would be more than my jobs worth to recommend using a Proxy to bypass the Geo-IP system. I also would not link to such proxy servers in the same post. But we all know once its online, location makes no difference. Just making downloading difficult is not ideal when thinking about the audience. But if it serves the purpose of convincing the lawyer, that a certain percentage of the rest of the world wont download the UK only content. Well theres no more to say.

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