An Open web service protocol for distributed notification

We all need ‘a place of our own’ in ‘the Cloud’, to replace ‘the desktop’ as the place notifications are sent to and distributed from. To be successful, it would need to be based on open protocols, so that any service provider can host the service, and must include at least one good FOSS implementation so we can DIY it. Is there a W3C committee working on this, that I haven’t heard about?

I frequently move between Android phone & tablet and Ubuntu desktop. I am sick of being repeatedly notified of something I read 2 hours ago. My devices don’t read my notifications, I do and I don’t want to have to go to a web wite to fetch them. I want them to find me, be read, then be cleared unless I say not to and for that to be propagated. Most of the OSs seem to have finally got a working notification system, about 3 years after it might have been useful without such a service.

Ubuntu or Mozilla would have been obvious places to launch an anti-competition service back then, for the good of the users. Now, I guess we’ll have to depend on Mozilla and even then they’d try to market it to sound like it depends on sign-up to Firefox Sync.

Overlapping-tribes notification would be an obvious expansion. Google Circles would have been a good place to start, if we could trust them. A WebRTC Googlist told me that the people who took the XMPP out of Googe Talk are ‘no longer with them’. The trouble is: I’m not sure if that was for being Evil or for getting caught.

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With Great Power Comes Great Exploitability

Between Christmas and New Year I saw Wolf Hall & Bring Up The Bodies at the RSC’s Swan Theatre. They tell a tale of how low men will sink, initially in pursuit of power, then to hang on to it and finally, just to survive. I’m sure Samsung, Google, Apple and Microsoft are not Henry VIII but I noted that the only thing the powerful are afraid of is the opinion of ‘the people’. When they lie to us, even to themselves, someone needs to point it out to them. Perhaps their souls might still be saved.

Allow me to take a break from the tale I began in my most recent blog entry, to give a real world example of why open standards matter, while it’s fresh in my mind.

I have a ‘Smart TV’ made by Samsung (which they no longer support.) I have a Samsung Galaxy S phone (2 actually, because Samsung no longer support them either, so ‘normals’ buy a new phone.) I have boxen, in various states of decrepitude, running Linux and I have occasional access to Apple OS X, Windows 7 laptops and a Google Nexus 7. They all connect over a wireless router from O2 and a Wireless Access Point from Netgear. They are not part of the problem.

It should be easy to play content from any of the intelligent devices on any of the display devices. Blindly moving bit-streams over distance is what The Internet was designed for. There is a device discovery protocol called UPnP and a wireless streaming protocol called DLNA that were defined for this. I’m sure you will be amazed to know that it isn’t easy. While AllShare on my Galaxy S plays nicely with it’s cousin the Samsung TV, the software isn’t available for the newer Android on the Nexus 7, nor even on the latest Samsung phones. Neither have Samsung made their AllShare software available for Linux (now renamed ‘Samsung Link’ to reduce irony levels.) Odd, as I thought Google said Android was ‘open’ and Android is built on Linux.

Apple want me dependent on the company iTunes store. Microsoft would like me using MediaServer to ‘keep me’ committed to Windows. Samsung wanted me to use AllShare/Link and Google now want me locked in to Chromecast, so ‘all my database are belong to them’.

I’d like life to be easy. I think most of us would. Apple will sell me easy. Google and Microsoft will sell a close approximation, and cheaper. I suspect Samsung will change their definition of easy every 6 months because clearly everyone should upgrade all their electronic equipment annually. I’m not willing to play this game of ‘1984’ bred with excessive consumption. I suspect DLNA underlies all these ‘products’ and they can be made to work together but an electric fence is still oppressive, even if you only believe it to be turned on.

I want freedom and privacy and I’ve accepted that I’ll soon have to pay for that. If we are in a new services market then I want it to be fair, transparent and competitive. Private protocols should not be used to lock us in walled gardens, however shiny the handles on the shovels.

Social vs Capital Part 1

When I joined ‘the computing industry’ (or was it ‘the data processing trade’?,) there were two kinds of computers: those made by IBM and the others. The others came in two flavours: IBM mainframe clones and ‘trying to be different’. Trying to be different was so successful that IBM were eventually forced to try being different to themselves.  The various hardware families all ran different operating systems. Changing hardware required all your software to be rewritten. Moving from IBMish mainframes meant your data had to be translated into ASCII. The proposed solution to the operating system problem was Unix. Unix was created to give hardware independence, through software portability. It was made easier to ‘port’ Unix by writing it in the C programming language rather than the specific assembly language of the hardware.

This revolution happened within AT&T, a company prevented from competing with IBM by anti-trust legislation. Freed from the profit motive, other than the desire to save costs, they did with Unix what was best for everyone. They gave it and its source code away free to anyone who wanted it. More importantly, they allowed its improvement by universities.

Later, the US government started to allow commercial exploitation of Unix by AT&T. Key source code became subject to non-disclosure agreements and the fastest period of cooperative computing innovation up to that point was closed down.

Two important things came out of this disaster – 1) PCs and hence Microsoft and 2) the Berkeley System Distribution (BSD) of Unix and GNU’s Not Unix (GNU), led by Richard Stallman, whose frustration at not having the source code to fix his own printer gave him such a mighty itch, he kick-started the whole Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement and it’s biggest success, the Linux Operating System, recently made popular by Google. Bill Gates’ biggest competitor was never Steve Jobs; it was an idea set loose by idealistic academics – that people are stronger when they share the product of their labours, that you pay people for producing, not for the product. This was a harmless ideal at first because large organisations owned the computers that were a key part of the means of production.

I am indebted to Robin Ince again, for pointing out in his TEDx Dublin talk ‘The Mind is a Chaos of Delight’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pfOHaWeTr8 that Evolution doesn’t predict only “survival of the fittest” but ‘survival of the just good enough not to die’, which I think explains Microsoft’s success, and for poking me in the profit-motive with his blog entry http://robinince.wordpress.com/2013/11/26/i-was-going-to-jump-in-the-canal-to-save-the-drowning-man-but-then-i-thought-whats-in-it-for-me/, to finally start this troubled tale of open software.

FOSS has been running around in the background, largely unnoticed by the lumbering beasts, much like the early mammals. Apple OS X is built on FreeBSD and Google Android and Chrome OS are based on the Linux kernel. In the long run, Apple and Google may look like the last of the small, fast raptors rather than the first intelligent apes, because somewhere along the way, the sharing became one-directional, and their essentially predatory nature struggled to survive as their more social competitors saw the danger and drove them into the swamp.

In forthcoming posts, I plan to look at the dangers the FOSS communities’ dreams of Freedom are facing in the current collision with Capitalism.