Category: Internet

Collateral Damage

The US Government yesterday shut down popular file storage site Megaupload (I can’t link to it because the site is down). The Feds have a very well written, 72-page indictment indicating the illegal activity that was going on there and the fact that the stuff pretty well knew that they were making their millions by selling files they didn’t own. That aspect of the case will be covered in court, and, whether or not you agree with the circumstances, it’s not what I want to cover here.

The problem is, of course, that there are tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of users who used Megaupload for perfectly legitimate, legal storage of files. As of yesterday, all their access to those files is gone. Work documents that groups were collaborating on, family photo albums, insurance records, and other valuable documents, now completely unavailable.

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Stop PIPA and SOPA

I have the regrettable honor to live in the congressional district of Lamar Smith, sponsor of the more regrettable SOPA and PIPA bills. Here is the letter I sent him this morning:

Dear Sir,

SOPA and PIPA are bad laws that fundamentally affect the freedoms enjoyed by Americans. I do not want to see the USA using the same techniques as China and Iran to control our citizens. Moreover, I have worked in the Internet industry—previously, as an engineering manager for Yahoo!, and currently as a software architect for Rackspace hosting—and I can tell you that these laws, if passed, would create huge burdens on providers while actually doing very little to stop piracy.

I encourage you to drop your support for these laws. No businesses have ever been successful in the long term by using the legal system to repress competition, and these acts will simply NOT stop the mechanisms used, nor the motivations for, sharing illegal content. The solution to intellectual property infringement is NOT to place a huge burden on businesses to enforce someone else’s rights, and I, for one, am appalled as the loss of freedoms that have occurred in the USA to such an extent that such laws could even be conceived.

Yours sincerely,
Glen Campbell

Pile up the photos

PhotoPile.me is a really cool site that lets you view all of your Instagram photos at once. Ok, maybe not all of them, but a nice big pile of them that’s really quite striking. Here’s mine (click through to see the live site):

Very cool (at least if you use Instagram).

How I invented Web 2.0

I recently took down all of my Siteframe-based websites. Because of the innovative nature of some of the technology (if I may be so bold), I’ve written up a brief history of Siteframe for your perusal.

Let me know if you have any questions.

 

Siteframe

In 1997, I acquired a Contax T*IX camera. It used APS film, and was small and light, and had an extraordinary Carl Zeiss lens. After a year or two, I upgraded to a Contax G1, an innovative autofocus rangefinder camera in 35mm format (which also had superb Carl Zeiss lenses). Looking for more information, I found an Internet mailing list for other Contax G enthusiasts. By 1999, I had purchased the domain contaxg.com and had set up a primitive website for sharing photos among the members of the mailing list. People would email me the photos, and I would manually edit the pages and upload the images.

In 2000, I moved from England to Silicon Valley. I converted an old PC to run Linux, and I started running contaxg.com over my DSL line. Managing the site manually had become a burden, so I built a somewhat less primitive site using PHP where people could upload their own images. I had never had a lesson in the Internet protocols, and I didn’t know the difference between GET, POST, and HEAD, so I made a lot of mistakes, but I learned a lot, too.

I took that learning and created what I called a “website toolkit,” a set of code that could be used to deploy an image-sharing website. By February of 2001, this had become the first version of Siteframe, a website framework that encapsulated much of what would become known as “Web 2.0″—it supported user-submitted content, it allowed online editing, it had comments, notifications, “skins,” and most of the features that differentiate dynamic, user-managed sites from the static websites of old. The web had become a toolbox, not a display window.

My experience with Siteframe helped me get my first Internet-related job as a PHP developer at Yahoo! News. Siteframe went through multiple iterations; it was used as a legal search engine and it was used as an internal content-management system for some Yahoo! sites. When the Indonesian tsunami hit in 2005, someone used Siteframe to set up a website that was used for the next several years to share documents and information among various international relief agencies.

At its peak, I was receiving about 20,000 email registrations per year for Siteframe. Alas, the pressures of time and family and other commitments kept me from working on it, and it stagnated. As hackers became more and more sophisticated, more and more security vulnerabilities were revealed. Techniques that were commonplace in 2002 for building a website turned out to open gaping holes in the site’s (often minimal) defenses.

Earlier this year (2010), someone used a vulnerability in Siteframe to hack one of my servers and use up more than 22 terabytes of bandwidth in just a few hours. The resulting charges caused me to take down all my remaining Siteframe sites.

The code for Siteframe is now available on Github, but I strongly recommend against using it for a production website. Hopefully, someone will take it over and maintain it, but I would not bet on it. There are newer, better technologies available for the same purpose.

I like to tell people that I invented Web 2.0 and, to a certain extent, it’s true. contaxg.com allowed people to take control of their web content long before sites like Flickr and Picasa came on the scene. I learned a lot about photography, PHP, HTTP, the Internet, and security. And I met a ton of really creative people along the way. Many thanks to everyone who participated.

Glen Campbell
San Antonio, Texas
28 December 2011

Links

Google+ and long-form publishing

In my previous post on Google Plus, the new social network from Google, I emphasized that, at least in terms of features, it has quite a ways to go. The service is still in Beta, and I expect it to go there, but it’s not there yet.

Philosopher

However, one feature, at least, stands head and shoulders above the rest of the competition: Google Plus permits lengthy posts. One of my continuing frustrations with social media sites are the arbitrary restrictions they place on content. Twitter limits you to 140 characters (ok, I can understand that somewhat: it’s based on the SMS text message size that Twitter was originally built to work with). Facebook restricts the size of a post, won’t let you edit them, and makes it very difficult to insert even a blank line in a post. Even FriendFeed (the current feature leader among social sites) limits the size of original posts and comments.

But Google Plus does away with that; while I’m sure there are some length restrictions on posts and comments, I haven’t seen or heard of them yet. And I’ve seen people take full advantage of that fact, treating Google Plus more like a “social blogging platform” than a mere status update.

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Google+ Encircles the Technosphere

Google Plus

Google Plus has launched, initiating a flurry of interest among the bleeding-edge technophiles of Silicon Valley (the metaphorical one that spans the globe, not just the literal one in California). It’s ignited a frenzy of commentary and participation not seen since, well, not really seen before—few services have started with such furor and immediate adoption.

Some of those A-list technophiles have given up their blogs, simply redirecting their personal domain to their Google+ profile page. Others have claimed that Google+ is the “Facebook killer,” and still others are ambivalent. In reality, of course, much of this is hype, and one of two things will happen: either Google will continue to build out G+ so that it truly is competitive with services like Facebook and FriendFeed, or else people will come to their senses, retract their statements, and write cautionary blog posts on the dangers of getting caught up in a feeding frenzy.

Some commentators add additional hype, claiming that Google+ is “not a social network” and that Google’s announcement emphasized “sharing” and not the “social network” nature of the site. This is, of course, baloney. Google Plus is nothing but a social network at the moment; it has no other features beyond those required to connect people together and group them. This is better known (in some circles [see what I did there?]) as a “social graph,” which is exactly what Facebook and LinkedIn maintain on their users.

What’s really important about Google+, however, is what it’s missing, rather than what it has, at least for the time being.

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