yamahito

OpenID is an open decentralized framework for identity management. In other words, it’s a scheme for a single sign on username and password that any website can use.

It’s an interesting idea. I like the idea of it, the thought of having a single definitive presence online. However, I can think of many more reservations:

Security is an obvious one. The most secure safe system in the world is still potentially useless if the human being at one end is willing to share their credentials (e.g. their password) willy nilly. I’ve seen too many office workers who stick their system password to their monitor on a post-it note, let alone the hoards who seem content to swap their passwords for chocolate. And even IT Professionals aren’t immune from being tricked into giving their passwords. In fact, according to some beer-mat statistics, they might even be worse. If one password is all you need to access many resources, the potential damage when/if that password is compromised is that much higher.

Privacy is another issue. If log-ins are unique on a per-site basis, it’s harder for a profiler to collect information from multiple sources and tie them to an individual. If you know that individual has the same identity on multiple sites, collecting that information becomes trivial. Privacy is a funny one, though, because that ability to link data across different contexts is potentially a powerfully useful one in terms of user enablement.

There are pragmatic issues to consider as well: in order for such a system to be a success, it has to be popular and widely implemented. This requires some big companies to overlook significant corporate advantages in having their own authentication data. It might be somewhat naive to hope this will happen without some considerable advantages to reward them for doing so.

I’m sure commenters can think of several others; despite that all, though, I’m still cautiously liking the idea: I can’t help it, I’m a romantic fool cursed with cynicism.

Matt is a respected security researcher who has a rare gift of communicating his field.

I’m lucky to be rather tenuously associated with him through a website his partner created and runs, on which I am a (seriously lapsed) moderator. Every now and again something goes disasterously wrong with the server hardware and we get a little email from him to remind us of his presence. Usually something along the lines of ‘I fixed it, it’s working now’.

Matt is almost entirely unknown about by the frequenters of the website he has done a lot to maintain over the years; occasionally one of us comes across his name in his professional context, given that there are a fair few computer profesionals around on the web, but generally these little emails serve as the only reminders of what Matt does.

And what Matt does is interesting. Moreover, Matt has the rare gift of being able to talk about what he does and make it sound interesting. You should go have a little look at his site and his blog that’s up there - hopefully he’ll get around to writing more of it sometime in the future.

I was recently asked to disable internet access on a suite of macs for an exam. Easier said than done: I don’t have any router/firewall control for the network they’re on, and they would still need network printing access.

There were a few things I could have done: blocking port 80 and 443 on the machines’ local firewalls, or changing the proxy settings to point the web browsers to some bogus proxy. Problem is that the machines will need internet again within minutes of the end of the exam, and I’m just not confident enough that changing such settings won’t bugger something up.

So I went down a different route: this is a script for running at the start of an exam. It only runs on a management server with Remote Desktop, so no worries about buggering up the client machines. It monitors the current application of each machine, and if someone runs firefox or safari, it will log their machine name, the application, and the timestamp, then bring up an observation window on their computer.
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…Is that they expect you to make a decision without enough information.

Work has a subscription to MacUser that normally ends up on my desk, and I always enjoy reading Howard Oakley’s column and the emails there. He can sometimes be a bit curmudgeonly, as a computing veteran, but I think he’s raised a good point here that’s equally applicable to pretty much any OS or browser out there.

Moreover, the point is based on what should be a fundamental principle of computing: too often developers these days are getting carried away with some technical idea without considering the pragmatic needs and concerns of the end user. It can be difficult to take that step back to gain some perspective if you relish getting your hands in the guts of the technology you work with. My problem tends to be the other way - brainstorms and careful consideration often results in great ideas that never go anywhere because I don’t have (or make) the time to get stuck in.

I’m sure it wasn’t long ago that a ‘mash-up’ was a seamless mix of two existing songs, but these days it seems to be taking on a different meaning in web design.

The name of the game, it seems, is taking elements from all those wonderful web-sites we belong to now, and mixing them together in some sort of portal/web-application.

Hmm… my latest flickr pictures and blog entries together with facebook information on a home page I’ve been meaning to write… Could be good, if it’s done right.

Honestly, I don’t know if it’s a useless fad or the next stage of web evolution. But Microsoft has jumped onto the bandwagon with Popfly.

Lots of people see me as some sort of ‘Mac geek’ (despite the fact that 95% of all my computing happens on a windows PC (for the moment)). Others are struck by my linux advocacy for servers. The truth is I don’t feel I’m particularly anti-Microsoft or pro-apple/linux. All of the current OS options out there grind my gears at some point or another, and all I want is to get the best of all possible worlds. But I do have some ‘automatic reservations’ about products from any software house based on previous experience, so I’m going to list a couple of MS-centric ones:

Microsoft have traditionally followed very closed-source development philosophies. When I say that, I’m not talking about the fact that their software is closed source, or that they charge too much for it: I really don’t think that they’re doing anything there that isn’t their right to do. The problem is that it extends to proprietary file formats and communication protocols and the like. And MS aren’t alone in this: real player, AOL Instant messanger, the list goes on.

One of the reasons I like how apple and google have changed in the last decade is that they will embrace open standards, even though their software is closed source. It means it’s easier to move data around different platforms, different clients… and rather than losing business, it seems to increase their market share. I think that this attitude will prove to be more successful in the long run.

So I’m a little cautious about popfly from MS - and also a little surprised, in a good way. I’m hoping that it will be a little gleam of Microsoft’s past glories - not a big invention, but a piece of useful innovation.

Some of these guys over at Flickr have come up with an interesting effect

It uses a setting called ‘Vibrancy.’ Vibrancy is a Saturation based parameter. As far as I’m aware, this is only available in Adobe Lightroom and the latest Adobe raw converters. I don’t have either of those, so I’m guessing that increasing the vibrancy will preferentially increase saturation of the least saturated parts of an image, whilst increasing the saturation of already heavily saturated parts of the image less drastically.

The effect that the guys on flickr are using involves a decrease in vibrancy, which desaturates all but the most saturated parts of the image, and then an increase in plain ol’ saturation, which normally (or almost normally) re-satuates those parts of the image. In other words, the grey bits get greyer, the bright bits get brighter or stay the same.

The challenge, in a nutshell, is to reproduce this effect with a jpeg.

Bonus marks for explaining to me how to do it with traditional film

Actually, if you can get photoshop to do this, it raises a more general, interesting possibility: “A ‘contrast’ control for the chroma channel” (Ian Tindale’s description of it, not mine)

You may notice a new link to my flickr page

I’ve been meaning to put a selection of my better pictures on Flickr for a while: the photodump is just that, a dumping ground, diamonds and slag all together. Ian (Tindale aka Rods Tiger) has been using it for a while, and I’m impressed with the level of a lot of the photography on there.

So I’ve been having a little play, and my good impressions extend to the interface of flickr itself. I’ve even created a little “Drive By Shooting” group that any flickr users can pop their photos in once it takes off

Ballmer must go?

I have my doubts about any article which starts with a joke likening Microsoft to a country yokel and then proceeds, in the next paragraph, to deny that it’s ‘Microsoft knocking copy’

However, I have more serious doubts about a man who loses control of his emotions to the point where he throws chairs around. I’ve done that, but I was eight at the time.

Maybe they have a point?

I’m having problems today with a server that keeps on downloading corrupt service pack installers for Windows 2003. Not just service packs, either, but most compressed installers, particularly from Microsoft.

The problem I’m having isn’t Microsoft’s fault (I don’t think anyway - yet to get to the bottom of the cause), but their download center doesn’t make it any easier.

It’s all Http. There’s no mechanism for checksum or error checking that I can find. edit — other than tcp/ip itself, of course

I know it’s easy to blame all sorts of things on Microsoft because they’re large and successful. Very often they don’t get the reputation they deserve for what they have acheived, even from those of us who believe their ethos is somewhat flawed. Still, I can’t help but feel this is a bit… unprofessional from a software provider. Particularly one who charges for most of their products.

end rant.

I’m not very good at it: perhaps I should try one or both of these?

Windows: Hippo Update Checker

Mac: App Update Widget