Innovative…0
rzwitserloot posted in tech on December 8th, 2006

I’m so happy I live in an innovative country!!

The final spam solution: Social networking.0
rzwitserloot posted in tech on June 22nd, 2006

Seth Godin reports on the spammers having found news aggregators. As you may have guessed, the news isn’t good for the aggregators.

Seth suggests counting a ‘known’, ‘respected’ voice more than a total stranger’s, where those terms (known/respected) are defined by their previous submission’s performance. The problem with that tactic, while it would work, is that you get into the groupthink problem: Only a small set of people will bother to submit news, because the rest would have to be noticed amongst an onslaught of SPAM. It’s been proven, time and time again, that making SPAM irrelevant through the use of spam filters and such doesn’t stop them: It’s so cheap for spammers to do it (they’ve aready written their scripts) that they’ll continue for the benefit of those few who check new submissions regardless of reputation of the submitter.

Another problem is hopping sites: If a reputable contributor from one thing decides to get into something else, he has to start all over again. Inefficient. A third problem is for those beginning their foray into internet contribution: They do have to start from scratch, but if you need a reputation with at least one site to get into others, our pilgrim will never get there.

What we really need is a leaf from the real world: Trust.

Here’s how it works: If a friend (or someone else I trust ‘in real life’ OR from the web) points me to something interesting, it tends not to be a spammer. We can use the web to extend this principle to half to all of the entire world population by using the social web: If a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend finds something interesting, its not spam.

if it does end up being spam, then I tell my friend that his friend’s friend needs to be told about a spam linkage in my social web. At some point in the chain, the spammer is found out, and either the spammer’s friend drops his trust, or he convinces the spammer to stop, or if spammer’s friend is unwilling to rat out the spammer, the spammer’s friends’ friend drops the trust of the spammer’s friend.

The problem is that it only works exactly as described if everyone’s personal social web is unique. This is a non-trivial computing issue, in that it requires huge resources and no small amount of cryptography to ensure that identities are reputable without also making people identifiable without being asked for it.

I have no definitive solution for how to set it all up technically, but I do think such a system is utterly impervious to spammers and widely applicable, from blog commenting to news aggregators to the original: email.

Back to the bomberman4
rzwitserloot posted in me, tech on May 20th, 2006

Apparently my forays into bomberman last time I was at the mediamatics building in Amsterdam for an unconference made some sort of impression.

There are some Firefox dev guys here along with an Opera employee, and it turns out bomberman makes for an excellent speed test. Only safari manages the full 50 FPS that bomberman tries to run at.

There isa debug build of bomberman available here. The number in the top box should be between 40 and 50 for a full speed bomberman. Any less and you’re in trouble.

Current standings, measured when 1 bomberman is running, a bomb is pulsing, and one explosion is going off, all measured on my iBook G4 1.333 Ghz (50 is max):

safari 2.0.3: 44
firefox 1.5.0.3: 15
firefox 1.6a1 (Deer Park Alpha 2): 18
opera 9 preview 1: 36

Note that at least in firefox (either version), the addition of the FPS counter and the debug boxes SIGNIFICANTLY slows down the whole thing, whereas Safari doesn’t skip a beat. This is really strange, because the purely DHTML (non-Canvas) based gfx demos like the one I reported on earlier (here) is notably faster in firefox.

Wikipedia submission on the Kalkar plant.1
rzwitserloot posted in tech on May 15th, 2006

I was looking for some information the Kalkar Fast Breeder nuclear reactor, but to my surprise there was no wikipedia article.

I remedied the situation. Feel free to proofread. It’s not much more than a stab and I used my rather inferior knowledge of german and the German page.

Speaking of, this kind of thing is a brilliant way to learn german.

Creating communities automatically web2.0 style9
rzwitserloot posted in tech on May 14th, 2006

Wherein I bash a decision made by my current (but soon to be ex-?) favourite news aggregator, reddit, continue on for an encore about how any such popularity contest-based stuff is doomed from the beginning, and then offer a workable solution for all to enjoy.
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Deniable file systems0
rzwitserloot posted in tech on April 19th, 2006

Bruce Schneier discusses the concept of ‘deniable file systems’ here. Perhaps all too relevant in today’s era. Read on for my own explanation on how to make one. (Warning: It’s real tricky).

Incidentally, that’s a good example of what I mean with: Security Breaks occur almost always due to a brainfart in protocol design, almost never in algorithms like Rijndael or RSA.
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meebo but better?1
rzwitserloot posted in tech on April 2nd, 2006

theswitchboard is a site serving up a whole switchboard solution using java applets. Like meebo, a web-based chat system, but with VoIP. Appears to be specifically designed to be a sort of ‘fire and forget’ solution for small companies needing a switchboard.

Pretty neat idea! I have been looking at asterisk but that’s still plenty confusing and takes a lot of work to set up still.