Werd I/O

My employer, Latakoo, is an enterprise media management company. We help people send files - mostly video, but we're expanding - really fast using any Internet connection.

A lot of our customers are involved in news and journalism. Here's a sample:

Used @latakoo on Air Force One to ship video of POTUS leaving DC as the plane was taxiing! Pretty cool technology. pic.twitter.com/N2rABZcCzF

— Jim Long (@newmediajim) December 9, 2013

It's not uncommon for us to get support requests from journalists in places like Syria who need to get footage out quickly and securely. Shortly, we expect to talking to people in Sochi a lot.

So here's the thing. We're a small, very agile (with a small "a") startup, and we need a little bit of help getting some of our upcoming projects out the door. They're all high profile, directly affect customers who themselves high profile, and are full of really meaty, interesting engineering problems. Oh, and they're based out of Austin or San Antonio in Texas.

Here's what we need:

• A freelance Objective-C iOS developer to help us with our completely redesigned iPhone and iPad apps.
• An experienced freelance PHP developer to help us build our media management interfaces, further expand our international file upload network, and integrate with things like ElasticSearch and CloudFront. Knowledge of HTML5, WebRTC and real-time application development are a big plus.

Sound interesting to you? Great. Email me at ben@latakoo.com, and let's talk!

Please, please, please, no agencies, offshore or otherwise. I want to work directly with individuals, and you have to be local to Austin or San Antonio.

The following is doing the rounds on social media. It sounds like fun, so I thought I'd adapt it:

I, Ben Werdmuller, promise to send a small work of art for the first fifty people who comment on this post by replying from their own website. Twitter or Facebook is not enough. Just link to this post and let me know you want in; I'll update this and provide an easy way to do that shortly. (If you're a developer, you can get started right away.)

***You may in turn post this on your own site and make something for the first fifty people who comment they want in on your post.***

The rules are simple: it has to be be your work, made by you and the recipient must receive it by the end of 2014 . It can be anything: a drawing, photo, video, a conceptual work of art or anything in between ...

This weekend, Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich called on the world to examine Firefox's source code to protect it from NSA intrusion:

Through international collaboration of independent entities we can give users the confidence that Firefox cannot be subverted without the world noticing, and offer a browser that verifiably meets users’ privacy expectations.

Firefox is the only major web browser that's fully open source; by extension, it's the only browser that can be publicly verified to be free of unwanted surveillance code (and other malware). This is a great example of how open source software is more secure, and can be more trustworthy than closed source platforms.

However, browsers are more than their core, so it's important to bring up the issue of plugins and components. These are not necessarily as verifiable, so users should proceed with diligent caution. (Perhaps a site could be established that verifies software and plugins in an auditable way?)

For example, the closed-source h.264 video codec has typically not been supported by Firefox's core code. Instead, the browser links to operating system libraries if they exist, or can use the Adobe Flash plugin to play these videos. In most cases, neither the OS libraries nor the Flash plugin are open source, and therefore are not verifiable. Additionally, you may remember that Cisco has released a component that will allow for cross-platform h.264 support:

We plan to open-source our H.264 codec, and to provide it as a binary module that can be downloaded for free from the Internet. Cisco will not pass on our MPEG LA licensing costs for this module, and based on the current licensing environment, this will effectively make H.264 free for use in WebRTC.

Note that it's the binary module, not the open source codec, that will be license-free, and this is what will be incorporated into Firefox:

We are grateful for Cisco’s contribution, and we will add support for Cisco’s OpenH.264 binary modules to Firefox soon. These modules will be usable by downstream distributions of Firefox, as well as by any other project.

This remains a great move by Mozilla, because it opens up sites like YouTube (and latakoo) without forcing users to install Flash, but it does mean that the h.264 codec component in Firefox will be unverifiable. In turn, this continues to highlight the importance of truly open source, license-free media codecs, not just to maintain a healthy software development ecosystem, but to protect all of our privacy, too.

The problem is not that there aren't any open source h.264 implementations; it's that the MPEG-LA issues licenses for the technology based on patents it controls, which effectively means that anyone who wants to create h.264 files at scale must build significant license costs into their model. Cisco's binary distributions include an agreement that they will pay for these license costs.

It's worth noting that Mozilla continues to work on Daala, its fully open source codec, and Google has made some strides into kind-of-license-free video with VP9. However, h.264 has established itself as a standard - we use it at latakoo for that reason - and is unlikely to be displaced in the near future.

The moments when I do my best thinking are always the quiet ones. All my devices are off, there's no sound around me except for (when I'm lucky) the gentle breeze through the trees, or the swish of far-off cars. My mind is at peace; uncluttered and uninterrupted, while at the same time free to meander.

Which is at odds with where my brain is for most of the rest of the time. Compared to many of my peers, I use a relatively small number of devices on a regular basis: really just one phone and one laptop. Nonetheless, I find myself checking social media potentially hundreds of times a day. I'm a dopamine addict, and I'm pretty sure it's killing my creativity, concentration and productivity.

I'm not alone. Earlier today, Tantek Çelik adapted an old saying for the modern age:

In the land of the distracted, the singularly focused person is king.

But how negatively is social media affecting the way I think?

Note that the problem is with multitasking, not lack of focus. Unfocused thought can be an advantage:

In recent years, however, scientists have begun to outline the surprising benefits of not paying attention. Sometimes, too much focus can backfire; all that caffeine gets in the way. For instance, researchers have found a surprising link between daydreaming and creativity—people who daydream more are also better at generating new ideas. Other studies have found that employees are more productive when they're allowed to engage in "Internet leisure browsing" and that people unable to concentrate due to severe brain damage actually score above average on various problem-solving tasks.

The results regarding multitasking, however, are not so positive. Clifford Nass, a psychology professor at Stanford, noted the effect of multitasking on students at his institution, specifically with respect to smartphones:

The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. [...] We have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted.

They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand. And even - they're even terrible at multitasking. When we ask them to multitask, they're actually worse at it. So they're pretty much mental wrecks.

Furthermore, just as second-hand smoking has effects beyond the original user, this multitasking behavior affects others too:

On a test following the lecture, students in view of multitaskers performed significantly more poorly than those who weren't in view of multitasking. The difference was 17 percent, enough to drop a solid A to a B-. Less surprisingly, a second study confirmed that the multitaskers themselves, not just those who incidentally witnessed multitasking, similarly suffered a drop in performance.

I've struggled with low self esteem for much of my life, which is associated with dopamine levels, and may make me more susceptible to this kind of addiction. Regardless of whether there's any truth to this or not, in 2014, I want my brain back.

Already, I've reduced my social media usage by posting to my own site here at werd.io rather than directly to the silos in question. This month, I'm reducing the number of quick-fix sites and networks I participate in, and have already jettisoned Instagram and Snapchat. It's not that I'm becoming an Internet hermit; instead, I want to focus on the kinds of content and interactions that are enriching to me. If I'm learning, growing and being productive, that's great. If I'm persisting because I get superficial rewards with no real lasting value to me, then it's time to jump ship. Long-form communication and engaging conversations are important.

As is spending more time with everything switched off, a cup of tea in my hands, leaves rustling in the breeze.

It's traditional to create resolutions for the new year. I've been thinking a lot about where I want to take my work in 2014; these are some ideas.

Write.

Specifically, I want to write more for other people, following from my previous work for the likes of ZDNet, IBM DeveloperWorks and Packt Publishing. I'm also interested in guest posting on blogs and sites around the web, about the social web, #IndieWeb, open source and responsible application development.

Empower independent content creators.

How can we put independent creators on a level pegging with the world's largest media companies? One thing I've been thinking about is that 24-7 news channels are obviously not a future-facing content medium given the web, where you can look up breaking news whenever you want, wherever you want, from whomever you want, without having to wait for a newscaster to restart their 30-minute cycle. Despite the ease of the web, leaning back and watching TV (or some screen) is sometimes pleasurable. Could you create a video newscast that aggregates stories from multiple providers based on your interests and context? Google News meets CNN?

Help support niche communities on the web.

The strength of the web is that we can all publish and communicate with each other, in a variety of different media, and it can all interlink as a single, continuous mesh of conversation and information. Unfortunately, that strength has been undermined by the proliferation of data silos, which make it harder to establish these kinds of links, and also limit certain kinds of content, topics and conversation through conservative design.

There are so many things to talk about, in so many ways, and by limiting ourselves to the platforms that the likes of Facebook provide, and by funneling the value generated by our communities to those sites, we're not using the web to its full potential. I want to help support the full range of communities on the web, and help them be self-sustaining, so that the people who create safe spaces for niche topics can continue to maintain them.

Idno is certainly a part of this idea, and I will continue to develop it as a first-class social publishing platform for both groups and individuals.

Figure out open source for designers.

Open source software suffers by treating designers like second-class citizens.

The open source process for programmers is well-established: we have many different flavors of version control, and the tools that surround them are first-class. I'm as happy as I've ever been working with Git, and software like GitHub and GitLab.

Working with design media is harder. Not only is it hard to represent visual changes using version control, and manage them in a sensible way using our project management tools, but even the accepted file formats for design work are closed. Photoshop comps are the norm, and UX wireframes often use closed software like Omnigraffle. That's because those tools are absolutely the best ones for the job, but standardizing on those formats make it harder to build open tools for design collaboration. And even with this aside, issue trackers are all written with source code in mind.

Collectively, this all means that welcoming designers into an open source community is extremely difficult. Nonetheless, design is an extremely significant part of any software project. It's worth thinking about the first steps towards making this easier.

Build bridges.

It's hard to share from, eg, the Twitter app to my own website, whether it's based on Idno or something else. I'm planning on building a shim that allows me to do that more easily, based on Android's share dialog. But there's more to do. There are ways to take ostensibly closed platforms and find ways to pry them open. For example, functionality to share closed content by email can be used to integrate directly into other, open software. Other integrations are possible, exploiting "growth hacking" features designed to find more people to lock into these platforms.

Work from everywhere.

I've still never been to Seattle. Or Tokyo. Or Melbourne. And it's been too long since I was in London, or Oxford, or Edinburgh. I want to travel more, and use the fact that I can work anywhere there's an Internet connection - and that I am not responsible for a family at this stage in my life - to see more of the world.

If you'd be willing to host me at your office for a few days, wherever you are in the world, let me know!

As part of the Nieman Journalism Lab's Predictions for Journalism 2014, Jason Kottke writes:

Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice. Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come. But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly not blogs.

He then goes on to discuss the death of the reverse-chronological stream, as well as the inevitable move to what he calls tightly-bound social media sites. Thematically, it's an interesting companion piece to Anil Dash's seminal The Web We Lost, which was published last year at about this time.

And, despite some hedging on his personal blog, it's clearly true. Almost none of you will have found this link through a feed reader (although my stats show that some of you are using Feedly, Digg Reader, and even Livejournal's RSS feature). Most links will have come through Twitter and Facebook, with a straggling number showing up through app.net and similar sites. If I'm lucky, someone might submit this post to an aggregator like Hacker News.

Note, though, that you're still reading it. The article isn't dying; you can think of the blog, or the stream, or the feed, as the container that the article sits in.

Medium exploits this in a clever way by presenting articles nicely, and then providing a magazine-style site for you to consume them in. Indieweb arguments about whether you should publish posts on a site that you control or on someone else's aside, there's no doubt that Medium's injected new life into long-form text on the web. That's great, and like Facebook and Twitter, you can choose to think of it as a well-executed proof of concept.

If you buy the idea that articles aren't dying - and anecdotally, I know I read as much as I ever did online - then a blog is simply the delivery mechanism. It's fine for that to die. Even welcome. In some ways, that death is due to the ease of use of the newer, siloed sites, and makes the way for new, different kinds of content consumption; innovation in delivery. Jason talks about the ephemerality of Snapchat (which is far from a traditional feed), and there are an infinity of other ways that content might be beamed to us on whichever device we happen to choose to be using at any particular moment. But these content forms are minor details.

The beauty of the independent web is that we can choose to represent ourselves online - and therefore, publish content - in a manner of our choosing. I happen to like the reverse-chronological feed, but if you prefer to publish in the form of an immersive 3D world, or a radio show, or full-screen autoplaying video with annotations, then, hey, that's up to you. It's all part of a rich, interlinking medium. Independence means not necessarily going with the flow.

The counterpart to that is how you read content. In the past, we've been very stream-heavy: RSS readers, Twitter feeds, Facebook timelines, and so on. But there's no need for that to be the case. Part of the joy of a diverse web is that while I might choose to read in the form of a feed or a newspaper, you might want to mash your reading list up in entirely new ways. You could have a robot announcer read to you while you drive to work in the morning (wouldn't that be better than the radio?), or mash related articles up to provide new kinds of content that provide better insight than the sum of their parts. And I can choose to use a completely different form to you. Each one of us can have a completely different experience.

That's a tough concept to get across to an audience that's used to mass media, where everyone consumes the same content in the same form. But we don't need that anymore. Not only can content be personalized, but the form of the content can be personalized. Facebook might agonize over the algorithm that decides which posts are surfaced, but in the future we can each have our own algorithms. Form and content will be separated.

These new kinds of readers will begin to appear in 2014, powered by simple web technologies like HTML and microformats. They will eventually be as easy to use as Twitter and Facebook. And they will make us all more empowered readers and creators, once again connecting us all, but this time on our terms.

TechCrunch reports that IBM bought Aspera yesterday:

Aspera’s software is built on “fasp,” its patented file transfer technology. Fasp is designed to leverage a company’s wide area network (WAN) and commodity hardware to achieve speeds that are faster than FTP and HTTP over a secure network. A WAN is essentially a company’s network across a large geographic region. Aspera’s technology optimizes the WAN through its software that allows for granularity in the way the technology is used. Through the process, Aspera optimizes the bandwidth, latency, bottlenecks and a host of other factors.

Essentially, Aspera is an optimized, proprietary protocol built on UDP. The sender and receiver needs to have Aspera software (or software that licenses Aspera's technology) installed for the transfer to take place.

IBM's thesis that we need faster file transfers is obviously correct. Uploading large data or media files is a pain, and it's not a problem that's going away. While downstream bandwidth is getting better all the time, upstream bandwidth often suffers in comparison - and between big data, more sophisticated applications and our insatiable appetite for video, the size of the files we're moving across the Internet is going up.

[Disclosure: right now I'm CTO at latakoo, a startup that helps enterprises (including TV news networks) move large amounts of media data around. We use a toolbox of compression techniques, as well as a global upload network, to make managing media files much faster. Journalists use us to, for example, upload video from Air Force One while the plane is taxiing down the runway.]

Don't think there's a problem? 5 minutes of recorded video on an iPhone 5 can be 1gb or more in size. Try uploading that from anything other than a super-fast broadband connection.

The trouble is that a protocol like Aspera's naturally leads to lock-in, and can only solve the problem for certain kinds of software. Unless fasp is open-sourced now that it's owned by IBM, every piece of software you own will need to have a license for their patents in order to take advantage of it. Not only does that lead to more expensive software, but it also limits the innovation that can happen around the protocol. If your business relies on fast file transfers, that's a lose-lose situation for you: you're locked into an expensive ecosystem, and there's little chance of a disruptive incomer to tweak and play with the protocol. Because of that, folks will just invent new protocols. When an improvement is made, it's likely you'll have to buy into a whole new ecosystem, as opposed to just upgrade to the next version. You'll hop from lock-in to lock-in.

Knowing that we need to speed up uploads, and use all available bandwidth, we need to think about other, more open approaches. UDP makes a lot of sense as a bedrock, but an open protocol designed for resilient file transfer is needed - and then, with a first version prototyped, we need to seed libraries all over the place, in every available language. We need to design it for backwards-compatibility. And we need to make sure it remains unencumbered with patents (possibly, in today's climate, by defensively registering a patent and then widely granting a license).

Our approach with Latakoo has always been to use standard protocols and optimize the files that are being transferred over the top. That works really well, and ensures wide compatibility with all kinds of networks, from corporate infrastructure through satellite modems connections. Even better would be to be able to rely on a well-supported open protocol that optimizes the upload stream in ways that TCP does not (and then, continue to optimize content with this as a starting point). Bittorrent exists, of course, and is wonderful - but is often blocked because of unfortunate connotations and liabilities relating to media piracy.

Developing such a protocol is in the interests of Netflix, Google, and, yes, Latakoo. Faster file transfers are empowering for every user, and save large service providers money. They're easier to integrate with, and allow for an ecosystem where the customer is in control. Everybody wins.

Back in the old days, you'd get a newspaper delivered, and you'd perhaps read it around the breakfast table or at your desk to find out what was going on in the world. The same paper, day in, day out. You'd read the columns, know which comics they ran, maybe do the crossword.

Some people still do this. That's nice. There's something great about reading a paper over a cup of coffee in the morning.

That doesn't apply to the web. Here's the Independent's paywall message:

Thank you for reading and relying on independent.co.uk for your news and information. You have now viewed your 30-day allowance of 5 FREE pages. Want to read more?

I'm sorry, The Independent, but I don't rely on you for anything. I don't read a linear paper on the web; I follow links curated by people I trust. The New York Times has no such illusions, meanwhile, but tells me, in all caps:

YOU’VE REACHED THE LIMIT OF 10 FREE ARTICLES A MONTH

Thanks, The New York Times. There's no need to shout.

The Independent's US price is $3.99 a month. The New York Times is a little more complicated, and expensive: $3.75 a week for the web and my phone, $5 a week for the web and my iPad, $8.75 a week for the web and my phone and my iPad, or all of the above plus a pile of dead trees every morning for the inexplicably lower price of $3.40 a week.

The New York Times is my favorite newspaper on earth, but imagine if I did this for every source I read on the web! I'd be broke, instantly. This is a model that scales well for the dead-tree economy, but doesn't work at all on the Internet, where you could easily read 10 sources in just a morning.

Hence advertising: the Independent knew I was unlikely to buy, so actually displayed a full video ad next to the advertisement asking me to subscribe. It clearly wasn't contextual, because it was for a Porsche - so it's a shot in the dark, basically. Awareness advertising with no real metrics (I assume) to back it up.

Another model must be found.

I don't think it's micropayments. Imagine if you had to pay for every single thing you read on the web, which is the future that micropayments promise. Just as if you paid for a subscription for every newspaper site on the web, if you're anything like me, you'd be broke pretty quickly. Or, alternatively, the payments would be of the kind that we've seen on subscription music services. That's a road that leads directly to Buzzfeed, where articles must be massively popular to turn a profit - and hence are impossibly populist.

In the old days, classified ads played more of a role. It's true that Craigslist's success disrupted $5 billion from the newspaper industry, but it's also true that this does not explain the hard times newspaper owners are experiencing. The context has changed, and attempts to drive traditional subscriptions show that the industry still hasn't full adapted to this. It's not that we're reading on multiple devices now, in different locations - it's that we're reading differently. The newspaper front page hasn't been our first stop in a long time.

Obviously, none of this is, well, news - countless articles have been written about this over the last decade. Yet, a solution has yet to be found. Which is a shame: journalism, newspapers and the communities they represent have become an important, and I'd say integral, part of the world in which we all live.

Back in 2009, I wrote:

Right now, we have to register with each application we want to use. What if we required each application we used to register with us, in digital identities under our own control?

What if, using these identities, anyone could connect to anyone else, and anyone could store their data anywhere as long as the storage provider followed the same broad standards?

The web itself would become a social networking tool.

By establishing a general standard for social application interactions, the services and technologies used to make connections become less relevant; the Internet is people, one big social network, and users no longer have to worry about how they connect. We can all get on with communicating and collaborating rather than worrying about where we connect.

The full piece was based on a talk I gave at Harvard University's Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. It declares a number of problems to solve:

• User control: users should have ultimate control over their data.
• Ownership: granularity of ownership, and the rights implied by ownership, is complex in certain contexts. Sometimes a single-user model of ownership is appropriate - but sometimes not.
• Privacy & Transparency: the ability to control who has access to your data footprint across the web, but also a clear knowledge of what happens to that data.
• Platform: software that actually embodies these properties.

In the interim, there have been many articles about the continuing silo-ization of the web - notably The Web We Lost by Anil Dash. In other words, the problem has become worse, not better. Generally speaking, users have less control, less ownership, less privacy and fewer platforms to choose from in 2013 than they did in 2009.

A glimmer of hope has been the indieweb, which I've written about at length. This is a movement that champions ownership, but through it, principles like user control, privacy, transparency and a healthy ecosystem of platforms are also promoted. Idno, the open source platform that powers this site, adheres to many indieweb principles.

There's more work to be done. I believe that contextual display advertising is the single biggest obstacle to a web that is under the control of users. In our advertising economy, users are tracked throughout the web in order to determine which ads will be performant for them. Mozilla Lightbeam is an extraordinary project that highlights the pervasiveness of the problem. Wherever we leave a data footprint, we are tracked.

The irony is that contextual advertising isn't even very effective! Fraud is rife in online advertising, and the price of online ads has dropped for eight straight quarters. As a result, publishers need to drive higher and higher visitor numbers, leading to less subtle growth strategies, often bordering on the unethical. Platforms seek vastly increased engagement, leading to an inability to remove your content, what amounts to spamming you to bring you back to the app, and a reduction in integration hooks that might make the software more useful within the context of a user's entire suite of applications.

On the content side, meanwhile, viral sites like Upworthy and Buzzfeed are king, which is great if you're writing about the top 15 things you might not know about Miley Cyrus - but death if you're a niche publisher, community or information source trying to make ends meet.

What if we rethink advertising in the same way that we're rethinking personal sites with the indieweb? "Niche" - in other words, highly specialized - communities are in many ways the lifeblood of the web. They're one of the things that makes it special; the fact that there can be a place to meet for any interest group. Finding platforms that will adequately financially support these groups, as well as by giving them responsible software that gives them control, privacy, transparency and ownership, will be hugely empowering.

Building the open web we want isn't just about software. It's about the mechanisms involved that will make it sustainable for people to create the right kinds of businesses that use it as a platform.

#indieweb #communities

Edward Snowden released this letter to the world in PDF format. The following is a searchable text version of same. Any errors or inconsistencies are unintentional and my own. I am unconnected to Edward Snowden and he has not authorized this reshare or transcription.

To whom it may concern,

I have been invited to write to you regarding your investigation of mass surveillance. I am Edward Joseph Snowden, formerly employed through contracts or direct hire as a technical expert for the United States National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, and Defense Intelligence Agency.

In the course of my service to these organizations, I believe I witnessed systemic violations of law by my government that created a moral duty to act. As a result of reporting these concerns, I have faced a severe and sustained campaign of persecution that forced me from my family and home. I am currently living in exile under a grant of temporary asylum in the Russian Federation in accordance with international law.

I am heartened by the response to my act of political expression, in both the United States and beyond. Citizens around the world as well as high officials - including in the United States - have judged the revelation of an unaccountable system of pervasive surveillance to be a public service. These spying revelations have resulted in the proposal of many new laws and policies to address formerly concealed abuses of the public trust. The benefits to society of this growing knowledge are becoming increasingly clear at the same time claimed risks are being shown to have been mitigated.

Though the outcome of my efforts has been demonstrably positive, my government continues to treat dissent as defection, and seeks to criminalize political speech with felony charges that provide no defense. However, speaking the truth is not a crime. I am confident that with the support of the international community, the government of the United States will abandon this harmful behavior. I hope that when the difficulties of this humanitarian situation have been resolved, I will be able to cooperate in the responsible finding of fact regarding reports in the media, particularly in regard to the truth and authenticity of documents, as appropriate and in accordance with the law.

I look forward to speaking with you in your country when the situation is resolved, and thank you for your efforts in upholding the international laws that protect us all.

With my best regards,

Edward Snowden
31 October 2013