The Leirdal Blog

We are visiting Rome, and for the first time I got an inkling about how many 5 million starlings are (also see BBC).

I guess this is a kind of "different" blog for me. A friend of mine has his own blog at blog.menneske.org. He is writing a small series on chocolate right now, and I found his entries kind of interesting and educational.
So "introducing" Svein Magnus Sørensen:

• Discovering fine chocolate


• Fine chocolate for beginners (part 1) (Part 2 is not available yet)

As a follow up to my earlier fantasy of new possibilities regarding a documented generation I would like to blow out some steam regarding social software as well.

One of the problems we see today is that there are only a few people producing the information that is consumed by all the rest. Those reading are participating with tagging, bookmarking and rating of the content, but even this should be easier. The production of the content could also be easier.

So let us play with the idea of a documented world. On our way forward we have a few stops on the way. Some of them we are experiencing right now, among else by using Facebook, Linked-In, Plaxo or other social networking applications. By blogging and micro-blogging what we do and what interests us we are giving the world knowledge and information that can be used by other applications as what we often call value-added content.

Consider this, you are watching a video or listening to a podcast on the net regarding some information. The video or audio is tagged in such a way that as you play the content, different meta-information rolls by in tandem with the content, and the media player might then display related information based on automated searches as you watch. We are talking hypermedia that intelligently can give you information that you need or want. You will be able to decide where the information is gathered from.

In the next generation of social software I expect us to be able to increase the value for each other in even better and easier ways than today. And as always, the enabler of these features will always be technology.

So in the future, expect great things. Probably not some of the small ideas I present to you here. What we will see will probably be better.

And you will be a part of it. By easily producing content, and adding meta-information and grading what you see. The world will give you more of what you want and of what interests you.

Whether it is semantic technology or intelligent search engines, I bid welcome to interesting and feature rich social networks, in a documented world where you can have an even more enhanced life experience.

Soon, in a life near you!

I don't know about you, but I always seem to feel that there are two kinds of graffiti lining up our city walls right now. The art: well executed, often illegal, maybe beautiful, complex figures or drawings on a wall. The other kind: Signatures and quick squiggles on a wall, ugly and badly executed. This is one of the last. I guess they are left by people with no talent and a great need for writing their name everywhere.

When you read the news from anti-virus companies and security advisors you get convinced that 90% of the software you find on the net is malware, and the last 10% have so many security issues that it turns out the same thing. At the same time a life seems to be worth less than the copyright interests of media companies.

I don’t know if you have noticed, but I feel that the whole world has been overrun by solutions and programs that want to harvest personal information about me. The products that don’t ask for the information grab it anyway.

Trusted computing is a much debated architecture, maybe rightfully so. That kind of architecture might limit the spreading of free/open source software. Microsoft has proven that they can offer this trough their HD-Video support. There they have signed code in all layers, and only approved hardware devices are allowed in the pipe from storage media to screen. I am not saying that it is impossible to bypass this pipe in some way, but the threshold to perform such a hack has been raised a fair bit.

So, when you consider the stack of components needed to display HD-Video, what do you need to have the same security/quality for our computers? Especially when you are connected to the Internet?

The question then is if we maybe should take a look at this “cursed” subject again. Financing solutions in order to secure that open source software can be verified and approved might become a reality. There is one thing that we have learned so far. It is impossible to count all evil. You cannot permit the execution of all software except the bad ones listed in a list. Such a list will never be complete. But you can allow all enumerated good software and block the execution of all other code. Anti-virus software tries to perform this enumeration on our behalf, but still they do not know everything and ask the users what to do when in doubt. When they do, the s**t hits the fan. Users do not know what to do. They do not realize the consequences of their choices.

Again, the driver is the money. It is somewhat of a symptom of the state of the world that it’s more important for Microsoft that a video is not copied than to secure the personal information of a user. If somebody steals all our personal details, all our money from our bank accounts and our identity, that is not as important for Microsoft as a video unlawfully duplicated and distributed.

So what is my wish for 2008?

My wish is that our lives and our identities will become more important to protect on the net than the economic interests of a few.

I grew up in the countryside in Norway. A fjord 100 meters from the house, a forest 30 meters behind the house and the mountains a few kilometres away. Wildlife to me was deer, fox, eagles and sea gulls. Now later in my life I moved into cities, and suddenly wildlife turned into pigeons, pigeons, a few sparrows, pigeons, a number of sea gulls and more pigeons. I guess that pigeons must be one of the modern success stories in nature.

In my family there seem to be some that carries "artsy" genes. Kristofer Leirdal is maybe the best known of these people. During WWII he spent some time with his brother on the family farm, and among else he created a lot of figures in plaster. They were mainly models for bigger statues, some of which he did in stone later on. This is a picture of a window on the farm where some of his plaster figures is put on display.

Bruce Schneier have this little gem available on his site today. Bruce and Marcus Ranum are discussing security issues and trying to guess where the field will be in ten years time. I've got to say that they are painting a somewhat bleak picture, and I sincerely hope that they are wrong in some of their assumptions, but I fear that they are probably correct.