the onda

The story of the clever Chinese hackers compromising Google's data center (along with 20 other companies) is almost too juicy to believe. Everyone likes the notion of a super smart hacker enemy who can, at a whim, bring crashing down the electronic infrastructure on which we are increasingly dependent. Especially if, along with the jingoistic fud, we can get a picture of a Chinese cyber cafe with scads of young men passionately pounding on computers (nevermind that they may be playing WoW).

All of which is why I think I might be more in the camp of Douglas Rushkoff, who suggested today that this might be Google's red herring for the fact that running all of your life from a server which you can only access through a leaky and insecure browser (HTTPS "fixes" notwithstanding) might not be the best plan— unless of course your entire engine for growth consists of getting more eyes to do just that.

I'm not sure that it is as stark as Rushkoff claims, but it certainly seems plausible that some brilliant PR person who has read a few too many Michael Crichton books giddy over the spin that could take care of two birds with one stone: the potential flaws with our favorite new mode of computing and the oopseys around making an "Evil" deal with the Chinese censors a few years ago.

And then again, may this is all just the Daemon just getting started...

I am skeptical of people who claim to want touchscreen laptops for the simple reason that I detest smudgy screens and thus can't see myself ever wanting to dirty up my laptop.

That said, I find the new extra large trackpads on the aluminum Macbook Pros to be the single most upgrade worthy feature in the laptops. Along with Apple's new Magic Mouse, they really do represent a new kind of human interface peripheral.

Except that for the last few months, my three and four finger gestures have completely stopped working. I know it may sound like overkill to anyone from the Wintel side of the house, who is used to at most the two finger trackpad scroll, but 3 fingers to navigate forwards/backwards (this is mapped to 2 fingers on the magic mouse) and 4 fingers to toggle Exposé (a desktop-clearing UI thing) become incredibly useful to anyone who has bothered to train themselves to use them. Trust me.

In case you are among those Mac users afflicted by the trackpad gimping software upgrade that took away my 3/4 finger gestures, here is the solution:

1. Run Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app) and click the "Repair permissions" button.
2. Reboot your Mac. Before it starts its reboot sequence hold down command-S (also known as Apple-S) to boot into single user mode. When you get a prompt, type in:

fsck_hfs -f /dev/disk0s2s 

I have no idea how disk permissions can affect the trackpad/mouse driver, but after some Googling and experimentation, I discovered that this fix did the trick for me.

VR pioneer Jaron Lanier has a fascinating and incredibly well-written editorial in the WSJ today called "World Wide Mush" where he looks at the dark side of what he calls "digital collectivism," or the ethos behind the platforms and projects that have most benefited from user contributions.

As a huge fan of open source over proprietary software, and insightful bloggers over established journalists, I was particularly taken by his claim that the era of digital collectivism is destroying the ability for the folks engaged in intellectual work to make a decent living. As he writes:

We're well over a decade into this utopia of demonetized sharing and almost everyone who does the kind of work that has been collectivized online is getting poorer. There are only a tiny handful of writers or musicians who actually make a living in the new utopia, for instance. Almost everyone else is becoming more like a peasant every day.

This is a bold claim— however it is one which he supports with a number of interesting arguments that make the piece a gem. Curious as to whether I could do some of my own quick research on the peasantization of the folks at the frontier of digital culture, I turned to Indeed's fantastic salary comparison search engine to try to tease out the differences in jobs available to folks playing in similar but distinct positions.

I started with my favorite: bloggers versus traditional journalists: according to Indeed, the average salaries for jobs listing "blogger," "reporter," and "journalist" in their title or descriptions are $34K, $44K, and $52K respectively. Ouch!

Turning then to software, where there is little doubt of the leverage and impact of open source, I was similarly surprised. I wanted to look at web developers according to technology of choice so I picked "PHP" (the most prevalent and totally open source), "Struts" (a Java-based middle ground between both worlds), and "ASP.NET" (Microsoft's completely proprietary stack) and came away with: $75K, $89K, and $83K respectively.

Now there are all sorts of problems with this type of quick-and-dirty analysis, but the pattern that emerges as you play out the types of job descriptions more aligned with this new era of digital collectivism against their predecessors is that Larnier is right— digital collectivism is no panacea for making a living.

A similar theme has emerged around the notion of "digital sharecroppers" or platform purveyors that leverage millions of small user contributions to build accrue most of the value for themselves. With the exception of eBay, and possibly Google (until now), this seems to be the case among all of the other "platforms" that have emerged in the last decade. So much so in fact, that I often tend to read the vision of many of these platforms, "X is going to democratize Y," as "X is going to really reap the investments of users who will do Y for next to nothing."

Examples:

Facebook is going to democratize communications and publishing = Facebook is going to reap the creative investment of users who will pour their lives into the largest privacy violation cesspool ever known to man.

Apple is democratizing mobile applications = Apple is going to reap the hundreds of millions of hours invested by developers for apps that are either free or sell for next to nothing so that they can maintain and possibly widen their lead selling expensive small computers.

The combination of these two trends makes Larnier's parting message in the piece something we should all be paying close attention to:

The owners of big computer resources on the Internet, like Google, will be able to make money from the open approach for a long time, of course, by routing advertisements, but middle-class people will be increasingly asked to accept a diet of mere kudos. No one should feel insulated from this trend. Poverty has a way of trickling up. Once everyone is aggregated, what will be left to be advertised?

Certainly worth at least keeping in mind as we plow forward into this brave new world.

There is no doubt that in the tech world, the combination of the shift to "cloud" computing (which to me means both the growing relegation of the desktop PC as nothing more than an intelligent cache that can power more responsive UIs, and the ability to leverage at-scale virtual compute environments run by the big web companies) plus the explosion of post-PC ubiquitously connected mobile devices, are going to be two most important ingredients in the cocktail that gets mixed up over the course of the coming year.

In the context of those two undeniable trends, here are three predictions for the coming year:

Privacy on the net is going to become a big deal. Facebook's recent snafu was just the start of this. Every year people do more important stuff online, and when combined with big companies whose emergent business models are predicated on targeted media accelerating attempts to ramp revenue, you get an explosive combination. This will only be exacerbated by mobile devices streaming all sorts of interesting metadata (starting with location) to these same web services. It will not take long for one of these location-based features to mix with lax privacy in a way that causes real harm in the physical world— theft, adultery, rape, or murder style— and when it does, it will create one of the big stories of 2010. It will also result in a groundswell movement on the part of normal users to take control over their information, be it what gets clicked on from their web browser, or emitted from a mobile.

And while on the subject of mobile, Android is poised to be the only alternative to the Apple juggernaut (goodbye RIM, goodbye Symbian, goodbye Maemo)— and in some key ways, it will surpass the iPhone this year. The obvious one is what is being repeated all throughout the tech blogosphere: that as everyone BUT Apple depends on Android, their installed base will quickly eclipse Apple. While I think this may be true, I am not sure that it matters all that much, as the installed base we should be talking about is that of the Webkit-derived mobile browsers that are common to both the iPhone and all of the Android devices. From a developer perspective, I think that this will increasingly become the relevant target (especially as the AppStore mania settles)— and will continue being so until the smartphone form factor settles down, x86 PC style (which I personally hope doesn't happen for a long time).

Where Android's ascendancy does matter is that as a more open system, it will enable hardware manufacturers and service providers to play with deep web service integration in much more interesting ways that any sandboxed developer environment ever will. Obvious choices will be things like data synchronization and content delivery— both of which a big company would see as ways of making users more "sticky." But there are other more interesting deep integration efforts along the "smartphone as a remote control for life" which innovative companies will be able to play with.

And finally (and I realize that this one is a geek aspiration and a stretch), I hope to see 2010 begin the process of turning regular users into programmers. Right now we are almost there without realizing it: every time someone sets a Google News alert, uses an eBay sniping program, or customizes a Pandora list, it is a form of programming. A few years ago, when millions of kids where learning rudimentary HTML and CSS to trick out their MySpace pages, I thought we were heading in this direction, but it didn't seem to catch on. This year, with the notion of APIs being front-and-center among web service developers, we may start to see something that goes beyond the geek efforts that were Yahoo Pipes and Google Mashup Editor. Already, I am amazed at how many regular folks seem to be interested in the Facebook API, and the other day, while helping a friend with a Wordpress installation, I was shocked to see how vibrant and turnkey its plug-in ecosystem has become.

The best part of anticipating the coming year is that, no matter how you cut it, it promises to be more exciting than the last one that just passed!

As we close the decade in tech, I've been reading the "2000s in summary" style articles and blog posts, amazed at how much we've gotten out of this decade. Wifi and broadband hitting a tipping point. Peer to peer. Amazon as a global powerhouse. The cloud as a viable platform. The iPod, the iPhone, and Apple's phoenix-like emergence as the dominant computer company of the 21st century. The Android alternative. The Nintendo Wii and other types of HID devices all leading to more touch, more direct manipulation, and a more seamless integration of man and machine. The AppStore, ebooks, and alternative business models for content online. OLPC and the netbook craze that it ignited. YouTube. Facebook. Twitter. Google as the fastest growing brand of all time and the future creche for our AI overlords.

It is hard to look at all of these products, services, and trends that have come into being over the last ten years and not be overawed. And yet, if I had to pick the vector that will have the longest lasting influence on the world, it wouldn't be any of these. Sure they are they adorn the pages of Geek People every day, and we all love to spill tons of virtual ink on them.

But at the end of the decade, the greatest single trend to emerge in the last ten years is the way in which the Internet has enabled mass scale changes in new forms of collaborative work. Of course, the poster boy for this trend is Wikipedia which has now bested both Microsoft's Encarta, and the much more venerable Britanica. But the real impact of this new style of work is much more apparent in the effects of a globally connected swarm of human minds working, not for the almighty dollar and all of the associated external incentives, but for the intrinsic rewards of mastering a craft and belonging to a community.

Its name is "Open Source—" coined at the beginning of the decade by people who were trying to differentiate this new style of working on software from the ideological free software movement. From it we have gotten Linux and Apache, MySQL and Mozilla. Today a software engineer working in one of the two platforms that actually matters (cloud and mobile) does so with the richest toolset ever available; from languages like the Perl/Python/Ruby family of dynamic languages to tons of high quality libraries to do just about everything imaginable. All because a whole load of hackers were early to this party and have spent the last 10 years showing everyone else how it is possible to work, collaborate, and belong without the explicit motivation of material wealth, the very grease of modern capitalism.

It may started in software, but as Wikipedia has shown, it will not stop there. To try to understand why, pick up my last book recommendation of the year: Daniel Pink's new brand book, "Drive," which delves much more deeply into why this new form of organized value creation works. Or subscribe to Umair Haque in your blog reader for 2010.

Happy new decade. In the midst of the economic cataclysms of the last couple years, of multiple wars of the last decade, it pays to pause for a moment and realize that there is no better time to be alive than now.