9fans - fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
* [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
@ 2016-03-30 23:40 cigar562hfsp952fans
  2016-03-31  0:12 ` Winston Kodogo
                   ` (4 more replies)
  0 siblings, 5 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: cigar562hfsp952fans @ 2016-03-30 23:40 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans

Greetings, 9fans!

We all know that Plan 9 started as a retrospective "re-take" on UNIX,
occasionally referred to as "UNIX done right".  This has led to
differences between "the Plan 9 way" of doing something vs. "the UNIX
way" of doing it, such as those highlighted by the infamous "Unix to
Plan 9 command translation" page on the Plan 9 wiki.  More generally,
this can be viewed as the difference between the "right" way to do
something versus the "popular" way to do it.

So, my question is, what would be the Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook?
Stated differently, if social networking were to be re-imagined and
re-done "right" this time, how would it be done?


E-Mail
======

The obvious answer that comes to mind is e-mail.  It worked well for
decades.  Although 9fans appear to continue this tradition in grand
style, using e-mail for social networking poses a number of problems:

1. _Spam.  The fact that SMTP doesn't authenticate senders of e-mail
   messages has led to a proliferation of spam which has greatly
   burdened the medium, requiring complex workarounds that usually put
   legitimate mail at risk of misclassification as "junk".

2. _`Subject lines`.  Few people seem to know how to choose an
   appropriate "Subject:" line, anymore.  People will use subjects like
   "tonight's meeting", without specifying what group is meeting, when
   the meeting is, or what it is about.  When the topic of a thread
   drifts from its original topic, few people remember (or even think)
   to update the Subject: line.  Often, when one person wants to send a
   second person an e-mail, the first person will simply reply to the
   last message they received from the second person, even if it was on
   a completely different subject.  (This, of course, creates false
   relationships between the Subject: and References: fields used to
   define threads.)

   Despite the fact that most MUAs (including Webmail_) offer the
   ability to automatically sort e-mail into different categories, many
   people don't know how to sort incoming mail.  When they get too much
   e-mail in their "Inbox", the become annoyed and confused.

   These problems were addressed, somewhat, by the advent of the Web
   forums which were popular in the 2000's.  On a Web forum, moderators
   could reclassify posts and reorganize threads to better reflect their
   content.

3. Listservs.  For people familiar with mailing lists, sending commands
   to list servers is not difficult.  Unfortunately, many people don't
   understand listservs, and want some way to subscribe to and/or
   unsubscribe from mailing lists using a Web page.  While some
   listservs provide a Web interface in addition to an SMTP interface,
   it is becoming more and more common for mailing lists to append
   footers containing "unsubscribe" links.  This information (which
   usually duplicates information found in message headers and should be
   obvious to anyone who knows how to use the listserv, anyway) pollutes
   the content of the messages.  Furthermore, if a message containing
   such links is forwarded to someone else, the final recipient could
   unsubscribe the forwarding party from the list without his or her
   consent.

4. _`HTML mail`.  Nowadays, people will write things in e-mail messages
   like, "I've highlighted the changes in red".  On my display, plain
   text is rendered in black-on-white!  Or they'll write something like
   "here's the link," without specifying any URL.  You have to dig into
   the text/html part to find it.  Forwarding an HTML message to other
   recipients can also pose security risks, if _hyperlinks in the
   message offer access to personal information.  HTML mail also makes
   e-mail messages five times the size they need to be.

5. MIME.  It's great to be able to attach small files to e-mail
   messages, but there are WAY too many people who will just blindly
   attach Word Perfect, Microsuck Word, or ZIP files to their messages.
   I've even seen otherwise "well-educated" lawyers do this.

6. Large attachments.  MIME permits relatively small files to be
   attached to messages, but it is not really meant for distribution of
   large _files such as large images, audio files, movie files, ISO
   images, or tarballs.  For people like us, that's not a problem; we
   just upload the file to a server and post its location, along with a
   brief description of the file.  People who do not know how to do this
   will typically end up jumping through hoops to upload their file to
   some dreaded third-party service like Flickr or YouTub, and then post
   a link to that.

7. _Quoting.  Very few people use Usenet-style quoting, anymore.  Often,
   people will quote the entire message to which they're replying, and
   use vague English phrases (or even in-line "quotes") to indicate to
   what points they're replying.  When top-posting became the default
   quoting style for Outlook, e-mail became all but undecipherable.
   Have you ever seen an e-mail containting five "Original Message"
   lines?  There can only be ONE "original" message!  Have you ever
   tried to respond to a top-posted message using Usenet style quoting?
   Have you ever tried to read a thread using a mixture of different
   quoting styles?  It's just a CF.

8. Paragraphs.  There is this thing, called a "paragraph", which people
   used to learn about in school.  The _paragraph is a great tool for
   structuring content, enabling an author to group related information
   together, and to separate it from content of a different sort.
   Nowadays, many e-mail messages are written on a single line (often
   even without word wrapping), without regard for any logical division
   or organization.  When paragaphs are used, they are often used to
   repetitiously reiterate the content of preceeding paragraphs.

9. Text messaging.  Because text messaging and e-mail are both
   accessible from modern phones, people have begun to treat them as if
   they were the same medium.  They are not!  People are now reading
   e-mail messages using cultural conventions from the "texting" world,
   rather than understood e-mail conventions, and mis-interpreting what
   e-mails say.  People are also writing e-mail messages as if they were
   texts: have you noticed how "A.M." and "P.M." have now almost
   universally become "am" and "pm"?

   People are also beginning to expect that their e-mail messages will
   be delivered to their recipients in the space of just a few seconds,
   like text messages are.  Oblivious to the fact that people don't
   necessarily even check e-mail every day, they seem to assume that
   anything they send is going to be received more or less instantly.

   Text messaging has also conditioned people to expect all their
   messages to be short.  This conditioning has gotten to the point,
   now, that people will consider an e-mail message longer than a single
   paragraph_ to be "long"!  (Certainly, the present post to 9fans would
   be considered epic-length, by that standard!)

10. Censorship.  Many groups _want some way to censor messages sent to
   other members of the group.  While mailing lists can be moderated, it
   generally requires one or more moderators to _`proactively screen`
   and approve each message before it is relayed to other subscribers.
   Once a message is delivered, it can't be un-sent.  This limitation
   was also addressed, to some extent, by Web forums.  On a Web forum,
   users are often able to _`flag posts` which are spam_ or violate some
   specified "_`acceptable usage`" policy, and moderators are able to
   edit or remove other users' posts.  Because Web forums store posts on
   the server, and don't offer means to _`cryptographically sign` posts,
   a user's words can be changed without them (or anybody else) even
   realizing it.  Most Web forums also allow a user to edit or remove
   their own posts, complicating historical perspectives on who really
   said what.  (Think of forum posts quoting other forum posts.)  For
   some people, the ability to alter or censor published content is a
   _feature.  For others, it is a _defect.

11. IMAP quotas.  Many people leave their mail on their mail server and
   just access it using IMAP.  When their mailbox quota gets consumed,
   messages sent to them will bounce, or cannot be filed correctly by
   the recipient.  I remember seeing a local city councilor who was so
   popular that her mailbox filled up, at which point she could no
   longer use it to communicate effectively.

12. _Webmail.  For starters, many people simply don't know the
   difference between e-mail and Webmail.  When using Webmail, mail is
   kept in the possession of a third party.  It makes it much more
   difficult to employ e-mail encryption, such as OpenPGP.  Webmail also
   encourages use of `HTML mail`_.  Have you ever received an e-mail
   message containing just a URL which you are expected to "click",
   without any further explanation?  By promoting the assumption that
   e-mail is always accessed on the World Wide Web, Webmail promotes
   this kind of Web-snobbishness.

13. E-mail is not stupid-compatible.  Participating effectively in a
   community using e-mail requires a certain level of education.  Each
   September, when a new crop of college students first gained access to
   e-mail, there would be an observable decline in the quality of
   e-mail.  Gradually, the situation would improve, as these students
   began to learn proper netiquette.  When AOL began offering Internet
   mail to its subscribers in September of 1993, however, there was a
   decline in the quality of e-mail from which the Internet never
   recovered.  This has been known as "The September that never ended".
   With the rising popularity of text messaging and mobile e-mail, this
   situation has grown progressively worse.  Now, droves of children and
   grandmas are getting access to e-mail without any of the requisite
   education.  This present state of affairs could, in a sense, be
   called "The September that never ended, that never ended."


Web Forums
==========

Many of the problems associated with e-mail were, at least partially,
addressed by the the Web forums which were popular in the 2000's.  (The
classic example is the Simple Machines forum software.)

A. As described under `subject lines`_, above, Web forums allowed
   moderators to reclassify posts by subject into organized threads.

B. Users could `flag posts`_ as spam_ or as violations of `acceptable
   usage`_ policies, avoiding the need for moderators to `proactively
   screen`_ messages.

C. Users (and moderators) could edit or delete posts (which could be
   considered a feature_ or a defect_, as noted above).

D. Users could upload or post references to multimedia files_, such as
   videos, with their posts.

E. Forums offered sensible quoting_ mechanisms, as well as the ability
   to include hyperlinks_ and to specify font colors, sizes, and styles.

F. Web forums were also fully stupid-compatible.  They offered graphical
   editing capabilities, so knowing the syntax of a particular forum's
   mark-up language wasn't necessary in order to make a post.

Forums, however, also had their share of shortcomings:

a. Web forums were stupid-compatible, but smart-incompatible.

b. Data was kept centrally, on a server.

c. Each forum was on a separate Web site, with separate accounts.

d. Using them required a Web browser with access to the World Wide Web.

e. Posts could be sensored (a feature_ or a defect_, as noted above).

f. It was difficult to `cryptographically sign`_ posts.

g. Forums had no obvious analogue to the RFC 822 Message-id header,
   making it difficult to identify individual posts.

h. The proliferation of different mark-up syntaxes used by various
   forums made it difficult to remember which syntax you were supposed
   to be using at any given time.


Social Networks
===============

The technology that's been displacing e-mail and Web forums over the
past decade or so is, obviously, that nebulously nefarious Medusa known
as "social networking".  Of course, there's no need to describe how
backwards and awful today's social networks, such as Facebook, are.
There have been several attempts to create "open source" social
networks; the most successful to date has probably been _`Diaspora*`
(http://diasporafoundation.org).  Diaspora* solves many of the
aforementioned problems, such as ensuring privacy and control over your
own data.  Because it's Free Software, it's also smart-compatible.
However, it still has significant limitations:

I.   Diaspora* cannot easily be used to create "groups".

II.  Content published on it cannot be removed, edited, or censored (if,
     indeed, that's something you want_ to be able to do).

III. It uses a push mechanism for distributing updates, so it cannot be
     used in disconnected operation, like a MUA can.

IV.  It is a Ruby/Rails application.


The Plan 9 Way
==============

So, if social networking were to be re-designed from scratch, all over
again, "the Plan 9 way", how would it be done?

Obviously, the network would present itself as a file system.  :D  I
should be able to browse and post content using shell commands at the
command line.  Or, I could use the Acme plug-in to automate the process,
just like using Acme Mail.  I'd be able to batch-up incoming or outgoing
changes using tar(1) or hg, so I could work disconnected from the 'Net,
too.  But... here's the tricky part...

It would have to be both stupid-compatible and smart-compatible at the
same time.  Perhaps there would be an HTTP server which would translate
between the file system interface and some flashy Web interface
reminiscent of Facebook or `Diaspora*`_.  Of course, the HTTP server
would offer some sort of click-tracking advertising framework, so that
the HTML view of your social life could be packed with ads by whatever
company you've chosen to host your profile.  Maybe that HTTP server
would be written in Limbo, so it could be run on Plan 9, Linux, Mac OS,
or Windoze.  Meanwhile, power users could fly right in, under the HTTP
layer, and access the file system using 9P, Acme, or whatever their
perferred tool may be, without having to deal with all the HTML cruft.
A social network has to be stupid-compatible if it's going to be
successful.  But it also has to be smart-compatible, i.e., done the
"right" way, if we are to keep from going insane.  ;)

--
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|           human <cigar562hfsp952fans@icebubble.org>                  |
|Any sufficiently high intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-03-30 23:40 [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook cigar562hfsp952fans
@ 2016-03-31  0:12 ` Winston Kodogo
  2016-04-01 17:44   ` cigar562hfsp952fans
  2016-03-31  0:23 ` Kurt H Maier
                   ` (3 subsequent siblings)
  4 siblings, 1 reply; 36+ messages in thread
From: Winston Kodogo @ 2016-03-31  0:12 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 15805 bytes --]

That's an awfully long troll. Some people have a lot of time on their
hands. And it's not yet April Fool's day, even in New Zealand.

On 31 March 2016 at 12:40, <cigar562hfsp952fans@icebubble.org> wrote:

> Greetings, 9fans!
>
> We all know that Plan 9 started as a retrospective "re-take" on UNIX,
> occasionally referred to as "UNIX done right".  This has led to
> differences between "the Plan 9 way" of doing something vs. "the UNIX
> way" of doing it, such as those highlighted by the infamous "Unix to
> Plan 9 command translation" page on the Plan 9 wiki.  More generally,
> this can be viewed as the difference between the "right" way to do
> something versus the "popular" way to do it.
>
> So, my question is, what would be the Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook?
> Stated differently, if social networking were to be re-imagined and
> re-done "right" this time, how would it be done?
>
>
> E-Mail
> ======
>
> The obvious answer that comes to mind is e-mail.  It worked well for
> decades.  Although 9fans appear to continue this tradition in grand
> style, using e-mail for social networking poses a number of problems:
>
> 1. _Spam.  The fact that SMTP doesn't authenticate senders of e-mail
>    messages has led to a proliferation of spam which has greatly
>    burdened the medium, requiring complex workarounds that usually put
>    legitimate mail at risk of misclassification as "junk".
>
> 2. _`Subject lines`.  Few people seem to know how to choose an
>    appropriate "Subject:" line, anymore.  People will use subjects like
>    "tonight's meeting", without specifying what group is meeting, when
>    the meeting is, or what it is about.  When the topic of a thread
>    drifts from its original topic, few people remember (or even think)
>    to update the Subject: line.  Often, when one person wants to send a
>    second person an e-mail, the first person will simply reply to the
>    last message they received from the second person, even if it was on
>    a completely different subject.  (This, of course, creates false
>    relationships between the Subject: and References: fields used to
>    define threads.)
>
>    Despite the fact that most MUAs (including Webmail_) offer the
>    ability to automatically sort e-mail into different categories, many
>    people don't know how to sort incoming mail.  When they get too much
>    e-mail in their "Inbox", the become annoyed and confused.
>
>    These problems were addressed, somewhat, by the advent of the Web
>    forums which were popular in the 2000's.  On a Web forum, moderators
>    could reclassify posts and reorganize threads to better reflect their
>    content.
>
> 3. Listservs.  For people familiar with mailing lists, sending commands
>    to list servers is not difficult.  Unfortunately, many people don't
>    understand listservs, and want some way to subscribe to and/or
>    unsubscribe from mailing lists using a Web page.  While some
>    listservs provide a Web interface in addition to an SMTP interface,
>    it is becoming more and more common for mailing lists to append
>    footers containing "unsubscribe" links.  This information (which
>    usually duplicates information found in message headers and should be
>    obvious to anyone who knows how to use the listserv, anyway) pollutes
>    the content of the messages.  Furthermore, if a message containing
>    such links is forwarded to someone else, the final recipient could
>    unsubscribe the forwarding party from the list without his or her
>    consent.
>
> 4. _`HTML mail`.  Nowadays, people will write things in e-mail messages
>    like, "I've highlighted the changes in red".  On my display, plain
>    text is rendered in black-on-white!  Or they'll write something like
>    "here's the link," without specifying any URL.  You have to dig into
>    the text/html part to find it.  Forwarding an HTML message to other
>    recipients can also pose security risks, if _hyperlinks in the
>    message offer access to personal information.  HTML mail also makes
>    e-mail messages five times the size they need to be.
>
> 5. MIME.  It's great to be able to attach small files to e-mail
>    messages, but there are WAY too many people who will just blindly
>    attach Word Perfect, Microsuck Word, or ZIP files to their messages.
>    I've even seen otherwise "well-educated" lawyers do this.
>
> 6. Large attachments.  MIME permits relatively small files to be
>    attached to messages, but it is not really meant for distribution of
>    large _files such as large images, audio files, movie files, ISO
>    images, or tarballs.  For people like us, that's not a problem; we
>    just upload the file to a server and post its location, along with a
>    brief description of the file.  People who do not know how to do this
>    will typically end up jumping through hoops to upload their file to
>    some dreaded third-party service like Flickr or YouTub, and then post
>    a link to that.
>
> 7. _Quoting.  Very few people use Usenet-style quoting, anymore.  Often,
>    people will quote the entire message to which they're replying, and
>    use vague English phrases (or even in-line "quotes") to indicate to
>    what points they're replying.  When top-posting became the default
>    quoting style for Outlook, e-mail became all but undecipherable.
>    Have you ever seen an e-mail containting five "Original Message"
>    lines?  There can only be ONE "original" message!  Have you ever
>    tried to respond to a top-posted message using Usenet style quoting?
>    Have you ever tried to read a thread using a mixture of different
>    quoting styles?  It's just a CF.
>
> 8. Paragraphs.  There is this thing, called a "paragraph", which people
>    used to learn about in school.  The _paragraph is a great tool for
>    structuring content, enabling an author to group related information
>    together, and to separate it from content of a different sort.
>    Nowadays, many e-mail messages are written on a single line (often
>    even without word wrapping), without regard for any logical division
>    or organization.  When paragaphs are used, they are often used to
>    repetitiously reiterate the content of preceeding paragraphs.
>
> 9. Text messaging.  Because text messaging and e-mail are both
>    accessible from modern phones, people have begun to treat them as if
>    they were the same medium.  They are not!  People are now reading
>    e-mail messages using cultural conventions from the "texting" world,
>    rather than understood e-mail conventions, and mis-interpreting what
>    e-mails say.  People are also writing e-mail messages as if they were
>    texts: have you noticed how "A.M." and "P.M." have now almost
>    universally become "am" and "pm"?
>
>    People are also beginning to expect that their e-mail messages will
>    be delivered to their recipients in the space of just a few seconds,
>    like text messages are.  Oblivious to the fact that people don't
>    necessarily even check e-mail every day, they seem to assume that
>    anything they send is going to be received more or less instantly.
>
>    Text messaging has also conditioned people to expect all their
>    messages to be short.  This conditioning has gotten to the point,
>    now, that people will consider an e-mail message longer than a single
>    paragraph_ to be "long"!  (Certainly, the present post to 9fans would
>    be considered epic-length, by that standard!)
>
> 10. Censorship.  Many groups _want some way to censor messages sent to
>    other members of the group.  While mailing lists can be moderated, it
>    generally requires one or more moderators to _`proactively screen`
>    and approve each message before it is relayed to other subscribers.
>    Once a message is delivered, it can't be un-sent.  This limitation
>    was also addressed, to some extent, by Web forums.  On a Web forum,
>    users are often able to _`flag posts` which are spam_ or violate some
>    specified "_`acceptable usage`" policy, and moderators are able to
>    edit or remove other users' posts.  Because Web forums store posts on
>    the server, and don't offer means to _`cryptographically sign` posts,
>    a user's words can be changed without them (or anybody else) even
>    realizing it.  Most Web forums also allow a user to edit or remove
>    their own posts, complicating historical perspectives on who really
>    said what.  (Think of forum posts quoting other forum posts.)  For
>    some people, the ability to alter or censor published content is a
>    _feature.  For others, it is a _defect.
>
> 11. IMAP quotas.  Many people leave their mail on their mail server and
>    just access it using IMAP.  When their mailbox quota gets consumed,
>    messages sent to them will bounce, or cannot be filed correctly by
>    the recipient.  I remember seeing a local city councilor who was so
>    popular that her mailbox filled up, at which point she could no
>    longer use it to communicate effectively.
>
> 12. _Webmail.  For starters, many people simply don't know the
>    difference between e-mail and Webmail.  When using Webmail, mail is
>    kept in the possession of a third party.  It makes it much more
>    difficult to employ e-mail encryption, such as OpenPGP.  Webmail also
>    encourages use of `HTML mail`_.  Have you ever received an e-mail
>    message containing just a URL which you are expected to "click",
>    without any further explanation?  By promoting the assumption that
>    e-mail is always accessed on the World Wide Web, Webmail promotes
>    this kind of Web-snobbishness.
>
> 13. E-mail is not stupid-compatible.  Participating effectively in a
>    community using e-mail requires a certain level of education.  Each
>    September, when a new crop of college students first gained access to
>    e-mail, there would be an observable decline in the quality of
>    e-mail.  Gradually, the situation would improve, as these students
>    began to learn proper netiquette.  When AOL began offering Internet
>    mail to its subscribers in September of 1993, however, there was a
>    decline in the quality of e-mail from which the Internet never
>    recovered.  This has been known as "The September that never ended".
>    With the rising popularity of text messaging and mobile e-mail, this
>    situation has grown progressively worse.  Now, droves of children and
>    grandmas are getting access to e-mail without any of the requisite
>    education.  This present state of affairs could, in a sense, be
>    called "The September that never ended, that never ended."
>
>
> Web Forums
> ==========
>
> Many of the problems associated with e-mail were, at least partially,
> addressed by the the Web forums which were popular in the 2000's.  (The
> classic example is the Simple Machines forum software.)
>
> A. As described under `subject lines`_, above, Web forums allowed
>    moderators to reclassify posts by subject into organized threads.
>
> B. Users could `flag posts`_ as spam_ or as violations of `acceptable
>    usage`_ policies, avoiding the need for moderators to `proactively
>    screen`_ messages.
>
> C. Users (and moderators) could edit or delete posts (which could be
>    considered a feature_ or a defect_, as noted above).
>
> D. Users could upload or post references to multimedia files_, such as
>    videos, with their posts.
>
> E. Forums offered sensible quoting_ mechanisms, as well as the ability
>    to include hyperlinks_ and to specify font colors, sizes, and styles.
>
> F. Web forums were also fully stupid-compatible.  They offered graphical
>    editing capabilities, so knowing the syntax of a particular forum's
>    mark-up language wasn't necessary in order to make a post.
>
> Forums, however, also had their share of shortcomings:
>
> a. Web forums were stupid-compatible, but smart-incompatible.
>
> b. Data was kept centrally, on a server.
>
> c. Each forum was on a separate Web site, with separate accounts.
>
> d. Using them required a Web browser with access to the World Wide Web.
>
> e. Posts could be sensored (a feature_ or a defect_, as noted above).
>
> f. It was difficult to `cryptographically sign`_ posts.
>
> g. Forums had no obvious analogue to the RFC 822 Message-id header,
>    making it difficult to identify individual posts.
>
> h. The proliferation of different mark-up syntaxes used by various
>    forums made it difficult to remember which syntax you were supposed
>    to be using at any given time.
>
>
> Social Networks
> ===============
>
> The technology that's been displacing e-mail and Web forums over the
> past decade or so is, obviously, that nebulously nefarious Medusa known
> as "social networking".  Of course, there's no need to describe how
> backwards and awful today's social networks, such as Facebook, are.
> There have been several attempts to create "open source" social
> networks; the most successful to date has probably been _`Diaspora*`
> (http://diasporafoundation.org).  Diaspora* solves many of the
> aforementioned problems, such as ensuring privacy and control over your
> own data.  Because it's Free Software, it's also smart-compatible.
> However, it still has significant limitations:
>
> I.   Diaspora* cannot easily be used to create "groups".
>
> II.  Content published on it cannot be removed, edited, or censored (if,
>      indeed, that's something you want_ to be able to do).
>
> III. It uses a push mechanism for distributing updates, so it cannot be
>      used in disconnected operation, like a MUA can.
>
> IV.  It is a Ruby/Rails application.
>
>
> The Plan 9 Way
> ==============
>
> So, if social networking were to be re-designed from scratch, all over
> again, "the Plan 9 way", how would it be done?
>
> Obviously, the network would present itself as a file system.  :D  I
> should be able to browse and post content using shell commands at the
> command line.  Or, I could use the Acme plug-in to automate the process,
> just like using Acme Mail.  I'd be able to batch-up incoming or outgoing
> changes using tar(1) or hg, so I could work disconnected from the 'Net,
> too.  But... here's the tricky part...
>
> It would have to be both stupid-compatible and smart-compatible at the
> same time.  Perhaps there would be an HTTP server which would translate
> between the file system interface and some flashy Web interface
> reminiscent of Facebook or `Diaspora*`_.  Of course, the HTTP server
> would offer some sort of click-tracking advertising framework, so that
> the HTML view of your social life could be packed with ads by whatever
> company you've chosen to host your profile.  Maybe that HTTP server
> would be written in Limbo, so it could be run on Plan 9, Linux, Mac OS,
> or Windoze.  Meanwhile, power users could fly right in, under the HTTP
> layer, and access the file system using 9P, Acme, or whatever their
> perferred tool may be, without having to deal with all the HTML cruft.
> A social network has to be stupid-compatible if it's going to be
> successful.  But it also has to be smart-compatible, i.e., done the
> "right" way, if we are to keep from going insane.  ;)
>
> --
> +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
> |           human <cigar562hfsp952fans@icebubble.org>                  |
> |Any sufficiently high intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.|
> +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
>
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 17816 bytes --]

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-03-30 23:40 [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook cigar562hfsp952fans
  2016-03-31  0:12 ` Winston Kodogo
@ 2016-03-31  0:23 ` Kurt H Maier
  2016-03-31  0:58   ` Winston Kodogo
  2016-04-01 17:30   ` cigar562hfsp952fans
  2016-03-31  1:53 ` Bakul Shah
                   ` (2 subsequent siblings)
  4 siblings, 2 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: Kurt H Maier @ 2016-03-31  0:23 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 11:40:03PM +0000, cigar562hfsp952fans@icebubble.org wrote:
> Greetings, 9fans!
>

Your post advocates a

(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to social networking. Your idea will not work. Here is why it
won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular
idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state
before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(x) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) Users of Twitter will not put up with it
(x) Facebook will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for social networking
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of communications
(x) Huge existing software investment in Facebook
(x) Susceptibility of protocols other than HTTP to attack
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Extreme profitability of Facebook
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Twitter
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!


hth,
khm



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-03-31  0:23 ` Kurt H Maier
@ 2016-03-31  0:58   ` Winston Kodogo
  2016-04-01 17:30   ` cigar562hfsp952fans
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: Winston Kodogo @ 2016-03-31  0:58 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3000 bytes --]

Well, that takes me back. I haven't seen a variant of that response in over
10 years. Although "Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business
with Yahoo" in the last one I saw is probably fair comment in the case of
what's left of the company formerly known as NZ Telecom.

On 31 March 2016 at 13:23, Kurt H Maier <khm@sciops.net> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 11:40:03PM +0000,
> cigar562hfsp952fans@icebubble.org wrote:
> > Greetings, 9fans!
> >
>
> Your post advocates a
>
> (x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
>
> approach to social networking. Your idea will not work. Here is why it
> won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular
> idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state
> before a bad federal law was passed.)
>
> ( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
> (x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
> (x) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
> (x) Users of Twitter will not put up with it
> (x) Facebook will not put up with it
> ( ) The police will not put up with it
> (x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
> ( ) Many users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential
> employers
> ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
>
> Specifically, your plan fails to account for
>
> ( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
> (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for social networking
> (x) Open relays in foreign countries
> (x) Asshats
> ( ) Jurisdictional problems
> ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of communications
> (x) Huge existing software investment in Facebook
> (x) Susceptibility of protocols other than HTTP to attack
> ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
> (x) Extreme profitability of Facebook
> (x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
> (x) Technically illiterate politicians
> (x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Twitter
> ( ) Outlook
>
> and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
>
> (x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
> been shown practical
> ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
> ( ) Blacklists suck
> ( ) Whitelists suck
> ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
> (x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
> ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
> ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
> ( ) I don't want the government reading my email
> ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
>
> Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
>
> ( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
> (x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
> ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
> house down!
>
>
> hth,
> khm
>
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3509 bytes --]

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-03-30 23:40 [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook cigar562hfsp952fans
  2016-03-31  0:12 ` Winston Kodogo
  2016-03-31  0:23 ` Kurt H Maier
@ 2016-03-31  1:53 ` Bakul Shah
  2016-03-31  2:09   ` Lyndon Nerenberg
  2016-03-31  2:17 ` Staven
  2016-03-31  5:24 ` lucio
  4 siblings, 1 reply; 36+ messages in thread
From: Bakul Shah @ 2016-03-31  1:53 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

On Wed, 30 Mar 2016 23:40:03 -0000 cigar562hfsp952fans@icebubble.org wrote:
> The Plan 9 Way
> ==============
>
> So, if social networking were to be re-designed from scratch, all over
> again, "the Plan 9 way", how would it be done?
>
> Obviously, the network would present itself as a file system.  :D  I
> should be able to browse and post content using shell commands at the
> command line.  Or, I could use the Acme plug-in to automate the process,
> just like using Acme Mail.  I'd be able to batch-up incoming or outgoing
> changes using tar(1) or hg, so I could work disconnected from the 'Net,
> too.  But... here's the tricky part...

cd /n/facebook
ls friends
...
cd requests
ls
johndoe
janedoe
...
cat johnedoe/about
ls johnedoe/posts
...
echo confirm > request/johnedoe/outgoing-request/me
echo hello > friends/johnedoe/message

cd /n/facebook/me/newsfeed
ls
1
2
...
cat 1/html 	# display raw html page
...
right-click 1/html	# view html page

# create a page with all your friends' latest posts.
htmlize friends/*/posts/latest | html-view

# look at the latest 10 messages from friends
ls -rt friends/*/messages/me | sed 10q | htmlize | html-view

:-)



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-03-31  1:53 ` Bakul Shah
@ 2016-03-31  2:09   ` Lyndon Nerenberg
  2016-03-31  2:59     ` Bakul Shah
  2016-03-31 19:41     ` Steve Simon
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: Lyndon Nerenberg @ 2016-03-31  2:09 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans


 > cd /n/facebook

cd /
unmount /n/facebook
rm -fr /sys/src/cmd/facebook* /*/bin/facebookfs



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-03-30 23:40 [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook cigar562hfsp952fans
                   ` (2 preceding siblings ...)
  2016-03-31  1:53 ` Bakul Shah
@ 2016-03-31  2:17 ` Staven
  2016-04-02  3:02   ` cigar562hfsp952fans
  2016-03-31  5:24 ` lucio
  4 siblings, 1 reply; 36+ messages in thread
From: Staven @ 2016-03-31  2:17 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans

It's not worth it.

You'll probably think I'm just being flippant, but I'm not.

It's just not worth it.




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-03-31  2:09   ` Lyndon Nerenberg
@ 2016-03-31  2:59     ` Bakul Shah
  2016-03-31 19:41     ` Steve Simon
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: Bakul Shah @ 2016-03-31  2:59 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

>  > cd /n/facebook
>
> cd /
> unmount /n/facebook
> rm -fr /sys/src/cmd/facebook* /*/bin/facebookfs

Agree. FB is so last decade!



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-03-30 23:40 [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook cigar562hfsp952fans
                   ` (3 preceding siblings ...)
  2016-03-31  2:17 ` Staven
@ 2016-03-31  5:24 ` lucio
  2016-03-31  9:03   ` hiro
  2016-04-01 20:00   ` cigar562hfsp952fans
  4 siblings, 2 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: lucio @ 2016-03-31  5:24 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans

Nice job, if a touch taxing :-)

> A social network has to be stupid-compatible if it's going to be
> successful.  But it also has to be smart-compatible, i.e., done the
> "right" way, if we are to keep from going insane.  ;)

I don't even remember the name of the feature, but I used a tool way
back in the very early days of a public Internet (it was called a MOO,
I remember now) which had an inner programming language to construct
your identity (today that would be you avatar, but it was more like
your identity, life history and future behaviour all in one and
extendible).

Given a browser-style interface with 3D capabilities, it would address
social networking considerably better than Facebook (with which I have
the lightest of passing acquaintances), but you have to consider how
much working time - and consequently rewarded time - you can afford
your employees to spend in such a virtual world.

For that is what social media provide: a world-wide stage on which you
perform selections from your real life and any fantasy life you choose
to publish.  Stupidly, we still demand that people be consistent, but
that will drift away over time, of that I'm pretty certain.

Where to?  I think we're destined eventually to become bubbles of
information in a purely virtual organism that "may" instantiate itself
as a physical entity as the context demands, and that technology is
going to get us there as quickly as it is able to.  Reminds me of
Philip Jose Farmer's trilogy - long time ago, I'm not sure I can
recall the title of the first book, I do recall Mark Twain and the
Riverboat thing.  Because we're not likely to get Richard Burton and
Mark Twain back, sadly.

But thank you for the stimulating thoughts.

Lucio.




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-03-31  5:24 ` lucio
@ 2016-03-31  9:03   ` hiro
  2016-03-31 10:17     ` David Pick
  2016-04-01 20:00   ` cigar562hfsp952fans
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 36+ messages in thread
From: hiro @ 2016-03-31  9:03 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

people would probably not talk with me if they had to 2-factor first.
they just ring and that's it.



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-03-31  9:03   ` hiro
@ 2016-03-31 10:17     ` David Pick
  2016-03-31 11:16       ` Iain Watson Smith
  2016-03-31 12:44       ` Kurt H Maier
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: David Pick @ 2016-03-31 10:17 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans

On 31/03/16 10:03, hiro wrote:

> people would probably not talk with me if they had to 2-factor first.
> they just ring and that's it.

But that *is* two-factor: they're using something you have (the
telephone number) and a biometric (your voice).

--
David Pick
Network Security Manager, IT Services
Queen Mary University of London
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7882 7079
Mob: +44 (0) 7973 379 161
E-Mail: D.M.Pick@qmul.ac.uk

Normal working days are Monday to Wednesday inclusive




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-03-31 10:17     ` David Pick
@ 2016-03-31 11:16       ` Iain Watson Smith
  2016-03-31 12:44       ` Kurt H Maier
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: Iain Watson Smith @ 2016-03-31 11:16 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 636 bytes --]

i'd pay you... to think of an answer.

On 31 March 2016 at 21:17, David Pick <D.M.Pick@qmul.ac.uk> wrote:

> On 31/03/16 10:03, hiro wrote:
>
> > people would probably not talk with me if they had to 2-factor first.
> > they just ring and that's it.
>
> But that *is* two-factor: they're using something you have (the
> telephone number) and a biometric (your voice).
>
> --
> David Pick
> Network Security Manager, IT Services
> Queen Mary University of London
> Tel: +44 (0) 20 7882 7079
> Mob: +44 (0) 7973 379 161
> E-Mail: D.M.Pick@qmul.ac.uk
>
> Normal working days are Monday to Wednesday inclusive
>
>
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1257 bytes --]

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-03-31 10:17     ` David Pick
  2016-03-31 11:16       ` Iain Watson Smith
@ 2016-03-31 12:44       ` Kurt H Maier
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: Kurt H Maier @ 2016-03-31 12:44 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 11:17:30AM +0100, David Pick wrote:
> On 31/03/16 10:03, hiro wrote:
>
> > people would probably not talk with me if they had to 2-factor first.
> > they just ring and that's it.
>
> But that *is* two-factor: they're using something you have (the
> telephone number) and a biometric (your voice).

Ah yes, the old "security factor that is in fact public information"
ruse.  Nobody ever sees that coming!  I use similar two-factor security
at my house -- they have to use something they have (the address of my
house) and something they know (whether or not they're allowed in the
door) --  it's basically foolproof

khm



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-03-31  2:09   ` Lyndon Nerenberg
  2016-03-31  2:59     ` Bakul Shah
@ 2016-03-31 19:41     ` Steve Simon
  2016-04-01 15:00       ` michaelian ennis
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 36+ messages in thread
From: Steve Simon @ 2016-03-31 19:41 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs


😀

> On 31 Mar 2016, at 03:09, Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon@orthanc.ca> wrote:
> 
> 
> > cd /n/facebook
> 
> cd /
> unmount /n/facebook
> rm -fr /sys/src/cmd/facebook* /*/bin/facebookfs



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-03-31 19:41     ` Steve Simon
@ 2016-04-01 15:00       ` michaelian ennis
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: michaelian ennis @ 2016-04-01 15:00 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 29 bytes --]

You had me at cigar.

Ian

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 112 bytes --]

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-03-31  0:23 ` Kurt H Maier
  2016-03-31  0:58   ` Winston Kodogo
@ 2016-04-01 17:30   ` cigar562hfsp952fans
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: cigar562hfsp952fans @ 2016-04-01 17:30 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Kurt H Maier <khm@sciops.net> writes:

> Your post advocates a
>
> (x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
>
> approach to social networking. Your idea will not work. Here is why it
> won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular
> idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state
> before a bad federal law was passed.)

Hah, I like that.  Is that an rc script?  An m4 macro?  An Acme plug-in?
Where can I get that?

> Your post advocates a

TOP doesn't "advocate" anything; it poses a theoretical question and
explores the benefits/drawbacks of a few potential solutions.

> (x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

Every problem is ultimately a technical problem.  That's true whether
you're building an OS, running for president, or trying to reach
spiritual Nirvana.  If any of these boxes were to be checked, I'd sure
hope it'd be the "technical" one.  :)

> (x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money

Based on the boxes that you checked, I'm assuming your response was
intended in jest, not meant seriously.  :) So, I won't take time to
address each of your points.  If this assumption is incorrect, however,
and you really do have such concerns, let me know, and I'll post a brief
answer to each of the questions you raise.

> (x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
> ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Well, I'm happy at least you didn't check that last box!  :D



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-03-31  0:12 ` Winston Kodogo
@ 2016-04-01 17:44   ` cigar562hfsp952fans
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: cigar562hfsp952fans @ 2016-04-01 17:44 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Winston Kodogo <kodogo@gmail.com> writes:

> That's an awfully long troll.

Or "epic-length".  :) Perhaps your smartphone didn't display to you item
#9 in TOP.  What you (incorrectly) call a "troll" I call "prebuttle".
It makes discussion much more efficient if all the obvious issues/
questions/answers are gotten out of the way, up front.  With all the
obvious stuff out of the way, you can jump right into discussing the
interesting stuff, as Lucio has done...



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-03-31  5:24 ` lucio
  2016-03-31  9:03   ` hiro
@ 2016-04-01 20:00   ` cigar562hfsp952fans
  2016-04-01 20:40     ` Wes Kussmaul
                       ` (3 more replies)
  1 sibling, 4 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: cigar562hfsp952fans @ 2016-04-01 20:00 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

lucio@proxima.alt.za writes:

> I don't even remember the name of the feature, but I used a tool way
> back in the very early days of a public Internet (it was called a MOO,

> Given a browser-style interface with 3D capabilities, it would address
> social networking considerably better than Facebook (with which I have

> For that is what social media provide: a world-wide stage on which you
> perform selections from your real life and any fantasy life you choose

Very interesting.  I was envisioning a system which would (at least on
its GUI side) present information in the form of a Web page, like
Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.  I hadn't thought of abandoning the Web page,
altogether, for some other kind of "social space" browser.  I wonder
what that might be like.

[Disclaimer: This is NOT a formal or serious proposal for a new Plan 9
file system.  (Not yet, at least.)  It's just an exploration of some
potentially possible possibilities.]

For a social network to be useful, it must provide some intuitive
mapping between information in the virtual world and its real-life
referents.  (In contemporary social networks, these take the form of
person/place names, mugshots, and interactive maps with balloon icons.)
The space which humans are most familiar with navigating, of course, is
meatspace - the physical, brick-and-mortar world.  It makes sense, then,
that the most intuitive interface would offer some kind of three-
dimensional virtual reality.  The simplest, most intuitive mapping
between virtual space and meatspace would probably be to visually
"overlay" information from the virtual space onto meatspace.  Technology
(mostly in the form of various head-mounted glasses or goggles) already
exists which allows a person to see what's around them, while projecting
information ontop of what they see.  A device such as this has generally
been called an "eye tap".  But it has a problem: when you turn your
head, the display turns with it.  In order for the UI to be as intuitive
as the physical world, it would have to maintain orientation with its
physical environment.  Tracking motion of the user's head could be done
using accellerometers, a la Oculus Rift.  Imagine a Rift with two video
cameras on its front (to provide a binocular view on the physical world)
that overlays a digital world ontop of the real world you see.  Virtual
arrows could guide you where you need to go without needing directions.
When you get near your favorite Chinese restaurant, a balloon could
appear in your view, giving you access to information about it.  When
GPS magic detects that a friend of yours is nearby, an friendly-looking
arrow appears, indicating the general direction and approximate distance
to him or her.

In order for a virtual world to be useful, however, simply mimicking the
physical world won't do; its physics must differ from the physics of the
real world in some useful way.  If your favorite restaurant is two miles
from your present location, for example, you won't want to walk two
miles to find its virtual balloon.  :) Navigating the virtual space
would require some way to stretch/pan space and time, allowing the user
to "fly" about and move forward/backward in time within the virtual
world, before restoring the overlay to match normal space/time.  You
would, for example, be able to hike the trail I hiked yesterday, even
after I got back from hiking it.  If I recorded GPS waypoints and/or
stereoscopic video along the way, you could hike right along with me,
having a conversation with my avatar about your favorite edible plants.
Then, I could "rewind" time and watch your hike & conversation as well
(assuming that you decided to share it with me).

An ability to stretch/shrink distances in virtual space enables use of
non-Euclidean volumes, as well.  Imagine "dimension compression"
technology as seen in the (sci-fi) movie Ultraviolet, or in the TARDIS
of Dr. Who.  ("It's bigger on the inside!")  You could stuff as many
files as you want into a single filing cabinet, have a filing cabinet
with a potentially infinite number of drawers, or stuff as many filing
cabinets as you want into a police call box which shrinks down and stows
neatly inside a virtual watch that you wear on your virtual wrist.  Want
to send a FAX?  Press a button on your virtual watch, and out pops your
personal TARDIS.  Reach inside it, grab your virtual FAX machine, grab
the document you want to send, and feed it through.  (You can fast-
forward time, if you like, so you don't have to wait for each page to
scan.)  When you're done, just hit the "poof" button on your virtual
watch, and everything neatly folds itself back inside.

Such a non-Euclidean 4-dimensional space full of nested objects could
certainly be represented as a file system.  Omero and Olive
(technically, o/mero and o/live) from the Octopus project over at LSUB
already allow one to represent a two-dimensional GUI as a file system.
(All or part of a GUI on one machine can be tar(1)ed up and untarred on
another machine, reproducing the same GUI.)  It stands to reason that
such an approach could be extended to allow representation of a greater
number of widgets, with real-life social signifigance, in a space with
more than two dimensions.

In a sense, social networking Web pages could be considered flattened,
stripped-down projections of such an n-dimensional social space into the
medium of the 2D document.

> Where to?  I think we're destined eventually to become bubbles of
> information in a purely virtual organism that "may" instantiate itself
> as a physical entity as the context demands, and that technology is

I'm not sure if we will become entirely virtual.  That would require us
to give up sex.  :) I don't think we humans will give up such things so
easily.

--
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|           human <cigar562hfsp952fans@icebubble.org>                  |
|Any sufficiently high intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-04-01 20:00   ` cigar562hfsp952fans
@ 2016-04-01 20:40     ` Wes Kussmaul
  2016-04-01 20:53     ` Giacomo Tesio
                       ` (2 subsequent siblings)
  3 siblings, 0 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: Wes Kussmaul @ 2016-04-01 20:40 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans



On 04/01/2016 04:00 PM, cigar562hfsp952fans@icebubble.org wrote:
> lucio@proxima.alt.za writes:
>
>> For that is what social media provide: a world-wide stage on which you
>> perform selections from your real life and any fantasy life you choose
> Very interesting.  I was envisioning a system which would (at least on
> its GUI side) present information in the form of a Web page, like
> Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.  I hadn't thought of abandoning the Web page,
> altogether, for some other kind of "social space" browser.  I wonder
> what that might be like.

http://aftertheweb.org/

I was the founder in 1982 of Delphi Internet Services Corp., a steadily 
profitable social network that we sold to Rupert Murdoch in 1993. News 
Corp managed to kill it, then bought MySpace and killed that too; both 
times using socially deadly techniques that only media companies seem to 
have mastered.

Allow me to share (against my better judgement) a prototype site for 
builders of the "After The Web" social networking industry: 
http://global-villages.com/

-- 

Wes Kussmaul
The Authenticity Institute
738 Main Street
Waltham, MA 02451

office +1 781 790 1674
mobile +1 781 330 1881


THIS COMMUNICATION IS INTENDED ONLY FOR THE USE OF THE PERSON TO WHOM IT IS ADDRESSED. If it was addressed incorrectly there's not much I can do but ask you politely to pretend you didn't see it. Any disclaimer suggesting that the sender has some kind of recourse is just wishful thinking.

If I had a message from you that was digitally signed using your Sigillum™ identity credential from the Osmio Vital Records Department (http://osmio.ch), we could easily and at no cost exchange encrypted messages and files with each other.






^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-04-01 20:00   ` cigar562hfsp952fans
  2016-04-01 20:40     ` Wes Kussmaul
@ 2016-04-01 20:53     ` Giacomo Tesio
  2016-04-02  9:32       ` hiro
                         ` (2 more replies)
  2016-04-03  4:22     ` lucio
  2016-04-03  4:32     ` lucio
  3 siblings, 3 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: Giacomo Tesio @ 2016-04-01 20:53 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 7490 bytes --]

While funny in it's visionary shape, I'm seriously scared about this matter.

Take for example Google's material design: any software that successfully
mimic the physical world (paper layers in particular) is going to bland our
perception of its "virtuality". Our mind is going to accept it as a
physical tool. Now, we "know that a programmable computer is no more and no
less than an extremely handy device for realizing any conceivable mechanism
without changing a single wire", but are we sure we really want to remove
the awareness of the wires?

Google glasses scare me even more: we are going to look the world through
some one else eyes. In the long run, our brain will start to accept the
virtual baloons like the other physical entities that really exists.

We are already trained to be suspicious about the truth even when it's
clearly evident, now we can even start to ignore the information from the
physical world, while accepting the virtual information that someone else
feed us.



Giacomo



2016-04-01 22:00 GMT+02:00 <cigar562hfsp952fans@icebubble.org>:

> lucio@proxima.alt.za writes:
>
> > I don't even remember the name of the feature, but I used a tool way
> > back in the very early days of a public Internet (it was called a MOO,
>
> > Given a browser-style interface with 3D capabilities, it would address
> > social networking considerably better than Facebook (with which I have
>
> > For that is what social media provide: a world-wide stage on which you
> > perform selections from your real life and any fantasy life you choose
>
> Very interesting.  I was envisioning a system which would (at least on
> its GUI side) present information in the form of a Web page, like
> Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.  I hadn't thought of abandoning the Web page,
> altogether, for some other kind of "social space" browser.  I wonder
> what that might be like.
>
> [Disclaimer: This is NOT a formal or serious proposal for a new Plan 9
> file system.  (Not yet, at least.)  It's just an exploration of some
> potentially possible possibilities.]
>
> For a social network to be useful, it must provide some intuitive
> mapping between information in the virtual world and its real-life
> referents.  (In contemporary social networks, these take the form of
> person/place names, mugshots, and interactive maps with balloon icons.)
> The space which humans are most familiar with navigating, of course, is
> meatspace - the physical, brick-and-mortar world.  It makes sense, then,
> that the most intuitive interface would offer some kind of three-
> dimensional virtual reality.  The simplest, most intuitive mapping
> between virtual space and meatspace would probably be to visually
> "overlay" information from the virtual space onto meatspace.  Technology
> (mostly in the form of various head-mounted glasses or goggles) already
> exists which allows a person to see what's around them, while projecting
> information ontop of what they see.  A device such as this has generally
> been called an "eye tap".  But it has a problem: when you turn your
> head, the display turns with it.  In order for the UI to be as intuitive
> as the physical world, it would have to maintain orientation with its
> physical environment.  Tracking motion of the user's head could be done
> using accellerometers, a la Oculus Rift.  Imagine a Rift with two video
> cameras on its front (to provide a binocular view on the physical world)
> that overlays a digital world ontop of the real world you see.  Virtual
> arrows could guide you where you need to go without needing directions.
> When you get near your favorite Chinese restaurant, a balloon could
> appear in your view, giving you access to information about it.  When
> GPS magic detects that a friend of yours is nearby, an friendly-looking
> arrow appears, indicating the general direction and approximate distance
> to him or her.
>
> In order for a virtual world to be useful, however, simply mimicking the
> physical world won't do; its physics must differ from the physics of the
> real world in some useful way.  If your favorite restaurant is two miles
> from your present location, for example, you won't want to walk two
> miles to find its virtual balloon.  :) Navigating the virtual space
> would require some way to stretch/pan space and time, allowing the user
> to "fly" about and move forward/backward in time within the virtual
> world, before restoring the overlay to match normal space/time.  You
> would, for example, be able to hike the trail I hiked yesterday, even
> after I got back from hiking it.  If I recorded GPS waypoints and/or
> stereoscopic video along the way, you could hike right along with me,
> having a conversation with my avatar about your favorite edible plants.
> Then, I could "rewind" time and watch your hike & conversation as well
> (assuming that you decided to share it with me).
>
> An ability to stretch/shrink distances in virtual space enables use of
> non-Euclidean volumes, as well.  Imagine "dimension compression"
> technology as seen in the (sci-fi) movie Ultraviolet, or in the TARDIS
> of Dr. Who.  ("It's bigger on the inside!")  You could stuff as many
> files as you want into a single filing cabinet, have a filing cabinet
> with a potentially infinite number of drawers, or stuff as many filing
> cabinets as you want into a police call box which shrinks down and stows
> neatly inside a virtual watch that you wear on your virtual wrist.  Want
> to send a FAX?  Press a button on your virtual watch, and out pops your
> personal TARDIS.  Reach inside it, grab your virtual FAX machine, grab
> the document you want to send, and feed it through.  (You can fast-
> forward time, if you like, so you don't have to wait for each page to
> scan.)  When you're done, just hit the "poof" button on your virtual
> watch, and everything neatly folds itself back inside.
>
> Such a non-Euclidean 4-dimensional space full of nested objects could
> certainly be represented as a file system.  Omero and Olive
> (technically, o/mero and o/live) from the Octopus project over at LSUB
> already allow one to represent a two-dimensional GUI as a file system.
> (All or part of a GUI on one machine can be tar(1)ed up and untarred on
> another machine, reproducing the same GUI.)  It stands to reason that
> such an approach could be extended to allow representation of a greater
> number of widgets, with real-life social signifigance, in a space with
> more than two dimensions.
>
> In a sense, social networking Web pages could be considered flattened,
> stripped-down projections of such an n-dimensional social space into the
> medium of the 2D document.
>
> > Where to?  I think we're destined eventually to become bubbles of
> > information in a purely virtual organism that "may" instantiate itself
> > as a physical entity as the context demands, and that technology is
>
> I'm not sure if we will become entirely virtual.  That would require us
> to give up sex.  :) I don't think we humans will give up such things so
> easily.
>
> --
> +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
> |           human <cigar562hfsp952fans@icebubble.org>                  |
> |Any sufficiently high intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.|
> +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
>
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 8844 bytes --]

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-03-31  2:17 ` Staven
@ 2016-04-02  3:02   ` cigar562hfsp952fans
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: cigar562hfsp952fans @ 2016-04-02  3:02 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Staven <staven@staven.pl> writes:

> It's not worth it.
>
> You'll probably think I'm just being flippant, but I'm not.
>
> It's just not worth it.

That's another interesting & novel way to re-think social networking:
just don't have anything to do with it!  Indeed, that's pretty much the
approach that I've ended up taking, myself.

Do you think it will eventually fizzle-out, kind of like pet rocks and
Usenet newsgroups?  Social networking is a logical extension of the
personal information management (PIM) apps that were so popular in the
late 20th century (and continue to be popular, today, on smartphones).
So, I suspect it probably won't just fizzle-out of its own accord.

Do you think that social networking will be overtaken and replaced by
something else?  Will the replacement be better or worse?  Keeping to
the topic, if social networking's successor could be predicted far
enough in advance, it could be designed and implemented to be
smart-compatible (i.e., with a file system interface) from the get go.
That way, when it finally catches on and becomes popular, it won't pose
a burden to us '9ers.  They say that the best way to predict the future
is to create it, right?  So, perhaps the best way to fix the present is
to create the future.

--
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|           human <cigar562hfsp952fans@icebubble.org>                  |
|Any sufficiently high intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-04-01 20:53     ` Giacomo Tesio
@ 2016-04-02  9:32       ` hiro
  2016-04-02  9:58         ` Richard Miller
  2016-04-03  2:30       ` [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality, WAS: " cigar562hfsp952fans
  2016-04-03  4:42       ` [9fans] " lucio
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 36+ messages in thread
From: hiro @ 2016-04-02  9:32 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

It's not social to send HTML mails to this mailing list.
I don't like your typesetting.

On 4/1/16, Giacomo Tesio <giacomo@tesio.it> wrote:
> While funny in it's visionary shape, I'm seriously scared about this
> matter.
>
> Take for example Google's material design: any software that successfully
> mimic the physical world (paper layers in particular) is going to bland our
> perception of its "virtuality". Our mind is going to accept it as a
> physical tool. Now, we "know that a programmable computer is no more and no
> less than an extremely handy device for realizing any conceivable mechanism
> without changing a single wire", but are we sure we really want to remove
> the awareness of the wires?
>
> Google glasses scare me even more: we are going to look the world through
> some one else eyes. In the long run, our brain will start to accept the
> virtual baloons like the other physical entities that really exists.
>
> We are already trained to be suspicious about the truth even when it's
> clearly evident, now we can even start to ignore the information from the
> physical world, while accepting the virtual information that someone else
> feed us.
>
>
>
> Giacomo
>
>
>
> 2016-04-01 22:00 GMT+02:00 <cigar562hfsp952fans@icebubble.org>:
>
>> lucio@proxima.alt.za writes:
>>
>> > I don't even remember the name of the feature, but I used a tool way
>> > back in the very early days of a public Internet (it was called a MOO,
>>
>> > Given a browser-style interface with 3D capabilities, it would address
>> > social networking considerably better than Facebook (with which I have
>>
>> > For that is what social media provide: a world-wide stage on which you
>> > perform selections from your real life and any fantasy life you choose
>>
>> Very interesting.  I was envisioning a system which would (at least on
>> its GUI side) present information in the form of a Web page, like
>> Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.  I hadn't thought of abandoning the Web page,
>> altogether, for some other kind of "social space" browser.  I wonder
>> what that might be like.
>>
>> [Disclaimer: This is NOT a formal or serious proposal for a new Plan 9
>> file system.  (Not yet, at least.)  It's just an exploration of some
>> potentially possible possibilities.]
>>
>> For a social network to be useful, it must provide some intuitive
>> mapping between information in the virtual world and its real-life
>> referents.  (In contemporary social networks, these take the form of
>> person/place names, mugshots, and interactive maps with balloon icons.)
>> The space which humans are most familiar with navigating, of course, is
>> meatspace - the physical, brick-and-mortar world.  It makes sense, then,
>> that the most intuitive interface would offer some kind of three-
>> dimensional virtual reality.  The simplest, most intuitive mapping
>> between virtual space and meatspace would probably be to visually
>> "overlay" information from the virtual space onto meatspace.  Technology
>> (mostly in the form of various head-mounted glasses or goggles) already
>> exists which allows a person to see what's around them, while projecting
>> information ontop of what they see.  A device such as this has generally
>> been called an "eye tap".  But it has a problem: when you turn your
>> head, the display turns with it.  In order for the UI to be as intuitive
>> as the physical world, it would have to maintain orientation with its
>> physical environment.  Tracking motion of the user's head could be done
>> using accellerometers, a la Oculus Rift.  Imagine a Rift with two video
>> cameras on its front (to provide a binocular view on the physical world)
>> that overlays a digital world ontop of the real world you see.  Virtual
>> arrows could guide you where you need to go without needing directions.
>> When you get near your favorite Chinese restaurant, a balloon could
>> appear in your view, giving you access to information about it.  When
>> GPS magic detects that a friend of yours is nearby, an friendly-looking
>> arrow appears, indicating the general direction and approximate distance
>> to him or her.
>>
>> In order for a virtual world to be useful, however, simply mimicking the
>> physical world won't do; its physics must differ from the physics of the
>> real world in some useful way.  If your favorite restaurant is two miles
>> from your present location, for example, you won't want to walk two
>> miles to find its virtual balloon.  :) Navigating the virtual space
>> would require some way to stretch/pan space and time, allowing the user
>> to "fly" about and move forward/backward in time within the virtual
>> world, before restoring the overlay to match normal space/time.  You
>> would, for example, be able to hike the trail I hiked yesterday, even
>> after I got back from hiking it.  If I recorded GPS waypoints and/or
>> stereoscopic video along the way, you could hike right along with me,
>> having a conversation with my avatar about your favorite edible plants.
>> Then, I could "rewind" time and watch your hike & conversation as well
>> (assuming that you decided to share it with me).
>>
>> An ability to stretch/shrink distances in virtual space enables use of
>> non-Euclidean volumes, as well.  Imagine "dimension compression"
>> technology as seen in the (sci-fi) movie Ultraviolet, or in the TARDIS
>> of Dr. Who.  ("It's bigger on the inside!")  You could stuff as many
>> files as you want into a single filing cabinet, have a filing cabinet
>> with a potentially infinite number of drawers, or stuff as many filing
>> cabinets as you want into a police call box which shrinks down and stows
>> neatly inside a virtual watch that you wear on your virtual wrist.  Want
>> to send a FAX?  Press a button on your virtual watch, and out pops your
>> personal TARDIS.  Reach inside it, grab your virtual FAX machine, grab
>> the document you want to send, and feed it through.  (You can fast-
>> forward time, if you like, so you don't have to wait for each page to
>> scan.)  When you're done, just hit the "poof" button on your virtual
>> watch, and everything neatly folds itself back inside.
>>
>> Such a non-Euclidean 4-dimensional space full of nested objects could
>> certainly be represented as a file system.  Omero and Olive
>> (technically, o/mero and o/live) from the Octopus project over at LSUB
>> already allow one to represent a two-dimensional GUI as a file system.
>> (All or part of a GUI on one machine can be tar(1)ed up and untarred on
>> another machine, reproducing the same GUI.)  It stands to reason that
>> such an approach could be extended to allow representation of a greater
>> number of widgets, with real-life social signifigance, in a space with
>> more than two dimensions.
>>
>> In a sense, social networking Web pages could be considered flattened,
>> stripped-down projections of such an n-dimensional social space into the
>> medium of the 2D document.
>>
>> > Where to?  I think we're destined eventually to become bubbles of
>> > information in a purely virtual organism that "may" instantiate itself
>> > as a physical entity as the context demands, and that technology is
>>
>> I'm not sure if we will become entirely virtual.  That would require us
>> to give up sex.  :) I don't think we humans will give up such things so
>> easily.
>>
>> --
>> +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
>> |           human <cigar562hfsp952fans@icebubble.org>                  |
>> |Any sufficiently high intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.|
>> +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
>>
>>
>



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-04-02  9:32       ` hiro
@ 2016-04-02  9:58         ` Richard Miller
  2016-04-02 10:08           ` hiro
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 36+ messages in thread
From: Richard Miller @ 2016-04-02  9:58 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans

> It's not social to send HTML mails to this mailing list.
> I don't like your typesetting.

If you read it with acme mail, you don't see any typesetting ☺




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-04-02  9:58         ` Richard Miller
@ 2016-04-02 10:08           ` hiro
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: hiro @ 2016-04-02 10:08 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

i don't use acme.



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality, WAS: Re: The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-04-01 20:53     ` Giacomo Tesio
  2016-04-02  9:32       ` hiro
@ 2016-04-03  2:30       ` cigar562hfsp952fans
  2016-04-03  8:13         ` [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality, Richard Miller
                           ` (2 more replies)
  2016-04-03  4:42       ` [9fans] " lucio
  2 siblings, 3 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: cigar562hfsp952fans @ 2016-04-03  2:30 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Giacomo Tesio <giacomo@tesio.it> writes:

> physical tool. Now, we "know that a programmable computer is no more and no
> less than an extremely handy device for realizing any conceivable mechanism
> without changing a single wire", but are we sure we really want to remove
> the awareness of the wires?

I don't think people are necessarily aware of the "wires", anymore.
Many millenials think of the Internet as a resource that just sort of
floats around in the air, kind of like oxygen.  (I once built a little,
"mini-Internet" for a cryptography demonstration I did for a group of
millenials.  One of them expressed to me his confusion that the network
actually contained a wired hub!)  When people use the Web, send a text,
or make a call, they assume that their information is private because
they can't see the radio waves.  They have little, if any, concern with
how the technology actually works, just that it somehow "magically" does
something useful.

> Google glasses scare me even more: we are going to look the world through
> some one else eyes. In the long run, our brain will start to accept the

That's one of the reasons why it's so important to maintain control and
ownership of OUR OWN data.  My data + my programs = my image of reality.

> some one else eyes. In the long run, our brain will start to accept the
> virtual baloons like the other physical entities that really exists.

I think we already have one foot planted firmly in that mine field.
People already mistake what they see on social media for reality.  A
little over a year ago, I attended a Mensa* meeting in Portsmouth, NH
(the same city that the treaty was signed in).  Our discussion focused
on how to get more people to join Mensa, and how to encourage existing
members to participate in chapter activities.  (Less than 1% of people
who qualify for Mensa are actually members, and the overwhelming
majority of those don't participate in any of our calendered events.)
As is wont to happen when discussing promotion of ANYTHING, these days,
someone offered the perennial suggestion of using social media.  I posed
this group the question, (paraphrasing) "If someone was invited to an
event by someone who they knew in real life, as opposed to someone they
only knew from Facebook, would they be more likely to attend?"  Another
member there answered my question by saying that she saw her friends on
Facebook as BEING real friends.  I was just blown away by that answer.
On social media, you have no idea who you're talking to, if what they
say is true, or if they're even a real person.  Not long ago, it was
revealed that the U.S. government has actually paid contractors to
create hundreds of fake social media profiles.  It had never before even
OCCURRED to me that people might acutally mistake what they see on
social media for reality.

I could probably list half a dozen other annecdotes that illustrate how
social media have distorted people's perceptions of reality.  But this
one is perhaps the most compelling, because it is so unexpected and so
foreboding.  If a member of Mensa (whose IQ must be at or above the 98th
percentile) can mistake social media for reaility, then that same
mistake can be (and most certainly is) made by the other 98% of the
population.  That's terrifying.

> We are already trained to be suspicious about the truth even when it's
> clearly evident, now we can even start to ignore the information from the
> physical world, while accepting the virtual information that someone else
> feed us.

Maintaining a strong sense of skepticism might be a healthy way to
engage with the dubious world of social media.  Whenever you listen to a
politician speak, for instance, you do so with a healthy dose of
skepticism.  Perhaps we could treat everything we see on social media
like we treat politicians.  If we were to adopt a popular predisposition
to consider anything on social media as "quite likely false", then the
damage to reality might be limited.  Earlier in this thread, ...

lucio@proxima.alt.za writes:

> to publish.  Stupidly, we still demand that people be consistent, but
> that will drift away over time, of that I'm pretty certain.

There is some creative merit in doing that.  Then again, an inability to
tell what's true at all could be an emerging trajedy of these commons.

*Mensa is a trade name, and Mensa does not necessarily agree with or
endorse any of my kooky views.  They should, though.  ;)

--
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|           human <cigar562hfsp952fans@icebubble.org>                  |
|Any sufficiently high intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-04-01 20:00   ` cigar562hfsp952fans
  2016-04-01 20:40     ` Wes Kussmaul
  2016-04-01 20:53     ` Giacomo Tesio
@ 2016-04-03  4:22     ` lucio
  2016-04-03  4:32     ` lucio
  3 siblings, 0 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: lucio @ 2016-04-03  4:22 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans

> When you get near your favorite Chinese restaurant, a balloon could
> appear in your view, giving you access to information about it.  When
> GPS magic detects that a friend of yours is nearby, an friendly-looking
> arrow appears, indicating the general direction and approximate distance
> to him or her.

No one in his or her right mind is going to wear something that
diminishes the sexual attraction of his or her face in a public place.
Whatever you may think of social media, in public it is the
opportunity for sexual encounters that "informs" (as seems to be
fashinable to say today - and following fashion itself is an act
towards sexual attractiveness, successful or otherwise) the behaviour
of the majority.  Good luck investing in and selling something the
majority is not interested in, at least in the technology sphere.

So, I don't think any form of face gear is likely to win the race for
3-D visual peripherals.

Disclaimer: I only have sight in my left eye and a slightly unsightly
prosthesis for ny right eye, which I cannot afford to replace.  It
makes me a bit sensitive about vision enhancements, possibly
negatively so.

Lucio.




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-04-01 20:00   ` cigar562hfsp952fans
                       ` (2 preceding siblings ...)
  2016-04-03  4:22     ` lucio
@ 2016-04-03  4:32     ` lucio
  3 siblings, 0 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: lucio @ 2016-04-03  4:32 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans

> I'm not sure if we will become entirely virtual.  That would require us
> to give up sex.  :) I don't think we humans will give up such things so
> easily.

I'm sure that in a society of information bubbles, the very concept of
sexual gratification will be nothing more than an atavistic idea :-)

Lucio.




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-04-01 20:53     ` Giacomo Tesio
  2016-04-02  9:32       ` hiro
  2016-04-03  2:30       ` [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality, WAS: " cigar562hfsp952fans
@ 2016-04-03  4:42       ` lucio
  2016-04-03 11:24         ` Giacomo Tesio
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 36+ messages in thread
From: lucio @ 2016-04-03  4:42 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans

> We are already trained to be suspicious about the truth even when it's
> clearly evident, now we can even start to ignore the information from the
> physical world, while accepting the virtual information that someone else
> feed us.

For an Italian inheriting the legacy of Galileo Galilei, you sure
approach Science from an odd angle.  "suspicious about the truth" is
good, scientific behaviour.  "clearly evident" is not.

And "accepting the virtual information that someone else feed us"
becomes a non-sequitur.  Question, question, question.  If you don't,
then you start to pick winners without sound scientific grounds.  The
masses do that and here in South Africa it is pretty obvious what the
consequences are.

Lucio.

PS: Hardly worth worrying about.  This is likely to happen after our
64-bit clocks have run out of nanoseconds.




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality,
  2016-04-03  2:30       ` [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality, WAS: " cigar562hfsp952fans
@ 2016-04-03  8:13         ` Richard Miller
  2016-04-08  3:25           ` erik quanstrom
  2016-04-03 20:04         ` [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality, WAS: Re: The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook Wes Kussmaul
  2016-04-03 21:28         ` Winston Kodogo
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 36+ messages in thread
From: Richard Miller @ 2016-04-03  8:13 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans

> If a member of Mensa (whose IQ must be at or above the 98th
> percentile) can mistake social media for reaility, then that same
> mistake can be (and most certainly is) made by the other 98% of the
> population.

intelligence != wisdom

skill at solving IQ tests != intelligence




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-04-03  4:42       ` [9fans] " lucio
@ 2016-04-03 11:24         ` Giacomo Tesio
  2016-04-03 11:44           ` lucio
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 36+ messages in thread
From: Giacomo Tesio @ 2016-04-03 11:24 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1214 bytes --]

2016-04-03 6:42 GMT+02:00 <lucio@proxima.alt.za>:

> > We are already trained to be suspicious about the truth even when it's
> > clearly evident, now we can even start to ignore the information from the
> > physical world, while accepting the virtual information that someone else
> > feed us.
>
> For an Italian inheriting the legacy of Galileo Galilei, you sure
> approach Science from an odd angle.  "suspicious about the truth" is
> good, scientific behaviour.  "clearly evident" is not.
>

Theoretically, this is a very good point! :-D

But what is good for scientific research will work very badly for social
behavior and politics.

As an Italian, I also inherit the legacy of Macchiavelli and believe me:
uncertainty, indifference and divisions (and fear) are among the most
powerful tool to gain and preserve power.

I'm not afraid of people challenging mainstream opinions (this is Plan9,
isn't it? :-D), I'm afraid of people doubting about evident facts or simply
ignoring them: climatic changes? unsustainable distribution of wealth?
parents negating their kids misbehavior? inadequate legal systems for the
current world? and so on...


Giacomo
entirely off topic, sorry

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1741 bytes --]

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-04-03 11:24         ` Giacomo Tesio
@ 2016-04-03 11:44           ` lucio
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: lucio @ 2016-04-03 11:44 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans

> I'm not afraid of people challenging mainstream opinions (this is Plan9,
> isn't it? :-D), I'm afraid of people doubting about evident facts or simply
> ignoring them: climatic changes? unsustainable distribution of wealth?
> parents negating their kids misbehavior? inadequate legal systems for the
> current world? and so on...

Let me remind you that this latter aspect of human behaviour has been
around a lot longer than the scientific method and the latter has had
considerably more impact in any real sense.  That's the thing, you
see: as humans we can learn beyond and contrary to our instincts.
It's when we allow our instincts to take over from our "civilisation"
that things fall apart (I share your political past and, likely,
personal experience closer to the period after the World War II).

This "civilisation" (or "civilising principle") can make all the
difference.  Politicians and their fellow exploiters try to manipulate
the "middle class", but in the burgeoisie resides the conscience
("social knowledge and awareness") of our humanity.  At either end is
"meat eat meat" and eventual, inevitable self-destruction.

Lucio.




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality, WAS: Re: The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-04-03  2:30       ` [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality, WAS: " cigar562hfsp952fans
  2016-04-03  8:13         ` [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality, Richard Miller
@ 2016-04-03 20:04         ` Wes Kussmaul
  2016-04-03 21:28         ` Winston Kodogo
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: Wes Kussmaul @ 2016-04-03 20:04 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans



On 04/02/2016 10:30 PM, cigar562hfsp952fans@icebubble.org wrote:

> That's one of the reasons why it's so important to maintain control and
> ownership of OUR OWN data.  My data + my programs = my image of reality.

This went out Friday...

THOUSANDS TRAPPED IN MINING DISASTER

While exact figures are not available at this time, the total number of 
victims in this latest mining disaster will surpass the total from any 
mining accident in history. Subsurface PII mines are known to stretch 
for miles in the underground economy south of San Francisco and beyond, 
where large veins of gold made up of the personally identifiable 
information (PII) of every user of a phone, computer or tablet are 
relentlessly excavated by skilled data miners.

“It's hard to get a handle on just how many people are trapped along 
with the sources of PII gold” said an official at the scene. “The miners 
built a whole economy by breaking into your information home, stealing 
your personal information and putting it on their balance sheet as a 
money-making asset. As it starts to sink in just what they've been up 
to, people feel trapped.” Much of that feeling, he noted, “is 
exacerbated by earlier pronouncements about doing no evil.”

Wes Kussmaul, author of Escape The Plantation, noted that the data mines 
have much in common with plantations during the era of slavery. “In the 
information age, ownership of information about you, your relationships 
and habits and affiliations and finances is like owning you” said 
Kussmaul, adding that “breaking into your information home is an act of 
burglary, and taking your information assets out of your information 
home should be considered grand larceny. The perpetrators of these 
felonious acts should consider getting into another line of work before 
law enforcement and the courts wake up and see the burglary and theft 
that are being perpetrated right in front of them in broad daylight.”

Asked whether the use of the plantation metaphor might be controversial, 
Kussmaul responded, “My book is about ownership of people. The word for 
that is slavery. Since the ownership of people via their digital selves 
is new, the metaphor may strike some as insensitive. My hope is that 
those who feel that way will take a good look at where we are headed if 
we don't do something about rampant burglary of, and theft from, our 
information homes. That practice leads to enslavement.”

Escape The Plantation goes beyond describing enslavement to presenting 
the Authenticity Infrastructure and its Personal Information Ownership 
Component, offering a viable way for people to take ownership and 
control of information about themselves. Characterized by Kussmaul as 
“PKI done right,” the Authenticity Infrastructure's credential “lets you 
log in anywhere using one single password. And just as your car's 
license plate makes you accountable but doesn't disclose the identity of 
the driver or owner of the car, this credential lets you assert your 
identity without disclosing your identity. If you use it to digitally 
sign a document, the relying party knows that the true identity of the 
signer is available, given his or her consent.”

_Escape The Plantation_, 387 pages, ISBN 978-1-931248-23-5, published by 
PKI Press, is available in ebook form ($12.98) and in print ($24.95) 
from PKI Press at https://pkipress.com .




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality, WAS: Re: The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-04-03  2:30       ` [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality, WAS: " cigar562hfsp952fans
  2016-04-03  8:13         ` [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality, Richard Miller
  2016-04-03 20:04         ` [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality, WAS: Re: The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook Wes Kussmaul
@ 2016-04-03 21:28         ` Winston Kodogo
  2016-04-04 11:37           ` hiro
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 36+ messages in thread
From: Winston Kodogo @ 2016-04-03 21:28 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 5353 bytes --]

Were it not for the spelling mistakes, I would swear that the cigarmeister
was the Blessed Mark V Shaney in drag. Although, I'm fairly sure that even
on an off day Mark  knew the difference between "less" and "fewer". "Less
than 1% of people
who qualify for Mensa"  indeed.

On 3 April 2016 at 14:30, <cigar562hfsp952fans@icebubble.org> wrote:

> Giacomo Tesio <giacomo@tesio.it> writes:
>
> > physical tool. Now, we "know that a programmable computer is no more and
> no
> > less than an extremely handy device for realizing any conceivable
> mechanism
> > without changing a single wire", but are we sure we really want to remove
> > the awareness of the wires?
>
> I don't think people are necessarily aware of the "wires", anymore.
> Many millenials think of the Internet as a resource that just sort of
> floats around in the air, kind of like oxygen.  (I once built a little,
> "mini-Internet" for a cryptography demonstration I did for a group of
> millenials.  One of them expressed to me his confusion that the network
> actually contained a wired hub!)  When people use the Web, send a text,
> or make a call, they assume that their information is private because
> they can't see the radio waves.  They have little, if any, concern with
> how the technology actually works, just that it somehow "magically" does
> something useful.
>
> > Google glasses scare me even more: we are going to look the world through
> > some one else eyes. In the long run, our brain will start to accept the
>
> That's one of the reasons why it's so important to maintain control and
> ownership of OUR OWN data.  My data + my programs = my image of reality.
>
> > some one else eyes. In the long run, our brain will start to accept the
> > virtual baloons like the other physical entities that really exists.
>
> I think we already have one foot planted firmly in that mine field.
> People already mistake what they see on social media for reality.  A
> little over a year ago, I attended a Mensa* meeting in Portsmouth, NH
> (the same city that the treaty was signed in).  Our discussion focused
> on how to get more people to join Mensa, and how to encourage existing
> members to participate in chapter activities.  (Less than 1% of people
> who qualify for Mensa are actually members, and the overwhelming
> majority of those don't participate in any of our calendered events.)
> As is wont to happen when discussing promotion of ANYTHING, these days,
> someone offered the perennial suggestion of using social media.  I posed
> this group the question, (paraphrasing) "If someone was invited to an
> event by someone who they knew in real life, as opposed to someone they
> only knew from Facebook, would they be more likely to attend?"  Another
> member there answered my question by saying that she saw her friends on
> Facebook as BEING real friends.  I was just blown away by that answer.
> On social media, you have no idea who you're talking to, if what they
> say is true, or if they're even a real person.  Not long ago, it was
> revealed that the U.S. government has actually paid contractors to
> create hundreds of fake social media profiles.  It had never before even
> OCCURRED to me that people might acutally mistake what they see on
> social media for reality.
>
> I could probably list half a dozen other annecdotes that illustrate how
> social media have distorted people's perceptions of reality.  But this
> one is perhaps the most compelling, because it is so unexpected and so
> foreboding.  If a member of Mensa (whose IQ must be at or above the 98th
> percentile) can mistake social media for reaility, then that same
> mistake can be (and most certainly is) made by the other 98% of the
> population.  That's terrifying.
>
> > We are already trained to be suspicious about the truth even when it's
> > clearly evident, now we can even start to ignore the information from the
> > physical world, while accepting the virtual information that someone else
> > feed us.
>
> Maintaining a strong sense of skepticism might be a healthy way to
> engage with the dubious world of social media.  Whenever you listen to a
> politician speak, for instance, you do so with a healthy dose of
> skepticism.  Perhaps we could treat everything we see on social media
> like we treat politicians.  If we were to adopt a popular predisposition
> to consider anything on social media as "quite likely false", then the
> damage to reality might be limited.  Earlier in this thread, ...
>
> lucio@proxima.alt.za writes:
>
> > to publish.  Stupidly, we still demand that people be consistent, but
> > that will drift away over time, of that I'm pretty certain.
>
> There is some creative merit in doing that.  Then again, an inability to
> tell what's true at all could be an emerging trajedy of these commons.
>
> *Mensa is a trade name, and Mensa does not necessarily agree with or
> endorse any of my kooky views.  They should, though.  ;)
>
> --
> +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
> |           human <cigar562hfsp952fans@icebubble.org>                  |
> |Any sufficiently high intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.|
> +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
>
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 6367 bytes --]

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality, WAS: Re: The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-04-03 21:28         ` Winston Kodogo
@ 2016-04-04 11:37           ` hiro
  2016-04-04 23:53             ` Winston Kodogo
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 36+ messages in thread
From: hiro @ 2016-04-04 11:37 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

here at my university mensa is just the place where the food tastes the worst.



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality, WAS: Re: The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook
  2016-04-04 11:37           ` hiro
@ 2016-04-04 23:53             ` Winston Kodogo
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: Winston Kodogo @ 2016-04-04 23:53 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 420 bytes --]

Alas, I can make absolutely no sense of anything from the cigarmeister.

But then again an inability to tell what's true at all could be an emerging
trajedy of these commons.

Or perhaps there is some creative merit in this.

Where is Boyd when you need him?

On 4 April 2016 at 23:37, hiro <23hiro@gmail.com> wrote:

> here at my university mensa is just the place where the food tastes the
> worst.
>
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1163 bytes --]

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

* Re: [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality,
  2016-04-03  8:13         ` [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality, Richard Miller
@ 2016-04-08  3:25           ` erik quanstrom
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: erik quanstrom @ 2016-04-08  3:25 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans

On Sun Apr  3 01:16:15 PDT 2016, 9fans@hamnavoe.com wrote:
> > If a member of Mensa (whose IQ must be at or above the 98th
> > percentile) can mistake social media for reaility, then that same
> > mistake can be (and most certainly is) made by the other 98% of the
> > population.
>
> intelligence != wisdom
>
> skill at solving IQ tests != intelligence

yup!

and, a 1000bhp engine on a yugo doesn't get much traction.  :-)

- erik



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2016-04-08  3:25 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 36+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2016-03-30 23:40 [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook cigar562hfsp952fans
2016-03-31  0:12 ` Winston Kodogo
2016-04-01 17:44   ` cigar562hfsp952fans
2016-03-31  0:23 ` Kurt H Maier
2016-03-31  0:58   ` Winston Kodogo
2016-04-01 17:30   ` cigar562hfsp952fans
2016-03-31  1:53 ` Bakul Shah
2016-03-31  2:09   ` Lyndon Nerenberg
2016-03-31  2:59     ` Bakul Shah
2016-03-31 19:41     ` Steve Simon
2016-04-01 15:00       ` michaelian ennis
2016-03-31  2:17 ` Staven
2016-04-02  3:02   ` cigar562hfsp952fans
2016-03-31  5:24 ` lucio
2016-03-31  9:03   ` hiro
2016-03-31 10:17     ` David Pick
2016-03-31 11:16       ` Iain Watson Smith
2016-03-31 12:44       ` Kurt H Maier
2016-04-01 20:00   ` cigar562hfsp952fans
2016-04-01 20:40     ` Wes Kussmaul
2016-04-01 20:53     ` Giacomo Tesio
2016-04-02  9:32       ` hiro
2016-04-02  9:58         ` Richard Miller
2016-04-02 10:08           ` hiro
2016-04-03  2:30       ` [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality, WAS: " cigar562hfsp952fans
2016-04-03  8:13         ` [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality, Richard Miller
2016-04-08  3:25           ` erik quanstrom
2016-04-03 20:04         ` [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality, WAS: Re: The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook Wes Kussmaul
2016-04-03 21:28         ` Winston Kodogo
2016-04-04 11:37           ` hiro
2016-04-04 23:53             ` Winston Kodogo
2016-04-03  4:42       ` [9fans] " lucio
2016-04-03 11:24         ` Giacomo Tesio
2016-04-03 11:44           ` lucio
2016-04-03  4:22     ` lucio
2016-04-03  4:32     ` lucio

This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).