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Imagining the Future of Privacy and Security

Pew Research Internet Project
The latest Imagining the Internet report is out from The PewResearch Internet Project and Elon University. This one focuses on the future of Privacy and Security.

In it, I say:

During the previous century of urbanization, we constantly complained of alienation and isolation. No one knew anyone quite as well as we did when we were in small towns. Now, like it or not, we are having to relearn the social behavior of small towns: how to cooperate, tolerate, or just ignore differences. Frankly, we were not so great at all of that when we were in small towns. Now, we get another chance to try to live like a Family of Mankind.

But read the report for more and varied insights.

Killer Apps of 2025 – Pew Internet

Imagining the Internet logo

No I did not say email. Nor did I say #noemail. What I did say in response to Pew Internet’s Imagining the Internet in 2025 survey question:

New killer apps in the gigabit age: Will there be new, distinctive, and uniquely compelling technology applications that capitalize upon significant increases in bandwidth in the US between now and 2025? Please elaborate on your answer. Explain why you think there will be hardly any change or tell what new tools and applications will excite people in the next decade and envision the kinds of personal connectivity and immersive media experiences that will seize the public imagination.

was this:

“More visual information that can be scanned and reconfigured and customized for the needs of the moment will be the hallmark of the next 10 years. Significant increases in bandwidth will remove some of the barriers to that end. Expect this information to be 3D and easily manipulated. Expect a new era of literacies more special than ever available to us.”

Many great insights passing as foresights in this report.

More predictions for 2025

Continuing releases from Pew Internet/Elon University Imaging the Internet in 2025

Regarding changes brought by AI and Robots: We will experience less drudgery, and more leisure time

I responded:

“I for one welcome my new robot masters. I don’t welcome the loss of jobs or the depersonalization of services. The social impact will continue to force us to refocus on what makes us human, who we are in relation to each other. And the terms of the social contract that binds us. In the [US] South we saw great changes when the plantation system was abandoned. Not for the best—much room for improvement—but certainly for the better. Human augmentation, both onboard via wearable and implants and offboard with devices that think, are unstoppable. We want them. We want our hearts to keep pumping, our eyes to keep seeing, and we want to know more now! A further and unresolved question coming to confront us: Where does personhood reside? In our bodies or in the robots that may become the housing for our new selves?”

Futures: What Did I Say?

For several years now, the good folks at the Pew Internet Project and at Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Project have asked people they consider experts to respond to questions about the Future of the Internet as it relates to different topics. A bit of what I’ve said has been sprinkled through those reports. The most recent series began coming out to public in March of this year. Here’s what I said–or more properly, some of what I wrote–about the next 25 years (with links to the larger reports):

As regards Digital Life in 2025
A: “Television let us see the Global Village, but the Internet let us be actual Villagers.”
Full report here.

As regards The Internet of Things.
A: I predicted that body movements may evolve into commands. “The population curve … will cause much of the monitoring and assistance by intelligent devices to be welcomed and extended. This is what we had in mind all along—augmented life extension. Young people, you can thank us later. We look like kung fu fighters with no visible opponents now, but soon, the personalized interface issues will settle on a combination of gestures and voice. Thought-driven? Not by 2025, but not yet out of the question for a further future. Glass and watch interfaces are a start at this combination of strokes, acceleration, voice, and even shaking and touching device-to-device. The key will be separating random human actions from intentional ones, then translating those into machine commands—search, call, direct, etc.”
Full report here.

As regards Threats to Net access and innovation
A: “Historic trends are that as a communications medium matures, the control trumps the innovation. This time it will be different. Not without a struggle. Over the next 10 years we will be even more increasingly global and involved. Tech will assist this move in a way that is irreversible. It won’t be a bloodless revolution, sadly, but it will be a revolution nonetheless.”
Full report here.

More to come in the coming months from
Imagining the Internet

Metrolina Librarians Association Keynote

Last week on June 12, I delivered the keynote talk at the 9th Annual Metrolina Librarians Association meeting in Charlotte. (slides below)

As you can see if you look at the slides, I provided a survey of activities underway at the UNC School of Information and Library Science to illustrate new trends and directions for engagement and research in Information and Library Science.

Kaeley McMahan of Wake Forest University‘s Z. Smith Reynolds Library writes about her pick of top three projects here on their blog.

The conference hashtag was #mlachange2014 You can find references on Twitter and Facebook and on the MetroLibs group on Facebook.

Thanks to Doug Short of Central Piedmont Community College and the Board of Metrolina Librarians Association for having me down.

Thanks and best wishes to El Sua

On January 30, Luis “elsua” Suarez visited our UNC School of Information and Library Science senior capstone course on Emerging Issues and Technologies to talk with us about his 6+ years without email while at IBM.

Luis brought a lot of good insight to the class as he did a Google Hangout with us from his home on Gran Canaria. Luis lives in Africa, reports in Europe and works most closely with a team in North America — without using email.

Near the end of his talk, he told us a little — very little — about his new adventure which was to start only a few days later. Luis is a charter member of Change Agents Worldwide.

Luis, who was extremely generous to spend time with us during his transition, will be moving from being a Change Agent within a very large global and hierarchical organization to advising and assisting organizations of all sizes to work better by learning about Social Business practices.

Luis has been a global presence already as has been noted in Wired, New York Times, and at Outside The Inbox dot EU (among others). His experience and personal engagement will definitely be a leader and advisor to call on.

Working with Luis has taught me not to look for the smartest person in the room but to look for the smartest network that has someone in the room with you.

Looking forward to his and CAWW’s future adventures.

Caldo Verde por Año Nuevo

Each year at New Year’s, I’ve tried to work out something that would meet all the Southern folklore requirements for luck, prosperity, and a long sweet life as Mama Dip says “COLLARD GREENS for LOTS OF MONEY, BLACK-EYE PEAS for GOOD LUCK, PORK for GOOD HEALTH, YAMS to SWEETEN THINGS UP.” There are a dozen variations of what food yields what attribute, but the foods involved plus cornbread are required for whatever reasons might be given.

Starting a few years back, I’ve been adding the New Year’s plate pieces to the Portuguese dish, Caldo Verde aka the Green Soup. This year with full respect to the taste changes and easily availability of foods we might call Mexican, I moved away from the Portuguese kale and hard sausage soup entirely and went with the recipe below.

Served with a masa harina based cornbread and a red wine, it made a great New Years meal.

Caldo Verde por Año Nuevo

1 pound chorizo (Mexican style crumbly or hard Spanish style)
1 pound collards (stemmed, washed three times, rolled and chopped)
1 – 2 large sweet potatoes (peeled and diced)
1 large onion (peeled and diced)
4 garlic cloves (peeled and minced)
3 celery stalks (stemmed and diced)
2 – 3 medium carrots (peeled and diced)
1 poblano pepper (seeded and diced)
1 can or equiv of prepared black eyed peas (1 – 2 cups)
4 – 6 cups of stock
1 – 2 bay leaves

Garnish (enough for the table):
chopped pepper (orange, red or green)
chopped cilantro
chopped celery
chopped red onion
chopped and seeded jalapeño

Most of the work here is in the preparation. If you start with dried black eyed peas, there’s a lot more work ahead of time. I skip that part and start with canned peas or those prepared ahead of time. Dicing for me means about 1/4 inch or less cubes or close to depending on the vegetable. Mincing, as in the garlic, means chop it as fine as you can or use a garlic press. For the garnishes, chop as course or as fine as your table desires.

You’ll need a large cooking pot for the caldo and small bowls for the garnishes.

Oil and heat the pot. Then saute the onion, garlic, pepper and celery until the onion is transparent.
Add the Mexican chorizo and stir until lightly browned and broken into bits.
Add sweet potatoes, bay leaf, and carrots. Stir for about 5 minutes.
Add the collards — they should be well shredded — and stir until dark green.
Now add the stock and black eyed peas then bring to a boil.
Reduce to a simmer and let it cook until the sweet potatoes are very mushy.
The slow simmer lets the flavors mingle. You can prepare the garnishes while you’re waiting and/or sip on a favorite beverage or chat with friends or read a good book.

Serve with cornbread (I make pan based on masa the tortilla flour, but every family has their favorite versions).

Revisiting Pasts – 1968 & 1983

I somehow missed Charlotte Magazine‘s September feature about the Charlotte of 1968. A turbulent year for the city, the nation and the world. And for me. I was graduating from East Mecklenburg High and headed to NC State. In a nice sidebar, the principals and perhaps a bit of the principles of The Inquistion are featured. A nice picture of Lynwood Shiva Sawyer and Tom Wilkinson — Tom has his own feature this month in the same magazine (see previous post).

Tom Wilkinson and Lynwood Shiva Sawyer

I missed a lot of what was going on in Charlotte at that moment, but thanks to working on and with The Inquisition a lot of it is still familiar and enduring — some in a good way, like having a context when talking with Adam Stein who was one of the founders Charlotte’s first integrated law firm.

In 1983, a bunch of us began to meet with poet Ann Deagon who was looking to turn her project Poetry Center Southeast into a statewide service group for all writers. By 1985, we were an official 501(c)-3 organization called the North Carolina Writers’ Network. The apostrophe and its placement seemed very important at the time as I remember. Judy Hogan was the first president with Georgann Eubanks and myself serving as vice presidents. I eventually left the vice presidency and the Board of Trustees for a couple of decades and recently (2008 I think) rejoined the Trustees.

Now the Network has 1200 (dues paying) members. 200 of those members were in Wrightsville Beach for the Fall Conference, a gathering that moves around the state to a different site each year. We began with an annual conference in our first year with our first director Robert Hill Long and I setting up folding chairs someplace in Durham for many fewer people.

It was great to see what current director Ed Southern and his staff have done with the Conference and the Network.

North Carolina Writers Network

Music, poetry, etc.

On Saturday afternoon, I sat in on Tom Arnel’s Placeholder Show on WCOM-LPFM serving parts of Carrboro and anyone streaming the show. Tom asked me to put together a playlist on some theme — my choice. About 8-10 songs. I decided to do a set of songs by and about Roma aka Gypsies mostly in the Balkans and in France mostly influenced by jazz, pop, dance music and even alternative sounds.

Gypsy Queen by Van Morrison
My Gypsy Auto-Pilot by Gogol Bordello
Carolina by Taraf de Haidouks mixed by Bucovina Club
Me la Kamav by Vera Bila
Losing My Religion by Dolapdere Big Gang
Gypsy Rover by Roger McGuinn
Hierachie by Carmen Maria Vega
Runnin’ Wild (Course Movemente) by Django Rheinhardt
Hora Staccato by Taraful Ciuleandra and Maria Buza
Gypsy by Charlie Parker
Romani by Turkish Gypsies from Gypsies of the World

On Sunday, I picked up the MC job from Jerry Eidenier at Saint Matthews Episcopal Church in Hillsborough for Favorite Poem III. The twice yearly series is based on Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project. Parishioners being a poem — not written by themselves or relatives or friends — to share with each other. For this event, the poems were:

“There is a Community of the Spirit” Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi as translated by Coleman Barks

“A Few Words on the Soul” Wislawa Szymborska (trans?)

“Barter” Sara Teasdale

“The Second Coming” W. B. Yeats

“Soliloquy of a Spanish Cloister” Robert Browning

“The Journey” Mary Oliver

“Departmental” Robert Frost

“The Poems of Our Climate” Wallace Stevens

“A Word” Emily Dickinson

“Provide, Provide” Robert Frost

Chapel Hill reads Green Eggs and Ham

During Festifall a couple of Sundays back, Chapel Hellians visiting the Chapel Hill Public Library table and bus took time to read Dr Seus’s Green Eggs and Ham (in front of a green screen). Familiar faces and voices are there including the Mayor and at least one member of Council.

RTP180 – 20 Years (of ibiblio) in 5 Minutes (more or less)

Luckily the slides have little to do with the words being spoken. The 60 slides in 5 minutes are illustrative of the variety of content hosted on ibiblio.org. The 60 projects represent about 1% of our holdings and relationships. The talk was part of a series of lightning rounds at The RTP Foundation on September 17, 2013, called “RTP 180: All Things Open Source”. Thanks to the RTP Foundation for putting the event together.

I posted the slides in an earlier article, but there they are again:

Email Gets Failing Grades. I speak for #noemail

#noemail is stylish. Who knew? Courtney Rubin reports in this past Sunday’s NYTimes Style section “Email Gets Failing Grades”.
I’m quoted as:

Paul Jones, a professor at the University of North Carolina, does not think they should have to.

“E-mail is a sinkhole where knowledge goes to die,” said Mr. Jones, who said that he gave up e-mail in 2011. It was a radical move, not least because Mr. Jones helped write the code for the university’s first e-mail program 30 years ago. “I’m trying to undo that sinful work,” he said, joking.

E-mails to him receive an automated reply: “Goodbye E-mail, I’m divesting,” plus some 20 ways to reach him. About the only person frustrated by this, he said, was a department head who wanted to know “how will you possibly read our important departmental announcements?” Mr. Jones said with a laugh.

But in his quest to eliminate e-mail, Mr. Jones may have a surprising obstacle: students. Canvas, a two-year-old learning management system used by Brown University, among others, allows students to choose how to receive messages like “The reading assignment has been changed to Chapter 2.” The options: e-mail, text, Facebook and Twitter. According to company figures, 98 percent chose e-mail.

My responses here later.

20 years in 5 minutes and #noemail at Duke

I had a great time this Monday at the RTP Foundation taking part in 5 minute talks on open source projects called “RTP 180: Open Source All Things.” While I talked — slightly over my 5 minutes, I’ll admit — just over 60 slides representing about 1% of the projects currently hosted at ibiblio.org passed by on the screen at about 3 seconds each. That could have been a little fast for some people, so I’ve reposted those slides here:

On Wednesday, I took the #noemail message to the Duke Libraries as “Imagine Life without Email” where one former ibiblian and current Duke Libraires developer taunted me by sending an email in my presence with not one but two attachments. Will is, of course, the source of his own pain as Oscar Wilde observed “We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.”

Slides from that talk are here (note that Is Good doesn’t trust Google Docs but I assure you this link is fine):

Remembering Seamus Heaney (April 13, 1939 – August 29, 2013)

Seamus Heaney

We were lucky and privileged in the course of Seamus Heaney’s live to have crossed paths with him several times. First when he agreed to be part of an early experiment in putting poetry on the WWW by not only granting us the use of some of his poems, but he agreed to record his readings of those poems himself with the help of Harvard’s Poetry Room in the 1994. Heaney had not yet won the Nobel Prize at that point. That would come the next year when his work was cited “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past”.

Certainly the poems he chose for the Internet Poetry Archive are exemplars of that sense of beauty, depth and exaltation.

Heaney returned to Chapel Hill in May 12, 1996 to deliver our commencement address.

To send off our graduates into their new lives, he quoted from a ballad he had heard whilst growing up in Derry in which a young woman was going off into the world leaving on the 12th of May. There was much wise reflection in his interpretation of that ballad in the context of commencement, but I recalled and recall now the final verse which is a hopeful send off for graduates and for Heaney himself:

                          So I bade them all good evening
                               and there I hoisted sail,
                          Let the best betide my countryside,
                               my fortune never fail.
                          Then night coming on, all hopes being gone,
                               I think I will try elsewhere,
                          at a dance or a wake my chance I'll take
                               and leave Magherafelt May Fair.

Seamus Heaney at the Internet Poetry Archive.

The Story Behind the WWW Hypertext 91 Demo Page and UNC and me

We’ve gotten a lot of nice coverage of my rediscovery of perhaps the earliest World Wide Web pages this past week.

Fact is that those pages — Tim Berners-Lee’s Demonstration Page for Hypertext 91 and my own personal page — have been on the net almost continually since they were developed and/or modified on my NeXT cube during Tim’s visit to UNC in the late Fall of 1991 on his way to San Antonio and the ACM conference in December 1991. While the pages have moved from server to server as we upgraded, the pages mostly worked just fine even in modern web browsers without modification. True, there are HTML tags that are strange to us now: DD, DT, DL, NEXTID, and a requirement that each A link have a NAME field. (place view-source:http://ibiblio.org/pjones/old.page.html and view-source:http://ibiblio.org/pjones/old.paul.html in Chrome to see the old school html unrendered).

But how did those pages get created and how did they end up in Chapel Hill on my NeXT in first place?

Wide Area Information Servers and the WWW gateway

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Judd Knott and I led a network services research group at UNC in the Office for Information Technologies. Among the projects we developed was an internet bulletin board service that allowed access to all kinds of software for information sharing, Free software (as in Freedom), USENET News, Gopher, etc — even email. LaUNChpad quickly had hundreds of users and allowed us experiment in a living world and in the process contribute to information access in a small way.

We were often implementers of access protocols and very early software releases. One particular project really caught our interest; Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), a Z39.50 database searching software suite, was being developed at Thinking Machines, Inc (a company mostly out of MIT that included Brewster Kahle who would later found Internet Archive). We, Jim Fullton in particular, quickly became a participant in development of a free and robust version of WAIS (wais-8-b2) in the spring of 1991.

Not long after, Jim made contact (via one of the hypertext newgroups) with Tim Berners-Lee of CERN who was interested in developing a gateway between WAIS servers and his project modestly called The WorldWideWeb. By about September, Jim and Tim had something working although not ready for general use. By October, Tim announced the gateway.

On The Way to Hypertext 91

Not long after, Jim got email from Tim saying that he was submitting a paper on what was now called more briefly WWW at the upcoming Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) conference Hypertext 91 in San Antonio in December. Tim made plans to stop by UNC and visit with us before going on to Texas. He was confident given the immediate acceptance of WWW on newsgroups and as seen in his logs that he would get a good speaking slot at the conference.

A few weeks later, we learned differently. Tim’s paper had been rejected. But he had been offered a spot to demonstrate the WWW. Only a couple of catches. There was to be no Internet connectivity at the conference. And as Tim’s demonstration required a NeXT computer, he would have to bring his from Europe. Tim was intrepid and soldiered on.

A Call to an Expert

Anticipating Tim’s arrival, I called a nearby Computer Science department. The voice at the other end had heard of Tim’s project but was not impressed. He immediately recited what he saw as deadly problems with the WWW:

  1. Links in hypertext must be bidirectional. WWW’s are one way only.
  2. WWW servers aren’t aware of each other and there is no inter-server communication.
  3. All WWW servers are equal. There should be a concept of hubs.
  4. WWW servers don’t keep state. They are completely unaware of their previous interactions.
  5. It’s obvious that whoever wrote the hypertext engine doesn’t understand SGML. This HTML is done all wrong.
  6. Finally, he’s giving this away for free. That means it has no value at all. We have our own version and a strong licensing partner.

I didn’t take Tim to meet with the person who owned that voice.

Tim Berners-Lee’s visit to Chapel Hill

When Tim did come to visit, he already knew that I too had a NeXT just like his. He stopped by. We talked about WAIS and WWW and beer and he pulled out a floptical drive (NeXT pioneered a read-write optical disk in a case. No one followed). I installed Tim’s graphical browser on my NeXT. Tim talked me through using WWW by using a copy of his Hypertext 91 demonstration page.

There was, as you see now, a link to the WWW< >WAIS gateway for searching a database in the next room. When I clicked on the link, my information request first went to CERN in Switzerland then back to UNC to search the database. The results then left UNC for Switzerland where html was added and then the results sent back to my NeXT.

Tim showed me how simple and easy editing and creating a WWW page could be. First he showed how straightforward editing was by changing “demonstration” to “demonfdgfgstration.” I created my own page and added a link to an FTP site in Denmark that hosted a sound collection among other things. I wanted to see if the NeXT and Tim’s WWW browser would be able to pass the sound to a player. I think it did, but I really can’t remember if it did.

Beers near English Scholars

That night, I invited Tim, Jim, Judd and others working on our project to my home. My wife, Sally Greene, was having a bunch of her friends, all PhD students in English over as well.

The geeks and literature folks didn’t really mix. The geeks were out on the deck in the warm North Carolina fall night. The scholars were in the kitchen. I think some of the talk inside was of “Afternoon, a Story” a hypertext composition by Michael Joyce. Someone was interested in how current theory impacted (yes that word) and was impacted by hypertext. No one had actually experienced hypertext other than Apple’s Hypercard though. Yet just a few feet and a few drinks away…

My NeXT, Proceedings from Hypertext 91, The NeXT Book

World’s Oldest Web Page (I have it)

Links for now. Story later.

Sources:

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