Earlier today I thought of a basic way to encrypt information on a 2D graph using logical XORs. Below is a brief explanation and example. This is just a thought exercise but if it helps you in anyway please take it and use it.

This could really prove useful if one could produce a QR code generator that both generates the encryption keys as well as decrypts encrypted QR codes on scan.

As always all code is free as in speech and free as in pizza under the MIT Open Source License

Putting a message on a 2D grid

While watching a font creation tool creating a bitmap cursive capital A I was struck by the fact that a letter is just a series of black and white squares on a grid. The higher the resolution means the more squares on the grid which leads to the human eye perceiving a smooth edge but extremely close it’s still squares on a grid.

That got me thinking along the lines of how to put some information on a grid and then jumble the squares to hide the message.

I started out by creating an 8×8 grid and putting a message on it:

Next I created a ‘key’. The key is just a random mixture of black and white squares also on an 8×8 grid. Here I used a checkerboard pattern to show a point in a moment.

Finally I laid the key on top of the message and did a square by square logical exclusive OR. If two squares were the same color the resulting square was white. If two squares were opposite colors the resulting square was black.

Above we have an encrypted message. Now simply pass it along with the key to whoever you wish to decrypt it and your message is safe from prying eyes.

Notice that the encrypted message forms a symetrical shape. This could be a clue to an attacker that you used a symetrical shape (such as a checkerboard) as the key and would be something to avoid. Also it’s assumed that since the key is traveling with the message that any man in the middle doesn’t know that the encryption algorithm is XOR.

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Those who interact with me regularly know that I’ve recently often used the term ’SuperUser.’ A SuperUser is a privileged user with the powers to make sweeping and fundamental system wide changes. In the Matrix you can think of a SuperUser as God and any user can command that archetype with the proper knowledge.

To be a SuperUser means to follow the three Laws of Sudo:

1. With great power comes great responsibility.
2. Respect the privacy of others.
3. Think before you type.

Though on the surface seemingly simple these three Laws are extremely deep and profound. To be a true SuperUser is a life of contemplation and control.

There are surely SuperUsers who live amongst us. Like Jedis protecting the Digital Force these people reserve the command sudo for only the most extreme situations.

Recently I’ve been deeply struck by all the grave misuses that our great technology is being put to. We are witnessing the creation of more wealth and knowledge than at any point in history yet our people are poor and dumbed down. Worldwide entire nations are starving and at war over dwindling resources yet the wealthier nations waste so much that our landfills are overflowing.

Above all of this sits the industrialized world with our high technology. And behind that sits a sysadmin. It is that sysadmin who knowingly allow these things to happen on his/her system that I seek to label with the term ‘SuperAbuser.’

A SuperAbuser is someone who has attained the privilege of Sudo yet uses it to suppress information and oppress freedom. Like the Sith to the Jedi the SuperAbuser is the mirror opposite of a SuperUser.

SuperAbusers follow the 3 Laws of -Sudo:

1. With great power DOES NOT come great responsibility.
2. DO NOT respect the privacy of others.
3. DO NOT think before you type.

The next time you hear about the FBI reading your communications or a lawyer locking you out of your own DNA remember that at the end of that trail sits a sysadmin who is knowingly allowing that behavior. That sysadmin is a SuperAbuser.

You know who you are.

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I finally made it to the legendary SF hacker space noisebridge on friday. Though I only recently became aware of it I feel like I’ve been looking for this place for a long time.

Walking in I got the feeling of what it must have been like to witness Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Labratory under John McCarthy or Stanford’s Augment Research Center under Douglas Englebart in the 60′s. I witnessed an eclectic mixture of both men and women at the apex of technical skill. The room was a zeitgeist of the digital era with San Francisco’s counter culture and anti authoritarian view apparent.

The future is do it yourself and distributed. The future is free both gratis and libre. The future is analog and digital. The future is male and female. The future is highly technical. The future is about ubiqutious information and who controls it. I witnessed the future in that room.

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This year I attended the Maker Faire—an amazing gathering of makers of all things creative and eccentric. This is a place where hardware hackers meet with art car builders with a small dose of model battleship enthusiasts thrown in for variety. I have never witnessed a gathering of this kind and can only say that if you have kids this is a MUST ATTEND.

The Maker Faire gave me a good chance to test out the camera on the new HTC EVO that Google gave me a couple of days ago. All in all the 8 megapixel camera is really nice and I think the pictures turned out great.

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Recently I had my DNA genotyped. I have been wanting to do this for years and had the chance to do it with a company that I have been interested in and decided to take the chance. I opted to have my ancestry and my disease predisposition made known to me and have decided to post the results into the public.

“BUT WAIT!” I hear you screaming. “Isn’t this important private  information? Won’t this affect what medical insurance you can get? Isn’t this revealing too much about yourself?” Possibly, in fact probably. But I am doing this to underscore a point about my life. My life is an open book. I have mentioned before my passions (the web, uplifting the human condition, art & music). I have mentioned before my triumphs (family, job, life). And I have mentioned my great failures (drug related criminal record, drug use as a young adult). Everything about me is public. I have no secrets to hide from you as you have no secrets to hide from me.

I also had my DNA genotyped and am sharing the information because I am on a quest of self discovery. Both figuratively and quite literaly. It is my hope that this information brings me further along that quest. It is also my hope that by revealing such intimate information about myself that I inspire you to consider opening up information about yourself. After all – we live in public.

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Welcome to my world…

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Once again I am adding my 2 cents to the overwhelming coverage of the iPad. Here goes..

YAY! Warning! I am about to come off like a total fanboi.

This device is very exciting. Yes there are things that I would change. I would add a camera. I would add multi-threading. I would make it more open. I would free it up to other carriers. But other than those few complaints I am very impressed.

As I said in my last post, Steve Jobs has a special knack for being one step ahead of the rest of us and releasing paradigm shifting technologies. As he said in his speech apple has recognized the need for a new form factor between an iphone and a laptop. Google has been saying the same exact thing. And I totally confer.

Considering my passion for the web I really can accomplish 75% of my tasks with only the web. Even more so when I am casually surfing the web or watching video. This device will perfectly accomplish that for me.

This is truly a new device. If you read some of the writings of Jeff Raskin (the creator or the Mac) he talks about making a piece of consumer electronics that simply gets out of the way and acts as an appliance and not a computer. And I think that this moment is the fulfillment of that idea. Apple has now moved the web and apps from “computers” to people friendly tablets.

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Very exciting news today for the open source community. The mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, announced that San Francisco officially has an open source software policy. That means that when government officials go to buy the next round of software that they have to consider open source equally with closed source.

Gavin Newsom had glowing things to say about open source including “The opportunities with open source are tremendous: lower costs, greater agility, better reliability, improved security, and increased innovation.”

This is a really big deal IMHO for a couple of reasons. 1. San Francisco has traditionally been ahead of the curve when it comes to social norms. If we are now at the place where our local governments can go to open source software then that is a good sign for the rest of the country and world. 2. Open source software is important in general because as time goes on and everything in our society is basically reduced to information and bits it will become more and more important to have everything be open (within reason of course).

It will be interesting to see what software the city government of San Fran actually picks. I will also be interesting to see what other cities follow suit.

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Ok, Darwin time. It’s time to admit the truth and face the facts. Internet Explorer needs to die. Die Die Die. And no I don’t just mean version 6. I mean every version. Even the unreleased version 9. Microsoft needs to give it up. If they absolutely must make a browser they should just use the open source webkit rendering engine that Apple and Google use. Its the fastest engine around and it is completely open source.

Hot off of the heals of the German govt. the French govt. has issued a release telling people to not use IE. The French and German governments are rightly concerned that businesses are using technological stone age browsers to view and send sensitive materials.

There are really a few of reasons that Internet Explorer must be laid to rest for the good of the people.

1. IE really sucks when it comes to creating websites. Ask any website designer and they will tell you. When you are creating a website you need to actually design several sites. First you design a site how you would like it to look in Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. And then you develop a website for each version of IE—6, 7, & 8. This is no joke. Designers spend seemingly endless hours tweaking their designs to get them to look good in IE. It is a waste of time and energy and is detrimental to a good work flow.

2. IE really really sucks when it comes to web standards. And standards matter more than any other thing on this great web of ours. Tim Berners Lee often says how if you put a bunch of ants together you won’t get an ant hive if they don’t all operate according to standards. Standards allow amazing things to emerge out of chaotic networks. And internet explorer has horrible standards support. Which means that it is holding back potentially amazing emergence’s. You can really see this with my work in HTML5. Internet Explorer doesn’t really support HTML5. So all of the great new bells and whistles won’t be able to be used by anyone using this dinosaur software. And we can expect many more amazing things to emerge from the web. Each one of these things will be held back in some way by internet explorer.

3 Internet explorer really really really sucks at security. And this might be the most important point of all. Because even though IE sucks at standards support that is really only something that someone who creates websites cares about. After all, the end user doesn’t realize what went into making a site look good across browsers and so therefore has no sense of the difficulty IE brings to developers. But the average user does realize if their system gets hacked. These recent attacks on Google and 20 other major tech companies show that the greatest computers in the cloud are vulnerable to this kind of attack. Do you really think that your personal PC is safe? It isn’t! Stop using Internet Explorer!

I realize that there are still companies that are dependant on IE and that is just ridiculous. I think it speaks volumes about Microsoft that they don’t bend heaven and earth to create some kind of software that allows these legacy systems to somehow upgrade to a standards compliant IE9.

Can you image google for 1 day allowing something to happen like this with Chrome? It would never happen. I’m not saying Chrome will never be hacked, I’m sure it will. What I am saying is that if Google had a major hack on an old version of it’s browser it would use some tech magic to help people move away from that browser. It is in their business interest to do so.

Microsoft just doesn’t seem to get that. And that is kinda worrisome. It is worrisome because Microsoft is one of the biggest software companies in the world. They are so entrenched that I would think they are set in stone for a generation. But that may not be the case. the web is like a rushing river. And even the mighty microsoft can get washed away if it doesn’t go with the flow.

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Lately it seems like I spend most of my time reading technical specifications. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. I personally enjoy digging in to a good spec. Although a bit jurisprudent at times, a complete spec is the final word when it comes to a technical questions. Either something is to spec or it isn’t.

The most contentious spec around right now is definitely HTML5. It seems to be taking on a nearly mythical and religious status in the web developer community. Either you hate it or you love it. But either way you feel really strongly about it. Me? I happen to love it. It is the right spec for the right web at the right time.

But HTML5 was only relatively recently brought in to the W3C for official specification. Before that it began it’s life as a project of the WHATWG—which stands for Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group. This group was formed in 2004 after the W3C voted to continue work on XHTML2.

Initially it was formed by a small group of 9 “members” from 4 of the 5 main browser vendors. These people believed that incremental improvement to HTML was better than the W3C’s vision of a complete overhaul with XHTML2. And although the WHATWG wasn’t an official part of the W3C they were the browser vendors. So they could go ahead and implement features that they were creating.

Eventually these new HTML5 features became so popular that the W3C had no choice but to bring HTML5 into the fold with a reconstituted HTML Working Group. (I realize that this is a generalization and simplification and I welcome all corrections in the comments )

Over time the WHATWG grew to include many more “contributors” than the 9 initial members. Disclaimer – I am a contributor to the WHATWG as well as a member of the W3C HTML Working Group. So I see it from both angles. And here is my take.

HTML5 is in a very interesting place right now because it is effectively being developed in 2 locations— the WHATWG & the W3C. Of course some would argue that in the end the W3C is all that matters. After all it is the standards body that sets the official recommendations. Governments, big businesses, and education world wide won’t really be able to back a spec until is gets the official nod from the W3C. So in that sense no matter what the WHATWG creates it will ultimately be up to the W3C to give it the final OK.

Also, as people much smarter than me and who have been doing this much much longer than my have argued elsewhere the job isn’t complete with HTML5 until it is completely accessible and W3C Standard. And that isn’t the case right now sadly. Also, the WHATWG doesn’t have a patent policy like the W3C. And that is worrying.

On the flip side of the coin. The web is speeding up. That isn’t hyperbole. I really mean that. The speed of innovation as well as the speed of our actual computers are speeding up. And this isn’t the 90′s anymore with microsoft holding 90%+ market share of browsers.

Now open source browsers are becoming the norm. Now mobile phones are becoming the web. Now applications and not static documents are becoming the web. It is no longer a time to drag on the process of creating new web technologies. So in that sense I appreciate a group like the WHATWG that pushes innovation forward. We are very fortunate that we have the W3C to temper the WHATWG.

As a final note let me say that I have only been observing this scene a relatively short time and in no way mean to offend anyone from any of the groups mentioned above. As I said before, please correct me if you see an error or have something you would like to add.

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