My OHM2013 talk: Federation fosters freedom

▼ Between 31 july and 4 august OHM2013 ("Observe. Hack. Make.") will take place in Holland. I'll have a talk on the 4th at 16.00 about how network protocols that let you run your own server foster freedom, while monolithic services such as Facebook and Twitter do the opposite.

Update: these are the slides (PDF, 4 MB)

This is the abstract of the talk:

Many services are monolithic: you can only Skype using the Skype client, and only Facebook using facebook.com. But it doesn't have to be that way: everyone can run their own mail server. Federation makes for more complex protocols, but is required for freedom.

A decade ago, the only way to use instant messaging was through a service like ICQ, AIM or MSN. Today, everyone can run their own Jabber server, and the servers communicate using the XMPP protocol, the same way as you can run your own mail server, which communicates using the SMTP protocol.

A federation of independent servers means that no single entity can control huge numbers of users. This has huge advantages: no single business can pull the plug on a service, or change it in ways the community doesn't like. Competition gets to drive down the price and/or improve the user experience. Last but not least, users have a choice of jurisdictions and can use servers in a country with at least a modicum of privacy protection on the books.

This talk will outline the challenges an opportunities for federation in areas such search and social networking (Twitter!), drawing inspiration from the XMPP and SIP protocols. It is a high level talk about fundamental choices—there will be no header diagrams or DTDs.

Permalink - posted 2013-07-15

Relaunching my blog

▼ Five years ago I turned this site into a blog. I used Apple's iWeb software, thinking this would make it easier to update the site than crafting HTML by hand. And it was, for a while. But iWeb has been dead for quite some time.

So I decided to relaunch the blog using a homegrown content management system (this makes it sound a lot bigger than it really is, trust me). With this, it's easier to fire off quick posts or just link to somewhere else with a comment. The title of these posts starts with a →.

To avoid scaring people away with large swaths of text, the homepage just shows a short intro by default. You have to click on the red triangle to expand the full text of a post in place. Because the text is already loaded, you'll see it immediately. You can of course also click on the title to see the post on a separate page.

If you decide you've seen enough, you can then click the triangle again to collapse the full text text of the post.

I wanted a clean, modern font for the blog, but not something as overused as Helvetica. Futura is pretty good, but too heavy. I looked at Century Gothic and ITC Avant Garde, but those are for-pay, and the buying options were too unwieldy for me—I was afraid to either buy the wrong thing or overpay. I considered Florencesans, which is very nice except that the t looks ridiculous. But then I found URW Gothic L. If you have any comments on the font or other aspects of the design of the site, I'm interested to hear them.

I've populated the new blog with the old posts as well as some photos I've posted from my iPhone a few years back and links to things I've written elsewhere.

Permalink - posted 2013-07-09

Buying a USB 3 - Gigabit Ethernet adapter

▼ I currently have a MacBook Air and plan on getting a MacBook Pro with Retina Display when the new models are released.

Both of these lack Ethernet ports. So I got Apple's 10/100 Ethernet to USB adapter two years ago. But it's pretty useless, because it only does 11 MB/sec, while I get 14 - 16 (sometimes as high as 22) MB/sec over wifi. So when a year ago Apple released a 10/100/1000 ethernet to Thunderbolt adapter I got that one. Which is great, except that you can either plug in the GE adapter or an external screen, not both.

When I get the new computer, I guess I'll have to buy a second GE adapter so I can transfer data between the two computers at the highest possible speed. There are now 10/100/1000 Ethernet - USB3 adapters. Those should give me full GE performance on the new computer that will have USB3, but in the meantime something better than wifi using USB2 on my current machine.

So I asked for suggestions on the Ars Technica forums:

Looking at Amazon UK, there are numerous options. Can anyone recommend a specific one? My requirements:

• has to work with MacOS
• preferably no driver required
• full GE performance over USB3
• at least 200 Mbps over USB2
• wake on LAN support is important
• jumboframes and energy efficient ethernet support would be nice

I didn't get any recommendations. I decided to go with the Anker one. Here are the unboxing photos:

This is how it compares to Apple's 10/100 USB and 10/100/1000 Mbps Thunderbolt adapters:

Minor gripes:

• the box is very small, the USB cable is bent a bit further than I like and the driver CD barely fits, despite it being an 8 cm CD
• because it's not a regular CD, it won't fit in many drives, including the ones Apple has been using for the past decade
• the installation leaflet doesn't tell you where to download the Mac driver] (or that this is needed in the first place)
• the adapter and the USB 3 connector are rotated 180 degrees relative to each other. So under normal circumstances, the adapter will be upside down

After installing the driver, you get a new ethernet interface:

Although it says the MTU can only be 1280 - 1500 bytes, values up to 4070 are accepted and larger ones are replaced with 4070. Strangely, the actual MTU setting that you get is 4 bytes larger: you can do pings with 4074-byte packets.

The wake-on-LAN seems to work as it should, but I'm not sure the energy efficient ethernet is implemented in the driver. With the Thunderbolt adapter it says it uses EEE when connected to the new Time Capsule, but this one doesn't:

en6: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 
	options=23<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,TSO4> 
... 
	media: autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex,flow-control>) 
	status: active

I got mine from Amazon.co.uk, at the time of this writing for £21.99 (associate link), but it's also available from Amazon.com, as I write this for $21.99 (associate link).

Permalink - posted 2013-07-05