Ryan Sholin » Technology

This.

Ryan Sholin — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 16:17:31 +0000

@andymboyle not every piece of journalism software is a public-facing news app built on deadline.

— jonathanstray (@jonathanstray) December 21, 2011

Wanted: The Unfollowemator

Ryan Sholin — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 11:55:09 +0000

As a Twitter user, I want a way to automatically unfollow users who mention specific terms with a certain sentiment, so that I can easily filter out people with which you just can’t argue.

Acceptance Criteria:

This tool should use the latest version of OAuth to allow the user to connect their Twitter account to the application.
This tool should allow the user to enter a keyword or keywords into a text field, then choose an emotional state (probably limited to positive/negative in the first iteration) to filter on.

For example, a user might search for positive mentions of “McRib”

The tool should display a few example tweets, and a paginated list of users that will be unfollowed.
The list of users to be unfollowed should include checkboxes, allowing the user to uncheck any box before confirming their unfollows.
After confirming, the user should be presented with an option to automatically unfollow all users who match this query in the future.

A short list of things that make me want to buy an iPad

Ryan Sholin — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 10:42:12 +0000

Instapaper 4.0
The Guardian
Flipboard, still
Tabbed browsing in Safari
Facebook
Lugging a 15.4-inch laptop around to meetings

Any better reasons?

Daniel’s status treatment

Ryan Sholin — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 11:56:24 +0000

I really like what Daniel is doing with his “statuses” in WordPress. Assume this is a custom post type. I think he started blogging these while taking a(nother) break from Twitter.

In his RSS feed, these show up with a plain title of “Status” — I find this to be sort of amusing.

A short list of things I didn’t post to social networks last week

Ryan Sholin — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 10:51:48 +0000

While on vacation last week, in an effort to unplug, especially from the constant cycle of posting things on the Internet and eagerly awaiting validation, I spent a lot of time separated from my phone (no laptop present on vacation) and while I did *read* Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ periodically (often in the middle of the night while awake with kids experiencing their first serious Florida-style thunderstorms), I didn’t post or share a single thing.

Here’s a short list of the sort of thing I didn’t share:

My pithy comment on your vacation pictures.
Stars on your tweets laden with Rupert Murdoch + pie jokes.
Pictures of my frosty rum drinks.
Pictures of my child enjoying her ice cream.
Pictures of my child enjoying her ice cream after falling off the bench she was eating it on.
Pictures of other people taking pictures while holding up their freshly caught red snapper, fresh off the fishing boat, just before cutting out their guts and attempting to grill their filets.
Snarky commentary on the foreign tourists burning their toes with charcoal while trying to grill their own catch by the marina.
Pictures of the incredibly lush resort lobby.
Foursquare check-ins at the resort, marina, restaurants, Whole Foods in Coral Gables on the way down, or any of the other semi-nostalgic South Florida locations we passed through, accompanied by appropriate photos of my kids in shopping carts or high chairs as logic would require.
Facebook status updates about how my wife was at the spa and I was aimlessly wandering around in the incredible heat with both my children.
Google Reader shares of your interesting analysis of the decline of Borders, News Corp, and/or Amy Winehouse.
Plus ones.
Likes.
Stars.

I think that covers it.

I can’t believe I’m writing a blog post about Google+

Ryan Sholin — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 11:34:10 +0000

Really. I’m more surprised than you are, I promise.

Also, I promise this will not be a blog post about “What news organizations can do with Google+” or anything of the sort. Promise. Will. Not.

So the thing that consistently confuses me about social products from Google is that as a user, I have truly mixed feelings about how much I want public and private in the Google universe.

On one hand, I have a rather public persona on the Internet, where you can find (tens of?) thousands of things I’ve said on Twitter or this blog, or links I’ve saved, or comments I’ve made, or in some cases, even news articles I’ve reported.

But what’s ~~much~~ slightly more difficult to find, unless you bother nosing around my screen names, or you’re a closer friend than the average blogger, is the sort of thing I say on Facebook about my family or people-I-see-in-person-lots friends, or pictures that I post of my kids.

And as usual, that’s what has me confused about Google+, which clearly aims to be a ubiquitous social layer to the Web, omnipresent in my browser as I use Gmail, Calendar, and Reader, on and off all day long, on my laptop and phone.

Do I use this for personal, old-friend conversations? That’s mostly something I do on Facebook these days. And besides, where are these things going to show up? On my Google profile? Which is the first thing anyone is going to see (I think?) when they search for my name? Yikes. That’s why I hated on Buzz: I couldn’t control what showed up on that very public part of my persona. Other people’s comments and conversations around links that I share are something I want people to have to click a couple more times (like on this blog?) to get to. That’s why I removed my Google profile and stopped using Buzz so quickly way back in the day when Google stumbled over privacy issues in social products.

Do I use this for professional, branding-related knowledge trumpeting and link sharing? (Yeah, that’s how I just framed it. It happens.) Not sure. Twitter still feels like the right place for that, from time to time, when I’m not busy desperately trying to sound more clever than I am in person.

Anyway, let’s put all that aside for the moment.

The feature of Google+ that interested me the most when I saw the demo, and still seems like the biggest deal to me? Hangouts.

Silly name aside, casual group video chat with a limited (ahem) circle of friends/colleagues/cats = a winning feature for me. The YouTube thing built into it is pretty awesome, too. This makes me want to set up circles for “Soccer Fan Friends” so we can open up video chat and watch USWNT and Copa America highlights together. Or commiserate/empathize over the Gold Cup final.

That’s about it — I don’t need another status app, or link sharing app, or blogging app, or curation app in my life or workflow right now — but real live connections with my friends and acquaintances around the world? I’ll take it.

In which you can hear the Internet breathing heavily on a hot day

Ryan Sholin — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 02:15:40 +0000

PBS hacked, new Twitter stuff, new Google stuff, new Apple stuff, constant flow of new Facebook stuff, that guy who had that other guy’s computer, a thousand horrifying tornado photo galleries, continuing viral revolutions in the Middle East, Instagram.

It’s too hot for this, Internet.

(I’d link, but I don’t want to break anything.)

The Inbox Zero Thing

Ryan Sholin — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 15:51:39 +0000

I really, really, really, dislike “productivity” books. And gurus. And methods. And things that can generally be characterized as dogmatic.

But I like this.

My empty inbox.

I know I’m late to this party, but for years, I thought Inbox Zero was some sort of Getting Things Done-related madness involving a lot of folders and filters and whatnot.

But no, it’s not that complicated. And Merlin Mann does a great job of making it palatable, even digestible, to extend the metaphor a little deeper into the gut.

Start here, and read everything under the “Posts in the Inbox Zero series” heading before you start mashing your mouse. It won’t take you more than an hour or two to get started.

Not that every salesman in a flea market is sleazy, but…

Ryan Sholin — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 01:42:44 +0000

This is why we use Twitter and Facebook and even Hunch and Quora to ask questions, search for products, and figure out how to replace dimmer switches.

Searching Google is now like asking a question in a crowded flea market of hungry, desperate, sleazy salesmen who all claim to have the answer to every question you ask.

via Marco.org – Google’s decreasingly useful, spam-filled web search.

WikiLeaks and Tor: Moral use of an amoral system?

Ryan Sholin — Mon, 31 May 2010 14:30:53 +0000

Reading the New Yorker’s piece on WikiLeaks, it’s hard to decide whether I’m reading about freedom fighters, skilled propagandists, or as is often the case, both.

Without looking too deeply, although I have serious reservations about their editorial decisions from time to time, I believe in what WikiLeaks is trying to do, and I have since they first arrived on the scene.

But I’m profoundly worried to read about Tor server traffic mined for data.

If I have the story straight, this is the sort of behavior Tor is designed to protect people from, not subject them to:

Before launching the site, Assange needed to show potential contributors that it was viable. One of the WikiLeaks activists owned a server that was being used as a node for the Tor network. Millions of secret transmissions passed through it. The activist noticed that hackers from China were using the network to gather foreign governments’ information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction has ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the site’s foundation, and Assange was able to say, “We have received over one million documents from thirteen countries.”

Confusing, right?

In this narrative, Chinese hackers are crawling the Tor network for the purpose of espionage. Someone attached to WikiLeaks with access to a Tor node — most likely an anonymous volunteer, if we believe the narrative regarding the structure of WikiLeaks elsewhere in the story — notices this, and starts tracking the activity of the Chinese hackers.

My first set of questions, directed toward friends who know far more about Tor than I do:

What, what? Can “hackers from China” successfully trawl Tor for information?
Hold on, even if they can, could someone with access to logs from a single Tor node figure that out, and then, figure out how to get access to the same documents the Chinese were accessing?

And then we come to my greater question, and worry:

If these two points of the narrative are true, then Tor is (perhaps as it should be?) an amoral network being used for both good and evil (painting with a broad brush here, forgive me).

And if that’s the case, if Tor is just a platform that doesn’t make any judgments of its use, how do we then judge the acts of a lone WikiLeaks/Tor volunteer?

Is it OK to hack Tor in the name of the public good?

And if it is, what do we do when secrets are exposed that don’t serve the public good?

I’m not sure, but I have a hard time trusting Tor or WikiLeaks right now.

Tell me why I’m wrong…

(It occurs to me now, of course, that the “Tor” line in the narrative could easily be a falsehood, constructed to substitute for something a bit more direct. If WikiLeaks wanted to fend off queries regarding the sources of documents in their possession, getting them from a network that theoretically provides total anonymity to the user certainly sounds like a solid way to parry those questions. Maybe.)

More context: Does the “military” section of the “Who uses Tor” page answer any of my questions?

These are all open questions. I’m reading up on the history of Tor, and its vulnerabilities. I’ll update this post with anything I hear from friends who know better…

[UPDATE: As expected, commenters come through. Ethan Zuckerman added a thorough explanation of what someone hosting a Tor server would be doing monitoring what users are up to, among other things.]

[SECOND UPDATE: The Tor Project blog responds, pointing out that Tor doesn't magically encrypt text, it simply allows for the anonymous transfer of files. So if you use unsecure connections and send data in plain text, it's just as safe as writing down the information on a piece of paper, folding it into an airplane, and throwing it across the street. (My ridiculous metaphor, not Tor's.) The other interesting thing you'll find in the Tor blog post is this sentence: "We hear from the Wikileaks folks that the premise behind these news articles is actually false -- they didn't bootstrap Wikileaks by monitoring the Tor network."] //Thanks to commenter Shava Nerad for pointing out the Tor post and more.

Further reading:

Wired’s Threat Level blog had pretty much the same reaction I did when they first read the New Yorker story.
The Slashdot thread on the issue isn’t super-useful, but the update to the original post contains this bit: “This flat denial of the assertion that Wikileaks was bootstrapped with documents sniffed from the Tor network is repeated unambiguously in correspondence from Wikileaks volunteers.”

Ryan Sholin » Technology

This.

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