Exciting.

Anyway, it’s interesting to see how others leverage the tools available.

[ Steve Rubel's Lifestream Workflow | steverubel.com ]

Links

[ 23andMe | www.23andme.com ]

I was pulling that consistently, with some pulls coming at 2.5 Mbps. I am seriously loving my 3GS.

By the way, this speed test app from Speakeasy (the one I used above) is best in class in my opinion. ::

Links

[ Speed Test iPhone App | App Store ]

Not sure if this is a Google thing, or an iPhone/Android thing–or both. But I can’t wait. ::

So I finally got my Wireless Access Point (an Apple AirPort) authenticating off of Active Directory-integrated LDAP in Server 2008 (which is called NPS now). So now I authenticate wireless users individually, through Active Directory, rather than using a shared secret. WPA2 Enterprise…it overfloweth with w00tn3ss.

Setup

So here are the basic steps, and I can provide more detail if you have questions in the comments.

1. Install AD and Create Users

First install Active Directory. Easy stuff.

Next, since the whole point of this is to have unique user authentication, you need to have…users. So create them as usual but be sure to add them to a new group like “RADIUS” or something, and ensure that they have dial-in access within their user account. I used “RADIUS Users” because I’m creative and eccentric.

2. Enable Network Policy and Access Services in Server 2008

This is what replaces IAS in Server 2008. The install is pretty straight forward; it’s the policy that’s the trick.

I’m using PEAP right now, although I haven’t yet researched the ideal setup. Soon, though, and if you have any input (or good reading) on this let me know.

You also want to set the authentication rule to Windows Authentication within the policy, and then select your group out of Active Directory that you placed your users in.

Be sure to setup a RADIUS client within the NPS configuration, and enter the info for your access point rather than for your individual clients.

3. Configure Your Wireless Access Point

Tell your wireless access point to use WPA2 Enterprise, and configure the RADIUS info to point to your domain controller that you just set up NPS on. Enter the shared secret you configured during the NPS piece.

4. Configure Your Clients

Connect to your AP as you normally would, and when prompted you will enter your Active Directory username and password. I’ve chosen PEAP as my authentication protocol pending more research on which is ideal:

Fin

And that’s about it. Connect to your AP and enter your credentials.

Now when your friends come over you simply make them an account in Active Directory and they have wireless access using their own username and password. And when they leave you disable their account until next time. This way you get all the added benefits of password expiration and stuff like that.

Oh, and if any part of this fails, check the NPS logs on your DC. Logs are much improved in 2008 vs. previous versions of Windows, and it’s pretty easy to troubleshoot. I saw a lot of errors with authentication types not being supported before I figured out which to use.

Bonus: If you’re one of the cool kids you’ll have your AD and AP logs going into Splunk so you can see (and alert on) attempts to access your wireless network from accounts and MAC addresses you don’t recognize. More on that later.

Anyway, enjoy, and hit me up with any questions. ::

So there’s a lot of talk about the speed of the new iPhone 3G[S]–understandably so, given that the [S] stands for speed. But this doesn’t excite me for the reason most might imagine.

I don’t want fast, I want a lack of slow.

What I want to see from the new iPhone is a lack of the following things:

• delays when moving between core apps (iPod, phone, etc.)
• delays when moving between functions within apps (from favorites to contacts within the phone app, for example)
• pauses when using search functions
• general UI jitters and slowness

So, yeah, Exchange support, video, improved camera–all cool, no doubt–but I mostly want the new iPhone to be better at what it already does. ::

I like the simple stuff that blows you away. EtherPad is one of those things.

You go to the site, start typing stuff, and then simply send the URL of the page to someone (or multiple someones) and you’re instantly sharing that document. You each see what the other person or people are typing, and their text is highlighted so you can clearly see who typed what.

Then you can export it, etc., as you would expect. So clean. Check out this screencast to get a better grasp of it. ::

As one might expect, I’m highly enthused about the new iPhone 3GS release. One of the new tricks I’m most excited about is Exchange support.

So, maybe in this order of feature anticipation:

1. Overall speed: I hate those UI pauses
2. The new camera: it’ll make my D90 crush slightly less powerful
3. Video: hello lifecasting (and a native Qik app)
4. Exchange Support: The ability to keep my work contacts separate is something I’ve been wanting for a long time.

[ Now I just need to somehow get my company onto Exchange 2007 so this'll work ]

But yeah, overall, I think this’ll be a solid upgrade. It’s kind of like Snow Leopard–it’s completely new, but many of the seemingly subtle enhancements are going to make it a must-have upgrade. ::

[ P.S. Oh, and yeah...I can't wait for Snow Leopard. ]

Meh.

Boxee support or it didn’t happen.

I say great. It’ll be fun to be on such a fast network before we move to Verizon (hopefully), but with AT&T it’ll still be unstable as hell while dropping calls.

So we’ll basically go from slow, shitty service to blazing fast shitty service. Awesome. ::

Well, Google Wave seems to have just become the first system to leap in the direction of this vision, and I am excited about this application to the point of giddiness.

[ Siri | siri.com ]

It’s getting exciting in the world of cross-network authentication. Let’s review. I can now:

• sign into Digg using Facebook
• sign into DISQUS using Facebook or Twitter
• sign into Facebook automatically using OpenID (with two-factor authentication) or Google
• sign into FriendFeed using Google, Twitter, or Facebook

We’re quickly approaching the point where we’re going to be able to log into one major service (Google, Facebook, OpenID, etc,) and from there access all of our other services without authenticating.

As it stands now, I can already log into my OpenID provider, visit the Facebook homepage, and be transparently logged in. Today this works on Facebook. Soon something like it will work for your bank as well.

This is a good thing, but there’s a catch.

Security

While this is completely phenomenal from a functionality standpoint, we need to consider the fact that single-sign-on (SSO) raises a serious security concern: it significantly increases the impact of an account compromise.

If my OpenID account gets me into Facebook, and my Facebook gets me into Digg and DISQUS and FriendFeed (where I can post to Twitter, of course)…then a compromise of my OpenID account means a compromise of all those other accounts as well. Basically, once someone gets into your main service, your entire online identity can be hijacked.

Authentication Strength: More Important Than Ever

As single-sign-on solutions get more popular (i.e. now) we are going to have to give significantly more attention to our authentication standards and processes. Traditionally this has meant having a strong password, and while that is an essential piece of it, it’s arguably no longer enough.

What we really need to do is move to a strong/multi-factor authentication system. This means combining at least two of:

• something you know (passwords, pins)
• something you have (tokens, smartcards)
• something you are (biometrics)

So if someone guesses your password to my OpenID account, for example, they still can’t get into my account. They know my password, but they don’t have my mobile phone with my soft token on it. That’s multi-factor authentication, and it improves your security greatly when done right.

My current recommended way of doing this is by adding two-factor authentication to OpenID, which can be done via Verisign PIP for free. VIP can be used to add two-factor auth to major sites like eBay and PayPal as well, and soft tokens are available for popular mobile phone platforms if you don’t want to carry an actual token.

Strong Authentication Alternatives

In addition to tokens a number of other innovative options are available for multifactor authentication. Vidoop is an interesting system that combines OpenID functionality with a unique picture-based authentication system. It’s not technically multi-factor since it relies on something you know twice (password, then the images), but it’s still considered strong authentication.

Plus there are number of systems that use other things we commonly have with us to provide an additional factor of authentication, like sending a one-time password to your mobile phone via text message.

Conclusion

Social web service integration is upon us. Very soon, signing into websites using local credentials is going to be an indication of one of two things: 1) your single-sign-on system is broken, or 2) you’re using a website so ancient that you might want to consider an alternative.

This is progress, and it’s progress we should embrace, but we need to keep the risks in mind and take steps to mitigate them. So yes, enjoy the new powers given to you by single-sign-on, but do your best to protect yourself by looking for strong/two-factor authentication options within your favorite online services. ::

Links

[ Strong Authentication | wikipedia.org ]
[ Two-factor Authentication | wikipedia.org ]
[ Single Sign On | wikipedia.org ]
[ OATH | openauthenticaton.org ]
[ Facebook Connect | facebook.com ]

People struggle with why Twitter is special. It’s special because it counters, better than any other technology, the timeless social obstacle of “out of sight, out of mind”. Regardless of how much time you’d spend with a given person if they lived nearby, relationships atrophy when distance comes between you.

The longer someone you care about is gone, the more an invisible barrier grows between you–one that makes it awkward to reinitiate contact. It’s as if loved ones over time somehow change from tangible people into abstract ideas that require effort to interact with. This sinister effect of distance turns best friends into strangers, and technologies such as mobile phones and video conferencing don’t help. They don’t help precisely because the barrier is the initiation of contact, not the ability to communicate once connected.

Twitter solves this problem in a way that no other technology has. Through a stream of common, real-world updates about one’s life, Twitter reminds our fickle, here-focused brains that those we care about are real, and prevents them from disappearing into the world of the abstract. In short, Twitter’s magic is that it’s able to keep close people close regardless of how far they are from each other, which is a feat that no other technology has been able to accomplish. ::

I think it’s really cool that FriendFeed is providing this service, but it’s also sad because they aren’t performing this role knowingly. In their minds, they’re actually competing with Facebook.

Kind of cute, really. Well, cute in a sad way. ::

http://hanson.gmu.edu/wildideas.html

On similar topics is one of my favorite essays of all time, by Bill Joy:

Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us

::

1. What are the variables among social networking tools?

I like to abstract everything before talking about implementation. What are the similarities between Twitter and FriendFeed and Facebook? What about them are the same, and what are different?

As many many know, I’ve been on a design kick for like…a couple of years now. It’s why the iPhone is dominating, and it’s likely why Facebook is as well. They just feel good.

That being said, you have to have some minimums before you can get there.

• photo sharing
• video sharing
• link sharing
• direct messaging
• micro-blogging (status)
• full articles/essays???
• incorporation of other network activity
• search (finding lost/new friends)
• games/fun
• what else?

…and most importantly…the EASE and FUN involved in doing these things.

So here’s the thing. Twitter is an input mostly. It’s something of a reader as well, i.e. you go there to read what people are saying of course, but at some point that’s going to be part of a true aggregator app. Why would you use ANY app that only reads one type of input?

Nobody will, unless that’s the only place to get it.

As the inputs continue to increase, and the need to consolidate increases, what we’re going to have is a battle of the aggregators. The big boy right now is Facebook. Why? It’s both an input system AND an aggregator, and it’s a very nice interface.

FriendFeed is the closest thing to Facebook out of the big players (except MySpace, but I don’t talk about them), but it isn’t as widespread or as approachable/intuitive.

So is the question really: when will Twitter become an aggregator? Can services like Twitter survive without becoming a central hub? I don’t think so. I don’t think people are going to have time to have multiple central hubs, and you can’t do with Twitter what you can do with Facebook, i.e. run your entire life from it.

So imagine a matrix of functionality on a giant, wall-sized whiteboard. Features on the x axis and services on the y axis. Every single service needs to be asking themselves what they have that others don’t, and then calculating how long before they get it, and what they’re going to do about it.

Right now I’m leaning toward Facebook as the winner in this game for a long time, with FriendFeed being a tech-elite supplement to it. But ultimately FriendFeed needs to be asking themselves, “Why can’t Facebook do what I’m doing?”

Endgame

Regardless of how we get there, the endgame is clear. Every service will be an aggregator and an input system, and it will work by finding and/or helping you find all of your friends (and people it thinks you SHOULD be friends with).

From there it’ll go get every service they are a part of, and integrate those inputs into your view of that person. Forget services–at this point you’re just tracking people and what they’re doing in their lives.

This is what FriendFeed is doing. They got there first, and that’s why I’m excited about them. But it’s only a matter of time before Facebook fixes their URL structure and starts doing this same exact thing.

The services will become abstracted. It’ll just be life events that you get when you use your FB or FF interface (which will be mobile or desktop or whatever).

So here are the features:

1. Find all your friends (and recommend more later)
2. Find everything they use online (FB, FF, Twitter, Blogs, Forums, Flikr, etc.)
3. Collect all that stuff together into a single “lifestream” for that person, and stream it into you in realtime.
4. Ultimately this allows one thing: people anywhere to connect into the raw experiences of those they care about, e.g. visual, auditory, textual, emotional, etc.

It’s just a race to get there, and right now the two big ones are Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed. ::

I don’t want to die, and being an atheist I have to engage in far more contortions than the average person to convince myself that I can avoid this fate.

But I don’t think avoiding death is that much of a stretch.

I think in the not-too-distant future, people under 40 or so, with the financial means to buy something along the lines of an expensive home, have a good chance of living forever. This will happen by the simple process of mapping and transferring the contents of the human brain to an electronic form, and then back into another body (or maybe that’ll be old-school by then) ¹.

I don’t mean to diminish the difficulty of doing this, but given how quickly we’re making advances in understanding the brain, combined with our computational achievements, I’d say this is entirely feasible within the next 25-50 years.

So here’s how this would play out: you’re upper middle class in 30 years (say you’re around 65, like I will be) and your body is breaking down. You go into your friendly regional LifeLease Inc. location and you start the process of getting a body swap. You basically pay for two pieces: the new body, and the transfer of your brain’s information, i.e. your identity.

Some may say, “Well, that’d just be a copy of you, not the real you.” Perhaps, but that’s the case for you today vs. yesterday as well. Our memories are our identity, and our memories are constantly overwritten, destroyed, and modified from one time to the next.

So, quite literally, you are not the same person you were yesterday. From moment to moment, day to day, and year to year, you are an altered copy of who you used to be. We consider this normal, and in time the transfer of our identities (even with some loss) will be considered normal as well.

So, once the system becomes mature, and barring major problems with the fidelity of the transfer, a bit of loss isn’t going to be a major issue. Your new self won’t really care. The changes will simply be a bit of uniqueness added to the package. They’ll probably have “fill in” packs available anyway–for those pesky dark spots.

It’s really not that fantastic, if you consider what we’re already able to do. The real problem is going to be the ethics around the replacement bodies, not the ability to download and transfer the identity information.

Anyway, to all you fellow atheists out there: chin up. We accept that our identities reside within our brains, so all we have to do is survive long enough to see science develop the ability to download them and transfer them to other bodies. Then we can live forever.

We don’t need no steenkin’ god to achieve immortality. ::

Notes

¹ Perhaps people will then be able to live as disembodied identities within what we now call the Internet. Inhabiting a body would then be like a vacation.

The challenge is that you don’t want to just follow people indiscriminately because it gets noisy in a hurry, but at the same time you want to expose yourself to new inputs.

Here’s a simple technique that will help immensely:

Using Twitter Search, perform a number of queries for specialized terms relating to your topics of interest, and follow people that are discussing these things intelligently.

Examples

So let’s say you’re like me and are in the Information Security field. Try some queries for:

• “pci qsa”
• “risk controls”
• “static analysis”

The results show a good amount of promise. In fact, I ended up finding @risktical in this test query, and he’s someone I follow already due to our similar interests. That’s a win for the technique.

Or perhaps you’re into Graphics and Design:

• “xhtml logo”
• “typography best”
• “css design”

In both cases the queries returned people in the midst of conversation on the very topics that we enjoy, and sampling this interaction is an excellent way to evaluate someone’s value as a follow.

So in other words, don’t search for value-add people directly. Instead, sneak up from the side by finding those engaged in the types of conversations that you’d like to be part of, and follow the people that are participating. ::

Related

[ When to Blog vs. Tweet | dmiessler.com ]
[ Why Twitter Works | dmiessler.com ]