aaron van Kaam

Google Chrome has quickly become my new favorite browser. It's simple, fast, and minimalist. The location bar -- also known as the "one bar to rule them all" -- accepts input intelligently; navigating to URL's or searching based on your input. By default your search input is passed off to Google standard search (google.com) but Google also offers encrypted search over SSL (encrypted.google.com). The encrypted search is incredibly fast! It operates exactly the same as the standard search but all of your communication with Google is secured and private. I will show you how to encrypt your searches by default through Google Chrome so you can secure your information without having to think about it. 

Woke up this morning to catch this really disappointing article claiming George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror. Maybe I have been naive but that wasn't the shocking part.

The shocking part, for me, came from a seemingly quick side comment (emphasis mine):

Colonel Wilkerson, a long-time critic of the Bush Administration’s approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, claimed that the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken.

So I'm browsing the Digg headlines and I come across this article about a federal appeals court ruling that the FCC lacks the authority to meddle in the affairs of broadband providers. "This is great news!" I think to myself. I'm an evangelist for open, free, unregulated internet. I'm a supporter of net neutrality and am very concerned about information control currently being carried out all around the world to silence citizens, conceal truths, and discourage opposition to unjust rule. Which is why I was completely stunned to find the Yahoo! article painted these events with a negative brush and the comments about the article were a waterfall of tears and desperate cries for a savior.

 Today while working I've been listening to TED Talks and I caught this one by Philip K. Howard talking about our modern view of law, how it is inhibiting our ability to live a free life, and four ways we can fix our broken system. This is powerful stuff! Find some time this week to listen to this. It will move you.
 

In the physical world, privacy is evaluated as a series of probabilities and assumptions which are often anchored to a network of trust. If you write something on a piece of paper and hide it in your mattress, the likelihood that someone will find it is relatively small because paper is a very primitive data distribution technology. It has real, physical limitations which directly impact the probability that the information will be discovered.

Chris Messina has a wonderful write up about something I've had a lot of interest in called The Death of the URL. I highly recommend taking a look. While I think he is correct, I have a slightly different perspective. I agree that the current effort by some companies to take advantage of new interfaces to funnel users (ahem: money) their way is dangerous and deserves every pint of paranoia but ultimately they won't last. Those companies know that it won't last but they'll make a boat load of money, build their brand, and look like saints when they finally open up. On the other hand, I really dislike the implication that we need the URL in all its raw glory. The idea of future generations growing up without knowing what a URL is does not scare me -- it delights me. If the web has shown me anything it's that, out here, once something is open it doesn't close. What we're afraid of in the exhibits on display in Chris' post is not the removal of the URL it's the removal of the flexibility a URL provides. I would prefer to frame the death of the URL as the death of the file path. Which is to say, it's not really dead, it has just matured into a more visually compelling and human-oriented metaphor.

Sometimes I'm very late in getting the latest and greatest. I wait until I can say "I need" something rather than "I want" something. My last cell phone lasted me about 5 years to become the only one on the block with an antenna in its old age. Aww, I loved that phone -- it was so punk rock! A speaker volume so loud that entire city blocks knew I was getting a call. Tough as nails it had been dropped, thrown, slammed, burned, drowned, spit on, knifed (yes, I said knifed), and still worked flawlessly without a single scratch on the screen. Alas, while the iPhone might be a physical pansy compared to my old friend, it was more attractive for the apps to be more productive. So I got an iPhone, gave my old friend a proper burial, and was given a new number and the start of the problem known as "Rick."

The OpenID community has recognized that the User Experience (UX) is not acceptable. People from several points of interest have come together to discuss and share ideas to improve the experience. There is currently growing consensus around certain ideas that I feel is risky and other areas I feel there is a missed opportunity. Before I get to my point of disagreement with the community, I'll highlight what I think we can all agree on.

Chris Messina, David Recordon, John McCrea, Josh Elman, and Kaliya Hamlin got together for The Social Web TV at SXSW to muse about the differences between "real identity" versus pseudonyms as we have grown accustom to using on the web. It's interesting to hear people at the forefront of identity talk about so-called "fabricated" identity with the subtle implication that it is something undesirable. I believe there are two overlapping discussions here: one about identity and the other about identifiers.