Non Forbes

Review of The Old Man's War Trilogy by John Scalzi

In 2005, John Scalzi burst on the scene with a remarkable first novel, Old Man's War. It got nominated for a Hugo and won him the Campbell award for best new writer. Many felt it was the sort of novel Heinlein might be writing today. That might be too high a praise, but it's close. The third book in this trilogy has just come out, so it was time to review the set.

It's hard to review the book without some spoilers, and impossible for me to review the latter two books without spoiling the first, but I'll warn you when that's going to happen.

OMW tells the story of John Perry, a 75 year old man living on an Earth only a bit more advanced than our own, but it's hundreds of years in the future. Earth people know they're part of a collection of human colonies which does battle with nasty aliens, but they are kept in the dark about the realities. People in the third world are offered o ne way trips to join colonies. People in the 1st world can, when they turn 75, sign up for the colonial military, again a one-way trip. It's not a hard choice to make since everybody presumes the military will make them young again, and the alternative is ordinary death by old age.

The protagonist and his wife sign up, but she dies before the enlistment date, so he goes on his own. The first half of the book depicts his learning the reality of the colonial union, and boot camp, and the latter half outlines his experiences fighting against various nasty aliens.

It's a highly recommended read. If you loved Starship Troopers or The Forever War this is your kind of book. Now I'll go into some minor spoilers.

Topic: 

The paradox of identity management

Since the dawn of the web, there has been a call for a "single sign-on" facility. The web consists of millions of independently operated web sites, many of which ask users to create "accounts" and sign-on to use the site. This is frustrating to users.

Today the general single sign-on concept has morphed into what is now called "digital identity management" and is considerably more complex. The most recent project of excitement is OpenID which is a standard which allows users to log on using an identifier which can be the URL of an identity service, possibly even one they run themselves.

Many people view OpenID as positive for privacy because of what came before it. The first major single sign-on project was Microsoft Passport which came under criticism both because all your data was managed by a single company and that single company was a fairly notorious monopoly. To counter that, the Liberty Alliance project was brewed by Sun, AOL and many other companies, offering a system not run by any single company. OpenID is simpler and even more distributed.

However, I feel many of the actors in this space are not considering an inherent paradox that surrounds the entire field of identity management. On the surface, privacy-conscious identity management puts control over who gets identity information in the hands of the user. You decide who to give identity info to, and when. Ideally, you can even revoke access, and push for minimal disclosure. Kim Cameron summarized a set of laws of identity outlining many of these principles.

In spite of these laws one of the goals of most identity management systems has been ease of use. And who, on the surface, can argue with ease of use? Managing individual accounts at a thousand web sites is hard. Creating new accounts for every new web site is hard. We want something easier.

The paradox

However, here is the contradiction. If you make something easy to do, it will be done more often. It's hard to see how this can't be true. The easier it is to give somebody ID information, the more often it will be done. And the easier it is to give ID information, the more palatable it is to ask for, or demand it.

Tags: 

Stig's Inferno Final Issue

In the 1980s, my brother Ty Templeton published his first independent comic book series, Stig's Inferno. He went on to considerable fame writing and drawing comics for Marvel, D.C. and many others, including favourite characters like Superman, Batman and Spider-Man, as well as a lot of comics associated with TV shows like The Simpsons and Ren and Stimpy. But he's still at his best doing original stuff.

Topic: 

A Package packager to compartmentalize my system changes

First, let me introduce a new blog topic, Sysadmin where I will cover computer system administration and OS design issues, notably in Linux and related systems.

My goal is to reduce the nightmare that is system administration and upgrading.

One step that goes partway in my plan would be a special software system that would build for a user a specialized operating system "package" or set of packages. This magic package would, when applied to a virgin distribution of the operating system, convert it into the customized form that the user likes.

The program would work from a modified system, and a copy of a map (with timestamps and hashes) of the original virgin OS from which the user began. First, it would note what packages the user had installed, and declare dependencies for these packages. Thus, installing this magic package would cause the installation of all the packages the user likes, and all that they depend on.

In order to do this well, it would try to determine which packages the user actually used (with access or file change times) and perhaps consider making two different dependency setups -- one for the core packages that are frequently used, and another for packages that were probably just tried and never used. A GUI to help users sort packages into those classes would be handy. It must also determine that those packages are still available, dealing with potential conflicts and name change concerns. Right now, most package managers insist that all dependencies be available or they will abort the entire install. To get around this, many of the packages might well be listed as "recommended" rather than required, or options to allow install of the package with missing 1st level (but not 2nd level) dependencies would be used.

Topic: 
Tags: 

Wireless choreography

At our new favourite Indian buffet (Cafe Bombay) they run Bollywood videos on big screens all the time. In Bollywood, as you probably know, everybody is dancing all the time, in wonderful synchronization, like Broadway but far more. I've never been to an Indian dance club to see if people try to do that in real life, but I suspect they want to.

I started musing about a future where brain implants let you give a computer control of your limbs so you could participate in such types of dance, but I realized we might be able to do something much sooner.

Topic: 

Selection of search engine by text in search box

Most search engines now have a search box in the toolbar, which is great, and like most people mine defaults to Google. I can change the engine with a drop down menu to other places, like Amazon, Wikipedia, IMDB, eBay, Yahoo and the like. But that switch is a change in the default, rather than a temporary change -- and I don't want that, I want it to snap back to Google.

Topic: 

Interview with me on Web 2.0 and privacy (and a French/German documentary)

While I was at Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Expo, I did an interview with an online publication called Web Pro News. I personally prefer written text to video blogging, but for those who like to see video, you can check out:

Video Interview on Privacy and Web 2.0

The video quality is pretty good, if not the lighting.

29th anniversary of spam

I wasn't going to make any special commemoration, but it seems a whole ton of other blogs are linking today to my articles on the history of Spam, so I should blog them as well.

Many years ago I got interested in the origins of the term "spam" to mean net abuse. I mean I had lived through most of its origin and seen most of the early spams myself, but it wasn't clear why people took the name of the meat product and applied it to junk mail. I knew it came from USENET, so I used the USENET search engines to trace the origins.

Topic: 

Pages