Tag Archives: evil

Don’t abandon XMPP, your loyal communications friend

Whilst email has always enjoyed a very decentralised approach where users can be expected to be on all manner of different systems and providers, Instant Messaging has not generally enjoyed the same level of success and freedom.

Historically many of my friends used proprietary networks such as MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and Skype. These networks were never particularly good IM networks, rather what made those networks popular at the time was the massive size of their user bases forcing more and more people to join in order to chat with their friends.

This quickly lead to a situation where users would have several different chat clients installed, each with their own unique user interfaces and functionalities in order to communicate with one another.

Being an open standards and open source fan, this has never sat comfortably with me – thankfully in the last 5-10yrs, a new open standard called XMPP (also known as Jabber) has risen up and had wide spread adoption.

XMPP brought the same federated decentralised nature that we are used to in email to instant messaging, making it possible for users on different networks to communicate, including users running their own private servers.

Just like with email, discovery of servers is done entirely via DNS and there is no one centralised company, organisation or person with control over the system -each user’s server is able to run independently and talk directly to the destination user’s server.

With XMPP the need to run multiple different chat programs or connect to multiple providers was also eliminated. For the first time I was able to chat using my own XMPP server (ejabberd) to friends using their own servers, as well as friends who just wanted something “easy” using hosted services like Google Talk which support(ed) XMPP, all from a single client.

Since Google added XMPP into Google Talk, it’s made the XMPP user base even larger thanks to the strong popularity of Gmail creating so many Google Talk users at the same time. With so many of my friends using it, is has been so easy to add them to my contacts and interact with them on their preferred platform, without violating my freedom and losing control over my server ecosystem.

Sadly this is going to change. Having gained enough critical mass, Google is now deciding to violate their “Don’t be evil” company moral and is moving to lock users into their own proprietary ecosystem, by replacing their well established Google Talk product with a new “Hangouts” product which drops XMPP support.

There’s a very good blog write up here on what Google has done and how it’s going to negatively impact users and how Google’s technical reasons are poor excuses, which I would encourage everyone to read.

The scariest issue is the fact that a user upgrading to Hangouts get silently disconnected from being able to communicate with their non-Google XMPP using friends. If you use Google Talk currently and upgrade to Hangouts, you WILL lose the ability to chat with XMPP users, who will just appear as offline and unreachable.

It’s sad that Google has taken this step and I hope long term that they decide as a company that turning away from free protocols was a mistake and make a step back in the right direction.

Meanwhile, there are a few key bits to be aware of:

My recommendation currently is do not upgrade to Hangouts under any circumstance – you may be surprised to find who drops off your chat list, particularly if you have a geeky set of friends on their own domains and servers.
Whilst you can hang onto Google Talk for now, I suspect long term Google will force everyone onto Hangouts. I recommend considering new options long term for when that occurs.
It’s really easy to get started with setting up an XMPP server. Take a look at the powerful ejabberd or something more lightweight like Prosody. Or you could use a free hosted service such as jabber.org for a free XMPP account hosted by a third party.
You can use a range of IM clients for XMPP accounts, consider looking at Pidgin (GNU/Linux & Windows), Adium (MacOS) and Xabber (Android/Linux).
If you don’t already, it’s a very good idea to have your email and IM behind your own domain like “jethrocarr.com”. You can point it at a provider like Google, or your own server and it gives you full control over your online identity for as long as you wish to have it.

I won’t be going down the path of using Hangouts, so if you upgrade, sorry but I won’t chat to you. Please get an XMPP account from one of the many providers online, or set up your own server, something that is generally a worth while exercise and learning experience.

If someone brings out a reliable gateway for XMPP to Hangouts, I may install it, but there’s no guarantee that this will be possible – people have been hoping for a gateway for Skype for years without much luck, so it’s not a safe assumption to have.

Be wary of some providers (Facebook and Outlook.com) which claim XMPP support, but really only support XMPP to chat to *their* users and lack XMPP federation with external servers and networks, which defeats the whole point of a decentralised open network.

If you have an XMPP account and wish to chat with me, add me using my contact details here. Note that I tend to only accept XMPP connections from people I know – if you’re unknown to me but want to get in touch, email is best at first.

Google Search & Control

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I’ve been using Google for search for years, however it’s the first time I’ve ever come across a DMCA takedown notice included in the results.

Possibly not helped by the fact that Google is so good at finding what I want, that I don’t tend to scroll down more than the first few entries 99% of the time, so it’s easy to miss things at the bottom of the page.

Lawyers, fuck yeah!

Turns out that Google has been doing this since around 2002 and there’s a form process you can follow with Google to file a notice to request a search result removal.

Sadly I suspect that we are going to see more and more situations like this as governments introduce tighter internet censorship laws and key internet gatekeepers like Google are going to follow along with whatever they get told to do.

Whilst people working at Google may truly subscribe to the “Don’t be evil” slogan, the fundamental fact is that Google is a US-based company that is legally required to do what’s best for the shareholders – and the best thing for the shareholders is to not try and fight the government over legalization, but to implement as needed and keep selling advertising.

In response to concerns about Google over privacy, I’ve seen a number of people to shift to new options, such as the increasingly popular and open-source friendly Duck Duck Go search engine, or even Microsoft’s Bing which isn’t too bad at getting decent results with a UI looking much more like early Google.

However these alternatives all suffer from the same fundamental problem – they’re centralized gatekeepers who can be censored or controlled – and then there’s the fact that a centralised entity can track so much about your online browsing. Replacing Google with another company will just leave us in the same position in 10 years time.

Lately I’ve been seeking to remove all the centralized providers from my online life, moving to self-run and federated services – basic stuff like running my own email, instant messaging (XMPP), but also more complex “cloud” services being delivered by federated or self-run servers for tasks such as browser syncing, avatar handling, contacts sync, avoiding URL shortners and quitting or replacing social networks.

The next big one of the list is finding an open source and federated search solution – I’m currently running tests with a search engine called YaCy, which is a peer-to-peer decentralised search engine that is made up of thousands of independent servers, sharing information between themselves.

To use YaCy, you download and run your own server, set it’s search indexing behavior and let it run and share results with other servers (it’s also possible to run it in a disconnected mode for indexing your internal private networks).

The YaCy homepage has an excellent write up of their philiosophy and design fundamentals for the application.

It’s still a bit rough, I think the search results could be better – but this is something that having more nodes will certainly help with and the idea is promising – I’m planning to setup a public instance on my server in the near future for adding all my sites to the index and providing a good test of it’s feasibility.

Die Flash, Die!

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“I hated flash whilst it was still cool!” — Jethro Carr, Internet Hipster

Adobe Flash has to be one of the more polarizing internet technologies out there, people either love it or hate it, but either way, it’s difficult to avoid. It’s used as the default for playing youtube videos, many online browser games, banner adds, “smart” uploaders and a large number of adult websites.

It’s also used for some important systems as well – Air New Zealand make heavy use of it for their Airports membership page (infact it’s not possible to login unless you have flash), which is extremely poor from a large company that should know better, along with a few too many enterprise web applications I’ve come across.

Whilst Flash has had a reputation for poor performance, CPU eating and battery-life killing, these are all implementation faults – the primary issue with Flash has always been that it’s a proprietary application and a proprietary standard.

If Adobe had simply allows Flash to become an open standard and open sourced the flash player, many of the technical issues with it would be resolved by the developer community, and it would become more ubiquitous with ports to other platforms that Adobe might consider “too small” to worth spending developer time with.

Adobe didn’t even release specifications and allow free licensing until 2009 when they kicked off the Open Screen Project and released the specification – but it’s a big catchup game to play for other applications to fully implement the specification needed to support flash applications. And the flash player itself is still fully proprietary, if Adobe doesn’t want to support a platform or a browser, you’re effectively screwed.

Open source projects like Gnash are slowly catching up, when I tried it recently it was good enough to allow me to play Youtube videos and some other flash features, but would fail on more complex applications such as Air New Zealand’s abomination of a website, so depending on your needs, you may still be chained to it.

Flash on Linux has always had a particularly rocky history – historically Adobe made a plugin available but only supported the i386 platform, requiring many years of the use of 32 to 64bit wrapper libraries in order to run Flash on modern 64bit Linux systems, leading to all sorts of wonderful performance, memory and audio issues.

A 64-bit alpha plugin emerged relatively recently and Adobe now supports 64-bit Linux as part of their official downloads, but other platforms such as PPC, MIPS and ARM are still unsupported – an issue which becomes more and more apparent as vendors release ARM based smart-phones and tablets and are unable to install flash player on them.

Adobe has now announced that they will be dropping support for Flash on Linux for anything but Google’s Chrome browser, which has it’s own special build in flash binaries – I suspect this will mean that it won’t extend to supporting the open source build of Chrome (called Chromium) which currently excludes the Flash support.

Of course, for other browser users like myself (eg Firefox), this decision is short sighted and very frustrating – a text book example of the problems with relying on proprietary software and standards.

Thankfully Adobe did at least realise that this decision is going to result in a lot of users sticking with the final 11.2 version on Linux and is promising to support 11.2 with security updates for another 5 years, so at least we won’t have thousands of users running around with vulnerable flash players – Flash Player does have a reputation for security holes after all.

On the positive side, Flash is dying.

Adobe has already announced plans to stop supporting mobile platforms like Android in favor of Adobe Air, although Adobe Air sounds like they’re making the mistakes of Flash all over again, unless they allow fully HTML5 based Air applications to run without need for a browser plugin in future.

Apple has always refused to support Flash on the iOS platform (iphone/ipad) and recently stopped shipping Flash with MacOS on Macbook Air by default. (in a hilariously ironic statement, Apple criticized Flash for being a proprietary locked down platform, whilst happily ruling the iOS platform and App store with an iron fist).

HTML5 along with Javascript is quickly securing it’s place as the web platform of choice for rich UI web application developers and I expect we’ll see more and more tools and frameworks to make working with these technologies easier.

You can even watch Youtube videos in HTML5 if you have a capable browser (recent versions of Chrome or Firefox will work) under their HTML5 trial.

Hopefully projects like Gnash are able to complete their implementation of Flash to a sufficient level to support legacy websites and applications, although by the time this happens, it may be that we won’t need it any more.

If Adobe had just open sourced Flash Player and the standards years ago, maybe this wouldn’t have been the case and we’d all be running stable open Flash implementations already, Adobe only has itself to blame for Flash’s demise.

But they won’t see any tears from me.