In an act of desparation, I tried the exact same command with the exact same client certificate on Linux, and it worked.

So I downloaded MacPorts, built curl from there on OSX, and it works. No idea what happened, Google is of no help. I’m mostly posting this that others with my problem can find it.

The German constitutional court disagreed and requires that all such logs be deleted as soon as possible.

Link to story (in German).

One thing that struck me particularly: it says that 45% of all people speak a language other than English at home. That is more than the third of people who were foreign-born.

Mind you, the NoSQL community still has a lot of work to do, years and years of work, InfoGrid and many other NoSQL technologies non-withstanding.

But I remember that when I first heard about what SQL is and what it does (particularly, what it can’t do), I thought: “this can’t be true. How many billions in revenue and market cap depend on that oddity?”. That was about when SQL was only about half as old as it is now… which makes this even scarier. (Try: no recursive queries. No abstract data types. No inheritance. No (meaningful) distributedness. No … <insert many other things here>. And how many thousands of lines would you like to write on object-relational mapping today? … )

So with that hat on, I’m proud to display this image as a bumper sticker, which comes from a presentation by Tim Anglade. May SQL never come near you If it does, run!

Disclaimer: I don’t build payroll systems for a living. If I did, I might think otherwise. But I think they have all been built, and the new stuff does require thinking much more along these lines.

Everything is decentralized, and no one is working to centralize stuff. I’ve got photos on Flickr, Posterous and Facebook (and even a few on MySpace), reviews on Yelp (but movie reviews on Flixster), location on Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla, status updates on Facebook and Twitter, and videos on YouTube. Etc. I’ve got dozens of social graphs on dozens of sites, and trying to remember which friends puts his or her pictures on which site is a huge challenge…

Someone will eventually help us make sense of all these various types of services…

He says the problem is decentralization, but I think he means fragmentation, rather than decentralization. After all, if he didn’t like decentralization he could simply “just do Facebook” (or whatever single site) and there would be no problem. But like most, he doesn’t seem to be interested in picking a single centralized service.

To which Kevin Marks responds:

To solve the social conundrum we need the equivalent - agreed standards in widespread use so that we can generalize across sites. Fortunately, we have these. We have OpenID and OAuth for delegated login; we have XFN, other microformats and Portable Contacts for public and private people connections; we have Feeds and Activity Streams for translating social actions between sites.

This enabling social infrastructure means that we’ll be able to have a new generation of sites that enhance our web experience through social filtering without our connections being centralised in a single company’s database.

Amazing that everybody thinks decentralization is the right approach, and Kevin is certainly right that the continuing adoption of these standards helps de-fragment our fragmented social media universes.

When I disagree is in that I think these standards are necessary, but not at all sufficient. Example in point: OpenID. Just because two sites both implement OpenID, it does not mean that if I log into the first, I’m automatically logged into the second. It does not mean that the GUI looks the same for OpenID at both sites. It certainly does not mean that both sites even know I’m the same person, even if I used the same identity provider. Similar issues arise around all of the other “social connectivity” standards, and even more so when put together.

What Mike Arrington wants, and very reasonably so from the perspective of the user, is massive simplification. We’ve made huge strides in the past 5 or so years in building up a technology stack that begins to address some of these issues, but we are far, far, from being done to get to that simplification Mike asks for. The biggest problem is that nobody can quite articulate how it would look like, other than “simple” in some fashion. Kind of hard to build technology for that kind of specification …

While other single sign-on schemes such as OpenID, InfoCard and Liberty came up with decent technology they got the economics wrong…

To which I can only respond: “you wish. We don’t have any security economics! Not even the wrong ones.”

In the past, every time I brought up this issue in the OpenID community, I got nowhere. (The Information card community has slightly better ones due to the possibility of branding, but it has bigger problems to worry about right now.) But perhaps it is time to try again …

Yep, we have seen all the pieces that make up the iPad: unibody, touch screen, WiFi, 3G, flash, big button in front, dock, … So technologically, it’s indeed a “yawn”. But this ignores the market innovation that it enables, which is the opposite of a yawn.

Just two examples:

• in healthcare, I can totally imagine hospitals putting up a stand+keyboard for the iPad in every treatment room, and the doctors and nurses carrying iPads. When they enter the room, they put the iPad on the stand, initially switched off, and figure out what’s wrong with you. Then, they can immediately enter what they need to into their medical records system.
  This is the first device for which this has ever been true! It can be carried, it wirelessly connects, it has the battery life, and it is big enough you can actually see something. The iPhone was the closest before, but the iPad nails it. That’s not just a billion-dollar market for Apple, but there is a very good chance we’ll all end up healthier!
• in education, it’s the device that could make printed textbooks obsolete. At $499 plus volume discount, that might even save the school districts money! And imagine what a textbook could turn into if you carried it around like an iPad with WiFi and high-end graphics available.

It’s very impressive that Apple manages to innovate technologically and market-wise in the same company. Any other company that knows how to do that?

Here are quotes from her speech today:

Franklin Roosevelt … delivered his Four Freedoms speech in 1941 …. principles adopted as a cornerstone of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights…

The final freedom, one that was probably inherent in what both President and Mrs. Roosevelt thought about and wrote about all those years ago, is one that flows from the four I’ve already mentioned: the freedom to connect – the idea that governments should not prevent people from connecting to the internet, to websites, or to each other. The freedom to connect is like the freedom of assembly, only in cyberspace. It allows individuals to get online, come together, and hopefully cooperate.

This is exactly how I would have put it. It’s assembly, just on a different type of town square, and just as important as the other fundamental human rights.

It’s smart she puts it as “flows from” what more countries signed already than they are now comfortable with.

She continued:

The United States is committed to devoting the diplomatic, economic, and technological resources necessary to advance these freedoms…

We’re including internet freedom as a component in the first resolution we introduced after returning to the United Nations Human Rights Council…

We are providing funds to groups around the world to make sure that [new tools that enable citizens to exercise their rights of free expression by circumventing politically motivated censorship] get to the people who need them in local languages, and with the training they need to access the internet safely…

Now, ultimately, this issue … [is] … about whether we live on a planet with one internet, one global community, and a common body of knowledge that benefits and unites us all, or a fragmented planet in which access to information and opportunity is dependent on where you live and the whims of censors.

… Historically, asymmetrical access to information is one of the leading causes of interstate conflict. When we face serious disputes or dangerous incidents, it’s critical that people on both sides of the problem have access to the same set of facts and opinions.

For companies, this issue is about more than claiming the moral high ground. It really comes down to the trust between firms and their customers. Consumers everywhere want to have confidence that the internet companies they rely on will provide comprehensive search results and act as responsible stewards of their own personal information. Firms that earn that confidence of those countries and basically provide that kind of service will prosper in the global marketplace. I really believe that those who lose that confidence of their customers will eventually lose customers…

This is exactly how I put it over at Upon 2020 when discussing Google’s China move a few days ago. 10 years ago, it wouldn’t have mattered. 10 years in the future it will be decisive in the marketplace. These are the early rumblings. Mark my words.

And censorship should not be in any way accepted by any company from anywhere. And in America, American companies need to make a principled stand. This needs to be part of our national brand. I’m confident that consumers worldwide will reward companies that follow those principles…

We cannot stand by while people are separated from the human family by walls of censorship. And we cannot be silent about these issues simply because we cannot hear the cries.

There is of course always the issue of how sausage is made, in international politics even more so than domestically. But it’s a good start, certainly better than I would have dreamed.

P.S. Spot the worst offender in this list from her today: “Violent extremists, criminal cartels, sexual predators, and authoritarian governments…”

Dare Obasanjo disagrees: he thinks we only need an OpenID Connect if there were multiple incompatible implementations of Facebook Connect-like products from multiple players, to standardize best practice.

Who is right?

Both, I think. They represent two different points of view that I both sympathize with. I like the first better but the second one might be more realistic. I only realized this a few months ago, this is as good a time as any to attempt to explain this:

First I have to make a detour: OpenID (and related “Open Stack” technologies) are fundamentally interoperability standards. If I have a website and you have a website, OpenID enables our mutual customers to do something interesting by “connecting” some pieces of my website to your website. Take authentication performed on my website to your website, for example. Move data, etc. It’s important to realize OpenID doesn’t do anything that can’t be done already by a site by itself, or within a tightly coupled federation of sites. Instead, OpenID is about interoperability between sites managed by different entities that only agree on the OpenID interoperability specification.

How do successful interoperability standards come into being, and how do they continue to evolve?

I’m not a technology historian, but it appears to me that they usually emerge after several companies have implemented similar, proprietary ways of interoperating, and the potential adopters of such proprietary specifications revolted saying something to the effect of “we can’t afford implementing half a dozen different ways of interoperating with you guys, we need to have one way for the whole industry.”

I think that is essentially Dare’s point. He’s asking where everybody else’s (MySpace, Google, etc.) products are that are like Facebook Connect, and finds very little. His conclusion: this is not the right time for an OpenID Connect.

Chris’ point comes from a different perspective, which is: let’s make the web a better place, and collaboratively design a set of new capabilities that help us all. I understand that perspective very well, because I, like many others, was preaching that perspective ever since I got into that digital identity business in the first place. The trouble is: it’s like molasses, and nothing much ever happens. So far, that has been true about an OpenID Connect, too, for which people like Chris and myself have been asking for for at least a year or more.

I wonder what the newly expanded board of the OpenID Foundation thinks of it. There are enough new faces, in particular from non-technology-platform companies on it that the dynamics may be different. Looking forward to seeing what comes to pass or does not.

Anybody know how they might be secured?