jr conlin's ink stained banana

So, i should probably talk about what the heck i've been doing at Mozilla, shouldn't i?

Well, with things finally starting to surface, i'm a bit more comfortable talking about them. The first part of what i'm working on is Notifications. What the heck is "Notifications" you ask? Well, it's kinda tricky.

The elevator pitch i like to give is "Somewhere between Instant Messaging and Email is 'Notifications'". It's a way for sites to semi-anonymously send messages to a user. Communication is one way right now, mostly for simplicity sake between the site and the user, but there's precious little to prevent the communication from going either way.

Ah, this is our floor, shall we get out of the elevator and actually talk about this? Cool.

The history lesson

A little over a year ago, a couple of damn bright interns spent their summer building a prototype notification system that used AMQP and a few other things to pass messages back and forth. The cool thing is that it allowed browsers to talk to browsers, or sites to talk to browsers or really anything to talk to anything. You could get twitter announcements in your chrome, or send a tab to your mobile device or all sorts of things. It was spiffy, but unfortunately, had issues. A fairly large one was relying on AMQP, meaning a persistent socket connection. That's expensive on a whole slew of levels, not including trying to convince your grandma to punch a hole into her firewall.

So, as is the case with a lot of good ideas, we headed back to the whiteboard to figure out what elements we can use. Some things, like sending a tab to a device, turned out to work better if we used something like sync. That still left a few other features that we wanted.

Enter the BrowserID

BrowserID is cool. The ability to log into a site by selecting what email you want to provide to them is amazingly simple! Granted, if you're logging into a site like GnomeBondage.com, you probably don't want to give them an email that will let them fill your work email box with things you may not want your employer to see.

That's why you want something that is a bit harder for them to associate back to you. And that's what i've been working on.

(Originally, Bipostal (BrowseriD Postal Services, no, really. Stop giggling like that.) was meant to be a later addition to the Push Notifications stuff. Because BrowserID pushed forward, though, the need was higher for that part.)

So, Bipostal generates a token that is specific for you and the third party site (say example.org). The token is ~64 base36 characters resulting in 64*(log₂(36) ~= 5.17) = 330 bits of entropy or 2187250724783011924372502227117621365353169430893212436425770606409952999199375923223513177023053824 possible combinations. That's pretty large. Plus, we're doing a number of things to prevent spammers and other ne'er do wells from sending in just random garbage.

When a site wants to send you a note, the send it to an address like "6e7snqnx6lomcr67r0clqyimrspopjt894kjhh0dafpfysa3sey944kc3aek1gfi@browserid.org". We make sure it's legit, strip out the fancy HTML cruft, and sent it to you. You can also quiet messages to that address (if some site turns out to be overly chatty) or delete that ID. In the future, sites can include bits of JSON in their email that can get pulled out and sent to you as notifications. All magical and pseudonymous. Well, unless you fill out all the profile info with your real values, in which case, they know everything about you, but that's an "out of band" problem.

What's to come

Honestly, quite a bit. While a lot has been nailed down (both Push and Bipostal are on Github), but that doesn't mean we don't want to hear folks comments and ideas. i've included two of the ways you can provide feedback on the Notifications main page. Likewise, you can comment here and i'll try to respond both here and via email.

Likewise, we'd really love for other companies to help us work out the details to provide a cost effective, light weight platform for this sort of thing. (Websockets and SIP are neat, but require persistent connections which can be costly. We have the option to do message encryption, which would allow the server to not know the content of the message being transmitted, but it would be neat to use non invasive encryption validation to see if we can prevent bogus messages from being delivered.) It's always good to have bigger brains helping out. There's a lot we can do and a lot we're trying to make sure we don't mess up.

Now more than ever, What do you think?

There's not a lot of us left in my family. Ok, that's not 100% true, but suffice to say that with my generation, the patriarchal legacy of my particular branch of the "Conlin" family is drawing to a close. While i'm fairly familiar that the surname of Conlin is neither rare nor carries any regal quality, the end of the branch is mildly notable, at least for personal reasons. With little shared history among the members of my family, for all i know, i come from a long line of pedophiles, axe murderers and investment bankers.

i have a cousin who is far more interested in the family legacy than most of us are. She is very interested in breaking the apparent wall that extends beyond my grandfather's generation. In fact, at the time of his passing (i was only around 8 or so), i had asked his surviving brother if there were any particular stories of note regarding the previous generations. We had lots of other stories of family members past to whet our appetites for more. Stories of Spanish War veteran uncles who met their fates leaping through windows after hearing cars back fire, others who had been run out of town for reasons that i was too young to know. "Son," the equally reclusive and religious gentleman asked in sonorous tones, "Do you love your Mother and Father?" Of course i did. If for no other reason than it would have been a very long walk back to the house for an eight year old. He smiled and replied "Then that is all that matters."

He never did tell us anything else.

It's both natural and alliterative that one does wonder about one's past, and since i am the uncle with a history minor, the crest of family history has undoubtedly fallen to me.

So i'm going to do the honorable thing, and make sh*t up.

You see, that's the glorious potential that i have. History is indeed written by the survivors, and if i've learned nothing from companies that sell family coats of arms and various online family research sites, every bloody one of us is descended from some drunken night of debauchery by an ancestor with a golden hat. Families, it would seem, often do not include a great deal of peasants and vagabonds.

This is why it is both my duty and obligation to ensure that my particular family branch be properly recorded so that when my time has come to pass this veil of tears, those that are curious can learn of our history.

And more importantly, we're all dead so they can't prove that we're lying.

Much like my great (fifteen times removed) grandfather Eric the Carnlyn. A great medium of a man who tilled his farm most days of the month, but when the moon was full and the mists rolled over the hills of the western tuath of Connachta, horror gripped his village. Terrible howls and screams would fill the night. The weathered farmers of the village told stories in cautious whispers. Tales of men who became like great wolves and murdered the sheep and oxen in the night. On those nights, mothers would call upon the gods and elves of the hills for protection of hearth and home. Strangely, while other homes would keep the peat fires burning though the night, Eric's small home would always be dark and empty. The screams would end by morning, but only a few knew the truth. The sun would greet Eric as he stood, fists upon his hips, a great smile upon his face, skin glinting in the dawn's light. He stood both equally defiant and pantless. No cow nor sheep murdered, and only blood drawn were from the scratches and bruises on his skin.

For he, Eric, had protected the tiny village in the manner that he found best. By having forced, carnal relations with the lycanthropes that roamed the hills.

That's right. He raped werewolves.

Of course, "Eric Carnal An Lycanthrope" was abbreviated to "Eric CarnLyn" (and eventually softened to "Conlin"), but that was mostly done to avoid the lingering lawsuits and demands for reparations.

Let's be honest. Even though the MPAA and RIAA are out to destroy the internet at all costs, you're not going to stop listening to music or watching movies, or generally consuming the media they produce. The problem is, all that consumption still goes to them and they pump all that cash straight into the lobbying efforts to forcibly exert control over the web.

So what's a soul to do?

Turns out that a rather clever person came up with the idea of MPAA Offsets. They're like carbon offsets for the soul. What you do is match your media consumption with a donation to EFF. Spend a buck buying a track off iTunes? Send a buck to EFF. Got a Netflix subscription? Fork over $8 a month to keep the web open. This is particularly great if you've got cable or satellite, because those services aren't cheap.

Hopefully, this will have a two fold effect. One, you're going to be a bit more prudent about going with indie labels or direct to artist sales for media. You're probably also going to seek out what the web has to offer, like the various short form movies you can get off of Youtube. You'll also get a fairly sizable tax credit if you're a US citizen. (If you're not, i'm also fine with you supporting your local equivalent.)

This is about money, plain and simple. You're the one with money, so it really matters what you do with it. If this crap matters to you, vote with your wallet.

SAN JOSE — The following is a statement by J R Conlin, Guy who understands the internet and how things actually work on the so-called statement regarding "Blackout Day" by the Chairman, CEO, Ex-Senator, and Mortgage expert, Chris Dodd.

"Only the day before Internet Blackout Day, after the White House, various Internet professionals, and pretty much the rest of the planet has stood up and say <expletive> NO! to a hastily cobbled together, slap dash, obvious power grab being rushed through congress from two fronts, Mr. Dodd and company are saying how this is unfair. Because they obviously know how to play fair.

Granted, the sites most prominently calling for citizens to come to their rescue are the sites that would be most directly effected by the bills that Mr. Dodd wants to rocket through our elected representatives so that they can shut down the phantasmal threats that they see, must like previous threats that needed immediate action lest his industry suffer forever.

Still, how does one react to the fact that Mr. Dodd's own reaction was a statement, dictated to a secretary, and drafted as a document "published" on the internet, without option for public comment or discussion? Quite possibly with the un-typed "Your's sincerely, yadda yadda, type that up and post it up for those low lifes will you sweetheart?". Maybe accented by the clatter of ice cubes in his glass as a subtle reminder that his gin also needs topping.

i think that description pretty much sums it up.

And frankly, he can go get stuffed."

About JR Conlin
He's just some guy, but one that bets he's done more for the benefit of society that Mr. Dodd.

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For more information, contact:

Your Elected Representative
In Congress
And let them know that SOPA and PIPA are horrible.

Social sites (like facebook, twitter, google plus, yahoo mail, etc) want human beings. To ensure that human beings are there, they use CAPTCHAs. Since all that effort to determine squiggly letters was kind of being wasted, Luis von Ahn, figured it would be great to have people try to figure out words from scanned books that computers couldn't figure out, and thus ReCAPTCHA was born.

Of course, there are bad guys. These folks want to use social sites (like facebook, twitter, google plus, yahoo mail, etc. to send you a free ipad for filling out endless surveys that end in your checking account being emptied as you unbox your very own 241mm x 186mm slab of plywood. Since CAPTCHAs are hard for computers to figure out, they pay folks to guess CAPTCHAs for them. Thousands of them per day.

So, in some respects, the greater force for aiding in the digitizing of lost texts is probably some guy in a coffee shop being paid $.05 for every ten ReCAPTCHAs. Those endless ads for discount Canadian Viagra may have also helped immortalize Robert Guillaume's groundbreaking show.. Or Anne of Green Gables. Maybe we'll go with Anne of Green Gables.

That's fine and dandy for doing distributed OCR work, but what about the other big problems out there?

How about solving a little protein folding? How about matching chromosome sequences? Maybe record weather patterns from historical logs? Sites know "problem nets" and could simple toggle a switch to use the new system. Heck, folks from other countries might actually appreciate not having to deal with figuring out English words.

As long as spammers are paying keyboard monkeys, let's use the spammer's money to help society more than they're trying to ruin it.