Archive for the ‘Web’ Category

The iPad Paradox: A Completely Closed System Promoting Open Standards

Monday, April 5th, 2010

appleipad.jpgUnless you have been living under a rock or been completely offline for the past several months, you know that Saturday was Apple iPad day and, today being the first “work” day post-iPad-emergence, the news and media sites are predictably in full-on iPad fever. Apple announced that it sold over 300,000 iPads on Saturday alone, along with close to a million applications and over 250,000 ebooks. A look at Techmeme this morning at 9:05am US Eastern showed that 10 of the 14 top stories were all about the iPad. It’s hard to find a single media site that is not referencing the iPad in some way.

I haven’t bought one yet, although I have the perfect use case for it. As much as I love chasing bright, shiny objects, I’m waiting in part to see how the “1.0″ release goes – and also to find out how I can connect a webcam to it for video. That said, it’s very tempting… and since I use Macs and an iPhone, it’s a natural fit with my infrastructure.

But as a strong supporter of open standards, I also find it philosophically hard to buy a completely closed system, even one that is rather bizarrely helping promote the growth of open standards!

A COMPLETELY CLOSED SYSTEM

The reality of the iPad is that Apple chose the “iPhone model” of development versus the “MacBook model”. With a MacBook, such as the one I’m typing this on, you have a very open UNIX-based operating system that you can hack away on to your heart’s content (in the original good form of the work “hack”). You can add new software, you can install, compile, and do whatever you want with it. Sure, you get your “official” software updates from Apple, as you would from any manufacturer, but you have the freedom to do whatever you want with the system.

In contrast, no application gets on the iPhone – and now the iPad – without going through Apple. Sure, you can “jailbreak” the iPhone, and people are already reporting jailbreaking the iPad, and some small percentage of the techie audience will do that… but at the cost of losing some of the syncing with Apple… and the constant challenge of future Apple updates that may block the jailbreaks. It’s not an easy path.

Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain hit on this in an article back on February 3 entitled “A fight over freedom at Apple’s core“:

This is the significance of the iPad. It could have been built either like a small Apple Macintosh – open to any outside software – or as a big iPhone, controlled by Apple. Apple went with the latter. Attach a keyboard to it and it could replace a PC entirely – boasting plenty of new apps, but only as Apple deems them worthy.

He goes on to note this fundamental shift:

Users no longer own or control the apps they run – they merely rent them minute by minute.

And ends with the plea:

Mr Jobs ushered in the personal computer era and now he is trying to usher it out. We should focus on preserving our freedoms, even as the devices we acquire become more attractive and easier to use

As one who believes in “The Internet Way” of distributed and decentralized applications and services, it’s hard to think of dropping $500+ on a completely closed device… even though it may be a very cool and sexy device that would be outstanding to have in our family room as an entertainment guide, web browser and so much more!

PROMOTING THE OPEN WEB

And yet.. in an incredible bit of irony, the iPad may be one of the single biggest drivers of open standards for the web. Take a look at point #2 on Apple’s technical note on “Preparing Your Web Content for iPad”:

apple-webtech.jpg

Use W3C standard web technologies instead of plug-ins.” Most importantly… no support of Adobe Flash for video – use HTML 5 instead. Now, it’s tempting to merely categorize this as a contest between two corporate giants – Apple not wanting to cater to Adobe’s desire to control all the formats people use to view online content. And undoubtedly that plays a factor here, too… but for open standards advocates, it’s truly a beautiful thing.

Take a look at Apple’s list of “iPad Ready” web sites. Here are major web content providers that have switched from Flash-based video and audio to HTML5 – and Apple invites you to add your site using the language of standards:

apple-lateststandards.jpg

Just do a Google search on “ipad HTML5″ to see a stream of other related stories. Or read the Gizmodo article from last week, “How the iPad Is Already Reshaping the Internet (Without Flash)“:

The iPad doesn’t run Flash. If your website uses Flash, it won’t play well on the iPad. Turns out, a lot of people want their sites to look pretty on the iPad. So the internet’s already starting to look different.

and:

It’s interesting, to say the least, that a device promising to be the best browsing experience—cue Scott Forestall crazy eyes— is in fact reshaping the internet. You could argue it’s for the better, moving sites away from proprietary formats and heavy, resource-sucking designs to more open standards, and more efficient layouts that are easier to use

As the article goes on to note, if you care about the market of the people viewing your site on the iPad (and, in my opinion, you’d be crazy NOT to care), you really have no choice but to look at how you can ensure your content is viewable.

YouTube, of course, has been experimenting with a HTML5 video player and you can join the beta program to try it out. Many, many others appear to be experimenting with HTML5. Some engineers have even ported the Quake II game to HTML 5. Expect much more to follow…

RESOLVING THE PARADOX

So what should an open standards advocate do?

  • Drop the $500+ on a new bright shiny toy with the knowledge that even while you are funding a company to promote a completely closed end device you are also helping promote the opening up of the web?

  • Wait and look forward to buying a more open end device – but be very glad for the open web that so many other people are buying iPads?
  • Ignore the whole topic and wonder why Apple is able to attract so much attention.

Which will you choose?

P.S. Me? Sooner or later I expect I’ll probably own one… :-)


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OAuth 1.0 to be issued as an Informational RFC

Friday, February 19th, 2010

oauthlogo.pngAs a “security guy“, I have been pleased to watch the emergence of the OAuth Working Group within the IETF and the work that is underway to create an actual IETF specification for OAuth. I haven’t had time to participate, but I’m glad to see that work going on.

If you aren’t aware of OAuth, it’s basically a way that you can authorize a application or service to interact with another application or service on your behalf without giving that first application or service your user ID and password for the second service or app.

For example, if you were a Twitter user in its earlier days, every time you wanted to use another application or web service with your Twitter account, you had to give that app or service your Twitter user ID and password. There’s a security issue here in that you are entrusting your credentials to some other company or application – and trusting that they won’t share those credentials. There’s also a configuration issue in that if you change your password you then have to go to all the other services and provide the updated info. Now, with OAuth support in Twitter, when you want to add a new service to interact with your Twitter account, you are prompted to login to your Twitter account and authorize or deny the access for the new service. The key point is that the new service or application never gets your Twitter credentials. (And as another example, OAuth is what our IMified service uses to allow an automated bot to interact with your Twitter account.)

Anyway, OAuth emerged out of the developer community and now there is work underway in the IETF to create official standard specifications to help in promoting OAuth implementation. As a first step, it was announced this week that OAuth 1.0 will be published as an Informational RFC. As noted in the announcement:

The OAuth protocol was originally created by a small community of web developers from a variety of websites and other Internet services, who wanted to solve the common problem of enabling delegated access to protected resources. The resulting OAuth protocol was stabilized at version 1.0 in October 2007, and revised in June 2009 (revision A) as

published at <http://oauth.net/core/1.0a>.

This specification provides an informational documentation of OAuth Core 1.0 Revision A, addressing several errata reported since that time,

as well as numerous editorial clarifications. While this specification is not an item of the IETF’s OAuth Working Group, which at the time of writing is working on an OAuth version that can be appropriate for publication on the standards track, it has been transferred to the IETF for change control by authors of the original work.

This first step will get a base level spec out so that people looking to implement OAuth will have an IETF specification they can use. The RFC hasn’t been published yet, but the draft that will be an RFC is here:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hammer-oauth

It’s good to see this work going on within the IETF and I look forward to seeing further work there. From my perspective, OAuth is a great step in helping secure connections betweens apps and services over the web… which is good for all of us as more and more moves into the cloud.


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Must-See Video: Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Keynote on The War For The Web

Friday, November 20th, 2009

This week in New York City, Tim O’Reilly gave a keynote at the Web 2.0 event that I definitely put in my “must-see” category. Not because of anything visual… I mean, it’s just Tim standing on stage talking… but because of his message.

There is a war on out there on the Internet.

It’s a war between those who would like to keep the Internet as the open platform for innovation that it has been for decades… those who champion “The Internet Way” – and those who would like to return the Internet to the world of walled gardens from which it emerged. In his excellent piece published on Monday, “The War For The Web“, Tim speaks of the sides as “Small Pieces, Loosely Joined” and, of course, “One Ring To Rule Them All”. He concludes with:

It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we’ll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we’ve enjoyed for the past two decades. But I’m betting that things are going to get ugly. We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

And it’s time for developers to take a stand. If you don’t want a repeat of the PC era, place your bets now on open systems. Don’t wait till it’s too late.

This IS the battle that will frame the Internet in the next years. As I wrote a few months ago in ‘Of DDoSs and SPOFs: How Twitter and Facebook violate “The Internet Way”‘, the way of the Internet is to use “distributed and decentralized” services. That’s how email works… that’s how the “web” works… that’s what excites me about the promise of Google Wave – not just that it’s a great platform for collaboration (and as I show here, it is), but that the Wave protocol has been designed from the start to be about federation… to be about distributed and decentralized services.

This war is a large part of why I work here at Voxeo, where one of our core values is “Unlocked Communications“, where we are huge believer in open standards (and chair/co-chair many of the standards committees), where we do things like open source our Tropo cloud telephony platform (“The Cloud Must Be Open!”) and where, in contrast to Nuance and TellMe as Tim mentions at 13:22, we give away our speech recognition engine for free as part of our Prophecy IVR/application platform… that’s why I’m here at Voxeo. It’s a war for openness that I believe we must win!

But listen to Tim… and then ask yourself – which side of the war are you on?


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