• The sad conclusion: “humans are such herd animals”

• The good conclusion: “virality has always existed, it’s not an invention of Web2.0. Social networking is just a powerful tool for everyone that wants to change the world”

• The mean conclusion: “how much does it take to get people from their computers to the real world after a virtual ‘heads up’ by some ‘dancing man’?”

• More conclusions: read the comments on this video on reddit and on youtube.

Table of contents

1. The Recipe
2. The Scenario
3. The Arguments
4. Why bother
5. The business side
6. The identity side
7. The Google side
8. The protection side
9. The communication side: tapping and protecting
10. Final words

The Recipe

Ingredients

• The 2009 social environment
• A bunch of hackers
• Some competent lawyers
• A Google Spokesman
• The Big Brother Awards
• A consistent amount of paranoia

Preparation

Take the whole social environment, utterly unprepared to the media \(r)evolution happening in the last years, and let the hackers observe and talk/write about it. Bring in the lawyers, and let them recognize that “Houston! We’ve got a problem!”, whilst also they define it via lawspeak. Ask questions, and participate to interesting debates.

Now, deliver the 2007 big brother award to the Google Representative, let the sun dive in the hills, add a noticeable amount of Tuscany red wine, and get ready for the next day. Let the paranoia flow, while the hackers show how you can be traced and found via the cellular network and spied via wifi-networked cameras placed there for your safety.

Watch the undelivered Big Brother Awards 2009 sit on the speakers’ desk and suddenly put on sale on ebay, and go back home, where you read about, and watch, a video-edited interview to the italian PM.

XFS internal error XFS_WANT_CORRUPTED_RETURN at line 295 of file fs/xfs/xfs_alloc.c.  Caller 0xc018066c
 [<c017fed0>] xfs_alloc_fixup_trees+0x1b0/0x2e0
 [<c018066c>] xfs_alloc_ag_vextent_near+0x31c/0x9c0
 [<c018066c>] xfs_alloc_ag_vextent_near+0x31c/0x9c0
 [<c0180187>] xfs_alloc_ag_vextent+0xf7/0x100
 [<c01824fe>] xfs_alloc_vextent+0x35e/0x420
 [<c019015d>] xfs_bmap_alloc+0x80d/0x12b0
 [<c0111254>] try_to_wake_up+0xa4/0xc0
 [<c02cf248>] schedule+0x308/0x5c0
 [<c01939c4>] xfs_bmapi+0x514/0x1470
 [<c0130069>] find_lock_page+0x29/0xe0
 [<c013013c>] find_or_create_page+0x1c/0xb0
 [<c01d9116>] kmem_zone_zalloc+0x26/0x50
 [<c01a2296>] xfs_dir2_grow_inode+0xf6/0x3c0
 [<c01b57a6>] xfs_iget_core+0x326/0x5a0
 [<c0163315>] alloc_inode+0xd5/0x170
 [<c01b978b>] xfs_idata_realloc+0x3b/0x160
 [<c01a3e2d>] xfs_dir2_sf_to_block+0xad/0x680
 [<c0137882>] cache_grow+0xe2/0x150
 [<c01aa27b>] xfs_dir2_sf_addname+0x9b/0x110
 [<c01a1c51>] xfs_dir2_createname+0x131/0x140
 [<c01d9116>] kmem_zone_zalloc+0x26/0x50
 [<c01cebcb>] xfs_trans_ijoin+0x2b/0x80
 [<c01d4967>] xfs_create+0x407/0x6c0
 [<c017e766>] xfs_acl_vhasacl_default+0x36/0x50
 [<c01df8f4>] linvfs_mknod+0x2c4/0x390
 [<c01a1d62>] xfs_dir2_lookup+0x102/0x110
 [<c01228b8>] in_group_p+0x38/0x70
 [<c01ba9a6>] xfs_iaccess+0xc6/0x1a0
 [<c0157cb7>] permission+0x97/0xd0
 [<c0158f94>] __link_path_walk+0xda4/0xe90
 [<c0157cb7>] permission+0x97/0xd0
 [<c015984c>] vfs_create+0x9c/0x120
 [<c015a00b>] open_namei+0x58b/0x5e0
 [<c014aa9d>] filp_open+0x2d/0x50
 [<c014ac70>] get_unused_fd+0x50/0xc0
 [<c0157ae7>] getname+0x67/0xb0
 [<c014ad9c>] sys_open+0x3c/0x80
 [<c0102867>] sysenter_past_esp+0x54/0x75

xfs_force_shutdown(hda8,0x8) called from line 1091 of file fs/xfs/xfs_trans.c.  Return address = 0xc01e2c5c
Filesystem "hda8": Corruption of in-memory data detected.  Shutting down filesystem: hda8
Please umount the filesystem, and rectify the problem(s)
xfs_force_shutdown(hda8,0x1) called from line 353 of file fs/xfs/xfs_rw.c.  Return address = 0xc01e2c5c
printk: 12 messages suppressed.

Yeah, I’d umount /var, if this box didn’t act_as_router and didn’t run pppd that didn’t lock /var/run/pppd2.tdb…

pppd   222 root  mem   REG    3,8    88080525 /var/run/pppd2.tdb (path dev=0,0 inode=34)

Of course kill 222 ; pppd call dsl-provider doesn’t work. YUCK. Let’s put a router in front of it.. configure, portforward, and start over.. then fdisk /dev/hdc to recreate partitions structure on the new hard disk, mkfs.xfs on all the new partitions, mount /dev/hdcX /target, pax -r -w -p e /{bin,boot,dev,etc,home,initrd,lib,media,root,sbin,srv,tmp,usr,var} /target… wait a lot for the copy to complete because of damaged sectors on the source hard disk, chroot /target, vi /etc/lilo.conf and substitute boot=/dev/hda with boot=/dev/hdc, run lilo -v while in the chroot verify /etc/fstab, and finally shutdown to remove the faulty disk, and boot again.. restoring lilo.conf. yay!

«Women! The knife grinder is here!» – Apart from funny jokes ;) the italian Apple Store together with Girl Geek Dinners Roma organized on May 16, 2009, a workshop about mobile lifestyle (focusing on the iPhone, of course).

Let’s start from the beginning: what are the Girl Geek Dinners? Linda explained to the audience (nearly 20 people) that a geek is a person passionate about technology in a broader sense: the GGD is a group devoted to aggregate women interested about the internet, new medias and technologic lifestyles. Women are often underestimated in geek communities, and this embarassing clichè generated a lot of discussion in the past, and it’s still unsolved (in my opinion).

The GGD italian group was born in 2007 in Milan, and then arrived to Rome in 2008, and is also present in Bologna and in the Marche and Emilia-Romagna states.

So, the GGD group tries to generate a “critical mass” of geek women, to abolish a stereotype that “computer programmers / power users” are only men: in GGD events boys listen and girls talk, then they blog, exchange vCards (and PGP keys, I’d guess ;) and in general try to harness women power and skills in the field of the computer industry. Networking and a dive into social media is the most efficient way nowadays to reach a great audience, and to build rapidly the aforementioned critical mass: that’s why the GGDs event was focused on social mobile applications and general productivity ones. Presented by two official Apple Trainers (Simona and Riccardo), the workshop started @11.30 AM and lasted nearly one hour.

This is the second part of my recap of the nnsquad.it convention held in Rome on May 14, 2009, and hosted by the ICT consultants foundation Fondazione Ugo Bordoni.

In the first part I described the morning session, dedicated to the definition of Network neutrality, and how global economics can cope with it. The afternoon was dedicated to more technical talks, and I had the occasion to hear telcos spokesmen remarks over the current situation and possible future developments.

The first speech started at 2.15PM and was held by Prof. Vittorio Trecordi (slides available here). He introduced it by stating that net neutrality could possibly contrast with the economic development and security assessment, because of the wiretapping needed for the latter, tap that is strongly against the individual freedom to communicate.

Strangely (or maybe not) enough, no mention was made to current ways to bypass both wiretapping and localization of communicating peers: I’m referring to the tor project, the most known bastion that guarantees privacy and is currently used by journalists working in "hot" areas, among many others.

http://www.fub.it/events/seminari/neutralitadellareteeaspettisocioeconomici

http://www.nnsquad.it/

Neutrality – “Economy is dematerializing”

Solicited by a Facebook message sent to all the members of the nnsquad.it – for a neutral Internet members on 6 May 2009, I stumbled upon this interesting event I had the occasion to participate, held in the 17th century Rospigliosi palace in the heart of Rome.

In this photo: Kenneth Carter and Stefano Quintarelli

The preface looked pretty good: technicians, Ph.Ds, telco spokesmen and politicians speaking about the internet, its inborn freedom, and how to cope with this in a society where security measures are constantly increasing, and as such contrast in a virtual world with no barriers whatsoever. Furthermore, it’s a virtual arena in which everything can be free, not only information, and people are becoming accustomed to it.

The first speech was held by prof. Kenneth Carter, directly from the columbia university, and served as a broad introduction about the matters that were explored (and sometimes repeated) through the day. In a nutshell, the big question is: might ISPs offer different degrees of performance over different sites (or charge for better performances), permit/block/surcharge access to certain sites or via certain devices?

This is my recap of the first italian facebook developer garage, held in milan on April 23, 2009, and hosted by mikamai. the morning has been dedicated to developer sessions, the afternoon to marketing & communication ones. some videos of the event are available here.

Morning: developer session

The first talk was held by James Leszczenski, facebook engineer, who presented the connect platform vision, mission, and values. interesting, besides the talk, for user participation: the audience was deeply interested about which information they get from facebook, how should they handle it, and which means connect does provide to match identities and find friends on an enabled web site.

Later I had the occasion to ask James about whether FB was inclined or not to adopt OpenID as an authentication method: he said that connect and OpenID both allow users to have unique login credentials to access multiple sites, but connect also allows to exploit the power of facebook social graph to allow users to communicate and share information. so, the short answer is “no”. Then I proposed him to implement OpenID on FB itself, so that connect could become really a superset of openID, but he said that “as a company, these are tough decisions I could not give an answer right now”. Fair enough :).

UPDATE: on April 27th 2009, techcrunch reports they heard that Facebook will embrace OpenID as a mean to authenticate users. Great news, looking forward for an official statement from Facebook! :)

The second talk was held by Vincenzo Acinapura, who described the basic means to create an application on the facebook platform. He explored the technologies behind it (XFBML, FQL, FBJS), the main integration points within the platform (notifications, publisher, ...), and he showed sample code to implement some of the most used FBML tags (fb:comments, fb:share, fb:feed, and so on). He eventually remembered the importance of automating the deploy of applications, and suggested to use capistrano to achieve it.

I’m searching for a new pet. We already have two lovely cats, but after feeling how alive a house can be with many pets (after a beautiful night @ il quadrato mansion), I’m thinking about having another one to grow and love.

But, what kind of geek am I, if I don’t add a nerdy bit to it? So, after the brain twitter interface about which we talked about so much in the last days, this evening a quite random funny thought has stumbled into my mind: what about getting a grey parrot, grow it, teach it to talk, and letting him .. well, tweet his words using a speech recognition system put right beside its cage and linked to a twitter account? How weird would that be?! :D

Thinking deeply, the weirdest thing is that in 2009, a tweeting parrot makes me think about a “parrot with access to twitter” .. and not a bird emitting its natural verse. Am I overloaded by this social media thingie? Should I take some vacation?

I guess. But not right now. The first Italian Facebook Developer Garage is just two days away.. :)

Image courtesy of @ozjulian on flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

April 7, 2009 · 3 min read

Bioniqa: We Applied to Y Combinator

• startup
• y-combinator

Back in 2007, Antonio Orlando came to me with an idea for a semantic question-and-answer platform. We called it Bioniqa — bionic Q&A. Not a search engine — search engines crawl existing pages and rank them. This would be a system where people generate the content themselves. You ask a question, the system routes it to the right person, and over time it learns who knows what, where, and in which language.

We called users “Neurons” and the collective knowledge “the Mind.” Each user is specialized — a Neuron in a particular domain, language, and geography. When connected, information flows between them and the system adapts. The software would borrow concepts from nature: diversity, adaptation, neuroplasticity. Geography and language would be first-class attributes, not afterthoughts.

The core insight was that search engines are terrible at contextual, hyperlocal questions. “What’s the mineral water with the lowest residue currently on sale in Bari?” No amount of PageRank helps with that. You need an actual person who lives in Bari and buys mineral water. Our system would find that person for you.

(As read on full-disclosure)

Subject: Notice to all employees
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 13:06:14 -0500

Dear employees,

Due to the current financial situation caused by the slowdown
of the economy, Management has decided to implement a scheme
to put workers of 40 years of age and above on early retirement.

This scheme will be known as RAPE (Retire Aged People Early).

Persons selected to be RAPED can apply to management to be eligible
for the SHAFT scheme (Special Help After Forced Termination).
Persons who have been RAPED and SHAFTED will be reviewed under the
SCREW programme (Scheme Covering Retired Early Workers). A person
may be RAPED once, SHAFTED twice and SCREWED as many times as
Management deems appropriate.

Persons who have been RAPED can only get AIDS (Additional Income
for Dependents & Spouse) or HERPES (Half Earnings for Retired
Personnel Early Severance).

Obviously, persons who have AIDS or HERPES will not be SHAFTED or
SCREWED any further by Management.

Persons who are not RAPED and are staying on will receive as much
SHIT (Special High-Intensity Training) as possible. Management
has always prided itself on the amount of SHIT it gives employees.

Sincerely,
The Management

(I hope you enjoyed this :D There is also an USAF version from 1997).