This just in from LinkedIn:

Have a question? Zander Jules’s network will probably have an answer
You can use LinkedIn Answers to distribute your professional questions to Zander Jules and your extended network. You can get high-quality answers from experienced professionals.

Zander Jules requested to add you as a connection on LinkedIn:

Dan,

Dear
My name is Zander Jules a Banker and accountant with Bank Atlantique Cote Ivoire.I contacting u for a business transfer of a large sum of money from a dormant account. Though I know that a transaction of this magnitude will make any one apprehensive,
but I am assuring u all will be well at the end of the day.I am the personal accounts manager to Engr Frank Thompson, a National of ur country, who used to work with an oil servicing company here in Cote Ivoire. My client, his wife & their 3 children were involved in the ill fated Kenya Airways crash in the coasts of Abidjan in January 2000 in which all passengers on board died. Since then I have made several inquiries to ur embassy to locate any of my clients extended relatives but has been unsuccessful.After several attempts, I decided to trace his last name via internet,to see if I could locate any member of his
family hence I contacted u.Of particular interest is a huge deposit with our bank in our country,where the deceased has an account valued at about $16 million USD.They have issued me notice to provide the next of kin or our bank will declare the account unservisable and thereby send the funds to the bank treasury.Since I have been unsuccessful in locating the relatives for past 7 yrs now, I will seek ur consent to present you as the next of kin of the deceased since u have the same last names, so that the proceeds of this account valued at $16million USD can be paid to u and then u and I can share the money.All I require is your honest cooperation to enable us see this deal through. I guarantee that this will be executed under all legitimate arrangement that will protect you from any breach of the law. In your reply mail, I want you to give me your full names, address, D.O.B, tel& fax #.If you can handle this with me, reach me for more details.

Thanking u for ur coperation.
Regards,

I’m suprised we’ve not seen more of this, and sooner. Youtube contacts are pretty spammy, and twitter have also suffered. The other networks are relatively OK so far. But I don’t think they’re anything like as robust as they’ll need to get, particularly since a faked contact can get privileged access to personal details. Definitely an arms race…

In the past we have handled this fairly informally, mixing short talks, themed discussion, inter-WG liaison, and lightning talks. This year I would like to theme any meeting around the practicalities of mainstream rollout: obstacles, issues, opportunities that arise as these technologies find their way into wider use. But this is a broad topic. What would you all like to discuss?

Comments and suggestions here or on the list please; although of course you can always ping me privately if needed.

Hope to see you in October…

Stephen Fry writing on ’social network’ sites back in January (also in the Guardian):

…what an irony! For what is this much-trumpeted social networking but an escape back into that world of the closed online service of 15 or 20 years ago? Is it part of some deep human instinct that we take an organism as open and wild and free as the internet, and wish then to divide it into citadels, into closed-border republics and independent city states? The systole and diastole of history has us opening and closing like a flower: escaping our fortresses and enclosures into the open fields, and then building hedges, villages and cities in which to imprison ourselves again before repeating the process once more. The internet seems to be following this pattern.

How does this help us predict the Next Big Thing? That’s what everyone wants to know, if only because they want to make heaps of money from it. In 1999 Douglas Adams said: “Computer people are the last to guess what’s coming next. I mean, come on, they’re so astonished by the fact that the year 1999 is going to be followed by the year 2000 that it’s costing us billions to prepare for it.”

But let the rise of social networking alert you to the possibility that, even in the futuristic world of the net, the next big thing might just be a return to a made-over old thing.

McSweenys:

Dear Mr. Zuckerberg,

After checking many of the profiles on your website, I feel it is my duty to inform you that there are some serious errors present. […]

Lest-we-forget. AOL search log privacy goofup from 2006:

No. 4417749 conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period on topics ranging from “numb fingers” to “60 single men” to “dog that urinates on everything.”

And search by search, click by click, the identity of AOL user No. 4417749 became easier to discern. There are queries for “landscapers in Lilburn, Ga,” several people with the last name Arnold and “homes sold in shadow lake subdivision gwinnett county georgia.”

It did not take much investigating to follow that data trail to Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga., frequently researches her friends’ medical ailments and loves her three dogs. “Those are my searches,” she said, after a reporter read part of the list to her.

Time magazine punditising on iGoogle, Facebook and OpenSocial:

Google, which makes its money on a free and open Web, was not happy with the Facebook platform. That’s because what happens on Facebook stays on Facebook. Google would much prefer that you come out and play on its platform — the wide-open Web. Don’t stay behind Facebook’s closed doors! Hie thee to the Web and start searching for things. That’s how Google makes its money.

So, last fall, Google rallied all the other major social networks (MySpace, Bebo, Hi5 and so on) and announced a new initiative called OpenSocial. OpenSocial wants to be like Facebook’s platform, only much bigger: Widget makers can write applications for it and they can run anywhere — on MySpace, Bebo and Google’s own social network, Orkut, which is very big in Brazil.

Google’s platform could actually dwarf Facebook — if it ever gets off the ground.

Meanwhile on the widget and webapp security front, we have “BBC exposes Facebook flaw” (information about your buddies is accessible to apps you install; information about you is accessible to apps they install). Also see Thomas Roessler’s comments to my Nokiana post for links to a couple of great presentations he made on widget security. This includes a big oopsie with the Google Mail widget for MacOSX. Over in Ars Technica we learn that KDE 4.1 alpha 1 now has improved widget powers, including “preliminary support for SuperKaramba and Mac OS X Dashboard widgets“. Wonder if I can read my Gmail there…

As Stephen Fry says,  these things are “opening and closing like a flower”. The big hosted social sites have a certain oversimplifying retardedness about them. But the ability for code to go visit data (the widget/gadget model), is I think as valid as the opendata model where data flows around to visit code. I am optimistic that good things will come out of this ferment.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting several of the Google OpenSocial crew in London. They took my grumbling about accessibility issues pretty well, and I hope to continue that conversation. Industry politics and punditry aside, I’m impressed with their professionalism and with the tie-in to an opensource implementation through Apache’s ShinDig project. The OpenSocial specs list is open to the public, where Cassie has just announced that “all 0.8 opensocial and gadgets spec changes have been resolved” (after a heroic slog through the issue list). I’m barely tracking the detail of discussion there, things are moving fast. There’s now a proposed REST API, for example; and I learned in London about plans for a formatting/templating system, which might be one mechanism for getting FOAF/RDF out of OpenSocial containers.

If OpenSocial continues to grow and gather opensource mindshare, it’s possible Facebook will throw some chunks of their platform over the wall (ie. “do an Adobe“). And it’ll probably be left to W3C to clean up the ensuring mess and fragmentation, but I guess that’s what they’re there for. Meanwhile there’s plenty yet to be figured out, … I think we’re in a pre-standards experimentation phase, regardless of how stable or mature we’re told these platforms are.

The fundamental tension here is that we want open data, open platforms, … for data and code to flow freely, but to protect the privacy, lives and blushes of those it describes. A tricky balance. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s easy, that we’ve got it figured out, or that all we need to do is “tear down the walls”.

Opening and closing like flowers…

I’ve just made a quick movie from the unedited sound of Firefox 3 restarting this morning: Krafty Nacirema (multitasking mix).

Raw materials include: New Order’s ‘Krafty‘ and ‘Confusion‘; John S. Hall’s ‘America Kicks Ass‘ rant, and who knows what else. I liked how it all sounded, so here it is.

… a little-language for analysing graph-structured data, especially RDF. The syntax of GraphPath is reminiscent of Xpath. It has a python implementation that can be teamed up with your favourite python RDF API (e.g. Redland, rdflib, or your own API).

Anyone tried it? Apparently it has a rule/inference system too (backward chaining). I don’t quite see how namespace abbrevations are handled, but guess there must be some mechanism for registering them in the API. Could be a candidate for transliteration into Ruby?

I asked for the backstory, which goes like this:

Quite a palaver. Got the train from Istanbul to Syria (amazing trip!). At the border they didn’t search the bags of “westerners” but asked us all to show our phones and cameras. They glanced at them all quickly, checking the brand (”Nikon, ok. SonyEricsson, ok”). One guy had an N95 and they led him off the train. His sister informed us that they’d said it wasn’t allowed in Syria, and that if she knew her brother he’d not give it up without a fight. Despite being on contract, he argued with them for an hour and a half, even calling the embassies in Damascus and Ankara. In the end he gave it up, with a promise that they’d send it on to the airport from where he was leaving. A few days later we’re chatting with a barman and spot his phone - an N95, and yes, he got it in Syria! A few days after that we found out the full story from our hotel owner in Damascus. Apparently the CIA gave a load of bugged N95s to high-ranking Kurdish officials in Iraq, many of which were then smuggled into Syria and given as gifts to various shady characters. After the Hezbollah guy was assassinated in Damascus a few months ago, the Syrians set about trying to root out spies, which led to this ban on bringing N95s into the country. Apparently.

This is the first I’ve heard of it, but searching throws up a few references to rigged N95s as “spy phones”.

Somewhat-unrelated aside: I don’t believe the relevant functionality is exposed in the N95’s widget APIs yet. I had trouble making it vibrate, let alone self-destruct after this message. But at least widget/gadget/app security is getting some attention lately. It can’t be too long before “spy widgets” on your phone become a real concern, particularly since the exposure of phone APIs to 3rd party apps is such a creative combination. I should be clear that AFAIK, Nokia’s N95 widget platform is free of such vulnerabilities currently, and any “spy phone” mischief so far has been achieved through other kinds of interference. But it does make me glad to see a Widgets 1.0: Digital Signature spec moving along at W3C…

“I surf the web, I used to watch TV
now I’m logged into Joost, it’s commercial free”[…]

 L’objectif du SemanticCamp Paris est de créer les conditions pour que les développeurs, les étudiants, les managers et les chercheurs se rencontrent sur le thème du Web Sémantique.

The tool allows users to inspect for errors the semantic annotations of web services of their choice using two adequacy criteria.

I was wondering why this was announced to the SemWeb lifesciences group, but the homepage has an explanation:

Semantic annotations have been proposed as a means of providing richer information about the behaviour of Web services to potential users. Ontologies of terms used in a particular application domain, or by a particular community, can be associated with Web service components (e.g. as task descriptions for specific operations, or as richer typing information for specific input or output messages). Users familiar with that ontology can then use the annotations to search for suitable service implementations, or to determine whether the outputs of one service are suitable for use as inputs to another. For example, in the biological domain, a user might wish to convert a protein sequence into its equivalent gene sequence, and might therefore ask a service discovery engine for information on services which take protein sequences as input and return gene sequences as output.

See their site for more details and publications. The related ISPIDER project has more publications in this area.

Nearby in the Web: online video of an ISWC 2006 talk on related work.

So I’m wondering if UMG mind that their branded content is being used as inventory for a cult to advertise over…?

Or, “but what do all those links mean?”

Based on the 1994 slides by TimBL which inspired the SWAD-Europe graphics and shirt.

The twist here is just an emphasis that the giant global graph is a graph of idiosyncratic claims, and only sometimes do we all see the world the same way.

“ordinary life is pretty complex stuff“ — Harvey Pekar

The readme.txt file describes the tabular data structure (split into a cells, and a measures file).

I think the cells data is the one most folk will be interested in re-using. Table headings are:

# id,lat,lon,mcc,mnc,lac,cellid,range,nbSamples,created_at,updated_at

For example:

7,44.8802,-0.526878,208,10,18122,32951790,0,2,2008-03-31 15:22:22,2008-04-07 08:57:33

This could be RDFized using something similar to the (802.11-centric) Wireless Ontology. Perhaps even using lqraps…