I realized today how much the net has deteriorated behind the scenes, after I was reveling in Sean's little shell script that would monitor /var/log/auth.log and auto-add IPs to a block list on a server when they pass a threshold of failed ssh attempts. After a quick sampling on a few of the boxes I help admin and seeing *thousands* of brute force ssh login attempts every day, and after reading Jerry's blog tonight, combined with increasing ratios of bad-to-good traffic across the board, I'm a little scared.

We're in Jail. It's as simple as that. Listening to any public IP on the Internet right now will show IMMEDIATE windows hack attempts, viruses, and as you stick around you'll see HTTP backdoor/overflow requests, ping scans, port scans, ssh root and dictionary attacks, dns/bind rootkit installers, ftp exploits, you name it. As soon as an IP is lit up, every thug and evildoer comes to try to get in. If you don't lock yourself away in a cell, batten down the hatches, hide behind someone elses big firewall gates and guards, you're toast, if not immediately then eventually.

How did it get this bad? It's ridiculous! Based on the trends, it's only going to get worse, and I don't know how such a clean and pretty looking internet will continue to cover up the sewers that all backbone pipes are right now.

The thing that frightens me most, is people will start to realize or be impacted to the point of unusability, and those that want to control the internet (copyright holders anyone? governments?) will use it as an excuse to assert their own view of who's good or bad. It feels like all of these recent murmurings of trusted computing and trusted network access might be the stink of that in action.

I hate to complain about something I can't throw out ideas for solutions on, anything I think of suffers the same take-freedoms-away... I'll keep thinking, hopefully really smart people are working on this while preserving the openness that defines the internet.

And yes, the title, Was (Not Was).

It's tempting to want to use this space to participate in the linkstorm to all the "cool stuff" or "good articles" I process on a daily basis, but that's not what this space is for and I need to be wary of that kind of mental share-rot.

This space is for me to share my thoughts, not re-distribute everyone else's, so my focus is on the thinking creation side. A list of topics I hope to touch on in coming posts are:

Open Source: Innovators and Builders, the life-cycles and social catering.

Web Chunks: "microcontent" and alternative distribution methods

Participatory Systems: Neat words, how soon before someone makes a Participatory conference and others create a 2.0 version?

Companies vs. Individuals: All companies are just groups of Individuals anyway, why all the fuss? Do we need more transparency here?

Inmates: that's us, tonight's topic :)

First fighting, and now recovering from, some deep throat/cold thing. Probably due to the seasonal change and constant immune system attack from what the kids bring home from school combined with frequent travel...

Right now I'm useless if I don't have a halls actively engaged combating the cough reflex.

First, the only relevance between the subject words might be that AJAX is often used to keep your attention focused. Other than that, they are just two micro-topics on my mind today.

I'm not sure I like the word attention in how I'm seeing it used on web topics, it speaks too much to me of an instruction, what I should be doing, particularly when I used to hear it all the time in school. What's more important when people talk about attention online, is impression. And I mean the exact opposite of how marketing people in the late 90's overhyped it, I mean the impression given from you to others. Whenever you participate, you are leaving an impression of yourself. You impress part of what you think, your pictures, your likes, your categories, your opinions. It's that impression that you leave all over the web that is important here, not your attention.

AJAX being all the rave that it is, even though it simply represents techniques many of us have used forever (and is a minor improvement upon), is a healthy little growth wave. It's far more healthy and exciting than something like, say, j2ee, even though they're not really comparable. I'm going to predict we'll see a whole marketplace next year, ajax processing appliances, ajax security, ajax accelerators, ajax routers, ajax ajax ajax. Kinda obvious I know, wish I cared enough to build some of those and get ahead of the game.

I am Jeremie Miller and I, am an Individual

Envision a video stream of 5 second clips of people from all over the world, all ages, all types, speaking that line with with their name and language and eminating pride and promise.

This is a dream I had almost seven years ago now, and I know there's nothing unique about it, it's a dream that many share, to revolutionize the world around us, as Individuals. Why it's important for me to start working on this dream again personally is the resurgence of the social and community driven web. It's what other's are calling Web 2.0 but I'd be so bold as to call it Web 0.5.

My first experiences on "the web" were in the early 90s, it was already an individuals paradise, heck it was built by individuals, and only used by individuals. Sure, they were students, professors, engineers, scientists, and the like, but it was a rich ecosystem of people talking to people with very little inbetween. The excitement in 94-96 as the rest of the world started to catch on was absolutely thrilling, I mean come on, people all over the world connecting as richly and productively as we had been for years with this technology, what a radical and exciting societal change!

Then it started to happen, I began feeling discomfort, MSN(BC), AOL, Yahoo's clean page becoming a car wreck, stupid ads appearing everywhere, all over the place these empires were steamrolling our individual's playground. The very soul of the net was being lost, Tim's great vision of
a highly personal vision of the Web as a powerful force for social change and individual creativity seemed but a fading hippie dream in the face of "The Web Economy."

My sense of displacement was a source of new motivation, I started to feed this notion of a full out Individual Revolution and was collecting ideas on how to begin planting some seeds, working on open source, encouraging platforms for collaboration and preserving open standards and communication systems. Jabber was borne of this process, and enveloped me fully from then on. Not long after, with Napster's passing, I became disillusioned in this vision of a powerful uprising against monolithic smothering social heirarchies.

My hope and passion have returned, thanks to the great many springs of individuals leaking from the web ground faster than can be contained, turning into streams and rivers, and eventually oceans. Wikis, blogs, tagging, social networking, all a part of something bigger in motion here, that's what I call the power of an Individual to revolutionize the world around us.