74 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2024
    1. current system is ‘closed source’, and is carried out by competitive agents that do not share innovations for very long time periods; the competitiveness of these agents requires behaviors that externalize costs

      for - examples - closed source IP externalises cost - from Substack article - The Cosmo-Local Plan for our Next Civilization - Michel Bauwens - 2024, Dec 20

      examples - closed source IP externalises cost - closed source circular economy is much more challenging than open source circular economy because - if inputs are kept secret and proprietary, reuse of End of life products are difficult to break down and reuse as input in a re-manufacturing process - closed IP creates fragmented and completing de facto standards that make interoperability impossible

  2. Nov 2023
  3. Aug 2023
    1. In computing, the robustness principle is a design guideline for software that states: "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others". It is often reworded as: "be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept". The principle is also known as Postel's law, after Jon Postel, who used the wording in an early specification of TCP.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle

      Robustness principle: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

  4. May 2023
    1. A flaw can become entrenched as a de facto standard. Any implementation of the protocol is required to replicate the aberrant behavior, or it is not interoperable. This is both a consequence of applying the robustness principle, and a product of a natural reluctance to avoid fatal error conditions. Ensuring interoperability in this environment is often referred to as aiming to be "bug for bug compatible".
  5. Apr 2023
    1. Interoperability: The ability of systems to worktogether, exchange, and make use of informationfrom other systems. In education, interoperability isthe ability of a system to exchange education andworkforce information with and use information fromother systems without special effort on the part of theuser. This means all individuals, including learners andemployers, have appropriate access to educationand workforce information, allowing them to makeinformed decisions in the workplace

      Interoperability is rooted in access and equity

  6. Mar 2023
    1. The lack of interoperability among hardware and software technology vendors has been a limiting factor in the adoption of two-factor authentication technology. In particular, the absence of open specifications has led to solutions where hardware and software components are tightly coupled through proprietary technology, resulting in high-cost solutions, poor adoption, and limited innovation.
  7. Dec 2022
  8. Nov 2022
    1. Can someone point me to a writeup or venn diagram explaining the relationship between the #Fedivers and #IndieWeb?Doing a lot of learning and not afraid to dig in on the protocol level. Do these protocols compete? Interoperate? Complement each other?

      https://mastodon.social/@tbeseda@indieweb.social/109368520955574335

      At a base level, the Fediverse is a subset within the bigger IndieWeb. Parts of the Fediverse, have and support some of the IndieWeb building blocks, but none that I'm aware of support them all. Example: Mastodon has microformats markup, but doesn't support sending webmentions or have micropub support. Currently it's easier for the IndieWeb to communicate into and read the Fediverse, but the Fediverse doesn't do a good job of seeing or interacting with things outside it.

    1. This all means working harder to make digital markets less prone to concentration. So how do we do that? An example is using interoperability policy to force big technology platforms to adopt common standards, so that people can move between spaces in Digitalland. This would allow people to take their data with them when they leave a space and it would let people message friends in another platform without having to join it. The ultimate goal is to make it harder to wall off Digitalland into private estates and to diminish those winner-takes-all effects.
  9. Jun 2022
    1. And when corporations start to dominate the Internet, they became de-facto governments. Slowly but surely, the tech companies began to act like old power. They use the magic of tech to consolidate their own power, using money to increase their influence, blocking the redistribution of power from the entrenched elites to ordinary people.

      "Money is its own kind of power"

      The corporations built by white, male, American, and vaguely libertarian people became a focal point of power because of the money they had to influence governments and society. They started looking like "old power."

      Later:

      Facebook took advantage of tech's tradition of openness [importing content from MySpace], but as soon as it got what it wanted, it closed its platform off.

  10. May 2022
  11. Apr 2022
    1. I wanted all of my Go code to just deal with JSON HTTP bodies

      Lame. Hopefully it's at least checking the content type and returning an appropriate status code with a helpful message, at least.

      (PS: it wouldn't be multipart/form-data, anyway; the default is application/x-www-form-urlencoded.)

  12. Jan 2022
    1. ike Jungius, Boyle made use of loose folio sheets that he called memorials or adversaria; yet he did not worry too much about a system of self-referential relationships that enabled intentional knowl-edge retrieval. When he realized that he was no longer able to get his bearings in an ocean of paper slips, he looked for a way out, testing several devices, such as colored strings or labels made of letters and numeral codes. Unfortunately, it was too late. As Richard Yeo clearly noted, ‘this failure to develop an effective indexing system resulted from years of trusting in memory in tandem with notes’.69

      69 Yeo, ‘Loose Notes’, 336

      Robert Boyle kept loose sheets of notes, which he called memorials or adversaria. He didn't have a system of organization for them and tried out variations of colored strings, labels made of letters, and numerical codes. Ultimately his scrap heap failed him for lack of any order and his trust in memory to hold them together failed.


      I love the idea of calling one's notes adversaria. The idea calls one to compare one note to another as if they were combatants in a fight (for truth).


      Are working with one's ideas able to fit into the idea of adversarial interoperability?

  13. Sep 2021
  14. Aug 2021
    1. Every year, in my platform-regulation class, I draw a Venn diagram on the board with three interlocking circles: privacy, speech, and competition. Then we identify all the issues that fall at the intersection of two or more circles. Interoperability, including for content-moderation purposes, is always smack in the middle. It touches every circle. This is what makes it hard. We have to solve problems in all those areas to make middleware work. But this is also what makes the concept so promising. If—or when—we do manage to meet this many-sided challenge, we will unlock something powerful.

      Interesting point about the intersection of interoperability. Are there other features that also touch them all?

    2. Fukuyama's work, which draws on both competition analysis and an assessment of threats to democracy, joins a growing body of proposals that also includes Mike Masnick's "protocols not platforms," Cory Doctorow's "adversarial interoperability," my own "Magic APIs," and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's "algorithmic choice."

      Nice overview of work in the space for fixing monopoly in social media space the at the moment. I hadn't heard about Fukuyama or Daphne Keller's versions before.

      I'm not sure I think Dorsey's is actually a thing. I suspect it is actually vaporware from the word go.

      IndieWeb has been working slowly at the problem as well.

  15. Jul 2021
    1. If we had truly robust standards for electronic data interchange and less anxiety about privacy, these kinds of data could be moved around more freely in a structured format. Of course, there are regional exchanges where they do. The data could also be created in structured format to begin with.

      This does exist. Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR; pronounced 'fire') is an open standard that describes data formats and elements (the 'resources' in the name), as well as an application programming interface (API) for exchanging electronic health records.

      See more here: https://hl7.org/fhir/

  16. May 2021
    1. Perhaps if everyone reads and writes from their own home on the web, they’re less likely to desecrate their neighbor’s blog because it sticks to their own identity? There’s lots of work to be done certainly, but perhaps we’ll get there by expanding things, opening them up, and giving ourselves some more space to communicate?

      Chris, I like your point about companies opening up, it reminds me Cory Doctorow's discussion of interoperability as a means of fixing the internet.

  17. Apr 2021
    1. Ideally, GitHub would understand rich formats

      I've advocated for a different approach.

      Most of these "rich formats" are, let's just be honest, Microsoft Office file formats that people aren't willing to give up. But these aren't binary formats through-and-through; the OOXML formats are ZIP archives (following Microsoft's "Open Packaging Conventions") that when extracted are still almost entirely simple "files containing lines of text".

      So rather than committing your "final-draft.docx", "for-print.oxps" and what-have-you to the repo, run them through a ZIP extractor then commit that to the repo. Then, just like any other source code repo, include a "build script" for these—which just zips them back up and gives them the appropriate file extension.

      (I have found through experimentation that some of these packages do include some binary files (which I can't recall offhand), but they tend to be small, and you can always come up with a text-based serialization for them, and then rework your build script so it's able to go from that serialization format to the correct binary before zipping everything up.)

  18. Mar 2021
    1. The idea is that many smaller tech companies would allow for more choice between services. This solution is flawed. For one, services like search or social media benefit from network effects. Having large datasets to train on, means search recommendations get better. Having all your friends in one place, means you don’t need five apps to contact them all. I would argue those are all things we like and might lose when Big Tech is broken up. What we want is to be able to leave Facebook and still talk to our friends, instead of having many Facebooks.

      I'd be interested to better understand this concern or critique. I think the goal of smaller, interoperable services is exactly the idea of being able to communicate with our Facebook friends even if we leave Facebook. Perhaps that is an argument for combining deconsolidation with interoperability.

  19. Feb 2021
  20. Jan 2021
    1. That means enforcing interoperability, so that, for example, payments services on one e-commerce platform can be used seamlessly on a rival one.

      interoperability: (of computer systems or software) able to exchange and make use of information.

  21. Nov 2020
    1. 1.Austausch von Wissen und Erfahrungen, gegenseitige Unterstützung. 2.Aufbau einer Interessengemscheinaft. Gemeinsame Entwicklung, soweit das mit den unterschiedlichen Programmen möglich ist.3.Einen Software-Standard für Verwaltungssoftware entwickeln (also die Programme zueinander kompatibel zu machen, soweit das möglich ist), damit·man diese Komponenten gemeinsam entwickeln kann·diese später vielleicht sogar untereinander austauschbar oder miteinander kombinierbar sind·neue Programmierer mitmachen können, statt allein von vorne anzufangenBetrifft z.B.:·Datenbankstrukturen·Dateiformate·interne und externe APIs4.Entscheidung für eine Software, die wir zukünftig unterstützen, finanziell und entwicklungstechnisch. Die Software soll durch möglichst viele Solawis und Solawi-Typen nutzen können und soll gleichzeitig modular und selbständig durch die Solawis erweitert werden können.

      Die Beispiele können erweitert werden durch die Vorarbeiten die @yova im internationalen Kontext mit Solidbase und in seiner wissenschaftlichen Abschlussarbeit untersucht hat.

  22. Oct 2020
    1. The Gopher story is a perfect case history for Adversarial Interoperability. The pre-Gopher information landscape was dominated by companies, departments, and individuals who were disinterested in giving users control over their own computing experience and who viewed computing as something that took place in a shared lab space, not in your home or dorm room. Rather than pursuing an argument with these self-appointed Lords of Computing, the Gopher team simply went around them, interconnecting to their services without asking for permission. They didn't take data they weren't supposed to have—but they did make it much easier for the services' nominal users to actually access them.
  23. Sep 2020
    1. Rollup is a tool that lets you write your application using ES6 modules, even though you can't publish those modules directly to your users, because native support is only just starting to land in browsers. Rollup compiles your modules into a format that all browsers _do_ understand—a single script file—by, essentially, concatenating files together (while reordering and renaming declarations to preserve scope).
  24. Jun 2020
  25. May 2020
  26. Mar 2020
  27. Jan 2020
    1. The Web Annotation Data Model specification describes a structured model and format to enable annotations to be shared and reused across different hardware and software platforms.

      The publication of this web standard changed everything. I look forward to true testing of interoperable open annotation. The publication of the standard nearly three years ago was a game changer, but the game is still in progress. The future potential is unlimited!

  28. May 2019
  29. Mar 2019
  30. May 2018
  31. Nov 2017
    1. David Smetters (in the G+ locked-in comments):

      A similar article could have been written 10 years ago about QTI 2.x. The vendors had coalesced around QTI 1.x, tweaking it as needed. Then QTI 2.x was created, but not with involvement by the vendors who implemented QTI 1.x. Somewhere along the way, QTI 2.x was pulled from the IMS website, only to reappear many months later, unchanged. There has been little adoption of QTI 2.x in the market and it still causes confusion for newcomers who think it's the "standard" they should be following.

  32. Sep 2017
    1. Over the course of many years, every school has refined and perfected the connections LMSs have into a wide variety of other campus systems including authentication systems, identity management systems, student information systems, assessment-related learning tools, library systems, digital textbook systems, and other content repositories. APIs and standards have decreased the complexity of supporting these connections, and over time it has become easier and more common to connect LMSs to – in some cases – several dozen or more other systems. This level of integration gives LMSs much more utility than they have out of the box – and also more “stickiness” that causes them to become harder to move away from. For LMS alternatives, achieving this same level of connectedness, particularly considering how brittle these connections can sometimes become over time, is a very difficult thing to achieve.
  33. Jul 2017
  34. Mar 2017
    1. Indeed, cannibalizing a federated application-layer protocol into a centralized service is almost a sure recipe for a successful consumer product today. It's what Slack did with IRC, what Facebook did with email, and what WhatsApp has done with XMPP. In each case, the federated service is stuck in time, while the centralized service is able to iterate into the modern world and beyond.

      What Slack, Facebook, WhastApp and others have done to not allow users to use their favorite app to communicate with someone who another app. Sad and bad!

      What would you do if had to use the same email client/provider as the people you want the communicate with?

  35. Feb 2016
  36. Jan 2016
    1. As NSFdirector Ardent L. Bement, Jr., observes, “with today's electrical grid. . . my neighbor and I can use differentappliances to meet our individual needs; as long as the appliances conform to certain electrical standards,they will work reliably,” and a sufficiently advanced cyberinfrastructure will work similarly: researchers willhave “easy access to the computing, communication, and information resources they need, while pursuingdifferent avenues of interest using different tools.”92

      Helpful analogy for thinking about importance of open standards/interoperability.

  37. Dec 2015
  38. Aug 2015
  39. Jul 2015
  40. Mar 2014
    1. There is no technical or functional reason not to use and establish EPUB 3 as an/the interoperable (open) e-book format standard. One short term obstacle is the non-availability of reader applications able to display all EPUB 3 features. However, this problem should be fixed soon by the IDPF Readium initiative which is developing an open source reference system and rendering engine for EPUB 3