In Metadata, Semiotics, and the Tower of Babel, Tim Oren rants against some of the assumptions behind the metadata bubblet which Joi Ito hinted at in his If I were Microsoft post. It is kind of ironic that Tim used the Semiotic wand to blast the Shangri-la illusion off the Tower of Metadata Babel because people had many different interpretations of Joi's post.
Symbols are just containers for semantics. If you put cookies in one, people know them as jar with cookies and identify it by its shape and location. As soon as you have one jar, you will have many so people invented ways to refer to each jar by name (cookie jar) and distinguish it by sight (it has a picture of cookies carved on it).
Semiotics is all about problems of jar selection. While size and shape of a jar limit what can be stored inside it, there are enough leeways for people to use the jars for wide variety of purposes.
In Korea, there is a specially shaped jar for urine so one doesn't have to go outside in the middle of the night to take a leak. It's a beautifully shaped jar. Now imagine what would happen if an American came upon the jar. Chances are pretty good that he would see a cookie jar, a jarring example of semiotics.
So Joi was musing about Microsoft monopolizing the emerging jar market to gain an upper hand on Google which cornered the market on baskets. Tim disagrees because people can put anything in jars regardless of the picture or label on the jar which will cause confusion like the Ecstasy test result mixup.
I am somewhere in between. I believe two common forms of human nature, conformity and mimicry, allow sufficiently large and reasonably coherent set of metadata to be created, if not by design, then by popularity (see Emergent Markup Languages).
Oh, sh*t. Several severe vulnerabilities were discovered in OpenSSL's ASN.1 parser code. These bugs are really serious and widely spread. Update Now! Beside pathcing your own programs that use OpenSSL, don't forget about program you didn't write. I'll have to scan my system to take stock of which programs I have to update. Sheesh.
- OpenSSL Security Advisory
- Feds, Industry, Battle the Biggest Bug - SecurityFocus
- Brits pound OpenSSL bugs - The Register
While the hole in OpenSSL might be patched, vulnerabilities in other applications using ASN.1 are likely to still exist and may come to light in the days to come.
Pass this news on to others so they can cover their ass too.
I just e-mailed a request to close my ServInt VPS account. In three days of trying to set it up, the server went down several times a day. Not a good sign. I think the company is a good company and have heard good things about them, but I think Virtuozzo, VPS implementation software they are using, has problems. Since I don't have time to wait for the problems to be fixed, I am going to look elsewhere.
Update #1:
I just ordered a modest dedicated server from ServerMatrix. 2 Ghz Pentium 4, 1G of hopefully fast memory, and 40G IDE with Red Hat Linux 9.0 and no cPanel (sheesh). Bandwidth is 750GB/month in both directions. I guess the unusual bandwidth accounting is due to ServerMatrix's dedicated game server products. Anyway, I am expecting to wait longer than usual to get the server up and ready for my newbie Linux administrator fingers.
Update #2:
I received an e-mail from Reed J. Caldwell, CEO of ServInt, apologizing and informing me that the VPS problems were indeed caused by a Virtuozzo bug which, fortunately, affected just the server I was on. He assured me that his teams are working around the clock to fix the problem.
He offered me several very reasonable options, but since I already ordered a ServerMatrix server I had to cancel. Thankfully, Reed promised a full refund. Great. As I mentioned before, ServInt is one of the best out there so my trouble shouldn't reflect too much on their reputation. I also still think their VPS program is a great deal once the bugs are fixed.
Update #3:
My ServerMatrix server is up and ready to go. Heehee.
According to Reed, CEO of ServInt, VPS problems are fixed:
The problems you were experiencing on smv5 have been stabilized. We had the Chief Software Architect from Virtuozzo on the server all day yesterday. They are now working on a patch which will be replicated to all Virtuozzo customers, courtesy of the joint work between ServInt and SW-Soft.
Cool. When I get unhappy with ServerMatrix, I'll consider ServInt again.
