But, honestly, is anyone really surprised?

Nick Saber isn’t happy now. Monday afternoon, after lunch, Nick came back from lunch to find out that he couldn’t get into his Gmail account. Further, he couldn’t get into anything that Google made (beside search) where his account credentials once worked. When attempting to log in, Nick got a single line message:

Sorry, your account has been disabled. [?]

That’s it.

Nick sent a message or three to Google for support. He got back this:

Thank you for your report. We’ve completed our investigation. Because our
investigation was inconclusive, we are unable to return your account at
this time. At Google we take the privacy and security of our users very
seriously. For this reason, we’re unable to reveal any further information
about this account.

And that’s it.

Suddenly, Nick can’t access his Gmail account, can’t open Google Talk (our office IM app), can’t open Picasa where his family pictures are, can’t use his Google Docs, and oh by the way, he paid for additional storage. So, this is a paying customer with no access to the Google empire.

Yes, the tools are shiny. The tools are wonderful and productive and helpful and largely state-of-the-art. But you should have a backup plan – a plan B – if you’re going to use online coolstuff.

We are still crawling towards a set of solutions, but we *are* making progress. We need self-hostable apps. We need continuous export in open formats of our data. We need offsite and redundant copies made of the things we create and generate.

We need OpenLifeBits. And we’re nowhere remotely close.

We need DiSo.

We need Tahoe.

Please hurry.

Tahoe Hackfest

A couple weeks ago I attended the Allmydata.org Hackfest (5th in a series, as I understand it). Zooko and Brian Warner hosted a few people at the allmydata.org offices and fed them pizza and code. Adam Langley spoke about his recent posting of Obfuscated TCP. Oskar Sandberg talked about his current work proving some of Freenet’s original routing code was mathematically efficient. David Molnar shared his current PhD work at Berkeley (metafuzz and catchconv), which are used to find bugs in programs.

I don’t pretend to understand all of what happened in front of me at the hackfest, but I know that I’m definitely putting the next Hackfest on my calendar and going if possible. The pizza was good and I really like having conversations with people who know their math.

DiSo / Drupal

Within a week or so of the Hackfest, I found myself headed back up into the city for dinner at the DiSo / Drupal meetup. The conversations were not as directed as I’d hoped, but I met some interesting people. Chris Messina, Will Norris and Kieran Lal held court at one end of the table, and I talked with Andrius Kulikauskas, Neil Drumm and Dan Kurtz down on the other end. I think DiSo is poised to become as big as microformats are today – and eventually become the standard for how we’ll interact as individuals (I’d say “online” here, but I think it’s more than that). I cannot wait to have my people in my pocket – XMPP and OAuth enabled – making recommendations and filtering out the noise. Please get here soon.

WikiDashboard

Unrelated to the city of San Francisco, I’ve been at PARC for two months now, and I’ve finished my first milestone. The WikiDashboard code I’ve been working on shipped today. This is a big deal for me since just a few short months ago I saw it on the internet for the first time and thought it was a really cool project. Now, I’ve contributed my own code – and even got paid! A neat trick.