more on CAM's

Wrote this about sometimbe back here and this has become a idea very close to my heart now....so some more thoughs

First, the debate on privacy and the obvious implication of you being recognised anywhere through continous autentication mechanisms or CAM as i will now refer to it for sake of being ....

So I truly believe the definitions of privacy are and will keep on changing, the world that we are moving towards, being recognised and being tracked by machines ( read non humans) should be fine. How that data is used is what we should be more concerned with. Who sees that data, and what it is used for should be in our control. Ofcouse, the question is control, even if there are mechanisms to control it, mechamisms which are fool proof and secure, do we, as humans with limited brainpower and scope have the ability of controlling all our data and who sees it, how it is used. Even if there were very simple but complex ways of categorising out data which in an ideal world would allow minute levels of control, would allow intersection and all the other set theory fundas, do we have the bandwidth to choose n allocate our data to all these criterions.

And that is why i truly believe nothing should be shared without our explicit approval, and that this should be governed by laws. And to help us there should be suggestion algorithms, which learn but always check too!

Another question is security, it would be really helpful to have one store of evrything, but then the person or people controlling that store will have unlimited power. And so i think that that store should itslef have the control of controlling itself. It should be the king of itself. Not a very refined thought but this is thought in process so...

Coming back to CAM, the original idea was that everyone and maybe someday everything should be recognisable. It should be possible, in some way to identify every human, not by name, or email ids or phone numbers (like in todays social world) but by something ehich is unique to you and is not replicable, and thus is reliable. And as of today, that is only u, or rather how ur built, ur fingerprints, ur vital stats, ur face and ultimatley ur DNA.

But to convert this into a practical implementation, you have to think of options. Facial recognition is not there yet, and is very device dependant. You need a camera to recognise you which is not very practical. For fingerprints, you really need to touch something to scan ur fingerprints nad be identified. And DNA, along with the other reasons is very invasive.

But what i suggest is a band (and someday an implant) whci hmonitors ur vital stats at the basic level. So it checks a combination of vital stats, processes them, identified you (every minute or second, every moment) and finally broadcast it.

Big big problems started showing up asi thought of this thought, you will broadcast your identity, but how do you control who identifies you? On a social network, you can configur manually that...but how in this. Well thats where the advanced level comes in. you not only broadcast ur identity but also signatures...so a the minimum u broadcast a 'deny recognition to all' signature and become completly anonymous. And then you you configure a signature of 'broad cast to friends n family' and a signature to broadcast to 'shops in a mall'. And you have complete control and ease of changing you broadcast levels. Think of it as broadcasting ur location through ur smartphone...!

At the receptors side, the device which captures ur broadcast and recognises you, well it will have to connect to that store i spoke about before. A store which in an ideal case will have rows n fianlly pages for each of the 6.5 billion people alive today...for the entire human population. But then the question is, should any device be able to access every humans information, no, ofcouse not.

And as i think about it, here comes the sister application, the ultimate social network, where you and only will be able to controll which device can control you.

As you read you see this is redundant, you are controlling what you broadcast and who can read that broadcast, well for sonething which is so crucial, there should be that level of control, dont you think?

And then there will be layers, like a layer which allows police maybe to override your settings, for hospitals even which is a far more acceptable use case. And these layer will be governed by laws, tough unbreakble rules if there is something like that.

The entire idea, i know, is fraught with risk, and just the scale n complexity of it makes difficult to be foolprrof, but i truly believe, we will, mostly in my life time live in that world, because its just improbable to imagine a new world without you being identified reliably...and also because it solves so many problems. Like anything else it will casue its own problems and will be misused, but I would still have Alfred Noble invent dynamite again! Its important to progress...

MS got Facebook and Apple got Twitter...and everyone was saying...oh whats google gonna do. but google had a Plus up its sleeve. 

After many many unsuccessful attempts at Social Networking (which is surprising as they always had the basic requirement for a social network, User accounts), they finally have something which might work. The list goes on, Orkut, Buzz, the revolutionary but way ahead of time Wave...but Google Plus might not just succeed as a Social networking platform, it has the potential to be the one platform which integrates all of google, the potential to be the SharePoint of the google world. 

Google was always best positioned to win the internet, they had all the bits and pieces, mature applications from mail to spreadsheets to chat to some sort of social networking and most importantly Search. But they were missing a platform which integrates it all, Google Sites was supposed to be that, but failed. If you think about it, google is the best and really the only positioned to bring an OS with all its apps on the cloud. Only required is a integrating platform. 

the revenue model..eh, lets talk about it later. :D

anyways so just looking at Google+ as a product, Circles, or what google calls groups are a step forward. In FB or most other SNP (Social networking platforms), setting security comes after adding friends, mostly at the time of sharing. So you can just go ahead and add a friend, but not add them to a group, and then while sharing something, set up the permissions. Google makes it mandatory to add a friend (contact really) to a group, which is good. So setting up access is easier.

But its still not there. Security in groups should really work like sets, I should be able to do Union (allowed in all SNP), Intersections (not allowed) and Difference (partially allowed). The most useful is Difference really, I should be able to say my post is visible to group 'Public' - group 'Team'. Right now you can say group 'Public' - person (X, Y, Z). But adding one friend at a time is time consuming. 

Another requirement will be Inheritance in groups, and inheritance which is descending. So A group Public contains a group 'Friend' contains a group 'Best Friends'. Any permission given to Public is automatically given to Friends and Best Friends. Also elevated permissions given to 'Best Friends' is maintained for all members of 'Best Friends' even if group 'Public' or group 'Friends' is added. Well lotsa SharePoint terminology here, but it is my bread and butter. Also i have not seen permission inheritance anywhere, inheritance mostly works at the resource level, so not sure about this. 

In an ideal world, groups should really be very very easy to create, they should be a level of automation associated with it, which is governed by intelligent algorithms. So at the simplest level, if I add a friend A, a friend B and a Friend C and create a group 'roommates', when one of Friend A, B or C, as me and the other two, an automatic group 'roommates' should be created for them. Thats the basic. 

What should really happen is you should not only be suggest friends, but also groups they should be added to, or maybe just add them and then ask.

Groups should be ephemeral, that is it should be really easy to group people or to ungroup them. Of course retention requirements will require them to be persistent as well.  One way of doing this is to really have proximity rules around groups. So no delete on groups, but as the group becomes inactive it moves further away from you.

The above two will basically make groups explode, there will be unlimited number of groups created. That is not an issue. The issue is what we call unique permissions…each post, each picture, each object that you share having unique permissions. This is kinda allowed right now, but is very difficult. You have to add individuals. But you should really be able to add groups (+ and - ) and manage at that level, but this is also not as easy, unless what I mentioned above is implemented. So why and how to tackle this. Well why because of resource constraints. Imagine how much storage and processing would you require if every post had unique permissions. Querying it will take ages. So how, well I think we should just extend the apple model. Local caching for all passive content, anything which has been posted is stored both in the cloud and locally, but retrieved only from local. The Local and Cloud stay in sync, the truth is on the cloud. Local is read only.

So that was groups, if you watch Google+ closely, it is an app made for the smartphone and not really the desktop. Which is how social networking apps should be really. Also good to see that even though Wave failed as a product, as an experiment is has started contributing to other places like Google+

Google is going with a really bland and pale UI, i think the thinking is that social networking and email and all the other stuff is not just fun anymore, they are basic requirements which will integrate in ur day to day life like a phone has today and so UI should be simple enough so that you don't was time trying to spot things. 

Well true, but the lack of colors makes it very dull and dead. 

Good thing about Google+ is that it will be integrated everywhere, you should be able to share and post from anywhere google at least, and frankly, we do use google apps for almost everything on the net, think mail, reader, pictures, blogging!

Will google+ be the end of FB, well not really, i have 699 friends on FB, it will take ages for all of them to show up on google+, but yea FB will have to cleanup its act. Skype integration i think is a big win, will keep people on FB for longer, but far more is required. 

Other thing is that I personally trust the 'do no evil' company more then Zuckerberg to do the right thing, so that is an image shift that FB has to make. 

Anyways still long way from ideal, any of these, social networking along with a dashboard should be the starting point for all you do on the net, there is a lot of progress on social networking, dashboards are still missing though.

take care.

oh an special mention to full fledged SMS support for sharing and posting on Google+ just for India. your 10 year old Nokia dabba can now do social networking without a 3G or EDGE network...cheers to that! 

BangaloreBus

didn't know what would be a good place to put this one...its not really an idea, its more of a demand for improvement, so this blog is not. Could have put it as a note on FB, which it mostly will end up to be...

anyways, so this is about the bus system in Bangalore, and i'll try to be as constructive as possible (but might just end up being really critical because it pisses me off)

so first the good things...

1. the Red city Volvo's - first city to start it i guess, with a fleet of 50 Volvos, they are comfortable and cheap, fast and the routes are good as well.
2. The routes - they have feeder routes, circular routes, track routes and what all...the idea is that instead of having a point to point service have two different types of service. One which takes you from outskirts to the center of the city, and then circular routes through out the city. It would work perfectly in a well planned city (circular city, business district in the center kinds) but Bangalore is not, there is a business district in each area, and so its not possible just to have a spokes with concentric circles kind of a route map and cater to all...still going somewhere.
3. The Bus day's - This started about an year ago, where on every 4th (now i think its first Wednesday of the month), the number of buses increase dramatically. To start off with i think this was more of a pilot to test demand, congestion et al, but now that it has been in Pilot mode for an year, not sure where its going. Anyways what i really liked about the Bus Day was the campaigning, it was on the Radio, there were posters behind every bus in Bangalore (and thus very very hard to miss), not even that, the posters were quiet attractive. A lot of the big IT firms were contacted about it, so that they can tell their employees, my firms environmental committee sent a mailer to all. I liked the fact because government agencies don't really do a great job of advertising the good work they do. 

Now the bad and my suggestions on how to make it good:

1. 1. Remove the brown buses please - the Brown bus, well thats the cheapest bus in Bangalore, where prices are about 50% of the actual costs...how do they keep the prices low, well, one, by running it in loss, secondly, but not having a conductor and thirdly, not maintaining the buses till they break down (this is a guess, because if u have taken a travelled in the bus, once you get down your body still keeps on vibrating).
   Anyways so, the idea behind the brown buses is very noble and govt like, give the poor a cheap means of transport, but that cheap mode of transport give bigger problems. I don't mind the 'buses not maintained' part, what i do mind is the absence of the conductor, because in his / her absence, the driver collects the money. So every time the bus stops and people get on it, the driver starts driving, issuing tickets, collecting money and giving change at the same time...you can imagine his concentration on the road. They drive slow, blocking the entire road, and recklessly, every time he has a tiff with someone who doesn't have change, the bus moves violently, scaring the hell out of everyone else outside the bus. So my suggestion, remote the brown buses or at least put a conductor in them. You are anyways in loss, a little more won't hurt.
2. Change the attitude of the drivers - Now don't take me wrong, i appreciate the drivers and conductors, they are all friendly, they mostly don't have any prejudices, and they do a hell of a job driving in that traffic all day long, with people shouting at them all the time. but its this good attitude that i have a problem with, the buses will stop anywhere if they see passengers, and this is because they want to help people, this is the old Bangalore attitude. All good, but what about the traffic which comes to a stand still behind. Or simply gets squeezed and has to brake violently, when the bus swerves suddenly from the right most lane towards the footpath because they see someone waving. Yes they do that...The stops should on be scheduled, at bus stops. Not for anyone and everyone, and surely not at bus stops where there are none, domlur flyover, jeevanbheema nagar, middle of intermediate ring road...What will that do, people will to walk a bit more...well if you don't like that, you are gonna hate my next suggestion.
3. Reduce the number of bus stops...on Airport road there are at least 6 bus stops in that 2 km stretch...and every bus makes a stop at every stop...thats just idiotic. How do you expect the buses to gain any speed if all it does is stop at a bus stop, get passengers, move to the right lane and immediate move to the footpath for the next stop?? and why have so many stops, i don't think in Bangalore weather walking 500 mts is a big deal. I know you'd say old people can do it, there are no footpaths and stuff, but people do it everywhere else, and there are footpaths, just full of hawkers and garbage, but thats another topic. My point is that sometimes you need to force people to adopt somethings. Why can't people walk, its not that big a deal, its good for health and its good for the environment. 
4. A solution to most of above problems, something which as worked really well in parts fo the world, including aapnu amdavad, is dedicated bus lanes. On Long straight roads like Old Airport Road, Intermediate ring road, Mysore road et al, why not just have the left most lane dedicated for buses. The buses have to stick to that lane, and no other vehicle can come on that road. That ways they don't interfere with other buses. It also takes care of the buses competing within themselves, there no where to go, they have to follow each other. In addition, have fixed stop over times, bus will stop only for 1 minute. Well this is a classic problem of bus movement, even if buses start from the first stop at fixed intervals, within a few subsequent stops, they all are together. This is because when the first bus reached the second stop, all passengers try to get on to it, and so it has to make a longer stop, by which time second bus has already reached, but there are no passengers left. So first bus is bursting and late, second is empty and slowed down. Two ways out, one have fixed stop overs, or have a very good information system, which tells waiting passengers location of buses, time of arrival et al. First is a forceful method, second is more sophisticated and thats exactly why i think we are not ready for it. First is simple to achieve, just have automatic doors (already there on all buses) and well trained drivers. Dedicated bus lanes might seems like a waste of space, but with the number of buses in Bangalore, am sure even a dedicated bus lane will have buses bumper to bumper. It needs a lot of planning, but if Ahmedabad is taken as an example, after a lot of opposition, it has sorted out the traffic on roads quiet a bit. And that is in a city with no traffic rules, Bangalore is far better in those terms. Try it i say. 

so thats it, have been thinking of doing this for some time, because it pisses me off when buses cut me off, and drive rashly, but tried to be as objective as possible.