What interesting times. 

If you were writing a political novel, it couldn't get any better than this. Or if you were show-running a serial like Breaking Bad, or The Good Wife.

I just watched MSNBC, incredible interviews, all the usual talking heads are showing that underneath the bullshit they're actually brilliant people who are forced to say stupid things because politics is usually so boring. But amp up the plot, and all of a sudden they can think.

But I don't think they're thinking of everything. Or maybe they do, but have to self-censor because the ideas are so out there, or provocative?

For example, a strange question just popped into my head.

What if Scalia committed suicide?

Now of course I know nothing either way about this, but what if he did?

Second question.

We all seem to assume that Congress next year will be Republican, but what if the Senate became Democratic?

I don't even know the math. 1/3 of the Senate is at stake, because that's how it works. Who is vulnerable? Where should we be focusing? Not only the Presidential election matters, of course, but this year more than most years, it's pivotal.

BTW, I asked that question of Nate Silver on Twitter. I'd love to know what he thinks. If you would too, why not RT and/or Fave that tweet? Thanks!

PS: RealClearPolitics has an analysis of Democrat Senate chances as of January.

I did something weird last night, I wrote a blog post in a sequence of Facebook comments. 

Like a tweetstorm only in Facebook. It's kind of nice actually, because you can respond in place to each paragraph. 

I wrote it without editing, maybe you can catch me in a mistake! :-)

Paul looks soulfully into the camera. You think, what a ham. Then he opens his mouth and out comes Hey Jude. A religious moment, for this old hippie at least. 

This is the best post I've read on last night's most interesting debate ever.

If the question on the table is whose financial regulatory legislation program should be submitted to be dead on arrival in Congress, then the tie goes to Clinton.

I realized this too, while the debate was happening, and laughed out loud. Look what she's forcing him to do. The truth is that yes, Obama took the money and that's why Dodd-Frank is so impotent. But most Democrats think Obama is great. So he can't attack him. Glad Yglesias said this, I didn't have the guts to write this post. And none of the talking heads on the networks will either.

It seems that the experience as chief diplomat for the US taught HRC how to screw someone with their pants on.

Also, the standard Sanders schpiel is taken straight from the Democratic platform for the last four elections. I know, I sat through countless speeches at the 2004 and 2008 DNCs where they harped about the 1% and income equality. Sanders isn't any better or worse at reciting the pitch. Basically it's the standard campaign for all Democrats for the last decade and a half.

Three sites I read somewhat regularly, the Boston Globe, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune (sports mostly) all have limits on the number of articles I can read every month.

And occasionally I read sites that I aggregate on mlbriver.com and nbariver.com. That's about 50 more local sites. 

They all want $5 a month or more.

I pay for the NYT because it's my hometown paper, but I'm not going to pay for a local paper of another city.

So why don't they band together and do an E-Z PASS type thing. For $5 a month instead of 5 articles on each  site, I get 100. The out-of-towner rate.

Also I think linkbloggers should get access for free. :-)

And yes, I can prove I'm a linkblogger. 

When real change comes it won't look like what they promise on the campaign trail, which usually is like the cartoon of the mathematician in front of a blackboard with all kinds of equations on it, and in the middle it says Then A Miracle Occurs. Once in office everything should transform itself magically and we'll all work together to solve all the problems and taxes won't go up, and all the benefits will remain.

That won't be real change, because while it's sexy during a campaign, when reality kicks in after Inauguration Day, unless there are all-new people there, it's not going to change, and there aren't going to be all-new people there. 

However, I believe there is potential for real change, but only if people commit to being involved in governing after the election. That's what Sanders says, more or less, but not clearly enough. Nothing about what he proposes to do, as vague as it is, has a prayer if people aren't willing to go to rallies and march and strike to make it happen. I assume he glosses this over because we're in the magic and unicorns phase of the campaign. If he were too clear about it, people might get bored or scared, or stop believing. A lot of minds have to change before you can have the kind of change he's talking about. 

I've seen this movie, as I think you can tell. I even signed on to working after the election, but each time when the moment came for us to participate in government, it just reverted to the way it worked before. And no, I don't believe this time is different. Not until I see people reorienting their lives to become politically active beyond the election, and equally important, the candidates explain exactly how that's going to work, and it has to sound like it has a chance. 

That's not to say that I've given up, we have huge problems to deal with, beyond income inequality. I wish we were talking about the kind of change that would give our climate a chance. If that's what Sanders was selling, I'd be much more enthusiastic. Somehow climate change isn't any candidate's talking point. That shows something is seriously wrong with our political system, and what's wrong includes Sanders and his supporters. 

A few takeaways from tonight's election in New Hampshire. American politics has changed. This is a turning point, a showdown.  Media and money have to rethink their roles. Neither will change easily. 

For news people -- is it fair/wise to hold one candidate to a standard that doesn't apply to all? Trump blew away the role of journalism as a gatekeeper, by going direct with Twitter, and holding big photogenic rallies. I predicted that money would not be the determining factor in politics, people laughed, said it'll never happen. Now we're there. Neither of the leading candidates have taken contributions from the established sources of political money.

So money and media are shaken-up. Do you expect them to go down without a fight? And if you were them how would you fight back? 

I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the Koch Brothers offices tonight. What do they have planned for Trump. And which of the remaining candidates will get the call? Or maybe they're calling Trump, quietly, to see if they can do a deal.

And which of the Democrats "establishment" will get off the fence, and will their endorsements help or hurt HRC? You can be sure that Steinem and Albright won't be campaigning for her in the future. 

This, media and money in crisis, tonight, is the horse race that matters. 

I find myself both captivated by and grossed out by the way the news media cover Presidential elections. I watched MSNBC three nights in the last week. I expect to be flipping between the channels tonight, for the posturing both before and after the results of the New Hampshire primary come in.

There's no question they report accurately on history of elections, I remember many of them, vaguely, as if I were being manipulated into accepting a certain outcome. McCain, Obama, Carter, Gore, Bush I and II, Clinton I and II, etc. Some of them did end up winning the title, others didn't. Were the decisions made on such superficial and highly manipulatable ways as they are now? Yes, I think so. 

So while all the horse race stuff is fiction, in some ways it's fact. It is how we make decisions, and it is highly manipulatable by the press.

The Dean Scream fiasco was the biggest most clear warning of how we are being controlled. 

My friend Jay Rosen has remained critical of the horse race coverage, but I wonder, if he were Lord Master of the Universe and everyone had to obey his command, what would he have Chuck Todd and Megyn Kelly do differently from what they do now? Or could they do anything, would there be a whole different flow of information? 

I'm just wondering, given the scale of the country and the world, is there any other way to make a collective decision other than looking at the most superficial differences policy-wise, and only voting on how we feel about the candidates as people?

Update

Jay, via email: "I've been trying to write something that would answer your question, until then, the short answer is the only way out of horse race coverage is to have a goal for your coverage, something you are trying to accomplish with it. But it's hard to have a goal and maintain the view from nowhere, so the pattern is to default to 'who's gonna win.'"

Good morning!

Today's a good day to ship something new!

As you may know, I've been involved in RSS as a standard way to distribute news since the beginning. I wrote the RSS 0.91 and RSS 2.0 specs, and shipped the first software that was compatible with both formats. My early products, My.UserLand and Radio UserLand got the market started, along with a deal we did with the NY Times in 2002 to get their news flowing on the RSS net.

The RSS market is slowly rebuilding after the dominance of Google Reader was followed by its closing a couple of years ago. It shows how resilient open formats and protocols are. If Google Reader had been built on proprietary formats, that would have been the end. But RSS isn't something anyone can own, an idea that confuses many big companies. 

RSS is alive and kicking and ready to act as the open distribution format for news for many years to come.

RSS and JavaScript

I switched over to development in JavaScript a few years ago, and one of the first things I did when I got to Node.js was build an RSS aggregator, River4. I built it to run on Heroku, which I thought was a revolutionary platform, because of its pricing and architecture. It was designed for lots of little apps that are easily deployed. I love that idea, it's one of the foundations that my own environment, Frontier, was based on. River4 was a good fit for Heroku, but that made it awkward to deploy elsewhere. Over time we took care of that, but that made it more complicated to configure. And Heroku changed their economics, and that made it less attractive. I started running my rivers on straight Linux.

I also learned about various ways to configure Node apps as I understood more about Node, and that is also reflected in the design of River4, not in a good way. There are some things that can only be configured in environment variables, and others that can only be configured through a config.json file. It became a bit of a hairball.

A new foundation

So I decided it was time to do a restart of my JavaScript RSS aggregator, and it's now ready for Node users -- it's called River5. 

• It's open source, MIT License. 
• There's a mail list.
• Example sites.
• A Hello World app.
• The Road to River5, for the historically-minded.

This ia a foundation for developers to build on, but it's also possible for an adventurous user to set up their own rivers. Ken Smith, an English professor, is running River5 on his personal computer. It works. I wrote a Poets Guide for people who are new to Node.

What's new?

So what's new in this river?

• It's faster since it builds the rivers incrementally as it scans the feeds. There's no intermediate database. 
• Configuration is simple, consistent and documented. You just edit a config.json file in the same folder as the application.
• In addition to the standard list format, I've also defined a JSON format for lists and a plain text format, to make it easier for people to get going. 
• Most important to me, it's easier for me to work on, so there's a better chance of new features in the future. 

I love RSS and the developers who support it. I also love JavaScript and Node, and think the two were made for each other. 

Let a thousand rivers bloom! ;-)

Watching Chris Hayes interview a Sanders surrogate. I'd like to know if Sanders will support the Democratic nominee, if it's not him.

Node.js needs a really good RSS toolkit. 😻

Am I the last to notice that the QB of the Carolina Panthers, an African-American, is a black Panther? Beyonce's dance was the hint.

I'm obviously not black, but part of the pleasure I got in voting for Barack Obama is that I believed I was voting for the first black president. And when I vote for Hillary Clinton, as I expect to, in the fall, I will vote for her because she's the right choice for me, but I will get extra pleasure knowing that I'm helping my country overcome another barrier to full acceptance for everyone.

I've watched this campaign with new eyes, and I totally see how much harsh judgement there is for her, and how we have to accept that people don't respect her as much as they do the men she's running against. I find that very very offensive. Not just on her behalf but on behalf of our country, half of which are women, and none of which have ever been President. Think about that for a minute. Maybe the difference in respect has something to do with that.

She is a serious candidate, no matter what you think of her politics. She deserves not just equal consideration, but a little extra to compensate, because it's clear not everyone is on board with the idea that we can have a woman as leader.

I also think we can forgive Gloria Steinem and Madeline Albright, two pioneers in this cause, for making the case awkwardly. What they were trying to say, imho is that one of the reasons to vote for HRC is that she is a woman and the other candidates are not. This is an extra value available to our country. We should grab it because the opportunity might not come up again any time soon. Maybe what's offensive about the idea is that Albright said women should vote for HRC because she's a woman and a better idea is that we all should vote for a woman because it would be good for us. 

Not only can we have a competent leader, but we can also break another barrier. It's a hard point to make, we don't have vocabulary for this, but we need to have a way to say it anyway. 

I read a lot of stuff about JavaScript, and therefore hear over and over that there are very few if any valid uses of the eval function.

There actually is one very good use of eval, and no others.

If you want to allow users to run code, then you must use eval, or something equivalent to it, to run the code.

I can hear you say -- maybe you shouldn't let users run their own code.

To which I say, some software exists solely to run user's code. 

For example, the very useful forever application.

And my own nodeRunner.

So, eval is useful. People who write docs should think about how they phrase their caveats. We can head off a lot of pointless arguments. 

Thanks!

One team gets the ball. They line up on the field. The team with the ball tries to get the ball into the "end zone" that they're facing. The other team tries to stop them. They get four plays to do it. If they get more than 10 yards they get another four plays. If they fail, the other team gets the ball and they do the same thing, going the other way. There are a bunch of other little plots in the story, but that's basically what's going on.

It's weird that Rubio is getting called out for doing what they all do. 

Each of the candidates has memorized a few talking points and they never go off-script. None of them do. Even Christie focus-group-tested the way he would hack at Rubio, to do it in the optimal way.

The gauntlet that candidates have to run is inhuman. No one, no matter how smart or eloquent, can avoid a career-destroying gaffe at the hands of the political press. If you ever had a doubt about this, the Dean Scream should have settled it. Don't get caught being human. 

Of course Rubio totally deserves this. He is a robot. More than most. 

PS: I liked the way Trump broke the fourth wall and told us the audience was made up of Republican donors. I haven't heard any of the reporters say whether or not that's true. The way Trump said it, it sounded true. (According to Factcheck.org, it's not true. Not totally surprising.)

One thing I fail to understand is a podcast feed that does not have enclosures. What am I supposed to do with that? 

What I find is that if I hunt enough I usually will find the feed that has the enclosures, but there's no predictable way to find it, and sometimes I don't, which results in un-listened-to and un-linked-to podcasts.

If you want your podcast to be heard, make it easy to find! 

Update: The feed I was looking for was the FiveThirtyEight election podcast feed. I eventually found it in an out of the way place, the ESPN podcasts index page. Apparently they're sharing a CMS. There ought to be something on the FiveThirtyEight site, that's Google-able, that gets you to the ESPN site. For now, this post may leave enough of a marker for other people to find it. 

Overnight someone at Twitter leaked the upcoming changes to the Twitter timeline. This almost certainly was a leak-from-the-top, given that it happened on a Friday night, long after the market closed. 

Update: Jack says it ain't so!

Yes, it would be suicide for Twitter to change the timeline for existing users. What they probably will do is offer a setting. Do you want the classic timeline or the new SMART timeline?

For existing users it will default off. We get the same timeline as before, the While You Were Out feature notwithstanding (an example of when they changed the timeline quietly without any fanfare without an opt-in or out). 

For new users, and existing users who haven't logged in recently, or don't follow many people, it will default on. 

I don't think it's terrible or the end of the world. Life in a silo where you and I are the product. McDonald's doesn't ask the chickens whether they like the options for Chicken McNuggets. A similar thing. The main difference is the chicken probably couldn't say. Humans have opinions, feel disempowered, not heard, not loved, bored, and we like to be consulted. A good shitstorm provides temporary relief for all these ills. So for a while, venting, then life goes back to the normal humdrum. 

But!

Would it hurt Twitter to add some features for users? Ones that just make us feel cared-for and whose loyalty is valued? Long-standing lackings in the product, addressed, finally? (I'm trying to talk like Sarah Palin, howamidoing?)

1. I for one would love to have the ability to delete a message in my Notifications panel. Someone leaves a turd. I'd just like to delete it, so I don't have to see it repeatedly. It's really time for this little feature. It can't be that hard to add.
2. How about unfollow-with-timeout? I'd like to unfollow someone for a few days, or a week or two, maybe. They're live-tweeting a conference I don't care about. Why should they feel compelled not to do it, and why should I have to endure the chatter. If I could unfollow them knowing they would return to my timeline eventually, I could keep them as a source, and not have to put up with the barrage of (to me) nonsense. 
3. And btw, the Mute command is great but it often doesn't work. And it would be nice if it were retroactive. 

I guess the point is this. Twitter seems to only do new features that try to dig them out of their business hole. I don't mind if they do that. I am a shareholder, after all. But since they have a monopoly on Twitter services, it would be nice if they also added features for the users. They shouldn't assume we will always be without a choice. It's a good thing to do for your product and company, to keep the users/product happy. 

In last night's debate, when HRC said there's more than one street, referring to Wall St, she was challenged. She had rattled off a list other industries that had misbehaved. But she left one out, and when we look back at this election in the future, the omission, imho, will be glaring. 

Neither of them mentioned the excesses of tech. They've enjoyed and taken advantage of an undeserved halo, and they use that to do things other industries, including the financial industry, only dream of.

The unchallenged power of tech. The press is oblivious. Politicians are mystified. The priesthood is firmly in control. That's going to get us in trouble in the future, probably in a much bigger way than the banks got us in trouble in 2008. 

We should worry about our next President being in the pocket of tech just as much if not more than we worry about them being in the pocket of banks. 

Too big to fail? Facebook has 1.5 billion active users. Think about the kind of trouble they can get us into with that power. 

You know what they say about fighting the last war? ;-)

You are the only real person. 

The rest of us are alien robots sent here to test you. 

No one else can see this message.

Read this bit on Medium by Stewart Alsop about his experience with Tesla.

So hard to believe that Tesla has decided that this passionate, heavily invested, even groveling user of their product can no longer buy one.

Back in the day, Stewart wrote a tech industry newsletter. I'm probably one of about a thousand people left who remember it. He would write open letters to tech CEOs. It was one of my inspirations for blogging, when I started in 1994. He's a good writer, and his experiences with products are worth listening to, even if sometimes they were totally off the wall. ;-)

There are good tech companies around who will use that kind of feedback, soak it up, ask for more and possibly use it to guide their product decisions. At its peak, Microsoft was like this. Their CEO, the famous Bill Gates, set the tone for the company. He was very curious sometimes in kind of an angry way, but you definitely knew he was listening. Same with Jeff Bezos at Amazon. There are counter-examples. I could see Steve Jobs banning someone as a user if he didn't like their attitude. On the other hand, I had a big complaint about Apple while he was running the company in 2007, and they responded really well even though I was blogging publicly about it. 

I think Musk and Tesla owe Alsop: 1. An apology. 2. The car he paid for (obviously). 3. Some kind of gift to show they understand that their job is to please people like Stewart, not ban them. Ridiculous that this is the kind of culture people tolerate in tech these days. Fix this, OK?

PS: I don't own a car at all so I'm not worried about being banned by Tesla, but I hear they're pretty cool, and overall I like the way Musk leads. 

Here's the HTTP request handler in my nodeStorage app.

Look at how deeply nested it gets.

Now you can see how it looks in the outliner here.

Totally manageable. That's how I edit the code.

One more piece about the HTTPS problem. 

Think of this as the TL/DR version. It started as a series of tweets.

The problem of requiring HTTPs in less than 140 chars: 1.Few benefits for blog-like sites, and 2. The costs are prohibitive.

There's actually a #3 (sorry) -- 3. For sites where the owner is gone the costs are more than prohibitive. There's no one to do the work.

I think to understand the boil-the-ocean nature of this goal, you have to have created a few websites over a reasonable period of time.

The web is fragile. The further back in time you go, the more fragile it is.

We could go deeper. You'll find that depth if you just scroll down from this point on Scripting News .

Here's a ten-minute podcast summarizing where we're at with Google and Mozilla and HTTPS. 

I don't plan to write any more about this. I've already much more than I had to. Really it's time for one of our fine tech publications to pick up this story. 

How about Ars Technica or Quartz or The Intercept, or any pub that cares about the continued existence of the open web. 

How about Planet Money? This would be right up their alley. Is it worth burning the history of the web for what we're getting in return, which btw, isn't clear. 

Maybe Vox could do one of their great explainers?

Google is aiming to plow under all that we've built that isn't being maintained. This might be okay if it was their private platform, but this is the web. It doesn't belong to them. 

Come on journalists, this is your job. 

I have to write software, keep my servers running and try to have a life. 

I'm sure others miss Jon Stewart in this election, as I do. He'd have been a good choice to run against Trump. TV star vs TV star.

Other comedians who might be added to the Democratic debates: Whoopi, Louis CK, Sarah Silverman, Chris Rock, Don Rickles.

Steven Max Patterson says that despite what others say Twitter's model is sustainable. I'd like to add this.

If you remember dreaming about what the Internet would be able to do 10 years ago, did you imagine a notification system that worked between people spread out everywhere across the world, instantaneously? Reliable. With an API. That's what I was looking for. And guess what, it's 2016 and Twitter has it working. And 300 million people use it,  it scales.

But they've limited the potential applications of this resource, only to allow it to run through software that they design so they can create a not so profitable ad business on it. 

But it seemed to me then and now that it could be much more than that.

I look at Twitter as a 1. User. 2. Developer. 3. Shareholder. 

1. As a user I miss that Living In The Future feeling I used to get with Twitter.
2. As a developer, I think they're within easy grasp of it, by just sharing the ability to create for this platform with developers who don't work for Twitter.
3. As a shareholder, I understand there's risk in this. It means Facebook can run software against Twitter's cloud. And so can developers who grow huge, remembering Instagram as an example. But, Twitter can also become a banker and distributor for these projects. That's what mature platform vendors always do. They don't try to force all the creativity through their own developer organization. 

It's like that scene in The Godfather where the families sit down with Don Corleone and insist that he share his senators and judges, for a fee of course. This is where we have that talk with Twitter. It's time to share the platform and we'll help you grow it. And we should become friends so you don't feel good about crushing us and we trust you so we'll continue to invest in the platform. This can be done, if you're human about it. 

For specifics see a post I wrote in August last year, Twitter NT. 

Okay I've said why Trump is doing so well, now why Hillary Clinton is our best choice. Everyone talks about how great Sanders is and how HRC is okay, but actually she's just the right person to follow Obama imho. 

The world is scared of us, but not in a good way. They're not scared because they're all bad guys and we're the good guys, they're scared because we're acting crazy, have been for quite a while, and it's getting worse. 

Sure the President should inspire us, but more important imho the President should be a good representative for us internationally. As crazy as Congress is, if we elect HRC, the rest of the world can relax a little, because the lunacy quotient has steadied a bit. We still have all the crazyness in Congress, but after the election the Republicans are going through, they might just calm down a little if we avoid Trump or Cruz as President. Either of them would change the Republican Party so much as to make it unrecognizable. And probably not in a good way if you're hoping for a return to sanity, as I am.

So it's not like I'd love to have Bernie but I'm settling for Hillary. I view this as a baseball manager trying to decide who should bat next. Should we send in someone who might walk or get a hit, but probably isn't going to strike out, but won't hit a home run either? Or should I put in someone who will swing for the fences knowing there's a very high probability they'll strike out. 

In 2008 we needed the latter. We needed a miracle, and we got one. But 2016 is not 2008. 

At this moment, we need a solid hitter, someone who the rest of the world is comfortable with, and who a deeply injured Republican Party can work with. The US has been a bronco the last decade or two, starting wars, leading to huge instability around the world and taken unnecessary risks with the world economy. Real recklessness. 

Time to sober up, everyone. Or else.

No I don't think it would be lunacy to elect Sanders, but I do think it would be lunacy to elect Trump. I believe HRC is as honest as any politician, including Sanders who imho is selling some real snake oil. And her honesty isn't the issue exactly. The issue is what kind of world do we want and what do we want our role in it to be.

Ever noticed how our choice of President tries to fix the bug in the previous President?

We elected Carter who promised he'd never lie, after we had just been hugely betrayed by Nixon. Carter is an honest man, exceptionally so, in hindsight. But not a great President.

We elected Reagan to fix the bug with Carter. Reagan promised to make us feel good about ourselves after Carter talked about our "national malaise." No President since has tried that one. Not a good idea. 

Then Bush was milquetoast to Reagan's charisma. We had had enough of charm. Time for a guy whose mind while basically sound (imho) was at war with the English language. 

Clinton was charisma because we were bored with Bush and because we didn't really want Perot.

And on and on.

Obama? We desperately needed hope after Bush II destroyed the economy. I laugh when the Repubs talk about the "disaster that is Obama." I guess they expect us to have short memories. And we do, collectively, have very short memories.

Now here's why certain people like Trump. 

To them Obama is a disaster simply because of the color of his skin. They like to say they're not racists, but deep inside there's a feeling something is wrong here. We need to get America "back on track." Which means a Strong White Male in charge. And Trump plays the role of a strong confident White Male to a T. 

That's my theory for why Trump is doing well.

Nik Cubrilovic sent me a link to the page on Mozilla's project management system where they decided to put a big red X through the icon for sites that are using HTTP, the standard protocol of the web, instead of their preferred HTTPS. 

Interestingly, it's both an argument for and against government control of utilities like web browsers.

1. It's an argument against control because Mozilla is acting like a government. They have decided that if you want to continue to publish to users, you must comply with the new regulation established by Mozilla. If not, we'll mark you as unsafe, and make sure everyone knows you're not to be trusted. And this is just the current iteration. When that fails to alter user behavior, or cause sites to convert, what next? Will they stop displaying them altogether? As Google does when they encounter a site that it thinks has malware embedded? 
2. At the same time, Mozilla is most definitely not a government. They are a private company. And they have not disclosed the impact of shutting down access to a huge part of the web. I likened it to book burning but on an unprecedented scale. As a user of the web, both as a publisher and a reader, I want protection from this kind of power grab. The web does not belong to Mozilla. What if it works? Most of my own sites will disappear, and lots of sites that I care about.

I wonder if they've even tried to quantify the outages they'll cause. So many sites are simply residing on a hard disk somewhere, served by an ancient version of some unknown and not maintained server software, chugging along as someone keeps paying the electric bill, and replaces a broken hardware component when needed. The people who created the site might not have understood HTTPS or how to deploy it, and many are long gone. Some of course are dead. We are certainly not all sitting around doing nothing waiting for a handful of programmers on a mail list to make us perform a ridiculous act of security theater for our blog posts written in 2002. 

Most of these sites do not need HTTPS. It isn't an issue for my ancient blog posts. Or yours.

In the thread there are some very reasonable alternatives offered, that help Mozilla achieve their goal, without burning all those sites. For example, if the browser sees a form that contains a password or a credit card number being transmitted over a non-encrypted connection it could warn you with a big dialog box, saying hey dummy, your ISP or their ISP can read that stuff. Are you sure you want to send it? That would actually communicate clearly to the user what the issue is without the confusion at the point where security matters. 

It was also pointed out that some users are going to think the browser is broken. Smart users! They are right. The browser is broken. It has totally the wrong idea of its role. 

Imagine Honda or Ford tried to do something like this. It noticed you were stopping at a McDonald's. Your Civic stops and a big red X shows up in your dashboard. When you ask why it says "McDonald's is not good for you Davey. Go somewhere healthy like Panera or Whole Foods." You might say who the fuck is Honda to tell me where to get my comfort food? And you would be right. Only in tech would they be so arrogant as to think they know better, when (get this) -- they don't.

If we had government oversight, they might require the equivalent of an Environmental Impact Statement. How many sites will disappear as a result of what you're doing? Maybe require them to disclose that so their users have a chance to switch to a browser that is less opinionated.

The web isn't their property. They are just providing a tool. They have too much power if this goes through. I suspect once they start putting red X's on sites that people care about, and their support people start handling calls saying the browser is broken, they might put this back on the list, as an urgent bug, and find a nicer way to help users stay safe, one that doesn't require sacrificing large pieces of the web. 

Joi Ito tells the story of how the MIT Media Lab's slogan, Demo Or Die, derived from the traditional academic motto, Publish or Perish, evolved first to Deploy or Die, and then just to Deploy. 

1. Imho, there's too much emphasis in tech on inanimate things dying, but this is worse, they're talking about people dying! And it's not true, never was, that you either demo'd or died. And it takes all the fun out of it if the stakes are seen as that high, without throwing a little humor into it. Demo or die is not, in any way that I can see, funny.
2. At my first company, Living Videotext, started in the 80s, when there were all kinds of new styles of management, we invented Management By Shipping. That was the value of the company. Getting product into the hands of users so they could kick ass with it. 
3. I also practiced Management By Walking Around. As the CEO, being accessible to everyone in the company was also a major value. I wanted to understand how my company worked, and believed that the people doing the work were in the best position to show me. 
4. It makes sense that Joi would bring Deploy! to academia. He came from the blogosphere, he's one of our champions, where the focus was always on the people who use the stuff. Ideas are great, but until they are deployed they aren't helping anyone. 
5. Academia is very much about publishing and demos, and not so much about deploying. 
6. In the blogosphere the focus was so much on the users (a good thing) that the software that made it possible sort of fades into the background (as all software should).
7. A popular slogan at my second company, UserLand, and on my own blog was Let's Have Fun! Although it may not seem so at first it has a dark side. There was a line in a movie with John Travolta and Christian Slater about high powered nuclear missiles. Slater has this great line at the beginning of the movie where he's showing Travolta a new weapon and says "it's a real crowd pleaser." That means of course it kills a lot of people. Let's Have Fun! was like that. Along the lines of the Chinese curse -- May you live in interesting times. Our culture was that we enjoyed our work, even when it felt like a death march. ;-)
8. One more software slogan, when someone reports a bug, a bad one, think to yourself  "It's even worse than it appears." That'll give you something to laugh about while you're investigating. 

I'm thinking of forking Chrome to create a browser that can only be used to read scripting.com.

All other sites, sorry, I can't vouch for your safety. So instead of displaying your contents, my browser will just display a big red X.

It will be the best browser.

PS: To show what a nerd I am, I just realized this would be super easy with the Electron browser that has Node.js baked in and is basically Chrome in a desktop app. It would probably be a very nice browser! :-)

Now I think I finally get why Google wants HTTPS everywhere.

1. A lot of pages have Google code embedded in them.
2. This code sends data back to Google.
3. Suppose Comcast wanted to track users in addition to Google, or in place of Google.
4. Now as the text of my page passes through their router, they simply modify the Google code, and leave the rest of the page alone. 
5. They wouldn't want to alert anyone to what they're doing, so they'd keep it as innocuous as possible. They probably would leave the Google code in, at least at first, so as to not arouse suspicion.
6. They can do this because a lot of the sites that include Google code don't use HTTPS.
7. This assumes Comcast can't crack the HTTPS. I have no info either way on that.

Disclaimer: I never wanted to have to understand this stuff. 

More: They probably couldn't care less about pages that have no code in them.

Also: Of course it's not just Comcast. All the mobile providers. In Europe, Asia, everywhere. And it's Facebook too. They have a browser coming too. 

Posted on Twitter this morning:

Tech journalists: Have you questioned the wisdom of Google/EFF/Mozilla push to shrink the web to only sites that support HTTPS?

I don't understand why Google et al are doing this, and I think we should all be involved in this decision, esp journalists. I expect the tech press to be leading here. But so far no one has been willing to look. I've been more or less alone in questioning the idea.

To think that people who set up blogging servers can jump through this hoop, no one can be so naive to think that won't hurt the open web. For what benefit? Please don't recite the standard talking points, I've heard them all before many times.

There's no doubt it will serve to crush the independent web, to the extent that it still exists.  It will only serve to drive bloggers into the silos. Perhaps that's the real motive for Google et al. 

Google did this before, with RSS, the loop is closed on that. So to assume their motives are good, or that they're competent to make these choices for us, is not true. They are a company. A very large one, and they behave like one. 

Update at 1PM

A former exec at one of Google's competitors explained what is possibly their real motive. Google doesn't want its competitors to write bots that scrape their search engine. 

So why not just encrypt all access to google.com? I asked. 

Because bits of Google code are embedded in other people's pages. Google Analytics, YouTube, maps. I immediately understood. The way HTTPS works, if any component of a page is not secure then all other accesses are not. 

I guess that means that google.com still has to be ready to handle unsecure requests, because some pages include references to it.