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Month: April 2020

Weeknote 14/2020

When I was younger I used to find it very strange that my mother was so pessimistic. She wasn’t exactly a ‘prepper‘ but she’d always make sure we had extra tins in the cupboard, and everything to hand in case something bad happened.

A particular phrase she used to use has stuck with me over the years: “if you’re a pessimist, you’re always pleasantly surprised.” I used to think that was no way to live a life, but now I’m approaching forty, I can see where she’s coming from.

Being mentally and physically prepared for things going south is sensible and expedient in a world which assails you from all sides. Whether it’s time ravaging your physical health, or the state of the world taking its toll on your mental health, it’s pragmatic to understand that we all will endure suffering.

That’s why I read books by Stoic thinkers on repeat. For example, one of my favourite quotations is the following, from Marcus Aurelius, who despite being a Roman emperor, suffered like the rest of us:

Men seek for seclusion in the wilderness, by the seashore, or in the mountains – a dream you have cherished only too fondly yourself. But such fancies are wholly unworthy of a philosopher, since at any moment you choose you can retire within yourself. Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul; above all, he who possesses resources in himself, which he need only contemplate to secure immediate ease of mind – the ease that is but another word for a well-ordered spirit. Avail yourself often, then, of this retirement, and so continually renew yourself.

Marcus aurelius (Meditations, book IV)

Other than having an underground doomsday bunker, we couldn’t have been much better prepared for the current crisis. However, this week, despite my mental and physical preparations, I’ve found myself…. stretched.


This week a couple of new books arrived at my house: a collection of Seneca’s Dialogues and Essays and Baltasar Gracián’s A Pocket Mirror for Heroes. I’m looking forward to adding quotations from both to Discours.es. I found the selection from Seneca’s On Anger (about which he wrote three books!) a particularly rich vein for quoting.

Until a while ago, I used to maintain a wiki. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to keep Mediawiki-powered sites working properly, and when my backups didn’t work, I gave up on it. Thankfully, due to some unexpected help, I’ve managed to salvage a few pages which I’ve added to this blog:

My daily reading has remained remarkably consistent over the last few years; there’s something meditative about reading the same books on repeat most mornings.

Talking of reading, I finished Future Histories by Lizzie O’Shea, which comes highly recommended. I loved the history, the deep understanding of technology, and the author’s politics. Great stuff.

I’ve started on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and am about half-way through. It’s dark. So dark, in fact, that when I tried to read it when my son was young, I had to put it down after five pages.

The rationale behind this is that, I think that in times of crisis it’s better to go for either end of the spectrum. Either comedy and light-hearted stuff to raise my spirits, or tragedy and dark content to make me realise that things aren’t really so bad after all.


A glimmer of light this week was OER20, which ALT managed to pivot to being fully-online in the matter of a couple of weeks. I didn’t get to go to more than a couple of sessions, but was impressed by what I experienced, and donated anyway.

One of the sessions I managed to attend was about the domain of one’s own initiative at Coventry University. It led to me asking some questions at the end, which I turned into a blog post entitled Domains, decentralisation, and DNS.


On the work front this week I attempted a new format for our MoodleNet team weekly meetings which worked well. I should write that up, but it’s based on Matt Thompson‘s approach.

I also checked in with Johanna Sprondel‘s MA students who are helping out with the crowdfunding plan we’re working on together. They asked some great questions. Moodle’s also working on a donations strategy, so I’ve been involved in management meetings about that.

On the We Are Open Co-op front, I continued to do some work on our contract with Greenpeace around Planet 4. We’re planning a ‘day of action’ so I put together a short video using Bryan‘s illustrations to explain the why, how, and what.


Although I’ve got enough done, I haven’t felt so productive this week. I think that’s because I’ve had to slow my brain down to stop it racing ahead and thinking of possible futures in which everything I’m currently doing fades into insignificance.

I’m taking a lot of solace in long walks with my family, in nursing a single malt and talking to my wife, and in hanging out with my parents on video chat. I even, with the help of our children, painted the garden fence this morning!


We’re now on ‘Easter holidays’, whatever that means in our current context. I think it means that the kids do a little less work, and that I take a day off from my Moodle work and half a day off from my co-op work. Days and dates have lost their meaning.

Anyway, I’ll keep on keeping on. There’s not much to do otherwise, except perhaps more DIY. And goodness knows I’m no good at that.


Photo from a walk around Morpeth one night this week after I realised I’d only done 647 steps by 21:00...

Domains, decentralisation, and DNS

Today I attended a session at the OER20 (online!) conference entitled At the scale of care. Not only was it a great session in its own right, but it got me thinking again about ‘untakedownable’ websites.

You see, the problem, as presenters Lauren Heywood, Jim Groom, and Noah Mitchell pointed out, is that, if we use the metaphor of a house, we can never control our address.

Image of house (=website), land (=web hosting), and address (=domain)
A Plot of Land: get to know your new web space (CC BY-NC 4.0)

This is something I’ve been concerned about for ages, but particularly over the last five years. For example, see:

In fact, my thinking around this took me to decentralisation, and directly to my work on MoodleNet.


As Jim mentioned in answer to my question at the end of the session, it’s like the ‘dirty secret’ of the internet is that we’re all sharecroppers in a rentier economy. Why? Because we can never truly ‘own’ our address on the internet; we can only ever (as Maha Bali and Audrey Watters have both discussed) pay money to a central registry.

We can do better than this. I’ve experimented with ZeroNet and, to a lesser extent, IPFS. The latter was actually used to circumvent the government’s crackdown on ‘illegal’ Catalan elections while I was in Spain in late 2017.


I don’t think I’m quite ready to give up on the web as a platform, but I am sick to my back teeth of the way that it is controlled by interests that don’t align with my own. Given that I make my living online, this concerns me professionally as well as personally.

There are several approaches to decentralising ownership of the ‘address’ system on the web. First, let’s just check we’re on the same page here and define some terms. When I’m talking about ‘addresses’ then technically-speaking I’m talking about the Domain Name System, or ‘DNS’:

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a system used to convert a computer’s host name into an IP address on the Internet. For example, if a computer needs to communicate with the web server example.net, your computer needs the IP address of the web server example.net. It is the job of the DNS to convert the host name to the IP address of the web server. It is sometimes called the Internet’s telephone book because it converts a Website’s name that people know, to a number that the Internet actually uses.

Wikipedia (Simple english version)

The DNS system is extremely important, but also, because it depends on an ‘official’, more centralised registry, quite brittle. For example, governments can censor websites and web services, or hackers can target them to take them offline.

As you would expect, many people have already thought about a fully decentralised DNS. Using this system, people and organisations could truly own their address. I actually have one of these: dougbelshaw.bit

Of course, nothing happens when you click on that link, because you’d need a special plugin or separate browser that understands the non-standard DNS system. So this is where it starts getting reasonably technical and regular web users switch off and go back to looking at pictures of cats.


It’s important that there needs to be some kind of ‘cost’ to reserving domain names, no matter how decentralised the system is. Otherwise, someone could just come along and snap up every possible permutation.

That’s why, inevitably, things point back to the blockchain, and in particular, Namecoin. This satisfies Zooko’s Triangle:

CCo Dominic Scheirlinck

This is better than the way ZeroNet works, for example, where each site has a long address more confusing than a unique Google Docs URL.

However, let’s just think about the steps involved here:

  1. Open a namecoin wallet
  2. Buy some namecoins
  3. Use your namecoins to buy a .bit address
  4. Set up your website to resolve to the .bit address
  5. Ask your website visitors to either install the PeerName browser extension or set up NMControl to act as their computer’s local DNS server

So after all of this, you’re still left with the need to ask website visitors to change their browsing habits — and to do so on a non-decentralised DNS site. In addition, the Namecoin FAQ states that .bit ‘owners’ may have to pay renewal fees in future.


So that’s the current state of play for web-based decentralised DNS systems. Outside of the web, of course, things can work very differently. Take Briar messenger, for example:

Diagram of Briar connections over bluetooth, wifi, and Tor

It uses the BTP protocol, meaning it can be fully decentralised, and works over a number of different connection types:

Bramble Transport Protocol (BTP) is a transport layer security protocol suitable for delay-tolerant networks. It provides a secure channel between two peers, ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, authenticity and forward secrecy of their communication across a wide range of underlying transports.

Briar project

So for example, just like other delay-tolerant protocols, such as Scuttlebutt, Briar is extremely resilient.

Sharing data with Briar via wifi, bluetooth & internet

As ever, Open Source projects are more secure and robust than their proprietary counterparts. This is the reason that Open Source software runs much of the ‘backoffice’ services for online services.


The real difficulty we’ve got here, and I make no apologies for highlighting it due to this particular crisis, is capitalism. In particular, the neoliberal flavour that hoovers up ‘intellectual property’ and farms users for the benefit of surveillance capitalism.

Over the course of my career, people have told me that they “just want something that works”. Well, it’s well beyond the time when things should just technically work. It’s time that things ‘just worked’ for the benefit of me, of you, and of humanity as whole.

How domain names resolve might seem like such a small and trivial thing given the challenges the world is facing right now. But it’s important how we come out of this crisis: are we going to allow governments, Big Tech, and the 1% to double-down on their ability to repress us? Or are we going to fight against this, and take back control of not only our means of (re-)production, but our homes online?

Wiki backup: information environment

Last year, my wiki went down at dougbelshaw.com/wiki. For reasons too boring to go into, I was unable to resurrect it. This made me sad, particularly because there was some stuff on there that didn’t exist anywhere else.

After a brief period of mourning, I got on with my life. Noel De Martin, however, decided to do some digging via the Wayback Machine, and found several pages, which I’m copying-and-pasting to my blog for posterity.

What follows is a snapshot of my ‘Daily reading’ page from July 2017.


This page helps list out the sites and services that constitute my digital information environment. It’s too difficult to decide, especially in this day an age, where ‘entertainment’ starts, and ‘information’ begins, so I’ve included everything I look at regularly.

Newspaper

Aggregators

Newsletters

I try out other ones, but these are my favourites:

Podcasts

As with the newsletters, I subscribe to other podcasts on a regular basis, but here are my go-to ones that I wouldn’t want to miss:

Routines

Internet culture

Music

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