Depending on how cynical one is, you might view the real estate multiple listing service (MLS) as "community owned", at least from a game theoretic standpoint.
It is not a monolithic organization. There are actually 850 regional MLSs in the US. In some sense this is a P2P walled-garden marketplace. However, there is downward pressure from the national realtors association to standardize on things like listing formatting, so it is not entirely self-organizing.
I think owning the marketplace is valuable. Similar to various open source initiatives, once the free marketplace gets to a certain size, someone like Red Hat will come in, fork it, and set themselves up as gatekeepers. The resting dynamic of the system is a feudal kingdom.
I saw it at B&N, read the back-jacket notes and thought it sounded interesting enough to read. I bought it, but haven't had time to actually read it yet.
FWIW, the author (Andrew Keen[1]) made a bit of a stir with one of his earlier books The Cult of the Amateur. All in all, he seems to hold a generally negative view of the Internet and "Internet Culture" and a lot of the things that have been enabled by the Internet and which have become very popular.
"Keen returned to Silicon Valley in 1995 and founded Audiocafe.com, which received funding from Intel and SAP. The firm folded in April 2000 and after the demise of Audiocafe.com, Keen worked at various technology companies including Pulse 3D, SLO Media, Santa Cruz Networks, Jazziz Digital and Pure Depth, where he was director of global strategic sales. In 2005, Keen founded AfterTV, intended to bring clarity, understanding and foresight to the post-TV-centric media and consumer landscape."
"Tim O'Reilly has said 'I find, Andrew Keen's, his whole pitch, I think he was just pure and simple looking for an angle, to create some controversy to sell a book, I don't think there's any substance whatever to his rants.'"
Maybe its secure, but maybe a vulnerability is simply worth more than the amount of btc in the pinata.
The amount in the pinata should probably double every X days. In this situation, if two people know the secret, it is advantageous for one of them to act immediately.
We're aware that bounties can't demonstrate security (mentioned early on in the post). However, putting such items out there and inviting review helps to stress-test the stack.
Right now, unikernels aren't in major production use, so there's little to gain by holding on to an exploit (one would assume).
> there's little to gain by holding on to an exploit
Correct, but there's also very little to gain by developing it in the first place. Right now, the pinata's value is approximately $2500, or less than two straightforward XSS bugs on Google properties, which are waaaay easier to find. There's just not anywhere near the motivation required to get (mostly well-paid) security people on this. It's interesting, but that's about it.
Yup, I totally agree with your points. However, I also feel there's some 'fun' factor here too -- and we hoped to appeal to it. By having the entire code base available, it also reduces the need for reverse engineering that other programs might require.
We didn't really expect the money to be the main motivator. Just a hook to draw attention.
I'm just imagining the subtle bugs that can happen if the developer can't assume a minute is 60 seconds and that each minute is the same length.
This seems like a feature for no one, as the people who really care about leap seconds are probably doing their own timekeeping already since computer clocks aren't exactly accurate to being with.
1. Time is never the same on two different computers.
2. Time is different when you send it and receive it (speed of light).
3. Time isn't necessarily linear (time dilation).
4. Clocks drift, even with NTP.
5. Some systems are isolated enough to accept inaccurate human input and time synchronisation.
Time is an invention for human consumption mainly. Machines are better served with explicit synchronisation (paxos, distributed transactions) or not at all (eventual consistency). Examples in brackets.
Time, if we lose a few seconds here and there, meh, don't sweat it.
If the leap second was really just expressed to the application as the 61st second of a minute, it wouldn't be so bad. But instead the second of 23:59:59 happens _twice_ (UNIX time steps backwards one second), which tends to confuse applications that assume time increases monotonously.
Has there been any serious quantitative research into the additive or multiplicative effect of tools on effective intellectual horsepower to solve hard problems?
For instance, if I put two groups of mathematicians in two different rooms and lock them up for three years, but one group has access to the internet and the other doesn't, how much more progress will they make on the same open problem?
What if I give both groups internet access but only one group gets to use modern search engines?
What about finer gradations of the same idea? Is a research team confined to using only Google to search smarter or dumber than a team that must only use Bing.
I'm wondering about how much IQ actually matters compared to tools. After reading Sapiens (which I highly suggest), I don't think the principle machinery for solving problems exists in our heads and hasn't probably since the middle ages, if not before.
The problem with Dropbox is that it is not locally encrypted. This means it will only ever be used for sharing excel spreadsheets at work.
Dropbox has a team of people whose only job it is to write AI software against the data being saved there. They have software agents rummaging through everything you upload (which is maybe not surprising, but also not a service I want to pay for).
I think if someone could combine the sharing aspects of DropBox with some of the more secure cloud backup products (like CrashPlan) they would have a winning business model.
The secret sauce would be figuring out how to do this without becoming a pure infrastructure provider, where the margins are a race to the bottom.
It is not a monolithic organization. There are actually 850 regional MLSs in the US. In some sense this is a P2P walled-garden marketplace. However, there is downward pressure from the national realtors association to standardize on things like listing formatting, so it is not entirely self-organizing.
I think owning the marketplace is valuable. Similar to various open source initiatives, once the free marketplace gets to a certain size, someone like Red Hat will come in, fork it, and set themselves up as gatekeepers. The resting dynamic of the system is a feudal kingdom.
My 2c