Introducing Ubiquity

An experiment into connecting the Web with language.

It Doesn’t Have to be This Way

You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed. This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task. And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them.

This kind of clunky, time-consuming interaction is common on the Web. Mashups help in some cases but they are static, require Web development skills, and are largely site-centric rather than user-centric.

It’s even worse on mobile devices, where limited capability and fidelity makes this onerous or nearly impossible.

Most people do not have an easy way to manage the vast resources of the Web to simplify their task at hand. For the most part they are left trundling between web sites, performing common tasks resulting in frustration and wasted time.

Enter Ubiquity

Today we’re announcing the launch of Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:

• Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
• Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
  
• Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
  
• Extend the browser functionality easily.
  
  

Learn more about Ubiquity and the capabilities that it could provide for users and developers.

The Initial Prototype

As part of this announcement, we’re also releasing an early experimental prototype to demonstrate some of the concepts of Ubiquity and the possibilities that it opens up. This release is meant as a illustration of a concept and mainly focuses on the platform. The next release will explore interfaces that are closer to features that might make it into Firefox.

Install the prototype and you’ll be presented with a tutorial to get you started.

Ubiquity 0.1

• Lets you map and insert maps anywhere; translate on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg and twitter; lookup and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax highlight any code you find; and a lot more. Ubiquity “command list” to see them all.
  
• Find and install new commands to extend your browser’s vocabulary through a simple subscription mechanism
  
• Read about Ubiquity In Depth, or see a number of the commands in action (with screenshots) in the Ubiquity Tutorial.

All of the code underlying the Ubiquity experiment is being released as open source software under the the GPL/MPL/LGPL tri-license.

This is the goal of what kinds of language-based services Ubiquity hopes to inspire people to create:

This is a screenshot of Ubiquity’s current map functionality:

Influences, References, and Background Resources

• The Graphical Keyboard User Interface by Alex Faaborg
• Why Verbs by Jono DiCarlo
• The Linguistic Command Line by Aza Raskin
• The UI Breakthrough-Command Line Interfaces by Don Norman
  
• Enso by Humanized
  
• Trust-based security, and Herd-based knowledge by Atul Varma
  

For a full list, see the credits page.

Get Involved

Mozilla Labs is a virtual lab where people come together online to create, experiment and play with Web innovations for the public benefit. The Ubiquity experiment is still in its infancy and just getting started. There are many ways to join the team and get involved:

• Download Ubiquity 0.1
• Find Ubiquity Commands
• Get Help, Make Suggestions, or Write Documentation to Help Others
• Write Commands for Ubiquity
  
• Report a Bug
• Discuss Ubiquity
  
• View Source

We’ve also started compiling a suggestion list for possible Ubiquity commands. If you have any suggestions, add them here or get inspired and develop one of them and add them to the command repository.

Original here

Facebook Hits 100 Million Users

Fast growing social network Facebook has hit the 100 million users mark, according to a statement today by Dave Morin, the company's Senior Platform Manager.
How does that compare to MySpace's ascent? A guy named Rick appears to have become MySpace's 100 millionth registered user in 2006. MySpace took 3 years after launch to hit that magic number; for Facebook it took 4 years and 6 months.

Drama

The first years of MySpace were characterized by music and spam, while Facebook's beginnings were in college parties and drama. That drama continues today. For example, the company reports that only 20% of its 100 million users have visited the dramatically redesigned version of the site by clicking on a button at the top of their screen in recent weeks. Facebook users don't like change.

The company wants to spin the 20% number as a positive embrace of the changes (and the ordinarily fabulous Eric Eldon at Venture Beat buys that spin for some reason) but in fact it fits in the history of conflict between Facebook and its users.

Innovation and Monetization

None the less, the site is growing by leaps and bounds. 100 million registered users probably includes a substantial number of regularly active users. Now if only the company could figure out how to monetize those numbers as well as they'd like.

We believe they will probably figure it out. More interesting to us is watching Facebook develop its feature set, leading then falling behind in innovation. 100 million registered users is a lot of people to innovate with.

Unfortunately for Facebook, sometimes it seems that those people are not interested in innovation or monetization - they just want to communicate with each other. I guess when you call yourself a "utility" some people expect you to remain unexciting.

Original here

Lasers Could Send World's Most Secure Messages Through Space

New experiments using Heisenberg's uncertainty principle extend the range of quantum cryptography, an advanced method of communicating in unbreakable code.

By Alex Hutchinson

Photograph Courtesy of JAXA

Finding a way to keep snoops from tapping into other people's information is a challenge that has gone to the subatomic level. First proposed in 1984, quantum cryptography (QC) promises to send coded messages that are, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, impossible to crack. The technique relies on a principle of modern physics called Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which states that it's impossible to measure something at the subatomic level without altering it.

QC systems send information in the form of a specially prepared stream of photons representing 0s and 1s. If anyone tries to eavesdrop, he unintentionallly alters the photons being transmitted, and the rightful recipient is able to detect the tampering. As a final layer of security, the beam of photons doesn't encode the actual secret message, it just contains an encryption key. So if part of the key is intercepted, the sender and recipient detect the altered photons and discard that part of the key. Once they've transmitted enough photons, the shared key is used to encrypt the message, which can be sent over public communication lines. But the photon key has to arrive reliably at its destination.

Quantum key encryption is one promising method of securing communication, especially if it can be transmitted by satellites. Scientists at an Italian observatory this year succeeded in firing lasers at the mirror-covered Ajisai Japanese satellite, proving that a sequence of photons can travel great distances through space. The laser pulsed photons at the satellite at 17,000 times per second; a fraction bounced back to a telescope at the observatory. On Earth, the longest successful quantum encryption link has been just under 100 miles because the photons scatter as they travel through the air. To reach the satellite, the photons only had to travel through 5 miles of atmosphere during their 1000-mile journey, allowing the sequence to arrive in order.

There have been several recent breakthroughs in quantum cryptography. In August, a team of researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) took the stage at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas for a demonstration of its quantum cryptography system at the notorious Black Hat information security conference. Using a laser to send the encryption key across the room, they streamed perfectly secure live video at 300,000 bits per second—as good as YouTube. "That's about two orders of magnitude faster than any other system for quantum key distribution," says NIST engineer Alan Mink.

At the same conference, researchers from the University of Singapore demonstrated a system using pairs of "entangled" photons. Entanglement is a mind-bending feature of quantum mechanics that can allow the physical properties of two particles to be intimately linked even if they're separated by a great distance. This provides an ideal way for a third party—a satellite, for instance—to distribute a perfectly secure key to two parties who wish to exchange a message, no matter where they're located.

Last fall, a secure QC line built by Geneva-based Id Quantique was used to transmit voting data in the Swiss national elections. And New York–based MagiQ Technologies has sold "a moderate number" of systems to clients in military and intelligence agencies, financial institutions and telecom companies, says company spokesman Andrew Hammond. No clients are willing to be named publicly, he says, but the systems sell for between $125,000 and $175,000.

In keeping with the 100-mile practical limit for terrestrial QC, Hammond says MagiQ's systems are best suited for metro-area networks. The company is also in discussions about a possible Washington-to–New York link, in which the signal would be amplified at a network node partway along the route. For international distances, space may be the solution. "We're not capitalized to send up our own satellite," Hammond says, "but from an architecture standpoint, we think it makes a great deal of sense." Mink agrees: though the transmission speed via satellite would initially be very slow, the technology is evolving rapidly. "It can be done," he says. "Definitely."

Original here