Eye on Winer

Apparently two days is all it takes for Facebook to ferret-out highly publicized fake users and exterminate them from their network. My sources with Facebook accounts tell me that searches for “Newsjunk” and “John Newsjunk” are returning no results, while before they were returning one account with a picture of Teddy Roosevelt. More confirmation always welcome, facebookers.

What’s interesting is that this has yet to be mentioned on the NewsJunk Blog or Scripting News… both still prominently advertising the fake account.

There’s no other way to see it. When the chips are down, the only principle Dave really has is one of selfishness. Today’s write-up on the AP’s legal bullying is a prime example.

He starts, right off the bat, by giving the AP an excuse, saying that because they’re large, they can’t possibly be of “one mind” about this. It’s a cop-out. There might be some internal disagreement, but the legal strategy is unmistakable.

There’s a bizarre comment about the AP being “a not-for-profit cooperative”, conveniently ignoring that while the AP itself is not-for-profit, the entities composing the AP are decidedly for profit. To explore that a bit further, consider one of the suggested reasons for the decline in revenue for many news outlets: bloggers. Consider that the AP is a cooperative of for-profit news entities. The AP is going after bloggers. No connection here? Really?

Dave’s typical attitude towards lawyers is strangely absent, with him insisting that we should try to hear the AP’s side of the story. Why are they sending ludicrous DMCA take-down notices? There must be a reason aside from intimidation, right?

By now, if you’re like me, you’re boggling at how or why Dave is taking the side of an organization that is attempting to lay claim to the news, stop the free flow of information, and is using a bunch of lawyers to try to force it through. What gives?

…

I want to testify on behalf of the AP. I did a deal with them at the end of last year, a quiet one, that the tech community mostly ignored.

FlickrFan. The bloated piece of crap-ware that Dave laments so few people took notice of. More accurately, everyone and their brother downloaded it, realized it was essentially worthless (aside from the AP feeds) and promptly uninstalled it. The AP scratched Dave’s back, and now he’s going to scratch theirs — reprehensible, anti-social legal tactics be damned.

The rest is classic. A massive organization flush with lawyers and cash is sending threatening letters to individuals, many of whom wouldn’t have the money to defend themselves against a traffic citation, let alone a massive IP civil suit… and this is no big deal? NetFlix doesn’t give Dave an easy way to export his movie ratings and he throws a fit, but an organization trying to control who reports the news is just a big joke?

Give me a break.

Dave is a sell-out. He’s probably worried that if he comes out too strongly against the AP they’ll end his sweetheart FlickrFan deal and make the app officially pointless. I would say that was smart business if FlickrFan actually stood to make any money, but it’s really more cowardice than anything.

Speaking of which, why no overt disclosure about the nature of the relationship between himself and the AP? We know that one exists, but we have no idea what the terms are.

What the AP is doing is dangerous. They’re trying to control the news, and they’re starting by pushing people around who they don’t think can defend themselves against it. They’re trying to centralize FACTS to lock everyone in their giant trunk… but I guess as long as Dave and the AP are in bed together, we can count on him to be their Yes-Man.

Dave Winer recently launched NewsJunk, an RSS-backed aggregator of political news, with Nicco Mele. Mele, the former webmaster for the Howard Dean campaign, says they’ve been developing it for months:

I’ve been working on a new project with Dave Winer — Newsjunk.com. For the last few months, I’ve been annoyed at how hard it is to follow the political coverage. News pops up in a lot of different places, and having single source to follow what’s happening throughout the day has been an itch that needs scratching. Dave remembers the briefing books we had on the Dean campaign, a fixture of many campaigns. So NewsJunk.com started as a way to scratch the itch of the political news junkie, and a way to begin to build an open briefing book.

During the 2000 cycle, I worked as the webmaster and technical director of the Shadow Conventions. That’s actually where I first met Dave, through Edit This Page.com. Then during the 2004 cycle, I worked as the webmaster for Howard Dean. This cycle (2008) after a false start, I’m excited to be working on NewsJunk.

What’s the over/under on how long it takes before this collaboration crashes and burns? As Jason Calacanis will tell any human or puppet who asks, Winer can’t work with people. He’s never mastered the principle “you have to be a friend to have a friend.” Mele, who destroyed his rep among former Deaniacs by backing McCain, is exhibiting some weird judgment here too.

As Mele ponders how much effort to put into their joint venture, perhaps he should consider the significance of the following three facts:

1. Winer owns the domain
2. Winer runs the application on his own server at 70.85.234.142
3. Winer claims all rights to the project: “© 2008 Scripting News, Inc. NewsJunk is a trademark of Scripting News, Inc.”

Dave’s been awfully coy about Switch-a-Bit so far. At present I’m really unsure what this is going to be, but I’m having a hard time caring. What scares me is that someone actually think’s Dave’s a good enough programmer to drive a start up. Wow.

It’s also designed to scale to work for hundreds of thousands of users, Murphy-willing.

Sure thing, Dave. I wonder why he couldn’t make FlickrFan scale well for ONE user but he can build a platform which supposedly will scale well for “hundreds of thousands”.

Dave Winer’s declaration that no one has the right to judge Rev. Wright provoked this exchange in his comments with a blogger named Marco:

Marco 18 hours ago

It will be hard to believe but this is not meant to be a shrill attack.

Posts like these are jarring in their inconsistency. I fully understand your point on Rev Wright and even sympathize with your position.

What I don’t understand is why you can’t see the hypocrisy in wanting to extend individuals like Rev Wright every possible explanation for their words or actions (”He was alienated”, “He was caught in a position non of us have ever been in”) but when someone you disagree with politically is automatically an evil person and each misstatement is borne of the most nefarious motives.

Its insulting to see you constantly deride others for sweeping generalizations and oversimplification of issues only to have you follow up with a string of posts casting sweeping dispersions and attacks based on 3 seconds sound bites addressing unbelievably complex topics.

I appreciate the perspective you bring which is why I haven’t yet unplugged from your feed but it would be great to see just a little of the balance you want to see in our political process displayed in your posts.

dave 17 hours ago

It’s pretty simple, I say what I have to say and it’s a function of what happens in the world. So when things change, my point of view may change too. If you disagree, go ahead and disagree. But all these charged words, hypocrisy, insulting, deride, attacks, etc — sorry, that’s your mind playing tricks on you. I’m none of those things. Usually I don’t let comments that require defensive responses (or else I admit to all the BS you accuse me of) through, but this time I wanted to restate this, that I’ve said many times before. My blog is my space to say what I think. You don’t have to agree, and if you want to, start your own blog to say what you have to say. That’s where comments like yours (above) belong, not here.

dave 17 hours ago

See how much space it takes to clear up your mess. But now that it’s clear I can answer your question.

BECAUSE MY MIND WORKS DIFFERENTLY FROM YOURS.

Which is so obvious it doesn’t even need to be said. All our minds work differently, we were all raised in different environments with different values. To say basically that I should see everything the same way you do is a waste of bandwidth. It’s ridiculous. It’ll never happen nor should it ever happen.

Marco 17 hours ago

That’s not even remotely my point.

Do you really think I would be interested in engaging you or anyone else who did not agree with my world view if that was what I believed? Of course not.

Your response is a wonderful defense of your desire to remain ideologically isolated. “I see things the way I see things and I have no need to try and understand your position” is a great way to stifle true debate and a horrible way to effectively change the way we approach issues in this country. As I said before - it wouldn’t matter to me if you wouldn’t insist on standing on your soapbox and donning sackcloth and ashes to mourn the death of honest debate.

dave 17 hours ago

Okay you get the last word, the rest of it, if there is more — in your space.

Marco, like every well-intentioned person who responds to Winer, hasn’t learned yet that he can’t handle criticism. Winer’s statement, “Usually I don’t let comments that require defensive responses (or else I admit to all the BS you accuse me of),” is one of the clearest explanations he’s ever given that explains why: He thinks that if he doesn’t delete critical comments, it means they are true.

Open and honest dialogue is not possible on any forum that Winer controls.

Apparently Dave can’t afford a test server:

Honestly… how do you blow up your production server this badly?

What would Dave say if GMail suddenly required it’s own browser to access? Now suppose that, to ensure you were playing by the rules, Google added a new HTTP header that only it’s new browser knew about?

What would he do? He’d scream bloody murder, of course. He’d have a week-long bitch-fest about this horrible new “controversy” and wring his hands about trunks and lock-in and the end of the internet as we know it.

Imagine my surprise, then, to have received this email this afternoon from a tipster:

Dave hasn’t mentioned anything, but he is now requiring a secret hash in the request header to download the AP/AFP RSS feeds for FlickrFan. If anyone else (Apple, Google, Mike Arrington, etc) did something like that he’d call them out and accuse them of terrible things. It shits all over standards, I mean it’s a whole new HTTP header called Hash. But predictably it’s really easy to work around… Frontier script and DW aren’t a clever combination.

Thoughts?

Dave’s own personal Reddit failed, and Dave has declared it dead. Of course, it didn’t fail because people just didn’t feel like using Dave’s private echo chamber… no, certainly not! It failed because of “idiots”. (So much for not getting personal, right Dave?)

The idiots want to rule the Reddit I started for Scripting News readers. I couldn’t figure out how to delete it, and while trying, I deleted my account

As best I can tell, the sum total of the activities of “idiots” consist of a) the link to EOW questioning the level of Dave’s political discourse, b) a link to a picture of a penis announcing the end of the experiment, c) people moderating down the links Dave submitted, and d) people not really using it.

With respect to (b), that seems to have appeared after Dave decided the experiment was over, so that’s not really determinative. It seems unlikely that one link to EOW would really bother him that much, and while I think that (c) probably irritated him, my guess is that the real reason that Dave is trying to shut the doors on the experiment is (d).

He’s just mad that he set up what he thought would be a neat little playground and nobody came to play on the jungle gym… and instead of just quietly closing it down or just saying “Well, it might have been neat, but it didn’t take”, he has to blame it on someone else.

Dave thinks of RSS as one format to rule them all. He wants everyone to use RSS (and not ATOM!) so that everything works together. But is he displaying a new form of hypocrisy with the AP photos feed?

Looking at the comments to a recent post here at EOW you can see that some odd things are afoot.

For starters, a commenter found the AP feed and started using it without FlickrFan. He posted about that here on EOW. Shortly thereafter, the photo feed stopped being updated… but FlickrFan kept getting new pictures. How? Dave changed the address of the feed and rolled out an update silently to FlickrFan clients.

Security through obscurity.

Furthermore, it was noticed that the reason that so many RSS readers were having problems reading this raw feed was due to malformed HTTP URLs, in violation of the RSS spec. Essentially, Dave was using an encrypted URL (albeit a very weak encryption) which required an algorithm (albeit a very simple one) to read the URLs. Some readers did that by default, some did not. In either case, though, the feed was not properly formed RSS (by the spec).

Once that little catch was posted here at EOW, the feed mysteriously changed again. This time with more variations on the “http://” part of the URL… he changed the encryption algorithm.

Is he doing this to make sure that iPhoto can never read his feeds? Is he doing it to break third-party photo-downloaders? Are these just typos?

It’s hard to tell, but one thing is certain: what Dave is putting out is not well-formed RSS. If he’s borking the RSS to break other readers… isn’t that a little hypocritical?

Call me naive, but isn’t “distributed twitter” just… blogging?

Presumably Dave wants to host his own twitter node so that he can revise history, redact things he doesn’t want to apologize for, and generally be an anti-social old coot. But still… I fail to see how a distributed twitter would be any different than just having a blog with a feed.

Maybe it’ll work on my TV.

Update: Dave is still talking about how IRC is different from Twitter. I’m having a hard time figuring out if this is a strawman or if people are actually stupid enough to ask the question. I wonder if it’s just a whole bunch of people trying to show how old school they are. “Hey man, I used to use IRC, like, all the time!” It’s like nerd street-cred.