by Paul Robinson
URL of original article: 
  https://medium.com/paul-robinson/immutable-urls-91925a8c9373

In many computing languages there is the concept of the immutable object. An object that once created cannot be changed. You can copy it and make a new version that is different, but the original is forever the same.

Compare this to the contents of any web page. You follow a link to a blog post and if you are lucky the post is there, just as it was the day the author created it. But just as likely, the link is broken and goes nowhere. Or the author has changed the contents (or at least the presentation) or simply moved it to a different place.

Blogs are abandoned, services go out of business or are [sic] aquired, authors lose interest, lose faith, and sometimes simply die. And although the URL, that universally unique permutation of characters, remains, the content it pointed to is lost.
This is only going to get worse.

Services like The Wayback Machine and to some extent Google, do their best to cache content for later retrieval long after its steward has become negligent. But mostly the host, whoever that is, simply turns off the server or doesn’t renew their account and it’s gone.
Who hasn’t experienced this themselves? Think of your first ever blog post or photo upload to the internet. Is it still online? Is it even still on your hard drive?

And so we are left with a Web that was brilliantly conceived to be simple and yet suffers from a kind of computer science-ism:[sic] everthing is just a pointer. A URL is nothing more than a pointer to some content that may or may not still exist.

I think this is one of the reasons the web is careening towards a mostly closed and hosted world where we leave our content to others not because we totally trust them to be good stewards forever but because they are very likely better stewards than we are! Facebook may not be around in 50 years but it is highly likely that anything I post there will outlast anything I post on a blog that I host myself.

I can abandon my Foursquare account for two years and come back to happily find all my check-ins still there, quietly waiting for my return. Even disabling my Facebook account only hides the contents until I return to my senses and reactive them. Say what you will about Facebook, but they are a great protector of my data’s longevity.

Is there a solution for the open web?

What if URLs were immutable? What if once content was posted to a URL (maybe a new kind of URL, the immutable IURL) it could never be changed? The contents of the site and the URL itself would be hashed together and out would come a key that could never be altered. Not even the theme and styling of the page could be rebranded. It would be frozen like Han Solo at the end of Empire Strikes Back.
​
I think most would say that would be ridiculous. A step [sic] backwards. But think for a moment about your first ever blog post. Sure would be interesting to go read that today exactly as it was then.

Here are some thoughts I have prepared for Frank Heart's Memorial service.

​Frank was a force to be reckoned with.  I was a little nervous about Frank, not knowing what he was thinking or how he was going to react.  And, this applies to the entire 35 years I was close to Frank, up through his last Birthday in May.

BUT, in that time, I benefitted immensely from his opinions, his support, and his encouragement.  It felt terrific when he encouraged me and I worked hard to justify his encouragement.

I think one of our last topics of interaction illustrates a lot about Frank's love of new ideas that have a chance of making a significant impact on important challenges.  Tom Fortmann, Steve Blumenthal and I were visiting Frank at Brookhaven lifecare community sometime in the last 12 months.  In searching for topics to talk about, I came across my interest in drones. I described to Frank experiences I had flying my drone around Lexington and the amazing technology present in these remote control devices.  

After a bit into the story, I saw that familiar look in Frank's eye, where I had touched his curiosity about what interesting things could happen with the proliferation and maturation of this technology.  I told him that I would bring my drone over on another visit -- and he looked interested -- but a little concerned about how that would be received at Brookhaven.  But Frank was curious and engaged right up to the end.  At his Birthday dinner in May, I sat next to Frank.  He leaned over at one point and asked if I was still flying my drone.  Frank wasn't much for idle chatter, so I knew he was still engaged and interested in this technology that had captured his imagination.

Finally, one admonition I received from Frank that I will always remember: "Don't try to boil the ocean".  He probably learned this piece of advice from all of the enthusiastic creative people who passed through his office in his many years of supporting and nurturing creative souls.  And we uncertain, nervous creative types, thank him for that interest.

​This article is a summarization of ideas that Glenn Parker and I have discussed.  These note are my summary of the conversation.
​

1. There are two concepts at play in this discussion -- Information Security and Information Privacy:
   
   
   1. Information Security:  The state of being able to view information.  Can you understand a piece of information or not.
      
      
   2. Information Privacy: The administrative rules over the rights view understandable information.  Who has the right to view information that is understandable?
      
      
2. Even if Information Security is totally successful, there is a need for Information Privacy because at some point Information must be in the clear to someone who does not "own" the information.  For example, if you are applying for health insurance, you want the health insurance organization deciding whether or not to provide you insurance the ability to read sensitive information sent securely to them but which belongs to you and you alone.  Information Privacy laws dictate how the health insurance insurance organization must protect, how they can use and how and when they must dispose of your information.
   
   
3. There are two types of information when it comes to talking about Information Security:  Government Information (e.g. military secrets) and Citizen Information (e.g. credit card transactions, civil legal agreements, etc).
   
   
4. My comments are about Citizen Information Security and Citizen Information Privacy.  None of my comments are about Government Information Security.  I'm not sure if Government Information Privacy is a separate concept from Citizen Information Privacy:  It's all Information Privacy achieved by rules built on top of different types of Information Security.  
   
   
5. Information Privacy (Government or Citizen) must be built on top of an unbreakable Information Security mechanism. 
   
   
6. The basic technology for achieving good information security exists for both the Government and Citizen sectors.  
   
   
7. There is far more Citizen Information than Government Information and far more actors (people, organizations) in the Citizen sector than the Government sector.  What is lacking for the Citizen sector are the refinements in performance and ease of use that result over time when experience is gained with any technology development.
   
   
8. The experience of the last 40 years of Government involvement in the development, implementation and deployment of Citizen Security technology is that the Government has tried to pull the wool over people's eyes by insisting that weak, breakable encryption systems with Government accessible backdoors become standard.
   
   
9. Add to that the failure in the last 40 years of the Government to effectively prosecute with any long-term effect crimes in the big-business sector of breaches of Citizen information security and privacy.   The Government's willingness and ability to protect Citizens Information is highly suspect.
   
   
10. So, rather than rely on weak laws created by the Government for Citizen Information privacy, technologists prefer to develop provably secure Citizen Information security mechanisms that can be used without any Government Involvement.
    
    
11. Where the Government can still help is in the Citizen Privacy regulations, as Governments in the EU have done.

I have collected some of my favorite recent sketches into an online album for (my, and hopefully) your viewing pleasure.

    http://forsdick.com/lps/carylibrary

The easy way is to just embed a PDF document in a Weebly document.  This uses weebly to deliver the PDF document to the reader in visual form without having to do much of anything.  You need to use the Scribd Document element type in Weebly.  Just drag the Scribd Document element to your document and follow the instructions.  

The hard way of recreating a formatted document is to deconstruct the document into it's text and image components and then rebuild it using the Weebly mechanisms.  Of course this is what we wish an automatic translation program would do for us since it is so simple to describe its behavior.  However, formatted documents are not as simple to understand as it appears.  So, here is what I did to reproduce Alex's travelog (or at least 10 days of it):

1. Show the PDF document in a PDF reader.
2. Select the entire document.
3. Copy the entire document onto your clipboard.
4. Create a text element in a Weebly document.
5. Paste the clipboard into the text element.  All of the pictures will be ignored (sigh).
6. Now painstakingly split up the single text element into multiple text elements that are bounded by images.  Best way I have found for doing this is to add an empty text element above the text element that you introduced in step #4. Then cut from the step #4 text element the (next) portion of text and paste into the new text element, and so on.  Eventually the text element from step #4 will be empty and you will have multiple smaller text elements between which you can add the images.
7. For the images, I use a PDF viewer, viewing the document at maximum width to get the largest version of the images I can get.  Then I use a screen snapshot program to copy just the images and paste them into the document.  Where two or more images form a block, I copy the block of multiple images and paste it as a block.
8. You've got to be a little possessed to achieve this result.  Benefit: it looks like the rest of Weebly authored content.

​

6/21, Weds: First day's drive finished. We're in Walterboro SC.
​
6/22, Thurs: We're settled for the night in Staunton VA. Today we visited the Pearl Fryor topiary garden (a private residence I learned about from the Atlas Obscura, a wonderful book my wonderful daughter gave me for my last birthday).

6/26, Mon: Visited "Diggerland" with the children and grandchildren. This is an amusement park full of construction equipment – some provides the basis for rides, and some can be operated by children and/or adult visitors. Kathy stayed back at the motel with Zoey. ​

6/28, Weds: Yesterday Kathy went to Sesame Place with the MacGumeraits and I did some laundry. Today I went to Northlandz Model RR in Flemington; another find from Atlas Obscura. After reading comments in Trip Adviser I wasn't expecting much, but this place is spectacular, even if a bit frayed at the edges. I spent more than 2 hours looking at over 8 miles of track and scenery. Highly recommended! ​

6/29, Thurs: Drive to Uniontown PA via Maryland. Lots of traffic around Philly, but clear sailing after that.
​ 
6/30, Fri: Today we left Zoey in daycare and visited 2 outstanding Frank Lloyd Wright houses: Falling Water and Kentuck Knob near Uniontown PA. We are in awe, especially of Falling Water! ​

7/1, Sat: You probably thought "Tara" was in Georgia, but today we visited "Tara" in Clark PA. An old mansion, converted to an inn with a Gone With the Wind theme. Lots of life-sized Remington bronzes in the garden. ​

We've stopped in Akron for the night. ​

Here are a 360° video and a 360° still (like a Google Street View) shot yesterday at the Yale-Harvard game.  Yale won 24-3!

I gave a talk about 360° Digital Photography last Wednesday to the Computers & Technology Group at the Lexington Community Center.  Although there are no speaker notes, I think if you click through the talk you will get the gist of what I said.

No matter how much an Internet surveyor tries to assure me that there will be no attempt to connect me with responses I give to a survey, I never believe them.  This impacts how I answer a survey. 

From my viewpoint, what is needed is some cryptographic-based mechanism that assures that there is no possibility of linkage been me and my answers.  From the perspective of the person running the survey, there is also a need to assure that a single person does not submit more than one response to the survey.

Searching around the Internet, I have discovered just such a solution called Anonize, developed by a professor (Rafael Pass) and his students (Susan Hohenberger, Steven Myers, and Abhi Shelat) at Cornell Tech, an outpost of Cornell University in New York CIty.  They have written several academic papers about the scheme.  Wired Magazine has published a more accessible description of the problem.  The Wired description still does not provide enough intuitive details about how the solution works. 

Acceptance of such mechanisms by the Internet survey industry will have the same resistance until to things happen:

• The general public starts demanding such a solution.
• The mechanism is explained in simple, intuitive terms the general public can understand and trust.

Articles for the General Public:

• New Crypto Tool Makes Anonymous Surveys Truly Anonymous, ​Wired Magazine (9/17/2015)

Papers for Computer Scientists:

• ANONIZE: A Large-Scale Anonymous Survey System, International Association for Cryptologic Research (7/6/2015)
• An Overview of ANONIZE: A Large-Scale Anonymous Survey System, ​IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine, (7/26/2015)

Of all the sights, sounds, and ideas of my four undergraduate years at Yale, one that evokes instant positive transport to that time is hearing the Whiffenpoof Song.  Even when I was at Yale, this evoked a feeling of an era that was long past -- so this isn't recalling something I actually experienced, but rather the myth of Yale that I understood but didn't actually live in.

Here is a rendition I filmed with my iPhone at a party before the playing of the 2016 Harvard-Yale game in Cambridge, MA.