SteveStreeting.com

Thanks John for the reminder to investigate S3 as a business media hosting service, it works like a charm!

Now that I have far fewer bandwidth worries (max $0.17 per GB), the Torus Knot site includes a nifty dynamic selector so you can pick low, medium or high quality - the latter is at a higher resolution too, clocking in at about 100Mb. I may well use S3 for future public commercial downloads in the future too. It’s altogether more convenient than the block bandwidth allocations you get with regular hosting packages, since it scales dynamically at a very fine level of detail depending on demand. And don’t be fooled by ‘unlimited’ bandwidth offers, all hosting companies have to pay for bandwidth and there’s no such thing as ‘unlimited’ resources; you’ll actually find your bandwidth being throttled or cut off via a ‘reasonable use’ clause in the small-print; ‘unlimited’ is simply a marketing lure. If you want truly scalable guaranteed bandwidth, you have to pay for it.

Getting S3 media hosting working wasn’t that hard, but did require a few discrete steps. Firstly, you need to create a bucket in your S3 account which is all in lower case, is globally unique and is DNS-compatible; so for example I created a bucket called ‘media.torusknot.com’.

Then to make it all look nice you need to create a DNS CNAME entry to map a sub-domain of your site to that S3 bucket; in my case I mapped ‘media.torusknot.com’ to ‘media.torusknot.com.s3.amazonaws.com’. That allows me to access any files I upload to that S3 bucket via ‘http://media.torusknot.com/somefile.jpg’. You do just need to set the ACLs on the files & the bucket to make sure public access is allowed.

Finally, if you want to stream video files via a Flash player from S3 to another domain, you also have to tell Flash that it’s ok for the content to be pulled in from a different domain. Create a file called ‘crossdomain.xml’ in the bucket, with these contents:

<cross-domain-policy>
<site-control permitted-cross-domain-policies="all"/>
</cross>

That allows the media to be accessed from anywhere - you can be more specific if you want but this is the simplest approach.

Once again I’m using the excellent FlowPlayer; my only issue with it is that the ‘buffering’ animation seems to not work all the time (so be patient if you’re viewing the high quality version).

Gotta love this cloud computing business

I blogged a few months ago about my concern regarding the precedents being set by the Northern Rock and Bear Stearns debacles - that investment bankers and city executives can take outrageous risks, bag huge bonuses and get into a situation that for the sake of the economy, the government has to step in and sort it out.

If only that had been the end of it; I don’t think anyone really thought it was, but since then things have really gone south. In the USA we’ve had the state effectively re-nationalising Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, and they’re now debating a $700bn rescue package to buy bad assets from a host of financial institutions in order to ‘extract the poison’ from the markets.

Now, as before I completely understand that, in the immediate aftermath of a train-wreck such as this, you have to concentrate on damage limitation and short-term recovery. That doesn’t mean, however, that we should stop asking searching questions - the world has been placed in a woeful position thanks to a comparatively small group of people who benefitted from continuously feeding the insatiable credit monster, no matter what the realistic repayment prospects were for those debts. It’s typical commission-based salesman behaviour - close the sale, let the accounts department worry about the rest.

I’m glad to see that the US congress haven’t just rubber-stamped the rescue bill, and are asking serious questions about future guidance & regulation on the market and its operators. The Wall Street guys will tell you that interference and regulation just inhibit the market and make everything worse, but I believe that recent events rubbish that claim; if the market was truly self-sufficient and self-regulating, it wouldn’t have gotten itself into the position where it needed a handout from regular people’s tax dollars to avert a total meltdown. Clearly short-term greed overwhelmed good sense, and those in this market acted like children who didn’t know when to stop eating junk food - except in this case, everyone ends up with a stomachache. Like children, if they can’t figure out for themselves how to behave, then they need a responsible adult to make those decisions for them. Trust is earned, and the financial sector essentially frittered all that trust away having a giant party, and there must be consequences.

Some people will blame the culture of credit and say that the market was just responding to that, and so it shouldn’t be held entirely accountable, and I say hogwash. Sure you can blame the people who took out loans they couldn’t afford to a degree, but come on - these were unlikely to be financially savvy people, and at the end of the day it’s up to the lender to evaluate repayment prospects rationally. After all, if they don’t get their money back, they’ll go out of business. In this case though, the financial wizards concocted another one of their ‘vehicles’ which magically allowed dubious debt to be repackaged and resold, effectively becoming somebody elses problem. What a marvellous invention! We can take all the risks we want, collect our fat bonuses and just keep hiding all our crap under a giant rug in the spare room. No-one will ever find it, right?

This is not responsible behaviour, it’s reprehensible. The vast majority of regular people work hard, are prudent with their money, think hard about lending or borrowing money, and don’t make the kinds of basic affordability errors these so-called financial experts were making. After all, regular people have to live with the results of their actions, so prudence is a wise stance. Mistakes in the financial sector, however, result in damage mostly to the lower echelons of their workforce, crippling problems for the rest of the public, desperate measures from government; yet the execs still get to keep their huge bonuses earned during the previous years.

After all the mess is cleaned up, I hope those that benefitted from the years leading up to this situation are held to account. Enron, Nick Leeson - they were nothing compared to this. The culture in the upper echelons of corporate banking is clearly fundamentally broken, and both governments and the industry owe it to regular people to resolve it, not just with short-term bail-outs, but with fundamental change. Something is badly wrong in the financial sector, and they’ve proven themselves incapable or unwilling to sort it out before it resulted in pain for everyone else. Because of that, they’ve forfeited their right to decide what happens next - behave like a greedy child, and you deserve to be treated like one.

I just watched the Little Big Planet beta video that VG247 posted, and I have to say well done to Media Molecule for creating a game with a definite British feel to it (as well as it still looking damn interesting). I complained a while back about the overt Americanisation in so much of the output of British studios in recent years, losing a lot of the regional quirkiness that I think enhances content from any country, so I’m glad to see the spirit is not dead. In particular I liked the use of the ‘gallery’ music from Take Hart, which is hugely appropriate. Great way to get the credits actually watched too. LBP remains the one exclusive that piques my interest on PS3 and I’m looking forward to having a play with it on a friends machine.

I’ve read that Fable 2 has a definite British slant to it too, I’m looking forward to seeing how that turns out next month.

One of the problems with doing most of your business internationally is that you’re at the mercy of currency exchange rates, with the ever-present possibility of losing money just because the market changed. In the last couple of years the Pound has steadily got stronger against the Dollar, meaning it’s not a case of whether I lose, but rather how much. It has also meant that for new work I either have to stick to my Pound rates and risk being less competitive, or just accept a lower & ever-depreciating Dollar rate in order to secure the work.

Over the last month though, things have suddenly changed. The UK housing market is in free-fall, and most recently the Chancellor gave a rather unexpectedly candid interview in which he basically admitted that the UK economy is up a certain creek without a certain paddling device. Nice of him to be honest about it, but the markets aren’t used to such lack of spin and reacted quite badly (being as they are twitchy, caffeine-overdosed sheep suffering from chronic panic attacks) - and promptly leaped off a metaphorical cliff, as did the exchange rate. Perhaps the Chancellor’s honesty is attributable to those eyebrows - I’m guessing they make bluffing considerably more difficult

Lots of people are now lamenting on the news & talk panels about how this will affect the price of imports, but there’s never a shortage of people to go on these programs declaring that we’re all doomed and we might as well throw ourselves under the next passing bus. Personally I find it rather ridiculous because these are the same people that were lamenting when the rate went up in the first place, because it would cripple all the exporters in Britain (and we might as well throw ourselv….you get the idea).

Personally, I’m glad - the Pound/Dollar rate has finally returned to about what it was when I went into full-time business in 2006 ($1.77 ish), having dropped over 10% in a month. I wouldn’t mind if it dropped a bit lower - I was quite happy when it was about 1.6 personally. Sure I’ll pay more if I buy something from the States, but far more money comes in my direction from there than the other way around.

So, to the Chancellor: thank you, Darling!

More patent silliness from those idiots in the US Patent Office, as they get exploited by soulless corporate types again:

US Patent 7415666: Method and system for navigating paginated content in page-based increments

I really can’t imagine how messrs. Sellers, Grantham and Dersch can sleep at night, having officially claimed that calculating how far to advance down a document when you hit the PageDn is a significant innovation that warrants the protection of 20-year exclusivity that a patent brings. It beggars belief that an engineer could possibly think that way - I’m guessing a company-sponsored discount lobotomisation scheme, or perhaps it’s enough to run internal training courses such as ‘TKNGTHPSS101: Stifling innovation by patenting the bleeding obvious’.

Time to stop this nonsense. Now.

I read today that ‘Pentagon uber-hacker’ (if you believe the US authorities, who presumably don’t want you to think that their security systems are akin to wet tissue paper) Gary McKinnon has lost his appeal in the Lords against his extradition to the USA. I think we can all feel sorry that a misguided but definitely non-malicious geek is going to get the book thrown at him.

Coincidentally, we also watched Sneakers last night, after I finally got around to buying it on DVD. It’s still one of my favourite films, even though occasionally it errs on being film-friendly rather than technically realistic (accoustic couplers in 1992?). The cast is fantastic, the script is great, and the appeal of a bunch of non-conformist, philanthropic hackers coming out on top is enduring.

What a shame life doesn’t imitate fiction a little more often.

The debate about whether Resident Evil 5 is racist or not continues to simmer. It’s easy to coldly and calmly rationalise the scenes that RE5 depicts on the basis that since it’s set in Africa, the chances are that the majority of the zombies are going to be black - it would be pretty stupid for it to be otherwise. Makes perfect sense. But, the fact is that the depiction of a white guy striding through an African village, gunning down the local populace, even if they are zombies, cannot be taken in isolation when there is far too much painful and rather recent history involved here - RE5 may be just adhering to common sense, but it invokes imagery which has strong parallels with real-life racism and oppression. I don’t think RE5 is itself racist at all, but I do think it is insensitive, and blind to the real-world context in which it exists. Imagine if instead the game featured a set piece where in order to destroy the zombie horde, you had to blow up a skyscaper in a major US city. That isn’t advocating terrorism and is explained by a valid plot device, but I’m sure people would find the imagery hugely distasteful. This is a case of game content being perfectly reasonable in a vacuum, but the real-world context makes it inappropriate.

Yes, you can say that RE4 had the exact same issues because all the zombies were Spanish - thus RE5 is no more racist than RE4. This is entirely true - but it’s also an irrelevant argument. This isn’t about RE5 being racist, it’s about certain elements of RE5’s imagery having very stong resonance with dark moments in real-world history. The simple fact is that the same kind of recent history of oppression, dominion and enslavement doesn’t exist in connection with the Spanish, and when it comes to subjects like this, history & context is relevant, and gamers who scoff at the sensitivities RE5 disturbs, even tangentally, are blind, ignorant, or both.

You could claim that society has progressed to an extent that images like this, which are not in substance connected with that history and do have a valid plot justification, should be viable because to avoid them in fact avoids dealing with / discussing that history, and in fact making it an issue perpetuates the race arguments. I wish we were at such a cold and logical juncture, but the problem is that these issues are not really historical yet. I recently saw on TV some reactions from regular US citizens to Obama’s ascendence to the Democratic candidacy (something I personally welcomed), and was appalled to hear a few of them say that despite being democrats, they wouldn’t support Obama because he was black, or were ‘considering their position’ based on that factor. I was appalled, not only that someone should think that’s an issue, but that they were willing to say it on camera, to an international audience, and act like it’s a totally cogent argument. The 21st century didn’t feel so progressive all of a sudden.

So, no matter how much RE5 might be able to logically explain the hordes of black zombies that must be dispatched, and thus not be racist in itself, the imagery it uses has too much resonance to be taken outside of the context of our imperfect world. The fact that the designers seem to have failed to see that is quite surprising to me, although I’m aware that Japan isn’t the most racially aware of countries. Plus, their argument that simple statistics denote that most of the zombies will be black doesn’t explain why the main character is white. I realise this is probably because they’re carrying forward a character from previous titles in the series, but isn’t it actually more believable that a local, so far uninfected by the zombie virus, would be making a stand rather than waiting for some American to fly over and save the day? After all in the original Resident Evil it was a local town law enforcer who was first on the case, so why is it different here? You can’t use common sense for one thing and ignore it for another. I’m not sure the protests would have been entirely absent had that been done, but I’m certain they would have been far less acute.

I’m not trying to be politically correct for the sake of it here, and like I say I don’t believe RE5 is itself racist. You should be able to have a game about zombies in any configuration and it shouldn’t be a race issue - after all with equality should come the equal right to be turned into a zombie and then blown away (in a virtual sense). But to pretend that history never happened, that we live in an equal world already, and that sensitivities around certain types of imagery don’t exist is frankly ludicrous. At the end of the day I don’t find RE5 offensive or racist, but I can definitely see how it has the potential to be construed as such for some people, particularly those who don’t know the RE history or who aren’t gamers, and ignoring that or saying it doesn’t exist, or is only present in ’stupid people’ is plain wrong. We should be concentrating on getting to the stage where there isn’t any reason for anyone to find such things offensive, but pretending that we’re there already is turning a blind eye to reality.

Grr. I hate it when departing politicians, particularly unpopular ones, decide to do a ‘farewell tour’. They’re an unmitigated waste of time, resources and news coverage - Blair did it and I found it grossly distasteful then, and now it’s Bush’s turn. The very act of touring countries shaking hands, getting all chummy with the native leaders is so undignified - the personal relationships they’re seeking to form / rejuvenate serve nobody but the individuals themselves, since once the administration changes it’s a total reset. Thus, I see these tours as self-indulgent ego stroking - no change there then for Mr Bush. He’s doing his trademark brash smirk / swagger combination in Downing Street today, and no doubt getting on the tits of most British people he meets, even if the crushing weight of his ignorance won’t let him recognise it.

Bush is already a has-been, with his only remaining notable acts likely to be a few last-minute pardons or favours for his chums before his sweaty hands are prised from the tiller of the economic powerhouse of the world. He’s clearly thinking about his legacy - but having presided over arguably the darkest period in American politics since at least Nixon, and in all likelyhood surpassing even that, this man has absolutely nothing to be proud of, except perhaps spawning an unintentional bi-product - that he has hopefully reinvigorated the more intelligent citizens of the USA to get involved in politics again to try to make sure that an administration like this doesn’t get their hands on power next time.

So, sod off Bush, you swaggering, arrogant, bigoted, egotistical ignoramus. Please do let the door hit you on the ass on the way out, assuming you can figure out how to open it in the first place.

My Rock Band drum mods arrived today, they took a week to arrive which isn’t bad considering they had to meander their way from the Land of the Free (ish) via regular US letter post.

Drum Pads
I decided to go for drum pads from RocPadz, which are basically just circular cut mouse mats with a rigid back. I went with these for a number of reasons, such as that the neoprene rubber is hard wearing and long lasting (unlike foam pads which quickly lose their effect). These pads also scored highly in reviews for ‘bounce’ which can make playing easier, and they were also rated highly for the QM drum set which I have. The other main contender was DrumSoft, but while their pads are nice looking, they seemed a little too delicate for my liking - reviews were very keen to point out that you could rip the top surface if you weren’t careful during installation, which made me think they might not stand up to long-term abuse as well. The only downside to the RocPadz is that they’re a little expensive for 4 modified mouse mats - you could actually just buy yourself some regular office mouse mats, cut them to size and get some rubber glue to apply them with, but a combination of laziness and the fact that the dollar is weak meant I decided to just go with the prefabs.

Installation was very easy, they even supply you with a little alcohol swab to clean the pads with first which I thought was a nice touch. The result seems very good - the noise from the pads is definitely reduced, and the fact that the drum sticks bounce more really does feel better when playing. The only downside is that it seems to very slightly exacerbate the lack of sensitivity around the edge of the drum pads, which was already there anyway but seems slightly worse. However the middle area of the pads, where you had to play anyway to avoid missing notes, are not affected at all, they’ve still highly sensitive and a very light tap will trigger them. I hope to play more over the coming days.

Kick Pedal
The kick pedal mod should be a familiar one by now, an aluminium plate from Pedal Metal. I went with the billeted metal version because it looked nicer than the regular diamond-plate - yeah, I’m a sucker for aesthetics. I also paid a little more to get the hinge replacement bit too - I don’t need it yet, and haven’t installed it because it’s more fiddly - I figure I’ll keep it as an emergency reserve in case my hinge does break, so I don’t have to wait for a replacement.

Installation was easy, once you get over the fact that you’re invalidating your warranty by screwing stuff into your plastic pedal. But I figure the warranty on the pedal is pretty useless anyway, since it’s the one thing that is highly likely to keep breaking in it’s original form under any long period of stress (given the cost of the kit, it’s scandalous that it isn’t already reinforced with metal), so I might as well make it more robust myself. Once it’s on, while it doesn’t make any difference to the play experience itself, it’s nice not to have to worry so much about how hard you’re stomping it, particularly as I’m starting to play on Hard now which is bringing in some rapid-fire kick pedal action in places. The main thing is that it totally eliminates the rather disconcerting ‘flex’ in the pedal if you pressed it between the hinge and the spring - this pedal ain’t for bending now.

So, I’m very happy with these mods - it’s yet more money down the throat of the ravenous Rock Band monster, but it’s so much gosh darned fun I really can’t hate it for it

Web 2.0. It’s a horrible, marketing-speak term that deserves the unending derision it is generally given by techs the world over, but nevertheless it’s stuck. Depending on who you ask, Web 2.0 either means the technology that make current darlings like Facebook and GMail work (such as AJAX), or the underlying principles of the regular users of websites having a more direct community involvement in the shaping of content they view. I guess it’s actually both. People have heralded this progression as a new renaissance for the Internet - personally I just see it as a natural incremental progression of technology and not the sea change that it is often sold as, there were pockets of the Internet doing this stuff long before the term was coined, it’s just more mainstream now.

However, there’s a trend that I’ve seen arise from Web 2.0 which I find a little disconcerting, and that’s an increasing centralisation of control and increasing reliance by the Internet-surfing public on a small number of technology players. On the one hand, we have personally hosted blogs, forums, comments etc where content is truly democratic / meritocratic; no-one controls what I say or do on this blog but me, and I expose precisely what I want to and no more. On the other hand, you have corporate players who provide hosted services, and increasingly this is what’s becoming what most ‘normal’ people associate with Web 2.0 - sites like Facebook, YouTube, Bebo, GMail are all controlled by corporations who make their money by attracting eyeballs. The content may be user-generated, but control over that content once posted is very much centralised and divested from the point of origin - convenient for sure, but what exactly are we giving up by being so dependent on them?

Freedom of speech has been one of the core tenets of the Internet from its inception. However, corporations have vested interests and potential exposure to litigation, so any service they host must be regulated, which is at odds with this principle. The result is of course censorship, often harsh and unilateral (particularly if Viacom took a dislike to you) and it has plagued most of the big names at one time or another. It’s because there’s a fundamental conflict of interest here - the corporations hosting these services make their money by hosting user content, but some of that content can get them into trouble, or ruffle feathers that it is not in their business interests to ruffle. Sure, these centralised sites can pretend to be the voice of the people, but they’re really not - they’re just corporations who have figured out how to make money by being a conduit for people’s Internet behaviour. In the end, despite the rethoric they’re ultimately not there for the individuals, or to make the world a better place, they’re there to make money - and individuals and content that isn’t compatible with that model can and will be excluded.

There are other issues too, probably the most important one being privacy. Protection of personal data from corporate exploitation has always been a serious issue in the UK (let’s ignore for a second privacy from our own governments which has gone backwards in recent years) but increasingly people are giving away their personal information to companies hosted in regions which have little or no such protection. Sure, a site may have a privacy policy, and perhaps give you supposed control over who you’re exposing the information to, but if they’re negligent and allow your data to slip into the wrong hands, there’s really very little statutory recourse, meaning data protection can never truly be a top priority for these companies, not compared to shoehorning in new features to beat the competition or to find ways of generating revenue. With identity theft on the rise, it’s alarming that so many people are willing to risk entrusting their personal information to third parties in juristictions with flimsy protections, and to companies who can sometimes pay lip service to privacy.

My opinion on this is that these problems are inherent to using third parties to act as hosts for our information, or rather allowing those third parties to control how the information is stored and regulated (and if you think that interface on your Facebook profile is true control, think again - at the end of the day your data is sitting unencrypted in a datacenter somewhere and is far from secure). They’re never going to care as much about our information as we do - with millions of users and a business to run, how could they? Maybe you don’t care that much since you’re just using these sites for personal photos and simple information, but I think this is a slippery slope. Do you know where the dividing line is between facts you’d be happy to be accidentally exposed by a server breach, and those you would not? Perhaps it isn’t a line, maybe it’s more of a grey area, since it’s increasingly possible to take a bunch of disparate information and piece together a greater profile from that? And can you deny that more and more of your life is transitioning to the internet, and that at some point you might look at everything you’ve given to the likes of Facebook and wish you hadn’t? And, what if you find that you can’t delete it?

Web 2.0 and the current vision of what ‘the cloud’ should be tends to revolve around technology companies holding repositories of information which we all must feed in order to form these rich online information exchanges. However, I really don’t believe this is necessary. Yes, there is a need for ‘hubs’ in the Internet, focal points where people can discover each other and connections. However, there’s really no reason why all our potentially private data needs to be centralised, under someone elses control. Right now it’s the only way for most people, because rolling your own hosting requires more technical knowledge and resources than most people have at their disposal, and ‘connecting the dots’ can only currently be done on centralised sites. I think we should be working towards developing technologies that make it easier for individuals to be in charge of their own information, not to give it away to third parties, and to form and be in control of their own connections - directly, not just via some centralised site which provides a mere illusion of control.

Personally, I see the current situation as a step on the path, and that the eventual goal should be to ‘re-democratise’ the Internet, where users are once again in full control of their data, exposing and exchanging only what they want to, directly with their trusted contacts and not via an untrusted middle man. Every Internet user has an ISP, and that ISP generally provides them with additional services like a mailbox and some variable amount of web hosting. All these technologies are based on standardised protocols and well-known principles, and generally are delivered via open source software. They’re true commodities - and what’s surprising is that this base feature set has barely changed in over a decade, and yet the way people use the Internet has changed almost beyond recognition. Imagine this - what if, as part of your ISP service, you were provided not just with simple web hosting, but a local version of Facebook? One where all the data you post is held locally on the ISP’s server (with appropriate quotas, but hey, disks are cheap), and preferably encrypted. Let’s now say that you can syndicate / exchange elements of that information to third parties that you trust over standardised protocols - exchanged over a secure channel if desired and the source / destination verified using digital signatures or common authentication systems like OpenID. All those updates you usually post to a central site can easily be desemminated directly in an ad-hoc fashion to your friends in a push model, or in a pull model for new joiners. But, you may ask, even with the automated syndication / synchronisation, how do you find your friends in the first place without a central system? Well, via the search engines we’ve all used for years - you will obviously need a regular public profile web page for unvalidated users to land on, and automated search engine submission; there’s no reason why specialist networking providers like Facebook couldn’t still act as hubs for just the public information to allow this discovery to happen, without having to hold sensitive or personal data.

In a nutshell the advantages of this approach over current centralised services include:

• Control of personal data remains in your own hands; you can choose what to give out, control encryption etc
• No censorship
• No need to maintain multiple profiles in many different systems
• No dependence on third parties, they are a value-add, not an inherent requirement
• Security based on open standards, transparency and trust are key

Much of the technology required to do this already exists, and has done for years, what’s needed is the vision and development effort to pull it all together and make it truly usable for the mass-market. If something like this is to fly, it has to be as easy to use as Facebook even though the underlying tech to make it happen is a lot more complex (as any decentralised system is). I think it’s an effort worth making though; personally I strongly believe that we’re setting ourselves up for a fall by entrusting too much of our data to third parties, and that in years to come, as people look to put more and more of their personal and business lives up on the Internet, eventually people will be crying out for a way to wrench control of their information back. Think of the web-of-trust systems we rely on for PGP communications, and now imagine that extended to a social network model, peer to peer, decentralised control, encrypted and validated via trusted signatures, not some self-appointed third-party web site.

The hard part is finding a business model to support it, because to do something this ambitious will undoubtedly require funding. Although I strongly believe that putting the power back in the hands of the people is the right thing to do, when you stack it up as a business pitch against the current approach of forcing users to give all their data to you, and to be totally reliant on you on an ongoing basis, it doesn’t stack up particularly well. Plus, everyone is already familiar with the ‘host user content, get eyeballs, profit!’ sequence so it’s a relatively easy sell. Perhaps the answer is not to chase the stratospheric growth targets of typical Web 2.0 companies, but to ramp something up quietly and organically, funding via lightweight (optional) hub search services and provisioning to ISPs and/or early adopters. Open source is totally inherent in the approach too, both to promote open adoption but also to instill trust - in order to fully trust a system like this, its inner workings have to be completely open for anyone to scrutinise.

Well, there we go, my vision for the future of exchange of personal information on the Internet. If any VCs are reading this, feel free to discuss it with me further