Photo by MSH*

Is worrying about security early in your startup just like worrying about scaling, a distraction that will eat up valuable time and increase the chances you’ll fail? That’s something that’s on my mind as I watch the looming issue of Facebook App security. Once there’s a richer set of targets like the Paypal App, there will be a lot more malicious people trying to exploit any holes, and it’s practically impossible to prevent cross-site scripting. It feels like the period when every engineer knew that Windows was horribly insecure, but there hadn’t been enough of a user impact for anyone to care.

That analogy is interesting because Microsoft crushed the competition for over a decade, thanks in part to their fast development process, enabled by reusing old, insecure components as a foundation. It’s a classic worse-is-better scenario, where the unobserved lack of security meant less to the customers than improved features. The very long-term outcome wasn’t so good, the lack of security mauled their reputation and opened the door to a lot more competitors, but their strategy still created an immense amount of value.

If you could go back in time to the early 90’s, I think it would have been possible to avoid a lot of the security holes with some comparatively simple changes to the code that was written then. From the 386 onwards, there was enough processor support to start partitioning user level code from the OS, but there was never a strictly enforced model for security.

I’ve tried to learn from that in my own work. Security planning can easily turn into a tar-pit of architecture astronautics, but it is possible to have some simple principles that don’t get in the way. Most of the exploits that The Harmony Guy and others uncover with Facebook could be fixed if every operation required an authentication token, like a session ID. Make sure you escape all your user input before including it in an SQL query. Drop a feature or technology if there’s a high security risk. There’s no such thing as absolute security, but a little bit of paranoia at the outset will go a long way to safeguarding your customer’s information. Know what the vulnerable areas outside your control are, and make sure they’re on a list somewhere, for once you’re rich and famous enough to get something done about them.

Now Facebook’s in that position, I really hope they’re lobbying hard for a secure foundation for browser-based apps. For example, an expanded and standardized version of the IE-only "security=’restricted’" attribute could prevent a script in one element from touching anything outside itself in the document. They’re trying to build a sandbox through script-scrubbing, but the only sure-fire way to do that is within the browser. They have a window now before they start suffering from bad publicity, I hope they’re able to use it.

Photo by Michael Helleman

The world’s first nuclear meltdown happened 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles, and released hundreds of times as much radiation as Three Mile Island. And I’m betting you’ve never heard of it.

I was at the SMMTC board meeting on Thursday night, and two of the parks representatives were arguing about whether Runkle Canyon was owned by the National Park Service or another agency. I pulled out my iPhone to check it out on Google, but was surprised to see that most of the links mentioned a nuclear disaster. I’ve lived in Simi Valley for 5 years, Runkle Canyon is only a few miles from my house, and that was news to me.

Digging in deeper, I discovered that the world’s first commercial nuclear reactor was opened at Rocketdyne’s Santa Susana Laboratory in 1957, powering 1100 homes in nearby Moorpark. As an experimental facility, it had no concrete containment shell, and it was using the highly reactive element sodium as a cooling agent, rather than water. In 1959, the cooling system failed, 13 out of 43 fuel rods melted, and a large amount of radioactive gas was leaked into the air. No measurements were taken at the time, but the Santa Susana Field Laboratory Advisory Panel report estimates that the total radiation released could have been up to 500 times that of Three Mile Island.

For 20 years the accident was kept secret, with a small report stating that only one fuel rod had melted and no radiation was released. In 1979 a UCLA professor uncovered documents showing the true extent of the accident, and since then there’s been a struggle to reconstruct exactly how much contamination there was, and how to clean it up. Home developers were recently been pushing to buy the site from Boeing and build a residential housing development! Luckily there was a recent agreement to keep the area as open space as a new state park.

I’m still happy here in Simi Valley, but now I’ll be keeping a careful count to catch any newly sprouted fingers or toes. For more information on the accident itself, check out this History Channel excerpt:

Photo by Vlasta2

Towards the end of the Dark Ages in England, monks collected the known history of the world into a manuscript, and then updated it with short notes every year. It’s hard to truly know what the motivations of the people who wrote the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle were, but it’s fascinating to read through and think about what drove them to write it.

There’s a strong human urge to write about your world for an audience, to make a connection with other people, to understand it better by organizing your thoughts on paper, to grab a little bit of permanence in posterity, to influence events and to spread the word about good or bad news. It’s always been a minority activity, but as literacy and free time spread, more and more people kept first diaries, then blogs and other time-based chronicles like Twitter or Tumblr.

Only a tiny fraction of people online keep a blog or tweet, but almost everyone creates content that would attract some audience if it was shared, it’s just locked in emails. The writers of the Chronicle had to overcome massive obstacles to see their work distributed, now we’ve got a massive selection of free and easy services to do the job, so why is there comparatively little take-up? Life-streaming services like Friendfeed and Facebook’s own feed are the closest to mass-market self-publishing we’ve got, but even those don’t have much of what we write every day.

Part of the reason is the comfort of privacy. Emails can go to a small trusted set of people, and you can have confidence that your frankness won’t come back to haunt you. Blogs are the other end of the spectrum, absolutely anybody can see what you’re saying. Social networks and services like Twitter are somewhere in-between, with the idea of a limited set of friends who can see your content, but without the fine-grained control of email.

I have a vision of being able to right-click in your inbox, and publish the content of a message, either to one of several groups you’ve set up (close work colleagues, the whole company, friends), or the original recipients, or to the whole world. A lot of my email could be shared, there’s technical explanations, status updates and interesting discussion threads that would be safe and useful to make available. Imagine a company where that sort of publication internally was routine, you’d have a valuable resource to search for solutions for so many problems. The really appealing part for me is that its not requiring anyone to change their routine, they’ve already got that content, they just need to unlock it.

The results sure wouldn’t be as polished or organized as most blog posts, but getting a lot more people publishing by lowering the barrier to entry would unlock so much juicy information that’s currently gathering dust. People have shown that they’re a lot more willing to post on web forums and comment on blogs than they are to create their own formal posts. I think the future has to be in gathering together all those fragments into a centralized identity (something folks like Intense Debate and Lijit have recognized) but what’s missing is any way to make email content be a part of that conglomeration.