Congrats to the entire Google Geo team. Well done.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-to-work-with-joyent-to-port-nodejs-to-windows-azure/9802

Node.js + Azure is a powerful combination, letting us run the same JS/JSON in the browser, server and database with an event model that makes scalability a breeze. Good stuff!

I am incredibly excited that this is being officially supported. Go team!

Is WebGL actually harming your computer in any way? I doubt that’s a serious or credible claim. And, frankly, if Microsoft has taken a formal position against WebGL, no one I know got the memo.

It would be an unfortunate position for Microsoft to take, IMO, because it gives the impression that Microsoft runs away from security issues that require some modest technical mitigation.

After all, what is an operating system but a series of security apparatuses coupled with Hardware Access Layers and useful software development APIs on top?

WebGL has the latter two in spades and most of the former, but clearly needs a bit more assistance on the security angle before everyone is “all warm and fuzzy.”

Operating systems and security mitigation are what Microsoft is known for. It’s our bread and butter. Why would we run away from that challenge with such an alarmist attitude of “shut it off, shut it off, it might hurt me!”

I think we would face these potential threats head on, as we’ve always done.

I mean, the exact same graphics hardware that WebGL uses is available to native applications running DirectX or OpenGL on your PC and/or phone. Are we going to ban downloaded games because they might, in some universe of possibilities, harm our computer or cause us to, God forbid, reboot? No. At most we give a security warning that this .exe might be harmful and let you make the choice.

Are we going to ban Chrome and Firefox as “unsafe” if they continue to unabashedly support WebGL? Are we claiming those guys don’t care about security and aren’t working hard to mitigate any remaining issues as soon as possible?

No. That’s not a tenable position, IMO. WebGL will be running on my PC and yours, one way or another. Microsoft will need to deal with it. And more to the point, we can actually help make it much more robust if we engage instead of apparently running away.

Remember Plugins?

I was mainly disappointed in those posts because I recall vividly that it was Internet Explorer’s pioneering work with plugins (specifically ActiveX controls) that help build the rich interactive web as it exists today. Plugins created capabilities not found in browsers, even to this day. Flash is a native plugin. Silverlight is a native plugin. Google Earth, running in your browser, is a native code plugin. RealVideo, YouTube, and FarmVille would arguably not even exist without plugins (okay, that last one might have been a blessing).

However, ActiveX controls were, at one point, the primary vulnerability for browser-borne attacks on your PC. They are, after all, native code with hardware access that could run malicious operations, perform disk writes, read your personal data and plant viruses. Indeed the MSDN site on ActiveX controls begins with “An ActiveX control can be an extremely insecure way to provide a feature.”

Yes, indeed.

Somehow we survived the existential threat of native code plugins taking over our PCs, or at least we made it through alive. The web prospered in rich user experiences primarily on IE, while the main residual downside of plugins, even today, is that they require user confirmation, code signing, and in some cases circulation of known or suspected threat information among browsers to help block attacks. That’s not ideal, but yet we survived and received the benefits of plugins on the whole.

Well, that’s not to say plugins are all safe. How often does your Flash plugin need to be updated (weekly?) to address vulnerabilities to keep it safe from attacks? If WebGL can help obsolete those security holes, it could actually be in some ways safer than what exists today.

WebGL is not a plugin but rather a “built-in” and it doesn’t ever allow the extreme native access of ActiveX — no disk writes, no main memory access, no CPU code apart from officially signed graphics drivers. A shader can really only affect your graphics hardware and screen output. The most severe vulnerability we know of today is that it might hang your machine. Worst-case solution: reboot.

We can do better. We can require WebGL shaders to be proactively trusted in the same way plugins are trusted and largely avoid the worst threats. We can do even better with code analysis, collaborative filtering, and hardware or OS watchdog  timers (e.g., any shader taking more than a fraction of a second can be reset without anyone complaining). Yes, we can. But if the choice comes down to running WebGL or not, I’d live with a popup asking permission to access my graphics hardware, as we do for GPS, camera, etc..

What’s going on?

From the one discussion I’ve had with leaders from IE, I can reassure folks outside Microsoft that this issue is actually about security and doing the right thing for users. It’s not about “GL” vs. “DX” in the name, as some suggest. It’s not about wanting to disrupt any other browsers, as Microsoft has often been accused. These leaders are genuinely concerned about the possibility that someone on a malicious website could use WebGL to disrupt your experience in a serious way, and incidentally that it would appear to be Microsoft’s fault…

Users are not very discriminating in their blame, after all.

Those leaders may not be fully aware of how big a movement WebGL really is and how it is going to transform the web yet again. But the reality is, if Internet Explorer does not support WebGL and WebGL nevertheless becomes the de facto standard for 3D on the web (which it will, IMO), then IE will be in an uncompetitive position to either help fix any problems and moreover retain or grow market share relative to other browsers. That would be sad, esp. given how long the product cycles are and how long it would take to course-correct. We could miss the boat entirely.

Now, I own Microsoft stock. I want Microsoft to succeed, and that includes IE. If Chrome, Firefox, and Safari support WebGL on Windows and there are new PC-only vulnerabilities found, do you really think people will blame Google, Mozilla, and Apple and praise IE?

Not a chance. They’ll blame Microsoft. They’ll blame the OS. They’ll blame the company. They’ll blame the logo sitting in the corner of the screen that just went blue or blank and say how “this never would happen on Chrome or OS X.” (ignoring market share)

All Microsoft would likely achieve by not supporting and improving WebGL securely is that the people who could really fix the few remaining issues (driver writers, hardware manufacturers, OS makers) will try less hard and take that much longer than they would with IE and DirectX demanding results.

Meanwhile, IE would potentially lose market share due to popular interactive experiences that are not achievable there. And any sort of weaker “safe” shader-less  alternative that IE might conceivably propose in a too-little-too-late DOA standard will make it appear as if IE is trying to disrupt the market, which I don’t believe is their goal. They really want to do the right thing, but it  may not be very clear what that is until the Web clearly and audibly demands it.

There is only one way through this maze. The way forward is to address the security issues head on, get IE the most robust implementation of WebGL on the market, and lead the industry to a new level of user experience, including NUI and rich 3D graphics, hand in hand.

Speaking only for myself, as always, I fully intend to use WebGL as one important tool for applications and platforms I develop for Microsoft. That means “wherever it’s supported.” For other cases, we’ll have to use creative fallbacks, lesser functionality, and/or resort to plugins or augmented browsers for cross-browser capabilities once again. Our charter at Bing requires working cross-platform to reach the greatest number of people possible and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

The kind of experiences we want to deploy are nothing short of revolutionary – 3D for the masses, tying the real world  to the information space that surrounds us in our everyday lives. This means phones, PCs, and the like will require the kinds of rich, real-time interactive 3D interfaces that right now only WebGL can offer in a cross-platform, stable, browser-based way.

There is clearly only one direction forward for Microsoft and 3D on the web.

WebGL is the way.

With my current project, the situation is much improved blog-wise. We concluded recently that the best way to accomplish our goals was to be open and even solicit cooperation from outside. Quite a concept!

The project’s name is Read/Write World.

If you haven’t heard about it, here’s Blaise’s (my boss’) recent keynote at this year’s Where 2.0 conference on Earth Day:

Below is a link to a live demo we recorded last week of something I’ve spent the prior week or so getting barely polished enough to show.

It’s a real-time editor for the Read/Write World. What you’re seeing is me flying around the map, sifting and editing some data by moving it around in real-time, incorporating (shown with the red lines) real-time match results from a great new service that better connects bits of data together (photos in this case) by visual similarity, aka feature matching.

Behind this visual front-end lies the unseen but much heavier effort of the last six months — real-time read/write Azure services ready to handle ungodly amounts of information. Yes, real-time, as kind of like a MMO, except we’re not tracking players but rather changes in the world itself. Building that, and a new (in some ways old) language called RML, to help describe that information, has taken up most of my time.

Our first goal is really straightforward, but not necessarily easy. Microsoft has lots of data in lots of formats. We also have to cater to every browser, every mobile device and platform known to Man. Multiply those together and you need a thousand talented people to just to keep parity with the rest of the world. What we needed was a way to make one application use one data format do more with less effort. In mathematical terms, 20×10 = 200 but 1×1 = 1.

Good in theory, hard to do in practice. But if we succeeded, the benefits would accrue not just to us, but across the board.

So on the “one application” front, we’ve focused on HTML5+CSS3[D]+WebGL as the most promising way forward (some Silverlight too, just since you wondered). On the data front, we’re building this crazy simple metadata format called RML. Here’s my quick writeup on “What is RML?” if you’re interested.

tl;dr: it’s just basic JSON structures with enough reflection to make it so we can transform to/from other formats/versions very easily, and write butt simple webapps that use it and render it to boot. At the meta level, it’s an Entity-Relationship model woven into a world-scale scenegraph.

Now, one of the debates we had was, does it need to be a standard? Our conclusion, which I’ll elaborate more on in my talk at the ARE2011 conference next month, is “no.” We’re not trying to change anyone else’s standard, nor do we require (or expect) that other people adopt our format as their own. We’re even expecting our own users will grow and change RML organically to suit their needs, without necessarily asking permission. We’re trying to make that easy, supported, and robust. A lot of this is inspired by Open Street Map, btw, which has very compatible goals.

Our intention is to gradually make public some beefy servers that can read and write this RML stuff, mostly visual data for now, such that anyone can easily store and retrieve their geospatial metadata here, for free, and even write apps that do useful things with it, for free.

Caveat: we fully respect copyright and claim no implicit or explicit ownership over other people’s data. So while our service might be free, some of the data we refer to might still reserve rights. For example, the images might be hosted elsewhere and carry a copyright tag. We will respect and pass-on those assertions to any consumer of the data, of course, but still strongly encourage content owners to choose creative commons wherever possible). Beyond that, our big “value-prop” is that we’ll crawl the data we store, trying to find new ways to connect it so it’s more useful than just a list of random cruft sorted by lat/long. That’s one of the hardest and most unique parts of the system.

So, to cut this off before it becomes a novel, between this site and the official ReadWriteWorld.net, I and others on my team will try to keep things pretty current and informative. The main difference is as always that RealityPrime contains no official Microsoft spokesmanship but merely my own personal opinions, which carry no warranty and can change without notice.

Last caveat: I might not be able to answer the most likely questions just yet, especially about availability, betas, and so on. That’s still being worked out. I’ll even be a bit hazy on the specifics of our functional RML format right now, mainly because it’s undergoing rapid evolution as we throw more and different collaborators into the mix. But any questions I can’t answer will go into a queue for the official FAQ.

Change, in this case, is good.

Photosynth for iPhone

Photosynth for the iPhone has finally hit the app store this week. It’s doing exceptionally well, and it’s not surprising. Taking photos on the phone is a very narrow experience. This app redefines that experience to let you take photos as wide as you want, up to a full 360 degrees. You can then publish your photos and share them in full quality.

Kudos to the Panorama team for hitting a homerun on their first time (standalone) at bat.

I believe this flooding effect is called liquefaction, whereby the ground can turn to quicksand in seconds. It doesn’t help that this is on reclaimed land in Toyko harbor, because the next thought after “holy shit” is Tsunami.

The author of the study had a financial interest in his so called findings. No one could reproduce those findings, though at the behest of concerned parents, many tried. And by now everyone of any integrity has disavowed the entire episode.

By that I mean to say that Jenny McCarthy claims the whole thing is a well orchestrated plot against the good doctor Wakefield who promoted the original autism/vaccine link. Yes, every scientist working for peanuts in terms of public money has decided conspire to ruin the life of one innocent man who stood to make considerable money from his so-called discovery. Brilliant plan! (reminds me of one not-too-bright former co-worker of mine who claimed the whole global warming debate was a devious plot by scientists to make more money).

Is it possible to issue a class action lawsuit against people who cause mass public stupidity leading to demonstrable harm? In my mind, it’s not much different than the fire in a theater scenario, especially when there is no fire.

Well, here’s an article about some election science that should be covered everywhere. The authors were apparently too busy to tweet, but they found the Washington Post just the same.

Update: here’s a blog roundup on #iranelection/Twitter that highlights the possibility that much of the so-called Twitter revolution is actually just ye old neocons up to their old tricks. Funny how TechCrunch fanboys (editors) are going ga ga over the fact that a neocon on FoxNews claimed twitter founders should get the nobel prize for keeping their servers running through the crisis. I’ll buy that for a dollar!

You will want.

Update: There’s a video on XBox.com that shows some of what they intend to deliver, with a disclaimer at the bottom. Also, check out Milo. Most impressive.

It’s easier to just download the CSV file and look at it in Excel…