The Well and the Cathedral

Number one in a series on my favorite Cincinnati innovation/open source/collaborative projects, spaces, and events:

Hive13 (think: five one three)

Photo from Flickr: Projector Fun by p_vince

So like many of the raddest projects I’ll cover, I’m partial to Hive13 because I currently work with one of the main organizers, used to work with another, and also worked out of a studio space right next to the Hive13 space in Camp Washington, and so on and so forth, and my cousin went to grade school with your wife and oh! you went to Finneytown, how is so-and-so?? So Cincinnati.

In any case, the folks at Hive13 are doing some very exciting, very fun things. From code-driven graffiti projectors to big party light up bathroom walls they’re working on a host of great hacks. I was most excited about the DIY 3D printer. Very cool.

Learn more: Soapbox covered Hive13 recently. The organization has a frequently updated site that explains some of the great projects they’re working on as well.

Where: Hive13 is located at 2929 Spring Grove Avenue in the Anchor Building in the Camp Washington neighborhood of Cincinnati.

When: Stop by for a Tuesday evening meeting, or attend their party this Saturday, February 13th.

I have to start this in a self-effacing way. Really, the analytics show that this message won’t be read by many people, however, I really feel compelled to explain. Since early December I’ve been working hard and forming a new company with a group of Drupal-focused developers. It’s a great project; I’m very excited to be working with these folks in this field. So until things are a little more settled I’ll be head-down, working on building something new and great on the foundations of something old and wonderful.

This is a very exciting development for all of the people in the world who use non-Latin characters, which I would posit is the majority. This is a major step forward, in my opinion, for the availability of information in general (or as they used to say just a few years ago, it closes the digital divide). I think this article sums it up best:

Let’s get ready to 파티에 나가다! ICANN, the body that organises domain names on the Internet, has approved non-Latin characters in Web addresses and top-level domains.

ICANN has been massaging the DNS system for a couple of years to get it ready to handle Web addresses with non-English-language characters, encompassing everything from Arabic and Chinese characters to accented letters in French. That means URLs will go from using 37 possible characters to over 100,000.

“The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago,” said ICANN’s Peter Dengate Thrush.

The change should make the Web more democratic and global, since non-English-speaking surfers won’t be forced to use domain names that don’t reflect their own language. We won’t have too long to wait before we start seeing the new URLs. ICANN says that it will accept applications by 16 November, and sites will be online by 2010.

Adding support for the thousands of new characters required an overhaul of the DNS system, the backbone of the Internet that gives each connected computer its own unique ID in the form of an IP address. But the challenges posed by the change aren’t just technical.

The huge range of new characters will also give scammers a newly loaded gun for firing off spoof Web sites. Because some characters look similar or identical in different languages, scammers could replace a letter in a URL with another to try to redirect visitors to the wrong site. The scam would be very difficult for users to detect because, at first glance, the URL would look correct — only a computer could see that the letter ‘a’ in paypal.com has been replaced with a Cyrillic letter ‘a’, for example.

Makers of Web browsers have already started implementing changes to help surfers spot these fakes, by alerting them when an address uses a mixed character set, for instance.