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Microsoft extends support for Office 365 on Windows 10 until October 2028, Samsung officially introduced the Galaxy S25 Edge, and Apple is introducing a new Accessibility Mode.

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Windows 10 support ends October next year. So what are your options if you want to keep it running past that date? Plus the EU has signed a contract to build its own Satellite broadband network. And Apple reported its fiscal 2024 fourth-quarter results, achieving a record revenue of $94.9 billion, 6% up over the previous year.

Starring Sarah Lane, Jenn Cutter, Patrick Norton, Len Peralta, Roger Chang, Joe.

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The last 120 years or so have seen tons of change for Korea, but what does the future hold? Tom shares what one heir is doing with their legacy.

Featuring Tom Merritt.

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Episode transcript:

On the 5th of September 1905, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, US President Teddy Roosevelt successfully mediated peace between Russia and Japan. The two Empires had been waging war in Manchuria since February 1904, focusing on control of the warm-water port of Port Arthur.

As one of the many provisions of the “Treaty of Portsmouth” Russia recognized Korea as part of Japan’s sphere of influence.

This did not go down well with the Joseon dynasty that had ruled Korea since the 1300s. Korea’s Joseon empire had slowly embraced a pro-Russian stance in opposition to Japan and to supplement support from China. Emperor Gojong had even spent a year in the Russian Legation in 1896 after the murder of his wife by a pro-Japanese faction.

The Emperor did not give up.

In 1907, Roosevelt prevailed on the nations of the world to hold a second “Hague Convention” in the Netherlands. The first had resulted in new rules of war and avenues to avoid it. This second conference included representatives from nations from every continent except Australia and Antarctica.

Emperor Gojong saw this as the last chance for Korea. He prepared three emissaries to secretly travel to the convention without Japan’s knowledge. Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II (yeah the one that would end his reign with the Bolshevik revolution) helped, by smuggling the emissaries into the conference hall without Japan’s knowledge.

But Japan found out. They objected to the emissaries entry on the basis that the treaty of 1905 gave them the right to represent Korea’s interests. The emissaries were turned away and did not get to plead their case in front of the countries of the world.

As a result, Japan deposed Emperor Gojong and installed his son, Sunjong as emperor and forced him to sign a succession of treaties that eventually resulted in the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910.

If Emperor Gojong had been able to protect his secrecy a little more, who’s to say if his emissaries were succeeded. If only he had the equivalent of a good VPN. Something to keep spies from seeing his traffic.

No. This isn’t. Ham-handed transition to a sponsor. But the descendant of Emperor Gojong, and heir to the throne, did create Private Internet Access, one of the most well-reviewed VPN’s on the planet. And then recreated the Joseon empire. With blockchain.

Let’s help you Know a Little More about Virtual Korea.

Andrew Lee was a geek. The Indianapolis native had studied at Purdue and the University of Buffalo, but like many tech entrepreneurs, focused on his own passions rather than getting a degree.

As a fan of IRC – Internet Relay Chat, Lee wanted a way to secure his conversations. IRC revealed IP addresses, which was something nefarious folks could use to track you. Especially if you traded in torrents. To protect yourself you needed a VPN, but there were a lot of untrustworthy VPNs out there. So, in 2009, Lee started London Trust Media with the aim of taking VPN mainstream. And in 2010 London Trust Media founded Private Internet Access, an open source VPN provider. PIA focused on privacy with a no logs policy, a kill switch and decent speeds. Deloitte audited PIA in 2022 and found its server configurations were not designed to identify users.

Lee’s activities after the founding of PIA mostly read like a typical tech entrepreneur. He got into Bitcoin in the early days. He started a bitcoin price tracker in 2013 called Mt. Gox Live, which was eventually sold to the ill-fated Mt. Gox cryptocurrency exchange. He acquired Freenode IRC in 2017.

And in 2018 he gained another title. Crown Prince.

Let’s go back to 1910. Emperor Sunjong has once again acquiesced to Japanese demands, and this time sealed the fate of Korea’s Joseon empire. Sunjong signed the Japan-Korea annexation treaty, making Korea part of Japan.

In thanks, Japan demoted Sunjong to King and he died in 1926. His powerless title passed to his brother Yi Un. Another brother Yi Kang had seniority, but had married a commoner and was passed over.

Eventually the allies defeated Japan in World War II. The liberation of Korea in 1945 brought about a republic in the south. The monarchy was not restored. While North Korea uses the word Joseon in its official name, it also does not recognise a royal family.

However the people still lived. There are many descendants of the royal court and more than one of them claim to be the legitimate heir to the throne. A few of them even lobby for the creation of a constitutional monarchy, similar to what exists in the United Kingdom. One of the claimants to the throne is Yi Kang’s son Yi Seok.

Yi Seok has a colorful history himself. He was born in Sarong palace in 1941 in the waning days of Japan’s occupation of Korea. With the founding of the Republic of Korea in 1945, the imperial family was sent out of the palace. Yi Seok struggled but eventually found success as a singer. The “singing prince,” Yi Seok, had a hit album called Pigeon House in 1967. He fought for Korea in the Vietnam War. He immigrated to the US for a time and worked as a landscaper, then returned to Korea in the 1990s. He eventually began working for the city of Jeonju’s tourism department and as a professor of history at Jeonju University.

Here’s the connection to our main story. In 2006, Yi Seok founded the Imperial Culture Foundation of Korea in order to lobby for a constitutional monarchy. Since the death of his cousin Yi Ku in 2005, Yi Seok considers himself the head of the house of Yi and crown prince and heir to the Joseon throne.

A moment to be clear. No one agrees who the legitimate heir to the throne is. There is no imminent possibility of the throne being restored by the Republic of Korea. Yi Seok’s claim is disputed.

But the man knows how to steal a headline.

As Andrew Lee, founder of PIA VPN tells it, he was playing Super Smash Brothers when a distant relative named Won Joon Lee interrupted him with a visit. Won Joon Lee’s grandfather is Yi Seok. After a conversation and a look at some family photos, Andrew Lee was convinced to fly Yi Seok to LA and take him to some golf tournaments and celebrity galas. They bonded over their shared love of music. And in the end, Yi Seok proposed adopting Andrew Lee as his heir.

On October 6, 2018, at a ceremony in Beverly Hills, California, Yi Seok declared Andrew Lee the crown prince of Korea and heir to the throne.

In an interview with Korea IT Times, Andrew Lee explained “The Great King Sejong never wished for the Great Korean People to have restricted access to the Internet,” and announced plans to create an imperial fund to invest in small businesses in Korea and teach coding. “The family intends to educate the Great Korean People with web and software development,” Lee said.

And while the imperial family doesn’t have its great stores of wealth any longer, Andrew Lee has made his own.

He has those early Bitcoin investments and in 2019, Israeli-company Kape Technologies bought PIA for $95.5 million. Lee didn’t get all of that but he got a chunk. Enough that in 2020, he moved into a $12.6 million house in Thousand Oaks, California.

Andrew Lee has also continued Yi Seok’s tradition of music. In 2023, Lee appeared under the name KingLee, rapping on J-Money’s album, “Dun It All.”

And most importantly, King Andrew Lee has restored the Joseon dynasty. In March 2022, Lee founded Joseon 2.0, a cloud-based blockchain-operated successor of the Joseon dynasty. Its digital charter makes clear it has no territorial aims- so South Korea has nothing to worry about- but it does consider itself a virtual successor of the imperial kingdom founded in 1392. To bolster its legitimacy, Joseon 2.0’s charter claims that treaties signed with the original kingdom are in full force. That’s based on the fact that Emperor Gojong never agreed to be deposed and the treaties Gojong signed were perpetual. So if Andrew Lee is the heir to Gojong, and the Republic of Korea has no ties to the imperial family, then, King Andrew Lee asserts, his virtual kingdom is the legitimate successor of Gojong’s.

Joseon 2.0 has also established bilateral relations with Antigua and Barbuda. Joseon 2.0 says this makes it the first cybernation to be recognized by a UN member.

And of course there is a cryptocurrency called the Joseon Mun or JSM which has about $5 million of trading value at around a penny US per coin.

Many organizations have tried and fallen short to become a virtual nation. But none to my knowledge have claimed the centuries long tradition that Joseon 2.0 does. We’ll leave you to judge the legitimacy of the various claims to that tradition.

As for me, I hope you know a little more about Joseon 2.0.

저는 당신이 조선2.0에 대해 조금 더 알기를 바랍니다

CREDITS
Know A Little More is researched, written and hosted by me, Tom Merritt. Editing and production provided by Anthony Lemos and Dog and Pony Show Audio. The public key cryptography players were Sarah Lane as Alice, Shannon Morse as Eve and Andrew Heaton as Bob. It’s issued under a Creative Commons Share Attribution 4.0 International License.

The backbone of nearly every network you use on a daily basis is based on a system designed to be cheap and easy to implement.

Featuring Tom Merritt.

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Episode transcript:

You know what an ethernet cable is don’t you? Even if you don’t think you do, I bet you do. It’s that cable you plug into a computer, or a router that delivers the internet. I know, so many people are doing WiFi these days so your laptop might not even have an ethernet port anymore. But I bet your modem does. Probably your game console does. Heck even your TV might have one.
For most of the internet’s history the ethernet cable has been the most reliable and fastest way to deliver internet traffic. And we owe it all to Hawaii.
Not what you were expecting me to say?
1968 was the year of the Mother of All Demos, but halfway across the Pacific Ocean one more piece of the future was taking shape on its own.
See, in 1968, the University of Hawaii was like a lot of other colleges. It had a big time-share computer. But the University of Hawaii had a unique issue. At Stanford, if you wanted to use the computer you walked over to the building where it was. In Hawaii, that wasn’t always practical. If you were studying on the island of Maui, it wasn’t a simple matter to walk over to the building on Oahau where the computer was.
Now even Stanford could have remote terminals in other buildings that connected to the main timeshare computer. That was also tough in Hawaii. It would be pretty expensive to run a cable through the ocean between Oahu and the Big Island or any other island.
That’s where Franklin Kuo comes in. Until recently, you wouldn’t recognise where he was born. But Wuhan, China has become famous for other reasons now. When Ku0 was 16 though he arrived in the United States and finished high school in New York City. He then got his bachelors, masters and doctorate in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. He caught on at Bell Labs after graduation and worked there until 1966 when he made a fateful decision.
He flew halfway back to his birthplace to take a job at the University of Hawaii as a full professor. And there he met fellow electrical engineering professor Norman Abramson. Together they led a team that solved that problem of how to connect those University campuses on other islands to the timesharing computer on Oahu. And their solution ended up as the foundation of ethernet.
Let’s help you know a little more, about ALOHANet.

ALOHA net sort of stands for Additive Links On-line Hawaii Area. But that’s something of a contrived acronym. They just wanted to call it Aloha. The idea was to use low-cost, off the shelf radio equipment.
So they needed a system that didn’t rely on precision. In fact it had to be fault tolerant.
They decided to use packets of data, an idea borrowed from the ARPANET which was also under development at the same time. But this wasn’t about using the ARPANET, not yet. This was just sharing local data from the central computer to clients on other islands.
The hub was the central computer. It broadcast its packets out to everyone on the outbound channel. It wasn’t trying to target the receiver.
The clients on the other islands broadcast their packets on the inbound channel.
The outbound channel was pretty easy to manage. Everybody got everything and the local client would sort out which packets were meant for it and ignore the rest.
But the inbound packets could be a mess. What if two users on Maui and one on the Big Island all sent their packets at the same time. How would you handle that? The answer? Don’t!
Just acknowledge when you did get a packet. The hub would send an acknowledgement everytime it successfully received a packet from a client. If the client didn’t get that acknowledgement after a certain amount of time, it sent the packet again. Eventually every packet found a clear space in the transmissions and the packet made it through.
This was the main difference of ALOHANet from ARPANET. AROANET nodes could only talk to a single node at a time. So each node had to know if it was OK to talk or it would remain silent. ALOHANet didn’t need to handle giving clients permission to send data. Just keep sending data until it makes it through.
Since the nodes, the hub and the client, didn’t have to coordinate on when to talk to each other the protocol and the hardware could be much simpler. You just needed a separate frequency for outbound and inbound, that way the broadcasts and the acknowledgements from the hub weren’t competing with the incoming requests.
And the packets from the hub needed an address so the client would know if they were meant for them or not.
The first packet broadcasting unit went online in June 1971
That version, now called Pure ALOHA was incredibly simple. If you have data broadcast it. If there’s a collision re-send the data later. The determination of later relied on a lot of math involving where the clients and hub were and how far apart and how long it took them to create packets. That math determined the efficiency of the network. But it worked.
Slotted ALOHA was an improvement that increased the maximum throughput. Stations were given timeslots and could only start transmission at the beginning of the timeslot. You could still send data any time as there were lots of timeslots, but the arrangement reduced collision.
Reservation ALOHA improved efficiency more by reserving a slot for any client that successfully used it. Clients had to wait for an open slot and then reserve it by sending a pocket. Again there were enough slots this didn’t slow things down much and the reduction of collision speed things up.
The principles of ALOHANet went on to be used in satellites, mobile phone networks and WiFi.
But the first and arguably most well known of its uses was by Robert Metcalfe at Xerox PARC in 1973.
Metcalfe was working at Xerox PARC and finishing his doctoral thesis about ARPANet. Harvard had rejected his first draft. He read a paper about ALOHA Net and figured out how to fix a few of its bugs. He then included his bug fixes in his thesis and was accepted by Harvard.
That stuck with him, so when he and David Boggs were figuring out a standard for connecting computers over short distances, Metcalfe included some of the ways ALOHA Net handled collisions as they traveled through the wires.
Two years after ALOHANet went live, ethernet first functioned on November 11, 1973.
It was one of many innovations to come out of Xerox PARC in the 1970s, many of them furthering the work of Douglas Engelbart, and many of them conducted by folks who had worked with Engelbart on the Mother of All Demos. We’ll get into Xerox PARC in the future. Stay tuned.
But let’s get back to the ALOHANet
In October 2020, the IEEE presented the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, the location of the ALOHANet hub, with a plaque commemorating the network as an official IEEE Milestone.
It notes that ALOHANet was the first to demonstrate that communication channels could be effectively and efficiently shared on a large scale using simple random access protocols. You didn’t need permission to send your data, just send it when you want.
Without the need to share computer resources between campuses on multiple islands there would be no need to build ALOHA Net. And without ALOHANet we don’t get wifi, cell networks, ethernet and more.
In other words, I hope you Know a Little More about ALOHANet.

CREDITS
Know A Little More is researched, written and hosted by me, Tom Merritt. Editing and production provided by Anthony Lemos and Dog and Pony Show Audio. The public key cryptography players were Sarah Lane as Alice, Shannon Morse as Eve and Andrew Heaton as Bob. It’s issued under a Creative Commons Share Attribution 4.0 International License.

October Apple event rumored, NASA patches Voyager bugs, Japan joins the Google investigation train.

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Video conferencing was a vital method of communication during the COVID-19 pandemic, but its roots go back much longer than you think.

Featuring Tom Merritt.

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Episode transcript:

Too soon? I know, but bear with me. Because among all the other unprecedented first time in history moments we experienced over the last few years, the boom in video conferencing was one of the biggest. Use of video conferencing to conduct meetings skyrocketed in 2020. With Zoom alone going from an estimated 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019 to 300 million by April 2020.
You’d almost think Zoom invented video conferencing. But of course we all know that Skype predated Zoom. And Webex and others predated those. In fact, the roots of video conferencing go pretty far back.
That’s Douglas Engelbart demonstrating his version of video conferencing in the Mother of All Demos in 1968. Pretty far back right? It was one of the many elements of that demo that became a real product. Maybe faster than you think. AT&T launched the first true video-conferencing system on June 30, 1970. Which means I’m two days older than video conferencing. Anyone could subscribe to AT&T’s service in their home or office. If you had the money.
But the roots of video conferencing go even farther back. As soon as the telephone was patented in 1876, people began imagining telephonoscopes and electroscopes, and video telephones. Reality lagged a little behind their imagination.
Ernest Hummel was able to transmit still images using his Telediagraph as early as 1895. It was limited to images that could be made in shellac on foil, but it was something. By 1913, Édouard Belin’s Bélinographe used a photocell and by 1921, Western Union had launched the Wirephoto service which could transmit photos over phone lines. These took more than a minute per image so no video.
One-way video came along as television. But it took until 1930 for AT&T to develop a “two-way television-telephone” system. The systems were not terribly practical though, transmitting low resolution black-and-white video over telephone lines. And they were basically a series of still images not video.
AT&T was trying to figure out how to do this over its copper phone lines. But you didn’t have to use phone lines.
Dr. Georg Schubert developed the first public video telephone service using coaxial cable, the cylindrical cables most people are familiar with from cable TV. It launched March 1, 1936 connecting two closed-circuit televisions by coaxial cable in post offices in Berlin and Leipzig, Germany, about 160 km apart. It had 150 lines of resolution at 25 frames per second. 150p! And it worked. By 1938, Berlin, Leipzig, Hamburg, Nuremberg and Munich each had two video telephone booths in their main post office. If two people wanted to video call each other, they would each visit one of the booths at their post office at the same time. There were plans to expand further but those ended with the start of the war in 1939, and the system was shut down in 1940 so it could be used for telegraph and broadcast TV considered more essential to the war effort. A similar post-office based system was built in France in the 1930s as well.
Meanwhile AT&T kept working on videophones over telephone lines. The Picturephone Mod I used a small oval case on a swivel stand to house the screen. AT&T demonstrated The Mod I at the New York world’s fair in 1964 by making a video call to Disneyland in California. AT&T opened its first public videophone booths later that year, with First Lady, Ladybird Johnson doing the inaugural honors. In New York, Washington DC and Chicago, each participant in a call could reserve a time and visit the booth to make their call. Calls cost $16 to $27 for three minutes. That would be $150-$260 in 2023. It was too expensive. And the booths closed in 1968, the same year Douglas Engelbart demonstrated his computer-based video conferencing in the mother of all demos.
AT&T took up that cue and launched Mod II in 1970. This was more like a videophone. Anyone could be connected to the system, you didn’t have to visit a dedicated booth. Pittsburgh Mayor Peter Flaherty made the first Mod II video call on June 30, 1970 to Alcoa CEO John Harper. Service launched the next day, July 1, 1970 with 38 picture phones located across 8 companies in Pittsburgh. A set cost $150 to install and $160 a month to use and additional sets could be added for $50 a month each. You got 30 minutes of calling per month with extra minutes costing 25 cents a minute. Resolution was 250 scan lines of black and white video. Customers for the service peaked at 453 in early 1973 and it was discontinued later that year.
Compression Labs is often seen as an AT&T competitor that picked up that baton but it was even more expensive. In 1982, it launched the CLI T1, the first commercial group video conferencing system. It cost $250,000 to install and each call was $1,000 an hour.
And that still wasn’t digital video conferencing. It was still just a phone call with video shoehorned in.
To do digital you needed digital video compression and to do digital video compression you need math.
Anil K. Jain was born in India in 1946, as the war that had shut down Germany’s big videophone experiment ended. Jain received a degree in electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, in 1967 and a PHD from the University of Rochester in 1970, the year AT&T launched its videophone. Jain would develop the math that would mean you didn’t need these dedicated units. He worked on transform coding, image compression and block-based motion compensation for video compression. And video compression meant all you needed was a camera and the internet to do what these big expensive systems in Germany and at AT&T were trying to do.
By 1981, Jain was at the University of California at Davis and published a paper combining his block-based motion compensation with transform coding. That paper inspired two students at MIT, Brian L Hinman and Jeffrey G. Bernstein to work on a way to compress video so it could be used over the internet. By 1984 they, with their professor, David H. Staelin, they founded PicTel. Later renamed PictureTel to distinguish it from Pacific Telephone Company, aka PacTel. Its first product was a video codec, the C-2000, the first commercial implementation of a compressor/decompressor of its kind.
Building on Jain’s math, C-2000 analyzed the motion between frames meaning it could work with much less data than an algorithm that treated each frame of video independently. Remember all those slowly transmitted still images of the early 20th century? To oversimplify the C-2000 let you get by on fewer still images and make up what came between so it looked like smooth video motion. In practice that meant you could do video over a 128-bit-per-second ISDN line instead of needing fixed location lines.
Most video compression standards for two-way video are based on this motion compensation and transform coding way of doing things, including the pervasive H.264 codec. PictureTel marketed its codec and eventually used it in its own software, including LiveSharPlus for Windows 3.1 And PictureTel did well. In fact AT&T used it for an international video conference in 1989. Hinman went on to found a separate teleconferencing company called Polycom in 1990, and Polycom bought PictureTel in October 2001.
The next step for video conferencing was the camera. The pioneers in this were motivated by coffee.
Yes the British drink coffee. And at the Cambridge computer lab in 1991, the coffee machine was in a separate room. Many were the agonies of a computer lab user trudging all the way to the Trojan coffee room, only to find it empty.
Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky had a solution. They connected a video capture card to an Acorn Archimedes computer and a 128 x 128 greyscale camera and pointed it at the coffee pot so you could check if it was worth the trip. At first it was delivered to the local network but in 1993, web browsers gained the ability to display images, so the camera was connected to the internet to make it easier to access on any computer in the lab… and the world. Daniel Gordon and Martin Johnson made it available over HTTP, thus making it the first webcam.
But that was still not two-way video. So here we go again. Another technician in a college saves the day.
Tim Dorcey worked in IT at Cornell University and used the new video codec and Internet Protocol system to write CU-SeeMee for the Mac in 1992. You could put it on any machine and connect to any other machine that used it over the internet. That way you didn’t have to set up a server for your video. Just install the software and start calling! It only did video at first but added audio in 1994 thanks to Maven, a client developed at the University of Illinois.
A National Science Foundation project called Global Schoolhouse made CU-SeeMee available to the public on April 26, 1993. CU-SeeMe was used by WXYC radio in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to simulcast its radio broadcast on the internet, making it the first internet radio station.
ABC’s World News Now became the first TV program to stream live on the Internet on November 23, Thanksgiving morning, 1995.
And that’s really the last step. Some innovative math and a smart codec implementation meant you didn’t need huge specialized machines, just a server, a bit of coffee-motivated ingenuity meant you didn’t need a big expensive camera, and some clever software coding meant you didn’t even need the server. From here on video conferencing exploded.
Microsoft entered the game with NetMeeting and as bandwidth increased, the amount of video conferencing software from Skype to GoToMeeting and beyond, increased with it.
So much so, that Eric Yuan had a hard time getting funding for his startup Saasbee when he left Cisco in 2011. Not because of the name, but because everybody thought the market was saturated. Yuan eventually prevailed on a few folks and in May 2012, reportedly influenced by the children’s book Zoom City, he changed the company’s name to Zoom. It took a few years but things worked out for Yuan.
And now many of us work, using Zoom, or some other kind of video conferencing technology. I hope this gives you some of the historical perspective of how we got to this world of working from home and Zoom fatigue.
In other words, I hope you Know a Little More about Video Conferencing.

October 1st, Microsoft will be separating Teams from the Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites in the European Economic Area and also Switzerland to head off antitrust regulators. Plus How is a YouTube invalid traffic bug causing problems for YouTubers. Tasia Custode from “AI Named This Show” explains. And the Philips Hue Line Gains Smart Cameras and Sensors.

Starring Sarah Lane, Robb Dunewood, Tasia Custode, Roger Chang, Joe.

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The story of RSS is simple and yet combative. In fact RSS’s success may hinge on one man’s idealistic dedication to his principles. Tom takes you through the history of RSS.

Featuring Tom Merritt.

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Episode transcript:

You probably use an RSS feed. In fact if you got this episode as a podcast you definitely used an RSS feed. Most people these days don’t even know they’re there. The story of RSS is simple and yet combative. In fact RSS’s success may hinge on one man’s idealistic dedication to his principles. If you’ve ever thought “why are people making this so complicated?” If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to be a person who just shut everyone up with an action that for right or wrong would stand the test of time. Get ready to Know a Little More about RSS.

People say RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication though it really doesn’t. That’s one of the charms of the story of RSS. Throughout its formative years nobody could agree on much and the name is still a matter of debate to this day.
If you’ve heard of RSS at all, it was most likely in connection with Podcasts. Podcasts are delivered through RSS feeds to the apps and platforms where you can listen to them. Behind every Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Audible Podcast and even most Spotify podcasts, there’s a simple RSS feed. You may also use RSS as a feed for headlines. If you use Feedly, NewsBlur or Inoreader or something like that you’re using RSS.
But where did RSS come from? Oh my friends. Be prepared for a tale of idealism, abandonment, betrayal and perseverance. It is the tale of RSS.
In the earliest days if you wanted to know if a website had been updated you had to visit it. As websites became more common this became a chore. So people experimented with ways to let you know when a website had been updated, without you having to go there. One of the earliest attempts at this was the Meta Content Framework or MCF, developed in 1995 in Apple’s Advanced Technology Group.
Ramanathan V. Guha was part of that group and a few years later, he moved over to browser-maker Netscape, where he and Dan Libby kept working on these sorts ideas. Guha particularly liked developing Resource Description Frameworks, or RDFs, similar to the old MCF he worked on at Apple. They were complex ways to show all kinds of things about web pages without having to visit them.
But Netscape’s team was of Guha, Libby and friends was not alone. And early on they weren’t he most likely to succeed. The Information and Content Exchange standard, or ICE, was proposed in January 1998, by Firefly Networks — an early web community company– and Vignette- a web publishing tool maker. They got some big names to back ICE too. Microsoft, Adobe, Sun, CNET, National Semiconductor, Tribune Media Services, Ziff Davis and Reuters, were among the ICE authoring group. But it wasn’t open source. In those days respectable tech companies like those I just named, still cast a skeptical eye on open source code. How were you supposed to make money on it? Who would keep working on it if they weren’t paid? So the members of the ICE authoring group paid people to develop it. And in the end that meant it developed slower than competing standards.
Interestingly, ICE’s failure caused Microsoft to get a little more open, a little earlier than you might expect. In 1997 Microsoft and Pointcast created the Channel Definition Format, or CDF. They released it on March 8, 1997 and in order not to fall under the death by slow development that ICE seemed to, they submitted it as as standard to the W3C the next day.
It was adopted quickly and in fact its success planted the seed of its successor. Dave Winer had founded a software company in 1988 called UserLand. UserLand added support for CDF on April 14, 1997 one month after its release. Winer also began publishing his weblog, Scripting News in CDF. But CDF, like ICE, was more complicated than a smaller site needed. So on December 27, 1997, Winer began to publish Scripting News in his own scriptingNews feed format as well. He just simplified CDF for his own needs and made that available for anyone who wanted to use it to subscribe.
Meanwhile Libby had been working away at his own version of a feed platform and Netscape was about to make a big launch that would cause his project to surpass them all. On July 28, 1998, Netscape launched My Netscape Portal, This was one of the earliest Web Portals. A place that aggregated links from sites around the Web. You could add sites you wanted to follow, like CNET or ZDNet and then see their latest posts all in one place.
Netscape kept the links updated with a set of tools developed by Libby. He had taken a part of an RDF parsing system that his friend Guha had developed for the Netscape 5 browser, and turned it into a feed parsing system for My Netscape. He called it Open-SPF at the time, for Site Preview Format.
Open-SPF let anyone format content that could then be added to My Netscape. It was rich like CDF, open like CDF but had one advantage over CDF. It worked on My Netscape, which suddenly everyone wanted to be on.
Netscape provided it for free because that meant the company didn’t have to spend time reaching deals for content. You want your content on My Netscape, use Open-SPF, it can be there. That meant there was more content available for My Netscape than was usual on curated pages. The content was free for both the users and Netscape. More content meant more users and more users meant Netscape could serve more ads. And content providers were willing to create the Open-SPF feeds, because they weren’t burdensome to create and the sites got more visitors who saw their content on My Netscape and clicked on links to come to their sites.
Sound familiar? This arrangement is the one Google still tries to rely on for Google News. Except the news publishers have changed tunes. Back then they were all about bringing visitors to their websites and happy that Netscape sent folks their way for free.. But as the years have passed and revenue has shrunk, now they’re more about getting Google to pay them for linking to their news.
Anyway back to the rise of Netscape.
1999 is not only the end of the millennium. It’s not only when everyone actually got to party the way Prince had been asking them to pretend to party. 1999 was a huge year for RSS. It was about to reach its modern form and become something users of RSS today would recognise. By name.
On Feb. 1, 1999 Open-SPF was released as an Engineering Vision Statement for folks to comment on and help improve.
Dave Winer commented that he would love to add Scripting News to My Netscape but he didn’t have time to learn Netscape’s Open-SPF. However because he had his own self-made feed format using XML he’d “be happy to support Netscape and others in writing syndicators of that content flow. No royalty necessary. It would be easy to have a search engine feed off this flow of links and comments. There are starting to be a bunch of weblogs, wouldn’t it be interesting if we could agree on an XML format between us?”
However by Feb. 22, Scripting News was publishing in Open-SPF and available at My Netscape. Feeling like it was a success, Libby changed the name of Open-SPF to refer to the fact that it used RDF, calling it the RDF-SPF format and released specs for RDF-SPF 0.9 on March 1. Shortly after release he changed the unwieldy name to RDF Site Summary, or RSS for short. Thus begins the first in a parade of meanings for RSS
And the new name took off. Carmen’s Headline Viewer came out on April 25th as the first RSS desktop aggregator and Winer’s my.UserLand.com followed on June 10th as a web-based aggregator.
Folks liked the idea obviously, but a lot of RSS enthusiasts thought the RDF was too complex, Dave Winer among them. Libby hadn’t ignored Winer’s earlier offer either. In fact, Libby thought they weren’t really using RDF for any useful purpose. So he simplified the format adding some elements from Winer’s scriptingNews, and removing RDF so it would validate as XML. This was released on July 10, 1999 as RSS 0.91.
Some folks write that the name changed to Rich Site Summary at that point but Winer wrote at the time “There is no consensus on what RSS stands for, so it’s not an acronym, it’s a name. Later versions of this spec may say it’s an acronym, and hopefully this won’t break too many applications.”
Anyway by 1999, like Toy Story, RSS is on a roll. Libby is bringing in feedback from the community and creating a workable usable standard that is reaching heights of popularity beyond just the confines of My Netscape.
Like some kind of VH1 Behind the Music story, as it reach that’s height, everything fell apart.
Netscape would never release a new version of RSS again.
In the absence of Netscape’s influence, two competing camps arose.
Rael Dornfest wanted to add new features, possibly as modules. That would mean adding more complex XML and possibly bringing back RDF.
Dave Winer preached simplicity. You could learn HTML at the time by just viewing the source code of a web page. Winer wanted the same for RSS.
On August 14, 2000, the RSS 1.0 mailing list became the battleground for the war of words between the two camps.
Dornfest’s group started the RSS-DEV Working Group. It included RDF expert Guha as well as future Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz. They added back support for RDF as well as including XML Namespaces. On December 6, 2000 they released RSS-1.0. and renamed RSS back to RDF Site Summary.
Not to be left behind, two weeks later On December 25, 2000, Winer’s camp released RSS 0.92.
Folks, grab your steaks knives. We have a fork.
In earlier days, Libby, or someone at Netscape, would have stepped in. In But AOL had bought Netscape in 1998 and had been de-empahasizing My Netscape. They wanted people on AOL.com. And if they didn’t care about Netscape, they cared even less about RSS. In fact they actively did things that could have ended RSS. In April 2001, AOL closed My Netscape and disbanded the RSS team, going so far as to pull the RSS 0.91 document offline. That document was used by every RSS parser to validate the feeds. Suddenly all RSS feeds stopped validating. Apparently this had little effect on visitors to AOL.com or people dialing in to their internet connection, so AOL just let them stay broken. With the RSS team gone and AOL doing nothing, RSS feeds were looking dead in the water.
But the RSS 0.91 document was just a document after all. And there were copies. Anybody theoretically could host it as long as everyone else changed their feeds to validate to the new address. Dave Winer stepped up.
Winer’s UserLand stepped in and published a copy of the document on Scripting.com so that feed readers could validate. That right there won Winer a lot of good will.
An uneasy truce followed. Whether you were using Netscape’s old RSS 0.91, Winer’s new RSS 0.92 or the RDF Development Group’s RSS 1.0 they would all validate.
By the summer of 2002, things are going OK and tempers have cooled. Nelly has a hit song advising folks what to do if things get hot in here. Maybe we can solve this? Let’s try to merge all three versions into one new version we can all agree on and call it RSS 2.0. right?
Except they couldn’t agree. Winer still wanted simplicity. RDF folks still wanted RDF and the fun features it would bring. They would agree to a simplified version of RDF but they still wanted it. To make matters more confusing, Winer was discussing what should happen by blog, with everyone pointing to their own blogs. The RDF folks were talking about it on the rss-dev mailing list.
Communication, oddly in a discussion about a communication platform, was the problem. Since neither side was seeing each other’s arguments they never came to an agreement. So Winer’s group decided not to wait. On September 16, 2002, UserLand released their own spec and just went and called it RSS 2.0. AND Winer declared RSS 2.0 frozen. No more changes.
Discussions continued on the RSS-dev list but Winer’s camp got another victory when in November 2002, the New York Times adopted RSS 2.0. That caused a lot of other publications to follow suit. Further consolidating the position.
The next year in another move fending off the debate, on July 15, 2003, Winer and UserLand assigned ownership of RSS 2.0 copyright to Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet & Society. A three-person RSS Advisory board was founded to maintain the spec in cooperation with the Berkman Center which continued the policy of considering RSS frozen. Mic. Dropped.
There was still a resistance. IBM developer Sam Ruby set up a wiki for some of the old RDF folks, and others, to discuss a new syndication format to address shortcomings in RSS and possibly replace Blogger and LiveJournal’s protocols. The Atom syndication format was born of this process and was proposed as an internet official protocol standard in December 2005. Atom has a few more capabilities and is more standard compliant, being an official IETF Internet standard, which RSS is not. But in practice they’re pretty similar. Atom’s last update was October 2007 but it is still widely supported alongside RSS.
And RSS 2.0 kept going. In 2004 its abilities to do enclosures, basically point to a file that could be delivered along with text, led to the rise of Podcasts. Basically RSS feeds that pointed to MP3 files.
In 2005, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Firefox all began incorporating RSS into their browser’s functions. Mozilla’s Stephen Hollander had created the Web Feed icon, the little orange block with a symbol like the WiFi symbol at an angle. It was used in Firefox’s implementation of RSS support, and eventually Microsoft and Opera used it too. It was also used for Atom feeds. Stephen Hollander did what most could not. Get people interested in providing automated Web feeds to agree on something.
And in 2006, with Dave Winer’s participation, RSS Advisory Board chairman Rogers Cadenhead relaunched the body, adding 8 new members to the group in order to continue development of RSS.
Peace in the form of an orange square was achieved.
OK. So RSS has a colorful history. What the heck does it do?
That part is pretty simple. It’s a standard for writing out a description of stuff so that it’s easy for software to read and display it.
Basically you have the channel (or Feed in Atom) and Items (or entries in Atom).
RSS 2.0 requires the channel to have three elements, the rest are optional. So to have a proper feed you need a title for your channel, a description of what it is and a link to the source of the channel’s items.
Like Daily Tech News Show – A show about tech news. And a link to dailytechnewsshow.com
Optional elements of RSS are things like an image, publication date, copyright notice, and even more instructions like how long to go between checking for new content and days and times to skip checking.
The items are the stuff in the feed. There are no required elements of an item, except that it can’t be empty. It has to have at least one thing in it. So an item could just have a title or just have a link. However most of the time an item has a title, a link and a description. The description can be a summary or the whole post. Other elements of the item include author, category, comments, publication date and of course enclosure.
So for our Daily Tech News Show example title might be Episode 5634 – AI Wins, the description might be “Tom and Sarah talk about how AI just won and took over everything.” And the link to the post for that episode.
The enclosure element lets the item point to a file to be loaded. The most common use for the enclosure tag is to include an audio or video file to be delivered as a podcast.
For Daily Tech News Show that would be a link to the MP3 file.
In the end an RSS reader or a podcast player looks at an RSS feed the way your browser looks at a web page. It sees all the titles, links descriptions and possible enclosures, and then loads them up and displays them for you.
After a rather stormy opening decade, RSS has settled down into a reliable and with apologies to team RDF, simple way of syndicating info. Really Simple Syndication indeed.
Like podcasting which it provides the underpinnings to, RSS has been declared dead several times. But it just keeps on enduring. I hope you have a little appreciation for that tiny file that delivers you headlines and shows now. In other words, I hope you know a little more about RSS.