Wikipedia Phone Home

I'm a big fan of Wikipedia; I use it several times a day. But that does not mean I am blind to its manifest (and manifold) faults. It does mean that I want it to get better.

So I was particularly interested to read about the latest kerfuffle involving an entry that was edited inappropriately and the battles to get it rectified, because it involved Bernard Haisch, who is the president of the Digital Universe Foundation. Digital Universe is a major project that, among other things, will offer a test of whether it is possible to use wikis to organise knowledge in such a way as to enjoy all or most of Wikipedia's advantages without its most egregious disadvantages.

Haisch's measured complaint is well worth reading. But perhaps even more interesting is Larry Sanger's comments on the incident. As the co-founder and "chief organiser" of Wikipedia from 2000 to 2002, Sanger is uniquely well-placed to draw lessons from the saga. Now might be a good time for Wikipedia to phone home and take cognisance of Sanger's views.

"Pirates" Redeeming 'Pirates'

I'm not keen on the term 'pirates' when applied to people who copy content; its one of those blatant attempts to pre-empt the debate by adopting a deliberately loaded terminology (rather like the idea of a 'war on terror'). My view is that pirates - the real ones - were a murderous and contemptible crew whose crimes are not even remotely comparable to those who transgress one-sided and disproportionate copyright laws, and therefore the two should never be associated.

But maybe I will need to re-visit my position. Although the reality behind pirates has not changed, the public perception probably has. And that's largely thanks to two films: Pirates of the Caribbean I and II. As a result of Johnny Depp's lovable rogue, equating those who infringe on copyright with pirates might actually make the former seem rather more admirable.

But there is something else interesting going on here. "Pirates", the film, is one of the most successful in recent times; and yet, as these figures show, it is also one of the most copied/'pirated' on the P2P networks. As noted by TechDirt, this goes to show in the most dramatic way possible, that

despite what movie execs say, their films can "compete with free" -- and do pretty well. Whether it's offering something more convenient, offering moviegoers a better experience, or using free content as a jumping-off point to sell people other stuff, there's lots of ways movie studios and theaters can thrive in the face of file-sharing. But to do that, they've got to own up to the obvious, and quit blaming piracy instead of changing how they do business.

Open Science and Modularity

As the open meme sweeps through field after field, there is a tendency to assume that openness on its own is enough. But as this wise post by Pedro Beltrão about open science explains, there's something else you need if you are to get the full benefits of opening up: modularity.

Open source thrives because major tasks are split up into smaller ones, joined by clean interfaces. This enables tasks to be distributed, and sometimes performed in parallel. Competition operates at the level of the small tasks - the best solutions are chosen - rather than at the top level, which is how proprietary software typically works.

But as Beltrão points out, science is still encouraging competition at the topmost level - at the point when results are published - which leads to teams being scooped and work wasted. Far more sensible if the whole were split up into smaller tasks where competition can operate more fruitfully, and he has some practical suggestions about how that might be achieved.

Why YouTube is Napster 2.0

Being of the older generation, I've never really gone wild over YouTube. But I recognise and salute its cultural importance, because it represents yet another instance of people's innate desire to share. But as this post by fellow old fogey John Battelle points out, YouTube has a big problem: the majority of its content is basically illegal according to current copyright laws.

So here we have a young people's phenomenon that is spreading like wildfire, and that is doomed once the Content Commissariat realise what's going on and decide to get their legal clubs out. In other words, it's Napster 2.0.

The Internet Goes...Open Source

There is a great irony at the heart of the Internet. Free software and its characteristic distributed development method were made possible by the Internet. Similarly, many of the earliest free software programs - Sendmail, BIND etc. - helped create the Internet. And yet today, the knots of the Net's interconnections - the routers - are generally proprietary (and usually from Cisco).

So here's an idea: how about creating an open source router? Enter Vyatta, which is doing precisely that. It's been working on the idea for a while, and, according to GigaOM, is close to launching its first product.

Assuming they get it right, I don't see any reason why this shouldn't steadily chip away at Cisco's dominant market share, just as every other open alternative to commoditised products has done. As they do, expect other open source solutions to enter this market soon.

The Great ID FUD

When will they ever learn?

Unlike traditional forms of identification, the VeriChip can’t be lost, stolen, misplaced, or counterfeited.

That's what the human-implantable RFID VeriChip site says. And this is what happened at the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) 6 conference:

two presenters demonstrated the electronic equivalent of making a copy of an implanted RFID or radio frequency ID chip.

The point was to show just how easy it is to fool a detection device that purports to uniquely identify any individual.

So let's just do a quick recap: which technologies are available for establishing identity unambiguously these days?

Irises: nope
Faces: nope
Fingerprints: nope
DNA: nope
Implanted RFID: nope

So, tell me Mr Blair, how exactly you were going to implement this ID card system in a way that it can't be spoofed to hell?

Open Source Marketing 2.0

Apparently, Benjamin Horst has succeeded in rustling up enough dosh to take out an ad for OpenOffice.org, along the lines of the big Firefox ad campaign. Well done, that man.

This is doubly good news. First, because OpenOffice.org will gain some useful publicity, and secondly, because it shows that the Firefox ad was not just a one-off. In this sense, these campaigns point the way for future open source marketing drives.

Google: Don't Be Evil - Unless It's Profitable

I knew that GoDaddy was evil, but this tie-up between the company and Google suggests that the latter is moving deep into the darkness too.

The scheme goes by the inglorious name of "CashParking": basically, it encourages scammers to register every possible domain name, and then load the home pages up with Google AdSense to generate some money from the poor individuals who wander there by mistake. As a result, it will reduce the overall attractiveness and value of the Web, and encourage even more of this behaviour. Typical parasitism, in other words.

Shame on you, Google: aren't your soaraway profits enough? (Via Searchblog.)

JBoss's Secret of Success

A long and thoughtful post by Matt Asay on why JBoss has been so successful. No secret sauce, but plenty of fascinating figures along the way. This is an area I'm getting into in a big way: my recent LWN.net article was a shot across the bows. You have been warned.

United Nations of Free Software

Here's a useful round-up of free software projects at the United Nations - there's more than you might think. Pity that this section is so mealy-mouthed:

Most of the traditional software industry has its base in the developed world; there is concern that promoting FOSS could hurt this industry. From the developing countries' perspective, however, FOSS is a way to introduce competition in order to lower costs and expand options. The different views of the role of software in development have hindered the UN's ability to create a single coherent strategy for FOSS to apply to all member states.

Free software does not "hurt" the traditional industry, it merely brings a much-needed balance between users and suppliers. Business models may change, but as IBM and others have shown, there's plenty of money to be made under this new regime. To phrase it in terms of "hurt" gives succour to outdated and paternalistic practices that have no place in the new computing landscape.

First Catch Your Neanderthal

This stuff is getting too easy.

First, find some ancient remains - Croatian Neanderthal bones are great. Next, sequence lots - at least 20 times coverage. Don't worry if all you're getting are tiny fragments with around 100 DNA letters, and the signal is vastly swamped by bacterial noise. Just bung the results into a computer, and tell it (a) to cancel out all bacterial genome sequences (b) to join up all the rest. Result: one Neanderthal genome.

There's just one problem:

If the Neanderthal genome were fully recovered, it might in principle be possible to bring the species back from extinction by inserting the Neanderthal genome into a human egg and having volunteers bear Neanderthal infants. There would, however, be great technical and ethical barriers to any such venture.

Understatement of the Year, Number 369.

Open Source Planes

First cars, then trains, now planes. New Scientist is reporting that it is now possible to create almost an entire plane by "printing" the components:

In rapid prototyping, a three-dimensional design for a part - a wing strut, say - is fed from a computer-aided design (CAD) system to a microwave-oven-sized chamber dubbed a 3D printer. Inside the chamber, a computer steers two finely focussed, powerful laser beams at a polymer or metal powder, sintering it and fusing it layer by layer to form complex, solid 3D shapes.

Two things are interesting here. First, this is precisely what Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, has been predicting for years. Indeed, he sees Project Gutenberg, which essentially lets you print your own books, as just the first, quite small step in the next industrial revolution, where physical objects will be printed routinely.

Secondly, note that the parts are printed under the control of a software program. So if the program and the data are open, this means that effectively the physical object will also be open. As usual, openness brings with it all the usual advantages of speed and lack of redundancy - you can re-use parts or parts of parts in other designs to create quickly entirely new objects.

The Office of Intellectual Monopolies

The group behind the Adelphi Charter has apparently proposed that the UK Patent Office be replaced with an Office of Intellectual Property:

The proposed new statutory body, the Office of Intellectual Property, with the suggested acronym OfIP, would cover all kinds of IP, including copyright and patents, and would have to report annually to the British Parliament on its activity, said John Howkins, director of the Creative Economy Forum, which put forward the proposal. The forum is a group of international IP experts - business, academics, non-governmental organisation representatives - interested in the creative economy.

An interesting idea, though I'm not wild about enshrining the term "intellectual property" in the title: how about the Office of Intellectual Monopolies? That's got a nice Orwellian ring about it.

The Open Body, Biometric Spoofing and ID Cards

Our bodies are open. That is, unless we are planning some criminal activity, we do not try to hide the basic physical facts about ourselves - our voice, our face, our eyes, our fingerprints. Unfortunately, these are precisely the characteristics that biometric ID schemes depend on for verification. This is tantamount to walking around with a large sign saying "my password is xxxx".

And this isn't just my opinion. Here's what one Bori Toth, biometric research and advisory lead at Deloitte & Touche, no less, has to say on the subject:

Many people are trying to regard biometrics as secret but they aren't. Our faces and irises are visible and our voices are being recorded. Fingerprints and DNA are left everywhere we go and it's been proved that these are real threats.

So the use of precisely these spoofable biometrics is just one more reason to bin the whole idiotic ID card idea, which rather depends on them being foolproof. (Via Slashdot.)

OOo or Aaargh!?

Here's a good analysis and general round-up of why Microsoft's decision to produce an extremely spiffy and completely different interface for Office 2007 was as bad a move as a very bad move can be. For me, the killer quote is:

OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office Currently Look More Similar Than Office 2003 and Office 2007
Training your users to go from Office 2003, or before, to OpenOffice.org, might be easier than teaching them the whole new Office 2007 system.

Just how easy is Microsoft trying to make the decision to jump to OpenOffice.org?

10 (More) Things to Build Blog Readership

I only mention this because it's similar to my own list from February. Well, similar and better, actually. (Via C|net.)

Open Innovation...

...is all very well, but will only work properly if attitudes to current intellectual monopolies change. Simply licensing stuff to and from others will prove too sclerotic without a radical simplification in the area of patents.

What is needed is a commons-based approach, where most ideas are available for all to use: then the value is added in the way ideas are combined, not just in coming up with them in the first place.

Tanenbaum Rides Again

For younger readers of this blog, the name Andy Tanenbaum may not mean much. But for oldies such as myself, it is highly redolent of those epic days when Linux was but a fledgling kernel, and taunts like "your mother was a hamster" and "Linux is obsolete" were thrown down like gauntlets.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Tanenbaum for my book Rebel Code, and it was fascinating to learn how close he came to creating what we now call GNU/Linux with his Minix. But Tanenbaum failed to do one crucial thing that Linus did almost without thinking: to let go. Understandably, as a professor of computer science Tanenbaum wanted to keep control of his teaching materials. But that one, tiny, reasonable brake was enough to stunt the growth of Minix and lend wings to Linux when it appeared in 1991.

Tanenbaum is still teaching, at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam (another Dutch story, then - must be the Rembrandt Effect), and I was interested to note this piece about some of his recent work on developing an anti-RFID device. Good to see him still moving forward in his work. (Via openspectrum.info.)

Not-So-Naked Conversations

A short, but interesting reflection on the changing nature of conversations - naked and not-so-naked. The key point:

The bottom line is that technology ushers in new forms of social organization that escape notice precisely because they are invisible to adherents of the old paradigm.

Something's Rotten in the Domain Name System

Although I can't quite claim to go back to the very first commercial domain, I do remember the Wired story about how many major US corporations had neglected to register relevant domains. And I also remember how around $7.5 million was paid for the utterly generic and pointless business.com domain.

So I've seen a thing or two. And yet I can still be disgusted by the depths to which the scammers can sink when it comes to domain names. Try this, for example: a company that seems to be magically reserving domain names shortly after people have entered them as a Whois search - only to dump it if it doesn't pull in any traffic.

It's this kind of parasitical business model that is pushing the domain name system close to breakdown, and making the Internet far less efficient than it could be.

OpenOffice.org Goes Dutch

Just in time for Rembrandt's 400th birthday, here's some good news from Holland:

De gemeente Groningen heeft besloten om een overeenkomst met Microsoft voor de levering van de Office-suite van de softwaregigant te laten verlopen. De noordelijke gemeente heeft namelijk besloten om over te stappen op het opensourcepakket OpenOffice.org. Hiermee is de gemeente Groningen volgens eigen zeggen de grootste gemeente in Nederland die serieus met opensourcesoftware aan de slag gaat.

Which, I think, says (roughly) that the northern Dutch municipality Groningen has decided not to renew its contract with Microsoft for Office, but to go with OpenOffice.org, confirming Groningen's position as the open source leader in Dutch local government.

What's interesting is that it's OpenOffice.org that's driving open source uptake again. Sure, Firefox is more widely used, but it rarely figures as a conscious decision. And it's certainly not one that loses Microsoft any revenue (though its managers probably lose some sleep), as OpenOffice.org will in Groningen, to the tune of 330,000 Euros. (Via LXer.)

Bill Gates Wants to Share "Openly"

It looks like Bill Gates is one step closer to getting it. According to this press release from his foundation, regarding a major research grant to create a series of research consortia to accelerate HIV vaccine development:

These consortia will be linked to five central laboratories and data analysis facilities, enabling investigators to openly share data and compare results, and allowing the most promising vaccine approaches to be quickly prioritized for further development.

...

As a condition for receiving funding, the newly-funded vaccine discovery consortia have agreed to use the central facilities to test vaccine candidates, share information with other investigators, and compare results using standardized benchmarks.

In other words, Gates is demanding open data sharing, and maybe open access too (it's not clear yet, as Peter Suber notes).

But this is a slippery slope, Bill: once you accept the inherent efficiency of sharing data "openly", as the press release emphasises, it's only a short conceptual leap before you find yourself accepting and then encouraging the other ways of sharing stuff "openly"....

No Comment, No MT et al.

Comments are the ichor that courses through the blogosphere's veins. A blog with no comments is probably dead, and a blogger that doesn't comment on the blogs of others probably needs to get out more.

But if it's hard enough keeping track of all the interesting things happening so that you can blog about some of them, keeping track of all the comments to your comments has been practically impossible. No longer. As this TechCrunch piece notes , there are now no less than three rival services that will help you track comments. Maybe I ought to try one.

Virtually Spot On

I have to admit that I tend to read The Reg more for its entertainment value than for its incisive analysis (with the honorable exception of John Lettice's pieces on ID cards, which always manage to be worth reading on both counts). But there's no doubt that sometimes there's some sharp thinking as well as sharp writing.

Like this piece on Microsoft's snuggle-up with XenSource in the field of server virtualisation:

Knowing that it can't compete in the market in the interim, Microsoft has played the old IBM trick of creating confusion. Don't go with VMware. Go with XenSource. That's who we like. Have a look at what they have to offer.

Spot on.

Blooks Like the Future

Blooks are generally blogs turned into books, but I suppose we can stretch the term to include books that are available from blogs. Here's a heartening story about the latter type.

A novelist became fed up waiting for an agent or publisher to deign to acknowledge his existence (don't we all know it?). So he did the obvious thing: bunged it up on his Web site for anyone to download. His reasoning?

I'm putting this full-length novel online and encouraging you to read it, send it to your friends, blog about it, distribute it on your blogs, etc. and we'll all see what happens. Maybe nothing. But maybe ... something. In fact after weighing the pros and cons of doing this, I can't find any actual downside.

I wrote The Agency Delta because I had a story. Now I want people to read it. I think it's a great story. Now tell me what you think.

This is the future, you writer people. (Via Self Publish Blooks.)