Why ID Cards Are Idiotic: Technical Impossibility

I hate to gloat (well, not much) but this story about the scrapping of a £141 million computer system by the UK's Department for Work and Pensions, after over two years of desperate efforts to make it work, is perhaps a tiny, tiny hint why the infinitely more complex ID card system does not stand a snowflake's chance in hell of operating successfully.

I suppose I ought to be comforted by the fact that the ID card's computer system is guaranteed to fail, as it means the scheme will never be implemented in its present, megalomaniacal form. But somehow, the idea of all those billions pouring into consultants' and contractors' pockets for nothing spoils this otherwise pleasant thought.

GNU GPL Punch-up in the Offing?

One of the unusual things about the GNU GPL is that it uses traditional law to untraditional things. This means that there's plenty of scope for argument (which is why the GNU GPL provokes such strong emotions, I suppose). It also means there's plenty of scope for litigation, and yet there's been surprisingly little so far.

That fact makes this spat about GNU GPL'd software noteworthy, since it might even get to court. That's good news - for the licence, at least, because every court case helps make clearer to people, especially corporate lawyers, just what the GNU GPL does, and how it does it. And so, paradoxically, every court case makes the licence stronger, at least in terms of its effect on the non-hacker world. (Via Slashdot.)

Warning: Tenuous Connection Follows

Well, Linus is Finnish, and hails from Helsinki, and this story is about a Finn in the same fair city.

OK, I confess, I choose it for the headline: "Suicide squirrel in opera-hating kamikaze bike spoke mangle". Gawd bless The Reg.

Skewering SpiralFrog

I've avoided mentioning SpiralFrog until now, since it is such a blatant attempt to be hip in a Web 2.0-ish sort of way, while completely missing the point (since when was DRM cool?). But this post on the subject by Umair at the one and only BubbleGeneration Strategy Lab is too good to miss.

Rich Blogger, Poor Blogger

There's a fun thread on Thomas Hawk's Digital Connections blog, where people are having a go at Blogger. And quite right too: it's a dog's breakfast in many respects (even the beta currently being used by Yours Truly.)

What I can't understand is why some Grand Google Pooh-Bah hasn't issued an edict - Fix It - and Lo!, It Is Fixed. I mean, this isn't rocket science, is it? The fact that this fixedness has not appeared, lo-like, suggests some worrying problems deep in the Googleplex.

Open BIOSes

BIOS: Basic Input/Output System. We rarely give it a thought as we boot up a machine. But it turns out that there's a lot of clutter in your common or garden BIOS that GNU/Linux in particular could do with out. As this excellent article explains:

On many systems, a large portion of boot time goes into providing legacy support for MS-DOS. Various projects, including LinuxBIOS and Open Firmware, are trying to replace the proprietary BIOS systems with streamlined pieces of code able to do only what is necessary to get a Linux kernel loaded and running.

Of course: if you've got an open operating system, it makes sense to use an open BIOS. I don't think I'll hold my breath waiting for PC manufacturers to offer that particular option, though. (Via OSNews.)

The Fat Belly...

...and why we need it.

Eclipse - the Magazine

I know, I know, magazines are so twentieth century. This one is different - it's a PDF magazine (OK, so that's worse). But at least it's entirely devoted to the world's favourite IDE: Eclipse. As a result, it tells you rather more than you might want to know, but it's good for skimming. (Via Bob Sutor's Open Blog.)

Grokking Wikipedia

For a project that is beginning to assume an ever-greater importance in the intellectual landscape (to say nothing of the online landscape), relatively little is known about how Wikipedia actually works. There's lots of polemic flying around about how it should work, but precious little research into the facts.

This makes Aaron Swartz's piece "Who Writes Wikipedia?" valuable - and long overdue. The results are not what we have been led to suspect:

When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site -- the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

And when you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Writing an encyclopedia is hard. To do anywhere near a decent job, you have to know a great deal of information about an incredibly wide variety of subjects. Writing so much text is difficult, but doing all the background research seems impossible.

On the other hand, everyone has a bunch of obscure things that, for one reason or another, they've come to know well. So they share them, clicking the edit link and adding a paragraph or two to Wikipedia. At the same time, a small number of people have become particularly involved in Wikipedia itself, learning its policies and special syntax, and spending their time tweaking the contributions of everybody else.

And you've got to love a story that includes the line

To investigate more formally, I purchased some time on a computer cluster and downloaded a copy of the Wikipedia archives.

As one does. (via BoingBoing.)

Headliner: the First Web 2.0 Product

Ah, yes, push:

Remember the browser war between Netscape and Microsoft? Well forget it. The Web browser itself is about to croak. And good riddance. In its place ... broader and deeper new interfaces for electronic media are being born.

Well, no, actually.

I remember push, and I remember hating it. Because it was intrusive, because it was the TV model, because it was anti-Web. But around the same time, a product came out that many thought was part of the push wave, but was actually so far ahead of its time, that nobody really understood its true significance - myself included.

It was called Headliner, and it came from Lanacom. But whereas all the classic push services - like PointCast - really did stuff news down your throat, Headliner did something slightly different. It went to a site and scraped the news from the Web pages - intelligently. That is, it knew - or could be told - which bits were important - like headlines and text - and which were just guff. The net result was a system that delivered streams of pure content to your desktop, seamlessly and without the bloat of push. A bit like today's newsfeeds, in fact.

I loved Headliner, I now realise, because it was essentially doing the job that Bloglines does for me now: providing me with concentrated newsfeeds, in a consolidated way. It was brilliant and it failed. Not surprisingly, perhaps, because as the first Web 2.0 product, released in 1997, it was a mere eight or nine years too early.

Of Vietnamese Straws

Lots of interesting trends here:

The Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) has signed an agreement with chip giant Intel to bolster the country's open source efforts.

In the deal, inked by both parties last month, Intel will establish a new open source lab in Vietnam to test and develop open source software that will power some 27,000 Intel-based PCs used by the VCP.

It's not news that the Vietnamese government are moving to open source: they've been doing this for some years. What's interesting is that it's Intel who are helping them. And this snippet is worth noting, too:

Vietnamese authorities are reportedly turning to open source software in an attempt to reduce software piracy, part of its free trade agreement with the United States, and its entry into the World Trade Organization.

This is something that many have predicted, so it's interesting that it might actually be happening. (Via LXer.)

On the Marc

This isn't exactly hot news, and it's been blogged elsewhere, but I don't feel a blog called "open..." would be complete without at least a pointer to it.

Marc Fleury, founder and head of JBoss, now part of Red Hat, has a blog entitled "Enter the JBoss Matrix". One of his recent posts, "Wall Street, Oracle and Game Theory", is a typically heady mix of peeks into the Red Hat machine, name-dropping and very perceptive analysis. It's long, but I urge you to read it - here's a characteristic sample:

See, nowhere in the GPL is it said that we must distribute the software to you in the first place. Dion Cornett likes saying GPL != Public Domain. In fact, in the case of RHEL, RedHat doesn’t distribute it to anybody, not for free that is.

If you want to have the software, you must subscribe to RedHat Network (RHN) and if you redistribute the patches or RHEL (which you can) you must pay us for every instance, if you don’t, well, we are under no obligation to give you the future patches and upgrades, in other words, we cancel the RHN distribution to you and you are technically /forking/ RHEL.

The Language of the Commons

Although we may have a general idea of what a commons is - not least the kind we stroll on - it's a difficult concept to pin down. So this essay on the language of the commons provides some food for thought.

It also has a nice quotation from another interesting piece, from Worldchanging, which begins:

Chris Sanderson and his colleagues at the Future Laboratory believe we're seeing a fundamental shift in how people think about the things they buy. I stopped by their London offices to find out what they're seeing and predicting.

"Overconsumption is no longer a signal of success," he says, sitting at a table strewn with proofsheets for the Future Labs house magazine, Viewpoints. Instead of conspicuous consumption, he says, a "conspicuous abstention" is emerging. People want less noise in their lives. They want design whose form serves function beautifully. They want homes with a spare, modern aesthetic and the health and sustainability benefits of green building. They're almost proudly adopting a "make do and mend, waste not want not mentality." Most of all, they're hungry for a connection between the things they buy and the lives they want to be leading -- and recognizing that sometimes the best thing to buy is, simply, nothing.

This clearly has fascinating correspondences with the way and the why all the opens operate.

Wiki, Wiki, Wonga

The New York Times has a piece about for-profit wikis. Personally, I can't see this happening much, since the essence of wikis is the man and the woman on the Clapham omnibus working for nothing: the idea that others will make money off their work will put a brake on that kind altruism.

It's true that the same could be said about open source, but the kind of people who contribute seem to have less problems with commercial use. Maybe it's because anyone can contribute to wikis - even those not so sophisticated when it comes to open politics, whereas coders tend to have a broader appreciation of the issues.

Open Source, Open Seeds

A nice report on a "knowledge symposium" in New Delhi, organised by Red Hat India. It touched on not only free software, but also the intellectual monopoly issues facing traditional resources like seeds and medicine. A useful reminder that there are many kinds of commons, and of the threats posed by narrow-minded Western viewpoints on ownership.

Happy Birthday

No, I don't mean this one, (which should really have been this one), but this one. (Via Tuxmachines.org.)

Lipstick on a Pig

I felt it in my bones. Everyone - even the normally sensible BBC - was running around waving their hands about the amazing Browzar. As the Beeb put it:

A web browser that leaves no trace of a user's online surfing habits on their computer has been released.

Browzar, as it is known, automatically deletes all records of the pages a person has visited when it closes down.

But the fact that it was based on IE - hardly the world's most secure or private platform - rang the alarm bells for me.

And now what do we find?

Contrary to earlier coverage, Browzar appears to be nothing but a simple shell to IE which forces Overture ads on its own users. The creators didn’t write a cache or history function, calling this a feature, and users are unable to change the search function or home page to anything other than Browzar ad results.

Pig, lipstick, on, anyone?

The other lesson to learn is that there is obviously considerable demand for such an easy-to-use beast: Firefox hackers, are you listening?

OpenID and Password Overload

Do you have too many passwords to remember? If you don't, that probably means you're using the same one or two for every site - not a good idea. If you are, you are then faced with two possibilities: writing them all down somewhere (physically or electronically) or trying to remember them all. Both approaches are fraught with dangers.

What we need, of course, is a centralised service that lets you establish your identity once, and which then handles all the tiresome details. Oh, and which isn't run by Microsoft.

Well, you could try OpenID (good name, if nothing else). It's not the only such system, but it seems to have it's heart in the right place. One to watch. (Via C|net.)

Under the Blogger Beta Bonnet

I mentioned a couple of weeks back that this blog is now running on the new Blogger Beta (with all the downsides that this implies). It turns out that the code behind the new Blogger is, well, pretty frightening: here's a brave soul who's plunged in. I predict a flood of books explaining it all will follow in due course. (Via Slashdot.)

Microsoft Can Go Conjugate Itself

I do not believe it
Thou dost not believe it
He does not believe it
She does not believe it
We do not believe it
Ye do not believe it
You do not believe it
They do not believe it
(Via TechDirt.)

On the Categorisation of Peer Production

Kant would have loved this one.

Here's a remarkable wiki from the P2P Foundation that seeks to explore and categorise the efflorescence of peer production that's going on these days. It's remarkable for its range, and for the fact that it includes just about every key word and concept used in this blog - with the exception of "open genomics" - complete with links to further wiki pages on topics like the Genome Commons. Amazing. (Via On The Commons.)

Not (Yet) The Terminator

The news that California has passed tough new legislation to cut greenhouse emissions is of course hugely welcome. But as this wise piece from On The Commons points out, Governor Arnie has not quite terminated this particular task:

But now that California has joined the growing roster of states and localities that has pledged to cap carbon emissions, it too must address the billion dollar question that lurks behind all carbon trading schemes: who owns the sky?

Opening Up Google

Google exerts its fascination in part because it so opaque. A quintessential Web 2.0 company, owner of Blogger, it also has few outward-facing blogs - and none really worth reading. So any insights into what makes the company tick are always welcome, especially when many of them hinge on software issues, as they do in this Information Week piece.

This is particularly interesting because much of the code that makes Google tick is open source. Surprisingly, this turns out to mesh with that desire for opaqueness rather well:

In fact, one of the things Google likes about open source software is that it facilitates secrecy. "If we had to go and buy software licenses, or code licenses, based on seats, people would absolutely know what the Google infrastructure looks like," DiBona says. "The use of open source software, that's one more way we can control our destiny."

Pointless Exercises of Our Time

So what is IEs 4 Linux?

IEs4Linux is the simpler way to have Microsoft Internet Explorer running on Linux (or any OS running Wine).

No clicks needed. No boring setup processes. No Wine complications. Just one easy script and you'll get three IE versions to test your Sites. And it's free and open source.

Right, so it's an easier way to install inferior software on your GNU/Linux system. I'm sure it's done with all the best intentions, but I can't help feeling this is not a good use of hacker time. (Via TuxMachines.org.)

After Open Access - Open Discourse?

This is not exactly a new idea, but it's a further sign of how things are moving from basic open access to a more participatory, bloggy kind of world:

How often have you asked yourself how a certain study was published unchallenged, without the results of a key control? How often have you wondered whether a paper’s authors performed a specific procedure correctly? How often have you had the opportunity to question authors about previously published or opposing results they failed to cite, or discuss the difficulties of reproducing certain results? How often have you had the opportunity to command a discussion of an internal contradiction the referees seemed to have missed? The haves of science, who benefit from the status quo they shepherd, have seldom felt the need to redress such grievances. The have nots have basically been stuck with their lot – until now.

Enter JournalReview.org (1), a website forum for open peer review and discussion/criticism of medical literature. Essentially an online journal club with free membership, JournalReview.org provides a venue which will improve communication among physicians and scientists and foster comment and criticism about published scientific research.

(Via Open Access News.)