China's Virtual Money Woes

It's spreading:

As if Chinese leaders did not have enough of a headache trying to manage the country's rising but still undervalued currency in the testy world of international trade, now the growing popularity of virtual money enters the already complex equation.

The so-called "QQ" coin - issued by Tencent, China's largest instant-messaging service provider - has become so popular that the country's central bank is worried that it could affect the value of the yuan. Li Chao, spokesman and director of the General Office of the People's Bank of China (PBOC), has expressed his concern in the Chinese media and announced that the central bank will draft regulations next year governing virtual transactions.

So tell me again the difference between real and virtual currencies....

Is Germany Really Losing It?

I have a great deal of respect for the German nation. More than anyone else, I think, they have come to terms with their recent history - specifically with the Nazi period - and emerged stronger, wiser and more admirable (compare, for example, Turkey's rather sad denial that a genocide of over a million Armenians lies festering in its past). But recently, I've noticed some signs that German society - or at least its politicans, which I concede is not quite the same thing - are really out of touch with reality.

I wrote yesterday about its daft plans to monitor PCs while connected to the Internet - blithely ignoring the near-impossibility of this idea. Now we have something else equally stupid: the criminalisation of violent video games. According to Der Spiegel - probably the best news magazine in the world - the Bavarian minister for internal affairs wants to make the "production, sale and purchase of such games punishable by up to one year's imprisonment."

This is so obviously a knee-jerk reaction by frightened old politicians, unable to deal with the technological changes that are happening around them. What makes it particularly sickening is that it concerns itself with virtual violence, and blithely ignores the rather more pressing issue of all the violence present in this world - as practised, for example, by the US Government in its various torture camps around the world. Get real, people.

BrainGumbo

This has to be the coolest name for a project in recent years: BrainGumbo. No wonder, perhaps, since it's pressing some of the hottest hot buttons in computing today:

The BrainGumbo Project aims to build a virtual movie (machinima) production studio in Second Life, from the work of amateur enthusiasts and free components.

IBM and Microsoft's OpenXML: Update

I'm impressed: IBM has just stuck a dirty great clog in the engine of Microsoft's machinations to get its Office XML format adopted as a formal standard:

IBM voted NO today in ECMA on approval for Microsoft’s Open XML spec.

Heavy stuff: I think we expect some horse heads to start turning up soon.... (Via C|net.)

Correction: further to Bob's comment, I've gone to the ECMA site and found the press release announcing the approval of the standard. Naively, I thought that somebody voting against it would block it: not so. Apologies for my over-enthusiastic analysis. I suppose IBM's move was therefore more symbolic than anything. Ah well.

Second Life Goes Really Brazilian

In a significant sign that Second Life is beginning to expand beyond its early-user, largely anglophone base, the Internet arm of Brasil Telecom has announced that it is coming out with a localised version of Second Life this month.

The company estimates that there are currently 30 to 40 thousand Brazilians already active in Second Life, a number it hopes to double in the first year of operation. It also aims to help those currently using the English-language version to migrate to the new Brazilian client.

A separate arm of Brasil Telecom is being created purely for this venture; worryingly, the company behind it talks about "selling advertising inside the game". I don't think that's going to go down to well with the (virtual) locals....

The Open Source Brain

At first sight, there's something appropriate about Paul Allen paying for the Allen Brain Atlas:

an interactive, genome-wide image database of gene expression in the mouse brain. A combination of RNA in situ hybridization data, detailed Reference Atlases and informatics analysis tools are integrated to provide a searchable digital atlas of gene expression. Together, these resources present a comprehensive online platform for exploration of the brain at the cellular and molecular level.

After all, he did work on an "electronic brain" as they were mockingly called back in those dim, dark days of early computing. And it comes as no surprise that the freely-available and rather impressive 3D Brain Explorer - think Google Earth for the mouse brain - is only available for Windows XP and the Macintosh.

But dig a little deeper, and you find something rather telling about the real "brain" behind this brain:

Processing the amount of data produced during the Atlas project (approximately 1 terabyte/day) requires a fully automated data processing and analysis pipeline. A goal of informatics is to provide the infrastructure that will allow scaling of an increase in image data and complexity of image processing. The IDP was designed to be modularized and scalable to support a library of informatics algorithms and to function so that additional incorporation of informatics modules does not interrupt production systems. The system must also have the flexibility to accommodate defining multiple workflows using some or all algorithms and is iterative in its processing of gene image series. Parts of the process are computationally intensive, such as image quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) and preprocessing, registration, and signal quantification. These tasks are scheduled and run in parallel on the server cluster.

Right. And just as a matter of interest, what might that cluster be running?

The cluster consists of a total of 148 CPUs, 32 HP BL35p blades with dual AMD 2.4Ghz, 4GB RAM and 21 IBM HS20 blades with dual Intel 2.8Ghz Hyperthreaded, 4GB RAM, all running Fedora Linux.

Obviously someone used their brain.

Carousel Fraud: Virtually Virtual

I'm always amazed when people raise their eyebrows over the money involved in virtual worlds, because it's obviously not "real", and so doesn't count (ever stopped to consider how valuable that piece of paper you call a banknote really is?). But when I read things like this, I have to shake my head:

Missing trader or carousel fraud cost Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs £3bn in the last financial year.

...

Carousel fraud involves importing, or claiming to import, goods from another EU country without paying VAT, then selling them on and pocketing the tax. The same goods will often go from country to country earning fraudulent tax at every stage.

Increasingly, the goods don't even physically move.

So, this is fraud to the tune of billions of pounds per year, "increasingly" involving goods that don't move - and that presumably only exist as disembodied numbers passing through the UK government's IT system: and they're telling me that virtual money doesn't count?

Arrested for Sharing a Kurdish Ubuntu?

Here's a rum to-do:

Controversy followed the release of a Kurdish translation of Ubuntu in Turkey last week. The release was originally reported in Millyet, a Turkish national newspaper, on November 21. This first release of a Kurdish language operating system and software has caused a stir in Turkey, where, up until 1991, it was illegal even to speak Kurdish in public.

...

Subsequent reports in the Turkish press suggest that Mayor Abdullah Demirbas of Sur, a town in Diyarbakir, Eastern Turkey, is currently under investigation by the Diyarbakir chief public prosecutor's office following the launch. It is not clear what Demirbas is being investigated for, but it is probably related to Turkey's less than tolerant stance on the public use of Kurdish.

Who - aside from RMS - would have thought that making a distro could be a political act?

Solaris Lives - Live

I've been slightly unkind to OpenSolaris in these parts. This was particularly reprehensible since I've never tried it (but why let the facts get in the way of some good bigotry?). Truth to tell, I've not really relished the prospect of grappling with its installation. Now I don't have to.

The greatest thing since the proverbial sliced bread - the live CD - has come to OpenSolaris. Significantly, this Solaris live CD, which is called BeleniX, hails from Bangalore - surely a sign of things to come. I'm off to download it to give it a whirl.

The Politicians' Big Disconnect

According to heise online:

the [German] Federal Ministry of the Interior declares the ability to search PCs without physical access to them to be a key component in the fight against terror.

Well, it can declare away until its booties fall off, but as the article points out:

How a screening of PCs protected by a firewall or tucked away behind a router with Network Address Translation is to be carried out the proposals of the politicians concerned with internal security remain conspicuously silent, however.

Quite. Throw in a modicum of serious data encryption, and you have a PC that is seriously hard to hack - however much the politicians might declare this approach to be a "key component in the fight against a terror."

All of which provides a further demonstration, if one were needed, of how this idiotic "fight against terror" is merely a pretext for governments around the world (step forward, Mr Blair) to impose pointless and unworkable schemes that serve no other purpose than to trample on the freedom of all of us, while the ne'er-do-wells laugh up their terrorist sleeves.

ODF Support from Apple?

Here's an interesting pair of screenshots, that seem to show that Apple has added ODF support to TextEdit tool. It may be a small stone, but it all adds to the cairn. (Via Erwin's StarOffice Tango.)

Samba Dances Towards the GNU GPLv3

According to this story, the Samba project will move to GNU GPLv3 once it's finished. That's a big win for the the FSF, since Samba is undoubtedly one of the most widely-used and highest-profile open source projects.

What a Waste of Energy

The official Curmudgeon of Computing, Nick Carr, stirred up a little excitement recently by pointing out that Second Life, for all its virtuality, really does use quite a lot of electricity. But before we start grabbing the digital pitchforks and descending upon Linden Lab for being such an ecological extravagant bunch, it's probably best to put things in context.

That's exactly what this post from KnowProSE.com does. It points out that the problem is not really Second Life's, it's the Internet's - ours, in other words. And it's certainly a big problem.

But it seems to me that the solution is less finding all the energy, than reducing the amount used by computers. It's a bit like cars: it's not really hard making them more fuel efficient, but until there are incentives to do so, you carry on using the old, inefficient technologies. We need to re-engineer our thinking, not just out technologies.

Wayback: 85,898,456,616 and Counting

The Wayback Machine is one of the Internet's best-kept secrets:

A snapshot of the World Wide Web is taken every 2 months and donated to the Internet Archive by Alexa Internet. Further, librarians all over the world have helped curate deep and frequent crawls of sites that could be especially important to future researchers historians and scholars.

As web pages are changed or deleted every 100 days, on average, having a resource like this is important for the preservation of our emerging cultural heritage.

And even for someone like me, who uses it all the time, numbers like this still take the breath away:

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine now has 85,898,456,616 archived web objects in it

plus

The database contains over 1.5 petabytes of data that came from the web (that is 1.5 million gigabytes) which makes it one of the largest databases of any kind.

And a cyber-pearl beyond price. (Via Open Access News.)

Set My Libri Free

Everybody knows about Project Gutenberg, which aims to provide texts of as many public domain books as possible. One freedom that is available for such texts is to create spoken versions of them. Librivox is aiming to do just that:

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net (through a podcast, catalog, and bit torrents). We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project, and we operate almost exclusively through Internet communications.

...

We get most of our texts from Project Gutenberg, and the Internet Archive and ibiblio.org host our audio files.

Not only that, but it offers its files in both the well-known - but proprietary - MP3 format, as well as the less well-known but free and deliciously-named ogg format. Another unexpected plus of the project, is that it can offer several versions of the same text, allowing all kinds of interesting comparisons to be made - to say nothing of cool reworkings.

There is also a small but select group of texts in languages other than English. (Via Creative Commons.)

Google Maps Go to Azeroth

If any further proof were needed of the fading line between real and virtual, here comes a story about Google Maps moving beyond the tangible:

The fictional continent of Azeroth in the World of Warcraft now has an area that uses Google Maps API. The map, if we may add, is amazingly accurate. Accordingly, there are over 15,000 data points covering 69 resources with their exact map location in the WoW database.

I can't wait for the virtual mashups.

Gowers Now Out

The Gowers Review is now out. I've not had time to read it all yet, but there's a good summary in the Treasury's press release:

Whilst the Review concludes that the UK has a fundamentally strong IP system, it sets out important targeted reforms. The reforms aim to:

* strengthen enforcement of IP rights to protect the UK's creative industries from piracy and counterfeiting;
* provide additional support for British businesses using IP in the UK and abroad; and
* strike the right balance to encourage firms and individuals to innovate and invest in new ideas while ensuring that markets remain competitive and that future innovation is not impeded.

There's some good news in this:

To ensure the correct balance in IP rights the review recommends:

* ensuring the IP system only proscribes genuinely illegitimate activity. The Review recommends introducing a strictly limited 'private copying' exception to enable consumers to format-shift content they purchase for personal use. For example to legally transfer music from CD to their MP3 player;
* enabling access to content for libraries and education establishments - to ensure that the UK's cultural heritage can be adequately stored for preservation and accessed for learning. The Review recommends clarifying exceptions to copyright to make them fit for the digital age; and
* recommending that the European Commission does not change the status quo and retains the 50 year term of copyright protection for sound recordings and related performers' rights.

But I worry about what the following will mean in practice:

With the music industry losing as much as 20 per cent of annual turnover to piracy and counterfeiting, the Review recommends strengthening enforcement of IP rights through:

* new powers and duties for Trading Standards to take action against infringement of copyright law;
* IP crime recognised as an area for police action in the National Community Safety Plan;
* tougher penalties for online copyright infringement - with a maximum 10 years imprisonment;
* lowering the costs of litigation - by using mediation and consulting on the use of fast-track litigation. The Review acknowledges that prohibitive legal costs affect the ability of any to defend and challenge IP; and
* consulting on the use of civil damages as a deterrent for IP infringement.

If this means going after large-scale counterfeiters, well and good. But if we're talking about "tougher penalties" and "police action" for all kinds creative uses - mashups etc. - then there are going to be big problems.

Parenthetically, here's a characteristically wise and well-written piece by Larry Lessig in today's FT about one aspect of the report. He's worried that the Gowers recommendation on not changing the status quo for sound recordings may be ignored by the UK Government to keep some of its industry chums happy:

There is not much doubt about what it will say on this proposal. There is much more doubt about whether the government will follow the report's sensible advice.

Lessig then makes his usual sensible pitch about orphan works, including with the following splendid peroration:

There are some who believe that copyright terms should be perpetual. Britain did the world a great service when it resolved that debate almost 300 years ago, by establishing one of the earliest copyright regimes to limit copyright to a fixed term. It could now teach the world a second important lesson: any gift of term extension should only go to those who ask.

TheyWorkForYou.com and Open Politics

Today I received an email from a service I signed up to recently. I'd forgotten about it because it dealt with the apparently yawn-worthy subject of what my local Member of Parliament said. In fact, the service promises to deliver to me, freshly-baked, all the wit and wisdom of said Honourable Member.

Now, truth to tell, what the chap opined about the number of buses on Chelsea bridge was less than gripping. But the point is, I now know when he speaks, and what he says. Not only that, the information on the site TheyWorkForYou.com presents a gloriously Web 2.0-ified version of Parliamentary speeches, complete with Ajaxy popups, and links to more information about MPs than you could shake an identity card at.

In short, the service turns the whole area into a data wonderland. This is what open politics should be. Thanks: YouReallyReallyDoWorkForMe.

How Cool is Coull.tv?

Today's Web user depends on search - well, I do, at least. But search/Google is really only doing words. And, as any fule kno, words is easy. Now video, that's quite a different matter.

So the appearance of any site claiming to make videos searchable is at least worth a look, so to speak. Coull.tv is one such:

coull.tv enables you to activate objects within a video - making people, objects and other items clickable. Anybody can then add tags and comments describing the video and or the objects in that video. This enables the video or parts of it to be easily found; the more popular tags and comments become, the more often coull.tv will suggest them in related searches. coull.tv will use the power of the community to help categorize and tag every element of a video. coull.tv has no pre-roll or post-roll advertising in the way of the viewing experience.

There are two important elements here. First, the fact that elements within a video can be demarcated and made clickable. But that on its own doesn't make a search engine: it just turns video flow into discrete elements. The second part of the coull.tv equation is to get users to do the difficult bit: indexing all those elements. In fact, this is probably the only way video indexing is going to be done for a long while. Automatic recognition through some kind of AI is just too difficult currently.

God knows, the last thing we need is another video sharing site; happily, coull.tv seems to be searching for something more. (Via John Battelle's Searchblog.)

Dell Delivers - Even in Second Life

If you go to Dell's main site at www.dell.com, you have an unexpected option on the pop-up list of countries and regions at the bottom, as this post shows. Yes, Dell really seems to get this Second Life lark.

Mashup 2.0 and a New Data Commons

One of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 is the ability to combine data from various sources - the mashup. And yet, in a sense, mashups so far have been purely additive: you take something and add it to something else to create a third. The two sources rarely meet in any deep way to forge some truly new information or insight, other than ones born of clever data representation (not to be sneezed at, either).

That's what makes the new Swivel service important. The Web site reveals nothing currently, but TechCrunch has some tantalising details:

the site allows users to upload data - any data - and display it to other users visually. The number of page views your website generates. Or a stock price over time. Weather data. Commodity prices. The number of Bald Eagles in Washington state. Whatever. Uploaded data can be rated, commented and bookmared by other users, helping to sort the interesting (and accurate) wheat from the chaff. And graphs of data can be embedded into websites. So it is in fact a bit like a YouTube for Data.

But then the real fun begins. You and other users can then compare that data to other data sets to find possible correlation (or lack thereof). Compare gas prices to presidential approval ratings or UFO sightings to iPod sales. Track your page views against weather reports in Silicon Valley. See if something interesting occurs.

And better yet, Swivel will be automatically comparing your data to other data sets in the background, suggesting possible correlations to you that you may never have noticed.

This is really heavy stuff, and will allow truly new information, and new kinds of information, to emerge from the comparison of other data - something that gets stronger the more data that is uploaded. And what makes me think it's going to be hugely successful is that it has a viable business model attached:

Not all data will be public. The companies business model is to provide the service for free for public data, and charge a fee for data that is kept private. Private data can still be compared by the owner to public data sets.

Which is exactly what you want: all the benefit of the public data, but none of the issues of sharing your own. Essentially, this allows limited private grazing of a new data commons, whose overall creation and care is paid for in part by that grazing. Brilliant.

Update: Swivel is now up, in beta at least. Inevitably, there's not much to see yet.

All the News You Can Trust

Here's an interesting twist on the Digg idea: a site that does not merely vote stories up or down, but which rates them in terms of their reliability - quality, not mere popularity:

In recent years, the consolidation of mainstream media, combined with the rise of opinion news and the explosion of new media outlets, have created a serious problem for democracy: many people feel they can no longer trust the news media to deliver the information they need as citizens.

To address this critical issue, NewsTrust is developing an online news rating service to help people identify quality journalism - or "news you can trust." Our members rate the news online, based on journalistic quality, not just popularity. Our beta website and news feed feature the best and the worst news of the day, picked from hundreds of alternative and mainstream news sources.

This non-profit community effort tracks news media nationwide and helps citizens make informed decisions about democracy. Submitted stories and news sources are carefully researched and rated for balance, fairness and originality by panels of citizen reviewers, students and journalists. Their collective ratings, reviews and tags are then featured in our news feed, for online distribution by our members and partners.

It's a laudable idea, although I'm not sure how it will be funded in the long-term, or whether it will fall victim to people with an agenda putting together a clique to skew the results. (Via OpenBusiness.)

From O(GL)LPC to O(W)LPC

An interesting story here:

Microsoft wants to make its Windows operating system available on the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) notebook computers, OLPC chairman Nicholas Negroponte said at the NetEvents conference in Hong Kong on Saturday.

...

"We put in an SD slot in the machine just for Bill. We didn't need it but the OLPC machines are at Microsoft right now, getting Windows put on them."

The SD slot is needed so that memory can be boosted sufficiently to run Windows. That probably won't be a problem in terms of cost, because memory just keeps on getting cheaper. But what's deeply ironic here is that the current price of the GNU/Linux-based OLPC system - around $140 - is utterly dwarfed by the cost of Windows. Obviously Microsoft will offer a cut-down, el cheapo version, but nonetheless the unjustifiable disparity between hardware and software costs is striking.

Microsoft's interest is understandable - it doesn't want to lose a potentially huge and impressionable market. What is less understandable is Negroponte's willingness to give up all his fine principles of empowering children, and to allow them to be shackled by closed source/DRM/Trusted Computing - for what looks like a rather pathetic and unbecoming reason:

"I have known [Microsoft chairman] Bill Gates his entire adult life. We talk, we meet one-on-one, we discuss this project," said Negroponte, according to a transcript provided to vnunet.com.

Gosh, you must be important. (Via Slashdot.)

The Great UnSuggester

This, surely, is what technology was invented for:

Unsuggester takes "people who like this also like that" and turns it on its head. It analyzes the seven million books LibraryThing members have recorded as owned or read, and comes back with books least likely to share a library with the book you suggest.

After all, who wants to know about things that will slide down your mental gullet like a proverbial oyster? What we need are intellectual chicken bones that makes us choke on new ideas.

Free Tibet, Free Tibetan Typeface

I came across this worthy project through an article about Tibet by Paul Jones:

The Tibetan & Himalayan Digital Library project at the University of Virginia is pleased to make available the alpha release of the Unicode character based Tibetan Machine Uni OpenType font for writing Tibetan, Dzongkha and Ladakhi in dbu can script with full support for the Sanskrit combinations found in chos skad texts.

Alpha release here, people: could all Tibetan hackers please hammer the code.