I've noticed an interesting new meme creeping into UK politics. When the Government is presented with a statement or facts that it doesn't like, it doesn't condescend to refute them; instead it simply states they are "just plain wrong". End of argument, end of story, go away little person.
Call is the anti-open meme.
It's always a sign that you're winning when the opposition start getting seriously desperate in their tactics. Here's a fine example:Many declarations have been made about the need for particular business models in the STM information community. STM publishers have largely remained silent on these matters as the majority are agnostic about business models: what works, works. However, despite very significant investment and a massive rise in access to scientific information, our community continues to be beset by propositions and manifestos on the practice of scholarly publishing. Unfortunately the measures proposed have largely not been investigated or tested in any evidence-based manner that would pass rigorous peer review. In the light of this, and based on over ten years experience in the economics of online publishing and our longstanding collaboration with researchers and librarians, we have decided to publish a declaration of principles which we believe to be self-evident.
This so-called Brussels Declaration on STM Publishing is supported by the usual suspects - hello, Elsevier - but it's disappointing to see major university presses like those from Cambridge and Oxford putting their names to this arrant, self-interested nonsense.
The emphasis is squarely on business models, and gives little space to larger issues like the public's right to see the research that they pay for, or of researchers' rights to maximise the credit they gain from their work. Instead it consists of risible claims such as:
Publishers launch, sustain, promote and develop journals for the benefit of the scholarly community
Yeah, right, I can just imagine all the fraught meetings where publishers with furrowed brows mull over ways they can help the scholarly community. Yeah, I bet every waking thought is devoted to the subject. That's why the prices of journals have been rising at multiples of inflation for many years; that's why libraries are being bullied into buying group subscriptions, including titles they're not interested in. Purely for the benefit of the scholarly community, you understand.
One of the benefits of open courseware is that it allows developing countries to access high-quality teaching materials for no cost. But in a move heavy with symbolism, India's National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning is now offering course materials itself. Great to see openness becoming bidirectional. (Via Open Access News.)
Its seems the US FDA, like the equivalent European authorities before it, has decided to ignore evolution:
The government is on track to approve a new antibiotic to treat a pneumonia-like disease in cattle, despite warnings from health groups and a majority of the agency's own expert advisers that the decision will be dangerous for people.
The drug, called cefquinome, belongs to a class of highly potent antibiotics that are among medicine's last defenses against several serious human infections. No drug from that class has been approved in the United States for use in animals.
The American Medical Association and about a dozen other health groups warned the Food and Drug Administration that giving cefquinome to animals would probably speed the emergence of microbes resistant to that important class of antibiotics, as has happened with other drugs. Those super-microbes could then spread to people.
Interesting not so much for what it says, but that it's Business Week that's saying it:
Just as the Enlightenment ushered in a new organizational model of knowledge creation, the same technological and demographic forces that are turning the Web into a massive collaborative work space are helping to transform the realm of science into an increasingly open and collaborative endeavor. Yes, the Web was, in fact, invented as a way for scientists to share information. But advances in storage, bandwidth, software, and computing power are pushing collaboration to the next level. Call it Science 2.0.
This probably won't mean much if you haven't followed Italian political history for the last 15 years, but I was intrigued to learn that Antonio di Pietro, perhaps the most famous of the prosecutors during the great Mani Pulite (Clean Hands) campaign to rid Italy of the endemic political corruption by the mafia, has gone Second life - and even blogged about it:
I have purchased an island and planted the banner of Italia dei Valori. On the initiative of Italia dei Valori, the island will soon be fitted out with offices, conference centres and information points.
In the future, visitors to the island will be welcomed by Italia dei Valori personnel through their virtual representation. The island will also be used for internal meetings and for meeting with journalists.
Now here's an interesting little cross-cultural spat:The European Commission has warned Microsoft that it could impose further penalties in its ongoing antitrust case against the software giant.
The EC claimed on Thursday that Microsoft wants to charge too much for interoperability protocol licences that enable third-party software vendors to develop software compatible with Windows servers. In a damning statemement, the EC claimed that the protocols "lack significant innovation", even though Microsoft has been awarded patents on much of the technology in question.
And what's Microsoft's response? Why, to go running to Mummy:Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith responded that other government agencies had found "considerable innovation" in Microsoft's protocol technology.
"US and European patent offices have awarded Microsoft more than 36 patents for the technology in these protocols, which took millions of dollars to develop, and another 37 patents are pending, so it's hard to see how the Commission can argue that even patented innovation must be made available for free," said Smith in a statement.
Hey Brad, you don't think this might be because the patent system in many countries is horribly broken, and regularly awards patents for obvious, trivial and otherwise inappropriate ideas? Just a thought.
Why does this worry me?Denmark’s Saxo Bank plans to offer Second Life residents the ability to manage their real-life financial portfolios from within the virtual world, and may eventually create a market to trade the Linden dollar against real-world currencies.
WoW - or rather World of Warcraft - real search for a virtual world:The Armory is a vast searchable database of information for World of Warcraft - taken straight from the real servers, updated in real time, and presented in a user-friendly interface. Since the Armory pulls its data from the actual game servers, it is the most comprehensive and up-to-date database on the characters, arena teams, and guilds of World of Warcraft in existence.
(Via Clickable Culture.)
Elsewhere, I've criticised the BBC for its all-too eager embrace of Windows DRM. But in some respects, some of its top people understand the new dynamics:The BBC has struck a content deal with YouTube, the web's most popular video sharing website, owned by Google.
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Mr Highfield said the BBC would not be hunting down all BBC-copyrighted clips already uploaded by YouTube members - although it would reserve the right to swap poor quality clips with the real thing, or to have content removed that infringed other people's copyright, like sport, or that had been edited or altered in a way that would damage the BBC's brand.
"We don't want to be overzealous, a lot of the material on YouTube is good promotional content for us," he said.
Rather longer ago than I care to think, there was a software company called Borland, run by an ebullient Frenchman by the name of Philippe Kahn. Philippe, I presume, is out sailing his yacht, and Borland still seems to be there. Good to see that one of Borland's best products, Delphi, is also moving into new waters:Delphi for PHP is the first completely integrated visual Rapid Application Development (RAD) environment for PHP. Delphi’s proven and familiar visual Rapid Application Development (RAD) approach means you are quickly up to speed and productive, without the headaches normally associated with learning a new development environment. The powerful PHP editor and debugger increase coding speed and efficiency, while the integrated VCL for PHP 5 component class library lets you quickly and visually create PHP web applications and integrate PHP open source components.
(Via TheOpenForce.com.)
An interesting meditation on green biotech hacking, and why we're not quite there yet:The bigger problem, though, is the turnaround time. No engineer or hacker wants to wait four weeks to see if a program works. Hit compile, wait for four weeks, no "Hello World." Start trying to debug the bug, with no debugging tools. No thanks. (I've actually had discussions with geneticists/molecular biologists who think even waiting a few days for a synthesis job isn't a big deal. But what can you say -- biology just hasn't been a hacker culture. And we are the poorer for it.)
I arrived here from the fine Open the Future blog, which had this very insightful comment in the same context:Green biotech hacking is still in the punch-card era, and ... computer hacker culture really didn't take off until you got past punch-cards into time-sharing, where the cost in time and money was low enough that mistakes were something to learn from, not dread.
I think the latter phrase - "mistakes are something to learn from, not dread" - could well stand as an armourial motto for the entire open movement.
Digg occupies such an emblematic place in the Web 2.0 world that it's important to understand what's really going on with this increasingly powerful site (on the rare occasions that I've had stories dugg, my traffic has been stratospheric for a day or two before sagging inexorably down to its usual footling levels.)
So this story from Annalee Newitz on Wired News is at once fascinating and frightening:I can tell you exactly how a pointless blog full of poorly written, incoherent commentary made it to the front page on Digg. I paid people to do it. What's more, my bought votes lured honest Diggers to vote for it too. All told, I wound up with a "popular" story that earned 124 diggs -- more than half of them unpaid. I also had 29 (unpaid) comments, 12 of which were positive.
Although it's worrying that Digg can be gamed so easily, there's hope too:Ultimately, however, my story did get buried. If you search for it on Digg, you won't find it unless you check the box that says "also search for buried stories." This didn't happen because the Digg operators have brilliant algorithms, however -- it happened because many people in the Digg community recognized that my blog was stupid. Despite the fact that it was rapidly becoming popular, many commenters questioned my story's legitimacy. Digg's system works only so long as the crowds on Digg can be trusted.
Digg remains a fascinating experiment in progress; let's hope it works out.
Oh, look. Here's yet another reason to get rid of patents:Guess what? Radio frequency identification tags are insecure. But don't demonstrate the technology's problems at a security conference. If you do, HID Global, a manufacturer of access-control devices, might sue you for patent infringement.
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The use of patent law to prevent vulnerability discovery and discussion is bitter irony, because a fundamental purpose of patent law is disclosure: In exchange for the right to exclude others from using, making or selling a novel invention, an inventor agrees to make public all the details. Once issued, patents are a searchable public record, and expire after 20 years.
It seems that the WTO's demands are starting to bite in Vietnam:Though copyright sale isn’t very common on the Vietnamese market, at the end of 2006, several major state-owned businesses signed copyright contracts with Microsoft. An example was the Ministry of Finance, which bought 15.000 Office software copyrights. Vietnam Commercial Bank (Vietcombank) also signed agreements to have 4.000 permits for Microsoft Office 2003 within 3 years.
Vietnam’s starting to buy software copyrights is indeed a good sign showing that the country is starting to respect WTO rules. The fact that the Ministry of Finance, one of the most important ministries in Vietnam, plays the leading role, also helps to prove to the world that Vietnam intends to make good all of its software copyright pledges to the WTO.
And not surprisingly, people there are beginning to wonder if there isn't a better way - especially for a developing country that has better things to do with its financial resources than giving them to the richest man in the world and his company:At a national conference on open-source software held in Hanoi at the end of 2006, Vietnam Information Association called for the use and development of domestic products, encouragement of free software with similar functions such as OpenOffice, and application of new technologies such as Web 2.0 which Google, Yahoo, Sun, Oracle are currently using.
As the WTO clamps down on countries that use unauthorised copies of software on a large scale, this kind of development is bound to be repeated.
Update: Meanwhile, here's another country with reasons of its own for preferring free software to the kind that comes from the US....
Here's an important conclusion drawn from the rather sad Joyce Hatto saga:It's a perfect example of what we've been saying about artists putting their work online: sharing files widely prevents plagiarism, by making it much easier to detect. One couldn't ask for a better drama to illustrate the point. Never mind Joyce Hatto — think instead of all those other pianists, whose recordings were passed off as her work: the only reason the hoax was detected was because their recordings were being shared online too!
It is a truism in the open source world that the threat of a fork keeps code honest. When contributors who disagree with the way a project is going can simply start their own, there is a powerful incentive to take account of their concerns.
There was a great demonstration of how something as painful as a fork can, in fact, be cathartic, leading to a better, stronger result:The Xara LX vector graphics editor took a big step forward last week. After months of gridlock between open source contributors to the project and its corporate owners, one of the contributors published his own fork of the code base -- and the company approved, offering to host it in the official Subversion repository.
I'm not quite sure what the collective noun for virtual worlds is, but here's a couple of new entrants to the world of worlds.
First, what seems to be a Chinese Second Life clone, Hipihi. And then, not a million miles away, there's Outback Online, from the splendidly-named company Yoick, led by the even more splendidly-named Randal Leeb-du Toit. Maybe that's his in-world name....
This response to an e-petition "to make software patents clearly unenforcible" is interesting:The Government remains committed to its policy that no patents should exist for inventions which make advances lying solely in the field of software. Although certain jurisdictions, such as the US, allow more liberal patenting of software-based inventions, these patents cannot be enforced in the UK.
The test used to discern between patentable and non-patentable subject matter in the UK has recently been clarified by the courts, and is applied rigorously by the Patent Office. Under this test, the true nature of the advance being claimed in a patent application must be determined, and if this advance lies solely in the field of software, or another non-technical field such as methods of doing business, the patent will not be granted. If the advance being made by an invention does lie in a technical field, it must also be non-obvious and sufficiently clearly described for the invention to be reproduced before a patent will be granted by the Patent Office.
The recently published Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, an independent review commissioned by the Government, recommended that patent rights should not be extended to cover pure software, business methods and genes. The Government will implement those recommendations for which it is responsible, and will therefore continue to exclude patents from areas where they may hinder innovation: including patents which are too broad, speculative, or obvious, or where the advance they make lies in an excluded area such as software.
Although it is little more than a statement that the current position will be maintained, it does contain the important confirmation that there are no plans to follow the US down the primrose path to the fiery furnace, and that US software patents are not enforceable in the UK. I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies.
Credit, too, to the 10 Downing Street site for responding in this fashion to a petition that garnered relatively few signatures (I didn't see it and so didn't sign).
This is something that many people have been waiting for:Linden Lab, creator of virtual world Second Life, has announced that it will be adding voice capabilities to the Second Life Grid, as part of its ongoing drive toward creating a richer, more immersive virtual environment.
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Scenario 1 - Residents can teleport to voice-enabled land, and automatically start speaking, with the volume of speech modified according to their spatial relationship with others. Up to 100 users can be present in the same audio channel at once.
Scenario 2 - Group conference calls for two or more Residents. This enables Residents to communicate with large groups across geographical boundaries (e.g. concert setting, or between pockets of land etc).
Scenario 3 - One-to-one personal communication. This enables Residents to privately share a conversation, which can be initiated by an Instant Message. Residents don’t have to be on voice-enabled land to do this.
It doesn't look like this new code will be open:Core voice capabilities are provided by Vivox, under the terms of a service agreement with Linden Lab, incorporating 3D voice technology from DiamondWare
but it's good to see Linden moving forward.
Chris Long tells it as it is:my concern about all this is the ignorance of the technical thinking behind these ideas; ideas that have apparently been formulated by people who've learnt their technology from watching, James Bond, Star Trek, Dr Who and Blakes 7.
I can just imagine the conversation: "Q says we have to connect the Tardis engine to some dilithium crystals and throw some tachyon particles at it... What do you think Orac?"
Can you say ID card?
Here's a fascinating question:how would you feel as a Second Life resident if a real world company stepped into Second Life and started patenting things left right and centre that you'd already done without their knowledge? The real world companies already have processes and budgets for setting up and defending patents; but being new to Second Life they may not know about what people have made already.
The issue raised here is what should be patentable in Second Life? This is easy, actually: nothing. Everything in Second Life is code; in particular, all the interesting stuff is done using the SL scripting language. Since neither software nor algorithms can be patented (at least in rational parts of the world), this clearly means that nothing in SL can be patented.
And that's right. If you could patent things, then, as the post puts it, things would get crazy:How would you feel if using a cylinder for a chair was patented? And then a box prim for a chair was patented, and so on. You'd be wading through patents before you even rezzed a prim.
And this is precisely the situation for software in those parts of the world that allow broad software patents. That is, programmers have to worry that unwittingly they are infringing on somebody's "patent" on that code, even if they are simply employing the basic building blocks of programming - the "cylinders".
In what almost amounts to a thought experiment, we see again the absurdity of allowing software - which is essentially just ideas and algorithms - to be patented. All it does is to impeded innovation. And to those who, in the absence of patents, worry about people stealing bits of their code, that's what copyright is for: it protects particular instantiations of ideas in code, not the ideas themselves, which remain freely available to all for further use and development.
It is no coincidence that the GNU GPL - essentially the constitution of free software - depends on copyright law to work. There is no contradiction between free software and copyright - quite the contrary; it is patents and free software that are intellectual matter and anti-matter.
Sounds cool:The University of Michigan 3D Lab has brought Second Life one step closer to real life by developing stereoscopic support for the Second Life viewer. This recent addition allows visitors wearing special glasses to see the objects of Second Life pop out of the screen similar to watching a 3D movie. Using the recently released source code by Linden Labs, Gabriel Cirio and Eric Maslowski have developed a stereoscopic version of the Second Life viewer that works with a large-screen stereo projection system. This lowcost system uses passive stereo based on polarizing filters and was built from off-theshelf components.
Further proof, if any were needed, of why opening up the code is good for everyone.
Sigh.EU Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini has assured Germany's Federal Minister of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble (Christian Democratic Union; CDU) of his "full support" for the plans of the federal government to engage in so-called online searches of private PCs.
Leaving aside the issue of the gross privacy intrusion this represents, and leaving aside the fact that it seems to be espousing police cracking of computers, there's a teeny-weeny problem here. It's called a firewall; it's what any sane person connected to the Internet will have on their system precisely to prevent crackers gaining access.
While politicians and their advisers remain so ignorant of technology there's hope for us yet.
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