25 February 2008
The Value of Nothing
One of those joining this blog in pointing out the power of pricing at zero is Chris Anderson. His next book is called simply "Free", and he's published a convenient synopsis in the form of an article in his personal publishing vehicle, Wired:It took decades to shake off the assumption that computing was supposed to be rationed for the few, and we're only now starting to liberate bandwidth and storage from the same poverty of imagination. But a generation raised on the free Web is coming of age, and they will find entirely new ways to embrace waste, transforming the world in the process.
Judging by the article, the book will be highly anecdotal - no bad thing for a populist tome. My only concern is that the emphasis will be too much on the "free as in beer" side, neglecting the fact that the "free as in freedom" aspect is actually even more important.
Digital Reputations
I've not read the book The Future of Reputation, but the fact that it's freely available and comes recommended by Danah Boyd is good enough for me:This book examines the darker side of personal expression and communication online, looking at some of the social costs of what I'm always rambling on about as "persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences." Our reputation is one of our greatest assets. What happens when our own acts or the acts of others sully that? What role does the technology play in enabling or stopping that? How should the law modernize its approach to privacy and slander to address the networked world?
Reputations play a crucial role in the free software world - a good reason to give the book a whirl.
24 February 2008
Let Us Now Praise Patent Troll Trackers
So the anonymous patent troll tracker is anonymous no more:My name is Rick Frenkel. I started in IP over 10 years ago, as a law clerk at Lyon & Lyon in Los Angeles. After a few years there as a law clerk and attorney, I litigated patent cases for several years at Irell & Manella. Two years ago I moved to the Valley and went in-house at Cisco. In my career, I have represented plaintiffs, defendants, large companies, small companies, individual inventors, universities, and everything in between. I currently work at Cisco.
Do I care? Not a jot. What I care about is this:Now that I have been unmasked, I’m not sure where the blog is going from here. I’d like to keep it going. For one, I still have quite a few post ideas in me (indeed, I have several already prepared, waiting to go). Further, there aren’t many in-house counsel blogging, and I think we deserve a voice. I’m going to take off the next couple of weeks to think it over.
He can be called Rick or Rumpelstiltskin for all I care: he performs a hugely valuable service that the world of computing would be poorer without. Let's hope those couple of weeks of thinking it over mark a hiatus and not a halt.
22 February 2008
Why eGov UK is Doomed
Read this and weep:Directgov welcomes and encourages other websites to link to it as the main UK central government website. By linking to Directgov you are deemed to have signed up to the terms and conditions.
Terms and conditions? For linking to a website??? If this is how little "the main UK central government website" groks the essential nature of the organic, evolving, pullulating Net, no wonder so many government IT projects are such an utter disaster.
Let a Thousand (Open Source) Blogs Bloom
Reading the various reactions to Microsoft's "big" announcement about openness, I was struck by the cumulative force of all the different open source blogs offering their two penn'orth. It made me realise how important it is to have ever more of the things to add to the blogospheric pressure.
And so, against that background, let me say: Welcome, Green Eggs and Ham.
No, I don't know either.
21 February 2008
UK Copyright Extension Alert
Even though the Gowers Review comprehensively trashed the idea of extending copyright for sound recordings, zombie-like it's back as a Private Member's Bill. The indispensable Open Rights Group has more and tells you what do about it. Hint: it involves writing to your MP:What can you say to persuade your MP to show up to the Commons on a Friday? Perhaps you might point out that all the economic evidence points against term extension. Or that every other UK citizen is expected to contribute to their pension out of income earned in their working life. Or that retrospectively extending copyright term won’t encourage Elvis Presley to record any more new tracks. Or that if governments continue to draft intellectual property legislation on behalf of special interest groups, it will only further erode the respect that ordinary citizens have for the letter of the law.
Why Intellectual Property Does Not Exist, Part 3502
A nice point from Mike Masnick:Those who insist that copyright is the same as real property break their own rule by also insisting that they retain perpetual rights to the good, even after it's been sold. If copyright were like real property, after the creator sold it, the buyer could do whatever they want with it, including giving it out for free.
A hit, a very palpable hit.
The Inq Has the Dirt on the One
More details on the Elonex £100 ultraportable:Elonex claims the whole caboodle is optimised for the Linux software it runs. The Linux is Debian flavoured and the little office suite that is bundled with it is all branded ONE. ONEInternet, ONEMail, ONEWord, etc.
As we surmised, storage comes in a 1Gb flash flavour. There's 128Mb of DDR-II memory, a seven-inch 800 by 480 LCD screen with stereo two-channel audio, built-in speakers, a microphone and audio Jack. Wibbling comes courtesy of a Lan/WLAN 10/100M Ethernet with WLAN 802.11g Antenna.
Update: And someone else has spotted that it seems to be this machine, rebadged.
Hip-hip-Hadoop!
Just one more reason why the Microsoft-Yahoo merger, if it happens, will be hell:
Yahoo is following in Google’s footsteps again in search. Today, it is shifting a crucial part of its search engine to Hadoop, software that handles large-scale distributed computing tasks particularly well. Hadoop is an open-source implementation of Google’s MapReduce software and file system.
...
Yahoo is replacing its own software with Hadoop and running it on a Linux server cluster with 10,000 core processors.
Go that? 10,000 core processors running GNU/Linux at the heart of Yahoo. Microsoft is damned if they do (rip and replace) and damned if they don't. Go on, make our day, Steve....
Document Freedom Day a Month Too Late?
It all sounds jolly japes:
On 26 March 2008, the Document Freedom Day will provide a global rallying point for Document Liberation and Open Standards. It will literally give teams around the world the chance to "hoist the flag": A 'DFD Starter Pack' containing a flag, t-shirt, leaflets and stickers is in preparation and is planned to be sent out in the first weeks of March to the first 100 teams that sign up. Sixteen teams already signed up during the preparation phase of the DFD prior to this release. Sign your team up now!
Hurry, hurry, hurry.
But I can't help feeling that they have missed a trick here. Surely the obvious time to try to raise awareness of open documents and open standards was just before the meeting beginning on February 25 in Geneva to decide the fate of Microsoft's soi-disant Open Office XML format?
Welcome to ... The Spittoon
Last night I had the pleasure - and privilege - of attempting to hack the minds of a roomful of young scientists. It was my usual Digital Code of Life riff, and in the course of preparing my thoughts I wandered over to the 23AndMe site. This, you will recall, is:a web-based service that helps you read and understand your DNA. After providing a saliva sample using an at-home kit, you can use our interactive tools to shed new light on your distant ancestors, your close family and most of all, yourself.
It is also the company set up by the wife of one of the Google founders - you can join the dots yourself.
But one thing I'd not come across before was the company's blog - called, rather charmingly, The Spittoon....
Adobe Flash - Now with Added Evil
Another reason to hate Flash:Now Adobe, which controls Flash and Flash Video, is trying to change that with the introduction of DRM restrictions in version 9 of its Flash Player and version 3 of its Flash Media Server software. Instead of an ordinary web download, these programs can use a proprietary, secret Adobe protocol to talk to each other, encrypting the communication and locking out non-Adobe software players and video tools. We imagine that Adobe has no illusions that this will stop copyright infringement -- any more than dozens of other DRM systems have done so -- but the introduction of encryption does give Adobe and its customers a powerful new legal weapon against competitors and ordinary users through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
(Via Techdirt.)
19 February 2008
Bank Julius Baer, Meet Barbra Streisand
One of the claims to fame of Techdirt's Mike Masnick is for coining the phrase "the Streisand effect":The phenomenon takes its name from Barbra Streisand, who made her own ill-fated attempt at reining in the Web in 2003. That's when environmental activist Kenneth Adelman posted aerial photos of Streisand's Malibu beach house on his Web site as part of an environmental survey, and she responded by suing him for $50 million. Until the lawsuit, few people had spotted Streisand's house, Adelman says--but the lawsuit brought more than a million visitors to Adelman's Web site, he estimates. Streisand's case was dismissed, and Adelman's photo was picked up by the Associated Press and reprinted in newspapers around the world.
So attempts by the Bank Julius Baer to shut down the Wikileaks site are not only doomed, but doomed to make things much, much worse than if the bank had just put up with it. Fighting openness is just not a good idea.
Monopoly in the DNA
It seems that Bill Gates' foundation is affected with the same love of monopolies and keeping things closed as its creator:The chief of the malaria program at the World Health Organization has complained that the growing dominance of malaria research by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation risks stifling a diversity of views among scientists and wiping out the health agency's policy-making function.
In a memorandum, the chief of the malaria program, Arata Kochi, complained to his boss, Margaret Chan, the director general of WHO, that the foundation's money, while crucial, could have "far-reaching, largely unintended consequences."
Many of the world's leading malaria scientists are now "locked up in a 'cartel' with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group," Kochi wrote. Because "each has a vested interest to safeguard the work of the others," he wrote, getting independent reviews of research proposals "is becoming increasingly difficult."
Amazing: exactly the same dynamics seem to be operating here for research as for software. Must be something in the DNA. (Via Slashdot.)
18 February 2008
Is Elonex the ONE?
One emerging trend is that of ultra-cheap ultraportables powered - of course - by GNU/Linux. As I've noted before, Microsoft simply cannot follow down this particular rabbit-hole: Windows is too big and too expensive for such cheap hardware.
And to prove the point that the only way is down, here are tantalising hints about a new sub £100 - yes, you read that correctly - machine called the ONE from the UK manufacturer Elonex:The ONE has been specially designed to aid and encourage learning. The user-friendly unit comes with a full software suite including a word processor, spreadsheet, scientific calculator, and an imaging and graphics package. Linux is at the core of the ONE. This has not only massively reduced the cost and has been a major factor in making the ONE available sub £100, but also corresponds with the governments startegy on software interoperability. “I want to see young people access all sorts of software, to feel confident with the use of open-source and proprietary software." Jim Knight MP.
Nice one: let's see what the UK government's reaction to *that* is....
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