The Facebook Approach to Open Source

Here's an interesting sign of the times. Facebook is opening up a big wodge of code....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Libelling Larry Lessig

Wow, outrageous:

Although it is unclear at this point who Senators Obama and McCain might choose, AAP believes it essential that key officials who will deal with intellectual property issues in a new administration have a full understanding of the importance of intellectual property rights for those who hold these rights and for broader U.S. economic and trade interests. AAP is concerned, for example, that based on their past academic relationship, Senator Obama might choose among his appointments a divisive figure such as Larry Lessig - a law professor and leading proponent of diminished copyright rights.

Lessig has done more for *extending* the usefulness of copyright than anyone. The Association of American Publishers (AAP) are simply beneath contempt. (Via Arbeit 2.0.)

Verified by Visa - As Valueless

I, too, have noticed the insidious spread of Verified by Visa (VbyV), and thought it looked well dodgy, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Here's the problem:

Once obtained by fraudsters, either by direct phishing attack or through other more subtle forms of social engineering trickery, VbyV login credentials make it easier for crooks to make purchases online while simultaneously making it harder for consumers to deny responsibility for a fraudulent transaction.

The easiest way will be for a compromised site to push you to a false login and obtain your magic password. You won't be able to prove it, of course, and so the danger is that you will end up the bill for fraud.

This is a disaster waiting to happen, and lots of people are going to get burned if we don't manage to get some sense into the banks soon. The only way to do that is to get the story out - please pass it on.... (Via Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog.)

Microsoft's Future

This is something that I predicted would happen:

The company's Windows client business grew by half its anticipated target - two percent instead of four compared to last year. Microsoft said fewer traditional PCs and more netbooks had shipped than expected. Also, revenue from OEMs was down as they shifted to sell cheaper netbooks.

Netbooks running Windows mean growth but relatively low income as they do not run money spinning versions of Windows, like Windows Vista Premium Edition. Microsoft said it was too early to say how much netbooks are cannibalizing traditional sales.

It will be interesting to see how steep the dive is.

Labour's Data Delusion

There is a common misconception in Labour's love of super-duper databases: that more data is better. In fact, as any fule kno, what you want is the right data. Here's a great comment that unpicks that delusion in the context of its insane ContactPoint scheme:

There was no shortage of information about Victoria. There was a chronic lack of wisdom and judgement in interpreting the information that was already available. Victoria’s case demonstrates just how difficult it can be to pick up on abuse. It would be far better to concentrate the limited resources available on retention of experienced child and family practitioners and on thorough investigation of children already known to social services, rather than flooding an over-stretched system with low-level data about every child (up to 50% of the child population) who might need services.

The Mirror

Wo informieren sich Medienprofis? Dem Branchenblatt "journalist" zufolge vor allem bei SPIEGEL und SPIEGEL ONLINE.

[Where do media professionals get their information? Above all from Der Spiegel and Spiegel Online, according to the industry newspaper "journalist".]

Ja, that mirrors my experience...

Open Source Spaceships?

Apparently:

This is a privately funded suborbital space endeavor.
Our mission is to launch a human being into space.

We are currently developing a series of suborbital space vehicles - designed to pave the way for manned space flight on a micro size spacecraft.

...

We intend to share all our techninal information as much as possible, within the laws of EU-export control.

(Via BoingBoing.)

*All* Russian Schools to Use Free Software

I've often lamented how few schools in the UK use free software, and how difficult it is to break the lock that Microsoft has on the entire educational system. The pathetic state here is highlighted by contrast with Russia, which is making amazing strides in rolling out open source to schools.

It began with a few pilot projects, and apparently these have been so successful that the Russian government has now decided to make it the standard for *all* schools....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Andrew Keen is Right...

...when he writes:

The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some "back end" revenue.

People aren't going to give away intellectual labour in that hope because...that's not why people contribute to Wikipedia, or Linux or any of the thousand other endeavours built around sharing, collaborating and giving.

As studies have shown, if you start paying people to do something that they are doing for the sheer pleasure of doing it, they suddenly lose much of the satisfaction they hitherto derived: people don't *want* to be paid for doing it - but they will want to be paid for doing something that do in order to get paid (aka "work").

And Mr Keen is absolutely spot-on again when he adds:

"Free" doesn’t fill anyone’s belly; it doesn’t warm anyone up.

Indeed not; but it does fill the *heart*, which has its own imperatives quite separate from the undeniable ones of the belly.... (Via Slashdot.)

Investing Out in the Open

As the recent financial fun has shown, investing can soon turn into an ungrounded exercise in fantasy wealth creation based on trickery, deceit and general exploitation of ignorance. Part of the problem is the lack of openness.

So here's an interesting idea from a company called Covestor: investing out in the open.

Covestor is not a bulletin board or fantasy trading game, it's all about actions. Covestor is about real-trades, real people and real results - where you can both build your credibility and see what other real people are doing to achieve their goals. Secondly, it's about helping people make more money by leveraging the hard work that is already being done. Of course, discussion is part of the investment process.

Many of our members also have their own stock blogs and are active on discussion sites. Our role is not to replace that, but to help add trust to what they are saying elsewhere.

Ah yes, trust: that's the glue that holds the opens together; it's also the stuff that, in the financial world, was melted down and sold off like lead from a church roof. Let's hope that Covestor can get its idea to, er, stick. (Via Mark Taylor.)

The True Value of Nothing

How much is GNU/Linux worth? Well, its price is zero, but it's clearly incredibly valuable: what to do? Here's what a new paper from the Linux Foundation did....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Why Microsoft Wants Us to Get All Mixed Up

“What's in a name?” some bloke in the sixteenth century once asked. As Microsoft knows, quite a lot. What you call something can have a major influence on how you think about it. So how Microsoft talks about free software is important – not least for the clues that it gives about its latest tactical move to defang the open source threat.

On Linux Journal.

Welcome Back, Old Fruit

The Apricot brand for computers goes back a long way - I was there, unfortunately. Remarkably, it consistently managed to misread the market at just about every turn - from choosing a daft name that was so obviously modelled on Apple's, to the decision to offer only MS-DOS rather than PC-DOS with its PC line ("good enough" we were told at the time), to the hopelessly premature voice-controlled portable system (I'll never forget the sight of Apricot managers shouting, red-faced, into the weird microphone in a desperate attempt to get it to recognise something - anything). And don't even ask about the dancing girls at the launches of their business machines....

Well, Apricot is back with a bang:

Apricot has pulled the plug on its Linux-based netbook, choosing instead to offer the pint-sized Picobook Pro only with Windows XP.

...


"Apricot will not be selling with Linux variants," a company missive revealed, which suggests it's not merely dropping SuSE for Ubuntu or another netbook-friendly distro.

"Apricot has made this decision to ensure customers have a smooth installation of their operating system," the company told Register Hardware.

"The Linux version proved too complicated with initial testers, who would opt to purchase and install XP any way.

"Apricot believes that this will be a more attractive product offering for their target customers, because as soon as it is switched on, it is ready for use."

Strange, then, that Asus has managed to make GNU/Linux ultraportables that are not only "ready for use" as soon as you switch them on, but extremely easy to use, too; and strange that Asus is so successful with these models. Just a coincidence, presumably.

Why OpenOffice.org Failed – and What to Do About It

Last week I noted that the release of OpenOffice.org 3.0 seems to mark an important milestone in its adoption, judging at least by the healthy – and continuing – rate of downloads. But in many ways, success teaches us nothing; what is far more revealing is failure....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Clouds on the Cloud Horizon

Following my post about RMS's doubts about clouds, Stan D. Freeman has kindly pointed me towards the growing kerfuffle over iGoogle's new format in the US, and how everyone is now redefining themselves as Brits (sounds a good move to me).

As Stan points out, this neatly underlines exactly the point that RMS was talking about: once in the cloud, you are in the lap of the gods (or something like that). It seems that Google is forgetting the first rule of Web 2.0: users rule. Why not just let people *choose* what they want? Isn't that supposed to be the way we do things around here?

Under the Aegis of AEGIS

Accessibility rarely figures in the headlines – unless there's some competitive angle, as there was with ODF's supposed lack of accessibility features that Microsoft was quick to trumpet. Against that background, it's good to hear of a thoroughgoing project to improve accessibility, like this one, announced by Sun's Peter Korn....

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Real Story Behind GNU/Linux

If the prospect of another week stretching out before you is getting you down, I've got good news. There's a post about GNU/Linux that is guaranteed to bring a smile to your face. It's a real stonker - try this for a start....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Surely Shome Mishtake?

People seem a little confused here:

Please note: this article is password protected and only available for IP-Watch Subscribers.

...

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. All of the news articles and features on Intellectual Property Watch are also subject to a Creative Commons License which makes them available for widescale, free, non-commercial reproduction and translation.

Or maybe they mean the statement that the article is password protected is under a CC licence...

Anyhow, this confusion about intellectual monopolies is highly appropriate, given the subject-matter of the article:

Intellectual property and financial stakeholders, representatives from developing and developed countries, and nongovernmental organisations are in Vienna this week to work on a global guide on how to use intellectual property as collateral in commerce.

Got that? After one of the worst economic crises in recent history, caused by pyramids of non-existent wealth being constructed on totally fictitious financial instruments, they now want to use "intellectual property" as "collateral" in commerce - that is, more totally fictitious financial istruments to create another pyramid of non-existent wealth.

Madness Begets Madness

This is where the madness of authoritarianism leads:

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.

Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.

A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say.

The move is targeted at monitoring the owners of Britain’s estimated 40m prepaid mobile phones. They can be purchased with cash by customers who do not wish to give their names, addresses or credit card details.

This is another reason why the super-duper snooper database is madness: to make it even vaguely workable, the government must try to plug all these loopholes. But plugging one - pay-as-you-go mobiles - only highlights the next. In this case, it's pay-as-you-go mobiles from *abroad*. The logic of the super-duper snooper database means that people will be forced to register every mobile as they come into the UK. But this will simply create a black market for used mobile phones, so then the UK government will have to make *those* illegal. And then people will turn to encrypted VoiP, so that will be made illegal, and so on, and so forth.

Why don't they just implant chips in us at birth at be done with it?

What is an Open University?

It is:

one in which

1. The research the university produces is open access.

2. The course materials are open educational resources.

3. The university embraces free software and open standards.

4. If the university holds patents, it readily licenses them for free software, essential medicines, and the public good.

5. The university network reflects the open nature of the internet.

where "university" includes all parts of the community: students, faculty, administration.

The Wheeler Declaration.

Why Stella is a Star

That's Stella Rimington, former head of MI5. Her Guardian interview is so packed with good sense that I'll have to quote it at length:

A former head of MI5 today describes the response to the September 11 2001 attacks on the US as a "huge overreaction" and says the invasion of Iraq influenced young men in Britain who turned to terrorism.

In an interview with the Guardian, Stella Rimington calls al-Qaida's attack on the US "another terrorist incident" but not qualitatively different from any others.

"That's not how it struck me. I suppose I'd lived with terrorist events for a good part of my working life and this was as far as I was concerned another one," she says.

In common with Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, who retired as MI5's director general last year, Rimington, who left 12 years ago, has already made it clear she abhorred "war on terror" rhetoric and the government's abandoned plans to hold terrorism suspects for 42 days without charge.

Today, she goes further by criticising politicians including Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, for trying to outbid each other in their opposition to terrorism and making national security a partisan issue.

It all began, she suggests, with September 11. "National security has become much more of a political issue than it ever was in my day," she says. "Parties are tending to use it as a way of trying to get at the other side. You know, 'We're more tough on terrorism than you are.' I think that's a bad move, quite frankly."

Rimington mentions Guantánamo Bay, the practice of extraordinary rendition, and the invasion of Iraq - three issues which the majority in Britain's security and intelligence establishment opposed privately at the time.

She challenges claims, notably made by Tony Blair, that the war in Iraq was not related to the radicalisation of Muslim youth in Britain.

Read it and weep.

Where China Leads...

...can Jacqui be far behind?

All visitors to internet cafés in Beijing will be required to have their photographs taken in a stringent new control on the public use of cyberspace.

...

According to the latest rules, by mid-December all internet cafés in the main 14 city districts must install cameras to record the identities of their web surfers, who must by law be 18 or over. There are more than 250 million internet users in China, approximately 10 times more than there were in 2000.

...

All photographs and scanned identity cards will be entered into a city-wide database run by the Cultural Law Enforcement Taskforce. The details will be available in any internet café.

Well, if it's got a centralised database, Labour's bound to want one to add to its growing collection....

Hoon Mines the Moron Meme

One of Tony Blair's stupider statements was the following:

"The biggest civil liberty of all is not to be killed by a terrorist."

Let's call this the Moron Meme: it assumes that people are stupid enough to confuse basic rights to life with others rights to liberty, when in fact they are two quite distinct dimensions. And having made this false comparison, Blair was then able to use false logic to demand a trade-off: if you don't want to be killed by terrorists, then you must give up some/many of your civil liberties.

What this glosses over is the real possibility that you can have *both* by bringing a mature and calm intelligence to bear on the situation, instead of respondingly disproportionately out of abject, unthinking fear ("Terrorists! Terrorists! Everybody panic!")

It was stupid when Blair said it, and it's just as stupid now Geoff Hoon is parroting it:

[Julia Goldsworthy] asked: "How much more control can they have? How far is he prepared to go to undermine civil liberties?"

Mr Hoon interjected: "To stop terrorists killing people in our society, quite a long way actually.
...

He added: "The biggest civil liberty of all is not to be killed by a terrorist."

This exchange contains another extraordinarily stupid statement:

"If they are going to use the internet to communicate with each other and we don't have the power to deal with that, then you are giving a licence to terrorists to kill people."

- As if the Internet were some magic pixie dust that, when sprinkled on terrorist activies, makes them murderously efficacious.

And yet today, without those powers, the British secret services seem to be doing a pretty good job at stopping misguided idiots attempting to spread mayhem and murder (not least thanks to the latter's enormous incompetence): seen any good terrorist attacks recently? No, nor me.

The only possible reason for bringing in more snooping powers is because it gives the Government even more control over everything - its current obsession.

What Comes After “Embrace, Extend”?

Here are two small, but significant moves by Microsoft....

On Open Enterprise blog.

What a Difference a Year Can Make

Talking of ultraportables, can it really be just a year that they've been around? Apparently:

ASUS sold over 350,000 Eee PCs in the fourth quarter of 2007 and had sold 1 million by June of 2008. And according to recent reports, the company has now shipped 4 million. That original Eee PC 701 was only the start of ASUS’ plunge into the category and, since then, they have released over 10 netbook models.

And let's remember: those first machines all ran GNU/Linux. Once again, despite Microsoft's prattle about "innovation", it was only later that the Windows world caught up. And only when Microsoft made a huge U-turn and gave Windows XP a new lease of life in the face of the fact that Windows Vista was not just a dog, it was a slow, fat, lazy dog that wouldn't even run properly on ultaportables.

Here's to the next year.