After Newspapers - Who's Next?

Newspapers are dying - or so you might gather from articles like this....

On Open Enterprise blog.

BBC, Meet Plughole....

We are grateful to Andrew Pierce for his informative article about how the Foreign Office minister misled parliament with regard to the advertising of the post of Director of the World Service.

...

To maintain the BBC World Service's reputation and credibility, the new Managing Director must be chosen through a fully open selection process, with full consideration of the availability and qualification of external candidates. In addition, a new managing director must be authoritative in news and current affairs, have wide international perspectives, must be capable of resisting pressure both from the UK government and from other governments and should not believe that the World Service can be founded on the perceived importance of marketing. To impose a closing date for applications of January 4, 2009 is to foreclose all these options.

Read it, and weep.

Torqueing of Monopolies....

I'd seen that Larry Lessig had written another fine rant about intellectual monopolies, this time in Newsweek. What I had missed in my cursory glance was something in the following paragraph:

Since the birth of the Republic, the U.S. government has been in the business of handing out "exclusive rights" (a.k.a., monopolies) in order to "promote progress" or enable new markets of communication. Patents and copyrights accomplish the first goal; giving away slices of the airwaves serves the second. No one doubts that these monopolies are sometimes necessary to stimulate innovation. Hollywood could not survive without a copyright system; privately funded drug development won't happen without patents. But if history has taught us anything, it is that special interests—the Disneys and Pfizers of the world—have become very good at clambering for more and more monopoly rights. Copyrights last almost a century now, and patents regulate "anything under the sun that is made by man," as the Supreme Court has put it. This is the story of endless bloat, with each round of new monopolies met with a gluttonous demand for more.

All good stuff. But what struck me was the "clambering for more": this, surely, was meant to be "clamouring for more". I can't believe someone as eloquent and erudite as Lessig got this wrong, so I can only assume we're looking at a sub-editor attack.

I wonder if it qualifies as an eggcorn?

Western Hypocrisy on Intellectual Monopolies

There is currently a huge bun-fight going on at the WHO over who has the "rights" to "own" key genomic information about pandemic influenza viruses. This is tantamount to arguing over who has the rights to hire out deckchairs on the Titanic as it goes down: the idea that intellectual monopolies have any meaning in a world threatened by hundreds of millions of deaths from a new pandemic strain is beyond obscene.

What makes this spectacle particularly disgusting is the hypocrisy of the West: not content with trying to patent the unpatentable, it wants the developing countries to give up *their* "rights" so that the West's industries can maximise their profit (failing to notice that it is hard to spend all this luvverly profit when you and/or your bankers are dead). Here are some of the sordid details:

Several delegates participating in last week's Intergovernmental Meeting on Pandemic Influenza Preparedness (IGM) (under the World Health Organisation) from countries providing influenza viruses to laboratories and manufacturers in developed countries, privately mentioned that the positions taken by developed countries in particular by the US, Japan and the EU on issues such as intellectual property rights and benefit sharing reveals the "double standards" of those countries.

On the one hand, the IGM saw the US, Japan and the EU pushing hard for relinquishment of sovereign rights, an interpretation of the International Health Regulations that obligates the sharing of viruses, text that requires countries to share as "all, as feasible, cases of H5N1 and other influenza viruses with human pandemic potential" with their laboratories in the name of global public health and pandemic preparedness.

However, on the other hand, they appear unwilling to commit in particular their manufacturers and researchers that receive biological materials to any concrete benefit sharing scheme, or to address IP issues in a manner that benefits developing countries' public health and pandemic preparedness. Much of the framework's text that deals with benefit sharing continues to remain in brackets, denoting there is no agreement.

Whenever reference to "manufacturers" and the need to have a better understanding of their roles and responsibilities was made by developing countries at the meeting, the issue was quickly passed over by the Chair of the IGM, Jane Halton from Australia. And countries such as Japan and the US insisted that the framework being developed should not dictate what the manufacturers or the researchers can do with the biological materials, or their roles and responsibilities.

You would have thought that against the background of a financial system brought to its knees by blind greed, at least here at the World *Health* Organisation there would be a more, er, healthy and mature attitude to saving the world from a potentially even greater disaster. Apparently not....

Do We Need a Google Street?

Here's a jolly idea from those wacky burghers of St. Petersburg: some of them want to rename Engels Avenue there to Yandex Avenue, after the leading Russian search engine:

Инициативная группа предложила поменять название проспекта Энгельса на проспект Яндекса, заявив, что классик коммунизма сделал для Петербурга значительно меньше, чем известный поисковый интернет-сервис.

[Via Google Translate: The Action Group has proposed to change the name of Engels on Prospect Avenue Yandex, arguing that communism has done to the classic St. Petersburg is considerably lower than the well-known Internet search service.]

Google Street, anyone?

PC vs. Mobile

One thing that is evident is the continuing emergence of the mobile platform as a real alternative to the traditional PC. The iPhone and Android systems are the clearest manifestation of this. But here's another:

For many Japanese adolescents, cellphone is inseparable partner of their lives, you might have heard. Different from PC, kids can have their own (not-shared with your family/siblings, not filtered by home-broadband), can bring it with you to school, outside, anywhere (it is important when your writing back within 5 minutes to your friend’s mail is the only way to prove your true friendship). The largest Social Network Mixi already got more page views from cellphone than from PC (and #2 Mobage and #3 Gree are mainly on mobile).

Some are said to write their college reports by e-mail on cellphone. (*1) (*2) (*3)

For those cellphone-adapted youth, PC’s QWERTY keyboard does not necessary be the best input device. They had to use PC keyboard fewer times on their computer class, however, 0-to-9 number pads are more familiar, even faster way for them.

If number pads in cellphone order is more convenient, some youth feel easier to use it even for PC. Yes, there are some solutions.

Keiboard+IE is USB external keyboard having cellphone-keypads, mouse-like joy pad and many short cut buttons (for IE, as its name implies).

I do hope it's not *that* IE.....

Go China?

There's nothing like a mature, balanced view of the world:

2009, Go China!

Lead: Snowstorm, freely falling down to earth, like western values
Lead: Despair fills the sky, ice covers the earth

Lead: Did China retreat?
All: No. The Olympics were a success! We are victorious!
Lead: Hot blood and iron will of Chinese people, lighten up the dark world like burning the holy flame
All: The rivers and mountains, ever more colorful and beautiful

Lead: Earthquakes, shifting back and forth like the positions of Sarkozy, with his dirty tricks, trying to shake the great China
Lead: Did China retreat?
All: No. The Shenzhou-7 launched. We are victorious!
Lead: Pathetic Europe will never stop the insurmountable force of our great dynasty
All: Just the aftershocks from the earthquake would destroy France!

But wait - there's more.....

Unearthing Microsoft's Shilling

Roy's digging has brought to light some interesting, er, hidden treasures:

Several weeks ago we received a public message from James Plamondon, who said:

Roy, et al.,

You’re right. Some of the evangelism practices that I taught and executed at Microsoft in the 1990’s were unethical. I didn’t think so at the time — I thought that they were just hyper-competitive — but I agree now.

I am trying to change the error of my ways. I trust that you will agree that even the most hardened sinner can be redeemed.

Assuming that's true, it should make Plasmondon's blog interesting reading....

Time for a UK Scurvy Dogs Party?

I'll get me cutlass:

When the Swedish Pirate Party was launched three years ago, the majority of the mainstream press viewed them with skepticism, with some simply laughing them away. Times have changed though. As the government works to introduce harsher copyright laws and others that threaten the privacy of Sweden’s citizens, the party is growing stronger and stronger.

In a recent poll, 21 percent of all Swedes indicated that they would consider voting for the Pirate Party in the upcoming European Parliament elections. Among men in the 18-29 age group, this number goes up to a massive 55% - an unprecedented statistic.

Alan Cox and the End of an Era

In the beginning, free software was an activity conducted on the margins - using spare time on a university's computers, or the result of lonely bedroom hacking. One of the key moments in the evolution of free software was when hackers began to get jobs - often quite remunerative jobs - with one of the new open source companies that sprang up in the late 1990s. For more or less the first time, coders could make a good salary doing what they loved, and businesses could be successful paying them to write code that would be given away.

On Open Enterprise blog.

In Praise of Whingeing

One of the central lessons to be learned from free software is that individuals can make a difference. Not many would have given Richard Stallman much chance of succeeding when he launched the GNU project, and Linus's efforts to hack his simple terminal program into an operating system kernel would not have struck a dispassionate observer at the time as likely to go very far. And yet, together, they have changed computing, and indirectly the world, as the ideas of freedom, openness and collaboration they helped to pioneer spread to other domains.

So where does that leave people like me, whose last programming consisted of the world's worst Fortran code (don't ask)? I often pose myself that question, and have gradually come to the view that the best thing I can hope to do is to indulge in a little constructive whingeing. Some recent events have strengthened me in this resolve.

On Open Enterprise blog.

I'm *Not* Linux

One of the most powerful aspects of free software is that its entire approach and mindset is orthogonal to proprietary software. It's not just better, it's profoundly different. That's one of the most important reasons that *everything* Microsoft has thrown against free software has not just failed, but failed dismally. The company can fight and win against more or less any conventional rival, since it has spent years honing its attack methods. But the latter are simply inappropriate when trying to compete against projects that are profoundly non-commercial: the community cannot be bought off or out; nor can it be undercut by selling goods at a loss against it. In fact, it is striking that along with undeniable strengths, the increasing commercialisation of open source has also brought with it vulnerabilities - notably legal ones - as some of free software's angularity has been smoothed down to make it more "acceptable" to enterprises.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Sun Enables Open Source for Accessibility

Free software has tended to serve the leading edge of the computing community - hackers, etc. - first. General users have tended to follow later, and those with access problems after that. That allowed Microsoft to use the relatively poor support for these communities as a stick with which to beat ODF during the early stages of the ODf vs. OOXML battle in Massachusetts. Things have moved on, but it remains true that free software's support for all users, including those with disabilities, has lagged somewhat behind proprietary offerings.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Serials Crisis, Thy Name is Reed Elsevier

I've noted this before, but here's more info on how evil my former employer is in the sphere of science publishing. Profit margins of around 30%...bring on the OA.

RIAA Gets...Cunning

People seem to be jumping to all the wrong conclusions on this:

After years of suing thousands of people for allegedly stealing music via the Internet, the recording industry is set to drop its legal assault as it searches for more effective ways to combat online music piracy.

The decision represents an abrupt shift of strategy for the industry, which has opened legal proceedings against about 35,000 people since 2003. Critics say the legal offensive ultimately did little to stem the tide of illegally downloaded music. And it created a public-relations disaster for the industry, whose lawsuits targeted, among others, several single mothers, a dead person and a 13-year-old girl.

Think that the RIAA is getting sensible? Think again: it's just getting clever:

Instead, the Recording Industry Association of America said it plans to try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers. The trade group said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider's customers making music available online for others to take.

Depending on the agreement, the ISP will either forward the note to customers, or alert customers that they appear to be uploading music illegally, and ask them to stop. If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.

Yup, it's that old favourite: three strikes and you're out...

MySQL, YourSQL, OurSQL

Jeremy Zawodny, ex-Yahoo, currently at Craigslist, is generally regarded as one of the gurus of the MySQL world. His recent thoughts on the evolution of that project – called, significantly, “The New MySQL Landscape” - are therefore particularly interesting, not least because it uses the “f”-word: fork....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Goodbye, Frozen North Pole

And just in time for Christmas:

Perhaps the most visible sign of climate change is the Arctic's shrinking sea ice cover. Concerns are growing that we are reaching a point at which the transition to an ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer becomes a rapid one.

...

Even our early climate-change models developed in the late 1970s told us that the Arctic would suffer most from the surface warming that came with adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and that this would be intimately tied to the shrinking of its sea ice cover.

This is called Arctic amplification and when we look at our climate records, that is exactly what we see: the climate warming, with the strongest rises in temperature in the Arctic, and those rises linked to the loss of sea ice cover – just as projected 30 years ago.

In other words, even the crudest climate-change models worked quite well here - something that those who cling to the hope that they are "only" models might like to bear in the mind for the future.... (Via DeSmogBlog.)

UK Businesses Indifferent to Intellectual Monopolies

Here's some interesting research from the UK government:

New research commissioned by the Intellectual Property Office's IP Crime Group shows that many businesses are not doing anything to ensure they protect their intellectual property. This is despite an overwhelming majority of businesses understanding the need to protect intellectual property....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Penguins Model Climate Change

A scientific project that will help govern how the European Commission tackles climate change is relying on Linux and the Géant academic grid to complete its vital work.

The Millennium Simulations, an earth modelling venture at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, will allow scientists to model the changes in the world's climate over the last millennium as well as centuries into the future.

By factoring in human influences on carbon, including changes in land use, as well as natural phenomena including volcanic activity, the Millennium Simulations will provide an insight into how the earth's climate will change over the coming decades and centuries.

It's this information that will go towards informing the next assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body whose information is fed to the highest levels of government to help them make decisions on the environment.

Open source *and* better climate change modelling - what's not to like?

*Don't* © the Future

Here's yet another UK consultation on intellectual monopolies:

David Lammy, Minister for Higher Education and Intellectual Property, has launched a wide-ranging consultation by the Intellectual Property Office on the future direction of copyright. The aim is to ensure that the copyright system properly supports creativity, promotes investment and jobs while also inspiring the confidence of businesses and of users (as being fair and reasonable). In building a long term vision and supporting our creative industries, we need to think beyond our national borders and consider the global future of copyright.

Given that the UK Government is ignoring its own Gowers Review in favour of giving in to emotional blackmail by ageing popstars, there seems little point in responding - but I probably will anyway....

Stop Software Patents in Europe

I've written a number of times about the unsatisfactory state of software patents in Europe – theoretically forbidden, but in practice, frequently sneaking in by the back door. Now there's a petition calling for greater legal clarity....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Making the Connection

When the following press release arrived, my heart beat a little faster....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Yoruba: Free Software's Shame

One of the advantages of free software that I've often touted is the ability to produce localised versions in situations where Microsoft would find the market too small. But it seems that Microsoft is waking up to some languages that free software is neglecting:

A post on the Yoruba Affairs newsgroup, which I subscribe to, recently announced that (a draft of?) the Yoruba Glossary for Microsoft's Language Interface Pack has just been released, as a partnership between ALT-i and Microsoft Unlimited Potential (whose acronym is, of course, "UP", not "MUP"). At 196 pages and 2000-3000 terms, this is a substantial document.

And there's worse news:

In response to my 2004 post about the confused NYT article, Bill Poser added some background about localization efforts in general, and registered a complaint about Microsoft "not localizing their software when they didn't see enough profit in it". But in fairness to Microsoft, they've had a large and effective localization effort for many years. They've certainly done much more than other computer companies have done, and in this case, perhaps more than the free software community has done.

Eek.

The post also talks about Wazobia Linux:

a distribution with (some programs?) localized in Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo. But it is apparently not actually free — only a demo version can be downloaded from the company's site, and those interested in the full version are invited to contact the company by email to discuss prices. The "where to buy" link is "currently under construction", and the Wazobia page at DistroWatch.com characterized this distribution as "dormant". I don't know of any other Linux distributions with a significant amount of localization in Yoruba — for example, the Yoruba pages for KDE localization and for Mandriva Tools localization don't show very much progress.

Now, I've managed to find some ISO images of Wazobia, but it's not clear whether they are full or demos: does anyone know? I'm reluctant to download the images, since I'm conscious that I would probably be clogging up the site's link to Europe, which it might have better uses for.

Anyway, it certainly looks like free software needs to pull up its Yoruban socks if we don't want to lose an entire dialect continuum to Microsoft....

Spot the Disconnect

On the one hand, we have a bunch of people I've never heard of whingeing in the Times:

We are very concerned that the successes of the creative industries in the UK are being undermined by the illegal online file-sharing of film and TV content. At a time when so many jobs are being lost in the wider economy, it is especially important that this issue be taken seriously by the Government and that it devotes the resources necessary to enforce the law.

In 2007, an estimated 98 million illegal downloads and streams of films took place in the UK, while it is believed that more than six million people illegally file-share regularly. In relation to illegal downloads of TV programmes, the UK is the world leader, with up to 25 per cent of all online TV piracy taking place in the UK. Popular shows are downloaded illegally hundreds of thousands of times per episode.

On the other, we have this perceptive comment from TorrentFreak:

when just this year it was reported that UK commercial TV broadcasters “enjoyed a bumper April with the highest viewing figures in five years”, that total TV viewing was up 10% year-on-year, and “the valuable yet hard-to-reach 16 to 24-year-old demographic [i.e the typical file-sharer] watched 4.9% more commercial TV in April year-on-year and saw 12% more ads,” you have to wonder exactly what the problem is.

So how do we reconcile those? Well, could it be, dear Times whingers, that the Internet actually *drives* traffic to your precious films and TV programmes, whatever they are? Could it be that the Internet is actually going to keep you all employed and so fraffly well-paid?

Learning from Education

Last week I went along to the Westminster Education Forum. The programme was only peripherally concerned with open source – Mark Taylor from Sirius was talking – but I wanted to get a feel for the context in which computers were being used in schools. As well as Mark, there was a representative from Microsoft: no surprise there, but what was very noticeable was the way that Microsoft's software was simply a given in the educational context. This is extremely unfortunate, at many levels...

On Open Enteprise blog.