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The role of technology in the wave of protests that swept the world last
year is a matter of debate. While some claim that social networks and
mobile phones allowed protesters to organize themselves with an
unprecedented speed and efficiency, others have seen their role as
marginal – or even counterproductive, since these same technologies also
allow governments to monitor events with greater ease than in
pre-Internet days.
Techdirt.
Among the many high-profile organizations that are joining the SOPA
blackout today is Greenpeace. That's great, except that you can't read
an important post on the Greenpeace UK web site about why it is opposing
SOPA and PIPA (it should be available at 5 pm PST from the home page or here.
On
Techdirt.
One of the more unfortunate consequences of Moore's Law is that
technologies that erode privacy are becoming cheaper every year – and
hence more attractive to governments eager to spy on their own populace.
The latest to heed the siren call of mass surveillance is Argentina.
On
Techdirt.
So the long-awaited verdict
on the extradition of Richard O’Dwyer has finally arrived, and, as
feared, it's ridiculous. There are many others better qualified than I
am to comment on the detailed legal issues of the lop-sided extradition
treaty that lies at the heart of the case, so I would like to
concentrate on two aspects that I feel better able to comment on. Both
touch on what I think are fatal errors in the judgment; either is enough
undermine its arguments.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
A few weeks back, Techdirt reported on an Indian minister asking Internet companies to do the impossible:
On
Techdirt.
Against a background where some European courts are telling ISPs that they must block access to certain sites (in Finland and the UK, for example), this news from Germany comes as a refreshing change (original German article in Der Spiegel):
On
Techdirt.
You don't have to be a marketing genius or industry pundit to foresee
that tablets will be an extremely hot sector in 2012. The launch of
Apple's iPad in 2010 largely defined the category, just as the launch of
the iPhone defined a new kind of smartphone in 2007; in 2012 we will
probably begin to see Android tablets start to gain major market share
just as Android smartphones have done this year.
On
Techdirt.
Back in September last year, there was a bit of a to-do about Microsoft's UEFI Secure Boot technology in Windows 8, when a Red Hat engineer posted the following:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
If we are to believe the early signs, 2012 may well be the year that
British schools finally start to address the continuing shame that is ICT teaching.
As I and many others have noted, the current approach essentially
consists of sitting people in front of Microsoft Word and Excel and
making them learn a couple of commands on the menus. It seems that the
message has finally got through to the powers-that-be:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
There's a wonderful line in Fred Brooks' book "The Mythical
Man-Month", where he says that when writing a program, plan to throw one
way - you will anyway. But that's a bit of a problem for conventional
software development, because it's not clear when the best time is to
throw that one away.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
A recent Techdirt post reminded
us that thanks to its crazy copyright laws, the US won't be seeing
anything new in the public domain for many years. But even in those
"fortunate" countries that get to use cultural works a mere 70 years
after the creator's death, the situation is still pretty absurd.
On
Techdirt.
Just before Christmas I wrote a fairly strongly-worded condemnation of what I saw as the imminent betrayal
of open standards by the UK Cabinet Office. This was based on reading
between the lines of a new Procurement Policy Note, plus my thirty
years' experience of dealing with Microsoft. At the time, I didn't have
any specific proof that Microsoft was behind this shameful U-turn, but Mark Ballard has, it seems:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the many dangerous aspects of SOPA/PIPA is that its backers seem
to have given no thought to what the unintended consequences might be.
In particular, there is no awareness that it might wreak serious damage
in areas that are very distant from the core concerns of unauthorized
copies of music or films – such as scientific publishing.
On
Techdirt.
A fascinating trend in recent years has been the gradual move from a
presumption of secrecy to one of openness, transparency and sharing.
This began with free software/open source, and has progressively spread
to include areas such as open content, open access, open data, open
science and open government.
Here's the latest field where people are advocating a more open approach:
On
Techdirt.
Against the background of today's war on sharing, exemplified by SOPA
and PIPA, traditional libraries underline an inconvenient truth:
allowing people to share things – principally books in the case of
libraries – does not lead to the collapse of the industry trying to sell
those same things. But publishers really don't seem to have learned
that lesson, judging by this article in the New York Times about the nonsensical attitude they have to libraries lending out ebooks:
On
Techdirt.
One of the central questions the Wikipedia community grapples with is:
What exactly is Wikipedia trying to achieve? For example, does it
aspire to be a total encyclopedia of everything? What is the
appropriate level of detail?
On
Techdirt.
Perhaps there's something about the German legal system that encourages
judges to push their interpretation of the law to the limit, without any
concern for whether the results of that logic are absurd. At least
that is the impression you might get from two recent cases whose
judgments both make use of the internet by ordinary citizens increasing
fraught with legal risks.
On
Techdirt.
At the end of last year I reported
on the worrying signs of vacillation from the UK government over its
support for truly open standards. At least it's relatively
straightforward to keep tabs on what's happening in Blighty; Europe is
another matter - I find the labyrinthine bureaucracy and its digital
shadow pretty hard to navigate. So I was pleased to come across the
following page, entitled "Strategy for internal use of OSS at the EC".
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Already it's clear that one of the hot tech topics of 2012 will be "The
Internet of Things" – the idea that even the most mundane objects will
be hooked up to the Net and communicating over it. So far, pundits have
concentrated on trivial applications like being able to check your
fridge's contents from a browser, but potentially it could be much more
than that if the "things" are groups of sensors whose data can be
usefully aggregated.
On
Techdirt.
In my last column,
I suggested that one of the best things that Mozilla could do in order
to promote the Open Web and openness in general would be to support the
battle for online freedom in more general ways. That's something it has
already started doing, notably in trying to halt the passage of the
awful Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that is currently grinding through the US legislative process.
On
The H Open.
By their very nature, drug patents can create monopolies that allow
prices to be kept artificially high. In other domains that may be
simply an annoyance or inconvenience, but in the world of medicines, it
can be a matter of life or death for those unable to afford those
inflated prices.
On
Techdirt.
One of the striking features of some of the most successful startups
over the last ten years – companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter –
is that their infrastructure is based almost entirely around open
source. Of course, that shouldn't really be surprising: open source
allows people to get prototypes up and running for the price of a PC,
which is great for trying out ideas with live code. And yet despite
these zero-cost origins, open source software scales up to supercomputing levels - the perfect solution for startups that hope to grow.
On
Techdirt.
One of the great tasks facing humanity today is digitizing the world's
books and liberating the huge stores of knowledge they contain. The
technology is there – scanners are now relatively fast and cheap – but
the legal framework is struggling to keep up. That can be seen in the
continuing uncertainty hovering over Google's massive book scanning project. It can also be observed in some recent digitization projects like Cambridge University's Digital Library:
On
Techdirt.
As the battle rages over SOPA and PIPA, censorship is very much on
people's minds. But there are many different kinds of censorship,
operating at different levels of precision. For example, while some
forms are crude and inexact, like Homeland Security's shutdown of 84,000 sites, others are highly targeted, and designed to block in a very specific way.
On
Techdirt.
Copyright maximalism has proceeded along two axes. The first is the
term of copyright, which has been steadily extended from the basic 14
years of the 1710 Statute of Anne to today's life + 50 or 70 years,
depending on the jurisdiction.
The other is the scope of copyright, where there are constant attempts
to make yet more fields of human endeavor subject to it – for example fashion or food.
On
Techdirt.
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