Meta-Knowledge is Mega-Power

Surprisingly subversive little piece in the FT:

Since Bahrain’s government blocked the Google Earth website earlier this year for its intrusion into private homes and royal palaces, Googling their island kingdom has become a national pastime for many Bahrainis.

The site allows internet users to view satellite images of the world in varying degrees of detail. When Google updated its images of Bahrain to higher definition, cyber-activists seized on the view it gave of estates and private islands belonging to the ruling al-Khalifa family to highlight the inequity of land distribution in the tiny Gulf kingdom.

Best bit:

A senior government official told the Financial Times that Google Earth had allowed the public to pry into private homes and ogle people’s motor yachts and swimming pools. But he acknowledged that the government’s three-day attempt to block the site had proved counterproductive.

It gave instant publicity to Google Earth and contributed to growing sophistication among Bahrainis in circumventing web censorship.

Not just knowledge, but meta-knowledge. (Via Ogle Earth.)

Petard, Meet Australian Government

Welcome back to the dark ages, Australia:

Plugging a word or phrase into a search engine may soon give you fewer results if proposed new Australian copyright laws are adopted, according to Internet giant Google.

The laws could open the way for Australian copyright owners to take action against search engines for caching and archiving material, Google says in a submission to a Senate committee considering the legislation.

This could potentially limit the scope of the search engine results, which the Internet company describes as effectively "condemning the Australian public to the pre-Internet era".

This is what kowtowing to intellectual monopolies gives you. (Via Boing Boing.)

Why RMS is Right...

...to be a pain in the anatomy: because if you nag intelligent people enough, it works. (Thanks, Jamais - Richard will be jolly grateful.)

Boo! - It's Bubble 2.0

Be afraid, be very afraid.

Why Does Iceland Hate the World?

In 2004, a report compiled for the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and other environmental groups concluded that bottom-trawling was "...highly destructive to the biodiversity associated with seamounts and deep-sea coral ecosystems and... likely to pose significant risks to this biodiversity, including the risk of species extinction."

And yet:

Conservation groups accused Iceland in particular of blocking further protection. Iceland is already under fire from the conservation lobby over its recent decision to resume commercial whaling.

"The international community should be outraged that Iceland could almost single-handedly sink deep-sea protection and the food security of future generations," said Ms Sack.

Why?

The Game God Speaks

I am not a gamer. Until recently, I had no idea who Raph Koster was. But the more I read of his stuff, the more impressed I am: he is clearly one of the deepest thinkers about the digital world today. Note that I do not say about games: for what he writes has ramifications far beyond the gaming world, and should be read by anyone with an interest in things digital.

Take his latest post, called "Are microtransactions actually the future?" This pieces ranges widely, touching on all the big issues that intellectual monopolies like copyright throw up. And he really gets it. For example:

since anything that can be seen by our senses can be reproduced, for better or worse, all digital forms of enforcing copyright are doomed to fail. Every form of encryption is moot, because everything must be decrypted in order for us to see it. At some point, the data is in the clear, and then it can be copied.

He then goes further, offering a suggestion about how content industries can and must cope with this ineluctable fact:

The value is in the service, not the content. In the service, not the microtransactions. A digital item is worth nothing. What is of value is the context. People are increasingly not willing to pay for the experience of hearing a song by itself in the abstract. They pay for the concert as a whole (the iTunes experience as a whole, the CD experience as a whole, the movie-going experience as a whole, the EverQuest experience as a whole), and it will be smart venue operators who survive and make the money in the long run.

Amen to that.

Eppur Si Muove

Sigh.

Italian prosecutors on Friday put two Google Italy representatives under investigation as part of an inquiry into how a video of teenagers harassing an autistic classmate surfaced on its Video site, a judicial source said.

The two are being investigated for allegedly failing to check on the content of the video posted on the Internet search engine's Web site.

Right; and I suspect that they don't check all their search results, either. Shocking: what is Google thinking?

The Italian authorities can order the sun to orbit the earth all they like; eppur si muove.

Open Source-y Gift Guide

Here's a handy list from Make, with a bunch of open source-y things, many of which have been mentioned before in these posts. Still, I'd like to single out the PortableApps Suite - happiness on a thumb drive:

PortableApps Suite (Standard Edition): ClamWin Portable (antivirus), Firefox Portable (web browser), Gaim Portable (instant messaging), OpenOffice.org Portable (office suite), Sudoku Portable (puzzle game), Sunbird Portable (calendar/task manager) and Thunderbird Portable (email client) and runs comfortably from a 512MB drive.

Installation and use are easy.

The Intellectual Monopoly Screw

One of the US's favourite tricks is to apply the intellectual monopoly screw. That is, demanding over time ever more from nations who wish to enter into trade agreements with them. In this way, the overall context becomes ever-more favourable towards intellectual monopolies, and the baseline moves inexorably forwards.

The latest example is Russia:

In its bilateral negotiation with the United States in order to join the World Trade Organization, Russia appears to have agreed to intellectual property rights standards that push those of the WTO and US law to new levels.

This is particularly bad news, because it's going to make unwinding all of this excessive protection for monopolies much harder. And that's the idea, of course.

Second Life by Numbers

Here's a fun list of financial figures associated with Second Life. The really significant one is the following:

652,581 USD - Real dollars spent in SL in the last 24 hours.

- not least because it hasn't wavered during all of the CopyBot kerfuffle, despite what all the gloom merchants were saying.

Speaking of which, I have a piece in the Guardian on the subject, mind-melded with some background to how Second Life came about. The basic message is: Don't Panic.

Turbo Wizpy

A long time ago, TurboLinux was a cool company with a turbo-charged CEO, Cliff Miller. As I wrote in Rebel Code:

Born in San Francisco, he had lived in Australia for a year as a child, and then went to Japan for two years, where he stayed with a Japanese family and attended a public school. After he moved back to the United States, Miller attended college, and spent a year in Macedonia, then a part of Yugoslavia, to further his studies of the Macedonian language. "I finished my BA when I was nineteen," he explains, "and then a year later got my MA in linguistics as well," and adds with what amounts to something of an understatement, "I tend to be pretty intense, and just get through things as fast as I can."

But that was in another land; Miller moved out, TurboLinux moved on.

And now here it is, with a dinky little object that sounds, well, cool:

It's an MP3 player. It's an FM radio. It's video and photo display device. It's an e-book reader. It's a sound recorder. It's a Linux-based personal computer ready for web, email and office usage. Yes, it's Wizpy, the Swiss Army Knife of handheld gadgets announced by Japan's Turbolinux this week.

I particularly liked this feature:

Just plug it into a PC's USB port, restart the host machine and it'll boot up into the open source operating system so you can surf and work and be sure nothing's being recorded on the hard disk.

Spitting the Atom

If you're using the main/atom feed for this blog at

http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/atom.xml

there seems to be a problem with Blogger at the moment. The other feed at

http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/full

seems fine.

Sorry about that, but short of buying a majority holding in Google, there's not much I can do about it.

Get 'Em While They're Young

I was going to write about this, but Matthew Aslett has done such a good job, there's not much point:

Several UK Members of Parliament have signed an early day motion* criticizing current government agencies for preventing the adoption of free and open source software in UK schools and universities.

The motion, tabled by Liberal Democrat MP for Southport, John Pugh, says the Department for Education and Skills and Becta (British Education and Technology Agency) policies are denying schools the benefits of open source software adoption.

Update: Mark Taylor has now weighed in with some useful information on what's really going on here.

Inspired or Not?

This sounds good news:

The European Parliament and Council reached agreement last night on the contents of the proposed INSPIRE Directive, which aims to harmonise spatial information across Europe.

Key points resolved during the final stages of the discussions between the institutions included the principles according to which citizens should be allowed to examine the official maps and other spatial data covered by the directive, and rules for granting authorities access to data held by other authorities.

...

Data search services designed for the public will generally be free of charge, although the directive allows fees to be charged for access to data that has to be updated frequently, such as weather reports.

However, the cynic in me suggests that the devil is in the details. Anybody know?

Update: Michael Cross of the Guardian does: the answer is "not inspired". We've been stitched up by the Ordnance Survey, invoking that perennial favourite, "reasons of national security" for withholding information - just like that nice Mr Bush does. Ever heard of Google Earth or Google Maps, which already give all this information?

Shaming Marcus Peacock

I know nothing about Marcus Peacock, but I know that this is scandalous:

Contrary to promises by EPA Deputy Administrator Marcus Peacock that all of the former library materials will be made available electronically, vast troves of unique technical reports and analyses will remain indefinitely inaccessible.

Meanwhile, many materials formerly held by the Office of Prevention, Pollution and Toxic Substances (OPPTS) Library, in EPA’s Washington D.C. Headquarters, were directed to be thrown into trash bins, according to reports received by PEER. This month, EPA closed the OPPTS Library, its only specialized library for research on health effects and properties of toxic chemicals and pesticides, without notice to either the public or affected scientists.

Clearly this is being done to protect those industries that pollute, and at the behest of those close to those industries. I don't know whether it's too late to save the EPA library materials, but I can only hope that the people behind this shameful act are brought to justice - at least in the court of history. (Via Open Access News.)

The End of the End for Academic Writing

Scholarship never ends. There is never a last word, even about established facts. What we've had up till now in published works are static snapshots. Sure, there may be follow-up articles, second editions and corrections, but each work stands alone as a completed product. I find myself wondering if researchers - and writers - will continue to be content with snapshots when the technical barriers to revision are so low and readers' comfort level with edited online works is growing.

Ergo, we need other ways of publishing - online, wikis etc. Not rocket science, but definitely something of a leap for the academic world. (Via Open Access News.)

TV's Spiralling Vortex of Ruin

Sounds good to me, in a double sense: form and content. (Via IP Democracy.)

Why Elsevier is Worse than Microsoft

I've sometimes made the comparison that Elsevier stands to open access in much the same way that Microsoft does to open source. But as I was reading this Evolgen post on Michael Ashburner, one of the Fly People, and a key player in keeping genomics open, I came upon this interesting link:

Reed Elsevier is a publishing company with an arms trade problem. While the bulk of their business is in scientific, medical and educational publishing, they also - through their subsidiaries Reed Exhibitions and Spearhead Exhibitions - organise arms fairs around the world. These include events in Brazil, Taiwan, the Netherlands, Singapore, and in the UK, one of largest arms fairs in the world, DSEi (Defence Systems and Equipment International), which is held bi-annually in London Docklands (next due September 2007).

The $1 trillion global trade in arms and military goods undermines human rights, fuels conflicts and causes huge civilian suffering. Arms fairs are a key part of the global arms trade, and allow arms companies to promote weapons to countries involved in, or on the brink of conflict, as well as those with terrible human rights records.

It makes Bill Gates look positively saintly in comparison. (Disclosure: I used to work for Reed Elsevier a decade and a half ago, but to my eternal shame was unaware of this side of their business if it existed then.)

The Middle Kingdom Moves Up the Pack

I mentioned the intriguing Uniform Office Format (UOF), from China, a little while back. Here's a presentation on the subject. As well as the information about the format, two other things are worth noting from this.

First, are Chinese views on openness and intellectual monopolies. And secondly - and more importantly - is the fact that the creation of the UOF shows that China is no long content to follow its Western counterparts in this area: it has started to take the initiative - and not for the last time, we can be sure. (Via ConsortiumInfo.org.)

Free Software's Syllogism

Here's a nice logic:

To maximise the freedom you can derive from free software, you need to be a programmer

To be a programmer, you need to learn how to program

Therefore, to maximise your freedom, you need to learn how to program

Ergo, the article argues, everybody should be taught how to program.

Who's Zuning Who?

Here's a nice thought:

We're figuring out that DRM isn't the best way to buy. And Microsoft can put the nail in the coffin in two, three, or five years when they end support for Plays For Sure formats--making sure all those tunes you bought while they were trying to attack Apple with Plays For Sure are just money wasted. In a few years, when we're all enjoying digitally watermarked music that, while it can't be plopped onto an illegal sharing site, can be played on any device, shared with a few friends or family members thanks to well-formed personal-use exemptions in U.S. copyright law, and inexpensive, flexible-format digital music stores give us no incentive to pirate music from seedy, virus- and porn-infested sharing sites, we'll look back on the Zune as the moment we all shook off our digital music stupor and said, "Whoa, wait a second. Why would we pay for this?"

Google at 500

I don't get very excited over share prices. I've never owned shares, and as a journalist I don't think I should. But the news that Google's share price has hit the $500 dollar mark, although utterly arbitrary, is as good a moment as any to pause for a little reflection.

There's a nice roundup of fun things to know on Silicon Valley Watcher, which pulls out some interesting graphical and numerical nuggets from other postings, and saves you and me the trouble.

But there's one thing to bear in mind against the background of all this euphoria. Google has become such a bellwether for the Web 2.0 generation, that once its share price falls steeply and significantly, it will take the entire market with it. Don't believe me? Just take a look at what happened when the share price of Microsoft, the Web 1.0 equivalent of Google, crashed half a decade ago: pop!

The Beginning of the End for Novell?

This is a characteristically brilliant post from Pam over at Groklaw, particularly in the way it uses the Wayback machine to skewer Novell as it twists in the wind. It concludes:

So, here's the question I have for Novell: what happened to that promise to protect FOSS with its patent portfolio? Novell did say it. We relied upon it, and OIN is totally separate from the above promise. I mention that because some Novell guys have been saying that Novell never made any such promise or that the OIN patents fulfill the promise. Read the promise again. Novell clearly promised to use its patent portfolio, not OIN's, and Novell appears to have just bargained that patent portfolio away, giving Microsoft a clear path to now bring patent infringement claims against everyone else. Novell's character and honor is on the line. And we await your statement with interest.

But arising from this, I too have a couple of questions that are starting to loom large in my mind:

Is this the beginning of the end for Mono? If Novell continues along its current path surely everything it touches will be regarded as tainted by the free software community, and Mono is sponsored by Novell. And now that Sun has done the decent thing with Java, there is a nice little programming language just waiting for all those disappointed hackers.

The other question is even bigger: is this the end for Novell? It seems to me that there is a broad-based and massive movement growing within the free software world to ostracise Novell utterly - something that will simply kill the company. As far as I know, this has never been done before - perhaps because the free software world simply wasn't strong enough. Now it is: are we about to see it claim its first victim? (Via AC/OS.)

Diddling Around with CDDL

Here's a lovely piece of Jesuitical reasoning:

Could, paradoxically, Sun's rejection of the CDDL for Java project be the best thing that ever happened for the license? It seems counterintuitive, but consider that the biggest obstacle to CDDL adoption - negative impressions of Sun - are in serious decline following the release of Java.

Nice.

Sweet as Sugar FastStack

This kind of thing is the future of open source in business:

Sugar FastStack, a software support and delivery service that provides a fast and simple way to install a complete open source software solution, including Sugar software, the Apache Web Server, PHP and the MySQL database.

Out-of-the-box solutions, full of stack goodness. (Via TheOpenForce.com.)