28 July 2008
27 July 2008
The Church of Openness
In Digital Code of Life, I explained at length - some would say at excessive length - how the Human Genome Project was a key early demonstration of the transformative power of openness. Here's one of the key initiators of that project, George Church, who wants to open up genomics even more. Why? Because:Exponentials don't just happen. In Church's work, they proceed from two axioms. The first is automation, the idea that by automating human tasks, letting a computer or a machine replicate a manual process, technology becomes faster, easier to use, and more popular. The second is openness, the notion that sharing technologies by distributing them as widely as possible with minimal restrictions on use encourages both the adoption and the impact of a technology.
And Church believes in openness so much, he's even applying to his sequencer:In the past three years, more companies have joined the marketplace with their own instruments, all of them driving toward the same goal: speeding up the process of sequencing DNA and cutting the cost. Most of the second-generation machines are priced at around $500,000. This spring, Church's lab undercut them all with the Polonator G.007 — offered at the low, low price of $150,000. The instrument, designed and fine-tuned by Church and his team, is manufactured and sold by Danaher, an $11 billion scientific-equipment company. The Polonator is already sequencing DNA from the first 10 PGP volunteers. What's more, both the software and hardware in the Polonator are open source. In other words, any competitor is free to buy a Polonator for $150,000 and copy it. The result, Church hopes, will be akin to how IBM's open-architecture approach in the early '80s fueled the PC revolution.
25 July 2008
War on Terror = War on Thinking
Oh look, you start down the slippery path of declaring war on abstract nouns, and you end up with pusillanimous mindlessness like this:
An 82-year-old woman in Southampton, UK was told she couldn't take photos of an empty wading pool because she might be a paedophile. Because, you know, anything that children touch regularly becomes part of their souls, and if a paedophile looks at those objects, it's just like sexually assaulting a child.
Open Source Skype Scuppered
I don't use Skype much, so news that it probably has a backdoor that lets others (hello, secret services) eavesdrop doesn't much concern me personally. But it's regrettable for several reasons.
First, obviously, that such a flaw should be built in is bad. It weakens the product - crackers of the world are doubtless firing up their Skype programs even as I write - and suggests an extremely patronising attitude to users. But I think there's another, less obvious, problem with this revelation.
For some time, people have been talking about getting Skype to go open source: you can now forget that. If there really is a backdoor, Skype is not going to reveal it - or let people rip it out of any released code.
Ah well, there's always Ekiga....
ActiveX: the Law in Korea?
I've long known that the Korean governmnet is pretty benighted when it comes to *insisting* that people use ActiveX in order to interact with it, but now it seems that opponents of this monoculture have just been seriously slapped down:Open Web, a Korean web forum led by professor Kichang Kim of Korea University is best known for its fight against rampant use of Active X in Korea, lost a lawsuit against the KFTC (Korea Financial Telecommunication and Clearings Comittee). Professor Kim accused that the Korean government's mandate on the use of Active X programs for the internet banking and other public web services should be lifted, as it is against fair trade and "overly favors technology from a single company (that is, Microsoft)".
Professor Kim has also asserted that as many Korean netizens somehow grew to think that Active X is something they have to download anyway, many of them are exposed to security vulnerabilities. Also, as so many entities including virtually all financial institutes in the nation depend on Microsoft technology in Korea, whenever Microsoft announces an update, the whole nation has to upgrade its internet infrastructure, and this leads to various losses on a national scale - Kim asserted.
But Professor Kim's year-long accusation fell short of convincing the court that the government mandate on the Active X is against fair trade and therefore is illegal.
How can a government lock its people into one technology - one, moreover, whose flaws are now well documented? Even the UK government has never been *this* daft.
Not Just Another Netbook
Rather, a home-grown one with some nice touches:
The webbook is manufactured by the UK electronics company Elonex and is being sold exclusively by The Carphone Warehouse.
The webbook is a high specification UMPC that has a 1.6Ghz Via C7 processor (x86), 512Mb of RAM and [currently] an 80G HDD. The screen has a very usable 1024×600 resolution and it has the usual assortment of USB, LAN and an SD socket, plus built in WiFi too. We have setup a blog specifically for the webbook here so users can get access to all the latest news, tips and advice. Be sure to add it to your feed reader.
The really cool thing about the webbook is the software. The webbok comes pre-loaded with Ubuntu 8.04.1 and some new software written especially for this application that delivers broadband connectivity over 3G Mobile networks.
OpenSim: Virtual Worlds Without DRM
OpenSim. the open source platform based on Second Life's protocols, is shaping up nicely. Here's more evidence of intelligent life in outer (virtual) space:
Frisby and Levine also backed an intellectual property scheme for OpenSim very different from Second Life’s. In Second Life, objects can be set with flags like “no-copy” by their creators, which Linden’s servers enforce. But numerous exploits to Second Life’s copy-protection model are known, and brazen theft abounds in Second Life.
In OpenSim, by default, no copy protection will exist at all. “You cannot know what a foreign piece of software will do with a piece of digital content once it receives it,” Levine said. To insert a digital rights management tool into OpenSim is to invite criminal hackers to find ways to circumvent it and undermine the credibility of the software, he argued.
24 July 2008
23 July 2008
W(h)ither the UK Database Nation?
Interesting:The court’s view was that health care staff who are not involved in the care of a patient must be unable to access that patient’s electronic medical record: “What is required in this connection is practical and effective protection to exclude any possibility of unauthorised access occurring in the first place.” (Press coverage here.)
A “practical and effective” protection test in European law will bind engineering, law and policy much more tightly together. And it will have wide consequences. Privacy compaigners, for example, can now argue strongly that the NHS Care Records service is illegal.
To say nothing of the central ID card database that permits all kinds of decentralised access....
Open Access to Drugs (Data)
Here's an interesting confluence of trends:
The Wellcome Trust has awarded £4.7 million [€5.8 million] to EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute [EMBL-EBI] to support the transfer of a large collection of information on the properties and activities of drugs and a large set of drug-like small molecules from the publicly listed company Galapagos NV to the public domain. It will be incorporated into the EMBL-EBI's collection of open-access data resources for biomedical research and will be maintained by a newly established team of scientists at the EMBL-EBI.
So here we have commercial drugs data being put into the public domain - no restrictions - and managed by one of the key public databases.
The transfer will empower academia to participate in the first stages of drug discovery for all therapeutic areas, including major diseases of the developing world. In future it could also result in improved prediction of drug side-effects.
Given that the current, capital-intensive method of drug development, which is highly skewed to coming up with drugs for rich, obese Westerners, this openness to all is important: it means that one of the key barriers to discovering new therapies is down, in part, at least.
And as Peter Suber rightly notes:
Kudos to Galapagos and Wellcome Trust not only for opening these data, but for choosing the public domain rather than a license. This fits with Science Commons' latest thinking on barrier-free research and collaboration in the Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data.
Public domain redux....
UK Public Sector Information Unlocking Service
Gosh, this is getting to be a habit:
As the regulator for public sector information re-use, we know that people can encounter difficulty from time to time getting hold of the information they need in the formats they want. Such difficulties can include issues with charging, licensing or the data standards that public sector information is provided in.
These issues are not about access (which are dealt with under access legislation, such as the Freedom of Information Act or Environmental Information Regulations), but all the other pitfalls which can occur when you want to do something with public sector information - copy it, remix it with other data or add value and republish it. If you are trying to re-use some public sector information, but the data you need is locked-up, this service is for you.
(Via Links.)
DYB DYB DYB for Drigg
As rumours swirl about Google buying Digg, spare a thought for the parlous plight of the open source version, Drigg:I took Drigg this far, but I am fatigued. I wrote Drigg not out of passion for programming, but because I felt that the whole world needed it. I wrote several thousands of line of code in a very short time, and kept fixing bug after bug. I also took the step of splitting Drigg into several sub-module--a painful, bold and much needed move. Not, the big reports are very few and Drigg is very well structured.
I am now looking for a new co-maintainer who can take the lead in Drigg's development. I am not a programmer, and I don't feel I am the right person to push this project any further. There are important features that need to be implemented, and I am just too slow. I am not a very skilled programmer, and it simply shows. The code is good out of immensely hard work, and this means that development is slow. I feel the community deserves better.
I will still be here! People who know me and trust me know that I will hold the hand of the new maintainer and will make sure that everything is going the right direction. I will be here, via email, IM, phone, etc. The new maintainer needs to know:
* PHP
* Drupal modules
* Javascript
If you would like to take over an immensely important, exciting, lively project, please let me know now ("merc" followed my "mobily1" and then ".com").
Someone?
Open Source in European Public Administrations
If you're trying to keep up with the increasing number of public administrations in Europe discovering the joys of free software, here's a handy resource: the Open Source Observatory and Repository.The OSOR provides a platform for the exchange of information, experiences and FLOSS-based code for the use in public administrations. Your are invited to participate in this exchange and make use of the OSOR services:
* international news on Open Source topics;
* a repository with code and documentation on software for public administrations;
* a state-of-the art forge for working together.
The value and usefulness of the platform will increase with the number of contributors and of contributions that are offered for sharing.
Everybody is welcome as a user. However, if you want to upload code and information or intend to open a community project, you will have to register on the forge. In case you come from the business sector, you will be required to reference a sponsor from the public sector.
The OSOR admits all free, libre, and open source software that is distributed under licenses that are recognised by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) or the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and code that is released under the European Union Public License (EUPL).
And remember: it's all about sharing....
Russian Schools A-Rushin' to Free Software
I've written before about a very interesting pilot project to introduce free software into schools in three Russian regions; things seem to be going down a storm:
В более чем 50% школ пилотных регионов, в которых запланирована установка пакетов свободного программного обеспечения (ПСПО), дистрибутивы уже установлены.
На данный момент в общей сложности ПСПО установлены в 572 школах республики Татарстан, Пермского края и Томской области (из запланированных 1084).
[Via Google Translate: In more than 50% of schools pilot regions, where the scheduled installation of free software packages (PSPO), distributions have been installed.
So far a total of PSPO installed in 572 schools in the republic of Tatarstan, Perm Territory, and Tomsk region (of the planned 1084).]
Medpedia: Just What the Doctor Ordered
Just because Wikipedia is wonderful (well, mostly) doesn't mean that there's no room for other wikis serving narrower domains. For example, one of the quips that is frequently made as a criticism of the crowd-sourced Wikipedia way is that you wouldn't want the same approach in the operating theatre. Well, maybe not, but this shows how you can usefully apply wikis to medicine:The Medpedia Project is an extraordinary global effort to collect, organize and make understandable, the world’s best information about health, medicine and the body and make it freely available on the website Medpedia.com. Physicians, health organizations, medical schools, hospitals, health professionals, and dedicated individuals are coming together to build the most comprehensive medical resource in the world that will benefit millions of people every year.
In association with Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, Berkeley School of Public Health, University of Michigan Medical School and other leading global health organizations, the Medpedia community seeks to create the most comprehensive and collaborative medical resource in the world. Medpedia will serve as a catalog, database, and learning tool about health, medicine and the body for doctors, scientists, policymakers, students and citizens that will improve medical literacy worldwide.
The key thing here, of course, is that only people who know what they are talking about will be allowed to add content, making it closer to the Citizendium model than Wikipedia (although the latter continues its slow waltz in that general direction too.)
Let's hope that other knowledge domains pick up on the idea: you simply can't have enough of this open content (Medpedia is under the GFDL, like Wikipedia).
How Open is That Database?
It's all very well calling for open data, but how open are databases really? Molecular Biology Databases aims to find out:
The objective of this project is to assess the accessibility of databases by analysing their interfaces to access data and their reuse policies in order to identify those that are in the public domain, starting with databases hosted by the Life Science Resource Name (LSRN) Schema registry.
(Via Open Access News.)
22 July 2008
Copyright = Monopoly: UK Government
Blimey, it must be Porcine Aerobatics Week or something. Here's the UK IPO - the official keeper of things "eye-pea" - on the European Commission’s proposal to extend the term of copyright protection:Minister of Intellectual Property Baroness Delyth Morgan said,
"Because copyright represents a monopoly we need to be very clear that the circumstances justify an extension. We will therefore need to consider these proposals carefully to understand how they would work and what the benefits are likely to be."
Kudos, Baronness: you grok it. But wait, there's more:
"I would like to hear what the public thinks about this and would urge all those who have an interest in these proposals to make sure their voice is heard and to contact the UK-IPO by the end of August."
Thanks for the request. You know what to do, Brits:If you have any comments on the proposal you are invited to contact Barbara Squires at Termextension@ipo.gov.uk by the end of August.
(Via IPKat.)
The Egregious Economist
I continue to be gobsmacked by the egregious stupidity of The Economist:Commercial piracy may not be as horrific as the seaborne version off the Horn of Africa.... But stealing other people’s R&D, artistic endeavour or even journalism is still theft.
Not only is it not as horrific as what occurs off the Horn of Africa, it is a total insult to parrot such a stupid, loaded metaphor, which consciously tries to equate the two. And for the six billionth time, it's *not* theft, no matter how many times you repeat it: it's infringement.
Nothing is stolen: you still have your R&D, your artistic endeavour or even your journalism. What has happened is that others may be making use of those, possibly against some laws in certain jurisdictions. Quite how terrible that might be depends on many factors, not least the scale and intent.
Maybe it would be better if The Economist put the paywall back to protect innocent minds from its idiocies.
The Acceptable Face of P2P
Despite attempts to demonise P2P, the technology is thriving. And no wonder: it's such an efficient way of sharing bits. Good, then, to see some "official" development of the idea in the form of P2P-Next - funded in part by the EU - to apply P2P to live video streaming.
Now you can download the SwarmPlayer, too:
Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology has proven to be an effective way to distribute a video among many users. This can be done in three ways:
* Download the video, and watch it afterwards (typical BitTorrent behaviour)
* Watch the video while downloading it (Video-on-Demand, Vuze and Joost)
* Watch the video while it is being generated (web-cams, live TV broadcasts, etc)
Our research focusses on combining all these modes of video streaming into a single solution by merging them into the BitTorrent protocol. This allows a single player to download movies, watch video-on-demand, and watch live video streams using one technology, while taking advantage of the popularity and maturity of existing BitTorrent clients.
We have completed our SwarmPlayer software to support these streaming modes, but require an audience to test it on. After all, P2P technology is designed to support thousands of users, and to properly test this, many users have to watch the same video at the same time.
The Death of US Software Patents?
That seems to be the conclusion in this amazing posting by John F. Duffy on the Patently O patent law blog:The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc.
...
The logic of the PTO’s positions in Nuijten, Comiskey and Bilski has always threatened to destabilize whole fields of patenting, most especially in the field of software patents. If the PTO’s test is followed, the crucial question for the vitality of patents on computer implemented inventions is whether a general purpose computer qualifies as a “particular” machine within the meaning of the agency’s test. In two recent decisions announced after the oral arguments in the Bilski case, Ex parte Langemyr (May 28, 2008) and Ex parte Wasynczuk (June 2, 2008), the PTO Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences has now supplied an answer to that question: A general purpose computer is not a particular machine, and thus innovative software processes are unpatentable if they are tied only to a general purpose computer.
Wow. It's probably a little early to break out the virtual champagne, but here's hoping....
Update: The ever-dependable Mike Masnick picks apart the story here, which is not all it seems, alas....
DNA = Do Not Ask
I wrote about this in Digital Code of Life, four years ago:
The Switzerland-based company says they can use a $199 DNA test (compare to $1,000 for 23andMe) to help you find your perfect match, statistically speaking. They’ve analyzed “hundreds of couples” and have determined the genetic patterns found in successful relationships. Based on their algorithm and your DNA, they’ll determine the probability for a satisfying and long-lasting relationship between two people.
OK, for certain diseases this is wise; for most - and certainly for relationships - it is not, if you think about the deeper implications of what's going on (see book for more....)
Time for the Firefox Tablet?
For all its faults, TechCrunch is arguably the leading tech blog. But it has been content to remain on the sidelines - commenting rather than jumping in. Until now:I’m tired of waiting - I want a dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen web tablet to surf the web. Nothing fancy like the Dell latitude XT, which costs $2,500. Just a Macbook Air-thin touch screen machine that runs Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux kernel. It doesn’t exist today, and as far as we can tell no one is creating one. So let’s design it, build a few and then open source the specs so anyone can create them.
What's interesting about this - aside from the fact it marks a major shift for TechCrunch - is that it takes for granted that GNU/Linux and Firefox will be the foundation of such a system. Indeed, it is remarkably close to the story I posted below.
As for the name "Firefox Tablet", I say: go for it, Mark....
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