And the Firefoxiest Country is...Indonesia

While some people (like me) have been fixated on the jolly good work being done in Europe in terms of boosting Firefox's market share, it seems that they (I) have overlooked an even bigger success:

One aspect of our global expansion is in our user base. By the end of 2007, nearly fifty percent of Firefox users chose a language other than English. In a fast forward, the first country in which Firefox usage appears to have crossed the 50% mark is Indonesia, surpassing 50% in July 2008. A set of European countries (Sovenia, Poland, and Finland) see Firefox usage above 40%.

And let's not forget that Indonesia is (a) big and (b) getting bigger fast. Indonesian will arguably be the other major world language of the future (along with Mandarin, English, Hindustani, Spanish, Arabic, Russian and French).

(Sigh): Another BBC Ad for Microsoft

I suppose I should expect this now:

In a surprise move, Microsoft has announced it will offer a free anti-virus and security solution from the second half of next year.

...


Amy Barzdukas, senior director of product management in the online services division at Microsoft, said: "This new, no-cost offering will give us the ability to protect an even greater number of consumers, especially in markets where the growth of new PC purchases is outpaced only by the growth of malware."

Ah, bless 'em.

Of course, this move couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that the security of Windows is so poor as to make the operating system unusable without this kind of anti-virus crutch. Well, that's certainly the impression you get from benign old Auntie.

As usual, Mike Masnick gets it in one. His headline? "Microsoft Realizes No One Wants To Pay Microsoft To Fix Its Own Security Flaws."

Opening a Digital Pandora's Box

This stuff is getting, er, interesting:

There are already whispers circulating that “amended” copies of the BNP member list are doing the rounds on Bitorrent. People are settling scores with neighbours by adding them to a bogus BNP list. The potential for abuse is sky-high.

Yes, indeedy. Imagine what fun people will have in the future distributing similarly erroneous versions of the Compulsory UK DNA database once it's introduced as an indispensable aid in the Fight against Terruh (and then lost along with all the other government databases....)

Straight Talking About the Unspeakable ACTA

I and many others have written a fair amount about the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA). We'd doubtless write far more, were more details forthcoming. And yet despite the huge potential knock-on effects of this agreement, everything is being negotiated behind closed doors. Even more outrageously, those doors are nonetheless being opened for representatives of trade organisations who wish to see their own agendas pushed through, but not for ordinary citizens, who seem to have no rights in this arena...

On Open Enterprise blog.

And Now for Something Completely Different...

Instead of suing people who upload your content on YouTube, you put up *better-quality* copies, and try to sell something off the back of them:

For 3 years you YouTubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them on YouTube. Now the tables are turned. It's time for us to take matters into our own hands.

We know who you are, we know where you live and we could come after you in ways too horrible to tell. But being the extraordinarily nice chaps we are, we've figured a better way to get our own back: We've launched our own Monty Python channel on YouTube.

No more of those crap quality videos you've been posting. We're giving you the real thing - HQ videos delivered straight from our vault.

What's more, we're taking our most viewed clips and uploading brand new HQ versions. And what's even more, we're letting you see absolutely everything for free. So there!

But we want something in return.

None of your driveling, mindless comments. Instead, we want you to click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years.

It's still a bit limited, at least they're trying.

Why Free Software is a Con-Trick

A number of sites have noted this interesting study of a particular kind of con-trick, known as "The pigeon drop". What really caught my attention was the following:

The key to a con is not that you trust the conman, but that he shows he trusts you. Conmen ply their trade by appearing fragile or needing help, by seeming vulnerable. Because of THOMAS, the human brain makes us feel good when we help others--this is the basis for attachment to family and friends and cooperation with strangers. "I need your help" is a potent stimulus for action.

Now, how does free software generally operate? It begins with a call for *help* - which means that it elicits the same deep human response as the con-trick described in the original post.

Here are two classics of the free software pigeon-drop con-trick genre, one from RMS:

Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free(1) to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed.

The other from Linus:

Hello everybody out there using minix -

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).

This is why proprietary software will never be able to beat free software: because the latter always brings with it an implicit cry for help, rather than simply offering us a cold and clinical business deal, it triggers the release of a powerful neurochemical that actually makes us feel good when we respond to that appeal. It turns out that it's altruism, not greed, that is good.

End of a (Dead Tree) Era

Ziff Davis, the tech/gaming media company that recently exited Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is now taking the brave but inevitable step of closing down the print version of PCMag to focus its energy on its growing PCMag online network of sites, led by flagship PCmag.com. The magazine, which was started in 1982, has a storied history, but its print base eroded over the years as its core brand of journalism—news you can use while shopping for computers—moved online. It cut back from bi-weekly to monthly earlier this year. PCMag, which literally invented the idea of comparative hardware and software reviews, at one time during the 80s averaged about 400 pages an issue, with some issues breaking the 500- and even 600-page marks, according to this Wikipedia history.

Indeed, as I well remember when I was Editor and Publisher of the first UK edition of PC Magazine at the beginning of the 1990s - before Ziff Davis spent enormous sums themselves trying to launch it here. I still remember the annual printers issue - which ran to hundreds of pages, filled with the most boring computer journalism known to mankind - with a kind of dread....

Why Governments Must Use Free Software

Fab story here from Northxsouth (for background on this fascinating outfit, see my interview with its founder, Ryan Bagueros) about the very real perils of using proprietary software for national infrastructure:

Venezuela’s decision to move to free software happened after a disaster scenario like this actually took place. In 2002, the traditional, social elite-backed administrators of PDVSA (Venezuela’s state-owned oil company) decided that they didn’t agree with President Chávez’s policy decisions, which included re-directing profits from the oil company elites into social programs (including literacy and medical programs). These administrators were so adamant about their position, they illegally shut down the oil company, locked out the workers, and took control over the software that ran the corporation. Conveniently, that software had been contracted to a US company called SAIC, which has well-known relationships with the US Department of Defense and CIA. In response to the illegal lock-out and sabotage of oil production in Venezuela, federal authorities were sent to PDVSA’s headquarters to reclaim the facility.

The SAIC workers realized that they had committed an enormous crime and fled the country — after they had changed all the passwords that ran PDVSA’s computer systems and set themselves up with remote control of these systems. Since the software was proprietary, no one except the SAIC workers knew how the software worked internally and the oil facilities were literally held hostage by criminals who were now seeking refuge in the United States. Why US authorities did not take action and apprehend these criminals is up for the reader’s interpretation. If the SAIC workers had used their remote access to destroy the data, they would have effectively sabotaged oil production in Venezuela for months, if not years.

The Venezuelan government recruited some computer security experts who were able to reverse engineer SAIC’s software, cut off their remote control of the computer systems and return access to the legal administrators of PDVSA. After this startling information warfare scenario had played out in real life, threatening the entire economy of a sovereign state by a multinational software firm with strong ties to a foreign defense and intelligence agency, President Chávez fully embraced open source, free software and mandated that all government systems be migrated to this more secure solution.

As the article points out, if a national government doesn't have full control over the software that is running key elements of its country, it doesn't have full control. Free software puts the power back where it should be: with the user, not the manufacturer.

gIMP My Foot

Jackboot Jacqui is at it again:

The government Interception Modernisation Programme (gIMP), a plan by spy chiefs to centrally collect details of every phone call, text, email and web browsing session of every UK resident, will be in place by 2012, according to a Home Office minister.

Apparently:

because communications providers already hold information about who contacts whom, when and how, the gIMP would not represent a major change. "We are not proposing that data that have never been collected are held," he said. "The question is how in the future, with all the changes that are coming we can still have access to something that we regularly use today for serious crime and counterterrorism." The final system will be fully compatible with human rights legislation, he said.

This shows once again that the Government either doesn't understand - or feigns not to understand - that putting together disparate information *is* a huge change, precisely because it allows all kinds of *new* info to be gathered about the public thanks to correlations and cross-linkings that are not evident when the data is held separately. Crudely speaking, this is putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to see something whole.

(Open) China Rising

It's become something of cliché in recent weeks to invoke the rise of China as an economic superpower. But what about its role in the world of free software?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Thingiverse: SourceForge for Objects

I wrote below about the distinction between digital and analogue objects, but that was just a crude statement of the situation, which is in a state of flux. The distinction between digital and analogue is blurring thanks to rapid prototyping machines that can take digital representations of objects and turn them into physical things.

Once that happens, it becomes possible to apply all the usual open source methodology to analogue stuff - sharing designs, improving on them etc. One thing you need to do this is a repository of open designs; enter the wonderfully-named Thingiverse:

Thingiverse is a place for you to share your digital designs with the world. We believe that just as computing shifted away from the mainframe into the personal computer that you use today, digital fabrication will share the same path. Infact, it is already happening: laser cutters, cnc machines, 3D printers, and even automated paper cutters are all getting cheaper by the day. These machines are useful for a huge variety of things, but you need to supply them with a digital design in order to get anything useful out of them. We're hoping that together we can create a community of people who create and share designs freely, so that all can benefit from them.

Creative Commons has some useful further info:

Thingiverse is an “object sharing” site that enables anyone to upload the schematics, designs, and images for their projects. Users can then download and reuse the work in their projects using their own laser cutters, 3D printers, and analog tools. Think of it as a Flickr for the Maker set.

Besides implementing our licenses, Bre and Zach [Thingiverse's creators] have also gone the distance and allowed users to license works under the GNU GPL, LGPL, and BSD licenses, as well as allowing them to release works into the public domain.

More Analyst Cluelessness

Yesterday in "the other place" I was berating Gartner for its inability to understand the reality of open source, and now here's someone else from that strange world of "research" that simply doesn't understand the basics - in this case, digital music:

Music cannot just be 'for free' anymore than cars or houses can 'just be for free'. If people aren't paid, they don't make the product.

Sigh. Once more, then, children - and do pay attention at the back: music is digital, cars and houses are analogue. You can make copies of digital music for effectively zero cost (it exists, but it's too small to measure); you cannot easily make copies of cars or houses, and certainly not for vanishingly small cost.

As for the second part, ever heard of something called free software? Variously estimated as worth tens of billions of pounds, most of it is created by people who aren't paid. And even if they are, that's not a necessary pre-condition for its creation, simply a reflection of the health of the business ecosystem that has grown up around it. If there weren't people who got paid, free software would stil exist - as it did originally.

Similarly for Wikipedia: nobody gets paid, but look at the results. In just a few years it has succeeded in creating an unmatched respository of human knowledge, to the point where it is pretty widely regarded as the first place to look stuff up, despite its undeniable imperfections.

As with Gartner, this seems to be a case of analysts simply telling their clients what they want to hear, rather than what they need to know. Hence my general contempt for the breed, with a few honourable exceptions - RedMonk and the 451 Group spring to mind - that both know what they are talking about, and tell it as it is.

New Open Source Second Life Viewer

Linden Lab's decision to open-source its viewer (and ultimately its server, too) has triggered a wave of creativity in Second Life free software. Here's the latest example:

More than two months after Jacek Antonelli and team launched an initiative to create a more user-friendly, open source version of the Second Life viewer, cheekily dubbed Imprudence, the first release candidate is available for download.

Do the Maths: GNU/Linux's Discovery

Westfield State College senior mathematics majors Jeffrey P. Vanasse and Michael E. Guenette, working under the direction of Mathematics Department faculty members Marcus Jaiclin and Julian F. Fleron, have made a significant new discovery in the mathematical field of number theory. They have discovered the first known example of a 3 by 3 by 3 generalized arithmetic progression (GAP).

And how did they do that?

An algorithm to check the necessary cases – still easily hundreds of trillions of cases – was programmed using a Linux version of the computer language C++.

Nothing extraordinary there - except that it's not extraordinary....

Why the Real Dan is the Real Thing

We need this man:

One thing you have to admire about Kara [Swisher] is that in a blogosphere that all too often resembles an echo chamber, she’s managed to cut out the middleman; she just echoes herself. And while others engage in logrolling, Kara keeps it real and rolls her own log. Kara, listen. You’re not the story. Bokay? You’re the reporter. This isn’t about you. It really isn’t. Now stop it or I will fly out there and sit you down for a talk. You’re getting Mossberg Syndrome, honey, and that’s not a good thing.

Update: Or maybe not....

The Super Windows That...Couldn't

One of the more bizarre accusations flung by Microsoft at GNU/Linux over the years is that it doesn't scale. This is part of a larger campaign to portray it as a kind of “toy” operating system – fine for low-end stuff, but nothing you'd want to run your enterprise on....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Mining the Mindless Wisdom of Crowds

First it was Google:

Google search isn't just about looking up football scores from last weekend or finding a great hotel for your next vacation. It can also be used for the public good. Yesterday, we announced Google Flu Trends, which uses aggregated search data in an effort to confront the challenge of influenza outbreaks.

By taking Google Trends — where you can see snapshots of what's on the public's collective mind — and applying the tool to a public health problem, our engineers found that there was a correlation between flu-related queries and the actual flu. They created a model for near real-time estimates about outbreaks, in the hopes that both health care professionals and the general public would use this tool to better prepare for flu season.

Even directory enquiries is at it:

Number request figures from the country's biggest directory service provider paint a gloomy portrait of Britain that reveals requests for bailiffs, credit card companies and house clearance services rising while calls for estate agents, surveyors and removals are falling.

...


The figures, based on about 130m calls a year to 118118, compare requests for numbers from January to June 2007 to the same period in 2008 with some surprising variations. "When we saw these figures we couldn't quite believe the huge difference in call requests between last year and this," said William Ostrom, spokesman for the company.

But for me, one of the best ways of mining the blind but revealing moves of the masses is through Wikirage:

This site lists the pages in Wikipedia which are receiving the most edits per unique editor over various periods of time. Popular people in the news, the latest fads, and the hottest video games can be quickly identified by monitoring this social phenomenon.

Gartner's FUD

Good news:

New research has highlighted quite how pervasive open source software (OSS) has become, with 85 per cent of companies currently using OSS and the remaining 15 per cent expecting to in the next 12 months.

The findings come from a Gartner survey in May and June 2008, which covered 274 end-user organisations in Asia/Pacific, Europe and North America, and raise a series of management issues for businesses.

But wait, trust Gartner to find a cloud in every silver lining for open source....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Of Lawyers and Software Patents

Regular readers will know that I have a bee in my bonnet about the non-patentability of software, largely because of the fact that software is made up of algorithms, algorithms are maths, and maths is not patentable: QED. So, as you might expect, the following, from a patent attorney, makes me go a funny colour:

Software is not a mathematical equation, nor is it a mathematical language. How anyone who writes software or professes to understand software could argue to the contrary is beyond me. Do people who write software actually think they are sitting down and writing mathematical equations and stringing them together? It is absurd to have such a narrow view of software.

The good news is that I do not intend to rebut this (and the rest of the post) here, because the comments to it, and those on Groklaw discussing it, are so good, and so varied, that it would be superfluous. If you ever come across people who have doubts about the non-patentablility of software, just point them towards those comments.

The Politicians’ Syllogism

Something must be done; this is something; therefore this must be done.

Nice.

Share This: The Internet is a Right

“They order, said I, this matter better in France.” So wrote Laurence Sterne in his 1768 book A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. Alas, things have changed much since then, at least as far as the Internet is concerned. In the light of recent events, now he would we have to say: they order this matter worse in France. Even more unfortunately, France's bad habits are spreading, and could have serious consequences for free software....

On Linux Journal.

ContactPoint: A Contradiction in Terms

People have been pointing out that the government's child database, ContactPoint, will actually make it *more* dangerous for children. Now the government is slowly cottoneing on:

Data on about 55,000 children will need to be protected from estranged and abusive family members, or because they are under police protection, according to figures from local authorities.

The protected information - part of the forthcoming ContactPoint child protection database - will include their address and details of the school they attend. ContactPoint users, who The Register revealed yesterday could easily number more than a million, will only be able to access basic data about "shielded" children: their name, age and gender.

In other words, some of the most vulnerable children must be excluded from ContactPoint, because its security is now recognised as insufficient - even though the whole point of ContactPoint was to *enhance* protection.

ContactPoint - and any centralised database - is simply not fit for its purpose: chuck it, people.

ARMed and Dangerous - to Microsoft

It's often forgotten that one of the strengths of GNU/Linux is the extraordinary range of platforms it supports. Where the full Windows stack is only available for Intel processors - even Windows CE, a distinct code-base, only supports four platforms - GNU/Linux is available on a dizzying array of other hardware.

Here's an interesting addition to the list:

ARM and Canonical Ltd, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, today announced that they will bring the full Ubuntu Desktop operating system to the ARMv7 processor architecture to address demand from device manufacturers. The addition of the new operating system will enable new netbooks and hybrid computers, targeting energy-efficient ARM technology-based SoCs, to deliver a rich, always-connected, mobile computing experience, without compromising battery life.

The combination of a commercially supported, optimized Ubuntu distribution for ARM, together with Canonical’s ability to tailor solutions to specific ARM technology-based devices and OEM requirements, ensures that highly-optimized systems can be rapidly deployed into the fast growing mobile computing market. ARM’s wide partnership with leading semiconductor and device manufacturers strengthens the mobile computing software ecosystem and extends the market reach for Ubuntu-based products.

Since ARM is based on original work by the ancient Acorn Computers (hello, BBC Micro), this represents a nice coming together of two British-based companies, albeit with global reach.

Spreadthunderbird is Go

One of the reasons that Firefox has been successful is the extraordinary way that users have been mobilised as part of a vast, global marketing group without precedent. Tens of thousands – perhaps even hundreds of thousands – of people have added their pebble to the cairn of promotion to produce the market shares we see today for Firefox (particularly in Europe)....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Not so FAST....

FAST is seriously losing it:

More worrying is how organizations like FAST feel that somehow they should be able to shortcut, bypass or change the law to suit their needs. “One argument,” said Lovelock, “is that personal data relating to a given IP-address may be given to the rights holder on request, without a court order being needed, which is arguably gold plating.”

Sure, let’s just scrap due process and the Data Protection Act. They just complicate things.

Why do these self-important little organisations think that they can override fundamental rights and legislation simply because they are too lazy to come up with a new business model to cope with the changing environment?

It's called "absence of scarcity": get used to it.