IT Lessons from the Thylacine's Genome

The thylacine is a near-mythic animal. A marsupial related to the kangaroo, it was wiped out early in the last century, surviving just long enough for a few specimens to be pickled in jars. As usual, mankind was responsible, hunting the animal to extinction. But not entirely:

Scientists have detailed a significant proportion of the genes found in the extinct Tasmanian "tiger".

The international team extracted the hereditary information from the hair of preserved animal remains held in Swedish and US museums.

The information has allowed scientists to confirm the tiger's evolutionary relationship to other marsupials.

The study, reported in the journal Genome Research, may also give pointers as to why some animals die out.

The two tigers examined had near-identical DNA, suggesting there was very little genetic diversity in the species when it went over the edge.

Although it was hunting that finally drove the Australian animal out of existence, its longevity as a species may already have been fatally compromised, the researchers believe.

So if *you* want to avoid the tragic fate of the thylacine, remember: avoid those Microsoft monocultures, wallow in the genetic diversity of the free software ecosystem.

Linus Gets Misty-Eyed Over the Sinclair QL

Apparently the Sinclair QL (remember the microdrives?) turned 25 yesterday (or thereabouts). One rather famous former owner was Linus; to begin with, he seems unimpressed by this historic moment:

when somebody sends me an email saying that the Sinclair QL turned 25 years old yesterday, and that I should mention it on my blog, I just went "hmm". Because while I had one and loved it, I have to say that I was so much happier with the PC I ended up replacing it with, and decided that I'll never use an odd-ball machine ever again.

But once you've leapt the Quantum Leap, you're never the same again, as Linus finally admits:

the email from Urs König (aka cowo) did end up festering in my mind and brought back fond memories. So here we are, twenty five years and one day later, and I'm writing a shout-out to the QL anyway. It was odd, and it was flaky to the point of being the only machine I had to do hardware surgery on to make stable and useful, but I guess I was at an impressionable age. And while I don't think there were many QL's that ever made it outside Britain, it was an interesting machine for its time.

I'm sure that made Sir Clive's day.

How Open Source Will Save Education

One of my favourite writers is John Robb; his book Brave New War is all about "open source warfare" - how the ideas behind open source software can, unfortunately, be applied with huge effectiveness to wreaking destruction.

Here's a good post about another little problem we have: the unsustainability of today's educational system. The solution? You guessed it: open source and open courseware, among other things:

The shift towards online education as the norm and in-person as the exception will arrive, however, the path is unclear. It is currently blocked by guilds/unions, inertia, credentialism, and romantic notions. Here's what could happen:

* Local governments cut costs. Nearly or officially bankrupt local governments, out of desperation, opt to reduce costs through online education (the single biggest line item in most local budgets). Drawing from online home schooling systems, the market for these systems explodes (growing at several thousand percent a year).

* Entrepreneurial innovation. As student populations at the collegiate level dwindle due to cost pressures, a major University (with a brand as good as MITs or Harvard), opts to offer full credentials to online student (at a tiny fraction of the cost of being in attendance). Ten million students enroll in the first year to attend Harvard's virtual world.

* Open source alternatives. Unable to afford in-person education, the lack of a major brand in the marketplace, and a job market in free fall stunts the growth of online education. As a result, a massive open source effort develops to develop virtual worlds and other online courseware that rivals the best Universities. The government is forced, over the objections of established institutions, to confer credentials to graduates that pass standardized tests (in fact, comparisons quickly show that these graduates are the equal and/or better than traditionally educated competitors). The business world embraces them.

Warning: only read the other posts on his blog if you are feeling strong. His analyses of the coming problems are frighteningly convincing. Let's hope he has a few more solutions too....

Free Software or Open Source? You Choose

“Free software” or “open source”? It's a perennial question that has provoked a thousand flame wars. Normally, the factions supporting each label and its assocated theoretical baggage manage to work alongside each other for the collective good with only a minimal amount of friction. But occasionally, the sparks begin to fly, and tempers rise. I think we're in for another bout of this particular fever.

On Open Enterprise blog.

SAP True to its Name

What is going through the mind of SAP? These people are *promoting* your products:

Business Objects claims that no one can use a Crystal Reports screenshot in a book without their approval. They sent letters to courseware vendors (including me) telling use that we need to get permission to use screenshots in our books. Most vendors ignored those letters and nothing more was said in the three years since. Now it appears that more letters are going out from SAP (who now owns Business Objects). I read one of the letters this past week and it talks about screenshots and adds a new warning about using SAP trademarks like the term “Crystal Reports”. The letter was very impressive, with majestic references to various sections of US copyright and trademark law. Sprinkled throughout the letter was the Latin incantation “inter alia” to make it seem almost pontifical. It sounded so ominous that it brought to mind the blustering Wizard of Oz (”ignore the little man behind the curtain”).

As I explained in 2005, using screenshots of a software product in a book is a “fair use” of a copyrighted work (see Sony vs Bleem). And there are also several clear cases to show that “nominal” use of a trademark word or phrase is fine for any purpose at all, so long as you are not claiming to be affiliated with or authorized by the trademark holder (see Volkswagen vs Church).

(Via Techdirt.)

Humanitarian FOSS Project

Here's an interesting group I'd not come across before:

The Humanitarian FOSS Project is a collaborative, community-building project that was started by a group of computing faculty and open source proponents at Trinity College, Wesleyan University, and Connecticut College. Our goal is to build a community of academic computing departments, IT corporations, and local and global humanitarian and community organizations dedicated to building and using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to benefit humanity.

...


Our project is part of the growing Humanitarian FOSS Community, a community that was inspired by the Sahana FOSS Disaster Management System, an IT system that was built to aid in the recovery effort following the December 2004 Asian Tsunami. During the past two years, with the help of IT professionals in Sri Lanka and at Accenture Corporation, our students have actively contributed to the Sahana project.

Our approach is not unlike the Habitat for Humanity project: Instead of helping communities build houses, our students help build free software systems that benefit communities. The NSF grant enables us to explore whether engaging students in the Humanitarian-FOSS enterprise will help undergraduates see that designing and building software is an exciting, creative, and (often) a socially beneficial activity.

(Via storming.)

Snowl 0.2 Takes Flight

As you may have noticed, messaging is pretty popular these days. An obvious place to read and send messages is the browser, the obvious way to do that is with a Firefox extension. Enter Snowl....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Is Google Running Short of Hackers?

How hard can it be porting Chrome to GNU/Linux? Hard, apparently:

The 2.0 version of the browser was released to developers and includes a number of new features including the begins of an extension strategy for the browser.

Senior Google staffers said, however, that Linux and Mac versions of the browser would only be made available later this year. CNet quotes Brian Rakowski, Chrome’s product manager, who said that the Mac and Linux versions of the browser were now at the “test shell” stage which meant that they could show web pages but are still in a very raw format.

Rakowski said that versions of Chrome for Linux and Mac would likely be made available by the middle of 2009.

Things getting a bit tough in the Googleplex, chaps?

Corporate IT Skills in an Open Source World

It's a given on this blog that open source is changing the world of computing. But what about the IT skills required to flourish in that world? Here's a thought-provoking blog post by Ian Smith, from the open source company Nuxeo, on what has changed since he first learned to program....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Keeping the Czechs in Check

Hm, looks like bad news from the Czech Republic:

Die tschechische EU-Ratspräsidentschaft hat sich für die kommenden sechs Monate auch auf den Gebieten der IKT und Bürgerrechte viel vorgenommen. Beim Schutz des "geistigen Eigentums" und der Neuordnung des EU-Telekommunikationsmarkts wollen die Tschechen auf der Vorarbeit der Franzosen aufbauen.

Die EU hat 2009 zum Europäischen Jahr der Kreativität ausgerufen. Dass es dabei auch um den Schutz des "geistigen Eigentums" geht, versteht sich von selbst.

So hat die tschechische EU-Ratspräsidentschaft in ihre Prioritätenliste für die kommenden sechs Monate unter dem Punkt "Entfernung von Handelsbarrieren" auch das umstrittene Anti-Piratierie-Abkommen ACTA aufgenommen, das derzeit hinter verschlossenen Türen von EU-Kommission, US-Unterhändlern und Vertretern weiterer wichtiger Industriestaaten ausgehandelt wird.

[Via Google Translate: The Czech EU presidency has opted for the next six months also in the areas of ICT and Citizens' lot. As regards the protection of "intellectual property" and the reorganization of the EU telecommunications market to the Czechs on the preparatory work of the French build.

The EU has 2009 at the European Year of Creativity exclaimed. That it will also ensure the protection of "intellectual property" goes, goes without saying

Thus, the Czech EU presidency in their list of priorities for the coming six months, under the item "Removal of trade barriers", the controversial anti-Piratierie ACTA agreement, which is currently behind closed doors of the EU Commission, U.S. negotiators and representatives of other major industrialized countries will be negotiated.]

And as if intellectual monopolies and ACTA weren't enough:

"Die tschechische Ratspräsidentschaft wird auf ihrer aktiven Kooperation mit der französischen Ratspräsidentschaft aufbauen", heißt es dazu im Arbeitsprogramm aus Prag. Man werde sich um einen Kompromiss zwischen den Positionen des Rats und des Parlaments bemühen. Nur Österreich und Dänemark hatten sich auf der Ratssitzung im November dafür ausgesprochen, Zusatz 138 in der Universaldienstrichtlinie zu behalten. Der französische Vorsitz sorgte dafür, dass der Zusatz in der endgültigen Fassung entfernt wurde.

["The Czech presidency is at its active cooperation with the French Presidency Building," puts it in the work program from Prague. It will be a compromise between the positions of the Council and Parliament endeavor. Only Austria and Denmark had to the Council meeting in November, called for additional 138 in the Universal Service Directive to keep. The French Presidency has ensured that the addition in the final version has been removed.]

And to round things off:

Weit oben auf der Agenda der tschechischen Ratspräsidentschaft steht auch das Thema Kinderschutz und Internet. Zu diesem Thema soll es informelle Ministertreffen in Prag geben; auch hier wollen sich die Tschechen eng an die Vorarbeit der französischen Regierung halten.

[High on the agenda of the Czech presidency is also the issue of child protection and the Internet. On this issue, should it informal ministerial meeting in Prague type; also want the Czechs closely the preparatory work of the French government hold.]

This could be bad, people: start preparing the pushback.

Should We Trash Windows Vista – or BadVista?

The world and their dog seems to be talking about Windows 7 at the moment. Ironically, in part that's because it's proving almost impossible to download the beta that has just been released: you can't help feeling that Microsoft has let this happen on purpose just to create a little demand. But while everyone is looking forward, I want to look back, at Windows Vista – more specifically, to the FSF's BadVista campaign.

On Linux Journal.

Why Outsourcing, not Open Sourcing?

James McGovern has a question (and another brilliant pic - where *does* he find them?):

Why do people outsource when they can open source? For example, if there are 250 P&C insurance companies in the US in which each may have their own claims administration system, why do they outsource individually to India instead of open sourcing the systems that are expensive but otherwise don't provide competitive advantage? Is it the lack of vision within the enterprise architecture crowd?

Microsoft and Artificial Scarcity

One of the themes of this blog is the relationship between scarcity and abundance. Here's a good example of how you make something artifically valuable by making it scarce:

Due to very heavy traffic we’re seeing as a result of interest in the Windows 7 Beta, we are adding some additional infrastructure support to the Microsoft.com properties before we post the public beta. We want to ensure customers have the best possible experience when downloading the beta, and I’ll be posting here again soon once the beta goes live. Stay tuned! We are excited that you are excited!

So either they're saying that they didn't expect Windows 7 beta to be popular and their infrastructure doesn't scale, or they've let this happen on purpose to generate a little buzz. In other words, in order to make Windows 7 desirable, first you make it unobtainable....

Whole Lotta Whole Earth Catalog(ue)

One of the seminal publications of recent years was the Whole Earth Catalog, which has attained almost mythic status in hacker circles. Now you experience (most of) the reality:

After the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG and its descendants ceased publication, New Whole Earth LLC, headed by entrepreneur and philanthropist Samuel B. Davis, acquired the intellectual property and physical assets of the family of publications from the Point Foundation.

We thought it was important to preserve the heritage of the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG and its succeeding publications. Although the CATALOG's heyday was during a specific and turbulent period of American history, the ideas found in it and in its related publications continue to engage the brightest minds of the 21st century—and Whole Earth LLC believes that those ideas should be preserved as they were originally disseminated.

This collection is not complete—and probably never will be—but it is a gift to readers who loved the CATALOG and those who are discovering it for the first time. The great stuff found on these pages is a celebration of the genius of Stewart Brand and all those associated with the WHOLE EARTH family of publications.

It uses Flash (alas), but quite effectively, to let you flick through the volumes. Fantastic fun for browsing.

Watch Out, There's a Meme About

There's a nasty rash of congruent memes going around government circles: they're all coming up with fiendish new ways to wage the non-existent war on terror, all of which unfortunately involve locking down useful technology.

Here's the latest threat - to us, that is:

The Indian government has set up an inter-ministerial panel to trace the activities of terrorists using Wifi networks. The recent series of blasts which has shattered the Indian subcontinent has been characterised by the culprits sending emails about the bombs via Wifi.

Headed by Advisor (Telecom), the Department of Telecommunication (DoT), and members from the Telecom Engineering Centre, the Ministry of Home, the Intelligence Bureau and the Department of Information Technology, the committee will examine international practices and enforceable ways and means to detect the actual user on a Wifi network. It will then prescribe modifications to existing policies and licences.

The decision is prompted by terrorists hacking into open Wifi networks twice in three months to send mails about the Ahmedabad and Delhi blasts to the media. While admitting the impossibility of obstructing the flow of technology, DoT officials say that its misuse must be checked, according to the Times of India.

Loved that bit about "[w]hile admitting the impossibility of obstructing the flow of technology, DoT officials say that its misuse must be checked" - a classic case of "something must be done; this is something; so we must do it."

How long before other governments start following suit? (Via Andrew Katz.)

Enough is Enough: Stand up for Sanity

TechCrunch UK's Mike Butcher has had enough:

From March this year all ISPs will by law have to keep information about every e-mail sent or received in the UK for a year. Currently many do this on a voluntary basis but this will now become mandatory. With little evidence to support their position, the government says this move is vital for monitoring crime and combating terrorist activity. The new rules are due to come into force on 15 March, as part of a European Commission directive which could affect every ISP in the country. It will cost between £25m and £70m. The rules already apply to telephone companies, which routinely hold much of the data for billing. The Home Office think the data is vital for investigation and intelligence gathering.

The Home Office insists the data will not contain the email content but data about when and where it was sent. But of course we all known that it is quite possible to work out quite a lot from email headers. This data will be accessible by over 600 public bodies, such as the police and councils, if they make a “valid” request.

Dr Richard Clayton, a security researcher at the University of Cambridge’s computer lab, points out that this will include all the spam out there and would rather see more focused online policing that catch all initiatives like this. Of course, once the government has this power, they will not draw back from it.

So what you gonna do about it, Mike?

On Monday I will be calling Westminster Council about how we can go about setting up a public rally against these initiatives, and I’d like to hear from anyone else who wants to get involved.

Me, I've had enough too: I'll be there, and getting in touch; anyone else?

Young People These Days...

Insightful point from Clay Shirky:

the thing that people say about young people is just that they understand the technology so well. Well, I teach in a graduate program, I see twenty-five-year-olds all the time. They actually don’t understand the technology particularly well. I think I understand quite a lot of it quite a bit better than they do, which is the reason why I’m teaching there and they’re students. The advantage they have over me is that they don’t have to unlearn anything. They don’t have to unlearn the idea that a card catalog is a helpful thing to have. That you need a librarian to find things. That you have to figure out where you’re looking before you what you’re looking for. None of those things are true anymore. And so one of the problems that old people like me suffer from is just we know too many solutions for problems that no longer exist. And it kind of freaks us out to realize that all the things we mastered don’t really add up to much value anymore.

SECURE's Future Not So Secure?

Last year I wrote about an insidious little agreement called SECURE - Standards to be Employed by Customs for Uniform Rights Enforcement. As you might guess, those "standards" involve intellectal monopolies to the nth degree. But lo! There is hope:

In what might be seen as a victory for defenders of flexibilities for poor nations in international trade rules, the World Customs Organization in December recommended the discontinuance of a working group on intellectual property enforcement standards after it became “deeply embroiled” in debate from member governments fearing it would impose undue obligations on them. But the IP and customs issue may not be out of the fire yet.

A new committee will be sought with a stronger focus on technical assistance and capacity building, according to a WCO document, but this has raised new doubts about participation in new committee’s creation, according to a developing country official.

“The Policy Commission was informed that the SECURE Working Group established by the Council in June 2007 to deal with IPR issues had become deeply embroiled in difficulties related to its terms of reference, essentially because of a perceived fear that the group’s work on standard-setting might be used as a means of enlarging the obligations imposed on countries by the WTO TRIPS Agreement,” said the summary of outcomes document [pdf] of the WCO Policy Commission, which met from 9-11 December in Buenos Aires.

It ain't over yet, but what is important is that it seems that the developing nations are really waking up to the way that intellectual monopolies are being used as a kind of new imperialism: the more that realise that, the less chance TRIPS and its misbegotten siblings will have in imposing their hidden agendas around the world.

A Different VistA for the NHS?

I've written quite a lot about Microsoft's ill-fated Vista in Open Enterprise, but nothing so far about another VistA:

Electronic Health Record systems (EHR) are essential to improving health quality and managing health care delivery, whether in a large health system, hospital, or primary care clinic. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has developed and continues to maintain a robust EHR known as VistA - the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture. This system was designed and developed to support a high-quality medical care environment for the military veterans in the United States. The VistA system is in production today at hundreds of VA medical centers and outpatient clinics across the country....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Security Vendors Will Log the Police Keyloggers

Kudos to Kaspersky Labs and Sophos: they understand that once you compromise a computer's security, there *is* no security:

The Home Office on Friday said it was working with the European Parliament on plans to extend police powers to conduct remote searches of computers. UK police already have the power to hack into suspect systems without a warrant, due to an amendment to the Computer Misuse Act, which came into force in 1995.

However, security vendors Kaspersky Labs and Sophos told ZDNet UK that they would not make any concession in their protective software for the police hack.

...

Em said that while police could provide details of the software it used so Kaspersky could avoid blocking it, the police software could also be used by cybercriminals. "While we wouldn't want to scupper police attempts to catch bad guys, police [hacking] software could end up in the wrong hands," Em said.

Kaspersky would not put a backdoor in its software to enable the police to bypass its protections, Em added. "If we provided a backdoor, it could be used by malware authors," Em said. "People would be able to drive a coach and horses through our security."

Once again, the experts have spoken: will the politicians listen? (Will they, heck....)

Open Cloud Conundrum, Open Cloud Consortium

One of the hot areas in 2008 was cloud computing, and 2009 looks likely to be a year that is equally occupied with the subject. But cloud computing represents something of a conundrum for the open source world.

On Open Enterprise blog.

You Know Your Software is Respectable When...

...big-name manufacturers start making hardware to support you:

Netgear has just announced its Internet TV Player, a set-top box that allows users to play content from video streaming sites like YouTube, directly on their TV. Perhaps of more interest is the device’s built-in BitTorrent client, which makes it an ideal TV-torrent player as well.

Netgear is a company that has its finger on the pulse of what users are doing and want; this is a clear sign that BitTorrent is mainstream now.

Follow me on Twitter @glynmoody

Trees Will Save the World

We need more trees. This is what they did 500 years ago:

The massive depopulation of the Americas via smallpox, hepatitis and other diseases introduced by Westerners (perhaps as much as 95 percent of the existing population died in vast pandemics) and the large landscape-altering scale of agriculture practiced across the "New World" by pre-Columbian cultures are two of the big themes of "1491." Both popped up in a presentation made by two scientists at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union last December. (Thanks to MongaBay for the tip.)

The scientists contend that after the die-off, massive reforestation on abandoned agricultural land occurred on a large enough scale to contribute significantly to the period of global cooling between 1500 and 1750 known as the "Little Ice Age."

After examining soil samples and sediment cores from numerous locations in Central and South America, Richard Nevle, a visiting scholar at Stanford's Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences at Stanford, and Dennis Bird, also from Stanford, concluded that the reforestation sequestered as much as 10 to 50 percent of the carbon necessary to cool the earth. Up until 1500, the soil samples showed a steady increase in charcoal content, likely generated from human-caused fire used to clear forest. After 1500, the scientists discovered a drastic drop in charcoal content. No more burning.

The good news is that we've cut down so many trees, there's huge scope for harnessing this effect to mitigate climate change by planting lots of trees.

The Pink 'Un Starts to Get It

Surprisingly spot-on piece in FT today about netbooks. Key bit:

The netbook category is posing a challenge for Microsoft, the biggest software group, as manufacturers turn to alternatives to its Windows operating system, writes Chris Nuttall.

To help cut costs, the free Linux operating system is featured in many products, while the use of flash memory rather than hard drives along with ‘virtualisation’ techniques means that Windows is being bypassed in others.

Consumers are beginning to associate netbooks with “instant-on” features, which mean that they can be used in a few seconds rather than waiting a few minutes for Windows to be booted.

How the OLPC's Rose Got its Canker

This blog post explains in painful detail how OLPC was "turned" by Microsoft - and hence why I have personally given up on the project:

As part of a small personal project, I've been reading through the court exhibits presented in Comes V Microsoft. One of those exhibits is a chain of internal Microsoft emails discussing how to get Windows XP on the OLPC.

...

Finally, in case you think I've failed to mention it: there is never any talk of "the best technology" or "educating or empowering children" or "customers/governments want Windows" or any such merit-based discussion. Outside of a brief mention of Academic Software offerings - literally the very last thing in the recap and suggested by the OLPC faction - the entire discussion revolves around what benefits Microsoft, what might hurt Google, and exploiting inside information they have on the OLPC project and OLPC people.

Read it and weep.

The Library as Knowledge Commons

When the going gets tough, the tough...go to the library:

Fewer people bought books, CD’s, and DVD’s in 2008 than in the year before. The number of moviegoers and concertgoers shrank last year, too, though rising ticket prices in both cases offset declining sales. Theater attendance, overall, is also down.

We usually hear about these declines in isolation. But taken together, they seem to suggest that cultural pursuits across the board are on the decline. Indeed, if nobody seems to be out buying books, movies, and music, what are they doing with their leisure time instead?

Apparently: going to the library. The Boston Globe reports that public libraries around the country are posting double-digit percentage increases in circulation and new library-card application

This highlights the *increased* importance of intellectual commons like libraries during times of financial hardship, when people can't afford to own so much stuff. It also suggests why we need support libraries through thick and thin.

He/She Speak de Troof

This is something that has often struck me, too: that installing/updating programs under GNU/Linux is hugely easier than under Windows.

This is how you install and update software on Windows:

1. Open a web browser.
2. Download an executable file from an (often un-verified) source.
3. Press next, next, next, next, next, next, next, next, finish.
4. Launch your software.
5. Wait for each individual piece of software to nag you about the latest update. (”Logitech is going to look for updates…,” “Adobe PDF Reader version 8.4 is available. Please install it now,” “QuickTime needs an update (hey, mind if we sneak Safari in there, too? *wink*)”)

On Linux, on the other hand, it works something like this:

1. Open Add/Remove programs.
2. Press a check mark and hit apply.
3. Launch your software.
4. Sit back as your software is automatically updated.

We really need to beat the the drum more about this kind of stuff.

How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer

Not my words, but the subtitle of a book that apparently has wise words on the harm inflicted on society by intellectual monopolies:

It is heartening to find more and more critics of our intellectual property regime, partly as a result of growing knowledge but more importantly, the growing critical reaction to the extreme excesses of the application of the law. A new voice for me is that of Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. whose book, THE CONSERVATIVE NANNY STATE; How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer, is available for download on line link here under a Creative Commons license. The book is about much more than IP, as the subtitle indicates, but this review focuses on the IP issues Baker covers. He calls the chapter, "Bill Gates Welfare Mom: How Government Patent and Copyright Monopolies Enrich the Rich and Distort the Economy".

He begins by examining the richest man in the world, Bill Gates, and Microsoft, noting that it was not Gates hard work or brilliance, or the superiority of his software, but his government provided monopoly based on IP law that made him today's Croesus.

Sounds my kind of book; moreover, it's freely available as a download (kudos). Our numbers are swelling every day....

Behold the Biohackers

This is clearly getting serious:

Katherine Aull's laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, lacks a few mod cons. "Down here I have a thermocycler I bought on eBay for 59 bucks," she says, pulling out a large, box-shaped device she uses to copy short strands of DNA. "The rest is just home brew," she adds, pointing to a centrifuge made out of a power drill and plastic food container, and a styrofoam incubator warmed with a heating pad normally used in terrariums.

In fact, Aull's lab is a closet less than 1 square metre in size in the shared apartment she lives in. Yet amid the piles of clothes she recently concocted vials of an entirely new genetically modified organism.

There's no stopping this now; great and terrible things will come of this....

Follow me on Twitter @glynmoody

Is Phoenix about to Enter GPL Violation HyperSpace?

If ultraportables were last year's big surprise success for GNU/Linux, one of the potentially exciting technologies for this year is the instant-on pre-operating system that loads in seconds when you power up a desktop or portable. DeviceVM’s Splashtop is probably the best known example. These are highly relevant to the free software world, since such instant-on systems are usually based on GNU/Linux, and once people start trying them out, they may simply stay there using the free software apps available, rather than wait minutes for the full glory of Windows Vista to chunder into its vitiated life.

On Open Enterprise blog.

GNU/Linux from...Marks & Spencer

As I've just written on Open Enterprise, the rise of the ultraportable/netbook was one of free software's biggest successes - and surprises - last year. It was particularly important for getting GNU/Linux into the hands of punters, many of whom were quite happy with it, contrary to the conventional wisdom.

Looks like things are going to get even better for free software:

Laptops will soon go on sale in Marks & Spencer and Next for less than £100, in the latest sign that the consumer electronics industry is tackling the recession by selling ever-cheaper products.

Elonex, a small British computer maker, will start selling its ‘net books’ in the two fashion chains from February, in an attempt to win over a new generation of female shoppers to cheap computers.

It promises its machines, which can fit inside a handbag, offer users all that laptop can – internet surfing, emailing, word processing, storing photographs – but on smaller scale. The screens are just 7 inches wide, the keyboard is slightly smaller than a normal laptop keyboard and the memory is limited.

At that price, they must be GNU/Linux. Free software-based systems as an impulse buy in M&S? 2009 is already looking good....

ARMing GNU/Linux Netbooks for Success in 2009

One of the surprises of 2008 was the runaway success of the ultaportable/netbook form factor. Now that systems running Windows XP are available people tend to forget that it was the low cost and small footprint of GNU/Linux that made this category possible in the first place. Without free software, the new machines would have been forced to run Windows Vista, making them too slow and too expensive - and hence failures. It was only because Microsoft saw GNU/Linux walking away with this nascent market that it executed a massive U-turn over Windows XP, and allowed it to be installed on these systems.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Climate Change Implies Open Access

One of the answers to What Will Change Everything? is - reasonably enough - climate change. But interestingly it focuses on the way that climate change will mean that science itself must adapt and become more interventional:

Climate may well force on us a major change in how science is distilled into major findings. There are many examples of the ponderous nature of big organizations and big projects. While I think that the IPCC deserves every bit of its hemi-Nobel, the emphasis on "certainty" and the time required for a thousand scientists and a hundred countries to reach unanimous agreement probably added up to a considerable delay in public awareness and political action.

Climate will change our ways of doing science, making some areas more like medicine with its combination of science and interventional activism, where delay to resolve uncertainties is often not an option. Few scientists are trained to think this way — and certainly not climate scientists, who are having to improvise as the window of interventional opportunity shrinks.

One consequence of this is that science will have to adopt open access. The pace and seriousness of climate change means that humanity does not have the "luxury" of hiding scientific results for six or twelve months: everything must be out in the open as soon as possible for others to use and build on. Delaying could literally be fatal on a rather large scale....

Vietnam in Open Source Vanguard

Impressive how far and fast Vietnam has moved on the government open source front:

Accordingly, by June 30, 2009, 100% of servers of IT divisions of government agencies must be installed with open source software; 100% of staffs at these IT divisions must be trained in the use of these software products and at least 50% use them proficiently.

...

Open source software products are OpenOffice, email software for servers of Mozilla ThunderBird, Mozilla FireFox web browser and the Vietnamese typing software Unikey.

The instruction also said that by December 31, 2009, 70% of servers of ministries’ agencies and local state agencies must be installed with the above open source software products and 70% of IT staff trained in using this software; and at least 40% able to use the software in their work.

(Via Enterprise Open Source.)

On the Wikinomics Paradox

In the long run, what drives the wealth and success of an economy is productivity and efficiency. In my opinion, many of the principles of wikinomics continue to hold the promise of an extraordinary amount of efficiency and productivity to be unleashed, which should/ could have amazing long-term benefits. But in the short to medium term, I see the potential for a very difficult paradox - what makes the economy more efficient and productive as a whole causing a major dislocation of workers, who as we all know are also the consumers, and as they have less to spend the economy potentially shrivels up in a way similar to the paradox of thrift.

Well, yes, but economics doesn't really enter into it (except as a by-product): what we're talking about here is mathematics. Things that can be done in a distributed fashion online, will get done (subject to a raft-load of caveats) because on the Internet - the Great Greaser - there's no friction to stop it. Whether people suffer dislocation doesn't enter into it - however regrettable it may be.

The (Intellectual Monopoly) Biter Bit

The author of a proposed Chilean law to fight copyright infringement was greeted with the warning message "This copy of Microsoft Office is not genuine" when he was making a presentation about it.

Whoops! [Google Translation.]

The Once and Future Economy

Great post by Tim O'Reilly about how we need to junk the idea that the economy can expand indefinitely, and move to a different system - one prefigured in the current sharing of code and content:

The consumption of electronic media perhaps gives a foretaste of an economy in which qualitative complexity might replace quantitative addition as the raw material of exchange. Obviously, we're not there yet, as we're still consuming lots of resources to build the substrate for our increasingly intellectual economy, but I love that he's broken the naive assumption that if we don't have growth, the only alternative is stasis.

This is yet another reason why the lock down of knowledge by intellectual monopolies is simply unacceptable in a world that will be predicated on sharing digital stuff, just as we used to share the physical stuff that Nature gave us a few hundred thousand years ago.

Brainstorming with GNOME's Stormy Peters

As I wrote last week, foundations are playing an increasingly important role in the development of free software. I cited Mozilla Foundation and GNOME Foundation - although Matthew Aslett rightly pointed out that Eclipse is a leader, too - but in one respect Mozilla and GNOME are somewhat different. We hear a lot about Mozilla's plans, articulated by Mitchell Baker, now ably abetted by Mark Surman, but GNOME is rather less high profile. The same goes for the head of the GNOME Foundation, Stormy Peters, so I was delighted to come across this very full interview with her....

(On Open Enterprise blog.)

Computational Journalism

I like the sound of this:

the digital revolution that has been undermining in-depth reportage may be ready to give something back, through a new academic and professional discipline known in some quarters as "computational journalism." James Hamilton is director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University and one of the leaders in the emergent field; just now, he's in the process of filling an endowed chair with a professor who will develop sophisticated computing tools that enhance the capabilities — and, perhaps more important in this economic climate, the efficiency — of journalists and other citizens who are trying to hold public officials and institutions accountable.

Sounds like bringing in openness to government willy-nilly....
(Via @timoreilly.)

On Becoming a Twit

In the last three years, I've written just under 4000 blog posts. You might think that is more than enough, but for some time I have been conscious that I don't always blog everything I could or even want to. Often, I've multiple Firefox tabs sitting there holding juicy items that I think deserve passing on; and yet I never get around to writing about them. I've been pondering why that is, and what I can do about it.

I think it comes down to two things. First, it takes a certain minimum amount of time to craft even the simplest blog posting: sometimes I just don't have the spare minutes/spare brain cycles to do that. Often, though, there is very little to say about the item in question - no profound comment is required beyond "take butcher's at this". What I really need, I realised, is a lightweight way of passing on such stories quickly.

Enter Twitter.

One of the interesting trends over the last year has been the steady rise of Twitter. Increasingly, I am finding bloggers that I read referring to stuff they find via Twitter, or to conversations conducted there. Clearly this can be a very powerful medium, if used in the right way. I've always been sceptical about the idea of twittering about every mundane detail of your life, but using it as a kind of micro-blogging tool is an attractive solution to the problems I've been experiencing.

As a result, I've started using Twitter at twitter.com/glynmoody; updates aren't protected, so anyone can follow. Note that I won't generally be posting links to blog posts there, unless there's a particular reason for doing so. In part, that's because the info is meant to be complementary. But it's also because some kind soul (whose name escapes me, to my shame - please get in touch if you want your name up in lights - now revealed to be one Jonny Dover, to whom many thanks) has set up a separate Twitter feed for opendotdotdot (which also includes pointers to my other posts on Open Enterprise and Linux Journal) at twitter.com/opendotdotdot. This means that you can choose whether to follow just the longer-form stuff, or the new, reduced-fat posts, or - for masochists only - both.

A few early observations on the medium.

First, one of the reasons I have held off from Twitter is that its parsimonious format forces you to use a URL shortening service, the best known of which is TinyURL.com. I have inveighed against these several times, largely because of the fact that they obscure the inherently linky nature of the Web. Fortunately, things have moved on somewhat: you can now provide users of the shortened URL with a preview. This means that (a) they can see that structure and (b) they can be slightly more sure you are not dumping them on some manifestly infected site.

Although TinyURL offers this service, I've plumped instead for is.gd, partly because it uses considerably fewer characters than TinyURL.com, partly because it has a shorter preview feature (you just add a hyphen to the end of shortened URL), and partly because it uses buckets of open source:

is.gd runs on the CentOS operating system. The most major pieces of software used are Lighttpd (web server), PHP (scripting) and MySQL (database).

CentOS:

is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.) CentOS is free.

The coy "prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor" is Red Hat, in case you were wondering.

The other aspect that has already struck me, after just a few days of using Twitter, is how you find people to follow. For me, at least, it's very similar to how I find blogs: I come across links to new ones in the blogs that I currently read. Similarly, I've found that a good way to find people who may be of interest is to look at whom the people I am following are following themselves. This leads to pools of people who tend to be reading and responding to each other - a micro-community at best, another echo chamber at worst.

I've also made up a few rough and ready rules: no news feeds (I want real people, their opinions and their daily lives - isn't that partly the point of Twitter?) and nobody who can't be bothered posting on a fairly regular basis. I've also avoided most of the Twitter super-stars (you know who you are) as a matter of principle: I don't really want to follow people who are almost totally famous for being famous on Twitter, for the same reason that I read relatively few of the A-list blogs.

Blogging has evolved considerably over the last few years, and I expect both it and Twitter to continue to do so - for example, in terms of them working together, fulfilling different functions (along with email, which completes the trinity of one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many interactions online). I've already found that I enjoy blogging more: I no longer feel obliged to blog about everything of interest, since I can push some stuff straight out on Twitter.

Part of the fun of blogging and twittering comes from participating in this huge, collaborative experiment in open writing and open thinking; this means that your comments/tweets on any of the above are even more welcome than usual.

Another Reason to Run GNU/Linux...

And a pretty important one:

The Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant.

So why might GNU/Linux help? Well:

He said the authorities could break into a suspect’s home or office and insert a “key-logging” device into an individual’s computer. This would collect and, if necessary, transmit details of all the suspect’s keystrokes. “It’s just like putting a secret camera in someone’s living room,” he said.

Police might also send an e-mail to a suspect’s computer. The message would include an attachment that contained a virus or “malware”. If the attachment was opened, the remote search facility would be covertly activated. Alternatively, police could park outside a suspect’s home and hack into his or her hard drive using the wireless network.

Er, and how are they going to break into my system to install the keylogger if they don't know the password? Attachments won't work: I'm generally clever enough *not* to open them, and even if I did, they wouldn't do much on a GNU/Linux box. And hacking my hard disc through the wireless network? I don't think so.

Looks like free software is becoming even more about freedom....

Not That Microsoft is Desperate, or Anything...

From the You Can't Even Give It Away department: the Ultimate List of Free Windows Software from Microsoft - 150 items. (Via @Jack Schofield.)

Major Win for ODF in Brazil

Great news for ODF in Brazil: it's becoming the official format for storing government agency dox:

Já no passado mês de Abril de 2008, o ODF (Open Document Format) tinha sido adoptado como Norma Nacional no Brasil, mas agora sabemos por um comunicado da SERPRO que foi publicada a versão 4.0 dos Padrões de Interoperabilidade de Governo Electrónico (e-PING) que torna obrigatória a utilização do ODF na administração pública federal.

A nova versão publicada pela Secretaria de Logística e Tecnologia da Informação (SLTI) do Ministério do Planejamento adota o Open Document Format (ODF), como formato padrão para guarda e troca de documentos eletrônicos no governo federal.

...

Até a última versão da e-Ping o formato ODF constava com o status de recomendado pelo documento, sendo facultativo aos órgãos o uso, na versão 4.0 o ODF assume característica de adotado, dessa forma, torna-se obrigatório para todos os órgãos da administração direta, autarquias e fundações.

[Via Google Translate: Already in April 2008, the ODF (Open Document Format) had been adopted as national standard in Brazil, but now we know for a release of SERPRO which was published version 4.0 of the Standards for Interoperability of Electronic Government (E-PING ) That mandate the use of ODF in the public service federation.

The new version published by the Department of Logistics and Information Technology (SLTI) of the Ministry of Planning adopts the Open Document Format (odf), as a standard for safekeeping and exchange of electronic documents in the federal government.

...

Until the latest version of the e-Ping the format ODF was recommended to the status of the document, and voluntary bodies to use, version 4.0 in the ODF takes characteristic of adopted thus becomes mandatory for all government agencies direct, municipalities and foundations.]

As ever, Brazil's decision is doubly significant: important in itself, given the size of the country, and important as an example to others.

Project Gutenberg Made Easy

In my view, Project Gutenberg doesn't get the respect it deserves. After all, this effort to make the world's literature freely available in a digital form pre-dates free software by a decade. Partly, I suspect, this is because people don't know much about the process. Here's a great hands-on intro:

Contributing my time, energy, and two books to PG was not my first excursion in UGC, but it is the first time I have allied myself with a high-profile international project. Adding content to PG requires patience, good social skills (for interacting with your proofreader), and the ability to intuit what needs to be done to get your contribution online. Here’s a journal of my recent experience. (See the sidebar Project Gutenberg’s Verions of the Steps on the right for the concise step-by-step directions for getting material into Project Gutenberg.)

DRM as Freedom-Eating Infection

I've often written about DRM, and how it is antithetical to free software. But here's an interview with Amazon's CTO, which provides disturbing evidence that it actively *reduces* the amount of free software in use:

InformationWeek: Amazon is known as an open source shop. Is that still true?

Vogels: Where in the past we could say this was a pure Linux shop, now in terms of the large pieces of the e-commerce platform, we're a pure Amazon EC2 shop. There's an easier choice of different operating systems. Linux is still very popular, but, for example, Windows Server is often a requirement, especially if you need to transcode video and things that have to be delivered through Windows DRM [digital rights management], so there is a variety of operating systems available for internal developers.

Another reason to fight the spread of DRM. (Via @storming.)

Why IPv4 Addresses Are Like Oil

IPv4 addresses are an increasingly rare resource. But I'd not spotted the parallel with oil until this:

the US was still the largest user of new IPv4 addresses in 2008 with 50.08 million addresses used. China was a close second with 46.5 million new addresses last year, an increase of 34 percent.

Although China and Brazil saw huge increases in their address use, suggesting that the developing world is demanding a bigger part of the pie while IPv4 addresses last, what's really going on is more complex. India is still stuck in 18th place between the Netherlands and Sweden at 18.06 million addresses—only a tenth of what China has. And Canada, the UK, and France saw little or no increase in their numbers of addresses, while similar countries like Germany, Korea, and Italy saw double-digit percentage increases.

A possible explanation could be that the big player(s) in some countries are executing a "run on the bank" and trying to get IPv4 addresses while the getting is good, while those in other countries are working on more NAT (Network Address Translation) and other address conservation techniques in anticipation of the depletion of the IPv4 address reserves a few years from now.

In other words, the greediest countries - the US and China - are rushing to burn up all the oil while there's some left, and to hell with what happens afterwards....

Happy Public Domain Day...

...er, yesterday:

It is January 1st, which means that this morning at midnight a batch more “life-plus” copyrights expired in those countries — most of them — where copyright expires at the end of the Nth year following the death of the author.

Yes, folks, it’s Public Domain Day! And it’s international! There are little Public Domain Day virtual commemorations going on in places like Poland and Switzerland. Spread the word!

In the life+50 universe, which constitute the largest cohort of countries, including Canada, which collectively have the majority of the world’s population, life-plus copyrights expired at midnight for those authors, or last-surviving of multiple authors, who died in 1958.

(Via Michael Hart.)

Will OpenOffice.org Go to the Ball this Year?

I remain perplexed by the state of OpenOffice.org. After years of using Word 2 (yes, you read that correctly - by far the best version Microsoft ever produced), I jumped straight to OpenOffice.org as my main office software. Version 1.0 was, it is a true, a little on the, er, rough side, but since 2.0, I've had practically no problems - no crashes at all that I can remember. It's reasonably fast, not a huge memory hog (certainly nothing compared to the old versions of Firefox, or even Firefox 3.0, which still regularly eats several hundred Meg of my RAM for breakfast) and does practically everything most people who aren't Excel macro junkies could possibly want: what's not to like?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Dear Mr Burnham....

Tom Watson is that rare thing: a tech-savvy MP. And since he has taken the trouble of asking what people think about Andy Burnham's proposals to adopt cinema-style ratings for the Internet, I think it would be churlish not to respond. Not least because this kind of thing should be the norm, not the exception, and needs to be nurtured.

Here's what I've posted on the site:

As someone who has been writing about the Internet for fifteen years now, I obviously agree with the majority sentiments expressed above: the idea simply won't work at multiple levels. If attempted, it will be costly, and cause great collateral damage in terms of maligning perfectly harmless sites.

But carping is easy: the real issue is what should be done instead.

I think the key to solving not just this problem, but myriad other technology-related issues, is to tap the huge reservoir of expertise that exists both in the UK and elsewhere. It is simply folly to attempt to come up with solutions to complex problems ex nihilo; instead, we need to build on what people already know, and what they've already tried. This means getting people involved, at all levels.

This would help not only in the current case, but generally when the UK government is grappling with the intersection of policy with technology. Sadly, previous decisions involving computers, the Internet and related areas have frequently ignored salient facts that have subsequently vitiated the proposed schemes.

In summary, please don't even think about implementing clumsy classification schemes until more general structures are in place to help arrive, collaboratively, at ones that will work better.

You may want to add your twopence.

Laying Down the Law

Ever since RMS drew up the GNU GPL, code and law have been inextricably linked. Mark Radcliffe provides a good summary of the last year from a legal viewpoint:

Last year was the one of the most active years for legal developments in the history of free and open source (“FOSS”). http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.com/blog/?p=27 This year, 2008, has seen a continuation of important legal developments for FOSS. My list of the top ten FOSS legal developments in 2008 follows...