This Week In The Fight For Digital Culture

Much in the way of interesting and infuriating has gone on this week in the areas of intellectual property, privacy, digital rights, open source and Googlization. A lot of it comes down to the rights of citizens and businesses in a networked society both parties helped create, the crucial need to protect the public domain, where innovation lies and the golden rule: he who has the gold (in this case, money and political power) makes the rules.

IP ALLIANCE TO OPEN SOURCE: YOU’RE PYRATES. ME: YARRRR! Like anti-healthcare legislators who take money from insurance companies, the US-based International Intellectual Property Alliance and its friends in congress should not have any say in determining the future of copyright and intellectual property, and how other countries set their own IP laws. Instead, the IP Alliance wants the United States to consider a Pirate or Enemy Of The State any nation that uses and encourages free/open-source software. Indonesia is the latest nation on the Alliance’s 301 watchlist for having the audacity to give “preference to free/open-source software because it will cost less and reduce the use of pirated proprietary software in government.”

That’s Apache, Blender, GNU packages, Linux packages, Perl, Python, Ruby, Thunderbird and WordPress, for starters. While I fully agree with Cory Doctorow that “this is like crack dealers campaigning against having a laugh with friends because happiness reduces the need for intoxicants,” what angers me about it is the sheer hypocrisy of the IP Alliance and the businesses it represents. Any technologist or R&D person will tell you that an astonishing number of these same companies use free/open-source software to maximize their technology budgets, innovate using these free tools and then slap patents and all kinds of proprietary-IP stickers on their final products. You think I’m kidding? The Recording Industry Association of America website runs on Apache and PHP. *facepalm*

No, kids, Walt Disney did not invent Cinderella and Snow White. Just like Disney built its fortune by copyrighting works in the public domain, the IP Alliance fosters this unethical business model: Build on or monetize free or cheap ideas and technologies that have come before, and then shut off these alternatives by buying yourself several congresspeople. (And people wonder why the Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission decision was so dastardly and wrong.) When the technology world clamors for automation, standardization and interoperability, i.e. different systems of different capabilities playing together more efficiently, is not the time to make useless noise against open standards and technologies. During a recession when innovation is key, charging $1000/lb for a sack of shit top dollar for clunky, mediocre products and enforcing these as preferred solutions with political bribery, in lieu of free, shared and open source technologies, is stupid and tantamount to the communism Real Americans so fervently dread.

SPYCAMGATE Schools spy on kids through webcams. This shocker made it into the mainstream news, so I’m sure all of you know about the class action lawsuit filed against Pennsylvania’s Lower Merion School District and associated offenders by now. What you probably don’t know is that this is not an isolated incident. In the PBS Frontline Digital Nation documentary, which aired earlier this month, a Bronx school administrator boasts that he regularly monitors students remotely through their school-issued laptops. Parents: This is an egregious violation of privacy, especially using property purchased with your taxes. Take this opportunity to check your kids’ equipment, know your rights and read Cory Doctorow’s Creative-Commons-published Little Brother before he is thrown in the brig with the Indonesians.

PLEASE ROB ME & SCRUB MY KITCHEN FLOOR WHILE YOU’RE AT IT Despite being an IT professional or perhaps exactly because of it, my husband has no social media accounts. He can be contacted solely via email, phone or the occasional private IM. D’s rationale is that there is enough information about him out there, should someone choose to search hard enough or pay enough, that he doesn’t need to feed the beast. Conversely, Twitter Queen (someone at work actually called me this today) here is still not afraid that someone is going to rob my house when I’m gone and tweet from the road because they have to a) know where I live and b) say hello to aforementioned big, burly husband if he happens to be home. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. You’ll just have to find out. Big, burly Neighbors 1 and 2 and crazy hunter dude with shotgun may be around, too, so take your chances.

Patrix comes closest to pointing this out, but if you are smart about what social media outlets you pick, employ the highest privacy settings and don’t declare your street address or UTM coordinates, you can tell the whole world you’re leaving your jewelry and electronics on the back porch and are going away for a month and folks will not be able to use social media to locate your home. Unless they bribe your crappy friends, in which case you’re screwed anyway and it’s not Twitter’s or FourSquare’s fault.

MORE BAD NEWS FOR GOOGLE Google’s Top Executives Defied Italy’s Privacy Laws Except this time, I’m on Google’s side. They did not act quickly enough to pull down a YouTube video that showed kids bullying an autistic/handicapped boy, which violates Italy’s privacy laws, but this may be the only chance for justice for the assaulted child. Should the kid’s guardians sue, the video may be thrown out as evidence for being fruit of the poisoned tree (assuming Italy does assault lawsuits & has similar legal code). This is a tough one: Do we allow Google to flout international laws in humanitarian ca(u)ses, but complain loudly that we don’t want a large corporation in our business when it comes to our email and Buzz? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

BOOK Tarleton Gillespie, law-technology-media-culture professor and blogger, was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on February 23rd to speak about the politics of online media platforms. I wasn’t able to attend but am waiting on responses from friends who did attend. Gillespie’s book Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture nicely sums up the fight for digital culture and the links in this post. From the Wired Shut website:

… the enforcement of copyright law in the digital world has quietly shifted from regulating copying to regulating the design of technology …

… this approach to digital copyright depends on new kinds of alliances among content and technology industries, legislators, regulators, and the courts, and is changing the relationship between law and technology in the process. The [print,] film and music industries are deploying copyright in order to funnel digital culture into increasingly commercial patterns that threaten to undermine the democratic potential of a network society.

That’s it for This Week In The Fight For Digital Culture. Keep thinking. Keep fighting.

February 26, 2010 | computing & internet, digital rights, government, public domain, science & technology, social media | 4 Comments »

What The iPad Might Have Done For Me

Needless to say, you’ve all heard about Apple’s iPad by now.  I’m certain Steve Jobs’s unveiling speech yesterday was more popular than Obama’s State of the Union address, judging simply from the crazy high TPM (tweets per minute) related to the new gadget’s drop.  (Disclosure: I contributed to said traffic with 9 tweets and around 10-12 replies and retweets.  Glad to have done my part.)

As a technologist and tech blogger who attends conferences regularly, I am in the market for a new portable computer that is a little lighter and faster than the existing Dell Inspiron. Size, shape, bezel and “form factor” are meaningless to me.  Following is what my portable computer has to DO, along with what the iPad does (green) and doesn’t (red) offer as a solution:

* Word-processing program for rapid note-taking, with machine on lap or standing at booths with very little counter space. $70 keyboard dock.  The awkward iPad-keyboard size ratio and keyboard’s tilt make it seem unlikely the setup will stay put on a lap.
* WordPress post creation and editing in full visual editor.  The WordPress 2.1 app or WordPress in Safari should work pretty well for this (images may have to be resized and repositioned later, especially on photojournalism blogs).
* Occasional code testing in Python or from a terminal window An impenetrable Terminal app exists, but other than that, I haven’t tried any such thing on my iPhone.  Anyone?
* Upload photos to Flickr directly from device OR quickly connect camera/device to computer, crop/adjust/saturate and upload to Flickr or to blog post.  No built-in camera. $29 Camera Connection Kit with two dongles that plug into the keyboard dock connector; one for USB and one for SD cards.
* TweetDeck. Check.
* eReader sans DRM. iBooks is right out because it cannot read Project Gutenberg plain texts or anything other than the EPUB format. Not supporting that crap. The Stanza App will continue to read all formats, but will lack “form factor” of iBooks.
* Standalone GoogleChat. IM+ App or m.google.com
* All of these programs running simultaneously.  NOPE!

Secondary requirements:
* Ability to view videos and HTML5 content.  YouTube app for video. No Flash (no Hulu for you!) or HTML5.
*  iTunes which accesses my 8GB iPod or my 20+GB iTunes music library.  HAHAHAAAA!  Dream on!
* Not having to deal with AT&T. What are my options here?

When I mentioned some of these points to a colleague who is seriously considering buying an iPad, he said, “I really don’t think it is meant to be a note taking device or for other uses you mentioned. Those are called laptops.”  This person is also going to get the $500 base model (16GB; WiFi only, no 3G) for “casual use at home, looking at the internets, watching videos, reading books, pictures, etc.”  Another friend is going to buy it as a second home computer, while yet another will purchase it as an eBook reader with internet access.

In no way will the iPad replace your phone, MP3 player, camera and a laptop/desktop, which you will still need to make calls, listen to much of your music, capture photos and video and do any substantial work.  Moreover, as the HotHardware review says, “If we’re going to carry around something that requires a separate bag, we want it to have a real desktop and real multitasking capabilities.”  It is, however, a cool toy with which to block the television while seated on the couch, read at the cafe or restaurant during those oh-so-frequent breaks or fall asleep with.  A large-font eReader that surfs the internet and runs apps without having to run a giant OS.

Therefore, let’s not kid ourselves about the iPad as Disrupting Gamechanger That Forever Changes The Face Of Computing.  That day is not yet here.

***

In my 2009 VizWorld tech wrap-up, I wrote, “There are many more people out there who simply want access to maps, books, music, data and that is the real imperative upon revolutionary, disruptive technologies.  We cannot swallow the eReader marketing pill because it’s handed to us and, in our obsolescence-inducing plenty, unwittingly set data standards for the rest of the world. Consumers going into the second decade of the 21st century must focus on content and delivery – useful content in an accessible and understandable format on a relatively fast and ubiquitous machine – as their technology drivers. Open data, better communication and scrutinizing intent in this day and age of Twitter and other social media will make this happen.  But, so will awareness, responsibility and active participation.  In 2010, I ask us to be mindless consumers less and nurturing communities more.”

So, think critically about the social context of the iPad and read some more before you make this purchase.

January 28, 2010 | computing & internet, digital rights, general, gizmos & hacks, science & technology | 3 Comments »

A List Of Lists

Lizzy Caston and I were to write a mode d’emploi for air travel in this day and age of the ever-orange threat advisory.  A sample: Lady, please do your best not to wear four-inch-heeled slouch boots and every metal ring and bracelet in your collection before entering airport security.  The grimace on your face as you hobble about like a startled flamingo while trying to yank that thing of your foot amuses no one and only makes us standing in line behind you at 6AM want to push you down and carry on. Ok, it wasn’t going to be snide and actually more polite and helpful, honest.  Given recent explosive and “explosive” events and evolving TSA guidelines, however, Lizzy and I are going to have to sit on a few more flights, visiting a few more airports in the process, before we can pen anything useful.

Lists it is, then.  Best of decade (never mind that the new decade technically does not start until January 1, 2011) and best of year lists.  Ranking things is not my cup of tea; all of my top five movies rate about the same.  But what motivates others’ sort algorithms and makes their #1? Let’s see.  As always, please add to the discussion and feel free to list your favorite lists in the Comments section.

Naughts Collage

TECHNOLOGY – Since my Precious iPhone has not been more than arm’s length away at any given moment this year, to the point that my husband thinks I need to “tweetox,” it seems only fitting to start with Wired’s 20 Favorite iPhone Apps of 2009.  Productivity is king, followed by games, travel and hobbies.  Am I supposed to be embarrassed that I’ve downloaded only 2 of the 20 – Runkeeper and RedLaser – or proud to have gone this long without spending money on some of these not-free apps? $5 for Instapaper when I can simply Safari over to reader.google.com?!  I think not.  What are some of your favorite apps and why?

MORE TECHNOLOGY – The Real-Time Web is all that excites me in this list of 2009′s disruptive technology. Augmented Reality has potential but, in my opinion, isn’t ubiquitous enough to have made a difference yet.  Google Voice and Wave haven’t shown me their value this year, either.  What do you think? PC World’s list of the 10 disruptors of the last quarter century rings truer even today – I highly recommend this read.

MOVIES and technology – Roger Ebert is a rockstar.  Here’s a man who can find a great movie in a stinking haystack, commit to his picks and explain patiently to you why.  Ebert’s on Twitter, where he points us to all four of his Best Films of 2009 lists.

Aside from watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Matrix trilogy, Harry Potter saga and a handful of pop and arthouse films in the theatre this decade, I have to admit that D and I are not the best cinema-goers, preferring to watch DVDs in the comfort of our home (Netflix – now there’s a decadal gamechanger mentioned little), and even that has fallen by the wayside.  But along comes streaming video, the Creative Commons (also one of the best concepts given form in the 2000s) and the notion of simply putting your art out there, the studios be damned, and you get beautiful genius like Nina Paley’s Sita Sings The Blues, which has been around a lot longer than you think.  Whether a movie has live actors or animated ones, the most important thing about it is the story.  To paraphrase my dear, departed 3D Arts professor, George Cramer, all the visual effects dreamt of in Hollywood cannot polish a turd of a story.  This is why I am not likely to watch Avatar and recommend Monsters, Inc. instead.  Excellent story + well-animated fur = WIN.

MUSIC and technology – NPR’s The Decade’s 50 Most Important Recordings Between YouTube and downloadable MP3s, my music collection grew and grew up in leaps and bounds this decade.  Ignoring the current obsession with emo-hipster bands, pop divas and American Idol ingenues, there was some real good stuff: Radiohead’s Kid A and self-released In Rainbows, Kanye West’s College Dropout, Madeleine Peyroux’s Careless Love, The Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, The New Orleans Bingo! Show’s For A Life Ever Bright, Neko Case’s Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, Sasha’s Airdrawndagger, DJ Krush’s Jaku and OutKast’s Stankonia.  Coolest music videos of the decade: Ok Go’s On Treadmills, Clint Maedgen’s It’s A Complicated Life and Empire Of The Sun’s We Are The People.  Alright, folks, tell me what I missed and why.

BOOKS and technology – Forget the Kindle and nook.  And forget those who tell you this carefully-planned obsolescence is going to change the nature of reading.  Find a light laptop and/or smartphone you’re comfortable with, do actual work with it and download books to it.  A book is not an exotic bird to be placed in the gilded cage of DRM, but something to be owned, shared and, most importantly, read many times on any platform.  I’m against the iTunes model of book consumption – fit the media to the unique delivery mechanism – and publishing companies’ constant war on the public domain.  Hooray for copyfight and folks like Cory Doctorow who have the balls to self-publish quality literature.  True defenders of freedom will enjoy and be inspired by his Little Brother.

The Times Online’s 100 Best Books of the Decade. If you’re going to read only one of them, make it Junot Diaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao.  What a book.  A Dungeons&Dragons-playing Dominican-American college student, the gut-punching dialogue and relationships, the history, the profanity oh the succulent profanity, the future.  What a book.  Your best read?

SPORTS – An NFL junkie, my most important moment in sports was the New Orleans Saints’ 2006 return to the Superdome after the Flood and Tom Benson’s near treachery.  Granted, it contained no triumph of athleticism, but you’d think it rates (sorry, brimmy, but the Patriots-Brady-NFL-ESPN lovefest is getting old).  Again, is there another such moment in the 00s that I should be aware of?  Please comment away.  Lastly, for the record, I am very pleased with my quarterback and Athenae‘s imaginary boyfriend, Aaron Rodgers.  His stats this season show that the team made the right decision and everyone else should shut it.

TELEVISION – When Babylon 5 ended in 1998, I despaired.  This is why God invented Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica, The Wire, Rescue Me and Futurama.  After Lando Calrissian and Kosh, the outstretched arms and biting sarcasm of Bender and Tommy Gavin beckoned. After Katrina and the Flood, the confused innards of Al Swearengen’s Deadwood, Adama and Starbuck made all too much sense.  The Onion AV Club’s Best TV Series Of The 00′s nails it.

LIST TO IGNORE – Ten Stories that Changed Our Lives This Decade: #10 Katrina. #9 Brett Favre.  Delete.  Any list that places Favre, whose family was very much affected by the hurricane, over the suffering of people goes right out the window.

THE WEIRD AND CHEESEHEADY, ‘cuz that’s how we roll – 2009 in Review: Top Weird Stories From Wisconsin: “A 37-year-old Fond du Lac man went to a motel room for what he thought was going to be a romantic tryst but instead was assaulted by four women who used Krazy Glue to attach his privates to his stomach. Police say it was all part of a bizarre plot to punish him for a lover’s quadrangle gone bad.”  Hey, we gave you Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer. Enough said.

ROUNDUP – I’m a sucker for New York Times graphics.  Philip Niemeyer pictures the past 10 years in a neat little 12×10 matrix.  The word “truthiness” gained popularity around the same time as Katrina/Federal Flood (they used a flood graphic and not a counterclockwise spinny one, phew).  2008′s maverick was Ron Paul and not John McCain – can’t keep pulling out the same old shtick every four years.  I often wonder what happened to 2008′s ardent house flippers.  Hmmm, Brownie was a Bushie term of endearment in 2004 but “tsunami” wasn’t big until 2006?  I really like the evolution of key nouns and verbs across the decade.  Would you have done this graphic differently?

Thus, 2009 comes to an end.  The ox gives way to the tiger.  Here’s wishing all of you a safe rest of the year and a great 2010 filled with pleasant surprises and many new buzzwords to learn.  Peace.

December 28, 2009 | books, computing & internet, culture-society-history, digital rights, federal flood, football, gizmos & hacks, government, hurricane katrina, media, movies/tv, music, new orleans, public domain, science & technology, sports | 3 Comments »

The Google Toilet

The quarterly technical and planning committee meetings of the Open Geospatial Consortium are held at interesting global locations without fail. Like Athens (Greece, not Georgia) in March, MIT’s Stata Center in June and Darmstadt, Germany in September 2009. I just returned from the December meeting which was held at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California. Those of you who follow me on Twitter may remember a particularly incisive tweet from last week: “This Google building has butt-warming toilet seats! Midwestern offices NEED this tech.”

That’s how they lure you in. Lo and behold, Current reveals the true intentions of The Google Toilet. Damn. I feel punked.

December 14, 2009 | computing & internet, digital rights, funny | Comments Closed

Like Asking A Peeping Tom To Install Your Window Blinds

eff-xkcd

There are days when the decisions make themselves.  Today is one of them.  I’m going to give myself an EFF-xkcd shirt for Christmas.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt holds forth on online privacy in a CNBC special on, surprise, Google.

I think judgment matters.  If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.

Schmidt is right in that judgment does matter.  Despite my prolific internet empire, I don’t presume data privacy so don’t place things out there I don’t want people to read, and have placed extremely tall privacy walls around certain social spaces.  But, the onus of information protection is not completely on the individual user, especially when the tools provided for said protection are not in the user’s control.  What if those walls really have huge street-level glass windows that we cannot see?  A case in point is the current Facebook privacy-settings brouhaha: a recent revamp of privacy settings publicized Friends’ lists and users had to resort to that old “outcry” tactic to have these lists withdrawn from public view.  Why aren’t all of these online social settings ultra-private by default and what protections do we have against a company’s marketing whims?  If we have already exercised good judgment within that company’s parameters and they change the rules to decrease privacy, how is it then our poor judgment?

As Bruce Schneier says in his response to Schmidt’s comments: “Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.”  Online privacy is really about keeping intimate knowledge about ourselves from marketers, scammers, spammers and just plain psychos, and Schmidt knows this.

We want to play in our Facebook spaces without fear that some weirdo finds out where we live and who our relatives and friends are.  We wish to purchase things online and know for certain that our transactions – including what we bought and what we bought it with – are secure.  We intend to read books, watch movies and map our paths to grandmother’s house as a part of living our lives and not as fodder for a new marketing campaign or the government’s latest profiling protocols.  It’s annoying and intrusive enough when the Twitterbot for an HVAC company begins to follow you three seconds after you mention it’s so cold in the Midwest it may be time for a space heater.  There ought to be limits to such eyes and intrusion, not because I’m doing something bad, but because they are.  I want empowerment for me, not them.

If we are not treated as Google’s customers but as data points for their real customers – all without our permission and while our information is visible to undesirables – the sophisticated among us will find a different solution.  But, no, not Bing Search.  Going from “don’t be evil, but apparently it’s ok sometimes” back to pure evil, now with a simply awful search engine, is dumb.

Related: Digital Media | Google Finds No Privacy On Private Roads (funny thing is photography is strictly prohibited inside Google buildings)

December 12, 2009 | computing & internet, digital rights, government | 4 Comments »

“An Optimal Return On Our Investment In Science”

wake_up_americaIn other words, get our little and big kids learning.  What are we waiting for?  An economic depression in which the most creative thing we can come up with is spending money on bread and circuses, casinos and throwback jerseys?  Wait.

TechDailyDose | Top Scientists Urge Access To Research

A group of Nobel Prize-winning scientists are urging Congress to pass legislation that would provide the public with free online access to federally funded research. In a letter to members of Congress sent earlier this week, 41 Nobel Prize-winning scientists in medicine, physics, and chemistry called on lawmakers to pass the Federal Research Public Access Act, offered by Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas., which would require online public access to the published results of research funded through 11 U.S. agencies and departments. Peer-reviewed journal articles stemming from publicly funded research also would have to be made available online within six months of publication, under the bill.

“For America to obtain an optimal return on our investment in science, publicly funded research must be shared as broadly as possible,” wrote the scientists, who are part of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access coalition. “Yet, too often, research results are not available to researchers, scientists, or members of the public.” The bill has been referred to Lieberman’s committee, but the panel has yet to act on the measure.

The federal government funds over $60 billion in research annually.  I can’t find my own theses online, but Elsevier will sell you my journal paper for a hefty fee.  Taxpayers paid for all of that research.  It’s not enough to pass such an act, though.  Information access requires a decent human interface, extremely intelligent search capabilities and expert database maintenance.   “Immediately available” – I do not think this phrase means what you think it means.

November 11, 2009 | computing & internet, digital rights, education, government, science & technology | 2 Comments »
« Older Entries