technology

Bad Internet, Good Internet

Andres over at Technollama is reading “The Cult of the Amateur”, by Andrew Keen, the Internet critic. I have been avoiding commenting on this book and on the author. Lots of other have been there already. Actually I will probably eventually get around to reading the book. Anyway, Andres notes that Keen has a bone to pick with the web and provides this Keen quotation which I could help but comment upon:

“When I look at today’s Internet, I mostly see cultural and ethical chaos. I see the eruption of rampant intellectual property theft, extreme pornography, sexual promiscuity, plagiarism, gambling, contempt for order, intellectual inanity, crime, a culture of anonymity, hatred toward authority, incessant spam, and a trash heap of user-generated-content. I see a chaotic humans arrangement with few, if any, formal social pacts.”

Well of course. I agree totally with Keen. Thats the beauty of the Internet – you get what you look for. Keen went looking for garbage and appears shocked when he found it. Big deal. I can do the same in any city in the world from Bombay to Boston from Seoul to Stockholm. What he then does is attempts to explain the world from the empirical garbage he picks up. This is not a reflection of the Internet but only an expression of Keen’s Internet related interests.

Posted on by mklang

YouTube & Crime

The media in Sweden is (understandably) full about reports of the school shootings in Finland.* This is to be expected. But what surprises me is the focus on the fact that the perpetrator had made a video and posted it on YouTube.

The focus of Swedish media on the YouTube connection shows a fundamental lack of understanding about the use of technology today. The surprise should not be that a young disturbed man planning a school massacre places a video on YouTube but we should be surprised if the young man had not done so. The YouTube suicide note must be as predictable as death & taxes.

Despite this, the media calls in “experts” and asks them to explain what kind of anti-social cesspit YouTube is. They ask about the responsibility of YouTube, they ask why the events predicted in the film could not be stopped. They want to know how to prevent children from accessing YouTube to watch movies such as these and whether or not the films online are creating copycats.

Basically people do not seem to understand the YouTube culture. Firstly it is not a sub-culture. YouTube is a massive collection of sub-cultures. Secondly, YouTube is the logical result of camera and communications technology. It collects everything from death to porn (and death with porn), from toddlers to seniors, from party to study. Basically every type of activity that can be recorded on film is to be found there.

And the audience has seen it all. Here are some examples of search results:

  • School violence 1770 videos
  • Going postal 193 videos
  • Weapons 126 000 videos
  • Death 584 000 videos

And the audience has seen it all before.

So even if the audience had seen a young troubled Finn posing with a gun, shooting in the forest and making threats against the society around him – what was the audience supposed to do? Nobody runs out of a movie theater to get a cop because a murder is about to be committed. We just sit back, munch our popcorn and wait for the ending to come.  The difference with YouTube is that the people watching can comment on the film and others can comment on the comments of others.

YouTube cannot be blamed for the site just as the audience cannot be blamed for not acting against the rantings of yet another gun-toting youth. The outrage should not be against the communications technology of the day but against the ability of disturbed people to be able to legally carry lethal weapons. For lets face it, if he had been armed with a knife, a hammer or a big stick – none of us would ever have heard of the Jokela high school in Tusby, Finland.

—
*The school shooting in Finland was another tragedy of the type we have almost come to expect on a regular basis. Probably the most shocking thing for Scandinavians is that this is the kind of thing that happens “only in America”. There is obviously no basis for this belief it’s just something everyone “knows” and therefore the shock is greater when our established knowledge is irrefutably challenged. No matter where things like this happen they are tragedies and the world should mourn the loss of life and innocence.

Posted on by mklang

How to embed YouTube videos into WordPress

For a long time all of my efforts to embed YouTube videos into this blog have been frustrated. Most of the help I found online was not helpful since it did not work. Finally I came across ShandyKing and hey presto I now can embed YouTube (wow! everyone is really excited now)

The main problem is that using WordPress, Mac and Firefox together is a bad combination if you want to be able to embed YouTube. The only way I managed to make it all work is by going into Users tab in the Admin section, find your user name and click on Edit. There is a “Your Profile Tab” and a box that say’s “Use the visual editor when writing”. Uncheck this, and click “Update Profile”. Then go back to your post and past the Embed code provided by YouTube.

Using the Code View under write did not work so I had to use the long way. Unfortunately this setting also means that I need to write in html – not fun. So the choice is either to go back and forth in the User settings or change browsers. But Firefox is staying!

Posted on by mklang

History of YouTube

YouTube was launched in February 2005. In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had reached a deal to acquire the company for US$1.65 billion in Google stock.

The anthropology class at Kansas State University has created a video about the history of YouTube and speculates briefly on its future.

For a full script of this video, along with references and notes, see here.

(via Peter Black’s Freedom to Differ)

Posted on by mklang

Don't believe in (cyber) war

Once again one of Sweden’s largest daily papers refers to a report about the state of Swedish national IT security. Apparently we are totally unprepared and vulnerable to everything that’s out there. Two things really annoy me about reports like this:

Firstly, very few people seem to question the motives of these “expert” reports. Most of them are written either by companies attempting to provide systems intended to solve the problems they discover, or (as this latest report) is provided by organizations (often governmental bodies) that need to show that there is work to be done. The implication is that the organization should be funded to carry out the work.

Secondly, if the world was so unprotected and vulnerable to cyberwar and cyberterrorism then why is it that most of our technology related collapses, disasters and problems do not originate from bad people, purposely intending to do us harm but rather by faulty systems, incompetent staff, greedy management and pure incompetence. Just look at technology related disasters such as Five Mile Island, Chernobyl, Bhopal and Exxon Valdez.

Terrorism and war remain on the primitive level of bombs and rockets – incompetence and greed accompany high level technical systems.

Posted on by mklang

Never mention the technology

A few posts back I talked about travel and was stupid enough to mention the vulnerability of technology while traveling. I could do this because fundamentally I am not a superstitious person and I was speaking about the risk of forgetting a vital part of technology like a cable. Naturally things like this do not go unpunished and I was (almost) instantly struck by lightening.

The keyboard and pad to my macbook pro just stopped working. Using an external mouse and keyboard worked fine – basically a hardware error. But I was far away from rescue disks, backup systems, external hardware, support and any kind of help. Basically I was screwed.

So I spent my days traveling with dead technology, wishing it to work but to no avail. Fortunately I was back at home base (Göteborg) on Monday. Major backups, handing in the laptop to the repairman and then attempting to get my old laptop into some kind of working order. My old one is very unstable and insecure no matter what I do to it.

Getting a computer into shape takes time. All the minor adjustments that turns it from a mass market product into a comfortable work environment is a slow process. Eventually I managed to get to sleep only to wake up two hours later for no reason. Returning to sleep never worked. After tossing and turning I succumbed to the temptation and went back to adjusting my laptop.

Sometime during the night I began to think about an idea of my former professor, Bo Dahlbom. He used to claim that we were becoming a nomadic society. Naturally he was referring to a segment of society and generalizing. Even though it’s mostly by train I am beginning to feel like a nomadic tribesman. But there is a problem with the nomad analogy.

The nomads are a self-reliant group, their technology is durable, lightweight and basic. If they cannot carry it, service it or fix it then they will not use it. The same cannot be said of the tecchie nomads who need a well functioning infrastructure around them to be able to carry out the semblance of what they (we?) would call a normal life.

On the train platform I saw my first iPhone – sweet!

Posted on by mklang

Really really annoying

The keyboard and mouse to my nice shiney new MacBook Pro. Everything else works but it is pretty useless without the input devices. When I use an external mouse & keyboard everything is OK. So now I have to hand in my little machine to be repaired and I know that this will take a long time. Anything longer than half a day is a annoyingly long time.

I am in Norwary now. Tomorrow I am back in Gothenburg and backup the machine. Then hand it in to the repairman. Then its off to Væsterås and Lund. I will be back in Gothenburg by the end of the week, but I wonder were my laptop will be?

All I can say is damn, damn, damn, damn and damn!

Posted on by mklang

Tracking Schoolchildren with RFID

It’s strange that everyone sings the praise of RFID and the main struggle seems to be how to implement the technology in as many places as possible. The Register reports that a UK school is piloting a monitoring system designed to keep tabs on pupils by tracking RFID chips in their uniforms.

According to the Doncaster Free Press, Hungerhill School is testing RFID tracking and data collection on 10 pupils within the school. It’s been developed by local company Darnbro Ltd, which says it is ready to launch the product into the £300m school uniform market.

As Bruce Schneier points out the scheme is not difficult to thwart – simply ask a friend to carry the chipped uniform into class. Despite this, the dream of using technological surveillance seems to blind people of their lack of efficiency and reliability.

The real cost is the actual lack of integrity, the high potential for abusing the system and the fundamental shift in attitude which we are pushing on the children in the project. They are being taught (indoctrinated) that technology should be used as a surveillance tool. Asking the teachers to remember their names would apparently be too much to ask for.

Posted on by mklang

Another idiotic regulatory attempt

The latest idiotic proposed legislation comes from Italy. The proposal is that all blogs and websites need to be registered (and taxed).

Beppe Grillo writes

Ricardo Franco Levi, Prodi’s right hand man , undersecretary to the President of the Council, has written the text to put a stopper in the mouth of the Internet. The draft law was approved by the Council of Ministers on 12 October. No Minister dissociated themselves from it. On gagging information, very quietly, these are all in agreement.
The Levi-Prodi law lays out that anyone with a blog or a website has to register it with the ROC, a register of the Communications Authority, produce certificates, pay a tax, even if they provide information without any intention to make money.

Oh my God, Lets start with the easy stuff.

First, How will they intend to police this law. The law can apply to all Italian sites. What is an Italian site? Is it:

  1. a site with an Italian domain
  2. a site on a server in Italy
  3. a site in Italian

Second, what happens when the site is based in several locations with data pulled from several sources? Do they get a tax reduction?

Third, what is a website? Can you define it legally? Is there a difference between the site, server and domain? What about:

  1. A facebook profile
  2. A blog on blogger
  3. An advert on ebay
  4. A wikipedia page
  5. A flickr profile

These may be unique individual websites – but they can also be seen as part of a larger domain.
Fourth, what about free speech rights? Basically an unregistered website would be in violation of the law but would/should the reaction be to close down the site? What happens if a newspaper does not register can they be closed down?

Fifth, administration. How much money and resource can be used to police a law such as this? Can the revenue it brings in even begin to cover the investigative resources required? No of course not. Imaging attempting to chase every Italian blog. How do you know when they are Italian?

Proposals to regulate the Internet come at regular intervals. Often they are barely thought through and will collapse before they even reach the enactment stage. Some laws on Internet regulation have been enacted but are then thankfully forgotten by those who should enforce them.

In the end proposals such as these show that regulators seem to lack even a basic understanding of the technology which most of us use. They also lack a fundamental modern historical approach to regulation. It is really a case of being condemned to repeat the past since we cannot remember it. All the earlier crappy failed attempts to regulate the Internet have failed but since the people proposing regulation have no memory of this we are doomed to see the same mistakes repeated again and again.

At best this provides a form of light relief and humor.

(via BoingBoing)

Posted on by mklang

Fatal error – bad programming kills

The South African National Defence Force is probing whether a software glitch led to an antiaircraft cannon malfunction that killed nine soldiers and seriously injured 14 others during a shooting exercise. (TWeb)

Tragic errors such as these are only to be expected – the more dependent we become on software, the more natural that software errors will occur. So if we include software in lethal weaponry the side effects of a programming flaw will not surprisingly lead to fatalities.

A software flaw almost started world war three in 1983. On that year the Soviet missile warning system indicated that five intercontinental ballistic missiles had been launched from a base in Montana. Correct procedure was to launch the USSR response. The man responsible was Russian Strategic Rocket Forces lieutenant colonel Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov. He deviated from standard Soviet doctrine by positively identifying a missile attack warning as a false alarm. (Wikipedia).

This human analysis of a computer error probably prevented the beginning of a nuclear war.

The bravery involved in questioning technology needs to be encouraged and cultivated to make sure that when computer errors occur they can be overridden by the human element. Indeed systems should be built to allow human intervention.

Posted on by mklang