Earlier in September I blogged about a “Down with DRM video Contest” arranged by FreeCulture.org. Anyway the results are in and Freeculture.org is pleased to announce the contest winners.
My favorites are
Interchangeability by R. Clayton Miller
CC License: BY-SA
and
Trusted Computing by Benjamn Stephan and Lutz Vogel (Lafkon)
CC License: Sampling Plus
Which do you like?
An old saying which is often cited is â??forgive and forgetâ??. Another is the idea that â??time heals all woundsâ??. These two useful adages express an interesting idea that bad memories fade with time. This may be true. But they do not take into consideration the ubiquitous camera phone.
Most people have forgotten most of the painfully embarrassing things they did as a teenage. Some people are able to recall things they did as a teenager that they are thankful not many others remember. A few of us, hopefully not very many, may still carry scars of things that happened long ago.
But things are different now. This is a simplistic statement. But valid nonetheless.
Most things that happened in the teenage period of most adults today occurred off-camera. Not all â?? but most. Growing up today is different. Most, if not all, friends and acquaintances carry cameras with them in their mobile telephones. This ensures that most, if not all, memorable occasions will be recorded.
Can you imagine if the un-reflected, immature actions of your youth were stored on a hard disk somewhere? The threat of revelation will ensure that you can never relax completely. This goes beyond an old friend showing up and discussing â??the old daysâ?? â?? there is no element of deniability once the image is produced. But there is ample room for misinterpretation.
How will the future accommodate this? Will the future be filled with paranoid stunted people fearing the revelation of past indiscretions? Or will the future free itself from the actions of its youth? The latter would be the same as experiencing the past as an exotic, but irrelevant, distant country. Familiar but not.
The forgiving and forgetting will not be quite so easy anymoreâ?¦
Some friends and I are kicking around the idea to build a Freedom Toaster. What?, you may ask, is a Freedom Toaster? And why on earth build one? So, first things first.
The Freedom Toaster is like a vending machine. It stands in a central location waiting for customers. But what does it sell? You ask impatiently? Nothing.
The Freedom Toaster is preloaded to dispense free digital products, including software, photography, music and literature. The idea is to bring together a compilation of Free Software based on the GNU/Linux operating system and combine this with music and literature taken either from the public domain or licensed via Creative Commons.
The point is to create a showpiece comprised of an easy to use system which allows users to pick up their own copy of such a CD.
Again, Why?
Well those of us who feel comfortable with Free Software use the Internet as our primary infrastructure of distribution. But to those who are unfamiliar with Free Software finding a site, and deciding which software is needed, downloading it and finally installing it is a process filled with a number of barriers.
The Freedom Toaster is a way to circumvent some of those barriers and will hopefully make people feel more comfortable with the selecting and downloading process. One far reaching goal is to show that Free Software is in the reach of everybody.
In a previous entry I wrote about walls of design and segregation. I tried to write about the impact of segregating people by using physical barriers â?? but mainly I pointed to the fact that there are many walls out there but we tend to forget this fact since we remain pleased with ourselves that THE WALL (the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain) has been removed.
Probably the easiest way to discover a wall is by looking at an area of the world which is troubled. Find a trouble-spot and all you have to do is to glance at the more fortunate neighbors to find a hefty wall.
So it should come as no surprise that the Saudi Arabian government is planning to build a security fence along its 550 mile stretch of remote desert northern frontier. This is a huge project. The wall or barrier will be equipped with ultraviolet night-vision cameras, buried sensor cables and thousands of miles of barbed wire.
Through this fence the Saudi Arabianâ??s now can join the great wall builders of the world such as the Israeli security barrier, the massive migration fence in southern Spain, and the U.S./Mexico border.
The Saudi Arabian barrier consists of a double fence running about 100 meters apart with 135 electronically controlled gates, fence-mounted movement detection sensors, and buried radio detection sensor cables. Naturally the equipment will also combine the standard hi-tech ultraviolet night-vision cameras with face-recognition software and communications equipment.
(via Subtopia)
A long time ago I read the biography of the Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi. This story led me to curiously find and read Musashiâ??s own strategy book, called â??Book of Five Ringsâ?? (Go Rin No Sho). Musashi developed the skill of fighting with a sword in each hand. He also had a list of seemingly simple recommendations for the reader. Among the recommendations that Musashi had which stuck into my mind was the advice:
Know your favorite tools and techniques for key tasks without getting overly attached to any one
This advice is on the surface extremely simple. We can all intuitively understand the importance of not getting stuck in a rut, learning new things, challenging our established beliefs and principles. BUT this is not an easy thing to do. We are (or at least I tend to be) simple solution people. We identify a problem from memory and apply the same solutions from the past – even if these did not work so well then.
This philosophically sound advice is important. But on a simpler level â?? I miss my mac. After having handed it in for repairs I have been using a loaner. Itâ??s a great machine. Itâ??s an IBM â?? I shouldnâ??t be complaining. But I miss my mac. I realize that it is not the actual software solutions that I miss. What I miss is the familiarity of the tool I am accustomed to.
As you may have known yesterday was the international day to protest against DRM. For more information see http://drm.info. Despite the fact that I defended my PhD and partied until two. I pulled myself out of bed at 6am to get dressed in yellow overalls and demonstrate outside Chalmers University at 7.30. At about 9.30 stopped handing out leaflets and took a well deserved break.
This did not mean that we were done for the day. Oh no. At 11.30 we gathered at the center of town to continue our demonstrations until 1pm. The results? We handed out well over a thousand leaflets, we were interviewed by two newspapers and my headache never left me for a moment.
It was a brilliant way to celebrate my new life as Dr. Klang. This is the first time I wrote Dr. Klang! Feels kind of strange, but nice…
Now that the thesis has been handed in and passed I have to return to real life again. One of the tasks I have been putting off is the fact that my laptop has to go in for repairs. The problem is that one of the memory slots is not working so this means that I have only half the amount of RAM that I should have. This slows down my computer considerably. The good news is that this problem is well known and Apple has a special repairs program which fixes this for free.
The PowerBook G4 Memory Slot Repair Extension Program is a worldwide program covering repair or replacement of the memory slot in PowerBook G4 models manufactured between January 2005 and April 2005 that are experiencing specific component failures.
Still this means that I am without my laptop for anything between a few days to a couple of weeks? I just don’t know.
So I am backing stuff up and attempting to maintain the important stuff available so that business can keep on as usual. I am not a happy camper…
Thanks to everyone who was there – both virtually and in person. What a great day it has been.
I have defended my PhD and passed.
After much wine and good company I am now diving into bed. Tomorrow I arise early (as a newly minted dr) and go forth to protest against DRM wearing special yellow protective clothing.
07.30-10 at Chalmers main entrance
11.30-13.00 at Kopparmärra.
I am tired and have just passed my PhD, but I will be there. Why aren’t you?
So it’s all happening tomorrow. I defend my thesis. Not only will I be the placed under scrutiny and stress – but I will also be wearing a suit! For those of you who may want to read the thesis it’s over here.
If you don’t feel like reading it you can get the main arguments & counter-arguments by attending the defence tomorrow in Göteborg (again more info here).
If you cannot attend then you can catch me presenting my thesis at Humlab in Umeå. The presentation has been streamed and is online here.
Here are some “promotional” pictures…
Greenpeace has a very nicely designed site to pressure Apple into becoming more environmentally aware. The site is called â??I love my Mac. I just wish it came in green.â??
The focus of the campaign is a letter-writing action where we all email Steve Jobs and tell him we want to be more green. We want the design without the major guilt of raping the environment.
Read the information at iTox & iWaste then join the campaign to persuade Steve to go greenâ?¦