technology

Social and cultural aspects of mobile phones

The social and cultural impact of mobile media has received too little study so here is an interesting call for papers to an international conference on social and cultural aspects of mobile phones, convergent media, and wireless technologies – The conference website Mobile Media 2007 will be up in August 2006.

Date: 2-4 July 2007

Place: The University of Sydney, Australia

…This relatively short history of mobile telephony is concurrently marked by the shift of the role of users from consumers to active producers – and mobile media is being heralded as a new site for consumption, democratic expression, individualism, citizenship, and creativity.

We also invite papers on all aspects of mobile media, including, but certainly not restricted to:

* what does it mean to talk about mobiles as media?
* how do we map and theorise the transformations underway with mobile platforms, applications, and networks?
* mobile art
* mobiles and photography
* emerging cultural and narrative forms for mobiles (such as mobile films and videos)
* intersections between mobiles and Internet technologies
* wireless technologies and cultures
* mobile television, radio, and other kinds of broadcasting
* video calling and communications
* sexuality, intimacy, and mobile media
* mobile media and national or regional cultures
* subcultures, minority cultures, majoritarian cultures, and mobile media
* how do gender, sexuality, disability, socio-economics, cultural and linguistic contexts inflect cultural practices in the far-from-even-and-even terrain of mobiles?
* mobile media and political economy
* mobile gaming
* what are the implications of mobile media for our concepts of culture, communication, and media
* mobiles, community, and public sphere
* mobile media, place and space
* ramifications of mobile media for creative, cultural and media industries
* challenges of mobile media for policy, regulation, and legislation.

Posted on by mklang

Identity Cards

Sweden was an early adopter of identity cards and individual identity numbers. This has had the effect that few people today actually question the ability of technology to invade privacy. The EU Commission has decided that Europe is to move towards biometric passports within three years. Not surprisingly Sweden has said nothing. The UK on the other hand has been active in the discussion against ID cards with anti-ID card campaigns and organisations (such as NO2ID). An unfavourable report was presented in 2005 by researchers at the London School of Economics.

The UK concerns about privacy seem a bit odd considering the amount of CCTV employed in surveillance â?? it just goes to show that accepting (?) one form of privacy invasion does not mean that people are prepared to accept them all.

In Canada The Globalization of Personal Data Project (GPD) in association with the Surveillance Project at Queen’s University will be holding an interesting workshop: National ID Card Systems to be held in June 7-9 2007. Abstracts due 21 August.

(via Square Lips, Purse Jaw)

Posted on by mklang

GPLv3 audio & video

The audio & video recordings from the 3rd International GPLv3 Conference held in Barcelona during June 22nd & 23rd 2006 are now online. The torrent files can be downloaded from here and include presentations by Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen and Georg Greve (amongst others). My own claim to fame was that I was on the enforcement panel on day 2.

Posted on by mklang

The missing ideology of Creative Commons

In the continuing discussion on the governance of the iCommons (the international Creative Commons) we have seen warnings raised by some (for example Tomâ??s article) about the loss of the grassroots. Attempting to address these concerns writers are attempting to explain why the iCommons works and therefore criticism of it is unjustified. For example Golden Swamp writes that the iCommons is a network joining up the nodes. While the network is a nice metaphor vague enough to incorporate almost all fuzzy feelgood thoughts on the virtual organisation and loose alliances working towards common goals â?? what does the network really mean?

If the Commons was a network power would be evenly (more or less) spread over the network â?? this is not so. The power of the Commons emanates clearly from the central point of San Francisco. The closer you are to the epicentre the greater the power.

After experiencing the presence of Microsoft and the Soros Foundation at the iCommons summit Becky Hogge at Open Democracy writes a post with the title that says it all â??Who owns a movement?â??

The Creative Commons is a great idea. It is a set of licenses which people can use. It helps â??ordinaryâ?? people participate in the copyright discourse by visualising the fact that the binary situation of all or nothing copyright is not enough. But the Commons is not a movement in the sense of the Free Software Foundation whose basis is on ideology â?? the Copyleft ideology.

By being pragmatic the Commons has grown faster than many contemporary movements. However this pragmatism is also part of the problem. The emptiness of its ideology means that many of the participants in this movement fill it with what they think it represents. The shock (?) then of seeing Microsoft at â??theirâ?? summit shows the effects of pragmatism. Those who want to see the Commons as being based upon a Copyleft ideology quickly must realise that this is not going to happen.

Does ideology matter?

Yes! If the Commons is to be seen as a movement. Without a central ideology the movement (can it be a movement without an ideology?) cannot define its core values and eventually will splinter.

No! The licenses are simple, standard licenses and nothing else. Naturally even licenses reflect ideologies but they are not in themselves ideologies.

If the iCommons wants to become more than a set of licenses (which it seems to want) it must then discard its all to pragmatic position and be prepared to make some people unhappy. Without taking a stance, setting up a camp somewhere, attempting to please everyone â?? it cannot grow.

Posted on by mklang

EU vs Microsoft

Here is part of the official statement of the Free Software Foundation Europe on the EU decision to fine Microsoft almost 300 million Euro.

“Microsoft is still as far from allowing competition as it was on the day of the original Commission ruling in 2004. All proposals made by Microsoft were deliberately exclusive of Samba, the major remaining competitor. In that light, the fines do not seem to come early, and they do not seem high,” comments Carlo Piana, Milano based lawyer of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) regarding the decision of the European Commission to fine Microsoft 1.5 million Euro per day retroactively from 16. December 2005, totalling 280.5 million Euro. Should Microsoft not come into compliance until the end of July 2006, the daily fines could be doubled.

These fines are a reaction to Microsofts continued lack of compliance with the European Commission decision to make interoperability information available to competitors as a necessary precondition to allow fair competition. FSFE has supported the European Commission from the start of the suit in 2001.

“If we are to believe Microsofts numbers, it appears that 120.000 person days are not enough to document its own software. This is a task that good software developers do during the development of software, and a hallmark of bad engineering,” comments Georg Greve, president of the FSFE. “For users, this should be a shock: Microsoft apparently does not know the software that controls 95% of all desktop computers on this planet. Imagine General Motors releasing a press statement to the extent that even though they had 300 of their best engineers work on this for two years, they cannot provide specifications for the cars they built.”

Posted on by mklang

Political Games

Let’s face it – we live in a world with short attention spans and a large amount of competing demands on our attention. One attempt to create and maintain attention in one of these tragic affairs is the computer game Darfour is Dying.

In the online game the player takes the perspective of the displaced Darfurian. The scary part is that such approached may trivialise the importance and reality of the actual suffering going on.

But lets take a tolerant approach and say that at least people are being reminded that the problem exists. Nomatter the medium – awareness is the most important part.

Posted on by mklang

Fun with google & googleheads

Philipp Lenssen has written the book â??55 Ways to Have Fun With Googleâ??. My first thought was that this must be a small broschure â?? but I was wrong. The book is 228 pages long. Best of all is that its available for download here. The book is licensed under a Creative Commons license (by-nc-sa).

Naturally, as one would expect, the book includes an inspirational quote from the song â??The Googleheadsâ?? see the weird song and video here (oh, and apparently you can buy the song on itunes!). Here is the googlehead quote:

On a spring day you can find your way
to a little flower garden where the Googleheads play
You know theyâ??re there by the clothes they wear
And their Googlehead faces and their Googlehead hair.

â??Cause theyâ??re the Googleheads
They shake their doodleheads
Theyâ??re the goo-ga-goo-ga-goo-gah Googleheads.
â?? Laurie Berkner

Check out Lenssenâ??s google website.

(via Lessig Blog)

Posted on by mklang

Ending the cold war

Hey â?? remember the cold war? Itâ??s over right? When a war ends it would be nice if the warring factions could pick up all their stuff and move it back to were it belongs. Despite this (obvious?) point the US maintains 480 nuclear weapons in Europe (Germany, UK, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, and Turkey). Formally these are NATO but they are owned and controlled by the US. It would be really nice if the US would take them back home.

The weapons are placed on European soil and if anything goes wrong the damage will be carried by Europeans. They were designed as a deterrent â?? at least that was what we where told the arms race was for. So now that there is no major power to deter (if there ever was a need for nuclear deterrent) please take the crap off our front lawn.

Why not do something really wild and make Europe a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone?

Greenpeace has more information and also a fun video â??Nato Big Brotherâ?? â?? after the video you are asked to vote whom should leave.

The Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (WMDC) released its report entitled Weapons of Terror: Freeing the World of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Arms read about the report launch here.

Commission Chairman Dr. Hans Blix presented it [the report] to the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the UN Headquarters in New York, and thereafter to the President of the United Nations General Assembly, the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Sweden, Mr. Jan Eliasson, to whom Dr. Blix expressed his and the Commissionâ??s gratitude to the Swedish Government for having established and assumed the main financial responsibility of the WMDC.

The report calls for (amongst other things) the removal of nuclear arms in Europe.

The report clearly states that the nuclear weapon states are in breach of their Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) commitment to disarm and “no longer seem to take their commitment to nuclear disarmament seriously – even though this was an essential part of the NPT bargain, both at the treaty’s birth in 1968 and when it was extended indefinitely in 1995.”

That’s the kind of thing we have been saying for decades – but which rarely features in the UN Security Council, dominated as it is by the five permanent members, all of whom possess nuclear weapons.  Far from disarming, they’re actually upgrading their arsenals.

The report also observes:

While the reaction of most states to the treaty violations was to strengthen and develop the existing treaties and institutions, the US, the sole superpower, has looked more to its own military power for remedies. The US National Security Strategy of 2002 made it clear that the US would feel free to use armed force without authorization of the United Nations Security Council to counter not only an actual or imminent attack involving WMD but also a WMD threat that might be uncertain as to time and place.

Download and read the full report here.

(via Real Peter Forsberg)

Posted on by mklang

Prudent use of DNA

The official position towards the use of DNA in police investigations in Sweden has until quite recently been unanimously positive. This positive stance has occasionally burst out in fits of blind optimism. One such example was when an ex-police chief and a law professor wrote a debate article in one of the main Swedish newspapers arguing (on extremely weak arguments) that everyone in Sweden should be forced to give DNA samples since this would prevent those who had been forced to give DNA samples in the line of police inquiries from being discriminated.

This techno-optimism approach to DNA may however be receiving a few more sober reflective comments. In an article in Dagens Nyheter the head of Swedish homicide investigation Dag Andersson states that the police must be very careful of becoming single minded. In other words DNA is a useful tool but it can also limit the efficiency of the police since they are too busy searching and analysing DNA samples to actually use more traditional â?? and no less efficient methods.

My critique of DNA in police investigations is the danger of over-reliance on technology and the misallocation of resources. Taking masses of DNA samples from a high number of suspects is sloppy work. It promotes laziness and is connected with high costs. These costs could have been better used in preventative measures enacted before the crime took place.
The Swedish Minister of Justice is a big fan of the implementation of high-tech. But in common for all his techno-optimism is that they are high-cost measures designed to be implemented after the fact. This high-cost techno-optimism approach is designed to hide the fact that there is really no plan or initiative to work in a manner to prevent crime.

An additional “side-effect” is also that civil rights are trampled upon with the bad excuse that such trampling is necessary.

Posted on by mklang