design

Broadcast & Podcast Rights

This is straight from Cory Doctrow at Boing Boing – not even going to edit it. Copyright is under fire from almost every angle imagineable. This is about the aweful Broadcast Treaty.

The Broadcast Treaty is an attempt to force the world’s governments to give a new right to broadcasters, a right to control the use of works they don’t own. The Broadcast Right will allow broadcasters to stop you from copying or re-using the programs they transmit, even if those programs are in the public domain, Creative Commons licensed or composed of uncopyrightable facts.

Fair use doesn’t apply to the broadcast right. It will have its own rules for fair use, separate from copyright. You’ll have to pay your lawyer twice, once to make sure you’ve got a fair copyright use, and again to make sure you’ve got a fair broadcast right use. And you might get sued twice — once for violating copyright and again for broadcast right violations.

Worse yet, they want this to apply to the Internet. A few US corporations — Microsoft, Yahoo — have hijacked the US position on the Broadcast Treaty and now the US is using every trick in the book to get the world’s governments (who roundly reject the idea) to create a “webcasting right” at the same time as the broadcast right.

This is deadly to podcasters. The webcasting right will break podcasters’ ability to quote and re-use each others’ work (even CC-licensed works), and other video found on the net. It will allow podcast-hosting companies like Yahoo to tell people how they can use your podcasts, even if you want to permit retransmissions. And it will hurt organizations that are tying to find novel ways to use podcasts, like

The webcasting stuff has been “narrowed” to try to make it apply only to “professional” webcasts and not podcasts, but this is a short-sighted view of the future of podcasting. The term podcasting was only coined 20-some months ago. The idea that we can predict what a podcast will look like tomorrow is ridiculous — it’s like designing a copyright for printed books ten seconds before the photocopier comes along and changes everything.

Luckily, the webcasting stuff is on the ropes. Mark Cuban, who founded Yahoo’s Broadcast.com, has signed onto an open letter from 20 technology organizations that reject the webcasting right. Last week, dozens of companies, libraries and public interest groups signed an open letter rejecting the treaty altogether.

Now it’s the podcasters’ turn. EFF has created an open letter on behalf of podcasters everywhere, rejecting the webcasting right. WIPO is supposed to be making treaties that protect creators. We podcasters are the Internet’s native creators. WIPO has no business trying to break the Internet so that it is better-suited to the business-models of yesterday’s broadcasters.

If you are a podcaster — or better yet, a podcasting organization — sign onto this letter now! It will be presented Monday morning to the WIPO committee that’s creating the Broadcast Treaty in Geneva. This is your best-ever chance to be heard. Link

Posted on by mklang

Three Judges & a Prosecutor

OK so itâ??s not really about judges and prosecutors. The date for my thesis defence looms closer and I thought that I might introduce you all to my three judges and my prosecutor. Actually itâ??s my examination board and my discussant.

My discussant is Professor Jonny Holmström from the Department of Informatics at Umeå University. He has worked diverse areas from IT innovations within organisations to file sharing. I have not met him yet.

My examination board consists of three people: Ulf Petrusson, Agneta Ranerup and Jan Jörnmark.

Professor Ulf Petrusson is Director of the Center for Intellectual Property Studies and wrote his thesis on the patent strategies â?? he continues working in the field of intellectual property strategies. He was also my teacher in my introduction to intellectual property when I was an undergraduate many, many years ago.

Agneta Ranerup is an Associate Professor at my own department. She has worked in the field of eDemocracy in particular the use of web-based service in the citizens choice of governmental and quasi-governmental services. Her work points to the fact that design choices play an important role in democracy.

Jan J̦rnmark is an Associate Professor at the Department of Economic History at G̦teborg University. He is also affiliated with Chalmers Рthe technical university in G̦teborg. He has done work on globalisation and also technology. He also has an interest in deserted places. I have met him on a few occasions.

So these are the main actors in the process â?? along with the audience and me. This is a good group so the process should be an interesting one. It should be a nice affair â?? Feel free to drop by if youâ??re in town.

Georges Rouault – The Three Judges circa 1936
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Responsible Design

From Question Technology come this story of grocery-carts with built-in TVs for your kids to watch while you shop.

OK so this does not have the same dignity as the mobile execution centers (death vans) but what were the designers thinking? What are the store owners thinking? and finally what are the parents thinking?

Does the designer who creates something like this even stop to reflect about the long-term effects of his/her ideas? Or is everything just a cool wacky idea? In Swedish we have a phrase which fits perfectly just now: Jag blir trött translated this means: I become tired. The phrase reflects the tired feeling one gets when acts of stupidity abound and your personal energy to fight is on the decline.

I WANT RESPONSIBLE DESIGN!!!!

Sorry for shouting but this pisses me off. Boy I am grouchy this morning…

Posted on by mklang

The Cool Blogs

It took some time but now I have visited Times 50 Coolest Websites 2005. My favourite section is the blogs (duh). Many of the Times choices were familiar but some were not. They include the amazing to the mundane.

One blog site on the list is PostSecret where people send their secrets on postcards to the blogger who scans them and posts them online. Some are secrets are trivial while others are dark most are disturbing in one form or another. A recent, simple yet disturbing example included the text: I lie to make my life seem normal.

Two sites on the list that are made for procrastination are Overheardinnewyork and Overheardintheoffice. Both sites are reports of snippets of overheard conversations.

The list also includes the design site MoCo Loco and the food fetish site Chocolate and Zucchini just to mention a few favourites.

The list of blogs also include gossip sites and more – but they were not those I would have added to my list…

Posted on by mklang

Social Innovation

It’s a sad truth that most of the world needs technology to resolve immediate serious mundane problems. But most technology development is focused on gadgets.

John Voelcker has chosen 10 innovative technologies which are aimed at solving chronic problems. The article Creating Social Change – 10 Innovative Technologies appears in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (Summer 2006)

  1. A self-contained toilet that treats waste without water or chemicals, protecting precious drinking water from contamination. www.eloo.co.za
  2. An inexpensive kit that turns smog-belching two-stroke engines into cleaner-burning, fuel-efficient sources of power. www.envirofit.org
  3. Small-scale solar power systems that not only produce electric power, but also generate cash by enabling people to set up their own home-based businesses. www.selco-india.com
  4. An electricity-free food preservation system. www.malnutrition.org
  5. A prestigious U.S. university is making many of its academic courses available on the Internet where users can learn from them â?? free. www.ocw.mit.edu
  6. Volunteers have developed a solar-powered microfilm projector that will help tens of thousands of Africans learn to read this year. www.designthatmatters.org/k2
  7. A team of Cuban and Canadian scientists has invented an inexpensive vaccine that could save the lives of half a million infants each year. gndp.cigb.edu.cu/
  8. Low-cost eyeglasses that wearers can tune without the aid
    of an optometrist. www.adaptive-eyecare.com
  9. A Pakistani organization is selling ergonomically correct weaving looms that let adults create the same intricate rugs that children now make. www.ciwce.org.pk
  10. A Brazilian nonprofit is rolling out telecenters that provide Internet access, telephone service, computer training, and other technology-based services to the poor and working class. www.cemina.org.br, www.radiofalamulher.com

This is a good list. I disagree with nr 5 since there are several universities offering similar schemes. In addition I do not believe that it has the same impact and importance as the rest of the list. This is becuase I do not think that by making learning material available people will automatically learn.

Don’t get me wrong – I am sure that these kinds of material are of great value to teachers at other universities since they can take the ideas and adapt them to fit their own classrooms. It’s just that I don’t see that this is on par with clean water, waste disposal and helping poor people access technology.
Despite my complaints – lists such as these are important since they help us open our eyes to the fact that we could all be thinking about solving important everyday problems.
(via Question Technology)

Posted on by mklang

Anti-RFID designs

RFID chips have been around for some time without really taking off. The main discussions have been in specialised privacy or technology discussions. This changed when the plans were launched to add RFID to passports. These plans have raised many concerns from privacy activists. These concerns have only increased now that the planned passports have been demonstrated as not being particularly secure. They have already been both hacked and cloned.

For the security aware: companies are now beginning to offer wallets, or a DIY version made from duct tape. Or why not special designs for clothes. All of which prevent RFID products from being read. The fundamental principal is to create a Faraday Cage effect around the RFID antenna to block the readers.

This is the same principle (as used by the stereotypical crazy-man) of wearing a tin-foil hat to prevent aliens/government from scanning the brain… here is a research article showing the inefficiency of the tin-foil hat.

Background material:

Ari Juels “RFID Security and Privacy: A Research Survey” Research Report, RSA Laboratories, September 2005.

Matt Ward & Rob van Kranenburg “RFID: Frequency, standards, adoption and innovation” JISC Technology and Standards Watch, May 2006.

Ann Cavoukian “Tag, Youâ??re It: Privacy Implications of RadioFrequency Identification (RFID)Technology” Information and Privacy Commissioner Ontario, February 2004.

Posted on by mklang

Summer progress

It’s a hot summer. Brains are melting and work is sluggish. Despite this deadlines loom over us the unrelenting sunshine. My PhD thesis defence is on the 2 October. The book goes to the publishers in the last week of August.

The title of the work is “Disruptive Technology – Effects of Technology Regulation on Democracy” and it will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. The blurb on the back cover will have this text:

Social interaction is partly shaped by technology being used. Therefore technological innovation affects modes of social interaction. While gradual technological innovation is often assimilated, some changes can be more disruptive. This research examines the democratic impact of attempts to control disruptive technology through regulation. This is done by studying attempts to regulate the phenomena of online civil disobedience, viruses, spyware, online games, software standards and Internet censorship â?? in particular the affect of these regulatory attempts on the core democratic values of Participation, Communication, Integrity, Property, Access and Autonomy. By studying the attempts to regulate the disruptive effects of Internet technology and the consequences of these regulatory attempts on the IT-based participatory democracy this work shows that the regulation of technology is the regulation of democracy.

If anyone wants to read an advance version it’s available here. If you send me comments before end of August then I can make changes in the text.

Other facts about the book:

It’s 272 pages long
It’s 103027 words long
It will have a cover design by Jähling.

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

Death Vans

In a move that is eerily echoes the mobile Nazi gas chambers China has begun to use specially designed busses as mobile centres of execution where they administer death by lethal injection. It is no secret that China has capital punishment, but the amount of capital punishments undertaken remains undeclared by the Chinese government.

Death Van

Product Specifications (via USA Today):
Cost: $37,500 to $75,000, depending on vehicle’s size
Length: 20 to 26 feet
Top speed: 65 to 80 mph

The van is divided into three sections:

Execution chamber: in the back, with blacked-out windows; seats beside the stretcher for a court doctor and guards; sterilizer for injection equipment; wash basin
Observation area: in the middle, with a glass window separating it from execution area; can accommodate six people; official-in-charge oversees the execution through monitors connected to the prisoner and gives instruction via walkie-talkie.
Driver area


Banality of Evil
In an earlier post I wrote about the banality of evil â?? here is another excellent example. How does it feel to design such a vehicle? Does the designer add this to his/her CV? What about the company that sells them? What does the sales rep think when he/she wakes up in the morning? Is it a good thing that they are selling well?

This is an excellent example of the responsibility of the designer which I hope to make use of in my teaching. The main point is to problematize around designer responsibility and the issue of whether it is right (ethically & morally) that the designer does his/her best to solve the needs and meet the requirements of the customer.

Death in China
Amnesty International writes that capital punishment can be used â??â?¦for as many as 68 crimes, including non-violent crimes such as tax fraud, embezzlement and drug offences. 1,770 executions were reportedly carried out in China during 2005.â??

USA Today report that the majority of these executions are by firing squad but death by lethal injection is growing. China has introduced mobile execution vehicles where lethal injections are administered as a

â??â?¦civilized alternative to the firing squad, ending the life of the condemned more quickly, clinically and safely.â??

It has been speculated that one reason for the transfer to lethal injection is that the method keeps the organs in better condition for removal and sale. For a longer report on the Chinese death penalty read this Amnesty report (March 2004)

(via Space and Culture)

Posted on by mklang