war

Fear and Courage

Naturally no one can live life through quotations but there are some quotations that kind of manage to capture a sentiment of importance. These also tend to stick in my mind – not that I remember the exact quote, more the general idea. While in Kalmar I came across a second hand bookshop and found a philosophical book on the topic of courage. I am looking forward to reading it.

One of the more curious quotes that I like is from Camilo Jose Cela’s Journey to the Alcarria

Sometimes one has frightening sensations of well-being, strong enough to move mountains; one must fight them courageously, as one would fight an enemy. And then, with the passage of time, they leave something like a drop of gall in ones heart…

Contentment is one of the more dangerous enemies that prevent our development. When we arrive in a situation of contentment we occasionally do not dare to take a risk that may help us develop. Not really sure about the “drop of gall” part.

Part of the problem is the fear of failure or the fear of losing out. But, to quote another writer, there is another way of looking at this problem:

By embracing the inescapable, I lost my fear of it. I’ll tell you a secret about fear: its an absolutist. With fear, its all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with a stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power vanishes like a puff of smoke. And another secret: the revolution against fear, the engendering of that tawdry despots fall, has more or less nothing to do with ‘courage’. It is driven by something much more straightforward: the simple need to get on with your life.

This is from Salman Rushdie’s “The Moors Last Sigh” and it hits the exact point that the fear of fear is more serious than the thing we fear itself. Overcoming our fears are as Rushdie puts it not really a matter of being overly courageous but more a need to get on with our lives…

Posted on by mklang

On Sleeping Bears

Getting older is a strange thing. I don’t feel older – in fact I feel younger today than I have been for many years. But I am older and the best way of measuring age is not the way in which you feel but rather in the way you relate to older and younger people.

I am not old and yet I have a school tie in my closet that is older than many of my students, I am not old but I am trying to lecture to a room full of people who were born when I was attempting to disco.

The difficult thing about getting old is attempting to talk across the barriers of age. My students perceive me as older and I perceive them as younger. The difference, in a teaching scenario, is the problem of giving examples. It is hard to convey the importance and turmoil of 1989. This was the year that saw both the Tiananmen Square student massacre and the fall of the Berlin wall.

While growing up the concept of the cold war seemed outdated. East-West relations had been frosty for my entire life and we had always lived under the threat of nuclear war. My generation was bored with the fear of nuclear war and were more concerned with the social economic changes brought about by Reagan and Thatcher.  We were tired and blasé, we did not really expect change. We knew that teenagers everywhere where in reality the same but politics was (and is) the game of old men.

So it’s understandable for my generation to see 1989 as a proof of the correctness of optimism and it is equally understandable for my students not to understand why I make a big deal of it all.

The question is what shall we all make of Putin’s decision to re-activate strategic flights by nuclear bombers:

Russia has resumed regular “strategic flights” of nuclear bombers. (They may or may not be carrying nuclear bombs, but you can practically hear Putin’s smirking tone as he says, “Our [nuclear bomber] pilots have been grounded for too long. They are happy to start a new life.”) (via Question Technology)

Are the cold war generation just nodding their heads in the understanding that the last 2o years has been an exception to the status quo. Do the post 1989 generation even think about the possible implications of this or have they lived in a post cold war era for too long to be able to imagine the alternatives.

And what on earth does my generation think about it all…

Posted on by mklang

ISP Liability in Sweden

Yesterday, the Cecilia Renfors presented the results of her investigation on copyright issues in relation to the Internet (press release in Swedish). The investigation entitled Music and Film on the Internet – threat or possibility? (Musik och film på Internet – hot eller möjlighet?). The purpose of this investigation was to understand and to create a way in which illegal file-sharing would decrease and users would be encouraged to pay for the downloading of video and audio.

The main suggestion in this investigation is to hold the ISP’s liable for users’ treatment of copyrighted material. In reality this would entail that the ISP would move from being an anonymous carrier of information to being actively involved in the content their customers desire. Cecilia Renfors suggests that the ISP’s should be forced to, for example, close accounts for users involved in illegal file sharing.

These suggestions have not been accepted quietly. Naturally the ISP’s are protesting – they don’t want to chase their own customers. But there is a wider issue at stake here.

Suppose that an Internet account is terminated because it has been used for illegal file sharing. This punishment does not fit the crime. Considering the drive towards e-government and the amount of services which are moving wholly online the loss of one’s Internet connection is too high a punishment. Another question is who actually carried out the downloading? Was it the underage child? Or is it a neighbor abusing an open network?

Most users do not know enough about their technology to control their own Internet accounts. In addition they do not know enough about the complexities of copyright law in relation to the Internet. A study (pdf here – in Swedish) user’s rights (paid for by an ISP), also presented yesterday, shows that most people do not know which actions in relation to the copying of copyrighted material are legal or not. This latter study shows that 83% of Swedish teenagers download music from the Internet. Half of them believe that when they make a copy of music for a friend or family member that this act is also illegal.

An example of scenarios presented in the examination:

My friend has bought a song on the internet. She plays it for me on her mp3 player and I would like to copy the song to my mp3 player. Is this act legal?

Teenagers answer
* No: 51%
* Yes: 29 %
* Don’t know: 21%

Teenagers parents answer:
* No: 55%
* Yes: 21 %
* Don’t know: 24%

The correct answer is that this act is legal. Sharing a legally purchased song with friends and family is permissible. It is not permissible to share it to the general public nor is it legal to circumvent technical protection measures to copy the song.

The lack of legal and technical information makes this a sensitive issue. Naturally everyone within a society is expected to know the laws which applies to them. Ignorance of the law can never be a defence. However, the fact is that few people really know whats what in copyright and online environments.

If we create an environment where we begin closing access to Internet we are taking a step back in the information society. Access to Internet today is arguably more important than being connected to a telephone system. Not that I would like to give up either.

Posted on by mklang

Discovering Lund

Yesterday I managed to arrange my sleeping quarters in Lund. I am now sharing an apartment in the center of town. I also managed to get an office so I am beginning to feel like the practical elements of life are falling into place. Since I could stop worrying and did not have to catch a train I spent some time exploring the town yesterday. Like all cities Lund has its secrets and I am looking forward to uncovering a few of them.

whisper.JPG

Found on a wall in Lund…

Posted on by mklang

Dutch Innovation

The Dutch collecting societies support CC – this is a great leap forward, I cannot help but wonder what the Swedish societies will do now? Probably try to continue to ignore technology, innovation, the commons, and reality…

From Paul Keller – CC Netherlands Project Lead:

On August 23, 2007, Dutch collecting societies Buma and Stemra and Creative Commons Netherlands launched a pilot project that seeks to provide Dutch musicians with more opportunities to promote their own repertoire. This project enables members of Buma/Stemra to use the 3 non-commercial CC licenses for non-commercial distribution of their works. It also allows Dutch composers and lyricists who already use the CC NonCommercial license to join Buma/Stemra and have them collect their royalties for commercial use of their works.

Before now Dutch authors have not been able to make their work available online under the CC NC license while at the same time having Buma/Stemra collect their royalties for commercial use of those works. The Netherlands is the first country to bring such a collaboration between a music copyright organization and Creative Commons, a move applauded by Lawrence Lessig, the founder and chairman of Creative Commons International, as “the first step towards more freedom of choice in the field of exploiting music works in the digital world.”

The press release by Creative Commons Netherlands and Buma Stemra can be found here. And for more information about what’s going on in the Netherlands check out CC Netherlands website.

Posted on by mklang

Regulating Violence

Is the regulation of violence in video/computer games censorship? Or is it a question of protecting the innocent? Naturally paternalism in all forms includes a “pappa knows best” attitude however there are cases of censorship/control/paternalism which we can accept and other forms which we tend to react against.

The forms of Internet censorship (more here) displayed by states such as China and Saudi Arabia are usually criticized as forms of censorship unacceptable in democratic societies while they themselves argue the need to protect their cultures and citizens against the corrupting influences online. It is, it may seem, a question of perspectives.

Then what of the regulation of violent computer games? Are computer games supposed to be seen as forms of speech to be protected? Or are we on a dangerous slippery slope when we start excluding forms of speech? The New York Times has an article showing that the US courts tend to find laws against computer game unconstitutional.

Considering the US approach to Free Expression this is not surprising. The European approach – in particular the French, German and Scandinavian models could not be as clear cut in this question. This only means that the US is against censorship and feels the cost of this decision is worth it, while many other jurisdictions feel that the damage caused by this extreme acceptance of free expression may cause discomfort and hardship to individuals and groups beyond the eventual benefits of the speech.

The ever eloquent Judge Posner is quoted in the article:

“Violence has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both high and low,” he wrote. “It engages the interest of children from an early age, as anyone familiar with the classic fairy tales collected by Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault are aware. To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it.”

The problem is that there is often great value (moral rather than economic) in quixotic pursuits and the practice of subjecting people to hardships in order to prepare them for eventual future hardships is really only useful in military training and never a satisfactory way of raising children.

Posted on by mklang

Web Politics

Andrew Chadwick (author of Internet Politics – fantastic book which I reviewed for Information, Communication & Ethics in Society) is organizing a conference Politics Web 2.0 to be held at Royal Holloway, University of London in April 2008.

Has there been a shift in political use of the Internet and digital new media – a new Web 2.0 politics based on participatory values? How do broader social, cultural, and economic shifts towards Web 2.0 impact, if at all, on the contexts, the organizational structures, and the communication of politics and policy? Does Web 2.0 hinder or help democratic citizenship? This conference provides an opportunity for researchers to share and debate perspectives.

(via Lex Ferenda)

Posted on by mklang

Norwegian Free Software

On the 15th August Norway opened a National Center for Free Software whose purpose it is to work with actors from industry, university, research and development environments and the public sector. The center’s goal is to increase competence in, and the use of Free Software in both private and public sectors in addition to stimulating competition in the programming sector.

They even have a magazine called FriProg… The Norwegians seem to be taking Free Software much more seriously than the swedes are.

Posted on by mklang

Internet

Andres over at Technollama reports that John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, has vowed to clean the Internet by “blocking pornography, upgrading the search for chatroom sex predators and cutting off terror sites.” The PM plans to achieve this by giving all Australians a free content filter.

Its amazing that the old tactics of creating paranoia and fear are still used so widely. Well why change something that works? Blocking pornography will not make it unavailable but it can be filtered out.  It’s still there but many people will not see it. Its like going into a porn theater and putting a paper bag over your head.

I am more amused by the fact that he intends to “upgrading the search for chatroom sex predators and cutting off terror sites” by using filters.

This is the stuff that sounds good to concerned parents but is technically useless. Its just words.

Posted on by mklang