war

Social Networks Thesis

Ericka Menchen Trevino has put her final (almost) Masters Thesis online. It is entitled  Social Bookmarks: Personal Organization and Collective Discovery on the Web

From the summary:

My findings suggest that people understand their own posts to del.icio.us as a memory aid as well as a sign of what they value. The posts of others, when aggregated, signified the interests of del.icio.us users as a group, and social trends on the web. It is possible to analyze this content much further, and while only a few do this infrequently, it is still an important development. The posts of other users often derived significance from prior knowledge of the individual. In the less common case of a browsing an individual account without any outside-del.icio.us information about that person, the posts were taken at face value, which depends on the browserâ??s prior experiences and purpose.

After a quick pre-reading it seem very good. I am looking forward to reading it more carefully later.

Posted on by mklang

You Cannot Patent Software

…and yet there are software patents.

In a long draft article entitled “You Canâ??t Patent Software: Patenting Software Is Wrong” – Peter Junger states that which most lawyers fail to see. Maybe because they are blinded by economics?

Computer programs are texts, not machines as some lawyers have confused themselves into believing, and thus they may be copyrighted and protected by the First Amendment, but they are not patentable as machines. Computer programs are indeed processes, but they are not patentable processes because what they process is information and what they produce is information, not some modification of material goods or articles of commerce. The simple fact is—though the reasons for it may be hard for most lawyers to grasp—that, as the title of this article puts it: “You can’t patent software: patenting software is wrong.”

A nice, old school, scholarly legal paper which hammers home it’s point. It’s a good way to start the week with a work like this.

Posted on by mklang

Homage to Catalonia

One of the things that I promised myself was that I would read more fiction after I was done with the PhD. Right now I am reading Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia” which is a mix of memory and description of the Spanish civil war were Orwell went to fight against facism. For Orwell the journey to Spain was necessary since it was the first country to actually protest the facist regime and to put up a fight against what was to prove to be the last centuries biggest political mistake.

He also writes with brutal honesty about the terrible conditions of those involved in the everyday fighting of the war. There is no glamour and even less honour.

An example which takes place after an attack on a facist position outside the town of Heusca. They took the facist trench but were driven back again:

They had left the parapet and were coming after us. ‘Run!’ I yelled to Moyle, and jumped to my feet. And heavens, how I ran! I had thought earlier in the night that you can’t run when you are sodden from head to foot and weighted down with a rifle and cartridges; I learned now you can always run when you think you have fifty or a hundred armed men after you. But if I could run fast, others could run faster.

On the totality of his experiences in Spain, Orwell writes:

When we went on leave I had been a hundred and fifteen days in the line, and at the time this period seemed to me to have been one of the most futile of my whole life. I had joined the militia in order to fight against Fascism, and as yet I had scarcely fought at all, had merely existed as a sort of passive object, doing nothing in return for my rations except to suffer from cold and lack of sleep. Perhaps that is the fate of most soldiers in most wars. But now that I can see this period in perspective I do not altogether regret it.

This is the most iconic photo of this conflict. It is Robert Capa’s Death of a Republican

Posted on by mklang

Make a Toaster

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.

Posted on by mklang

More on Walls

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)

Posted on by mklang

Swords and Apples

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.

Posted on by mklang

What a PhD feels like

Itâ??s Friday. This is my last weekend before I defend. I have not been thinking a lot about what happens after Friday but I have naturally been curious about it. Previously, I have asked a people about the actual experience. Most of them seem only to have vague memories of the actual defence. This is not because they defended so long ago as not to remember. It seems to be common not to remember much of the actual defence. It might be the stress or the focus of the occasion but the result is that the audience seems to have a clearer memory than the defender.

Things get more complicated when asking people what the PhD feels like after the defence. Once the idea has sunk in, what does it change? Obviously the shiny new PhD qualifies the holder to apply for new positions, apply for research funding and opens doors within academia to rooms which were previously off-limits.

Despite this, the people I have spoken to report a range of emotions of what the PhD feels like. Everything from â??nothing changedâ?? to â??everything is differentâ??. My preference is towards â??everything changesâ??. The PhD is more than a formal exam and an entrance into the academic guild it is also a effort of great personal importance â?? at least I feel that my experience is this and I may feel a bit cheated if nothing changed.

Posted on by mklang

Steve! We Wants Greener Apples

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?¦

Technorati tag.

Posted on by mklang

GPLv3 info from FSF

The Free Software Foundation wishes to clarify a few factual points about the Second Discussion Draft of GNU GPL version 3, on which recent discussion has presented inaccurate information.

1. The FSF has no power to force anyone to switch from GPLv2 to GPLv3 on their own code.  We intentionally wrote GPLv2 (and GPLv1) so we would not have this power.  Software developers will continue to have the right to use GPLv2 for their code after GPLv3 is published, and we will respect their decisions.

2. In order to honor freedom 0, your freedom to run the program as you wish, a free software license may not contain “use restrictions” that would restrict what you can do with it. Contrary to what some have said, the GPLv3 draft has no use restrictions, and the final version won’t either.

GPLv3 will prohibit certain distribution practices which restrict users’ freedom to modify the code.  We hope this policy will thwart the ways some companies wish to “use” free software — namely, distributing it to you while controlling what you can do with it.  This policy is not a “use restriction”: it doesn’t restrict how they, or you, can run the program; it doesn’t restrict what they, or you, can make the program do.  Rather it ensures you, as a user, are as free as they are.

3. Where GPLv2 relies on an implicit patent license, which depends on US law, GPLv3 contains an explicit patent license that does the same job internationally.

Contrary to what some have said, GPLv3 will not cause a company to “lose its entire [software] patent portfolio”.  It simply says that if someone has a patent covering XYZ, and distributes a GPL-covered program to do XYZ, he can’t sue the program’s subsequent users, redistributors and improvers for doing XYZ with their own versions of that program.  This has no effect on other patents which that program does not implement.

Software patents attack the freedom of all software developers and users; their only legitimate use is to deter aggression using software patents.  Therefore, if we could abolish every entity’s entire portfolio of software patents tomorrow, we would jump at the chance.  But it isn’t possible for a software license such as the GNU GPL to achieve such a result.

We do, however, hope that GPL v3 can solve a part of the patent problem.  The FSF is now negotiating with organizations holding substantial patent inventories, trying to mediate between their conflicting “extreme” positions.  We hope to work out the precise details of the explicit patent license so as to free software developers from patent aggression under a substantial fraction of software patents.  To fully protect software developers and users from software patents will, however, require changes in patent law.

Posted on by mklang

Read Book Change World

Do you have a guilty conscious about books you should have read? I do. Most of the time I can ignore this little voice but every so often the voice shouts too loud to be ignored.

One book which I thought I should read when it came out in 2000 was Monbiotâ??s â??The Age of Consent: A manifesto for a new world orderâ?? but somehow I always had other stuff to do.

Then I began reading Monbiotâ??s writing online. He posts some (all?) of his newspaper articles online a short while after they have appeared in the newspapers. His â??Children of the Machineâ?? (2006) is an insightful understanding of how RFID technology will slowly come to be accepted and to control us.

Anyway I bought his Age of Consent and I was not disappointed. Here is a man who writes about the complicated hypocrisies of world economics in a manner that is understandable, entertaining and at the same time provoking.

His final goal is to provoke the reader into action. But he is aware that he must move the reader from ignorance, to understanding, to agreement before he gets anyone to act.

Some short quotes:

We must accept that democracy will always be something of a mess. Attempting to tidy it up too much could mean subordinating diversity to universalism and the individual consciousness to the general will to such an extent that we may establish the preconditions not for freedom but for captivity. We must leave gaps between the building blocks, in case we accidentally build a wall. (Monbiot, Age of Consent, p 115)

Throughout this manifesto, I have sought to suggest ways in which we can use the strengths of our opponents to our advantage, and it seems to me that the roaming hunger of corporations is another asset we can turn to our account. (Monbiot, Age of Consent, p)

â?¦the curtailment of the world-eating mathematically impossible system we call capitalism, and its replacement with a benign and viable means of economic exchangeâ?¦ (Monbiot, Age of Consent, p 238)

I end this with the same words with which he ends his book:

Well? What are you waiting for?

Posted on by mklang