war

Portable Anonymous Surfing

When I travel I am sometimes forced to use public terminals to communicate. While doing this I often consider how insecure this method is. It does not stop me from using public terminals but it does concern me.

Now a great little application has been developed to help in situations such as these. It is a combination between Tor routing and the portable Firefox browser called TorPark.

Installation is easy: All you do is download the software. Expand it. Drag and drop the folder onto your memory stick.

Then when you have to use Internet on a public terminal simply insert the memory stick, start the TorPark which then connects to the Tor network and launches the portable Firefox browser.

Tor is about anonymous Internet use and it makes you virtually untraceable online. In addition it also protects you from local snooping as well (more documentation here). TorPark allows you to do this on public machines.

The downside is that it slows down browsing and that it only works under Windows.

(Via Suburbia)

Posted on by mklang

Being-with Information Technology

Anna Croon Fors from Umeå University has defended her PhD thesis Being-with Information Technology: Critical explorations beyond use and design (fulltext here).

From the abstract:

In the thesis a theoretical exploration concerning the significance of information technology in everyday life is conducted. The main question advanced is how the reflexive nature of information technology can be envisionedâ?¦The framework being-with information technology emerges as a result of my insistence on grasping the relationship between information technology and human experience as a whole. Informed primarily by Martin Heideggerâ??s thinking on technology the framework ascribes primacy to meaning-making and sense-making processes. The framework also aspire to reach beyond notions of use and design by emphasizing the role and importance of the potential of information technology to transform human experience in new and significant ways…

It is suggested that a focus on aesthetic experiences entails the possibility to investigate ambiguous meanings of information technology, meanings that all are intrinsic to information technology, but so far has received little or no attention. This suggestion is also a move away from a view of information technology as an object, with certain features, qualities and properties, towards a view of information technology as a relation to the world, to itself, and towards being human.

It sounds exciting and scanning the table of contents confirms this. I am looking forward to reading it properly.

Posted on by mklang

bye bye blogburst

This news (below) gives me the push I needed to quit blogburst. The idea of syndication in this way interested me in that it might increase my readership but it annoyed me as it made me think about my readers. In other words the question of what my readers would think occurred to me. I did not change the content of my work in any way. But the appearance of the question in my mind was enough to annoy me.

A writer wants to be read. This is the reason I signed up to the blogburst service. This may have been a bad idea. Posts from Living the Scientific Life and Bitch Ph.D. present some valid arguments for not joining such syndication services.

The blogburst license states that bloggers who sign up agree to:

… a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual license to reproduce, distribute, make derivative works of, perform, display, disclose, and otherwise dispose of the Work (and derivative works thereof) for the purposes ofâ?¦

When I read this I first thought that this could not be wrong. My thinking was that increasing the reach of my writing would be a good thing. But as Bitch Ph.D. explains this is flawed thinking in a couple of ways.

First: If material is published somewhere through blogburst it is very unlikely that the eventual reader will click through to my blog. Therefore I add to the value of someone elseâ??s work without increasing the popularity of my own.

Second: Since the pictures remain on my local server the popularity of my work somewhere else means that my bandwidth is supporting this popularity. Economically this does not effect me too much as blog on the university resources but the principle is that I pay in work and technology and do not get much (or anything in return).

Posted on by mklang

Bah, lazy hypocrites!

Its soon time for me to lecture on plagiarism again. I give this lecture every year to groups of students who are about to write their thesis. The idea is both to help them understand the boundaries between quote, citation, paraphrase & plagiarism and to get them to start thinking about the nature of property in relation to intellectual goods.

Giving this lecture today is aided by the current discussion on copyright and file sharing. In my IT & ethics course I regularly attempt to discuss the problem of file sharing and ask my students what they believe is the moral position of the person who illegally downloads music or films. Usually among my students 80-90% of those who download music do not consider there actions to be morally wrong and nor do they consider themselves to be stealing. The most often used legitimisation of their actions:
1. that they are not depriving anyone of use.
2. the entertainment industry is rich enough.
3. they would not buy that which they download and therefore there is no loss to the industry.

Considering these points it is interesting to attempt to raise awareness about plagiarism. In one way it is pretty easy: if you get caught you will be punished and it is humiliating. But this is not a good starting point since the stress is on not getting caught as opposed to building awareness.

Attempting to discuss student plagiarism is made more difficult recently when two professors have been accused (correctly) of plagiarising others work in their books. One is a professor at the University College of BorÃ¥s who has been sloppy when quoting others his/her own defence other are harsher and call it plagiarism (DN 29/4 â?? 2006)

The second is a professor at the University of Göteborg who has stolen other peopleâ??s works and included them in his work. The excuses for this theft was that the book was written under a very short deadline and the works from which he borrowed material are included in the bibliography.

We would never accept these excuses from our own students then why would these professors even think that the excuses would work for them?

Posted on by mklang

The sod-off day

Since I am approaching the date for my PhD defence the question of what I intend to do afterwards is being asked more often. I dont really understand the problem – the lists of stuff I want to complete once this project is finished is seemingly endless.

For example today I came across (I know I’m late!) the Creative Commons “Podcasting Legal Guide: Rules for the Revolution” wiki. Its a great idea except for the fact that it is based on US law so simply translating it and adapting it to Swedish conditions would be a worthwhile project.

Since I have a faculty position the US (?) problem of post-PhD tenure chasing is not an issue. While speaking to a colleague in Stockholm yesterday we both agreed that under the Swedish system the PhD defence is the big â??sod-offâ?? day, since once the PhD is accepted the shiny new PhD is no longer dependent upon currying favour among senior faculty.

After PhD you can say â??sod-offâ?? to many of the unpleasant tasks that you have been carrying out due to office politics and political correctness.

Which of course reminds me of a quote from Blackadder III where Backadder has promised to fight a duel for Prince George:

Prince George : Ah Blackadder. It has been a wild afternoon full of strange omens. I dreamt that a large eagle circled the room three times and then got into bed with me and took all the blankets. And then I saw that it wasn’t an eagle at all but a large black snake. And also Duncan’s horses did turn up and eat each other. As usual. Good portents for your duel do you think.
Blackadder : Not very good sir. I’m afraid the duel is off.
Prince George : OFF?
Blackadder : As in sod. I’m not doing it.

Posted on by mklang

Blogging in the private/public divide

Part of blogging is attempting to figure out why we blog? Not all blogs pose this question but it appears often enough* to be recognised as being a common question. This question becomes even more relevant when the blogger takes active risks by blogging.

In an earlier post (blogging revisited 21/1105) I reported about an article concerned with the risks being taken by job-seeking academics who blog. The author of the article wrote that their blogs prevented the potential employer from hiring since they revealed a different side to the applicant than that presented at the formal interview.

A temporary prosecutor in San Francisco blogged about a case he was prosecuting:
Karnow didn’t find the postings prejudicial enough to throw out the entire case, as the defense wanted. But in turning down that motion to dismiss this week, the judge still came down hard on ex-prosecutor Jay Kuo, calling his conduct “juvenile, obnoxious and unprofessional.” … (via Lunda Wright)

Other bloggers take greater risks as whistleblowers or reporting on corrupt and/or repressive governments. While some bloggers and blogs are well protected using different means many are open and tracing the authors is a (relatively) easy task.

Organisations such as the EFF have created documents to help those who need to blog anonymously â??How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else)â?? but these are either not widely known or widely used.
There seems to be something special about the blog and its place in the private/public divide. The blog is a private diary and yet it is open to the world.  The privacy promotes the sharing of secrets while the public the desire to communicate.

Why take the risks? Are they really risks or is blogging perceived to be a private act? Even though most bloggers are aware of their publicâ?¦

*Some examples from Google on the search â??why I blogâ??
Watermark – Jacobsen – Under the sun – Media Metamorphosis –

Posted on by mklang

Mixing metaphors or postmodern celebrations

Yesterday was Valborgmässoafton a date celebrated in memory of the princes Walpurgis later Saint Valborg who helped bring christendom to the Germans. Later her cult became particularly associated with lighting fires to ward of witchcraft (which actually is a pagan practice which predates her).

The celebration I attended yesterday was a postmodern version. The pagan fire was actually set alight by people dressed as witches, announced by marching drums, playing samba rhythms which was then followed by a band playing Swedish music with a country flavour. Most people have no idea of why the fires are lighted or who Valborg was but this does not stop the celbration from being considered a very important date in the calender.
But at least it was a good fire – despite the rain.

Posted on by mklang

Rainy Sundays

Its almost a cliché. Its a rainy Sunday afternoon! The good news is that a large second hand bookstore nearby (Röde Orm in Haga) was having a major sale 10 kr per book. Most of the good stuff was gone but I came away with Lars-Ingvar Sörenson licenciate thesis from 1997 entitled Naturrätt, egendomsrätt och praxis (Natural rights, Property rights
and praxis). I am looking forward to reading it.

It begins with a quote from Sitting Bull’s speech 1875 where he speaks about his enemy and says, amongs other things:

They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse. They compel her to produce out of season, and when sterile she is made to take medicine in order to produce again. All this is sacrilege. This nation is like a spring freshet; it overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path. We cannot dwell side by side. (online version included here)

What can be better on a rainy sunday?
Posted on by mklang

Scientific & personal revolutions

The problem with the development of science is our need to draw straight lines. We want to believe that science is the incremental, linear, progressive, growth of knowledge in society. We know it isn’t true but we do so all the same.
In 1935 Ludwik Fleck wrote on the development of science (Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact). According to him one of the major stumbling blocks in scientific development was the ruling ideas (thought styles) which have been established within the totality of scientific thought (thought collective). The thought collective was made up of individual members but was greater than the sum of individuals since the ideas remained strong even if members left the collective.

These ideas dove-tail very nicely into Thomas Kuhnâ??s ideas (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) that science passes through revolutions (paradigm shifts) were first new ideas are resisted until the normative thought style no longer fits the understanding of the results being brought forward by scientists.
Its easy to giggle at the stupidity of past knowledge – sometimes my students have a hard time understanding how people in the past could have been so ignorant (as opposed to our enlightened state). Sometimes I try to compare this scientific development to individual development and ask them to think about the last time they had a paradigm shift of their own.

Two doctoral thesis’ on/connected to Fleck
One in archeology by David Loeffler â??Contested Landscapes/Contested Heritageâ?? from 2005 (uses Fleck’s ideas) and one in philosophy by Bengt Liliequist â??Ludwik Flecks jämförande kunskapsteoriâ?? (in Swedish).

Posted on by mklang

Define disaster?

What is a disaster and how does it compare to a catastrophe or a tragedy? A few months ago I began thinking about this. I wanted to use this as part of a future lecture on the effects of technology (and probably an advanced form of procrastination). The basic idea is that most of us have short memories. We trust technology implicitly and we see the failure of technology as a brief, unfortunate anomaly.

While writing about the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident these thoughts came back and I began to dig for a suitable list of man-made disasters. The man-made is an easy criterion since all technology is man-made (this is a specie-ist argument where I am brutally discounting tools made by animals and aliens). But what other criteria should be involved when attempting to demonstrate the failures of technology and their connection to trust?

  • War is a disaster but it is for the most part intentional.
  • The slow erosion of the ozone layer may be a disaster but â?? do we include it?
  • How does one differentiate between extinction and natural selection in relation to the disaster?
  • What about â??naturalâ?? disasters which have been triggered or aggravated by technology?

Therefore for the purpose of a lecture on trust in technology events can have disastrous consequences without being disasters.

Feel free to add comments on this! To be continuedâ?¦

Posted on by mklang