Science Addiction

In a sense, it’s the year Linux arrived. The year Flash and Real Player took Linux seriously. Flash Player 10 was released for Linux the same day as other platforms and earlier in the year Real Player 11 was released as a .deb for Linux. [via Slashdot]

Nancy Scola at TechPresident has put together a set of resources to help you vote and make sure it counts. Especially interesting are resources for college students who vote where they go to school and the large variety of rules regarding voting by felons.

When I had my idea for a questionnaire for US Presidential candidates about issues important to geek activists like myself, I started reading up on the positions of the most popular candidates.

Guess what? None of them talk about the issues that matter to us directly. Even the big ones like reforming the USA PATRIOT Act aren’t being touched with a 10-foot pole- no one wants to look weak on security, I suppose.

At the same time, I have been thinking a lot about Lawrence Lessig. For those not familiar, after 10 years of leading the fight to protect a free culture among other things, Lessig is stepping away to embrace a much broader issue- corruption. At first, this seems simplistic, naive. But in the end, isn’t that what it all comes down to?

Net neutrality, copyright laws and fair use, the MPAA/RIAA, the DMCA and all the other issues that lock consumers, fans, hackers and hobbyists in a cage where the key is sold to the highest bidder. As a geek, these look like issues for hacktivists. In a broader sense, however, this is the oldest game in politics- the government serving the deepest pockets.

Corruption. Lessig is specific about what he means by corruption, in this quote as applied to himself:

I never promote as policy a position that I have been paid to advise about, consult upon, or write about. If payment is made to an institution that might reasonably be said to benefit me indirectly, then I will either follow the same rule, or disclose the payment.

The key word is never. Not sometimes. Not with disclosure. Just, plain, never.

So coming back to the issue of getting the current US Presidential contenders to answer questions about PATRIOT Act reform or Network Neutrality- shouldn’t the ultimate question be: What would you do to remove the influence of lobbies and corporations from US politics?

If we have an answer for that- a workable, sincere one- then we have an answer not only for problems in hackland, but also in healthcare, in energy policy, in every major social issue of this land of plenty.

Along those lines, here are links to what the major contenders have to say on Washington’s culture of corruption:

• Barack Obama on Reforming Washington
• Hillary Clinton on Government Reform and how she is shaping up as the Privacy Candidate
• John Edwards’ letter to the FCC Chairman regarding the upcoming 700MHz auction.
• The closest Rudy Giuliani comes is in talking about fiscal responsibility but that’s a stretch. Also, here is video of Edwards’ talk at Google
• Mitt Romney on investment in technology and tort liability
• John McCain on Lobbying & Ethics Reform and McCain at Google talking policy.

(Send me more links for the rest of the candidates if you find them. Also, I’m still putting together a questionnaire for the candidates, so suggestions would be great!)

The so-called iPhone Hearings yesterday were entertaining and it seems they may only be the first shot fired on the issue of separating devices from the network.

The folks at FreePress.net have set up Free the iPhone as a ‘save the internet’ (net neutrality) and ‘save net radio’ type movement. The idea is to strike while the iPhone publicity peaks and the current 700MHz auction planned by the FCC rolls around. Also, since the FCC, Google and some members of Congress seem to be showing interest in the idea of separating the Network from the Devices (Delaminate the bastards says Weinberger) this seems to be the appropriate time to be pushing for separating the layers.

Also, the folks at Public Knowledge have a set of videos from the iPhone Hearings including Rep. Ed Markey comparing the iPhone lock-in with Hotel California (_check out, but they can never leave_), Professor Tim Wu pointing out the tech gap between US and Europe in the wireless space, the Verizon General Counsel claiming that there is no consumer demand for delamination, and finally Jason Devitt on the issues for small innovators in the business.

A few more reads:

• Om Malik on the meaning of competition in the US
• Susan Crawford on balancing public interest, security and business pressure
• Google’s Public Policy blog on open access to the wireless network
• Jason Devitt on the implications of the new spectrum auction

Susan Crawford, a law professor who specializes in intellectual property and cyberlaw, has a description of the proceedings at today’s iPhone hearing chaired by my own representative: Rep. Ed Markey. Now Mr. Markey usually gets it on the subject of technology (e.g. net neutrality) and even when he is completely wrong (e.g. when he went after the guy who demonstrated a crucial flaw in airline security), he has the sense to very quickly apologize. Generally, however, I am pleased that he chairs the House Commerce Committee (Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet). Read the rest of this entry »

The FCC has solicited comments from the public on Net Neutrality. This was my letter:

The growth of the Internet has been during the most productive one-third of my life and the threat to Network Neutrality threatens much of what has fueled my professional, social and personal life.

This is further complicated by the fact that the Internet service providers are themselves competitors in the web services space. Thus, they get to control the ‘pipes’ for their competition. This is a frightening landscape in which smaller players have little hope.

You can tell your story to the FCC as well at [Save the Internet]

In May 2007, that seminal work by Eric S. Raymond turned ten years old. The Cathedral and the Bazaar is a book about the simple notion that in software development given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. Six years after Linux came on to the scene and 14 years after Richard Stallman gave birth to the GNU project, Eric Raymond put an intangible, untested concept in to words and has arguably had a phenomenal impact on software and geek culture.

When I wrote my 95 Theses of Geek Activism last year, I put in CatB as a required reading as thesis #12 (the order meant nothing!). It could well have been #1, because it was the book that, for me, transformed the open source model from a touchy-feely philosophy to a practical, viable and achievable ideal for software development.

When Richard Stallman introduced the GNU project, it was a philosophy. You stuck with the GNU model because you believed in truth, liberty, freedom and justice. The BSD and other licenses were less philosophically rigid and have hence been taken advantage of by companies. Apple based their operating system OS X on BSD but were not obligated to share their improvements with the BSD community. They could take, but did not have to share. The GPL aimed at changing that- sharing was a many way street.

Linux brought the truly bazaar-style development in to the (geek) mainstream- where every user was a developer and the code was released early and released often. These facets of Linux development were part accidental, part consequences of the GPL and part Linus’ genius. Of course, Raymond was the first to test and formally describe the theories behind the success of Linux and how to apply them to future projects. Raymond tested the bazaar philosophy on his own fetchmail project and the book tracks his success with it.

• CatB as a Manifesto: This book changed the geek language. Phrases such as the one above about eyeballs and bugs or the fundamental ideas about how to treat your beta testers are now treated as obvious. Indeed, even Yahoo and Google use the idea of treating their users as insider beta testers for many of their products.
• CatB and O’Reilly: The Cathedral and the Bazaar was the first book published in print (by O’Reilly) with an open source document license. This allowed the book to be copied and modified as long as the resulting work had the same license- a precursor to Creative Commons licenses.
• The Open Sourcing of Netscape: The open sourcing of the Netscape browser and the start of the Mozilla project at the end of the browser wars in the late 90s is largely attributed to this book. At the time, CTO of Netscape, Eric Nahn told Raymond, “On behalf of everyone at Netscape, I want to thank you for helping us get to this point in the first place. Your thinking and writings were fundamental inspirations to our decision.’‘

Eric Raymond first presented The Cathedral and the Bazaar at the Linux Kongress on May 22nd, 1997 in Würzburg, Germany. Ten years later, Linux is more powerful than ever, Ubuntu is ready for the desktop (says me) and the bazaar model is alive and thriving.

• Read The Cathedral and the Bazaar
• About the Netscape decision
• Raymond’s ever-growing archive of notes, comments, rebuttals and more on CatB.
• Read Linus Torvalds’ fun, light and frothy autobiography about the heady young days of Linux Just for Fun
• And of course, there is the The Circus Midget and the Fossilized Dinosaur Turd (don’t worry, it’s satire and it has a point)

The best radio show on traditional radio and the internet is going on a hiatus for the summer following a series of setbacks involving loss of many of the pillars that formed its financial support- UMass Lowell, WGBH and unnamed others. A last ditch fundraising effort kept them afloat for the last few weeks, but the Christopher Lydon and Radio Open Source are off the radio for now.

How ironic that this happened the day after Internet radio’s day of silence.

Good news, everyone- this site is censored in China! We must be doing something right…

A brilliant comic from xkcd for a Friday morning:

SciFi writer, activist, BoingBoing editor, EFF evangelist and now US-Canada Fulbright Chair at the University of Southern California recently gave a talk to people at USC that covers many topics ranging from digital freedoms to science fiction that is truly worth listening to [MP3]. Of course, the greatest Cory Doctorow speech of them all is his talk at Microsoft about why DRM is bad for business, bad for people, bad for artists and bad technology (streaming video). The text of that talk is also available online.

The #2 thesis on of my 95 was that Violating a license agreement is not theft.

I got a lot of feedback about that one- many people made the point that it could be theft if it involved either loss of property or loss of potential income.

I grant both of those points- and I am not even close to being a lawyer- but my point still holds: Violating a license agreement could also be theft, but in my opinion, is not theft on its own.

The BBC has a video debate between the MPAA President Dan Glickman and the EFF co-founder John Barlow on the subject, and while much of it treads familiar ground for those who follow this issue, it is especially interesting because the two opposing viewpoints have been presented together.

To get a better idea about John Perry Barlow here are a few bits about him:

• Founded the EFF in 1990.
• Was a lyricist for the Grateful Dead
• His article on The Economy of Ideas where he says

  Intellectual property law cannot be patched, retrofitted, or expanded to contain digitized expression any more than real estate law might be revised to cover the allocation of broadcasting spectrum (which, in fact, rather resembles what is being attempted here). We will need to develop an entirely new set of methods as befits this entirely new set of circumstances.

• His Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace where he writes:

  Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

• And more recently, more pointed remarks from him.

Back in May, I published an article here that highlighted how MSN AdCenter kept non-IE users out of their service. As a Mac user, it is a mild irritation whenever a major online player keeps non-IE customers out, but this one took the cake. Their customer service rep asked me to buy Windows. Think about that for a second- a major corporation asking a potential advertiser to drastically change their computer usage behavior for the privilege of advertising with them. I’m sorry, but Yahoo and Google will gladly take my business.

In any case, earlier this month- about 3 months after the service launched- Firefox support has been introduced in MSN AdCenter. They listened. I doubt building a standards compliant web site actually took 3 months, but I am glad that it happened. Also glad to see it works in Safari on my Mac.

AOL has put our privacy at risk by publicly disclosing the recent search history of 650,000 users. This wrong in so many different ways- and yes, your search queries say a lot about you, including your identity. The New York Times discovered just who AOL Searcher #4417749 was just using their search strings. Read the rest of this entry »

The controversy started- for those not paying attention- when CMP served a cease-and-desist letter to an Irish non-profit for using the term “Web 2.0” in the name of their conference. Bad move- the blogosphere went in to attack mode and O’Reilly (who runs the conference and is associated with CMP) will never have quite the same reputation again. Before the blogosphere outrage over CMP’s claim of Web 2.0 as a service mark for conferences dies down, I have a few things to say. Read the rest of this entry »