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Now that PIPA is defeated… →

Joel Spolsky, on Google+1:

The internet seems to ignore legislation until somebody tries to take something away from us… then we carefully defend that one thing and never counter-attack. Then the other side says, “OK, compromise,” and gets half of what they want. That’s not the way to win… that’s the way to see a steady and continuous erosion of rights online.

The solution is to start lobbying for our own laws. It’s time to go on the offensive if we want to preserve what we’ve got. Let’s force the RIAA and MPAA to use up all their political clout just protecting what they have.

I agree with the diagnosis. Although not completely, as the internet doesn’t always wake up when someone tries to take something away from them. The best example for that is ACTA, an international treaty, almost as bad as SOPA/PIPA, which has gone almost completely unnoticed.

And of course I agree with his proposed direction. We have to find avenues to fight for. We have to find causes to fight for. His list makes a good start, but I’d love to see this discussion furthered.

In the meantime, we desperately need a legislation tracker and early warning system. One thing that has been mentioned over and over again in the aftermath of the Jan 18th blackouts is, that legislation very similar to the one protested will be back. We better know when it’s back, then.

  1. If you’re on Google+ with an iOS device, you can’t copy/paste. What is that about? ↩

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“Radiolab effect” →

Alexis Madrigal, for The Atlantic, with a smashing observation on the “Radiolab effect:”

Radiolab is actually post-blog and post-livestream. It’s not aping the oratory of old or the raggedness of the new. It’s a hybrid that takes lessons from the past, recent and deep.

This is the Radiolab effect extended: expect less pretension to authority, greater understanding of one’s nodeness, but greater respect for the production culture of the pre-web era.

This is what I believe I heard when Johannes, almost 18 months ago, first explained why they chose their name for their company. And this is a direction I like the web going – a kind of Jarvis meeting Keen, thesis-antithesis-synthesis thingamajig.

With all the chatter of blogging being dead, anyway, I have high hopes for what there is to come.

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Where’s the offense?
18-01-2012

It’s Tuesday, bleeding into Wednesday right now and in a couple of hours, Wikipedia will go dark. And reddit. And countless other sites, big and small, in what has been touted as the nuclear option in the battle against SOPA and PIPA. This is all part of the fight against the forces that wage the war against general purpose computing and freedom of expression.

The warmongering begins. The rhetoric is there.

We’re playing defence again; having to defend our turf. Again and again. As they’re coming back with the next idea even crazier than the one before.

And I’m wondering: where are the people that play offense, what are the ideas that could be played in offense in this game for how the net will evolve?

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My Information Flows are Breaking
12-01-2012

I have a strange feeling lately.

I can’t find things anymore.

Things that I know I knew, things that I remember I’ve read.

I can’t seem to find them anymore.

I know what you’re thinking: “Is he admitting to dementia just now? Surely, he’ll start talking about the war in just a second.”

But it’s not my brain that’s betraying me. The information systems that I’ve learned to rely on are breaking. The very tools that should enable me to work with much more information at hand than I could just “remember” are failing me. And not just me. They’re failing you too.

Sacrificed on the Altar of statistics

When Twitter introduced their t.co domain shortener, at first I didn’t notice. I’ve experienced some glitches, especially when out and about, trying to surf a link from the iPhone app on the subway. It would fail to resolve, loading would take forever. I didn’t really think about it. And then, Twitter decided to wrap all links on Twitter in their t.co re-direct contraption.

Safari Browser History

Just like that, a part of my memory failed.

It feels like anterograde amnesia.

To “remember,” more often than not, means to remember how to access information. To remember means to remember that you’ve read about something before, and then finding that something again.

With the promise of statistics1, and the desire to control their platform, Twitter managed to break one of the fundamental information flows on the web.

Social != Search

Fun story: I was trying to find some recent information on a Google Initiative announced at last year’s Google I/O called Android@Home. I was, of course, using Google as the search engine of choice. However, with Google’s recent remodelings of their search engine it was absolutely impossible to find anything recent.

It used to be that you could search, and Google would look for the words you entered. Maybe it would offer you a correction to what you entered, but it would first search for what you entered. You then had a whole array of additional search tools available to narrow down the search, such as time, for instance.

I wasn’t able to find anything recent on Android@Home — a Google initiative! — because of the rather unusual nature of the term. You have to search for strictly “Android@Home” to find anything. Unfortunately, Google modified search, presumably in order to push their social products, to such extent that you can either search strictly2, or within a specified timeframe, but not both – effectively breaking search for this term.

Remembering is about strategies of information retrieval. It is more important to know how and where to search for something, than actually memorizing something.

Hard questions are not those we don’t know the answer for – hard questions are those we don’t know how to ask. Hard problems are those for which we don’t have a strategy to find the information.

Google’s remodeling of search — more personalized, more social, but less precise, less trustworthy — is breaking strategies of information acquisition. Google is actively turning problems that were easy into problems that are hard.


My information systems are increasingly breaking. And I can’t be the only one.

  1. Stats, oh glorious stats, what won’t you justify? ↩

  2. Verbatim, as it is called nowadays. ↩

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QotD: Rob Beschizza, BoingBoing →

Just because lots of people are somewhere, that does not make it public.

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Wenger In Response to Cerf – the Internet as a human right →

Albert Wenger, of Union Square Ventures, in response to Vint Cerf’s Op-Ed (which was linked here as well):

the headline for my post it is not the exact inverse of Cerf’s who wrote “Internet Access” – I simply talk about the “Internet” by which I mean a set of ideas that is grounded in these original principles behind the architecture of the Internet.  At their heart all human rights are ideas and highly abstract ideas at that, such as equality and freedom.  How we concretely instantiate these ideas through legislation and social norms has changed dramatically over time and much of that change has been driven by technology.

So when I claim “The Internet is a Human Right” I mean that the legislation and social norms that we use to operationalize abstract rights such as freedom of speech should be embracing not fighting the principles of the Internet. For example, freedom of speech will be a hollow right if movie studios can make entire web sites disappear off the Internet without due process, as is currently contemplated by the legislation known as SOPA. That is the exact opposite of the principle of decentralized control.

It is in essence and extension of Cerf’s argument.

Where Cerf argues that we should focus on the intent of rights rather than their technical enablers, Wenger argues that the internet itself is not just a technology, but rather a set of principles that embody intent.

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Internet Access Not a Human Right? →

Vint Cerf, for the New York Times:

technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things.

An important piece, timed just right.

Maybe we should apply this thinking to the discussions around SOPA/PIPA etc, that is: not discussing saving existing infrastructure, but rather making explicit the goals the current infrastructure supports and enables that are worth saving.

∞

Doctorow: Copyright Wars just the Beginning →

Cory Doctorow at the 28C3:

The grievances that arose from unauthorized copying are trivial, when compared to the calls for action that our new computer-embroidered reality will create. […]

This was the year in which we saw the debut of open sourced shape files for converting AR-15s to full automatic. This was the year of crowd-funded open-sourced hardware for gene sequencing. And while 3D printing will give rise to plenty of trivial complaints, there will be judges in the American South and Mullahs in Iran who will lose their minds over people in their jurisdiction printing out sex toys. The trajectory of 3D printing will most certainly raise real grievances, from solid state meth labs, to ceramic knives.

This is something I have been mulling over as well: what good is weapons regulation if you can print the stuff at home? What good is Bio regulation if we get to the point of manufacturing living organisms from computer files The fighting over sound and movie files really is just the beginning.

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Managing the stuff I’ve read →

Daniel Bachhuber, in the awesomely titled post «“Phone” is to the iPhone as “RSS reader” is to ?», writes:

It would be awesome if I had a secondary system for quickly accessing information I’ve previously come across. A search engine for information I’ve consumed.

I’ve been thinking about this a while back. I employ a couple of tools to aid me remembering the stuff I’ve come across on the net (and if you’re anything like me, you’ve felt the necessity for this, as well.) I don’t know the solution for this problem though, as the content I consume doesn’t move through one channel anymore, but rather a lot. And (I really need to work on this!) oftentimes I only realize that I should have saved something for posterity when it’s too late, when I need a certain bit of information but can’t find it anymore.

Tools like Pinboard only help insofar as I have to remember to commit sites/posts I’ve read to the service, which leads to the aforementioned problem of realizing I haven’t pushed stuff there when I need it. Often, the instances of Tweetnest and ThinkUp I’ve got running on my server save the day, because they automatically (and passively) capture what I share, predominantly via Twitter.

However, I wish there was a tool to passively store the content I read over a wide range of services (if annotations were permitted, that would be awesome) and make it searchable later.

Can someone build that, please?

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Siri’s Kinect-moment
22-11-2011

A little over a year ago, Microsoft released, what until then was known as “Project Natal”: the Kinect. A low-cost 3D camera intended for gaming with the Xbox360. It sold almost 8m units in the first 2 months of availability. But more importantly, it was hacked almost immediately. The first Open Source driver for the Kinect was available as early as end of November 2010, not even a month after launch. Microsoft threatened to crack down on Kinect-hacking, but ultimately relented, releasing an official SDK in June this year. The Kinect had a huge impact, as it was the the first low-cost, high-availability 3D camera. And with the hacking of it, it opened up a huge array of applications which Microsoft would have never thought of or serviced. Take for instance the Roomba which was afforded spatial awareness by means of the Kinect.

Late October this year, Apple released the iPhone 4S with Siri, the “virtual assistant”. It enables voice interaction with the Phone.

Bear all of that in mind when you watch this video:

[via Wired]

I’m very excited about this, as it might enable us to control a huge variety of aspects in our lives by alternate interface paradigms, in this case voice.

Voice has issues of its own, of course. For starters, Siri is content with voice recognition, not user recognition, which ultimately would be necessary as homes are shared spaces. And we haven’t rid ourselves from the weirdness that is talking to a machine. (I find myself in the position more often than not that I don’t use Siri, just because talking out loud would be inappropriate or weird.) That might change over time, of course.

For now though, I’m excited to see how far we can go with this. Pete Lamonica can control his thermos by voice. What else can we make accessible in this way?

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