Apple Pulls WikiLeaks App
Hmmm… it seems the Apple Afficianados are at it again. An app providing easy access to WikiLeaks materials has been removed from Apple’s app store with little explaination from the company. See this:
Apple Nixes WikiLeaks iPhone App. Will Google Follow? Andy Greenberg, Forbes’ Blogs
Yet again, major ‘tech’ companies prove they are not really interested in the information revolution but tying their devices to your bank account and controlling the information landscape for their own purposes. I’m sure that Apple’s lawyers had a hand in this–likely wanting to protect themselves from the wrath of the U.S. goernment–but it still speaks to the fact that all the hype about world-changing, game-changing, information technologies that empower the individual like never before is just marketing clap-trap… in reality, Apple and others are only self-interested with the desire to turn all media usage into consumer-driven, micro-transactions. Why engage with humanity, the environment or the wider world when you can blankly stare into the blue light of little, corporate-controlled LED screens where your perfected consumer image is constantly reflected back to you?
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The CBC and its Obsession with Twitter
[Update: I subsequently found... or, more correctly, was shown the Land & O'Leary Exchange email address as the program announces it at the end of the show. It must be well buried on the website, as I could not find it but I despite all this I still stand behind what follows. And even though I now know the email address, I am not forwarding my comments as they probably do not care about such viewpoints anyway as it doesn't really square with the narrative they need to keep telling.]
Don’t get me wrong, as far as mainstream media as sources of reliable information goes, the CBC is a treasure. (In fact, some of my favourite media sources (especially when it comes to television) are public or state-sponsored broadcasters (CBC, PBS, BBC, Al Jazeera International). As someone who devotes most of his life to studying the media, I can confidently say these can be or tend to be very good sources. (BTW, my favoured source of news and current events are independent websites, radio, magazines and research institutes.)
So, I am not a CBC-basher or idealogue who thinks that public broadcasting is akin to Communism, but I am very frustrated with the likes of the CBC and their obsession with social media, specifically Twitter and Facebook. Sure, it’s popular amongst the ‘kool’ kids… those in high-school or think they still are in high school and feel an undying need to ‘run with the pack’ and who visualize themselves looking cool while others are watching them use their cool gadgets (and thinking to themselves: ‘Man, I’m so connected’). That’s annoying but OK. I can put up with such posturing but when it starts to really take over, then that is when I begin to worry.
I just tried going to the Lang & O’Leary Exchange website to make a comment about some recent programming but could not find, anywhere on the CBC’s vast website, any way to send an (e)letter to the editor. Instead, apparently, the only way you are supposed to contact the program’s staff is to follow them to some proprietary service, hand over all you private information, and then you’ll have the pleasure of reading, in 140 characters or less, some inane fact or thought passing through their heads.
Now, if this was a private news source, then I would not mind so much. If some news business thinks that it will expand its news-reading audience by limiting its interactions to a narrow space within the media-sphere that is primarily occupied by youth (who tend not to consume news), then that is their business decision. But a public broadcaster has a different mandate: it is meant to serve the public at large and in various capacities. To my mind, cordoning yourself off inside the proprietary space of another media service is not a wise way of going about this.
Perhaps it is just another way that the kool kids (that is, those who tend to swallow gallons of branded koolaid) tend to hijack things, in this case tax-payer-supported broadcasting, and turn it into just another mirror that reflects themselves to themselves while they think everyone is looking at them with undying admiration. It is just like high school cliques all over again. (And, really, isn’t Facebook just one giant, interactive high-school yearbook?)
It’s too bad as I like the program (especially when Kevin O’Leary is absent, hehe ) as they tend to have interesting guests and cover a lot of issues. Perhaps I am being too harsh, but it is a travesty when, in the 21st century, a viewer cannot easily contact the editors/producers of a tax-payer funded program on a public broadcaster.
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Hmmm… I wonder… what are the important ‘twends’ that the Twitterati are twittering about now?
…and now?
… how about now?
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Google to World: Let’s Do Evil (but pretend we’re not)
A colleague asked if I had been following the most recent volley in the net neutrality issue involving that schizophrenic good/evil corporation Google and their partner Verizon. Other than a few articles and an interesting episode of Democracy Now, I have been too busy with other projects to really delve into it. But this morning I took some time to read up on the issue, including a Google Blog entry describing their joint proposal with Verizon. In the entry, the “compromise” between Google and Verizon, and the resulting policy paper, is discussed and summarized. It is quite interesting, in the sense that it is a prime example of public-relations double-speak (where I think they are trying to carefully camouflage their intentions and make it seem that they support the principle of net neutrality while actually going against it or around it).
In the blog post, they summarize their joint policy proposal with seven key points, which I will ‘translate’ from the obfuscating language of the corporate-lawyer-public-relations-guru to the language of an ordinary netizen (again, you can access the original here):
1. Google-Verizon state they believe in net neutrality. Well, not exactly. What they specifically state is that they “have long been proponents of the FCC’s current wireline broadband openness principles.” Sort of wishy-washy. The phrase, “have long been proponents,” is not a strong statement and leaves the future tense wide open. Plus, they are not ‘for’ the principle of net neutrality but the Federal Communications Commission‘s “current wireline broadband openness principles.” Keep the term “wireline broadband” in mind as this is a crucial point. (They also reference a past court ruling in the U.S. which decided that technically/legislatively, the FCC does not have the power to enforce net neutrality principles. The suit was brought by the cable giant Comcast (another less than savory media player) against the FCC.)
2. They (Google-Verizon) reiterate that “wireline broadband” should abide by net neutrality principles.
3. They (Google-Verizon) believe that broadband providers, both ‘wireline’ and ‘wireless,’ should act in a transparent manner toward customers, application- and content-providers so that they know how various services are structured. This is a slippery paragraph where Google-Verizon put forth language with positive connotations (“transparency”) but also introduce the conceptual division they are making between ‘wireline’ and ‘wireless’ services.
4. Raising the FCC-Comcast court case again, and the fact that under U.S. law, Congress has not specifically given the FCC jurisdiction over net neutrality, they (Google-Verizon) put forth their own policy framework where the FCC is given such powers and where enforcement takes place on a “case-by-case” basis and in a “complaint-driven process.” Which means that the FCC could only react to complaints about abuses to net neutrality by being informed by third-parties. Under such a process, the FCC would not have paid, trained investigators who actively look out for such abuses but would rely on third-party individuals to bring complaints to the commission. (Would your average user or small business have the necessary knowledge, information and expertise to make such complaints?)
5. Here we find Google-Verizon offering some more glittering generalities such as “innovation” (who can argue with that?) and “safeguards” (those are always good). They (Google-Verizon) state that they “want the broadband infrastructure to be a platform for innovation.” OK, that sounds good. But then they go on: “Therefore our proposal would allow broadband providers to offer additional, differentiated online services….” OK, so here innovation is defined as allowing corporations to offer “differentiated online services.” What these are they don’t quite say (“It is too soon to predict how these new services will develop….”) but in doing so they have just semantically “differentiated” between ‘old’ kinds of broadband and new services that will be somehow different.
6. This is the meat of the issue so it’s best to let Google-Verizon (or simply GooglErizon?*) to speak for themselves: “Sixth, we both recognize that wireless broadband is different from the traditional wireline world, in part because the mobile marketplace is more competitive and changing rapidly. In recognition of the still-nascent nature of the wireless broadband marketplace, under this proposal we would not now apply most of the wireline principles to wireless, except for the transparency requirement.” So, in English: GooglErizon thinks that wireless broadband is different from wired (or ‘wireline’… wow, that’s so ‘old’ sounding) because it is more competitive and, THEREFORE, GOOGLERIZON BELIEVES THAT NET NEUTRALITY PRINCIPLES DO NOT APPLY TO ‘NEW’ KINDS OF BROADBAND SERVICES THAT HAVE YET TO BE DEFINED AND WILL BE DEFINED BY GOOGLERIZON AND OTHER SIMILAR CORPORATE ENTITIES. They then go on to throw a bone to the GAO (U.S. Government Accountability Office… which if recent history is any indication, is a rather toothless organization when it comes to accountability) by giving them some sort of authority to study stuff.
7. Finally, they (GooglErizon) believe that broadband is in “the national interest” and that the FCC should continue using the Federal Universal Service Fund to fund broadband services into areas where there is currently no service.
So, there we have it. It is interesting how GooglErizon has come out in support of net neutrality principles by saying that those principles are fine as long as they are not applied to the ‘new’ services that they (GooglErizon) will offer in the future. The fact that they are not ‘wired’ is the only distinction, even though how one can distinguish between the multitude of wires, cables, radio, and satellite infrastructure–especially when a single piece of communication might travel along all of them in getting to its destination–is still an interesting question.
They (GooglErizon) seem to think that if there is a service (say, smartphones running Google’s Android operating system and carried by Verizon’s phone network) that lies on top of the existing internet or broadband infrastructure, then it should not be ruled by net neutrality regulations because this is not the ‘wireline‘ part of that collection of technologies that we collectively call the internet. I have been amused at how RIM, Nokia, Motorola, Apple, et all insist on calling their products by anything other than ‘computer’ (which is what they are) and instead use ‘smartphone’ or some other term. They do this because it makes it seem like what the user is using is not a small handheld, internet-enabled computer tied to proprietary services, but little magical Star Trek Tricorders that are somehow separate from all that other communications infrastructure. Now I see this at work in the GooglErizon policy proposal. We’ll all just pretend that these ‘new services’ don’t access the wireline Internet and all the public and private technological infrastructure that supports it. As long as their is some proprietary ‘smart’ device acting as an intermediary between ‘the line’ and the user, then net neutrality (and other regulations) will not apply.
But perhaps that is GooglErizon for you… they can do evil and slowly take over the world (as long as no one can really see that they are doing so).
*GooglErizon (Goo’ gler i zon): One of many corporate entities that are vying for control over communications and the public sphere.
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Venture Capital and Technology… is the Tech Boom Over?
I have been blabbering on… to anyone who will listen to me… about my fears that the ‘tech boom’ we are living through is likely to end. And by ‘end’ I mean that it will take its place among other (sometimes struggling) industries and reach a level of normalcy. What this means is that the pace of innovation and heated competition–all fuelled by venture capital and the easy credit of the 1990s and 2000s–will be scaled back.
I teach media studies in a New Media department at a well-funded Canadian university. This means I am surrounded by well-meaning but caught-in-the-hype individuals who like to buy lots of iThings and assume (if they think about it at all) that it will all continue like this forever. They do not realize that the industry is extremely resource- and energy-intensive and that it has been heavily subsidized by governments (at all levels), venture capital, and monopoly money in the form of easy credit. Instead, they think that iPads are made in LaLaLaApple Land by happy little fairies (not slave labour) with materials that magically appear out of thin air (not mined by slave, migrant labour in some far off country controlled by some dictator friendly to Western corporations). Or, they assume that all these gadgets are magically powered by the sheer combined genius emanating from the craniums of Bill Gates, Michael Dell and, of course, Steve ‘God’ Jobs (he is the father of the ‘Jesus Phone’ after all) and not by an electrical grid that is increasingly under pressure from our air-conditioned, convenience-at-all-costs lifestyles. Or, they think that when they toss out their months-old smart phone (what makes it ‘smart’ again?) or GPS unit or PSP and then head on down to Sprawl-Mart to buy a newer and better one on their credit cards, that the old unit magically disappears, does not leach toxins into the environment, and certainly is not a waste of all of the labour, engineering, and the increasingly-hard-to-find precious metals and other resources. Today, technology for us Westerners is merely something to buy on a whim (and a credit card), use to a tenth of its capacity, get board with when the lustre (and fashionableness) wears off, and then discard. (One day soon, I am sure, we will be wishing we could rescue some of the mountains of discarded technology that are sitting in landfills.)
That is why I don’t think it is a particularly bad thing that this all will come to an end. With the financial industry (not just the housing market, the entire financial industry) having imploded, the mirage of free money appearing out of thin air starting to disappear, and–most of all–the shrinking of the middle class in Western nations, there is going to be little to continue to fuel the tech boom that laid the foundations for the technology that we are enjoying right now.
“Sure,” you might ask. “But what of the return to profitability? The impressive sales of the gadget and software? The fact mainstream media pundits can only talk about Facebook and Twitter? And that Steve Jobs is a friggin’ god? What do you have to say about all that?”
My reply would be that these things take time to develop. Most people have been convinced (more likely they convinced themselves) that this little ‘recession’ was over, and began spending again, apparently confident that everything would return to ‘normal’ (instead of realizing that we are returning to normal after many years of excess and fantasy). Politicians around the world handed over trillions (trillions!) in monopoly money to prevent the financial sector from melting away (along with their campaign contributions no doubt). And, perhaps most important, many people just cannot be bothered to pay much attention to all this until they are impacted directly.
But, today, I came across an interesting analysis of investment in the broad sector of technology development and it is extremely eye-opening:
“Technology Bubble Ten Years Back: The Money’s Not Back,” iTulip, Aug. 3, 2010.
Looking at some of the information presented in the article is very interesting and eye-opening. The level of investment ten years ago, and which disappeared after the tech- and other bubbles burst, was mind-boggling. One graph in particular shows just how different things were back then:
If you consider the investment made in software, telecom, and networking companies in 2000 as compared to now, the difference is huge. It is no wonder that we are swimming in a sea of tech gadgets today. And remember that it takes years for technology in established industries to make it into the marketplace. (It takes decades for technology in unestablished industries to make it into the marketplace which is why our need to develop alternative energy sources–and new gadgets, including vehicles, that will run off that alternate energy–is so desparate.)
As I said previously, I don’t think this is a bad thing. If we return to normal sure, we might not buy new gadgets like we did in the last decade, but we will learn to live with that. Some sectors of the economy and some in these indstries might be affected, but these are companies that built business models that are entirely reliant upon a creadit-fuelled, highly subsidized system where we act like complete, mindless consumers… and these companies will not be as profitable (and some might not survive) in this new market that looks like it might be based more on reality and not reliant on phantom money and subsidized by future debt and tax-payer money.
Mint, Conky and #!
Before retiring an old computer that I had originally purchased second hand about four or five years ago, I used it an an experimental box to try out different versions of Linux. I kept it until I had my new ‘experimental box’ built. At any rate, I saved some screenshot of the desktop showing the last configuration it before its retirement: Linux Mint 8 and the latest version of #! (or Crunchbang Linux).
I have mentioned Linux Mint before and it has become my main Linux distro for the time being. I like it as much as Ubuntu and will follow its development for some time. Like versions of Ubuntu, it is very much oriented to a broad audience, including those that might be considered as casual users (those that don’t want to fiddle too much with their computer and want things to ‘just work’). In the screen shot, you can also see (in the top, right corner) a little program called Conky. (More on that in a bit… also, just to be clear, I don’t think the background image is from Mint, I think it is one I downloaded from a desktop wallpaper site.)
Installed next to Mint was the current version of Crunchbang… henceforth referred to as #! (just for typographical fun). #! is very different from Mint. #! is a small project that is based on Ubuntu/Debian and so has underlying resemblance to Mint. But as I mentioned previously, it has a sparse and minimal feel. It requires familiarity with using the terminal (command line) and so is intended for consideration by individuals with those skills. I also mentioned that #! is slightly beyond my skills. But I do really like the minimal aesthetic and how fast it is. Therefore, I installed it on my old laptop/netbook because for simple tasks like playing music and accessing the internet, it is both fast and quick. So, while I will not use #! for my main desktop needs (unless I become better at using the command line), I like it for those web-based purposes.
It too features Conky… and it is a default feature. Conky is a little program that can be (relatively) easily modified to sit on the desktop providing system monitoring and other information. I liked it so much when I saw it in #! that I installed/enabled it in my installations of Mint (Conky can run with most versions of Linux I think). While some people have installed scripts that can retrieve local/regional weather, I like using the simple functions like displaying information about your computer. It only took a little while to figure out how to modify the proper files (in Mint, I also had to install a script to get it to run 30 seconds after the system boots so that it would not conflict with the startup of another program). There is a lot of information online, including many excellent examples by other users. (It was in the Mint and Ubuntu forums where I learned about the script workaround just mentioned.) For the record, the modified version of Conky that you see running in the #! screenshot above is one I cobbled together from someone’s example that was shared with others in the #! forums.
I really find it useful to see the system resources being used. I could see that it would help with security (especially in terms of incoming and outgoing network traffic) but I really like it because it shows the usage or system resources like RAM, CPU, and the hard drive(s). I like it so much, I found a similar program for Windows 7 called RainMeter that I might install on my computer at work.
Anyway… when it comes to Mint, Conky and #!… I find all three to be really good open source software.
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