On June 15, Google launches its Chromebook netbooks. The Ubergizmo site has a useful preview of the Samsung version. Highlights include:

The most interesting revelation, however, had nothing to do with the hardware. Google announced a “Chromebooks for Business” deal which, for $28 per employee per month, organisations get:

There’s also going to be a comparable deal for education – at $20/student per month.

This could be really interesting – especially as many organisations (including major UK newspapers and universities) have already gone over to Google Apps (Gmail and Docs especially).

Amazon.co.uk will be selling it from June 15.

Hmmm… I see that the IMF’s Articles of Association state that its officials “shall be immune from legal process with respect to acts performed by them in their official capacity except when the Fund waives this immunity.”

I’m continually impressed by the creativity and ingenuity of the people who do the cover designs for high-end magazines like the Economist and the New Yorker. This one from the issue of the New Yorker following Bin Laden’s killing is, IMHO, a minor masterpiece.

I’ve got far too many books to read at the moment, and so have been havering about whether to get Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, partly because it seems very relevant to understanding why countries like Egypt stand a chance of becoming modern states while one’s like Libya and Bahrain don’t. Until this morning I had concluded that life is too short to read long books way outside of my field, but having read David Runciman’s absorbing review, now I’m not so sure.

Fukuyama’s new book is dominated by the influence of another of his mentors, the conservative Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington. Huntington is best known for his own cosmic soundbite – The Clash of Civilizations. But his main interest was in political order: how to achieve it and how to mess it up. Basically Huntington thought there are two things that could go wrong on the road to a well-ordered society. You could fail to get there because your society never gets beyond a condition of internecine conflict and incipient civil war. Or you could get there and find your society gets stuck in a rut and fails to adapt to new threats and challenges. Fukuyama takes this framework and applies it to the problem of democratic order. Why is it that some societies have gone down the democratic route to stability while others have remained stuck with autocracy? And will democracies be able to adapt to the new threats and challenges that they face?

Runciman provides a lucid and illuminating summary of Fukuyama’s argument, which I suppose might constitute an argument for not buying the book. Against that, he’s whetted my appetite for it. Damn.

Oh — and while I’m on the subject of understanding why some countries work and others do, there’s an interesting review by Pankaj Mishra of Anatol Lieven’s new book on Pakistan.

Approaching his subject as a trained anthropologist would, Lieven describes how Pakistan, though nominally a modern nation state, is still largely governed by the “traditions of overriding loyalty to family, clan and religion”. There is hardly an institution in Pakistan that is immune to “the rules of behavior that these loyalties enjoin”. These persisting ties of patronage and kinship, which are reminiscent of pre-modern Europe, indicate that the work of creating impersonal modern institutions and turning Pakistanis into citizens of a nation state – a long and brutal process in Europe, as Eugen Weber and others have shown – has barely begun.

Wittgenstein’s grave, originally uploaded by jjn1.

In Ascension Churchyard, Cambridge. People leave the strangest objects and messages on the grave of the great philosopher.

For example:

The ashes of my first wife, Carol, are buried in this loveliest of churchyards, and whenever I go there I always check Ludwig’s grave on the way out. Sometimes the messages are deeply poignant, and make one wonder what lies behind them. There’s a novel here, somewhere.

If you wanted a demonstration of the naiveté of traditional media in relation to networked technology, then you be hard pressed to better the Wall Street Journal’s new ‘whistleblowing’ facility, SafeHouse.

Documents and databases: They’re key to modern journalism. But they’re almost always hidden behind locked doors, especially when they detail wrongdoing such as fraud, abuse, pollution, insider trading, and other harms. That’s why we need your help.

If you have newsworthy contracts, correspondence, emails, financial records or databases from companies, government agencies or non-profits, you can send them to us using the SafeHouse service.

Stirring stuff, eh? But let’s have a look at the Terms and Conditions:

Submission Options

SafeHouse provides three options to submit documents and other information:

1. Standard SafeHouse: The standard online submission form can be used to provide any relevant documents and information along with your contact information. If you choose this option, and provide us with your contact information, Dow Jones retains the right to use the material and any other information you provide about yourself as it sees fit (as described more fully below in the Limitations section), and does not make any representations regarding confidentiality.

2. Anonymous SafeHouse: If you prefer not to include any contact information, and instead remain anonymous, you can still provide information through this form. If you choose this option, Dow Jones retains the right to use the material and any other information you provide as it sees fit (as described more fully below in the Limitations section), and does not make any representations regarding confidentiality. In an effort to attach an added level of security, we have designed this online submission form to minimize the amount of identifying information we or others can access. Despite efforts to minimize the information collected, we cannot ensure complete anonymity. For additional security, you can use certain online tools, such as The Tor Project (https://www.torproject.org), to submit any documents or information. When used correctly, these services and software can block the recipient of information from knowing the source of that information. More information on this topic is available here. You agree that we are not responsible for, and do not control, any such third party services and software that attempt to provide anonymity.

3. Request Confidentiality: If you would like us to consider treating your submission as confidential before providing any materials, please make this request through this online submission form. Please note that until we mutually decide to enter into a confidential relationship, any information you send to us (including contact information) can be used for any purpose, as outlined in point 1 above, and described more fully below in the Limitations section). If we enter into a confidential relationship, Dow Jones will take all available measures to protect your identity while remaining in compliance with all applicable laws.

You understand that regardless of the method of submission, we are unable to ensure the complete confidentiality or anonymity of anything you send to us. As a result, please use discretion in contacting us and providing us with information. You use this service at your own risk.

[…]

Except when we have a separately negotiated confidentiality agreement pursuant to the “Request Confidentiality” Section above, we reserve the right to disclose any information about you to law enforcement authorities or to a requesting third party, without notice, in order to comply with any applicable laws and/or requests under legal process, to operate our systems properly, to protect the property or rights of Dow Jones or any affiliated companies, and to safeguard the interests of others.

(Emphasis added.)

According to the Guardian story dated 6 May, “uploading from Tor did not work on Thursday or Friday when tested by security researchers”.

So, here’s my question: if you were a whistleblower would you feel more comfortable sending stuff to (a) Wikileaks, or (b) the Wall Street Journal?

What this highlights, of course, is the difficulties established media organisations have in dealing with this stuff. The whole point of Wikileaks-type operations is that they have no assets to be seized, no executives to be subpoenaed, no shareholders to be intimidated, no publications to be injuncted, no advertisers to withdraw their support. It’s interesting to see that several traditional outfits (the NYT and Guardian are rumoured to be planning their own “secure” submission channels for leaked material, and Al Jazeera already what it calls its Transparency Unit). What remains to be seen is whether any one of them will be seen as deserving the trust of whistleblowers.

Mumbai Golf – ESPN E:60 from Evolve IMG Films Ltd. on Vimeo.

Astonishing film. Worth watching to the end.

Thanks to Pete for the link.

When Apple eventually deigned to respond to the furore about iPhones logging location data, it issued a PR-mediated statement so slippery that it practically slid off the monitor. But it did contain one apparently unequivocal statement:

“Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.”

Oh, yeah? Consider Exhibit A:

It comes from a patent application entitled “Location Histories for Location Aware Devices” which Apple filed in September 2009.

(Thanks to Leander Kahney for the patent link.)

A location aware mobile device can … collect network information (e.g., transmitter IDs) over time. Upon request by a user or application, the network information can be translated to estimated position coordinates … of the location aware device for display on a map view or for other purposes. A user or application can query the location history database with a timestamp or other query to retrieve all or part of the location history for display in a map view.

Here’s how TechDirt tells it:

Apple’s key points are:

Apple (not researchers, or tons of other people who have noted this “bug” for a year or so) “discovered” a bug with location data on the phone:

The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a bug we uncovered and plan to fix shortly

There’s no tracking going on. There’s nothing to see here.

Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.

Even though there’s no tracking and nothing to see here, it’s still a bug which will be fixed.
The reason people are concerned about this is because people are confused.

Got that? People are confused and there’s nothing to see here, but Apple has discovered a minor bug which will be fixed.

There’s a staggering level of hypocrisy here which is par for the course for Apple. It’s a bit like the old newspaper mantra in the glory days of print: “Never apologise, and never explain.”

Except that it won’t wash any more. And the strange thing is that we get this crap all the time from companies that are supposed to be, well, 20th-century organisations. Matthew Ingram had a good post about this on GigaOM in which he looked at the way Sony and Amazon as well as Apple have displayed a steam-age sense of responsibility in an online age:

Given its past behavior, it’s possible that Apple is beyond help in this area. The company’s approach seems to be that people will unfailingly line up to buy its products regardless of how it handles such PR gaffes, so it may be a lost cause. But Amazon and Sony arguably have a lot more to lose.

Sony in particular — a former technology leader — has not been doing well on a number of fronts for years now, as Apple has taken over virtually every market segment that the technology company used to own. Not only that, but the company is already infamous in computer security circles for its last major fiasco in 2005, the “Sony rootkit” affair, in which users had a virus-like software program installed on their computers without their knowledge if they played a CD. So you might think that the company would try hard to get out in front of the most recent issue — which venture investor and technology analyst Paul Kedrosky described as “among the worst such debacles in modern financial/technical history” — as quickly as possible. Oh, but it’s really complicated too.

Amazon is not nearly as desperate as Sony, but the company has still pinned a lot of its hopes for the future on the success of its cloud-hosting and cloud-based services business, and seeing hundreds of major companies and websites fail — and lose critical data — is a huge issue. And yet, while Amazon eventually did release something that was much closer to an actual apology than anything Sony or Apple came out with, the company still avoided discussing the issue for what seemed like an eternity in Internet time. One Internet analyst said that Amazon’s “anemic public response” was a major flaw, and that arguably wasn’t the only one.

This isn’t an issue just for Apple, Sony and Amazon — it’s something that companies of all kinds are still struggling to deal with. The reality is that social media such as Twitter and Facebook have increased the ability of customers and users to speak out about such issues, and decreased the amount of time that companies have to deal with them. And that means the old approach of taking days to hold “war room” meetings and come up with elaborate PR plans just doesn’t work any more.

Those things still have to be done, but they have to be done a lot faster.

Yep. Matthew also provides a link to a fascinating diagram summarising the USAF’s “Rules of Engagement for Blogging” from which companies could learn a thing or two.