The power of images
What does this photograph say?
Answer: tenderness, love, compassion.
It’s a photograph by Gideon Mendel of a mother carrying her 31-year-old terminally ill son to sit in the shade. You can buy a high-res copy from here.
Then and now
One of my sons has just gone to University in London. On the day before the start of Term, he and I filled the car with his stuff which included: a nice laptop computer, a good hifi system, a MIDI keyboard (he’s a musician) and his precious bongo drums. He also had cooking utensils (he’s a good cook), lots of books and clothes and a raft of other ‘necessary’ stuff. By the standards of his contemporaries he was well-organised and fairly minimalist (other parents’ cars were more heavily loaded — I saw one father buckling under the weight of a mattress. Perhaps the standard university issue didn’t meet with parental approval). And then I embarked on James Gleick’s lovely new biography of Isaac Newton, who came to Trinity College, Cambridge in the summer of 1661 bringing with him precisely this: “A chamber pot; a notebook of 140 blank pages, three and a half by five and a half inches, with leather covers; “a quart bottle and ink to fill it”; candles for many long nights; and a lock for his desk’.
Writing paper was expensive in Newton’s time, which probably explains why his writing was so small and neat. He believed in making full use of every square millimetre. He was also fantastically careful with money. The Wren Library in Trinity College has a lot of his papers, and I once brought my boy in to see the account book in which Newton recorded his expenditure in minute detail. On the way in, however, we had to pass the manuscript of Winnie the Pooh, which lay open at the page describing the invention of the game of Pooh Sticks. My son valiantly tried to pretend that Newton’s account books were fascinating (to please his Dad), but it was clear which he regarded as the more seminal document. Sigh. But then he was only six at the time.
Needless to say, one can play virtual Pooh Sticks nowadays. Oh — I almost forgot to say — Disney now own the rights to Winnie the Pooh, so don’t even think of putting any artwork on the Web or their copyright police will be after you.
Town and country
To London for a meeting with some folks from Creative Commons — Christiane Asschenfeldt, Glenn Brown and Cory Doctorow — who are in town to lay the groundwork for a UK Creative Commons organisation. We met in one of the clubs to which I belong — the only one which has a WiFi network — and had a really interesting talk about: the differences between the public discourse on intellectual property (IP) issues in the US and UK; ways of raising the importance of IP in public consciousness; the role and significance of the BBC and other public-service institutions in all this; and a whole lot more. They are smart and interesting people who are doing great work.
It was fascinating to meet Cory, someone whose writing I have admired for years. He had a neat retro gadget — a WiFi sniffer in a small black plastic box with four red LEDs to indicate signal strength. My admiration for this gizmo was tempered, however, by the fact that it had failed to detect the Groucho network that both its owner and I were using!
London was beautiful this morning — so much so that I got out of the Tube at Covent Garden and walked to Soho in the sunshine. The streets were fresh and uncrowded, and yet the place teemed with life. I love the city and agree with Dr. Johnson that “the man who is tired of London is tired of life”.
And yet… I also feel elated when I step off the train back at Cambridge — also ravishing in this amazing Autumn sunshine.
Strange that this obscure market town on the edge of the Fens should be such a magical place. And yet it is.
For me, its beauty is not just a matter of architecture (or ‘inhabited ruins’, as one of my friends once put it) but of the fact that it’s the place where Erasmus and Newton and Darwin and Maxwell and Rutherford and Tennyson and Wittgenstein and Russell and Whitehead and GR Moore and Keynes and Alfred Marshall lived, studied and worked. I often walk past the room where, in 1932, John Cockroft and Ernest Walton split the atom; the lab where J.J. Thompson discovered the electron; the room where James Watson and Francis Crick sussed the molecular structure of DNA; the building where Frank Whittle invented the jet engine; or — in Hinxton, just outside Cambridge — the lab where John Sulston and his team led the decoding of the human genome and kept that knowledge in the public domain.
In other words, the magic of Cambridge for me is bound up with the knowledge it has produced — the ideas (or ‘intellectual property’ if you must) which belongs to all of us and has incalculably enriched our lives. Which of course, brought me back to the discussions I had in the morning with Christiane, Glenn and Cory, because the prime purpose of Creative Commons is to stop the intellectual property maniacs from disabling our ability to build on the creativity of others. Newton famously said that he was able to see further because he was able to “stand on the shoulders of giants”. He provided the underpinnings of our modern world. But if the RIAA and the MPAA and Disney had been around in the 17th century they would have cut him down to size.
More about the Dean campaign
From David Weinberger, who’s been advising them. He writes:
“WHAT PEOPLE STILL DON’T GET ABOUT THE DEAN CAMPAIGN
[Disclosure: I am Senior Internet Advisor to the Dean campaign, a title that sounds more important than it is. No money changes hands, well, at least not from them to me.]
At BloggerCon, a blogging conference, the people who run the various campaign weblogs were beaten up because the comments on the comment boards do not shape the candidates’ policies. That’s wrong (in my opinion) for an uninteresting reason and for a more interesting one.
Uninteresting: Presidential candidates are not representatives. They try to attract supporters by holding positions. Especially at this stage in the campaign, they should not be shifting too much to suit their supporters.
More interesting: The Dean campaign in particular has figured out how to crack the nut of mass-ness. How do you connect a single candidate to several million supporters in a meaningful way? You don’t. You enable the supporters to connect to one another. And that’s exactly what the Dean campaign has been doing brilliantly. They provide a site where people can initiate their own local projects and find other local supporters. They’ve created open source software to enable groups to form, complete with RSS feeds…all completely decentralized. They provide a facility where you can print up Dean posters with your own message, not theirs. They don’t censor the comment boards on the campaign blog; the commenters feel that those boards are their own blog. Even the idea of having identifiable, enthusiastic staffers writing the blog rather than the candidate feels like us getting in touch with us.
Some stats: Over 60,000 people have planned or attended over 6,000 local events, all without any central coordination or control. About 13,000 people belong to DeanLink, social software that lets local people find one another. There are over 500 independent Dean Web sites and blogs. Over 105,000 posters have been designed by individuals using the Dean site’s facility. Over 140,000 comments have been published on the Dean blog since commenting began in June. They get over 1,000 comments a day and over 2,000 on a good day. Of those 140,000+ comments, about 5 have been removed. Over 120,000 people have signed up for Dean MeetUps (real world get-togethers), where in the past two meetings over 60,000 letters were hand-written to undecided voters in New Hampshire and Iowa; the following week there were significant jumps in support for Dean in those states.
The Dean campaign hasn’t merely inverted the broadcast pyramid so now the bottom is “messaging” to the top. It’s done away with it to a large extent, relentlessly focusing on giving up control of its message in favor of enabling supporters to organize themselves.
HOWARD DEAN IN PERSON
I traveled with the Dean campaign on the first leg of its four-day “Sleepless Summer” Tour. I went to a rally in DC, traveled on the plane with the Governor, the staff and the national press, and went to another rally in Milwaukee. Pretty damn exciting. (I am, I believe, the first weblogger to travel as a blogger on a presidential campaign bus or plane. Someone call Guinness!)
I got about three minutes alone with Gov. Dean to talk with him about weblogging. Not a lot of time, granted.
Here’s what Howard Dean didn’t do: Grip my hand in a manly fashion, look me in the eye, and say “Hey, it’s great to meet you! So glad you could travel with us as we campaign to take our country back.” Instead, after saying hello, the first thing he said was that he was unhappy with his blogging on the Larry Lessig site. He wasn’t expecting the sort of technical questions that readers brought up.
So, here’s a presidential candidate who is capable of talking like a human being, engaging on an actual issue. More telling, from my point of view, the very first words out of his mouth pointed to a weakness of his. And then the conversation proceeded. He listened, not in the patronizing “Listening Tour” sense but the way someone with actual curiosity does.
I have to say I really liked the person I met for three minutes.
Could I be wrong? Of course. Dean may have a shady past as a porn star, he may be wanted in Nevada for kidnapping, and his campaign organization may turn out to be a front for the Russian Mafia. Hey, it’s American politics and we can never be certain that things are as they seem. But to me he seemed like a real person able to connect with others.”
Tangled Webs
Well, as far as I can understand it, this is the position…
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been trying to clamp down on telemarketing (cold-calling to you and me). It set up a do-not-call registry on which you can lodge your number if you do not wish to be pestered by marketers’ phone calls. The telemarketers’ industry association then went to court, arguing that their First Amendment rights were being violated by this high-handed government interference. On September 29 a judge (named Nottingham) agreed and granted the pests an order that barred the FTC from fining them for dialling registered numbers. The Commission announced that it would appeal all the way to the Supremes and yesterday a federal appeals court let the FTC enforce its do-not-call program against telemarketers, pending the outcome of its appeal against the Nottingham ruling. The Appeals Court judges seem to think that the FTC will win the Constitutional case. And why not? It seems daft to maintain that a double-glazing salesman has Free Speech rights to intrude on my privacy.
This tele-marketing case, however, is really just a dry-run for the spam problem. Here the spammers seem to have convinced the Congress that they also have Constitutional Rights to fill one’s personal inbox with revolting ads for unmentionable products. This has led Congress to the perverse idea that enabling people to ‘opt out’ of spam is the way to solve the problem — analogously to the telemarketing policy. So anyone wishing to avoid spam will have to register his email address(es) with some federal body which will then be empowered to fine spammers for violations. As if… !
It’s a patently daft and unworkable approach. Compare it with the emerging (and broadly sensible) EU policy — which is that consumers would actively have to ‘opt in’ to receive unsolicited email. But because the Net is a global system, the EU policy cannot work so long as the US operates a diametrically opposed approach. We’re doomed.
California dreaming
Tom Lehrer famously said that satire died the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. What, one wonders, would he have made of the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger has been elected Governor of California? I love California — well, the Northern bit of it anyway — but really it’s a basket-case politically. Someone once said that, geologically speaking, the US slopes from East to West — which explains why everything in America with a screw loose winds up in California. Amen.
Why Linux and Unix-based systems are less vulnerable
One of the myths frequently propagated by Microsoft apologists goes like this: “Sure, Windows users are plagued with viruses, worms, trojans and other nuisances. But that’s only because Windows is the dominant system. If everyone used Linux, then the world would be full of Linux worms, viruses and trojans”.
It’s a superficially plausible line of argument, but wrong, because it ignores the architectural differences between different types of operating systems. Linux/Unix, for example, allows users much less freedom to inadvertently trash the entire system (though they may make a mess of their home directory). Linux email is less vulnerable to malicious executable attachments simply because the business of handling attachments is more fiddly and not just a matter of click-and-regret. And so on. There’s an interesting and useful essay in The register about all this.
At last! M’learned friends take an interest in liability issues arising from Microsoft vulnerabilities
I’ve been thinking for a while that we will only see progress on the security front when software companies (particularly the biggest, but others too) are held accountable for flaws in their products which damage their customers. And now the NYT reports the first Class Action suit in the State Superior Court in Los Angeles, asserting that Microsoft engaged in unfair business practices and violated California consumer protection laws by selling software riddled with security flaws. Quotes:
“The litigation, legal experts said, is an effort to use the courts to make software subject to product liability law — a burden the industry has so far avoided and strenuously resisted.
“For a software company to be held liable would be a real extension of liability as it now stands,” said Jeffrey D. Neuburger, a technology lawyer at Brown Raysman Millstein Felder & Steiner.
To date, software companies have sidestepped liability suits partly by selling customers a license to use their programs — not actual ownership — with a lengthy list of caveats and disclaimers. So the warranty programs offered by PC makers, for example, cover hardware but not software.
The industry has argued that software is a highly complex product, often misused or modified by consumers. Assigning responsibility for a failure, the argument goes, would be unfair to any single company.
Besides, software executives say, the industry is a fast-changing global business that is largely led by United States companies. Opening the industry up to product liability lawsuits, they say, would chill innovation and undermine the competitiveness of American companies.”
Tsk, tsk. I’m sure it would indeed ‘chill’ innovation in Microsoft products. It would lead to longer and slower release cycles and much more intensive testing and less ‘feature bloat’. Legal liability chilled innovation in the automobile industry. It also saved a lot of lives. And it stimulated innovation in safety technologies, leading to cars which are immeasurably safer than their predecessors of 40 years ago.
Beyond Fear reviewed
Useful Slashdot review of Bruce Schneier’s latest book, Beyond Fear: thinking sensibly about security in an uncertain world.
