U.S. develops ‘Panic Button’ for democracy activists

Posted on by

I recently attended a seminar in LSE given by a State Department official — one of the people who advise Hilary Clinton on technology. (The seminar was held under the Chatham House rule, so I can’t identify the speaker, but Charlie Beckett blogged about it.) What I found interesting — and encouraging — was the discovery that, despite its curiously disorganised reaction to the WikiLeaks release of diplomatic cables, the US administration still apparently believes in the idea of an open Internet. In that context, this report in the NYTimes is intriguing, perhaps even hopeful.

WASHINGTON Reuters – Some day soon, when pro-democracy campaigners have their cellphones confiscated by police, they’ll be able to hit the ‘panic button’ — a special app that will both wipe out the phone’s address book and emit emergency alerts to other activists.

The panic button is one of the new technologies the U.S. State Department is promoting to equip pro-democracy activists in countries ranging from the Middle East to China with the tools to fight back against repressive governments.

“We’ve been trying to keep below the radar on this, because a lot of the people we are working with are operating in very sensitive environments,” said Michael Posner, assistant U.S. secretary of state for human rights and labor.

The U.S. technology initiative is part of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s push to expand Internet freedoms, pointing out the crucial role that on-line resources such as Twitter and Facebook have had in fueling pro-democracy movements in Iran, Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere.

The United States had budgeted some $50 million since 2008 to promote new technologies for social activists, focusing both on “circumvention” technology to help them work around government-imposed firewalls and on new strategies to protect their own communications and data from government intrusion.

“We’re working with a group of technology providers, giving small grants,” Posner told reporters.

“We’re operating like venture capitalists. We are looking for the most innovative people who are going to tailor their technology and their expertise to the particular community of people we’re trying to protect.”

Tim O’Reilly on why DRM on eBooks is a waste of time and effort

Posted on by

Clip from an intriguing Forbes.com interview with Tim O’Reilly.

Jon Bruner: On all your titles you've dropped digital-rights management (DRM), which limits file sharing and copying. Aren’t you worried about piracy?

Tim O’Reilly: No. And so what? Let’s say my goal is to sell 10,000 copies of something. And let’s say that if by putting DRM in it I sell 10,000 copies and I make my money, and if by having no DRM 100,000 copies go into circulation and I still sell 10,000 copies. Which of those is the better outcome? I think having 100,000 in circulation and selling 10,000 is way better than having just the 10,000 that are paid for and nobody else benefits.

People who don’t pay you generally wouldn’t have paid you anyway. We’re delighted when people who can’t afford our books don’t pay us for them, if they go out and do something useful with that information.

I think having faith in that basic logic of the market is important. Besides, DRM interferes with the user experience. It makes it much harder to have people adopt your product.

Why some Apps work — and some don’t

Posted on by

Om Malik has a thoughful post about why some products work while others don’t — no matter how much VC money and industry plaudits they attract.

He picks up Gary Vaynerchuck’s idea of The Thank You Economy, in which the companies that provide the most value to their customers win. “It is a quaint notion”, writes Malik, “as old as the first bazaar, but somehow it got lost in postindustrial over-commercialization”.

When I use Marco Arment‘s Instapaper, I quietly thank him, pretty much every single time. Why? Because he solved a problem for me and made my life more manageable. As a result I gladly upgraded to the paid version of the app. And when I am not saving or reading articles using Instapaper, I am telling everyone I can tell: Try it. That is what the “thank you economy” really is — me doing marketing for a product I have only an emotional or utilitarian connection to.

I look at all these great tablets coming to market. They are feature-laden, power-packed, and have bundles of computing oomph. And yet, they will all struggle because the makers are all looking through the wrong end of the telescope. My friend Pip Coburn emailed me, pointing out that people with iPads are the ultimate commercial for the device. The more people have them, the more people want them. “People will trust other people who do not carry an agenda to build revenues and manipulate you,” Pip wrote. Bing!

Don’t believe me? Put all the things that are part of your daily routine into these two buckets — happiness and utility — and you will see it for yourself that in the end those two are the driving forces behind a successful app, service, device or media property.

That rings lots of bells round here. Instapaper has solved lots of problems for me, and I really value it. Same goes for Dropbox, in spades. I’m currently finishing off a new book, and I’ve used Dropbox from the outset: it’s been a revelation compared with the last time I wrote a book — when I was continually fretting about back-ups, the location of different versions, etc.

Another revelation is how useful the iPad has become — for me, anyway. When it first came out, I was quite critical of it. What has changed is the ecosystem of apps which have transformed it into a really powerful mobile workstation. It’s still hopeless for my kind of blogging (which really needs multitasking), but for writing non-academic articles, reading and commenting on PDFs, note-taking in seminars and conferences and email-on-the-move it’s terrific. And Dropbox is the glue that binds it to my other ‘proper’ computers.

Thanks to Quentin, I’ve also found that the iPad is a pretty good thinking and presentation tool. It does run Keynote, which is fine if you like that kind of PowerPoint-type thing. But more importantly, it has a mind-mapping App which (unlike some iPad1 Apps) can drive a projector, and I’ve found that audiences which are PowerPointed-out seem to like it. You just work out the map of what you want to say, and then talk through it, squeezing and pinching and swiping as you talk. And if they want a printed record, you can export the map as a jpeg and email it to them.

The Libyan campaign: who’s in charge?

Posted on by

Answer: impossible to say — as this sharp piece by Max Fisher argues.

On the fifth straight day of foreign, air- and sea-based attacks against Qaddafi’s forces, there is still no one leading the massive Western force. The U.S., as Pentagon officials frequently point out at daily press conferences, is not in charge. NATO, still deadlocked by internal disputes, is not in charge. The United Nations Security Council, which only gave enough authority to enforce a no-fly zone, is not in charge of the now far more aggressive campaign. The Arab League, which withdrew its support within hours of granting it, is certainly not in charge. It would be as if, in June 1944, the allied powers decided to invade Normandy at roughly the same time, but didn't bother to appoint General Eisenhower to command and coordinate the multi-national force.

Journalists trying to answer the question of who is in charge have been reduced, perhaps because no concrete answer yet exists, to speculating as to whether the U.S. might be willing to support France's proposal for a “steering committee” for the war, though it’s not even clear who would lead that committee or how it would delegate authority between the Western powers. Not only is no one in charge, no one wants to be, and no one has any idea who to appoint.

There appear to be two primary reasons for the confusion, both of which may also help explain why there’s no clear objective.

The first reason, Fisher maintains, is that all the states involved have different objectives. The most cynical is the frantic attempt by the French to overwrite the embarrassing fact that Sarkozy’s support for Tunisian dictator Ben Ali was deep, long-held, and consistent right up until the latter’s overthrow by popular protest. Italy needs Libyan oil more than most other states. And Germany, always reluctant, has become positively hostile to the venture — even to the extent of withdrawing four warships from NATO control in the Med.

The second reason is that nobody in Europe (or the US) is willing to take on a leadership role in a civil war in a fractured, tribalistic statelet.

As my mother used to say, never start something that you cannot finish.

“Information overload” — pshaw: that’s old hat

Posted on by

Interesting interview in Inside Higher Ed.

Preamble:

As modern as the problem may seem, information overload wasn’t born in the dorm rooms of Larry Page and Sergey Brin (let alone Mark Zuckerberg). In fact, says Ann M. Blair, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Harvard University, the idea that more textual information exists than could possible be useful or manageable predates not only Project Gutenberg, but the printing press itself. In her new book, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age, Blair cites sources as far back as Seneca — “the abundance of books is distraction” — to show that the notion dates to antiquity.

While the book’s context is broad, Blair’s primary focus is on the information management strategies employed by scholars in early modern Europe, whose enthusiasm for and anxiety about textual overabundance may sound surprisingly familiar all these hundreds of years (and hundreds of millions of Google searches) later. Inside Higher Ed conducted an e-mail interview with Blair to find out more about information management in the Renaissance and today…

Tribes With Flags

Posted on by

On March 21, David Kirkpatrick, the Cairo bureau chief for The New York Times, wrote an interesting piece from Libya that posed the key question about all the new revolutions brewing in the Arab world: “Is the battle for Libya the clash of a brutal dictator against a democratic opposition, or is it fundamentally a tribal civil war?”

Yesterday Tom Friedman tackled the question.

This is the question because there are two kinds of states in the Middle East: “real countries” with long histories in their territory and strong national identities (Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Iran); and those that might be called “tribes with flags,” or more artificial states with boundaries drawn in sharp straight lines by pens of colonial powers that have trapped inside their borders myriad tribes and sects who not only never volunteered to live together but have never fully melded into a unified family of citizens. They are Libya, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The tribes and sects that make up these more artificial states have long been held together by the iron fist of colonial powers, kings or military dictators. They have no real “citizens” in the modern sense. Democratic rotations in power are impossible because each tribe lives by the motto “rule or die” — either my tribe or sect is in power or we’re dead.

It is no accident that the Mideast democracy rebellions began in three of the real countries — Iran, Egypt and Tunisia — where the populations are modern, with big homogenous majorities that put nation before sect or tribe and have enough mutual trust to come together like a family: “everyone against dad.” But as these revolutions have spread to the more tribal/sectarian societies, it becomes difficult to discern where the quest for democracy stops and the desire that “my tribe take over from your tribe” begins.

Friedman’s conclusion is that most of the remaining Middle East countries are mainly tribes with flags. in which case the prospects for democracy are, well, dim. He sees the Iraq experiment as just that — an experiment to see if an artificial country created by the straight lines on an imperialist’s pen can re-engineer itself into a democracy ruled by consent. “Enabling Iraqis to write their own social contract”, he writes, “is the most important thing America did”.

It was, in fact, the most important liberal experiment in modern Arab history because it showed that even tribes with flags can, possibly, transition through sectarianism into a modern democracy. But it is still just a hope. Iraqis still have not given us the definitive answer to their key question: Is Iraq the way Iraq is because Saddam was the way Saddam was or was Saddam the way Saddam was because Iraq is the way Iraq is: a tribalized society? All the other Arab states now hosting rebellions — Yemen, Syria, Bahrain and Libya — are Iraq-like civil-wars-in-waiting. Some may get lucky and their army may play the role of the guiding hand to democracy, but don’t bet on it.

Yep.

Ida Kar

Posted on by


Ida Kar, originally uploaded by jjn1.

I had an hour to kill one day last week before a meeting in London and took the opportunity to see the Ida Kar exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

She was billed as a “bohemian photographer”, which was intriguing, and her work was unknown to me. Turns out that she was an Armenian who went to study in Paris in the late 1920s and was much influenced by the artists she encountered there. She lived in Cairo for a while and came to London in 1945 with her second husband. She tried to set up as a theatrical photographer, but seems to have more success with painters and sculptors, and these are the basis for the NPG retrospective.

There are lots of memorable pics. A wonderful picture of Bertrand Russell, scribbling in what looks like a Moleskine notebook while sitting for a portrait painter. Marc Chagall, wistful in a ribbed sweater. Graham and Kathleen Sutherland, at home in front of fireplace and a table loaded with pre-lunch drinks: impeccably upper-middle class, don’t you know. There’s Stanley Spencer under his trademark black umbrella and a terrific 1954 picture of Fernand Leger in a heavy tweet suit and matching cap, looking more like a bookie or a farmer than an avant garde painter. There’s a shot of Man Ray looking dubious in a tartan waistcoat, and one of Le Corbusier in short sleeves and heavy round glasses. A particularly nice portrait of Eugene Ionesco, sheltering thoughtfully behind a pile of books comes before a shot of T.S. Eliot in 1959 looking like a triumph of the embalmer’s art, and one of Jean-Paul Sartre, boss-eyed and formal in front of tottering piles of files. Kar caught Iris Murdoch in 1957, sitting on the floor surrounded by the ms of The Bell, looking fey and somehow dangerous (the best — i.e. most revealing — picture in the exhibition, IMHO.)

Other images that caught my eye included one of Augustus John in 1959, looking fierce and slightly potty; a lovely wistful pic of Laurie Lee in 1956; Colin McInnes reclining full length on a bed; the painter Terry Frost captured in 1961 in his St Ives studio overlooking the beach; Somerset Maugham in the Dorchester in 1958, looking not just starchy but positively stuffed in a tightly buttoned double-breasted suit; and a lovely 1968 pic of Bill Brandt, perched on an antique chair in his Kensington flat.

The obvious comparison, of course, is with Lee Miller and her photographs of the surrealist painters with whom she and Roland Penrose mixed. But the abiding impression of the Kar show was its evocation of the 1950s: what a strange time it must have been; and how small and constrained London must have been then.

I was also left musing over the adjective “bohemian”. What, I wondered, had the inhabitants of that lovely part of central Europe done to deserve such raffish connotations. As ever, Wikipedia came to the rescue. The term bohemian, it seems, came to refer to “the nontraditional lifestyles of marginalized and impoverished artists, writers, musicians, and actors in major European cities – emerged in France in the early 19th century when artists and creators began to concentrate in the lower-rent, lower class gypsy neighbourhoods”. Quite so.

Well worth a visit, if you have the time.

Court rejects Google Books settlement

Posted on by

Significant setback in Google’s path to world domination. CNET News reports that

Adding another chapter to a long, drawn-out legal saga, a New York federal district court has rejected the controversial settlement in a class-action suit brought against Google Books by the Authors Guild, a publishing industry trade group.

“While the digitization of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many, the ASA would simply go too far,” a court document explains. “It would permit this class action–which was brought against defendant Google Inc. to challenge its scanning of books and display of ‘snippets’ for on-line searching–to implement a forward-looking business arrangement that would grant Google significant rights to exploit entire books, without permission of the copyright owners. Indeed, the ASA (Amended Settle Agreement) would give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission, while releasing claims well beyond those presented in the case.”

The settlement would grant Google the right to display excerpts of out-of-print books, even if they are not in the public domain or authorized by publishers to appear in Google Books. When the settlement was initially announced in mid-2009, opposition flooded in from lawyers on behalf of Microsoft, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a coalition called the Open Book Alliance who decried it as anticompetitive.

“Google and the plaintiff publishers secretly negotiated for 29 months to produce a horizontal price fixing combination, effected and reinforced by a digital book distribution monopoly,” a lawyer for the Open Book Alliance said at the time. “Their guile has cleared much of the field in digital book distribution, shielding Google from meaningful competition.”

Gay? There’s an App for that, apparently

Posted on by

Well, well. Interesting story in the Guardian.

Apple is under fire from gay rights activists after it approved an iPhone and iPad app targeting “homosexual strugglers”.

More than 80,000 people have signed a petition against the so-called “gay cure” app, which Apple deemed to have “no objectionable content”.

Exodus International, the pro-Christian group behind the app, promotes the “ex-gay” movement, encouraging people to change their sexuality. The app gives users “freedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus”, according to the group.

Apple had not returned a request for comment at the time of publication.

Ben Summerskill, chief executive of gay rights group Stonewall, said: “At Stonewall, we’ve all been on this app since 8am and we can assure your readers it’s having absolutely no effect.”

That’s a nice witty response. But it looks to me like Apple blundered in passing this App for distribution. As a petition from Change.org puts it:

“Apple doesn’t allow racist or anti-Semitic apps in its app store, yet it gives the green light to an app targeting vulnerable LGBT youth with the message that their sexual orientation is a ‘sin that will make your heart sick’ and a ‘counterfeit’.

“This is a double standard that has the potential for devastating consequences. Apple needs to be told, loud and clear, that this is unacceptable.”