Hey! Bill has signed up for Twitter. Last time I looked he had accumulated 241,614 Followers. He also has a new website, portentously titled The Gates Notes.
The Chinese ‘attack’ on Google
Best explanation I’ve come across.
Google, China, and the future of freedom on the global Internet
Long and characteristically wise and thoughtful post by Rebecca MacKinnon on l’affaire Google.
I am not one of those people who believe that the Internet is going to eliminate the human need for geographically-based government. But I do believe that we're starting to enter a time when enlightened governments will slowly come to recognize that their legitimacy along with the well-being of the societies they govern will be improved if they figure out ways not just to peacefully coexist – but to share power with the global cyber-nation. Each has a duty to help us – citizens of both physical and cyber space – to keep the other's power in check. Both must submit to appropriate public oversight. Both must commit to high standards of transparency if they want our trust – which they require in order to be successful and powerful for the long haul. We're very far from figuring out how to make it all work. But it is in our own self-interest as netizens to be proactive in doing what we can to help companies and governments come to grips with what is, unavoidably, in their own long-term interest.
Worth reading in full.
Freedom to link
Terrific Guardian column by Jeff Jarvis.
Linking is not a privilege that the recipient of the link should control – any more than politicians should decide who may or may not quote them. The test is not whether the creator of the link charges (Murdoch’s newspapers will charge and they link). The test is whether the thing we are linking to is public. If it is public for one it should be public for all.
We in the media tend to view the internet in our own image. But the internet is not a medium. Instead, as Cluetrain Manifesto author Doc Searls argues, it is a place. Think of it as a public park. You may not be selectively kept out because of your association with a race, religion … or aggregator. “Linking,” says Bartlett [Struan Bartlett, founder of NewsNow, an aggregator that Murdoch papers are now blocking from linking to their content], “is a common public amenity.”
I fear that what is really in danger here is the doctrine of openness on which journalism and an informed society depend. Pertinent are the arguments around Google’s Streetview, which takes pictures of buildings and the people who happen to be in front of them. Some object that these photos violate their privacy. But they are in public. What they do there is public.
I understand that people caught on Streetview might not want us to see them strolling into a drug den or brothel. But if we give anyone the right to restrict our use of that image or information, then we also give the mayor the right to gag us when we want to publish a picture of him skulking into that opium parlour.
What’s public is public – that is, we, the public, have a right to observe, point to, share, and comment on it. And the internet is public.
Right on, man! (As we ageing hippies like to say.)
Now the French government is advising people to stop using IE
Well, well. Even I’m surprised by this.
Following in the footsteps of Germany last week, France is now advising its population to use an alternative browser pending a patch for an Internet Explorer vulnerability.
The French Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) published an advisory on Friday January 15 stating “pending a patch from the publisher, CERT recommends using an alternative browser.” In the advisory Internet Explorer 7 and 8 are both listed despite Microsoft confirming the vulnerability is only exploitable on Internet Explorer 6.
Last week the German Federal Office for Security in Information Technology (BSI) issued a similary advisory urging its population to stop using IE. According to the BSI the flaw will, put simply, “perform reconnaissance and gain complete control over the compromised system.” The BSI noted that even running Internet Explorer in Protected Mode isn’t enough to stop the flaw. Microsoft issued further insight into the vulnerability this morning in a company blog posting. The software giant confirmed the exploit is only effective against Internet Explorer 6.
Wonder if French and German users will pay any attention to this.
The Balkanisation of the Internet
Even the New York Times is catching up with the reality, as evidence by this piece in today’s online edition.
As the Internet grew, it became fragmented and linguistically diversified. It developed borders, across which it now works in different ways.
In Spain, for instance, you can share music and movies with virtual impunity; in France, doing that is likely to cost you your Internet connection.
In China, meanwhile, it may soon be nearly impossible to use Google. The company, saying the security of its e-mail had been breached in a campaign to spy on Chinese dissidents, announced last week that it would stop censoring Google.cn, its Chinese Web site, and might have to withdraw from China.
No matter what happens in the fight between Google and Beijing’s leaders, one thing seems clear: the company is not going to be able to turn the clock back to 2006. That year, Google itself helped to fracture the Internet by creating Google.cn.
The Death of the News Package
Perceptive post by Adam Tinsworth about why newspapers have been so traumatised by the Net.
A discussion yesterday with some of the Cardiff postgraduate journalism students reminded me of one of the elements I think is missing from the paywall discussion: a really deep examination of exactly what people really paid for when they bought a print newspaper or magazine.
The reflexive journalistic answer is “news” as, after all, the clue is in the name “newspaper”. My contention, though, is that we journalists have a bias towards the news element of the publication that our readers do not share. We got into journalism to “do news”. They were buying a mix of news, features, comments, comics and crosswords that added up to a valuable package of information and entertainment in one handy portable product. And the cheaper bits of the paper to produce cross-subsidised the more expensive bits (ie: news). Oh, and the advertising paid for more of it than the cover price did…
So, in essence, we never really charged people for news. It was just part of a wider offer.
Spot on. Print newspapers are value-chains which linked unprofitable products (news) which have (or had) the capacity to attract readers with profitable activities (advertising) which earned revenues that were directly or indirectly proportional to circulation. In the old days, readers had to buy the whole package — they couldn’t have news without the ads, or vice versa.
But one of the features of the Net is that it dissolves value-chains — it enables profitable cherries to be picked off. Which is exactly what Craigslist did with classified ads, which in any event work better online than in print because they enable people to search for what they want rather than wading through columns of small newsprint.
The Net has had an analogous impact on other industries too. In the 1930s Ronald Coase showed that an important determinant of how companies developed was the transaction cost of doing things that were essential to supporting their core businesses. If the transaction costs were low, then companies outsourced the activity. If they were high, then they took it in house — and grew vertically, as it were.
The arrival of the Net radically altered that calculation. In many cases B2B transactions costs reduced, because they could be conducted online — and in many cases automated by software. As a result, vertical integration no longer looked so smart — and outsourcing became much easier to do. Thus was born what Manuel Castells calls the ‘networked enterprise’. The rest is recent history.
Mandelson and the laser
This morning’s Observer column.
Lasers are … a critical part of our technological infrastructure, yet no one involved in the research that led to them had any inkling of what their investigations would produce. The original idea goes back to a paper Albert Einstein published in 1917 on “The Quantum Theory of Radiation” about the absorption, spontaneous emission and stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. For 40 years, stimulated emission was of absorbing interest to quantum physicists, but of little interest to anyone else – certainly to nobody in government.
Which brings us to Lord Mandelson, now in charge of all government funding of universities and academic research. He has no personal experience of research in science or technology, but, like many people whose minds are unclouded by knowledge, has strong views on these matters.
LATER: BoingBoing picked up the column (thanks, Cory) and among the comments there was a link to an interesting article which reminds us that when the first working laser was reported in 1960, it was described as “a solution looking for a problem.”
The banal network
Travelling over the Christmas break, we had lunch one day in a cheap and cheerful eaterie in the midlands. It’s a good, non-nonsense, inexpensive carvery which, on the day we visited, was thronged with families having lunch. The first thing I noticed on our table was this card. To me, it signifies how far the Internet has come from being something weird and exotic to being positively mundane. When restaurant chains like this take it for granted that many of their (mainly working-class) clientele have a Facebook account, then you know that something’s happened.
I’m reminded of an observation that Andy Grove, then the CEO of Intel, made in 1999. “In five years’ time”, he said, “companies that aren’t Internet companies won’t be companies at all”. He was widely ridiculed for this prediction. Was he really suggesting that every fast-food joint and shoeshop would have to have online offerings? No: what he was trying to convey was the idea that, by 2004, the Internet would have become a utility, like electricity or the telephone or mains water. Most companies do not, for example, generate their own electricity. But if they’re not on the electricity grid (or the telephone network) then they’re at a severe disadvantage. So every company would, Grove thought, have to come to terms with the new reality of Internet-as-utility.
As it happens, he was a bit optimistic about the time it would take. But this Toby Carvery ad shows how perceptive he was.
Apple with Balsamic vinegar
We went to lunch at one of our favourite restaurants the other day and, before ordering, were given the standard board with bread plus butter and Balsamic vinegar in olive oil. This led us to wonder if the management knew we were slaves of OS X. Purists will argue that it must be coincidence — it lacks the mandatory bite out of the right-hand-side of the image. Still…