Author Archives: graham crumb

A Second Flowering

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]

Lilly Lui with one of her biggest fansA quiet revolution is taking place in North Efate.

Awareness of the rights of women in Vanuatu flowered briefly post-Independence thanks to the labours of eminent advocates such as Grace Molisa and Hilda Lini. They laboured continually to ensure that the neglected majority – Vanuatu’s women and children – were heard in the national dialogue.

Thanks to their generation, we have provincial and national Councils of Women, shelters in Vila and Santo and countless projects and services focused on improving conditions for women. To cap it all, over a decade of effort has finally given the Family Protection Act the force of law.

And yet, in spite of all this, women still face countless obstacles making themselves heard in daily life of the nation.

Lilly Lui wants women’s rights to bloom again as they did in the heady days following Independence. The sole female candidate in the upcoming Efate North bye-election, she has been entrusted by women throughout rural Efate to voice their concerns on the national stage.

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Copyright and the Social Contract

[This week’s Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent. It’s a somewhat fleshed out and more rounded version of this essay.]

Since the arrival of the Internet, there’s been unceasing talk about the imminent demise of traditional publishing models (especially newspapers), the subversive effect of ‘free’ online content and the purported damage done by Peer to Peer ‘pirates’ sharing music, movies and other creative works. At the centre of all this debate over the imbalance that new technology has created between creator and consumer is the oft-ignored conclusion that copyright as a regime for encouraging creativity in modern society is simply unworkable on the Internet.

Pundits, lawyers and media distributors the world over continue fighting the tide, thinking they can shape the Internet to match their expectations concerning copyright. Instead, they should be shaping their expectations to match the Internet.

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Parts of a Rumour

1

this is only evidence

the rattling that betrays
a flock of sparrows
in the branches of a barren shrub

gathered
and pressing the stems
like a small cold wind

the rattling that betrays
a cat in a dry rose bush

collected like parts of a rumour

2

there are no petals
on a wet black bough

no apparition to blend
these two mysteries

that I found your love without looking
is not your fault
and not mine

Creativity and the Social Contract

Tangled up amidst all the talk about the imminent demise of newspapers, the subversive effect of Free, the purported damage done by Peer to Peer ‘leeches’ and various other riffs on the imbalance that new technology has created between creator and consumer is the often unexamined conclusion that copyright as a regime for encouraging creativity in modern society is simply unworkable on the Internet.

That leaves us with two options: We can continue to tinker with copyright, attempting to redefine fair use, to place reasonable penalties (or at least disincentives) on unauthorised copying… ultimately, to renegotiate the compromise that lies at the heart of the concept.

That’s a commendable, fundamentally reasonable approach that unfortunately ignores the fact that digital information is immune to copyright enforcement. The practical ‘right’ to make copies is the very essence of digital technology. Its usefulness is predicated on the fact that data is infinitely mutable and that copies cost as close to nothing as makes no difference. To pretend that we can place anything more than voluntary limits on this capability is dangerously naive.

Alternatively, we can scrap copyright, go back to first principles and examine in detail what the rights of the creator really are.

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Fibre Optics

[This week’s Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent.]

Last weekend’s announcement by Minister Rialuth Serge Vohor of an agreement to participate in the SPIN fibre-optic project had been met with cautious optimism from observers. While nobody doubts the desirability of having an undersea cable linking Vanuatu to the rest of the world, some questions remain.

The devil, as always, is in the details.

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Tit For Tat

[This week’s Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent.]

We’ve seen a lot of griping and moaning recently about – and by – our two telcos. The former is not really news in and of itself. The fact of the matter is that anyone relying on technology in Vanuatu will have ample cause to complain before very long. Human, logistical and environmental factors in Vanuatu conspire against even the best-intentioned, making high-tech businesses here a pale echo indeed of what one might see in Sydney or Auckland.

To see our two telcos descend to a juvenile level of petty and rather vindictive name-calling and insinuation, however, was surprising and not at all welcome.

On top of the all-too-familiar litany of complaints concerning mobile telephone costs and service levels, readers of the Daily Post this week witnessed a public dust-up of playground proportions between TVL and Digicel. If we’re to believe the two providers, a mobile user’s choice of providers is between an incompetent dinosaur and a dishonest fast dealer.

Neither depiction is accurate, useful or informative for people in Vanuatu. It leads one to wonder whether either of them really understands where they live. This undignified public display is an object lesson in how NOT to win friends and influence people in Vanuatu.

One thing is for certain: As far as the public is concerned, the post-liberalisation honeymoon is definitely over.

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Selling Democracy – ctd.

Farhad Manjoo says the Revolution will not be digitised. His recent Slate column, subtitled “How the Internet helps Iran silence activists” makes the obvious point that technology makes all aspects of communications easier – even the unpleasant ones. But his simplistic analysis misses the import of his own observation.

The key to all this is his failure to distinguish between the network and the protocol. Manjoo says that the Internet helps Iran’s repressive efforts. That’s not true, at least not nearly to the extent he thinks. The network – the physical infrastructure of cables, switching and routing equipment, is what’s trapping people right now. If it weren’t for the end-to-end nature of the software protocols that make up what we conveniently call the Internet, little if any news at all would have emerged from Iran.

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Selling Democracy – Part II

In a press conference about Iran last week, a reporter asked US Press Secretary Robert Gibbs if the US couldn’t do an end run around Iranian censorship and use its satellites to ‘beam down’ broadband data connections to the Iranian people.

The question as asked comes across as remarkably naive to us geeks. We make it our business to know the difference between the logical (soft) network and the physical (hard) network.

A tension exists between the inherently democratic design of the myriad end-to-end connections that compose the Internet and the centralised conformation of the physical networks themselves. Briefly, the ‘soft’ elements of the network (the software we run on our computers and the protocols they follow) are completely agnostic about how the data they share actually get from one point to another.

On the other hand, the ‘hard’ elements (international satellite links, long-distance cables and the connection between your home and your ISP) are all about how the data moves. Controlling the data flow is their very essence.

From a ‘hard’ network point of view, this idea of ‘beaming down broadband to an entire population’ is little more than a pipe dream. The thing is, it’s pretty easy to receive a signal from a satellite. Sending an answer back is another matter entirely. That requires some pretty sophisticated equipment.

This led a number of geeks to discard the question entirely and to laugh more than a little at the naiveté of the reporter who posed it.

I’m not so sure we should cast it aside it so quickly.

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Common Ground

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]

Even in the decades before Jimmy Steven’s Nagriamel movement, land has been at the core of ni-Vanuatu politics and society. Many battles have been fought – and far too many lost – over land rights.

Justin Haccius, a legal researcher for the World Bank’s Jastis Blong Evriwan project, has been looking at this issue for some time now. The conflict between kastom and law, he says, is one of the central issues affecting Vanuatu society today. The problem, as he sees it, is simple: “The system of the majority is not the system of the State.”

In a briefing note titled “Coercion to Conversion: Push and Pull Pressures on Custom Land in Vanuatu” Haccius highlights some of the pressures brought to bear on kastom land owners in their efforts to derive value from their land without becoming completely disenfranchised in the process.

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Selling Democracy by the Byte

[This week’s Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent. Updated and edited slightly from the original print version.]

Thirty years after the Revolution, the June 12th Iranian presidential elections seem to have catalysed a transformational moment in the nation’s history. One Western commentator writes:

The widespread, sustained, peaceful and courageous demonstrations by Iranians this week has been an astonishing and inspiring sight. In a way this feels like the anti-9/11.

Analysts have suggested that the rapid rise in popularity of moderate candidate Mir-Hosain Mousavi caught the theocratic regime’s leaders flat-footed. Juan Cole, President of the Global Americana Institute and long-time commentator on Middle-East affairs, writes:

As the real numbers started coming into the Interior Ministry late on Friday, it became clear that Mousavi was winning. Mousavi’s spokesman abroad, filmmaker Mohsen Makhbalbaf, alleges that the ministry even contacted Mousavi’s camp and said it would begin preparing the population for this victory.

The ministry must have informed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has had a feud with Mousavi for over 30 years, who found this outcome unsupportable. And, apparently, he and other top leaders had been so confident of an Ahmadinejad win that they had made no contingency plans for what to do if he looked as though he would lose.

They therefore sent blanket instructions to the Electoral Commission to falsify the vote counts.

His narrative is, he admits, largely speculative.

The result, witnessed through countless independent blog posts, photos and videos, has been massive, occasionally violent protest in the streets of the capital Tehran and, according to reports, in Tabriz, Mashad, Shiraz and Rasht as well.

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