As individual control over the flow of information rises, central control wanes. And this, obviously, is the crux of the dilemma facing businesses and governments across North Africa and throughout the world. They are belatedly coming to realise that they are fighting a many-headed hydra. As they cut off one avenue of communication, another rears its head.

But that hydra has a body, and the body is the network itself.

The US Congress’ latest attack on the integrity of the Internet demonstrates that at least some American businesses have heard this message loud and clear.

Their intent now is simply to cordon off what they consider to be the American part of the Internet, and to beat into submission any site that refuses to play by American rules. The rules, needless to say, are expressly designed to impose an economy of hoarding and scarcity on a technological landscape premised on bounty and sharing.

To what end? What do so-called content-producers stand to gain from all of this? Not much, really. Except that they can continue using the same business model that has stood them in such good stead for the last few decades.

Essentially, the SOPA legislative package doesn’t create a Great Firewall of America; it encases the giants of the media industry in amber.

The starkest evidence of the fossilising effect of this legislation was provided by a recent House Judiciary Committee hearing, which consisted of little more than a gaudy carousel of facile pronouncements:

How low was the level of debate? The hearing actually descended to statements like “the First Amendment does not protect stealing goods off trucks” (courtesy of the AFL-CIO’s Paul Almeida).

Criticisms were brushed aside with the blithe assertion that if these rules don’t fit the Internet as it is today, then it’s the Internet that should change, not the rules.

The one detractor allowed a place on the stage was Google, which objected strenuously to to the vague, often blatantly prejudicial language of the Bill.

It was up to Google alone to make the argument that SOPA’s definition of “rogue sites” is poor, that its remedies are extreme, and that plenty of legitimate sites could be targeted. One has only to think of YouTube, which even without SOPA is being sued by Viacom for $1 billion and would certainly have been hammered years ago under SOPA’s crazy language (sites can be dismantled under SOPA if they take “deliberate actions to avoid confirming a high probability of the use of the US-directed site to carry out acts” of infringement. What does that even mean? And how does it fit with existing robust safe harbors for user-uploaded content sites?)

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of this hearing was that Google, the sole opponent to the legislation allowed to present at the hearing, was castigated by most of the people present, impugned for purportedly profiting from piracy and cast as the villain in this whole affair.

Seeing one of the few growing and dynamic drivers of the information economy not only cast out of the fold but actively opposed, one can only conclude that the captains of the US media industry are perfectly content to cut their nose off to spite their face. They will burn the bridge represented by Google rather than cross it.

I see two immediate dangers if this regime is actually allowed to take the shape proposed for it:

1. Innovation in content re-use and sharing will move outside of the US. Some will move into the shadows (kind of like offshore pirate radio in days of yore, except the ships and radios are available for the cost of a laptop). Some will move into the less governed – or governable – areas.
2. US influence on innovation and invention will decline significantly. This legislative package will serve as a clear signal that Silicon Valley is no longer the influence it used to be. (Indeed, the Valley’s lack of standing in DC was evidenced by committee members’ contempt for Google throughout the hearing.)

The latter outcome is the more dangerous of the two. Losing influence in the direction the Internet’s development takes also means losing the uniquely American ethos of freedom and individualism.

There are numerous new media and technological players poised in the wings right now. But few of them (with the possible exception of Al Jazeera) have any moral stake in human rights or even individual expression.

Warnings that SOPA’s passage will mark the death knell of the Internet as we know it are, therefore, not exaggerations.

Like a bug in amber, the US media and content industries may be preserved for a while, but the life that they breathed into world culture – the American ethos of individual freedom – that will diminish and die.

UPDATE:
When I talk about the ‘American ethos of individual freedom’, I’m using ‘American’ to modify ‘ethos’ not ‘individual freedom’. Tons of cultures have extremely strong traditions of freedom and individual rights. Few have that particularly American flavour of it. And it’s that particular flavour which, not coincidentally, fits so well with the Internet today.

That second sentence is just false, as even a quick visit to wikipedia is sufficient to discover: Current research shows that this vastly complex behaviour requires no interaction between all points, and no orchestration by some unseen hand.

Flocking behaviour can be simulated in computers by creating groups of simple bots, each of which responds independently to three simple rules:

1) Separation – avoid crowding neighbors (short range repulsion)

2) Alignment – steer towards average heading of neighbors

3) Cohesion – steer towards average position of neighbors (long range attraction)

Some researchers have even gone so far as to create real, flying drones that exhibit this behaviour.

The miracle is not that this grand ballet is so complex, but that it’s so damn simple in its essence.

Look, I marvel just as much as the next person when watching vast flocks of starlings. And there are few things more graceful and poignant than an entire school of sardines arcing over the waves in consecutive leaps as they flee from predators. There is little in life so exhilarating as being engulfed in a pocket of azure space as a school of reef fish flow soundlessly around you.

These are all examples of of simple creatures following simple rules, collectively iterating and permuting in patterns whose complexity the human mind finds attractive, even enthralling. Because it cannot follow the linear progression of individual acts in such a vastly parallel pattern, the brain hits the overload switch, which results in our sense of wonder.

It is, almost literally, mind candy. But that does NOT make it a mystery.

I’m not asking that we put aside our wonder, but can we please accept that many of these so-called mysteries are NOT mysterious. (Well, not any longer, anyway.) I’m as big a fan of exaltation as the next person, but I cringe when we allow it to curb our perceptions and our ability to learn.

I admire him for that. And I’m more than a little disgusted to hear about Jobs’ ‘visionary’ genius from the likes of Ballmer and Gates – who, not to put too fine a point on it, wouldn’t know a good design if it slapped them in the face with a dead salmon.

Who the fuck are they to judge? And who the fuck are we to listen?

No, the thing we need to admire about Jobs – the thing we need to LEARN about Steve Jobs – is how he thought, how he never stopped trying to make things simpler, how he utterly refused to compromise, how he refused to accept ‘improvement’ as the criterion for success. It was necessary, of course, and relentlessly pursued, but it was the means to another end….

And that was good design. Something the technological world knows far too little about. And with his passing, most of its collective knowledge and ability pass with him.

If you really want to show respect and admiration for Steve Jobs, understand him.

Emulate him. Let them call you arrogant and impolite if they must, but be a perfectionist. Be unforgiving, cruel even, to yourself and others. But be simple and clear, too. If you do that, then one day you might – just might – do one perfect thing.

Turns out that finding duplicate attachments is fairly easy. First create the view:

function(doc) {
  if (doc._attachments){
    for (var i in doc._attachments){
      emit([doc.collection, i], doc._id);
    }
  }
}

Which returns JSON output that looks like this:

["collection name", "filename.rtf"]

So all I have to do to find the duplicates is query that view using the composite key and see if it returns any rows:

http://my.couchdb.server:5984/database-name/_design/my-listings/_view/attachment-exists?key=["collection name","filename.rtf"]

I could do the same with MD5 checksums, too, but I won’t. The problem is that even a single character change is enough to make two documents different. So if someone opens their copy of a file and Word changes the metadata in it, it’s no longer byte-for-byte identical, even though the text has not changed. This means that the number of false negatives (i.e. duplicate files that are NOT found) would be too high for people to rely on.

What I’d really like to find is an algorithm that determines whether the textual content of two documents is significantly similar….

To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you. For example, if your full legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, either of those would be acceptable.

Audrey Watters at ReadWriteWeb got a little further clarification from a Google spokesperson concerning Google Profiles and the use of real names:

“We are not requiring people to use their ‘real name’, but rather they need their Google profile to include the name they commonly go by in daily life. I know that sounds like the same thing, but there are some differences. For a hypothetical example, Samuel Clemens could choose to be known as ‘Mark Twain,’ although we wouldn’t allow him to go by Authordude88. And for a real life example, 50 Cent is using Google+, after we verified that this is the name he is commonly referred to. More details can be found here.

That page goes on to say that your name should use your first and last names, avoid ‘unusual’ characters (more about this below) and that your profile should represent only one person.

There are numerous problems with this policy which, taken together, make it impossible to implement it consistently or, indeed, objectively. Arguably, this policy would have disallowed some or all of the following:

Jesus Christ

‘Christ’ is an title, not an actual name

Buddha

It’s really a title, and it’s only one word

Pol Pot, Lenin & Stalin

All noms de guerre, associated with illegal and subversive activities at some point in history.

The Apostle Paul

He was ‘really’ Saul

Socrates

What, no last name?

Ellery Queen

‘He’ is actually a ‘they‘.

Acton, Currer and Ellis Bell

The Bronte sisters, who hid their identities (and location) to avoid scandal in their community

George Eliot and George Sand

Just a couple of the most notable women who could only be taken seriously after assuming a male identity

I could go on at great length, but suffice it to say that there are problems. You’ll note, by the way, that many of the names listed above refer to individuals who were guilty of subversive and often illegal activities. In many cases, too, there was a point in time where these names were not commonly known, or were disputed (even proscribed) by large segments of society, or by the powers that be.

Let me try to make these apparently silly examples clearer. It’s easy, with the benefit of hindsight to say, “Dude, that’s JESUS. Everybody knows he’s the Christ.” Well, that may be true now, but what about when he was some misfit wandering from town to town, pissing off a lot of Pharisees in the process? And yes, knowing what we know now, maybe we wouldn’t want to give a voice to Pol Pot, Lenin or Stalin. But how would we have felt about them in the early years of the 20th Century?

My question is: Are we on the side of the Pharisees, the Tsars and the Cambodian despots? Because that’s who we’re helping here, metaphorically speaking.

I’m not advocating taking a particular side. I’m suggesting exactly the opposite – not taking sides. That’s why I deliberately included some decidedly contentious figures in the list. (I could just as easily have included the authors of the Federalist Papers.) I just want to know that there’s room in our society for gadflies like Socrates, that it’s okay for some as-yet-unknown literary genius to speak freely and loud.

(And that, yes, even the soon-to-be villains can be captured in the public dialogue. There’s actually an argument to be made for listening to nuts like bin Laden and Breivik, in order that we better understand – and engage – our enemy.)

There are technical problems with any set of rules applying to names. As Patrick McKenzie eloquently demonstrates, just about any rule you think might apply to names actually doesn’t. Furthermore, the rationale that disallowing pseudonyms would have any effect whatsoever on spam and/or civility in public discourse, let alone that it will ‘help people know who they’re talking to,’ is entirely unproven.

But the issue is bigger than just technical. Skud writes that disallowing pseudonymity can be discriminatory and downright dangerous. The fact that her argument isn’t comprehensive makes it all the more compelling.

Throughout history, and for countless reasons, the use of pseudonyms and the appropriation of unofficial names are common, reputable and widely accepted practices,

One of the most common responses to these (and other) objections can be stated succinctly enough: Google’s Service – Google’s Rules. Fair enough, but let’s consider the implications of this. If we as a society allow ourselves to be utterly circumscribed by corporate policies over which we have no control (and which, as here, are pretty much arbitrary in nature), we’re in effect voting ourselves back into feudalism, where the rule of law becomes meaningless – or rather, indistinguishable from fiat.

I know some of you are writhing in your chairs right now, waiting to shout, “Oh come on, Crumb! Lighten up. This is a bloody social network we’re talking about, not some proletarian revolutionary struggle.” Well, no. This is a social network, and if it wants to reflect society then it needs to bloody well reflect it. In many parts of the world, just hanging out with your buddies on a service like this can get you into a lot of trouble.

Identity matters, for political, economical, social and philosophical reasons. The ability to define one’s identity freely is a fundamental human right. Google’s aim is to reduce bad behaviour, and that’s laudable. But if they want to do it right, they should focus on behaviour, not practices that are only tangentially linked to the problem.

If Google really wants their network to reflect society rather than deform it, they need to back off the name issue and look at fostering a culture of respect and civility instead.

If you must recommend Ubuntu Linux to others, recommend nothing later than 10.04, the last LTS release.

10.10 saw a number of minor but irritating bugs creep in that show a significant shortage of testing and forethought. There were countless small things like context menus no longer working after returning from a suspended state or new window positioning that’s completely counter-intuitive. Some of them, like changing sides for window buttons or listing indecipherable package descriptions above package names in Update Manager, were deliberate (and conceivably, in some universe, necessary), but most of the changes were clearly mistakes. When these are combined with long-standing bugs (like Network Manager arbitrarily deciding to disable the Save button) and inconsistencies, they begin to weigh against Ubuntu’s many virtues.

In 11.04, Unity, combined with an increase in the number of stupid bugs (that spiffy state-of-the-machine motd message is FUBAR’ed now on console login) clearly indicates that Ubuntu is more interested in new and shiny than they are in quality. A quick scan of Launchpad (itself a new product designed to simplify bug maintenance and supplant the competition, but which has done neither) shows that there are, on average, 100 open bugs per project.

Ubuntu is slipping out of control. Canonical have stopped listening and – more importantly – working with the community. The number of defects is growing, but Canonical’s response is to make it harder for mere mortals to submit bugs. They seem to think that strong guidance is needed for their product to grow in new and interesting ways. Fair enough, but they’re confusing leadership with control. They’re simply imposing their views because they don’t value the discussion. They’re treating criticism as opposition and shutting themselves off from valid feedback.

Worse, they simply don’t have the number of skilled developers they need to achieve their goals. When I look at the bug queues on some packages, I shudder in sympathy with the poor souls who are expected to wrangle them. Canonical is clearly embarked on an impossible task, but nobody’s either got the guts or the vision to spell this out to Shuttleworth and co.

Getting buy-in and active participation from the community is a pain in the arse at the best of times, but the alternative is far worse. Heaven knows that the GNOME dev camp are… special, to be nice. But it’s clear that, given the choice between getting a partial but workable success through compromise or taking their ball and going home, Canonical has consistently chosen the latter.

This cannot end well. It will, however, end sooner than later.

I’d have thought striving to be independently wealthy would be an admirable goal – it’s a lot easier to be a philanthropist when you don’t have to worry about the roof over your head and where your next meal is coming from.

You’d have thought, but you’d have been wrong.

The pursuit and acquisition of wealth generally breeds greater stress and worry rather than less. Granted, there is a level of income below which one struggles constantly to manage even the most basic aspects of daily living.

Having lived on both sides of the divide, I can say with some assurance that living in poverty is debilitating, but so is significant wealth.

The one lesson of any value I’ve learned is that if you’re really serious about helping others (or helping make important things happen), you’re doing it already. Opportunities tend to look for people willing to accept them. You don’t have to be rich or powerful to achieve important things. Most of the time, you’ll find yourself pitted against the rich and powerful – at least you will if what you’re doing represents any sort of change. Even then, there are always influential allies to be found. Put in enough hours, demonstrate – no, prove – your abilities and Good Things do happen.

But here’s the catch. To do so is to accept uncertainty and risk as your constant companions. You are guaranteed to fail more than you succeed. Every victory, save a very choice few, will be temporary or mitigated by compromise. Your own needs and satisfaction will always take second place to those of others. You’ll find yourself – as I do – older, wiser, largely contented, but with very little to guarantee a contented, comfortable retirement.

All of this, of course, runs counter to the American myth of Success, where the sole measure of influence and importance is wealth. Rightly or wongly, it highlights people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, relegating Knuth, Woz, Mohammed Younus and countless other more meritorious figures to the shadows. This is a distortion. It’s not false, but it’s fake.

In rare cases, wealth will accompany accomplishment, but that’s not always the case, and if you let the former stand for the latter, that’s all you’ll have. As a wise man once said to me, ‘If you go into the hills looking for gold, all you’ll find is gold.’

The freedom that we experienced on the Internet of the ’90s is waning. Governments and commercial interests take ever-increasing steps to circumscribe people’s ability to communicate digitally. The only way to change this tide from ebb to flood is to fulfill a promise that was first made in the ’90s.

We need to disintermediate the network. It’s an ugly duckling of a word, but cutting out the middle man matters more now than ever.

As long as the cables, wires and frequencies over which we communicate are susceptible to being controlled, curtailed or even disconnected when the things we say -or the way we say them- become upsetting, we will find ourselves increasingly confined.

As I said during an Internet policy session yesterday, if you ask anyone -anyone- whether there should be limits on Behaviour X on the Internet, the answer will always be a resounding Yes. That’s not a problem in and of itself, because X is usually anti-social and contrary to the public good. The problem is that anything capable of curtailing Behaviour X can be brought to bear on Behaviours A through W as well.

The only way out of this is to provide the technical means to do what we have always done in democratic societies: Keep our private discussions private and our public discussions free.

For the former we at last have all the ingredients we need:

1. Gigabit wifi – We can finally start thinking about getting decent performance out of wireless data transmission, meaning that we can worry a little less about putting a lot of people onto a single wifi network;
2. Wireless Mesh Networks – Enough with the telcos; we can now start looking at creating ad hoc, self-organising networks, relegating the role of the data carriers to one similar to power and water utilities;
3. Secure Voice Communications – Security expert Moxie Marlinspike (yeah) and a crew of like-minded individuals have floated a very useful service recently, allowing secure VOIP and SMS communications between phones. By building encryption into the bones of the app, they’ve created software that looks and acts exactly like normal calling and texting. The only difference being that, if the other person is using their RedPhone service, the entire communication remains a secret shared only by the two of you.

The idea behind these things have been floating around for some time (the protocol underlying RedPhone has been with us since 2006), but now they’re all here in usable form.

I’ve said it before: The story of freedom of Internet freedom and online privacy will be the defining social conflict of our generation. As the peoples of the Middle East are discovering, the narrative of freedom is suspenseful, dramatic and exciting in the best and worst ways.

Whoever manages to blend these three technologies together seamlessly and easily enough for anyone to use them will assuredly be one of the main protagonists in this unfolding drama. They may not garner the celebrity of a Jobs or a Gates, but they will have the impact of a Gandhi or a King.

“Some of us might like to believe that the genie is out of the bottle and that we all have access to an unstoppable decentralized network. In reality, the internet is entirely controlled by central authorities.”

Arrgh! This kind of thing drives me crazy. If we could stop conflating the Internet (which is a combination of networking protocols) and the physical network (which is a bunch of cables and antennas and switches), we might be able to have a useful dialogue about how to reduce the Internet’s vulnerability to coercive measures by changing the shape of the network.

In the end, that’s what Rushkoff advocates; I just wish he wouldn’t muddy the water so.

Stay with me, kids; I’m going to say this again slowly: The network is the wires and antennas and stuff. The Internet is the way information is organised to travel across it.

More to the point, the Internet is a very specific way for data to travel across it:

• It doesn’t rely on a middle-man. I might choose to use Facebook for chat, but I don’t have to. I could connect straight to your computer or phone and chat away.
• It doesn’t need a road map. In effect, the data packets just go hitch-hiking across the network with a sign saying ‘San José’ – or whatever.
• It doesn’t see borders the same way some other network protocols do. In fact, that’s why it’s an Inter net: Because it routes traffic between different networks.

Once more:

• Internet = you & me talking.
• Network = the road system that allows you and me to get together to talk.

There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

Oh, as long as I’m being pedantic: It’s Internet-with-a-capital-I. It’s a proper noun referring to a very specific thing. It’s like a country with all the geography taken out. It still has to have a capital.