OLPC Q&A
There’s been a ton of interest in the OLPC laptop ever since the Vanuatu IT User Society (VITUS) obtained a prototype to demonstrate to people here in Vanuatu. A few readers will have already attended one of the VITUS demonstrations. In the interests of raising awareness about this new approach to learning technology, here are a few common questions and answers about the laptop, the project, and OLPC-related activities in Vanuatu.
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Category Archives: geek
Talking Technology
This week’s column starts with a mea culpa. The column about Microsoft’s meeting with the Ministry of Education raised some eyebrows, and both Ministry employees and individuals wrote in to point out that there were inaccuracies in the reporting. They rightly observed that the author did not attend the meeting in question, and was therefore presenting hearsay evidence. While efforts were made to corroborate the details presented, it is an unfortunate truth that no public record was available. If any of the facts were incorrectly reported, the responsibility for this lies entirely with the author.
In the course of discussions about how to properly correct the record, two points kept recurring, both explicitly and implicitly: So-called ‘geeks’ often focus far too much on technology and not nearly enough on what it’s actually for. Additionally, there’s often a lot of talk – some might say too much talk – based on speculation. Making blithe assumptions can spell disaster for any project, but those with high-tech as a principle ingredient are even more prone to failure because of their inherent complexity.
Software and the New Colonialism
A colleague of mine recently attended a meeting between the Ministry of Education and representatives for a new initiative sponsored by Microsoft. On the face of it, the offer on the table was compelling: Microsoft Windows and Office licenses for sale at about 700 vatu each for educational institutions. Huge investment in flagship schools in Vanuatu, with hundreds of new PCs in total running all the latest software at prices never seen before. How could anyone refuse?
Microsoft is not the only company to come to the sudden realisation that there are about 5 billion people out there who don’t buy their product. Many major IT corporations have taken a look at the mature European and North American markets and decided to begin developing markets elsewhere in the world.
It’s a great opportunity for them. Junior and intermediate managers trying to make a name for themselves are leading the exploration. Rather than navigate the shark-infested waters of corporate HQ, they’re establishing new territories, trying out new tactics and creating new opportunities for themselves and their customers.
This is not a bad thing in and of itself. But it does need to be understood.
A Matter of Trust
“We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know, because they have never deceived us.” These words belong to Samuel Johnson, a wise man indeed. St. Augustine looked at things from the other side and famously observed, “Familiarity breeds contempt.”
We in Vanuatu have a distinct advantage over our neighbours in other countries. Our community is small enough that we can really get to know the movers and shakers in our society. It may take us time to become familiar with them, but if we have a mind to, we can learn the quirks and the capabilities of most of the people and organisations who can influence Vanuatu’s course and its future.
Pink Dolphins
Pink dolphins are my idea, and I refuse to let anyone else think of them. Anybody who does think of pink dolphins must pay a royalty fee for each time they think of pink dolphins, multiplied by the number of pink dolphins they think of.
That last paragraph is a simple – and absurd – example of why so-called intellectual property is an oxymoron. If it’s intellectual, it can’t be property. The concept is based on the premise that ideas can be treated as things, and that’s just not true.
Reality Check
Jason Hiner at Tech Republic has written an article entitled “How Microsoft beat Linux in China and what it means for freedom, justice, and the price of software.” He contends that Microsoft’s ‘victory’ over Linux in China is total.
But what kind of a victory are we talking about here? Well, they gave away access to their crown jewels, the source code:
“In 2003, Microsoft began a program that allowed select partners to view the source code of Windows, and even make some modifications. China was one of 60 countries invited to join the program.”
They cut prices drastically:
“Microsoft got serious about competing on price by offering the Chinese government its Windows and Office software for an estimated $7-$10 per seat (in comparison to $100-$200 per seat in the U.S., Europe, and other countries).”
And they caved completely on piracy and so-called Intellectual Property enforcement:
“Microsoft’s initial strategy was to work to get intellectual property laws enforced in China, but that was an unmitigated disaster. Microsoft realized that it was powerless to stop widespread piracy in China, so it simply threw up the white flag.”
So what exactly did Microsoft win, again? This article is rife with untested assumptions. Let’s establish a bit of context here before going too far.
Randall Biliki, 1963 – 2007
I just found out at Randall Biliki has died, apparently murdered in an attack on his family.
I met Randall for a brief time, when he came to Vanuatu to help get the ball rolling on our leg of the People First Network. He was a conscientious, quiet individual whose intelligence quickly made itself shown through the clarity of his questions and comments. He was always tactful and soft-spoken, so perfectly disarming that I thought he was one of those people who would always sail through smooth waters.
I’m going to Honiara next month for the annual PACINET conference, a regional ICT get-together sponsored by the Pacific Islands Chapter of the Internet Society (PICISOC). I was really looking forward to buying him a beer (he didn’t like the kava at all). Now I’ll have to go and pay my respects to his family, if they haven’t fled Honiara.
A note about PFNet – they were virtually the only media presence on the ground during the civil strife in the Solomon Islands, and their Internet café was for some time the sole means of communication with the outside world for a number of people.
Randall, David Leeming, David Ma’ai and many others created a viable nation-wide communications network using technology that most others thought beneath them. Comparing their approach[*] with, for example, an Asian Development Bank-funded telecentre (at USD 125,000 a pop) provides an object lesson in sensible, sustainable development.
People often toss about the phrase ‘He will be missed‘ when speaking of the dead. But Randall’s death does exact a price. It can be measured directly in the ability of people on some of the remotest islands of the world to speak with one another.
This is probably the final straw for the Vanuatu extension of the project. Randall was to have come in and help run things for the first six months. I honestly don’t know how it can get off the ground without him around.
Gates vs Shuttleworth
Some childish name-calling recently erupted on a forum that I frequent, which resulted in a philanthropy pissing contest. Some people said Bill Gates is saving lives through his generousity; some said Mark Shuttleworth is building futures.
Some were silly enough to suggest that Ubuntu is just a bunch of geeks getting their rocks off playing with their tech toys.
I replied:
I work in development, in a country that’s internationally known as a malaria hotspot. Several people I know are employed by Gates Foundation money, and everyone here agrees that this is a Good Thing. But there’s a limit to how much good this kind of thing can do.
One friend of mine once politely mentioned to a Gates Foundation researcher that we don’t really need to know much more about malaria in this country. All we really need is trained and equipped medical staff within a day’s walk of every man, woman and child. Malaria isn’t a terribly dangerous disease if it’s treated properly. I’ve had it myself, by the way, so I know whereof I speak.
The big problem in disease prevention around the world is an almost unbelievable shortage of health workers and medicines. Very little is being done to address these fundamental issues. Here’s an interesting series of facts:
- Number of new doctors sub-Saharan Africa would need for its per-capita number to match America’s: 3,900,000
- Number of new doctors produced by sub-Saharan Africa’s universities each year: 4,000
(Source: Harper’s Index.)
Again, I respect the work being done by the Gates Foundation, and I’ve seen its benefits with my own eyes. But to assume that those people working to try and improve education and communications are not involved in something equally vital is a little silly. In fact, it smacks of a holier-than-thou attitude that tends to tarnish most donor-driven projects, and often results in people chasing sexy aid projects at the expense of boring things like making sure that the local nurse has enough pills for everyone, and can order more when he needs them.
Web Standards – A Rant
It’s very common on Slashdot and other, er, technical fora, to see people make assertions like the following:
“IE extensions [of existing standards] have proven to be a very good thing for the web overall. It has always been IE that has pushed the limits of dynamic web pages through the inclusion of similar extensions (primarily for the development of Outlook Web Access) which have given birth to the technologies that fuel AJAX and other modern web techniques.“
What an interesting viewpoint. I couldn’t disagree more.
The ‘Embrace and Extend’ strategy on which Microsoft has relied since about 1998 is designed to be divisive and ultimately to support Microsoft’s one interest: by hook or by crook, to land everyone on the Microsoft platform. They worked with little or no support or cooperation from any other body[*] and more often than not used their position to subvert the activities of others. They published competing specifications and duplicated functionality through their own proprietary implementations.
Now before we go any further, it’s important to remember that this strategy was dressed up nicely, spoken about politely in marketing euphemisms and was seldom openly disparaging of competing technologies. It is also important to note that very few of the people actually responsible for the creation and fostering of standards ever felt anything but frustration and animosity toward these efforts to subvert the process. I’ve seen such luminaries as Lawrence Lessig and Sir Tim Berners Lee stand up in public fora and state in absolutely unambiguous terms that ‘this MS technology is the single biggest threat faced by the web today.’ (WWW Conference, Amsterdam 2000, for those who care).
It’s true that there are some who have argued for accomodation, and while they’ve achieved short-term gains (RSS and SOAP, for example), the recent announcement of MS-only implementations and extensions of these standards offers further evidence that MS’ intentions are anything but benevolent.
Now, some may trot out the sorry old argument that a corporation’s job is to profit and damn the ethical/legal torpedoes, but the fact is that to most of the people working in standards, this is not the goal. Believe it or not, most of us actually care about the community, and feel that the way things are implemented is just as important as what gets done. So feel free to act as apologist for the soulless corporate machine if you must, but please, don’t pretend that that’s the only way things can be made to work.
Microsoft (and Netscape in its time) are not only guilty of skewing standards in their favour. They’re also guilty of something far more insidious: the infection of the application space with software designed to lock people into their proprietary approach to things. Often enough, the design is fatally compromised in the process. The example cited above, Outlook Web Access, is a prime example of how to break things in the name of lock-in.
Here’s a quick summary of just some of the ways in which Outlook Web Access, which encapsulates email access inside HTTP and passes it through ports 80/443 by default, is technically broken:
- Caching proxy servers might or might not do the right thing – behaviour here is undefined
- Traffic/network analysis is subverted
- Security is compounded, as activity patterns have to be checked on more, not fewer ports (think about it)
- Likewise, security audits are far more difficult, as traffic has to be disambiguated
- Security is subverted, users can simply tunnel high volume traffic through to (at least) the DMZ with no guarantee that it’s being inspected (i.e. no one catches that the traffic is neither going to the web nor the Exchange server; each one assumes it’s going to the other and that it’s ‘okay’. Same goes with large volumes of outgoing information.)
- Deliberate bypassing of firewall policies, promoting insecure configurations (e.g. pushing things through ports 80 and 443 as a matter of informal policy, reducing the firewall to an ornament)
- Buggier software due to additional complexity
- Non-standard, meaning (little or) nothing else will support it
- Promotes software lock-in, which has cost and management implications
- Promotes monoculture, which has cost, management and *security* implications
- Protocols exist for this purpose already
That last point is the key. Why on earth would MS build an entirely new way to get one’s email when secure IMAP or POP3 already exist? Microsoft doesn’t particularly care about doing things better, they just want to make sure that their customers do things differently. Quality is seldom a concern, and as a result, it’s usually a casualty.
[*] It’s true that they were – and remain – members of such organisations as the World Wide Web Consortium.
NSA for Dummies
There’s been a lot of discussion recently about the NSA eavesdropping programme, which reportedly has been surveilling US citizens without first getting a warrant. In one of these discussions, someone asked:
What’s the worst case scenario? How big could it be?
That’s a really good question. It occurs to me that no one has really attempted to address this yet in layman’s terms, so here goes….