Category Archives: geek

Science & Virtue

There’s a new article out from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, which suggests that scientists don’t communicate very well with the public. Among the observations:

“Perhaps scientists are misunderstanding the public…due to their own quirks, assumptions, and patterns of behavior,” suggests [Chris Moody, a science journalist.]  Laypeople, meanwhile, tend to “strain their responses to scientific controversies through their ethical or value systems, as well as through their political or ideological outlooks.”

That’s the crux of the problem right there. What’s changed is not our tendency to filter everything through our own personal strain of moral and ethical judgment. What’s changed is what that moral and ethical fibre is composed of these days: fear, cynical distrust and an assumption of dishonesty.

It’s not communication skills that we’re short on, it’s moral and intellectual honesty.

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Wikileaks – Who Cares?

Glenn Greenwald builds the case that bad boy hacker Adrian Lamo deliberately duped and betrayed Spc Bradley Manning, the young soldier notorious for having leaked the ‘Collateral Murder‘ video depicting an Apache helicopter crew gunning down unarmed civilians as they tried to aid a wounded journalist in Baghdad.

In the discussion on Slashdot, someone asks if this isn’t just a distraction from the real story?

That’s what’s bugging me here as well. Who cares how the footage was released? The important thing is WHY we have soldiers killing unarmed civilians.

I do. I care a lot. Why does someone have to face a lifetime in prison just to allow us to discuss ‘WHY we have soldiers killing unarmed civilians’?

Greenwald posits that ‘distractions’ like Manning’s may actually be deliberately manifestations of Pentagon Policy.

Whatever the merits of that argument, the fact that someone had to break the law to show a commonplace incident in the so-called War on Terror can be viewed as a sad commentary on the state of censorship in our time, or (if you’re an optimist) an affirmation that, despite a culture of secrecy, information really does want to be free.

In either case, Greenwald’s conjecture is that Manning really was genuinely motivated by his conscience and that his ‘confessor’ Lamo rewarded his honesty with lies, venality and betrayal. I find his case as presented compelling but not conclusive.

Greenwald’s larger point about wikileaks, however, is, I think, irrefutable:

The reason this story matters so much — aside from the fact that it may be the case that a truly heroic, 22-year-old whistle-blower is facing an extremely lengthy prison term — is the unique and incomparably valuable function WikiLeaks is fulfilling. Even before the Apache helicopter leak, I wrote at length about why they are so vital, and won’t repeat all of that here. Suffice to say, there are very few entities, if there are any, which pose as much of a threat to the ability of governmental and corporate elites to shroud their corrupt conduct behind an extreme wall of secrecy.

As others will no doubt suggest, whistle blowers should understand the consequences of their actions, accepting the sometimes inevitable retribution that follows in order to serve the public good. That does not, however, excuse what Greenwald characterises as ‘despicable’ behaviour by Lamo. If this account proves true, then Lamo really is a sick, sorry individual.

I find this whole story compelling precisely because it demonstrates the stakes involved in something as simple as telling the truth. Secrecy and Transparency both are costly and dangerous when we wander too far towards either end of the continuum.

Stories like Manning’s allow us the opportunity to gauge where we are in that continuum and the price of remaining there.

Stuck in the Middle with Neil

Oy. Neil McAllister is at it again, saving the online world by describing how Mom & Pop shops can compete with the Amazons of the world. With retail giants like Tesco and even Sears building out programming interfaces (APIs) that will allow people to buy mattresses and microwave ovens with their mobile phones (srsly. ed.) , he claims that small businesses are more vulnerable than ever.

(You know, I once thought Fatal Exception was a quirky title for a column, but now I realise it’s just an accurate description of the cognitive processes of its author.)

McAllister writes:

Ask any company that hosts an open source software project how many outsiders actually commit code changes on a regular basis and you’re likely to hear a discouraging figure.

His conclusion is that low uptake makes opening APIs a high risk activity. That’s as may be, but isn’t it equally possible that these organisations aren’t successful because they’re doing it wrong?

Unless I have some kind of moral ownership stake in the project (such as I might have if I maintained a Linux software package, for example) what incentive to I have to invest my time? I understand the reasons for it, but many large businesses today are notoriously unreliable when it comes to strategy. Driven as they are by quarterly returns and subject to the whim of an increasingly sociopathic class of managers driven by MBA culture to abstract all decisions into monetary terms, why in the hell should I, the lowly FOSS developer, want to hitch my wagon to their star?

(More accurately, they’re asking me to hitch my horse to their wagon, without giving me any say on the destination or even the route.)

There are a few organisations who really get how community relations and management work, but they are a tiny minority. The overwhelming majority baulk when they come to the realisation that FOSS means sharing ownership and control.

None of this is news to us geeks. What gets me riled up about this article is that someone who should know better spends his time chiding FOSS processes for being inappropriate to business status quo instead of explaining to business how they’ve got to adapt to a new set of circumstances.

The reason McAllister doesn’t want to say that is because he’s holding out for a new set of actors in the online world: Middlemen who build out standardised (but presumably proprietary) API and data management services for small and medium businesses so they can keep up with the Amazons and Tescos of the world without having to build their own data infrastructure.

McAllister is, in other words, trying to reinvent the Distributor in an environment that was invented precisely to remove the need for intermediaries. My only response is to apply an aphorism from another age of commercially appropriated social phenomena: ‘You’ve come a long way, baby.‘

Disaster? What Disaster?

Neil McAllister seems to think we’re on the brink of an abyss. Digital Armageddon is just around the corner, because business’ increasing reliance on pure information makes them liable to meltdown should they sufficiently mismanage it.

But what I’d like to know -and what McAllister conveniently forgets to mention- is: What, exactly, constitutes a ‘True Data Disaster?’

Are we talking about a leak that effectively kills a company’s credibility dead? I don’t think so, because if incompetence or data mismanagement had any kind of real-world relationship with a company’s success, Yahoo!, Amazon, TJX and Heartland Payment Systems and dozens of others would at very least have suffered losses in stock value following their colossally poor management practices.

Are we talking criminal abuse of private information? If that were the case, then Microsoft, Yahoo! and all the nation’s telcos (save Qwest) should be facing imminent demise because of their complicity in the unconstitutional breach of their customers’ privacy in the US Government’s domestic spying programme.

Are we talking straight-up data loss? If so, then Microsoft (hmm, that name keeps coming up) should have taken a dive when they managed quite literally to lose all of Danger Networks’ data.

Or are we talking non-performance and generalised uselessness on a scale that beggars comprehension? If that were the case, then why do large consultancies still manage to win multi-million dollar contracts that suck up centuries of developer time and never actually deliver a thing? Think of the FBI’s famous foray into modernisation, the now-legendary death of the UK’s online medical database and any of a hundred other projects that ended up entirely written off (to the tune of 100s of millions each) without so much as a downward tick in the value of the contracting companies involved.

It seems that in the esoteric world of noughts and ones, belief matters far more than empirical truth, making a true Data Disaster literally inconceivable.

There can’t be a Data Disaster today, because we can’t imagine what one would look like. Likewise, there won’t be a Data Disaster until we become capable of realising that they’re all around us, happening every day.

Plus ca change…

When I arrived in Vanuatu about 7 years ago, uptake on Internet was limited to a small minority. Prices were about 10 times what I’d been paying at home, and the total amount of available bandwidth nationally was only slightly more than I’d had on my own personal DSL line.

Now, in 2010, we’ve spent the better part of a decade helping people get online, getting people in front of computers and teaching them to make the most of the learning and social opportunities that the Internet provides.

The recent release of Ookla’s Household Download Index allows us to measure how far we, as a nation, have come.

Uptake on Internet is still limited to a tiny minority. The pool of Internet users has risen substantially in real numbers, but as a percentage of population, the numbers are still so small that, in a recent national telecoms survey, the researchers declined even to ask about Internet. The data set was too small to be relevant.

Prices today have effectively risen, megabit for megabit, relative to developed markets. Oh, they’ve dropped from the stratospheric levels they used to inhabit (US $1000/month for 128 Kbps and a 100 MB download limit). But you still pay over US $500/month for a single megabit which, occasionally, actually delivers a megabit of bandwidth. When it works.

Most depressing of all, the total amount of bandwidth available for the entire country is only slightly more than the average bandwidth capacity of a single household in Seoul, Korea.

Let me say that again: There are people in Seoul – and countless other cities in the world – who have more bandwidth at their personal disposal than a quarter of a million people here in the Pacific.

Pent-up demand for Internet is easily on the same scale as we’ve witnessed for mobile telephony services these last two years. Informal markers (like the average number of facebook friends among ni-Vanuatu Internet users) show that people love the potential of the Internet and will go to lengths to access it.

But nobody is willing to actually invest in it.

Even Digicel Vanuatu, who over a year ago imported a new CTO with extensive wireless Internet experience, have yet to provide an offering viable for day-to-day use even for the average expat customer.

Frankly, I find it depressing that, in spite of years of advocacy, lobbying and awareness-raising, the movers and shakers here in Vanuatu don’t appear to have learned a thing about the importance of either communications or technology.

Invention

Once everyone had a replicator – everyone would replicate the newest, coolest, best car.

And nobody would pay for it.

And the people who design cars wouldn’t have money to keep designing cars. And all of the advancement and innovation that we’ve seen since the first car and now would grind to a halt.

This is the cornerstone of the argument for so-called Intellectual Property. If I can’t find some way of extracting money from my invention, I won’t invent. The only way to extract money from an invention is via legal monopoly. Breach of legal monopoly is therefore theft because it denies me my rightful reward.

The logic fails at every step.

As many a creator has discovered, invention is its own reward. Or compulsion, if you prefer. Invention using computers is even more rewarding because, having built a thing once, we can effortlessly and endlessly replicate it. As well as alleviating that peculiar ‘itch’ that drives much of human creativity, digital inventors sometimes are indulged with community approbation and, occasionally, a pretty good chunk of change.

People invent because it’s an innate part of human nature. So is jealousy, of course, so it’s more natural for us to talk about ‘my’ idea than it is to talk about ‘an’ idea. Like three-year-olds, we exchange ideas, insights and other intellectual tidbits in exchange for social advancement. And, like three-year-olds, the recipients of the wit and invention of others honour the implicit contract: We express our delight and appreciation; we (mostly) attribute the idea properly; we reward it even in the absence of a contract.

Especially in the absence of a contract, I should say. Somebody who wants their reward up-front is usually resented and occasionally ridiculed.

But when, despite our best efforts, recognition and social advancement are not forthcoming, we try harder, not less. We change our conception of reward. We change our audience.

We do everything except stop inventing.

Snippet

I came across something all too rare these days – a viewpoint well expressed, cogent and thought-provoking:

“We are turning into the society Burke feared. One dominated by emotive, shallow views which applies naive levelling reason to all problems it encounters. This is why our prisons are filling up as crime goes down; why our internet is being censored even as our society becomes more tolerant; why our politics becomes more polarised even as our political parties become more homogeneous. And it is why we seek to gather vast, unprecedented amounts of data about ourselves without bothering to really try and use it, or to consider the consequences of doing so.”

The context is interesting as well: a discussion, cutely titled “The Data-Driven Life“, about the prevalence – and often-unintended influences – of surveillance and data-gathering in modern society. I don’t ever expect much from a Wired writer – or from most commentators on technology – but if nothing else, it provided the catalysis for that plump little gem above.

NEWS FLASH – TVL, Digicel Merge, Announce Joint Venture

[Yes, this is an April Fools’ story. Any relation to actual people or events is purely satirical. ed.]

April 1, 2010 – Port Vila

In a move that stunned the telecommunications industry, Digicel Pacific and Telecom Vanuatu Ltd. have announced a merger, simultaneously unveiling a massive Internet project that could revolutionise communications across the entire Pacific ‘Ring of Fire.’

Jacky Audebeau, CTO of the new joint venture, to be named TeleDigiVanuaCel Ltd., announced the plan at a press conference at the Forari Mine site this morning.

“We’re confident that this joint venture will provide us with the resources necessary to utterly change the way people communicate throughout the Pacific region,” he said.

The plan uses the strong magnetic resonance found in magma chambers buried deep under the Earth’s surface. By inserting large antennas deep underground, the project aims to create signals by generating massive radio waves and transmitting them through these subterranean chambers at
nearly light speed.

Asked whether early work on this technology had anything to do with the recent increase in activity in all of Vanuatu’s volcanoes, Audebeau looked sheepish and muttered only that sometimes to have to break a few omelettes to lay an egg.

The joint venture came about under unusual circumstances, said Audebeau. Apparently, he ran into new Digicel Pacific owner Denis O’Brien at Port Vila’s Anchor Inn last weekend, and a dispute arose over the relative merits of French wine and Irish Whiskey. After 3 hours of bitter dispute and extensive sampling, the two realised they should no longer fight.

“I couldn’t figure out which one of him to hit,” said Audebeau. “So I thought, ‘what the hey? If you can’t beat them, join them.’ Now somebody get me a glass of water and some panadol. I feel like I have fur on my brain.”

A spin-off company named Forari Online Operations Ltd (FOOL) will handle the funding and development of the Ameliorated Projection of Radio Into Lava (APRIL) technology.

Global Village or Digital Island?

A mother shows her daughter how to textElectronic media have been with us for a couple of lifetimes now, and many of the lessons that once seemed revolutionary, even world-changing, have been reduced to mundane platitudes. Here in Vanuatu, however, we would do well to relearn them. A new report from the Pacific Institute of Public Policy gives us that opportunity.

Marshall McLuhan’s rise to prominence as a cultural icon parallels that of television. Today, just like television, he is as widely lionised as he is misunderstood. Like credulous children, we toss around the terms he minted without a moment’s reflection. ‘The media’ has become a shibboleth for corporate commentary on the events of the day, filtered arbitrarily through a lens that sees no further than the next ratings cycle.

McLuhan saw this trend and feared it. Contrary to popular belief, his famous image of a global village was a pessimistic, almost despairing vision. A flickering television screen replaced the campfire at the centre of the human experience, but those huddled around it, seeking meaning in its seductive gaze, were as brutish and unreflective as he imagined early man to be.

It’s a shame he wasn’t around to see the how the rise of personal communications has subverted this dark vision. A new PiPP report, “Social and economic impact of introducing telecommunications throughout Vanuatu”, demonstrates unambiguously that access to personal communications has the power to change lives.

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