Category Archives: wonk

Systemd and The Unix Way

What follows is not for the benefit of systemd supporters. I write it because somewhere out there In the wilds of the internet, there might still be some youngster with a clue who needs to get this:

Systemd, OOP and a number of other technologies have been touted by people who have a curious mixture of cleverness and a lack of imagination or experience (something altogether too common in the world of software development). They claim that because they have solved a problem, they are therefore entitled to use the same approach to Solve All Problems Ever. So instead of exercising a little humility and moving their work ahead in a way that’s accepting of other approaches, they charge in full speed, damn the torpedoes and devil take the hindmost.

It happened with Microsoft and ActiveX. It happened with Object Oriented Programming languages – most notably with Java: there was a time when it was hard to find work programming in anything else. It happened, to a smaller degree, with design patterns. You can find numerous other examples if you search for them.

It’s happening again today with systemd. Continue reading →

There’s no app for that

Putting responsibility for our children in the hands of governments and corporations is just wrong

In recent years, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has been drumming up support for surveillance and censorship. They do it under the guise of creating measures to protect children and stop what they call cyber-crime. But what they advocate is nothing short of a toolkit fit for a police state.

I’d love to be able to say that I’m overstating the case. I’d love to find out that the technologies and legal levers that are being proffered by the ITU and various other agencies were never used for anything other than good. I’d also love a pony.

I’ve written before about the fractious relationship between the ITU and the technical organisations that actually do run the internet. I’ve written about how Pacific island governments and societies can come to terms with surveillance and censorship. I’ve even talked about this push by the ITU, extending across the developing world, to drum up support for its vision of the internet as a fenced and orderly place. More to the point, I’ve already written about where it leads.

But just last week, at a conference discussing the protection of critical IT infrastructure, I watched a presenter describing the creation of a computer incident response team (in ITU jargon, a CIRT) based on a model adopted by some of the least free countries in the world. This was presented without apology or explanation. Continue reading →

THE WAIT – Healthcare in Vanuatu

A young woman shows off her chest X ray after a visit to the Peace Ark, a Chinese PLA Navy hospital ship. photo: Graham Crumb - imagicity.com

A young woman shows off her chest X ray after a visit to the Peace Ark, a Chinese PLA Navy hospital ship. photo: Graham Crumb – imagicity.com

The failures of Vanuatu’s health services are felt by everyone. But these shortcomings are particularly vivid to me today. As I was working on PiPP’s latest multimedia story on the state of health care in Vanuatu, I buried two friends on consecutive days. I have not the slightest doubt that they would both be alive today if they lived in Auckland or Sydney.

Danny Tetiano and Dr John Otto Ondawame were both influential, important people. One was a gifted musician, mentor to a generation of aspiring artists in Vanuatu. The other, of course, was one of the leaders of the West Papuan independence movement. In addition to the loss to society and to the world, both left grieving widows and young children behind.

To put it plainly, Danny and John died of poverty, not disease.

The cost to society is immense. One of the very reasons West Papuans have struggled to organise themselves and become a well-defined locus of international attention is the lack of well-educated, dynamic people, skilled in persuasion and diplomacy. They lack entrepreneurs to improve prosperity, education to create the entrepreneurs, and health services to preserve and protect them.

The lack of basic services is characterised as systemic abuse when Indonesian government policy is concerned. But how should we characterise such neglect in Vanuatu?

Health services in Vanuatu – there is no health system, per se – are rudimentary at best. Post-operative infection rates make even the most run-of-the-mill surgery a cause for concern. One long-time acquaintance died following the amputation of his big toe. A well-intentioned (but unforgivably vague) blog post by the UNDP raises the point that life expectancy in Vanuatu and other Pacific island countries is ten years less than in Australia and New Zealand.

Ten years, and three hours flight away.

The difference is quantum. It’s at once tantalisingly close and achingly distant. But the bitter lesson that I’ve learned this week, and repeatedly in the past, is that the cost of inactivity is not an abstract one. Death impacts directly on a nation’s ability to grow, to gain experience, and ultimately to survive.

Honour is respectable

Vanuatu’s first prime minister Walter Lini famously said, ‘respect is honourable.’ The phrase is often quoted today by people from all walks of life as a means of recalling the best aspects of Vanuatu society: its use of deference and respect as an integral part of community peace-making. Modern influences have transformed kastom in many ways, but respect is still held tightly to the national breast.

We might do well, though, to turn the phrase around.

It must be said that traditional life in Vanuatu is indeed happy… for those men who survive their first five years in comparatively good health. And some women may be content living within the confines of their village roles. But like it or not, that life is no longer available to a growing number of people.

If we include people living in peri-urban areas around Port Vila and Santo, census figures show nearly a 10% change in the urban/rural population ratio between 1999 and the last complete census in 2009. Much of this change is composed of the so-called youth bulge – a growing number of young adults with limited opportunities both in the modern economy and in traditional life.

These are not the only source of discontent. Household dynamics are increasingly complex. Domestic relationships, both formal and informal, are more fluid –and generally more violent– than they were. This is largely a result of the clash between the de facto status of women as chattels, and women’s increased economic independence, and thence mobility, in the modern economy.

Men and women both are no longer subject to the social and geographical confines of village life. Mobility and distance undermine traditions that have sustained Melanesian societies since time immemorial. The coercive or corrective power of community scrutiny recedes once it becomes possible to evade the villagers’ gaze. The village’s role as collective conscience has been eroded and, to date, nothing has arisen to take its place.

At all levels of society, the dwindling power of social pressure leads to behaviour that once might have been unconscionable. Legal and regulatory checks go unheeded and national institutions teeter on the edge of dissolution.

But kastom is a resilient term. It has survived thousands of years of challenge and changing circumstance; it has managed to remain a viable idea throughout even the last two centuries of transformation. There is no reason to believe it won’t survive the changing economic and social conditions of the present day. Continue reading →

The potholed road to prosperity

Originally published on Pacific Politics

Vanuatu’s budget books, released earlier this month, reveal a fairly healthy economy. When you look at the broad strokes, that is. But they are far less revealing than they should be about the road ahead for the tiny island nation.

Overall, the economic news is okay. Revenues have improved significantly, largely because customs and inland revenue has tightened up its processes. Businesses are now closer to paying what they actually owe. The world economy is improving, and so is Vanuatu’s. Growth is expected to increase, from 3.3% in 2013 to 5.1% in 2014, and even higher in 2015. Inflation will remain low, likely less than 3% in the coming year. The government is taking on USD 5 million in new debt in order to contribute to a number of largely donor-funded infrastructure projects.

But dig a little deeper, and things appear less rosy. The budget does little to reflect the government’s goal of ‘a Just, an Educated, Healthy and Wealthy Vanuatu’. Overspending on scholarships in 2013 has not only left the department of education constrained at the very moment when it should be investing heavily in teachers, schools and educational resources, it’s diverted money from other areas as well.

In health, things don’t look so good either. Whatever we may think about the department’s recent decision to focus on medicine to the exclusion of other activities, it’s clear that much could be done to improve the ministry’s policy-making and implementation processes. A recent outbreak of dengue in Port Vila has caught it flat-footed. The cost in terms of medical care and, potentially, in lives, will only add to the nation’s burden.

Vanuatu managed to get through the recent global economic downturn with less damage than some of its neighbours. Some part of this is due to the government’s efforts in recent years to liberalise certain sectors, to improve conditions for businesses large and small, and to improve its own administrative processes as well. The result is that the country is a better place to do business than it was.

But we’re facing a welter of challenges still. The 2010 census contains stark evidence that the country is becoming increasingly urbanised. When peri-urban neighbourhoods like those surrounding the Port Vila and Luganville municipalities are factored in, we see that the old 80/20% rural/urban split no longer holds. Over the last few years, falling commodity prices and lack of opportunity have drawn more and more young adults into our towns. Back in 2010, the division was closer to 70/30, and based on observation alone, it’s clear that this trend is continuing at a rapid pace. Continue reading →

Talking Shop

The Internet Governance Forum is sprawling, unfocused and formally useless. You should go.

I hate talking shops. Most sensible people do. If you are involved in any way in policy making, advocacy –or heck, if you just have to work for a living– the last thing you want to do is waste time talking. The Internet Governance Forum is a global conference that draws together governments, telecommunications interests, standards & technical management bodies, NGOs & social development groups… well, pretty much everyone who gives a fig about the internet. It was one of very few tangible results to emerge from the 2003 World Summit on the Internet Society, a UN-sponsored get-together that attempted (and ultimately failed) to address a widely-held perception of US dominance of the internet’s governance structures.

The IGF, quite deliberately, was designed to have no regulatory authority, no policy levers and indeed, no formal mandate to advocate even for issues about which the entire world is in screaming agreement. It can’t even publish findings. And that is its genius.

It’s a sprawling, unfocused event with disparate interests. Discussions cover everything and anything even remotely related to internet governance, from human rights and freedom of speech to child protection to spam and cyber security to standards development and law. It draws thousands of attendees from all walks of life. It’s uneven in quality and sessions range from the enlightened meeting of minds to fractious verbal brawls. As Winston Churchill might have said, it’s the worst possible forum we could possibly have, except for all the others. Continue reading →

Buddies in bad times

Pacific island countries could –and should– do more to help one another

[Originally published on Pacific Politics.]

The recent breakdown of Vodaphone Fiji’s investment in Papua New Guinea’s BeMobile is just the most recent in a series of missed opportunities in cross-investment that could not only improve small island economies, but mitigate against some of the worst aspects of large-scale development projects in the Pacific.

Pacific island nations possess a chronic, unfixable weakness: With few exceptions, their economies are so small and fragile that a failure which might cause only ripples in a larger economy can hamstring theirs for years. Furthermore, their diminutive markets make them unappealing to most investors. Although they’re often put in the same basket as Caribbean states, their distance from other markets renders them unique – and in the eyes of many, uniquely unsuited for investment.

It serves no one’s interests to imagine that the development and financial approaches that work well in other developing states can simply be cut-and-pasted into the Pacific. And yet, far too often, this is the hole into which our development pegs are hammered. Although development banks and donor nations offer loans at extremely low interest rates, the assumptions under which funding is offered are sometimes unrealistic. And because return on investment is generally smaller than just about anywhere else on the planet, governments are expected to offer either guarantees or exclusive concession rights to investors, or to become shareholders themselves, and sometimes both.

Continue reading →

Surveillance, censorship & secrecy – island style

Global villagers could learn a thing or two about information security from Pacific island societies

[Originally published on Pacific Politics.]

It’s telling, and rather tragic, that even after the lessons of Wikileaks, democratic governments have still not learned how to deal with secrets. Ask a Pacific islander, and he’ll tell you how. If he trusts you. It’s high time for global villagers to take a seat by the fire and take a lesson on surveillance, censorship and secrecy from societies that have been using them as their stock in trade for nearly 3000 years.

Viewed from this side of the lagoon, one of the most startling aspects of the Manning and Snowden scandals is that people, organisations and entire governments were taken utterly by surprise by the breakdown of secrecy. If it weren’t so damaging, the US’s flailing reaction would be comical. The Obama administration’s actions resemble nothing so much as a grasping debutante whose connivances have been exposed mid-cotillion. Swearing vengeance, warning others off from even talking to the tale-teller, harping shrilly about the damage, the harm, the lost integrity – it’s all a bit much, really. Unfortunately, this particular prom queen has nukes.

Continue reading →

THIS is how you do posterity

I just posted this to Facebook, but they deliberately design their service as a memory hole, so….

Facebook is designed as a memory hole. Its search tools are crippled and external search engines are not allowed a look in. The manner in which posts and comments are displayed is predicated on their ephemerality. We -they- are deliberately repudiating posterity.

It galls me to no end that I have to bitch about this on Facebook in order for it to be seen. Nobody will even remember I said it….

End of an age….

In an online discussion concerning an ‘old-school’ geek’s fear of change, there was a lot of back and forth concerning luddism on the one hand and change for change’s sake on the other. At one point, someone chastised the poster for his trepidation.

“I’m going to guess he’s going to look back on his life and realize that he was dumb to think he’d seen it all at age 24. He talks as though the Third Age of Middle Earth is ending…”

In some important ways, it is. The process isn’t complete, but there is a fundamental change happening, and it will discomfit some of us.

The days of ‘Homesteading the Noosphere‘ (as ESR put it), are coming to a close. Scale, network topologies, business models and legal encroachment on the principles of individual online freedom are all conspiring to make the technological world we live in substantially more constrained than it’s been since the internet became part of our lives.

The land rush is over, the cowboys are gone (either buried or rich) and the homesteaders are being bought out by the speculators and tycoons. Community-based governance is under siege by national and international interests.

And this is being reflected in the tech world. The craftsman’s approach to software (always greater in repute than in reality) is decidedly more difficult to practice as a trade than it was. Toolkits are giving way to frameworks and apps replace applications. Backyard-mechanic roadsters and dirt-track races are swallowed up by Nascar – VCs get us excited by the prospect of building only big enough to sell out to someone bigger.

The physical networks themselves are being taken back by the telcos and proffered to governments for surveillance in exchange for ever more egregious rent-seeking behaviour. What we used to call sharing is now piracy. The word ‘copyright’ now means ‘don’t copy at all, ever.’

And in the midst of it all, we’re grateful to lockin-vendors who make Free software difficult, if not impossible, to use. We rent what we used to own. Even our identities are no longer our own.

I grieve to say it, but unless there’s a sudden and immense resurgence of the DIY spirit, especially in peer networking and distributed data, we’re going to fall back into the bad old days of the dumb terminal and the smart network. And that network’s smarts will not exist for our benefit.

I’m pushing 50 now, and do I fear change? Not really. I just regret the lost freedom, the creative anarchy of the ’90s, the ability to hack something cool and new, the chance to achieve things never before possible. It’s not gone yet. We could still turn things around. But every day we don’t brings us a day closer to the day when we can’t any longer.