Something to keep an eye on.
Read and Pass
Seth Godin is always up to something amazing. He’s doing something over here you need to check out. [Halley’s Comment]
Category: Social Impact
How Many of These are In Your iPod?
Not all of them…yet.
This is the kind of thing that could get expensive. Fortunately, music industry execs are still so wrapped up in preventing people with no money from “stealing” music, that they make it hard for people like me with some disposable income to spend it as easily as I might (for which my wife is thankful). But any of these I can find at itunes will be on my iPod shortly.
How Many of These are In Your iPod?.
via Zannah: Palm Beach Post’s 50 best rock intros.
Congratulations Alan!
Congratulations indeed! I used to wish that Alan would publish more, but I finally realized that Alan’s choice was an engineer’s choice to build stuff because it was interesting and not worry about where the credit fell. Nice to know that nice guys practicing old fashioned ways can still win after all.
Congratulations to Alan Kay for winning 2004 Kyoto Prize in addition to the ACM Turing Prize and the NAE Draper Prize earlier. He’s really “cleaning up” this year. This is cool. He deserves it.
Hope this helps the Squeak project too!
By Joichi Ito joi_nospam_@nospam_ito.com. [Joi Ito’s Web]
Bill O’Reilly trying to bury his Fresh Air interview
Sounds like a plan to me. The 21st century is not going to be kind to control freaks or their lawyers.
Bill O’Reilly trying to bury his Fresh Air interview. Terry Gross conducted an extraordinary interview with notorious demagogue Bill O’Reilly on her Fresh Air last October (listen here). Now, O’Reilly is withholding permission for NPR to relicence portions of the program. Please tell all your friends about this interview and get them to listen to it, so that O’Reilly’s plan to bury the interview backfires and this becomes the definitive O’Reilly interview of all time. Link [Boing Boing]
High school, sex, the student press, and CNN
This was adjacent to the Dali quote item I just posted in my aggregator. Is it a job prerequisite that school administrators have no sense of humor?
High school, sex, the student press, and CNN. A longtime close friend, Mike Mahoney (we were both editors at the Sacramento Bee), penned an opinion piece in today’s Bee. Mike is now a high school English teacher and student paper adviser. Turns out Mike’s paper was at the… [JD’s New Media Musings]
Dali quote for the open copyright folks
It does make you wonder whether those most eager to wrap protections around ideas lear that they don’t have enough ideas. Reminds me of Linus Pauling’s observation that “the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.”
Dali quote for the open copyright folks.
In London, i went to the Dali exhibit. At the entrance, they had hundreds of “wacky” quotes by Dali about sex, his philosophy (and his belief that philosophy doesn’t exist), art and everything you could imagine. I came across one that made me immediately think of a few of the copyright crusaders that i know, so i thought i’d share:
Ideas are made to be copied. I have enough ideas to sell them on. I prefer that they are stolen so that i don’t have to actually use them myself.
It’s from an interview where he’s being asked about his art, copies and the public.
Easy DRM Stripping for Windows iTunes
Another approach to protecting your investment in your music library
Easy DRM Stripping for Windows iTunes. Use the Video Lan Client to generate your iTunes Music Store license key, then deDRMs to strip the copy protection–but not the personal information identifying you as the owner of the music–from protected .M4P songs. Although the deDRM interface is clunky, at best (drag and dropping individual files onto the… [Gizmodo]
Winner in the perfect weblog pitch competition
We have a winner! Judith has dutifully tabulated the results and Lee LeFever is the winner of the Perfect Pitch competition for the best “elevator pitch” on weblogs in the organization. Here’s his winning pitch:
First, think about the value of the Wall Street Journal to business leaders. The value it provides is context the Journal allows readers to see themselves in the context of the financial world each day, which enables more informed decision making.
With this in mind, think about your company as a microcosm of the financial world. Can your employees see themselves in the context of the whole company? Would more informed decisions be made if employees and leaders had access to internal news sources?
Weblogs serve this need. By making internal websites simple to update, weblogs allow individuals and teams to maintain online journals that chronicle projects inside the company. These professional journals make it easy to produce and access internal news, providing context to the company context that can profoundly affect decision making. In this way, weblogs allow employees and leaders to make more informed decisions through increasing their awareness of internal news and events.
You might also want to take a peek at the runners up:
Second Place Randal Moss
Third Place (tied) Michael Angeles & Jack Vinson
Judging Panelists:
Dave Pollard, Dina Mehta, Don Park, Flemming Funch, Jim McGee, Lilia Efimova, Martin Dugage, Phil Wolff, Ross Mayfield, Scott Allen, and Ton Zijlstra
The Dark Side of Numbers: The Role of Population Data Systems in Human Rights Abuses
Here’s an excellent and chilling example of the importance of thinking carefully about complex opportunities and problems. Technical rationality is too narrow a perspective to adopt in an interconnected world. At the same time, we can’t simply cede control to power elites that believe that either nothing or everything is possible with technology.
The Dark Side of Numbers: The Role of Population Data Systems in Human Rights Abuses..
Many people have heard me tell an anecdote that i learned while living in Holland: At the turn of the century, the Dutch government collected mass amounts of data about its citizens with good intentions. In order to give people proper burials, they included religion. In 1939, the Nazis invaded and captured that data in less than 3 days. A larger percentage of Dutch Jews died than any other Jews because of this system.
Well, i’d been searching for a citation for a while. Tonight, i remembered to ask Google Answers and in less than an hour, had a perfect citation:
The Dark Side of Numbers: The Role of Population Data Systems in Human Rights Abuses. Social Research, Summer, 2001, by William Seltzer, Margo Anderson
The essay is even better than my anecdote and i truly believe that anyone in the business of doing data capture should be required to read this.
National identity cards, wicked problems, and tough thinking
Let me also put in a plug for Bruce Schneier’s analysis on this and other security related topics. These are critically important issues in their own right.
They are also examples of what Horst Rittel termed “wicked problems.” What I think particularly important about wicked problems is that they require much more subtle and nuanced thinking. Schneier provides excellent examples of just that kind of thinking.
If this general topic interests you, another place you might want to look is the work of Jeff Conklin who’s built some very interesting systems and process thinking on top of Rittel’s work. His work is available at CogNexus Institute. Be sure to take a look at “Wicked Problems and Social Complexity” (pdf file) and “Issues as Elements of Information Systems” (pdf file) which is Rittel’s original paper on the topic.
Identity cards considered harmful.
In the week after David Blunkett came out in favour of issuing a national ID card in the UK — and making it compulsory by 2010 — Bruce Schneier, who has forgotten more about security than Blunkett and his idiots ever knew in the first place — does a memorable take-down of the idea that ID cards contribute to security. It makes for sobering reading:
My objection to the national ID card, at least for the purposes of this essay, is much simpler.
It won’t work. It won’t make us more secure.
In fact, everything I’ve learned about security over the last 20 years tells me that once it is put in place, a national ID card program will actually make us less secure.
My argument may not be obvious, but it’s not hard to follow, either. It centers around the notion that security must be evaluated not based on how it works, but on how it fails.
It doesn’t really matter how well an ID card works when used by the hundreds of millions of honest people that would carry it. What matters is how the system might fail when used by someone intent on subverting that system: how it fails naturally, how it can be made to fail, and how failures might be exploited.
Read the rest if you want the gory details. Basically, it’s not good. And that’s before you factor in the stupendous price of the scheme ( 70 per person? You gotta be kidding!) and the security apparat to administer it and the headaches when it goes wrong or is incorrectly trusted, never mind the civil liberties implications.
The authoritarian weakness is to assume a sweeping solution to a perceived problem will, in fact, solve it — rather than introducing new loop-holes. And this looks to be a classic case of shoot-self-in-jackboot.
(Have I plugged Bruce’s book Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World yet? If not, consider it plugged. Go. Read it. Open your eyes and see how we’re screwing up. It’s seminal.)