Reminder: Create A PSA About The Impact Of Technology On Creativity And You Can Win $1,000

from the step-on-up dept

As you may remember, NBC Universal via New York City, is running a contest trying to get NYC school children to create anti-piracy public service announcement (PSA) propaganda videos. In exchange for that, they're giving the "winner" $500... but also taking their copyright. We think it's a bit ironic that a contest where you're forced to only talk about how great copyright is also forces you to give up your copyright.

Anyway, thanks to some generous Techdirt readers (and a matching grant from us directly), we're offering our own contest and the deadline is rapidly approaching. You've basically got a week left. We're looking for the PSAs to be about the impact of technology on creativity. We're not giving you talking points, or even a specific view you have to take. Unlike NBC Universal and New York City, we trust you to make your own arguments, not regurgitate what you've been handed. We're also offering twice the amount of money they are... and we don't force you to give up your copyright. So, step on up. Details of how to enter can be found here.

Filed Under: culture, nyc, psa, technology
Companies: nbc universal

Complexity, Why Steve Jobs Got More Coverage Than Dennis Ritchie... And What That Says About The Patent System

from the layers-upon-layers dept

ComputerAddict points us to an interesting discussion of complexity of computer systems today, written by Jean-Baptiste Queru. The key point is that, at the user level, the various technologies we use today seem incredibly simple, but the amount of things happening under the hood is awe-inspiring. He starts out by digging into what actually happens when you visit Google's home page:

You just went to the Google home page.

Simple, isn't it?

What just actually happened?

Well, when you know a bit of about how browsers work, it's not quite that simple. You've just put into play HTTP, HTML, CSS, ECMAscript, and more. Those are actually such incredibly complex technologies that they'll make any engineer dizzy if they think about them too much, and such that no single company can deal with that entire complexity.

Let's simplify.

You just connected your computer to www.google.com.

Simple, isn't it?

What just actually happened?

Well, when you know a bit about how networks work, it's not quite that simple. You've just put into play DNS, TCP, UDP, IP, Wifi, Ethernet, DOCSIS, OC, SONET, and more. Those are actually such incredibly complex technologies that they'll make any engineer dizzy if they think about them too much, and such that no single company can deal with that entire complexity.

And, of course, that's not everything. From there, he describes what's happening in the operating system and the hardware as well, to demonstrate the complexity involved in the different levels of the technology stack. The key point is that there's an amazing number of things happening behind the scenes, just to do something simple like visit Google's website. And that's pretty awesome:

Once you start to understand how our modern devices work and how they're created, it's impossible to not be dizzy about the depth of everything that's involved, and to not be in awe about the fact that they work at all, when Murphy's law says that they simply shouldn't possibly work.

But, of course, most people only see the UI at the top of the stack. And that, Queru notes, is why Steve Jobs' untimely death got so much more attention that Dennis Ritchie's death the following week:

That is why the mainstream press and the general population has talked so much about Steve Jobs' death and comparatively so little about Dennis Ritchie's: Steve's influence was at a layer that most people could see, while Dennis' was much deeper. On the one hand, I can imagine where the computing world would be without the work that Jobs did and the people he inspired: probably a bit less shiny, a bit more beige, a bit more square. Deep inside, though, our devices would still work the same way and do the same things. On the other hand, I literally can't imagine where the computing world would be without the work that Ritchie did and the people he inspired. By the mid 80s, Ritchie's influence had taken over, and even back then very little remained of the pre-Ritchie world.

The fact is, both are important, but in different ways. We would live in an extremely different world without either of them. And, I actually have to disagree slightly about the idea that "deep inside" the devices would work the same way (if there were no Jobs). Perhaps at a superficial level, but I think it's worth noting that what Jobs made standard at the UI level certainly had some trickle-down effects in terms of what was happening underneath and what sort of technology developments were prioritized.

At the end of his post, Queru then points out how this multilevel complexity shows part of the problem of the patent system:

Finally, last but not least, that is why our patent system is broken: technology has done such an amazing job at hiding its complexity that the people regulating and running the patent system are barely even aware of the complexity of what they're regulating and running. That's the ultimate bikeshedding: just like the proverbial discussions in the town hall about a nuclear power plant end up being about the paint color for the plant's bike shed, the patent discussions about modern computing systems end up being about screen sizes and icon ordering, because in both cases those are the only aspect that the people involved in the discussion are capable of discussing, even though they are irrelevant to the actual function of the overall system being discussed.

I'm going to guess -- having had a few of these discussions -- that the patent system supporters in our comments (including patent lawyers and USPTO employees) are going to deny this. I think this is just a part of it. The patent system is definitely designed to look only at the twigs (not even branches or trees) instead of the forest. And that's why it almost always misses what's "obvious" to those skilled in the art, allowing the granting of patents on basic things that hinder innovation.

But the real issue is related, but deeper. When you look at the technology stack and the inherent complexity, the reason why it works is because you have all these different complex pieces working together with different experts focused on specialized pieces within the stack. That's what allows for massive complexity to occur. But the patent system isn't designed to handle such a system. It's designed to handle integrated systems where top-to-bottom is patented by a single party (or maybe a few parties). The idea that a huge number of players might come together and work together to, in a somewhat ad hoc fashion, build a much, much more complex system, and not seek to profit directly from the overall system but from the pieces and expertise, is antithetical to the entire structure and premise of the patent system.

Filed Under: complexity, dennis ritchie, layers, patents, steve jobs, tech stack, technology, ui

As Governments Get Censorship Happy, New Technologies Popping Up To Route Around That

from the damage dept

We've been discussing more and more movements from various governments towards censoring the internet, whether it's things as simple as "filters" of "bad sites" or more recent efforts by governments to shut down speech they don't like from people they don't like. However, as tends to be the case, technology seems to quickly come to the rescue. Late last week a new effort from J. Alex Halderman started to get some attention. Called Telex, it's a system for getting around internet censorship on a massive level, by using a variety of distributed nodes and disguising the type of traffic being sent over them. The idea is to try to make it effectively impossible to filter out certain sites.

So if you're in China, and you want access to a banned site like YouTube, you just type YouTube.com into your browser, and the Telex station will see that connection, and disguise it as something innocuous. You might be watching YouTube, but to a censor, it will just seem as if you're visiting a harmless, non-blocked site.

But that's not the only new technology popping up. Via Ross Pruden, we learn about a relatively new offering, called Where's The Party? which is designed as a "censorship-resistant mirror network." Basically it's a system that will mirror content more easily.

What's interesting also, is that this alerted me to Streisand.me, a project that is connected to Where's The Party? Streisand.me is (as you might have guessed) a mirroring system for content that is targeted in an attack likely to bring about a Streisand Effect response. I had no idea Streisand.me existed, despite my minor claim to fame of having coined the phrase "Streisand Effect." I have to say that's pretty cool...

But the larger point remains: as various governments move more towards trying to censor the web, technologists will create the technologies that make each of those efforts obsolete before they can get very far.

Filed Under: censorship, free speech, streisand.me, technology, telex, where's the party?

The Web Might Be 2.0, But Greed Has Always Been In Open Beta

from the history-doesn't-repeat-itself,-but-it-does-rhyme dept

Last week I wrote about the anti-twitter proclamations of Baroness Susan Greenfield, which I found ridiculous, to say the least. There was some debate in the comments about whether technology can be inherently good or bad, and whether it is just as naive to blindly accept technology as to blindly reject it. This is an important topic and it deserves more attention and discussion.

TechCrunch columnist Paul Carr recently mused about the overall moral ramifications of Web 2.0, the tech startup game and SEO-driven media. On one hand, I think the column is an excellent example of the right way to criticize technology: by focusing on how people use it, not on the technology itself. But the problem is that once you think that through, you realize there is very little in his observations that is new or unique to the web.

At first, Web 2.0 seemed like a perfect two-way street. Brilliant entrepreneurs who genuinely wanted to change the world built services that we all wanted to use. They became rich, and our lives became better connected. We were all in it together.

Fast forward just a handful of years, though, and something has gone very, very wrong with that particular social contract. We users have kept our side of the bargain — dutifully tagging our friends in artificially-aged photos, and checking in at bars, and writing reviews of restaurants. We’ve canceled our newspaper subscriptions, and instead spend our days clicking on slideshows of “celebrities who look like their cats” or obsessively tracking trending topics on Twitter. We’ve stopped buying books published by professional houses and instead reward authors who write, edit and distribute their own electronic works through self-publishing platforms. We’ve even handed the keys to our cars and our homes to strangers.

On the face of it, the entrepreneurs have continued down the same track too: inventing ever more Disruptive companies to further improve the world, and in doing so enjoying multi-billion dollar valuations and all the trappings of fame and fortune. Even richer have grown the angels, super-angels and VCs who carefully nurture young entrepreneurs, molding them into the next breed of Mark Zuckerbergs and Sean Parkers, reminding their charges that “what’s cool” is a billion dollars — and that every new user acquired is another dollar added to their eventual high score.

And yet. AND YET. You only have to look at a couple of mini-outrages that bubbled up in the past few days to realize just how misaligned the interests of some entrepreneurs have become with those of the human beings they rely on for their success.

The first such mini-outrage was a controversial Huffington Post article that bore the headline "Amy Winehouse’s Untimely Death Is a Wake Up Call for Small Business Owners", which Carr offers as an example of the way content sites will pander to keywords and trending topics, even when it seems heartless to do so. There is truth to this, but he mostly ignores the fact that it is hardly a new complaint or one unique to the web: for decades people have accused newspapers and broadcasters of exploiting tragedies, perpetuating scare stories and generally using every dirty trick in the book to boost circulation or ratings. Carr is an avid media critic, who certainly knows this, so it's unclear to me why he puts so much blame on new technology. He notes that "every so often we are reminded of the grimy truth: making money with online content is a question of attracting millions of eyeballs, whatever the moral cost", but that grimy truth clearly predates online content. The dark side of the media might not have disappeared as quickly and as cleanly as many people hoped at the dawn of the web, but, in sum, we certainly seem better off with fewer gatekeepers to communication. At the very least, it makes a more solid foundation on which to build a new and better media landscape.

The second example is a recent Airbnb scandal. In short, a woman's apartment was trashed by a stranger who rented it through the service, she blogged about it, and one of the co-founders called her personally with an insensitive plea for her to take down the post because of the impact it could have on Airbnb's growth and funding. He later asked her to help give it a positive spin. She made it all public, and the story picked up steam:

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, we also know for sure that investors in the company leaned on publications like TechCrunch to stop reporting the story. Their ludicrous wail of protest: AIRBNB IS RUN BY NICE GUYS! IT’S NOT FAIR TO CALL THEM OUT WHEN THEY SCREW UP!

The question of whether Airbnb is run by nice guys is irrelevant. For all I know CEO Brian Chesky is a modern day Mother Theresa who had to break off his important work curing kitten cancer to deal with this growing PR nightmare. What’s relevant — and all too obvious — is that good old Brian and his co-founders stand to make millions, if not billions, of dollars from the success of Airbnb. His investors stand to make even more. That kind of wealth can easily drive the most saintly of us to behave in inhuman ways — to become so remote from reality and humanity that users like EJ become (at best) PR problems to be solved and (at worst) irrelevant pieces of data; eyeballs or clicks or room nights to be monetized in the pursuit of an ever greater exit.

Again, my disagreement is not with his observations but with his curious focus on the web and the tech sector. None of the actual problems are new. The world is far from perfect, and society is fueled by a lot more greed, inhumanity and injustice than anyone likes to admit - most of it immeasurably more terrible than these examples. Carr's concerns have been echoing through history since the birth of industrialization, and they have ancestors before that, so it's hard to see how the web has made things worse.

In fact, I firmly believe it has made things better. To fall back on a cliche, the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, and the democratization of communication and media makes society's problems a lot harder to ignore.

Filed Under: bad actors, greed, technology

Billboard Apparently Unable To Hire Its Own Writers For Copycat Conference; So Just Copies Text From Others

from the so-derivative! dept

The SFMusicTech events have become something of an institution in San Francisco over the past five years or so, bringing together all sorts of people at the intersection of technology and music for a day. I've been to a bunch of them, and have always found them to be interesting and insightful, while also great networking/meeting opportunities. I was interested to find out that Billboard Magazine is apparently putting on something of a copycat conference, a month after the next SFMusicTech, called FutureSound -- also in San Francisco. The events definitely look similar... and perhaps that's because whoever put together the website for the Billboard event seems to have decided to just start with the SFMusicTech text, and then make some slight changes. From the SFMusicTech description of who attends:

The best and brightest developers, entrepreneurs, investors, service providers, journalists, musicians and organizations who work with them at the convergence of culture and commerce.

And, from Billboard's description:

The best and brightest developers, entrepreneurs, investors, music labels, service providers, journalists, artists and organizations who work with them at the convergence of music and commerce.

Kudos to the fine folks at Billboard for finally recognizing that "remixing" is cool. Though, seriously, I do think it's great that there will be more events hitting that intersection between tech and music. But, I do find it amusing when Billboard seems to have this habit of copying others, while attacking me when I suggest copying can be good for you. Apparently, copying is only good when you do it yourself. When others do it, well, that's a different story...

Filed Under: billboard, conferences, copying, music, sfmusictech, technology

We're Missing The Point Of The Cloud: It's Not Supposed To Be Locked To A Single Service

from the where-are-my-apis? dept

In the last few months now, we've had the launch of Amazon's, Google's and now Apple's "music locker" services. There are some key differences there, but all of them involve storing music collections in the so-called "cloud." But here's the thing: none of these actually match the promise of what "the cloud" is supposed to be. Rather, each involves online storage and lock-in to a particular vendor. I made this point back when Amazon launched its offering. I already back up all my (yes, legal and authorized) music via a mountable "cloud" drive using S3. Then I can access all of that music using any music player I want. With Amazon's and Google's offerings, the streaming only can occur via its own streaming service. In fact, the ultimate in ridiculousness was that I had to re-upload some songs to Amazon's music locker, rather than just point it at my S3 drive -- which is run by Amazon as well! At least with Apple's the focus seems to be syncing the music on various devices, but with Apple's control over the platform, it seems likely that for most people this still will effectively restrict usage to Apple applications.

I absolutely understand why this is happening, and am sure that the labels would positively freak out if someone had offered a cloud service that you could point any application to. But, really, when we're talking about "the cloud" and it involves this kind of lockup, it's important to remember that we're really not seeing some of the key features that the whole concept of "the cloud" is supposed to enable. Yes, we're seeing the remote storage and the access from anywhere type features, but not the ability to access information and data with different services. And, of course, once you could access such info with different services, you could see some real innovation start to occur around that information, including unique services for sharing and combining playlists, and making music a lot more social. At some point that will come, but, until then, these offerings are nice, yet hardly demonstrate what the technology really could do if it were unshackled.

Filed Under: cloud, innovation, music, technology
Companies: amazon, apple, google

Sarkozy's Attempt To Woo The Digerati Foreshadows The Coming Conflict Between Technology & Regulations

from the but-what-happens-next dept

There's been a lot of talk about the e-G8 Conference this week, which was an attempt to bring together technology and internet leaders with government officials. The idea, apparently, was for government officials to convince the digerati that it was time for government to take a much more active role in regulating the internet. The initial reports suggest that the tech folks weren't buying what Nicolas Sarkozy and other government officials were selling -- with some putting out scathing reports about any company willing to help the government clamp down on free speech online.

We're seeing more and more stories of government attempts to exert greater control over the internet. While governments have been seeking such control for quite some time, we're finally seeing some real movement here, and I have no doubt that the pace and intensity of such efforts is only going to increase. The results of the e-G8 are not at all surprising. The politicians approached it as politicians do: looking to plead their case and create an atmosphere of political trade-offs, but many of the digerati tend not to work that way (which is why they tend to avoid policy and political debates altogether). They're not interested in tradeoffs, and that leads to a pretty serious culture clash, which is what we're seeing.

That's why this is going to get worse before it gets better. Governments are going to increase these kinds of efforts, and they're going to have significant legislative successes. There are two reasons for that. First, most elected officials don't really understand technology, and don't recognize the impact and the unintended consequences of what they're doing. They think that they're attacking "problems" online, or "bringing order" where there was chaos. They're not. Second, many large legacy companies, who are past their innovation stages, are equally frightened of the disruptions the internet has created. These are also the firms with the biggest lobbying budgets and most connections within the government. So they see this as an opportunity not to bring order to chaos (even if they claim such), but to stifle innovation and competition that might challenge their market position.

And there's no doubt that this combination of factors will win in the short term. It's hard to see what could stop them at this point.

The long term is a different situation however. As we've seen, the technologically literate recognize that such regulations are, effectively, technology problems, and what barriers the regulators and the dinosaur companies put up are simply challenges to be coded around. We're already starting to see some of that in efforts towards more distributed systems, and I would bet those will only increase rapidly over the next few years. These kinds of things take time -- and many will mock these early projects as not being very good or successful (and they won't be).

But, over time, you cannot deny what technology allows. Technology will prevail and make the regulations obsolete. The only real question is what kind of timeframe we're talking about. I'm hopeful that this confrontation is short, but I fear that it will be long.

Filed Under: e-g8, law, regulations, sarkozy, technology

Do Tools Ever Die Off?

from the species-extinction dept

Robert Krulwich, who has done some interviews with Kevin Kelly recently, highlighted a recent discussion in which Kelly makes quite a claim:

"I say there is no species of technology that have ever gone globally extinct on this planet."

Further in the debate, Kelly expanded and even bet Krulwich that he couldn't find any tool, no matter how far back in the past it was from, that wasn't still being made today (and made new) somewhere in the world. Krulwich brings up a few suggestions, each of which gets shot down, including "paleolithic hammers." Turns out they're still being made (mostly by hobbyists). He then went through a bunch of pages of an 1895 Montgomery Ward catalog... and found that every one is still being made. So Krulwich asked people to chime in with suggestions, and they've come up with a few, such as radium suppositories, a Roman corvus (a ship boarding tool) and the ferrite core of a Seeburg Jukebox. Kelly's job is to try to find if all of these are still being made.

Of course, some of this depends on how you view the initial premise. The initial claim from Kelly was that no species of technology has ever gone extinct -- and in that case, you should be able to include more updated technologies that are better/safer/more efficient. But, in the interview, Kelly does seem to take it a step further in claiming that no tool itself was no longer being made new. So, I'm curious if anyone can actually find "new" versions of the things listed above.

Filed Under: extinction, kevin kelly, technology, tools

Four Factors Needed To Make Technology A 'Liberation' Technology

from the understanding-activism dept

There's been something of a silly debate going on for a while now, about whether or not various technologies and social media tools "help" or "hurt" democratic or populist uprisings. Of course, technology is just a tool, and it can be used for good reasons, bad reasons and perfectly neutral reasons. Technology itself is not the impetus behind any of this stuff... but as a tool, it can be used to accelerate, enhance or emphasize certain aspects of what's going on. So while the general debate is silly, it is important to understand the factors that make technology useful in these scenarios. Mathew Ingram points us to an interesting attempt by Mary Joyce to break down what factors really need to be present to make a technology useful for "liberation" as opposed to "repression." You can read all of the details at the link above, but the headline version is:

1. It must transmit political information
2. It must be accessible to a large segment of the population
3. It must allow for effective utilization
4. It must allow for protection of privacy

The article also argues that "repression technologies" requires the reverse. I'm not sure I completely believe that. For example, something that is available to a large segment of the population can certainly be used for repression as well. Still, it is an interesting framework for thinking about how these technology tools are used (or not) in various political conflicts.

Filed Under: liberation, repression, technology

The Distributed Party Of 'We' Is Already In Control

from the this-ain't-no-tea-party dept

I tend not to be much of a believer in political "parties." They always seem to get lost in groupthink around what's best for "the party," rather than what's best, period. I even tend to have issues with groups like The Pirate Party. While I support many of the ideals and concepts within the party's platform, I don't agree with everything they have to say, and still think the use of "pirate" in the name, while attention grabbing and perhaps useful in the short-term, is quite limiting long-term. And yet, I'm certainly intrigued by a lot of what's been happening over the past few months, in terms of somewhat ad hoc groups coming together and protesting things they just know are not right. While I still don't agree with the denial of service tactics of "Anonymous" and its Operation Payback, I've been saying for a while that this really is a moment when centralized top-down legacy systems are coming into conflict with distributed, decentralized, bottom-up systems -- and not understanding them at all.

Michael Scott points us to an opinion piece from lawyer Douglas Wood, in which he does a nice job describing what he refers to as "The Party of We," which he notes is already in control.

I think that final point is the part that is the most interesting, and the least understood in many of the discussions around what's happening online. In the past, with traditional systems, if you didn't agree with something, you would just protest. But if you look at what's been happening lately, when the public doesn't agree with something -- official secrecy, draconian copyright laws, censorship, privacy violations, etc. -- rather than just protesting, they're simply routing around those things. It's an incredibly important point. They're not protesting by saying "this will not stand." They're protesting by saying "your laws don't matter, because we can simply route around them."

That's a hell of a lot more powerful than most people realize.

Of course, I already know that some will mock this, saying that it's just a bunch of kids (probably "entitled" kids -- or maybe "freeloading" kids) "breaking the law" and such. Or they'll say that the recent arrests of a few folks show that they can't really route around the system. But I think that significantly underestimates the long-term impacts of what's happening. Whether or not you want to call it the "We Party," it does seem clear that a large (and growing) group of people have realized that code trumps laws, and no matter what laws are put in place to try to beat back code, code will always win.

What's most important is the tipping point, spawned not by Assange but by a new body politic -- a new party of individuals bonded by commonality of interest not defined by national or geographic boundaries. The Party of We.

In response to the attacks on Wikileaks, this virtual We Party, comprised of citizens of the world, unleashed an unprecedented -- and united -- attack on parts of the infrastructure that transact payments and sustain eCommerce and for a brief moment shut critical parts of it down.

This was unprecedented not because it hasn't been tried before (even with some success), but because its success, however brief the moment may have been, was only reversed by those who started it and who had a change of heart. Furthermore, it was novel in its motivation not to hack a system or engage in fraud or greed, but rather in support of a cause -- a belief in the idea and purity of unencumbered speech.

What's left out of this is that it's not actually a party. It's not actually an organization at all, which is part of what makes it so powerful. With an organization you can attack the organization or cut off its head. When it's just a whole bunch of people who understand the power of technology, plucking out a few people that can be tracked down does nothing other than attract more people to the power of code.

Whether or not you agree with the concept of "The We Party," or what they're doing, it's difficult to not recognize that what's been happening is significant, meaningful and important.

Filed Under: anonymous, distributed, people, politics, technology, we, wikileaks