Category: tech

Proprietary Vendors Want Open Source Sanctions

The Guardian reports that  International Intellectual Property Alliance requested that the U.S. Trade Representative to put countries using open source in government on a “Special 301 watchlist” – a list of intellectual property-violating nations, or “state sponsors of piracy.” The recommendation states:

The Indonesian government’s policy… simply weakens the software industry and undermines its long-term competitiveness by creating an artificial preference for companies offering open source software and related services, even as it denies many legitimate companies access to the government market.

Rather than fostering a system that will allow users to benefit from the best solution available in the market, irrespective of the development model, it encourages a mindset that does not give due consideration to the value to intellectual creations.

As such, it fails to build respect for intellectual property rights and also limits the ability of government or public-sector customers (e.g., State-owned enterprise) to choose the best solutions.

In general, this is just another example of an established, successful industry trying to maintain power by coercing governments to make emerging business models illegal, rather than bothering to innovate and create sustainability in the free market. I rant about this all the time, so I won’t continue to do so here.

But since this was filed by the “International Intellectual Property Alliance” – an interest group which conveniently separates this action’s publicity from the companies it represents – I thought I’d just call out just a few of the member companies which are behind this anticompetitive action: (this list goes through member organizations of the IIPA, including the BSA, ESA and AAP)

  • Adobe
  • American Association for the Advancement of Science
  • Apple
  • Bloomberg Press
  • The Cato Institute (Free market libertarian economics think tanks for government regulations?!)
  • Cisco Systems
  • Dell
  • Electronic Arts
  • Harcourt, Inc.
  • Houghton Mifflin Co.
  • HP
  • IBM
  • Intel
  • McGraw-Hill
  • Microsoft
  • Motion Picture Association of America
  • Nintendo
  • Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)
  • SAP
  • Sony
  • Symantec
  • Xerox
  • Countless University presses (MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Oxford, Universities of California, Chicago, New York, North Carolina and more)

While there isn’t evidence that these companies directly instigated the effort to stifle competition from open source, they are the financial backers of this anticompetitive organization, and thus have a responsibility to be accountable for its actions.

Why Google Buzz is a huge deal

Today, Google announced the release of their new product, Google Buzz.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi50KlsCBio

Looking at just the features offered in this video, it appears to be nothing more than a Facebook News Feed clone with Gmail integration. But don’t be fooled: Google Buzz has the potential to totally disrupt social networking as we know it today, and to do it for the better, for the sole reason of its open nature.

Online social networking has been a repetition of the same pattern since the mid-1990s: companies offering “walled-garden” networks offering cool new ways to connect with others – as long as they buy into the same network. It’s great for business, as users are better attractors of customers than any cool new feature could ever be. The operator then owns that social interaction medium between the people who come to rely upon it. We saw it happen with AOL. We saw it in the early 2000’s with the advent of blogging, as the most successful personal blogs were the ones hosted on social communities such as Livejournal, Xanga and Blogger. We moved on to MySpace (come on, admit it… we all can share in the shame!) and then Facebook, and Twitter has long passed the point of being a toy for early adopters, as it has become a tool of the masses.

But these sites – these closed networks – lock users into using their system for communication. This is in stark contrast with our real life social network – the completely fluid and decentralized manner in which we interact. This social network belongs to us, and cannot be monopolized by another. There is no tangible constraint that keeps me from interacting with someone else in one way or another, only issues like distance and language, things which are decreasingly important as technology advances.

So why should our social interactions online be different from our interactions in the rest of the world? I should be able to connect with others regardless of which applications I choose to use. Google Buzz is a major step in this direction. Buzz has a huge amount of interoperability using existing technologies like Atom/RSS and OAuth, and is getting much more soon. (It’s all for developers’ taking at Buzz’s Google Code page.)

What makes this relevant to everyone is the ability to publish and read from just about any application you want. This isn’t a centralized application like Facebook Platform, where developers extend more functionality to users and keep them inside the “Walled Garden,” but enables social communication between all kinds of applications, instead of demanding that friends use the same applications if they wish to communicate. In theory, I can post a status, photo, video, or just about anything on Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, or even my personal site at ZekeWeeks.com, and everybody gets that information regardless of which applications they choose to use themselves.

This announcement means a win for the users, and a serious threat to operators of closed social networks. I don’t know how much it will succeed, but I’m all for products which improve users’ lives and increase technologies’ openness to everyone’s benefit.

A Day In Technology: 2010

Two and a half years ago, I was feeling super geeky and wrote a post covering the software I use in a normal day. It was interesting to read now, as somethings have changed a ton, and some things have remained exactly the same. I have since switched my main machine from a Dell Inspiron laptop to a MacBook Pro running OS X Snow Leopard, so that obviously changes some things, but what’s more interesting is the trends in how work and play gets done online in a pretty short time. So here’s an up-to-date synopsis of the tech that this CIS Major / Web Developer / general technophile interacts with in a normal day:

In the morning:

  • I try to avoid the computer sitting in my bedroom. I agree with the psychologists who claim that bedrooms should only be used for sleep and sex; I prefer to have a separate workspace. My current house is great, but lacks the room for me to really do this. I’m connected to the web all the time, so I can afford to stay disconnected in the morning as I gather my senses and try to remember who I am and why I’m not waking up in Spain.
  • This all goes out the window if I’ve forgotten to sign out of Instant Messenger – in that case, my friend Jesse usually jars me awake just for kicks.

From the Fortress of Productivity (also known as my home workstation):

  • It’s insane how many productivity tools are moving online. Because of this, most of what I do runs out of a Chromium (Google Chrome) nightly build. Chrome’s recently-added bookmark sync and extensions features are to die for, and make web apps feel more like traditional desktop ones.
  • I had a six-month affair with Apple Mail for my e-mail, but I have since returned to my web Gmail client. Nothing beats the ability to never delete a single email, and then go back to search all of those messages. I can pull up client interactions from 2004 and have them readily accessible at a moment’s notice. I’d honestly prefer to use a desktop client, but so far they’re pretty limited by the old IMAP and POP protocols.
  • I keep an eye on both my social networks and the news using TweetDeck.
  • Less frequently, I check a ton of RSS feeds using my Netvibes homepage. I recently borrowed my friend Kevin’s great idea and now have a whole tab devoted to feeds of Craigslist job listings, which allows me to spend a lot less time on upkeep while still staying on top of the latest job openings.
  • I recently started teaching myself guitar. I use Apple’s Logic Studio to play and record. It has a ton of amazing amp models and effects. I was using FL Studio on my PC system, which I still know my way around better than Logic. I’m honestly tempted to put a native Windows install back on this machine in order to have FL back. I’m trying to convince myself that I just need to work my way up the learning curve with Logic. We’ll see how that goes. On the flipside, I have GarageBand installed too, and that’s about the coolest and easiest-to-use Digital Audio Workstation I’ve ever used.
  • Adium is one of the real joys of being on Mac OS. I haven’t been happier with a multi-protocol IM app.
  • I’d be dead in the water without VMware Fusion 3. I use this as my connection to the Windows world, as well as the tool which enables me to try out the latest Linux distributions, though this has become a lot less interesting since my switch to OS X satisfied almost all the needs I was looking to Linux to fill.
  • For years I relied on the Adobe Creative Suite, especially Dreamweaver, to do web design and LAMP development work. Now I’m using Panic’s Coda, which is an amazing single-window IDE for web development. The interface is way more usable and gets out of the way to let you code. It has great integrated workflow for previewing layouts, uploading & managing files, and doing remote terminal work. I use the MAMP software package as a super easy way to test my apps on local web servers and databases.
  • For the more uninteresting kind of work, I’ve got both the Office 2008 for Mac and Office 2010 Beta for Windows installed on my system. I have to say that I’m not a huge fan of Mac Office in comparison to Office 2007 and 2010 for Windows, of which I’m a huge fan. But what has surprised me most is how much I enjoy using Apple’s Pages and Keynote as alternatives, which seriously required no time for me to learn and are a lot easier to start doing pretty great visual layout tasks without needing in-depth knowledge of the program. All of my current résumé stuff is done in Pages. It’s really the first time I’ve actually felt like I’m enjoying a word processing program. Unfortunately it doesn’t have perfect compatibility with MS Office, so anything that has to be interoperable with others still gets done in Office.
  • Dropbox has accomplished what web companies have been trying to get right for over a decade: seamless personal file sync. My Dropbox folder has completely replaced the various “Documents” folders on various systems I use. Instead, this little piece of software gives me one unified folder that stays in sync across all my machines: my laptop, my netbook, even my iPhone. And if I’m in a computer lab or elsewhere, it’s all accessible through the Dropbox website as well.
  • Picasa 3 is still my photo library software. They don’t make it easy to export from Windows to Mac versions, so I had to do some XML hackery to keep all of my albums and tags intact. Picasa has all of the features I need, but the Mac version is built on the Qt framework, which does a great job, but is very sluggish. I’d love to give a more native app like iPhoto or Aperture a try, but the effort involved in moving my stuff over means that I won’t make the jump unless I really have to.
  • I still love using WordPress as a content production platform for myself and clients. While traditional blogging is falling in popularity, WordPress is evolving to offer syndicators new and interesting ways to get their content out there. Right now I’m trying to decide on the best way to turn ZekeWeeks.com into my personal content hub which then syndicates select stuff to Facebook and Twitter.

On campus:

  • Each day I debate which computer I should bring to campus: my MacBook Pro or my netbook. The netbook runs Windows 7 Professional phenomenally, and has an amazing battery life. Having Google Chrome on there means my bookmarks stay in sync with my main machine. On a side note, I am a huge fan of Windows 7; I think it’s the best Windows release in a decade, and could be a very happy person using it as my main OS.
  • I take notes with Evernote, which is nothing short of amazing. All my notes stay in sync across all my devices, a rich web client, and my iPhone, and are fully searchable and require little effort to keep organized. I have one class where laptops aren’t allowed, so I’ll scan in notes from that class once I get home. Evernote has OCR technology that recognizes my handwriting and makes those notes searchable.
  • This semester, I’m taking a pretty interesting class in advanced networking & security. We’re doing everything on top of the VMware ESXi virtualization platform. I’m pretty familiar with VMware’s desktop offerings, but ESXi is a whole new bag of fun for me.

On my iPhone:

  • I’ve had my iPhone since 2007, and phones are finally starting to come out that can match its usefulness. I’m patiently awaiting the next round of devices from HTC and Apple, and will probably go with the best offering on Verizon later this year.
  • I have constant social network overload thanks to Facebook for iPhone, Tweetie 2, iReddit and BeejiveIM.
  • Spare moments around town find me using the Kindle app, or DoodleJump, an addictive game tied into my friends’ highscores. My 9 year old cousin kicked my butt last week.
  • My phone is carrier unlocked to T-Mobile and jailbroken to allow me to run GV Mobile, a native Google Voice client for my phone. All my voicemail forwards to Google Voice, where I get message transcriptions that are easier for me to deal with than traditional voicemail.

So there it is – I had a lot more to say on that than I had expected! It’s interesting how much stuff has moved over to the web. Socially, everyone is getting more and more interconnected, and it’s changing the face of our personal and professional lives. I think it’s important to stay conscious of these changes, both for the opportunities they present and the important decisions they demand we make regarding our availability to others, our privacy, the way we do business, and even our values in how we relate to one another.

Google Grows a Pair

I’ve long disapproved of American companies’ willingness to go along with oppressive regimes’ human rights abuses. Some companies have given information on dissidents to governments and helped in the apprehension of political prisoners. This has attracted significant attention over the years, both in the media and in Congressional inquiries.

For years, Google has censored search results on their Chinese domain, Google.cn, in an effort to keep their site from being blocked by the “Great Firewall of China,” which blocks access to countless sites on an unpublished Government blacklist.

Today, Google made public their findings of targeted malicious break-ins to Google accounts of various activists for Chinese human rights, both within China, and in the U.S. and Europe. The attacks weren’t exclusive to Google, but widespread across other major companies.

Amazingly, after finding this, Google has made the decision to fight back and stop participating in China’s self-censorship mandates:

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

I applaud this policy decision by Google. It’s a shame that American companies benefit so often from doing their business in ways that support corrupt governments, and our own country should do more to prevent it from happening to others.

China is growing and has the potential to improve the quality of life for people worldwide, but it has some very disturbing issues that it needs to address as it matures

U.S. Intel failed on Underpants Bomber due to Misspelling, Software

Well, this isn’t good. According to an official White House review, the intelligence community failed to notice red flags about the underpants bomber. Why? The software that would have correlated intel and raised alarms was rendered ineffective by a one-letter misspelling of the would-be bomber’s name.

From the White House’s review of the government’s failures in the Flight 253 debacle:

Mr. Abdulmutallab possessed a U.S. visa, but this fact was not correlated with the concerns of Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father about Mr. Abdulmutallab’s potential radicalization. A misspelling of Mr. Abdulmutallab’s name initially resulted in the State Department believing he did not have a valid U.S. visa. A determination to revoke his visa however would have only occurred if there had been a successful integration of intelligence by the CT [counterterrorism] community, resulting in his being watchlisted.

According to Talking Points Memo, Abdulmutallab’s name was misspelled by just one letter.

Via TPM

Nexus One thoughts

Google announced the HTC Nexus One today. On paper, it’s just about everything I want: a touchscreen-only HTC device with a 1GHz Snapdragon processor. It’s headed to Verizon sometime in the first half of this year.

I returned my Droid last week and put my unlocked iPhone onto T-Mobile, which has a great lower-price plan for contract-free customers. I told myself I’d wait until better devices come along, and the Nexus One almost grabs my attention. Engadget posted a very thorough review of the device, and I’d say it meets 90% of what I’m looking for. There are but a couple of issues that give me pause:

  • The AMOLED display is supposedly better than the Droid’s, but it has some color balance issues – specifically, over-saturation in the reds and oranges. More importantly, its screen resolution is 58 pixels shorter than the Droid, at 800×480.
  • The speaker is described as “tinny.” One of the best parts about the Droid was its absolutely amazing speaker.

These issues are hardly dealbreakers for almost anyone. For myself, though, it’s enough to make me feel OK waiting to see what future phones offer, especially the next iPhone, which will likely have a boosted screen resolution, and possibly carrier support for Verizon.

After testing the Droid for a month and then reactivating my 2007 iPhone, I’m struck by just how well the original iPhone has held up to the competition of devices that are a full two and a half years newer. Other phones are just now catching up, and three major OS revisions are more than most could hope for. (Year-old Android phones are already missing out on new OS updates.) I could happily switch to an Android phone like the Nexus One now, but my financial situation as a student and the status of American GSM and CDMA networks just before the 4G LTE transition make me feel like having some patience will really pay off for me. Hopefully my geeky, impulsive side will be OK waiting until I’m on a real income later this year before jumping onto the new device train again.

A NOTICE

I hereby declare the following things “played out” and thus disallowed from now forthwith:

  1. The “jumping-in-midair” photo pose
  2. Writing tweets about your breakfast
  3. Lisping the “c” in “Barcelona” or the “s” in “España”
  4. The Facebook status “(your name) is.”
  5. “Broseph”

That is all.

Switched.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2-UuIEOcss&w=640&h=505]

Got a 15.4″ MacBook Pro last week. It’s last years’ model, I got it for a steal on eBay. Great quality aluminum build, and an amazing LED screen. It puts my external display to shame.

I’ve now been undertaking the effort of remembering and relearning the “Mac way” of doing things; while daily e-mail and internet surfing is easy on any machine, I do find myself pretty regularly running into things that demand to be approached from a different mindset. Which is all fine, really, it’s just a slow shift from one paradigm of computing to another. I’ve noticed a few things that are nice compared to the Windows experience, but overall it’s just different, not inherently better. We’ll see how this machine holds up in nine months or so – if it hasn’t become bogged down and slow, it will be a big improvement in my book.

I’ve gotten most of my digital life migrated over. The majority was pretty easy- my media was already managed by iTunes, and I keep all my important documents in the cloud on Evernote or Dropbox. The tricky part was photos. I use Picasa, a great free photo library app that’s been on Windows for a while. They have a Mac client in beta, but migrations between Windows and Mac clients are unsupported as of yet. I had to spend a few hours digging into program settings files and editing the raw XML to trick my Mac into thinking the Windows album files were made by the Mac all along. It all worked out in the end, but it was a real hassle.

So now I’m more or less settled for the things I use daily on my computer. Now is the time where I start to branch out and try some of the apps that weren’t available to me before: Garage Band, iPhoto, the iPhone SDK… And I have to say that having a UNIX command line behind my normal system is a freaking godsend.

Open Source Entrepreneurship: How to survive while starting a FOSS web app project?

Today I had an idea about a pretty big web publishing / content aggregation platform that I’d like to get started on as a FOSS project. This post isn’t really about that idea – I’ll share that later when the time is right – but more about my own uncertainty of the right way to proceed with a rather large undertaking at this point in my life. There are quite a few unknowns in my mind:

  • My age / career situation: I am a year away from graduating from college. I think a project of this scale would demand a lot of attention, but also has high potential for success in both terms of adoption and related commercial opportunities. I know of plenty of very successful young programmers who dropped out of college once the success of their product made formal education unnecessary for them: Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg and Mullenweg are all great examples. Now I’m not in a rush to drop out of school – I wouldn’t even consider it unless the project had such momentum that it was obviously justifiable.
    What I’m more worried about is what I could do after graduation. I should be thinking about what career moves are wise at that point. That might mean full-time tech work, it might not. I think that especially at first, this project would require a lot of attention without lots of financial backing. I might be able to manage it at the same time as a part time job, 20 to 30 hours a week. And that’s assuming I don’t end up at a job that has weird IP policies that say they have a right to all of my code. Ideally, I’d like to find a way to fund the development of this OSS product so that I could see it turn from idea into reality while still being able to do things like have health insurance and decent food and beer 😀
  • How to go about development: At this point, the project only exists as a few ideas floating around my head. My business classes have taught me enough to know that others probably have pretty similar ideas, and since this product would be something open source and available to all, I’m more interested in having it done right than I am in being first to market or whatever. As a total newcomer to open source web applications, and as a fairly unskilled programmer, I’m not sure about the best way ahead. I have the potential to learn a lot more of the technical backend and do a lot of the initial work myself, but it might be a better strategy to bring other people on pretty early and just provide input as an “idea man”.
  • How to pace myself and avoid scope creep: My idea starts out with some very big-picture concepts about current developments in content publishing and media consumption, and gets more detailed with some ways that I could implement my new system. In other words, I have a large vision for where this could go, how it would open content publication and facilitate media consumption for many people, and of related commercial opportunities that would be created. Organizing that vision into smaller action items and not biting off more than I can chew will be the hard parts.

So in short, I’m really excited to get into working on this project, but need to figure out how to do it without shooting my own wellbeing in the foot. I know it’s possible, I just need to find some more of the answers first.