Selling Democracy (Slight Return)

17 November 2011 admin

Writing about the influence of the Internet on pro-democracy movements earlier this year, I observed:

As individual control over the flow of information rises, central control wanes. And this, obviously, is the crux of the dilemma facing businesses and governments across North Africa and throughout the world. They are belatedly coming to realise that they are fighting a many-headed hydra. As they cut off one avenue of communication, another rears its head.

But that hydra has a body, and the body is the network itself.

The US Congress’ latest attack on the integrity of the Internet demonstrates that at least some American businesses have heard this message loud and clear.

Their intent now is simply to cordon off what they consider to be the American part of the Internet, and to beat into submission any site that refuses to play by American rules. The rules, needless to say, are expressly designed to impose an economy of hoarding and scarcity on a technological landscape premised on bounty and sharing.

To what end? What do so-called content-producers stand to gain from all of this? Not much, really. Except that they can continue using the same business model that has stood them in such good stead for the last few decades.

Essentially, the SOPA legislative package doesn’t create a Great Firewall of America; it encases the giants of the media industry in amber.

The starkest evidence of the fossilising effect of this legislation was provided by a recent House Judiciary Committee hearing, which consisted of little more than a gaudy carousel of facile pronouncements:

How low was the level of debate? The hearing actually descended to statements like “the First Amendment does not protect stealing goods off trucks” (courtesy of the AFL-CIO’s Paul Almeida).

Criticisms were brushed aside with the blithe assertion that if these rules don’t fit the Internet as it is today, then it’s the Internet that should change, not the rules.

The one detractor allowed a place on the stage was Google, which objected strenuously to to the vague, often blatantly prejudicial language of the Bill.

It was up to Google alone to make the argument that SOPA’s definition of “rogue sites” is poor, that its remedies are extreme, and that plenty of legitimate sites could be targeted. One has only to think of YouTube, which even without SOPA is being sued by Viacom for $1 billion and would certainly have been hammered years ago under SOPA’s crazy language (sites can be dismantled under SOPA if they take “deliberate actions to avoid confirming a high probability of the use of the US-directed site to carry out acts” of infringement. What does that even mean? And how does it fit with existing robust safe harbors for user-uploaded content sites?)

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of this hearing was that Google, the sole opponent to the legislation allowed to present at the hearing, was castigated by most of the people present, impugned for purportedly profiting from piracy and cast as the villain in this whole affair.

Seeing one of the few growing and dynamic drivers of the information economy not only cast out of the fold but actively opposed, one can only conclude that the captains of the US media industry are perfectly content to cut their nose off to spite their face. They will burn the bridge represented by Google rather than cross it.

I see two immediate dangers if this regime is actually allowed to take the shape proposed for it:

Innovation in content re-use and sharing will move outside of the US. Some will move into the shadows (kind of like offshore pirate radio in days of yore, except the ships and radios are available for the cost of a laptop). Some will move into the less governed – or governable – areas.
US influence on innovation and invention will decline significantly. This legislative package will serve as a clear signal that Silicon Valley is no longer the influence it used to be. (Indeed, the Valley’s lack of standing in DC was evidenced by committee members’ contempt for Google throughout the hearing.)

The latter outcome is the more dangerous of the two. Losing influence in the direction the Internet’s development takes also means losing the uniquely American ethos of freedom and individualism.

There are numerous new media and technological players poised in the wings right now. But few of them (with the possible exception of Al Jazeera) have any moral stake in human rights or even individual expression.

Warnings that SOPA’s passage will mark the death knell of the Internet as we know it are, therefore, not exaggerations.

Like a bug in amber, the US media and content industries may be preserved for a while, but the life that they breathed into world culture – the American ethos of individual freedom – that will diminish and die.

UPDATE:
When I talk about the ‘American ethos of individual freedom’, I’m using ‘American’ to modify ‘ethos’ not ‘individual freedom’. Tons of cultures have extremely strong traditions of freedom and individual rights. Few have that particularly American flavour of it. And it’s that particular flavour which, not coincidentally, fits so well with the Internet today.

Mystery & Wonder

6 November 2011 admin

According to Andrew Sullivan, Alexis Madrigal claims that flocking behaviour is “… a beautiful phenomenon to behold. And neither biologists nor anyone else can yet explain how starlings seem to process information and act on it so quickly.”

That second sentence is just false, as even a quick visit to wikipedia is sufficient to discover: Current research shows that this vastly complex behaviour requires no interaction between all points, and no orchestration by some unseen hand.

Flocking behaviour can be simulated in computers by creating groups of simple bots, each of which responds independently to three simple rules:

1) Separation – avoid crowding neighbors (short range repulsion)

2) Alignment – steer towards average heading of neighbors

3) Cohesion – steer towards average position of neighbors (long range attraction)

Some researchers have even gone so far as to create real, flying drones that exhibit this behaviour.

The miracle is not that this grand ballet is so complex, but that it’s so damn simple in its essence.

Look, I marvel just as much as the next person when watching vast flocks of starlings. And there are few things more graceful and poignant than an entire school of sardines arcing over the waves in consecutive leaps as they flee from predators. There is little in life so exhilarating as being engulfed in a pocket of azure space as a school of reef fish flow soundlessly around you.

These are all examples of of simple creatures following simple rules, collectively iterating and permuting in patterns whose complexity the human mind finds attractive, even enthralling. Because it cannot follow the linear progression of individual acts in such a vastly parallel pattern, the brain hits the overload switch, which results in our sense of wonder.

It is, almost literally, mind candy. But that does NOT make it a mystery.

I’m not asking that we put aside our wonder, but can we please accept that many of these so-called mysteries are NOT mysterious. (Well, not any longer, anyway.) I’m as big a fan of exaltation as the next person, but I cringe when we allow it to curb our perceptions and our ability to learn.

Find Duplicate File Names in CouchDB

5 October 2011 admin

I was stumped for a bit, trying to figure out how to help my editorial staff avoid uploading the same file twice. In a repository spanning tens of thousands of titles in over a hundred different collections, our staff can’t easily tell whether a document is already in a collection or not.

Turns out that finding duplicate attachments is fairly easy. First create the view:

function(doc) {
  if (doc._attachments){
    for (var i in doc._attachments){
      emit([doc.collection, i], doc._id);
    }
  }
}

Which returns JSON output that looks like this:

[“collection name”, “filename.rtf”]

So all I have to do to find the duplicates is query that view using the composite key and see if it returns any rows:

http://my.couchdb.server:5984/database-name/_design/my-listings/_view/attachment-exists?key=[“collection name”,”filename.rtf”]

I could do the same with MD5 checksums, too, but I won’t. The problem is that even a single character change is enough to make two documents different. So if someone opens their copy of a file and Word changes the metadata in it, it’s no longer byte-for-byte identical, even though the text has not changed. This means that the number of false negatives (i.e. duplicate files that are NOT found) would be too high for people to rely on.

What I’d really like to find is an algorithm that determines whether the textual content of two documents is significantly similar….

Warring Stories

7 August 2011 admin

[Note: Tim Bray is conducting an interesting exercise in public debate over on Google+, testing its commenting capabilities to see how it fares in civil discourse on contentious political topics. His efforts are well worth following. I’m re-posting one of my comments below for posterity – as much for my own benefit as anyone else’s.]

There seems to be a nearly universal preference for narrative over fact in most (if not all) of the US debate over economic policy. People invest the issue with their own biases (a common propensity) then construct or defend the most closely aligned story.

In short, people have been led to believe that the whole situation:

a) makes sense;
b) can be simply expressed; and
c) has a straightforward solution, if only the rest of the world can be made to see it.

This explains not only the refusal even to grant that a debt policy must of necessity consider revenue generation AND reduced spending, but also the tendency to draw the Hayek/Keynes/Friedman debate as a zero-sum argument.

Government, at the best of times, is more a clusterfuck than anything else. It requires a level of opportunism and ideological/ethical/moral compromise that few of us can stomach. Tragically, it breeds people who can stomach it far too easily.

Human society requires narrative in order to make sense of this otherwise senseless situation. (We can’t all be Sartre or Clauswitz – and really, who wants to be?) But its desire for narrative has been cynically abused so consistently and for so long by propaganda that the possibility for civic (not to say civil) discourse has been reduced nearly to zero.

The increasingly (irretrievably?) fictional rhetoric driven by the various camps within the anarchic village that is Washington has made mutual understanding (and therefore compromise) impossible. We can, in other words, no longer talk usefully amongst ourselves.

On Pseudonymity

27 July 2011 admin

My friend Skud (yes, Skud) recently had her Google+ account suspended, apparently for not using her ‘real’ name. The section of Google’s privacy policy dealing with the issue of names says only this:

To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you. For example, if your full legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, either of those would be acceptable.

Audrey Watters at ReadWriteWeb got a little further clarification from a Google spokesperson concerning Google Profiles and the use of real names:

“We are not requiring people to use their ‘real name’, but rather they need their Google profile to include the name they commonly go by in daily life. I know that sounds like the same thing, but there are some differences. For a hypothetical example, Samuel Clemens could choose to be known as ‘Mark Twain,’ although we wouldn’t allow him to go by Authordude88. And for a real life example, 50 Cent is using Google+, after we verified that this is the name he is commonly referred to. More details can be found here.

That page goes on to say that your name should use your first and last names, avoid ‘unusual’ characters (more about this below) and that your profile should represent only one person.

There are numerous problems with this policy which, taken together, make it impossible to implement it consistently or, indeed, objectively. Arguably, this policy would have disallowed some or all of the following:

Jesus Christ: ‘Christ’ is an title, not an actual name
Buddha: It’s really a title, and it’s only one word
Pol Pot, Lenin & Stalin: All noms de guerre, associated with illegal and subversive activities at some point in history.
The Apostle Paul: He was ‘really’ Saul
Socrates: What, no last name?
Ellery Queen: ‘He’ is actually a ‘they‘.
Acton, Currer and Ellis Bell: The Bronte sisters, who hid their identities (and location) to avoid scandal in their community
George Eliot and George Sand: Just a couple of the most notable women who could only be taken seriously after assuming a male identity

I could go on at great length, but suffice it to say that there are problems. You’ll note, by the way, that many of the names listed above refer to individuals who were guilty of subversive and often illegal activities. In many cases, too, there was a point in time where these names were not commonly known, or were disputed (even proscribed) by large segments of society, or by the powers that be.

Let me try to make these apparently silly examples clearer. It’s easy, with the benefit of hindsight to say, “Dude, that’s JESUS. Everybody knows he’s the Christ.” Well, that may be true now, but what about when he was some misfit wandering from town to town, pissing off a lot of Pharisees in the process? And yes, knowing what we know now, maybe we wouldn’t want to give a voice to Pol Pot, Lenin or Stalin. But how would we have felt about them in the early years of the 20th Century?

My question is: Are we on the side of the Pharisees, the Tsars and the Cambodian despots? Because that’s who we’re helping here, metaphorically speaking.

I’m not advocating taking a particular side. I’m suggesting exactly the opposite – not taking sides. That’s why I deliberately included some decidedly contentious figures in the list. (I could just as easily have included the authors of the Federalist Papers.) I just want to know that there’s room in our society for gadflies like Socrates, that it’s okay for some as-yet-unknown literary genius to speak freely and loud.

(And that, yes, even the soon-to-be villains can be captured in the public dialogue. There’s actually an argument to be made for listening to nuts like bin Laden and Breivik, in order that we better understand – and engage – our enemy.)

There are technical problems with any set of rules applying to names. As Patrick McKenzie eloquently demonstrates, just about any rule you think might apply to names actually doesn’t. Furthermore, the rationale that disallowing pseudonyms would have any effect whatsoever on spam and/or civility in public discourse, let alone that it will ‘help people know who they’re talking to,’ is entirely unproven.

But the issue is bigger than just technical. Skud writes that disallowing pseudonymity can be discriminatory and downright dangerous. The fact that her argument isn’t comprehensive makes it all the more compelling.

Throughout history, and for countless reasons, the use of pseudonyms and the appropriation of unofficial names are common, reputable and widely accepted practices,

One of the most common responses to these (and other) objections can be stated succinctly enough: Google’s Service – Google’s Rules. Fair enough, but let’s consider the implications of this. If we as a society allow ourselves to be utterly circumscribed by corporate policies over which we have no control (and which, as here, are pretty much arbitrary in nature), we’re in effect voting ourselves back into feudalism, where the rule of law becomes meaningless – or rather, indistinguishable from fiat.

I know some of you are writhing in your chairs right now, waiting to shout, “Oh come on, Crumb! Lighten up. This is a bloody social network we’re talking about, not some proletarian revolutionary struggle.” Well, no. This is a social network, and if it wants to reflect society then it needs to bloody well reflect it. In many parts of the world, just hanging out with your buddies on a service like this can get you into a lot of trouble.

Identity matters, for political, economical, social and philosophical reasons. The ability to define one’s identity freely is a fundamental human right. Google’s aim is to reduce bad behaviour, and that’s laudable. But if they want to do it right, they should focus on behaviour, not practices that are only tangentially linked to the problem.

If Google really wants their network to reflect society rather than deform it, they need to back off the name issue and look at fostering a culture of respect and civility instead.

Canonical is Failing

18 May 2011 admin3 Comments

A word of advice to FOSS geeks:

If you must recommend Ubuntu Linux to others, recommend nothing later than 10.04, the last LTS release.

10.10 saw a number of minor but irritating bugs creep in that show a significant shortage of testing and forethought. There were countless small things like context menus no longer working after returning from a suspended state or new window positioning that’s completely counter-intuitive. Some of them, like changing sides for window buttons or listing indecipherable package descriptions above package names in Update Manager, were deliberate (and conceivably, in some universe, necessary), but most of the changes were clearly mistakes. When these are combined with long-standing bugs (like Network Manager arbitrarily deciding to disable the Save button) and inconsistencies, they begin to weigh against Ubuntu’s many virtues.

In 11.04, Unity, combined with an increase in the number of stupid bugs (that spiffy state-of-the-machine motd message is FUBAR’ed now on console login) clearly indicates that Ubuntu is more interested in new and shiny than they are in quality. A quick scan of Launchpad (itself a new product designed to simplify bug maintenance and supplant the competition, but which has done neither) shows that there are, on average, 100 open bugs per project.

Ubuntu is slipping out of control. Canonical have stopped listening and – more importantly – working with the community. The number of defects is growing, but Canonical’s response is to make it harder for mere mortals to submit bugs. They seem to think that strong guidance is needed for their product to grow in new and interesting ways. Fair enough, but they’re confusing leadership with control. They’re simply imposing their views because they don’t value the discussion. They’re treating criticism as opposition and shutting themselves off from valid feedback.

Worse, they simply don’t have the number of skilled developers they need to achieve their goals. When I look at the bug queues on some packages, I shudder in sympathy with the poor souls who are expected to wrangle them. Canonical is clearly embarked on an impossible task, but nobody’s either got the guts or the vision to spell this out to Shuttleworth and co.

Getting buy-in and active participation from the community is a pain in the arse at the best of times, but the alternative is far worse. Heaven knows that the GNOME dev camp are… special, to be nice. But it’s clear that, given the choice between getting a partial but workable success through compromise or taking their ball and going home, Canonical has consistently chosen the latter.

This cannot end well. It will, however, end sooner than later.

The Powerful and the Good

17 May 2011 admin

[This review of Wan Smolbag Theatre’s new play, Zero Balans was written for the Vanuatu Daily Post.]

Zero Balans, the new play from Wan Smolbag Theatre, seems to argue that you can be powerful and you can be good, but you can’t be both at once.

This political morality tale recounts the story of Ezekiel. A charismatic, intelligent and powerful man, his weakness and self-indulgence have led him to achieve only notoriety in his years as a cabinet minister. Struck down by an early heart attack and faced with eternal damnation, he demands, cajoles and finally begs the Recording Angels for just a little more time to achieve all the good he intended.

We follow him through flashbacks from his early days in politics. His wildly optimistic promises inflame and inspire the fictional community of Lagoon Saed. The delirium of his first election victory quickly wanes, however; before the celebration is properly over, he is already beset with demands from above and below.

Derek, Ezekiel’s mentor and financier, quickly reminds him where his sympathies had better lie, but not before Ezekiel’s wife and sister have begun to plague him with demands for the family. The community chief, an amiable old rascal, is quickest of all, proclaiming the newly-minted MP’s value to the community even as the voting results are being read.

This is Vanuatu. Everybody needs something, and it’s never something small. In a cutely staged scene, community members literally climb over one another to bend Ezekiel’s ear – and open his wallet. His political masters are happy to keep him flush with cash, but only as long as he toes the party line.

Politicians in Ezekiel’s world seem to have a nodding acquaintance with policy and development, but the ever-present threat of a confidence motion leaves them perpetually scrambling after cash and other emoluments to keep their MPs onside. Happily for them, they do not lack in assistance from outside ‘investors’ willing to grease the wheels of the political machine.

Ezekiel is willing to say anything to avoid damnation. But as events progress, we come to see him as merely human, a man fallen victim to the same desires and temptations as any other man – albeit sometimes two at a time. Beset as he is in a morass of venality, short-sightedness and fickleness, he is, ultimately, no better than he should be.

It’s notable that the play’s purportedly moral and upright citizens come out with very little shine remaining on their respective halos. Playwright Jo Dorras, as she always does, avoids the easy accusations. Refusing the lie that politicians are just amoral rascals sprung sui generis from the ranks of humanity, she shows how the scramble for advancement and advantage afflicts everyone, inside politics and out.

But this is not a society of villains. If Ezekiel’s sister wants more money, it’s to send her children to a better school. The chief comes seeking hundreds of thousands, not for himself but for the local church. Ezekiel protests to the Recording Angels that it was these demands (and not the endless spending on baubles, booze and debauchery) that have driven him into the company of men who are altogether too comfortable in the faithless, venal world of Vanuatu politics.

Given a chance at redemption, however, Ezekiel quickly finds himself bereft of friends and influence. In becoming a good man at last, he is stripped of the influence he once had.

As with all Smolbag productions, Zero Balans avoids polemic and prescription. The play seeks primarily to subvert the common conception that simply changing one’s MP is enough to change the cycle of corruption and callous disregard for the future. It is a mordant indictment of Vanuatu society’s inability to look beyond its immediate needs and desires, to forego quick reward in order to strive for a greater good.

Nobody, it appears, is willing to forebear in order for all to thrive.

The only characters who demonstrate any degree of redemption are those who, like Ezekiel, are at last left with nothing but the clarity of their own vision. The performance of the night was provided by Helen Kailo, who played Lisa on the evening we went. (She shares the role with Florence Taga, another powerful young actor.) Kailo’s fluid, natural and finally heart-breaking rendition of a young woman seduced, discarded and ultimately cast out of her own community was one of the best yet seen onstage in Vanuatu.

But the wisdom of misplaced love and bitter experience isn’t enough to obviate the oppression of society and circumstance. In this world, some forces are too great for any of us.

Director Peter Walker says, “[W]e collude with politicians and it takes a brave person to rock the boat. However the danger is that even if someone does rock the boat it may be too late because some people are beyond the law.”

Zero Balans features some of the most polished and professional performances to grace Wan Smolbag’s stage so far – and certainly its best ensemble effort. It’s testament to the commitment of the husband and wife team of Peter Walker and Jo Dorras that many of Smolbag’s actors have been appearing consistently on stage and screen for years now – some for decades. Their maturity, experience and enduring passion add fluidity and considerable nuance to a complex, demanding script.

Morinda Tari, as the protagonist’s importunate sister Elise, was so consistently powerful and natural that we’re not sure people even realised they were watching a character. She has the power to carry an entire play. We hope to see her in a leading role some day soon.

Noel Aru (who alternates with veteran Titus Joseph as Ezekiel) created a mannered, professional portrayal of a complex, deeply flawed man who quite literally fights for his life from the beginning of the play. He showed the maturity of a seasoned actor, sustaining his presence yet allowing space for others such as Donald Frank, whose smooth, serpent-like self-awareness made Derek, a mephistophelian political leader, at once alluring and repugnant.

Special mention goes to Danny Marcel, who plays two key roles (as the PM and the community’s chief) with such adroitness and flair that we honestly didn’t realise we were watching the same man. His sense of timing and physicality is superb. Aru, Frank and Marcel’s first scene together is a comic gem that competes with the best British political satire.

Zero Balans is performed at 7:00 p.m. every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday evening at Wan Smolbag until June 25th. Tickets are 50 vatu each. Arrive at least an hour early to be guaranteed a seat.

The Wealthy Programmer

27 March 2011 admin

In discussion today about programming for money – as opposed to programming for the love of it, or helping to change the shape of modern technology – someone made the following point:

I’d have thought striving to be independently wealthy would be an admirable goal – it’s a lot easier to be a philanthropist when you don’t have to worry about the roof over your head and where your next meal is coming from.

You’d have thought, but you’d have been wrong.

The pursuit and acquisition of wealth generally breeds greater stress and worry rather than less. Granted, there is a level of income below which one struggles constantly to manage even the most basic aspects of daily living.

Having lived on both sides of the divide, I can say with some assurance that living in poverty is debilitating, but so is significant wealth.

The one lesson of any value I’ve learned is that if you’re really serious about helping others (or helping make important things happen), you’re doing it already. Opportunities tend to look for people willing to accept them. You don’t have to be rich or powerful to achieve important things. Most of the time, you’ll find yourself pitted against the rich and powerful – at least you will if what you’re doing represents any sort of change. Even then, there are always influential allies to be found. Put in enough hours, demonstrate – no, prove – your abilities and Good Things do happen.

But here’s the catch. To do so is to accept uncertainty and risk as your constant companions. You are guaranteed to fail more than you succeed. Every victory, save a very choice few, will be temporary or mitigated by compromise. Your own needs and satisfaction will always take second place to those of others. You’ll find yourself – as I do – older, wiser, largely contented, but with very little to guarantee a contented, comfortable retirement.

All of this, of course, runs counter to the American myth of Success, where the sole measure of influence and importance is wealth. Rightly or wongly, it highlights people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, relegating Knuth, Woz, Mohammed Younus and countless other more meritorious figures to the shadows. This is a distortion. It’s not false, but it’s fake.

In rare cases, wealth will accompany accomplishment, but that’s not always the case, and if you let the former stand for the latter, that’s all you’ll have. As a wise man once said to me, ‘If you go into the hills looking for gold, all you’ll find is gold.’