December 15, 2006
| Free software |
free_software
|
This post is cross-posted from gnuband.org where it was originally written.
Please, if you want to follow my rants, update your bookmarks to the new blog URL http://gnuband.org and more importantly
subscribe to the new RSS feed at http://gnuband.org/feed/.
One of the big advantages of using GNU/Linux is that most of the computer games don't run on it and, as a consequence, I don't have the risk of trying one, become addicted and hence even less productive (whatever productive means). However I somehow feel isolated from conversations and frontier experiences for not being able to try World of Warcraft or SecondLife. I once tried to find some Free Software alternatives and downloaded PlaneShift, a very cool Free Software MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game) that runs also under GNU/Linux, but what happened is that I played until 6 in the morning and the following day I was sooo sleepy!
Another game that might soon become Free is Ryzom.
"Ryzom is an innovative MMORPG, which has been developed since the year 2000 by the independent studio, Nevrax. For the past two years Ryzom has been marketed and sold to gamers, developing a fiercly loyal fanbase. Unfortunately, due to market conditions and other unforseen cirucumstances, a request to begin bankruptcy proceedings has been filed at the commerce tribunal."
The Free Ryzom Campaign is soliciting donations in order to "help us purchase the source code, artwork and other game data associated with Ryzom, so we can breathe new life into it as an open, democratically run player project".
It is great to read that the Free Software Foundation announced that it will officially support the Free Ryzom Campaign with a pledge of $60,000. Lack of games is often mentioned as one of the main reasons for people not to switching to GNU/Linux.
And Ryzom seems incredibly cool too (see the YouTube video), so who will need the non-free software World of Warcraft or SecondLife anymore?!?
You might want to support this initiative and donate to The Free Ryzom Campaign or donate to the Free Software Foundation.
[via gnuvox] (this post was also an excuse to try how embedding YouTube videos works)
December 05, 2006
This blog permanently moved to http://gnuband.org.
In case you are interested, you can subscribe to the new RSS feed that is conviniently located at http://gnuband.org/feed.
Summaryzing:
Follow the new blog at http://gnuband.org
Subscribe to the new RSS feed at http://gnuband.org/feed
November 23, 2005
| Trust and Reputation |
trust_and_reputation
|
Wow, I received an email with another trust-related project.
The Agent Reputation and Trust (ART) Testbed initiative has been launched with the goal of establishing a testbed for agent reputation- and trust-related technologies. The ART Testbed is designed to serve in two roles:
* as a competition forum in which researchers can compare their technologies against objective metrics, and
* as an experimental tool, with flexible parameters, allowing researchers to perform customizable, easily-repeatable experiments.
You can play with the code released on Sourceforge and you can also enjoy the explanation movie!
| Trust and Reputation |
trust_and_reputation
|
Today is a day of interesting conferences about trust.
Reinventing trust, collaboration and compliance in social systems
A workshop exploring novel insights and solutions for social systems design
April - 2006 in conjunction with CHI 2006
| Trust and Reputation |
trust_and_reputation
|
- 22nd Chaos Communication Congress - Private Investigations - Breaking Down the Web of Trust
Even with tutorials on the WoT and good trust policies the concept of "trust" can still be hard to grasp. Here we'll look at trust metrics, ways of using current trust systems better, and some non-crypto applications of trust.
- Microformats Proposal for Reputation and Trust Metrics By Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc. Very interesting!!!
[From http://del.icio.us/tag/trust, subscribe to the rss feed (http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/trust)]
| Trust and Reputation |
trust_and_reputation
|
"There are three types of lies - lies, damn lies, and facts found on the Web."
Dr. Tim Finin, paraphrasing the well known quotation by Benjamin Disraeli on Statistics
This quotation opens the "Workshop Motivation and Goal" of the Models of Trust for the Web (MTW'06), a workshop at the 15th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2006), May 23-26, 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland.
The workshop seems incredibly interesting.
(via del.icio.us/tag/trust)
November 18, 2005
I read from Ethan Zuckermann who is currently in Tunis for the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) some shocking news.
I’m here to help run a workshop titled “Expression Under Repression”, hosted by Hivos and organzied by the Global Voices team. When we arrived at the exhibition hall this morning, we were warned that our workshop could be cancelled. (...) Specifically, it was suggested by Tunisian authorities that “expression under repression has nothing to do with ICT for development.
and
Yesterday, we were warned that our session could be cancelled by the Tunisian authorities. We also discovered that the session wasn’t listed in the official program guide. Today, we came to the room where the session was to be held and there was a sign on the door stating that the workshop was cancelled. Friends who passed by the UNDP booth on the WSIS floor earlier today heard gossip that the security forces would appear at our session and anyone who attended would be arrested. And I got a few SMSs from people who’d asked about our session at the information booths and had been told there was no information on our session.
It is incredibly stupid for Tunisia to just show its repressive and censorship face when all the world is looking in their direction for the WSIS. And we all should really think about it more often, many countries control Internet and negate freedom of expression to their citizens.
Something you can do (but only a tiny contribution of what we should do) is to join the Electronic Frontier Foundation which, among millions of other worthy campaigns, published How to Blog Safely (see also GlobalVoices technical extension and the Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
Just one more shocking news, RSF head Robert Menard was not allowed by Tunisian security officials to leave the plane after his arrival from Paris in Tunis.
Too often, leaving in a country where Internet is not (too much) filtered and there is (enough) freedom of expression I forgot about these important matters. If you care about these matters, do join EFF and follow Ethan's blog.
November 16, 2005
| Free software |
free_software
|
| ICT4D |
ict4d
|
You probably have heard of the MIT initiative One Laptop Per Child, a plan to develop a $100 laptop computer for distribution to millions of schoolchildren in developing countries.
Today I read from WallStreetJournal:
Steve Jobs, Apple Computer Inc.'s chief executive, offered to provide free copies of the company's operating system, OS X, for the machine, according to Seymour Papert, a professor emeritus at MIT who is one of the initiative's founders. "We declined because it's not open source," says Dr. Papert, noting the designers want an operating system that can be tinkered with.
Wow! Apple offers for free its fabolous operating system and the MIT has the strenght to refuse such an offer. Just think if this would have happened 5 years ago. MIT would probably have been so happy and thanking. But now GNU/Linux on the desktop is almost as usable as other operating systems, and it will be better in few years.
Of course MIT's refusal makes a lot, a lot of sense and I totally support their decision, even if they should speak fo Free Software and not Open Source. Anyway, embracing a proprietary operating system would not give to schoolchildren in developing countries the freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0), the freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). [Access to the source code is a precondition for this.], the freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2), the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). [Access to the source code is a precondition for this]. These are the freedom that Free Software gives you.
The $100 laptop is just a mean for achieving a goal, that is reducing poverty (that can be defined as inability to improve your current conditions). In this sense, only the ability to "play with" and study how your tool works, the ability to be an active player in the game and not just a passive swallower of information can produce empowerment. So being able to play with the tool (i.e. access to its source code) is mandatory. And the before mentioned freedoms as well.
November 14, 2005
| Recommender Systems |
recommender_systems
|
Users reviews of products (like "I bought an Ipod and it was not working" or "I went yesterday to XYZ Restaurant and it was fabolous" or "i saw 'paradise now' and it was great") are the basic building blocks of Recommender Systems. And of course they are able to determine the success or failure of a product. Many people nowadays before buying a product check "what Internet is saying about this product?", usually the level of information awareness is precisely this one.
So, it should not be surprising that:
- There are authors on Amazon who write reviews of their own books under pseudonyms
at least one U.S. author was mistakenly outed on Amazon.com's Canadian website as having written a review of his own work. The real names of thousands of people who had posted anonymous customer reviews under pseudonyms like "a reader from St. Louis" were revealed online for several days - a mistake that finally was corrected after reviewers, some of them authors themselves, complained.
- a restaurant is suing zSurvey.com, a company that collects restaurant reviews from common consumers and posts them online and in a book, for damaging its reputation. (...) seeking a public apology and 50,000 yuan (US$6,173) each in compensation.They are also demanding the Website delete all of the negative comments it has posted online and stop publishing a guide book with negative comments".
- and mainly that Amazon Gets Patents on Consumer Reviews
Review your local dry cleaner, pay $10 million?
User reviews are a hot new content area, being used by Google (Quote, Chart), Yahoo (Quote, Chart) and MSN to sweeten their local search results. But as of Thursday, such consumer reviews could put search providers, as well as thousands of e-commerce sites, video rental or review sites and online booksellers, in the sights of Amazon.com's (Quote, Chart) lawyers.
The patents are simply absurd (you can read them in the article) and I'm not going to comment them and I'm very happy that at least for now Europe voted against Software Patents).
About reviews, I think that creators should be free to publish their opinions (in term of reviews in this case), they should own their reviews (hreview seems a great format for this task), reviews should be released under very liberal licences and everyone should be allowed to aggregate the reviews and do whatever she prefers with this information: offer a Recommender System service, use them for her own decisions, .... Reviews are one of the cornerstones of the Information society and they should be usable by anyone who has an idea.
| Copyright |
copyright
|
| Free software |
free_software
|
From dewinter.com: The spyware that Sony installs on the computers of music fans does not even seem to be correct in terms of copyright law.
It is simply great. While Sony claims that it installed software secretly on the computers of unaware customers in order to protect the copyright of its musicians (while everyone knows that Sony is just trying to perpetuate its dying
business model), Sony itself does not care about not respecting the copyright of the author of the software LAME that is licensed under the so called Lesser Gnu Public License (LGPL).
It turns out that the rootkit contains pieces of code that are identical to LAME, an open source mp3-encoder, and thereby breach the license.
This software is licensed under the so called Lesser Gnu Public License (LGPL). According to this license Sony must comply with a couple of demands. Amongst others, they have to indicate in a copyright notice that they make use of the software. The company must also deliver the source code to the open-source libraries or otherwise make these available. And finally, they must deliver or otherwise make available the in between form between source code and executable code, the so called objectfiles, with which others can make comparable software.
November 10, 2005
| Semantic web |
semantic_web
|
One night, many days ago, Bru and I had a night divertissement (as I liked to call it). During a funny Skype session, we created a paper for SWAP2005 (Semantic Web Applications and Perspectives, 2nd Italian Semantic Web Workshop, Trento, Faculty of Economics,14-15-16 December, 2005). The title of the paper is "A Semantic Mobs Manifesto for the (r)Evolutionary Web" (pdf). Since the conference is in Trento, I'll probably go anyway so the idea was to get one more publication (is there another reason for sending a paper to a conference? ![[winking face]](http://moloko.itc.it/paoloblog/images/smilies/wink.gif){kind=small}
). As I already said, it was a night divertissement, it took us few hours creating it, well, most of the time was spent in chatting about the possible title. We skyped really improbable titles I think I remember. And it was a lot of fun.
Anyway I received few days ago an email saying that the paper was rejected (in the following there are the reviews in case you are curious). I think reviewers did the right thing in rejecting it. It was not a serious contribution to science but more a provocation (and a funny-for-us night divertissement).
So how we created the paper? We took verbatim a blog post by Ryan King titled "An Evolutionary Revolution - On the shoulders of giants" and we inserted it in the paper. Since the blog post was resealed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence, we could import it legally, in fact we of course gave credit to Ryan King in the paper, we re-released the paper under the same licence and the paper was not a commercial work.
Then we added a short quibbling about how with the Semantic Web envisioned in the conference, a paper like this one would be easily creatable by some software tool, expecially when i a short future the number of creative commons released text works will be huge. The last lines of the abstract hinted a matrix-like scenario in which (human) researchers will be no more needed. The title was entirely Bru's fault. Don't tell him but I think we got rejected because of the title
So, well, enjoy it, it is released under a creative commons licence, respect the licence and do whatever you want with it, yes you might even want to cite it in a "real"paper, that would be a larger point about "what are conferences for in an era of free, decentralized publishing?" but I guess you will have to wait another post for it. Anyway, don't worry, it is not a unexpected or clever post, nothing more that our rejected submission for SWAP
In the following you find the reviews we got and at the really bottom the text version of the paper.
I wonder if Danny Ayers was one of the reviewer since he writes "I nearly had a dilemma over whether to give something a positive rating simply because it was really cool, rather than bringing significant academic value to the field. Again fortunately for me the material in question did have value in the latter sense as well, so I could call it a Clear Accept without any ethical worries." But it can't be because our paper has no value in the latter sense
October 04, 2005
| Free software |
free_software
|
| Future |
future
|
[Update: re-released under CC-by for Sys-con (my blog posts are usually released under CC-by-sa)]
From Yahoo!News: Google, Sun Challenge Microsoft's Office
Google Inc. took a big step toward challenging Microsoft Corp.'s dominance in computer word-processing and spreadsheets with the announcement Tuesday that it would distribute Java technology from Sun Microsystems Inc.
Few days ago I got a phone call, it was Jason Stamper from London, wow, I never got an interview call from London. He wanted to know about my forecast: Ajax Office available in less than one year. The article ended up in Computer Business Review and then got slashdotted. Wow, I have never been slashdotted. But let me be clear about it: I opened a project called AjaxOffice on Sourceforge because I was thinking about writing some code (I played with Javascript and the DOM model and you can create magic and this is easy-enough). I was thinking that a community would possibly gather around the project. In the process I set up a wiki and start collecting many similar projects and useful packages (some of them are Free Software). But I received many emails saying that the project is just vaporware, that I just want to get credit for something that other people are doing (I suspect all of them generated from few persons but I cannot tell of course).
So let me clear about it: yes, there is no code and, since I should write my PhD thesis and since there are already many interesting projects, I don't have plan to write any code about it in the next few months. I plan to shout down the project shortly and just leave pointers to other Free Software projects that are already ahead creating a Web Office suite (Zimbra manages emails and contacts by now but check the video and hold your jaw (it is Free Software). But there are other intersting projects as well, just look in the ajaxoffice wiki).
Anyway, it seems that with the "one year" forecast I have been conservative.
In fact, this post is about the today joint announcement of Google and Sun. This is really disruptive for the entire computer, software industry.
Don't you think that Google and Sun have already spoken with Hardware producers in order to have their system pre-installed on normal computers sold to normal people? I think so. And I can already foresee the scene in a normal computer shop: the seller is going to ask: "Ok, we have chosen your computer. So, which system do you want on? The crappy Windows XP or the new shiny Sun system with bright OpenOffice and Google widgets already integrated? By the way, the Microsoft one costs 100 euros more."
Well, if you want a first idea, check the stocks: quotes of Microsoft vs Google (last 5 days) and quotes of Microsoft vs Sun (last 5 days).
And look at what Scoble keeps saying: the thick client is coming back. I understand that you have to say it but really, Scoble, do you believe your own words? Or are you secretly selling all your Microsoft stocks?
Question for you, reader: "which you would rather give up - your browser, or all the rest of your desktop apps?". First, answer. Ok, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun President, asked this very same question to the audience at a keynote and I can imagine you can predict the answers he got.
Last point of an already too long post: having an alternative in the software market will be simply great for everyone, having concurrency is always better, having a monopoly is always worst. In this way, normal people will start undestanding that there is an alternative (TIAA), i.e. Windows is not the computer. The fact that OpenOffice is in the new system is good since OpenOffice is Free Software, software that gives you freedom. I don't think that the Java Desktop code is Free Software (see licence) but I think sooner or later Sun will have to release it under GPL. [The fact that most of this new Google+Sun system will use online services, for which they don't have to release the code, is the topic of another long post].
By the way, I think this is a great opportunity for a Free Software GNU/Linux system to really become available pre-installed on normal computers sold to normal people, my forecast this time is that it will be Ubuntu. Yours?
September 30, 2005
| Trust and Reputation |
trust_and_reputation
|
I just saw the presentation by Dick Hardt at OSCON2005 about Identity2.0. The style of the presentation is great, it is almost a cartoon, check it. And it is a great for getting to know in a quick way many of the current efforts in providing an identity system that can really work on the Internet (decentralized, open, ...). I'm currently lurking the OpenID mailinglist and I discovered Passel that seems interesting. The presentation is available in WMV, QuickTime and as Flash, so you should have no problems. The last slide says that the presentation style was borrowed by Lawrence Lessig.
As the online world moves towards Web 2.0, the concept of digital identity is evolving, and existing identity systems are falling behind. New systems are emerging that place identity in the hands of users instead of directories. Simple, secure and open, these systems will provide the scalable, user-centric mechanism for authenticating and managing real-world identities online, enabling truly distinct and portable Internet identities.
September 26, 2005
| Free software |
free_software
|
From news.com: Massachusetts has decided to use only products that conform to the Open Document Format for Office Applications which is developed by the standards body OASIS. (...)The move to adopt OpenDocument shuts Microsoft out of the state's procurement process because the software giant, which dominates the office application market, has said it does not intend to support the OpenDocument format.
Microsoft of course is trying to stop a precedent that would be possible followed by many other states all over the world (and terminate its global monopoly). So Microsoft manager Alan Yates wrote a letter (15 pages PDF available on mass.gov site).
I hightlight just one paragraph of the Microsoft letter: In short, the proposed policy is costly and unnecessary and would limit the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to a desktop software policy that is less functional, less open, and less flexible than the Commonwealth’s current policy.
Tim Bray comments on this precise claim: That barn-floor stench threatens to overcome me. In particular, the claim that office technology based on an open, standardized, file format that has already been implemented multiple times is necessarily “less functional, less open, and less flexible” is outrageous.
Summaryzing, "Openness is Closeness". I think Big Brother Microsoft is suggesting to add this new slogan to the 3 Orwellian ones, “War is Peace”, "Freedom is Slavery” and “Ignorance is Strength" [by the way, if you have not read 1984, I strongly recommend it. And of course, after reading it, you may want to join SOS: Students for an Orwellian Society.]
Continue reading "Orwellian Microsoft: Openness is Closeness"September 25, 2005
| GeoBlogging |
geoblogging
|
Some time ago I had fun playing with Google Maps but then I didn't follow evolutions. Today I tried a quick search and I found already 2 gems (but I guess many more exist). Animated Route, Integrate layers on map from NASA WMS server. Check this page and the additional Javascript library by which you can create similar gems.
10 older entries:
-
Presentation at the Web Intelligence conference [09/21/2005]
I just finished giving a presentation at the Web Intelligence Conference in Compiegne (France). I tried to push the concept of VoteLinks. The presentation is in S5 (so pure standard XHTML+CSS+JS) and CreativeCommons licenced: Page-reRank: using trusted links to re-rank authority (presentation) with the accompanying paper (pdf). Nothing earth-shaking at all, really. The main (simple) concept was that "Attention != Appreciation", the most linked to page is not necessarily the most appreciated: I might link to gwbush.com in order to criticize it but my link increases its PageRank (something I don't want). At the moment, HTML does not allow to express the reason behind a link, but VoteLinks microformats will allow to add some semantics to linking language. For example, you could say something like <a href="http://forza-italia.it/" rev="vote-against">berlusconi</a> <a href="http://romanoprodi.it" rev="vote-abstain">prodi</a> <a href="http://ivanscalfarotto.info"rev="vote-for">scalfarotto</a> In the paper I also give evidence of the (intuitive) fact that "Attention!=Appreciation" with a simple experiment on a real, huge community with positive and negative links. I thought it would be good to have the Web Intelligence community knows about VoteLinks and other microformats. And actually only 1 person (out of a number of people raging from 10 to 30) had heard of VoteLinks before, so the goal of spreading knowledge was accomplished. And feel free to link to the presentation of course ... hopefully not with a rev="vote-against" link!! Tomorrow I go to Paris for giving a demo at SonyLabs and then meeting with Alf. My trip was once more time sponsored by HospitalityClub/CouchSurfing: in Compiegne I was hosted by Jeremy and in Paris by Antonello. Too cool! Try it yourself, you always met great people!... (280 words)
(4 Comments)
-
Speaking effectively hints [09/18/2005]
Reading How to Make Your Speaking Easier and More Effective: An old UCLA study of effective presentations analyzed 3 elements (verbal, vocal, visual). Here's what it found was important in establishing credibility/believability: * Verbal (words you say): 7%. * Vocal (how you sound when you say them): 38%. * Visual (how you look when you say them): 55%.... (59 words) (0 Comments) -
Presentation in standard format, S5 [09/18/2005]
Some days ago I had to give a presentation for the 2K* symposium, a joint initiative of research groups from different IT institutions, based in Trento and in Genova. The 40 mins presentation was titled "Trust in Recommender Systems: an historical overview and recent developments" (check the source code!). It is heavily based on an old presentation, I just added some slides about microformats, a concept I wanted to convey to the audience. Anyway, I took the occasion to try to create the presentation in HTML using S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System developed by Eric Meyer. I think I will create all my future presentation in S5 from now on. The advantages: it "forces" you to keep the slides simple (no unnatural flow of information) and short (however you can have animations, check this slide); it is easy to publish the presentation on the Web, anyone can link to a specific slide, search engines find the information and index them, it is highly standard, evolutionary and small-pieces-loosely-connected-philosophy-like (for exaple it would be possible to create a small piece of javascript code that collect slides from different presentations in some meaningful automatic way to create a new presentation, but the possibilities are endless of course, especially if using the S5 format based on XOXO microformat), I can create the presentation with whatever text editor (perfect if you are in text mode), it does not require the viewer to have some fancy program (openoffice for the freedom lovers, powerpoint for the others) but a browser suffices. You can find many presentations in S5 format in the microformats wiki; I also liked this presentation of Firefox, with style vulpes-flagrans or with style greenery. Yes, I know the stile I used for my presentation is not that great, if someone with graphical skills would like to create a style for me, it will be very appreciated of course. For starting playing with S5, I suggest you S5 primer (you need to download HTML code and edit it) or S5present, an open-source web-based slideshow application (you just create an identity there and then use the site for creating the presentation). Guess what? S5 Presents was written in under 10 hours and 500 lines of code using the fantastic Ruby on Rails framework. [question about English: "take the occasion to"? "take the chance to"? I wanted to say that I used this fact as an opportunity to try the technique. How do you say it in English?] Tag: s5... (426 words) (3 Comments) -
Am I a human? Well, I take the Turing Test [09/17/2005]
Very funny post: How I failed the Turing test. Actually, it raises a lot of metaphysical questions. Some time around March, I started receiving a number of random instant messages from people I've never met before. Apparantly, my AIM alias had been added to at least two online lists and people all over the world were busy importing me as a buddy. I say "at least two" because the people who contacted me fell into one of two camps: people who thought they were contacting a celebrity and people who thought they were contacting a robot. As I talked to more and more of these folks, I began to discover something really disturbing about myself: I consistently fail to be perceived as human. Since you are defined but what other people think of you, if the other people think you are not an human, what are you? Read the entire post.... (154 words) (0 Comments) -
Discovering Roman ancient villa through GoogleMaps [09/17/2005]
From Nature: Using satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian computer programmer has stumbled upon the remains of an ancient villa. (...) Luca Mori reports his findings on this blog post. On Gmap you can see the discovered villa. Luca then created CyberArchaeologist.net: In the world many places exist that deserve of being investigate to you. For this it is necessary collaboration with the persons of the place, with who it knows to recognize the places and with who it knows the history well. An Italian television (La7) made a report about it. And you could possibily see the video at mms://videoteca.cdn.... I could NOT see it since I use GNU/Linux and MMS (the mms:// part in the previous URL) or ' Microsoft Media Server ' protocol is Microsoft's proprietary network streaming protocol. Microsoft has never released a specification to describe how MMS actually works, yet it is extensively used by their Microsoft media player software. (info about MMS protocol taken from http://sdp.ppona.com/ and I didn't check if they are still true). I could probably try to download the last codecs for my Free Software player that someone has retroengineered but this is not the point. Just as much as http:// is an open protocol that allows anyone to contribute (for example, Luca was able to contribute using the Web and providing info on the Web), mms:// is a closed protocol which does not allow evolution, contribution, freedom. Seeing videos on GNU/Linux is always a bit problematic, since there are no open protocols for streaming videos, or I'm missing something? Vorbis? How can we make an open protocol hugely adapted? By the way, good spot Luca!... (287 words) (2 Comments) -
Petition for Open Access to State-Collected Geospatial Data [09/16/2005]
You might want to sign up the petition for Open Access to State-Collected Geospatial Data (in Italian). We believe that state-collected geodata should be openly available to citizens. Please sign up below to support this manifesto. All government-collected geodata should be open, that is, available for free distribution and re-use under a ShareAlike license. Geodata is a public good. Open access to it, under a 'Commons' (ShareAlike) license, is the best way to see its full benefits realized by industry and citizens. At the same time such an arrangement, by requiring users to redistribute updates and improvements to the data, promises to deliver more and better data for less.... (110 words) (2 Comments) -
Trusted computing video [09/14/2005]
Marco Fabbri comments on my previous post about open standards and recommends me to check the Trusted Computing Video, since I'm interesting in Trust. The video overcame my attention threshold at least twice during this week but when I tried to watch it the site was always down. This time I was luckier and I must say the video is incredibly well done, and released under a Creative Commons licence! Marco Fabbri (some initial pagerank for a new comer in the blogosphere) comments that I will find especially interesting the definition given: "Trust is the personal believe in correctness of s.th. . It is the deep conviction of truth and rightness, and can not be enforced. If you gain s.o. trust, you have estabilished an interpersonal relationship, based on communication, shared values and experiences. TRUST always depends on mutuality". Idea: since the video is under Creative Commons, shall we be a bit Creative and enrich the Commons? Shall we translate and dub it in Italian so that non-English-speakers can get an idea of what this is about? I could easily translate the text but I don't have any device (trusted or not) for recording the audio. And just in case you don't have handy plugins for playing videos (as me), here we have some direct links to the high quality video: http://www.lafkon.net/tc/trusted-computing.torrent, http://yafc.net/TrustedComputing_LAFKON_HIGH.mov... (225 words) (0 Comments) -
Problems with Beppe Grillo Blog [09/14/2005]
Beppe Grillo Blog is currently 66th on the Technorati list of top blogs. Pretty impressive if you think he only writes in Italian. However I see some problems with this blog I'll try to describe here. Every daily post has around 1000 comments. This is not a problem per se, of course, if people want to write a lot of comments to every your post, this is good, you probably write something that is very interesting. So today I wanted to alert Beppe (or who read all the comments) about this article on groklaw, so I went to beppegrillo.it and try to leave a comment and, surprise, you cannot leave as signature a link to your blog but only an email address! This is really against empowering communication in a decentralized manner! In this way, if I want to be heard on the Web I cannot write on my blog but I must come back to beppegrillo blog and leave a comment there. I cannot have a Web identity independently of beppegrillo.it domain! I think Beppe speaks often of "Direct democracy" that is achieved through his blog. Well, this is not at all something new. Instead Beppe Grillo is becoming a leader of a face-less, identity-less crowd that exist only by commenting on his blog. It is not very different from a Prodi or Berlusconi leader whose followers are anonymous identities (you might even have doubts they exist at all). So, enough criticisms and let start with the (hopefully) constructive part: Beppe, please, invite people who flock to your blog to have their Web presence. Let commenters leave a link to their Web identity (a blog). Place a very visible invitation (in the menubar and on top fo the right column) for visitors to open their own personal blog, with instructions on how to do it. The message could be something like this: (in Italian) "Sono molto contento di vedere cosi' tanti commenti ai miei post. Ma credo che la forza del Web sia nel fatto che ognuno puo' dire la sua. Ti invito quindi ad aprire un TUO blog e a postare in esso le TUE idee. Potrai ovviamente linkare i miei post quando lo ritieni opportuno o lasciare commenti con link alle TUE riflessioni sul TUO blog. Io ho tante cose da dire ma sono sicuro che anche tu hai tante cose da dire, e non e' affatto detto che quelle che dico io siano piu' interessanti di quelle che dici tu. Quindi ti consiglio di aprire un tuo blog. E' semplicissimo. Le istruzioni per farlo sono qui di seguito. (e nel seguito alcune semplici istruzioni su come creare un blog in splinder.com, blogger.com, ...)" Another comment I wanted to leave on his blog was about GNU/Linux. He speakes a lot about the power of the new technologies and Internet but a search for linux on his blog returns zero results. I wanted to suggest to Beppe to speak about this alternative in the domain of software. Anyway I hope that in some decentralized way, he finds this post and comments here, here you can leave a link to your web presence. And Beppe, since you are so intripped (yes, this is not English) with the power of the Web, I'm confident you'll be able to understand why I (try to) write in English even if I'm Italian. UPDATE: a comment by Matteo lets me know that Massimo already wrote about it: crea il tuo blog. "Tutto quello che pensi e scrivi lo ha gia' pensato e scritto qualcun altro" - Anonimo... (598 words) (14 Comments) -
Open standards: you want to be able to call the police independently of the phone you use, right? [09/14/2005]
However FEMA announced that online applications for Federal Disaster Assistance would only be accepted from victims who use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser. On grokster you can find this great article When Open Standards Really Matter - The Katrina Factor. I really suggest you to read it and to pass it on to your friends (especially the non-tech-savvy ones!). Starting from post-Katrina communication efforts, it makes good points on why communication formats MUST be based on open standards. Isn't it time, after so much suffering, to recognize that keeping people alive is more important than allowing private companies to lock in customers into proprietary systems that don't then work in an emergency? And why does the Internet always work, no matter who you are or what operating system you use? Because it was built, not on proprietary standards, but entirely on open standards. That's why you can send an email to me, even if you are using Microsoft Outlook. I don't run any Microsoft products currently, but because of open standards, I can still read your email, and in an emergency, we will not be disconnected because we are on "different communication systems." (...) I shudder to think what Microsoft would have done, if it had invented the Internet. Every bit of it would be patented, and we'd all be paying through the nose and would be restricted to whatever Microsoft chose to let us do. (...) If Microsoft is successful in persuading the powers that be to establish emergency communications based on their proprietary XML, it will shut out millions of people. That is too big a price to pay. And there is no reason why Microsoft can't follow the same XML standards as the rest of the world. They may feel it is in their best interest to have proprietary extensions on XML, patented to boot, but it isn't in the public's best interest to be forced to use it, and frankly, why would any government wish to reinforce a monopoly's monopoly position? How is that good for the marketplace? For that matter, how does it build faith and respect for the law? Anyone should really tell me a reason for which a closed, proprietary, secret format is better than a public, published, standard one. It is like someone telling you "it is better if you forget English, Italian, etc and communicate only using the language I inventend. You cannot understand how to utter words (the language is secret) but you can use our tools to do it (of course other people cannot create other tools for uttering words because, you know, it costed a lot to us to develop this language and, you know, we must get some money to buy food, you know). It will be much much better, for everyone". By the way, Massachusetts is requiring open standards for all government documents. If your software does not save documents in open standards, Massachusetts's agencies cannot buy it, as simple as that.... (499 words) (1 Comments) -
Linux displaces 2,460 Windows XP desktops in rural Italian schools [09/04/2005]
Some 16,000 students in the mountainous South Tyrol province of Bolzano in northern Italy will find 2,460 classroom computers upgraded from Windows XP to Linux when they return to school this month. (...) That's not all. More than 20,000 liveCDs will be burned "with the same (Linux) software they will find at school," Russo said. "These will be given for free to students and their families" for use at home, he said. If you are interested read the entire article on DesktopLinux. Bolzano province is in north east of Italy, really north, just northern than Trento Province. Hopefully we will be able to do something similar as well and hopefully soon you will read on DesktopLinux "Linux displaces 5130 Windows XP desktops in Trento province schools". This is still a hope but we are working on it and surely the mediatic impact will be great if you think that Microsoft had opened a research center in Trento. Wish us good luck.... (163 words) (2 Comments)
