Planet NYC

Since everyone else appears to be at SXSW, I suppose I’ll have to step up for today’s March Madness. I bring you: a screen scraper for retail products on ecommerce sites.

While I’m hardly the first person to write such a tool, finding useful examples or libraries among the hundreds of pages of screen scraper spam has proven difficult. I ended up writing one from scratch in PHP using the DomDocument object.

The goal of the scraper is to come up with the product title, price, and 3 most likely product photos from any given product URL. In order to make it a bit faster (it’s pretty painfully slow), I attempt to filter out images which are obviously not product photos (those which are very long/tall, those which are not displayed in the browser). Then for a bit of extra fun, it sorts the image array by it’s “likeliness” to be a product photo. Obviously it needs some refining to actually be useful.

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loadHTMLFile($link)) {
	//get the title
	$title = $dom->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue;
 
	//get the images
	$images = $dom->getElementsByTagName('img');
 
	//get the images most likely to be product photos
    foreach ($images as $img) {
    	$skip = FALSE;
    	$likely = 1;
    	unset($img_height); unset($img_width);
 
		//get the style on the images
		$style = $img->getAttribute('style');
 
		//if the style is set to not display, it's not worth checking
		if(preg_match('/display\:\s?none/',$style)) $skip = TRUE;
 
		//attempt to get the height and width if they are set
		$img_height = $img->getAttribute('height');
		$img_width = $img->getAttribute('width');
		if(is_numeric($img_height) && $img_height<$height) {
			$skip = TRUE;
		} else if(is_numeric($img_width) &&$img_width<$width){ 			$skip = TRUE; 		} else if(is_numeric($img_height)&&is_numeric($img_width)){ 			if(($img_width/$img_height)>3||($img_width/$img_height)<0.33) $skip=TRUE; 		} 		 		//if it's not already thrown out 		if($skip === FALSE){ 		   if (                 ($url = rel2abs($img->getAttribute('src'), $link)) &&
                ($i = getimagesize($url)) &&
                $i[0] >= ($width-10) &&
                $i[1] >= ($height-10)
            ) {
           		//if the aspect ratio is greater than 1:2, it's unlikely that it's a product image
				if($i[0]/$i[1]>=2||$i[0]/$i[1]<=0.5){ 					$likely = $likely*0.5; 				}             	             	                 $thumbs[] = array('url'=>$url,'likely'=>$likely);
            }
 
            //sort the array by likelyness, most likely first
            foreach ($thumbs as $key => $row) {
    			$likeliness[$key] = $row['likely'];
			}
			array_multisort($likeliness,SORT_DESC,$thumbs);
 
		}
    }
 
    //gross hack to try to find price
    $xmlstring = $dom->saveHTML();
    if(preg_match_all('/\$[0-9\.]+/',$xmlstring,$matches)){
    	$price = $matches[0][0];
    }
 
    //output to browser
    echo "
<h1>$title</h1>
";
    echo "
<h2>$price</h2>
";
    foreach ($thumbs as $thumb){
    	$src = $thumb['url'];
    	echo "<img src="$src" alt="" />
";
    }
 
}
$time2 = microtime(true);
$diff = $time2-$time1;
 
echo "Script executed in $diff seconds";
?&gt;

Tal and I are giving a talk about technology in hacker spaces at sxsw called "Doing It Wrong." Here's the deets:

Like ninjas battling on stage, Bre Pettis and Tal Chalzin will volley projects demonstrations back and forth. From guitar player robots to machines that vomit plastic skulls, the presentation will include a mix of projects they've worked on and that have been worked on at the GarageGeeks, NYCResistor and beyond. This presentation will both thrill and repulse you with the possibilities that have recently emerged in the diy hacker technology space.

It's been great to go through the NYCR blog and mine all the wonderful projects that have come through NYCResistor. Good times.

I'll also be talking at Dorkbot tomorrow night. I'm really looking forward to that too!

So in the last week I have read some stuff, seen some presentations, and visited some sites that I have really loved, so here they are to share:

Trollcats (this will take my power point slides to a whole NEW level) and here is one for all the free software geeks, in particular.

I finally read Manuela Carneiro da Cunha fantastic Prickly Paradigm press book “Culture” and Culture: Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Rights. If you don’t know jack about the thorny issues around indigenous knowledge an IPR, the first 2/3 provides a pretty darn good introduction rooted not only in an explanation of trade treaties, the limited repertoire available for indigenous groups to politically respond, but a great story about a specific frog that secretes a sticky film that basically F’s you up (if you let it seep in your open wounds). It is entertaining. The last 1/3 takes a far more theoretical turn and will be harder to understand for novices (it helps if you have like at least a BA, possibly MA in anthro, best if you have a PhD from her academic home, U of Chicago). It is there where she discusses the relationship between culture as “reflexive” (hey, peoples of the world, we have x, y, c culture) as lived unreflexively (the unconscious plane of norms that helps guide perception and action). I loved her theoretical somersaults whereby she explained how contradictions between the two are experienced as anything but a contradiction.

Ok so today I went to this conference Radars and Fences III (where I presented my anon/scientology talk for the first time 3 years ago!). I was not able to stay the whole day but I saw Ricardo Dominguez & Amy Sara Carroll from the Electronic Disturbance Theater present on the Transborder Immigrant Tool, which I knew about but did not know how infused it was in poetry, poetry that is, in fact, an integral part of its arsenal. Their presentation was fantastic and it reminds me the great political work being done at the interface of art and technology (and believe me, these 2 are rabble rousers. UCSD, who helped fund the project, are not all that happy they did and they also get not hate mail they get but the HATE mail).

Then I saw Laila El Haddad & Mushon Zer-Aviv present on an amazing project You are Not Here which is a bit hard to explain briefly but I will try (and their site introduces it as “an urban tourism mash-up. It takes place in the streets of one city and invites participants to become meta-tourists of another city.”

So basically there are two interlinked sites (NYC and Baghdad and Tel Aviv and Gaza) where you can be a tourist (though the physical place to follow the symbols are only in NYC and Tel Aviv). You need a map. You get a map. The map, once put up to the light shows two cities/places with symbols that indicate a special spot on the map. You find the physical spot, there is sticker or other sign with a phone number, you call, and you hear a story not about NYC or Tel Aviv (where you would physically go) but about Baghdad or Gaza and a story that pertains to the area of the map that overlaps where you are in NYC or Tel Aviv. We saw a bunch of examples and they were riveting and powerful.

Use of the GNU Affero GPL is on the rise, so it’s no surprise that I get a lot of questions about it. Most recently, I was asked how AGPL-licensed extensions interact with a Content Management System that is licensed under the GNU GPL, version 2 or later. Generally speaking, AGPLv3 extensions are compatible with CMS code licensed “GPLv2 or later”. The complication arrives when you have multiple extensions of various licenses because the extensions need to be license-compatible with each other as well. Hopefully this post will clarify matters.

There are three versions of the AGPL. The first wasn’t much used. The second exists solely as a way to upgrade to AGPLv3, and it is not a license used for distribution. The third is what most people think of when they say “AGPL”.

At any rate, when using AGPL (or even just discussing it), make sure you specify which license you mean. You might want to use the phrase “AGPL version 3 or later” to describe your AGPL-licensed code.

As with AGPL, there are multiple version of GPL as well. There was version 1, which is no longer in use. There is GPLv2, which is the most used software license on the planet (although I’m guessing not in outer space). And there is GPLv3, an update to GPLv2 that is growing in popularity.

Some software is licensed under multiple versions of GPL. This includes software that is licensed under GPL but doesn’t specify a version, as well as software that designates a minimum license version (e.g. “GPL version 3 or later”). Other software limits itself to a single version (e.g. “GPL version 3 only”).

There are various ways to combine these licenses, so here is license compatibility in tabular form:

Assuming you’re not dealing with AGPLv1 code (a safe assumption almost every time), as long as none of your extensions are GPLv2 only, you can mix AGPLv3 extensions without difficulty.

If, however, you are dealing with GPLv2-only extensions, you can run into complications. While the extensions can be distributed separately, if you distribute a “CMS-in-a-box” or deliver to somebody a complete CMS install that comes with the extensions already plugged in, mixing extensions of different licenses can lead to incompatibility. Packaging up GPLv2-only extensions with AGPLv3 extensions is usually a license violation.

Because of this, projects that maintain extension directories might consider requiring extensions to select from a set menu of licenses. That way developers and repackagers can be assured the extensions will play well with each other. To ensure extensions are license compatible, both now and in the future, you could restrict extensions to the following licenses: “GPL”, “GPLv2 or later”, “GPLv3 or later”, “AGPL”, “AGPLv3 or later”.

For those interested in how export rules affect Free Software, I have a post up at SFLC’s blog on the topic. It contains news that is both good and somewhat useful.

Breaking news from James Vasile:

Scientists going back to Galileo have secretly abused corpses in the pursuit of knowledge. Researchers studying the Atlantic Ocean garbage patch have been throwing dead pigs into the sea just to see what happens next. Yes, that’s shocking and gross, but just like in the Whitewater scandal, it’s the coverup that is the crime.

National Geographic originally (maybe accidentally?) revealed the dead pig experiment in an article at nationalgeographic.com. You can clearly see references to the dead pigs in Google’s search results (see attached screen shot). The National Geographic url, though, makes no mention of the pigs at all. They scrubbed the record.

Why the coverup, National Geographic? Who are you protecting?!

Naturally, we had the rants.org crack investigative team look into this. James is right — something does smell funny here, and it’s not just dead pigs.

Let’s start with the Google search results. As you can see, at some point in the past the National Geographic article did talk about scientists using dead pigs to measure something about a newly-discovered Atlantic Ocean garbage patch:

The Google search results; red highlights the key words. (Original image here.)

The exact words in the Google preview snippet are: “After dropping dead pigs into the sea and watching via Webcams, researchers were…”.

Uh. What?

But if you visit the article now, it no longer mentions anything about dead pigs — the red arrow points to a failed search for the word “dead” in the page:

The National Geographic article; red arrow highlights the failed search for “dead”. (Original image here.)

The original article is no longer in Google’s cache, unfortunately; it’s been superseded by a revised version of the article. But the cached version does have a message at the top indicating that the word “pigs” appears only in links from other pages, not in the article itself, so obviously other people were on to this too:

Google’s cache of the page has already lost the mention of dead pigs. (Original image here.)

(The word “dead” doesn’t appear in the cached text of the article either; it’s just in the title of an unrelated sidebar news item in the cache.)

I know National Geographic isn’t the New York Times (then again, neither is the New York Times… but I digress). Still, silently removing a substantial fact from an article, leaving no notice of the change? That’s just not kosher.

National Geographic, the people have a right to know: what’s behind the dead pig coverup?

There was a plug for an up and coming conference in my last post but it was a bit buried and it deserves a bit more attention: the Libre Planet Conference in Cambridge, MA. It is fast approaching but there are still spots, student rates, and funding for female attendees. Though I can’t go as I will be out of town, this seems like it will be a great event: excellent speakers, lots of interesting folks, and I am sure a fantastic set of discussions.

If you’re near Manhattan this weekend, stop in to Eyebeam for their MIXER event Friday and Saturday nights (Mar 13 and 14) from 9PM to 2AM.  NYC Resistor will be one of the presenting artists with our “Color Commentary Teletype” a restored 1930’s era Model 15 serial printer, along with a sentiment analysis chart recorder!  MIXER is a huge party, with music, art, and performances.  It’s going to be awesome!

Check out the details at Eyebeam!  Now!

MIXER:Olympiad

Earlier today, the Mozilla Foundation announced its process for revising MPL 1.1, in a public comment-driven process lasting until the fall.

I like their process announcement, which proposes a reasonable schedule and workflow. The Foundation has clearly studied the GPLv3 process, and has drawn good conclusions about what worked for us, and what will work better for them if done differently. They’re using Co-ment, the wonderful Web-based text annotation system designed and implemented by Philippe Aigrain and his colleagues at Sopinspace in Paris. They helped us design the Stet system we used for GPLv3, and they’ve gone far beyond it with Co-ment.

The MPL has been an influential free software license, but I agree with the unstated proposition of the Mozilla Foundation that it’s now showing its age. I think this is precisely the right time to be doing the revision, and I wish the Mozilla folks a smooth, thoughtful, and successful process. I hope everyone who cares about the health of Web, and about free software licensing, will register and get involved. SFLC and I will be doing whatever we can to help. And I sure look forward to being an insignificant minor player this time around…

So I'm pretty obsessed with sharing. I used to be in the cult of beautiful objects and I would take photographs and go into a color darkroom and make giant c-prints.

Then I found flickr and my grandpa gave me his old digital camera and I started taking lots of pictures and sharing them. That was when I joined the legions of sharers. I got a major buzz when people left comments. I was hooked. I discovered Creative Commons and Open Source culture and the EFF became my personal heroes.

I shared video too, first it was personal stuff, like video tours around my Seattle apartment. Later I started sharing infrastructure for people to make things and that was really fun.

Now at MakerBot we're sharing a machine that you put together that is an object enabler. We share all the plans for it and set up a website called Thingiverse where folks can share their own digital designs for physical objects. It's my favorite thing to look at in the morning and see what new designs have been shared!

As a culture, we're figuring out that sharing is great. We're communicating and developing infrastructure like wildfire to find new ways to share our thoughts, ideas, designs, photos, videos, and pretty much anything you can think of.

I see sharing as the future of education. It used to be that in order to learn something you had to go to an institution. Now, because people are sharing how they do things and their knowledge on things, learning is often as easy as googling something.

As a former schoolteacher, I know just how broken education is and how far away it is from hitting the mark of supporting the development and exploring personal potential for young people. One thing you can do for the next generation of young people is share what you know on the internet. If you lay down the breadcrumbs as you live and you share what you know, it will live on and help others stand on your shoulders and build past what you have done. There are lots of benefits to going to school, but it doesn't have a monopoly on knowledge or hold the only keys to a great job.

I see sharing as the future of business too. By sharing our designs with the MakeBot community, we've found a fantastic community of passionate people who are willing to tell us what we're doing right and support us in figuring out how to improve. The examples go on and on.

What are you sharing? What frontiers do you see for sharing. Are there things that you're not sharing that you could?

This is just a reminder (or a notice) that this Friday, March 5, we will be screening the new documentary “Copyright Criminals” in room 109 of Warren Weaver Hall. This screening is free and open to the public, and – according to FC @ NYU’s president Parker – “the movie is really great. You may know it as a follow-up of sorts to the fantastic film “Freedom of Expression” which we screened a while back, which was also made by Kembrew McCleod.”

There will be a Q&A session after the screening with Mr. McCleod and the legendary remixer Steve “Steinski” Stein.

Once more with the details:
Free public screening of Copyright Criminals by Kembrew McCleod, with Q&A with McCleod and Steinski
7pm, Friday, March 5
Warren Weaver Hall, rm 109
251 Mercer Street (at 4th)

And for more information about the film: http://www.copyrightcriminals.com/

Hope to see you all there!

I just finished an excellent biography of Ayn Rand and her philosophy in the context of American political culture. While reading, I couldn't help think of Wales' expressed interest in Objectivism and the next to the last page actually comments on this issue:

One of the many ironies of Rand's career is her latter-day popularity among entrepreneurs who are pioneering new forms of community. Among her high-profile fans as Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales, once an active participant in the listserv controversies of the Objectivist Center. A nonprofit that depends on charitable donations, Wikipedia may ultimately put its rival encyclopedias out of business. At the root of Wikipedia are warring sensibilities that seemed to both embody and defy Rand's beliefs. The website's emphasis on individual empowerment, the value of knowledge, and its own risky organizational model reflects Rand's sensibility. But its trust in the wisdom of crowds, celebration of the social nature of knowledge, and faith that many working together will produce something of enduring value contradict Rand's adage "all creation is individual." (Burns 2009, p. 284)

Readers in New York may be interested in attending a presentation of “Collaborative Futures”, a text composed over a week in January by six writers, myself included, and published as book for the Transmediale festival in Berlin. Mushon Zer Aviv and Michael Mandiberg will present the book, and Stephen Kovats, who commissioned the work for Transmediale, will also be present. The event is hosted by Upgrade! New York and will take place at Eyebeam (540 W21st Street) this Thursday at 7.30 pm There’s even a live video stream!

Given the result has attracted a bit of attention, I’d like to add a couple of impressions about both the process of working together, and the future (if any) of the resulting book.

Booksprinting

Much has been made of the accelerated pace of  the books production. When I arrived on the monday morning, the only participant known to me was the facilitator, Adam Hyde. Thus the first day was spent introducing ourselves and making notes – basically teasing out a shared language and framework within which to work. Although we had assembled a basic outline by late that night, in reality the structure was revised right to the end. The following morning we sat down to write but the patter of the keyboard was constantly punctuated by conversation, negotiation and clarification.

Negotiation in this context requires willingness and good faith, qualities which were happily in plentiful supply. I wondered also if the freshness of our acquaintance may have been a help: sometimes working with people we know well can elicit competitiveness and oversensitivity. Amidst all of this there is a physical aspect: long days spent together nourishes trust, while the shadow of an imminent deadline instills an urgency that encourages compromise for the sake of completing the task.

The irony of being asked to sign the book was not lost on Marta Peirano and I...

This obviously modified what we would have otherwise written individually, but also enabled each person to work on the others’ outputs sensitively. Most sections were initially drafted by one person, others would then edit, add and rephrase where necessary. Being able to discuss and tease points out together provided a means to grasp the acceptable extent to which one could revise other people’s contributions – to refine for clarity, whilst leaving the ‘thrust’ of their sense intact. Here we encounter an issue that arises repeatedly in collaboration: the need for a framework which functions at the level of the collective whilst enabling individual initiative within its own boundaries.

The result entailed an interesting modification to the relationship with the act of writing. The romantic theory of authorship places enormous weight on the concept of expression as inhering to the personality of the writer, insisting that from their inherent subjectivity comes forth a uniqueness which makes it uniquely their property. Whilst I never adhered to this school of thought, it was nonetheless interesting to live its practical contradiction. Writing together in this manner displaces the connection between the individual and the text, as some ‘pure product of the self’, but relocates it to an identification with the subject matter and the methodology employed to elaborate it – peculiarly appropriate for a book about collaboration. On this point it’s safe to say that none of those involved in writing the book would stand 100% behind its contents, whilst nonetheless insisting on the value of the endeavour.

Overall I think what we ended up with is useful overview with some good insights. Those expert in the areas won’t find much that is really fresh, but writing like this leaves no time for original research, but rather leveraging what we already know and trying to fit it into a coherent framework. Regarding its deficiencies: if you care enough to be bothered, please help to remedy them, sign up to booki.cc and get cracking!

Possible Futures…
Other books written under the auspices of FlossManuals focus on technical subject matter, making the question of their upkeep relatively straightforward: as the field progresses, or new functionalities are added to a software, the book can be updated to reflect that. Given the conceptual nature of our subject, a roadmap for revision and maintenance seems trickier, but the chance to solicit new contributions makes me think it worthwhile.

1. The opening section outlines some assumptions and sets out the limitations of the subject we address. Collaboration is an infinitely extendible concept, and we ended up focussing on mostly large online collaborations. How it pertains to art, political movements and a more traditionally conceived notion of economic activity were put aside. Training the gaze on these areas, examining their specificities and distinguishing them from one another might be one worthwhile approach.

The rest of this section is  dedicated to the motivations of participants and how the decision-making process is structured. Given the wide variety of collaborations out there, this is just a fragment and much could be added and/or qualified. We were not fully satisfied with the placing of process here in terms of the overall structure, but couldn’t come up with a convincing alternative either…

2. Next we attempted to distinguish collaboration from apparently similar phenomena such as sharing or aggregation. We also propose a set of criteria to place interactions on a continuum corresponding to degrees of participation, and offer some examples.

3. Following this, there is a section titled ‘Edge Cases’. For my money, this is the part most amenable to expansion. First of all because it needs it: there are too few case studies! Secondly because anyone interested in this subject has their pet examples, and there isn’t just one way of dealing with knotty topics like ‘ownership’, ‘attribution’ and ‘decision-making’. Additional descriptions of communities together with a problem they faced, or successfully overcome, would fit very neatly here. ultimately I think this section could function as a form of scrapbook, where snapshots of positive and negative experiences can be memorized.

4. We closed with ‘Futures’, where we speculate on how these forms of production may transform realms so far less affected, and on the wider issue of what forms of individual and group identify may be prefigured in what we observe at the moment online. This would be the place to let oneself go with futurology, utopian projects and experimental proposals.

Sita Sings the Blues is now available FREE for the iPhone, rather than for $3.99. The former price was required because for every copy of Sita “sold,” I had to pay almost $2 to extortionate corporate licensors. That’s a flat fee; doesn’t matter what the sale price is. So selling Sita apps for the customary $.99 would result in a huge loss for me, since I’d be paying far more than that to the licensors.

The solution of course was to make it FREE (gratis). They’re all Promotional Copies. No sale, no license fee. To support Mars Yau, who created the app, and me, who created the movie, you can buy the Sita Wallpaper App for $.99. And of course you can always donate to the Sita Distribution Project.

I'm especially gratified by app develope Mars Yau's correct use if the Creator Endorsed Mark. It's displayed prominently on the free app, indicating my authentic endorsement of this particulr distribution. On the $.99 Wallpaper app, he applied the "50% supports the artist" version:

read more

Question Copyright welcomes two new members: legal interns Kat Walsh and Victor Cohen, who will be working with our counsel Karen Sandler.

Victor is a third-year student at Brooklyn Law School, and has worked with the Brooklyn Law Incubator and Policy (BLIP) Clinic helping to defend artists against copyright infringement suits. Kat is in her last semester at the George Mason University law school, focusing on copyrights, patents, and trademarks, and is currently the Executive Secretary of the Wikimedia Foundation, where she has been a board member since 2006.

You'll see their names appear more and more here in the coming months, as they take a hand in current and upcoming projects. Welcome, Kat and Victor!

read more

For the most part, I wrote my dissertation and book manuscript using a simplified version of markdown complemented with biblatex citations. Because it was a simple text file, it made managing the edits to the manuscript very easy. I could do global textual replacements trivially. Also, obviously, it was trivial to generate PDFs, HTML, etc. Using Mercurial, I could take advantage of some nice features like the "attic" extension which allows me to keep change sets on the side to be applied only when appropriate. So, for example, the changes necessary generate HTML were kept in the attic and would only be applied when I wanted that.

Unfortunately, once the manuscript went into the MIT Press system, I had to use Microsoft Word. As much as much as the Word document format annoys me, I understand it is widely used, and I can't think of an easy alternative that also provides the capability for editorial annotations. Nonetheless, I had a difficult time seeing changes in Microsoft Word, and want to backport the changes into my source files. And, there does not appear to be a nice textual difference tool for Word documents.

I have posted a small Python script that makes use of antiword and dwdiff but also gives me context on either side of the change. It, of course, doesn't work well with formatting, but is useful and will generate output like the following:

   reflects {-the-} [+a+] stabilization
   a {-number of pragmatic questions: it-} [+project was conceived. It+] would
   there {-will-} [+would+] be
   article {-will-} [+would+] be
   linked {-to from-} [+via+] a

If you were following our twitter feed (or @aditix, @thisisparker, @wachen, or others) you may already know that we had a great time. A more detailed post to follow, but feel free to peruse the #fcx hashtag on twitter or any of our twitter feeds to get a sense of the conference!

To everyone we met there — it was wonderful meeting you!

I’ve been following the Health Care debate since about the middle of the Democratic presidential primary, when all the candidates first announced their plans for how to change things if elected. In that almost two years, I’ve heard a lot about these things: the public option, town hall meetings, teabaggers, Stephen Hawkings, and endless coverage of the National government as if the whole thing were a sports competition about number of Red or Blue votes rather than an important public discussion.

What I didn’t know, until I watched the Daily Show from Feb, 11, 2010, is anything about Hawaii’s health care system, which apparently has achieved almost universal health care coverage via government mandate and has been using this system for the last 40 years. Until that minute I thought there was nothing in the debate that could surprise me anymore.

When Dog the Bounty Hunter, one of the Hawaiians interviewed on the Daily Show’s Hawaii coverage, has a better ability to express the need for health care than the politicians and media personalities whose job it has been to talk about it for the last 18 months, we need to start listening to different people.

I would suggest we start listening to each other.

Here’s the idea. Take $30 but, rather than giving it to a political group or non-profit, go to the store and buy a webcam. Set it up at your computer and record a video on why you care about health care. It can be 30 seconds, 60 seconds, or however long it takes to tell your story.

Public Voices

I’m lucky, my office really cares about making sure we have great health care coverage, but I still have a couple stories to tell about issues my coworkers are having with insurance right now. And then there are all the stories of my friends in their 20’s who are trapped in jobs they would otherwise leave for more rewarding work but can’t for fear of losing health insurance. I have almost as many of those stories as I have friends in their 20’s.

So I’m going to go get a webcam and record a couple minutes worth of video and post it online. Maybe we put the videos on YouTube and tag them “healthcarestories” or maybe one of those non-profits that care about health care will come forward and we can put them all there. Then we watch each other, listen to each other, and vote for the best videos. Find the ones that make you remember why you care.

If we want to influence the “public voices” in broadcast media, we could all throw in a couple dollars and buy some air time for the videos with the most votes. Or maybe that media is hopeless and we run some ads telling people where to come for the sane discussion, like throwing a lifeline to pull people back onto dry land.

Either way, if we can get a million of these video messages in a bottle together, a million people engaged in actually talking about health care rather than screaming about it, we can convince a lot of politicians that their interests lie in listening rather than talking for once.

Aaron Williamson, one of my friends and colleagues at the SFLC, put up a great piece yesterday running through the various panoptic services that google offers. It is well put and worth reading in full. Unfortunately, Aaron’s site requires registration in order to leave comments so I’m going to respond here instead and let Planet NYC’s feed pull together the discussion.

Aaron makes reference to a couple of points that are key, both in critiquing Google’s specific practices, and in picking up the discussion from last time.

The first, Paul Ohm’s piece “Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization “, does the same thing to the field of information sharing that an expose that condoms don’t work at stopping STDs would do to the field of Sexual health medicine.

Professor Ohm documents the field of “Information reidentification”, and that field’s success in countering so called “anonymization” techniques used to remove the personally identifying bits of information (name, address, SSN, etc.) from things like your medical history or web search history before releasing that information to the public.

In a nutshell, “anonymization” is really just obfuscation; the data we are collecting about people is so rich and precise that we can take supposedly anonymous records and fill in all the missing information by fitting the record into all the rest of what we know. This should be a basic piece in discussions of our digital lives and public policy, but it has gotten almost no coverage since the initial publication.

The second point I want to talk about is that this is not about Google. This is not personal. It is not fueled by some thought-less hatred. We talk about Google and Facebook in these discussions, just as we talk about Apple in discussions of closed vs. free software, not because we have fanboyish love for a different team but because they are the most successful at popularizing practices we are concerned about.

This is a structural critique, just as arguing that banks shouldn’t be allowed to gamble with other people’s money is a structural critique. If you want to talk about whether particular organizations, whether that is Goldman Sachs or Facebook have been malfeasant, or behaved with a lack of respect for the interests of their customers, that is a different discussion.

I spent a year trying to write these posts around the theme of “Towards a Free Facebook” before realizing that the biggest problem with Facebook is how much they have popularized unsafe data systems. That’s what this is actually about.

I’ve been working on developing a free software application market for Android.¹ The obvious place to start was the SlideME Community Edition code, which as far as I know is the only existing free software project that does even part of the job. Unfortunately, SlideME’s Community Edition was abandoned due to “lack of community interest” in April 2008, several months before the first Android phones were even available. So most of the work I’ve done so far was to update the code to work with the current SDK, rework the interface to behave in a more standard way, and rewrite portions that relied on now-unavailable API elements.

FLOSS Dispenser (like SlideME) works in conjunction with a J2EE server application called JVending. JVending’s public repository was also abandoned by SlideME some time ago, so I’m maintaining a fork of JVending along with my fork of FLOSS Dispenser as a part of the Replicant project.

I put up build instructions for FLOSS Dispenser as well as for JVending; using these, you should be able to build both and have them work together. However, neither one is ready, which is why I’m not hosting an application store already. The FLOSS Dispenser code in particular is pretty buggy (most of them aren’t mine, but only because I haven’t written much of it), for one thing. For another, the system doesn’t yet facilitate GPL compliance — you can download and install apk binaries, but they don’t come with source code and license text. Until at least this feature exists, I don’t recommend anyone serve GPL’d apks to the public using JVending.

I wanted to have this and some other issues hammered out before I put the code up, but I was motivated by Jonathan Corbet’s recent LWN article on Android to just put up what I had and try to get some help. I know other people are interested in something like this, and though I’m hardly proud of the little coding I’ve done on this, it’s the best start we have for a free market.

So by all means, take a look and help me kick this thing out the door.

1. The quick rationale for this is that the Android Market 1) is not itself free software, and 2) doesn’t enable you to search for applications by their license.

I just read an interesting post on Gabriella Coleman’s blog: The Hacker as Troller and Trickster, in which she points out that the “trickster” character of myth is increasingly embodied — non-mythically, non-allegorically, but in glorious corporeality — by the hackers around us, and by the trolls and all the other anonymity-encouraged occasional pranksters that make the Internet what it is.

In Lewis Hyde’s “Trickster Makes this World”, Coleman says, he asks if there are tricksters in modern industrial societies, and concludes (surprisingly, for 1998) not. The trickster needs a polytheistic system “or lacking that, he needs at least a relationship to other powers, to people, to instructions, and traditions that can manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having those boundaries regularly distributed” (p. 13)

Double attitude? Boundary redistribution? Sound anything like people you’ve been met on the Net?

I was kind of surprised by Hyde’s thesis in general (though I haven’t read his book (yet), so you’re now hearing the thesis third-hand, and I could be mangling it). I think there’s sometimes a temptation to assume that modern society is such a sharp break from our tribal, hunter-gatherer past that there are entire categories of human behavior no longer accessible to us. And that may be partly true… it’s just probably not as true as we think it is. Trickster is an impulse deep in human nature; it hasn’t gone away, and if anything, modern industrial society — which was heavily anonymized even before the Net came along — offers more opportunities for people to try out deviant or odd behaviors temporarily, safe in the knowledge that they are not necessarily asserting a permanent identity.

Well, there are my deep thoughts for the day. Biella’s whole post is very much worth reading.

Managing your life online isn’t easy.  You use email, IM, and other social tools.  You create, manage, and share documents.  You search for things you’re interested in and research things you’re working on.  You track your finances to the penny and buy everything you need.  You store your private medical records and access information about your health.

To do all of this, you maintain countless passwords, chase your friends across an ever-increasing variety of social networks, and constantly move documents and data between your personal computer and various web services.  But often there’s no good way to get data from here to there — the sites you use may not accept the data format you have or communicate with the other sites holding your data.  Sometimes, the sites you use stop offering the features you need, or are bought by larger companies and shut down to quash competition in a key market.

Google Labs is changing all that with Goolog.  Now, when your life is stored in Google’s services, we keep track of it for you. No more separate identities. No more wondering where all of your friends went. No more moving from place to place.

Take a look at some of the things Goolog takes over for you:

Single point of entry

Remember all of those usernames and passwords you used before?  Now, you don’t have to.  There’s only one way into Goolog: the Google Account login and password you already have!  You won’t need to remember how to log in anywhere else, because you won’t need to go anywhere else.  That’s because, as we like to say at Google Labs…

Everything you do is right here

We already kept your email and your documents for you, and showed you how easy it was to communicate and work with other people in Goolog (though of course we didn’t call it Goolog at the time).  You didn’t have to track your communications and personal documents across folders, hard drives, and websites, because we were tracking them all for you.

Now, we can track everything else too.  You can keep your whole life — the books you read, the things you buy, all your creativity, all the news you get, everything you say, see, and hear, everything you know, your time, your work, your wellbeing, and your money — all right here in Goolog.  What this means is that you don’t ever have to worry about getting it back out again, because all of our services integrate with one another.  Your Health and Finance records are Docs, your Docs move through GMail and Groups, and on to your Sites or your Blog(ger).  Your GMail messages generate Calendar entries and when you Talk we listen, and figure out what you’re trying to do.

Starting to see how much less you need to think about when Goolog is in control?  It gets better.

Goolog is social

Not only is everything you do in Goolog, but everyone you know is here too.  (Ok, maybe not everyone just yet.)  So it’s as easy for you to share everything you do with others as it is to move your data between our services.  And it’s easy for us too!  Now, we can tell the people you know what you’re doing even when you don’t ask us to.

Goolog is exactly what it sounds like

But the social features don’t end there.  The best part of communicating in Goolog is that we hear everything you say, whether you’re emailing, IMing, blogging, or even talking on the phone.  And just like our name implies, we log all of it.

This enables us to make our services more useful to you, because when we keep track of everything you do, we can relate what you’re doing now to what you did months ago, and better understand what you’re trying to do.  It also enables us to make useful data about what people do online available to the public (we anonymize all of the data first, of course).  And finally, it enables us to better serve our partners, by providing them with access to better information about their target markets.

No need to sign up

The best part is that you don’t need to hound your friends for an invite to Goolog. You don’t have to opt in. If you have a Google Account, you’re already in Goolog. So relax… everything you do is right here.

 Biella passed this flyer around on the Debian-NYC mailing list. If you are in New York City this Friday, you won't want to miss this Eben Moglen's talk.

If you can't see the embedded object, go here or to this post's permalink.

Last week I participated in an extreme booksprint on the theme ‘Collaborative Futures’, commissioned by Transmediale for their festival which begins in Berlin on tuesday.

For five days I saw almost no-one other than my collaborators, Adam Hyde, Marta Peirano, Mushon Zer-Aviv, Michael Mandiberg, Mike Linksvayer and Aleksandar Erkalovic.

Twelve to fourteen hour days were standard, as we drove ourselves to establish some common ground. The result is a 140 page book which will be ready for distribution at the festival this week.

Lots more on this later, but the photo above was taken during the initial organization of our ideas at the end of the first day.

The Book Liberator got a writeup in Good magazine! I sent in hundreds of rambling words about the project, and Theo distilled them into a few pithy quotes. Thanks, Theo, for making me seem clever!

Today I attended a barcamp-style CrisisCamp in NYC  where volunteers from around the world  gathered physically and virtually to brainstorm, organize, coordinate, and work to help alleviate the suffering in Haiti (CNN CrisisCamp coverage). When people talk about crowdsourcing relief to this disaster, CrisisCamps around the country helped assemble the the sources (and faces) in these mysterious crowds.

Self-Organized Collaborative Production and Action

It was amazing to see these strangers converge, congregating around the familiar communication modalities of wikis, mailing lists, irc, and now twitter and google wave. While these torrential rivers of information are overwhelming, some subcultures are developing strategies for managing and synthesizing these flows. A main organizing hub is http://crisiscommons.org/ , and the hashtags #cchaiti and #haiti are being used to ‘tag’ disparate social media around these efforts.

Today’s NYC event drew over a dozen people, techies, community organizers, students, Hatians, UN reps, librarians, union workers, journalists, and beyond. I have been closely following ushahidi/swiftapp project, and their http://haiti.ushahidi.com collaborative filtering curation strategy is in full swing. Open Street Maps is proving to be an essential piece of infrastructure  around mapping data, and the New York Public Library has rescheduled the launch of their amazing new map rectifying tool to help make sense of Hatian geography – shockingly, there are very few maps of Haiti, and their collection might significantly help when overlaid on satellite imagery. This can assist relief workers who need to  know what neighborhoods are called, and which buildings were where, etc. If you are familiar with Hatian geography, you can help rectify maps here.

The Sahana Disaster Management Project is also looking for python developers to help scale their software.

Strategic Communication Flows

Strategically, I was struck by the asymmetry of information flows. Many of the efforts seemed to focused on collecting Hatian data, and representing it to Americans and NGOs working on the ground in Haiti. But, not too many Hatians have iphones…

There seems to be very little focus on creating flows of information back into Haiti – information from the outside world directed to Haitians, or, on creating infrastructure for Hatians to communicate with each other.  Beyond that, I am not aware of any coordinated efforts to establish non-corporate-mediated, 2-or-more-way channels of information between Hatians and Hatians in the diaspora.

I was reminded of the recent Iranian uprising. A wonderful moment of microblogging glory, although few Americans appreciated how the Iranians were able to receive lifelines of information from outside of Iran (like where to find proxy servers), and were also using the platform to communicate with each other, within Iran.

I was struck by what an important role traditional mass broadcast media might play in a crisis situation. People on the ground need information, desperately.  They need to know which symbols indicate that a house has already been searched, where the next food/water/medicine drop will be, and that the biscuits are good, and not expired.  They also need entertainment, and news -

à la Good Morning Vietnam.  And messages of consolation, emotional support, solidarity, and even song and laughter. Maybe even Bryant Park style movie nights.

Hybrid Networks

Electricity and ISPs are largely down. There are trickles of bandwidth available, and some Hatians have made it onto facebook and cellphones.

So, what could a hybrid, analog-digital network look like?  Low-power FM? High-speed copy machines? Blackboards?

It’s actually not that hard to imagine a hybrid network, composed of people, FM radio, blackboards, printing presses, portable video projectors, cell phones, SMS,  and Internet.  Really, whatever is available.

The Earth Institute and UNICEF Innovation has been deploying RapidSMS on the ground in Africa, and they are working in villages where a single cell phone operator brokers vital information to a blackboard in the town square, transforming a cell phone into a mass broadcast device.  Reminiscent of the Wall Newspapers in communist russia.

And if there were a low power FM Radio station set up, the DJ could presumably retransmit messages coming in over the Internet or the cell phones (kinda the reverse of the activist who retransmitted police scanner transmissions over Twitter at the G20 summit protests).

Hatians would know that if they needed to get a message out to a loved one in Haiti, they could get to the radio station and it might be transmitted, back into local community. Messages would travel over human and technological networks, routed intelligently by humans where technology leaves off.

What would the programming on this radio station look like?  They could have hourly news and announcements, read out community messages submitted by listeners, convey messages of condolences and support from the outside world, play music, pray, talk radio, “call in” shows, anything really. Most importantly, this radio would be locally produced, with  the local community deciding what to play.  There was a precedent for local radio, KAMP, in the astrodome stadium after Katrina. The station was set up with the help of the fantastic Prometheus Radio Project volunteers, though authorities tried to shut down the “pirate” lifeline.

Turning Messages in Bottles into Skywriting

Today I met someone who is working with local Haitian communities in NYC.  We are both very concerned with CNN dominated the coverage, frittering away their 24/7 news coverage on looping segments, and circling like vultures waiting for violence to erupt. We have to understand the danger of a single story.

We were both very interested in creating alternate channels of communication for Hatians to speak for themselves, and engage in dialogue with their relatives in the diaspora.

Here is one project we could run over the kind of hybrid analog-digital/human-machine sneakernet described above.

Hatians could send video messages in a bottle.  The community here could gather to watch and reply to those videos.  Say the videos and the replies were limited to 3 minutes each. The original message and the reply could be bundled and sent back to Haiti – not unlike sending a letter before the postage service – you would give it to someone heading to the recipient’s town.

Initially, a few flip cameras on the ground in Haiti, with the video transmitted home over the Internet, or even back to the states by sending the memory cards home with a courier. Eventually, when bandwidth begins to open up, we might be able to imagine a live, synchronous, stream. But, before then, we can imagine ansynchronous video messages being sent back and forth, between Haiti an Haitian communities in the diaspora.

On the Hatian end, the replies could be projected and played back to groups gathered around projectors at night. On our end, distribution is trivial, but the message might easily get to the precise person it was intended for through community social networks.  A Haitian could send a video message in a bottle to Brooklyn, and it would not take long for their relatives to know they were safe.  Replies could include message of hope, compassion, and support.

Most importantly, independent lines of communications could be opened. As a secondary benefit, if the messages were disseminated publicly (say, on you tube), secondary waves of help could create journalistic highlights, extract crucial data to feed the informatics systems (sourced to the originating testimony), and we could start hearing each others voices.

At the moment, our aid feels like we are tossing a homeless person a few dollars while averting our gaze, when what they really need is for us to look them in the eye, recognize their humanity, and have a conversation with them. We are electronically strip searching the people of Haiti, when (forgive the Avatar reference) we need to see each other.

Theory and Practice

A few closing thoughts to this already rambling post.

I attended the event for many reasons including:

• My research interests in the politics of memory, information flux,  distributed cognition, collaborative production, and collective action.
• A seminar I am participating in this Spring that is taking up the themes of collective memory, pedagogy, digital media, and trauma (using a the 9/11 Project Rebirth as a point of departure, but conceptualizing responses to collective trauma ranging from Katrina, to evironmental refugees, and beyond).
• Because the situation is horrifying and desperate, and I have the sinking feeling that no one has a handle on how to help the Hatians.  Worse, I fear that many are already beginning to view this event as a rhetorical chip, and angling to advance their own agendas on the wave of this shock.

The importance of mass media in creating a sense of (imagined) community is well theorized in communications studies.  Haiti’s physical infrastructure is shattered, but we can very quickly reconstruct its communications infrastructure and help them reconstitute their sense of identity and community.

Cultural theorists have criticized the pacifying power of mass media – but the UN is forecasting a sharp increase in violence, riots and rape – if ever there was a time to distract and pacify the populace – or should I say, provide them with a constructive channel for them to express and vent their energies?

If we want to turn this disaster porn on its head, we should just give Hatians the IP rights to all the images pouring out of their country now. The profits would be enough to rebuild the country 10-times over.

The life saving importance of information should not be underestimated – The only thing more important than food, water, or medicine is hope.

Update: This brain[storm/dump] has now been transformed into an actual project proposal at the Crisis Commons wiki – The Open Solace Haiti Project , whose first priority is the Haitian Video Postcard Exchange Network.

[Special thanks to Mar Cabra and Rasmus Nielen for being a sounding board for some of these scattered ideas, John Durham Peters, whose brilliant thought broadcasts on Broadcasting and Schizophrenia induced my thinking, and Levanah and Stan Tenen and the work of the Meru Foundation whose spiritual teachings helped shape these ideas.]

Last year I posted on Google modifying representations of reality (Streetview) and hypothesized about the potential problems. Now we have a potential real world test case as Google might be selling advertisements inside Google Maps:

This patent, which was originally filed on July 7, 2008, describes a new system for promoting ads in online mapping applications. In this patent, Google describes how it plans to identify buildings, posters, signs and billboards in these images and give advertisers the ability to replace these images with more up-to-date ads. In addition, Google also seems to plan an advertising auction for unclaimed properties.

Read more at RWW.

You could say that I’m partial to Lessig’s maxim that “code is law.”

I also think it goes a long way to explaining some decisions James Cameron made while making Avatar. More specifically, the code and technology responsible for the majority of the movie’s (we can’t very well go on calling them films much longer, can we?) visual experience actively constrained the choices of the production team and thereby the choices of the Avatar characters themselves. Neytiri couldn’t have had voluminous hair even if she wanted to, because James Cameron’s hardware and software wasn’t good enough.

If you haven’t followed computer graphics closely you might not know that certain textures and materials, like hair, are incredibly difficult to get right. Though there has been quite a lot of progress in the realm of still CG, capturing the motion and flow of humanoid hair is still very difficult if not virtually impossible. Cameron’s Avatar didn’t significantly advance the state of the art, but he was able to creatively sidestep the issue by giving his characters thick braids and dreadlocks which he could motion capture.

This alleviated the chore of trying to artificially generate the realistic movement of millions of individual hairs: if all the Na’avi had braids or dreadlocks, then all of that movement could be motion captured by actors in reality.

Much has been made of Cameron’s innovation to accurately develop motion capture for individual facial movements, and it is my strong feeling that the team also took this approach for the hair of their characters. As Wired pointed out in their features on the movie, this is an evolution in the modern director relationship to computer graphics: instead of trying to *simulate* real world phenomena using procedural software, directors opt to direct a close enough analog in the physical world whose motion could be captured at a very high resolution using camera-like devices.

Don’t believe me? Check out these screen grabs from the Avatar making of video floating around:

Look closely at Zoe’s head and it doesn’t require a lot of imagination to believe that her dreadlocks have individual motion capture devices embedded in them. It’s also probably true that motion capture systems of this type can not be scaled small enough for individual hairs. This might change in the future, but for now it is a real technological constraint in the world of Pandora. There are a couple other examples of technology constraining creative choice: why don’t any animals in the Pandora jungle have fur? Might it be because Cameron couldn’t get CG fur to look right?

So Cameron’s technological constraints and innovation drove choices that would have have otherwise been purely creative. Code became law on Pandora. Sometimes the origins of code’s constraints are artificial (such as copyright law) but sometimes they’re just practical constraints like software and CPU horsepower, and I think that’s what happened here.

Let me know if you agree or have any evidence to the contrary.

I had a fun idea for a new Free Culture campaign last spring, but I haven’t gotten around to blogging about it until now.

LET MY CULTURE GO!

• Walt Disney: Let my cartoons go!
• Jack Valenti: Let my music go!
• Rupert Murdoch: Let my news go!
• Steve Jobs: Let my iPhone go!
• Jeff Bezos: Let my Kindle go!
• etc, etc.

I know it would be more consistent to substitute ‘our’ for ‘my’, but I really want to evoke the biblical/mythological imagery around freedom and liberation, while simultaneously calling these CEOs out for the pharoahs/slavemasters that they are (we used to have another term for 360 deals…). The campaign simultaneously inverts the framing of copying as piracy, and takes up the mantle of liberators.

As Nina Paley rigorously demonstrates, there are many parallels between the struggles against Human Property and Intellectual Property. Just as we once thought it was morally acceptable to own humans, can we imagine a future where the ownership of ideas is viewed with similar disgust and incredulity? What are the best ways to remind people that Copying is Not Theft?

Anyway, the signal to noise ratio is quite high, and it will definitely
fit on bumper stickers and T-Shirts…

Any graphic designers want to donate some skillz?

I spent last Thursday and Friday in Brussels, attending the European Commission’s Oral Hearing in the competition investigation of the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. The proceedings at the Oral Hearing were confidential; I cannot write about the presentations made there by others. I can, however, summarize the three points I made during my brief presentation on Friday; my previous written submission to the commission is already available. I want to explain what I said and where I think we stand now that the Oral Hearing is over.

See more ...

Last week, Ian and Winnie got all heroic with some tools, wood and plexi. The result is a couple sweet prototypes, which we’ll be sending to the Decapod folks so they can hack software to process BookLib images.

In other news, I put a prototype design of the camera mount on thingiverse. Ian’s original washer-and-bolt design was a little janky, and when we get the parameters right on the mount, we should be able to print them quite cheaply.

We’re moving quite quickly towards a shippable kit. The cradle design is stable. We have dimensions for the plexi and the cube. We’re down to exploring two basic design paths (bent plexi vs. two flat sheets). Everything else about the prototype is in the detail stage.

There are photos of the wood hackery around, and I’ll try to post some soon.

Our tenth season continues next Tuesday night:

Perl Seminar New York
Tuesday Nov 17 2009
6:15 – 8:15 pm
NYPC User Group
481 8th Ave (Ramada New Yorker Hotel, West 34 St)
Suite 550

Main Topic: Perrin Harkins: "Choosing a Web Architecture for Perl"

Perl Seminar NY is once again pleased to welcome Apache expert and veteran Open Source contributor Perrin Harkins to speak at our meeting.

In the past few years, many new web proxy servers have come onto the scene with new performance promises and features. Servers based on non-blocking I/O bring claims of greatly improved performance. At the same time, FastCGI has become more widely used, giving people a possible alternative to mod_perl. Perrin's talk will help you choose the right architecture for your project by presenting a useful set of benchmarks and a comparison of strong points and key features.

Hope to see you on Tuesday November 17.

Jim Keenan
Moderator

Welcome to GNOME Blogs. If you are the owner of this brand new blog, you can start posting right now!

A quantum computer is, roughly, a device that can prepare a quantum system in a known state, manipulate it in a way that maintains its quantum coherence, and extract some useful information.

What makes a quantum computer so different from a classical computer?

After all, the computer on my desk operates according to the laws of quantum mechanics, doesn't it? Indeed, the entire world operates according to the laws of quantum mechanics, and a classical computer is no exception. And semiconductors, the materials that computer processors are made of, can only be understood with the help of quantum mechanics.

So what really does it mean to say that a certain type of machine is a quantum computer, while the computer on my desk is not?

A quantum computer's means of storing and processing information must be in quantum states.

...to my new blog.

Throughout the next several posts, I plan to consider a seemingly simple question: If at some point in the future we are able to build one or more quantum computers, how might our individual freedoms be affected?

Given my background working with the free software movement, it should come as no surprise that I believe that we, as human beings, ought to be in control of the technology we allow into our personal lives. And I optimistically believe that in time, the vast majority of people will come to understand that our ability to control our collective destiny rests on our ability to keep the power of technology in the hands of the people who use it, not the corporations who develop and distribute it.

I expect that most readers of this blog will already be familiar with these ideas, so I will take them as a starting point for the coming discussion, as we jump right in to the idea of quantum computing.