Turning your vision into reality is a big leap. Going from zero to one represents a Zenoan step, which is not guaranteed to be possible, in the world of mathematical abstractions or in the world of physical action. So it is a wonderful feeling that OpenSpime is actually making this leap. If not to 1.0, at least to 0.9!
The architecture of the OpenSpime protocols, based on an extension to XMPP, is available for anyone to explore, and improve, but what is even more important is that with very little effort anybody can run his or her own OpenSpime servers, and implement OpenSpime compliant applications using the Pyopenspime libraries which have also been released simultaneously.
OpenSpime is an ambitious project, and it is not only about technical issues of implementation, protocol optimization, server scalability, etc. The healthy development of future technologies which can have a high level of impact on our societies depends on the availability of the right kind of policies concerning privacy, data retention, security, etc. for individuals, corporations, and government bodies alike.
OpenSpime.org has the aim of becoming the meeting place for an open debate about these wide ranging issues, where the discussion can be held alongside the technical development of the infrastructure, so that there won’t be a consumer backlash against poorly thought through policies, or ambiguous terms in privacy protocols.
Marco ‘Funkyprofessor’ Zamperini has been kind enough to invite me to talk to the top management and the board of Value Team about ‘The Open Internet Of Things‘, which will also obviously touch upon OpenSpime. It is nice that they said “We know how you always record your speeches, so you will be pleased to know that we’ll also want and have our offices in Brasil, India, Turkey, etc. to watch your seminar”. I actually do like it when people get it! I will of course post the slides and the recording of the seminar as soon as possible.
What web browser do you use? How much time to you spend in front of it per week? It is your window on the online world, it is what you use to see the web, compose an email on an online mail service, watch videos, listen to music, find photos, and more and more every day of your activities. Even applications, like Google Earth to view a 3D map of the planet, which seemed to be too complex and require a stand-alone application, are migrating into the browser.
You deserve to get the best. I use Firefox, and I highly recommend it.
If your computer didn’t come with Firefox preinstalled, you can use the one you were give to download and install it quickly. You will see a immediate improvement in your productivity, and enjoyment of online activities. The Mozilla Foundation is organizing a Download Day for entering into the Guiness World Records, and you can also pledge to be part of it, as I have.
The Phoenix interplanetary exploration vehicle landed on Mars. My name, David Orban, is on it, together with those of the other members* of Planetary Society. This is of course a rather indirect way of being on Mars, but for the moment I can’t do better, and it is still thrilling to feel part of humanities space exploration efforts!
The photo above is really worth seeing at high resolution: it shows the Phoenix lander descending on the surface, as seen by the Mars Orbiter flying around the planet.
*If you want your name flying into space on other vehicles, you can participate in other programs that the Planetary Society is organizing too!
The migration of our lives into the Cloud has accelerated lately, and it is not at all to the detriment of our physical experiences. We need simplicity, in order to face a complex world, and certainly to me this world appears to getting really complex. The unified access to what concerns us, what interests us, and what we actually do day after day, which is offered by the Internet, and the various services popping up there, is a great help, that more and more people are discovering. As the number of people using the Internet and the services increases, it won’t sound strange anymore for people to send a url to a friend who wants to see a photo of the kids growing up, or a movie of a vacation spot, and so on.
Image by ximenatapia
What are the consequences of the digitization of our data? How does the local storage that we used to own as our only solution for preserving digital memories, avoid becoming a puzzle for the industrial archeologists of the future, instead of a trusted safe for us and our children?
I use a lot of local storage, at more than a Terabyte in my home currently, and certainly more in my companies, and I also spread data out in the services that I use. For photos, videos, documents, slideshows, and so on, including of course the stream of consciousness of contemporary microblogging tools of one type or another. So much so that somebody remarked that I am brain downloading. Which is, brain downloading, or brain dumping, somewhat the point really here. Since we do have this strong belief in the continuity of our identity, falsified day by day through our conversations where different accounts of the same events, forgetful memories, and just plain decadence, we jump to the opportunity of recording our feelings, thoughts, actions, and possessions.
And once the brain is dumped, what can you do with it? How do you treat it, what rights does it have, or what rights do you have on it?
There are a lot of things to talk about, and that is what we are going to do tomorrow at ‘Living In The Cloud“, an aperitivo that I organized tomorrow at 6PM. Please come along, and make yourself comfortable!
A few days ago I’ve become a vegan. Vegans are those who do not eat meat like vegetarians, and also eschew animal products, like milk, cheese, eggs. When I tell people they laugh. I laugh as well, since I am a jovial person. But I am pretty serious.
Here are five good reasons:
I am fat. This is the simplest, apparently, and a valid excuse for dieting that the people around me easily accept, while they have more of a problem with the rest eventually. It took me twenty years, more or less, to breach the 100 kg barrier. I was 102 kg (225 lb) four days ago, when I became a vegan. I never tried to get slimmer, as I knew I wouldn’t be able to sustain it for long enough to get good results, that would also be sustainable. With being a vegan losing weight is a convenient side effect, that contributes to your well being, and reinforces your choice. Weight loss is not at the center.
Animals deserve better. I love eating meat. I just choose not to. We’ll see what I’ll do when we’ll be able to grow meat in hydroponic vats. In the meantime nervous systems are a good starting point to apply moral rights to their bearers.
The planet deserves better. We are growing much food, and distributing it badly. People are starving. And at the same time we are feeding livestock, cattle, which will be then eaten by us. This is not sustainable.
I love vegetables, and fruit. Eating like I’ve been doing for the last four days, since I became a vegan is not a sacrifice. The colorful variety of taste, texture, and smell that I’ve eaten and smelled is amazing. The spices I am using. And in just these few days my body started reacting, changing its odors already. We truly are what we eat.
In space colonies, and on Mars we can only be vegans. Can you imagine growing food to feed animals to eat under the canopies of the cities on Mars? I can’t. What nightmare a slaughterhouse in geostationary orbit would be? I want to go to space!
So there you go. The first thing I did last Friday was to twitter my flipping (it wasn’t even a decision). And move on from there, happily announcing it to anyone I would meet.
There is much I will have to learn of course. Decisions on how to find the right balance and make my way in a society that is not yet attuned to what will be the politically correct thing in ten years or more. Understanding what micro-nutrients will be needed to make sure that my diet keeps me healthy. A coupld of years ago Joi Ito started on this path, and I’ve read his blog entries with interest, curiosity, and admiration. In december I met Larry Lessig again at a working group, and he confirmed that he was inspired by Joi to take on his ways. Joi and Larry are worth copying in a lot of what they do. This is one of them.
Al Gore is in Rome this Thursday for the launch of the Italian edition of Current, his television channel around user generated content, and I am among the dozen or two people invited to meet him for a couple of hours’ conversation. The questions we are going to ask him were themselves voted upon on the Current platform, in a very open manner, which was contested by some, but in my opinion was really good. (Maybe because my question received a lot of votes?)
I am going to link two of Gore’s themes and ask him how the bottom up content that Current can host and distribute together with his presentations, and sensor networks like OpenSpime is capable of positively impacting the political process and implement those necessary levers that bring forth the change we need with respect to our environment.
Because this is in my opinion the crux of the question! Al Gore on one hand influences the public discourse and popularizes the concept of the Climate Crisis, on the other hand declares that individual behavior is not going to have an impact without public policy following it too, as reported in the New York Times’ opinion piece:
“Mr. Gore’s ambition is not just to change individual behavior by getting people to buy energy-saving light bulbs: it is to change policy. Whether he can compete with the public’s preoccupations with war and the economy is unclear, but it is certainly worth the effort.”
The interaction of these two forces, from the bottom up on one hand, and from the top down on the other, is going to be a crucial element on how quickly we can implement change, and how effective we are going to be facing our existential threats as a species.
I received a letter yesterday from Michael Robertson, a friend of mine and founder of MP3tunes. His company’s mission is to let people listen to their music wherever they want, and on any device they want. Recently EMI sued him, claiming that he was infringing EMI’s copyright by implementing the services that MP3tunes offers to its users.
Regardless of the legal and technical details, the point here is the possessive pronoun in the expression “their music”. Whose music is it? Whose property is a digital good?
When the world was not largely built on digital technologies and goods, it was easy to say who owned something. If I had it, you didn’t. If I gave it to you, I stopped having it at the same time. With the emerging value of the ideas that the objects embodied, a series of legal tools were forged that were needed to supplement the legislation that already well protected material goods. The existing ones for example covered theft. The new ones introduced the concepts of Copyright, Trademark, and Patents. After a while, maybe in a moment of seeking efficiency of expression (?), lawyers came up with a new simpler expression to talk about the three new protections, and started to say simply “Intellectual Property“. In time this shorthand form to mean the laws concerning copyright, trademarks, and patents, acquired an implied meaning of its own, and it became normal to say things like “intellectual property theft“, as if the legislation concerning material goods also covered digital ones.
They don’t. You can’t steal music. You can’t steal a movie, you can’t steal an ebook. You can’t steal bits!
Bits are inherently copiable, they are made to be copied, and all the tools we use to deal with bits are taking necessarily advantage of this. As you display information on your screen, or listen to sounds on your headphone, bits get necessarily copied.
Michael Robertson believes that you should not go back and ask for permission, and probably pay an additional fee, if the only thing you want to do with a song you already paid for once is to listen to it on a different device or in a different place. EMI believes that you should.
The WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, whose meetings are not public is steering our societies in a direction that is based on the original confusion I described above. How can its actions and recommendations make sense, and be beneficial to the wide range of countries in different economical and cultural conditions, if the edifice of the WIPO worldview is built on the quicksand of confusion?
Michael’s battle is an important one. It is today, but even more so for the future, when not only bits are not going to be harder to copy, but actually physical goods are going to become easier to copy. If today there must be a certain level of ingenuity, and organizational skill to make sure that your gang of brand-inspired copysters can make a profit from producing knockoff Prada bags in China and selling them on the street in Western countries, tomorrow with 3D printers these skills will be commoditized and anybody will be able to either make an identical copy of any object, or take inspiration from it and remix it for new forms or new uses.
The change this brings will be monumental: all of our manufacturing industry is based on the assumption that building is hard. When it won’t be anymore, the battles to protect those failing industries will be huge.
Michael’s battle is an important signal of the future to come, and in my opinion he is on the right side. Let’s make our voices heard, and help him win.
The birth of new social organizations in online-worlds is a great interest of mine, andI was delighted and honored when Michel Manen approached me to discuss the possibility of holding the inaugural lecture on Al-Andalus Caliphate, an innovative and vibrant multi-cultural community in Second Life.
The title of my lecture is going to be “Tolerance As A Guiding Principle For Societies And Technologies: The Rise of Robust Information Systems“, and it is going to be held at 2pm PST on April 27 on the Al-Andalus Alhambra sim’s Abd Ar Rahman III Auditorium. In the lecture I will analyze the analogies between the tolerance and resilience of healthy societies as they recognize the value of the contribution of different cultures and people, and the fault-tolerance of networks like the Internet, which keep working even if their parts behave in an unexpected manner.
I will of course post the slides and the recording of the seminar as soon as possible.
