Hitler Jokes
I’m always a sucker for teenage humor:
Web Fonts Arrive! Firefox 3.5 is out!
“But we need not wait for epiphanies from those whose paycheck depends on them not having any.” - Dmitri Orlov
Firefox 3.5 is out, and supports web fonts! Grab it from getfirefox.com and tell your friends :-)
The Core of the Copyfight
Over on the PHD-DESIGN mailing list, Lars Albinsson asked, “In Sweden there is a huge debate on copyrights vs sharing on the Internet. (Swedes managed to both start the Pirate Bay, allegedly the leading peer-to-peer service, as well as introduce very strong regulatory legislation against it.) The trail of the pirate bay people this spring was one of the most internationally covered events in Sweden for years. The pirate lobby also started a political party and managed to get a seat in the European Parliament. There are mainly two sides in Sweden; roughly summed up as: Mainly record companies and some artists claim that the creative industry is dying because of internet piracy; and Other artists, many “intellectuals” and IT industry people claim the internet offers huge potential for creative businesses and people. What are the thoughts on the list about this issue (or issues)?”
As I see it, there are three sides to the “copyfight”: The public, the authors/artists, and the publishers.
Computer networks are built to share data, and the public Internet is the ultimate publishing system. Trying to prevent the public sharing data over the Internet is impossible, unless you create an intrusive police state.
Copyright conceptually starts with everything published being in the public domain. The public then grant authors a limited time monopoly over some aspects of published works in order to encourage publication. Authors do not have a natural right to control their work, this control is granted to them by the public so that the public may benefit. Note that the phrase “intellectual property” is designed to confuse this, suggesting that authors have natural rights akin to physical property rights, and lumping together laws which have almost nothing in common (patents, copyrights, trademarks, database rights, attribution rights, etc). That phrase must be avoided to have a meaningful discussion of the issues it is associated with.
The public used to trade away its natural right to copy published works to encourage the publication of more works, when it didn’t have widespread copying machines. Now that computer networks are here, the copyright bargain makes less sense for most of the public, and it seems they would rather have file sharing - even if this means that there are less works being published, which can not be assumed, although it is asserted by publishers.
Generally the political process of western democracies is dominated by corporate interests, and in this area, by publishing corporations. Therefore while the actions of the public support p2p file sharing, their governments have worked to support publishing companies. The Pirate Party is the end result of this; if the public are disenfranchised by corporate lobbyists enough about some issue, they will start political organisation to oppose the lobbyists.
So the question is, can authors/artists continue to make a living while allowing the public to share complete copies of their works, non commercially, on P2P networks? Or will the public taking back its right to share published works mean that great authors stop publishing new works and do something else?
In 2009 there is plenty of evidence that artists who are independent of publishers can make plenty of money when they respect their fan’s desire to file share; and indeed, there are examples of authors who assert they now make MORE money when the full texts of their novels are posted online.
This leaves little room for publishing companies, since artists are interfacing directly with the market over the net, and since the most famous authors and artists are contractually tied to publishers, as the publishers’ ship sinks, those artists who are going down with them have quite loud voices. However, famous artists are now actively leaving their publishers (Madonna, Radiohead, etc) and implementing the kind of mature and sophisticated “direct marketing” to monetise their works that newer artists who weren’t able to get publishing contracts have been perfecting.
Here in academia, the question is, can academics make a living while allowing the public to share complete copies of their articles, non commercially, on the web?
I suggest that they can.
A quick example: Orion Magazine just came to my attention today (having published an article - in full - about the Transition Towns movement, which I’ve recently started participating in) and the footer of each page explains: “Orion publishes six thoughtful, inspiring, and beautiful issues a year, supported entirely by our readers – we’re completely ad-free!”
Journalists and other professional authors will continue to exist, but their publishing companies and newspapers probably won’t. Many people are now professional bloggers, paid by donations directly sent by their readership and advertising.
(Many thanks to my friends Richard Stallman, who gave a speech titled “Copyright and Community in the Age of Computer Networks” at my undergraduate university in 2004 about these issues, and my dear departed friend Fravia who also practiced what he preached. Thanks also to the countless other thinkers associated with the copyfight who I do not personally know but whose works I have read :-)
Print is dying fast, I suspect collapse psychology afoot.
TechCrunch reports that the newspaper industry has had an unprecedented drop in revenues in the first quarter of this year.
Print is dying fast. I wouldn’t be suprised if they pretend everything is okay and then one day just turn off the presses; that’s the pattern of collapse
I’m reminded of Mish: “Things that can’t happen, are about to.”
I’m also reminded of my good friend Dr. Thomas Fischbacher, who explained in a recent lecture series on “the econo-energy crisis for engineers” the similar situation in Mathematics:
“God exists, since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists, since we cannot prove it.” (A. Weil)
For a long time, Mathematicians tried to prove that their axioms are ‘consistent’, i.e. never will produce contradictions. At some point, they found that this is a seriously misguided idea: They managed to show that Every set of axioms that allows a proof of its own consistency then automatically also allows finding a “proof” for every possible statement, wrong or not. So, a mathematical theory that succeeds in self-justifying its correctness is worthless, for then it inevitably will be able “to demonstrate both that 2 + 2 = 4 and that 2 + 2 = 4 at the same time.”
At first, this was a surprising result. But it caused Mathematicians to make a transition to a higher state of awareness on what their discipline is about. Knowing what you never will be able to achieve, and why this is a good thing, can be humbling, but provides us with a higher degree of understanding of what it actually is we are doing. The problem with “proof theory” is that many people philosophize about it (in particular: about G ?del’s Theorem) without having a sound idea how it works. This is not what we want to get into here! So, let me emphasize: the link we are about to make with Mathematics concerning the ascension to a higher state of awareness on what we are doing is only an analogy! We do not and can not transplant G ?del’s Tree onto the soil of, say, Politics!
Many people (maybe preferentially in western societies?) search for an all-encompassing explanation of how the world really works. (Hypothesis: Maybe because not knowing makes the human mind feel deeply uncomfortable?) Some of them arrive at a picture of the world which they consider meeting that ideal and then start to prosyletize – to convert others to their belief. The problem with every “I explain it all” ideology is that it provides an explanatory framework that makes its adherents blind to disconfirming evidence. Suppose the ideology is wrong, for some reason. If you can find an explanation for and come up with an answer to every conceivable observation, how would the problems that arise in the application of a false ideology manifest themselves?
As indications of major flaws are never seen for what they are, the only conceivable consequence is collapse – being deprived of all room for manuevre by the clash with hard reality!
New Interview with Mike Ruppert
I’m happy to see this new interview with Mike Ruppert about his new book, “A Presidential Energy Policy.”
China is implementing his Presidential Point #1 - Double the national oil reserve storage, because we are post peak - and PetroChina is now the largest company in the world.
Moblin 2.0
Intel’s distribution of GNU/Linux, Moblin, is very nice:
Off the cliff we go
The Oil Drum just posted an excellent up-to-date set of graphics on oil decline rates, and even at 3.4% this does not look good at all; that mean’s we’ll have half the liquid fuel we do today in 20 years time.
My gut feeling is that the rate of decline will accelerate, not float down as in the above graph, as it did in Cantarell:
Off the cliff we go.
UK Government Approves DRM
A while ago I signed a petition to the UK Prime Minster’s office against DRM, and a response came back today. Not good and containing plenty of nonsense, sadly.
The petition was:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to investigate the legality and fairness of DRM, specifically SecuROM. With more and more consumers being effectively handcuffed by games producers using draconian methods of DRM, we require the government to protect our rights as consumers by investigating this issue. We maintain that “limited installs” and “online activation” are both misleading, immoral and discriminatory. We also maintain that our rights of resale are being infringed by said DRM methods.
The Government’s response:
The Government wants as many people as possible to enjoy all the benefits that broadband internet can bring. New technology has changed the way people want to use and access media content, in some cases faster than products and services commercially on offer have developed. But we are also clear that the benefits of the internet must include economic benefits for our creative industries and artists.
Of course DRM is about more than just preventing people doing things, it is also about enabling content and other companies to make their material available in more sophisticated ways, offering different deals at different price ranges for example. But it is also employed as a “policeman”, and it is particularly in those circumstances that the utilisation of DRM by rights holders can be controversial.
Generally speaking the Government considers that DRM remains a legitimate tool for industry to use so long, obviously, as its utilisation stays within the general legal framework. If consumers are resistant then there may well be commercial advantage to offering DRM-free goods, as is happening in the music industry – but as a tool it is reasonable to leave it as something to be deployed as appropriate.
Guardian Editor in Chief: “Newspapers are going to die”
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p>Alan Rusbridger, Guardian Editor in Chief, on the Future of Journalism: Bloggers’ comments make journalists’ articles “look quite silly.” “Newspapers are going to die” “Its a broken model, the victorian model of distribution” “blurring the distinction between journalist and reader … acknowledge they bring so much, create a community around your journalistic core” “we look to see how the [guardian] technology team are working, that’s how we’ll all be working in 5 years time”
How to force reading EULAs
The LGM2009 inGIMP talk is awesome - the second half about “arresting graphic design” was really smart: they figured out how to influence people to actually bother reading EULAs :-)
2009-03-07 John Taylor Gatto on “Open Source Education”
John Taylor Gatto made a speech on the 7th of March this year, and the video from homelandstupidity.us is embedded above. It is also available to buy on DVD from booktv.org and you can download the 700Mb FLV video direct (and play it using the free software VLC).
I also recently found an audio recording on archive.org of John making a short speech and then reading a chapter of his latest book, “Letter to my Granddaughter,” at the unSchooling Oppression conference, November 6, 2007.
The first chapter Weapons of Mass Instruction was published in Ode Magazine, and last year I tracked down Alexandre Innis’ Principles of Secondary Education and you can download a ZIP of all the the pages which John references.
Fun: Univers Revolved
Here is an interesting way of checking the curves in a typeface:
Can anyone into Libre Fonts attend Open Translation Tools 2009?
Open Translation Tools 2009 will be held in Amsterdam, Holland from 22-24 June, 2009.
It will run alongside an Open Translation Book Sprint to produce a free book about the tools and best practices of Open Translation, with FLOSSManuals.net.
In 2007 I and Alex Prokoudine attended the wonderful Open Translation Tools event in Croatia, and my flights and hotel were paid for by the Open Society Institute, and I believe that there will be a similar bursary for people to attend this year.
I cannot make it however, since it will be a couple of weeks before my big MA Typeface Design deadline, and I’m going to LGM.
But, the topic of libre fonts was welcomed by the organisers and proved interesting to all the other participants, and so I hope someone from the Open Font Library or Deja Vu projects can attend.
I’d like people at OTT09 to know about @font-face and what it means for minority languages, and for them to tell the libre fons community what is bugging them about the fonts they have to use (or don’t have available yet.) And also, what is bugging them about the way other tools use fonts - such as the font selection/management features.
http://aspirationtech.org/events/opentranslation/2009 has all the details, and there is a mailing list too.
Swine Flu in North America
Mish reports that Swine Flu has gone to ‘emergency’ status, while Mike Ruppert suggests this will be the first wave of peak oil die off.
And I’m off to North America in a few weeks. Great. Although Monreal is the opposite side to the Mexican coastline, the New York connection is not good.
Web fonts starts bubbling merrily: “Fuck the foundries”
Mark Pilgrim is an important software freedom advocate, famous for his blog posts about switching from Mac OS X to GNU/Linux (nb Gruber’s reply) and from MovableType to WordPress. So I’m happy to see him championing web fonts, since this little feature of CSS3 that is going to ship in all major browsers this year hasn’t got enough press I think.
Although his manner is a little obnoxious:
That post goes with aListApart interview with David Berlow, who has been out in the wilderness talking about “optically scaled” web fonts (and web font DRM…) for years, and Tal Leming’s reply to Mark (Tal is one of the Robofab geniuses). His comment about the secrecy in the W3C Fonts group is something I strongly agree is problematic.
I made tonnes of notes for this overall topic during the research of my dissertation, but didn’t include a section in the final text. I’ll be tidying it up and adding this topic as the 4th final chapter, and publishing it as a book after I graduate.
I also posted some stuff about all this last year on the Open Font Library wiki - such as the EOT page section “What might happen in the future?” - but all that needs updating.
The new Open Font Library will go live very soon, I hope, and add some positive action to the web fonts discourse. There’s a discussion on the OFLB list about this.
Mike Ruppert’s Energy Policy Book: May 1st
Mike Ruppert’s new book, “A Presidential Energy Policy,” is out on May 1st.
This will be followed by a new documentary about his work from the guys who did The Yes Men, which was good: Collapse
Why Mac Computer Systems Reduce Creativity and Inhibit Quality Improvement of Novel Innovative Design
I’ve been enjoying the PHD-DESIGN mailing list run by JISC lately, and Terry Love just made a cracking post in the thread about intuition in design, which which he linked to a paper of his:
“Why Mac Computer Systems Reduce Creativity and Inhibit Quality Improvement of Novel Innovative Design”
Wonderful stuff :-)
I made a little post there in that thread too, which I’ll make into a future blog post.
American Scientist promotes @font-face!
American Scientist just published a wonderful article about the state of science publishing on the web, and I am very happy to see that the author, Brian Hayes, recognises the huge potential of @font-face and free software fonts to change the business of type:
How will it all turn out? Will Web sites of the future be chock full of MathML, or will TeX and HTML continue to prevail? Or will something else altogether come along?
I have no answers for these questions, but I want to suggest an adjustment in the way the Web works—a small change that could improve any strategy for displaying mathematical notation. It has to do with where fonts come from.
Under the present rules, a Web author can request a particular font, and the reader’s browser will honor the request if the font is available on the client machine. If not, some default font is substituted. Wouldn’t it be more helpful if the author could supply the missing font, either by embedding it directly in the page or by referring the browser to a site where the font is available? Given such a mechanism, any font-based system for presenting mathematics could ensure that all the needed symbols are ready at hand.
This is not a new idea. A proposal for “Webfonts” was included in a draft CSS standard in 1998, and the idea was even implemented in a few browsers, including Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. But the proposal never caught on, and it was removed from later versions of the standard. Recently, Håkon Wium Lie of Opera Software has called for renewed consideration of the idea.
Much of the discussion centers on legal questions of interest to the owners of typeface copyrights. This doesn’t seem like an insuperable problem. It was solved in the case of PDF files, which do embed fonts. Even if proprietary typefaces were off limits, there are enough freely available fonts—including all those commonly used with TeX—to make the prospect attractive.
For a change of this kind to have any impact, all the browser makers would have to adopt it. Those are the same people who have so far resisted implementing MathML. Why would they treat the font proposal any differently? I think there is reason for optimism on this score, not because the mathematical community has much clout but because embedded fonts would be of value to other constituencies. Advertisers, in particular, would be pleased to gain greater control over Web typography.
Meanwhile, as I finish preparing this column for the press, I also face the task of helping to get my own penalty copy ready for publication on the American Scientist Web site. Those irksome equations and curious characters I’ve been writing about will somehow have to be made Web-friendly. I don’t know exactly how we’re going to do that, but I suspect some bicycles are going to be outfitted with spinnakers and jibs.
Hopefully I can do this before the monetary system breaks down.
(Via Karl Berry)
Eliot Spitzer is a hero of mine
Eliot Spitzer is a hero of mine: He is a public witness to the establishment’s principle agency in creating the financial collapse.
Back in February last year, he wrote in a US national paper about how Bush caused the housing collapse:
Next month, Bush had him busted for hiring Ashley Alexandra Dupré, a wannabe-pop-star prostitute.
Greg Palast wrote it up on his blog pretty well at the time.
So I’m very happy Spitzer has kept up writing dissident articles, like this one:
The AIG bailout’s counterparties were paid because of the ‘sanctity of contract,’ but one of the conditions of the car bailout was that those employees’ contracts were ripped up, and their wages cut. “The question arises: are contracts with blue-collar workers less binding than those with highly-paid derivatives traders?”
(This soundbite from that article is tight: “[This is] the American dream in reverse. First they lose their jobs, then their health insurance, then their homes, then their hopes.”)
Over in Latvia, you get the secret police round for talking about the reality of the economic collapse. Since the UK has some really nice anti-terrorism laws, I wonder how long it will be until the same happens here.
Recent Gatto Speech
Here’s a nice blogpost about a recent (2009) Gatto speech. I wonder if there are any recordings…
Soundbites on free software business and culture
The idea that making free software is not a business model for an individual who is a talented programmer is not, I think, compatible with current data.
Eben Moglen, Part 2 of an interview from 2007 (part one here)
Microsoft still maintains strongly the view that its business model, which depends upon concealing source code from users, is a viable and important and necessary model. And as long as a company that sells a billion dollars a week in software is fundamentally still trying to [fight] the free way of doing things, Microsoft remains a very dangerous party. But Microsoft, too, has now fundamentally recognized that there is not another generation left in the proprietary software idea and [it is] trying to move to a world in which it can leverage the remaining value of its monopoly in a world of mixed free and unfree code. As Microsoft begins to move itself away from being the primary partisan of unfreedom, the second most important partisans of unfreedom slot into place and they are the owners of culture, the Disneys and the other major movie studios who have a great deal of image-making authority in the world — and a great deal to lose from the obliteration of their distribution mechanisms.
Eben Moglen, computerworld interview, 2007
The death of the newspaper industry in “a year or two”
Couple more nice pieces about the collapse of newspapers via the Backstage list:
Massive layoffs with no end in sight. Wave after wave of acquisitions and mergers fueled by the excesses of artificially cheap capital. Widespread fear that an entire industry and its contributions will stall or simply stop. This describes the news industry today, but it also described the high tech industry in the late eighties and early nineties. Read more…
There should have been a ten-year evolutionary process: the ecosystem steadily diversifying and establishing its complex relationships, the new business models evolving, the papers slowly transferring from print to digital, along with the advertisers. Instead, the financial meltdown – and some related over-leveraging by the newspaper companies themselves – has taken what should have been a decade-long process and crammed it down into a year or two. That is bad news for two reasons. First because it is going to inflict a lot of stress on people inside the industry who do great things, and who provide an important social good with their work. But it’s also bad news because it’s going to distract us from the long-term view; we’re going to spend so much time trying to figure out how to keep the old model on life support that we won’t be able to help invent a new model that actually might work better for everyone. Read more…
On the backstage list, the BBC has been proposed as a model for paying journalist’s wages, but it has been noted that there isn’t any other news organisation at the same scale anywhere else, ever. But I think there might be when the other large beehive organisations collapse in the depression, and popular support for the stomping jackboot evil emerges.
Anyway, to me, the solution for individuals looking to do journalism is, they get another job to keep the bills paid, learn how internet marketing really works (which ought not to be too hard for those already expert at writing), continue to do journalism about what they love, and work hard at being worth it.
They’ll have to accept that everyone else will call them a “blogger” “podcaster” or “video podcaster” or something else that fails to see past the media form to the actual activity, and will fail to pay the social dividend of “I work at Acme Media Corp.”
Plenty won’t like that social adjustment, and I expect they will also be the ones who have been recycling press releases instead of doing real investigation, and heaping scorn on their colleagues who were trying to keep up with the Internet. Like lawyers who got into law because they wanted to get rich, instead of believing in the rights of man, I won’t be sad to see them work another job and without continuing to do their “journalism.”
There have been plenty of professional bloggers during the last few years, and some were not lone individuals but small groups. Of all the ones I’ve paid for, my favourite was Gruber, who offered for money a full-text RSS feed with a T shirt. My hope is that we’ll get more stuff like MediaLens but outwards facing (who are also not traditionally funded, but who are indeed funded.)
My hope with the change is that we’ll get an answer to the questions MediaLens raise about the integrity of the profession.
“You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model.
In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the newspapers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. … “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” … Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke. … It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem. … “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. Read more…
Clay Shirky is one of my favourite academics, and he has been making a habit of explaining why the newspaper industry is even more zombified than the car manufacturing industry. His latest piece in this series, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” is one of his best essays, I think - although my personal top favourite is still “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.”
There will always be a need for people doing journalism, writing well-informed opinions, taking the right photos at the right time in the right place. But we don’t need other people to support us do these things any more. So as it gets harder to generate revenue from these activities, the people who support the activities and turn them into ‘work’ - which directly means, the organisations who support and employ the activity-participants - are collapsing in the vacuum.
The internet is changing the demand for “high quality content,” because it is changing the definition. “Sharable” and “modifiable” are now crucial parts of what make up “high quality,” and “HD quality broadcast footage” is facing stiff competition from “HD quality off-my-pocket-camera.”
The way to generate revenue is obvious, if you study the way the free software business community generates revenue :-)
(Via Sean Daly)
How Indiana Jones was thought up
A complete transcript of a intensive five 9-hour day meeting between George Lucas, Speilberg and the screenwriter has found its way onto the web.
Magic!
Robothon reports
There’s a good set of links to reports on the Robothon over on Typophile
