Monthly Archives: September 2012
The sham “terrorism expert” industry
A highly ideological, jingoistic clique masquerades as objective scholars, all to justify US militarism
via salon.com
Twitter Causing Rise In Product Recalls
Public use of Twitter and Facebook to warn consumers about dodgy products could be driving the increase in companies issuing voluntary product recall notices, Consumer New Zealand says.
The increase locally has been climbing since 2009, according to advertisements placed in the Nelson Mail.
Consumer NZ editor-in-chief David Naulls said that social media might have prompted companies to recall food and goods deemed to be faulty, because the system relied on their voluntary action.
via stuff.co.nz
Killing the copper and income inequality
Why is all of this happening with so little policy response?
In Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (2012), author Martin Gilens makes a data-driven case for the following proposition: The responsiveness of government policies in America is strongly tilted towards the most affluent Americans. Indeed,”under most circumstances, the preferences of the vast majority of Americans [including the middle class as well as poorer Americans] appear to have essentially no impact on which policies the government does or doesn’t adopt.”
Who’s affluent? The top ten percent – including all members of Congress and most policymakers.
via scrawford.net
Universal service, still a good idea.
“White space” viable for rural broadband – report | InternetNZ
A just-published report on radio spectrum “white space” has found that the technology is a viable alternative for getting high-speed broadband out into rural and remote New Zealand communities.
White space refers to radio spectrum frequencies allocated to a broadcasting service but are not used locally.
The report – written by telecommunications consultant Jon Brewer – explores a number of technology and regulatory issues, as well as several practical uses and trials of white space technology.
Brewer notes that approaches based on “white space” are inexpensive, lightweight and can provide more effective broadband coverage in geographically-challenged parts of the country.
In the report he highlights the potential of white space for three New Zealand rural communities – Parikino in the Wanganui District, Pourerere in Central Hawkes Bay and Clova & Crail Bays in the Marlborough Sounds.
The report was funded by InternetNZ (Internet New Zealand Inc) as part of its Community Projects Funding Round, held last year.
How copyright enforcement robots killed the Hugo Awards
Last night, robots shut down the live broadcast of one of science fiction’s most prestigious award ceremonies. No, you’re not reading a science fiction story. In the middle of the annual Hugo Awards event at Worldcon, which thousands of people tuned into via video streaming service UStream, the feed cut off – just as Neil Gaiman was giving an acceptance speech for his Doctor Who script, “The Doctor’s Wife.” Where Gaiman’s face had been were the words, “Worldcon banned due to copyright infringement.” What the hell?
via io9.com
How apt.
chadband – Wordsmith Talk
Date: Fri May 30 00:02:55 EDT 1997
Subject: A.Word.A.Day–chadband
chad.band n.[Name of a character, the Rev. Mr. Chadband, in Dickens’s Bleak
House] A canting unctuous hypocrite.
via wordsmith.org
When I first learned this word, I couldn’t think of a situation where I’d prefer to say “Chadband” than “canting unctuous hypocrite.” Still can’t.
OpenStand: Principles for The Modern Standard Paradigm
stand with us
On August 29th five leading global organizations jointly signed an agreement to affirm and adhere to a set of Principles in support of The Modern Paradigm for Standards; an open and collectively empowering model that will help radically improve the way people around the world develop new technologies and innovate for humanity.
via open-stand.org
Doc Searls – Will the carriers body-snatch the Net with HTML5?
Background: telcos and cablecos – what we call “carriers,” and the industry calls “operators” – are hounded by what they call “over the top,” or OTT (of their old closed phone and cable TV systems). Everything that makes you, app developers and content producers independent of telcos and cablecos is OTT. NaaS, as Crossey explains it, is a way for the telcos and cablecos to put the genie of OTT independence back inside the bottle of carrier control.
The blathering about OTT, and its eager adoption as the term of craft to signify understanding, has irked since day one. Because since Day One, every service on the Internet has been (or can be) provided by other than the carrier.
Indeed this structural separation is the foundation of the freedom and flexibility that has caused the innovation for which the Internet is justly famed.
The idea that access to carrier customer information, in the two-sided model advocated for so long by Telco 2.0 (home to “Internet warming” scare monger Martin Geddes), will exclude some by becoming mandatory is a bit of a long bow. Indeed services may differentiate and appeal by not being geo-aware, or interested in all your demographic and social graph information.
That interest is conventionally held to be required for the nirvana of ad-supported services, but Doc Searls has for sometime predicted the demise of the model (or at least its marginalisation).
Too many too large and too clever organisations efficiently deliver their services using the Internet to be tempted by entering a global negotiation with local and national carriers to establish APIs, thus granting them the power Twitter is so casually abusing.
Co-operation at the level required for this strategy is mercifully beyond the narrow short-term self-interest of telcos to co-ordinate. All happy to ITU when the going was good, but competition has changed that happy band of brothers.
Telco 2.0, or at least Dean Bubley, illustrates this over-engineered habit time and time again: http://disruptivewireless.blogspot.co.nz/
In the long term, we’re not going back to X.400, the abstracted Internet market is so many orders of magnitude larger than any “carrier” that working with them (a pig of a job at the best of times) is very unlikely to be worth the grief.
Hamish MacEwan 