Technology Bites

Because I’ll read whatever I damn well please on a device that I own, thank you very much…

Apple has rejected Eucalyptus, an ebook reader that facilitates downloading public domain books from Project Gutenberg, because some Victorian books mention sex (many of these same books can be bought as ebooks through the iPhone Kindle reader or purchased as audiobooks from the iTunes store). It’s amazing to think that in 2009 a phone manufacturer wants to dictate which literature its customers should be allowed to download and read on their devices.

The developer of Eucalyptus details the nightmare in his blog entry Whither Eucalyptus?

So much of what drives the far right’s rhetoric regarding the terrible, awful threat that Islam allegedly presents to the world is driven by fear — and fear is, almost invariably, driven by ignorance. The Internet has the potential to be an effective tool for education; can it be used to dispel the ignorance about Islam that pervades so much of the West?

Joshua S. Fouts and Rita J. King, Senior Fellows at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, have attempted to address this question. Their year-long project, entitled Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds, set out “to see what they could learn about Islam — not by inviting particular people with particular perspectives into Second Life, but rather to follow the trail of what was already happening culturally in the space that might yield new insight about Islam.”

In an interview regarding the project, Fouts says:

Our work was a bona fide listening effort. We went into communities in Second Life that either self-identified as Muslim or were self-declared efforts to better understand Islam, and we asked people about their stories. In the end, this project was about storytelling. What people are doing is building new narratives to find ways to coexist. That said, we are not Pollyannas, and Second Life is not a utopia. We encountered numerous situations where tense, impassioned dialogue occurred. But the virtual nature of the space provided an opportunity for people to find new ways to work through differences.

Fouts and King will release their report on January 29th in New York, and will host a Second Life event to discuss their work on January 30th. Second Life accounts are free, so if you don’t have one, I urge you to join up and attend the online discussion.

SF author Charles Stross, in an online discussion:

People buy stuff advertised in spam because, sadly, in aggregate, people are made out of s-t-u-p-i-d.

Found this on Chaotic Utopia… It’s a truly amazing and thought-provoking exposition of what the Web — no, scratch that, what we who are on the Web are doing to change the way we communicate, think, and learn.
 

Guy Kawasaki, one-time Macintosh evangelist, lists Ten Things to Learn This School Year (actually, twelve of them):

1. How to talk to your boss
2. How to survive a meeting that’s poorly run
3. How to run a meeting
4. How to figure out anything on your own
5. How to negotiate
6. How to have a conversation
7. How to explain something in thirty seconds
8. How to write a one-page report
9. How to write a five-sentence email
10. How to get along with co-workers
11. How to use PowerPoint
12. How to leave a voicemail

If you’re in school now — or if you’re not — it’s worth reading the whole post.

In February 2006, the popular weblog BoingBoing was banned from the computer screens of hundreds of US companies and schools, as well as in many repressive countries, by an asinine decision made by a single purveyor of web-filtering software:

At fault in most of these cases is a US-based censorware company called Secure Computing, which makes a web-rating product called SmartFilter. But SmartFilter isn’t very smart. Secure Computing classifies any site with any nudity—even Michaelangelo’s David appearing on a single page out of thousands—as a “nudity” site, which means that customers who block “nudity” can’t get through.

Last week, Secure Computing updated their software to classify Boing Boing as a “nudity” site. Last month, we had two posts with nudity in them, out of 692—that’s 0.29 percent of our posts, but SmartFilter blocks 100 percent of them. This month, there were four posts with nudity (including the Abu Ghraib photos), out of 618—0.65 percent.

In fact, out of the 25,000 Boing Boing posts classed as “nudity” by SmartFilter, more that 99.5 percent have no nudity at all. They’re stories about Hurricane Katrina, kidnapped journalists in Iraq, book reviews, ukelele casemods, phonecam video of Bigfoot sightings (come to think of it, he doesn’t wear clothes either), or pictures of astonishing Lego constructions.

In response, Mark Christian created Distributed BoingBoing, which allows users who browse the web from behind the so-called SmartFilter to access BoingBoing via alternate sites. I’ve just set up DBB on this site, and it is accessible at http://dbb.thinkingmeat.net. Enjoy.

And Secure Computing… bite me.

The good folks at BoingBoing discovered that their site was being blocked in many US organizations and foreign countries by a ham-handed content filter. Their response? Compile an extensive list of ways to defeat censorware. Read the rest of this entry »

It was hardly as exciting as rescuing a hard drive with a pooched Master Boot Record, but I had occasion to use the Knoppix live CD to fix a minor problem with my Ubuntu PC.

I awoke Sunday, turned on the Dell Optiplex, and came back to a warning that the window manager session had lasted less than ten seconds. Not good. Read the rest of this entry »