As part of my research, I’ve had to dig into the history of hackers. Real hackers, not the the criminals and vandals that the media refers to.
The fundamental reference for hacker history is Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, written in 1984, way before the media started using the word as a synonym for someone who breaks the law.
The book has been around for a while, so I will not bother to review it, other than to say that it still remains the most comprehensive resource for understanding the origins of a movement that has began as a small group of people at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now, what’s interesting about hackers, is that, in my opinion, they are somewhat unacknowledged heirs to the bohemian tradition.
“How can that be?” you might ask. After all bohemians are night creatures who sit around bars and paint stuff, while hackers (the real ones) are just computer nerds who have no girlfriends and use the terminal! If you get past the stereotypes, though, you can find many similarities between the archetypal bohemians from the late 19th Century and early 20th Century and the hackers that emerged from the 1950s and after.
So Steve Jobs, rather apologetically, writes up a confessional piece explaining why his iToys don’t support flash. If you haven’t read it, here’s the quick summary: Jobs argues that Flash is not an open standard, uses an “old” video codec, is insecure, battery-draining and not specifically targeted at apple devices.
Jobs’ explanation is laughable. Almost all of the criticisms thrown at Adobe apply to Apple as well. The “not an open standard” argument is perhaps the funniest. While it is true that Flash is by no means and open standard, apart from being proprietary and closed source, Apple’s products are no different. He himself admits so:
Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards.
To add insult to injury, Apple’s preferred video codec, H.264, which it calls an “industry standard”, is in fact no more open than Flash itself. Indeed, it is the source of a corporate dispute that threatens to diminish the HTML5 open standard that Jobs so much praises.
Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s widely acknowledged co-founder, has written a letter to the FBI arguing that Wikipedia, more specifically, the Wikimedia Commons project, knowinglyhosts child pornography.
While Sanger’s relationship with Wikipedia and the Foundation in the past few years has become colder, to say the least, I can only wonder what prompted Sanger to rush into notifying the authorities without first a) inquiring whether or not the Foundation was aware of the existence of the offending images and b) actually verifying that said images could indeed be considered as child pornography.
So, after a few months of inactivity and a lost database, I’m back to regular blogging with my input on perhaps the best Ted talk I’ve seen so far.
Jane McGonigal is a game researcher with a PhD in performance studies from Berkeley. Her argument is bold: games —or rather videogames— can help solve many of the world’s problems. How, you may ask? I’ll let her tell you. My comments after the video.
In what is perhaps the ultimate twist of irony, Amazon.com decided it would be a good idea to go all Nazi on kindle users who had legitimately bought George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four and Animal Farm and delete them from their e-book readers, citing a conflict between the publisher and the copyrights holder in the US, where the books haven’t gone into the public domain, presumably thanks to the abomination that is the Sonny Bono copyright extension act.
Now, I don’t care if readers were reimbursed and I most certainly don’t care whether or not Amazon is allowed to do this by the Kindle’s terms of service. It is just plain wrong.
To start, the act of going into your legally-purchased machine and deleting your legally-purchased e-book feels like a violation of your most private space. Imagine if Penguin Books or your neighbourhood bookstore decided that they no longer want you to have a copy of that book they sold you, so they decide it’s OK to send someone to break into your house, retrieve the book and leave a check by the door. That’s what you can be subjected to when you purchase a Kindle —and more incredibly— that’s what Amazon actually decided to do to keep the publisher and the copyright holder happy, all at the expense of those foolish enough to purchase an e-book to read on their shiny new Kindle.
This is just a symptom of how twisted DRM technologies are. Content industries, namely film & television, software, music and increasingly book publishers have become so obsessed with anyone copying their stuff that they are willing to step on the very people that make them money. By wanting to exercise such tight controls, they end up abusing their legitimate customers, invading their privacy and treating them like criminals.
Sorry, Amazon, it’s unrestricted formats or good ol’ paper books for me. I think I might give my dog-bitten paperback copy of Nineteen Eighty-four a re-read, just in case I ever feel tempted to buy a Kindle.
