Verizon announced last month that it will open its network to “any application and any device” by the end of next year.
But while Verizon’s pledge sounds promising, the language in which it is couched makes me wonder whether Verizon understands what a true open platform looks like. The announcement states that “the company will publish the technical standards the development community will need to design products to interface with the Verizon Wireless network,” and that “devices will be tested and approved in a $20 million state-of-the-art testing lab.” It’s not yet clear what standards developers will need to follow to write applications that work with both the device and the network, and who will control those standards.
This is not “open.” It’s just a little less closed. A true open platform like the Internet doesn’t have certification of trusted devices or applications. Developers get to do anything they want, with the marketplace as their only judge and jury.
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The power of a social network like MySpace or Facebook isn’t in its software or its control over which applications get on its platform. It is in the critical mass of participating users.
From Nat Torkington, chair of OSCON and co-author of the Perl Cookbook:
Nebraska High Schooler Makes Ethanol Breakthrough: Emmett Jordan, a high school student in Nebraska, successfully demonstrated high-efficiency production of cellulosic ethanol by a genetically engineered bacterium during the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, beating out biotech giants to the prize. This step signals a major milestone in what Freeman Dyson calls the domestication of biotechnology.
Federal government agrees to use version control for all legislation: Following a suggestion made here on Radar, Nancy Pelosi today announced that the U.S. House of Representatives is deploying version control for all legislation, allowing the public to see who made changes to any bill, just like they can do with Wikipedia. The Senate is expected to follow suit. Virgil Griffith, creator of Wikiscanner, announced LawScanner within two hours after Speaker Pelosi's declaration. The Register writes up the story: Code is Law, but Law is Sausage.
Reputation, which plays a key role in almost any economic or social system, is a fundamental, but not well understood, aspect of online business transactions, peer production of information and knowledge, and exchanges within virtual social communities. Traditional modes of authentication, accreditation, reputation, and prior acquaintance with participants rely on the social norms of close-knit communities and the accountability of meeting face to face. Since these mechanisms usually do not apply to online environments, we have witnessed the development of alternative models for reputation management including third-party certificate authorities, peer-produced evaluations, ratings, stars, points, karma and others.
These new models, which apply to businesses, community-mediated information sources, people, goods, and services, challenge our accepted notions of identity, social capital, accreditation, expertise, and risk as they shift the reliance of reputation systems away from traditional business and social networks, educational backgrounds and institutional affiliations and towards the wisdom of the crowd. This shift, in turn, entails dramatic changes to information privacy, information quality, ownership and the ability of groups and individuals to affect these issues. Technology-mediated, cyber-reputation management is based on transactions in information that are often sensitive and always contextual. The data and information that are collected in online reputation systems are both valuable and powerful. The ability to control this information, store it, process it, access it, and transport it, are crucial to the maintenance of the reputation economy.
The symposium will seek to explore themes in individual reputation, business reputation, community-mediated information production, and the implications to democracy and innovation. The symposium, which will be open to the public, will bring together leading scholars from industry, academia and government to discuss the role of reputation in cyberspace.
I am pleased to announce that The Lost Border is now available as a book published by Princeton Architectural Press.
The book generally follows the structure of the The Lost Border website, but includes a number of additional photographs including six made in 2004 in Berlin, and an essay by Anthony Bailey and a personal statement.
From the Publishers Weekly review:
Rivers slash across snow-covered tundra, barbed-wire fences partition desolate fields and graffiti-covered walls divide the land in Rose’s powerful pictorial.
Beautifully photographed and richly reproduced ... this is an intelligent, eye-catching chronicle of the changes, in both landscape and architecture, that occurred in central and eastern Europe throughout the 1980s and early ’90s.
Quagmire is an emulation of an impossible 8bit processor, where all memory is addressed in 2 dimensions, and is represented by pixel value. Program execution threads can run up, down, left or right. Sections of code are visible in memory, as are the processes as they run. Unlike a normal computer the internal process of the machine is visible. Programs are drawings.
In this system, crashes can be viewed as they occur, processes can write all over each other, or themselves. Lost threads of execution wander through memory, running any data they meander over.
Read while you listen:
Nine Inch Nails: The Art of Self Destruction (Part Two)
Doris Lessing's acceptance speech for her Nobel Prize for Literature
Topic: Literature
9:02 pm EST, Dec 11, 2007
Gold Star.
Last night Doris Lessing, aged 88, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In her acceptance speech she recalls her childhood in Africa and laments that children in Zimbabwe are starving for knowledge, while those in more privileged countries shun reading for the 'inanities' of the internet.
All done. I could take the rest of the month off now, to read.
"There's not an obligation to be famous. We live in a culture that has impressed on us the idea that everybody not only can be famous, but should or must be famous, and if you're not famous, you've failed, and if you're making art and the world doesn't cheer you, then it's a failure, and that's just a lie."
Iraqi policewomen are told to surrender their weapons
Topic: Politics and Law
9:02 pm EST, Dec 11, 2007
The Iraqi government has ordered all policewomen to hand in their guns for redistribution to men or face having their pay withheld, thwarting a U.S. initiative to bring women into the nation's police force.
Critics say the move is the latest sign of the religious and cultural conservatism that has taken hold in Iraq since Saddam Hussein's ouster ushered in a government dominated by Shiite Muslims.
