rebel with rather too many causes
As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I’m giving a talk about my Revealing Errors project tonight at the Boston Linux Unix meeting. It will be at MIT in E51-351. More information is on the BLU website.
Revealings Errors is a very different kind of project from what I’ve done. Please show up if you can. I’d love support, feedback, suggestions, and the like.
Unhappy Birthday — a website that tries to educate the public and encourage folks to snitch on their friends for singing the (copyrighted!) Happy Birthday song in public places — is perhaps the most widely read thing I’ve ever written. It’s been seen by millions and I continue to get hate mail several times a week.
Last Sunday, the nationally broadcast CBC show WireTap aired an pseudonymous in-character interview with me about the site where I pretended to be a copyright high-protectionist. I think it turned out pretty well.
You can listen to it on the unofficial WireTap podcast. My interview starts at a bit more than 10 minutes into the show.
Recently, the EFF reported that the European commission had responded to a request by European Parliament member Satu Hassi about tracking dots in printers. European Commissioner Franco Frattini replied that tracking dots may constitute a human rights violation saying that:
"..to the extent that individuals may be identified through material printed or copied using certain equipment, such processing may give rise to the violation of fundamental human rights, namely the right to privacy and private life. It also might violate the right to protection of personal data."
Intriguingly, the request text includes a mention to and link to the Seeing Yellow project I started last year as an example of the fact that consumers have complained to printer manufacturers and that these complaints have fallen upon deaf ears.
Everyone who called their printer manufacturer in response to Seeing Yellow deserves come credit for the raised visibility to the issue that we’ve created and the set of actions that have brought the issue this far. Please, keep it up! If you’ve not complained to your printer manufacturer, visit Seeing Yellow and call today.
Yesterday witnessed the most important step forward for the Definition of Free Cultural Works (DFCW) since its adoption and endorsement by the Wikimedia Foundation a year ago.
Although I might have wished things otherwise, Creative Commons is not a social movement fighting for essential freedom or the essential freedoms at the core of the DFCW in particular. From the movement’s perspective, CC is more like a law and advocacy firm that works for us — a very sympathetic one. CC writes, hosts, and supports a variety of licenses. Some are free. Some are not. Last year they took steps to explicitly limit the extent of restrictions they are willing to tolerate in their licenses.
Yet, while CC has resisted taking a stand in favor of the Definition of Free Cultural Works, they continue to produce some of the best free licenses, tools, and metadata available and they seem honestly interested in helping users interested in social movements based around these definitions organize more effectively.
In perhaps its most important move to date in this area, Creative Commons announced yesterday that it was placing a seal on each of its licenses that provide the essential freedoms laid out in the Definition of Free Cultural Works. The seal links to the definition over at freedomdefined.org. In Creative Commons’ words:
This seal and approval signals an important delineation between less and more restrictive licenses, one that creators and users of content should be aware of.
A very practical reason users should be aware of these distinctions is that some important projects accept only freely (as defined) licensed or public domain content, in particular Wikipedia and Wikimedia sites, which use the Definition of Free Cultural Works in their licensing guidelines.
The seal is currently on two CC licenses that provide for essential freedom (Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike) and their public domain dedication. Thanks go to Erik Moeller at the Wikimedia Foundation and everyone at Creative Commons to helped make this happen.
Recently, Students for Free Culture — a non-profit organization dear to my heart — elected its new board. Several months ago, the group voted to hold its elections using the same preferential election method system that Debian uses. To help make their election easier I agreed to support them with a new set of features in Selectricity aimed at more structured organizational decision-making. Currently Selectricity is more geared toward more informal QuickVotes.
From a democratic and voting technology perspective, the election was a huge success. With 16 voters and 13 candidates, a traditional plurality or "first past the post" election would have been a poor match for their group — the 16 first-place votes were very split among the candidates. The results also show one very polarizing candidate who won the plurality but was in the bottom third of most preferential rankings! The use of Selectricity helped SFC select a board who better represented the preference of their group than they would have otherwise. Exciting stuff! You can read more on the Free Culture website or on the Selectricity blog.
Thanks are due both to the previous SFC board who took the risk on the technology and to all of the candidates and voters! I’m currently integrating feedback and improvements based on the SFC election and will open the feature up the public in the next couple weeks. If you want hear about this when it happens, you should subscribe to the Selectricity Blog or drop an email to team@selectricity.org.
Groups that campaign for free technology, like the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tend to be supported primarily by technologists. Both groups have struggled to communicate their messages to non-geeks. I have written an article and helped create a new weblog, both called Revealing Errors, that attempt to address a root cause of this issue in what I hope is both an insightful and entertainingly manner.
Geeks support groups like the FSF and EFF because, as people who understand technology, they understand just how powerful technology is. Geeks know that control of our communication technologies is control over what we can say, who we can say it to, and how and when we can say it. In an increasingly technologically mediated age, control over technology is not only the power to control our actions; it is the power to limit our possible actions. Our freedom to our technology is our freedom, full stop.
This message fails to resonate with non-geeks but it does not fail because non-geeks are happy to hand over their freedom. It fails to resonate simply because the vast majority of people do not understand that technology, and control over it, is powerful enough to impact their freedom. Most people fail to see the power because, quite simply, most people fail to see technology. While we all see the effects of technologies, the technologies themselves are frequently hidden. We see emails but not mail transport agents. We see text messages but not the mobile phone network. Before one can argue that such systems must be free, one must reveal their existence. Technologists are keenly aware of the existence of these systems. To everyone else, they are completely invisible.
Marc Weisner of Xerox PARC cited eyeglasses as an ideal technology because, with spectacles, "you look at the world, not the eyeglasses." When technology works smoothly, its nature and effects are invisible. But technologies do not always work smoothly. A tiny fracture or a smudge on a lens renders glasses quite visible to the wearer indeed. Similarly, people see their MTAs when messages bounce. They see Windows on their ATM or phone when the system crashes. Technological errors are moments when usually invisible technology becomes visible. They are, in this sense, also an educational opportunity.
I have recently published an article in Media/Culture Journal from the University of Melbourne within a special issue called Error. If you are interested in learning more about what I’m trying to do or looking at some examples, please read the article.
With support and ontributions from Aaron Swartz, I have also created a new weblog, Revealing Errors, that reveals errors that reveal technology by posting descriptions of errors with commentary on what the error reveals. I’ve posted a few examples there already and I will be updating it regularly. The goal is to help explain the power and influence of technology in the service of broadening the base of people who can get excited about freedom to technology.
Eventually, I hope to be able to communicate this message to a less technical audience. With that said, I hope that even seasoned technologists will learn things about their technological environment through the analysis and interaction. I hope readers of this blog will subscribe to it and, if possible, comment on and contribute to the project as it moves forward.
So, I finished graduate school at MIT.
I presented some of my thesis work at Wikimania and I’ll be posting information, code, and the thesis itself, in the next weeks as I find time.
I’ve decided to focus, at least in the immediate future, on several important projects. Here’s what I’m up to:
This is, of course, in addition to my work with FSF, Debian, and Ubuntu which I’ll be continuing. And talks. And writing. (Yikes!)
I’ll be keeping my office at MIT (yes, like RMS) for the time being and sticking around Cambridge at least until Mika finishes her degree at Harvard School of Public Health.
I’ll be in wrapping up projects modes for the next few weeks and months and will be posting about them here as I go.
Adapting some work from my thesis, I’ve written a short article on Wikinews over on the blog for the newly created MIT Center for Future Civic Media where I am a Fellow this year. Please, check it out.
Inspired by Mitchell Charity’s printable paper rulers and Steve Pomeroy’s CSS ruler, I wrote a little python script to generate an on-screen ruler for the OLPC XO-1. The XO-1 screens are super high resolution (200dpi) and are each identical. This makes for a very accurate ruler. It’s one of a few project I’ve done or am working on that tries to take advantage of the physical qualities (and physical consistencies) of the XOs. Also, a ruler is just a really useful thing for a school child — or anyone else for that matter.
Of course, different screens have different pixel sizes so the ruler for the XO won’t work on another screen. This made some of my friends jealous. To appease them, I spent a couple hours and hacked up a little web frontend to my ruler generator which allows anyone to create custom on-screen rulers and to save them and share them with others who might have the same screen. I’ve called it YouRule. Please check it out or download the source and send me improvements.
Perhaps you want to both reflect on 9/11 and help demonstrate that limericks can be serious by writing some serious limericks about 9/11?
Several months ago, I announced that I’d received a grant from mtvU and Cisco to work on a cool voting technology research project called Selectricity. A project in quotidian democracy, Selectricity attempts to apply some of the best voting technology and election methods research towards every-day decision-making. It takes research I did at the MIT Media Lab and packages it into a real, useful, application.
I spent probably half of my time over the last several months managing a team of competent hackers and designers as we’ve built out the project. Last week, press releases and news stories went out as we launched our first production batch of features and a new design. You can check it out online at:
There is a whole line-up of a groups and organizations, some high profile, that will be using the software in the coming months. There’s also half a dozen killer new features that are built and waiting in the wings for a little polish and fanfare. We’ll be testing and releasing those in the next couple months.
No doubt, I’ll be mentioning bits and pieces of my work on the project on my blog here. However, if you want to follow development, you should subscribe to the Selectricity News Blog where more full coverage will take place.
You can leave feedback, suggestions, and bugs as comments on the blog or email it to team@selectricity.org. The election method code is already published and we’ll be releasing the rest of the code under the AGPLv3 when the license is released by the FSF in the next few weeks.
It’s been fun to see a stream of translations of the The Official Ubuntu Book coming in. I now have copies of El Libro Oficial de Ubuntu and Das Offizielle Ubuntu-Buch on my bookshelf. I’m particularly happy about Ubuntu徹底入門 The Official Ubuntu Book日本語版, the Japanese translation. It was coordinated by the Ubuntu Japan community, looks great, and has won me all kinds of brownie points — and a congratulatory bottle of top shelf shōchū — from Mika’s family members.
Seeing Yellow seems to have encouraged hundreds of people to contact their printer manufacturers and complain about tracking dots. Lots of reports (like this one) are popping up on blogs and being sent to me in email. There are reports in upcoming magazines. And as far as I know, nobody has been visited by the US Secret Service yet.
I spent half an hour on the phone with HP. I filed a technical support request about the yellow dots and had to speak with the engineer for a while before I was able to convince him that this was definitely not a malfunctioning printer. He checked out seeingyellow.com while on the phone with me and seemed to be genuinely shocked and concerned. He said he would talk to the other technical support people in the color laser group and would write up a report to send up the chain of command. I even had him promise not to turn me into the Secret Service.
Please, lets keep the calls coming! We really are making a difference.
Another thing people might do is call laser printer manufacturers before they buy a printer and talk to sales representatives. Demand an assurance that the printer they sell you will not surreptitiously print intentionally identifiable information. Explain that you will buy from the first printer manufacturer who can give you such an assurance. So far, no company has.
I was thinking about how it was slightly funny that Brother prints tracking dots in their color laser printers. One might say that tracking dots are courtesy of Big Brother, and Big HP, and Big Toshiba, and Big Xerox, and all the other big printer color laser printer manufacturers.
You may have heard some of the noise that EFF was making a year so ago about the tracking dots hidden in documents by color laser printers. A number of people contacted their printer manufacturers to ask how to turn the "feature" off. At least one person (who has, understandably I think, expressed interest in remaining anonymous) was subsequently visited by the United States Secret Service who asked him questions about why he wanted to turn off the tracking dots in his printer.
I’ve put up a little website with some others in my research group at MIT that tries to organize individuals to call into their printer manufacturers and demand that the feature is turned off. If many people call, the government won’t be able to visit us all.
We’ve made a long list of technical support contacts to help with the process. Please call your printer manufacturer today and spread the word about the site so that more people call in.
The site is called Seeing Yellow — a reference to tiny yellow dots that make up the tracking code — and its online at seeingyellow.com.
I announced the Official Ubuntu Book roughly a year ago. Several months ago, I wrote this in the preface of the second edition:
As we write this, it is one year since we penned the first edition of The Official Ubuntu Book. The last year has seen Ubuntu continue its explosive growth, and we feel blessed by the fact that The Official Ubuntu Book has been able to benefit from, and perhaps in a small even contribute to, that success.
It’s an honor indeed. The first edition received almost universally good reviews and sold very well. Due to the book’s success, most of the group that brought out the first edition (plus a few others) reunited to update the text for Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn).
After months of hard word and waiting, printed copies of the Official Ubuntu Book Second Edition arrived in my office today! They should be shipping out of the online stores very soon.
The new version is updated throughout to reflect changes in Ubuntu over the last two releases and to document new features and improvements. Trying to keep a book like this up to date is a great way to learn about just how fast moving Ubuntu is (answer: very). Meanwhile, Edubuntu has blossomed over the last year. Through the work of Peter Savage, we’ve included a new chapter that deals with Edubuntu in depth.
The book is bigger (almost 450 pages!), better, and more up-to-date. It provides a great introduction for those that are uninitiated to Ubuntu or to GNU/Linux and free software in general. We’ve tried to keep the price down (it is available for $27 plus shipping from most online stores) and should ship almost immediately. Best of all (at least to me), the whole book is released under a free culture license (CC BY-SA).
The book is a major improvement on what was already a very solid piece of documentation. Everyone who contributed to the book (the list is too long to put up here) should feel proud. It was a lot of work but it shows. The opportunity to represent the Ubuntu community in this way, and to try to live up the distribution’s high technical standard with the "official" branding, is a challenge and a reward that is worth the effort.
You can order the book from Amazon or find it in any of many other sources.