ARTS & FARCES internet

Some Republican members of the US House of Representatives may believe House members are “supposed to drive the train,” but I submit that it’s the other branches of government and an informed citizenry that manage to keep that train on the tracks.

That public education, health research, and law-enforcement are all treated like third-class issues exposes a disheartening lack of civil civic discourse, a deficient basic working knowledge of civics in general, and an unmitigated arrogance unbecoming of any public servant at the national, state, or local levels.

Public health, education, and welfare (from Webster’s: a state of health, prosperity, and well-being) is fundamental to a viable, healthy, democratic nation. Both now and historically such remains among the best ways to “raise all boats” floating on any nation’s “currents/currency.”

Perhaps passing a civics test at a higher than seventh-grade level should be mandatory prior to running for public office—regardless of the candidate’s formal education.

JK Rowling recently released all of the titles in her Harry Potter franchise as ebooks. Simultaneously, in all formats for all platforms. The ebooks are available exclusively through Rowling’s Pottermore website.

Of course, Rowling’s Harry Potter franchise is so lucrative that she can dictate terms with just about all the vendors, but simultaneous release on all formats and platforms isn’t the only interesting thing Rowling has done. Each title is available without digital rights management (DRM) restrictions of any kind (although each title will be watermarked). Customers can send the titles they purchase to any device they like. Customers can also download eight digital copies of each title they purchase; either for use on another device, or—wait for it—sharing with up to seven friends. Imagine that.

That sharing bit is so obvious—and costs virtually nothing—but few if any publishers are doing it. Instead, the corporate publishers are either refusing to sell ebooks to libraries (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster) or charging outrageous rates (Random House).

Matthew Ingram, writing for GigaOm, cites Charlie Redmayne—who left HarperCollins to run Pottermore for Rowling—who demonstrates just how far ahead of the publishing pack he is:

“My view is that the one thing we should learn from the music industry, is that one of the best ways of fighting back against piracy is making content available to consumers at a platform they want to purchase it on, and at a price they are willing to pay, and if you do that most people will instinctively want to buy it.”

Meanwhile, the corporate publishers and Apple are under the gun for employing the agency model in pricing ebooks. In an agency model, the publisher sets the price of an ebook and the retailer takes a percentage of that. It’s the only really fair way to price ebooks and, as Mark Coker of Smashwords—a large aggregator/distributor of independent book publishing—writes, it’s actually driving down the price of ebooks.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin tells Ian Katz, writing for the Guardian, that the internet’s core foundation of openness and universal access are under greater threat than ever. “Very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world,” Brin tells Katz. “I am more worried than I have been in the past ... it’s scary.”

China, for example, recently implemented a “real identity” program that requires internet users in that country to use their real names. And China now has more internet users than any other country on the planet.

While governments are trying to regulate internet access and control communications by their citizens, the entertainment cartel’s anti-piracy efforts threaten to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And then there’s the walled gardens of the likes of Apple and Facebook that exert ultimate and unwavering control over what software can be used on their products and platforms. The end result, Brin warns, is a balkanized web pointing to information locked inside apps that cannot be searched because it’s not discoverable by web search engines like Google.

Five years ago, when Brin was architecting Google’s partial exit from China, he believed that no government could effectively restrict the internet for more than a brief period of time. He was wrong, Brin now admits, telling Katz, “I thought there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle, but now it seems in certain areas the genie has been put back in the bottle.”

Brin minces no words when it comes to Facebook, telling Katz that he and Larry Page would never have been able to create Google in the Facebook era: “You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive. The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules that will stifle innovation.”

Brin was most critical of the entertainment cartel, telling Katz that it was “shooting itself in the foot, or maybe worse than in the foot” with its lobbying efforts to block infringing websites. The only way to accomplish that goal, according to Brin, is for the US to “the same technology and approach it criticised China and Iran for using.” Brin states the obvious when he tells Katz that people will continue to pirate content until—and probably only until—they can obtain the content legitimately just as frictionlessly and easily. “I haven’t tried it for many years but when you go on a pirate website, you choose what you like, it downloads to the device of your choice and it will just work –- and then when you have to jump through all these hoops [to buy legitimate content], the walls created are disincentives for people to buy,” says Brin.

I spent yesterday with the Twin Cities’ best and brightest at the local BarCamp event, MinneBar. The only tech events I attend any more are the un-conferences like MinneBar. I’m an old and jaded from too many past events where too many hucksters used invitation-only events to sell their (almost always) useless ideas and wares.

This was the seventh annual edition of the MinneBar spring event and it always brings together the best of the technology and design communities in the Twin Cities. This year, some 1,300 people attended; a new record. Passion—not money—drives the content of these events and I go because it makes me feel better about where we’re collectively headed.

One session—Chris Coyier‘s “What we don’t know”—was exceptional. As I tweeted from the session, I deeply wish all web front-end developers had the wisdom, humor, and just plain humanity of Coyier. It was the best tech presentation I’ve seen in more than a few years.

Food was provided by Chow Girls, and it was outstanding. Bagel and fruit for breakfast; pulled pork, pasta, and salad for lunch (I probably should have had the chicken or vegetarian sandwich, but I couldn’t resist). No small feat to feet a crowd of 1,300 well and timely. Hats off.

This morning I woke up with my brain still buzzing from yesterday’s event, took Annabelle Joy out for her morning constitutional, not fully awake but fully aware I was back in the real world. A guy was pawing through the trash in the alley between Summit and Grand Avenues. Now I’ve been known to dumpster dive—it’s truly mind-blowing what the University of St. Thomas and Macalester College kids throw away—so has Karen. But this man was looking mostly for food. I wished him a happy Easter as he trundled on down the alley.

The level of inequality in the United States today is heartbreaking—absolutely crushingly heartbreaking. And the disparity—lots of headhunters and human resource folks were plying their trade at yesterday’s MinneBar—simply takes my breath away. Economic recovery my ass. This was a middle-aged white man foraging in my alley. This is the new normal, brothers and sisters. The new normal.

Something on the order of 600,000 Macintosh computers have been infected by the most recent variation of the Flashback trojan that first surfaced in 2007. The most recent variation of the malware targets Macs with an older version of the Java Runtime software installed. Earlier this week Apple released an update to the software that addresses the flaw, but here’s how to check your machines:

1. Launch Terminal.
2. At the command prompt, enter: defaults read /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironment. If the message The domain/default pair of (/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironment) does not exist appears, so far so good.
3. At the command prompt, enter: defaults read ~/.MacOSX/environment DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES. If the message: The domain/default pair of (/Users/[username]/MacOSX/environment, DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES) does not exist appears, the machine has not been infected by the Flashback trojan.
4. If anything other than the above messages appear, your computer has been infected by the Flashback trojan. Use the instructions on the F-Secure website to manually remove it.