Open Source in the Third World

The Blog of Will

Via Newsforge comes an interesting look at Open Source and developing nations

The argument is not new: open source is good for developing nations since its cost of entry is much smaller than most closed source options. It does have an interesting angle in that it points out that third world nations will have a hard time contributing back into the Open Source pool, at least in the short term.

The foundation of Open Source is the community interaction between developer and user. If the user doesn't understand or want to communicate with the developer, the process breaks down. The article has a few valid points in that people who have to work full time to support basic needs will probably not take the time to debug someone else's code, or send a list of issues to the developer. They're too busy trying to eat and acquire shelter.

The point they miss is that just like how Apple & Microsoft give away software to educational facilities and students, Open Source needs a way to catch people before they become used to something. Its really nice of Microsoft to sell students copies of Windows at $10 a pop. But its certainly not altruistic. They do it so that we get used to using windows, and are less willing to switch.

The Open Source movement can do the same, but at a national level. If these developing nations really are developing, then they will become used to Linux and other Open Source solutions. When they mature, they'll continue to use the software they learned on. And at that point they will be able to, and probably likely to, contribute to the software pool.

In short, long term benefits outweigh the short term one way trade between OS & developing nations.

Warning: Wireless Internet may lead to Identity Theft & Jail Time

The Blog of Will

Well This is one way to handle those pesky hackers.

Exec. Summary: New York county passes law requiring busisnesses to secure their wireless internet access.

Likelihood of working: .001%
Likelihood of being silly: 99.99%

Right now there are four wireless networks, unencrypted, accessable from my laptop. I could piggy-back on any one of them. Very silly users. Not at all uncommon. Very few people understand the necessity for encrypting ones wireless communications. Everyone wants it to be easy, but few realize that easy != safe.

Yes, I encrypt my access point. But I didn't always. Too much of a pain. Then I picked up a nasty case of code red, a virus that ran around a few years ago. I'm not positive it got through the wireless, but its a possibility. Since then I have done my best not to be on an unencrypted AP. Too many coffee houses and busisnesses don't encrypt. This is a very good way for a not-so-nice person to sit and dig through all the bits to find that one nice credit card #.

Next time you use a free wireless point, remember, you are broadcasting everything you type to everyone around you. I'm not positive passing laws to protect users is the way to go about it. It would be exceedingly difficult to enforce for one, and secondly, its a bit of excessive control from the govt. too.

The amusing bit is that part of the law says that store owners must post a notice letting people know that they need to have firewalls & antivirus to be safe. Seems a bit like the warnings on cigarettes. Danger! The internet is not a safe place!

Education, not legislation.

Wireless Email CAGEMATCH

The Blog of Will

I love the Times on Tech.

In this above article they discuss the original inventor of wireless email. He used pagers instead of blackberries, but the principle is the same. What the article brings up, just barely, is a really interesting debate over patent law in the US.

There are two companies. One buys a lot of patents. Thats all. They don't make anything, they don't plan on making anything, and their whole business plan revolves around people paying them for the right to make things. Then there is company B. They make things. A lot of things! That a lot of people use!

Company A holds a patent, one of a very many total patents they hold, that covers the broad general term of "wireless email". Company A sues Company B, who is out there making the thing.

For all intents company A wins. Company B pays a ton of cash to A.

(Of course A is NTP, B is Blackberry).

How is this sane?

Patent law is supposed to protect those who actually create. Its there to encourage innovation and creation in the marketplace, and prevent people from stealing others ideas. But it looks to me like NTP never intended to make crap here. They own a piece of paper with some words. And because of that NTP can sue anyone who does anything similar.

So people make less. NTP got something in the order of $20 Million in a settlement with Blackberry. That's a heck of an operating cost. Isn't it better for the market that someone be out there making things and generating revenue (not to mention making millions of people more productive (maybe)) than not? Yet somehow patent law protects people like NTP over Blackberry.

I think an addendum is in order. Patent law should protect those who do, not those who have paper. If a patent holder can show no actual intent to ever make a device, then they don't deserve to hold onto that patent like a blackmail photo. Give the patent to the people who will actually make something of it. Everyone prospers.

Wireless Email CAGEMATCH

The Blog of Will

I love the Times on Tech.

In this above article they discuss the original inventor of wireless email. He used pagers instead of blackberries, but the principle is the same. What the article brings up, just barely, is a really interesting debate over patent law in the US.

There are two companies. One buys a lot of patents. Thats all. They don't make anything, they don't plan on making anything, and their whole business plan revolves around people paying them for the right to make things. Then there is company B. They make things. A lot of things! That a lot of people use!

Company A holds a patent, one of a very many total patents they hold, that covers the broad general term of "wireless email". Company A sues Company B, who is out there making the thing.

For all intents company A wins. Company B pays a ton of cash to A.

(Of course A is NTP, B is Blackberry).

How is this sane?

Patent law is supposed to protect those who actually create. Its there to encourage innovation and creation in the marketplace, and prevent people from stealing others ideas. But it looks to me like NTP never intended to make crap here. They own a piece of paper with some words. And because of that NTP can sue anyone who does anything similar.

So people make less. NTP got something in the order of $20 Million in a settlement with Blackberry. That's a heck of an operating cost. Isn't it better for the market that someone be out there making things and generating revenue (not to mention making millions of people more productive (maybe)) than not? Yet somehow patent law protects people like NTP over Blackberry.

I think an addendum is in order. Patent law should protect those who do, not those who have paper. If a patent holder can show no actual intent to ever make a device, then they don't deserve to hold onto that patent like a blackmail photo. Give the patent to the people who will actually make something of it. Everyone prospers.

Google takes over the MSM

The Blog of Will

The NY Times, that most main stream of MSM, has an interesting article up about how google's presence is altering the way headlines are written.

They get it mostly right

Only thing is, they miss tagging. That's what they almost come out and say. They talk about how search engines don't do irony or humor very well, which is funny to me, because if you google the word "failure", I consider the response pretty funny. They talk about how headlines are becoming a string of keywords. But they miss that bloggers have already fought this battle. How to do you have good subject lines and still get searched? Tags.

You keep your keywords, and let them make the life of a search engine all the easier, and keep your headline. Seems like a pretty good fix over all.

Oh, I was also amused by the bit of "They don't teach this kind of stuff in Journalism school." Really? I'll be darned. What have I been doing at 9:00 AM this last semester? I could have been asleep.

Security scares the crap out of me

The Blog of Will

The Daily Kos is a good read, if you don't already subscribe to it. Add it to your favorite reader. Now.

But, today, they scared me. Badly. This is the black box from hell. A company, under the name of Narus, has developed and apparently deployed a device capable of monitoring 10 gigabits of data a second. As a brief idea, that's gonna be pretty close to what is generated every second by the city of Austin.

Think about this. This is a device that can literally, on demand, recreate the email of every single net-connected individual in the city upon request of any federal authority. They list among its features the ability to reconstruct what web pages a consumer has been to.

Here's why this is scary. Before this, while it was possible to do on a one-by-one basis, it took a lot of work. And you couldn't possibly have a system that would automatically retrieve and store this level of data. 10 Gig a second adds up pretty fast. So while the feds could easily try and get what email was in your inbox now, they couldn't possibly hope to find out what all web pages that you'd been too in the last month.

This device would let them do that.

I can't imagine how much storage this thing would require. What interests me is that they sell it as a network monitoring device. I do a lot of network monitoring, and I can tell you, I would never see a need for something that could monitor EVERY SINGLE THING a million + people did.

Ah Technology, isn't it grand.

PhotoBlog of Art in the Forest

The Blog of Will

Hosted by Flickr. Best viewed as a slideshow, which is what the link below is. Also available via the badge on the right.

Art in the Forest PhotoBlog

I'm blogging about a blog post about a blog post

The Blog of Will

Guess I'm really part of the blogsphere now.

Revenews, a blog about revenue generation online, posts about the company 180solutions.

Who is 180solutions you may ask?

Why, I answer, they're evil! Truly. They sell spyware. Addware. Evilware. They install a small application on your system, via various illicit means, that generates pop-up ads. Constantly. It generates these adds based upon what you're browsing, or what you have browsed. Thus, it is also spyware. It is also pure evil, since until a few years ago, they didn't have a method to uninstall their software. You could install it, but there was no way in god's green earth to get rid of it.

The post in question is from a former employee, who talks about what its like to work in the death star. Darth Vader, it turns out, is not so much a great boss.

The reason I link this is twofold. First, if you don't know your enemy, you're in trouble. Second, 180solutions, for all their malice, has a method to make money on the internet. Not many others do.

I fear for web 2.0. At the moment it feels like the stock market is treating it like web 1.0. Do we remember how well web 1.0 did? Really great for a year or two. Then it kind of fell apart.

Does anybody out there really think that myspace is worth whatever absurd amount of money Fox paid for it? Help me out here. It doesn't generate a red cent. Sure it doesn't cost much beyond server and bandwidth charges. That's the great thing about user-generated content. But the problem is that user-generated content only really thrives in a free environment. Charge for it, and watch your system collapse.

How long would myspace last if they charged $5 a month? About 1 month. And still, to this day, nobody has proven that online advertisements are worth the paper they're not printed on.

180 may be 90 degrees from a good idea, but at least they're trying. So far people, and the market, seem content to buy up random RSS-blog-cast-sphere orginizations like they're going out of style. Next we'll see the VC people get really frothy at the mouth about it. Then we'll see Friendster Inc. IPO at about $50000 a share. And then we'll all be living in boxes.

Except me. I'm going to start work on Web 3.0. Its going to be a hyperlinked convergence of user-generated moblogging with WiFi interconnects to a P2P dynamic database.

Just call me Gates Jr.

The Times, they are a changing

The Blog of Will

Kudos (or Karma) to Sharon for pointing out a times article I might have missed.

The Times on Poli-Blogging

Great article all around, but one bit really stood out to me. Ken Mehlman, RNC chairman, said the following (emphasis added):

"You need your message out through the Internet, through e-mail, through talk radio."

Which one of these is not like the other?

Ok, you have a massive networked system that is content -independent. Then you have a person-to-person exchange, and finally, you have talk radio.

What?

Radio?

Are you kidding me? Did he mean to say podcast? Its even worse when you take his directly prior quote into context:

"The effect of the Internet on politics will be every bit as transformational as television was,"

Ok. Mr. Mehlman seems a tad confused. Talk radio has been manipulated to extend political bias for years. Traditionally by the right wing. Lately with Air America the left is giving it a shot, but that's a pretty recent event. What really interests me is how he includes the net with talk radio.

I don't think its biased of me to say that talk radio has been right-wing for quite a long time. Its also a medium through-which the Republican party has effectively gotten its message out. To include email and the internet in the same list is of some interest to me.

Clearly both sides want to use the net to convince people to vote for them. As well they should. But implicit in Mr. Mehlman's quotes is the idea of talk radio as a mouthpiece of the republican party. Probably not news to many people, but it has rarely been so candidly admitted.

In any case, I'm sure to be just as sick of political blogs/pop-ups/spam/etc as I am of political commercials around 2008.