Category: culture-and-politics

95 Theses of Geek Activism

In the vein of the cluetrain manfesto, Devanshu posted a great post with 95 points about geek activism. Honestly there pretty awesome, but here's my favorate…

  • Violating a license agreement is not theft.
  • All corporations are not on your side.
  • Everything will enter the public domain some day- even Mickey Mouse.
  • Trusted computers must not be trusted.
  • Proprietary data formats must never store public information.
  • Fair use is a good thing.
  • Use multiple operating systems regularly so you truly understand interoperability.
  • Data mining will not stop terror.
  • Express your opinion in public
  • Blog
  • Security is a trade-off- what are you willing to give up?
  • Use Creative Commons
  • Understand the difference between civil disobedience and breaking the law.
  • Support the free, public domain archives of information.
  • Undermine censorship by publishing information censored in oppressive countries.
  • Voicing your views in a Slashdot comment thread is good, in your own blog is better, but in places that non-geeks frequent is best.
  • Have a global perspective in ideas of geek civil liberties, intellectual property rights and so forth. Do you like your country’s policies in this respect? Can you help people from another country?
  • Read more
  • Make sure that if a vendor locks you in, you lock them out.
  • Linux is no longer a philosophy- it is a good piece of software. Use it if it fits your needs.
  • More information available to the most number of people is a good thing.
  • Vote
  • Read our modern geek philosophers- read Bruce Perens, Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling and even Richard Stallman. Read Schneier to find practical reasons why stupid security mechanisms are stupid. Read them even if you disagree with them- it will help frame your point of view.
  • DRM only keeps an honest user honest.
  • Be proud of being a geek, a gamer, a privacy advocate, promoter of free speech and an innovator without fear of litigation, of government or restrictions on liberties- a geek activist.

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Thoughts on the bombings in Lebanon

I found this on Ben's blog today and needed to post up this video which really outlines so well who's really paying to price for this pointless and meaningless conflict. Someone once said, Everything is lost in war, nothing is gained. And yes its easy for me to say this from my house in South East London but you know what, like Ben I'm really getting a nasty taste of whats done in the name of a religion.

I have to admit I generally dislike the concept of any and all religions its always been the number one cause for segregation and conflict in, and is used ultimately as a control/influence mechanism for society.

I'll leave it be for now, and maybe expand on this subject a lot more in the near future.

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BBC announcements

Rather than comment on what's going on in the BBC, I'll just outline some of the major points. If I feel brave later, I may care to comment.

  • BBC Knowledge, Entertainment, Fiction, Nations and Childrens will now be BBC Vision
  • There will be a new division which sits inside of BBC Vision to encorage Indies input
  • New media is now gone and will now be Future media and Technology (FMT)
  • Radio and Music will be platform netrual and will be come BBC Audio and Music

  • BBC News and Sports will be part of BBC Journalism
  • BBC Finance and BBC People will stay about the same
  • Audience and Marketing will be a core part of what we do everywhere.
  • Creative Digital Simple Open (CDSO)
  • If you don't respect the BBC values, maybe the BBC isn't the correct place for you.

Some observations about the Questions and Answers with Mark Thompson after his higher level speech.

Someone mentions there has always been a Radio and TV division since 1936, whats going on? Mark mentions iplayer, downloading content and talks about how under the divisions people are much more closely aligned. Mark hints at the Longtail of content and how that could inspire programme makers. Mark gets grilled about the 360 degree commisioning process and how it could be unfair to indies. Radio and Music drama could fit in Audio and Music or even Vision, Mark suggests they would sit in Audio and Music. Someone suggets iplayer is kind of dull but also offers a huge training issue which can not be ignored. Bouns are on the menu once again, Mark Thompson and Mark Byford talk about supporting 10% bouns (currently at 30%). Mark Thompson is challenged with a question about local independance and how everythings is heading towards centralisation, Mark mentions how we have 23 CMS to make content for the web. Someone ask Ashley Highfield (head of future media and technology) if the technologies should also learn tradional technology like Radio and TV, he agrees. Mark says the new BBC model will be transisional and that we need to be flexiable, envolve and change.

You can see the offical announcment here now

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Exclusive: London Girl Geek Dinner Short Film by Angela Saini of ITN

Sarah Blow beat me to this exclusive, so I'll just quote her.

The London Girl Geek Dinner short film has just been released.  Here is an exclusive first look at it prior to it going on FourDocs.  It was filmed about a month ago by Angela Saini of ITN who was just fantastic at both directing the video and setting everything up.  I hope you enjoy the video and feel free to let anyone else know about it! 

I hope to see other short video's and films from the girls over at BlogHer after the conference. /images/emoticons/happy.gif

The next London Girl Geek Dinner is to be announced at a later date… it is looking like some time around the end of August/ First week of September.  If you want to get updates of our next event feel free to join the mailing list on www.londongirlgeekdinners.co.uk or syndicate with the rss feed on the site!

PS: Many thanks to Angela for doing the film for us and for her support and also to Ian Forrester of www.geekdinners.co.uk for his ever constant support for the girly geek dinners!

Thanks Sarah! I've been sitting on this documentary from Angela for quite some time now. I think its a fantastic documentary and well worth everyone's time to watch. I'm now interested to see what conversation develops following the documentary. You can also now watch get the documentary in Windows Media and Quicktime formats here.

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Stephen Colbert, the court jester in the know

If looks could kill

If you've not seen Stephen Colbert at The White House Correspondents’ Association event, stop and go and check it out. Sarah downloaded it on Sunday and it came down really quickly over the torrent network. But you can also check it out on YouTube, part 1, 2 and 3. We watched the whole event from start to finish including the stuff missing from youtube (says it all really, not good enough to get onto youtube maybe?). So generally the whole thing about the old place where the press correspondents currently report from really sucked and went on too long, I wanted to say give it up the joke is so dead now. Then Bush did his thinking Bush and just Bush routine. It was ok, but to be honest it got long in the tooth again really quickly and was it only me or was Bush's timing really bad. Don't get me wrong I know he's not a comedian but the other guy is and should have added more pace to the whole routine. Funny enough the mainstream press loved the whole thing. Well enough said really?

Then Colbert took the stage and like that best man who says all the wrong things at a wedding who makes everyone cringe so much. Colbert plunges into grounds which no one thought even he would do in front of Bush.

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Technorati blocked in China?

Chinese censorship at work?

Mario dropped me a skype just a moment ago, the skype was this gem of a blog post titled China blocks Technorati.

I received an email this morning from Ken Carroll of ChinesePod telling me that China has blocked Technorati at the great firewall – it would appear that Technorati will no longer be available to anyone to use in China.

And its starting to kick up a stink over at Technorati and Mad about Shanghai. To be honest I'm not suprised. Technorati is one of the biggest blog search engines and was a gateway to all types of views and opinons from around the world. This simply won't do if your a chinese authority attepting to censor what your citizens are viewing online. Obviously I think this censorship is not a good idea and there simply causing there citizens to look a little deeper for the content they actually want to read just like the iran censorship of bbc.co.uk.

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Geek and Geekhag podcast number eight – Black White

Chess piece

My and Sarah's 8th podcast is now available online. Enjoy and please leave a comment if you've enjoyed it or simply hate it. This is really part two of podcast number seven but its unique enough to simply make it another number. As always, enjoy.

This time me and Sarah explain what happened after the last podcast and spend most of the time talking about Black White, a TV series we've been downloading recently which tries to tackle black and white culture in America. We talk about the difference between Black American culture and Black English culture. The weirdness which is simply the extreme American way and how I love to mess with people stereotypes and perceptions of young Black men. We settle on the fact that a whole range of things keep up the perceptions and that people hate change.

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The censoring and blocking inside of Iran

BBC Persian blocked

I've been wanting to blog this for quite some time now. When we think of blocking and censorship, everyone goes on about China. Well theres many other nations which have levels of censorship and blocking. So it started with the blockage of BBC Persian content in Iran, then we started to syndicate more via public RSS and Email. Then Mario wrote a Instant messenger bot which takes BBC Persian RSS feeds and republishes them on the MSN network if you subscribe to the bot (just add bbcpersian@hotmail.co.uk to your buddy list). Then Mario added support for the Jabbber network (just add bbcpersian@menti.name to your buddy list) and tried to get YIM (Yahoo) working, as thats the most popular Instant messenging tool in Iran. Now he's trying out JRS which is a publishing tool for the XMPP (jabber) network as the Perl Yahoo module is broken or/and out of date. Then Hoder (Hossein Derakhshan) gave a good talk about censorship in Iran to the BBC.

Some observations along the way. Although right to left text should be easy with most unicode complient instant messenging clients. This simply is not the case. The markup of right to left languages is still a very difficult thing to do. Dan Brickley send a good email into the W3C internationalisation core group. I keep meaning to respond myself, but still have a draft ready which I keep rewriting. I'm happy Martin Duerst and others have read my paper from Xtech 2005. But I would like a little more clarity on Martin's reply.

In Ian's article and in Mario's messages, there is also some extent of confusion with regards to bidi. If the text in a line or paragraph contains only rtl characters, or neutral characters such as punctuation, any application is supposed to display it in the correct order. No attributes are neccessary, except for where to start the line (flush left or flush right), which can be considered a matter of taste (in mixed English/Farsi text, I wouldn't consider having all English messages flush left and all Farsi messages flush right necessarily
always the best display) and which could be handled by a switch in the user agent.

It's only when a line or paragraph mixes both rtl and ltr text where having additional information becomes really necessary, to indicate whether the text is a (e.g.) Farsi sentence with some English embedded or the other way round (or even a more complicated structure).

See this is great in theory but the practice or reality Applications don't do this correctly. Its good to see I was correct about ATOM and RSS when it comes to language support.

It very clearly shows that more thought should go into supporting internationalization markup in all kinds of document or document-like (in the sense that they use free text rather than data items) formats.

The only blog format that got that right (sic!) from the start is Atom (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt). Elements such as title all allow for embedded XHTML markup, which then can take a dir attribute. RSS 1.0 has a content module that could do the same thing, but I'm not sure how well it is supported.

Certainly, its hardly supported in the RSS space. ATOM is the only one which had this from the start, so all the developers who build there readers have build in the ability to have markup inside of content module including directionality.

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Real women and their male counterparts

Krug and Pullman

I sent the following around to some of my friends which are women. Its taken from Rachel Clarke's blog post titled What real women want. Which is actually a copy of what Gia wrote here.

  1. Girls should grow up valuing their Brains over their Looks.
  2. Boys should grow up valuing women's Brains over their Looks. (yes, yes, I understand genetics… but your boys will have much better relationships if they desire a woman they can fondle AND talk to…)
  3. Girls should grow up understanding they have control over their bodies.
  4. Girls should NOT grow up believing that menstruating is a curse and something to be ashamed of (without going into a big long explanation, I believe that deep seated shame and revulsion because of a natural bodily function is at the heart of a lot of women's emotional and psychological problems… but that is for another day…)
  5. Girls and women should not define themselves exclusively by their relationships with and to other people (ie to put being a mother, wife, daughter, sister, friend before being an independent person)
  6. Smart women should be proud to be smart.
  7. Women should show off their intelligence at every opportunity. Flaunt it.
  8. Smart women need to take their place in public eye rather than 'just pretty women'.
  9. Women should never feel they have to put up or shut up.
  10. Women should always use their gender if it will get them ahead (I mean, if wearing a low-cut shirt at the interview will actually get you the job, then go right ahead. You'll only really *keep* the job if you can actually do it… )
  11. Women and girls should always remember, 'Well-behaved women seldom make history.”

I'm in almost total agreement with this list. I've been thinking if I was to ever bring up a little girl in this world, these are some of the values I would want to instill in her. My god-daughter Megan is currently number one for values right now.

Some points however, point number 2. Yes I understand Genetics too but come on, have we not evolved passed the dog humping stage now? I agree Boys should grow up valuing women's brains over there looks. Its something I've always done. Looks are subjective and what most of my work mates see as stunning I usually don't find the time for. See for me it was always about the personality and the intellengence. I mean who wants to go to a movie and then somewhere else for coffee and have a conversation about how Donnie Darko was too confusing. Geez, shoot me now. Honestly I don't think men do a very good job respecting women's intellengence. I still hear comments which almost hinge on sexism. I do try and pick people up about these comments but you just know there not going to repeat there sexist comments in front of you again. But will carry on making those comments either way. Its a shame but its there loss.

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