Just back from two weeks in the remarkably lovely town of Capena, north of Rome, and found this great faux image of the fountain at the end of Via Capena.
Watching the Olympics
[As ever you can read this on the BBC News website – and it seems the story is already moving on, with reports that press access to the net will be filtered by the Chinese]
I won’t be going to Beijing for the Olympic Games next month, and in fact I probably won’t even be going to London in 2012 when it’s our turn to host the festivities.
I don’t watch athletics or any of the other events that will be taking place. I don’t support a football team either, or have much interest in cricket despite being an English male. Sport just doesn’t excite me at all.
But even though I don’t care which country wins most gold medals or whether world records are broken for running, jumping or throwing odd-shaped objects, I’ll be watching what goes on around the Olympic Games with keen interest, because this world-wide sporting event offers a fascinating perspective on the state of the internet today.
Shouting ‘bug’ on a crowded Internet…
[As ever you can read this on the BBC News website, and it’s also on CircleID]
In the last few weeks we’ve seen two very different approaches to the full disclosure of security flaws in large-scale computer systems.
Problems in the domain name system have been kept quiet long enough for vendors to find and fix their software, while details of how to hack Transport for London’s Oyster card will soon be available to anyone with a laptop computer and a desire to break the law.
These two cases highlight a major problem facing the computing industry, one that goes back many years and is still far from being resolved. Given that there are inevitably bugs, flaws and unexpected interactions in complex systems, how much information about them should be made public by researchers when the details could be helpful to criminals or malicious hackers.
Being there
[As ever you can read this on the BBC News website]
On Monday I went to see Clay Shirky talk at a lunchtime seminar hosted by the Demos think tank, travelling in to London earlier than I needed to on a crowded train, sitting on a slow bus across town and then squeezing into a bright but too warm room to sit on a hard seat in order to listen to something which was being recorded and will later be available as a podcast.
Clay was charming and intelligent and funny, and I got to hear him thinking out loud about the impact of social tools on international politics, which was fun, but I could have done all that by listening in online, or even by watching the stream of brief reports appearing on Twitter, the communications service that is currently taking the net by storm.
Instead I sat there offering my own online commentary on what he was saying while looking up references on the web as he talked.
Charlie Leadbeater Synecdoche
Charlie was speaking at the NESTA-organised seminar with Tim Berners-Lee last week. I thought this captured his essence.
Hanged for a sheep
[As ever you can read this on the BBC News website. There’s another related piece about the proposals]
And here’s its Wordle…
Making laws in the European Union is a long, complicated and often tedious process that involves a delicate ballet featuring the Council of Ministers, the Parliament and the Commission. Before a Directive is passed there will be numerous committees, occasional votes, multitudinous amendments and many, many occasions for lobbyists, campaigning groups and special interests to try to influence things in their favour.
So it shouldn’t surprise us that a package of amendments to telecoms laws currently making its way through the European Parliament’s committee system has received careful scrutiny from those who worry that the interests of the music and film industry are being placed before freedom of expression or civil liberties.
Closing the Gates after Bill
[This is my BBC column from Monday – I forgot to post it here in all the week’s excitement (2gether08, New Media Awards, Shift Happens). You can read it on the BBC News website too.]
The publicity surrounding Bill Gates’ departure from Microsoft should not obscure the fact that he is still deeply involved in the company he founded in 1975.
Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie may now be in charge, but they were chosen by Gates, worked with Gates and are still answerable to Gates. After all he remains company chairman and a major shareholder, and he will be working as an ‘advisor’ on special projects.
Gates also played a major part in setting Microsoft’s strategy for the next few years, as it continues to try to figure out how to convert its enormously profitable operating system and office software business into something that can generate money as we all move applications online and look for stripped-down, secure and reliable operating systems on our desktops, laptops and handheld computers
We Can Show Them A Better Way
When Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson launched his ‘Power of Information Task Force’ in March he was applauded by campaigners for open source software and free access to public sector information and easier availability, but there was a general concern that it wasn’t clear what the Task Force could actually do.
Since then there have been a few speeches, some ideas have been floated for general consideration, like the recently announced Treasury review of how Ordnance Survey and other trading funds operate, and there’s been an interesting investigaion into how crime mapping might operate.
But now they are putting their money where their mouth is – or, to be more precise, our money where their mouth is since they are a public body – with an online competition to find the best ideas for ways to reuse governnment data.
‘Show Us a Better Way’ has £20,000 to offer to people who come up with innovative ways to use a wide variety of data sources, including a massive amount of medical data from NHS Choices and neighbourhood information from the Office of National Statistics.
Bill Thompson chairs Openness and Innovation session
Jem’s picture of me in action at yesterday’s Media Futures Conference, which was a lot of fun.
Changing the Way We Think
[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website, and Nick Carr has picked up on it]
In her recently published book ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century, Professor Susan Greenfield brings her considerable expertise as a neuroscientist to bear on the question of whether and how our current use of computers is changing the way our brains work.
Greenfield argues that the visual stimulus we get from screen-based information and entertainment differs so markedly from that available to previous generations that certain areas of the brain, specifically those areas that are older in evolutionary terms and retain the capacity to alter as a result of experience, may be affected in ways that express themselves a changes to personality and behaviour.
It’s an interesting hypothesis, and one that has the virtue of being experimentally testable, unlike many other claims about the effect of modern living on human psychology.