Musings & Meanderings

A recent part time activity of mine has included some detective work which led me, among other things to a particular IP block. These 255 IP addresses, on which you could probably host hundreds of thousands of websites, show a very short list of users, but most of the info is phony, including the provider, tech support, and abuse contact info. The block is listed as registered to NTT America. The first time I called them, the tech taking my call cheerfully entered the IP numbers I gave him, froze into silence, started stuttering, and ended, after several attempts, with a tentative sounding statement that they do not have that block listed after all. Further lookup shows the block as belonging to a netherworld where blocks created before any registries existed reside.

The contact with NTT started me thinking about the ingrained distrust of big business among denizens of the web. This distrust, regardless of whether it is political in origin, has become an unquestioned tenet of faith in many segments of modern society, sometimes with less basis than we require before accepting a religious tenet.

As I often repeat, neither businesses nor currencies are bad. It is people who do right or wrong.

There are many tech and non-tech small business owners on the web. There are plenty of techs and devs who eat based on their ability to get paid for their skill sets on a consulting basis, and who also believe in a peer to peer social and economic model. Individuals, service providers or consumers, represent the vast majority of the population using the internet. Big business, venture capitalists, and public companies, however, represent the vast majority of both investment and ownership of all the resources here. Understanding these entities, and dealing with them, is unavoidable for anyone interested in new or alternative models of any sort.

NTT America, Inc. is a privately owned subsidiary of a Japanese corporation. Whether they are as big as AT&T is not publicly known, although they are enterprise driven and undoubtedly more profitable that the Texas based creation spawned by baby bell. Many fret about Google as well, but as a consumer driven company (and without looking at politics or behind the scenes), they should, imo, rank pretty low on the list of big companies whose interests conflict with those of the general population. Anyone who wants more information about a home grown public company such as this can also become a shareholder. Tracking hacker activity to a company such as NTT, only to hear them expresses no interest in correcting the fact that they are publicly registered as responsible for the hosting block, concerns me far more than what an American public company might do.

A public company is a powerful vehicle. The attendant legal structures offer opportunity for various lucrative occupations, such as stock market promotion, which contribute little to society in general. Regardless of this, the vast majority of large companies remain law abiding and respectable. We don’t worry about GM or P&G taking control of our activities or limiting our freedoms. What makes technology different in this respect is its potential for invasiveness. We are right to be vigilant, but vigilance by itself will make little difference to how the next stage of growth is constituted. The only thing that can make a difference is understanding and involvement.

Peer to peer interactions as a class of business aren’t currently more than a speck on the entire landscape. Those who care about liberty and autonomy would do well to adopt a larger focus. In the same way that media and a few other big businesses are struggling to develop micro-management of electronic relationships and communication with customers, the independent operators should be developing macro visions based, not on the ‘wisdom of crowds’, but on the power of many. A group of many with modest to reasonable means can elect world leaders and influence economies just as a few individuals wielding vast resources can.

The current corporate business models are, in practice, the most likely to influence events and lives. The only thing that can change this is alternative models of a competitive size. Consider building, joining, contributing to, or at least endorsing one. The more of us who have a personal stake in electronically based businesses, the more we know and trust one another in the marketplace and personally, the less we’ll need to worry about potential threats posed by others.

Matt posts Best Open Source Social Networking awarded to WordPress by Packt Publishing. Wtg!

Check out the numbers in A Hollow Victory Microsoft which says “the fact is that open source has won this battle”. There’s a lot of spin in this post, which refers only to web hosting software, rather than the OS upon which Microsoft’s empire is built, but the basis is real. Unix and Apache are increasingly adopted by enterprise developers because they work, and new development growth continues to be increasingly based on open source vs Windows.

Open source isn’t about free. It’s about self sufficiency and community. It is about building things for ourselves instead of serving a master.

The anonymous WordPress blog to which I linked above, called There Is No Government Like No Government, claims to be about anarchy, yet is rich with the political cant of the extreme left, with an occasional right wing position thrown in. Does anyone other than me find this ironically amusing?

There’s a hidden chasm in many a segment of open source communities which is tied to political agendas (qu’elle surprise). Many community members bristle at big business, and many corporations deserve it, exhibiting intent to capitalize on free software, as they do on the free content millions of individuals create on the web every day. Open source community members are far more likely to be on the political left than the right. Nevertheless there is a core of practitioners of true free enterprise, which is apolitical. Here new economic models are needed, and here casting aside canned political agendas can make a great difference for all of us.

Open source developers who are apolitical shouldn’t worry about capitalistic opportunism, other than in the aspect in which it gains baseless dominance through big government support, regardless of which party is in power. The fact that open source has the momentum it does, is based on achievement and performance, not politics. Keep that thought.

We’re too smart and sophisticated to fall for a scam, right? Even if that is true, can you say the same thing for everyone you know and care about who uses a computer?

‘Rasslin’ with people who mean us harm is a pretty brave thing to do, and I’m grateful to those who take it on for all of us.

We can each do something every day to make the world we share a better place. Helping one another isn’t a formal obligation or duty, it’s an exercise of free will. Snoskred does more than her share.

From Please Help! What You Can Do To Stop Internet Scammers NOW.…

“Educating people about scams online is one of the most difficult things I have ever done in my life, because every time I think the word is getting out proof comes back to me as a surprise that it is not.
I have the knowledge to stop people from being scammed but it still isn’t enough. I can’t make the word go far enough. I can’t seem to get other people to write about the scams and link back to information I have here on the site about them.
The elderly, the stay at home Mom’s, the disabled, the depressed, the lonely, the vulnerable - these are the people who get scammed the most.”

You can read more about Snoskred’s scambaiting activities here
Snoskred and Sephy’s new site Scam Warning.

I may be a foreigner, with limited knowledge of the details of American politics, but I recognize propaganda when I see it.

Lawrence Lessig has been one of my reads since I joined the blogosphere because of his work in the copyright arena, and I consider his contributions to freedom in online publishing valuable. I approached his introduction of a new and different area of study and specialty with interest.

The hour I spent yesterday listening to the Corruption Lecture - Alpha Version was an emotionally turbulent one. I listened only once, and do not have a transcript; the following references to the content represent my personal impressions.

The presentation opens with, and is wrapped in, an (unpaid, I assume) advertisement for Al Gore’s book. This is followed by a paean to the cause of global warming which does not state openly, but leaves the listener/viewer to draw, the conclusion that refutation of global warming is a symptom of corruption. Throughout, images of prominent Democrats glow like angels while those of Republicans are offered in a demonic light. Visages of America’s founding fathers which are shown are as stern, forbidding, and authoritarian looking as any I’ve ever seen. No criticism is cast on these venerable personages directly; there is only one non-laudatory but essential statement (which hooks to the conclusion) proposing that those gentlemen would never have envisioned the world we live in today, with its specific challenges. The conclusion is that “re-making our constitution” is the work which Professor Lessig (and whoever else is included in his plural ‘we’) considers important and will be undertaking over the next 10 years.

All of this political dogma is wrapped around an introduction to the topic of corruption. This topic is initially presented from a view of personal and societal responsibility, in a very powerful way, a way which should lead naturally to a focus on morality. Instead, the flow is jarringly interrupted by the substitution of the word money for morality. We are treated to images of the long suffering proletariat, in the form of elementary school teachers and firemen, alternating with oppressor images, which include the sugar and pharmaceutical industries as well as Cliff Richards and Disney aka Mickey Mouse. There is a pointed statement to the effect that this study of corruption will be only about money. After this statement the focus shifts to defining political corruption in terms of indirect influence. Eventually it skips across a small menu of specific issues, such as the limited influence of politics on the Supreme Court, and campaign finance reform.

At the end, I am left with a feeling of betrayal and my abiding concern about schools and education.

I am hardly surprised by Lawrence Lessig’s political beliefs, nor is this the first shameless propaganda I’ve heard from any faction of the political spectrum. If I was interested in reading political views, however, I would be at RedState or DailyKos.

Were I an American, I’d have a difficult personal challenge in voting. Both political parties have held power through my lifetime, and both have increased government spending, as well as inappropriate involvement in the private affairs of individuals. I believe that a non-partisan study of corruption and political influence could have value, and also that both of these factors are directly tied to morality and personal responsibility, and therein to freedom.

The issue that disturbs me deeply is that this piece is presented as an embarkation point for scholastic study by a prominent academic. It isn’t a new issue either, and is intrinsically related to censorship, the banning of books, and the re-writing of history. My support of free speech, freedom of public information, and open access is fervent and based on classically conservative views, which include social responsibility and respect for the public trust. We are accustomed to the concept of betrayal by politicians, yet often oblivious to the same concept in regard to teachers.

What we don’t know can hurt us.

Dan writes on being a student again, a change which has granted him access to academic libraries, saying,

As an independent researcher, I simply could not keep on top of my subject properly.

We complain about the quality of education without thinking twice about the lack of resources available to anyone with a spark of interest or an iota of motivation. Any of us who choose to pursue an interest can easily summon the sense of attraction and challenge that emanates from a newly discovered and available body of knowledge. Most of us have looked for information in vain on many occasions.

Almost everyone I know who has any sort of specialized knowledge outside of technology and computers has commented to me on doors closing on the availability of learning resources over the internet for a number of years now. This continuing construction of barriers to learning is destructive to our society. It is rationalized on an economic basis, yet it shares characteristics with the economics of free enterprise. Lower taxes and the result will be economic growth. Open libraries and the result will be a higher level of public education and a greater demand for learning materials.

The more we limit access to literature of every sort the less knowledge we all have.

Some percentage of bloggers are also academicians. Those who are typically have access to far more online resources than the rest of us, but usually do not consciously recognize their participation in creating what is effectively a class distinction. The class divides are expanding. Schools increasingly ban access to online publications of the less educated while restricting access to tools of self education. Elite online publishers shun the masses, yet there are many weblogs written by informed and well-educated citizens who take greater care with facts than some professional journalists, with access to expensive resources, do.

My own subscriptions over the years, represented a huge outlay of dollars. Where those subscriptions were used to inform business activities they represented an investment. This thinking is sound as far as economics are concerned, but our lives and our society are about more than just economics. We don’t expect a direct financial return from teaching our children to read, nor from much of the reading and learning we do ourselves. My personal interests are wide ranging and cross disciplinary, so I have constant cause to compare the enormous gap in quality and depth of information available to the public on different topics. On this issue, I envy Dan his official student status. There is much online information that I would be willing to pay for access to which is not available at all, for love or money, to non-members, be they professionals or laypersons. Being limited physically, I don’t have regular access to various libraries, so am perhaps more aware than most of just how empty the electronic public library is.

The expectation that the internet could and would make more substantive information available to all of us has not been fulfilled. Whatever your views on the wisdom of crowds versus the madness of mobs, each is composed of a collection of individuals. Those individuals are either informed and educated, or not, and often those levels are determined by accessibility to learning resources. Formal education isn’t free, but access to educational materials and other publicly published information shouldn’t be limited only to those who can afford an expensive education. People who have a higher level of education read more. They read more for the rest of their lives, not just while they are in school. Not everyone who wants a higher education gets one. Sometimes life interferes.

If you’ve read this far, and are new to Open Access, try reading these
11 (mis)Leading Open Access Myths.
Peter Suber offers a page titled
What You Can Do To Promote the Open Access Movement.

Open Access does not make education, or books, free. Teachers and authors both require stuff such as food and heat in winter just like the rest of us do. The internet, though, offers us a different world with its own unique characteristics. In a bookstore or a public library, we can browse hundreds of publications on a topic we’re interested in. A majority of the billion people with internet connections, though, never even see the wealth of potential information and learning tools that already exist electronically. Much of it languishes, rarely read and ‘gathering dust’ in walled gardens while people of all ages, eager to learn something, wade through ad-laden Google search results.

One oft cited frustration by institutions which offer some open access is that we use the information without linking to the source or crediting the author. Perhaps some of us use information irresponsibly, and perhaps there are enough of us who have the opposite intention to make a difference. If you care, teach someone else about this.