machine-envy

This week’s column in the New Statesman picks up on the damning indictment of my journalist prowess that has since disappeared from my Wikipedia entry:

“It was a crushing verdict: ‘Becky Hogge is a journalist of no particular fame or distinction.’ My ultimate judge was Rajah, an expert on many things, including Cuban judo champions, the Irish indie-pop band The Thrills and the various staff writers and bit-part actors in Seinfeld. My jury was made up of the hundreds of Wikipedians who police entries to the online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit.

”It all started with a little joke here in these pages…”

Read the rest here.

However, as Nick Moreau has kindly pointed out, I read the edit history wrong, and accused Rajah of being behind the judgement, when in fact it came from an anonymous IP address in London. My deepest apologies to Rajah.

I will now take the advice of the Wikipedian who so kindly cleaned up my entry and “write my column on something interesting please, not trivial stuff like this“.

That’s me.

Last week’s column for the New Statesman was a pithy little number entitled “When world leaders blog…”, which for some reason I didn’t point to at the time. This week’s is on the DEFRA wiki. Coincidentally, the day after my piece was published (that’ll be last Thursday), Guido Fawkes and his gang of merry co-conspirators quietly and totally sabotaged it. Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

As Bill Thompson reminded me over dinner last week, wikis work in one of two circumstances. Where a close-knit group of people who share a specific goal are the editors (eg organisational wikis), or where a very, very large group of people with differing views but a more general shared goal are the editors (eg Wikipedia). Anything in between is going to be subject to atrophy or sabotage.

So although I’d never style myself a co-conspirator, I’m not going to join the ranks of liberals wringing their hands at the horrid things that nasty Guido and his gang of big buwy fwiends do.

Anyway, those two columns are below. Choose wisely, my friends, the NS will only let you read one for free today. But don’t worry too much, as oD will be publishing my column for them later today, which is all about freedom, and, correspondingly, free.

The DEFRA column:

“A wiki is where ideas go to die. This may sound strong, especially given the success of Wikipedia, the user-generated encyclopaedia. I’ve been at several grass-roots meetings which ended with the fatal words: “OK, let’s continue this discussion on the wiki.” Months later, said wiki has been left to wallow in its own incompleteness, its participants presumably left cold by the open questions ossifying on its pages. I can only conclude that ideas are among the class of things that cannot be collaboratively edited.

”So it’s interesting to note the launch of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’s (Defra) wiki last month…”

Read the rest here. And I don’t think even Senor Fawkes can muster up the 44m signatories needed to fulfil the associated pledge “I will contribute to the DEFRA environmental contract wiki but only if 44,000,000 other UK electors will too“.

When world leaders blog:

“A friend and I used to share a joke about Iranian bloggers. Well, the joke was really on UK magazine editors. Their interest in the vast array of bloggers scrutinising the Tehran establishment came around about once a year, and each time they treated the discovery that Persian is the second most blogged-in language on the web as if they had come across Lord Lucan convalescing in a retirement village in Bournemouth. “What’s hot on the net right now?” the joke used to go. “I know - Iranian bloggers!”

”But early this month a new Iranian voice joined the fray…”

Read the rest here.

This fortnight’s column for openDemocracy is about darknets, anonymisation and crypto-anarchy. Horray!

“People who want to hide their activities online already have the tools to do so. We’re just giving those tools to the general public.” These were the words of Rickard Falkvinge, chairman of Sweden’s Piratpartiet(Pirate Party), when he revealed that the political party dedicated to copyright reform would be supporting a controversial new commercial “darknet”, Relakks. “Until we have changed the laws to ensure that citizens’ right to privacy is respected, we have a moral obligation to protect citizens from the effects of current routine surveillance”, says Falkvinge.

“So, for a fee of €5 per month, Relakks offers to provide that protection increasingly being eroded from our civil liberties…”

Read the rest of the piece here.

I contacted Ben Laurie, who among other things is a longtime supporter of TOR, for some last minute advice, which was so last minute, it didn’t make it into the piece. On TOR adoption, he had this to say:

“Tor is an interesting problem - it seems that although many individuals of good standing are prepared to endorse tor or run tor nodes almost no companies are. It seems to me that if a less thorough hatchet job had been done on anonymity (only paedophiles and terrorists have any need for it, after all) then companies would be able to get behind it and it could become a pervasive tool.”

When I was a kid, I used to think working in the music industry would be, like, the coolest thing ever. In my early twenties, I started doing music writing, and started having my doubts. Then, as a tech journalist, I started meeting people from the BPI and I knew the mirror had cracked.

At twelve, this kid is never going to have that experience. She already knows the industry sucks. That’s why she flash-mobbed BPI headquarters on Tuesday, after they took her single off the fledgling “kiddie-chart”. The BPI’s logic? Her single was released on Flowerburger records, a label currently petitioning the BPI to stop suing filesharers. From The Inquirer:

“12 year-old singer-songwriter Amy Thomas staged a protest outside the headquarters of the British music industry yesterday, following a decision to ban her from a new school kids’ music chart because of her views on downloading.”

Read the rest here. (via Techdirt)

This week’s column for the New Statesman is on AOL’s search data blunder of a fortnight ago.

Since filing, there’s been some interesting developnments worth linking to, such as this story from the NYT of one searcher who identified herself from the data and this piece in the WSJ on what the search trends say about us. If you want to do your own research, try this little search tool. And if you’re worried your search data might be intercepted and published in a national newspaper one day, follow this advice from the EFF.

“Everyone has a billboard ad they hate. For me, it’s “AOL/discuss”. Perhaps it’s because I spend a good part of my working life pondering the eight-foot-high questions plastered across them (”Is technology killing the art of conversation? AOL/discuss”) that whenever the bus is driving past one, I strain my neck to see it just so that I can hate it more.

AOL will have been asking itself some tough questions lately. This month, to the horror of the blogosphere, it released 658,000 personal, three-month-long search histories for US users. So, AOL, is the internet the ultimate invasion of privacy? Let’s/discuss…”

Read the rest here.

With news in today’s UK papers that the Deleting Online Predators Act went down a storm at the House of Representatives last week, this fortnight’s column for openDemocracy asks if legislation is the right response to cases of child molestation involving social networking sites:

“Warning: this article cites language that some readers may find offensive

Supa Sam’s blog and profile on the social-networking site Xanga looks pretty innocuous at first glance. Not updated since January 2005, the blog features poor spelling and a liberal use of expletives in its detailing of the ups and downs of life as a teenage girl who is into rugby and singing (but not in public!). The profile image of a pretty blonde lying in her bedroom staring into her webcam confirms that this chick is just bored, bored, bored and looking for friends online.

Only one thing hints that things might not be as they seem. Tucked underneath the latest post, a comment dated 31 July 2006 reads: “Have fun in jail, you fucking child molesting cunt…”

Read the rest here.

Links used to research this piece can be found here.

This week’s column in the New Statesman is all about bubble 2.0:

“It is unlikely that when Prince penned the immortal line “Tonight we’re going to party like it’s 1999″, what he had in mind was a bunch of old media professionals hunkered in a central London hotel basement earnestly discussing ways to “monetise content”. Yet at a Guardian new media conference in March, representatives from first Microsoft, then Virgin Radio, then the Daily Mirror, took to the stage to unveil their thoughts on profit in the information economy. It was reminiscent of the years before the dotcom bubble burst.

Spurred on not least by the rise of Google, the money people are back…”

Read the rest here.