machine-envy

This week’s column in the New Statesman stretches a metaphor. After Tony Neate, director of GetSafeOnline advised UK web surfers to “treat their PC like their car” and maintain it with regular updates, lock it away safely behind a firewall, etc, I go on to suggest that, if we want our PCs to remain open and flexible, we should learn how to drive them safely on the information superhighway. Funnily enough, the day after I filed this I went to a seminar at the Oxford Internet Institute chaired by Jonathan Zittrain, whose work on internet generativity I cite in the piece. The discussion - about “badware”, executable code that is not malware in the traditional sense, but dangerous in the wrong hands - bore out many of the ideas in this piece.

A trip to Brussels earlier this week served to do the same. We were there to discuss citizens access to information, and Shamit Saggar, professor of political science at the University of Sussex, said something that’s been ringing in my ears ever since: “The logical conclusion on the Gutenberg Press was compulsory schooling”. There’s a theory that bears exploring.

Anyway, for those that can bear a stretched metaphor or two, here’s the column (and before you ask, why the headline has referenced phishing is beyond me):

“Batten down the firewalls, release the anti-spyware hounds, and up the spam alert to red status: 21 per cent of us are now more worried about online crime than about being burgled. According to a survey for the UK’s Get Safe Online campaign, fear of being duped by hackers is enough to put some of us off going online altogether.

”And we’re right to be concerned. In the week the survey was released, coinciding with the national internet safety roadshow, Microsoft issued a record number of security patches for its software, and the online virtual world Second Life was attacked by a code storm of self-replicating grey goo…”

Read the rest here.

This week’s column in the New Statesman reviews the Pew Internet and American Life Project’s recent survey of prominent futurologists:

“Sometimes writing about the internet can seem like a cop-out. Imagining the impact that new technology will have on human life, in all its social, political and linguistic forms, is fun, exciting and much easier than, say, reporting from the Middle East. And yet the futurologist is only a step away from the cocktail-party doom-monger boring on about speed cameras, mobile-phone masts and shopping centres.

”But it is a refreshing experience to view futurologists’ predictions in aggregate. A survey released late last month…”

Read the rest here.

This week’s column for the New Statesman is on the Google New’s defeat in the Belgian courts. It’s all you’re going to get for a fortnight out of the NS, since apparently, my column’s being turned into ad space next week. Charming.

Last year, back when a girl could get a hotel room and a £500 fee for telling a roomful of newspaper execs what a blog was, a director from one of the UK broadsheets taught me a lesson about how the web was changing the news agenda. Each morning, he said, his assistant would download a page from Google News that listed for him and his editorial team the ten top stories around the world that day. Though it would by no means define where they might choose to focus their attention, it was another tool for them to use in their quest to talk back to the world.

Today, Fleet Street might be wondering what happened to Belgium…

Read the rest here.

I’m interviewing Shaun Woodward, UK Minister for Tourism and the Creative Industries next Tuesday, for a special on the computer and video games industry being run by the New Statesman next month. If anybody’s got any burning questions they want to put to him, let me know…

This week’s column in the New Statesman is a little dance around the grave of the music industry:

“Speaking as a reformed music journalist, it’s been fun watching the industry gasp its last breaths. First it sent peer-to-peer file-sharing underground with the closure of Napster in 2001. Now, it is suing its own fans. The music industry has struggled to cope with how its main export can now be translated into bits and sent down a series of tubes direct to its (not always paying) customers. And all the while, the music has only got better.

Vivendi Universal is the biggest of the remaining handful of bloated mega-corporations that have been suffocating innovation in the music industry since the late Eighties….”

Read the rest here.

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.

This week’s column in the New Statesman celebrates 15 years of open source:

“Fifteen years ago this month, when the internet was the domain of the geeky and the good, a young computer science student from Finland sent an e-mail to a message list of programmers. ‘Hello everybody out there using Minix,’ began the message, ‘I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like GNU) . . .’. Linus Torvalds couldn’t have been more wrong…”

Read the rest here.

Well, not quite. But this week’s New Statesman column is a response to a post Guido Fawkes wrote criticising openDemocracy after the New Media Awards last week (which we won, by the way). I admit it was a bit mean of me to pull him up on his misspelling of smorgasbord:

“When I was a little girl, I dreamed of having my own column. At 27, I appear to have fulfilled my ambition. Unfortunately for my sense of self-achievement, the whole bloody world is now a columnist. Volunteering an opinion on the issues of the day is as easy as setting up an account with one of the many blogging service providers. More often than not, these new voices ape the worst of those in the national press, generalising from trifles, affecting an air of self-importance that barely conceals the poor levels of research, compromised upon to file on time and…”

Read the rest here.

Guido’s original post is here.

This week’s column in the New Statesman is on the Gowers Review of Intellectual property and a report from Rufus Pollock for the ippr:

“As the British Phonographic Industry, the body that represents the UK music business, begins a fresh assault on those who use peer-to-peer file-sharing networks to download music illegally off the internet, it’s worth asking if there might be a better way to protect the creative industries than by punishing potential customers.

This autumn, the government will wind up a nine-month review tasked with examining intellectual property (IP) law…”

Read the rest here:

Useful links:

• The value of the public domain, Rufus Pollock
• Inside the Creative Industries: Copyright on the ground, Anthony Lilley
• Innovating for Success: The intellectual property review and economic competitiveness, Lord Sainsbury