Technology commentary without the hype

Why I am not voting Pirate

Posted on May 9th, 2012

I have already voted in the federal state diet elections in North Rhine-Westphalia which will take place on Sunday (I tend to use the postal vote system as I find it more convenient than running to a ballot on my day off). Contrary to what many people might guess, I have not voted the Pirate Party. After being ignored by the mainstream press for the majority of its existence, possibly due to the fact that the large publishing and broadcast companies did not at all enjoy its initially very copyright reform happy agenda, the German branch of the Pirate Party has been bathing in hype and media attention for months now. To the point where opinion polls are claiming it will be the third most popular party nationwide. I was initially very supportive of the party and even angry when it seemed like the mainstream press was boycotting any reporting on it, but as time has moved on I have become more and more weary to the point where I now consider the German Pirate Party unelectable myself.

The reasons for my change of heart are diverse. Let’s begin with why I was supporting the party initially: Copyright and patent reform as well as a staunch anti-DRM stance and emphasis on freedom of speech, freedom of the internet and open access were all points I very much identify with. After all, the Pirate Party used to be so much in favour of copyright reform, that even RMS was worried. Sadly, there aren’t many mentions of copyright and patent reform left in the electoral manifesto. The Pirate Party is still saying it wants to reform copyright, but it is saying this very softly. Their representatives are constantly downplaying this aspect of the party in public debates. I completely understand why this is happening. To become a popular party that wants to have even the slightest chance to be part of any administration, wide-reaching copyright and patent reforms have to be de-emphasised. The Pirate Party has learned that the rights holders are a powerful lobbying group that directly or indirectly controls most of the media organisations in Germany. Even Google had to learn the hard way that you do not mess with GEMA without having powerful friends. So cries for a copyright and patent reform and anti-DRM activism has to be tuned down. I understand this. If these were the only arguments against voting the Pirate Party, they’d still have my vote.

Unfortunately, there are other arguments against voting orange, as it where. There’s the persistent right wing tendencies. Something that I will not tolerate from any party. Freedom of speech is one of the most important things to fight for but it does not excuse electing borderline Nazis into the leading cadre of your party. Nor is the fact that you could not expel the member in question because a legal procedure did not succeed an argument that I will let stand. There are other ways to throw undesirable people out of your party, usually peer pressure works very well. But that is beholden to the fact that the majority of your members actually want the person gone. For a party that so obviously thrives on left wing ideas as the German Pirates, I find this whole situation perplexing and extremely irritating. Bodo Thiesen was my first tangible reason never to vote them.

Then there was the whole incest debate. Basically, the German Pirate Party opposed a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights which had said that the German ban on sex between siblings is legal. The statements by Pirate Party officials in this case were so eye-watering and obviously devoid of any scientific grasp of the medical and biological facts surrounding the issues that I lost almost all of my remaining confidence in the party. Please note that I am opposing the Pirate Party decision not out of some misguided prudery but because there is serious evidence, both based in historical research and biological science, to suggest that siblings having offspring together is a very bad idea. And anyone who tells me that this case was just about sex, not having offspring, should look at teenage pregnancy rates and ponder really hard if we should leave such a decision up to the potential parents. And I haven’t even addressed the psychological issues that the children would face yet. No, I can not vote for a party that publishes statements like the one in this case without consulting with some party members that actually know what they are talking about in the area that is being debated. The Pirate Party obviously is not in a habit of doing that since there is no other way I can possibly think of to explain its erratic decisions in situations like this. And this wasn’t the only time I have seen such unpredictable behaviour. Which brings me to my biggest point of contention with the Pirate Party.

I have come to understand over the past few months that my biggest problem with this party is their fascination with direct democratic action and referendums. Maybe it is down to me having studied history for way too long, but I’m not a fan of direct democracy at all. From 1789 onwards it has been proven again and again that this approach does not work. Especially not in a country with more than 80 million inhabitants. There is a reason that the political system of the Federal Republic of Germany is structured the way it is: because it generally works. It has always been in fashion to complain about how it doesn’t work, of course, but I’m not buying the claim that the alternative which the Pirate Party is presenting is better. The party seems to have a tendency of wanting to change things just for the benefit of changing things, which I find extremely short sighted and naive. Let me be blunt and as clear as possible: People are generally stupid. The bigger of a subsection of the population you sample, the lower the average intelligence will be. We do not really want all of these people to have a direct say in the general policy making of our country on a mere whim. That is the last thing I want, in fact. Our country actually benefits from having certain barriers in place that limit the decision making process within the political system to a relatively small number of individuals. It always has. This might not be a popular opinion, especially with those believing in a perfect world and the basic goodness within every member of society, but I believe that it is the truth. You might think me an abhorrent elitist because I believe these things, but I am willing to accept that verdict. That is, essentially, what the detailed study of history, politics and sociology will do to a person. You start to recognise why certain patterns exist in our governance structures. It isn’t all “the man keepig us down.” The Pirate Party with all their online platforms and wikis will soon discover, and to a certain extend they have seen this already, that direct democracy doesn’t scale. You can’t apply an open source software development model to a political party. That isn’t how things work.

I am not saying that our political system is perfect. Far from it. But I will always vote for the boring party that actually proposes sane policies over the exiting one that is en vogue because it wants to change everything. Right now, the German Pirate Party is all talk and no action. The new head of the organisation has recently even doubted that he is fit to lead the party because “all that power might change him”. This from a party that is not actually involved in a single administration within Germany and only has relatively few seats in a few parliaments on the most local level of government. Power? Your attitude might change if you ever attain actual leverage, but your party is so unpredictable right now that it is impossible for me to say what you will do in the next two months, let alone five years. So no, I am afraid I won’t vote Pirate in the foreseeable future. Let’s revisit this decision when the Pirate Party has made some actual decisions under circumstances that are, in fact, important.

I did like the Pirate Party when it was a feisty bunch of upstarts, too idealistic for their own good, fighting for intelligent ideas. Right now it is a populistic mess filled with people of incredible hubris who do themselves exactly what they so often protest the “traditional” parties do: talk a lot of talk without actually walking the walk.

Categories: Politics

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NRW election results

Posted on May 14th, 2012

In light of my last post, I wanted to share the results of the North Rhine-Westphalia state diet elections, now that they are out. In essence, the election was a sound success for the SPD/Green government which now has the majority of seats in the diet (before the forced elections, they were operating a minority government). The conservative CDU had a big loss and The Left was resoundingly kicked out of the state diet. The Pirate Party had a pretty big win and gets seats in the assembly for the first time. All in all, this election was a success for the Pirate Party but it looks like the myth of being “third strongest party” has been thoroughly dispelled. The Pirates gain 20 seats in the state diet but are far from being a force that is included in any decision making, especially because of the unwillingness of more traditional parties to ally themselves with the Pirate Party. Let’s hope this result gets other parties to adopt some of their more key values, though.

Source: tagesschau.de

 

Categories: Politics

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Blowing raspberries

Posted on April 14th, 2012

There has been a lot of media attention on the Raspberry Pi lately. The small Linux computer seems to have become somewhat of a press favourite, and not only with the people that mainly cater to geeks. Even the fact that Ubuntu (everyone’s favourite distro) doesn’t run on it didn’t seem to be able to stop the excitement. Well, I’m not particularly excited about it myself and whenever I say that, people seem puzzled. It almost seems like there is a requirement to squeal with joy at the mere mention of the project. Personally, all I can manage is a yawn. So let me explain. Even though I’m really not a hardware hacker and my soldering talent is just about enough to modify the simple wiring on a Telecaster, I’ve always been excited about small computing devices. Let’s face it, they’re just cool. And having one of those hanging around your living room is a lot easier to justify to your better half than a rack-mounted server. But the whole Raspberry thing doesn’t ring true to me, somehow. Putting aside all of the embarrassing production and delivery hiccups and the totally unprofessional handling of the CE mark issue, there are some deeper reasons beyond the way the Raspberry Pi Foundation handles itself that come to mind.

First of all, why aim the thing so squarely at education? Is that really such a good idea? Do they honestly think teachers will come up with all the materials needed to make use of a bare bones computing device such as this? Sure, there are a lot of cool teachers out there (I have a few in my own family), but teachers in general aren’t known to be the most experimental of people. Usually, they are the most happy when they can stick to a well-tested curriculum and have their hands full with just keeping the kids under control most of the time anyway. I suspect this is a PR move to garner the project the favour of the press, which seems to have worked. But still… Why isn’t this thing aimed at geeks? You know, like Arduinos, MakerBots and all these other gizmos — that stuff seems to generally sell well, after all. I think the education angle will weigh the project down in the long run, especially when it fails to excite the revolution in UK computer science education that people seem to be hoping for.

Another problem I’m seeing with this device is the hardware. The Raspberry Pi uses, by all accounts, a pretty old type of ARM chip and the rest of the specs are also pretty downmarket. I get the fact that they want to keep the device cheap, but to be honest, something like the Cotton Candy seems a lot more desirable; even despite the absolutely horrible name. Lets face it, geeks want powerful devices. Granted, this is only the first of several versions planned for the product, but that doesn’t change the fact that it feels like Broadcom just wants to get rid of some old chips they have no other use for. Especially since Broadcom has strong ties to the project, chiefly in the fact that the initiator of the thing and creator of the foundation works for the company. I’d rather pay three times the amount of money and get something with better CPU speed, wireless LAN support and a decent amount of RAM which would open up a lot more possibilities for cool hacks.

Lastly, and most importantly, I simply do not see the Raspberry Pi as such a revolutionary piece of kit that it would deserve all this media hype. As far as I can see, its only two remarkable qualities are that it is cheap and small. And those stand against the many other arguments that would make me think twice about buying this device: mediocre hardware, Linux distributions that want to run on it have to specifically go the extra mile to support it, the fact that it isn’t actually aimed at the market it excites most and a sketchy track record on the part of the foundation as far as delivering on its many promises is concerned.

I believe that everyone and their dog is going nuts over this because of inertia. That is how hype works psychologically: by generating inertia. If you get enough coverage, people will start following their group instincts without thinking about it. While I understand why it is happening, I refuse to take part in it, however. When I see the Raspberry Pi, I see the things it could be, not what it actually is. It could be so much more awesome if it was actually aimed at geeks, tinkerers and hackers. Instead, it seems like a lame attempt to get rid of some chips and employ some people in the process. Unless the Raspberry Pi becomes as awesome as it could be, I’m not interested. For those who are, it seems the devices finally have started to be shipped out  — one thing I must congratulate the Raspberry Pi Foundation on is that, while they do have had a lot of setbacks, at least they are blogging about everything. They might not be completely transparent with all details concerning their project, but at least they do keep their customers up to date. Myself, I’m rather spending the £25 on something else. Let’s see if this verdict changes once people come up with really good ideas for hacks using the Raspberry Pi. That might convince me to change my mind.

Photo Credit: Thanks to my good friend Ana Bee for the header image of some raspberries on a plate.

Categories: Hardware

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Controversial columns

Posted on February 21st, 2012

If my last article has taught me one thing, it’s the fact that a two column layout for blogs is highly controversial. While a lot of these comments are cheap shots at the first thing conveniently different about the forum my criticism was presented in, I do quite appreciate the irony of having accused the Canonical Design Team of a top-down model when it comes to designing Ubuntu and getting the same accusation thrown back in my face regarding my blog design — a design that I didn’t come up with, I would like to point out.

I do admit that I like this blog theme a lot and that I also do not see the problem in scanning one column down a page while ignoring the other (the other column is often filled with very annoying blinking ad banners in many other blogs, after all), then scrolling back up. I also don’t have a problem with stylistically imitating a classic book or print magazine on the web if it looks good, but I can understand how that would annoy some people, especially since aesthetics like that are highly subjective. I think it mostly annoys the purists though, the kind of people who code their own web pages in GNU Emacs (not that there is anything wrong with that, mind you). It is valid criticism. On this issue, I will however ignore all comments coming from the Canonical camp, as someone who is of the opinion that icons like these are fit to be released to the wider public, just isn’t my target audience.

One of my biggest goals in life is not being a hypocrite and I am very keen on listening to the readers of this site when it comes to the content of the blog and how it is presented. People accusing me of “not listening to the community” are, however, either being facetious or they aren’t aware of the fact that I have started this project less than a month ago. I am listening to your feedback, I’m just not acting on the criticism of the two column layout right away as I think this blog needs time to grow an actual community before I will start changing things. I will keep it very much in mind, though. Let’s wait until the firestorm that got started by daring to criticise the mighty empire of Ubuntu abates a bit, and then we can reconsider this issue more calmly from all sides.

Categories: Editorials

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Ubuntu: you’re doing it wrong

Posted on February 20th, 2012

Ubuntu is awesome and it’s all about the community — at least if you believe the marketing (from both Canonical employees and unpaid volunteers). But if you start looking beyond the hype, a somewhat different picture emerges. Ubuntu was the first Linux distro I ever installed and I have been following news about the project for about six years now, but in the last two years a new pattern is emerging. While I was, from my very first contact with the distribution, aware that Ubuntu, at its core, is about making money for Canonical, the company had steered a very gentle course in managing their flagship product (which is to say the main Ubuntu desktop version). While Canonical had always made clear that they’re in it for the money, the main focus for Ubuntu from the get-go was clearly to make the users of the distribution happy. But in latter years, that course has drifted more and more towards a strategy aimed first and foremost at doing what is good for Canonical, not the users.

I believe Canonical’s goal for Ubuntu these days is to basically emulate what Apple did with BSD: taking an existing base operating system and building a tailor-made graphical environment on top that hides the base system as completely as possible. In one way, Canonical’s approach is a lot better than Apple’s though, because they are doing this by not only using existing free software but by making their own stuff free software as well. They have to be commended for that. On the flip side, Canonical is repeating a lot of Apple’s mistakes, however, as they are using the same closed feedback loop development system that Apple is using. A lot of people like the way Apple designs things and they love the end result, but I am not one of those people. I have owned Apple hardware in the past and I have experienced first hand that their approach tends to yield inflexible software that tends to get in my way for the simple reason that I prefer to not do things exactly like the designers intended all the time. Apple’s software is hard to customize and can be extremely clunky and annoying to use — that is, if you use your own brain instead of blindly buying the hype. A very good example of this is iTunes and the way the iPhone forces you, even today, to plug in and sync everything through one horridly clumsy application. In their envy of the Mac ecosystem and their desperate desire to become profitable, Canonical is going down the same path. They are forcing design changes on the user that are aimed at giving Ubuntu brand recognition (the window button move, Unity, the HUD, designing their own font) or are emulating Mac OS X (the global menu, overlay-type scroll bars) under the ever-quoted guise of the almighty usability. The problem is, I can’t see how these things are actually improving how the users interact with their desktops and even the Canonical Design Team struggles time and time again to produce actual valid data to this effect. The “usability studies” that get quoted whenever I have talked to people from Canonical about this have participation numbers that are laughably low. Having a focus group with two or three dozen hand-picked candidates to “evaluate” complex user experience changes like these does not seem convincing to me. It seems ludicrous.

Canonical’s Design Team claims to be open to community involvement, yet I haven’t been able to trace a single one of the many design changes they implemented recently to an actual proposal from the community. I have no doubt that someone from Canonical will be able to point out where the Design Team has implemented such a suggestion but the aforementioned big changes certainly were decided very much top down, at least from what I can tell as an outsider. Furthermore, many of these changes have prompted pretty negative reactions from many users of Ubuntu. These aberrant voices are very successfully suppressed, of course. If there is one thing that Ubuntu has perfected, it is the way in which the “community” (read: hardcore Canonical supporters within the Ubuntu project as well as Canonical employees) immediately jump on anyone who dares to express controversial or even just slightly deviant opinions about these things. The “it’s not an issue because it is trivial for users to change it back” straw man gets carted out almost every time before a fair discussion even has the slightest chance to develop. All of this is almost always done in a very nice and friendly tone (Jono Bacon in particular is a master at this), but that does not change the simple fact that discussion is not exactly encouraged — and by this I mean a meaningful discussion that has a chance to modify or even revert the actual design decision.

A lot more important and existential to the way Ubuntu and Canonical deal with the inevitable backlash against the top-to-bottom decisions, however, is the way the development is done in the first place. In following Apple’s model of unilaterally deciding how features will be designed, Canonical is making what I believe is a crucial mistake. Canonical is writing free software in a code-only sense; while they respect the technical requirements of software freedom, they do not respect the culture of the free software community. Free software is not only about sharing your code, it is also about collaboration. Healthy free software projects encourage collaboration from the very beginning and in all stages of the process and that includes the design process. The community should be involved from the very conception of an idea to the actual execution in code and beyond. While Canonical is happy to accept thousands of hours of free work in bug fixes and quality assurance of their code, they are not interested in letting the community have a meaningful say in its conception. Mark Shuttleworth has hinted many times that he does believe that design has to be accomplished within a small group and not within the broader community.

Increasingly, though, Canonical is in a position to drive real change in the software that is part of Ubuntu. If we just showed up with pictures and prototypes and asked people to shape their projects differently, I can’t imagine that being well received! So we are also hiring a team who will work on X, OpenGL, Gtk, Qt, GNOME and KDE, with a view to doing some of the heavy lifting required to turn those desktop experience ideas into reality.

~ Mark Shuttleworth

As is prevalent with many Apple fans, community-driven design gets immediately equated with design by committee — a comparison that is completely false and can be disproven very easily by looking at the very community Mark had such problems in working with: Gnome. Gnome is a community-driven project through-and-though, yet it has recently come under fire for the way it has developed the latest incarnation of their desktop. The Gnome 3 development process is a very good example how you can simultaneously involve your community, yet have a pretty small team develop almost the whole user interface. I am not saying that the Gnome 3 process was the perfect way to design a free software user interface, but it was a way that is respectful of the culture within such a project and it does take the floor out from under Mark’s arguments regarding the fact that involving your community from the very beginning will necessarily result in a design nightmare. You might not like how Gnome 3 turned out, but the end result is surprisingly close to what Unity looked like when it first came out; using a completely different process to get there — a process that anyone within Gnome could have been involved in.

The fact that the end result of Ubuntu’s design process does not look like I want my desktop to look is actually not bothering me much. Unlike Apple, it is still Linux underneath and I could indeed change it, but why should I? Instead, I prefer to use a distribution that respects free software values in the spirit as well as in the letter of the law. I do not find the idea appealing that one man is deciding how I should use my desktop, if that was my kind of thing, I would indeed be using a Mac. Apple executes the whole concept a lot better than Canonical anyway. And if I want to use a free software desktop, I want to use a free software desktop that is proud to be an active part of the Linux ecosystem instead of one that secludes itself off on its own little island to work in secret and prefers to substitute real community involvement with aggressive PR and hype. I would say I wish Canonical luck with their approach but that would be a lie. I have been attacked by their supporters so often for simply speaking my mind and being critical of their approach that I can’t say I’m a fan of the company these days. I don’t mind good, honest criticism and I can stand many a personal insult too, but being called an “Ubuntu basher” on almost a weekly basis just because I tend to see Ubuntu news critically on Linux Outlaws has left me somewhat galled and weary. I respect Canonical for doing an awful lot of free software coding and I am thankful to them for having introduced myriads of people to Linux (myself being one of them, as I pointed out at the start of this article), but that’s about it. There are better ways to get started on Linux now and there are other companies that show more respect to the ecosystem in general. And even with luck I am not sure Canonical can be profitable with their current strategy anyway. They are certainly reaching their goal to make Ubuntu an instantly recognisable brand, but what’s next? How will that lead to a sizable income? Selling desktop Linux does not work, Red Hat has the scars to prove that. And I don’t believe that the Ubuntu-on-mobile and Ubuntu TV initiatives will net Canonical significant revenue — not in a million years. The only thing I can see them doing to save themselves is risking the dangerous gamble of eventually going proprietary (maybe even using their own kernel underneath) which would make it workable to sell even the desktop, but the backlash would be enormous and could potentially collapse the whole bubble. And there is, of course, always the danger that Shuttleworth gets fed up with his little project and stops the flow of money; which would also mean sudden death for Ubuntu as we know it. This uncertainty is actually the second big problem I have with the project, aside from the fact that I do not like the philosophy behind how things are built. I have read Mark Shuttleworth’ blog for years and, having never met the guy, that reading has given me the suspicion that he isn’t doing Ubuntu for the greater good of mankind, but rather to boost his own importance in the world. I don’t think that is anything to frown upon, it is a perfectly valid reason to engage in what is basically a charitable act at the moment, but it is a very fickle thing to base a community on. The bottom line is that I could live with all these things if I felt I had a stake in how the project is being developed (and as someone who is a miserable coder but interested in design, the design process would naturally be my focus here), but I don’t. Since I also don’t like the outcome of their design process, I don’t really understand why it isn’t truly open and participatory in the first place anyway. But after all, Ubuntu is Mark’s project and he can do with it as he pleases. And the Canonical Design Team can build the desktop as they please. I just think they are doing it wrong.

Categories: Linux

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Welcome to Blurmany

Posted on February 13th, 2012

Germany is starting to become a really weird place. The current focus on privacy, especially in the mainstream media, could probably be more accurately described as an obsession and I basically had to stop reading articles from German authors about the topic as they would quickly drive me into a state of angry disillusionment with this country. Privacy in itself is a good thing. As our constitution asserts, it is a prerequisite for personal freedom and the well-being of democratic states. But in the current discussion here in Germany, the term “privacy” is being used to excuse an irrational fear of the public. It seems to me that people are afraid of publicness when it comes to the Internet in a way that does not at all equate to their behaviour when it comes to publicness in the rest of their lives. It also seems to be a phenomenon that is mostly generation specific, with most people being born after  roughly 1985 not caring about these mostly sensationalistic media reports at all. But even with older people, it seems to be very prevalent to regularly use one’s Facebook account but to complain about privacy matters anyway.

Privacy is an ethic of knowing — We need protection of privacy. We also need to adapt our norms of privacy to new social tools and behaviors so we can better understand when something is said in confidence, when information should not be used without consent, what the harm is of spreading information, and how to give people more control of their information.

~ Jeff Jarvis

The weird thing about Germany in this regard is the fact that Germans, by nature, are very trustworthy and obedient when it comes to the state being in possession of a lot of information about them but they are inherently paranoid when it comes to their fellow citizens having the same kind of access to information. To understand this, you need to understand the fact that obeying state organs has been a cornerstone of the German way of life since the nation was founded in 1871. This focus on obedience had always been widespread in the Prussian kingdom and its various holdings and when Bismarck united the German kingdoms under the Prussian banner, this trait was deeply integrated into the organisation and lifestyle of the new German nation. Germany has had state-issued ID cards for decades and citizens are required by law to produce them on request of state officials. The system does make it a lot easier for citizens to identify themselves for official business such as buying real estate or opening bank accounts and it has been in place for so long that almost nobody questions its usefulness. Moreover, when the German government recently enacted a census, people gave the state extremely granular information about their property as well as their circumstances of life and very few people objected to this. The federal government threatened serious punishments for house owners not supplying information such as size of their property, number of people living there, their ages and income and much more. And this information was collected in addition to the huge amounts of facts the government already has about every German citizen as part of the mandatory registration procedures and tax information. All this happened without a single pundit complaining about it in the media. But when Google wants to take a simple photo of people’s houses, all hell breaks loose. Analysing these reactions, it seems that the typically German cry for privacy is very much targeted at corporations, with citizens being a lot more trusting towards state officials. This gets mixed up with a general fear of publicness itself that Jeff Jarvis talks about at length. Maybe I am not German enough, but I completely fail to see how Google making a picture of the outside of my house available to the public is an invasion of my privacy. All that Google is doing is making publicly accessible information more accessible. After all, anyone could drive up to my house and take the same picture from the street themselves. They could even publish that picture on the Internet, completely legally, as it was taken from a public road. German courts have consistently held that you do not have an expectation of privacy if the outside of your home is viewable directly from a public street. Now, the inside of one’s home is a completely different matter, of course, as that is explicitely protected by the constitution. But I fail to see how Street View is doing anything that could even remotely be considered as infringing on people’s privacy. If you are in public, you do not have an expectation of privacy. The whole outcry over Street View makes as much sense as running around the town square stark naked and then trying to sue someone who took a picture of your privates while you were waving them in the wind. The world is completely right to make fun of us by calling the country Blurmany these days.

Myself, I am a lot more sceptical of the government than I am of corporations. While corporations are immoral and would do anything for the bottom line, their dependence on their customers to generate money usually keeps them somewhat in check and prevents the worst abuses of personal data. A government, even of a democratic country under the rule of law, potentially lacks these checks and balances in fundamental ways. With governments, the bureaucracy collects all of the personal information of the citizens, usually completely independent of the ruling administration. With the people in power, who are directly accountable to the voters, coming an going, the bureaucrats are around much longer and information, once collected by the state, tends to pile up and stick around as well. It also worries me that while at its core, data collected by initiatives such as Street View are inherently public and available to the government and citizens alike, almost all data collected by the state is proprietary. Most people confuse this situation with adequate privacy but it only means that the public can’t spy on you, not that you actually possess any real privacy. The more I think about this, the more I am becoming convinced that for most Germans, this whole story is not about privacy at all. It is about arbitrarily limiting access to their private information. Or more specifically, having the illusion that such a limit exists. Most people seem to prefer to have certain information about, say their house, rather be available to a small circle of people, say within the government, than have it available to the public. But that is not what privacy is about. You only have a reasonable expectation of privacy if you can completely control who exactly has access to the information in question — and you definitely do not have this control when you hand your data over to state organs. It seems counterintuitive, but in many ways, companies are a lot more accountable and transparent than the state when it comes to how they handle our personal information. There is no privacy policy in place at the governmental offices where I have to register when I move to a new city. And even if there were, the government has the power to change any such rules at a whim. I can also not opt-out from the national ID card system. Therefore I completely fail to see what the fuss is about when Google harvests SSIDs that the owners of the access points are blasting into the street unencrypted, compared to the data the government forces me to hand over to them.

Publicness is an ethic of sharing — The foundation of a more public society is the principle of sharing: recognizing the benefits of generosity, building tools that facilitate it, and protecting the product of it.

~ Jeff Jarvis

The problem with this irrational fear of being public which is perpetuated through the conventional media, amplifying the inherent distrust of corporations and institutions that are enabling sharing (especially on the Internet), is the fact that the general populace is losing sight of the benefits of publicness and sharing. Jarvis has talked about these benefits often, and indeed, has written a whole book on the subject, going into much detail on the conflict between privacy and publicness. Right now, the pendulum is swinging wildly towards the privacy side of the argument in Germany, a movement which seems unlikely to stop any time soon. It seems to be mostly driven by the fact that the Internet is a new thing with the natural German reaction being to distrust all things new and assume the worst. Sadly, that reaction is harming all of us and society in general every day, the net effect being that many extremely useful online services are being neutered within the country for reasons that elude any logical explanation while people happily bend over whenever the state wants to exert more power over their lives and curb their personal freedoms. In this weird country, taking pictures of the outside of your house produces a huge public uproar, when it seems completely acceptable for the police to infect people’s computers with malware with little due process, all the while storing huge amounts of personal information about you every time you connect to the Internet on the mere assumption that anyone could be guilty. Welcome to Blurmany — what a strange place we have built ourselves here…

Categories: Privacy

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Now with 100% less hype

Posted on January 24th, 2012

I love covering technology news. I’ve always been very interested in computers and all kinds of nifty gadgets and I love writing and talking about new stuff. But the one thing that is very disturbing about the tech industry is the hyperbole that seems to intrinsically pervade it. Everything has to be always new all the time and every new thing will inevitably revolutionise the way we live and work. That is, at least, if you believe the hipsters in Silicon Valley and their myriad blogs, news sites, video shows and podcasts. I object to this. I believe in informing people and I’m not afraid of being opinionated; hell, I get as enthusiastic as the next person about cool stuff, but not everything has to be positive all the time. Sometimes things are crap and don’t work or the ideas behind them look good on paper and in marketing videos but it turns out to be completely awkward when you get the thing home and the initial buzz of opening the shiny packaging has worn off. There has to be a place for sane reporting in the technology field. I believe we need a counterweight to all the cries of “OMG this is so awesome!” all the time. I believe Dehype is this place.

Having said all of this, I realise that my position isn’t the popular one. I realise that many people out there subconsciously yearn for harmony and perfection in a world that has precious little of either. This means that the person levelling the buzzkill at things won’t get as many page views as the awesomebunnies. But you know what? I don’t care. I don’t give a fuck. I’m angry and it is good. Angry people have produced some of the best music, writing and art in the history of mankind. I’m not saying my writing will have the unblunted edge of a pissed off Dylan song, but I will give my best to cut through the bullshit as eloquently as I can. I’ve had it with the Engadgets, the OMG Ubuntus, the kindergarten headlines and the Apple keynotes. I will do all in my power to make this a haven of sanity for all those that feel the same way. Feel free to speak your mind in the comments — the articles on here will be very opinionated so I expect, nay cherish, dissenting voices. Just don’t come here and expect touchy-feely, happy go lucky love poems to the next marvel of technology from Cupertino, California.

This site isn’t designed to report the news as it happens, other places do this better, but rather is aimed at providing commentary to these stories. I aim to cover Linux, Android, free and open source software, digital rights, netizen politics, privacy, security, indy gaming and anything that intersects with these fields. All of this will of course be skewed by my personal viewpoint.  I only use Linux machines myself and the whole site is created on Linux with open source tools so that is obviously slanting my perception of the IT world. This is to be expected with any publication you’ll ever read so the key is to gather as many different opinions on things as possible. There is plenty of reasonably objective reporting going on out the on the web, I just feel that most of the opinions being expressed are fairly one-sided towards people within the PR bubble of the big companies so I’m trying my best to balance the situation out a bit. You are very welcome to come along for the ride. Just remember one thing in case something offends you: nobody is forcing you to read this blog.

Categories: Editorials

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