Jack Scott's Blog

This week I’m at linux.conf.au, the southern hemisphere’s premier open-source conference. This year it is being held in Ballarat, about an hour’s travel from Melbourne. I’ll be documenting the trip and conference as much as I can given the limits of my enthusiasm and awakeness.

Friday 20th January:

Friday is the last day of the conference, and everybody is starting to look tired; it’s a full-on week. But, before we all go home, there are just a few more excellent talks to attend. The first of these was Friday’s keynote, given by Jacob Appelbaum, and what an amazing keynote it was. Jacob talked about the state of surveillance states. He explained what they are doing to keep track of all of their citizens, and the special measures that have been put in place in the last few years (mostly since September 11) that significantly curtail our freedoms in the name of privacy and safety. A few choice quotes from the talk:

Free software is for freedom, open source is for business solutions.

Be the trouble you want to see in the world. [It's in my notes, but I'm pretty sure it was actually just written on his shirt]

90s Nihilism: I have nothing to hide.

The data kept about you in [server] logs around the world tells a story that is not necessarily true, but is made up of facts.

This talk flowed on nicely from Senator Ludlam’s talk at the Penguin dinner.

After morning tea, I watched the talk by Rusty Russell and Matt Evans about why UNIX has been getting bigger over time (in terms of binary bloat). It’s mostly due to new features, but also because of the infrastructure that modern systems have and the libraries that are statically linked in these days (glibc is basically just bloatware). Also in this session I attended the talk by Simon Horman on Open vSwitch. It’s really interesting content, but the presentation was a bit dry. It’s definitely something I want to check out when I get home though, as it could be quite useful for me when I have VMs set up in Linux. The support for VLANs makes it a much better choice than standard Linux network bridges.

During lunchtime there was a meeting between a group of Tasmanian delegates, and it was decided that the Hobart Linux User’s Group should be started up again. So if you’re reading this, like Linux and live in Hobart, get in touch!

After lunch was the best-of sessions. These were talks voted for by the delegates that they wanted to see again, or missed the first time around. I watched two fabulous talks. The first was on Codec2 (presented by David Rowe), an audio speech codec that uses 1400 bits/sec for transmission, which is a 500x improvement on raw 16bit 44.1kHz audio. Very impressive. The second was on the freedom box project (presented by Bdale Garbee, which is a platform for developing easy-to-use home servers oriented towards federated social networking services (such as Status.net or Diaspora). This followed on nicely from Appelbaum’s talk that morning, giving a solution to some of the problems that were outlined.

The final session of the conference was the lightning talks. The real highlight was watching Paul Fenwick jump up on stage between the lightning talks and try to give a several minute long presentation in thirty seconds. He failed, but it was funny to watch. After the lightning talks was the closing ceremony. The main reason for this is to hand out a few awards and thank some people, but also to find out where the next linux.conf.au is going to be held. Next year, it’s in Canberra!

Front Cover

As you might be aware, I’m not a huge fan of Google, or indeed, cloud-based apps in general. When I saw The Googlization of Everything (and why we should worry) in my local campus bookstore, I decided that it would be a good read on the spot. It was a good read, and here’s why.

I will admit upfront that I’m probably not the most unbiased person in the world when it comes to what is really a review of a review of Google. If you dislike bias, go watch the Pakistani cricket team instead.

I’d always been a bit hesistant to use Google products (or any cloud product) because of lax privacy. How do I know that Google won’t be using my information against me? This book (partially) confirmed my suspicions. They are using my information, both for and against me. Every time somebody performs a Google search, Google stores the query and information about me (my IP, my location, browser, etc) and uses that to tune search results for me. This appears on the surface to be fine. I like it when I search “cat” on Google and Google knows that what I really want is the first result to be whatismyip.com (I use the “cat” Google search as a quick method to test Internet browser connectivity, I don’t know why). But Vaidhyanatham (the author) raises other points about this. Firstly, how long is our data kept? And who else is it being shared with? But perhaps most disturbingly, Google might prevent me from seeing new information because it’s too busy telling me about what I think I want. For instance, if a new species of cat was discovered in the jungles of Peru, I might miss it because Google is too busy customising my results with Internet connectivity tests. While that not matter much, on other (more important) subjects the splitting up of information based on what we think we want to see is disturbing.

Vaidhyanatham raises many other points in his book too. The Google Books project is designed to give everybody in the world access to out-of-print books, instead of having them sit on dusty shelves in university libraries. It’s a nice goal. However, the program is structured in such a way that nobody else could possibly compete with it, due to arcane copyright law and out-of-court settlements. Do we want Google to be the sole provider of this service? Shouldn’t this be done by a public or community organisation instead? They’re difficult questions, and the fact that we haven’t even started considering them should warn us.

Another similar situation exists for Google Scholar. Google has obtained agreements with universities to provide academic articles for inclusion in Google’s archives. The idea, similarly to Google Books, is to allow more people to see things they wouldn’t have otherwise seen. A noble goal. Again, however, there are several problems with the project’s implementation. Again, arcane agreements and laws prevent universities from easily collaborating with an alternative archive agent. Even more worrying is the fact that to most users (those without access to the paywalled sites that the articles actually reside on) only the abstract of an article is available. This results in a broadening but a shallowing of the information available to most people. This is another of those projects that might be better taken on by the people, for the people. I know of one user on an IRC channel I frequent who is collecting datasheets and manuals from PC components from the 1980s, before these datasheets become extinct. While not legal, and while he hasn’t made this public, it’s the right direction to go in.

Then there’s the shallowing of our knowledge due to Google. This is a huge topic, and so many authors have covered it in so many various degrees of rigour that I won’t even begin to scratch the surface. However, here’s the gist of the idea: Because we have access to the largest library in human history (the web) at our fingertips at any point we’re in front of a computer (which for those of us with a smartphone, is constantly), we don’t remember information like previous generations did. I’m still not confident that this is a bad thing; I am a lot more knowledgeable than I would be if the only learning resource I had was a paper encyclopædia. I don’t know a lot of facts, but I know where to find them. In today’s world, that’s what counts. Still, it’s something we should look into further.

A good portion of the arguments put forward in this book are more general than Google and apply to the Internet at large (such as the shallowing of our knowledge). Most of the other arguments could be taken directly to Google’s legal department in a court showdown (which would almost certainly be the court case of the century). Whichever way you stand on the issues, more information is never a bad thing.

My friend Michael Wheeler has written an excellent article on the whys and hows of removing your data from the cloud. This post is basically just to point you all towards it.

Over the last few years I’ve been in a similar process, getting rid of my Google account and hosting my own email. I’ve attempted to get rid of Facebook, and learned a lot about myself, my friends, and Facebook in the process. I now no longer have twitter (again) and I’m just generally being a lot more careful with my data.

I think everybody will benefit from thinking just a little more about where their information goes, so I highly recommend you read this article.

…and why you probably haven’t noticed.

Facebook, along with its partner in crime MySpace, were touted as the all-singing, all-dancing duo of social networking in the Web 2.0 age. For a long time I didn’t catch on, until about March/April in 2008. It was at that point in time that I decided to open an account on Facebook, to see what friends of mine were up to. And that’s when the trouble started.

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