If you think it’s about time that individuals took back the Net for the things it can do for us and for each other, rather than leaving it to large companies and governments, join us now.

It’s easy to lament these things. It’s more fun to do something. A group of us are running some projects under the heading Retake The Net to try to put some power back into the hands of ordinary users. Yes, you and me. Retake the Net is putting together a Bar Camp for 29 October 2011.

The project I’m most closely associated with is called the Policy Auction. (That’s a working title and it will change when we launch.) The basic idea is to provide a platform where people can promote policies – things they think the gummint should do – and put up real virtual currency against them. Hence the auction. Maybe it will make a splash – that’s the general idea. And the timing right before an election is no accident.

About half a dozen people are giving up their time to build this thing, and it’s going to be very cool. But not as cool as it would be if you helped, too. We want to hear from Java geeks, visual designers and comms folk.

There’s a meeting of the Retake The Net crew at Betty’s in Wellington tomorrow night (3rd August). I do hope to see you there!

How to describe Webstock 2011? Compared to commercial conferences, it was head and shoulders better than any I had been to, ever. Compared to unconferences and enthusiasts’ meetings, it was way more professional and focussed. But the best description of it was one word – the adjective on the conference pencil (I kid you not) – Awesome!The speakers were at the top of their game. Scott McCloud, the graphic novelist. David McCandless of Information is Beautiful. Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay. Singer/songwriter Amanda Palmer. Many, many more. The production values of their presentations were immense. Their competence and sheer brilliance was overwhelming. People kept thanking them for coming down to New Zealand and they said: no, this *is* the premier conference – thanks for inviting us. That’s impressive for a meeting organised from scratch by a few passionate and committed people.

The attendees were smart people from all over New Zealand. Mostly Web folk with some entrepreneurs, security geeks and a few scientists. The conversations over coffee were fascinating.

It’s all still a bit of a whirl. Some impressions:

• The encouragement to get on and do something with the Web, with a lot of concrete advice on how to. Several speakers focussed on this.
• Talks from success stories, and from someone (Merlin Mann) who spent a long time confronting the fear of failure.
• Tom Coates trying to unpack what it all means, how the Web is changing our society and creating our future.
• The conference was in no way associated with Apple, but almost everyone present had a MacBook Pro or an iPad open on their laps. All the speakers had them. Apple has huge mindshare of people who care about technology.
• We were told that at one point there were 657 devices connected to the conference wi-fi. That’s way more devices than people present. Most people had two or three. Despite this, the wi-fi held up pretty well.

I’m left with a huge amount of material to read. I stopped taking notes after a while and decided to rely on the crowdsourced notes taken by others in the meetings and loaded directly and collaboratively into Google Docs. You can find them here.

I need to thank the organisers for doing such a stunning job, for bringing such cool people together, and most of all just for creating such a thing of beauty.

Missing technology trends is not unique to the academics and business leaders who promoted the Knowledge Wave. In the mid 90s I went to a presentation to Ministers by a government department (which I won’t name to save its embarrassment) explaining how it was going to build an entire business on helping New Zealanders and the world find things on the Internet. Oh dear.

“Content is king!” cried the first wave of entrepreneurs who saw the Internet. It didn’t turn out that way. There are staggeringly successful tech companies out there – Google, Microsoft and Apple come to mind as the front runners – but they don’t make a living by selling content. Whatever that is. Just try asking any newspaper proprietor. And remember what happened to the marriage of AOL and Time Warner?

There are two ways to generate money of intangible sales – content, if you like – which you might call “bespoke” and “pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap”. And, of course there is a range in between. Bespoke would be a high-end magazine like the Economist, or a book like Encyclopedia Britannica, which try to cater well for a small but wealthy market. One of those is still around, but I haven’t heard from Britannica for a while. Piling them high would be Microsoft, or even Apple, which produce endless copies of things that people will pay for. (Yes, I know Apple makes excellent hardware, but its that married to its software which sells the product.) Google is somewhere in the middle, but it has two clever innovations: to automate a very personal search experience and to find a third party to pay for it all in the form of advertisers.

One problem with selling knowledge is that you have *not* to deliver that knowledge to people who don’t pay. Not only does this irritate the non-payers, who will often ways to get the knowledge anyway, but it also reduces the overall size of the economy because people don’t get knowledge that might benefit their businesses.

But the key to the Internet is open sharing. Internet protocols are open in the sense that you can download the for free and implement them if you are able. Google makes almost all its services available online for free (to the users). Wikipedia – do I need to go on? These services have permitted the Internet to become a truly vast knowledge exchange – for free. And that’s what drives its expansion and usefulness.

How does that play out for New Zealand? It lets us have a tech sector which has to compete with the rest of the world. It would be nice if we had as large a natural competitive advantage in tech as we do for milk and tourism, but its hard to argue that we do have that. But, we still grow some great companies, partly due to our reasonable if patchy business Internet infrastructure. We can pat ourselves on the back a little and praise our tech entrepreneurs and developers who make this happen. What we mostly aren’t making money from is building barriers to prevent people from accessing knowledge unless they pay. And that’s a good thing.

I’ll be on air after the 11am news. You can listen live, or soon afterwards you will be able to pull the podcast or download the audio as ogg or mp3.

It’s not a straightforward issue. On the one hand, most of us would accept that there is value in providing an incentive to create clever things that ultimately benefit many people. That’s the public good argument for copyright and patents. On the other, our culture and our technology are built on the work and ideas of others and controlling people’s access effectively controls our development as a species.

These are important matters that need a global consensus. What I’m seeing at the moment is an attempt to enclose the commons of ideas for the benefit of a few and to detriment of us all. That’s been the case for a century at least, but the arrival of the Internet has pushed things to a whole new level.

That brings me to ACTA, the treaty being negotiated in secret by our government and others, which is at least partly about the interaction of copyright and the Internet. I’ve railed against the secrecy around ACTA before, because it prevents the ordinary people whose lives will be affected from having a say in it.

There have been some remarkable revelations about ACTA in the last few days. Firstly, there have been three leaks. The text of the Internet chapter, an analysis of some countries’ views on transparency of the agreement, and an analysis of each country’s negotiating position on the Internet chapter of the draft ACTA agreement. We don’t know where the leaks are coming from, but it’s clear that many people negotiating the agreement are unhappy with the insistence of secrecy coming from (we now know) the US, South Korea and Denmark.

Nat Torkington has analysed the New Zealand positions from the latest link. New Zealand’s negotiators are pushing for clarity, for reasonableness and for transparency. Good on them. It looks as though New Zealand is making its view more felt than many other countries. Even so, what we end up with, of course, is not just up to New Zealand.

People in our government are listening about the lack of transparency. Our negotiators have just issued a call for submissions on some points of the Internet chapter ACTA by 31 March. This, coupled with the leaks, offers ordinary people a chance for some kind of say. So does the PublicACTA event to be hosted by InternetNZ on April 10th, right before the next round of ACTA negotiations which are to be held here in Wellington the following week.

It’s good that we have found out more about ACTA – even if it is mostly through unacknowledged “leaks”. It’s good that New Zealand is pushing for transparency. We need to empower our negotiators and those in like-minded countries to reject the extreme positions that some of the other countries are taking. Do consider sending a submission, even if it’s just “the current model works well, don’t change it”. I’ll write some more detailed points and publish them here well before the deadline.

However, it’s still appalling that a treaty that will affect everyone is being negotiated in secret, with an agenda being pushed by one industry based mainly in one country which won’t let the secrecy be lifted for fear that other countries’ citizens won’t let them stay in the negotiations.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant. We’ve had a glimpse of it. Let’s throw the curtains wide.

I’ll talk about his case today on Radio New Zealand National after the 11am news, as well as handing out a brickbat and a couple of bouquets. After the broadcast you’ll be able to download the audio as ogg or mp3.

Gary McKinnon – British computer programmer – the facts

• Early 40s, originally from Glasgow although grew up in London
• Accessed 97 US government and military computers in 2001/2, from Britain
• Why: Claims it was to uncover evidence of UFOs – his activities in the computers seem to back this up
• McKinnon doesn’t dispute that he accessed the computers. He says that they were open (i.e. default passwords) and that he just left messages saying how bad their security was.
• US claims that he deleted some critical operating system files on some and caused $700,000 of damage
• Tracked down to Britain, arrested in 2002
• US announced it wanted to try him in the US “biggest military computer hack of all time”
• In 2006 the Brits decided to allow extradition to the US
• In the US could face 70 years, perhaps even in Gitmo
• Since then a series of legal appeals including to the House of Lords and the European Court, and the UK Home Secretary
• Wants to be tried in the UK. In the UK, still illegal but a far lesser penalty.
• Has been diagnosed with Aspergers by none other than Simon Baron-Cohen or Cambridge
• Still appealing but his chances look slim.
• A lot of public support – 80MPs calling for prison to be served in UK. List of luminaries, Sting, Boris Johnson, Bob Geldof, Terry Waite, the LibDems. Daily Mail running a campaign. Some people believe he was entrapped.

Opinion

• Do not tweak the military’s nose. Even if you think they are stupid. They have a lot to lose by being made to look stupid.
• The guy is clearly not on the same planet as the rest of us – UFOs, “Free energy”
• That’s what this is about and the UK government shouldn’t be letting the US military get away with it. Let’s have a bit of humanity
• Compare with Knox / Kercher case – 26 yrs for murder.
• Change law if necessary
• By all means try the man but do it in his home jurisdiction

Links

Gary McKinnon – evil hacker or confused Asperger’s sufferer?

Alan Matheson Turing was a British mathematician and Word War II codebreaker. He was the main person responsible the British ability to read the German Enigma codes. His contribution may well have saved Britain from being starved into submission by U-boat packs and so of losing the war. His work, without doubt, saved many lives. But, because of the heavy secrecy about it, most people had never heard of him until late last century.

Turing was a very unconventional character. He was gay, but made little attempt to hide. He was convicted after the war of gross public indecency – i.e. of having sex with a consenting male partner in private – and forced to undergo repeated injections of female hormones in some kind of bizarre attempt at chemical castration. He committed suicide two years later.

It’s about time that Britain faces up to how badly Turing was treated, and for that matter how badly other gay men have been treated over the years. Gordon Brown’s apology is fulsome, as it should be, but long overdue.

Atiu has less than 500 permanent inhabitants, plus at the moment 12 vistors. Put another way, visiting with my immediate family has increased the number of people on the island by a percentage point.

The people are very welcoming. I’m staying at the Atiu Villas, run by expatriate kiwi Dr Roger Malcolm and his wife Kura Malcolm, who is from Atiu. Everyone greets you as you pass them, and people are uniformly friendly. Nobody locks anything, and keys are normally left in vehicles. People all seem to be bilingual in Cook Islands Maori and English.

There are few cars on the island. As the title of this post suggests, the main way you get around is by moped. And New Zealanders have to get a Cook Islands driving licence from the police. This isn’t hard – it took me 15 minutes and $2.50. My 16 year old son also wanted a licence so he could ride a moped, and that took a little longer because he hasn’t got a New Zealand driver’s licence of any kind. He had to sit a theory and a practical test which took about an hour and cost $2.50. He’s very proud of his motorcycle licence, but I don’t suppose he’d better try using it in New Zealand!

Atiu is beautiful. It’s not the usual volcanic cone fringed by palm trees – although there are palms a-plenty. Atiu is a volcanic seamount which never made it to the surface while active, but has since suffered a series of uplifts, resulting in a low hill surrounded by a wide band of crushed coral. There are rather more beaches than visitors so you don’t have to share. Then there is a fringing reef about 50m from the beach.

The crushed coral forms a wide belt all around the core of the island. It’s near-impossible to walk on. There are caves full of stalactites and rare birds which navigate by sounds. The interior is jungle interspersed with swamps, which the islanders use to grow taro.

Atiu has a long history as a regional power. Atiuans used to raid many local islands, and to this day own land in Tahiti. Captain Cook – who else? – was the first European to come ashore in 1777. Today, power in the island appears to be in the hands of the Ariki (chiefs), the Island Administrator (appointed by the government), and the Cook Islands Christian Church, who are the spiritual descendents of the London Missionary Society which came to convert the natives some 50 years after Cook. Although the islanders now all live in a village in the island’s centre, the jungle hides the remains of old settlements and holy places, still decorated with stalactites and coral.

We had assumed that there would be little if any medical care on the island. This definitely wasn’t the case. The island has a hospital with a doctor, a nurse and a welfare officer-cum-ambulance driver. The doctor was away on leave when we were there and his post was being filled by an English medical student on elective. Also there were two young German dentists who had been sent to provide care to the islanders. They weren’t getting many takers among the locals but New Zealand visitors were enjoying their services.

The main problem the island faces is depopulation. It’s come down from 1,500 to under 500 in a decade or so. The senior policeman was telling me that, of his 11 siblings, he is the only one still living on the island, and that his adult children now live in Australia and New Zealand.
The essential problem is that there’s very little work. You can live for nearly free on taro, coconuts, fish, chicken and pork, but that’s nearly a subsistence level of living, and the people leaving want more.

The principal showed us around the school. He’s a native Atiuan trained in New Zealand, and one of his teachers is from New Zealand. The others are from the Cooks. The kids learn in Cook Islands Maori in primary, then learn in English in secondary. They use a modified version of the New Zealand curriculum, and do NCEA level 1 and 2. The school buildings are modern, and quite like a rural New Zealand area school, but it’s very noticeable that there are many empty classrooms. The school is built for a roll of 500 but has about 150.

I’d like to think that Atiu could remain a viable place to live, if only because I enjoyed meeting the people there so much. I’m hoping that the broadband Internet – well, sort of – that has recently arrived on the island can help turn things around by offering people the chance to work elsewhere while living there.

It would be a wonderful telecommuting location.

I put out a call for suggestions for this program by email and on my blog a few days ago. If you were one of the helpful people who replied – thanks. This program’s yours as much as mine. Don’t you love the Internet!

Listen live at 11:05 or download the audio as Ogg or MP3.

Q: Your main topic today – free things. What sort of thing do you mean?

A: Mostly software and services. Let’s start with the canonical example that most of use every day – Google search. We all know it, of course. That’s a free service supplied by a private company, and using the Internet is almost inconceivable without it.

Q: It’s supported by advertising.

A: Yes, it is. And a lot of free stuff is only free in the sense that the users aren’t paying but someone is.

Q: You’ve talked about free software before – that means something more than that you don’t have to pay for it, right?

A: Yes, there’s a definition of free software – Richard Stallman originated the term in this sense. And, by free software, Stallman means that the software itself is available for people to modify and pass on. It’s a strong form of open source. But that’s one meaning of free software. I thought to day I’d concentrate on the less idealogical meaning, the straightforward alternative meaning that it doesn’t cost you any money to use it.

Q: That’s not the same thing?

A: No – it’s possible to have free software in the Stallman sense of the word that you have to pay for, and quite a lot of software you don’t have to pay for is not free in the Stallman sense. The terms ‘libre’ and ‘gratis’ get used sometimes to make the distinction – both translate as ‘free’ in English, but one is about freedom and the other about cost.

The other thing we are not talking about here is software that’s been placed on sites for unlawful download. There’s no excuse for using pay for software without paying for it. It’s just wrong. And there’s so much legitimately free to use software and services out there that, if you don’t want to pay for some specific thing, there’s a high chance that there is a free to use alternative. Just use Google.

Q: OK – we’ve got that straight. So, what sort of thing is out there legitimately cost-free?

A: there’s a whole array of amazing stuff just waiting for you to use it!

Let’s start with OpenOffice, which is a free replacement for word processing and spreadsheet software. Lots of people have OpenOffice, and its often distributed on a new PC. If you want to do word processing – writing letters etc and you don’t have a program to do that – you can either buy one of get OpenOffice for absolutely nothing.

Q: Is it any good? And does it open the same files as the other programs?

A: Yes, OpenOffice opens files from all the main word processing packages including the ones you have to pay for. And it’s pretty good. Just go download it from OpenOffice.org.

And then there’s Ubuntu – or Linux in general, which can completely replace Windows on your computer if you want it to. If you do install that you find a huge list of free software in the menus. But you don’t have to be a fully piad-up Linux-loving tree-hugging hippie to like getting stuff for free. Assuming we are staying with Windows, there are some great things available just for the download.

Links

Web browsers: Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera

Mail software:Pegasus Mail, Thunderbird

Web-based mail: Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Hotmail

Notes and backup: Evernote, Dropbox

Applications online: Google Apps and Microsoft Office live

Word processing and spreadsheets for your computer.

Maps: Google Earth, Google Maps, Windows Live Maps, and for the stars: Stellarium, Celestia

Skype for free calls and inkstand messaging, also Microsoft’s and Google’s equivalents

Security software: AVG free edition. HijackThis for advanced security users trying to diagnose problems.

Play audio and video: VLC

Social Media – Facebook, Twitter, and Twitter clients Twitterrific, Tweetdeck

Air New Zealand’s superb mobile phone software – mPass

Doodle – meeting scheduling – if you have people around the world, check Time and Date

VirtualBox – for running several operating systems simultaneously.

Published materials – TV, NZ Onscreen, Radio

Books – TOR science fiction, Bantam DoubleDay Dell has some free stuff as well, so does O’Reilly technical publishers, and some books about open source software.

Tripit – trip planner, puts together an itinerary from all your tickets and bookings.

Swivel.com – stats and charts form your own data. See also Geocommons.com

Gapminder.org for analyzing statistics about world population, health, wealth etc.