I’ve talked about RtN before. It’s a group of people who are uncomfortable about the extent of control of the Net being exerted by governments and companies, and who want to do concrete things to imp roe the situation. This last point is the kicker – anyone can yell a bit, but doing actual projects is a lot harder. We are trying to the use the features of the Net that have made it so successful, its openness and its innovation culture, to find ways to do things more freely.

The bar camp is for people to come and contribute ideas, meet some fantastic people, and just maybe get energized enough to actually do stuff. There will be sessions through the day starting at 10am (best get get there a bit early) and going on until an after party, starting around 4:30.

There are going to be some very cool people there. And, you never know, we just might make a difference! Come if you want to be part of that.

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.

The results are quite interesting. You can read the report here. InternetNZ is asking for comments on the report – please send them some if you have any.

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!

From time to time, telcos drop these charges, often by quite a large margin, then pat themselves on the back. Just try working out what the charges are in gigabytes, not the megabytes they always quote, and see how they stack up against what you pay at home.

Why should you have to pay more when you go overseas? When you take your mobile to the UK, say, and use data, the mobile telco you are connected to in the UK ships that data back to New Zealand for your home telco to put it onto the Internet here. That’s bonkers, and its part of the reason why its all so expensive. What *should* happen is that local mobile companies wherever you are should just connect you to the Internet for a decent price, i.e. whatever they charge their own customers plus a percentage to reflect the cost of billing it back. I’m not holding my breath on this.

Anyway, that’s not what this article is about. It’s about how to avoid paying these insane charges.
While international data roaming prices remain unaffordable we need a way to make all those shiny gadgets that need Internet access work when traveling without needing a mortgage to pay for it. Here’s what worked for me.

Having several machines with me – laptop, iPad, Kindle, iPhone – I wanted a way to make them all work. So, whatever solution I came up with had to connect them all to the Internet as and when I wanted to. The way I would normally manage that is by using the personal wi-fi hotspot feature on the iPhone. (That feature came in the last major iOS upgrade; before that I would tether the phone to the laptop and run the laptop as a hotspot. Messier but doable.) The problem with doing this overseas, of course, is that it’s going to need international data roaming turned on. Either that, or I put a local SIM in the phone and lose access to the phone calls and texts that come in to my New Zealand number.

iPhones are not the only phones that can provide a hotspot. Androids do it well, for instance. And 2 Degrees were selling a cheapish Android smartphone. I bought it, set up the Android’s wi-fi hotspot, then took it with me to the UK. As soon as I got off the plane I bought a data-only SIM from Vodafone for 10 pounds. I chose Vodafone rather than, say, Orange simply because it was the first mobile shop I encountered. Not very scientific, but it worked.

I could have bought a mobile broadband stick for slightly less than the Android phone. I opted to get the phone because it gives me a backup handset if I ever need one, and because I got some experience with Android that way.

Anyway, the whole thing worked well. All my devices could use the wi-fi hotspot. I had a car charger for the Android phone with me and left it running when we were driving (not for the driver’s use!). Emails were sent and received, the web was surfed, Twitter was tweeted and Google Maps was a useful as ever. There were a couple of “learning experiences”, though:

• Running a hot spot chews through phone battery. If you go out walking with it, you either need to turn it off and just turn it on when you need it, or face three-hour battery life.

• Don’t assume that 3G is everywhere in the UK. Admittedly I was in some fairly remote areas, but I found that I was getting very low speed sometimes, to the extent that the web was barely usable. THis wasn’t a problem in the cities.

All in all, it was a good way to take the Internet with me while avoiding stupid roaming charges. But I shouldn’t have to go these lengths. I look forward to the day when there is sane pricing for data roaming.

Yes, there needs to be balance between rights holders and ordinary Internet users. Yadda yadda yadda, we’ve been through the arguments so many times before. This Bill, now an Act, was hugely skewed towards the companies that sit between us and creative artists – check out InternetNZ’s Vikram Kumar or tech journalist Juha Saarinen for more detail.

But that’s not what has really, really annoyed me as well as just about every NZer under 30.
What has really got me going here is the total disregard, no, let’s call it what it is, contempt for the rights of ordinary New Zealanders. Voters, you know? Perhaps parliamentarians don’t think people a generation down from them deserve to have their rights considered. Certainly, the members debating it (and, let’s be clear, any high school debate would have left that so-called debate in the dust) displayed *no* understanding of the issue. Check out National’s Melissa Lee, who weighed in against file sharing the day after she used Twitter to thank a friend for copying music for her. Or Katrina Shanks, who wants to be my local MP but is so far up the National list that she obviously doesn’t have to worry about her seat. Or the National MP who described the Internet as Skynet, the evil enemy in the Terminator films. Perhaps he knows something we don’t, but watching him in action I doubt it. Only Gareth Hughes of the Greens even seemed to understand what the debate was about.

This whole thing was rammed through under the emergency provisions being used for Christchurch Earthquake recovery. That’s right, your rights were being given away to multinational companies in the name of the biggest natural disaster in New Zealand in living memory. If that’s not cynical, I don’t know what is.

But it’s not just National who voted for this thing. According to Radio New Zealand, only the Greens and two independent MPs voted against it. Labour said that it had done a deal with National to reduce the worst parts of the previous Copyright Bill – and it had – but it has still voted for something that disenfranchises the majority of its voters. Peter Dunne who opposed the previous law voted for this one. Shame on you, Peter! Maori Party – what are you going to tell your people when they get their Internet cut off? ACT – well, ACT even voted against the anti-spam act so their position is no surprise. Jim Anderton – the ordinary people of Christchurch will be ashamed of you.

Ultimately, this kind of behaviour can only lead to disillusionment with the political system. I’m proud of the open system we have in New Zealand, but abuses like this one shake my faith in it. Perhaps we are no better than other countries where policies seem to be bought by well-heeled lobbyists. Faced with choices like this, why should the next generation of potential voters even bother?

I hope the generation below me – the people who have been contacting me in droves for the last few days, unable to believe that their Parliament could do anything so contemptible – will remain engaged and vote them out. That’s what elections are for.

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.

This article sets out the thinking I’ll be basing my talk on. And here is the Prezi I’ll be using.

This is an article about how we, the human species, deal with finite limits. There are finite resource limits all around us but, because they are large, we tend to ignore them. When we come up against limits we need to find a way to allocate the limited sources. We have a name for the study of resource allocation: economics.

It’s fashionable – and I’ve been guilty of this myself – to rubbish economics as the “dismal science”, or as a collection of fantasies about human motivation that have to be taken as an article of faith. Douglas Adams was merciless when describing a non-existent place as a “fantasy that people tell their children about at might if they want them to grow up to become economists”. Even the great economist JK Galbraith said that “economics is important, but chiefly as a source of employment for economists”. Some economists couch their results in highly mathematical language which, some might say, conceals the underlying fact that people just don’t behave in the way that economists assume they will. There’s little doubt that academic economics has been used to justify ideological prejudices with bad outcomes for many people.

Even so, there are many useful truths lurking in the economics syllabus. One of them is about how we behave when there are a mixture of public and private resources. It’s called the Tragedy of the Commons. Let’s try a little thought experiment: you live in an Scottish village about three hundred years ago. You and all your neighbours are small farmers. You feed your family through agriculture, maybe a few sheep and cattle, and you trade your surplus for the things you can’t grow. You and your neighbours each have a little land that was left to you by your fathers, and there is some common land that is available for all villagers to use as they wish. Which land do you graze your animals on?

A second’s reflection should convince you that you should graze your animals on the common land until it’s completely grazed out, then switch to using your own land. And that’s what happens, of course. Unless some kind of authority – a village council say, or a local lord – regulates access to the commons, that land becomes rapidly degraded and not fit for use. This is the tragedy of the commons – that without some controls, a finite resource gets overused even when other private resources are available.

We have evolved a very natural-seeming concept which deal with the tragedy of the commons. It’s called: “property”. It’s a way of dealing with the problems of finite resources. The notion is that people will look after something they own and depend upon, and that by enforcing property rights they can keep others from overusing it and degrading it. That’s quite important – this only works if you can prevent others from using it. There are other ways – a third party like a state or a local lord can hold the land in trust for all and allocate access to it on some basis it determines. You’ll notice I have just described capitalism and communism respectively – these both stand or fail for other reasons, but they are valid ways of protecting a finite resource.

Returning to our thought experiment – the poor use of the commons was a real problem, and what tended to happen was something called the enclosures, in which subsistence farmers were forced off their land which was sequestrated by big landlords. It happened most recently in Scotland and Ireland, but it also happened in England some centuries earlier. It was horribly unjust, but it did lead to far more efficient use of resources, partly because it allowed land to be better managed, and partly because it gave economies of scale – one tractor can cover a lot of land – and of scope, where it makes sense to grow the things you are good at and trade them for the things that others are better at. Without that, none of us in New Zealand would ever eat a banana.

It also helped us avoid the Malthusian catastrophe. In the mid-nineteenth century Thomas Malthus predicted dire starvation around the world. He did this by projecting the population increase and noting that it would overwhelm the food supply. In fact, the food supply has increased geometrically along with the population, due mainly to improved agricultural technology – and that wouldn’t have been possible without large-scale ownership of land.

There’s a much more brutal example of the tragedy of the commons – Easter Island. Everybody knows Easter as the island covered in stone heads. How they got there is quite amazing. Easter is very isolated. It’s about five hours flying time from anywhere. It’s not a big island – from the top of the largest hill you can see the sea all round.

Easter was settled by Polynesians a few centuries ago. At the time it had a very poor biota, no grass for instance and very few edible plants. The people mainly ate a diet of fish.

As is common in Polynesian societies, the settlers were divided into iwi, each with a ruling family and a chief. They vied with each other for prestige, or mana. The way in which you got mana for your iwi was to construct statues of your ancestors, from the plentiful volcanic rock, and – this is important – move them to the coastline where they could face the sea. The only way to move them from the quarry where they were made was by using tree trunks as rollers.

There are quite a lot of the statues, called moai, on the island – hundreds at least. They are pretty big, ranging from two to four metres tall. Moving each of them would have consumed the trunks of many trees. You can see what would have happened – the islanders used all the trees, which led to a disaster. Suddenly they had no way to build boats which they needed to catch fish. They couldn’t just leave the island for the same reason. There was starvation, warfare and a population crash. When Europeans found the island there were very few people living on it in a poor state of health due to bad diet.

My point here is that people who cut down the last trees would have know what they were doing. They would have known that their action would lead to starvation and chaos. Yet, it was the logical course – the only sensible thing to do. The person who cut down the last tree would have said: if I don’t do this, someone else will, and we will still all starve but someone else will get the mana. Cutting down the last tree was a rational response if you had no way to protect the shared resource.

We are facing resource limits today. Atmospheric carbon, tuna and oil are all examples of things which we can only use a finite amount of per year, or in the case of fossil fuels, a finite amount ever. But, you don’t have to accept anthropogenic climate change to accept my main point: that we don’t have a way, as a species, of dealing with limits. There are lots of limits. Unless that is, you believe, like US Representative John Shimkus that none of these limits threaten us because God has already set out how the world will end and that a flood isn’t part of it. Scary, isn’t it. But he rather proves my point. You only need some, a few, one person or country to break the deal and you are back to the Easter Island situation where the logical thing to do is cheat at the cost of the whole of humanity.

As an aside, there are many resources that are not limited. Ideas, creativity, and software are examples of things that cost nothing to duplicate, to publish, to broadcast widely. Yet we devote a lot of effort into controlling copying. Real resources get consumed trying to prevent copying things that would cost nothing to copy. We use the term “intellectual property” to cover a whole range of constructs from software patents to rights over plant varieties, yet these so-called properties don’t have the main characteristic of property – if I take your idea, instead of you losing your idea we now both have a copy. Something new has been created! In economists’ jargon, intellectual property is “non-rivalrous”. Or to quote Thomas Jefferson: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” Calling it property is flat out wrong.

We have negotiated international IP treaties to control illegal copying, but we have failed to negotiate treaties on carbon and tuna. We have a problem.

But, you can say, why didn’t Malthus come true? Because of technology. Technology has got us into these scrapes; it can get us out. Maybe it can, maybe it can’t. We have a variety of limits we are running up against and we don’t have a social or economic mechanism for managing them. People use the term “voodoo economics” – what we are really seeing here is more like “Cthulhu economics”.

What options do we have to deal with the finite limits we are increasingly hitting? Here’s a few:

1. World government – unlikely to be popular just about anywhere. See how even a small transfer of power from the UK government to the EU is resisted. And, can you imagine the US signing
2. Space travel – could be good for two reasons, one because it can bring resources back to our planet, and the other because it can get some people off the planet to start wrecking a new one. Unlikely again because even getting to Mars would cost a quarter of the Iraq war budget and I don’t see anyone paying that.
3. A treaty and a protocol that applies to all resource limits as they become an issue. Good luck with that, but it may be our best hope.

Postscript: to read more about this, start with Jared Diamond’s excellent Guns, Germs and Steel. And think!

One 17 year old’s opinion on this phone may be somewhat redundant, I don’t pretend to be the target market for a phone this expensive (possibly attributing to my ogling when being handed this for a play by my father?). But from the perspective of one who’s owned many Nokias and an iPod Touch, this phone seems to be a mix of the two with money thrown at it. So I’ll assume that you, reader of this post, who almost certainly spends more than $10 a month on their phone don’t really mind about spending a bit of money on some data. Not that I pretend to be an expert on data pricing.

Seeing as I have just spent 114 words outlining why I am completely unsuited to providing my opinion on this phone, I will now proceed to give it. In terms of hardware I can find no fault with it. It has a few buttons that are easy to grasp, but relies predominantly on its touch screen as an interface. The screen seems to be as good, if not better than my iPod, and it has a 4.1 megapixel camera. The Windows-driven interface is also easily manageable, their ‘tiles’ approach seems to work effectively, and maneuvering between the phone’s functions is easy and efficient.

The Internet user will also find that their address book is integrated with Facebook, and I would guess heaps of other stuff which my teenage phone experience has warranted little exposure to.

However, I still find myself maintaining my initial judgement of this phone, that the software, after a harsh upbringing in an orphanage, has been adopted into the hardware’s family, unlike with an iPhone where the components seem to be blood brothers. Oh please, elaborate on your confusing comparison I hear you ask. Very well. (i’m drunk on power by this stage.) Many of the phone’s menus and titles don’t fit, or are just a little too small for the screen, with seemingly random areas of blank screen space for no apparent reason. Stupid. Also, this may sound typical of someone who has grown up on Macs [the computers, not the beer -Ed], but the ‘Windows’ factor becomes apparent sooner rather than later. I have found myself turning to Google far too often to solve my problems, with a depressing rate of success. In this way (and many others) the phone seems more restrictive than the iPhone, and indeed it would be hard to not view the iPhone as more varied.

Thanks for taking the time to read this uncomprehensive (and in hindsight shockingly pretentious) report on my time with this phone. In conclusion, This phone seems to be good at being a phone, and I’m sure if you wanted to fork out around $900 for it, it could make your telephonic experience easy and simple. Comparing it to an iPhone seems harsh, despite them being in the same price bracket, and my Mac experience makes me question why you would buy one over an iPhone, but i’m sure Windows users will quite justifiably belittle this opinion. Whatever, man.