Curated computing is no substitute for the personal and handmade | Cory Doctorow
Bespoke computing experiences promise a pipe dream of safety and beauty – but the real delight lies in making your own choices The launch of the iPad and the general success of mobile device app stores has created a buzzword frenzy for "curated" computing – computing experiences where software and wallpaper and attendant foofaraw for your device are hand-picked for your pleasure. In theory, this creates an aesthetically uniform, and above all safe and easy, computing environment, as the curators see to it that only the very prettiest, easiest-to-use and most virus-free apps show up in the store. I'm all for it. After all, I've spent the past 10 years co-curating Boing Boing , a place where my business-partners and I pick the websites that interest us the most and assemble them into a kind of deep, wide, searchable catalogue of things that you should know, do, and marvel at. We've recently launched a store, the Boing Boing Bazaar, consisting of the most interesting inventions, clothing, gadgets, decor, and assorted gubbins that our readers have created, as picked by us. My Twitter account mostly consists of retweets from other twitterers – my collection of the best tweets I've seen today. I am a born curator, and have spent my life amassing collections and showing them off. But there's something important to note about all these curatorial roles I enjoy: none of them are coercive. No one forces you to read Boing Boing, and if you do, there's nothing that prevents you from reading another weblog (or a couple hundred other weblogs). Order as many gizmos as you'd like from the Boing Boing Bazaar, we'll never tell you that you can't fill your knick-knack shelves from anyone else's curated wunderkammer . Follow me on Twitter if it pleases you, and feel free to follow anyone else you find interesting. The beauty of noncoercive curation is that there are so many reasons we value things, it's really impossible to imagine that any one place will serve as a one-stop shop for our needs. Two categories in particular won't ever be fulfilled by a curator: first, the personal. No curator is likely to post pictures of my family, videos of my daughter, notes from my wife, stories I wrote in my adolescence that my mum's recovered from a carton in the basement. My own mediascape includes lots of this stuff, and it is every bit as compelling and fulfilling as the slickest, most artistic works that show up in the professional streams.
See the rest here:
Curated computing is no substitute for the personal and handmade | Cory Doctorow
Steve Ballmer | MediaGuardian 100 2010
Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer slides down the MediaGuardian 100 as the software giant is overtaken by Google and Apple Job: chief executive, Microsoft Age: 54 Industry: digital media Turnover: $58.44bn Staff: 88,180 Worth: $13.3bn 2009 ranking: 5 "We have only one way to go, and it's up, baby. Up, up, up!" said Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer two years ago. Now it feels like he's playing catch-up, catch-up, catch-up. Ballmer's slide down the MediaGuardian 100 is not to be dismissive of a company with a market capitalisation of more than $200bn. But it is a reflection of how the software giant has fallen in the pecking order, superseded first by Google and now by Apple, whose own market cap exceeded Microsoft for the first time this year. But it's not all about the numbers. It's also about perception. No one wakes up thinking "What will Steve Ballmer do today?" They do with Steve Jobs. Well, some people do. Ballmer fought a rearguard action against Google with the launch of Microsoft's search engine Bing . His company has also fallen behind Apple and Google in the smartphone market. The Microsoft boss dismissed the iPhone at its launch in 2007 as having " no chance ". Now it finds its core territory – the PC – under threat from tablets such as the iPad. " The race is on ," said Ballmer. " We've got great long-term optimism. " Critics of his company may suggest he needs it. Microsoft's revenues went into decline last year for the first time in its 34-year history, and it embarked on a cost-cutting programme that will see 5,000 jobs go around the world. The company's Office software and Windows operating system, which runs on more than 90% of the world's PCs, continue to do huge business, but its online services division including search, Hotmail and its "Live" services have racked up huge losses , and there were embarrassing technical problems with its XBox 360 games machine. The debate about the number one position in this year's MediaGuardian 100 was all about Apple and Google; Microsoft did not even come into it. "Ballmer
Original post:
Steve Ballmer | MediaGuardian 100 2010
David Cope: ‘You pushed the button and out came hundreds and thousands of sonatas’
Composer David Cope has spent the last 30 years teaching computers to create classical music • Hear an example from David Cope's Emily Howell project • Download an Emmy Bach-style invention Where does music come from? If pressed on this question, many of us would say it comes from the "soul", or from the "heart" of the person who composed it. That music is the clearest expression of human emotion, one person to another; that certain chords, certain melodies seem to communicate a whole language of feeling. When we listen to a Beethoven symphony or a Chopin sonata, we are hearing, we might say, the authentic expression of the composer's inner harmonies and discords, carried magically across the centuries. Could we ever be so moved by a piece of music written by a computer? We'd probably like to think not. David Cope, emeritus professor of music at the University of California, Santa Cruz, would beg to differ. "The question," Cope tells me, "isn't if computers possess a soul, but if we possess one." Cope, now 69, has devoted the past 30 years of his life to what amounts to an obsessive examination of that particular question. He began, almost by default, back in 1980, with a severe case of writer's block. One of America's most acclaimed young composers, whose music had been performed at Carnegie Hall, and won great critical praise, Cope had been commissioned to write an opera. For weeks and months he sat at his piano, or stared at a blank piece of sheet music; nothing came. He had a wife and four children to support. In desperation he started playing with a computer. What he found there changed his life and, perhaps, the course of musical history. Cope had long held the belief that all music was essentially inspired plagiarism. The great composers absorbed the music that had gone before them and their brains "recombined" melodies and phrases in distinctive, sometimes traceable, ways. We all have an internal database of musical reference; composers were those with the ability to manipulate it in new patterns. With the aid of an early computer, he realised he could put this to the test.
See the original post here:
David Cope: 'You pushed the button and out came hundreds and thousands of sonatas'
Britons admit they just can’t live without home internet
Domestic web connection joins holidays, mobile phones and fridge-freezer among necessities of modern life, Joseph Rowntree Foundation finds A computer and an internet connection at home are no longer viewed as luxuries but as essentials, according to research published today. The latest Minimum Income Standard report released by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the social research charity, gauges what members of the public think people need to achieve a "socially acceptable standard of living". Participants decided that a computer and internet access at home were now vital for all working-age households to enable people "to participate in society", both to access job opportunities and to get discounts on services. The Minimum Income Standard differs from the government's official poverty line (which is set at 60% of the median income) because it looks beyond money and focuses on what a household has to budget for. It is an attempt to determine what, aside from physical necessities such as food, warmth and shelter, people need to allow them to feel part of society. Participants confirmed that fridge-freezers, DVD players and mobile phones are "such an integral part of modern life that everyone should be able to afford them". Everyone should have enough money to allow them to buy birthday presents and to go on a week's holiday a year (not abroad), they said. A car, however, is not seen as essential: it was judged that a minimum budget should cover only public transport. The inclusion of a computer and internet connection echoes the government's drive to get more people online – a campaign motivated partly by the desire to streamline public services and partly by a drive to foster digital inclusion. The Race Online 2012 strategy calculates that 10 million people in the UK have never been online – four million are among the country's most socially excluded, it says. The Rowntree paper reveals that a single person needs to earn at least £14,400 before tax to afford a basic but acceptable standard of living. A couple with two children would need £29,200. Because the price of food, council tax and public transport have outstripped official inflation, families on a low income have seen their benefits dwindle. The report calculates a single person whose income had risen by only the official inflation rate would have experienced a 10% fall in his or her standard of living over the past decade
Original post:
Britons admit they just can't live without home internet
Tech Weekly podcast: iPhone 4, Like-jacking and searching with Wolfram Alpha
Aleks Krotoski and Charles Arthur welcome Tom Watson MP in this week's lively Tech Weekly discussion about open data, the newest iPhone announcement from Apple, and the most recent problems plaguing social network Facebook. Watson, who was instrumental in helping the previous Labour government understand the value of opening up its public records, shares his view on the reasons why openness should be valued – and what he had to do to convince his political colleagues. Charles Arthur speaks with Wolfram Alpha creator Conrad Wolfram about one of the potential applications of the government data, and how more like this should be released for the benefit of his service – and of mankind. Charles also reveals the specs of the newest handset in the Apple iPhone lineup, announced on Monday. But how did the leak of a prototype affect the launch? The team also discusses Steve Jobs' visions of the future, and how similar they are to Microsoft. Finally, we hear how to avoid being "likejacked", or scammed by hackers who've taken hold of a new Facebook feature that allows you to share where on the web you've been with your social network friends. Don't forget to ... • Comment below • Mail us at tech@guardian.co.uk • Get our Twitter feed for programme updates • Join our Facebook group • See our pics on Flickr /Post your tech pics Aleks Krotoski Charles Arthur Scott Cawley
Here is the original post:
Tech Weekly podcast: iPhone 4, Like-jacking and searching with Wolfram Alpha
Jakob Nielsen critiques the iPad’s usability failings
Usability guru Jakob Nielsen has just published a report on the iPad, and thinks Apple should allow more diversity on its platforms – including the option for Adobe Flash Apple's iPad has usability problems , and shows an "overemphasis on aesthetics", according to usability guru Dr Jakob Nielsen, who has just published a free 93-page report on iPad usability. He was in London last month where his company, Nielsen Norman Group , was holding a usability conference. Since he had an iPad in his hotel room, I asked him how well it had turned out. "In some ways, less well than I expected," he said. "There were really a lot of usability problems in this first-generation of iPad applications. It's often quite difficult for people to discover what they have to do because the options are not very visible. I have to say of both the device itself and the content, it's very attractive, which is good.
Read the rest here:
Jakob Nielsen critiques the iPad's usability failings
Labour candidates must address the liberty deficit | Henry Porter
The failures of the database state have been laid bare, but most of the leadership candidates don't see where Labour went wrong The liberty deficit left by the last government – the gap between the freedom enjoyed by UK citizens in 1997 and what was left in 2010 – is not something that Labour has got its head round yet. The candidates in the leadership election talk about reconnecting with the public, but Balls, Burnham and the Milibands simply don't grasp that they have effectively excluded themselves from the only liberal-progressive act in town. Diane Abbott gets it , but the standard male products of the New Labour curia have got a long way to go. One reason they wrote themselves out of the picture appears in a study from the Centre for Technology Policy Research at the LSE, which is summarised by Ian Grant in Computer Weekly this week. The LSE thinktank concludes : "Despite a spend of as much as £21bn (a year) on public sector IT, it is difficult to find any compelling examples of direct productivity gains and improved public services." Much of the money was spent on intrusive databases – last year, I estimated a total of well over £33bn. We were told it was necessary to give up our personal information to allow the joined-up delivery of services. Prospect magazine praised the programme and declared that personal data was like a tax that we owed to the state; that privacy was luxury we could no longer afford in the modern era. Transformational Government , as the programme was known, was driven by a simple faith in operational savings that were entirely theoretical – "an anachronistic and ultimately ineffective approach from which the UK has only recently begun to distance itself". The following are the crucial lines from Ian Grant's report: "Transformational Government [used an] outdated, 20th-century approach of imposed command and control enabled by large central databases. It distracted government from its own policy aspirations and ignored where the technology of the internet age was heading – towards more localised, autonomous, distributed and consumer-responsive services built around common technical standards." In other words, the statism that demanded we give up personal data and submit to the surveillance society not only had few tangible benefits and was a vast waste of money, but was based on decidedly old thinking that was entirely unsuitable to the internet age
Go here to see the original:
Labour candidates must address the liberty deficit | Henry Porter
Extradition of computer hacker Gary McKinnon put on hold
Theresa May agrees adjournment of judicial review to consider whether Gary McKinnon is fit to be extradited to US The extradition of the computer hacker Gary McKinnon has been put on hold after the home secretary, Theresa May, agreed to an adjournment of a judicial review that was supposed to start within days. The move will allow May to begin formal consideration of the medical evidence to see whether McKinnon is fit to be extradited. If it is established that he cannot be allowed to go, it paves the way for a prosecution in the UK. A Home Office spokesperson said: "The home secretary has considered the proposal from Gary McKinnon's legal team and has agreed an adjournment should be sought. An application to the court is being made today." McKinnon's lawyer, Karen Todner, said she hoped May would make a decision on whether he was fit to be extradited in a matter of weeks. Todner said: "The secretary of state, having recently taken office and having received further representations from the claimant's representatives, wishes to have appropriate time fully to consider the issues in the case." She said she hoped the decision was "a signal of a more compassionate and caring home secretary". McKinnon's lawyers were granted permission for a judicial review last week – having failed to win one last year – into whether a decision by the former home secretary Alan Johnson to allow extradition and trial in the US breached McKinnon's human rights. The judicial review was supposed to start next week and was virtually a last throw of the legal dice. Its adjournment allows May to cast a fresh eye on what has turned into a cause celebre, and to make a close examination of the extradition agreement between the US and the UK. Legal experts said May's main difficulty would be to override her Home Office advisers. "They will, perhaps, tell their minister that if she reverses the [Jacqui] Smith-Johnson decision, the Americans might take her to court for judicial review. But this is unreal: the Obama administration is unlikely to challenge, on behalf of a local state prosecutor, a decision of the new British government," Geoffrey Robertson QC wrote on the Guardian's Comment is free website, this week
Here is the original:
Extradition of computer hacker Gary McKinnon put on hold
Facebook ’sexiest video’ malware spreading virally, warn experts
Fake video installs adware – while Microsoft compares its Internet Explorer 6 to 'nine-year-old milk' and urges upgrade If you get a posting on your Facebook wall telling you "this is without doubt the sexiest video ever! 
:P :P" which seems to be accompanied by a video titled "Candid Camera Prank [HQ]" then don't click on the video: it's a lead-in to malware. Clicking the link will take you to what seems like a Facebook application which then tells you that your video player is out of date – and encourages you to download a file. If you do, then the same "video" plus link gets posted using your avatar to al your friends on Facebook -– meaning it is spreading virally. It's not clear at present whether Facebook has acted to halt it. You should, however, expect that it will mutate in the coming hours/days (depending on how determined the virus writer is), so it might not be exactly that message or video frame. The key element in the attack is that it tells you to download a file. At Sophos, Graham Cluley notes that: "Judging by the number of messages posted on Facebook, thousands of people received this attack. If you were one of them, you should scan your computer with an up-to-date anti-virus, change your passwords, review your Facebook application settings, and learn not to be so quick as to fall for a simple social engineering trick like this in future." The file seems to install a piece of adware called Hotbar , which thus generates revenue for the malware writer. (About Hotbar: "displays a dynamic toolbar and targeted pop-up ads based on its monitoring of Web-browsing activity. The toolbar appears in Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer. The toolbar contains buttons that can change depending on the current Web page and keywords on the page. Clicking a button on the toolbar may open an advertiser Web site or paid search site. Hotbar also installs graphical skins for Internet Explorer, Outlook, and Outlook Express
View post:
Facebook 'sexiest video' malware spreading virally, warn experts
Get plugged in with Pogoplug | Technophile
The Pogoplug lets you share files from your home or office all across the web to yourself or a group you nominate You're working in the office, but that vital file that you need to complete the Powerpoint presentation with which you're going to anaesthetise the board this afternoon is at home! Oh noes! What can you do? If you've hooked yourself up with Pogoplug, no problem: simply go to its site and you'll be able to log in and pull down the file directly from your home network. Always assuming, that is, that you took the trouble before you left home to hook the USB drive with that vital file to the Pogoplug itself. So actually the scenario might not work. Still, it shows you the principle of the device, which is a personal file server that works across your home firewall and router to offer password-protected access to files connected to it
Originally posted here:
Get plugged in with Pogoplug | Technophile