Posts tagged Four
All Four GOP Presidential Candidates Now Oppose SOPA/PIPA
Jan 20th
The four leading presidential candidates voiced opposition to the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP Acts in a televised debate Thursday. The most forceful stance may have come from frontrunner Mitt Romney, who called the bill written by one of his key backers a threat to freedom of speech.
“The truth of the matter is the law as written is far too intrusive, far too expansive,” Romney said. “It would have a depressing impact on one of the fastest growing industries… I’m standing for freedom.”
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SOPA, the House version of the bill, was written by House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, who is one of Romney’s biggest backers and endorsed the former Massachusetts governor for president in October. SOPA and its Senate counterpart, PIPA, would block access to sites accused of violating U.S. copyright laws. The measure has been called Draconian by opponents who say it would fundamentally change the free flow of information across the Internet. Proponents, ranging from the NBA to Universal, say the measure is needed.
Opposition by the Republican presidential candidates comes as overall GOP support for the measure deteriorates, which has started to push the measure towards partisan lines and has increasingly forced Democrats to take the defensive in moving the legislation forward. That’s a change from earlier this month, when none of the Republican presidential candidates had taken a firm position on SOPA.
In addition to Romney’s denouncement of the bill, the other three candidates also made anti-SOPA comments in Thursday’s debate:
- Newt Gingrich said the bill, as written, censors the Internet. “The idea that we’re going to preemptively have the government start censoring the Internet on behalf of giant corporations’ economic interests strikes me as exactly the wrong thing to do,” he said.
- Ron Paul said SOPA and PIPA threaten freedom. “”This bill is not going to pass but watch out for next one, and I am pleased that the attitude is sort of mellowed up here, because the Republicans unfortunately have been on the wrong side of this issue,” he said.
- Rick Santorum may have been the least commital. While Santorum took the populist stance of opposing SOPA and PIPA, he was quick to add the Internet is not somewhere “where anyone can do anything they want.”
The Obama administration, meanwhile, has said it has reservations about the way the law is currently written. But in a statement Saturday, the White House said it remains committed to giving law enforcement new tools to fight online piracy.
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore
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The Four Horsemen of the General Purpose Computing Apocalypse
Jan 13th
Cory Doctorow’s "keynote to the Chaos Computer Congress" and follow-up post (Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing) on BoingBoing raise the alarm about keeping the Internet and PC "free and open." Doctorow makes excellent points and if you haven’t watched the keynote or read his essay, you should do so right away.
I’m generally in agreement with Doctorow, but I’m not really sure that he goes quite far enough with Lockdown. Doctorow’s focus on the copyright war we’re facing with things like SOPA and PROTECT-IP is well warranted, but I’m not sure it covers everything.
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The threat to general purpose computing goes beyond legislation. As I see it, we have at least four major threats to general purpose computing:
- Legislation
- Cloud Computing
- Computing Appliances
- Consumer Indifference
Legislation
Doctorow covers legislation pretty neatly, so I’m not sure there’s much need to go further. But, as he says in Lockdown, "copyright wars are just the beta version of a long coming war on computation." However, Doctorow limits most of his discussion to legislation that might come from parties hostile to general purpose computing.
In many ways, general purpose computing and free/open source software (FOSS) go hand in hand. You can’t really make the most of general purpose computing without FOSS. The fact is that we’re seeing a number of other forces that threaten general purpose computing and FOSS, and they’re not all intentional.
Cloud Computing
Some free software advocates have been warning against cloud computing for some time. While I don’t subscribe to the idea that cloud computing is to be completely avoided, it is worth considering the impact of cloud services on general purpose computing.
By definition, cloud services place limits on a user’s ability to perform general purpose computing. If you’re using a IaaS platform like Amazon Web Services or OpenStack, you’re facing the least amount of restriction. But even with an IaaS, you have limits. Some operating systems may not be available for your IaaS. You may not be able to run some types of services. You cannot modify the hardware, and so on.
As you go up the stack to PaaS and SaaS offerings, you encounter more limits that take users further and further away from general purpose computing. You can write a wide variety of applications for a PaaS like Engine Yard or Heroku, but only using the tools offered and within the constraints of the platforms.
Cloud computing is also a challenge for FOSS. While some of the platforms are built on FOSS or may even be fully open, most have a lot of non-free software that users are unable to examine, modify or distribute outside the service provider.
Using a SaaS platform, you have even less control and flexibility, to the point that most SaaS offerings are essentially appliances rather than computing platforms. Data goes in, data comes out, black box in the middle that users don’t control at all.
Computing Appliances
Doctorow touches on computing appliances briefly in Lockdown, but primarily speaks to the legislative issues related to computing appliances. Specifically, the issues that crop up when manufacturers of computing appliances decide they need legislation to ensure that their appliances are not used for general purpose computing.
For the vast majority of users, restricted computing appliances are just fine. The loss of freedom and functionality that concerns me and folks like Doctorow is of little concern to most users. So what if an iPhone or iPad isn’t a general purpose computer? It’s easy to use. It does what most users want. Why should they lobby for general purpose computer rights from their legislators when they don’t use them?
But legal restrictions are only one facet of the problem. Another part of the problem is the technological challenge that we face with computing appliances. We’re doing an increasing amount of computing using appliances that are capable of general purpose computing, but not designed or fully permitted to do so by their design.
Tablets, smartphones, set-top boxes that feature apps, game consoles and many other devices are likely to replace general-purpose computers for many households. There’s no legislation required here. Even if users can legally root an Android tablet or Roku to turn it into a general purpose computer, it doesn’t lessen the technical challenges. Whether the OS on a device meant as an appliance allows general-purpose computing, it may not be well-suited for the task.
Doctorow talks a bit about the rise of PCs, distributing software via floppies and sneakernet. The early days of computing demanded general purpose computers for users who wanted to play games or connect to the Internet. That’s not the case now.
Even our general purpose computers are starting to come with technical restrictions. Computers equipped with UEFI secure boot, which are expected this year, may in some cases not boot operating systems without the right keys. Apple is slowly but surely restricting apps that run on Mac OS X via its App Store. Granted, you can run whatever you want on Mac OS X that you download outside the App Store, but you have to wonder if that will always be the case.
Again, app stores provide special challenges for open source because of the restrictions on licensing. For instance, neither Microsoft or Apple allow copyleft licensing due to their Terms of Service for their respective app stores.
Consumer Indifference
And that brings me to the fourth issue that we really shouldn’t overlook, consumer indifference to general purpose computing. Doctorow notes that for the "vast majority of the world… ideas like Turing completeness and end-to-end are meaningless."
For the vast majority of users, restricted computing appliances are just fine. The loss of freedom and functionality that concerns me and folks like Doctorow is of little concern to most users. So what if an iPhone or iPad isn’t a general purpose computer? It’s easy to use. It does what most users want. Why should they lobby for general purpose computer rights from their legislators when they don’t use them?
Of course, general purpose computing is important to most users for the same reasons that FOSS is important. There’s an enormous loss of opportunity, especially for kids, in not having readily available general purpose computers. But it’s an abstraction to most users, and not something that they’re prepared to demand from the manufacturers or government.
It seems to me that the indifference from users is an even bigger challenge than legislative threats. Convince an NRA-sized voting bloc that any restriction on general purpose computing is a threat to society, and we’d be in good shape. But, at the moment, the vast majority of people just don’t care.
Doctorow says that we haven’t lost the war on general purpose computing, "but we have to win the copyright war first if we want to keep the Internet and the PC free and open." I don’t disagree that winning the copyright war is important, but the first priority needs to be convincing the public at large that general purpose computing is important in the first place. Failing that, we are always going to be fighting a losing battle.
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Four Things You Can Do With Inconclusive Split Tests
Jan 11th
There is a certain sound a teenager makes when confronted with a choice they aren’t interested in making. It is a sonic mix of indecision, ambivalence, condescension and that sound your finger makes when you pet a frog. It is less committal than a shrug, less positive than a…
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Three Out of Four Mobile Developers Writing for iOS First
Dec 13th
Android is making some big news at the end of the year. The platform is seeing a billion app downloads a month, it controls nearly 50% of the smartphone market, new devices are being released every week and Ice Cream Sandwich is starting to make its way into the hands of consumers. With everything that Android has going for it, you would think that it is the No. 1 app developer choice, right?
Not so fast. Mobile analytics company Flurry shows that new projects by developers are still dominated by iOS. Google chairman Eric Schmidt said last week that developers would be making apps for Android first by the middle of 2012. If that is going to be the case, the platform has a lot of catching up to do.
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In the last quarter of 2011, 73% of developers using Flurry’s analytics platform are starting new projects to iOS first. Android faired better earlier in the year, with more than a third of new projects. Flurry has 55,000 app publishers in its platform. For this study it researched 50,000 apps published in 2011. The company predicts that in 2011, a quarter of the apps downloaded from the Apple App Store and Android Market are powered by Flurry.
Flurry’s methodology:
- At Flurry, we track developer support across the platforms that compete for their commitment. When companies create new projects in Flurry Analytics, they download platform-specific SDKs for their apps. Since resources are limited, choices developers make to support a specific platform signal confidence, as they invest their R&D budget where they expect the greatest return. Further, because developers set up analytics several weeks before shipping their final apps, Flurry has a glimpse into the bets developers are making ahead of the market.
The good news for the entire mobile ecosystem is that more apps are being published for each platform every month. The last four to five months of 2011 has seen an explosion of apps to market, increasing by several times what had been seen before. We are seeing growth across all sectors of the mobile app ecosystem, from malware, app published daily, advertising impressions etc.
Developers make more money from iOS. Flurry says that developers tell it that they are making three to four times as much on Apple mobile devices. Flurry pulled sample apps from the top of the App Store and Android Market and found that, based on in-app purchases, iOS made a dollar for every 24-cents made by Android. Flurry blames part of this to the fact that Google Checkout has lower penetration than iTunes and the App Store. Apple captures every credit card of every person that can buy apps or music through the company. Google does not do that and while it does not hurt Google itself (because the company does not take a cut of Android Market sales), it seems to be hurting developers.
What do you think of Schmidt’s prognostication? Will developers be writing Android apps first by the middle of next year? How about we put a wager on it. By the time that the next CTIA conference rolls around in New Orleans next may, will you be writing Android first? Let us know in the comments.
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The Four Degrees of Separation on Facebook
Nov 22nd
New research sponsored by Facebook out of a Milan computer science university shows that the old saw of there being six degrees of separation is no longer accurate. Call it 4.7 degrees instead. The researchers used a random sampling of half a million Facebook users who were active in May 2011 and mapped their social graphs.
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There were two academic research papers that were posted last night. One of them looks at how many friends people have, and found that this distribution differs significantly from previous studies of large-scale social networks. The second paper discovered that the degrees of separation was a lot smaller than previously thought, and is growing smaller over time. Facebook claims it is the largest social networking study to date, and given their user population, that is probably accurate.
First up is this graph that plots the number of friends of each user against the “cumulative average distribution” on the Y-axis. This latter measurement shows the percentage of users who have less than the given number of friends. So you can see that 10% of the total Facebook population have less than 10 friends, and 50% have less than 100 friends. So much for friending envy. The distribution shows that the average friend count is 190 people. My personal goal has always been to have more friends than my 20-something daughter, but that probably is unattainable. Still, I guess I shouldn’t feel so bad that I am in the 90-something percentile, at least according to this analysis.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the distribution of the ages of your friends closely matches your own age. The red line in the graph below shows what the age distribution of your friends would be if were to follow a more random pattern.
The researchers used a 24-core CPU with 72 GB of RAM for one study and a 2,250-node Hadoop cluster for the other. Hadoop had its origins at Facebook, so that was quite appropriate. The post on Facebook Data’s site goes into more detail, and has links to the two academic papers, which go into much more detail. If that is too much to ponder, then consider the following graph:
I put together my own analysis using an Excel spreadsheet and fake data to come up with the pie chart. Here I posit that the types of lists of friends that I have already created for my own account are typical of the many millions of Facebook users. You tell me what you think.
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Four ways the SEO industry could rule the world – Econsultancy (blog)
Nov 17th
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Four ways the SEO industry could rule the world
Econsultancy (blog) SEO has changed beyond recognition over the last ten years. At one point SEO was an obscure hobby for geeks chatting to one another over Usenet. Then it became a cottage industry. Then SEO became a career prospect. Now it's a huge industry that … |
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Four ways the SEO industry could kill itself – Econsultancy (blog)
Nov 10th
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Four ways the SEO industry could kill itself
Econsultancy (blog) Many agencies are bucking the economic climate, budgets for SEO continue to grow and pretty much every decision maker on the client-side understands and appreciates the value of natural search. The SEO industry, however, is not immortal. … |
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Four Essential Components to Effective SEO – Business 2 Community
Sep 28th
 Business 2 Community |
Four Essential Components to Effective SEO
Business 2 Community Getting all the necessary components of good SEO strategy together for maximizing your results is easy in theory. But, implementing these tactical components so they all work together to achieve a seamless … |
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A Leading Internet Marketing Company Launches Four SEO Services Packages – Online PR News (press release)
Sep 20th
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A Leading Internet Marketing Company Launches Four SEO Services Packages
Online PR News (press release) WL Marketing, a leading Internet marketing firm is now offering all activities under four SEO services packages to make it easy for clients to order. Online PR News – 20-September-2011 –Texas,USA : WL Marketing has just announced that they are now … Tips for Buying the Best and Most Affordable Term Life Insurance Policy The SEO Agency Delivers Cost Effective Internet Marketing A Leading Internet Marketing Company Launches Four SEO Services Packages |
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