Technophile Monkey

I’m deleting my Facebook profile because Facebook, Inc. creates a very scary situation. And that’s even if you don’t use the privacy-abusing games on their platform.

What will happen when I’m no longer on Facebook? Will I disappear? Will my status messages be deleted when Facebook, Inc. deletes my profile, removing me from the memory (read: walls) of all my friends? Will there be people who refuse to communicate with me because I do not use Facebook?

What happens when those of you who stay there for now find your next social platform, after Facebook goes out of fashion? Will you invite me to it or will I be so far removed from your world by then you don’t consider me worthy?

My Facebook private messages. They are saved inside Facebook. I’m glad I never put anything inside that platform that I really need to save, but I might want a copy of my messages anyhow. There seems to be no easy way to do this other than giving some random stranger’s application read rights to your entire profile in order to pull a backup. And if I had anything private in my inbox, I’d be completely daft to do that.

As an aside: There’s a sort of workaround that uses a Firefox extension called Archive Facebook to pull a “dumb” HTML copy of your profile. It’s better than nothing, but getting this back into machine-readable form to import into e.g. an e-mail client is less than fun. And did I mention it’s taking several hours to do and takes thousands of requests to Facebook?

The alternative could be to register as Facebook developer and write your own application against the Facebook API to retrieve your data, but I’m not sure if most people would like to invest that much work.

But back to the sinister business. Why does Facebook, Inc. cling onto your personal data like that? Some people have analyzed why it’s so hard to get your own Facebook data back from the company. I’ll let you read their opinions directly instead of regurgitating them.

Anyhow, I’ll shoot my profile in the face now. Goodbye. It was sort of fun, but also sort of unnecessarily risky. I’ll jump back on the bandwagon when decentralized, encrypted, self-hosted, privacy-aware and standardized social network nodes come into fashion. Maybe next year sometime. I’ll surely get Diaspora’s source on September 15th and see if there’s anything I can help out with.

Until then you’ll have to read my idiotic mutterings on this blog and on IRCnet’s #linux, and you’ll have to get my photos at Flickr. Yeah, I know making people look in three different locations for one person is social suicide nowadays

If you feel all cheerful about killing yourself now (well, on Facebook), here’s the link to Facebook, Inc.’s account deletion request form.

It’s quite scary if a single company is not only in control of all delivery but also all storage of communications between people. Facebook, Inc. is turning into such a company. Yet they don’t have to abide by the same privacy laws that bind e.g. telecommunications companies like ISPs.

The Diaspora project is working on an alternative, decentralized social platform that gives control over your personal data back to you. I think that’s the right way to go. Even though you could argue social platforms like Facebook bring nothing new to the table (chat, instant messaging, photo sharing and blogging have existed long before Facebook came along), combining everything in one platform does have some advantages.

Diaspora sites can be hosted by yourself but then syndicated securely with other diaspora sites (seeds), so that each person not only controls where and how their data is stored, but also who can and who cannot see or receive it. If humanity needs such a social platform, this seems to be the right approach in my opinion.

So I’m pondering Facebook suicide, and erecting a Diaspora site as soon as it becomes usable, to see if it has the potential it seems to have.

Die Veränderungen in der Schweizerdeutschen Sprache aufzeichnen, ist doch auch ein schönes Hobby.

Ein meines Wissens neuer Import aus dem Hochdeutschen sind die Relativpronomen der/die/das. Im Alemannischen, oder wenigstens im Schweizerdeutschen, kannte man bis anhin nur das Relativpronomen “wo”. Ein Beispiel, das in meinen Augen richtig ist:

• Hochdeutsch: Der Mann, der mir die Brille verkauft hat.
• Schweizerdeutsch: Dr ma, wo miar d brilla verkauft hät.

Ich höre aber öfters von jungen Leuten solche Konstrukte: “I hola schnell min kolleg, der das besser kann”. Die übliche Formulierung wäre aber “I hola schnell min kolleg, wo das besser kann”. Ganz interessant war auch die Aussprache von “der”, es war effektiv “der”, wie im Hochdeutschen, nicht “dä”.

Dabei wird im Schweizerdeutschen das Geschlecht des Subjekts beim Relativpronomen überhaupt nicht unterschieden. Die Kollegin wäre auch eine gewesen, wo das besser kann. Die dem Hochdeutschen angeglichene Variante wäre aber sicher geschlechtsspezifisch herausgekommen: mini kollegin, dia das besser kann.

Schweizerdeutsch-Sprecher in der Leserschaft: Welche Relativpronomen benutzt ihr? Der/die/das oder wo?

Eine interessante Häufung von Deutschismen, lustigerweise habe ich alle davon in den letzten fünf Tagen gehört:

• “Welles wotsch? Das mit hüenlifleisch?”
• “Und denn bini mittem fahrrad gange go…”
• “Jo, mittem rad voll in gehsteig…”
• “Fahruswiiskontrolle.”

Schweizerdeutsch hat für mich einen Teil seines Charmes deshalb, weil man so viele schöne frankophone Einflüsse findet. Diese scheinen aber jetzt Germanismen zu weichen, die es bis anhin in unserer Sprache nicht gab. Wer die vier “Fehler” in den Sätzen nicht erkennt, ist entweder jung oder muss sich schämen

In the last few years, we’ve seen many typical computer applications move to phones, tablets and other portable devices with little computing power. This was accompanied by a “geekification of the nation”. Fifteen years ago, talking to other people using a keyboard was perceived as odd and geeky. Today, instant messaging, SMS and social networks like Facebook are the norm. This is a socio-technological paradigm shift, with both technology and social norms advancing in lockstep.

Now among rumors of Apple purchasing ARM (a specialist in designing processors with low power consumption), Microsoft looking for someone to port their systems to ARM-based servers, Google rumored to be interested in developing ARM-based servers and the iPad, all Android phones and almost everything in the mobile sector running on ARM, we might be witnessing another technology shift.

Up to this point, Intel’s x86 architecture has remained unchallenged as the de-facto standard for personal computing. Even though the base architecture is outdated, it has managed to keep up with the market through a lot of patching and gaffa-taping of new features.

Yes, Intel had a brief moment of horror when AMD’s AMD64 instruction set extension became the king of mainstream 64-bit computing, but that is long forgotten — the instructions were absorbed into Intel’s chips as x86_64. But Intel has never faced a challenge like the ARM one, the battle for the low-voltage processor market. So far, they can’t compete, not with the x86 instruction set; Atom processors are far too inefficient for the small devices that the (social) masses would use.

I believe it is again both a social and a technological evolution that will change the market. Without customers queuing up for iPads and iPhones, the ARM market would still be smaller. And people buying iPads and iPhones are not generally the biggest geeks, they’re your average technology users, or not even interested in technology at all. They don’t care which instruction set their device understands, they just want it to run smoothly and for a very long time on a single battery charge.

This is a big opportunity for the Linux kernel. This kernel has been running on ARM chips (and PPC, and SPARC, and MIPS, and…) for years and years, something that Microsoft can’t accomplish with their Windows kernel. Linux powers the Android operating system, it can even run on an iPhone. Next to purely technological aspects, the Linux and Free Software communities are very quick at embracing new social technologies, unlike many large corporations. This again feeds back into the whole “hey, I wanna be able to tweet from the toilet” social phenomenon, and that drives the development of new, mobile and social Free Software.

Don’t ask me why, and I surely don’t claim that I can connect the dots any better than other people, but I think that ARM + Linux + social mobile stuff are the harbingers of a significant change in computing that will happen in the next decade.

The fact that even many large players like Microsoft and Apple are now supporting more open standards instead of their own proprietary sandboxes is another element to all this. Could it be that the market will be more fairly split among the competition? 25% Microsoft, 25% Apple, 25% Google and the rest split between Free Software solutions?

It’s a very pretty idea.

Alex Brown’s blog posting illustrates nicely how, after making many beautiful promises of fixing their broken MS-OOXML format, Microsoft still fails to deliver.

You may remember how Microsoft used every dirty trick in the book, including ballot-stuffing, to force this “standard” down ISOs throat two years ago. In the meantime, many defects, large and small, were reported and Microsoft agreed to fix them, which never happened. MS-OOXML is an unimplementable monstrosity of a specification (6000 pages long) even without these defects. But with them, the whole situation becomes impossible. And some of the defects discussed might not even be errors at all, but deliberate attempts to break compatibility — these tactics are not unusual for Microsoft.

In my opinion the only way to rectify this would be to pass maintenance of MS-OOXML into the hands of an independent governing body. That would be sort of unfair, though. Microsoft implements and force-feeds us a clearly broken standard and we point out the defects. But it’s not Microsoft that has to fix them, it’s us? That’s not the way it should go.

If ISO had only maintained a stronger position when MS-OOXML went up for standardization, we might have instead put all this effort into improving a truly open standard such as OpenDocument (ODF). Now the defects reviews and meetings about MS-OOXML tie up valuable expert resources in the standards committees.

Maybe stealing a lot of time and sowing frustration inside ECMA and ISO was the whole point of MS-OOXML? You think that’s cynical and naïve, but the way things are going at the moment, might this not actually be a welcome byproduct for Microsoft? While the standards bodies are stalled, MS makes sure their broken implementation of their own broken standard is the only one that catches on. And boom, total market domination for Microsoft, all the while looking as if they are just supporting an “open standard”.

Well played.

To round this off, a quote from Brown on Microsoft’s engineers’ inability to implement even their own standards:

It is also a worrying commentary on the standards-savvyness of the Office developers that the first amateur attempts of part-time outsiders find problems with documents which Redmond’s internal QA processes have missed.

The EU has had a policy called the European Interoperability Framework, which to some extent defines how to apply open standards in order to improve IT interoperability.

There are, however, a few large companies in the IT sector that do not like interoperability. They would much prefer if the world remains incompatible so that they can profit from their own vendor lock-in schemes. Under the lobbying of these companies, Microsoft is one of them, the EU is about to update and weaken the European Interoperability Framework and turn it into a toothless silly document that does nothing for interoperability. This would reverse the push for open standards in the EU to some extent.

If you are a EU citizen, write the commissioners handling this case that you would prefer if the EU would not bow to corporate bullying and would uphold its stance on open standards and Free Software.

Karsten Gerloff already reported on this nonsense in 2009, his article has more background.

Last week, the Swiss government passed a motion requiring it to work on a law to, at least, ban the sales of video games rated 18+ to minors. A second motion is in place that would forbid the sales, production or advertisement of games deemed “violent” (by whom?) in Switzerland.

I remember the 80s, when people were outraged about Rambo and films like it. They said it’ll turn children into killing machines. Did that happen? Naw. The government then had the foresight not to do anything drastic, and thus the exiting age rating system for films was all that it took. It’s a voluntary system, where a board of assessors gives each film an age rating, but there is no law forcing stores not to sell 18+ films to minors, except in the case of hardcore pornography. This works fine! Why would we need a law for video games when the same law doesn’t exist for films or books?

Even centuries ago, there was violence (rape, suicide, murder…) in the media — Shakespeare’s novels, for example. And is Shakespeare 18+ now? No, they teach the stuff to 15 year olds at school.

This law represents one step into the direction of state censorship. The more drastic version of the law that is being suggested would forbid the production and sales of very vaguely defined “violent games” in Switzerland. Is it violent to be a fat Italian plumber that jumps onto mushrooms? Is it violent to play as Jade, a reporter battling human trafficking and other horrors and quite definitely smacking aliens in the skull with various weapons because they would kill her otherwise? One of the few games with a believable female lead character, a true miracle in gaming, which is rated 7+ now would be illegal under this new law? Or for a more popular example, Half-Life 2, one of the greatest advances in game storytelling and depth in a first-person game ever to grace the screens of the world, would be illegal just because you need to sometimes crack a mutant’s skull with a crowbar to save your character’s life and the lives of those your character loves?

I think we’re talking generation gap here. These politicians have never played any of the games I’ve mentioned. They have no clue how the medium works. None of these politicians ever stood on top of the Citadel and saw their own character’s fate roll out before them. None of them ever felt a chill run down their spine when they glimpsed the G-Man silently observing them from afar. None of them ever had that odd feeling in the pit of their stomach approaching a an eerile Combine police officer in the introduction scene to Half-Life 2. They don’t even know these scenes exist, or that there is more to game storytelling than simply shooting the limbs off your enemy. James Bond also kills people, but the audience applauds. It’s because he doesn’t kill in cold blood. What a boring Bond film that would make.

I’d wager that 99.5% of the games released today, and a significant portion of the games that would be affected by the ban, are not the kind of games the politicians are thinking of when they talk about these issues. If they would actually play some of them, they’d know that. If they prefer to simply ban what they don’t know and don’t understand, I’d be losing some confidence in our government.

What I’ve posted last year is actually starting to happen now. HD movies are starting to be sold online, with Sony being the first to market. They’ll be leveraging their PlayStation Network (PSN), which comes with every PS3.

The product is still defective at this time due to the DRM crippling, but by 2019 I think we’ll have that sorted out, too.

So something is starting. Where can I buy and download my DRM-free English-language Dexter episodes in 720p instead of the skullfucked and assraped German dubs in 720×576? It’ll still take some time, but I’m sure it will be possible eventually.

Here’s a very insightful comment on a recent Slashdot article asking for the best eBook reader:

dpbsmith writes: I’ve been taught a lesson. I am now the proud owner of over $300 worth of useless bits. They are encrypted and keyed to a serial-numbered hardware device which bit the dust last year. In theory, this is no problem, as the books and Gemstar’s record of my ownership remains on the servers. All I need to do is buy a new device, call Gemstar customer service, have them reencode my books with the new device serial number, and download them again. Except that Gemstar doesn’t exist, Gemstar customer service doesn’t exist, and the servers were shut down long ago.

Because of another limitation of DRM–I couldn’t share my books with my wife even if she had her own Rocket eBook reader, which she didn’t, she didn’t know that I had purchased an e-copy for $15, and bought her own paper copy for $15. She can still read her copy. She will still be able to read it twenty years from now. She can lend it to a friend. She can sell it on eBay. Scarcely five years after purchase, I cannot read mine and will never be able to read it again.

The same is true today with the Kindle. The Kindle only supports a handful of formats, and none of them are open. Perversely, the Sony readers mostly support open formats like ePub today. Sony used to be the king of crippled, proprietary products and formats, but with their eBook readers (Sony PRS-505, etc.) they seem to have opened up. Who knows why, but it’s a good thing to have happened. A good thing for Mr. and Mrs. Customer, at least.

So before you buy a Kindle, ask yourself the question: Do I want my reader to natively support non-DRM-crippled books? Do I want my reader to still be able to display the books I’ve bought five years down the line? Then maybe the Kindle is not the right choice. Right now, there are ways to get the Kindle to do this as well, but Amazon can issue an update at any time that removes your ability to do so. Other manufacturers are instead adding more and more open formats to their readers. You may think the ~ $100-$200 lower price on the Kindle may justify the loss of freedom, but I think you won’t be happy with that decision.

If you want to find out what DRM is all about, check out Defective By Design.