Oblomovka

2008-07-16»

Curses. Thanks to the irresponsible exuberance of Matt R., David M., Andrew, Diggory and Adewale, I have sentenced myself and the internets to 30 days of blather (folks, if any of you would like links to your sites, send me a mail. Yeah, that's right kids, I'll trade my Google juice for your donations).

A few of my bribers mentioned some riders they'd like. First, a copy of my slides from the OpenTech talk, "Living on the Edge". That seems perfectly reasonable, given that I promised all over the place that I'd do that too. Here's the original PDF I used. There's also an OpenOffice presentation file here that has slightly more detail in it.

The blurb I sent OpenTech six months ago is below.

Living on the Edge (of the Network)

When you want to make a private picture or note available only to your friends, why do you hand it over to a multi-national corporation first? What use is a mobile phone running Apache? Does IPv6 really exist? Can we be ecologically-sound and still run our terabyte home servers? Please? These, and other whining rhetorical questions answered by Danny O'Brien, ORG founder and EFF activist.

It was mostly a reworking of these blog entries. There's been a lot of talk and independent thinking in this area for the last few months, leading to a flurry of public action in the last few weeks as many people come to the same conclusions: that we need to consider a counter-balance to the current move toward centralisation online.

The way I phrase it is that "we're back at 1984" -- not the novel, but the point where Richard Stallman realised that if he was going to preserve the most powerful freedoms of his community into the future, he was going to have to sit down and re-implement Unix with a better license.

We've reached the same point with the move to software as a service. If we want people to have the same degree of user autonomy as we've come to expect from the world, we may have to sit down and code alternatives to Google Docs, Twitter, and EC3 that can live with us oon the edge, not be run by third parties.

This is the spirit of the Franklin Street Statement and more practically, software like Laconica.

I'm sure to be blathering more on this topic in the next month: if it gets too much, I will consider taking more donations to shut myself up.

(Incidentally, if the slides don't make sense, I'll try and get around to recording a slidecast of the whole talk or uploading some video. Crossing ORG's palms with silver and mailing me will make this more likely... :) )

2008-07-15»

I saw and heard far too many stirring matters in Europe this month for it to strictly count as a relaxing holiday. It was more like some sort of brisk Victorian tale of moral recuperation, where a malaise-filled city gent, falling asleep at his desk, is shown by his labouring conscience vivid images of model courage struggling against enormous odds while terrible forces swell nearby to depose civilization in the (third) highest corridors of power. Inspired and chastened by his vision he awakes on Sunday morning to sweep himself off to a church revivalist meeting and dedicate himself anew to the cause.

Of course, just as in Victorian times, the inspiration rarely lasts longer than late Sunday afternoon.

But I am determined to be good! For ever and ever! Or at least until mid-August! And you can help me, dear occasional reader!

At OpenTech, I helped the Open Rights Group launch their new membership expansion campaign to double their supporter level from 750 to 1500.

To encourage you to help fund Britain's own grassroots digital rights group, and to improve my own moral standing, I hereby make a pledge:

If five people reading this sign up for ORG (or increase their subscription from a fiver to a tenner a month), I hereby decree that I will blog every weekday for the next month.

I have lots of things to say, and they are all terrifically interesting, but I am currently too louche and feckless to express them. Your fiver will stiffen my resolve, gall me to action -- and support a worthy and fine institution.

Simply send me your ORG "scalp" (the reference code that you get when you sign up), and when I have five, I will start spilling all the beans I have at my disposal.

Or you know, you could just callously click "mark all read", and move onto the next RSS item.

Oh you wouldn't. Don't you dare! I'll put a javascript spell on you!

Update: Two and half sign-ups! (one of them backdated their increase to the beginning of the year, so I count that as one and a half). You're so close to obliging me to waste valuable time!