|
|
|
 |
Any tool which helps people think, store and share is by its very nature a public good. It is also a public good with a difference: since it deals so much with what is intimate and inside of each of us it has to realize that it caches what is possibly sacred and private. Secondly, since by its very nature digital technology can magnify small changes very rapidly, it also has to be a public good which has to tread always on the side of transparency, i.e., its design, intent and execution should be open to public scrutiny at all and every time.
These two ideas, of privacy and transparency, can be accomplished through a certain type of design philosophy. In particular, it is a design philosophy which enables independent, autonomous and transparent software units to easily talk to each other and which are very happy to hand-over the full control to the user rather than the developer, maintainer and innovator. This design philosophy can be captured within the ideas of 'freedom', 'liberation', 'distributed sense of ownership', etc.
Fortunately, these ideas can be concretely realised by everyone applying the same design philosophy in their own use of software and technology products: by bringing together an assembly of different products and services and stiching them in their own way. This requires the use first and foremost of an operating system (whether it be a desktop, laptop, tablet or phone) which allows for this. Secondly, browser is today the most frequently used software product. Therefore, a browser which maintains anonymity, which shares only what is essential about you with the world outside and acts as a constant watchdog for you is the second piece of the assembly. Finally, the way one communicates digitally, any serious matter, is through an email. It is, to use a Microsoft term, a 'passport' to the digital world. Hence, which ever email service one uses it has to meet the tests of privacy, transparency and non-control.
With these three building blocks one can then look outward to use other products and services which meet this norm, or choose to associate and support organisations and efforts which strengthen this possibility. This page is then a pointer to such tools. It is only directional and the reader can happily choose his own suite as long as he gets the significance of the notion of 'freedom'.
It cannot be overemphasised that our minds are deeply affected by how we interact with information in general. Gone are the days of genteel, long conversations carried out at leisure in the precincts of our friend's drawing room. Those conversations were private, informed, engaging, and importantly, we and only wer were in control of them. Instead we now have micro-conversations at a rapid pace on platforms designed, monitored and controlled by a third party whom we simply do not understand and whose intentions do not align with ours. In such a scenario, it is not a Luddite's vision to harken back to an earlier time: but a patient's need to recover his privacy, sanity and health.
All it requires is for an individual to reflect minutely on the consequences of his digital behaviour: what is he using, how is he using and how much is he using it. And adopt an attitude of selective and scrupulous use rather than one dictated by force of habit, boredom and collegial pressures. I hope the page triggers some kind of a reflection on these lines.
Happy surfing.
Free Software Foundation: "The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom and to defend the rights of all free software users.
As our society grows more dependent on computers, the software we run is of critical importance to securing the future of a free society. Free software is about having control over the technology we use in our homes, schools, and businesses, where computers work for our individual and communal benefit, not for proprietary software companies or governments who might seek to restrict and monitor us.
The Free Software Foundation is working to secure freedom for computer users by promoting the development and use of free (as in freedom) software and documentation --- particularly the GNU operating system---and by campaigning against threat to computer user freedom like Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and software patents."
See also Richard Stallman - the freedom defender whom we may not deserve e but definitely need
Project Gutenberg: "Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today."
"The mission of Project Gutenberg is simple: To encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks. This mission is, as much as possible, to encourage all those who are interested in making eBooks and helping to give them away. In fact, Project Gutenberg approves about 99% of all requests from those who would like to make our eBooks and give them away, within their various copyright limitations."
"Project Gutenberg is powered by ideas, ideals and idealism. Project Gutenberg is not powered by financial or political power. Therefore Project Gutenberg is powered totally by volunteers."
"Project Gutenberg is not in the business of establishing standards. If we were, we would have gladly accepted the request to convert an exemplary portion of our eBooks into HTML when World Wide Web was a brand new idea in 1993; we are happy to bring eBooks to our readers in as many formats as our volunteers wish to make."
"In addition, we do not provide standards of accuracy above those as recommended by institutions such as U.S. Library of Congress at the level of 99.95%."
"We want to to continue to encourage everyone to send us eBooks, even if they have already created some without any knowledge of who we were, what we are doing, or how we were doing it."
Defective By Design: "We are a participatory and grassroots campaign exposing DRM-encumbered devices and media for what they really are: Defective By Design. We are working to eliminate DRM as a threat to innovation in media, the privacy of readers, and freedom for computer users."
"Digital Restrictions Management is the practice of imposing technological restrictions that control what users can do with digital media. When a program is designed to prevent you from copying or sharing a song, reading an ebook on another device, or playing a single-player game without an internet connection, you are being restricted by DRM. In other words, DRM creates a damaged good; it prevents you from doing what would be possible without it. This concentrates control over production and distribution of media, giving DRM peddlers the power to carry out massive digital book burnings and conduct large scale surveillance over people's media viewing habits."
Duck Duck Go: "In a lengthy profile in November 2012, the Washington Post indicated that searches on DuckDuckGo numbered upto 45,000,000 per month in October 2012. The article concluded "Weinberg's non-ambitious goals make him a particularly odd and dangerous competitor online. He can do almost everything that Google and Bing can't because it could damage their business models, and if users figure out that they like DuckDuckGo way better, Weinberg could damage the big boys without even really trying. It's asymmetrical digital warfare and his backers at Union Square Ventures say that Google is vulnerable." (quote from Wikipedia)
Tor: "The Tor network is a group of volunteer-operated servers that allows people to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. Tor's users employ this network by connecting through a series of virtual tunnels rather than making a direct connection, thus allowing both organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy. Along the same line, Tor is an effective censorship circumvention tool, allowing its users to reach otherwise blocked destinations or content. Tor can also be used as a building block for software developers to create new communication tools with in-built privacy features."
The immediate way to gain from its benefits is to use the Tor browser which is downloadable here.
Snowdrift.coop | Free the Commons: "The open, participatory internet has the potential to empower citizens around the world. Through online collaboration, we've built astounding projects like Wikipedia and the GNU/Linux operating system. Because these digital works are non-rivalrous, everyone can access, use and share them freely.
Unfortunately, we face great obstacles. Artificial restrictions impede innovations and creativity. Pervasive advertising pollutes our cultural space and our minds. Rampant surveillance threatens our civil liberties. Institutional powers assert their control through legal monopolies (copyright and patent laws), technical controls (often called Digital Restrictions Management or DRM), secrecy (such as published computer programs with only private source code), and "walled gardens" (undemocratic platforms that lock-in and capture creative value generated by users).
But if we reject proprietary restrictions and ads, how will people get paid to produce works in the first place?
First of all, people enjoy participating in meaningful projects regardless of money. An amazing number of projects get developed today by people who work in their free time and release the results to the world. Terms for such unrestricted works include "Free/Libre software", "Open Source", "Free culture", "Open knowledge"... From here on, we'll use the inclusive combination of Free/Libre/Open or FLO.
Of course, work done only by hobbyists in spare time often fails to match the quality of dedicated and well-funded businesses. If we could provide a sustainable living to FLO project teams, we could have high-quality resources without the anti-features of obnoxious ads, surveillance, or artificial restrictions.
...
We need a new social contract: If projects choose to be FLO, the community will still fund them; and likewise, if the community funds a project, it should be FLO."
Google It is strange to find reference to a commercial behemoth in the sanctified pages of this website. But three developments have enveloped the average person: cheapness of bandwidth, ubiquity of multiple devices, and a reasonable portion of the computing actually happening not on the device itself, but over the ether. The latter is referred to somewhat airily as cloud computing. A more sober and grounded term to club all these developments together is distributed computing. It is also in keeping with the nomenclature in tradition of good old computer science and engineering.
Evidently, our computing is now indeed distributed. Over the years, computing has been harnessed in various ways: from providing actual computing power, to substituting or automating dull labourious tasks, to correspond, communicate and collaborate, (to) becoming a media of knowledge, entertainment and learning. When something acquires such a variety of uses, it essentially ceases to become a technology or a tool, but a medium: a means to accomplish something. To understand the change digital technology has enforced, imposed or engendered, it is best to think that mankind is now in possession of a completely new medium through which to put words on "paper". And surprisingly, the more the medium is evolving, the more it is coming to resemble the 'paper' world. From oral tradition to a written tradition was a marked change, but the change from paper to screen, though steep is not as radical as it seems at first sight.
The capitalist will be enthralled and the socialist perhaps appalled. But for the lay person that hardly matters: he must get things done to keep his day moving. Irrespective of the political ramfications of such a shift, the question is what is the best way to adapt to it? The best way is to assemble a virtual computing environment for yourself, much like youngsters in late 70s, 80s and 90s would assemble a desktop at home.
Now, semiconductors would never have seen the light of a person's home, were it not for that crucible of ingenuity called the Unix operating system built using the C programming language. Unix was of course a class apart: it relied on the timeless philosophy of minimalism: act only to the extent necessary and no more, or in other words, know your bounds. As a result, an operating system behaved like an operating system and a text editor behaved like a text editor. More importantly, Unix believed in free and open trade: so a text editor did not feel shy talking to an operating system and vice-versa. Thus, Unix made possible to assemble an environment from a number of different softwares.
The fact that Unix-based and Unix-inspired computing environments lie at the heart of the infrastructure that powers the internet is testament to the fact that the design of Unix had the kernel of principles within it to support a 'distributed' computing power. In the era of ether, if one is looking for distributed computing, perhaps this non-ether analog is still the best place to turn to. Its spirit of computing cooperation has to be re-created in the ether without pinching one's pocket.
But care has to be exercised in what parts we use and how we glue them together. If one is hard-pressed on the noble ideals of absolute privacy and liberty, then the road ahead is exceedingly difficult. There are but few softwares that respect privacy & security, do not harbour rank commercial desire, cooperate well with other pieces of ethereal software, make sense to an average person, provide the feature set that most need, and importantly, also happened to be used by many others. On the other hand, if one has thrown privacy and caution to the wind and is indifferent to being a slave to someone else's design, the road is full of risks that attend to carelessness, including, being defrauded, bombarded with spam, nuisanced with advertisements, and being locked into a system never to be able to get out (the thing called Apple).
Achieving the balance perhaps lies in understanding where the need to rely on distributed computing arises from. The trigger surprisingly is very simple: the need, and perhaps the convenience, to access data at any given point of time from any given location. The need is not just to access, but perhaps to modify or create anew, and as well as to share it. Put together this set of functionality is called a 'a file system' in computer science. Having a file system outside the computer is not a new conception: there was the floppy disk, the CDROM, the usb-drive and the client-server model of managing file systems. Moving the file system 'over the connection' or 'to the cloud' is simply a rolling over of such a practice.
But it feels a little different and new because psychologically now, the 'file system' is away from us. In all the earlier conceptions, the file system was either co-located within the same premise, or at least was under closer supervision and control. Apprehension naturally attends to trusting a 'file system' to the cloud. In product terms, computer users need a trustworthy online storage mechanism.
Now if there is a file system, then evidently there have to be utilities that allow a variety of file system operations. Further, these operations should allow themselves to be carried out online, else the very basis of distributed computing, inter-operatibility amongst multiple devices, is unmet. These suite of utilities layered with those of correspondence, sharing and collaboration, result in the desing of a 'virtual computing desktop'. Or, in common terminology, a 'workspace', or an 'ecosystem'.
But Unix had one other thing besides a light-hearted operating system, a scalable file system and a range of complementary utilities that allowed Unix to be used in an elastic way by its users: from desktop publishing to system administration to network management. This magic potion was the tool or command that invoked other tools and commands, a meta-tool-command to orchestrate and bring alive the underlying Unix architecture. It was and is appropriately called the shell. If the operating system and the file system were the mind of Unix, then shell was its heart. The ethereal equal of a shell is the browser today. The url-bar is to an internet-reliant distributed computing set-up what the shell command-line is to Unix.
Then, a combination of online storage, browser and attendant content-management and communication utilities (all of which can be invoked from the browser) constitute the virtual distributed computing operating environment. Theoretically, there are many options for storage, competing browsers as well as common-place utilities such that there is no to rely on a Google or Microsoft. It is possible to mix and match.
But where the mix and match approach will likely encounter frustration and friction is that some of its components may not work across all devices, or even if they do, the overall experience is highly uneven. The component softwares chosen have to enjoy a degree of comfort on a variety of hardware platforms. Furthermore, no one would wish their storage to be under custody of an organisation whose longevity may be in question, or its costs start to pinch. Remember, it all started with distributed data (the file system) and without sound distributed data there is not much of distributed computing (what use is an operating system which lacks a sound file system?).
Unfortunately, affordable online storage solutions require economies of scale coupled with a really good browser that can inter-operate and navigate the plethora of devices that exist and are likely to emerge. Economies of scale in turn require product designs that thrive in distributed computing, or are built assuming a distributed computing world. Casting a wide glance, there are not many that fit the bill. The competitive set is so narrow and common-place that it hardly bears mention: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon and perhaps a few others which may not be as well known. If the above criteria are strictly applied, then what emerges from the thin crowd is Google.
Those who treasure liberty will object, rightfully. But it is no denying the fact that Google's storage features and its browser have acquired a ubiquity. It also not denying the fact that it hasin its own commercial way provided affordable access to distributed computing power. But politics aside, even its hardest critiques will not fault its engineering design. What it offers today under one umbrella comes closer to creating a virtual Unix than any other entity out there. Its visual design is simple, bare-bones and even scratchy. Its utilities cooperate and are not closed. The Android operating system offers a reasonable semblance of public scrutiny. And again from a design stand-point, its utilities harbour a plastic design: they can be made to be what the user makes them to be.
Its product development seems to live always in a beta stage: the products are in dialogue with their users, and while the user busy with them, an engineer seems to be modifying behind their backs in real-time. Nothing about Google's services and product is final, yet nothing breaks dramatically. Security is not thrown to the wind, and privacy is respected to the extent a commercial behemoth is likely to.
Inspite of its commercial exploits, its engineering has salvaged Google. But this is not a pean to Google. The author is not foolish to entrust his private, professional and statutory correspondences to Gmail. Neither does he believe that Google Search has no alternative. He too fancies himself to be a man of principle: but principles teach restraint and balance and not hardening. The restraint one can exercise is to appreciate and remember the Unix principle: everything has its place. It is upto the user to study and engineer how to combine the freedom respecting softwares with softwares which serve a commercial master: so as to gain the desired benefit without unduly risking privacy and security. Where there is a threat of compromise, set-up hedges. One such hedge is to pay for a secure private third-party email service provider and not stake it all on Gmail itself. Similarly, in the era of portable devices, nothing can compete against a well-tuned Gnu/Linux operating system. Its proud owner is in possession of a cheap, durable secure as they computing system. While Google may fail, GNU/Linux will still remain standing.
An open distributed computing architecture is a genuine public good. Wikipedia is a shining example of what can be built atop it. Google is perhaps an example of how far that idea and principle can be stretched to provide the economies of scale that a public good needs to thrive. If Google goes any further, it will tear itself apart. But if it learns to restrain its commercial instincts and perhaps dampen them a little in future, then it stands to serve many with what they need. Time shall tell. But there is no doubt: we need more Wikipedia and less of Google. But there certainly is space for the likes of Google. It, whether, its critics like it or not, has become a public institution in itself. We hope it cares to remember.
| |
|