The open source movement

The open source movement is an idea that software can be freely distributed for anyone to use. Open source software often produces better alternatives and sometimes better security and privacy as opposed to software which you buy from corporations. Open source software means that the software must include the source code and allow for this to be freely manipulated and changed by anyone in society which is a great idea because the general public can see what the specific program or web page is doing as opposed to a non open source software.

Linux and Mozilla Firefox are most probably the most recognized open source products on the market today. They like many others believe that everyone should have access to software because in a way open source was one of the key founding stones for the internet.  

 "Without the internet and the web, no open source – without open source, no internet or web”

Mitch Kapor, Interview in The Guardian, Oct 2009

If the majority of things in life were open source then there would be no barriers with entrepreneurs and inventors creating ideas and products more efficiently and cost effectively. If you want to build a rocket that can go to mars and use your own codes for the software but need to use two lines of code from N.A.S.A you would not be able to unless you pay for them which would be tremendous. A lot of ideas and creations do not come to life because of this money constraint or the threat of legal action. Products such as medicines have been held back because of copyright.  Do you think this barrier is a good thing for life on earth?

 “Copyright is a system to advance public interests”

William Patry, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, 2009

I think that this is partly true because people should get recognition for their work and should get rewarded for this but a lot of the time multiple copyrights are snapped up by conglomerates so that their sole corporation has the rights to make these products resulting in mass profits. This stifles the competition making them the leader in the particular area of work they are working in. As well as this companies will also buy other companies just so they can acquire their patents so that they can use them with their own products.  At the moment patent wars are happening all the time with companies such as Apple sueing Motorola and Motorola sueing Apple over using their work in the products they sell. Unfortunately this is the environment in which capitalism creates. 

This is why at the moment there is a power struggle in the technology industry between the likes of Hollywood and Silicon valley. Hollywood among others, wants the governments of the world to crack down on illegal file sharing and open source because they say this harms authors and entrepreneurs as well as hurting their profits. On the other hand, some of Silicon Valley say that cracking down will hurt the industry more then help it.

It would seem that the Hollywood and associates lobbyist groups have been successful in getting governments around the world to sign the new ACTA law which will come in to affect in the UK this summer . Your ISP will be checking all data packages entering and leaving your computer for material that they deem counterfeit or infringing. Human rights groups say that this is a dangerous road to travel down. If you download a film you could be sharing a jail cell with a murderer. Good luck.

Some would say that it is things like this which prevent humanity from moving forward at an efficient pace as we are holding ourselves backing in certain areas of our system. 

Metadata, Tagging and Free labour

We are the first generation to be able to shape and mold a medium in the media. We now have  power to directly affect what media is shown, for example on a web page to a certain extent. Tagging is an aspect that was born with Web 2.0, that helped launch a communal online society. Tagging is the idea that any individual user can make their imprint on a piece of data which enables them or other users to access the data again with ease. This could include photos,videos, pieces of text, rating a website and links.

Sites such as facebook and twitter have a collection of data visible on one page. This contains metadata which is data giving another piece of data an imprint such as a photo tag or a twitter tweet so we can revisit the data with ease. This is essentialy the system of tagging as well as tagging yourself with every piece of data that you identify. On sites such as Facebook, you can use a tool to like a photo, video, band, company pages and campaigns among other things. As well as this you can tag yourself in a photo, video, post and places of where you have been. A great feauture for the users, who can in a sense attribute a part of them on the the internet for others to share their views, thoughts and traits. A sharing experience of every part of your life, freely available to read your story. 

The tagging though is a literal imprint of your visit. For example, on wikipedia every article that is edited or written is not completely anonymous. You can infact trace down the route of the editor by using sites such as http://wikiwatcher.com/  which identify's the ip address that was used. Past articles have been found to be edited by orangisations such as the FBI,CIA and politicians. "It violates Wikipedia's neutrality guidelines for a person with close ties to an issue to contribute to an entry about it, said spokeswoman Sandy Ordonez of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia's parent organization". This neutrality guideline is essential because if it is not abided by, then there is no way that the post can be impartial, which breaks a feundamental of democracy. As a result of of this tagging, a log of your activity's are recorded which is in some cases are good.

Every person who uses youtube for example are creating money for the company even though it is a free service. This is because youtube only uses a basic structure of website with limited data of it's own existing, for example, advertising videos and banners. The rest of the website is left to be created by the internet community who upload videos, tag, comment and watch videos free of tube. Although Youtube are giving us the service to use free of charge, we are in effect, also giving Youtube a service free of charge by creating data (videos) and uploading them to the site creating the rest of the site! This is one of the ways Youtube makes money as it then makes money from advertisments from the vast amount of users. Should we get paid for this as we are making the products it makes money from? What company wouldn't dream of free labour?

Facebook uses the links you go to on the site to piece together your life activitys, friends, traits and also for advertising purposes. This is done to make the user expierience easy,useful and friendly. This also begs the question, do we want a company to be able to harvest all of our personal information and keep it in their hands of independant body? We are teaching Facebook everytime we use it and click on links. The friends you interact with, such as talking to them on chat, clicking their profile, photos you are in together will tell facebook your friendship group or acquientences as a pattern will emerge of the people you interact with. This is then used for example, to manipulate advertisements to mention bands your friends may like as to try to appeal to that individual user. As well as this in the chat menu, they have two categories; the first categorie shows the people you interact with the most and the second is the rest of your friends. This gives them an insight into the world outside of facebook that involves you.

Facebook has also, been found to have been logging down every page you visit outside of facebook which is a major privacy breach. They have been found breaching privacy on many occasions since they were established. It would seem facebook would rather have their own way with the laws and have taken to making a lobbying group on Capitol Hill to make their voices heard more closely.  "According to U.S. reports Facebook has recently set up its own Political Action Committee, an American term for a lobbying outfit to get its views heard on Capitol Hill. So far this year it has already spent £352,000 on lobbying, already ahead of last year’s total of £224,000". This is a worrying factor because Facebook will now have a chance to effect laws that are in place or new laws that are coming, to benefit the company in some way and lesson the chance their business model will be hurt whilst stamping on our rights!

Robotics and development issues

In today's world , robots are rife and are always on the increase, whether from military influence or from the demand from population. A robot is a system which executes computer demands for a specific job or a compilation of various tasks, for example a machine to package food or an unmanned aircraft to survey the ground with the capability to assassinate them. 

The major increase in robotics is from the military industrial complex who see that military tasks can perform better without the risk from human error but also because the equipment can execute tasks much quicker. We are in a age where everyone wants or is influenced to want tomorrow's technology today so it is no surprise to see this increase. In recent years America has invested a lot of money into surveillance aircraft such as Drones among other devices for it's own purposes but also for states such as Israel and it's allies but this does not mean America is alone in arms trading. "In 2005, Russia ranked first in arms transfer agreements with developing nations with $7 billion or 23.2% of these agreements. France was second with $6.3billion or 20.9% of such agreements. The United States was third with $6.2 billion or 20.5%. In 2005, the United States ranked first in the value of arms deliveries to developing nations at $8.1 billion, or 45.8% of all such deliveries. Russia ranked second at $2.7 billion or 15.2% of such deliveries. The United Kingdom ranked third at $2.4 billion or 13.6% of such deliveries".

A drone is a unmanned aircraft which fly miles above the ground surveying ground activity which it then sends back to the owner. Worldrobotics.org says "With about 6,000 units, service robots in defense (military) applications accounted for 45% of the total number of service robots for professional use sold in 2010. Thereof, unmanned aerial vehicles are the most important application".We can see that the key demand is for the military to obtain these robots. The website goes on to say "The number of service robots for professional use will increase to 87,500 units between 2011 and 2014". It seems robots are going to be growing on us. A worrying factor for America is that it seems they are looking to partly commercialize drones for private use. Arizona has recently been deemed fit for testing grounds for private drones. There is a growing concern that these drones will be used by individuals and companies for their own uses which infringes on Human Rights. The Washington Post says "The agency projects that 30,000 drones could be in the nation's skies by 2020.

Although there is an argument that say robotics reduces human error's, there is still an element of human control which still effects the use of the machine or sometimes down to bad software/hardware maintenance.
The Superdrone which recently had a test flight , ended premature as it crashed into the ground. This is a waste of money i think, and especially for the American taxpayers as a lot of financial aid has been provided to Israel, especially in a time of economic turmoil. Domestic needs tend not to be on the elites top priorities but surveillance does.

The issue with robotics is that these advancements often get used on domestic populations. A lot of autonomous machines get passed into law for terrorism. The worrying thing about this trend is that, too often these machines get drafted in to control,monitor and watch domestic population under the guise of terrorism. For example, President Obama who is the first President in history to pass a bill giving him the power to assassinate America citizens, used a drone to kill a America citizen Anwar Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric in Yemen. Obama used a CIA drone to take out the cleric. The obvious reasons used were that he was a terrorist. This is a obvious breach of human rights and various international laws but this was overlooked and the cleric was not brought to trial.

The UK is one of the most surveyed country in today's world. This may well be necessary to stop the act of terrorism happening, but again there are some issues when this infringes on the average citizens privacy and rights. In recent years, police forces have been using the "Eye in the Sky" to catch law breakers on the odd occasion but it would seem that the use of the UAV's(Unmanned Airial vehicle) are going to be increasing. As the Olympics get closer , the financial backing for law and order has increased dramatically since the first estimation. It has recently been found that for the Olympics the London police and military may be using UAV drones to keep an eye on human activity to help remain order and stability but also on grounds of terrorism. A growing concern is that the "eye in the sky" will be kept in use after the Olympics.

Surveillance

Surveillance all over the world is for ever increasing and a lot of the time, the majority of the population is oblivious to this unless they have a key interest in this area because most of the time, it is not reported on in the mainstream media. Some of this is for the better, for example, helping to catch villains and terrorists but the problem is when these tools start to infringe the privacy of the average law abiding citizen.

Twitter and Facebook, in essence, are a mass surveillance tool. Not only do we as a social population use it to survey, but so do the governments and businesses of the world. Privacy on the internet has in a way been lost, because we happily will post our lives on these social network sites free for anyone to see to a certain extent. Privacy also shrinks from the facebook team though, they are for ever updating and changing the privacy settings which can be majorly confusing for the average user. They have recently in the past few years started to notify users of these changes because of media uproar and condemnation but a lot of the times these notices fall on deaf ears. For example, in recent changes, third party companies can now access your mobile number and home addresses if you agree to the conditions of a facebook app or twitter app.

The problem with twitter and facebook is that the government agencies can invade our privacy freely because of these settings. This information is free for them and does not impede on any laws because a lot of the information is already accessible to the public, ultimately giving them the chance to bypass any laws and bills. A useful tool for the agencies is the gps tracking on smartphones, when you post a status on your mobile it will post where abouts in the country you were when you posted it if you wish to share your location. A stalker's delight.
The problem with these sites is that sometimes it is hard to see what is a joke and what is the truth (if your paranoid).Recently a british couple travelled to America where they were obtained upon arrival at the airport by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) because of Leigh Van Bryan's previous tweets before he entered the country. He had tweeted "'Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?". For friends and family this would of been an obvious joke about the couple going to party but because of the over zealous and paranoid agencies of the U.S.A, they put them in a prison cell along with mexican drug dealers for 12 hours. This is a blatant breach of privacy in the moral sense but in law this is perfectly legal and just. The other tweet was "3 weeks today, we're totally in LA p****** people off on Hollywood Blvd and diggin' Marilyn Monroe up!" 

A recent global bill which is being run through the European parliament is the ACTA bill ( Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement).  Currently 22 countries are supporting this bill but it seems that support for the bill is waning. This bill, they stress, is to help copyright law and protect innovators, entrepreneurs and technology. The problem with this bill is that the terms are very loosely written as with many bills, meaning that you could be liable to taxes or put in prison for things which are not illegal right now. Your privacy will be invaded even more so that it already is, but do we want this? ISP's (Internet Service providers) will be legally obliged to check every packet off data which is entering and leaving your computer, looking for incriminating files and counterfeit products. For example, if you learnt how to knit from a video you buy online and share this knowledge to someone else in your household you will be liable to the law because that product is copyrighted. This is going to be law. Crazy, right?       

                            This is a view from the Online hacker/activism group Anonymous.