Sean Flynn from the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University has sent some questions on ACTA, the “Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” to Techdirt who wrote about it. These questions are based upon the interpretation of the current state of ACTA from the perspective of someone concerned about the availability of generic medicines especially to less developed countries.
But those people are not the only ones concerned about ACTA! A growing number of technologists such as Simonand authors such as Cory Doctorow have parsed ACTA as well and are mightily concerned about both the method of negotiations as well as the actual contents of the proposed treaty.

When I myself have read parts and reviews I was involuntarily reminded if the US Declaration of Independence. I that document the American finders claimed:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

It seems to me that several supposedly democratic governments of the present are forgetting about these fundamental rights and their fundamental obligation to protect them. If ACTA continues on its present course a case could well be made that the governments of the ACTA member nations will have crossed the line.

So the one question I would add to the catalog of questions by Sean Flynn would be:

Are you aware of the fact that you are leading your nations directly into legitimate revolution?

After all the claim of “No taxation without representation” is much weaker than the claim of “No criminalization without representation”. I see a clear and present danger to our fundamental liberties presented by ACTA and call on my fellow human beings to let their governments know that ACTA is a no-go. I call upon you to act like our American predecessors. They have aired their grievances for several years before declaring their independence:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Now is the time to let our leaders know that or freedoms are not transient causes. It is time to state clearly that we will neither stand for the methods of negotiating ACTA nor will we accept the proposed contents.

Now I by no means claim to be the first person ever to come up with this. After all there are a myriad of web-based HTML editors out there. And some software even has the ability to edit code inside a browser (such asCouchDB). but to generalize this to interact directly with an SVN repository may well be a novel idea. One would then have to simply put the editor code on the same server as the SVN repository in order to allow the Ajax components to have access to the repository URLs and presto you could edit files directly in the repository. This would solve the editing part of the equation and be sufficient for web-developers. To facilitate even more interaction server-side code could be added to facilitate even more actions (think compiles, restarts, and the like). This bundled with apps like iSSH (which could be used for even more server side processing) would create a pretty powerful web based IDE.

Of course this would require the user to be always on, but then that is why I bought the 3G iPad. But this still means a few more short comings,such as being unworkable on most airplanes and many railway trips, but it also solves a lot of problems.

I don’t quite know when (if) I will find the time to work on this, but I definitely think this would be a worthwhile open source project.

- Posted from my iPad

P.S.: why oh why does AirSharing HD not include an editor? That would be so damn close to solving my particular itch, I’d buy it all over again.

Of course the original bounty and rues still hold. All I would like to do is enhance the offering so that the criteria can be met in a slightly different way.

I have come to realize, that the iPad actually has a great way for applications to share documents. It does that without exposing a full fledged structured file system. This is no mean feat and I admire both the courage and ingenuity on Apple’s part for devising this scheme. It is done by applications registering to handle files of certain types. Once that is done, other applications can send files to those applications for further treatment.

This opens a new possibility for solving the issue at hand for me (developing software not for, but rather on the iPad). The bounty asked for a single app. However the same aim could be achieved with 2 (or more?) smaller dedicated apps as well.

One of them would simply need to be able to handle SVN repositories. It would need to do checkouts, updates, checkins and all the other neat SVN stuff. Of course it would need to handle both http as well as https (including SSL-Client-Certificate authentication). To be useful it would need to be able to send files that have been checked out to other application(s) for viewing and editing. This has been implemented already by the guys at DropBox, so it is definitely possible.

The second dedicated application would then be a code editor that supports that same mechanism of accepting files and saving them back to their original location. The actual editor could then focus on one thing, editing code, and do that well. I have already bought one app that does the editing part fairly well, called “for i”. However as it cannot currently accept files from other applications it is not quite there yet.

As this now requires 2 distinct applications, each smaller in scope, I propose to alter the terms of the bounty to the following:
For each of the above described constituent applications a bounty of $500 is on offer. In total a sum of $1000 is being offered for solving the entire problem. However each part is already useful on its own and as such a partial pickup of the bounty should be possible

I sincerely hope, that someone will write these apps soon. Most of the parts already exists after all. There is an app called iVersion for the iPhone, which handles SVN, so that is almost there. All that remains on that fro is to port it to the iPads larger real estate and enable the sharing of files with other applications. The editor is, as mentioned above, almost there as well, all that remains there is to enable the receiving of files from other apps.

Oh and just to make this clear, I am not a patient person. So this bounty has an expiration date. If it is not claimed by September 1st 2010 00:00:00 UTC it expires not to come back again!

- Posted from my iPad

Given my experiences so far I feel that I can only recommend the iPad to anyone that wants to expand their digital life. The experience is such a pleasure that I am willing to forgive Apple their closed model policy. After all, one can always jail-break the iPad and add whatever to it. Whether that is the route I will choose remains to be seen.

- Posted from my iPad

I have named some of the love aspects above, but that isn’t the topic of this post. The topic of this post is about what I really don’t like about v8. Here are some off these things:

• Ooodles of static variables!
• What would you want threads for?
• Deterministic variable destruction, what for?

Static variables abound in v8; they are everywhere; they are so many and so wide spread that even v8′s developers claim that they are so many to find that they consider it nigh impossible to find them all. Well that makes it hard to fix the other problems with v8.

One of those other problems is that it’s nigh impossible to compile a dynamic library with it. (Actually it may not be impossible, but really harder than it should be.)

It’s pretty obvious that the people at Google don’t really care much about the usability of V8 for anything other than the Chrome web-browser. And in all honesty, that’s OK! Yet it is still disappointing; I would so much have liked to use V8, now I ‘ll have to rethink my project using SpiderMonkey.

1. Direct communications with personal friends
The first usage I have for Twitter is to stay in touch with personal friends of mine. Here I want to read all those “meaningless” tweets about lunch, the kids, and the puppies. This is also the category where I want to engage with people intensely. For this usage Twitter is really just another medium like the phone or email.

2. Staying aux current with my topics of interrest
There are a few topics where I want to stay current on any developments. Since these are not classical newspaper topics, it’s tough to get the news. So by following other activists in the field, I have a good way to stay up to date as well as keep those interrested up to date on my own activities.
This is a less directly engaging way to use Twitter. It’s more about sharing mutually interresting news.

3. Getting information from leaders
There are and always will be those whose opinion I value on a diverse array of things. For that reason I want to hear what they have to say. I want to be informed when they write a new blog post or similar. I really don’t care as much whether they ever read anything I write. Or whether they ever interact with me in any way whatsoever.
This usage of Twitter is completely unidirectional and non-engaging.

These three major usage categories create different patterns in what I want to gain from Twitter. It’s hard, but I have found a way to have all three. I just group my real friends into one group. These I don’t filter at all then I have a group per topic. Here I filter out all @replies unless they are replying to me. And then I have a group for my category three people. Here I filter out all @replies and filter the individual people through a topical bayesian filter.

This way I can actually follow many more people than I would otherwise be capable of. By severly filtering Twitter depending on my usage patterns. I think unless someone filters like I have come to do there is no way that it’s possible to keep up with more than 500 people.

Dominic Jones(@irwebreport) is considering and has suggested to unfollow people that follow more than 2000 people. I think he has a points. However I think he is ignoring what Twitter is used for by different people. If you group and filter aggressively it may well be or become legitimate to follow a lot more people than 2000. I think a year from now I will be following closer to 20000 as I discover people and as more people join Twitter internationally. I hope @irwebreport will reconsider his position and take into account the possibility that filtering and grouping may well increase his limit.

• Cloud- Services are globally accessible
• Cloud-Services are scalable on short notice
• Cloud-Services outsource to shared cost operations
• Cloud-Services reduce the initial investment

Cloud- Services are globally accessible

Contrary to many internal IT-Systems cloud services are reachable from anywhere in the world. Now that may not be important to someone spending their day in a cubicle, but it is crucial to someone that needs access to their data on the go.
Unfortunately this also means that this data is reachable from any crackers computer as well. However the security measures in place are usually sufficient to alleviate that risk, especially if your own usage habits are in tune with the security requirements imposed on you. Also, as Bruce Schneier tirelessly reminds us, most security breaches are not perpetrated by outsiders, but by insiders. And then there is the saying that “most data leaks occur not because someone breaches your security, but because your communications partner discloses information”.
Taking all of this into account, the decision can become one based on a risk/benefit analysis.

Cloud-Services are scalable on short notice

IT-Infrastructure costs money. That’s a well understood fact. And that means businesses all over the world hate to buy IT-Infratructure; unless that is they really need it. The problem is that when they need the infrastructure, they usually need it yesterday. They need it the moment their existing capacity reaches its limits. So prudence would dictate, that you have at least some additional capacity in store to meet the demand when it is required. Well I guess it has become obvious that this directly conflicts with the presumptions that ” businesses all over the world hate to buy IT-Infratructure”.
Cloud-Services provide a bandaid to this vicious circle by shortening the time from the emerging need for new infrastructure elements to their deployment to hours instead of days or weeks. How do they do this?

Cloud-Services outsource to shared cost operations

Well they do that by creating “cooperatives” (yeah that’s the stuff you learned in social studies when doing the Soviet Union ). Simply put they share the cost of buying new infrastructure among multiple customers. So they’ll always have enough spares to put up when their customers need them, presuming that not all of their customers will need to upgrade at the same time.
And because the term “cooperative” has been so damaged by history they simply call it cloud computing and sell it under that name. And since it turns a tidy profit, it’s a very good demonstration of capitalism at work.
The downside to this is that if you run at average usage, you are actually paying more for your computing power than you would if you were to own the equipment outright.
But at that point it becomes again a simple cost/benefit analysis that can lead you to a decision.

Cloud-Services reduce the initial investment

That analysis has another component to it that comes into play especially when you are a cash strapped start-up. Your initial investment in infrastructure becomes significantly lowered. You can therefore also lower your risk. Now if you don’t have the cash to buy your own, Cloud-Services enable you to still start your own venture. So while you are paying a bit more for your computing needs than you otherwise would, you are actually able to do so at all.

So this is my plea to all bloggers, posters, commentors and twitterers: be honest in your statements and disclose your affiliations.