Marco Arment — Lockdown

The bigger problem is that they’ve abandoned interoperability. RSS, semantic markup, microformats, and open APIs all enable interoperability, but the big players don’t want that — they want to lock you in, shut out competitors, and make a service so proprietary that even if you could get your data out, it would be either useless (no alternatives to import into) or cripplingly lonely (empty social networks).

Google resisted this trend admirably for a long time and was very geek- and standards-friendly, but not since Facebook got huge enough to effectively redefine the internet and refocus Google’s plans to be all-Google+, all the time.4 The escalating three-way war between Google, Facebook, and Twitter — by far the three most important web players today — is accumulating new casualties every day at our expense.

Google Reader is just the latest casualty of the war that Facebook started, seemingly accidentally: the battle to own everything.

Marco.org
Lockdown

Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper
(h/t Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism)

Is Zuck the devil?

Barry Eichengreen — Open-Access Economics

Lessons to be gleaned from the Rogoff & Reinhart debacle if economic analysis is to continue to be taken seriously.

Project Syndicate
Open-Access Economics
Barry Eichengreen | Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former senior policy adviser at the International Monetary Fund

Open Culture — Creative Commons Announces “School of Open” with Courses to Focus on Digital Openness

Just in time to celebrate Open Education Week, here comes a new initiative, the School of Open, a learning environment focused on increasing our understanding of “openness” and the benefits it brings to creativity and education in the digital age.

Developed by the collaborative education platform Peer to Peer University (P2PU) with organizational support from Creative Commons, the School of Open aims to spread understanding of the power of this brave new world through free online classes.

We hear about it all the time: Universal access to research, education and culture—all good things, without a doubt—made possible by things like open source software, open educational resources and the like.

But what are these various communities and what do they mean? How can we all learn more and get involved? 

School of Open has rolled the conversation back to square one so that understanding the basics is easy. Through a list of new courses created by users and experts, people can learn more about what “openness” means and how to apply it. There are stand-alone courses on copyright, writing for Wikipedia, the collaborative environment of open science, and the process behind making open video.

Open Culture
Creative Commons Announces “School of Open” with Courses to Focus on Digital Openness

Amy Goodman — Aaron Swartz on the Fight for Internet Freedom

Aaron Swartz: So, you might say, surely COICA would get declared unconstitutional, as well. But I knew that the Supreme Court had a blind spot around the First Amendment, more than anything else, more than slander or libel, more than pornography, more even than child pornography. Their blind spot was copyright. When it came to copyright, it was like the part of the justices’ brains shut off, and they just totally forgot about the First Amendment. You got the sense that, deep down, they didn’t even think the First Amendment applied when copyright was at issue, which means that if you did want to censor the Internet, if you wanted to come up with some way that the government could shut down access to particular websites, this bill might be the only way to do it. If it was about pornography, it probably would get overturned by courts, just like the adult bookstore case. But if you claimed it was about copyright, it might just sneak through.

And that was especially terrifying, because, as you know, because copyright is everywhere. If you want to shut down WikiLeaks, it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that you’re doing it because they have too much pornography, but it’s not hard at all to claim that WikiLeaks is violating copyright, because everything is copyrighted. This speech, you know, the thing I’m giving right now, these words are copyrighted. And it’s so easy to accidentally copy something, so easy, in fact, that the leading Republican supporter of COICA, Orrin Hatch, had illegally copied a bunch of code into his own Senate website. So if even Orrin Hatch’s Senate website was found to be violating copyright law, what’s the chance that they wouldn’t find something they could pin on any of us? [emphasis added]

AlterNet
Aaron Swartz on the Fight for Internet Freedom
Amy Goodman | Democracy Now

Aaron Swartz is framed as the bad guy in many media reports of his "regrettable" death because he was "breaking the law and got caught," rather than as a victim of state intimidation in service of those collecting economic rent from artificial scarcity.

“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." — Malcolm X (h/t Stephan Ewald)

Aaron Swartz — Guerilla Open Access

Guerilla Open Access

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable. 

“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back. 

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies. 

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us? 

Aaron Swartz
July 2008, Eremo, Italy

Study: Open access publishing of science research rising at unanticipated rate

A new study shows that the rise of open access publishing of academic research is faster than anyone had previously realised

The Raw Story
Study: Open access publishing of science research rising at unanticipated rate
The Guardian (UK)

Gold-std & Closed-data-std ... Both Trash. We need Sexier, Speedier, Rockin & Rollin' Policy!

In a recent blog, Martin Wolfe says "We still have that sinking feeling."  and then goes on to reiterate much heterodox economic commentary from the last 70 years, without acknowledging a single source that preceded him.

Apparently, Wolfe has no idea how ironic his statement is.  It almost retraces the fractal history of expanding irony!

Why are group policy adjustments so tortuous?  Watching public policy adapt is like watching 300 million people slowly aligning to push a long train, while a few dozen idiots stationed in the locomotive keep engaging the brake!   The idiots are afraid of losing control?  Control of what?  I've heard of the left hand not knowing what the right is doing, but I'd never before considered a whole nation where none knew what the others were up to.

Forget Clonal Selection, it's too slow.  What we now see is fractal competition & selection of the fitter fractal layer. :)  Can you clone fractal mutation rates?  Can we tally & manage the rate of fracking? :)   Diversive stuff, certainly, but we can do it, and must.  We started off relying upon sexual recombination to drive diversification rates in small aggregates.  Now we depend upon virtual fractal recombination in order to pursue the exploding number of options available to our aggregates of aggregates.  Yet most students - let alone policy staff - don't even get exposed to that concept.  In fact, we're told that diversity = subversity.  So be it.  If we're going to invent nonsense as a prelude to policy, let's make "Proversity" the goal and insist that "heterozygoality" is better than "homozygoality!"  :)  Let the selection begin.  Gentlepeople, start your virtual engines.

Do you ever wonder why policy staff so stubbornly refuse to read widely enough, and why academics & media staff also refuse to acknowledge operations literature outside their own country club?

Expanding peer review, peer credit & open access is what drives the research world, the scientific method and the past 500 years of the Renaissance. Journalists & electorates should try it.   After all, that's what defines evolution.

Yet it seems neither reality nor Martin Wolfe have received permission from the Queen to exist. How else would you explain UK fiscal policy?

While speaking out so weakly, Wolfe himself is part of the problem.  He apparently accepts that people like Marriner Eccles, Vickrey, Mosler, Godley, Goodhart, Mitchell & Wray etc don't deserve his permission to exist either. Perhaps not until he gets the Queen's consent? :(

Then, the courtiers have the gall to insist that you pay money to read Mr. Wolfe's Financial Times blog!  Timely delivery of plagiarism costs money, after all.  Finally, - to add insult to injury - the plagiarism backlog is effectively pegged to our Output Gap!  (If you're willing to wait a decade or two, you may one day see the following headline:  "Plagiarism Backlog Pegged to Output Gap," read by the last Luddite still reading owned journalists.)

We can actually retrace the fractal history of plagiarized operations insights.  When it's traced, it always reveals the stifling drag of having to engineer consent ... from the lords of Luddite.

And the Queen wonders how economists could fail so badly? She should try listening to more of them, more often, and also allowing them to listen to more of their own peers. Heck, just have the population listen to one another?  Ending the distinction of unproductive class is the common solution. You have to wonder what's stuffed under that hat collection.  Just another straw man that they weren't supposed to keep for more than a one day demo.

This is yet another example of why we need to make OpenSource news a policy.

We can't allow class-endowed Luddites to opine about & advise on our future without sharing what they presumptuously advise for us - especially when it's plagiarizing our own, decades old advice, now trotted out as au courant.  If we're even going to bother harboring such parasites, then we must save them from themselves, or suffer the rash.  National policy agility - just like tribal policy agility - requires rapid dissemination of emerging perspectives.  Call it open discussion.

As surely as we ended the restrictive gold-standard currency process, we must end the restrictive closed-data policy process. It's strangling our national initiative and agility. We can't run circles around our competition when 99% of the country isn't told which circles we're running, why, when or how. We're smarter than this. We should just Openly admit it, & get on with it.  Randomly running around straw men is a game for kids, or idiots.  If HP is ever to know what HP knows, the method will involve fiat communication, where every idea is disseminated as an automatic policy stabilizer, not CopyWronged & barred from effective group utilization.

Who knew that fractal sex-drugs-rock&roll really was the answer? :)  If higher rates of sexual recombination supplied past physical diversity, then better/faster/wider fractal policy recombination is what we need now.  It's called OpenSource.  Once you try it, it's addictive.  Face it, the scientific method is sexy.  We need to scale it up exponentially, not avoid it like some venereal disease.  All our virtual gods want us to go forth & multiply our virtual fractals.

Let us pray together.  "Oh Lords, let us be more virtually promiscuous, and yes, let it begin now."