A Networked World

In the hands of parasites and thieves

We expect the Americans to try and steal everything that is not nailed down, its the normal process of the empire to appropriate everything. But to find a New Zealand government ministry assisting the theft is a bloody disgrace.

A rural library in Horowhenua says a United States company has hijacked the computer system it invented and taken the trademark on its Maori name.

The Horowhenua Library Trust devised a software system called Koha 12 years ago to manage catalogues and lending information.

The system is free and widely used by other libraries, churches, schools and corporations around the world.

However, the trust's head of libraries, Joann Ransom, says the American company LibLimehas been granted provisional rights to the name Koha by the Ministry of Economic Development.

She says LibLime is trying to adapt the Koha system for its own private client base.

"We did something really good and we gave it away to the world and it's been a glorious thing globally for 12 years. And now this American corporate wants to take it," she says.

Ms Ransom says she is astounded an international company could trademark a Maori word.

The library has three months to object to the decision and Ms Ransom says it has little money to pay for a legal case.

via www.radionz.co.nz

We live in a world where only those things that are done for profit may be done and that anything being done without a desire for profit can be treated as optional until some way can be found to profit from it.

Those who have assets that are not being used for profit can have those assets expropriated for the benefit of anyone who seeks to profit from those assets. 

Theft of IP, theft of living treasure in the form of the Maori language within which Koha is a significant cultural factor, theft of the value that has been created by a great product that enables libraries all over the world to conduct their business without paying excruciating fortunes to commercial interests.

And there is the crime that Koha has committed. Because we have now reached that stage where any task done for free is defined as theft of profits from someone trying to profit from that activity and that must be stopped.

The people in MED who have sanctioned this are complicit in the crime and at the very least need to be hauled into the street,tarred and feathered and dumped in Wellington harbour then charged with polluting the environment.

I will also give good odds that someone will, once the deal is done, get "head hunted" by an affiliate company for a nice lucrative job. No crass, brown-paper-bag-full-of-cash corruption is needed in this corrupted system, just a nod and a wink.

Actions needed.

1. Internet NZ needs to step into this and fund the case against this theft
2. Tweet it, FB it, letter to the editor it, and for Kiwis 3 days out from an election, kick some pollieass.

What a disgrace.

#NetHui Lessig on fire

I've been a huge fan of Larry lessig since I first found the net back in 1995. So when he was booked for NetHui I was a lot more determined to turn up on the Friday than I would otherwise have been.

While I expected most of what he had to say, albeit updated, the last 10 minutes were seriously unexpected.

I never expected to hear a guy with such a huge reputation who comes from the heart of the online world to stand up in Auckland and beg us to help rescue his nation from its evolving disaster driven by systemic corruption. Watch it.

#NetHui and Digital Literacy

At last week's excellent NetHui, run by Internet NZ, I was asked to plug in 5 minutes worth on Digital Literacy. As usual, I tried to give it a bit of a spin. (starts at 41.12 and runs 6 minutes - the cut [poor sync] is Download Nethui_digital-literacy)

Here's the full version that probably takes a bit more than 5 minutes.

As one of the other presenters suggested, Digital Literacy means different things to different people and I want to pick up on some points raised by Mike Dickison and maybe be push them out a little, perhaps just shove them off the cliff.

For me digital literacy includes knowing when to take one of these and stick it in your mouth.

The reason for this is simple; in Miami Beach on Memorial Day this year, a bunch of out-of-control cops pumped over 100 shots into a private car in a public place, killing an unarmed black man inside (now there's a surprise) and wounded some bystanders.

A young man called Narces Benoit saw what was happening and whipped out his cellphone to record the scene. One of the cops noticed what he was doing, broke off his shooting gallery duties and came charging at Benoit, waving his gun and screaming at him to get out of his car and hand over the cellphone, which he did.

The cop them smashed the cellphone under his boot and arrested Benoit. Nevertheless, within a few hours, the video of the event was going viral on Youtube because, when he saw the cop rushing at him, Benoit had the presence of mind to take out of the phone his digital media storage card and put it in his mouth.

The difference between Benoit and the cop is what I call Digital Literacy.

A few months ago in the Australian Navy, a female recruit was having a sexual relationship with another recruit. The guy in question thought it would be terribly cool to capture the "action" with his webcam and broadcast it to his mates. She was not happy and complained to her commander about the breach of trust and privacy. He essentially told her not to be a spoilsport and swept the matter under the rug.

The young woman became even less happy and shared her experience on facebook. Within days her commander and his boss and his boss and HIS boss were all publicly on the mat, caps in hand, staring at their shoes and explaining HOW they were going to solve the problem of their appalling leadership.

The difference between the young woman and the Australian Navy is what I call Digital Literacy.

About the same time, footballer Ryan Giggs was having an affair with model Imogen Thomas and when it was discovered he sought the help of the UK Supreme Court which obligingly issued a "super injunction" forbidding the publication of the facts.

Within hours, over 70,000 Twitter users had turned the super injunction into a legal fiction.

The difference between the Supreme Court and Ryan Giggs fan base is what I call Digital Literacy.

And all over the Middle east and North Africa this year, people have risen up, trying to throw off a generation of oppression, corruption and violence against them. Now we have had revolutions for a long time, but in the past they have needed a core of intellectual, philosophical and operational leadership, surrounded by a cadre of activists willing to take the message into the community.

Those roles are now being taken over by the whole community using social media tools. It is that takeover and the loss of the privileged position of leadership that I call Digital Literacy.

In Christchurch's major earthquakes, at risk of their lives and while their buildings and their city crumbled around them people grabbed their cellphones and videoed the event as a way to record their own experience to share with others and possibly to provide evidence of what happened to them if they didn't make it out.

That too I call Digital Literacy.

Literacy of any kind is not just being able to read and write the words, it is understanding the meaning, the significance and the context of the communication, then knowing how to manipulate them.

The best example I can think of is the advent of film to entertainment. The first films were little more than stage plays with a camera placed in front of them to record the action. But it wasn't long before we saw the appearance of film literacy, using the unique language of the cinema to tell the story in its own way. The language includes backgorund music, closeups, tracking and pan shots, framing and the million other ways to use a camera that are not available to stage plays.

So we cannot expect that Digital Literacy will look in any but the most superficial ways, like hard copy literacy. In fact, by my definition Digital Literacy is happening all around us, all the time, with increasing frequency.

For 20 years we have talked about the ICT Revolution, blithely ignoring the fact that all revolutions break stuff, and the thing they break first and most irreparably, is the status quo, to expect the revolutionaries to restore the powers of the old guard is nonsense.

Digital Literacy does not consist in being able to write a CV in a word processor nor manage our accounts with a spreadsheet, they are far too often, a way for the old guard to try and force the revolution into a mould with which they feel comfortable.

Our problem is that digital illiteracy is rife in Government, business, education, health, justice and the NFP sectior, very often among those who are pushing hardest for solutions.

The real digital literacy challenge that we have is to shift the old guard into actual digital literacy so that our organisations, which have real, and vital, work to do, can engage with, communicate with, work with an increasingly digitally literate community; so that they can swim in that literacy instead of drowning in it as they are doing right now.

MY problem is that I   have no idea how the hell we are going to do that.

Digital Literacy does not consist in being able to write a CV in a word processor nor manage our accounts with a spreadsheet, they are far too oftten, a way for the old guard to try and force the revolution into a mould with which they feel comfortable.

The real Wikileaks secrets

Most of what we have seen from the Wikileaks cables is mere confirmation of what we suspected all along, mostly that our politicians and other leaders routinely lie to us about what they are doing and, especially, why they are doing it.

In some cases that leads to dead people as have illegal or unwinnable wars such as in Iraq and Afghanistan and it is seriously rich to have people with buckets of blood on their hands lecturing Wikileaks about the possibility that people may be compromised.

There is a difference between those who cause harm inadvertently while trying to out a criminal and those who commit the crimes in the first place. Ask any cop who has accidentally killed someone who walked into the line of fire at the wrong moment, for example.

But the real secret that is causing so much panic is not the diplomatic chitchat and scandal, schadenfreude-inducing though that may be; what is causing all the sturm und drang is the meta message that is coming down the line and will get much liuder and much clearer as the commercial and banking data comes out.

That message is this, the game is rigged. Like this, for instance

TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – A WikiLeaks cable indicates that BHP Billiton tried to sabotage a proposed investment by China's Chinalco in rival Rio Tinto, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“The cables sent from Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan's chief of staff to US officials describe how BHP "played its cards with consummate skill" in lobbying the government to delay a decision on a deal between Rio Tinto and Chinalco,” the ABC report said.

In February 2009, Chinalco agreed to invest $19,5-billion in Rio Tinto and its operations to obtain an 18% stake in the world's third-biggest mining company, which at the time was battling to shift debt.

But Rio broke off the deal in June, opting instead for a big rights issue and a since-scrapped iron-ore joint venture in Australia with BHP.

The Chinalco agreement had followed an earlier failed hostile takeover bid by BHP Billiton for Rio Tinto.    

All of the players involved knew what was going on, not one of them lacks the resources to know what the others are actually doing behind the scenes, the only people who must not find out that the pollies and the captains of industry are rigging the game is us.

As long as we can be convinced that we have to play the capitalist (or communist or theocratic) game and that there are rules which, if followed, can lead to "success" we will keep doing our best and blaming ourselves for any failures.

But once we see clearly that the whole game is rigged by those who have been playing longest, we will first withdraw our participation and, when they try to enforce play, out will come the torches and pitchforks.

THAT is what is getting so many panties in a bunch in the capitals of the world.

The damage done by Wikileaks

I'm sure that it comes as absolutely no surprise to any diplomat nor their employing government, that their counterparts from other nations routinely lie to them about pretty much everything. Nor should it come as a shock that some of their counterparts think of them as idiots or worse.

A diplomat is someone who lies professionally for his country and any diplomat not fully aware of that is a liability and should be fired forthwith.

So it is unlikely that the Wikileaks data dump provides anything more than confirmation of normal suspicions and, being diplomats, these people will have no trouble whatever continuing both to deal with, and lie to, each other with unruffled feathers for many years to come, their personal flutterings soothed by regular application of canapes and booze.

On the other hand, what the leaks can very much damage is the credibility and safety of governments at the hands of their employers, viz, us.

While most of us have a default position that our masters, elected and otherwise, treat us and our aspirations and needs with dismissal when it is not outright contempt, it is another thing altogether to discover how regularly and egregiously they betray our interests in the pursuit of their rarefied and esoteric goals in the Great Game.

Wikileaks has the mission of fleshing out and adding fine detail to those betrayals and in doing so they undermine the pretenses and obfuscations and credibility, the authority of nation states in relation to their own people.

THAT is why the bastards are screaming in moral panic; that is why they are plotting the destruction of the torchlight shone straight into their corrupted hearts.

That is why we all have a duty to support Wikileaks, because it has the potential, at last, and in fact, to keep the bastards honest.

Update:  What is the betting that, if sweden is able to have Julian Assange extradited, the rape case will be dropped but he will be held because there is an application from the US for his extradition to their jurisdiction? I'm going with about 80%.

Plus, after spending so many uyears in a very happy association with sweden and its reputation for openness, I'm bloody horrified by their role in this.

Is Google building a 3D map?

OK, maybe its not, but I think somebody is.

For the last couple of nights, around 11PM (NZDST), while sloshing in my spa pool, I have spotted 3 satellites flying in exactly the same formation in a circumpolar orbit.

Two of them side by side in the lead, I would guess about 10 miles apart and a third following about 40 miles behind (I may be out by a factor of 10 given the other variables) in an isoceles triangle. Seeing them all in the same formation on two different nights argues for deliberate, to maintain that relationship for more than a few seconds they have to be in exactly the same orbit and exactly parallel tracks.

Any ideas?

Mega

Lomania

The sooner this guy self destructs, the better for us all. Tamaki's 700 'sons' swear oath of loyalty

The leader of Destiny Church, Brian Tamaki, who not long ago anointed himself bishop of the church he founded, has now proclaimed himself the church's "spiritual father" and designated the male members of the church as "spiritual sons".

At a special service during the church's annual conference in Auckland at the weekend, about 700 male members of the church swore a "covenant oath" of loyalty and obedience to Mr Tamaki and were given a "covenant ring" to wear on their right hands.

A church document describes the covenant as "a solemn oath of commitment that is binding, enduring and unbreakable. You are bound to covenant ... Covenant is an irrevocable, undissolvable oath of commitment".

There's another word for that kind of relationship; slavery. And if these 700 "sons" don't wake up to their "father's" serious ego problem, they will become his shock troops next.

There's a time to stop this dangerous crap, and it is now, before it gets out of hand. He has feet of clay like the rest of us, someone needs to dig them up pronto, although he is as cunning as a fox, he already has the antidote in their veins.

"You will hear all sorts of statements and opinions but you must be
prepared to ignore them and consistently hold him in the same high
regard no matter what you hear."

Somewhat surprisingly, the protocol says that Mr Tamaki is human and does make mistakes.

However, the sons must "be prepared to defend against any problems arising out of his mistakes.

A
loyal man is supposed to 'cushion' the effect of a mistake on Bishop
and to protect him. NEVER intentionally expose his weakness."

Now, we know that he knows that there is something under the covers. All that matters is what that something is.

NSS

Well I'll be danged, media suckered again. Sheriff says balloon boy a hoax

FORT COLLINS, Colorado - A Colorado sheriff said it was a hoax when parents reported that their 6-year-old son was in a flying saucer-like helium balloon hurtling away from their home.

Sheriff Jim Alderden said Richard and Mayumi Heene "put on a very good show for us, and we bought it."

"We believe that we have evidence at this point to indicate that it was a publicity stunt done with the hopes of marketing themselves or better marketing themselves for a reality television show at some point in the future," Alderden said.

When this hit the screens I wandered over to Google and looked up the the average weight of a six year old kid and the lifting capacity of Helium, did a few basic calculations with a spreadsheet and came up with a spherical balloon about 12 feet in diameter.

I didn't bother trying to figure out how big a balloon it would take to rise to 7,000 feet in that short time, nor the effect of its evident partial deflation, what we were seeing was just too small to do the job.

Besides which, any child would have to have been inside and breathing helium for the whole time which would have killed him.

But nobody suggested any of these things, the media, the military, the cops and uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all chased yapping after it as if it was real. We happily sit in front of the idiot box and watch session after session of MythBusters and the net result is that the level of thinking achieved by the media is still subterranean.

Retaining value - what exactly does that mean?

James West has an interesting piece at Midas Letter - Gold Price Prediction

When anything, be it stock, bond, currency or commodity, reaches a new high, the impetus for selling into strength and taking profit off the table are enhanced dramatically. With gold’s new record high, there are plenty of holders of bullion who started acquiring it in the first years of the millennium who are now sitting on profit equivalent to 3 times the money.

The question is, however, sell gold in exchange for what?

Certainly trading gold for U.S. dollars is akin to forward selling gold at an incrementally lower price. Anyone smart enough to own gold since 2001 is unlikely to be so silly.

Renmibi might seem like a good trade. The only problem with that is you can’t easily spend renmibi at Home Depot or Safeway or Nordstrom.

No, there’s really no substitute for gold at this point in the global currency landscape. And so, the normally present impetus to sell and take profit has been castrated by the lack of anything else capable of retaining its value.

OK. I get that. But the question then becomes, what exactly does he mean by retaining value? If there is nothing that you would accept in exchange for it, how much "value" does it have?

I always look at the extreme case such as me having the last plate of food on earth and you having all the gold. How much of that gold would you give not to starve to death? How much gold would I accept to commit suicide?

Since the person who survives gets all the gold anyway, the only thing that has "value" is the food and even that is losing value the longer I remains uneaten.

I completely agree that exchanging gold for fiat money is a fools bargain, but once you have the gold you too can get fooled by seeing its exchange rate (as distinct from its value) constantly rising against all other possible "stores of value". Storage of any kind only has value if it is able to be released. from water in a dam to grain in a warehouse to savings in the bank, the storage part only works if the release part can take place. So how do you release the value stored in gold?

At some point you have to exchange it for something in the certain knowledge that you will never be able to get it back at that price, it will always go higher.

Well it will until all those left holding all the gold realise that it can't be eaten, worn, lived in, burned or used as medication, and if all anyone else wants is food, shelter, clothing, fuel or medication, how exactly do you sell your "assets" in exchange for something you actually need.

In complex societies the location of value is seriously camouflaged, and we can get carried away by the idea that, just because gold is durable and unchanging it has some kind of intrinsic value that can be locked away. I don't believe it.

Show me the mechanism.

Towards the new normal

Whenever I'm with Steve barnett, he's usually drinking and I'm the designated driver. Mostly because he and my wife are members of a wine club and when they go on high-class pub crawls (or winery tours) and I of the cardboard palate drive the people mover. When he talks about business he reminds me a lot of Johnnie Moore and Rob Paterson; and me. Learn fast: things aren’t (ever) returning to “normal”.

National Bank (NZ) Chief Economist Cameron Bagrey... confessed he’s embarrassed that his profession’s consistently got it wrong: failed to predict the current recession and doesn’t have a clue how to fix.

He says only one thing’s for certain: we can’t go back to the way it was. Anyone who thinks that things will return to “normal” is stupid. The policy makers are determined it won’t; determined we figure out new ways to do, manage and teach business and the economy. Previous answers are wrong.

[...] I seriously doubt NZ Business Education can change from its prescriptive right-answer model any time soon, hobbled as it is by administrators and their anti-professional, centralised rules and controls, and know-no-better student and employer market.

I’m sceptical too that NZ business managers can abandon their manager-knows-best, right-answer approach any time soon: go deeper than recite the superficial lists of “secrets” peddled in popular business management literature.

Actually, if Steve thinks its only NZ managers, he's dreaming. The managerial class is global, its largely responsible for the problem and will cling to its paycheque till the collapsing businesses they parasitise crumble in their hands.

[...] Here’s the guts: (really) involve everyone; confess ignorance (starting at the top); spend time together generating a long term goal that everyone’s passionate about but not sure how to achieve; get very clear on the medium term strategy and short term goals that stand to take you towards the long term; openly generate and agree clear individual and collective accountabilities in achieving the change; openly measure progress to keep individuals and groups (at all levels) openly accountable for their contribution; continually review and revise in the light of individual and collective experience; take every opportunity to talk about the long term goal and the actual action and progress towards it.

I think he's optimistic here.

In the new normal, we have so little idea of what will work that the idea of goals and strategies may be a waste of time as well. As our energy and financial resources are decimated we will gain new appreciations of those resources that are left.

I think there might be some new parameters that will have more power in the future.

• We will demand much higher value returns for any of those irrecoverable resources that we expend, especially if we hand them to someone else.
  
• We will increasingly trade time for goods and services. Where we have invested a lot througout my lifetime in "saving time" we will now "spend" or invest, that time ratrher than use a resource like energy.
• Things will slow down in some areas such as travel and material flows
• Information shipping will speed up as we reduce even further the documentary exchanges and rely more on electronics (saving paper, energy etc)
• Discretionary spending will evaporate and the industries based on them will disappear. If we spend more time waiting, travelling or producing things we will have less liesure time and less money to spend in it.
• Energy and material flows at a personal, community and business level will become a critical part if every economic model and activity.
• The idea of waste will disappear, we will be much more conscious that we can't 'afford" it any more. The idea that we should pay for packaging, then pay to have it taken away and pay again in opportunity costs merely to have a wrapper will become laughable, if not criminal
• Product design, durability, ease of use and fitness for purpose will become absolute criteria for everything
• We will all need to try many, small actions that may or may not succeed. We will need to be deadly honest about the outcomes and rethink those that fail while iterating those that seem to succeed.
• We will need to acknowledge that, at a time of paradigm shift, nothing will be reliable for quite a long time; what worked yesterday may not work again tomorrow. That is why small, iterative actions will be the only safe ones, there will be no more going large.
  
• Your turn. What other geenral rules do you think might fit here and does this make any sense at all?

I'm planning some renovations to my house - we have been since we moved in 2 years ago - and the other night I was using Google Sketchup (a brilliant bit of software) to turn the 2D plan into a 3D model so we could try stuff out.

I put in a work bench for building things and a wet area for wine making and a pot still for recovering essential oils from the flowers and herbs and plenty of space for creating stuff and storing it and for tools and consumables like glues and screws and so forth.

And then I stood back and realised that I am making not just a workshop a small artisanal factory that would fit in the 19th century or earlier. I'm doing it because it is the logical outcome of thinking about local production andtrying to close the energy and material flow loops as tightly as possible.

When i build stuff, I use screws not nails so that everything can be dismantled and used again in something else. More rules.

• Low energy dismantle-ability
• Repurposing all manner of manufactures
  
• Building things that can be applied to new uses
• Shared spaces, shared tools, shared skills
  

What else?