The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
The range of speakers and topics is worth a look. There is no focus to open source at the same time that the main emphasis appears to be the role of the state rather than service to the public.
Free and Secure Internet for All
Freedom Online, Tallinn, Estonia
April 28-29, 2014
What Makes or Breaks Startups in the Sharing Economy? Insurance Rates
EXTRACT
Insurance represents both the lifeblood and the biggest threat to the sharing economy. As I explore in this month’s WIRED cover story, companies like RelayRides — or Airbnb, Lyft, or any other sharing company — depend upon its customers’ willingness to trust one another. These businesses have devised numerous mechanisms to engineer that trust, but perhaps no one feature has been as important as insurance.
Watch for Flying Pigs as Microsoft Embraces Open Source
Microsoft is getting its open source on. Ars Technica reports, “Microsoft Open Sources a Big Chunk of .NET.” It seems the tech giant is softening its stance on open source resources; perhaps they now see they have little choice if the company wants to remain relevant. Writer Peter Bright reports:
“At its Build developer conference today [April 3, 2014], Microsoft announced that it was open sourcing a wide array of its .NET libraries and related technologies and creating a group, the .NET Foundation, to oversee the development and stewardship of the open source components.
“Perhaps the highlight of the announcement today was that the company will be releasing its Roslyn compiler stack as open source under the Apache 2.0 license. Roslyn includes a C# and Visual Basic.NET compiler, offering what Microsoft calls a ‘compiler as a service.’”
Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Microsoft Embraces Open Source – Watch for Flying Pigs”
The right to infrastructure: a prototype for open source urbanism
Alberto Corsín Jiménez
Abstract. This paper develops an analytical framework to place the rise of open source urbanism in context, and develops the concept of the ‘right to infrastructure’ as expressive of new ecologies of urban relations that have come into being. It describes, first, a genealogy for open source technology, focusing in particular on how open source urban hardware projects may challenge urban theory. It moves then to describe in detail various dimensions and implications of an open source infrastructural project in Madrid. In all, the paper analyses three challenges that the development of open source urban infrastructures is posing to the institutions of urban governance and property: the evolving shape and composition of urban ecologies; the technical and design challenges brought about by open source urban projects; and the social organisation of the ‘right to infrastructure’ as a political, active voice in urban governance. In the last instance, the right to infrastructure, I shall argue, signals the rise of the ‘prototype’ as an emerging figure for contemporary sociotechnical designs in and for social theory.
Keywords: open source urbanism, infrastructures, urban ecologies, urban commons, right to the city, prototypes
Corsín Jiménez A, 2014, “The right to infrastructure: a prototype for open source urbanism” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32(2) 342 – 362
PDF (21 Pages): 2014 Open Source Urbanism Right to Infrastructure
Got TweetCred? Use it To Automatically Identify Credible Tweets
What if there were a way to automatically identify credible tweets during major events like disasters? Sounds rather far-fetched, right? Think again.
The new field of Digital Information Forensics is increasingly making use of Big Data analytics and techniques from artificial intelligence like machine learning to automatically verify social media. This is how my QCRI colleague ChaTo et al. already predicted both credible and non-credible tweets generated after the Chile Earthquake (with an accuracy of 86%). Meanwhile, my colleagues Aditi, et al. from IIIT Delhi also used machine learning to automatically rank the credibility of some 35 million tweets generated during a dozen major international events such as the UK Riots and the Libya Crisis. So we teamed up with Aditi et al. to turn those academic findings into TweetCred, a free app that identifies credible tweets automatically.
We’ve just launched the very first version of TweetCred—key word being first. This means that our new app is still experimental. On the plus side, since TweetCred is powered by machine learning, it will become increasingly accurate over time as more users make use of the app and “teach” it the difference between credible and non-credible tweets. Teaching TweetCred is as simple as a click of the mouse. Take the tweet below, for example.
Search and Big Data: Been There, Done That
Is the use of search to find information in large collections of content revolutionary? Er, no. What about using search to locate an Internet Protocol address in a repository of monitored email traffic? Er, no.
With the chatter on LinkedIn and the vacuous news releases from some floundering search companies, one would think that gathering up content and running a query was the equivalent of my ancestor stealing and ember and saying, “Look, I invented fire.”
Sorry.
Beyond the rather influential if specious IBM white paper published in 2010 (link is at http://bit.ly/1gckiPJ), a large number of companies continue to position some old as new again.
One interesting twist on the “search is better than SQL” is the useful solution brief from RainStor. In some circles, RainStor has a low profile. In others, the company has caught the attention of some recognized “names” in the Big Data world; for example, Cloudera and Dell. So think Hadoop friendly.
Pirate Party Vindicated By Highest EU Court, Killing Mass Surveillance Law
Yesterday, the European Court of Justice ruled the detested Data Retention Directive invalid. Retroactively invalid, even: the court ruled that it had never existed. The directive (a directive is sort of a federal law covering the EU) mandated all EU states to log all communications from all citizens: from whom, to whom, from where, using what method, and when. No communication would be unseen by the Government.
This wasn’t for the usual organizedcrime-terrorism-pedophiles-filesharing mantra. This was for everybody, with the express purpose of using your communications logs against you. The Pirate Party was founded as a direct reaction to this blanket violation; we were quoted in 2006 saying “this is worse than Stasi” in a context depicting us as though we were talking complete rubbish and nonsense.
Yesterday, the European Court of Justice – the highest court of the world’s largest economy – said the same thing in a historic verdict. The blanket violations are intolerable and inexcusable.
