Arjen's blog

Article in Surgeon's journal

The Dutch Journal for surgeons, publishes an article written by my collegue Younass and myself. We wrote this article to further explain some of the points we made during our  keynote at the natinal Convention of surgeons last month. The entire article here in English and Dutch, the PDF of the journal here. Background links and articles here (mostly Dutch).

Ubuntu 'protects' against Microsoft-claims

Dutch IT-magazine 'Webwereld' (1, 2) asked me to comment on the news of Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu Linux, is offering legal protection against potential patentclaims of Microsoft on Linux. Red Hat provides a comparable service and refers to it as a 'nessecary evil'

The vast majority of softwarepatents are not legally recognized in Europe making this one of those typical American problems mostly designed to make lawyers very rich. But leaving that aside, how solid are the claims anyway? 2003 Microsoft invested in the anemic software provider SCO to sue IBM on the basis of alleged ownership of  crucial Unix/Linux components. The case lasted many years and achieved  nothing. Except of course a lot of confusion in the marketplace with IT-buyers who were considering moving to Linux, thus sometimes delaying a firm decision. It would seem that this was the primary orginal objective.

Microsoft has been working for over a decade to undermine opensource in general in Linux in particular. So far with limited succes. Linux runs most websevers, all Tomtoms, most supercomputers and more phones than Windows mobile. Even on the desktop, Microsofts homebase, is is slowly gaining ground.

For many years now Microsoft says, about once per year, that 'soon'  they will show their many patents that will make Linux unusable. Prof. Eben Moglen, chief counsil of the Free Software Foundation, explains this phenomenon in this video:

It would behoove companies like Redhat and Canonical if they would extend the promise of legal protection to not just the users but also the individual developers who work on Linux. It is those individuals who need protecting the most since mpostoften they cannot afford to legally defend themselves against a company like Microsoft. As long as they don't do that the risk remais that Steve Balmer will continue his yearly 'be very afraid tour' making some developers afraid to work on opensource sofware. That is of course exactly what Balmer wants.

EU commisioner Neelie Kroes meanwhile says to companies like Microsoft: put up or shut up. Wise words from someone who has some experience in dealing with the rascals from Redmond.

Kroes: vendor lock-in waste of money

In a recent speech EU-commissioner Neelie Kroes said that badly functioning IT-markets and high vendor-dependence have far-reaching consequences for the functining of public bodies and companies in Europe. There is much to be gained, both economically and functionally, by focussing on open standards and opensource software. 'This is a waste of public funds no government van afford any longer.'

The Dutch IT-managzine Computable.nl has a summary of the speech with my comments (original in Dutch - Google translation here). English commentary on the speech here, here and here.

Game over

Prof. Hugenholz's contribution to The Great Download Debate in the Netherlands last week was clear: laws and treaties that are unalterable in the short term will determine the legal framework of the downloading debate. The professor himself called it a "legal reality check." As I understand the situation, it does not matter much whether you vote for the Pirate Party or the conservative in the upcoming election next week. Successful lobbying by the copyright industry in the last 100 years has led to a system of laws, treaties and international guidelines that has locked down the entire system, and which seemingly can only be changed when moving in the wrong direction. ACTA teaches us that endlessly lengthening the terms of copyright and further privatisation of the investigations of alleged infringements is not a problem.

So on the one hand our democracy is effectively sidelined. This apparently immutable situation gives the copyright industry a free hand to try to charge you every time you honour the works of your favourite artist by singing out loud in the shower.

Fortunately, on the other hand the vast majority of Dutch political parties understand that a serious enforcement of any download ban is just not feasible. Even hang-em and flog-em politician, Fred Teeven, will no longer be sending SWAT-teams to arrest 14 year old girls who refuse to stop downloading. Even though it is technically possible to tap all the Internet connections in The Netherlands, the political will is simply lacking. The electoral consequences would be almost as bad for the politicians as if they suddenly started promoting road tolls or scrapping mortgage tax relief. For most politicians it is a no-win situation, and they will not want to get their fingers burnt.

So as citizens we have been completely sidelined in the ongoing development of these laws and treaties. However, as no one seriously wants to enforce them, it makes little difference in practice.

Finally there is the technology that - fortunately - has its own laws. For example, the doubling of computing and storage capacity in a fixed period. This has been a stable reality for many decades, independent of economic or geopolitical developments, and thus we can confidently predict it will continue into the future. The technological capabilities of today and the very near future ensure that the laws and treaties referred to by Prof. Hugenholz will be unenforceable, even should the political will magically emerge. Every debate also underestimates the effective bandwidth of a backpack full of hard disks. Storage has become so cheap that is easy to give as birthday presents to your friends and family a year's worth of music on a hard disk or e-books on a micro-SD. And in about 14 months that will have doubled again (more about sneakernet 2.0 this coming summer – downloading is soooo 2009).

In other countries it may be possible to take draconian measures against less technically-savvy people and scare them for a month or so, but then a next-generation technology, made sufficiently user-friendly, will be widely adopted by these people and their friends and family. And the more draconian the measures, the faster the new countermeasures will be developed and applied. Many of the newer tools such as VPN tunnels and other privacy-enhancing technologies are not yet user-friendly enough for the mainstream, but that was also initially true of MP3 downloads. Today, even my father can rip a CD in minutes, upload the resulting files to his network drive and play them through XBMC on a variety of devices around the house.

The download debate is over. The citizens have won. Not within the context of the debate, but by simply ignoring such obviously unreasonable laws and using technical capabilities of which the government is largely ignorant. Similarly in the 1990s the political debate and “policy development” around rapidly maturing bio-tech in plants was irrelevant before it had even begun, due to the pace of technological change and fast adoption. It is this last point that our MPs and civil servants in The Hague should really pay attention to. We'll revisit the whole debate again over the next 15 years, with the emergence of the 3D printer. Just ignore it while you print yourself a Kalashnikov.

Cory Doctorow wrote a piece in the UK Digital Economy Bill and there is the usual discussion going on. Informative for those new to the debate

Auto-immune disease in the pigpen

Computer viruses and palliatives against it are a growing threat to high-tech care. For an old problem of a vulnerable mono-culture there is the classical solution: diversity.

Last Monday alarm bells went off in many IT departments. A viral infection on Windows XP computers was initially caused by an anti-virus update from McAfee. The update made part of the system seem a threat and system file protection software made the system unusable, a type of auto-immune disease.

In hospitals and care institutions XP is still widely used, as specialized medical applications are often not ready for the new Windows version (and as often purely because of under-investment). This time it was McAfee, but almost all anti-virus products from time to time cause such problems. Anti-virus updates are a real-time arms race and sometimes in the rush something goes wrong.

From agriculture and ecology, we know that monocultures are efficient but also very vulnerable. It is no different in the pig pen of IT. The management of 4500 identical systems seems simpler than a more varied infrastructure – until a virus or autoimmune disease outbreak. Then the overtime starts. The scale of many of these incidents shows that even large health care institutions do not have proper internal firewalling and compartmentalisation. Nevertheless, the situation is better than five years ago.

Security issues caused by monocultures are not a new story. In 2003 Daniel Greer and Bruce Schneier wrote a report about the security implications of the dominant OS monopoly. Since that time neither the market nor the government has succeeded in effectively breaking this monopoly. In health care applications with medical or laboratory equipment included, many are Windows-only. Vendors often set additional conditions on the PCs, for example no firewall, before guaranteeing proper functioning of their own applications. Thus a computer virus (or an autoimmune disease) is not only annoying for the admin department, but also can make scanners unusable. The MRI scanner can still take images, but the PC is crucial to the operation and viewing the results. So a Philips or Siemens unit worth a cool million is effectively scrap metal and patients cannot be treated. Sooner or later, this is a real time problem and then more people than just the help desk are affected. In England, more than 1100 National Health Service computers were infected with a data-thieving worm. There goes your medical confidentiality.

From the many conversations I have had in recent years with IT workers, I conclude that the difference between a product monoculture (a 'standard' desktop) and the application of standards to achieve interoperability is still not understood. Some years ago I spoke to a ministry official who enthusiastically told me that a 'standard' desktop was on its way for the entire government. When I asked what standards would be applied, he launched into a list of products, "this version of an OS, this version of a word processor" and so on. The perception is prevalent amongst many IT managers that systems can only work and be properly managed if they are all from the same vendor and version. But this is much more a symptom of market failures and the immaturity of the IT industry. It is a problem to be solved, not a law of nature to which we have to adapt.

That there is another way to do things can be seen from the work over the past 10 years in the Antonius Hospital in Nieuwegein. There they have consistently, in small steps, consciously worked to minimize dependence on a particular vendor, platform or application. What most IT managers of health institutions describe as 'impossible' has been done in Nieuwegein. Fortunately this hospital is in the centre of the Netherlands so when a really big crash occurs all critical patients can be sent there. In 2010 we can avoid succumbing to the first virus or software-update-gone-wrong by using virtualization, web-enabling and open standards environments to build greater diversity and interoperability.

Weapons of mass distraction

On July 12, 2007 in Baghdad 12 civilians, including a Reuters photographer and his driver, were shot dead by a U.S. Apache helicopter. Because of the involvement of the Reuters staff, this became minor news and the Pentagon gave a statement on the circumstances surrounding the events: nine 'rebels' and two civilians were killed (the Reuters employees). That seemed to be end of the case. Reuters tried to research the circumstances of the shooting but was blocked by the U.S. government. A formal request for access to videos of the Apache helicopter and audio communication between the crew and ground troops was refused. At that time the story was a tiny blip on the news radar, and quickly forgotten. There have been over 100 journalists killed in Iraq since March 2003 and an estimated 700,000 to over 1.3 million civilians (the U.S. military sees no need to keep track of exactly how many - "we do not do body counts").

Nearly three years later the incident is known worldwide because of the online release of 38 minutes of video recorded by the Apache helicopter involved in the incident. The shortened version on Youtube has been viewed over 6 million times. For anyone who thinks the Iraq invasion was a good idea, watch the full 38 minutes. Twice. A wealth of supporting information is available at collateralmurder.com. On Dutch TV activist and hacker extraordinaire Rop Gonggrijp was invited to give some background to the video. The anchor closed the item with the immortal words "well, it's a good story." Former Chief of Staff General Hans Couzy had called the actions of the Apache crew a war crime one day earlier.

Immediately after the appearance of the video heated debates exploded on a number of online forums. Was it reasonable or unreasonable to shoot? Or was just the first shooting reasonable and the second-to-the-bus-with-the-kids was not? The New York Times found it necessary for military experts to “explain”, and to suggest with detailed analysis that really nothing was wrong. The 'rules of engagement” were followed and that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Similar discussion took place in a multitude of other places. Many arm-chair generals who anonymously claimed military expertise stated that the behaviour of the Apache pilots were quite normal. How a badly injured person without any visible weapons can be a threat to an armored Apache helicopter flying at least one kilometre away remains unclear to me (take the time difference between the Apache firing its gun and the impacting of the shells and multiply this by 800 meters per seconds). Luckily there are many veterans who honestly reveal that the Wikileaks video is unfortunately not exceptional.

But what was missing from virtually all discussion was the simple point that the original statement of the U.S. Army from 2007 was incorrect and that they must have known that. On the day of the attack itself, the Pentagon had the video that we have access to only now. So how come they said for years they did not know how the two children were injured, as the crystal-clear video images show that the Apache helicopter shot them and their father for no reason?

Apart from the specific tragedy of 12 dead civilians and two seriously injured children, it seems to me the main lesson of the WikiLeaks video is that we are still consistely being lied to. The case for war in Iraq was based on deliberate lies back in 2003 and it seems nothing has changes since then. To retain support in Europe for continuing the war in Afghanistan, the CIA has developed a great propaganda plan in which the fears and principles of certain demographics in each country will be manipulated.

In the Netherlands, the Davids Committee report on the Dutch support for the invasion of Iraq expertly avoided the most important question, "did we participate militarily?" by claiming that it found no evidence. It is unclear how hard they searched for evidence because more than enough has emerged in recent years. The easiest way to avoid annoying answers is still not to ask the question.

Soon on Wikileaks there will be a new video of a bombing in Granai, Afghanistan. Hopefully, the discussion will not be about what type of bombs we can better use next time.

What the iPad is good for

With some surprise I have in recent months seen how the drone-armies of Steve Jobs' cult of Mac, hyped a 15 year old concept into sainthood. From the moment the technical specifications of the iPad became known, it was clear to me that I would not be buying. The iPad is an iPhone + + and that is unfortunately the level of control that Apple will take over all aspects of the use of it. Apple determines which applications you can run, which media sources are acceptable and in what formats those media sources are stored. The iPad is comparable with the AOL Internet experience of over 12 years ago. A walled garden where customers are 'protected' from the chaotic freedom that is the open Internet and are made to pay for the privilege.

Critics of the iPad have in recent months rightly explained in detail how the iPad is in many respects a step backwards compared to the rich read/write Internet. Steve's tablet is primarily a media consumption device, much like a DVD player. You read, watch and listen to something that someone else has created for you and are passive, like a TV couch-potato (TV, you know, from the past ...). Determining what things you are viewing is also done by Apple. Having people simply choose their own content and using formats of their choice is obviously not the way things are done on the iPad. The Apple Politburo also chooses what "dirty" words you can and cannot read on the e-book reader.

Like the AppleTV, the device is a direct pipeline to the iTunes and App store. For Apple is it a direct pipeline to your credit card. For the AppleTV there is now a good alternative: XBMC gives the choice over media source and format selection back to the owner of the hardware. Probably there will be something like this for the iPad, a jailbreak or something, so .mkv files can be played and fans can install their own apps without first having to ask permission from Steve.

There is another way. On the Archos Internet tablet, the possibility of installing a completely different OS is even explicitly allowed. If I have a 'third' device (in addition to laptop and phone) I want to buy that kind of freedom and I'm willing to pay for it. Buying an iPad in its current form is not for me. Perhaps the device will be more open in the future and then I will reconsider, but not now.

In spite of all this I'm glad that Apple makes these things and hypes them. Apple forces other suppliers of these products to innovate where otherwise they would not, or much later. There are now more than ten other parties involved in the release of tablet-like devices and existing devices suddenly get extra attention and software upgrades. More importantly, Apple sets a bar for high usability. This gives the open source community something to strive for. Usability is traditionally not the strongest aspect of open source software. Security, stability and portability were always the focus. For the Linux desktop Windows is no longer the benchmark, this has been largely achieved (including CPU-hungry eye-candy with bouncy using windows). MacOSX is the standard being pursued (and imitated) by the Ubuntu team and others and that is fine. As Steve himself once quoted Picasso: "Good artists copy, great artists steal", and he would know.

IPod MP3 players were poorly used and uninteresting for the majority of people. The iPhone has motivated Nokia, Samsung, HTC and Google to develop new great phones. So although I will never buy another iPod/Phone/Pad, I enjoy its effect indirectly because of the new concepts that these products have made mainstream. In the same vein I am now, after two MacBook Pros, again enjoying a Thinkpad (X301, Lenovo's answer to the MacBook Air) with Ubuntu. Thanks Apple!

A 5-7 "tablet with 32Gig fixed memory and an open architecture sounds very nice to me, stick some HSDPA capability on it and I am happy to shell out 600 euros or so.

How the monkey got to Mars

Last year I was asked to contribute to a book by XS4all (PDF) about the history and future of the Internet. I decided to make some broad brush points on page 102. My colleague Menso also contributed (page 36), or here on his blog. 

Long ago there were some monkeys on the African savannah. It was difficult for them as they hunted other animals that were stronger and faster. Other animals could digest the dry grass and live with little water. The monkeys could do none of these things. You would think they would never survive, let alone go on to play an important role in the evolution of the Earth. That they did so is through a unique combination of two things that led to  everything else: an opposable thumb and big brains.

Separately, each of these makes little difference. Dolphins have large brains and are certainly intelligent. But without hands to apply that intelligence they cannot build complex civilizations. Chimpanzees have thumbs but lack the brains to make hand axes and build terabit optical routers. So dolphins and chimpanzees are in our zoos instead of vice versa.

At the same time people tend to associate intelligence with book learning and unworldly academics. "You need more than intelligence to make it in this world" is often said, as if charisma and emotional sensitivity come from the kidneys instead of the brains. When you say the word “intelligence”, think not of a crazed professor but rather of the difference between humans and chimpanzees.

Mankind dominates the planet by intelligence, not by running faster, breathing deeper or chewing through the hide of an elephant. Intelligence, the ability to create new solutions to new problems, is the key to all that we have and all that we are. First we use the thigh bone of an antelope as hand axes or javelins, and not long after (in evolutionary terms) we have the improved spear we call the “intercontinental ballistic missile”.

Technology comes from intelligence and has a fundamental influence on who we are and how we live. Fire, agriculture, bronze, the wheel, the domestication of animals and irrigation systems fundamentally changed our position in respect of all other animals. But with writing came a technology that improved on our most valuable feature. For the first time it was possible to record knowledge outside our brains, and save it over long distances in time and geography. This had enormous implications for the scale at which we could organize and the speed with which we could develop new ideas by building on the ideas of others.

Around 1440, the modern printing press was invented by Johannes Gutenberg. The effects of this invention put Europe two centuries ahead. Suddenly books were affordable for an emerging middle class. There were books about issues, history, politics, science, and culture. For the Vatican this free dissemination of knowledge and ideas was a threat and it therefore hired troops to destroy all the printing presses across Europe. Fortunately the citizens objected and a few tough fights over the right to freedom of thought were the result. Later, this fight was repeated all over again by Scientology and the RIAA, with equal lack of success.

Now that knowledge could not only be written down and shared but also cheaply reproduced on  a mass scale, our civilization developed rapidly. Science brought new technology and soon the smoke stacks of the industrial revolution existed  throughout Europe and then the rest of the world.

Then things really accelerated. The complex societies existing over a century ago needed counting machines and from this came all the computers we use today. The logical next step was for these computers to talk to each other, so the researchers who used them could work smarter together. Forty years later it is impossible to imagine our daily lives without the InterWeps. Now we all have a printing press with a global reach.

Access for all is the next step in the development of our civilization. It is a step that is as fundamental as ensuring everyone can read and write. It makes us smarter as we get more information, knowledge and ideas more quickly and cheaply and we have more people to share with. Internet and cheap computers in everyone's pocket will change as much as the printing press 550 years ago. Only this time those changes will develo ten times as fast.

But it may be that the effects of networked computers obediently following Moore's law are more fundamental. As computers make us smarter or even smart, they can be used to make more sophisticated systems even faster, which will in turn create more sophisticated systems, etc. .. If the difference between us and chimpanzees ensures that we walk on the moon and the chimps are our pets, what are the implications of a system (artifical Iintelligence or human-machine combo) that is fundamentally smarter than the smartest man who ever existed? And if that cleverness is deployed to always smarter successors, a self-perpetuating process begins. This would reduce the entire information revolution of the past millennia to a very minor precursor of the real landslide that is about to happen.

How did the monkey get to Mars? By using his big brains, opposable thumbs and some technical instruments. And the Internet is one of the most important of those to come along in the last 500 years. 

Votingcomputer-twitter-CTO-discussion

Municipal election night in the Netherlands and I was twittering back and forth about votingcomputers with another CTO while zipping along on a German ICE highspeed train. Felt very modern. Below a short conversation with someone who shares my love for Pieter Bruegel paintings.

rtolido: Voting day in the Netherlands. Back to red pencil thanks to the privacy mob. Computers are scary and unsafe blabla. [link2tweet]

rtolido: In India, even in the most rural areas without electricity, voting machines are already used for 6 years. 'Innovative' NL sticks to pencil. [link2tweet]

ArjenKamphuis: @rtolido In the Netherlands the proces of voting can be understood and monitored by *any* citizen #votingcomputers #ruleoflaw [link2tweet]

rtolido: @ArjenKamphuis Help me: we are using pencil and paper, so voting is transparant and understandable...? [link2tweet]

ArjenKamphuis: @rtolido Undetectable voting fraud with paper ballots if very difficult, as opposed to using software that most can't understand or check. [link2tweet]

rtolido: @ArjenKamphuis So let's do our book-keeping with pen & paper again, because we can't understand or check SAP..? [link2tweet]

ArjenKamphuis: @rtolido bookkeeping in individual organisations is no where near as important as the decision who runs our state. But I agree SAP can suck [link2tweet]

ArjenKamphuis: @rtolido much more on the sordid history of Dutch votingcomputers: http://bit.ly/bZ4JAg Scary that local govs in do not understand or care [link2tweet]

rtolido: @ArjenKamphuis The comic is scary too http://bit.ly/c4kmx7 a bit too much of Plato's shadow cave to me. It's on paper, so it's true..? [link2tweet]

ArjenKamphuis: @rtolido It's not about truth but about detectability of fraud. Software based voting fraud is very hard to detect, as opposed to paper [link2tweet]

---

I've written before about the fundamental problems with voting computers. There is a broad consensus among experts that these are not trivially solvable. Blackboxvoting is a great english language resource on this issue. Votingcomputers also came up in an English interview with the Indian Centre for Internet and Society.

Some of the producers of votingcomputers keep pushing for the adoption of these technologies even though they have been banned in the Netherlands. For me the questions start with: what problems do these machines solve? What is so important that we would dare risk undetectable fraud and loss of voter-privacy? I can see none. 

On a lighter note: the Onion News reports US voting computer-leak reveals outcome presidential elections.

A reasonable discussion

In recent weeks a number of leaked documents has made it crystal clear how a cluster of companies (hereafter referred to as the "copyright industry") warns off any threat to its commercial interests. The copyright industry consists of all those companies whose business models are based on the most extreme neo-liberal interpretation of copyright. In this interpretation, the ability to make money by endlessly re-selling the same piece of intellectual property is considered more important not only than democratic control over the creation of laws, but also than basic civil rights such as the principle of innocent until proven guilty. 

Where copyright once began in the 18th century with a period of 14 years, in the 19th and 20th centuries it extended to 70 years after the date of death of the author. It is not entirely clear how copyright 70 years after the death of a creative person can encourage more creativity (the original purpose of copyright). There is no evidence that more culture is created by endless renewal and reinforcement of copyright; indeed, there are many indications that it actively blocks both new creativity and the preservation of existing culture.

First there are the now infamous Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations. ACTA is an international treaty designed to combat the counterfeiting of branded products and other forms of copyright infringement. Although citizens of participating countries must adhere to this treaty on pain of subsequent fines or worse, they had no say in or even oversight of the treaty's creation. Companies from the copyright industry appear to have had a free hand in developing the content of ACTA. Citizens and their elected representatives were excluded and nobody will say why. That hardly creates trust.

Now, in a report to the US government, it appears that the overarching pro-copyright lobbying organization, the International Intellectual Property Association (IIPA), wants to place a number of countries on a special watch list, because the governments of these countries actively promote the use of open source software. The deployment of open source is apparently comparable to copyright infringement, protectionism and terrorism because it threatens the ability of proprietary software companies to make money. The logic of this is so distorted that you have to read it three times to believe that someone in his/her mind could write this in 2010. How nice that a Dutch caretaker government promoting open source can simultaneously be in the 'coalition of the willing' and the 'axis of evil'.

The whole course of events raises the question of whether we, as citizens, can still have any rational discussion with these interest groups in the hope of reaching a reasonable consensus. A workable balance between different interests requires that both parties follow certain basic rules eg to respect the democratic state. If, as in this case,  lobby groups are so crude as to operate outside the normal frameworks, they leave the other party in the debate no choice but to do the same. That other party is we, the citizens, and we are many. And because we are many, we can innovate more quickly to circumvent any technical or legal barrier. In every public debate on copyright, the burden of proof is always put on citizens who believe that things should be a little less extreme. The copyright industry and its lobbyists have never been to able demonstrate the social utility of the endless tightening of copyright. An industry that desires legal protection for it's businessmodel, is it not reasonable that it shows society that this protection is of value to society? And if it will not or cannot... why should citizens give credence to the industry and its unilaterally-asserted  'rights'?

The copyright industry seems headed for a total war against its own clients, with centuries-old civil rights simply set aside in secret negotiations. Obviously honest citizens will first try to change unreasonable laws through the usual democratic channels. However, if these paths are obviously and actively blocked, then they will fall back to civil disobedience. If that does not help, stronger measures may follow. Fortunately in this case civil disobedience is extremely fun to do; download, upload, copy, share, crack, jailbreak and remix, until to all members of the IIPA either wake up to new realities or go bankrupt.

And then we hold a huge party. With great music of course.

Documents, differently

What is a document? It started as a flat piece of beaten clay, onto which characters were scratched with a stick. 8000 years later it was found and after years of study, archaeologists concluded that it said: 'You owe me three goats”. 



Through papyrus and parchment scrolls we arrived at mass production of paper and book printing in Europe in the 15th century. Our sense of the nature of a document is still derived from this previous revolution in information capture and distribution. When computers became commonplace as a tool to create documents, there was therefore a strong focus on applications to produce paper document as quickly and nicely as possible. The creation had become digital, but the final result was not fundamentally different from the first printed book in 1452.

Most word processors in use today cling to this concept. There are hundreds of functions for page numbering, footnotes and layout to achieve a legible final result - on paper. Many IT tools around the management and access of documents are directed to the concept of a digital document as a stack of paper. Ready to print for 'real' use. The modern ways of working together for various reasons no longer apply to a paper-oriented way of recording and distribution. Paper is static, local, and now much slower and more expensive to transport than bits. It is this combination of restrictions has led to new ways of creating documents where both the creative process and the end result is digital. A famous example is Wikipedia, the world's largest encyclopaedia with millions of participants continually writing and rewriting about the latest insights in technology, science, history, culture or even the biography of Andre Hazes.



In this new form a document is a compilation of information at an agreed place online. In Wiki environments anyone can register and then comment or improve the document. This input is visible and therefore usable for all other participants so the end result is the sum of knowledge rather than the interpretations of a small number of "editors". 



If the future of documents is digital, with a new way of working we also need new tools. Page numbering and footnotes are irrelevant in hypertext. However, what is relevant in a culture of transparency and collaboration is software that allows comfortable "writing" (another old word) in a web browser.

Opensource policy needs a 'Why'

In 2002 Peru had a coherent action plan for open standards and open source. That went way beyond the Dutch action plan of five years later and was probably far ahead of its time. Where the strengths of the Dutch plan lie in focusing on practical operational goals such as interoperability, market forces and strengthening the local economy, the Peruvian plan made no attempts to hide its political mission.

As Peruvian Senator Dr. Edgar Villanueva described in a famous response to a lobbying letter from a proprietary supplier, these are the fundamental IT considerations for any democratic government:

• Free access to public data for citizens
• Digital preservation of data
• Safety of the State and its citizens

The idea is that a democratic government must in the first place be accountable to its citizens concerning its actions. This makes control over, and insight into, the software that implements the law a political issue. Free access to public data and digital preservation are mainly the areas of open standards and it seems that this battle is pretty much won. The importance of open standards is generally accepted in 2010, even by the parties (you know who you are) that have actively blocked its implementation for many years.

Security of the state and its citizens is a lot harder. What security and against which threat? The state must protect itself from unwelcome outside influences. If it can be externally influenced outside the democratic will of its citizens, then there is not much point to democracy. Full access to the source code is a good guarantee of a high level of control and independence. This access means the right to view, modify and redistribute those changes. The government must have, if it wants, its own "gold master" to make critical pieces of software. With a certified, public checksum of the code so that a simple and transparent process exists for verification. This makes the government truly independent of foreign companies or countries that would like to exert influence through undocumented loopholes.

Citizens must be protected from both external and internal robber barons (this is why we have nation-states in the first place!), and against the government itself. Because we know that even democratic governments sometimes just lose their way when it comes to human rights etc. This is why access to source code is also crucial. With an open platform you, the citizen, can protect yourself with heavy encryption on your data(traffic). And that crypto can be checked by someone you trust not to have any back doors. Free software (also known as open source) is therefore just as natural as the use of open standards for any innovative, democratic and sovereign country that deserves the title. For a company this independence and freedom to innovate may also be a strategic matter. And more and more companies are discovering that.

Such a policy is not, as certain parties often state, discrimination against the business model or suppliers. The business model of a software supplier is not relevant to a government. But the term&conditions of product delivery are and those may be set by governments. It is then up to the supplier to decide whether he wants to meet those conditions. Or not. No one is forced to deliver against their will.

The lack of a political mandate in the current Dutch policy is a limiting factor. Without a clear political strategy detailing the 'why', IT discussions will always depend on migration plan details and total cost-of-ownership-for-3-years. It may be totally against the zeitgeist to discuss the principles of democracy, national sovereignty and civil rights. But if we do not continually make these points, we might just as well outsource the governing of the Netherlands to Blackwater/Xe and Halliburton

Futureshock presentation at HAR2009

For over a million years we lived as hunter-gatherers in small family groups, for thousands of years we lived as farmers in small villages, for 200 years we lived in cities and built industry. Now we live globally in a world that is changing faster every day than ever before through new ideas and technologies.

Sickness and mortality? Scarcity of material goods? Humans as the most intelligent beings? How very 20th century!

Our history has not prepared us for these changes, Our cultures, ideologies and religions provide no answers to many of the new questions we are faced with. Trying to impose old world views or ways of doing things on a new world is a recipe for failure, whether you are a company, government or individual.

For businesses the challenge will be to provide valuable products in a world where many things that were expensive in the recent past have quickly become very cheap or essentially free. Governments will struggle to remain relevant in a world that moves much faster than they can and where geographical location is becoming less and less important for the individual citizens' identity, income and social network.

All of us will be challenged to rediscover what being human means in a world that is constantly changed by new technologies that we cannot really control. Do we try to stop these changes or can we adapt to them? What are some of the risks we face if we use all these new technologies? What are the rewards we might miss out on if we decide to not use them?

Slides are here in ODF and PDF (CC-licenced, free for non-commercial use) 

 Talk starts at 05:20 - working on correcting that.

This type of presentation is part of our scenarioplanning services. Other visual examples in Dutch are this TV appearance in 2005, a short film we made for one of our finance clients in the summer of 2008 and another film we helped make about the future of culture and knowledge.

Debate between HAR and Brein

On the second day of HAR2009 a copyright debate was held between the entertainment industry and the hacker community at HAR2009 in the Netherlands. Tim Kuijk very bravely represented the views of the entertainment industry while Walter van Holst and myself put forth a range of contrarian views and Prof.dr Wilfred Dolfsma moderated us and a full Monty Hall of hackers. Because of some slight historic animosity between hackers and the entertainment industry we made a real effort to keep everything civilised. Since no tomatoes were see flying or Godwin's law invocations were required I think we succeeded. I've stated my personal views on copyright in the 21st century on various occasions on this blog.

Tim advocated the position that individual authors need to have the right to control what they create while Walter and myself argued for a more balanced approach given the inequalities between large media corporations, individual artists and the interest of society as a whole. New culture is after all mainly built on what came before and so what came before needs to be re-usable. Disney made a killing by producing animated movie versions from European 17th century stories. But if it were up to the entertainment industry copyright would last pretty much forever and so no new Disneys could ever come into existance.

Most people with knowledge of network technologies agree that the change in the way we distribute and share culture has already happened and organisations like BREIN are merely fighting a rear-guard action to delay the inevitable. We can help the inevitable a bit by behaving like active citizens instead of acting like passive consumers. If you have to wait 5 minutes for that TV-episode to download you might as well write a courteous E-mail to your representative in parliament pointing out some of the fallacies in the copyright claims of the entertainment industry. If we all do that then we'll soon see a repeat of the exchange between a US Colonel and his Vietnamese opponent in 1974: “You know, you never beat us on the battlefield.” said Col. Summers and Col. Tu responded; “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”

In the second part the debate was opened up to the public and Anakata (one of the admin's from The Piratebay) stepped up to the mic to ask Tim not to call them criminals. According to Tim he never did. We'll let the Swedish judge decide. After the debate Tim and Anakata demonstrated they could be friendly to each other in spite of the law-suits and counter-law suits flying through Europe.

With thanks to Reinhoud van Leeuwen for the great photography. Lot's more picture here.

Hacking policy talk at HAR2009

Had fun doing talk this afternoon at HAR2009. While I was taking a nap afterward someone wrote a very nice review on the HAR wiki.

I re-iterated many of the points I made at the CCC-conference in Berlin. My main points were also written down in english in a recent interview with the Indian Center for Internet & Society.

To spice things up a bit I added a new aspect about areas of public sector IT that should be under ultimate control by public sector organisations. I'm still refining these ideas but this is the gist of it:

In modern nations many laws and policies are implemented through software and supporting computer systems. Control over these systems is therefore control over the functioning of the state and its laws. A democratic government should therefore have total control over critical information processing functions, on behalf of its citizens. Having access to the sourcecode and the right to compile it into working binaries is a crucial part of this control. Examples of area's of application are voting tabulation, national defense&security, the police- and justice system, power grids, water and sewage systems, Air-traffic, harbour and transport control systems and the national media. Opensourcing these critical government applications and supporting systems is therefore a required step for continued national sovereignty.

The CC-licenced slides are here: ODF, PDF. Thanks to Y0landa for taking the above picture and making it available.

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Hamburg Declaration, newspapers can't network

Last month, a group of European news outlets drew up the 'Hamburg Declaration'. It demands that the European authorities take measures to prevent the re-use (they call it theft) of 'their' content. They want to demand money for 'their' news, as they get with printed editions.

Of course, publishers are free to hide their articles and other content behind a wall, available only to  subscribers. They can also prevent search engines from indexing (and saving) their content. They can even choose to have no website at all, and reach only a shrinking and aging audience. You do not have to be a twitter-using iPhone owner to predict what happens to a news organisation that starts a subscriber-only website or exists completely offline. For the growing number of readers of online news does not focus on individual outlets and there are many, many others which are eager to feed for free this readership's insatiable hunger for information 24/7.

The publishers claim that their model is unsustainable if they unable to pay editors to maintain standards, and thus their role as the  watchdog of democracy is at stake. This thesis contains two parts, both doubtful:

1. The need for a classic, paid editorial as the only possible way to make news and information accessible. Very touching in a month where the traditional media are dependent on the twitter- and youtube-savvy citizens in Iran. CNN calls on its viewers every 30 minutes to continue sending in videos (with some interesting results). Nowadays on most newspaper forums, the comments and links posted by readers are often more relevant than the content of the article, which is just a copy/paste of AP or Reuters, and I had those already. Once the subject matter is specialised (and that often occurs in a complex world), the editors may not have the in-depth knowledge to understand an issue, so it is better to go to a specialised site where the authors as well as the responding readers are professionals.

2. The crucial role of the traditional media as a watchdog of democracy. Where shall I begin, in  an area so rich with juicy examples? The New York Times that, after more than a year, admits that it failed in just this role in the run-up to the attack on Iraq? The Dutch national newshour and so-called "quality newspaper", which accused Iran of having a nuclear weapons program, while both the CIA and experts such as the International Atomic Energy Agency are confident that this is not the case? The constant failure to ask the truly painful questions, as they might prevent editors from being 'granted' the occiasional scoop? Bloggers who report things that should be in the national news? Or how about Mr Broertjes, editor of The Volksrant, who  talked about a reducing  investigative journalism because it meant taking people "out of production". 'Production' in this context means reading the AP/AP or Reuters newsfeeds and other news releases, then quickly writing a short article. Exactly the behaviour newspapers accuse bloggers of.

Based on my experience of the established media in recent years, I just do not trust them as a primary source of information about interesting events; too often they have failed to ask the difficult questions. And whether that is down to incompetence, lack of courage or something else does not matter much. In a Europe where surveillance and censorship have become normal and where we get dragged into wars and occupations, there is plenty for the guardians of democracy to do.

So if the former watchdogs take up that role again I will pay for a subscription, provided I get the information in a way that suits my lifestyle (and not once every 24 hours on a piece of dead tree). From the former office of Mr Broertjes, I hope the editorial staff find both courage and a spine.

Interview by Indian Centre for Internet and Society

On april 7th Aldert, Brenno and me had the pleasure if dining with Sunil Abraham. Sunil used to work for the UN Development Program and is now Policy Director of the Indian Centre for Internet and Society. We discussed the difficulties of bringing technology to rural places in India and the impact of product-oriented IT-education. After dinner Brenno interviewed Sunil for his weekly podcast (pocast in Dutch, interview in English from 05:15). Sunil also wanted to interview me about my experiences lobbying for open standards and opensource in the Netherlands and he did so by mail. The result can be read here.

Afghanistan: there is no 'why'

Western armies have now occupied Afghanistan for 7 years. The US invaded the country in 2001 because the Taliban refused to extradite Osama Bin Laden. The Taliban came to power after a bloody civil war that was the aftermath of a ten year war against Soviet occupation. That occupation itself was a direct consequence of a covert CIA operation started in 1979 to give the Soviets a 'Vietnam-type' war to damage their economy and military. Osama got support, weapons and training in the '80s to kill as many Russians as possible. The CIA plan worked like a dream, an unwinnable war in Afghanistan was the extra push required to break the Russian economy and end the cold war. Too bad if all Afghanistan was destroyed.

Osama was the reason and so US special forces got in the field to get him 'dead or alive'. The Taliban was willing to surrender him to the US, if the US would provide them with evidence of his involvement in the attacks of 9-11; for a brief moment western judicial values were embraced. Despite the fact that the US claimed to have this evidence, they refused to make it publicly available (it was said to have been shown to NATO partners in a confidential meeting in Brussels) because that might endanger the intelligence gathering process. The rest of the world, including the Taliban, had to take their word for it.

The Taliban refused to do so and on October 7th of 2001 (almost a full month after 9-11) the US began the search for Bin Laden. The Taliban was quickly defeated but Osama was never found, escaping out of Bora Bora into the Pakistan border area.

Fast forward 7 years. Afghanistan has an elected (sort of) government that has no power whatsoever outside the guarded compound it hides in. The Dutch military participates in the occupation of the country with the solemn promise that we will begin reconstruction as soon as the Taliban is defeated. When the mission started the Dutch Ministry of Defense was very clear about the how and why of the invasion of Afghanistan: "Osama did it" and so NATO had to invade. See this (Dutch) screenshot made in 2006:

The problem with this is that no-one believes any more in Osama's guilt when it comes to 9-11. Not Dick Cheney, nor the latest White House spokesdrone or even the FBI! The Dutch MOD has very schrewedly adapted its Afghanistan webpage and Osama is no longer mentioned. In fact the entire menu-item 'Why to Afghanistan' has been disapeared into a some dark place, never to be seen again. It has been replaced by the more neutral 'About Afghanistan'. This is not a redesign-issue because the Bosnia mission still has its original 'Why page'. For Bosnia there is still a 'Why', for Afghanistan apparently no longer. We're not there for a purpose anymore. We're just there. Afghanistan is rapidly turining into Iraq (both times), a war against a former ally, based on lies and impossible to win. So be a good citizen and repeat after me: “Oceania has always been at war with East-Asia”.

Buy Iceland?

'A crisis like this can be a real opportunity to buy things for next to nothing' said a former board member of one of my banking clients to me recently during a meeting. I'm not an investor myself but if you're a finance minister and able to easily tap a loan from the ECB there are real possibilities here.

Take Iceland, a rugged wasteland twice the size of the Netherlands and only 300.000 or so people living there, all directly on the coast. Iceland has two properties that, like Fortis/ABNAMRO make it a great investment opportunity for governments: a financial problem and exploitable resources.

I'm not talking about fishing rights or the various military installations that Russia might want to rent for the next century. I'm talking about the potential for geothermal energy that sits underneath Iceland's rocky landscape. Energy will be one of the most valuable and scarce resources until we get those fusion reactors to work and Iceland has been hard at work for decades to tap this virtually unlimited source. Most of the hot water for cooking, washing, heating and the many open air swimming pools comes from geothermal sources as well as over a quarter of the electricity generated. This is cheap and CO2 free, giving Iceland an edge in future carbon-trading. Because Iceland sits on top of the crack between the Eurasian and American continental plates, there are many places on the island where heat from the inside of the planet can be cheaply and reliably accessed.

Energy generation with geothermal heat has many advantages compared to the best known sustainable resources such as wind and solar: its available reliably 24x7 and very concentrated. This means it can be generate in industrial volumes (think Gigawatts - enough to power several cities) in a fairly small location. Most sustainable sources cannot provide that level of reliability at such quantities. This means that the installations for 'harvesting' geothermal energy are very much like the power stations we build all over the planet running on coal, oil or natural gas. The source of hot water is different, but most other parts are essentially the same.

The Icelanders are only tapping about half a Gigawatt right now because with 300.000 of them and a fair amount of (even cheaper) hydro power available there is no need for more. The potential power available could make Iceland the Kuwait of the 21st century if Gigawatts of energy were used to make hydrogen for use in Europe or move our energy-intensive industries (aluminium smelters and chemical factories) to Iceland. The interior of Iceland is uninhabited and the ecosystem consists of some patches of moss here and there. In fact NASA thought it looked so much like the Moon that the Apollo missions were rehearsed there 40 years ago. All in all not a bad place for heavy industry (way better than the center of of of the most densly populated countries on earth).

Whether we have peak oil next week or in 20 years, geothermal will keep going for millions of years and can handle the expected growth in energy needs. And those fishing rights will keep our chips from being all by themselves in yesterday's paper for years to come. Might just be a real bargain!

In a response on Sargasso member JSK points out that an undersea cable for moving the electricity is feasible. I thought the distances would be too great but the an existing 'NordNed' cable between Norway and the Netherlands has a longer length (580Km) than  the gap between Iceland and the Faröe islands or from there to Scotland or Norway (via the Shetlands). The transmitting capability of the NordNed cable is 700MegaWatt so an Iceland-EU cable will have to be at least 10-20 times bigger to have a real impact on European power requirements. The laying of such a cable at a depth of kilometers instead of tens or a few hundred meters will be an additional challenge. Unlocking Iceland's Gigawatts of clean and dependable power for many decades would seem to be worthwhile to take on such a challenge though.

The Ultimate Business Model

I've discovered what I want to be when I grow up... Wall street banker! Seriously... what a job! When things go right you give yourself a million-dollar bonus. Or 10, Or 100. If things fall apart because your worthless commercial paper is now poisoning the financial infrastructure of the world you run to the governments to tap them for a $700 billion bail-out package saddling the US-taxpayer with debt for three or four generations. All the while keeping the aforementioned bonus of course.

This is called 'privatise-the-profits-and-socialise-the-cost' in strategy terms. It's a model where the profits (if any) of a certain activity become a private asset while the cost or losses (and these are not just monetary - think dead soldiers or a poisoned environment) is borne by society at large. This behaviour out of Wallstreet is extra double-plus hypocritical since the firms now asking for a handout of ginormous proportions have done everything they could over the last decades to whittle away what little oversight there was to prevent exactly the behaviours that led to these problems.

All of this would not be so bad in itself if the US government actually had $700 billion lying around but they do not. Everyone of those dollars has to be borrowed from foreign lenders increasing their control over the US state. By now a significant part of the US is de-facto property of foreign banks and other large investors such as pension funds or sovereign wealth funds who have the power to implode the US economy at any time. I don't see a Dutch pension fund doing this but China might be interested eventually. This is a real time clock of the US national debt, just the tip of the iceberg but it gives a feel of what is going on. Injecting $700 billion into this mess is not going to solve anything structurally. The US is consuming too much and making too little. Sooner or later gravity much take hold.

With a twinge of (professional) pleasure I note that my scenario, developed in 2004, where the US becomes the fastest imploding empire in at least 2000 years. While the consequences of dollar-collapse will be bad for both the US and Europe it may just be the most effective way of preventing additional 'pre-emptive' wars in Asia.

An important lesson learned over the past four years when I started many of my presentations in the financial sector with the debt-clock: it's just as dangerous to be too far ahead of the curve as it is to lag behind. Not necessarily because the analysis is faulty but because people need time to adapt to new concepts. In 2004 most of my clients were not ready for the concept of a failing US state (or not ready to discuss it openly). Despite two openly stolen elections and an illegal war the US was still perceived as the standard to aspire to by many. After Katrina it became easier to be critical of US policies in the Netherlands, the images of a drowned city touched a nerve. Now the problems with some bad mortgages have exploded into a full-scale meltdown and both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have utterly failed to achieve any of their stated goals it has become possible to discuss these possibilities openly in polite company. The idea and the basic data are the same, the perception of the world has changed.

What will the next 'impossible' scenario be? Watch this space. Meanwhile ING bank can buy the rest of New York and we can call it New Amsterdam again, like before.

(the link to the PDF file is a Dutch newspaper set in 2030. What will the world look like and how did we get there? We ocasionally make these for clients too facilitate discussion about possible futures - an English version is being made)