I recently watched this movie. The plot is about an ex secret agent from Mossad now secretly controlled by the US government to perform illegal actions in defense of the “American lifestyle” and declaring he is OK to kill a few innocents when that is for the good of everybody else.  This bad guy goes crazy for money and escapes control, killing his angel in the Senate and creating an incident with many victims.  The movie hit the theaters in the US on Jun 2001, three months before the twin towers, but of course that’s a mere coincidence, isn’t it?  And oh, one of the bad guys in the movie – the one who dies first – is called Torvalds, is Finnish and is an hacker sought-after by the FBI for the many international computer-related crimes he commited.  Any resemblance to real events and/or to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The computer-related stuff in this movie is rendered very badly and no amount of geek slang used in the script can make it better.  On the other hand Halle Berry is astounding – she is the one who makes the movie worthwhile.

Swordfish
USA 2001, by Dominic Sena, Thriller
IMDB 244244

So… last time I blogged was months ago.  Back then I was in Brazil.  Where have I been since then?  No, I was not kidnapped in a favela.  No, I was not out of topics.  Actually, I had many things to write.  Just for starters I traveled back and forth to Brazil, drove to Berlin, joined a gospel choir and sung in a famous theatre.  The problem is, I just got sucked into Facebook.

At the beginning I used Facebook to keep in touch with my friends abroad.  For this usage pattern I think it was a good tool, because you receive a constant feed of updates from your friends: their mood, their pictures, their friends, their new interests and so on.  You can filter and prioritize stuff and organize your daily dose of updates.

One the other hand, FB can be a total disaster for you privacy, much more than any other social network, because everybody appears with their actual name and everything you write (and everything you friends write and tag about you) is immediately forwarded to all of your friends and God knows who else.  Even basic good practices like keeping a clear border between your work and your private life can be very difficult.

So there are pros and cons.  Is it worthwhile?  I don’t know.  For sure the potential is great because in July this website was basically unknown in Italy (I used it only for foreign friends) and now I have most of my Italian friends on it.  It’s so popular that yesterday I was walking in the city center and I heard everybody and his brother talking about it.  Some of my friends even taught it to their moms and at the Xmas lunch my aunt used my laptop to check out her page!  Go figure.

On nice thing is that suddenly I started to receive connection invitations from friends I had last heard last century.  This is great!  Through Facebook I could reconnect to friends I had totally lost!  The problem is, this service is growing exponentially both on the usefulness axis and on the danger axis and I feel like the thing is quickly going to out of control.  There are already many reports of identity thefts performed through Facebook and their privacy statement is particularly scary.  The fact that Facebook is located in a foreign country ruled by an administration that showed absolutely no love for privacy doesn’t help either.  It does not surprise me that among the investors in FB there are venture capitalists connected to the CIA.

One thing I totally hate is that immediately after you complete the subscription process they ask you to enter your gmail login so that they can fetch your data (e.g. your address book) from there.  They say this is convenient but to me this looks outrageous.  I mean, if you login in my gmail account you have access to: my analytics, my documents, my calendar, my email, all the password remainders I received from other sites.  And from there you can read more password reminders just by going to a website and entering my email address, including the one for my bank account.  This is the same as giving away your entire life!

Unfortunately my brain bandwidth for online time was limited and when I started to use Facebook on a daily basis my time budget for this blog went dramatically down.   I’m sorry for this because I still like this blog and I think Facebook is no substitute for it so I think I’ll try to use less Facebook and move back to this place.

from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced.
But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird.
The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire
and thunder upon them. For the beast had been
reborn with its strength renewed, and the
followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

Looking at this dithered GIF makes me so nostalgic…
Today AOL announced Netscape Navigator has been discontinued. Time for a new chapter in Mozilla’s book.

Exactly ten years ago, on Feb 9th 1998, Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond began the Open Source movement. It was just a different way to explain what had been already happening for quite a few years, and make it understandable for the business world. And it worked very well.

Building on the ground-breaking work of great leaders like Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, we laid out the software technology that leads many markets of today’s world, entering the mainstream. When I say we it’s because I have been an active contributor of this community and an advocate of the open source concept since the beginning.

Nowadays I use open source for everything, my parents use Linux on their desktop, my friends are eager to buy an Asus EEE and major governments have state funded programs to adopt or develop open source. Several open source companies are making billions and almost everybody is saving huge money just by using it.

The idea spread even out of the software world, generating parallel incarnations in the culture generation and distribution area. Try to imagine a world without open source: no Firefox, no Open Office, no MySQL, no OLTP project, no Asus EEE, no Creative Commons, no Wikipedia, no peer-to-peer. Lately, all the biggest innovations in the software world came from the open source community are were possible because of it. There are still are some areas where Open Source has to work in order to go truly mainstream, for example Desktop applications, but we can clearly see it’s going to happen sooner or later.

Thanks to Linus, Richard, Bruce, Eric, Larry, Guido, to friends at Ferrara Linux Users Group, and to everybody who helped and believed in this amazing challenge.  Where will we stand in 2018?  I can’t wait to see that.

This is a great tool, thank you Joel!  Basically you enter an address and Walk Score looks it up in Google map automatically collecting a list of interesting places you can reach on foot and finally computing a walkability score.  How easy it is to move on foot in your neighborhood?  Do you need a car?  The place where I work got 80 out of 100 which is defined as “Very Walkable: It’s possible to get by without owning a car”.  In fact I own a car by I never use it to go to work.  I usually ride a bicycle and believe me, it’s great.  I can’t stand the stress of traffic jams.

Google led the creation of Open Handset Alliance, a consortium involving a number of telco and manufacturers . As its first act the Alliance released Android, an open source operating system for mobiles complete of SDK and API. The SDK includes a working emulator and half a dozen example applications. The idea to establish an open platform for mobile developers is very good but not particularly new: project Openmoko has been working to a similar concept for several months and went as far as to release a developer version of the handset.

Currently there are several competing platforms with a significant presence on the market: Symbian OS, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Apple iPhone, Motorola MotoMAGX, Qualcomm BREW and RIM Blackberry to name a few. Trying to build a business on top of mobile applications is very difficult because you have to make several different versions of your application and the market is very fluid. Now, with the huge money and pressure that Google can inject into the field there’s a chance they can impose a common platform.

They chose to build on top of several open source technologies: Linux, OpenGL, SQLite and Webkit. The latter is particularly interesting because it’s a rendering engine derived from the KDE project (and going to be merged back into konqueror) and already powers the iPhone, s60 and Safari. This could become the rendering engine widely used both on the web and on mobile handsets.

To bootstrap the project and quickly build a critical mass of third party developers, Google issued a contest with a 10 million dollar prize for the best applications that will be developed in the next few months. There are a few countries not allowed to participate to the contest. As usual there are countries forbidden by US laws (Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, and Myanmar) and on top of that there are countries excluded because of local restrictions: Quebec and… Italy!

So Telecom Italia is one of the members of Open Handset Alliance, but Italians can’t participate to the challenge. Great. How is this possible? Simple: in Italy contests are regulated by a very strict law requiring that issuers create accurate documentation, put the prize in a protected guarantee fund and seek permission of the Ministry of Economy. Google probably found that going through all of this was not worthwhile. Italian bureaucracy and over-legislation at work. Do you remember my last post on this topic?

It looks like we are again at a turning point in the Value Added Services space. Apparently this market undergoes at least one paradigm shift every three years.

The first happened in 2002, when premium SMS was introduced. Back then the market was based in bulk traffic sustained by Internet advertising. Massive traffic was generated by web sites, but when carriers opened the opportunity to attach a premium tariff to a text message a number of new services began to flourish, mainly connected to TV commercials and printed ads. Recurring subscription services became the most successful, with ringtones of the week being the undisputed king, at least in Europe. Meanwhile handsets grew MMS capabilities, colour displays, mp3-quality audio.

Then, in 2005 the Internet-mobile convergence became real, with interactive services that were paid on the phone but mostly used on the web. The best acquisition channel became Internet advertising, with Google Adwords and affiliation networks taking the lion’s share. This allowed the biggest companies in the market (which were Italian and German) to begin playing internationally (Internet is international by default, whereas TV commercials and printed ads are much more difficult to replicate abroad) and go conquering the rest of the world. Meanwhile 3G networks became common in many countries and with the advent of WAP2 handsets (who said WAP was dead?) started to offer a much better browsing experience and a camera.

Now it looks like we’re again at a new turning point, for a combination of different phenomena.

1. Many services grew a nice WAP interface and carriers are opening their on net space and allowing flat tariffs for data traffic. The ability to charge directly from a WAP link, with no SMS involved, is popping up in new countries every month. They call it WAP billing. After all, using SMS as an identification and payment method is weird when you’re trying to build a really interactive WEB/WAP service. And mobile advertising is becoming a business in itself, opening the door for WAP to become an important acquisition channel.
2. Internet providers want to emulate mobile carriers and provide subscription and billing connected to the DSL account. Imagine you are browsing on a web site and at some point they ask you if you want to but a service. You just enter your DSL password (or you just click on a button!) and they charge you on your balance. As simple as that. It works because they can track your identity on their RADIUS server, using your IP address.
3. I hate to say it, but the iPhone is the third breaking factor. They’re trying to redefine what phone browsing is. No WAP, just straight Internet and AJAX. No apps. No downloads. The iPhone experience is much similar to browsing from an Internet Café. You can access web sites, but you can’t get anything on your local disk. Except, maybe, if it comes from iTunes…

Anyway, we’ll see. It looks like an interesting 2008 is to come.

Is there anybody out there who doesn’t know who Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are? Everybody and his brother know that they are the leaders of Apple and Microsoft and have been dominating the personal computer industry for the last 30 years. In all of this time, they’ve been very careful to appear together very rarely, but last Wednesday they shared the stage at the D: All things Digital conference. They chatted about how the industry evolved during their kingdom and talked about how they think our digital future is going to be. A warm and friendly chat, like a get together for long-standing friends who finally relax and nostalgically recall the common past. But wait, look at the picture, is that a real smile?

They’ve been enemies so far, trying to extend their business by attacking the market occupied by the other company, but now they have common enemies to fight. Google is moving users one level up in the stack, feeding them with application that run inside a normal Internet browser, storing data on the server, and basically making the personal computer a commodity that nobody cares about. And they use AJAX, a technology paradigm where neither Apple nor Microsoft have experience. Hand-held manufactures are on their way to provide a new computing concept, where you carry your important data and applications in your pocket and always on. Meanwhile, the Open Source movement is making operating systems and standard applications a commodity.

They know their traditional business is in danger, so their companies are both busy at differentiating, trying to find an escape path. Microsoft spent the last years investing in game consoles (the Xbox), internet search engines, portals and advertising (MSN) and now they’re trying to merge with Yahoo and become a media company. Apple spent the last years investing in portable players (iPod), music distribution (iTunes), cell phones (iPhone) and basically dismissed the computer hardware market when they stopped having their own technological platform, standardizing on the same Intel processors that run Windows.

This get-together appears as one more signal the personal computer industry reached a dead end and a new industry is taking the lead. That is not a real smile at all. Their eyes are nervously trying to convey a message: “let’s stop our fight and work together to save the business”. I won’t be surprised if they announce a joint venture or a strategic partnership in a few months.

Last summer in Haarlem (The Netherlands) I attended a concert of a group that back then was named Mayday. Since I loved their music I even bought their CD and now I believe I have the one and only copy in the whole Italy! Recently I visited their website and discovered they changed their name in Fifth Lane, apparently because they had a trademark conflict. The problem is, Fifth Lane was taken as well! I sincerely hope they won’t be forced to change name again. Guys good luck! See you in Firenze for your next European tour

In the global village of Internet days choosing a good name for a product, a band name or a blog site is very hard. There is an good chance you hit somebody who chose the same before you. I think in a few years trademarks contextualized in hierarchies (such as internet TLDs) will become commonplace. At that point will be completely normal to call a group mayday.nl and that will not collide with mayday.us. Basically I’m theorizing the merge of trademarks and DNS system, but maybe to get there first we have to make DNS more fair and trustworthy, e.g. by removing any ties to US Administration and to local governments in general.

Say you are a journalist, one working in a famous and heralded newspaper. You have been assigned to write an interview about an hostess who enjoys selling her body as a second job. Now, your article would surely attract more attention if you add a nice picture, wouldn’t it? Too bad you forgot to take a photo of your interviewee and to ask her permission for publishing.

Hell, who cares, Internet is so easy… Let’s try to Google for generic hostess images. You feel lucky and the first hit is this wonderful girl on a Portuguese blog. She’s darn beautiful, she is an hostess on a plane and has this glamorous smile. Can you resist? It looks like the perfect picture!

Ok, you have no right to publish this picture, you don’t even know who she is. As a good journalist you are supposed to ask permission, at the very least, and then maybe pay back some quid. But hell, you have no time. After all, nobody will ever discover where this image comes from, right?

I’m sorry bad journalist, we’re in the 21st century and the Internet is way smarter than you. Blogs connect people and they found the original picture in a matter of days. This innocent Portuguese girl was probably accused of being an whore. She was probably going to sue the newspaper for illegal use of the image. At end of the day the newspaper had to publish apologies and remove your article.

Now, I can understand when similar mistakes are made by unknown bloggers, people who write just for hobby or for fun. But a journalists does it for a living, it’s his profession and he is supposed to be professional. This is the kind of errors that make a journalist deserve to be fired.