Half-formed thought on Wikileaks & Global Action
I find the conflation of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as one entity to be one of the more frustrating features of the WikiLeaks furore, and was therefore pleased to read Clay Shirky’s analysis of what groups like WikiLeaks mean for the future of, well, the world and democracies—rather than whether Julian’s rape charges are really a US conspiracy to “get at” WikiLeaks.
Like many recent areas directly affected by the changing ways technology provides to mediate access to content—in this case both access to data to leak and the ability to widely and instantly publish leaked data—the reaction generally seems to miss out on the fact that we’re dealing with fundamentally game-changing processes at work.
Android Isn’t About Building a Mobile Platform
A very interesting piece of analysis by Kyle Baxter, and a timely reminder that Google’s motives need not be pure. There’s quite a lot that is not evil, but which is well inside the grey area.
This helps explain some puzzling moves by Google. For example, Android’s market may not be terrible in comparison to Apple’s App Store for paid applications just because Google hasn’t yet finished it; rather, discouraging paid applications on the Android platform is in Google’s interest. If users won’t pay for applications, what will developers use to make money from their applications? Advertising. And Google conveniently owns one of the largest mobile advertising providers, Admob.
The fanfare and bluster around company rebrandings really gets my heckles up sometimes. Take the new Starbucks logo. It’s pretty nice, but not exactly up to this love-in:
The new logo expresses what Starbucks represents to our partners and customers.
While I appreciate the power of branding, I don’t think a green siren in a crown expresses what Starbucks itself represents, instead, inversely, the logo recognisably represents Starbucks—-the Starbucks coffee shops are what “Starbucks” represents to their partners and customers, surely? Reducing this to a logo short sells their influence in making Starbucks as popular as it is.
The rights and wrongs of hacktivism
The Economist discusses the right of protection of protest in a free society, and whether Distributed Denial of Service attacks deserve to be a form of protected protest.
The furtive, nameless nature of DDOS attacks disqualifies them from protection; their anonymous perpetrators look like cowardly hooligans, not heroes. This applies to those attacking WikiLeaks too—a point American politicians calling for reprisals against Julian Assange’s outfit should note. Posses and vigilantes, online and off, mete out rough justice, at best. That is no substitute for the real thing.
In $2tn debt crisis threatens to bring down 100 US cities, the Guardian reports on how cities are increasingly at risk of sliding into bankruptcy—just like normal people and countries seem to be.
New Jersey governor Chris Christie summarised the problem succinctly: “We spent too much on everything. We spent money we didn’t have. We borrowed money just crazily. The credit card’s maxed out, and it’s over. We now have to get to the business of climbing out of the hole. We’ve been digging it for a decade or more. We’ve got to climb now, and a climb is harder.”