Author Archives: paolo

Links for 2007 06 20

Academic Productivity Â» Soft peer review? Social software and distributed scientific evaluation
Although I donâ€™t think social software will ever replace hard evaluation processes such as traditional peer review, I suspect soft evaluation systems (as those made possible by social software) will soon take over in terms of efficiency and scalability.

(tags: academia, peer_review, research, evaluation, Social_software)
Open Source Life: How the open movement will change everything – lifehack.org
The open-source concept doesnâ€™t have to just apply to software. It can apply to anything in life, any area where information is currently in the hands of few instead of many. Some examples but I’m more interested in money (think Ripple).

(tags: future, free_software, opensource, change, money, ripple)
visualcomplexity.com | Segoland
Segoland is a visual representation of 1054 local blogs that supported the 2007 French presidential candidate, Segolene Royal. It displays an intricate network of sites, divided by political party and geographically placed throughout France.

(tags: blogs, network, map, geolocation, segoland, politics, france)
Lawrence Lessig – Required Reading: the next 10 years
Lessig could have kept being the star of the free culture movement for ever but decided 10 years are enough and is time to start with a new challenge, from scratch: fix "corruption of the political process". I’m speechless and admiring.

(tags: lessig, activism, courage, politics, corruption, future)

Campaign for the Liberalization of the sector of Software for Personal Computer

There is a worthy campaign in Italy for the Liberalization of the sector of Software for Personal Computer. You can sign the petition (in Italian).
The campaign LiberaSW (Il computer Ã¨ mio e lo gestisco io) asks a national law containing (in a nutshell) the following points:
1) When a personal computer is sold, the price of the hardware must be stated explicitly as an independent value and it must not be incorporated with the price for the license of the (possibly present) software.
2) The buyer must be able to refuse to pay the price for the software license and pay just the price of the hardware.
3) The price of the software license must be realistic.
Is there such a law in your country? If not, maybe you could start a similar campaign for your country.

“The Implications of OpenID” presentation

Leave a reply

Simon does a great job in explaining what is OpenID, what problems does it solve, what can you do with an OpenID and providing answers to a lot of other questions you wanted to know and never dared to ask about.
The presentation is composed by 178 extremely clear and informative slides, pure gold really!

A very important slide is #109: “Why is OpenID worth implementing over all the other identity standards?” Answer:

It’s simple
Unix philosophy: It solves one, tiny problem
It’s a dumb network
Many of the competing standards are now on board

Check OpenID, it is really simple, that’s why I think it will work. Making gnuband.org an OpenID URL took 3 minutes, now I can login in sites using gnuband.org as OpenID: no more need to remember a nick/password pair for every site and no more risk someone “steals” your preferred nickname.

Links for 2007 06 09

Leave a reply

Open Money Manifesto (built on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
We, the People declare that The current monetary system does not respect Human Rights It generates inequalities, segregation, hidden forms of slavery and prevents access to basic needs (healthcare, food, education, housing, safety, workâ€¦).

(tags: money, manifesto, declaration, economics, human, rights)
MicroID – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An open source, decentralized identity protocol. A MicroID is a simple identifier comprising a hashed communication/identity URI (email, OpenID,..) and claimed URL. The 2 elements create a hash that can be claimed by third party services.

(tags: microid, identity, openid, simple, occam)
Category:Money – P2P Foundation
This section’s theme are generally the monetary aspects of P2P trends, and more specifically, aspects of monetary reform, that aim to make the monetary system into a participatory resource that more broadly benefits larger sectors of the world population.

(tags: money, p2p, gift, economy)
P2P Exchange Infrastructure Projects – P2P Foundation
Here are projects that seek to create an underlying infrastructure for p2p-based exchanges, monetary, gift, or otherwise.

(tags: p2p, gift, economy)
SPIEGEL Interview with African Economics Expert: "For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid!" – International – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News
Read it. "Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. Development aid weakens local markets and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship."

(tags: africa, development, economics, poverty, aids)

Reputation is in the eye of the beholder: on subjectivity and objectivity of trust statements

2 Replies

I eventually managed to get invited to the ENISA Workshop “Security Issues in Reputation Systems” and at the eema’s “The European e-identity conference”. So I’ll be in Paris from Monday 11 until Wednesday 13, of course hosted by friendly Couchsurfers. The program is quite interesting, I’m especially looking forward for the keynote address by Kim Cameron, whose blog I’ve been reading since some time, and a presentation by Alessandro Acquisti of CMU titled “Imagined communities: awareness, information sharing and privacy: the Facebook case”
Let me know if you’ll be there, I’ll be happy to discuss about trust, reputation, identity, whatever.
Since I was required to provide a position paper, I put up the following, the intention was to be a little provocative but I don’t know if it was successful. If you read it, let me know what you think about it. The position paper “Reputation is in the eye of the beholder: on subjectivity and objectivity of trust statements” can be read after the jump (i.e. click on “more” if present).

Continue reading →

An online game is like a country and citizens asks for democracy

2 Replies

Interesting article on nytimes. I particularly liked this part:

â€œPerception is reality, and if a substantial part of our community feels like we are biased, whether it is true or not, it is true to them,â€ Hilmar Petursson, CCPâ€™s chief executive, said in a telephone interview. â€œEve Online is not a computer game. It is an emerging nation, and we have to address it like a nation being accused of corruption.â€

Also relevant this washingtonpost article Does Virtual Reality Need a Sheriff? Reach of Law Enforcement Is Tested When Online Fantasy Games Turn Sordid:

Rosedale said he hopes participants in Second Life eventually develop their own virtual legal code and justice system. “In the ideal case, the people who are in Second Life should think of themselves as citizens of this new place and not citizens of their countries,” he said.

Note that he is speaking about citizens developing legal code and not world-creators embedding a legal code into the programming code. Interesting times …

Below the beginning of the article from nytimes
Continue reading →

Links for 2007 06 08

Leave a reply

O’Reilly Radar > Don’t Call Me a User!
Words shape understanding. And "user" does not inspire participation. What is your suggestion? member, participant, contributor, citizen, author, creator, editor are some. What is yours? I like "meaning creator" but it is not catchy, nor single word

(tags: words, web2.0, culture, community, user)

Links for 2007 06 06

Leave a reply

Linux.com | Movable Type 4 to go Free Software (GPL)
It tool SA years to see the light but better late than never. "But we’ve also seen what amazing contributions the open source community makes, and how much more comfortable people feel knowing that, instead of data lock-in, an open process of development

(tags: movable_type, blog, wordpress, GPL, free_software)
Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"By using Einstein words, Lobacevskij challenged an axiom. Whoever dares to challenge an accepted truth, seemed required and reasonable for the great majority of intelligent men during at least 2000 years, risks his own scientific reputation, if not actua

(tags: controversial, progress, challenge, Lobachevsky, math, bell, axiom)

Links for 2007 06 05

Leave a reply

Keenâ€™s â€œThe Cult of the Amateurâ€: BRILLIANT!
Genious Lessig comments on Keenâ€™s book â€œThe Cult of the Amateurâ€, calling it a brilliant self-parody and highlighting some of the serious errors in the book. You can add more on a Wiki page. Brilliant!

(tags: Book, review, lessig, keen, amateur, wiki)
Doing Business Map – The World Bank Group
Discover how easy (or difficult) it is to do business in 175 countries. Italy is one of the few yellow countries in a green Europe ;-(

(tags: economics, maps, statistics, business)
An Open Letter to the Open Source Community
Women represent approximately 50% of population, average female representation in Open Source is 1.5%, in the proprietary software industry is 28%. A letter by Melissa Draper (Ubuntu Member) about the conditions of women in Open Source projects.

(tags: gender, female, opensource, free_software, ubuntu, women)

Links for 2007 05 29

Leave a reply

26 Reasons What You Think is Right is Wrong
Bandwagon effect, groupthink, herd behaviour, Bias blind spot, Choice-supportive bias, Endowment effect, Hyperbolic discounting, Illusion of control, Impact bias, Loss aversion, … all of them with handy Wikipedia links and short descriptions

(tags: cognitive, right, wrong, wikipedia)
Dr. Dobb’s | Web 2.0 and the Engineering of Trust | December 12, 2006
Trust is important in business, but basic to Web 2.0. Sections such as "The Sociology of Web 2.0" or "Trust Never Sleeps". Very interesting!

(tags: trust, sociology, engineering, social, web2.0)
O’Reilly Radar > Google Calls for Real-Time Spectrum Allocation
Google filed a proposal with the Federal Communications Commission to let companies allocate radio spectrum not in a long-term service contract but instead in ongoing open auctions. "Iâ€™m hoping we treat spectrum as a scarce renewable resource which shou

(tags: google, spectrum, allocation, scarse, auctions)
Tasty Data Goodies: Introducing Swivel G
Easily represent any data on an interactive world map using Swivel.

(tags: map, cool, visualization, data)