TechnoLlama

Chile enforces net neutrality for the first time, sort of

Andres — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 16:19:36 +0000

(via Jose Otero) In 2010 Chile became one of the first countries in the world to enact a net neutrality legislation. The law 20.453 enacts a three-pronged approach to protect users against abuse, firstly by determining that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) may not differentiate content based on the origin; it creates an obligation for ISPs to allow users to use any legal equipment, and it also creates an obligation with regards to transparency of filters, speeds and quality of service. This is interesting because it is a very broad definition of net neutrality. Typically, net neutrality has been deemed as a principle of non-discrimination of content, which is present in the Chilean legislation in this manner:

“a) [ISPs] May not arbitrarily block, interfere with, discriminate against, hinder or restrict the right of any Internet user to use, send, receive or offer any content, application or legal services through the Internet, and any other legal activity or use conducted through the network. In this sense, each user must provided with an Internet access or connectivity to the Internet service provider, as appropriate, without arbitrarily differentiating content, applications or services based on the source or ownership thereof, taking into account the different configurations of the Internet connection in accordance to its current contract with its users.”

This is clearly a pure net neutrality provision. However, as mentioned, the law also has provisions that are more relevant as consumer protection legislation, such as transparency and disclosure.

With this fact in mind, a Chilean Internet user made a complaint against their ISP to the Chilean telecoms regulator (SUBTEL) with regards to advertised Internet speeds, alleging that he had a contract for 40 Mbps, but he would get at the most 5 Mbps. SUBTEL ruled in favour of the user, and ordered the ISP to change the tariff in accordance to the actual speeds that the user was getting.

So it is quite interesting that for the first time we have an application of net neutrality law, but for an offence that is not at all related to net neutrality. We will have to wait and see if in the future there is a more clear-cut net neutrality case.

SOPA and network architecture

Andres — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:46:36 +0000

The media frenzy over the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act (SOPA and PIPA respectively) appears to be finally dying down after last week’s Internet blackout, mostly due to the shocking news regarding the shutting down of Megaupload. While I publicly expressed some misgivings about the focus of the current debate, it is undeniable that with regards to SOPA and PIPA, there is indeed room for concern outside of the U.S about the two pieces of legislation (not to mention concern inside that country), as it is very possible that SOPA and PIPA could have serious extraterritorial consequences. This has been a point that has been constantly repeated in the last few days, but the danger is much graver than anyone thinks. See, the existing network architecture of the Internet relies heavily on the United States, and any legislation that affects the core would have cascading consequences elsewhere. Allow me to elaborate.

In network theory, there is a concept called centrality which measures the importance of a node in any given network. This is calculated by the number of links a node has to neighbouring nodes, the shortest number of paths to other nodes in the network, and the average shortest path. A node is said to be central in a network if it is linked to a large number of other nodes, if it can be connected to other nodes quickly (the six degrees of separation phenomenon), and if the average distance to other nodes is short. When plotting charts describing networks, central nodes can be sometimes easily identified like in this chart, where blue indicates more central nodes:

Node and hub centrality is an important indication that there is a power law at work in a network, as high concentration of centrality in some nodes may give rise to a scale-free network, where some nodes are more important than others. The Internet is a scale-free network (here is where I plug my book if you want to read more about the subject, wink, wink), so centrality comes into play in two ways. There is the physical network, the wires, routers and hubs that make up its physical architecture, and then there is also a logical level of centrality. I would class the DNS system and Internet governance to be important aspects of the logical Internet. It should be no surprise to anyone to learn that any way you look at the Internet, the U.S. is extremely central. Take for example this picture of the global submarine cable network (from this excellent website):

This is just one aspect of the large dominance that the U.S. has in the Internet’s infrastructure. Things get even more interesting when you look at the logical architecture, where the U.S. has managed to remain considerably ahead of other countries. While anyone can become an Internet server by just installing web server software into any computer connected to the Web, you need a registrar if you want a domain name that resolves in the system (such as technollama.co.uk). Most top level domains are registered in the United States (.com, .org, .net, .biz), and statistics show that the U.S. is the country with the most domain names registered under its jurisdiction, with 78,453,258 as of last week.

Country-wise Domains Distribution: Domain Names by Country of Purchase

Rank	Country	Domains
1	United States	78,453,258
2	Germany	6,481,160
3	United Kingdom	4,617,854
4	China	4,502,381
5	Canada	3,869,783
6	France	3,271,896
7	Japan	2,483,667
8	Australia	2,405,261
9	Spain	1,589,942
10	Netherlands,The	1,372,323

The closest second country is Germany with over six million. In fact, not even combining the rest of the countries can you reach the total of domains registered in the U.S. A similar picture emerges with regards to hosting, that is, where content is actually placed in a server. For example, while this blog’s domain name was registered by a UK provider, it is hosted by a U.S. company (and I assume that the content is actually held there). 9 out of the top 10 hosting companies are American, and of these, the largest host in the world is GoDaddy (WildWestDomains in the chart). The end result is a skewed map of the world, where whatever happens in the United States affects the Internet disproportionately. Take what happened to Megaupload, while the company was registered in Hong Kong, and most of its operations ran from New Zealand, its .com domain was registered to an American company named DotRegistrar, based in Washington state. Similarly, the site had also hired some of its hosting services in the States, where at some point it had leased more than 1,000 servers to companies like Carpathia Hosting and Cogent Communications. This state of affairs opened up Megaupload to enforcement by American authorities, which is precisely what took place.

One does not need to know anything about networks to know that DNS registration and hosting are the Achilles heel of both pirating and legitimate sites. However, centrality has an important lesson to teach us with regards to the dangers of SOPA and PIPA in other ways. Imagine that most digital lockers, torrent trackers and other sites operating in the shadier side of the Web were to move shop and get out of the U.S. as fast as you can say “Conspiracy to Commit Racketeering“, but that the North American country retains its centrality in the Web’s architecture. This is precisely where SOPA wants to step in, as it would create several dispositions that would try to get to websites that are currently outside of the U.S. jurisdiction, namely, are registered and hosted elsewhere in the world. The most controversial norm in SOPA (of which there is talk of being removed), was contained in s102, which stated that:

“A service provider shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) that is subject to the order, including measures designed to prevent the domain name of the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) from resolving to that domain name’s Internet Protocol address. Such actions shall be taken as expeditiously as possible, but in any case within 5 days after being served with a copy of the order, or within such time as the court may order.”

This would have established a filtering responsibility for ISPs and other intermediaries against alleged copyright infringers. The problem with such a feature when introduced in such a central country is that it could perfectly trickle downstream to other physical and logical clients elsewhere, which would mean that SOPA would be used to filter content to all of us. There are already lots of national filtering systems enacted in countries around the world, but none of these is as central to the workings of the Net as the Land of the Free™. Seen from an architectural perspective, countries like China are large Intranets, which is why it was so easy for Egyptian authorities to shut down all Web access during that country’s revolution. The U.S has an entirely different role to the network, so anything that is filtered there could end up being filtered in places that have never heard of SOPA, be it justified or not. I cannot imagine that this is a bug and not a feature, some in the copyright industries seem determined to export this draconian model.

The optimist in me wants to believe that we have seen the last of SOPA and PIPA. Unfortunately, Megaupload proved that things are about to get bumpier. “Squad leaders, we’ve picked up a new group of signals. Enemy fighters coming your way.”

TechnoLlama in 2011

Andres — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:56:04 +0000

Jetpack by WordPress has a very interesting feature that offers the year in statistics. Here are mine.

TechnoLlama in 2011.

From the report:

“The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 80,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 3 days for that many people to see it.

In 2011, there were 48 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 121 posts.

The busiest day of the year was May 8th with 1,750 views. The most popular post that day was Is Portugal about to make Creative Commons illegal?.”

Thanks to all readers for continuing to make this blog worthwhile.

ETA: By the way, visits to the blog have exploded since last week, due mostly to people googling “ACTA in the UK”. Am I missing something?

The implications of Megaupload

Andres — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:51:55 +0000

May you live in interesting times, the Chinese say. Oh my, aren’t we blessed? The file-sharing site Megaupload has been the subject of an international law enforcement operation by U.S. authorities, who have arrested six men charged with running an international criminal operation engaged in copyright infringement. A fact that has been less reported is that the FBI also managed to shut down the site through technical means by ordering their registrar to seize the names, so as of today the address www.megaupload.com and related domains do not resolve in the system. Who needs SOPA?

I am looking for superlatives to use in the case of Megaupload and I keep coming short. The site was huge, it accounted for 4% of Internet traffic and received an estimated 50 million visitors per day. It is said that it used up more bandwidth than Dropbox, the very popular and acceptable digital locker. Megaupload operated a free service, but what really seems to have played a big part in its demise is the fact that it was a mega business (be prepared for excessive use of the word Mega in these paragraphs), with income estimated at $150 million USD in subscription fees and $25 million USD from advertising. I will truly never understand people who pay subscription fees to services such as Megaupload, but do not pay for content, but I digress.

I do have to admit that with figures like these, it is very difficult to feel sympathy for Megaupload, or to think of its owners as some sort of anti-establishment heroes. In most occasions I have a large cache of sympathy and understanding towards other points of view, but in this occasion it has been shut tightly by reading that the owners of Megaupload collectively owned 14 Mercedes-Benz “with license plates such as “POLICE,” “MAFIA,” “V,” “STONED,” “CEO,” “HACKER,” GOOD,” “EVIL,” and—perhaps presciently—”GUILTY.”", according to Ars Tecnica. Reading through the indictment, the picture that emerges is of a bunch of hackers that knew fully well that the site’s main business was infringement, evidenced by several internal emails and the existence of a reward program for mega-uploaders.

So, what will be the result of the mega bust of Megaupload? In the short-term we will witness some angry Anonymous activity against U.S. interests, which is already taking place, but as xkcd once commented, attacks on websites are akin to the removal of a public poster (already World War Web is trending on Twitter). Funnily enough, I also think that the action against Megaupload may end up killing SOPA and PIPA for good. Why do you need new legislation when your domain name seizure strategy is proving effective?

In the medium-term, if the information in the indictment is accurate, and if extradition is granted, it seems possible that those arrested will be found guilty of criminal infringement charges and will receive mega sentences (OK, enough already). It is also possible that there will be lawsuits from legitimate users of Megaupload.

In the long-term, I do not think that much will change. Megaupload was a one-off, a vastly centralised and popular system whose actions will mean that proving direct copyright infringement and even secondary infringement following the Grokster incitement doctrine will be easy to achieve. While it was big, MU did not command the market dominance of a Napster in its heyday, but like that service, it suffered from its decision to provide a very direct involvement with what its customers were doing. What we can really expect is that we will see more domain name seizures.

The piracy wars will now be fought in the domain name system.

Web activism grows up, but beware its narrow focus

Andres — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:17:00 +0000

Mafalda joins fight against SOPA

As Wikipedia goes silent today in protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), and as other Internet giants unite their voices against the proposed legislations, we could really say that Web activism is starting to become a force to be reckoned with. Undoubtedly the rise of social media has made it more difficult for controversial treaties and laws to be passed without the knowledge of significant number of people.

Internet activism is becoming more powerful and sophisticated. Just last month, hosting firm GoDaddy had to drop its support for SOPA when it became clear that they faced mass migration from influential clients because of this single decision. A web petition forced the White House to make a negative statement against SOPA, and voices all over the world have been clamouring against this misguided solution for piracy. For the moment opposition to SOPA has managed to at least put the law on hold. Similarly, strong and vocal opposition in the UK to the Digital Economy Act almost managed to defeat the law. This is all very good, and I strongly believe that we are better for it. Imagine if social media had been prevalent at the time of some other controversial pieces of legislation such as the DMCA.

However, as much as I welcome the rise and rise of Web activism, I cannot help but to be just a little bit worried by what I believe is a very narrow focus, both thematic and geographic. Undoubtedly, this has to do with the continuing global dominance by the United States when it comes to the Internet, so we are in danger of becoming focused on things that matter to a portion of the U.S. population, in detriment of almost anything else. Web activism then has become mostly concerned with anything that might affect white U.S. middle class web users, so we end up getting worked up about SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and net neutrality. I am not trying to say that no other problem gets through the Net’s collective psyche, but it seems clear that the netocracy mostly is concerned with the copywars.

The reason for this is something that I have talked about before in these pages. There is a growing global anglophone wired techno-elite that shares a common language of technology, are fluent in memes, and hang out in Reddit, BoingBoing, TechCrunch and similar blogs and forums. This global class has technical sophistication that usually puts them at odds with those who do not share the technical environment. They tweet, blog and facebook (decreasingly, as FB is no longer cool), and are capable of using mass media in ways that we could only dream of in the past. This class is not only global, but it tends to replicate at a local level anything that is posted in BoingBoing, so each country has its own elite of top tweeps and bloggers concerned with anything that Cory and Xeni think is relevant. This to me explains the growing concern for net neutrality in countries where connectivity is still the most prevalent concern, or the current interest given to SOPA. While it is true that SOPA as written could have nasty extraterritorial effects, the level of concern and sometimes outright fear-mongering that is being shared online is quite simply out of proportion to the actual threat. SOPA will outlaw streaming! SOPA will create a global firewall! SOPA will come into your house, sleep in your bed and eat your porridge!

Web activism is proving its power. While the Internet’s role in the Arab Spring is still disputed, there is little doubt that at least social media was used successfully to pass information around. We just need to give emphasis to the things that really matter, and be a bit more sceptic about sources.

Having said this, I am heartened by some other signs of change. The #occupy movement is almost a direct result of the 15-M movement in Spain (and to a lesser extent due to Tahrir Square), and the Indignados were able to export their brand of public space occupation and social media use. Let’s hope that Web activism continues to grow outside of the narrow concern of certain popular blogs.

Now, how do I fact-check this entry without Wikipedia?

ETA: Almost to prove my point, I just read on Twitter that the English managing editor of BoingBong got interviewed by Al Jazeera about SOPA. No comment.

Confessions of an open access editor

Andres — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 15:22:13 +0000

Ideogram, my favourite SCRIPTed cover

Since 2004 I have been the technical editor of SCRIPTed, the open access journal of Law and Technology published by the SCRIPT Centre in Edinburgh. This involvement has survived all other Edinburgh-related commitments, and has become one of the most rewarding aspects of my academic life. Every four months I sit down and do nothing but edit the articles and put them online. The end result is that I get a four-monthly jolt of joy when each issue goes live that gives me a small idea of what it must be to be a father.

Talk of paternity is not rare when it comes to open access, in great part it is a labour of love. For 8 years SCRIPTed has been made possible by a rare combination of vision, talent and funding. In 2003 Professors Lilian Edwards and Graeme Laurie had the idea of producing an online journal as part of the remit of the SCRIPT Centre, following the North American publishing model of employing students as editors. This was a visionary decision that allowed SCRIPTed to gain longevity, as a large part of the work was performed by volunteers. This is a noble tradition that is common in legal establishments in the United States, and has been performed by the likes of President Obama and Justice Elena Kagan.

While the journal has had immense support from the funding side and is relatively cheap to produce, I have always felt that innovative projects such as these seemed to be ignored by mainstream academia. As on online-only publication, we had to contend with an idea that an online journal is simply not the same as a printed journal. Similarly, while I dedicated countless hours to the journal, I always felt that there seemed to be little official recognition to the work, as it did not fall easily into any normal bead counting categories. Still, the work was very rewarding in its own right, and the back catalogue of excellent articles is a testament to all of the hard work of a large legion of editors that have put a lot of effort into the journal.

All things need to evolve, and that is why we have now moved SCRIPTed outside of the University of Edinburgh servers, and created one of the first WordPress-based journals (as far as I know). While there are lots of open source journal interfaces out there, I felt that WordPress has evolved enough to allow a full migration. We will be moving our back catalogue to the new site during the next few months.

Sustainability is still an important question in open access journal, and hopefully we will continue to be able to support SCRIPTed for many years to come.

So if you do not know what to do today, why not go to SCRIPTed and browse our archive?

ETA: Claudio Ruiz has directed me to this great WordPress guide for open access journals (in Spanish).

ETA 2: There is a very interesting discussion on open access publishing in The Guardian.

Networks, Complexity and Internet Regulation

Andres — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 23:09:28 +0000

If you follow Yours Truly in any sort of social media available you will know by now that my book entitled Networks, Complexity and Internet Regulation: Scale-Free Law has been published by Edward Elgar. The book has its own page on this blog, and is now available for purchase at e-commerce retailers, or directly from the publisher. There is an e-book version, but alas, not on Kindle as the publishers have assured me that Amazon offers rather bad terms. The book is offered under a Creative Commons licence, although the copyright page in my copy does not seem to reflect this fully and the publishers have added a generic “All Rights Reserved” copyright notice although I drafted a different one. I guess CC is still not that well-known.

For those who are thinking of getting the book, I apologise in advance for the price, it is beyond my control. To whet your appetite, here is a file with all of the images used in the book in colour (where available) and the highest resolution I could find. Here is also the book´s brochure. Enjoy.

UPDATE

I have been contacted by the editors, who acknowledge that there has been an error in the printed copyright page, this is because my book is their first Creative Commons book. At some point in the printing procedure someone probably slapped the generic All Rights Reserved notice instead of my suggested text. Edward Elgar will in future change their procedure so that this doest happen again. Similarly, they have kindly agreed to give rreaders of this blog a 20% discount on the book from their site. Yes, you read correctly, twenty percent! The code to redeem the discount is “Guadamuz20″.

Thanks to Edward Elgar for this amazing response, they have really treated me superbly.

SCRIPTed December 2011

Andres — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 02:53:17 +0000

The new issue of SCRIPTEd is now online.

(2011) 8:3 SCRIPTed 226-339

Issue DOI: 10.2966/scrip.080311

Cover

Crystals

Editorial

Law Meets Biology: Are Our Databases Eligible For Legal Protection?
| HTML | PDF |
Michele Oliva and Marcelo Corrales, pp.226-228
The authors look at the interaction the European Database Directive, existing ECJ jurisprudence, and biological databases.

Reviewed Articles

Forgetting Footprints, Shunning Shadows. A Critical Analysis Of The “Right To Be Forgotten” In Big Data Practice
Bert-Jaap Koops, pp.229-256
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The so-called “right to be forgotten” has been put firmly on the agenda, both of academia and of policy. Although the idea is intuitive and appealing, the legal form and practical implications of a right to be forgotten have hardly been analysed so far. This contribution aims to critically assess what a right to be forgotten could or should entail in practice. It outlines the current socio-technical context as one of Big Data, in which massive data collections are created and mined for many purposes. Big Data involves not only individuals’ digital footprints (data they themselves leave behind) but, perhaps more importantly, also individuals’ data shadows (information about them generated by others). And contrary to physical footprints and shadows, their digital counterparts are not ephemeral but persistent. This presents particular challenges for the right to be forgotten, which are discussed in the form of three key questions. Against whom can the right be invoked? When and why can the right be invoked? And how can the right be effected? Advocates of a right to be forgotten must clarify which conceptualisation of such a right they favour – a comprehensive, user-control-based right to have data deleted in due time, or a narrower, context-specific right to a “clean slate” – and how they think the considerable obstacles presented in this paper can be overcome, if people are really to be enabled to have their digital footprints forgotten and to shun their data shadows.
Music and Dance: Beyond Copyright Text?
Charlotte Waelde and Philip Schlesinger, pp.257-291
| HTML | PDF |
Are experiential, experimental forms of music and dance beyond protection by copyright? If they are, how might these art forms best be protected by cultural policy and cultural economics? These were the key questions that we set out to investigate with the support of a Beyond Text grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and with the help of our network members where together we formed an interdisciplinary team comprised of experts in copyright law, cultural policy, cultural economics, dance and musical composition. Through a series of interviews with musicians, singers, songwriters, composers, dancers, choreographers and others involved in the music industry and dance community we came to the conclusion that these types of works are both before copyright and beyond copyright. They are before copyright because what matters to the majority of those involved is the process of creation – which itself is constantly evolving – rather than the product – the protected work once fixed. They are beyond copyright because key aspects of the performance involve contributions which are not recognised by copyright, and because there is much about the performance which simply cannot be captured in the mechanical sense. As a result, policy intervention, which focuses on the product rather than the process, becomes problematic. This article suggests a series of practical recommendations made by our interviewees for ways in which the art forms may be supported into the future.
We are grateful to all of our interviewees, some of whom feature in our documentary Performers on the Edge, published in Audiovisual Thinking: the journal of academic videos, and who have remained in touch and contributed extra evidence to this project which can be found on our project website, and who joined us at our dissemination event in September 2011 in Glasgow.

Analysis

Challenges for Free Access to Law in a Multi-Jurisdictional Developing Country: Building the Legal Information Institute of India
Graham Greenleaf, VC Vivekanandan, Philip Chung, Ranbir Singh and Andrew Mowbray, pp.292-316
| HTML | PDF |
This article analyses the complexities involved in providing free public online access to the “public legal information” of the Indian legal system. It starts with some of the causes of the complexity of Indian legal information then describes the considerable progress that has previously been made in the provision of free access to some types of legal information, but why the result is still below international standards. The article then explains a project to remedy some of these deficiencies, the Legal Information Institute of India (LII of India), being carried out by eight Indian law schools and an international partner. It has developed in its first year of public operation, the LII of India, a system with over 750,000 searchable documents and 151 databases. The considerable remaining challenges for creation of a world-standard and sustainable system are then outlined, and steps proposed to address them. The extent to which this collaborative project might be a model for development of free access to legal information in other countries is considered.
By “public legal information” we mean that information which, as a matter of public policy, ought to be available for free public access in a society which values democracy and the rule of law. This has been argued elsewhere to include legislation, case law, treaties a country has entered into, reports proposing reform of the law, and such legal scholarship as authors have chosen or are required to make freely available to the public. For the purpose of this article, this definition is assumed.
India’s New Data Protection Legislation: Do The Government’s Clarifications Suffice?
Raghunath Ananthapur, pp.317-322
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After giving an introduction to data protection legislation in India, the author analyses the latest round of regulations to arise out of that country. This is important because India has started gaining prominence in the outsourcing business from European Union countries.

Reports

Regenerative Medicine Goverence: The EU Experience and Argentine Possibilities
Shawn H E Harmon, pp.323-328
| HTML | PDF |
Can We Trust the Media?
Yolande Stolte, pp.329-332
| HTML | PDF |

Book Reviews

Enhanced Dispute Resolution Through The Use Of Information Technology
By Arno R Lodder and John Zeleznikow
Reviewed by Vagelis Papakonstantinou, pp.333-335
| HTML | PDF |
Patents
By Joseph Scott Miller (ed)
Reviewed by Erika Ellyne, pp.336-339
| HTML | PDF |

Cyberpunk 2.0

Andres — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 17:09:35 +0000

I am currently reading REAMDE, Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, and although I am still going through the initial pages (I am savouring it as I do most of Stephenson’s work), and it already has me thinking about new trends in literature.

Cyberpunk is a well-defined post-modern sub-genre within science fiction, with a distinctive narrative style, anti-hero characters and specific technological background. The technology in cyberpunk literature is a mix of cyborg implants and early cyberspace depictions. Interestingly, many of the seminal works pre-date the development of the World Wide Web, but they tend to describe virtual spaces as part of the Internet. William Gibson´s Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Pat Cadigan’s Synners, and Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net are some of the defining works. The genre has had its off-shoots, most notably steampunk, which is beautifully encapsulated in the wonderful yet under-appreciated The Difference Engine by Gibson and Sterling.

In the last couple of years I have read some works that do not fall easily into the cyberpunk genre, but have a lot in common with some of its aesthetic values, so I am thinking that we are seeing a new type of cyberpunk, let’s call it Virtualpunk, a type of Cyberpunk 2.0. These works are Halting State by Charles Stross, For The Win by Cory Doctorow, and now REAMDE. The common theme is that all of these works heavily feature virtual worlds, and seem to be informed directly or indirectly on the MMORPG phenomenon best showcased by World of Warcraft. In these three works, vast worldwide games are integral part of the plot, which I believe is the first definition of Virtualpunk. The second is that they are all works with sophisticated understanding of economics and finance, in the case of For The Win, Doctorow actually has written one of the most believable depictions of a financial crash due to crazy derivatives markets that I have yet to read in fiction and non-fiction (including, dare I say, Too Big To Fail). The third characteristic is that all of these works have been written with the real Internet in mind, and therefore this space does not resemble the idealized versions in Snow Crash or Neuromancer. To me this adds a level of realism that some of the earlier cyberpunk lacked.

The final characteristic of the new genre, and what prompts me to write these lines in this blog, is that these three works share a high level of legal and regulatory sophistication. In all three novels the protagonists have to deal with cybercrime, filtering, censorship, e-commerce and jurisdictional issues that would not be alien in many Internet regulation classes. In Halting State we are presented with the way in which a police force is asked to deal with a heist of virtual goods worth millions of Euro. In For The Win, we are presented with life behind the Great Firewall of China, institutionalised gold farming, and how game companies try to handle it. In REAMDE we have viruses and cyber-extorsion (so far, please do not spoil the book for me), all dealt with the aplomb and knowledge of someone who is familiar with how virtual spaces operate. Is Neal Stephenson a WoW player I wonder?

Anyway, I highly recommend these books, they lead me to think that there is a new literary trend that has wider repecussions than the geek sci-fi circles.

Anyone interested in the above works might also want to pick up an augmented reality variant to the trend, works such as Spook Country by William Gibson and Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge.

ETA: I am leaving Larry Niven’s augmented reality LARP novels outside. They are rather cyberpunkish in a way.

The PC is not dead

Andres — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:13:41 +0000

"The report of my death was an exaggeration"

This is a response to Johnathan Zittrain’s article entitled, surprisingly, The Personal Computer is Dead. I say surprisingly because the title is a bit deceiving, and the content has little to do with the death of the PC as such, 98% of the piece is spent talking about Apple’s closed development environment. In fact, I happen to agree with most of the content of the article, what I completely disagree with is the title and the first paragraph. Zittrain declares the death of the personal computer to illustrate the problem that he sees with Apple’s walled garden approach, as he envisions a future where we cannot have free access to software because most of us will be using Apple computers, and will be getting our computer programs from controlled environments like the App Store. He says in the opening paragraph:

“The PC is dead. Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don’t merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we’re seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other—and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse.”

Just like a coroner at a busy mortuary, he simply signs the death certificate with the merest glance at the body in front of him. No figures, no statistics, we’re simply told that the PC market is dying, and I must assume that the replacement will be a world where everyone will be using iPads, smartphones and netbooks. This is the premise that I want to argue against.

In a very controversial article published last year, Wired declared the death of the Web for similar reasons to those presented by Zittrain, namely, the rise of mobile computing. According to that piece, everyone in the future will access the Internet through apps, and the humble website would simply disappear. There were several replies to this, but my favourites were this article in Scientific American, and this deconstruction of their now infamous chart at Boing Boing. A common criticism of the article is that it was too parochial, that it noticed some trends amongst the technocratic elites of Silicon Valley, and assumed that we would all be doing the same thing. I believe that the same may have happened to Zittrain, perhaps he surveys the contents of his classroom, and sees only tablets and smartphones. Where did all the laptops go? This seems a very American-centric view of the world, and a college-age view at that. In the rest of the world not everyone can afford an iPad.

There is no doubt that we are seeing an unprecedented diversification in the computer hardware market, but this does not spell the end of the PC. In fact, PC sales have continued to grow year on year for the past two decades, and while Gartner recently slashed its growth forecast, the PC market grew by more than 3% in 2011.

PC annual sales growth actual (1998-2010) from The Guardian.

The fact is that the PC is still doing fine for a very simple reason: people need to work. Have you tried getting any actual work done on your iPad? Even with a keyboard it is not the friendliest of working environments. Apps are good for specific tasks, such as playing games, reading news, checking social networks, chatting, listening to music, watching videos, and all sort of things that apps are good for. But if I need to write a document, design a website, or go through some spreadsheets, I do it at my Windows PC. The workstation is still a considerable marketplace, and I reckon that it will be with us for at least another decade.

What I envision will happen is that the growth of the PC market will stop, and we will experience a gradual decrease, probably with movement towards cloud-based devices and sturdier work-friendly tablets, but the PC will still live strongly until a workstation replacement really comes of age. If I think of my technology usage, I now own a Kindle, an iPad, an iPod, an Android smartphone, a PS3, a laptop and a PC. They all have overlapping capabilities, for example, I can listen to music and read ebooks in all of them. But I use them for different purposes, most of my work is done on a Windows PC (and some online gaming). I also use this as a media server to send video files to several devices, like the games console and the iPad. The laptop is for travel and work at the office, while the iPad is mostly for gaming and watching videos. I cannot envisage getting rid of either the laptop or the PC, and I suspect I’m not alone in this.

As mentioned already, I completely agree with Zittrain’s main argument. Apple’s closed development policies are bad for innovation. This is why I’m placing a lot of hope in Android.