Protopia - Envisioning an Improving Future

As part of the movement to return to optimistic science fiction, Kevin Kelly proposed a writing project on the web magazine Medium.com. The prompt was to write in 100 words or less, a description of a compelling future 100 years hence that is neither horrible dystopia (machines harvesting our energy, vast squatter cities picking through the garbage of the rich) or boring utopia (free food, no work, sybaritic decadence).

By promoting optimistic and appealing future scenarios, we may be able to inspire young people to become technologists and scientists that work to create such a future. (More on the Optimistic SciFi movement at Neal Stephenson's Project Hieroglyph page http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/)

Below is my humble submission:

Small scale fusion and distributed solar cells make energy cheap enough to ignore.

Radical transparency reduces inequality to tolerable background levels. Prediction markets and algorithms inform policy making.

New perennial food crops, restore tilth and sequester carbon in healthy, biodiverse soils. Small scale attempts at deextinction lead to increasingly ambitious rewilding projects.

Human population voluntarily split between dense cities and distributed villages. All are connected by high speed networks. There are no hinterlands.

Automation renders most human work unnecessary, liberating people to engage in creative and analytic pursuits. Code and algorithm auditing are major sources of employment.

Lenovo Yoga 2 11

A customer has asked me to prepare some Windows 7 machines to go to South America for some fieldwork. Because of the scope of the project (and some time constraints) we didn't use an institutional vendor through the University, but went to Best Buy instead. We settled on Lenovo's nice, compact, light weight Yoga 2 11. It comes with Windows 8.1, but we intended to 'downgrade' to Windows 7. The Yoga 2 11 doesn't come with a CD drive, but that wasn't a problem - I just grabbed a USB CD drive and prepared to install Windows 7 from a CD. It turns out that the Yoga 2 11 comes with an unadvertised 'feature' - you cannot boot it from an external source.

I assumed that this was merely some BIOS security getting in the way. In BIOS, I disabled Secure Boot, disabled Fast Boot, and enabled USB Boot.

Going the traditional route, I rebooted and hit F12 at the splash screen to select an alternate boot source. Nothing. My only option was Windows Boot Manager. I selected that and Windows 8.1 launched.

Accepting that I'd have to interact with the 8.1 OS, I went into Advanced Startup Options. Under Advanced startup, I selected 'Restart now'. I then selected 'Use a device'. I first tried 'EFI USB Device' (the CD drive is connected via USB, right?) and received the following error: 'System doesn't have any USB boot option. Please select other boot option in Boot Manager Menu'. Next I tried 'EFI DVD/CDROM' and received 'System doesn't have any CD/DVD boot option. Please select other boot option in Boot Manager Menu.'

After spending several hours on the phone with Lenovo tech support (3.5 hours, 4 representatives) I eventually got through to a supervisor. The representatives had variations on 'If you want to restore your OS, press the 'novo' button and boot from the recovery partition.', 'We can sell you the recover disk that you need.', and (my favorite) 'Yes, you can do that, but you'll have to talk to a different department so they can tell you how. Here, I am transferring you to the department that transferred you to me.' The supervisor quite definitively told me that boot from an alternate source is simply not an option for this machine.

This was very frustrating. I've had many frustrating afternoons with computers in the past, but I've always managed to get a resolution. This is the first time that I've had a computer say 'I can't let you do that Dave.' I really expect my machines to say 'Yes master!'.

So here's what I think about the Lenovo Yoga 2 11: It's a remarkably small, light, and sleek laptop. It seems quite responsive with a gorgeous monitor. If you're looking for a Windows 8.1 machine and know that you will never need to change the OS, this is a great buy. It is smaller than a legal pad and weighs barely anything at all. However, if you're a power user and expect to be able to change your OS, boot to Spinrite, want to play with Linux, etc. I'd strongly recommend against buying this machine.

Library Privacy in the Age of Information Sharing

Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society will be hosting Hyper-Public: A Symposium on Designing Privacy and Public Space in the Connected World later this month. The Symposium will host

Discussions of privacy often focus solely on the question of how to protect privacy. But a thriving public sphere, whether physical or virtual, is also essential to society. The balance of social mores and personal freedom in these spaces is what makes cooperation and collective action possible.

The strength of networks is firmly rooted in the ability to share information freely and easily, but that is also a great weakness - creating opportunities for abuse and oppression by the strong against the weak.

Berkman fellow David Weinberger has written an excellent manifesto - Rebooting Library Privacy in the Age of the Network - for encouraging sharing information in libraries while maintaining a default position of strict privacy. Weinberger's scheme for protecting patron privacy while prmoting the value of information sharing is summer up by his Three Laws of Library Privacy:

1. Users own their data.

Users decide who has access to the data about their own interactions with the library and what may be done with that data.

2. The library fiercely protects the decisions made according to Principle #1.

The library enforces the user’s decisions about privacy, and enables public and social access in accord with the user’s decision.

3. The library is transparent, except where it affects Principles #1 or #2.

The library is transparent about its principles, and about how it is handling users’ decisions about privacy, except when such transparency would betray information users have decided not to make public or social.

I look forward to seeing what other great discussions come out of this exciting Symposium.

How (not) to tweet like a chatterbot

I'm still getting my feet wet with social media. I've been blogging about my professional experience as well as my thoughts on computers, technology, education and anything else that catches my fancy.

In an attempt to spread the word about my blog, I've been shortening the URLs (despite my reservations about URL shorteners, particularly ones with a .ly extension - I'll talk more in later posts about that) and tweeting them out to my social network. My first ham handed tweets were in the format:Note the self-consciously self promoting style. Starting my tweet with 'My latest tweet...' is like starting a sentence in a persuasive essay with 'In my opinion...' or 'I think...' - it's undermining my position and weakening my statement (not to mention wasting valuable characters).

After examining how Bruce Schneier tweets his blog posts, I decided to make some changes.

I realized that rather than letting you know that he was pointing at his own post, he merely gave a brief synopsis of his post and let you hover over or click through to see what he was citing. I decided to take a stab at it, which resulted in this.
Since my Twitter feed also rolls over to Facebook, I almost immediately recieved this message.

Clearly something was wrong.

Mistake #1: Too terse. I didn't give enough detail.

Mistake #2: No hash tags. I didn't provide any context.

Ultimately, my clumsy attempt resulted in me coming across as a chattebot trying to linkbait my friends into some ill advised web browsing.

I've cleaned it up and provided this Tweet.

After consulting with the management (my wife), I realize that I need to direct all of my tweets to her. If she wouldn't understand my tweet or follow my link, then it's no good.

Manage your home network like the pros

Researchers at Georgia Tech have just announced the release of Kermit, a project designed to help home Internet users monitor and manage their network traffic.

Kermit promises easy to read graphs and charts - helping you see if your ISP is delivering the level of service that you're paying for or if your network is slow because your teenager is torrenting too much TV. This tool is both a network probe that helps you analyze your network usage as well as a management tool that lets you shape network traffic. Want to keep the wife from sucking up too much bandwidth? Done. Want to make sure that the kids don't play WOW all night? Done.

This tool should bring professional enterprise grade network management to the home user. It might even be a good free alternative to expensive network management tools for small businesses and schools.

I can't wait to start playing with it.

Fake anti-virus targeting Macs

An old trick is being repackaged for Macs. A malicious program purporting to be an anti-virus program called MacDefender has been circulating around the Internet in the last few days and targeting Macs (this is why we recommend iAntivirus or ClamXAV for all Mac users). Make sure to be careful about downloading software from websites that you don't know and trust.

I anticipate that you will see many e-mails and websites in the next few days that include attachments claiming to be video of the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Please don't open any videos that are not posted to legitimate news sites.

For more information about these recent attacks, please take a look at these articles.
http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/05/02/bogus-macdefender-malware-campaign-targets-mac-users-using-google-images/
http://www.pcworld.com/article/226846/fake_macdefender_brings_malware_to_macs.html

Educating children in South Sudan

My friend Nyuol Tong is the founder of Sudanese Education for Liberty Foundation (http://www.selfsudan.org/). This summer, he is building his first school in Ayeit, his village in soon-to-be-independent South Sudan. The Malualdit Ayeit Liberty Academy will educate Sudanese boys and girls, helping this impoverished region recover from years of civil war.

Nyuol has partnered with filmmaker Andrew Schoneberger to document the process of building the school. They have started fund raising through KickStarter.com (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1307080824/it-takes-a-village-building-a-school-in-south-suda).

Please donate what you can to either of these worthy causes.