Smári McCarthy`s blagoblag on Yaxic.org

There is frequent talk of computers and cellphones converging and becoming readily available for use in the developing world. Let’s analyze that statement with regard to time, financial incentives of companies such as Nokia, and the economic prospectus for the developing world as it is.

Currently two billion people have access to cellphones, which are providing a severe jump in infrastructure all over the place. It is expected that within the next five to ten years every human on earth will have access to a cell phone. This is based on direct trend analysis without much regard to means, but let’s take it as a given.

If this is the case, then most likely what will happen in the short term is that older phones used in the west will trickle down the line to be sold or given away second hand in developing countries - now I’m not talking about places like urban areas in India, where almost everybody already has a cellphone, but rather places like the Indian province of Kerala, or perhaps Burma or rural Thailand, or even Malawi. So second-hands filter down, infrastructure is raised, all the while in the west our cell phones become like 1990’s level supercomputers, with big screens, fast uplinks and high levels of interactivity.

This is not a bad way of doing it, and what’s probably going to happen is that the cell phone emergence in the developing world will cause a massive positive feedback loop of innovation and economic growth. Couple that with appropriate technology and you’ll see numerous other trends:

• Decreased fatalities due to smoke from open fires, malnutrition, simple bacterial or viral infections, and that kind of poverty related death.
• Decreased birth rate, connected to higher quality of life, availability of contraceptives, and lower infant mortality rate.
• Increased global food output
• Increased levels of organic farming on a global scale
• Far higher average GDP globally, and less scedasticity overall

But this is all grounded on the added functionality expected of cellphones during this inevitable convergence, e.g. built-in global positioning, fast internet access, high resolution screens, USB host inputs on devices, all of which could provide for things like:

• Location specific agricultural instrumentation and satellite based fertility analysis provided directly to farmers on the land, so they can get specific recommendations for plantation.
• SmartAID - cell phone based expert system for first aid and disaster response; essentially a simple AI strapped onto a Wiki, channeled through a cellphone.
• Cellphone based microcredit/mutual credit banking systems.
• Identity management, voting registration and direct democracy.
• Public safety announcements, etc.

For some of these any modern cellphone, dating back to 1998, will do. But for many of these services you need to be far further along the convergence pathway.

Which is why rebooting tech is a smart idea.

With $10 in parts today you can build a 20 MHz network-capable computer that’s roughly equivalent to a cheap home computer of the early 1980’s. Connect it to either a TV or a cheap LCD screen, for example a Nokia 3310 screen (pictured), and a keyboard, and you’ve got yourself a really simple teletype terminal.

So, instead of waiting patiently for the convergence to reach developing rural areas, which is 10-20 years from now at current rate, you use what exists to push general computing into 1980’s level tech. Make it available to people, and you’ll have an emergent hacker culture.

Now, for text only teletype terminals to interface with the best resources of the day, we’re going to need a few things:

• BBSWikipedia - a small C application that runs natively on AVR microcontrollers, for example, that can download Wikitext directly from Wikipedia or other Wikis, parse it, and display it on a 80×25 type display (or less!), with links active but images omitted and tables severely simplified. This could be just a port of Links, but then it would have to have significantly improved offline caching support, because
• we really need stable Internet connections; and while this could mean waiting for proper broadband penetration in rural areas, it more likely means backing up a bit and using cellphones as dial up modems for a while. At any rate, we can’t assume the existence of persistent network connectivity for a while, so people must have a way to back their shit up while offline so that they can schedule downloads and stuff.

Essentially, what I’m talking about doing is making a cheap platform for 1980’s style tech and use technological paradigms of the era as a migratory step until there’s something better. Something better will arrive a lot faster than it did the first time round, that’s almost certain, but having something workable really fast is definitely a win.

How insane is this idea?

Eftir allt hafarí síðustu ára liggur við að hvert mannsbarn á Íslandi þekkji framleiðsluferli áls að einhverju leyti: Bauxít, álríkt málmgrýti sem er aðallega fenginn úr yfirborðsnámum í Ástralíu, Kína, Brasilíu og nokkrum öðrum löndum, er flutt til annarra landa þar ýmist orka eða vinnuafl er ódýrt, þar sem hún er hreinsuð með gríðarlega orkufreku ferli: fyrst er málmgrýtið hitað í þrýstitönkum upp í 150-200°C og blandað við natríum hýdroxíð (svokallað Bayer ferli) og þannig er rauðleitur leir að nafni gibbsít einangrað. Gibbsítið er svo hitað upp í 1000°C, en þá bráðnar það, og þá er það rafgreint með ærnum tilkostnaði með svokölluðu Hall-Héroult ferli. Einhver afbrigði af þessu ferli eru til og margt fleira sem kemur til, en þetta er sæmileg nálgun.

En hér skal staldrað við. Hví bauxít? Aðeins lítið brot þess áls sem finnst á jörðinni er bundið í þessa tilteknu gerð málmgrýtis, en stærsti hlutinn er bundinn í mun algengara grjóti á borð við andalúsít, kyanít og öðrum alúmínósilikötum. Eina raunverulega ástæðan fyrir því að bauxít er notað er vegna þess að úrvinnsluferli þess hefur verið mest notað sögulega og var eitt af þeim fyrstu sem uppgötvaðist.

Önnur aðferð sem hefur verið mun minna notuð var þróuð til að vinna ál úr leirtegund sem heitir kaolín. Grundvallaratriðið í þeirri aðferð er að hægt er að sleppa rafgreiningu alfarið og ná álinu með einföldu efnaferli: Leirinn er mulinn og hann kalsíumbættur við c.a. 750°C. Því næst er vítissódi blandaður við það og álið flýtur upp. Ferlinu er lýst mun nánar í Bandarísku einkaleyfi 4388280, sem rann út árið 2003, en auðvitað eru svo til fræðibækur sem lýsa þessu líka.

Hvort að þessi aðferð skili frá sér minna af gróðurhúsalofttegundum og annarskyns mengun en rafgreiningarferlið veit ég ekki, en þó tel ég það víst að þar sem að þetta ferli er mun orkusparnara væri hægt að reisa álver án þess að þurfa að reisa stórar raforkuvirkjanir.

Ekki það að við þurfum neitt á fleiri álverum að halda. Í skjölum frá Century Aluminum sem ég kom höndum yfir fyrir nokkrum mánuðum (látum það liggja milli hluta hvernig það átti sér stað) kom skýrt fram að í dag væri framleiðslugeta þeirra frekar langt umfram eftirspurn á heimsmarkaði, og var eingöngu vegna framleiðslutaps í Kína árið 2006 sem þeir náðu að halda niðri vörulager sínum. Væntanlega verður töluvert framleiðslutap á þessu ári líka, en miðað við 7% árlega aukningu á eftirspurn á áli á heimsvísu – tala sem þeir gefa sér – munu þeir samt ekki lenda í framleiðsluvanda fyrr en eftir tæpan áratug. Svipaða sögu má sennilega segja af Alcoa og öðrum álrisum.

Í dag er áætlað að hvert mannsbarn í Kanada standi fyrir um 27 kílóa neyslu á hreinu áli á ári. Miðað við sömu neyslu hér á landi má gera ráð fyrir að á meðalævi, um 80.7 ár skv. Hagstofu Íslands, sé hver einstaklingur ábyrgur fyrir um 2,2 tonnum af áli. Sú tala heldur áfram að hækka. Bandaríska stofnunin CRI áætlar að aðeins um 52% álumbúða fari í endurvinnslu á lífsferli sínum, en miðað við að um 20% áls fer í umbúðir af þessu tagi er hægt að búast við um 220 kílóum af áli sem má finna í sorpgryfjum landsins fyrir hvern einstakling á Íslandi eftir tæp hundrað ár.

220 kíló af hreinu áli, urðað. Það er slatti.

Mannkynið reiðir sig í sífellt auknum mæli á ál sem eitt af undirstöðuefnum samfélagsins. Þó tekur það senn að breytast vegna framfara í koltrefjaefnum. Koltrefjar eru mun léttari og sterkari en ál, og hafa auk þess meiri tilheygingu til að sveigjast en að brotna – gjarnan er talað um að efnið sé meira “lifandi”, jafn asnalega og það hljómar. Þetta þýðir þó að flugvélar á borð við nýju Boeing 787-Dreamliner vélina, sem smíðaðar eru úr koltrefjum í stað áls, eru í fyrsta lagi mun léttari, og í annan stað eru mun minni líkur á að eitthvað brotni í þeim. Dreamliner þoturnar eru með það sveigjanlega vængi að ef að vélin lendir einhverra hluta vegna í frjálsu falli geta vængirnir svignað þar til þeir snertast fyrir ofan vélina, sem er mun jákvæðari hegðun en að þeir brotni hreinlega af.

Sömuleiðis eru bílar sem smíðaðir eru úr koltrefjum mun þolnari gagnvart árekstrum. Minniháttar dældir laga sig bara. Auk þess, við árekstur, þá tekur koltrefjagrind á sig mikið af afli árekstursins eins og hlaup, sem eykur öryggi bílstjóra og farþega til muna. Brotþol koltrefja er um tólf sinnum meiri per fermeter en í stáli. Það hvað koltrefjarnar eru léttar gerir það einnig að verkum að eldsneytisþörfin er mun minni. Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) áætlar í bók sinni, Winning the Oil Endgame, að eingöngu 6% afls í venjulegum bíl fer í það að koma bílstjórnaum milli staða – afgangurinn er varmatap í vél, núningur bílsins við jörðina, og svo afl í að yfirvinna massa bílsins sjálfs. Með því að gera bílinn 50% léttari mætti minnka eldsneytisþörf um 68% samkvæmt RMI.

Íslendingar hafa verið á álfylleríi í langan tíma og það er byrjað að hafa verulega slæmar afleiðingar fyrir okkur með tilliti til efnahags, mengunarmála og ímyndar Íslands út á við. Nú finnst mér vera tvennt skynsamlegt í stöðunni. Annað væri að taka nýjum álverum með miklum fyrirvara og leggja áherslu á að skoðuð séu mun vistvænni og orkusparneytnari framleiðsluferli á þeim álverum sem nú eru til – það ætti ekki undir nokkrum kringumstæðum að vera nauðsynlegt að reisa fleiri vatnsfallsvirkjanir á Íslandi á næstu áratugum, enda ætti frekar að reyna að minnka orkuþörf fyrirtækja og heimila. “Mjúk orka” er ódýrari fyrir alla.

Í bókinni Small is Profitable sýnir höfundurinn, Amory Lovins, með afgerandi hætti að engin raforkuvirkjun sem framleiðir meira en 100 MW hafi nokkurntíman verið arðbær til lengri tíma litið þó svo að skammtímaávinningurinn sé ef til vill nokkur. Kárahnjúkavirkjun hefur rafmagnsframleiðslugetu upp á 780 MW, og miðað við samninga ríkisins við álrisana væri allótrúlegt ef að kostnaðurinn við að reisa virkjunina myndi skila sér til baka á líftíma hennar.

Hitt, sem væri hægt að gera, væri að skoða möguleika á að stofna koltrefjaverksmiðjur á Íslandi. Framleiðsla koltrefjaefna er raunar í dag frekar óvistvænt ferli, en eflaust mætti bæta það mjög mikið með góðu hugviti. Það væri firra að reiða efnahag Íslands á ál nú þegar koltrefjar hafa möguleika á að taka við af stórum hluta þeirra verkefna sem ál er notað í.

Svo auðvitað mætti líka spyrja sig hvort að stóriðja sé nokkuð svo sniðug. Minni framleiðslueiningar og staðvær framleiðsla eru hugmyndir sem hafa margsannað sig á síðustu áratugum. Þessi tilhneyging til að vilja hafa allt stórt er byggt á þeim algenga misskilningi að stofnkostnaður sé fasti eða vaxi mjög hægt þegar skalað sé upp, eins og allir starfsmenn fyrirtækisins Goretex gætu útskýrt mjög vel.

Margar mítur eru til, sérstaklega hvað snýr að iðnaði. Ef að það er einhver lexía sem við hefðum öll gott af því að læra, þá er það að mjög mikilvægt sé að spyrja sig réttu spurninganna. Hvað stóriðnað, virkjanagerð og mengunarmál varðar á Íslandi þá hafa menn verið að spyrja kolrangra spurninga allt of lengi.

Nokkrar heimildir og ýtarefni:

• Small is Profitable eftir Amory Lovins (PDF)
• Winning the Oil Endgame eftir Amory Lovins (PDF)
• CRI - Aluminum recycling rate
• National Encyclopedia - South Africa - Mining
• Extraction of Aluminum from Clay - US Patent 4388280
• Hall-Héroult process - Wikipedia
• Hagstofa Íslands
• “Vafasöm gögn” frá Century Aluminum
• Viðtal við Marcin Jakubowski: Global Swadeshi Dialogues 1
• Samtal við Marcin Jakubowski, Open Farm Tech
• Myndir: Ýmsar heimildir. Afsakið höfundarréttarbrotin.

The new Global Swadeshi Dialogue is up. It’s about one and a half hours of me and Vinay talking about really hard core stuff.  I hope it’s worth the watch.

The diminution of irregularity is exemplified, amongst other things, in the case of staple products which supply our necessary food and clothing. With respect to them, famine and scarcity are by comparison almost unknown now, at any rate in tolerably civilized communities. As a consequence of this, and of the vast improvements in the means of transporting goods and conveying intelligence, the fluctuations in the price of such articles are much less than they once were. In other directions, however, the reverse has been the case. Fashion, for instance, now induces so many people in every large community simultaneously to desire the same thing, that great fluctuations in value may ensue.

- John Venn, The Logic of Chance (p 370-371)

 Written by John Venn (of Venn Diagram fame, unfortunately little else of his work has receive popular attention) in 1866. It shows that scarcity wasn’t even very real back then.

Marcin and Vinay did a great dialogue over on Global Swadeshi, out today. Check it out.

In response to my podcast of the other day, Fenn asked:

How should one go about building a post-scarcity society in a patent-and-copyright-encumbered intellectual climate?

There’s no easy way to answer this, as the answer is neither obvious nor uniquely defined. I can posit three suggestions that I think are deeply related:

1. First, one of the things that will inevitably happen over the next decade, which has been going on for the past three decades, is that the idea of copyright will change. We are accustomed to an extremely rigid system for copyrights, born out of a greed which no longer really has any place in the realms of man in our new digital reality. Those who wish to uphold the old form of copyright are increasingly having to criminalize children and family folks, and any system which marginalizes the majority of the population (by stamps of unethicality, criminality, or whatever) is doomed to die (in the cybernetic sense) eventually.
2. Second, there has been a lot of talk about manufactured scarcity on Global Swadeshi recently, and in a number of other places. This has relevance here: We already live in a post-scarcity society on a number of levels. We haven’t achieved full cornucopia yet, but for all intents and purposes nobody should be want of anything. The only thing stopping us from having this kind of global equality is the patent-and-copyright-encumbered intellectual climate of which you speak. But that intellectual climate isn’t self-organizing. Rather, it’s a result of the assumption of scarcity, which leads people to believe they can’t survive without property, which leads to greed. This may sound simplistic, but it needn’t be more complicated. So if you want to build a post-scarcity world, start by breaking the current system and replacing it with something better. This can be done in a number of ways and I don’t support any single one more than any other, but as a rule the less violence applied the better.
3. Third, there is the option of doing the subversive hack. Nokia, amazingly, heralded this in the hardware market by saying that their patents were free for use in free/open source projects without royalties, and that they would not allow companies that did not follow the same guideline to use their patents. This was a big win, and completely parallel to the GNU General Public License or the Creative Commons licenses. Basically, these licensing schemes are viral in nature, and the more you spread the meme the stronger it becomes. Because of this I have been discussing open hardware licensing with a number of ‘big guys’ over the last couple of months, and I happen to know that Richard Stallman and Neil Gershenfeld have been discussing this issue (Neil told me the other day…).

Or, taken into short form:

1. Just wait, the problem will solve itself.
2. Encourage the problem to solve itself by political activism. (And btw, anarchism is the way to go)
3. Push for subversive licensing methods and adopt free hardware licenses that are hostile towards patents.

On the third note, I think I’ll take the liberty of posting a few highlights of the mails thrown back and forth under the topic “Open Hardware License” a couple of months ago. I hope nobody minds.

The discussion started with Michel Bauwens asking about Open Hardware Licenses, or more generally, Open Source Physical Objects,

What do we need to have “economically-significant, replicable, open source physical production efforts?”, i.e. true Distributive Production. Marcin Jakubowski proposes a set of OSE Specifications to judge such efforts.
Key entries: Free Hardware Design, Open Development, Open Customization ; Open Design, Open Hardware, Open Innovation, Open Source, Open Source Product Design, Open Source Hardware
See also: Citizen Product Design; Co-Creation; Co-Design ; Desktop Manufacturing ; Peer Production Entrepreneurs ; Self-organized Design Communities
Open Source for Appropriate Technology: Instructables, Honeybee Network, Appropedia, Howtopedia, Demotech
Sixteen Key Technologies for an Open Habitat. Marcin Jakubowski [3]
Key organizations: Open Design Foundation ; Open Hardware Foundation
Typology by degree of openness: Closed Hardware; Open Interface, Open Design, Open Implementation
The Open Source Product Design platform has a list of Open Design projects
MAKE magazine “has managed to regenerate a previously static culture of do-it-yourselfers at a feverish pace”
The Village Forum focuses on how we design and build our habitat.
The P2P-Design Delicious tag monitors the topic

Vinay Gupta said:

The issue is patents. Open Source derives it’s power from copyright law - they use the property right of “copyright” and then pool it by using the GPL and other such licenses which rest on copyright.

Patent is a huge pain in the ass. You could do an open source patent pool, but that’s a very expensive and hard to manage undertaking.

So… one option is to work in the domain of no property rights - public domain - which is where a manufacturing technology goes if it is disclosed without patents, or is patented but the patent has expired.

But then what if you publish your design, then somebody makes a small tweak which kind of perfects your design, and then patents their tweak - without a patent on the original item, you can’t require them to release their changes for general use, because there’s no property right that you hold which applies to their work.

A problem, for sure, in terms of doing Open Manufacturing in the same vein as Open Source.

And later followed up:

I’m not sure we need an open hardware license. I’m also pretty sure that we need to investigate other approaches to protecting IP other than copyright and patent, because neither one really expresses the essence of what we’re trying to get at here. Copyright and Patent are two forms of Imaginary Property: we could easily create a third form of Imaginary Property that suited our needs, although it wouldn’t have legal status unless new laws were passed, or old ones amended.

To which I responded:

The problem with Open Source licenses on physical objects is that even though they might do the trick in a legal context, it isn’t what they’re designed to do, so the wording is all wrong. It’s like selling vodka as a disinfectant. It’ll do the job marvelously, but a lot of people will remain skeptic.

Conversely I think doing an “Open Hardware License” would be missing the point to a certain degree - the boundaries between hardware and software are bound to grow increasingly fuzzy as we draw closer to digital fabrication (let alone molecular assembly), and even if we lump those two together we’d be neglecting all the other kinds of “intellectual property”, such as ideas, etc.

I consider patents to be harmful by design. Their original purpose, to spur innovation, worked to a certain degree but it certainly doesn’t scale (much like the republic) - as soon as you have a certain number of innovators, they find their options limited by the number of existing patents, and the patent system becomes counterproductive. Bounty based systems may be better for certain purposes, but this is an issue I haven’t seen anybody nail properly yet.

Which brings me to my point: What we need isn’t just a new license, it’s a new terminology for dealing with “objects”, both physical and imaginary, something that encompasses both snugly, fits in with modern legalese and does the job patents were originally intended for without artificially stifling innovation or stepping on anybody’s toes.

Once we have that kind of framework, a license that applies in general terms to all these things will probably follow somewhat naturally, and that has the potential to handle software, hardware, biomass or whatever humans need to possess.

Marco Fioretti joined the conversation, with:

A much more effective and easier to implement solution may be to simply:

- reduce duration in time of patents
- do not allow them in some fields: software, living things…

if it ain’t completely broken, that is if there is an intermediate
solution that puts an end to all or almost all the harmful
consequences, why make the effort to fix it completely?

Michel Bauwens then replied:

Concerning the new terminology, are you aware of Spimes as a concept,
http://p2pfoundation.net/Spime, explained in this video,
http://p2pfoundation.net/Bruce_Sterling_on_the_Internet_of_Things_and_Spimes

The only beef I would have with Bruce Sterling’s concept is that it relies
on paying for online designs, which I think is not realistic,

some other license related links:

http://p2pfoundation.net/Talis_Community_License

http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Design_License_Agreement

Here is the perspective of the TAPR open license people, taken from
http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Hardware_Licence

I hope Lawrence is not objecting to being copied on this, busy as he must
be?

Michel

From http://www.tapr.org/OHL.

You can download pdf versions of the proposed licenses through this site.

“The TAPR Open Hardware License (”OHL”) provides a framework for hardware
projects that is similar to the one used for Open Source software. This
isn’t as straight-forward as it seems because legal concepts that work well
for software (such as copyright and copyleft) don’t neatly fit when dealing
with hardware products and the documentation used to create them. The OHL
deals with Documentation, which describes a project using elements such as
schematic diagrams, CAD/CAM files, and Gerber files, and Products which are
based on that Documentation.

Like open source software licenses, the OHL permits Documentation to be
used, modified, and distributed to third parties. Unlike software licenses,
it also addresses how Products based on the documentation can be made and
distributed. The OHL’s requirements are aimed at encouraging the community
to develop, use, and improve open source hardware — and to prevent others
from turning that hardware into closed, proprietary products.

The OHL does not address software, nor does it address firmware or code
loaded into programmable devices such as FPGAs. These fit much more closely
into a software licensing model than do the physical objects that the OHL
attempts to cover, and we encourage developers to use open source licenses
like the GPL for them.

One important, and unique, component of the OHL is a patent immunity
provision. In short, the OHL requires each person who uses the Documentation
to promise that they will not sue others who make Products based on that
Documentation for infringement of any patent they control. This ensures that
the community is protected from patent claims by those who benefit from the
community’s contribution.

Another unique aspect of the OHL is a provision to provide feedback about
modifications. Open source software licenses steer away from obligating
those who make modifications to pass those changes back to earlier
developers or other users. For a number of reasons, particularly our belief
that hardware fixes and improvements, especially for safety issues, should
be made known to those who may be making or using Products, we felt that a
public feedback provision would be valuable.

At the same time, we wanted to minimize the burden of such a provision, and
the loss of privacy that would result from requiring developers to provide
their email addresses. So, TAPR will provide a mechanism to report
modifications to a central archive that will be visible to anyone. The
requirement is structured so that if the mechanism fails (if, for example,
TAPR should disappear), the rights granted by the OHL will not be affected.

The Open Hardware License allows Products to be used for any purpose. An
alternative version, the TAPR Noncommercial Hardware License, is identical
to the OHL but limits Products to noncommercial use only. While open source
licenses normally don’t allow restrictions on use, there is a big difference
between software and hardware that we believe justifies offering this
option.

While there is no real cost in compiling or copying open source software,
someone who wants to make Products available to others confronts upfront
costs of making circuit boards and obtaining parts. It’s often
cost-prohibitive to do this in small quantity, so the developer who wants to
make his or her Product available, even on a non-profit basis, has to make a
substantial up-front investment. That investment is at risk if others can
compete commercially with him. The Noncommercial Hardware License addresses
this concern. ” (http://www.tapr.org/OHL)

[edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Hardware_Licence?title=Open_Hardware_Licence&action=edit&section=2>
]
Context and Commentary

From Instructables at http://www.instructables.com/forum/EEMFZXN1G5EXCFLKHF/

“Recently, people over at tapr.org released drafts of open-source hardware
licenses. I got the following message from Jonathan Kuniholm at Duke asking
for comments on the drafts: “I have spoken with each of you regarding our
interest in the infrastructure for the sharing of hardware designs. An
organization with its roots in amateur radio and open source software has
released a draft of two open hardware licenses ( http://www.tapr.org/OHL ).
I believe that the inspiration is primarily electronic hardware, but the
concept addresses issues we have encountered in our work with The Open
Prosthetics Project and its parent organization, the newly incorporated
Shared Design Alliance.

We have been interested in the ways that we might protect those who choose
to share designs for public good from the possibility of having those
designs patented out from under them or otherwise removed from the public
domain, as well as helping them avoid the cost and time delays of patent
protection for efforts from which they are not trying to profit. These draft
licenses also address liability issues, which are another can of worms. I
would be interested to hear thoughts from folks more knowledgeable than I
about the effectiveness and potential pitfalls of such measures, given the
difference between the issues surrounding physical designs and patents (for
which there is currently no open license option outside of patent-related
measures), and those surrounding items traditionally protected by copyright,
which can currently be released under Creative Commons or GNU licenses (
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ , http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html,
http://www.fsf.org/ ).

The TAPR folks have invited comment on their draft, and I think that this is
as good an effort as I’ve seen so far. If you have interest or expertise in
this area, please submit comments through the TAPR site, and please forward
this to anyone else you know who may be interested.” (
http://www.instructables.com/forum/EEMFZXN1G5EXCFLKHF/)

I piped up again, saying:

Thanks for that link, I wasn’t familiar with Spimes. But I’ll agree with your beef. I had a conversation with my good friend Dhananjay Gadre of the Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology in India about exactly this issue - I was pitching to him a concept I had for a “Sourceforge for Objects”, like the flipside of Make Magazine that was intended as a warehouse for digital design patterns. Originally, I had intended for authors of objects to be able to have people pay for downloads, going for the GNUesque stance of “free as in free speech, not as in free beer” trend.. but Dhananjay objected, pointing out a very important fact:

- Most innovation done in the world today is being done By the developed world For the developing world, and this is clearly the wrong way to do things. Enabling people running a collective warehouse of digitized objects to demand money from one another for use of their intellectual possessions would only widen the gap between the developing and developed, instead of reversing the innovation cycles and putting the power in the hands of those who need it, which is essentially my end goal.

In the end I came up with two methods of addressing this. On the one hand ask for donations rather than demanding money. The other method was applying a PPP-valency matrix to pricing schemes. Let me coin the term: A PPP-valency matrix is a NxN matrix, V, of the ratios between regional PPP’s (with tr(V) = N, and prod(V) = 2N, by design.).. the concept is to take the “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” mantra and apply it to the actual economy, so the amount of money you get from objects is relative to the ability of people to pay for them. The problem with this method is it’s extremely hard to implement in a way that doesn’t beg for abuse, and after doing a few paper napkin Monte Carlo simulations (yes, I’m a geek), I’ve seen that there’s an inherant feedback loop in this thing that could cause instability in the long run. It can be fixed, but I’m not sure how.

Regarding Spimes on a more technical level, there’s an AI point here. Searching physical reality for objects is NP-hard. If we were to apply Bruce Sterling’s idea at face value, we’d end up with a world where you Google your toaster, and it just goes through all known reality searching for the RFID that matches your toaster. This would be stupid.

AI researchers fit into two categories these days: the people who want the AI’s to understand everything, know where everything is, and use deep searching to solve their problems, and the people who want the AI’s to understand context. The first group would just search the entire space for matching concepts. The latter group would narrow the search down to kitchens at first and expand only if necessary. The problem is, despite the best efforts of smart people ranging from John Von Neumann to John McCarthy to Noam Chomsky, we still don’t understand the nature of “context” well enough to actually implement this kind of thing. And actually understanding context might lead us to a far smarter way of doing this that is currently obscured by our limitations.

… after which the conversation pattered out into pointless chit-chat. We didn’t reach any useful conclusion, but I think there were a lot of very good points in there. What I’d like to do is get the big names in the game to stick their noses together and come up with a Much More General Public License - one that doesn’t just apply to software, but to anything. If that seems unreasonable, then I’d settle for a GPL-lookalike that addresses the key issues of free/open hardware, which is definitely one of the things that’s going to be hardest to fix for the purposes of a post-scarcity future.

In the end, it doesn’t matter how the game has been played so far, or that it’s being played unfairly, but only that we are in the unique situation that we can change everything, forever, by playing the game right now. In a world where everything can be a bitstream, what are we going to do?

As I write this I’m sitting on a bus heading out of Reykjavík, catching up on blogs I’ve been too busy to read. I would do e-mail, but the other laptop is out of power and there aren’t any electrical outlets on this bus (nor any other bus I’ve ever come across, oddly enough).

But I do have intermittent wi-fi. Reykjavík is a fun city that way, and now as I’m crossing the boundary out of the city I can see the connectivity meter dropping to zero as I exit the blanket of wireless. I’m surprised how good it’s been.

I haven’t got any software handy to crack wepkeys or any other of your average wardriver paraphernalia (GPS, directional antenna, notepad and MAC address spoofer), but despite this there appear to be just about enough free wifi on the way from the bus station to the outskirts to give me streaming video off stod2.is, where I was looking to see if they had posted the interview they took with Neil Gershenfeld when he was here the other day - they didn’t appear to have, but I only managed to check two of the three news reels before the connection became flaky again.

This is the future though. If I had a pricey 3G dongle and little enough self-dignity to pay per kilobyte fees for Internet connections I would still be connected now that I’m out in the wilderness, on top of a plateau where the bus winds between black snow-topped mountains. But if all things were equal, every access point in Reykjavík - and everywhere - would be considered to be part of a distributed Internet infrastructure, meshed together for everybody to share and enjoy.

That still wouldn’t help me out here, but I don’t care. I can look out the window and enjoy nature. It’s only in cities where nature needs to be downloaded.

Over on the Global Swadeshi network there’s a discussion going on about the generation of artificial scarcity by the state or the market to keep the price high on produce - an act which I find appalling and disgusting.

I don’t know how to start fixing this. I know the cause is greed, and that scarcity hasn’t existed for many things such as agricultural produce for a long time now. I know that the end result will be severely rethought models about how the economy functions… but how do we start that trickle effect?

It turns out that what was one of the most promising open source mesh wifi projects of its day has been overrun by profiteering bastards who have closed up the source, possibly illegally, and have instated a governing policy for the hardware they sell that is reminiscent of Microsoft’s XBox 360 tactics and, well, most commercial out-of-the-box hardware being developed these days.

In this great article the story is told of a Vancouver based free wifi activist group who got repeatedly ass-fucked by Meraki and their fluctuating policy. This story underlines but one thing: the demand for open source hardware is increasing, in part due to the fact that the OEM producers are becoming increasingly totalitarian with their hardware.

Through a month’s worth of discussion about Open Hardware licenses on a small backwater mailing list (consisting of many of the smarter people in the field of open licensing) I’ve come to realize that the need is augmented by the thresholds created by hardware manufacturers - with electronics fabrication techniques becoming increasingly complex, the ability of Joe Public to fabricate such revolutionary open hardware such as Sun Microsystems’ OpenSPARC II is severely limited, even to the degree that I’ve given some thought to how hard it would be to get a small chip fab into the Fab Labs.

As I said previously in an article that appeared on the Peer-2-Peer Foundation’s blog: The problem with Open Source licenses on physical objects is that even though they might do the trick in a legal context, it isn’t what they’re designed to do, so the wording is all wrong. It’s like selling vodka as a disinfectant. It’ll do the job marvelously, but a lot of people will remain skeptic.

Conversely I think doing an “Open Hardware License” would be missing the point to a certain degree - the boundaries between hardware and software are bound to grow increasingly fuzzy as we draw closer to digital fabrication (let alone molecular assembly), and even if we lump those two together we’d be neglecting all the other kinds of “intellectual property”, such as ideas, etc.

This holds. With the sheer number of projects attempting to create blanket mesh wifi for urban areas, such as Vancouver’s FreeTheNet and related software/hardware projects such as Peernet and B.A.T.M.A.N, it’s only a matter of time before the Genie gets let out of the bottle.

The community must prepare for this.

As Cory Doctorow showed in his fantastic novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, besides the huge technological barriers to achieving free mesh Wifi are the “capitalistic” barriers of the phone companies not really wanting people to do that kind of thing and being very bent on stopping them.

Point in case: My ISP, Hive, leases out wireless routers to their customers and does not allow their customers to use other endpoint equipment than their own. The equipment is locked and password protected, so they can access it from their headquarters over some telnet route but I cannot log in to it myself. As a result, the ESSID and the wep key cannot be changed by me. I could not blank out the wep key and open up my network even if I wanted to. Or, let’s say I could: then I would be in violation of my service agreement with them. Actually, even telling my friends the wep key when they visit so we can play a game of OpenTTD over the wireless is in violation of the service agreement. Not that that’s going to stop me.

As much as I understand Hive’s policy in not letting the lemmings tamper with the settings on the router, which would cost them endless hassle in incompatibility, repair service and lengthy telephone arguments with know-it-all PFY’s who’ve just botched their GPIO settings and can’t connect, I’m afraid their policy is more suited towards blocking uses that would be legitimate if the ISP’s were selling uplink access as opposed to personalized tyranny.

Because that’s what ISP’s are: They’re service providers, and their service is uplink. As soon as they step outside that box they’re well on their way towards blocking legitimate uses. It would be as if a grocery store were to ban customers from opening tin cans bought at their store, lest they cut themselves on the lid; or worse, would forbid customers to share bananas bought at the store with their friends, lest the friends figure out a way to stage a bank robbery using the bananas.

A friend of mine is renting an apartment in down town Reykjavík, and the landlady has provided wireless Internet to her tenants. Allegedly. The truth is the signal is extremely flaky and only perceivable in one room in the apartment. However, due to the virtue of the immensely thick carpet of wifi in the city center, there’s more wireless access points in her vicinity than is strictly possible to shake a stick at. During our frustrating moment the other day when the granted wireless connection was failing to impress, we stopped for a moment to consider breaking into some of the AP’s and using them.

Ethically, I’m not opposed: Anybody who locks their wifi is blocking a resource that others could use on egalitarian grounds, given just a hint of altruism. To wit, I think anybody who willingly blocks their wifi is behaving criminally towards their fellow humans. Legally, I can’t see any objection: There are no laws, to my knowledge, banning people from connecting to uplinks when available, and WEP keys are not really locks so much as just a simple obfuscation technique to prevent discourage eavesdropping.

In the end the only reason we didn’t do it is I didn’t have any software to crack the WEP keys. Since then I’ve been thinking, perhaps I should have just gone door to door in the neighborhood asking people to submit their ESS ID’s, WEP keys, addresses and WGS84 coordinates to a public pool.

But even if we did do that, the telco’s are not altruistic. They are not fond of egalitarianism. Their interest in liberty, and equality is none. We need open hardware, and we need a battle plan.

“Once you can understand something in a way that you can shove it into a computer, you have cracked its code, transcended any particularity it might have at a given time.” - Jaron Lanier

From a great article in Edge.