Regular Reminder - Our tools Are Broken: social networking tools and other information infrastructure that are not publicly owned (and by that I mean licensed under the General Public License or Copylefted -see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft) are fundamentally broken. Because anything less than public ownership severely limits the extent to which we can use, fix, experiment, and grow these into useful universal assets .. This is especially true in the long term.
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The list of our broken tools include Facebook, Google search, Twitter, and the operating systems Windows, Mac-OSX, IOS, and bits of Android. Linux is completely ours. Most of Android and the software that serves up and browses the world wide web is also properly public property.
Distributed/Federated social software that could easily replace Facebook and Twitter already exists (see Diaspora and Identica). Publicly owned search engines won't have to start from scratch either.
Its just going to take us some time to realise that all the complaints that we have about our social software - about the abuses of power that extend from privacy violations to the manipulation of search results and manipulation of our social signalling - all of these cannot be fixed until we switch to Free (as in speech) Software.
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
01 January 2018
31 July 2017
keyword shortcuts in chrome
The following works by typing a keyword into the address bar (omnibar) and pressing enter to jump to a specific url. In Google's Chrome (as of version 59.0), this isn't available through the bookmark manager like it is in Firefox, but you can easily use the Search Engine Shortcuts feature in Chrome to work the same way.
For example, I use a keyword shortcut that jumps to list of bookmarks on https://pinboard.com by given tag. For that:
How to create a keyword shortcut in Chrome
- Right click the address bar (omnibar)
- Select edit search engines...
- Click on 'ADD' - which appears after the default search engines section
- In the dialog that pops up:
- in the search-engine field - name your bookmark
- in the keyword field - enter your keyword shortcut string (what you will need to type in the omnibar to quickly jump to this 'bookmark'
- In URL field - type in the url you want to associate with the keyword
Placeholder for additional text
The url can contain a special placeholder: '%s' (without the quotes) that will serve as a placeholder for additional text that you can enter if you press tab after typing the keyword shortcut.For example, I use a keyword shortcut that jumps to list of bookmarks on https://pinboard.com by given tag. For that:
- I use 'pint' (without quotes) as keyword,
- and https://pinboard.in/u:jaysen/t:%s/ as url.
- I type 'pint' in omnibar,
- press TAB
- type the tag I want to visit - in this example 'todo'
- and ENTER This takes me to https://pinboard.in/u:jaysen/t:todo/
18 February 2011
Tim Wu, on the monopolization of the Internet, and other things
Recently caught a conversation with Tim Wu, originator of the phrase 'net neutrality', and author of The Master Switch, on the monopolization of the Internet, and other things : interview with TimWu on SearchEnginePodcast
Listen here : http://podcasts.tvo.org/searchengine/audio/800868_48k.mp3
The book sounds important - theres a good review here: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/reviews/2010/12/ars-book-review-the-master-switch-by-tim-wu.ars
Some nice bits on how older technologies had open phases too, before they were closed - as we, the consumers, brought about monopolists and consumptive systems, in tandem with emerging parasitic business ecosystems.
And whether things could be different this time around ..
Whether, if we were aware of the systems and information we 'choose' for ourselves; we could keep it open, and therefore, game-changing
Definitely, some things for us cyber-optimists to think about .
wiki notes are accumulating here: http://jaysen.wikispaces.com/TimWuOnSearchEngine
Listen here : http://podcasts.tvo.org/searchengine/audio/800868_48k.mp3
The book sounds important - theres a good review here: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/reviews/2010/12/ars-book-review-the-master-switch-by-tim-wu.ars
Some nice bits on how older technologies had open phases too, before they were closed - as we, the consumers, brought about monopolists and consumptive systems, in tandem with emerging parasitic business ecosystems.
And whether things could be different this time around ..
Whether, if we were aware of the systems and information we 'choose' for ourselves; we could keep it open, and therefore, game-changing
Definitely, some things for us cyber-optimists to think about .
wiki notes are accumulating here: http://jaysen.wikispaces.com/TimWuOnSearchEngine
11 September 2010
the Adliberous idea
Adunblock Communities ..updated for clarity:
The idea is to form additional communities around a tool like AdBlock-Plus. Subscribing to exclusion filter lists that tell your browser which ads to disallow; as usual; but also subscribing to a whitelist of ads and servers that will be allowed through.
Communities could collectively maintain such lists, based on a set of criteria, also collectively arrived at.
The criteria could include things like:
• the type of ad , (text-only, no large downloads, no annoying animation)
• political / consumer activism (for example, only advertisers that behave well; with commitments to sustainability, global justice, workers rights.
• advertise within product ranges / what the community is interested in buying. The community could ask for just the type of ads that interest that community (advertisers should be willing to jump through a few hoops for the right to have access to those strongly matched eyeballs)
• optional fund-raising / activism - where advertisers/adservers pay money to, or support in some way, organisations or a list of organisations, in order to be allowed on the whitelist.
Additional ideas / notes:
• The lists of course should be crowd sourced - using the numbers in the community to monitor for bad matched ads and to suggest products/ads/adservers that the community could include
• Communities manage themselves using the new online tools available for organising and arriving at consensus (wikis, forums, voting)
• Encourage forks/branches of communities / whitelists as required.
• Because community asks for just the type of ads that interest it, you know that whatever ads you see, are for products that are in line with your community's values, and that you can purchase with greater confidence.
• to join, someone would only have to subscribe to the appropriate whitelist
• participation should be under open principles
• a possible fundamental shift in the dynamics between consumer, producer and advertiser.
• effective consumer activism
• a community would decide to sell the right to be on its white-list to ad-servers that meet those criteria. Then collectively decide on what the money advertisers pay to be on the white-list is used for.
more on adblocking ..
checkout Adblock and Adblock-Plus - already well working crowd sourced adblocking extensions - which by the way, is very usable in both firefox and chrome)
...
any thoughts, comments ?
The idea is to form additional communities around a tool like AdBlock-Plus. Subscribing to exclusion filter lists that tell your browser which ads to disallow; as usual; but also subscribing to a whitelist of ads and servers that will be allowed through.
Communities could collectively maintain such lists, based on a set of criteria, also collectively arrived at.
The criteria could include things like:
• the type of ad , (text-only, no large downloads, no annoying animation)
• political / consumer activism (for example, only advertisers that behave well; with commitments to sustainability, global justice, workers rights.
• advertise within product ranges / what the community is interested in buying. The community could ask for just the type of ads that interest that community (advertisers should be willing to jump through a few hoops for the right to have access to those strongly matched eyeballs)
• optional fund-raising / activism - where advertisers/adservers pay money to, or support in some way, organisations or a list of organisations, in order to be allowed on the whitelist.
Additional ideas / notes:
• The lists of course should be crowd sourced - using the numbers in the community to monitor for bad matched ads and to suggest products/ads/adservers that the community could include
• Communities manage themselves using the new online tools available for organising and arriving at consensus (wikis, forums, voting)
• Encourage forks/branches of communities / whitelists as required.
• Because community asks for just the type of ads that interest it, you know that whatever ads you see, are for products that are in line with your community's values, and that you can purchase with greater confidence.
• to join, someone would only have to subscribe to the appropriate whitelist
• participation should be under open principles
• a possible fundamental shift in the dynamics between consumer, producer and advertiser.
• effective consumer activism
• a community would decide to sell the right to be on its white-list to ad-servers that meet those criteria. Then collectively decide on what the money advertisers pay to be on the white-list is used for.
more on adblocking ..
checkout Adblock and Adblock-Plus - already well working crowd sourced adblocking extensions - which by the way, is very usable in both firefox and chrome)
...
any thoughts, comments ?
22 May 2010
freedom in the cloud
"Everyone wants a piece of you these days: Google, Facebook, Flickr, Apple, AT&T, Bing. They’ll give you free e-mail, free photo storage, free web hosting, even a free date. They just want to listen in. And you can’t wait to let them. They’ll store your stuff, they’ll organize your photos, they’ll keep track of your appointments, as long as they can watch. It all goes into the “Cloud.”
How we got here is quite a scary story. But nowhere near as scary as getting out again. Eben Moglen, a Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University and the founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center, warned you about privacy and the cloud before. At a public meeting of the Internet Society of New York on February 5, Moglen asked you to consider how much worse things have become since then and explain what you can do to reclaim your freedom in the era of Web 2.0."
got sent this way by the folks at diaspora. they cite it as one of their motivators.
eyeopening talk. nice bits about the choices that were (not) made about internet architectures - why client-server limits the internet peerage possibility - and some of the political aspects of those choices.
How we got here is quite a scary story. But nowhere near as scary as getting out again. Eben Moglen, a Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University and the founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center, warned you about privacy and the cloud before. At a public meeting of the Internet Society of New York on February 5, Moglen asked you to consider how much worse things have become since then and explain what you can do to reclaim your freedom in the era of Web 2.0."
got sent this way by the folks at diaspora. they cite it as one of their motivators.
eyeopening talk. nice bits about the choices that were (not) made about internet architectures - why client-server limits the internet peerage possibility - and some of the political aspects of those choices.
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