The future of open data? | News. Next week hundreds of public servants, developers, journalists and NGOs from around the world will gather in a former factory building in Warsaw to swap ideas, write code and meet people behind open data projects in dozens of countries around the world. Last year's event helped to catalyse dozens of grassroots and official open data initiatives, established lasting contact between pioneering advocates and public officials. This year's event will be even bigger, with representatives from dozens of countries, over 30 partner organisations, and direction from the great and the good from the open data community all over the world.
Participants at Open Government Data Camp 2010 It's been over five years since the Guardian launched its influential Free Our Data campaign. Nearly four years ago Rufus Pollock coined the phrase "Raw Data Now" which web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee later transformed into the slogan for a global movement. More data World government data Development and aid data.
Why Facebook's new Open Graph makes us all part of the web underclass | Technology. When you own a domain you're a first class citizen of the web. A householder and landowner. What you can do on your own website is only very broadly constrained by law and convention. You can post the content you like. You can run the software you want, including software you've written or customised yourself. And you can design it to look the way you want. If you're paying for a web hosting service and you don't like it (or they don't like you) you can pack up your site and move it to another host. Your URLs will stay the same and so your visitors won't notice. If you use a paid-for web service at someone else's domain you're a tenant. Welcome to the web underclass When you use a free web service you're the underclass. The conclusion here should be obvious: if you really care about your site you need to run it on your own domain. But it's no longer that simple.
Anyone who's ever run a website knows that building the site is one thing, but getting people to use it is quite another. Amazon Web Services, WikiLeaks and the Elephant in the Room - ReadWriteCloud. Yesterday Amazon Web Services sent out a promotional email titled "Amazon Web Services Year in Review. " Understandably, the email didn't mention one of the biggest AWS stories of the year: the company's decision to remove the WikiLeaks website from its servers.
Dave Winer noticed something else of note in the email: a paragraph about how the U.S. Federal Government is one of AWS's customers, with over 20 federal agencies taking advantage of the company's services. And, according to the announcement, that number is growing. Winer suggests this is the reason that Amazon.com closed WikiLeaks' account.
Winer also noted that after the U.S. Winer's explanation is purely speculative, and some might call it a conspiracy theory. Put WikiLeaks aside for a moment. And it's not just a free speech issue: freedom of commerce could be in jeopardy as well. I've focused on AWS in this article, but these concerns apply to any provider. Amazon, WikiLeaks and the Need for an Open Cloud: Tech News « As the WikiLeaks saga continues, with founder Julian Assange facing potential extradition to Sweden (although not for leaking secret documents) and the U.S. considering espionage charges against him, it’s easy to overlook some of the key issues that have arisen out of the affair — particularly those raised by Amazon’s removal of WikiLeaks from its servers, out of concern about the legality of the content being hosted there.
At least one senior technologist thinks this could raise red flags about cloud computing, while programmer and open-web advocate Dave Winer believes the incident reinforces the need for an open cloud-hosting service. In the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Dr. Joseph Reger — CTO for Fujitsu Technology Solutions — said Amazon’s decision to withdraw hosting for WikiLeaks from its EC2 servers is “bad news for the new IT paradigm of cloud computing,” and ultimately calls “the security and availability of cloud services into question.”
WikiLeaks' leader Julian Assange. The Weakest Link: What Wikileaks Has Taught Us About the Open Internet. "The first serious infowar is now engaged," EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow tweeted on Friday. "The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops. " And here we are. In the week since the whistleblower site released its latest round of documents to major global newspapers, the site has been besieged by DDOS attacks (upwards of 10 Gbps at one point), forcing the site offline and hampering its ability to deliver data. After moving to Amazon Web Services at one point, presumably to better handle the traffic, the site was summarily booted on Wednesday, shortly after Senator Joe Lieberman condemned Amazon with a "providing comfort to the enemy" sort of rationale.
In justifying its actions, Amazon pointed to its Terms of Service, and challenged Wikileaks' rights to and ownership of the documents, as well as its ability to promise no injury will occur based on the content. On Thursday, Wikileaks also lost its nameserve provider when EveryDNS cut service. Terms of Service & the Espionage Act 1. Long Live the Web. The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet | Magazine. Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting. Chris Anderson explains how this new paradigm reflects the inevitable course of capitalism. And Michael Wolff explains why the new breed of media titan is forsaking the Web for more promising (and profitable) pastures.
Who’s to Blame: Us As much as we love the open, unfettered Web, we’re abandoning it for simpler, sleeker services that just work. by Chris Anderson You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. This is not a trivial distinction. A decade ago, the ascent of the Web browser as the center of the computing world appeared inevitable. “Sure, we’ll always have Web pages. The Medium - The Death of the Open Web. People who find the Web distasteful — ugly, uncivilized — have nonetheless been forced to live there: it’s the place to go for jobs, resources, services, social life, the future. But now, with the purchase of an or an , there’s a way out, an orderly suburb that lets you sample the Web’s opportunities without having to mix with the riffraff.
This suburb is defined by apps from the glittering App Store: neat, cute homes far from the Web city center, out in pristine Applecrest Estates. In the migration of dissenters from the “open” Web to pricey and secluded apps, we’re witnessing urban decentralization, suburbanization and the online equivalent of white flight. The parallels between what happened to cities like Chicago, Detroit and New York in the 20th century and what’s happening on the Internet since the introduction of the App Store are striking. Like the great modern American cities, the Web was founded on equal parts opportunism and idealism. Still don’t really know what an app is? Tim Berners-Lee Calls Facebook a Walled Garden - Is That Fair? This week the Web's inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, published an article in Scientific American promoting open standards and net neutrality. In the article, he takes aim at Facebook for being a "walled garden.
" He claims that Facebook and other social networks are "walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. " If Facebook and others proceed unchecked, warns Sir Tim, then "the Web could be broken into fragmented islands" and "we could lose the freedom to connect with whichever Web sites we want. " But how fair is that argument? Proponents of Facebook's Graph API point out that third party sites can access as much of a user's Facebook data as that user allows. The Graph API allows third party web sites to access to Facebook's "social graph" data.
The crux of the issue that Sir Tim raises is that users cannot export their social graph data to other services. (Click on image for full size view) Advertisement — Continue reading below Sir Tim continues: The Tragic Death of Practically Everything. Wired Editor in Chief Chris Anderson is catching flak for the magazine’s current cover story, which declares that the Web is dead. I’m not sure what the controversy is. For years, once-vibrant technologies, products, and companies have been dropping like teenagers in a Freddy Krueger movie. Thank heavens that tech journalists have done such a good job of documenting the carnage as it happened. Without their diligent reporting, we might not be aware that the industry is pretty much an unrelenting bloodbath. After the jump, a moving recap of some of the stuff that predeceased the Web–you may want to bring a handkerchief.
Internet Explorer, as you’ll recall, died in 2004. In 2005, the Macintosh suffered a trauma which inevitably led to its death earlier this year. Linux absolutely, positively died in 2006. The venerable technology known as TV died in 2006. too. By 2007, Microsoft Office had bit the big one. Microsoft itself also passed away in 2007. The iPod definitely died last year. Net Neutrality Issue Divides Media Companies. La boutique contre le bazar. Imaginons le web comme une ville. Avec son centre : urbain, social ; avec ses activités : trouver un job, faire ses courses ; avec ses services ; Et puis avec sa banlieue mal famée, ses quartiers "chauds" (spywares, spams et malwares). L'article du NYTimes "The Death of The Open Web" (intégralement traduit sur Framablog) file cette métaphore jusqu'à nous amener dans l'une de ces si typiques entrées de mégalopoles modernes : les zones de chalandise que constituent les "magasins" ou autres boutiques, plus précisément celles d'Apple (avec l'IPhone et l'Ipad notamment, puisque ce sont là les deux éléments centraux dudit article).
"People who find the Web distasteful — ugly, uncivilized — have nonetheless been forced to live there: it’s the place to go for jobs, resources, services, social life, the future. But now, with the purchase of an or an , there’s a way out, an orderly suburb that lets you sample the Web’s opportunities without having to mix with the riffraff.
White flights. Tim Berners-Lee: Facebook could fragment web | Technology. Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking sites represent "one of several threats" to the future of the world wide web, its founder, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has warned. Some of the web's "most successful inhabitants", such as Facebook and large telecoms companies, have begun to "chip away" at its founding principles, Berners-Lee wrote in a Scientific American journal essay published today. Social networking sites that do not allow users to extract the information they put into them is a "problem" that could mean the web is "broken into fragmented islands", he said. Google accused Facebook earlier this month of leaving its 600 million users in a "data dead end" with their contact details and personal information "effectively trapped".
Although Facebook recently began allowing users to download profile information including status updates and photos, the world's most popular social network has been roundly criticised for leaving users' network of contacts "walled" inside its own site.