Link Dump 4

• Open Source Ecology 4 Year Review: Efficiency is key to making open source technology viable. In December 2012, we have shown for the first time that one of our heavy machines, the Compressed Earth Block (CEB) Press, can be built in a single day. We combined modular design, digital fabrication, and swarm build techniques – for a rapid, parallel, Extreme Build. One Day.
• Gartner says lock-in technology will replace open source philosophy for 3D printers – and that should make everyone angry by +Adam Oxford: Gartner’s future is likely to pass if we don’t try and stop it now. In this future, big tech brands take over and fight to keep prices high by introducing new ‘features’ rather than continue to reduce the off-the-shelf cost of new printers. They lock people into artificially incompatible designs that are non-user serviceable. Even as raw feedstock prices drop due to demand, the move to proprietary cartridges that only fit one type of printer rather than generic spools of filament will keep end user costs high.
• How do you avoid being forked into oblivion? by +Stack Exchange: the founder of the project that was forked says: "The purpose of the MIT license is to unencumber your fair use. Not to encourage you to take software, rebrand it as your own, and then "take it in a new direction" as you say. While not illegal, it is unethical." It seems that the GitHub page of the new project doesn't even indicate that it's a fork in a typical GitHub manner...So my questions are: Was Xamarin's action and the way the action was done ethical or not? Is it possible to avoid such a situation if you are a single developer or a small unfunded group of developers?
• Investing in Junk Armies: Why US Efforts to Create Foreign Armies Fail by +William Astore: Bremer and his team vowed to create a new Iraqi military from scratch...Its main job would be to secure the country’s borders without posing a threat to Iraq’s neighbors or, it should be added, to U.S. interests...Despite years of work by U.S. military advisers and all those billions of dollars invested in training and equipment, the Iraqi army has not fought well, or often at all.  Nor, it seems, will it be ready to do so in the immediate future...The simple answer: for a foreign occupying force to create a unified and effective army from a disunified and disaffected populace was (and remains) a fool’s errand.  In reality, U.S. intervention, now as then, will serve only to aggravate that disunity
• New thoughts on capital in the twenty-first century by +Thomas Piketty's 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century': French economist Thomas Piketty caused a sensation in early 2014 with his book on a simple, brutal formula explaining economic inequality: r > g (meaning that return on capital is generally higher than economic growth). Here, he talks through the massive data set that led him to conclude: Economic inequality is not new, but it is getting worse, with radical possible impacts.
• Why Kids Sext by +Hanna Rosin: Usually Lowe can more or less classify types in his head—which kids from which families might end up in trouble after a drunken fight in the McDonald’s parking lot. But this time the cast of characters was baffling..."If she was a teenager with a phone, she was on there."...Lowe’s characterization of the girls on Instagram morphed from “victims” to “I guess I’ll call them victims” to “they just fell into this category where they victimized themselves.”...For the most part, the laws do not concern themselves with whether a sext was voluntarily shared between two people who had been dating for a year or was sent under pressure: a sext is a sext...Whether a sext qualifies as relatively safe sexual experimentation or a disaster often depends on who finds out about it. 

Link Dump 2

• A fault in our design by +Colin Dickey: Even a quick round-up of the technological advances of the past few decades suggests that we’re steadily moving forward along an axis of progress in which old concerns are eliminated one by one...the same technologies that are making our lives easier are also bringing new, often unexpected problems.
• What I Wish I Knew When I Started My Career as a Software Developer by +Michael O. Church: Let me bat out a few suggestions based on my experience and observations. This list is not all-inclusive—because it can't be. Your experience will be unique.
• 7 questions to ask any open source project by +Simon Phipps: Do you truly have permission granted in advance to benefit from and innovate upon an open source project? These questions will help you find out
• On The Origin of Circuits by +Alan Bellows: Dr. Thompson dabbled with computer circuits in order to determine whether survival-of-the-fittest principles might provide hints for improved microchip designs...what he found inside was baffling. The plucky chip was utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops. Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest-- with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output-- yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type.
• Here's What Would Happen If You Asked Ayn Rand To Loan You Money by +Lauren Davis: Naturally, Rand couldn't resist answer a request for a loan with a dissertation on fiscal responsibility. While there is some sensible stuff in here (and hey, at least she admits that Connie doesn't have to agree with her personal philosophy), most communications with teenage girls don't turn into a miniature version of Atlas Shrugged, paired with threats of viewing them as embezzlers.
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck by +Mark Manson: In my life, I have given a fuck about many people and many things. I have also not given a fuck about many people and many things. And those fucks I have not given have made all the difference.
• Lost in the Meritocracy by +walter kirn: Someday we'll be screened and then separated...Four years ago my SAT scores set me on a trajectory...I knew only one direction: forward, onward. I lived for prizes, praise, distinctions, and I gave no thought to any goal higher or broader than my next report card. Learning was secondary; promotion was primary. No one had ever told me what the point was, except to keep on accumulating points, and this struck me as sufficient. What else was there?
• Decentralized Autonomous Organization: sometimes referred to as a Fully Automated Business Entity or Distributed Autonomous Corporation/Distributed Autonomous Company...It can be thought of as a corporation run without any human involvement under the control of an incorruptible set of business rules. These rules are typically implemented as publicly auditable open-source software distributed across the computers of their stakeholders. A human becomes a stakeholder by buying stock in the company or being paid in that stock to provide services for the company. This stock may entitle its owner to a share of the profits of the DAO, participation in its growth, and/or a say in how it is run.

Freedombox, A Suggestion

The Freedombox is an idea who's time has come. Unfortunately, it's still just an idea.

Why is it still "just" an idea? Joshua Spodek has some thoughts. To paraphrase: it's probably because the idea isn't perfect yet (engineers are notorious for never being ready to release their work). He figures someone (or someones) needs to step up and organize an effort, no matter how poor the initial outcome might be. Once SOMETHING is out there it can be improved by feedback from actual users.

Pictured: users.

I agree that open-source projects either publish or cease to exist. OS projects just don't work until a person or a small group takes responsibility for getting results. Ideas are a great contribution, but someone has to contribute time and money too. Arguably an idea that can't attract even one person to take responsibility for it must not be a very good idea.

Freedombox is a great idea. We need to shift the momentum of the internet back to individual control.

That being the case, why hasn't the idea gotten more attention?

At the moment it catches the attention of people who 1) understand technology and 2) are not invested in using it to control people (for one reason or another). Unfortunately that means the vast majority of the world is not, and possibly WILL not, be captivated by the idea.

Getting a lot of people to use one is kind of the whole point of the freedombox concept, so failing to capture the collective imagination is pretty much total failure period. Therefore, it seems to me that a big part of getting some momentum behind the idea is getting people interested in it.

Or, failing that, latching onto something people are already interested in.

Time to get sneaky.

On average, people don't care about security. They will instantly compromise every single security precaution established if it saves them a moment's frustration. They will not "opt in." So, to get them to do secure things, you have to restructure their environment such that they must "opt out."

Rather than focusing on all the security advantages of the freedombox, emphasize its NON-security features. For example don't advertise the idea as a personal security initiative (freedom from oppression), instead advertise it as a personal cloud initiative (freedom from

cost/frustration). THEN build in all the security stuff you would have anyway. Tell people that's all there to guarantee the security of their cloud data. People love the idea of the cloud right now, and arguably a bunch of freedomboxes working together would fit under that umbrella.

The project could still be called "freedombox" and the product could still be pretty much the same as before, just change the marketing.

The strength of the idea is that it is the most "inherently" secure of all the options. When your data is on a company's servers it's under THEIR control. When your data is in your closet it's under YOUR control. In every society a person's home is considered more sacred than anywhere else. If an entity (cops or criminals) has to break into some faceless corporation to compromise you, that's one thing. When they have to go into your personal residence, that's an entirely different thing. No only is it simply physically easier to protect your dat

a when it's at home, but the government (even if it's corrupt) is far more likely to extend extra protections under the law to anything in your home.

Play up all the ways the freedombox will "free" people to go anywhere and still have access to their data. It will absolutely accomplish that goal. When people embrace that they'll also be getting all the security built into the gadget by its creators. If they want to turn that stuff off, they can. It's theirs and they can do what they want. Since it's open-source someone will probably even create a security-lite release that runs on the same hardware. Whatever. All the people grabbing up the "personal cloud" will create momentum that will help out the people who live under repressive governments.

Trickle down freedom.

Basically, attach the idea to something that's already popular and it will get a lot more support. Play up one or two features that appeal to the largest audience. That way the few people who can REALLY benefit from it will get it even though they would never have been able to create enough momentum on their own.