[FC-discuss] Free Culture topics in News from around the world. February.

[andrea fassina]

United States: Restating the obvious with facts. The Coverity Scan: 2011 Open Source Integrity Report, which can be found here, highlights how Open Source code is of higher quality than Proprietary software. The average density of defects per one thousand lines of code for Open Source software is 0.64, where as for proprietary software is 1.0. Coverity analysed 37M line codes from 45 important open source projects.

Europe: The European Union has doubts and concerns over Google change in privacy policy. So, since yesterday Google achieved what the EU wanted/wants with Indect - an online identity of users recording all actions done by a user across all Google services. The key of the vault is Gmail, so your personal and possibly business life, then YouTube, so what you watch, what you have watched what you have uploaded and liked. Then Google documents, so what you work on. Google search engine, so what you searched for what links you clicked on. This magic world of tailroed advertisement  and mass not anoymous information gathering is a threat to privacy and different aspects that govern a persons life.  The Guardian talks about it here.

The assurance or security of better search results, more effective advertisement and more accurate recommendations is not worth the consolidation of an user online activties and the replication of a person identity through an unavoidable and  hydroid creature more effective and pervasive than our own shadows. Giant internet companies like Google Apple Facebook should have user elected representatives to protect and advocate the users rights, it is time for web democracy in the real position of powers(ie where code gets written) in today's online world.

Not to mention that if you have an Android phone you need a Google account to operate it, so everything will be recorded and nothing forgotten. There-must-be-greater-accountability-and-transparency!

South Korea: Korea Telecom, the main ISP in Korea is dealing with network neutrality. KT recently blocked Samsung's SmartTV software from accessing its pipes saying that it should pay for the huge amount of bandwidth this service consumes. After a couple of days of talks the access to SmartTV was restored, but KT relaunched the idea that big data eaters like YouTube should pay for using their pipes. Ironically, these pipes have already been paid for by each customer accessing the service, so taxing websites(regardless of how gigantic they are) for the user accessing them is not only redundant but it would discriminate against smaller ones which are growing quickly and don't have the bandwidth and resources  to fulfill this request and it would also create a dangerous precedent.

The pipes which physically deliver the web are like the ones which carry water. If you buy a pool, you pay for the water to fill it up. It seems only absurd that the water company goes banging on the door of the company making the pool demanding compensation for all the water consumed to fill the tank.

Germany: Library.nu providing thousands of eBooks - most thought to be copyright infringing - for free download was shut down by a court in Munich. Given and admitted that the copyright infringing issue must be addressed and sanitized, it is evident that access to culture has been restricted in the same way that eBook readers make it difficult to share digital copies of the book you have legally purchased. Proprierty is essential and consequently copyright is necessary, but used as a hammer crushing the free exchange of culture, whether in the form of books or movies makes the world every day a bit gloomer and more arid. Article from the Huffington Post here

United States: Facebook's timeline is a great idea. It makes it so much easier to search in a users content back to the first post someone made on Facebook. It creates a beautiful chronological story for companies, allowing them to show their history from the initial founding act to today, just take a look at Cocacola or the NYT page, great! Very informative and delivering an entertaining user experience, it might not be good for users itself. As a friend of mine said last night while discussing the topic, "if three years ago someone posted on my wall or tagged me somewhere that I might not necessarily like now it was more or less ok. Before finding the specific post it would take hours to go all the way back to that exact entry, with Timeline that same post can be found in a matter of clicks, so now I have to be worried about something that was published years ago." Great for companies, not so much for users, but as long as there is the option not to activate Timeline, the situation is still manageable. But it must be the user's choice, not a default action.

 Full article here: http://www.studentsforfreeculture.eu/blog/2012/03/free-culture-topics-in-news-from-around-the-world-february/

Regards,

Andrea