Stanford Center for Internet and Society

My day two at WOS started with a session by public libary activists giving information on their efforts to preserve computer games. While gaining recognition from academia and the public in the recent years both the funding situation and the problem of copyrights are hindering the sustainable development of computer game preservation. We also learned again that the Amiga is not dead...

The Panel Globlalization: Bridging the Digital Divide showed that the digital divide is actually a set of divides, with not only hardware and connectivity missing in developing countrys, but also policy, skills and language being important barriers that are to overcome. The case of detentions in Ghana over the use of VoIP where just one example on the impact of the policy barriers that Marek Tuszynski from the Tactical Technology Collective gave.

You can check Wendy Seltzers impressions of the WOS at her blog.

First of all - this is huge. The third annually Wizards of OS has managed to draw both a profound crowd and a high profile range of speakers.The event took of with a much celebrated speech by Eben Moglen, who, along the lines of his »dotCommunist Manifesto«, stated that the Free Software Movement has brought into reality the tools of liberation. That now there is the moment in history to take them up and gain "freedom now", since: "Proof of concept plus running code equals revolution".

Slashdot already has the news: the third Wizards of OS Conference on free Software and free Content opens this Thursday in Berlin. Creative Commons Germany will be lauchend there. Among the speakers are Lawrence Lessig, Ross Anderson, William Fisher, Eben Moglen, Jah Shaka, Ethan Zuckerman, Wendy Seltzer to name just a few.

I going visit the event with a group of students from Bauhaus University and will provide some coverage in this blog here.

For the last ten years I attended the Moers New Jazz Festival on Whitsun. Besides being a lot of fun, this event always managed to puzzle me intellectually and provide a lot of inspirations for my work.The Moers New Jazz Festival was founded in 1972. Initially devoted to Free Jazz it opend up during the last thirty years and now covers a range from free improvised music and contemporary composing, over Funk, Hip Hop, Electronica to World Music. It is the biggest festival of this kind worlwide, spanning four days, hosting 400 musicians from all continents and attracting 50.000 people to visit the festival ground, with nearly 20.000 of them actually coming to the concerts. Musically Moers Festival is all about the idea of meeting and communicating, most vividly expressed by the "projects" conducted every moring. Here various musicians meet for two hours and improvise, usually without having played together before.

Privacy International has published a public opinion survey (PDF-File) on the proposed National ID Card in the UK. The representative Poll contains some interesting results, since it shows both support and strong opposition against ID Cards. 61% support compulsory ID Cards, but 16% of those opposing an ID card said they would participate in a "campaign of civil disobedience" and 8% even would go to prison in order to avoid registration...

The proposed Card will include biometrics and interfaces for government IT but at present there are no plans to include Digital Signatures, as is the case with other proposed ID Cards in Europe.

Both Liberty Alliance and RSA have announced progress on their Federated Identity Management specs for Web Services on Monday and Tuesday respectively.

Federated Identity Systems aim to provide a solution for sharing identities between multiple websites, services and applications, without burdening the user to re-authenticate himself. In other words a single-sign-in solution where 'federated' stands for standardized methods in sharing trust in an identity among multiple service-providers.

RSA has partnered with Microsoft and IBM, among others, for their SAML (Secure Assertion Mark-Up Language) based solution called 'RSA Federated Identity Manager'. IBM and Microsoft are commited to support the product in their Web Services applications.

Today the National Conference on Digital Government Research kicks off in Seattle. Judging from the announcements in the conference program, this could become something like a founding event for a whole new discipline. Seattle is far away from Germany and unfortunally I have teaching obligations in Bremen and Weimar and can´t be there. If anybody is blogging the event, please let me know.

Switching to Mozilla Thunderbird as the main mail app on my iBook gave me some undesirable insights on how Apple tries to constrain choice in internet applications. I assumed that you set your standard web-applications in the system preferences. After searching through them and the entire system afterwards, I was astonished to find the dialog hidden within Apples own web-applications. The standard web browser is set in the Safari preferences, the mail client at the correspondent place in Mail.

This is a change in Apples policy, since older versions of OS-X allowed to change your web apps where you expect it: Among the internet & network options in the system preferences.

Germanys biggest computer magazine c´t has reviewed my book Electronic Government - Vom User zum Bürger (Electronic Government - From Users to Citizens; german only) in it's current issue. Obviously the reviewer didn´t like what he read - but his final conclusion is pretty accurate to my intentions: "confessed humanists may appreciate this thoroughly theory heavy diligent piece of work in their discussion-circles - practically orientated potential buyers should consider reading an extract before doing a purchase...". I never intended to write a manual on how to turn yourself from a user into a citizen, but wanted to provide an analysis why such a process is inevitable in the given setting of political economy. I strongly believe that E-government is one of the most important developments underway, that might fundamentally affect the internet, governments and people alike. Considering the ambitions that the responsible administrations show, there should be much more critical discussion on this currently under-theorized topic.