Some recent revelations confirm what many of us have already known. There is a lot of money exchanging hands amid efforts to deny man-made climate changes.

This comes around the same time that a United Nations panel took a stance which does confirm that global warming is real. How long can companies manipulate the world though?

Yesterday, in another site, I wrote about the possible Intel-Dell kickbacks affair, which has pretty much been exposed. And only a week ago, Microsoft offered money for changes to Wikipedia. It is sad to see the extent of fraud, but encouraging to see that it gets exposed.

I have just got a short new article over at newassignment.net. Dave’s improvements, made gradually as we corresponded, are muchly appreciated (as always!) . It is pleasant to work with a good editor, but I would still like to present the original text below.

EPEATEDLY we speak about the merits of an Open Source paradigm, which puts control in the hands of more people. This can either be a case of handing over control from the vendor to the customer or — more aptly in this context — from the author/journalist to the reader/critic.

At the end of last week, results from a highly-anticipated study on software were finally published. The study was backed by European Commission and it was authority- and vendor-independent. The results indicated that Europe would get significant competitive advantage owing to the economical superiority of Open Source software. This study, which involved rigorous trials and long-term observations, shows that there is a great economic incentive to use Open Source software in a company.

Let us use this as a lesson while we study how Open source practices can move beyond software onto things such as design or authoring, journalism included. Open Source journalism is beginning to prove its economic viability. It offers greater flexibility, which is obtained for low costs. Journalism in an Open, collaborative and unmoderated context is argued to raise maintainability costs, but experience suggests that a voluntarily effort of a group not only reduces production pace and costs, but it also improves quality.

There is still great resistance among the traditional world, which attempts to disrupt this emerging trend, by discrediting its practicality. Facts on the ground suggest otherwise. Only by studying alternative paradigms to the handling of information and associated tasks can one truly appreciate its value and establish confidence in it. And such is the case of Open Source intellect, whether its expressed in code or in natural language.

The study shows that costs are brought down with Open Source software. It also reports on quality going up, either because people involved in the project are more affordable (lower licensing expenses translate to an open door and increased staffing). In the same vein, it is easy to assume that costs will go down in Open Source journalism — journalism based on volunteers. Big media’s big response is about quality and quality is most easily attained by involving large groups, basing factual information on many opinions, formed by a greater pool of knowledge. Wisdom of the crowds not only raises accuracy, but it also benefits from a crowd, whose reward is involvement with real impact; the compensation for the efforts needn’t be monetary.

Picture from the BBC (2004).

T is relieving to see that some educated people in the States have begun fighting disinformation. Recently, a serious matter that is denial of global warming has been taken more seriously. In fact, severe actions could soon be taken against those who seek to deny factual dangers whose impact is considerable. Have a look at the short summary from Slashdot.

Expert Wants to Decertify Global Warming Skeptics

“Apparently in the Senate, at least one scientist wants to put a permanent stop to any arguments over Global Warming. The Weather Channel’s most prominent climatologist is advocating that broadcast meteorologists be stripped of their scientific certification if they express skepticism about predictions of manmade catastrophic global warming.”

Mobility of data is becoming an important issue these days. Many people’s data is stored on third-party Web sites, whose data formats are not specified. The data cannot be exported (e.g. for upgrades or migration) either, so there’s a lockin involved in many such Web services (think Web 2.0).

Possession of one’s data would be a selling point. So why are sites not providing this facility? Why is its implementation assigned such a low priority? Simply put, sites wish to elevate exit barriers and make it hard for customers to walk away. But there is a cost here. This leads to resentment. This leads to backlash, which DRM, for example, comes to show us.

Let’s just integrate facilities for import and export in all user-driven Web sites. Export at the least — one that relies on standard protocols for containing data — should be crucial. Without import facilities, quick flow of SPAM is not an issue, in the case of public-facing sites such as Digg.com. Just take del.icio.us for example.

Earlier today, a mini milstone for Google Groups left its stingy mark . The beta version of the new interface, which acts as a gateway to UseNet (and beyond), has just gone live as a stable service. The old presenatation, which was simpler, is sadly no longer available. I am not too happy about this ‘facelift’, yet no options that I navigated through could take me back to the minimalist and familiar interface. This transition — a questionable ‘upgrade’ — may be even worse than the last one, which discoraged proper netiquette and earned Google Groups users some bad reputation. It sometimes led them to killfiles and filters, quite collectively and prejudicely.

In any event, my main concern with the new interface is one which cost me between 15 minutes to half an hour. The new Google Groups interface conflicts with AdBlock (Firefox plugin). Something in the naming of the divs has apparently changed. Looking at userContent.css (under /chrome) and removing some of the prominent selectors with “ad” as a substring resolved the issue. They are located at the top, but I am not sure whose removal resolved the problem.

So, in case someone is having the same trouble as me, I decided to post this as a blog item that’ll prove redundant to most readers. Let’s make something more useful of this ramble. Are you reading and /or using Digg? If so, why not strip all the ads off the site?

ANDLING SPAM where collaboration is involved can be a hard task, whereas in non-social systems, erasing SPAM (or content with vandalistic intent) may be easy(ier). There is virtually no interaction with the context in the latter case. With social Web sites and forums this equates to nuking a spammer along with some innocent people in the spammer’s surroundings. In the case of collaborative editing, such as this one which I discovered yesterday, judgment becomes difficult as well. It’s marginal because free of speech, authority, and censorship ought to be weighed.

I would like to throw in some random thoughts: earlier this morning, in Netscape, I had a look at some tag clouds and saw some arcane phrases dominating the cloud. I decided to dive in and I found that these sometimes came from spammers (brute-force tagging) whose account had been suspended. This led me to pondering if by leaving these links in tact spammers have an incentive to return. There’s a true dilemma where SPAM comes to a content management system. It’s much easier when it comes to E-mail, unless excessive marketing and bulk mail which fills up boxes is concerned.

Returning to my main concern, Netscape thrives in high figures. High figures may be good for site vanity and integrity of the whole community (e.g. not purging votes and comments of non-spammers), but what about a bury-like feature (a la Digg) that keeps these submissions of out the reach/sight of search engines (and sometimes human visitors too)? As it stands, spammers are currently being rewarded by going under the ‘radar’ of Web spiders.

Sadly, many people use a convenient argument to defend Windows’ security problems. They would like you to believe that security is failing because of relative market share, not inherent security, which one can attain through proper design. Windows was built to serve users’ convenience while neglecting to account for the subsequent inclusion of an Internet connection. Windows was very desktop centric, as Gates’ snubbing of the Internet has proven over the years. That, and only that, is why Microsoft struggles to rewrite a vast codebase in a quick and secure fashion that leads to mature and well-established libraries.

The following articles demonstrate and explain why Windows is simply insecure by design. Market share plays a relatively minor role in this equation.

• Linux Security: A Big Edge Over Windows
• Security Report: Windows vs Linux
• Microsoft Windows: Insecure by Design
• If Only We Knew Then What We Know Now About Windows XP
• Why Windows is a security nightmare

Consider more secure platforms, preferably ones that confirm with the POSIX/UNIX model that has matured over many decades. Keep the cr4ck3rZ working much hard(er).