[This was written last night, while on a bus between Cloughjordan and Dublin, during which time I saw no news from the London riots. Oddly, between the time of writing and now, the first bit of the final “prophecy” came true: people started to clean up the mess.] The UK government was very quick to adopt a stance of dismissal with regard to the London riots. The word “opportunistic” was used by everybody vaguely related to the government within a short time period, suggesting that it was coordinated as an effort to cast doubt on the action.

My talk at GoOpen 2011, on the FSCONS track. Finally got it edited and uploaded. This is really a work in progress in many ways, but we’ve got alarming amounts of documentation written up on the subject; however, this is just the analytical model for a bigger project. More fun soon.

Í nýlegum skrifum lagði ég fram nokkrar tölur sem fengu lýsingar á borð við “sláandi”, og margir báðu um ögn dýpri rýni í afleiðingarnar. Þessi pistill er hvorki stuttur né geri ég ráð fyrir því að það sé auðvelt að melta hann – það var svo sannarlega ekki auðvelt að skrifa hann. Vandamálið við söguna sem við erum að upplifa er að það er afskaplega gagnslaust að tala um einstaka þætti sögunnar nema að búið sé að koma öllum saman um ákveðin grunnatriði samhengisins.

Báðum megin Atlantshafs eru fjármálaógöngur að aukast. Bandaríska ríkið er eitt fárra í heiminum sem hefur þak á heildarríkisskuldum, en þakið er sem stendur um 14.4 þúsundir milljarða dollara (um 1.6 milljón milljarðar króna). Því þaki hefur verið náð, og fer bandaríska ríkið í greiðsluþrot ef ekki verður náð samningum um hækkun þaksins á næstu dögum, þar sem ekki verður hægt að standa í skilum við tugmilljarða vaxtagreiðslur. Samkvæmt könnun Russia Today búast um 17% áhorfanda við því að samningar náist ekki og að ríkið fari í þrot með alvarlegum áhrifum á hagkerfi heimsins, meðan önnur 8% eiga von á því að greiðsluþrot eigi sér stað án alvarlegra áhrifa á umheiminn.

I absolutely forgot to mention it previously because I’ve spent way too much time bouncing around Europe recently to get anything sensible onto paper (or Internets). Anyway, a paper I wrote with my friend and colleague Primavera de Filippi, “Cloud Computing: Legal Issues in Centralized Architectures”, was published in the proceedings of IDP2011 (Internet, Law and Politics conference), which I attended on our behalf in Barcelona a couple of weeks ago.

I’ve put together some worksheets that are intended as a kind of infrastructure and authority analysis kit for fledging Collapsonomicists. It’s still a very beta thing, but feel free to download and play around. The source files are SVG’s and can be accessed on GitHub. They use the Museo-slab 500 font, but probably shouldn’t. Feel free to fiddle with it and by all means push back. The “slides” from my talk from ISDT, “Infrastructure, Authority, and the Industrialization of the Internet”, is available here inSVG format (warning: 26 MB!

During a session at IDP 2011 (conference on Internet, Law and Politics) in Barcelona I started thinking about the issue of opt-outs / opt-ins for tracking cookies. If we were to imagine a situation where most people reject tracking cookies – which would be nice – then those who are interested in tracking users would have to resort to other methods. I just came up with one. I haven’t seen this before but it’s fairly obvious, I’m sure that there are dozens of variations on this theme or even much better approaches.

Q: How much of the sterility of modern airport terminals and air travel in general can be attributed to the hypochondriac aviator Howard Hughes? A: None. Howard Hughes may have had a less than healthy approach to the issue of hygiene, but the sterility of airports is not a germ-theoretical one. Any time spent sitting on the floor is sure to convince the intrepid traveler of this. Rather it is a cultural sterility born in part from an urge to project a 1950′s feel of jetsetter’s class and distinction, and partly as a failed attempt to normalize the experience of airports across the world, cussioning travelers from culture shock while not discriminating.

The News of the World scandal is over, kind of. The newspaper will be shut down and lawsuits are under way. While there’s a lot of discussion in favor of this and I’m definitely not disagreeing with that, I can’t help but feel that this entire scandal is proof of a double standard. In basics, reporters at the News of the World decided to actively engage in small scale surveillance of public figures using techniques that most anybody with technical understanding of how cellphone systems work would dismiss as too cumbersome given the much easier methods available?

Wednesday was marked with rumors flying around about the imminent eruption of Iceland’s volcano Hekla, which news reports dubbed as “one of Iceland’s most feared volcanoes”. The mountain has entirely failed to grip me with fear despite it erupting roughly every decade since the 1940′s, so naturally I felt somewhat puzzled by this news report and wanted to know where it came from, how the rumor floated around, and how it hit the world media without the famous stratovolcano giving any occasion to.