My god, it's Full of Macs!

Have a look at what Pogo does with ‘protected content.’ I don’t want a world where this kind of remixing and reinterpretation of material is illegal.

Expialidocious

Unfortunately, Apple’s “Parental Controls” are a mess.  They are turned on when you are managing users with MCX, and they interfere with web access.  Why, how?  When “Parental Controls” are on, even if no restrictions are set, your Mac is routing all web traffic through its own internal server.  This slows things down and even makes some sites unusable (Gmail, Pandora, etc).

To restore access to the real internet, you can make the proxy server unexecutable by running the following command in Terminal.  You may need to run it again after software updates but it works great and it’s worth it if you’ve run into this issue.  We applied it in the Mac Media lab after some users reported issues with accessing certain web sites.

sudo chmod a-x /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/FamilyControls.framework/Versions/A/Resources/httpsproxyd

EndNote X2 adds support for cite-while-you-write in Pages ‘09 (Apple’s word processing and layout application from the iWork suite).  I wouldn’t count on this working flawlessly – EndNote has a history of buggy relationships with new software, but it’s about time!

I’ve continued to use Word to write all of my longer academic papers because I depend on cite-while-you-write but I’m looking forward to being able to use Pages instead, nothing beats the ease of use, especially when incorporating images and dealing with complex layouts.

Users with a GC account can download EndNote X2 here.

Have a look at this brilliant film about collaboration, trust and safety in the online world.  They make the radical proposition that by trusting and being more open we actually build more trust and openness.

“With contributions from Clay Shirky, Alan Cox, Paul Miller, Don Tapscott and many others, Us Now explores the ways in which new technologies and a closely related culture of collaboration present radical new models of social organization.

The principles of trust, transparency, self-selection and open participation are coming closer and closer to the mainstream of our social and political lives. Us Now describes this transition, telling the stories of the online networks whose radical self-organizing structures may change the fabric of government forever.

The film is streaming online for free and the filmmakers intend to license all of the footage with a Creative Commons license.”

via RealitySandwich

The Xerox Phaser  8560DN has arrived and is now set-up in the Mac Media Lab.  The phaser is a solid-ink color laser printer, which means less packaging and very little waste.  We drop in solid cartridges (that come in very slim cardboard packaging) and when the ink is used up there is nothing to throw away.

It’s quite different from other color laser printers:

• Please don’t turn the printer off: The printer contains HOT liquid ink, every time it’s turned off the melted ink is cleared from the printer, this wastes ink.
• Please don’t move the printer when it is on: The HOT ink can spill inside the printer and that’s a mess.
• Please use a print preview to check your document before printing: There’s no need to print a document to see how it looks, that’s a waste of ink, paper and electricity.  Instead go to the print menu and click “Preview.”  This will give you a PDF of the document that is exactly what it will send to the printer.  Look at the PDF and imagine it’s a piece of paper in your hand – resize if you need to, zoom out to get the same perspective you would get by holding the paper further away.  Assess your brilliant layout skills, make corrections, preview again, and then print.

We’ve received some wireless keyboards for the Mac Media Lab and they have these very clever silicone overlays with all the quick-keys for Final Cut Pro.  They’re a great tool for the lab.  You can take a wireless keyboard to whichever Mac you want to use.  The overlay helps you learn Final Cut and makes working in it much faster for those who are familiar with the software.

But the keyboards are wireless and that means batteries.  As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one solution to this and that’s rechargeable batteries.

About the same time that I replaced every bulb in my house with compact fluorescents, I also replaced all the batteries with rechargeables.  That was 2 years ago and we haven’t bought a battery or a light bulb since.

Yes, technology can be great, but it can also be toxic and wasteful.  As technophiles, I suggest that we have a moral obligation to reduce the waste we produce and keep disposable products to an absolute minimum.  It also makes financial sense; do you want to buy 1 rechargeable battery or 1000 disposables?

I heartily recommend the eneloop brand I use at home.  They come pre-charged, they hold the charge much longer than other brands, they last ‘forever,’ and they look really cool.  Technophilia satisfied, environmental sustainability satisfied.

“Security” is a buzzword we hear every day in IT.  For some it has become the foundation of IT policy and a litmus test for every decision.  But it’s not a closed case.  What “security” actually means is still up for debate.  There are researchers doing incredible work on these questions of “security” uncovering the ways it’s used to disempower people, spy on them and prevent them from regaining power.  Big Brother in the Black Box and the boardroom.

”Electronic media…have become the privileged space of politics…without it there is no chance of winning or exercising power.” (Castells, M. The Power of Identity. 1997)

During my 15 years in academic technology I’ve frequently witnessed the idea of “security” used as justification for closing down previously open services and limiting user choice.  Not as a response to problems that have arisen, but as a “Best Practice.”  Whenever I encounter this, it always clashes with my experiences of technology opening up previously closed systems and empowering users to remake the world.  When I.T. uses “security” in this way they’re really saying:  ”There is some kind of threat, some potential danger, and we have to protect you from it even though nothing has happened so far – to do so, we’re going to to take away civil liberties and restrict your civil rights.”  Sounds eerily familiar doesn’t it.

The application of this notion of “security” does not make us more secure, it does not increase our security.  It limits our freedoms.  If an IT department considers “security” above all else, pay careful attention because they’re likely limiting your freedoms in significant ways.  By prohibiting certain protocols, software and behavior and not allowing you to choose what is installed or have control over your computer or software they’re policing your behavior, hoping to stop you from doing something either “illegal” or “harmful.”  But it seems pretty clear from both historical and modern attempts that policing and criminalization don’t achieve the desired result; the behavior inevitably continues in a different form and through different means.  The most troubling part about this implementation of “security” is that it’s not just happening in the corporate sphere, but in higher education, in research universities, in places where these kinds of restrictions not only limit users rights, but actually hinder the goals of the institution.

“A powerful counterhegemonic use of the Internet is the ability to communicate intersubjective knowledge – as much an attribute of hypertext as innate in the Internet. People from different places, with radically variant experiences, are able to convey a notion of what it is like to be them, to live their lives, via the Net. For example, the production side of the commodity chain no longer is shielded when one reads an essay, written by a shoe-factory worker, that describes conditions where Nike shoes are made. In an ideal situation these texts are written by the individuals who are involved, not by experts or elites, and are unfiltered.”   (Warf, B. and J. Grimes, Counterhegemonic Discourses and the Internet. Geographical Review, 1997.)

Why would higher education choose a model of “security” that threatens open inquiry?  Some of it is coming from corporations.  If you work for MegaCorporation X and your job is filling in a spreadsheet with numbers, they might squeeze more profit out of your labor (in the short term) by only giving you access to a spreadsheet application, restricting your access to anything else and spying on you while you work.  Of course, they’re missing out on innovations you could discover if you were free to use the full potential of your digital device on the open network – but they don’t want innovation, they want a factory worker who sits at a computer instead of an assembly line.  OK, so the corporations always do this – but they’re also informing much of what is done behind the scenes in the broader world of IT.  Higher education is always in danger of inheriting the corporate discourse from hardware and software vendors, through hiring policies and because of traditions of institutional organization that regard IT as a building service and not a department with a responsibility to education and research.  You can see how insidious this danger is if you listen carefully to the language used in academic IT departments.  They talk about “enterprise” services, “clients,” “customer satisfaction,” “customer service” and “training.”  Again, buzzwords that sound great to MBAs, but not policy, practice or discourse that encourage participation, learning and democracy in education.

If you haven’t worked in IT, you might even think that IT staff are well suited to making decisions about issues like “security.”  That’s not usually the case.  It’s not malicious, they’ve just learned to respond to technology in certain ways.  For example, they have a gut reaction that “peer-to-peer file sharing is bad” without considering that organizations like the Democratic Voice of Burma use P2P technology to collect digital reportage of human rights violations from citizen journalists.  And the IT staff have been constructed by a corporate IT discourse with little regard for pedagogy because corporate IT doesn’t care about pedagogy.  But IT policy doesn’t have to be a monolithic dogma accepted only because the people who repair hardware, write code and build networks “know more about technology” than the users.  To allow that is no different than trusting government officials who won’t show the evidence, but say “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

So, when someone in IT says “we can’t do that because it’s a security issue” I encourage users to borrow from a classic film and respond:

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means….”

With that in mind, here are some closing thoughts on specific Users Rights, a working draft on a Users Bill of Rights if you will.

Because digital device hardware, software and network systems exist only to meet the needs of the user AND because the user is not a powerless subject of arbitrary policy AND because liberty and the exercise of freedom are always under threat, users have the right, including but not limited to:

1. Free and open access to computers, software and network services
2. Freedom to choose Free Software over proprietary software
3. Equal Representation and participation in the creation of IT policies and procedures
4. Control of the software and operating systems installed on the devices they use
5. Freedom from all forms of surveillance
6. Equal access to administrative control for the devices they use
7. Equal access to all network services from the platform of their choice
8. Equal, unhindered access to an open and free network
9. Freedom from traffic-type discrimination
10. Freedom from platform-type discrimination
11. Total protection of  privacy in all matters regarding data they have engaged with
12. Total protection of privacy in all matters regarding their activity on the digital devices and the network

The HDTV in the lab now has an audio connection to the MacBook Pro on the podium.  You can use the TV for presenting slides, showing film clips or sharing other media work in the lab.

Soon, we should have one of the Mac Pros connected to the TV as soon as the HDMI cable arrives.

GIMPshop was on all our Macs before an issue with OS X 10.5 came up and it was removed.  Today, prompted by a request in the comments on my earlier post about free software on the Macs in the lab, I’ve added GIMP to all the Mac Pros in the lab.

If there is anything else you would like to see in the Lab, please post a comment.  The way I see it, there’s no point in providing technology unless it’s in response to users needs.  I would much rather offer technology based on requests than construct ideal systems that no one will use.  So, thanks for the request Marcos!

When you download an application and run it on Mac OS X 10.5, you’ll get a pop-up window letting you know that you’re about to run something that was downloaded.  It says:

“Name” is an application whichwas downloaded from the Internet.  Are you sure you want to open it? It might kill you.

Well, I added the last line, but that’s basically what it says.  This is a great feature for protecting users from content they might not understand or trojans that were downloaded without the users knowledge, but it’s a huge annoyance if you understand what you’ve downloaded and you just want to run it without having to agree to run it after you’ve already made it clear that you want to run it by asking Mr. Computer to open it for you. (Computer says “Nooooo…”)

You can remove the tag that causes this pop-up from a single application or a whole folder of applications using the following command:

find folderpath -print0 | xargs -0 xattr -d com.apple.quarantine

(where “folderpath” is the folder you want to remove the tags from, for example /Applications)

The easiest way to run this is to open Terminal, type:

find

and then drag the folder or application you want to change into the Terminal window, the path will automatically be typed out for you with the right format (which can be tricky if there are spaces involved) then you can paste the rest of the command

-print0 | xargs -0 xattr -d com.apple.quarantine

and press return.

This hint comes from the work of joelparker and billspat on macosxhints.com.