My god, it's Full of Macs!

Gregory Donovan has posted a great critique of Rupert Murdoch’s World Media Summit speech.  Here’s Murdoch, as quoted in Donovan’s post, on “stealing” content:

“The Philistine phase of the digital age is almost over. The aggregators and the plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid-for content, it will be the content creators, the people in this hall, who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs will triumph.”

And part of Donovan’s critique:

“Like Gates’ before him, Murdoch willfully ignores the unwaged labor that he so handsomely profits from. Murdoch sees News Corp, AP, BBC, Xinhua, and the like, as the only rightful (and thus recognized) producers of content – just as Gates sees Microsoft’s hired programmers as the only rightful producers of his software. But what about the millions of MySpace users who freely produce untold volumes of content that News Corp then monetizes for a hefty profit?  What about all the blogs that News Corps’ journalists read and take information from without so much as a citation, never mind compensation. What about all the people that freely participate in beta-testing Microsoft’s software and the millions of software “users” who report problems and freely contribute their time and energy to improving Microsoft’s content? If it’s obvious that “there should be a price paid for quality content” — which I’m willing to support — then how much will News Corp be paying for all the free quality content it uses, and how will it compensate all the unwaged labor it uses?”

Continue reading…

Snow Leopard

We’ve begun upgrading the Macs at the Graduate Center to OS X 10.6.

Along with this upgrade, we’re implementing some other changes.  We are no longer asking users to authenticate with Active Directory credentials in order to use the Macs in public areas.  Users will not have to log in with their name and password in order to use all the applications on Macs in the Library, student computing areas and departmental lounges.

We’re implementing this change because our Mac users have had chronic problems saving files to their network drives and using applications that rely on saving to network drives.  My first concern is making certain that users can actually use the technology, without anything standing in the way, and this change is the best way to make that happen.

Password Liberation

There is an additional benefit that comes with this change.  All students, faculty and staff can now use our Macs without worrying about passwords.  And once the user is done and they log out, all trace of their presence and activity is deleted from that computer.  This is a dramatic increase in privacy for our users and frees them from having to worry about their password or account being up to date.  As it is, most students I talk to use a non-CUNY email account as their primary email, so they often have problems when they are asked to use the CUNY account because the password has expired.

But what about printing and other network services that require an account?  If the user wants to access any network services that require authenticating against Active Directory, they can do so à la carte  -  they choose to connect to the service (printing, network drives, etc.) and authenticate for each service.

This à la carte model flies in the face of current trends.  Everyone says they want ’single sign on’ – which means, you log in once and everything else uses that authentication to give you services.  But, I wonder, what if you want to use a computer without telling the computer who you are?  And why should you have to confirm your identity at the door of the building and then again when you sit down at a computer?  After all if security let them in the building they’re entitled to use other public services of the building.  Just as they have access to the public restrooms, shouldn’t they have access to the public computers?  Now they do.  And more relevant to most users, what if their password expired, they don’t have time to deal with the bureaucracy of having it reset, and they just need to look at an email quickly or email a document from a flash drive?  Now they can.  And there are other benefits to privacy:

As much as I despise G**gle and everything they are doing (from data mining, to privacy invasion, to bowing to China’s every demand) they make the best free email service available.  So I use Gmail.  I use it for everything.  Every CUNY email account is pulled into Gmail, all my personal domain names are pulled into Gmail.  Why?  Because you can search and it works.  I’ll say it again, the search actually works.

How do you know if your search works?  When you’re trying to find an old email and you just remember a word or two and the senders name, if you can’t type that into a search box and get your email in 2 minutes or less, your search doesn’t work.  If you use Outlook, or Outlook web access, you know what I’m talking about.  You can’t find anything, ever.

So, how do you get all of your email accounts collected together in your Gmail account?  Use G**gle’s instructions here. And now, Gmail is offering the ability to use your own SMTP servers to send email. What does this mean?  When you send, it won’t say “on behalf of” because it will actually be sending through your own email servers.  This makes Gmail more like a desktop email client, such as Apple Mail, Thunderbird, etc.

So far I haven’t been able to get my CUNY email addresses to work with this feature (not surprising, is it!) – but it’s still useful for your other domain accounts.

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