Mohamed Nanabhay's Blog

I hadn't really thought about how many devices I had connected to the Internet until I was staring at some network entries while doing some troubleshooting:

• Windows Desktop Computer
• MacBook Pro
• Dreambox Satellite Receiver and PVR. Basically a Linux box I have hooked up to a couple of satellites (ArabSat, NileSat and Hotbird) - all sorts of potential here that mh would love...
• Nintendo Wii
• Nokia N95
• Apple iPhone (next week....)

So, I've got nearly every consumer OS running on my home network. Now all that's left is for me to get a fridge that connects to the Internet to order my milk...

Ethan Zuckerman has just posted a powerful and compelling essay on his reasons for (co-)founding Global Vocies. It is more a social history of the Internet than an "about us" post. In it he suggests that the utopian ideals and values that were held last century (okay, last century sounds dramatic but remember this is internet time!) has failed to scale as the internet became more broadly available. This is because this utopian vision didn't factor in the rich and complex nature of the history, culture, langauge, religion and experience that is deeply ingrained in societies across the globe.

I remember reading Barlow and Stallman during the late nineties and the cultural underpinnings resonated deeply within me. I remember when I co-founded #islam on ZAnet IRC server in 1997 I used to constatly get messaged with "a/s/l" which was the classic opening line which asked what is your "age, sex and location"? I used to constantly respond saying "This is the internet - those things are irrelevant here. Here you are judged only by your ideas..."

Ten years on it is clear that just being connected to a global network doesn't make a/s/l (well, at least the "l") less significant. Facebook, MySpace and the profileration of local social sites has proven that people want to connect at a very local level. What the global network does offer is the ability to amplifiy local voices and serve to make the world a smaller place.

Ethan elequoently sums up his essay saying

The dreams articulated by pioneers like Barlow, Rheingold and others are a proud legacy of the Internet. But we need to ask whether they saw the Internet bringing people together into a single, unitary net culture, or whether they saw that the Internet could be a space that allowed people from all different cultures to meet on common ground. The former is a fun club to belong to, where we can trade All Your Base jokes and cat macros. But the latter is powerful, political, and potentially transformative. It’s something worth fighting for.

I reckon that the real reason behind Google's Gmail is not to make some money by serving some focused ads. I think they have a greater plan...I think they are trying to map out a universal social network. Think about it...they started offering a gigabyte of storage enticed thousands of people away from other mail services. The fact that you get to "invite" 7 friends every now and then (and then they get to invite some more friends, etc). Imagine Google now has this huge database mapping out who my friends are and who their friends are...they probably have this huge screen in the Googleplex with a world map showing all the links...

Link: Welcome to Gmail.

I read this when I was in high school and thought it was amazing...

Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...

Damn kids. They're all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?

I am a hacker, enter my world...

Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...

Damn underachiever. They're all alike.

I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers
explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand
it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it inmy head..."

Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this
is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because
I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened
by me... Or thinks I'm a smart ass... Or doesn't
like teaching and shouldn't be here...

Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.

And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through
the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic
pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-dayincompetencies is sought... a board is found.

"This is it... this is where I belong..."

I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...

Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...

You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food
at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did
let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by
sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to
teach found us willing pupils, but those feware like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch,
the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing
without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by
profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We
explore... and
you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us
criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without
religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs,
you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us
believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look
like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something thatyou will never forgive me for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.

I usually warn about ideas getting "bigerised" at the organisations I'm involved in. It's a sure way to derail a great idea. Of course, the concept is not my own - so I present another cool story from from Michael Hiltzik’s “Dealers of Lightening – Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age", where I first read about "biggerism" a few years ago:

The Berkley Computer Corporation (BCC) pioneers were about to become victims of the “second-system effect”. The theory of the second systems was formulated by an IBM executive named Frederick Brooks, whose career supervising large-scale software teams taught him that designers of computer systems tend to build into their second projects all the pet features that tight finances or short deadlines forced them to leave out of their first. The result is an overgrown, inefficient monstrosity that rarely works as expected. As he put it in his pithy masterpiece, The Mythical Man-Month: “The second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs.” The BCC machine could have sprung full-blown from the pages of Brook’s text. As Lampson recalled, the designers of the economical and practical SDS 940 regarded their next machine as an opportunity to “look at all the things you could make much more wonderful, and plan to make them all more wonderful by creating a system that could handle a lot more users and much larger programs and was much faster and used computing resources much more efficiently and was better and more wonderful in every possible way. “It was not a very realistic enterprise,” he acknowledged. “But at the time is seemed great, the proper next step, as second systems often do.”… Some of the workers, including Thacker, could tell early on that the project was getting out of hand. The engineer’s engineer possessed the unique trait of aiming for less, not more, in his systems. “This was so unusual for an engineer,” recalled Charles Simonyi, a young immigrant from communist Hungary who assisted Thacker, watching as he chain-smoked through the night designing the machine’s logic, “He had this word for what was happening. He called it ‘biggerism’. I heard this word from him and my English was not that good and I always thought it sounded slightly obscene, because he’d say, you know, ‘This project has been biggered.’”

This lesson goes beyond systems - it applies to any activity which requires a bit of planning.