Il commento della FSF sul nuovo iPhone 5S

Il FSF executive director John Sullivan ha espresso il suo commento riguardo il nuovo modello di iPhone (n.d.r. in maniera specifica il 5S)

Mobile phones are the most widely-used and deeply intimate personal-computing devices. [...] it is essential that the software they run be fully under the control of their users. Instead, Apple has given us new hardware with the same old restrictions, allowing only Apple-approved software, putting users -- along with their data, their privacy, and their freedom of expression -- at the mercy of programs whose operations are secret and demonstrably untrustworthy. We can't imagine a more hostile reaction to the wave of privacy concerns sweeping the world right now than debuting a proprietary, network-accessible fingerprint scanner as your new 'feature'.
Because so many people carry computers in their pocket which can track and transmit where they have been, who they have communicated with, what they are interested in, and what sights and sounds are around them at any given moment, any liveable future absolutely depends on free 'as in freedom' software. Free software empowers users to replace any software hostile to their interests. The first step is rejecting Apple's restrictions.

In pratica riconferma l'intrinseca insicurezza che ogni software proprietario si porta dietro.

Dopo lo scandalo Snowden ci si sarebbe aspettata una maggiore garanzia di trasparenza e riservatezza dei dati personali, specialmente da parte di Apple: questo non è avvenuto. E questo non è cospirazionalismo o puro e semplice talebanismo (tipico) della FSF: si parla del diritto fondamentale del consumatore di poter fare ciò che meglio si vuole col proprio device e di averne il pieno controllo.

Lo stesso Phil Zimmerman, l'inventore del programma di crittografia PGP, ha espresso la sua preoccupazione

To put it bluntly: sure, if it wants to, the NSA can probably read your email.  But that isn’t mathematical cryptography’s fault — any more than it would be mathematical crypto’s fault if goons broke into your house and carted away your laptop.  On the contrary, properly implemented, backdoor-less strong crypto is something that apparently scares the NSA enough that they go to some lengths to keep it from being widely used.

Alternative libere? Ci sono, in primis Replicant, basato sul codice aperto di Android, fra i browser Firefox, e  F-Droid, come market, è una buona alternativa. Perché non Android direttamente? Perché neanche di Google ci si dovrebbe tanto fidare..

[fonte]

Any source

Nextome - Indoor Navigation System

Quest'oggi vi voglio parlare di un interessante progetto made in Italy che cerca fondi per iniziare. Sto parlando di Nextome, un sistema di posizionamento per interni nato dalla mente di alcuni ragazzi italiani. Il sistema consente all'utente di localizzare la propria posizione all'interno di spazi chiusi (con una precisione di 50 centimetri) direttamente sul proprio smartphone. Un esempio applicativo può essere quello dell'uso in un museo. L'utente tramite il proprio smartphone potrà localizzare la propria posizione ed essere guidato verso l'opera preferita. Oltre a guidare l'utente il sistema consente di visualizzare informazioni aggiuntive atte a migliorare la propria esperienza.

Una video presentazione di Nextome è stata presentata sul sito Finanziami il tuo futuro dove è anche possibile effettuare una piccola donazione per aiutare questi ragazzi a realizzare il loro progetto.

La prima versione di Nextome è disponibile per iPhone ma è previsto il porting per Android e Windows Phone.

Nextome Indoor Positioning System

Nextome nasce dall’idea di realizzare il più innovativo sistema di indoor positioning. Attraverso una sofisticata tecnologia di localizzazione, operativa in ambienti interni, l’utente potrà finalmente localizzarsi e ottenere informazioni relative alla propria posizione.

Possiamo paragonare Nextome al navigatore GPS che abbiamo nella nostra auto, con la differenza che Nextome funziona negli spazi chiusi. La prima release di Nextome sarà ottimizzata per i Musei. Immaginatene l’utilizzo in un museo come il Louvre o i Musei Vaticani.

Basta soltanto uno smartphone per ricercare tutte le informazioni desiderate inerenti al luogo e con una precisione nell’ordine di 50 centimetri, l’utente potrà visualizzare sul proprio smartphone la propria posizione in tempo reale e scoprire il percorso più rapido per raggiungere l’opera preferita.

Inoltre l’utente potrà visualizzare la pubblicità (del luogo), visualizzare il percorso per arrivare al punto ricercato, fruire le  informazioni (ad esempio descrizioni) del punto d’interesse, acquistare souvenir ed in fine scambiare dati.

Per consultare comodamente i contenuti è sufficiente trovarsi in prossimità del punto d’interesse. Le informazioni saranno fruite senza  importunare l’utente con messaggi indesiderati o pubblicità invadenti ma nella maniera più semplice ed intuitiva possibile.

Con Nextome, arricchiremo l’esperienza di guida dell’utente  fornendogli contenuti multimediali come video e audioguide nelle principali lingue, oltre che contenuti sociali come le opere più apprezzate o più visitate.

Inoltre abbiamo introdotto la Discovery Mode, con questa modalità l’utente potrà visualizzare in modo automatico tutte le informazioni dell’opera che ha davanti ai propri occhi.

Per i Musei che mapperanno la propria struttura con Nextome, ci saranno possibilità di monetizzazione vendendo souvenir e contenuti tematici direttamente dall’App ma soprattutto potranno accedere a preziosissime statistiche sui flussi pedonali all’interno della propria struttura.

Il servizio consente, inoltre, di raccogliere dati statistici sull’utilizzo del sistema, il tipo e la quantità delle informazioni fruite, il sesso e età (ove possibile) degli utenti della propria struttura.

Gli acquirenti del servizio possono accedere a questi dati e avvalersene per pianificare interventi di marketing e campagne pubblicitarie destinate a particolari target di clientela.

Queste informazioni sono vitali per il posizionamento di contenuti strategici all’interno del Museo o semplicemente per migliorarne la viabilità.

L’installazione di Nextome è totalmente wireless e non invasiva, inoltre la nostra applicazione è compatibile con il proprio iPhone e sarà presto disponibile su Android e Windows Phone.
Nextome è realizzato tramite l’utilizzo di tecnologie green: garantisce un basso dispendio energetico e limita l’inquinamento elettromagnetico.

www.nextome.org
info@nextome.org

Any source

OSM - Riassunto Settimanale #68

22 Aprile 2013 - 6 Maggio 2013

Un riassunto di tutto ciò che sta accadendo nel mondo OpenStreetMap.

• Il nuovo editor OSM, chiamato iD, ha raggiunto la versione 1.0 ed è adesso online sul sito principale. In più questo ha una nuova feature: Aggiungi una nota!
• E' aperta la Call for Papers per il prossimo State of the Map (SotM) in Inghilterra. La registrazione è anch'essa aperta e il prezzo per i membri della comunità è 60 sterline – Early Bird.
• Il prossimo OSM Hack Weekend a Karlsruhe (Germany) sarà l'1 ed il 2 Giugno.
• L'Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT) sta cercando un senior field coordinator per il Bangladesh (Sri Lanka). Mikel chiede aiuto per scrivere un protocollo di attivazione per HOT.
• Un articolo sul blog USA di OSM parla del “crescente uso di OSM nel governo americano“.
• Amir e “Come dire: No… Non è un bug!” in OSM.
• Pascal ha creato un sito con alcune statistiche e classifiche dei contributori relativamente alla nuova feature “Aggiungi una Nota”.
• Humberto Yances ha scritto riguardo “La Boquilla Project“: “includendo l'uso di mappe OSM per la conservazione delle mangrovie, inclusione sociale e forza della comunità”.
• Martijn van Exel ha scritto un post sul Chicago Hack Weekend.
• Un post di Eric Fischer su “Visualizzare il progresso di OpenStreetMap intorno al mondo“.
• Marco Antonio ha mostrato alcune anteprime di OSM 3D su smartphone.
• “Mappare la storia della toponomastica di San Francisco“, una grande visualizzazione di Noah Veltman.
• Un utile script che può essere utilizzato in JOSM permette di scaricare errori trovati in OSM che devono essere corretti. Puoi trovare maggiori informazioni sul wiki di OSM. [made in Italy by Groppo, ndr]
• L'editor open source POI+ ha bisogno di altre traduzioni. Puoi aiutare qui.
• Il sito “Hexbin Edits on OpenStreetMap” di Tom è disponibile su github.
• E' stato aggiornato il sito degli estratti Planet.osm forniti da bbbike.org. Puoi esportare dati OSM in vari formati (e.g. Garmin OSM o shapefile ESRI) per l'area che ti interessa. Hanno pubblicato anche una app per bicicletta gratuita per iPhone.
• Una nuova versione di RTKLIB, un pacchetto software open source che permette il posizionamento accurato (tramite Gnss), è stata rilasciata il 29 Aprile. Puoi trovare maggiori informazioni sulla wiki di OSM.

Traduzione dal blog di OSM.

Any source

Richard Stallman explains iBads and Cell Phones

Any source

Structures to Build

Being a scientist means asking good questions. A good question is one that you don't know the answer to, but the answer has consequences. In designing experiments, a good scientist can't worry so much about the consequences of the answer, because the truth is more important.

Being an entrepreneur also means dealing with questions you don't know the answer to. But the consequences matter much more than the answer. The entrepreneur does experiments too, but the object is to obtain a good outcome, not to learn the truth.

Experimentation has never been more important for the word of books and the stories they tell. We don't know how books will be distributed ten years from now. We don't even know if public libraries will exist. We hardly know how verbal stories will be told in 10 years. The answers to these questions are of great import to our societies and to the generations that will come. Since I think of myself as both a scientist and an entrepreneur, I have a lot of questions to answer.

The Uni Project- Home Stretch

While I'm busy with the experiment in the business of books that is Gluejar, I can't help but be fascinated other sorts of experiments that are in progress, and which are worthy of public support. While I'm sure that interesting experiments are being conducted in academic and government institutions and that many of these are being supported by foundations and research agencies, the most audacious experiments I know of are being conducted by passionate individuals and being funded by in non-traditional venues such as Kickstarter.

One of these is the Uni Project. Last year, I wrote about the Chinatown Storefront Library. Never intended to be more than a temporary installation, it has left a legacy of understanding of the ways a space designed for reading and books can interact with and enrich a community. The team behind that project, Sam and Leslie Davol, wondered whether structures could designed specifically to be temporary, itinerant libraries- quick to deploy, easy to operate, and dramatic to see. Working with Professor J. Meejin Yoon of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, they came up with a concept for a modular system of stackable cubes, each of which could contain a micro-collection of library materials.

I don't know whether this idea will work. But I do know how to help them find out: support them on Kickstarter. The project is currently 90% funded; they have 6 more days to raise another $1900. Update 8/11: The Uni achieved its goal with 3 days to spare!



I learned about another compelling experiment last week. This one aims to have people all around the New York City area contribute to a location based story, using an augmented-reality view of the twin towers as a unifying theme. Founded by Brian August, a New York technology executive who describes himself as "obsessed with the twin towers" 110 Stories will be an iPhone app that aims to both inspire and document the stories of the millions of us who saw the twin towers of the World Trade Center almost every day until they were destroyed on 9/11 almost ten years ago. Although the augmented reality feature gets the buzz, I think the story-telling aspects will be a lot more interesting in the long term. Imagine a location-aware ebook using the technology that Liza Daly demonstrated last year.

110 Stories

As of tonight, 110 stories has blown through its goal of $25,000 with the help of 423 backers, and the fundraising campaign has 4 days to go.

As we build Gluejar's ungluing books website, we're trying to work out whether the "only six days left" aspect of Kickstarter projects is a necessary ingredient for a crowd-funding site. Since we'll be working to "unglue" books that have already been written and published, they won't disappear if a fundraising goal isn't reached by a given cutoff date. A rights holder that's willing to release a creative commons edition of a book for $10,000 on July 31 will probably still be willing to do so on August 15, so there's not the same time-pressure in an ungluing campaigns.

Questions to answer. Towers to build.
Article any source

Wave is Better on the iPhone

The more I play with Google Wave, the less I like the user interface. In contrast, the more I learn about the Wave technology stack, the less I care about the user interface, because it's clear to me that the important innovations are underneath the skin. That became very clear to me when I got on the train on Friday morning and decided to see whether Wave worked on the iPhone. I've decided that wave is better on the iPhone than it is in a full screen browser.

On a full screen browser, Wave takes up 3 columns. When you get to try Wave, the first thing you should do is get rid of the leftmost column. This gives the rest of Wave a bit of room to breathe. On the iPhone, by contrast, you get only one column of content per screen. The result is much, much easier to digest. You don't have waves yipping at you while you read another wave.

The iPhone version on Wave is implemented as a web app running inside Safari. Inexplicably, when you log in, there's a message that says that the iPhone browser is not fully supported. This is inexplicable for 2 reasons.

1. The iPhone implementation is quite a bit more mature than the Firefox 3.5 implementation I run on my laptop.
2. The main bug in the iPhone implementation is that the screen telling you the iphone browser is not fully supported breaks links into Wave.

I would expect to see a iPhone native Wave app very soon.

I think most people running Wave will eventually choose to run Wave in native applications that talk the Wave protocol, just as most people (i.e. me) use native email clients to do their email. I just hope that Google's choice to launch Wave inside browsers is not just a plan to establish Chrome as a new web operating system. Twitter owes its success in no small part to the ecosystem of client applications that have sprung up around it. Although I use the Nambu client myself; I'm sure that many satisfied Tweetdeck users would be unhappy if the only way they could use Twitter was through Nambu.

I've read the assertion that Google Wave is the Segway of email, but I think that's wrong. The better analogy is the videophone. Although it's often thought that AT&T's videophone failed because there was no one to call, that's only half of the story. The reason that there was no one to call was that the videophone didn't fit into any social practice- no one really want to have people popping up on little screens in their living rooms.

I'm betting that Wave will turn out to be more popular than the Picturephone, but the real turning point will be third-party clients.

This article is also posted inside Wave.
Article any source

Siri and the Big Head Cases

A year and a half ago, I had some business in London. I had recently acquired an iPhone, and I was enjoyed showing it to people because it was not yet available in England. On my day off, I got a map from the hotel and set out to wander the city. What I discovered was that when I needed do some navigation I reflexively pulled out the iPhone to look at the Google maps app, despite the fact that the paper map was in my other pocket, it was faster and more convenient to use the paper map, and for the roaming data charges I was running up on the iPhone, I could easily have bought a whole guidebook. Once I had a "workflow" that had been previously rewarding, I would repeatedly reuse that workflow, even when it was inappropriate.

The most exciting thing at the Semantic Technology Conference this week was, for me, the keynote address by Tom Gruber, Founder and CTO of Siri. He demonstrated the "Virtual Personal Assistant" that they have been working on. It will be released as a free service complete with iPhone app this summer, and I can't wait to try it out. (To get your name on the beta list, go to http://www.siri.com/registration). Gruber articulated a theme that was repeated several times during the conference, that the web world has resulted in a fragmented user experience. Those Apple commercials that pound home the message "There's an app for that" now have taken on a new meaning for me. It seems that while I can go to my iPhone for just about anything I want to do when I'm mobile, the proliferation of apps has made may user experience much more complex- I have to chose the app I want to use for a particular task, and I sometimes need to orchestrate several apps to accomplish a task. Siri's virtual personal assistant is designed to be the one button I use to accomplish a variety of tasks, and I'm guessing that I will be reflexively using Siri even when I shouldn't.

The other interesting perspective I got from Gruber's talk was the concept he awkwardly called "The Big Head Cases". Siri has tried to focus on the few things that users do most often- get directions, find a restaurant, communicate with friends, and handle these things really well using speech recognition, natural language processing, contextual awareness, service orchestration, etc. This is the opposite of the stereotypical internet focus on the "long tail". "What's the opposite of the long tail?" Gruber asked himself. "I guess it's the 'big head'." In other contexts, you might call this the 10/90 rule. Siri will be addressing the "long tail" tasks by opening up an API that will let 3rd parties expose their services through the virtual digital assistant. The library world should sit up and take note- there will need to be a good way for libraries and other information services to offer their location-specific services in this way.

Article any source