- Dropbox Ran Afoul of Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines: So What?
Last week, a number of developers reported that Apple was rejecting iOS applications that used Dropbox, a popular cloud file storage and backup system. An initial thread on the Dropbox developers’ forum has led to a outpouring of tech news full of hyperbolic claims. However, none of this reporting has covered the real problem – Apple is now more concerned about protecting its business model than serving its users or its developers. Read more »
- Help pioneer Casebook: The Next Generation
We at the H2O project are seeking a full-time Project Manager. H2O is an online platform for textbook development and distribution, currently in a pilot stage. H2O is based on the open source model – instead of locking down materials in formalized textbooks, we believe that course books can be free (as in free speech) for everyone to access and, equally important, build upon.
Using H2O, professors can freely pull together materials for a course by selecting cases, editing those cases to the sections that are most relevant, and grouping them into readings. Once the materials are assembled, they can be copied in part or in whole by other interested faculty and then edited further. H2O has been successfully piloted in JZ’s 1L Torts class, and will be rolling out further over the coming year.
H2O’s project manager will play a leading role in shepherding H2O into its next phase, which will focus on developing new materials and incorporating additional features, in order to expand the platform beyond its law school roots.
H2O is a joint project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Harvard Law School library. The Project Manager will be housed at the HLS Library and work in close collaboration with lead members of the Library Innovation Lab team; he/she will also work closely with the Berkman Center and current H2O teams. More info and job posting here.
- Meme patrol: “When something online is free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”
I participated in the Berkman Center’s fascinating HyperPublic symposium in the summer of 2011. When moderating a panel I invoked the aphorism that “When something online is free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.” It’s a way of encapsulating the idea that online free services usually make money by extracting lots of data from users — and then selling that data, or using it for targeted availability of those users for advertising, to advertisers. In that sense, the advertisers are the clients, and the users enjoying free content are what’s being sold. (Of course, sometimes that happens even when the user pays.)
I didn’t coin the phrase, and since it was featured (and attributed to me!) in wordsmith.org’s wildly popular “word a day” as a thought for the day accompanying the word “enceinte” — I sought to nail down its provenance.
The first use of the quote that we can find is as a comment within the famed MetaFilter community in August 2010. The user’s name is blue_beetle, who might be someone named Andrew Lewis. It’s entirely possible I saw it there, as MeFi is one of my five favorite sites on the Web.
Similar sentiments (whether drawn from that source or independently invented) have been expressed by Bruce Schneier in October 2010 and by Douglas Rushkoff in September ’11.
The phrase “you’re the product” also apparently appeared in a 1986 speech by President Reagan about the drug war.
Just say know.
–KA and JZ
- OS X Mountain Lion and Gatekeeper
This week, Apple announced that it was moving to a new, faster OS X operating system development cycle, starting with the release of Mountain Lion next summer. It previewed a number of features for the OS, and released some parts in beta.
Mountain Lion is slated to include a feature called Gatekeeper as part of the security and privacy settings. Gatekeeper allows administrators (those with full privileges on a Mac) to limit the applications that can run on the Mac. They can choose among allowing apps downloaded from the Mac App Store only, or apps from outside the Store so long as they are digitally signed to Apple’s satisfaction by their developers, or apps from anywhere. (The latter has been the way both Mac and Windows PCs have worked, for better or worse, since the introduction of the Apple II in 1977.) Read more »
- GPS-based Insurance Rates: The Devil is in the (Data) Details
A British insurance company called Motaquote has teamed up with TomTom, the GPS manufacturer to offer insurance prices based on data gathered by GPS. Fair Pay Insurance, Motaquote’s new program, is an opt-in insurance pricing scheme where drivers will get a free GPS unit in return for potentially lower (but possibly higher) premiums. The GPS unit will provide all the traditional navigational services as well as warn drivers when they corner too sharply or brake too hard. Read more »
January 16th, 2010 at 7:46 pm (#)
[...] anyone answer a quick cosmology question? http://futureoftheinternet.org/a-quick-cosmology-question zittrain – Sun 17 Jan 0:23 0 votes previous [...]
January 16th, 2010 at 7:50 pm (#)
I am not even an amateur cosmologist so take with a grain of salt:
we could have been moving in opposite directions at first, and then it came toward us.
what if we all started out close together. We went east 7bn light years. It went west 7bn light years, then for whatever boomerang reason it started moving back at us.
That’s not it exactly, but it seems we (a) could have been close together but moved in different directions and (b) we wouldn’t have visibility on whether it was a straight line of 13bn light years away, or had taken an out and back or ricocheting path. It only looks straight from an “earth, a view of space” perspective.
January 16th, 2010 at 7:59 pm (#)
that galaxy wasnt “13.2 billion light years away 13.2 billion years ago”, that point in time is 13.2 billion years & light-years away from here/now. ((( assuming our universal constants are indeed universal. )))
January 16th, 2010 at 8:14 pm (#)
My understanding is that the photos are a snapshot of history. It was 13.2 bil LY away at some point in time, but not any more. We can’t calculate at what point in time it was 13.2 bil LY away unless we know the speed of the expansion of the universe and assume that the expansion is linear, which most likely is not.
January 16th, 2010 at 8:32 pm (#)
Yes, inflation is the answer. Inflation is essentially a period of exceedingly fast growth that happened very shortly after the universe started (10^-36 s afterwards). The universe wasn’t even transparent to light (photons) until 377,000 years after the Big Bang. The light that comes to us from the earliest part of when the universe was transparent is not of galaxies; the universe was too hot and such for these to form. That earliest light is actually the glow of the early, newly transparent and hot universe, called the cosmic background. The light from that hot time has been stretched during travel to us and is now no longer heat (infrared) but microwave. The light from these very old galaxies Hubble sees did start from galaxies that were 13.2 billion light years away then. Due to the expansion of space, “now” these galaxies are much farther away (47 billion light years or so) and probably look very very different.
January 16th, 2010 at 8:36 pm (#)
[...] answer ! (before my head explodes) http://futureoftheinternet.org/a-quick-cosmology-question (via @zittrain) markoff – Sun 17 Jan 1:20 0 votes previous [...]
January 16th, 2010 at 8:52 pm (#)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space will probably do a better job than me in helping you out here. But I’ll try anyway.
The 13.2 billion light-year number is an oversimplification. During the period light traveled from there to here, the space between expanded. When you’re dealing with expanding space, the word “distance” has to be (re-)defined before you can even have this discussion. (See “comoving distance” in the Wikipedia article.) You touch on a slightly-less-simplified version when you say that _by definition_ if it took 13.2 billion years for the light to get here, it’s 13.2 billion light-years away.
BTW, the universe _is_ expanding faster than the speed of light, if you measure by the change in distance between two sufficiently-distant objects. The objects’ velocities as measured in space aren’t faster than light, but space itself is expanding between them. This means there are parts of the universe we will never see, because space is expanding too fast for their light ever to get here. The boundary is called the “observable horizon”.
January 16th, 2010 at 9:43 pm (#)
Joe provides a nice explanation which can be summarized as the big bang is accompanied by truly incredible inflation. Also take with a grain of salt the statement that light took 13.2 billion years to get here. Along the path of a photon from emission there to absorption here the elapsed time is zero seconds because the interval is a light-like interval (rather than space-like or time-like). A non-zero mass spacecraft that left at the same instant as a photon that managed somehow to accelerate constantly at 1 g (10 m/s^2) for half the journey and decelerate at the same rate for the other half would measure elapsed time at well less than a normal human life span.
Of course we have no such design that could sustain constant acceleration and if we did the blue shift of cosmic background radiation would be a daunting issue. But the main point is that elapsed time depends on the details of your path and it is zero for photons. That is related to why we know neutrinos have non-zero mass: they could not oscillate among three states otherwise which is observed when measuring solar neutrinos. Sorry for the detour but spacetime is much more interesting than it is usually portrayed.
January 16th, 2010 at 11:42 pm (#)
Given all the conditions and unknowns that come packaged with any explanation, I’m inclined to think that we’re just missing some key insight that change the way we look at all the data and will seem obvious 500 years from now.
Think of the poor pre-Copernicans and their idea that the universe moved around the Earth’s fixed position. How do we know that our assumptions, metaphors, and models aren’t just as flawed?
As a very casual observer, to me it looks like we might be at an analogous stage: instead of having a theory that helps us make sense of new information, new information seems to make our theory make less sense… (This is just the impression I get as an outsider.)
This line from the NASA article (via @laurenweinstein and @markoff) is telling:
So — I’m just waiting for the proverbial apple to fall on someone’s head.
January 17th, 2010 at 5:38 am (#)
Two things..
Dark Matter and Dark Energy..
You should read..
TROTTA, ROBERTO (2007) Dark Matter: Facing the Arche-Fossil. Collapse Vol. II: Speculative Realism. March 2007
But this is also interesting:
http://astro.ic.ac.uk/rtrotta/public-lectures-courses-and-exhibits
January 17th, 2010 at 8:59 pm (#)
I wonder how quantum physics’ questions would rewrite ‘linearity of time’ assumptions. Might there have been (quantum) ‘rewrites’ in time and space (e.g. colliding universes) that render such Hubble data subject to significant, further interpretation?
January 18th, 2010 at 4:40 pm (#)
I’ll refer you to a great blog, Starts With a Bang, which covers cosmology and has answered this exact same question:
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2008/02/q-a-the-age-and-size-of-the-universe.php