kontroll – Page 2

several months later

it’s already 224 days since the incident when ABC removed its presidential poll from their website, when i guess they couldn’t believe that ron paul actually was the most popular candidate amongst their visitors. a few days ago, i read the first article in HBL where ron paul gets mentioned (other than the occasional he’s-irrelevant-comment). the article was bought, written by a swede, and the angle was how “social media” changes the election parameters in usa, just like helicopters and television once did. with helicopters the candidates could speak at several places a day. with television, appearance began to matter immensely, news travelled fast and broad, and another possibility to manipulate opinion was added, by those who were in control of television. technology changes democracy.

enter internet. i’m not giving a history lesson, i’m just saying. this time, i’m simply saying: digg. and, somewhat reluctantly, youtube. i like youtube from a pragmatic point of view, but would much prefer p2p-based solutions instead, to prevent censorship and accumulation of control.

but cut back to ron paul. i just realized that one of the reasons i resonate with him might be due to a common opinion about globalisation. more specifically, he wants to minimize the role of government and doesn’t see the need for a global government. i agree. and most of the time i don’t like my equivalent, the EU. neither do i support global order. ron paul says in an interview that some people believe in globalism, internationalism and the northern union – and concludes:

i mean i don’t even like the size of our federal government, let alone world government. i want government to be local.

[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8417135044213597647&q=ron+paul+glen+beck+duration%3Along&total=1&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0[/googlevideo]

another point being made was that “global warming” essentially is an effort by some to impose a global government. that’s actually a more provocative thought for me. but that would make bush and al gore brothers 🙂

i’ll think about social security and the scandinavian model (välfärdssamhället) another time. and if you’ll be watching the video clip (40+ min), you might as well start with the 2-3 last minutes where he gets to speak about whatever he wants.

nokia – new shit in same package.

so i was reading slashdot today, about nokia opposing the ogg format and deeming it “proprietary”. one of the comments nailed my feelings about nokia:

the Nokia of five years ago is probably not the Nokia of today. Where old Nokia was trying to deliver devices to let you do whatever you wanted to do, new Nokia is trying to become a media company and that means is almost certainly joining the dark side.

nokia certainly has changed during the years. i’ll illustrate my point by relating to some of the nokia phones i’ve owned.

nokia 6110: before the millennium, a good piece of mobile phone using the gsm network.

could do text messages and had an alarm. it felt like quite an investment at the time, but its quality was as good as anything. it was a nokia and i took pride in nokia being a finnish company.

nokia n-gage: it’s 2003, and oh my, did nokia fuck up with this device.

aimed at the young and hip, someone at nokia should’ve been fired for thinking that being dumbo is cool.

yet the n-gage had its merits, and in 2004 i bought one. why? beacuse, like the asus eee today, it was cheap and technically advanced. if you felt too cool to bother about looking like dumbo, you got yourself an n-gage at 100euros in 2004, and you could do: web surfing, instant messaging (messenger, icq), email, calendar, ftp, listen and record radio, mp3 player with mmc card and use it as a speaker as well. for a hundred euros. in 2004! in a sense, nokia had never been better. but that’s not because they tried to, but because they fucked up, and were desperate to enter the gaming market. (where they failed, miserably. and as a sign of future decay, nokia later released the n-gageQD – priced the same, better designed, but had poor mp3 support and no radio!!)

nokia n80 internet edition: it’s late 2006 and nokia brags about it’s n-series “computers“. feeling the need to get a faster device with wlan and more pixels, i wait for the n80ie, which promises so much, more than the already existing n80, which, it turns out, has the exact same hardware as the n80ie, and can be upgraded to n80ie later. for this fact alone, i wish nokia burns in hell. not only does the availability date for the “internet edition” constantly postpone, i become hugely disappointed at nokia when the n80ie finally arrives.

the n80ie, selling for 480 euros at the time, is indeed a potent phone. yet it disappoints in so irritating ways. here goes:

no ftp program available, because, nokia has designed the symbian os in a way that newer versions are incompatible with older ones, so the ftp program i had on my n-gage doesn’t work anymore on the newer n80ie.
they disabled the ability to record fm radio. wtf nokia!? that was a huge disappointment, and to me illustrates well the point how nokia has allied not with the device owner, and instead trying to gain more control over the device in order to be able to sell “content” as well. aka as zeroes and ones.
sound recording is limited to 1 minute. [sarcasm]yeah, thank you nokia for being so KIND as to let me record ONE minute! it’s very good to limit the length artificially! [/sarcasm]
built-in memory is way too modest. since nokias web browser can’t do stripped down surfing, it frequently crashes while surfing, most often because of memory shortage. oh, and did i mention symbian os i painstakingly slow? so good luck with restarting the application – or, more often than not, restarting the phone as well. however, it has to be noted that the opera mini delivers instead.
general instability. the n80ie just crashes. it just doesn’t work like it should. it’s software is poorly coded.
general impression of what nokia wants me to do with the phone: [sarcasm] use mms and use OUR excellent “download” service to eventually pay for software that we create. no, nokia, it’s 2007 (2006 when n80 arrived) and you still don’t get it: internet is open, the devices i OWN i want to – OWN – and i’m not a dumbass who’d want to pay money for some shitty “services”.

so in conclusion, nokia just didn’t pay attention to open source and linux but rather thought hey, sms was such a bloody good cash cow for the phone operators, let’s team up with them and make even more money!

and what can you say to that? nokia is a listed company, it tries to make money to its shareholders. yeah whatever, nokia, you still suck badly. kallasvuo suck harder. the “comes with music” that nokia is keen to promote, seems to me it is about to walk the same path as vista. the alternative? linux and the eee.

facebook, take n

facebook. it’s getting tedious in some respect, yet it fascinates me. reidar wasenius, known for inventing the visual radio – that sucks by the way – has had his profile on facebook shut down. he claims facebook gave him no reason. whatever the case, here’s an example of the enormous influence the owners of facebook has, and will get, should facebook become the de facto standard in communication over the internet. it’s similar to the position google holds, although there are actually decent alternatives.

at the moment though, there is little to prevent you from:

communicating through email, instant messaging
exchanging information through bittorrent
searching on the internet more or less anonymously, without your identity being connected to your searches
publishing content on a server, like this blog.

i’m guessing facebook aims to become the tool of doing much of this. if most people were on facebook, it would often be more convenient to use facebook’s built-in system of communicating and publishing content. with microsoft acquiring parts of facebook, they might also intend to compete with google by incorporating a search function into facebook.

as long as facebook isn’t all that important to you it doesn’t matter much whether or not facebook accepts you as a user. but if it becomes as necessary to have an identity on facebook as it is to have a mobile phone number and email adress?

the thing is, if facebook decides reidar wasenius – or any other facebook user – is a persona non grata, there is no way to get back into facebook. now how is that, you say, since it’s simple as hell to register as a user, with a fake name? the answer is as simple: the profile you had before will be matched with the one you create, so sooner rather than later, facebook’s algorithms will have discovered that it has to be you behind the new profile and boom, you’re banned again.