Technology

OpenID and You

/ Christopher Parsons

People are doing more and more online. They use Flickr to upload and share their pictures, they blog using Blogger and Livejournal, and chat using AOL systems. In addition to doing more online, the more they do, the more passwords they (tend) to have to know. They also have to create a discrete user profile for each new environment. With OpenID, those hassles could be over!

What is OpenID

OpenID is an open source community project that is intended to act as a centralised user-space. It is describes as:

a lightweight method of identifying individuals that uses the same technology framework that is used to identify web sites … It eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience. You get to choose the OpenID Provider that best meets your needs and most importantly that you trust. At the same time, your OpenID can stay with you, no matter which Provider you move to. And best of all, the OpenID technology is not proprietary and is completely free.(Source)

In essence, users will be able to carry their profiles and data with them, regardless of the service or content providers that they turn to. the major upshot, for consumers, is that it should mitigate some difficulties and hassles related to online lock-in. At the same time, it means that the different communities and spaces a person participates in will have access to that centralised knowledge basin, from which increasingly complex and rigorous digital portfolios can be developed.

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Shaping your Identity

/ Christopher Parsons

It’s been a while since I’ve been updating this blog regularly – since I last wrote, I’ve completed my Master’s thesis, traveled to Brasil, sent out applications to Doctoral programs, found (temporary) full-time employment, and rested my brain a bit. Now, I feel rejuvenated, and ready to get back into the swing of things.

Setting the Stage

We are increasingly living in a hybrid world, one where our lives are being digitized. We eat food (analogue) but order it online (digital); we use our voices to talk with one another (analogue) using cell phones (digital); we read cooking recipes (analogue) from recipe websites (digital). In addition to what we actually do, what happens around us, and shapes how we are capable of interacting, often occurs within digital spaces – banking institutions are networked, government documents are send across departments by email, and major corporate executives that make (oftentimes) global decisions seem to have Blackberries surgically attached to themselves.

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Shield the Sources, Shield the Telecoms

/ Christopher Parsons

The past couple of days have been interesting, to say the least, when looking at recent shifts and decisions in American legislatures. Specifically, the House is looking to shield bloggers from federal investigations by providing them with the same protections as reporters, and that after the telecommunication companies that ‘theoretically’ (read: actually) cooperated with NSA spying activities have refused to cooperate with Congressional investigations that they have been let off the hook. Let’s get into it.

Federal Journalists and Professional Bloggers Shielded

The US has had a long history of journalistic freedoms, but in the face of recent technological advances they have refused to extend those freedoms to users of new journalistic mediums. Bloggers, in particular, are becoming a more and more important source of information in the US – some dedicate their lives to blogging and use it for professional gain. Until recently they have (typically) been refused the same status as traditional journalists, which has made it risky for bloggers to refuse to disclose their sources if hauled into courts of law.

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The Birthing of a Conference

/ Christopher Parsons

As of this week I’m working with a series of incredibly smart, erudite individuals to set up and run a graduate student conference – I’m excited, but nervous! I want to quickly note what technology we hopefully will be using, and then note some of the immediate challenges standing before all of us, and invite any comments on how to overcome/run around them.

One Down?

First, I think that we may have found an online conferencing system that would really make life easy – the Public Knowledge Project provides a FOSS conference system that is really awesome. I’ve used their open Journal system when submitting a paper to a University of British Colombia undergraduate journal (Prolegomena) and it was a really slick system. I think that (for me at the time) the most awesome part of the system was that I could log in and see how far along the process my paper was. It kept me from harassing the journal editors, which I’m confident is a reasonably common problem with other methods of harvesting and selecting papers.

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Bombs, Bombs, and the Children

/ Christopher Parsons

In the past several months there have been more and more fractures in the carefully maintained facades of the RIAA and EU’s democratic openness. They have also been the formative months of Nicholas Negroponte’s dream of putting inexpensive notebooks in the hands of the most disenfranchiased youth in the world, a dream that will be realized in a few short weeks. I want to quickly elaborate on the first two ‘bombs’, and then quickly comment on Negroponte’s dream.

Reznor Serves His Walking Papers

Trent Reznor is a brilliant salesperson. Over the course of his last album he used some incredible guerrilla marketing to generate (more or less) free advertising for his album . . . only to have the RIAA threaten to sue his fans! Reznor has been incredibly critical of the record labels for some time, but now he’s free of them! On the Nine Inch Nails’ website he has written;

Hello everyone. I’ve waited a LONG time to be able to make the
following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally
free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have
been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the
business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very
different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a
direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate.
Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008.
Exciting times, indeed.

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Read History. Be Fearless.

/ Christopher Parsons

Academic environments are (theoretically) places where students come to be educated – they arrive on campuses after (typically) being cocooned for 16+ years – universities are where students emerge from their cocoons fundamentally transformed.

Plato and Shame

I’ve had the distinct privilege of working with students for more than two years now; the past year and a half as a teaching assistant and the time before that as a tutor. When you work with students, you realize that most of them have incredible potential, potential that you can see pent-up inside of them, but potential that they’re either unable to, or afraid to, release and realize. To address the latter concern in the first day of my tutorials this session I talked briefly about Plato and the straight-from-the-text reading of how absurd men appeared when laughing at the women who trained to become philosopher kings alongside men. The point was this: laughter in the classroom threatens to injure your comrades and, more importantly, marks that the person laughing can’t comprehend the purpose/form of laughter – their mirth demonstrates just how little they themselves understand.

I haven’t had a single person (that I’m aware of) be shamed by having other students laugh at them.

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