Science and Industry

I worked during the summer with OtaSizzle, which has a main component (Aalto Social Interface) that allows everyone to build new services ontop of it. Even thought my work effort is not especially well visible, it feels goof — finally got something out in the wild.

Now the system is go in the sense that there has been a huge marketing push of the two lead services, Kassi and Ossi.¹ There are even actual users of in these services.

Well, this is a research thing after all. The guys in HIIT are intressed in the groups and related stuff. I might be doing some social network analysis based on that data… And let’s see what else we can pull out from this.

1. Kassi is a service that facilitates exchange of favors and items and Ossi is a mobile, context aware social service [↩]

I ended up discussing with Erika Reponen, researcher at Nokia Research Center Tampere, in Facebook around the topic of mandatory supervision fee, that the Finnish Board of Film Classification is charging from publicly available videos. Well, not from all — special cases such as research and education videos are excluded.

The story presented in Digitoday discusses this from the viewpoint of hobby filmmakers, which should according to strict interpretation pay the supervision fee, 800 euros per film in 2010. The more interesting thing is, what happens to videos I film and publish e.g. Youtube.

Youtube is a public media, meaning that publishing content there is bound with the legal framework we Finns have. My video could be something that is not excluded as a special case, meaning that I must — according to law — pay the feed. And 800 euros is a big sum for a random video in Youtube, at least for me.

Let’s jump to the next topic, from social to ubiquitous media, but let’s keep the same focus, namely videos, here. What does ubiquitous media mean in practice? Let’s start from the assumption, that cameras will be everywhere — most mobile terminals nowadays have them — and they may be connected to the Internet. Forget the Google Street view, that is tiny compared to this — we can change the world!

But, there are also some problems here. Some problems are created by social norms, things such as privacy. Google Street view caused a mess, and they do an extra effort to anonymize the pictures¹. I remember a few new year’s ago, I walked in the city of Helsinki and streamed video directly to Internet². What happens when pictures of use are pushed to the Web instantly, from the spot? Am I ready to show the whole world that I walked somewhere with someone — the recording is easy now and may become popular later.

These two cases presented above mean, that two key technological changes, the Internet and mobile technology, will change how we think of certain things³. At the same time there is both legal and social frames, that bound what is accepted, but these frames must adapt⁴ to the changes information- and communication technology have brought and will bring.

How do you feel about related topics, such as the copyright, privacy and publicity? Are those ready for 2010 and the networked society of tomorrows?

Notes: Author does not hold any degree in law and thus this discussion may not be legally solid.

1. Well, most of the issues are related to the fact that Google creates an easy to search index, not separate sources of data that need to me mashed up by the user [↩]
2. I did do an extra effort not to shoot faces to the film, as I didn’t feel that would be fair. [↩]
3. Obvious cat is obvious here. [↩]
4. Or do they? Can the frames behave in same way even when context has changed? I shall argue no, as we can see from the copyright laws, which seem to be more and more hilarious when I follow up news on those topics [↩]

I’ve been working on a Javascript exercise – well, developing JS library for other users – and finding out that I’m not so good at it. But the only way to become better is to make mistakes. There has been some discussion around mobile devices and Javascript cababilities, performance and other aspects like the famous UX — but the still the documentation could be in better shape.

What I felt nasty is lack of developer tools here. Of course I had both Firebug and Safari 4 developer tools available and they do a good job on desktop. And thus, the code worked fine on the desktop, then I tested it on N97 – still working. But on S60 3.1 – namely N95 and E90, it just crashed. If a read the document right, the Javascript core of these browsers is from early 2007, so in the age of Internet they are rather old.

Thus, I got a bit lost there and started the usual debugging strategies: removing and lines until it started to work. Firstly, I found out that the parser is rather strict on old Nokia devices – my objects had a last comma

o = {

a = ‘a’,

b = ‘b’,

}

which is invalid and thus makes the whole object invalid. So, no comma in the end. The problem for me was, that on desktop browsers it works even with that comma, which makes finding bugs a bit harder. A nice tool here is JSLint, which allows you to check the syntax validity of Javascript code. Otherwise, it’s like hide and seek.