American actress Jenny McCarthy used to be a scandalous beauty in the Nineties, but lately she is more famous for her work against vaccines. Yes, against. She is the face of the anti-vaccine movement, which claims that vaccines cause autism. Today, I came across yet another case of internet lore on this topic, rather a vulgar one (but it got the point across): the Jenny McCarthy body count—how many lives have been lost due to the myth of vaccines causing autism? 1170, by today’s count, in the US alone. Why is this a Netopia topic, you ask? Because it reminds me of a brilliant story in Wired magazine a few years ago that took the anti-vaccine movement as a departure point to discuss how the internet makes us regard all facts as equal and that experts are often believed to have such vested interests that their knowledge becomes a reason for suspicion rather than trust. “Denialism” is the term coined by science writer Michael Spectre. Navigating a web with no publisher responsibility puts a lot of responsibility on the individual user in evaluating facts and statements. In the offline society, we used to rely on specialists to make those judgements; now we like to assume that everyone is perfectly equipped to do it themselves. I, for one, can testify that that’s not the case—how many times have I clicked dubious links or taken misinformation as fact just because I was not enlightened in that particular field? Countless. And I have a lot more coming. So do you.

Tokyo Digital Arts Museum Showed Ways Forward for Games, Maps and More

A few years ago, I had the chance to visit the NTT Intercommunication Centre in Tokyo. It’s a digital slash video art museum sponsored by Japan’s main telecom. In my mind, I have returned to that visit many times. In one room, there was an FM-radio dial where the visitor was the needle. By moving left and right, different radio stations would play on the speakers. By moving forward and back, the height of the visitor’s shadow controlled the volume of the audio. It was fascinating, but not as fascinating as the next room where a video game was the art piece. Echochrome by Sony for the Playstation Portable, which allows the player to make Escher-esque impossible figures as game maps. Games are popular among art museums, but this was an early example and the fact that it was presented as any work set it apart. In the next room again, was a thrilling map project – Authagraph, which uses triangles to solve the age old problem of projecting a globe (Earth) on a flat space (map). Three experiences that change my view of the world, all in the same afternoon. If you need an excuse to make a trip to Tokyo, let NTT-ICC be it!

Keeping secrets online is notoriously difficult. Data has a tendency to escape when we least want it. Many of us have been caught with a white lie, as social media posts reveal that we may not have been at home doing laundry when we didn’t want to join that meeting to plan for the boss’s birthday party, but played football instead. If you don’t have a story like that, it’s likely only a question of time. US government learned this the hard way when Wikileaks started leaking classified cables to the media. If not even the Pentagon can keep their digital secrets, then who can? In the wake of Prism, some are taking  extreme measures. Yes it sounds like something out of a cold war fiction by Frederick Forsyth, but the Kremlin has placed an order for type-writers to secure its most classified communications. It is a case of digital irony, that it sometimes brings back the old ways: look at how vinyl record sales have spiked in the wake of digital music services – or how artists are supposed to rely on concerts rather than record sales to make a living in the age of file-sharing. Digital does not replace analogue, sometimes it makes analogue more important.

The EU commission announced yesterday that they will investigate whether the internet providers collaboration is a case of an illegal trust. While it is too early to draw conclusions about the outcome, it is a welcome development that an arm of government looks into the field of online competition. The internet is a network of cables owned and operated by all kinds of different organisations. We tend to think about it as a commercial project, but in fact large proportions of the infrastructure are partly or wholly owned by the government, on the national and/or local levels. Other parts are owned by academic institutions, research institutes and universities. The basic research on the technology for the internet was made by the US military in the Sixties and Seventies, the first applications were by universities in the Seventies and Eighties, the world wide web was developed by Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN particle laboratory (which is funded by the EU member states). So the commercial internet service as we know it is actually a fairly recent development. The internet therefore belongs to everybody, not the telecom companies. That makes a democratic responsibility to regulate it, anti-trust is a good place to start.

The success of platforms like the Appstore and Google Play is beyond question. By giving developers access to a global market through a service that also provides payment options and device standards has helped many independent developers reach out on a scale that was previously impossible. It is fascinating  to observe the combined creative power of the developer community, there are almost a million apps on the Appstore for example – of course Apples in-house developers could never have produced such quantities. So no wonder the idea is catching on, a variety of different platforms now invite independent developers – from the long tail of mobile operating systems to completely different industries such as automobiles. The question remains, however, if there is an endless supply of free software development. From the developer’s perspective it makes sense to develop Appstore and Google Play-versions of your software, simply because these are the biggest platforms. For most cases, Windows 8/Windows Phone would be the third option. Then what? Blackberry? BMW automobiles? Various Linux platforms? The long tail quickly reaches a point when the return on investment is too small for most projects. So picking up on my previous post about niche monopolies, it may be that most app developers will focus on the main platforms, leaving many other companies eager to tap into the flow of open development disappointed. If this is the case, will there be consolidation of platforms? Third-party standards developed? A backlash for open software? Time will tell, watch this space.

Niche monopolies seems to be the nature of the internet, there is really only one search engine, one auction site, on ads listings site, one business networking service etc. It makes sense too, at least in some cases: if there is more than one used car sales website, it makes it more difficult for the buyer to get the full view of the market, at the same time it makes it easier for sellers if all potential buyers are in the same place. There are some obvious problems with this, putting all the eggs in one basket gives that platform a lot of power. Regardless of this, it seems that in many cases this is the direction where digital is going. It is driven by globalization and market needs, in some cases there are competing standards (mobile apps), but only a few dominant players in each niche. Google is not necessarily afraid that Bing will take away their business, but rather that users will interact with information in a different way – Apple and Facebook are much bigger competitors in this perspective. If this trend continues, is it the destiny of the internet to be a multitude of niche monopolies as the strong  chops off the virtual heads of the virtual opponents? Reminds me of the Eighties cult movie Highlander: There can be only one!

Tried it yet? The trend of logging and posting everything that can be logged and posted: meals eaten, runs taken, places visited, people met… It’s the combination and extension of social media, that’s developing from status updates (Facebook) via images (Instagram) to video (Vine). They all still require user action, however, but the next step is a fly on the wall type technology that passively records everything you do, without you having to actually do anything. One example is Memoto, a camera that clips onto your collar, takes two photos per minute, geotags them and uploads them to your web photostream, so that all your friends can see what you’re doing, whom you’ve met, where you’ve been and what you had for lunch (plus what the plate looked like halfway through the meal). Sure you can go to a private mode and limit sharing, but the default is to invite the world to hang around your neck. Think about this for a second, then think about what things will be like in five years when the Memoto 5.0 launches with live streaming video and 5.1 audio. Or in ten years, when technology is advanced enough that you can search in your video stream for objects. Forgot your keys? Just search your lifelog for where you last saw them. Or in case somebody moved them, search their lifelog for where they left them (and send them an instant message to leave your keys alone!). If this trend picks up, dimensions like time and space will be less meaningful. Walk into a room, search all available lifelogs for what happened in that room before you came. Or as you ride the bus, follow a friend’s video stream live from a football game, a nightclub or just observe what he or she is cooking for dinner. Sure, lifelogging may end up not being a great hit at all. History is full of technologies that never caught on. But it could also be the next smartphone. In that case, we should start to think seriously about what it means in terms of privacy – what we’ve seen so far in terms of monitoring, intrusions, and scandals is just a breeze compared to what ubiquitous lifelogging would bring.

As editor of Netopia, I am proud to introduce a new columnist: Rhoda Crocket. Many things in our world are not really what they appear to be and a big part of being an informed citizen is developing the ability to look beyond the surface. That is especially true of the internet, spam and phishing and fake aliases are all over. We may be able to see through e-mails promising lottery wins or millions of Euros in mineral bonds in a country we’ve never heard of before. We may even be able to double-check sender addresses, mouse-over links and use the safe mode on our web browsers from time to time. But real spammers don’t only con us users, but beat the system itself. By acting on random or opposite to normal users, they find the weak spots and find out how to take advantage of them. Spam is not only unwanted e-mail, today it is a wide variety of strategies to fool us ignorant web users – from search enginge optimization that tinkers with search results, to fake friends on Facebook and stolen user identities on web services. Sometimes illegal, often immoral, always ruthless but not rarely without a great sense of humour. Rhoda Crocket knows all the tricks and she will take Netopia’s readers on a wild magic carpet ride through the unknown dark underbelly of the internet as we know it through a series of columns. Enjoy!

The claim is often made that internet companies are just like the post office, so they should not be forced to check the content of the traffic. However, recent events have shown that they do, but so does the post. So turns out it was true, the post office reads your mail. Just like the telcos.

Clayton Christensen is the author of the celebrated book The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997), where he explains why companies fail rather than succeed—his theory is that the threats from competitors’ cheap, low-quality offerings are underestimated and companies react only when it is too late. Disruptive innovation is his term; think of how the iPad literally changed the game for children’s interactive entertainment and ate Nintendo’s lunch—to take a recent example.

Netopia likes to follow the blog Mr. Tea Cup, which recently applied Christensen’s theory to Silicon Valley start-ups, arguing that they overuse these thoughts and that just because a tech is disruptive does not necessarily mean it’s good or helpful. If you only read one more blog post today, read this!