Autonomía digital y tecnológica

Código e ideas para una internet distribuida

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Hello and welcome! We (Matt Stempeck, Micah Sifry of Civic Hall, and Erin Simpson, previously of Civic Hall Labs and now at the Oxford Internet Institute) put this sheet together to try to organize the civic tech field by compiling hundreds of civic technologies and grouping them to see what patterns emerge. We started doing this because we think that a widely-used definition and field guide would help us: share knowledge with one another, attract more participation in the field, study and measure impact, and move resources in productive directions. Many of these tools and social processes are overlapping: our categories are not mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive.

la Comisión Europea propone entre otras cosas hacer que los agregadores de noticias, plataformas de contenidos y redes sociales paguen a las empresas editoras de las noticias por usar, total o parcialmente, contenidos que no son suyos.

Si esta regulación produce una cierta sensación de deja vu, es porque en España ya la tenemos, se llama canon AEDE -Tasa Google para los amigos- y es parte del artículo 32.2 de la nueva Ley de Propiedad Intelectual. La importantísima diferencia es que el modelo propuesto por la Comisión no es obligatorio. Las empresas de noticias tendrían derecho a reclamar ese dinero pero también pueden renunciar a hacerlo. Y tampoco hay un cobrador intermediario que se beneficia del proceso sin haber producido contenido alguno.

En España, el cobro de estos derechos «conexos» es irrenunciable, pero no los cobra el periódico, la productora o la revista que los ha generado sino CEDRO, con carácter retroactivo desde enero de 2015. Las empresas de noticias que no son socias de CEDRO no reciben un céntimo de la recaudación generada de su propiedad intelectual y las que son socias, todavía no saben cuándo ni cuánto cobrarán.

Even if Amazon optimized solely for consolidation and fuel efficiency, consumers are shopping so often that it makes sustainable, efficient delivery difficult.

Free and fast shipping has always been a Prime membership’s marquee perk — one that’s drawn in over 100 million subscribers who pay $119 annually. A 2017 study by UPS found that nearly all (96%) US customers had made a purchase on a marketplace like Amazon or Walmart, and over half (55%) said free or discounted shipping was the primary reason.

That convenience is encouraging people in the US to buy more, and to make more individual purchases rather than placing a single order for several items.

people aren’t offsetting the traffic to shopping malls and grocery stores by buying online. “The problem is we are still doing both, meaning there are more emissions and more congestion,”

Amazon is only speeding up customers’ options. In addition to free two-day shipping for Prime members, Amazon added free two-hour delivery with a new service, called Prime Now, in 2014, and it increasingly relies on hundreds of thousands of independent contractors with passenger cars to make those deliveries. Amazon’s Flex program, which operates in 50 US cities, is an app-based platform like Uber, but instead of dropping off people, Flex drivers drop off Prime packages or groceries.

Those drivers’ cars are typically smaller than commercial delivery vehicles, so they can’t fit as many packages or complete as many deliveries per tour. They’re taking longer routes, too. “Drivers are going from their home base to a warehouse to your house, and back to their home base. And warehouses are farther than the store you would have gone to,” Goodchild said.

Our engineers disassembled and analyzed each device, awarding a repairability score between zero and ten. Ten is the easiest to repair.

A device with a perfect score will be relatively inexpensive to repair because it is easy to disassemble and has a service manual available. Points are docked based on the difficulty of opening the device, the types of fasteners found inside, and the complexity involved in replacing major components. Points are awarded for upgradability, use of non-proprietary tools for servicing, and component modularity.

it’s hard to buy ethically because there are so many issues to take into account when buying any product

[Smartphones have] so many components from different countries, which all have their own challenges regarding fairness.

Devices vary, but your average smartphone may use more than 60 different metals. Many of them are rare earth metals, so-called because they’re available in smaller quantities than many other metals, if not genuinely rare.

Often, these substances are found in conflict zones, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Labor issues are often at the heart of the most controversial stories concerning the technology industry. In January, Bloomberg exposed working conditions at the Catcher Technology Company factory in China, which makes iPhone casings. It revealed that some workers had to stand for 10 hours a day in a noxious, potentially toxic, environment without proper safety equipment.

If you’re on the hunt for a smartphone that isn’t produced with the sort of intensive labor that most of us would wince at, chances are you’re not going to be satisfied. Even smaller companies, like Fairphone, with its public commitment to offering a better deal, struggle with the systemic problems of the industry. Its handset is manufactured in Shenzhen, but as Huhne explains, «if you want to change the industry, you have to go where it is.» He says suppliers are often surprised when Fairphone reps ask how they could improve working conditions in partnership.

Smartphones, and consumer technology more generally, don’t just have the potential to harm the people building them. There is also the enormous environmental damage caused in the handsets’ production, through resource extraction, intensive manufacturing and transport.

The organization found there’s plenty of environmental blood that can be laid at the door of the smartphone. In the last decade, production of the devices has consumed nearly 968TWh, enough to power India for a year. In 2017, smartphones, and related products, made 50 metric tons of e-waste — discarded smart devices and their accessories — and it’s only going to get worse.

there’s iFixit, which publishes a chart of smartphones ranked by their repairability. Unsurprisingly, Fairphone 2 tops the list, and sadly the rest of the top five is filled out with older devices, like Motorola’s Droid Bionic and Atrix 4G (both 2011). The current run of flagship devices from from Google (6/10), Apple (6/10) and Samsung (4/10) demonstrate somewhat less commitment to repairability.

EPEAT, a green electronics standard based on the IEEE 1680 framework, helped supercharge environmental standards back in 2006. EPEAT grades consumer electronic products against 1680, awarding a bronze, silver and gold ranking. The regime includes mandates on recycled plastic, manufacturer recycling programs and a reduction on the use of hazardous materials. The latter category has helped drive down the use of poisonous substances like lead, cadmium and mercury in countless consumer devices.

But Schaffer’s report is critical of EPEAT’s leadership role, citing the moment when Apple released the 2012 MacBook Pro with Retina Display as its death-knell. The laptop shipped with a variety of non-upgradeable parts, a glued-in battery and a proprietary non-user-replaceable SSD. Despite this, the device was awarded gold certification, and in Schaffer’s eyes «effectively gutted the modularity criteria in the standard.»

the issue, right now, is with standards development itself. It can take the better part of a decade to produce a new standard, and it’s a laborious process of negotiation between the industry, its regulators and relevant stakeholders. «Because these standards-development processes are taking four, five, six years,» she explains that some smaller stakeholders «don’t have the financial wherewithal to continue.» Specifically, smaller IT companies, security experts and environmental advisors who lack the time and resources to remain involved. Gillis believes that this results in the standards’ development becoming unbalanced in favor of larger manufacturers.

It seems that big manufacturers have carte blanche to define their devices as environmentally friendly.

El principio básico de la economía colaborativa es que el recurso que se consuma sea un bien temporalmente en desuso. Lo que se observa (Gil, 2018) en la mayoría de las plataformas es que los recursos que se introducen en el mercado no cumplen la función de ser bienes ociosos tratándose más de bienes de inversión que se han adquirido con el fin de que el bien produzca valor.

el tipo de actividades a las que se hace referencia con el concepto de economía colaborativa poco tienen que ver con relaciones de colaboración.

Uno de los filósofos contrarios a este tipo de prácticas es Byung-Chul Han (2014) que afirma que la economía del compartir conduce en última instancia a la comercialización total de la vida. Y subraya la importancia del dinero: “quien no posee dinero, tampoco tiene acceso al sharing”. Para este pensador surcoreano, “también en la economía basada en la colaboración predomina la lógica del capitalismo. De forma paradójica, en este bello compartir nadie da nada voluntariamente”.

¿Cuántos de ustedes poseen una taladradora? Rachel Botsman, la autora del libro The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, preguntó a la audiencia en TedxSydney en 2010. Previsiblemente casi todos levantaron la mano. “Ese taladro eléctrico se usará entre 12 y 15 minutos en toda su vida”, continuó Botsman con burlona exasperación. “Es un poco ridículo, ¿no?” Porque lo que necesitas es el agujero, no la taladradora.

Confidential Mode will push users further into Google’s own walled garden while giving them what we believe are misleading assurances of privacy and security.

It’s important to note at the outset that because Confidential Mode emails are not end-to-end encrypted, Google can see the contents of your messages and has the technical capability to store them indefinitely, regardless of any “expiration date” you set. In other words, Confidential Mode provides zero confidentiality with regard to Google.

But that’s only the beginning of the problems with Gmail’s new built-in IRM. Indeed, the security properties of the system depend not on the tech, but instead on a Clinton-era copyright statute. Under Section 1201 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA 1201”), making a commercial product that bypasses IRM is a potential felony, carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense. DMCA 1201 is so broad and sloppily drafted that just revealing defects in Google IRM could land you in court.

We believe that using the term “Confidential Mode” for a feature that doesn’t provide confidentiality as that term is understood in infosec is misleading.

But while followers may hate it, going private is a new way for professional and semi-professional Instagrammers to stay afloat in a crowded market on an increasingly volatile platform.

“People go private because they get more followers when a follower sends a post to their friends and that person has to follow the account in order to see. It’s that simple,” says Jack Wagner, a Los Angeles–based director who has run several meme accounts. “It’s just a weird technique somebody noticed one day and now lots of people do it.”

So instead of considering the practical ethics of impoverishing and exploiting the many in the name of the few, most academics, journalists, and science-fiction writers instead considered much more abstract and fanciful conundrums: Is it fair for a stock trader to use smart drugs? Should children get implants for foreign languages? Do we want autonomous vehicles to prioritize the lives of pedestrians over those of its passengers? Should the first Mars colonies be run as democracies? Does changing my DNA undermine my identity? Should robots have rights?

Asking these sorts of questions, while philosophically entertaining, is a poor substitute for wrestling with the real moral quandaries associated with unbridled technological development in the name of corporate capitalism. Digital platforms have turned an already exploitative and extractive marketplace (think Walmart) into an even more dehumanizing successor (think Amazon). Most of us became aware of these downsides in the form of automated jobs, the gig economy, and the demise of local retail.

But the more devastating impacts of pedal-to-the-metal digital capitalism fall on the environment and global poor. The manufacture of some of our computers and smartphones still uses networks of slave labor. These practices are so deeply entrenched that a company called Fairphone, founded from the ground up to make and market ethical phones, learned it was impossible. (The company’s founder now sadly refers to their products as “fairer” phones.)

Meanwhile, the mining of rare earth metals and disposal of our highly digital technologies destroys human habitats, replacing them with toxic waste dumps, which are then picked over by peasant children and their families, who sell usable materials back to the manufacturers.

Tal y como aparece en la orden ministerial, las plataformas de alquiler vacacional deberán identificar al titular de la vivienda (y, en su caso, del que tiene el derecho a cederla) y a las personas a las que se les alquila. También deberán dar la dirección completa y la referencia catastral del inmueble. El número de días de disfrute de la vivienda con fines turísticos, las fechas y el importe percibido por el titular deberán asimismo constar.

De manera opcional, pero para evitar eventuales peticiones de información adicional de la Agencia Tributaria, Airbnb, Homeaway y similares podrán dar también otros datos como la identificación del medio de pago utilizado (transferencia, tarjeta de crédito o débito u otro medio de pago).

Para Javier Gil, del Sindicato de Inquilinas, «es increíble que a estas alturas no haya un mayor control y que se pueda estar operando con múltiples pisos en plataformas como Airbnb y no se declaren las ganancias». En todo caso, a su juicio «este tipo de medidas no solucionan los principales problemas que los pisos turísticos están generando, relacionados con la subida de los alquileres y la turistificación de la ciudad».

Hace tres años que la Agencia Tributaria lleva a cabo una campaña específica sobre alquiler turístico, cuyas ganancias se deben incorporar en la declaración de la renta. En 2017 se enviaron 136.000 avisos a contribuyentes de la obligación de declarar esta actividad. Desde que comenzaron estas campañas, los rendimientos de capital inmobiliario declarados en la renta han crecido un 40%.

Todos sabemos lo difícil que es experimentar en un entorno tan intolerante al error como es la política y la gestión pública, donde los partidos y el poder mediático están siempre a la caza del fallo. En un escenario tan hostil, la Administración tiene que hilar fino para dar cierta seguridad como entidad garantista, y eso le obliga a habilitar dispositivos que “aíslen” la experimentación a un entorno controlado que ayude a gestionar mejor el riesgo.

Europa comenzó un gran declive social en los primeros años ochenta. Mientras en España la juventud, muy al loro, se dedicó a ejercer la dictadura de la fiesta (para mayor felicidad de una élite acojonada por las luchas sociales y la militancia roja en los barrios obreros), en el Reino Unido, la demolición del Estado del bienestar fue liderada por una ‘dama’ capaz de reprimir incluso las ansias evasivas de una juventud sin futuro, que en vez de bailamer pogo y escupir a los cantantes punk, se dedicó a buscar nuevas sensaciones bajo dosis depastillas y acid house. Unos nuevos contestatarios con píldora en la lengua acababan de surgir, al principio en discotecas, después, en las ilegales raves.

Un cliente de mensajería que no depende de servidores centralizados, usa la red Tor para ofrecer comunicaciones cifradas de extremo a extremo y es de código abierto.

A diferencia de las aplicaciones de mensajería tradicionales, Briar no depende de un servidor central – los mensajes se sincronizan directamente entre los dispositivos de los usuarios. Los mensajes se envían a través de la red Tor, protegiendo a los usuarios y en caso de que Internet no funcione, puede sincronizarse vía Bluetooth o Wi-Fi.

Su sistema para añadir contactos tampoco es convencional ya que, se genera un código que la persona a añadir debe escanear con su dispositivo móvil. De esta forma se busca que haya un encuentro físico entre el usuario y el futuro contacto. La lista de contacto se cifra y se almacena localmente en cada dispositivo.

Hirikilabs pretende ser un espacio en el que reflexionar sobre por qué, cómo y para qué utilizamos la tecnología y experimentar en torno a ello, un espacio donde la tecnología no es un objetivo sino un camino, donde pasa de ser el centro del proceso a ser parte (importante) del proceso.

…tiene el objetivo de analizar la tecnología desde varias perspectivas y trabajar de manera crítica las relaciones que se crean a partir de ella, haciendo uso de diversos proyectos, grupos de trabajo y procesos, y garantizando distintas maneras de acercamiento. Y es que creemos que en ese sentido promovemos una reflexión crítica hacia la tecnología entre la ciudadanía. Así, entendemos que la mirada crítica y el dominio de las herramientas y de las dinámicas de difusión son el camino hacia el empoderamiento.

Entendemos la soberanía como un proceso de apropiación y comprensión de las tecnologías por parte de los ciudadanos que contribuye a una sociedad más y mejor informada y con cierta capacidad de autoprotección ante los retos derivados de una cada vez mayor convivencia con la tecnología. La irrupción en la vida diaria de la inteligencia artificial, la automatización, la privacidad en la red o el control son solo algunas de las cuestiones ante las que antes o después la sociedad tendrá que tomar partido. La apertura del conocimiento y el uso de software y hardware libres, contribuyen a comprender las implicaciones y saber que al menos existen alternativas.

El verdadero problema es que las infraestructuras de la nueva tecnología digital están en manos de monopolios de facto privados. Nos hemos dado cuenta de que, además, estás empresas han estado realizando una promoción fraudulenta de sí mismas, que no se corresponde con su real actividad. Se definen como compañías tecnológicas pero en realidad son empresas publicitarias: por eso tenemos un sistema de comunicación coptado por la publicidad y, por tanto, por los fines mercantiles y de consumo.

El Estado conoce a sus ciudadanos menos y peor que los conocen estas empresas privadas. El estado ha perdido capacidad de iniciativa, ha perdido capacidad de reacción. Es momento de lo público y de instituciones como la UE en cuanto a crear un marco jurídico que garantice derechos individuales y colectivos, en cuanto a infraestructuras, en cuanto a apoyo de empresas estatales de carácter nacional, que deberían ser calificadas como estratégicamente sensibles. Todos los circuitos de comunicación no pueden estar sometidos a un embudo discrecional de una potencia extranjera.

Clearly a project the size of WordPress needs some strong leadership and a clear roadmap. However, when that roadmap starts to be clouded by outside factors such as financial pressure to compete with the market, decisions aren’t made in the best interest of everyone. Don’t forget that whatever is implemented in WordPress.org is being built for WordPress.com (one of the main money-making arms of Automattic) and no doubt their biggest concern when considering losing customers to competitors. Gutenberg is a clear attempt to attract new users to the platform.

The major part of backwards compatibility is not breaking things, or doing everything possible to avoid it. Gutenberg simply will break sites. This won’t be white screening, or breaking appearance on the frontend, but as soon as a site is updated to 5.0, a user will have a broken experience the next time they edit a post, if the site relies on custom meta boxes.

The percentage number of sites on the web that are powered by WordPress is often touted and this number will be made up of a variety of different types of sites and site owners. A large number will be developers, freelancers and agencies who have built sites in the past, manage sites currently, and build every new site with WordPress. From experience, these developers typically don’t use page builder plugins but a combination of custom fields and meta boxes to give clients the ability to add all the data needed to be displayed on the site in a controlled and prescribed style.

These people will need to prepare for 5.0 (more on that later) to make sure their clients aren’t affected by Gutenberg.

Out of all the modern frontend frameworks, React was always the first choice for Gutenberg, even after some token debate, and weathering the storm of patent clauses. But adding a shiny new framework to a critical piece of WordPress core is highly problematic and we’ve seen it before. WordPress 3.5 was released with a new media manager, built with Backbone and landed without documentation, no clear extensibility model, and a steep learning curve for core contributors and developers with media-related plugins.

Gutenberg has the potential to go the same way, but undoubtedly it will reduce the amount of people able to contribute to it, without learning React deeply. It also places a burden on plugin developers (in a short timescale) to learn, adapt, and get their plugins ready.

Of course this is possible for the big guys like WooCommerce (Automattic owned, large team) and Advanced Custom Fields (independant small team, huge user base), but this will affect any plugin which registers a custom post type, or meta boxes. Most developers simply won’t have the time, inclination or skills to make them compatible with Gutenberg. We will likely see a lot of plugins broken which just won’t get fixed. That will have a detrimental effect on user experience and the WordPress ecosystem in general.

Core should leave Gutenberg as a feature plugin for longer. The timeline is just too short for people to prepare. It is too great a change to be rushed. I think the decision to be merged should be rethought and only merged when a certain level of plugin adoption by users is reached.

Your big questions about the future answered. How science will influence and change our lives. Britt Wray and Ellie Cosgrave present a fortnightly investigation of a hot science topic in about 30 minutes. The Tomorrow’s World podcast will begin a second run of episodes in early 2018.

Data on waste generation typically separate producer wastes, such as those from mining, and consumer wastes such as those from households. But there are problems with such division.

It makes the mistake of thinking producer waste and consumer waste are two separate things instead of flip sides of the same coin in industrial systems. It also makes the mistake of presuming consumers have much in the way of meaningful choice in what their electronics are made of.

Electronics contain a wide variety of materials. One important example is copper. The electronics industry is the second-largest consumer of copper. Only the building and construction sector uses more.

Post-consumer recycling of electronics will never be enough, we need to be able to repair — and upgrade — the devices we already have, if we are to slow our production of e-waste.

In the U.S., the Repair Association is doing the hard work of advocating for consumers to have the right to repair the devices they purchase by enshrining those rights into law. That said, an e-waste recycler in California now faces a 15-month prison sentence and a US$50,000 fine in his efforts to extend the lives of computers.

The automobile, food and pharmaceutical industries have to show their products meet certain safety standards before they are put on the market. Why not demand the same of the electronics industry?

Daniel G. Andújar acude al arte griego para recordar que los nazis se lo apropiaron (al igual que los mitos primitivos, como el fuego y la noche). Elige obras clásicas, fotografía Neptunos, Victorias, discóbolos desde distintos puntos de vista, y con un software los reproduce en plástico usando una impresora 3D. Todo esto va ligado a su sentido del trabajo más humilde, el que realiza lo que se llamaba, hasta hace poco, el pueblo. En Atenas, confrontó un taller popular de las fallas con un prestigioso taller del Pireo de réplicas artísticas, que suministra a todos los museos del mundo con el aval de originalidad del Gobierno. Y en Kassel, ante el pasmo del alcalde, la noche de san Juan sacó de la galería una de sus propias piezas en cajas como las que se utilizaron para evacuar los museos del Prado y del Louvre durante las guerras, y le pidió a los falleros que la quemaran en el jardín mientras tres músicos valencianos interpretaban A las barricadas con dulzaina y tambor.

Easy: you need to set a CNAME record in your xxxx.com domain, pointing to your dynamic DNS domain at xxxx.strangled.net

DNS resolver will follow the CNAME transparently. User will not notice any difference. It might add a hundred milliseconds or so to the whole query, but that shouldn’t be a problem. When you type htpc.xxxx.com in your browser, it will still stay htpc.xxxx.com. You will not even realize that the strangled.net address is involved in all this.

…el modelo productivo actual es insostenible. Nueve de cada diez productos consumidos en Occidente llegan por barco, utilizando energías no renovables, contaminando los mares y causando un deterioro significante en la flora y fauna. Tras disfrutar de ellos, los desechamos localmente. ¿Es este el único modelo posible?

Las herramientas digitales de producción, así como el acceso a información sobre cómo se hacen las cosas, son accesibles a cada vez a más gente. Es de esperar que, con el tiempo, las personas empiecen a diseñar sus propios productos y los creen localmente en sus fábricas de barrio…

La fabricación digital busca cambiar el paradigma de producción actual competitivo y extractivo por uno colaborativo y local. En el caso de los Fab Labs, esto es posible gracias a la creación de repositorios online de datos para la fabricación que se convierten en un inventario común de diseños y que pueden ser utilizados por los diferentes Fab Labs del mundo.

A diferencia del software, donde abundan las licencias creative commons, en el hardware (es decir, en los objetos físicos) las licencias que estimulan la contribución de los diseños no son habituales. Cuando alguien sube el diseño de un objeto, por ejemplo una silla, es difícil controlar que no sea una copia o que vulnere el reconocimiento de la autoría original. La tecnología blockchain podría usarse para definir cómo puede ser utilizado un diseño, bajo qué condiciones y qué tipo de licencias de contribución se pueden crear.

It’s easier for a successful volunteer Free Software project to get money than it is to decide how to spend it. While paying developers is easy, it can carry unintended negative consequences. This essay explores problems and benefits of paying developers in volunteer free and open source projects and surveys strategies that projects have used to successfully finance development while maintaining their volunteer nature.

Y ahora que el bar ha cambiado de dueño, ¿a qué bar nos vamos? ¿Seguimos en este por cómo nos sirven las chelas o por su decoración minimalista y cuidada, o mejor nos vamos a otro más de pueblo, cercano, con el camarero de siempre, con la cocina de toda la vida, con su tradición? Nunca fue nuestro pero nos sentíamos parte de él. En esa reflexión nos encontramos algunos (muchos) y en esta semana no son pocas las veces que he(mos) mantenido dichas conversaciones.

The software giant said Monday morning that it would acquire LinkedIn in a $26.2 billion cash deal. The acquisition, by far the largest in Microsoft’s history, unites two companies in different businesses: one a big maker of software tools, the other the largest business-oriented social networking site, with more than 400 million members globally.

LinkedIn could help Microsoft accelerate its shift to the internet by giving it a large online property that has became the de facto standard for posting résumés online. The site is heavily used by recruiters for finding new workers. Microsoft is one of LinkedIn’s biggest customers.

“The mission statements of LinkedIn and Microsoft have different words, but are essentially the same,” Mr. Weiner said. “We’ve come at it from different perspectives. LinkedIn built a professional network. Microsoft built a professional cloud.”

Add this to your theme’s functions.php:

function alx_embed_html( $html ) {
    return '<div class="video-container">' . $html . '</div>';
}
 
add_filter( 'embed_oembed_html', 'alx_embed_html', 10, 3 );
add_filter( 'video_embed_html', 'alx_embed_html' ); // Jetpack

And next up, we need to add the CSS that makes it responsive to our style.css:

.video-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; }
.video-container iframe, .video-container object, .video-container embed, .video-container video { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }
wget --recursive --no-clobber --page-requisites --html-extension --convert-links --domains website.org --no-parent www.website.org/tutorials/html/

This command downloads the Web site www.website.org/tutorials/html/.

The options are:

–recursive: download the entire Web site.
–domains website.org: don’t follow links outside website.org.
–no-parent: don’t follow links outside the directory tutorials/html/.
–page-requisites: get all the elements that compose the page (images, CSS and so on).
–html-extension: save files with the .html extension.
–convert-links: convert links so that they work locally, off-line.
–no-clobber: don’t overwrite any existing files (used in case the download is interrupted and resumed).

As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there’s a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a «filter bubble» and don’t get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.

Since Dec. 4, 2009, Google has been personalized for everyone. So when I had two friends this spring Google «BP,» one of them got a set of links that was about investment opportunities in BP. The other one got information about the oil spill. Presumably that was based on the kinds of searches that they had done in the past. If you have Google doing that, and you have Yahoo doing that, and you have Facebook doing that, and you have all of the top sites on the Web customizing themselves to you, then your information environment starts to look very different from anyone else’s. And that’s what I’m calling the «filter bubble»: that personal ecosystem of information that’s been catered by these algorithms to who they think you are.

Una burbuja de filtros es el resultado de una búsqueda personalizada en donde el algoritmo de una página web selecciona, a través de predicciones, la información que al usuario le gustaría ver basado en información acerca del mismo (como localización, historial de búsquedas, y elementos a los que les dio clic en el pasado) y, como resultado, los usuarios son alejados de la información que no coincide con sus puntos de vista, aislándolos efectivamente en burbujas ideológicas y culturales propias del usuario.

Un ejemplo son los resultados de la búsqueda personalizada de Google y el hilo de noticias personalizadas de Facebook . El término fue acuñado por el ciberactivista Eli Pariser en su libro que tiene el mismo nombre; de acuerdo a Pariser, los usuarios son menos expuestos a puntos de vista conflictivos y son aislados intelectualmente en su propia burbuja de información. Pariser relata un ejemplo en donde el usuario hace una búsqueda en Google para «BP» y tiene como resultado noticias acerca de British Petroleum mientras que otra persona obtuvo información acerca del derrame de petróleo Deepwater Horizon y que los dos resultados de búsqueda fueron muy diferentes entre ellas.

Según Mark Zuckerberg: «Saber que una ardilla muere en tu jardín puede ser más relevante para tus intereses que saber que muere gente en África».

The Web, on the other hand, breaks the traditional publishing model. The old model is about control: a team works on a document, is responsible for its content and format, and releases it to the public when it’s been certified as done. Once it’s published, no one can change it except the original publisher. The Web ditches that model, with all its advantages as well as its drawbacks, and says instead, «You have something to say? Say it. You want to respond to something that’s been said? Say it and link to it. You think something is interesting? Link to it from your home page. And you never have to ask anyone’s permission.» Then it adds: «And how long will it take to do this? I dunno. How fast do you type?» By removing the central control points, the Web enabled a self-organizing, self-stimulated growth of contents and links on a scale the world has literally never before experienced.

The result is a loose federation of documents — many small pieces loosely joined. But in what has turned out to be simply the first cultural artifact and institution the Web has subtly subverted, the interior structure of documents has changed, not just the way they are connected to one another. The Web has blown documents apart. It treats tightly bound volumes like a collection of ideas — none longer than can fit on a single screen — that the reader can consult in the order she or he wants, regardless of the author’s intentions. It makes links beyond the document’s covers an integral part of every document. What once was literally a tightly-bound entity has been ripped into pieces and thrown into the air.

What the Web has done to documents it is doing to just about every institution it touches.

Four months ago we launched Liberapay, a recurrent donations platform whose primary goal is to help fund the development of free software. In this post we explore why that’s difficult, and the solutions we’re proposing for the two steps of the process: getting the money, and distributing it.

Many projects have trouble with the fundraising itself.

A big reason is that there are psychological barriers on both sides (the open source projects on one hand, and their users on the other).

In the eyes of many people donations are not a valid business model. To some of them it even feels like begging. Our answer to that is simple: seeking donations isn’t asking for charity, it’s more like allowing the customer to choose the price of the service. It’s pay what you want, and there’s nothing wrong with it, in some ways it’s even better than other pricing schemes.

We’ve also identified another hurdle: information circulates badly in the open source community, especially when it comes to money. There’s no social network you can use that will keep you updated on which projects need funding. To address this issue we’re trying to build communities, to bring people together and keep them informed through newsletters (those aren’t operational yet).

So you’ve found people to support your work, great, now what? Any sizeable project has multiple contributors, and determining who should get how much is a big challenge.

To solve it we’ve come up with an innovative way to distribute donations to contributors: a team system that allows members of a project to share income, without having to set up a legal entity, and without creating resentment.

The basic principle is very simple: each member decides every week how much of the team’s income they take! We call that “take-what-you-want” remuneration. There is no hierarchy, not even an owner with special powers. The amounts are public, so everyone can see how much each team member is taking.

In this paper, we begin to outline how feminist theory may be productively applied to information visualization research and practice. Other technology and design-oriented fields such as Science and Technology Studies, Human-Computer Interaction, Digital Humanities, and Geography/GIS have begun to incorporate feminist principles into their research. Feminism is not (just) about women,
but rather draws our attention to questions of epistemology – who is included in dominant ways of producing and communicating
knowledge and whose perspectives are marginalized. We describe potential applications of feminist theory to influence the information
design process as well as to shape the outputs from that process.

In this paper, we have outlined six principles for feminist data visualization: Rethink Binaries, Embrace Pluralism, Examine Power and Aspire to Empowerment, Consider Context, Legitimize Embodiment and Affect and Make Labor Visible. These are preliminary and offered for the purposes of beginning a dialogue about how the digital humanities and information visualization communities can productively exchange theories, concepts, and methods. Applying humanistic theories to design processes and artifacts may be new territory for many humanists, just as grappling with questions of subjectivity, power, and oppression may be new territory for many visualization researchers. As data visualization becomes a mainstream technique for making meaning and creating stories about the world, questions of inclusion, authorship,framing, reception, and social impact will become increasingly important. In this regard, the humanities and specifically feminist theory have much to offer.