Interestingly, it was today featured on KillerStartups.com where they ask “Will this service remain a free one?” The point of releasing the source under the AGPL is precisely for users not to worry about that question – if it ends up turning into something you don’t like, you take the code and host it yourself. In this case, they’ve taken the code, hosted it themselves but failed to tell their users that they can do exactly the same.

If you do use the service and you’d like the source code, head over to FiveFilters.org for download instructions.

If the authors of WizardRSS are reading this, please include a way for your users to download the source code.

It seems a natural career move. In 2002 and 2003 Sambrook’s BBC news team spun heaven and earth to lend an air of respectability to one of history’s most brazen campaigns of state-orchestrated lying. The performance was encapsulated perfectly by BBC “rotweiller” Jeremy Paxman when he said last year:

“… when Colin Powell sat down at the UN General Assembly and unveiled what he said was cast-iron evidence of things like mobile, biological weapon facilities and the like [in Iraq]… When I saw all of that, I thought, well, ‘We know that Colin Powell is an intelligent, thoughtful man, and a sceptical man. If he believes all this to be the case, then, you know, he’s seen the evidence; I haven’t.’”

Idiocy is one thing, but the BBC’s idiocy all went one way – no journalist swooned with comparable helplessness at the feet of experts excoriating US-UK propaganda.

PDF version of the guide also available.

Intro

If you’re a student at either one of these universities, you have two options when it comes to connecting to the Internet when you’re on campus or at one of the libraries around town. The most common way is to connect through Nomad if you’re a Chalmers student or GUWLAN if you’re a GU student. This guide covers an alternative way called eduroam.

According to GU, in February 2010 only 184 students connected to the wireless network through eduroam, as opposed to 6,324 students connecting in the standard way. (See GU’s wireless network stats.)

The problem

Most GU students do not have accounts at Chalmers and most Chalmers students don’t have accounts at GU. So if a Chalmers student goes to sit down in a GU library to do some work, she won’t be able to connect to the Internet through the university network. Similarly, if a GU student decides to have coffee at Chalmers, she won’t have access to the network.

Another problem is that both these networks use the captive portal technique for authentication – which means having to enter login details or click through a login screen each time you sit down to work.

The solution: eduroam

Eduroam was designed to overcome this problem. It lets you enter your details once and allows you to connect easily wherever you see the eduroam wireless network – even at universities in different countries. (I’ve used my Chalmers eduroam account for internet access at the University of Cambridge in the UK – it works the same way it does when I’m at Chalmers/GU.)

Instructions for configuring Windows 7 for Eduroam

Other operating systems: For Linux, Win XP/Vista or Mac try GU instructions if you’re a GU student or Chalmers instructions (these are mainly in Swedish).

The instructions below have been taken from the University of Cambridge’s UCS website. I’ve simply modified the steps to include details Chalmers/GU students will need to enter.

Note: Before continuing, make sure you’re already able to connect via Nomad or GUWLAN. To test the connection, you will need to be at one of the universities or at a university library – if you look at your list of wireless networks you should see eduroam listed.

1. Go to Start, then Control Panel, then Network and Internet, then Network and Sharing Center
2. From the list of tasks select Setup a new connection or network.
   
3. When asked to choose a new connection option select Manually connect to a wireless network
4. You will then be asked for information about the wireless network.
   • In the Network name box, type eduroam (note the lower-case ‘e’).
   • From the drop-down lists:
     • For Security type choose WPA2-Enterprise (or WPA-Enterprise if your wireless card doesn’t support WPA2)
     • For Encryption type choose AES (or TKIP if your wireless card doesn’t support AES)

   Select Next. You should now be told that eduroam has been successfully added. Select Change connection settings.
   
   This will bring up the network wireless connection properties.

5. On the Connection tab uncheck Connect to a more preferred network if available. The result should look like:
   
6. Select the Security tab.
   
   • From the drop-down list for Choose a network authentication method choose Protected EAP (PEAP)
   • Select Settings…
7. Complete the settings in this dialogue box as shown:
   
   • Make sure Validate server certificate is ticked.
   • Tick Connect to these servers, making the text field below available…
   • …in this box, enter eduroam.chalmers.se (this is fine even if you’re a GU student without a Chalmers account).
   • From the list of Trusted Root Certification Authorities find Thawte Premium Server CA and tick the box next to it
8. The drop-down list under Select Authentication Method should already have Secured password (EAP-MSCHAP v2) selected – select the Configure… button next to it to open the EAP MSCHAPv2 Properties dialogue box:
   
9. Untick the box next to Automatically use my Windows logon name and password (and domain if any) then select OK, then select OK to close the Protected EAP Properties dialogue box
10. Now, from the Security tab select Advanced settings
    
11. Check that you have the 802.1X settings tab and, from the pull-down menu select User authentication then select OK
12. Select OK to close all the various dialogue boxes
13. Select Close to close the “Manually connect to a wireless network” box.
14. After a short period of time, your computer should detect the eduroam wireless network and display a balloon, telling you Additional information is needed to connect eduroam.
    
15. Click in the balloon and a dialogue box will appear, prompting you for your credentials.
16. Enter your login details into the dialogue box:
    
    • If you’re at Chalmers your username will be your CID followed by @chalmers.se: CID@chalmers.se. If you’re at GU it will be your username followed by @gu.se: gus…@gu.se
    • Your Password will be the the password associated with your account. (For Chalmers students, this is not the same as your Nomad password!)
17. Select OK.
18. After a little while it should connect. (If you’re a GU student you might see another prompt about certificates. If you do, click continue and it should connect.)

All the settings you have made are stored in your computer and should not need re-entering each time you connect.

Thanks again to the UCS team at Cambridge University for doing the hard work of writing up the step by step guide.

Written in Processing and PHP. Source code is available (PHP source is coming soon).

In all his novels after Bel-Ami … Maupassant evidently submitted to the theory which ruled not only in his circle in Paris, but which now rules everywhere among artists: that for a work of art it is not only unnecessary to have any clear conception of what is right and wrong, but that on the contrary an artist should completely ignore all moral questions, there being even a certain artistic merit in so doing. According to this theory the artist may or should depict what is true to life, what really is, what is beautiful and therefore pleases him, or even what may be useful as material for ’science’; but that to care about what is moral or immoral, right or wrong, is not an artist’s business.

I remember a celebrated painter showing me one of his pictures representing a religious procession. It was all excellently painted, but no relation of the artist to his subject was perceptible.

‘And do you regard these ceremonies as good and consider that they should be performed, or not?’ I asked him.

With some condescension to my naïveté, he told me that he did not know about that and did not want to know it; his business was to represent life.

‘But at any rate you sympathize with this?’

‘I cannot say I do.’

‘Well then do you dislike these ceremonies?’

‘Neither the one thing nor the other,’ with a smile of compassion at my silliness, replied this modern, highly cultured, artist who depicted life without understanding its purpose and neither loving nor hating its phenomena.

HCI for the Real World (PDF)

This paper by Nicholas Knouf looks at the field of HCI and argues that those of us involved in design need to think more critically about the types of problems we work on — problems usually determined by corporations only interested in profit. He cites the work of radical designer Victor Papanek:

“The economic, psychological, spiritual, technological, and intellectual needs of a human being are usually more difficult and less profitable to satisfy than the carefully engineered and manipulated ‘wants’ inculcated by fad and fashion” … What should be clear by now is the underlying critique of capitalism that forms the basis of Papanek’s project. By framing design projects within the limited space of profits, design ignores those who need the most help.

So a major problem is the conflict between the priorities of business (making more money) and the goal of design (addressing real human needs).

With market pressures, relationships with totalitarian regimes, and a legally-bound slave relationship to shareholders, how can we expect corporations to be able to use design as part of the process of social emancipation? And what would be the alternatives? This act of thinking an alternative requires a process of reflection that would focus on (as I have been doing in this paper) the designer’s role within existing structures of power and h/er latent assumptions regarding (un)conscious values that ultimately become framed through the choices of what design problems to consider.

Corporate Influence on Science and Technology

This report by Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR) is a more general look at the “the detrimental effects of commercial influence on science and technology”.

One of the conclusions:

Companies have expanded the number and range of partnerships with universities, focusing on business research priorities and goals. The power and influence of some corporations, and the increased …pressure on researchers to bring in funding from business, means that academic departments are increasingly orientating themselves to commercial needs rather than to broader public interest or curiosity-driven goals.

Update 2010-02-18
Another good piece by Arvind Lodaya: Deglobalising Design (via Victor Vina):

Any sensitive person cannot help noticing the stark contrast between the slick designs being created in the studios and the ever-increasing squalor and poverty around us, the increasing failure of the infrastructure, and the very different aesthetic and culture of our streets as compared with what we learn and later, practice and preach.

If you know of any other interesting texts, leave a comment…

This is an experiment in creating randomly connected nodes all trying to upset the A* search algorithm by moving apart as soon as the algorithm finds the shortest path. They don’t always succeed.

Left click near the nodes to disturb them.
Right click (or space bar) to see how the algorithm works.
Press ‘c’ to generate a new random set of nodes.

On 27 October he will be at SOAS with a talk titled Crises and the Unipolar Moment:

It is widely felt that the fall of the Soviet Union left a unipolar world, dominated by the remaining superpower, and that the “moment” is coming to a close with the collapse of the Anglo-Saxon “free market” economic model. Investigation of this two-decade “moment” can provide considerable insight into what came before, and possibilities for shaping the future.

On 29 October he will be at LSE with a talk titled Human Rights in the 21st Century.