Recently, I've been growing to another role - that of the boss. It already creates some interesting communication when your colleagues read your blogs and tweets, and there's some nice tension when you know that your boss subscribes to your RSS streams. That's fine though - it creates a certain peer pressure model which keeps stuff like corporate secrets out of the internet, and may also lead to friendships beyond the corporate life.

However, I think the online life gets really interesting when you have people who report to you. Me, being part of the internet unit of the corporate behemoth these days, I get the ones who even better at living online than me. And, it's the same people you want to be doing things you tell them to, but at the same time they will be privy to parts of your life in which you're not the boss, but just a normal human being with average and not-so-average tastes. So it's kinda scary.

Now, I live on the borderline: I am not young enough to know of no other world than one with sharing online everything you have; but I am not old enough to believe in the necessity of keeping my different lives separate. Gen X, all the way :-).

Risto Linturi writes wonderfully (albeit in Finnish) on the generational differences of the necessity of keeping "roles": The elderly caution the kids that "you can't remove anything from the internet", and "be careful or all the stupid things you do will come back to haunt you later" - but the kids do it anyway, because sharing so much more efficient than the old way. It's an incredibly powerful way to create trust between people, and the young view the "must hide everything lest people figure out that I am not as smart as I try to look like" -attitude of their elders with suspicion. Which is obvious, considering that the mechanisms of trust are different, and as much as the older generations don't understand the young, neither do the young understand the older generations.

The fun thing is that the Internet amplifies this kind of mechanisms. Of how many private photo-sharing sites have you heard of recently? There are zillions of them, but none of them can match the popularity of Flickr, where everything, by default, is public (and the privacy controls are really coarse). The popularity of Flickr feeds the popularity of Flickr - because you can talk about it. You can show your pictures easily. There's a strong incentive towards sharing, and sharing begets sharing. Image searches find Flickr pictures, but they don't find your hidden pictures - so the Flickr pictures get shared even more. Putting stuff online openly is a much faster breeder, so to say, than private image sharing (which obviously has its uses as well - I keep most of the kids pictures hidden simply because it should be his decision to choose whether to share or not, so I'm deferring that decision until he can make it himself).

People, especially those who vote Pirate Party, say "sharing is caring", but I think it's more correct to say that "if you don't share, nobody cares." We live in an information age, and whoever moves information fastest or best, wins the race. In a few measly years, who is going to care about an artist whose works you can't download for free from the internet? You used to hear it for free from the radio; now you use Spotify or Pirate Bay.

I have been on the internet since 1989, and yeah, I've done stuff which can't be erased from the net and I feel now rather ashamed about. But never ever has this come back to haunt me. It may be that I've managed to keep the account on the positive side - that is, I do more of the stuff that makes me appear sane and fit to serve humanity than I do of the insane/oh-my-god -variety. Or it may be just the fact that there is always someone weirder on the internet.

OK, so here's the catch for me: In order to be able to actually function as a leader in an internet company, I simply have to choose the younger generation way, or there would be no credibility. But all (well, most) my superiors over time have been of the older generation, which means that all the role-models I have are inherently faulty. Which in turn means that I feel, on occasion, rather lost.

So here I go again, twaddling along with leaking boots, inventing stuff as I go along... Comfort zone is what happens to other people. *sigh*

Now, obviously, a single guy can't do much, and the elected representative, Christian Engström, just moves from the lobby wing of EU to the actual parliament, so I don't think there will be much impact on that side.

But what is really significant is the fact that Piratpartiet got 7.1% of votes. That 7% is huge amount of voters that any party would love to sign up, especially considering Piratpartiet's popularity in the 18-30 demographic (20% votes), who by the time of the next election, are going to be the 18-35 demographic, and therefore likely to grow from that 7%. So, it is very likely that some parties will start changing their rhetoric towards PP's lines in order to cannibalize their support; especially parties which are already pretty close in some ideals (like the Greens). The Pirate Party is seen as a single-agenda movement, and many people who in principle agree with the sentiment don't necessarily want to support a party whose other views are unknown, or just think that PP is too extremist in their views towards copyright.

So, there's at least 7% of voters to be grabbed by choosing to openly defend consumers and driving towards a more modern copyright and internet legislation. I say modern, because I feel that there is a good, solid middle path which actually takes into account the extremely rapid change that media creation and distribution and communication is currently ongoing, without sacrificing people's right for privacy and freedom of speech, but still fulfilling the original purpose of copyright, which was to give financial incentives for people to create. Unfortunately, the quest for this middle path is completely hidden by irrelevant discussions, bad metaphors, falsified or misinterpreted data, deeply entrenched opinions with no actual facts to back them up, and the simple inability to communicate across the board.

Perhaps it'll take a few years of fighting between the extremists on either side, and we may have to wait until that 20% becomes the 18-50 demographic. But time is on the side of the Pirate Party: If the idiotic "copyright enforcement over all civil liberties, damn you evil pirates" -trend continues for a few more years, will the "starving artists" have any friends left by the time the current teenagers actually have power? And how will they use the vast powers created by the current administrations? For good, or for revenge?

So, no matter who you vote, vote.

After a dinner, we ended up watching videos from the time we spent together, and had collective self-embarathy moments. Then, we ended up in a discotheque ("Wiltsu") which had been reopened under the same name after 20 years, and which was to many of us a first touch of adulthood - so it was obviously THE place to go and visit. And we danced like we were eighteen.

Finally, it was a bit of traditional local food ("Vety") and watching the sun come up.

Good reset. Great company.

What really makes me happy is that I was able to rekindle some old friendships, and also - hopefully - actually start some new ones. Finding a common tune with someone you never really talked to before is an uplifting experience, no matter how many years pass or how old you are.

The problem is - it's not Star Trek. Or at least it's not my Star Trek.

(May be spoilers here.)

After the movie, I sat there, in the half-empty theatre, watching people flow out. Feeling quite empty. Yeah, I had laughed, I was excited, but you know, it was as if I had seen something else than a Trek movie. A nice sci-fi flick, with planets exploding, gigantic war machines with a vengeance-driven ruler. Cute aliens. No technobabble. A triangle drama between the hansom but loner captain, a cool but uncertain man, who does not quite know where he belongs, and a beautiful lady with a strange hairdo. Lots of action and little complexity, conveyed through a barrage of special effects and lots of platforms on which the good and the evil guys can jump about.

Change a few names, have different spaceships, minor changes to the plotline, and this would've made a truly excellent Star Wars Episode 1; much better than the monstrosity that George Lucas came up with.

But it ain't Star Trek. There's no "what if". There's no thinking, no alien cultures. Just action. Just childish joy at breaking things. Nothing adult or difficult; nothing that compares to the best Star Trek episodes (of all the series).

OK, maybe I'm old. Maybe this is exactly how the old trekkies felt when Star Trek - The Next Generation appeared. And I remember the cries of foul play when people learned that there was going to be a remake of Battlestar Galactica, and Starbuck was going to be a woman!

But there was a difference: the new BSG series was actually really good. It really showed something different, something that very few series had done before. It challenged people with non-trivialized plotlines and did evil things to main characters that we loved. The new Star Trek isn't better than the original. It's a superimposition of Star Wars on top of the Star Trek universe. There is nothing new in it. Everything has been seen before, in other surroundings.

To summarize: the new Trek movie is a nice action flick with lots of in-references and jokes thrown in for the fans. But it's a movie with little power. Someone could make a great TV series based on it, but any movie sequels I'm probably going to skip.

(Update: Ha! "The writers have said their goal is for the film to appeal not just to Trek fans, but to new audiences as well. They hoped to bring the feel of the original Star Wars trilogy into the movie, since Abrams has often said he's more a fan of Star Wars than Star Trek.")

It isn't half bad. Now it remains to be seen whether the political will of the parliament can be turned into something concrete.

• Reading & Writing: We were no longer had to be in a given place or time to get information. Tomes of knowledge could be consumed by anyone who just acquired the necessary skills, no matter when or where.

• Printing press: Served as a means to get reading/writing to so many more people.

• Train & Mass transport: Again, a means to get the books produced by the printing press to even more places.

• The Internet: A renessance of literacy. Just dropped the threshold of participation in the human knowledge pool again a lot more.

But the internet isn't the end-all in this sequence. It's still relatively expensive to get to, and in many places of the world it just isn't practical. Much like the monks of old, only a few people get access to it.

Some people look at the number of mobile phone subscribers and say that the "mobile internet" is the next step. Yes, mobile phones are available for almost everyone at prices which are no longer prohibitive. But still, they are primarily for voice - doing the same stuff as what we used to do before the invention of writing. And it's going to take a long time before everyone in Africa has a smartphone.

Incidentally, this progression is also the reason why I'm not that hot on location-based services. I mean, why add dependence just when we managed to get rid of it? Yes, they're useful to some degree (and it's cool to be able to figure out your own dependencies and not be limited by what is there physically - kinda like drawing on a blank piece of paper after spending lots of effort rubbing it clean), but still it's akin to freezing yer balls off at a nudist beach after spending millennia figuring out how not to freeze them by inventing all kinds of new clothes.

The way I see it, while the internet almost completely demolishes our time- and location -dependence, it does not still address some fundamental problems with the idea of spreading knowledge. One big issue is language - our choice of material is limited by the languages we know. Even with filtered and aggregated media (like newspapers or TV) we're still bound by the limits of the languages the editors know. I like to quote a work-specific example: Nokia has been involved with NFC for years, and we've been running big pilots with thousands of people and selling the stuff commercially for ages, but not until we did a couple of small pilots in English-speaking countries, and got English-language coverage, did the Finnish press really pick it up.

An even bigger issue is cultural. All cultures try to limit the free flow of information to some degree, for legal reasons or because they don't like the idea in general. The recently popular "internet censorship" is not really that different from the censorship slapped on every kind of media - and it's pretty much as ineffective too. People have always found ways around it if they needed to; it's just a way to pretend that bad things don't exist. And that's really the problem: The internet has something for everyone, which means that you don't need to be exposed to the stuff you don't want to be exposed to. It's really difficult to blow your mind if all you read are the same blogs and same newssites which serve you the same stuff all over again; stuff to which you already agree to.

At least when you only had a few books, you could read them all and be exposed to opinions and facts you didn't really want to know.

I don't know what the next step after the internet is going to be, but I think it should primarily concentrate on abolishing the cultural dependencies of our minds. You know, make it really easy to really see what the world is like. By that I don't mean that we should agree, but that we should at least try to understand what we're talking about and where the other guys are coming from.

Don't know about you, but even with knowing that this was a programmed response from an AI researcher, it still sends chills down my spine.

(From Slashdot.)

And that is fine too, but don't come telling me that "it's only going to take a couple of minutes."

US Government official forms have this "filling this form should take no more than XX minutes" in the bottom. If you make a form, try to figure out how long it actually takes for someone to respond to.

The end result is usually rather hilarious, and you get to keep the playlist.

(Kudos to Kari Haakana for coining the term and probably the game too!)

Then, they propose a legislation which can get your blog or web site (including sites like Youtube and Facebook) censored if you disagree with any current legislation (of course, without any oversight again).

Then they sue Google executives for content on YouTube.

And now someone in the parliament is demanding to ban anonymity completely on the internet?

I don't claim to understand any of Italian politics, but this all sounds rather scary to me. May be that all this is just an effort to ride on cheap media tricks, but on the other hand... Major Italian TV channels are mostly endless game and variety shows. It's as if someone wanted to keep the people as stupid as possible.

It's easy to badmouth a bad restaurant or service or product, but it's more rare to remember to say good things about positive experiences. So thank you for the nice waitress who gave us a nice, romantic table by the window; the cook who prepared a perfect meal; and especially Outi's parents who practically threw us out of the apartment.

Mertenhän tätä jo aiemmin spekuloi (mutta en löydä linkkiä kirjoitukseen). Eihän nyt voi olla sattumaa se, että poliisilla ei ole oikeutta teleliikenteen valvontaan tekijänoikeusrikoksissa, mutta Lex Nokian myötä kaikille yhteisötilaajille sellainen tulee. Ja jos nyt joku tulee ja sanoo vaikkapa teekkarikylän verkkoylläpidolle, että teillä saatetaan harrastaa laitonta kopiointia, niin eikö se ole juuri sellainen tilanne, jossa ylläpito saa alkaa valvoa mitä verkossa liikkuu?

13 d§:

"Yhteisötilaaja saa käsitellä tunnistamistietoja manuaalisesti, jos on perusteltu syy epäillä, että viestintäverkkoa, viestintäpalvelua tai maksullista tietoyhteiskunnan palvelua käytetään 13 b §:n 3 momentissa tarkoitettujen ohjeiden vastaisesti tai että yrityssalaisuus on luvattomasti annettu ulkopuoliselle ja jos:"

13b §:n 3 momentti:

"2) määriteltävä, minkälaisia viestejä sen viestintäverkon kautta saa välittää ja hakea, sekä miten sen viestintäverkkoa ja viestintäpalvelua saa muutoin käyttää ja minkälaisiin kohdeosoitteisiin viestintää ei saa harjoittaa."

Tuohan siis käytännössä tarkoittaa siis sitä, että käyttösääntöjen rikkominen antaa luvan seurata toimintaa. Luen tuon niin, että vaikkapa nettisensuurin (siis ei edes lapsipornosuotimien, vaan esim. Facebookissa käyminen työajalla, jos se on yritetty estää jotenkin) kiertäminen on riittävä syy sille, että nettiliikennettäsi aletaan seurata. Tosin vain silloin, että siitä voidaan osoittaa olevan merkittävää haittaa - mutta esimerkiksi torrentien hakeminen teekkarikylän verkossa (joka vienee merkittävän osan kaistasta) voisi sellainen olla. Pääasia kuitenkin on, että "merkittävä haitta" on yhteisötilaajan itsensä määrittelemä, ja jos esim. TKVK:n lakimiesten soittoihin vastaaminen vie merkittävän ajan ylläpidon elämästä, niin ehkä sekin voisi olla merkittävä haitta.

Ja siis toiminnanhan ei tarvitse olla todistettavasti laitonta. Jos joku jakaa merkittävän määrän tauhkaa koneeltaan, oli se miten kryptattua tahansa, se voi riittää siihen, että joku masiina jossain piippaa, ylläpito tutkii tunnistetiedot, ilmoittaa eteenpäin ja koneet takavarikoidaan tutkinnan ajaksi. Saa ne sitten muutaman kuukauden kuluttua takaisin, jos syytettä ei nosteta, mutta ei se paljoa lohduta.

Mutta tämähän on vain vainoharhaisuutta. Eihän kukaan koskaan näin oikeasti väärinkäyttäisi yrityssalaisuuksien suojaamiseksi tehtyä lakia. Eihän?

Luonnollisesti Suvi Linden väittää, että tämä koskee vain yrityssalaisuuksiin käsiksi pääseviä työntekijöitä, mutta tuossa 13d §:ssa on tuo maaginen tai, eikä ja. Ongelmahan on nyt siinä, että tässä laissa on koplattu yhteen sekä yrityssalaisuuksia valvova laki (joka siis on sinällään melkein bueno) että yhteisötilaajien oikeus käsitellä tunnistetietoja teknisten ongelmien ratkomiseksi, jolloin molemmat lait valuvat toistensa vaikutusalueille ja aikaansaavat hämäriä sivuvaikutuksia, joista osa kuulostaa Anssi Kotilaisen märältä päiväunelta.

If you're interested in the game, this is a great opportunity to come and see the thrill of a top-notch competition personally. It doesn't get much better than this - until next year, when Tampere as the first city in Finland hosts the European Go Congress for 700+ players all over Europe and the world. Any go player will be happy to teach you the rules - just make sure you don't bother the people still playing!

(Disclaimer: I organized the first Takapotku tournament, back in 2003. It was already back then the largest tournament ever held in Finland, and it just keeps growing, thanks to the tender care of the new organizers.)

Anyway, if the corporations (and schools, and kindergartens, and libraries) get more freedoms than the police to spy on their users, it's only logical that in the near future, the police will get similar rights. Probably using child pornography as a smokescreen, since it works well against everything. In fact, it should be a law: "Any civil liberty can be squashed using child pornography as an argument." (Just like Godwin's law says that any discussion is moot after someone mentions Hitler). And, not soon after that, also right to inspect the content of the packets is given, so that pesky people who send MP3s over email can be prosecuted as well. You see, I don't think it's enough to prosecute anyone based on the headers only - you will need to read the contents as well in order to get the evidence. Currently, you do need a court order. However, it would be a lot more convenient and cheaper to give the right to read the contents as well - after all, it's only a minor technical change after the right to read the headers is given...

It is a slippery slope, and when you consider these as separate, isolated laws and reasonings, each single step kinda makes sense. But as a whole, in the end, it means that every internet user in this country will be monitored "just in case" they do anything bad. And that's not a big step away from the good ol' communist countries. I know this sounds kinda alarmist, but it has happened before, and it will happen again. Just ask any Chinese dissident, or anyone old enough to remember DDR. The fun thing is that some people will welcome the change, because they think it's just a way to get rid of bad people, and they themselves are not bad.

Anyway, here are the videos, in which you seen politicians wipe their arse with the Finnish Constitution. Very much to the point.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8pqfJQDSUE
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tDhemyzB3k
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lqo8se_54XU

(Hitler. Ha, said it first! You can't argue anymore!)