Hacker Ethics are not Completely Universal
April 25th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
I paraphrase the main values of the hacker ethics, taken from Steven Levy’s 1984 book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution:
- Access to computers – and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works – should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On imperative!
- All information should be free.
- Mistrust authority – promote decentralization.
- Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degress, age, race, or position.
- You can create art and beauty on a computer.
- Computers can change your life for the better.
While such values are laudable, I find a series of reservations with the hacker ethics that makes me think of it as a more exclusive, restrictive culture than what many hackers gurus might have initially thought of:
- It assumes a potentially equalitarian access to technology. Not all would-be hackers have the possibility to be exposed to the technological advances where hackers thrive. I cannot conceive a leading hacker dealing with obsolete technology. By definition, access to technology cannot be limitless to everyone.
- Despite a free flow of information, the truth is that where you are born will condition your ability to become a hacker. Access to information alone is not enough. Why are there no well known hackers outsite the rich world?
- Unless you speak and understand English you will never succeed as a hacker. All programming languages are based on the English lexicon and without it one cannot understand many of the nuances. The development of the hacker culture is also tied to a very specific environment and tradition.
- Hacker culture is based on a civilization of abundance. Most people have their limited salaries and obligations to meet. The hacker culture assumes a continuous amount of free time, that many people simply do not have. This excludes hacker values from universal adoption.
Hacker values are great ideals to be aspired by current generations of would-be entrepeneurs and even philosophers. Let’s not forget, however, that this culture was grown and fostered in a very particular set of circumstances and country. I do not believe that these ideals are necessarily universal. I can think of a parallel analogy with democracy: despite being universal in its aspirations it does not work in all cultures.
Personal Genomes Ripe For Social Networking
April 9th, 2010 § 5 Comments
Personal genomics offers the promise of raising quality of life to unexpected levels. Understanding one’s genome and its effects become paramount for achieving this promise. Recreational Genomics has arisen as a field of commercial activity allowing mass scale genome screening. For several hundred dollars it is possible to have one’s genome analyzed and results easily downloaded as a flat text file. In the case of 23andMe, this analysis consists of personal variants (genotype) for more than 0.5M SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms). This personal “genome” is interesting in its own right and it would be even more interesting provided that this information is compared and analyzed in the context of other people’s genomes and their phenotypes.
A resource available for social networking to allow mass comparison of people sharing traits and genomic variants, I believe could have revolutionary effects. Such a network could allow one start making sense of specific personal traits, susceptibility to illnesses and determination of potential treatments proven successful by genetically similar people. Exchange of genetic information made easy should be a reality soon.
The time is ripe for social genome networks. Indeed there are lots of potential ethical and legal challenges ahead. How long are laws and social prejudices going to stop the inevitable?
I don’t want privacy to be dead
February 16th, 2010 § 1 Comment
“Privacy is dead. Get over it”. People who have famously said this or something similar include Scott McNealy (CEO Sun Microsystems), Eric Schmidt (CEO Google) and Mark Zuckerberg (Founder of Facebook).
Some of the reasons that justify why not having privacy is OK include “if you do something that you want nobody to know, maybe you should not do it on the first place” or “people are ever more comfortable with sharing information about themselves”.
These arguments are all well and good. However, the other side of the coin is when personal information is used by strangers to take advantage of the person, let alone potential misinterpretations or simply gossip.
Is this interconnectedness worth exchanging for personal privacy? ‘Clever’ algorithms are constantly crawling the web in search of personal information. The degree to which these algorithms are more effective at spamming you is proportional to the amount of public information about you on the web.
Have you ever said anything or joined an internet group you would rather not join now? Unfortunately it is likely that this information will never disappear. Even if you delete it from your profile, it is probable that some web crawling algorithm has stored that information somewhere.
It has only been until recently when users have a tighter control over the information they make available to the web in Facebook for instance. Default settings are indeed terrifying in terms of the information of one’s profile made available to search engines.
Despite the possibility of being able to control how much information one makes public, this is not the end of the story: I have found situations where pieces of information in my profile were picked by a friend without me knowing it. True, it is specified in the settings how much you want to make public. Nevertheless, even though I have unselected information from my public profile, who knows who would have looked at it.
Not that I have anything to hide but I would rather keep quiet about my personal interests rather than sharing them widely. Surely a better knowledge of my personal profile could facilitate the way to finding more easily passwords and even breaking into my bank account.
Have we now reached a point of no return in privacy?
Probably.
Of Hackers and Painters
July 19th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age is a book that tells a lot about the life of the author himself. According to Graham, nerds do not spend as much time thinking about how to be popular. He calls himself a nerd and tells how he was in the ‘D’ popularity group at school, ‘E’ being the least popular group of all. This in part implies that hacker traits are implicit from young age. The author has the very interesting background of having studied painting in Florence after finishing his PhD in Computer Science at Harvard. He explains his experience creating his own startup company, called Viaweb, which ended up being bought by Yahoo, becoming a very successful online store tool.
The author thinks that the reason why Viaweb managed to become the leading company in their sector was due to providing their services via the web itself and using the Lisp computer language. According him, being a web software company has great advantages. Web companies are able to add features incrementally or fixing bugs without having to ship the application back to the user every time: such small changes make releases more manageable and bugs can be reproduced exactly without having to guess the user’s environment and configuration. Web applications are much easier to run, you just need a web browser. Traditional standalone applications require the user to know system administration (getting the right configuration) but in web applications the system administration burden is transferred to the developers instead.
Coding in Lisp apparently was a definitive advantage to keep abreast with competition. He argues strongly in favor of Lisp as the most powerful language due to its ability to provide greater capability for abstraction than any other language. Lisp was initially developed as a mathematical formalism and then made into language. Other computer languages tend to be based on assembler specifications, approaching concepts from the hardware point of view rather than mathematics. This argument made me think seriously about learning at least the fundamentals of Lisp to discover new ways of coding abstractions. I found in Paul Graham’s own website an introductory tutorial for Lisp. I look forward to my next trip to this new mindset.
Computational Bioethics: Leveraging Personalized Medicine Ethically
July 14th, 2009 § 1 Comment
Computational Bioethics relates to the appropriateness of use, management of access and discovery of biological insights applied to patient health. A simple search in Google shows that this concept has only been used in the past at a workshop session in the Rocky Bioinformatics conference in 2008. In the resulting publication of this meeting, Computational Bioethics is said to encompass ethical issues that are unique to computational scientists compared with bench and clinical scientists. In addition, it is argued that as medical informatics, computational biology and bioinformatics become more widely used in medical research, these issues will become even more relevant in the future.
And the future is now become a present reality. The rise of next generation sequencing technology, together with the adoption of microarray techniques in normal clinical practice is revolutionizing the way patient’s data is handled. Similarly, the amount of data created is surpassing most software tools available. Projects like the 1000 Genomes are generating an enormous pool of variability of genome data and derived sources of information. This makes necessary the exchange of data between research centers to be able to establish what constitutes normal and pathogenic variation in human beings.
Personalized medicine, a widely used term since the near completion of the Human Genome Project, implies the application and use of personal genome data for the determining genomic changes leading to disease, risk factors and patient’s susceptibilities. The problem with this sort of data is that it may yield information that could severely change the life style of the person, affect relatives and, in many cases, with little ability to do anything to mitigate the effects of findings. As our current knowledge is so fragmented and rudimentary, it is expected that collected information with no current value may be relevant in the future, influencing analyses and results.
Some ethical practices currently implemented in Computational Bioethics include the creation of consent forms that allow putting anonymized patient information in genome databases. This information may be accessed by the scientific community and compared with other previously consented patient data for the characterization of new syndromes, the effect of knockout genes in the general population and the understanding of genome variation in normal individuals.
Apple’s Core Values According to its new CEO Tim Cook
March 8th, 2009 § 4 Comments
- We believe that we’re on the face of the Earth to make great products.
- We believe in the simple, not the complex.
- We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make.
- We participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.
- We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us.
- We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot.
- We don’t settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company, and we have the self-honesty to admit when we’re wrong and the courage to change.
Taken from: http://www.devdaily.com/blog/post/mac-os-x/apple-business-philosophy-mission-statement/
