OLDaily

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics.

Copyright Industry Wants To Apply Automated Blocking To The Internet’s Core Routers
TechDirt, 2024/12/30

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Glyn Moody writes, "A central theme of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) and this blog is that the copyright industry is never satisfied. Now matter how long the term of copyright, publishers and recording companies want more." Thus their latest land grab: the internet's core routers. Writes Moody: "it's a terrible precedent. It means that blocking – and thus censorship – can be applied automatically, possibly without judicial oversight, to some of the most fundamental parts of the Internet's plumbing." Needless to say I think that this would be a bad idea.

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Knowledge Commons Works
Knowledge Commons, 2024/12/30

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"Friends don't let friends use academia-dot-edu," writes Kathleen Fitzpatrick. The same goes for Research Gate. These services are based on collecting academic content and then making it hard to access. What they really want you to do is 'upgrade to premium'. Hence the need for this service: "open access, community governed, and free to all - and permits downloads without requiring a login." I need to figure out how to make it work best with this newsletter.

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Computing, You Have Blood on Your Hands!
Moshe Y. Vardi, Communications of the ACM, 2024/12/30

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The Slashdot thread that discusses this story has all the commentary you would need on it. Specifically, the author blames computing for: hate on Twitter, anti-Rohingya content, a youth mental health crisis in the U.S., negative behaviours like bullying and exclusion, and body image issues. As one /. commenter says, the title needs to be fixed: "Blaming Media, ACM Publication Argues Media 'Has Blood On Its Hands'." As someone who was around before social media, I can attest that none of these is unique to the computer age. Mass media proliferated hate and misinformation as efficiently as any computer network. The only difference is that it has been democratized; it is no longer a corporate and state monopoly. As the other articles today show, though, companies and governments are working hard to regain that monopoly. Via Apostolos Koutropoulos.

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When AI summaries replace hyperlinks, thought itself is flattened | Aeon Essays
Colin Jennings, Aeon, 2024/12/30

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This article is mostly a history of associationism, the philosophy based on Hume's philosophy that knowedge is based on a (non-logical) association of ideas and impressions. It connects Larry Page's Page Rank algorithm that powered Google search with this long tradition spanning from Locke to Hume to Mill to Freud to modern theories of knowledge management. I, too, am an associationist, and the AI machines that underlie large language models like ChatGPT are based on associationist principles. How ironic, then, that Google seems to be trying to eliminate associationism from the web by eliminating the link. It's what media companies do (note how few links there are in this article about linking) to keep control over the product and the consumer. Via Alan Levine.

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Xbox Game Streaming Still Down After 24 Hours, Reminding Us That Your Phone Isn't Actually An Xbox
Zack Zwiezen, Kotaku, 2024/12/30

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These words strike fear into my heart: "Your phone is your ticket." What that means is that this thing I bought cannot be used if the company server - in this case, Ticketmaster - isn't working properly. That's why it took me hours of struggle to but and access my tickets to a hockey game over the weekend. Microsoft, too, is turning this thing you bought - in this case, a computer game - into something you depend on its servers to provide. And in this case, it was down for more than a day over the holiday weekend. Large centralized streaming networks are a single point of often-failing failure, Yet companies love them, because they give the company complete control over the product.

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I’m Tired of Pretending Physical Media Isn’t Still Better Than Streaming Digital
Sabina Graves, Gizmodo, 2024/12/30

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I'm not going to disagree that physical media is better - as long as you have a player, and aren't blocked by faulty DRM, then you (sort of in a non-technical way) 'own' the media, and can play it at a higher quality than streaming services whenever you want. Of course, people forget how much physical costs. Each movie or album will cost you as much as a month of streaming, which means you get to 'own' a tiny fraction of what's out there. To entertain yourself for even a couple of hours a day with physical media would cost, I don't know, $600 a month? Don't get me wrong - I think we are being ripped off by streaming media companies. But no more than we were being ripped off by traditional media companies. What would be best is fully downloadable media we can store on our own physical media. But this, of course, is the one option no company wants to support. Via Ben Werdmuller.

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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