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Backing Up Android Contacts

by James Vasile

I couldn’t find any Free Software to back up my Android phone contacts list. After some stumbling around and reading a ton of instructions (none of which got me where I needed to go), I came up with a simple way to do it by hand.

Use adb shell to get to the phone, then do “su” followed by “dd if=/data/data/com.android.providers.contacts/databases/contacts.db of=/sdcard/contacts.db”.

That will put your contacts on your sdcard, where you can adb pull it with “adb pull /sdcard/contacts.db”.

Replace ‘pull’ with ‘push’ to put contacts on the sdcard, then replace if and of in the dd command to put the db back in the dir where the phone expects it.

The whole thing should be rather easily scriptable if you’re so inclined.

04 March 2010 | Comments (2)

Disaster Proofing

by James Vasile

In the wake of recent disasters in both Haiti and Chile, the lack of working telecoms infrastructure has greatly hindered local communication. The first relief workers to hit the ground had trouble talking to each other (let alone the outside world), and that was very bad for the relief effort. Inefficiencies that retard relief efforts result in more death and suffering in times of crisis.

There are two problems that contribute to broken local telecom systems. First, there wasn’t much infrastructure to begin with. Haiti is a poor nation with political risk, and like many such nations, the environment doesn’t easily support investment in large ISP infrastructure. So Haiti had some slow access, but even before the devastation, local infrastructure could not easily handle the increased demand presented by the people flooding in to help.

Second, what little access existed was not designed to withstand natural disasters. Service providers in Haiti are like commercial ISPs everywhere. They favor centralized networks that are easily maintained and controlled (and thus easily monetized). But all those profitable choke points are also centralized failure points, And those
central points of failure are tragically vulnerable at times of natural disaster.

That’s not to say the ISPs are malicious. Various telecoms companies and charities rose to the challenge and poured a lot of effort into rebuilding the local infrastructure. Their approach, though, is to do what they do best: construct big, expensive, centralized investment that will fall over quickly when stressed.

The better solution is for people to use mesh networks (ideally, to be using them even before disaster strikes), in which computers network directly with each other instead of going through the centralized ISP intermediary. Mesh networks are ad-hoc and self-healing, hop out to the world wherever a connection is found, and don’t depend on centralized choke points. If mesh networks were in place in Haiti and Chile, everybody’s laptop would be part of the communications infrastructure, and at the very least people on the ground could talk to each other. Mesh networking is a technology that could save lives.

What’s more, meshes are cheap to deploy and they don’t require centralized ISP investments. That makes them perfect for markets that aren’t supporting the investment necessary to provide the more usual centralized broadband access.

Mesh networking is maturing (see this Ars Technica state-of-the-industry piece on the subject). It’s time to make mesh capability a standard part of everybody’s setup, both to bring access to under-resourced areas and more importantly because doing so will save lives at times of crisis.

03 March 2010 | Comments (0)

Keep Your Enemies Close

by James Vasile

People join social networking sites to connect with their friends, so it’s no surprise that when they use those sites, they are friendly. It is the norm to set a fairly low bar for accepting friend requests, which is how contact lists fill up with people you barely remember from grade school, summer camp or last night.

The exception to such promiscuous networking is exes and enemies. Because inclusion in your network is so low significance, exclusion can be highly significant. You are less likely to be friends with people toward whom you have negative feelings, even if they are connected to the rest of your network.

And that is why when Google Buzz datamines your friendship map and displays a list of people you may also know, it’s quite likely to be a bunch of people you don’t want to connect to. It’s also a good illustration of how mapping friendship networks can reveal information that is not just personal but even emotionally raw.

16 February 2010 | Comments (2)

Mastermind

by James Vasile

Six years ago, while tinkering with Javascript and CSS, I made this clone of the Mastermind game as a Valentine’s day gift for my girlfriend. For some reason I can’t now remember, I licensed the entire thing under CC-By. I just stumbled across it while cleaning up old files, so here it is again. Happy V-Day, everybody.

14 February 2010 | Comments (0)

Intro to Remix Culture

by James Vasile

Julian Sanchez delivers Remix Culture 101, and gets to the point about whether we’re going to prohibit or protect these social and cultural works.

10 February 2010 | Comments (0)

You Can’t Crowdsource Software

by James Vasile

I gave a talk at Limewire last week, and my talk rambled around to crowdsourcing and Free Software. The point I made then, and the one I’m making now, is that when it comes to making software, crowdsourcing is a myth. There is no project built by a multitude of people each making a few small changes and additions to a codebase.

When I was a kid, I played Tetris until I saw falling tetraminos every time I closed my eyes. Likewise, almost every Free Software project has a few people that see code when they try to sleep. These folks make a series of big contributions, and they’re usually the source of the vast majority of productivity in the project.

The crowd, those drive-by contributors who fix one shallow bug and then disappear, have relatively little impact, even cumulatively.

Despite this, most projects recruit developers by dangling shallow bugs and todo lists of easy-to-implement features. Many even offer to help people fix those shallow bugs, just to get them involved. It’s a lot of effort, probably more effort than it takes to just squash the bugs and implement the features. The hope is that today’s drive-by bug hunter is tomorrow’s big contributor.

This model is broken. Projects spend a lot of resources to get worse code (veterans are better contributors than newcomers) and the low conversion rate means they’re rarely paid of with bigger, better, and more contributors.

People who care about Free Software efficiency might want to think about how to increase the conversion rate. More importantly, it’s time to dream up ways to get large contributors other than by slowly growing them from small ones.

04 February 2010 | Comments (6)

Eben Moglen On Freedom in the Cloud

by James Vasile

Eben Moglen is going to speak about “Freedom in the Cloud” at Friday’s meeting of the Internet Society.

  • What: ISOC-NY Public Meeting: Eben Moglen – ‘Freedom In The Cloud’
  • When: Fri. Feb 5 2010 7pm-9pm
  • Where: Room 109, Warren Weaver Hall, 251 Mercer Street NYC
  • Webcast: http://www.livestream.com/isocny

If you’ve never had the pleasure of seeing Eben drop a speech in person, do yourself a favor and attend. It’s always a treat. My only caveat is that anybody expecting Eben to make lots of references to Billy Dee Williams will probably be disappointed.

02 February 2010 | Comments (0)

Book Liberator in the News

by James Vasile

The Book Liberator got a writeup in Good magazine! I sent in hundreds of rambling words about the project, and Theo distilled them into a few pithy quotes. Thanks, Theo, for making me seem clever!

28 January 2010 | Comments (0)

The Impracticality of CC Licenses

by James Vasile

Some time in 2005, I ran into Jane Ginsburg and we fell into conversation. Professor Ginsberg is wicked smart and teaches copyright law at Columbia University. That day, she grilled me about Creative Commons licenses. We talked over the practical benefits of CC licensing versus using the public domain to share content.

I gathered from her questions that she saw CC licensing as an empty symbolic act less useful for sharing than the public domain. She couldn’t see a business model in CC licensing, so she categorized the licenses as only useful for amateurs. What’s more, she wondered why amateurs, being unlikely to ever enforce their copyrights, would get excited over licensing terms.

We struggled over these questions. I admit I didn’t do a great job of explaining the appeal of CC licenses. I kept trying to press the practical advantages, and I mostly ignored the symbolic, emotional, and aspirational values that are the foundation of the CC community.

Then, today, I read about the zero-rupee note, a piece of paper designed to have zero practical value but which holds great symbolic significance. People in India are protesting public corruption by using the valueless notes to pay bribes. The amazing thing is that it appears to be working. One sentence stands out because it rings as true for the Creative Commons as it is does for the zero-rupee note:

This last point—people knowing that they are not alone in the fight—seems to be the biggest hurdle when it comes to transforming norms

Symbols matter. Community matters. And the most important thing the Creative Commons does is transform the norms around sharing. That, more than the practical implications of the terms in the licenses, is the reason why Creative Commons is so important.

When I left Jane’s office that day in 2005, she smiled because she had pressed me on a number of issues. We had a good discussion, but I left unhappy because I hadn’t given good enough answers to change her views. I should have made my case better, and I shouldn’t have ignored that sharing is an emotional, communal act. Maybe, a few years later, I should give it another shot and do a better job this time.

26 January 2010 | Comments (1)

Digital Footprinting

by James Vasile

I wasn’t aware that audio and video were being recorded, so finding these online was a bit of a surprise. Either recording gear has gotten small and unobtrusive or I’m getting less observant. Probably both.

Those last two are available as ring tones in case you want your phone to lull you to sleep when somebody calls.

16 December 2009 | Comments (0)