Originally published at Lemmingworks. You can comment here or there.
Matrixsynth: SynthLab for the XO - One Laptop Per Child Project & OLPC News: This is OLPC Learning Club Dedication! & OLPC News: G1G1 Canadians Are Humans, With Kids Too.
No OLPCs for canada until after the holidays 
Lucky for me I have american income. so I might get a tax deduction.
Originally published at Lemmingworks. You can comment here or there.
Sousveillance makes Popular Mechanics in: Surveillance Camera Rights - Glenn Reynolds Op-Ed - Watching the Watchers. This is great, as Steve, Barry and I have a chapter coming out on the topic in the new year.
Originally published at Lemmingworks. You can comment here or there.
For immediate release:
Operation Python (O.P.) Stops Skim Scams (SSS)
Many of us have been victims of “skimming”, when sales staff, waiters, or waitresses illegally skim an extra copy of our credit card. Some of the more sophisticated skim scams are perpetrated by store managers, and even higher-level officials within large organizations.
Although the credit card companies often re-imburse us for this lost money, ultimately it costs us all — customers and merchants alike — by way of increased credit card fees. Recently we’ve noticed some merchants starting to charge a higher price if you buy something with a credit card.
But working together, we can prevent crime with OP (Operation Python) that Stops Skim Scams (SSS, pronounced with a hiss).
It’s easy to join OP — all you need is a camera — any kind of camera. Since many of us have cameraphones, we use them to Shoot Down Skimming. In summary:
We Document all our credit card purchases: ——————————————
By photographing everyone who handles our credit cards, we’re collecting potential evidence that MIGHT be of later benefit to law enforcement and credit card manufacturers.
But hopefully our photographs are like fire extinguishers — important in the event the unthinkable happens, but we all hope we never have to use them!
OP as prevention: —————–
Join OP and spread the word!
Print out this press release or any of the other materials on our website, http://glogger.mobi/op or http://glogger.mobi/sss and spread it widely. We often hand out a copy to each of the staff that we photograph, so that they (1) know why we took their picture; and (2) hopefully they, like many others, will join OP and begin to photograph all of the people that handle their credit cards.
Organizations that issue corporate cards or organization purchasing cards can encourage (or even require) their employees or members to document all purchases made with the company or organization’s cards.
Sousveillance: ————–
We all know what surveillance means — it’s a French word formed form “veiller” which means “to watch”, and “sur” which means “from above”. Small portable recording devices have given us the growning phenomenon of sousveillance. The French word “sous” means “from below”, so “sousveillance” means “to watch from below”. When you join O.P., you’re probably in a store, restaurant, gas station, or the like, that’s under surveillance, i.e. you’re being watched by the staff who are being watched by their manager who is being watched by their head office, etc., all the way up the hierarchy. But we all know that “The customer is the King”, so shouldn’t we customers be doing some watching too? With sousveillance, we finally have a balanced world in which the “watching” goes both ways, up and down the fluidly varying organizational charts that make up our supply chains. This is not a twentieth century “us versus them” battle. One minute you yourself might be a staff member being photographed, but when you go on break to buy your lunch you become King (customer) and hopefully take a shot at reducing crime yourself.
Don’t forget that December 24th — the biggest shopping day of the year in many countries — is World Sousveillance Day (WSD).
Take a shot at stopping skimming! Working together we can stop crime!
### –30–
Operation PYTHON: —————–
P.Y.T.H.O.N.
PhotographicallY
Your
Trusted
Humanitarian
Observer
Newsgatherer
Possible words for the P.Y.T.H.O.N. acronym; welcome other suggestions:
P: Photographic, Preventative, …
Y: Your, …
T: Tactful Telling Tangible Technique Teleconference Telephone Televised Tenacious Trusted
H: Homeland Honesty Helpful Horizontal Humanitarian
O: Oasis Observer
N: Nation Natural Near Necessity Negotiate Newsgathering
Originally published at Lemmingworks. You can comment here or there.
This is a great little article on OLPC: OLPC struggles to realize ambitious vision - washingtonpost.com. It highlights what I’ve always thought was a flaw in the program: organizing the project through governments. I know there are many people working with governments who have vision and insight, JuliaD comes to mind, but in general the institution of government is beset by LCD mentalities (lowest common denominator). In Ontario we used to have the Unisys Icon computer
(Unisys ICON - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia); a technology that kept me out of educational computing until it died and went away. The article notes how windows/intel is selling when OLPC is not. And why? Some references note that teaching people with windows will help them enter the workforce faster… no doubt getting them into service positions that will soon marginalize them. The old adage to give someone a fish and you feed them for a day, teach someone to fish and you feed them for life fits with information technology. Teach someone to use a program and you forever enslave them to a system. Teach someone to program and you free them to create new worlds. I think OLPC scares governments because they’re profoundly ignorant of technology. I think OLPC excites people who are not ignorant of technology because they can see the potential to disrupt a hegemonic system of control over information and technology. There’s no question, I do not think that the OLPC is perfect. I’m no evangelist. OLPC smacks of MIT hubris, and I don’t mind them getting smacked down because of it. I will take MIT’s hubris over Microsoft/Intel’s any day (though I’d take either of their support or funding for my projects, to be honest).
JuliaD and I (and others) talked about zero cost computing for a number of years, and it is still a goal: create a computer that can be dropped from an airplane (delivering more crucial aid such as water purification tools and shelter), frozen, left in the sun, rained on, etc. Ensure that it will function in someone’s own first language, even if they are not literate in that language. And it should cost nothing, relatively speaking.
It is a goal. OLPC is a step in the right direction. The other alternatives I’ve seen are a step backwards. That’s about all I have to say about it.
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