In these videos, Robin Good interviews Richard Stallman about free software and the open source movement. Stallman created the GPL and the Free Software Foundation to protect the GNU operating system from becoming proprietary.

In the sequence embedded below, filmed, the founding father of open source software answers a series of questions. This interview was originally posted at MasterNewMedia.org in 2006 and features commentary and links from Robin Good.

Q: What is free software?

Q: What are the negative consequences of using proprietary software instead of free software?

Q: What free software do you recommend using?

Q: Can individuals and organizations use GNU/Linux in their daily operations?

In this Google TechTalk, Ted Nelson discusses implementing the original hypertext concept and how transclusion should be used now to fulfill its original potential.

While Nelson is credited with coining the term “hypertext, Vannevar Bush is responsible for inventing the concept, which he described as “instant cross referencing.”

As usual, we tread in the path of giants.

CommonCraft.com is already well known in the blogosphere and social media world for creating brilliant, lucid short videos that explain tricky concepts.

The two-person team that make up CommonCraft (Sachi and Lee LeFever) put it simply: they solve explanation problems.

I love that tagline. It’s rather similar sort of thing we try to do here at WhatIs.com. To that point, I’ve embedded three of CommonCraft’s previously released videos on our site, each of which explore and explain a different social media technology:

• RSS in Plain English
• Wikis in Plain English
• Social Networking in Plain English

The newest addition to the mix is a video explaining what Twitter is and how it works.

As you may know, Twitter is a popular microblogging service that launched almost exactly one year ago at the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas. While we’ve blogged about it right afterwards. Due in no small part to the high percentage of geeks and “digerati” at the festival who had the opportunity to try it out and start networking with each other, Twitter really took off. Twitter is now a leader in the “social messaging” category that includes Pownce and Jaiku, spanning the gap between our online and offline worlds. Each allows users to update a microblogging service using SMS messages, a Web interface or a desktop application. (Twitter relies on third party apps for the last based upon its APIs. Try Snitter if you have Adobe Air installed.)

CommonCraft’s video sheds worthwhile additional insight. Watch it below:

There’s plenty of interesting activity going on out there, too. Just check out this mashup of Twitter, Google Maps and live election results for intriguing insights into the 2008 presidential primary season.

And if you’d like to find/follow me on Twitter, head over to http://twitter.com/digiphile.

There’s no question that living in Cambridge and writing about technology has its benefits. The city is swimming in startups, geeky events and plugged-in discussions.

Last month, I was lucky enough to score an invitation to a Q&A session with two distinguished MIT physicists focused upon the theoretical underpinnings of teleportation , followed by a roundtable discussion that brought in with “Jumper” director Doug Liman and Anakin Skywalker himself, Hayden Christiansen. The movie will be in wide release tomorrow, so I thought it would be timely to offer a comment or two concerning this confluence of fact and fiction.

You know you’re in a special place when professors receive enthusiastic applause comparable to the reception given to a Hollywood director and bonafide heart throb movie star. That being said, Hayden was clearly the focus of considerable adoration, expressed at his entrance and in more than one invitation to dates and afterparties.

Serious students of quantum physics are going have to employ the classic “willing suspension of disbelief” to fully embrace this picture. In other words, when questioned, both Dr. Edward Farhi and Dr. Max Tegmark kindly but firmly ruled out the possibility of human teleportation any time in the near future. The current state of this branch of science is exciting, however, given that experiments have successfully teleported the properties of photons over a distance. This sort of quantum teleportation relies on “quantum entanglement“, whereby the properties of two particles can be tied together even when they are far apart, a phenomenon Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.”

I managed to capture the presentations of Professor Tegmark and Farhi on the physics of teleportation on my webcam and stream it on uStream. My apologies: The quality of both the audio and video is regrettably poor. Still, I’m happy to share. Jumper’s plot relies on a staple of science fiction, however, not fact: genetic mutation. In other words, some evolved version of CERN’s large hadron collider or a hitherto undiscovered means of stabilizing worm holes powered by cold fusion is not at at the heart of the film. Some people are born with the ability to teleport from one place to another. Off to the races.

Mr. Liman’s direction of Swingers, Go and the Bourne Identity , however, recommends taking a chance on his vision of the moral and ethical challenges presented to someone with the power to teleport at will. I found his willingness to research what the event would actually look and sound like was impressive, particularly the collapse of air into the vacuum left by the removal of a body. He said he fell in love with the script when he read that the first action of the character upon discovering his power was to rob a bank.

For more coverage of the event, check out:

• Doug Overbye’s “Quantum Teleporting, Yes; The Rest is Movie Magic” in the New York Times
• Jess K’s hilarious blog post, Hayden Christensen Comes to MIT, Looks Pretty, for some perspective from a current MIT student
• Sharon Gaudin’s “Teleportation: The leap from fact to fiction in new movie Jumper“
• Jim Rapoza’s “Hollywood Jumps to MIT” at Emerging Tech

Following is the trailer, if you’ve somehow missed it theaters, on TV or elsewhere on the Web.

UPDATE: I’ve gotten some anecdotal feedback that “Jumper” isn’t exactly Citizen Kane. RottenTomatoes.com has delivered a dire rating of 15% while imdb.com users are being considerably kinder with a rating of 6.4/10.  That being said, the film raking in $27.2 million at the box office this past weekend, so tastes may be for forgiving out and about.

Permanence is both fleeting and intractable on the Internet. In the print world, once the newspaper, magazine or book has been proofed and fact-checked to the point where the law of diminishing returns kicks in, the final product is just that.

Online, “stop the presses” just doesn’t cut it. It’s a nearly universal experience to have clicked “send” before the message or attachment is ready for its audience — or post, in the age of the blogosphere, YouTube and Twitter. And it’s not just novice users that wish they had thought twice before responding or composing their thoughts. Part of the job here at WhatIs.com is always making sure that our copy and links are accurate and working, whether you find our content though this blog, within our definitions or learning content or in any of the new media types that have appeared on the site over the past few years, like podcasts, embedded videos or screencasts.

Earlier today, unfortunately, came one of the moments that editors cringe to admit, where a grammatical rule was broken and a wild card character made its way into one of the few remaining digital media forms that can’t be recalled: the email newsletter. Once it goes out of the mail server, there’s no calling your words back. WhatIs.com sends out a Word of the Day newsletter (Subscribe ere), each weekday, chosen from among the thousands of IT-related terms in the database. Our editors write three questions to go along with the term, usually written to match whatever the theme of the term might be — mobile computing, open source, SAP, CRM or perhaps whatever major tech events has occurred recently.

The three categories of tech trivia include:

• a Secret Word of the Day, where we describe a term without naming it
• an IT Acronym Challenge, where we test your ability to make sense of the alphabet soup
• and a Daily Tech Trivia question, which can be about nearly anything related to technology or current events

Today’s Word of the Day was BotHunter, which meant that our questions centered on security and threat management. The final question should have read as follows:

In IT security, AAA means more than roadside assistance. A AAA server is a server program that handles user requests for access to computer resources and “AAA” services. What do the three A’s stand for in AAA server?
Answer

When I originally wrote the question, I heard “triple A” in my head when I read AAA, a symptom of depending on a certain highway assistance service for decades. In the context of IT security, however, AAA is pronounced by saying each letter separately, or “Ay Ay Ay,” spelling out the acronym. That means that “an” is correct, not “a” as I wrote in the newsletter, just as it is in our definition for AAA server. My apologies to you, dear reader, for the mistake.

If you’re further interested in the correct pronunciation for some of the most commonly mispronounced terms in IT, make sure to consult our guide, How do you pronounce IT? You can see the correct phonics and hear the word spoken aloud by yours truly. Leave us a voice message if you disagree, approve or want to add to the list.

It’s been quite a week for wonders of the world. First, the online world got together and voted for seven modern wonders of the world, provoked by the lonely status of the Pyramids as the last remaining example of the ancient wonders. (For those that love these kinds of lists, Wonderclub.com has put together their own indices of global wonders, including ancient, modern and natural versions.)

My eye was drawn, however, to this list of programming languages from Code to Joy, where computer scientist, philosopher and cyberscriber M. Easter has “compiled” his own, “admittedly biased,” list of languages. In chronological order, here are the languages that the digital composer thought were the seven wonders of the coding world:

1. Fortan
2. Lisp
3. Smalltalk
4. C
   
5. Python
6. Java
7. Javascript

Now, no doubt many of you are already grumbling. What about C++, Visual Basic, COBOL, Perl or APL? What about the sexy new kid on the block, Ruby? What about PHP, ubiquitous on the Linux servers that underpin today’s database-driven Internet?

Several comments on Easter’s post have already listed those examples, protesting Easter’s choices, along with .NET, Forth, SKILL, Objective-C, Haskell and others. As usual, everyone has an opinion — especially on a rather subjective subject like this.

Whew! Editing a list like this isn’t easy, of course, and it’s much easier to criticize than create. What do you think? When you look at the history of code, as illustrated in this exceptional diagram of the evolution of programming languages (hat tip to M) which do you think are “wonders of the programming world?”

What would your list look like?

My own line in the sand, in case you were wondering, would (in no particular order) reads follows:

1. Javascript
2. Java
3. C
4. Ruby
5. COBOL
6. Perl
7. Python

Agree? Disagree? Think the whole thing is preposterous? Comment away.

Throughout the years I’ve been writing and editing on WhatIs, I don’t think there’s been another issue that’s cropped up as often or been as gnarly to try to settle as the question of whether a person who attacks computers and networks is a hacker or a cracker.

Just about everyone but the serious geeks uses hacker to mean an attacker but anytime we do we get notes from readers to the effect that a malicious hacker is a cracker and a hacker is just someone with mad computer skills. Furthermore, they feel that we should be upholding proper usage and not letting standards slide. On the other hand, when we’ve used “cracker,” we often get notes asking if we don’t mean “hacker” and suggesting that we might want to think about using the same term everone else does.

I’ll admit I’ve often tried to skirt the issue by using “attacker.” But the time comes when an editor has to take a stand. Especially in the wake of several years of wishy-washy, indeterminate indecision. So. Decision time. Let’s see what everyone else says…

Wikipedia has a fairly extensive entry for hacker. The article starts out by defining a hacker as “a person who illegally breaks into computer and network systems” but links to a better page for hacker definition controversy.

Alpha hacker Eric S. Raymond weighs in authoritatively on the topic in his article, How to become a hacker:

There is another group of people who loudly call themselves hackers, but aren’t. These are people (mainly adolescent males) who get a kick out of breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers call these people ‘crackers’ and want nothing to do with them. Real hackers mostly think crackers are lazy, irresponsible, and not very bright, and object that being able to break security doesn’t make you a hacker any more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. Unfortunately, many journalists and writers have been fooled into using the word ‘hacker’ to describe crackers; this irritates real hackers no end.

The basic difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break them.

There’s much more in Raymond’s FAQ-style article, including:

The Hacker Attitude

1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.

2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.

3. Boredom and drudgery are evil.

4. Freedom is good.

5. Attitude is no substitute for competence.

On the other hand, you can also find support for the use of hacker as a synonym for cracker. According to wordorigins.org, that usage goes back to the November 20, 1963 issue of The Tech, the M.I.T. student paper, where it was used to refer to breaking into the phone system:

There are those that claim that hacker should not mean someone who maliciously invades computer systems, and that it really means someone proficient in computer use. But this is not the history of the term. Hacking from its beginnings at M.I.T. has always been associated with using technology to subvert institutional systems for personal use. Besides, the meanings of words are determined by usage, not etymology. So if people use hacker to mean someone who breaks into computer systems, that’s what it means.

So, the way I see it, there are a number of fairly compelling arguments for either side, chief among them being:

• Eric Raymond says a hacker is defined by skill and good intention. And everybody loves Eric Raymond.
• The earliest reference to skill-based, non-malicious technology hacking that I could find traces it back to ham radio operators in the fifties, predating the MIT paper cited on wordorigins.
• However, as wordorigins correctly points out, common use is what drives definition. So if people use hacker to mean cracker, eventually that’s what it will mean.
• And yet… cracker is unambiguous. If one uses cracker in this context, people get it. So if we use “hacker” to mean a highly computer-literate geek and “cracker” to mean an attacker of whatever skill level…

Sigh. ‘Round and round and round it goes. I’m just not sure. I’d love some input. What do you think? ~ Ivy Wigmore

Welcome to “pro-am journalism,” “an attempt to bring together professional writers and editors with citizen journalists to collaborate on reporting and writing about the rise of crowdsourcing on the Web. Inspired by the open source movement, the goal of Assignment Zero is to develop a working model of an open newsroom.” [Full Press Release]
AssigmentZero is bankrolled by Wired and led by Executive Director Jay Rosen, founder of NewAssignment.net and NYU journalism professor. If reporting in this proposed “open style” works, according to Rosen, it could “change journalism and expand what’s humanly possible with the instrument of a free press.” You can read Jay’s full essay on the subject here. The project has also partnered with citizen journalism site Newsvine with an eye to engaging that site’s users and involve them in selected assignments. “Essentially, we’re building a software platform for journalism 2.0 — open source and extensible – which we believe will bring new dimensions of creativity to news gathering.” said Evan Hansen, Editor in Chief, Wired News.

Jeff Howe, who we interviewed about crowdsourcing earlier this year, will be drawing from the project for his upcoming book on the subject. Make sure you check out our crowdsourcing podcast if you missed it the first time around.

A new messaging service has gained some real traction in the blogosphere and offline among the “digerati,” though to be fair most of those coders, writers and futurists are rarely truly offline anymore. Just look at how often they are creating “tweets” with Twitter.
While Twitter was born as a side project within the offices of Odeo in March of 2006, it’s taken adoption by A-list bloggers like Robert Scoble and Steve Rubel to raise the profile — and usage — of the tool. Twitter allows members to effectively “lifestream,” constantly providing details, mundane and trivial as they may be, of their daily lives. One user, David Troy, created an extraordinary mashup Google Maps and Twitter, Twittervision, which tracks “tweets” in real-time on a global scale, moving from one post to the next.

Twitter, along with its founders, was recently profiled in the New York Times’ Business section, along with the service, in “From Many Tweets, One Loud Voice on the Internet.” Jason Pontin, the author of the article, described Twitter as :

“…a heady mixture of messaging; social networking of the sort associated with Web sites like MySpace; the terse, jittery personal revelations of “microblogging” found on services like Jaiku; and something called “presence,” shorthand for the idea that people should enjoy an “always on” virtual omnipresence. “

As Jason points out, Twitter is currently one of the fastest growing trends on the Internet. Adoption really took off after the 2007 South by Southwest Music, Film and Interactive Conference (SXSW) which was absolutely saturated with Twittering. And it’s not just bloggers and new media mavens — U.S. presidential candidate John Edwards is using Twitter as he moves around the country.

What is Twitter? It’s a simple service with an Ajax-y Web presence that allows users to share where they are, what they’re doing and how they can be contacted. You can post to Twitter using SMS, much like Blogger or other tools. The difference is that the platform then sends those posts to a group of subscribers (friends, clients, family) by phone alerts and to your channel on Twitter. Users can turn off mobile alerts if they like — an important feature, judging from the feedback that, for some, Twitter is rather addictive. The service is currently free, though interested parties should check with their mobile telephony providers regarding SMS charges, which are certain to rise with greater use.

Twitter is part of Obvious Corporation in San Francisco, California. For up-to-date info about Twitter, make sure to visit the Twitter blog.

Tweet, tweet!

Channel 9 is a discussion forum used to promote conversations among Microsoft’s customers, hosted by Microsoft, featuring video interviews with developers, podcasts, forums and a wiki. More than twenty different podcasts and IPTV shows are available for download and subscription as well.

According to the first video ever posted on the site, the name “Channel 9″ was chosen after the on-board channel #9 on airplanes. When the flight crew turns on Channel 9, passengers can listen to cockpit conversations. The metaphor makes sense in describing a forum between developers and users — and both the site and the name stuck. Microsoft’s application development teams use Channel 9 as a platform for aggregating user feedback and responding to it, publishing production notes and occasionally posting quirky videos like a “Hitchhiker’s Guide to Microsoft.” You can learn more about the story of Channel 9 by watching this video or reading the Channel 9 Doctrine.