Cody Taylor

In Barcelona at Mobile World Congress, the world’s biggest show on phones and other things wireless and portable, the town is bristling with parties and product launches. At Sony Ericsson’s bash, the company unveiled the code-named Idou, an iPhone-like critter with a 3.5-inch touch screen, an emphasis on entertainment, and 12.1mp camera with flash.

So will downloading YouTube videos now become as frowned upon (to put it mildly) as BitTorrent? Hard to believe that YouTube could close all the holes to downloading (there are so many ways, and many of them free, and still working, when we tried recently).

Just hours ago The Pirate Bay and Piratbyrån held a joint press conference at the Museum of Technology in Stockholm. It was broadcasted live on the web and Pirate Bay co-founders Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm spoke at length. Here is a breakdown of some of the key points.

Security and privacy have become so compromised that many experts believe it is time to start over.

A little more than a month after announcing it had 150 million active users, Facebook has reached 175 million active users–the statistic the social-networking site prefers to use, rather than registered accounts overall.

Hugh Pickens writes “Episteme, a magazine about the social dimensions of knowledge, has a special issue on the epistemology of mass collaboration, with many of the articles focusing on Wikipedia. One of the most interesting articles is by Lawrence M. Sanger on the special role of experts in the age of Wikipedia. Sanger says the main reason that Wikipedia’s articles are as good as they are is that they are edited by knowledgeable people to whom deference is paid, although voluntarily, but that some articles suffer precisely because there are so many aggressive people who ‘guard’ articles and drive off others (PDF), including people more expert than they are. ‘Without granting experts any authority to overrule such people, there is no reason to think that Wikipedia’a articles are on a vector toward continual improvement,’ writes Sanger. Wikipedia’s success cannot be explained by its radical egalitarianism or its rejection of expert involvement, but instead by its freedom, openness, and bottom-up management and there is no doubt that many experts would, if left to their own devices, dismantle the openness that drives the success of Wikipedia. ‘But the failure to take seriously the suggestion of any role of experts can only be considered a failure of imagination,’ writes Sanger. ‘One need only ask what an open, bottom-up system with a role for expert decision-making would be like.’ The rest of the articles on the epistemology of mass collaboration are available online, free for now.” Sanger was one of the founders of Wikipedia, and of its failed predecessor Nupedia, who left the fold because of differences over the question of the proper role of experts. Sanger forked Wikipedia to found Citizendium, which we have discussed on several occasions. After 2-1/2 years, Citizendium has a few tenths of a percent as many articles as Wikipedia.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jamie found this Bad Astronomy blog on the many reports beginning about 7 hours ago of one or more fireballs in the sky across Texas. That blog’s proprietor first doubted that the phenomena could be due to the satellites that collided in orbit last week, but later left the possibility open. The National Weather Service for Jackson, KY put out an announcement about possible explosions and earthquakes across the area and blamed the defunct satellites. “These pieces of debris have been causing sonic booms…resulting in the vibrations being felt by some residents…as well as flashes of light across the sky. The cloud of debris is likely the result of the recent in orbit collision of two satellites on Tuesday…February 10th when Kosmos 2251 crashed into Iridium 33.” An Austin TV station has more reports.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.