Driving from Vegas to Grand Canyon.

Just before the entrance to the historical 66 lightning started and shortly after a strong rain. The amazing thing was a rainbow – throughout the whole sky, just above the highway, from one mountain to another… And the sky around it – light gold on the left and pastel pink on the right… We stopped the car and took some pictures. It was so spectacular, that the side of the highway started to be filled up with cars. One by one people pulled off, got out of their cars and took pictures or just stood and watched the sky…

Shortly after it started getting dark; it’s amazing how early it gets dark around here. The dusk starts around 6 pm and in the beginning you think it’s just because of the heavy clouds, because the sky between them is really light. You just remove your sunglasses and keep them on your head ready to put back any minute. But by 6.30 pm you suddenly realize that your headlight went on and you see the stars. Then you ask yourself a questing how come stars are so bright just to be hit by a sudden realization that they are bright and sharp on the absolutely black desert sky!

The back mirrors become completely useless – it’s so dark and you so completely alone as far as you can see and you are even wondering sometimes if you actually have any mirrors at all!

For miles and miles there was nothing but darkness and the road in front of you, as far as your headlights are slicing it from the desert. According to the guide the nice place for a dinner and a room would we in Truxstone, except that GPS had no idea where it is. Which was ok, such as it was supposed to be along the road just 10 miles after Valentino. We haven t really noticed Valentino as such, but there was a road sign with the name, which was good enough as an indicator.

So, right 10 miles further, as promised, there was a place called “frontier cafe” indeed, with its famous pies. Great place indeed! You really have the feeling you are back into the far west, small simple pub house on the left, low and friendly looking motel houses on the right, quietness and peaceful, just a lonely cat walking on her own business and paying you a short busy look and a couple of crickets somewhere in the dark… That and the fact that the place was closed… Until Monday. It is open every day from 8 am till 8 pm, except… Saturday, when it closes at 2 pm. And Sunday, when it’s just closed. This messed our plans a bit such as it was in fact the last place mentioned in the guide for miles to come. Miles in the total dark. In the desert. Well, there was another one in the old Indian village further away, but not very clear where. We didn’t have much choice but to hope to find it…

JC took over the driving and we continued the trip. For like about 5 minutes. Then there was a dog, in the middle of the street sniffing on something, far away in front; then a bit closer; then not that far at all! I know JC hates it when I do it, but I screamed anyway. Apparently just in time, because he didn’t see it. He just got a couple of meters to deviate to the left and he managed to avoid it. The dog didn’t look very concerned at all. JC was, and pulled aside. Then the car behind us stopped as well. I was worried that they hit the dog and damaged their car, so we went to check if they were fine. Maybe a bit stupid, I realized walking to that car in the desert, blinded by its front lights and having no idea who will great me there, in what mood, and does he have a gun? Trying to look friendly and natural and keeping my hands where they can see them I approached the driver’s window and said “hi, folks, are you ok?” and a silent “please don’t shoot me!” the window went down and a scared old Indian lady looked at me with eyes filled with fear and cried “I am so scared, what was it?” I explained it was just a dog, they obviously didn’t hit it and it was all right. The Indian guy went to look for a dog, didn’t find it and scared the lady even more because the place was full with police and they would ask questions. Have no idea why? In any case, we tried to calm her and two other ladies down and wished them safe ride.

Strange night! Desert, stars, black dog on the road, and a car full of native Americans. It felt like weird Castaneda story.

Anyhow, we found next hotel, had great meal, checked in a nice room, I just took a nice hot shower and am going to sleep. The place is Indian, of course with a marble bathroom and a high speed Wi-Fi connection. But no alcohol served and no GSM reception. Strange place Arizona! I love it!

ACTA – ‘The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement’ is a proposed plurilateral agreement for the purpose of establishing international standards on intellectual property rights enforcement.

ACTA would establish a new international legal framework that would create its “own governing body outside existing international institutions” such as – the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) or the United Nations.

An open letter signed by many organizations, including Consumers International, EDRi (27 European civil rights and privacy NGOs), the Free Software Foundation (FSF), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), ASIC (French trade association for web 2.0 companies), and the Free Knowledge Institute (FKI), states that “the current draft of ACTA would profoundly restrict the fundamental rights and freedoms of European citizens, most notably the freedom of expression and communication privacy.”

I have been on Facebook for a while now and it seems like there are a lot of people out there who are also using this global social network website (750 millions at last counts). It is fair to say that even if it is falling short of some requirements (privacy) and expectation that some may have, it became one of if not the phenomenon of this decade. Mark has been very productive in the last few years and came up with some ideas on how this little baby of his should be.

From the closed college network to the global worldwide reach that it has now, Facebook has managed to gather a crowd of people that would deliberately give their private information so that they could be interacting with other friends using the same website. What is the initial attraction or the reason you were forced to get on it, it does not really matter; in the end you ended up pouring your data into it.

The one aspect that is slowly crawling out of this global user database is the notion of Real ID. And to most the lambda users this does not mean much as they do not see the point of using anything else but their real first and last name as well as other personal information on this website. After all, what would be the point of not showing that this is “me”, I would not be able to connect to my friends then and they would not be able to find me or interact with me?

And that’s how it all started, the initial requirement to connect to Facebook was to have an email address form the university in order to connect, this ensured that all the users where unique and they would be who they said they are. This created a fixed and reliable base of users that would then send invitation to their friends that they would know and thus increasing the reliability of the initial database. The fact that you can now open an account on Facebook with any name or email address does not really matter, because the large majority of the users are who they claim to be offline.

Then the concept of “connect with Facebook” appeared, a simple API that one could use on a website and that would enable you to use Facebook as your login and password to website and thus avoid the creation of a profile every time you want to be identified on some forum or write a comment somewhere.

This is a first step and it will be quickly be followed by another one, the possibility to use your profile as an identifier for online payment, a bit like paypal but with a lot more information linked to it. This would reinforce both the uniqueness of the user and the fidelity to Facebook. There is already a credit system that has been implemented for in-games such as farmville and from there a link with your credit card information is not far fetched.

However that is not what can be seen as the last step, you see a RealID is more than just a way to make login and online payment easier, it is also an international and up to date passport, with your personal information, your picture, your tastes and most importantly your friend network. If somehow everyone on the internet ends up with a RealID and you have made your profile private, you are still in the system, and it can still be used to give you access to websites and make payments. What would prevent Facebook from using this information to provide some others sort of service, like profiling data to use by paying customer?

The obvious case is targeted marketing where the data is used to try to sell you good or services that correspond to your profile, the advertising on your screen would be only what interests you and the product would look at your age rage, friends, relationships, history, family, holiday location, drinks, movies, hobbies even job and colleagues… But that is already in place, and Google is on the same track with the data they can collect from your emails and google+. That is what they are also trying to accomplish and there is no point in trying to deny it. However, since the human mind is twisted, let’s see what we can come up with if we push the envelope.

Let’s say that you want to apply somewhere for a job, you’d have a choice to login using your Facebook ID to fill in your application online or send it by the old mail or even better, a pigeon. The result would be that people would probably use their Facebook ID to log on. Then in the background, a service build by Facebook runs a check on you, on your friend list, the comments you posted, the pictures where you’ve been tagged.  This is compared to some predefined criteria and taken into account and even before your posted profile is filed to the company, your application can be rejected by the systems.

The HR resource does not even see the reason why the application is refused; on their end they just gave the criteria to Facebook to filter results according to their “company policy”. The check is done in the background and the result is a simple accepted or refused. A fee would be requested to companies using this service allowing you to pre-select candidates.

Of course this would probably kill Facebook or Google right on the spot if they allow such a use of personal data for discrimination purposes. However this type of check must already be done for some sensitive position such as government security or politically sensitive jobs.

However the concept of a real ID on the web can make sense for a lot of services and has been in the work for a while with the Open ID initiative. The concept is to provide a single log in and password that would work on multiple web site however there would just be a minimum amount of personal data attached to this ID. It is obvious what is the problem is with this one, you can have as many open ID as you want thus making the uniqueness of these IDs highly questionable.

Google is trying to request people to use their real name on google+ to prevent multiple profile from being created, it has not been welcomed by most of the defendant of personal privacy and I can understand why to some extend.

I am certain that one day we will all have a unique or at least as far as acceptable, unique ID system that will be used on the internet and will enable us to go to any online shop, forum, cloud storage and other services requiring to provide a unique identifier to grant you access to your data. This real ID should however remain impersonal and only used by you. You may display whatever name or pseudo you want on those site.

Imagine if you could be sure that you can block one spammer for good on your incoming mailbox, whatever email address he or she  is using, or that you can be sure that the items your are selling to someone on craigslist are to someone you trust because you know it is the same person as the one on eBay. When you are purchasing an application or a game, no need to input a key in or to have it attached only to a single machine, you can just use your RealID during the purchase and it would be automatically be valid the moment you log on. You don’t need to know who the users are or what they look like or how they are feeling in the morning, just that this particular user is not the same as the other one.

Maybe that could happen with the IPv6 where each one of us would receive a unique IP for ourselves this would be allocated to the machine we are on, the moment we use our RealID to log on… or something along those line. It should not be compulsory to access information and the it should remain remain as anonimous as possible if the user wants to.

That last point is the one that is causing all the problem in the current discussions. What happens in countries where free speech is not allowed? The moment a RealID is imposed, there is no way for those people to post, write, comment on anything that the regime would consider illegal and that would result in them beeing persecuted for. Therefore the option should remain possible not to use this RealID system and just make it a very attractive option to use with the possible signs that this or this user is using RealID but some others don’t. Not an easy task but one that has been growing in a box for a long time and just starts to crawl out.

So, for the time beeing the RealID concept is still fragmented and until it is unified into a single all purpose standard, this question will remain open. I would be using it for the conveniences that I mentioned before but I wouldn’t wand to be tagged and followed whatever I do or say on the web. Same as real life, if I apply for a loan I’ll give you my ID to check my credit rate, if I ask for direction in the street, you don’t need to know I’m a fan of DaftPunk and that I enjoy eating chocolate while watching Games of Thrones…

We would like to more particularly thank our witnesses and  my sister who have all been very helpful before and during the whole day. But again thank you all for making this day a very special one!!!

So first a little cocktail party with some colleagues and then a full blown roman arena fights with your friends.

That was how my sweetheart celebrated her last birthday and with a little visit from her dad to crown the day it was really was worth an empire ;-)

This happened at an ATM in Brussels belonging to then BKCP bank. I wonder where the reset button is…

After those two days in France we took the car to drive back and stopped to a hotel on Sunday night to spend the night and enjoy the “wellness” center that they have on Monday. Aside from the fact that we were the only customer that they had that night, I can honestly tell you that it was worth it, sauna, swimming, pool, nice breakfast and lunch. Overall, the whole 3 days have been absolutely great.

After looking for almost an hour for a place to park the car, that is also part the Paris city life, we spent a good restful night at the hotel that I had found online. We had typical french break-fast the next day in a cafe not too far from where we stayed, with bread and croissants that you can only find in France.

The rest of the day we spent in Louvre where we where surrounded by ancient Egyptian, Roman and Greek artifacts. A little trip to the other side of the building gave us a chance to peek at the Mona Lisa, always very popular, and finish by exploring what remains of Napoleon III apartments. Overall, a very nice week end.

I admire Francis Ford Coppola as a producer of some very influential movies like the Godfather, Apocalypse now, Dracula, Sleepy Hollow, Lost in Translation and the Good Shepherd. But I have gained even more admiration from the interview he gave on the99percent.com where he is putting some things back in context to further fuel the current crusade that is currently taking place on the internet today.

How does an aspiring artist bridge the gap between distribution and commerce?
We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.

This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?

In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it.

I don’t say that I agree but it certainly deserve credit from a producer as talented as he is to actually look at the current state of the industry and just ask if we should not just go back to basics instead of trying to develop this model further than where it is at the risk of making it lose its initial purpose, entertain us.