httpvh://youtu.be/B45CQQTGJUc

There’s been a lot of talk in the (tech) media about the future of education being online, especially in the form of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). So far, I haven’t looked closely due to not enough interest and/or time, but I did fall over an interesting one on edX today and looked a bit closer. edX has an impressive list of schools and partners listed, so it much be good, right? The course description pages have a nice summary sidebar, with school, start date, course length, estimated effort in hours per week, and prerequisites, but does not mention the price. While the price actually is well-hidden half-way through the page, I at this point assumed I had to sign up before seeing the price. During this process, there is not only a Terms and Conditions, but also a Privacy Policy and an Honor Code, as the usual click-through bullets in any webpage these days. I did wonder about the Honor Code though and had a click glance. It includes wonderful titbits like this:

EdX reserves the right to modify these TOS at any time without advance notice

My interest was spiked. It continues:

Any changes to these TOS will be effective immediately upon posting on this page, with an updated effective date. By accessing the Site after any changes have been made, you signify your agreement on a prospective basis to the modified TOS and all of the changes

Aha! Not only do I have to give a carte blanche to whatever they feel like to write in there in the future without telling me, but also after reading the new terms, I already accepted them as I had to access the site to find out about them. Catch 22.

Another glance a bit further down the page, I noticed I had to grant edX a license. Interesting I thought, let’s find out. Anyone remember the hot water Facebook found itself in a while back?

License Grant to edX. By submitting or distributing your User Postings, you hereby grant to edX a worldwide, non-exclusive, transferable, assignable, sub licensable, fully paid-up, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to host, transfer, display, perform, reproduce, modify, distribute, re-distribute, relicense and otherwise use, make available and exploit your User Postings, in whole or in part, in any form and in any media formats and through any media channels (now known or hereafter developed).

Clearly, that’s a lot broader than what’s needed for the operation of the site where users’ comments are shared between other users and instructors.

Needless to say, I stopped reading here, not even bothering with the TOC or Privacy Policy. Next time a reporter goes raving that MOOCs are the greatest thing invented since sliced bread, solving everything from the bored life of university professors to literacy and poverty in the 3rd world, point them to the small print. At a $250 fee and those kinds of legalese, it seems the nice people behind these MOOCs are not just doing it for the good of society.

For those who haven’t noticed in any of the other media, I attended the ICANN49 conference in Singapore last week. We live in interesting times, with the NTIA announcement taking the spotlight, but lots of developments in (DNS) security and DNSSEC in particular. For now though, here’s some pictures.

As my old PGP key has passed it’s 15th birthday and improvements in cryptology in the meantime, it is about time to roll my key.

The old key is:
pub 1024D/0xAB2F5A5B15256990 1998-07-03
Key fingerprint = FB58 9797 299A F18E 2D3E 73D6 AB2F 5A5B 1525 6990

And the new key:
pub 2048R/0x517BE614A5C1EEC7 2013-09-24 [expires: 2018-09-23]
Key fingerprint = 6AFC 44AA 53E9 82A4 4BC7 1DB7 517B E614 A5C1 EEC7

The new key is signed with the old key, so make sure to check the signatures when importing the new key. The old key will be valid for a while, but I would prefer to use the new key.

After reading Jens Rohde’s post listing all his social media and other cloud activities, I thought I’d list mine as well.

• WordPress (self-hosted) for blog and website, and some pictures as well.
• Apache::Gallery (self-hosted) for all kinds of pictures, though not as much recently as I’d like to.
• Twitter: yes, I’m there (and still don’t like them for punishing me with a 6 character minimum username as a first mover).
• Facebook: yup, there as well, but don’t expect me to read it, it’s mostly a passive account.
• Pocket: formerly Read-It-Later, the previous name describes it pretty well; really nice iPad app.
• Newsblur: RSS feeds after Google shut down Reader. Great iPhone/iPad apps. I looked into tt-rss several times to host myself, but last time I looked, it did have a really nice web interface and iPhone web app, but neither of those work great on the larger touch screen on an iPad. A lot of development has happened since, so this may have changed.

Let me end with a shout out to Sparkleshare. Not so much social, but added as a bonus item. While I do use Dropbox as well, mostly for sharing between computers and iPhone/iPad, Sparkleshare is built around git and is independent of where it is hosted. If you want to use a more “cloudy” service, like github, it’s supported, but you can also set up your own server and no longer be bound by space limits (except for the harddisks you buy) or depend on a 3rd party provider with a random server in a random datacenter in some random country governed by a very long EULA and thus a lot more secure for you personal, financial, or otherwise sensitive documents. Unfortunately, no phone or tablet apps. For those without an always-on server somewhere, the Bittorrent Sync, just released in alpha, might be a better alternative.

Which I’m sure they won’t be for a long time after being release into the fields for the first time after a long winter.