Elon’s not the only one. But otherwise presented without comment. HT to Mother Frunker.
Category: Culture & Society
I see that Matt Edgar, Head of Design at the NHS, has announced the withdrawal of the NHS Common User Interface (CUI). The reason given is that the CUI had not “changed with the times” following the closure of NHS Connecting for Health in 2013.
This is a post about decentralised systems. Bear with me. I was reading this about an Internet primer in FHM magazine in 1995. The writer is about the same age as I was when the article was published. The tone of the piece is familiar. Back then, the Internet was seen as a minority interest, like drag racing…
Maciej Ceglowski (founder of Pinboard and overall Polish hero) says “Brevity is for the weak” – and he certainly has no problem producing very long and probably rather unread screeds. But they’re worth reading I think. I read this over the weekend. And because I believe in the power of précis, I’ll save you the…
Regardless of whether you see uncontrollable mass surveillance by both governments and corporations as being a problem, the fact is that it is happening. This raises questions about lots of things in life that previous generations never had to deal with, if only because the extent and methods of surveillance are also largely unknown to (and even beyond the understanding of) most people. From what we know right now, US and European government agen…
Last week, my attention was drawn to the fact that people in Bulgaria were protesting on the streets against the appointment of Delyan Peevski as the chief of Bulgaria’s National Security Agency. Peevsky controls the larger part of Bulgaria’s media, has no prior experience with national security, and has also been linked to organised crime. What’s happening in Bulgaria isn’t disconnected, isolated or irrelevant to other European countries. Just a…
… Kaoru I do think that the fact that Scoble posted himself naked in the shower waring them is a big minus point. I mean really big. I want an Oculus Rift. But that’s because I still want the future to be Snow Crash….
A long time ago, I allowed myself a cheeky dig at one of my heroes of old, Nicolas Negroponte. The news this week about Blockbuster UK made me think of him, and how they outlived his prediction by almost a decade. But the prediction business is hard, and if Blockbuster took twice as long to go as he thought it would (albeit enjoying something of a peak in the year he thought it would have died), then so what. Incidentally, I predict News Internat…
The other day, I was interested to see the comments on this Google+ post by BoingBoing contributor and general Internet person Sean Bonner. Somebody called Steven G appeared to be complaining about Sean’s lack of attribution. Naively, I assumed he meant the creators of the work, and posted a reply along those lines. But I quickly realised by his reply to me that this wasn’t what he meant at all. He didn’t appear to care (or even know) about thing…
(I posted this to Google+ a couple of weeks ago, but I may as well post it here too) Each time I engage in any activity that involves the legislature, I come away feeling soiled. Despite numerous independent and well-respected studies that said term extension in sound recordings would not achieve anything most people would call positive, the EU have voted to extend it. The thing that really depresses me about this is not that I spent hours sendin…
At the 2011 FOSDEM conference in Brussels on Feb 5, 2011, Eben Moglen gave talk called Why Political Liberty Depends on Software Freedom More Than Ever. “Well we can go back to mesh networking. We’ve got to go back to mesh networking. We’ve got to understand how we can assist people, using the ordinary devices already available to them, or cheaply available to them, to build networking that resists centralized control.” So it’s happening. And in …
… eikoku kopistropi Nothing like the smell of a new book. Jonathan Addict!…
… May a Great Repeal Bill rise up and destroy the malignant hoards of government anti-privacy legislation! This looks promising indeed! And even as we speak…! …
“Radicalise” is a term that I’ve heard some people use about defining moments in people’s political lives. It was longer ago than I care to remember, and I was very young when I heard LKJ’s “Reggae Fi Peach.” Today it’s all come back. [Adobe Flash movie was here] “Oy people of England, Great injustices are committed upon this land, How long will ye permit them to carry on? Is England becoming a Fascist state? The answer lies at your own gate; And…
Everyone as boring as me on the subject of copyright, community and contemporary culture (OMG it alliterates!) has something to say about the Great Paywall of Murdoch. It’s coming to an interface near you in June, we are told. So naturally, I have been ruminating on this too. My thoughts were crystallised when I read Roy Greenslade’s article in the Evening Standard today (which only recently become a free paper in London – an irony there). Greens…
I’ve just noticed this on my favourite law news site. Law news is so much more interesting and thought-provoking than other kinds of news, and this piece certainly got me thinking. Widespread adoption of IPv6 is generally regarded as being part of the next stage of Internet development. The ability to assign unique address to literally anything and anyone on earth obviously opens up a large number of possibilities. But this makes the French rulin…
On January 5th, 2010, The Independent published a photo as a backdrop to a feature inviting readers to submit pictures of the snow and cold weather. But they never asked the photographer if they could use his work. Newspapers and magazines have of course from time immemorial sometimes used work without either attributing, asking or paying the creators. There are a number of reasons for this, and cock-up is certainly one of them. Were it, say, 197…
Angela Epstein is unbelievably pleased to have been able to “bag poll [sic] position” in getting a national identity card. While she is apparently aware that the cards are “hotly disputed”, she says “everyone is entitled to their view”. Epstein (the Jewish surname not without some grim irony here) may think that ID cards are to be debated at the level of the colour of soft furnishings or who should win The X Factor, but amid all the blinkered adm…
A couple of weeks ago, Lorenzo Wood posted a great example of one of the reasons why I find the use of office printers fascinating. I am amazed, amused, informed and utterly baffled by this in pretty much equal measure, all the time. A trip to the printer is almost as good as a trip to the kitchen or (if I were a smoker) a fag in the car park. In almost every office I’ve ever worked, the printers and the areas around them are generally populated …
… eikoku kopistropi Don’t know if you know about this lot http://www.laquadrature.net/fr Apparently Lily Allen no brains has stopped blogging due to the backlash. Hopefully she’ll stop singing next … Jonathan Yes (http://idontwanttochangetheworld.blogspot.com/) – and she said she will stop singing too! http://www.nme.com/news/lily-allen/47490 Jonathan News just in on French presidential wholesale piracy….
I’m not sure if I’ve blogged this idea before or not, but here’s a mini-thread that came up on Slashdot today. It’s about of the ignorance that a lot of people have about data security that I thought illustrated my thoughts quite well: >> You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in your email communication. I think you don’t understand the concept of “reasonable expectation of privacy”. It’s not a technical idea meaning “this data is secure”…
Today’s news from Tinsel Town is that the heirs of J R R Tolkien and the charity they head, the Tolkien Trust, are seeking more than $220 million in “compensation” from New Line Cinema as a cut from the huge profits from the Lord of the Rings films. The family say have a right to this money because it was promised to them in the contract the author signed in 1969 with United Artists. The moral, social and (at these sums) economic impact of all th…
“To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet. It’s distracting. It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.” Ray Bradbury (90) doesn’t explain why he doesn’t like the Internet, but I think I can make a good guess based on the “it’s in the air somewhere” remark. Whenever anyone discusses the merits of books over digital literature, somebody always says something about how nothing can beat the feeling of a nice …
So, jail terms for the Pirates of Pirate Bay. “Judge Tomas Norstrom told reporters that the court took into account that the site was “commercially driven” when it made the ruling.” Commercially driven? What then, your honour, is the difference between Google, and The Pirate Bay? Yes, you could outlaw all trackers, but that’s not going to happen. The fact is that the verdict – as the defendants have always pointed out – is merely theatre. The mus…
… Join the blackout. …
Let’s hope the march of paid lobbyists and other industry schills in Europe will be stopped by these clear and concise arguments against extending copyright in sound recordings. It’s rare that politicians don’t take the side of big business, but when the pandering to greed and the destruction of the public domain is this blatant, perhaps common sense will prevail. The European Commission is due to vote soon on the issue. (Thanks Ben – Link) Write…
Phew. I’ve just got out from a large amount of IRC and email about this and this bug on Wikimedia. As of about midnight this evening, it’s boiled down to what seems like (at worst) some over-zealous censorship by the IWF which has now been corrected. I spent a while hanging out on Be Internet’s new IRC channel watching a couple of people discussing the issues. One of the chatters was kicking up a fuss about it, while just about all the others tho…
… Matt You’re quite right. I beleive we’ll look back at this period as some sort of privacy explosion. Currently we seem to be in some sort of boundary testing phase and Facebook is the perfect environment. mdja Here’s some semi-related password related comedy for the new year :) http://adactio.com/journal/1538…
Another day, another… hardly a week goes by without… if I had a fiver for…. I’ve lost count of how… The latest incident of data loss really, really plumbs the depths. I’ve started to pay less attention to the detail of such cases recently because it’s plain they’re simply endemic, human failings and not something we can somehow cure by tinkering around the edges. But I’ve just been reading this, which says: “The portable drive contains the names,…
For no particular reason, I’ve been editing the Wikipedia entry for Megatripolis this week, mainly tidying it up a bit. I added something about pHreak a while ago, but in the course of editing this time, I found this photo, taken in about 1996, of the pHreak BBS being demonstrated at the club. Ahh, nostalgia! I think (but I’m not sure) that the person on the left is Bob Blake, who was involved with pHreak shortly before I took over – but I may be…
… At least I assume it is: …
I’ve recently read We-Think by Charles Leadbeater, having attended one of his talks a couple of months ago. I thought I’d record my thoughts on it. Books about the socio-political or cultural effects of the Internet are rolling fast off the presses right now. I’m now feeling a little less like the pallid geek I once was. The penny has dropped, even in the hallows of Downing Street (Leadbeater was a Labour advisor under Tony Blair for a while), th…
… It’s out! Not seen it yet, but I’ll be downloading as soon as I get out of the bath. In case you’ve not been following – Big Buck Bunny is a feature-length 3D animation – and this is what makes it special. Do them a favour and download it (preferably by BitTorrent if you can). …
In my dreams, I like to think that if I ever made a lot of money I would be like Joi Ito. He must rank as one of the most worthwhile people on the planet, and somebody that I’d love to meet. Today, he writes an astute post about the “mobile Internet” and why nothing very interesting is happening in that space, nor will it ever while the current closed systems exist. Incidentally, he recently re-vamped his blog, so even if you have no interest in …
My ongoing experience with Tiscali’s appalling broadband offering has made me research the overall broadband industry in the UK. The picture is now becoming alarmingly ugly. Something has to happen to avert a disaster, and that something may be local networks. But before I elaborate on the solution (although not a new idea), let me outline the problem. There seem to be several horsemen of the information apocalypse riding over the horizon towards…
I don’t watch nearly enough films, but my attention has been drawn to two animations recently. Both are free. Firstly, the Blender project has brought out a new film (I wanted to embed it here but it breaks the page). It has a CC licence, and looks like an impressive bit of 3D animation (all the models and source files are also provided on the CD). Secondly, there is the incredible new production from Paul Robertson: Kings of Power 4 Billion %. I…
A friend of mine recently said they thought ID cards could be useful. They said they thought one day they might forget to take their passport to the airport or on the Eurostar. It struck me that I’d not blogged about my thoughts on this (and hey, what’s a blog for if it’s not for idle pontification?). ID cards will no doubt be very useful – in the same way as DRM is useful, or restrictive EULA contracts are useful. What matters is the consequence…
I used to think I had a handle on the state of spam and malware. I chuckled at the obfuscated spam content, marvelled at the botnets, and secretly admired the general ingenuity of those skript kidz and their r00tkits. But I didn’t know the half of it until I read this (670K PDF – thanks to Francois for sending it to me) “Professional Paranoid” Peter Gutmann, of the Department of Computer Science in Auckland, lists a deluge of flat-out evil busine…
Will Wikipedia survive the constant sniping its been getting about quality, style and everything else? In the last few weeks, I’ve observed (nay, been involved with) two issues relating to their conflict of interest policy. To save the blushes, I won’t divulge who was involved, but the first incident started when a PR operative at a medium-sized company decided that because a rival company had an entry in Wikipedia, they should have one too. The …
When I’m murdered in my bed by a gang of bored teenagers, I’ll try to remember to blame the RIAA as I expire. Some issues are too big to arrive at any useful perspective until you have thought and experienced a great many ideas relating to them. For a long while now, I have tried to fathom what it is about my concern, not to say alarm, about the increasingly draconian imposition of copyright law and the erosion of fair use that has come with it. …
… I am usually completely unsuccessful in hiding my glee at the demise of music publishers, and this post is no exception. I have been hoping for the last few years that what started as a trickle would become a flood. And now with Radiohead and even (gasp!) Madonna, it surely has. I think the penny is dropping. If you are an artist, you now have a choice to become an artist and a business, or an artist and a slave. …
… Jonathan Interesting news I see today, that relates to this….
I’ve been thinking about “info graphics” again, and what a tricky area this is. It’s doubly so because a large part of what I do for a living is information design. There is essentially an “emperor’s new clothes” problem prevalent in the production of information graphics. To me, the vast majority of subjects that I see addressed by such graphics (in particular, complex ones) would be better expressed in words – either spoken or written. I recent…
… Eikoku This ain’t got the punters rioting like the police post. Jonathan Maybe because it mentions HTML 3.2?…
Max Hole is President, Asia Pacific Region and Executive Vice-President, Marketing and A&R for Universal Music Group International. He has some soothing words for anyone who thinks the internets might be a bit worrying for music publishers. When he’s using words like “… record companies … sign and encourage great music by great artists. This will never change”, you know they’re in trouble. At least, in trouble in the long term. One thing that’s t…
My six year-old son went on a trip to the park today with his holiday playgroup. There were various activities there, and among them it seems the Met were hosting some kind of “meet the Police” event. Part of this appears to have involved his fingerprint being taken. What the hell is this about? He describes it as being something the policemen did “for fun” – but I’m not laughing. I don’t know (and I need to ask the teachers who were at the event…
When our grandchildren look back on the late and early 20th century – the dawn age of computing and the information revolution, they will see a company called Microsoft writ large across it. Just how large is difficult to grasp until you compare the profits that Microsoft makes from their nearly unchallenged monopoly. Now compare these profits to the amount of innovation displayed by Microsoft in the marketplace. Who is this a problem for? I thin…
Cultural issues and technology are subtle things so I may be barking up the wrong tree, but on my recent trip to Japan, I met some teenagers who told me that they didn’t know much about computers (I’d told them that I design web sites. They were not impressed). Instead, they use their phones for almost everything. Why didn’t they use computers? The answer seemed to be that they didn’t need to, so had no interest in them. Computers are big, phones…
So the BBC is now the latest broadcaster to sign a deal with the force that is YouTube. Right now, the Beeb (and CBS, NBC and Fox) are all saying that YouTube is a “promotional vehicle” for them. Nothing to do with their core programming or anything like that. OK, and what about all those naughty uploads that were on YouTube before the agreement? “We don’t want to be overzealous, a lot of the material on YouTube is good promotional content for us…
… Eikoku Yes – it is pretty cool indeed. Eikoku Update your blog. It’s been days now ……
It being near the end of the year, I find myself in retrospective mode, so I’ve got an excuse not be very topical in reviewing Scan This Book! by Kevin Kelly of the New York Times, written back in May this year. I’ve just finished reading it (it’s that long – doesn’t the NYT have editors?) and I can’t resist a pop. Kelly says some interesting things about the future of digitised books. For example: “Turning inked letters into electronic dots that…
Now this is interesting. Kaoru has been working on a site that allows you to upload videos – and schedule them. I like to think of myself as a contrarian (well, until it becomes uncomfortable), and there’s something about this site that tickles my contrarian fancies. Timeshifting, PVR-fuelled, 24-hour living is all the rage, and this is of course tearing society apart as we know it, obviously. But nobody, until now, has had the courage to explore…
One of the sites I read rather a lot is Boing Boing. Some over-enthusiastic web filtering software (and possibly some oppressive regimes) classifies Boing Boing as an undesirable site and blocks it. So, I’ve installed the Distributed Boing Boing proxy on this website. The URL for the proxy is http://www.webtorque.org/dbb.php Now might also be a good time to mention the fact that I installed a Tor server here as well a few months ago. Call me a ca…
10 Downing Street, in conjunction with mySociety, have recently launched an on-line petition system where citizens can collect signatures for issues with which to petition the government. If you haven’t already, I strongly encourage you to lend your support to petition set up by Suw Charman of the Open Rights Group: “Thousands of people own MP3 players which they have filled with copies of CDs that they have legally purchased, yet making this cop…
… Jonathan There’s no shortage of news on this in the tech sphere of course. During a four-day stretch, researchers at the Manheimm, Germany, honeynet project counted about 9,700 infections from a single command-and-control center and calculated that the attacker was making hundreds of dollars a day in commissions from DollarRevenue alone. That’s a pretty hefty business model they got there……
I’m thinking of adding a new category of “copyfight” to this blog. There’s so much to write about! Hot on the heels of the AllofMP3.com news comes more news that the BPI wants to sue them! This after Tiscali is made to take down its juke box service. The BBC article above mentions that AllofMP3.com’s UK market share of online downloads is estimated as being 14%. Rise or fall now? I wonder. The Pirate Bay seems to be struggling to cope with demand…
As previously observed here, David Byrne and Brian Eno have not only recently re-released their My Life In the Bush of Ghosts album, but have also made all of the multitracks of two of the songs on the album free for re-mixing under a Creative Commons licence. Things are getting really interesting in this area. Eno and Byrne are the first artists of significant stature to do this as far as I know. This is what I think it might lead to at some poi…
… I love a good bit of historical perspective, and this Wired article is a good ‘un. I must admit to being a bit worried about people playing sudoku though. All that mental effort… why? …
… I commend you today to the “articles” section in the top right nav, where I humbly offer for your most worthy attention a treatise entitled “When the Internet is Gone.” It’s a load of rubbish, obviously, but it was fun to write. I’ll tighten up the bit about fall of the Rupee a bit later maybe. …
Recent events toward something collectively dubbed the “two-tier Internet” by journos have got me thinking about the future of the Internet again. Bear in mind Clay Shirky’s adage that whenever he thinks about what should happen, it prevents him from thinking about what will. The following is therefore not particularly considered against anything and is doubtless rooted in too many pre-conceptions, but what the hell. See what you think. Forward i…
I have a rather sixth-form attitude to art. Something is art if a) I could not have thought of it myself (a standard that gets lower as I get older) b) it works on numerous levels and c) it says something to me or asks me questions I can’t answer, but I try to anyway, and fail. Crucifix NG gets a perfect ten on those things. If I had to pick out one aspect of this that fascinates me most: it’s made by a faith-based based organisation, yet has cle…
The absurdity of UK government agencies having to sell data back the very tax payers that paid for it has been going on ever since I was a lad. I’ve always regarded it as another one of the breathtakingly stupid things the Thatcher government did that, once done, could not be un-done. Like football hooliganism, chaotic public transport and the poll (now council) tax. But the Grauniad’s now come up with an interesting angle – and a campaign no les…
About once every six months or so, somebody on the otherwise excellent SIGIA mailing list posts to say they think there are too many “off topic” posts. This is invariably couched in some painfully lame justification – in this case appealing to us to “respect others” – but more usually assuming the mantle of “the silent majority” or some other hogwash. Naturally, I reminded them in my customarily restrained manner that they were idiots. Nobody too…
I don’t write much about marketing, because I usually regard myself as somebody who designs systems for people, not profit. But lately I’ve been re-examining this because it’s hard to ignore Seth Godin. I watched Godin’s talk to Google this evening. In the past I’ve always regarded him as a bit of a marketing smoothie: how can the writer of Permission Marketing be anything else? But his talk has me thinking about that in a different way. You prob…
At the beginning of the month, I posted a comment on one of Framfab’s public blog postings. It was, as usual, rather spur of the moment, in between coffee and the next round of application testing we’re doing. In it, I clipped some text I found around a quote from Naked Lunch that I was looking for. I originally just wanted the quote, but the text I found around it served my point rather well. I should have attributed it, but what happened next w…
I went to see Cory Doctorow and others on a panel organised by Free Culture UK last night. The subject was “Open Content” – a moniker given to the concept of digitisable works of either art or craft distributed under an alternative copyright licence (such as Creative Commons). Inevitably, a lot of ground was covered by the speakers, and one of the hottest topics of the evening was the recently-launched BBC’s Open Archive project. I wasn’t actuall…
I’d been only dimly aware of the “Amen Break” drum sample until now, although the sound, if not the rhythm itself is instantly recognisable. However, this video (34Mb MOV) puts the use of the sample into its fascinating social context. Anyone interested in music, popular culture and particularly the effects of recent copyright legislation, should see this. I get spammed by Zero-G every now and again as well. Bastards. Makes me want to download so…
… I’m always late in on things, and this is no exception. But I’ve just put up a Shoutcast stream of the American Edit mashup tracks. First time I’ve done this, so hope it works. For a day or so anyway… …
… Of course it’s too early to say, but I’d like to think that this is the beginning of the end for the music publishing industry. The terrible signal: too weak to even recognise… Unless you’re Madonna, Coldplay or U2, chances are that you’re not going to make money selling records. So let’s try something different here. …
Incredible, amazing and funny as hell! US business-methods patents (and the people who pay money to bring them to the USTPO) just took another leap further into surreality – with Cereality! Cereality has patents pending to give them an exclusive right to six business methods, including “displaying and mixing competitively branded food products” and adding “a third portion of liquid.” If these patents are approved by the U.S. Patent Office, Cereal…
When I was doing some user testing for A Very Large Company That Shall Remain Nameless, one of the questions we were asked to ask of the users was what, if anything, they thought about the fact that there was not one, but three terms of use links on the sign-up page to their service. Not surprisingly, just about all users said they wouldn’t even click on the links, let alone read the contents of them. One user was honest enough to say that even i…
Canadian law professors have produced a 600-page book that is being made freely available under a creative commons license in which they make the point that “The public’s interest in copyright, something inconceivable even a few years ago, is the result of the remarkable confluence of computing power, the Internet, and a plethora of new software programs, all of which has not only enabled millions to create their own songs, movies, photos, art, a…
“At The Guardian,” writes today’s Sunday Times, “…they claim that they came up with the idea of a compact newspaper long before The Independent.” Well, I can confirm that it’s not just a claim, it’s a fact. What’s more, they even put out a prototype in 1994. Went to tea yesterday with Ben House, a friend of mine from way back; the power behind The Wire magazine and an astute observer of popular culture. He’d been going through some old papers whi…
Laurence Lessig’s written a great short piece (I didn’t know Americans could do that!) for Foreign Policy on the death of the public domain. He’s great at hitting the nail on the head. “There is no doubt that piracy is an important problem — it’s just not the only problem. Our leaders have lost this sense of balance. They have been seduced by a vision of culture that measures beauty in ticket sales. They are apparently untroubled by a world where…
We had an email from HR on the company “fun” list today seemingly inviting all employees to listen to a popular music number called “Running Away’ by Roy Ayers.” Why, I don’t know. Out of lunchtime interest though, I was curious to find out whether we’d need a license to distribute music to employees. So I Googled about and got to PPL. Looks like we’d need to get one. Hmm. The phrase “screw you” came to mind. But even more surprising was the home…
I feel relieved that the European Parliament voted by 648 votes to 18 to reject the proposed directive on computer-implemented inventions this week. There was a heck of a lot of activity on both sides, and I did a bit with some letter and postcard writing, and trying (unsuccessfully) to ring MEPs in Strasbourg last week. It was also good to meet the goons from the DTI on the issue, even if there wasn’t enough time to table my question about inter…
… StumbleUpon is a nice idea and I’ve been using it a bit recently. Its categorisations are a bit too broad to be really useful, but if they hooked it up with some sort of folksonomy system that you could use to refine your profile, then it might get really interesting. Like del.icio.us/ only less… flat. I was impressed when the “random stumble” button took me to one of my favourite pages on the web, hence the title of this post. …
… And to quote the Register ‘the professional pundits and their pyjama-clad reflections in the “blogosphere” had been anxiously waiting for the Supremes’ verdict for a week… And off they went, like lab monkeys on meths sniffing fresh air for the first time’…
… This is apparently helping to finish somebody’s PhD, but it was mainly out of curiosity that I filled it in. He doesn’t give you the option of listing Trillian as your IM client, so he’s obviously a bit stuck up in his ivory tower. The results page is down at the time of writing, but it promises to be quite interesting. …
… Just as I’ve found a Greasemonkey script that fixes up Odeon’s site and provides a link to IMDB for all their films, I’ve now found a script that puts a link to a torrent for films listed in IMDB! So now I can see what’s on at the Odeon, and if I don’t think it’s worth the money to go and see after reading IMBD, I have the option to burn it to DVD and watch it the next evening. Sure, this is piracy, but at least it’s discriminating. …
Avast! Brian Appleyaaard! The hammy Bible-bashing tech/culture journo we all love to hate came out on Sunday as a shameless raider of intellectual property in his article on the death of TV last weekend: “…the internet has begun to work as it should. Thanks to broadband, students now routinely download the best television shows — at the moment, that means the US hospital comedy Scrubs — over the net and, happily, pass them on to me. Video is no…
Our weekly Monday-9am-with-buns department meetings usually consists of discussions about projects people are working on, techniques we have applied or are thinking of applying, department housekeeping issues etc. All good inward-looking stuff. But last week was a little different. We had a presentation by the head of the new Client Services division. For me this was a reminder that for an agency such as ours, no matter how far we get into inform…
It’s been a while since I had a foray in the genre that I call “half-formed ideas,” but here’s a good one that I’ve been brewing for a while. For no good reason I can recall, I was reading this essay about spontaneous use of chiasmus in contemporary English and it got me thinking. Not so much about chiasmus, which is of course fascinating in its own right, but about language and communication in general. Life has always been a crisis of communica…
I was reading this article on the BBC about people providing IT support on the side and it struck me that there’s a bigger thing going on here than simply offering a bit of help to a clueless neighbour. I have a love/hate relationship with helping people with their computers. I imagine that in the same way as specialists in fields of medicine (neuroscience, or plastic surgery, say) probably get pestered by friends asking them what to do about the…
Having worked for a print publisher for two years and developed a negative impression of that industry (and journalists) when it comes to all things on line, imagine my surprise when I saw the Sunday Observer Blog this morning! I can honestly say that if I were in charge of a serious redesign of any newspaper’s online presence this would be it, and more. I saw a link to it on BoingBoing: “The weekend paper is now supplemented by a daily blog, wit…
… As a blogger, I call on the Iranian government to free Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad, both in prison in Iran for expressing opinions on their blogs about the government. February 22nd, 2005 is Free Mojtaba and Arash Day – this blog is dedicated to them and their protection. …
Just when it looked like things had got back to reality…. I’m getting sick of this, and worried too. Here’s a letter I’ve just penned to Robert Evans MEP: Dear Robert Evans, I read today that the European Patent Directive is not likely to return to the first reading as previously demanded by Parliament, and that the Commission may ignore the Parliament’s vote on restarting the legislative process for this bill. While in the past I have contacted …
Now that software patents in Europe have gone back to the drawing board, both sides will now doubtless regroup. I feel that we have a head start though, if for no better reason than the FFII looked like it was fighting an uphill struggle most of the time until the eleventh hour, when at last MEPs saw their point and showed their displeasure at the Commission’s railroading of the issues. Meanwhile, one of Lord Sainsbury’s invites for another sessi…
… Seth David Schoen has done an interesting hatchet-job on a statement from the Business Software Alliance that shows (rather long-windedly, but that’s what Americans are like) exactly why there are issues with defending copyright law on the grounds that it allows the software industry to get richer. Nice of them to clear the air so… clearly! …
… Ahh – graphs! And I’ve got my own little status graph now! …
Just thought I’d check Slashdot after one last brandy and a mince pie (made by me: Ainsly Harriot BBC Top 100 recipe, the one with the grated orange peel in the pastry). I love Slashdot. Not that I understand half of what gets talked about there, but the responses to this Christmas day story are wonderfully heart-warming. From my RSS feed: phreakuencies writes “Worried since the recent post about the MN4 2004 asteroid, I added a bookmark to it’s …
It’s not over yet, but it looks like our protests to MPs, the government, my postcard to Theresa Villiers, and then that confab with Lord Sainsbury may have done something. It seems that the Poles have put a spanner in the works for us, and the final decision on patents has been delayed for more thinking. It’s good that we’ve got some more time, but we have to keep the pressure up. I’m increasingly thinking that this really is an us-and-them situ…
After managing to wangle an extra day’s holiday from work after I mixed my dates up, I attended the meeting today on the European Computer Implemented Inventions Directive today at the DTI. Lord Sainsbury of Turville had generously invited all those who had written to their MPs (well, some of them at least) to explain the government’s position on software patents and to allay fears of impending doom. It’s certainly a bit of a complex area, and it…
… I assume you are one of the so-called “anti-software patent activists” and no, my name isn’t Frank Black…
I tell myself I look down on blog posts that simply link to other things, but it’s Friday and I’m feeling lazy. The Charlie Brooker incident is (I’m gonna say it) significant, but not because he’s called for the assassination the US head of state, or that he’s annoyed so many Americans, but for what it says about the state of the “media.” And this time, NTK have put it best: Brooker may write in a paper, but he still posts like he was on a newsgr…
… Ah – the archives Who cares what Julie Burchill thinks….
… The Open Money Project looks interesting (although I wish they’d sort out their navigation). I can’t decide whether they are the seed of a revolution that will tear apart the rules of commerce as we know it, or just a geeky fad. Still, I’ve promoted it to my “stop” button above as it’s potentially a Rather Big Thing. …
… Apple Much as I love Apple, they are as much an evil empire as any other megacorp. With as much of an idea about fair use as any of them. They just make things look and feel nicer and more different. A placebo effect. Placebo A placebo effect, I might add, which I fall for every time :p And now with a nutty and nutritious Unix kernel….
Well that was interesting. Last night I became one of North Finchley’s “Seventeen” at the soon-to-open Arts Depot. This is part of Bill Drummond’s latest project entitled “How To Be An Artist” and involved seventeen men (well, it was actually fourteen I think) recording an improvised vocal performance accompanied by the sound of Bill’s Land Rover engine and a C minor chord. Bill Drummond doesn’t come across as the scary maverick I was expecting –…
I’ve just got a mail from Bill Drummond. He’s doing an installation of some kind (details rather sketchy) in the soon-to-be-opened Arts Depot, which is just round the corner from my house. The installation/project/work will be called “How To Be An Artist” and he needs male voice “singers” (in my case that term is applied loosely) to record something as part of that. I’ve always thought of him as rather scary ever since he left a dead sheep in the…
“If Haydn had patented ‘a symphony, characterised by that sound is produced { in extended sonata form },’ Mozart would have been in trouble.” Since I am involved in software design, I feel I should oppose any move by the European Union to allow the patenting of software. Software patents threaten to stifle innovation in software design and given even more monopolistic power to existing software corporations to the detriment of smaller companies a…
It’s a landmark ruling! The decision of the US 9th Court to find Grokster not guilty to the charge of “contributory and vicarious copyright infringement” is the first sign that corporate manipulation of IP rights legislation is at last being reined in. It’s all on the Register today. It is incredibly important that we understand the current war going on in the IP arena, with P2P, open source, copyleft, creative commons, et. al. on the one side, a…
… Never replied Oh well, he never replied to that. Pity. He’s a busy man I’m sure….
Being in an expansive mood this Saturday morning, and having received the latest from Clay Shirky on his “Networks, Economics and Culture” (NEC) mailing list, I’m trying to gather my thoughts around what’s going on (from as high a level as my little mind can get). I’m a big fan of Mr Shirky. I once had the good fortune to talk to him while we were in (of all places) Rupert Murdoch’s “Fortress Wapping” several years ago. He was consulting for Curr…
This is hardly an original subject to blog on, but it interests me nonetheless. I was at a new year’s party this year and discovered that I’d been to school with one of the guests. After chatting a while about jolly japes (slightly embarrassing as you’re aware it’s boring the crap out of the people around you…) we got round to asking what each other did. He told me he was as surprised as anyone to have become the MD of Sony Music Publishing UK. I…
One thing that gets me irrational about BBC News Online is the glaring lack of any proper back channel. People want to talk, and I for one resent only having half a chance to do so. The “Have your say” links at the bottom of some (but not all) stories, accompanied by the pretty contemptuous small print: “The BBC may edit your comments and cannot guarantee that all e-mails will be published,” works me up even more. How long is it going to be befor…
I’ve been hearing about nanotechnology for a while, but for some reason was never motivated enough to find out much about it. Far future stuff… solution looking for problem… blah blah. But a random post on Slashdot the other day caught my eye. The poster was saying that once molecular nanotechnology and “nanoengineering” take off, then the nature of matter as we know it will fundamentally change – with massive socio-economic consequences. The det…