The female twist to Ofcom’s annual report today on the use of new media is interesting. One view of Internet use that’s always intensely annoyed me is that it’s a solitary medium best suited to male, sociopathic geeks. That may have been true of the web for a brief period between the decline of the dial-up BBS and the arrival of HTML 3.2, but with Usenet and the embers of the London dial-up scene in the mean time, my own online experience has always has been highly social. I assume this aspect of the web in it’s 2.0 incarnation is also one reason why the female audience now seems to be taking the ascendency in some areas.
I hope this will put paid to those who see being “on the Internet” as some kind of mindless activity akin to watching TV. May it make such an attitude seem as ridiculous as berating somebody for “reading books” or “having fun.”

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 think it’s a problem for all of us because when I use technologies not produced by Microsoft I think of what might have been. What might computing and the information revolution be like today if we had had a competitive market in operating systems and software?

We will never know – but it’s interesting to wonder. Not least because Microsoft are now moving into areas like publishing.

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 are small. You need training for computers – but everyone can use a phone, they said. This latter statement appears to be true. I was struck by the consistency of the physical interfaces of most people’s phones in Japan, even across vendors the key layouts are pretty much the same, and I assume the virtual interfaces are therefore similar too. Why shouldn’t they be when content is king and the network operators business models are stable? Adults (sometimes even quite old ones) talked about their phones in the same way as quite young people in the West do, but not in terms of the features – they cared about the content.

I sometimes wonder if my skill set is too web-based, too classically client-server and desktop orientated. For all I know, a wave of mobile usage scenarios that I can barely guess at is going to break over my little world and obliterate it. How long can I chuckle over what I see as the risible user experience of contemporary mobile comms in the West and its utter failure – so far – to engage people?

The recent Sunday Times report(s) on keylogging got me thinking about why journos never examine the other dimension of the problem of keyloggers and security compromise: spam.

The Times basically took the start of the problem to be a mysterious process of “inadvertently downloading a Trojan” which then installs a keylogger, which then reports all your passwords and other interesting data to black hats in some faraway exotic place (like Swindon). After that, all hell breaks loose, and the journos in question (notably one Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas, more about whom later) had obviously had great fun finding numerous stories of innocent victims (including – shock – “IT professionals” who had taken “all precautions” to prevent it) having their savings stolen, computers crashed, etc. etc, ohmylordthisisterrible! You got the idea after about paragraph three of five thousand. The message was clear: we are all sitting ducks – you heard it here first!

Continue reading It’s The Spammers – They’re In It With The Aliens! →

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?

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.

Continue reading When the Internet is Gone →

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 took any notice.

Continue reading Social Software, Politics and Getting it Right →

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 some Squarepusher to up the ante.

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 if they did try to read them, they would have neither the stamina nor the capacity to understand them.

End user licence agreements are one of the great blots on web and software user experience. They erode trust, engender suspicion and generally fart in the face of a good time. What’s even worse is that contrary to what most people hope is the case, most of these EULAs in fact completely unfair, and usually a lot worse than you might think. It’s only because nobody reads them that this isn’t commonly understood.

Hooray, then for the EULAlyzer, free software that auto-magically highlights the fine print that will get you in trouble. Here it is giving me the low-down on Sony Picture’s privacy policy.

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.

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 now at the same stage as audio was when Napster first started. 
Just as MP3 chipped away at the foundations of the record industry, so video downloading is subverting 
television and film.

In fact there are two things in the above quote that are notable as indicative of the state of the copyfight to date: the first is the fact that a mainstream hack writing for none other than the Sunday Times can happily admit to consuming bootleg TV shows (although oddly, not actually downloading them – a bit like not inhaling, eh Brian?). The second is the bald assumption that such activity undermines the visual media industry. This is pure Chomsky: repeat something often enough (“home taping is killing music, MP3 is killing music, BitTorrent is killing video…”) and it becomes an accepted fact.

My opinion of Appleyard has always been a pretty low one, but I’m glad he’s written this article as some of the wider issues are pretty well observed. I wonder how BT and the rest will fare? Personally, I think Appleyard is probably right about the fate of TV as we know it, but wrong in his assumption that it will be relegated to a media backwater. He’s really just attacking the schedules. The programme quality factor is irrelevant. Who cares what he thinks about Scrubs?

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 their piles and whatnot, so I get regular requests to mend desktop PCs. I’m neither qualified, nor even very able to do this, but most times I lend a hand. True, my time as a sysadmin was fairly close to IT support, but setting up slapd or editing zone files is rather different from working out how to get Word to stop crashing.

What I found interesting about the BBC article was that the writer made a point of putting his actions in the context of a lack of manufacturer support for home, and even business, computing. When I look back on how I found out (and still find out) about things, I’m struck by how infrequently I’ve relied on commercial support for products. In fact, I’m also struck by the fact that when I have relied on commercial support, it’s been really awfully bad, or simply non-existent.

The vast majority of my education about computing in the general has been from loose online support communities: bulletin boards, websites and Usenet. When I was doing sysadmin stuff, and much to my surprise a the time, the efficacy of big, expensive helpdesks for systems like iPlanet Server, Oracle and WebLogic (for which we had big, expensive “support contracts” to access) were usually slower and less helpful for most things than a simple couple of posts on Usenet.

So when I read the article about “unofficial” support, it struck a chord. If effective support for commercial software cannot be sold to consumers then that’s yet another good reason to use FLOSS. What a pity the writer missed that angle. And what a pity we can’t point that out.

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 my parliamentary and other representatives about software 
patents, and concentrated on the fact that software patents cannot be anything other than 
deeply corrosive to innovation, consumer choice and the health of the UK software industry, 
I want now to turn to something that has made me even more worried: the overwhelming evidence
I am starting to see of democracy being simply ignored in Europe.

How can it be that obviously bad legislation is being railroaded through by the Commission 
when nobody other than corporate lobbyists support it? 

- The elected European Parliament are 100% AGAINST (this version of directive)
- The majority of the The European Council of Ministers are AGAINST (with new 
countries joining the against all the time)
- European citizens/software users (who know about it) are all AGAINST
- European software-industry alliances/coalitions are all AGAINST
- European software companies are nearly all AGAINST
- European programmers are (probably) all AGAINST

Who does this leave in favour?

- The UK & European Patent Offices
- A small number of very rich companies
- UNELECTED civil servants

What is going on? Where is the democratic process here?

I am very, very concerned at the events that have taken place in the last 
12 months on this issue.

Yours sincerely,


Jonathan Baker-Bates

“Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state
and corporate power.”

– Benito Mussolini, Encyclopedia Italiana.

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 session with the Patent Office landed on my doormat last week, this time to discuss what people want the words “technical contribution” to mean. This is something that’s incredibly difficult to define, according to the UKPTO, but it seems pretty easy to me:

First, no patentablity for ideas. Patents are about material inventions, plain and simple. You design it, build it and make it work first – then let’s talk about patents.

Second, no patentabilty of systems or techniques defined as a protocol, standard, or mechanism of interoperability. You want to pass data into, through, or talk to another system? Let’s be grown up about this: we’re all open now. It’s just a means to an end, after all.

Third, effort should be respected. Demonstrate you have taken an abnormal amount of effort to create something, and that gets you on first base. You have to get off your arse to contribute.

Fourth, nothing gets a patent until it’s been decided by peer review. But who would vote to give a competitor a patent for their software? If you meet the above two criteria, then anyone who understands that tomorrow, they might be the ones applying for that protection, that’s who.

There, that should keep the patent lawyers in a job, while making sure that nothing much gets a patent.

From time to time I get a reminder that the future isn’t somewhere you travel to, it’s something you create. As a teenager, my grandfather made a crystal radio set and let people listen to broadcasts from Paris at church fetes (this was before the BBC existed). He must have felt good about that. I feel the same sort of thing about onion routing.

After reading a post the other day on BoingBoing about how the EFF is doing development for Tor, I decided to set up a server of my own on my little DSL line (I have a fixed IP with Plusnet). It’s sitting their right now, anonimising connections from CIA whistle blowers and Tibetan exiles, or so I like to think. If you want to know more about Tor, it’s all explained there, but it just goes to show that the Internet isn’t all about sending email and using the latest P2P things. “What did you do in the great information revolution, Daddy?”

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 situation. The Poles obviously agree, and even Lord Sainsbury seemed to think that maybe the government has it wrong, or has at least been ill-advised by the UKTPO. Some very large interests will be served if the Council of Ministers has their way. Things smell distinctly fishy.

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 was clear that much was unclear on both sides of the argument. But some of my worst fears were confirmed. But the gist of the debate went as follows:

The primary issue of “technical contribution” as a hurdle that must be cleared for software to be considered patentable seems to be too low. The UKPTO also isn’t properly equipped to judge what is and what is not sufficiently “technical” in most applications and this is really ringing the alarm bells (while arguing a point, one of the UKPTO officials clearly confused a file system with a file format and didn’t seem to understand some of the points being put from the floor). Not only that, but the wording of the proposed legislation on this point is just too broad. The patent office has framed too many of the principles around hardware and not software, and there is a lack of provision for the underlying nature of software development as a whole. In short, things are pretty grim.

Less pointedly debated was whether the actions of the Council of Ministers in not implementing the amendments reccommended by the EU parliament (which, while not wonderful, were at least OK) is a symptom of gross corporate lobbying. In their defence, the UKTPO said that this is down to them wishing to frame the legislation so as not to disadvantage technological industries other than that of software. Therefore, they want to keep the definitions such that they should be interpreted by the courts, and not so detailed as to be restrictive or have undesirable, knock-on effects.

That’s all very well, but we came back to the fact that the clauses as they stand seem to define just about anything as “technical” – the majority of EU software patents granted to date are simply re-writes of US and Japanese patents with token “technical contribution” clauses added.

From my own point of view, if the Council of Ministers gets it way, working in the software industry (and that includes UI design) is going to become either more complex or more dangerous, or both. While there were many at the meeting that expressed more concern about this than I did, I am starting to wonder if we are not in fact on the edge of a precipice. The UK government seems to think it’s doing the right thing in attempting to clarify and stabilise the current situation by pushing this legislation forward, yet the current situation itself is unacceptable. Preserving it will mean monopolists will have the legal platform from which to launch the proper destruction of fair competition and innovation in software. Anti-competition law is going to prevent the worst abuses, but the speed and rate of change involved in the software business will run rings around any attempt to keep a lid on things using that part of the law.

So what now? I’m going to read up on what my mates at the FFII have said once their account of the meeting comes out.

My banging on about software patents to sundry MPs and ministers has borne fruit in the shape of an invite from the DTI to attend an event organised by them and the Patent Office to present the arguments in favour of proposed EU software patent legislation. The Register has some more details on it.

I’ll see if I can digest the brochure they sent with it, but on first sight, I’m confused about how the “technical effect” will be determined. Better start RSVP-ing as places seem limited.

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.

We took a test at school once to find our what kind of career we might be suited for. When my results came through I went to the careers advisor’s office to be told that he thought “printing and packaging” would be my best bet. At the age of seventeen, I thought that sounded suicidally boring and swore I would never show any interest in such things ever. And so it has been until yesterday, when a colleague had a new iPod mini delivered to work.

The iPod (and indeed all Apple products) are supposed to be meticulously well designed, even down to the packaging, so we reverently performed the unpacking. A sleek, white box emerged from its cardboard housing and unfolded to reveal a silver iPod gleaming like a stone in a freshly cleaved peach. The power supply, leads and accessories then fairly melted out onto the table before us.

Such a pity then that written on the plastic screen guard on the device were the words “Don’t steal music” in large, unfriendly type. Hard to think how they could have wreaked the preceding experience any better than that.

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, and the frankly evil forces of utter greed and cultural distortion of the Disney Corporation, the RIAA, MPAA and others. Particularly worrying are the moves to extend patents to software in the EU, and in the UK the movement to use “crown copyright” to bury bad news and prevent access to information.

I’m thinking about how best I can do something, however insignificant, about this, because even thought the 9th may have struck back, there’s a hell of a lot to do yet if our children are not to inherit a cultural wasteland controlled by corporate greed. Perhaps a cup of sugary tea would be a start.

There have been some cracking threads on the Chinwag uk-design list over the last couple of weeks. I say that because not only am I participating in my usual “you’re all stupid” kinda way, but there are some really excellent people coming out of the woodwork. For example, the celebrated Nico Macdonald, who (I like to think) I have been putting on the spot in a gentlemanly fashion about his spatial interface musings, etc. Here’s peek:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nico Macdonald [mailto:nicolist@spy.co.uk]
> Sent: 18 August 2004 13:24
> To: Jonathan
> Subject: Re: [uk-design] GUI innovation (was Trademarking)
> 

>
> As I note in a forthcoming Guardian Online article:
> 
> "There is little serious or practical discussion in the IT 
> industry about the future of the GUI, and how we might move on. 
> We have few grand visions, and even fewer leaders capable of 
> implementing them. Instead we are fiddling with and tweaking a 
> late-70s legacy.
> 

How about this for an alternative interpretation: What is so wrong with a late-70's legacy, 
and could the basic ideas you seem to be fighting against simply be "good enough" to remain 
fundamentally unchanged? The Stephenson rail gauge, the QUERTY keyboard, 240 volts, VHS tapes... 
None of them were the best at the time, and none are the best now, but their continued use 
shows that they meet - and now feed in to - the requirements placed on them. The arguments 
around them at their inception have moved on to higher things, and there's nothing to say the 
same thing can't happen with the way we interact with computers. We can't really afford to keep 
ploughing up and re-seeding something as important as the interface to the personal computer, can we? 
Well, as long as that computer has a screen to look at, anyway.

As for things that are not documents, and the need to deal with large numbers of objects perhaps
 visually or semantically - there is still a chance you may be missing the point if the *need*
to do so never truly materialises. User testing of radial menus, for instance, has shown them to 
be inferior in terms of learnabilty compared to more traditional methods (I'll drag up the 
reference for that if you want). That doesn't make them bad, it means that they may be good for 
specialist use by trained operators. That's par for the course in other fields: court stenographers 
use those weird little piano keyboards to type at massive speeds using syllabic chords, but it 
takes them years to learn how. Similarly with claims by HCI academics that businesses would benefit 
from being able to visualise their MIS data. The idea's been around for about 30 years, but spatial 
interfaces aren't exactly the first thing Sir John Harvey-Jones recommends to struggling firms. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to belittle your ability to identify or theorise about different 
ways of doing things in HCI (which would appear to be far superior to my own), just that you seem 
to be missing some wider aspects of things like the social or historical context for these things. 
Like Clay Shirky says, whenever you think about what *should* happen, it distracts you from 
thinking about what will.

> I guess you are referring to the lack of a desktop trash in MacOS 

Ah, no. I was referring to Job's supposed quote about getting rid of the spatial Finder in favour
 the more "Explorer" like file manger in OSX. "Spatial" here simply means file organisation 
"in space," as in a desktop with folders scattered across it, or sub-folders with files arbitrarily
 grouped together by the user, given colours, etc. He is said to have retorted that the old finder 
"forced users to be janitors," which he thought was a bad thing. 

Last I looked, there was a trash can on the desktop of OSX. Was there not one at some point? 

Jonathan

Lord, I hope Dr. Mischa Weiss-Lijn isn’t reading this! Let’s see how he replies.

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 CurrentBun.com and the other News International websites, and I wasa lowly producer working for a Times Literary Supplement educational site that soon after went West. He has this amazing gift of being able to cut through the crap and see things straight. Something that I find incredibly hard to do.

Anyway, I think he said he was convinced that we are in a golden age of experiementation with the network, communication and ways of allowing humans to exchange information. It certainly seems that way to me.

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 details were sketchy, So I did a bit of Googling.

And I was shocked. Nanotech isn’t some dry theoretical domain of research scientists playing about. It’s a real gosh-darn industry! Have a look at foresight.org for instance.* After a while reading up on some of the basics, the Slashdot post made sense. There is no reason that’s yet been discovered to prevent us from building “nano factories” that can create anything physical by building it from the molecular level up. Just like factories and assembly-lines today make bricks, cars and cans of cola, so might nano factories do the same – but for literally anything out of re-cycled atoms.

So imagine a world where physical matter can be produced, sold and otherwise dealt with in the same way as software. Want some orange juice? Go to the nano factory that sits in the kitchen and enter the details to produce it. Need a new set of razor blades? Same deal. The retailers of the future may not need to produce anything other than the “plans” for nano factories. Buy a plan for Coke, a plan for Gillette razor blades, for a music CD, and produce them all at home.

I’m really struggling to understand the sheer tectonic effect of this on economics and society. For example, nano engineering could REALLY screw primary producers. Why would any country buy physical goods from another?

But the thing that perhaps intrigues me most is whether in the we are currently seeing in techniques of copyleft, open source and other developments in “intellectual property,” the foundations for something truly amazing: a split between closed and open “plans” for matter. Do you want to buy the Gillette razor plan or a freely-available plan for razors (“GNU Razor 0.7”)? And how would the auto industry feel about a Napster for Ferraris?

Now *that* made me think…

* See also evidenttech.com “Do you have an opto-electronic material problem? Need semiconductors with tunable properties to remove nature-imposed limits?” This is like Blade Runner!