Christmas tree decoration seen in Canary Wharf shopping centre reads: CCTV in operation here.

This has to be a prank, right? There’s no way, even in the Orwellian Albtraum of Canary Wharf, that someone would have decided this an appropriate Christmas decoration for the shopping centre’s christmas trees.

Alas, I fear it’s real and intentional: what you see here is the red version of the sign on the red-lit trees. Similar colour-coordinated signs were on the blue trees too. In fact, this sign was on every damned Christmas tree in the whole of the damned centre.

It’s possibly the most obnoxious, awful thing I’ve ever seen come out of this obnoxious, awful managerial surveillance culture of ours. This defies parody. If it’s a prank, it’s an excellent one. But…

You know, I hate the polythene-thin sentiment of Christmas, in so many ways. But even I think we’re worse off if Christmas means goodwill to all men, and remember, we’re watching you people.

This is what I came up with.

The script takes one argument – the term to search on – and creates a sqlite3 database in the current directory containing all the tweets that the twitter search API returns for that term.

It requires datamapper and twitter_search gems to be installed.

Have at it, make it better, bend it to your twitter-slurping needs.

You’ll need a room, account, etc. in Campfire; you’ll need to compile this version of dumb-frotz; and you’ll need a zcode file to play – plenty of those at the Interactive Fiction Database.

I only wrote about this because @lazyatom called me a genius for doing it. Which was nice.

Have fun.

Two delights in opening these boxes: the first being the feelies – little trinkets and props that warm you up for the game.

Sherlock – The Riddle of the Crown Jewels arrived today and comes with a fold-out tourist map of 1889 london and a copy of ‘The Thames’, a fake antique newspaper. Lovely.

The infocom gallery has scanned versions of the original box contents for most of the infocom games.

These physical things acted as a form of copy protection: the game would ask you for the co-ordinates of a place, for example, that was printed on the map. But they’re also delightfully made and funny with it.

I wish I saw such love in current games packaging. I no longer eagerly open up console games on the train home from the shops – the contents are invariably charmless, miserable and full of legal warnings and nonsense, even though the budgets for today’s games are so much greater than those of twenty years ago.

The second delight in these decades-old games is brushing up against twenty-year old technology, instructions and marketing. Such gems as:

It is always advisable to make a copy of the diskette that came in your game package… Insert your IBM (or compatible) DOS disk in Drive A and turn on your computer… The SCRIPT command is used to print a transcript of your moves as you play the game on selected printing hardware… /f disables the UNDO feature. This switch is useful on machines with 256 kbytes or less of memory… A clicking sound has been added to the keyboard to make typing easier. Use the volume control on your TV set to control the level of the clicks…

In one of the boxes, there’s an 1980s-colourful leaflet for the Commodore 64, telling me ‘it’s not what you pay… it’s what you get’; in another is an advert for a new digital comic: ‘Lane Mastodon, accountant turned interplanetary hero’.

After all that, the best bit is still playing these excellent games – although I can’t say I play the original versions. Their quaint 5¼″ diskettes are made for long gone systems.

The cheapest legal way to play is probably to get hold of a copy of Lost Treasures of Infocom or one of the other compilations released by Activision after they bought Infocom. You can still find CD versions on auction sites and the like. Then you can play the games using a modern Zcode interpreter. I use Zoom on the Mac, and there are interpreters available for almost any platform you could want.

And, of course, there’s a thriving community making contemporary interactive fiction, most of it for free and much of it as good if not better than the original Infocom titles.

I’m off now to do battle with that bounder Moriarty. The game is afoot!

They’ve forced developer Ollie Parsley to to remove club logos from his site and shut down part of his FootyTweets service, which used Twitter to provide live match updates for a variety of clubs. You can’t just start publishing live match reports – it’s a service that can cost more than £15,000 per year, depending on how you distribute the reports and how often.

I care not a jot for sport – except the odd TV snooker match. But this interests me because it hints at a thought experiment of mine.

I’m convinced that either the next World Cup or the 2012 Olympics will be a citizen journalism watershed. Specifically with regard to video – the most valuable of the revenue-generating sports media outputs.

Here’s a question: how many spectators with video phones would you need in order to, with some clever software, reconstruct event coverage such that the quality rivalled that produced by professional broadcasters with their amazingly high-end optic cameras?

If it helps imagine all the camera phones as individual cells in a huge compound eye. Like a fly’s.

And, if you’re sceptical about the software side of things, see Microsoft’s photosynth..

I’m convinced there’s a straight numerical answer to that question – and I hope we’ll find out. Maybe the World Cup is a bit soon, but 2012 feels far enough away to give this a shot.

Would you hand in your video phone at the turnstile? Because I don’t see otherwise how this can be stopped.

Yes, I know it’s already been done by tweetminster and there are lists on listorious, probably elsewhere too.

But there are none that I know of that are freely available, which are amenable to inserting into a database for twitter-bot magic, nor which connect to any other online profiles of MPs – I use the public whip ids from MySociety’s parlparse project.

Linked data, innit?

There are bound to be errors and omissions, so let me know if you have any corrections and I’ll update. And if there’s someone else doing this better, I’ll gladly defer to them.

Do what you want with this data – hell, you could even republish it in RDF if you want.

That might have been for the best. If I had stayed, I would have probably melted into an unseemly puddle of nostalgia and pity for my younger geek self.

I have a non-24 hour sleep cycle – which means, in those days before the internet, I used to watch an awful lot of overnight TV.

There wasn’t the ‘play roulette, on the telly, for £4/min, especially if you’re drunk’ crap that’s on now. Nor the slop bucket of simulcast 24 news. But there was the Open University. And, with only four channels, most of them off-air, you had no choice what to watch. It was surpassing brilliant.

It was the only way I could indulge my true geek – we used to call them ’spods’ and they were hated, picked on, teased. By me too. How shameful.

Anyway, I remember clearly an OU programme about the Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine: MENACE. An ingenious learning device made out of matchboxes and marbles. And I spent weeks, at night, making one and teaching it to play. I’d forgotten all about it until reading James’ talk – he has some great pictures of his version.

The thing is, I did all this in secret. I knew my non-geek friends wouldn’t understand. While by day I pretended that I really enjoyed reading dreadful angsty poetry.

Keeping these two identities separate was, I think, a major contributor to the teenage breakdown I had a bit later. I’m sure I had friends who were also secret geeks, but we never let on to each other.

Anyway, isn’t the internet brilliant? I think the mainstream sometimes misses that there are teens now much less tortured – by themselves and others – because they can find these circles of interest online. This is an enormously good thing, and I wish lawmakers and commentators would cherish it more.

Go enjoy James’ talk. It’s indeed awesome. I’m off to read some dreadful angsty poetry, in secret.

I feel a little bad singling it out for criticism so I hope you’ll take my comments as a broadside aimed at all non-malleable software, rather than as a snipe at this excellent application.

You see, Tweetie, like most commercial software is closed source. That means I can’t myself change the way it works. I can’t help to fix it.

It has one annoying and I’d think, simple to fix, bug that daily gets on my nerves.

My twitter name is @beng which is a subset of the far more popular @bengoldacre.

Tweetie should highlight posts that mention me like so:

And so it does! But it also highlights posts mentioning @bengoldacre too, like so:

This is such a minor annoyance. I can’t bring myself to care about it too much. But it’s a demonstration of how non-malleable software can be disempowering. Not in big, dramatic “Microsoft is evil but OpenOffice makes you FREE” way, but more in a niggly, annoying way.

It’s like a squeaky hinge that I’m not allowed to oil.

I’m pretty sure that lurking within Tweetie’s code is a regular expression that matches tweets to see whether to highlight them. There’s probably one character that needs changing in this expression to make it less greedy.

I have the know-how to make this change; I’m sure the bug affects hardly anyone else. And yet, I can’t make the change myself because the software is closed.

I don’t want to bug Atebits about this, it’s such a little thing. Although I’m sure it will get fixed because they do seem to really care about these small details. Like I said, this isn’t really about Tweetie itself at all.

These squeaky hinges are typical of closed software experiences – and it’s time we started noticing them and calling them out. I think we accept the consequences of non-malleable software too readily.

Postscript: “So, you’re saying that Atebits should make their source code freely available, just because of a little bug that affects practically no-one? Do you think people shouldn’t get paid for writing software? What are you? Some kind of freetard?”

Well, you miss my point, Strawman, and haven’t read what I’ve said. It would be better – for my definition of better – if all software was open to being fixed, fiddled with, and improved by its users. And no, I don’t care if I’m asking for the moon on a stick.

I’m your man for washing machines and version control systems, apparently.

Just to restate my position on illicit filesharing. I think it’s wrong for those who can afford to pay, or to wait, to download content for free. I just don’t do it. And, if you can afford it, I’d encourage you not to either.

But, as I’ve said before, we need some perspective here. The industry figures, relied on by the lawmakers, are nonsense. It’s not such a big deal, and our economy isn’t on the verge collapse – well, not because of this kind of piracy, at least.

Further, I’m in agreement with Tim O’Reilly that the facts of piracy make it a welcome progressive force in culture.

I strongly support the reduction of copyright terms to, say, 12 years. Whereupon I’m convinced we’d see the greatest cultural flowering in this country that any amount of arts funding could buy.

We have poor access to our recent British canon of culture today because of the tangle of rights and rightsholders we’ve allowed to grow up in the so-called ‘creative’ industries.

And who can support the way devices are being tied into closed monopolistic schemes of DRM and content control? It’s fundamentally anti-consumer and anti-public.

But others make these pragmatic cases for tacitly supporting illicit filesharing much better than I can.

None of these reasons, though, are at the root of my opposition to the internet cut-off law.

Here’s how I fear the debate in parliament will go…

Very sensibly, someone will raise the fact that the internet is essential now to public life. There’s no way we could ban someone from, say, filing their tax return online, from accessing information published on DirectGov, from getting BusinessLink advice. It would, of course, be wrong to cut these sites off, on principle.

The response, I fear, an Orwellian compromise: the government’s ‘technical measures’ will not be a complete disconnect, but a firewalling allowing access to pre-approved government sites. Yes, that’ll fix it.

Technology, mandated by law, can do this, right? Unfortunately so. And what happens next?

Now we have a fledgling Great Firewall of China in every ISP. A government-controlled fifth estate. But rather than the blacklisting that repressive regimes rely on, this one works by whitelisting – everything is banned by default, unless it’s a sanctioned site. Altogether more reliable and robust, more repressive and controlled.

Repressive technology has a tendency to grow in scope.

First, given this technical capability, it would be nonsensical to cut pirates off from government-sanctioned ‘legitimate’ content providers – say the big four major labels’ websites.

There can’t be any piracy going on from their sites. (oh really?)

Banks might be white-listed too. No sense in stopping people managing their finances online. Yes, that all makes sense.

In fact, this is such a fantastic bit of technology, we can now make our own, government-approved safe internet. We’ll let facebook on there, maybe, and no-one will mind too much about everything that’s gone. It’ll be safe, controlled. Who could possibly object?

And what about a few newspaper sites – just the ones we like. And of course, they could be removed in the face of injunctions or libel bullying.

And you know, we won’t make it impossible for you to publish webpages – you’ll just have to register with us. The fee will be reasonable, we promise.

This would have been an unthinkable development, but we’re already running registers for anyone who works with children. So, not so farfetched, eh? This is something we know how to do, and are big fans of. And, you know, all the ISPs now have this technology installed already so that’s easy.

When David Lammy says “now we must decide what we want balance between anarchy and authoritarianism to be in the digital world of the future,” I get chills.

Do you see why?

We must oppose ‘technical measures’ because building an infrastructure of repression is not what I will allow my government to do.