Entries Tagged 'Internet' ↓

I expect more from the BBC than from commercial organisations, and not in that narrow “I’m a license-fee payer” kind of way. I expect the BBC to be an honest-speaking alternative to the excesses and drivers of the commercial world.

That’s why I’ve become so annoyed about the way the BBC engages in the Freeview HD debate. It’s being spin-ful in its use of language. I’d like to see it make a fairer and straighter assessment of what it’s chosen to do.

Such an assessment, I think, could have gone something like this:

“We’re sorry. We’ve had to make an imperfect deal with programme-producing companies which will require us to encrypt some of our HD transmissions.

“We think the impact will be minimal for most consumers that buy boxes from retail channels. For those of you who prefer to use open hardware and software, we’re afraid you won’t be able to enjoy these transmissions.

“However, we made a judgement that this was the best tactic currently available to allow us to broadcast any HD content from third parties.

“We will of course, be broadcasting in the clear those properties for which we own the rights or have made ourselves. We are currently lobbying parliament to strengthen the laws regarding our standard definition content so that this deal doesn’t become the thin end of a DRM-encumbered wedge.”

Of course, I made up the proposals in that last paragraph.

But, I’d be happy to accept that reasoning. I disagree with it, but only mildly so. The regret expressed is appropriate and would be welcome. It encourages me that they believe DRM to be the least-worst rather than the best option.

Instead we get triumphant, salesy and slightly aggressive posts here and here.

I just want the BBC to be more honest about the restrictions imposed by this technology. And I would be pleased if the starting point of their negotiation wasn’t at the DRM end. I hope they stood up for public broadcasting on open platforms more strongly than these posts imply.

Unfortunately, the BBC doesn’t seem to have the courage it used to have.

Maybe too many people with eyes on jobs in media companies. Maybe. I don’t know enough to be sure. I do know though that yet another BBC executive moved recently to Microsoft. I have to say, I’m surprised that the organisations have anything like compatible cultures. Perhaps I shouldn’t be. Updated: in hindsight, I think that paragraph, while true, was a distraction from my main point.

If the BBC is just another media company in a sea of media companies; if working for the BBC is just like working in another corporate; and, if PR from the BBC feels like spin-ful PR from everywhere else, well, what’s the point?

I hate dealing with High Street retailers, especially when things have gone wrong.

The USB cable for my Vodafone 3G modem has broken. Not a big deal, easy to replace – why don’t I just pop into the Vodafone store and, you know, they’ll change it for me. I’ll be able to use it on the train back that evening and all will be good. Can’t take more than a few minutes. Right?

No. Instead, bloke in Vodafone shop, you tell me that my warranty has expired. Then, when I protest, you grudgingly tell me that you could send it off. But, of course, the whole modem would have to be sent off not just the cable. It would be gone for, oh, 6 or 7 working days at a minimum. Oh, and I’m not from here am I? Well, I can only get it sent back to this shop.

“It’s a goddamn USB cable”, I’m thinking. Over and over again.

He carries on: but it’s not covered by the warranty anyway, so… you know. (I really don’t) Of course, you could upgrade.

Upgrade for the sake of a bloody cable? I should have just gone to Maplin and bought one. Silly me to think I’d get some service from Vodafone. But I don’t say any of this, I’m very polite.

Do the new modems come with these cables? Yes? Can’t you just take a cable out of one of those boxes then? No, your warranty has expired, see?

So I end up moaning about how the Sale of Goods Act and its EU equivalents mean that I don’t need a warranty to get a fault replaced – the 3G modem is only a little over a year old – and storm out of the store.

Anger and annoyance for the sake of a £1 cable replacement, I’ll be changing away from Vodafone as early as I can.

What should have been a simple “Of course, sir. Here you go!” becomes an anger-inducing farce. A fucking £1 USB cable. That’s all. How hard could it be?

What I understand the least about these situations is the lack of any empathy from the sales-folk. I guess they don’t get commission from replacements, or something.

But, surely, they themselves wouldn’t want to be treated like this? Surely, they’ve been in these kind of situations, where they’re trying to get something that shouldn’t have broken replaced?

So, clearly, the Sale of Goods legislation isn’t worth a damn in the real world. Am I really going to go to the small claims court for a cable that costs a few quid?

A friend of mine tells of taking something back to Currys and having to quote the Sales of Goods legislation only to be told “I don’t care about the law, this is Currys’ law”. Indeed.

First, a bit of a warning. I am going to witter on about Smalltalk, and about HotJava, and about the VIC 20. I’m having a nostalgic week. Indulge me.

None of those things – nor what they represent – are at the gravitational centre of the computing world. This is a terrible shame. For twenty years computing has been making itself in the image of the business machine. This leaves us all worse off.

I’m pretty sure that if I’d grown up with the machines we have now, well, I wouldn’t be into this stuff at all.

My first machine was a Commodore VIC 20. And here’s an article from 1983 about its video chipsets. You don’t have to read the article, but at one point it says:

“Suppose we want to lay out our own screen and characters. It seems simple enough: choose the locations for screen memory and character set, and POKE the block numbers (screen block times 16 plus character block) into address 36869.”

POKE and PEEK – that’s messing directly with the computer’s memory. We did a lot of this sort of stuff. The computer’s memory was there for us to mess around with. As it should be.

Play was encouraged and to do some things it was necessary to fiddle directly with memory locations. You know, this sometimes killed the machine but it had a big on/off switch within easy reach (and it started up again in just a few seconds).

Now, on to smalltalk. Well, what’s to say that hasn’t already been said? It’s another environment that encourages you to take it apart and put it back together again. Until you start changing the way it works, it’s near useless. I liked that a lot.

Here’s a bit from the Squeak source code:

initNormal

	NormalCursor :=
		(Cursor
			extent: 16@16
			fromArray: #(
		2r1000000000000000
		2r1100000000000000
		2r1110000000000000
		2r1111000000000000
		2r1111100000000000
		2r1111110000000000
		2r1111111000000000
		2r1111100000000000
		2r1111100000000000
		2r1001100000000000
		2r0000110000000000
		2r0000110000000000
		2r0000011000000000
		2r0000011000000000
		2r0000001100000000
		2r0000001100000000)
	offset: 0@0).

If you squint, you can see that it’s defining the bitmap for drawing the the normal cursor. You can get at this code with three clicks from launching a smalltalk image – I just did.

You can get hold of the cursor object it initialises, right then and there. Change that object and your system will work differently, right then, right there. Turn it into a space alien, or a pacman icon. Easy. Beautiful.

And everything is like this, change the code editor, change the compiler, change the thread scheduler. Smalltalk all the way down, and modifiable in place.

Um, HotJava. Some of you might remember this project – um, it wasn’t very good. But it hid an amazing idea. That the web could be Java™ all the way down. That the JVM could be that malleable machine, but networked.

Yeah, it didn’t work that one, but I remember being pretty excited about it at the time. And, I think it was the last time that I heard anyone properly talk about my vision – a malleable consistent environment from the top to the bottom, that would encourage play, require tinkering, be empowering.

Now, when I hear Google and its many commentators talk about the browser being the OS, they’re talking about spreadsheets and word processing. What a pale promise. Not interesting in the slightest to me.

An OS that is written entirely in javascript – well, that’s getting warmer. Watch a couple of minutes of this demo video to see why this gets me…

Well, I ramble on. I recently read Alan Kay’s 1972 Dynabook paper. Wow. It’s the one that a lot of folks credit with creating the idea of a personal computer. Alan Kay was also one of the drivers behind the Squeak smalltalk project and one of the original Smalltalk creators.

It’s a marvellous idea of a malleable, tinkering machine – malleable in the same way as Squeak is, as the original home computers are, as the Hotjava browser was supposed to be. How I wish it existed, not for me, but for my son.

Unfortunately the way things are going, by the time he’s ready to do bitwise battle with the world, everything will be locked down by the business f***wits.

I don’t want to end on a miserable note, but really, it’s is getting worse and we’re allowing ourselves to be dragged further away from this ideal, day by day, by corporations who have forgotten how cool computing used to be and forgotten how to build things their kids would be proud of.

About time we did something to get it back.

I’ve been re-reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer this week, reliving the effect that it had on me twenty-odd years ago.

There was a chap at my school who had a cool older sister with an even cooler American boyfriend. This boyfriend had all but smuggled this book out of Canada. Or so the story went. Hadn’t even been published in the UK. Was hot.

It wasn’t the same shape as British paperbacks and the typeface was really small. All the spelling was American. By the time I was reading it, it was falling apart – I guess it had been passed around lots of kids before me. I read it in one afternoon and one evening and it has had a huge effect on me.

I remember thinking that there was no way anyone in my parents’ generation could even understand a half of one page of this book. It was something that only we could have access to. I was hugely disappointed when I found out that Gibson was about the same age as my Dad.

So, I’m reading it again – it’s still excellent.

It starts: “The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.” How odd, I’m thinking now, that with all the amazing predictive power that Gibson has, the first line is so analogue and dated. I’m pretty sure that my son will grow up without ever having seen what static on a TV screen looks like.

But, when I was 14 and reading it for the first time, the world he described seemed so, so far away and still does.

A friend and I were arguing in the pub a couple of weeks ago. The next war, he said, will be fought over internet latency. Countries battling it out over the rights to fast internet fibre routes.

Nonsense, I replied. You can’t feed people with faster broadband. Or at least that’s how I remember it. We had had a few jars of ale by that point.

Then today I came across this fantastic historical example of the strategic advantage of low latency in Thinking Strategically:

A famous example … was made by the Rothschilds following the Battle of Waterloo. The Rothschilds supposedly used carrier pigeons and hence were the first to know the battle’s outcome. When they discovered that the English had won, the sold British bonds publicly and thus led others to believe that England had lost. The price of British bonds plummeted. Before the truth was discovered, the Rothschilds secretly bought an even greater number of bonds at the rock-bottom price.

Those who ignore history…

By the way, the book is better than its cover suggests – it’s in fact a readable, anecdote-rich introduction to the basics of Game Theory.

The UK clothing industry is worth around $50bn a year.

The government must act now to save thousands of jobs and tens of billions in lost revenue!

All over the country, youths are going clothes shopping. Shockingly, before buying anything, they’re trying the clothes on. That’s right, wearing the clothes – for free!

Often, they try on clothes that they don’t buy. Sometimes, they wear clothes that they were never intending to purchase, just to see how they look!

I know, horrific isn’t it. Immoral and wrong. It’s tantamount to theft. They don’t own them, haven’t paid for them. And yet there they are, taunting the whole industry!

All those poor tailors, seamstresses, dyers, cutters – their jobs are in peril due to this blatant.. well.. fabric piracy!

Forget this digital britain nonsense – the real ‘lost money’ in our economy is in folks trying on clothes. Ban changing rooms now!

Last time I went shopping – let’s face it we’re all guilty in this – I tried on three pairs of trousers and bought one. If I’m in any way typical – well at 3:1 worn/bought ratio that’s $100bn of lost revenue right there!

I hold no candle for digital pirates. You’re somewhere above rats and below salesmen in my hierarchy of distasteful creatures. The sense of entitlement you have, as you steal what doesn’t belong to you, disgusts me – the same disgust as the trough-guzzling of MPs and bonus-boozing of bankers. Worse, you call yourselves ‘sharers – an inhuman disservice to the wonderful human act of sharing, of lending a much-loved book or film to a friend.

You represent a terrible egotism – I want this now, therefore I’m allowed it now. You’re spoilt children, having silly tantrums over shiny things you can’t have.

But, right now, you’re being used; being used in a public policy ‘debate’, by ambitious politicians and business-blinded lobbyists. And, on balance, I dislike these people and their ends more.

This week saw the publishing of a report by SABIP claiming ‘a rise in economic losses sustained by unauthorised downloading’.

It’s actually a pretty good and thorough report – though it’s a review rather than original research, and undertaken with the usual economic/industry bias.

But the executive summary is much more apocalyptic and negative than the report as a whole – one might say ‘sexed up’. It makes chilling reading – £10 billion in monetary losses; 4,000 jobs; £12 billion stolen by the users of one small peer-to-peer network annually; who knows the figure for the whole of the internet! As the summary says “these figures are staggering”.

Yes they are. And also utter, utter nonsense. Maybe the figures aren’t supposed to be the kind that stand up to simple scrutiny. Perhaps they’re of the good-enough-for-a-powerpoint-slide-or-spreadsheet-or-press-release type.

But, even the most innumerate of us will wonder how 4,000 jobs relates to a £10bn loss – unless each of those potential employees earn/costs £2.5m a year.

Some of us will wonder further. When the summary says that a season of 24 is worth £5, wouldn’t that imply that 4.2 million years of content are being downloaded annually to make up this £12bn in stolen value.

To put it another way, with these numbers, even if every broadband-connected household in the UK was involved, some 48 hours of pirated content would be being watched by each of them online, every week.

And, further, we have to assume that if the content weren’t downloaded it would be paid for. Phew!

Indeed “these figures are staggering”. Staggeringly stupid and cherry-picked to get headlines, I’d say. The numbers imply a very odd world, one that I’m certain doesn’t really exist. (I’m being a little unfair by not splitting the numbers into UK v. world losses, but it’s not that clear in the report’s summary either).

Even given these ridiculous numbers, the report says that it’s going to get worse – 50mps broadband can deliver 10 hours of music in five minutes! Imagine how much more people will listen to when it can be downloaded so quickly! It will only take 12 minutes to download a whole 24hrs of music.

I’m guessing that the fear is that young folks find a way to consume more than 24 hours of content in a day – then we’ll be in trouble. Or not.

My favourite bit:

“The new generation of broadband access at 50mbs can deliver 200 mp3 music files in five minutes, the unauthorised DVD of “Star Wars” in three minutes, and the complete digitized works of Charles Dickens in less than ten.”

Now, leave aside the fact that Charles Dickens’ work is now out-of-copyright and perfectly right, proper and good to share. It’s some deep level of digital ignorance that thinks that in terms of file size the order goes music > video > text. Do these folks not use email? This is a soundbite drop-in: false but designed to be easily repeatable. And, I’d warrant, it must have been written by someone who is digitally illiterate – just the peeps you want setting digital policy.

It’s obviously too much to ask for a simple model of file-sharing activity – one in which the numbers add up and doesn’t point to some coming digital apocalypse. Because that’s not where we’re heading. There is a hard limit on how much digital content we can possibly consume – time.

There is clearly no strict equivalence between the amount of content downloaded, the amount consumed and the amount that would otherwise have been bought. Refusing that is where these silly numbers come from. There is no secret ‘dark’ £10bn (or was it £12bn?), just waiting to be delivered to Bono and his mates, in trucks.

Sigh, but you can bet it’ll be the big numbers that are picked up by the media and repeated and exaggerated and the government set public internet policy off the back of them. Public internet policy that will be restrictive and designed to appease the industry lobbyists – ignorant of our individual rights and utterly disproportionate.

Panic in the Techbelly family’s secret underground lair this morning when we thought the washing machine broken. A domestic disaster, given the child’s insistence of vomitting on or otherwise soiling everything we own, every day, more than once.

Just so others can find this post: the broken washing machine was a Siemens xlp1400 (or maybe xlp 1400), and the symptom was a flashing key symbol.

Turns out it wasn’t broken – the flashing key symbol meant that the child lock had been accidentally engaged. The fix, given by the friendly folks on the Siemens help-line: simply hold down the start button for two seconds. Bingo, the laundry cycle can crank up again. They also offered to send us a new manual for the machine. Which was nice.

Couldn’t find any information on the interweb of how to solve this – hence this post. After-sales service on the web becomes increasingly impossible through the spew of affiliate and review sites that vie daily to dominate the search results – to everyone’s disadvantage it seems. (Although, it would have been helpful if Siemens published their manuals online in a way that google could search them. Just saying).

This might be the most boring post I’ve ever written. And the most useful.

Thinking more about my previous post decrying British journalism for its imbalance in reporting arrests and not releases.

So, I searched for ‘plymouth terror arrests’ on Google news:

Yep. That’s 422 reports of the arrest, 10 of the release. Only 3 news organisations reported the releases, and all of them as local news.

See the problem?

You know, we could make this a story again if we all blog about it, tweet it, link to it on facebook. Please do.

Update: Paul has blogged about this and added it to Reddit. Please vote up if you think this deserves more coverage.

I’m sure that in a newsroom somewhere there’s a journalist or editor with a bee in their inky bonnet about the arrest and subsequent release of 5 people in Plymouth last week.

I’m sure there’s someone arguing that the release without charge of these five people should be plastered all over today’s newspapers. After all, their arrest under the Terrorism Act received blanket front page coverage.

I’m sure there’s a passionate journalist, right now, doorstepping the police officers involved and trying to tease out how the arrest of a 25-year-old man for spraying the grafito ‘Antifa’ lead to the unwarranted detention of 4 others under the Terrorism Act.

I’m sure there’s someone asking what it must be like to be a 16-year-old schoolboy wrongly arrested under the Terrorism Act.

I’m sure a feared editor is banging a table with angry fists and sending journalists scurrying to uncover the facts: to disclose the ‘information [the police] had at the time of the arrests’; to make public the evidence presented to the district judge that allowed their continued detention.

I’m sure the ‘material relating to political ideology’ is about to be revealed in an in-depth investigative report. We’ll soon know if we’re talking about tracts inciting revolution or copies of Thatcher’s autobiography.

I’m sure that one of those awful infographic timelines is being sketched out, describing what came to light between the initial Friday night arrest for simple criminal damage and the Sunday arrests of his associates.

It may well be that the police actions were proportionate and necessary – in good faith. But something smells wrong here – and has done from the initial reports of the action. Surely there’s a journalist or editor somewhere that’s pursuing this story?

So far, no evidence of said reporter has appeared.