The Blog




Is your favourite site blocked by your UK ISP?
https://www.blocked.org.uk/

There's at least two things going on here.

1) Sites blocked by "Adult Filters" that are defaulted on by the major ISPs but can be turned off. This might be an obvious porn site but could also be collateral damage. For instance These have included a website selling Porsches, a Jezebel article on post pregnancy care and the women's rights website SheRights.com

2) Sites blocked because somebody, somewhere disagrees with them. This is often because the site has something to do with sharing paid entertainment such as the Pirate Bay or New Album Releases. These are blocked regardless of whether you've disabled your "Adult Filter".

You can often get round these blocks via automated proxies like the one at https://immunicity.org/

Won't anyone think of the kittens? Thank goodness that Claire Perry and David Cameron are thinking of them for us. /s
 Are you being blocked? »
The government is promoting filters to prevent children and young people from seeing content that is supposed to be for over 18s. This includes pornography and sites that talk about alcohol, smoking, anorexia and hate speech.

[from: Google+ Posts]




So, farewell then, Orkut
http://en.blog.orkut.com/2014/06/tchau-orkut.html

10 Years ago, there was a rush to invite your friends and sign up to each new social network (remember Ryze, Tribe, Pownce, Jaiku, Plaxo, Plazes, Xing, among others? [1]). +Marc Canter invited me to Orkut and I joined just days after it launched. For a a few months I created and moderated 4 communities and put effort into them, before drifting away. Then Google took it over and later combined the logins. And in the process I lost my profile and somebody else hijacked my communities. It took ages to recombine my profiles but I never did manage to retrieve the groups. Like this one. https://www.orkut.com/Main#Community?cmm=292 It's still got my words and the image I added to it.

I know Orkut gets ignored in the USA and UK, but it's still huge in South America and especially Brasil. And note of course that it is still much richer in terms of functionality than G+, especially around the communities. 

So where will G+ be when it's 10 years old?

Meanwhile the mailing lists I started on Yahoogroups in the last millennium are still going strong. At least 15 years and counting.

[1] Also remember RDF. FOAF[2], Semantic Web, the RSS 1.0 wars.
[2] DnaCheckSum as a proof of ID is nearly here! http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_dnaChecksum
 Tchau Orkut - Orkut Blog »
The latest news from the orkut team

[from: Google+ Posts]




Series 2 of Orphan Black has been fairly irritating compared with Series 1.  But most irritating has been it's airing on BBC America in the USA 10 days before BBC3 in the UK. Which means spoiler headlines on several sites I read, at least once a week on what for me is next week's episode. If the BBC can do globally synced Dr Who, why not their other global properties? 

I see Utopia is coming back for a second series next month. Hooray! But will they have screwed it up because series one was perfect right up to the last 5 minutes. But then I've lost count of the number of TV dramas that had you entranced until the final wrap up which ended up being too obvious. eg, Shadowline. But not Fargo. That was just perfect!
[from: Google+ Posts]




So who was flying a big drone quadrocopter above Stonehenge in the hour before sunrise on the Solstice day? It had two green and two red lights on it to show orientation and seemed to be pretty fast and powerful. Was it:-
- An enthusiast
- A journalist from a TV or newspaper
- The Police playing with their latest crowd surveillance toy
- The (Salisbury Plain) military playing with their latest recon toy

And yes, Stonehenge was a laugh. Just a bit different from '74, '75, '76, '81 when I've been before. Although crowd control was pretty organised, it's a fairly acceptable compromise that keeps a lid on the mayhem with the actual presence from the authorities being hidden in the background and pretty low key. That was an exhausting 36 hours though!

There's a certain amount of conflict between the people who just want to have a party and those who want to use the spiritual baggage of the place to change their brain state through the power of dressing up, music and dance. I lean towards the first, mainly because I don't really understand the second and keep trying to rationalise it. Getting upset because there are too many people not showing proper respect does seems a little pointless though, on that night, in that place.
[from: Google+ Posts]




If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the excluded middle.
[from: Google+ Posts]




The "Beckham goes to the rain forest" documentary on BBC was quite entertaining. But would you choose a custom Triumph Bonneville for that trip and then ride with almost no safety gear or even a jacket? This isn't Shoreditch High Street, you know.

http://blog.motorcycle.com/2014/06/10/celebrity/david-beckham-rides-custom-triumph-bonneville-amazon-rainforest/
[from: Google+ Posts]




Where can I go to find definitive maps of UK council and district boundaries?

Because I've just run up against a problem where there's some fly-tipping practically underneath a "No Fly Tipping" sign. The sign is put up by one district council with one phone number but it turns out the site is well within the boundary of another district with a different reporting phone number.

If I follow this up to find the maps, I get put through to some obscure land registry department in the councils and still can't get the information. I've tried this with both district offices and the county council offices. As far as I can tell the Ordnance survey maps don't have these boundary markings either.

Meanwhile the fly tip waste is still there 2 weeks later. It's household builder's waste, some of it in rubble sacks. Why, how? It's on a Restricted Byway with quite a lot of walker, bicycle, horse traffic. And yet none of them seem to want to report it or do anything about it. So is this a society problem, council problem or landowner problem? Who's supposed to deal with it? And equally, who's job is it to maintain the track and keep the overgrowth under control?
[from: Google+ Posts]

Is that it for http://last.fm ? It's 3 days now and counting and it's still down.
[from: Google+ Posts]




From my privileged position I get to read Rudolph Rocker on Anarcho-Syndicalism, and laugh ironically at Dilbert making fun of the capitalist system. Without worrying too much about having enough to eat or having adequate health care.

Dilbert: http://howtosavetheworld.ca/images/LOTM-elbonians-via-gen-alpha.jpg

Rocker: The portentous development of our present economic system ... sacrificed the general interests of human society to the private interests of individuals, and thus systematically undermined a true relationship between men.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Rocker

[from: Google+ Posts]

Did you forget about Woodfest 2014 on Sat 14 June? Just off the A10, just N of the M25.

If you didn't get an invite then drop me a line.

https://www.facebook.com/events/234905970046933/
[from: Google+ Posts]




I do have a special weakness for deep future speculation inspired by a lifetime of reading SciFi. It brings a little perspective to present day here and now issues. The problem is that my consciousness won't see any of it.

So what might the Earth look like in a couple of hundred thousand years? From the perspective of whatever hominids are still around; assuming they are still around.

If 200,000 years (Homo Sapiens) is too near term, how about 2 million (Hominids), or 20 million (Primates)?

http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2014/06/deep-future-ultimate-destiny-of.html
 Deep Future: the ultimate destiny of humankind »
In the 1950s, we knew what the future would be: an age of prosperity and unprecedented wonders. Energy too cheap to meter, flying cars, vacations on the moon, and the conquest of space. Then, space heroes would return to Eart...

[from: Google+ Posts]




On the NSA's RFT for an internet-scale sarcasm detector
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/06/we-need-a-pony-and-the-moon-on.html

Did you hear the one about Epimenides' Cretan friend who said "So all Cretans are sarcastic?, Yeah right!".

When they've done the weaponised sarcasm detector, can we please have a weaponised irony detector as well. Seeing as how irony is nearly as hard to cure as Herpes or Malaria. Once you've caught it, it keeps coming back. Which makes you wonder, does Quinine cure Irony? Hmmm, maybe it does.

Please note that Google auto-added the hash tag "sarcasm" to this post.
 We need a pony. And the moon on a stick. By next Thursday. - Charlie's Diary »
Background: the US Secret Service has two main jobs (three, if you include persecuting Role Playing Game companies, but let's leave Steve Jackson out of this for the time being): combating currency counterfeiting, and protecting the President Of The United States, an office that for some reason ...

[from: Google+ Posts]




So Farewell Then
Alexander Shulgin.
Fare the'e well.

We Have Known And Loved one or two of your children, but by no means all.
[from: Google+ Posts]

A portrait of an artist at work: Punting down an industrial canal on a wooden bed with oil drums strapped to the bottom and handing out daffodils to random passers-by.

Glad to see the spirit of English Eccentricity is alive and well.

Not very political though, is it.

http://www.djbroadcast.net/features/featureitem_id=306/Gallery_Bill_Drummond_The_25_Paintings.html#
 Gallery: Bill Drummond 'The 25 Paintings' »
KLF legend Bill Drummond takes his artistic project, The 25 Paintings to the world through a new touring touring exhibition

[from: Google+ Posts]




Sad that series 2 of Elementary has ended. But happy that series 3 has been green lit and is due in the autumn.
[from: Google+ Posts]

Mary Meeker on the State of the Internet.
http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends

Much to comment on here!

Glad to see the X market is still projected to increase by Y% in Z years!

Note: Laptops are mobile devices but not counted in the comments about smartphones and laptops. And mobile page views is still under 25% of total page views. This may be a "post-PC world" but clearly PC is still very important and 75% of the total. My sense is that PC total is not declining but the growth in the total is from mobile. So mobile's rising share is growing the whole market.

Digital Universe growth 50% y/y. That's for end user generated content. I'd suggest that total data generation has passed 100% growth y/y. Exponential growth with a doubling period under a year (or two) is very hard to get your head round. TL;DR, there's no past (it's tiny proportion of now) and no future (now will be  a tiny proportion in only a year or two). Now is getting shorter and shorter.

We need a new name for a "data generating consumer"! What do you call an end user who generates more data than they consume? That's not the internet as glorified TV channel any more. And when did we stop lurking? Does that mean that it's not "90% lurk, 9% comment and 1% post" any more.

Tencent (and alibaba and ) is huge. it's just not that visible because there's no need for them to try and expand into the English speaking world.
 2014 Internet Trends — Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers »
Partnering with great entrepreneurs to build the next big thing.

[from: Google+ Posts]








Here's a puzzle. How do (UK) camera vans work with motorcycles that have no front number plate? Somebody[1] might well be doing an alleged 40 towards them in the 30 limit or 85 in the 60 limit. But by the time the bike has passed them and they can get a readout of the speed superimposed on the picture of the rear number plate, the bike is doing 27 and 57 respectively. So there's no record of the speed that would stand up in court. Is that how it works? Or if you're seriously taking the piss do they have a signed judgement call that the bike in the two pictures is the same one? Or is it all fully automatic and the intention is not to catch anyone (except the very stupid) but to get the public to pay more attention and stop playing silly buggers?

So that's St Neots - Higham Ferrers, Mkt Harboro- Melton Mowbray and Melton Mowbray - Kegworth roads where not only have they got loads of signs that say "MOTORCYCLE DEATH ROUTE" and "BIKER ACCIDENT HERE" along with long stretches of 50mph limit, but also camera vans out on a Bank Holiday Sunday evening. This modern world, eh?

[1]Somebody else I was following. Not me. Obviously.
[from: Google+ Posts]




Icon Books (2013), Edition: Reprint, Paperback, 288 pages
[from: Librarything]

Hoxton Mini Press (2013), Hardcover, 96 pages
[from: Librarything]

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