OMG Audio -- Incoherence
Incoherence is an audio visualization tool that shows you the placement of sounds in the stereo field and the frequency spectrum, simultaneously. plugins for Winamp, WMP, iTunes [from: del.icio.us]

A2B Location-Based Search Engine
Find websites "near" you. Track your position in meat space. [from: del.icio.us]

elastic space
A UK project that combines Geotagging with photography to build various art projects. [from: del.icio.us]

WITW Part I: Brute Force and Ignorance
Where in the world am I? Where in the world are they? [from: del.icio.us]

Could this be a solution to searching on tags and Geotags simultaneously? [from: del.icio.us]

"How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software [from: del.icio.us]

Times Online - Comment : Conspiring in torture, betraying our freedom. Charles Clarke is a disaster

This should be a devastating attack on Charles Clarke and the culture of control in the UK Labour party. But despite being in the main editorial section of The Times, I rather think that nobody will take any notice.

Since the Times restricts access to UK only, I'm going to break the rules and quote it in full. It applies to many other countries as well as the UK that are proposing to throw out a whole bunch of basic freedoms.

---

Conspiring in torture, betraying our freedom. Charles Clarke is a disaster
Simon Jenkins

ON FRIDAY the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, will ask the Conservative and Liberal Democrat leaders to help him to infringe the rule of law. He will tell them of a threat facing Britain that is greater than anything since Hitler. There are people out there, he said last month, who “want to kill hundreds and thousands of people who are innocent of everything”. Surely Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy will not want to impede urgent legislation — and just before an election?

Mr Clarke is emerging as one of the weakest home secretaries of modern times. He has capitulated to the dark forces behind every government who do not care a cat’s whisker for civil liberty. He wants to allow himself (which means them) to impose “control orders” on anyone he (which means they) choose. The victims may be Muslims, Irish, animal rights activists or anyone the Home Secretary “suspects of terror”. Mr Clarke wants curfews, electronic tags, internet and phone bugs and restrictions on contacts, all without court orders. Yesterday he withdrew passports from two British former Guantanamo inmates without explanation. He eschews the phrase “house arrest”, preferring to “restrict people to the premises where they live”. Authoritarians love euphemisms.

I cannot believe that Mr Howard and Mr Kennedy will give Mr Clarke this crude political bonbon, let alone on the threshold of an election. Despite two years of hyperbole, the Government has not convinced anyone but itself of the scale of the threat. It did not convince eight out of nine law lords, the Law Society, the Bar Council or a bevy of former defence chiefs (in Monday’s Times). Tony Blair keeps citing 9/11. As any reader of the official report into that atrocity will know, its ferocious impact resulted not from an over-liberal American Government but from a catastrophic failure of intelligence.

Mr Blair and Mr Clarke seek to bolster their case through asserting some “means of mass destruction” available to Muslim extremists to “undermine the entire British way of life”. Both threat and consequence are implausible. I have heard of nothing that puts Britons at greater risk today than from, say, a nuclear holocaust or Soviet special forces during the Cold War, or from the IRA, or from the disparate fanaticism that goes by the name of al- Qaeda. The British way of life has survived all these threats without having to suspend the rule of law.

A more serious reason for the Opposition to have no truck with Mr Clarke is that his requested control orders will make Britain less, not more, safe. They will radicalise every dissident group and minority neighbourhood and make Britain a target for every nutcase.

The control orders are to be prepared on the basis of secret reports from the police and security services. Such intelligence was shown during the Iraq weapons fiasco to be unreliable. Its gathering and assessment were distorted by the most brazen executive pressure from Mr Blair’s office. That pressure will be the more intense when the Home Secretary has made himself sole arbiter of the orders. He may set up an appeal, like that in place for imprisoned foreigners. That has proved such a travesty of justice that two “special advocates” assigned to it have already resigned.

Neither the Prime Minister nor the Home Secretary have shown any contrition for the deceptive Iraq intelligence dossiers. Now they are inviting the agencies which wrote them free rein to deprive British citizens of their freedom. The deprivation will be indefinitely renewable, as will the law itself. This is monstrous. I find it hard to believe that once-upon-a-time liberals such as Mr Blair, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, Gordon Brown, Peter Hain, Patricia Hewitt or Tessa Jowell can sit in a Cabinet that is embarking one inch down this totalitarian road. Now I know how banana republics are formed.

And there is worse to come. The control orders will be based not just on British intelligence but also on American, which means from the interrogation camps of Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. Last year the Court of Appeal gave a ruling of astonishing naivety. It allowed the Home Secretary to detain people without trial on the basis of intelligence gained overseas by torture, so long as British agents were not doing the torturing. Perhaps the court thought the idea hypothetical.

As so often, Americans are found not only among freedom’s most inept defenders but also among its most trenchant guardians. It is American congressmen, American lawyers and American journalists who have supplied the most vigorous critique of coalition actions in Iraq. Now the truth about Mr Clarke’s control orders can be unearthed from a long exposé by Jane Mayer in this week’s New Yorker.

The magazine collates mounting evidence from victims of Donald Rumsfeld’s policy of “extraordinary rendition”. This policy was approved by George Bush and employs “removal units” to kidnap people (of any nationality) and fly them in great secrecy to client states that employ torture. The results are fed back into the intelligence loop. The countries used include Syria, Jordan, Morocco, Egypt and probably Uzbekistan. That such places should be considered allies of Britain and America in any War on Terror is surreal.

The lengthening list of survivors now seeking legal redress puts the policy beyond doubt. One such is Maher Arar, a 34-year-old Canadian who is suing the American Government after being kidnapped, flown to Syria and tortured for almost a year before being sent back to his family a physical and mental wreck. Apparently a victim of mistaken identity, he told his interrogators anything they wanted to hear and was eventually considered “worthless”. There are countless other cases. The non-existent links between Saddam and 9/11 that so delighted right-wing commentators were apparently beaten out of an al-Qaeda informer by Egyptian torturers asked by the CIA for that particular titbit. It appeared in Colin Powell’s UN dossier. Did Tony Blair know this at the time?

The White House, in the person of Dick Cheney, endorsed torture after 9/11 because he thought that it might prevent another imminent attack. Like all such instant responses, it was soon institutionalised. Other whistle-blowers cited by The New Yorker include retired CIA and FBI agents exasperated by the counter-productivity of “rendition”. The trickle of torture disclosures is becoming a flood, contaminating the entire judicial process against terrorism. Guantanamo houses some 550 detainees whose cases cannot be brought to trial because any honest judge must dismiss all evidence against them as extracted under duress.

The only suspects so far prosecuted over 9/11, in Germany, had to be freed because America declined to send crucial witnesses from Guantanamo. It reportedly feared what they might say in court. Whatever the instant appeal of torture to some enforcers, once systematised it is lethal to sound intelligence and due process of law. Nobody knows what to believe, nor what to do with the victims afterwards.

So Mr Clarke is about to deny British citizens their freedom on the possible say-so of an Uzbek sadist, a Syrian thug or an electrode-wielding Egyptian. A British court says he can do this provided only that a chap from MI6 is not involved — which I would have considered a safeguard. I cannot see what conceivable weight can be put on such “intelligence”. At least in Tosca’s day Scarpia was in the next room. Even assuming that Mr Clarke’s conscience has gone to sleep, what has happened to his brain?

Control orders are a deep offence to British justice. Despite being based on unreliable intelligence and “outsourced” torture, they will become entrenched, like all past “prevention of terror” laws. They will alienate the Muslim population and make martyrs of hoodlums. No court can treat their evidence as usable. As America and Germany show, this will severely compromise the bringing of real terrorists to justice.

Mr Clarke may think that he is hanging tough for his boss at election time. But he is making Britain less free and less safe. Mr Howard and Mr Kennedy should have nothing to do with him on Friday.

simon.jenkins@thetimes.co.uk

IMHO, Single Signon is hugely important. It's also hugely boring. I've been trying off and on for some years now to try and get a development project off the ground in this area without success.

I've watched Passport rise and fall with no interop support. I've seen Liberty get hijacked by megacorps and generate a hugely complicated SOAP API with essentially no implementations. And the reference implementations are Java and ported dotnet only. SXIP looked promising but they seem unable to get any critical mass. And it's still tied to a single vendor who represents a choke point and is not big enough to force usage through. I keep thinking that one of these days Google will reprise Microsoft's MSN->Hotmail->Passport route to critical mass but I'm not holding my breath. Meanwhile at the low end Drupal's Distributed Auth is a toy approach[1] but is now as widely deployed as Drupal. And Identity Commons might work but like SXIP it's linked to a small but centralised choke point offering a for pay service (i-Names). Now we have LID which finally looks like something I can get behind. But it's currently perl only.

The vision I have is an API and set of libraries for use on the low end of blogs, Open CMS, BBS and such like. It would implement:-
1) Personal Identity Serving. From your choice of home site. This could be your blog, your website or your favourite (home) community site. This would provide an HTML About Me page as well as an XML (or XML-RDF) machine readable version.
2) Single signon. Go to a new site and say "Use my credentials from my home, here"
3) Instant account creation. Go to a new site and say "get my account profile details from my home, here."
4) Account Sync. For sites where you had used 2 or 3, automatic synchonization of the local account copy with that at your home.

What I'm looking for is a group of people prepared to hack code, implement in their favourite CMS or blog software and evangelise the above.

And I'd suggest that a useful starting point is to port LID to other languages (like PHP and Python) and then to implement it in test CMS systems. In the process we will learn huge amounts about where LID is wrong and can be improved.

At this point I'll declare an interest. I want Ecademy profiles and login to be the "Identity Home Site" for at least some Ecademy users. And I want to share that login across websites that are both tightly and loosely coupled with Ecademy. And I have a project in the short term that requires tight coupling.

Is anyone up for this?

[1]I don't want to be rude about Drupal. Distributed auth is out there and working. But using plain text passwords and passing the password around with the request for remote authentication is just not going to hack it in the wider world. And although it answers 2) it doesn't answer the other requirements.

Imagine a wiki that is set up to document a topic area (like online social networking tools). It has a a page for each tool or item in that topic. Now add tagging. Anyone can add their own tags to each page. Then there's a del.icio.us or flickr style secondary navigation where lists of pages can be browsed via tag links.

So is anyone good at hacking wiki code? Could this be fed into the Wikipedia-Mediawiki development?

marv on record, archive : Turning Napster's 14 day free trial into 252 full 80 minute CDs of free music.

Inspired by this, I can imagine a bit of clever scripting that downloaded from Napster, played to Wav and then encoded the Wav with LAME to MP3 all in real time assuming that you can download them at faster than real time. So why bother burning the CDs?

The Sound of Russian Music

Gosh. A whole article about me and buying music from AllOfMp3.com. Well actually it's about a Wall Street Journal piece, but fully 50% of the article is quoting my words.

Yet another awesome tool from the MySociety people [from: del.icio.us]

Slashdot FAQ - Accounts : My RSS Headline Reader Tells me I Was Banned!

I'm getting really tired of this. I share an NTL web proxy server with thousands of users. Every so often enough of us try to get Slashdot via RSS that we all get banned. And yet my RSS reader plays very nicely with them and only fetches every 4 hours while I'm awake.

Come on Slashdot, get your act together. You could get my real IP if you tried. And then you wouldn't ban me because of the aggregation of users on a single IP.

I'm looking for sponsorship to go to the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference - March 14-17, 2005

I'll be writing it up and I promise to promote you to anyone I meet.

Somewhere on the net in the dim and distant past I've seen an essay on how to be an online guru in your chosen field. But I can't find it again. Anyone got any ideas?

It's something like
- Post copiously
- Join all the mailing lists, BBS and Usenet groups in your field
- Start your own mailing list and newsletter
- Attend conferences and seminars
- Get speaking engagements at those seminars
- Start a blog on the subject
- Write the book
- Declare yourself "The Expert"
- ???
- PROFIT!

What else should you do?
[from: JB Ecademy]

Backing Blair :: FAQ :

What exactly is it that you want from me?
We want you to register to vote. Then, when the election comes around, we want people who live in 'safe' Labour seats or marginal ones to vote for the candidate most likely to beat the Labour candidate. Not the anti-war-person, or the seems-like-a-nice-person, but the candidate most likely to beat the Labour candidate.

But your group is called 'Backing Blair'! What's all that about?
We're using satire with an Orwellian tone to reach people. We realise some folks may be challenged/confused by this; that's why we have an FAQ.

OK, so why do you want us to do this?
People involved in this campaign pretty much want to get rid of Blair and bring a halt to his style of government. We hope that includes you. Common beefs include Iraq, the erosion of civil liberties, Blair's almost unquestioning loyalty to the Bush administration and the Blair government's ongoing swing to the right.

Our ultimate goal is to significantly reduce Labour's majority. We hope this will weaken Blair's position within the Labour party and lead to a viable leadership challenge.

But for a protest vote to be effective, it must be visible and damaging.

[from: del.icio.us]

[from: del.icio.us]

We've now got a Flickr style way of walking round the member database at Ecademy. This started when I realized that the 50 words (keyword bios) were the same as tags in flickr and del.icio.us.

Start here with a list of the most popular keywords. From there you can browse the database by walking round related tags based on clustering.

I'm going to write up how I did this over the weekend and some of the implications.

A key factor I'm grappling with at the moment is the relationship between folksonomy tagging and the soft metadata that generates and relatively hard metadata like Geolocation. My gut feel is that it's a mistake to use a folksonomy for geolocation. But maybe I'm repeating the old mistakes of trying to build hard categories before the event. And note here that Craigslist geolocation categories suck. Badly. More on that later.

Big Champagne have just released "illegal" download figures for last week. They think the top track was downloaded more than 5 million times. That's 250 million a year, times the number of tracks and include direct copying and we're 3 or 4 orders of magnitude larger than iTunes if not more. The ease of ripping, the analog hole and the relatively small size (6Mb) mean that audio is essentially a free commodity. Digital distribution and especially P2P distribution just ain't going to go away. You can kick and scream all you want about freeloaders, parasites, the poor artist and so on. The industry can attempt to prosecute students and dead people but it won't change a thing. Deal with it.

We've got a thread running on Ecademy, about alternate business models for the music industry. Here's my latest.

How is there no distributor in an online model? The majors (with the possible exception of Sony) can't sell direct due to channel conflict. So there has to be a 3rd party (like Apple) in the chain.

The big saving in the digital world is from all the manufacturing, shipping, distribution, warehousing and retailing costs. The actual cost of the CD is tiny these days, but the manufacturing setup is still fairly large and has to be spread across the production run. The equivalent costs online of all this are ripping the analog to digital which can be automated. And the cost of running the online site (bandwidth, servers, programming) which is spread across the entire catalogue.

So the key to getting the online costs down looks like size of catalogue and volume. Even if we keep the current model of "selling" individual tracks or small groups of tracks (the album), there should be enough savings in the process to get the price 30% down from the CD equivalent and still pay the artists and record company the same gross.

I think the next 30% comes from amortizing the original marketing, promotion and production costs. The vast majority of the catalogue is more than 1 year old and most of it is more than 5 years old. The production and marketing of that huge back catalogue of every bit of audio ever recorded has long since been paid for. So now we're left with a cut for the rights holder, the artist and the online site and that's it.
It certainly looks to me as though those three could make just as much money per track at an online price of 20cents as they do on back catalogue CDs via HMV or Amazon at $9.99 per CD. And quite a bit more than they make from royalties on 3rd party "best of" CDs (all that crud in Woolworths!).

But all this is still based on the trad model of "selling" individual "product". I think Napster will fail hopelessly. And not due to the model but to the execution. But at least they're exploring a new model where you rent the right to listen to an unlimited supply.

The truly radical approach here is to treat mid-fi downloads (less than 128kb) as pure marketing, no different from radio play and then make the money from a premium product (DVDs) and live performance. At the moment, the industry demands that online sites that provide previews can't play more than 30 secs of lo-fi. Why not actually give away the full track but as 32k or 64k MP3s? Nasty, crackly AM radio level. Now we can start doing things like 50% filling of an iPod at point of sale.

And so on.