Tech & Net News on technology and the Internet from The Times and Sunday Times

Yet another one sided article. What really gets me about this is that there is no way on the Times site to answer back to the journalist (Steve Boggan) or at least none that I can see.

- The key person in this is Gina Harkell, a musician, who settled for £2,500 for allegedly sharing 1,330 songs. Quite a modest collection really, about 100 CDs or about £1,200 worth. And not exactly the major file sharer we were told that the BPI were going after.

- "The oft-repeated mantra of file-sharers was that allowing people access to free music would generate interest and boost sales, but a whole tranche of independent and BPI-sponsored studies in Britain, the US, Europe and Canada have shown that people who get music for free are likely to spend up to 59 per cent less on paid-for music." (my emphasis) Well that depends on which study you read. There have also been studies that show no statistical link or that show a rise in spending.

- To fully understand, it is necessary to go back to 1999 when Shawn Fanning, an 18-year-old American student, released Napster, a computer software program that enabled people to swap digital music files. Alarm bells instantly began ringing at US and British record companies. If these kids could obtain music simply by swapping among themselves, surely sales would drop? And they did, as hundreds of millions of files were swapped for free in breach of copyright law. Right. In the midst of a recession and a time when singles were no longer selling.

Just had a great IM about Skype with someone who runs a small web hosting business. Names changed to protect the innocent.

Julian Bond says: ps, I wish you'd use Skype instead of/as well as MSN...
Julian Bond says: I'm trying to wean myself off MSN and run just one IM program. And you;re the only contact left.
XXXX says: ok I might have to re-think the strategy as skype was getting a bit abused in the office
Julian Bond says: heh
Julian Bond says: Abused by cold callers?
XXXX says: that as well as staff personal calls and the fact that there was 15 people in (the office) using it and it was killing the connection
Julian Bond says: typical web product. Destroyed by its own success...
XXXX says: exactly
XXXX says: it was cutting through the bandwidth of the standard VoIP calls we were making because you can't really QOS http
XXXX says: well it's quite difficult
XXXX says: now I'm considering trying to install a dedicated connection for Skype calls
XXXX says: crazy.................................

So Steve Jobs made the big announcement last night that Apple is moving to Intel processors. Somewhere in there he also said that OSX86 would only run on Apple hardware.

What puzzles me about this is what makes an Intel motherboard an Apple motherboard. If you look inside a current Apple desktop there's a lot of commodity hardware; disk drive, PSU, memory, graphics card etc. You can run a PC keyboard and mouse. They have USB ports, ethernet ports and so on.

Now presumably the early machines will be Intel processors with Intel glue chips and an Intel motherboard. And I bet they will be very, very similar to Intel PC motherboards. My guess is that there will be a single Apple ROM or gate array that the OS will lock into. Which means I think that we'll see a rash of almost functional clones that try to reverse engineer the Apple proprietary bit and/or that require the addition of a single Apple chip from a genuine Apple machine. There's strong sense of deja vu here as we've been here before back in the old Mac world. The catch this time around is that the Apple chip is likely to be surface mounted rather than socketed.

One other catch in all this. It's very likely that future Intel chips will have hardware support for a DRM standard that will also be supported by MS in Longhorn. So what we'll have is "One DRM to rule them all, One DRM to find them, One DRM to bring them all, And in the darkness bind them". Should give the MPAA and RIAA some hope. Except of course that all DRM gets broken. Just Say No To DRM! [from: JB Ecademy]

Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog argues back about my dissing Infocard. I got a mention on Doc's Garage as well. Heh!

Here's what I posted back to Kim.

I put up the straw man, and deliberately painted a bleak picture. And rightly you're arguing back ;) I'm also extrapolating a bleak future from some current problems that may or may not resolve themselves. So let me re-state and provide a bit more reasoning.

The touchstone I have is whether Marc Canter's Ourmedia would be able to use Infocard where the end user is using Firefox. Now Ourmedia is based on Drupal and is pretty much a pure PHP implementation. It's representative of a very large number of small to medium sized websites running on pretty simple hosting. And the geek early adopters have switched from IE to Firefox wholesale. If you can't get them on board and evangelising, how will you get the great unwashed on board?

So one piece at a time.

- Firefox. (and Safari, and non Windows clients). Requiring a DLL/ActiveX to use Infocard doesn't completely preclude non-Intel, non-Windows, or non-IE browsers but it makes implementation a damn sight harder.

- PHP SOAP never really got traction. It almost works but the document model is essentially unfinished. Now how long have we been trying to get basic SOAP interop? I seem to have been following this for what feels like at least 4 years. And I'm still reading stories about how this or that toolkit doesn't really work with that or this toolkit in another language.

Now we're talking about building an Identity system on top of a large stack of unfinished protocols on top of a basic communications protocol that still has some interop problems on top of a very common web scripting environment where the bottom level of the stack is not going anywhere. Yup, that'll work.

I fully expect that if you're working with an MS only environment using MS only tools, then Infocard will work. But I can't see anything that says that you want to embrace those millions of Drupal, phpBB, Wordpress, Movable Type, php-Nuke, MediaWiki sites. Now that's a business decision that MS is free to make. But it precludes the whole of the long tail of web building. Including me.

Smart Mobs: Remixing the BBC
mashups of Google Maps and BBC backstage data [from: del.icio.us]

Following Cory Doctorow's talk (video here) on last wed night, here's a list of European organisations that are fighting for customer rights over the Broadcast flag and similar copyfight legislation.

FFII: http://www.ffii.org/

Union for the Public Domain: http://www.public-domain.org/

FIPR: http://www.fipr.org/

FSF Europe: http://fsfeurope.org/

BEUC: http://www.beuc.org/

Which?: http://www.which.net/

and in the USA,

EFF http://www.eff.org/
[from: JB Ecademy]

I'm really bothered by the reports coming out that future intel processors will have DRM support baked in. A few thoughts.

- AMD will have to match them to retain compatibility. So there's no competition here.

- How does this affect the rumours that Apple is considering switching to Intel?

- It's only support. And it will have to be added to with DRM software that uses the processor instructions. So it won't have any effect until MS (and others) actually use it in some future version of WMP, REAL and others.

- It's hard to see how it could have any effect on files that do *not* have DRM baked in. It's impossible for the processor to tell the difference between a public domain file with no DRM and a coprighted file with no DRM. So once the DRM in a file is broken and it's turned into something that is clean, the processor won't make it any easier to restrict distribution. And since *all* DRM gets broken eventually it doesn't actually change the landscape any.

- Which means that this is nothing more than an Intel-Microsoft (Apple?) ploy to convince the government-entertainment-military-industrial complex that this time the DRM really is secure. Really.

- And as with so many other of these cases, it's really, really hard to see why the technology industry is in such a rush to deliberately hobble their products to support another industry with a broken business model. And the only answer I can see is that the technology industry is now one and the same as the entertainment industry. It's not us vs them. It's them vs them. And as such Intel, Microsoft, Apple, Real, (Dell, etc, etc) apparently hate their customers just as much as Sony-EMI and all the content copyright owners.

And the solution to all this is the same one it's been for some time now (like back to 1985).

Just Say No To DRM

As customers we should vote with our feet and pockets. And just refuse to buy their deliberately hobbled products. If there's a source of non-DRM music, we should use that instead of their rip-off aid download or subscription download services. If they try to sell us DRMed CDs, we should take them back and complian that they don't work. If Tivo or Sky+ or whoever change their rules on us after buying the product we should send it back and sue them for breach of terms, lying in their advertising and selling a product that is not fit for use. We should never buy a region encoded DVD player. If Intel try to sneak DRM in the backdoor, we should call them on it and buy AMD. If Dell will only sell us an Intel based box with DRM, we should switch to Lenovo.

Johannes Ernst's Blog : Julian thinks "InfoCard will fall at the first fence"

Yet again the distributed conversation that is blogging fails because I didn't notice somebody blogging about something I wrote. Dammit.

I've written here and on Kim Cameron's and Marc Canter's blogs that InfoCards is doomed because MS cannot implement a standard that is genuinely open. They're completely stuck in architecting something that relies on ActiveX, Internet Explorer and the WS-Stack of SOAP protocols. It's completely understandable why they do this. But it's also just about guaranteed to fail. The reliance on ActiveX and IE rejects macs, linux and firefox on the desktop. The reliance on the WS-Stack rejects PHP/PERL/Python on the server and it probably rejects Java as well because interop with plain old SOAP is patchy let alone the full stack. Basically, if you don't use an MS development environment you can pretty much guess it won't work. And compatibility or at least the ability to interop with things like SAML, PingID and Liberty is a noble goal, but I wouldn't bet money on it unless I could afford large numbers of Accenture contractors.

So yet again, MS are trying to create a global standard, but a global standard that only works on their platform and so re-inforces MS Windows. I guess they can't do anything else. But frankly that means it's irrelevant to me. And I reckon it's irrelevant to at least 60% of the market and probably more like 75%. And given that it's going to be non-trivial to implement, we're probably back to a handfull of the huge players. At which point it's irrelevant to all of us. Who cares that you can sign in to Amazon with your Hotmail ID?

Every player with very large numbers of accounts has the ability to create an Identity standard. But most of them rightly focus on their core business and this is just a distraction. However it's interesting to speculate about who else might pick up this opportunity. Google? Skype? That last one looks very interesting. Identity + Presence looks like being functionally rich.

Back to Infocards. The touch stone for me now for any new Identity standard is whether Marc Canter and Ourmedia.org can use it. You can be sure Marc would want to as it's core to Digital Lifestyle Aggregators. And since Ourmedia is PHP, Drupal based, it's a good lowest common denominator. If it works there it will work almost anywhere.

London Geek Dinner June 7th 2005 - PerfectPath
ooh err [from: del.icio.us]

This is now up here. The other videos from last night will be up shortly here. [from: JB Ecademy]

Tonight's event features Stuart Henshall of Skype Journal If you're interested in the future of Skype and it's implications, you need to be there.

It also features Cory Doctorow If you're interested in why the media/entertainment complex wants to control technical innovation and make Open Source illegal, you need to be there as well.

Phil Mon, 30 May 2005 06:51:47
>It was the mickey mouse short circuit, only Kagayama had raced on this one,
>made passing very difficult, the track
>suited the Ducs, nice to see Haga competitive again, Corser increases his
>lead in the championship after Laconi
>crashed out in race two.

It's actually not a bad track in that configuration but it misses out on some of the more dramatic corners of the longer courses at Silverstone. But that's "not bad" from the rider's point of view. For the spectator it's complete and utter crap. I haven't been to Silverstone much over the years. Many, many times as a kid; once to see Sheene and Roberts at a F750 race; a few F1 races on hospitality in the early 90s; And yesterday. It was always flat and hard to see much but there were places where you could get reasonably close to the action and see something. But now the F1 safety issues and Ecclestone's demands have created a sterile, soulless track that exists to make money above all else and where there's so much gravel trap and fencing that you can't see a damn thing. While WSB was running on the short track, the other half of the circuit was running a car based hospitality day. Even with all the control and organization, they still manage to screw up. The PA on the pit straight was pathetic and several parts of the circuit which might have been good places to watch had no PA at all or it was turned off. The one Starvision big screen was pointing at grandstands across the whole Luffield complex so even if you were in line of sight, it would have been miles away. And yet at 90 deg to the way it was setup there were lots of spectators at good viewing points on both sides. Finally, there were no camping facilities *at all*. So no incentive to go for the whole weekend. And of course, no campsite mayhem. So we went up expecting to camp illegally in a field in the surrounding countryside and that's exactly what we did. On the good side, it was dead easy to get in and out, all queues were short and the toilets were clean (Donington, take note).

Any road up, I won't be going back and my guess is that anybody who went the last few years won't go back either, so I expect the small crowd to dwindle further.

Donington GP last year was like a police state. Now whether this was the effect of insurance or the "War On Terrah", I don't know. And although there are a few good places to watch, the racing is rarely close. Silverstone is utterly boring. So I think I'll only bother to go to Brands Hatch now and then just for the day. Or go to the continental circuits where they still know how to have a weekend to remember, loosely surrounding some decent racing.

Warning. This is somewhat off topic and veers into areas that might be political.

Mankind is a tribal species. And every so often the tribe needs to get together for a great festival. Get large numbers of people in a relatively confined area with a central event to provide the reason. Let them all get happy drunk, mashed or whatever and just let them get on with it. Inevitably a few people will get hurt in some way but the temporary autonomous zone will fulfil its purpose of bringing the tribe together.

This seems to be a very basic need that keeps bubbling up. In recent history, the free festivals of the late 60s and early 70s. The Punk era. The rave culture of the late 80s and early 90s. Goa beach parties. Glastonbury up until the early 90s. The Berlin Love Parade. The Grateful Dead caravan.

M/C racing events have been very much part of this and in the same spirit. From The Bol D'or to the TT to Donington (in year's past) to Assen to Jerez to Mugello. Motorcyclists got together and re-affirmed their membership of the tribe with a full on party.

But somewhere along the line, central reality control in the form of Northern European societies (and those like them in USA and Canada) have decided that this sort of free form gathering is too dangerous. They need to be sanitised and controlled and preferably eliminated. If it's not the governments that do this, it's their cohorts; lawyers, insurance companies and petty bureaucrats. And if not them it's the bourgeoisie. The moneyed classes with so little sense that they can't work out that buying a house right next to a race circuit means having to put up with noise on a lot of weekends each year. Or it's the same moneyed people who may even pay to go some of these events just as long as it's not in their back yard.

Some of my stand out memories, that I take out and polish every once in a while, are of these temporary autonomous zones. So it makes me very sad that in so much of the western world, these tribal gatherings are now basically outlawed. It's enough to make me want to emigrate to some country that's developed enough to have modern infrastructure but still anarchic enough to actually allow people to party en masse.

But perhaps this is just the mid life crisis talking. I just have to make the effort to get myself to the great Southern European races where this still happens. And to go back to those parts of Asia where a few million people gathering for some reason in one place is normal and not a disaster in waiting that must be stopped. And right now.

Open Tech 2005 - 23rd July in Hammersmith
NTK, BBC Backstage, UK Unix UG, together ... at last ... for a NotCon Sequel [from: del.icio.us]

In my never ending search for better slogans and epigrams, I thought up another one.

Don't give me ads in feeds, give me a feed of ads.

This is a reaction to Google adsense in feeds and the generally poor quality of adsense ads on blogs. I don't want to abuse my readers either here or on Ecademy even for money. But I do already take several composite feeds on specialist subjects from places like topix, del.icio.us, scraped Google News and so on. So why not have an associated feed of new ads from people working in those niches?

BTW. My favourite bit of advice comes form matchboxes. "Keep dry and away from children". A perfect rule to live by for most of us. Today I noticed that my lighter was trying to tell me something as well. There in Caps is KEEP AWAY FROM CHILDREN. How can I ignore this?

BTW2. So I edited this and AdSense has already targeted the post with the completely worthless:-

News Feeds. Great deals on News Feed. Shop on eBay and save.

Yeah, right. What is the point? I mean really, WHAT IS THE POINT?

The next Ecademy Event features Cory Doctorow. Cory has very kindly given us a link on my long time favourite weblog, BoingBoing.

Places are limited for this event so get your registration in now. [from: JB Ecademy]

Do you run Skype as well as an Instant Messenger like MSN Messenger, AOL, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger?

I bet you don't use the Instant Messenger any more.

So why not just turn it off? [from: JB Ecademy]

Roadcasting
links to last.fm? [from: del.icio.us]

This system has some nice UI, but the thinking doesn't look to me as though it's any more clever than last.fm. And they're glossing over exactly how "you can listen to anyone in a 30 mile range" as there's no info about the broadcast technology.

I've been playing with Google Maps. Along the way this web service kind of dropped out of the code.

Google Maps Address to Lat/Long convertor

It's a demo guys. Please don't hammer it. Feel free to copy the code and do whatever you like with it.

The trick is to request the javascript from google maps with http://maps.google.com/maps?output=js&q= and then look for the <center> tag which contains the lat/long.

Demo One for Unofficial Google Maps Embedding How To
[from: del.icio.us]

WigiWigi :: Index
Skype Video [from: del.icio.us]