The Blog
20 Jul 2005 TRIZ 40 Principles
oblique strategies for mechanical engineering creativity and innovation [from: del.icio.us] 19 Jul 2005 There's a discussion going on here about issues with using Skype when yours is the sole computer behind a cheap firewall/router on broadband. It seems relatively common that you copy of Skype ends up being a supernode helping to switch traffic for people who are behind NAT. In some circumstances the sheer volume of TCP connections can then overwhelm the router. So even though the bandwidth needed is quite small, the effect is that internet access grinds to a halt with DNS and web timeouts. There's a further problem here that people with bandwidth capped broadband are likely to have exactly this sort of connection and may not have any router at all. In which case, first they are very likely to become a supernode, and secondly, even the small bandwidth taken is eating into their cap.
Skype really need to do something to rate limit this or even allow people to reject being a supernode. The problem is that if they do that their whole switching mechanism and NAT busting approach fails if not enough people are supernodes. But in the past couple of days I've had two people say they've had to reject Skype for exactly this reason, so if they don't do something they will be shooting themselves in the foot. In my case, I've now had three instance of this happening in the last 2 days. Fixing it involves killing Skype for 3-4 minutes and then restarting it. One suggestion has been to go into tools | options | connections and uncheck "Use port 80 and 443 for incoming connections" as this is supposed to bar being a supernode. But it's had no effect for me. On another note, my son is going to Brunel Uni in Sept. I was scanning the computer network terms of use. In the middle is a statement that goes "P2P file sharing pograms (such as kazaa, grokster, bittorrent, Skype) are expressly forbidden". I'm not exactly surprised, and the issue is likely to be bandwidth as much as copyright issues. Still irritating though to see Skype lumped in with these. I've been taking a look at OpenID and searching for PHP implementations. Along the way I've come across several programs that are typically only 5-10k long. And I'm seeing a wide variety of copyright statements at the top which basically say "do what you like but leave my name on this because I want attribution". Sometimes there's even a no commercial restriction. I have to ask myself, what are you trying to achieve and what are you afraid of? This all gets particularly annoying in an area where the code is very likely to get absorbed into a bigger system, as is the case with Identity.
So here's a request. If you're contributing code to the world, either use an established copyright scheme like GPL, or effectively make it public domain. Which is why when I do this stuff I typically put a disclaimer in the top of the file that says "do whatever you like with this, I don't care". It would be nice to hav a more formal way of saying this but I've never found a formal way of saying "I renounce copyright over this file". 18 Jul 2005 I've just received this email about the Pledge to refuse to register for the UK ID Card and to give £10 to a legal fund to support those who do the same. They've now got 10,000 signatures. I think the email needs wider distribution.
Thank you all - what a success![from: JB Ecademy] 16 Jul 2005 Intel to cut Linux out of the content market
Wonderful rant about Intel, East Fork, MS and DRM [from: del.icio.us] 15 Jul 2005 Bloggerheads (UK) - Prepare your angry-pants
Security Services generally despise politicians and they especially despise politicians when they are particularly stupid. There was a famous case not so long ago when an MP stood up in the UK parliament and bragged that the Argentinians couldn't do anything pre-emptive because we'd broken their encryption codes. Shortly after, they changed their codes. Doh! So now we have a case where for purely political reasons (getting elected mostly) the Republican party bragged to the media that the west had a mole in Al Qaida. And then they gave enough information to the media that they were able to name him. As a result the British MI5 had to move before they were ready on contacts in the UK and some slipped through the net. So far so stupid. Except that some of the people allegedly involved in the bombings in London last week were allegedly linked with the groups being tracked via the mole. At which point you could be forgiven for laying at least some of the blame for last week's 50 odd deaths at the US Republican party's door. Me, I'm not so sure. There are some weird anomalies around the bombings just as there were around 9/11. Not really enough to fuel a full blown conspiracy theory but enough to make you go "hmmm?". Is it a rather cute but horribly over priced robot dog from Sony? or is it an Anti Internet Banning Order?
Blunkett moots 'proof-lite' internet and banking banning orders | The Register I can think of one or two people with blogs that ought to be given AIBOs but that's another story. Guardian Unlimited | Online | Ben Hammersley: Swift and offshore
The rise of personal offshoring. Rentacoder, audio transcription, web hosting [from: del.icio.us] Microsoft's OPM for the masses - Will Longhorn DRM force you to upgrade your monitor? : So what is OPM? The successor to Microsoft's rarely-mentioned COPP (Certified Output Protection Protocol), PVP-OPM (Protected Video Path - Output Protection Management) is the first play in Microsoft's game plan to ensure that protected content stays protected. PVP-OPM performs two main functions. First, it detects the capabilities of the display devices attached to the computer. For instance, does the DVI LCD monitor that you're using have HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection)? Second, it manages what, if anything, gets sent to those devices.
OMG. Is there no end to this madness? Here's the OS working in conjunction with the video card and drivers, not to mention the software video player, extending the reach of a "broadcast flag" embedded in the content all the way out to the video display device. I can hear the sound of suits signing contracts, cash registers ringing, Apple and Linux fans crying foul and in the background hackers sharpening their tools. Yup, that'll work to keep unauthorised copies of Sith out of the customer's hands. 14 Jul 2005 There's a problem here that I've struggled with, with FOAFnet and I will struggle with, with OpenID. Sites like Tribe.net and Ecademy depend for a lot of their function on having a rich user record. Even if I run an OpenID ID provider on Ecademy and Tribe trusts it, Tribe will want to create a local user account with lots of data attached. So checking against Ecademy when logging into Tribe serves no useful purpose when they could just as well authenticate the user against the local data.
Once the user has logged in, you don't want to make round trip requests for the data on every page refresh so you have to maintain a local session with locally cached data. Wich again points at a local user database. This means that it is useful to help the user avoid typing all that data again into yet another account creation form. But single signon makes less sense. Having said all that I think there are places where a temporary check against a trusted third party is useful. And it's exactly the scenario that led to OpenID at Livejournal. That is allowing users that have been authenticated by a trusted source to leave comments against an article. So think TypeKey, not YASN account record.   [Edited to add] I've already been accused of being insensitive for the first image (mine) as one of the suicide bombers worked in an Indian restaurant. But I think it nicely illustrates a point. Consider that apart from the pint (and that could be an Indian Pale Ale), Chicken Tikka Masala is the national dish, Tea is the National drink and both of them have strong ties with the the Indian sub-continent. Every small town in Britain has an "Indian" restaurant and the vast majority of them are run by Muslim Pakistanis and Bangla Deshis. So Asians are integrated into every corner of British society. So let's understand that the problem here is not racism. The problems are extremism, violence and a small minority of disaffected youth being preyed on by the followers of a death cult. Pretty much like N Ireland then. And I still maintain that we should be finding ways of integrating that disaffected youth, no matter what skin colour or racial background, into mainstream society. They should be going out and they should be having fun. They should be the ones sticking two fingers up at authority and saying, hell no, I won't subscribe to your medieaval ideology. Hell no, I won't kill people and myself for your religion. And hell no, I won't spend my life in a closed inward looking community that wants to live in the past. I'm British, damn it and we don't do that sort of thing round here. NINJAM - Novel Intervallic Network Jamming Architecture for Music - Main
a solution to latency when trying to jam across the net [from: del.icio.us] 13 Jul 2005 Two stories have come to my attention today.
Wayback Machine sued: DMCA IFPI vs Heise vs AllofMP3 The first is about a law suit being brought in the USA where an old copy of a company's web site appears in the Wayback Machine. They are claiming copyright abuse using the much discredited DMCA. Crucially, they claim that old snapshots are available even though more recent snapshots have been prohibited via a robots.txt file that is being honoured. This is a problem that I've hit on Ecademy with Google where somebody has chosen to hide their profile from Google, but Google still maintains an entry in the index and a cached copy of the page from before they made the change. The second is about a new law in Germany, where promoting a service which is illegal in Germany is also illegal. A German magazine website that specialises in copyright issues has a link in an article to AllOfMp3, the Russian paid for music download site. They are being sued in Germany by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). And this despite the fact that they have not yet brought a case *in Germany* proving that the AllOfMp3 site is illegal under German law and within the German jurisdiction. In my naive way, I think that both cases are absurd. There should be some basic free speech view that linking to something illegal should not in itself be illegal. I also think that services like Google and the Wayback machine are too useful and too important to trans-national society as a whole to hobble them. And finally, that if you publish something on the web for public access all bets are off and it is effectively public domain in the sense that there will be copies with attribution and links to the original all over the place. Some will have limited accessibility in web caches, some will be very public like Google. Like Doc Searls, I'm scared that this vast, free and open system will get tied down, monetized and ruined as more and more commercial and governmental interests try to control it. This is what we are fighting, folks. The open and free marketplace the Internet provides is shortly going to look like the best darn mess of few-to-many distribution systems for "content" the world has ever known. It will not be the free and open marketplace it was in the first place, and should remain. The end-state will a vast matrix of national and private silos and walled gardens, each a contained or filtered distribution environment. And most of us won't know what we missed, because it never quite happened.[from: JB Ecademy] [ 13-Jul-05 8:10pm ] Nearly 25 years ago we had Rock Against Racism and the Two-Tone movement. Two weeks ago we had Rock Against Poverty. I'm here to propose Rock Against Terrorism. Maybe the words are wrong and it should be Rock Against Violence or Rock Against Bigotry. But whatever, it's about using music to include sections of British society that are alienated from what we think of British culture.
So where's the 2005 equivalent of UB40, The Clash, "A Message To You, Rudie". Where's the Bangla-Ska-Garage mashup band. Where's The Specials? Where's Skateboarders Against the Nazis? Where are all those T-shirts and badges that anyone could feel proud to wear? Music is the best. Without the Music, I don't know where we'd be. Writing this with tears in my eyes. [Edited to add] I'm feeling really freaked out by a society where a 19 year old teenager brought up in Britain is so alienated that he can be indoctrinated into killing himself and others *from his own society*. "You should be going out and you should be having fun" (c) Madness. "Rudie, don't go". I do remember Handsworth, St Pauls and Brixton, not to mention Notting Hill, but the whole Rock Against Fascism movement, Two Tone and the strange cross over between Reggae, Ska and Punk united black and white youth and did a lot to dispel the tension between them. So is there a way that music can do the same for disaffected Asian youth and build a bridge between them and their black and white brothers. (Damn, I'm tearing up again). BTW. "Rock Against Violence" is perfect. It can also be used against the extreme right wing as well as against Gangsta hip-hop and the the glorification of gun culture. And it gives all the potheads something to get behind as well. I haven't blogged for a few days. Not because there wasn't way too much tech stuff to comment on but because I've been trying to get my head round what happened in London. To all those who expressed sympathy and wondered if I was OK, thanks. But as I try never to use public transport and generally commute by megascoot, it wouldn't have affected me anyway. In reality, I was 25 miles away and overdosing on news (5 chat sessions and 10 browser windows on constant refresh).
The news today that the bombers were almost certainly teenagers from the Midlands is particularly hard to comprehend. I simply cannot understand the rift in our society that allows an idealogue to train, supply and above all indoctrinate a 19 year old to suicide bomb innocent people in their own culture and society, never mind in their own country. Perhaps part of the reason for this lack of understanding is that the home grown suicide bomber is a story that almost never appears in popular media, whether that's books, films or TV. I can only think of a single episode of a single series that tried to address this narrative. On a lighter note, I've yet to hear the inevitable British sick jokes; that wonderfully non-PC and British way of coping. The closest is the re-purposing of "We're not afraid" images to say "We're not afraid because we're drunk. Anyone for curry?" 07 Jul 2005 There were a lot of Paris 2012 T Shirts printed. Where can I get one? [from: JB Ecademy]
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