These documents should not be allowed to disappear.

Letter #1

Confidential

FM Tashkent (Ambassador Craig Murray)

TO FCO, Cabinet Office, DFID, MODUK, OSCE Posts, Security Council Posts

16 September 02

SUBJECT: US/Uzbekistan: Promoting Terrorism

SUMMARY

US plays down human rights situation in Uzbekistan. A dangerous policy: increasing repression combined with poverty will promote Islamic terrorism. Support to Karimov regime a bankrupt and cynical policy.

DETAIL

The Economist of 7 September states: "Uzbekistan, in particular, has jailed many thousands of moderate Islamists, an excellent way of converting their families and friends to extremism." The Economist also spoke of "the growing despotism of Mr Karimov" and judged that "the past year has seen a further deterioration of an already grim human rights record". I agree.

Between 7,000 and 10,000 political and religious prisoners are currently detained, many after trials before kangaroo courts with no representation. Terrible torture is commonplace: the EU is currently considering a demarche over the terrible case of two Muslims tortured to death in jail apparently with boiling water. Two leading dissidents, Elena Urlaeva and Larissa Vdovna, were two weeks ago committed to a lunatic asylum, where they are being drugged, for demonstrating on human rights. Opposition political parties remain banned. There is no doubt that September 11 gave the pretext to crack down still harder on dissent under the guise of counter-terrorism.

Yet on 8 September the US State Department certified that Uzbekistan was improving in both human rights and democracy, thus fulfilling a constitutional requirement and allowing the continuing disbursement of $140 million of US aid to Uzbekistan this year. Human Rights Watch immediately published a commendably sober and balanced rebuttal of the State Department claim.

Again we are back in the area of the US accepting sham reform [a reference to my previous telegram on the economy]. In August media censorship was abolished, and theoretically there are independent media outlets, but in practice there is absolutely no criticism of President Karimov or the central government in any Uzbek media. State Department call this self-censorship: I am not sure that is a fair way to describe an unwillingness to experience the brutal methods of the security services.

Similarly, following US pressure when Karimov visited Washington, a human rights NGO has been permitted to register. This is an advance, but they have little impact given that no media are prepared to cover any of their activities or carry any of their statements.

The final improvement State quote is that in one case of murder of a prisoner the police involved have been prosecuted. That is an improvement, but again related to the Karimov visit and does not appear to presage a general change of policy. On the latest cases of torture deaths the Uzbeks have given the OSCE an incredible explanation, given the nature of the injuries, that the victims died in a fight between prisoners.

But allowing a single NGO, a token prosecution of police officers and a fake press freedom cannot possibly outweigh the huge scale of detentions, the torture and the secret executions. President Karimov has admitted to 100 executions a year but human rights groups believe there are more. Added to this, all opposition parties remain banned (the President got a 98% vote) and the Internet is strictly controlled. All Internet providers must go through a single government server and access is barred to many sites including all dissident and opposition sites and much international media (including, ironically, waronterrorism.com). This is in essence still a totalitarian state: there is far less freedom than still prevails, for example, in Mugabe's Zimbabwe. A Movement for Democratic Change or any judicial independence would be impossible here.

Karimov is a dictator who is committed to neither political nor economic reform. The purpose of his regime is not the development of his country but the diversion of economic rent to his oligarchic supporters through government controls. As a senior Uzbek academic told me privately, there is more repression here now than in Brezhnev's time. The US are trying to prop up Karimov economically and to justify this support they need to claim that a process of economic and political reform is underway. That they do so claim is either cynicism or self-delusion.

This policy is doomed to failure. Karimov is driving this resource-rich country towards economic ruin like an Abacha. And the policy of increasing repression aimed indiscriminately at pious Muslims, combined with a deepening poverty, is the most certain way to ensure continuing support for the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. They have certainly been decimated and disorganised in Afghanistan, and Karimov's repression may keep the lid on for years - but pressure is building and could ultimately explode.

I quite understand the interest of the US in strategic airbases and why they back Karimov, but I believe US policy is misconceived. In the short term it may help fight terrorism but in the medium term it will promote it, as the Economist points out. And it can never be right to lower our standards on human rights. There is a complex situation in Central Asia and it is wrong to look at it only through a prism picked up on September 12. Worst of all is what appears to be the philosophy underlying the current US view of Uzbekistan: that September 11 divided the World into two camps in the "War against Terrorism" and that Karimov is on "our" side.

If Karimov is on "our" side, then this war cannot be simply between the forces of good and evil. It must be about more complex things, like securing the long-term US military presence in Uzbekistan. I silently wept at the 11 September commemoration here. The right words on New York have all been said. But last week was also another anniversary - the US-led overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile. The subsequent dictatorship killed, dare I say it, rather more people than died on September 11. Should we not remember then also, and learn from that too? I fear that we are heading down the same path of US-sponsored dictatorship here. It is ironic that the beneficiary is perhaps the most unreformed of the World's old communist leaders.

We need to think much more deeply about Central Asia. It is easy to place Uzbekistan in the "too difficult" tray and let the US run with it, but I think they are running in the wrong direction. We should tell them of the dangers we see. Our policy is theoretically one of engagement, but in practice this has not meant much. Engagement makes sense, but it must mean grappling with the problems, not mute collaboration. We need to start actively to state a distinctive position on democracy and human rights, and press for a realistic view to be taken in the IMF. We should continue to resist pressures to start a bilateral DFID programme, unless channelled non-governmentally, and not restore ECGD cover despite the constant lobbying. We should not invite Karimov to the UK. We should step up our public diplomacy effort, stressing democratic values, including more resources from the British Council. We should increase support to human rights activists, and strive for contact with non-official Islamic groups.

Above all we need to care about the 22 million Uzbek people, suffering from poverty and lack of freedom. They are not just pawns in the new Great Game.

MURRAY

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Letter #2

Confidential

Fm Tashkent (Ambassador Craig Murray)

To FCO

18 March 2003

SUBJECT: US FOREIGN POLICY

SUMMARY

1. As seen from Tashkent, US policy is not much focussed on democracy or freedom. It is about oil, gas and hegemony. In Uzbekistan the US pursues those ends through supporting a ruthless dictatorship. We must not close our eyes to uncomfortable truth.

DETAIL

2. Last year the US gave half a billion dollars in aid to Uzbekistan, about a quarter of it military aid. Bush and Powell repeatedly hail Karimov as a friend and ally. Yet this regime has at least seven thousand prisoners of conscience; it is a one party state without freedom of speech, without freedom of media, without freedom of movement, without freedom of assembly, without freedom of religion. It practices, systematically, the most hideous tortures on thousands. Most of the population live in conditions precisely analogous with medieval serfdom.

3. Uzbekistan's geo-strategic position is crucial. It has half the population of the whole of Central Asia. It alone borders all the other states in a region which is important to future Western oil and gas supplies. It is the regional military power. That is why the US is here, and here to stay. Contractors at the US military bases are extending the design life of the buildings from ten to twenty five years.

4. Democracy and human rights are, despite their protestations to the contrary, in practice a long way down the US agenda here. Aid this year will be slightly less, but there is no intention to introduce any meaningful conditionality. Nobody can believe this level of aid - more than US aid to all of West Africa - is related to comparative developmental need as opposed to political support for Karimov. While the US makes token and low-level references to human rights to appease domestic opinion, they view Karimov's vicious regime as a bastion against fundamentalism. He - and they - are in fact creating fundamentalism. When the US gives this much support to a regime that tortures people to death for having a beard or praying five times a day, is it any surprise that Muslims come to hate the West?

5. I was stunned to hear that the US had pressured the EU to withdraw a motion on Human Rights in Uzbekistan which the EU was tabling at the UN Commission for Human Rights in Geneva. I was most unhappy to find that we are helping the US in what I can only call this cover-up. I am saddened when the US constantly quote fake improvements in human rights in Uzbekistan, such as the abolition of censorship and Internet freedom, which quite simply have not happened (I see these are quoted in the draft EBRD strategy for Uzbekistan, again I understand at American urging).

6. From Tashkent it is difficult to agree that we and the US are activated by shared values. Here we have a brutal US sponsored dictatorship reminiscent of Central and South American policy under previous US Republican administrations. I watched George Bush talk today of Iraq and "dismantling the apparatus of terror… removing the torture chambers and the rape rooms". Yet when it comes to the Karimov regime, systematic torture and rape appear to be treated as peccadilloes, not to affect the relationship and to be downplayed in international fora. Double standards? Yes.

7. I hope that once the present crisis is over we will make plain to the US, at senior level, our serious concern over their policy in Uzbekistan.

MURRAY

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Transcript of facsimile sent 25 March 2003 from the Foreign Office]

From: Michael Wood, Legal Advisor

Date: 13 March 2003

CC: PS/PUS; Matthew Kidd, WLD

Linda Duffield

UZBEKISTAN: INTELLIGENCE POSSIBLY OBTAINED UNDER TORTURE

1. Your record of our meeting with HMA Tashkent recorded that Craig had said that his understanding was that it was also an offence under the UN Convention on Torture to receive or possess information under torture. I said that I did not believe that this was the case, but undertook to re-read the Convention.

2. I have done so. There is nothing in the Convention to this effect. The nearest thing is article 15 which provides:

"Each State Party shall ensure that any statement which is established to have been made as a result of torture shall not be invoked as evidence in any proceedings, except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made."

3. This does not create any offence. I would expect that under UK law any statement established to have been made as a result of torture would not be admissible as evidence.

[signed]

M C Wood
Legal Adviser

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Letter #3

CONFIDENTIAL

FM TASHKENT (Ambassador Craig Murray)

TO IMMEDIATE FCO

TELNO 63
OF 220939 JULY 04

INFO IMMEDIATE DFID, ISLAMIC POSTS, MOD, OSCE POSTS UKDEL EBRD LONDON, UKMIS GENEVA, UKMIS MEW YORK

SUBJECT: RECEIPT OF INTELLIGENCE OBTAINED UNDER TORTURE

SUMMARY

1. We receive intelligence obtained under torture from the Uzbek intelligence services, via the US. We should stop. It is bad information anyway. Tortured dupes are forced to sign up to confessions showing what the Uzbek government wants the US and UK to believe, that they and we are fighting the same war against terror.

2. I gather a recent London interdepartmental meeting considered the question and decided to continue to receive the material. This is morally, legally and practically wrong. It exposes as hypocritical our post Abu Ghraib pronouncements and fatally undermines our moral standing. It obviates my efforts to get the Uzbek government to stop torture they are fully aware our intelligence community laps up the results.

3. We should cease all co-operation with the Uzbek Security Services they are beyond the pale. We indeed need to establish an SIS presence here, but not as in a friendly state.

DETAIL

4. In the period December 2002 to March 2003 I raised several times the issue of intelligence material from the Uzbek security services which was obtained under torture and passed to us via the CIA. I queried the legality, efficacy and morality of the practice.

5. I was summoned to the UK for a meeting on 8 March 2003. Michael Wood gave his legal opinion that it was not illegal to obtain and to use intelligence acquired by torture. He said the only legal limitation on its use was that it could not be used in legal proceedings, under Article 15 of the UN Convention on Torture.

6. On behalf of the intelligence services, Matthew Kydd said that they found some of the material very useful indeed with a direct bearing on the war on terror. Linda Duffield said that she had been asked to assure me that my qualms of conscience were respected and understood.

7. Sir Michael Jay's circular of 26 May stated that there was a reporting obligation on us to report torture by allies (and I have been instructed to refer to Uzbekistan as such in the context of the war on terror). You, Sir, have made a number of striking, and I believe heartfelt, condemnations of torture in the last few weeks. I had in the light of this decided to return to this question and to highlight an apparent contradiction in our policy. I had intimated as much to the Head of Eastern Department.

8. I was therefore somewhat surprised to hear that without informing me of the meeting, or since informing me of the result of the meeting, a meeting was convened in the FCO at the level of Heads of Department and above, precisely to consider the question of the receipt of Uzbek intelligence material obtained under torture. As the office knew, I was in London at the time and perfectly able to attend the meeting. I still have only gleaned that it happened.

9. I understand that the meeting decided to continue to obtain the Uzbek torture material. I understand that the principal argument deployed was that the intelligence material disguises the precise source, ie it does not ordinarily reveal the name of the individual who is tortured. Indeed this is true - the material is marked with a euphemism such as "From detainee debriefing." The argument runs that if the individual is not named, we cannot prove that he was tortured.

10. I will not attempt to hide my utter contempt for such casuistry, nor my shame that I work in and organisation where colleagues would resort to it to justify torture. I have dealt with hundreds of individual cases of political or religious prisoners in Uzbekistan, and I have met with very few where torture, as defined in the UN convention, was not employed. When my then DHM raised the question with the CIA head of station 15 months ago, he readily acknowledged torture was deployed in obtaining intelligence. I do not think there is any doubt as to the fact

11. The torture record of the Uzbek security services could hardly be more widely known. Plainly there are, at the very least, reasonable grounds for believing the material is obtained under torture. There is helpful guidance at Article 3 of the UN Convention;

"The competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the state concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights."

While this article forbids extradition or deportation to Uzbekistan, it is the right test for the present question also.

12. On the usefulness of the material obtained, this is irrelevant. Article 2 of the Convention, to which we are a party, could not be plainer:

"No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."

13. Nonetheless, I repeat that this material is useless - we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful. It is designed to give the message the Uzbeks want the West to hear. It exaggerates the role, size, organisation and activity of the IMU and its links with Al Qaida. The aim is to convince the West that the Uzbeks are a vital cog against a common foe, that they should keep the assistance, especially military assistance, coming, and that they should mute the international criticism on human rights and economic reform.

14. I was taken aback when Matthew Kydd said this stuff was valuable. Sixteen months ago it was difficult to argue with SIS in the area of intelligence assessment. But post Butler we know, not only that they can get it wrong on even the most vital and high profile issues, but that they have a particular yen for highly coloured material which exaggerates the threat. That is precisely what the Uzbeks give them. Furthermore MI6 have no operative within a thousand miles of me and certainly no expertise that can come close to my own in making this assessment.

15. At the Khuderbegainov trial I met an old man from Andizhan. Two of his children had been tortured in front of him until he signed a confession on the family's links with Bin Laden. Tears were streaming down his face. I have no doubt they had as much connection with Bin Laden as I do. This is the standard of the Uzbek intelligence services.

16. I have been considering Michael Wood's legal view, which he kindly gave in writing. I cannot understand why Michael concentrated only on Article 15 of the Convention. This certainly bans the use of material obtained under torture as evidence in proceedings, but it does not state that this is the sole exclusion of the use of such material.

17. The relevant article seems to me Article 4, which talks of complicity in torture. Knowingly to receive its results appears to be at least arguable as complicity. It does not appear that being in a different country to the actual torture would preclude complicity. I talked this over in a hypothetical sense with my old friend Prof Francois Hampson, I believe an acknowledged World authority on the Convention, who said that the complicity argument and the spirit of the Convention would be likely to be winning points. I should be grateful to hear Michael's views on this.

18. It seems to me that there are degrees of complicity and guilt, but being at one or two removes does not make us blameless. There are other factors. Plainly it was a breach of Article 3 of the Convention for the coalition to deport detainees back here from Baghram, but it has been done. That seems plainly complicit.

19. This is a difficult and dangerous part of the World. Dire and increasing poverty and harsh repression are undoubtedly turning young people here towards radical Islam. The Uzbek government are thus creating this threat, and perceived US support for Karimov strengthens anti-Western feeling. SIS ought to establish a presence here, but not as partners of the Uzbek Security Services, whose sheer brutality puts them beyond the pale.

MURRAY

The Boycott Sony Blog
Maybe soon it will be running again, but right now it's down. [from: del.icio.us]

In a comment to a blog about VC and Consumer Electronics.

"Open Source Firmware"

Why do consumer electronics companies want to be in the software business? Why do they outsource their firmware, driver and application development and then make such a pig's ear of supporting it and providing updates? Why does each one have to re-invent the wheel: Do we really need every Mp3 player manufacturer to produce a competitor to iTunes and Winamp? Why are people like Broadcom forced into a situation where in order to get FCC approval they have to lock down the hardware API? Why do Sony with the PSP and MS with the XBox have to build in hardware DRM supported by closed source and deliberately crippled firmware? Why does Apple have to deliberately cripple the iPod in order to reach a deal with the media companies to be able to create iTMS?

Open Source Firmware is an idea who's time has come.

Salon.com - Daou Report : Here's why: the dynamic of a typical Bush scandal follows familiar contours...

1. POTUS circumvents the law - an impeachable offense.

2. The story breaks (in this case after having been concealed by a news organization until well after Election 2004).

3. The Bush crew floats a number of pushback strategies, settling on one that becomes the mantra of virtually every Republican surrogate. These Republicans face down poorly prepped Dem surrogates and shred them on cable news shows.

And so on.

I wonder what the equivalent is for a Blair scandal.

Google Press Center: Press Release : Enabling Google Talk and AIM instant messaging users to communicate with each other, provided certain conditions are met;

Here we go. Sit back and watch Googletalk take over and dominate the IM, PC VoIP and Video chat market. Google talk is based on Jabber so lots of clients can talk to the Googletalk servers for chat. Then we get LibJingle and the Jabber XMPP audio extensions. So lots of clients can talk to the Googletalk servers for audio. Now we have Google+AOL bringing AIM to the party so that AIM and Googletalk users can chat and talk to each other.

Now we move into unannounced territory. Apple bolt libjingle into iChat so that Chat users can also use voice with all the other chat clients circling around Google. LibJingle then gets extended to video (which should be easy. It's just another codec). And this whole group are now doing presence, chat, audio and video. Finally Yahoo throws in the towel and joins in leaving Microsoft and Skype out in the cold. eBay cans Skype and takes the hit on their share price leaving just Microsoft and the Google conglomerate. But by that time nobody is using the Google client, they've all switched to Gaim, Trillian, Adium and half a dozen others. And they all talk MSN as well. Google starts using all that dark fibre they've been buying and using their existing relationships with the big carriers to offer *really cheap* IM-voice to POTS interconnect. And as well as your 2Gb of gmail you can have 2Gb of voice ad video mail.

The confusion in this starts with the Google, Jabber server interconnect. If they give this up, they can't maintain the lock on the customer. But if they don't do it, there'll be a lot of complaints. Then there's the question of whether they can ship early and ship often. Even if they expect lots of people to use 3rd party clients, they really need a reference implementation. Having a lead GAIM programmer on board ought to help here. But I don't see any evidence of Google being able to build and ship client side software. And right now Googletalk is still just a proof of concept. August 23, 2005 when Googletalk launched seems a long time ago now. Where's v0.2?

I did a quick search this morning trying to find details of Googletalk's approach to NAT busting when both clients are behind a firewall but without success. It's really irritating when a Google search brings up your own blog with the question!

The only experience I have here is with my daughter at Edinburgh University. They have a very restrictive firewall that limits you to HTTP via a proxy and that's basically it. She (with my help) hasn't been able to get Skype or MSN to work. But Googletalk got straight through with good voice quality. So how did they do that?

But mostly I'm curious about how Google's servers compare with Skype's Supernodes. Anyone?

But most of all I'm desperately waiting for GoogleTalk v0.2 and the first decent alternative (Gaim?) that supports voice.

One small snippet for anyone working with Google Base. They've opened up the restrictions on the g:location tag. You can now put in any location string that returns a single location in maps.google.com So "postcode, country" is perfectly acceptable and works. They also have a format for lat,long[1].

I'm still getting errors from Google about "too much activity" but it seems that this is a limitation of the management pages and not the underlying database. I'm successfully uploading Ecademy's Marketplace listings daily.

If you're doing a regular upload, you need to post a bulk file by hand first. Then use FTP to relace the same filename periodically. Something that's desperately needed for bulk uploaders is an incremental load. At the moment, you have to post your entire database as old items from old copies of the file are deleted when you put up a new bulk file. The fact that they take RSS/Atom as a data transfer format means we should be able to get to the point where we register a feed and then use a ping technique to tell Google it's changed.

Sadly, Google are ignoring the PubDate tag. All items get the date from the bulk file date. This screws up the listings when you view "by date".

I still don't understand the need for a g:label tag when RSS already has Category and we're using it successfully to tell other services about tags on an item.

I think the user interface to Google Base still needs lots of work. Several of the fields look like they ought to be clickable but aren't. And it's not always clear what's going to happen when you click on a tag label.

[1]A note here. Google has a very powerful Geocoder in their String to Lat,Long conversion. I wish they would provide an API to this.

Light Reading - VOIP - Jabber IM Adds VOIP - Telecom News Wire

Jingle All The Way

I don't need to tell you that this is hugely significant. It adds P2P NAT busting and support for Audio and in the near future Video to the Jabber community. There's also the hint of a near future SIP interoperability as well. It's all open source, free to use in commercial products and has announcements of support from Gaim, Trillian and Asterix among others.

Inevitably there are questions arising
- There needs to be a Mozilla Firefox style project to produce a definitive IM-Voip product.
- Long term, how can Skype, Yahoo! and MSN compete.
- At what point do AIM and Apple join in.
- What's in this for Google?
- Where's GoogleTalk v0.2? Or does Google now get out of the Client business and just focus on running the servers?
- Google has threatened to interoperate with other Jabber servers at some stage in the future. How does this affect that?

But right now I want just one thing. A way of putting GoogleTalk/Jabber presence on a web page. And a way of clicking on that presence to launch a GoogleTalk/XMPP chat session.

Just got this from Microsoft. It's only really of historical interest now. A SOAP addressable index of SOAP endpoints seemed like such a good idea at the time. Shame the press built it up into something
it was never going to be. And that the big players managed to complicate it all so much that, like SOAP, it became unusable. At the time I actually thought an Open Source implementation in PHP would be a good idea and there were a few attempts but AFAIK they never really got finished.

It feels like the idea has now been replaced with the directories of web APIs being built by WSFinder and Programmable Web

uddi@microsoft.com Wed, 14 Dec 2005 16:19:15
You are receiving this mail because you have registered as a publisher on the Microsoft node of the UDDI Business Registry (UBR). The primary goal of the UBR was to prove the interoperability and robustness of the UDDI specifications through a public implementation. This goal was met and far exceeded, and now the UBR is discontinuing its operations. As part of this process the Microsoft UBR node at uddi.microsoft.com will be permanently unavailable for all operations beginning January 12, 2006. Data stored in the UBR may be retrieved until January 12, 2006 and used in accordance with the UDDI Business Registry terms of use available at http://uddi.microsoft.com/policies/termsofuse.aspx. You may find the UDDI Data Export Wizard useful for retrieving your data, and it is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9D467A69-57FF-4AE7-96EE-B18C4790CFFD. For more information, please see the frequently asked questions related to the UBR discontinuation at http://uddi.microsoft.com/about/FAQshutdown.htm. You may submit feedback to Microsoft at the following location: http://uddi.microsoft.com/contact/default.aspx.

Thank You,
Microsoft UDDI Team

I just had one of those Ah-Ha moments.

Back in the day we used to focus group discussions on a subject around a mailing list. The participants knew where to find the latest conversation and it was pushed to you via email. Now we've exploded these discussions all over the web into individual blogs, blog posts and comment threads on blog posts. It's still way too hard to track who said what about the particular subject and who replied to your post. We've tried all sorts of things to try and cope with this all the way to trying to use common tags and using Technorati and things like it to bring it all back together.

Over on Tribes, they're having a Terms and Conditions crisis. Somebody asked if you could build a P2P version of Tribes wth no central controlling body. I thought of Skype Group chats and Groove. Then I remembered the Microsoft SSE RSS extensions and Ray Ozzie.

So now imagine an extension to Blog CMS software that allowed a blog to subscribe to a federated group of participating blogs that maintained state between themselves by replicating the conversation around using RSS SSE. This would begin to look like a mailing list again, but where there was no central server.

Or have I just re-invented NNTP and Usenet?

Videntity.org: PHP-OpenID Classes
[from: del.icio.us]

MP3Test
MP3 validity checker [from: del.icio.us]

p2pnet.net - Europe may pass snoop law : "The legislation, written in September, is coming up for a vote in record time," says the New York Times. "Though it generally takes a year to 18 months to bring a law to a vote, the countries that make up the union back the legislation, which comes in the wake of terrorist attacks in London last summer and Madrid last year."

And the European parliament is expected to approve it, says the story, going on that the speed, however, alarms telecommunications companies, which say the public hasn't had enough time to consider the implications.

The version the EU parliament will vote on tomorrow, written by Britain, would require phone companies to keep information like the time of phone calls or fax transmissions, the phone numbers of incoming and outgoing calls and the duration of the calls for at least two years, says the NYT. Details of e-mail activity would have to be stored for a minimum of six months.

...

"The industry's main worry, however, is cost. It estimates that telecommunications companies would have to store 50 times the data they do now. There is no provision under the draft law to compensate phone companies and Internet providers."

Oh good grief. Everything I've seen has asked how Telcos and ISPs can afford this. But that assumes that they are the only ones that provide Email servers and such like. What about Corporates and SMEs. Even private individuals. Will they too have to store 6 months worth of email logs? My Ecademy logs are currently running at 0.25 Gb a week or 6 Gb for 6 months. Not too bad I guess. I dread to think what the volume is for the emails as well.

It's about time Google sorted out a system to cope with people who have multiple accounts with them. I reckon I've got 3 email addresses used for Adsense, Analytics and googlegroups. Then there's a gmail account also used for Googletalk. And an Orkut account. And Blogger. Then I've got a signin to Google Earth as well

Now currently these tend to be stored in cookies and things like Googletalk have trouble working out who you currently are. If you made the mistake (I did) of using different email addesses for different services, you then find yourself constantly logging in and logging out. And every so often you end up with a password change in one system (like something in the UK) that doesn't propagate to the others.

Yahoo! hit the exact same problem some years ago and allowed you to link email addresses together and confirm that they all represented a single person. As they acquire people like Flickr and now del.icio.us they're doing a fairly good job at adding them into the system. Google needs to do the same. and soon.

Looking at all this, Google and Yahoo! have a golden opportunity to create a competitor to Passport but to do it in an open way with plenty of APIs (preferably based on something like OpenID). I really don't understand why they don't do this.

My good friend Dave posted this.

Scripting News: 12/12/2005 : Here's a serious thought. Google Base is all about RSS, right? That's cool. I understand RSS, and I like it. And no one owns it, dammit. But everyone's all concerned (rightly so, imho) about turning over our data to Google. How do we know they won't put ads in our stuff without our permission? And without paying us? How do we know they won't change what we say? We've been through this before, and they won't even talk about it with us! How about that for snarky.

So here's an idea, let's start a company, hire some great people to run our database. Instead of being the users in "user-generated content," we'll be the owners. The former sounds like a hamster in a cage, to me. An owner is someone who commands respect. We could wear badges and give ourselves business cards that say Owner. Forget about being a hamster. I want to be an owner!

I've already talked about this idea with friends with huge pipes and big databases who know how to run things reliably, and they find the idea interesting. But so far they haven't said they'll do it.

So I've done a load of work on Google Base, and right now it sucks. It's an unstable alpha. Craigslist is irritatingly local and it's horribly Web 0.9. eBay is all about money, not classifieds. A web 2.0 version of Craigslist with tags and AJAX and maps and APIs and RSS coming out of it's ears sounds like a good plan. And there's some real serendipity available if you link it with a publisher driven Ads system like BlogAds. Post your listing, have it turn up all over the place via RSS and including in the Ads on relevant Blogs.

I want to do this, and I've now got a lot of experience after building a tag based listings service into Ecademy. I was seriously thinking about building it as a Drupal module, but the tag support in Drupal was going off in a direction that didn't help me.

Anyone else want to play at this? Drop me a line at julian_bond at voidstar.com

[edited to add] As all the major blog systems add support for tags, they become a neat way of working out relevance for Ads placed on the blog. Just match off the tags added by the advertiser with the tags added by the blogger. Then pick a random Ad from the intersection.

The Clicker: What did I just buy? - Engadget - www.engadget.com

They turned off comments on this article. But it's mention of derivatives got me thinking.

What if we could trade the right to use content independently of the content itself?

In the financial markets, ever since Stani Yassukovich invented the Eurobond, it's become normal to produce ever more complex paper that securitises underlying investments. Fundamentals are grouped, packaged and turned into a derivative paper contract that is then tradable independently of the fundamental. Can the same thing be done with media content? Can we create a situation were I can buy and trade the right to listen to the latest Cinematic Orchestra Album without actually shipping the bits from one place to another? Can I go further than this and package my MP3 collection as a contract to listen to it and then sell that to somebody else? How about futures and options. Could I sell the
right to access it in 6 months time?

To some extent the EULA is all that's left of digital media. The actual bits get moved, converted and transformed more or less without friction. It's only the EULA that has any value. And it's only the physical EULAs that let me prove to the RIAA that I obtained all my MP3s honestly. But
the EULA is just text and itself ends as just bits as well. So what if we used digital money technologies to ensure that one and only one copy of the EULA is in the possession of one and only one person at any one time. Now I can trade this certificate separately from the MP3.

Which reminds me of the guy who did the proof by example of trading an iTMS track on eBay shortly after iTMS launched.

::HorsePigCow:: life uncommon: The Madenning Octet

The 8-fold path to Internet Happiness

1. Information wants to be free
2. Zero distance
3. Mass amateurisation
4. More is much more
5. True names
6. Viral behaviour
7. Everything is personal
8. Ubiquitous computer

The 8 barriers to progress

1. Copyright
2. Borders
3. Censorship
4. Network blocking
5. Identity cards and databases
6. More network blocking
7. Everything is trackable
8. No privacy

A restatement of the World Of Ends manifesto as another 8-fold path.

1. The Internet isn't complicated
2. The Internet isn't a thing. It's an agreement.
3. The Internet is stupid.
4. Adding value to the Internet lowers its value.
5. All the Internet's value grows on its edges.
6. The Internet has three virtues:
a. No one owns it
b. Everyone can use it
c. Anyone can improve it
7. So Money moves to the suburbs.
8. It's a world of ends, not the end of the world.

I've been listening to Lawrence Lessig giving an interview to Digital Village and part of it is about the current arguments around Google Print.

I have a slightly different take on this. Most of the arguments from both sides and from commentators have been about copyright and copyright law and focusing on fair use. I think this is a red herring. I think what's really happening here is horse trading in public between Google and the publishers. And the publisher's real worry is that Google is creating a new form of their product which they really should be doing themselves. In a few years, Google will hold a digital copy of the publisher's product and the publishers won't. And at some time in the future after that, the publishers will want to buy a digital copy from Google rather than create one themselves. At which point it may be rather more expensivethan they would like because Google will have sole control.

One point in the copyright arguments that I find particularly interesting is that fair use of the written word is fairly well understood and has a long history. Provided you give attribution where you can and limit what you quote, it's held to be entirely reasonable to include a snippet of text from a copyrighted work in your work and then do whatever you like with it, including to sell it. However there appears to be no equivalent fair use for any other form of media and communication. Or at least that's what the major media companies would like you to believe. And in particular where it relates to sound and vision. To make it completely clear, including a sample of music or video in your music or video is not allowed while including a sample of text in your text is allowed. Now why is that and is it right? And as we move to an increasingly multimedia world and away from a pure text world, this limits our freedom of expression and ability to create new works. It also limits Google's (and others) ability to provide search metadata for audio and video in comparison with their ability with text. This is the core of Lessig's arguments for a remix culture and against current copyright law.

Has anyone figured out bulk upload via FTP? I can't seem to make it work reliably.

What I want to do is a daily upload from a PHP script. The script is running, it appears to upload ok and ftp returns no errors, but Google rarely seems to process the file. And there's precious little feedback about what's going on. And when there is feedback, it's 2-6-12 hours later.

1) Are you supposed to use the same file over and over again? Or does it need a new unique filename for each upload?

2) Do you have to do one manual upload and then ftp over the same filename later? Or if you do the manual upload does that prevent using ftp later?

3) After doing an ftp upload by hand, filezilla, firefox and IE usually show no entry on the server side. What? But if you use linux ftp from the command line and do a dir / the new file is there with the correct timestamps. If you try to upload the file twice in quick succession, the second upload fails with a permissions error. Try it an hour later and it goes through as if Google is processing the previous one. But the timestamps on the web bulk upload file display don't change.

Agh! This is getting extremely frustrating and google support are not responding to trouble tickets.
The only mailing list I can find doesn't seem to be very helpful either.

If anyone can help please email julian_bond at voidstar.com

Quantum mechanics appears to work. The equations predict things we can test and these check out. But numerous anomalies and paradoxes appear if we try and scale them up to the real world. There are two classic problems 1) Put a cat in a box with a radioactive pellet. If the pellet decays, release a poison capsule. After one half life of the pellet, the cat has 50% probability of being dead. The equations predict that the cat is both alive and dead until we open the box. Not either alive and dead but both alive and dead. 2) There are lots of atomic actions that generate a matched pair of particles with opposite values of some parameter. Like polarization of light photons. Now before we measure one of them we don't know their state. But after measuring one we know the state of the other. Now let them move light years apart. When we measure one we now know the state of the other instantaneously. So something (information perhaps) has traveled across the gap faster than the speed of light.

There are a bunch of major views on all this.

- The Copenhagen interpretation. The equations don't reflect reality. They reflect a reality we need to create in order to think about what's happening. They're nothing but maths, although they are useful maths

- Bell's Theorem. Particles that have been in touch continue to influence each other. They can only do this if the communication employs no known form of energy since it violates Relativity. Which leads to.

- Everett-Wheeler-Graham. Everything that can happen does but in another universe. When we open the box and discover a live cat we choose which universe to live in and it's the one with a live cat. Next door there is a universe where we found a dead cat.

- Hidden variable. There is an invisible hand below the quantum level that is manipulating reality to appear the way it does. Some people think this is consciousness

- Non-objectivity. The universe has no reality aside from observation. If the tree falls in the wood and nobody hears it, there is no sound.

Now Reed's law suggests that that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network. The reason for this is that the number of possible sub-groups of network participants is 2^N - N - 1 , where N is the number of participants. This grows much more rapidly than either

* the number of participants, N, or
* the number of possible pair connections, N (N - 1) / 2, (which follows Metcalfe's law)

But this requires that every entity in the network is in touch with every other entity, and all possible combinations of entities simultaneously. This violates several social relativity laws such as the number of people any one person can "know" and track. And as this is all happening in time rather than as a snapshot it assumes simultaneous communication across time and space at faster than light speed. So while the reality of the value of large networks does appear to be somewhere between Metcalfe and Reed, we can draw some parallels with the Quantum Physics paradoxes and theorems. :)

- Reed and Metcalfe are just mathematical formalisms. We don't actually know what they mean by value. But they seem to be handy when predicting the success of various networks.

- Two people who meet at an Social Networking meeting continue to influence each other across space and time (limited only by their ability to use email)

- Every possible combination of people at Social Networking meetings does in fact happen. Just not all in the same room.

- The network owners are actually manipulating all their members. They just don't all notice this.

- If you don't keep your eyes open at Social Networking meetings, you'll miss the details. If you're asleep in the corner and don't observe it, it's as if the meeting never happened.