Monthly Archives: December 2009

Is this really to the public good?

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911buildings A couple of weeks ago I came across this article in the Guardian (not my normal read, but their online media pages are useful) referring to the publication by the Wikileaks organisationof an archive of text and pager messages from 9th September, 2001, which effectively provides a narration to the terrorist attacks on New York city that day.

The archive contains text and page messages generated by both human beings and computerised systems.  Many IT systems fall back on sending pager and text messages when something goes wrong, and unsurprisingly a lot of IT systems were going wrong that day.  There were also lots of ‘tactical’ messages betweenthe emergency services, requesting people come in to work, etc.  But what I find rather distressing – and maybe I’m over-sensitive here – is that amount of private messages between normal people involved in a very abnormal situation – folks in imminent danger of death reaching out to their loved ones in the only way possible to say ‘I love you’; worried watchers of unfolding events realising that their family was in the middle of it all and asking them to get in touch; basically, an awful lot of people in extremis reaching out to family and friends with concern and to say, in some cases, Goodbye.

Now, who on Earth could consider the latter clutch of messages to be of any public interest whatsoever?  I’m honestly dismayed that Wikileaks did this.  There are soem things in this world that are just personal.  They may be of titillation value to the public, but to argue that there is any public interest value in publishing such personal messages in this way just beggars belief.  I have to say I’d be very annoyed if I found a loved one’s last message to me published for all and sundry to read without my say so.

Wikileaksdoes a lot of good work, but they need to realise that there are categories of hidden information in the world.  For the sake of argument, let’s call them Sensibly Secret, Public Interest, Private and Personal.  Sensibly Secret is stuff that’s been officially labelled as ‘secret’ for purposes of national security, and validly so.  Public Interest is stuff that is generated by our governments, local and national, our leaders, businesses, etc. that some may wish to hide but that it is genuinely in the wider public interest to ‘out’ – a government department covering up mistakes, a business hiding poor safety reports, bad public budget management, public safety, military errors that have cost the lives of our troops, etc.  Then there’s Private – things that businesses and individuals MAY wish to keep secret – the day to day details of the running of a business, or Government, which may need to be publicised or made available to others in order to ensure that no wrongdoing is taking place.  And then there’s personal; the stuff of the red-top tabloids; who Tiger Woods is sleeping with/ has slept with, whether x,y or z is gay or has a fish fetish, and private texts and emails between people facing death.

There….not perfect but not too difficult to get ones head around, is it?  Personal information may well get out in to the world but it isn’t the role of whistle blowing groups like Wikileaks to publicise it.  There are enough real, live, current Public Interest issues to chase up without becoming an electronic tabloid.

RATM vs X-Factor – Corporate Music Win!

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moneyThere’s a lovely comment in the movie ‘Con Air’ in which the character Garland Greene, a psychopath played by Steve Buscemi, watches the inmates on a prison transport plane celebrate their take over of the aircraft by having a mid-flight party to the song  ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ by Lynyrd Skynyrd.  This encourages him to define irony as:

Bunch of idiots dancing on a plane to a song made famous by a band that died in a plane crash.

Now, for those of you who’ve spent the last few weeks slumbering in a deep, dark cave in the Outer Hebrides (or who’re outside the UK and so don’t get exposed to this sort of rubbish) there’s a TV show called ‘The X-Factor’ – a sort of ‘talent show’  for wannabe celebs – that was this year won by a young chap called Joe Mcelderry.  The tradition in recent years has been that show’s impresario Simon Cowell would take the winner under his capacious wing,  get him / her a deal with his recond company (part of Sony BMG), and, usually, grab the UK Christmas Number One Chart Spot (a place in musical history usually occupied by such rock and roll phenomena as children’s choirs and Mr Blobby.

With me so far?  Well, this year a bunch of radical, anti-corporate rock fans decided to set up a campaign to ensure that whoever won the X-factor wouldn’t be getting the Christmas Number One slot.  The group – here – decided that the tune to do the job would be Rage Against The Machine’s 90s hit ‘Killing in the name of’. 

Sounds good in principle, yes?  People power overturning the desires of a Corporate Media Monster like Simon Cowell?  Evil vanquished by the marvels of Facebook?  The chart returned to ‘real rock for real people’?

Here’s where the ironic reality check comes in.  It’s quite rich…

  1. The whole business has kept Mcelderry, X-Factor and Cowell being talked about.  This typically equates to money, promotion and PR opportunities.
  2. Both Simon Cowell and RATM are part of the Sony Behemoth.  Sony will get wealthier whatever happens.
  3. Mcelderry was given a dire song this year – the sales of the song would probably have been less had the campaign not taken place.  It might be that the campaign has actually boosted Cowell’s earnings directly as well as indirectly via the Sony connection.
  4. It’s great that £77,000 has been raised for Shelter, and RATM have promised a proportion of the profits will also go to charity.  However, another runner in the Christmas Number 1 race this year was Peter Kay’s novelty record for the BBC Children In Need, which had managed to raise £170,000 for children’s charities by December 9th without all this palaver.  Maybe….the effort could have been put behind this song?
  5. There’s a delicious irony in the choice of a song that is probably most famous for the refrain ‘Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me’ being used in a campaign where people are….told to buy the song.  And as for choosing a band who ‘rage against the machine’ whilst being on a multi-national corporate label like Sony – irony meter just hit max. 

Whilst it’s been quite an achievement to get the chart manipulated in this way – and whether folks want to hear that phrase or not, that’s what it is – if the aim was to poke Cowell, X-Factor and corporate musical pap in the eye then I’m sure that Cowell, the X-factor team and Sony BMG are smarting with discomfort all the way to the bank.

I’m just going to put Sweet Home Alabama on and have a boogie around the kitchen….

After the Goldrush

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There’s a song by Neil Young called ‘After the Goldrush’, which he wrote in the 1970s.  There’s a couple of lines in there which for the last 20 years have sounded increasingly like a warning:

“We got Mother Nature on the run, in the 1970s

Look at Mother Nature on the run, in the 1970s”

Well, 40 years later it looks increasingly like Mother Nature, somewhere along the way, stopped running, turned around, grabbed us by the nose and started kicking our sorry asses.  I have no doubt that this morning in Copenhagen there are some serious hangovers – probably not all alcohol fuelled.  There will be serious hangovers in the offices of those Governments, NGOs and other groups who’d hoped to get something legally binding and lasting from Copenhagen, rather than the half arsed fudge that we appear to have been delivered.

There’sa good piece from the BBC’s Environment spokesman, Richard Black, in which he suggests that the days of internationally agreed, ratified and binding steps towards climate control are over.  I have to say that I agree with him – we’ve had, off the top of my head, Kyoto, Bali and Rio – all of which have under-delivered and have been hailed as first steps on the way to something better.  I hate to be negative, but just how many first steps does this baby need?  And do we have enough time to allow a new set of first steps to take place every couple of years?

We’re in an interesting dilemma – governments and multi-national corporations with the power to make things happen abrogating their responsibility and apparently unable or unwilling to actually make decisions.  What we require now is leadership from our governments – one is forced to wonder whether the international ‘leadership’ from the US and UK that threw hundreds of billions of dollars in to the throats of the world banking community was actually leadership or whether it was our governments doing the bidding of their bosses in international finance.  And all this happens whilst the climate clock keeps ticking; a deadline that cannot be fudged or avoided by our children and grandchildren who will almost certainly live long enough to see the start of the major long term impacts of climate change and environmental collapse on this planet.

What can we, as individuals, do?  I’m a Libertarian; a believer in governments having the minimum possible involvement in our day to day lives.  I do, however, expect my government to take some responsibility at it’s level of power, and one thing that has emerged from Copenhagen and all the other failed international initiatives is that governments are unwilling to do anything for the long term benefits of this planet, mired as they are in the short term requirements of staying in power.  I’m therefore left painfully aware that climate change is going to happen, and that the best that we as individuals can do is, I believe, as follows:

  1. Work within your families and communities to do what you can to reduce your own environmental impact and encourage your communities to do the same.  Involvement in local environmental initiatives, and wider organisations such as the Transition Town network and the Permaculture Association can only help.
  2. Consume less – in terms of energy and resources.  Support the local economy at all levels – services, food, whatever.  Watch your food miles and the carbon footprint of what you eat.
  3. Put your elected representatives on the spot, and vote them out if they’re not delivering.

In all goldrushes throughout history, what’s left behind after it’s over is a mess.  Except this time, it’s the whole planet rather than a few hundred square miles of land.  What we can do to help put things right is very little, but it’s a start.     And at the very least when your grandkids ask what you did to try and make a difference, you can look ’em in the eye and say ‘I did all that was possible for me to do.’

A Modest Proposal to focus Climate Negotiator’s Minds.

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globalwarmingIn the last few minutes of the final episode of the TV series ‘Blackadder Goes Forth’, Blackadder and his Company are poised to go ‘over the top’ from their trench to charge the German lines.  In the background, artillery guns are shelling the enemy trenches; it looks like the end for our boys.  Suddenly, the firing stops.  Silence.  Birdsong.  Private Baldrick dares to suggest that the war may be over, and for a moment we start to think that the series might just have a happy ending.

George: Well, hurrah! The big knobs have gone round the table and yanked the
iron out of the fire!

Darling: Thank God! We lived through it! The Great War: 1914-1917. 

And at that point you realise that it’s not to be, and our chaps charge forth in to TV comedy history.  

Over the last few days I’ve been willing the ‘big knobs’ around the various tables at Copenhagen to bury their differences and come away with some sort of legally binding structure that  will at least help my God-daughter, niece and all other rug-rats known to me to grow up in a world that is not an ecological disaster area.  I guess that deep in my heart I knew it was likely to be a hard job – a few weeks ago I attended a ‘Climatewalk’ event and expressed the view in debate that Copenhagen was unlikely to deliver, and at the time of writing it looks like I was right.

And so it goes on.  Politicians and non-Governmental representatives make statements about returning to discuss a binding deal in 2010, and then you know what it will be – 2011, 2012, and so on.  And all the time the global climate systems get closer to the ‘tipping point’ beyond which we cannot predict, let alone influence, what will happen.  Perhaps the task is too big for our elected representatives – maybe they’re holding out for some sort of miraculous intervention, or even hoping that something will happen in 2012 to remove the problem.  Some Governments are no doubt relying on being out of power in a year’s time, and thus leaving the problem for others.  And others do probably care more about keeping their own national interest sound than anything to do with the wider picture.

And anyway, for most people involved, when the coastal plains flood, when there are wars over water, when we have vast tracts of forests burning every summer – never mind.  They’ll have their bolt holes and armies to protect them on a personal basis.

So….a Modest Proposal. 

We live in a world stitched together by incredibly effective communications.  There is no longer a need for, for example, the UN to be in New York, or negotiations like this to be held in nice cities like Copenhagen.  I propose that we find a suitably sized, low-lying island or atoll in the Pacific – one that will basically drown in the next decades if we don’t get things sorted.  One where the food supply is governed by the climate, and that would best be in an area that gets a few typhoons.  We then build a massive conference centre with living accommodation on this island, and choose by lot people of senior executive level from Government, Non-Governmental and Business organisations to go there and stay there until deals are sorted out. 

And just to concentrate the minds of politicians, we send their families there as well.  Visting rights would be arranged – we’re civilised.  Put the beaurocrats there from places like the UN, and let ’em negotiate.  Because they’re not coming home until it’s fixed.  

Perhaps the world’s leading polluters could send the families of their leaders to this paradise – no expense would be spared in making it a beautiful and safe place to live.  It’s just one that will drown in a few years, along with everyone on it, if we don’t sort things out.  Maybe generations of people will grow up there whilst the big knobs try and sort things out.

I know, it’s a crackpot, harebrained scheme – mad.  And, as Edmund Blackadder might have commented were he around today, who’d notice another mad scheme in a world full of them.

Twitter hacked – not the end of the world, no surprise, and a badge of honour.

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There’s a scene in the movie ‘Blazing Saddles’ where the Waco Kid, being asked why he’s ended up in prison for drunkenness, bewails the fact that when he was the well known gun-slinger everyone wanted to try and get him, so they could be the new number one.  He tells how he eventually hung up his guns when he heard a voice yelling ‘Draw’, turned around to fight, and nearly shot a 5 year old child.

He turns his back on the little brat, who then shoots the Waco Kid in the ass…..

Life in the online world gets like that, too.

Apparently Twitter was hacked last night by an outfit called the Iranian Cyber Army.  The story broke on the Mashable web site – I have to say that were I not receiving Tweets from Mashable I wouldn’t have known, as I’ve been getting (I think) Tweeted over the period of the hack and I can quite happily see their home page.  The fact that this is now being reported as a DNS based attack means that it wasn’t so much Twitter that was walloped as that traffic to Twitter was diverted elsewhere for a while …

Anyway, let’s face it – this is a slap in the face to Twitter (indirectly) but isn’t the end of the world.  At least some of us – if not most of us who’re not using the DNS system that was compromised – are still Tweeting  and the world will not slide to DEFCON1 because the global inanity stream was temporarily interrupted for the Digerati.

But, assuming these chaps ARE who they claim to be –  a group with Iranian sympathies – we shouldn’t be surprised.  A campaign was organised through Twitter earlier this year to protest about the clamp down on civil rights in Iran.  This attack may be regarded by the originators as ‘payback’ and goes to show that in Cyberspace, as in the real world, ‘people power’ is not a one way street.  The big boys do sometimes have their day of successful protest as well.  Governments can quite easily learn the fine arts of online civil disobedience, and do it with greater ease than the folks running the protest.

When people use a site as a base or launching ground for civil disobedience, campaigning or protest then it will become a target for those who object to the issues being promoted.  That kickback may come in the form of debate, negative campaigning against the site, abuse of people on the site, legal efforts to remove or silence the site, or, as here, technical efforts to remove the site.  Which means that more and more sites used by people to organise campaigns will either have to become ‘hardened’ to protect against attack or stop carrying legitimate material that someone, somewhere, is pissed enough about to want it removed.

We may be heading in to a period of ‘big boy’s rules’ in cyberspace where sites that permit the exposition of people power are simply taken down by this sort of online activity.  But if that happens to your favourite site, and the cause is just, don’t be sad; regard it as a badge of honour that your activities have upset someone enough to want to take you down.

Remember the words of Winston Churchill ‘ ‘You have enemies; that’s good – it means that you have stood up for something sometime in your life’.

Iframes in phpBB

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I am currently tinkering with a phpBB3 installation for a forum I ran until the summer of this year – Coffeehouse Chat. I shut the site down in the summer, but am now contemplating opening it up again. However, I want to try a few new things out on the site, including some ’embedded content’ where I include content generated elsewhere on my site in forum posts and pages.

The easiest way to do this seemed to me to be use the HTML IFRAME tag, but I wanted to do this within the context of Forum posts, and didn’t want to get in to having to create separate template pages for these special pages within Forum threads. I therefore decided to use BBCode tags and use those to code IFRAME tags.

There are always warnings about implementing any form of BBCode that can in principle allow a user to put code from another site dircetly in to your page – and quite rightly so. However, I felt reasonably comfortable about the approach I was going to take, as rather than make available a ‘generic’ BBCode version of an IFRAME tag, I was going to create a series of BBCodes that would only insert an IFRAME tag with a pre-specified URL and other attributes in to the page.

The approach was as follows:

Install the code that I wanted to run in the IFRAME within a sub-directory on my web server.

Tweak that code so as to run within a window that would fit comfortably within the space available for a conventional phpBB forum post.

Within the phpBB administration screen, create a new BBCode to generate an IFRAME specific to the application in the sub-directory.  For example:

phpbb-bbcode-1

Here I decided that to add my game of ‘Battleships’ to a page I would simply create a BBCode tag called [battleships].

Write the corresponding HTML code that will be inserted in the page when the phpBB is encountered.  In this case, it’s as follows:

phpbb-bbcode-2

Because the URL is pre-set to a location within my own site, there is no problem if users of the Forum choose to use the BBCode on their own posts within the Forum.

The BBCode command can thus be placed on any page and brings in content generated from the predefined URL. I’ve used this approach to embed some Javascript applications in Forum posts, and it works very well as a means of delivering customised content within posts.

 

The Dr Johnson License….

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I appreciate that this is likely to be one of those posts that will annoy some folks, but, here we go. A couple of days ago I was invited by two or three separate people to join Facebook Groups and sign petitions against the UK Digital Economy Bill. Now, I believe that we need a Digital Economy Bill like I need a hole in the head; what we actually need is less red tape and a more hands off approach from Central Government to let entrepreneurs get on with the job without requiring a chit from a bureaucrat to go to the toilet. However, I didn’t sign any petitions or join any groups; why? Because the total pre-occupation of everyone was whether it’s right to have a legal structure in which it’s possible to remove or restrict someone’s Internet access if they’re guilty of or accused of sharing copyright materials. 

There are some truly stinky parts of that bill, like there are with most pieces of New Labour legislation – but I want to look today at the filesharing issue in a wider sense.  

Let’s start with the ‘The Internet is an essential part of modern life and it shouldn’t be possible to be cut off from it.’  argument.  Bollocks. Water is essential. A roof over your head is essential. Electricity and Power are pretty important. And yet you can lose all of these by simply not paying your mortgage and utility bills, ultimately resulting in being thrown out of your house and living in a cardboard box. If that’s possible, why on Earth does anyone living in the real world and not in Second Life think that your Internet connection should have some sort of God-given right of protection? And as for essential – quite a few people manage quite happily without an Internet connection, thank you very much.

In the context of this argument, what the Internet HAS done for some people is to allow them to access, free of charge, a large tranche of media that they would have had to borrow off of their friends 20 years ago.  The actually physical act of borrowing and copying probably restricted copying in that few people had the brass neck (or stamina) to borrow 20 CDs from a friend and copy them in one sitting, for example.  The Internet is, no doubt, an essential tool for people in ripping off media.   I’ve heard most of the arguments, and there are some good points on both sides of the debate. Rather than re-hash the usual debates, here are a few observations to provide food for thought for anyone approaching this argument with an open mind.

We have a number of open licenses like Creative Commons, Open Source, etc. Why shouldn’t it be possible, therefore, for a creator of software, film or music put their material out through a proprietary license that requires payment to use the material? After all, I am restricted with what I can do within the GNU licence, for example; I have to allow other people to copy the material – it’s part of the GNU licence and I am more than happy to play along with that. If you want to have a recording of a film, then you should surely, by the same logic, abide by the license of that film. Typically pay money and don’t copy it. No one is forcing you to adopt that license – you have the choice not to buy the DVD. Similarly with Open Source; if I don’t want to pass on my source code to other people, I choose to write my own code and not use the GNU license. I can see no difference.

I’d be interested to know how many people who regularly engage in file sharing of copyrighted materials have ever created something non-trivial and original and have tried to sell it. I may be wrong but a quick poll of folks I know (outside the professional digerati) would indicate that the answer is ‘not many’. Perhaps to have experienced running a small business that deals with created works like software, or publishing a book, etc.  might change people’s attitudes a little.  Same argument as above; if I wish to place material I create in the public domain or under GNU or CC, then it’s my right to do so, and your right as consumers of media to take advantage of my action. If, on the other hand, I choose to publish under what I might start calling the Dr Johnson License (‘Only a fool writes and doesn’t get paid for it!’) then you have a right to not purchase what I produce, and I have the risk of not seeing my works go out in to the world. If you make an illegal copy of my work, then I have a right to pursue you to make you abide by my Dr Johnson License – just as the creators of software licensed under the GNU license can pursue someone who breaches that license under the law.

I’ve heard the argument of ‘try before buy’ and it’s a good one.  Which is why I have a Spotify account – legal music downloading, free of charge, some advertising, no actual physical ownership of the music outside the service even if I pay a monthly fee (which removes the ads).  I have to say that I find the latter a pain in the rear – there are some advantages to having physical ownership of the files – but then again, it’s THEIR license and I choose to go with them or not.  It’s an imperfect system.  If you download stuff on a ‘try before buying’ basis, then perhaps the case could be made to allow you to download any piece of media with a built in duration, that renders the media unplayable after, say, 30 days unless you buy it – the act of purchase then generates an unlock code.  The argument has been expressed that downloaders tend to be purchasers of music – again, I’m yet to be convinced.  Anecdotal evidence from people I know would suggest that whilst they may purchase material, the value of that that they download illegally vastly exceeds that which they purchase.

To all the freetards, can you explain why wrong for me to put the material I’ve created out in to the world, want to be paid for it, and take action when I’m not?  I am exercising my personal, creative freedom to want to be paid for my work.  If my view of my own value is wrong, don’t pay me – but don’t copy either.