The New Crowdsourcing: Pubsourcing

Interesting development here:

The United States has unveiled an unlikely weapon in its battle against drugs gangs and illegal immigrants at the Texas-Mexico border - pub-goers in Australia.

The drinkers are the most far-flung of a sizeable army of hi-tech foot soldiers recruited to assist the border protection effort.

Anyone with an internet connection can now help to patrol the 1,254-mile frontier through a network of webcams set up to allow the public to monitor suspicious activity. Once logged in, the volunteers spend hours studying the landscape and are encouraged to email authorities when they see anyone on foot, in vehicles or aboard boats heading towards US territory from Mexico.

But the important point here is not just the quaint locale: it is the fact that the observers are completely disconnected from the observed. There is no human connection, so there would be no compunction in reporting anything required.

This is the perfect surveillance system: not where your neighbours keep an eye on you, but where total strangers the other side of the world do. (Via The Reg.)

Why DNA Databases Are Doomed

I've been against DNA databases for years, but I've always felt that the generic arguments I've been using were a little pallid, shall we say. And now, in what amounts to almost a throwaway comment, the wonderful Reg gives me what I've been looking for:

Although police are keen to bang the drum for cases where DNA evidence has proved vital, there are obvious privacy objections as well as fears that over-reliance on DNA evidence will lead criminals to use it as an alibi - infecting a crime scene with someone else's DNA.

At the moment, there's not much point doing that because DNA isn't regarded as as an indispensable, infallible tool. Put everyone's DNA in a database, and the police are bound to get lazy - that's human nature - using it as a quick and foolproof method for finding perpetrators.

At that point, it will be worth seeding crime scenes with some judiciously-chosen DNA - secure in the knowledge that the rozzers will be able to work out whose it is. At this point, DNA begins to lose its value, as everyone starts sprinkling the stuff everywhere, utterly confusing the DNA bloodhounds.

And so, inevitably, we will be left with a huge DNA database, useless for its original purpose, built at enormous cost, posing an even huger security risk. Great. Not.

You Must Be Joking

They can't be serious:

This is a proposal for an integrated National Operational Deterrence and Intelligence Surveillance System (NODISS) strategy to be accomplished over a five to fifteen year period concurrent with the introduction of compulsory Identity Cards and the Tracking Database (“audit trail”) of the National Identity Register. It has been prepared by the Domestic Affairs Cabinet Committee Officials Committee, chaired by the Cabinet Office.

What a scoop - that Arsene Ghia has really got her, er...oh, never mind.

First Big Blue, Now True Blue Open Source

I remember well my shock - and delight - when IBM announced that it was throwing its weight behind GNU/Linux on 10 January 2000. I feel somewhat similar about news that the Tories are also planning to push free software really hard:

A Tory strategy to make more use of open source software in the public sector is likely to tackle the culture of secrecy in government procurement, according to early details released to The Register.

Planned for publication next month and stemming from shadow chancellor George Osborne's adoption of a West Coast attitude, the plans are also likely to encourage the adoption of open standards and promote an indigenous open source industry.
Click here to find out more!

Mark Thompson, a Cambridge University IT lecturer and businessman who is drawing up Osborne's request to make Britain the "open source leader of Europe", said that procurement - including the notoriously secretive gateway process - might be opened up so that it was easier for smaller firms to pay homage to the public purse.

Indeed, I find myself echoing the thoughts of the hackers interviewed by The Reg:

These ideas have created some excitement in the apolitical open source movement (the flossers). Those who spoke to The Register about the Tory promise found it necessary to say the same six words: "I am not a Tory, but...".

Chinese Whispers About Dell and GNU/Linux

As this Reg article points out, Dell's attitude to GNU/Linux has always been somewhat ambivalent. So news that a Dell box running the Red Flag distro is available in China is interesting.

Not-So-Sadville

Here's an interesting piece of research that attempts to get some (relatively) hard facts about residents of Second Life. It's only an indication, of course, but it certainly gives the lie to many misconceptions about the place:

Respondents who claim to feel happy in Second Life, also feel happy in the physical world: this hypothesis does not hold for those who spend more than 30 hours a week in Second Life and feel unhappy in the physical world. The relation is strongest for the 18-30 hrs group: the happier they feel in real life, the happier they feel in Second Life. The relation is weakest for the under 18 hrs group. The hypothesis that the more hours one spends in Second Life, the unhappier one feels in the physical word, does not seem to hold. The socially skilled, who feel comfortable in the real world, also feel most comfortable in Second Life.

Update: And talking of hard facts, here's a new page of Second Life numbers. What's most interesting is that they are all showing the same shape.

Warning: Tenuous Connection Follows

Well, Linus is Finnish, and hails from Helsinki, and this story is about a Finn in the same fair city.

OK, I confess, I choose it for the headline: "Suicide squirrel in opera-hating kamikaze bike spoke mangle". Gawd bless The Reg.

Virtually Spot On

I have to admit that I tend to read The Reg more for its entertainment value than for its incisive analysis (with the honorable exception of John Lettice's pieces on ID cards, which always manage to be worth reading on both counts). But there's no doubt that sometimes there's some sharp thinking as well as sharp writing.

Like this piece on Microsoft's snuggle-up with XenSource in the field of server virtualisation:

Knowing that it can't compete in the market in the interim, Microsoft has played the old IBM trick of creating confusion. Don't go with VMware. Go with XenSource. That's who we like. Have a look at what they have to offer.

Spot on.

SAP's Success is Being Sapped

SAP is a strange company. Largely unknown to the general public (at least outside its native Germany), it is large, and until now, hugely successful in its chosen field of Enterprise Resource Management. It is also a dinosaur and doomed. Indicative of this is its very ambivalent attitude to open source, which some of its executives show little sign of understanding.

This story from the Reg confirms my suspicions: that its power is being sapped by rival closed-source companies. Just wait until the up-and-coming open source ERP companies start hitting their stride....

The Dark Side of Eclipse

Eclipse has finished last as far as quality of features are concerned in a survey of developers conducted by Evans Data Corp, and reported by The Register. Looks like there's some work to do here, chaps.

Are Coders Beginning to Get the Message?

The Reg has a good summary of the European Commission's initial findings from its public consultation on Europe's patent system. For me, the most interesting statistic to emerge is that 24% of those who replied came from the open source and software developers community. This says to me that people there are beginning to get the message that they must become involved if they want to change things. Maybe there's hope after all.