Showing posts with label vpn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vpn. Show all posts

11 April 2011

UK Newspapers Confirm Digital Death-Wish

I thought I had plumbed the depths of the UK newspaper industry's stupidity when it came to digital. The idea that putting up paywalls in any way strengthens the readership, reputation and brand of a publication was so far off the mark that I thought it was not possible to go beyond it in sheer wrong-headedness.

I was wrong:

The UK government is abandoning plans that would have compelled publishers of content behind “paywalls” to make that content available for free through Britain’s main libraries.

...

“The government is committed to delivering regulations that cover non-print content and therefore propose to develop the draft regulations to include only off-line content, and on-line content that can be obtained through a harvesting process.”

The fact that the government was bamboozled into believing that it was impossible to "harvest" online content behind paywalls shows how little it understands about technology: it would be trivial to allow external access through a VPN to the editing/versioning systems that newspaper journalists, subs and editors have access to internally. It would probably cost nothing - as in zero. The idea that it would require "£100K per annum per publisher" as some were suggesting, is absurd.

It's also disappointing to see the Guardian Media Group making idiotic statements like this:

“A random patch work of snap shots will “plug the digital black hole” which the British Library (BL) states threatens the nation’s digital heritage ... it poses a real threat to our ability to safeguard our commercial interests. The threat arises from the BL itself.

If they really think "snapshots" are enough, they, too, have not understand the deep changes being wrought by the shift to digital, despite their relative success there compared to other even more benighted publishers. The whole point is that for the first time in history, we have the possibility of capturing everything, and finding unguessed-at connections between them at a later date. This is unique, invaluable data about not just newspapers but the world they purport to mirror that cannot ever be obtained from "snapshots."

This comment also confirms once more that copyright is a canker, eating away even at the heart of one of the few "serious" newspapers with a vaguely liberal attitude to re-use. The fact that the Guardian Media Group thinks that its "commercial interests" somehow outweigh the rights of posterity is a terrible comment on the state of media thinking in this country.

Bear in mind, that this is stuff that theoretically is supposed to enter the public domain after some (long) but finite period: so does that mean all the newspapers will be progressively releasing their files down the years? I think not - it will doubtless be "too expensive" again, and that presupposes that the newspapers are even still around, which I strongly doubt based on their current reading of and response to trends.

And this is the real tragedy. By refusing to allow Legal Deposit Libraries to do their job - to capture culture as it is made, and store it safely for the future - they are inevitably consigning themselves and their production to oblivion at some point, when they close their doors, or the servers crash and the backup copies can't be found or don't work. They are throwing away not just our past, but theirs too.

Update: seems the UK government hasn't swallowed the UK publishing industry's ridiculous claims. Let's hope it perseveres here.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

13 January 2010

How Solid is the Great Firewall of China?

Here's the best description I've read of the situation:

Anybody inside China who really wants to get to Google.com -- or BBC or whatever site may be blocked for the moment -- can still do so easily, by using a proxy server or buying (for under $1 per week) a VPN service. Details here. For the vast majority of Chinese users, it's not worth going to that cost or bother, since so much material is still available in Chinese from authorized sites. That has been the genius, so far, of the Chinese "Great Firewall" censorship system: it allows easy loopholes for anyone who might get really upset, but it effectively keeps most Chinese Internet users away from unauthorized material.

That seems an incredibly important fact to keep in mind over the Google/China business. Talking of which, the above comes from a typically sane post from James Fallows on the subject: well worth reading.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

06 October 2008

Having Lots of Fon

One of the blogs I really enjoy reading is that of Fon's founder, Martin Varsavsky. What I love about his writing is his candour: he clearly writes what he thinks, even if it's slightly painful for others - or himself. I've already noted this interesting comment:


Fon has to provide special VPN tunneling technology in the UK for the UK secret services to investigate suspected criminals and terrorists when they log on to our WiFi signal.

Strangely, this passage has now been "disappeared" from the original post....

Here's some more interesting info - not quite so controversial, this time:

Fon now has 10 times more hotspots around the world than our second closest rival. In the UK and Japan our coverage is especially good. With this crisis Fon cannot think of deep pocketed investors continuing to cover high burn rates, regardless of the fact that our investors are BT, Google, eBay, Itochu, and some of the largest VCs in the world.

20 April 2007

BeThere? I'd Rather BeSquare

I've sometimes been vaguely tempted by BeThere's promises of "up to 24 Meg download" speeds. No more, if this is how it treats someone pointing out a serious vulnerability in its operations:

A 21-year-old college student in London had his internet service terminated and was threatened with legal action after publishing details of a critical vulnerability that can compromise the security of the ISP's subscribers.

BeThere took the retaliatory action four weeks after subscriber Sid Karunaratne demonstrated how the ISP's broadband routers can be remotely accessed by anyone curious enough to look for several poorly concealed backdoors. The hack makes it trivial to telnet into a modem and sniff users' VPN credentials, modify DNS settings and carry out other nefarious acts.

Here's a simple explanation: if someone exploits your vulnerability, they are crackers and deserve punishing; if someone points out your vulnerability so you can fix it and protect yourself, they are hackers and deserve rewarding. (Via TechDirt.)

03 April 2006

To DRM or Not to DRM - That is the Question

Digital Rights Management - or Digital Restrictions Management as Richard Stallman likes to call it - is a hot topic at the moment. It figured largely in an interview I did with the FSF's Eben Moglen, which appeared in the Guardian last week. Here's the long version of what he had to say on DRM:

In the year 2006, the home is some real estate with appliances in it. In the year 2016, the home is a digital entertainment and data processing network with some real estate wrapped around it.

The basic question then is, who has the keys to your home? You or the people who deliver movies and pizza? The world that they are thinking about is a world in which they have the keys to your home because the computers that constitute the entertainment and data processing network which is your home work for them, rather than for you.

If you go to a commercial MIS director and you say, Mr VP, I want to put some computers inside your walls, inside your VPN, on which you don't have root, and you can't be sure what's running there. But people outside your enterprise can be absolutely certain what software is running on that device, and they can make it do whatever they think necessary. How do you feel about that? He says, No, thank you. And if we say to him, OK, how about then if we do that instead in your children's house? He says, No, thank there either.

That's what this is about for us. User's rights have no more deep meaning than who controls the computer your kid uses at night when he comes home. Who does that computer work for? Who controls what information goes in and out on that machine? Who controls who's allowed to snoop, about what? Who controls who's allowed to keep tabs, about what? Who controls who's allowed to install and change software there? Those are the question which actually determine who controls the home in 2016.

This stuff seems far away now because, unless you manage computer security for a business, you aren't fully aware of what it is to have computers you don't control part of your network. But 10 years from now, everybody will know.

Against this background, discussions about whether Sun's open source DRM solution DReaM - derived from "DRM/everywhere available", apparently - seem utterly moot. Designing open source DRM is a bit like making armaments in an energy-efficient fashion: it rather misses the point.

DRM serves one purpose, and one purpose only: to control users. It is predicated on the assumption that most people - not just a few - are criminals ready to rip off a company's crown jewels - its "IP" - at a moment's notice unless the equivalent of titanium steel bars are soldered all over the place.

I simply do not accept this. I believe that most people are honest, and the dishonest ones will find other ways to get round DRM (like stealing somebody's money to pay for it).

I believe that I am justified in making a copy of a CD, or a DVD, or a book provided it is for my own use: what that use is, is no business of the company that sold it to me. What I cannot do is make a copy that I sell to someone else for their use: clearly that takes away something from the producers. But if I make a backup copy of a DVD, or a second copy of a CD to play in the car, nobody loses anything, so I am morally quite justified in this course of action.

Until the music and film industries address the fundamental moral issues - and realise that the vast majority of their customers are decent, honest human beings, not crypto-criminals - the DRM debate will proceed on a false basis, and inevitably be largely vacuous. DRM is simply the wrong solution to the wrong problem.