Opening the Mirror

Der Spiegel is the greatest news magazine in the world, bar none. It makes The Economist look superficial, and yet constantly surprises with the range of its coverage.

A little while back, writing about Focus, its main rival - although that's really too strong a word, good though Focus is - and the fact that the latter was providing free access to its archive, I made the wish that Der Spiegel would follow suit.

Apparently, it has. It's called Spiegel Wissen, and I may be some time....

Must Do Better, BECTA

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Thin End of the Software Patents Wedge

On Open Enterprise blog.

A New Star in the UK Open Source Blogosphere

On Open Enterprise blog.

Next Up for Enterprise Open Source: Nexenta?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Alfresco's Open Source Barometer

On Open Enterprise blog.

Three Strikes and the Media Industry is Out

So the music and film industries want to follow Sarko's daft plan:

People who illegally download films and music will be cut off from the internet under new legislative proposals to be unveiled next week.

Internet service providers (ISPs) will be legally required to take action against users who access pirated material, The Times has learnt.

Users suspected of wrongly downloading films or music will receive a warning e-mail for the first offence, a suspension for the second infringement and the termination of their internet contract if caught a third time, under the most likely option to emerge from discussions about the new law.

Broadband companies who fail to enforce the “three-strikes” regime would be prosecuted and suspected customers’ details could be made available to the courts. The Government has yet to decide if information on offenders should be shared between ISPs.

Well, if they want three strikes and out, try these for size:

Strike One

The music and then film industries failed to recognise that digital downloads were the future. Instead of embracing this incredibly efficient way of distributing content, the industries have fought it tooth and nail. Since there was no legal way to download materials, users were forced to turn to alternative sources.

Strike Two

When it became blindingly obvious that users wanted digital files, the media industry eventually provided them - in the hideously hobbled form of DRM'd formats. Which meant, once more, that people who wanted content that they could use on all their computers and players were forced to turn to other sources.

Strike Three

The present move. Leaving aside the civil liberties angle - the fact that ISPs become the media industries' spies - and that the UK government proposes propping up a dying business model for no other reason than the said industries demand it, even when there is evidence that sharing music *increases* sales of media - it won't work. The instant this becomes law, the number of sites offering encrypted downloads, which are impossible to check in transit, will mushroom, just as decentralised P2P systems sprang up once Napster was nobbled.

The upside is that average user will probably start using encrypting routinely, thus putting the kibosh on Echelon's easy access to everyone's Internet traffic.

Update: Moreover:

UK government proposals to make ISPs take action against the estimated six million users who access pirated online material every year could prompt an explosion in Wi-Fi hijacking, experts warned today.

Microsoft Cunctator

Here's a classic example of how Microsoft plays the delaying game:

Microsoft’s rival Sun Microsystems had complained to the Commission that the US software giant would not grant it data needed to ensure that Windows was interoperable.

“Microsoft’s defence was that the information was covered by intellectual property rights,” Hellstrom said. “This argument was never used when Sun asked for the information. It was only used in the eleventh hour. Microsoft showed one patent a day before we adopted our decision [in 2004].”

One day before: obviously hoping to throw yet another spanner in the regulatory works.

Flickrvision

I wrote recently about the wonderful WikipediaVision: be warned, if you thought that was good, you'll love Flickrvision too - and have even less time left to do useful things in your life.... (Via Commonsblog.)

Free Thinking

I have been accused of being "sniffy" about Kevin Kelly's meditation on eight new scarcities created by free; well, be that as it may. However, I was much more impressed by an earlier essay, pointed out by Chris Anderson, called "Technology Wants to be Free", which seems much meatier to me. It contains lots of concrete examples of how the cost of commodities inevitably tend to zero, and concludes with this important thought:

The odd thing about free technology is that the “free as in beer” part is actually a distraction. As I have argued elsewhere (see my 2002 New York Times Magazine article on the future of music for example) the great attraction of “free” music is only partially that it does not cost anything. The chief importance of free music (and other free things) is held in the second English meaning of the word: free as in “freedom.” Free music is more than piracy because the freedom in the free digital downloads suddenly allowed music lovers to do all kinds of things with this music that they had longed to do but were unable to do before things were “free.” The “free” in digital music meant the audience could unbundled it from albums, sample it, create their own playlists, embed it, share it with love, bend it, graph it in colors, twist it, mash it, carry it, squeeze it, and enliven it with new ideas. The free-ization made it liquid and ‘free” to interact with other media. In the context of this freedom, the questionable legality of its free-ness was secondary. It didn’t really matter because music had been liberated by the free, almost made into a new media.

Catalonian Androids

Google's Android makes its debut in Barcelona:

The first mobile phones fitted with Google's Android software platform made their debut at an industry trade show on Monday, a key advance in the struggle to bring the power of desktop computing to handsets.

But the most interesting part of this report was the following:

Although the technology on display Monday is in prototype form, experts and journalists were so eager to witness its demonstration that all places for private displays were booked out on Monday within the first hour of the show.

Well, there's clearly some pent-up demand *there*.

DAB Dying?

It might seem strange that an avowed lover of high-tech and music should not have a DAB radio: but so it is with me. In part, it's because DAB in the UK seems to be worse than FM (at least that's what Jack Schofield says, and his argument looks pretty reasonable).

But it's also been from a gut feeling that this is the wrong way to go. It looks like I'm not alone:

In a sign of crisis for digital radio, UK commercial radio leader GCap will, as expected, sell its 67 percent stake in the DigitalOne DAB multiplex

...

”We believe that broadband is the ideal complementary platform to analogue radio given the interactivity that they both provide, creating social networks and communities on-air and online.”

I suppose what I'm looking towards is a radio with built-in Wifi to pick up radio-over-IP signals sent out by one of my computers. One reason for that is the extremely high quality of music online these days: BBC Radio 3, for example, is broadcast at 64 kps, which is pretty much CD quality in a domestic setting. Who needs DAB?

XML People: Tim B on TimBL

Here's a rather wonderful document by Tim Bray, one of the key people in the XML world, and someone who evidently knows everyone else there:

XML is ten years old today. It feels like yesterday, or a lifetime. I wrote this that year (1998). It’s really long.

It's also really good for its witty pen portraits of XML notables. Here's a sample: Tim B on TimBL:

TimBL is thin, pale, and twitchy, a well-bred British baby-boomer who circumlocutes and temporizes and gets to the point slowly. Englishly, he deplores confrontation and can find a way to paint any blood-feud in the colours of unfortunate misunderstanding. His publications suggest strong idealism, an overriding vision of the future of information space. His detractors say he’s a good second-rate programmer who was at the right place at the right time and got lucky. The McArthur foundation says he’s a genius. I can’t figure out what he’s getting at half the time, or why he does things, but I’ve known a couple of real geniuses and that’s not necessarily a symptom.

However, I take exception to that idea of TimBL being "a good second-rate programmer who was at the right place at the right time and got lucky." Not so much because it's insulting Sir Tim, but because I think it misses the point entirely. Like RMS's, TimBL's greatest contribution is not actually technical: it is ethical.

Had he not put his code into the public domain - after briefly flirting with the idea of licensing it under the GNU GPL - the Web would not have become the greatest invention of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It is for his inspired altruism that we salute Sir Tim - not for anything so trivial as a markup language.

OOoCon in China?

The OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon) is an

annual gathering is where representatives of all the community projects meet to celebrate and learn from the achievements of the past twelve months, and discuss how to meet the challenges of the next twelve.

Hardly stuff to get excited about, you might think, but apparently not:

I was only 50% out yesterday when I expected four bids to host the OpenOffice.org Annual Conference this year (OOoCon 2008). It’s felt like every time I looked in my inbox today, there was another entry waiting. With an hour to go before the final deadline of midnight UTC, I’m heading off to bed with a total of six bids received:

* Amsterdam, The Netherlands
* Beijing, China
* Bratislava, Slovakia
* Budapest, Hungary
* Dundalk, Ireland
* Orvieto, Italy

Spot the odd one out. The appearance of Beijing is particularly interesting, because it's still not really clear how well open source is doing in China. Maybe this is a hint that there's more interest than you might think.

Asus Eeek PC?

I'm a big fan of the Asus Eee PC, but it seems that someone was a smidge careless with the software that runs by default:

Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to root.

EU to Clobber MS Over OOXML Vote - Allegedly

There's a story zooming around the blogosphere that the EU smells something rotten in the state of Denmark - or rather in a few countries - where the committees voting on OOXML ballooned suddenly with pro-Microsoft people.

What's annoying is that there's been no official confirmation of the story, and the original source, the Wall Street Journal, has a paywall, so you can't find out the details.

Not exactly very open.

Saving Limbu from Linguistic Limbo

There's a fair amount of acrimony flying around the OLPC XO machine at the moment, which is a pity. Because the real story is stuff like this old but still important post that I came across recently:

The development team at OLPC Nepal have been working hard on developing various learning activities for children using the XO. A significant area in which they have been making progress has been in creating activities to help children learn their local dialect.

The first dialect to be setup for use on the XO is Limbu. This is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by more than 300,000 people in eastern Nepal as well as parts of Myanmar, Bhutan and India.

This is a really exciting development and is a positive counter to concerns that the OLPC project will only serve to homogenise indigenous cultures. In fact, the project may aid the long term preservation and viability of minority dialects and culture which are no longer part of the curriculum in the traditional school teaching models.

I always was a sucker for those Tibeto-Burman languages....

Top 50 Open Source Alternatives

Top n lists are two-a-penny in the world of computing, and collections of open source alternatives to proprietary are pretty common. This one has the virtue of offering a paragraph on each, so you have a better chance of deciding if something's worth following up.

The same site has some other lists that may be of interest: Top 25 GNU/Linux Games, and an intriguing list of "brave" hosting companies that won't (it is claimed) dump you when the going gets a smidge tough.

DRM For Libraries?

This is a very bad precedent:

the BPL [Boston Public Library] has launched a new service powered by a company called OverDrive. The system gives BPL patrons access to books, music, and movies online -- but only if they use a Microsoft DRM system.

There are lots of problems with the introduction of this system: it bars access to users of GNU/Linux and MacOS and creates a dependence on a single technology vendor for access. These are important issues, certainly. The worst problem, however, is much more fundamental.

By adopting a DRM system for library content, the BPL is giving OverDrive, copyright holders, and Microsoft the ability to decide what, when, and how its patrons can and cannot read, listen, and watch these parts of the BPL collection. They are giving these companies veto power over the BPL's own ability to access this data -- both now and in the future. Cryptographically, BPL is quite literally handing over the keys to their collection. In the process, they are not only providing a disservice to their patrons. They are providing a disservice to themselves.

Libraries should be about opening people's minds, not closing off their collections.

Time to Get Incensed about the 2011 Census?

US authorities will not be able to see data covering all UK households even if a US defence giant wins the contract to run the 2011 census, a minister says.

The US Patriot Act allows personal data held by companies in the US to be made available to intelligence agencies.

But Treasury Minister Angela Eagle told MPs the government had received legal assurances this would not happen if Lockheed Martin wins the census bid.

Oh, that's alright then - if they really gave "legal assurances".

The fact the US telecom companies have been spying on US citizens illegally because they were told to do so by the US government doesn't have any bearing here, does it? I mean, if Lockheed Martin were *ordered* by the US government to hand over all the census data, they'd just refuse, wouldn't they? They'd have to: after all, they have given those legal assurances.

And if by any chance you were still a teensy-weensy bit nervous about the security of all that intimate information about yourself and your family - because, well, you know, the UK government has had one or two little mishaps with data recently - Angela Eagle has some reassuring words:

she was "pretty confident" there would be robust safeguards on the security of data.

Update: ORG's Becky Hogge points out a useful site called Census Alert that tells you what you can do to thwart this gross insult to the national intelligence.

No Download iPlayer for GNU/Linux in 2008

The BBC will launch a download version of its iPlayer online video service for Apple Mac users by the end of 2008.

But no mention of GNU/Linux obviously means we won't be seeing one this year....

And somebody should tell Mark Thompson about platform-independent technologies:

He wrote: "Were we to choose to not develop any systems or services until they could be received by every single individual licence-fee payer, our capacity for development and innovation - in the interest of serving those who fund our services - would be severely limited."

Welcome to the Spectrum Commons

Dana Blankenhorn gets it:

When the history of this era is written, it will be seen that one of the biggest bi-partisan mistakes was to treat spectrum as property rather than a commons.

Billions have been earned off the spectrum, first by the government, then by those who won the auctions. But the spectrum has been under-utilized and it has been over-priced.

Open Source Airbus

I always knew that that the A380 Airbus was cool:

An Airbus aircraft has a working life of up to 30 years. On-board hardware and software needs to be maintained, updated and adapted to new specifications for the same amount of time. However, 30 years is an eternity in the short-lived software industry. Which software vendor can nowadays guarantee that their tools will still be usable and meet all the relevant requirements in 2030? And the production path from system specifications to tested control programs and the hardware to run them on requires many tools.

Led by aircraft manufacturer Airbus, several companies located in the French Aerospace Valley close to Toulouse have, therefore, formed a consortium and initiated the TOPCASED Open Source project to create the necessary system development tools. TOPCASED is an acronym for Toolkit in Open source for Critical Applications & Systems Development.

OpenID - and Openness - Is Winning

I am very happy to be able to say that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo are joining the OpenID Foundation (on whose board I sit.) It marks the end of a lot of hard work by all parties involved, as well as -- at least for me personally -- the hope that we will be able to get a decentralized federated single sign-on technology across the internet.

Nearly there....

Australia: The New Commons Hero

One of the surprising - and heartening - recent developments in the environmental world has been the transformation of Australia into a real commons hero. Not just in terms of signing the Kyoto Protocol, but also in taking a very active part in revealing the reality of the scandalously callous and egotistical behaviour of the Japanese whalers.

The latest result of this new position is a truly shocking video that shows the death-throes of two Minke whales, almost certainly a mother and her calf. Be warned: this is literally revolting in its capture of the slow suffering inflicted by the Japanese.

But appalling as it is, it is a valuable document in the fight against this totally senseless slaughter and the Japanese government's cynical portrayal of such butchery as "science". The Australian government and people should be proud of their work in attempting to defend this fragile commons. (Via The Times.)