Defend the Data Protection Act

One of the most important and earliest pieces of legislation concerning digital information is the Data Protection Act (DPA). Clause 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill, currently before Parliament, would effectively nullify the DPA, since it would allow Ministers to use information gathered for one purpose for another – one of the things the DPA is there to prevent.

I therefore urge you to use the WriteToThem service to contact your MP, asking them to vote against the measure. Here's what I've sent:

I would like to express my concern about Clause 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill. As you know, this would enable any Minister by order to be able to take any information gathered for one purpose - across the public and private sector - and use it for any other purpose. This would effectively nullify the Data Protection Act (DPA) – one of the key pieces of legislation for the digital age – and leave British citizens quite defenceless in this important sphere.

Not only would this be bad in itself, it would be done in a way that undermines Parliament: Ministers would be able to ignore the DPA for any purpose whenever it suited them, without any need to return to Parliament to have the move scrutinised.

I am writing to you to ask you to vote against this pernicious move. Moreover, please know that if the Clause is passed, I refuse to give my consent to the arbitrary sharing of my information under any ‘Information Sharing Order’.

UK Government Fails to Get Web 2.0

This is so depressing:

There should be no new exemption from copyright law for users' adaptations of copyright-protected content, the UK Government has said. To create such an exemption for user-generated content would ignore the rights of content creators, it said.

...


"Another significant concern is the extent to which such an exemption might allow others to use the works in a way that the existing rights holders do not approve of and the impact that exemptions in this area might have on remuneration," it said.

In fact reading the full report is even more depressing, since it constantly harps on "stakeholders" - by which it means content owners - and clearly doesn't give a toss for the general public's concerns or needs.

The UK government is clearly still trapped in the mindset that it's about telling the little people what they can do with the stuff kindly provided by those magnanimous content corporations. Even extending exemptions for teaching and libraries are frowned upon as self-evidently bad things - can't spread that dangerous knowledge stuff too widely, now can we?

How to Save Investigative Journalism

There's increasing hand wringing over the fact that revenues at dead-tree newspapers are diving, leading to redundancies, and loss of the ability to conduct high-quality investigative journalism. At the same time, one of the best sources for investigative journalism, Wikileaks, is a bit short of dosh. Problem, meet solution: newspapers should fund Wikileaks.

What the Hashtag?!

One of the reasons Twitter has taken off and become so popular (at least amongst sad people such as myself with nothing better to do) is that a rich ecosystem has sprung up around it, with all kinds of serious and silly services that build on its content. Here's one of the better ones, What the Hashtag?!:

Welcome to What the Hashtag?!, the user-editable encyclopedia for hashtags found on Twitter

What's a hashtag?

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They're like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your posts. Hashtags can be created by anyone simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #myhashtag. Hashtags were developed as a means to create groupings of related content on Twitter.

This is an interesting way to access and index content, and adds an extra level of usefulness to Twitter.

Linux's Next Frontier: “In-Vehicle Infotainment”

One of the sure signs that open source is taking hold in computing is that it is spreading far beyond its heartland, the datacentre. Smartphones have been perhaps the most visible manifestation of this, but the world of embedded systems, where the operating system is even less evident than with mobile phones, is potentially even more important, for the simple reason that it embraces so many different sectors, each of which is economically significant in its own right.

The announcement today of the creation of GENIVI is very clear sign that Linux is already moving into another huge vertical industry: in-car entertainment...

On Open Enterprise blog.

How to Make Money from Music

Someone's managed:

it was recently revealed that rock gods Aerosmith have made more money off of their crummy co-branded version of Guitar Hero (I say crummy because reviews of the game have been lackluster) then they have on any album that the band has released to date. The revelation recently came from Activision chief executive Bobby Kotick and it unscores a number of really interesting points. First off, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is nothing more than a "greatest hits" montage for the band, with a bunch of indy band songs sprinkled in for variety. Putting out the game cost Aerosmith nothing more than their signature, agreeing to allow Activision to use their music. Secondly, it proves the consumer is still interested in paying for music. They just don't want to buy CDs or single tracks anymore. They want interactivity, add-ons, special content and video games. According Microsoft gaming chief Robbie Bach, more than 60 million tracks were downloaded for Rockband, Guitar Hero and Lips over Xbox Live in 2008.

The second point is crucial: you've just got to offer stuff in the form that punters want. Is that so hard to understand for the music business?

Sun's McNealy Sees the Light on Open Source

If you were looking for a sign of the times in computing, you could do worse than consider the trajectory of Scott McNealy. When he was running Sun, open source in his view was pretty much the un-American cancer that Microsoft had proclaimed it to be - largely because of the inroads that GNU/Linux was making against Sun's proprietary Solaris. That was then; this is now....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Help Stop Clause 152...

...of the Coroners and Justice Bill (currently being debated in Parliament): it's not just bad, it's diablolically bad, because it lets the UK government eviscerate the Data Protection Act at will.

As No2ID's Phil Booth put in at the Convention on Modern Liberty:

Please write NOW to your MP - http://www.WritetoThem.com is a single click away - telling him or her that you *refuse your consent* to the arbitrary sharing of your information under any ‘Information Sharing Order’ and that you want him or her to vote to have Clause 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill (currently being debated in Parliament) *completely removed* from the Bill.

If you care about our fundamental rights and freedoms, the time to act is now - before we lose yet another one!

For those who don’t have time to read Clause 152, it would enable any Minister by order to be able to take any information gathered for one purpose - across the public and private sector - and use it for any other purpose.

All by itself, it is more dangerous than the entire Identity Cards Act - it literally provides the powers to build the Database State.

Please write to your MP *now* - and tell everyone you know about Clause 152, and ask them to write to their MP too.

http://www.WritetoThem.com - “I refuse to consent, stop Clause 152″

We CAN stop this. Over to you…

He speak de troof: please do it....

How to Hijack an EU Open Source Strategy Paper

Open source is an outsider, not part of the establishment. One price it pays for this is not being privy to all the decisions that are made in the field of governmental policy. Too often, established players are involved without any counterbalancing input from the free software side. Generally, we don't see all the machinations and deals that go on here behind closed doors. But thanks to the increasingly-indispensable Wikileaks, we have the opportunity to observe how an organisation close to Microsoft is attempting to re-write – and hijack – an important European Union open source strategy paper.

On Linux Journal.

This isn't “Open Source”

As a kind of pint-sized free software fidei defensor I feel obliged to counter some of the misconceptions that are put about on the subject around the Web. But I find myself in a slightly embarrassing situation here, in that I need to comment on some statements that have appeared in the virtual pages of Computerworld UK....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Has Microsoft's Patent War Against Linux Begun?

It's been in the air for ages, and now it's happening:

Microsoft filed suit against TomTom today, alleging that the in-car navigation company's devices violate eight of its patents -- including three that relate to TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel.

...


Five of the patents in dispute relate to in-car navigation technologies, while the other three involve file-management techniques.

Presumably those are the three that relate to Linux, in which case this is likely to have broader implications than just the in-car navigation market.

Here's a nice statement of how Microsoft views all this:

"Microsoft respects and appreciates the important role that open-source software plays in our industry and we respect and appreciate the passion and the great contribution that open-source developers make in our industry," Gutierrez said. He said that respect and appreciation is "not inconsistent with our respect for intellectual-property rights."

In other words, Microsoft "respects and appreciates" open source until it actually starts to replace Microsoft's offerings, in which case the charming smile is replaced with the shark's grimace.

It may not be a coincidence that Gutierrez has just been promoted to the rank of corporate vice president: could this legal action be his way of announcing the direction he and Microsoft will now take in the battle against Linux?

Follow me on Twitter @glynmoody

ID Card Database *Already* Breached

That's almost before it's come into existence:

The breaches of the Customer Information System (CIS), which is run by the Department of Work and Pensions, were revealed in a DWP memo to housing benefit and council tax benefit staff on 15 January.

CIS is designed to give local authorities access to citizens' data, including HMRC tax-credit information. In 2006, it was decided that the ID card project would use CIS for biographical information, to avoid having to create a new, monolithic database of the UK's inhabitants.

In the DWP memo, the government department said that desktop access to CIS had helped to "significantly improve service delivery" to citizens, but noted that a series of checks had identified that some local-authority staff were committing serious security breaches using the system.

What makes it even more risible is the following comment:

"The breaches were not necessarily someone purposely going on there and checking something they shouldn't," the DWP spokesperson said. "They could be inadvertently clicking on information."

Yes, that will be a good excuse, won't it: honest guv, I just inadvertently clicked on Gordon Brown's ID card information....

And then, of course, there is the canonical "white is black", "up is down", "bad is good" bit of spin:

The DWP's spokesperson did not respond to a request to describe how it might be possible to break these rules by inadvertently clicking on information in the CIS database, but did claim the number of breaches revealed in the memo showed the system was secure.

And presumably it will use the increasing number of breaches to prove the increasing security of the system in the future.

Open Sourcing America's Operating System

Carl Malamud is one of the leaders in the fight for access to public data, specifically that in the US:

For over 20 years, I have been publishing government information on the Internet. In 2008, Public.Resource.Org published over 32.4 million pages of primary legal materials, as well as thousands of hours of video and thousands of photographs. In the 1990s, I fought to place the databases of the United States on the Internet. In the 1980s, I fought to make the standards that govern our global Internet open standards available to all. Should I be honored to be nominated and confirmed, I would continue to work to preserve and extend our public domain, and would place special attention to our relationship with our customers, especially the United States Congress.

Now, in a campaign dubbed "Yes We Scan", he would like to take on the role of "Public Printer of the United States". Here's one of his key goals: making America's operating system open source:

The Federal Register system of publications represents many of the official publications of the executive branch. A large stream of other documents come from the legislative branch and judiciary, forming a collection of primary legal materials that make up “America’s Operating System,” the rules that govern our society. A goal of the new administration should be to make America’s Operating System open source, guaranteeing that a complete and current archive of all primary legal materials in the United States are freely available on the Internet. This goal is partly about democracy, allowing citizens to see the rules that govern our society, but America’s Operating System is also about innovation, guaranteeing that any scholar or entrepreneur can download our legal materials and develop new and more effective ways of presenting, practicing, communicating, and learning about the law.

How can they not give him the job?

A Little Marvell Plugs Sub-Netbook Gap

As I've been telling anyone who would listen, one of the key recent trends has been the "race to the bottom" in terms of pricing for computer systems. The only real winner here (aside from the end-user) is open source - proprietary systems cannot cut prices enough, and are rarely flexible enough to allow the kind of experimentation that is necessary at this end of the market.

Here's another great example of the kind of thing I have in mind:

Can a computer get any smaller and cheaper than a netbook? Marvell Technology Group Ltd. thinks so.

The Silicon Valley chip maker is trying to create a new category of inexpensive, energy-efficient devices it calls "plug computers," for which it would supply the integrated processors.

Strongly resembling those vacation timers that turn on your lights at night to ward off potential robbers, a plug computer is more of a home networking gadget that transforms external hard drives or USB thumb drives into full network-attached storage (NAS) devices.

Aside from the form-factor, the other thing of note is the expected price for these GNU/Linux-based systems:

Marvell has already announced a handful of other resellers that plan to build plug computers. But it hopes to attract far more, so that it can eventually price its SheevaPlug chips low enough for vendors to profitably sell plug computers for as little as $49, Mukhopadhyay said.

At first sight, it's not clear why anyone would want one of these extremely small computers; but at prices around $50 you can bet all kinds of unexpected uses will start popping up. It's not hard to imagine a day when a house or office is full of dozens of tiny, low-cost and low-energy GNU/Linux-based devices, all talking to each other and other systems across the Net. Juding be the speed at which netbooks have caught on, it's probably closer than we think.

Dwindling the Kindle Swindle

Here's someone writing in the New York Times about the Kindle's text-to-speech function:

You may be thinking that no automated read-aloud function can compete with the dulcet resonance of Jim Dale reading “Harry Potter” or of authors, ahem, reading themselves. But the voices of Kindle 2 are quite listenable.

Well, yes, that's precisely what I was thinking. But I'm willing to go along with the point.

However, consider this: if people start using the function, it suggests that they like listening to books. So maybe some of them would like to listen to the author, rather than the dulcet tones, and even prepared to pay a premium. A smaller number might even bestir themselves to go along to a book reading by that author. See? opportunities, not threats....

Open Source? Labour's Working on It

One of the great things about free software is that it transcends politics. Those on the left love it because it is a collaborative effort, born of altruism; those on the right love it because it is efficient and flexible. This has led to some interesting jockeying on the political scene, as politicians of all stripes have tried to prove that they were more open than their rivals.

There's no doubt that in the UK the winners so far have been the Conservatives, who have seized on open source as a stick with which to beat the current government's miserable record on large-scale IT projects, most of which have been way over budget at best, and utter failures at worst (with some managing both). This has understandably put pressure on Labour to come up with a riposte, and yesterday it was unveiled in the form of something called “Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan” (there's a handy version from WriteToReply here, where you can add your comments.

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Chinese (Web Servers) Are Coming

The monthly release of the Netcraft survey is always good, since it generally shows the continuing dominance of Apache in the Web server field. But this month has something new and vaguely frightening:

In the February 2009 survey we received responses from 215,675,903 sites. This reflects a phenomenal monthly gain of more than 30 million sites, bringing the total up by more than 16%.

This majority of this month's growth is down to the appearance of 20 million Chinese sites served by QZHTTP. This web server is used by QQ to serve millions of Qzone sites beneath the qq.com domain.

QQ is already well known for providing the most widely used instant messenger client in China, but this month's inclusion of the Qzone blogging service instantly makes the company the largest blog site provider in the survey, surpassing the likes of Windows Live Spaces, Blogger and MySpace.

Got that? QQ's server QZHTTP just put on 20 million sites in the survey - enough seriously to dent both Apache and IIS (and making the latter look suddenly vulnerable to losing its second place).

Does this represent the dawn of a new (Web server) era?

What makes this all slightly troubling is that I don't know anything about QZHTTP: I presume it's not open souce, since I can't find any links to its code. But can anyone give me any more details, please? (Via @codfather.)

Follow me on Twitter @glynmoody

Open Enterprise Interview: Bertrand Diard, Talend CEO

If open source did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it, if only to deal with the ragbag collection of data formats out there.

For open source has a unique flexibility and extensibility not generally available to proprietary programs, which allows it to cope with most applications and situations. This makes it ideal as a kind of software “glue” for stitching together pre-existing computer systems, which were created in an ad-hoc way with little thought of any eventual need to make them talk efficiently to each other.

This powerful feature of open source was pretty much the driving force behind the creation of the data integration company Talend. Here its cofounder and CEO, Bertrand Diard, talks eloquently about the genesis of his company, open source's unique advantages in this sphere, the state of free software in his native France, and just why Talend decided to snuggle up to Microsoft last year...

On Open Enterprise blog.

EndSoftwarePatents.org Phase II

There's no doubt that more and more scrutiny is being applied to patents around the world, with particularly hopeful moves in the US in the wake of the Bilski judgment. So it's a wise move on the FSF's part to turn up the pressure with their EndSoftwarePatents.org campaign:

The Free Software Foundation today announced funding for the End Software Patents project to document the case for ending software patents worldwide. This catalog of studies, economic arguments, and legal analyses will build on the recent success of the "in re Bilski" court ruling, in which End Software Patents (ESP) helped play a key role in narrowing the scope for patenting software ideas in the USA.

For this new phase of End Software Patents work, the FSF has engaged veteran anti-software-patent lobbyist Ciaran O'Riordan, taking over from Ben Klemens as director of ESP. O'Riordan brings years of experience campaigning against software patents in the EU. This knowledge, combined with what was learned during the Bilski work, will form the starting point for a global information resource and campaign. The goal is to make it easy for activists around the world to benefit from existing knowledge, often scattered and sometimes disappearing with time.

That's absolutely right: one of the great things about work trying to claw back some of the ground lost to intellectual monopolies is that it all feeds into itself. The more info you have, the easier it is to build the case with further research and campaigns.

As O'Riordan explains:

"Each campaign raises new evidence and arguments for the case against software patents. The work on the Bilski case uncovered new economic studies and developed legal proposals for how to pin down the slippery goal of excluding software ideas from patentability. To make the most of that work, Phase II of ESP will work on documenting and organizing that information and making it easily reusable. We'll add to that what was learned during the years-long campaign against the EU software patents directive, and then we'll research and document what's happening in South Africa, India, New Zealand, Brazil, and so forth."

Here's to Phase III: victory.

He Wants a Million Quid? Don't Give it to Him

Tom Steinberg has a simple request: he wants a million quid.

If you want to know how I think mySociety could change the world, this is your answer. I don’t want a million quid because I want some sort of open source empire: I want a million quid because we can’t cross this chasm with any less.

I don't think we should give him a million quid; I think we should give him a *ten* million - OK, make it a hundred million - plus the job of overseeing the opening up government in this country to such an extent that its buttons start popping.

Oh, and as another precondition for the dosh, could he kindly respond to my Twitter request to follow him (not that I'm bitter).

After all, it's not a question of how much that would cost, but how much it is costing us - economically, politically and socially - by *not* doing it.

ChinesePod Gives Me a Reason to Go Android

Hm, this looks like a good excuse to get an Android phone soon:

A big part of ‘learning on your terms’ is not being tied down to sitting in front of a computer in order to learn. Learning should adjust to your lifestyle and not the other way around. The ability to download podcasts and take them on-the-go was a big step in this direction, and today we add another - a ‘Quick Review’ application for Google Android-powered phones.

...

The ChinesePod Quick Review App is an integrated Chinese dictionary and flashcard system designed for ‘fast launch and short use’. We will be following up with another more full-featured app in the future. The App has four main sections: dictionary, flashcards, settings and history.

Interesting that the iPhone version is still held up in administrative limbo....

CK-12 Foundation Re-invents Textbooks

It's no surprise that textbooks are being radically re-invented - after all, in the past they have been hideously expensive, which means that they were an obstacle to learning rather than the contrary. Nonetheless, it's heartening to see more and more ventures attempt to do textbooks properly. Here's another:

CK-12 Foundation is a non-profit organization founded in January 2007. Our mission is to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the US and worldwide, but also to empower teacher practitioners by generating or adapting content relevant to their local context. Using a collaborative and web-based compilation model that can manifest open resource content as an adaptive textbook, termed the "FlexBook", CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality, locally and temporally relevant, educational web texts. The content generated by CK-12 and the CK-12 community will serve both as source material for a student's learning and provide an adaptive environment that scaffolds the learner's journey as he or she masters a standards-based body of knowledge, while allowing for passion-based learning.

As this makes clear, crucial elements include Net-based collaboration to produce open content that is "adaptive" to students' and teachers' needs. This is clearly the future of textbooks, and any company still banking on selling dead content on dead trees is likely to end up just as moribund.

The True Begetter of Innovation is Openness

One of the persistent myths peddled by lovers of intellectual monopolies is that you need things like patents to promote innovation. The idea is that patents encourage new research, which then feeds into more research, and the world is a better place.

Not so, according to some rigorous new research into the effects of intellectual monopolies on science:

Scientific freedom and openness are hallmarks of academia: relative to their counterparts in industry, academics maintain discretion over their research agenda and allow others to build on their discoveries. This paper examines the relationship between openness and freedom, building on recent models emphasizing that, from an economic perspective, freedom is the granting of control rights to researchers. Within this framework, openness of upstream research does not simply encourage higher levels of downstream exploitation. It also raises the incentives for additional upstream research by encouraging the establishment of entirely new research directions. In other words, within academia, restrictions on scientific openness (such as those created by formal intellectual property (IP)) may limit the diversity and experimentation of basic research itself. We test this hypothesis by examining a “natural experiment” in openness within the academic community: NIH agreements during the late 1990s that circumscribed IP restrictions for academics regarding certain genetically engineered mice. Using a sample of engineered mice that are linked to specific scientific papers (some affected by the NIH agreements and some not), we implement a differences-in-differences estimator to evaluate how the level and type of follow-on research using these mice changes after the NIH-induced increase in openness. We find a significant increase in the level of follow-on research. Moreover, this increase is driven by a substantial increase in the rate of exploration of more diverse research paths. Overall, our findings highlight a neglected cost of IP: reductions in the diversity of experimentation that follows from a single idea.

This work basically shows that recent attempts to introduce intellectual monopolies into science in order to "promote innovation" have actually been counter-productive.

our results offer direct evidence that scientific openness seems to be associated with the establishment of entirely new research lines: more specifically, increased openness leads to a significant increase in the diversity of the journals in which mouse-articles in the treatment group are cited, and, perhaps even more strikingly, a very significant increase in the number of previously unused “keywords” describing the underlying research contributions of the citing articles.

In this context at least, it's openness that leads to more innovation, not its polar opposite. (Via Open Access News.)

Follow me on Twitter @glynmoody

Crowdsourcing Health Research

Although the post calls this "open source health research", it's more a matter of crowdsourcing, since it lacks many of the elements of open source - true collaboration (rather than massed effort), modular organisation (rather than loose collections of separate facts), etc. But it's interesting nonetheless:

There are definitely a lot of patient communities based on stories and support. But there are very few patient websites based on data. CureTogether is a data-driven site, bringing people with different conditions together to compare symptoms and treatments in a quantitative way.

Indeed: putting that data together in a way that is useful to researchers is an important task, even if not truly collaborative in the open source sense.

Dell *Does* Deliver (with Netbooks)

There's been a lot of sound and fury flying around about the split between GNU/Linux and Windows XP sales on netbooks, and what that means for the larger desktop sector. Some have used low figures for the former to suggest that GNU/Linux *still* stands no chance with the general public. But maybe what we need are more datapoints - ones like this, perhaps:

While MSI told us a few months back that Wind netbooks running SuSE Linux saw 4x higher return rates than that of XP machines, Dell has had quite the opposite experience with its Inspiron Mini 9 offering with Ubuntu. “A third of our Mini 9 mix is Linux, which is well above the standard attach rate for other systems that offer Linux. We have done a very good job explaining to folks what Linux is,” says Dell’s Jay Pinkert.

Dell attributes part of the Linux growth to competitive pricing on the Ubuntu SKUs. “When you look at the sweet spot for this category it is price sensitivity, and Linux enabled us to offer a lower price entry point,” added Dell senior product manager John New.

The key point here is that the manufacturer must make it clear what the customer is getting for the super-low price. Kudos to Dell that they seem to have managed that.

Oh, and could we please have less whining by other netbook manufacturers about their GNU/Linux sales, since it might well be your *own* fault, not that of free software...