Lords, Bless 'Em

More sanity from the House of Lords:

The government has been defeated in the House of Lords over the issue of keeping peoples' DNA and fingerprints on the police national database.

Peers backed a Conservative amendment calling for national guidelines for deleting material by 161 votes to 150.

Ministers said the safeguard was not needed and could hinder anti-terror operations but critics said innocent people should not be stigmatised.

The safeguard was not needed, presumably, because we no longer have any right to be regarded as innocent until proven guilty - the government's operating principle being that we are *all* potential terrorists, and therefore should *all* be under surveillance at all times and in all ways.

Dig, Baby, Dig

The idiocy of "drill, baby, drill" was evident to anyone with a functioning synapse: it would have led to marginal production of extra oil at the cost of considerable environmental damage. Alas, the EU seems not to have got the memo:

Natural areas protected under EU law could be opened for mining as part of efforts to curb Europe's growing dependence on third-country imports of precious minerals and metals, the European Commission announced yesterday (4 November).

"This is the beginning of a natural resources strategy," EU Enterprise Commissioner Günter Verheugen told journalists during the presentation of a new 'integrated strategy' for raw materials.

Well, if it is "the beginning of a natural resources strategy", it is also the end of any serious environmental strategy. What is needed is more recycling and more efficient use of resources and materials that we already have, not a constant search for new places to dig up to meet our unbridled industrial hunger.

Blears Shoots the Blogger Messengers

Quoth Hazel Blears:

"But mostly, political blogs are written by people with disdain for the political system and politicians, who see their function as unearthing scandals, conspiracies and perceived hypocrisy.

"Until political blogging 'adds value' to our political culture, by allowing new voices, ideas and legitimate protest and challenge, and until the mainstream media reports politics in a calmer, more responsible manner, it will continue to fuel a culture of cynicism and despair."

Well, darling, could it be that bloggers unearth scandals and hypocrisy because that's mostly what you and your chums in the government seem to generate? Could it be that a more affirmative kind of blogging will emerge once your government drops its own unending flood of cynicism and spin and lies?

Because - and here's the shocking truth, Hazel - nobody is stopping "new voices" from emerging in the blogosphere: that's it's beauty, entry is frictionless. The fact that there aren't any such voices, or that nobody reads them if there are, is because of the noxious atmosphere you and your mates have engendered. Essentially, politicians get the journalism they deserve, so you stand condemned by your own observations.

Free Our Bills by Writing to Them

Those nice people at Free Our Bills asked me to Write to Them, so I did:

I am writing to ask you to sign Early Day Motion (EDM) 2141, whose text is as follows:

"That this House believes it has a duty to publish Bills in such a fashion that they can be accessed as easily and as early as possible by the public; notes that the non-partisan Free Our Bills campaign is urging the House to publish bill texts in a new electronic format to improve accessibility and public scrutiny of legislation; further notes that the changes requested would have no impact on the content of Bills, nor upon the process by which they are currently made; considers that the new format could be delivered cheaply and quickly; acknowledges that the Leader of the House's office did not accept a prior request for new formatting from mySociety, nor provide an explanation of why the changes could be made; and calls on the Leader of House to ask House of Commons Clerks to work with Free Our Bills campaign staff to commence publication of Bills in the new format."

As you can see, this about making the Parliamentary process more transparent, more useful, and therefore, ultimately, more engaging. This would obviously be beneficial not only for the electorate, but also for politicians.

The new format request is not onerous in the slightest, but would provide a huge boost to democracy in the UK. I hope that you will support it.

Yours sincerely,

Glyn Moody

You might want to do the same if you care about a transparent democratic process - or just want an excuse to write to your MP.

Blu-ray's DRM Pixie Dust Defeated

Why do people persist in believing that DRM can ever be effective for long?

A small group of dedicated researchers over on the Doom9 forum have successfully defeated BD+, the Blu-ray copy-protection system. This was the copy-protection mechanism that Richard Doherty, a media analyst with Envisioneering Group, claimed wouldn’t likely be broken for 10 years.

Not that any cares about Blu-ray, of course.

Of Patents and Property

As long-suffering readers of this blog will have noticed, one of my favourite hobby-horses is that the whole idea of "intellectual property” is a trick, designed to plug into the warm and fuzzy feeling most people have about the idea of property, and aiming to cover up the fact that what we are really dealing with here are intellectual monopolies – of which few people are fans....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Opencourseware About Openness

Opencourseware grew out of the application of open source ideas to education, so it seems appropriate that education should return the favour and offer opencourseware about open source. Here's a list of a hundred such courses, handily grouped by rough area.

WikiDashboard

This is really cool.

One of the great things about Wikipedia is that you can see who has made edits: this makes the process of accumulation transparent - in theory. In practice, it's often too hard to see the wood for the trees.

Enter WikiDashboard, which offers a visual representation of the editing process:

The idea is that if we provide social transparency and enable attribution of work to individual workers in Wikipedia, then this will eventually result in increased credibility and trust in the page content, and therefore higher levels of trust in Wikipedia.

It's dead easy to use: you just bung in your search term, and the relevant Wikipedia page appears (from a mirror), alongside with a neat graphic that shows who did what when. (Via All the Modern Things.)

Banking on Imaginary Assets

Haven't banks learned *anything*?

In 2006, the Bank of Communications Beijing Branch began offering loans to Chinese SMEs secured against IP assets. Since then 37 companies have borrowed a total of over 400 million yuan (around $58.5 million) in 44 separate deals. And not one has defaulted.

Yet.

When banks start lending money against IP assets, it has to be a pretty positive sign. I know that banks have a pretty poor reputation these days, but they are not going to make cash available to companies if they do not think that they have a very good chance of getting it back; or, if they do not, that they can recover the money in other ways.

Er, because banks never make mistakes, and are never motivated by blind greed? "A pretty positive sign"? I don't think so....

OpenStreetMap's Lead Out in the Open

I've written many times about OpenStreetMap, but rarely in the context of the proprietary online mapping services. Here's a post that shows why open is better: in several important locations - such as Baghdad, apparently - it's the *only* option:

And when you're done with Baghdad, check out Kabul, yet another place where Google Mapmaker isn't enabled: Yahoo Maps, Virtual Earth, Google Maps vs. OpenStreetMap. It isn't even close.

Open Content's Great Healing

There is an irony at the heart of the open content world: that the two biggest successes there – Wikipedia and the Creative Commons movement – cannot share content. This is because Wikipedia was created before CC came on the scene, and therefore – quite reasonably – used the best existing open content licence, the GNU Free Documentation Licence (FDL), which is not compatible with popular CC licences. As the man who did more than anyone to craft the latter, Larry Lessig, explains....

On Open Enterprise blog.

ACTA of Hypocrisy

I've written several times about the mysterious Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which is currently being negotiated behind closed doors, with little or no input from proles like you and me. Despite efforts to present us with a fait accompli, it seems that the Very Important People who are working on this are getting slightly rattled by the increasing criticism of both the process and the likely result.

For the fine site Digital Majority has managed to get its mitts on a leaked document put together by the European Commission in a desperate attempt to head off that growing discontent.

You can read the whole thing here, as well as Digital Majority's useful analysis. Basically, it's a case of the lady protesting too much: earnestly assuring us that it doesn't intend to bring in a shopping list of legal nasties - criminalisation of infringement, summary injunctions for those *suspected* of infringing, "three strikes and you're out", etc. - but convincing no one.

But what caught my attention were the closing words of this sad little document:

Fake medicines are reckoned to account for almost 10% of world trade in medicines. Most of these fake drugs are headed for the world’s poorest countries.

Riiiiiiiiiiiight. And why, might one ask, are the world's poorest countries buying all those fake drugs? It couldn't possibly be because of the high prices demanded by the owners of the relevant patents on the "real" thing? And it couldn't possible be the case that much of the counterfeiting this treaty aims to expurgate is caused precisely by those self-same intellectual monopolies?

And yet, strangely, getting rid of monopolies is something that the people working so feverishly on ACTA simply cannot contemplate - despite all the economic evidence that it is the solution to so many of the the problems they claim to be addressing.

Counterfeiting bad, monopolies good.

Open Source Invention

Here's an interesting point about a new trend in "publishing" inventions directly to YouTube:

This is a very good article in the New York Times about publicising inventions via Web 2.0 tools like YouTube. The piece concentrates on Dr Johnny Chung Lee, a 28-year-old inventor who became a YouTube celebrity by posting Wii hacks, including how to make a muilti-touch whiteboard, and the mind-boggling video on generating real 3D gaming experiences. The videos went viral, and attracted 2 million and 6 million views respectively.

...

Something not mentioned in the NYT piece however is the patent implication of Dr Lee's practices. Patenting requires novelty, therefore by making his inventions public before filing for a patent application would invalidate any later request. However, by placing his inventions on YouTube, it also precludes anyone else from trying to patent the invention. This is, for lack of a better word, open source invention.

Indeed, and an interesting example of how openness can help stymie intellectual monopolies.

From Open... to Open Everything

You've read the blog, now visit the conference:

On 6 November 2008, London will host an Open Everything event, a global conversation about the art, science and spirit of 'open'. The conversation will cover, well, everything. Qualifier: the 'thing' in question is built using openness, participation and self-organisation. There are people coming to talk about open technology, media, education, workplace design, philanthropy, public policy and even politics. These people want to tell you what they’re doing and find out what you're up to.

Look at it this way: for fifteen quid you get a unique opportunity to heckle me....

Open Enterprise Interview: Ross Mason, MuleSource

One of the hottest buzzwords/buzzphrases over the last few years has been Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). This is rather good news for open source, since SOA's underlying philosophy of linking together many separate elements fits free software like a glove....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Whatever Happened to La Liberté?

What on earth have the French got against the Internet? First the "three strikes and you're out", and now this:

The Soviet Internet where all software that runs on the internet needs to be certified by the State has arrived in France. The rapporteur over the law Hadopi (Internet and Creations) in the French Senate, Mr Tholliere (UMP, same party as Sarkozy), is proposing that all software running on the internet should have a stamp from the State in order to be legal.

I blame that Sarko, myself.

Bilski: Almost the Big One

Those with good memories will recall a short post I wrote back in February about a case, generally known as “Bilski”, that was going before the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC). It was important, because it asked the court to rule on the patentability of business methods – something that, like software patents, have blossomed to absurd levels in the US. The judgment came through yesterday, and it's pretty good news for those who would like to see some sanity in this area. Here's what well-regarded the patent law blog PatentlyO wrote....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Enterprise Interview: Dirk Morris, Untangle

One of the reasons the open source development methodology is so powerful is because of the modularisation that lies at its heart. This allows those with a particular expertise to work on the module they are best able to improve, and for all such modules to be slotted together thanks to the clean interfaces between them. And at a higher level, the open source world is made up of many independent projects – unlike the world of Windows, say, where the ecosystem revolves around and is dependent on Microsoft's strategic decisions to a high degree - each able to proceed at a speed and in a direction that suits them best....

On Open Enterprise blog.

A Big Day for Fans of Archimedes

At 2pm on October 29th, 2008, ten years after the Archimedes Palimpsest was purchased by the present owner, the core data generated by the project to conserve, image and study the manuscript, will be released on the web. This will be the electronic product that Reviel Netz looked forward to, several years ago. Conceptually speaking, what we wanted to create then was a digital version of the Archimedes Palimpsest – and one that revealed the unique ancient texts in the manuscript that were scraped off and overwritten with a prayer book by Johannes Myronas in 1229AD.

That's the good news. The even better news is this:

1 Rights and Conditions of Use

The Archimedes Palimpsest data is released with license for use under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Access Rights. It is requested that copies of any published articles based on the information in this data set be sent to The Curator of Manuscripts, The Walters Art Museum, 600 North Charles Street, Baltimore MD 21201.

That's pretty incredible, and simply would not have been possible a few decades ago. Particular kudos goes to the present owner of the manuscript for making it available; for Larry Lessig and others for coming up with the Creative Commons licences; and for RMS for starting everything with his crazy GNU project.

Give a Convicted Monopolist Enough Rope...

... it will hang you.

Maybe there's some kind of lesson here.

Uncle Brucie Frightens Me

Eek:

Measures such as ID cards are a temporary measure before biometric technology becomes ubiquitous; That was the warning from security guru Bruce Schneier this week who claims that surveillance technology will get more sophisticated and, more importantly, smaller and harder to detect. "We live in a very unique time in our society. The cameras are everywhere and you can still see them," said Schneier, BT's chief security technology officer. "Five years ago they weren't everywhere, five years from now you are not going to see them."

...

Biometric technologies such as face recognition, or systems based on a particular type of mobile phone owned or even clothes, may also be used for identity checks. The increase in background ID checks means that the current debate around national ID cards in the UK is only a short-term issue, according to Schneier. "I know there are debates on ID cards everywhere but in a lot of ways, they are only very temporary. They are only a temporary solution till biometrics takes over," he said.

Eventually, even airports won't actually require people to show ID, as the checks will just happen in the background while you queue for check-in or move through the terminal. "When you walk into the airport they will know who you are. You won't have to show an ID – why bother? They can process you quicker," he said.

Jackboot Jacqui Strikes Again

Our dear Home Secretary decides to ignore what we proles think again:

His warning follows an admission yesterday by Jacqui Smith that the technical work on creating a giant centralised database of all email, text, phone and web traffic will go ahead, despite the fact that ministers have decided to delay the legislation needed to set it up and instead put the proposal out to consultation.

Democracy? I've heard of it.

Tim O'Reilly's Greatest Post

I don't always agree with Tim O'Reilly's views, but it seems clear to me that this is his best, and potentially most important post even though - or maybe because - it's about politics, rather than technology:

for those concerned about climate change, the most urgent case for the election of Barack Obama was made by John McCain. Despite being an early and thoughtful advocate on the threat of global warming, he lost all credibility with his selection of Governor Palin as his running mate. We can not afford to take the risk of a Vice-President (especially for a candidate as old as McCain) who is scornful of science, denies human involvement in creating climate change, and is completely unprepared to tackle this most urgent of problems.

Let's hope America is listening to him and all the others saying much the same. If they don't, this planet is in very serious trouble indeed.

Que la Bête Meure

The National Health Service's £12.7 billion computer system is in doubt after its managers acknowledged that there will be further delays.

Connecting for Health, the NHS agency responsible for the world's biggest civil IT project, said it didn't have a clue when hospitals in England will start using the software that is required to keep track of patients' medical files.

Come on, put the beast out of its misery.

Cloud Computing Dispels the Fog of FUD

One of the anomalies of the currently-fashionable cloud computing is that people tend not to talk about the underlying operating system – presumably because they tend to think the cloud *is* the operating system. The fact is that both of the main cloud computing systems – from Amazon and Google – have been running on GNU/Linux. In other words, not only is open source running vast swathes of the Internet, but now it's holding up nearly all the clouds, too....

On Open Enterprise blog.