Madness Begets Madness

This is where the madness of authoritarianism leads:

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.

Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.

A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say.

The move is targeted at monitoring the owners of Britain’s estimated 40m prepaid mobile phones. They can be purchased with cash by customers who do not wish to give their names, addresses or credit card details.

This is another reason why the super-duper snooper database is madness: to make it even vaguely workable, the government must try to plug all these loopholes. But plugging one - pay-as-you-go mobiles - only highlights the next. In this case, it's pay-as-you-go mobiles from *abroad*. The logic of the super-duper snooper database means that people will be forced to register every mobile as they come into the UK. But this will simply create a black market for used mobile phones, so then the UK government will have to make *those* illegal. And then people will turn to encrypted VoiP, so that will be made illegal, and so on, and so forth.

Why don't they just implant chips in us at birth at be done with it?

What is an Open University?

It is:

one in which

1. The research the university produces is open access.

2. The course materials are open educational resources.

3. The university embraces free software and open standards.

4. If the university holds patents, it readily licenses them for free software, essential medicines, and the public good.

5. The university network reflects the open nature of the internet.

where "university" includes all parts of the community: students, faculty, administration.

The Wheeler Declaration.

Why Stella is a Star

That's Stella Rimington, former head of MI5. Her Guardian interview is so packed with good sense that I'll have to quote it at length:

A former head of MI5 today describes the response to the September 11 2001 attacks on the US as a "huge overreaction" and says the invasion of Iraq influenced young men in Britain who turned to terrorism.

In an interview with the Guardian, Stella Rimington calls al-Qaida's attack on the US "another terrorist incident" but not qualitatively different from any others.

"That's not how it struck me. I suppose I'd lived with terrorist events for a good part of my working life and this was as far as I was concerned another one," she says.

In common with Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, who retired as MI5's director general last year, Rimington, who left 12 years ago, has already made it clear she abhorred "war on terror" rhetoric and the government's abandoned plans to hold terrorism suspects for 42 days without charge.

Today, she goes further by criticising politicians including Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, for trying to outbid each other in their opposition to terrorism and making national security a partisan issue.

It all began, she suggests, with September 11. "National security has become much more of a political issue than it ever was in my day," she says. "Parties are tending to use it as a way of trying to get at the other side. You know, 'We're more tough on terrorism than you are.' I think that's a bad move, quite frankly."

Rimington mentions Guantánamo Bay, the practice of extraordinary rendition, and the invasion of Iraq - three issues which the majority in Britain's security and intelligence establishment opposed privately at the time.

She challenges claims, notably made by Tony Blair, that the war in Iraq was not related to the radicalisation of Muslim youth in Britain.

Read it and weep.

Where China Leads...

...can Jacqui be far behind?

All visitors to internet cafés in Beijing will be required to have their photographs taken in a stringent new control on the public use of cyberspace.

...

According to the latest rules, by mid-December all internet cafés in the main 14 city districts must install cameras to record the identities of their web surfers, who must by law be 18 or over. There are more than 250 million internet users in China, approximately 10 times more than there were in 2000.

...

All photographs and scanned identity cards will be entered into a city-wide database run by the Cultural Law Enforcement Taskforce. The details will be available in any internet café.

Well, if it's got a centralised database, Labour's bound to want one to add to its growing collection....

Hoon Mines the Moron Meme

One of Tony Blair's stupider statements was the following:

"The biggest civil liberty of all is not to be killed by a terrorist."

Let's call this the Moron Meme: it assumes that people are stupid enough to confuse basic rights to life with others rights to liberty, when in fact they are two quite distinct dimensions. And having made this false comparison, Blair was then able to use false logic to demand a trade-off: if you don't want to be killed by terrorists, then you must give up some/many of your civil liberties.

What this glosses over is the real possibility that you can have *both* by bringing a mature and calm intelligence to bear on the situation, instead of respondingly disproportionately out of abject, unthinking fear ("Terrorists! Terrorists! Everybody panic!")

It was stupid when Blair said it, and it's just as stupid now Geoff Hoon is parroting it:

[Julia Goldsworthy] asked: "How much more control can they have? How far is he prepared to go to undermine civil liberties?"

Mr Hoon interjected: "To stop terrorists killing people in our society, quite a long way actually.
...

He added: "The biggest civil liberty of all is not to be killed by a terrorist."

This exchange contains another extraordinarily stupid statement:

"If they are going to use the internet to communicate with each other and we don't have the power to deal with that, then you are giving a licence to terrorists to kill people."

- As if the Internet were some magic pixie dust that, when sprinkled on terrorist activies, makes them murderously efficacious.

And yet today, without those powers, the British secret services seem to be doing a pretty good job at stopping misguided idiots attempting to spread mayhem and murder (not least thanks to the latter's enormous incompetence): seen any good terrorist attacks recently? No, nor me.

The only possible reason for bringing in more snooping powers is because it gives the Government even more control over everything - its current obsession.

What Comes After “Embrace, Extend”?

Here are two small, but significant moves by Microsoft....

On Open Enterprise blog.

What a Difference a Year Can Make

Talking of ultraportables, can it really be just a year that they've been around? Apparently:

ASUS sold over 350,000 Eee PCs in the fourth quarter of 2007 and had sold 1 million by June of 2008. And according to recent reports, the company has now shipped 4 million. That original Eee PC 701 was only the start of ASUS’ plunge into the category and, since then, they have released over 10 netbook models.

And let's remember: those first machines all ran GNU/Linux. Once again, despite Microsoft's prattle about "innovation", it was only later that the Windows world caught up. And only when Microsoft made a huge U-turn and gave Windows XP a new lease of life in the face of the fact that Windows Vista was not just a dog, it was a slow, fat, lazy dog that wouldn't even run properly on ultaportables.

Here's to the next year.

Ultra-Portables Creep Towards £100

The one thing that's certain about ultraportables is that their price will keep coming down for a while. Here's one step:

Let's get the sub-$300 netbook party started! Pereira just pinged me to share this Best Buy link which shows the white Asus Eee PC 900A available for $299. This is basically the same model as the 900, but the "A" stands for Atom. As in 1.6 GHz Intel Atom. So it still comes with Linux pre-installed on the 4GB SSD drive and includes 1GB of RAM which is more than plenty. My original Eee PC was pretty zippy when running Linux with just half of that.

Indeed; and as the price drops, so the pressure on Microsoft increases....

Microsoft "Innovates" Again - By Copying GNU/Linux

Good to see that Microsoft is trying hard to keep up with free software:

A recent Microsoft survey sent out to select users has us wondering what on Earth the mega-corp is planning to do next, and judging by the looks of things, it has everything to do with Instant On. We've seen a number of these lightning-fast boot applications, with the most recent being ASUS' Splashtop OS and the iteration loaded onto Dell's freshest Latitudes.

How to Save the Amazon Forest by Sharing

The use of technology to monitor deforestation and other problems in the Amazon rainforest is a great idea. This could make it even better:

Canada and Germany are among the only countries that have satellite images from radars that can penetrate clouds.

"If they really want to help the Amazon, they could make their satellite images available," said Lopes.

Sharing this kind of info (a) costs *nothing* to the governments concerned and (b) could give this important project a big boost.

The Forecast Looks Good for OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org has always been something a Cinderella in the free software world. Partly this is because it started out as a proprietary program, and partly because it took a while for its code to be sorted out (although the same is true for Mozilla/Firefox). Whatever the reason, it's not had as high a profile as other major open source programs. But that looks like it is about to change, thanks to the interest in the recently released version 3.0....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Why We Need More Spam

Jerry Fishenden is not somebody you'd expect me to see eye-to-eye with much:

Jerry Fishenden is Microsoft UK's lead technology advisor, strategist and spokesman. Since being appointed to the role in 2004, Jerry has been responsible for helping to guide Microsoft's vision for how technology can transform the way we learn, live, work and play. He plays a key role in an international team of technology officers who work closely with Craig Mundie, Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer. Jerry's popular blog on issues of technology and policy can be found at http://ntouk.com.

But he's put up an excellent analysis of all that's wrong with the UK Government's proposed super-snooping database that's all-the-stronger for being much more moderate in tone than mine often are:

I remain unconvinced that we should be using technology to progressively build a panopticon here in the UK. Technology has a huge upside that we should be using positively, not allowing its more toxic potential to erode our long cherished liberties.

But what really caught my attention was the following point about weaknesses in the plan:

scale and volume: at Microsoft, last time I looked we were having to deal with some 3 billion spam emails a day through our Hotmail/Windows Live Mail service. Let alone the volume of legitimate emails. The Independent states that about one trillion emails and more than 60 billion text messages will be sent in Britain this year, and that most homes and offices now have a computer, with an estimated 20 million broadband connections. That's a serious volume of data and a serious data centre or data centres we're potentially talking about - let about the analytics then required to make sense of that data.

Yes, of course: what we need to do is *increase* the volume of spam, say, a thousand-fold - easy enough to do if you sign up for a few obviously dodgy Web sites, and reply to a few spam messages with your address. That would be inconvenient for us, but not a problem given the efficiency of spam filters these days (Gmail catches about 99.5% of the spam that I receive). But multiplying the quantity of information that the UK Government's super-snooping database would need to hold by a factor of one thousand would really cause the rivets to pop. And once databases scale up to cope with that, we just turn up the spam volume a little more.

Perhaps the same approach could be applied to Web browsing: you could write an add-in for Firefox that pulls in thousands of random pages from the Internet every day (text only). This, again, would add enormously to the storage requirements of any database, and make finding stuff much harder.

If the UK Government wants to live by technology abuse, then let it die by technology abuse. Alternatively, it might try actually listening to what people like Fishenden and countless other IT experts say about how unworkable this scheme is, and work *with* us rather *against* us on this matter....

The Elephant in the Library

As I read about the incredible riches of content stored on the Internet, one thing worries me increasingly: who's doing the off-site backups? Too many of the current stores seem to have single points of failure, but nobody's really talking about this serious issue - call it the elephant in the library.

So it's good to hear of new projects that aim to back up content independently of others. Things like HathiTrust:

HathiTrust is a bold idea with big plans.

As a digital repository for the nation’s great research libraries, HathiTrust (pronounced hah-tee) brings together the immense collections of partner institutions.

HathiTrust was conceived as a collaboration of the thirteen universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the University of California system to establish a repository for these universities to archive and share their digitized collections. Partnership is open to all who share this grand vision.

HathiTrust is a solution.

To prospective partners, HathiTrust offers leadership and reliability.

It provides a no-worry, pain-free solution to archiving vast amounts of digital content. You can rely on the expertise of other librarians and information technologists who understand your needs and who will address the issues of servers, storage, migration, and long-term preservation.

Not all of this content will be freely available to all, although that will be the main emphasis - here's the current stats:

2,123,209 volumes
743,123,150 pages
79 terabytes
25 miles
1,725 tons
335,300 volumes (~16% of total)
in the public domain

Still, it's good to have backups for proprietary content too: if in the coming apocalypse it's lost because the primary stores go down permanently, there's no hope of ever opening it up.

And if you were wondering:

What does the name HathiTrust mean?

Hathi (pronounced hah-tee) is the Hindi word for elephant, an animal highly regarded for its memory, wisdom, and strength. Trust is a core value of research libraries and one of their greatest assets. In combination, the words convey the key benefits researchers can expect from a first-of-its-kind shared digital repository.

LSB 4 For Whom?

Remember the Linux Standard Base (LSB)?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Jacqui Wants "Openness"

Jacqui Smith has set out plans to give the police and security services more powers to gather phone and e-mail data.

But wait:

"I want this to be combined with a well-informed debate characterised by openness, rather than mere opinion, by reason and reasonableness," she told the IPPR.

Well, that's alright, then. Except:

"What we will be proposing will be options which follow the key principles which govern all our work in this area - the principles of proportionality and necessity."

What, like ID cards, you mean?

Note, too, that when she says this:

"There are no plans for an enormous database which will contain the content of your emails, the texts that you send or the chats you have on the phone or online."

There is also this:

Plans to collect more data on people's phone, e-mail and web-browsing habits are expected to be included in the Communications Data Bill, due to be introduced in the Queen's Speech in November.

Which, assuming it's correct, means that "web-browsing habits" - IP addresses et al. - *would* be stored, which are potentially even more incriminating that email, texts or chats....

Open Source Business Does Not Scale

At first sight, the findings of The 451 Group’s latest CAOS report, “Open Source is Not a Business Model“ might seem to be terrible news for open source....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Birth of a Meme: the O(o)pen Web

One of the interesting slogans that the Mozilla Foundation has been pushing a lot recently is the idea of the “open Web”. That's clearly distinct from an *open source* Web, but the latter is more or less predicated on the former, since a Web that isn't open is hardly going to be very welcoming to open code....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Celebrating Open Access (Day)

Open Access is a movement that works for the free online availability of research materials. As one of the best short introductions to the subject explains....

On Open Enterprise blog.

More Data Losses? Yes, Please....

I’ve been asked to say a few more words about various recent data losses.

These losses are reported to me in various ways: one day a memo from the IT manager, the next a report in the news media, or as happened last week by EDS over dinner at Le Gavroche. In most cases the data is not especially sensitive, being limited to next of kin details, passport and National Insurance numbers, drivers’ licence and bank details, National Health Service numbers, medical records and child protection details.

...


In each case we have followed established procedure and established enquiries. Each one is an isolated incident. Taken together the picture is that almost all of these leaked details had been leaked already, several times in some cases. Therefore no single leak can be regarded as particularly significant. We have established various call centres for people who wish to take part in consultation and feedback processes.

This kind of wit almost makes me look forward to the next data loss....

Maybe Erik *Will* Deliver...

I have been gently reminding Erik Huggers about his confidence that there would be a GNU/Linux version of iPlayer that included the time-limited stuff by the end of the year. Now here's the first sign that he might deliver:

Today, we are announcing that in partnership with Adobe we are building a platform-neutral download client.

Using Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), we intend to make BBC iPlayer download functionality available on Mac, Linux and Windows for the first time later this year. Whatever platform you use, you'll now be able to download TV programmes from the BBC to watch later - on the train, in the garden, or wherever you like.

Given our obligations to rights-holders and the BBC Trust, these programmes are protected with DRM, but in a way that shouldn't affect your enjoyment of our programmes, whatever platform you've chosen.

I must confess the idea of using the cross-platform AIR crossed my mind too. Given the licensing constraints that the BBC operates under, this is probably the best we can hope for in the circumstances.

Now, if the BBC could please start working on getting rid of DRM when it licenses content in the future....

Symbian's Patently Terrible “Triumph”

Although I've written elsewhere about the recent court case of Symbian v Comptroller General of Patents, noting that it was bad news, I hadn't realised quite how bad the news was until I went through the complete judgment. It's plain that the judges in question, who to their credit tried their level best to understand this mysterious stuff called software, failed to grasp the central issue of what software is. As a result, they have passed down a judgment that is so seriously wrong it will cause a huge amount of damage in the future unless it is revoked by a higher court....

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Counterproductive Counter-Terrorism Bill

Excellent in-depth analysis of all that is wrong with this deeply-flawed bill here.

Sawing Off the Branch on which We Sit

I am a great believer in trees and the commons they form; it seems to me that going beyond preserving them to extend their coverage across the world could help deal with many of the most pressing problems facing mankind: climate change, desertification, water, etc.

It has always struck me as barmy that the contribution that trees make to the planet has not been better quantified; now it has:

The global economy is losing more money from the disappearance of forests than through the current banking crisis, according to an EU-commissioned study.

It puts the annual cost of forest loss at between $2 trillion and $5 trillion.

The figure comes from adding the value of the various services that forests perform, such as providing clean water and absorbing carbon dioxide.

The study, headed by a Deutsche Bank economist, parallels the Stern Review into the economics of climate change.

Think about that, and then think of the continuing destruction of forests around the world - in the Amazon, in Africa, in Indonesia, in Russia. This really is the literal equivalent of sawing off the branch on which the whole of humanity sits....

Ubuntu's Balancing Act

One thing that has always struck me in the free software world is the power of example. Once it emerged that Google ran on GNU/Linux, there could be no more argument about the latter's suitability for the enterprise. Similarly, MySQL's adoption by just about every Web 2.0 company meant that it, too, could no longer be dismissed as underpowered.

I think that the following could mark a similar milestone for the business use of Ubuntu....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Visualising the End of an Era

Good analysis - and don't miss that embedded video:

Twenty world Internet citizens met in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in October of 2008 for a week of reflections on life, love, and the Internet.

The perfect if unintentional nailing of a bunch of narcissistic wallies and their bankrupt "values"....