September 2009
37 posts
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ID Cards
I posted this on a mailing list, but I figured I’d stick it on here, too.
This is not an instruction manual for politicians.
Yeah, but there are ways of doing it. Rather than make it compulsory,
you make it voluntary, but “encourage” more and more services to treat
it as the primary form of ID.
Then some of those services start accepting it as the only form of ID.
Then you pass a...
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Cory Doctorow on Freeview HD SI encryption
Cory Doctorow has penned a decent piece for Guardian Technology (via @capn_b:boingboing), detailing the issues with the BBC’s petition to encrypt the service information tables for Freeview HD channels.
The thing which bugs me about this, and similar issues, is that the BBC’s public face to it all is always one of positivity: never ever talk about the downsides (i.e., what it will prevent people...
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Fair point
“The trust isn’t perfect,” says Seaton. “But show me a media regulator that is. Ofcom hasn’t worked, the PCC hasn’t. I am terrified when I think about the lobbying going on.”
Professor Jean Seaton, the BBC’s official historian
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Neutral traffic management
Maintaining a network is hard: too much capacity, and you’ve wasted money. Too little, and customers complain. It’s a balancing act, and a relatively small proportion of your users can tip the scales in a particular direction by making heavier-than-normal use.
So, how do you deal with it?
One way, which has become popular of late (and is the way corporate networks tend to deal with it), is to...
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Was James Murdoch right?
In a word, no.
However, I do think the BBC needs some competition. I don’t think any of the Murdoch family interests are in any position—nor, through choice, will ever be—to be that competitor.
While some might consider Sky a competitor to the BBC, it’s only in the loosest sense that it’s true: in order for somebody to choose whether to watch, say, a programme on BBC 1 or a programme on Sky...
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Piracy and copy protection 101
Many people who download illegally-shared content are “casual pirates” (that is, they do it purely because it’s convenient, or more convenient than legitimate methods).
Almost all copy-protection mechanisms are designed to make it harder for “casual pirates” to share things with other people (e.g., to seed on file-sharing networks). All incur varying degrees of collateral damage in terms of also...
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What's wrong with me?
redcloud:
I’m sure there are people in the world who would love to answer that question for me. But I’m seriously wondering.
I had some intense fatigue today. Started suddenly about 5 hours ago, and I’m still recovering from it. Getting better, but still moving pretty slow.
This was not ordinary, “I wish I could take a nap” fatigue, or “I’m depressed” fatigue, or “I’ve worked hard and my...
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jkdodd:
Quelle surprise! − “Firefox is up to date, but your current version of Flash Player can cause security and stability issues.”
I’m not even sure why it needs a version check to tell you that Flash can cause “stability issues”.
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Team GB:
On October 11th 2008 we were robbed of Shynola director, brilliant friend, and damn-good-egg, Gideon Baws.
Gid’s sudden death was due to a form of Cardiomyopathy, triggered by a viral infection. Chances are you’ve never heard of it. However in the UK alone it is estimated that 12 “apparently fit and healthy” young people under 35 die from undiagnosed heart...
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@arusbridger:
Breaking news. Guardian gagged by a company in the High Court. We can’t tell you which company, or why. Er, that’s it.
Much as when this happened with the Eye, I suspect the outcome will be: gag order lifted, Guardian then goes into overdrive giving far more column inches to the original story than it was going to originally, resulting in a complete own-goal for...
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Unfit for purpose
backslashn:
…I’m left once again with a product that doesn’t work as advertised, due entirely to the publisher’s paranoid and vain attempts to stop the illicit spread of the PDF. And the irony is, as always, that I could have downloaded the PDF illicitly, and got a more usable product at no cost.
So I’m not going to buy another PDF from Apress unless they start selling unprotected PDFs. I...
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An aside from Marquee
“The industry should rise to the occasion and solve this. How can it be that as broadcasters we’re in a position where the tuner decides how we broadcast content?”
NMA, quoting Eric Huggers.
Well, the industry has solved it, many times over. The BBC continually acceding the idiotic demands of rights-holders that content be “protected” by DRM—which only goes to inconvenience legitimate...
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Once upon a time…
…a small computer company called “Apple Computer, Inc.” decided it was going to go on an adventure.
It had, in the Dark Days, experimented a-plenty with consumer electronics. It had tried creating all kinds of things: PDAs, cameras, even a games console, with varying degrees of ultimate failure.
In embarking upon this adventure, Apple Computer, Inc. hit upon a magic formula whereupon it...
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How to sell to a pirate
backslashn:
Paul Battley, to the media industries:
There is no point in putting restrictions on the sale of the legal copy, because your free competitor has the same product.
When you region-code the product, you prevent me from buying it.
When you don’t sell the product in my territory, you prevent me from buying it.
When you put DRM on the product, you prevent me from using it on the...
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Prologue
There’s one aspect of this illicit file-sharing consultation I don’t understand.
This applies to both the revised proposals, and the original ones as set out by the Digital Britain report: more relaxed sanctions don’t alter the problems with the justification, being able to produce evidence in order to establish guilt, or with detecting it in the first place).
In order for either sets of...
The Supreme Court
BBC News:
Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, who saw the reforms through Parliament, agreed that the new court would strengthen the judiciary.
“The Supreme Court will be bolder in vindicating both the freedoms of individuals and, coupled with that, being willing to take on the executive,” he said.
I can’t tell if Lord Falconer’s making a prophecy of doom, or whether he...
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UK file-sharers to be “cut-off” — Justification
This is the thorniest and ultimately most unpleasant of all of the aspects of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills’ plans to impose sanctions upon illicit peer-to-peer file-sharers.
While plenty of ordinary people are likely to be caused great inconvenience by the planned sanctions if they come to pass, the wider ramifications are not insignificant.
The argument put to the...
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UK file-sharers to be “cut-off” — Proof
As I recounted in the last post, conclusively detecting illicit file-sharing is actually quite tricky. If you don’t need accuracy, and are just concerned with “network management”, you can—for the moment—get away with treating anything which looks like file-sharing as though it is (and in this context, you don’t need to distinguish between legal and illegal use). Perhaps rightly, even this has...
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So like, wanna watch me work on Modernizr 1.0's... →
kurafire:
WARNING: Entertainment value not guaranteed, in fact, strongly discouraged.
WARNING 2: I’m sporting a massively unshaven face and scruffy-as-hell hair.
Man, you look tired.
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UK file-sharers to be “cut-off” — Detection
So, how do you detect a file-sharer?
One way is to use what’s called “Deep Packet Inspection”. Some ISPs are quite fond of DPI, because it lets them loosely identify what kind of traffic some parts of somebody’s Internet connection appear to be. The key word there is “appear”. DPI isn’t conclusive, and has never (seriously) been claimed to be. It looks for patterns, and performs actions—such as...
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UK file-sharers to be “cut-off” — Sanctions
The thing which everybody is talking about—and actually the only thing which has really changed in the revised proposals—is what to do with persistent illicit file-sharers. Setting aside the issue of actually detecting persistent illicit file-sharers (I’ll get to that), there’s the matter of what you do to them.
The answer is: whatever Ofcom decides is appropriate.
The key difference between...
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UK file-sharers to be “cut-off” — Introduction
Well, this is a fun one.
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has not only trumped Gordon Brown’s “Digital Economy” message from a couple of months ago, but also its own consultation (PDF). A new “explanatory note” has been published (again, PDF).
It announced plans to be tough on copyright infringement, tough on the causes of copyright infringement.
Okay, not that last part.
...
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An observation
kurafire:
I think what made Tumblr the big hit of today, is—aside of some great UI work they’ve done that certainly helps—the simple fact that they largely copied LiveJournal and put it in a Web 2.0 context. Now I don’t mean to diminish the creative work and innovation that the people behind Tumblr have poured into the site, but let’s face it: LiveJournal did one thing great and it did it more...
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Researcher Cracks Mac in 10 Seconds at PWN2OWN,... →
eli:
Charlie Miller, a security researcher who hacked a Macintosh in two minutes last year at CanSecWest’s PWN2OWN contest, improved his time today by breaking into another Mac in under 10 seconds.
Kinda what happens when a security expert spends all year just coming up with a crack that they can miraculously unveil knowing full well that nobody else has found it, and by extension, it’ll remain...
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