December 2011
26 posts
5 tags
The iMessage/stolen phone thing
What Apple needs to do is (conceptually) really bloody simple: when a remote wipe occurs, or a device is activated without having iMessage/FaceTime credentials to hand (i.e., because it’s a factory reset rather than a restore-from-backup), remove the device’s UDID from iMessage’s and FaceTime’s respective databases.
And, er, that’s about it.
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Freedom Online: Joint Action for Free Expression... →
Endorsed by Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Estonia, Ghana, Ireland, Kenya, the Republic of Maldives, Mexico, Mongolia, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Sweden.
Irony.
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Wait, what? →
#Hitchens: why did the world’s most famous atheist, faced with horrors of cancer, not opt for euthanasia?
— @cristinaod1 (Cristina Odone)
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An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the U.S.... →
If enacted, either of these bills will create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure. Regardless of recent amendments to SOPA, both bills will risk fragmenting the Internet’s global domain name system (DNS) and have other capricious...
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A short Linked Data URI design Q&A
URI design for Linked Data is pretty straightforward, but there are a few common practices out there in the real world which I find jarring as somebody who is mainly a data consumer. This is my attempt to briefly talk about why you shouldn’t do those things. I’ll probably update this post over time.
Why should I avoid routinely redirecting [usually a 303] from a published thing URI to a specific...
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Kultivate
I’m presenting today at the Kultivate Linked Data workshop in London.
Should anybody be interested, my slides, notes and example data can all be found here.
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Can I take photos at the school play? →
The ever-excellent Paul Clarke.
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Best. Facebook. Status. Ever. →
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Domesday Reloaded Project opens at Bletchley Park →
The BBC’s Domesday Project has been made into an interactive ‘touchtable’ now on display at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park.
Visitors can zoom in on any part of the UK and see multimedia submitted in both the eighties and in 2011.
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Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 Diary →
Fascinating.
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Testimony to the Leveson Inquiry by Alexander John... →
Between 1999 and 2005 I was the Senior Investigating Officer with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) based in Wilmslow.
Definitely worth reading.
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The Artist Gateway - linking our data to the best... →
Universal Music meets Linked Data. This is very exciting.
(It’ll come as no surprise that there are one or two BBC Audio & Music Interactive alumni involved in this project).
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Dr Petra: A tragic case of medical misconduct →
A journalist colleague then tried to pitch a story critiquing the g-shot , but they were unsuccessful. Over the past three years I sent my blog post questioning the g-shot to any media outlet I spotted giving it publicity. In most cases I heard nothing back. Occasionally a journalist would politely thank me and tell me they’d consider my opinions if they wrote similar pieces in the future.
In...
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Slightly Right of Centre: Notes and thoughts from... →
I am yet to hear a convincing argument as to why lobbyists pushing corporate agendas at the highest level of government should not themselves be subject to some scrutiny. Why are so many corporations so afraid to speak openly and on the record?
Good question.
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Jeremy Hunt supports BBC Orwell statue →
For some time there’s been a campaign to erect a statue of George Orwell outside the BBC’s new Broadcasting House building. Orwell worked at the old BBC Broadcasting House next door during the war – an experience which inspired aspects of his novel 1984, not least the notorious Room 101 where he worked.
I am wholeheartedly in favour of this plan.
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DHS abruptly abandons copyright seizure of hip-hop... →
This case was widely reported as being pretty bizarre when the domain was first seized. It’s no less bizarre now.
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Cameron versus the EU
I don’t find David Cameron particularly trustworthy at the best of times, and he’s shown little credible evidence that he really understands what “Britain’s interests” actually are as far as most people are concerned.
So without being in a position to determine the detail of what’s been rejected, and given that this now appears to be David Cameron’s cabinet in firm disagreement with all of the...
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Translation from PR puff piece into English
UltraViolet service offering digital locker of films and TV planned for UK:
A consortium including Warner Bros, Sony Pictures and Fox are backing the UK launch of a new service that aims to revolutionise home entertainment, and cut piracy, by offering consumers a digital locker of films and TV shows they can watch on any device.
“We’ve finally managed to cut through the tangled rights...
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Mandate
I’ve grown weary of being insulted by members of different societal class who believe they can do and say whatever they like without consequence. While there are some good, honest, hard-working members of this class striving to do the right thing, many seem to be little more than self-serving scroungers attempting to get away with doing as little as possible at the taxpayer’s expense,...
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WSJ: Online Consumers Happy to Be Tracked →
The headline doesn’t quite tally with the content, however:
Consumers are happy to share their personal data with organizations they trust and if they get something in return, but are increasingly concerned about privacy and losing control of that data, according to a global survey of consumer trends.
(My emphasis).
My question: how can people make an informed decision about the trade-offs?
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Google does charts in search results →
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BBC Live: London roadside emergency →
A “live-blog” worth reading.
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Mike Garry: i’ve just stopped a guy from jumping... →
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Carrier IQ
A few days after the Carrier IQ controversy broke with the aid of Trevor Eckhart, there’s been… more controversy and a little more information.
If you’re an iOS device user, things are pretty straightforward. When you buy an iPhone or iPad, what you get is down to Apple, not the carriers. Certainly, Apple lets carriers (via a kind of provisioning profile) dictate certain settings on an iPhone,...
Typical BBC bias
Handily, the Graun have published a transcript of the portion of the One Show which has caused controversy.
This is useful, because without it I would have had to have gone to the trouble of transcribing it myself.
Have you read it? Are you still outraged? How?
You know what Clarkson was doing? He was taking the piss out of the BBC’s famous policy of achieving “balance” by having two polar...
