09.20.09
Posted in politics, technology, web at 2:39 pm by Rob Fahey
Creative Commons licensed image from nrkbeta on flickr
In recent weeks, there has been some fairly solid grassroots inertia gathering behind a campaign against new legislation being proposed by Lord Mandelson, the business secretary. The gist of the legislation is straightforward – it proposes that individuals accused of illegal downloading should, after a certain number of accusations, be disconnected from the Internet.
There are several grounds on which this proposal is mad, bad and downright dangerous. First and foremost, while the details have not been fully nailed down yet, the implication of what has been revealed so far is that users will not be disconnected after being tried for a criminal offence which is proven beyond reasonable doubt – rather, you’ll just need to be accused a certain number of times before it’s decided that you’re definitely guilty and your connection is severed.
This is a brand new step in the abuse of the British legal system by copyright holders. Some of you may recall a series of cases in the past few years where copyright holders employed legal firms with low moral boundaries to send out letters to large numbers of people whom they accused of downloading movies, videogames and so on. (I reported on one of those mass-mailings, which was initiated by game publishers including Atari and Codemasters, for The Times – the story made the front page.)
Those letters were simple legal blackmail. They told the recipients that they had to pay a few hundred pounds, and warned that if they tried to contest this, the legal costs would be much more expensive – so just pay up, and we’ll leave you alone. The reason for this blackmail approach is straightforward – the “evidence” which they had of copyright infringement would probably never have stood up in court. It certainly wouldn’t have stood up in a criminal court, where you have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that your accusation is true – and on a good day, it would have fallen flat in a civil court too. (In Britain, civil courts have a less stringent standard of “proof” – you only have to prove that “on the balance of probabilities” something is true, rather than “beyond reasonable doubt”.)
The copyright holders know this. They know that it’s technologically nigh-on impossible to pin an act of downloading to an individual. Simply standing up and saying “I’ve got a Wi-Fi network” means that anyone within 100 yards of your house could have been responsible – even someone who sat on a bench in the park outside with a laptop – and that’s even before the question of things like spoofed IPs and the likes are considered. Unless you basically catch the person red-handed – raiding their home to find the infringing file sat on their hard drive and their bittorrent client merrily seeding it to the world – you basically can’t prove an act of downloading.
The solution the media industries have found is as straightforward as it is morally bankrupt – if you can’t work with the legal system, bypass it. Instead of having to fight things in the courts, and work with awkward concepts like “evidence” and “proof” and “justice”, they have lobbied the government to give them a system whereby they alone will be allowed to act as judge, jury and executioner. No courts, no police – just a few accusations from the likes of Sony, Disney or Activision and job done – off with his modem!
It’s not hard, of course, to see how a system where punishment is based on accusation rather than proof could be open to abuse. Indeed, it’s not so much a system open to abuse, as an abusive system.
Then there’s the question of the punishment itself – the cutting off of Internet access. There’s a generational issue at play here, I fear. Many people in their fifties, sixties or older – Lord Mandelson is 55, by the way – probably don’t see disconnection as much more than a slap on the wrist. These are people who probably don’t often check their own email or read webpages, who don’t manage their bank accounts or mobile phones or tax affairs online, for whom news stories about online shopping or Wikipedia or iPods seem impossibly exotic and futuristic. The Internet is a luxury, its removal no different to taking away a games console or a child’s toy.
That’s not what the Internet is to my generation – by which I mean anyone under 40, realistically speaking. I’m in the first generation to have grown up with the Internet as a constant presence (I’m a little ahead of the vanguard, since an early obsession with computers meant I was using Fidonet at a tender age), but people ten years older than me have used it for all of their working lives.
To many of us, the Internet is a service almost as vital as water, gas or electricity. It’s not only our primary social tool, it’s our first point of contact with the corporate and government services on which we rely. It’s essential for our work lives, for our lives as citizens – for our finances, our taxes, our democratic rights. It’s our touchstone for research, information and news.
This isn’t restricted to a handful of Internet obsessives. Countless people in the United Kingdom – whole swathes of the population – rely on the Internet for some aspect of their employment, even those whose job doesn’t involve computers in any way. They interact with their banks, their electricity, gas and water companies, their local councils, the Inland Revenue and the wider Government almost exclusively online. Their votes in elections are informed by online information, making it a crucial tool for democracy – and their social interactions with friends and acquaintances are often also carried out online.
Cutting that off is the removal of an essential service – the crippling of an individual’s ability to function as a normal member of modern society. This isn’t taking a toy from a naughty child (or at least, a child accused of being naughty by a biased third-party) – it’s a step back to the medieval concept of taking someone’s hand for being accused of stealing. It’ll cripple them, but at least they won’t do it again, eh?
Lord Mandelson doesn’t understand that, and nor do those who have worked with him on this proposal. (The media companies who urged him into this decision do know this, but why let the basic injustice of the punishment get in the way of protecting profits from their failing, outdated business models?) The proposed punishment in no way fits the crime – bear in mind that if you shoplifted a DVD from HMV, you’d get little more than a caution and a telling-off, despite the actual material losses involved in that crime. Download the same film from the Internet, an act which causes no direct material loss to anyone involved, and you could be cut off from the social, government, civic and financial services provided by the Internet. It’s an insane imbalance.
If you’re reading this, the chances are that you understand. You’re an Internet user. You know how vital it is – how damaging it would be to everything from your career to your social life if it was to be turned off on you. And unfortunately, you’re one of the few people who will ever know the extent of these laws, because the mainstream press – largely owned by the same companies which own the media groups lobbying for these laws – is mostly keeping quiet on this.
As such, you have a responsibility to act. That could be as much as writing to your local MP (they get remarkably little mail – and only a very tiny amount of that is lucid, well-argued and intelligent, so every decent letter gets considered fairly seriously, meaning that you can make a difference), or as little as getting involved in the campaign being waged by the fantastic Open Rights Group, or signing the petition organised by 38 Degrees, which is working with the ORG on the campaign.
Whether Labour is on its way out the door or not, this legislation needs to be killed dead in the water – because it’s much harder to repeal old laws than it is to bring in new ones. Be it just another in the litany of bad bills which Labour have run through parliament, or the sting in the tail from a dying government, this would be a basic attack on liberty, freedom of expression and the rights of consumers and citizens. We can’t let it happen.
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11.12.07
Posted in technology, work at 2:17 pm by Rob Fahey
Despite being a Gentleman of Leisure these days, I still have a basic built-in loathing of Monday mornings. Self-employment is simultaneously great because it allows you to wake up when you like, and awful because it means that every day is, in effect, a working day; so Mondays should, in theory, be meaningless, and mornings even more so.
However, if something is going to go wrong for the week, it’ll probably go wrong on a Monday morning. So it doesn’t really bode terribly well that thus far, the bulk of my Monday has been spent swearing at my PC, followed by taking Affirmative Action and delving into its bowels to try and work out what ridiculous thing has gone wrong with the heap of ill-conceived junk that is the IBM-derived Personal Computer this time.
I’ve just spent an hour at my desk laboriously taking apart my graphics card, meticulously cleaning the heatsink and fan, carefully dabbing off the bizarre gunk that passes for thermal paste in whatever South-East Asian sweatshop is throwing together curiously brand-named ATI chipset boards these days, painstakingly scraping on a thin film of Arctic Silver paste, and then excruciatingly carefully screwing the whole godforsaken assembly back together.
I’m almost afraid to try loading Tabula Rasa again, frankly, because if it doesn’t work I’m going to heave the whole fucking box out the fucking window.
Who ever said PC gaming wasn’t fun, eh readers?
Oh wait, that was me. About ten times a week. Grr.
Technorati Tags: PC, rant, videogames
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06.15.07
Posted in technology at 12:36 pm by Rob Fahey
The short and sweet form of this article; ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, a soi disant tech blogger, reckons that Apple is copying Vista in its new operating system. Okay, blink a few times, shake your head slightly as if attempting to dislodge a small grain of idiocy lodged in your brain, and read on.
I posted earlier this week about how disappointing Steve Jobs’ keynote at WWDC 2007 was, and I wasn’t exactly alone in this. Tons of tech blogs and news sites criticised the “Stevenote” for its lack of content, bad pacing and general failure to match up to public expectation. It was, unquestionably, something of a miscalculation.
As with any event of this nature, though, the really interesting reactions come from the fringes – the slightly loony vested interests who sit on the edge of the debate. What’s interesting this week is that one of the most clearly biased, unresearched and ignorant pieces I’ve read in the wake of the keynote came not from a tin-foil hat wearing nutter on the outskirts of the tech community, but from a by-lined blogger employed by one of the larger tech sites, ZDnet.
Mary Jo Foley describes her column as “An unblinking eye on Microsoft”, and as you’d expect from an intrepid investigative reporter into the shadowy world of technology, she was clutching her media pass and ready to get to the heart of the truth about the Apple keynote. In the process, she has uncovered a massive conspiracy; Apple’s operating system is copying Microsoft!
You can have a gander at Foley’s take on the whole matter on her ZDnet blog.
Now, the key problem here isn’t so much the dismissal of a whole lot of interesting OS ideas because they’re from the wrong company (she basically says out of hand that Time Machine and Core Animation aren’t important, apparently because she doesn’t understand them). The real problem is that Mary Jo Foley has taken it upon herself to deliver these judgements without doing the slightest bit of research. She has splurged her ideas into a word processor, hasn’t even bothered googling for a few facts and some background info to back up her conclusions, and published it on a blog on a prominent tech site.
This leads to some brilliant howlers, like her apparent belief that Dashboard, Spotlight and so on were actually entirely new features, rolled out in a hurry to counter Vista’s functionality. Five minutes on Wikipedia would have disproved this – and ten minutes spent talking to any one of the 5000 developers who surrounded Ms Foley at the Moscone West Convention Centre would have set her straight on several of her other broken, un-researched assumptions, like her confusion over 64-bit functionality.
I find two things interesting about this whole mess, neither of which reflects particularly well on the editorial hands on the tiller at ZDnet.
Firstly, as someone who edited a business and technology website for nearly five years, I’m astonished that any editor allowed this article onto their publication without demanding that Foley go back and research some of her claims. I’m aware that this is technically a blog, and that ZDnet may have decided that writers’ blogs should be free of editorial oversight; if so, this is a terrible mistake. You cannot absolve yourself of editorial responsibility for blogs, so long as they continue to carry your banner and logo. Any decent editor would have thrown this article over to another contributor with some background in the field for a quick fact-check. That’s how the quality control process works, and ZDnet clearly chose to bypass it.
Secondly, Mary Jo Foley writes a column for ZDnet under the title “An unblinking eye on Microsoft” – suggesting, to me at least, some kind of watchdog role. A perusal of her earlier entries reveals that a caveat is required; Ms Foley’s unblinking eye is often utterly adoring.
Granted, she has a relatively healthy disrespect for some of Microsoft’s more odious marketing antics – the commissioning of biased studies, for example – but her coverage of the company rarely rises above simple, credulous posts about product announcements. Her coverage of other companies, however, is routinely negative. Apple takes something of a hammering; Google, too, attracts ire. In a later entry updating her stance on Leopard (but mostly just bashing the people who mailed her letting her know how retarded her original post was), Foley openly admits to being too set in her Microsoft ways to give any other product a fair chance. She didn’t need any such admission; anyone with the time to read some of her blog efforts already knows.
I always find this kind of individual, and their seeming success, quite surprising. It leads me to wonder if there are any political correspondents out there who are paid to cover a specific party, despite openly admitting to having a preference for that party’s politics. I’ve been accused of bias in the past myself, but at the very least, I can happily say that the allegations swung my way have been even; I’ve had as many accusations of being a Sony fanboy as I’ve had of being a Microsoft fanboy or a Nintendo fanboy, which I think means I’m probably hitting things nicely down the middle of the lane. I find it pretty hard to sympathise with journalists like Foley who take great pride in their bias, and then express annoyance when they’re called up on it.
Technorati Tags: Apple, Mary Jo Foley, journalism, Steve Jobs
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06.11.07
Posted in technology at 11:18 pm by Rob Fahey
In my last post, I suggested that perhaps Steve Jobs’ showing at D: All Things Digital was rubbish because Apple was keeping its powder dry for its own WWDC event.In the wake of today’s keynote at WWDC, I wish to apologise for any confusion caused by my own confusion. For “keeping its powder dry”, I should have said, “wondering why it has no damn powder in the powder-box, and where it can get some more.”
To recap; where we had hoped for hardware and cool new software, what we got from Jobs was:
- A demonstration of OSX Leopard, which still looks like a wonderful upgrade, but hasn’t really changed much since he originally demoed it at WWDC last year.
- The announcement that Safari 3 will be available on Windows. This is good news for web developers, who can now test in all browsers on one system, and utterly meaningless to everyone else in the world.
- The announcement that if you want to develop apps for the iPhone, you’ll have to build them as websites. In itself, this might not be a bad thing if the promise of fully implemented iPhone interface elements for AJAX (the web scripting technology that makes websites properly interactive) comes through – but it does mean that unless you have a flatrate data tariff for your phone, the iPhone could well be prohibitively expensive.
For the consumer, in other words, there was sweet fuck all in this announcement – it was utterly meaningless to anyone who isn’t an Apple developer. Now, from Apple’s perspective, perhaps that feels fair enough; WWDC is, after all, a developer conference.
However, this to my mind represents a complete misunderstanding of both consumers and the media – which is surprising, coming from the typically media-savvy Apple.The issue, to my mind, is that WWDC is seen as Apple’s quarterly product update – perhaps not by the company itself, but certainly by the rest of the world.
It’s that latter perception which matters. Tens of thousands of people view the news from the keynote in real-time, and they expect there to be exciting product news in there to justify their attention. When WWDC fails to deliver this, it reflects incredibly badly on Apple – and with the iPhone launch coming up in a few weeks’ time, Apple cannot afford to seed bad feeling in this manner.
Interestingly, I had… Well, not an argument, but certainly a difference of opinion, with Sony’s Phil Harrison on a similar matter a few months ago. Some of you may recall Ken Kutaragi’s keynote at the Tokyo Games Show last September, only a few weeks before the launch of PlayStation 3. Rather than showing off new games, or revealing the online service, or generally exciting the world about his new console, Kutaragi chose to deliver an interesting, but disjointed and somewhat irrelevant, lecture about his vision of how technology will look in ten years time, how important Web 2.0 is, and how data services will evolve. It was the wrong thing to do.
The hall was packed with the cameras of the world’s media – from specialist press like ourselves, through to the big news agencies from all over the planet. They wanted to be wowed by the PlayStation 3, and no matter how visionary Kutaragi’s speech may have been, they walked away from the keynote feeling let down and underwhelmed. Across the globe, game fans tuned in to live broadcasts in text, audio and video, and felt similarly let down by Ken’s speech.
Now, you could argue that this is a case of gamers failing to understand the event in question, or of the media hyping it up to be something it was never intended to be – and that’s certainly what Harrison believes. He told me that Kutaragi had been invited to give a talk at TGS about the future of the industry, not about Sony or its specific plans, and that it was felt that it would have been rude to TGS’ organisers to break with that arrangement.
I disagree – or rather, I feel that such rudeness is merely practical, and necessary. Sony, like Apple, is in business to make money by selling products to consumers. When your consumers are available to you, when the media has hyped them up and they are hoping for something good, you give them something good. Previous Steve Jobs keynotes have delivered fantastic new products – the Intel macs, the new iMac designs, the Mac Mini, the iPhone, the AppleTV. Previous Ken Kutaragi keynotes had included new games, new hardware, new technology. When you set a standard for yourself, and it’s obvious to any fool that the world is expecting you to continue hitting that standard, then you must be prepared to pull out the stops to make that happen – even if that means reorganising a product schedule a little to ensure that you have worthwhile products to show, when people want to see them.
In that respect, WWDC is egg on Apple’s face. The company needs to look carefully at how it approaches WWDC in future; if there’s no big reveal, then perhaps it’s best not to put Steve on stage. At least that way, the world won’t be waiting for a One More Thing that can’t deliver.
Technorati Tags: Apple, PlayStation 3, iPhone, Sony, Steve Jobs
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06.10.07
Posted in technology, toys at 9:56 pm by Rob Fahey
The D: All Things Digital conference, which ran in the United States last week, was an interesting look at what happens when you run a highly promoted event where the major players want to turn up and be seen without actually committing to announcing anything useful. Three big companies were meant to take the stage with something to show off; by the end of the week, you’d forgive anyone with any remaining critical faculties for wondering why they bothered at all.
Perhaps the worst off after this whole mess is poor, beleaguered Palm – a company which has watched, apparently powerless, as the PDA market it practically invented is dominated by rivals with better devices, better technology, better marketing and better vision. I’ve always had a soft spot for Palm, if only because I thought the interfaces and technology used in the original PalmOS devices were very elegant and clever. I thought it was a real shame when it became apparent that the company’s strategy had changed over from building small, lightweight, clever operating systems to trying to snap at the heels of feature-rich, overpowered and overweight systems like Microsoft’s various Windows implementations on smartphones.
I think my soft spot for Palm has turned into outright pity in the wake of this week’s reveal of the Foleo “mobile companion”. The company has spent a fortnight hyping up the entirely new class of mobile device it planned to reveal at D; when the Foleo appeared on stage at the conference, that suddenly all seemed like a cruel joke. Except Palm’s execs weren’t laughing. They looked deadly serious, in the way that a completely batshit insane old woman on the street who thrusts a dog turd wrapped in a dirty blanket at you and insists that it’s her baby might look serious.
Out of options and out of creativity, Palm has seemingly chosen the road less travelled; madness. The Foleo is, in essence, a particularly ugly, underpowered and overpriced laptop; its small screen and form factor are offset by chunky plastic styling and large surrounds. Trying to sell this device as a magical new class of mobile technology is incredibly misguided – and what’s worse, it speaks of a company which has presumably run out of ideas for improving its smartphone device, the Treo. The iPhone may turn out to be far from perfect, but at least it’s innovating and pushing other manufacturers to do likewise. Trying to persuade people to carry around a chunky slab of laptop to extend your smartphone’s functionality is a step in the opposite direction. It feels like a white flag.
Second place in this uninspiring list has to go to Microsoft – although, on form as ever, the company seems to have garnered plenty of positive headlines for “Surface”, the company’s ludicrous and pointless rip-off of a million tech demos of yore. Such is the joy of the modern tech news media; the perfect meeting of bloggers who don’t do even the most basic research on their stories in their rush to be the first to regurgitate the latest press release, and PR people who can dangle freebies in front of their credulous, eager faces in return for the disposal of integrity they never had in the first place.
Here’s some real, honest to got analysis for you; Microsoft Surface is shit. It’s not just shit, it’s old and shit.
I’ve seen demos of interactive tabletops for almost a decade now, and the concept itself is much older. Every year or so, regular as clockwork, the research labs at somewhere like MIT, or Cambridge, or Philips or Fujitsu, will churn out an interactive tabletop, controlled by gestures, or by RFID-tagged objects that you move around on the table, or by a pen, or whatever. Every year or so, we look at it, and go “right, that’s nice” – and nobody gets terribly excited, because while we can see the potential uses for such a system, they’re not very exciting uses and the whole thing is much too expensive anyway.
This is exactly the same problem Microsoft Surface faces; the uses aren’t very exciting, and it’s too expensive. Microsoft’s implementation faces a further problem; it’s rubbish. While other researchers have managed to put together systems that are entirely integrated into a table, mostly by using cameras under the glass to read hand positions, Microsoft’s Surface requires that you have IR cameras positioned in the room above the surface (yeah, they glossed over that bit in the demo a bit). While some systems use RFID or bluetooth, Surface requires that your various devices have stickers on the bottom of them with unique ID tags that the camera can identify. For a tech demo, this is fine; for the real world, I’m not exactly convinced by the usability (or by the $10,000 price tag).
To the large, expensive and poorly designed Surface, then, add Bill Gates’ astonishing comments on user interfaces for videogames. He heavily implied that MS is working on gesture based input for Xbox 360, but said that it won’t be like the Wii – going on to dismiss the Wiimote because you can’t, err, “pick up your tennis racket and swing it.” This, apparently, is a “natural thing” to want to do.
Strike one; Gates (not, it should be added, a man with a great track record in terms of predicting consumer technology trends) believes that we want to play videogames by picking up real-life devices and flinging them around our living rooms. Hmm.
Strike two; Gates then goes on to say that this revolutionary, amazing new technology will be based on… Video recognition. Unfortunately, his interviewer didn’t have the cop on to check that Bill has actually heard of Eye Toy, or seen any of the next-gen stuff Sony is doing with that technology.
It’s good that Microsoft is thinking outside the box on interface stuff, at long last, but perhaps they should try getting their thinking out of other people’s boxes while they’re at it.
Final strike for the week – albeit a somewhat weaker one – goes to Apple, who turned up at All Things Digital with really very little to bring to the table. Apple has an excuse, admittedly, since WWDC is just around the corner and Steve Jobs will want to keep his powder dry for an event on the company’s home turf. All the same, his announcement at All Things Digital was disappointing – an Apple TV box with a bigger hard disc, and the ability to play YouTube videos.
Now, the former is fine, but the latter? YouTube videos played full-screen on a HDTV? Even the normally far from incisive Walt Mossberg, interviewing Jobs on stage, couldn’t help but comment that this looked, well, a bit crap. As plenty of other have observed, what AppleTV needs isn’t YouTube support – it’s decent support for a wider range of codecs and containers. Admittedly, you can now hack that onto the box with relative ease; but supporting a full set of codecs out of the box would change it from a curiosity into a killer product. On that front, Jobs had nothing to say.
Oh well. WWDC tomorrow. I don’t know whether to hope for the rumours of a 12″ display, ultra thin and light MacBook to be true or not; if they’re true, I’m going to be significantly poorer in the coming weeks, I fear. The joy of geekery is matched only by the pain in my wallet.
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