Category Archives: Observer

Amazon and the memory hole

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This morning’s Observer column.

Up to now, the debate about eBooks has been dominated by technical issues: ergonomics, portability, storage capacity, the readability of display screens, the quality of the user interface and so on. These are important matters, but ignore the biggest issue of all, namely the ways in which the technology enables content owners to assert a level of control over the reader that would be deemed unconscionable – and unacceptable – in the world of print.

Our societies have spent 400 years developing legal traditions which strike a reasonable balance between the needs of authors and publishers on the one hand and those of users on the other.

Compromises like the doctrine of ‘fair use’ are examples of that balancing act. One of the reasons the publishing industry is salivating over the potential of electronic texts is that they could radically tilt the balance in favour of content-owners in a single decade. We’re sleepwalking into a nightmare of perfect remote control. If nothing else, the tale of Amazon, Orwell and the memory hole ought to serve as a wake-up call.

Update: Bobbie Johnson had a good piece about this in the Technology section of Thursday’s Guardian and the following day reported the reaction of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s boss, to the debacle. Bezos wrote:

“This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle… Our ‘solution’ to the problem was stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted and we deserve the criticism we’ve received.”

A Tale of Two Stores

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This morning’s Observer column.

The prospect of Microsoft and Apple stores side by side is rich in comic possibilities. For one thing, what will the Microsoft store sell? It's a software company: its hardware range consists of the Xbox games console, some keyboards and mice, and the Zune music player – which, compared with the iPod, looks like something produced by the Soviet Union in its heyday. But a retail store needs exciting hardware to attract people in off the street and create a buzz.

Stand by, then, for a new range of viral ads from Apple. A Tale of Two Stores, perhaps. One establishment is crowded with teenagers browsing Facebook and trying to get off with one another, watched by benevolently smiling, T-shirted geeks. The other is a deserted cavern, rather like one of those Sony outlets, in which dispirited chaps in ties try to interest passing tramps in the new features of Office 2009. YouTube here we come!

Google takes on Netscape’s mission

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This morning’s Observer column.

The intriguing thing about the Google announcement is not that it is developing an OS, but that it is switching tack. For nearly two years the company has been developing a Linux-based OS for mobile phones under the Android label. Most of us who have used Android assumed it was only a matter of time before a version tailored for Netbooks was released.

But that is not what Google announced. There wasn’t much technical detail in the company’s blog post, but the one thing that is clear is that the new OS will be – in its words – “a natural extension of Google Chrome”. It is, they go on to say, “our attempt to rethink what operating systems should be”.

If true, we have reached a significant milestone because what the Google guys propose amounts to turning the world upside down…

Free Thinking

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This morning’s Observer column.

The reception accorded to Free has been markedly different from the respectful audience for the Long Tail. The opening salvo came from Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker writer who is himself a virtuoso of the Big Idea, as expressed in books such as The Tipping Point and Outliers. He was particularly enraged by Anderson’s recommendation that journalists would have to get used to a world in which most content was free and more and more people worked for non-monetary rewards.

“Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels?” Gladwell asked icily…

The Gladwell piece is here, by the way.

We need Hague Convention 2.0. And we need it soon

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This morning’s Observer column.

If you’re not worried, you have not been paying attention. Almost without realising it, our societies have become hugely dependent on a functioning, reliable internet. Life would go on without it, but most people would be shocked by how difficult much of the routine business of living would become. It would be like being teleported back to the 1970s. Even a minor conflict could slow the global internet to a crawl. So cyberwar is a bit like nuclear war, in that even a minor outbreak threatens everyone’s life and welfare.

In those circumstances, isn’t it time we thought about devising treaties to regulate it? We need something analogous to the 1925 Geneva Protocol to the Hague Convention, which prohibited chemical and biological weapons. And we need to start now.

UPDATE: Interesting to see that this is also the lead story in today’s New York Times .

The United States and Russia are locked in a fundamental dispute over how to counter the growing threat of cyberwar attacks that could wreak havoc on computer systems and the Internet.

Both nations agree that cyberspace is an emerging battleground. The two sides are expected to address the subject when President Obama visits Russia next week and at the General Assembly of the United Nations in November, according to a senior State Department official.

But there the agreement ends.

Russia favors an international treaty along the lines of those negotiated for chemical weapons and has pushed for that approach at a series of meetings this year and in public statements by a high-ranking official.

The United States argues that a treaty is unnecessary. It instead advocates improved cooperation among international law enforcement groups. If these groups cooperate to make cyberspace more secure against criminal intrusions, their work will also make cyberspace more secure against military campaigns, American officials say.

“We really believe it’s defense, defense, defense,” said the State Department official, who asked not to be identified because authorization had not been given to speak on the record. “They want to constrain offense. We needed to be able to criminalize these horrible 50,000 attacks we were getting a day.”

Any agreement on cyberspace presents special difficulties because the matter touches on issues like censorship of the Internet, sovereignty and rogue actors who might not be subject to a treaty.

United States officials say the disagreement over approach has hindered international law enforcement cooperation, particularly given that a significant proportion of the attacks against American government targets are coming from China and Russia.

And from the Russian perspective, the absence of a treaty is permitting a kind of arms race with potentially dangerous consequences.

Parliament’s ‘transparency’ trick

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This morning’s Observer column.

Many years ago, the Harvard legal scholar Lawrence Lessig coined the phrase “Code is Law” to express the view that, in a digital world, private fences erected via software can undermine public law in all kinds of unanticipated ways. The recent antics of our parliamentary authorities in relation to MPs’ expenses have provided us with an instructive case study of the Lessig principle in action.

Their chosen tool for controlling our access to information is the computer code embodied in the portable document format (PDF)…

The iPhone and the Kama Sutra

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This morning’s Observer column.

The big news at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference last week was that Steve Jobs is apparently still away on sick leave. So the limelight fell on subordinates. They announced a new version of the iPhone, drastic price reductions on the old model, a new operating system for old and new iPhones and the next version of the company’s OS X operating system.

But widely-touted expectations that the company would launch a ‘tablet’ computer were not realised. Which makes sense, really: a tablet would represent a major change in direction for Apple and it’s hard to imagine Jobs leaving such an announcement to a mere underling. As far as unveiling tablets is concerned, Steve’s only peer is Moses…

UPDATE: Bill Thompson wondered if Apple were just trying to protect us from badly-scanned versions of the Kama Sutra.

Google: waving, not drowning

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This morning’s Observer column.

From the outset, Google clearly had plans for Ajax. The evidence was in the steady accretion of Gmail features like instant messaging, audio – and then video – chat, and so on. But until the end of last month we were still unsure about where all this was headed.

Now we know. It’s called Google Wave. It’s described as “a real-time communication platform which combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client”. Translation: it’s a sophisticated set of tools enabling people to work collaboratively across the internet. And ‘real-time’ means exactly that: in most cases what you type appears – as you type it – on other people’s screens…

Breaking up is so easy to do…

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This morning’s Observer column.

Here’s an idea for distressed newspaper editors: a regular feature entitled “Forthcoming Divorces”. Source material could be observations of squabbling couples in restaurants and supermarkets, comments written on Facebook walls, tagging of embarrassing photographs on Flickr, etc. And the feature could be surrounded by tasteful advertisements placed by legal firms specialising in matrimonial destruction, dating agencies, private detectives, house-clearance firms and purveyors of Viagra.

Those of us who watch the technology business do this kind of thing all the time. For years, for example, we’ve had our eye on a glamorous showbiz couple named Mr and Mrs AOL-Time Warner…

I type, therefore I am

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This morning’s Observer column.

For writers of my (baby-boomer) generation and older, typewriters were the bane of our lives. On the one hand, you couldn’t work without one. On the other, they were a pain to use. Every time you made a mistake, or had second thoughts about a word or a phrase, you had to cross it out and laboriously type the revision. There was no such thing as cut and paste and no backspace-and-erase facility. So the result was often a page that became so awful to look at that in the end one tore it out in a rage, screwed it into a ball and typed the whole ruddy thing again. Cutting and pasting was done with scissors and word-counting by going over the typescript with a pencil, whispering numbers as you went.

Most people who use keyboards today have no inkling of this. Word-processing software has always been part of their lives. As a result, the writing process has subtly changed. As Marshall McLuhan said: we shape our tools and afterwards they shape us. Composing on screen has become more like sculpting…