The Blue Screen of Death — for real

Every Windows user is familiar with the ‘blue screen of death’ — what you see when Windows crashes. For most of us (well, most of you, dear readers — I don’t use Windows) this is irritating or infuriating, but not life-threatening. But now a Channel Four News investigation has revealed that Britain’s Royal Navy has chosen the Windows operating system for the war-fighting computers of its latest destroyers. And the Ministry of Defence is considering using Windows for the submarines which fire the UK’s nuclear weapons. So what will we do when a nuclear exchange is inadvertently triggered by a buffer overflow? Press the Start button? It brings an entirely new meaning to the ‘Fatal Error’ dialog. Thanks to Roger Houghton for the link.

How to censor the Web

I’ve been arguing for years that ISPs are ludicrously timid when faced with a lawyer’s letter, but this is ridiculous. Here’s the Slashdot summary of a fascinating — and sobering — experiment.

“Members of the Bits of Freedom group conducted a test to see how much it would take for a service provider to take down a website hosting public domain material, and have published their results. They signed up with 10 providers and put online a work by Dutch author Multatuli, who died over 100 years ago. They stated that the work was in the public domain, and that it was written in 1871. They then set up a fake society to claim to be the copyright holders of the work. From a Hotmail address, they sent out complaints to all 10 of the providers. 7 out of 10 complied and removed the site, one within just 3 hours. Only one ISP actually pointed out that the copyright on the work expired many years ago. The conclusion of the investigation is definitely worth reading. The three providers who didn’t take down the material are XS4ALL, UPC and Freeler. The company that came out the worst was iFast, who forwarded all the personal details of the site owner to the sender of the fake takedown notice without even being asked to do so.”

Today’s Observer column…

… on the significance of peer-to-peer networking is here. Audio version here. (MP3, 4.91MB)

Understanding the impact of the mobile phone

Fascinating essay by Christine Rosen in The New Atlantis. Quote:

“Although [Irving] Goffman wrote in the era before cell phones, he might have judged their use as a ‘subordinate activity,’ a way to pass the time such as reading or doodling that could and should be set aside when the dominant activity resumes. Within social space, we are allowed to perform a range of these secondary activities, but they must not impose upon the social group as a whole or require so much attention that they remove us from the social situation altogether. The opposite appears to be true today. The group is expected never to impinge upon — indeed, it is expected to tacitly endorse by enduring — the individual’s right to withdraw from social space by whatever means he or she chooses: cell phones, BlackBerrys, iPods, DVDs screened on laptop computers. These devices are all used as a means to refuse to be ‘in’ the social space; they are technological cold shoulders that are worse than older forms of subordinate activity in that they impose visually and auditorily on others. Cell phones are not the only culprits here. A member of my family, traveling recently on the Amtrak train from New York, was shocked to realize that the man sitting in front of her was watching a pornographic movie on his laptop computer — a movie whose raunchy scenes were reflected in the train window and thus clearly visible to her. We have allowed what should be subordinate activities in social space to become dominant.”

This is a long piece but worth it — the most perceptive piece I’ve read on the way the mobile phone has changed behaviour.