Have a look at this before answering!
Serendipity
Andrew Brown had one of those lovely moments today when two parallel universes are brought together by Google technology.
He’s also very impressed by Google Earth, but that’s no good to me because (like that other great Google offering, Picasa) it requires a Windows client.
Our brave American allies, contd.
Hmmm… Apropos my speculation that we would see a dramatic fall in US vacation bookings in London, here’s an interesting report.
Thousands of US military personnel based in the UK have been banned by commanders from travelling to London in the wake of Thursday’s bomb attacks. Personnel, most of them from US Air Force units at RAF Mildenhall and RAF Lakenheath, in Suffolk, have been told not to go within the M25 motorway. Family members who are from the US are also being urged to stay away. The US air force said the order had been made in the interests of the safety of its troops.
I’ve just listened to a slightly embarrassed British Defence Secretary, John Reid, arguing on the radio that this was just the equivalent of a bureaucratic error — i.e. an order than had been issued immediately after the bombings but had not yet been rescinded. We’ll see.
Update: Order now rescinded. The Commander of US Forces in Europe, General James L. Jones, based at Mons in Belgium, said in a statement:
“While all personnel are encouraged to be vigilant, we cannot allow ourselves to be intimidated by the acts of terrorists. All US personnel are encouraged to continue with their normal routine.”
Phew! So that’s all right then. Thanks to the many American readers who drew this statement to my attention!
Six degrees of separation
Here’s a statistical freak. The chances of knowing anyone directly affected by the terrorist bombs must be vanishingly small. Yet I discovered on Thursday that a woman I know slightly from work had been on the tube train that had been bombed at Aldgate. (She suffered from smoke-inhalation, but is basically ok). Then I find that a friend of my son had been on the bus that was bombed in Tavistock Square, but had disembarked a few minutes earlier, having concluded that it would be quicker to walk. And now I discover that the sister of a colleague had been on the Aldgate train, and had stayed to help the wounded.
Software patent bill thrown out
According to BBC online, European politicians have thrown out a controversial bill that could have led to software being patented.
The European Parliament voted 648 to 14 to reject the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive.
The bill was reportedly rejected because, politicians said, it pleased no-one in its current form. Responding to the rejection the European Commission said it would not draw up or submit any more versions of the original proposal.
Yippee!
Ouch!
Apropos my prediction that terrorism in London would lead to “mass cancellation of vacation bookings by Americans, who despite the gung-ho militarism of their society, seem pathologically nervous as individuals”, an American friend writes:
It is not, Sire, that we are “pathologically nervous as individuals”, but rather that we have already celebrated our July 4th and need no further pyrotechnics. Further, the London weather was clearly obvious to even the most dull American TV couch-potato news watcher, and we do have sunshine in closer locations.
Also, cheaper. . . .
Ouch! In my defence, I should say that we did see such mass cancellations in the past every time there was an IRA bombing campaign on the UK mainland.
The networked world
Mary Kaldor, writing in openDemocracy…
There is something perverse about globalisation. I live and work in the area of London targeted in the four explosions on Thursday 7 July. None of our phones worked for several hours and I couldn’t reach my family and close friends. Yet even before I quite realised what was happening, I was receiving emails from India, America, Azerbaijan, Kosovo and even Baghdad.
Plumbing the depths
It’s almost enough to make one feel sorry for Windows users. MessageLabs is reporting that it has intercepted
copies of an email posing as a video news clip of yesterday’s terrorist attack in London which instead contains a Trojan designed to compromise the recipient’s computer. The email containing this Trojan has been crafted to appear as a CNN Newsletter which asks recipients to ‘See attachments for unique amateur video shots’.
When executed the attachment copies itself to %Windir%\winlog.exe and modifies the Windows registry key ‘HKLM/Software/microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run’ so that it runs automatically on system start-up. The Trojan then attempts to obtain a list of the SMTP servers that the victims machine is configured to use and starts to use these servers to send large volumes of unsolicited mail.
The Economist gets it right
The Supreme Court tried to steer a middle path between these claims [of the content and technology industries], and did a reasonable job. But the outcome of the case is nevertheless unsatisfactory. That’s not the court’s fault. It was struggling to apply a copyright law which has grown worse than anachronistic in the digital age. That’s something Congress needs to remedy.
In America, the length of copyright protection has increased enormously over the past century, from around 28 years to as much as 95 years. The same trend can be seen in other countries. In June Britain signalled that it may extend its copyright term from 50 years to around 90 years.
This makes no sense. Copyright was originally intended to encourage publication by granting publishers a temporary monopoly on works so they could earn a return on their investment. But the internet and new digital technologies have made the publication and distribution of works much easier and cheaper. Publishers should therefore need fewer, not more, property rights to protect their investment. Technology has tipped the balance in favour of the public domain.
A first, useful step would be a drastic reduction of copyright back to its original terms—14 years, renewable once. This should provide media firms plenty of chance to earn profits, and consumers plenty of opportunity to rip, mix, burn their back catalogues without breaking the law. The Supreme Court has somewhat reluctantly clipped the wings of copyright pirates; it is time for Congress to do the same to the copyright incumbents.
Couldn’t have put it better myself. Full text here.
BitTorrent incorporated in Opera browser
According to The Register,
Opera has released a version of its web browser with the BitTorrent client built in. Users clicking on a Torrent file will see the file load in Opera’s traditional Transfer window, so for most file transfers, there’s no need to install a third-party BitTorrent client. To Opera, it’s simply another MIME type, like Gopher and Usenet before it.