Another useful T-shirt

After the HTML one, how about this?

Lots more in the same vein from lowercasetee.

Why the US cannot win in Iraq — by a soldier serving there now

Extraordinary, frank article by Al Lorenz, a former state chairman of the Constitution Party of Texas and a reservist currently serving with the US Army in Iraq.

Ed Felten on the importance of open disclosure

Ed commented on the bike-lock story. Now he’s been reflecting on the CBS ‘fake memos’ episode. His conclusions are the same as mine in the bike-lock saga. This is what he says:

“What’s true with CBS is true elsewhere in the security world. Disclosure teaches the public the truth about the situation at hand (in this case the memos), a benefit that shouldn’t be minimized. Even more important, disclosure deters future sloppiness — you can bet that CBS and others will be much more careful in the future. (You might think that the industry should police itself so that such deterrents aren’t necessary; but experience teaches otherwise.)

My sense is that it’s only the remote and mysterious nature, for most people, of cybersecurity that allows the anti-disclosure arguments to get traction. If people thought about most cybersecurity problems in the same way they think about the CBS memos, the cybersecurity disclosure argument would be much healthier.”

Canon’s new digital camera

First, the good news:

16.7 megapixels EOS-1Ds Mark II. It has a 36 x 24 mm CMOS sensor (full 35 mm frame size), ISO sensitivity through to ISO 3200, faster continuous shooting (4 fps) with a large and improved buffer (32 JPEG, 11 RAW). Optional extras include a Wireless Transmitter which supports 802.11b/g as well as tethered LAN for transmission of images directly back to a server.

Now the bad news: It will cost £5,999 in the UK.

More details here.

The rewards of failure

One of the most tiresome spectacles in life is that of besuited businessmen lecturing the rest of us on the consequences of poor performance. Thus we are told that workers who are laid off because their productivity isn’t up to scratch somehow deserve their fate. But further up the capitalist food chain, the situation is reversed. There, failure is lavishly rewarded. The Financial Times tells me, for example, that Sir Peter Davis, the bloated smoothie who presided over the decline of the Sainsbury supermarket chain, is to get a £2.6 million cash payoff. And my own newspaper reveals that the former chairman and chief executive of Jarvis, Paris Moayedi, received a £260,000 ‘performance bonus’ for 2002. Why is this noteworthy? Well, 2002 was the year of the Potters Bar rail crash. Jarvis was responsible for the maintenance of points at Potters Bar which broke when a train passed over them and derailed, killing seven people. And this happened on the aforementioned Moayedi’s watch. Quite a performance. Quite a bonus.

After phones for dogs, what?

The industry’s got ones for toddlers too. Quote:

“MYMO (My Mobile) is a three-button, cat-shaped mobile phone aimed at five to 10 year-olds. It can dial five pre-programmed phone numbers and is available online for £69. It is billed as a “security mobile” that buys parents “peace of mind”.

Doggerel

Now that every man, woman, child and dog has a mobile phone… Hang on — did I say “dog”? Yes, I did. You couldn’t make this up, you know. But it appears to be real.

The law of unintended consequences

Among the people with whom I work and correspond, it’s a commonplace that the patent and copyright systems are broken, and that this will have terrible long-term consequences for society, business and innovation. Few legislators seem to understand this, which makes the position even bleaker. In an interesting forthcoming book two American academics, Adam Jaffe and Josh Lerner, track the breakdown of the US patent system to two isolated administrative changes made years ago. The first was a decision in the early 1980s to establish a single federal appeals court to hear patent lawsuits, replacing 12 regional courts of appeal. The second was a decision by Congress in the early 1990s to change the way the US Patent Office was financed: henceforth it would get its income from the fees that it charged for granting patents.

Guess what happened. The easier it became to get patents, the more people wanted to apply for them, and that led to a situation where examiners were deluged with more patents to review, which led to pressure to conduct quicker reviews and a degradation in quality of patents issued. This is what led to the granting of absurd ‘business process’ patents like Amazon’s one-click ordering, and to the granting of countless others where there was clear ‘prior art’ that the examiners simply hadn’t the time or the resources to uncover.

Jaffe and Lerner describe this in terms of the Law of Unintended Consequences, which is true in one sense. But in fact it’s symptomatic of something deeper — the failure of policy-makers to take a systemic view of the decisions they recommend. Some consequences are indeed unpredictable; but taking a systems perspective, and using systems modelling techniques, can help to identify implications that might not otherwise be obvious.

This insight was the basis for a ground-breaking pamphlet that my former colleague Jake Chapman wrote for DEMOS, the UK thinktank. Jake’s ideas have spread like wildfire in the UK civil service, and he is now developing an online course based on it for my Open University Relevant Knowledge programme. The course is scheduled for its first presentation in May 2005.

Read any dangerous books lately?

From Scott Rosenberg:

Among many other unfortunate provisions in the Patriot Act, passed in haste and hysteria in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there’s one that’s especially loathsome to American values: It gives the government an unprecedented and scary carte blanche to paw through library and bookstore records to see what you’ve been reading. If you believe that such records might actually help the government nail the next wave of al-Qaida terrorists, then you don’t have to do anything. But if you believe, as I do, that this particular power is useless for that goal — but might prove handy for John Ashcroft and successors should they decide that, for example, citizens who read too many books about subject X might warrant close surveillance — then you should go here and sign the petition by the Campaign for Reader Privacy, a coalition of booksellers, librarians and writers, to push Congress to change this un-American law.

This particular part of the Patriot Act is one of those stealth provisions that simply invites government abuse. Consider: “The FBI may request the records secretly; it is not required to prove that there is ‘probable cause’ to believe the person whose records are being sought has committed a crime; and the bookseller or librarian who receives an order is prohibited from revealing it to anyone except those whose help is needed to produce the records.”

Inside the mind of the copyright thug

Neatly summarised by this lovely phrase in a very perceptive Groklaw article about Free and Open Source software (FOSS): “Corporate views on IP law might be described, I think, as similar to a 2-year-old’s concept of who gets to play with all the toys in the playground, regardless of who brought them.” Groklaw is a wonderful Blog. The article was a commentary on Gabriella Coleman’s anthropological perspective on the political dimensions of FOSS.