RFID tags go to school

If you think John Ashcroft and David Blunkett are bad, just wait until Radio Frequency Identification tags go mainstream. RFIDs are the next-generation bar code. A tag is a low-cost microchip outfitted with a tiny antenna that broadcasts an ID number to a reader unit. The reader searches a database for the number and finds the related file, which contains the tagged item’s description. Unlike bar codes, which must be manually scanned, RFID-tagged items can be read when they are in proximity to a reader unit, essentially scanning themselves.

Wired is running an interesting story about a school in Buffalo which has already deployed the technology as a pupil-monitoring system. “Principal Stillman”, it reports, “has gone whole-hog for radio-frequency technology, which his year-old Enterprise Charter School started using last month to record the time of day students arrive in the morning. In the next months, he plans to use RFID to track library loans, disciplinary records, cafeteria purchases and visits to the nurse’s office. Eventually he’d like to expand the system to track students’ punctuality (or lack thereof) for every class and to verify the time they get on and off school buses. ‘That way, we could confirm that Johnny Jones got off at Oak and Hurtle at 3:22,’ Stillman said. ‘All this relates to safety and keeping track of kids…. Eventually it will become a monitoring tool for us.'”

And of course we can put RFID tags on banknotes just to make sure that nobody’s laundering money. And..well, the sky’s the limit.

This stuff is going to happen — and MUCH sooner than people think. Industry, commerce and government think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread and are already tooling up for it. In the UK, Tesco put RFID tags on Gillette Mach3 razor blades (apparently because they are a regularly shoplifted item.) RFID technology will enable a nightmarish world of fine-grain, total surveillance. George Orwell, where are you when we need you?

Jonathan Zittrain on reforming copyright law

“It’s time for us to wise up and redraw copyright’s boundaries so that the law and reasonable public expectations fall into better alignment with one another. To be sure, this may require more, rather than less, subtlety.”

Lovely, thoughtful, sensible piece. [Full text.]

Concorde flies its last

Concorde flew for the last time today. I know it’s a politically incorrect thing to say, but I there was something about the gas-guzzling, environment-wrecking machine that I loved. One of my nicest memories is of flying the Atlantic in it in 1990. Here’s what I wrote at the time. I wouldn’t change a word today.

The cost of spam

A Pew Internet survey finds that spam is starting to hurt email and erode people’s trust in the Internet world. Press Release reads, in part:

“WASHINGTON (October 22, 2003) — The recent explosion of email spam is beginning to take its toll on the Internet world. A new nationwide survey shows that 25% of America’s email users say they are using email less because of spam. Within that group, most say that spam has reduced their overall use of email in a big way.

Further, more than half of email users say that spam has made them less trusting of email in general. One of their fears is that legitimate emails might be turned away by filters designed to stop spam. Another is that they’ll simply miss incoming email from friends, family, or colleagues amid the clutter of spam in their inboxes.

“People just love email, and it really bothers them that spam is ruining such a good thing,” said Deborah Fallows, Senior Research Fellow at the Pew Internet & American Life Project and author of the report. “People resent spam’s intrusions; they are angered by its deceptions; and they are offended by much of the truly disgusting content.”

Here are some other key figures from a national phone survey of 1,380 Internet users conducted by the Pew Internet Project in June. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus three points:

* 75% of email users are bothered that they cant stop the flow of spam, no matter what they do
* 70% of email users say spam has made being online unpleasant or annoying.
* 55% of email users say they get so many unwanted email messages in their personal account that it’s hard to get to the ones they want
* 30% of email users are concerned that their filtering devices may block incoming email that is important to them.

Despite their dismay, most Internet users keep the issue of spam in perspective. For them, spam takes its place next to life’s other annoyances, like telemarketing calls. Further, many users believe they know how to behave in a spam-saturated environment. The most popular way of dealing with spam is to simply click “delete.” More than 2/3 have made a more aggressive move, clicking to “remove me” from future mailings, although many voice concern that doing so only leads to more spam.”

Good God! Amazon making profits!!!!

I always thought that Amazon was a work of genius (and indeed it has already parted me from a significant amount of my money), but somehow I never expected it to become like a normal company. Yet the NYT is saying that Amazon “yesterday reported its first profit outside of the fourth quarter, which includes the holiday season, as its strategy to reignite growth with lower prices continues to pay off. Amazon, which some investors wrote off as being on the brink of insolvency a few years ago, is now generating cash at a steady clip. Its low prices and increasing selection of goods from other merchants have accelerated its growth in North America. Its sales are still growing rapidly in Europe and Japan, but the pace of growth is slowing overseas, largely as a result of increased price-cutting and offers of free shipping in many countries.”

Microsoft Officescam 2003

Here we go again. According to the NYT, Microsoft is planning to spend between $150 million and $200 million marketing the release of Office 2003. That’s five times as much as it spent on marketing Office XP two years ago. Now we all know that Microsoft sits on a mountain (over $40 billion) of cash, but even so…. What’s up?

Well, one reason for this hysterical marketing push might be that the boys at Redmond are worried about competition.

But which competition? Answer: two kinds. The first is from Open Source software — particularly from OpenOffice/StarOffice the free/cheap (respectively) office suite. The second — and possibly more threatening — is competition from earlier versions of Microsoft Office. After all, if a company is getting by perfectly well with boring ol’ Office 2000, why should it spend oodles of money upgrading to Office 2003? This could be a big threat to MS revenues in the future — the fact that its customers see no reason to upgrade to newer version of Redmond bloatware.

So what to do? One possible answer: a ‘feature’ called MO3, which is allegedly built into Office 2003. According to Michael Robertson, the colourful CEO and founder of Lindows.com (who has had his day in court with Microsoft and is therefore hardly an impartial source) “this code will give Microsoft the ability to change anything on your computer at anytime they wish with no notification to you…. Post 9/11, few people question actions taken under the guise of ‘improved security’ and this is how MO3 will be foisted onto computer users – as a feature to ‘make you safer.’ Computer users have understandably tired of the near daily worm and virus warnings, as well as the time-consuming patch process due to Microsoft’s lax software standards and its focusing not on building secure products, but products that secure its monopoly market positions. To improve the predicament which they’ve created, Microsoft is forcing consumers to accept MO3 embedded into every computer. Listen closely and you’ll hear Microsoft mouth pieces speak of “turning software into a service” which really means they will be changing the software on your computer whenever they feel like it. They will slowly limit your ability to run non-Microsoft software. They will restrict choices on your computer to only those products they approve. They will make changes which cripple other software programs or reduce their ability to interoperate with your computer so you will be forced to use exclusively Microsoft approved products.”

Robertson goes on to claim that MS have already embedded what he calls “the MO3 virus” into their XBOX game console. “They now have the power at anytime to change all existing Xboxes which connect to the Internet, and they are already misusing it. They have deleted files from users’ computers without their knowledge or permission. They have added software which has removed the ability to run competitor’s software. They have been changing users’ systems without their consent and notification. They will do the same on Microsoft Windows based computers once MO3 is installed.”

Hmmm… Wonder how much of this is true. What we do know is that Office 2003 won’t run on versions of Windows older than XP (or Win2K with Service Pack 3 installed). We also know that “the newest version of Office 2003 will have the ability to assign rights and privileges to office files. The Information Rights Management (IRM) technology requires a Windows Server 2003 running Windows Rights Management Services software to manage the restrictions. Users will have the ability to specify who has the rights to read, change, print or copy the document, and can set an expiration date.

The IRM tools will be included in the professional versions of all the various Office 2003 applications. However, the technology will not be backwards compatible, meaning that an Office 2003 document that makes use of IRM, will not be able to be opened by an earlier version of the Office software. However, Microsoft is also planning on providing a plug-in for IE that will give users the ability to view, print or forward the document, assuming they have the appropriate privileges. Even though there is already software on the market that allows users similar functions, Microsoft is hoping that by giving the users the ability to perform these lock down functions directly from the creating software, they can make it easier.” [Emphasis added.]

We Media

Extraordinary paper by Shane Bowman and Chris Willis on ‘participatory journalism’. By far the most comprehensive, thoughtful and perceptive analysis I’ve seen. Every journalist — offline and online — should read it. [PDF download (4 MB) from here.]

The power of images

What does this photograph say?

Answer: tenderness, love, compassion.

It’s a photograph by Gideon Mendel of a mother carrying her 31-year-old terminally ill son to sit in the shade. You can buy a high-res copy from here.

Then and now

One of my sons has just gone to University in London. On the day before the start of Term, he and I filled the car with his stuff which included: a nice laptop computer, a good hifi system, a MIDI keyboard (he’s a musician) and his precious bongo drums. He also had cooking utensils (he’s a good cook), lots of books and clothes and a raft of other ‘necessary’ stuff. By the standards of his contemporaries he was well-organised and fairly minimalist (other parents’ cars were more heavily loaded — I saw one father buckling under the weight of a mattress. Perhaps the standard university issue didn’t meet with parental approval). And then I embarked on James Gleick’s lovely new biography of Isaac Newton, who came to Trinity College, Cambridge in the summer of 1661 bringing with him precisely this: “A chamber pot; a notebook of 140 blank pages, three and a half by five and a half inches, with leather covers; “a quart bottle and ink to fill it”; candles for many long nights; and a lock for his desk’.

Writing paper was expensive in Newton’s time, which probably explains why his writing was so small and neat. He believed in making full use of every square millimetre. He was also fantastically careful with money. The Wren Library in Trinity College has a lot of his papers, and I once brought my boy in to see the account book in which Newton recorded his expenditure in minute detail. On the way in, however, we had to pass the manuscript of Winnie the Pooh, which lay open at the page describing the invention of the game of Pooh Sticks. My son valiantly tried to pretend that Newton’s account books were fascinating (to please his Dad), but it was clear which he regarded as the more seminal document. Sigh. But then he was only six at the time.

Needless to say, one can play virtual Pooh Sticks nowadays. Oh — I almost forgot to say — Disney now own the rights to Winnie the Pooh, so don’t even think of putting any artwork on the Web or their copyright police will be after you.

Town and country

To London for a meeting with some folks from Creative Commons — Christiane Asschenfeldt, Glenn Brown and Cory Doctorow — who are in town to lay the groundwork for a UK Creative Commons organisation. We met in one of the clubs to which I belong — the only one which has a WiFi network — and had a really interesting talk about: the differences between the public discourse on intellectual property (IP) issues in the US and UK; ways of raising the importance of IP in public consciousness; the role and significance of the BBC and other public-service institutions in all this; and a whole lot more. They are smart and interesting people who are doing great work.

It was fascinating to meet Cory, someone whose writing I have admired for years. He had a neat retro gadget — a WiFi sniffer in a small black plastic box with four red LEDs to indicate signal strength. My admiration for this gizmo was tempered, however, by the fact that it had failed to detect the Groucho network that both its owner and I were using!

London was beautiful this morning — so much so that I got out of the Tube at Covent Garden and walked to Soho in the sunshine. The streets were fresh and uncrowded, and yet the place teemed with life. I love the city and agree with Dr. Johnson that “the man who is tired of London is tired of life”.

And yet… I also feel elated when I step off the train back at Cambridge — also ravishing in this amazing Autumn sunshine.

Strange that this obscure market town on the edge of the Fens should be such a magical place. And yet it is.

For me, its beauty is not just a matter of architecture (or ‘inhabited ruins’, as one of my friends once put it) but of the fact that it’s the place where Erasmus and Newton and Darwin and Maxwell and Rutherford and Tennyson and Wittgenstein and Russell and Whitehead and GR Moore and Keynes and Alfred Marshall lived, studied and worked. I often walk past the room where, in 1932, John Cockroft and Ernest Walton split the atom; the lab where J.J. Thompson discovered the electron; the room where James Watson and Francis Crick sussed the molecular structure of DNA; the building where Frank Whittle invented the jet engine; or — in Hinxton, just outside Cambridge — the lab where John Sulston and his team led the decoding of the human genome and kept that knowledge in the public domain.

In other words, the magic of Cambridge for me is bound up with the knowledge it has produced — the ideas (or ‘intellectual property’ if you must) which belongs to all of us and has incalculably enriched our lives. Which of course, brought me back to the discussions I had in the morning with Christiane, Glenn and Cory, because the prime purpose of Creative Commons is to stop the intellectual property maniacs from disabling our ability to build on the creativity of others. Newton famously said that he was able to see further because he was able to “stand on the shoulders of giants”. He provided the underpinnings of our modern world. But if the RIAA and the MPAA and Disney had been around in the 17th century they would have cut him down to size.