The ‘Web Squared’ Era

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Web 2.0, the name we gave this phenomenon in 2004 when we named our new conference, turns five on Oct. 5 (the anniversary of the first Web 2.0 Summit). In our ongoing quest to understand where technology is taking us, the milestone serves as an opportunity not so much to look back but to examine the landscape ahead. Whereas the advent of Web 2.0 marked a profound shift in the meaning of the Web, this next phase is less a new direction than an exploration of what becomes possible when the building blocks of Web 2.0 (such as participation, collective intelligence and so on) increase by orders of magnitude.

We call this step Web Squared.

— Tim O’Reilly, writing in Forbes.com.

BBC tries to sneak in ‘Broadcast Flag’ DRM by the back door

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Terrific piece by Cory Doctorow.

As the BBC readies itself to begin free-to-air high-definition broadcasts, it has petitioned Ofcom for permission to encrypt part of the broadcast signal – specifically, the data-channel that contains instructions for decoding and playing back the video. The corporation argues that because it isnt encrypting the actual video just the stuff that makes it possible to watch it that it isnt violating the rule against encrypting its programmes.

The encryption keys necessary to decode BBC programmes will be limited to companies that agree to the terms set out in the Digital Transmission Licensing Administrator agreement, something created by a bunch of non-UK companies in co-operation with the Hollywood studios. This agreement includes requirements to encrypt any stored programmes and any digital outputs on the device, so that anyone who wants to make a device that plugs into a DTLA-licensed box will also have to take a DTLA licence. Its a kind of perfect, airtight bubble in which all manufacturers are required to limit their designs to include only those features which make the big studios happy. These limitations – on recording, storing, and moving programmes – are not the same as “what copyright allows”. Rather, they are, “what makes the movie studios comfortable”.

I’ll say it again: the public’s deal with the BBC is: we pay you the licence fee, you give us programmes, we can do what we want with them within the confines of copyright law. The studios promised that they would boycott US free-to-air television unless they got a version of this called the ‘Broadcast Flag’. They didn’t get the Broadcast Flag, and they didn’t boycott. They have shareholders to answer to, and those shareholders won’t put up with corporate tantrums that promise no licensing revenue until the rest of the world rearranges itself to the company’s convenience.

This is important. Time to look out that list of BBC Trust members. And the OFCOM directory.

Don’t Bail Out Newspapers

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Nice rant by Daniel Lyons.

The only beneficiaries of a bailout would be a handful of big newspaper companies that used to be profitable and powerful and now, well, aren’t. Those companies saw the Internet charging toward them like a freight train, and they just stood there on the tracks. They didn’t adapt. Why? Because for decades these companies enjoyed virtual monopolies, and as often happens to monopolists, they got lazy. They invested their resources in protecting their monopolies, using bully tactics to keep new competitors from entering their markets. They dished up an inferior product and failed to believe that anything or anyone could ever take their little gold mines away from them.

It’s hilarious to hear these folks puff themselves up with talk about being the Fourth Estate, performing some valuable public service for readers—when in fact the real customer has always been the advertiser, not the reader. That truth has been laid bare in recent years. As soon as papers got desperate for cash, they dropped their ‘sacred principles’ as readily as a call girl sheds her clothes. Ads on the front page? Reporters assigned to write sponsored content? No problem.

And moreover,

Meanwhile, all of us need to get over this pious notion about the sanctity of the newspaper. I’ve been a journalist for 27 years, and I love that romantic old notion of the newsroom as much as the next guy. But I recently canceled my two morning papers — The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal — because I got tired of carrying them from the front porch to the recycling bin, sometimes without even looking at them. Fact is, I only care about a tiny percentage of what those papers publish, and I can read them on my computer or my iPhone. And I can rely on blogs and Twitter to steer me to articles worth reading.

As for all the hand-wringing about the great “in-depth” information that only a newspaper can provide, let’s be honest: the typical daily newspaper does a lousy job. It tries to provide a little bit of everything — politics, sports, business, celebrity stuff — and as a result it doesn’t do anything particularly well. Ask anyone who’s an expert in anything — whether it’s bicycle racing or brain surgery — what they think when they read a newspaper article about their field. Chances are they cringe, because the material is so dumbed-down, and because it’s so clear that whoever wrote the article has no real expertise on this topic.

He’s right. Alas.

The Doomsday machine

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I didn’t know about this. Did you?

The Soviets were especially worried about the decision that an ailing leader like Leonid Brezhnev would have to make if faced with a warning of nuclear attack. He would have only minutes to decide, and the alert information might not be clear or certain. What if he hesitated? What if he made a mistake and issued a launch order based on a faulty warning?

The Soviet designers responded with an ingenious and incredible answer. They actually built a doomsday machine that would guarantee retaliation — launching all the nuclear missiles — if the leader's hand went limp. Now some details of the system have come to light in documents and interviews with officials who were involved. I have detailed the history and rationale of this doomsday machine in my new book. The system was in effect a switch that would allow the Soviet leader to delegate the decision about retaliation to someone else. An ailing general secretary could activate the system if he received a warning of attack, and thus might avoid the mistake of launching all the nuclear missiles based on a false alarm. Should the enemy missiles actually arrive and destroy the Kremlin, there would be guaranteed retaliation.

Originally, the Soviet Union devised a totally automated, computer-driven retaliatory system known as the Dead Hand. If all the leaders and all the regular command systems were destroyed, computers would memorize the early-warning and nuclear attack data, wait out the onslaught, and then order retaliation without human control. This system would, basically, turn over the fate of mankind to machines.

However, this idea was too frightening for the Soviet designers and leaders, and they did not build it. Instead, they constructed a modified system, quite elaborate, known as Perimeter. Instead of machines, Perimeter had a human firewall to make the fateful decision — a small group of duty officers buried deep underground in a concrete globe-shaped bunker. If certain conditions were met, including seismic data showing that a nuclear explosion had already detonated on Soviet soil, and if the Kremlin communications were down, these duty officers could launch a series of small command rockets in superhardened silos. Like robots, the command rockets would then fly across the country and issue the launch order to the intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Perimeter system was tested in November 1984 and put on combat duty in early 1985. But the Soviet Union kept this system a secret, and many features of it were not known to the United States until after the Cold War…

[Source]

On this day…

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… in 1924, two United States Army planes landed in Seattle, Washington, having completed the first round-the-world flight in 175 days.

Phineas Fogg would not have been impressed.

A portent of things to come?

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A petrol bomb was thrown at the Irish Ministry of Finance last night, causing a small amount of damage. It reminds one of the incident in which the RBS culprit, ‘Sir’ Fred Goodwin, had all the windows in his elegant mansion broken. Are these incidents just cases of mindless vandalism, I wonder, or attempts to vent fury at the way the country’s corrupt and incompetent banks have been bailed out by the taxpayer? The disconnect political elites in Western democracies and their electorates seems particularly acute in relation to the way the banks have been rescued. Everywhere I go I see and hear evidence of simmering fury and resentment. I cannot believe that it won’t find expression eventually. The hope is that it finds expression via the ballot box. The fear is that it will also find more violent outlets.

America’s Last Counterinsurgent?

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As an armchair (well, Aeron-chair) General, I’ve long regarded the adventure in Afghanistan as futile, for reasons that anyone who knows the history of that extraordinary country will understand. What I didn’t expect was that a major US military figure would set out the problem clearly in public. Yet that is exactly what Obama’s appointee, General McChrystal, has done. Here’s a useful summary from Foreign Policy of what he told Congress:

McChrystal’s report describes what must change in Afghanistan to increase the odds of success. However, neither the U.S. military nor the rest of the government can hope to do much about these problems before the political clock runs out in the United States. The problems McChrystal discusses include:

1. The need to elect a president Afghans (and Americans) will accept as legitimate

2. Corrupt and ineffective Afghan governance at the national and local levels

3. U.S. soldiers’ lack of facility with Afghanistan’s languages,

4. The U.S. military’s inability to gain trust and credibility with the population,

5. The difficulty expanding the size and quality of Afghanistan’s security forces,

6. The requirement to significantly disrupt Taliban and al Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan,

7. The requirement for U.S. and NATO countries to accept higher casualty rates over the medium term as they attempt to protect Afghanistan’s population.

Foreign Policy‘s inference is that

McChrystal’s report will have unwittingly rendered a fatal blow to Western counterinsurgency doctrine. It will be hard for anyone to seriously recommend counterinsurgency elsewhere after it was abandoned in Afghanistan. McChrystal will be America’s last counterinsurgency general for a long while. The United States will still have to endure a long era of irregular warfare. It just needs a new military doctrine for this era, and fast.

At least the Americans are being relatively open about the fiasco in Afhganistan. (And there are voices there now muttering openly about a “twenty-year war”.) Over here there’s only official hypocrisy and psychological denial. What really gets my goat is the cynical nonsense spouted by British ministers as the list of British casualties lengthens almost by the day. We’re now in the kind of position that the US got into in Vietnam — fighting a war that we cannot win, yet (allegedly) cannot afford to lose.