It’s a race against time at Chateau Naughton. Will we get enough sunshine to ripen the crop?
Flickr version here.
On this day…
… in 1957, the Space Age began as the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, into orbit, thereby triggering the alarm in the Eisenhower Administration that led to the setting-up of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which funded the development of the Arpanet, which led to the Internet… Read all about it here
There’s life in them thar fogeys
This morning’s Observer column.
WE ARE all slaves of some defunct economist, said Keynes, who until the recent disturbances in the banking system was widely regarded as defunct himself. But it wasn't just bankers and politicians who denied their indebtedness to ancient economic principles. Newspaper and print publishers generally also ignored the axiom that, in a competitive market, prices tend to converge on the marginal cost – the cost of producing one more unit of the good(s) in question.
The internet provides a pretty good approximation of such a market…
What climate change looks like
How to deal with Iran: an aside
From a column by Timothy Garton-Ash.
A textbook example of what democracies should not do was provided last year by a joint venture between Siemens and Nokia, called Nokia Siemens Networks. It sold the Iranian regime a sophisticated system with which they can monitor the internet, including emails, internet phone calls and social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, much used by Iranian protesters. In today’s politics of people power, that is the equivalent of selling a dictator tanks or poison gas.
So, to be clear: a German company, Siemens, which used slave labour during the Third Reich, sold a Holocaust-denying president the instruments with which he can persecute young Iranians risking their lives for freedom. Think of that every time you buy something made by Siemens.
Indeed. Last time I looked, the BBC had outsourced all of its IT systems to Siemens. We didn’t hear anything about that during the post-election demonstrations.
Welcome to dreamland
I watched Gordon Brown’s ghastly Conference speech and thought that Simon Hoggart got it right.
But there was a dreamlike quality to the whole speech. The gist of it was, that after nearly 13 years, Labour wants a crack at government. Having constructed a short, sanitised version of a past that did happen, he launched into a future that probably never will: whimpering bankers flee from the wrath of the British people, grateful old folk get free care at home, sinister-sounding “action squads” will sort out troublemakers on problem estates, no more hereditary peers, a plebiscite on PR, green jobs for green people, as he almost said, and a weird Victorian notion of an institution for fallen women – a barracks for single teenage mothers. There will be “family intervention projects” for the most “chaotic” families. “Blimey, it’s the fip-man at the door. Put that spliff out and get the dog off the baby’s tea.”
And asbos will be strictly enforced, no doubt by the same action squads that will stop binge drinking and bankers’ bonuses. But as the late Linda Smith said: “Don’t knock asbos – for some of these kids it’s the only qualification they’ve got.”
The whole fantasy, that Labour has another five years in office to do all the things it never quite got round to in the last 13, pleased the conference mightily.
They’re going to dream massive buy-two-get-one-free dreams and reach deep inside themselves like the monster from Alien. They loved it.
As regular readers know, I’ve thought for a long time that the reason Tony Blair hung on for so long was that he knew Brown would be a disaster. In that, at least, he was dead right.
The ‘Web Squared’ Era
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.
Shakespeare’s ratings
There’s a lovely iPhone App that puts all of Shakespeare’s plays in the palm on one’s hand. I was intrigued, though, by the App Store’s ratings of the Bard’s work.
BBC tries to sneak in ‘Broadcast Flag’ DRM by the back door
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
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.