I caught this piece on Radio 4’s “You and Yours” last Thursday. I was so incensed by the lack of balance they were giving the issue of people accessing open wifi networks that I went back and listened again.
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The Home Office call it “theft of bandwidth” and that “stealing that internet space is potentially an offence under the Computer Misuse Act and Communications Act”

The penalty is up to 5 years in prison!

I think that Darryl agrees with me when I suggest that anyone running a Wireless network in 2008 should reasonably be expected to secure their network to their desires. I wrote about it here and here.

As I said:

Next they’ll be arresting people for illegally smelling the perfume and aftershave of people as they walk past. Or illegally hearing conversations spoken aloud in a public place.

The government are taking this very seriously of course and have assigned someone to look after all of this. He has to, of course, be utterly out of his depth when talking about technology. Days like this make me want to become a politician. But not that much.

Careful, Darryl, your blog could be considered an admission of guilt.

The crazy thing is that I actually considered it. My dad has been a lifelong Tory and I know it would make him proud. And some of the policies in the manifesto seem, on the surface, to be entirely reasonable. But I’d have real issues dealing with ‘politicians’ as, frankly, I’d not be afraid to call a turd a turd.

None of the ConservativesNI are inspiring. And I’m probably a little too outspoken for them (otherwise they’d have approached me by now!).

That said, their idea for a national system of Dragon’s Dens just speaks to me of blatant marketing. I mean - where does it say that Dragon’s Den is a good way to evoke a spirit of entrepreneurship? It’s a bloody comedy. In comparison it’d be nice to end a year with InvestNI reporting they actually did everything they could and spent all their money as opposed to watching client companies desert Northern Ireland (Seagate), spend a lot of money then go bust (De Lorean), waste millions trying to entice big creative companies over here and utterly fail to get Google to headquarter here all the while making the paper mountain for starting entrepreneurs too high to be tolerable or worth the effort.

Go for it? Sure.

Be a candidate for the Tories? I would except that I have no faith that the political system in Northern Ireland does anything other than line the pockets of the people involved.

Which, if you think about it, is good enough incentive for some….

Ian Paisley Junior has confirmed he is receiving a salary from Westminster as a researcher for his North Antrim MP father.
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“It means he is being paid as an assembly member, a junior minister and also by his father from his parliamentary allowances,” he said.

The rest of the article focuses on the MPs who hire family members. Nothing wrong with that.

I’m more concerned that he’s being employed three times. I’d have thought being an assembly member was a full time job. What about being a junior minister? And he’s also a researcher too?

Let’s have some disclosure here. How much taxpayers money is being given to these part-time workers?

Now, that sounds terribly cynical in black and white and I must stress that I’m not advocating that we start categorising our friends and acquaintances on what we can get out of them because that would be a horrific application of the idea, but rather that we judge our own actions on the results that may occur. If I do this, what will happen?.

It’s this philosophy that gets you out of arguments by just apologising rather than scoring points. When I argue, I like to sulk for a little - just a few minutes of self-indulgence when all the witty and cutting remarks I didn’t say in the argument swim around my head. The result is the same - with these remarks I would have completely won that argument, but what would I have lost? Having won this argument, will I congratulate myself in my ivory tower, alone and proud?

Aldous Huxley, my flavour of the month, wrote:

And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle–the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: “How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man’s Final End?”

Seeing as Social Networks are now the bubble rage, how do you apply a social results-based economy to social networking? We see a little of it in social networks at the moment with the granting of “friend” status though some, like Robert Scoble, have popularised the friend status to the point that it becomes worthless. How can you complain about a limit of 5000 friends? Get over yourself. LinkedIn does a little better but is such a narrow niche and the recommendation system becomes reciprocal. You’re more likely to recommend someone who has recommended you, but who takes that first step?

With the Identity Crisis looming (and yes, it’s a crap name for my theory but you try churning out good names. We need Tim O’Reilly to popularise it and make a book!), we have to consider the consolidation of our various online identities into one semantic entity so that “the system” knows who we are but only provides that information to those we permit, to those who have some relevance to us. I don’t relish the idea of OpenSocial being the panacea there because it’s an advertising engine and I don’t see any of our governments stepping in to create something that they, by default, cannot control and mis-use.

The Jabber model works for me. I have the passwords which link my various online identities into one Island (server, service, online shopping portal). Other people verify this online identity is “me”. They have tenuous virtual connections to me through these other services which may or may not include an entry on my “Island”, we just may be strangers in strange lands elsewhere.

This post has rambled on long enough but the gist is: making your choices carefully and not based on reaction is what separates us from the animals. Being able to build social networks beyond the immediate family (or the Dunbar number) is a quality unique to humans as a consequence of our technology. The actions we take identify us as a person - they give us character. Through this display of character, we may be able to make connections to other people and have other people make connections to us on a basis of recommendation.

It would be nice to know that the people I associate myself with online all display good character. But in truth, I have no way of knowing and some of the people you’d expect to be fine, upstanding citizens simply are not.

One exception to this is a search incident to arrest — if the police are arresting you, they can search you and your possessions without first obtaining a warrant. During the past few decades, Gershowitz explains, courts have given the police wide rein in conducting such searches. If police arrest a driver, they’re allowed to search not only the driver but the car, passengers in the car, and “containers” in the car — envelopes, wallets, aspirin bottles — that they find. And incriminating evidence they find — even if it’s not related to the crime they’re arresting you for — can be admissible in court.

In recent years courts have been asked to rule on the legality of police searches of electronic devices found during the course of an arrest, and judges have almost always come down on the side of the officers.

The most obvious answer is “Don’t do illegal stuff, ever” but frankly my experience of the police forces, admittedly limited to Northern Ireland, would make me hesitate to wonder if even this is enough.

The obvious thing to do, just in case you are involved in something dubious (and even then, looking at Dumb Laws it can be something as puerile and stupid as:

• Those wishing to purchase a television must also buy a license.
• Chelsea Pensioners may not be impersonated.
• It is illegal to leave baggage unattended.
• Picking up abandoned baggage is an act of terrorism.
• Any person found breaking a boiled egg at the sharp end will be sentenced to 24 hours in the village stocks (enacted by Edward VI).

and other similar nonsense) is to password protect or otherwise encrypt your data.

From The Register:

“The last line of defense really is you holding your own password,” Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the EFF, said.

Aha, that may work in the US with the whole Fifth Amendment stuff, but what about in the UK where, of course, we care about.

From The Register again, regarding the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000:

The RIP Bill contains one truly frightening basic assumption: if you have stored on your computer any form of encrypted message, you will be forced on request by the police to hand over the necessary keys to decrypt this data. If you do not have the keys, YOU MUST PROVE THAT YOU HAVE NEVER BEEN IN POSSESSION OF THEM, or you could be subject to a two-year jail term.

So much for the lack of self-incrimination.

One of the world’s largest hard disk manufacturers has blocked its customers from sharing online their media files that are stored on networked drives.
Western Digital says the decision to block sharing of music and audio files is an anti-piracy effort.
The ban operates regardless of whether the files are copy-protected, or a user’s own home-produced content.

Nice of them to be considering our feelings on this.

Alexander Ross, a lawyer claims:

“The reason for a lack of standards across the industry is that there’s no such thing as the industry,” said Mr Ross.
“There is Steve Jobs and Microsoft and the two titans are at odds with one another. Between them they rule the market.

That’s utter bollocks, Mister Ross. There’s all sorts of standards for video, there just aren’t standards for DRM. From one point of view that’s a bad thing because we then have to have deals made across the industry but from another point of view it’s a good thing because it prevents one company from controlling the market - something no-one wants especially when one of them is a convicted monopolist.

Boycott Western Digital. You know it’s the right thing to do.

In a brief submitted to federal court, state antitrust regulators dismissed companies such as Google and Mozilla Corp. and technologies such as AJAX and software as a service as piddling players that pose no threat to Microsoft’s monopoly in the operating system and browser markets.
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“In spite of the advantages of arguably superior products and missteps by Microsoft, Apple has been unable to raise its share of the worldwide installed base of PCs, hovering near 3%,”
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“Competition in the market for Intel-based PC operating systems has not been restored by the five-year term of the Final Judgment,” he concluded.

Not quite but it’s amazing that Microsoft and the DoJ are both appealing against the decision to review the monopoly ruling and see if the restorative measures decided by the DoJ were sufficient. Evidently they were not, as the US states agree.

Does anyone think there has realistically been a change in the market? Is it still not dominated by one player?

Today I set up a web page for a campaign for improving a playground. It’s based around Colby Park in Four Winds in Belfast. Have a look at the Campaign for Colby Playground. Sure, it’s just a little Wordpress install but it takes my time (and my money) to set these things up and the people doing this aren’t technical people. My kids won’t even see the benefit of this park as they don’t live anywhere near it, but I was asked and it’s a good cause.

If you have any knowhow in the political process or even know how to motivate people, get in touch with them. It’s not about what you can gain from it, but rather what will become of it on it’s own.

when I get into a debate I can get very, very hot under the collar, very impassioned, and I dare say, very maddening, for once the light of battle is in my eye I find it almost impossible to let go and calm down. I like to think I’m never vituperative or too ad hominem but I do know that I fall on ideas as hungry wolves fall on strayed lambs and the result isn’t always pretty. This is especially dangerous in America. I was warned many, many years ago by the great Jonathan Lynn, co-creator of Yes Minister and director of the comic masterpiece My Cousin Vinnie, that Americans are not raised in a tradition of debate and that the adversarial ferocity common around a dinner table in Britain is more or less unheard of in America. When Jonathan first went to live in LA he couldn’t understand the terrible silences that would fall when he trashed an statement he disagreed with and said something like “yes, but that’s just arrant nonsense, isn’t it? It doesn’t make sense. It’s self-contradictory.” To a Briton pointing out that something is nonsense, rubbish, tosh or logically impossible in its own terms is not an attack on the person saying it – it’s often no more than a salvo in what one hopes might become an enjoyable intellectual tussle. Jonathan soon found that most Americans responded with offence, hurt or anger to this order of cut and thrust.

This honest trashing of an opponents argument I’ll refer to as virtual spittle. Not a derogatory thing but the act of arguing vehemently that were you face to face no doubt you would exchange mouth liquids and pieces of your last meal in the defence of your stance and the systematic unravelling of the opponent’s.

I found this to be especially true when debating points of importance in arguments on RPGnet and also in the daily grind. I get passionate about certain things, the way Stephen does. Global Warming, Operating Systems, doing the right thing the right way and other topics are areas that, to be honest, I avoid arguments in. I try hard not to get pulled into them not because my devotion to one or other side is all-consuming but because I have found that the recipients of my virtual spittle and verbosity are simply not up to the muster. I love a good debate, especially in a pub; we argue, we go red, we express exasperation and then we order another round. There’s no harm and no foul.

On RPGnet, a community I don’t love, any virtual spittle is received with the immediate shut down of the argument. The debatee is the first to hit the buzzer and cry foul. They produce the Passive Aggressive trump card. They don’t understand that it is possible to tell someone to “fuck off” and still be friends. It’s hard to explain that I’m not Passive Aggressive, I’m just Aggressive because they don’t know the difference. “Passive Aggressive” as an accusation is just a way they can get out of the losing side of an argument and not lose too much face. They’re just not ready for debate.

In the daily grind, I try to fix things that are so terribly terribly broken and it seems obvious to me that the process is so mangled and the supposed contributors are so wrapped up in their own way of doing things that they cannot conceive of anything better. Arguably I might be just their mirror counterpart but the difference is that I was hired to fix it. It so happens that my colleagues in EMEA are embracing the new way of doing things because they have had the benefits explained face to face and, perhaps more as a testament to my debating ability rather than the value of the points I was raising. In North America, however, the case is not the same. They’re agreeing to everything on the various conference calls and give lip service in emails - but when it comes down to fixing the things that are broke they’re like a classic Romero Zombie, mindlessly replaying the actions of their former life. When we Europeans correct them there are two definite approaches. One is typified by my manager, a political animal who has dealt with the Americans in the company for more than a decade and the other, well, it’s mine.

• Subservient - where you accept what they say and calmly try to work around the issue, use vague terms, ry not to get their backs up and finish the conference call with a couple more assurances and nothing actually changing
• Assertive where you actually say what’s wrong.

Yes, I tend to be Assertive in these cases because, at the end of the day, they’re paying me to come in here and fix the problem and I don’t want to waste my time or their money. If they’re happy with me being generally ineffective and nothing changing then they should let me stay at home with the kids and still pay me because I’d be achieving about the same.

So I’ll continue the way I am. Being aggressive, being forthright, honest about the issues and not afraid to trash another argument. But it’s not personal, it’s just impassioned debate.

And yes, it’s my round.