Will Knott

If you are going to sell my pictures without me getting a cut and not call it piracy… Bye.

I've known for a while that the international telecoms companies have wanted to put the Internet genie back in to its bottle so they could charge for access in the same way they make deals between themselves for international calls  (they are loosing calls to Skype and more) but I didn't know that the proposal had actually gone to the UN.

If they succeed the internet could get very expensive, and start-ups may be forced away from the market entirely.

So this shot is being fired at anyone who can access the internet then.

This wasn’t meant to be a Loose Bloggers Consortium post on the theme of “Fire”, but given my infrequent postings, I think that I should make it count.
To find out that the others in the consortium think, check out, …
Delirious, Maria/Gaelikaa, Maria SilverFox OCD writer, Padmum, Paul, Ramana, The Old Fossil, Grannymar.

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The fight for control of the internet has become critical | John Kampfner
If plans to put cyberspace under a secretive UN agency go through, states' censoring of the web will be globally enshrined In horror movies, the scariest moments usually come from the monster you can't see. So the same goes for real life, or at least online life. Over the past few years, largely out of sight, governments have been clawing back freedoms on the internet, turning an invention that was designed to emancipate the individual into a too…

as is tweeting pics to Twitter, Facebook, Plus etc from the Olympic venues.

I really hope someone tries to enforce this either in courts (with arrests) or with cease and desist letters, just to see the entire thing blow up.

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London 2012: The Most Social Games Ever? It’s Inevitable.
Artist – Space Hijackers (UK) // site specific install next to Olympic Village, East London

Reading through the Brand Guidelines for the 2012 Games [pdf], I don’t see much that is as unreasonable as the two recent over-zealous enforcements (the chips issue and the police/plastic bags silliness).
Given IOC’s promise that this would be the most social Olympics ever, it’s even more surprising that the organisers are constantly on the back foot as social media helps these gaffes spread faster th…

Well we have a referendum in Ireland. I won’t go in to the details.

This has been the focus of the airwaves for the last 6 weeks, and will be headline material until Sunday, then the features editors get another week.

However, by holding the vote on a Thursday, I means that I can’t get to my polling booth. Geography conspired against me again.

Well I expect spaceshifting, timeshifting and something-else-shifting to show up as things made legal rather than the slightly grey area they currently live under.

Of course, as usual I might be mixing up American, Australian, Canadian, Irish, English, New Zealand and Scottish law. Again.

Lets see what TDs Stephen Donnelly and Catherine Murphy with Antoin O’Lachtnain of Digital Rights Ireland, Tom Murphy of Boards.ie and solicitor +Simon McGarr .

Reshared post from +Siliconrepublic

TDs Stephen Donnelly and Catherine Murphy are crowdsourcing their response to the Copyright Review Commission

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Savvy TDs crowdsource their response to Copyright Review
A pair of independent TDs are enlisting the public as part of a crowdsourcing exercise to get feedback on their submission to the Copyright Review Commission in the aftermath of the signing of the sta…

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Giving you a choice about cookies
A year ago a law – known as Directive 2009/136/EC – came into effect throughout the European Union on the use of cookies on websites, requiring a website owner to seek visitors’ consent to cookies being saved to their computers when they visit a website (more on cookies).
Implementing the law in the UK was delayed for a year to give businesses time to become compliant. The Information Commissioner’s Office – responsible for policing the implementation of the UK-specific version of the EU law …

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Society runs on trust. Without it, anarchy rules.

I mean you might allow a strange man with heavy implements in to your home, near your family, maybe offer him food which neither of you check for poisons and when he has performed certain functions, you pay him with an unguaranteed piece of paper.

Or, you hire a plumber, offer him something to eat while here’s there and pay him with a cheque.

That is societal trust. Security depends on trust. If the vast majority of people were untrustworthy, then policing wouldn’t work. A majority of honest actors are required, and a minority of defectors exist.

This is the argument of “Liars and Outliers” by Bruce Schneier and it goes on in to more detail. Schneier began writing this book as a security focused book, but kept finding his examples and the facts kept bring things away from pure security measures and more towards “Trust”. Societal trust is different from personal trust, societal trust is needed once the small tribe becomes a much large group (Dunbar’s number is in the mix with the switch).

But both personal trust and societal trust can be abused. Defectors of trust exist. (And isn’t defector a lovely slightly neutral word here).

What do you call someone who defies the trust of society, breaks the rules of the group and unashamedly lies about their actions and reasons to their friends?

Criminals?

Corrupt?

Evil?

Then what about whistle-blowers breaking personal and professional trusts? What about creatives breaking social norms in their areas? What about Oskar Schindler?

He lied to those he had professional contacts with. He lied to the officers of the law. He corrupted government finances. To save over a thousand people from the extermination camps.

Some trusts are made to be broken.

This is a Loose Bloggers Consortium post on the theme of “Trust”.
To find out that the others in the consortium think, check out, …
Delirious, Maria/Gaelikaa, Maria SilverFox OCD writer, Padmum, Paul, Ramana, The Old Fossil, Grannymar.

Ubuntu, as well as being a very good operating system translates roughly from the South African root (not sure which language, sorry) in to English as “pleasure derived from the good fortune of others”. Its direct counterpart is found in German, namely Schadenfreude; “the pleasure derived from the bad fortune of others”.

For the last two weeks, its been a guilty pleasure working its way through the UK after the shock and anger has subsided. All of this has been aimed squarely at Rupert Murdoch.

I’m actually writing about this due to asking about the Loose Bloggers Consortium (LBC) that Grannymar writes with. That and I need a deadline to work with. This week’s topic, nominated by Anu is “Guilty Pleasures”.

And for many in in UK at least, there is pleasure to be derived… let’s ask John Finnemore on the BBC’s “Now Show“…

If you have been living in a cave (or in a compound using only dead letter drops containing USB disks for news updates) for the last few years you would have missed the power of Rupert Murdoch and News International. This man owns media properties throughout the world (and a few satellites above it) most famously a stable of newspapers in the UK and Fox News in the US. The man has had power, power to undermine and control the thrones of power in very high places. Prime Ministers, arguably Presidents, but certainly congressmen and Senators and, if the allegations are true, police were under his sway. And now he is falling from grace because of a child called Milly.

Allegations that Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked set off a chain of events which have brought Rupert Murdoch’s media empire to its knees, or at least crouching a lot. Today, he tried to stop the rot and anger by telling the Dowler family and all the other victims of phone hacking that he was deeply sorry.

He is currently facing investigations in the UK, and the allegations of possible hacking of the telephones of 9/11 victims and their families have sparked FBI and Senate investigations in the US. Its conceivable that News International, now a US based company, may either be broken up, or will be forced to shed all the Murdoch family members at its heart.

It turns out that hacking a mobile phone, in Ireland at least, is actually pathetically easy. You have to know your victims phone number, say 081-1234567. If you dial 081-5-1234567 you go directly to their voicemail, and can attempt a remote  login. Depending on the network the default password is 0000 or 1234. Given that most people dial in to their voicemail account from their registered phone, few people realise that there is a password to be changed and that they can access it from any handset. And if you can get hold of their phone, you can change the password in 20 seconds. Thanks to Brian Greene for the research (and he will never get to borrow my phone).

When someone generally disliked falls, you tend to find a few gleeful at the drop in power. Its a guilty pleasure.

But of course its not my guilty pleasure. Mine is the Transformers toys. I like the way they give you the impression of being one thing, guiding you one way, then uncovering that its something else. Or maybe slight of hand is my pleasure? Maybe. But its not as interesting as the still ongoing news story.

To find out that the others in the consortium think, check out, in alphabetical order: AKANKSHA (Anki), ANU, ASHOK, CONRAD, DELIRIOUS, GAELIKAA, GRANNYMAR, MAGPIE 11, MARIA, PADMUM and the GOM of LBC, RAMANA SIR.

I was glad to see Alannah re-started blogging, but to took me seconds to realise that it wasn’t her; she wouldn’t blog about premiership football. Now that the New Year is comfortable over, I have a resolution I’d like you to consider; update your blog at least once this year, even if its just to say “I’m closing this down”.

And now, the long-winded meat of this post.

I am subscribed to over 900 blogs in Google reader. That is a seriously silly amount of information flowing in to my brain. Or at least it would be if they were 900 actively updated blogs.The sad truth is that for a lot of reasons, blogs die. Sometimes its because life gets in the way of a keyboard. Sometimes its because a death stops typing. Sometimes its because the blog was tied to a company position and the blogger has moved to keyboards new.

A silent blog gathers no feed. Or rather, its feed sits in silence. Polls are ignored and it takes up very little attention.

But recently three things happened which makes me question that.

First was the apparent hacking of Tom Raftery’s blog feed. Or rather the feed in Google reader. It appeared as if his blog’s output was replaced by a very spammy list of products. A few hundred a day. I confirmed that he knew about it, but I didn’t want the firehose of, well, DVDs in stock so I un-subscribed while he was trying to figure out its source.

I’m not too sure if the problem was at his servers now, but let me go on.

The next feed to suddenly spring to life was the life of the knitter Alannah of “Over a Cup of Tea”. But her feed was full of the minutia of the UK Premiership Football League. This wasn’t a spam stream of products, it was a stream of valuable (to the fantasy football players I know) information. It was tied to a site called “Over a Cup of Tea”, but that wasn’t the girl I was following. So I unsubscribed.

Then, since many things happen in threes, a third blog sprung to life. This time the technology blog “Its a Feature, not a bug” was replaced by details of a Japanese dance school.Yet another dead blog sprung to life in someone else’s hands, or in this case, shoes.

So what happened.

I have two possible answers, and both lie in Google Reader feeds.

Sometimes Google creates a feed for the blog, this usually turns up if I try to share a link from my phone. The format is something like feedproxy.google.com/~r/nameofblogwithoutspaces followed by a id string for the page. However, some names occur more often than others. If you don’t blog for a while, I suspect that the name get re-cycled to another blog of the same name.

The other possibility is that, while I wasn’t looking, the blog shut down. The domain expired and was reassigned, and a new blog started up in its place. Google then saw “nameofblog.com” with a new feed and assumed that it was a continuation of the previous one, and reassigned it the old feeds it had in place.

Either of them is interesting. Just think, how often do blogs and domain expire? And if a once popular blog goes dark, and then off, if you get that old name or domain, would you suddenly find yourself with an automatic audience (and they aren’t interested).

Personally, I don’t clear out old silent feeds because, since they are silent, they don’t show up. It would take me quite a while before I noticed that someone was silent, unless their quarterly blog posts always began with “must blog more”.

Which is something I need to do more of.

take care… with the feeding of you blog,
Will

In Ireland we end up with the politicians we elect. That sounds perfectly logical and democratic; suggesting anything else would be, well, non-democratic.

However this means 3 things, firstly a TD needs to make a lot of people happy to be elected and re-elected. All politics is local, but a large amount of a local TDs work is giving their constituents the things they are already entitled to. National politics can be scuppered due to local pressures.

Secondly a TD tends to be a certain type. The talking professions such as teachers and lawyers (and one or two professional PR types) account for most of the Dail. The corporate types (who understand standard expenses claims systems) or small business people tend to not run as they don’t have the time. That and family ties. If their mother/father/close relation was a TD, there is a high chance that they will give it a shot too. Of course there are the party lines being followed.

And thirdly, a TD usually wants to be re-elected. Which means caution and conservatism.

So why not try something out. Dail reform is being talked about so lets add a radical element. A National Lottery. We already have the “millionaire raffle” so why not offer a more desirable prize; a job. Also having the National Lottery run this makes sense as they have all the infrastructure in place.

I know it sounds dumb, but how many people have said “I could do better”, so lets let them. Its one way to get a random person in there. The seat would have to be non-local, as its a national lottery, anywhere could have a winner. There should be some criteria for eligibility, I assume that the standard types for a TD would apply (age limit, Irish citizen and not in prison etc) but with a few additional catches. Current public servants would be ineligible as would currently sitting TDs and Senators. This is important; the winner cannot win next round.

Why, well its a random element. One person who is (at the start anyway) whip-less. He or she need not follow a party. This person will, statistically, not have the standard background of a TD. Could be a Moore Street trader, or a Cavan farmer or a new citizen in Mullingar. And as he or she is not incumbent to a constituency, then they can think a little more nationally. Naturally he or she will have a local focus, but those strict constituency lines may not apply. And there is nothing to stop this person trying to run as a standard TD, and declaring his or her constituency (probably local for them) next election. But they cannot try to enter again next time. And the next person to get the job will also be a random (self) selection.

Anyway, it would be an experiment. And could shake up the ruling class.

Does it make sense?