Peter Brown of the Free Software Foundation (from BBC News):

“Media companies are trying to force people to think about copyright infringement almost in line with murder on the high seas.”

That’s complete poppycock, and the FSF should know better; they’ve been around more than long enough to have seen the software and music piracy phenomenon arise, and that being the case, I can’t believe they don’t know that “pirates” play up to the skull-and-crossbones image.

It’s only recently, when massive copyright infringement has become mainstream (and yes, sadly, it is mainstream), that people have started to object to the use of the word “piracy” in this context, and only then because they want to think they’re doing nothing wrong.

He goes on to say

“Copyright law is about copying and reproduction of work; that is on the statue books for everyone and is sufficient to tackle the problem.”

which, again, is complete arse-gravy (to quote Stephen Fry). We can tell that it isn’t sufficient to tackle the problem because there are many thousands of copyrighted files being shared every day on peer-to-peer networks, and the few prosecutions to date have done little to discourage that.¹

Also, anyone involved with copyright will tell you that it’s presently impossible to enforce to any reasonable extent because of jurisdictional issues. For instance, the infringer may be in (say) Italy, and may be using a service run by a German company but hosted on servers in London and whose details are being obscured by a “privacy” service run by an American company.

So, you want to start a lawsuit? You’ll first have to obtain a subpoena from a U.S. court, which requires that you file a suit in the United States. But the U.S. court doesn’t have any jurisdiction in London, so in order to get the name of the German company you’ll need to sue the U.K.-based hosting company in a U.K. court. You still haven’t got the name of the infringer yet, and you still don’t even know which country they’re in. So now you sue the German company in a German court to get them to give up the name of the infringer. If you’re lucky, you have name and address and you know the infringer is Italian. So you start another lawsuit in an Italian court.

The tally so far? Lawsuits in four different countries, which means at least four sets of lawyers; you can’t get anyone to pay for those because the people you were suing weren’t individually doing anything wrong… you just needed them to give up the name of their customers. You probably could recover the costs—which, by now are astronomical—from the copyright infringer, however that assumes that they actually have enough money to pay for all those lawsuits and lawyers, which is unlikely. And how long has all of this taken? Years, probably. Some court systems are fast; others simply are not.

This is uneconomic and impractical even for huge corporations, and Peter Brown would have us believe that it’s a viable solution for e.g. solo software developers?! I’m beginning to see why Fake Steve Jobs calls them “freetards”.

Personally, I think that the fact that the problem here is widespread misbehaviour on the part of the general public means that the only option is for copyright infringement to become a petty crime, like shoplifting. Of course, the civil rights movement will probably fight such a move, but at the end of the day we either have to accept that copyright isn’t working (in which case the only option will be strong DRM, which nobody really likes), or do something about it.

An Indian judge has issued a court summons for two gods.

I’d laugh my head off if they actually turned up, but given my scepticism about the existence of deities generally (gods, as far as I’m concerned, are a lot of superstitious nonsense that we could usefully do without¹), I find the prospect disappointingly unlikely.

It does put the priest in a quandary though. If they don’t turn up, who is the court going to hold in contempt? Surely the priest, as the representative of those gods, is the only option, which means he might very well win his case and go to jail :–)

Somewhat predictably, the “privacy” lobby¹ has been taking advantage of the increased publicity after the recent H.M. Revenue & Customs debacle.

However, the entire debate is marred by the fact that all of the people shouting the loudest are completely missing the point.

The problem is not really that HMRC has just lost 25 million sets of personal details. That’s very careless of them, of course, and it’s quite right that they should be chastised for it. But that isn’t really the problem.

The problem is that the Government, the banks, building societies, lenders and credit reference agencies use your personal details as an identifier for you, without authentication of any sort. If it weren’t possible to take out a loan in someone else’s name just by knowing a few personal details, the loss of data from HMRC would be incompetent, but largely inconsequential.

The right fix is not to enact new and even sillier laws to “protect” our personal data—to do that would be to treat the symptom, not the cause. The right fix is to close the loophole that is being exploited by so-called identity thieves². And the loophole is the fact that the Government doesn’t issue us with a decent identity mechanism that can be positively authenticated³.

The sad thing about this entire affair is that identity cards, done right, would solve this problem in a fairly satisfactory manner, and without posing any real risk of loss of privacy.

Apparently, one in ten U.K motorists has collided with a parked vehicle and driven off, according to the BBC. One in ten!!

If true, I reckon ten percent of U.K. motorists should probably have their driving licenses confiscated.

I have to say, I’ve thought for ages that the focus on technical proficiency in the driving test was misguided. It isn’t incompetence that causes the largest number of problems on the road, it’s peoples’ attitudes, so what we really need is a psychological test, rather than trying to beef-up what was already a perfectly good proficiency test.

From Universe Today:

And this was the technique that Redfield and his team used to measure the atmosphere. “Take a spectrum of the star when the planet is in front of the star,” explains Redfield. “Then take a spectrum of the star when it’s not. Then you divide the two and get the planet’s atmospheric transmission spectrum. Each time the planet passes in front of the star the planet blocks some of the star’s light. If the planet has no atmosphere, it will block the same amount of light at all wavelengths. However, if the planet has an atmosphere, gasses in its atmosphere will absorb some additional light.”

It occurs to me that this approach has an interesting flaw. If we were to find a planet whose body was transmissive for some reason (the example that springs to mind is a planet made entirely of glass or of some translucent or transparent mineral like quartz or diamond), the assumption that the solid body of the planet blocks light equally at all wavelengths is no longer true.

What’s the likelihood of such a body existing? Quite low, I should think; after all, many things that we think of as transparent would probably be opaque at planetary sizes. But then the universe is a big place, and there are plenty of strange and unlikely sounding objects out there already.

I suppose most such configurations are likely to show up in the line spectra, but even then my guess is that they could easily be mis-interpreted. That, of course, is one of the hazards of all of this type of research… because we can’t actually resolve the planets themselves, we don’t really know what we’re looking at. It’s all best-guess and assumptions. In a few hundred years’ time, I’m sure people will look back on the present-day planet hunters with considerable amusement, just as many of us do today at the unusual beliefs of some of our ancestors.

Stephen Fry’s latest post includes the following explosion of despair:

“How come we British are just about the only nation on earth who have to make the tedious and entirely unnecessary three extra keystrokes every time we type a URL? I could be stephen.fr in France, stephen.za in South Africa, stephen.ru in Russia, stephen.nl in Holland, etc, etc, but here? Oh no, it’s stephen dot co dot bloody uk. How annoying is that?”

It should really be “stephen dot me dot bloody uk”, of course. “.co.uk” is really intended for commercial organisations, but because of its liberal registration policies, like the similar “.com” TLD it has been widely abused for other uses. As a result, the general public seems, not unsurprisingly, to be a little mystified as to what the TLDs and the U.K. SLDs actually mean.

It may still seem a little irritating having to type a few extra keystrokes, though of course you’re entirely free to register “stephen.com” instead, and having these fixed SLDs does make it a little harder for people to fraudulently set up sites that appear to belong to the British Government (for instance). Particularly now that internationalized domain names are becoming available… can you tell the difference between “.gov.uk” and “.gоv.uk”? I find it quite difficult myself, but the two are different.

Anyway, if you want the reasons for the “.co” or “.me” and a list of second-level domains, Wikipedia has one.

From MacWorld:

“The use of unsanctioned devices, iPhone or otherwise, in the enterprise adds tremendous complexity for IT managers and executives trying to develop strategies around mobility while maintaining control and security over such devices,” wrote IDC Mobility Enterprise Device Solutions analyst Sean Ryan, in a press release. “IT managers need to be aware of the implications of allowing iPhone access to corporate networks.”

It’s a shame that many in the IT industry have forgotten what IT is fundamentally about. It is not about “maintaining control and security” as the analyst above suggests. It is about improving the productivity of a business through the use of computer technology to automate common tasks and to assist in the running of the business.

Certainly there needs to be some element of thought given to security, but it needs to be balanced with an understanding that the IT department is there to serve the needs of the business and its staff.

“Islam is a moderate religion… if a person deserts Islam, we kill him.”¹

Those were the words spoken by a Muslim cleric in charge of a “re-education facility” (the Centre for Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue) in Afghanistan during the bad old days of the Taliban. This was the place you were sent if, as a man, you shaved your beard. Or if you repeatedly failed to turn up for prayer (and survived the beatings that would be dished out by the Taliban patrolling the streets). Or were caught listening to music, especially “music with women singing”. Or playing games. Or for committing any number of other offences, many of which would seem trivial to you and me.

Why does this quote seem appropriate now? Well, apparently Gillian Gibbons deserves to be shot for “insulting religion”. How did she commit this grievous crime? By asking her class to name a teddy bear; they chose the name “Muhammad”.

I happen to think that she was rather naïve to allow the name “Muhammad” to stand, but I certainly don’t think she deserves to be shot for it. Whether she deserves the 15 day jail sentence or the order expelling her from Sudan is a slightly more difficult question though; liberal commentators claim that this is wholly unacceptable, but then those self-same liberals also claim that it is the right of the religious to follow their religion, and you can’t really have it both ways². At least, not unless all religions adopt liberal principles as their fundamental ideals, and they simply don’t.

It seems that our glorious government (yeah, I know, the sarcasm will drip on the carpet…) has outdone itself once again. Having admitted twice already in recent days that it had “misplaced” the details of millions of British taxpayers, it has just had to admit to having lost the child benefit and bank details of, get this, 25 million people.

Yes, you read that right. Nearly half the population of our country has just been told that a CD containing (apparently) unencrypted copies of their personal data has been lost in the mail.

Why didn’t HMRC encrypt the data on the CDs? Why didn’t they send the data by encrypted e-mail? Or upload it to a secure server? Why did the National Audit Office not simply have access to the HMRC computer system?

Who knows?

(I’ll just add that I don’t think it’s fair on the basis of this almighty cock-up to criticise the idea of identity cards. If we’d had identity cards and a proper centralised database, there wouldn’t have been any need to send the data on blasted CDs in the first place. But it does show that whoever is in charge of the whole identity card and government database project needs to know what they’re about. i.e. Let’s not use the same people responsible for this debacle. Or the people the banks used to design their Chip & PIN system, which it turns out is not nearly as secure as it could have been.)

John Gruber just wrote a piece about how he hopes that Amazon’s new e-books flop.

Personally I don’t think we need to hope. The physical experience of a real book is still far superior to any electronic version I’ve yet seen. The only way I’m ever going to be persuaded that e-books are a good thing is if someone makes a physical e-book that looks and feels like a real book, that has multiple electronic pages (preferably at least twenty) and onto which I can load any of my digital books.

Even then e-books will be worse than real books, because publishers will be concerned (and rightly… as a software developer, I’m only too aware of the horrible problem of copyright infringement and the total lack of respect the public has for other peoples’ hard work) about theft of their material. That isn’t a problem with real books, since it’s uneconomic (generally speaking) to copy one.

In the meantime, I may use the on-line version of Version Control with Subversion, but I still own (and use) a paper copy, which says it all, I think. The only books I use entirely in on-line form are Apple’s developer docs, and the only reason for that is that they’re updated so regularly and are so large that printing them is uneconomic.