The Blog
15 Jul 2005 Bloggerheads (UK) - Prepare your angry-pants
Security Services generally despise politicians and they especially despise politicians when they are particularly stupid. There was a famous case not so long ago when an MP stood up in the UK parliament and bragged that the Argentinians couldn't do anything pre-emptive because we'd broken their encryption codes. Shortly after, they changed their codes. Doh! So now we have a case where for purely political reasons (getting elected mostly) the Republican party bragged to the media that the west had a mole in Al Qaida. And then they gave enough information to the media that they were able to name him. As a result the British MI5 had to move before they were ready on contacts in the UK and some slipped through the net. So far so stupid. Except that some of the people allegedly involved in the bombings in London last week were allegedly linked with the groups being tracked via the mole. At which point you could be forgiven for laying at least some of the blame for last week's 50 odd deaths at the US Republican party's door. Me, I'm not so sure. There are some weird anomalies around the bombings just as there were around 9/11. Not really enough to fuel a full blown conspiracy theory but enough to make you go "hmmm?". Is it a rather cute but horribly over priced robot dog from Sony? or is it an Anti Internet Banning Order?
Blunkett moots 'proof-lite' internet and banking banning orders | The Register I can think of one or two people with blogs that ought to be given AIBOs but that's another story. Guardian Unlimited | Online | Ben Hammersley: Swift and offshore
The rise of personal offshoring. Rentacoder, audio transcription, web hosting [from: del.icio.us] Microsoft's OPM for the masses - Will Longhorn DRM force you to upgrade your monitor? : So what is OPM? The successor to Microsoft's rarely-mentioned COPP (Certified Output Protection Protocol), PVP-OPM (Protected Video Path - Output Protection Management) is the first play in Microsoft's game plan to ensure that protected content stays protected. PVP-OPM performs two main functions. First, it detects the capabilities of the display devices attached to the computer. For instance, does the DVI LCD monitor that you're using have HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection)? Second, it manages what, if anything, gets sent to those devices.
OMG. Is there no end to this madness? Here's the OS working in conjunction with the video card and drivers, not to mention the software video player, extending the reach of a "broadcast flag" embedded in the content all the way out to the video display device. I can hear the sound of suits signing contracts, cash registers ringing, Apple and Linux fans crying foul and in the background hackers sharpening their tools. Yup, that'll work to keep unauthorised copies of Sith out of the customer's hands. 14 Jul 2005 There's a problem here that I've struggled with, with FOAFnet and I will struggle with, with OpenID. Sites like Tribe.net and Ecademy depend for a lot of their function on having a rich user record. Even if I run an OpenID ID provider on Ecademy and Tribe trusts it, Tribe will want to create a local user account with lots of data attached. So checking against Ecademy when logging into Tribe serves no useful purpose when they could just as well authenticate the user against the local data.
Once the user has logged in, you don't want to make round trip requests for the data on every page refresh so you have to maintain a local session with locally cached data. Wich again points at a local user database. This means that it is useful to help the user avoid typing all that data again into yet another account creation form. But single signon makes less sense. Having said all that I think there are places where a temporary check against a trusted third party is useful. And it's exactly the scenario that led to OpenID at Livejournal. That is allowing users that have been authenticated by a trusted source to leave comments against an article. So think TypeKey, not YASN account record.   [Edited to add] I've already been accused of being insensitive for the first image (mine) as one of the suicide bombers worked in an Indian restaurant. But I think it nicely illustrates a point. Consider that apart from the pint (and that could be an Indian Pale Ale), Chicken Tikka Masala is the national dish, Tea is the National drink and both of them have strong ties with the the Indian sub-continent. Every small town in Britain has an "Indian" restaurant and the vast majority of them are run by Muslim Pakistanis and Bangla Deshis. So Asians are integrated into every corner of British society. So let's understand that the problem here is not racism. The problems are extremism, violence and a small minority of disaffected youth being preyed on by the followers of a death cult. Pretty much like N Ireland then. And I still maintain that we should be finding ways of integrating that disaffected youth, no matter what skin colour or racial background, into mainstream society. They should be going out and they should be having fun. They should be the ones sticking two fingers up at authority and saying, hell no, I won't subscribe to your medieaval ideology. Hell no, I won't kill people and myself for your religion. And hell no, I won't spend my life in a closed inward looking community that wants to live in the past. I'm British, damn it and we don't do that sort of thing round here. NINJAM - Novel Intervallic Network Jamming Architecture for Music - Main
a solution to latency when trying to jam across the net [from: del.icio.us] 13 Jul 2005 Two stories have come to my attention today.
Wayback Machine sued: DMCA IFPI vs Heise vs AllofMP3 The first is about a law suit being brought in the USA where an old copy of a company's web site appears in the Wayback Machine. They are claiming copyright abuse using the much discredited DMCA. Crucially, they claim that old snapshots are available even though more recent snapshots have been prohibited via a robots.txt file that is being honoured. This is a problem that I've hit on Ecademy with Google where somebody has chosen to hide their profile from Google, but Google still maintains an entry in the index and a cached copy of the page from before they made the change. The second is about a new law in Germany, where promoting a service which is illegal in Germany is also illegal. A German magazine website that specialises in copyright issues has a link in an article to AllOfMp3, the Russian paid for music download site. They are being sued in Germany by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). And this despite the fact that they have not yet brought a case *in Germany* proving that the AllOfMp3 site is illegal under German law and within the German jurisdiction. In my naive way, I think that both cases are absurd. There should be some basic free speech view that linking to something illegal should not in itself be illegal. I also think that services like Google and the Wayback machine are too useful and too important to trans-national society as a whole to hobble them. And finally, that if you publish something on the web for public access all bets are off and it is effectively public domain in the sense that there will be copies with attribution and links to the original all over the place. Some will have limited accessibility in web caches, some will be very public like Google. Like Doc Searls, I'm scared that this vast, free and open system will get tied down, monetized and ruined as more and more commercial and governmental interests try to control it. This is what we are fighting, folks. The open and free marketplace the Internet provides is shortly going to look like the best darn mess of few-to-many distribution systems for "content" the world has ever known. It will not be the free and open marketplace it was in the first place, and should remain. The end-state will a vast matrix of national and private silos and walled gardens, each a contained or filtered distribution environment. And most of us won't know what we missed, because it never quite happened.[from: JB Ecademy] [ 13-Jul-05 8:10pm ] Nearly 25 years ago we had Rock Against Racism and the Two-Tone movement. Two weeks ago we had Rock Against Poverty. I'm here to propose Rock Against Terrorism. Maybe the words are wrong and it should be Rock Against Violence or Rock Against Bigotry. But whatever, it's about using music to include sections of British society that are alienated from what we think of British culture.
So where's the 2005 equivalent of UB40, The Clash, "A Message To You, Rudie". Where's the Bangla-Ska-Garage mashup band. Where's The Specials? Where's Skateboarders Against the Nazis? Where are all those T-shirts and badges that anyone could feel proud to wear? Music is the best. Without the Music, I don't know where we'd be. Writing this with tears in my eyes. [Edited to add] I'm feeling really freaked out by a society where a 19 year old teenager brought up in Britain is so alienated that he can be indoctrinated into killing himself and others *from his own society*. "You should be going out and you should be having fun" (c) Madness. "Rudie, don't go". I do remember Handsworth, St Pauls and Brixton, not to mention Notting Hill, but the whole Rock Against Fascism movement, Two Tone and the strange cross over between Reggae, Ska and Punk united black and white youth and did a lot to dispel the tension between them. So is there a way that music can do the same for disaffected Asian youth and build a bridge between them and their black and white brothers. (Damn, I'm tearing up again). BTW. "Rock Against Violence" is perfect. It can also be used against the extreme right wing as well as against Gangsta hip-hop and the the glorification of gun culture. And it gives all the potheads something to get behind as well. I haven't blogged for a few days. Not because there wasn't way too much tech stuff to comment on but because I've been trying to get my head round what happened in London. To all those who expressed sympathy and wondered if I was OK, thanks. But as I try never to use public transport and generally commute by megascoot, it wouldn't have affected me anyway. In reality, I was 25 miles away and overdosing on news (5 chat sessions and 10 browser windows on constant refresh).
The news today that the bombers were almost certainly teenagers from the Midlands is particularly hard to comprehend. I simply cannot understand the rift in our society that allows an idealogue to train, supply and above all indoctrinate a 19 year old to suicide bomb innocent people in their own culture and society, never mind in their own country. Perhaps part of the reason for this lack of understanding is that the home grown suicide bomber is a story that almost never appears in popular media, whether that's books, films or TV. I can only think of a single episode of a single series that tried to address this narrative. On a lighter note, I've yet to hear the inevitable British sick jokes; that wonderfully non-PC and British way of coping. The closest is the re-purposing of "We're not afraid" images to say "We're not afraid because we're drunk. Anyone for curry?" 07 Jul 2005 There were a lot of Paris 2012 T Shirts printed. Where can I get one? [from: JB Ecademy]
Google Toolbar
Wait with bated breath. The current page links to a blank page. Supposedly due today. [from: del.icio.us] 30 Jun 2005 29 Jun 2005 Mark Prisk MP, Hertford & Stortford (TheyWorkForYou.com)
My MP and his voting record [from: del.icio.us] Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent - The curse of the missing clause : While developers in the US are being hamstrung by their courts, and their counterparts in Europe are about to have software patents kick the chair out from under them, the developers in the warm and cheap places are getting busy. If you really care that your software was written in the US, then the Grokster case is quite a big deal. If not, you just shrug and move on. The rest of the world's a big place. They make software there too.
Hear, Hear! 28 Jun 2005 27 Jun 2005 Notes on RIAA and MPAA Press Conference: Corante
9-0 Unanimous in favour of MGM. "We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties." Oh, fuck... That ruling opens the door to endless law suits because it will shift the burden of proof onto the technology company to prove that the technology does not foster infringement. And the liability for acts by third parties means a pretty much open ended upper limit on damages. The only winners will be the lawyers. No change there then. 26 Jun 2005 Following Johannes and Doc
We should be able to draw out stacks for Infocard using what we know about it so far. SP and IP Infocard SXIP-MIS LID-MIS A.N.Other-MIS MIS WS.* SOAP HTTP End-User MIS WS.* SOAP Browser Extension |- Browser HTTP----| SP = Service Provider IP = Identity Provider MIS= Meta Identity System SXIP-MIS = Future SXIP that uses MIS LID-MIS = Future LID that uses MIS A.N.Other-MIS = Future Liberty/SAML/PingID/whatever on MIS So what does this mean for implementing on non-MS platforms. Well for IP and SP, you'll need at a minimum, a full WS* stack implementation. Then you'll need to reverse engineer the MIS. Then you need to convince the Identity systems who have implmented on top of that to implement on your platform on top of *your* version of the MIS. For the End User, we're going to need the browser to offload to an ActiveX or DLL. And for non-MS operating systems we need to get the browser support extension built in a way that looks the same to the browser. So the big question for me is the extent to which MS help and support people building non-MS implementations. Because without their help I just can't see anyone doing the work. And even on the MS environment I question whether anyone else will build alternate identity systems on top of the MIS. So Kim, the gauntlet is on the floor. Are you going to pick it up? Let's take this line of thinking a bit further. First the End User. Let's assume that the MS implementation of the end user part gets very wide implementation, at least as wide as the dotnet framework. In taht case on an MS OS it's actually quite reasonable to imagine extensions in Firefox, Opera and Safari to get built. We've already got extensions that interact with DLLs and local aplications so it's not so hard to see. On a non-MS OS it's all a little harder but not impossible. On the server side, the critical issue is support for the Service Provider. There's really two approaches here. The first is a native language version. This means that the WS* stack, MIS and Identity service are built in PHP or perl. Given the current state of SOAP support and the difficulty in getting the community to build it, I don't think this is going to happen. The second approach is to have WS*, MIS and Identity service written as an operating system extension or as a web server extension and then to have language extensions that talk to it so that the humble web application programmer can then just make calls in the same way you might use Expat, MySQL or Frontpage. Now we've broken the problem in two. The first part is getting LAM versions of WS*, MIS, Identity service written and deployed. The second part is getting the language extensions written. I'm repeating myself but this is not that different from Passport. And I don't see it happening unless MS puts effort into helping a community to do it. The last part is the Identity Provider as a Server side process. I'd love to see this widely distributed and a whole class of low end IPs (like Typepad) appearing. But I think the barriers to entry are just too high within this environment. If all the SP server side parts get built, then just maybe, people will then do this. But I think all the other parts have to be in place first before anyone will try. Haven't Microsoft just re-invented the RDF:Bag and RDF:Seq tags as an RSS extension?
Apart from just re-inventing the wheel, I kind of wonder what the point is. Perhaps we'll find out when there are some real examples of data using this extension. 
  1 to 20 of 3860 |