eclectech : the very model of a modern labour minister : a tribute to charles clarke and his id cards
No2ID - The GB version. Awesome! [from: del.icio.us]

'I will refuse to register for an ID card and will donate £10 to a legal defence fund' - PledgeBank - Tell the world "I'll do it, but only if you'll help"
Do it now! [from: del.icio.us]

A music lover's lament : You smiled when you first got away with selling a Billy Joel LP for $8.98, and you can damn well smile again now when we fold the worthless thing into jagged thirds and ram it up your ass.

In the last couple of days we've heard of some emails being sent out that apparently come from Ecademy. The text of the email reads almost like a typical support form email but is subtly different from anything we actually send.

If you receive these you should delete them and above all else do not open or run the attachment.

A few notes:-

- We never send emails with an attachment.

- We never request that you change your password except via a personal email from the support team which will have been obviously hand written.

Here are a couple of examples.

---

This one was actually sent by a BT Openworld connected PC and contained a virus laden attachment.

From: support@ecademy.com [mailto:support@ecademy.com]
Sent: 14 June 2005 10:13
To: xxx.yyy@zzz.com
Subject: Warning Message: Your services near to be closed.

Dear Ecademy Member,

We have temporarily suspended your email account xxx@yyy.zzz.

This might be due to either of the following reasons:

1. A recent change in your personal information (i.e. change of address).
2. Submiting invalid information during the initial sign up process.
3. An innability to accurately verify your selected option of subscription due to an internal error within our
processors.
See the details to reactivate your Ecademy account.

Sincerely,The Ecademy Support Team

+++ Attachment: No Virus (Clean)
+++ Ecademy Antivirus - www.ecademy.com

---

From: webmaster@ecademy.com [mailto:webmaster@ecademy.com]
Sent: Monday, June 13, 2005 3:30 PM
To: xxx.yyy@zzz.com
Subject: Your password has been successfully updated

Dear user xxx.yyy,

You have successfully updated the password of your Ecademy account.

If you did not authorize this change or if you need assistance with your
account, please contact Ecademy customer service at: webmaster@ecademy.com

Thank you for using Ecademy!
The Ecademy Support Team

+++ Attachment: No Virus (Clean)
+++ Ecademy Antivirus - www.ecademy.com [from: JB Ecademy]

I had a wonderful Indian dinner last night with a collection of notables including David Weinberger, Cory Doctorow and a cast of BBC employees. At some stage in the evening I was talking to the ubiquitous Tom Coates about factors in the adoption and success of social networking technologies. He suggested that for a technology or system to be successful it must provide an immediate payback and benefit for three participants:-
- The end user
- The community
- The company or organisation that runs the system
If we look at last.fm, del.ico.us, flickr and a host of others we can clearly see that they fulfill a basic need and provide an immediate payback for the end users because even without the social network, they let you track your music listening, bookmarks and provide an easy way to post photos on the web. All three systems then derive added value from the fact that lots of people are using them and feed this back into the end users behaviour. Finally, and inevitably, the organization gets benefit from high usage. Although like all internet systems, success has a cost. I'm sure you can apply the same sort of analysis to the growth of Tags on blogs and Technorati or the growth of Skype.

What I'm interested in here is whether the same thing applies to new standards. If we look back at RSS. It appeared fully formed from the heads of Netscape and Dave Winer. Simultaneously with the standard appearing there were both tools for generating RSS and tools for reading it. Atom was the same; really not long after the standard was first proposed we had support for it in several programming toolkits as well as from Movable Type and Blogger. If we go back to the early RFCs there was a very tight link between the appearance of the RFC and the appearance of toolkits and applications that actually used them.

So I think it's fair to say that Standards need reference implementations to succeed and that, in my famous quote "Standards without implementation are just academic wanking"!

But for a standard to succeed, we need more. We actually need adoption as well. So the big question is how do we engage the early adopters and get them to actually use it. This is usually seen as being a political issue. The trick is to get one of the bigger players to support it. Which then means wining and dining key individuals within those players, getting speaking engagements at conferences, making noise on mailing lists and blogs and all the other evangelist activities.

Now even if you do all that, you still can't get the standard off first base if people don't actually use it. And at that point, I think we're back to the question of immediate payback for the three layers of participant. End user, community and system owner/provider.

And so finally I get to the point of this whole post. There are a whole lot of metadata standards that many of us feel ought to exist and buoyed up by the success of RSS we think it should be easy to get them going. And a lot of these fall under the heading of microformats. eg
- A structured "About me" page in common blogging software that provides a Personal Identity Server.
- A structured way of showing my friends and their presence on my personal website
- Open Reviews. For reviews placed on a personal site rather than IMDB or Amazon
- Open Listings. A way for me to post my offered/wanted listings on my website instead of Craigslist
- Open Events. A Web wide shared calendar based on my own public calendar on my website
- Publisher driven advertising. Anyone can post an advert and aggregators then serve them. Publishers can pick and choose which ones they show.
- Attention. A more formal way to say, right now I'm listening to this, reading that, viewing this TV program, learning about this, working on that, talking on Skype to them, participating in this IRC channel where I last posted 3 hours ago.
- Location. I'm currently in Geneva airport in transit to Heathrow and then San Diego for Etech 06. Or the Starbucks in Kings Road.

Now there's at least some work being done on creating standards and providing transports and displays for all of these. But the catch is not only are they missing implementations at the toolkit level, but they're also missing applications that actually do something useful with them. But much much worse, for quite a few of them there's no obvious immediate payback for any of the end user, community or a system or application owner. To take just one example of OpenReviews; why should I make the effort to write a review and post it on my website. And especially if there the associated systems don't exist to pick them up, aggregate them and get the extra link love of people reading them elsewhere and clicking back to me.

I'm especially concerned here about the Personal Identity Server. This really *should* exist. But it's dead boring and the payback for the user is minimal. At least initially.

So I'm not really doing my usual thing of "Bitching and Moaning before eventually Agreeing". This is more a call to arms for people who are doing the work to define standards to enable these sorts of opportunities described above. Even if you write a good well documented standard, and even if you build reference tools to use the standard, and even if you do the politics to get the standards adopted in systems, it still won't come to anything if you don't provide a compelling reason to adopt it to the end user, the community and to commercial or non-commercial system owners.

Making the Jump to tableless design
[from: del.icio.us]

LoicLeMeur Wiki - The european blogosphere is an amazing barn-raising attempt to try to map the European spread of blogs. The gist is that it is much much wider than is generally portrayed in the (US dominated) media.

Found via Boing-Boing, Cory said Loic sez, "In 24 hours, about 40 bloggers from around Europe created wiki pages to get a better picture of the European blogosphere. Everybody is welcome to correct and add information so that we bridge Europe with blogs faster." [from: JB Ecademy]

Perhaps we need a firefox add on or bookmarklet to auto-fill phishing sites with random detail following
PBS | I, Cringely . June 2, 2005 - Man Bites Phish. Cringely suggests swamping Phishing sites with random data.

Though actually this hasn't got a hope in hell of working because it relies on lots of people doing something with no immediate payback. More on that later regarding getting critical mass for micro-content.

New Skype Developer Zone
[from: del.icio.us]

This site is based on Drupal. So "node.php" appears often in the URLs. So what does Google AdSense throw up?

Node
Huge selection of Node Albums and posters
Search for Node now

What is the point?

Hey! Ford! Listen up!

I want to buy a Hybrid Focus.

Just a thought. The London congestion charge is currently free for Electric and Hybrid vehicles. If we end up with a national congestion charge and road tolls will they also be free? They should be because that could provide a large initiative to the motor industry to get us to use more efficient vehicles and we could be seen to be doing something for global warming.

Marc's Voice: Personal Identity Summit in London - Sept. 21st : Listen to Julian Bond bitch and moan and then agree.

Miaaaoooww!!!!

I guess I've been found out.

Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog : Commenting on my over-excited piece from yesterday, Julian Bond replies: Pick a very popular open source web system wth very wide deployment. It doesn't matter which, but something like Drupal, phpBB, Wordpress, Movable Type, PHP-Nuke.

This is a really good idea, Julian.

[Julian] Now try and imagine a roadmap where Infocard gets implemented on that application and gets widely deployed.

OK. I'm going to pick one of these and show exactly how I would do it.

So I threw down the gauntlet, and Kim has picked it up. In the unlikely event that we both forget about this, somebody please call us on it. I'm going to be very interested in how this plays out and which popular PHP/Perl application he uses as an example. Noting that his blog is running on Radio and that Radio has quite good SOAP-rpc support, I could be mean and suggest he Infocard enables his own blog and blog comments. But that would be mean, right?

Tech & Net News on technology and the Internet from The Times and Sunday Times

Yet another one sided article. What really gets me about this is that there is no way on the Times site to answer back to the journalist (Steve Boggan) or at least none that I can see.

- The key person in this is Gina Harkell, a musician, who settled for £2,500 for allegedly sharing 1,330 songs. Quite a modest collection really, about 100 CDs or about £1,200 worth. And not exactly the major file sharer we were told that the BPI were going after.

- "The oft-repeated mantra of file-sharers was that allowing people access to free music would generate interest and boost sales, but a whole tranche of independent and BPI-sponsored studies in Britain, the US, Europe and Canada have shown that people who get music for free are likely to spend up to 59 per cent less on paid-for music." (my emphasis) Well that depends on which study you read. There have also been studies that show no statistical link or that show a rise in spending.

- To fully understand, it is necessary to go back to 1999 when Shawn Fanning, an 18-year-old American student, released Napster, a computer software program that enabled people to swap digital music files. Alarm bells instantly began ringing at US and British record companies. If these kids could obtain music simply by swapping among themselves, surely sales would drop? And they did, as hundreds of millions of files were swapped for free in breach of copyright law. Right. In the midst of a recession and a time when singles were no longer selling.

Just had a great IM about Skype with someone who runs a small web hosting business. Names changed to protect the innocent.

Julian Bond says: ps, I wish you'd use Skype instead of/as well as MSN...
Julian Bond says: I'm trying to wean myself off MSN and run just one IM program. And you;re the only contact left.
XXXX says: ok I might have to re-think the strategy as skype was getting a bit abused in the office
Julian Bond says: heh
Julian Bond says: Abused by cold callers?
XXXX says: that as well as staff personal calls and the fact that there was 15 people in (the office) using it and it was killing the connection
Julian Bond says: typical web product. Destroyed by its own success...
XXXX says: exactly
XXXX says: it was cutting through the bandwidth of the standard VoIP calls we were making because you can't really QOS http
XXXX says: well it's quite difficult
XXXX says: now I'm considering trying to install a dedicated connection for Skype calls
XXXX says: crazy.................................

So Steve Jobs made the big announcement last night that Apple is moving to Intel processors. Somewhere in there he also said that OSX86 would only run on Apple hardware.

What puzzles me about this is what makes an Intel motherboard an Apple motherboard. If you look inside a current Apple desktop there's a lot of commodity hardware; disk drive, PSU, memory, graphics card etc. You can run a PC keyboard and mouse. They have USB ports, ethernet ports and so on.

Now presumably the early machines will be Intel processors with Intel glue chips and an Intel motherboard. And I bet they will be very, very similar to Intel PC motherboards. My guess is that there will be a single Apple ROM or gate array that the OS will lock into. Which means I think that we'll see a rash of almost functional clones that try to reverse engineer the Apple proprietary bit and/or that require the addition of a single Apple chip from a genuine Apple machine. There's strong sense of deja vu here as we've been here before back in the old Mac world. The catch this time around is that the Apple chip is likely to be surface mounted rather than socketed.

One other catch in all this. It's very likely that future Intel chips will have hardware support for a DRM standard that will also be supported by MS in Longhorn. So what we'll have is "One DRM to rule them all, One DRM to find them, One DRM to bring them all, And in the darkness bind them". Should give the MPAA and RIAA some hope. Except of course that all DRM gets broken. Just Say No To DRM! [from: JB Ecademy]

Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog argues back about my dissing Infocard. I got a mention on Doc's Garage as well. Heh!

Here's what I posted back to Kim.

I put up the straw man, and deliberately painted a bleak picture. And rightly you're arguing back ;) I'm also extrapolating a bleak future from some current problems that may or may not resolve themselves. So let me re-state and provide a bit more reasoning.

The touchstone I have is whether Marc Canter's Ourmedia would be able to use Infocard where the end user is using Firefox. Now Ourmedia is based on Drupal and is pretty much a pure PHP implementation. It's representative of a very large number of small to medium sized websites running on pretty simple hosting. And the geek early adopters have switched from IE to Firefox wholesale. If you can't get them on board and evangelising, how will you get the great unwashed on board?

So one piece at a time.

- Firefox. (and Safari, and non Windows clients). Requiring a DLL/ActiveX to use Infocard doesn't completely preclude non-Intel, non-Windows, or non-IE browsers but it makes implementation a damn sight harder.

- PHP SOAP never really got traction. It almost works but the document model is essentially unfinished. Now how long have we been trying to get basic SOAP interop? I seem to have been following this for what feels like at least 4 years. And I'm still reading stories about how this or that toolkit doesn't really work with that or this toolkit in another language.

Now we're talking about building an Identity system on top of a large stack of unfinished protocols on top of a basic communications protocol that still has some interop problems on top of a very common web scripting environment where the bottom level of the stack is not going anywhere. Yup, that'll work.

I fully expect that if you're working with an MS only environment using MS only tools, then Infocard will work. But I can't see anything that says that you want to embrace those millions of Drupal, phpBB, Wordpress, Movable Type, php-Nuke, MediaWiki sites. Now that's a business decision that MS is free to make. But it precludes the whole of the long tail of web building. Including me.

Smart Mobs: Remixing the BBC
mashups of Google Maps and BBC backstage data [from: del.icio.us]

Following Cory Doctorow's talk (video here) on last wed night, here's a list of European organisations that are fighting for customer rights over the Broadcast flag and similar copyfight legislation.

FFII: http://www.ffii.org/

Union for the Public Domain: http://www.public-domain.org/

FIPR: http://www.fipr.org/

FSF Europe: http://fsfeurope.org/

BEUC: http://www.beuc.org/

Which?: http://www.which.net/

and in the USA,

EFF http://www.eff.org/
[from: JB Ecademy]

I'm really bothered by the reports coming out that future intel processors will have DRM support baked in. A few thoughts.

- AMD will have to match them to retain compatibility. So there's no competition here.

- How does this affect the rumours that Apple is considering switching to Intel?

- It's only support. And it will have to be added to with DRM software that uses the processor instructions. So it won't have any effect until MS (and others) actually use it in some future version of WMP, REAL and others.

- It's hard to see how it could have any effect on files that do *not* have DRM baked in. It's impossible for the processor to tell the difference between a public domain file with no DRM and a coprighted file with no DRM. So once the DRM in a file is broken and it's turned into something that is clean, the processor won't make it any easier to restrict distribution. And since *all* DRM gets broken eventually it doesn't actually change the landscape any.

- Which means that this is nothing more than an Intel-Microsoft (Apple?) ploy to convince the government-entertainment-military-industrial complex that this time the DRM really is secure. Really.

- And as with so many other of these cases, it's really, really hard to see why the technology industry is in such a rush to deliberately hobble their products to support another industry with a broken business model. And the only answer I can see is that the technology industry is now one and the same as the entertainment industry. It's not us vs them. It's them vs them. And as such Intel, Microsoft, Apple, Real, (Dell, etc, etc) apparently hate their customers just as much as Sony-EMI and all the content copyright owners.

And the solution to all this is the same one it's been for some time now (like back to 1985).

Just Say No To DRM

As customers we should vote with our feet and pockets. And just refuse to buy their deliberately hobbled products. If there's a source of non-DRM music, we should use that instead of their rip-off aid download or subscription download services. If they try to sell us DRMed CDs, we should take them back and complian that they don't work. If Tivo or Sky+ or whoever change their rules on us after buying the product we should send it back and sue them for breach of terms, lying in their advertising and selling a product that is not fit for use. We should never buy a region encoded DVD player. If Intel try to sneak DRM in the backdoor, we should call them on it and buy AMD. If Dell will only sell us an Intel based box with DRM, we should switch to Lenovo.