State control of your data is increasing and they people concerned have realised that ‘getting them while they are young’ seems to be the easiest way to slip these databases and surveillance systems in to place.
Seriously, look at the responses to the library fingerprints link – shouldn’t we be concerned that we are creating children who will accept anything for the sake of ’safety’?
The question therefore is what can we do to educate children about the flaws in such systems?
My immediate thought is to make Orwell’s ‘1984′ and Doctorow’s ‘Little Brother‘ compulsory English texts. But what else? Perhaps ORG/FIPR/No2ID should start setting out their stalls at school fetes, and town shows, or start making child friendly websites?
But what else can we do?
I’m open for suggestions.
(And the first person to say that ‘if you’ve nothing to hide then you’ve nothing to fear’ will have their net curtains removed, their walls replaced with glass and be made to sign a declaration stating that they trust this, and all other future governments, as well as every soul that works for the civil service, the NHS, social services, transport your local council etc…)
I’ve spoken before on the ‘Connecting for Health’ IT project, its something that frankly gives me the willies; a huge database of all your medical details that has shockingly bad security measures.
(I’ve spoken to people working on the system, and trust me, it’s horrendously insecure).
They are having a consultation process on the use of your medical information, which you can take part in on-line.
The health and well-being of the population can be improved by activities such as medical research, disease surveillance, screening, needs assessment and preventative activities.
NHS CFH is keen to obtain the views of the general public, patients and other interested parties on how patient information held by the NHS should be used for additional purposes such as research.
I suggest that everyone in the UK has a look at it.
From the Open Rights Group mailing list I’m part of, someone has made the following point.
Note that the survey more than once claims that patients have no legal right to control information they have given the NHS about themselves once it has been anonymised.
As a matter of law this is nonsense.
Information given in confidence may not be used or disclosed except for the purpose for which it was supplied unless the supplier consents, and this is not changed by removing the supplier’s name. So I hope responders will challenge this (and perhaps also the blithe claim that
anonymisation only fails in the case of people with very rare diseases, which greatly understates the risk that an aggregation of conditions,
dates and places will identify someone just as plainly as a name and address).
This is just exactly the sort of function creep that I mentioned in the previous post, please go and have your own say about your data being used in this fashion.
Oh, and you folks do me proud. If anyone else wants to join up (I do recommend it, I’m a proud supporter, and you can see the sorts of bright people we have involved) you can find out more here. These folks do good work that you can help support for less than the price of two pints of lager.
I do so love my Sony e-reader, it’s small, it’s tough and the text display is very much like paper. With it I can sling it in my bag and have a large chunk of my library with me at any one time.
For a while it was only available in America which is where I bought mine. I then waited what seemed like an eternity for it to be released over here in the UK.
In America there is a lovely big library of books you can download electronically and until Waterstones fired up their version of the e-book library over here in the UK the only books I could (legally) read on my reader were those either in the Public Domain, or licensed under the Creative Commons license.
So I was hoping for big things from the Waterstones launch.
The Waterstones website is not as slick or intuitive as the Sony’s American ebook library. To search for specific e-books as opposed to paperback or hardback formats, you need to hit the ‘advanced search’ button. The ebook minisite’s search bar will, by default, search the whole of the site.
For an example, if you go to the Waterstones ebook site and search for ‘Devil May Care’, the first four results are in non-ebook formats.
But here is the main problem. I really like the works of Neal Stephenson and I’ve been looking forward to reading his new book ‘Anathem’. I’m making an effort to buy as many new books in e-book format because they take up less space in my flat, are more portable and with the Sony e-reader, there is little difference between that screen and the printed page.
Also, downloading an ebook really does tickle the part of the monkey brain that desires instant gratification. Now waiting for the postman to drop an Amazon package through my letterbox and no need to go hunting for a copy (that may not be in stock) in physical bookshops.
But of course, ‘Anathem‘ is not in the Waterstones e-book store.
If I were an American I could buy it from the Sony library with no problems, but because of what I assume is licensing concerns it’s not available in the UK. Actually there is very little in the Waterstones library that I am interested in reading, it has quite a limited selection and as mentioned earlier the search mechanism discourages browsing.
At least I assume that it’s the licensing that is the problem – It is possible that Waterstones could be purposefully limiting the number of ebooks that they ’stock’ in order to determine demand. Or perhaps, for some reason, they want the e-reader to fail.
So they have a lost sale. If I weren’t such a rabid fan of Stephenson’s books I wouldn’t now go and buy the physical object, I’d just not bother.
I quite fancied reading ‘Apache‘, but it’s not available as an e-book and I don’t desire to read it enough to buy it in hardback.
One lost sale right there.
Electronic bits after all do not respect boundaries – It’s how I’ve seen, loved and evangelised ‘Burn Notice‘ before it’s show on UK TV. It’s why I make my book (and forthcoming sequel) available for download. Everyone who enjoys a book gets to appreciate the author and so will be more likely to buy other books by them.
By limiting the amount of readable material you are cutting your market. Can someone tell me how that makes sense?
It’s no wonder the torrent sites are doing a fine business, to take traffic away from them the legitimate companies need to concentrate on making the user experience of getting the content as easy and painless as possible. It’s the reason why I download my music from iTunes rather than bittorrent it, pure convenience and the satisfaction that comes from doing the right thing
Anyway, I’ve sent Waterstones an email, so I’ll be interested in their reply.
While I am unapologetically a Mac fan-boy, it does annoy me slightly to see people like the BBC reporting on the ‘upcoming’ WWDC, rather than just reporting on things that are definitely announced.
What also annoys me is that I’m at work during the keynote, so shall be hitting ‘refresh’ on my iPhone to catch the Engadget coverage.
Here is my wish list.
Opening up the iPhone bluetooth. While the onscreen keyboard is fine for twittering, I’d really like to pair it up with one of my bluetooth keyboards. While they are at it, let me pair up my bluetooth GPS as well, that way I won’t have a phone battery that lasts just a few minutes.
The iPhone application store – downloadable apps? Yes please.
02 to announce free upgrades to any Mac, native running of Direct X windows games for instance, or something to make emulation of Direct X easier for virtualisation.
A Decent .Mac experience – something that will make me want to pay for hosting + extras, the extras being the main draw.
Announcement of a tablet computer, an iPhone+ device perhaps. It seems that a lot of work is going into the iPhone SDK, so why restrict it to just this one physical platform? Have Mac OSX Touch announced as an operating system. There are plenty of applications for such a machine and Apple’s drive towards ‘thin and light’ would mean that a computer without a keyboard would seem to fit that goal.
Partnership deals with e-Book retailers similar to the MS Reader relationship, something that works on both desktop and iPhone platforms. While I hate DRM, I still have to use it for my e-Books, being able to read it on the Mac platform would save me having to dual-bot my laptop.
More games – preferably developers taking the Blizzard route of releasing both Mac and PC versions in one box. Age of Conan and Warhammer would be my favourites. Hopefully Spore will further prove the success of multi-platform titles.
One last thing that no-one saw coming and will blow our minds – just for the sheer poetry of it.
You know something – I’m really rather against guns. Horrible shooty type things that the local hoodlums use to put holes in each other when they have money burning a hole in their pocket and they can’t be arsed with a knife.But there is something deliciously geeky about this concept weapon.
I like the thinness of it, I *love* Mac OSX. I’m not bothered that there isn’t a slot for optical media.
But it is missing a few things like Firewire and a smaller footprint that I would have liked to see in preference to the thinness.
So, for what I would use it for (writing on the move), I’d rather have an Asus EEEPC, it’s much cheaper so I wouldn’t feel worried about throwing it around in the back of an ambulance and I think I can live with the smaller keyboard.
Or I may just wait until a fold-out keyboard for the iPhone turns up…
As for Time Capsule – the price seems right and as I run much of my life off my Macbook (hoping one day to be able to get a Macbook Pro) wireless, seamless backups seems like a dream come true. Of course, if I could get Time machine working with my three NAS drives I could save that money as well.
I was surprised to see the Maps location update working in the UK. And I won’t be holding my breath waiting for the video rentals to make their way over here.
(Well, if iTunes managed to stop me hitting P2P sites for music, I’m sure it can do the same for *ahem* the sort of people who download movies).
Actually the biggest and most surprising announcement wasn’t made by jobs – it was the Fox announcement that they would be putting ‘digital copies’ on their DVDs. The devil is no doubt in the details, but it’s an interesting move.
Two interesting bits of news from the Virtual Worlds Forum.
First off, Peter Edwards, the director of the upcoming ‘Home‘ platform for the PS3 stated that they were very interested in consumer created content and that, as soon as it was possible, they would be including the tools for users to make their own objects.
And that there would be an economy where you would be able to sell them.
I would imagine that they would have to employ moderators clearing the content before it becomes public in order to avoid the ‘Dildo in the room*’ problem. Especially as I doubt that there will be an age restriction on using Home.
I have a few ideas how the Economy might work, but that is a subject for an upcoming post
The second rumour is just that, a rumour (and to be honest I don’t hold out much hope for it being true), but a person who works for There.com told me that there would be a Mac client ’sometime next year’.
This person didn’t know what Boot Camp was, so I’m not too hopeful about this.
UPDATE: I’ve just had it confirmed from two other sources, there.com is working on a Mac client and are hiring people to work on it at the moment. There is joy in my heart, because I consider There.com much more social than Second Life.
*The ‘Dildo In The Room’ problem is that no matter the intended audience, if you allow user generated content, someone will make sex toys in your virtual world. Like the elephant in the room, people try not to talk about it. This is related to the ‘Time until penis” measurement*
‘*’Time Until Penis’ – The amount of time from software release until some bright spark crafts a giant penis out of whatever tools are available. (In World of Warcraft I think it was created out of gnome corpses…)
The UK government could legislate to crack down on illegal file-sharers, a senior official has told the BBC’s iPM programme.
Lord Triesman, the parliamentary Under Secretary for Innovation, Universities and Skills, said intellectual property theft would not be tolerated.
“If we can’t get voluntary arrangements we will legislate,” he said.
The comments could prove controversial with privacy advocates and internet service providers.
Lord Triesman called on internet service providers to take a “more activist role” in the problem of illegal file-sharing.
I heard Lord Triesman talk at the Virtual Worlds Forum earlier today – you can hear an MP3 of what he said here.
It’s something I’d liked to have asked him about but he seemed to disappear quite sharpish. I need to learn to run quicker if I want to get my journalism badge. Chris must be a faster runner.
(And kudos to Sasha for mentioning after his talk that there are such things as Open Source Software and Creative Commons).
Going back to the idea that ISPs could be forced to deal with illegal content I’d ask why we should stop there? Shouldn’t we make the Post office liable for illegal pictures and documents sent through the mail system? How about making the telephone companies liable for offensive phone calls? Next we could make the roads agency liable for drunk drivers…
I love arguing like this, it’s cheap and easy like me.
This is without getting into the technical problems of determining infringing traffic over the internet without blocking legal traffic.
I have a horrible fear, after hearing Lord Triesman talk about P2P networks ‘often’ being used illegally, that the government will try to bring in a complete ban on all P2P software.
I also find it amusing that in the talk, he calls the default position for users of the internet to be ‘I want stuff for free’. You know – he’s insinuating that we are all criminals.