12 March 2010
My ISP is Telstra, cable. It's pretty darn good for most everything. Except youtube. The performance of youtube streaming video is really really shit.
There are people complaining about youtube on telstra in Wellington here and here and here and here and here and here and ......
Earlier this year youtube added a neat section where you can see the data speeds from your ISP, compared to others in your city, your country and the world: http://www.youtube.com/my_speed
It shows my ISP, telstra, sitting at between 30% and 70% of the average wellington speed. in other words, telstra with their superior cable network technology is being beaten by people with DSL, and being beaten a LONG way..but only for youtube. Telstra have done something to make youtube perform like shit for their customers.
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In the world, there are companies and businesses that create products for clients. There are automobile manufacturers that build cars, there are food companies that make canned spaghetti and there are IT firms that design software for businesses. All of these companies rely on their clients. They are there for one purpose – to serve the client needs, because if they don’t do this, then they won’t have a business.
In this same sense, we can think of Canonical and the community as a company that’s creating a product for some clients. In our situation, the product is Ubuntu and the client is the end user.
There are over ten million users of Ubuntu world wide. That means that there are ten million people who have made a conscious decision to install Ubuntu on their computer. If these ten million people weren’t here, then we wouldn’t exist. We serve the end user, and because we serve them, we want to keep them happy by providing what they want.
We create things that the end user wants, and we often under estimate the value of their opinion. This can happen in design, this can happen in packaging, marketing, software development, any of the areas that Ubuntu encompasses.
If an automobile company, let’s say Honda, decided that it would switch the foot pedals from Clutch, Brake, Accelerator, to the other way around, Accelerator, Brake and then Clutch. Their argument could be that it is better to accelerate with your left foot, and change gears with your right foot, because they’ve done some research or perhaps they just like it that way.
Could you imagine the outcry if this happened? Not only would it cause a lot of accidents as customers tried to adjust to the new positions, but it would also ensure that Honda went bankrupt as customers chose another company, and another product that satisfied their needs. Remember that a need could actually be that they don’t want to change from what they’re used to.
It’s all well and good changing something, but at what cost?
Sometimes it is possible for us to get ahead of ourselves and believe that innovation can only be achieved by radically modifying things. Sometimes it’s possible for us to not see the wood for the trees and believe that we are doing something good while being completely oblivious to the fact that what we are doing can affect millions of people.
So before you think about changing something that might affect a lot of people, firstly do some research and conduct some surveys and ask yourself – “is this what our client actually wants or needs?” If you have conducted the surveys and research correctly and thoroughly, this question should be very easy to answer.
You will never be able to successfully create something for someones needs, if you never make an effort to find out what those needs are.
     
UPDATE: I’ve added in “Fixed!” where things are fixed, and “Probably won’t be changed” where it’s more than likely nothing will be changed.
In this post I’m going to list 16 things that I think could be improved in Lucid. I’m going to try my best to address the issues in detail and offer solutions. Of course, all of this is also a matter of opinion too. The object of this post is to make you think about ways we could improve each one. I’ll try to link to bugs where there are bugs, but a lot of these are quite new design decisions only present in 10.04 and hence don’t have bugs filed.
All of these screenshots were taken about two hours after I installed Lucid Lynx alpha 3, daily build from Saturday March 6th 2010. Read: after the UI freeze.
Window Controls
There are two things wrong with the new window controls in the Lynx.
Firstly, the controls are on the left. This is bad because:
- Ubuntu users are used to them being on the right
- Windows converts to Ubuntu will have yet another reason why they don’t want to switch
- There is no particular reason for moving them to the left, it’s change for the sake of change
- It makes windows unbalanced (window controls, window options, window title, sidebars and breadcrumbs etc are now all on the left)
- GNOME upstream has them on the right which reduces compatibility and could cause problems in the future
- It’s not easy for the average user to change them back to the right (Gconf is NOT easy!)
- Fitt’s Law comes into play. Lots of small targets in the same area, it’s harder to the right one.
Secondly, the button order has been shuffled around so that maximize and minimize are swapped. This is bad because:
- Ubuntu users aren’t used to this
- In fact, no one is used to this
- Close is on the inside – which is completely illogical
- It breaks other themes and makes them look ugly:
It is also pretty obvious that people don’t like the change:
Of course, if the design team consulted the community or conducted any research whatsoever before deciding on this, they would have already realized it’s a bad idea.
To see more on why moving the window controls to the left is a bad idea, read this post.
Bug #403135 – Notification area background transparency Fixed! (in the default themes at least)
This bug has been around since Karmic alpha, and just appears to be gathering dust. It affects a tonne of non-default applications that users are likely to try out, such as Pidgin, Banshee, VLC etc.
Basically the problem seems to be that certain applications aren’t appearing in the panel with transparent backgrounds, even though they have transparent .png images in /usr/share/pixmaps and the like.
I have noticed that it’s fixed when using Clearlooks, Kin, Homosapien or Turrican. So it’s obviously a theme thing – why the “professional” default themes have this bug but community themes don’t is beyond me.
Rhythmbox search for plugin
This is the reason I switched to Banshee. Even though I have ubuntu-restricted-extras installed, Rhythmbox prompts me to install plugins pretty much on every second song. It does it all the time when loading my collection into the library. I have all the gstreamer plugins in the world, but it still won’t go away. The silly thing is that it actually starts playing the song that it apparently can’t play, but when you click cancel it skips to the next one. Searching for plugins never returns results.
Bug report: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=529690
Some possible solutions:
- Have an option in the Rhythmbox preferences to disable plugin search
- Have the plugin search program remember if it’s already searched for that type of format, and not search again
- Increase the number of formats available to it so that the search results are more fruitful
- Have a checkbox in the plugin search dialog that says “don’t search for plugins again.”
Also, note how crappy the close button looks on windows such as this that don’t have maximize and minimize options.
Software Center progress bar Fixed!
The black box around it is actually part of it – I didn’t put that there. Why this progress bar isn’t nice:
- It has a big black border around it which doesn’t match the rest of the Software Center style
- It is using a red that isn’t in the Ubuntu colour pallete
- It is using a red that doesn’t appear anywhere else in the Software Center
- It doesn’t have the padding set correctly, so it appears out of place.
I am going to assume that this will be fixed at some stage in the next few weeks.
Bug #533535
Gnome menu icons
This one has been talked about recently on Planet Ubuntu. I don’t care what anyone says, having some icons here and no icons there just looks inconsistent. You either have to have them all or have none at all, you can’t have a mix of both. Especially now that there are huge gaps in menus where icons look like they should be – it appears to be a bug and has actually been reported as a bug many times.
If the GNOME developers *have* to take away the icons by default, they need an easy way for users to put them back in. An easy way is not a gconf key. An easy way would be an option in “Appearance Preferences.”
Notification area margins
Once again, another odd design decision that just screams unprofessional. The checkbox is floating in a random column on its own, but then the icons are in another column?
I would love to know the design reasoning behind this.
Bug #533548
Notification area
The notification area now takes up almost 1/2 of my 1280px wide top panel. For those of us who don’t like having two panels and want their window list up the top, it leaves hardly any room to show open windows.
Just look at the spacing around the Rhythmbox icon, you could drive a bus through there!
The current panel spacing is bad because:
- It uses up too much of your top panel
- It is inconsistent compared with the rest of the theme
- It is inconsistent with other items on the panel*
* Compare the gap between Rhythmbox and the volume icon with the gap between the wireless network icon and Pidgin.
Another thing that’s bad about this new notification area is the fact that each item isn’t an individual applet. Fixed!
For example, say I want to remove the Messaging menu because I don’t like it or don’t use it. This is actually a fairly plausible scenario, many people don’t use Evolution because they prefer webmail services such as Gmail. Also, many people use Pidgin instead of Empathy because, well, because Pidgin is just better. So in this scenario, pretty much 75% of the functionality of the messaging menu is now useless.
My only option is to remove the entire notification applet, so I lose Rhythmbox, the battery status indicator, and the volume indicator. But for some reason the wireless applet is separate.
Solution? You could either separate all of the applets into individual ones, but I think the best way would be to group them into “system status” and “applications.” For example, in the “system status” applet you could have things that tell you information:
- Battery indicator
- Wireless indicator
- Volume indicator
- Crash report notification
- Updates available
- CPU scaling
- etc
And in the “applications” area you could have a tray like section that has stores the icons for applications:
- Rhythmbox
- Messaging Menu
- Pidgin
- Desktop Drapes
- Transmission
- Banshee
- etc
Bug #533544
Default font size and default pointer Probably won’t be changed
It’s about time that Ubuntu changed the default font size from 10, 96 dpi to something a bit smaller. I use size 8, 96 dpi with Sans and it’s perfectly legible. Having a gigantic font size suggests that our operating system is a toy for kids.
“The effect of having the font so large is evident from the outset – menus appear never-ending, dialogue windows seem disproportioned and the entire feel given off is that of a toy.”
Here’s stock Firefox with with ascending font sizes. Notice how much more room Firefox has with 8px – practical for netbook users, no?
Bug #533552
Also, the default pointer? Why is it still set to DMZ (white)? That is so Windows 98. Whiteglass is a much more acceptable pointer and fits with the new theme a lot better.
Images and some wording taken from omgubuntu.co.uk with Joey’s approval, see this article for more information on fonts.
Ctrl+Alt+Delete Probably won’t be changed
This should launch System Monitor, instead of logging you out. The rationale is that Windows users coming from Windows to Ubuntu will instinctively hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete when something goes wrong, which will bring up the shutdown/logout menu. They wouldn’t have been expecting that.
The solution would be to assign another key combination for log out – or just have no key combination at all because it’s easy to get to the log out option by just clicking on the panel applet in the right hand corner.
Then you could have Ctrl+Alt+Delete launch gnome-system-monitor by default, which is the Ubuntu equivalent to Task Manager on Windows. Here, users can kill processes that have frozen. Even for non Windows converts, it’s a useful tool to have set as a keyboard shortcut.
Pidgin should minimize to messaging menu, instead of closing
Why does Pidgin close now when I close my buddy list? It should minimize to the messaging menu like Empathy does. It is possible to enable the tray icon so it closes to the tray, but that looks ugly due to the transparency bug above and the inconsistent notification area spacing.
Actually, it does show up in the messaging menu – but it doesn’t stay there if you close the buddy list window. This is pretty counter intuitive, if it’s listed in the messaging menu alongside other permanent apps that are listed even when they’re not open, you would expect Pidgin to remain open when you close the buddy list.
Computer Janitor should not be in Ubuntu
Not only does this program destroy your system by removing dependencies and third party software that you’ve installed from .debs – Fixed!, but it also looks hideous and unfinished with incorrect padding and missing sections.
Bug #533559
The entire program isn’t clear on what it’s supposed to do. Not only are the section titles wrong (see below), but even the name of the application is wrong.
Firstly, “Computer.” It doesn’t clean your computer, it cleans your packages. If it really cleaned your computer, it would remove old kernels, run virus scans, clear the internet browsing history etc.
Secondly, “janitor” is rarely used outside the United States of America, down here in New Zealand we use “cleaner.” I’m pretty sure “janitor” wouldn’t translate that well either. Try translating an American word like janitor into Hungarian, Chinese or Arabic for example.
Bug #533557
Bug #533558
Another thing that’s wrong with the naming is the section titles. Pretend you are a new user:
- Unused what? That doesn’t make sense, because Google Chrome and Skype appear there and I use those every day.
- Recommended what? Recommended applications to install? To download? Recommend what I should feed my cat?
- Optimize what? Defragment? Run a virus scan? Clear my browsing history?
This application needs a tonne of work before it’s up to the standard required for the default install, and I honestly think it is dangerous to have it available to new users and it should be removed from Lucid immediately until it’s ready.
I suggest it’s renamed to “Package Cleaner,” removed from Lucid, and re-targeted to Lucid+1. The concept is good, but the execution is terrible.
Preferences menu is huge!
How are we ever going to sell Ubuntu as “easy to use” when the default preferences menu is bigger than most screens!
This menu needs a serious clean up and half of the stuff could be merged.
Or you could just use the Gnome Control Panel.
Volume applet now looks terrible
This applet now looks a lot worse than the Karmic one, in my opinion. Why?
- The slider is too short and doesn’t let you fine tune volume properly
- The two options, “mute all” and “sound preferences” are not grouped together
- There’s a random 1px line that inexplicably runs underneath the slider box Fixed!
- The max volume icon doesn’t have enough padding, compared to the no volume icon Fixed!
- Volume changes appear in the notification system – you would expect the volume controls to have the same style
- The proportions of the volume indicator applet are inconsistent with the wireless connection menu, the messaging menu, the MeMenu, the date/time/calender, the rhythmbox applet and the user session menu – all of these are longer than they are wide, but this one is wider than it is long
- The background colour for the slider looks out of place, it isn’t necessary. Fixed!
To be honest, this applet does nothing right except change your volume when you move it. In fact, with this track record, I wouldn’t be surprised if moving the slider to the right actually decreased the volume!
Bug #533560
Here’s an image that illustrates the proportions of the applets. Click on it for a full size version.
What happened to the nice battery stats window?
There used to be a nice little UI window that would pop up when you clicked on the battery name in the applet. I don’t have Karmic installed anymore, so I can’t show you. But it was nice, trust me. Now you get this:
This information is cool, but the average user doesn’t need this amount of information, they just want their battery to be able to work, and they want to see how much time they’ve got left before it runs out. Perhaps they’ll want to know what the model number is if they need to replace it at some stage – but that’s it. Especially when half of the information reported is incorrect. I wish my battery lasted 12 hours.
MeMenu doesn’t pick up the image from About Me Fixed!
When you click on the picture in the MeMenu, it opens up the “About Me” application, implying that it takes the image from there. You can fill in the details and choose a picture, but the picture won’t be displayed in the MeMenu – even after a restart.
Oh and once again, note how fantastic the new theme window controls look when their isn’t a maximize option.
MeMenu text box doesn’t explain what it does
Okay, you got your new user shoes on again?
As a new user, please tell me what the text box does in the following image:
If I was going to take an educated guess at what you thought, it would be that the text box updates your IM status, because directly underneath it is a list of IM statuses. Right?
Wrong. It actually updates any accounts you have set on Gwibber. In my case, Twitter and Facebook. What happens if the user doesn’t have either of these?
Also, broadcast accounts? What are we, a radio station now?
     
A reasonably sane series of pretty good reasons. As plucked from Twitter.
http://popey.com/blog/2010/03/11/why-ubuntu-is-better-than-windows/.
Wellington Community Network (WCN) is a place for community organisations to host websites for free, powered by a bit of Joomla.
The City council has decided to shut down this community service. This makes me sad.
It is currently used by a HUGE list of diverse groups such as: (grabbed at random)
Friends of the Wellington Town Belt
Wellington Kidney Patient Network
Wellington RSAs
Diabetes Wellington
Lotsa sports clubs
Rotary
Wellington Association for Deaf Children
Lotsa Playcentres
schools such as... Wellington Hindi School and Wellington Sri Lankan School
Wellington Homeschoolers
Widowed Separated Divorced Support Group Inc
Wellington Somali Council
Pan-Pacific and Southeast Asia Womens Association
SeniorNet
Toastmasters
ESOL Home Tutors
lots and lots of Scouts and Guide groups
Lions clubs.
New Zealand Malaysian Society
Wellington Science And Technology Fair
and a couple *thousand* more.
and now a baby photo:
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11 March 2010
On Tuesday next week Mark Osborne of Albany Senior High School will be presenting on the Open Source Information Technology systems he has employed at the school. The presentation will be held at the school at 7:30pm. Albany Senior is a leader in deployment of open source technology, and has even enabled it's students to create their own audio visual system. It is a excellent example for other schools to follow.
Apologies to anyone who noticed a loss of service @ lists.nzoss.org.nz this morning between 0100 and 0900 NZDT. A power glitch in the central Wellington area caused the server concerned to drop briefly - but also caused the network it connects to to experience an outage for several hours. Any email waiting should now have dequeued, and all is back up and running.
Chilling, originally uploaded by Br3nda.
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10 March 2010
Newtown Fair, originally uploaded by Br3nda.
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Urewera is a special place, full of rainforest, hermits, and Patupaiarehe.
Lake Waikaremoana, originally uploaded by RobAucklandNZ
I spent more childhood summers than I can count in the Ureweras, staying at the Hostel in Tuai. You're always a long way from "civilisation" and even further from a petrol station. The road enters the bush suddenly and you've got 3 hours of road just wide enough for one car, while you hope you don't discover a car going the otherway on a blind corner (though you seldom do see anyone else on the road). Suddenly the lake becomes visible from a high cliff top. I think it's the second largest lake in New Zealand, formed when a massive landslide blocked off a small stream. There's not much water going in or out so it's a very calm place.
Child beside Tuai lake wall, near the Hostel. Photo by Chris Thompson
It was, and still is, another world. Wild bees swarm in the village regularly. There seemed to be a dredge taking mud out of lake Tuai constantly, and silly birds that stand on one leg. There was no security stopping people wandering into the power station back then. Everything was closed in, the bush always nearby and us humans have only these little clearings that are far far apart.
We ended up out there because my father worked for the Electricity Department. My whole childhood can be mapped around powerstations.
Thanks to flickr, i found a few photos of that remote world.
I like this one best:
Meet Dan - this is his house.... he is a very happy man.
Unfortunately I met Dan around half way through the Urewera National Park, around 70km from my destination on a windy, wet gravel road. Dan and a few friends were moving his house from Ruatahuna to his marae. It is a VERY tight fit! I had a 30 min wait at this point while they dug the bank away enough to get the house through, and let me through.
This gate is the overflow of late Tuai; It is powered and controlled by gravity and alway fascinated me as a child. The high security fence is new; Times have changed.
Photo by Chris Thompson
Tuai Power Station
Photo by Phillip Rickerby
Photo by Phillip Rickerby
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This comment was posted on Ivanka Majic’s article “Those pesky buttons” by Murat Güne and I think it’s worth re-posting here.
Ivanka, your post is very much welcome in that it has broken the official silence and will perhaps start a dialogue, but since the new branding was introduced, what lots of people, especially those on the periphery of design and development discourse, rather than the center, have been expecting to hear is a concrete statement of reasoning regarding the current button positioning in the new themes, as opposed to “some correspondence”.
This post, by providing an outline of your thought process in the internal UX&D team meetings, provides the latter, but still not the former. You list the questions you asked, the whiteboard shot outlines the examples you studied; that’s all good, but there’s no trace of the rationale for the actual change. It’s indeed hard to tell if the change is “better or worse”, and for people to present any useful feedback, without knowing what it is that you intended to achieve with it. And this situation brings about all sorts of reactionary accusations of the design being a “ripoff”, being “unoriginal”, being “by Mac users for Mac users”, etc. and causes a lot of negative buzz.
If this is just an experiment (which, given that Lucid is still pre-Beta, is very much expectable) without much of a strong rationale, at least at this point, then we should make that known too, so that the placement is not going to be received as if it were set in stone.
We can really do better at communicating the intentions behind radical changes to users and development branch testers, and I’m willing to help with that.
     
It’s my last time on Radio New Zealand National for a while, and I thought I’d use it to address some more a philosophical question than I often do. I’ve written a separate post with my ideas below.
I’ll be on air after the 11am news. You can listen live, or soon afterwards you will be able to pull the podcast or download the audio as ogg or mp3.
The Internet is an unmediated form of communication between humans all around the planet. It was designed that way and so far it has stayed that way. It’s different from the telephone, which allows targeted one to one communications, and from broadcasting which is one to many, although it does provide those as well. Through blogging, twitter, even email lists, the Internet has allowed us to build many-to-many communications systems. That’s a first.
There’s no doubt in my mind that the Internet is the greatest engine of prosperity since since, say, the telephone or even since mass transportation. It allows us all to interact with people and business around the world without using up fossil fuels and personal resources in travel. It provides businesses with a customer communications channel connected directly to their back-end systems. On the Internet, life is good. And, as I have said on numerous occasions, it only got that way because the Internet is an open conduit for anything people can think of.
It has been recognized by lawmakers for years that openness is the key to the Internet’s usefulness. But, increasingly, that is coming to an end. The Chinese government routinely censors its domestic Internet and forces all Internet traffic entering and leaving the country through a giant gateway it controls. The US allows private companies to remove material placed on the Internet by third parties on accusation of copyright infringement. Australia looks likely to implement a national Internet filter in the name of pornography suppression. The UK is considering a “Digital Economy Bill” which would force Internet disconnections and filter access to websites. Even the New Zealand government is looking at a limited filtering system to combat child pornography.
All this brings me to my point: Can we, humankind, actually stand an open communications medium? One that lets all of us talk to all of us? Along with the huge list of economic and social benefits that brings? Observing the actions of government world wide, I’d have to answer “no”.
It appears that the Internet is just too open and too useful for humanity to come to terms with. Since the Internet is just a communications tool, this means that we, as a species, can’t tolerate open communications between all our members. That’s why I question whether the Internet is just too good for us, whether we deserve it at all.
But then, what can you expect from a species that can’t organize itself to operate in an environment of finite resources? There is no functioning mechanism for us to deal with global environment destruction or fossil fuel exhaustion, for instance. You don’t have to accept anthropogenic climate change to agree that we don’t have a way of dealing with it.
So, then, we are a deeply flawed race careering off a cliff of our own making. Does that mean we shouldn’t fight – that we should just eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die? I don’t think so. For me, each of us who recognizes the problems should act as best we can to hold a mirror to human activities. That means calling governments and industries when they try to hold progress to ransom. It means arguing for cooperative approaches to dealing issues that face us. It means not hiding our heads in the sand about limited resources.
I certainly don’t have all the answers. But until we at least accept the questions, neither will any of us.
How we deal with the Internet and its ability for us all to communicate will the question I posed in the title: is the Internet too good for us?
Enjoy: The EU tables a bill to make ACTA negotiations transparent, put a ban on the "three strikes" model and no personal border searches:
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4848/125/ The UK government "clarifies" a bill to stop people freely sharing their wifi. From neighbours to cafes - but not big companies:
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1594048/uk-kill-internet-cafes A breakdown of Apple's patent lawsuit against HTC. This appears to be goading Google into supporting HTC, then attacking Google:
http://i.engadget.com/2010/03/02/apple-vs-htc-a-patent-breakdown/ Nokia patents the use of shakeable rechargers in mobile phones:
http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/news-mobile-wireless/nokia-patent-targets-mobile-device-kinetic-energy-charging-5723 A worthy deployment to Afghanistan; 3,700 OLPCs to teach the beleaguered kiddies with:
http://blog.laptop.org/2010/03/09/olpc-provides-children-of-afghanistan-access-to-a-modern-education/ HTC Magic phones found to come pre-installed with Mariposa bot client. Some of the perps are arrested:
http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/htc-phones-pre-installed-mariposa-bot-client-030910 The Energizer Bunny pulls something magical out of the rabbit hole - a virus that is spread by an Energizer USB charger:
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/338752/energizer_bunny_software_infects_pcs/ The US to drop its embargo on selected software to Iran, Cuba etc. The selected software is mostly social networking and e-mail stuff:
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/58290 And finally. Cullinary investigators take on the Girl Guide Biscuit as a sub-standard batch shocks Wellington biscuit affectionados:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10631052 Vik :v) Diamond Age Solutions Ltd. http://diamondage.co.nz
This is not the Hamilton i remember growing up in:
http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/top-stories/6913352/hit-and-run-robbery-vic...
Passing motorists ignored a hit-and-run robbery victim left lying on the side of a Hamilton road last night, police say.
The 21-year-old man was walking home across Anglesea Street about 11pm when he was hit by a vehicle, near the Caro Street intersection.
The vehicle's occupants, believed to be two men and a woman, demanded the victim's wallet and took his backpack which had been thrown a short distance by the impact of the car.
In fact i'm hoping the journalist has left something out of this account to explain it. I'm gonna be watching for more details.
The area was busier than usual as people made their way home from the international cricket match at Seddon Park, and police hoped someone may recall seeing the incident take place.
I've seen someone fall off a pushbike in central Wellington and be inundated in people trying to help. Hamilton isn't that much different to Wellington.
p.s does Cricket really run as late as 11pm?
and now a baby photo:
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09 March 2010
Michael Geist is coming to town..
allow me have a little fangirl moment
:-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D
Here's the press release:
Michael Geist to keynote PublicACTA - InternetNZ
Media Release - 10 March 2010 - InternetNZ (Internet New Zealand Inc) is excited to announce that renowned Canadian law professor Michael Geist, a world authority on technology law issues, will be the keynote speaker at the PublicACTA event, being held in Wellington on 10 April 2010.
"We are delighted that Professor Geist is able to make it to New Zealand to contribute to the debate around the ACTA negotiations," says InternetNZ Policy Director Jordan Carter.
PublicACTA is being held the weekend before the next round of ACTA negotiations in Wellington, 12-16 April 2010.
ACTA is a plurilateral trade agreement being negotiated by the USA, EU, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other countries, aimed at increasing the control that intellectual property owners have over their products and ideas, and at reducing incidents of counterfeiting and illegal trade in goods. The negotiation phase of the treaty is intended to be finished in 2010.
Professor Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada, has written widely on the challenges of copyright and digital technology.
"His in-depth understanding of the ACTA process to date, and well publicised positions in favour of citizen access to the negotiation process, will add quality analysis and profile to the event," says Carter.
"PublicACTA will be aimed at creating a constructive contribution to the negotiations being held in Wellington. Professor Geist's participation will contribute to that goal," says Carter.
Professor Geist is looking forward to participating in the event:
“New Zealand has emerged as a leading global voice on ACTA and I'm delighted to have the chance to participate in this important event.
“Many people around the world have watched with admiration at how thousands of New Zealanders have actively engaged in domestic and international copyright reform initiatives, promoting a balanced approach that meets the needs of all stakeholders,” he says.
Further information about Michael Geist is available at his website, which can be found at www.michaelgeist.ca.
People who are interested in attending the PublicACTA event should register their interest by sending an email to rsvp@internetnz.net.nz.
Further details about the Conference will be released on a dedicated website next week.
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The fancy new version of statusnet rocks.
It's AGPL licenced, fully federated, and you can have you own installation for free.
head to
http://status.net/signup
And you can get your own statusnet installation. Mine is at http://shiny.status.net.
And cos it's all federated, anyone using another Ostatus compliant app can subscribe to you. You can subscribe to me by entering shiny@status.net, or br3nda@identi.ca -- you can subscribe to Google buzz users by entering their gmail address - and there are a handful of other apps out there that support ostatus.
It's a true open source, open data, open web solution - without any single point of failure. awesome stuff.
and now a baby photo:
p.s. Baby microblogs at caseyaroha@identi.ca
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I'm willing to be challenged on this one, as I have only the basic details, but here's something that doesn't sound right going on in this tale.
Red Cross goes into Haiti following a massive earthquake - puts out the plea saying "send infant formula, we need it"
Across the Lactivist communities, (mostly) western white middle class women bloggers cry foul. Formula is evil, they need breastmilk, not formula. Don't send formula! boycott any charity sending formula!
and they're mostly right - the World Health Organisation STRONGLY advocates breastfeed exclusively because most of the world does not have access to a clean later supply. Haiti included
but - something feels wrong here. The Red Cross are there, on the ground, and they say that infant formula is what they need. It doesn't take much imagination to work out scenarios where formula is necessary. The mother being dead or missing comes to mind first.
Likewise, an island in Samoa recently asked for supplies, such as infant formula, to help them through the next cyclone.
I also ponder how much breastfeeding is a privilege. You need to be nearby a hungry child in order to successfully breastfeed, or have access to refrigeration, a breastpump, and sterilisation equipment. How many people in developing and impoverished nations have this access?
Breastfeeding rates in New Zealand are lower amongst those on low incomes, and lacking tertiary education. Many would like to breastfeed but are unable to because they work. (We only have 15 weeks paid leave, and it's very low paid).
Is it not the same in Haiti? Perhaps worse? Women don't have a choice but to return to the workplace, and there's no protected right have breastfeeding breaks or facilities for pumping.
My own conclusion is: If Red Cross say they need formula, then I will believe Red Cross first and foremost.
and now a baby photo:
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I’ve been designing a new website for the Lunar Numbat project.
Click the images for a full size view.
Here’s the first idea, which is fairly generic and boring:
It’s not “spacey” enough, not unique enough. Hence, I made this one:
The problem I have is finding a unique design that’s both relevant to the project (high-tech, space orientated) and that also makes it easy to read. Also, it’s pretty hard finding a good place to stick the logo – which is inconveniently round =P
Here’s some more changes to the second idea:
Feedback?
     
08 March 2010
The conclusions on a kiwiblog post really annoyed me. (yeah, i know, i shouldn't read that blog if i wanna keep my faith in NZ)
http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2010/03/the_gender_pay_gap.html
quote:
I’m generally reluctant to conclude discrimination, and look for other factors, because discrimination is just so plain stupid. I can’t understand how anyone would think someone is more or less capable in a job because of their gender, and would pay them less. Mind you, I think the discrimination might be subconscious, rather than a conscious decision.
To paraphrase, the author thinks discriminating on gender is stupid, therefore gender discrimination probably isn't the reason women graduates are consistently paid less than men graduates with the same degree.
That logic just doesn't bare up to scrutiny, that because something is stupid it's therefore not what's happening.
Regardless, the study didn't find a difference in whether graduates gets employed or not. Both men and women graduates found jobs; but the woman was consistently given a lower starting salary than the man. The employer is not thinking "the woman can't do the job". They are employing women and paying them less.
There's two aspect to this:
1) Women doing the same job as men and getting paid less for it.
2) Jobs seen as "women's work" are paid less.
It's not because women take time off to raise children, because we're talking starting rates of someone who has just graduated from university.
The commenters did pick up on women not being aggressive negotiators; The commenters however haven't followed through to *why* women are weak negotiators.
This has been studied to death in recent years. Women who are aggressive getters of what they want are punished for it, with derogatory names, and avoidance. They are often considered selfish. Men who state clearly what they want and go for it are respected. This goes way beyond pay negotiations into all aspects of life.
Girl infants who are rowdy aren't encouraged, while parents will play much rougher with their sons. Girls learn very early that they are expected to be polite, simply because people around them correct their manners more, and their loudness, than they do for boys. Even a parent trying hard to not apply these differences to their children will struggle to stop grandparents, other parents, daycare, teachers, and other children defining their gender attributes for them.
Just as children today learn quickly that pink is for girls (and has been a girls' colour since only circa 1950), they quickly learn which gender they are in therefore whether they should be crashing trucks in the sandpit, or brushing a dolls hair in a circle with the other girls.
Girls who boast are not rewarded. Think of the women you know that have a high opinion of themselves, and how they are regarded by those around them - do they appear well liked? Now think on how many men you know with high confidence, are they disliked for this?
We need to undo this. Employers, and employees, need to question why they are paying women less. "She didn't ask for more" isn't a good enough reason if we're ever going to undo this. Teach the women graduates that they need to negotiate harder, and we should all examine our own prejudice against aggressive women. Negotiation skills are valuable in an employee.
Likewise, women ask your men colleagues doing the same job what they earn.
I hold no blame on women who choose to not negotiate harder. They do so simply because they are punished for being aggressive.
As for women's work being paid less - i don't know the answer, i work in an industry that is ~85% men. I suggest asking people working in those industries. Those observing from outside won't be able to see as clearly.
and as a last thought: In Open source 75% of women have experienced sexism, while only 15% of men have noticed sexism.
and now a photo of a baby driving a car:
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“Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant,” the resolution said, “but rather a highly beneficial ingredient for all plant life.”
Change the wording a little bit, and substitute “shit” for “carbon dioxide”, and it’s still just as true
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07 March 2010
Gravity Computing Limited offer specialised consulting and development within OpenOffice.org Calc and Microsoft Excel. An overwhelming number of companies rely on these spreadsheeting programs to assist them with day-to-day functions; however as business grows, the original solution is usually not the best. Gravity Computing works with these documents, and can build in task automation, data visualisation, dashboards, consistency & accuracy checks, and even provide training.
read more
A UK Hansard Society report – Parliament 2020: visioning the future Parliament
asking first-time voters, parliamentarians and parliament officials about their visions for a future Parliament found that all groups wanted to see Parliament using new technologies to more actively engage with citizens.
(just ignore all the pro-labour stuff on there, the stuff is still interesting)
http://blog.labour.org.nz/index.php/2010/03/07/young-voters-demand-more-...
Sony Patents "feature erosion"
http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/05/sony-patents-degradable-video-game-de...
USA's secretary of state says good things about the goodness of OLPC laptops in use in Haiti after the massive earthquake.
http://blog.laptop.org/2010/03/05/hillary-clinton-touts-the-work-of-olpc/
Goodnight Forest Moon - a downloadable book to assemble at home, is a mash up of starwars and goodnight moon.
http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/Al9LbPPf6gg/goodnight-...
Ubisoft's misguided "uncrackable" DRM is cracked in 24 hours
Boingboing muses that giving gamers DRM is really giving them a puzzle to solve, and that's what gamers do, they solve puzzles.
http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/fHyD-O5t650/ubisofts-n...
The "blind" camera
What it does is tracks the exact time that the button was pushed, and then goes out and searches for another image taken at that exact time. Once the camera finds one, it displays the image in the LCD on the back of the camera.
http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/03/05/the-blind-camera-shows-you-someone-...
Nearly half of Nepal's children under five are suffering from malnutrition, a report by the Nepalese government says.
Folks living in the developed world have an average 22 hectare "footprint"... but there's only enough planet for 16 hectares per person.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/2/hi/south_asia/8550503.stm
Apple versus Innovation.
The patent system is out of touch with the modern world, where today’s innovations are taken for granted in next year’s products
HTC has become real competition for apple's smartphones - so apple are suing HTC for patent infringment.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Money/Mises-Economics-Blog/2010/0304/Apple-s-su...
Cliff Chiang has created a great series of Star Wars Imperial Propaganda posters
http://www.cliffchiang.com/2010/02/22/armed-forces/
Gladiator fight in the amphitheatre at Te Papa
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjY8arWlp24&feature=youtube_gdata
Green Party sound alarm at proposed policy change removing the second chance school leavers get at a university education.
http://blog.greens.org.nz/2010/03/02/will-the-govt-deny-kiwis-a-second-c...
Picture of the massive earthquake in Chile.
http://feeds.boston.com/click.phdo?i=6dbc4c975e19c049cc0a8bb79ab8c9da
NZBus refused to let evangelical athiests advertise on their buses.
http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2010/03/the_atheist_bus_campaign.html
and now baby photos:
     
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My LCA2010 Tuesday started with an Airport pickup; it was my job to meet Keith Packard at Wellington International Airport and deliver him to the event.
I then had to drive across town to my car park and walk back to the event :/
However... I did get back on time to pick up the tail of the Keynote and then attend the remainder of the days session - and this day was of particular interest, being the 'Open and the Public Sector' stream. This was kicked off by Don Christie in his role of President of the New Zealand Open Source Society and the keynote was by the UK Governments Director of Digital Engagement, Andrew Stott. I have to say that I give the UK Government a lot of credit for their willingness to embrace online engagement, the talk was given via Skype and was (generally) successful - though they should probably have pumped the audio across an ordinary PSTN or even cellular phoneline, as the Internet link wasn't flawless by any means...
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Though I have made two, separate previous entries on the subject, my grand intention to blog about the Wellington-hosted Linux Australia Conference kinda looks pretty lame; here I am 6 weeks? later finally putting 'pen to paper'.
In my defence, well, domestic and professional life have both taken their toll; a grand total of 2 months off work (All of Dec and Jan) resulted in a need to hit the ground pretty much running when I returned to work proper on the 4th of February, and it's been basically a full month before I got to the stage where 'normality' had returned. That was Friday...
So back to my intention: To write about LCA.
Well, there's an article above about the Monday, but really, my involvement in LCA started earlier than that:
The Rental Truck...
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Super happy dev house, originally uploaded by Br3nda.
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Super happy dev house, originally uploaded by Br3nda.
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Super happy dev house, originally uploaded by Br3nda.
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06 March 2010
There have been a bunch of leaks from the ACTA process lately, and this week saw 2 of the biggest – the names of the countries who are opposing transparency and, even more surprisingly, a breakdown of the positions different negotiating teams are taking on aspects of the US proposal, known as the “Internet Chapter”. I think both documents are genuine, though I wouldn’t put it past the negotiators to put out misinformation as part of a bait-and-switch campaign, but I haven’t read through the documents yet in enough detail to comment on them, though others have:
One thing that stands out, as Nat notes, is that the reported New Zealand positions are much more realistic and reasonable than MED’s public utterances would have lead us to anticipate. That’s great, but we’re only one voice at a table we shouldn’t really be sitting around. And I say again, there is nothing in a confidentiality agreement that limits you exposing your own position to your own citizens. If you’ve got nothing to fear…
ACTA is coming!! That’s right, sportsfans! The circus called ACTA is coming to Wellington on 12-16 April this year. In the lead up to that, the Commerce Minister, Simon Power, is calling for submissions “to help set a higher benchmark for the enforcement of intellectual property rights”, so there’s obviously no prejudging going on there ¡ Make your submission by 31 March.
Also, this week, InternetNZ announced that they will be hosting a PublicACTA session on the 10th of April, as a counterpoint to the SecretACTA sessions the Government is hosting. I’ll be at that session and I encourage anyone with a Saturday to spare to be there two.
And lastly, this week, I gave a presentation on ACTA at Ignite!Wellington, focussing on the secrecy, as well as something we haven’t heard too much about – pharmaceuticals. It’s worth noting that at the USTR Special 301 meetings this week counterfeit drugs was very prominent in the committee’s questioning of NGOs.
Have a look at the Ignite! site, as there were some other good sessions (Mike Brown’s zen poem about cycling across America was my favourite) but I’ve embedded the video of my talk below as well, if you just want the ACTA bits. It’s a testing format – 5 minutes, 20 slides changing every 15 seconds – but I enjoyed it and learned heaps for the next one  Very hard to draw down hours of material into 5 minutes. Might help to think of it as a series of tweets…
05 March 2010
I’ve spent today preparing myself for a fresh install of Lucid Lynx, so I’ve been backing up my entire computer and I downloaded the latest daily image of Lucid then stuck it on a pen drive.
I just booted into the LiveCD off the pen drive, and holy moly it is FAST. The boot is fast, but that’s expected. What I am amazed at is the speed that the applications are loaded, it’s almost instant. I would say it’s 3x faster than my Karmic full install. Firefox opens in the time Chrome takes to open on my regular install. Yelp is actually usable now. Browsing files and folders is instant, opening nautilus or apps like Calculator is blazingly fast.
Not only that, but desktop effects can be enabled on the LiveCD too now!
I also get a way bigger battery life because both my drives aren’t spinning due to it running off the USB stick. Why don’t I just use this as my default? Heh.
But yeah, I am totally impressed – this is so much better than I was expecting. Now… fingers crossed that suspend/resume works.
     
Stay classy New Zealand, originally uploaded by Br3nda.
NZ looks down the path of eugenics.
Only last year there was talk of paying the poor to undergo sterilization.
One group of people calling for the forced, or sometimes rewarded, sterialisation of another group of people pops up all over history; Because that target group is seen as inferior, dirty, dangerous, or just plain different. It has been, and is still used against religious groups, racial groups, social-economic groups, homosexuals, transpeople, and against the disabled.
Some recommended reading:
Sterilisation in history and literature!
http://dimpost.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/sterilisation-in-history-and-lit...
Sanjay Gandhi’s forced sterilisation campaigns against Muslim’s during The Emergency, when the Indian Congress Party led by Indira Gandhi essentially declared martial law for eighteen months. Poor muslim men and women living in slums in South Delhi were forcibly given vasectomies and hysterectomies.
Officials had sterilisation quota to fill, people died due to botched operations, doctors who refused to perform the operations were jailed. The programme was abandoned when democracy and freedom of the press were restored.
It’s bitterly well remembered in India, where there’s still massive opposition to family planning and contraception because of the campaign...
Trans men still fighting mandatory sterilisation in [Western Australia]
http://hoydenabouttown.com/20100303.7295/quickhit-trans-men-still-fighti...
The Czech government has expressed regret over the illegal sterilisation of Roma women.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8375960.stm
Ottawa Columnist Argues for Forced Sterilization
http://radicalbookworm.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/ottawa-columnist-argues-...
Reproductive Justice Linkspam: A Starting Point
http://theangryblackwoman.com/2010/02/26/reproductive-justice-linkspam-a...
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04 March 2010
Yeahs, i'm a hippy.. both an open source hippy, and a "made locally, with no child labour, and eco friendly please" hippy.
So, when finding clothes for our baby, that outgrows everything every 4 weeks, I'm looking for crafty craft people.
Tomorrow (6th March), is the Martinborough fair. It's about 75 minutes drive from Wellington and it's massive. The whole town is taken over by this ginormous fair. We'll be picking up bebe clothes, but also adult clothes, kitchen things, jams, pickles and who knows what else.
http://www.martinboroughfair.org.nz/
Martinborough Fair, originally uploaded by cristina.gherghe.
070203_017.jpg, originally uploaded by mEyegallery.
Tomorrow is also Craft 2.0, out at the Dowse in Lower Hutt. Lotsa crafty wellington people selling their wares
http://craft2.org/
Goodie bag, originally uploaded by Cle0patra.
And on sunday, the Newtown festival. This has less craft, more made-in-china junk.. but there's entertainers and lotsa food, much of it fair trade.
http://www.newtownfestival.org.nz/
Newtown Festival 2002 - 053, originally uploaded by TELPortfolio.
and now a baby photo:
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Edit: Apparently a lot of this stuff (especially the branding) isn’t confirmed yet, ie, this isn’t the final look and feel. Also I have heard that the person who took the screenshots likes having the window controls on the left on his computer. Either way, expect stuff to change over the next couple of days. I’m hoping the controls will move back to the right. Perhaps in future, announcements like this could include a bit that says it’s subject to change, and if you’re going to include screenshots, include the default settings. Thanks everyone!
Some of you may have seen the new Ubuntu branding which was announced today. I think it looks fantastic, I love the new logo font and the new colour scheme, I love the new website too. The boot screen is simply gorgeous and I do actually like the purple thing going on. I think that a branding refresh is long overdue; brown is all well and good, but we’ve been with brown for almost 6 years now and I am pleased that Canonical is changing. But I do personally have some issues with a couple of things that I would like to raise in the hopes of sparking some discussion.
Firstly I am interested in the decision to move the window controls (minimize, maximize, close) to the left. To me, this decision doesn’t add anything new, and from a design standpoint, doesn’t make sense. It is my understanding that window controls are theme-specific, ie, you can set another theme and the controls will move. (Which is actually a bad thing – users don’t expect the window controls to change location when they simply change their theme).
I know that a lot of people don’t change their system from the default theme – they haven’t done in the past with the Human theme, and now that this theme is a prettier, they’re even less likely to. Which means that as small and as insignificant as you think this change is, it actually will affect a lot of people.
I’d just like to give you some background about my design knowledge – in case you think I’m a rambling fool 
I’m not new to design. I have been designing websites for years, all through high school where I was awarded the computer web design prize for two years in a row in 6th and 7th form. Since then I have done web design work for a number of clients, and also created websites for my own projects and myself. I work on UI mockups for programs like Quickshot, and have done logo design for my clients and projects such as the Ubuntu Manual Project and Ground Control.
From a design standpoint, the window controls on the left don’t make sense. They clutter the left, which already has the window menus (file, edit, view etc) and now also has the window title. In Nautilus, and many other programs, things like bread crumb navigation menus are left-aligned, same with sidebars and other controls. It makes the entire window layout look quite lop-sided and out of balance, as if Nautilus wasn’t as cluttered enough as it is. Nautilus now has four “layers” of menus and options in the top of the window before you even get anywhere near what you actually want to do: browse files.
Compare that to Finder in Mac OS X (which Ubuntu seems to be taking many hints from):
I’m not the only one who thinks Nautilus is overly cluttered. The elementary team have modified Nautilus to make it prettier and less complicated. Obviously Nautilus is upstream and out of Ubuntu’s control, and there’s not much we can do to remove some of the clutter at our end. But we can try to minimize the effect of it by spreading stuff out across all the space that we’ve got, and the window controls on the right did that quite well. But now all we’re doing is adding to the clutter by having them on the left.
Mac OS X can pull off left-aligned window controls because they have the window menus (file, edit, view etc) in the panel – not the windows. If you’ve ever used OS X you’ll know what I mean. It doesn’t look cluttered at all, and it’s fine. Apple also chuck in a search box on the right to balance it instead of having this big chunk of space. They moved the controls to the left not necessarily based on anything in particular, but more to distinguish themselves from Windows, who is their main competitor.
The new left-aligned window controls don’t make sense not just from a design standpoint, but also from a user-base standpoint. Ubuntu users have always had window controls on the right, and that’s what they’re used to. By default, upstream GNOME has its controls on the right, and always has done. There is absolutely no genuine reason for moving them, there’s been no complaints, no usability issues, nothing. And considering that most of Ubuntu users come from Windows, moving the controls to the left just gives them one more thing to get used to when they make the jump, which is one more point for them when they argue that they don’t want to change because they’re already used to Windows. As we have already seen, this is a real problem because there is high demand for things like Zorin OS and the XPGnome Windows XP Ubuntu theme.
It is a proven fact that Windows users are reluctant to change, so why make it even harder?
So, I want to know – what do left-aligned window controls actually add to the Ubuntu experience? What is the reasoning behind this change?
The second gripe I have about the branding is the inconsistency with the logos. Canonical has a trademark policy that has some Logo Usage Guidelines at the bottom:
Our logos are presented in multiple colours and it is important that their visual integrity be maintained. It is therefore preferable that the logos only be used in their standard form but if you should feel the need to alter them in any way you should keep the following guidelines in mind. It should also be borne in mind that the more you wish to vary our logos from their standard form the smaller is the chance that we will be able to approve your proposed use.
- If presented in multiple colours, the logo should only use the “official” logo colours.
- You may use transparency and gradient/depth tools but should retain the “official” colours.
- A monochrome version may be acceptable in certain situations, if the use requires it (e.g. desktop backgrounds).
- Any scaling must retain the original proportions of the logo.
Okay, so that’s good. I appreciate that this is yet to be updated for the new branding and logo. What I can’t get my head around, is why the new artwork for the Ubuntu online services don’t conform to the new logo change. Take a look at the new logo closely again:
It’s a white circle of friends inside a larger orange circle. Now take a look at the brainstorm logo:
Hold up a sec, that’s the original coloured circle of friends, made 3D and on its side. “Any scaling must retain the original proportions of the logo.”
Now take a look at the Ubuntu QA logo (whatever Ubuntu QA is):
That’s just the old logo with a big green tick through it. “If presented in multiple colours, the logo should only use the “official” logo colours.” Now have a look at the “spread Ubuntu” logo:
That logo is the same as the first one, but inversed so the circle is white and the logo is orange. Actually, I think the logo has the original colours, but it’s too small for me to see clearly.
Then take the logo in the panel on the new theme:
That one’s a monocolour version of the logo. Now take a look at the boot splash screen logo:
That one is the original circle of friends inside a white circle this time.
Can anyone say inconsistency?
So let’s recap:
On the colour front, we have a monocolour version, an original version, a white version on a new orange, an orange version on white and a logo with a green tick in it.
On the layout/orientation front, we’ve got logos on their own, logos inside circles, logos with other things in or on top of them and a logo that’s been made 3D and is now flat on the ground.
Alan Pope says in his blog post that “Canonical have put together a world-class design team to come up with these changes.” I’m sorry, but designers should know the importance of consistency in branding.
People associate logos and images with ideas, concepts, products and companies. By being inconsistent across all of these platforms, they’re risking user confusion and disassociation with products, and not to mention not conforming to their own logo usage rules laid down for the community.
I know it’s early days, and that this sort of stuff might change, but it’s unlikely because they released it on the day of the Lucid User Interface freeze and if it wasn’t finished, Canonical wouldn’t announce it. I think there have been some oversights on basic company marketing and I would like to raise them, because I love Ubuntu, I work very hard for Ubuntu, and I am concerned that we’re taking a step backward here.
As I said in my first paragraph, everything else I like a lot. The purple is cool and unique (sort of – nevermind that Mac OS X also has a purple wallpaper by default), the boot screen is gorgeous, the new font is clean, sharp and fresh and the monospace logo in the panel is cool. Minimalism is the trend, Canonical knows that, but I honestly think more work is needed.
     
I talked today about cryptography, China, and Facebook’s billions. My apologies for how rushed it was on air, but we had less time than usual. I’ve written up below what I was going to say. Listen in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis.
Links
The Code Book, Mozilla Debates Whether to Trust Chinese, and Facebook on Track for $1B Revenue This Year.
Cryptography
I’ve read this fabulous book on cryptography by Simon Singh, “The Code Book”. It’s easy to read and full of the little anecdotes and trivia nuggets that I love.
The book opens with the story of Mary, Queen of Scots. It’s a great story for illustrating the value and dangers of cryptography. Mary, as I’m sure you know, was sister to Queen Elizabeth and probably had the better claim to the throne. She misjudged the politics and showed up in England to get away from tetchy Scottish locals, only to be thrown in the Tower to keep her from making a play for the English throne.
While in the tower (or “whilst” as the Brits say) she entered into a conspiracy with plotters outside. This is in the days of Catholic vs Protestant and conspirators were plotting with Mary even as she was in captivity.
Not being stupid, they had invented a code to hide what they wrote and hid the messages in a barrel and smuggled them into and out of the country house where Mary was now being kept. So when Elizabeth’s aide, Walsingham, brought Mary to charge for treason, Mary felt safe.
He starts with this story because it shows all the important bits of cryptography. First, you’ve got “steganography”–the art of hiding messages. Smuggling them in via a barrel bung just one way–Ancient Greeks wrote their message on wood and then covered it in wax so that it looked like a smooth wax tablet. This is how Xenophon in Greece was able to get advance knowledge of an attack from Xerxes in Persia, according to Herodotus, and thus foil it.
Then you’ve got the code itself. He takes you through the different types of codes, beginning with jumbling up letters of the alphabet so every “a” becomes a “g”, and so on. This was the type of code that Mary had used, though she’d been a little more sophisticated and some words had become symbols, so “mine” was a kind of double S logo, and “in” became an italic “x”.
Codes revolve around a system and a shared secret. The system here is “replace letters and some words with other symbols”. The shared secret is exactly which letters and words get replaced by others–does an “a” become a “g” or a “q”?
And you’ve also got the codebreakers. Codebreakers are rarely portrayed as heroic, alas, because it takes far more time to break a code than it does to create it. So the poor codebreaker is often like Walsingham’s codebreaker, Thomas Phelippes, who is described as “a man of low stature, slender every way, dark yellow haired on the head, and clear yellow bearded, eaten in the face with smallpox, of short sight, thirty years of age by appearance”. He was a linguist who could speak French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and German.
The techniques of the codebreaker remain the same. You can either exploit the fact that often a code leaves information that helps you break it, or simply to use some other means to learn more about the cipher and so make your decoding problem easier.
For example, in a later story Singh tell us about the Enigma machines of World War Two. The French Secret Service bribed the disgruntled brother of the head of the German Signal Corps to get the schematics for the machine. This told you how the machine worked, but the machine had settings — to decode messages the Allies still needed to know which settings were being used. The Poles figured it out first–the cipher wasn’t perfect and the Germans reused the settings all day, which gave you a lot of messages that were encrypted the same way. The Poles were breaking Enigma-encrypted messages until 1939 when the Germans changed the crypto system and made it stronger.
Then it was the Brits turn. At a place called Bletchley Park, which you can visit today as a museum, began applying themselves to the new Enigma. Thanks to the Poles they had the basic approach, but the German changes made it harder to crack. Fortunately the Brits had many more people working on it than the Poles did, so were able to read the encrypted German communications.
This is another technique we see today: “brute force”. When your mathematical analysis reduces the number of possibilities to a manageable number, you simply try each one. The more people you have working on this stage, each person trying one possibility, the more quickly you can break it. This is why the invention of computers has changed cryptography — computers can try the many different possibilities much faster than a person can, so we now don’t need as much mathematical insight to reduce a complex code to the point where you can just brute force the possibilities.
Anyway, back to Mary. Mary had received messages about a conspiracy, and they’d been intercepted and decoded. But Walsingham, Elizabeth’s Principal Secretary, really didn’t like Mary. He didn’t just want to deny her liberty, he wanted to get her red-handed plotting. So he waited, and eventually Mary acknowledged and endorsed the plot. He then had his cryptographer insert a PS onto the bottom of an outgoing Mary message, in code, asking to know the names of the conspirators and when the reply came, he had them arrested.
How’d it end? The conspirators were all “cut down, their privities were cut off, bowelled alive and seeing, and quartered”. Mary was beheaded. Score one for the Protestants over the Catholics. Never mind denying your atheist bus slogans, the 16th century knew how to deal with religious dissent.
So, good book, and it talks about a lot more: Navajo code talkers, and the “public key cryptography” that computers use today. But the basic systems of secrets, codes, interceptions, and breakers is largely unchanged today even though it’s all happening with computers and the code systems themselves are much more complex.
China
There’s really only one security system on the web. When you go to a website whose address starts with “https” and not “http”, you’re gong to a secure site. The communication between you and the server is encrypted and the identity of the other party is verified. This solves the Mary Queen of Scots problems where someone was listening in and even pretending to be one of the people communicating.
The site I linked to talks about the step where your browser verifies the identity of the other party. For example, I go visit ASB’s web site to do my Internet banking. My browser wants to be sure it’s talking to ASB and not to dirtyhacker.com who has rerouted traffic from ASB to their site.
To do this, ASB gives my browser a “digital certificate” signed by someone my browser trusts. There aren’t many places that browsers trust. The link today talks about how Mozilla is trying to decide whether to trust China’s official signing authority.
This is important because if China’s official signing authority becomes a puppet of the government, then dissidents might think they were communicating secretly and privately with a website when in fact all their communications could be overheard and decoded by the government.
It’s tricky politically, of course, because it’s not fashionable to stand up and say “the Chinese government can’t be trusted”. I’ll let you know how it comes out.
Facebook
And finally, Facebook. Facebook’s revenue has doubled every year since 2007: $150M then, $300M in 2008, $700M in 2009, and they’re on track to break $1B in 2010.
What’s interesting is where they make their money. It’s almost all coming from advertising. They know about what you like, so they can show you ads that you’re likely to like, so advertisers are happy and pay more for the advertising space. It’s Google’s idea but more personal–until recently, Google had no way for you to tell them how old you are, where you live, what interests you have, and so on. Despite that, of course, they’re still making a billion dollars every quarter, so it’s not too shabby.
People spend an hour a day on Facebook on average, which is much more than the 15m on average that people spend on TradeMe. Of course, if TradeMe could get you laid, maybe their average visit length would go up …
Today’s connecting them: life (Mary’s loss thereof), liberty (Chinese loss there off), and the pursuit of happiness (and Facebook’s monetisation thereof).
03 March 2010
02 March 2010
I make no apology for using Sir Winston Churchill’s title for the first volume of his history of the Second World War to describe the culture war between those who would capture ideas for their exclusive use and those who would disseminate them widely.
It’s not a straightforward issue. On the one hand, most of us would accept that there is value in providing an incentive to create clever things that ultimately benefit many people. That’s the public good argument for copyright and patents. On the other, our culture and our technology are built on the work and ideas of others and controlling people’s access effectively controls our development as a species.
These are important matters that need a global consensus. What I’m seeing at the moment is an attempt to enclose the commons of ideas for the benefit of a few and to detriment of us all. That’s been the case for a century at least, but the arrival of the Internet has pushed things to a whole new level.
That brings me to ACTA, the treaty being negotiated in secret by our government and others, which is at least partly about the interaction of copyright and the Internet. I’ve railed against the secrecy around ACTA before, because it prevents the ordinary people whose lives will be affected from having a say in it.
There have been some remarkable revelations about ACTA in the last few days. Firstly, there have been three leaks. The text of the Internet chapter, an analysis of some countries’ views on transparency of the agreement, and an analysis of each country’s negotiating position on the Internet chapter of the draft ACTA agreement. We don’t know where the leaks are coming from, but it’s clear that many people negotiating the agreement are unhappy with the insistence of secrecy coming from (we now know) the US, South Korea and Denmark.
Nat Torkington has analysed the New Zealand positions from the latest link. New Zealand’s negotiators are pushing for clarity, for reasonableness and for transparency. Good on them. It looks as though New Zealand is making its view more felt than many other countries. Even so, what we end up with, of course, is not just up to New Zealand.
People in our government are listening about the lack of transparency. Our negotiators have just issued a call for submissions on some points of the Internet chapter ACTA by 31 March. This, coupled with the leaks, offers ordinary people a chance for some kind of say. So does the PublicACTA event to be hosted by InternetNZ on April 10th, right before the next round of ACTA negotiations which are to be held here in Wellington the following week.
It’s good that we have found out more about ACTA – even if it is mostly through unacknowledged “leaks”. It’s good that New Zealand is pushing for transparency. We need to empower our negotiators and those in like-minded countries to reject the extreme positions that some of the other countries are taking. Do consider sending a submission, even if it’s just “the current model works well, don’t change it”. I’ll write some more detailed points and publish them here well before the deadline.
However, it’s still appalling that a treaty that will affect everyone is being negotiated in secret, with an agenda being pushed by one industry based mainly in one country which won’t let the secrecy be lifted for fear that other countries’ citizens won’t let them stay in the negotiations.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. We’ve had a glimpse of it. Let’s throw the curtains wide.
Enjoy: Massive ACTA document leak from the EU dated Feb 2010. Ironic that we have to get NZ's ACTA position from European document leaks:
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4829/125/ http://blog.die-linke.de/digitalelinke/wp-content/uploads/ACTA-6437-10.pdf Europe to get user selectable cut-off limits for roaming phone bills and limits on roaming charges:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/190413/new_eu_limits_on_mobile_roaming_begin.html Rickrolling is killed off by YouTube, as it removed the original video after a terms-of-use violation. No, I won't rickroll you:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/190128/rip_rickrolling_youtube_kills_original_video.html British company Pelikon shows a keypad for mobile phones that serves as a touchpad. It is illuminated to highlight different key functions:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/01/pelikons-morphpad-demoed-combines-touchpad-morphing-keyboard/ UK Spy drone makes its first arrest, fingering a perp hiding in the bushes in Merseyside:
http://technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=2811 And finally. An amazing litte super-compact electric bike. Just wish it had a super-compact price tag too:
http://www.yikebike.com/site/gallery Vik :v) Diamond Age Solutions Ltd. http://diamondage.co.nz
What a flurry of ACTA stuff today -- here's a press release from InternetNZ on their "PublicACTA" initiative.
InternetNZ to take public message to ACTA negotiators
Media Release
2 March 2010
InternetNZ (Internet New Zealand Inc) will assist the public in voicing its concerns about the controversial international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) through an open conference to be held next month in Wellington, New Zealand.
“We’re going to give the public the chance to have their say - in contrast to the secrecy of the negotiation process,” says Jordan Carter, InternetNZ Policy Director.
PublicACTA will be held on Saturday, 10 April 2010, two days ahead of Round 8 of the ACTA negotiations on 12-16 April in Wellington. The outputs of PublicACTA will be provided to the New Zealand government negotiators.
PublicACTA will be an open and public opportunity for people to critique the known and likely content of the ACTA proposals, providing a counterpoint to the secrecy of the negotiations.
“These plurilateral negotiations appear to extend well beyond the area of trade and physical counterfeiting to potentially cover non-commercial infringement of copyright material by ordinary citizens and digital rights management,” Carter says.
Despite the high level of secrecy surrounding the process, some of the proposals have leaked and demonstrate cause for concern.
"ACTA could affect everyone's rights on the Internet. Proposals from some countries seek to go beyond New Zealand's current public position. It is therefore very important that there is a forum for public discussion," says Carter.
"The aim of PublicACTA is to raise the public’s concerns, seek improvements to the Agreement, and provide an opportunity for people to connect and discuss the issues. The output will be an agreed statement that the public and interested organisations can sign up to, to be delivered to New Zealand Government negotiators and politicians."
The New Zealand Government today called for submissions on ACTA identifying the dates of the negotiations and outlining some specific areas they would like feedback on. InternetNZ will also submit on that document, which has a deadline of 31 March 2010.
Details of the programme of and high profile international guests at PublicACTA will be provided in coming days.
For more information contact:
Jordan Carter
Policy Director, InternetNZ
021 442 649
jordan@internetnz.net.nz
and now, a baby photo:
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Today saw the biggest leak so far of ACTA info. Michael Geist has details on Internet and Civil Enforcement Chapters With Country Positions
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4829/125/
(discovered via boing boing)
Nathan Torkington has a summary of New Zealand's standpoint on various issues within the leaked document:
http://nathan.torkington.com/blog/2010/03/01/nz-acta-negotiation
NZ's Ministry of Economic Development has asked the public for ACTA advice
Tech Liberty NZ asks "Why do NZ citizens have to find out the NZ position in ACTA negotiations from leaked documents?"
When i get some non-work non-baby time, i'll write a real blog post on it, promise :)
Meanwhile here's the press release calling for submissions:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA1003/S00028.htm
Submissions sought on Anti-Counterfeit Trade Deal
Tuesday, 2 March 2010, 2:50 pm
Press Release: New Zealand Government
Minister calls for submissions on Anti-Counterfeiting Trade
Agreement
Commerce Minister Simon Power is calling for submissions on a
range of intellectual property proposals in the digital arena to help
develop the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).
This is the third round of public consultations on ACTA, and New
Zealand will be hosting Round 8 of the ACTA negotiations in
Wellington from 12-16 April.
Digital enforcement measures will be one of the topics that will be
discussed by delegations from Australia, Canada, the European
Union, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Singapore, Switzerland, Morocco, and
the US.
"Intellectual property rights infringement is changing in nature with
the development of technology. Therefore, enforcement measures
need to be constantly reviewed to ensure they remain effective.
"I encourage interested parties to provide submissions to help set a
higher benchmark for the enforcement of intellectual property rights."
The Ministry of Economic Developments discussion paper can be
found at:
http://www.med.govt.nz/templates/MultipageDocumentTOC____425
82.aspx
Submissions about digital enforcement can be sent to:
trademarks@med.govt.nz.
The closing date for submissions is Wednesday 31 March 2010.
ENDS
and now a baby photo. \m/
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The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is an agreement between countries around IP rights and enforcement. The negotiations have been happening in secret, with every country saying “well, we’d love to reveal what we’re talking about but those other countries just won’t let us”. Fortunately there have been leaks, and the latest is a fascinating glimpse at how these things are put together and where the parties stand.
It seems bizarre at first, but the draft is laid out like a spreadsheet: one article per row and with three columns, one each for the US/Japan version, the EU version, and comments. Inside each sentence square brackets mark the attributed proposed alternatives for language. From this we can tell some very interesting things about the New Zealand position:
- NZ negotiators are keen on the wording “copyright and related rights and trademarks” rather than the US’s catch-all “intellectual property”. Richard Stallman has a well-written article on why “intellectual property” is a dangerous illusion. (Namely, it covers some very different pieces of law with different intents, terms, scope, and applicability)
- NZ negotiators are keen to keep the Copyright Tribunal option open. After Section 92a collapsed last year, the government consulted and has proposed a nuanced and good proposal that balances ease of complaint against risk of false accusation, giving the Copyright Tribunal the ability to hear complaints and award fines of up to $15,000. A 6-month suspension of Internet access and larger fines remain the domain of the courts. The US proposed language is all about “judicial authorities”, so New Zealand has proposed “competent authorities”. This is good–it shows that the government is serious about the Copyright Tribunal part of the new Copyright Bill and is not simply mooting it knowing that it will be overruled by ACTA.
- NZ negotiators are aware of the US desire to turn litigation into a revenue stream. They’ve opposed the US language “in the case of patent infringement, damages adequate to compensate for the infringement shall not be less than a reasonable royalty”, although interestingly NZ only supports this being stricken from the US proposal not from the EU proposal. The EU negotiators’ comments are fascinating: “The EU sticks on the concept that damage compensates all the prejudice but only the prejudice. Neither ‘punitive damages’ nor ‘future prejudice’ is acceptable”.
- NZ negotiators are keen to prevent the situation where someone joins a filesharing network, grabs an album, and is hit with a $100,000 penalty. Their wording supports flexibility when copyright damages are set: the authorities may consider lost profits (as opposed to the US wording shall) and NZ suggested the authorities consider retail price as well. The US wants each country to set up a system of pre-established damages and guidelines for calculating the penalties (oh, say, number of copies times profit we say we would havemade), and give the rightsholder the choice of using that formula instead of letting a judge award penalties. NZ wants this to be optional, not mandatory.
- Pirated or counterfeit items will be removed from sale or distribution, and NZ would also like them to be surrendered to the rightsholder (so Mattel get the knock-off Barbie dolls). The machinery used to manufacture the pirated or counterfeit goods is also forfeited, which NZ raises no objection to. It’s unclear to me whether this applies to computers used in copyright infringements.
- NZ supports deleting the article which says that when you’re found guilty of infringement, your identity and the identity of others involved in the infringement and distribution are turned over to the rightsholder.
- NZ is questioning the scope of the term “online service provider”. As we’ve seen with S92A, the term “provider” might cover cafes, hospitals, employers, apartment building body corporates, families, even sites like Google and TradeMe. Clarity is essential.
- ISP and website liability is a hot topic. Some countries already hold service providers liable for what happens on that service (e.g., Italy’s prosecution of Google executives) while others give safe harbour to such providers. Section 4 says “what we said for the physical world also applies for the online, but countries can place limits on the liability of service providers under certain conditions”. Switzerland wants this optional, NZ wants to know why search engines deserve safe harbour. I hope they got their answer–Google’s programs index billions of web pages and there aren’t enough humans on the Internet to read and pre-qualify pages before they go online.
- There’s an interesting clause that would prevent service provider safe harbours from being made conditional on proactive monitoring. That is to say, a country wouldn’t be able to say “oh sure, you can have safe harbour, but you have to be reading everything your users do and you lose it if you’re not searching all their traffic.” There’s a NZ objection here, but it’s unclear to me whether it’s to the whole provision or just the language.
- NZ is the white knight when it comes to anti-circumvention legislation. The ACTA draft contains proposed text saying that if you make or use a tool that breaks “technical protection measures” (DRM) then you’re breaking the law. The NZ negotiators point out that DRM is out of scope for ACTA, but even if it were in-scope there’s still public domain material locked behind DRMs and breaking such DRM shouldn’t be against the law. The paragraphs are beautiful. I quote them here:
NZ: The paragraphs refer to “adequate legal protection” as well as remedies, which is inconsistent [with] the objective of ACTA to establish standards for the enforcement of intellectual property rights and the ACTA discussion paper. In particular, we note that the discussion paper refers only to parties providing “remedies against circumvention of technological protection measures used by copyright owners and the trafficking of circumvention devices.”
New Zealand does not support protection being mandated against circumvention of TPMs where the underlying work is not protected by copyright. In particular, we do not support protection against circumvention of access control TPMs because access control is not an exclusive right given to copyright owners.
- There’s an odd section about preserving electronic rights management information. I assume it’s meant to preserve owner and license information, but I’m not really clear on the situations that motivated this section. NZ opposes extending protection of RMIs to cover information about performances or the producer of a phonogram.
On the balance this bit isn’t too bad–New Zealand is a good voice for sanity in the negotiations. I have to qualify my assessment in two ways, though:
- I’m not a lawyer. I may have misread the complex document. I’m not intimately familiar with the current legislation, so I may have overlooked a situation where the negotiated text will throw out a freedom that we currently have (e.g., format shifting).
- I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about how specific technology might interact with the proposed treaty. For example, do I run foul of the Rights Management Information protections if I rip a CD and don’t add in title, composer, etc. information?
This treaty is going to need a lot of close examination from people who can read the legal language and yet who are intimately familiar with the possibilities and opportunities of technology. This is why negotiation in secret is a bad idea–our country won’t benefit from the knowledge of experts until the text is set in stone. We’ll get something that likely has flaws, but we’ll have to approve or reject it “warts and all”.
01 March 2010
Someone once defined a Compromise, as a Solution neither party is happy with...
New Zealand has a new section 92 of the copyright act -- or rather, the copyright bill. The first reading of this bill in Parliament was last week.
The core principle of the right to contest accusations, and to not receive punishment until after due process, is now in the bill. That is the one thing I'll never compromise on.
However we must remain vigilant. The injustice was not obvious in the old law, it only reveals itself when you think through how the law could possibly be implemented. I'm gonna keep following this closely.
Disconnection is still in there. It really shouldn't be. How many times do we need to say "Would you disconnect someone's power, water, gas, for breaking civil law? Would you deny them use of the postal service?". Why are we terminating a service vital to livelihoods, social and democratic participation and communication - all for the offense of copyright infringement? The punishment outweighs the crime, and is inventive and inappropiate.
Large scale commercial copyright infringement should be punishable with fines. Casual personal copyright infringement should also be punishable with fines.
The size of the fines for personal copyright infringement should be a true sting that makes legitimate purchase appealing, but also needs to be in proportion to the wrongdoing. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of penalties for a few songs is not okay, and that would only furthers the erosion of respect for copyright law, and respect for artists and publishers. The Bill includes a $15,000 limit, when using the Copyright Tribunal. If the copyright holder wishes to claim more, then they'll need to go to court. This still leaves us open to crazy big penalties in New Zealand, through the court system. I'm holding hope in our judges to not award the multi-million dollar amounts, for a dozen mp3s, that we've seen in other countries.
Last time we had a copyright bill, it was looking pretty good -- until the last possible moment: the final reading in parliament. It was then, after all the consultation and select committees, that the villian (Judith Tizard) added a Supplementary Order Paper which inserted section 92 - the Guilt Apon Accusation that worked out at ISP being forced to disconnect anyone accused of copyright infringement in order to avoid being liable themselves.
Could that happen all over again?
Trackback URL for "Thoughts on the Copyright Bill."
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i'm waiting for solr again, it's become the bane of my week. So, here's some link spam:
Do you know that the bitter, in lemon lime and bitters, is 45% alcohol? Danni discovered this recently
http://dannipenguin.livejournal.com/292929.html
Vancouver ran outta condoms during the olympics - and emergency shipment was sent for the athletes. That's about 14 condoms per person.
http://www.cbc.ca/olympics/blogs/postblog/2010/02/emergency-shipment-of-...
Vodafone tried to take advantage of Telecom XT's woes. Lance Wiggs goes over the difficulty and inconveniences you must go through to actaully take up their offer.
http://lancewiggs.com/2010/02/27/vodafone-fails-to-take-advantage-of-tel...
NZ Herald gets 2009 and 2010 confused, and reports an internet blackout campaign from last year as if it was next week. Also quotes from Bronwyn who was busy giving birth at the time:
http://creativefreedom.org.nz/blog/2010/02/a-statement-about-mondays-int...
UK Government forced to reveal evidence they hold on the USA's use of torture.
http://norightturn.blogspot.com/2010/02/open-justice-wins-again-in-uk.html
ChiefSciAdvisor: Peter Gluckman on climate change and the scientific process, including this quote: “Uncertainty about some aspects of climate science should not be used as an excuse for inaction. Some people ask why we should act when scientists say they are only ninety per cent certain about the problem. But would you get on a plane that had a ten per cent chance of landing?”
http://www.pmcsa.org.nz/issues/climate-change-and-the-scientific-process/
Tofu wrestling, for Vegans.
http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/zDfmtCzTIUM/tofu-wrest...
pretty DSLR
http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/26/dslr-camera-built-from-scratch-looks-...
Vegan shoes, made from recycled TVs.
http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/VtqguPXzGgA/vegan-pump...
Another school spying on their students. Same country as last time. They scare me.
http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/G2lMaBGyKLo/school-adm...
Palm's "WebOS" still lives on. One day we may even be able to buy it. Yet-Another-Linux-Based-Phone-OS.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/26/palms-webos-1-4-emerges-screenshots-g...
The smurfette principle, a humorous 12 minute video, asks why it is that female characters in general-audience cartoons, if present at all, are always plot points for the male characters.
In other news - Does anyone actually read link spams?
and now a happy baby photo:
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The Law Commission has released its latest report on privacy law, Invasion of Privacy: Penalties and Remedies. This report (part 3 of 4) specifically deals with matters such as surveillance, interception of communications, and criminal and civil law.
A key recommendation is that “the tort of invasion of privacy recognised in Hosking v Runting should be left to develop at common law”. It is worth remembering that the Hosking case was only decided in 2004, and then only by a 3-2 judge majority – a very clear reminder that privacy law in this country is still in its most formative stages.
The recommendation to leave privacy law “to develop at common law” is the equivalent of kicking for touch – and in the circumstances, the only realistic option for the Commission. It is clear that much of the “real” privacy issues that will affect New Zealanders on an everyday basis will not be decided by New Zealand’s courts or the government. Rather, where Europe and the US go, New Zealand will have to follow. The increasingly connected nature of the world makes it futile to attempt to chart a different course. And in any case, there are benefits in following the lead of others, with far greater resources and innovation, in this area.
Another recent report, this time from the European Union, highlights just how far advanced Europe is, compared to New Zealand at least, in defining and developing privacy rights. With the terribly exciting name “Study on Online Copyright Enforcement and Data Protection in Selected Member States” (PDF), the report examined 6 EU states (not including the UK) and tells us:
- “IP addresses are generally considered to be personal data” and therefore subject to privacy laws.
- “IP addresses are generally considered to be traffic data, which means that they may only be processed in a limited number of circumstances and for specific purposes (such as billing, invoicing, etc.), and that consent is generally required to process them for other purposes (such as online copyright enforcement).”
- “ISPs cannot store IP addresses for the specific purpose of online copyright enforcement (except in France, where retention for the purpose of making information available to the judicial authorities or to the Hadopi Commission [not dissimilar to NZ's s92A] is allowed).”
- “The processing of IP addresses by ISPs to pass on infringement warning notices is generally prohibited or subject to strict restrictions (e.g., in France if the Hadopi Act is complied with).”
- “The general monitoring of P2P networks by right holders resulting in the creation of a database of potential copyright infringers is usually prohibited.”
- “The disclosure of P2P users’ identities by ISPs to right holders for civil enforcement is generally restricted by data protection law. “
This is a level of detail and analysis not yet seen in New Zealand. Of course, privacy law around the world is a rapidly developing area of law, policy and social issues (e.g. see my post Changing expectations of privacy). The EU report itself acknowledges that “many of the legal concepts and questions examined have not been the subject of authoritative decisions by courts or data protection authorities” (such as NZ’s Privacy Commissioner). But the decisions, policies, research and jurisprudence being developed in the EU will ultimately determine (or at least, strongly influence) the direction New Zealand takes.
as mentioned previously, once Casey sleeps all night, seven nights in a row, we'll open that bottle of wine in the fridge.
tonight is night FIVE.
here's hoping.
Update: counter reset to zero at 2am this morning.
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Saying bye bye at the bus stop this morning., originally uploaded by Br3nda.
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Good day everyone,
Sorry to bore you with more mockups. They’re practically the same as before, I tried to sit down and figure out what I could improve on but I couldn’t really find anything at all! So what I did do is create a collage of screenshots of our “tools” that we use in the project, like Ground Control, Quickshot, bzr, Launchpad etc. I then put that into a new Get involved page. I think it looks pretty nice, if I say so myself 
Click for a bigger version!
And, here are the other two pages with small revisions.
I’m looking for web developers who are interested in helping me actually create a working website from these mock-ups. We’ve already done a bit of HTML and javascript, and have the first page working – but it needs someone more experienced than I and with more time to actually make the site look like the mockups
If anyone is interested, send me an email: humphreybc [at] gmail [dot] com
     
oh Radio NZ -- oh let me count the ways i love you! no, there are too many to count
So of course i wanted to sign the petition to save radio NZ. I headed over to http://www.issues.co.nz/handsoff to do so.
but then... wait! WTF is that?
All for saving radio nz, but not gonna sign up to a "Labour all good, national all bad" publicity campaign by "Brendon Burns, Labour spokespersonman"..
Can we have a petition without his smiling mug on the side, please? Nothing against the guy, but this isn't a "Labour to the rescue" scenario. KTHNXBYE!
and now a baby photo:
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28 February 2010
After feedback from Kevin Godbyk and Thorsten Wilms, I’ve combined the about and home page into one page, and then moved the old home page and made it a “downloads” page.
The idea is that the user will visit the site, if they already know about it, they can hit the download button up the top. If not, they’ll read about it and then download.
The download button on the home page will detect their system language and download the correct PDF in their language. But if they’re on a shared computer/internet cafe or a friends’ computer, or want a different language for whatever reason, they can click “Alternative download options” which will take them to the downloads page, where they will answer the three simple questions.
They can also get a “2-up” printer friendly PDF document there as well, in case they want to print it and save paper.
The new home page (click for 100% view):
New downloads page:
     
Hey everyone!
So, you may have been wondering how we’re actually going to deliver our product to the masses if we’re not on the CD. Well, we’ll hopefully be in the repositories for Lucid 10.04, so that’s one way. But another way is a super groovy and user-friendly website, which I have spent most of today mocking up!
So, check it out. Click on the images for a bigger 100% view.
What do ya’ll think? Criticism? Feedback? Ideas?
     
27 February 2010
OLPC testing today, originally uploaded by Br3nda.
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