machine-envy

Two items of copyright geekery in this morning’s Guardian. Firstly. Alice Gould gives the legal 101 on hijacking”user-generated content” for a traditional media setting (well done Media Guardian for removing that nasty subscription barrier, by the way). Her conclusion:

The law may appear antiquated in the fast-changing world of the internet, but in most cases citizen journalists have the same legal protection as any other journalists.

And on the letters page Jonathan Mitchell QC suggests that the Guardian’s legal team are fostering “deeply undemocratic” ideas, after the publication of Winston Churchill’s famous “We shall fight them on the beaches” speech over the weekend:

When MPs make speeches in parliament, these are recorded in Hansard and the report is subject to parliamentary copyright (formerly crown copyright) under section 165 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Houses of Parliament might in theory restrict republication of the debates in Hansard; but for many years they have, in practice, allowed this quite freely… Even that formal permission would not be needed now, as parliamentary copyright lasts only 50 calendar years, so that the last remnants of copyright in this speech ended on December 31 1990.

Read the entire letter here.

…for the apparent attraction of the Metro as it is held in a fellow commuter’s hands. An attraction that disappears completely when the commuter leaves it on the seat and you start reading it.

Still looks like Westminster are doing the right thing and charging them for dumping tonnes of crap on the streets of London every day.

I was having a problem where I would see “Forbidden, perhaps you need to change the file permissions for this document or upload an index page” for every page in the site if I changed the permalink option in the wordpress admin page.

The good folks at A4 suggested putting this in the .htaccess file:

Options -Indexes
Options +FollowSymLinks

Which fixed it. Thanks A4.

After James showed me the web is us/ing us video, I wrote about it for my latest openDemocracy piece. It’s the first time I’ve been able to join up my interest in linguistcs with my interest in the information age, and I’m quite proud of the result.

After the Sandinista government took power in Nicaragua in 1979, its reform of the education system included expanding the country’s schools for the deaf. The schools’ methods had been harsh and broadly ineffective, consisting of drilling the children in lip-reading and spoken Spanish. But eventually - simply by bringing previously isolated deaf children together - they generated an unexpectedly positive side-effect.

Largely, the children had been living with hearing relatives, and had had no opportunity to communicate with other deaf children. Brought together, however, they pooled the makeshift gestures they had used at home. What resulted was a usable jargon that was all the children’s own. When new groups of deaf pupils arrived at the schools - their minds ripe for natural language-learning - they took the jargon of the older children and turned it into a fully-fledged, expressive language. Now known as Nicaraguan Sign Language, or Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua (ISN), this was the type of language, according to the Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, with which “a child can watch a surrealistic cartoon and describe its plot to another child”. It is a language that can be used in poems, jokes and life histories, one that “is coming to serve as the glue that holds the community together”.

Read the rest here.

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the web is us/ing us.  Its good short film about the way the machine learns.  Not sure if we need to rethink all the things listed, but still good.

I went to the premier of We’ll Never Meet Childhood Again a few weeks ago.  It was showing as part of the Human Rights Watch film festival.

The film follows the plight of Romanian children with AIDS who were abandoned to institutions in the eighties, see the HRW report here.   It shows the stories by interviewing the adults who chose to look after the kids outside the institutions they had been abandoned to.  Overall its a tough but rewarding film - make sure you see it if you can.  And congratulations Lindsay and Sam!

Just in case, as I did, you think of running a mixed windows/linux network using a samba PDC then here’s something to be aware of. When mounting the smbfs filesystem from linux, you will get CIFS extensions. Great - your uids will be the same on server and client. However, winbind will generate you a random uid when it authenticates on the PDC. What joy!

Given that these two utilities are from the same project, you think they would play nice.

We’re back.

Okay, it’s happened again - I have a new job and I’m not blogging. Sorry.

This is just a quick post to prove I still exist, and its theme is funny drawings on the web. I keep getting sent links to xkcd - this one cracks me up. And here’s a link to my favourite gaping void strip of all time.

And if you’re coming to this blog simply to find out where my writing is appearing, you should be looking here and here.

Yesterday was my first day working with the Open Rights Group. It’s going to take me a while to gain pace with the rest of the team, and the bevvy of projects they’re working on both in terms of campaigns (e-voting, more IP stuff, and the European Television without Frontiers legislation are all under the spotlight right now) and behind-the-scenes work.

I’ve been trying without success to get the widget in del.icio.us working so I can post links direct to this blog. In the meantime, here are a couple of titbits:

• Lawrence Lessig on net neutrality and municipal broadband in Wired
• Unsigned punk band make top 40 (health warning: they are represented by the PR company Quite Good, who were responsible for all the noise about Sandi Thom last year)