machine-envy

Is this the hardest end of year quiz of all time? I actually worked at openDemocracy for most of this year, and I still only scored 64%. And most of that was thanks to the questions in the internet and copyright section. How much will you score?

I had an interesting phone call from a friend who wished to settle a Christmas family argument. The argument was over Deal Or No Deal. Imagine the case where there are only two boxes left closed, one belonging to the contestant and the other to someone else, and the million is in one of these two boxes. Now Noel offers the contestant to swap his box for the other, should he?

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m pleased to announce that as of 15 January next year, I’ll be joining the Open Rights Group as their new Executive Director!

Suw Charman, ORG’s outgoing Exec Director, has just posted the announcement on the ORG website. I’m looking forward to working with her, ORG’s Ops Manager Michael Holloway, and the incredibly diverse and talented group of people who make up ORG’s board, advisory council and army of expert volunteers.

It’s a big year ahead for digital rights. ORG scored a massive success with their Release The Music campaign against the extension of copyright terms in sound recordings, but this recommendation will need pursuing in Europe, where the music industry has vowed to take its rhetoric next. And there’s a lot more going on which requires the scrutiny of the digital rights community - like the e-voting pilots scheduled for this year’s local elections in March.

Of course, joining ORG means I’ll be leaving my post of Technology Director at openDemocracy. I’ve had a great two years there - watching the website go from strength to strength and working to build and launch a sister website, ChinaDialogue. I’ll miss the friends I’ve made there, they’re some of the most dedicated and talented people I’ve ever worked with. I wish them all the best of luck in continuing to develop what I believe is a worthwhile and necessary exercise in political analysis on the web.

I’ll still be writing my columns for openDemocracy and the New Statesman. All in all, it’s going to be a pretty busy year - I’m looking forward to it already.

I just finished reading The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper. One of the chapters discusses the idea of Utopian engineering rather than piecemeal engineering.

The Utopian approach may be described as follows. Any rational action must have a certain aim. … To choose this aim is therefore the first thing we have to do if we wish to act rationally … These principles … demand that we must determine our ultimate political aim, or Ideal State, before taking any practical action. Only when this ultimate aim is determined and … when we are in possession of something like a blueprint … only then can we begin to consider the best ways and means for its realization.

This is opposed to the piecemeal engineer, who:

will be aware that perfection, if attainable is far distant, … will adopt the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evils of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good.

Now my claim is that Utopian Engineering is similar to the waterfall model and that piecemeal engineering is similar to an agile approach. I think this is pretty much self evident. Waterfall attempts to capture requirements (i.e. the greatest good) and development the ‘final solution’. Agile developments attempts to satisfy quickly certain user stories (i.e. the greatest need).

Popper goes on to explain why Utopian engineering is doomed to failure. Firstly, Utopian engineering encourages centralized control (totalitarianism) and since the re-engineering will likely be painful and costly, the engineer becomes deaf to complaints. Secondly, since the program will take time to deliver, the requirements are likely to change:

This approach … can be of practical value only if we assume that the original blueprint … remains the basis of the work until it is completed. But that will take some time. It will be a time of revolutions, both political and spiritual, and of new experiments and experience in the political field. It is therefore expected that the ideas and ideals will change.

Change `political’ for `software’ in that and it reads like a criticism of the waterfall method. Perhaps the history of failure in the software field could have been avoided if we’d paid attention to what happened to previous attempts at Utopian engineering. Of course, the price of failure is much less when software projects go bad, but when our health insurance is being robbed to pay for it it starts to hurt.

I’ve been playing with the excellent pyjamas and I thought i’d share my experiences of using pylons to create a simple json service for the pyjamas client.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some really fab coverage on Gowers in the Guardian and the Observer, starting with this Leader from Friday’s edition:

“…The report was given a guarded welcome by the recently formed Open Rights group which campaigned strongly against extending the 50-year limit, but the war is not won yet. The Gowers report is only a staging post, a way of influencing UK government thinking before Whitehall submits its own policy to Brussels where the final decisions will be taken. The real lobbying has only just begun.”

Then on Saturday one of my favourite writers, Marina Hyde, throws in her twopence worth:

“It was, of course, barely a fortnight ago that readers of these pages were pleased to take a lesson in political theory from my temporary Guardian colleague Mick Hucknall, the lead singer of Simply Red and a signatory of the aforementioned ad, who opened a presumably self-parodic opinion piece with the statement “copyright is fundamentally socialist”. Mick then contrived to conflate notions of intellectual property - and there’s something about “property” that grates with our fifth-form Marxist’s thesis - with solid leftwing values, though I’m afraid I’d rather lost track of his point by the second mention of “the free flow of ideas”, and realised we were being asked to conceive of a Beverley Sisters track as such.”

And finally, new media heavyweight John Naughton files his analysis on Sunday:

“American neocons like to say that the only things found in the middle of the road are ‘white lines and dead armadillos’. Much the same applies to intellectual property (IP)…”

As someone who’s devoted the last two years to getting accessible arguments about IP into the national press, I’m celebrating.

My interview with Andrew Gowers has gone up on openDemocracy.

“‘Look at the debates that there have been on intellectual property since the arrival of the internet. They have been loud and shallow. They have been between people who say everything’s free and you shouldn’t pay for anything and people who say everything’s mine, and you should pay for everything. And actually neither of them are right.’ Andrew Gowers is sitting in a back room of the British government’s vast Treasury building. It’s just a few hours after the launch of his year-long reviewof the framework governing intellectual property, a text he hopes will change the nature of the debate not just in Britain, but internationally.

“The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property has been broadly welcomed by copyright campaigners…”

Read the rest here.

openDemocracy will shortly be publishing my interview with Andrew Gowers. In the meantime, the New Statesman have put up my latest column - what to buy a geek for Christmas. Of course, if you’re a real geek, you will have ordered all your presents online by now, so treat it as a little light relief:

“I had a strange dream last night. In a living room that bears no resemblance to my own, but in which I was entertaining friends, one of my guests found a box marked simply “Wii”. “What’s this?” he asked accusingly. It could only be one thing. As we pulled out swaths of bubble-wrap, looks of betrayal appeared on the faces around me. Sure enough, it was Nintendo’s seventh-generation games console, complete with innovative motion-sensitive wireless controller. What was I doing with this, when the product won’t hit the UK market until 8 December? More importantly, why was it still in the box?

”It was a classic anxiety dream…”

Read the rest here.

If you’re wondering what I want for Christmas, I found out yesterday afternoon. Halfway through the 15 minutes I’d managed to bag with Andrew Gowers at the Treasury, my archaic analogue dictaphone started chewing up the tape. Luckily no part of the interview was destroyed, it just meant I had to blush and change the tape halfway through recording.

I love my dictaphone because unlike a lot of digital recorders, it has one button which says play and one button which says record. Simple. But it’s unreliable, gives poor quality recordings and is, well, analogue. What I really want is a very, very simple and usable digital voice recorder with 100% reliability and not too much stupid software for getting it onto my computer in mp3/ogg format. Anybody have any recommendations?

Oh, and I also want a Nabaztag. (Isn’t he cute? Perhaps I could use him to record interviews… Do you think he’d go down well at the Treasury?)

With thanks to David Berry on the FC-UK list, here’s the government’s response to the Gowers Review in the Pre Budget Report:

“3.81 The Government welcomes the Gowers Review and will take forward those recommendations for which it is responsible. The Government firmly believes in the need for strong enforcement of IP rights to support the UK’s creative industries. The Government is therefore today endorsing the full Gowers enforcement package to tackle piracy and other IP infringement and is providing Trading Standards with an additional £5 million in 2007-08 in order to support the implementation of their new powers to tackle copyright infringement. To ensure that IP policy is strategically formulated in the future, the Government also supports the creation of an independent Strategic Advisory Board for IP policy. This Board will receive £500,000 from the Patent Office to commission research on emerging IP trends. The Government notes the recommendation to the European Commission on copyright term.”

Full Pre Budget Report here.

The House of Commons have started debating Gordon Brown’s speech and the Gowers Review has been published online. Here it is.

I’m reading over it now. Eye-catching recommendations include:

• tougher penalties for online copyright infringement - with a maximum 10 years imprisonment
• consulting on the use of civil damages as a deterrent for IP infringement
• business representatives sit on a new independent Strategic Advisory Board on IP Policy, advising the Government (what, no public interest groups?)
• a strictly limited ‘private copying’ exception to enable consumers to format-shift content they purchase for personal use. For example to legally transfer music from CD to their MP3 player
• clarifying (library) exceptions to copyright to make them fit for the digital age
• recommending that the European Commission does not change the status quo and retains the 50 year term of copyright protection for sound recordings and related performers’ rights

UPDATE: Those with a particular interest in the term extension debate might like to check out this report, commissioned by the Review, into the economic arguments for and against.