The naughty list

The Register reports on what's going to become the fallout of the Digital Economy Act, with internet users being added to a blacklist if they're accused of copyright infringement, and then eventually cut off, or have money demanded from them with menaces, or both. This marks the beginning of the long march towards routine encryption of internet traffic.

It's unclear to me whether this only applies to music, movies and software, or whether it applies more broadly than that. For example, if I posted three or four images to this blog, or on my web site, that I didn't own the copyright on and were not under a creative commons license, would that mean that I could be disconnected from the internet? In a strict interpretation of copyright, with no room for fair use, that's what the DEA implies.

It seems highly likely to me that copyright violation will be used in future as an excuse to block whistle-blowing web sites like Wikileaks, or blogs which post information which causes embarrassment to government officials.

The only positive side to very strict and uncompromising forms of automatic policing is that the sort of low level sharing of proprietary software, literature or media between friends which has always occurred for as long as I can remember would become technically impossible without incurring fines or disconnection, so users would have no option but to move towards software under free and open source licenses, and creative commons media. This shift already seems to be underway, but the en masse issuing of letters and creation of blacklists could accelerate the trend.

Another Beagleboard

This is the kind of overall direction which I'm thinking of for the GROK2 project, or for quite low cost robotics in general. The Beagleboard has enough processing power to do interesting things, and can run an ordinary operating system such as Ubuntu. If you package this together with a Minoru webcam, wireless USB adaptor and Phidgets stepper controller and 8/8/8 then it would be possible to produce quite a sophisticated robot for maybe in the region of $500.




The low power consumption makes these boards attractive compared to other small PC motherboards, since on a mobile robot the main power consumer is the computer or laptop.

Just another brick in the wall

An example of robotic brick laying going on at the university of Southern Denmark. Construction is an industry in which there is certainly a need for improved automation. If you take a longer term view and are concerned about construction of habitations in space or on other planets then fully automating the construction process is an essential prerequisite - although it's quite unlikely that moon bases will be made out of bricks.



This isn't a bad attempt, and presumably the robot is doing detailed localisation using the checkerboard patterns which wouldn't be unreasonable in a construction scenario. If the bricks have a distinctive surface pattern to them then there probably isn't any need for the additional checkerboard on each of them.

Brick laying could be streamlined using a less general purpose robot. If a large Cartesian robot was used, which had a spring loaded mechanism similar to the one used in staplers for delivering the bricks then the construction process could be much faster.

The big Facebook kerfuffle

Not so long ago I predicted that there would be some catastrophic privacy breech in relation to social networks or government data, which caused people to re-evaluate how much personal information they put online. It looks as if this event has come much sooner than I imagined, with the recent kerfuffle over Facebook. By conventional standards the information recently disclosed by Facebook about its users does resemble a catastrophic privacy breech.

There's some extended banter over Facebook's woes in this Twit episode (about half way through).



If there's any doubt that private information has been inappropriately disclosed then this site quashes it. There's also another site where people's phone numbers and pictures are shown. It's obvious that the people who made these comments or photos, or who gave out their phone numbers, only expected them to be seen by their friends or group members, and not the entire world.

The reaction of most technologists seems to be to blame the users for not updating their privacy settings, but I don't think that this criticism is entirely fair. If you're a software engineer or a web developer, or just someone who obsessively reads the tech news you'll know that everything you put online should be considered to be public, or potentially public information. But unfortunately the majority of Facebook users are not people who know about these things. Their mental model of what's public and what's private is a natural pre-internet one, which is at odds with the way that Facebook currently operates. Where there is dissonance between an intuitive notion of privacy and its online implementation you're going to see people being embarrassed, outed, bullied, fired, discriminated against or worse depending upon what sort of regime you're living under. Some privacy breeches are humourous and trivial, but others can have much more serious consequences.

The problem is that social networking services occupy a fuzzy region between email, which is generally regarded as private, and Twitter, identi.ca or YouTube which is clearly a public broadcasting medium. Personal information should probably be private by default, with appropriate options to make it visible to others if required.

So will I be joining Leo Laporte in an exodus? Presently I've no reason to leave Facebook, since I always assumed that any information there was public to begin with. There currently don't appear to be any good alternatives to Facebook anyway (what alternatives exist all come with "spying for free"), but if something new emerges which has a better, more intuitive, opt-in privacy policy then I'd probably switch over to using it. If Diaspora looks viable at the end of the summer I might become an early adopter or developer if it's released under an open source license.

Oil slick

Images of the environmental disaster taking place in the gulf of Mexico. It looks as if this is going to involve a massive cleanup operation.



You can see from the images that many businesses are likely to suffer as a result of the oil slick. Probably the best thing that anyone in that situation can do is to compile an estimate of the damages (eg to beaches or lost tourist revenue or loss of fishing grounds) and then file a lawsuit against the companies responsible for the pollution - primarily British Petroleum. If enough people do that then this sends a clear message that companies which behave irresponsibly must expect to pay the full price for any environmental damage that they cause.

Dickensian

"Has your mind been latterly directed to the consideration of the condition of the children and young persons engaged in the mills and factories of this country, with a view to affording them permanent legislative relief?"

Even in the 21st century it seems that there are still child workers or child slaves. Calling them slaves is probably more appropriate, since they certainly do not earn a fair wage comparable to an adult doing the same work. Seeing something like this is like being transported back in time a couple of centuries to the beginning of the industrial revolution. In early 19th century Britain there were children doing jobs like these, and worse.

Which got me thinking as to when did child labour end in Britain. Doing a bit of reading on this there appears to be no point in time at which child labour was actually ended. Instead the minimum working age was very gradually raised over the course of two centuries, in a series of parliamentary bills known as the Factory Acts. Probably passing laws is on its own not enough and there are other factors at work, such as improved enforcement of laws, changes in social attitudes and reduction in adult poverty. Changes in technology might also have become a factor in the 20th century. As the machines become more complicated to operate they require higher levels of education.

Election analysis

At the time of writing the eventual result of the UK general election remains unclear, in terms of who gets to wear the crown, but the voting figures are known. Far more important than the political machinations and deal or no deal style negotiations is the question which everyone wants to know the answer to - did Google predict the result?

The answer is probably "no", or at least the Google trends do not give a very clear indication in advance of who would win (or get the most votes).

Plotting by political party doesn't show much of interest, except that there is an exponential rise in search volume for all parties in the few days preceding the election. You can also see that the Labour party gets notably more news coverage in the final week.



Plotting by party leader we can clearly make out three peaks corresponding to the TV debates.



The first two debates generate a lot of search volume for Nick Clegg - a phenomena which became known as "Cleggmania". Presumably this is because many voters had no idea who he was and were plugging his name into Google to find out. The third debate was massively overshadowed by bigotgate. Quantitatively we can say that bigotgate was at least twice the magnitude of Cleggmania. By election day Cameron is ahead in search volume, but not with sufficient consistency to place a confident bet more than a day in advance.

Curiously at the finale both Brown and Clegg have a similar search result. Comparing this to the voting figures this suggests that although people were curious about Clegg they didn't want to vote for him.

So from this I think it's safe to conclude that Google is not a very good guide to predicting election results, and that the US presidential election may have been anomalous. At the time when Obama was running for office his internet based campaign - particularly his exploitation of Facebook and Twitter and their social network effects - may have given him an inflated search volume relative to the competition who probably didn't utilize the latest technology to the same degree. In contrast the May 6th 2010 UK election was not really very internet oriented, and I didn't witness any significant amount of campaigning going on online. Bloggers may have blogged and twitterers tweeted, but they had only a negligible impact on the shape of the popular debate compared to "old media".

Freedom in the cloud

A talk by Eben Moglen on the issues which accompany cloud computing.



Privacy problems associated with Facebook seem to be becoming more acute. I agree that the privacy settings are too complex, and if you want to stop information which you might believe to be private being automatically handed to various companies you have to go through a very convoluted process.

Simply shrugging and saying "Privacy is dead. Get over it" might be good enough for exhibitionists or a small number of philosophers, but in the real world most people want and expect some modest level of privacy, which in the modern era translates into data privacy. Ultimately it comes down to the dignity and integrity of the individual.

This is the problem with the current cloud computing paradigm. If you put your data on someone else's server they get to keep all the logs and do more or less anything they like with what you put there. In many cases, such as open source software development or writing an online encyclopedia, this is an amicable situation which is beneficial to all concerned. But when the data in the cloud is your personal life, which might include relationships, medical information, religious or political affiliations and business connections it might not be such a good idea for all of that to be 100% in the public domain, or even just 100% accessible to one company who can then sell it to advertisers or anyone else who might want to pay for it or demand it. Not so long ago it was standard advice not to give out personal information to people you don't know on the internet. Sites like Facebook potentially industrialise that sort of disclosure.

What's needed to overcome these problems is something like a peer-to-peer equivalent to Facebook, where users maintain full rights and control over their own digital identities. Personal profiles could be synchronised between friended peers, perhaps using encryption to ensure that the data can't easily be endlessly relayed on to other people or organisations without authorization. I've blogged about this kind of concept in the past, where you might have some software which acts as a kind of data ambassador or secretary on your behalf and you can specify what information is given to who under what circumstances. This sort of system puts the user back in control, rather than trusting some other organisation to store and process your information in ways which are highly opaque and under terms which can be modified on a whim for fun or profit.

Fortunately there is such a project underway.

Diaspora: Personally Controlled, Do-It-All, Distributed Open-Source Social Network from daniel grippi on Vimeo.

Even if this doesn't succeed, something like it probably eventually will.

Purple haze

Ubuntu 10.04 is another good release. I installed one of the beta versions a while back, and have only experienced one major issue with it in relation to the Phidgets USB devices. One of the plugins within Rhythmbox seems to interfere with the Phidgets, presumably erroneously classifying them as a music player or iPod. One solution is just to close Rhythmbox, but if like me you want to have music or podcasts playing in the background nearly all the time the way to have simultaneous music and robotic action is to select Edit/Plugins from the Rhythmbox menu then ensure that Portable Players - MTP is disabled.



Apart from that everything works straight from the installation. The social networking client Gwibber is greatly improved from the version which shipped with 9.10 and doesn't hang or crash like it used to. Window control buttons have moved to the left side by default, but this can be changed easily by selecting a different desktop theme, and there's now some justification for this move given other than the nebulous "frees up space nicely on the right". The window button position will be counter-intuitive for new users coming from Microsoft Windows, but I think this convention is already familiar to Mac users. Probably the biggest change is just the default desktop background changing from brown to purple/pink. Although it's a very minor cosmetic alteration I think that alone will attract more new users, since the brown background was a long running cause of criticism as being uninspiring or unattractive. Purple would be a more eye-catching colour in a store window or magazine advert than brown.

I also predict that Gimp will return to the default installation in the next one or two years, once its GUI has been improved. Gimp is really one of the best examples of how free software can be competitive with very expensive proprietary systems, and there are plenty of users who want to do more with images than just crop or rotate them.