Oblomovka

2006-02-07»

Hello, computer. This week I am spilling secrets (well, not really secrets, just not entirely known things) by public speaking in semi-private places. Untangle that if you can.

On Thursday, I’m giving a brownbag talk at Google, so if you know how to break into that organization’s campus, I’ll be answering questions there on EFFish topics. Want me to talk about EFFish topics at your company?Mail me.

On Saturday, I’ll be in San Francisco being one of Charles Enders’ caged and greased bikini-clad literateurs with machine guns at Writers With Drinks, where I will spend ten minutes reading a piece called Confessions of a Self-Help Guru. And after that, I will be at NerdSalon getting very, very drunk.

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2006-01-28»

IT Conversations has put my OSCON To Evil! keynote from last year up, which is really nice of them. Just so you get all the jokes, here are the To Evil! slides that went along with it. I guess I’ll just have to pray the Lazyweb will write something to synchronise the two. The presentation uses huge uncompressed images, and ingenious S5 presentation javascript magic. About five minutes before the talk I tried to make the standard S5 CSS a little more evil; I’m absolutely sure I succeeded.

In other news, you have no idea how proud I am that the Web2.0 Bullshit Generator uses “life-hacks” as one of the keywords. I’ll be a footnote to history yet!

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2006-01-23»

One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to Get Out More. I’ve been tied up with a new job with EFF and a new home in an exciting city, both of mean I really ought to get out more, and speak more online. Somehow, I’ve managed to do the opposite, and have largely disappeared off everybody’s maps.

So, I’m determined to be a bit more visible. Yesterday, I gave an interview for EFF on Wikinews; tomorrow evening I’m hosting the regular monthly CopyNight at 21st Amendment in my new city of San Francisco. And at the Godforsaken time of 7.00AM PST, I’ll be sitting on my own on IRC in irc.freenode.net, #techactivism amusing myself while watching the Broadcast/Audio Flag hearings being webcast. Drop in if you want to see a bleary-eyed man trying to make sense of Washington politics.

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2005-09-21»

I don’t see the Guardian in this country, so I missed David Mery’s front page story about being arrested for wearing a rain jacket:

LONDON (Reuters): – A London underground train station was evacuated and part of a main east-west line closed in a security alert on Thursday, three weeks after suicide bombers killed 52 people on the transport network, police said. A Transport Police spokeswoman said Southwark station was closed and Jubilee Line services suspended between Waterloo and Canary Wharf in the east London business district.

This Reuters story was written while the police were detaining me in Southwark tube station and the bomb squad was checking my rucksack. When they were through, the two explosive specialists walked out of the tube station smiling and commenting nice laptop. The officers offered apologies on behalf of the Metropolitan Police. Then they arrested me.

David’s put up a record of the whole experience, which he is keeping up to date as he attempts to regain his possessions and investigate what happened.

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2005-09-19»

comrade worker: … okay, we can do that on the website. Is there anything else I should be worried about?
me: [adopting my completely terrible authority voice] Yes.
cw: Yes?!
me: Uh… yes. Yes there is.

[PAUSE] cw: And that would be?
me: [THINKING FURIOUSLY] Avian flu?
all: Avian WHAT?
me: Potentially pandemic virus? Mortality rate of 55% in humans?
all: [VISIBLY PANICKED] What? Seriously?
me: [TRYING TO REGAIN CONTROL] Yes, yes, but it’s okay, it hasn’t mutated into a human-transmissable airborne disease yet. You can still only get it from … from … [LOOKING AT FRANTICALLY GOOGLING, UTTERLY SHATTERED MEETING] … chickens…

Comments Off on why i should never be asked to run meetings

2005-09-17»

It’s been a weird year for me. I say that with the shock of someone who was intending to write “a weird few months”, and then started counting, and then ran out of fingers.

Since October last year I’ve been involved in projects that for one way or another, have discouraged idle gabbling. I’m not sure that’s been good for me. It’s given me a chance to think a great deal and get far ahead on some topics, but now I feel pretty lonely and a little insecure. I don’t feel I’ve done what I should really have done all along, which is bring others along with me for the ride. I know all this extra stuff, and it was delicious learning it all. But now it feels like just a big pile of boiled potatoes in my stomach.

I’m out of practice at being open. Or not completely open, but that half-way state that most people who have online public exposure built into their daily lives, that state of having the doors to their life slightly ajar.

I have an office now. I love having an office; after six months, I still get a little burst of delight when I walk in there. I love being able to close the door when I’m calling people, so I can concentrate on just what they are saying. Often I forget to open the door after the call. A few minutes later, I snap to attention and pull the door ajar again, because I can’t hear the buzz of what’s going on outside, and somehow that drives me a little crazy. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything; I feel like I’m missing.

I feel like when you’re sitting in the forest clearing, and it’s been very peaceful and quiet, but your good sense tells you it’s time to turn around and go back, because it’s a long way home, and it’s getting dark, and you have some friends who are wondering where you are.

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2005-07-29»

The video and audio for the talk on the British EFF is now out, and you can now download it on your electronic download-accordions. (It’s 135MB for the video, 20MB for the audio).

As ever, the real meat is in the audience questions. If you fast forward past the panel to 38m:20s, where the questions begin, you’ll get in quick succession: Stefan Magdalinski (creator of FaxYourMP and other dandy projects) giving a fine rant on the stinginess of British dotcom millionnaires, followed by ex-MP Richard Allan explaining what digital rights activists should do to attract the attention of Parliament. Then we have an interesting discussion on the US EFF’s fund-raising. Suw Charman asks a rather pointed question based on some chats we’d had in San Francisco about needing a central clearing house for info in the UK digital rights world.

Then I try and wrap up the talk. At 48 minutes, you can see me going “okay, well, let’s think about this some more over a leisurely couple of future conferences”. Cory talks me into taking a few more questions, the first of which is Stephen Coast, who took the poll of people to see who’d pay a fiver a month. And at 52:09 or thereabouts, I capitulate, and suggest the Digital Rights UK Pledge.

I’ve been having phone calls and chats with a few people over the week. The plan is to have some sort of short description of the narrower aims and how the organisation will be structured when the pledge ends. There’s a strong image forming of what the organisation will be like. It’d be a bit foolish of me to start talking, though, about the envisaged nanotechnology giant robot research project folk have planned until we actually have a list of potential costs and overheads. Keep watching the skies; expect the mundane.

In the meantime, if you work in the digital rights arena in the UK, and you think you’d benefit from some extra help, write. Clearly one of the first orders of the day is to build up an up-to-date contact database: for the fledgling org, for other people, and for the press. Just mail me at danny@spesh.com and say hi. I might not have the chance to say hi back yet, but I’ll forward it onto the sinister big brother monitoring project.

Also, hand over your money, etc, etc.

Comments Off on the people have spoken, the bastards

2005-07-24»

Ran back to the UK for a week to speak at OpenTech and to foment. The amount of interest in a British digital rights organisation took me by surprise. There was a strong sense that there’s both loads going on in the UK and Europe behind the scenes to fight for these issues, and also that folk were hungry to find out more about it.

The pledge is a start to fixing that. If you haven’t already seen it on Boing Boing, a gang of the usual suspects have effectively agreed to start a membership-funded digital rights org in the UK, if a 1000 people pledge a fiver a month by Christmas.

The “fiver a month” figure came from the “Where’s the EFF UK?” debate audience. In the question and answer session, the audience themselves suggested and took a straw poll as to who would pay that much. Most of the audience put up their hands. The pledge stats suggest that the audience lived up to their promise.

What can you do with a monthly budge of 5000UKP a month? Well, at the risk of sounding “Just Five Pounds Will Free This Poor DRMed Document And Let It Roam Free In One of Our Free Range Open Standards”, we did some back of the envelope calculations after the talk, and agreed we could do something: Probably two staffers and an office.

One would act as a media conduit. Half our problem in the UK right now is that the press just don’t have anyone in their address books that they can confidently call about on these issues. As Rufus said, most of the time they just run music industry press releases as news. The biggest lesson for me with NTK was that your best way to influence the agenda, and generate support, is to generate stories, and point people to the right experts. Just having someone at the end of a phone, handing out quotes and press releases, and pro-actively calling journalists to make sure they know what’s going on, putting them in contact with all the other orgs in this area in the UK, is half the work.

The rest of the job is actual activism (one person can do a lot, if they don’t need to cram all their white paper writing, research, and lobbying between contract coding sessions, and finishing their university degree) and bootstrapping more funding.

Which is, actually, the most important part of this hypothetical venture. Twelve months of research into other sources of funding apart from pleading on PledgeBank would, I’m sure, help build and firm up the financial side of any group – and help build a network of support for the many expert, targetted organisations that already fill the UK cyberrights landscape.

Anyway, do think about signing the pledge. It’ll be a grand experiment. If it fails, it will fail in a way that reveal plenty of new data about how to make something like this work. And if it succeeds: well, we’ll all be in for a fun ride.

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2005-06-22»

More Supreme Court decisions on Monday, and maybe an extra day after that.

Phew.

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Two things have some non-negligable probability of happening tomorrow:

It’s one of the last few days for the Supreme Court to announce their decision in the Grokster case, which could go either way. You’ll hear about that around 7.30AM PST. And then, at noon PST, the Senate Appropriations Committee could ignore the thousands of mails and phone-calls and faxes sent, and legislate into existence a Broadcast Flag.

I’ll be the one under the desk with the rosary beads.

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