Oblomovka

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.

Comments Off on getting out more

2005-06-22»

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

Phew.

Comments Off on no grokster for you

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.

Comments Off on tomorrow will be quite the eigenday

2005-06-13»

I duly avow that I will only use this blog to shill EFF projects when it I am absolutely, categorically, slightly inclined to do so. But the new Legal Guide for Bloggers is a surprisingly fun casual read, even if you’re not at this moment being dragged away from the wi-fi cafe by the cops.

I particularly like the defamation section

Context is critical. For example, it was not libel for ESPN to caption a photo “Evel Knievel proves you’re never too old to be a pimp,” since it was (in context) “not intended as a criminal accusation, nor was it reasonably susceptible to such a literal interpretation. Ironically, it was most likely intended as a compliment.” However, it would be defamatory to falsely assert “our dad’s a pimp” or to accuse your dad of “dabbling in the pimptorial arts.” (Real case, but the defendant sons succeeded in a truth defense).

(Kurt says he has another great case law example that will go in shortly, based on a detailed discussion of the idiomatic use of “dumb ass”, and what exactly linking a name to www.satan.com conveys about an individual.)

I would love to to find someone who might be interested in doing a similiar document for the UK. God knows we need a blogger’s guide to British libel (if only because the UK is the most likely place for anyone online to be sued), as well as the UK’s implementation of the EUCD and other DMCAish statutes.

Comments Off on pimptastic eff easter eggs

2005-04-28»

Can’t believe Quinn scooped me on this. No wonder I’m quitting journalism.

It’s true. I’m off to the EFF. My title is “Activist Co-ordinator” (make up your own jokes), where I’ll be applying some of the lessons I learnt helping out with STAND and Fax Your MP and They Work For Youin the UK.

One thing we definitely learnt is that even the smallest bit of new information, or the tiniest of tweaks – in user interface, responsiveness, outreach – can have big effects. So if you have any suggestions about any part of the EFF, or you’re running something that you think the EFF should know about, let me know.

Oh, and become a member! That way you can boss me around with impunity.

Will still be carrying on with NTK, To Evil (although objective measurements of evil as conducted by that column may not match the poorer subjective yardsticks used internally by the EFF), and the Irish Times column. The genial demons of O’Reilly’s production department have now begun their gentle poking of my and Merlin’s voodoo dolls, so the theoretical Productivity Hacks book continues apace also.

I don’t know how it’s possible to blog less here, but I’ll try.

And of course, Quinn’s actually doing pretty well in journalism now herself. Which means they’ll probably be some hilarious Hill Street Blues/West Wing-style kitchen-table battle over her reporting of the EFF’s fights in our future. To which: no comment.

Comments Off on new job

2005-03-23»

You see, now that you’ve helped me fix a problem, I’m obliged to start blogging again. See how the LazyWeb extracts its pound of flesh?

Does Tiger’s Spotlight search the comment field of files in the “Get Info” dialog box? No, no, don’t tell me, I know you’d be breaking an NDA.

But here’s what I’d do, if I’d paid the $500 to Apple for the Tiger starter kit. I’d write a little mini-application (or maybe a QuickSilver plugin), that would let you select a bunch of files in the Finder, and then add a simple line of text to all of their comment fields. Another keyboard shortcut would let you easily delete one of these lines from a selected file. Another would quickly select all the files that contained that line – or, shall we say, tag in the current folder.

And then, whenever I needed to find all my files tagged with, say, “oblomovka”, I’d just type into Spotlight. Actually, that highlights one of the problems with this – maybe they need to be prefixed with something, so you’d search for “tag-oblomovka” rather than the very common term.

It’s a bit of a hack, but it would give you folksonomies for the Desktop. (Unless that’s already in Tiger, of course.)

Comments Off on if i was a tiger developer, but then again, no

2005-03-22»

Well, the server is still down, but the data seems to be okay for now. It’s in a sort of carbonite-like stasis. The machine isn’t stable enough to check to see whether its mobo, drive or IDE controller that’s bust, but I have been able to mount the drive read-only using the Ubuntu LiveCD, and peer at five or so years of mail. I’m living out of Gmail for now.

Which means I’m also slightly more dependent on my PowerBook than I like. And as if by magic, MacOS X has started acting in a “I hope you don’t think that three years of OS reliability is an indication of future stability, do you?”

Does anyone have any clue about what’s going on here, for instance?

Selected icons (including the Trash) have turned bright blue. It started after I rebooted the machine after the last security update. It only happens on my login, which makes me suspect that it’s some debugging feature I turned on in the past, and has now come back to haunt me. As far as I can work out, it’s icons that are stateful – ie probably drawn in Quartz rather than painted as Icons.

I’m damned if I know what to do about it. Any suggestions?

Update: I moved ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences.plist out of the way, and that seems to have fixed it. Cheers, Jason! (This is like a BoingBoing post in so many ways, isn’t it?)

Comments Off on mac got the blues

2005-03-18»

Something awfully hardwaric has just happened to my main mail (and everything else) server. As it traditional, it happened while I’m still two days away from home, so it’s tricky to diagnose. If it’s the hard drive, I’m in for a minor planetoid of pain. Anyway, suffice to say that if you sent me mail in the last 24 hours, I won’t be able to read it for a while. And replying to other mail will be slow in the next few days (there’s a nest of filters on that box that make coping with my mail bearable).

Hooray for checked out CVS versions, that’s all I can say…

Comments Off on slightly inopportune

2004-12-29»

1. In America, a sign that says “Open!” in bright flashing neon demonstrates that the store in question has electricity, and is shut.
2. Make a career out of being sarcastic, and the gods will give you a sarcastic toddler.

   Ada: Mvy! Blz Ftzzz! Mvy! Blz Ftzzz!
   [MAKES SIGN FOR “MOVIE”, “BLUES CLUES”]
   Ada: Mvy? Blz Ftzzz?
   Me: Would you like to watch “Blue’s Clues”?
   Ada: [IN TONE OF GREAT SURPRISE] Noooo.
   Me: You mean yes?
   Ada: [LOOKS ME STRAIGHT IN THE EYE] Yas.

3. According to my Kidde fire extinguisher, dry chemical consists of: Sodium Bicarbonate, Mica, Calcium Stearate, Nuisance Dust, Irritant.
4. The average fire extinguisher containt sixteen tons of dry chemical.
5. When used to extinguish a toaster fire, it can expel this chemical at a rate of six Niagaras a second.
6. In the event of dry chemical spill, toddlers will absorb the “nuisance dust”. Parents will absorb all the “irritant”.
7. The best way to clear up the remainder of the dry chemical is to move house.

Comments Off on things i have learnt this christmas

2004-11-02»

My memory of the election: milling around the aisle of the Houston-San Jose flight, waiting to step off into the dark. After all that time in the air, the captain announces: “Bush is winning”. General mutter of groans from the strangers around me. And distantly, from first class, a little patter of cheers.

Comments Off on so, what did i miss?