Oblomovka

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.

Comments Off on getting out more

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.

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…

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