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Oblomovka

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2003-05-29

that beverley hughes letter in full

I’ve been meaning to blog this for a while, but then I’ve been meaning to do a bunch of stuff.

Below is the letter I wrote to Beverley Hughes, the Minister who told Parliament that only 2000 people had responded to the ID Cards consultation, when we know for a fact that five thousand or so replied via our Website. It’s not a ball-buster, I’m afraid, because we did want to open up some sort of communication channel. Also, mad political haranguing works a lot better on Newsnight than it does in a private letter. As the letter rather sinisterly implies, we’re saving the louder bleating until later.

We sent this a couple of weeks ago. We still haven’t heard a reply. So now we’re stepping up the sabre-rattling a bit.

Dear Beverley,

I’ve been eagerly looking forward to your department’s report on the Entitlement Card consultation you concluded earlier this year. I’m one of a who participated in the discussion, along with five thousand others who entered in their opinions of your paper via http://www.stand.org.uk/ , a Website I help run.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I read in Hansard for April 28th that you had only received two thousand replies in total to the consultation.

I hear that you have decided to collapse all five thousand communications that you received via our site into a single vote.

[ This hint came from “ministerial sources” – which is to say, somebody who works closer to government than us told us that he’d heard that this happened. ].

I suppose the idea is that all five thousand entries were engineered by us, or that they all come from members of the same vast organisation, speaking as one united voice.

The chilling reality – chilling, at least, for me – is that STAND is about four or five somewhat stressed looking people, working part-time from their homes and occasionally gathering in a pub. And we can’t even agree on which pub, let alone a coherent political platform.

Aware of our own limitations, we try and keep as thin an interface between us, and what we feel is our job – which is putting people online in touch with the parliamentary process. We do enough to achieve just that, then step out of the way and let you people talk amongst yourselves.

That does have some political connotations. We’re mostly interested in putting people in touch with Parliament via the Net. In the online world some political areas are hotter than others. Digital security; censorship; the telecoms industry and radio spectrum allocation; privacy and large-scale computer initiatives; digital democracy itself. These are the topics that excite the most debate online.

Sometimes, as the name implies, we take a STAND on one of these issues. The ID Cards consultation was one. We said we thought ID cards were a bad idea.

But more importantly, we said we thought that the consultation had not sought out critical views during its collection period.

In order to solicit opinions from a wider base than previously, we put together a link between the Web and your consultation email address (and, for good measure, let people contact their local MP on the matter). We publicised it in a few areas where people who are online a lot tend to gather.

We felt that most people using our service would be against the ID card – but not exclusively. We wanted people who felt that the ID card was a good idea should also have a say. Accordingly, we allowed people to write whatever they wanted using our system. And so, as far as we can gather, they did.

Now we hear that you are viewing all of those separately considered opinions as one collective petition.

Apart from being somewhat concerned for the people who expressed a positive opinion being ascribed into what I presume would be a single negative vote, this seems to lead to a terrible waste of resources, opportunity and time on both our sides.

Frankly, if we were forewarned that this would happen, we would have told people to sign a petition (in fact, two petitions), and engineered some way of conveying that to you. It would certainly have saved some time and effort on both our sides.

As it is, I’m pretty disappointed. And I don’t think I’m the only one.

I feel that there were a lot of people involved in the ID Card consultation for whom this would be their first experience of directly contributing to a government initiative. To turn to them now and explain that their voice counts for nothing – or 1/5000th of a voice, whichever is greater – seems to me to convey the exact opposite of what a consultation is meant to achieve. They spent a lot of time working on their thoughts: far more, I’d wager, than we spent enabling their thoughts to be forwarded. They’re going to feel more disenfranchised than ever after this.

Obviously, we’re going to contest this decision, and are proceeding to kick up the usual fuss through the usual channels.

But, to be honest, whatever happens here, the most important step for us is to ensure that this never happens again. We’re going to continue to put together feedback loops to link what you do, to what the wider public thinks. That’s something that i think we can all agree is a good thing.

We’d love to avoid such short-circuits in the future. What we really need to proceed is solid criteria by which contributions are decided to come from one source, or from many.

Would your department – perhaps in co-operation with the Cabinet Office – be prepared to draft a quick set of guidelines for this?

It would make our life easier; I think you would make better informed decisions from a wider variety of sources; and your consultations would be rather less controversial.

Best wishes,

Danny O’Brien
— standing in for Stand.org.uk

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2003-05-28

too hot to live

I originally typed that title as a reference to the weather here, but now that WASTE, Nullsoft’s latest naughty GPL P2P app has 404ed, I guess it has wider applicability.

Too late to be stopped, though. Here’s a link to the Linux-ported server source. Here’s a local copy to the Windows WASTE client.

Anyone want to lay bets on how long the first MacOS X and Linux clients take?

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2003-05-27

and my depressing triplet

If they really do open up an execution chamber at Guantanamo Bay (and thank God the Mail on Sunday isn’t a reliable source), I’m going to start seriously considering moving out of the US. But when I read about an asylum seeker in the UK sewing his eyes and mouth shut in protest, you wonder where can you go?

Try and fix things where I am, wherever I am. Look for levers. Because “this time we said it would be different. Remember?”

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picking through the remains

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oh just my life

Everybody else pads out their blog with their life, so I might as well join in. Actually, this is more padding out my life with my blog, as not much is going on (and Cait, yes, this is what my blog would look like if it were a diary.)

This weekend, we went Ada juggling around Baycon with Cory and Martin. Last year’s Baycon was my first SF convention ever. Oh, except for that Welsh one a few years back when a bunch of overenthusiastic security volunteers, dressed like Blake’s Seven guards, tried to throw me and Dave out for unauthorised filming. We and our pathetic Sony camcorder were being manhandled to the fire-exits when Dave announced that he’d seen another, even more unauthorised, film crew with boom mics and everything heading up behind us into the lifts. Our captors immediately abandoned us and ran up the stairs, doing little SWAT team hand gestures and shouting for backup into their little throat-mics. We went back to illicitly giving publicity to their con with one of their guest speakers, who’d asked us to come. Let no-one say that these tricks only work in comedy action capers.

Now I am world famous, such misunderstandings are a thing of the past. No longer am I part of an underground rebellion of ex-convicts with shitty camcorders. No, this year I was complimentary “guest of a guest”. Quinn was a guest of another guest. Ada was a child of two guests of two other guests.

It was all a bit unnecessary – Ada exudes so many cutons these days that you could swan into the Pentagon by slotting her into a giant plastic badge holder and waving her around reception. We were going to dress her in a little Star Trek uniform too, but she was sick over it. I guess there must be cuton toxicity levels, even in the eye of the cuteness hurricane.

Baycon is a very costume-based convention (or “ Comments Off on oh just my life

2003-05-21

we aim only to improve quality of pagerank

My friend Cait has decided to go public with her blog. It’s mostly about her pregnancy, but she has wisely started off with a long rant about blogs themselves. She says they’re no different from diaries, and they’re just called blogs because men don’t like to admit to such female pursuits. Oh, and she thinks social software is a load of unrevelatory bunkum too, and that even if it does exist, there’s more to it than blogs.

I’m linking to it mainly because I find it really funny that someone should go on about how people just endlessly talk about blogs by endlessly going on about blogs. And, you know, I should point out that people who write diaries also go on about the nature of writing diaries quite a bit. I know I did in mine – and I distinctly remember Cait doing so in her old online journal. Livejournal, similarly, is full of people talking about Livejournal. It’s like Children’s TV as a frequent topic amongst students; it’s popular, because everyone has it in common.

And what about that whole media obsession? Well, I did a search for “blogosphere”, as Cait suggests, on the BBC and Guardian sites. The BBC site has two hits. One is by Bill Thompson, poo-pooing the whole thing. On the Guardian site, there are eight hits, two of which are negative, one of which is just the name of an app, and the rest have that excited tone of people using a word they’ve just heard. It looks like a reasonable percentage of the people talking about blogs in the press are doing exactly what Cait’s doing: going on about how much people overrate them, and how there’s more to social software than that. Which is to say, Cait’s complaining partly about people doing what Cait’s doing right now.

The other reason I’m linking to Cait, though, is because I remember thinking similiarly when I started writing Oblomvovka. I think what changed my mind and made me more interested in their more novel aspects is the effect of being linked to, and having people comment on your pages, and seeing things you’ve discovered percolate around the rest of the world. That really seems distinctly different from my experience of writing diaries, and much closer to the original idea of a weblog – as a commonplace book of interesting links that you’ve found. It’s the meeting of strangers in referers, rather than the internecine world that you meet when you just read blogs and their explicit links, that I find fun. Whatever you call them, writing a blog is a lot more fun than just reading them.

And I don’t care how much I talk about that. It’s my blog, I can do what I want with it. Nyahhh.

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2003-05-20

i should be in bed.

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2003-05-17

must try harder. see me.

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2003-05-14

new spamassassin out

I have to write about something other than spam sometime. Anyway, Justin Mason wrote in, to say the new version of SA (v.2.54) severely punishes those Pine-‘n’-Mozilla pretending creeps, and adds: “overly cautious my ass”. Apparently Razor doesn’t get high scores, because the genetic algorithm that they use to calculate the scores doesn’t think it needs it. In other words, most of the Razor stuff gets caught by other traps. He also reckons I’ve got BAYES_60 and BAYES_70 a bit too high, and maybe he’s right – I got one FP from LinkedIn the other day. On the other hand, I have problems separating give-all-your-friends-email-addresses-to-a-third-party services like LinkedIn from spam.

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2003-05-09

spam

Wow. I now get over 20,000 spams a month. Maybe that explains why I seem to get a lot more false negatives (spam that gets through) via Spamassassin. It’s the same small percentage as ever, there’s just a lot more of them.

Some spammers are definitely working on evading SA’s filters. I see a lot of spams that pretend to come from Pine and Mozilla simultaneously – scoring them a massive minus twelve on Spamassassin’s anti-spam-o-meter. I’ve tweaked the reward for these tests down a bit in my own user preferences. I’ve also nudged up the penalties for falling foul of SA’s new Razor2 and Bayesian modules. Spamasssassin’s still a bit hesitant to trust these much. But with the amount of spam (and normal mail) I get, my Bayesian filters get all the training they need. Don’t know why it gives Razor such a low score – perhaps Spamassassin’s overly cautious approach to false positives is leading it to punish for accidentally catching some major mailing lists?

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