It seems Apple wasn’t serious when it promised the European commission it would use micro-USB. Read more about it in my article in ComputerWorldUK this week.
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Software Patent Solution Under Our Noses
Posted on September 14, 2012 by Simon Phipps
I was blown away by a paper by legal scholar Mark Lemley when I read it in full this week. He plausibly claims there’s a very simple and elegant solution to software patents in the USA that simply needs a future defendent to use it in their defence. Read about it in this week’s InfoWorld article.
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Tweetlog for September 10, 2012
Posted on September 10, 2012 by Simon Phipps
Some cool demo shots of Lytro’s refocussable photos: Lytro http://t.co/DBUj0phy
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Chill out. Watch some clouds drift by 🙂 http://t.co/bDSsGC99
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Free/Libre Culture Forum in Barcelona, October 15-27 2012: http://t.co/xcAo8YuQ
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Why does the EC think companies know best regarding children & society & will put them ahead of profit? http://t.co/mWKXFK4e
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Excellent video about volunteering for animal conservation on new web site: http://t.co/jUs8l06D
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Kenyan government switches to open source: http://t.co/1b7CaoDr
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Would you develop an open source education app for $75k? SLC Apps Bounty Program is for you: http://t.co/DPC1PyL4
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More data on why people reject science – http://t.co/mzn63Zbp
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Turns out FinFisher needs an export license. Pity it’s not blocked on ethical grounds but at least it’s controlled: http://t.co/K7RWZJ34
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Distributed Teams And Open Source
Posted on September 7, 2012 by Simon Phipps
Remote staff? Learn from open source. My article for InfoWorld this week observes that having a distributed team works best when you borrow the practices of the most successful open source projects, just as businesses like Automattic and the former MySQL did.
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It’s Not Just The Hugos
Posted on September 5, 2012 by Simon Phipps
DRM farces are like London buses. You wait for ever, and then several come along at once. After writing my story for ComputerWorld about the blackout of the Hugo awards by a copyright enforcement robot with no concept of “fair use”, along came an even more stunning story. Yes, the big rally to reselect Barak Obama as candidate for the upcoming US elections was hit by a shoot-first-ask-questions-afterwards bot claiming to be protecting just about every content provider imaginable.
So I’ve updated and expanded the story for InfoWorld – take a look. The key quote:
“When a technologist embodies their or their employer’s view of what’s fair into a technology-enforced restriction, any potential for the exercise of discretion is turned from a scale to a step, and freedom is quantized. That quantization of discretion is always in the interest of the person forcing the issue.”
When you assign algorithms to make subjective judgements, they can’t. Instead, they impose the biases of the people who created them. The content distributors, like UStream and YouTube have a bias, created by US law, to block anything that might turn out to be infringing, because that’s how they get “safe harbor”. Thus the technology they wrote or bought from snake-oil suppliers is imposing their bias.
We fix it not by getting the suppliers to do better bots – they can’t, algorithms are incapable of subjective judgement – but by fixing the law so it doesn’t incent the providers to have this bias.
Filed under: Copyright, DRM, InfoWorld | Comments Off on It’s Not Just The Hugos
“Fair Use” Robots Are Science Fiction
Posted on September 4, 2012 by Simon Phipps
The black-out of the Hugo Awards by a “robot” that thought the clip of Doctor Who shown just before Neil Gaiman spoke was proof positive of piracy is educational. My article on ComputerWorldUK today explains why.
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App.Net Ignores Software Freedom
Posted on August 31, 2012 by Simon Phipps
Plenty of “open”, “ad-free” and even “free” is mentioned in various places, of course. But I took a good look at App.Net and found the concepts of software freedom – as well as any expression of them in open source – seriously lacking. I explain in today’s InfoWorld column.
Filed under: InfoWorld | 1 Comment »
Apple v Samsung
Posted on August 28, 2012 by Simon Phipps
Patents are now an anti-trust weapon rather than a reward for innovation. That’s my conclusion after a weekend trying to decided whether I has happy or sad Apple had beaten Samsung in the billion-dollar-suit in San Jose. It’s just a part of a deeper narrative around the fight by the winners of the 20th century to stop the upstarts of the 21st century from succeeding.
The case is an inevitable consequence of the fact the patent system has not kept pace with the realities of globalised business, the complex, fast-paced technology sector or the reality of open source software. Patents were supposed to protect the instantiation of ideas, not the ideas themselves. But the system has been thoroughly, impossibly gamed, to the point where only a Grand Master can play it.
Patent law is now being used as an anti-competitive weapon so much that I begin to wonder whether it’s the anti-trust/competition laws rather than patent law that should be updated first. Read more in InfoWorld.
Filed under: InfoWorld, Patents | Tagged: Apple, Samsung | 1 Comment »
Why The Communications Data Bill Should Concern You
Posted on August 23, 2012 by Simon Phipps
I wrote today on ComputerWorldUK about the draft Communications Data Bill. As I explained at OggCamp (my slides are online) last weekend in Liverpool, it is yet another attempt by the Home Office to get the government of the day to legalise sweeping permanent surveillance powers that allow the automated aggregation of all the details of your online life. Well, all but the actual “payload” – the message bodies themselves in e-mail for example. But the other information surrounding your communications provides plenty of data to fill a “big data” tank and analyse heuristically to detect trends in who you communicate with, when, why, where from and how.
The legislation is modelled on (and absorbs) existing postal surveillance laws but to use those the police have to go to the sorting office and look at envelopes. The cost in time and effort to go there creates “friction” that means the power is not used all the time on all your mail. But CDB is “frictionless”, allowing automated gathering of all the meta-data of all your communications (not just e-mail) and making it available over the next 12 months for analysis.
CDB makes us all a suspect, all the time. Instead of being under surveillance when there is evidence of wrongdoing, you will be under surveillance by default, with a wide range of people able to “go fishing” for information to support accusations against you without your knowledge. No amount of “access controls” can make this sort of resource safe; once created, it can only grow in scope and use.
It’s now too late for you to offer the Joint Select Committee your input on the draft, but you can still join the Open Rights Group who are at the forefront of defending your digital rights in the UK.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, Open Rights Group | Tagged: CDB, OggCamp | 2 Comments »
How Open Source Forced Microsoft’s Hand
Posted on August 17, 2012 by Simon Phipps
Even if you’re not using LibreOffice, you owe it a debt of gratitude because it (and its ancestors) forced Microsoft to interoperate, have a stable file format and innovate. I explain more in this week’s InfoWorld column.
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