The Ex-ex Pat
The Ex-ex Pat
Photo: AFPA slightly more surreal photograph found on the web. In some ways it is hopeful, while terrorism has become a way of life, and those cops look ready for action, it shouldn’t get in the way of life, even if you life is dressing up as a storm trooper.
It is just as well that for Ptolemy III that there was no equivalents to the RIAA or the MPAA wandering around in 240 BC. He passed a decree that all visitors to the city were required to surrender all books and scrolls in their possession, these writings were copied by official scribes and placed into the Library of Alexandria. Can you imagine the amount of infringement notices that they would be issuing, though he might have argued that it was his teenage son, Ptolemy IV, who had issued the decree because he had a P2P (Pyramid to Pyramid) installed.
What ever machinations went on behind the scenes the result, the library, became the most famous in the world, so we have one example, albeit an old example about how copying other peoples work can have a positive effect on society.
Nowadays we have copyright laws and they are meant to preserve the right of the artist and motivate them to produce art by guaranteeing a means of generating an income once it gets released to the public, but not the public domain.
However the rules and laws have been so upsurdered that it is hardly the artists that are rolling in the money, they are given a bit, but it is these massive media organisations that thrash people all over the world with copy right law pulling down royalties. In the US it runs for nearly 70 years after the authors death. I have covered this in a previous blog entry: copyright and tipping.
It is an insane situation, the poor old patent world only get 25 year dibs on making an invention successful and exacting any royalties they can. The CD patent expire a few years ago but not before it made a lot of money for Philips which had a virtually exclusive ownership, with Sony, on the CD patent. Technical companies, somehow, which are limited to patent law and its 25 years limit mange to stay in business and turn a few meager billion or so a year.
So it was quite refreshing to see a paper claim that the optimal copyright term currently is 14 year. This takes in to consideration the amount of time it takes to pay the artist and pay off all the costs associated with producing the content. This figure apparently will go down as distribution channels move over to digital means.
Imagine what this would mean, the top selling album of 1993, 14 years ago, was The Bodyguard – Whitney Houston. At the end of this year it would enter the public domain and you could re-record your own version and go on to be as big a star as Whitney was, piece of advice watch your yourself on the way down, she isn’t looking so crash hot anymore….
Here is the list of the other great songs and albums which would be getting freed up.
I don’t believe we will ever see a more sane application of copyright law in our life time, but the enforced revenue generated will dry up, meaning artist will have to move back to the old school way of earning some cash, get out there and play live. The live experience can’t be replicated.
However AppleInsider today have a write up about a patent they found filed by Apple in September 2006. detailing a technique for one mobile device communicating with another.
“The mobile devices can then wirelessly transmit data from one mobile device to the other”
The natural extension of this is have iPod and iPhone swapping and sharing information seemlessly. Sounds pretty good (remember back in September 2006 Apple had yet to announce the iPhone)
iphone meet photo ipod, originally uploaded by b. andy andy andy d..
This, I believe, is one of the reasons Steve Jobs wanted iTunes to move away from been forced supplying and maintain DRM files. So far they have been able (barely?) to keep the DRM model working, as long as a computer must to use to download music to the iPod. However if Apple want to put add in the functionality as detailed in the patent, one mobile device pretty much transmitting data ad-hoc to another mobile device, supporting the current DRM gets problematic fast. First they would have to spend time getting it to work, getting two client devices to maintain DRM would be more complicated than the current host/client situation that is used. Then, more than likely, it would be cracked which won’t be as easy to fix as updating iTunes is, which would make Apple look bad. The solution make sure that Apple start moving away before the iPhone is released, Jobs letter on music was one month after the iPhone was announced.
So while Steve Jobs as always is less than honest about his intentions as listed in his letter, this is probably another example of how he is way a head of the game and on the way to making pant loads of even more money.
As unsurprising as it turned out Steorn has failed to produce a successfully working example or orbo. At least they have had the good sense to come out and eat some humble pie. Here is the YouTube video of Sean McCarthy explaining away why their demo didn’t work :
Apparently it was something to do with the bearings. While he is all humble and taking all the blame, which as chief charlatan he probably should. Here is the crux, if it is a really is a working technology they must have operating examples else where. They would at least get some heat off them to bring the media there and show it to them. However that is really a proof by contradiction, they haven’t done this which is probably proof that this technology doesn’t exist.
To the people of Steorn please, please disappear, you are not only carrying the name of you company and shareholders you are dragging down the name of the newly empowered technical Ireland. Or at the very least it better be a topper of a hoax, we all like a good laugh provided it is done well. It should at least be as good as when Gay Byrne announced that a truck of dehydrated water had over turned on O’Connell St and caused huge traffic delays as people tried to avoid it.
There are a few things in life that are scary, terrorists and clowns are obviously at the top of the list. However officials can freeze my soul from time to time. It can’t be easy running a country or even small parts of it. Some times they might be privy to information that they would rather not know. The Sydney Morning Hearld has an article today with comments from the Commissioner for the Australian Police (AFP) Mick Keelty. In it he discussed the rise of more technical savvy criminal and the challenges that it places on the Federal government to have a matching policing response. I don’t think any body would doubt that this is true, online fraud is one of the fastest and most profitable industries today.
What did give me pause however was his comments on cloning :
All jokes aside, comments like this are actually more dangerous than people might realise. Most of the Commissioners comments are entirely accurate, but when these very same comments are recorded and hit the intertubes it is no surprise when there is much dirision and the sanity gets drowned out by the nonsense.
When I was growing up in the 80s home computers were very new to people and so was the concept of hacking. I remember relatives and friends worrying about plugging in their computers into the wall because they might get hacked. They assumed that hackers could get in over the electrical cord. To me at the time it was prosperous and silly and I would have to explain then why they had nothing to worry about. Of course now people are educated and have a better idea of how computers work, though hacking as a problem never went away. (Though the electrical cord hacking now could be possible since there are proposed techniques of routing internet over power lines).
The media, both news outlets and entertainment, I always felt was to blame as they usually showed hacking in some easy to follow way that would sell well either on a big movie screen or when described in a newspaper. For the record there has only been one relatively accurate example of hacking in a movie and it went to The Matrix Reloaded when trinity uses an ssh exploit to gain access to a machine so that the grid of the city can be shut down. It is a blink and you miss it moment.
In the world of computers there are two types of problem hackers,
The problem in the media is that they don’t generally make a distinction between crackers and script kiddies and all hacking events are given the same level of gavitas.
I can’t help feeling that the recent spate of terrorist events in London, Glasgow and New York are merely script kiddie terrorists. Don’t get me wrong they were of sufficient lethalness that there could have been serious injury and loss of life. However they were failures and as investigations have proceeded they appear more and more like they have been handed down from from “Terrorism for Dummies” handbook. The media though have hyped up the events, I took particular exception to the coverage of the New York JFK plot. There the terrorist were planning to blow up a fuel stage container and hope it would cause a chain reaction and blow up the airport. One quote from U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf was that it was “one of the most chilling plots imaginable,” and could have have caused “unthinkable” devastation (It was subsequently debunked by security expert Bruce Schneier who argued that the plot was never operational).
The media need to get off there “if it bleed, it leads” mantra and become part of the productive community and educate people as well as inform. The two London car bombs were found before they exploded due to the the education of the emergency services (The sharp eyed paramedic noticing something hinky about a car nearby and reporting it getting special notice.) Also as noted previously the JFK plot was never even close to being operational, been shut down by an effective intelligence operation by the Americans. The cracker terrorist are always going to be a problem unfortunately, there are some amazingly smart people in the world that just really don’t like us no matter what we do. Let’s hope however effective intelligence can catch the script kiddie terrorist while they are only annoying and before they move onto lethal.
In August of 2006 an Irish company called Steorn announced that they have developed a technology that produces “free, clean, and constant energy” and challenging the scientific community to review its claim.
This was (and still is) an audacious claim and one that should either revolutionise the world of physics and engineering then and there or be discounted for the tinfoil hat wearing nonsense it most likely is. However persist it did and for the next 11 months Steorn put out a call for scientists to come in and review the technology and once completed this technology would be presented to the world.
The grand unveiling, for what they are calling orbo (I’m guessing short for Oroborus, an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon swallowing its own tail, also a symbol of unity), was announced to take place in London on July 4th at the Kinetica Museum at Spitalfields Market in London.
As it turned out the demonstration was canceled due to “technical difficulties” and they will reattempt it on July the 5th. (Engadget provide an interesting run down of the events).
I can’t believe this has been kept alive for so long and a part of me actually wants it to be true, but for selfish personal reasons. As a Irish engineer that has worked around the world it is hard to get away from the paddywackery stereotype image of the Irish. It doesn’t matter how many microchips you have taped out, or C++ programmed applications you’ve debugged and shipped or been involved in the deployment of the carrier network for the next generation of mobile phone technology, it doesn’t matter. Endless times I have endured or witnessed fellow irish ex-pats field innate question like did you have electricity growing up? or is television in color in Ireland? or have we ever heard about a computer? In a lot of cases we just feed the stereotype, Irish people love winding people up and while you might think we’re dumb we don’t mind taking the hard technical jobs, doing the best job we can and the money that comes with it.
There has been many suggestions that it is a hoax, part of some viral campaign for a product (Halo 3 has been mentioned and I was interested to find the top of the engadget page this listed All the Halo 3 news that’s fit to print ) but the problem is that most hoaxes aren’t drawn out this long.
So while Irish people have endured the slights of a bit a slagging what is going to happen if Steorn turn out to be wrong. Man the ammunition that is going to give people world wide will be painful. It’ll be the punchline to so many Irishman jokes and it will have the unfortunate fact of actually been true.
“Did you hear the one about the Irish company that thought they had created free energy?”
Argh!
Update :
Apparently orbo doesn’t work well under hot lights no demo today either. If they turn all the lights off we could then see it working, . . . wait that doesn’t work either!
Am I the only one not in the least bit surprised that the day after Tony Blair steps down there is an rumours of an announcement that the Spice Girls are getting back together. There has been a lot of talk about the uneasy relationship that Gordon Brown and Blair had in recent time, but there was also supposed to be a deal between the two men that once Blair stepped down Brown would get his shot. However that back room deal is nothing in comparison to the one done between the Spice Girls and Tony Blair.
Now the truth can be known, back in 1997 when the twin behemoths of the Spice Girls and Tony Blair were both introduced to the masses the entire world was within their grasp. Alas this massive force was too much for a planet as small as what we call the planet earth, so a deal was entered only one would be allowed to exist at any one point at time, and the Spice Girls like true patriots handed in there platform shoes so that Blair could do his good work. Now his time has come to an end, but do not despair this was merely the catalyst that will lead to the new power. Now that Blair has stepped down the Spice Girls are again able to reform but this time with an extra special ingredient, Tony Blair!
Don’t believe all the talk about his new post as middle east envoy it is a ruse. The first thing Blair is doing after he gets his brand new iPhone is straight into the studio with the Spice Girls to record the greatest album recorded since Sgt. Peppers.
Picasa web albums is a strange beast. Launched in beta over a year ago it seemed all geared up to take on Flickr. That didn’t happen and so far there has been no real move to wards making picasa the social web experience that is flickr’s power. Instead Google seem content to allow picasa web albums as a backup storage for photographs with the ability to share with other people(it is also used as a storage medium to power images hosted on blogs like this one.)
Today google announced that they have added geotag support in Picasa.
For the uninitiated geotagging involves assigning a geographic co-ordinate to an image. It has been around for a long time, the military been a big user, but support has grown is recent years. The biggest impact was the release of Google maps/Earth which allowed a user to find the co-ordinates of the given location. This was then extended by the Google API plugin that allowed people to pull down the co-ordinates of that location and apply in in various ways to images, either adding the co-ordinates in the EXIF of the digital image or as tags on the flickr page hosting the image.
Last August Flickr added integrated support for image geolocation, using yahoo maps instead of google maps which has introduced geotagging to the masses. However the more discerning geotaggers are not too fond of yahoo maps and still geotag using google maps.
It is surprising that picasa web albums took so long to added geo location support. Especially since the picasa tools, picasa2 (very confusing) has had geotag support, using google earth for a while. However they might have been playing the long game on this one as in the same release they also announced mobile support for picasa web albums. With phones beginning to come with GPS as standard (now that cameras are de-facto and places like Europe are demanding that phones have GPS) all images will be geotagged in the future so the requirement to physically place a image in space will no longer fall to the user any more.
This means uploaded images to picasa web albums will be in the correct locations and the user will be able to see where the images were taken. This could be very helpful to travelers on exotic holidays. It’s easy to tag images where you are from as you more than likely know the locations intimately it is not easy if you were taken through the depths of asia.
Once or twice a week I cycle into work and I usually cycle along the promenade down by the beach front of Bondi to check out the surf. For locals (you become one after about a year given this exceeds the amount of time a back packer will be there) we are always amused by the Asian tourist that arrive every morning still wearing their black suits, a very un-beach looking attire, and will watch them filter onto the beach like a black tide. One morning I was even asked to have my picture taken with an Asian couple who were fasinated to see me dressed up in my cycling gear, previously either wearing a surf life saver uniform or wet suit would be the pre-requisite to earn the honour of having you picture taken.
However I always felt there was something darker to the whole experience and so I was shocked, but not very surprised, to find out that Asian tourist companies are fleecing these visitors. The list starts with charging $100 to walk to walk Bondi beach. God knows what they think when they see me on my bike with my helmet on as I buzz past them, maybe that I dropped a load of cash on a season pass.
Though for an observant person some thing foul should have been flagged a long time ago. If you spend any time around Sydney you find these tourist/souvenir shops dotted around the city that are never normally open, except when a tour bus arrives. They are usually fairly non-discript office buildings, but you can see the slew of stuffed Koalas and Kangaroos inside. When the bus pulled up there are usually people standing outside with the implied threat not too enter. It never really entered my mind why. I suppose naively I had assumed that the tourist were getting a better deal than the locals, but the reality appears to be much more sour with the tour operators :
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Locking tourists in shops and confiscating passports until they spend big on overpriced goods”Having been a tourist in another country a few times and well aware of the two prices for items taking advantage of visitors might seem fair game. However it is one thing to have them innocently make the mistake and have every opportunity to walk away, it is another thing to have it mandated by greedy tour operators.
Not having the language obviously puts them at a disadvantage with virtually all communications these tourists get are from the operators. One way to break the chain might be at the customs check point. If the government could supply a pamphlet with what is and isn’t acceptable in there own language possibly with a phone number to contact to report violations. I have seen this work before, either for quarantine or during the SARs scare a few years ago, I suppose it comes down to how much of a dent to Australian reputation they are willing to tolerate.