Month: July 2008

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I saw this…

Here’s what I’ve tagged on del.icio.us:

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My del.icio.us bookmarks for July 23rd through July 30th

Here’s what I tagged on del.icio.us between July 23rd and July 30th:

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Watching the Olympics

[As ever you can read this on the BBC News website – and it seems the story is already moving on, with reports that press access to the net will be filtered by the Chinese]

I won’t be going to Beijing for the Olympic Games next month, and in fact I probably won’t even be going to London in 2012 when it’s our turn to host the festivities.

I don’t watch athletics or any of the other events that will be taking place. I don’t support a football team either, or have much interest in cricket despite being an English male. Sport just doesn’t excite me at all.

But even though I don’t care which country wins most gold medals or whether world records are broken for running, jumping or throwing odd-shaped objects, I’ll be watching what goes on around the Olympic Games with keen interest, because this world-wide sporting event offers a fascinating perspective on the state of the internet today.

Continue reading “Watching the Olympics”

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Shouting ‘bug’ on a crowded Internet…

[As ever you can read this on the BBC News website, and it’s also on CircleID]

In the last few weeks we’ve seen two very different approaches to the full disclosure of security flaws in large-scale computer systems.

Problems in the domain name system have been kept quiet long enough for vendors to find and fix their software, while details of how to hack Transport for London’s Oyster card will soon be available to anyone with a laptop computer and a desire to break the law.

These two cases highlight a major problem facing the computing industry, one that goes back many years and is still far from being resolved.  Given that there are inevitably bugs, flaws and unexpected interactions in complex systems, how much information about them should be made public by researchers when the details could be helpful to criminals or malicious hackers.

Continue reading “Shouting ‘bug’ on a crowded Internet…”

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My del.icio.us bookmarks for July 17th through July 22nd

Here’s what I tagged on del.icio.us between July 17th and July 22nd:

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My del.icio.us bookmarks for July 13th through July 17th

Here’s what I tagged on del.icio.us between July 13th and July 17th:

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Being there

[As ever you can read this on the BBC News website]

On Monday I went to see Clay Shirky talk at a lunchtime seminar hosted by the Demos think tank, travelling in to London earlier than I needed to on a crowded train, sitting on a slow bus across town and then squeezing into a bright but too warm room to sit on a hard seat in order to listen to something which was being recorded and will later be available as a podcast.

Clay was charming and intelligent and funny, and I got to hear him thinking out loud about the impact of social tools on international politics, which was fun, but I could have done all that by listening in online, or even by watching the stream of brief reports appearing on Twitter, the communications service that is currently taking the net by storm.

Instead I sat there offering my own online commentary on what he was saying while looking up references on the web as he talked.

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Time for digital turnoff

Jeff Jarvis has a great post over at Buzzmachine in which he argues that its time to ‘tear down the broadcast towers’:

My most striking realization since getting my iPhone (love it, thanks for asking) is that radio is doomed. Pandora is a wonder, creating my own radio station, live and on the fly without need for a broadcast tower.

I agree.  Here’s something I wrote over two years ago about television…

Rethinking Digital Television

Spending ÂŁ700 million on digital switchover is perhaps the most foolish waste of public money since the Maginot Line, and will be as effective in stopping the tide of Internet-based programming that is about to sweep over Europe and the rest of the networked world.

Building a dedicated transmission network designed solely to distribute digitally-encoded television over a fixed set of frequencies, so that audio and video can be received by specialised aerials, decoded on single-purpose computers and displayed on screens is an absurd idea when cable companies are already making the switch to IPTV and a general-purpose data network – the Internet – can provide a suitable infrastructure for programme distribution.

Continue reading “Time for digital turnoff”

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My del.icio.us bookmarks for July 11th through July 12th

Here’s what I tagged on del.icio.us between July 11th and July 12th: