billblog – Page 53 – The BillBlog

November 30, 2009

More than Digital

[As ever, this can be read on the BBC News Website]

I once got told off by the manager of the BBC’s Heritage Collections for publishing a photograph of Alistair Cooke’s typewriter in its display case on the second floor lobby of Bush House, home of the World Service.

It seemed that photography on BBC premises was not approved of, so I removed the image from Flickr as I didn’t want the people in charge of such things to stop exhibiting interesting artefacts because they were scared we might take photographs of them.

Fortunately things seem to have got a lot more relaxed since 2006, as the stream of BBC-related photos and videos on the world’s many social networks demonstrates.
Cooke’s typewriter fascinated me because it seemed to bring me close to the journalist himself, whose work I had long admired. It’s long gone from the lobby, but I was reminded of it earlier this month when I saw another important typewriter, one owned and used by T S Eliot during his years working at Faber & Faber.

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November 17, 2009

An Internet That Speaks Your Language

[This was posted on the BBC site at the end of October]

It is forty years to the week since the first data packets were sent over the ARPANET, the research network commissioned by the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to see whether computer-to-computer communications could be made faster, more reliable and more robust by using the novel technique of packet switching instead of the more conventional circuit switched networks of the day.

Instead of connecting computers rather as telephone exchanges work, using switches to set up an electric circuit over which data could be sent, packet switching breaks a message into chunks and sends each chunk – or packet – separately, reassembling them at the receiving end.

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October 22, 2009

Start Me Up..

[As ever, this can be read on the BBC News website, as part of their Windows 7 coverage]

In August 1995 I queued to buy the newly-released Microsoft Window 95 from the PC World store in Ropemaker Street, near Moorgate in Central London and hurried off to install it on my desktop computer.

It was hard to miss the launch. Microsoft had bought every advert in that day’s edition of The Times and even licensed the Rolling Stones song ‘Start Me Up’ to promote their brand-new operating system.

I knew what Windows 95 looked like and had seen the Start button and all the other innovations in the user interface, file system and control panel, because I worked in the tech industry and had access to the Windows 95 launch website, and also because I had been to a conference where Microsoft’s Jeremy Gittings showed it all off to a select few outside the developer community, but for most users it was all relatively unknown.

Sometime this week a package containing Windows 7 that I pre-ordered months ago from Amazon will arrive in the post, strike action permitting, and I’ll get to play with the latest Microsoft technology. However I’ve been using the pre-release version for over three months, so I doubt I’ll be very surprised by it.

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October 20, 2009

What Would Foucault Do?

[This one was on the BBC News website on October 16]

Broadband speeds may remain painfully slow, but the desire to provide access for all will be driven by the pressing need to save money by reforming public services, cutting costs and improving efficiency, whoever is in power.
So we’ll see universal access simply because the financial benefits of online public services will only be realised if nearly everyone has access to them, although there will always be a need to provide offline provision for those who cannot be served effectively through a screen and keyboard and I, like many others, will fight for this.

Over the next five years we can expect to see increasing use of web-based tools as the primary way of accessing state-provided services. I already renew my Road Tax, register to vote, pay my VAT and Income Tax, hand over the money for my TV Licence and pay the occasional parking penalty charge online, and I expect that soon I will have no need to write or phone a single agency to transact my business with government at local or national level.

The drive to digital will also be fuelled by increasing demands for transparency, as the crisis of faith in our MPs created by the revelations about expenses claims works its way through the political system, while a desire to emulate Obama will give extra impetus to the Googleisation of Government IT and initiatives like data.gov.uk. Any resemblance to its transatlantic cousin, data.gov, which speaks proudly of its exciting mission to ‘increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the executive branch of the federal government’, is of course entirely deliberate.

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October 20, 2009

Stop. Look. Change your Password

[I’ve been neglecting this space for the last few weeks… this was published on the BBC News site on October 9]

If you use a web-based email service then here’s a public service announcement. Tufty the Squirrel says ‘Change your password. Now. Before you read the rest of this column. And if you use your webmail password for any other services go and change it there too.’

OK, assuming you’ve done that, we can discuss the apparent plundering of tens or even hundreds of thousands of login details from Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail and other web-based email services, revealed last week when a partial list of ten thousand addresses was posted to – and quickly withdrawn from – the Pastebin code-sharing website and details of another 30,000 accounts were posted elsewhere.

The compromised email addresses seem to be the result of a number of phishing exercises, where fake websites are set up to harvest login credentials from those who can be tricked into visiting the phishing site instead of the authentic home page for their service provider, and not related to any security flaws in the webmail services themselves.

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October 3, 2009

Neo-Nomad at Large

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

A couple of years ago I wrote about my life as a ‘neo-nomad’, one of the growing number of people who use digital technologies to allow them to work from anywhere, living with ‘no office, colleagues who are largely engaged with online and often a number of overlapping projects to be juggled and managed at the same time’.

It was a pattern of life that had emerged for me over years of being freelance as I put more and more of my work on a laptop and found that I could generally rely on being connected to the Internet when I needed to be, initially over dialup lines ‘borrowed’ from amenable friends, then via open wireless networks, and now thanks to the good graces of my 3G dongle.

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September 20, 2009

African Broadband

[As ever, this piece is on the BBC News website, where they called it ‘How Broadband is Changing Africa’, though I think the real message is that a broadband Africa will change the Internet…]

Norman Borlaug, whose work in Mexico and India led to the ‘green revolution’ in agricultural production, died last week and was widely commemorated for his important work.

While the introduction of new crops and the use of irrigation, fertilisers and pesticides certainly enabled us to feed millions of people, the crops were delivered at a price, and we should not forget it and Borlaug’s green revolution, like every revolution, had a negative as well as a positive side.

New farming practices create dependencies on machinery and chemicals, and the the patents that protect genetically modified crops limit the ability of farmers to do things like retain seed from one harvest to plant next year, forcing them instead to buy anew each year.

I was reminded of the debate over the green revolution this week as I stood outside my hotel in Nairobi, Kenya, and watched a work gang lay fibre optic cable in a trench they were laboriously digging with pickaxes on the other side of the busy road.

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September 14, 2009

No Net Gains for Party Politics

[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News technology pages, and Alan Connor kindly reminded me of his excellent analysis after the 2005 election that made a similar point.]

The next British General Election will almost certainly be called the first ‘real’ internet election, on the grounds that the ‘internet election’ of 2001 happened when relatively few people had home network connections, while the 2005 poll took place before the social media explosion brought us Facebook, MySpace and a growing belief that anyone who is tired of twitter is tired of life.

One unfortunate consequence of this will be that anyone who claims a passing acquaintance with the network world will be called upon as a pundit, commentator or ‘expert’ to interpret the parties’ online activity and tell an eager public who is ‘up’ and who is ‘down’ when it comes to internet campaigning.

I know this is the case because I’ve already been asked myself, and a well known technology consultant of my acquaintance is being lined up for the role too.

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September 6, 2009

Giving Google Company in the Library

It’s been a busy week. My article on the Google Books settlement (which the BBC headlined as ‘Keeping Google out of Libraries‘, even though my point was that Google should not be the only company in the library, and my original title was ‘Keeping Google’s Tanks Off The Library Lawn’), provoked a fair amount of debate, to the point that I ended up having a long chat on the phone with Santiago de la Mora, the company’s director of book partnerships in Europe and writing it up for the BBC website.

This is what I had to say…

Google is in the middle of a massive project to scan and digitise every book it can get its hands on, whether old or new, and if it gets its way then the US courts will soon endorse an agreement between the search engine giant and the US book industry that will allow it to do this without fear of prosecution for copyright infringement.

Authors and publishers will get some money in return, and we will all benefit from the improved access to digitised books that Google will provide.

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