Category: billblog

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UNIX: The Enlightenment’s Operating System

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

In the autumn of 1984 I completed the Diploma in Computer Science at Cambridge University and started looking for my first job in the computing industry.

Cambridge was a good place to be a programmer at the time. Trinity College had built its Science Park on the northern fringe of the city in 1970 and the university’s permissive approach to intellectual property meant that it was relatively easy to spin off an idea and see how it worked out without severing all links to a departmental salary.

As a result the cauldron of innovation had been well-stirred by academics from Computer Lab, the Engineering Lab and elsewhere, with a good mix of venture capitalists and an influx of talented managers eager to guide new companies, and by the mid 80’s the Cambridge Phenomenon was in full flood.

I ended up in the middle of it, joining a small software house called Bensasson and Chalmers as a programmer to work on their database management system, Spires.

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Downloading is Not Enough… probably

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

Peer to peer download services are still popular with music-loving kids, it seems.  The second annual survey of young people’s music consumption by pressure group UK Music found that three-fifths of the 1,808 18-24 year olds who took part said they used p2p services, and four-fifths of those did so at least once a week.

This is almost the same as last year’s result, and would seem to indicate that the efforts by the music industry to offer a range of licensed alternatives to Limewire and other p2p services have failed to have any real impact.

The survey was carried out by academic researchers in the Music and Entertainment Industry Management Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire, and the picture it presents is a complex one that will surely give the music industry many sleepless nights.

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Oiling the Digital Society

[As ever, you can also read this on the BBC News Website. And Bud Smith at Google Voice Daily mentions it in his round up of GV news.]

The announcement that Google’s chief executive Eric Schmidt is standing down from the Apple board hardly came as a surprise.
Google’s Android is already powering smartphones that offer an open alternative to Apple’s iPhone, while the recent announcement of plans for Chrome OS, an operating system that will directly challenge Mac OS, makes Google a direct competitor to Apple in its core market.
Apple’s recent decision to keep Google Voice out of the iPhone App Store must surely have increased tension on the board, and may have been the last straw.

The move not only annoyed customers, who wanted to take advantage of the single phone number and voice-over-IP calls it offers, but has also invited the attention of the US Federal Communications Commission, which has asked Apple, Google and network provider AT&T to provide it with details of their decision making process.

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Follow in the footsteps of geeks

[As ever, this is on the BBC News website too]

About ten years ago I went on a family holiday to Cornwall, and one day I dragged my unwilling kids to a delightful but otherwise undistinguished beach so I could point out to them the spot where the world’s first undersea telegraph cable came ashore in 1870.

They were about as impressed by Porthcurno beach as they had been on our trip to the fabled Saxon burial site of Sutton Hoo, which my son memorably recalls as ‘mounds in a field’, but I felt a moment of geek joy that has stayed with me since.

That first cable linked Britain to India, and helped create a communications revolution that transformed the world. The telegraph, as Tom Standage makes clear in his excellent book, was ‘The Victorian Internet’, and undersea cables were vital to its development. The cable at Porthcurno was the precursor of the Seacom cable that has just gone live in Kenya, and is a direct antecedent of the complex web of fibre-optic cables that make today’s Internet possible.

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Learning to live offline

[This was on the BBC News website last week, but I’ve only just got round to posting it here… lazy, I know]

I have just endured a week of limited connectivity and it has given me a salutory lesson in what life is like for the digitally dispossed here in the UK and around the world.  I have been driven to searching for open wireless access points so that I can download my email, sometimes wandering the beach looking for elusive 3G signals just to get my Facebook status updated.

It was my own fault, of course. I spent a few days on the Norfolk coast with my son and some of his friends in a wifi-less cottage in an area that had poor 3G coverage, though I was probably less frustrated with lack of connectivity than he was, as he wanted to keep in touch with his mates back home while I was mostly on holiday.

Then I spent the weekend at the lovely Latitude Festival in deepest Suffolk, there to represent Writers’ Centre Norwich as we had supported some of the poets in the Poetry Tent. No wireless there, at least none that I could get connected to – there did seem to be a private network for the tech crew to use – and the phone networks were clearly swamped as text messages were taking two or three hours to be delivered while my 3G dongle repeatedly failed to connect.

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I Needed Music ‘cos I Had None…

The latest report on young people’s online music-finding habits from consumer research company The Leading Question has attracted a fair amount of coverage for its headline finding that UK teenagers use of filesharing services has dropped by a third.

‘Speakerbox’ polls a thousand young people, so it’s a reasonable survey although of course there’s a margin of error in any survey and a significant likelihood that the interpretation of the results will be driven by the predispositions of those reading them, demonstrating yet again what the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn calls ‘theory-dependent observation’.
Music industry pollsters will inevitably look for a silver lining in the cloud of consumer behaviour, and a focus on the growth of legal services is to be expected.

But even with that caveat in mind, there has clearly been a shift in behaviour as more young people find licensed ways to listen to the music they want, watching YouTube videos, streaming songs through MySpace and Spotify and generally using legal avenues to find and enjoy the music of new bands like Florence and the Machine.

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Being Open About Secrecy

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

It must be tricky to be an advocate of transparency when your job involves selling serious encryption tools to government departments, large and small companies, hospitals and people who are concerned about having their bank account details hijacked from a home PC.

After all, the point about good encryption software and the systems that surround it is that they provide a way to keep your secrets secret, while open government and the effective regulation of financial services would seem to require the widest possible dissemination of all sorts of operational data, from MPs expenses to bank investment portfolios.

And once something is on a website, in an email or available for inspection through a published program interface then it is no longer secret, however well the copy on your internal network might be protected. Continue reading “Being Open About Secrecy”

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Giving Life a Shape

[This is also available to read on the BBC News website, as always]

One of the more interesting shifts in the technology world over the last quarter century has been the way that cultural organisations have gone from being the late adopters, inheriting office-oriented computer systems from business and making do with them, to being those leading the digital revolution in many areas.

When I worked with the Community Computing Network in the late 80s it was hard work persuading charities and voluntary organisations that having a computer to handle their member databases and print letters was worthwhile.

But now that there really is a computer on every desk and word processing, spreadsheets and databases are standard, arts organisations seem to be far more willing to engage and experiment with the latest tools, especially online.

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Whose Service?

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

Much of the debate that followed last week’s publication of the Digital Britain report has focused on the proposal to take some of the income from the TV Licence and make it available to fund universal broadband access, with a suggestion that once this has been accomplished £130m a year could be used to support local news services and perhaps even children’s programming provided by people other than the BBC.

Within the BBC there is a strong feeling that this would be a very bad idea because the corporation’s resilience comes in part from having a guaranteed source of funding that does not rely on politically-motivated decisions of the government of the day. The fear is that once the licence fee is shared there will be nothing to stop it being carved up to meet short-term policy objectives.

Others share this view. The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee is vehemently opposed to what she calls ‘deliberately breaching the unique status of the BBC’ and asks if the destruction of the BBC is ‘really going to be this Labour government’s legacy?’

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Digital Britain: Engaging with the Internet

I got home at 1500, checked out the Digital Britain website, then fired up the Parliament channel at 1530 to see new Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw present the Digital Britain White Paper (according to BERR) or Final Report (according to DCMS). And then I tweeted while I read, before sitting down to write this, which I filed with the BBC at around 1730 (it should be up soon). So it’s a bit rough and there may be things I’ve missed… the joys of journalism, I suppose.

We live in a largely digitised country, so in one sense the Digital Britain report is an exercise in ensuring that the legal and regulatory system catches up with the lived reality for most of the UK population rather than a visionary document describing a far-distant future.

As such it is a serious attempt to ensure that government makes the best possible use of the network in serving us all, and that businesses offering access to the internet or providing services and content over the network are regulated, rewarded and cajoled as necessary to ensure that the UK does not fall even further behind the rest of the industrialised world.

Although I criticised the interim report when it was published in January because it had been written behind closed doors and offered few opportunities for consultation and engagement for those outside the charmed circle of invited experts, it is clear that Stephen Carter and his team have listened to and taken notice of the extensive debate around their initial proposals. The result, though far from perfect, offers a good basis for work on the detail of implementation and legislation, and there are clear signs that those who want to engage will be able to do so.

There are suggestions for how to liberalise and improve access to wireless infrastructure, with potentially transformative proposals to shake up spectrum allocation to build a next generation mobile network offering 50mbps in cities and 5mbps in rural areas.

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