Category: billblog

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Being watched

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

The chances are that I’ll be getting a letter from my internet service provider in the next few weeks telling me that they’ve been watching my network activity closely and think I’ve been breaking the law.

Virgin Media, who used to be called ntl before they acquired Virgin Mobile and turned themselves into a ‘four-play’ media company, has announced that it is working with record industry lobby group the British Phonographic Industry to write to customers whose network connection seems to have been used to download unlicensed content.

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Spotted in Sao Paulo


Sao Paulo

Originally uploaded by BillT.

On a random bookstand along Av Paulista. I can’t imagine finding Bukowksi, Baudelaire, Neal Cassidy, Anais Nin, Erasmus, Emily Dickinson – and Garfield – for sale on a stall in the UK!

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Made it to Sao Paulo


Sao Paulo

Originally uploaded by BillT.

So time to go exploring beyond the view from my hotel room… here til Sunday, one day conference so time to have a look around, though doing anything other than getting a sense of this megacity is of course impossible.

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Putting the people to work

In his excellent science fiction novel ‘The Diamond Age’ writer Neal Stephenson describes a world in which nanotechnology and nanobots are commonplace and ‘Matter Compilers’ can create objects at will.

However there are no artificial intelligences on his imagined earth, the technology having failed to deliver on the promises made by generations of researchers.  Computers do lots of things, but they are unable to replace or even convincingly impersonate humans.

One consequence of this is that some of the characters in the book make their living by providing voices for virtual reality-based entertainment since although computers are able to produce convincing 3-D worlds they cannot, in Stephenson’s alternative reality, substitute for real human intonation or emotion.

It’s an interesting idea, and when I first read the book in 1995 it resonated with my view that while non-human intelligence is perfectly possible we will never actually manage to create it ourselves because intelligence emerges from biology not technology.

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Storm warning for cloud computing: more like a miasma

[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website, and Nick Carr has an excellent piece on ‘miasma computing‘ that moves the argument on nicely.]

My friend Simon is one of those net entrepreneurs with the attention to detail it takes to have an idea and turn it into an effective company. He’s currently on his second job search service, and it seems to be going very well.

One reason for the success may be that Simon has embraced the network age with a dedication that most of us can only wonder at. He uses a range of productivity tools, scheduling services and collaborative systems to manage both his personal and professional life, and once confessed to me that he had ‘outsourced his memory’ to Microsoft Outlook and its calendar service.

So far I’ve resisted the temptation to pay a team of hackers to break into his laptop and add ‘jump off a cliff’ as his 10am appointment on Thursday.

Recently I’ve noticed that Simon’s head is in the cloud. Or rather, his business is, as he and his team have moved most of their systems online, taking advantage of the move from local storage and processing to ‘cloud computing’, where data and services are provided online and accessed from a PC or any other device.

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Are we all law-breakers?

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

It has always been difficult to stay completely on the right side of the law, however law-abiding one tries to be.

I try to check the copyright status of every picture I use in my presentations, but may sometimes slip up.  Copying CDs I own to my iPod may – or may not be – illegal, and copying DVDs I own certainly is.  And like all drivers I sometimes see the speedometer creep up above the speed limit when I’m not paying attention to it on a quiet motorway.

But now it seems I could face prosecution for the wide range of user accounts I’ve created on MySpace, Facebook, Googlemail, Flickr and Bebo to support the various projects I’m involved with. The ‘Norfolk and Norwich Festival’, ‘Tyneside 100’ and ‘Wysing Arts Centre’ identities I have lovingly crafted may well fall foul of a US decision that breaking the terms and conditions of a social network site can count as unauthorised access, turning what would seem to be at most a civil offence into a criminal act under computer misuse laws.

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Do we need two Internets?

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

Jonathan Zittrain’s recent book, The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It, has spurred a lot of discussion both online and offline, with blog posts lauding his insights or criticising his over-apocalyptic imagination.

The book itself makes fascinating reading for those who have watched the network grow from its roots in the research community into today’s global channel for communications, commerce and cultural expression.

And the distinction that Zittrain makes between computers and devices that are open for hacking, exploration and creative use and those which are locked down and limited is one that we can clearly see.

An iPhone and an Asus Eee PC are very different objects, and I can’t imagine anyone scrawling ‘this machine kills fascists’ on their iPhone in homage to Woody Guthrie, while my son has just done this to his Asus.

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Computer, heal thyself

[This is also on the WattWatt site, an online community for anyone concerned with energy efficiency]

Like every other product of the advanced manufacturing capabilities of a long-industrialised society the computers that surround us – and, for the pacemaker wearers among us, that we have taken into our bodies – carry an environmental cost.

Silicon may be cheap, but turning it into processors requires vast amounts of energy, clean water and many potentially toxic chemicals.

Some of the raw materials used elsewhere, like the coltan in our mobile phones, are extracted at great human and environmental cost.

Displays and casings may contain heavy metals and damaging chemicals, while the disposal of old computers is becoming a significant issue.

And the billions of processors, hard drives, screens and network devices that we increasingly rely upon consume more and more electrical energy, much of it wastefully generated from non-renewable sources that release carbon into the atmosphere.

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Something comes of Nothing..

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

I used to be a professional computer programmer, writing in the C language on the Unix operating system back in the 1980’s when half a megabyte of memory was enough to support a sixteen-user system.

These days I’m only really up to hacking other people’s code to meet my needs, although I do occasionally find myself messing around with languages like PHP and JavaScript and I’m tempted to learn Python.

But I’m still enough of a coder to share the excitement that has been rippling through the IT security community recently after the publication of a paper from Mark Dowd, X-Force Researcher at IBM Internet Security Systems.

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Workspace




Workspace

Originally uploaded by BillT.

This is my desk at the moment – haven’t quite migrated off the old Vaio desktop onto the new iMac, and apart from picking up the wrong mouse from time to time I’m managing the keyboard switching ok.

Should really have put the Asus EEE PC in there too, I suppose…