It wos the Sun wot dun him

So the Sun has come out against Gordon Brown, at the end of his Labour Party Conference. Gordon Brown quite properly replied that it will be the voters who decide the election, not the Sun (The voters of Scotland, Wales and England at any rate, since Labour lack the courage to face the voters in Northern Ireland).

Still, there is something not quite right about a newspaper making the news to this degree. I thought the papers were supposed to report the news (in the Sun's case, the gossip), and I realised that to a degree they also choose the news - but the degree to which this move on this day was calculated to puncture Labour's positive post-conference glow is just a bit too political for my taste.

As the media becomes more political, I hope that in the UK we won't see politicians ignoring the interests of the people and their own principles (for those who still have any) and tailoring their policies to gain the support of Rupert Murdoch's News International, or any other media group.

It's bad enough that they tailor their policies to the interests of companies whose boards they hope to join!

Electric dreams - missing technology

A fascinating show from the BBC, Electric Dreams is an experiment to see how one family adjusts to life in the 1970s, '80s and '90s. Their house was stripped of modern technology, completely reorganised in period fashion, and decorated and equipped with only items available in 1970. The family dressed in 70s clothes, and they they lived a decade a day, with new gadgets (like a freezer and a colour TV) arriving as they became generally available.

Life was very different then - and at times the family complained of being bored, and having "nothing to do" (except for the mother, who was very busy indeed with housework). They spent a lot more time together, eating as a family for instance, and going out together. They had to plan ahead, and phone home - no texting to say you're going to be late, or you've changed your mind.

The programme gave a fascinating glimpse of social history (initially in glorious monochrome) from the power-cuts and strikes of the 1970s, to today's increased freedom from household chores. It also illustrated some very contemporary preoccupations, such as the parents' anachronistic level of concern with health and safety, attitudes to smacking, and the relative freedom then of children to spend time outside, without today's paranoia over "stranger danger".

But there was one major media technology available in the 1970s that was curiously absent. A form of entertainment, and source of information. One that could be used even during the power cuts the family experienced, even when confined to an unheated, game-console-free bedroom "without any supper". One that was virtually omnipresent in the 70s, and that is still widely available. A technology that remains compatible with content produced many years, decades, centuries, even millennia ago. A technology popularised by an invention in Europe in the 15th century.

They had no books!

Perhaps they did, but we didn't see any. Maybe that says more about the priorities of the media people concerned than about the 1970s?

More free lunches

There was a Drupal Camp in Belfast this weekend. No tents involved, fortunately - that last time I tried that, the air mattress deflated during the night, and I woke up lying on the ground. This was a more comfortable affair - a bunch of people talking about Drupal, doing presentations and demos, and having free lunch - two free lunches, in fact.

It was good timing really - I have been playing with Drupal a bit recently to get a website set up. It's not finished yet, so you can't see it. But I now know a few more useful tricks. It'll be ready soon. Maybe.

In short, thanks to the sponsors of the event, I am now better fed and a little better informed. The cake was a lie, but we did have special Drupal gingerbread men, and I won a frisbee. Better than winning a book, because then I'd have had to do a talk at the next event. And I got to sleep in my own bed, and didn't wake up on the ground, with only a thin tent between me and some particularly ominous clouds.

But in spite of the risk of clouds I'm still planning on going back to Greenbelt next year. Some people never learn.

Microsoft Alderaan Slammed in Race Row

The Register reports that outrage was sparked when the website of Microsoft's outpost in Alderaan was clumsily photoshopped, allegedly to conform to local racial demographics.

Two humans were crudely pasted into the picture to make the all-Wookie board of Microsoft Empire seem more acceptable to potential customers in the influential and wealthy Alderaan mobile, droid and deathstar O/S market.

However the subsequent furore may have hampered the chances of the up and coming Microsoft, as it tries to compete for market share with the dominant BSD2 and 3-CP/M systems deployed in most clone armies.

Jabba Gates and Steve "chair" Bal'cca of Microsoft Alderaan were unavailable for comment.

And you thought it belonged to you: Why DRM is such a bad idea

Last night I noticed a very funny thing. Amazon had "un-booked" some books they had sold. Their customers woke up to find that their copies of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm had been taken back, and the cost refunded. Ironic as anything, but how could it possibly happen?

They had not bought a physical copy - they had paid for a licence to read an electronic copy on Amazon's eBook machine - a "Kindle". And that electronic copy was weighed down by DRM - Digital Rights Management (or Digitally Restricted Media) - so that the people who control it are not the buyers, but the sellers. So when Amazon felt they needed to revoke people's eBooks, they could.

You buy it - but they own it!

It turns out that Amazon, surprised by their customers' outrage or embarrassed by the irony of retrospectively un-selling 1984 -- who knows -- have said they won't do it again.

But they can - and that's the problem with DRM. You don't own what you have bought. "They" can stop you lending it to people. They can prevent you from electronically quoting snippets. They can invisibly edit or change what you have bought - or add new advertising. Or they can take it away altogether. And, often, if the publisher goes bust or even decides to stop selling it, what you bought just stops working. Forever. And it's illegal to try to get it back (in America, it's a felony).

And that is why DRM matters, and why the laws that pander to it matter even more.

And the more media becomes digital and is delivered electronically, the worse this will get.

Maybe not today; maybe not tomorrow; but soon - and for the rest of your media.

Links: NY Times, NY Times Blog, Slashdot discussion.

Fit for purpose?

The UK does not have a very good system for handling people who need a visa to visit the country.

The process is slow and awkward - when the Russians have a slicker process (and their process is by no means slick), you know something is wrong.

The information available on the official Websites is poorly organised, and is not written from the point of view of someone who wants to come to the UK - it reads like some bureaucrat randomly dumped stuff he knows onto a page, and somehow manages to not quite answer any question you may have.

Then there is an unfortunate gulf between the questions they ask, and the information you need to give them if you are to be successful. For instance, there is a section for "any other information". If you don’t fill that with a convincing explanation of why you will absolutely definitely leave the UK after your trip, you’ve just wasted £80 and three weeks - and that doesn't include the time taken to research and fill in the form before you submit it.

And you have to be very convincing - a visit to the UK see a critically ill parent, followed by a journey home to get married and resume employment was considered insufficiently convincing. And by the time the appeal process had dragged on (and that’s another problem with the whole morass), the parent had died. Unfortunately the nameless, faceless, soulless wretch who made that decision had no accountability.

If you have any questions - too bad. You can try to submit a question via a web form, or email. If it does not vanish into the ether, the answer you eventually get is as good as random. I asked the same question twice in a row (I’m sceptical that way) and got diametrically opposed answers each time. And if you think the unambitious targets for response times in the UK are bad, spare a thought for those with questions for the High Commissions abroad - they can propose a staggering 3 weeks to answer a question.

Or you could pay some extortionate amount to speak to the same hapless incompetents on a premium rate line. After this scam has drained your wallet for a while you may well be be sadder and wiser, but you're unlikely to be much better informed.

The system operates as yet another stealth tax, with many of the services being charged at well above the cost of providing them. To add insult to injury, if you save them money by applying in person, they almost double the charge.

And there's another thing. The administration is a farce. A friend of mine applied in person for a visitor visa. £500 or so. You'd think for the money you'd get something a bit slick, and indeed the interview went quite smoothly. It looked like she might be able to meet some friends for lunch. Then she discovered she had to wait for the passport to be processed. And wait. And wait. She could see the pile of passports being processed. One at a time, slowly, with breaks for chat, and lunch, and cups of tea. But when a passport was eventually processed, was it returned to its owner? Was it ever. Not until all the pile had been processed were any passports returned. Sheer gratuitous awkwardness.

More fundamentally, there is a deeply ingrained culture of disbelief, and a failure to understand that, as well as keeping harmful people out, their role is to, you know, let people in.

You’d think all foreign businessmen and women were stealing from us, that tourists were eroding our culture and robbing us blind, and that we all just want to be left alone, the way visa applicants are positively discouraged.

I could go on. You're probably picking that up. You're clearly very perceptive!

Maybe I’ll rant some more about this later.

Good UN / Bad UN

Nobody is perfect, and few organisations are irredeemably corrupt or evil. The UN is no exception.

On the one hand, the UN refugee agency has been trying to do good work on the ground in Sri Lanka in the face of a huge refugee crisis, when the government allows them. (They also do vital work in Pakistan, the Sudan / Darfur, Iraq, and elsewhere).

A refugee camp in Sri Lanka -UNHCR/B.Alan

On the other hand the UN Human Rights Council has ducked the question of human rights abuses and possible war crimes during and after the conflict in Sri Lanka, calling it an internal matter. But as I mentioned before, considering who is on the UNHRC, and their sensitivities about their own "internal" affairs, we should probably not be too surprised.

At least parts of the UN are aware of the need for rapid resettlement of refugees, and the importance of not indiscriminately shelling concentrations of civilians.

On not being involved in a land war in asia?

It seems that the war is over in Sri Lanka, and that Sri Lankans are all one nation now - at least that is the official story. Certainly I've seen lots of flags and public celebration in the streets of Colombo. People are delighted that the brutal and ruthless LTTE (the Tamil Tigers) no longer hold territory in Sri Lanka.


Not so much public concern though for the hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankan refugees being held in internment camps in their own country, without adequate shelter, food, clothes, health care, communications, or access of any kind to the outside world. Private concern, to be sure. From some at any rate. But not so much in the local press. I even saw one article that claimed the West, egged on by the Christian Church, had been training Tamil suicide bombers. But back to reality.

Now that the war is over, it might be a good time to allow international relief workers back in, reunite families that have been divided, and take care of those Tamil menbers of the one nation of Sri Lanka who are enduring such terrible conditions.

If you're interested in the crisis there, a site with more voices and more information than the mainstream media are able to provide is Ground Views: a Sri Lankan citizen journalism initiative, as it calls itself. Check it out!

Aristophanes would have been proud

2400 years ago, Aristophanes wrote his play Lysistrata, in which the women of Greece tried to force their husbands to end a war by withholding their affections. No sex, basically. On strike.

Fast forward to Kenya, 2009. The BBC reports that the Women's Development Organisation, backed by the Prime Minister's wife, called for a similar boycot, to last for a week. They want to force Kenya's political leaders to break the current deadlock and work together. There has been a troubled and ineffectual coalition government since the 2007-2008 election violence.

Will it work? I've no idea - but one Mr Kimondo is not happy. He is suing the organisers of the boycott, claiming it has "interfered with his happy marriage".

Website Assassinated

The Register reports that the Sri Lankan Army's site was "assassinated" by pro Tamil Tiger hackers. Apparently they put "horrible and gruesome images" up instead! The hackers were accused of terrorism.

One commenter at the Register cut through the claim and counter claim:

Let's hope the "horrible and gruesome images" are quickly replaced with the images of picnics and children playing with puppies usually associate with the ongoing artillery barrages upon concentrations of civilians and land wars in Asia in general.
- TW Burger

Could it be that the images the hackers added reflected the "horrible and gruesome" reality of war?

By all accounts both sides have perpetrated horror and grue in huge amounts.

Here is a UN report on the effects of the Army shelling [large 13M pdf document] - published then un-published, apparently because they thought it might damage dialogue with the government. The SL Army accuse the Tamil Tigers of firing at them from the civilian safe zones. The Tamil Tigers have also recruited child soldiers, and fired on civilians who try to leave the conflict area. Of course, when the civilians at last manage to escape they are concentrated into camps with inadequate provisions, and no provisions for reuniting families.

In this disaster, as always, civilians suffer dreadfully.

If you're curious, here are some of the gory details from the hacked website:

The great Greenbelt Giveaway

So how do we get our free church leader? Will they deliver, or do we have to collect them? And if they've been kept in a tent for ages, will they have gone off?

I'm sure the answers are somewhere on the greenbelt site. I hope the weather is good, this August...

Rip-off Britain: it's worse if you're foreign

Call it a stealth tax, call it taking advantage of those with no choice... call it what you like - it doesn't look very fair.

Look at these figures for New Labour's proposed visa charges for 2009/10, compared to what it costs to process the application:

(Click on the graph for a larger version)

Figures from Written Ministerial Statement announcing proposed fees for Financial Year 09/10

A true lady never sees the middle of the road as "a convenient spot to park the car".

That's one of the set of rules for true ladies, from the police in a Siberian city, according to Russia Today. Accidents caused by women drivers have been increasing, and this pink book of rules is an attempt to address the problem.

Not everyone is impressed. "They seem to have written it for idiots, not responsible drivers," says Maria, a local female driver. At least it seems to have started some debate.

One more rule from the book: "A true lady uses rear-view mirrors to check the road, not her appearance."

Freedom of speech, or the right not to be offended?

The United Nations' Human Rights Council (the indistinguishable and undistinguished successor to the discredited Human Rights Commission) has excelled itself [see this article]. That august body of the UN approved a resolution which calls for limits on what they called "defamation" of religions, especially Islam. To illustrate the sort of defamation they had in mind, the resolution mentions associations with terrorism or human rights abuses, which it describes as unfair.

It may be argued that such linkages are unfair - correlation does not necessarily imply causation, after all, and human rights abuses and terrorism are not uniquely Islamic. But to seek to ban such discussions would be to play into the hands of two dangerous,yet opposed, groups. It would give comfort to extremists within Islam who believe precisely that their faith requires militant terrorism; they would now have the spurious authority of the UN when they label any critique of their ideas a defamation of Islam. And it would make martyrs of those who see every Muslim as a Bin Laden in waiting.

Worse, this proposal rests on an utterly misguided notion - that organisations and belief systems have "human rights" which trump the rights of actual people. They do not.

Fortunately or unfortunately (you decide) it's about the tenth time the UN has done something like this, so it's not likely to become law any time soon - except perhaps in states where human rights are already pretty much a lost cause.