Sunday, 3 January 2010

Suspend/Resume broken on Ubuntu

Irritatingly suspend/resume stopped working around about the time I upgraded to Karmic. After going down a few blind alleys I eventually looked at dmesg and saw:

cannot set freq 16000 to ep 0x86

...which is due to a broken driver for the Quickcam 5000, which wasn't broken in Jaunty. Unplug the webcam and resume now works again.

Tuesday, 15 December 2009

ISP Filtering Live Report

The ISP Filtering Live Pilot Report was just released. I've linked to an alternate URL since the site seems to be down. So what does it tell us?

"All six ISPs achieved 100 percent accuracy blocking the ACMA blacklist." Of 1000 URLs. Well, that doesn't seem very realistic since 1000 URLs isn't very many. But that's OK, there was another part to the test:

"In addition the above blacklist, filtering a wider range and volume of material to provide some level of protection to children using the internet." "In blocking additional categories of content all six ISPs achieved 78 percent to 84 percent accuracy when assessed against the test list of URLs compiled by Enex TestLab (Enex)." Hmm, that doesn't sound so good.

But at least there aren't blocking innocent material right?

"Testing was also undertaken against a list of content, prepared by Enex, considered to be innocuous and which should not be blocked by a filter. All participants experienced some level of over-blocking in this test (i.e. blocking of some legitimate URLs). All filters blocked less than 3.4 percent of such content."

Oh dear. Well, at least circumvention isn't an issue right? Because at least we can stop people from downloading prohibited material which is the point of the legislation (summary from wikipedia):

"A collection of both federal and state laws apply, but the most important are the provisions of Schedule 5 of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 inserted in 1999 and since amended.[6] Under this regime, if a complaint is issued about material "on the Internet" the ACMA is allowed to examine the material under the guidelines for film and video. If the material would be classified R18+ or X18+ and the site does not have an adult verification system, or would be refused classification, and is hosted in Australia, the ABA is empowered to issue a "takedown notice" under which the material must be removed from the site. If the site is hosted outside Australia, the site is added to a list of banned sites. This list of banned sites is then added to filtering software, which must be offered to all consumers by their Internet Service Providers."

From the report:

"A technically competent user could, if they wished, circumvent the filtering
technology."

Well... at least it didn't impact performance:

"Testing revealed that the three ISPs filtering only the ACMA blacklist had no noticeable performance degradation that could be attributed to the filter itself."

So it wouldn't actually stop someone if they were competent, and if you implemented a realistic sized list then you probably won't catch all URLs, and in any case you are probably going to get false positives. But at least it didn't affect performance. Although if you did want to actually prevent circumvention:

"As a general rule, there appears to be a relationship between measures to counter deliberate circumvention and impact on internet performance (i.e. stronger circumvention prevention measures can result in greater degradation of internet performance)."

Oh dear.

Tuesday, 29 September 2009

Social Networking

Social Networking is certainly a big deal in the tech community, and it must be a big deal in the Internet community given Facebook's 300 million+ active users plus the innumerable other Social Networking sites, but somehow it has never clicked for me. I have a few blogs here and there which I update occasionally, but somehow it has never sucked me in.

There is definitely something important about the idea of Social Networking: humans are social animals and communication is an important part of our socialization. In fact our communities are defined by who we communicate with- from the detailed discussions with partners and work colleagues to the friendly nod to the-guy-at-the-bus-stop who's name you don't know but you see every day (except for rainy days when his wife drops him off at the train, which you saw one day when you missed the bus and had to walk to the train station).

And therein lies the rub: we are expert social animals and our everyday social communication is nuanced and subtle. We naturally track very subtle interactions with a range of different people (did the shopkeeper hear me discussing my tinea with my friend? oh yes, she made a comment about socks to the next person- wait no that was in response to a direct question about where they were- she still might have heard about my tinea) and we naturally present ourselves differently to different people in different contexts (yeah, this is a company offsite and I'm with the guys so we'll discuss getting drunk, but 24 hours later at work we won't have that discussion, except if we...).

None of that nuance exists in the online Social Network: we are rarely aware of who has read what, we don't present ourselves differently at different times (everything I've ever posted is available at any given time) and there is none of the everyday grouping of people which we do naturally and easily in the real world.

Social Networking as it stands today groups communication into: one on one private communication or public communication to everyone. And the tools to create more subtle groups (all the people within ear shot of my desk at work, the people I trust not to blab this sort of thing) are generally non-existent or far too much of a pain to manage. So at the moment social networking is basically a promiscuous process: hey everyone! here's everything about me!

That is effectively what it means to be famous. So if you want to be famous, Social Networking is currently an effective medium.

I think there are lots of people who don't want to be famous. Or at least there are lots of people who like more control over who knows what about them.

The alternative online is hoping for obscurity. Just a few friends or family read your blog/tweets/facebook and hopefully nothing happens to change that.

Its a shame that better options don't exist because increasingly the people you communicate with are distant and electronically connected. And those everyday electronically connected people don't have some of the everyday real world modes of communication: John looks hungover- best not to ask him any questions to day, Jane is spending a lot of time talking to Peter- I wonder if something is going on?

That's why tweets and status updates and blog posts are important and simultaneously look like junk. They are day to day pings of communication.

Hey! The-guy-at-the-bus-stop got dropped off by a different woman! I wonder what's going on there?

Monday, 13 July 2009

In Defense of Google Books

In my continuing series of "Yeah what he said" posts:

http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/money-trail/2009/06/23/defense-google-books

So I have to be clear: I work for Google, but I don't work on Google Books and I don't speak for the company. This blog is my personal reaction as a reader. I love reading and I'd really like to be able to get access to the back catalog of human thought. So I get very upset when I read articles in the popular press that decry or vilify the book deal because it is an easy headline. At high level it looks like it is a win for all parties.

Maybe I'm just coming from the wrong perspective but it seems like a good deal from an author's point of view. Author's can opt at any time to change what information about their book is presented and Google Books otherwise acts as an additional distribution method. And even better, books can continue to be available and in distribution even after they are no longer being printed in dead tree format- that seems like a big win! There seems to be some concern about pricing but I find hard to believe Google gain anything by ripping off the customer (who won't buy) or the author (who will withdraw the right to sell). Did I mention that the authors can actually make money out of a book that is no longer available in dead tree format?

Publishers seem to profit to me too since for books that ARE in print they'll get extra promotion. Book stores benefit since in print books will point to a book store where you can buy it.
There is even a concern that Google will have some kind of "monopoly" on information. Well, given that Google has now forged the prototype agreement it should be much cheaper for someone to go down this path again breaking the 'evil' monopoly. But this actually makes information that would otherwise not be accessible open to readers again. And for that it should be applauded and supported.

Google is not beyond reproach and like any large organisation its actions should be inspected closely. But many of the critiques of the Google book deal that I've read so far don't offer much thoughtful analysis and merely cloak the deal in FUD. As a reader I would be angry to see the huge back catalogue of out of print books snatched from my grasp without very good reason. And so far, I haven't seen any good reasons.

ChromeOS

I agree with this article:


I don't think ChromeOS is an attempt to spit in Microsoft's eye. ChromeOS simply reflects a real user behaviour which is 'I just want a light laptop to browse the web with- I mostly read email, go to ebay, watch youtube videos, lookup wikipedia and I'd like to do that while sitting on the couch.'

I've had people ask me if this kind of hardware existed and I've said "not yet, but it will come". ChromeOS enables this new hardware in the same way that Android enables a new generation of mobile phones.

Yes, Google can justify this for business reasons- more people using the web tends to mean more income. But my observation is that internally the real justification for most projects in Google is that this is good for users and an interesting technical project- and incidentally it also has a business case. (I don't have any special knowledge about ChromeOS from internal documentation- I haven't got around to looking.)

Wednesday, 28 January 2009

Australian Private Fibre

I don't know if this has been considered by the Australian government but I've been wondering about an interesting use for some of this financial stimulus money. In short: subsidised private fibre to the node.

The Australian government provides a subsidy for individuals to plumb fibre optic cable from their house to the nearest node or junction. The tricky part is the legislation which controls how the fibre is connected and used at the node. But oddly enough, this is a problem the Government already has.

The Broadband Fibre to the Node program has a huge problem: Telstra owns the nodes. The current non-Telstra contenders all assume that somehow they'll be granted access to the nodes. But the nodes are owned by Telstra. Government intervention will be required one way or another- either to un-privatise the nodes or force Telstra to allow access.

But another option would be to create this infrastructure anew using modern infrastructure. And the timing is surprisingly good: Passive Optical Networks make fibre infrastructure cheaper and we happen to want to spend money right at the moment.

The current Keynsian Economic thinking calls for a stimulus to the economy: sensible Government led investment prefereably in productive assets. In an ideal world this investment would have long term benefits, be socially equitable and have broad geographic impact. Oh, and we'd like it to happen sooner rather than later. The classic stimulus is building roads. The 21st century equivalent has got to be Broadband networks.

I'm not suggesting that this is an easy suggestion. Maybe it has already been thought through and dismissed. But if not- well it is certainly worth the thought.

Tuesday, 2 December 2008

Blogging: content generation made easy

Blogging has made content publishing a much easier process. The technical challenge has been reduced to a sign up process and typing out a document. Just as importantly blogging provides a conceptual framework for thinking about publishing.

The technical changes are obvious: no need to worry about html and css, or creating DNS entries or webserving (or any other mix and match combinations of hosting). The signup process for blogging is now more or less: what would you like to call this blog and what sort of colour scheme would you like?

Less obvious is how much the conceptual process has been simplified. My Space and Facebook have been very succesful in part because they have provided a framework for what to say as well as how to say it. They have lowered the barriers to entry by constraining the up front choices required to get started. Blogging is slightly less socially constrained but still provides some of the simplifying assumptions: I'm here to write about this topic- which could be me, or it might be about sewing or Belgian politics. But I don't have to think much about the site design, or access permissions, or social networking until I want to- I can start by posting and think about the rest later.