alfa.org.uk

Good to see the BBCi hacks still have a sense of humour:

“The final decision on whether it becomes law falls to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger who can approve it or decide to terminate it.”

So, the RIAA have sued 493 more filesharers. They don’t seem to realise how completely futile this is, and how they’re only scratching the surface of the problem (”Oh, you’re only tracking down people who use Kazaa or LimeWire? What about those using other distribution methods? Bittorrent, WinMX, SoulSeek, even DCC on IRC ffs?”).

They hope that by making enough noise in the press they’ll scare people away from file-sharing. Well, sorry, it isn’t going to happen. Napster made people realise not only that the Internet could make everything available on their doorstep, but that sharing it could be fun. People much cleverer than me have been telling the industry for years that the Internet will become the new distribution method for media, and they’d better get used to the idea.

Apple caught on first (as usual). But in order to get the big four record labels interested there had to be DRM involved. Cue DVD Jon to crack it. Again.

The games industry has realised what’s happening. People want to play multi-player games over the internet, and they’re willing to pay for it. That’s because they’re not interested in the physical game itself, but the potential for social networking it can offer. Just look at EverQuest.

The music industry should take a leaf out of the games industry’s book. People are quite uninterested in physically owning the media and holding it in their hands. They’re quite happy with an iPod full of tunes, and nary a CD in sight. The industry should tap into the potential for huge cost-cutting this offers, and make real products that people would be interested in.

Micro-payments are the way forward. Why should I buy an album when I’m only interested in one song? More to the point, why should I pay a fixed price for one song, regardless of the number of times I play it? Why not charge 1p per play, for any song? Bandwidth is cheap and the internet is ubiquitous.

Supply and demand, man. Supply and demand.

Or maybe the industry is scared of the people having real commercial choice over where their money goes.

Shameless plug, this one:

City of Southampton Orchestra
Saturday 22nd May 2004, 7:30pm
at Romsey Abbey

Conductor: John Traill

Berlioz - Overture: Roman Carnival
Mendelssohn - Violin Concerto
Soloist: Catherine Nassif
Tchaikovsky - Symphony No. 5 in E minor

Tickets (reserved): £12.00 & £9.00; (unreserved): £5.00
Concessions available
Romsey Tourist Information Centre (01794) 512987

ian@dermot:~$ ls /home/ian/Mail/inbox
ls: /home/ian/Mail/inbox: No such file or directory
ian@dermot:~$

Bollocks. What that means, basically is: if you sent me an email between last Thursday and today - please resend due to muppetry. Personally I’m blaming procmail…

Cor, look at that!

Southampton University Guild
Southampton, Hampshire
4 St Michael’s Square
Sunday, 16 May 2004 in 28 mins (D)
1260 Plain Bob Minor
1-2 Ian O Partridge
3-4 Oliver R Hall
5-6 Jonathan C Hetherington (C)
First quarter peal in hand: 1-2.
First quarter peal in hand as conductor.
First quarter peal in the house.

Southampton University Guild
Southampton, Hants
St Mary’s
Sunday, 16 May 2004 in 46mins (21cwt)
1264 Plain Bob Major
1 Lucy M Bricheno
2 Rhiannon M Meredith
3 Neil I G Mackay
4 Alex J Cannon
5 Gareth E Wildig
6 Robert M Forster
7 Ian O Partridge (C)
8 Oliver R Hall
A birthday compliment to the ringers of the treble and fifth.

Genius.

Hey, Toby! How-To: Write your doctoral thesis ;-)

Accurate?

As I approach my mid twenties, middle-age seems quite ominous.

I had a rule to combat the onset of middle-age. It was a simple rule, but it worked for me. It was:

Thou shalt not listen to The Archers

The other day something happened to cause me to doubt this rule though. I turned on Radio 4 about 7:15pm to listen to Front Row, and The Archers had just finished. The voice-over guy announced:

“If you’ve been affected by any of the issues in tonight’s episode of The Archers, you can call the BBC Action Line free and in confidence on 08000 xxxxxx”

Wtf? When did The Archers get all controversial? I thought it was all about runaway sheep and broken down landrovers??

I need a new benchmark. Any suggestions for rules to observe when avoiding middle-age?

I’m not a religious person, but this is quite amazing, and strangely cool.

There’s a few things that have been bugging me about the proposals for a new UK National Identity Card. Obviously there’s the major one that it’s a bad idea and won’t work, but I think I can be more specific than that.

You can read more than I care to write about the matter at The Register, but there’s two major points I want to make.

1. The Government has lied. They held a public consultation on ID cards last year, and published the results. I quote:
   

   What was learned from the consultation exercise?

   11. Individual responses, sample surveys, and polling results have demonstrated substantial support for an identity card. Of the 5000 people and organisations who responded formally to the consultation, 4200 expressed a view. Over 60% of these were in favour. We also received over 5000 e-mails from an organised opposition campaign. Over 96% of these were opposed.

   The “organised opposition campaign” they mention is stand.org.uk. The government decided to ignore all 5000 of these opinions and claim that, overall, people were in favour of the proposals. This pisses me off, mainly because what’s the point of having a consultation if you’re going to ignore the results, but also because I was one of those 5000 e-mails, dammit! How dare they ignore my submission to the consultation!

2. My basic position on ID cards is “In general, it’s a bad idea, more so if you cock up the implementation”. Unfortunately the implementation being proposed is a complete foul-up. Basically, each card will have two biometrics on it, a primary (probably fingerprints) and secondary (probably facial geometry). If you were clever, you might think “hang on, didn’t David Blunkett say this would ‘make identity theft and multiple identity impossible, not nearly impossible, impossible’. If my fingerprints are stored on this card, what happens when someone nicks it? They’ve just stolen my identity, right? It’s not like I can report my fingerprints stolen and get a new set”. You’d be right, too. A system like that (such as the government proposes) would make identity theft easier, as well as more damaging when it happens.

   There is a way around the problem though, which at best leaves the possibility of identity theft as likely as it is today. It’s what a lot of clever people assumed the government would do. It’s called secure cryptographic hashing.

   Simply, when you go to have your fingerprints taken to get your card (try to put the slightly Orwellian picture this conjures out of your mind for a minute), the government doesn’t actually store your fingerprints themselves. What it does it produce a cryptographic hash of your fingerprints, a one-way mangling of them, and stores that instead. If the bad guys then nick your card, all they get is a meaningless number. But if all you’ve got is a meaningless number, how can you use it an as ID card?, I hear you ask. Well, the readers at airports, job centres etc. would also produce hashes of the prints they take, and instead of comparing the fingerprints, they compare the hashes. This means that they can verify your identity (which is what the cards are for, right?) without actually having to store your fingerprints on a scary national database. And of course, if your card is nicked, you just regenerate a new hash, and use that to authenticate from then on.

   The failure of the government to implement this safer system worries me. It’s not like they weren’t told to - privacy campaigners submitted reports to the consultation explaining in painstaking detail what the correct, safe way to do this kind of stuff is. But they’re being ignored, and that is very very troubling. Why does David Blunkett want to know what your fingerprints are? He still hasn’t answered that…