RuinsOfMorning.net

Just to catch you up. This year my ISP, Eircom.net, settled a dispute with the Irish Recorded Music Ass. (IRMA) who had taken them to court over illegal file sharing. The claim was that Eircom were complicit in the illegal activities of their users. the evidence against them included internal emails showing Eircom execs joking about copyright infringement.

The out of court settlement, so far as anyone can tell, is entirely one-sided. Eircom have agreed to institute both content filtering - censorship by any other name - and a three-strikes rule - very like the situation promised by the recently defeated EU Telecoms Package. The Industry Ass. will put forward to the courts websites and online services that they feel need to be blocked in Ireland to protect their profit margins and Eircom have agreed not to contest any of them. A sorry little MediaSentry wannabe called DTecNet is in place to monitor internet users and provide accusations which Eircom will be asked to act upon by disconnecting those accused without any room for appeal. Remember, this is the same monitoring technique that lead the RIAA to sue a woman who did not even own a computer! Also keep in mind that this is a private arrangement, there is no public consultation, no democratic or judicial process, no tests for legality or constitutionality. This is the Recording Industry successfully inserting a de facto law without any need to lobby politicians or campaign for public support.

Fine, I'll ditch Eircom in a heartbeat, and I'll be sure to let them know exactly why I, and no doubt many other customers are jumping what has become the Recording Industry patrol boat to man the cruise liner across the dock. I'm thinking I'll sign up with UPC, an international company that bought out NTL and Chorus and that offer better stats for a similar price.

But there's a problem...

Since their success with Eircom the Irish Recorded Music Ass. has been sending threatening letters to all the other ISPs operating in the country (and a few that aren't ISPs at all) offering the same arrangement they offered Eircom and backed by the same threats of legal action. In fact both BT Ireland and UPC are already facing legal proceedings over this.

Eircom is the largest telecoms operator in the Republic, the one-time monopoly holder, their pockets are as deep as they get in the local industry. Even they could not face the legal avalanche that the Recording Industry promised to drop on them - appeal after appeal, case after case. Eircom have a maximum possible consumer base of maybe 2 million households and businesses. Subtract from that the customers who have taken up offers from other companies. What's left does not look like much when placed before the international cartels that are applying monetary leverage across the fulcrum of IRMA. All the other operators here are smaller than that, or at least have a smaller stake in the already tiny market. Even BT will probably settle before the cost of legal activity outstrips their profit margin. It seems we're about to find out.

How can anyone select a new provider when it looks like they'll all end up in exactly the same situation?

UPC have publicly stated that they have no intention of folding before the threats. In their own words "UPC intends to vigorously defend its position in court." And this is exactly the stance that lead Eircom to court in the first place. And look where they are now.

Angry yet?

Just a snip from an interview with Elvis Costello over on NJ.com:

Q. A couple of years ago, in interviews, it sounded like you had kind of lost faith in the recording industry altogether.

A. Yeah, but I think I started to think too hard about the industry, and less about the music. Since I stopped caring a damn about the business, I've got a lot of freedom. Look at how bad things are: it's a miracle any business is still going. I've always thought that there was more in playing concerts. I haven't made any money from records in 30 years. I don't know that I ever made any money from releasing records. I made money, probably, to a degree, from publishing record releases, because when they give you those advances that everybody makes such a song and dance about, when you sign a record contract, what nobody ever says out loud is they're just loaning you the money to make the records. It's not free money. The record companies set themselves up pretty well, to loan you the money to make the records. "Momofuku" took nine days. This took three days. I don't think it should take any longer than that. The Beatles' first record took a day. What in the world are people doing spending six months making a record? That's a nonsense. How long does it take to play a song?

The interview continues with some qualification regarding the conditions required for certain musical creations. But I'm sure you get the general idea: the real money is in performance, actually playing music (which one would think is a musician's Raison d'être), not in sitting on your arse while someone else takes money for making copies of something you did last year.

Last weekend our cat, Tilly, was poisoned. When I saw him lying on the living room floor he was suffering some form of seizure, shuddering, stretching and curling uncontrollably. His pulse was so light, his breathing so shallow, that I was sure they had stopped altogether. The spasms were too strong to get him safely into a the carrier so he went to the vet wrapped in a towel.

Having heard and seen what happens to poisoned animals, I feared the worst. Even if he survived, I was sure there would be permanent damage, that he would never be the same again, would never be fit or well.

Fortunately we'd found him in time and got him medical attention as quickly as possible. So after a night on a drip he's back to himself with nothing but a slightly blooded leg from the IV.


Needless to say, my relief has been tempered to some degree by frothing outrage.

A while back there was a discussion in comments to a Boing Boing post on the so-called "better mousetrap", various parties offering advice on catching and killing vermin. I offered my own opinion that, catching and killing rats, mice, roaches, anything of that nature is essentially futile, no more effective than bailing out a river. Lay all the poison the pest-controllers will sell you, poison all the rats you like, there are plenty more waiting to fill the vacuum you are creating. In the meantime you are leaving incredibly toxic substances around for people's pets to find, occasionally in the form of dying, delirious rodents wandering away from their territory and taking the poison with them. Not to mention the possibility of inquisitive children coming into contact with the materials. And what do you get for your trouble? A couple of months without a pest, if you're lucky. But if you're unlucky...

A couple of years ago I was working IT on premises where they had fallen for this dumb idea to deal with a handful of mice in the building (which I had never seen but which the female staff swore were the rabid harbingers of all-consuming death). The pest controller left a half-dozen little white containers of poison around the halls and wandered off to the next job. Did he have any other suggestions? Not that I heard, after all, why give the customer a permanent solution when quick fixes guarantee repeat business? After a few weeks we began to notice a bad smell in the offices. You can imagine what had happened. It was a couple of weeks, during which the stench rapidly became unbearable, before the pest controller finally located the rancid corpse he had generated, tucked away under a raised floor.

As I said in that Boing Boing thread, the best mouse trap is not a trap at all. There are only two things that one need do to deal with a rodent problem: take away their reason for staying, then take away their means of getting in. Their reason for staying is food, remove the food source, or at least put it out of their reach, and the rats won't want to be there. Keep your house clean and tidy, don't leave spills and crumbs on the floor, throw out your junk and minimise their hiding places. Keep your trash secure in metal or plastic bins, not just a heaps of bags, and keep the bins and the area around the them clean. Find out how they got into the place to begin with and seal it up. I've heard stories about POWs beating food tins flat to armour-plate their food stores - this isn't rocket science. Think about the area you live in: is there flytipping going on, are there empty or derelict buildings, is there a neighbour with a garden full of garbage? These are things your council and maybe the police need to deal with.

"Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door."

Perhaps, Mr Emerson, but build a better world and they won't have to.

The bottom line is that a pest controller shouldn't be selling you something to kill every living thing that comes into contact with it, he should be showing you what must change to disrupt the rat-friendly habitat you are living in. If you have a pest problem you don't need a better mousetrap, what you need are better living conditions.

All closed source code is invariably poorly written, containing bugs, mistakes, design flaws and security issues from beginning to end. For every ten lines of code there is a disaster waiting, and when that disaster comes to pass you'll be lucky if the system even reports it. Within the cloak of secrecy afforded by closed source code programmers demonstrate just how careless and unprofessional they can truly be, and just how much they are willing to risk for the sake of making their job easier.

Prove... me... wrong.

Ireland's Broadcast Bill 2009 is about to be passed by the government here and it has come to the attention of a few watchful souls that something looks a little off.

Part of the bill deals with changes to the TV license. One of the these changes is the definition of "television set":

"television set" means any electronic apparatus capable of receiving and exhibiting television broadcasting services broadcast for general reception (whether or not its use for that purpose is dependent on the use of anything else in conjunction with it) and any software or assembly comprising such apparatus and other apparatus;

This means that any household which has a device that allows the receiving and viewing of RTE programmes is now required to pay the TV license fee.

Oh! RTE just launched their online RTE Player. Now anyone in the republic with a broadband connection can use it to receive RTE programmes. What a coincidence!

That's right, as it stands anyone with a broadband connection will need a TV license even if they don't own a TV!

However, there is just one additional facet to this pitifully obvious money-grab that Irish commentators are not mentioning, probably because, for them, it is the status quo. The thing is, our national, publicly-owned broadcaster, funded by the TV License Fee, runs commercials. I can tell you that, beyond its mandate to serve a small amount of Irish language content and Gaelic sports coverage, the services RTE offer are indistinguishable from other wholly commercial stations. And I'll offer this simple observation: if every RTE service currently available were to suddenly cease, it would be months before I'd even notice - that's just how little I value them.

When I moved here in 2K I was put out, to say the least, that I was asked to pay a tax for what was clearly a commercially funded enterprise. The extra reach on this double-dipping farce afforded by the new Broadcast Bill is not endearing me to the system at all.

The EU has decided that we, the public, must continue to pay performers of musical works for 70 years after they have completed the work. That's another twenty years closer to perpetuity.

Perhaps I should write to my MEP and enquire if this scheme could be extended to other areas of employment. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we were all paid for the rest of our lives for every job we've ever done? I could really do with getting a half-dozen paychecks every month.

So how about this alternative: performers are paid a decent wage when they perform, and when the performance stops, so does the money!

In the case brought by the DVD Copy Control Association against Real over their RealDVD movie copying software, the MPAA are seeking to seal the courtroom from the public. Their argument is that the details of the Content Scrambling System at the heart of the case are super secret and their entire business model would crumble before our eyes were a single syllable of it to reach the ears of pirates!

Excuse me, I have something in my throat...

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# 531-byte qrpff-fast, Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz
# MPEG 2 PS VOB file on stdin -> descrambled output on stdout
# arguments: title key bytes in least to most-significant order
$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;$c=142;$t=255;@t=map{$_%16or$t^=$c^=($m=(11,10,116,100,11,122,20,100)[$_/16%8])&110;$t^=(72,@z=(64,72,$a^=12*($_%16-2?0:$m&17)),$b^=$_%64?12:0,@z)[$_%8]}(16..271);if((@a=unx"C*",$_)[20]&48){$h=5;$_=unxb24,join"",@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[--$h+84])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$&/;$d=unxV,xb25,$_;$e=256|(ord$b[4])<<9|ord$b[3];$d=$d>>8^($f=$t&($d>>12^$d>>4^$d^$d/8))<<17,$e=$e>>8^($t&($g=($q=$e>>14&7^$e)^$q*8^$q<<6))<<9,$_=$t[$_]^(($h>>=8)+=$f+(~$g&$t))for@a[128..$#a]}print+x"C*",@a}';s/x/pack+/g;eval

That's better.

I wonder, is the secret they are trying to keep the fact that everyone with even a passing interest in the field already knows everything single little thing about it? Is it a secret that this pitiful attempt to dress the shadow of obscurity as effective security was blown wide open at least ten years ago? Is it a secret that their throne is at the shore?

Would that they hang their crowns when this tide wets their robes.

This latest animation project is a simulation of a mechanical binary timepiece finished in gunmetal, glass, brass and gold leaf. Binary time, in this case, is a 16 bit value which divides the day into 65,536 seconds. It even chimes the 4 bit hour in binary. There are full instructions on reading the clock, using the controls and also on embedding this animation in your own web pages.

The animation is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license.

A recent post on Slashdot highlights one of the uses of the Little Island Universal Commenting System quite well.

The story concerns the Norton Internet Security suite which has been causing some problems for users lately. A hitherto unknown component of the software is being reported by firewall applications as attempting unauthorised access to the Internet. While this was troublesome in itself, the report also revealed that the component was located in an non-existent directory. Bad enough, you may think, but when users posted about this on the Norton customer forums trying to find a solution, and perhaps some reassurance that it was not evidence of a viral infection, they discovered that their questions were being deleted despite obvious interest:

"There were several posts about this to the Norton customer forums asking for help or information on this mysterious program. The initial thread received several thousand views and several pages of replies in a few short hours before being deleted. Several subsequent posts to the Norton forum were deleted much more quickly. These actions - whether actively covering up, or simply not well thought through - have spurred people to begin crafting conspiracy theories about the purposes of this PIFTS program." - Norton Users Worried By PIFTS.exe, Stonewalling By Symantec, /.

Of course, these forums are hosted and controlled by Symantec/Norton so they can delete whatever they want from them and don't have to justify it to anyone (if you wanted to delete a comment on your own blog, would you want to have to justify it to the mob first?). Whether they are right, as a service provider, to delete those threads... that's a whole other question. This sort of commercial censorship is pretty unsurprising, after all, these people are in the business of selling products, and hosting critical commentary on their own servers can hardly be considered a good marketing strategy.

Well, this is one issue that Project Little island neatly side-steps without the need to go in search of another website.

Here is a screen cap of the /. post linked and quoted (somewhat brazenly I must admit) on the Norton Internet Security 2009 Product Page itself via the Little Island Client:

This is something I've been doing instead of blogging recently:


Project Little Island is what I sparingly call a "universal commenting system". It allows users to leave comments on any web page for other users to read and respond to. It does not require the host of a web site to provide anything or even be aware of the Little Island service.

This open source project is in the alpha stage, perhaps even something closer to proof-of-concept. As such the client that allows users to view and post comments is currently deployed using Firefox's Greasemonkey Add-on. Later it will be developed as a Firefox Add-on in its own right. The project has an open API which will also allow third-party applications to access the commenting system and offers the possibility for clients in other browsers.

If you have Firefox and Greasemonkey you can get the latest version of the Little Island Client by clicking here to install the user script. You'll find instructions on getting started in the Client Guide.

The comments can be viewed even without a Little Island account but if you'd like to join in you can register here.

More information is available via the project home page.

This is the first public announcement of the project and there are zero testers besides myself. So if you experience any problems let me know.