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Yes, it’s another Digital Economy Bill rant.

It’s passed the Lords, and is on the way to the Commons, where it *could* be rammed through with minimum scrutiny once the General Election is called.  That’s what the corporate interests that have drafted it want:

In this leaked, six-page email, Richard Mollet, the Director of Public Affairs for the British Phonographic Institute (the UK’s record-industry lobbyists), sets out the BPI’s strategy for ramming through the Digital Economy Bill, a sweeping, backwards reform to UK copyright law that will further sacrifice privacy and due process in the name of preserving copyright, without actually preserving copyright.

<snip>

On the other hand, he identifies Members of Parliament as being “resigned” to the fact that they will not be allowed to debate the bill or give it “detailed scrutiny” (heck of a job, MPs!). He cites an expert on legislation as saying that the bill will likely die if MPs insist on their right and responsibility to examine this legislation in detail before voting on it.

There’s still one last chance to prevent this, if MPs do what MPs are supposed to do and hold the legislation up to some kind of scrutiny.   Time to hit WriteToThem – especially if you have a LibDem MP – and tell that’s what they should be doing.

This is my contribution, aimed at Nick Clegg.  Feel free to use something similar yourself :

Dear Mr Clegg,

I was heartened to see that the resolution regarding the Digital Economy Bill was overwhelmingly passed at the Spring Conference.  But despite the fact that the Liberal Democrats have woken up to the implications, the Bill is still a deeply flawed piece of legislation that is utterly skewed to the interests of big corporations, and will do irreparable damage to the real digital economy in the UK:

• The Joint Committee on Human Rights has said that it is unable to rule on whether the Bill would be compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights without more detailed scrutiny. [1]
• Speaking in the Lords, Lord Puttnam said “I am absolutely convinced that, within the next two or three years, there will be another bill before this house which will be created to deal with the deficiencies of the present bill.” [2]
• According to a leaked memo, the BPI are relying on a lack of Parliamentary review to ensure that clauses which were drafted word-for-word by them become law. [3]
• The statistics which form a central plank of the lobbyist arguments are demonstrably misleading. [4]

This Bill will do nothing for the digital economy, as it’s written entirely from the perspective of media conglomerates who are seeking to shore up outmoded business models that are rapidly being rendered obsolete by technology.  If their approach was taken back 100 years, the telegraph industry would be attempting to pass legislation that effectively outlawed the telephone.  It threatens the livelihoods of thousands of people like me who are making the most of new opportunities to make a healthy, legal and creative living through the internet.

That’s the view of everyone – and I really mean *everyone* – I know who works in the IT and internet industry, and there’s a growing groundswell of public opinion that shares this.

People’s faith in politics in the UK is an an all-time low, and it would be a travesty of the legislative process if a Bill this flawed was allowed to become law without scrutiny in a mad rush to clear the decks before the General Election.

I’m writing to ask that you and your fellow Liberal Democrats do not allow this Bill to pass without detailed scrutiny, and that Danny Alexander’s promise to do so [5] is kept.

Yours sincerely,

Tim Duckett

[1] http://www.out-law.com/page-10754
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/mar/02/digital-economy-puttnam
[3] http://www.boingboing.net/2010/03/12/leaked-uk-record-ind.html
[4] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/05/ben-goldacre-bad-science-music-downloads
[5] http://www.libdemvoice.org/danny-alexander-digital-economy-bill-18321.html

These aren’t weeknotes so much as month notes – I’ve been somewhat tardy in writing them up, although things have been quiet enough that one post a month will cover things nicely.

The big project that I’m working on at the moment is a personal one – Conflict-of-Interest-o-Matic. It’s a iPhone client for the They Work For You API, intended to give you quick access to the wealth of data that TWFY hold on our representatives and their representativeness.

Apparently there’s some talk of an election some time soon – you might have heard about it, you might not – so there’s something of a deadline attached to this project. That’s great for concentrating the mind, but it’s also throwing into sharp relief the gaps in my Objective-C knowledge.

So far the app is trawling the API and grabbing data – the next stage will be to make the interface a bit more shiny and implement the various bells and whistles needed to make it beta-testable.

A small project for a charity has kicked off – knocking together a Bebo channel for the My Dangerous Loverboy project in conjunction with Quba. There’s a wealth of content which the project has created, and Bebo have chipped in with some generous sponsorship. The next step here is to put together the design assets, and then start getting the content uploaded.

And just to keep the social network theme running, I did a bit of poking around Facebook for Folksy and Rattle to see how they could integrate the two sites more closely. There’s a very, very simple quick win which will get it off to a good start and generate some hard stats on usage which will allow a decision about whether some more involved work will be justified.

Other than this, it’s been quiet and domestic. That was always the plan for the first part of the year, but with the new financial year approaching so is the need to start turning from personal projects to more renumerative ones. So, I’m available for hire at highly reasonable rates, and will have to start chasing down opportunities a bit more proactively in the next few weeks or so.

Deploying iPhone applications to testers involves creating an ad-hoc distribution package that they can install through iTunes, rather than the App Store.  To do this, you need to get each iPhone’s identifier or UUID code.

There are two steps to this – the first is to get your guinea pig to connect their iPhone and fire up iTunes.   Then on the iPhone Summary page, they’ll see their phone’s serial number, like this:

The serial number isn’t the one you’re after – clicking on the Serial Number will flip the display so that it shows the eleventy-billion digit UUID, like this:

Thankfully, you can copy the number even though it looks as if you can’t select it on the screen – just hover the mouse pointer over the number, and Cmd-C / Crtl-C to copy the number onto the clipboard.

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  Unit testing in Objective-C is provided by the SenTestingKit framework that installs with XCode in /Developer/Library/Frameworks/. However it is not compatible with the iPhone SDK. The Google Toolbox for Mac provides an implementation of SenTestCase for the iPhone that I am using instead.
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• Testing View Controllers « Carbon Five Community
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  Description: The Cellular Shield for Arduino includes all the parts needed to interface your Arduino with an SM5100B cellular module. This allows you to easily add SMS, GSM/GPRS, and TCP/IP functionalities to your Arduino-based project. All you need to add cellular functionality to your Arduino project is a SIM card (pre-paid or straight from your phone) and an antenna and you can start sending Serial.print statements to make calls, send texts and serve web pages!
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• Facebook Connect Tutorial
  "This tutorial will focus on integrating Facebook Connect with a dynamic web site. The tutorial assumes it's an existing dynamic site that has its own user base and login mechanisms, but it applies equally to one that you are building from scratch if you still want to support more than one login mechanism (your own and Facebook Connect).
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  "Last week during #journchat, I saw a reference to a post titled Does Your Twitter Handle Belong on Your Resume? The author is a PR college student, and the conversation around the post is mainly tactical, but the bigger picture surrounding our online identities is one I’ve been wanting to address for some time, so this gives me the opportunity. I’ll briefly cover some basic points about the nature of online space, but then I want to dig into the opportunities that are available in a networked culture."
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• Locus Online Perspectives: Cory Doctorow: Making Smarter Dumb Mistakes About the Future
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• Books in the Age of the iPad — Craig Mod
  I want to look at where printed books stand in respect to digital publishing, why we historically haven't read long-form text on screens and how the iPad is wedging itself in the middle of everything. In doing so I think we can find the line in the sand to define when content should be printed or digitized.

  This is a conversation for books-makers, web-heads, content-creators, authors and designers. For people who love beautifully made things. And for the storytellers who are willing to take risks and want to consider the most appropriate shape and media for their yarns.

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• iPad Application Design » Matt Legend Gemmell
  I held a 6-hour workshop at NSConference in both the UK and USA recently, focusing on software design and user experience. Predictably, an extremely popular topic was the iPad, and how to approach the design of iPad applications. I gave a 90-minute presentation on the subject to start each workshop, and I want to share some of my observations here.
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Vodafone have got a problem. On the one hand, they’re one of the world’s largest mobile networks, with however many billions of subscribers. On the other, they’re just another network as far as many of their customers are concerned.

One of their responses is Vodafone360:

Vodafone 360 is a new internet service for your mobile, PC and Mac. It brings your phone, email, chat and social network contacts together in one place. Communicate with your friends, see their status updates, share your photos and favourite places – from your phone, PC or Mac.

As part of the launch, Voda are running roadshows aimed at their nascent development community and brought the latest one to Sheffield yesterday in partnership with Screen Yorkshire. (No, I can’t work out the connection between Screen Yorkshire and mobile apps either, but it was good of SY to cough up for the coffee and biscuits.)

I went along to have a look, and I *might* have been a bit rude in the backchannel. It’s not that I think Vodafone are doing a *bad* job – it’s just that I think it’s impossible for them to do a good one.

Voda’s first problem is that Apple have pretty much eaten their lunch as far as mobile application mindshare is concerned. There’s a reason why you don’t hear Tesco shouting about their new app for the Samsung H1 – it’s because they’re busy building apps for the iPhone. That might change, it might not – but there’s a hell of a mountain to climb right now.

The other problem that Voda have got is that the core 360 offering is simply a mashup of access to largely existing services. It’s a single consolidated address book, a single view of various social networks, maps, basic photo sharing, a music store, a web portal and an app store.

The fundamental issue for the networks is that the richer the devices and online experiences become, the more commoditised the network services get. If all I’m interested in accessing while I’m mobile is Facebook and Twitter, then I really don’t care about the network so long as it’s fast and reliable.

I’m a classic case in point – I use an iPhone, and switched from O2 to Orange because of the flakiness of the O2 network. I have no loyalty to Orange whatsoever – all my content is on the device, which can be ported from network to network as I see fit. If and when Orange start to piss me off through cost or reliability, I’ll move – and there’s really not an awful lot they can do about short of lock me in with contracts.

What Voda are attempting to do is interpose themself between me and the services I want to interact with. What 360 doesn’t seem to be about is “hey, come and use this cool new social network brought to you by Vodafone”. The only network in town is Facebook – there’s really no point in even trying to complete with it – so all Voda can do is try to graft on a funky access layer.

This all looks and smells something like the “walled gardens” that the network operators built of old. Rather than allowing unfettered access to all that the web could offer, chosen bits were carefully selected and presented to customers in a bounded environment. And rather than allowing access to “open” services like Twitter and Facebook and email, interaction had to take place within the confines of the operator’s webmail service.

The obvious problem with this is that the web moves far, far faster than any network product manager can, and customers vote with their feet when they find that they can’t go where they want. Once the first network caved and allowed access to the whole of the web, the others had to fall into line. And any value that *might* have existed in the walled garden was instantly lost. Back to being a dumb pipe again.

Ultimately, I can’t see a way that Vodafone – or any other network – can stem this tide. They’re doomed to become ISPs in the sky. For all that the likes of Talk Talk and BT and Virgin would like to *think* that they’ve got customer loyalty for their ISP services, they really know deep down that internet connectivity is commoditised and it’s the other services, such as bundled phone lines, that create the loyalty.

[As a sidenote, I'm an exception to this - I'm a Zen customer because they're a) reasonably priced; b) technically knowledgeable and c) sensible about things like Phorm and deep packet inspection. But I'm a geek, and I'm one of an incredibly small market. And even I've got my limits - if Virgin ever get around to running fibre past my front door, I'd be sorely tempted.]

One possible way of reacting would be to do a reverse Apple – offer some compelling devices that are exclusive to Vodafone only. The difficulty there is that Voda don’t have a device business, so they’re dependent on the OEM market. OEM manufacturers are unlikely to be interested in serving a single network only because it’s not a big enough market – unless they’re Apple, in which case they have the networks’ collective cojones in a vice and can extract revenues for the privilege of supplying the hardware.

And in any case, building those compelling devices is really, really, really hard – as Nokia are finding as their market share dwindles.

Overall, I can’t fault Vodafone for *trying* to do something about this. It’s just that I’m not sure that there’s anything they *can* do – mobile bandwidth is destined to become a commodity like fixed bandwidth has regardless of how hard they try to stem the tide. And it’s going to take them and their brand with it.

If you can see this post, it means that the server move is completed and the DNS change has propagated.

Move along, nothing to see.

Russell Davies’ Interesting conference are something of an institution.  350 people cram into Conway Hall in London to hear interesting people talk about interesting things, ranging from Prozac-flavoured yoghurt, to a history of well-beloved ponies, to a live demonstration of the colour of Radio 4.  And that was just last year.

I’ve been to all three, taken photos of two and spoken at one.   And while they were all tremendous fun, all the Interesting conferences in the UK have taken place in London. With Russell’s blessing, it’s time to change that.

Interesting North will take place at some point this year somewhere that’s north of London and south of Edinburgh.  I’m not sure exactly where it will be, or when, or who will speak, or how much it will cost.   Those are all details that will get worked out between now and then, hopefully with the help of the kind of genial lunatics that make Interesting what it is.

So, this is a plea for help.  I’m going to need help to organise this, and I’m going to need interesting people to talk about interesting things to make it an Interesting day.  Give me a shout if you can help, and watch this space – and interestingnorth.com or interestingnrth – for further details.

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  A better question might be to ask how augmented reality will change our lives, and more importantly, how will it change our brains.  The brief snapshot of its effect in the story above was to illustrate the result of a ubiquitous computing environment.   But to truly understand, we have to go deeper into the actual brain matter and watch how AR might change it.
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