Calculating your nerd score

I’m not sure how many additional nerd points you pick up by actually linking to a test designed to calculate your nerd score - but here goes:

How NERDY are You?

No, you pay us

The flipside view of the “Google should pay us for using their pipes” argument…

Death by Powerpoint - an antidote

This presentation, given by Dick Hardt at Etech last week is worth taking a look at for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, if you’re interested in online identity management then his company, Sxip (obligatory clever Web2.0 name, pronounced ’skip’) is working on technology that aims to balance the conflicting demands of authentication and privacy.

But if you’re not even slightly interested in any of the technology or the issues, it’s worth taking a look at for the presentation itself. To say it’s one of the more unusual presentation styles I’ve seen is a bit of an understatement - but it works. As an antidote to the corporate death-by-powerpoint style that most of us have to deal with, but secretly dream of subverting, it’s very effective.

When I first saw it, my immediate reaction was ‘great, but I’d never get away with that’. Then I had second thoughts. I’m convinced that at least part of the reason that I landed my current project was as a result of the presentation I gave - not the content, necessarily, but the fact that I was using an Apple Powerbook (which stood out a mile in an otherwise dull corporate environment); and also that I controlled the show with a bluetooth mobile talking to Salling Clicker. Then the content was also deliberately as far from a bland corporate presentation as I could make it - lots of big typography and colour images on a white background.

If I’d gone in with a standardised agenda-driven corporate clone of a presentation, then I’d have merged into the crowd of everyone that went before me, but the fact that this was something different made me stand out. I’ll never know for sure if that was the clincher, but it can’t have hurt.

So - Dick Hardt’s style might not be everyone’s taste for every occasion, but it could be worth a try now and again.

FT: Digital ants wreck the music industry’s picnic

I’d always mentally pigeon-holed the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society together with the other analogue-era dinosaurs of the music business; but it seems that I got that wrong.   In an article in today’s Financial Times, the CEO of the MCPS-PRS alliance argues that the big four record labels don’t have much of a future left.

For the music industry, the new digital technologies with their vastly reduced recording and distribution costs are a harbinger of industrial restructuring. Their problem is not the oft-quoted piracy, the length of copyright term or falling CD sales. The problem is whether the intermediaries between artist and audience can change their cost base to fit this new world. This puts music in the same place as coal in the 1970s, steel in the 1980s and TV in the 1990s.

Link

Update: Charles Arthur puts a print-publishing angle on this

Create your own blurb

It didn’t take long for mainstream dead-tree publishers to catch onto the potential of turning blogs into books - O’Reilly and Microsoft Press to mention just two - and now it seems that the vanity publishers are following suit.

Via Springwise comes news of Blurb, an online printing outfit who offer Booksmart -  a means of transforming a blog archive into a preformatted book.   It’s a pretty logical extension of the photo printing model that sees sites like Flickr offer partnerships with offline fulfillment partners.

It’s not particularly cheap - $30 or so for 40 pages of 8×10 colour, but it’ll certainly fill a niche - and the added twist is the online marketplace that’s planned; so once you’ve transformed your blog into a neat pile of dead tree, you can flog it online (and presumably Blurb takes a cut of the proceeds here, too).

Tightening the rules on “hacking tools”

According to the FT this morning, plans are afoot to tighten the laws around hacking, partly in response to last year’s acquittal of someone charged with an email-based denial-of-service attack.  That loophole has been closed, but more worrying is the clause regarding “hacking tools”.  To quote the FT:

Types of activities that will become illegal under the proposed laws include making or supplying “hacking tools”- computer programmes or code that can help crack passwords or bypass security systems - and will be punishable by up to two years in prison.

The problem here is that one person’s “hacking tool” is another person’s means of doing their entirely legitimate job - for example, packet sniffing tools can be used nefariously to capture data as a prelude to encryption cracking; or they can be an essential diagnostics tool for resolving network problems.

Which when you think about it, is no different to carrying a hammer - I could use it for knocking in nails, or knocking little old ladies over the head.

Which suggests that intent to use the tool for nefarious purposes is a better measure (IANAL, or course) - but then we risk straying into a situation where mere possession of a certain piece of software can be presented as evidence of intent to commit a crime.

But with the current levels of government paranoia about the “terrorist threat”, it seems unlikely that a certain amount of common sense will prevail without some fairly vigorous lobbying.

Blogging minister worries Whitehall

David Milliband, the politician tipped as a future Labour leader, is to become the first member of the cabinet to set up a web log in which he will publish views that go beyond his ministerial brief.

Sunday Times, March 7th 2006

Personally, I’ll believe it when I see it.   I predict it’ll have the dead hand of ministerial spindoctoring all over it…

The future’s bright, the future’s - anthropomorphic?

Once upon a time, Orange were different - they had one of the most innovative brand identities ever seen, and they made a point of being different when there was little or nothing to choose between the existing two incumbent mobile networks (remember children, once upon a time there was no such thing as a rebranded carrier - you could have your mobile service in two flavours, one Vodafone, one Cellnet.)  The future was bright, the future was Orange.

Then the suits took over, service declined and Orange ceased to be anything other than Just Another Mobile Network.   The other networks copied their tariffs and service packages, and their advertising agency dreamt up instantly forgettable campaigns featuring Hard-nosed Businessmen, annoying 10-year-old know-it-all geeks, and guru figures.

That process has reached its logical conclusion with the news of new Orange tariffs, which are named after animals.   Are you a Dolphin, a Panther, a Canary or a Raccoon?   None of the above as it happens, having abandoned Orange years ago, but it seems that their marketing department is staffed entirely by Asses and Peewits…

Cognitive biases

A long list of cognitive biases courtesy of Wikipedia - a list which should be compulsory reading for anyone involved in making decisions…

The Future of Privacy

The pervasiveness of computers has resulted in the almost constant surveillance of everyone, with profound implications for our society and our freedoms. Corporations and the police are both using this new trove of surveillance data. We as a society need to understand the technological trends and discuss their implications. If we ignore the problem and leave it to the “market,” we’ll all find that we have almost no privacy left.

Bruce Schneier - The Future of Privacy