FryPhone 2.0
The Greatest Living Englishman on the iPhone, with a quote about enterprise IT that should be tattooed onto the retinas of CIOs as they assume their position:
Filed under Geek, Them | Comment (0)the iPhone is now a serious corporate contender: employee pester-power will see to it that it becomes the tool of choice for medium to large businesses that aren’t so pompous and deluded as to think dullness and bad design are a sign of probity and business acumen.
OMFG we’re all going to die
Latest “news” from the sloppy-unquestioning-journalism-from-recycled-press-releases department:
Police disrupt 13 terror networks
Scotland Yard has disrupted 13 terrorist networks in London in the last financial year.
During the 12 month period, there was an average of a suspected terrorist incident in London every other day.
Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?
Filed under Them | Comment (0)Collateral damage
According to Jonathan Zittrain, we’re all going to go to hell in a handbasket because devices are increasingly closed.
According to Adam Thierer, it doesn’t matter because they’ll get cracked open anyway:
So, Jonathan, I hate to pick on you again buddy, but what exactly is the problem? Apple has put another great device on the market and people immediately took steps to open it up and see if they can make it even better. Sounds like progress to me.
The Zittrain thesis is just getting harder and harder for me to take seriously.
Well, yes, up to a point. The issue isn’t that it’s possible to crack open devices like the iPhone. The issue is the collateral damage that gets caused when heavy-handed legislation is used to try to prevent what’s going to happen anyway:
Filed under Geek, Them | Comment (0)Germany has just passed a new law that adds more “anti-hacker” provisions to the German criminal code. Although the new rules are meant to apply narrowly to hacking, critics are already complaining that they may prevent necessary security and network research.
The Future Of The Web, and the Past Of Panel Events
It’s said that you should never meet your heroes in case they turn out to be a disappointment. That’s not something that’s ever really bothered me before - the chances of bumping into Asterix and Biggles is fairly low - but I was a bit apprehensive about seeing Tim Berners-Lee speak at NESTA’s The Future Of The Web event last night. In the event it was a bit of a disappointment, although nothing to do with the man himself.
Mr Modesty
The Great Man himself probably doesn’t like being billed as that - refreshingly, he comes across as being totally free of ego. Ten minutes prior to the presentation, he was on his hands and knees plugging in his Mac, which is the antithesis of the superstar CEO keynote speaker.
Hearing the story of the genesis of the web from the man who invented it made it worth the trip, although he was at pains to point out that he wasn’t the web’s creator - just the inventor of a small part of it. And just as fascinating was hearing that in the early days, he had difficulty in explaining to people what it was.
Berners-Lee also has passionately held opinions about net neutrality and privacy. One of the later questions referred to ISPs as the “villain of the piece”, which prompted the nearest thing to an outburst that I think you’re likely to hear from him - he wants just three things from an internet service: “give me plenty of bandwidth, don’t sell my clickstream and let me connect to anybody”.
And the others
And that’s about as much as it’s possible to say about Tim Berners Lee, because that’s about all we got to hear from him. He was bookended by Charles Leadbetter, author of “We Think“, and Andy Duncan, Chief Executive of Channel 4. Whether that was because the organisers thought the audience might get bored of just one speaker I’m not sure, but the end result was frustrating in the extreme - Leadbetter is such a talking head it’s possible to hear him any night of the week, whereas Berners Lee speaks much less frequently.
And Andy Duncan was something of a bizarre choice given the main speaker. I really wasn’t sure about his description of Channel 4 as “open source television” - I suspect he might have different ideas if I was to take a creative commons approach to his content and start remixing it? His other main point seemed to be a plea to Google to “put more back” - presumably the cry of a man watching his traditional advertising revenues disappearing online.
The evening itself was the usual tired NESTA format - three suits on a stage, compered by a simpering Chief Executive. There was no attempt to control either of the two subsidiary speakers, who rambled on at length, and that was aggravated by the frankly bizarre practice of taking questions in threes. All that happens is that the first two get lost, particularly if the chair doesn’t prevent the habit of the usual suspects forgetting that questions have a question mark at the end.
Fortunately for my blood pressure, there was an active backchannel on Twitter, which was being “monitored” during the event itself. I know there are conflicting opinions about the benefits or otherwise of a backchannel, but if it rises above the bitching it can become a great aggregation tool for catching points and opinions that you might otherwise have missed.
See you there again?
Despite the problems with the format, it was an excellent evening - it’s not often you get to meet the person who started this all. And despite the inevitability of the format being repeated, I’ll likely go along to the next one, if only because they tend to attract interesting people to talk to - and moan about the format with - over the canapes afterwards.
Filed under Geek, Them, Twitter, Work | Comment (0)