I want to try and come to a conclusion on the logo. We have bandied around a couple of ideas but don’t seem to be there yet. So wheeling back to basics I want to outline the requirements.

It needs to be friendly and inviting, to welcome all to the space, we seem to have gone with the term Makerspace rather than Hackspace which appeals more to the creative types.

Simple is best, text can be associated with the logo, but the logo needs to be able to stand alone.

It would be good if we could incorporate a QR code, these are gaining in popularity, and a good way to point at the website.

So looking for inspiration in what others have done is a good place to start. I like the idea of something based on a circut design.

Or there are simple text based logos, but I don’t think we have an iconic local momument to symbolise Reading as the Tokyo have. But we could still do a simple text based logo.

Then I found a couple of logo developments that are fun, not sure they meet our requirements.

I like the idea of this one, a maker like symbol, so the symbol can be used on its own, along with the text in places where that is possible.

I also like the revolutionary feel of this symbol. After all we are really starting (or taking part in) a revolution.

Of all the logos this is the one I like the most, a simple idea, we could replace the internal gears with a QR code, the text could be removed for small versions.

So here is yet another example of public information displays showing Windows blue screen of death. The real problem here is that the operating system was designed to be a desktop system so there would always be a user there to press any key to restart the system.

Because the builders of these systems chose the wrong operating system to have the system around, these displays require a maintenance technician to come around and plug in a keyboard to reboot the system.

Simon Singh gave an interesting and wide ranging talk for the Reading Skeptics last night. Quite popular with at least 30 people there. He was mostly talking about the subject of his new book, Trick or Treatment?: Alternative Medicine on Trial and the associated issues with the reform of UK Libel law.

The message arrived the day after I bought the ticket, so it is obviously run on the settlement transaction rather than the Authorisation. Obviously they are using the returning MSISDN to link the reply to the sent message. But a nice easy way of processing this sort of fraud detection, easier for the Issuer, and easier for me than dealing with a phone call, authorisation, calling back, getting redirected around the call centre…

Dear Mr Ward,

Thank you for contacting Theresa May about web blocking and EDM 1913. I am sure she will appreciate your concerns on this matter.

As you may be aware, Members of the Government do not, by convention, sign any Early Day Motions, as doing so is likely to breach the Ministerial Code’s rules on collective responsibility. However, digital copyright infringement is a big problem in the UK and poses a very real threat to Britain’s hugely successful creative industries. Aside from ethical concerns, it undermines creative expression and has the potential to seriously affect British jobs and the country’s economic recovery.

Illegal file-sharing costs the industry £400m a year. To help combat this problem, the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has asked Ofcom to review whether website blocking measures are workable. This review follows on from the public responses to the Deputy Prime Minister’s ‘Your Freedom’ consultation which was designed to give people a chance to tell Government which laws and regulations they think should be amended or revoked.

I know Mr Hunt and his departmental colleagues are aware of the Special Rapporteur’s report. Communications Minister, Ed Vaizey, has confirmed that the Government agrees with the individual right to free and uncensored access to the internet and that states should only interfere in exceptional circumstances. The Government also agrees that the degree of interference should be proportionate to the risks involved. Mr Vaizey has stated that such measures should not be adopted lightly and that the Government will only do so if convinced that it is appropriate, proportionate, in accordance with international legal obligations and effective on the basis of evidence in the future.

The Government has responded to the Human Rights Council, welcoming the Special Rapporteur’s report and supporting the general thrust of his conclusions and recommendations. The Government will continue to support the work of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. The Government is now considering the Ofcom review before deciding on the best way forward.

Yours sincerely,

Ian Bennett

Case Worker
Office of the Rt Hon Theresa May MP
Tel: 0207 219 1013

And here is my response back to Mr Bennett

Ian Bennett

Where to start in your very misguided response.

Firstly the financial harm that you quote is a recording industry created value, that has been shown numerous times to be seriously flawed in the assumptions and methodology of calculation.

Secondly there is the huge harm to our cultural heritage in the current overly restrictive copyright. I would like you to consider the following points:

1. The lack of access to works that are no longer economically feasible to offer for sale, but are still in copyright. There a huge body of work that is not accessible to anyone, we are relying on these media companies to keep and preserve our cultural heritage in these recordings and films.

2, The reach of copyright in the UK means that almost every citizen will have technically infringed copyright several times per day. A law that is routinely broken in this manner can only be selectively enforced, and thus creating lack of credibility in the law.

3. The industry says that this is harming artists, but there is a huge swathe of artists who are bypassing the media industries and using alternative distribution models, and licenses such as creative commons, and doing very nicely from this. The media companies are more interested in capitalizing their back catalog than funding artists.

4. The enforcement of Copyright by the big media companies is more about preserving their existing business model. These companies have refused to adapt to the internet and have stifled every attempt by innovative companies in this area. The government is overly influenced by these companies and has been complicit in driving their agenda. The government should peruse and agenda of what is best for Britain even if that means that some companies that fail to adapt go out of business.

5. The government has failed to listen to groups advocating change, such as the Open Rights Group, and others.

6. Website blocking will not work, and will cause more harm to the internet and free speech that it will help enforce copyright.

7. Access to the internet is becoming a fundamental right, disconnection must not be used as a tool of compliance.

8. The use of a extra judicial form of collective punishment is not a proportionate response to the breaking of the contractual conditions of copyright. That this is even being considered is astounding!

I thank you for your response but you and the government have a long way to go to even understand the problem let alone be proposing solutions.

Kind Regards

Stuart Ward

I did a quick bit of searching through the document to see if this is any better than the previous report. The terms Creative Commons, GPL, and Copyleft are not mentioned at all. There is one reference to open-source in a footnote comment:

US Social Science Research Council, 2011, Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, p52-53: “Piracy, in effect, has allowed the major vendors to dominate low-and middle-income markets …… that they have little financial incentive to serve. …… piracy acts as a barrier to entry for competition, especially “free” open-source alternatives that have no upfront licensing costs. When these emerging markets begin to grow, as most did in the last decade, piracy ensures they do so along paths shaped by the powerful network and lock-in effects associated with the market leaders…….. As Microsoft executive Jeff Raikes obvserved: “In the long run the fundamental asset is the installed base of people who are using our products. What you hope to do over time is convert them to licensing the software” (Mondok 2007).

There does appear to be some sensible suggestions in the report, establishing the Digital Copyright Exchange, and using this to declare unlisted works as Orphan works.

4. Orphan works. The Government should legislate to enable licensing of orphan works. This should establish extended collective licensing for mass licensing of orphan works, and a clearance procedure for use of individual works. In both cases, a work should only be treated as an orphan if it cannot be found by search of the databases involved in the proposed Digital Copyright Exchange.

How can this be even considered as a comprehensive review if it fails to take any account of open-source, and creative commons licensing of works. This means that the review has only listened to the big media companies and powerful vested interests. They do list the Open Rights Group as a consulted organisation but they cant have listened to anything that they said.

In the weeks after the attacks, rumors began circulating inside the N.S.A. that the agency, with the approval of the Bush White House, was violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—the 1978 law, known as FISA, that bars domestic surveillance without a warrant. Years later, the rumors were proved correct. In nearly total secrecy, and under pressure from the White House, Hayden sanctioned warrantless domestic surveillance. The new policy, which lawyers in the Justice Department justified by citing President Bush’s executive authority as Commander-in-Chief, contravened a century of constitutional case law. Yet, on October 4, 2001, Bush authorized the policy, and it became operational by October 6th.

Their takeover of Nokia was really about combining their patent libraries and then going after the open source competition. Taking on a smaller Android user in the form of Barnes & Noble.

Microsoft has a scheme, Barnes & Noble asserts, to dominate Android and make it undesirable to device manufacturers and customers by demanding “exorbitant license fees and absurd licensing restrictions” — a license fee that it says is more than Microsoft charges for its entire operating system for mobile devices, Windows 7. Others have, it believes, signed it. Barnes & Noble says the deal with Nokia is in furtherance of this scheme.

The patents asserted are “trivial, not infringed and invalid”, Barnes & Noble says, and merely a vehicle in furtherance of the scheme, as they “are not even close to covering the entire functionality of Barnes & Noble’s NookTM and Nook ColorTM devices, or of the AndroidTM Operating System.”

They are proposing a licensing regime that values use of a few of their patents as more expensive than licensing the windows phone 7 mess, so it is clearly a mechanism to get OEM’s to use the Microsoft software rather than a fair price for the developmental effort that went into “Inventing” these patents.

This is essentially the same tactic that they have used for years to force manufacturers of PCs to only sell systems with windows installed. This is called the Joint Marketing Agreement. What this means is that if a manufacture undertakes to sell only systems with windows installed, then the per unit cost of those windows licenses is reduced. If they produce just one machine that doesn’t have windows installed then the unit price goes up. In a cut throat price competition for PCs then any OEM offering a non-windows machine means that all their windows machines become more expensive, so they all just offer windows.

How this has got past the competition authorities for so long is just amazing. One day we will probably find out about all the underhand deals that perpetuate this situation.

Spoiler Alert. I am attaching the screenshots of the last two levels. So if you want to solve them yourself don’t read any further.

To take screenshots I installed the Dalvic Debugger for Android. This is looks like an awesome tool for managing and testing software for android. I haven’t delved beyond taking screenshots but there seem to be lots of functionality there for monitoring an application running on a hard phone, or running on a virtual phone hardware.

And here is the full screen capture showing the controls, and the not very intrusive advertising.

2011 will see the outbreak of the first massive botnet/malware that attacks smartphones, most likely iPhone or Android models running older software than the latest and greatest. If Android is the target, it will lead to aggressive finger-pointing, particularly given how many users are presently running Android software that’s a year or more behind Google’s latest—a trend that will continue in 2011.

I think this is possible but unlikely, the reasoning is that while there are many smartphones, there is not the monoculture that fuelled botnets on the wired internet. The chance of one infected phone being able to find a nearby phone that it can spread to is much less that the similarly infected Windows PC.

If the exploit applies to a specific variant, (say release Android 2.1) then it will need to find a similar phone by probing nearby IP addresses. If these phones make up say 30% of the user base (I’m being very generous here) and say 50% of the IPs probed are active and connected means that 1 about 7 probes could hit a target.

Firstly I think users are going to notice fairly quickly the increase in data usage, battery life, phone temperature, or slowness of other applications.

Networks will filter these connections pretty quickly, because network bandwidth is a prized commodity in the air interface. They have the monitoring and filtering equipment in the major markets, in the minor markets data pricing means that many users have this switched off unless they actually need it.

Google, Apple and others control the platforms and have remote deletion capabilities in these devices, so this sort of malware could be quickly removed by these companies taking action, and no user or network operator consultation would need to happen. Meaning that the malware would be eradicated very quickly.

The last factor mitigation this is that mobiles are built on Linux, and other Unix variants (BSD for the iPhone) and remote triggered compromise of these systems is much harder that even today’s windows boxes.

There is no room for complacency, but this one wont happen.