MishMash

Our data to be freed?

Rich sent me a link to this BBC story about evidence that the UK government's attitude towards data is changing. They have, “decided to make access to a database of UK laws completely free for the public to access and re-use.”

Let's hope that this is a harbinger of a more general change in attitude. The debate around Ordnance Survey mapping will continue for a long time, though there have been reports that OS are interested in opening up some way. The primary business of the Survey is to collect spatial data and produce maps. I have much less sympathy with government agencies which collect data in the line of fulfilling their statutory and tax-funded duty, yet still make obtaining access to that data difficult and time consuming (and therefore, indirectly, expensive) for academic researchers and impossible for the general public.

At the lauch event for the Intitution of Civil Engineers'  report "Learning to live with rivers" report, commissioned by the government after the Autumn 2000 floods, I asked a representative of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) (Defra) for a response to paragraph 11.11.1 of that report:

The Commission recommends that publicly collected primary and processed data (topographical, meteorological, hydrological and hydraulic) should be made publicly available, as is the case in the United States. This would result in improved flood risk assessment and management.

The gist of his response, as I remember it, was that without charging for data there was no way of knowing its value. This was some sort of official line, and he expressed a less hard-line view in private later. It occurs to me only now that this response is to some degree a red herring anyway: much of this data are available "free" to some, such as researchers on Defra or Environment Agency approved projects, and not at all to others. That point aside, the argument is redolent of accountant-driven policy. All one can establish by charging for data is its commercial value, and even that only crudely.

Blocking access to data (data, remember, which must be collected anyway), whether by charging for it or simply not making it available,  destroys much of its value.

May the changes continue.

Run for the hills, it's getting weird out there!

Via BoingBoing:

A Shanghai online game player stabbed to death a competitor who sold his cyber-sword, the China Daily has said, creating a dilemma in China where no law exists for the ownership of virtual weapons.

Yahoo! News

Just in case anyone suffers the same confusion that I did, "competitor" sold "online game player"'s sword.

Jailed for using a nonstandard browser?

How's this for two sides of the same story?

Tsunami simulation

The Danish Hydraulic Institute have made a pass at simulating the Tsunami of 26 December. DivX videos of simulation output available. The jaggy nature of the tidal wave as it nears the shore presumably suggest that some significant numerical errors will be building up (I'm no expert, mind).

A Networked World: Just because I'm Paranoid ...

Earl Mardle has a piece commenting on location awareness in mobile phones, and the applications to which it is already being put. As ever, it's excellent, and well worth a read.

The December 15 edition of Newsweek reports that the Europeans are trying to balance the technological capabilities with legislation, preventing location data being used without consumer consent, except in the case of emergency calls and police needs. Mhmm, and if you believe legislation will save the day, good luck, because the US and UK are planning to use such data for anti-terrorist actions; and in today's world, we are all suspect. Oops. [A Networked World: Just because I'm Paranoid ...]

Just think what happens when you have to show your national ID card to get a mobile phone, and the identity of the phone is added to your record in the national database. Welcome to the police state.

And one for the paranoid parents: just imagine what happens when the security of the system is compromised, and information about where your child is can be seen by exactly the people you are so paranoid about in the first place.

BBC NEWS: Sony rapped over car music advert

The BBC report that a complaint against Sony's car stereo ads has been upheld by the ASA.

Apparently, "The complainant objected on the grounds that the advert could encourage drivers to play their music too loud."

Now the advert may encourage antisocial behaviour, but surely it would also be reasonable to say that Sony is an accessory to that behaviour. After all, they manufacture the ridiculous devices. 1000W, even on the fantasy power scales used for these things (30W on a high quality amp is painful: what gives?), can only be used specifically to ensure that you can be heard three blocks away.

"Thus" the farce continues

The BBC reports that Thus is abandoning its 118 directory enquiries service. Will the perfomance of the services together go up, down, or remain unchanged as a result?

Who benefitted from this whole process? Surely there can't be anyone who seriously thought it was a good idea?

ID cards, and consultation chicanery

The following just sent to my MP, Jean Corston.

Dear Jean,
cc Sam,

I'm disappointed to have heard nothing -- not even acknowledgement of receipt -- of my communication earlier this year regarding University tuition fees, being as they are another attempt by our decision makers to fulfill the wishes of comfortably off Middle England to offload their responsibilities onto future generations and take a payment holiday. The Vice Chancellor the University of Bristol, known for being in favour of the fees, at least asked his press secretary (or some such) to send me the text of a letter to the Times. A letter which failed entirely to address main point, but at least I know that my own was received.

That, however, is not the subject of this missive. Here I return to the old ID card chestnut. It seems that our good friend Mr. Blunkett (I have a friend who likes to refer to him as "Security Blunkett", a tag which I do wish I had thought of myself) has made some headway with this idiotic notion of voluntary -- no, compulsory, entitlement -- no, sorry, I'll get this right eventually, Identity cards.

Open Source Voting System?

James Robertson:

Sean McGrath - and a lot of other people - have been piling on about how voting machines just have to be open source in order to be safe. I don't really care about the politics of this - let's look at the claim though. If no closed source system is safe for voting, then how safe is closed source for anything? i.e., if you advocate this position, then you should not be using WIndows, or Oracle, or SQL Server, or Solaris, or Java, or Smalltalk (outside of Squeak or Gnu ST) - etc. Somehow I doubt that all these advocates are quite that consistent.... [James Robertson]

They may be inconsistent, and there may be some milage in answering that closed source isn't safe for anything, but the implication that every little business transaction or letter to a friend is even nearly as critical as the voting systems that our (supposed) democracies rely on is absurd. And this still applies when it's billions of business transactions.

Surely if a voting system isn't completely transparent, it isn't democratic.

Bonsai Broadband

Via stecay at the Semantic Blogging Demonstrator:

Tiscali is to offer broadband net access at the same price as dial-up. [BBC: Broadband at the price of dial-up]

According to the BBC, Ian Fogg of Jupiter Research who are "broadband analysts" (ohforgoodnesssake) said, "The cut-back speed does not really offer the full broadband experience that customers expect."

Yet again (and this from "broadband analysts") people fail to see that always on, and not getting in the way of the telephone is a huge advantage of broadband, as big or bigger than the bandwidth for a large number of people. Me, I can use the bandwidth, but if I hadn't already decided that the value was there for me (splitting costs with my housemate) in existing broadband offerings, I'd be grabbing Tiscali's hand off on this.

As stecay says, the KPMG analysis seems much closer the mark.

I wonder if broadband analysts breath such a rarified atmosphere, moving in we've-had-broadband-for-years circles all the time, that the only type of customer for broadband they can imagine are the ones who have bought into it already?

The downside of this? There's less to share.