Archive for the ‘rant’ Category

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Don’t trust US companies with your data

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

We all know the USA badly needs some sane data protection legislation, and this is a good illustration of why:

Yesterday, in the Viacom v. Google litigation, the federal court for the Southern District of New York ordered Google to produce to Viacom (over Google’s objections):
all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website

The court’s order grants Viacom’s request and erroneously ignores the protections of the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), and threatens to expose deeply private information about what videos are watched by YouTube users. The VPPA passed after a newspaper disclosed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video rental records. As Congress recognized, your selection of videos to watch is deeply personal and deserves the strongest protection.

(Fortunately this ruling appears to be illegal, but you can easily imagine that less-rich companies couldn’t afford to appeal.) Time to log out of YouTube and start using Tor.

Posted in legal, news, rant | 2 Comments »

Why I will never live in the USA

Friday, April 27th, 2007

What does that community mean to me, a person who has to walk by the ROTC [Reserve Officer Training Corps] offices every day on my way to my own office just down the hall — who was watched, noted and reported, all in a day’s work? Today, we gave in willingly and wholeheartedly to a culture of fear and blaming and profiling. It is deemed perfectly appropriate behavior to spy on one another and police one another and report on one another. Such behaviors exist most strongly in closed, undemocratic and fascist societies.

— Kazim Ali, an Indian-ethnic professor of poetry at a university in Pennsylvania, after being reported as a terrorist for leaving a ‘suspicious’ box next to the bin to be recycled (which turned out to contain manuscripts that he was recycling). It’s not his race that caused it, it’s the culture of paranoia that exists over there. America is quite plainly not a free country any more.

Posted in politics, QOTD, rant | No Comments »

An analogy

Tuesday, February 20th, 2007

Suppose everyone communicates via scribes, who write in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Microsoft is the only company who trains them.

Now there do exist some talented linguists who can figure out approximately what they’re writing. That’s what the Rosetta Stone was about, except in this analogy there’s no Demotic or Greek alongside, only the hieroglyphs and a scribe to tell you what they mean in English. Unfortunately, after they send the scribes away, the linguists can never be sure that they’ve got it right, especially since Microsoft can change the language as they like simply by changing the curriculum. As soon as new scribes start writing in this new language, the old scribes will stop being able to interpret some messages you receive because they don’t know about the changes in the language.

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Posted in computing, rant, uni | No Comments »

More ranting about license

Saturday, November 11th, 2006

I’ve got into reading Boing Boing again. Today I read a (by now probably quite old) piece on the EULA for Windows Vista. I have ranted about EULAs before on this blog, but this piece hits the nail on the head on one particular aspect of it: that a unilaterally-dictated license cannot be meaningfully described as an “agreement”.

Real agreements are negotiated. You and I sit down at a table and hammer it out. Real agreements aren’t “subject to change without notice.” Real agreements don’t make you agree not to sue for negligence. Real agreements don’t make you agree to treat your property as if it still belonged to the guy who sold it to you.

Posted in rant | No Comments »

Using a multiuser blog as a better forum

Friday, September 22nd, 2006

A member of the role-playing society (who shall not be named, though some people reading will know who I am talking about) recently tried to set up a SUCS account for the role-playing society for the purposes of making a forum. I have expressed my opinions of forums before on this blog, and will be referring to them here. I would be interested in setting up a forum for the RP soc, except for my reservations about web forums.

Essentially, my major complaint about web forums is their interface. phpBB will email you to tell you of new posts, but these emails do not contain the post’s content, and I assume they don’t contain appropriate headers to let your email client thread them properly. More critically, however, it’s not possible to post by email. Essentially, to interact with the forum I have to use a web browser, and web browsers are not well suited to content that updates irregularly. I want to do everything – read and post – within my email client. (A cynic would say that what I want is a mailing list. And they’d be right, except that I want people who want a forum to have one of those too.)

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Posted in computing, rant, thinking aloud | No Comments »

QOTD III

Thursday, August 10th, 2006

If this is a good idea now, then why won’t it still be a good idea in a year? A decade? After all, terrorist plots will always exist in potentia (can you prove that no terrorist plots are hatching at this moment?) Until they handcuff us all nude to our seats and dart us with tranquilizers, there will always be the possibility that a passenger will do something naughty on a plane (even then, who knows how much semtex and roofing nails a bad guy could hide in his colon?).

Cory Doctorow (from Boing Boing) on the recent ban on hand luggage on UK flights. I’m glad I didn’t book my flight for any later or I’d have had to leave half my luggage behind!

Posted in diary, politics, QOTD, rant | No Comments »

The Broadcast Flag on steroids

Saturday, July 29th, 2006

Ugh. I take it all back.

France has just passed a new copyright law which essentially makes it impossible for anyone to safely develop open source software there.

Someone needs to smack the pro-DRM lobby upside the head and make them realise that their approach is totally short-sighted and counterproductive. Or just forcibly disestablish it.

P.S. I swear, the next thing I post about will have nothing to do with politics.

Posted in legal, politics, rant | No Comments »

Don’t give me any of that juris-my-diction crap!

Friday, June 9th, 2006

Argh, don’t you just hate it when you spend ages writing a long rant, and then your session expires and you lose it. Anyway.

I’ve been hearing lots about Half-Life 2: Episode 1. It looks pretty shiny, so I decided to buy it through Steam. Just after I fired up Steam I remembered that my debit card expired just over a week ago, and I received a replacement on the 7th. The bank said it had been posted on 3 May. Not only has it taken over a month to arrive, the envelope was sealed with sellotape. Very likely it’s been intercepted and opened and the card cloned. So I sent the bank a message rejecting the thing. Sigh.

I clicked on ‘purchase’ anyway, to see how much it would cost. It gave me a price in dollars… “plus tax”. It didn’t say what tax. So do I pay US sales tax, VAT, import duty, all three? What exactly am I paying here?

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Posted in legal, rant | 1 Comment »

On the shitness of web forums

Sunday, March 19th, 2006

We’ve been having a big argument on Milliways today on the relative merits of web forums and mailing lists. Basically the arguments are:

  • In favour of forums:

    1. Most people are familiar with their interface

    2. They have a pretty interface

    3. You can leaf through old conversations


  • In favour of mailing lists:

    1. I’m not forced to use any particular interface; my user experience is not dictated by the admins’ taste in UIs

    2. (following from the above) I can pick an interface that’s nice and fast

    3. I don’t have to poll them – my email client tells me when there are new posts

    4. I can read all the ones I’m interested in in the same place and with the same interface without having to set preferences for every single one individually

    5. Email is cheap to send, so doesn’t result in much server load

    6. You can leaf through old conversations with the help of an archive

    7. You get proper hierarchial threading (as opposed to linear sequences of posts with no structure)


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Posted in computing, rant, thinking aloud | 1 Comment »

Life without a PDA

Friday, October 28th, 2005

About 4-5 days after arriving in Regensburg I finally remembered my PDA’s cradle was still stowed deep in my rucksack, and the thing itself was running out of charge, so I fished it out, plugged it in, and stuck the PDA in it. The green light that usually lights up when it’s charging spectacularly failed to light.

Looking around the back of the cradle, I noticed that the power cable was lolling halfway out of the socket, so I attempted to rectify this by pushing it back in. The socket promptly gave way. Oops, looks like it got damaged in transit.

So onto eBay I went, looking for a replacement. Getting one direct from Palm or Amazon.co.uk is guaranteed to cost 10 times what it costs to make the thing, and there are always people on eBay with spare cradles. I found one for sale in the UK for 1p, he says he can send it to me for a couple of quid more than the UK shipping price, so I place my bid and win the auction. 1p for a Palm cradle, not bad :)

I saw that other people in my hall have put their names on their letterboxes. I am told that even if the address on the package is right, they won’t deliver it unless the name on it matches the name on the letterbox. Being a busy (har har!) foreign student, and having in fact received a couple of letters addressed to me, and being skeptical that any modern postal service can really be that backward, I hadn’t thought this important enough to get round to putting my name on my letterbox.

Two weeks later, the cradle still hasn’t arrived. But in this instance I think the seller has sent the thing off and Deutsche Post haven’t delivered it. Why? Because I still hadn’t got round to putting my name on my letterbox. So this package, as well as my bank card (though, weirdly, not my PIN slip), have been returned to sender. Gah! How can any postal service really be that backward?

Posted in confused, diary, rant | No Comments »

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