Category Archives: Rights and Legal

a new adage for social

Arthur C. Clarke famously said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

The recent Facebook frictionless sharing gives us a new one “Any sufficiently complete and transparent sharing is just going to be creepy”.

We’re basically a fickle bunch. Some of us want to share more easily, but sharing everything also irritates us. Facebook in particular annoys me because I can’t send my habits for the useful bubbled-up aggregations, without the endless inanity of GARETH IS LISTENING TO BLAH. Given I listen to a lot of the same songs that’s really boring and spam. Ditto what articles I’m reading on The Guardian, individually quite dull but as part of the “things that you & your friends have been reading” aggregated things a bit more interesting.

Anyway, this is kind of problem that services like Zeebox will always face, incomplete or creepy. As a standalone app I have to remember to use it (and I’m already using my iPad for twitter), if they did ever have direct integration with my TV (By this I mean my TV updating things, rather than the existing TV Remote functionality in the app), I’d be creeped out because again, viewing habits reveal some awful taste. Maybe I just need a “share this” button on my remote that can easily publish what I’m doing to Facebook or some other back-end. A bit less friction, but still some.

It’s a tough one to solve, but we can’t seem to be comprehensive and convenient without being creepy.

Definition of Slippery Slope

BT are being forced to block access to a piracy site.

This will no doubt use the BT Cleanfeed infrastructure used for the IWF. You either have something clever that proxies everything, or your redirect the blacklisted IPs to a filtering proxy. The former is expensive, the latter breaks wikipedia anonymous updates.

Anyway, I wrote about this point that the Aussie No Clean Feed were making made a while back. Given politicians and the judiciary a toolkit that can be applied generally, and they will.

This raises some depressing questions:

  • How long until this ruling applies to other ISPs?
  • How long until the IWF watch-list becomes broader to save content owners going after each ISP?
  • How long until refusing to use the IWF list, like some smaller ISPs, becomes illegal?
  • At what point is using VPN services outlawed: I use one when I’m on public WiFi but it would bypass any ISP provisions.

I’m sure none of us are really surprised, but it’s sad to be proven right.

Hashtags as plausible deniability from compliance

Various broadcasters have done “chat around content” applications: the Apprentice and The X-Factor being two examples. These are expensive to run, because the second the content is on bbc.co.uk or itv.com then you face the wrath of compliance.

This is not a compliance rant, broadcasters need compliance, and at its best it helps programme makers get the most out of their rushes. It is an overhead though, and given we’ve yet to really see how we can “monetize” those people talking about shows, is it worth paying that penalty for highly vocal, but very small minority?

Enter the hashtag: Now shows have been transmitting with cues of suggested hashtags for many years. Now really only used on Twitter, but you could argue that a tag is really a platform neutral way to flag your content.

You’re not hosting the discussion, which means you’re not paying for moderation, and you’re not liable for the compliance. The broadcaster is saying “you guys can go and huddle over there, but it’s not really anything to do with us, understood?”

This has implications for second-screening because I think it means that broadcasters are going to be loathed to actually build wide-scale chat-around-content style applications: their name being associated with it just causes too much expectation. Can you imagine installing the “BBC Socialiser” app and getting the “THIS APPLICATION MAY CONTAIN BAD THINGS” pop-up from the iTunes store? It’s not what people would expect from the BBC.

Most people are still lazy, lean-back linear content consumers – the TV is a familiar friend at the end of the work-day who doesn’t expect much response, but over time people will want nicer ways to contextualise their tweets about content.

And so to the meaningless predictions…

  1. Much as they will be loathed to let go, Broadcasters will realise that they can’t justify self-providing these services, and they will give more data away about schedules and items on-air in a form that can be better used to tag content by 3rd-party services
  2. Services like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ will provide ways to embed this metadata in posts, so the a unique identifier of a show could be associated with a post, in a similar way to geo-tagging appeared.

The combination of those two things mean that you could create an app that was specialised twitter client. I don’t want a new social network for telly, but a client that embeds the magical codes to make everything more findable feels like a workable compromise.

Transition periods are the worst: technology, privacy and injunctions

Transitional times are the worst. Much like the music industry trying to retain their existing business model based on recorded music, or broadcasters using DRM to maintain rights windows on content that is transmitted in-the-clear; it’s always difficult to move on. Once you’ve accepted change, it might not be as easy as it was before, but you’re at least not fighting the inevitable.

We’re currently fighting that battle with privacy. As people tag us in Facebook, other people check us into insalubrious venues, we’re stuck in an ongoing battle to remove things that we don’t want stuck to our profile. We hide behind privacy settings on sites, only to watch a friend share a private RSS feed or one poorly-written API client leaking all the information to google. Our friends re-tweet from private accounts disclosing partially-incriminating thoughts. Strangers can sometimes see one-side of a conversation, not enough to know exactly what was said, but certainly enough for my mum to admonish me for some months ago.

Today we’ve had fun with super-injunctions, Twitter and parliamentary privilege. English courts trying to uphold rulings that Scotland and the Peoples’ Republic of Twitter are not subject to. And sure the identity of CTB is a nice bit of gossipy tittle-tattle, but what about when it’s the name of someone accused of a serious crime?

Our reporting restrictions are far more extensive than those of America, and while I don’t want to routinely have ‘perp-walks’ in the UK, I’d rather not have trials abandoned because our protections are unworkable in the modern world.

Away from the legal sphere, with the rise of computer vision and recognition projects, (look at the flurry of activity around the Kinect), and the availability of powerful on-demand computing resources (like GPU heavy instances from Amazon), privacy will soon be a problem that can be brute-forced away. Facebook is already rolling out photo recognition (this does seem to be taking longer than most of their phased roll-outs as I know a few people who had it months ago).

Embarrassing images we thought ‘anonymous’ because the face wasn’t shown will be tied down to people through bizarre combinations of EXIF tags, 3d room mapping, carpet recognition and host of other recognition metric that I can’t even imagine. That mole on your chest will no longer just be a minor cancer risk; it’s a data point that can be correlated.

Anyway, we’re in the transitional phase: We’re still trying to hold onto old-models of privacy which in a few years won’t be possible to have without moving to the “Google Opt-Out town“.

The other side of this transition we’ll probably have less privacy, but nobody will really have privacy, and somehow that will make it alright – that or we’ll have to change our names after we leave university, and dispose of all of our electrical devices, have that mole removed, and if we want to run for political office be very careful what we get up-to at college.

The Months After Everyone Else Kindle Review

I got a Kindle for Christmas from my lovely parents.

Why I like it:

  • Form factor, screen size, weight, battery life
  • Reading more long form copy in a while, I think because I can get the right amount of copy on screen to match my natural skimming style
  • The inherent task switched that you have by picking it up, and the single-tasking of it. As someone else said (not that I can find the link) the web-browser will be useful for emergencies, but that’s about it. No push alerts, growls, or games to distract
  • Instapaper’s integration is really lovely (and finally helps me address the “popping” of To-Read items instead of the the “pushing” of them onto the stack)

Things I don’t like:

  • Limited choice of Newspapers – I would pay for the Guardian on it if I could. With the 3G variant, it’s a tablet thing always up-to-date with that.
  • Similar to that, I will not pay for the economist again. I don’t have to pay for the Online access, the iPhone app or website over and above my subscription, so much as I would love the have the economist on my Kindle – until Amazon/Publishers sort out a discount for subscribers I’m not
  • I can’t think how to do it efficiently, but the screensaver could be so much more than just a book image… (that said that completely breaks my previous statement that I like the mono-purpose of it)

I’m not going to pretend whose commercial teams are at fault here for these, but they are the main gripes I’ve found so far. Given those are policy, rather than technology, I hope they’ll shake out in time.

A Hunt related suggestion for styleguide writers

Many years ago a friend of the family got divorced: “Alan and Julie” were longstanding friends, and when “Alan” got into another relationship, we found it difficult to say “Alan” without “And Julie”.

We flipped them, it was always “Sue and Alan”.

In the light of recent naughtieness, can I suggest it’s always “Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt”.

Is scientific tear-down fair use?

Ben Goldacre has been asked by the lovely Lawyers at Global Radio to take-down his 44 minute extract of Jeni Barnett’s piece she did on MMR. Jenni, who later admitted she was woefully ill-prepared and started off an emotive debate on her blog with the standard pathos laden phrases like “as a mother…”, spouted a load of quasi-plausible pseudo-science about how awful vaccines were.

As Goldacre and others have pointed out many times, the Wakefield claims are totally refuted/withdrawn/dismissed now. There is no evidence that immune systems are overloaded by vaccination. There is a plethora of evidence that Measles is returning.

I hope he finds some legal representation, because at a time when we’re questioning the impact finance reporting can have on the real world economy, we should ask the same about science. But “as a mother…” people don’t tend to have opinions about the state of the credit default swaps market.