Day: 22 April 2010

Ok I was never going to be happy reading the Wired top 100

Top 100

The Wired 100: Positions 10 to 1

The Wired 100: Positions 11 to 50

The Wired 100: Positions 50 to 100

But I almost threw my ereader across the hotel restaurant table this morning when I read through the wired 100 list.

Who are the influential people in the digital economy who can make things happen? Who are the designers, innovators, investors and creatives with the power to touch the rest of us?

I later in the day showed Sheila and she counted how many woman had made the list. Not many as you can imagine but I noticed something even more alarming. There are no woman in the top 10 at all. Its not till you get to 11 which Martha Lane Fox occupies before you start to a lot more woman.

I was also trying to work out the bias toward the South East of the country (aka London). Don’t get me wrong a lot of the firms are based in London or the South East, so it makes sense but I’m having a really hard time working out any Northern entries which are not games related. This tells me that Wired magazine needs to spend more time looking at the rest of the country for those pockets of innovation.

One person who I was certainly would be in the list was Herb Kim.

Not only is this guy CEO of the hugely successful Codeworks, the mastermind behind the closest thing to TED and Pop!Tech we got in the UK, Thinking Digital but he was the driving force behind the collaboration of TEDxNorth. He also took up the challenge and did all this in the North east, which if you believe some people is only known for Games, coalmines and football. The guy from Brooklyn has done some amazing things and can usually be found either in the company of some of the greatest thinkers, in a TED conference or zipping back and forth between Liverpool and Newcastle.

The fact he’s not even on the list is shameful, he should be floating around the 25 marker for sure. Wired editors are certainly overpromote alot of no-hoper in this list. I won’t say there names but theres a lot of people who have gotten into positions which are high but not really done much. In my book thats no good. You can be the head of whatever but if your just riding out time, you shouldn’t be on this list. There’s plenty of people who deserve to be on the list and are not.

My ISP’s Response to the Digital Economy Act

My ISP is UKFSN and there the small kind of ISP which you use to get years ago. They don’t like restricting there customers and they hate things like Phorm and other content interception. So what do they make of the DBill?

Recently the UK government pushed through new legislation aimed to address many aspect of the “digital economy”.

Much of the Act is reasonable and needed to ensure that things like the rollout of digital television and radio services can be accomplished properly. The Act also included various measures to do with the Internet that were not well considered and were certainly not properly debated by Parliament and which have attracted much comment from many different parts of society. As an ISP our position on the Act is limited to the parts that relate to the Internet and the operation of Internet Service Providers, including UKFSN.

The Act seeks to implement measures to protect the rights of copyright holders from unauthorised copying and distribution of the works on which they hold copyright. This is a worthwhile aim however the Act has failed to accomplish what is set out to do for a number of reasons. Firstly the Act is clearly written by people who simply do not understand the Internet and how it is used. This shows in a number of ways but primarily in the manner in which the Act seeks to make ISPs and other network operators responsible to prevent copyright infringement and to act as enforcers for the civil rights of others completely bypassing the courts. This is a serious abuse and is, I believe, a prima facie breach of the Human Rights Act in that it removes the protection of the courts from those accused of unlawful activity.

All ISPs and network operators are bound to operate within and to obey the law. This applies to all laws including the Digital Rights Act. This means that we are obliged to act in response to a valid copyright infringement notice or a valid requirement to block access to a site and we will comply with any such valid requirement. Note that I have emphasised valid. The Act states a number of things that will be necessary for such a report or request to be valid. The most important one of these for copyright infringement notices is that we must act in response to a valid notice from the copyright holder or their authorised agent. In order to comply with this requirement we will need anyone who sends such a report to have registered their copyright in a recognised database to which we have free access and to have registered details of any and all agents who are authorised to make such notice reports to us. Further we will need a means of assuring that any notice or report we receive is really from the registered copyright holder or agent – this means they will need to implement a recognised and reliable digital signature system which we can verify. We simply cannot comply with the Act without this.

The Act specifies that copyright holders and ISPs must share the cost of any systems needed to implement the Act. I strongly believe that, as the only beneficiaries of the Act are copyright holders, they should be the ones to bear the cost. I propose that ISPs implement a system such as I have outlined above and charge copyright holders a very smallannual fee to register each copyright and each agency. This will help to prevent the Act’s requirement on ISPs to act in response to infringement notices from becoming a means for anyone to implement a massive denial of service attack.

I have already had some discussion with other ISPs about this and these ideas are being actively pursued. As things become clearer I will make further statements.

If your ISP isn’t standing against the Digital Rights Act, you really should consider moving to another one and support them.