Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io

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.

There is something about E-ink which is changing the way I read

Ereading from the beach

I no longer like to read on my LCD screen. Its just not the same.

Eink is lovely to read on and for me changing the widths of text is still a dream come true. Its really changing the way I read and I can’t help but pull it out when I got a spare moment or two. What I’ve also got setup is the regular morning syncing. Every morning when I wake up there is a selection of news from places like ars techinca, the guardian, etc on the device ready to be consumed. I then also have it setup so that if that book goes out of date by 7 days, it will be removed from the device automatically. Its all down to a great piece of software called Calibre.

I do kind of wish the Sony Ereader did have wifi or at least bluetooth so it could remotely do what Calibre does but to be fair its not a big deal leaving the ereader synced over night, just a bit pointless because the battery life is weeks at a time.

I’ve got Google Reader working with Calibre but the documents it creates are so big, navigating them on the Sony Ereader is painful. I either need to modify the script so it creates smaller chunks of my whole Google reader account or sort out the massive amount of stuff I don’t read on the account. Maybe a bit of both sounds right. Another reason for the wireless would be to tell Google that I’ve just read a article so I don’t have to read it again on my laptop, but with no actual API for that on Google Reader and no wireless on the Ereader, I guess I’m double out of luck.

Lastly a bit of colour and speed would be great. I’m not suggest the same as LCD or even OLED, in actual fact eink is great but I like the idea of colour eink even better.

Mix transfer from elsewhere, great but…

Upload mix

Lets mix has launched a new way to upload a mix. Enter a url of a Mp3 and it will grab it and upload it for you. This should be a standard feature on a lot of social sites. The next step would be upload a RSS feed and it would strip any links to mp3s.

What I don’t get is Let’s Mix generally, is it use to be based around the Pacemaker and now the pacemaker seems to have been forgotten. For example when you upload your mix, it gives you the option of where you made the mix. So you got all the usual options like live, virtualdj, pcdj, etc but no pacemaker option.

Let’s mix is a weird place right now, I can’t work out if there trying to replace Soundcloud.com or do something different. They had better sort it out before I have a uploaded library on both.

Urgently on the look for hot properties

Urbansplash's Chips and Islington Wharf

It was about a year ago when I went looking for a place to buy in Manchester and the new islington or ancoats part of the city centre (East Manchester) was looking pretty attractive. This time around I’m much more secured in my mortgage and how much I can spend (although thats not a lot due to a base line deposit) so hopefully this time around it the question really will be Chips or Islington Wharf?

Apple’s threat on screen based home entertainment

Everyone is talking about the ipad but isn’t it time the Apple TV was due an upgrade? Rather than leave the apple tv out to dry, I’m certain Apple will want to tie it into there already closed ecosystem (I mean rainforrest). That will mean developer written applications for your Television, something which other platforms like Boxee have been use to for some time.

I personally can’t see the attraction of writing applications for your TV but I’m sure with decent content some will be on to a winner. Rather than the widget like systems being thrown around now, content producers could build content and systems which work hand in hand. So a real simple example would be a Diggnation or Diggreel would give you the real time digg amounts with the option to further digg a story or add a comment.

Another reason why I think Apple will go down this route is because this will be Apple’s entry into the home console market. They have already announced there going to be creating there own gaming network (like Xbox Live or XLink Kai) so why not extend that out to your TV too? So not only will have your music, videos and books all within the Apple Universe but also your game playing too. Is there going to be anything which Apple won’t hold in their Rainforrest?

To be fair if Apple do launch a new AppleTV by the 3rd quarter, they may catch Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo napping. But the real forward thinking is being done by the likes of Boxee who have adopted the open wide model with a revenue model. If Boxee can get on to other platforms and spread quickly, who knows what might happen. I got to hope the most open will finally attract the talented developers, everything else is in place.

So where does this leave things like GoogleTV, Android and Canvas? Who knows…

DBill provisions for ISPs, a series of loopholes

I’ve said very little about the Dbill (Digital Ecomony Act), I’ve actually got a massive post saved up venting why the bill is a joke and how the UK just went back to the stone ages. But I also find it interesting how theres lots of loopholes to be found in the bill, even from a ISP point of view. Actually thats one of the most annoying parts of the bill, the fact that all UK ISPs have to follow these stupid rules even if there doing fine with what they already have.

Here’s some of the concerns

That we have to pass on copyright notices to subscribers and may have to suspend or restrict access to subscribers. This is actually relatively easy for us to do, but has implications for us and the subscribers. For a start, if we do not do things that help our customers then we will lose them. OFCOM have made it easy and cheap for people to change ISP. If they change ISP all of the history of notices disappears and the copyright owner has to start again.

That we could have an order to block locations on the internet. Now, we would hope that as such an order can apply to transit providers or BT wholesale, etc, that anyone making such an order would not go to the bother of making an order against every small ISP. So such an order would not affect us, hopefully. If it did there are allowances for paying our costs. If BT wholesale did DPI based blocking we can work on ways around that by simple obfuscation at the PPP level. If transit provides block a location we can set up tunnels to links outside the UK. We can find ways around blocks if we have to, and so can our customers.

And here’s some of the loopholes,

OK, several ideas come to mind…

  • In the event of a copyright notice, making our customer not a subscriber by allowing them quickly and easily to change who the subscriber is but continue service unchanged.
  • In the event of a copyright notice, making our customer not a subscriber by making them a communications provider. We’re prepared to peer with our customer buying access to our customers IP blocks via their ADSL line for 1p/month. This makes them a communications provide and so not a subscriber. But as their customer is us, a communications provider so not a subscriber, they do not become a service provider and so not themselves subject to most of the regulations.
  • In the event of a copyright notice, making our customer not a subscriber giving them a choice of IP addresses (change of IP). However, by offering a choice and allowing them to pick an IP they have not been allocated an IP address by us. That means their service is not an internet service and so they are not a subscriber.
  • Recording where our customer is a communications provider – which applies if they provide communications to anyone. I suspect many businesses and even homes could buy our service as a communications provider.
  • Operating more than one retail arm selling to customers and allowing customers to migrate freely with no change to service between those retail arms, thus bypassing copyright notice counting and any blocking orders.
  • Making us not a service provider by making all customers not subscribers using either the communications provider or not allocated IPs as above. Hence making us not subject to most of the Act.
  • Not co-operating with copyright holders – if they send a notice which we consider invalid, just delete it.

I know my ISP USFSN will certainly be looking at this list, most of the subscribers to there service pay well over the odds for non-logged non-bothersome unlimited Internet access.

iPad Dj Application?

Been thinking 2 ipads to mix music with could be interesting. However where would you store all those tunes? Would you put the mixer on a third device or even a iphone/ipod touch? Could you run the whole thing on one ipad?

There are a few stories exploring the idea. But generally most of the problems related to the ipad are also related to the iphone too. Things one audio output, no ability to add an external usb soundcard, locked up music subsystem, etc, etc. I did however see that the ipad has already been hacked or jailbroken, so who knows what might change for a serious dj setup.