What was it, you ask, that finally drew me back to my blog (well, one of them, anyway)? Has my muse compelled me to write on matters of National importance? Have I been moved to the pen by some bowel-clenching happenstance?
No.
By smugness.
Tawdry my motives may be, but they are real, at least. And so, to the tale:
…launches today. There are plenty of reasons not to upgrade, but if you’re worried about the ability of M$ to stop you watching things you’ve paid for at their whim, fret no more, the DRM controls of Vista have just been successfully (and as far as I can determine, permanently) bypassed: which just goes to show that there’s no point spending money on digital protection when you should be spending it on better marketing strategies. From another direction though, there’s a lot of hidden legalese in the EULA (End-User License Agreement) that is making some lawyers rather concerned.
Now that’s a proper survey. Auntie Beeb is reporting a Danish study of 420,000 mobile ‘phone users going back to 1982 that finds no sign of an increased tumour risk in the brain, eyes, or salivary glands, or of developing leukaemia. No more of this “we asked 7 people if they thought they felt warm” stuff; the sheer numbers involved make these results about as concrete as a medical study can get.
So you can all carry on using your mobiles safe in the knowledge that you’re not cooking your heads. I guess I’ll get around to buying one sometime, but still not until I actually find I have a need for it.
As someone who tries (and fails) to minimize my back strain whilst earning my daily wage at a desk and PC all day, I keep a wary eye out for information about posture, screen height, and so on. Now we all know that we should be sitting upright when typing, yes? Well, there’s some new evidence to suggest that it’s not the best position. The research suggests that lying back (halfway between prone and upright) is better than upright or slouching forwards.
In case any of you were remotely sceptical about the Government’s fabulous new plan to issue IDs along with passports, and more worryingly, add your biometric data to a National Register (which won’t be sold to anyone, oh no, honest), then you were right.
The Guardian, with a little help from a friend, has announced that it’s accessed and can copy the data stored on a standard UK passport chip using a cheap (174 UKP) reader. The article goes into some detail as to why this is important, and gives the Home Office it’s chance to answer concerns, so it’s worth a read.
You can keep the new supercomputer that IBM have built out of Cell Chips. It may be able to do thousands of trillions of calculations in a second, but it has none of the elegance and charm of the wonderful device that has been lovingly recreated at Bletchley Park. I caught the unveiling on the news yesterday and watched, beaming, as the rotors ratcheted around in the little dance of decoding they do. If you’ve not heard of Station X and the Turing Bombes, then you’re unaware of one of the most amazing technological developments made during World War II. And sometime next year, I shall be visiting Bletchley Park and watching the Bombe do its work.
Well, we can live in hope: the ‘voluntary’ ID card scheme is being increasingly reported as in trouble. A giganitic white elephant of a project, so wrong, unpopular, and ill-concieved the only way to get it past the House of Lords was to threaten to neuter the rights of the Second House, and the only way to obtain the required information was to steal it off of another project – when you ‘volunteer’ to renew your passport, your information is automatically added to the National ID Register, and you can’t refuse. Data capture by redefining the meaning of the word ‘voluntary’. How Orwellian is that?
Several interesting stories have popped up today and as I’m short of thinking time, I’ll just post them for reference and rumination:
What a day out there on the Electron Sea.
That’s my way of saying “The tide is turning”. I’ve said for a while now that the music industry in the UK, and especially in the States, should stop trying to prosecute grandmothers, children, students, and dead people for file-sharing and so-called ‘priacy’, and expend all that effort and money in developing new business methods to exploit the download and P2P markets. There’s no point in trying to put the technological genie back in the bottle; they should be devising cheaper and simpler alternatives to ‘piracy’. People are more than willing to pay for ease-of-use and simplicity, and the money is much better spent – just ask Apple if they think their iTunes is a good thing or not.
Two stories about the same thing on different sides of the Atlantic, come to very different conclusions. Digital Rights Management (for those of you who haven’t heard of it) is the technology that (e.g.,) music corporations hope to be able to use to control what you listen to, when you listen, and how many times you listen. Rather than buying a CD and listening to it as often as you want (because you paid for it), they’d rather make you pay for each time you want to listen. DRM does that, and prevents you from making any copies too.