Tom Morris

Submission to the House of Lords Select Committee on Communicatons on superfast broadband

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 12:20:18 +0000

Below is what I sent in to the House of Lords Select Committee on Communicatons on the subject of superfast broadband.

My name is Tom Morris. I am a freelance web technologist and a Ph.D student in philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London. In my spare time, I am involved heavily in Wikimedia projects as a volunteer: I am an administrator on the English Wikipedia and Wikinews, and have a few other positions of responsibility. I am also a dues-paying member of Wikimedia UK, a UK charity. I was quite heavily involved behind-the-scenes in the recent anti-SOPA Wikipedia blackout.
My interest in this topic derives from both being an Internet user since 1995, my professional connection with the web and my support for the Wikimedia projects.
Broadly, I am supportive of investment from both public and private sources to increase the availability and speed of broadband, but with a number of constraints. Internet users, and those who have not yet got on the Internet, must be the primary beneficiaries of broadband investment. This must not be a blank cheque handed over to BT, Virgin Media, TalkTalk and the mobile networks. Broadband investment must serve the public interest not the private interest of ISPs and telcos. There are a number of issues which neither the government nor industry have adequately handled with Internet policy so far. These issues broadly are synchronous speed, usage caps, traffic shaping, lack of data retention, properly competitive access, intellectual property and IPv6.
While it is welcome to increase broadband speeds and ensure the availability of widespread and preferably universal high-speed broadband, the continued use of usage caps would make this futile. Currently, where I live, we do not have access to faster level broadband (24Mb), so use an ADSL ‘Max’ 8Mb connection. Speedwise, this is actually perfectly adequate for most of my needs. It is slightly too slow for reliable streaming of some HD movies, but I don’t consider this a major issue. Meanwhile, in order to not be stuck with a very low usage cap, I am paying significantly higher than most people pay for broadband. Increasing the availability of high speed broadband without increasing usage caps is fruitless. With higher speed broadband, people will want to use it more, but if the amount they are allowed to use it each month doesn’t rise in proportion to the speed, the benefits of increasing broadband speed will be fruitless.
Currently, broadband in Britain is delivered in the form of ADSL or asynchronous digital subscriber lines. ADSL compresses the voice bandwidth of an ordinary telephone line and uses the space saved to deliver Internet data. The ‘asynchronous’ component of ADSL is concerning: this means that it is far slower to upload than download data, presumably because most people want to download more than they upload. With the continued rise of services which allow individuals to participate in media creation (sometimes called “social media” or “social software”), and Internet-based data storage and services (commonly and slightly confusingly referred to as “cloud computing”), individuals upload more than ever. But unless broadband upload speeds rapidly improve as well, the benefits, both personal, commercial and social of online sharing and collaboration will be slower and less available to individuals in the UK.
Wikipedia is increasingly looking for and using more video and animation, and considering a future where the free transmission of 3D models and 3D animation becomes a reality. We envision a world where Wikipedia articles will have high-quality, high definition video attached to our educational articles: you look up London, and see high-quality, high-definition video of the changing of the guards, Big Ben chiming, Tube trains, black cabs and maybe (if Parliamentary copyright and other issues are resolved) the Prime Minister answering questions in the Commons. To upload those videos, individuals need fast, syncronous broadband speeds. They need the same broadband speeds as broadcasters, newspapers and other media outlets, because they are part-time volunteer media outlets too and not just consumers of commercially or professionally produced content.
ISPs in the future need to provide service in a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory fashion. Currently, the widespread use of traffic shaping is discriminatory. Individuals pay for a particular speed of service, and they should be able to expect that speed and availability, without the use of traffic shaping, often using deep packet inspection, to prioritize certain types of traffic. Imagine: you send 50 postcards, and the Post Office reads them to decide whether or not to send them first class or second class, discriminating on the content of those postcards. Fair? Perhaps. But if you’ve paid for first-class stamps for all of them, they should all be treated equally. This is basically the situation with traffic shaping. ISPs make unfair assumptions about usage and fail to treat all customer data the same. BitTorrent traffic gets given lower priority on the assumption that all BitTorrent traffic is copyright infringement. This puts people who work on and develop free and open software (FOSS) projects at a disadvantage, as they often use BitTorrent to legally transfer large files to users. Traffic discrimination of this sort means that software developers cannot make judgments of which protocols and methods to use on the basis of their technical merit but based on having to guess what the idiotic political or social prejudices those running the traffic shaping do.
When you go to the library, you don’t expect that borrowing a copy of the Qu’ran would tag you a political extremist. Wanting to read Mein Kampf doesn’t make you a Nazi; wanting to read Pierre-Joseph Proudhon doesn’t make you an anarchist. We rightly give people latitude to read and think and consider ideas in the privacy of their own head, and we don’t infer from consideration of ideas support for those ideas. The government should not require ISPs to hold data on what websites people visit, and to ensure that the police cannot use what people read on the Internet as some kind of proxy for their beliefs or attitudes. If there were another 7/7 type attack, just rounding up people who’ve read particular websites is a lazy and ignorant law enforcement technique, because, as I have said, people read things they don’t agree with. People need to be able to use the Internet as a library of thoughts, ideas, some radical, some dangerous, without surveillance or the building up of massive data backlogs which can then be used by those in power to conduct fishing expeditions at the cost of privacy.
The market for DSL has been uncompetitive for many years. ISPs have offered broadly the same product under a variety of different brand names, but without any actual significant differences. Over time, the market has been getting less and less competitive, and it has been harder to find small, no-nonsense DSL providers. This has been due to the stranglehold at the exchange level. We must ensure that a thriving market for small and medium-sized ISPs continues to exist, to provide services and high-quality support not currently offered by the larger conglomerates.
The broadband market has spectacularly failed to adapt to the provision of IPv6. For background, the Internet works by assigning every computer an IP address. These are almost like telephone numbers and consist of a set of four digits between 0 and 255. When you type in a web address, like wikipedia.org, it translates it into an IPv4 address, like 208.80.152.201. There are 4.3 billion assignable IPv4 addresses which are assigned by to a number of regional bodies, who then assign them to companies and organisations who apply for them. There’s a small problem: we’ve run out. The last block was given to the regional assigning bodies in 2011. Considering I read articles back in the mid 1990s calling for the Internet industry to collectively work out a transition plan to IPv6, the fact that we still don’t have one in 2012 is extremely concerning. If the government are investing a large amount of money in improving broadband networks, requiring all of the infrastructure to be IPv6 ready would be an enormously good thing. IPv6 will ensure clear addressability for all devices. Instead of 4.3 billion addresses, IPv6 gives us 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456. That works out as 67 billion billion addresses for every square centimeter on the planet. With IPv6, we can quite happily give everyone a few billion IPs to use and have enough left over for when we start needing to browse the web on our iPhones on the moon.
Copyright laws are utterly unfit for the digital age. They do not reflect anything like the current practices or reality of the contemporary world. Currently, copyright law in Britain is far, far too long, and is stifling the development of a vibrant public domain. I traced the copyright on a photograph taken by my great-grandfather who died in approximately 1970. The photograph was taken before World War I, but the copyright on the photograph is not due to expire until 2040 (given life of the author plus seventy years). Why exactly does a photograph taken on an Edwardian era building site need copyright protection for 130 years? It doesn’t. Copyright terms are too long, patents are granted for increasingly absurd and obvious things: business ideas, peanut butter sandwiches, ordinary business practices but ‘on the Internet’, algorithms and data structures that have been taught in undergraduate computer science classes and textbooks since the 1950s. The overextension and exploitation of the intellectual property regime has brought the whole damn thing into disrepute with sensible people everywhere. Rather than pre-emptively adapt and innovate, music, movie, TV and newspaper industries have sat on their thumbs for years. Come about 1996 or 1997, any forwardthinking person in the news business would have realised that online was coming. Come Napster, the music industry should have perhaps gotten the message and got their own business in order. But no, they sat back and whined about pirates, and took a few grandmothers to court. Then they bought laws in countries including the UK, like the clueless Digital Economy Act, the preliminary drafts presumably written by Lord Mandleson while on David Geffen’s yacht, and rushed through without due debate or consideration during the “wash-up”. In order to have a copyright system that is fit for the digital age, it needs to actually balance the rights of consumers and the public interest of society as a whole against the rights of content creators. That means that works actually need to enter the public domain a lot, lot sooner. That means we need to forbid DRM and other anti-piracy measures. They punish the legitimate customers and are are absolutely no hindrance at all to the infringers. That means we need to encourage significantly more material to be released under free and open licenses. That means we need to extend and increase what is covered by fair dealing exceptions to guarantee that criticism, commentary, non-commercial educational use, parody and so on are protected in an age where everyone can be a media producer as well as a consumer. We should allow maximum amounts of private non-commercial modification of work that has already been purchased: format-shifting, time-shifting, location-shifting. Rather than humbly bowing before the content industries and passing ridiculous laws for them, we should tell them to work out some of their own solutions: tell them to work with streaming services like Spotify, Lovefilm and Netflix rather than undermine them.
Music, movie and TV industries need to understand that the alternative to people pirating their stuff isn’t them legally purchasing it, it’s them not caring about it at all. They can adapt to the Internet on the Internet’s terms, or a whole generation of Internet users will just ignore them.
However big the film or music industry is, the Internet will always be bigger, better, cleverer, fresher, faster, funnier, more innovative, more technically sophisticated and we will always have more cats.

Mini-movie-review: The Woman in Black

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 21:41:45 +0000

I watched The Woman in Black on Saturday. As you are all lazy and hate words and stuff, I’ll condense my thoughts into handy bullet point form. If it turns out that my movie reviewing is anything other than awful, I may do more in the future.

Daniel Radcliffe is still Harry Potter to me. I know, I suck.
Next time you think the city is scary, just remember: if horror movies are right, it’s always out a creepy old house in the countryside where nobody can hear you scream.
The Legal Practice Course has been updated with new best practices: when dealing with the estates of deceased northerners in massive mansions, collect all papers and take them back to the town to avoid distraction by ghosts.
Opening scene was brilliant. Children + bizarre suicide pacts = cinematic win. Just ask the Japanese—Suicide Club.
Despite slightly unsatisfactory plot, execution was superb. Some beautiful photography and evocative sets.
SPOILER The ending was really tacked on and unsatisfying. I mean, it couldn’t just be that ~~Harry Potter~~Kipps and son get on the train back to London and live happily ever after. No, no, has to have a grisly death… but that doesn’t resolve the relationship with the afterlife. Director managed to nail the scene technically though.
Not at all gory, hence the 12A rating, but definitely chilling. I’m not a huge horror fan, but when I do watch horror, a little bit more gore is fine. They definitely kept this at the nice end of the Harry Potter to Human Centipede spectrum.
Must avoid sending controversial mailing list posts out before going to cinema as I may compulsively check phone. Managed to resist: only one email check during movie.

"Democracy depends upon plain language. It depends upon common understanding. We need to feel safe in..."

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 15:38:33 +0000

“Democracy depends upon plain language. It depends upon common understanding. We need to feel safe in the assumption that words mean what they are commonly understood to mean. Deliberate ambiguities, slides of meaning, obscure, incomprehensible or meaningless words poison the democratic process by leaving people less able to make informed or rational decisions.”

- Don Watson, Gobbledygook, p. 79

"The media seems to have reinvented itself not as a source of information, but escapism, a one-way..."

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:27:31 +0000

“The media seems to have reinvented itself not as a source of information, but escapism, a one-way conversation with your own internal idiot. In this world an octopus called Paul, who can predict the results of the World Cup, is a story, even if he cannot, actually, predict the results of the World Cup, because he is an octopus, and is probably above such things. Add squirrels on waterskis, obese rabbits, dogs that can use cash-points and – who knows? – semi-politicised fish, and you have a genre of the media that is probably bigger, and is certainly more profitable, than the section that cares about feminism.”

- Tanya Gold

Capital letters: not just a good idea but a Good Idea

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:17:00 +0000

Travel warning. If you are in London, be sure to not spend any time in either York Way or White City if you happen to have any form of computing device on you. It may be damaged beyond the point of repair. Not just computing devices, really, anything that has the ability to produce written English: computers, pens, typewriters, sophisticated neural implants that can turn your thoughts into text files.

Why the warning? Because if you go anywhere near the journalists at the BBC or the Guardian, the shift key may stop working. That has to be the explanation.

The BBC have been long known to omit capital letters from abbreviations and acronyms to the point of unreadability. “WPCs” (woman police constables) becomes “Wpcs” even though, unlike “NATO” (sorry, “Nato”), you can’t pronounce Double You Pee Cee as a word.

I had that eery and slightly sickening feeling that someone was going a bit too easy on the shift key recently with multiple pieces from The Guardian referring to the Stop Online Piracy Act as “Sopa” (not to be confused with “soma”, the stupefying drug of choice for denizens of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World) and the PROTECT IP Act as “Pipa”. The fact that PROTECT IP is itself a ghastly initialism of the sort that seemingly started with the ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act’ (or USA PATRIOT Act) adds to the idiocy of this trend.

Today I saw on one of the news sites the Director of Public Prosecutions referred to as the “director of public prosecutions” as if that were not an office but simply a description. The Attorney General often becomes the “attorney general”, the Chancellor of the Exchequer becomes the “chancellor” and so on. I have so far not yet seen the newspapers sink to “Usa” or “Uk” but given this idiotic trend, it can’t be long.

I really have no idea what is behind it. Some utterly bizarre desire to seem more hip and down with the Twitering Facebookers on their smartphones? Yes, well, those same people will probably think you rather ridiculous if you refer to an iPad as an “ipad” or indeed an “Ipad” or omit the CamelCase from BlackBerry.

The other explanation seems to be some kind of idea that it is less deferential, stemming from a bizarre idea that using capital letters is an exercise of power. Perhaps it all goes back to some half-baked deconstructionist nonsense: the word “capital” in the phrase “capital letters” is somehow linked to the root of the word “capitalism” and if we just stop using capital letters, we can avoid propping up capitalism, and then the revolution will finally come.

Some kind of power-based analysis seems to fit danah boyd, and maybe k.d. lang too. bell hooks says it was “to distinguish [herself] from her grandmother”.

One thing I find very annoying about my fellow atheists is when they decide to do the same thing to ‘God’. ‘God’ is a proper name, like ‘Dave’ or ‘Susan’. It is also a description, ‘god’. Hence the title of Reza Aslan’s book, No god but God is derived from the expression that there are no gods that exist other than ‘God’ (for Aslan’s purposes, that would be the Islamic god). But some of my atheist brothers and sisters seem to think that giving the word ‘God’ a capital g grants respect or implicitly endorses the actual existence of the ‘God’ character. They don’t seem to apply to same logic to Gandalf, Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, Zeus, Thor etc. Nobody suggests that I’m either presuming Gandalf’s existence or granting special powers to the word ‘Gandalf’ by printing the first letter as a capital, so why should ‘God’ be any different? Why give one fictional character exemption from the same rule the others follow?

We’ve had similar debates about capital letters at Wikipedia. A recent one I came across is this Manual of Style rule (and, again, note that internally we are perfectly happy to talk about “AfD”, “MOS”, “ANI” etc.) about capital letters for religious doctrines:

Doctrinal topics or canonical religious ideas that may be traditionally capitalized within a faith are given in lower case in Wikipedia, such as virgin birth (as a common noun), original sin, transubstantiation.

In itself, uncontroversial. But there’s a limit. And that limit should simply be “what do the best secondary sources say?” The point of Wikipedia is that it follows secondary sources. And if we’ve got non-fringe contemporary, academic theological sources consistently using a theological term differently from Wikipedia, that seems like a pretty good path to follow. Again, as an atheist, I don’t really see a problem. While “the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven” may be a bit of a mouthful, following traditional rules on case hardly commits me to accepting the metaphysical presumptions that underlie it. Nor does writing “the assumption of the blessed virgin mary into heaven” strike some sort of blow for freethought. It just makes it look like my shift key is broken.

The rule on religious doctrines is a bit of a strange one, because mostly Wikipedia’s Manual of Style on capital letters is actually pretty sensible.

Unlike the BBC (“Bbc”?) and Guardian. What on earth ought we do to get them to shift their position on capital letters?

The new Gmail sucks

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:30:52 +0000

The new Gmail sucks:

Crooked Timber is right: new Gmail sucks and Google is becoming crappier. I have been trying Duck Duck Go for search… we really need an open source Google Apps suite that you can chuck on Amazon cloud, pay for, and not be manhandled by Google in their not-even-in-the-slightest-bit-evil way.

adactio: (via Design won’t save the world)

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 03:26:12 +0000

adactio:

(via Design won’t save the world)

"Gamification” treats people like children — children who need to be manipulated, who need to be..."

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 17:11:48 +0000

““Gamification” treats people like children — children who need to be manipulated, who need to be tricked into doing what’s good for them.”

- Brent Simmons

My take.

Creative Commons 4.0 proposal: fair use baseline

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 12:19:00 +0000

Creative Commons has launched the Creative Commons 4.0 process, where they hope to produce a fourth version of the Creative Commons licenses. I have a proposal that I think could make Creative Commons even more useful than they already are, namely using CC licenses to enforce a minimum baseline of fair use. It’s very simple: we simply make it so that every CC license includes extra clauses that not only specify that the Creative Commons license does not infringe on fair use (the licenses already include such a clause) but they also guarantee a minimum baseline of fair use.

Fair use differs by country, but the nice thing is that the CC license could encode in the license those fair use rights while also allowing them to be enforced by statute.

In the United States, there is a broad class of fair use exceptions are described by 17 U.S.C. § 107 as follows:

the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright

Those are examples given, but the U.S. law works by defining four criteria of fair use, and then saying that a work is fair use if it meets those four criteria, leaving it open in the future for people for reusers to make a case to the courts if challenged that they are pursuing a new form of fair use.

The United Kingdom doesn’t have fair use in the same way. Instead it has a variety of “fair dealing” exceptions. There is a common law fair dealing defence, and a number of statutory fair dealing defences. Unlike the U.S., there is no general class of exceptions, just a specific list of exceptions, often with a stack of secondary legislation specifying exactly how that fair dealing could take place.

According to Wikipedia, there is also fair use in other countries, specifically Canada (which has a fair dealing style limited exceptions rule), Israel (which is broadly U.S. style), Poland and South Korea. Fair dealing is, of course, used in Commonwealth countries like Australia and New Zealand.

Now, before I get on to the substantive proposal, I’ll say something hopefully uncontentious: fair use is good, fair use is consistent with Creative Commons values and it is something we should try and promote. Of course, in an ideal world, people would simply use public domain/CC Zero or CC BY or BY-SA or something, which would essentially provide a much stronger version of fair use/fair dealing for most purposes. So, broadly, fair use is good, and the copyleftish, free culture movement who thinks things like Creative Commons and Wikimedia and free software and so on are pretty cool are generally in favour of more of it. This seems uncontentious, and hopefully my proposal will seem equally uncontentious.

Given that we like fair use, CC 4.0 could promote fair use by guaranteeing fair use internationally. Just as the main terms of the CC license are applicable internationally, instead of simply specifying that the CC license doesn’t interfere with or supersede one’s common law or statutory fair use or fair dealing rights (because, you know, how could it?), the CC licenses could guarantee some uncontentious and shared subset of fair use/fair dealing rights as part of the license. This means that even in countries where fair use is not guaranteed by the laws of that territory, one can still engage in those fair use rights even if they are not guaranteed by the main terms of the license (namely, share-alike, no-derivs, non-commercial).

So, you have a reuser in the fictional country of Examplia. He finds a particularly intriguing scientific article online under the CC BY-NC license and wants to write a blog post in response that quotes some small chunks for the purposes of criticism or review but has a small amount of advertising on his blog (the question of non-commercial licensing rears its ugly head).

If he were in the United Kingdom, fair dealing would protect his right to copy material for the purposes of review under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, § 30(1). But Examplia does not have such an exception built in to their copyright laws. Thankfully, he is doing it with a CC 4.0 license that includes my magical fair use baseline requirement, which guarantees fair use rights very similar to those granted by the UK and USA to reusers internationally, and so he is able to go ahead.

Guaranteeing international fair use rights even when the law doesn’t seems like a no brainer in principle. But, of course, I am not a lawyer, and there may be legal reasons why it is a bad idea. (Sadly, there usually is.) There is also the question of what exactly would be covered. This is, of course, ripe for debate. I think the existing UK and US laws guide us, and sticking fairly conservatively to the sort of things they allow means that people will find this proposal as uncontentious as I think it is. I’d suggest the following:

non-commercial study (this is guaranteed by all the CC licenses already except perhaps no-derivs licenses)
quotation for the purpose of news reporting
criticism and review
parody of the work, and perhaps use of the work to parody or satire other things
format shifting
time shifting
educational use within government-operated or accredited schools, colleges and universities

All of these except the last one are pretty well-covered already by the existing fair use and fair dealing laws, so I should justify my inclusion of the last entry. This is because of the very common use case of someone finding a useful paper in a scientific journal and wanting to distribute it to students in class. This is about as fundamentally straight forward a case of fair use/fair dealing in terms of intuitive understanding as I can think of, but buts up against the non-commercial clauses of some CC licenses because technically a student pays tuition fees to be at university, and the lecturer is paid to give the class, so distribution of educational materials in that situation is technically a commercial use of those materials. Although the requirement that the schools be government-operated or accredited is rather problematic, that’s simply because that is a convenient way of getting most of the real schools and universities while excluding diploma mills, the shadier side of for-profit colleges (all those language colleges you see down Oxford Street in London!) and so on. Of course, this is just a very rough proposal, so it would be up to people who actually know about law to figure out how to implement this.

If any of these are legally problematic, we simply leave them out. Providing a baseline of fair use rights internationally is simply a very simple response to the way that the copyright extremists are doing the same thing with DRM and all the other crap that they’ve been pushing through WIPO and ACTA etc. Creative Commons saying through the licenses that wherever the reuse occurs, something like fair use is a fundamental requirement of an equitable and fair copyright system might be a small way to rebalance that debate.

This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

Why we should teach programming in schools

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 10:00:06 +0000

Finally, an issue lots of my fellow techies have been droning on about for years has reached public consciousness: the lamentable state of ICT lessons in schools and the lack of any programming or computer science stuff for learners before university age.

John Naughton in the Guardian last week:

What’s missing from both sides of this campaign is any appreciation of the real significance of introducing children to programming. Messrs Livingstone and Hope take an instrumental view of the matter, which is understandable given their industrial backgrounds. They are concerned that UK universities are not producing graduates with the skills that their industry needs now. […] But in a way they’re making the same mistake as those who saw ICT as a way of preparing kids for the world of work by training them to use Microsoft Office […] What governments don’t seem to understand is that software is the nearest thing to magic that we’ve yet invented. It’s pure “thought stuff” – which means that it enables ingenious or gifted people to create wonderful things out of thin air. All you need to change the world is imagination, programming ability and access to a cheap PC.

So, here we’ve got two justifications: Livingstone and Hope have a business justification. Naughton thinks we should teach proper computing in schools because it potentially enables kids to produce wonderful things that might change the world. I have a funny feeling the former might be more convincing for the Tories, and I’ve got no objection to fitting the message to the target audience.

But I’ve got a better reason than both, I think. The reason I think programming ought to be taught in schools is simple: it is real, practical, applied logic. There are people on philosophy courses who really struggle with the logic, and battle through logic textbooks, eventually mastering it. But if you write code, everything you learn in logic gets felt deep in your bones. The process of taking some kind of hand-wavy specification and turning it into a working machine, where the cogs and gears and pipes of that machine are pure logic? The government seem to want vocationally useful training that still has academic quality: unlike “leisure and tourism studies” or an A-level from McDonald’s, computer science gives you that.

Teaching people to code might lead them to create something cool, and it might mean that software companies can hire lots of talented programmers in the future. But the primary reason we should teach programming, in my opinion, is simply because it is a bloody good way of instilling logic into one’s mental toolkit, along with that nice, vague “problem solving” that is so often considered a “soft skill” or “key skill” or whatnot. There is a valuable moral lesson too: when you want to solve problems, you have to break them down and solve each step as logically as straight-forwardly as possible. That kind of attitude might help contribute to making society less dominated by utter bullshit.

Structuring a solution to a programming problem is essentially a pragmatic form of conceptual analysis. Writing decent, non-bloated code? Ockham’s Razor. Plenty of logic. Unit testing? Well, when did you last read an analytic philosophy paper that didn’t include a whole stack of intuition-prodding examples with which to compare proposed theories? If all the philosophers haven’t been forced to drink hemlock in order to save money in the higher education budget, and they find that they are particularly pedantic, they could even go study philosophy…

Bell Pottinger behind the scenes

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 21:29:00 +0000

This post has been removed at the request of fellow Wikipedia administrators who are concerned about revealing deleted information. Personally, I disagree with this, and think that when it comes to a major scandal like Bell Pottinger, the public have a right to know as much as possible, so long as it doesn’t breach confidentiality. Until there is community consensus on the appropriateness of such publication, I have removed this post.

Turning off notification sounds for muted threads in Gmail on Android?

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 19:40:40 +0000

At the weekend I bought a new phone, a Samsung Galaxy S2. It’s very nice, blah blah. I’ll write up a long post about Android sometime soon.

But I’ve got a bit of a tech support question.

I’ve got the Gmail app that comes with the phone, and I have it set to give me notifications when I get new e-mail. I know this will probably drive me completely apeshit very quickly, so I might turn it off. But it is actually mostly useful.

The only thing is it seems to not be very smart about what it notifies me over. It seems to notify me over every new message in the inbox, even muted threads. I reported a bug with Firefox a while back, and someone just got around to submitting a patch for it this evening, and there have been a few developers commenting on the patch and changing Bugzilla statuses and so on. Which is fine, but it gets annoying. This seems like the ideal case for muting at thread.

I don’t need a notification every time it happens, but it’s still inbox material as the first message to come through for months since reporting it is interesting and I don’t want to write a rule to send it to the same label as all the crappy notifications I get about people following me on Twitter.

Only the Android Gmail app doesn’t seem to have a way to let me change this. I could have it only notify me on Priority Inbox messages, which might do the job as then muted threads are highly unlikely to make it in. But I’m not sure I want that. Any advice?

Code noodling contest: functionalize this

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 00:33:42 +0000

Learning moment for me. I’ve been learning functional programming for a while, but was faced with an interesting little challenge today. I’ll spare you the problem domain, which is rather boring, and simply give you what’s needed…

A function that takes a positive (that is n>=1) integer, calculate the number of times this number is divisible by 16, and how many times the remainder is divisible by 8, and how many times the remainder of that is divisible by 4, and how many times the remainder of that is divisible by 2. Return each of these values in a key-value structure similar to Ruby’s Hash.

My mind immediately leapt to “oh, this is a perfect fit for some kind of functional technique! Who needs variables?” And then I sat down and tried to write something and my brain very quickly turned to jelly, and I gave in and wrote a very quick imperative version.¹ Which looks like this:

Which is fine and will do the job. But, here’s the challenge to any of my FP-loving readers. Feel free to code-golf the hell out of this. Lisp/Clojure, Scala, Haskell, OCaml, Ruby, Python, JavaScript: whatever your poison, show me how much I suck for using variables. The prize? I might nick your solution and quietly put it into production. And you get over 9000 nerdpoints. And the warm feeling of satiating my curiosity. I don’t care if you don’t output necessarily the same data structures, but you do have to output the right values given the same input.²

Why? My new standard practice with the client in question is to sit down with them at a computer, and if they describe some potentially complex business rule, try and write a simple implementation of the rule in the form of a Ruby (or Python or Scala or whatever) function and verify that it does vaguely what they want. I then chuck it in the bug tracker so when I implement it, I have some nice readable, compilable pseudocode rather than a vague specification. In many cases, implementation is just a matter of writing tests, putting it in the context of the class, documenting and updating the UI and so on. ↩
If you feel like cluttering your example code up with checks to make sure non-positive non-integers raise an exception, feel free. But that’s not really what I’m interested in. ↩

"Police officers told a member of the public they were prohibited from bringing “political materials”..."

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 13:50:00 +0000

“Police officers told a member of the public they were prohibited from bringing “political materials” into the Houses of Parliament”

- Police attempt to ban “political materials” from House of Commons

Start with the politicians, I say.

"A 61-year-old Halifax County man died Tuesday, a day after police shocked him with a stun gun while..."

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 13:42:59 +0000

“A 61-year-old Halifax County man died Tuesday, a day after police shocked him with a stun gun while he was riding his bike, family members said.”

- Halifax County man dies after being shot with stun gun

I was on the train recently and saw something that to anyone competent at using a computer is a bit...

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 09:40:00 +0000

I was on the train recently and saw something that to anyone competent at using a computer is a bit like the sound of nails on a chalkboard.

Across the aisle from me was a man with a MacBook Pro. He had open Numbers, Apple’s spreadsheet software.

He had a list of figures in the spreadsheet. He wanted to do some arithmetic on the same column in each row and have the resulting value fill the column directly to the right of it.

He had found a method for doing this.

For each value in the spreadsheet, he looked at it, stored the value in his brain, hit the button on his keyboard (F4) to open the Dashboard (OS X’s gallery of helpful widgets), manually clicked the number into the calculator Dashboard widget using the trackpad, stored the resulting value in his brain, hit F4 to close the Dashboard, then typed said value into the spreadsheet.

I’ve seen people pull out a calculator to crank numbers while sitting in front of a computer, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone doing anything quite so elaborately strange with a computer for quite some time.

I sat there wanting to say “you know, you could just write an expression in the first row, then use fill down, that way if one of the values changes, the calculated value will also change”. But I didn’t.

Someone once said that Excel was the world’s most widely used functional programming language. I’m so glad to see that both functional programming and cargo-cult programming have reached mainstream acceptance.

Bad code: it’s everywhere.

Sounding the death Knol

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:46:02 +0000

Business Insider in 2008:

Google Launches Wikipedia Killer “Knol”

Google in 2011:

Knol will work as usual until April 30, 2012, and you can download your knols to a file and/or migrate them to WordPress.com. From May 1 through October 1, 2012, knols will no longer be viewable, but can be downloaded and exported. After that time, Knol content will no longer be accessible.

Business Insider, hyperbole much?

Why WebFonts matter

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 23:30:00 +0000

I want to share a font that changed my life.

This is a paragraph from this page on Malayalam Wikipedia. The article is about Simone de Beauvoir. (You could tell, right?)

I listen in on the web design community. It’s often very interesting, but can be a little bit narrow. When WebFonts first came out, the discussions were about type foundries and putting DRM on type and how WebFonts would never work because of the lack of copy protection.

And, yes, typography designers will now have to work out what their business models are. They may follow the music industry and try to sue everyone into oblivion. Because that has worked real well.

But that doesn’t matter. The Web as universal archive is so much more important than whether or not existing industries can continue making money. Napster may have pissed off the music industry, but it helped build an enormous library of human creativity.

Designers look at the web and see that it needs civilizing, it needs design. It needs beauty. It’s been designed–if you dare use that word–by philistine programmers who spend fourteen hours a day staring at white text against a black background in some godforsaken text editor like Emacs or Vim. They never went to art school and they prefer reading Perl manuals to reading Keats. They probably use Android, not iOS.

They are right (although I did briefly go to art school). The web is ugly. And WebFonts might not help. The type foundries may or may not jump on to WebFonts. The DRM schemes may or may not happen. And it doesn’t matter.

The reason WebFonts is vitally important is because of the key role of typography. Typography is to make things readable. And they currently aren’t for hundreds of millions of people around the world because there are many, many languages that don’t have fonts. There are 35.9 million people who speak Malyalam. Up until recently, they couldn’t use the web in their own language. At the end of the fiscal year 2010, Apple had sold 73.5 million iPhones.

Malayalam fonts and input methods means Malayalam now has a blogging community, it now has a vibrant Wikipedia and Wikisource. The Malayalam Wikipedia community have been distributing Wikipedia and Wikisource on CD to schools in India: WebFonts means that the CD they distribute need only contain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which means that it can work on any computer that has a web browser on it.

What’s more important to the world: that smartphone users in the West have a “beautiful user experience” with pretty typography, or that the “rest of the world” as we so frequently call them can actually read and write on the Web? How you answer that question will tell you how important WebFonts will be for you. For me, everyone being able to have the chance to participate in the World Wide Web is far more important than making sure the privileged few have a more magical user experience.

WebFonts are important because language requires type, and access to one’s own language is about as profound a social justice issue as you can find. As the early Wittgenstein said, the limits of my language are the limits of my world. If you can’t type or read your language online, your world is not part of the World Wide Web. That needs fixing.

Is deletion driving editors away?

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 16:29:05 +0000

In the constant debate about Wikipedia, one trope often brought up is the idea that deletion of articles drives away contributors, and that this may be one cause of the decline in the total number of editors at English Wikipedia. In feedback regarding the current fundraiser, this has been brought up: people say they would support Wikipedia but for rampant deletionism.

There’s only one small problem.

It seems the number of deletion nominations is going down.

In response to the claim made above, I checked the Articles for Deletion log. I checked the same day (the 20th) every month since January 2007. In 2007, every single day log page I checked had over 90 closed nominations, and most had over a hundred. One even had 156. This has seemed to decline: this year, in the eight day logs I sampled (January through August), the highest number of nominations closed in a day has been 90.

This is, of course, an extremely limited study: I picked only 57 data points: I was doing it by hand, and didn’t want to spend more than an hour or so compiling the data.

There are, of course, many other issues here: it may be that we are deleting the same number of articles, but just not doing it through the AfD process: instead, the CSD and PROD process are being used more, and admins might be doing IAR (“ignore all rules”) deletions. To get a full picture, we’d obviously have to factor in CSD and PROD deletes, and to compare these figures to the number of articles created. (It may be we are deleting less articles because there are less incoming articles that need deleting.)

But I think this gives us good reason to lower our confidence in the hypothesis that deletion is the cause of editor retention issues. There are plenty of other potential causes (obligatory link to the Huggle research).

Hackdiary: Wikihacking in Brighton

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 22:21:00 +0000

This weekend, I went down to Brighton for the MediaWiki Hackathon. I’m not a MediaWiki developer, and I only really do PHP when I need to. I do have access to the Toolserver which is a live, read-only mirror of the databases that power the Wikimedia projects. This is very useful: if I need to, I can log in via SSH, type in sql -r enwiki_p and run SQL queries against Wikipedia.

So, what did I build at the Hackathon?

Not as much as I’d like. The four regular MediaWiki developers there smashed lots of bugs¹. Me? I worked on a few different things.

Open Plaques

I helped Jez from Open Plaques with the MediaWiki API, specifically Open Plaques can start using Wikimedia Commons to host images of plaques. A while back, I started pushing at Open Plaques to have Commons as an alternative file host to Flickr. Currently, Open Plaques recommends that you take a photo, CC license it, then post it on Flickr with a machine tag, and then Open Plaques pulls it in, and Flickr links to Open Plaques.

But Open Plaques could also support Commons in three ways:

By making it easy to add images from Commons.
We might be able to export all the license compatible files from Flickr to Commons, but with added metadata from Open Plaques (OP data is public domain although the photos are under various CC licenses, not all of which are Commons compatible).
Using Commons as a file hosting back-end: when people come to Open Plaques, they could upload photos directly to Open Plaques, and we’d then push them straight on to Commons and use that as a file host. They’d obviously have to agree to the relevant license and so on.

The first thing is a fairly straightforward one: being able to simply provide a Commons URL and then extract image metadata and the path to the image. That’s relatively easy, and it looks like that might be something we can add.

Scala

After Jez left, I tried to work out what to do next. I decided it might be useful to have an API library in my trendier-than-thou functional programming language of choice, Scala. On the bus home, I made a few notes about the general design of such a library. After a bit of noodling with Maven, I actually got to the point where i could type mvn compile.

That I have to play these silly games every time I start a new Scala project is profoundly depressing. I basically either need to stop being a wimp and fully embrace SBT 0.10/0.11, or I need to write myself a new Maven archetype that does Scala properly and has all the libraries I want. And to wrap said archetype in a command line alias called something like “scala-new-project”. Scala is supposed to be a fun, pragmatic and functional (in the sense of not-dysfunctional) language. Choosing between SBT and Maven is basically a choice between choosing a build system designed by hipsters and a build system designed by enterprise people. Whatever choice you make you will regret.

My build still has one major issue: mvn scala:console gives me errors, and JLine still buggers up my shell after I exit the damn console.

Databinder Dispatch is a breath of fresh air. It is intimidating at first to use a library where 70% of it seems to be punctuation, but the design decisions make sense. For using the MediaWiki API, it’s actually very easy: you can basically do each different thing as a series of layered objects. Firstly, you construct a Request object that points to the API endpoint (MediaWiki isn’t a RESTful API), then you use the <:< pseudo-operator to add all the relevant headers (specifically User-Agent), and then you can do it again to add in the authentication token (cookies rather than OAuth, but the principle is the same). Then, finally, you can simply provide a Map of the query you are sending, and then you supply an inline response handler.

I haven’t yet gotten anywhere particularly interesting with the Scala library, but I’ve got some good ideas. It’s currently in a closed repo. When it sucks less, I’ll release it. That might not be for some time, sadly.

VMs, vagrants and maintenance/dev/

Over the weekend, I mentioned to one of the experienced MediaWiki developers about one of the things that puts me off MediaWiki hacking: dependencies. Hacking on MediaWiki generally means having a working MySQL install and a working Apache install, and so on. This can be a giant pain-in-the-ass on OS X, as the bazillions of tutorials on how to set them all up in the right way has shown. There’s a reason why people are using things like Vagrant and other VM based systems. The same sort of quasi-VM type strategy seems to be happening with RVM, the Ruby Version Manager, which the Ruby community nicked from Python’s virtualenv. Obviously, if you are in Javaland, you are running in a VM… the JVM.

But PHP is a bit more of a pain: this is the downside of being built around the very reasonable use case of “I want to be able to FTP it onto my server and have it work”. What you lose in the development stage, you more than make up for in deployment.

At this point, someone pointed me to this discussion on wikitech-l.

The current bleeding edge MediaWiki basically has a script/server, and a built-in SQLite. It’s almost like… Rails! You simply run maintenance/dev/install.php and it downloads PHP 5.4, and sets you up a development version of MediaWiki that uses PHP 5.4’s built in web server. You can then just run maintenance/dev/start.sh and it’ll boot up on port 4881.

There was one slight hiccup: the PHP 5.4 build script didn’t like the fact that i had a space in one of the names of a parent directory to the SVN checkout of MediaWiki and borked. I quickly renamed it to remove the space and it compiled fine. Once the initial compile was done, I can now boot up a new, clean MediaWiki install in a few seconds. This makes it dramatically easier to start hacking on MediaWiki.

And now.

Although I didn’t do any MediaWiki hacking over the weekend, I’ve just assigned to myself an issue. Lemme see if I can get some of my code running on Wikipedia…

After I took that photo, they finished work on a really tough bug involving GeSHi. ↩