May 2012
6 posts
2 tags
“Over the years Rational has seen and tried a variety of approaches, but they...”
– Interview: IBM on the Linked Data Platform
4 tags
IE10 will ship with Flash, after all, but... →
That is, Flash is supported for only those popular but legacy web sites that need it. This feature is not broadly available for all sites.
(Apparently).
2 tags
RIAA claims Limewire damages should be $72Tn →
That’s more than:
all of the money in the world;
the cumulative sum of money that the entire music industry has made since Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877.
1 tag
A4e mandatory placement in... a strip club →
I’m all for strip clubs under the right conditions, but one generally accepts that they’re not going to be everybody’s bag.
1 tag
Man slashes wrists in JobCentre →
1 tag
“a political system that values debate-winning over truth-seeking, and openly...”
– Geeks, rise! — Martin Robbins, writing in the Guardian
Man speaks sense.
April 2012
5 posts
2 tags
“The incident at the O2 was eventually resolved after guards called police, who...”
– O2 Olympic venue in row over security against legal photography
Clearly a worthwhile invocation of the Terrorism Act and well-reasoned decision not to pursue further, then?
1 tag
“Monkey is increasingly convinced that Twenty Twelve’s Ian “so...”
– Media Monkey’s Diary
Email and web use 'to be monitored' under new laws →
The government will be able to monitor the calls, emails, texts and website visits of everyone in the UK under new legislation set to be announced soon.
(Not an April Fools’ prank)
See also my response when this was proposed by the last government.
3 tags
“Where April 1st falls on a Saturday, Sunday or Bank Holiday, April Fools Day...”
– Banking and Financial Dealings Act 1971 (dated December 1971, before you ask)
March 2012
17 posts
Alice and Bob and Linked Data
Alice: Hi, I’m Alice. You might remember me from danbri’s post to public-lod.
Bob: Hello again.
Alice: So, you want to share your in-house thesaurus in the Web as ‘Linked Data’ in SKOS?
Bob: Let’s just assume you’ve handed over the data stick and we’ve got as far as confirming that it’s well-formed RDF/XML, shall we?
Alice: Sure thing.
Bob: Okay, now what?
Alice:...
“Mowat told MediaGuardian: “There is no evidence that anything illegal went...”
– From BBC pays 3,000 freelancers through personal service companies.
Here’s the rub: the BBC, like most other large corporations, takes people on for short periods under temporary contracts through service companies. This should be no surprise whatsoever to anybody who’s worked… at all. The...
3 tags
European Parliament Blocks Copyright Reform With... →
WTF
2 tags
International Teletext Art Festival →
Excellent.
2 tags
4 tags
Provisioning keys and provenance
This one’s been bugging me for a while.
One of the issues which has caused issues for the adoption of standardised PKI in serious applications (such as banking) has been that of provisioning: you don’t want your customers storing the keys to your particular castle in a software keystore because the risk of compromise is too great.
The traditional approaches to this have either been to...
2 tags
Academy row school governors sacked by Michael... →
What the hell?
2 tags
“Meanwhile, in partnership with the BBC, Arts Council England is launching The...”
– Mark Thompson’s speech to the Royal Television Society on March 14th 2012.
Nice to get a plug. Ithankyew.
2 tags
Fired For Using Birth Control? It Could Be... →
Insane.
3 tags
2,000 Suspended Tennis Balls Appear to Bounce... →
4 tags
Howling raises idea of ‘Freeview Smart’, with... →
Freeview managing director Ilse Howling raised the possibility that connected TV services could reach a mass audience on Freeview without the need for a YouView set-top box at today’s Digital Television Group (DTG) summit in London.
Pick a box, any box…
2 tags
Apple’s TV Dream Revealed →
Guess we’ll see. Or won’t. Who knows?
3 tags
YouTube shows Silicon Valley how it can beat... →
5 tags
Blurting it out? →
The war on FOI continues.
3 tags
Signatories | Coalition for Marriage →
67,962 (at the time of writing) bigoted selfish twazzocks.
8 tags
Revealed: government plans for police... →
What could possibly go wrong?
January 2012
20 posts
3 tags
DWP Benefits Cap Impact Assessment →
If you look at nothing else, scroll to the charts.
2 tags
Capped
A small note regarding the “£26k benefits cap”:—
Lots of people seem to be talking as though the benefits being paid are exclusively (or, at the very least, predominantly) to those seeking work. In other words, if they found work then these benefits would go away. This is the justification for capping to an “average” salary — pay too much in benefits to the unemployed, then you’re providing a...
2 tags
European court of human rights: which countries... →
The UK was found against for lack of effective investigation on five occasions, not to have offered a fair trial on three occasions, and to have failed its duty on prohibition of torture twice.
See also this.
2 tags
BMJ: Does anyone understand the government’s NHS... →
In a Personal View published on bmj.com today, he writes: “I have tried very hard, as have some of my cleverer colleagues, but no matter how hard we try, we always end up concluding that the bill means something quite different from what the secretary of state says it does.”
2 tags
Ariel: Learning to make competition-winning ideas →
Nassé and BBC North director Peter Salmon also decided to commission Mega Bits, an idea from runner-ups Chris Tangye and James Parkin in Future Media, which encourages children to write computer code.
Excellent.
1 tag
Islington Council admits tree sign 'error' →
A council has warned residents not to attach objects to trees - in a notice attached to a tree.
1 tag
3 tags
Church refuses boy with Down's syndrome Holy... →
In its letter, the diocese said Denum had “limited concentration, doesn’t really access the RE curriculum and does not enjoy going to Mass”.
It said if Denum took his first Holy Communion when he was “better placed to understand” it would “enrich his whole experience”.
Pretty sensible, I would have thought. Faith is (meant to be) a personal thing, and...
3 tags
BBC names David Shukman as first science editor →
Definitely a role which needed creating.
3 tags
Rodong Sinmun →
North Korea’s official newspaper, featuring such headlines as S. Korean Traitors’ Group to Stop Playing Disgusting Trick, All Koreans to Open Gate to National Reunification, and Russian Organization Discusses Measures for Introducing Immortal Exploits of Great Men.
4 tags
BASF to Stop Selling Genetically Modified Products... →
leejarvis:
Hooray, Europe! Lesson to everyone - you can vote with your wallet - if it doesn’t make “business sense” then corporations won’t try and sell you crap!
So BASF is no longer doing the R&D in Europe, but will still import the products. The potato in question, incidentally is used… for…
(wait for it)
…making paper.
It’s difficult to see this as a victory for common sense.
3 tags
What is WebID?
WebID is a W3C Incubator Group (soon to be, and possibly by the time you read this already, a W3C Community Group) specifying a mechanism for using X.509 End Entity (or “client”) certificates to identify yourself to online services, and for performing attribute exchange through Linked Data.
WebID works like this:
You generate, or obtain, an X.509 certificate for yourself. It doesn’t really...
2 tags
The Rise of the New Groupthink →
Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.
While this may be a study of the bleedin’ obvious, the message has yet to sink in for many designing working environments.
5 tags
3 tags
A polite request
Dear The Newspaper Industry,
I pay for your content—in electronic form, no less. I’ve tried a few different ways of doing this, but my present favourite is a Kindle subscription. I receive The News when I wake up in the morning and read it on my commute. Splendid.
What I’m unable to fathom is why the content which is delivered to my device and I have paid actual money for is a subset of...
5 tags
Microsoft hustled UK retreat on open standards,... →
The British government withdrew its open standards policy after lobbying from Microsoft, it has been revealed in a Cabinet Office brief leaked to Computer Weekly.
Bunch of knobbers.
3 tags
Home Office: The local labour market effects of... →
The perception that immigrants take away jobs from the existing population, thus contributing to large increases in unemployment, or that immigrants depress wages of existing workers, do not find confirmation in the analysis of data laid out in this report.
4 tags
Israel vows to retaliate after credit cards are... →
Israel has said it will respond to cyber-attacks in the same way it responds to violent “terrorist” acts after the credit card details of thousands of its citizens were published online.
4 tags
Mac OS X: Adding a new Windows printer
Say you have a printer shared via Windows — and you want to add it as a new printing device in Mac OS X. You head to System Preferences, then either Print & Scan or Print & Fax depending upon your version, press the + button… and fail to find it in any of the sections. The Windows section doesn’t seem to provide anything useful.
There are two ways to do achieve what you want.
One is to...
4 tags
Teachers warned over Facebook and Twitter use →
Jim Docherty, assistant secretary of the SSTA, told BBC Scotland that teachers should follow his advice: “First thing is don’t bother telling anybody else about your social life. Nobody is interested about your social life and it doesn’t help.
“Secondly, never make any comment about your work, about your employer, about teaching issues in general.
“There is...
December 2011
26 posts
5 tags
The iMessage/stolen phone thing
What Apple needs to do is (conceptually) really bloody simple: when a remote wipe occurs, or a device is activated without having iMessage/FaceTime credentials to hand (i.e., because it’s a factory reset rather than a restore-from-backup), remove the device’s UDID from iMessage’s and FaceTime’s respective databases.
And, er, that’s about it.
4 tags
Freedom Online: Joint Action for Free Expression... →
Endorsed by Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Estonia, Ghana, Ireland, Kenya, the Republic of Maldives, Mexico, Mongolia, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Sweden.
Irony.