Category Pointers

The return of the DPI

Ross Anderson writes about how the newly elected 'coalition' government in the UK plans to proceed with a controversial plan to mandate the installation of Deep Packet Inspection kits at ISPs in that country. I've written about DPI in the past, how it affects our liberty and provides little, to no, advantages for safeguarding national security. A few years ago Hellas was one of the best countries to live in, in terms of privacy; that was more due to the fact that the country has practically little to no governance where it comes to security than due to liberty and privacy respecting government agencies. DPI has been proposed under the pretext of national security and economic purposes (piracy fighting, bandwidth optimisation) and the technology has --- for a several years now --- allowed relatively cheap devices to be installed to practically all medium-sized or larger ISPs. I'd like to hope that sanity will prevail, but in a post 9/11 world civil liberties are not exactly a priority.

The Document Foundation

The greatest news for the project-formerly-known-as OpenOffice.org, since it became free software a decade ago. Let's hope that the new maintainers/leaders of the project and the commercial 'supporters' listed on the web site will make LibreOffice a worthy competitor in the age of cloud computing, SaaS and Google's impending dominance (viz. Google Apps) of the market.

Yes, Prime Minister.

No, this is not --- exactly --- about the legendary and much loved 1980s series by Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay, but the new play by the same writers. While I am quite uncertain anyone could portray Jim Hacker like Paul Eddington did, or Humphrey Appleby like Nigel Hawthorne (who both died in the past fifteen years), or even the pedantic and often whimsical Bernard Whooley, originally played by Derek Fowlds, these are moments I wish I were still in London. Yes, Prime Minister, the play, will be showing this year, for a limited season, at the Gielgud Theatre in London.

What's wrong with this?

Check out this table. A bunch of modern, high-quality, high-performing codecs. AAC+, AAC LC, enhanced AAC+, MP3. All decodable by Android, on all devices. Sadly, Android devices can only encode on AMR-NB at the sad sampling rate of 8KHz. At the miserable bitrate of 4.75 to 12.2kbps. At qualities unheard of since the early days of the telegraph (ok, I'm kidding --- AMR-NB is the voice codec most GSM and UMTS phonecalls are carried over). Now, you may be asking: Couldn't the manufacturer add encoding support for more audio codecs? Sure, and some do. Others, like HTC for example, don't. Even on high-end devices like the Desire. Devices with Qualcomm Snapdragon CPUs clocked at 1GHz. With hardware support for stereo AAC encoding. No, really, what on earth is wrong with these people. At the same time, HTC went into the hassle of adding encoding support for h.264 and 720p (using MPEG4). And it makes me wonder: that they added h.264 encoding support means they are at least clued up with respect to paying royalties, adding the codec to the system and making use of it. That they introduced 720p using MPEG4 on the other hand makes no sense: how useful is 720p video recording --- recently introduced with HTC's Froyo build for the Desire --- or the capability to record audio as a whole come to think of it, when the recorded audio on this phone sounds like a wax record from the 1880s, not least because of the totally backwards codec they use throughout, while one of the most powerful mobile device CPUs in the market today just sits there idling. Idiots.

The Books – The Way Out (2010)

The Books are back! After four --- long --- years The Books return with The Way Out. An album upon which they've worked for a year and a half, it is a gradual evolution of their fantastic work of the early to mid 2000s. Familiar, yet daring in parts, The Way Out felt like 'more of the same' at times, with some notable exceptions (e.g. 'I Didn't Know That'). The 'experiment' that was Books keeps going; The Way Out may be interesting, true to The Books heritage, and evolved, but somehow the end-result is not as immediately attractive as their previous works.

Nokia. A Company in Denial.

Arrogant. Disoriented. Unfocused. Accurate characterisations of Nokia? Perhaps. Still, who'd have thought in the early 2000s that the market leader of mobile phones, one of the most innovative companies in its field that owned the European market would be the dying king of the 2010s; high volume sales of silly feature phones, low profit margins, a chaotic software ecosystem, little to no mindshare in the most important, lucrative segments. Perpetually in denial about its ageing Symbian stack, its schizophrenic Maemo/Meego stack, its unstable, ever-changing APIs and the amateurish, mediocre, unpolished user-experience its products provide. So many unappealing devices. A nervous acquisition of Navteq in 2008 for $8.1bn upon that the company never capitalised, while Google and Tomtom keep offering less while gaining so much more from their users (e.g. Ovi Maps has had free navigation for a while and no one seems to care). Its repeated failed attempts to create a mobile service ecosystem/platform (n-gage, MOSH and now Ovi). Prediction: With the N8 not being out until later this year and already looking like a device that should've been out in 2009, Nokia's future certainly looks bleaker than it thinks. Unless it wakes up, ditches Symbian for good and makes Meego something more than the mickey-mouse platform it currently is soon, I can't see how it will ever manage to compete with the super-polished iOS or the lightspeed-evolving Android. (The verdict is still out on Windows Phone 7)

Rails3 Critique Tidbit: html_safe, raw() and h.

One of the most annoying thing with Rails has always been how it provides for convenience at the expense of uncertain (and sometimes shady) abstraction implementations. It's a great framework for prototyping, yet there are reasons why quite a few people are skeptical about it. Nevertheless, in the truest tradition of Ruby, Rails provides a pretty clean way to do web application development. Rails 3, the latest incarnation of the framework builds upon a solid foundation, offering great improvements in many areas. But not everywhere. Take for example the html_safe string escaping that supersedes 'h'. In Rails 3, all input strings are automatically escaped, unless the developer passes the string through raw() before the string. That's fine, as it's bound to make sloppy developers safer by forcing them to go out of their way to leave the string unescaped. One of the issues with this, however, is how the old way of escaping, 'h', is still around in some cases: say when you want to render a link using link_to and you use raw to provide formatting to your link (via span) and include some part of user provided input (as found in the example provided in the xss and scripting screencast at 02:20), then you have to resort --- once again --- to using 'h'. This is confusing and inconsistent; if all strings are automatically escaped, you'd expect input variables to be automatically escaped too, even if included in strings using raw().

Changing our mode of thinking

Despite appearances, this goes well beyond Marxism vs. Capitalism (thinking in such one-dimensional terms would be degrading to anyone doing so). The issues that have surfaced through the world economic crisis of the late 2000s could not have been part of a 'socioeconomic' theory from the 19th century, the 1930s or the 1950s or even a modern one. The debate should not be about whether Hayek/Friedman were right (they never were), whether Keynes was, or whether Marx's arguments hold any water nowadays (some still do, but a lot of them clearly don't). Economic theories usually seem to fail exactly because they try to explain human activity in simplistic terms while struggling to prove a central thesis. That's not how the world works however. Deregulation has meant that the global finance sector has really gone wild in the past thirty years or so, and --- in the end --- markets and the financial deregulation can and have failed with detrimental results to families, businesses and societies as a whole. We don't need to explain everything or prove a meaningless thesis regarding markets, statism or innovation; we don't need to explain human frailty, culture or institutions. If anything, the central argument here is that a viable capitalism is one that exists under a fair, well-defined set of rules, one that fosters innovation and competition and one that respects the dignity of the vast majority of the population, the environment and those extra-economic aspects of human civilisation, like the arts, philosophy and history. We're nowhere close to having that at the moment. Is it possible? [via talos]

Cartoonish stereotypes lurk just below the surface

Well here is the thing. Real, live Germans are not heartless ants, and the Greeks are not broke because they are giddy crickets who sing their summers away. Greece is a grown-up country with grown-up problems: rough, tough politics, and a lot of recent history, not all of it very nice. And it is precisely that recent history, and rough politics, that are at the core of Greece's fiscal woes today. Take the painful question of the huge public sector, and all those civil servants with jobs for life, and unusually generous retirement packages. The existence of those jobs for life is not a cultural quirk, in which Greek officials simply like coffee and backgammon too much to do any work. It is the end result of a brutal, multi-decade power struggle between the left and the right: a struggle that got people killed within living memory.
Spot on.

That Parade of Clichés that we call Cinema

Excellent, albeit over-the-top. But so are most Hollywood productions anyway. I mean over-the-top, not excellent. =)