What a lovely euphemism.

See how you’d stack up as a 1930s husband or wife.

62 As a 1930s husband, I am Superior Take the test!

Golly gosh!

Time difference from broadcast to posting on iPlayer: 1 hour
Time difference from broadcast to availability (in presumably higher quality) via BitTorrent: 2 hours

Impressive no? Especially as the BitTorrent release groups have to re-encode the stuff before posting it.

I’ve been there since yesterday - for reasons which I won’t mention in case I jinx something - and the whole place has seemingly been transformed. The Limmatquai, the main street which runs along the river, has been turned into a fan mile, with a carnival atmosphere and all sorts of scrumptious food. There’s a lot of live music going on and a huge Fan Zone has been set up at the botttom of the street. A lot of the local shops have special Euro 2008 lines and window displays, and the Euro seems to be accepted as an ersatz currency (though I think that’s the case for most touristy areas here anyway). And fans are being given free public transport throughout Switzerland and Austria on match days as part of their match tickets.

There were reports that Scotland was on hand to take over should Switzerland fail to prepare sufficiently. Unless Zürich is an anomalous example then I can’t take these reports as anything more than UEFA grandstanding (ho ho ho).

On a separate note, my passport was checked while entering Ireland from the UK on the way here. What gives, Common Travel Area?

If you haven’t used Pownce before - it’s a microblogging tool, like Twitter, but it has quite a few nice features that Twitter doesn’t have - such as private messaging, file upload and link sharing.

Twitter has many more users but it also goes down pretty regularly, which makes it a little frustrating to use. So feel free to follow me on Pownce. There’s a link below to my profile.

The University then informs the police that this communterrorist literature has been trafficked, and the police arrest the MA student (Rizwaan Sabir) and detain him for six days without charge, after which they release him after confirming that the document was ‘illegal’. Then, they arrest the PA friend (Hicham Yezza) on immigration charges, set a date for an immigration hearing, then drop the charges in favour of a summary process involving no hearing (he’s set to be deported to Algeria on 1st June).

Starters for 10:

• How was Nottingham made aware that the material had been downloaded? Network snooping? Informants?
• How has Nottingham shown its commitment to academic freedom?
• As the prevailing leader in the discourse of security theatre, is a document available on a US government public website likely to be so dangerous it shouldn’t be seen by academic researchers, of all people?
• Should the UK government be judging what is and is not dangerous material?
• Why no fair hearing for Yezza?
• Should I securely erase my copies of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, von Clausewitz’ On War, my copies of Al-Qaeda ’statements’ and other materials I collected for my Security Studies class?
• When will the book burnings commence, and will they be carbon-neutral?

Incidentally, the offending document was on the US Department of Justice’ website…

If you know more about this story, please leave a comment.

More: Free Hicham Yezza blog, The Guardian, International Herald Tribune

Update: Here’s the offending material itself.

Update 2: More coverage at The Independent, ThisIsNottingham.co.uk and The Canadian Press. Still nothing from BBC News.

A teenager is facing prosecution for using the word “cult” to describe the Church of Scientology.

The unnamed 15-year-old was served the summons by City of London police when he took part in a peaceful demonstration opposite the London headquarters of the controversial religion.

Officers confiscated a placard with the word “cult” on it from the youth, who is under 18, and a case file has been sent to the Crown Prosecution Service.

A date has not yet been set for him to appear in court.

The decision to issue the summons has angered human rights activists and support groups for the victims of cults.

The incident happened during a protest against the Church of Scientology on May 10. Demonstrators from the anti-Scientology group, Anonymous, who were outside the church’s £23m headquarters near St Paul’s cathedral, were banned by police from describing Scientology as a cult by police because it was “abusive and insulting”.

Full story

“Overthrowing Government on a Budget”

“Rembrandt, Pr0n and Robot Monkeys: Lessons From the Present About Flesh and Technology”

“Tracking Arms Dealers with Python and Bits of String”

From the Open Tech 2008 line-up.

Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that Scottish politics is changing, and that it is having important implications for the assumptions that UK politics is based on.

The incumbent UK Prime Minister is Scottish and in a spot of bother* over the 10p rate of income tax, a poor showing in the local elections and a general impression of being out of touch (and other trivial matters**). As a traditionally strong source of support for the Labour party, the current troubles of the Scottish Labour Party are causing severe worries for the UK party.

In the past few weeks, the issue of a referendum on Scottish independence has come to the fore oncemore. The Scottish National Party, the largest party in the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood and a minority administration, is committed to introducing a referendum in 2010. The Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander attempted to outmanoeuvre the SNP by declaring support for an immediate referendum (her mind, it is said, was changed during an interview on a BBC show). The threat was empty: Scottish Parliament legislative rules prevent private members’ Bills being introduced if the government of the day is planning to legislate on the same issue, so the SNP referendum bill would take trumps. Alexander’s move spectacularly backfired, leaving UK PM Gordon Brown having misled the UK Parliament about her views and the two sections of the party dramatically out of step, with the UK party opposed and the Scottish party committed.

And Alex Salmond (SNP First Minister of Scotland) looking even more smug than usual.

What can we say for sure? There will be a referendum on independence in 2010, after Salmond’s National Conversation finishes up. It is unimaginable that Labour could go back on that now. But the devil will be in the detail - wording matters greatly to the result, as does the selection of options present.

And the result? Anyone’s guess. Polls show anywhere between 25% and 75% support, depending on the questions asked. But an option is likely to be included offering greater powers for Holyrood - an option which would have overwhelming support. The presence of a Tory government in the UK Parliament might be enough to tip the scales toward independence.

Gerry Hassan from Demos provides an excellent summary of the issues leading up to the events of the past two weeks:

 

Gerry Hassan on The Unravelling of Labour Britain   (via Scottish Futures)

The advent of devolution created two different political systems in Scotland: the Scottish Parliament and Westminster. In the later Labour dominance still continues – the only part of Scotland still elected now by First Past The Post and the only part where Labour have a majority of the seats on their customary minority of the vote.

The Scottish Parliament is elected by a broadly proportionally system which means that all political parties are parliamentary minorities. From the first elections in 1999 which Labour finished as the leading party, the SNP established themselves as the clear challengers and opposition to Labour.

Thus, from the onset of the Parliament the dynamics of the two institutions and the parties within them have beat to a different pulse. The party sits in Holyrood in a Parliament where its main opponents sit to the left of them and unashamedly stress their Scottish credentials. At Westminster Labour have most often had to worry about losing votes and winning them from the right and a party emphasising its British qualities. Scottish Labour and British Labour have also had very different internal cultures and external strategies.

 Scottish Labour has had to emphasise its ‘bridge building’ qualities – stressing its Scottish qualities at Holyrood and its British at Westminster. It has had to do this with nuance and a deft touch: while being Scottish at Holyrood also emphasising the merits of the British union and at Westminster using its British agenda to sometimes stress the need for greater sensitivity to Scottish concerns. Pre-devolution the Scottish party under such titans as Thomas Johnston and Willie Ross managed this ‘bridge building’ strategy with great aplomb; it is the dynamics of the Scottish Parliament and devolution which have created the circumstances which have made this more difficult.

* Diplomatic license utilised

** And again

The new politics of EU internal security:

This is area of international co-operation that has long been the exclusive domain of national governments. For over 20 years, interior ministries – meeting in the EU, UN and Council of Europe – have quietly agreed and implemented inter-governmental agreements on internal security and judicial co-operation between themselves. There was little need to accommodate outside views and concerns. Now officials look nervously to 2009 when euro-parliamentarians should begin to use their new authority.

The ministries are right to be anxious. The European Parliament’s civil liberties and justice and home affairs (JHA) body – known as the LIBE committee – has made no secret of its intention to exercise the new powers to the full. The committee wants to reverse a trend in EU decision-making on terrorism, crime and immigration that many parliamentarians feel is wrongly skewed towards state security at the expense of civil liberties. For example, MEPs have been wary of the member-states’ eagerness to create databases and new information-sharing arrangements for terrorism and other cross-border crimes. They complain that the member-states are conspicuously less interested in reaching an agreement on data protection legislation needed to ensure such data is not mis-used.

That is, of course, after Ireland is coaxed into a ‘yes’ vote on the Lisbon treaty itself.

There has not been much debate on the costs of intergovernmentalism, and Council dominance in these areas of European integration. In Britain particularly, justice and home affairs is the area where national governments have been most keen to be seen to preserve national vetoes.

Perhaps as Lisbon rolls out, the parameters of the debate will change as the benefits of European Parliament involvement become clear.

It still amazes me that Universal even bothered to file a takedown request for this in the first instance. Then again, the DMCA makes it so easy for them to do so that they’d be foolish not to file.

Anyway, here he is (along with his very busy sister):

Judge Dismisses DMCA-Abuse Lawsuit Over Video Of Baby Dancing To Prince (TechDirt)

This particular gentleman started off with something like that, and then embarked on a musical odyssey which took in Mellow Yellow by Donovan, I Fought The Law by the Clash, a couple of The Jam songs and finally (and it had all been going so well) I Predict A Riot by the Kaiser Chiefs.

2. There’s something recognisable in this scene from Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (hilarious series btw):

In Space.

Unfortunately, I’m now permanently emotionally scarred. No matter.

Make sure you download the 500MB version from one of the mirrors listed on the LiveJournal page. YouTube doesn’t do it justice.

Kings of Power 4 Billion%:

Kings of Power 4 Billion% [12 min AVI] - A new release from pixel artist Paul Robertson, known for such previous works as the video for "Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006" and Architecture in Helinski’s "Do The Whirlwind."

(Via .)

Germany’s highest court apparently had memories of Nazi and Stasi abuses in mind when it ruled on a series of surveillance and data privacy cases this year. In the most recent ruling, made today in Karlsruhe, the Constitutional Court found that Germany’s recent data retention directive targeting ISPs and telephone companies was problematic; going forward, the data retention will still be mandatory, but the information can only be accessed with a warrant and only for serious crimes.

Also from the same article:

The ruling follows other, similar rulings this year. Last week, the court also struck down indiscriminate license plate monitoring in the states of Schleswig-Holstein and Hesse, saying that authorities needed to have a reason for running people’s plates. The court hoped to prevent the creation of automated systems that track movement around the country.

Via Ars Technica.

And how did they restore it???

Spotted on BBC News online.

I had noticed aggressive image compression on certain sites - the Youtube logo looks pretty terrible, for example - but I had assumed that it was done at the website and appplied selectively to IP ranges or browser User-Agents that are likely to be mobile phones. While this does sometimes happen, it seems that both O2 and T-Mobile (and probably others) also dynamically recompress images coming across their network.

This is:

a: Annoying, given that I’d rather see the real internet on my phone - after all this is the point of having a fast HSDPA connection and a big screen

b: Intrusive, given that you don’t ask for it, they simply do it.

Of course, dynamic compression is not an unknown phenomenon - Opera’s mobile browsers and the BlackBerry Internet Service have done it for some time, but in those cases you expect it, and to some extent choose it. There’s no reason for it to be the default on the cell network.

Evidence:

A picture of an unreleased phone, downloaded via the plain-ol’ Internet:

O2’s version of it:

T-Mobile’s version of it (even worse):

At least the O2 version is at full size - the T-Mobile one is ridiculous. Of course, if you’re viewing this via either of these networks, all of the pictures probably look equally terrible

I’m going to try to find out if it’s possible to switch this off. It’s obviously aimed at saving them bandwidth, but it serves no purpose for the customer.

The Copyright in Sound Recordings and Performers’ Rights (Term Extension) Bill was objected to by an as-yet anonymous MP during its second reading on 7th March, which is Good News, and should finish it off.

The Bill’s draft text was published, which revealed that retrospective term extension for existing works - what we all wish to avoid for countless reasons - was included:

Copyright in Sound Recordings and Performers’ Rights (Term Extension) Bill
Part 2, Sections 4-5

4. Copyright in sound recordings: interpretation

(1) In the provisions of this Part relating to copyright—

(a) “existing”, in relation to a sound recording, means made before commencement, and

(b) “existing copyright work” means a sound recording in which copyright subsisted immediately before commencement.

(2) For the purposes of those provisions a sound recording of which the making extended over a period shall be taken to have been made when its making was completed.

5. Duration of copyright in sound recordings: application of new provisions

The new provisions relating to duration of copyright in sound recordings

apply—

(a) to copyright works made after commencement,

(b) to existing sound recordings which first qualify for copyright protection after commencement, and

(c) to existing copyright works, subject to section 4,

and nothing in this Act shall operate to revive copyright in an existing sound recording in which the copyright has at the date of commencement expired under the 1988 provisions or any earlier enactment relating to copyright.

The term chosen was 95 years.

The reading was rescheduled for 14th March (yesterday) due to time constraints, but as yet Hansard has not revealed what happened during that debate. If anyone knows, please email me or leave a comment.

I must thank my MP, Tom Harris, for acknowledging my letter.

There’s an elephant in the room, however. A similar move has been proposed at by the European Commission. Check the petitition page for more information, and do check out the excellent FT article on the subject by Professor James Boyle, co-director of Duke Law school’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

Should I be concerned??