The clocks went back a few hours ago as winter sets in. Over the last few years, more and more of my electronic devices have changed back on their own. I thought it might be interesting to see which devices had updated without manual intervention this time around.

Devices that wound back automatically?

A few years ago, Windows XP didn’t seem to update daylight saving time automatically for me, but Vista seems to be doing it perfectly. Interestingly, a few days ago, it reminded me the clocks would be going back on the dialog that is shown if you click the clock on the task bar.

As usual, my Nokia mobile phones had no problem, and both the Cisco and Snom VoIP phones also updated without any manual intervention, although I don’t know if that’s because they both synchronise with time from the server or because they know to change.

Devices that showed mixed results

The Sky box automatically updated however the Sony TV which it is plugged into did not. The Sony TVs do allow you to set up the time zone which was set to GMT and select automatic updating of daylight saving time, but the time was still out for some reason. I had problems setting this to BST before.

It would have been interesting to check what the electronic programme guide on the Sky box said prior to the change, i.e. whether it correctly showed the 01:00 to 02:00 a second time. It would appear that at least on the My Sky website, they are still running in BST, so probably the system needs manual re-setting at Sky.

A BT (pstn) phone it would appear doesn’t update automatically, but it will re-sync the time each time a phone call comes in (assuming Caller ID is enabled) and this effectively resets the time as soon as the first call is received after the clocks change.

Devices that needed manual resetting

I was a bit surprised to see the latest generation of Canon EOS Digital Cameras not update the time automatically. As expected, my old and trusted pager as well as an old fax machine (with Internet connectivity I should however add) didn’t wind the clock back automatically. Again another Sony digital TV exhibited the same problem.

I do wonder how long it will be until we don’t even notice when the clocks change.

Over the last few days, the power of the masses on the Internet has manifested itself, when users felt their rights to know what their elected representatives in parliament were saying, were being infringed.

On 12 October 2009, The Guardian published an article reporting a matter they could not report in language that resembles a poem:

“Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.”

(my emphasis)

Within hours, everyone in the country knew that this related to law firm Carter Ruck obtaining a ’super-injunction’ on behalf of Trafigura following the leaking of a document known as the ‘Minton Report’.

I have absolutely no basis for judging what actually happened, and I hope that there will be an investigation into the matter to bring out the full facts. However, what I am particularly interested in, is the way in which the Internet was so critical in frustrating an injunction.

One of the key reasons that the news spread so quickly, was the re-tweeting that took place on Twitter. Very soon the twitter hashtags ‘#carterruck’ and ‘#trafigura’ became so popular they appeared as a ‘trending’ topic. Trendmap produce this in a graphical form based on geography:

Trendmap of Twitter traffic showing #trafigura and #carterruck

The Guardian were very clever in publishing a cryptic article of this kind, as it was bound to lead its readers to find the information, and since it was not possible to serve an injunction on the whole population, the genie was out of the bag. The fact they agreed (according to Carter Ruck’s statement) to make a ’substantial contribution’ to Trafigura’s legal costs’ does however suggest the story may not quite be as simple. I can sort of understand why Trafigura might decide the costs of defending an action (potentially against the inability to recover costs even if they win) might mean a settlement is desirable, regardless of actual liability. There is then the question of whether parliamentary privilege was used as a way to circumvent an injunction.

What is clear is most people will now believe that Trafigura are bad guys and The Guardian are defenders of truth. Time will tell if this will be the case.

The morals…

Trafigura’s position is that this document is legally privileged and as an interim document, incomplete. I have to have some sympathy with that position, but in today’s society, this raises interesting questions, of how can we balance with the democratic ‘right to know’ in a free society whilst maintaining fairness at trial. We’ve seen actions in the past for infringement of privacy, something I certainly believe strongly in.

A parliamentary committee a couple of months or so ago, was looking into the effects of privacy laws that were effectively being formed in a court as a result of case law, rather than a full debate in parliament. As part of that process, Alan Rusbridger and Ian Hislop, editors of The Guardian and Private Eye respectively, gave testimony on the effects of such laws on their decision to run controversial stories relating to large companies or rich individuals. Their argument focusses on the large legal costs involved in defending such publication.

Should newspapers, magazines or websites be able to publish a story without being sure they are in the right? I would hope that laws exist to protect victimised parties and to dissuade the press (or anyone else for that matter) from publishing a story if they aren’t confident about their facts. This of course does not mean that the cost of legal action should be a factor, but more so damages.

Finding a balance between the concept of privacy and fairness against freedom of speech is a difficult one.

The Internet, through websites such as Wikileaks and the power of crowds through services like twitter, has changed the landscape and the law needs to recognise this. Getting an injunction to stop publication in the UK won’t prevent it circulating on the Internet, so we need to revise our thinking.

Leaks will take place in all organisations, and is a breach of trust between the organisation and its employees or other partners. The question should be asked, is there a public interest that is so important that it should override the interest of the organisation? This is not merely something that should be left up to the individual who wants to leak information, but should be a test which can be judged as objectively as possible, ignoring political or moral views that an individual may hold. In this case, it will come down to the final decision, who was right? If Trafigura can prove that actually the waste dumped in the Ivory Coast was not the cause of some of the major suggested illness, then it would suggest the leak was improper, but could the person who leaked it even know?

These are all difficult questions, and I have a suspicion we will never find the answers. What I can say with absolute certainty, is that once something is on the open Internet, it is too late to try and remove it. At this point, damage limitation is the only strategy.

If we are going to look at establishing a privacy law, we need to consider not only the rights for privacy, but also the effectiveness of enforcing such rights. The Internet and the power of the masses has stirred up society, but it does not mean we can forget the responsibility that goes with that freedom.

I’ve been neglecting my blog a bit due to lack of time. I’ve also given up reading other blogs as regularly on my RSS feed since I found that many people felt the need to blog regularly, even when they had nothing of value to say. Reading my RSS updates every morning was becoming just as time consuming as trying to clear my inbox of those nagios, cron and other messages I really should not be getting anyway.

Everyone seems to be at it.. Whether it’s a wordpress blog, a twitter feed or your facebook status–There is an expectation that you should be annotating your life online. Of course it is human nature to interact with others, and the Internet is now just making that easier.

So, what’s the problem? With more and more information being directed to us, we have to find better ways of processing that information in an efficient manner to be able to make any use of it. Even managing twitter effectively is difficult without some kind of app.

Presentations are another area where this phenomenon is quite clear. Over the last year, I have seen many presentations and most seem to have one trend in common: They could be condensed by 70% and still contain all the necessary information I needed out of them. Is this because I am already aware of the topics? Maybe in some cases, but generally presenters are not encouraged to keep to the point. (I am sure that as a presenter, I am no better than those I seek to criticise.)

I have been somewhat impressed by the quality of some of the presentations at the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference in London (2008) and Dublin (2009), although still I find that they could cover material more efficiently. Perhaps the best examples are in some of the TED talks which are often only a few minutes long.

I remember the days of Microsoft Visual Basic 3.00 Professional Edition which came in a mammoth box full of manuals and media (I think it was CD already back then rather than the 3.5″ disks like Windows 3.11). Over the years software boxes have got smaller, with the ’standard’ size now being about the size of a three DVD cases stacked up. This seems to the the size Adobe, Microsoft, etc. adopt.

I’ve recently purchased some new software/upgrades and I was amazed that inside a big box, we still only had so little contents; just a DVD box in fact..

However, this dwarfed the waste which Norton Internet Security 2009 demonstrated:

Of course, this is so that they can produce product shots like this:

All this for one CD and a leaflet–I guess it’s at least not wasting trees printing manuals no one will read (unlike Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 which includes a one inch thick manual which includes several languages!)

In the last few months, I have been increasingly suffering from a problem which seems to have crept up. I’ve read about people declaring ‘e-mail bankruptcy’ and ‘e-mail free Fridays’ in some companies but being involved with quite a few businesses, neither of these is honestly something I could contemplate seriously.

My inbox always seems to be at around 500 e-mails no matter how much I clear it. If I remove half of them today, by close of business tomorrow it will be back at this level. Most of these e-mails are also ‘action items’ of some kind requiring me to respond (usually with something that would take me 5-15 minutes to deal with per e-mail; so if we assume an average of 10 minutes and 400 e-mails, this would be around 67 hours of “replying to e-mails”).. that’s over 8 working days at normal hours, or 4.2 working days in ‘theo‘ hours..

So, if you haven’t had a reply from me, it may be because your e-mail didn’t require attention this very minute (most fall into this category), it would take too long to reply to now (second most popular), I trust you from having known you so long that I know you won’t take my lack of reply personally (even a few long term customers belong in here), or because I think your e-mail is so pointless it shouldn’t have been sent in the first place.

So, how does everyone else manage this?

On the broadband information website I run, we provide users with various options to subscribe to e-mails which for example send them reminders each month if they haven’t rated their broadband service provider, weekly news summaries, or notifications of new posts on the forums. Users have always been able to subscribe/unsubscribe from these automatically on the website, but admittedly this was in various parts and not exactly easy.

So, a few months ago we built this generic unsubscribe form which allows users to type in their e-mail address, receive an e-mail with a new link (with a code) which verifies they are the authentic user of the e-mail address, and then they can select what to unsubscribe from, click Unsubscribe and it’s all done from various systems in one go:

thinkbroadband.com – screenshot of ‘unsubscribe’ page

Now you’d think this should stop all the e-mails from users every week after they get our weekly news summary on Monday morning asking to be removed from the list.. Well.. No..

It’s resulted in e-mails like this:

“I want to stay in subscription and would to take the opportunity to thank you for a great and useful service”

“Please DO NOT Unsubscribe Me The Link was Clicked in Error.”

..and do on. Obviously users would only be removed after going through the verification process so most of these people haven’t actually unsubscribed themselves.

Clearly we have something to learn on the user interface front which we’ve not quite tweaked yet

Broadband is becoming the favourite utility of rants. As more and more of the population upgrade to fast always-on Internet connections, we are starting to see more problems arising indicating that the market is maturing. In the late nineties, we had the Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications that pushed for changes from “per minute” charges to unmetered, so called ‘flat rate’ plans. Broadband has changed all this, and whilst ‘unlimited’ plans exist, there is an increasing move to limits, not in the form of charging but more ways to limit the ability of a small number of individuals to abuse the concept of unlimited.

The reason why unlimited broadband is a problem is rooted in human nature. When there is no cost to an activity, users start behaving in the optimal way which maximises their personal benefit which sometimes translates to ‘downloading the entire Internet’ to their PC (metaphorically speaking). In most other unlimited offers there are some kinds of restrictions. So, if you have an ‘all you can eat’ deal in a restaurant, you are limited by the fact you physically can’t eat more than a certain amount. Unlimited entry to an attraction is also limited by the fact you only have so much leisure time. But, what about broadband? You can leave it downloading whilst you’re at work and asleep.

Say you have ten cars and take up all the parking on the road outside your house.. Your neighbours would start giving you strange looks.. But, do they know that you’re the person hogging the Internet pipes? Bear in mind your ‘broadband neighbours’ aren’t necessarily physically that close to you anyway.

On his Blog, Ashley Highfield argues that we need a Broadband Charter which among other things sets out arguments that service providers should guarantee minimum speeds, not ‘up to’ speeds.

One suggestion Ashley makes is a standard of “high definition broadband” or HD broadband which would help to unify standards. This is something we (I and my colleagues at thinkbroadband.com) have thought about in the context of providing effective comparisons between different packages. The problem is, it’s not easy to come up with specifications which you can’t, as a service provider, work around to drop the cost (and level of service).

I think there is a significant misunderstanding in the general population that broadband is just about speed with suggestions like connection speeds should be 8 meg or higher.. Previously, users used to look just at price.. now it’s price and headline speed. This is just as bad as those shopping for cameras looking just at “how many megapixels will it do?”.

An Internet connection is about a number of factors including actual speeds , latency, packet loss, connection reliability, support all at various times of the week/day as well as financial stability of the operator and much more. Most users could not begin to understand the complexities of what it takes to provide a good service. Someone could offer you an 8 meg service which seems fast, but if you start running VoIP applications through it, you might find the quality isn’t up to it because latency is too high.

My biggest gripe is with those calling for unlimited broadband.. because it shows the clear lack of understanding that costs of providing a service are very much based on how fast you want the service to be and how much it’s used (by time and amount of use).. Why should service providers subsidise some users who want to use 100 times more than the average user? Shouldn’t that cost be borne by the user who does the downloading?

Service providers can do more (admittedly only with help from wholesale operators) to tackle the issue of making users aware of what they are getting, but demanding they provide a financially unsustainable service is no different to expecting to pay £30 a month at BP and receive unlimited fuel.

The recording and movie industries are fighting an uphill battle to tackle the large scale copyright infringement and are now targetting broadband service providers as their previous efforts against end users seem to have backfired.

The main element of this strategy is that suing end-users is bad publicity because the population reacts emotionally to big bad corporates going after the little guy (in many cases, literally, as it’s often children who download pirated material). By making the ISP responsible for enforcing copyrights, they are shifting the blame and anger towards another entity.

Politicians jump on bandwagons without understanding the Internet and are often quick to take sides. Of course software, music and movie piracy, or in fact any other breach of copyright for that matter, is wrong but there are various ways to address this. Firstly, ISPs should accept that they should not be immune from any liability about what happens on their network–They are not there to provide an anonymous facility for illegal activity to take place. If they think for a second that this is a viable long term proposition, they are sorely mistaken as eventually the activities will move into morally outrageous types which will result in speedy and badly thought out legislation.

The concept of a ‘three strikes’ system does have one significant benefit–It removes the element of being sued or criminalised for an activity which is clearly legally unacceptable, but which is so common in society that is is considered only technically wrong, without being morally so (or at least to a degree where it would be seen as something you shouldn’t do–Many will say piracy is wrong and whilst they may feel a bit guilty, they still do it.)

If such a ‘three strikes’ rule is adopted, it should not bar a user from seeking service with another provider (as doing so would be effectively preventing them from playing any part in today’s society which relies on the Internet), and should include an appeals process (with ultimately the rights holder being required to take the individual to court). Also, the rights holders should accept liability for any errors made on their part including consequential losses. This should ensure that the systems are used fairly and equitably.

The record and movie industries really haven’t been good at recognising the Internet’s opportunities, with very few exceptions such as Radiohead’s ‘name your own price’ campaign. The Internet has changed many business models and it is not possible for an industry to exclude itself from these forces forever. Record labels’ days may well be numbered. Similarly, the concept of regions in DVD releases, is outdated and the sooner the industry realises this, and the globalising nature of the Internet, the better.

From time to time I get various kinds of surveys in the post asking me to provide information as to my views on various issues. I tend not to answer most of them, and here is why.

Last year I wrote about the Illusion of Compromise. Marketers always seem to ask the right question to get the answer they want. This can be done by setting the mindset from the outset.

For example, if an opinion pollster were to ask you the question “Would you like the government to raise your taxes?”, there would be two obvious answers: Yes or No. (We’ll ignore the “I don’t know” for this purpose.) Most people will say “no” (at least as long as they feel the question would raise their own tax burden.)

On the basis of this question, we might get the following outcome:

           keep     raise
            |         |
            +-a-------+
           80         20

(where a is the average outcome)

This would suggest that most people were in favour of keeping taxes at the current level. In reality, if we asked the question in a more open way “What would you like the government to do about taxes?” we might see a very different answer:

lower      keep     raise
  |         |         |
  +---b-----+---------+
 70         10        20

(where b is the average outcome)

Now it becomes clear that whilst 20% of people might want higher taxes, the 80% that do not, are not necessarily of the view that they should stay the same–Some of them want lower taxes. In the first case, a compromise outcome may be a small increase in taxes, whilst in the latter it would be a moderate decrease.

As such, always be weary of opinion polls or surveys that come through in the post asking for your opinion on such matters.

Many websites these days have the option to register which in turn gives you access to additional features. The average Internet user is obviously going to either use the same password on most websites (hopefully they would avoid that on their online banking at least) or they will start forgetting passwords. To deal with this problem, many websites offer a password recovery option of some kind.

Quite a few sites ask you for a “memorable question” allowing you to select one of say five. These are usually questions like “What is your favourite colour?”, “What was your favourite subject at school?” or “What was your first school’s name?”. They rarely offer an option of “I don’t believe in silly security questions.”

Unless I happen to have a sophisticated taste in colours, it’s probably not too difficult to find the answer to the above question with a few guesses (probably even fewer if you profile me a bit). Even with the slightly more personal ones, this information is often in the public domain, particularly with the trend in social networking. These types of decisions by website developers make it pointless for me to use a ’strong’ password since it is too easy to bypass.

There has recently been quite a bit of discussion about a distributed single sign-on solution called OpenID which is being supported by AOL, Google, Microsoft, Verisign and Yahoo among others. This might help to solve problems like this by having a central system which requires multi-stakeholder input to iron out security weaknesses in the first place.