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By Nathan Chantrell, on January 31st, 2010
Wikileaks, the site that allows whistleblowers to anonymously leak information has had to temporarily shut down while they try to raise more funds. The site currently says:
“To concentrate on raising the funds necessary to keep us alive into 2010, we have reluctantly suspended all other operations, but will be back soon.”
Wikileaks is a valuable tool for freedom, utilising the Streisand effect – the online phenomenon where an attempt to censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of causing the information to be publicised to an even greater extent, ie. once it is out there it isn’t going back in the box.
The site has a history of publishing reports and data that otherwise would have remained secret; recent leaks of note include the BNP membership list, the Climate Research Unit emails, Internet censorship lists and The Minton report. The site has won numerous awards including the Economist Freedom of Expression Award in 2008 and the Amnesty International New Media Award in 2009 and its continued operation is essential to ensure that companies and governments cannot get away with censoring the exposure of injustice.
Wikileaks is run by a non-profit organisation and doesn’t accept government or corporate funding in order to maintain its absolute integrity so all funding has to come from its supporters: human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public.
“We have received hundreds of thousands of pages from corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others that we do not currently have the resources to release. You can change that and by doing so, change the world. Even $10 will pay to put one of these reports into another ten thousand hands and $1000, a million.”
In order to continue getting this information out to the public they need your help. You can donate to support Wikileaks here.
By Nathan Chantrell, on January 30th, 2010
Last week YouTube and Vimeo introduced experimental support for HTML5 video but their choice of video codec, H.264, has caused a bit of a stir. One of the aims of HTML5 is to reduce the need for proprietary plug-in-based technologies such as Flash through the use of the new video tag for embedding video in web pages. The problem with using H.264 for these videos is that it is patented in many countries and its use in a product (eg. a browser) requires a licence from the MPEG-LA. So is it really any better than Flash, Quicktime, Real Video and all the other proprietary standards we’ve had to suffer over the years?
It’s not as if there aren’t free, open source alternatives available, the Ogg Theora codec for instance was actually recommended in earlier drafts of the HTML5 specification.
Whilst H.264 licensing isn’t a problem for Google, Apple, Microsoft etc. it’s a different issue for free and open source software, not just from a cost perspective, but also from a philosophical one. Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s VP of engineering explained why Firefox won’t be supporting H.264 video for this reason:
“there is no apparent means for us to license H.264 under terms that would cover other users of our technology, such as Linux distributors, or people in affiliated projects like Wikimedia or the Participatory Culture Foundation. Even if we were to pay the $5,000,000 annual licensing cost for H.264, and we were to not care about the spectre of license fees for internet distribution of encoded content, or about content and tool creators, downstream projects would be no better off.”
Granted, these are only experimental options so far, but YouTube in particular, has a huge influence here due to its ubiquitousness; how many people would be happy with a browser that won’t work with YouTube? Admittedly, Flash support isn’t going to go away for a long time yet but if H.264 gets entrenched as the default HTML5 video standard early on by such an influential content provider then the situation is unlikely to change.
In large the web is built on open technologies and HTML5 video has the potential to open up one of the few areas where proprietary technology has a hold. Let’s hope it doesn’t fall at the last hurdle.
As is the way these days, there is a petition to make YouTube use open media codecs.
By Nathan Chantrell, on November 25th, 2009
I expect most people are aware of the debate surrounding the UK Government’s proposals to disconnect alleged illegal file sharers from the internet without a fair trial. This is the so called “Three Strikes” system which has the potential to cut entire households off from the net due to the alleged actions of one family member or because of a hacked wireless router. This is despite the Government’s own Digital Britain Report espousing the benefits of, and need for, universal broadband internet access.
Last week it emerged that Secretary of State Peter Mandelson wants to make additional changes to the Digital Economy Bill which would give him and his successors the power to make “secondary legislation” (legislation that is passed without debate) to change the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act to create new remedies for combating online copyright infringement as well as the ability to impose “duties, powers or functions on any person as may be specified” and giving rights holders new investigative and enforcement powers. All without debate. See Boing Boing for the full horrors.
Disconnecting people from the net would be a hugely disproportionate response in my view and flies in the face of the ambition stated in the Digital Britain Report “To ensure that everyone can share in the benefits of a digital Britain” but Mandelson’s new proposals take things to another level, they are simply outrageous – giving someone in an unelected position the ability to create further legislation related to this contentious issue without debate is dangerous and must not be allowed.
If you agree please contact your MP to voice your disapproval and if you believe disconnecting people from their broadband connections is wrong please sign the petition to the Prime Minister.
By Nathan Chantrell, on November 10th, 2009
I’ve been hearing a lot of dissent in the Firefox-using ranks lately and have to say that I have been feeling some pain myself, on multiple machines and different operating systems. Once heralded as the lightweight, reliable, alternative browser, Firefox seems to be becoming slower and more bloated with each release.
As a multi-platform user I was a big fan of the Mozilla Suite for years and was quite a late convert to Firefox, hanging onto Mozilla for a long time after the main development focus had switched to Firefox. Eventually it was the breadth of extensions available for Firefox that finally swung it for me and if I’m honest that is the only thing that is making me cling on now.
I’m finding myself using Google Chrome more and more often, the dev channel version for Linux is now completely functional and is extremely fast, possibly more so than the Windows version. If I can wean myself off a couple of Firefox extensions I will be on Chrome full time and there are more extensions becoming available for Chrome all the time. The latest development version of Chromium (the open source version of Chrome) being able to convert Greasemonkey user scripts into extensions can only speed this process up.
How are Firefox and Chrome shaping up for you, or do you use something different?
By Nathan Chantrell, on November 5th, 2009
I’ve added a page with three very quick and dirty Wordpress plugins I made and use here. They are very simple and were made for my own use so those that need configuration don’t have any settings pages, you will have to edit the plugin file manually, not that they require much in the way of configuration. They are:
Google Latitude Shortcode – Add your Google Latitude location using a Wordpress shortcode.
Short URL Auto-Discovery Header – Adds a short URL auto-discovery header, useful if you have an alternate URL for your blog that is shorter than your main one.
QR-Code-Link – Add a Wordpress widget with a link to a QR Code for the current page.
I don’t have the time to offer any support on these plugins but I thought they might be useful to someone.
More information and downloads here.
By Nathan Chantrell, on October 10th, 2009
Postcodes are something most people give little consideration to, originally created to aid the sorting of mail and first introduced under Postmaster General Ernest Marples in 1959 the postcode took until 1974 to become universal across the UK. It has since gone on to be used for a wide range of location based purposes.
To licence the database of postcodes to latitude and longitude from The Post Office costs anything from £1000-4000 per year which puts it out of reach of most non-profit and community web services. To address this, Ernest Marples Ltd (named after that 1950s Postmaster General) was formed to provide free conversion from a postcode to latitude and longitude, how this was done is a bit of a mystery as all they would say on the matter was:
Where’s the data coming from?
We’re not saying. But, just to be clear: we don’t hold a copy of the postcode database ourselves, neither in complete form nor as part of a cache.
Their API was used by a number of sites such as PlanningAlerts.com, JobCentreProPlus.com and Healthwhere to provide free information to the public.
The Royal Mail weren’t happy about this and this week Ernest Marples Ltd was effectively shut down by the Royal Mails legal team.
Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group, said:
“Post codes were created with public money, so they need to be used for the widest public benefit. Ernest Marples have been showing how this can be done. Their ideas need to be legalised for non-profit use, not shut down.
Intellectual Property rules need to work for society, and not the other way round.”
It’s hard to disagree with that. If you agree you can sign a petition here that asks the Prime Minister to encourage to Royal Mail to offer a free licence that wil allow non-profit projects to continue to offer location-based services of this nature.
I’ve also been using the Free The Postcode! iPhone app over the last year, I urge everyone to register their post code and latitude and longitude here so that we can at least build a postcode database free of the Royal Mails limitations.
By Nathan Chantrell, on July 12th, 2004
Posting this from my phone as the whole of bt business broadband is down… i may as well go home….
By Nathan Chantrell, on August 26th, 2003
See, this is what I have to work with!
Nathan ,
Internet is down , sorry mither you at home but how do i get it back on
Thanks
(Name removed to protect the guilty!)
So he’s emailing me to tell me the internet isn’t working? anyone see the problem here? (obviously this only came through after someone else phoned me & the problem was sorted).
Got someone coming round to look at the trees in my back garden this afternoon, and quote me many many pounds for removal of same no doubt! Sky TV is now completely non operational so it’s got to be done! Not that there’s ever anything on worth watching mind but it’s not the point is it!
By Nathan Chantrell, on August 24th, 2003
Greg Dyke, director general of the BBC, has announced plans to give the public full access to all the corporation’s programme archives. More at BBC News.
Will be very cool if this really happens.
By Nathan Chantrell, on February 14th, 2001
H2G2 is back at last, it’s now part of BBC Online which seems fitting. It seems much faster so far but alas the beeb have buckled under legal worries and introduced moderation.
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