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Links for 2011-06-11

Published June 11, 2011

  • Data Protection Commissioner investigating Eircom's "three strikes" system : Eircom accused customers of piracy using systems that hadn't been updated for DST. 'this appears to show up ineptitude in relation to a very basic aspect of network management - i.e. making sure that the server clock reflects daylight savings time. As a result, it seems that users found themselves being accused on the basis of what somebody else did from the same IP address either an hour earlier or an hour later. Consequently, the users who were wrongfully accused should consider themselves lucky that this incompetence did not lead to their being accused of a serious crime - for example, being arrested and having their homes searched due to the wrong time being used.' As TJ explains, this could have very serious results
    (tags: dpc ireland eircom fail time dst daylight-savings three-strikes filesharing piracy)

Links for 2011-06-10

Published June 10, 2011

  • Hipster Ipsum : 'Adipisicing do Tumblr fugiat vinyl Pitchfork. Organic tempor laboris, esse Tumblr irure eu nostrud. Dolor Cosby sweater mustache qui consequat incididunt. McSweeney's ullamco occaecat Wes Anderson. Minim aute lomo, duis ea proident enim Carles. Eiusmod culpa photo booth ex. Pariatur incididunt minim qui, dolor Pitchfork wayfarers mollit vinyl fixie.' (via boogah)
    (tags: via:boogah hipster lorem-ipsum filler text markov-chains funny humour)

  • Apple rips off student's rejected iPhone app : 'Wi-Fi Sync' was rejected from the App Store last May -- and a year later, iOS 5 is released with the same feature. what a coincidence! 'Hughes said Wi-Fi Sync was rejected from the iTunes App Store in May, 2010, one month after he submitted it. He said an iPhone developer relations representative named Steve Rea personally called him prior to sending a formal rejection email to say the app was admirable, but went on to explain there were unspecified security concerns and that it did things not specified in the official iPhone software developers' kit. “They did say that the iPhone engineering team had looked at it and were impressed,” Hughes told El Reg. “They asked for my CV as well.”'
    (tags: apple walled-garden protectionism iphone wifi syncing apps ip rip-offs)

  • Why Ryanair The Cookie Monster is just an urban myth : “If the price manipulation allegations were true, we would have expected to see price discrepancies in the results between Firefox and Chrome on day two. What we actually saw were exactly the same prices on both browsers.”
    (tags: ryanair pricing airlines travel web shopping urban-myths)

Links for 2011-06-07

Published June 7, 2011

Links for 2011-06-01

Published June 1, 2011

Links for 2011-05-23

Published May 23, 2011

Links for 2011-05-18

Published May 18, 2011

Links for 2011-05-13

Published May 13, 2011

Links for 2011-05-04

Published May 4, 2011

Links for 2011-04-29

Published April 29, 2011

  • Online censorship now bordering on the ridiculous in Turkey - Reporters Without Borders : 'access to websites containing words on the list would in theory be suspended and it would be impossible to create new ones containing them. However, it is not clear how and to what extent the directive will be implemented in practice. The TIB could decide to suppress or block pages for just one blacklisted word. ... The list, which borders on the ridiculous, includes words such as “etek” (skirt), “baldiz” (sister-in-law) and “hayvan” (animals). It poses serious problems for access to online information. If words such as “free” and “pic” are censored, countless references to freedom and everyday photos will be eliminated from the Turkish Internet.' Incredible (via Danny)
    (tags: via:mala repression internet turkey censorship filtering false-positives)

Links for 2011-04-27

Published April 27, 2011

Links for 2011-04-25

Published April 25, 2011

Links for 2011-04-21

Published April 21, 2011

Links for 2011-04-20

Published April 20, 2011

  • demerphq on "perl's regexps are slow" : His classic response to the Russ Cox DFA-over-NFA regular expressions paper. 'A general purpose regex engine like that required for perl has to be able to do a lot, and has to balance considerations ranging from memory footprint of a compiled object, construction time, flexibility, rich feature-sets, the ability to accomodate huge character sets, and of course most importantly matching performance. And it turns out that while DFA engines have a very good worst case match time, they dont actually have too many other redeeming features. Construction can be extremely slow, the memory footprint vast, all kinds of trickery is involved to do unicode or capturing properly and they aren't suitable for patterns with backreferences.' -- Also interesting to note that he mentions an approach I've used in several SpamAssassin speedup add-ons, too ;)
    (tags: performance perl regular-expressions perlmonks demerphq regexps dfa nfa state-machines)

temporary Hackerspace at MindField

Published April 20, 2011

This sounds very cool! Nice one, hackerspace ppl.

Ireland's Hackerspaces and Makerspaces (091 Labs - Galway, Belfast Hackerspace, MilkLabs - Limerick, Nexus Cork and TOG - Dublin) have been asked to build and man a temporary hackerspace during the MindField - International Festival of Ideas (http://www.mindfield.ie/). MindField will take place over the weekend of 29 April - 1 May in Merrion Square.

During MindField our temporary hackerspace will provide a range of events where festival participants can learn about diybio, 3D printing, basic electronics and micro controllers, electronic fashion/crafting and open data. These events are included in the festival schedule (http://mindfield.ie/festival-schedul/).

In parallel with these events we have an opportunity run a Hardware Hacking Challenge. In this challenge we will try to engage a group of willing hacker, makers and festival participants in the challenge to create or construct interesting or innovative projects out of recycled hardware. We are trying to source interesting materials, electronic devices or equipment that can be used to based projects off or as sources of components.

We are particularly interested in devices that contain various types of transducers which can then be hooked up to micro controllers and computers. We're not looking for normal computer equipment or servers we've got lots of that, but more unusual stuff that people have lying around.

If you think you've got something they might like, contact Robert Fitzsimons.

Links for 2011-04-20

Published April 20, 2011

Links for 2011-04-19

Published April 19, 2011

Links for 2011-04-19

Published April 19, 2011

Links for 2011-03-29

Published March 29, 2011

Links for 2011-03-24

Published March 24, 2011

Links for 2011-03-23

Published March 23, 2011

  • Detecting Certificate Authority compromises and web browser collusion | The Tor Blog : 'If I had to make a bet, I'd wager that an attacker was able to issue high value [SSL] certificates, probably by compromising [the USERTRUST SSL certificate authority] in some manner, this was discovered sometime before the revocation date, each certificate was revoked, the vendors notified, the patches were written, and binary builds kicked off - end users are probably still updating and thus many people are vulnerable to the failure that is the CRL and OCSP method for revocation.' It seems addons.mozilla.org was one of the bogus certs acquired. Major ouch. Thanks to EFF/Tor et al for investigating this -- SSL cert revocation is a shambles
    (tags: security ssl tls certificates ca revocation crypto exploits eff tor comodo usertrust)

My Problem With Norris

Published March 22, 2011

I'm uncomfortable voting for David Norris for President. Here's why.

In November last year, he was a key voice in a Senate debate on the topic of "Protection of Intellectual Property Rights", where he quoted heavily from the flawed judgement by Mr. Justice Peter Charleton in the Warner, Universal, Sony BMG and EMI vs UPC case. (There are allegations that he called the debate after speaking to Paul McGuinness (U2's manager) and Niall Stokes (of Hot Press).)

In the debate, Norris quotes Mr Justice Charleton, saying:

'In failing to provide legislative provision for blocking, diverting and interrupting internet copyright theft, Ireland is not yet fully in compliance with its obligations under European law.' Norris then says: 'Irish law could be brought into alignment with the intention of the European directive through a simple statutory instrument.' [1]

Now, let me clarify my position -- I'm in favour of some means of resolving the level of piracy of music and movies which is widespread nowadays, and I believe there's a mutually agreeable way to do this. But what Norris and Mr Justice Charleton propose is not it. Here are the problems as I see them.

It Lets The Internet Filtering Genie Out Of The Bottle

The big one.

The problem is that any infrastructure for 'blocking, diverting and interrupting internet copyright theft' is effectively infrastructure for 'blocking, diverting and interrupting' any communication on the net. We have to be very careful about how this is permitted, as it'll very quickly suffer "feature creep" and become a general-purpose censorship system -- the Great Firewall Of Ireland. As Damien Mulley put it:

'first they’ll start with the Pirate Bay. Then comes Mininova, IsoHunt, then comes YouTube (they have dodgy stuff, right?), how long before we have Boards.ie because someone quoted a newspaper article or a section of a book? And don’t think they’ll stop there too, any site that links to The Pirate Bay and the others on the hate list will probably be added to the list too...'

In Australia, the anti-child-porn filtering system was quickly used to block gambling websites, gay and straight porn sites, political parties, Wikipedia entries, Christian sites, Wikileaks, and a dentist; in Thailand, a similar system was used to block criticism of the royal family.

Will It Help? I Don't Think So

Norris:

'As long as Irish law is deficient, Mr. Justice Charleton has found that all creative Irish industries are losing money.'

This is quite a hilariously overblown and sweeping statement. ALL creative Irish industries? What qualifies as a 'creative' industry? I suspect some in this country have been involved in industrial acts of creation that made money. ;)

While they're not Irish, the well-known indie label Beggar's Banquet has gone on the record as stating the opposite where the current music situation is concerned --

"There's fewer gatekeepers now. We don't have to knock on a TV station's door or a radio station's door and it's made us far more competitive. [...] There's a wide highway in front of us we can go speeding down, and it wasn't there even two years ago. It means the majors are looking at a world where only 35 Gold Albums a year are certified compared to ten times that recently. But going above Gold in the US is not a problem for us."

So it appears a 'creative' industry (albeit in the UK) is finding things not quite so bad.

Norris again:

'the facts were established in the judgment of Mr. Justice Charleton in which he stated: “Between 2005 and 2009 the recording companies experienced a reduction of 40% in the Irish market for the legal sale of recorded music.” That is a devastating blow. [...] He went on to state: “Some 675,000 people are likely to be engaged in some form of illegal downloading from time to time.”'

Without quite lining up one statement with the other, this reinforces the impression that the only reason the recording companies have seen these drops in revenues is due to internet-borne piracy. However, quoting the brilliant Mumblin' Deaf Ro on the topic of lies, damn lies, and music biz statistics:

'The drop in the value of Irish retail music sales was 11.7% between 2008 and 2009, which is significantly less than the 18% overall drop in retail sales for the economy that year. Digital album sales have increased by 30% since 2007 both in terms of volume and market value.'

So in other words, between 2008 and 2009, Irish retail music sales outperformed the retail sales economy as a whole!

In addition, Ro provides the following BPI figures for UK market volumes over the 2005-2009 period:

    Year  Albums  Singles
    2005  159.0m   47.9m
    2006  154.7m   66.9m
    2007  138.1m   86.6m
    2008  133.6m  115.1m
    2009  128.9m  152.7m

It's clear that singles sales went through the roof, more than tripling. Album sales did drop however, but nowhere near by 40% -- and this coincided with the general drop in the prevailing global economy around that time. He also notes that digital sales in the UK went through the roof globally on a number of metrics in 2009.

While this does not provide figures for the Irish market, I'm at a loss as to how it could be radically different -- Irish and UK consumers have pretty similar musical tastes and consumption habits, I would guess.

Here's a theory: perhaps the issue could be that "Irish" music sales are associated with bricks-and-mortar music shops selling the physical product, whereas digital music sales are associated with online services based outside Ireland, and an Irish buyer buying an album at 7digital.co.uk, or on iTunes, isn't counted as an "Irish retail sale"? Could the problem be that we don't have any significant Irish shops selling music online, I wonder?

Bricks-and-mortar music shops, such as ex-Senator Donie Cassidy's "Celtic Note" (who coincidentally was quite vociferous in that Seanad debate), are indeed hurting in this new model of music consumption -- and that's a problem. But given that good, working digital music sales systems are in operation, it doesn't necessarily appear to be due to massive volumes of internet-borne piracy, going by these figures.

Essentially, internet piracy is a convenient bogeyman, especially for the technophobic old guard, but may have little bearing on the current woes of the Irish record industry and bricks-and-mortar music shops.

(Update: a couple of days after this was posted, a pair of economists at the LSE have said basically the same thing.)

Audible Magic Won't Work For Long Anyway

Audible Magic, which Norris suggests is IRMA's favoured filtering system, received the following verdict from the EFF back in 2004:

'Should Audible Magic's technology be widely adopted, it is likely that P2P file-sharing applications would be revised to implement encryption. Accordingly, network administrators will want to ask Audible Magic tough questions before investing in the company's technology, lest the investment be rendered worthless by the next P2P "upgrade."'

Naturally, encryption is widespread nowadays, so this may already be the case.

Internet Censorship Harms Our Global Image

As Adrian Weckler points out:

'do we really want to send out the message that, digitally, we're the new France? Come to think of it, do we want to tell Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter that, digitally, we're the new Britain?'

Right now, more than ever, we need to put out an image that we're ready to do business on our end of the internet. Mandatory censorship systems don't exactly support this.

In Summary

So in summary, I would hope to see a more balanced approach to the issue from Norris. Most of the problematic statements in his speech were directly sourced from Mr. Justice Charleton's flawed judgement, but some critical thinking would be vital, I would have thought. The fact that this was lacking, particularly given the allegations of heavy music-biz lobbying beforehand, leaves me feeling less inclined to vote for him than I would have been before, particularly since I haven't heard any clarification on these issues.

([1]: Funnily enough, an SI similar to this was nearly sneaked through a couple of weeks ago, according to reports.)

Links for 2011-03-14

Published March 14, 2011

Links for 2011-03-03

Published March 3, 2011

Links for 2011-03-02

Published March 2, 2011

Links for 2011-02-28

Published February 28, 2011

Against The Use Of Programming Languages in Configuration Files

Published February 18, 2011

It's pretty common for apps to require "configuration" -- external files which can contain settings to customise their behaviour. Ideally, apps shouldn't require configuration, and this is always a good aim. But in some situations, it's unavoidable.

In the abstract, it may seem attractive to use a fully-fledged programming language as the language to express configuration in. However, I think this is not a good idea. Here are some reasons why configuration files should not be expressed in a programming language (and yes, I include "Ruby without parentheses" in that bucket):

Provability

If a configuration language is Turing-incomplete, configuration files written in it can be validated "offline", ie. without executing the program it configures. All programming languages are, by definition, Turing-complete, meaning that the program must be executed in full before its configuration can be considered valid.

Offline validation is a useful feature for operational usability, as we've found with "spamassassin --lint".

Security

Some configuration settings may be insecure in certain circumstances; for example, in SpamAssassin, we allow certain classes of settings like whitelist/blacklists to be set in a users ~/.spamassassin/user_prefs file, while disallowing rule definitions (which can cause poor performance if poorly written).

If your configuration file is simply an evaluated chunk of code, it becomes more difficult to protect against an attacker introspecting the interpreter and overriding the security limitations. It's not impossible, since you can, for instance, use a sandboxed interpreter, but this is typically not particularly easy to implement.

Usability

Here's a rather hairy configuration file I've concocted.

    #! /usr/bin/somelanguage
    !$ app.status load html
    !c = []
    ;c['sources'] = < >
    ;c['sources'].append(
        NewConfigurationThingy("foo_bar",
            baz="flargle"))
    ;c['builders'] = < >
    ;c['bots'] = < >
    !$ app.steps load source, shell
    ;bf_mc_generic = factory.SomethingFactory( <
        woo(source.SVN, svnurl="http://example.com/foo/bar"),
        woo(shell.Configure, command="/bar/baz start"),
        woo(shell.Test, command="/bar/baz test"),
        woo(shell.Configure, command="/bar/baz stop")
        > );
    ;b1 = < "name": "mc-fast", "slavename": "mc-fast",
                 "builddir": "mc-fast", "factory": ;bf_mc_generic >
    ;c['builders'].append(;b1)
    ;SomethingOrOther = ;c

This isn't actually entirely concocted from thin air -- it's actually bits of our BuildBot configuration file, from before we switched to using Hudson. I've replaced the familiar Python syntax with deliberately-unfamiliar made-up syntax, to emulate the user experience I had attempting to configure BuildBot with no pre-existing Python knowledge. ;)

Compare with this re-stating of the same configuration data in a simplified, "configuration-oriented" imaginary DSL:

add_source NewConfigurationThingy foo_bar baz=flargle

buildfactory bf_mc_generic source.SVN http://example.com/foo/bar
buildfactory bf_mc_generic shell.Configure /bar/baz start
buildfactory bf_mc_generic shell.Test /bar/baz test
buildfactory bf_mc_generic shell.Configure /bar/baz stop

add_builder name=mc-fast slavename=mc-fast
     builddir=mc-fast factory=bf_mc_generic

Essentially, I've extracted the useful configuration data from the hairy example, discarded the symbology used to indicate types, function calls, data structure construction, and let the configuration domain knowledge imply what's necessary. Not only is this easier to comprehend for the casual reader, it also reduces the risk of syntax errors, by simply minimising the number of syntactical components.

See Also

The Wikipedia page on DSLs is quite good on the topic, with a succinct list of pros and cons.

This StackOverflow thread has some good comments -- I particularly like this point:

When you need your application to be very "configurable" in ways that you cannot imagine today, then what you really need is a plugins system. You need to develop your application in a way that someone else can code a new plugin and hook it into your application in the future.

+1.

This seems to be a controversial topic -- as you can see, that page has people on both sides of the issue. Maybe it fundamentally comes down to a matter of taste. Anyway -- my $.02.

Update: discussions elsewhere: HackerNews

Another Update, 2012-04-06: Robey Pointer wrote a post called Why Config?, in which he describes a Scala-based configuration language in use at Twitter, which uses Scala's runtime code evaluation, and a Scala trait, to express configuration succinctly in a Scala source file and load it at runtime. The downside? It's a Scala source file, executed at runtime, containing configuration. :(

However, this comment in the comments section is worth a read:

At Netli (now part of Akamai) we had a configuration framework very similar in spirit and appearance to Configgy. It was in early 2000-s, we open sourced it since. (http://ncnf.sourceforge.net/). It would provide on-the-fly reload for the C-based programs (the ncnf if a C library). It also had some perks like attribute inheritance and a concept of block references. Most importantly though, it contained a separate schema language and a validator to allow configuration be checked before pushing in production. At Netli we used it to configure 1200 services on over 400 hardware boxes, the configuration becoming about 20+mb in length (assembled from several pieces by the CPP, then M4 templating library).

Naturally, it wasn't Netli's first attempt at doing configuration. One of the first attempts failed since it was Turing-complete. That approach was to specify the configuration as a Perl data specification. In a very short time the lure of unused expressiveness of such Turing-complete environment prevailed and people started to write for-loops around data pieces and doing other tricks to remove redundancy from the configuration. It turned out to be a disaster in the end, with configuration becoming unmaintainable and flaky.

One principle I got out out of that exercise is that configuration shall not be Turing-complete. We've got burned specifically by that property far too many times. Yet I do agree with you that a validation facility is a must-have, which is something not usually part of the simple text-based frameworks. C-based NCNF had it almost from the very beginning though, and it proved to be a very useful harness.

+1. There's lots more info on that system at this post at lionet.livejournal.com.

Another Update, 2017-05-09: casio_juarez on Twitter:

Also related: The Configuration Complexity Clock.

(Image credit: Turn The Dial by VERY URGENT Photography)

Links for 2011-02-16

Published February 16, 2011

Links for 2011-02-09

Published February 9, 2011

Irish Times “Most Read” Article Feed

Published February 7, 2011

If you visit the Irish Times at all frequently, you'll probably have noticed a nifty "wisdom of crowds" feature in the right sidebar: the list of "most read" articles. It's quite good, since they're often very interesting articles. Unfortunately, there's no RSS feed for this feature.

Well, now there is:

Links for 2011-02-04

Published February 4, 2011

Links for 2011-02-02

Published February 2, 2011

Links for 2011-01-17

Published January 17, 2011

Links for 2011-01-07

Published January 7, 2011

Links for 2011-01-05

Published January 5, 2011

Links for 2010-12-31

Published December 31, 2010

Links for 2010-12-16

Published December 16, 2010

  • opendata.ie : 'to help citizens access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Irish Government and public sector authorities; to improve access to the Irish Government data and to establish an innovative platform that can demonstrate to government how and why they should share data'
    (tags: open data ireland open-data open-source free datasets)

  • RunwayFinder shut down by patent trolls : “While we appreciate your offer to shut down the website to stop future infringement, we notice that your website is still operation. And without further information from you, our only means to assess the potential damages is the observation that your website had 22,256 unique visitors in July 2010. Each visit represents a potential lost sale of our client’s patented invention at $149 per sale. This damage calculation exceeds $3.2 million per month in lost revenue.”
    (tags: patents swpats patent-trolls flightprep runwayfinder aviation web law)

  • The Background Dope on DHS Recent Seizure of Domains : according to this, the US Dept of Homeland Security is "seizing" domains through a back-channel to Verisign, since they directly control the .com TLD's nameservers. Expect to see dodgy sites start using non-US TLDs, names in multiple TLDs a la Pirate Bay, and eventually IPs instead of DNS records
    (tags: tlds dns security dhs seizure domains cctlds filesharing icann immixgroup)

Links for 2010-12-13

Published December 13, 2010

  • Accentuate.us : 'We are proud to announce the free and open-source Accentuate.us, a new method of input for over 100 languages that uses statistical reasoning so that users can type effortlessly in plain ASCII while ultimately producing accurate text. This allows Vietnamese users, for example, to simply type “Moi nguoi deu co quyen tu do ngon luan va bay to quan diem,” which will be automatically corrected to “M?i ng??i ??u có quy?n t? do ngôn lu?n và b?y t? quan ?i?m” after Accentuation. To date, we support four clients: Mozilla Firefox, Perl, Python, and Vim, with more to be added shortly.' cool
    (tags: accents language web-services typing text-entry ascii unicode characters)

  • The Day MAME Saved My Ass : 'Publishers would have people believe that MAME and the emulation scene is the root of all evil, that it promotes piracy and ultimately hurts the poor, starving developers slaving away on the game. Not only is this claim patently false, it ignores the fact that many developers use things like MAME, mod chips, and homebrew development utilities to help us overcome the day-to-day frustrations caused by the people behind the real problems in our industry.'
    (tags: mame games coding legal spy-hunter emulation rips takedowns)

  • Digital Socket Awards : 'We’d like you to nominate the longlist of best music of 2010 on www.digitalsocketawards.com. From this, 26 blogger judges from towns and cities all over Ireland will each score their top choices to reach a shortlist of three finalists in each category. The winners will be announced on 3 February 2011 at a live event in Dublin’s Grand Social.'
    (tags: blogs blogging irishblogs music mp3 mp3blogs ireland awards)

I made a sled

Published December 6, 2010

Facing yet another day of being snowed in, with Dublin's icy roads and footpaths driving us all stir crazy, I came up with this:

More pics, vid -- fun!

Links for 2010-12-03

Published December 3, 2010

Links for 2010-12-02

Published December 2, 2010

Links for 2010-12-01

Published December 1, 2010

  • Barry Eichengreen on the Irish bailout : 'The Irish “program” solves exactly nothing – it simply kicks the can down the road. A public debt that will now top out at around 130 per cent of GDP has not been reduced by a single cent. The interest payments that the Irish sovereign will have to make have not been reduced by a single cent, given the rate of 5.8% on the international loan. After a couple of years, not just interest but also principal is supposed to begin to be repaid. Ireland will be transferring nearly 10 per cent of its national income as reparations to the bondholders, year after painful year. This is not politically sustainable, as anyone who remembers Germany’s own experience with World War I reparations should know. A populist backlash is inevitable.'
    (tags: ireland economy bailout eu euro)

  • Video: Robots Explain The Irish Economic Crisis : Pretty good explanation, actually
    (tags: news ireland robots youtube debt eu politics economy)

Links for 2010-11-26

Published November 26, 2010

Science Gallery Xmas Cards

Published November 26, 2010

The Dublin Science Gallery Greeting Cards are excellent!

Get 'em here, or pick up one of the great gadgets and gifts they have in stock.

(disclaimer: I am mates with the designer and the guy who runs the shop -- but I still think they're great work, regardless ;)

Links for 2010-11-19

Published November 19, 2010

Links for 2010-11-16

Published November 16, 2010

Links for 2010-11-09

Published November 9, 2010

  • Tony Finch - Some notes on Bloom filters : more good Bloom Filter tips. he says: 'I take a slightly different tack, starting with a target population in mind which determines the size of the filter. Also there's a minor error regarding performance in the corte.si post. You only need to calculate two hash functions, and use a linear combination of them to index the Bloom filter. This simplifies the coding a lot, and if hash calculation dominates filter indexing, it's also a lot faster.'
    (tags: bloom-filters tips coding via:fanf false-positives)

Links for 2010-11-01

Published November 1, 2010

Name-checked in the Seanad

Published October 22, 2010

So, after I posted this post about Aslan's imaginary illegal downloads, someone on Twitter linked to this comment by Senator Paschal Mooney (Fianna Fail), in the Seanad the next day, repeating the incorrect Aslan factoid:

Sen. Paschal Mooney (Fianna Fail): There is a perception that the big five record companies, all international companies, have been ripping off the consumer for many years. I do not want to be seen as an apologist for the music industry, but at the lower level I can give a specific example to highlight the impact of illegal downloading on Aslan, an Irish band. It has sold 6,000 copies of its current album, but there have been 22,000 illegal downloads. [...] Why must we wait for a High Court judgment to be made before we introduce relevant legislation?

It appears a few people, Adam Beecher for one, got in touch with the Senator by email. To my surprise, a couple of days later, I got some Twitter messages telling me that I'd been mentioned in the Seanad! Indeed, here it is:

Sen. Paschal Mooney (Fianna Fail): Last week on the Order of Business I raised an issue relating to illegal downloading of music on the Internet which followed on a court case which the major international record companies had lost that had been taken the previous day. I asked the Leader what possible legislation could be introduced to address this gap, and I am repeating the request. I have had quite a significant amount of response to the comments I made last week, specifically from persons who state that the figures quoted in my report, and also the figures quoted in the court case to defend the record companies’ position, are inaccurate, and I was asked by a number of those who emailed me to correct the record. Having investigated this further - I recommend to the House that those who are interested log on to taint.org - there is no doubt that the figures that have been quoted to support the court case, which was subsequently lost, are not accurate. It related to the group Aslan. I do not want to delay the House on this other than to correct the record in that I put the figures as I had received them in good faith and such has been the response to the comments I made in the House last week that I feel obliged to correct the record and state that there is no doubt but that the figures that have been used are, at best, suspect.

It would be important if the Leader could have the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Innovation, Deputy Batt O’Keeffe, come to the House to give some indication of his proposals because the music industry is currently lobbying in this House and in the other House to have legislation changed to benefit it. However, there is a wider view that illegal downloading will continue irrespective of what happens, the record companies are now on the defensive and there are other alternatives that could be brought forward such as licensing those who wish to download. In that context, I would be interested in the Leader’s response.

A few comments in response:

  • Credit is due to Senator Mooney in that he admitted that he'd been misled, and corrected the record in that regard.

  • it's amazing to see that the democratic process has opened up to this degree. I would have never expected to have this degree of input to our elected representatives without having to go through more traditional channels (face-to-face meetings etc.)

  • Finally: 'The music industry is currently lobbying in this House and in the other House to have legislation changed to benefit it'. That is very, very worrying. Indeed, suzybie noted on Twitter:

@jmason not sure if you caught it but I saw Willie K and his mates entering Dáíl last Wednesday evening. FF backbenchers were being met

McGarr solicitors have been in touch with the relevant Ministers requesting that Digital Rights Ireland be included in any discussions regarding legislative change. This will be one to keep an eye on.

Links for 2010-10-18

Published October 18, 2010

Irish Times Letter re EMI v UPC

Published October 18, 2010

Submitted via email to their letters page. This may be a bit too long for the format, but hey. Enjoy.

Madam, -- Commentary in this paper and elsewhere has given the impression that Mr. Justice Charleton's judgement on the EMI v. UPC case was a poor result for EMI and the other record companies represented. This is not necessarily the case. While UPC may not yet have to implement "three strikes", there are many things to worry the Irish internet user in the judgement.

Mr. Justice Charleton states that he is satisfied that the business of the recording companies is being devastated by piracy, entirely based on evidence submitted by the record companies and IRMA. One of these assertions was that over 20,000 illegal downloads of an "Aslan" album had been "traced" -- but no details of the methodology of this "tracing" has been produced.

Third-party attempts to reproduce this figure indicate that it is probable that an extremely naive approach was taken in this testing -- the putative copies of the album available to download, and their large download figures, are in reality a lure used by criminals to persuade unwitting victims to provide their credit card details to fraudulent websites.

Worryingly, this flawed evidence has already been represented as fact in the Seanad by FF senator Paschal Mooney.

Other studies cited in the judgement have been criticised widely elsewhere, including by the US Government Accountability Office in its April 2010 report to the US Congress.

Mr. Justice Charleton goes on to suggest that all internet access from UPC (and presumably other ISPs) be filtered through a piracy-detection system. One wonders what the many companies who currently run internet-based services from Ireland would make of this proposal.

The government now seems keen to rush in and implement the filtering and blocking systems requested by IRMA and the music companies, as Mr. Justice Charleton recommends, or possibly even to give hand-outs to the music industry to compensate them, as IRMA demands. One hopes that more technical expertise will be brought to bear on the supposed "evidence" before this happens.

Yours, etc., Justin Mason

Links for 2010-10-14

Published October 14, 2010