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Justin's Linklog Posts

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 5, 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