linux
Water Babies
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Soul mining
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Battling technology
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Underneath your clothes
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My own personal antivirus
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Ukulele
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A rant about bad pop song lyrics
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More about fat cats
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My name is Ann and I am a trainaholic
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Settling into London now
Today we were in Mayfair as I had a job interview. Amazing to see all the Bentleys, Rolls Royces and Bugattis alongside just common Porsches and Mercedes. We also wandered past Nobu (restaurant for the stars) and one of Gordon Ramsay's restaurants.
We are settling down in our house now and have put together most of our Ikea furniture. We love the East Twickenham/Richmond area down by the river and are enjoying our place. So much good food around also and so little stomach capacity!!
Forza 3 director wants you to lose sleep
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Building Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy
I’m (hopefully) going travelling soon, and I’d like to have ready access to Wikipedia so I can investigate more information about various things, and generally keep up with what I should know while I’m visiting places. So I’ve spent some time trying to figure out how to get data plans for my phone.
This morning I had an epiphany, why not download the Internet before I left? My Nokia e66 can take a MicroSD Card (according to Nokia it only supports up to 8GB cards, although I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t support a 16GB card.)
There are several articles on how to build an offline wikipedia. I like the idea of having the compressed entire English text-only version of Wikipedia (~4.5GB). Maybe using the compressed Open Street Maps data (~5.2GB) to provide some geo-location while offline. And for good measure maybe compressed FreeBase dump (~1.2GB) to provide more links between articles, and provide information on regions (Wikipedia tends to provide a single point representing a region, not useful.)
Hopefully with a bit of hacking, I can end up with something like Mobilizy’s Wikitude, using the GPS for location, and accelerometers to figure out direction and rotation in 3D space (Android has an electric compass which makes this a bit easier for them), using freebase + Wikipedia to annotate the current scene.
What would be really cool would be to have a HUD that overlayed wikipedia articles over your current vision from your phone. Although I suspect no matter what you do, you’ll end up looking like a tool.
It’s scary that the sum of human knowledge (Wikipedia + Open Street Maps + FreeBase) fits in ~11GB (ignoring indexes and the like), and that I can fairly easily fit this onto my cellphone, with heaps of room to spare!
holidaying in china
I am currently taking a holiday in China, visiting my wife who is working here on contract.
On the way, we spent a few days in Singapore - they were having below average temperatures with lower-than-usual humidity, and after the warm NZ January weather it didn't actually feel uncomfortably hot like it did last time I was in .sg. We bought a laptop at Sim Lim mall, which is 7 stories high (as well as having a food court in the basement) and is all solely computer/electronics/camera shops.
We are in Guangzhou (formerly known in English as Canton) which is a city of around 8 million. The province (Guangdong) has around 100 million people I think, and the area between here and Hong Kong, known as the Pearl River Delta area, is where many of the factories that make the exports are located. Chinese New Year was on the 26th of Jan this year, so many of the factories were closed this week while all the migrant labourers went back to their home cities/provinces, and kids have been letting of firecrackers almost continually since then. Maybe coincidentally, the weather has been much better with blue skies and sunshine, when it was grey and overcast for the first week I was here. We took a weekend away at Shenzhen (the city just across the border from Hong Kong), staying at a beach resort called Dameisha, which would be very hot in summer, but was a bit cool in winter. The train between the cities is very modern, reaching speeds of over 200kmph but smooth enough that you wouldn't believe we were going that fast.
It's been much easier to adjust to being here than I thought it would be - almost all road signs and many shop signs/adverts have English as well as Chinese on them, even though few people here can speak much English. There are lots of Western-style malls, and in many cases the prices are significantly higher than in NZ. Eg a 120GB Classic iPod retailing for NZ$399 in NZ costs the equivalent of NZ$650 here, so there are obviously enough well-off people here, even if the large number of low skilled workers make very little. Labour costs being low means that things like clothing and taxi rides are very cheap by NZ standards, although you'll pay closer to NZ prices if you buy clothes at a shopping mall instead of a market. (Ironically, clothes from a branded store might even have been made in Europe and imported into China.)
As for the Great Firewall of China (as implemented by our ISP), so far I've only encountered 3 problems:
- any mis-typed domain name gets resolved to a catch-all, presumably to show ads in your web browser.
- bit-torrent doesn't work at all. This seems to use packet inspection rather than just port numbers. I had half of ubuntu downloaded via bittorrent at singapore, and couldn't get the rest when I arrived here.
- Web browsing is all forced through a transparent proxy that disallows any url ending in ".flv". This can be trivially defeated manually by adding a "?" or "&" to the end of the url, but I guess it's effective enough to stop 99.9% of users. (At least they are using open source software to oppress us - the http headers include "Server: squid/2.5.STABLE3")
New Zealand Copyright Amendment
Some interesting points I’ve not heard anyone mention about the New Zealand Copyright Amendment (IANAL, YMMV, …).
The submission format
92D Requirements for notice of infringement
A notice referred to in section 92C(3) must—
(a) contain the information prescribed by regulations made under this Act; and
(b) be signed by the copyright owner or the copyright owner’s duly authorised agent.
– 2D Requirements for notice of infringement
I’m unaware of any regulations made under this act so far, so currently you can’t create a notice of infringement that is prescribed by any regulations… yet.
The Submission format II
Although there hasn’t been any discussion about the submission format yet, it concerns me that you obviously need enough information to uniquely identify the copyright infringer (either the person, or the account). If an ISP’s business model involves putting customers behind a NAPT box, then a timestamp and IP address is not sufficient to uniquely identify the user, you at least need a timestamp, and the 5 tuple used. This is particularly concerning given that we are rapidly running out of IPv4 addresses, and one of the suggested solutions is to place as many customers as possible behind a Service Provider NAT box. Since connections through a NAPT box are far more ephemeral than IP address allocation, timestamps must be more precise, and more accurate. Which customer an IP is assigned to is usually stored along with the rest of the accounting information in RADIUS and generally is recorded by an ISP for essentially free. Having to record every connection through a NAPT box would incur a serious overhead, and data management problem for an ISP. Also, how long should an ISP hold onto this information so that it can process these notice of infringements before it can discard it?
You can only disconnect people.
92A Internet service provider must have policy for terminating accounts of repeat infringers
(1) An Internet service provider must adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of the account with that Internet service provider of a repeat infringer.
(2) In subsection (1), repeat infringer means a person who repeatedly infringes the copyright in a work by using 1 or more of the Internet services of the Internet service provider to do a restricted act without the consent of the copyright owner.
– 92A Internet service provider must have policy for terminating accounts of repeat infringers
This leads me to some interesting questions: If Alice is a member of an organisation, and the organisation has an account, and Alice infringes peoples copyright repeatedly, then the account that Alice is using is the organisations, but the account is not Alice’s. Is the organisation (perhaps Alice’s place of work) considered an ISP? In the more obvious case if Bob sits at an Internet Cafe and infringes peoples copyright then can the Internet Cafe’s account get shutdown? If the Internet Cafe buys it’s bandwidth from LittleIspInc, can LittleIspInc’s account get shutdown by their upstream? What should happen if UpstreamInc receives a notice for Bob’s infringement? Obviously it should pass it to LittleIspInc and LittleIspInc should pass it on to the Internet Cafe, who should terminate Bob’s account. In this case, Bob probably doesn’t even have an account at all. Are Internet Cafes going to require ID so they can check people against previously banned lists?
If LittleIspInc gets a series of notifications from UpstreamInc, should LittleIspInc be cut off, even though it’s multiple different downstream customers of LittleIspInc that have been infringing? Should the Internet Cafe get cut off if it has multiple different customers infringe? What if the Internet Cafe places everyone behind NAPT, and the infringement notices aren’t specific enough to identify an individual person?
Fake notice of infringments
While I’m not a lawyer, I’m sure there are laws already about sending fake infringement notices. So anyone who’s doing this maliciously is likely to get themselves into trouble.
False Positives
Ok, this one I have seen people talk about at length. There is no incentive for people sending notice of infringements to make sure they aren’t generating false positives. If people are too abusive they will probably end up running into trouble, but as long as they put in a reasonable effort, it seems to me that they are likely to get away with it.
I’ve seen people sent takedown notices for Open Office because some automated tool decided it was actually Microsoft Office (At the time, an unintended compliment I’m sure). I have seen people asked to take their photo’s down, because someone /else/ had permission to use the photo and was believed incorrectly to be the copyright holder.
Under this law, you appear to have no right of reply, no way to state your case and point out that you are innocent. ISP’s don’t appear to have the right to make judgement as to the quality of the notice of infringement (not that the ISP’s want this responsibility).
What’s an ISP?
I can’t find anywhere a definition of what is considered an ISP. Does it include anyone providing IPv4/IPv6 connections? If I run a public IPv4 network that doesn’t connect with the Internet, am I an ISP? If I run a public packet switched network (such as X.25), am I an ISP? Is a disconnected UUCP graph considered an ISP? Is a FidoNet BBS considered an ISP given that you can send FidoNet files and emails around (even tho noone in a FidoNet network need be connected to “The Internet”?). Is the phone system an Internet, given that I can dial anyone and send them data via a modem? Can I call Telecom and get them to disconnect an account for infringing my copyright?
In Summary
I don’t like this law. It seems to have too many problems. It appears that it could force ISP’s to use real world IPv4 addresses where their use is unwarranted, and impractical thus hastening the depletion of the IPv4 address pool. I am not a lawyer, I’m trying to interpret this the best I can without any formal law training, but I do know something about the technology from the ISP point of view.