So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship: that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of the Second World War could have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. [from the Telegraph]

Don Camillo – A Confession

I hate this, not out of any misguided visions of a socialist or nanny state, but because the entire process is designed to destroy all the last vestiges of positivism that may be lodging in a dark corner of my soul. Also because I fundamentally disagree with one aspect of the benefits system, which is this: If you are living with your partner, the jobseekers allowance claim is joint. No matter whether they’re in work, a full time student, or whatever. Not only do I have to dig though all *my* documentation and history, bank accounts, debts (yes) and creditors (no. Well…), but I also need to get in all the details for her. Hate. (The form. The process. The assumptions. Not, I feel the need to clarify, the partner).

Filling in the form took hours, although it helped that I could do it all online at direct.gov.uk. There was a lot of backtracking (That counts as an income, doesn’t it. Oh, crap. There’s a separate box for it three pages on), and quite a bit I’m not entirely sure on (I own a company, although it doesn’t have any money and it’s not giving me any, which isn’t really employment, is it? Where does that go on the form?) and then the site crashed. Fortunately I could resume from where I was.

A day or two later I got a text message saying I had an appointment to do my claim, and that we both had to turn up and bring all required documents. First, didn’t say which documents. Second, I was booked to go to a job appointment then. Third, SMS is not guaranteed delivery. If you are sending required, unrepeated, unduplicated information over SMS you are doing it wrong. So I phoned to reschedule, and was put though to a line which rang for ages then cut me off, and did so repeatedly.

So today, I went to visit the Job Centre for my appointment. Since I now have a job (I start work for Zappit on Wednesday), this was purely to stop the application process.

“Hi, I’ve got an appointment in about half an hour for a new claim, but I’ve just got a job. What do I do next?”

(Pause. Shuffle shuffle. Think. Aha)

“Come with me.” says the reception at the Job Centre, and makes it someone elses problem with astounding haste and certainty.

The someone else (whose lunch I interrupted, unfortunately) deleted my claim outright. So either I’m safe and everything’s fixed, and I don’t have to go though the rest of the process, or I’m stuck with no claim and also a background check in progress.

What could possibly go wrong?

Across all our roads and rails hundreds of workers are on standby to ensure that, should we receive a mega deposit of snow, we are in a position to keep the capital moving.

London Weather, Sunday:

London Snow (Image by me, via Instagram)

Transport for London, Sunday:

First snow of the year in London. London Underground comes to a grinding halt. (Image via @tariqpanja on twitter)

Rexaura does a very good job of introducing you to its new concepts, all of which seem logically thought through (Caveat: I’ve not played though the entire set yet) and while the writing falls short of the original, it’s better than most games. If there’s a complaint, it’s that it tends slightly further towards the timing-based shoot-portals-quickly mechanics that Valve themselves steered away from for the sequel, but it’s still an entertaining series of new and original Portal levels, and well worth the nothing you’re paying for it.

I’ve got a rotten cold that’s filled my brain with cotton wool, my computer rejected a software update hard enough to require a system restore (Advice: Avoid Catalyst 12.1), I had to throw out dinner when it became obvious the chicken was out of date (which was after I’d spent the time making it), and I’m generally feeling like the universe was waiting for today in order to subdue any optimism I have.

But over the course of the day, starting yesterday afternoon as my Australian friends started the day, I’ve had a steady stream of trills from my phone as people from every part of my life and lives have wished me happy birthday, from family to people I haven’t seen or spoken to since I walked out of the office I worked with them in, though to people from Usenet, IRC, computer games and larp systems. A stream of people who give enough of a care to write two to five words into a text box on Facebook, which is nice.

You sleep. Time passes. Thorin sits and sings about gold.

You have levelled up! You are now level 31. You have one ability point to spend on a feat of your choice.

> Select ‘Gainful Employment’

Processing….

Acer Inc., Amazon.com, ASRock, Asus, Barnes & Noble, Cisco, Dell, EVGA Corporation, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, Lenovo, Logitech, Microsoft, MSI, Motorola, Netgear, Nintendo, Nokia, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba, Vizio.

(Source)

A short list of Foxconn’s customers mentioned in articles about Foxconn’s working conditions:

Apple Inc in all of them, and “Xboxes” twice.

(Source, Doing a google news search for “Foxconn”, reading the top articles for each story on the front page, and a random selection of the non-top stories, around 20 in total)

Foxconn’s conditions are awful. The latest round of allegations makes me upset at what we do to human beings, and a lot of this coverage comes from Apple’s recent release of a report on how they have to do better by the workforce, but every Foxconn tragedy story I’ve read since they came to light has mentioned iPhones (Which is fair enough, they’re a good and well known example to use) and very few have mentioned any other company at all.

Notably absent from either of these lists is HTC, who do their own mass production. I haven’t seen any news stories about their factories, so they must be paragons of virtue.

Annoying, isn’t it, how these international websites are going dark internationally for a US law? Well, that’s kind of a large part of the problem. How do you define a site that is under US law? Is it where the servers are hosted? Is it where the company who owns the servers are incorporated? Is it where the person who accesses the data lives?

I (in the UK) rent a virtual server from Linode that’s hosted in London. Linode are an American company. I host an episode of the Daily Show, owned by an american company. Whose copyright laws apply?

In this case, SOPA defines a “Domestic” site as one with a US registered domain name (.com/.net/.org or .us) or IP address. So because my IP address is owned by Linode, it counts as Domestic under SOPA, but also because most of the domains that point at the server (but not all) are top level domains controlled by US parties.

That may not matter, since there is a precedent for charges against British citizens being able to be brought by US companies under US law and for them to be extradited to face them.

The reason why it affects us is that it starts to make a lot of resources unviable, because it places the onus of proof of copyright onto the “host”:

The owner or operator of the site is “committing or facilitating the commission of criminal violations punishable under section 2318, 2319, 2319A, 2319B, or 2320, or chapter 90, of title 18, United States Code.” Those sections primarily deal with copyright infringement and counterfeit products.

This means that sites like Tumblr and YouTube suddenly have a problem, because instead of the person who uploads a copyrighted image, text or video being liable for committing an act of computer piracy under US law, suddenly the websites are, and since the sites are far larger, more obvious and richer targets for lawsuits it will mean the cost of running a site where people upload things starts to have to include fighting thousands of lawsuits against copyright holders, while the user who lied when they clicked the “I have permission to post this” checkbox continues to do so.

It would be interesting to see what the percentage of YouTube/Tumblr etc. uploads that are copyrighted content is, and what percentage of that can be classified as “Fair Use” and what percentage of the rest the copyright holders don’t mind being published, since it brings more exposure. In addition, a lot of posters to YouTube seem to believe they *do* have the legal permission to post things so long as they post a magic mantra about “Not claiming any copyright on any of this video or characters or anything!”. If YouTube, to take a single example, is now legally responsible for every video it hosts, the simple “I’m allowed to post this” legal figleaf stops sufficing, and they suddenly need actual legal proof of copyright, and how do you prove that?

I have a video of tea being brewed,  which I took myself with my very own iPad. It has a soundtrack which I didn’t actually have permission to use, but which I replaced with a public domain track later. I *took* the video, and I can’t legally prove my ownership beyond a sacred vow that that really is the state of the tiling in my kitchen. My video channel also includes some dancing santas and a dancing raccoon suit. The wonder and the beauty of YouTube is, in part, that it’s quick, it’s easy, and it doesn’t require you to log your original tapes with a legal authority before uploading, which is what SOPA runs the risk of requiring.

You can argue that that’s fine, because Google’s huge and can afford to fight those bills, but I host websites on my little server, and if someone with an account on my server decides to upload a jpeg owned by someone else, the idea of me being personally and legally liable for it, able to be extradited to the US for prosecution for it,  is actually terrifying.

And this is hyperbole, to some extent. It’s the ultimate extreme of what the bill would require of hosts if it was misused by the large media companies to attempt to set fire to the stable and set a sniper on the horse, long after it bolted for the hills. They say, as they always say, that the strict rules and the draconian requirements are there not to use against ordinary people, but *bad* people. You know, those other people. They said the same thing about the DMCA when that came in, and those are horribly misused to break free speech, fair use, parody and commentary already.

There’s room in the world for better piracy controls and especially education on what copyright actually *is* and how and why it’s enforced, and for real actual *change* from both sides on how intellectual property and pure-digital creations can have proven ownership, but SOPA and its associated bills are a really bad idea that only really benefit the international mega-global media corporations who lobbied for it, and not just for the US, but for every person in every country that uses a US-based site and looks at cat pictures on the internet.

I generally have great hopes for the time between jobs. I’ll finish personal projects, clean the flat, get to the holy prophesied state of no laundry *or* washing up.

So in the last month I’ve played some Skyrim, a lot of Star Wars, some Orcs Must Die, and rewatched the entire seven season run of The West Wing.

I’ve done work on Piracy Inc as well, I’ve got a new combat model which is far simplier from both sides than the previous six-axis stat-a-rama, but which doesn’t fit into my tech model very well. I’ve been working on Larp.me.uk, designed as a cross-system character white-pages, event organisation system and gallery. So far it has the character bit mostly working, though I need to play with the interface a bit more. The Story is a few thousand words++, although my attempt at a christmas chapter-a-day thing fell apart distressingly early.

Recruitment continues apace. I’ve got three interviews and a tech test today, which is a bit of an overload, but should work out all right. The first one is in about twenty five minutes, so I’m sitting in a Starbucks a few hundred metres from the office (Top interview tips: Wear clothes you’re comfortable in, have three questions ready to ask, arrive an hour early so you’ll *never* arrive late and also have time to gather calm around you before you walk in) with a Vanilla Spice Latte, an iPad and a 3G connection.

Wish me luck…