HMG won’t kill IE6

Filed under: Uncategorized by saul | No Comments »
Tags: , , ,

Today the Government responded to a petition to drive all Government bodies to upgrade their browsers to something that conforms to modern standards.  The petition was signed by 6,223 people who believed that the reluctance for many Government departments to upgrade costs many thousands (if not millions) of pounds of additional, unnecessary development costs to ensure that web applications still work with this 10 year old web browser.

The petition also cited the security vulnerabilities in IE6 as another good reason to upgrade, surely our Government systems should be using secure and reliable software.

The Government’s response basically boils down to:

  • the security issues are dealt with by the Government networks, firewalls and filters
  • upgrading is not cost effective

Now, I can see that the cost to upgrade is more than will be more about upgrading all the existing systems that have been built to ONLY work with IE6 than just installing new browsers on all PCs and that that cost will bring no new direct benefit to users and therefore the cost doesn’t seem to be justified, but what doesn’t seem to have been understood is the future cost of NOT upgrading.

Not only is there a cost for any web project that must be made compatible with IE6 (this cannot be understated), but the cost of Government users not being able to take advantage of new techniques, interfaces and tools that are commonplace in the web applications we all use daily is enormous.

Our ability to open our Government up and  for citizens to work with civil servants is going to rely on everybody being able to use the same tools, to be able to see and share the same information and contribute to it together.

Now surely there is someone, somewhere in Microsoft who is bright enough to work out how IE6 can be packaged up so it can still be used on those legacy systems that weren’t built to the right standards in the first place, while still allowing IE8 (or another modern browser) to be used for all other modern systems.

big society, little hope?

Filed under: social networking by saul | 4 Comments »

This week I attended a meeting intended to start activity on the Big Society in the North.  I went along to find out a little more and to get an impression of whether the ‘Big Society’ thing is a political ideology driven scheme to dismantle the apparatus of the social welfare system or a real grass roots movement to redistribute the authority to JFDI to civic minded citizens.

The overall impression I got was that the people in the room (excluding the usual Sheffield digerati) were all activists in the charity sector in one form or another.  Some had specific causes (recovery from substance addiction, self esteem building, providing conflict resolution skills to kids), some were thinking about general tools for organisers (online networks, hyperlocal information, skills exchanges, an app store) and a couple were thinking about the Big Society movement itself (what defines a Big Society activity? [see Matthew Taylor's blog post], what does the Big Society network look like?).

Several of these people stood up and gave a pitch for their organisation, endeavour or idea, primarily to start a conversation among the attendees, to draw on wider experience and gather ideas.

On the whole I walked away with 3 thoughts:

  • those people who pitched their specific cause were in the wrong room.  Everyone in that room was already up to their ears in pro-bono work and good causes or interested in the Big Society as a concept rather than the good work that happened under it flag.
  • Too few of the people there (excepting the internet people) were thinking about the power that networking would bring to their endeavour.  In fact one person actually suggested that their organisation abandon using technology to communicate and send each other postcards instead.  I’m all for simplicity, but not at the cost of magnitudes of scale of effectiveness.
  • No-one seemed to be thinking about building a community of practice for voluntary, pro-bono and charity work.  The idea that someone brought to create an app store of tools went in that direction, but the conversation seemed to head quickly toward technology rather than technique and practice.
    While discussing whether an activity could be considered as a ‘Big Society’ activity, it was suggested it should not be if a funded body was already doing it, but no-one revealed how someone would know if an activity that they want to undertake is already funded.

However, my overriding impression was of hope. The people who had gone to the Big Society in the North meetup were stoic in the face of a future without government funding and with tightening purse strings from private sector funders and were all still fighting hard to get done what they know needs to be done.

Perhaps the encouragement to JFDI is worth more than all that funding after all.

another letter to my MP re: the digital economy bill

Filed under: digital economy bill, web design by saul | No Comments »

Once again I find myself using the brilliant writetothem.com to show my displeasure at the Digital Economy Bill and how it is being pushed through the Parliamentary process.

I seem to be turning into ‘Angry from Sheffield’.

Dear Angela Smith,
You recently replied to my enquiry regarding the Digital Economy Bill stating that you “believe in appropriate scrutiny of all Parliamentary business and would not make decisions on legislation out of haste or speed”.

I am now writing to you to urge you to live up to this statement by showing your support for the Early Day Motion being put forward by your colleague Austin Mitchell. He, and many other MPs wish to ensure that this proposed legislation is properly scrutinised and considered before being passed into law.

The possibility of this Bill becoming law via the ‘smoke-filled-rooms’ of the wash-up fills me with dread that we may have to live with the legacy of a badly formed law for years to come.

I hope you recognise that proper scrutiny on this matter is of paramount importance and that you can stand by your previous statements,

Yours sincerely,

Saul Cozens

Ada Lovelace Day 2010: Gina Trapani

Filed under: Uncategorized by saul | 1 Comment »
Gina Trapani

Gina Trapani

Inspiration comes in many forms.  Sometimes it’s a TED talk that captures your imagination, or a TV show that really communicates the importance of a subject in a way that brings it to life, but for me for the past few months some inspiration has come from a woman discussing a fairly ordinary topic on an online panel/discussion show.

Gina Trapani is the co-host of This Week in Google alongside Jeff Jarvis and Leo Laporte.  It’s a show that I try and watch live every Saturday at  5:15 EST, which works out about 10:15pm UK time.  Each week the panellists (and usually a guest) dial in via skype and  discuss the technology, business and social impact of the week’s goings on atGoogle.  Maybe you don’t think that this would make riveting viewing but the conversation is always lively, interesting and often insightful.

But why would I find Gina Trapani’s presence inspirational, I mean it’s not exactly Nobel prize winning stuff is it?  Well no, but Gina’s ability to see through the technology and the business issues and communicate the real benefits that are being provided.  She also exudes a real love for technology that is infectious without being elitist or condescending.

I recall an example; Gina explained (and I’m paraphrasing) that she respected people who use Linux as their desktop more than those who use Windows or OSX because ‘they are willing to put the effort into using something just because it is right’.  That understanding that the technology in itself is not to be revered, but those who use it to better themselves and benefit others deserve a nod of recognition marks, in my book, Gina as someone who inspires me to try and do good.

Gina’s recently joined to Expert Labs, and they are adopting and developing her ThinkTank crowdsourcing application, which will be applied to help the US Government to address the ‘Grand Challenges’ of the 21st century – so maybe that  Nobel prize isn’t such a crazy idea.

DON’T RUSH THROUGH EXTREME WEB LAWS

Filed under: digital economy bill by saul | No Comments »
Dear Angela Smith,
I am writing to you again regarding the Digital Economy Bill that is currently being passed through Parliament.  I am extremely concerned that this extremely contentious and far-reaching legislation seems to be being hurried through Parliament with no real scrutiny.
This legislation will mean that ordinary law abiding citizens will receive threatening letters from their ISPs and some will have their internet connection cut-off without any proper recourse.
In addition, providers of public Wifi will withdraw their services due to fear of heavy fines because they are not able to identify alleged copyright infringers.  This will mean that thousands of people who use these services in public building, will no longer have the means to access vital information services.
All the while, copyright infringers will be mostly unaffected as the will simply use existing techniques to bypass the monitoring of their activity.
The Digital Economy Bill is ill-thought out and will not protect the interests of our creative industries. I ask you to insist that it is properly debated before it is passed into law.
I look forward to hearing whether you agree that such important legislation should be debated and discussed by you, our elected representatives, rather than being passed into law on a nod and a wink.
Regards
Saul Cozens
46 Rivelin Park Road
Sheffield
S6 5GE

I just used 38 Degrees to tell my MP, Angela Smith (Labour) that I am not happy that the Digital Economy Bill is being pushed through Parliament without proper debate.

I’ll let you know if/how she responds.

Dear Angela Smith,

I am writing to you again regarding the Digital Economy Bill that is currently being passed through Parliament.  I am extremely concerned that this extremely contentious and far-reaching legislation seems to be being hurried through Parliament with no real scrutiny.

This legislation will mean that ordinary law abiding citizens will receive threatening letters from their ISPs and some will have their internet connection cut-off without any proper recourse.

In addition, providers of public Wifi will withdraw their services due to fear of heavy fines because they are not able to identify alleged copyright infringers.  This will mean that thousands of people who use these services in public building, will no longer have the means to access vital information services.

All the while, copyright infringers will be mostly unaffected as the will simply use existing techniques to bypass the monitoring of their activity.

The Digital Economy Bill is ill-thought out and will not protect the interests of our creative industries. I ask you to insist that it is properly debated before it is passed into law.

I look forward to hearing whether you agree that such important legislation should be debated and discussed by you, our elected representatives, rather than being passed into law on a nod and a wink.

Regards

a letter to my MP about the Digital Economy Bill

Filed under: digital economy bill by saul | 8 Comments »
Tags: , ,

I have been getting gradually more and more angry about the Digital Economy Bill that the UK government are going to try and pass in the next few months.  I have been moved so much that I have used writetothem.com to write to Angela Smith my local MP.

Dear Angela Smith,

Could you please let me know you position on the proposed Digital Economy Bill that was mentioned in the Queen’s speech.

I am extremely concerned that the interested of certain industries are being supported over the interests of the citizens of the UK.

In addition to stifling a communication tool that has the potential to increase community and political engagement, the DEB seems to be attacking democracy itself.

That the bill allows a person’s internet connection to be removed on the suspicion of wrong doing, with no proof required and no right to recourse or hearing in a court of law, runs counter to the long held British tenet of ‘innocent until proven guilty’.

In addition to this, the expected clause allowing a Minister to make changes to the terms of the Bill after it has been passed, without further discussion or debate by accountable and electable representatives is abhorrent.

I hope that you will tell me that you will be voting against this bill when it comes before the House of Commons. I would be pleased if you can tell me that you will speak out publically against it before then.

Yours sincerely,

Saul Cozens

I will post her response both here and on openrightsgroup.org

UPDATE: I have had a response from Angela Smith MP

(more…)

Aspire Acer Revo + Ubuntu + Boxee

Filed under: Uncategorized by saul | 2 Comments »

I’ve received an Aspire Acer Revo on Friday and have spent a few hour s so far this weekend installing:

  • Ubuntu
  • Boxee

Thanks to Liam Green-Hughes fantastic guide, it’s been relatively painless.  I didn’t need to do the crazy-assed graphix driver installaiton either – I just used EnvyNG to get and install the correct Nvidia drivers.

I now have it all up and running and playing music and video from my NAS. My next task is to interface a standard Sky remote control via LiRC and a Nintendo Wii remote via bluetooth.  I can then start building apps on top of the XUL based interface provided by Boxee.

If anyone has any ideas of apps that would be appropriate for a TV based device (either in the home or in an office environment) or any interesting ways in which gestures from a Wii remote could be interpreted, please let me know.

check point FDE: as secure as a brick!

Filed under: security, sys admin by saul | No Comments »

I’m as mad as hell at Check Point.  They’ve managed to turn my MacBookPro into a brick.

This evening I decided to get around to encrypting my MacBook’s harddisk in accordance with our company security standards.  When we bought this first batch of MacBooks we thought hard about how we woud maintain the security standards we have in place for our Windows and Linux based laptops.  We concluded that in order to do this we would have to pay for encryption software (we use an Open Source package on Windows/Linux platforms), but security is worth paying for.

So I followed the instructions and installed Check Point Full Disk Encyption for Mac on my lovely shiny new MacBookPro.  Everything seemed fine and I was happy to see the ‘restart your computer now’ button appear quite quickly.

Unfortunately, 5 seconds after clicking that restart button I was greeting with a console error message:

Couldn’t init Graphic!

FATAL ERROR

Nothing would boot any further.  Eeek!  Quickly I get onto my desktop PC and start googling.  Low and behold there is a known issue with new MacBookPros and Check Point FDE 3.0. It doesn’t work!

Okay – at least it’s a known problem, so there must be a fix available.  After 5 minutes of registering on Check Point’s website to see the solution, I am informed that ‘To view this solution, Advanced access is required.’

So Check Point release a product that silently bricks my MacBook and then tell me that in order to find out how to fix the problem I must pay for a support contract.  Nice!

Maybe I should go round to their house, shit on their carpet and ask them for money to clear it up!

digital britain discussion at geekup sheffield

Filed under: Uncategorized by saulcozens | No Comments »
Tags: ,

I had a great time at geekup Sheffield last night.  The format had changed from a bunch of presentations (mostly by techies about technical issues) to a much more freeform conversation.  This was extremely succesful and looked a lot like what I’ve been trying to do with my Pub2.0 thing.  So well done Geekup!

In order to seed some interesting conversations, the geekup organiser (Jag) asked a few people to ‘host’ some conversation topics.  Jag asked me to try and start up a conversation about the Digital Britain Interim report recently published by Lord Carter.  I was only too happy to oblige.

So I spent a considerable part of the evening talking to a couple of people (namely Chris and John) about what was right and wrong with the report and its proposals.  I was keen to try and steer the conversation away from widely discussed topics of infrastructure (whether it should be the government’s role to fund our new high bandwidth to the home network, or should it be left to the telcos?) and content (are the proposals in DB for the setup of a ‘copyright police’ simply propping up an outdated business model).

Instead I wanted to discuss one area that Lord Carter’s report doesn’t seem to cover at all – digital services.  I wanted to know if there are any digital services that are big enough that only a government could deliver them, but are not so important that we shouldn’t trust a government to provide them.

The obvious candidate is digital identity services, but that kind of falls into the ‘too important to be trusted to government’ category.  Also, as an evangelist for openID (and other distributed service mechanisms), I couldn’t, hand on heart, suggest that the identity management for an entire nation be provided by a central service (government run or not).

This lead to the statement perhaps government should instead concentrate on setting data interchange standards and service provider certification. The obvious application would be to enable the easy transfer of personal health records from one provider to another, not in some invisible way where any backstreet quack (or pharmaceutical company exec) who has got themselves an NHS login can access my records, but instead  in a way where I could be in control of who has access to my records.  Better even, I can also receive notifications when my records are accessed.

Chris mentioned that he didn’t think that current FOI legislation allows someone to ask an organisation WHY they have their personal data, which may become a pertinant question when you see that BigPharma Inc. have recently accessed your GP records.

Of course, this idea is probably past its best as the Nth billion pound of fund is poured into the big centralised NHS health-care record system, but the principle could be applied to many other areas of personal information: credit records, employment/tax history, benefits, pensions, criminal records/driving convictions.

Not only did we think that setting standards is what government is better suited to than providing services (certainly in IT), but it could also allow for innovation and consumer choice to enter the information systems market and allow the public to be able to control their own data.

Of course after this very interesting and inciteful discussion we then went on to talk about how the record industry is trying to prop up an outdated business model and how all the best songs are written by poor starving artists anyway…

I’m now looking forward to GeekUp Sheffield next month!

Ada Lovelace Day: Mary Lou Jepsen

Filed under: Uncategorized by saulcozens | No Comments »

I signed up to Suw Charman-Anderson’s Ada Lovelace Day pledge quite a while ago and ever since I have been trying to work out who I should blog about.

You see the brief is to pick a woman in technology that I admire and blog about them to try and provide more women with the role-models, the inspirational figures that they are able to related to, that will encourage them to work with and in technology.

While thinking about why it is that I have so few women in my list of technologists I admire, I recalled how I was first introduced to probably the most influential women in technology ever, Ada Lovelace.  During my first year of my Electronic and Control Systems Engineering degree, I took a course on programming.  Early in this course the lecturer was discussing (very briefly) the general concept of strong typing in languages for embedded systems and mentioned ADA, the language developed for the US DoD.  With glee, he told his audience of impressionable young engineers (a small percentage of who were women) that ADA was named after Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage’s mistress.

And with that dismissal of the significance of inventing the concept of programming, my lecturer gave a slamming indictment of the perception the contribution women have made to our industry.

So I will do all I can do to counter this perception and let women know that our industry welcomes their participation and I look forward to being inspired by them in future.

Now, I know many women technologists, I have worked with some outstanding women over my years and while I have respect for their knowledge, skills and endeavour, I don’t think I can claim any of them to be my heroine.  To admire these women just on the grounds of their gender would be patronising and demeaning.

I also know of a few women who are industry leaders and influencers, but  I have to confess to being more interested in the things that they do rather than who they are.  Among the few women’s names that have been associated with things that have been inspiring enough for me to research the person behind them is Mary Lou Jepsen.

What I know about Mary Lou Jepsen can be found out from her page on Wikipedia, but her dedication to a project such as One Laptop Per Child, must surely deserve admiration.  The OLPC vision is:

To create educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. When children have access to this type of tool they get engaged in their own education. They learn, share, create, and collaborate. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future.

This must be one of the most important technology projects that could be undertaken in a World where the divide between the connected and the non-connected is widening and being connected brings both the opportunity for self-fulfilment and economic independence.  Access to information allows people to educate themselves in the absence of anybody to teach themselves, to trade in a renewable resource that they have in abundance, their intelligence, and to add their contribution to the entire world of understanding and knowledge.

Mary Lou Jepsen, was the Chief Architect and driving force behind the OLPC project and was pivotal in getting numerous large corporates to participate in it.  Without her, the World would be a poorer and less equal one.

Next Page »