CONTENT You shall retain ownership rights in information or other content that you upload, post or otherwise transmit to or via your use of Twidroyd (“Submissions”); however, by making your Submissions through Twidroyd, you grant Licensor a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, reproduce, edit, translate, reformat, distribute, modify, transmit, prepare derivative works of, publicly display and produce the Submissions in connection with the enhancement of the Twidroyd service or otherwise in connection with Licensor’s business. You agree that these licenses include the right for the Company to make your Submissions available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with the Company for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such content use. Such additional uses by the Company, or other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with the Company, may be made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Submissions. We may modify or adapt your Submissions in order to transmit, display or distribute it over computer networks and in various media and/or make changes to your Submissions as are necessary to conform and adapt that content to any requirements or limitations of any networks, devices, services or media.

This is a bit like Microsoft saying, “If you use Word to write something then you grant us a license to it.”  Or Bic saying if you use their biros then they get a license.  Or perhaps your paper manufacturer.

It’s also really sneaky.  They don’t do it upfront and tell you that they want this right; they hide it in a EULA and in the Terms and Conditions.

So, this was happened when they were bought by Tweetup?  So let’s look at their Terms. Sure enough, hidden in their Terms is:

You agree that these licenses include the right for the Company to make your Submissions and, if applicable, User Content, available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with the Company for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such content use.

Again they are hiding this.  I guess they want to use all the ‘tweets’ to try and sell them or the intelligence/analysis that they contain.  And they are a commercial company and so want to make money.  I have no problem with that.  My problem is that they aren’t being upfront about it.  And I guess they aren’t being upfront about it because they suspect that most people don’t really like the idea that their stuff (even if it has no individual value) is being sold.

Perhaps we should start paying for these services and really know what is happening to our data, rather than thinking everything is for free, and thus effectively forcing companies to do this type of thing?

Now I just need to find an alternative.  And ideas?

Apparently, said buskers have to audition for a place in the city so that they can play! This is to ensure that they are up to scratch and fit with the city.

I’m frankly astonished that councils would have a busking policy, auditioning buskers, probably having an council officer administer the policy and then having various people checking that buskers have a license. What a waste of money. Let the market decide. Bad buskers will not get any money and move on. Good ones will earn money and stay. The public can decide.

Thankfully, Newcastle upon Tyne has a sensible attitude; apparently, it doesn’t believe that busking is something that should be licensed.

Don’t get me wrong; I think Alexander Hanff does great work campaigning on privacy issues.  I just wonder if, in this case, he’s seeing stuff that simply isn’t there.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Googlegate is about Google collecting un-encrypted WiFi data whilst roaming the streets with their StreetView project. Apparently, according to Privacy International et al., they have been doing this with criminal intent to record the bits of data intentionally so that they can find out more about us.

It appears that, whilst driving along, the software listened for WiFi broadcasts, discarded ALL those that were encrypted, and stored the packets, in entirety, of those that were not encrypted. This, according to conspiracy theory, means they knew that they couldn’t use the encrypted ones, and therefore were intentionally storing the unencrypted ones, even though they could have got the SSID from the encrypted WiFi broadcasts. This is the smoking gun.

Personally, I have no idea what Google were thinking, but I’m going to hazard some guesses.

WiFi access points. What kind are generally encrypted and what kind are generally open? Most home routers supplied by networks to consumers in the last few years are almost always encrypted now. If you buy off the shelf then you have to make a choice on whether to encrypt. Every Starbucks, hotel, cafe, airport, and other public access WiFi is unencrypted. Unencrypted WiFi seems like an invitation to join it, doesn’t it? It’s providing a service that you can connect to.

If I was writing software I’d probably make the decision that if anybody bothers to encrypt their WiFi then they probably don’t want their SSID used either. Hence I’d discard those packets. Also, for my roving software, to keep it simple, I’d probably just store the whole packet and pull out the SSID later during analysis. Storage is cheap. It’s easier to do, and you’d want your 24/7 software to be simple just so that it stands a better chance of not crashing. And, if it’s simpler, then it’s quicker and cheaper to write and test. Particularly if the brief is: “collect the SSIDs and geolocations of unencrypted WiFi stations”.

Why collect the SSIDs in the first place? Android phones and location services. It seems to me that it’s simply about better location services and getting more accuracy. Cell towers + SSIDs helps to place you on the map.

Should Google be collecting all this data in secret? No, I don’t think so. Are they an evil company? No, I doubt that too. Are they a large (huge?) organisation intent on making a profit? Damn right, and that’s something we should worry about. Have they got a good privacy record? Not really, especially after the Buzz debacle. Should we watch them like a hawk? Definitely. Was Google stupid? Without a doubt. But are they criminal?

My wife talks about ‘cock-up or conspiracy’. It’s a bit like ‘never attribute to malice what can adequately be attributed to stupidity’. I think Google cocked up, not that it was some conspiracy to collect our WiFi transmissions and analyse them. Still, paranoid people tend to see conspiracies everywhere.

But then Gmail arrived, in beta, and, for me, changed the game.  And now with spam levels rising ever higher, I’ve finally reached the point where my poor little virtual server isn’t powerful enough to deal with all the spam that comes with mail domains I have since 1999.

These posts are about a journey that I’m going to make in transitioning from my own server to a Google Apps Mail account.  On the way I have to:

• move about 7GB+ of mail that is sorted into lots of different folders
• back up the mail from Google every day using an IMAP sync tool
• migrate 6 different domains so that I can receive and send on those different domains
• move my wife’s accounts and domains as well

And all without losing any mail on the way.  Or at least finding out I’ve lost mail on the way.

Why Google Apps Mail?  I’m driven by the nice user interface, tagging, searching and the fact it will just work on my Android phone.

It’s going to be a three step process:

1. Move spam processing off the server
2. Forward mail to Google from the existing mail mail server
3. Change the MX records to move them to Google.

This still means that I can change back to my own (or other server) at some time in the future.  Probably that move will happen when we can have the ability to easily run email server appliances in the cloud.  Until my decentralised dream becomes a reality I’ll go with Google.

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting opinion piece on the iPad recently over at BoingBoing about why you shouldn’t buy and iPad.  I found it via Slashdot, where many of these articles tend to get mentioned.  Many people have already commented on his post, analysing his position, arguments and thoughts;  I’m not going to – just Google and read a selection.  But it did set me thinking about Apple and their impact on how they are guiding consumers to view technology.

Those that know me, know that I avoid Microsoft wherever possible, will never buy from Sony, and I am coming to the same position on Apple.  I’ll kick off by quoting Doc Searls  from his “Prisons vs. Horizons” EOF page in the May 2010 Linux Journal:

“… the iPhone is a silo that stands on one company’s closed OS and hardware. It is equipped with a slick SDK, rules galore about how products should run and developers behave, and a single retail sphincter – the iTunes ‘store’ …”

If you own an iPhone or iPad you have precisely one place where you can get your apps: the iTunes store.  That’s it. There is no where else that you can get an App and install it on your device.  And Apple has absolute control over what goes into that store.  And, it seems, it has a pretty arbitrary decision making process for allowing apps into the store.

Several things are fairly well known:

1. If the App competes with something from Apple, then you won’t find that App.
2. If it is digital content then you can only buy it from Apple.  i.e. music, books or just about anything else.
3. If Apple decides they don’t like it then you aren’t going to find it.  Witness Steve Job’s latest outburst: Want Porn? Buy an Android Phone, Steve Jobs Says

Now, I’m not saying that you should go out an buy porn, but to have Apple dictate that you can’t have it, and shouldn’t have it?  It’s like Disneyland as Ed Felton at Freedom to Tinker wrote about.

It does not matter how good Apple products are if you, as the user, are not free to do what you want with it.  Yes they are nice shiny boxes. Yes, it’s a lovely Disney experience. But there just isn’t enough control left in the hands of me, the user.

To me, Apple with the iPhone and iPad are the AOL, Compuserve, and MSN of the Internet era: walled gardens, silos or prisons where everything is controlled by one entity.

Apple, for the consumer, is about a choice: as a user of the iPhone/iPad/etc., you have Apple dictate what you can do with the device, what apps you can use, where you can buy your content and even whether you can have Flash applications or not.

If that’s the choice, I think I’m going to choose something else.

T5 Experience for Transit Passengers

My wife and I got off the plane at 6.45 am on Sunday morning.  After queuing and being checked for over an hour we finally made it into the Terminal ‘proper’ at around 8.00 am.  That’s an hour and a quarter to clear immigration.

There were four queues to negotiate when getting off the plane at T5. They all took place in a hot, airless, basement of the terminal.  Not very welcoming to foreign passengers.

• The first queue was to actually get into the hall where we had our boarding card checked. Essentially, we were transit passengers.  This queue split us into UK passports and everybody else. Luckily, our UK passport queue seemed shorter than everybody else – god knows how long they had to wait.
• The next (for us) fairly short queue was to get our passports checked. Everybody else seemed to have very long additional waits to get their passports checked.
• The third queue was to get our pictures taken.   This took a LONG time. I wonder how long they keep the pictures.  Knowing the previous Labour government, probably ‘forever’ is the retention time.
• The fourth, final, tedious, queue was to get our hand luggage scanned. Luckily we weren’t the lucky few who got a very, very personal pat down from the security staff.

And all this took over an hour.  It is was also staffed by grumpy, bored, unsmiling security staff who treated is like cattle to be processed.  And the joke is: we paid for this as part of our plane ticket price.  We were the customer.  You’d never know it.

We were finally ejected from the security circus into a shopping centre. Not a calm place where you can relax between flights or before setting off on your first one. Nope. An incredibly busy, over bright, shiny, steel and glass edifice with widely spaced shops and hardly any seats. A place where the restaurants are not grouped in one place, but are scattered to the four corners of the Terminal. Choosing a restaurant means walking the entire length of the terminal, passing the oh-so-important shops of course.

After waiting over an hour in the queues, we also needed to use the toilets. Considering the sheer quantity of people that were stuffed into T5 it was a surprise that there weren’t more toilets. There were long queues at both the ladies and gents toilets. This is the first time I have experienced that at an airport here or abroad. You’d think that, when designing a terminal, you would get something as basic as the number of toilets for the expected number of people in the terminal.

Leaving the terminal to get on to a plane was also tedious. We were checked twice at the gate and again stood in a slow moving queue. The main culprit this time was having our photo checked. Then we had our boarding cards checked before getting onto the plane.

Finally, because Heathrow was so busy, after pushing back from the terminal, the plane was still trundling around the airport 30 minutes later before finally taking off 20 minutes late. Normal day at Heathrow I suppose.

Design Goals for Terminal 5

It’s not entirely clear what the design goals for T5 were but the outcome for us was not a particularly pleasant customer experience. It feels less like an airport terminal and more like a shopping centre which happens to have air passengers in it. Maybe BAA were more concerned with maximising revenue per passenger and less concerned with comfort, relaxation or a calm, friendly, passenger experience?

I’m going to compare Schiphol Airport near Amsterdam with Heathrow because I have had experience with both. It’s like comparing apples and oranges. They are so different that the only thing they seem to have in common is that they are both called ‘terminals’. Being in transit at Schiphol goes roughly like this.

1. Get off plane
2. Walk for 5 minutes or so to the centre of the terminal.
3. Make a choice in whether to eat, shop or relax.
4. Go to the appropriate zone
5. When ready to the gate
6. Be checked at the gate which includes the baggage check, passport check and boarding card.  This doesn’t seem to take very long at all.
7. Get on plane and depart.  From push back you are in the air within 10 minutes.

Each airports apparent attitude to security and their passengers results in very different passenger experiences. Whereas Heathrow is completely paranoid about security, Schiphol, to me, seems more pragmatic. Heathrow tries very, very hard to ensure everybody in the terminal has been checked before you get in.  At Schiphol they check you just before you get on the plane.

One of the problems with Heathrow seems to be the requirement to photograph everybody coming into the terminal and then check it on the way out. The results in delays and long queues aside from being an invasion of privacy. The overly paranoid security policy at the airport creates the rest of the delays. Besides, it’s theatre; Bruce Schneier has a lot to say on this.

T5 wants passengers to shop ’till they drop? Schiphol thinks it’s optional. T5 doesn’t want you sitting down? Schiphol provides relaxation couches around the airport. T5 makes you walk past shops whilst trying to choose where to eat. Schiphol puts them all in the same place. And Schiphol never seems to have queues in their toilets.

In summary

Heathrow T5 fails because it is designed with lots of security theatre and as a shopping centre. That’s the security processes that make us feel safe without actually doing anything about security. Long delays and miserable, bored and unfriendly security staff aren’t going to make passengers feel welcome. The apparent emphasis on extracting cash from travellers rather than giving them somewhere to relax isn’t going to help either.

I’m going to avoid Heathrow T5, which also sadly means British Airways, in future.

Well software source control or version control systems.  I tend to use two: subversion and git.  Actually, I tend to use git whenever I can including when I have to use subversion. git svn is, in US terms, awesum.  One debate I have had on and off is whether to:

• Do development on trunk and put releases in branches — OR
• Do development on branches, merge to trunk, and tag releases (or put them in their own branches).

I’ve previously done the former, but I’m rapidly shifting to the latter.  My rather simple reasoning is that I want trunk/master to be, to all intents and purposes, a working copy of the latest software.  i.e. the software that is in trunk/master passes its tests, builds and basically does what it says it should on the tin.  The developing software is done on a branch and only merged back to trunk/master when it passes its tests.  Thus the process is:

1. Branch
2. Develop & test
3. Merge from trunk/master to the branch (i.e. pull any updates)
4. Test, test, test
5. Review code with buddy, senior dev, etc. (depending on your set-up)
6. Merge back into trunk as a finished feature.

Even better, only work on code that is actually described in a ticket, bug, or on something like pivotal.  That way you stay focussed and only spend time on developing features/fixing bugs that the ‘customer’ actually wants.

The only question then is what you do with releases?  My initial guess is to tag them as a release on trunk/master.   Then if you get a bug and have to maintain the old release then to branch at that point and maintain the release as its own ‘master’ release branch.

Piracy evokes images of beards and cutlasses on the high seas, where pirates board ships, steal galleons and generally go about their pirating business.  Updated to modern times, it involves boarding ships with guns and knives, kidnapping crews and demanding vast ransoms for the return of said crew, ship and contents.  Nowhere in these scenarios is piracy the same as copying a digital file.

Piracy != copyright infringement and sticking ‘digital’ in front of it doesn’t either.  Copyright infringement is not the same as ‘stealing’ or ‘theft’.  If I steal something from you, I deprive you of the use of whatever it is I’ve stolen.  If I copy a file, YOU still have the original, and can do everything that you could originally do with it.

So why are they using the word ‘piracy’?  Well it could be so that the media want people to think of copyright infringement as ‘theft’, want us to draw an equivalence with stealing, want us to think it is as bad as real piracy.  But what copyright infringement really is is the civil infringement of a monopoly granted by the government to groups that publish works.  I’ll say it again. It’s a government granted monopoly on creating artificial scarcity in order to extract proportionately higher ‘rents’ or profits than could otherwise be achieved.  It was given to printers in the 18th century to stop cheap knockoffs and encourage them to print books.  It’s got about as much relevance to the 21st century as the law about having a man with a red flag walk in front of a car did in the 20th centuary.

And the Digital Economy Bill?  Don’t get me started. I’ll just end with this:

“a bill proposed by the unelected, debated by the ignorant and voted on by the absent” #debill /via @Glinner & @alnya /via @davidwren

However, one presentation tried to tackle the immensely challenging science of networking and attempted to explain the academic difference between complex and complicated.  Whilst the explanation of ‘complicated’ was good, ‘complex’ was almost just left as being ‘not like complicated’  – the explanation didn’t really explore the concept due, most likely, to a lack of time.  I’m going to try to touch on it here.

(Update:  This is about complexity theory, rather than the normal English use of the words.  Sorry for any confusion!)

Complicated was described using the Boeing 747 example.  This one often pops up in popular literature as being an example of something that has a huge number of parts that fit together in a staggeringly intricate way.  View a plane as a whole you don’t see the myriad parts of the engine for example.  “Wow, that looks complex!” you might exclaim.  Well, no, it looks complicated.  You could, with sufficient time, completely dissasemble a 747 and lay out all of the constituent part.  You also could understand the purpose and of each and every part and how they fit together.  With time, there would be no mystery why the engine’s fan blade is shaped a particular way.

Complex on the other hand, describes an entirely different set of phenomena.  The Boeing 747 is an example of a complicated system, where system is used to describe a set of components which together achieve a purpose.  The trouble with analysing complex systems is that looking at the parts tells you almost nothing about the system.  That is, you have to look at the interactions and feedback between the parts and the emergent behaviour that the interactions and feedback bring about.

It is probably easier to take a few examples.  Birds flocking and termite colonies are examples complex systems as are organisations and society.

Birds flocking is a bit of a classic and programs have been written to simulate it.  Each agent (or ‘bird’) only has a small set of behavioral characteristics or rules when flocking and completely analysing a bird does not give an inkling of the beauty of the motion that a flock of birds draws in the sky.  The behaviour of the flock emerges from the interactions of the whole and, critically, cannot be predicted by looking separately at the behaviour of each of the birds.

Termites are interesting in that they are quite simple and can be examined from a physical and biological perspective of the individual termite.  However, again, their social functions and mound building can only be studied at the level of the colony the social behaviours only emerge from the non-linear interactions and feedback between the termites which is one of the features of a complex system.

When humans are part of a system, each agent can make their own decisions and they will only do that based on their own partial perspectives of their own understanding of the system.  Hence society and politics.

So complex systems are non linear, involve feedback loops and resist reductive analysis; they can only be analysed at the macro level where the behaviour of the system emerges from it parts.

I had the ‘pleasure’ of travelling through Heathrow T5 twice during my holiday to Thonon les Bains on Lac Leman which is reached via Geneva.  On paper, the flights look fine; catch the BA plane to Heathrow, two hours at Heathrow and then catch your onward flight to Geneva.  On the return journey, three hours are offered at Heathrow – little did I know it was to clear security.

On the way out to Geneva, the plane was delayed by nearly an hour waiting at the gate.  However, desipte a 2 hour transfer time (not including the extra delay) our bags failed to make the connection from Newcastle and didn’t travel with us.  That’s everybody who flew from Newcastle to Geneva, six in total; not one of us was joined by our bags on the flight.  The bags did eventually turn up on the next flight and were delivered to us after a 5 hour delay. The baggage company at Geneva were not surprised; it seems that bags are far more frequently delayed from T5 than any other airport in the developed world.

However, it only got worse on the way back.  First we were delayed in Geneva because there was no slot available at Heathrow.  Then, even when we were given a slot at Heathrow, when the plane arrived at the airport’s airspace we were delayed again.

Then the plane was parked away from the terminal as there were no stands available.  Normally buses await to take the passengers to the terminal.  Except there weren’t any.  For 30 minutes.   None of the ground staff seemed to have any sense of urgency.  The bus driver even seemed to wait with the bus full despite several panicked American passengers on short transfers – they didn’t stand a chance with T5.  But when we were finally delivered to the terminal the fun really began.  We didn’t get to the T5 shopping centre for another 30 minutes.

Queues seem to be the norm at T5.  Firstly, there was a ludicrous queue after getting to T5.  It transpired that at the head of this queue was a small woman asking people whether they were transferring to local or international flights.  She was completely pointless because the hall immediately behind her was full of signs directing you where to go if you were transferring to a local or international flight.  She had no purpose whatsoever.  Utterly unbelievable and the first 10 minutes of waiting.

Next we queued to have our boarding passes checked.  After that another queue to have our passports checked.  Finally, both the local and international passengers were shepherded to yet another security check.  Together.  Why we were split up into different queues is anybodies guess as both the national and international passengers had boarding card and passport checks.  The final security check is the one where you take your belt off, take your laptop out, etc.  This took another 15 to 20 minutes.  Why?  Why?  Because the staff were just slow.  Inept too, probably, but generally very, very slow at staring at the computer monitor that displays the innards of cases, jackets, purses and other assorted bags. Incredibly slow.  In Newcastle this queue usually takes about 5 minutes.  The queue for our machine was on 10 or so people long yet took nearly 20 minutes …  I dispaired.

All told from the moment of touching down to getting into T5 took over an hour; it would have been 30-40 minutes at best even if we had got to a stand.  What a disgraceful way of treating people arriving at supposedly the most advanced passenger terminal in the world.  I imagine the American passengers on short transfers missed their flights.  There bags almost certainly will have done.

However, once in T5 proper you understand that it isn’t for passengers to relax waiting for their flight.  No, it’s only purpose is to extract money; it’s simply a glorified shopping mall.  All we wanted to do was get some lunch and then find somewhere comfortable for our next flight.  Instead, there are precious few places to eat and virtually no where to actually sit.  Unless you have an executive lounge pass that is.  T5, which because of its size, should feel spacious, yet feels claustrophobic, cluttered, noisy and generally unpleasant.

Even when we boarded our flight to Newcastle the madness of Heathrow didn’t end.  We ended up staying a further hour at the stand and taxiing before we finally took off.  Because they are operating at full capacity.

That seems to be the problem.  There are simply too many passengers.  They don’t need another runway; they need less passengers.  The current ‘systems’ at T5 don’t seem to be able to cope.  Most of the staff have a ‘learned helplessness’ air around them.

Heathrow needs proper competition.  Maybe BAA needs to be broken up so that Gatwick and Stansted can offer real competition to Heathrow to force it to buck its ideas up and provide a proper service to its passengers.  The security theatre is a joke; I don’t feel more secure, just that I’m having my time wasted.  We are paying customers; yet we pay to be treated like cattle.  I’m not sure why we put up with it.  Yet another reason for competition, but perhaps in a different way.  If there was an airport that didn’t treat you like cattle and actually treated you like paying customers then I would definitely fly through there, even if it was a bit more expensive.

BAA is bad for Heathrow and bad for British Airways.  The sooner it is broken up the better.