15Mb: yet another blog from Dave Birch

My tweets on 2009-07-04

• @ruskin147 anything good in the new Wired? in reply to ruskin147 #
• Good morning Paris, what abeautiful day for travelling around on le metro… #
• Story in the Standard about thieves cloning electronic car keys by leaving bugs in bushes to record key codes. #
• @aleksk Go to sports store and get baseball bats, get to a narrow passage where they come thru 1 at a time. Elementary Zombie defence! in reply to aleksk #
• Shouldn’t have turned on tennis: now I can’t get out of the car. #
• @diane1859 Something about tensions between identity and creativity? Free speech, that kind of stuff? in reply to diane1859 #
• @ruskin147 use iplayergrabber to get shows you want then load them into iTunes. I watched excellent bbc2 Beowulf show on my iPod on train. in reply to ruskin147 #

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My tweets on 2009-07-03

• R4 says BofA will honour CA IOUs for ten days. This is fascinating stuff. #
• At #intellect Consumer Electronics, listening to Maggie Philbin. Was she on Tommorrows World or am I getting mixed up? #
• @ruskin147 thanks for tip but I’m now struggling with twitter etiquette dilemma - I only follow people that I know. Is this an outdated view in reply to ruskin147 #
• #intellect Sony say that while TVs are more than half uk “box” Market but uk is only 4% of world tv demand #
• @diane1859 So you favour a strictly limted transitive approach Interesting, I shall reflect. in reply to diane1859 #
• #intellect Lord Carter is up now. Something about “digital Britain”. Does this ring any bells at all? He says it was “industrial activism” #
• #intellect Lord Carter says that 95% of what he recommended will be implemented whoever is in government. #
• Carter says technology sector punches below weight in lobbying — I think he means ministers will always listen to pop stars not engineers #
• @ruskin147 @maggiephilbin picked me to ask last question to Carter! Hurrah! Now I can follow her with etiquette intact. in reply to ruskin147 #
• #intellect Erik Huggers up now. At last I will be able to complain about iPlayer to the right person. #
• #intellect Project Canvas… Standards are important (OK)… There are 16 different versions of iPlayer… We need an intl standard #
• #intellect Canvas will be a subscription-free broadband box (like Apple TV but harder to use?). Erik says it will democratise TV. #
• #intellect a quarter of all iPlayer access is via Virgin Media (ie, it’s onTV not on PC). #
• #intellect I don’t get it. Why dont BBC just put the shows on bittorrent and let market sort out devices. Oh I know, rights. Sorry, Canvas. #
• #intellect Erik Huggers says it is critical for Canvas to support DRM-based pay-per-view. Sounds a little last century, but he’s the BBC. #
• #intellect Erik says in the long run content should be in the clear, but in the short run copyright owners have concerns. Ignore them! #
• #intellect Now it’s Gerry Sullivan, Erik’s counterpart at Sky. He’s talking about HD, which I don’t have. Is it any good? #
• #intellect Cool. Sky can deliver 3D TV through the HD boxes. Surely the “adult” channels will love this! #
• #intellect News in HD means “challenges for the make up people”, apparently. #
• BBC: Ant mega-colony takes over world, http://bit.ly/19YVoH [I, for one, welcome...] (via @jackschofield) in reply to jackschofield #
• #intellect talking about entertainment sector in 20 years, but not mentioned 3D HD porn yet, so forecast is probably wrong #
• #intellect Well, the 20 year vision didn’t look right to me. Will we really still be using wifi? Won’t hyper-localism be in effect? #
• Just discovered that UK has fallen to 2nd place in European crime league behind… sweden! When did they become so criminally inclined? Why? #
• Phew! Relieved to find our violent crime rate is still higher than US and South Africa, so we’re still top at something. #
• @stripes_smith I’ve never read Wallender and didn’t watch TV show because I can’t watch Kenneth Brannagh in anything. But now I will try. in reply to stripes_smith #
• @maggiephilbin I think they had like 50 too many people in there, so it was just too hot and cramped. But interesting, certainly. in reply to maggiephilbin #
• @maggiephilbin Sorry not to stay to the end, by the way, but had to leave to get Eurostar. #
• Ou sommes nous? http://yfrog.com/0w16zbj #

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My tweets on 2009-07-02

• @ruskin147 Won’t the green dam stop the bloggers? P.S. Don’t worry, it doesn’t work. Note the software author’s point http://bit.ly/VXMSS in reply to ruskin147 #
• What a nice day to attend the opening of a new Museum of Computing http://bit.ly/eS0dx #
• 34C in Swindon! Reminds me of the summer of 1976 at Park School. #
• @LaurieJ the shemasons? in reply to LaurieJ #
• UKGov “consultations” are hilarious. Utterly Orwellian. #
• A decade of New Labour edukashun http://yfrog.com/0v2sntj #
• Evening at the Museum http://yfrog.com/5djhoj #
• AudioBoo: Museum Of Computing http://boo.fm/b35205 #
• @david_bott there are free drinks in the new Library in reply to david_bott #
• New podcast http://bit.ly/NIeV6 #

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My tweets on 2009-07-01

• Another Airbus goes down? Airbus 310 flight IY626 #
• What was that on the BBC The Home Office announce that the ID card will only be for people who can’t vote? I must have misunderstood. #
• @ruskin147 If they won’t accept an iPhone at a Jonathan Ive talk, the world really has gone mad. in reply to ruskin147 #
• A scandinavian solution to the pension problem: index retirement age to life expectancy http://tinyurl.com/mmzep9 #
• I see the chocolate ration has gone up again http://bit.ly/16qMLr #
• Another reason to get rid of cash… it’s f***ing filthy (six things you touch that are filthier than toilets) http://tinyurl.com/lc39tc #
• Do they mean US $? “Chinese govt has declared that virtual currency cannot be traded for real goods or services” http://tinyurl.com/kk7ujm #
• RT @giyom: CA IOUs on a debit card could be used to pay state sales tax (from http://tr.im/qlA1 comments). Nice. Very nice. #

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My tweets on 2009-06-30

• @privacyint Psychic ID !! in reply to privacyint #
• What a lovely day to go out for lunch and talk about identity management. #
• @ruskin147 And we still have to use different plugs in UK, Europe, US…. in reply to ruskin147 #
• Come on England! Stuart — put Micah up front! #
• That’s it. It’s all over. Germany 3 - England 0. No way back now. #
• 4-0. Don’t believe it, I just don’t believe it. #
• http://bit.ly/ovS9x #
• Economists and physicists http://bit.ly/47hOft #
• I swore I wasn’t going to post about Michael Jackson. But whoa! Why doesn’t Debbie want custody? http://dlisted.com/node/32722 #
• @ruskin147 It’s 2 sets all, Murray 3-0 up in final set in reply to ruskin147 #
• Cool. My OpenDNS won’t let any of the computers in my house visit “News of the World”. Site categorised as “adult themes and nudity”. #

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My tweets on 2009-06-29

• @aleksk True: I saw Spinal Tap in SF in 1983. My friend knew it was a joke, but didn’t tell me. I didn’t realise until Stonehenge. in reply to aleksk #
• Taxpayer’s revolt http://bit.ly/2MVjG6 #
• Mobile data roaming charges are reasonable? Myth BUSTED http://twitter.com/donttrythis/statuses/2348102100 #
• The BBC have sent 407 people to Glastonbury. 407!! Wouldn’t it be cheaper to move Glastonbury to Westifeld? #

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My tweets on 2009-06-28

• @williamheath What? I just heard minister Liam Byrne R4’s Today: “there are excellent public services in all parts of the country”. in reply to williamheath #

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My tweets on 2009-06-27

• More on the meme http://bit.ly/HMNiy
  — an analogue switch-off for money? #
• #eema Jon Shamah winning eema annual award #
• @victoriajane Ignore it, it’s an Ericsson fantasy. in reply to victoriajane #
• #eema As always, Caspar is asking good questions at the Information Card roundtable. Audit trail? #
• #eema Another good idea from Caspar. What if there was some kind of “rating agency” for IDPs? #
• #eema This whole “identity in the cloud” area is turning out to be very interesting. Gerry Gebel from Burton helping to explain. #
• @diane1859 Gordon Brown = UK’s Bernie Madoff. We’ve been making massive tax deposits in his scheme, when we want to withdraw… nothing. in reply to diane1859 #
• @ruskin147 He died, didn’t he? in reply to ruskin147 #
• #eema Stopped for Microsoft fire alarm test. I expected “You appear to be fleeing from a burning building. Would you like help?”. #
• “First class”, another blog post at http://blog.dgwbirch.com/?p=522 #
• #eema Giles Hogben from ENISA, making us reflect on what cloud computing actually is and what some of the security issues are. #
• #eema I don’t think this is new, I remember seeing a presentation on this a decade ago http://tinyurl.com/lvgz97 #
• Whoa! We won a penalty shoot out! At last! Gutted for Joe Hart though. #
• Freakonomics http://tinyurl.com/ma8j8h: “Will the homeless start carrying eMoney readers?”. They already do: called “mobile phones”. #

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First class

One of the first thing you learn from studying the history of technology is that it takes a long time for new technologies to replace old ones. When something new comes along, it spends some time intermingling with the old, being used in the same processes, fitting the existing ecosystem for sometimes generations before natural selection takes over. So, the arrival of high-speed Internet didn’t destroy the postal service, but changed it. More home shopping means more parcels and packages, more e-mail means less letters, and so on. But here’s another fascinating example of the interplay between old and new.

So Amazon is offering customers the chance to store their data on an external device, ship it via post, and Amazon will load it into S3.

[From Amazon’s New Service Goes Postal Over Slow Broadband]

The idea that is if you have a really big chunk of data, then you may not want to spend a week uploading it over your Internet connection (slowing down everything else) but will instead be happy to put it on a USB stick or something and then post it. I’m sure Amazon must have researched the niche and found it big enough, although I have to say that I’m not convinced. If you post something, you’ve no idea whether it will ever get to its destination. Unless, that is, you fork out for a courier or pay extra in some other way.

Down in the comments on this story is though, I think, a really good idea. One of the posters suggests building very high-speed links out to Kinkos or places like that. Then the average home user can pay for a 20Mb/s link for watching BBC iPlayer, downloading unauthorised copyright material and e-mail. Every now and then when you need to upload the contents of a 32Gb/s USB flash drive, you could pop into somewhere in the mall and pay a couple of bucks to get that data into the cloud while you have a coffee. I think I would be more likely to do that than to pop an SD card in an envelope.

In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen megabytes [posted with ecto]

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My tweets on 2009-06-26

• See you all at the European eID conference, I’ll be talking about mobile e-identity later on. Why not use your mobile as your ID card? #
• Loving this Guns and Roses / Beatles mash up. Search for “sgt pepper’s paradise” #
• Hmmmm. Lots of young people with t shirts, rucksacks and wellies on the train. It must be Glastonbury weekend right? #
• @victoriajane well done Vic. I’ve decided to “design in crime” instead, starting by persuading banks to put mag stripes on chip & PIN cards in reply to victoriajane #
• #eema Kim Cameron is right. Minimal disclosure is fundamental to success of federated world. The “need to know” Internet. #
• #eema Identity in the cloud seems to be a meme here. The next big thing? #
• #eema listening to the Department of Homeland Security’s Chief Privacy Officer. She’s a lawyer. #
• #eema DHS CPO has a slide claiming that biometrics “confirm the purpose” of your visit to the US. Caspar is incredulous, as am I. #
• #eema A clarification. She says the biometrics mean the government can “derive” the purpose of your visit to the US. #
• I’ve just been chucked out of #eema conference because you’re not allowed to take coffee into the room. Health and safety? #
• Yet another blog post at http://bit.ly/ldrU8
  , this time it’s “Roy Vella, RBS” #
• #eema CA talking on OASIS service-oriented identity ISTPA reference model. http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ #
• #eema Now moving on to digital signatures and e-identity DSS/DSS-X from OASIS technical committee. Central services for signatures. #
• #eema Learning about privacy features in European ID card specifications with ENISA. Looking forward to their assessment of UK. #
• @ruskin147 FTP? in reply to ruskin147 #
• #eema Oh dear. Turns out that they couldn’t get hold of specification for UK ID card. How come the Germans have specification and we don’t? #
• #eema Nice case study on mobile access to local government services from Serbia. Java, XML, SOAP, SAML, WS-Security… lovely stuff. #
• @smcrae You are much too kind, but thank you #eema. This is a really good session. Liking the Serbian case study and the Valimo technology. in reply to smcrae #
• @ruskin147 I just googled “China” and it was working fine. What’s the problem? in reply to ruskin147 #
• @diane1859 Great spot, thanks — something to read on the train home! in reply to diane1859 #
• #eema Finnish mobile eID case study. To get mobile eID, first register with operator, then with the police. Result: no users. #
• Support this bill!!! http://bit.ly/vGu7I #

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