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Good Grief!

Could one ofour resident tecchies comment upon this?

All those who are suspected of wrongly downloading pirated material will receive a warning email for the first offence, a temporary suspension from going online for the second and if they commit a third crime they will find their web contract will be terminated, under the new proposals.

Every broadband company will be expected to enforce these rules and firms who fail to adhere to the guidelines could be prosecuted.

Could you tell me whether this is in fact technically feasible? And by that I mean at anything approaching a reasonable cost?

I can\’t see how an ISP can be expected to tell the difference between somoone using BitTorrent legally and somone using it illegally. So it all seems a bit of a non-starter to me, but anyone actually know?

What a Business Idea!

Yes, this sounds very good indeed….unless someone is already doing it.

//For anybody out there looking for a business idea how about a software filter which uses information provided by other internet users to create its block list. i.e. like social bookmarking. Other parents/users who stumbled across a site could rate it or block it and other visitors could rate or block it similarly. Those sites with a high block rating would stay blocked, but those with lower ratings would stay open. Parents could also set the filter strength of the software. This relies on no central censor but rather the distilled morality of thousands of individuals. Talk to me; I am too busy to pursue independently but would be happy to work with somebody on it//

Can we get some technical input from readers?

A collaborative project perhaps?

What the Internet is For

I had an interesting little email yesterday from someone I haven\’t seen or heard of since I was 10, he\’d stumbled across the blog.. How\’s that for technology beating the anomie of modern life, the way in which we no longer commune?

71-73 we lived just north of Naples (father, RN, was posted to the AFSouth base there) and one of the families in the same road was a US military family, the son of which was one Dean Ottoman. Two memories stand out from that time, the way we (like so many young boys did) put playing cards on the shafts of our bicycles (those old American ones, one gear, you braked by pedalling backwards) so that they rubbed against the spokes and made a really "cool" noise as you rode along.

The other was one afternoon when a very flea ridden and shaggy stray dog turned up (some indeterminate mix of collie, lurcher, whatever). He managed to catch all of us by the way he would offer his paw to be put into your hand (obviously, he had been "set free" from somewhere). It was Dean who persuaded his parents that "Ralph" should be taken in and cared for. He became part of the gang, of course.

They do have winters in Italy and given that at that time no one had heating, they could be pretty miserable. There were also such annoyances as school and so on (run by the RAF if memory serves) but the over-riding theme of my memories of that time is of blissful summer afternoons spent roaming the area, climbing the volcano (yes, it started at the bottom of the garden, or perhaps the top is better) variously with Adam, Dean, Stacey, my brother Peter, the gang. Dean remembers better the carolling we did at Christmas, he had my cricket bat for many years after we all left.  In memory at least, some combination of the Famous Five and Swallows and Amazons.

One other memory from then, we often used to go to Cumae for picnics. The area is awash with Greek and Roman ruins and Cumae is a concentration of temples and the like. One of the childhood photos on my parents\’ mantelpiece is of two headless statues, circa 100 AD or so, with my brother and I popping up behind to provide the faces, in the style of those seaside amusements.

So that\’s what the internet is really for, to allow me to wallow in the memories of a golden childhood, long ago.

Dean\’s in Seattle Washington now and has a band. Have a listen here. If you happen to run a bar or gin joint in that area then you should hire them. Both the internet and the power of the blog demand it. They do a pretty good blues chug with "Mojo" (a reworking of perhaps the Muddy Waters and JJ Cale songs of similar names).

What an Idea!

Yes, all in favour of this one.

"The video-sharing Web site YouTube has suspended the account of a prominent Egyptian anti-torture activist who posted videos of what he said was brutal behaviour by some Egyptian policemen, the activist said."

A YouTube competitor should post these videos and then run advertisements saying that unlike YouTube it is not afraid of embarrassing dictators.

Actually, "Embarrassing Dictators" would make a fantastic name for a human rights website that deliberately sought out such videos.

Now, does anyone know how to actually set up a YouTube clone? Is there readily available software? I\’m in to help pay for the bandwidth if anyone does. In fact, if we can get the technical resources together then I\’m pretty certain I could find a sponsor or two (I am assuming that it would not grow to anything like the size where bandwidth would be more than 100\’s of pounds a month).