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Tony Wilson

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Rare was the day when Anthony Wilson, the Manchester music impresario and local TV presenter who died yesterday, couldn’t walk down the street in his home city without a murmur of “wanker” and “twat”. It was as much as a part of the city as the incessant drizzle.

But Wilson revelled in the role of camp, ironic, antihero and played it to the hilt. In interviews in early June, six months after his cancer had been diagnosed, Wilson fretted that Mancunians were suddenly “being nice to me”. This was a shock in such a fiercely unsentimental city.

Music lovers visiting Britain from overseas began skipping London in the 1990s, heading straight for what’s now recognised as Britain’s great music city – and that owed much of that outrageous charm of Tony Wilson.

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Ancient satire foretold AOL’s privacy disaster

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“The Internet is becoming more and more widespread and will increasingly represent a scientific random sample of the population”
– Joi Ito

“Igor, to the machines – we have a sample”

One thing seems to have been forgotten following AOL’s careless, but quite magnificent data dump of the internet’s “hive mind” at play this week.

AOL’s assiduous documentation of the private thoughts of over 600,000 web searchers has certainly added some much needed sparkle to a public internet that of late, has been in dire need of a tonic. Now, internet users’ most private thoughts are revealed, in all their banality and creepiness, and we must count ourselves fortunate.

“AOL’s data sketch sometimes scary picture of personalities searching Net,” was the headline USA Today newspaper chose, but this barely conveyed the voyeuristic frisson, or glee we felt as the AOL database made its way across the net.

Nothing in recent months has made the net come alive quite like these queries, and it’s not hard to see why. Recently, the net has been drowning in banality. Billions of identical blogs – some human generated, some machine generated – spring up every day, with identical opinions to match the identical templates each blog hoster seems to provide. This outpouring of new recorded writing has been trumpeted as a new era in human expression. But the truth is, in practice, the consequence of all this is that it’s getting increasingly difficult to tell which is which. Human, or machine?

But let’s focus on an aspect lost in the “scandal”. The thing that everyone has overlooked is that this wasn’t an accidental or negligent data loss by AOL. The search query data was sincerely released in the name of science.

Boffins at AOL Labs published the data for boffins at similar “labs” to peruse.

That’s strange enough in itself, and it should make you yearn for white-coated frontiersmen of yore. Things have changed a bit since then and now.

Behold: the Mighty Atom
Fifty years ago, scientists did things like, oh… split the atom, and deduce the shape of the DNA double helix. Today, working off the hottest and freshest evidence available, scientists proclaim breakthroughs such as “People get more drunk at weekends”.

Once upon a time scientists set out to describe the unknown, and make it understood in
mechanical terms. But now, like a group of well meaning, but slightly simple lifelong in-patients making their first tentative steps into the real world, they venture out to find what’s on their doorsteps.

Now, if science is to have any useful purpose in society, it’s in describing the unknown, not the bleeding obvious. No wonder it has gotten such a bad name recently.

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Apple (finally) tries to patent BluePod

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The file-sharing iPod

Apple will fill in some long-awaited missing features from its iPod and iPhone mobile players, a patent application published this week suggests. There’s just one problem: Much of Apple’s “invention” was dreamed up by Reg readers several years ago – and one embodiment is already on the market.

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FCC: making a rulebook out of metaphors

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Regulators and network operators across the world will be watching events unfold in Washington DC with some astonishment today, as the US telecoms industry becomes embroiled in a bureaucratic farce.

Late last week, the US regulator the Federal Communications Commission issued a landmark assertion of authority over how American operators should manage their networks – and announced a new policy framework. We won’t know what this policy framework will be for days or perhaps weeks – and the statements issued so far don’t help.

What we got on Friday was a self-contradictory press release which simultaneously both encourages and prohibits prioritizing internet traffic by application type.

Er, say what?

Well, it gets even stranger. Accompanying the commission’s release, all five commissioners issued their own individual personal statements – the FCC is split down the middle on the issue – with the two dissenting Commissioners, McDowell and Tate, complaining they weren’t given the text of the release until the last moment.

“Commissioner Tate and I received the current version of the order at 7pm last night, with about half of its content added or modified. As a result, even after my office reviewed this new draft into the wee hours of the morning, I can only render a partial analysis,” wrote Commissioner Robert McDowell.

Well-placed sources also suggested that having voted, they then realised it was immediately unworkable – so the statement was redrafted after the vote. Maybe that’s in keeping with an exercise in “Policy-based Evidence-making”: Take a vote and then try and figure out what you’ve voted on.

Before getting into specifics, let’s look at the problem – and the main problem with making laws out of net neutrality has been painfully obvious from the start. As a descriptive generalisation about what “the internet” looks like, or should look like, it’s impossible to disagree with. You won’t get any dissent about the evils of content discrimination from The Register, because unlike most of the neutrality activists, our livelihoods depend on networks delivering pages like this without favour. But a description is not the same thing as a working principle. Any law or regulation needs to be understood by the engineers working at the business end of keeping the networks running.

Take, for example, a statement such as “driving fast is bad”. This can be implemented and then enforced (as a speeding law). However an observation or generalisation such as “highways are better when people are nice” can lend itself to a metaphor, for example “Friendly Roads”, and made into a policy principle – “drivers should be considerate to each other”. But it’s one that is much harder to turn into a workable, prescriptive regulation.

The problem is that when it comes to implementation, “neutrality” only works as a metaphor. Not only has the internet never been “neutral”, it’s misleading to think of one internet, rather than many interconnecting networks. (The clue’s in the name).

The FCC has now taken upon itself on the task of turning a metaphor into law, and the difficulties are evident from the press release, and chief commissioner Martin’s statement.

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MS-DOS paternity suit settled

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An overlooked court case in Seattle has helped restore the reputation of the late computer pioneer Gary Kildall.

Last week, a Judge dismissed a defamation law suit brought by Tim Paterson, who sold a computer operating system to Microsoft in 1980, against journalist and author Sir Harold Evans and his publisher Little Brown. The software became the basis of Microsoft’s MS-DOS monopoly, and the basis of its dominance of the PC industry.

But history has overlooked the contribution of Kildall, who Evans justifiably described as “the true founder of the personal computer revolution and the father of PC software” in a book published three years ago.

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Why (almost) nobody wants a music tax

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In Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, set in WW2 London, a character called Slothrop begins to realize that everywhere he has sex, a V2 rocket subsequently lands on the same spot, obliterating the area. If you dig a little, you may notice something spookily similar with the idea of a Music Tax in the media.

Back in March, talk of a Music Tax suddenly exploded at the SxSW music conference in Austin. WiReD‘s blog ran a story by Frank Rose, entitled Music Industry Proposes a Piracy Surcharge on ISPs.

“[The] idea is to collect a fee from internet service providers – something like $5 per user per month – and put it into a pool that would be used to compensate songwriters, performers, publishers and music labels.” Apparently this was the brainwave of Jim Griffin, a collective licensing advocate hired by Warners to think the unthinkable. Here’s an interview with him from 2004, where he dismisses the idea that collective license should be compulsory, should penalise non-participants, or be imposed by the government. “Government has an after the fact role, as it does with Antitrust legislation. The arguments should be voluntary,” he said then, and sources indicated he hadn’t changed his mind.

A pool, yes, but not a tax.

Coincidentally, the International Music Managers’ Forum happened to be meeting in Austin, and its former head (and now Emeritus President) Peter Jenner was quoted in the article.

Last week, another screaming came across the sky, and another Tax Bomb fell to earth, this time in London.

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Who killed Three Strikes for filesharing?

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A badge of pride

Rejoice! “Three strikes and you’re out” is dead in the UK. Music file sharers will no longer face the threat of seeing the household broadband connection severed. The plague that is currently endemic in France won’t be jumping the English Channel.

Strangely, some people want to keep it alive. Stranger still – this includes the “digital rights” lobby.

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Nokia: Our community is the best money can buy

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Who says there’s no honesty in tech marketing? We beg to differ, and present Nokia product manager Janne Jalkanen as proof to the contrary.

Speaking at a marketing website called Nokia “Conversations” (“Stories from around the neighborhood” – it says), Jalkanen gives a very frank overview of the grassroots enthusiasm for Nokia’s S60 platform.

“Pretty much the only community around S60 is the community we pay to be there,” says Jalkanen, “a few lone, strong, awesome warriors notwithstanding”.

He’s speaking in a personal capacity, but is actually saying much the same as Symbian’s John Forsyth said here, only without the wishful thinking. But what a great metaphor for the Finns’ oh-so-earnest attempts to manufacture grassroots enthusiasm.

Nokia didn’t invent the idea of astroturfing, but more than any company in the Noughties, it’s taken it to heart.

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Google and the Mother of All Antitrust Battles

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The US Senate today embarks on what could become years of antitrust investigations into Google by the IT, telecoms and media industries. The hearing today is just that – a piece of political showboating ordered by antitrust subcommittee chairman Herb Kohl. It’s not a formal investigation, let alone a lawsuit. Yet with the destiny of … Read more