Andy Hedges’ Tech Blog

“There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.” — Ayn Rand

I found this quote posted on Slashdot in connection to a story that states the UK Government is preparing to give the police the authority to force organisations and individuals to disclose encryption keys. Chilling indeed.

For the if-you-haven’t-done-anything-wrong-you-have-nothing-to-hide-brigade I refer you to a journalist more eloquent than me

Just read this article about the One Laptop Per Child project. The article concentrates mostly on the technicalities of producing a laptop for $100 US however what struck me was how this will change the Internet. Currently most the people on the Internet are relatively well off Europeans and Americans. With this initiative to give 5-10 million laptops to children in India, China, Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, Egypt, and Nigeria by Q1 2007 things start to get much more interesting. The Internet as a whole gets very much more diverse with ideas from many more perspective entering the shared consciousness.

Robert Metcalf’s law states that the “value” or “power” of a network increases in proportion to the square of the number of nodes on the network. However if all these nodes (people) are pumping out the same or similar ideas then, I’m sure, this places a dampening effect on the value/power of the network. You only have to look at a blog aggregator to see the ideas on the Internet seem to be part of a small closed system, there is a feedback loop going on but the loop is still too small to really amplify and evolve the ideas to their full potential. Now if you add 10 million nodes to the network from very different backgrounds you have a larger set of seed and mutation points to develop ideas.

I’m excited by this and applaud Google, Red Hat, AMD, Brightstar, News Corp and Nortel Networks for each donating $2 million US to the project. Oh and the laptop will run Linux.

Who said blogs lack editorial rigour, this blog, ironically enough, about editorial rigour has more of it than anything I have read in the main stream media… EVAR!

Plus the favicon appears to be a Go board, which is nice.

CD distributors are deliberately corrupting their audio CDs so that they will not work on certain CD players. A list of reported corrupt CDs is being compiled so people can avoid buying CDs that simply don’t work. There is also an alternative list here.

Record companies are doing this to limit consumers use of their music (i.e. you have to buy the music once for your CD player and then once again for your iPOD) and secondly to try to stop unauthorised distribution of their copyrighted music. Whilst I can financially understand their motivation for the first reason and morally agree with their second this tactic will not help them. Firstly, those individuals who want to play their CD in the PC, car, hi-fi and iPOD are going to be pissed off when it doesn’t work in most their players and stop buying CDs. Secondly, those people who want to pirate music will not be stopped by these technologically pathetic schemes to limit copying. YMMV

Update 11-Nov-2005: Sony has gone one step further and put a rootkit (malicious code) on 20 of its CDs to stop you coping them with your PC. However the rootkit leaves your PC wide open to viruses; this is even if you haven’t tried to copy the CD. So if you value your computer’s security don’t put any Sony CDs in your CD drive without being sure they don’t contain this rootkit. More information on this is available from the wonderful BBC.

Update 15-Nov-2005: idiot abroad says he has found no fewer than 47 titles containing Sony’s DRM rootkit. They are spread across several sub-labels owned by Sony-BMG. Geoffrey has posted the list of rootkit-infected titles he’s uncovered so far in his blog.

Yes, it’s true there now exist a Dummies book that covers BitTorrent the file sharing system the media companies hate. BitTorrent for Dummies promises instruction to the uninitiated on sharing and obtain files over the massively distributed file share network. It also, apparently, points out the legal ramifications thereof - good for it.

I just downloaded an album of the Interweb using BitTorrent without paying for it! I’m listening to it now - it’s not too bad.

STOP, before you call the authorities and have me hauled in front of a court of record company executives let me explain. The artists involved Harvey Danger are behind the free release of their album. They have decided to release a high quality, DRM unencumbered, version of their album ‘Little By Little’ on MP3 and Ogg. They have choosen to use BitTorrent as the distribution means, presumable to reduce their bandwidth bills. They do ask if you like the album to either donate on their website or buy the old school physical CD in a music shop (how olde worlde).

Slowly but surely it seems the record industry, or at least the artists, are joining the 21st century. Consumers don’t want DRM and most intelligent people are sick of being told what to like by radio stations and MTV.

Read about why they decided to do this in their own words.

This is ridiculous. Of course it is the politicians that are to blame, the police are just doing their job and appear to be fairly embarassed by the whole thing.