Tuesday 24 February 2009

Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children

I am against all forms of child abuse. I am against imposed internet filtering/censorship.

"What, you don't support internet filtering? Why do you support terrorists and paedophiles?"

I think the first two statements I made can sit happily together. Unfortunately a coalition of children's charities don't agree and seem to believe the only way to stamp out the evil of child porn is to ensure all internet providers are blocking it.

There are lots of problems with this approach and key among them are that I, and many others far more expert than me, don't believe it makes the slightest difference.

The other day I was standing outside a railway station. Across the road a family stood at a bus stop. The mother (I presume) was screaming abuse at a young boy. He must have been 10 or 11 and was being told he'd ruined the weekend, she and everyone else hated him and he was stupid. It was a foul mouthed tirade, a horrible thing to see and I really felt for the poor kid. But what did I actually do? I simply turned up my iPod so I couldn't hear and read my magazine so I couldn't see.

Internet technology has made it more likely that child porn will be seen by someone who finds it as abhorrent and upsetting as indeed they should. A number of these people have made the mistake of blaming the internet technology for this arguing since the technology brought this into our home, technology can stop that from happening.

Well that's true, it can. But unfortunately, and this is what really matters, it can't stop abuse from taking place, from having taken place or counsel the individuals concerned.

It's the internet equivalent of turning a deaf ear and a blind eye to child abuse in the street. Has internet technology made child porn more prevalent? I don't know, but really nasty stuff has been around for a long time before affordable broadband internet access and the kind of people this appeals to will seek it out in whatever form it takes.

So not only is it a waste of everybody's time and money (and it is very expensive), it's also potentially doing some serious societal damage. Once a government controlled internet censorship system is firmly in place how long before it's seriously misused? It may start with preventing access to known child porn sites. Then it's employed to help prevent terrorism... after all you don't want the terrorists being able to find bomb making recipes online do you? Then it's used to help 'keep the peace' and ultimately to 'quell dissent'.

That may sound like paranoid rantings, but it is a very slippery slope and one best avoided no matter how well intentioned at the start.

Nobody is going to campaign in favour of child porn and access to it. However I will campaign against internet censorship, and that doesn't amount to the same thing. Because the protection of children is important and emotive many are scared of accusation that they either don't care or much worse and that gives a very weak argument far more power and political weight.

What I would add is there are lots of ways individuals can choose to effectively restrict access to unsavoury and illegal material online. There are personal internet filters available but my favourite is to use openDNS. It's a free service that will work with pretty much any computer/network and does a really good job of controlling the blocking of content based on categories. I use it on the networks I maintain.

The key to this is choice. I will choose what I want to block. I do not want that choice made for me by someone else who thinks they know best because how do I know I can trust them?

Friday 20 February 2009

Language it's a beautiful thing.

Right now I'm sitting on a train opposite a very pretty girl who, while on the phone to her dad asked, and I quote "is my room full of shit?". This made me wonder what sort of plumbing emergency might cause such a thing. Later she stated to her friend that her dad was "literally up to his neck in shit". In which case it's fair to assume that some of it may have made it into her bedroom. I can understand the concern.

Wednesday 18 February 2009

Android after a few months

Since November 08 I've been the owner of a T-Mobile G1. For those not in the know, this is the first phone to use Google's Linux based smartphone OS called Android. Android is quite a big deal for the mobile phone world for two reasons. Firstly it means manufacturers don't have to pay hefty license fees to a company like Microsoft, secondly because it's an open source OS manufacturers can tinker with it to make it an ideal fit for their device.

So Android's lovely and we should all embrace it. Well... no. There are a number of problems right now, some of which are the fault of Android (Google), others are down to the inadequate hardware of the T-mobile G1 phone.

The G1 is made by a company called HTC who've been making Windows Mobile based devices for years. I've had two of them and been pretty happy with both. The phone we all call a G1 is in fact an HTC Dream and it's a bit poor. HTC have made several phones with a screen that flips up to reveal a keyboard. Each of these has been a slight evolution of the previous model. The G1 does away with all this sensible design and uses a strange hinge that leaves the keyboard blocked by a huge lump of phone. Also the keys have such a low profile that they're actually quite hard to use by feel. These are minor gripes compared to the pathetic battery life and internal memory capacity. Anybody who's used to working with 3G networks knows that 3G eats batteries for breakfast, leaving nothing by lunchtime. The Dream needs a considerably bigger battery. The phone also hasn't got anywhere near enough memory, 8GB of internal memory would have been about right. But my biggest gripe is with Android itself.

I mentioned the lack of internal memory. The G1 does have a card slot and now comes with an 8GB card, but this is almost entirely useless for most people because Android's security model doesn't allow applications to live on the memory card, they can only live in the phones internal memory, which is tiny. Effectively what we have is hardware designed for Windows Mobile, not Android.

To be honest I can't help but feel this OS simply isn't ready. All the basics are there. The OS works, it's stable and by all accounts the API is nice enough to use so developers are happy working on it. But the included applications are a long way off. Considering this entire OS and all its included apps are from Google why is it that Google Maps and You Tube are a pale imitation of their counterparts on the iPhone? The browser isn't bad, but doesn't handle zooming in a very elegant way. But the e-mail client is quite possibly the worst piece of e-mail software I've used for a very long time, on any platform. I'm not going to go into what's wrong with it, but suffice to say it feels like I've stepped back about 10 years. Some folks have created a forked version of the Open Source code in the form of K9, an attempt to better the bundled mail app. It's better, but still woefully slow and awful. Clever people who understand these things will tell you that Google have optimized Android for the wrong thing, low memory use instead of fewer processor cycles. Memory is cheap both to buy and to run, but processor time costs precious battery life.

You'll be getting the idea that I'm not happy with my G1. You're right. I'm not. It's a long way from being what it should be. This phone is being marketed as a rival to the iPhone and in pretty much every way it just isn't. I have no doubt that Android has a reasonably bright future but I'm very disappointed that Google chose to release it when they did. Many people will have done exactly what I did, bought the G1 because it has Google's name on it and expected great things. Instead what we've got is a developers toy that probably won't be ready as a viable platform until the end of 2009/early 2010. By that time Android will have come on a long way and there will be new hardware on the market.

Sadly those of use who were early adopters with a G1 will probably find T-mobile/HTC lose interest and we won't get the juicy updates. I understand Flash has been announced for Android. I'm willing to bet it won't run on the G1 with its limited memory.

So after several months of use I'm afraid I can't recommend the G1 to anyone. The slick simplicity of the iPhone betters it in every way. I'd even go for one of the current crop of Windows Mobile devices over the G1 if I had the option. Unfortunately I'm stuck in a contract until May 2010

Turning 32

So today I've turned 32. Like all human dates it has no real significance at all, but it does leave one feeling the inexorable march towards the grave. Still as someone living in grace I don't really have to worry about that.

I could spend time worrying about how much stuff I'd like to get done before I have to stop. However my family has bought Guitar Hero for the Wii so now I can spend even more time procrastinating rather than getting on with something useful.

Tuesday 17 February 2009

Welcome

Often baffled by blogs I've always considered them to be largely pointless unless published by someone who's opinion may actually be interesting to others. So the BBC's editorial blogs, CEO of a large company etc... that all makes sense. The rest? Total waste of time. 

So I'd long ago decided I wasn't going to contribute to the ever growing quantities of wittering nonsense that seems to make up most of web 2.0 yet here I am doing just that.

I suspect this mainly this will turn out to be a cathartic exercise. I find myself ranting at family and friends about things they don't really care about, so instead I've decided to publish my thoughts and rantings here.

I remain quietly confident that nobody else is actually going to read any of this. Which is absolutely fair enough. If however I manage to share something even remotely useful to a fellow human somewhere on the planet that's more than I could possibly hope for.