Pupil Barrister
The Litopia online writers colony broadcasts several weekly podcasts on various aspects of writing and literature. I was invited onto the Debriefer show, presented by Donna Ballman, to discuss the pressing issue of libel reform.
You can listen to my dulcit tones right here. If it leaves you inspired, you can always head over to www.libelreform.org to find out how you can help the campaign.
Royal Courts of Justice. Photo by Yrstrly off of Flicker.
Time again to plug the upwardly mobile Edinburgh tinkers/tinklers, FOUND. Their new album is entitled Factorycraft and is launched on 14th March by the extremely respectable Glasgow label Chemikal Underground. Here’s a short trailer for the album, put together by Adam Proctor. Its an aesthetic not unlike videos we have previously admired on this blog.
FOUND, you will recall, sold music to fund their trip to the SXSW festival, and created the marvellous yet moody steampunk musician, Cybraphon. They’re playing at the Voodoo Rooms in Edinburgh on 3rd March, and Dingwalls in London on 7th March. Yrstrly has some small psychological stake in their success, having helped create an earlier music promo ‘Static 68‘ while I worked at Fifty Nine Productions.
Housekeeping: I’m fed up with the 500 Internal Server Error Messages that keep being generated, and I know others are too. I am not sure whether it is the del.icio.us API or the postalicious plugin itself that is at fault. Since Yahoo is trying to ‘sunset‘ del.icio.us I am guessing the former is more likely.
But until I work it out for sure, I shall have to disable it the regular posting of links. These automatically generated posts with no useful content are ruining what little credibility I have.
Right then: I’ve made a tentative foray into the world of webtools for urban living: The Farringdon Lane Docking Station on Twitter. Now I need help making it better.
There’s a long established trend of inanimate objects being on Twitter, including Tower Bridge and The River Thames. In both cases, they update people on crucial aspects of their current status: for example, is the tide in or out? I felt it was time this particular bike rack joined the service – as a keen user of Boris Bikes (an ironic moniker given they were commissioned by Ken Livingstone) I often need to check the status of the rack outside the Free Word Centre (where I work).
The Farringdon Lane Docking Station is a popular rack, one that is usually either (a) completely full with no space to park a bike, or (b) completely empty with no cycles available to use. For that reason, I often find myself trying to check the status of the racks online or on the move. Unfortunately, the workflow required is relatively difficult, involving several steps through the website or iPhone apps like Fliplab’s London Cycle. This actually takes a fair few frustrating minutes via a 3G connection, which is no good when I am in a hurry and keen to make a quick decision about whether to take a tube train or a bike.
I thought I could solve this by creating a twitter account that automatically updates itself, whenever the status of the dock changes. That way, whenever I think I may need a bike, I can simply fire-up my twitter application of choice and look at the latest status of the docking station. I don’t have to load unnecessary information about the status of every other docking station.
Unfortunately, my coding skills are minimal and limited to simple PHP. I don’t have the wherewithal to pull data from the London Cycle Hire site using their API. I solved this by making a customised RSS feed using the Feed43 (Feed for free) service. This scrapes the cycle hire map page (which has the status of all the bike racks embedded into it). Then I used Twitterfeed to post the results into a customised twitter account. The results are below:
The problem with my system should be obvious! If the chain of data was linked together properly, then we should be able to see every single change in status, not a huge jump from 16|0 to 8|8. This is clearly happening because both Feed43 and Twitterfeed pull data a long but regular intervals, not on a second-by-second or minute-by-minute basis. This is useless for my purposes. How can I improve it?
This blog has been saturated with Wikileaks commentary recently (one, two, three, four in a row). Allow me one more on the basis that it adds a dash of caution to the Kool-Aid.
Reading various commentaries about the Wikileaks and its #Cablegate releases, I think a balanced consensus is emerging around the publication of Government information. Everyone agrees that the near-mythical “launch codes” should be kept secret (although how one would actually go about launching a nuclear weapon if one did have the codes is never explained). Back in the realm of the possible, examples such as the identities of Iraqi and Afghan translators working for Nato forces are obvious no-nos. The risk of harm is obvious and the possible chain of events that might lead to someone coming to harm is quite direct. But when government policies, attitudes and diplomacy is concerned, there seems to be a feeling that The People’s Right To Know outweighs any tangental negative effects it might have on the governing class. Administration embarrassment is not a genuine national security issue. For the most part, Wikileaks seems to be adhering to similar principles, and many of the leaked cables are indeed gossip and opinion. Not facts that can be turned into weapons. It seems the journalists covering the publication for Wikileaks media partners (for example, the Guardian) have taken care to self-censor when National Security is genuinely at stake.
One example from a few days ago stands out, that of the list of facilities crucial to US National security. It lists pipelines, chemical labs and undersea fibre-optic stations that, if attacked, would cause major problems for the US economy and wellbeing of its citizens.
The cable is listed as secret, but a defender of freedom of information might point out that the information it contains is available elsewhere. It does not take a Pentagon analyst to work out that the major pipelines are critical pieces of infrastructure, as are cable landing points. Anyone with a basic knowledge of the economics and history of medicine would already know that a facilities that manufactures insulin and vaccines are important establishment for all humanity.
However, let us remind ourselves of a blogpost at Minority Report on the subject of anonymity (which I enjoy referring to from time to time):
Its when computers talk to other computers that liberty disappears. Because a computer can correlate countless bits of data and create new records that would take many humans exponentially longer to do. And that gap, or grace period, is actually where anonymity lies, or did.
I think this same thought could apply to the secrecy of government information, too. Sure, any old terrorist cell, given Google and a couple of live minds, could come up with a similar list of mission-critical targets for attack. If they stumbled accross Neal Stephenson’s masterful long-form report on the FLAG-project, they would know exactly where to find fibre-optic landing stations on any continent – Stephenson, ever the geek, includes precise GPS locations as his chapter headings! But crucially, these searches will take a little time. You do need to do some thinking and some searching, which takes a lot of man-hours. And (to paraphrase David, above) in that gap, that grace-period, may be where our national security lies.
This is, for me, the strongest argument I can think of against the Free Information Fundamentalism preached by Wikileaks. But even then, this only counsels against the disclosure of some very specific types of information, not the wholesale immorality of the project.
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