Whenever I encounter a problem, I look first to instinctive solutions. If non present themselves, I look at similar situations I have been in before and see if similar solutions apply. Failing that, I seek advice but if non is available, I tend to revert to a rule based approach that mostly follows the six thinking hats process. For those not in the know, this is where you gather information, look at the downside of taking no action or taking different actions, look at the corresponding upsides, inject some creativity and finally come to a conclusion.

Even in describing the process I go through, I am essentially laying down a methodology, a guideline or set of rules.

Rules pursue us.

Our pattern recognition nature  is always looking for rules so that we can develop predictable processes. Human nature seems both to abhor and crave randomness in our daily lives. We want a rule based life so that little can blindside us but also need the spontaneity of the unexpected as long as its primary consequence is to delight.

The problem with an over reliance on rules, however, is that they throw up barriers to alternate action and behaviour. Mandatory minimum sentencing in criminal cases is a case in point in that it can lead to gross distortions of justice akin to Jean Valjean’s five year sentence for stealing a loaf of bread. Judges are often constrained from using their common sense in such cases.

Traffic rules are another good example of a methodology designed to structure, streamline and make driving safer that can often produce the opposite effect. Towns in the Netherlands, Germany and the UK have initiated projects to remove traffic signals from their busy intersections as a way of creating what they call “shared spaces”. The results have been remarkable. Instead of a crash a minute, accidents have gone down while wait times through or across the intersections have likewise reduced both for drivers and pedestrians. Without the over reliance on rules, drivers are acting more like people. They are watching the road instead of the lights, being cautious and civil to the other shared users instead of following a rule that gives them temporary right of way.

I see a similar issue in those areas of Iraq where religion is predominant without a qualifying level of education. In one case, a father put his daughter to death because she flirted with an English soldier. In UK, honour killings work the same way in that male family elders will punish and kill children who they deem to have dishonored them by dating or marrying someone from the “wrong” religion. Would I put this down to lack of education or more likely a false reliance on the letter of religious law?

It seems that all these cases are problematic because people are using rules to either remove their personal responsibility or satisfy an unpleasant impulse, be it greed, pride or vanity. They become rule following machines and lose their humanity.

I am not advocating the end of all rules. On the contrary, some rules are very good. I only wish more countries, yes I am looking at you USA, would fully embrace the rule against killing people. Any society that advocates the forceful ending of a person’s life under the right conditions should not be surprised when people take it onto themselves to sometimes decide those conditions.

The thing about rules is that we cannot regulate every element of our lives and any attempt to do so lends a false authority and arrogance to those who feel they are on the right side of that law. Instead of being reasonable, we become legalistic. Any society so constituted, and yes, I am looking at you again USA, falls to the un-mercy of the superego rather than the more reconciling ego.

Such societies cannot help becoming mean and intolerant of others. The cold hard rule is king and our shared humanity is left bleeding on the roadside. Those on the losing side may look for mercy, may ask for it, but that is what losers do, they whine about fluffy intangibles. I have the law on my side, I need pay no heed.

The path forward seems thus plain. We can push the legality further and make laws for kindness  and friendship or we can free ourselves from an overwhelming legal system that most can barely understand. Laws should exist but perhaps we need less of them and those we do have, should be easy to understand.

One might even apply such an idea to our religious lives. Rather than an assumption of one path being right while another is wrong, we should simply approach religious doctrine as a guide providing one winding walkway to heaven. We should accept that these are not rules and that others, following quite opposite paths, can similarly arrive at a nirvanic destination.

There is an adage, homily, metaphor, or what you will about what parents want for their children through ensuing generations. I could look it up to get an exact version but that would probably undermine my extrapolation or, at the very least, deprive the tale of an endearing mystique. The story, as I remember it, goes something as follows:

A couple work the land to put food into their mouths and hope that their children can go to school, learn a profession so they do not need to work with their hands, that they might, perhaps, become Teachers.

Those Teachers then grow up to form their own families and work to better their children’s lives that they might grow to become Doctors or Scientists.

Those Doctors or Scientists labour with their minds, enriching their families such that their children might grow to become Writers and Artists.

The idea is a progression from working with our hands, to working with our minds and finally to working with our hearts, or wherever else is considered to be the seat of our talents. The story is not meant to disparage one activity over the other, it does not suggest that those who till the land are less than those who heal the sick or sculpt marble. It is more about a parents desire that their children live fulfilled lives. We hope that future generations will have an easier life with less physical hardship, we hope that they live doing what they love.

This progressive idea is repeated in a number of social environments and activities. If we look at employment in the Western world, we see that there is a growing shift towards selling virtual or digital products and building machines to do our heavy lifting. Such a development is not without its drawbacks as many fear the loss of physical manufacturing and rage over the difficulty in finding a plumber when you need one. It has become almost inevitable, however, that over time any activity that can be clearly defined and quantified will be handled more and more by machinery. The human involvement will deal more with how that machinery is applied.

Likewise in the leisure industry, we have gone from a day of rest to embracing new activities on our days off. Visits to foreign lands are de rigueur once a certain level of financial stability is achieved. Nowadays, there is a move on from just going to see something to creating a memorable “experience”. Such things are hard to define as they combine a range of events, activities and mood becoming, in their own way, more like Art. Those who arrange these experiences have something of the Artist about them.

The problem with patterns like this, however, is that once you see them, you cant stop seeing them. And maybe, after all, these examples simply represent a common human yearning towards fulfillment. At first, we strive to cover our physical needs using our physical skills because these are most readily available to us at a younger age. As we grow older, we think of better ways to do things, we try to optimize our physical effort through our mental skills. But what explains the move towards art? I consider art as a means of connecting to those things just out of reach, a way of putting our soul out there. As we grow, we learn to understand human nature through some form of working philosophy. Inevitably, many areas remain outside our ken. We travel as far as we can, realize we cannot move much further but we still know that the road stretches tantalizingly ahead. It is our guess at this vision which is art.

Art is thus Religion, Religion Art.

I probably should have done more groundwork in getting to this point. The general progression is one where we start with practical organizations, move through thinking about better ways to live together, go on to the philosophy of life and finally the art of that philosophy. We arrive at that which is out of reach, undefined and indefinable: faith.

Once you do get there, the entire discussion about religion and its affect on our society becomes somewhat moot. Concepts like “separation of Church and State” become a nonsensical issue between governments and organized art.  Theocracies become states organized around an artistic viewpoint as though pointillism had its own country. The ethics or rules of any religion become descriptive terms for that artform, having minimal impact on the world unless of course you live in Impressionistan. This is not too say that art cannot influence our opinions, it can and should. Art is wonderful for communicating the vague and ephemeral. But does anyone in the real world want to be ruled entirely by art?

Stephen Jay Gould, the famous scientific historian, talked about religion and science being “non-overlapping magisteria” and he could not have been more right. Science is of the mind, religion is of the heart.

For many years my head was filled with noise,  a relentless and maddening disharmony that rarely went away. In times of action and engagement, it was filled with alternatives to whatever was going on at the time, innumerable “what ifs” and “how abouts”. In less active moments, it would become even more demanding, asking me to prognosticate through “what wills” and “how coulds”.

Some days would be worse than others as my mind threw up terrifying scenarios designed to defeat its own ability to escape them. If I ever felt I was getting a torturous dilemma in perspective, some new wrinkle would appear as a way of tightening the screws on me. My dreams, mostly nightmares when I was younger, would continue to build elaborate traps designed, it seemed, to distract and destroy any hope I had for calm.

For a long time I thought it was all driven by a deep streak of self-destruction. I assumed my physical end would be the self-inflicted conclusion to this deranging symphony. It often felt like having a large number of spinning demons on my shoulders, collectively driving me to an abyss as each insisted a particular viewpoint was the right one. Even my own viewpoint was not static as, being aware that all voices were mine, I frequently inhabited and leapt between the dancing dervishes.

But we are creatures of assimilation, ever ready to hold incompatible or multiple impossible ideas in our head at the same time, exposing the fact that we are all a little bit white queen.  Of course, such an assimilating structure is fractured by nature and it causes me to view the world as through a prism. I find oddity more engaging than the lead, subtext more intriguing than text.  I am drawn to dichotomies, especially opposing ones, and thing seem more right when they are a little bit wrong.

This disharmony pervades all my thinking and writing. I like to bring disparate ideas together and weave a pattern through them.  Subtext that threatens the very structure of the text is too enticing for me to leave out. I  am almost unable to say anything that cannot be misread. Sentences feel half baked, incomplete if they have mono-meaning. If I write about someone, I must threaten my own critique, often through irony as I use the tone of the piece to ape or characterize my subject. If I write about Christopher Hitchens, I adopt a blustering and elitest mien. If I write about Alan Dershowitz, I use twisted logic.

Any topic I look at must be viewed askew. It is not that I have trouble seeing the standard through-line, it just holds my interest less. I prefer to look at the off-notes and reflections, quite probably because it fluffs my vanity as though I am saying “look how clever I am, I see this”. Likewise, I can’t help but choose the alliterative to the plain. Hemingway’s terse prose is admirable but not for emulation. Nothing I feel can be worth saying unless it has some poesy.

Sometimes saying anything can be hard work. Words can be slippery. Chomsky believes that language is innate, suggesting, at least to me, that the words should come easily and be clearly understood by all. Something in my gut tells me that rather than being innate, language is external. Deprived of any sensory input, language would be meaningless. Our language is abridged experience. As such, and to take the tiniest of leaps, our language shapes our reality.

Bill Hicks, the incendiary and brilliant comedian who died at the age of 32 from cancer, spoke of reality, of life, as a ride. I love his take as long as you see it less as roller-coaster and more like being on a horse. In the first case you would have little, if any, control over where you are going while in the latter, you can at least have some impact on how you get there. I choose that reality.

Herman Hesse in his novel “The Glass Bead Game” lavishly discusses life in terms of what is done, what is experienced and what is thought. He lengthily courts ideas dealing with the role of the intellectual in society and whether he has the right to remove himself from practical worldly demands. The highest achievements in life are at first considered to be a game before the main character gives up this intellectual pursuit for real world experiences and then dies in short order.

Keats, the romance poet, suffered a similar dilemma in that he was driven by a need to do definable good. This was a large part of his impetus to be a Doctor although his passion and, he felt, his true calling was for poetry. The first he felt was to heal the body, the latter was in service to the soul. Keat’s journey is almost a mirror to Hesse’s protagonist, Joseph Knecht, and he also died too soon.

In his introduction to “The Fall of Hyperion”, Keats wrote about our collective need to participate in the ride, to place ourselves in such a soul service:

Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave

A paradise for a sect; the savage too

From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep

Guesses at Heaven; pity these have not

Trac’d upon vellum or wild Indian leaf

The shadows of melodious utterance.

But bare of laurel they live, dream, and die;

For Poesy alone can tell her dreams,

With the fine spell of words alone can save

Imagination from the sable charm

And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say,

‘Thou art no Poet may’st not tell thy dreams?’

Since every man whose soul is not a clod

Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved

And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.

Maybe Keats thought too much of Poetry, but then he did dedicate his brief life to it. His reality prized the sum over the parts and he would have us all be writers, comedians and poets engaged with, depending upon your level of ownership, the game or ride of living. Perhaps the gameride would be a useful composite. We each understand this differently, its rules and form, and even the terms under which it takes place. It is this difference that guides our mode of expression. Some have families and babies while others engage through action or writing. Some become comedians, others poets. Some live on the extreme while others are passive.

I wonder if the knowledge that the gameride ends at some point is innate. Is that knowledge fear of the dark, pulling away from pain and the cold? If not an internally shared construct, it seems to be learned early. And that knowledge begets our struggle to answer the eternal question about the meaning or meaninglessness of it all. Such a question, despite being universal, does not have a single form. I am fond of the childlike version: What is the best way to play?

Sadly, I think, for many the answer to that comes down to whatever is needed to exercise the greatest control. We feel ourselves to have little and so wish for more. Life it seems, like much, boils down to supply and demand.

The cruelty of children seems to bear this out, engaged as they are with black and white viewpoints and a constant need to assert control over all around them. I used to think we grew out of this and, at some point, made a subconscious decision to accept or not the unknowingness. Those who accepted saw the world in shades, having numerous forms with all positions having some, if not equal, value. Those who did not, developed a more absolute worldview in which a right and wrong position always exists, even though it may not always be easy to describe.

I used to think that.

Now, I think these are just roles we adopt, parts we play. The longer we play any part, the more we identify with it and the more we see challenges to that role as personal affronts. The why of choosing a particular role probably has more to do with fitting in, gaining control as much as it does anything else. After that we rationalize into being a whole set of accessory attributes. We playact concern for those who have less with an adopted empathy, some charitable observance or weekly chant.

It is not as though that is even a bad thing exactly. It can even be a good thing. But it is a fraud. All such acts of deceit are frauds. They are our false attempts to engage with the world by telling it we know better, that we have learnt something from our time here and it is valuable knowledge that we can gift to you.

And it seems, we manage quite effectively to kid ourselves. This is not done from need but from a desire to look at ourself with complacency, to say that we have not wasted our sojourn, our “success” is real and important and makes us worthy.

We each desire nobility as we guess at heaven.

To my mind, it is a shame that we have mostly forgotten the childhood maxim that it does not matter if you win or lose because we all end at the same place. It really is how you play the game. The journey is all. Many, it seems, like to think there is a point to it, a rousing conclusion that makes sense to all that came before. Religions of the world are dedicated to their being both a specific point and path. As though by following The Word, you can win and the meaning of it all will be clear.

I tend to think that with minimal foreshadowing, unexpected no matter how predictable, the words just stop.

I am in a state of siege. Attacks on Net Neutrality, I equate with the Wallace’s fight for freedom. The commercial over-reaching of copyright enforcement and the mass sending out of DMCA take down notices, I see on a par with the Empire’s Stormtroopers, searching out Rebel bases, who must be resisted with whatever guerilla tactics come to hand.

The villain in these pieces is invariably large corporations and the governments they have bought and paid for. I probably see it as an axiom that rampant commercialism, left unchecked, will eat itself and all of us with it.

Having said that, there is clearly an issue with protecting the rights of creators over their creations, versus the usage rights of the public.

I have heard creators claim that their ownership rights cannot be usurped and any attempt to do so is tantamount to stealing.  Such claims, however, ignore the fact that it is the public that owns the market place and if you want your product to exist there, you must play by the public’s rules. This is not a straw man argument but merely an attempt to lay bare the underlying conflict and separate it from the law and legalistic shenanigans made by companies eager to protect a dwindling bottom line.

Indeed it would very much be mother’s milk for me to go off on a rage about corporations having so devalued the law with petty constraints and suing grandmothers that piracy is made more acceptable and not less so due to their efforts. I know that whenever I see the anti piracy advert that precedes many a purchased movie, I feel a vague compulsion to steal someone’s bag, snatch their mobile phone and nick a policeman’s helmet. I even felt vindicated when the FBI was put in its place after sending a DMCA type takedown notice to Wikimedia over the use of the FBI shield. Wikimedia Counsel nicely slapped the FBI down, saying: “while we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version”.  The shield remains on Wikimedia.

But all that would be too easy as there are so many cases. Giving vent to my spleen might feel good but it seems more realistic to look at how the needs of both owner and public can be addressed in practical terms. In this vein I propose the below idea.

Automatic Digital Rights Changes Based on Real World Conditions

That heading is as close to a précis as I could get for what I am describing. I call this system a Rights Management Exchange or RMX for short and it is designed to better handle software locks.

Software locks are used to restrict or enable how software can be used. A prime example of this is Digital Rights Management which can be used to prevent access to digital files except by the person who has purchased that file.

One of the problems with DRM is that in many cases it becomes invalid, and perhaps even illegal, for a file to continue to be locked once the DRM has expired. This can happen, for example, when digital books are no long in copyright. While in copyright, the DRM should be effective, when out of copyright, the file should be unlocked and no longer restricted by the DRM.

Using DRM presents us with a simple example of the data an RMX would need to manage. The lock itself would be recorded in the RMX along with the constraints by which it operates:

• Reference ID – This should allow the file(s) to be identified on the system.
• Country or defined Region – Different regions may have different rules.
• Creator/Author/Owner Details (Birthdate, Date of Death,etc) – This handles variables relating to the party who has set the lock or claims the right to set the lock.
• Type of Lock/Usage Change – The thing being locked or unlocked.
• Lock/Unlock Parameter – Details about how the lock/usage should be changed. This parameter can be an absolute value, like a date, a relative date based on a variable related to the Lock, or a function.

In this case the idea might be to ensure DRM files can be checked against this system and, if necessary, have it’s DRM altered as a result of it being X years after the Creators death. The beauty of this is that a single RMX entry can manage any number of actual files and the system could even be extended to handle variations of the same content that operates by the same constraints.

It should also be possible using the system to change different features at different times so that printing of a DRM file may be allowed at one time while making the file fully open might happen at a different time.

This idea also extends to the opposite implementation in which a facility has been provided subject to a possible expiry period or set of expiry constraints.

An example of this might be the use of a car with a navigation system in which the navigation system is only supported by the car manufacturer for 1 year. After that year, the service may need to be discontinued. In such cases, it is advisable to notify the system user of the expiry process and period as well as a method for extending the usage period. Such reverse systems may need to transfer the extension process to a Software Developer’s internal system for charging.

This entire set of processes act as an Rights Management Exchange and is meant to provide a balance between overzealous software constraints that hobble end users and improved interaction with the end user. This system should also provide protections for end users in cases where the original developers become bankrupt or are no longer able to support the product. Such a constraint could be included as a variable that allows the software to become fully unlocked in such a case.

The RMX would initially consist of the following parts:

1. Database as outlined above.
2. Interface for software developers / content owners to update the system.
3. Interface whereby digital files can check and alter their status.

I do not think that such a system would solve all the issues that parties have with software locks but it does start to constrain the misuse of DRM and similar systems that have driven so much piracy.

Everywhere you look these days, there are barriers to entry. With the concerted attacks being made against Net Neutrality, there is a good chance that such barriers are only going to become greater and more intimidating. In the online world, such barriers were hard to put in place at the start because the technology to do so did not exist. The explosion of the web certainly benefitted from the underlying transports being new and not fully informed. Net Neutrality itself was de facto in that Quality of Service restraints, which can now be used to set preferential traffic, were still in vitro, quietly gestating as a way of improving different types of traffic like voice over IP. It seems often the way of it that a generally good idea like QoS should deliver the walking abortion that seeks to axe the mostly neutral net.

But it is not just on such a grand scale that barriers are developing, becoming more and more thorny. I will be covering the general issue in a longer piece that looks at the expectation commerce has that all things must serve their commercial ends, but for the moment, it is worth taking an example from the world of online spam and news analysis.

Even with the most robust of spam filters, all email users have to put up with a certain amount of junk email. And by the way, if you do not receive any spam at all, the chances are you are also missing emails you want to see. An inevitable part of using the net involves authenticating yourself in one place or another and most of us get that this is a trade off: we are given subsidized access to information and we end up on a mailing list that may eventually lead to email we do not want.

It is a balance.

The problem I find is when I receive a newsletter as part of one such signing up and it is full of snippets of articles with “Read More” links. When I do click the article I am taken to a website that insists on knowing more about me, which includes forcing me to re-enter the email address that just received the article link. Before I can see the article that has been teased, I have to give my name and address, sometimes even my telephone number. If I only had a passing interest in the subject, I give up at this point. Of late, however, even if the information is important to me, I have taken to not only turning away but also immediately removing myself from the subscription list.

Perhaps this sounds a little like I am cutting off my nose to spite my face or some other equally inane cliche but I already pay to be on the net. In fact, I pay for my net multiple times: for my office, my phone and my home. Plus, you already have some of the details that you are asking me to reenter and my time is just as valuable as yours. Making me reenter information tells me that you want me but don’t respect me and much like many a cheap whore, I expect a little better.

But wasting my time is not the key reason I turn away. The main one is that I simply do not trust you. I don’t trust you to protect my information. I don’t trust you to give me a mostly unbiased viewpoint on the topic itself. I don’t even trust that you are expert enough to be giving advice on the subject. A shiny website with a less than stellar sign up process provides me with no confidence as to your bona fides at all.

Of late, at least for those subjects where I consider myself reasonably informed, I find it more useful to spend my time searching for the passionate write up from a non-corporate than read your slanted barely disguised infomercial. And for those areas where I am less than expert, your “sign up gate” is distinctly off-putting, dousing my ardor before I even have a hard on.

I don’t think corporations really want to kill illegal P2P, the Pirate Bays and other such torrents that enable so much digital piracy. If they did, they would stop messing around with suing their customers or making customer’s lives harder by implementing DRM systems. Instead they would adopt the tactics of overwhelming the peers and poisoning the P2P info stream. If, for example, they set up download servers that did not upload, they would be taking from the P2P stream without giving back, slowly suffocating the stream. If, instead of spending millions on lawyers, they chose to adopt this throttling method, they would support legal P2P which will eventually be invaluable as part of their distribution and sales stream all the while they build up their digital distribution hardware.

As a second level of attack, they could selectively spoof uploads so that when they did feed the P2P info stream, they sent poisonous information that would leave the downloading pirate with a corrupt file.

And these are just two methods of attack dreamt up in a moment. Just imagine what a group of really talented geeks could dream up given a few weeks at it. Yes, it would be a war of sorts and no doubt the software developed as part of that would evolve into something amazing. The thing about such evolutions, however, is that eventually they come down to issues of scale and in such a fight, the distribution companies have very deep pockets. Such an approach also has an intriguing side effect in that it redefines, recreates the distribution industry, giving it new purpose and value rather than its quickly diminishing value within the current system.

So, why hasn’t this happened? Primarily, it is because many such companies have become used to their fat profits from a standard business model and the people at the top of such companies have, for the most part, old style think which only looks at new technology as a way to expand their business not recreate it. It is a sad truth that people fail to see the end of one way of life and the start of a new one until they are forced, shoving and screaming, to the edge of some precipice.

*”Tuft” refers to the half thoughts that i could not quite fit into Twitter’s 140 character limit. The acronym stands for “Too Unwieldy For Twitter” and they are presented here because even bad ideas need a home.

Everybody lies. It is an aphorism that we all accept with a modicum of humour. We give ourselves the benefit of lying with cause, to right a wrong, to avoid harming another, to give ease. We make noble the reasons we lie to make less the lie.

And maybe that is mostly how it is.

But why then do we lie to ourselves? Who are we protecting other than our own fragile ego? Or perhaps you doubt that such lies are told and instead put down our many rationalizations to poor thinking or the simple, surely not foul, act of being mistaken.

Of course, there are many lies which it seems are never meant to be believed.

According to United Arab Emirates daily newspaper, Gulf News, in its online edition dated July 25, 2010:

Quote:

Abu Dhabi: The Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (TRA) has said BlackBerry operates beyond the jurisdiction of national legislation, as it is the only device operating in the UAE that immediately exports its data off-shore and is managed by a foreign, commercial organisation.

A statement from the TRA said the introduction of BlackBerry in the UAE in 2006 pre-dates the 2007 introduction of the UAE’s Safety, Emergency and National Security legislation, which regulates BlackBerry applications in the UAE.

It added that as a result of the way BlackBerry data is managed and stored in its current form, certain BlackBerry applications allow people to misuse the service, causing serious social, judicial and national security repercussions.

The statement also said: “Like many other countries, we have been working for a long time to resolve these critical issues, with the objective of finding a solution that safeguards our consumers and operates within the boundaries of UAE law.”

<http://gulfnews.com/business/telecoms/uae-telecom-body-raises-issue-of-blackberry-misuse-1.659291>

UnQuote

This statement from the TRA is wrong, mistaken, false on a number of points, and leads, the more you think about it, to some not so surprising but slightly unsettling conclusions.

Firstly, it is wrong when it says that the Blackberry is the “only device operating in the UAE that immediately exports its data off-shore and is managed by a foreign, commercial organisation.”

Almost every smartphone or computer device does or can do this and usually does so on a number of levels. Whether you are using Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail or MSN Messenger, you are still passing information to servers in other countries where they effectively fall under the control of foreign commercial entities. And these are just some of the more popular ones that most people use, what about all the secure sites that are used to buy products online? Amazon and eBay both use secure sockets, which is an encrypted way for moving information to servers in other countries.

Even if we ignore computers, which for the most part use standard communication protocols, what about any of the social networking or messenger apps on smartphones? They all send information outside the country to stores under foreign control.

The issue here is clearly nothing to do with exporting data offshore as that data still has to go through Etisalat networks. The problem is that Blackberry use their own proprietary protocols to do this and Etisalat is not able to listen in. I would not be at all surprised if this “problem” with the Blackberry had been going on for some time. I seem to remember in July of 2009 that there was some fallout after Etisalat rolled out what they claimed was an official Blackberry patch. This blew up when RIM stated that it was nothing to do with them (http://www.blackberrycool.com/2009/07/21/rim-responds-officially-to-etisalat-spyware-found-in-update/ ) and then the patch was found to include spyware from Etisalat that would give them access to the phone’s communications (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/14/blackberry_snooping/ ). The ruse very nearly passed unnoticed but for the fact that it killed the battery life and this led the whole thing to be exposed by a software company that specializes in spyware.

You cannot help but think that Etisalat felt pwnd by this!

I would also not be at all surprised if Etisalat had asked RIM for details of the Blackberry communication protocol and been told “sorry, we can’t give you that”. My imaginary dialogue might be crediting RIM too much but they did go up in my esteem after I considered the rationale behind the RTA’s current missive. RTA’s statement, such as it is, is almost common within the UAE as Government bodies will regularly issue press releases that are, at best, economical with the truth. This time, however, it is hard to know who they are trying to convince as only the most unaware or naive observer can fail to see this as throwing down the gauntlet to RIM, a challenge that says: “We are not kidding, give us what we want or we will shut you down.”

Most people who have lived in the UAE for any length of time become aware of the Big Brother quality of life here. Locals are acutely aware of the fact that their conversations are overheard and can lead to painful visits from the police forces. Everyone learns to be a little wary and avoid certain topics of conversation, at least in public. People smile and nod their head knowingly when a newspaper report is part of the general propaganda. The problem for the Government, however, is that the information walls are too porous. They talk about “finding a solution that safeguards our consumers and operates within the boundaries of UAE law” when what they really mean is appearing to allow people’s freedom to live their lives while secretly recording everything they say or do. The problem is not so much a balance between two aims, rather it is a law that is over-reaching and doomed to failure. We can assume that they feel all the other methods of communication are securely being monitored. Do they think VPN traffic is safe? What about the numerous direct satellite systems that support encryption and do not use government run networks at all? Do they think the US is monitoring all these? Even such high concept spying systems like Etchelon are fundamentally flawed because the more you monitor everyone, the more information there is to process. It does not take long before the demands of processing overrun the ability to sensibly do so.

But such is the mindset that thinks all things can be legislated. Another one of the many rationalizations that we tell ourselves: we really are creatures of light; our souls are unique snowflakes; absolute security can be maintained; someone is always to blame.

As Kurt Vonnegut might say: “Ho, Hum”.

The only true way to make everyone safe is to put everyone in a cell… and of course stop them talking to each other. Heaven forbid that the real way forward is through a dose of chaos, contentious dialogue, passionate argument and a true appreciation of our differences.

We live in a world where fiction properly framed is far more powerful than the truth.  Proverbs address this in the form of ‘a lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on’, indicating that this is not a new phenomenon. It is sad, however, that with so much information being readily available to test lies and help truth on its way, still the lie often holds sway. It seems that the lies we agree with have more weight than truths we despise.

On the run up to the election of Barack Obama to the US Presidency in 2009, there was a long running debate in the media over a grassroots get-out-the-vote organization called Acorn. This group basically helped the poorer communities, the largely democratic voting communities, to vote and, as such, they became a target of the republican voting mindset.  Into this picture came some conservatives activists who produced a selectively edited video where one of them posed as a prostitute and seemed to get advice from Acorn for running a people smuggling and prostitution ring.  The end result of this was the defunding and destruction of Acorn with any Democrat caught in the mix being smeared as a supporter of this corrupt organization.

Unfortunately, non of it was true.  The actual video shows a very different story with Acorn employees calling the authorities and delaying the activist/prostitutes until the police arrived. But by then the damage was done.

Recently, a similar incident has occurred where a woman named Shirley Sherrod was fired from her job in the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) over a speech she made in which she talked about not helping a white family save their farm. The video was circulated by Andrew Breitbart, a notorious right wing ideologue, in conjunction with Fox News, the shameless and unbalanced ones.  Many have come out against Sherrod, including the NAACP, but again the truth is different. The unedited video shows a woman talking about a transformative moment in her life over 20 years ago in which she moved beyond her initial feelings of difference, in part caused by the racially inspired murder of her father, to arrive at a place where we are all the same with the same problems and worries. She did in fact end by helping that family.

Again, however, the damage was done. The lie was regnant.

There are many more such tales that seem to come to the fore within the current US political scene: Universal health Care leading to Death Panels; President Obama is a Muslim born in Africa; etc.

And my query: Why is it that the people allow these lies to be spread in their name? Are they really so uninterested in the fraud that is committed with the aim of seeking power? Is the lie fine, the fraud fair if it gives you an advantage or supports your bias? Is that what we respond to nowadays? Dirty pool is ok as long as you win?

*”TUFT” refers to the half thoughts that i could not quite fit into Twitter’s 140 character limit. The acronym stands for “Too Unwieldy For Twitter” and they are presented here because even bad ideas need a home.

If I buy a car promoted as having electric windows and the windows only go half way down electrically with me having to roll them the rest of the way, would I consider the advertising false? Would it be a petty fraud by the manufacturer? In essence, should I have an expectation of use that binds them to deliver a certain feature set from a given technical spec?

I have an iPhone that supports WiFi, 3G and Bluetooth. When I am outside a WiFi access area, I can connect the phone to the internet via 3G. My laptop computer also has Bluetooth and WiFi. When outside a WiFi area, I can use the Bluetooth to connect my phone to my laptop and, using an phone feature called “Tethering”, I can browse the net from my laptop via the iPhone’s 3G. This essentially makes the phone a modem for connecting my laptop to the internet.

I also have an iPad that has WiFi and Bluetooth, similar to my laptop. The WiFi allows me to connect to WiFi access points and connect to the internet. I should, logically, be able to connect my iPad to my iPhone and, using the phone’s tethering feature, connect my iPad to the internet via 3G.

Unfortunately, I cannot do this because the facility has not been enabled on the iPad in that the Bluetooth data transport profile has not been enabled. When asked directly if this feature would be available on the iPad, Steve Jobs answered succinctly “No”. There is no more information about the subject than that so it is hard to know why this feature, supported by the hardware, is not enabled. I would hope it is not due to a desire by Apple to force people to buy the more expensive 3G iPad as that would certainly seem to go against Mr.Jobs own statement about loving their users, but who knows?

My question, however, runs as follows: With an increasingly technical world in which we have numerous devices using a variety of integration methods, does Apple have a duty of care to ensure that technologies advertised as being part of a device are implemented to a common sense level? In essence, is Apple committing fraud by not enabling certain elements of the technology that should reasonably just work?

Should there be an alternative rationale why this feature is not available, can not Mr.Jobs at least have the courtesy to advise his customers as to why this is the case?

*”Tuft” refers to the half thoughts that i could not quite fit into Twitter’s 140 character limit. The acronym stands for “Too Unwieldy For Twitter” and they are presented here because even bad ideas need a home.