People clamouring for DRM systems continue to miss some key points. Two links to two articles which are interesting counterpoints to each other. One claims technology will win the day pointing at legal services as successes. It misses the reason the legal systems are a success are because of service not technology. The other points out the reason why teens (especially) engage in infringment is because they have no other real option - no one is providing them a useful service. The former group should look at the latter and think about how to deal with this.

The BBC reports on an anti-piracy campaign which assumes that technology can win the day - that technology designed at its core for copying and transforming bits from one place and form to another can be used to lock down such things. It cites the success of legal music downloads as proof of this. The irony is in reality the reason people use iTunes has nothing to do with DRM, but everything to do with service. The DRM enables content providers to think "this will protect my work", when the existance of Hymn and a dozen other tools prove this to be a fallacy. And yet they have an income. Why? Because iTunes provides a service that people want at a price people want.

However, it is also an exclusionary service, what about those using unsupported operating systems? (This impacts me for example, I'd be tempted by the TV, but I'm happy to wait for it to turn up on Sky) What about those who don't have a credit card? For a business the market size is certainly large enough, but a public service which needs to be universal access, it can't be the right model (can it?). This leads me to the counterpoint article by Julien McArdle .

In this article it points out that if you're (say) between the ages of 12 and 18, you can't get a credit card (OK, in some countries you can, but not here). You can't buy access to iTunes in a shop (again, in places in the US you can, but not here). You have two options - either go to your parents and ask them to buy your music or find some other way to get it. Now we're talking about teenagers, the demographic that is stereotyped as not getting on with their parents at all, especially on the point of music. Yes, in an ideal world this wouldn't be a problem, but we don't live in an ideal world.

As a result they have limited options for listening to music on an iPod or similar.

One obvious option is to go and buy the music at a shop and rip it yourself. This sounds fine since everyones getting paid, but is actually copyright infringement in the UK (though you'd be hard pressed to show lost revenue). However, bear in mind at this point, if they take this route they have already infringed copyright. It doesn't matter that they've paid for it, it doesn't matter they didn't download it off Kazaa or Limewire, or similar, they've infringed. They're damned if they pay and rip, and they're damned in the same way if they download without paying.

Now consider someone who doesn't have any idea about how to rip a CD that they buy, transcode it to AAC, MP3, or WMV. What option do they have? Well, they can ask someone who does know how to do this for a copy of their music. And given sharing is blugeoned into children (in the nicest possible way) from birth, the default is for people to say "sure". As a result, those who can rip share with their friends. Those who can't share what they get with their friends. (right or wrong, this is what happens and the basic core motivation boils down to conditioning like "Share your toys/book/chocolates/cds with your brother/sister/friends")

And that's how a P2P system gets populated with unauthorised copies - people being nice to their friends... multiplied by the Kevin Bacon game. The next step in this chain is this - why would someone who can't rip a CD buy that CD if all it's going to be is a £15 ($30) table coaster? They're teenagers, not rich. If they could spend £15 ($30) on music and play it on a device they want to play it on, they would.

The sad thing here is everyone in that chain would agree - the artist needs to be paid for their work. The doubly sad thing here is, the bulk of people in this demographic who would want to pay for music (so their favourite artists can make more music), and are targeted as pirates have no other realistic option.

Where's the service that makes iTunes (or almost any other online service) realistic for that demographic clamouring for music? DRM won't stop them infringing - providing the service they can actually use and will happily pay for will. There's a market there, and if you can make them happy you'll be rich.

Finally, note: I'm not saying here that DRM is per se a good or bad thing, I'm deliberately steering away from saying DRM is good or bad. One good thing about it is that it encourages trust in a system for many content producers, owners and providers. The worst thing (IMO) about it is that it is currently divisive.

The basic technology has merits beyond the music world for it's ability to mark content as private (family photos, videos) and keep it private (as some people wish some things they'd said would be).

For the record, I very very very rarely buy music (I watch more TV or listen to the radio), but when I do I go in a shop and buy something classical in a sale - I like physical shops - you can often get a nice coffee nearby :) .

Some people wonder why I don't talk about my private life online, or 'silly things' like whereabouts I live in the world. The response  I generally give is "it's private". Some people however seem to think that in the modern age privacy is a bad idea, that if you want it you must have something to hide - as if privacy isn't a basic human right (Toilets have locks for a reason). Bruce Schneier's written an excellent article about privacy which sums up the debate as liberty vs control. I personally think that it really boils down to privacy matters and if its none of your business, it's none of your business no matter who you think you are, however aside from that final summing up I think its a great article.

It's also one of the reasons I'm interested in mechanisms to allow private communication to be integrated into Kamaelia, since the people engaged in private communications need to trust their not being evesdropped. This turns out to be a harder problem with Kamaelia than you might expect, mainly because of the high degree of decoupling in Kamaelia. (This is probably a good thing overall, since if you do manage to implement something you can trust you'll probably have a higher degree of trust in the system as a result. There's other practical applications at work (such as field journalists in hostile zones, or places with extreme censorship), but for me the basic need is one of privacy.

There are many RSS sources on the web, and people are beginning to look at them as a form on unix pipe for the web. Whilst this isn't a bad analogy, it misses a number of things about pipes (especially graphline type pipe systems), which would make things more powerful. We've got a specific need here, so I'm thinking "what's the most Kamaelian way of doing this", and starting from the perspective of "what's missing". The rest of this post discusses the editted highlights of my thoughts.

What's wrong today with a web RSS feed as the universal pipe connector?

• It's pull only
• There's no apparent _standard_ way to push back - trackback is the closest I can find right now, but that's application specific, not a generic connector.
  
• There's no mechanism for actually creating the pipe aspect as yet today
• As well as pushing into the object you would then want to pull out the other sides (taking the Kamaelia viewpoint that you don't have just stdin/stdout)
• The web is not the only source. Any device could easily publish one or many RSS feeds via zeroconf technologies, meaning you could fire up your machine, find out who's publishing a resource locally, and then play with the resulting feeds.
  

Ironically on the Kamaelia project we've now got a specific need where this would be of use, so I'm extremely tempted to deal with this. As usual the specific need is trivial - posting subversion checkins as news onto the website, but it would be extremely useful. The resulting tools would be reusable, which could be quite fun in a number of different places :)

An email address I had many moons back I now have again :-) You can now reach me once more at zathrus >A.T< mad >D.O.T< scientist >D.O.T< com :) (Note that's zathrus with a "u" not spelt correctly)
Sorry about the obfuscation, replace >A.T< with @ and >D.O.T< with a . (mutter nasty things about spammers)

Looks like I haven't been paying attention to the prolog world. Since I last looked they've also gone all OO. Just heard about logtalk, which strikes me as interesting and perhaps coming back to. Description from freshmeat: Logtalk is an open source object-oriented extension to the Prolog programming language. Integrating logic programming with object-oriented and event-driven programming, it is compatible with most Prolog compilers. It supports both prototypes and classes. In addition, it supports component-based programming through category-based composition.

So not quite the prolog I originally learnt then ... :-) Or perhaps as prolog would say: no. Mind you, I've always thought that if prolog could be made useable by the average person that it would have some really interesting applications for users. After all, being declarative it does allow you to do a lot more by doing a lot less. You've got to wonder what the implications of a tutorial on event based systems in prolog where messages to objects are events have for other systems.

Well, the release candidates for Kamaelia 0.5.0, Axon 1.5.1 have been created merged with the megabundle and uploaded to sourceforge, next comes the steps of finding what's broken (esp by last minute additions), and fixing. Meanwhile I've also written the Kamaelia article for Linux Format (december issue probably!), which is really cool. It focusses on the whiteboard largely, what you can do with it, and also has a section on how Kamaelia works from basic principles through to building graphlines.

I'm really quite pleased with it, and look forward to seeing what Linux Format do with it. (It's bound to be editted down and I imagine have its tone changed at least slightly!) It's made me realise that we missed out some dependencies from the MegaBundle, and that some areas need fixing, which is really useful.

I'm currently sitting in the session Scaling Up Open Collaboration and was expecting the two presenters to run a session, to run a talk. What have we got instead? We have a "video". This has instantly turned me off. Almost everyone in the room is now concentraing on their laptops, and not the message of their video. Despite the clear amount of effort and love that they've put in, they've failed completely to get their message across, which is a shame. If you run a talk, talk. I've been in bad talks, depressing talks, but all of these have been more compelling that smeone playing a video at me.

On a technical level, I watch a lot of TV - probably waaaay too much, and being in a broadcasting org I've picked up some tips about how to make a documentary, and this breaks a lot of rules. In places we have video, in others we don't. There doesn't appear to be a story being told... There's sections with people talking over text, which is fine, however the editors clearly recognised this alone isn't compelling, so they decided to add some background music. However if you're hearing isn't that great (like mine) then the fact that the music was louder than the person.

Another problem is the large changes in volume - the lack of good audo editting also turns me off.

Personally, I found the session awful. Ironically, if it'd been on youtube or google video, then there's a good chance I'd've watched it if linked through it.

As a session though, I found it painful.

Five million Scary Cybermen jumping through the void,
One fell badly, and whirled and whirled,
Rose phone The Doctor and The Doctor said,
"No more Cyberman taking over the world"

Four little Daleks, with a genesis pod
One got shot and bumped his head.
Rose phoned The Doctor and The Doctor said,
"No, no Daleks off you go to bed"

That's the question on my mind right now. I'm supposed to go to the US for work reasons (Foo Camp) which is undoubtedly (almost?) a once in a lifetime opportunity, but does it outweigh the concerns I have over the fact that I'll have to check in my laptop into the hold ? (having had one data recovery experience this year, I don't want to risk a second) More importantly does it outweight the concerns my family have for my well being - that is they don't want me blown up ? That I really don't know right now. I do know that I'd planned on flying on one of the airlines that had apparently been targeted, which doesn't really inspire me.

The restrictions on what you can take on board for a long term flight (ie nothing) would probably also drive me barmy, and for EuroFoo and EuroOSCON I'm probably going to get the train - under 2.5 hours from Waterloo!

As you can probably tell, I'm rather undecided what to do right now. I've got about a week to consider though. Taking any longer and it wouldn't really be possible for Tim & co to re-allocate my space to someone else (something I'd like them to do if I can't make it to foo). Ironically, whilst my families biggest fear right now is of me being blown up, mine revolve around losing my data. I've already had that hell once this year and really could do without it a second time :-(

Any experience anyone else has had with laptops stowed in the hold would be encouraging to hear. (Even if my response is a little delayed...)

This is something I've been itching to write for a while, and I'm not sure I've got my analogies and descriptions right yet, but the gist is right more or less right (perhaps less than I'd like), the long tail sucks, viva le long tail...

The long tail - or rather Zipf's Law - has been getting a lot of publicity recently, which is nice in a way, but also suprising in others. I first came across the long tail 8 years ago when I started work at the Janet Web Cache Service in a variety of papers from the 3rd web caching workshop (which had been held in Manchester just before I started working there). The one thing that struck me was the fact that Zipf's law is a fundamental aspect of human behaviour (as fundamental as fire).

As a result, when people started putting catalogues on the internet people, whole new communities - business communities - started to see the effects of the long tail of human behaviour on their profits. Intuitively we all understand the long tail - we know that we want things that suit us, that match our desires.

However the reason why "hits" and "hit culture" took off is simple to explain - we all want quality. We don't want to choose from 20,000,000 things - this for me is the nightmare of the record store (online or real). Ask me what music I like and I'll say "good stuff". Don't ask me if it's garage or rap or indie, I don't know. I don't care about that subdivision, that label. I like cool stuff. I can point at stuff by Queen, stuff by Rob Dougan, Pictures at an Exhibition, the theme tune from twin peaks, Ernie the Milkman, Lilly the Pink, and so on. I don't classify my likes. As a result music stores suck for me (of almost all kinds).

Expanding that choice by even double, let alone 10 fold or 20 fold, leaves me cold. I'm aware that this makes it more likely that it is _possible_ for me to find something I'll like, but my ability to find it decreases as that choice size increases. This is Mooer's law in action. The usefulness of the system to me decreases as the amount of information increases.

I'm not alone. (I might be one datapoint, but I'm not arrogant enough to assume on a planet with 6 billion people to believe I'm that different from other people)

That's why top tens are good. It's why if I'm going on a long flight at an airport, I'm pleased that they have a top ten (or a variety of top tens). It's why I'm pleased that shops tend to operate on a principle of "survival of the fittest". If a book is good, it's likely to stay on the shelves (through restocking). If it's not, it's likely to disappear or get covered in dust. The smaller the shelf space, the more important those decisions become. Too much dust and you go out of business. Sure, the books available are less likely to be a good fit for me, but they're also more likely to be closer to the head than the tail (The tail being where the likelihood of it sucking for me increases).

This for me is the real issue. Why do you see zipf distributions? Because by and large the values as to what is good are shared by many people, we do tend to have similar likes on some levels to other people. That is why places like Amazon are particularly good, they don't just operate a long tail - every online bookstore does that - they allow people to gain insight into what's going on in that long tail. Similarly, Google News has the ability to look at what thousands of journalists worldwide have chosen to write about and chosen to publish. They then allow you to look at the head of that snake, by time, date, a search or a combination of all of these.

These services make the head & body of the long tail visible, which in essence is what we all want anyway, though personal to us.
The long tail exists because our tastes all subtley differ, and we all want quality. What you think is terrible, I might think is great. I still remember seeing Spawn at the cinema, how much fun I found it, and how good a film I find it, and yet, I'm still to find another person who agrees. The phrase "so bad it's good" is a cliche, and with good reason. If I say "The Matrix" however, you find lots of people agreeing that think its a cool film.

As a result, the head of the snake is useful. The head of the snake is a means of navigating yourself to content that lots of other people who may share similar tastes to you think is good for some reason. If you make the place to choose from attractive to a wide audience who choose from the wide variety of content, then the head of that snake will be attractive to that wide audience. And that's why hit culture took off. As long as everyone was choosing from the same pot and the reporting on that pot was accurate, then the top 10, top 40, top 100 was useful. That's why the top 40 in your local supermarket might be more relevant to you than a general top 40.

The real interesting aspect of things like recommendation engines is that they're personalising this snake. They're turning the snake into a hydra, and each head is a real user.

However, the interesting point is this: caching makes sense. Caching to be effective has to identify the head of the snake. By identifying the head of the snake, but still making available the tail the cache is useful, but provides a time benefit to the user and cost benefit to the provider with regard to the content. What does this mean in the context of a long tail? It means that small stores can exist, and can stock a wide variety of useful content, and can even use simple heuristics to make money. This is essentially what web caching does after all.

And why does caching make sense? It identifies the head & body of the snake, allowing you take advantage of the fact that the head and body have equal business or bandwidth value as the entirety of the tail, which is a choice set, many, many, many, many, times larger.

Now, I'm not a business person (by choice), but I'm savvy enough to realise this: if a web cache (fixed amount of choice of storage) can cope with the vagaries of an effectively infinite choice zipf distribution, and still turn a profit (ie be worth running), surely the same can be true of a business. You don't have to say "we'll stock everything", merely being able to get everything, and be able to serve the high quality stuff (as chosen by that audience) is sufficient. Furthermore, it's entirely likely that given a sufficiently "good" recommendation engine, that the amount you stock can be kept small.

The paradox of the long tail is this: you don't need a tail to take advantage of it, a virtual tail is sufficient - as long as you're willing to change your body and head to match the whims and desires of those choosing. If you can provide insight into that long tail, and shift content into a local store - and turn that tail into a body & head, then you increase the value of your proposition to the audience, and they will move your store along the long tail of online stores further towards the head, than the tail of online stores.

After all, if you could go into a store on the high street and say "give me something cool to listen to", and they did, and every time you went there not only did they give you something cool, but it got cheaper with time, surely you'd go back? You'd stop caring about the size of the tail, as long as you could get at it.