The Musings of Harry

Richard Whitely died after heart surgery this week

Richard Whitely really was a British institution. There’s just nothing like Countdown when you wake up at 4.30pm on a weekday afternoon. All his jokes were terrible, of course, except this one… which is great!

Guest Judge Person: When Richard was in college, he was known as Twice Nightly Whiteley
Audience: Laughs
Whitely: Yes, and now it’s “Twice Yearly Nearly”…!

Classic!

He will be missed.

So, Grokster lost… but not really.

This whole thing seems like no big deal to me. The EFF is predicting a dire result, but most people seem to think that the ruling of the court wasn’t that significant - and from reading the syllabus, I agree. In a nutshell, the court ruled that Grokster didn’t infringe any copyrights, but that they may have induced infringement of copyright - a question that they’ve kicked back to the lower court to decide. Here’s the meat of it:

One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use
to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative
steps taken to foster infringement, going beyond mere distribution
with knowledge of third-party action, is liable for the resulting
acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of
the device’s lawful uses.

Seems reasonable to me.

The Good:
P2P is not dead. Sony has not been overturned. The INDUCE bill is now unnecessary.

The Bad:
It’s not over. We have to wait for the lower court’s decision on inducement. I predict that Grokster will get spanked.

The Ugly:
The court has, with this ruling, created a new form of copyright infringement: inducement. On the positive side, they have created a clear and hopefully quite strict test (”clear expression or other affirmative steps”) for inducement. On the negative, this is (obviously) untested, and the entertainment company’s lawyers will undoubtedly go to great lengths to construe off-the-cuff comments or other such trivia to be clear expressions of intent to induce infringement. In other words: watch out for the first case that ‘tests the test’. This could ultimately be very bad if the court interprets this test too much in favour of the entertainment industry.

…because I’ve been playing GTA San Andreas all day. It’s really good. Standard GTA, but bigger, and more interactive, and just cooler generally. Go buy it!

But then, just as I was about to post, I read this on Slashdot… zombies! Real zombies! Seriously though, this really is amazing. They drained a dog’s blood and replaced it with cold saline at a few degrees C. Then they waited a few hours, replaced the saline with blood, and used pure oxygen and electric shocks to restart the heart. Apparently, tests showed no brain damage, and the dog appears to have suffered no damage as a result of the procedure.

That is until the next full moon, when the dogs develop superhuman strength and stamina, escape from their cages, and wreak havoc upon the local community, until a hermit living in a shed up a mountain turns up to save the day with a frosty disposition and a box of silver bullets. Muahaha!

Hot on the heels of the MPAA inventing nonsense , the BSA has been caught doing it too!

One wonders if it’ll ever stop. A recent study by the Business Software Alliance indicates that 80% of European small/medium-sized enterprises use patents to protect their computer implemented inventions:

… SMEs account for 20% of all CII (Computer Implemented Inventions) patents granted since 1998 (and 2/3 in 2004) and 81% of them rely on patent protection for their businesses.

In actual fact, the 81% figure refers to the number of European SME patent holders that only hold one patent. In reality, only 0.018% of European SMEs hold patents.

It gets better. The BSA’s criteria for selecting organisations to be included in the list of patent holding SMEs were hopelessly flawed. In their list of SMEs used in the study, there were five universities and numerous large companies that are certainly not SMEs - including Infotech, a huge Indian outsourcing company, NTL, a telecoms giant with revenues in excess of £2bn last year, and the Energy Pool Funds Administration, which is owned by National Grid Transco - a company that had a turnover of £8.5bn in the last financial year.

The ZDNet article sums the situation up nicely:

It is difficult to conclude other than the BSA is happy to allow these errors because they fit the organisation’s argument. It is also hard to conclude other than that the BSA studies really should be independently corroborated if they are to be trusted. As a lobbying organisation, it is doing itself a lot of damage by its attitudes and actions, and it risks damaging the very industry it claims to support by parlaying its inaccuracies into national policies and international law.

Looks to me like BSA or just BS? hit the nail right on the head.

Techdirt reports that the MPAA are in fact full of shit very creative with their press releases.

After their previous press release, some people bothered to actually check their math, which was off by an insy-teeny-weeny 31,000%. In response to this, the MPAA now claim that their figure of $30 million worth of goods seized was actually the value of the goods that the seized stamping machines could have produced if they were used to make illegal DVDs.

Staggering. Do they really invent this stuff with

a straight face? This is just ripe for a Family Guy sketch or something. I can see it now: a bunch of people sitting round a table snickering at themselves for their cleverness in weaving as much bullshit as they can into already truth-starved press releases.

Next we’ll be hearing that someone’s CD burner got confiscated for copying a VCD, and that goods to the value of $500,000 were seized… I never knew my computer was worth so much.

Apparently, federal law requires that Dell ask what the servers it sells will be used for.

If they ever asked me that, I’d tell them to get lost, and cancel my order. A bit like when telemarketers ask for my phone number, address, email address, previous 10 addresses, national insurance number, bank details and sleeping habits. What the hell does it matter what a server will be used for?

Someone commenting on Bruce Schneier’s blog did elaborate - that this question has to do with trade regulations and not the PATRIOT act, as quoted - but even so. Asking for unnecessary personal information is bad, for whatever reason.

Another interesting bit of trivia from Schneier on Security: apparently the PATRIOT act has a clause on pedantics… so you can’t just say: “Why, I’ll be using this server to serve data!” Shucks.

This will be a programmer-ish entry. May wish to skip this one if you don’t care about PHP.

So, recently, I read someone saying that one should always use require_once to include files in PHP, rather than include, include_once, or require.

I always use include without really thinking about it, but someone claiming that require should always be used struck a wrong note with me. Upon thinking it over, I rememered that in Ye Olde Days Gone By™, require behaved exactly as named. In other words, this code would result in the inclusion of x.php:

if(false)
{
require 'x.php';
}

As distinct from this example, which would not include x.php:

if(false)
{
include 'x.php';
}

This is horribly confusing, and led to my rule of thumb that one should never use require.

This behaviour was changed in PHP 4.0.2, but the rule stuck. There is one difference though, and that is in the manner in which the error is handled when the file to be included is missing. require fails with a fatal error, but include fails with a warning, which allows execution to continue. This is kinda cool, and when you’re guaranteed to be running your script on a webserver running a recent version of PHP, I’d say either is fine - but for anything which has to support multiple versions of PHP, require becomes a dangerous choice, because it may not behave as you expect. Thus, I say that include is the wiser choice: you should notice a warning just as easily as a fatal error, and you’re guaranteed that include will behave the same way everywhere.

On to include_once and require_once: I feel that these are bad. I don’t think anyone should use them routinely. Why? Because they hide bad design. With include_once, you may never know that your script is executing twice. Or, conversely, you may want to include your script more than once, and end up with a confusing bug through force of habit. Of course, if you’re in a situation where *_once is specifically and legitimately called for, then that’s fine - but I wouldn’t use it as a matter of course. Besides, it’s case sensitive on windows servers, which sucks:

<?php
// this will include a.php
include_once("a.php");
// this will include a.php again on Windows! (PHP 4 only)
include_once("A.php");
?>

Argh!

…if we make it work!

Copyfight reported on Monday that the MPAA tried to sneak the broadcast flag through congress, by attaching it to an amendment to an appropriations bill. Thankfully, this ever-so-sneaky move did not go unnoticed, and within a few hours, the Senate Appropriations Committee had been Slashdotted, Instalanched, and BoingBoinged.

By the following evening, the committee had received over 11,000 emails and faxes - over 500 an hour! The EFF is rightly claiming a victory here, but are quick to point out that it’s not over - you still need to take action.

On the European front, I’ve recently been contacting my politicians to make known my opposition to national ID cards and software patents. I’ve had some responses, mostly politician double-speak, and I’m trying to engage some of them in healthy debate! I’ll let you know how it goes.

So, just when you thought the rabid crap spewing from the mouths of the RIAA/MPAA couldn’t possibly be any more nonsensical, we get this little gem:

Authorities seized an estimated $30 million worth of DVDs and copying equipment from a duplicating plant, the Motion Picture Association of America announced Monday.

New Century Media was shutdown by the Southern California High Tech Task Force last week, according to the MPAA. The company was founded in 1989 by Carson and Jennifer Yu and provided clients with CD and DVD copies produced in China.

Well, the company in question, New Century Media, were rightfully rather angry when they read this story - because practically none of it is true. In actual fact, $10,000 of DVDs were siezed, along with some machines worth $86,400. In total: $96,000 - a mere 31,000% difference.

Thank God for the internet. Without it, we’d probably never hear these things. As it is, we do - and so, we know that the MPAA are a filthy bunch of filthy lying liars. Filthy liars. Who lie. I’ve never really believed anything they say anyway, but this is some nice evidence to back me up - hopefully, some more people can start ignoring them now. Better yet, point at them and laugh at every opportunity.

The moral of the story? Always ignore the MPAA.

According to Forbes, all of Batman’s gear and training would cost $3,365,449 in the real world.

Cool! Speaks for itself really — now all I need is a shedload of money and a mild psychological breakdown…

Click here for the slideshow.