Leave the Pirates alone

The prosecution of file sharing site The Pirate Bay reached new, farcical levels this week.

An idiot named John Kennedy from the International Federation of Phonographic Industries actually testified that if it were not for sites like The Pirate Bay, then users would have paid for every single file that was downloaded.

The response in the courtroom was appropriate – according to Wired:

Kennedy answered an affirmative “Yes” to Pirate Bay defence attorneys when asked whether that was true. Bursting laughter could be heard from the audio room beside the courtroom where the trial’s sound was being broadcast.

When will the recording industry learn that this kind of nonsensical prosecution simply will not work. This trial is an absurdity because:

• Sites like The Pirate Bay do not host any files – these are kept on the PC’s of individuals. They therefore cannot be accused of sharing such files – they are just an indexing service;
• There are perfectly legitimate uses for bit torrent technologies – breakout bands/film makers looking to make a name for themselves, copyright expired material, copyright exempt material, research data, creative commons or copy-left material, etc, etc…
• There is an assumption from the recording and movie industry that they can churn out repetitive, formulaic crap, and people must pay up front to listen to or watch it, even though the creative effort to manufacture it was seriously sub-standard. This is anti-competitive price fixing, intended to rob the public with over-promising advertising, which is unrepresentative of the actual product received. The so-called illegal sharing of this media allows users to assess the validity of the producers’ claims (if they hadn’t been so disingenuous in the past, there would be a reduced need for this safety mechanism now);
• File sharing actually increases the popularity of good producers, giving them a reach and credibility that would otherwise be unavailable to them. As the reputations of good producers grow, people will be more inclined to buy future store-sold products of theirs, or attend live performances or buy limited availability, non-digital content (posters, collectibles, books, etc);
• There is actually very little money lost in the sharing of digital media. Despite the laughable claim that gave rise to this blog, most users pick up shared material out of passing interest – if it was all hidden behind a price tag, then much of it would remain unseen and unsold (and in fact artists would lose MORE money – as traditional production requires large upfront costs (manufacture/transportation/storage/disposal) so poor downstream sales only ends up in increased LOSSES!).

Instead, the industry should realise that the world has changed – you can no longer just produce/distribute/sell like we did in the last century. Some artists are realising how the new world works – they make their money from touring,  product ties-in, and having a presence across media boundaries (all revenues strengthened by file sharing among fan groups).

If we are even to half-believe the recording industry claims then we should be prosecuting pub cover bands, celebrity impersonators, mobile phone owners, radio stations (no way do their fees cover the alternative of making every potential listener buy a full copy of any song they might be interested in listening to), and we should ban nightclubs and school balls.

The alternative of course is to grow up, stop making lawyers rich based on unenforceable claims, and get on with building the new digital world of entertainment distribution..

3rd Annual IM Conference – ADF Presentation

The  Australian Defence Force (ADF) context was presented by John Thynne, Director of Command Intelligence Management Headquarters.

As an agency, John started out with perhaps an obvious statement, but one which was telling within the subsequent context:: If the ADF gets its IM strategy wrong, people die. With command and control operations now running out of a new facility at Bungendore, and covering global operations from Iraq, Afghanistan, Solomon Islands, Sudan, Sinai, Israel, and East Timor, there are literally millions of people all over the world whose lives depend on the information management systems they use.

Information for them is key to:

• Strategy: accurate reports leading to concise recommendations and
• Operations: coalition and inter-agency communications
• Tactical: clear direction and processing of incidents

To deliver these capabilities, project initiation and turnaround is paramount – some projects have run for several years, cost millions of dollars, but have still not gone into production. In this kind of environment the ADF is implementing a more realistic approach, with projects that must focus on::

• access
• usability
• availability

And what is the big thing they do NOT want – ‘sophistication’ (for which you could substitute ‘complexity’, ‘gadgets’, ‘features’, or’ ‘latest versions’).

This is interesting – John said that the green light comes on at around 80% of anticipated needs realisation – that is enough to advance capacity, and may in fact give them enough of an advantage to save lives in future operations. The key is OODA – can that system allow them to Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act faster than the other guy? If so, it may be a war-winning capacity.

The lesson is clear then – clever is good, but it may not solve your identified problems. Get the 80% usefulness out of the project. This applies to the project initiation and delivery, reporting, and budget analysis undertaken along the way. It doesn’t have to be perfect – it just has to be reliable enough to move us forward.

This reminds me of a phrase I heard in 2000 from the IT manager of a major Wall Street organisation (to a room full of software developers): “I want the ‘first-of-the-worst’ of you. The first of you guys into my office with an idea that advances my business by 5% for 6 months will make themselves rich. The rest of you guys, working on a ‘perfect solution’, will never get to market – the business and the world will have moved on while you were trying to get it 100% right”.

It was a sobering moment – and looking around the room there were some ashen-faced developers and researches engaged in long-term work who saw the Cadillac and the mansion disappearing rapidly – and ‘first of the worst’ didn’t seem to fit with their world view.

John finished with another perhaps clichéd phrase, but again it was interesting to hear from his world: “work smarter, not harder”. Reduce hours, seek automation, and implement best-practices.

Sounds like a good idea – I’m on it.

(I’m Twittering the conference highlights on http://twitter.com/mdart)

Conference Twitter

I’m attending the 3rd Annual Information Management Strategy Conference in Canberra today/tomorrow.

Check my Twitter feed for live updates here: http://twitter.com/mdart

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Don’t get too comfortable – the web is about to change…

Good article (full text here) about imminent changes to the way the web, and web tools, are set to change (web 3.0 if you like). This is an extension of many current web 2.0 projects, and it reinforces that we really need to focus on search as the key to our websites, not menus or predefined hierarchies of information. Let the user search for it and decide how to use it (the last line sums it all up).

This means organisations have to give up the power they think they have to control the message by corralling users through a predefined information production line, resulting in grinning customers who then ‘get’ the corporate strategy. Those days are gone, and the semantic web should prove to be the last nail in the coffin for corporate control of the message.

In the semantic future your corporate data will be sliced and diced, to be served up in all manner of contexts that you would never have dreamed of, and perhaps would traditionally have had nightmares about. It’s starting now through mash-ups, cloud storage and social networking, but come the semantic search engine get set for a whole new ball game.  

What You Need to Know About the Semantic Web

by Tom Ilube

A quiet technology revolution – one that will radically change the way the internet works – is likely to catch much of the world off guard. It involves the “semantic web” – a way of organizing and presenting web content not as documents but as items of data that are linked by both meaning and relationship. A shockingly high percentage of businesspeople have never even heard of the semantic web, which bodes ill for their ability to position their organizations to cope with its implications or exploit its opportunities.

The semantic web was envisioned nearly 15 years ago by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and is being developed within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which Berners-Lee directs. Indeed, some 23 billion data relationships have been coded since 2000 (more than half of them in the past year alone) using a protocol known as Resource Description Framework (RDF).

The pieces of data that make up a present-day HTML-based document are not, for lack of a better term, aware of their relationships with the document’s other pieces of data (or data in other documents). The semantic web, however, is built on standards and protocols that clearly define the relationship of each data item to others – not just within the document but wherever those other data may be on the entire web. At present, people must wade through and make sense of search results. The semantic web would enable computers to interact with other computers to assemble data items that are precisely responsive to highly specific queries.

Suppose you’re interested in Shakespeare’s many references to adultery. Whereas a conventional search would return thousands of separate documents, which you would then have to ransack for the exact material you want, a semantic web query would extract data from those thousands of documents and assemble a single, convenient collection of all the relevant references.

Online retailers, music stores, travel agents, game sites, media publishers, and myriad others need to absorb the implications of living in a rapidly emerging world of open, linked data. Business leaders must first understand what is going on and make sure that someone in their organization is immersed in semantic web issues and considering their implications. If you ask your CTO about the semantic web and he or she looks at you blankly, you’ve got a problem. Your technology team will have to devise an architectural road map for the semantic web over the next three to five years and to undertake the difficult work of transition.

Perhaps most important, try to see the semantic web from your customers’ perspective. They won’t care what it’s called, only what it does. The enhanced customer experience resulting from services that draw on a global web of highly relevant data will render obsolete many websites that are considered today’s best in class.

Loving the cloud

This week a press release quoted comments I made about a WatchGuard deployment, and the phrase that summed up the project was "building a WAN in the Cloud" (see http://www.cio.com.au/article/275170/national_native_title_tribunal_resolves_favour_watchguard ).

It is interesting how the wider industry and various government agencies are now utilising aspects of cloud computing and networking, as the savings are considerable.

In terms of a personal opinion I am not convinced by the alternative to cloud computing, which is the building of private infrastructure (the alternative to point-to-point VPN such as WatchGuard being a private IP WAN (MPLS) from a Tier 1 comms provider). It might be needed for some national security sectors, but that really is a very limited market.

In examining such proposals in the past, I have been sceptical of the idea of contention on private IP WAN systems. There you are paying top-dollar for a closed system, but you still end up sharing your purchased bandwidth with many other users, and somewhere in that ISP’s WAN there are pinch points where many thousands of such customers converge to be switched across long-haul lines for interstate communications.

Along the way you as a customer are reliant on the ISP administrators to configure those switches/routers correctly, and in the national sense there may be third-party contractors looking after the last mile and undertaking installations into your office locations (one Tier 1 ISP I dealt with had a proposal that involved 3 separate companies handling my so-called private WAN solution).

Of the customers you share such services with, you are reliant on their in-house security procedures and staff relations to prevent an insider threat materialising that could jeopardise the running of the IP WAN.

The killer of course is cost-versus-speed. An MPLS service for an SME connecting a few offices together will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and will commence with speeds around the 1mbps mark. This shocked me. I thought there was a zero or two missing off that speed, but it seems not. In 2009 in a supposedly advanced country, we are being slugged with dirt-road speeds for toll-road prices, and having to take it on trust that nothing bad will happen to the ISP that is controlling all of our private infrastructure. In this day and age I think that is too great a risk for any business to take, and you should certainly make your ISP aware of such dissatisfaction should you be presented with such a model by them.

I tried this with one provider, and I asked them straight out "why should I adopt this model over a cloud VPN point-to-point solution?".  I actually asked the question numerous times in the same meeting, and the only answer I ever got was "security", repeated as if it was a magic mantra – although no detail was forthcoming. This was really just scaremongering on their part – trying to leverage the corporation with an attitude of  ’scare them enough, and they will have to transfer the risk to us’.

Now transferring risk is all well and good, and a valuable management strategy, but it still sucks to see such blatant abuse of the process by lazy ISP’s and poorly informed  sales staff (its especially riling to call one and ask for information and pricing, and have them insist on ‘visiting your site to tailor a solution to your needs’. This of course just means, ‘we are going to come and offer you the same deals you can see online, but we will try some tired old persuasion techniques to try and get you to commit to us over the other companies offering exactly the same thing, at the same speed, at the same price…’).

In the private and government sectors the use of cloud computing for some materials  is now an accepted, everyday matter. Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Google Earth, Facebook, Flickr and so forth are now the hosts of many public resources which would have previously been unavailable behind closed doors. In many instances this opens up opportunities for public-inspired mash-ups of data, and a new perspective on public policy matters.

In the networking and data environments then, we are seeing The Cloud coming to a useful, democratising and cost-effective maturity.

This is just what we need if we are ever roll off of the dirt roads an open up our potential on the information super highway. Viva la Cloud!