I just found my copy of David Warsh’s “Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations”. I have promised myself that I would review it but on studying the dust cover, I find it says that the long term paradox of falling costs, is explained by internalising i.e. to the growth process, technological change. Such a simple insight, which from today’s view point seems so obvious. It may have impacted the capitalist economists more than the Marxians. …
Nice class of person
I have been reminded this week, of Robert Townsend’s book “Up the Organisation”; one gem goes something like this,
…Don’t have reserved car parking spaces for senior managers, you should be in early enough to get the space you want and meet a nice class of person in the staff car park!
Who got there first?
A friend has been quoting to me, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance”. It’s why I used part of the phrase in the last article, but who said it first; whom are we quoting?
This article provides a surprising answer, i.e. it’s not Thomas Jefferson and its best iteration maybe from Aldous Huxley,
…“The price of liberty, and even of common humanity, is eternal vigilance.”
Sabotage
The skwawkbox is running a story that not only did Labour’s bureaucracy sabotage the 2017 election campaign but they attempted to cover their tracks.
There is a petition to sign if you want, click on the picture.
…
Eternal vigilance
I have been pointed at China’s Social Credit Scoring plans via two routes. The first is this extract published at Wired from Rachel Botsman’s book, “Who can we trust”. This details the Chinese Governments plan to build a social credit scoring scheme, but the sources and incentives are horrendously comprehensive, including their leading match making agency. (It’s taken me some time to read this article, an I have bookmarked and annotated it in my diigo feed.) Worrying things about the Chinese scheme is that voluntary participation becomes mandatory; while rewards and incentives are at the forefront of everyone’s mind today, control and punishment is planned, in the Chinese case in the short term they are talking about foreign and domestic travel restrictions but as I note, the countries leading dating agency is one of the surveillance agencies. There is also talk of social investment loans (helicopter money) which become available on the basis of social scores.
The second route was an article on Medium by someone who got banned from AirBnB. He pointed at an article on Buzzfeed, “A Chinese-Style Digital Dystopia Isn’t As Far Away As We Think” where a series of regulatory decisions in the USA seem to be paving the way to something similar, a powerful illustration that the argument that surveillance is OK if it’s private sector is horrendously false.
One worrying aspect of the proposed Chinese system is that your reputation is as good as that of your friends and we have idiots trying to replicate it with peeple, and reading up on that has started me worrying about Linkedin and its competitors and we all know we should get off facebook.
The wired article came before machine learning and massive scale AI became a hot topic, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens to social credit scores when they let rip with the application of machine learning. The automated derivation of reputation scores also raises issues of safeguarding, libel and context. Safeguarding and libel laws require the machines to tell the truth, in fact safeguarding may require machines to hide the truth. Context requires a level of nuance that we are unsure if machines will ever have, but even if they get there, justice and judges must remain human and the code must be open; China’s & Facebook’s is not!. The GDPR gives data subjects rights, perhaps its time to revisit the seven principles.
Of course in the UK, we have our very own examples of machines and data sharing getting it wrong. Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary has suspended the intra-government and some of the other immigration data sharing as a result of the backlash on the Windrush scandal. (I wonder if this I an excuse to look again at the DPA Immigration Exemption clauses.) Much of what is happening in China and the USA is also happening in the UK, it’s just that the surveillance agents are the US owned datenkraken and the British State have legalised the hacking of their data streams.
What’s happening in China is terrible, but our governments are following suit! The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. …
Ulveas together
Another interesting copyright story. In 1974 ABBA won the Eurovision song contest with Waterloo. This launched an amazing career releasing 66 singles between 1974 and 1982, with nine UK No. 1 positions and 11 BPI Gold discs, putting them in the top 20 best selling bands ever.
But as we know, copyright lasts for life + 70 years and so reusing their material can only be done at a price. While researching this article, I discovered that we can perform an artist’s copyrighted material for money in a venue, and it is the venue’s responsibility to pay the collecting society. However, band names are protected by intellectual property laws.
It became clear, that ABBA had ceased to perform, and declared that they never would again and in 1988, Rod Stephen launched an ABBA tribute band, called “Bjorn Again”, which is a different name and also protected. This has also been successful. The line-up has changed, and even at times there have been two bands on separate tours. Fascinating that such a simple copyright statement allows the appropriation of value. I think I’ll copyright “Ulveas together”.
It’s a story of great music and showmanship, abandoned and restored, but still enclosed. You can perform it, but you can’t monetise it without paying a tax. When I first conceived of this article, I was curious as to whether the Bjorn Again owners were licensing the name as a franchise, however it seems not but it would be a smart business move, and another illustration of the monopolistic tendencies created by modern creative copyright.
There seems to me to be something not quite right about the way the performers & fans are at the bottom of the heap in this particular model. …
Modelling power
I have finally posted my long planned piece, on the way Bioware adopted a permissive licence for their AD&D games at the turn of the century. In doing so they enabled a fan community to create content which increased the value of the game to all its customers and also the demand in volume for the game binaries, and the period over which it was used.
I had planned a Part II having come across Ludovico Prattico’s academic paper, Governance of Open Source Software Foundations: Who Holds the Power? which in the abstract he states,
The research reported in this article attempts to discover who holds the power in open source software foundations through the analysis of governance documents. Artificial neural network analysis is used to analyse the content of the bylaws of six open source foundations (Apache, Eclipse, GNOME, Plone, Python, and SPI) for the purpose of identifying power structures.
I was interested if his techniques could be applied to the Bioware licence and see what one might learn, by comparing the output with Prattico’s findings. He had looked at six open source licences so it would be interesting to see how the formal outputs compared. Prattico used additional documents beyond the licence and used the tool Catpac II, which sadly is not free. (I wonder of Carat II will do instead; I hope not because I was/am looking for something better than a bag of words.)
I also wondered if it could be used for analysing, describing other power relationships, such as national constitutions, or the Labour Party’s rules. The latter would be needed in text form which is not easy to find. …
Crime & Brexit
As I said, earlier this week I attended a session of the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee. This was called to take evidence on the impact of Brexit as it impacted Europol and the European Arrest Warrant.
I have published a link to the video recording of the event but I took some notes and wanted to share them with you. They interviewed Sir Robert Wainright, a former Head of Europol and Claude Moraes MEP, Chair of the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) and Camino Mortera-Martinez, Research Fellow and Brussels Representative, Centre for European Reform. If we leave, we are unlikely to get a better agreement than Denmark which has withdrawn from Europol and unless we accept the Court of Justice of the European Union, we will be excluded from the European Arrest Warrant. Moraes made the point that the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act may inhibit a data sharing adequacy finding which may lead to a restrivtion on access to Europol’s databases. … …
Power in Iran & the UK
A couple of years ago, I found this picture, illustrating the relationships between organs of government in Iran. I we struck by the similarities between it and the UK.
On revisiting it over the last few weeks, I am less enamoured of the similarities. Originally I saw the Queen & Iran’s Supreme Leader as equivalent and the UK’s Premier & the Iranian President as equally the equivalent positions. The Guardian Council is the House of Lords and we should note that the Assembly of Experts is elected.
If you study the diagram and look at the powers appointment of the Supreme Leader, we can see that the British Premier is more powerful as all those appointments are made in the UK on the so-called recommendation of the Prime Minister.
At least the Iranian President is directly elected and the Supreme Leader indirectly so.
ooOOOoo
I think I might create dot graphs of the two governments. …
On Adequacy after Brexit
I attended the Home Affairs Committee on Europol and the European Arrest Warrant yesterday. Don’t say I don’t know how to have a good time. One of the members, suggested that since we have passed a new Data Protection Law, we will be compliant from Day 1, or Day 0 as we engineers call it. I think not and here’s why. In short, the Government say they’ve implemented the GDPR into British Law, but once we’re a third country, it’s the Commission that has the last word, and they have questions we need to answer. …
Firstly, I don’t think the Commission would act that quickly and they’d need to issue an adequacy decision and there are four questions of substance that the Commission would need to consider.
- The European Data Protection Supervisory Board’s predecessor, the Article 29 Working Party and the Commission had outstanding issues with the UK’s implementation of 95 Directive, to the extent that it seems the Commission had started infraction proceedings. (I find it very hard to get explicit data on this, and much of what is available reads like conspiracy theories, but the most vocal campaigner published his views in the Register, here. The author argues that the infraction process proposes to carry forward to the 2018 DPA. ) The author checkpointed his findings in a 2011 blog article, called “European Commission explains why UK’s Data Protection Act is deficient”, he also points to an Out-law Article, “Europe claims UK botched one third of Data Protection Directive” 17 Sep 2007.
- The House of Lords Committee on Data Protection found that as a 3rd Country we may be required to meet a higher standard than as a member state. (This is because we will lose the powers granted to member states under Article 23 Restrictions of the GDPR. These powers relate to the exemption of national security organisations and the courts (and others) from some aspects of the GDPR). This is why there is concern with the Investigatory Powers Act, already declared deficient by the UK Courts and the DPA immigration service exception will jeopardise any attempt to obtain an adequacy finding. i.e. a member state might be able to have these laws but a 3rd country may not.
- The loss of member state status and privilege means that our intelligence sharing arrangements with the US, a country which still has the death penalty, and operates under a different military legal doctrine may be deemed to be a critical problem in granting adequacy. (We should note that Tom Watson MP, obtained a barrister’s opinion on the legality of sharing intelligence and wrote to the Prime Minister at the time on the legality of this activity; it was taken up by Rights Watch who are pursuing this through the courts.)
- Depending on the withdrawal agreement, and it seems that no-one is thinking about this, we may cease to be covered by the US Privacy Shield agreement, and thus will be prohibited from transferring EU citizens personal data to the USA, and they to us. (Actually prohibited is a bit strong, participants in cross border data transfer would need to be covered by model clauses, or binding corporate rules and both of these are under judicial review (Schrems II) and create a barrier to entry because of cost to SMEs).
It should be noted that the ECJ has required the US Safe Harbour agreement to be re-negotiated; its successor allows US corporate self assessment, but also requires EU citizen access to the US Court system. The important thing here is that the Commission consider protections of EU citizens’ personal data, and the establishment of rights against the State’s intelligence, security and police services to be part of an adequacy findings and since the EU is not frightened of a row with the US; it wont be with us. …