Pirate party gets into european parliment!

I’m not sure whether to be amazed, impressed, shocked or dismayed to hear that Piratpartiet gain a seat in the European Parliament yesterday. Piratpartiet, translates to ‘the Pirate Party’, are a Swedish parliamentary party, that want to reform copyright law to legalize file sharing sites like ‘Pirate bay‘.

According to their website, The Pirate Party ‘wants to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens’ rights to privacy are respected. With this agenda, and only this, we are making a bid for representation in the European and Swedish parliaments.‘

Piratpartiet - The Pirate Party.

Under Swedish law, Piratpartiet had to go through six distinct stages in order to become an official political party, this process started with collecting a petition of signatures  in early 2006. Creating a website to harness the power of the internet, they achived the required number very quickly. This is all the more amazing, when you consider that all signatories must give there name and address, and for many that is admitting to breaking the current laws by using illegal file share sites.

While Piratpartiet have had a number of followers from the start, this number was greatly boosted by of all things a police crack downs on the ‘pirate bay’ group,  with an initial speed up in sign up when charges were made and a massive increase when the organizers were later jailed.

Over the 3 years since it was set up Piratpartiet has slowly gained momentum overtaking the  Green Party in December 2008, the Left Party in February 2009, the Liberal Party and the Christian Democrats in April 2009.

Piratpartiet is now the third largest political party in Sweden in terms of membership, and Ung Pirat, the Pirate Party’s associated youth organization,  is now the largest political youth organization in Sweden. Its sudden popularity has given rise to parties with the same name and similar goals in Europe and worldwide.

Alongside other fringe and extremist party victories around Europe, (including the first ‘british national party’ parliamentary seat), I’m not sure whether this is more an indication that the current political system is broken, or that the we really believe that copyright theft should be legalized.

While I understand what drives people to vote for parties like Piratpartiet, I can’t help but wonder how they will handle power. Its fine to stand for increase privacy, but how will they view hacking, police powers , anti terrorism measures. It may be that criticising government is somewhat easier than running it.

One thing that is for sure, is that as with the Obama election in the states, that the internet can used with tremendous effect to bring about politican change. At the moment this power seems to be targeted at the young, but as more and more of us start to use twitter, and blogs and the internet on a daily basis this is likely to spread.

Sources: Pirarpartiet | wikipedia

Could Google WAVE goodbye to twitter?

Google never cease to astonish me with their innovations. They are often criticized these days for being too big. Sometimes they seem to be into simply everything, and big powerful companies tend to scare us. But just when you think they can’t get any bigger, they up their game (again), and bring something out that is truly huge.

In typical Google style, they waited until the second day of the Google Developer Conference in the Moscone Center, San Francisco on May 27 – 28, 2009, to show us there biggest secret, WAVE. I’ve pasted the 1 hour 20 minute keynote video of below (for those of you that may have just woken up from a coma and havn’t seen it).

Google don’t normally make this sort of announcement, this early in a products development, but they have made an exception for WAVE. The announcement has already set the development and tech communities on fire, Youtube simply couldn’t handle demand for streaming the movie on the night of its release, (i had to wait several hours for things to calm down enough to access it), and twitter is still positively buzzing with comments on WAVE (which is a little ironic as WAVE could soon replace many existing communications channels like Twitter).

So what is Google WAVE? It is an entirely new communications model.
The Google Maps team, lead by Lars and Jens Rasmussen, have developed an application to allow people to communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and other tools, all within a standard browser.

So what makes WAVE different? for a start the whole approach to communication is different. Although unified communications has been around a while, it has always imitated nonelectronic forms of communication, but the Wave team threw away the old rule books and started again from scratch.

Over the past year Twitter has started to changed the way that we think about communications, its faster, its more inclusive (conversations are with groups rather than individuals), more accessible (searchable) , its far more personal and its creating new collaborative communities. WAVE is likely to take this to a new level, no longer are users limited to 140 characters, no longer do they have to wait until a reply is complete (you see them as they’re typed) no longer do you have to link to photos, videos, blog posts, you can include them all in a wave, and collaborate on them in real time.

Unlimited by the old rules of communication, WAVE is almost bound to change the way we communicate, but are businesses ready to make the change? Are our bosses ready to accept that online collaboration and communication can save more time than it costs, are corporations ready to take the leaps of faith required to trust employees enough to express opinions freely, do IT departments have the resources to keep up to date and can we find solutions to all the legal issues that this might raise, are the laws even capable of being applied to this kind of technology.

Like all waves, this WAVE is likely to gather speed and momentum before it reaches its full height and comes crashing down.

Related posts: Google WAVE | Releasing a wave of possabilities

Will the VAT reduction make any difference at all?

I have had to adjust the VAT codes and prices on my Epos systems (electronic point of sales – otherwise known as tills) and online shop this week. The reason? The government think that they can eradicate the credit crunch by reducing VAT by 2.5%, for 13 months.

Am i missing something here? Surely any school kid can see that this will never work in a million years. Firstly 2.5% is not nearly enough to restore confidence, energy costs are still rising for many of us and
that will more than offset the VAT saving. Secondly there is nothing to force companies to pass on the savings, and for the millions small of retail companies the cost and time required to relabel their entire product range it simply doesn’t make sense. Especially when you consider the extra cost of having to deal with additional requirements for small change, and the physiological factor that people like round prices. Then there is the cost factor, if government has less money in its pockets, then its going to be spending less and that is bad for businesses in the Uk, and not only will this money have to be repaid but there is also the interest.

I can see that changing VAT may seem the simplest way to have an effect on people that are spending, but surely it will have an inflationary effect if some companies put up their prices to keep prices on the shelves the same as before the vat change. Surely a change to income tax would have a more controllable and noticeable effect?

I seem to remember during the recession of the early 90’s that there were campaigns to buy british, to ensure that what spending did take place was having an effect at home. This reduction in VAT will benefit the cheaper foreign manufacturers as much if not more that british businesses, and british families.

As i type this up sitting on my sofa at home, the news on tv is talking about increasing numbers of housing repocessions, increased redundancies more businesses going bust etc, etc, etc. I can’t help but think that a 2.5% reduction in VAT is like trying to stop the recent floods with a seaside bucket and spade.

Virtual murder, leads to real life arrest.

Earlier this week I wrote a post about Wayne Forrester, the 34 year from here in the Uk, jailed for life for murdering his wife after she changed her facebook status to single. Well in a strange turn of events I find myself blogging once again, this time about a real arrest following a virtual murder.

Mayumi Tomari a Japanese woman of 43, was taken 620 miles from her home in Southern Miyazaki to Sapporo for questioning by police on suspicion of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating electronic data, to kill off his in game avatar.

It is believed that the old piano teacher became so enraged that her online husband (in computer game MapleStorey) had unexpectedly divorced her, that she used logon information the 33 year old office workers had given her while they were happily married (in the game) to delete his account. It is believed that the two have never met in the real world and that the man made the complaint to police after finding his avatar (character that represent’s him in the game) was dead.

While she has not yet formally been charged she could face a 5 year prison sentence or a fine of more that £3,000 if convicted. There have been several arrests in the past for virtual crimes, but unlike this case these usually involved corresponding material gains in the real world.

I think this is a case of real life being stranger than fantasy. Also in the news this week was the story of a blogger arrested in Newcastle and charge with offences under the obscene publications act for describing what he would like to do to a geordie pop star in girl band Girls Aloud. The blurring of reality and virtual reality has to make you wonder what will be next? Will we start getting actual speeding fines for racing cars on online games, or worse still tax bills for virtual purchases.

My advice to Japanese office workers considering a quicky divorce from their online spouses – change your password first!
My advice to this victim, if your behavior results in murder in the virtual world, stay single in the real world!  Finally my advice to miss Tomari’s piano students – keep practicing she’s obviously easily upset!

Sources: the telegraph, The Yomiuri Shimbun, associated news

Search history Privacy

Thought that when you clicked on the Clear Private Data button that you were deleting your search history? Well if you have a seach tool bar you’d better think again.

Having recently blogged about the potential for Ip addresses to be considered personal data, i thought i’d take a look at how various search engines handle dealing with data about our searches. What i found was quite a surprise.

All of the major search engines have (and display on their sites) Privacy Policies detailing what data they collect , how they collect it and how they use it. While Yahoo and live search don’t allow you much control of this data, it would seem that Ask and Google have taken very different approaches.

Ask recently announced that they are adopting an 18 month data retention policy and will delete all data over that age. They also released AskEraser an option that allows you to opt out of having your data collected. This is a simple one click option on the home page of there search page. The data is actually captured, just not committed to their database (unless it meets certain legal requirements for data that has to be tracked).

Google on the other hand have created Google History (currently list listed as a BETA). To use the history services you’ll need a google account and the google toolbar (if you have the toolbar but not an account your details are recorded you just can’t access them).

The History services is split into search history, trends, interesting items and bookmarks. My history showed me details of each search i’d done going back to April 27th 2007. This information is sub divided into wen, images, news, products, sponsored links, video, blogs and books.

Trends shows your top queries, sites and clicks, interesting items predicts pages you might like related to your searches (so searches you havn’t done but others with searches like yours have) finally boomarks shows you all of the searches you have bookmarked. There is also a calendar showing your search colour coded with your search activity.

There is an option to delete all or some of your search history from the menu bar when you’re loggen in as a registed user, and the settings within the google bar appear to have options to turn off this feature.