Internet censorship is here

There’s always been a sense that internet censorship was something that they did in other, less free countries, like Iran or China. Then the Australian government started talking about it. But I’ve never seen evidence of it in the UK until now.

Depending on your ISP, you may or may not be able to see a Wikipedia page about the album Virgin Killer by The Scorpions. This is not because of their well documented and varied crimes against music, but because of the album cover art reproduced on that page, featuring a censored photograph of a naked girl. It may be in poor taste, but it doesn’t seem to be illegal. If it were, we’d be looking at removing it from Wikipedia, surely?

There’s more information about it on the Wikipedia bug tracker—it looks as if traffic from certain UK ISPs to Wikipedia is being fed through a reverse proxy with the ability to selectively censor pages.

Just in case that’s not clear: some ISPs in the UK are censoring certain pages on Wikipedia. That’s a worrying precedent: which pages will they be censoring tomorrow? In a country where opposition politicians are apparently arrested for leaking embarrassing details, will information that inconveniences the government be next to disappear?

So far I’ve heard that Virgin (how appropriate!) and Be Un limited are censoring Wikipedia. Conversely, I’m happy to report that my ISP, NewNet, is continuing to give me an excellent and unfiltered service.

2008-12-07 01:11 UTC. Comments: 26.

How to convert an S5 presentation to images

I used S5 for my RubyManor presentation. It worked great. I didn’t have to mess around with PowerPoint or anything complex like that: instead, I wrote plain text, ran it through a script, and called up the results in a web browser.

However, S5 doesn’t work so great when someone wants to take those slides and put them into a video. But all is not lost. All I really need to do is to mash the space bar and take screenshots. I could sit there doing that—hit space, hit print screen, repeat (well, except that this keyboard doesn’t have print screen)—but that would get old fast. If I were a high street clothes retailer, I’d hire some children in Bangladesh to do it for me. But I’m not. It’s nothing ideological—I just lack the supply chain. Computers excel at mindless repetition, though, so why not take advantage of that and automate it? More…

2008-12-06 17:45 UTC. Comments: 2.

iPlayer downloads temporarily broken

The iPlayer appears to have changed somehow. As soon as I can get hold of a session trace, I’ll work out what’s changed and fix my downloader.

In the meantime, here’s a snippet from the iPlayer source code to amuse you: More…

2008-11-27 21:44 UTC. Comments: 14.

Ruby Manor

The best executive summary of Ruby Manor I can give is to quote Kerry Buckley:

How cool is a conference that only costs £12, has excellent talks, and still has enough left over to put £500 behind the bar afterwards?

2008-11-23 10:42 UTC. Comments: 2.

Why the Jubilee Line is so confusing

The Jubilee Line of the London Underground runs from the north-west, through the centre, south-east, and on into east London. It doesn’t have any branches—well, apart from a secret spur near London Bridge, and a defunct one that used to lead to the old terminus at Charing Cross—so the only decision when getting on is whether to go towards Stanmore or Stratford, two stations whose names share the same first two letters, the same vowel sounds, and almost the same length, yet are at completely opposite ends of the line. Peering at a distant sign or hearing them over a fuzzy public address system, you might easily mistake them. Fortunately, all Underground platforms are also clearly marked with their compass direction, and announcements correspondingly mention the ‘eastbound service’ or whatever, so you can ignore the easily-confused names as long as you know vaguely which direction you’re going. More…

2008-11-15 11:53 UTC. Comments: 2.

Older entries can be found in the diary section.