It’s fixed now. See below.

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:

var _uaMatch = {
  'apple-i-family' : /(iphone|ipod)/,
  'nokia-s60-webkit-family': /(n95|n96|n78)/,
  'samsung-win-mobile': /sgh-i900/ //"SAMSUNG -SGH-i900/1.0 Opera 9.5"
};

So you can now use the iPlayer if you’re using an iPhone or an iPod Touch, or a Nokia N95/N96/N78, or a Samsung SGH-i900. That’s it. I wonder how long they can keep up this piecemeal approach to mobile support before it overwhelms them. If they’d only used open standards … Ironically, of course, they are using open standards, just obfuscated.

I’ve really got to get hold of an iPod Touch. It would make all this reverse engineering so much easier. Anyone got an old one going spare?

Update: Apparently it’s genuinely broken. Even from a real iPhone.

Update 2: It’s broken for some people using iPhones. Not sure what’s going on.

Update 3: There was a small change to the iPlayer that broke downloads. Thanks in no small part to Mike Trim, I’ve published a fix. It will be available on the project page shortly.

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?

Very cool, in fact. James Adam and Murray Steele took their idea for a conference in which the content and schedule was shaped by the community, and made it happen. Not only that, they made it a huge success and sold out all the available tickets.

Graham Ashton did an outstanding job as unofficial scribe of the conference, and wrote a comprehensive summary of the day’s events (part two).

I really enjoyed doing my talk on opening up the iPlayer, and I received plenty of positive feedback. I was up first, which was good and bad. I was able to relax for the rest of the day, and give all my concentration to later speakers. However, a few people who wanted to see my talk didn’t manage to get there in time.

There’s an audio recording, and a video with possibly as much as half my face on it, and I’m sure those will become available soon. In the meantime, I’ve put my presentation online: I’m an evil iPlayer hacker. I hope it makes at least some sense without the voiceover. I used Eric Meyer’s S5 for the presentation, but my stylesheet has only even been tested in Firefox and may look skewy in other browsers. I apologise for any inconvenience.

I’ll have to write in a bit more detail at some point about the Ruby + Redcloth + Syntax + Rake + S5 workflow that I use to turn plain text into a presentation without having to get into the hellish pointing and clicking of WYSIWYG presentation software. It may be simple, but it works well for me and lets me focus on the content without getting distracted by the visuals. Simplicity is good.

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.

What I can’t get my head around, though, is Canada Water and Canary Wharf. These two stations are adjacent on the Jubilee line, although they are separated by the Thames at ground level. I live near Canada Water and I’ve always managed to avoid getting off at the wrong one, simply because I know the preceding station in each case. But when it comes to talk about either station, I say the wrong one about half the time, and I’m never confident. The orthographic and audible similarity between the two stations’ names just throws me. Humans are predisposed to find patterns and connections, but it’s not helpful when what I actually want to do is to distinguish them.

It may just be me that finds the Jubilee Line confusing. But I’ve read similar complaints about the names of new fonts in Windows Vista (Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, Corbel) and of the constituent applications of the KDE desktop (Kaffeine, Kamera, Katapult, Kate, Konqueror, Kontakt, Kopete, etc.).

Advice for authors commonly recommends giving the characters in a story distinct names—varying not just initials, but also length, rhyme and rhythm. Maybe it’s advice that should also be heeded by transport planners, marketers, and programmers, for exactly the same reasons.

I’ve been starting to appreciate the potential of Greasemonkey lately. It’s a Firefox extension that allows you to write scripts to modify a website to work the way you want. For example, it lets me fix my gripe about Delicious not allowing me to save my password even if they won’t.

Seeing it in action spurred me to start finding solutions to other inconveniences. One of these is Google Maps. On the 7-inch screen of my little Eee PC, so much of the page is given over to extraneous elements that the actual map occupies a pathetic quarter of the screen even when running Firefox in full-screen mode.

What I really want is to see just the map. I don’t use the route guidance. I don’t need the search box—I usually just use the ?q= parameter in the URL anyway.

With Dive Into Greasemonkey for a reference, I wrote a few lines of script to hide the bits I didn’t want to see via CSS and to resize the map to fit the screen. It comes out like this:

That’s a much better use of space, don’t you think?

You can get the script from userscripts.org.

If you can’t download programmes at the moment, please don’t tell me! It’s also affecting iPhone and iPod Touch users, so it doesn’t seem to be a Beeb counter-attack.

It appears that something went awry over at the transcoding barn where the programmes get converted into iPlayer versions. There’s a thread about it on the iPlayer message board.

It sounds like everything is back up and working again now. If you can’t download any new programmes, I’m interested in hearing about it.

I’m reasonably happy to suffer some inconvenience when identifying myself for online banking, because I have a financial incentive. If my account were compromised, I might lose money. I want complex passwords that are infeasible to crack. I don’t want my browser to store them for automatic completion, in case someone else gains access to my computer. This is all as it should be.

At the other end of the spectrum are the free internet services where the user name and password combination is something that I just have to tolerate in order to use them. They might need some kind of identification in order to provide a personalised service, but they’re not really sensitive.

Delicious (né del.icio.us) is one of these. It’s a bookmarking service. It’s useful. Very useful. In fact, I probably use it every day. But it’s not a critical service.

Since del.icio.us became delicious.com, a couple of things have changed to make it less useful. First, the login cookie/session expires much sooner. Whereas before I hardly ever had to sign in, I must now do so once a fortnight. That’s a small inconvenience, though. What’s more inconvenient is this:

<input type="text" name="username" 
id="username" value="" class="field" 
autocomplete="off">

They’ve told my browser not to give me the option to save the password automatically. When my bank does this, they’re probably doing the right thing. When a free bookmarking service does it, they probably haven’t really thought it through.

It’s a good opportunity to try out Get Satisfaction. I love the concept, so I’ve posted my gripe on there. Let’s see what happens!

Imagine that you’re an authoritarian government minister and you’ve just failed to gain support for your scheme to abolish traditional liberties and acquire the power to incarcerate people who haven’t even been charged of a crime for up to six weeks. You’ve been playing the terrorist card for so long that it’s visibly dog-eared. The public is calling your bluff—they’re just not scared enough any more!

What’s worse, the ungrateful wretches don’t seem to appreciate the essential security requirement to set up a £12 billion database to track and record every phone call made, email sent, and website visited by everyone in the country.

What is an aspiring tyrant to do? Well, you might try to elevate public indignation levels by appealing to two bogeymen at once, by seeding a propaganda piece to a complicit journalist.

And you’d probably end up with something like this:

A link between terrorism plots and hardcore child pornography is becoming clear after a string of police raids in Britain and across the Continent, an investigation by The Times has discovered. Images of child abuse have been found during Scotland Yard antiterrorism swoops and in big inquiries in Italy and Spain.

Secret coded messages are being embedded into child pornographic images, and paedophile websites are being exploited as a secure way of passing information between terrorists.

What breed of cretin do they take us for?

It’s not the first time this has come up. I’m reminded of the Forest Gate incident. To recap: in June 2006, thirty-odd police officers raided a house in East London in the middle of the night to arrest two men suspected of terrorist activity. During the confusion, one of the men was accidentally shot at near-point-blank range—an accident that was blamed on the thick gloves the police were wearing. Fortunately, it wasn’t fatal. Both men were released after several days, as nothing related to terrorism had been found.

It didn’t end there, though: the shot man was arrested again, this time on child abuse charges related to images found on his computer during the raid. I thought this very fishy at the time. It just seemed too conveniently vindictive. After all, the British public hates a paedophile even more than a terrorist! And so what if the charges didn’t stick, and he was released without charge? His name had already been publicly besmirched.

I believe that a concerted effort is being made to associate paedophilia with terrorism in order to provoke and maintain a foaming level of outrage among the populace and to ensure public acquiescence in the progressive diminution of civil liberties.

Whilst chatting about this the other night, I recalled the ‘Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse’ of Cypherpunk FAQ fame. I was a little surprised that the idea wasn’t as well known or remembered as I had thought. The message is even more relevant now than it was in 1994:

8.3.4. “How will privacy and anonymity be attacked?”

[...]

like so many other “computer hacker” items, as a tool for the “Four Horsemen”: drug-dealers, money-launderers, terrorists, and pedophiles.

One part of the terrorist mythos is true: there are people out there who hate our freedom and want to destroy our way of life. Unfortunately, they appear to be in government.

They know where you travel, by car (via ANPR) or public transport (with London’s Oyster card). They want to know who you call and email, and where you go on the internet. They want to lock people up before they’ve even worked out what they’re supposed to have done. And it’s not a conspiracy theory in the classic sense: collecting and mining much of this information is the declared intention of the government.

I’ve received many comments and emails asking why it’s not possible to download Heroes with my downloader. Several people have hypothesised that it’s due to the age restriction. It’s not: in fact, it’s possible to download other age-restricted programmes without any trouble.

The answer is simple. Downloads are done by spoofing an iPhone, but Heroes is not available for iPhone:

We now have the rights to offer Heroes on BBC iPlayer. However, there are some restrictions, which means we cannot offer downloads, and we cannot offer the Sunday repeats or BBC3 ‘Look first’ broadcasts.

This means that we cannot offer Heroes on Virgin Media, Wii and iPhone and iPod touch. We are aware of demand so there is no need to contact us about this.

Officially, you can’t download the iPhone version, so it’s amusing to see that used as a reason. Perhaps I’m partly responsible for its unavailability to iPhone users!

The word ‘terrorism’ is bandied around as an excuse for anything and everything these days, but it’s increasingly used without any attempt at a logical narrative:

The United States Saturday removed North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism in exchange for a verification plan allowing the U.S. and other parties to monitor the communist country’s nuclear disarmament.

The issue of state construction of a nuclear deterrent is orthogonal to state sponsorship of terrorism (a nebulous phrase that I’ll accept at face value for now). This leads to two possible hypotheses:

1. North Korea was not a state sponsor of terrorism, and was placed or retained on the list as a bargaining tool to encourage co-operation in nuclear disarmament.
2. North Korea still is a state sponsor of terrorism, but has been removed from the list as a bargaining tool to encourage co-operation in nuclear disarmament.

Either way, the presence of a state on the list of sponsors of terrorism is based on political expediency rather than whether the state is, in fact, a sponsor of terrorism. The list does not achieve its stated goal of enumerating states that sponsor terrorism.

On the upside, the DPRK is co-operating on nuclear disarmament. I don’t think anyone’s much in favour of them having The Bomb.

I’m releasing a quick update today with a bug fix and a couple of enhancements.

Command-line tool:

• Accepts multiple PIDs once again (broken in previous release)
• Has a --dry-run option to skip the download step

Both GUI and command-line tool:

• Can extract the PID from URLs on http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes.

The Windows executable was built on Windows 2000 this time. I don’t think that should cause any problems, but let me know if it breaks anything!

The files are on the project page.