Britons should be subjected to random carbon spotchecks and intensive surveillance of their diets, transport and waste disposal habits, says the Government’s architecture and design quango in a new report today.

The word “monitoring” occurs 19 times in the 32-page publication by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). If the proposals in the report What Makes An Eco Town?are implemented few aspects of life will go unrecorded.

CABE says the strict monitoring is needed to ensure the carbon footprint of the eco-town dwellers remains at one-third of the British average, which is the requirement for what’s called “one-planet living”, the quango says.

Examples of monitoring include “the ecological footprint of the diet of 100 randomly selected residents”, and the number of shops selling local produce. Waste disposal and transportion habits will also be scrutinized.
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There’s a new lobby group in town – but unusually, this one unites traditional adversaries from tech, telecoms, and media companies. Backers include the American Songwriters Guild representing creators, Microsoft, Cisco, and AT&T, and media companies including Viacom and NBC. Everyone but Google, it seems.

The launch in New York today was well attended by songwriter’s reps. Arts and Labs’ mission, the group says, is “robust and intelligent networks needed for the swift and safe delivery of the online content consumers demand.”

Which very much sounds like a counterpoint to “Net Neutrality” and similar freetard-friendly campaigns – although everyone present in New York today denied that Neutrality was an impetus in the creation of the group.

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News Corporation and the major record labels are facing antitrust questions about the blockbuster MySpace Music venture – even before the site has launched.

MySpace Music is billed as the biggest music retail launch of the year. It’s a one-stop shop backed by the cross-media muscle of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, with the three biggest record labels. The site promises to offer everything from downloads to ringtones to concert tickets, backed by the “street” cred of the MySpace brand, and a blockbuster launch is expected this week. Astronomical valuations – $2bn – have already been placed on the service, which MySpace insiders want to become the ‘internet’s MTV’.

The problem? Not everyone can play. Independents say they’re being frozen out of the new venture. No independent music company has inked a deal with the News Corp, and independent labels report that they’ve been blocked from uploading their music. And since MySpace Music is a joint equity venture between News Corp and the three biggest labels, which control 70 per cent of the US recorded music business, the trouble might only be starting.
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Oil supplies will actually last for far longer than our politicians think, the scaremongers fear, and the oil companies tell us. So says Dr Richard Pike, head of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and someone who isn’t afraid to stir controversy.

Whither, then, Peak Oil?

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British digital music company 7Digital claimed a coup yesterday by becoming the first online music store to carry DRM-free catalog from the “Big Four” major record labels. Calling it a coup is misleading, however. It’s really further confirmation that the top of the music business is run along feudal lines: closer to the 12th century than the 21st.

At the apex of this power structure is the King, with a divine right to rule – and apportion land and revenue raising concessions as he sees fit. Barons who pay the necessary fealtye may receive a generous property apportionment and collection rights – although these concessions may be withdrawn at any time.

But because the Barons were formerly Warrior Knights, and had their own private armies, the relationship was in a constant state of tension. The King feared the old Warrior Knights might be getting too uppity, or keeping too great a share of the tax collection.

Divide and rule

Five years ago the royal court permitted one baron, Apple, to launch a digital download store – but only if it bore the King’s seal of DRM. Apple had its own army of “fanbois” – derived from the old Norman word for a slavishly devoted following of peasants. So iTunes went ahead with the reluctant blessing of all four major labels.

Five years ago too, you may recall, eMusic relaunched its own subscription service – but without the King’s approval. Because eMusic thought DRM was lousy for its customers, it refused to take the catalog concession on offer, because it had compulsory DRM attached. eMusic also offered much better value than the iTunes concession. It meant the King may receive lower per-unit revenue, even though there would be more of it. As a result, the major labels withheld their catalogs from the service.

So 7Digital becomes the first UK music retailer to offer DRM-free catalog from all four major four labels: Universal, Warners, Sony and EMI. This, it’s hoped, will provide competition for the other barons: Amazon, which hasn’t yet launched in the UK yet, Apple, with its fearsome but mostly harmless army of fanbois, and Tesco, where the serfs already buy their turnips.

All this may be largely irrelevant, however. For beyond the few, safe, patrolled thoroughfares where the Barons raise their taxes, roam the hordes of “freytards” – who simply scavenge what digital music they can. And that’s most of the people, finding most of the music, most of the time.

The King has belatedly realised that if the freytards continue their plunder, tax raising concessions will soon be completely meaningless. He’s realised, too, that the Baron he so dismissively kicked out of Court five years ago, eMusic, now offers one of the most attractive legal alternatives to banditry: it’s cheap, good value, and doesn’t penalize the serfs for experimenting with new music.

(And today, most of the King’s court and advisors now believe that more radical measures are needed: scrapping the divine exclusive right to make copies, in exchange for a voluntary subscription-style payment, thereby taking the freytards out of the banditry business. Publishers and independents thought that waging war against the peasants was daft in the first place.)

Alas, the punishment goes on.

eMusic continues to be withheld the vital concession that would permit it to build a mass market business: it still can’t get DRM-free catalog material wholesale from the big four major labels. So eMusic is justified in viewing yesterday’s 7Digital deal as a further example of anti-competitive behaviour, and perhaps longs for a fair court where its case can be heard.

But the Enlightenment hasn’t happened yet, and Feudal thinking still holds sway.

Baidu is renowned as China’s glittering internet success story, and as the start-up that gave Google a bloody nose. It dominates the web in the world’s second biggest economy with 70 per cent market share, and on Wall Street carries a market cap of almost $12bn.

But Baidu’s success comes at a price, for the legitimate music business, for the development of China and of its intellectual property (IP) law, and for any internet company wishing to do business in China.

Baidu owes its success to its MP3 Search service, which takes surfers directly to music. It’s known as “deep linking”, and early this year, sound recording owners represented by IFPI filed a copyright infringement case against Baidu, claiming damages worth $9m.

Yet the scale of Baidu’s operation, uncovered by a forensic six-month investigation conducted in China for The Register, has surprised the music business.

“Although we already had some doubts about Baidu mp3 search, when we saw the investigation results presented, it was really a shock,” Susanna Ng, EMI Music Publishing Managing Director, Asia Pacific told China’s Fortune Times.

Music searches using Baidu return results that are heavily skewed in favour of unlicensed music, while they rarely return search results for licensed music sites. Meanwhile, the unlicensed MP3s appear to systematically move around a complex network of domains in response to infringement notices.

Chinese web surfers may be forgiven for missing the news. Baidu fails to link to news stories critical of the company, including some of the findings below; these have been covered only by a handful of publications within China. It’s a chilling reminder of the ability of a web search engine to control and shape public discourse.

We’ll explain what Baidu does, and why it’s in trouble. And the grim prospects for anyone hoping to build an internet business in China — with an unstoppable Baidu.

What does Baidu do?

Most full-length recorded music in China is unlicensed, infringing material. Some estimates put the figure as high as 98 per cent. A popular act can expect to sell as few as 2,000 copies. Yet China is not quite the lawless frontier these figures suggest.

In March this year, another Chinese top five music search engine, Zhongsou had its servers seized and subjected to the maximum fine for copyright infringement by state administration authorities. This was the first public case of a music search engine being convicted for hosting MP3 files. Government appointed bodies such as the Music Copyright Society of China (MCSC) and the China Audio-Video Copyright Association (CAVCA) are both active in attempting to support businesses that reward the creators. Baidu’s notorious MP3 Search is the biggest problem they face.

MCSC’s Director of Legal Services Liu Ping used the following real life analogy to describe deep-linking:

“If Google’s search works as a guide by giving directions and telling you the address while taking you right to the door of your destination, Baidu’s search brings you directly through the door, right inside the room and helps you take away the CD from shelves without the owner’s permission.” Liu Ping considers this to be beyond the scope of a search engine, and a practice which moves Baidu into the area of transmission of music.

Baidu has amassed numerous lawsuits over the practice, with MCSC and the IFPI involved in a number of these. Baidu’s defence is that as a network service provider it cannot be responsible for the legality of the sites it indexes and is therefore not liable for damages. Nevertheless, Article 23 of China’s Copyright Law says that it is jointly liable “where it knows or has reasonable ground(s) to know” that the linked works are infringing material.

However, our investigation suggests close enough linkage between Baidu’s business and the infringing material for it to be viewed as something more than ‘just’ a network service provider.

Baidu’s MP3 Search was monitored for six months at the end of last year, analyzing search results using 600 songs spread across multiple genre. A number of areas that seemed incongruous to a pure and neutral search engine were discovered, and three details emerged.

Firstly, a network of mysterious sites with closely related domain names contributed more than 50 per cent of the search links returned by Baidu. The songs hosted on the mystery sites were unreachable except through the Baidu search engine. Furthermore, infringement notifications resulted in unlicensed songs simply moving from one of these domains to another.

Secondly, Baidu does not link to the two leading paid download sites in China, 9Sky and Top100. While Google for example will return results for a song search to licensed providers (7Digital, Amazon, eMusic or even iTunes) as well as Torrent trackers, Baidu is much more selective.

Thirdly, music blogs and forums naturally form a significant source of music search links for any search engine. But with Baidu, these contributed to only 30 per cent of the music search links on Baidu’s MP3 Search.

The cumulative effect is to keep the “free music flowing” for Baidu’s users — with devastating consequences not just for creators, but for rival internet businesses.
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What a strange world it is, the world of “digital rights” activism. Campaigners pause only to pat each other on the back.

Last week, anti-copyright campaigners Public Knowledge revealed their annual award winners. The group’s president Gigi B Sohn proudly announced the winners: fellow campaigner Carl Malamud of PublicResource.org, fellow campaigner Ben Scott of FreePress… and fellow campaigner Fred Von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the EFF.

Trebles all round, then. But Sohn was merely returning the favour. Two years ago, the EFF announced its annual Pioneer Awards – and up stepped Gigi B Sohn of Public Knowledge to collect his.

In recent years the EFF has found an ingenious solution to the task of finding new pioneers – by simply giving awards to EFF insiders. In 2005, we noted, the EFF marked the lifetime’s achievements of one Mitch Kapor. One of his achievements happened to be… founding the EFF. Last year, the EFF cast its net far and wide, scoured every corner of the earth… and honoured EFF Fellow Cory Doctorow.

And if you’re not in the race to win one of the awards, that could be because you’re judging them. The EFF’s von Lohmann judged the Public Knowledge awards in 2007, when one of the winners was Columbia law professor Tim Wu. And Wu was so delighted, he returned the favour this year, as an awards judge honoring von Lohmann.

Is there a more incestuous and self-congratulatory scene anywhere outside the fashion business?

When the EFF first instituted its Pioneers Awards, it was rewarding people who’d actually achieved something. Bob Kahn, Ivan Sutherland and Tom Jennings were recipients in the first two years. All have left a rather more tangible and lasting mark on the world than ranting on a blog, or issuing a press release.

Meanwhile, we have spotted a gap in the circle jerk merry-go-round. Soros-backed newcomers FreePress fails to honour campaigners in any kind of annual ceremony. We trust this omission will be rectified. Nature abhors a vacuum.

The LHC comes at a crucial time for particle or quantum physics. In particular, it comes at a crucial time for the dominant theory, known as the Standard Model.

The Standard Model has been to modern particle physics rather what the periodic table was to 19th century chemistry. It served both to organise the known entities systematically, and as an impetus to fill in the holes in our knowledge. The Standard Model can claim to have predicted the existence of several previously unexpected particles, which were subsequently discovered experimentally. Arguably, too, it has also seeded the separate field of quantum information theory, and quantum computing.

From the point of view of having things neat and tidy, there is just one hole in the jigsaw of Standard Theory. The missing piece is the (by now surely) world-famous Higgs boson – popularly known now as the “God particle”. So named not because it could resolve the Augustinian Dilemma, but perhaps as in, “Oh God, when are we going to find it?”. More seriously, the Higgs boson could account for the mass properties of the other entities – why some have it, and some don’t. So if particle physicists observe the Higgs boson, they can effectively draw a line under 50 years or so research, slap themselves on the back, and move on.

Unfortunately, the Higgs boson has spent over 40 years hiding – ironically not because it is tiny. The Standard Model unfortunately does not predict its mass. As efforts have concentrated on manufacturing the boson in particle accelerators, its continuing elusiveness has been put down to it being big – a tad too big.

Hence the LHC, which crudely speaking whizzes bits of matter to as fast a speed as possible. Experimenters let these crash into various targets to see what new interesting bits emerge. The record-breaking energies of the LHC require similarly record-breaking electro-magnets to achieve.

….Read more at The Register

The man dubbed the “King of Climate Porn” achieved notoriety at the turn of the decade as the architect of the Foot and Mouth holocaust – which unnecessarily slaughtered seven million animals, and cost the country billions of pounds. But King astonished observers by saying something sensible last week – and he promises to do so again tonight.

Speaking at the British Association’s Science Week, King will say that the Greenies’ anti-science superstitions are causing unnecessary suffering in Africa. King blames “anti-poverty” campaigners, aid agencies and environmental activists for keeping modern farming techniques and bio-technology out of Africa. King tells the Times today:

“The suffering within [Africa], I believe, is largely driven by attitudes developed in the West which are somewhat anti-science, anti-technology – attitudes that lead towards organic farming, for example, attitudes that lead against the use of genetic technology for crops that could deal with increased salinity in the water, that can deal with flooding for rice crops, that can deal with drought resistance.”

King wonders why recent productivity revolutions in agriculture, which have been such a success in Asia and India, have not been implemented in Africa on the same scale. He concludes that the blame lies not with Africans, but with Western “do-gooders” who prefer Africans to remain picturesque and dirt poor.

An example he cites is the attempts of eco-campaigners Friends of the Earth to keep drought-resistant crops out of Africa.

He has a point.

“Where once there were ambitions for people in the third world to enjoy Western standards of living, now the voice of the voiceless instead celebrates the primitive lifestyles that the world’s poorest people suffer,” wrote Ben Pile and Stuart Blackman recently in a scathing critique of the charity Oxfam, called Backwards to the future.

Indeed, and the same middle-class superstitions that endeavour to keep Wi-Fi out of schools are used to justify keeping biotechnology out of Africa.

For example, Friends of the Earth continues to argue that modern seed technologies should not be used to make agriculture easier and more productive for poor farmers – even when this causes more ecological damage than the new technology. FoE’s most recent campaign against biotech means that subsistence farmers must continue to use seeds that require more fertiliser than GM varieties, and which need environmentally-destructive tilling.

Whatever it is that motivates these self-styled “Greens”, it isn’t a concern for the environment. Nor, despite claims to the contrary, is there any valid concern of “over-population”. The UN estimates global population growth to peak in the 2040s at 7.87bn, then decline, assuming modest development is permitted to continue. Not only does economic development mean fewer people, but it means less suffering: those fewer people are much happier.

Clearly, we can easily generate enough food to feed everyone on the planet and we have the means to ensure there’s less human suffering. Some people want that to happen – and some don’t. You’ll find many nursing their Malthusian or Eugenics prejudices under the banner of Greenery in the former camp – but it’s a refreshing surprise to find King in the latter camp, or at least edging away from the Greens’ death cult.

©Situation Publishing 2008.

When people buy software – buy it in seriously large amounts – it isn’t just today’s binary they’re choosing. They’re buying what they think is a bit of the future – they’re buying a piece of risk insurance. This explains why very mature and well-proven systems often lose out to the Newest Kid on the Block. It also explains the enduring effectiveness of FUD and Vapourware.

And it’s not just software. From TP monitors, to minicomputers, to Novell Netware, recent history is full of examples of perfectly splendid systems being thrown out and replaced with something that doesn’t live up to the billing – and perhaps never will. Which sounds wacky, but that choice is being made on the rational calculation that the software or hardware of choice today won’t be made or supported, or the standards that bind the parts of the system together will become obsolete. (Which leads to the same thing.)

Sometimes a brave company bucks the trend. Most famously Microsoft refused to “eat its own dog food”, and stood firm against the move to client/server computing running PC or Unix-based databases like Microsoft SQL Server, instead insisting that its mission-critical accounts department ran on, er, an IBM AS/400 mini.

But by and large, the strategy works very well for companies that trumpet a “paradigm shift”, or “new era in computing”, and convince people that they own a secret part of the future – one that no one else can yet see. It worked for Microsoft, and Google hopes it will work for it, too. The Chrome browser today is little more than a piece of demoware, but it’s not just about “today”, is it?

Before we see what Google is hoping to achieve with Chrome, let’s take a look at a precedent from history that I find quite spooky.

Old-timers may excuse this brief wallow in nostalgia.
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