I have a list of some words that really should be banned in polite conversation. The only reason not to ban them is that they’re useful indicators, an unambiguous warning that the speakers are going to be a serious waste of our time. The use of any of these words is like wearing a giant invisible that that says: “I have no insight or experience to offer and talking to me represents a huge opportunity cost.”

Many of the most enthusiastic users work in consultancy or academia or punditry or new media – the parasitic professions. So what might be on my little list?

One is “meme”, obviously.

Another is “business model”. Nobody in business ever used the word “business model”; it’s the sign of an outsider who has never run a business. But people in consultancy or academia use it profusely. It’s like virgins talking about complicated sexual practices.

The word I’ll look at today, the first day of the reign of Apple’s new full-time CEO Tim Cook, is “disruption”.
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Britain could have invented the iPod – if it wasn’t for a copyright law that everyone ignores. So says the UK government in a remarkable economic justification of the so-called “Google Review”, the Review of IP and Growth led by Ian Hargreaves. The document was written for the government by civil servants at the IPO, part of the business department BIS.
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Lib Dems are appealing to the vital online pirate vote at this year’s party conference, putting the membership on collision course with LibDem ministers in the coalition government. In a new IT policy paper called “Preparing The Ground”, a team of party activists led by Cambridge MP Julian Huppert calls for the Digital Economy Act to be gutted of its copyright measures. It also threatens new legislation to ensure all “traffic flows at the same speed”, and wants the IR35 contractor tax suspended.

Senior party figures speaking on condition of anonymity expressed dismay at the proposals. The LibDems are in government for the first time in 70 years, and have attempted to leave behind the Party’s old “sandal-wearing” image as a haven for single-issue-fanatics.
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Wars over creators’ rights are pretty old – much older than copyright law. In one of the first “copyfights”, in 561AD, about 3,000 people died, writes Robert Levine in his new book Free Ride. St Colmcille and St Finnian clashed over the right to make copies of the Bible, with the King castigating Colmcille for his “fancy new ideas about people’s property”.

Levine’s book is a story of the digital copyright wars.

“I tried to write in an analytical way about something people get very emotional about. I don’t really believe the entertainment industry is good and the technology industry is bad; I just don’t see it as a morality issue. Businesses are in business to make money,” Levine says.

The book details the calamitous decisions made by the music business, particularly in its suing of end users for infringement. “In a few years,” he writes, “the major labels managed to destroy the cultural cachet they had spent decades building.”

The book also follows in detail Google’s “war on copyright” and the academics and activists who benefit from it. It comprehensively demolishes the arguments put by Lawrence Lessig, who helped create the cyberlaw industry. This is a book with masses of solid, meticulously researched detail.

I caught up with Levine in Berlin.

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Is Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility is good for Android, or an expensive mistake for Google, made in a moment of irrational panic. Columnist Matt Asay thinks it “spells iPhone doom“, and he’s not alone. John C Dvorak thinks it’s “pure genius“. This supposes that Google performed a cost-benefit analysis and calculated that the cost of not buying Motorola’s phone and set-top box division was greater than $12.5bn.

I beg to differ. Not all business decisions, made in the pressure cooker, are as rational as they should be.

On Monday, I explained that Google hadn’t bought what it thinks it has bought. Since then some very interesting new detail has come to light. This suggests that the Chocolate Factory really doesn’t understand the value of its proposed acquisition, and snapped up Motorola not merely in a hurry, but a blind panic. Pulling out of the deal may now be sensible – but also costly for Google. The deal carries a $2.5bn break-up penalty, which is smaller than AT&T’s penalty for failing to complete its acquisition of T-Mobile US, but is still a hefty sum of money. Should this happen, Google will have paid almost as much to buy nothing as it did to buy Doubleclick, its largest ever acquisition.

Let’s look at some evidence.
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Keyser Sose

If children didn’t believe in Santa, thousands of grown men wouldn’t dress up in fur-trimmed red jumpsuits, put on false beards, and give children unwanted gifts in tents every year. Perhaps some would, but they’d probably be arrested.

For the past fortnight, TV and newspaper editors in the UK have pushed aside stories of famine and the European financial crisis – which is greater now than the credit crunch three years ago – in favour of saturation coverage of the troubles of a rival media company.

This rival has real troubles, to be sure, which I will not attempt to diminish. But the volume and intensity of coverage is defined by the real size and reach of News Corporation. And this is not reality, but a myth. Just as children want a Santa, so too do editors and Prime Ministers want a “Murdoch” that resembles the omniscient movie villain/myth Keyser Soze. They’ve defined themselves by this myth.
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Len Sassaman, a cryptographer and security researcher of high repute, has died aged 31. Sassaman maintained the Mixmaster remailer and he contributed to various other privacy projects, including OpenPGP. He also co-founded the annual CodeCon conference with Bram Cohen. He was security researcher and doctoral student at the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven.

Len was a friend and roommate in San Francisco, in the year following the dot.com crash. The Register‘s West Coast Bureau at the time was wherever I happened to be – Len provided a mascot.

It was a dire time for bright programmers. It got even worse after 9/11. Bram had been turned down for a job at Google because he didn’t have a degree. Neither did Len. The pair persuaded Jamie Zawinski to open his DNA Lounge club during the day over one weekend, and invited practical demonstrations of working code from interesting people.

“Conferences cost a ridiculous amount of money, and hackers are treated like dirt,” said Bram. That was the first CodeCon, and it was Len’s energy and enthusiasm that pulled it together.

He’d already helped organise the campaign to free Dmitry Skylarov, a Russian cryptography student jailed at the request of Adobe after a demonstration of eBook security.

I had assumed Len was in his late twenties or early thirties; he was so widely read, and psychologically astute. I was shocked to learn he’d just turned 21.

He introduced me to the cypherpunks at one of their regular meetups at Stanford. I introduced him to Robert Anton Wilson, the author of the Illuminatus trilogy, and his favourite author.

One beautiful autumn afternoon, we drove in Len’s sports car at breakneck speed down from Golden Gate Park to Aptos, where Wilson lived. The car’s already overturned once, he said, but don’t worry about speeding tickets. He showed me a Get Out of Jail Free card, which he assured me would work magic.

Some brilliant people are irritated by dumb questions. I learned a lot from Len, who was always a patient explainer. We were last in touch a year ago, when he was enraged at the entrapment of Bradley Manning. Len realised I hadn’t met his wife Meredith, and renewed an invitation to Leuven.

They say when you turn 30, you realise how trivial conversations have been. And when you turn 40, you stop giving a flying fuck about how you should appear. Len’s best years were ahead of him, and his departure is a terrible loss.

Ten years ago on Sunday, Apple called it quits on one of its oddest products ever, the G4 Cube. The Cube was a strange and wonderful machine that continues to fascinate today – but it was widely perceived to have failed. Some people thoroughly enjoyed the failure, thinking it served Apple right.

Dull people will always cheer a bold experiment that goes wrong. After July 2001, Apple’s design team never again attempted anything as daring or distinctive. It has produced beautiful designs, and unarguably influenced consumer technology design more than any one else.

But essentially, its computer designs are variations on the same theme. The professional laptops have continued in their rectangular, razor-like way. Even the iPad looks very much like how you’d expect a media slate to look like, for example.

But the Cube was different. The Cube looked like Buckminster Fuller talked; the Cube looked like it might have fallen to earth from an advanced civilisation, eager to escape orbit and looking to throw some ballast overboard. Or like a millionaire had given a mad bloke on a bus an unlimited budget.

“Hello. You look like you’ve done a lot of LSD. Well, here’s several million dollars – go and design a computer, any shape you want. Just make sure it hangs upside down.”
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Doug Keenan, the statistician whose work highlighted severe flaws in the work of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia, has welcomed the Sunshine order to open up the station records.

Scientists need the raw data to replicate temperature records, but CRU refused to release the data requested – a subset of weather station records from around the world – to a top UK Oxford physicist, despite having already shared the data with Georgia Tech in the United States.

The ICO comprehensively demolished the reasons CRU offered – including intellectual property and fear of jeopardising international relations. In doing so, it’s raised the standard for academics working across all UK sciences.
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Self-harming attention-seeker Kevin Warwick has admitted to snooping on the public in a previous life. Warwick made the creepy confession on Radio 4, recalling an earlier job as a GPO engineer:

“I remember taking ten different calls and plugging them all together; one call would continue, the other nine would listen in. Then I’d patch everything back again.”

In a 30-minute interview with Michael Buerk, Warwick compared his cat-chipping operation a decade ago to Yuri Gagarin’s first space flight. They were both scientific pioneers.
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