Apathy and ignorance from dying UK Parliament

The UK Parliament has just put in place legislation demonstrating clearly that its members largely do not understand the way that knowledge and culture is fostered.

While they still apparently support the rights of creators to receive legal protection for their work, they do not understand that this right – copyright, in other words – is not something that is best either defined or policed by corporations who market such work (aka ‘publishers’).

They also showed that themselves happy to take the easier path, ignoring the vast body of complaints they have received from constituents, rather than the harder path of conscientious scrutiny. Most MPs were absent from the debate, which itself was rushed through on the last day of business. I was shocked by the complacent ignorance of Sion Simons, the minister responsible for the Bill, and sad to see so few of his colleagues take an interest.

But there were exceptions – Tom Watson MP, John Redwood MP and Fiona Mactaggart MP prominent amongst them – who took the time and trouble to explain clearly (if only to those of their colleagues who were present) the flaws in the Bill and to highlight the foolishness of rushing it through. Let’s hope that the electorate returns a new Parliament that has more conscientiousness, more intelligence and a better understanding of the society that surrounds it.

Otherwise the UK is going to lose out.

Fiona Mactaggart MP sums it up

Letter to Harriet Harman about the Digital Economy Bill

Dear Harriet Harman,

I am writing to express my concern about the Digital Economy Bill.

I am worried by reports that this Bill will be rushed through the Commons without the scrutiny it deserves. I do not believe that the allegations about undue influence from commercial lobbyists can yet be refuted, since clauses drafted by such lobbyists remain in place in the Bill as it stands. Such unquestioning acceptance of lobbyists' material is disappointing and at a time when politicians are under such grave suspicion of corruption it does not help to restore confidence.

The current provisions of the Bill (especially clauses 11-18) also threaten to have a severe negative effect on the freedoms we currently have in the UK to use public internet access and public file transfer services, while also threatening users with disconnection following allegations of copyright infringement: both these objectives represent a massively disproportionate response to the offences purported to occur.

It should not be possible for a conviction for infringement of copyright to result in curtailment of the defendant's access to something as fundamental as the Internet now is. That is like switching off the water supply to someone who has not paid their TV licence. Copyright is extremely important but this is not the way to encourage society to understand and respect it.

It is very difficult to prove accurately who is responsible for a copyright-infringing file transfer and this might lead to the most vulnerable users - those who do not understand the technology - being exploited by unscrupulous individuals who use their networks to perform such infringing file transfers. The passing of the bill will certainly drive determined individuals to make more concerted efforts to cover their tracks and it seems likely that innocent people will suffer at the least the pain of being unfairly charged and having to fight their case, even if they are not eventually convicted.

In addition, disconnection seems to restrict fundamental human rights, such as freedom of expression. Such rights can not be infringed by a democratic government without exceptional reasons. The infringement of copyright has not attracted such draconian penalties since the days of the Court of Star Chamber - a long-past era of oppression in which freedoms were not valued as we value them now.

Please take note of these concerns, which I share with so many others, and resist the call to rush through this inappropriate Bill.

Yours,
Ben Weiner

Firefox goes for Meta. Is there nothing better?

Good to see the Firefox 3.6 ‘what’s new’ page is swathed in styles that use Erik Spiekermann’s font Meta. But a shame that Mozilla or its design team couldn’t find an OFL licensed font worthy of their use.

A better OFLB online today might have helped. The design and coding is done; we await implentation.

Screen scraping joy

Been doing a touch of screen scraping, scripting with Ruby, against a target that was ‘unwilling’. A few observations:

• Using Mechanize (available in various forms for Perl, Python and Ruby [homepage for the latter]) is a must. I started with the Ruby HTTP library, then went to Curb (Ruby’s implementation of Curl), but having the pages you retrieve abstracted into an object that you can manipulate in familiar terms (like, say page.forms_with :name => "choose_colour") helps you concentrate on the peculiarities of your task
• Replicating the path of a real user is important. There could be session variables at the server end that mean jumping about between items that you cannot navigate between as a regular user will generate error pages, but see below
• Don’t count on friendly HTTP errors from the server, as it might not know it has done anything wrong
• If the page output looks OK but you cannot parse it, check for funny characters hidden in the HTML. I found ASCII nulls dotted about; these are initially hard to spot for somewhat obvious reasons. Browsers can deal with this kind of dodginess but XML parsers, as @fidothe reminds me, must ignore the elements in which such characters occur. I was able to do this to get around the problem:

@agent = Mechanize.new
class << @agent
  alias :orig_get :get
  alias :orig_fetch_page :fetch_page
  # remove the chaff characters
  def get(options, parameters = [], referer = nil)
    page = orig_get(options, parameters, referer)
    page.body = page.body.gsub(/"[0x00]"/,"")
    page
  end
  def fetch_page(params)
    page = orig_fetch_page(params)
    page.body = page.body.gsub(/"[0x00]"/, "")
    page
  end
end

[0x00] represents ascii null in the sample code; I was able to select and paste the character from an HTML dump with both vim and a GUI text editor but it tends to be less than visible in the wild and YMMV.

• Assume that what you’re doing is an unwelcome task. If the points above don’t give you that impression, other curiosities probably will.

SERIAC 2010 in Chertsey

I’ve attended SERIAC (the South Eastern Region Industrial Archaeology Conference) for the last three years and enjoyed it every time. It’s also very good value at £12.50 for a day of talks that invariably span the whole field of industrial archaeology but remain understandable and interesting. This year it’s hosted by Surrey Industrial History Group at Chertsey Hall in Chertsey on Saturday 24 April. The programme is online; all the talks look genuinely interesting. Hope to see you there.

Subsections in Textpattern

One provocative omission from the excellent Textpattern CMS is subsections. I don’t know why it was omitted (probably just because it was out of scope when Dean Allen sat down to write TXP). Now that there’s a codebase, fitting in subsections is slightly tricky. There’s a need to adjust the way that URL rewriting works and there’s also a need to rework the section admin form. I could really do with having this sorted and I have started to scope it out. If somebody would like to sponsor the work let me know ’cos I haven’t got time to do any more for nothing.

Yes, I have investigated what’s out there. It is not good enough, I’m afraid: for one thing, it is susceptable to break with every minor point release. Something better is needed.

Web fonts talk online

The text and the slides for the talk I gave last night at London Web Standards are online.

In the talk I gave suggestions about how to get started with web fonts which are still a bit of a mess. I’ve also cited a lot of very helpful information on the net so you can get much more detail on the topics I covered. I’ve also stuck the html, css and js test files I used on there. Comments and corrections most welcome.