Geek News and Musings

Are A Quarter Of The UK Government’s Databases Illegal?
Governments keep trying to build bigger and bigger databases — and almost every such database eventually gets abused in ways that harm privacy rights. One of the most aggressive governments in building such databases has been the UK — and a new study of such databases has found that approximately a quarter of the UK government’s databases are illegal in that they don’t do nearly enough to protect individual’s privacy and civil rights. Of course, these sorts of things don’t get any attention until it’s too late — and there’s a big enough abuse or leak to really lead to public attention.

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Are A Quarter Of The UK Government’s Databases Illegal?
Governments keep trying to build bigger and bigger databases — and almost every such database eventually gets abused in ways that harm privacy rights. One of the most aggressive governments in building such databases has been the UK — and a new study of such databases has found that approximately a quarter of the UK government’s databases are illegal in that they don’t do nearly enough to protect individual’s privacy and civil rights. Of course, these sorts of things don’t get any attention until it’s too late — and there’s a big enough abuse or leak to really lead to public attention.

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Darkly Surreal UK Comedy Masterpiece “Jam”
Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger

Reclusive British comedy genius Chris Morris came out with his darkly surreal masterpiece of weirdness, “Jam” (based on his “Blue Jam” radio show) in 2000, but sadly because of expensive music rights issues, “Jam” has seldom been seen outside of the UK. This is a shame, because “Jam” is a uniquely…um… well… ah…hmmm… I hesitate to call it “comedy” because it’s so odd and disturbing, but if I called it “David Lynchian” comedy, we’d be in the right ball park at least. “Jam” is like a bad –make that very bad– acid trip played for laughs. Take a look at one of the show opens:

Not exactly “funny ha ha” stuff. In fact, there’s nary a traditional “joke” in the entire series. There are six episodes of “Jam” and although I’d classify myself as a huge fan of the show, six episodes of something like this is plenty!! The style would’ve become a creative dead end. But a great talent like Chris Morris wasn’t to repeat himself anyway –his next project, the wonderfully vicious satire of dotcom dickheads, “Nathan Barley” was quite a shift away from the brooding psychopathy of “Jam.” I eagerly await his feature comedy debut, rumored to be about Islamic terrorists and suicide bombers.

This is one of my favorite “Jam” moments, “Mister Lizard” featuring the always brilliant actor, Mark Heap –he’s in tons of stuff– as a creepy television repairman.

Here’s another great “Jam” clip with another UK comedy auteur, Julia Davis, creator of the “wheelchair Gothic” classic, “Nighty Night” as a particularly stupid woman:

Twitter Restores UK SMS Functionality For Vodafone Users; Mysterious Ad Box Gets A Refresh

Twitter has just announced that it has restored full SMS functionality to customers in the UK who are using Vodafone. While any Twitter user can submit updates via text message, for months only users in North America have been able to receive them (a key part of the service if you don’t have a smart phone). Other countries used to have this functionality, but Twitter began to cut them off after reporting that a single heavy UK user could cost up to $1000 in fees per year.

From Twitter’s blog post:

Vodafone UK has signed an agreement with Twitter allowing customers to send and receive SMS updates at no additional cost. Sending tweets from your mobile will be part of your normal text messaging bundle with Vodafone—there will be no extra fees. In fact, for the first few weeks, sending tweets won’t even effect your bundle. Receiving tweets via SMS on your mobile is totally free. Vodafone loves Twitter!

For more on the new UK deal, check out our post on TechCrunch Europe.

Also worth noting is the latest chapter in the story of Twitter’s mysterious sidebar box that may-or-may-not be an ad, some day. Two weeks ago Twitter introduced an unobtrusive box in the ride sidebar of user profiles, where it began to promote some of its own services (including Twitter Search). Three days ago, it began showing ads for third party services. One of these was for ExecTweets, a recently-launched aggregator of Tweets from high-ranking business exectuives that was built in part by Federated Media. Federated’s John Battelle wrote that the ad network was paying Twitter, but it was unclear if this was directly related to the promo appearing on Twitter’s homepage. And the other two apps being promoted - an iPhone client called Tweetie and a web app called Twittervision - weren’t paying a cent.

Today Twitter appears to have swapped these promos out for new ones, which include Twidroid (a Twitter app for Android), twistori (a social experiment), and march tweetness (a Twitter service that revolves around the NCAA tournament).

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Debating Copyright Extension In The UK
Shane Richmond, who writes about technology and media for the Telegraph, recently handed over his blog to Martin Kretschmer and Horace Trubrudge for a debate about copyright extension (which is currently being discussed in the UK). Kretschmer is an intellectual property professor who is against copyright extension, while Trubrudge is the Assistant General Secretary of the British Musicians’ Union, and (not surprisingly) favors copyright extension. You can read the back and forth as follows:

• Kretschmer: We must not inhibit digital creators :: Shane Richmond
• Trubrudge: I am here to fight the corner of the UK’s musicians
• Kretschmer: Musicians should see themselves as part of a continuum of creative endeavour
• Trubrudge: It’s time performers’ moral rights were strengthened
• Kretschmer: Redistributing from the living to the dead
• Trubrudge: ‘What have you got against Cliff Richard’?

Unfortunately, the debate is a bit haphazard and goes all over the place at times. Kretschmer, unfortunately, doesn’t do a great job picking the key points for why copyright extension is bad and sticking to them (i.e., the fact that copyright is a deal struck between the public and the creator, and changing that deal at a later date steals from the public). Instead, he focuses on the fact that most of the money will go to the record labels and big name musicians — which is a worthwhile point, but it leaves it open for Trubrudge to basically say, “so what?” Trubrudge’s point is that even if the record labels and some big artists will benefit the most, other musicians will still benefit somewhat, and his job is merely to make sure that those artists benefit. He also pulls out the “moral rights” argument which is a total red herring.

It’s too bad the debate went in that direction, as the question of copyright extension is a really important one — especially considering that it breaks a contract that the public made with musicians on the terms under which that content was created. It also ignores how such extensions limit the ability of new artists to build on older works — which is a key component to many newer artists creating their own unique works of art. As an example of this, I point (again) to James Boyle’s excellent discussion on how Ray Charles invented soul music by effectively “ripping off” other musicians, and how others have then built on Charles’ work. Stringent copyright protection at the time may have prevented soul music from ever coming about. There are plenty of similar examples as well — but unfortunately the debate doesn’t seem to touch on that aspect at all.

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Which Is The Bigger Privacy Invasion: Google Street View Images Or Major Newspaper Reprinting Those Images?
Last week there was quite an uproar in the UK over how Google’s Street View offering was somehow a violation of privacy, despite the images being taken out in public. Also, Google was quite quick in removing any questionable images as soon as they were brought to Google’s attention. Yet, in true Streisand Effect fashion, the uproar and the removals has only led to much more focus on those very images. Reader Steve Cook points out that, in fanning the flames of the so-called “privacy violation,” The Daily Mail has reprinted a bunch of the “questionable” images which Google had already deleted. So, in creating a privacy uproar about it, now those images are more popular than they would have been if people had just left it alone.

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Now that China Is the New Israel…What’s Israel?

When I moved to Silicon Valley in early 2000, I quickly became fascinated with Israel. A very tight relationship had formed between the holy-land-for-all-things-tech and the actual Holy Land, bolstered by the success of people like Yossi Vardi and Checkpoint’s Gil Schwed.

The rapid pace of liquidity in the late 1990s meant Valley investors couldn’t find enough start-ups to stuff their money into, and unlike dot com fluffiness that was roaming around San Francisco, Israelis were hard-core techies with a work ethic that seemed to defy basic human needs like sleeping and eating. Most of all, Israelis, particularly those in high-tech and cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, had a reputation for living like there was no tomorrow, because when you’re surrounded by hostile neighbors there may not be.

The 1990s were a period of a lot of structural change in the venture business. It was no longer about families and private money investing—money came from big public pension funds and endowments, and more of it was coming online as the baby boomer retirement accounts swelled and the American stock market made everyone richer. That kind of scale forever changed the venture game. Meanwhile, the Internet enabled companies to be flipped in under two years—also unheard of before. Similarly, Israel represented one of the first times the cozy boutique Sand Hill Road firms ventured overseas and made money as a result. For a time, Israel had more Nasdaq-listed companies than any other country in the world.

Then the crash, happened here and there. Only Israel got a double whammy of the Second Intifada and a resurgence of violence starting around the same time. The talk was always that Israel would come back as a hub for brilliant, crazy, ballsy entrepreneurs, and the returns would come back too. Weren’t these things just cyclical? A positive sign was how many Israeli VC firms were opening their doors. For much of the last ten years, investments in Israeli companies by Israeli VC firms has roughly equaled foreign investment in Israel, according to stats from Ben Gurion University’s School of Management. That’s a huge strength, as Valley and Boston investors always like to invest with local partners, and a lot of developing economies don’t yet have that local infrastructure.

By 2004, an executive from Silicon Valley Bank was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle after leading a contingent of VCs back to the Holy Land saying Israel was poised to explode again. He crowed that the crash and violence aside, Israel was getting more venture money than anywhere other than Silicon Valley and Boston and it was only ramping up.

But it turned out, he was wrong. Money continued to invest along the same $1.2 billion-to-$1.4 billion a year range, and returns fell off a cliff. Israeli companies have raised just over $10 billion since the beginning 2001, but acquisitions and IPOs have returned just over $860 million over that almost eight-and-a-half-year period. Bear in mind, the industry tends to measure performance over ten-year periods, and not many people expect a roaring acquisition or IPO market for the rest of 2009, and arguably 2010.

Compare those numbers to start-ups in Europe, a continent that has long been characterized as risk-adverse, thanks in part to labor laws that work against start-ups. Sure, Europe is a bigger place, so its to be expected that European companies have raised a much bigger 36 billion in Euros since the beginning of 2001. But European companies have returned $6.3 billion. If you do the percentages, Israeli companies have returned 8.6% of the money invested over the last eight-plus years. I don’t know how to account for Euro-to-Dollar conversation rates over eight years’ time, so let’s pretend for a moment that it was 36 billion in dollars invested in Europe. If that were the case, European companies would have returned 17.5% of the capital invested. The real percentage is undoubtedly much higher, although still pretty poor as an industry. Most investors like to get all their money back, and then some. (All stats are from Dow Jones VentureSource.)

Ten years after the peak of the last bubble, it’s clear that when foreign investment fell in Israel from about $4 billion a year to $1 billion a year, the country wasn’t just weathering a recession. Somewhere along the way, the entrepreneur scene here lost its mojo.

Now, before the hate mail starts, let me be clear, that numbers aside, I still believe Israelis are singular entrepreneurs. There is interesting stuff here and always will be. There’s an element of risk taking that even the Valley can’t rival, and it’s no secret Israelis are brilliant technologists. They also share a lot of qualities with some of the best entrepreneurs I know: They’re born hackers. They love to work within constraints  to make something happen. They love when odds are stacked against them. They’re ballsy. They’re brash. As I said in this interview with Loren Feldman yesterday, they start companies like they drive. In either case—you don’t want to be in their way.

So I don’t say this to trash Israel, but facts are facts. In sheer numbers, Israel’s place on the global scale of investing has been dwarfed by China, and matched by the United Kingdom. And after three days of talking to dozens of entrepreneurs and investors in Tel Aviv, this seems like a country wandering in the desert, looking for a new tech movement to own and dominate.

What happened to Israel is a bit like what happened to Boston—the story and opportunity moved away from what the city’s entrepreneurs were good at. In the case of Israel, security and encryption was always a strength, but that’s not the growth industry that it was. In the case of Boston, enterprise technologies and telecom were always strengths. Now, as media has become the story of the last boom, it’s not a surprise New York surpassed Boston in the amount of venture capital raised.

Internationally, China has become the new obsession, with India a close second. It’s not that Chinese entrepreneurs are better than Israeli entrepreneurs. And so far, there are certainly a lot of concerns about returns in China. But when it comes to international entrepreneurship—at least in terms of attracting those billions in U.S. venture dollars—entrepreneurs need to give VCs a compelling reason to come to them. In the 1990s, Israel gave them superior technologists. Now, China is giving them an exploding demographic that needs all manner of goods and services.

Was a booming Israel just a relic of the 1990s boom like Webvan and the Pets.com sock puppet? I don’t believe so. But I’m in Tel Aviv for the next two weeks looking for the company and the tech movement that will prove me right. If you find it, drop me a note.

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