So last November my MD and myself went down for the 4th annual conference which was hosted in the Science Museum.  The moderator for the day was Sarah Montague from the Today programme on the radio.

We started with the introduction and a celebration of 25 years of the .uk register.  It boggles my mind that in 1985 a couple of individuals registered the first .uk domains.  I mean I was still in junior school.  Nominet itself was started in 1996 after the register has grown to 26000 domain names.  This register had been maintained by a handful of volunteers who vetted and checked each registration.

But we are in the age that looks to the future, so the morning keynote was from Johnathon Margolis, who is a technical journalist for the Financial Times and an author.  He started speaking about 4G mobile internet and the fact that you can get 100mbps when years ago the very idea of mobile tech being able to do this (at a time of 9.6kbps speeds on modems ) was laughable.  4G will be due out in 2012, current testing in a pub got 70mbps.  Nice.
Of course the general point of Johnathon’s talk was that Technology experts get it wrong, but people who are generalists with imagination will get it nearly right.  Jules Verne made a prediction that was very much pointing towards the current delivery of MP3, except Verne described it as music will get pumped via a main pipe into a house from a music factory.  (Hmm, bit XFactor really).

There is also now a hydrogen powered motorbike out, however clean and nice the technology is, the infrastructure is not there for it to be taken up by the masses.  There is only one filling station in South London and it takes 15 minutes to fill up a motorcycle tank.  Hmmm, as Johnathon points out you can see how this would cause a huge time sync with a car, 30 minutes to fill a tank.  You can also see why oil forecourts will not stock it yet either really.  Johnathon pointed out that as electric vehicals are quiet pedestrians could get knocked over and as electric cars will be required to have a sound he made his prediction:  Car Ringtones, it makes sense, people will want their own sounds to make their cars sound unique.  Makes me shudder really, although to be fair, car modders with their stereos already have their own ringtones so to speak.

I wonder that with all the doom mongering about flood planes and global warming that perhaps there will be a product that lifts your house up and down on hydraulic lifts to be like stilt houses.

Johnathon also explored the idea of the fact that facebook now has to deal with familys wishing to leave their facebook page online as a memorial.  It reminds me of one of Anne McCaffery’s short stories about Students proccessing dead peoples online storage and data with the moral implications.  Of course the fact that you leave a digital footprint online whenever you use your smartphone, online services or a credit card you leave something of yourself.  The opinions of people online are already surviving their death, in greater numbers.  It also reminds me of the current premise for Scify channels Caprica, where one of the characters is an avatar created from information including, school, medical records, bank statements etc.

The slightly sci-fi imaginings continued with the possibilities of conscious machine intelligence and what rights they have.  Whats more some professors are already pondering this issue.

There are also some rather interesting issues for writers that use some online services when doing their writing planning.  Who owns it, the online company that owns the tool that collates your notes or the writer/writers estate when they pass away.    Of course the workforce of tomorrow are teenagers today, one of the Facebook executives have postulated that every 5 years that those people will want a wipe clean button to delete their past.  Not truly possible, and if it was then I can think of a rather nasty possibility that someone will take that data now, store it and then offer it as a checking service to employers.  If I suspect this then I also think that there is a pretty good chance that there is a start-up somewhere preparing to do just that.

My apologies Pandora, however the box is open.

The concept of privacy can be dated to the Protestant reformation, by the idea that worshiping and your relationship with God should be private.  There is a pressure on Privacy on the Outer/Inner-self.  It’s all starting to become public again.  This pressure happens because the goal is to make life easier, and people trade privacy for this and other benefits like power and influence.  The state applies “systematic pressure” to make it easier for civil servants to do their job.  People are willing to use Oyster cards as there is a reward in reduced fares, but the data from the journey’s you take are stored somewhere.

The trouble is that people have a trust in the database that they should not.  Errors creep in.  The DNA database alone has half a million errors, imagine the implications for miscarriages of justice because of this false trust.  In addition to this databases can walk, people carry copies on memory sticks and laptops and loose them.   That data can be sold on elsewhere.  People use supermarket loyalty cards, which is a real boon for the supermarkets as they can get marketing data for free.  They are also quite free to sell that on.  Even if you have indicated that you do not wish them to.

On the 1st of September 2009 I went along to hear Robert Calliau talk about the internet at the Runrev conference.

The talk was entitled “Tale of two Revolutions”.

It was a very interesting talk that resonated with a high percentage of the audience.  Robert summarized the pre-history of the web and how it got to the inital stage of hypercards, the World Wide Web etc.

However the most important part of the speech was about what Calliau did that was most important for the world wide web. He spoke to CERNs Lawyers and persuaded them to let the protocol and development be opened up.  So that every one could develop tools to use it and access the data on it. When Robert told us this, a sudden rousing round of applause came up.  Mr Calliau was gratified by that. I’m not entirely sure he understood why he got that round of applause though. There were a number of Open Source users and developers within the room. More than a few were ruby developers who had heard of the event from Techmeetup.

So later on when Robert Started talking about how programming language syntax can be a real bind and how good runtime was caused a bit of disquiet among some of the developers.  RunRev is a natural language programming language.  You can get free compilers for it, however the underlining engine is closed source.  Runtime is a small edinburgh company with over 20 employees.    Within any propriatory language there is always a danger that the company can get taken over and the language or product disappears after aquirement by another company..

At least with Open Source you can look at what’s under the code.  You have a freedom of choice as to whether you develop a program using that code your or paying a developer to do it for you.

I’m concerned that we are going to repeat 30 years of history again. I’m all for making computing easier for the masses and helping start ups. But perhaps instead of using tools like runrev and offers of propriatary software for free for a long trial period we are locking in the next generation again to only having a few very expensive choices. I do not mean just in terms of expense in cash, but expense in time with trying to get old formats to talk to new formats. Especially if the standard that they are based on is locked up within Intellectual property. Free Software does not just mean free as in no cost. It means the freedom to do what you want with the information that you are using.

Look back to my post about the user who was very excited about Open Source. It was not the cost aspect. It was the possibility of being able to access her data in a meaningful way to her. Not what a programmer thought was meaningful.