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“By signing up to this service you agree to give us one of the single most important pieces of information about your Twitter account – your password. You acknowledge that this gives us complete control over your account.

You agree that by using this service we may use your account to spam our shit. And we will. Oh boy will we ever. If we do a decent job about it, it’ll look just like something you wrote and people won’t know its us spamming our shit until they see a whole flood of identical messages clogging their stream.

You agree that you’ll probably use this once and then forget about it, like so many others before. Its ok, we won’t feel too bad. After all we both know what this is, a fleeting moment of curiosity. We’ll still have your password though.”

Seriously people, get with the OAuth.

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Built on Wolfam’s Mathematica application, WolframAlpha is actually not calling itself a Search Engine as it offers little in the way of links ot resources. Instead, it aims to give you the facts you are looking for rather than the places to find them.

The server responses are a little flakey at the moment, but I imagine that its just being hammered with a first day release. Nice to see they can have a sense of humour about it too.

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Section 140 defines the television set as “any electronic apparatus capable of receiving and exhibiting television broadcasting services broadcast for general reception (whether or not its use for that purpose is dependent on the use of anything else in conjunction with it) and any software or assembly comprising such apparatus and other apparatus”.

In light of this text, does this definition consider computers and Flash-compatible mobile devices capable of viewing the newly launched RTE Player service to be covered by the TV license?

If so, is a TV license going to be a requirement even if these devices have never used the RTE Player service?

Will this also require thousands of businesses who have never needed to own television licenses as thy have not owned a “traditional” television set to now purchase a license, irrespective of whether or not the RTE Player service is used by said business or its employees?

I would also question how such a requirement could possibly be enforced. Will computers be checked by TV license inspectors to ensure that they do not have the relevant Flash player or other compatible software installed? Will only certain software be considered as applicable?

Are there plans for Internet Service Providers to join An Post as an issuing agent as per Section 145?

If this is the case, how would the Bill hold users of compatible mobile devices who use a network connection owned by someone else, either with or without permission?

Earlier this afternoon I received the following reply:

The Broadcasting Bill 2008 currently before the Houses of the Oireachtas (see Annex A below) will not require computer users accessing the Internet (through a broadband connection or otherwise) to have a television licence.

As the case with existing legislation (see Annex B below) a computer will require a television licence only if it is capable of exhibiting standard television broadcasting services (see definition in Annex A.  Key phrases are bolded) e.g. the computer is used in conjunction with a television tuner card or similar device and, as at present, if such is the case, a single licence will cover all the “television sets” in a household. A computer which is not capable of exhibiting standard television broadcasting services but can access programmes through the Internet site of the broadcaster concerned, for example, downloading programmes or clips from the RTE, TV3, TG4 or BBC websites or the RTE Player, or from sites like YouTube does not, nor will not under the new legislation, require a television licence.

I hope that this addresses your concerns.

Yours sincerely,
…

Annex A

Section 140 of the Bill defines a television set as follows:

“television set” means any electronic apparatus capable of receiving and exhibiting television broadcasting services broadcast for general reception (whether or not its use for that purpose is dependent on the use of anything else in conjunction with it) and any software or assembly comprising such apparatus and other apparatus

This definition should be read in conjunction with section 2 of the Bill which defines a broadcasting service as follows:

“broadcasting service” means a service which comprises a compilation of programme material of any description and which is transmitted, relayed or distributed by means of an electronic communications network, directly or indirectly for simultaneous or near-simultaneous reception by the general public, whether that material is actually received or not, and where the programmes are provided in a pre-scheduled and linear order, but does not include:
(a) a service provided in a non-linear manner where each user of the service chooses a programme from a catalogue of programmes, or
(b) other audio and audiovisual services provided by way of the Internet;

In addition under section 142(3) of the Bill the Minister is further empowered to exempt classes of devices falling within the definition of a television set from any television licensing requirement.

Annex B

Section 1(1) of the Wireless Telegraphy Act 1972 as amended by section 2 of the Broadcasting and Wireless Telegraphy Act, 1988 states…
“Television set” means any apparatus for wireless telegraphy capable of receiving and exhibiting television programmes broadcast for general reception (whether or not its use for that purpose is dependent on the use of anything else in conjunction therewith) and any assembly comprising such apparatus and other apparatus.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who received a copy of this email either.

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“I think that at the moment, just for streaming, iPlayer uses about 60Gbps of bandwidth (that’s about 7.5GB downloaded every second) in an evening peak. I think about 15Gbps for downloads, and about 1.5Gbps for iPhone. So overall on a particular peak day we may hit 100Gbps (about 12.5 gigabytes per second) although typically it’ll be somewhat less than that. That turns out to be up to 7PB of data transfer a month.

via CNET.

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My buddy Brian went to view the new Facebook design on IE6 on his computer at work.  The problem, it won’t load!  He got a funny message from Facebook telling him that they are not cool enough to support his browser.

At least this means that all those businesses that still use IE6 won’t need to worry about their employees wasting all their time on Facebook any more. Unless, you know, they allow them to install other browsers…

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KildareStreet.com is a non-partisan website which aims to make it easy for people to keep tabs on their elected representatives in the Houses of the Oireachtas.

A fantastic resource, providing a quick and easy way to see what your local TD is doing, or more importantly not doing.

The only glaring omissions I can see at the moment are contact details for the individual TDs, as it would be great that if the site can stir someone into action it might be best to give them the means to contact their TD about it.

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Plug-ins like Adblock probably take care of this for most people who know and care, but its nice to know there is at least an “industry standard” for getting out.

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RTE release their take on television catch-up services, most obviously influenced by the BBC iPlayer.

A pet peeve of mine are all-Flash sites, so that counts as a strike against it for me straight away. But as a first public release this isn’t at all bad. It would be great if it was embeddable, and better if the episodes were downloadable.

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The media companies are right. Piracy is wrong.

Lets make no bones about it. These people are creating something and asking for a reward they deem fair in return. Whether or not we agree with that does not give us the right to take something without due compensation. I’m not going to get into the whole “victimless crime” thing or anything else like that, this is what I believe to be true.

What they are, however, is completely and utterly bone headed.

Times are changing. Music is not distributed primarily by physical media any more, but online. As time goes on we will start to see movies, television, books and other media shared the same way. These are already on the road, but not to the same extent that music is.

But the picture is not entirely bleak, these media companies have done some positive things. EMI were among the first groups to start selling music without DRM protection on iTunes. All of the “Big Four” music labels support the Amazon MP3 Store, unfortunately not available in much of the world yet. Microsoft were even able to pull a coup that Apple were long unable to do, subscription pricing in the Zune Store for “all you can eat” music access, and 10 tracks to keep. Not a fantastic deal, but better than most. Movies and TV shows are availble to rent or to buy in some countries, but legal issues mean they are not available everywhere just yet.

There is still a lot of work to do. Licensing is archaeic at best. So far, no officially supported store that I am aware of support lossless, or free and open formats or codecs (feel free to correct me in the comments and I’ll update accordingly). A choice between “pay-per” and proper subscription pricing to suit the casual user and the music lover both.

And all this needs to be done with video as well.

People have rallied against restrictive DRM systems for years, complained that they cannot get what they want when they want it where they want it. And you know what happens? It all starts again.

The Authors Guild have gotten Amazon to disable the text-to-speech function in their new Kindle. They are afraid that it will cause people to decide that a tinny, computerised voice with a difficulty understanding punctuation is much better than an audio book performed by a professional voice actor, or the author himself. I’m sure Amazon, owners of Audible, will bet against that. The madness starts anew.

Even communities of people who could benefit the owners of media, media players and media applications are being closed down. Movie associations are routinely targetting websites offering fan made subtitles, because they are breaching their copyright. Music associations used to do the same to lyrics sites. Better idea? Work with these sites to create a standard by which this meta data missing on purchased media can be displayed using the obviously willing and able community. Don’t kill them, don’t discourage them, don’t give them any more reasons to hate you. Embrace them, work with them, build a commuity around them. There is no reason this can’t be done.

Times are changing. People are adapting to the new way of consuming media at a far faster rate than anyone might predict (look at the explosion of file sharing and video streaming sites as proof), and if the media companies don’t take the long term view and start doing the same they are going to find themselves out of business. It might not be today, or next week or next year but it will happen. There are millions and millions of dollars and euros being spent persuing and fighting the way people work, which could instead be better spent offering better systems that might make people more likely to work with media associations rather than against them.

Tick, tock.

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