Sorry, but I can’t face calling them “Reverb” anything. I don’t imagine I’ll stick with “December Dailies”, either, but it’ll do for today. Mind you, on the strength of this question, I may not sticking with doing them, as it has an unpleasant smell of “no I are a proper writter for serios!” about it, and amateurs/fanwriters doing that sets my teeth on edge. Anyway, on with the show.

There are two obvious answers here: the first one being “lots”. I work a day job, I spend time with friends and loved ones, I eat, sleep, shower and occasionally shave. I read, I blog, I take photos. None of these things contribute to my writing. This is the tedious literalist’s answer.

But of course that every last one of those things contributes to my writing, which is the other obvious answer, because at some time or another every experience can inform writing. This is the pretentious wanker’s answer.

The truth, of course is that the only thing that I am certain doesn’t contribute to my writing are those times when I think “Shall I sit down and write? Nah, it’s been a long day, I’ll play computer games/watch TV instead.” It happens less often than it used to (although I did just get savagely hooked on Renaissance Batman Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, so that’s productivity shot for a little while longer), but I do still do it.

Yes, I could eliminate this. But I haven’t yet. Maybe in a few years. And in any case, I don’t do it each day. Things I do each day (or close enough to qualify, anyway), well, I listed them above. Short of “ditch the day job”, I don’t see a lot there that it’d even be useful to ditch.

I know this hasn’t been a very satisfying answer, but it wasn’t a very satisfying prompt (said the shoddy workman). Keep your fingers crossed for some better springboards.

See you tomorrow!

Dreadful title “Reverb”, but I enjoyed something similar I did last year, so here we go with a month of blog posts in December. As before, I reserve the right to ignore or replace any prompts I think are just plain daft. Prompt one challenges me to sum up the last year in one word, explain that choice, and then pick another word for next year.

2010: Inspiration

I’ve a number of friends, old and new, who have directly or indirectly inspired me this year, but none more so than Miranda. I’ll spare you all the gushing stuff I could put here – for all I know, there’ll be a later prompt I can use it for, and I’ll nauseate you all then. For now, I will simply and sincerely say that, by virtue of her own drive and passion she pushes me to do better, for which she has my thanks and more besides.

And one of the ways I’m doing better is that for the first time in years, I have a fiction-writing project I’m excited about – I’m inspired to write. While I’ve mentioned it to a few people, I’m trying not to talk about it too much, and not at all on-line (beyond the odd bit of twitter-based venting which doesn’t count). I’m mostly avoiding talking about it because every time I’ve done that in the past, I’ve dropped the ball, lost interest, or in some other way, failed to bring the thing to fruition. I really don’t want that to happen here, because I love this idea out of all measure, so this is all you’ll hear about it on this blog for now – I have an idea I’m excited about, and I hope it goes well. Shocking stuff, I know, but it’s actually the first time I’ve felt like this in a good few years now. So I’m pleased, and that’ll have to do for now.

And so I need to pick a word for my hopes for next year, and I chose “perspiration”, after Edison’s famous quote. Actually, I don’t think my idea is genius-level, but I’d also quite like to get back into regular exercise next year, so it seems like an apt one to pick, when talking about a year I hope will be filled with productive work, with something nearing completion by the end of it.

See you tomorrow.

I’ve been watching Tim Berners-Lee’s Do lecture, and it has crystallised something for me about IT, education, and a little bit about gender.

The other week on I-forget-which lefty/feminist/big hippy blog, there was another round of the usual flap about women in IT – how there weren’t enough of them, and the culture is bad, and we don’t do enough to encourage them, and we don’t give them an appropriate education to prepare them.

Without wishing to bore you all with a long personal history, I’m going to have to ask you to take my word for the fact that I got a dreadful IT education, and was fairly actively discouraged from pursuing it by my school. My one attempt to get an IT education was an absolutely dismal failure. Please, just trust me when I say: whatever you think an education that doesn’t prepare people to go into IT was, I got it. By the end of my formal education, I’d been taught that what a computer was for was word processors and spreadsheets, and how to use versions of them that were so primitive they were out of date before I left school. And a little bit about Charles Babbage that I don’t really remember any more, although I very clearly remember studying IT in soporifically hot classroom without any computers in it. I trust you see my point: school taught me that computers were dull and boring, and while they may not have taught me it because of my gender, they did very effectively teach me that computers were Not For Me.

In other words: I got exactly the sort of education that people talk about young women getting when the subject comes up in relation to gender. So obviously, these young women are just slackers, who aren’t trying hard enough.

No. Don’t be ridiculous. The difference, of course, is in my home life. (But not quite in the way you think.)

Even at home I wasn’t the image of the teenage male geek (in this respect – I had all the others down pat). Sure, I had a computer in the house from a young age, but what I used it for was games. I shoved a disk in the drive, double clicked an icon, and grabbed a joystick, and off I went. (I also used it for homework, from time to time.)

But.

I remember my Uncle building his first computer from a kit, and I remember the little basic program he and my cousin wrote on it so that we could play spaceship – not so that we could play space invaders, you understand, but so that we could play spaceship. It didn’t do much more that ask us to “Turn on Artificial Gravity”, “Plot Course”, flash up the odd “Life Support Emergency” warning and generally beep and cause the screen to flash every so often, but it made our childish pretence of being interstellar explorers much more exciting, as we dashed around the living room, shooting imaginary lasers at mostly-imaginary bug-eyed monsters, before getting back in our spaceship, engaging the artificial gravity, and blasting off to some other world, hampered only by a life support emergency or two en route.

And as I grew up, I remember my Dad programming applications to track Christmas turkey orders at my Grandfather’s butcher’s shop, or, in my teenage years, applications to help record competitors times at triathlon events, and so on and so forth.

We got the intertubes plumbed in when I was 17, and a year or so after that I got into HTML because I wanted a web page of my own, like half my internet friends had, and from there into actual programming. And it was at this point, that the lessons I had unknowingly learned about computers sprang into life.

It wasn’t that computers were easy (I still find them hard), or that computer programming was intrinsically fun, worthwhile, or rewarding (I still don’t think it is, which is what separates me from the “proper” computer geeks – give me a way to avoid programming, and I’ll probably take it). It was simply this: that you can make a computer do anything. I learned that programming computers is a fundamentally creative act, and that the only limit on what you can make a computer do (assuming that you’re willing to put in the time and effort) is the limit of your imagination.

Even though I hadn’t programmed a damn thing in my life, I’d been around others who did. They did it for all sorts of reasons, and they built all sorts of things. And so when I finally decided to do it myself, it never occurred to me that it wasn’t for me, and not because I was a bloke, but just because my conception of what you did with a computer was akin to my conception of what you did with pen and paper, or a guitar, or camera. Only more so. I absolutely understood that a computer was a tool to enable my imagination, right from that that first experience of my uncle’s starship simulator. (I’m not saying that my gender was irrelevant – I do appreciate that society casts computers as a boys thing, and I wasn’t going to be discouraged from sitting at a computer, just because of my gender – I’m saying that it was irrelevant to my personal conception of the reasons to sit at a computer).

It’s not about demystifying them. It’s not about not teaching girls that computers are a boys thing, or that they’re not hard or boring. (Well, it is, but not quite in the way you think…)

It’s not just about the contents of the education, it’s about the context that education occurs in (especially when realistically, the content of that education will be out of date by the time they come to apply most of it). It’s about teaching girls and boys alike that computers are a creative thing. If I’d been taught that in school, I’m fairly sure I’d have stayed awake in IT lessons. I was lucky, and got that context in spite of the content.

Taking them out of the realm of maths and science (which shouldn’t be seen as gendered anyway, but that’s another thing for another time), and casting computers as creative tools instantly makes it harder to gender them as “for” one gender more than another. I’m not saying it makes it impossible, and I obviously have no idea what these things are like for women, but at the same time, a quick look around my female friends suggests that while many, if not most of them may have been taught that computers weren’t for them, very few of them seem to have been taught that “creativity” wasn’t for them. Almost all of them write (even if it’s “only” a blog) or take photos (even if it’s “only” holiday snaps) or draw (even if it’s only “doodling for fun”. Why should they (and of course, all my male friends) not also program (even if it’s only “so I can let my kids fly a spaceship”).

(I hate to close on a parenthetical aside, but I know if that I don’t, some well-meaning person will take me up on it: many of my female friends do far, far more in those various fields than the “even it’s only” stuff I’ve listed at the end there, and I’m not seeking to suggest that women are limited to “hobby” level creativity, I’m simply setting an inclusively broad base.)

These days, half of us carry some kind of wifi capable device around with us – laptop, phone, MP3 player, swanky new iPad. We own something that we can browse the net on via wifi, that we can use while out and about.

And we’re all familiar with the experience of agreeing to meet someone in a pub or café, and finding that either we’re running early, or they’re running late, at which point we pull out this device and do something with it. Check Twitter. Check our email. Log in to Facebook and see who it is that’s been pissing on our wall, or whatever it is that Facebook users do these days. In any event, the point is this: we hook out little boxes of digital magic up to the wifi that’s available and start using it. Sometimes we might have to pay for the privilege, sometimes we might just have to give the username and password that’s written on a sign behind the counter, and in some places, we can just start surfing away.

We don’t stop think about the danger.

You see, most of these networks aren’t secured – even the ones that require a username and password to log on to, often only require the username and password as an authentication system – a confirmation that you have the right to be using the system – not as a method of securing communication. (How you can tell: if you try and get to a website, but then get an extra screen in between from BT Openzone, or The Cloud, or 02 or T-mobile or whatever, asking you for a username and password, or your phone number, without leaving your browser, then it may well just be authentication, and not security, that the wifi is checking.)

And then along comes Firesheep. I’m not going to link to it – if you’re really interested, you can Google it. What Firesheep does is exploit a technique called session sidejacking. Up until Firesheep, this was something it required a little skill to know how to do. Not a lot, but some – you needed to put a few different tools that most people would know nothing about together on a laptop, and know how to fiddle with some fairly advanced settings in your browser. Firesheep, on the other hand, makes it possible in two or three clicks. And it’s a Firefox extension that you install like any other. My not-very-tech-savvy mother could do it, if she wanted.

One of the often-unspoken truths of security is that there is no such thing as true, 100% unbreakable security. There is just “enough security that it’s more trouble than it’s worth to get around it”. It’s why we secure our houses with simple locks on doors, and not three different biometrics and a machine-gun turret. It’s the same on-line. With enough time and effort, any system can be hacked. It’s just about making it hard *enough* to hack that most people don’t bother – a good username and secure password will keep 99% of hackers out, and the odds of being targeted by the remaining 1% are quite small. This is why Firesheep is bad – because it’s made the effort involved in this hack so trivial.

So what is session sidejacking?

We’re all familiar with logging into websites – you stick in your username and password, and presto, you’re logged in. If you’re very tech savvy, you might even know that it’s important to check for https:// at then front of the URL and not just http:// when you log in. That’s the sign that the data you’re exchanging with the website is encrpyted – that your password isn’t just being sent through all the dozens of computers between your laptop and the website you’re using, in plain text for anyone to eavesdrop on. You see that, and you feel secure.

But there are plenty of websites out there – Facebook is one example, but they’re not even close to alone in this – I think Gmail even does it, if you don’t configure some settings just right, and apparently Twitter is vulnerable to, and that’s just a few quick big names, never mind all the other small sites – where once you’ve logged in, they stop using the https:// bit. The theory being that the thing it’s important to be secure about is the authentication. And up until Firesheep, they were probably right.

Now, the way you stay logged in on most websites is that they set a thing called a cookie. You’ve probably all heard of them. They’re ones of the things that get ditched when you clear your cache and cookies because you’re trying to fix a problem. Clearing your cookies means that you suddenly find yourself logged out of loads of websites, and you have to go to all the hassle of trying to remember your password to log back in.

That cookie contains a little bit of information (actually, it might contain quite a lot, but there’s only one thing that’s relevant here) – it contains what’s called your Session ID. When you log into a website, you get assigned a Session ID, and when your browser requests pages from that website, it says (roughly) “Hi – I’m a browser with Session ID 12345, and I’d like this webpage please.” And the site goes away and works out what webpage you want and what content Session ID 12345 should get, according it it’s records. Your session ID essentially *becomes* your username and password, and it’s sent back and forth with every request you make to that website.

And if the website isn’t using https:// and if you’re using a wifi network that’s not secure, then people using the same network as you can listen in. They won’t be able to get your username and password – that got sent over https://, after all. But they will be able to find your Session ID. And once they’ve got that, they can pretend to be you.

And Firesheep does all this, in three clicks, in a really easy to use manner.

And so they can pretend to be you. And get into your Facebook, or your Gmail, and discover all sorts of things about you.

So how can you make sure you’re safe?

Well, in the first place, don’t use unencrypted Wifi, unless you have no other choice. Key terms that will tell you it’s encrypted are things like WEP or WPA. And when you’re asked for password to go along with those, they won’t be in your web browser – it’ll be your operating system asking for them.

Secondly: if you are using unencrypted wifi, make sure everything you request is over https://.

As soon as you log in to Google or facebook, or any other site, if you don’t see the little ‘s’ in the URL, add it in yourself, and hit return to reload the page. This won’t be 100% foolproof on all sites, but it’s a good first step. And you’ll find that a lot of really secure sites – bank websites and that sort of thing, do everything over https:// already, even once you’ve logged in.

Other than that, well, there’s not a lot you can do. Sorry, folks. Fixing this one is going to require companies, and people like me to do something. They haven’t in the past, because the security we used to have was good enough. But as of last week, it isn’t, so we need to get on with fixing it. But in the meantime, do please be careful when using unsecured wifi.

(Just in closing, I should probably note that the chap who wrote and released Firesheep wasn’t doing it just to cause trouble – or rather he was, but with noble motives. He wasn’t doing it to make hacking easy, he was doing it to force companies to make exactly this kind of change, and improve their security all round.)

A bunch of different clever types have been writing posts about the things they are thinking about right now. I am not that clever, but I’m also not finding the time to write about these things the way I want to.

(Some of the reason is also just that I don’t think anyone who reads my blog is going to be interested in everything this set of topics – any one of them might have two or three people who are interested, but that just means I’m going to be boring the crap out of the rest of you. So I don’t write this stuff up in full. I may start doing these 5things things monthly, though.)

1) Cognitive Surplus.
I read Clay Shirky’s new book (and his old one as well, as a matter of fact) a few weeks back, and I watched Jane McGonigal at TED a while back, and I know it’s obvious to any thinking human with a brain that collectively we have an unprecedented amount of spare time, and can collectively do amazing things with it, but I’m sometimes a little slow. At the moment, some of my spare brain time is devoted to quietly working out what I can do to help other people use their collective surplus time. And some more is devoted to actually helping some people to do that. A standing offer: if you have an idea for an interesting website that will make the world a better place (that is: not a personal website), and you have no idea how to go about making it, you can always talk to me. I might or might not be able to help, but even if I can’t, I can probably help you work out who can. (I’ll also happily talk to you about personal websites, but am much less likely to be interested enough to give up my spare time.)

2) Motivation
I also read Dan Ariely’s “Predictably Irrational” – a book on cognitive psychology and behavioural economics, which was fascinating, and I’m thinking about ways I can apply its behavioural insights into both interface design, and, er, LARP design.

3) The Interconnectedness of All Things
After reading Shirky’s books, I read “Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism” by Natasha Walter. It struck me that one of the insights in Shirky’s book was applicable to some of the questions posed by Walters – both in regard of why teenage/young adult men and women behave the way they do, and in regard of the ways we need to think about bringing about cultural change. (Essentially that human nature doesn’t change – the young men and women of today *aren’t* more sexist or more exhibitionist than they were a generation or two ago, it’s just that the opportunities for and benefits/penalties of certain behaviours have changed – we shouldn’t be asking “why is this happening now?” we should be asking “why wasn’t it happening before?”) This, in turn, got me thinking about the ways ideas feed into one another, and about cross-disciplinary thinking and studying, and wondering how we can promote more of it.

4) The Windrush Generation
I’m just starting the serious research for some writing I may do (the books arrived today, I’ll probably go finish the first one when I’m done writing this). Playing back into the interconnectedness of all things, I’m currently wondering if I can do something with the gap between desire and opportunity that was faced by those early immigrants, and the gap between desire and opportunity that faces many young people (from all sorts of backgrounds) today.

5) Revamping The Publishing Process
One of the reasons that book publishing has not been (as badly) hit by NooMeeja as music/film publishing is that some of the skills required by the process (that have traditional been part of the publisher’s work) are much harder to automate/amateurise – the editorial role, both as copy editor, and as curator. If the editorial hurdle can be overcome, though, I think the curatorial one will naturally wither. I think I’ve come up with an idea that will not entirely eliminate the copy of copy editing, but could possibly reduce the amount of time required to copy edit a novel massively (by crowdsourcing it). No idea if it’s got legs, but I’m still batting it around in my head, trying to make it work alongside points 1,2 and 3. And point 4, actually, come to that.

I’ve threatened to write about this for years, because I know a lot of my friends tend to assume that either this is a strange technical issue that won’t affect them, or that this is a strange technical issue will affect them, but that they can never hope to understand.

Essentially, the thing is this: At the moment, sitting at your computer, it doesn’t matter if you’re looking at a YouTube video, my website, the Disney website, of the website of Joe the specialist lizard breeder from Norwich (Joe will be important later). It all downloads at the same speed. I know that in practice, it doesn’t always – there are all sorts reasons for that, but in principle it downloads at the same speed – every link in the chain between content and user passes things along at the best speed it can. You pay your ISP for your 2,4,8, 24MB or whatever speed broadband, and they deliver content to you at as close to that speed as they can.

That’s because the net is neutral. All content is delivered to the person asking for it at the fastest possible speed. It’s a principle that has been built into the internet from day one – the internet was designed at the most fundamental, basic level to be accepting of new uses, and not to prioritise a particular use over any of the others, because the designers were smart enough to know that they weren’t smart enough to invent every use for it themselves. (They thought that all it would get used for would be be porn, on-line casinos and unwanted emails about penises). The playing field between Joe the lizard specialist and Mickey Mouse is level, at least on a technical footing. Any other disparity is getting into attention economy stuff, and isn’t relevant here, except in that our burgeoning attention economy will work best and fairest when we are equal on a technological level.

Google and Verizon are putting forth a document that contains policy suggestions that seek to undermine that principle of neutrality, by, among other things, making distinctions between “wired” and “mobile” internet. This is an entirely artificial distinction, and here’s why:

The base protocol of the internet is TCP/IP – don’t worry about what it stands for, if you don’t know. What it means is irrelevant, that key fact here, that if this were a Powerpoint presentation would be sliding on with some kind of animated fireworks and a little fanfare sound, is that absolutely *everything* that is on the internet makes use of it, at some level. If something doesn’t, then it isn’t on the internet. Yes, your mobile 3G broadband uses a different technology to your WiFi connection, which is different to your ethernet cable. But once you get past those technologies of connection, then technology of communication becomes the same. From a TCP/IP point of view, the difference between your iPhone’s 3G connection and your office desktop’s ethernet is the difference between a blue network cable and red network cable. (The blue ones are faster, if you’re wondering.)

Google and Verizon are making this distinction because they want to pre-emptively limit the authority of the FCC to regulate the “mobile internet”. This is sophistry and horseshit: it’s all the same internet. Your “mobile” phone communicates with my “wired” desktop computer without either one of them having to know that the other is not also a phone/desktop/internet-enabled-dog. And in a world where people increasingly use a “wireless” broadband dongle for home internet access (a practice that is more common in low income households, in the UK at least), it’s not so much seeking to prevent regulation as to deregulate that which is already regulated, for good reason.

Verizon and Google are also making a distinction between “the public internet” and “additional services”. I can’t tell you what those are for certain, because there isn’t an iron-clad definition, but what they look like to me is a way to get the thin end of the wedge in. Allow me to explain.

These proposals acknowledge the importance of network neutrality. They make it clear that ISPs must provide a basic level of service that is neutral. But as long as they do that they are free to sell anything else as “additional services”.

So, say for example that you currently have a 8MB internet connection. There would be nothing stopping your ISP from declaring that actually, only the first 0.5MB of that is their “basic service”, and that the remaining 7.5MB was “additional services”. They wouldn’t need to change their pricing to you, you understand – you’d still pay the same 20-odd a month for a 8MB connection. So why should you care?

Well, just for example: ITV might have paid your ISP to ensure that you get their content faster. So while you really want to see Joe’s content about rare geckos (and who wouldn’t, really?), actually, you can only get that at the speed of a 0.5MB connection, but you can get ITV News content at the full speed you paid for.

That doesn’t sound so bad, though – I mean, Joe’s content is pretty niche, isn’t it? Well, yeah. But it’s what you want to look at today, and you’re paying to do it. Who’re ITV and your ISP to decide that that’s how your bandwidth should be allocated, once you’ve bought it?

Of course, the picture I’m painting isn’t what’s exactly likely to happen.

What’s more likely is that you’ll continue to pay 20 quid a month for the “basic” service – your 8MB internet. But you will be charged another couple of quid for, say, iTunes and Emusic at “premium” speed – say at 16MB speeds. And another few quid for faster delivery of YouTube and Vimeo video content. And another few quid for on-line gaming via PC, and another couple of quid for on-line gaming via Xbox, and so on, and so on. It’ll be a lot like the way people pay for TV packages.

Well, what’s the harm in that, you might say? It’ll all still be available, just a bit slower, on the basic package, which is fine for us all at the moment.

Well, a few things, but we’ll start with this question first: What’s the difference between a race where you give one or two competitors a five second head start, and a race where you give all competitors except one or two a five second handicap?

Secondly: ITV News can afford to pay your ISP in order to get their content into the “premium” category that will get delivered faster. Joe, on the other hand, has lizards to feed, and doesn’t make much money off his website, and so can’t. Why should ITV News get an advantage over Joe, when his content is actually far more interesting?

Thirdly: Setting what we have now as the base past which everything else is “premium” might sound OK, but it stifles future innovation. How many people are going to want to play some form of new game, that requires loads of extra bandwidth for all the fancy graphics and sound, if it’s going to cost them an extra tenner a month from their ISP, on top of the cost of the game itself? It means that exciting new start ups of the sort that built Google and YouTube are going to have a harder and harder time. (This, by the way, is one of the reasons that I so deplore Google being involved in this. They’ve climbed up the ladder to the big kids treehouse, and now they’re helping kick the ladder down so that other kids can’t get up there as easily.)

Fourthly: In order to connect from the computer I am sitting at to the server that hosts my own website, and email, my data actually passes through networks and equipment owned by 4 different ISPs. Suppose that my home ISP’s network was happy to prioritise, say, my request for my email, and give it more bandwidth, but the ISP two steps removed wasn’t, then well, why the hell am I paying my ISP as extra fiver a month for speedy access to my email? (This is also why we in Britain need to care about a deal between two US companies – because we make use of their networks, too.)

And that last one is really the big deal. The internet is a network of networks. It only works if all those networks talk to each other on an equal footing. If one or two decide that they like things to work one way, and another two or three like it to work another, then we start to move toward a world where the content I can get via my ISP, that belongs to one cartel, is different to the content you get via yours, that belongs to another. And neither cartel has room for poor Joe and his lizards.

Any questions?

Yes, this is a real poster for a real movie. Supply your own jokes. Prizes awarded for the funniest.

I want one!

I’d like to get in the habit of doing the blog-all-dog-eared-pages thing, but I really really hate dog-earing pages. I’m not absurdly fussy about the state of my books – they are working objects after all – but I don’t like folding the corners of the pages. So I thought I’d note this one down while it was fresh in my head.

“The craftiest storytellers can tell you a tale without you realising it’s being told. They are called advertisers [..] They can tell a story with a phrase, a picture, and sometimes with a single pencil line. Without them transnationals would become extinct because in order to sell, they have to tell stories. They have to tell them to survive”

From Mark Thomas’ “Belching Out The Devil“