I spent some of last night and this morning playing with Flock, the new exciting web browser that everyone’s talking about. Flock is purported to be a “move forward” for web browsing, combining passive browsing with active social software elements such as blogging and social bookmarking. The blurb sounds promising, even if I don’t like the name (”Flock” suggests a sheep-like herd mentality). However, although it looks nice (using Gecko as the main engine - see screenshots), I’m not exactly blown away. It is not the amazing breakthrough that everyone says it is.

Flock does have some interesting features. Like the ability to post blog posts straight from the browser. Which is nice, but I already have a way of sending blog posts from my browser - it’s called my blog. With the WordPress “Write Post” page bookmarked, I can start a blog post in a new tab pretty much instantly, and have more features (categorisation, pinging etc.) than the limited in-browser controls Flock has. Drag and drop’s a nice touch, but only if you don’t use keyboard shortcuts all the time like I do.

Flock also allows you to add in photos from your Flickr photostream into your blog. Again, nice, but Flickr already has this functionality with it’s “Blog This” control, and again, the Flickr interface is much richer than the one that Flock can offer. As well as this, Flock also allows you to post to del.icio.us straight from the browser - nice, but the Firefox extension for del.icio.us has been out for yonks. There’s also some RSS autodiscovery and aggregation stuff for news and blogs, but y’know, that’s not exactly anything new either.

Still, there are a couple of actually good features. The ability to synchronise local bookmarks with your del.icio.us ones is handy, although not for everyone. And the best new feature - the ability to do proper content searches on your browser history, and keep track of frequently visited pages is nice. But if anything, this should be in Firefox proper, and not just in Flock, since plenty of people who aren’t bloggers would find this feature welcome.

Flock is supposedly another step towards Web 2.0, but I think it’s the opposite. Rather than allow the free use of data, mixing of different media and the ability to create unique configurations different compatible technologies at will, it compartmentalises everything. Del.icio.us is defined only as a bookmarking tool (not a linklogging tool like I used it). Flickr is little more than a photo hosting site for blogs. All blogs have the same posting interface. RSS is just for reading news and blogs, not getting search results or podcasts. All these features are kept in their place and only permitted certain interactions with each other. Flock does little to further empower the user, encourage remix and reuse, or widespread social collaboration.

Little bit of social construction of technology dropped in here: technologists (of all kinds, not just information) create and form products according to their own prejudices and definitions of what “user” and “technology” and other key concepts mean. While this is a blog post, not a full analysis, I won’t make any conclusions (especially as it is only at version 0.5 so far), but… I suspect the Flock team are actually quite conservative; they are designing a product that they want to make existing tasks that they already carry out easier, rather than being bold and inventive and finding new things to do with what’s out there. At the moment, Flock is little more than what I can achieve with Firefox and a few well-chosen extensions.

A really bold client-side Web 2.0 app would not be as discriminatory, and allow us to browse photos, links, blog posts, news, search results,wikis, web services, audio, video etc. via tags and other social navigation methods, treating them with little distinction, adding minimal embellishment and with no compartmentalisation. Such an app would probably be quite dull in its plain vanilla flavour, and would probably require high-level scripting (at the natural language level), extensions and additional configurations on top for it to be a rewarding experience, which would be different for every user. The first attempts to make it will probably fail. But whatever it does turn out to be, I’m fairly sure it won’t be the formalised, monolithic app that Flock looks like becoming.

So the Government won the third reading of the ID cards bill, despite some curious absences. I myself wonder if the Government didn’t time the bill’s reading deliberately to coincide with the Conservative leadership election, so that it would go unnoticed by the majority, but that is only a suspicion…

I haven’t the time to write properly about it at the moment, but many others have. Chris Lightfoot points out that Charles Clarke’s supposed concession on restricting it to information that is only on the passport is not much of a concession. Meanwhile, Spyblog highlights a jaw-dropping piece of stupidity by the minister responsible, Tom McNulty, who wants the ID register accessible and editable via the Internet (so much for the watertight security). Talk Politics has not just one, but two very long pieces on the subject in general.

Now the Bill is being sent over to the Lords, Politics of Privacy has pointed out that the Salisbury Convention will mean it won’t be blocked. I’m not so sure about that; unlike the government that swept to power in 1945, New Labour only got in on 35% of the vote as opposed to 50%, and won the Commons vote on Wednesday with only half their normal majority. At the very least, I hope the Lords will put up a good fight, at least.

Scientists in the US have sequenced the genome of the 1918 Spanish ‘flu (the one that killed tens of millions. A hell of an achievement - and if you’re a biology geek, then you can enjoy the full article here. But now some doom-mongers have condemned the risk that the terrorists might use it against us. Quote:

This is extremely foolish. The genome is essentially the design of a weapon of mass destruction. No responsible scientist would advocate publishing precise designs for an atomic bomb, and in two ways revealing the sequence for the flu virus is even more dangerous.

Ah, weapons of mass destruction. Quick factoid: in 1945 the Soviets were given quite detailed plans of Fat Man, the plutonium fission bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki by the British physicist Klaus Fuchs. Despite having these plans to hand, the Soviets took longer (four years) to make their first nuclear bomb than the Americans had done from scratch (three); not only were there problems in obtaining the necessary fissile material, but the many esoteric technical skills unique to the task of fabricating such a weapon took time to accrue.

The spectre terrorists using such information to make weapons is a false one. Biological or chemical weapons are not just a matter of someone downloading a bomb recipe off the internet and making it (although that didn’t stop us from falling for the whole ricin “plot” bullshit). Laboratories and workshops, testing facilities, materials, training and skills, distribution equipment, financial resources, not to mention the will and commitment; all of these are required. Importantly, as this good counterpoint post highlights, if you have the ability and the means to fabricate the virus then you also have the ability to sequence and discover the virus yourself anyway.

This is not to say that it is impossible for terrorists to make chemical or biological weapons, but it’s very hard for them; conventional explosives and weaponry are easier to make, train with and traffic. Any counter-terror project trying to suppress WMD-related information like this is pointless; sociotechnical systems theories highlight the need for many components to come together for a technology to work (such as the ones I list above). Any sort of approach at preventing proliferation must target not just raw how-to information but all these other aspects that are needed to bring a technology to fruition.

In the case of sequencing the ‘flu virus, by publishing the genome they open it up to research and investigation by scientists around the world, rather than the usual close-knit community of the authors’ known contacts (cf. Linus’s law in software development). The possible benefits (nothing is guaranteed, after all) of the widening of research this allows, if H5N1 does go ape-shit and start killing us all off in six months’ time, far outweighs the minor to negligible security risk that letting it fall in “the wrong hands” creates.

A trademark dispute has meant that in the UK GMail is now to be called Googlemail. All new UK-based accounts will be @googlemail.com. But if you’re from anywhere else in the world, your new account will still be @gmail.com. Existing @gmail.com users in the UK will still retain that address, but Google admit they’re not sure if it will always stay that way. Result? Confusion, uncertainty, etc..

It seems Google have dropped the ball yet again; rather than realise from the start that a good chunk of their userbase is outside America (the same thing has also happened in Germany) and hire a half-decent trademark lawyer who would have looked around for other products of the same name the world over, they hurriedly plumped for the more generic name of “Gmail” and now have all manner of court cases and disputes on their hands. Careless.

Last week I was in Edinburgh, and I finally got round to adding the last of my photos, taken from the top of the dark and scary-looking Scott Monument. Enjoy.

While making lunch I heard on Five Live the bizarre tale of a woman who was arrested under the Terrorism Act (which exact one, I’m not sure) for walking on a cycle path in Dundee. I thought it was someone winding them up during a phone-in, but no - the Times reports that it actually did happen:

“The next thing I knew, the harbour master had driven up behind me with a megaphone, saying, ‘You’re trespassing, please turn back’. It was totally ridiculous. I started laughing and kept on walking. Cyclists going past were also laughing.

“But then two police cars roared up beside me and cut me off, like a scene from Starsky and Hutch, and officers told me I was being arrested under the Terrorism Act. The harbour master was waffling on and (saying that), because of September 11, I would be arrested and charged.”

The mind boggles at trying to assess the thought processes in the harbourmaster’s mind. Can anyone seriously think that the act of walking on a cycle path is but a few short steps away from mass murder? Mind you, perhaps more worrying is the fact our legal system is now able to define any sort of petty infringement under the umbrella term of terrorism, and allow the harbourmaster to “do his job” thusly.

I am getting ever-more convinced by the hypothesis that the British are now not a nation of shopkeepers, but more a nation of petty jobsworths. The political class are just as jobsworthy as the rest of us, which is why the solution to any problem now seems to be writing down more and more laws, guidelines and frameworks (such as the above), and the use of ever-more bureaucratic pedantry (e.g. ID cards), simply because it is the only way they know how, and the only way that satisifes their predilection to meddle and nag.

Over at light from an empty fridge, as well as mirroring my own thoughts on why considering current affairs is so jading, fridgemagnet writes about possible projects (s)he is considering, which include:

…writing a Glorify-O-Matic that will allow you, with just one line of code, to make your blog or site illegal and For The Terrorists - not sure about this one as it is still possible that the bill will not get through

Which does raise an interesting point. Let’s say for the sake of argument I did write an app that constructed glorifying-of-terrorism phrases (like my anti-everything liberal and decent phrase generator), at the touch of a button. Even though I myself had never actually written or published such phrases, merely bits of them… would creating a Flash app that simulated “infinite jihadists with infinite typewriters”, which might on the off chance incite someone to commit terrorist acts (in the eyes of the Home Office) via the joys of JavaScript be a crime? I myself would have not written anything offensive, merely enabled someone on the client side the means to construct such phrases via scripts in their browser.

On the one hand it would demonstrate the barminess of such laws, the capriciousness of what “glorifying” or “publishing” means, and expose the perilous flexibility of bandying about harsh descriptions such as “terrorist” willy-nilly, by demonstrating what can be simply done with a random word generator that puts likely phrases together. Which would be clever and score political points for yours truly. But on the other hand I really fucking don’t want to go to Belmarsh. So - your thoughts?

The messageboards on the NaNoWriMo site (I am toying with the idea of taking part this year) are a source of eclectic joy. For example, the variety of topic titles on the Plot Realism Q&A just ooze with eclectic appeal:

• Curing Animal Skins - How?
• Edible parts of humans?
• EXPERT: Human Sexuality, Sexual Deviance, Fetishism, Strangulation, and Crystal Meth
• anybody know anything about nuns?

I might not bother writing a novel, but just hang about in the forums instead…