tar is a command for moving a file or files into a single archive file (or for reversing the operation). It can also apply compression/decompression algorithms, and perform various other neat tricks. It’s useful and ubiquitous. Unfortunately, it’s also quite sensitive.

Just now, I was using tar -cfz mytarfile.tar.gz mydirectory to archive a directory, and this returned the error, tar: mytarfile.tar.gz: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors. Hmm, not good.

Easy to fix, though. The solution to the problem is this: I should have written, tar -czf mytarfile.tar.gz mydirectory. In other words, the z and the f get swapped in the options. This is because the f option is supposed to denote that what follows it is a file. So the first command I tried was looking for a file called mytarfile.tar.gz to add to an archive file called z. Since the mytarfile.tar.gz didn’t exist, tar couldn’t locate, or stat, the file. Hence the error.

Oh, what fun is to be had at the command line!

I stumbled across a news article today about Wikipedia content being blocked by ISPs. I had noticed that my connection to Wikipedia over the last couple of days had been flaky, so I decided to investigate. It turns out that one of the ISPs blocking Wikipedia content was the ISP I use at the moment, Virgin Media (hereafter “VM”).

I’m a big fan of Wikipedia and have been for a few years. Querying Wikipedia is like asking a group of interested and generally well-informed people a question. You often get to hear many points of view, and you almost invariably get good references to other sources of information. It’s also about as libre as media can get, which makes it an excellent resource for communities of people with shared interests.

I use Wikipedia regularly and it forms an important component of my reference library, so if my connection to it is censored, my opportunities for learning, and for sharing my knowledge, could potentially be severely curtailed: a grave concern for me.

After reading a few more news stories and checking that my connection was indeed being censored in the ways they described, I looked up the Internet Watch Foundation (“IWF”), and various reports on the matter from within the Wikipedia community. It was the IWF’s bizarre decision to blacklist a Wikipedia page bearing a long-published album cover by stadium rock band Scorpions that prompted ISPs to block Wikipedia content. It became clear to me that some consumer action – not to mention citizen action – was needed.

Technical support

I called VM’s technical support line to report that there was a problem with my internet connection: some pages from Wikipedia weren’t coming through properly and I’d like them to solve the problem, please, as it seemed that my internet connection was being censored by VM without my consent; could they perhaps fix my connection? This was at about 2030hrs GMT, 08 December 2008.

The first person I spoke to denied that Virgin Media blocks anything, and he suggested the problem may have been due to anti-malware software on my PC, or due to problems with Wikipedia’s servers. He refused to accept that the mainstream news articles about the issue – even the BBC one – were credible. He said that if VM was doing anything to block Wikipedia, the VM tech. support team of which he was a part would have been notified; so since it had not been notified, it was not possible that VM was responsible for the problem. I asked if I could speak to his supervisor, and he agreed.

The supervisor (title: Manager, Technical Support; name: Suman) was very helpful and courteous. He confirmed that the tech. support team had not been told about a block imposed by VM on any Wikipedia pages. He tried accessing the Virgin Killer page but could not (his connection, like mine, was routed via VM’s network), even though he and his colleagues were able to access other Wikipedia pages. He agreed to investigate this, and said he would have somebody call me with news within a day or two. He agreed that if VM was indeed imposing censorship, his team should have been briefed about it, and that if the VM network was blocking Wikipedia pages, it was a major problem.

Well, it was good to know that the technical support staff took the issue seriously, and I was glad that they were as aggreived as I was to have had censorship imposed without warning.

I reported the call to the Wikipedia article hosting responses to VM’s official statement. Next, I figured it was time to contact the IWF.

Internet Watch Foundation

The IWF’s contact page states, “For out of office hours media enquiries, please contact Sarah Robertson, Director of Communications on +44 (0) 7929 553 679,” so I did, at around 2200hrs GMT, also on 08 December 2008.

I wasn’t able to capture the call verbatim, but I did my best to type it up as we spoke, so what follows is a reasonably accurate transcript and, I hope, one correct in all important particulars.

I introduced myself as a blogger writing a piece about the IWF’s blacklisting of Wikipedia content, and started asking the questions that were bugging me and that I thought were most important with respect to civil liberties and policy.

Interview transcript:

I’d like to know whether it’s the IWF’s policy to blacklist content that has not been found to be illegal.

“No, absolutely not.”

In that case, why did the IWF go against policy in the case of the Wikipedia article that has been in the news today?

“We didn’t.”

So that must mean that the content was found to be illegal. Who found it to be illegal?

“The IWF found the image to be illegal.”

But under UK law, if I’m not mistaken, only a court can determine if something is illegal. Has a UK court found the image to be illegal to publish or transmit, etc.? Or, for that matter, has any other court you know of; a foreign court?

“We only use UK law. Look, we’re not judge and jury. We just blacklist child sexual abuse content on behalf of the UK internet industry.”

That doesn’t seem to be true either, because as far as I can tell, both the URL for the page and for the image have been blocked. Surely the text on the page doesn’t count as “child sexual abuse content”. Wouldn’t it have been possible for you to just blacklist Wikipedia’s image of the cover, instead of the whole article?

“We blacklist the URL where the abuse content was found.”

That doesn’t answer my question, because the image and the article each have their own URLs.

“We’ve blocked the image and the URL.”

But both the page and the image have URLs. What I’m asking is, why did you blacklist the URL for the page, as well as the one for the image? If all you wanted to do was prevent the image from being shown on the page, wouldn’t you only have had to blacklist the URL for the image?

“The internet industry asks for pages to be blacklisted rather than images, because this is more effective at stopping child pornography rings from being able to publish.”

Going back to my earlier question, you said you found the image to be illegal. I agree that illegal content should be taken down, but it’s not clear to me that the Scorpions cover was illegal. Since the IWF is not a court, what did you mean that you “found the image to be illegal”?

“We do our job on behalf of the industry. We have the support of law enforcement agencies, and a memorandum of understanding with the Crown Prosecution Service and ICPO. We pass all our leads on to Interpol. The industry trusts the IWF to assess the potential illegality of content.”

Surely any content is “potentially illegal”, though. I’m opposed to censorship of content that is not illegal, so…

“So are we.”

Well, then either you could request prosecution of illegal content and blacklist it if it is found to be illegal, which seems sensible to me, or else you could do what you’re doing, which is to help censor content that hasn’t been found to be illegal. You can’t have it both ways, can you?

“Our law enforcement partners agreee that the Scorpions cover was illegal, and we have absolutely no doubt that we made the right decision. We’ll be updating our official statement tomorrow.”

If you’re sure you made the right decision about the Wikipedia page, then will you also be blacklisting other URLs where images of the Virgin Killers album cover are hosted? Amazon hosts one, and so do many dozens of other music sites. Are you going to blacklist them all?

“We don’t work proactively. A member of the public reported the URL concerned [i.e. the Wikipedia one], and we responded to that. We haven’t made a decision about any other sites.”

OK. I still don’t see how you can be opposed to censorship of legal content and yet be helping to block content that hasn’t been found to be illegal by a court. Could you explain that to me a bit more clearly?

“I don’t think you’re going to get the clarity you’re looking for; I think I’ve said as much as I need to say.”

Thank you for your time.

“Thank you.”

Considerations

It is my opinion that:

1. Sarah Robertson is not competent in her role as Director of Communications of the Internet Watch Foundation. Clearly, she does not understand terribly well how the internet works, as evidenced by her confusion between pages and URLs. Without prompting from me, I doubt she would have drawn the distinction. Yet URLs are crucial for the functioning of many internet communications, and an understanding of them is an important component of understanding the internet. Surely, if your organistion was founded to “watch” the internet and act upon what it sees, its Director of Communications ought to have a good understanding of internet communications. Additionally, Robertson’s words to the effect that I would not “get the clarity I was looking for” from her suggest that she may not even be competent to communicate the position of the IWF on matters fundamentally important to its activities, like why it acted the way it did if it is opposed to censorship. Surely, as Director of Communications, she is responsibile for communicating the IWF’s reasons for acting; yet she has not only failed in that responsibility, she has discarded it.
2. The Internet Watch Foundation has been granted unwarranted, and perhaps illegal, power of censorship. The fact that ISPs may be required by law to block content blacklisted by the IWF means that IWF is acting as an official censor. However, an official censor must be publicly accountable; yet the IWF is not.
3. The Internet Watch Foundation should not have blacklisted the Wikipedia article that displayed the album cover image. No credible evidence I am aware of suggests that the text of that article fell under the IWF’s remit. Roberton’s suggestion that blocking the page was justified because page-blocking is effective against child pornography rings makes no sense in the context of the Wikipedia article in question, because the article was not the product of a child pornography ring but, rather, the product of a community of editors creating a general purpose encyclopedia: an encyclopedia incorporating articles about notable popular music albums (the album in question was voted “LP of the Year” in Scorpions‘ native Germany).
4. The Internet Watch Foundation should not have blacklisted the image of the album cover hosted by Wikipedia. Without a court finding that the image is illegal to own, transmit, etc, within the UK, all UK citizens have the right to view it for purposes of criticism, comment and education; in short, for the sorts of purposes Wikipedia hosted it.
5. Reform is needed. The IWF ought to review its employment practices, in the light of the questionable competence of its director of communications and its flawed decision to blacklist legal content. Legal reform is needed to hold the IWF publicly accountable, or else to relieve the ISPs of a need to block content on the IWF’s blacklist. At the moment, I’m inclined to favour a solution whereby the IWF is:
   1. permitted only to blacklist content that has been found, by a court in the UK, to be illegal to access online; and
   2. either part of government, and accountable to it, with a binding blacklist; or else a public body with a non-binding blacklist.

I don’t know what the audio-processing algorithms hearing aids use are, but it’s fairly clear that:

• the user doesn’t have much ability to modify them, except perhaps in the case of highly expensive models.
• they probably aren’t terribly powerful, because – judging by digital hearing aids’ power consumption – the processing power available to them is very small.
• although amplification is one of the primary components of a hearing aid’s processing chain, amplification alone won’t combat most hearing difficulties (certainly not Mel’s).
• they are optimised for speech, rather than music.

So I set about trying a different approach: CPU-intensive audio-processing using the best algorithms I could lay my hands on (i.e. Wavelab’s plugins), optimised for music. I set up an EQ stage at the end of the chain, modelled on the graph of Mel’s auditory response, and started applying filters before it in an attempt to make the end result sound as natural as possible. I had a hunch that multiband compression might be more effective for this than EQ – certainly more effective than EQ alone – and so it proved. Partly this is because multiple stages of EQ filtering can induce “ringing” (they become resonant – an unwanted side-effect). Although multi-band compressors include EQ filters to split the signal into bands, these filters didn’t seem to suffer from the same side effects, perhaps because the compression was attenuating any resonances that might have otherwise been present.

Anyhow, a few months ago – long after my first experiment, I was blessed with a few minutes of the Mel’s time, and we tried some of the filter chains, with The Decline as the test track (because it was the only CD I had to hand with a mix that I was familiar with). We were somewhat successful, but I haven’t had time to do much more with the algorithms since then.

I mentioned to Mel that I thought it would be cool to make portable Sharc DSP devices so people could carry their audio processors around with them, set up so that they could select and edit the algorithms. This isn’t very far-fetched. There are lots of battery-powered, pocket sized audio processors on the market at affordable prices (for instance, the Korg Pandora). I don’t know if they use Sharcs, but I do know that many price-breakthrough audio processors with pluggable algorithms that I’ve seen hit the market in recent years have used Sharcs, so they seemed like a good bet. (Mel knew the same company’s devices by a different name, Blackfin, and suggested those. Then we worked out we were talking about essentially the same thing :-] The Blackfin is a sibling product to the Sharc.)

And this is how I come to be writing a blog post called Earglasses. Sunglasses – filters for your eyes – are easy to get hold of, and not even very hard to make, but filters for your ears aren’t so straightforward. I doubt Mel and I can’t make earfilters possible by ourselves because we’re both too busy with other things, so this is where a community effort might come in handy. I’d love to see a bunch of people working to make earfilters – affordable, portable devices with an audio input and a headphone output and ton of helpful, user-programmable algorithms running in between – a reality. So making this an open hardware, open software project seems like the way forward.

I’ve registered earfilter.org and will set up a wiki there shortly. It will be a place that people can post their filter chains (from Wavelab, Audacity, etc), links to useful plug-ins, suggestions for hardware architecture, and anything else that’s relevant.

* * *

*It turns out there actually is a company manufacturing what they call Earglasses, a kind of latter-day ear trumpet. Whaddya know. Their engineering reminds me of Big Ears, which I’ve known about ever since I took up the dubious habit of reading Canford Audio catalogues as a teenager. (Actually, I learned a lot from those catalogues – and from CA’s competitors’ catalogues – which included pinouts, specs, regulations, construction diagrams and all sorts of other nutritious information for enquiring minds.)

**Mel’s post was, of course, not just about hearing. I’ve focused on that aspect of it here because of the earfilter.org idea, which I wanted to let the world know about. Mel’s underlying point is about communication, and I couldn’t agree with her more: any barrier to communication or comprehension can be frustrating. One of the greatest joys, for me, of living in the information age, is that we’re better placed than any previous generation to reduce or eliminate those barriers. Another great joy is that there are so many people working passionately and enthusiastically to do just that.

Thinking along these lines yesterday, I realised that several obvious domains for these services could make good use of TLDs other than the usual .com, .org, .net, and so on. Specifically, they could have benefitted from .ly or .ng . So I looked into registering domains with these and discovered that in the first case it wouldn’t be affordable for me and in the second it wouldn’t be straightforward.

.ng is the Nigerian ccTLD, and although there exists a Nigeria Internet Registration Association with a form to help potential registrants register their “domains”, it in fact only allows the registration of subdomains below .com.ng, .edu.ng, .gov.ng, .net.ng and .org.ng . So even if I had the most interesting site in the world, I couldn’t do something cool like host it at http://interesti.ng .

I think that’s a little crazy, because Nigeria could start making quite a healthy income from registrants who would be willing to pay for domains like that.

There’s another snag too: .ng is what’s known as a “closed” ccTLD, meaning that it’s supposed to only be used by organisations based in, or with a presence in, Nigeria. There has been high level criticism of the concept of “closed” ccTLDs for some time now, and I think much of it is valid. After all, what counts as a “presence in Nigeria” – or in any other country, for that matter? The registrar and hosting provider Web4Africa gives some guidance, and so do other sites, but it’s very vague. If I use a DNS server in Nigeria to host my domain, does that count as my having a physical presence there? I think it should, just as if I were renting an office there. But it’s not clear if it does. What is clear is that checking whether or not I have a physical presence in Nigeria is done manually. This means that Nigerian domain registration can’t happen quickly. That in turn means that there won’t be a Nigerian Go Daddy any time soon. Go Daddy is the largest domain registrar in the world by some margin, at the time of writing. It has built its business in large part, if I’m not mistaken, on its ability to perform automated domain registration. This is an opportunity that’s effectively denied to Nigerian registrars because of .ng’s closed status.

I should note at this point that I’m not a fan of all Go Daddy’s moral principles – here’s why – and for this reason, I avoid using Go Daddy (currently, I use Dreamhost and 123-reg for domain registration, but there are plenty of other good registrars about). But I do not believe that those ethics were necessary for the success of the business. What was necessary was a legal and technological infrastructure that permitted the automated registration of domains. This, and the ability to register whateveryoulike.ng, is all I am proposing herein that Nigeria should provide.

Another name I had in mind for a web service ended in .ly – the Libyan TLD. Here, the state of affairs is more promising, but still not quite ideal. There seems to be only one .ly registrar with a working web site in English: the intriguingly-named Libyan Spider Network. It seems that I could register whateverIwant.ly without too much trouble. The biggest snag is the price tag: $150 per year (for comparison, a .com typically costs $5-$15 per year). Clearly, what’s needed here is some competition. With a few more registrars in the marketplace, that price would likely fall to something a pauper like me could afford for a fledgling, unfunded web service.

Is there, you ask, a ray of sunshine in the ccTLD domain business? Well, yes. ccTLDs like .us, .uk, .jp, etc, are available through vast numbers of registrars. Competition keeps the prices low and the service reasonable (although there are opportunities to be fleeced if you’re foolish). But there are some great success stories from non-developed economies too. Tuvalu’s .tv ccTLD is wildly popular and widely available. Another island state with a thriving domain name business is São Tomé, whose .st TLD is modestly priced and available through a very efficient-looking site.

These cases highlight the shortcomings of Nigeria’s system. I don’t know why Nigeria doesn’t follow these other countries’ examples, and I wish it would.

Yes, I know what Bertrand Russell thought of those axioms (that they don’t, in fact, characterize the natural numbers), but I also know that Russell was very taken with Peano at a conference in Paris some years later and saw him in a new light. It also seems that Peano did think the axioms characterise the natural numbers. I tend to agree with Russell, but I still find it slightly astonishing that the axioms were numbered. Talk about bootstraps!

¹NB. I don’t have an original copy of FDM to hand; I only have secondary sources that quote it. If they are misquoting, then this post is bunk and those secondary sources slide a little lower in my estimation. If you have a copy of FDM, why not photograph it and put it online for the world to see? These issues need clearing up; foundational maths is still a mess, and the history of foundational maths is even worse.

This sort of comment bothers me for three reasons. One is that it is baldly nonsensical: one must interpret it – with little guidance except one’s own background knowledge and a few of the antagonist’s preceding slip-ups – in order to make sense of it. Another is that it shows a lack of concern about accuracy; a dangerous lack of concern, in fact, for someone who has responsibility for one of Cambridge’s extensive, unique, and breathtakingly expensive digital datasets (furthermore, the scholarly accuracy of the input to the system matters little if your data is being corrupted by both its storage and its delivery mechanisms, which it was being). The third reason, which is the one of greatest personal concern to me, is that somebody like this – and he really is a brilliant scholar – might not be able to use Interpreader. Without people like that using Interpreader, or something like it, the paradigm of keeping annotations private and interpretations informal will remain among at least some of the best (in a traditional sense) scholars. That is not what I want.

My usability hat just swivelled itself onto my head a little more firmly.

* I’ve nothing against bound manuscripts per se, but they are not an efficient means of mass-communication.

And so far, I like it. No horror stories yet

With their boundless energy and enthusiasm (egged on by a few notable supporters), this couple has built a thriving, lively and – crucially – extremely happy community from people with a thoroughly diverse range of backgrounds. It’s a community that has assembled one or two evenings a week, not just to dance, but – and I think this is true for all the community’s members – to receive a dose of Matt & Lotte’s magic brew of humour, motion and music. Why magic? Because the sum is greater than its parts. These simple ingredients, in lesser hands, would not be a recipe for a sense of elation that can last a week (not to mention a sense of, quite honestly, levitation, that can last at least a day).

How does the magic work? It works, as most magic does, by the silent action of an unmentioned thing. In conventional magic, this thing could be a hidden compartment, a card up the sleeve, or a gap in a steel hoop (hope I haven’t spoiled that trick for anybody!). In Matt and Lotte’s case, it’s a deep and abiding combination of optimism, love and insight. They exude a happiness that’s so welcoming it would be impossible (and, in my experience, is impossible) to leave a session with them feeling glum: they bring you into a glorious, shared emotion. This is a potent kind of communication.