A bit of light humor today from BBC’s comedy, Mrs Brown’s Boys.
..and I thought I was stressed!
Taylor Jones’s Free Album Love2Dream Available For Download
The artist Taylor Jones (check here and here for featured articles) has released his first EP which is available for FREE from his website! (http://www.taylorjonesmusic.co.uk/)
Help support young artists by downloading and sharing their materials, and sharing the link through your Twitter and Facebook feeds. 🙂
Investigation: Is it legal to jailbreak a UK iPhone?
Earlier this week, the Library of Congress in the United States ruled that it’s entirely legal to jailbreak your iPhone. But what about the UK? Is it legal for us Brits to jailbreak our iPhones?
An investigation by Duncan Geere
Since the device’s earliest days, users who chafed at Apple’s draconian device restrictions have hacked their handsets to enable extra functionality, like access to 3rd party app stores with content that Apple refused to approve. Apple had claimed the process was illegal under copyright law.
But now an exemption has been created in the US that allows the legal breaking of DRM for: “Computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute software applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications, when they have been lawfully obtained, with computer programs on the telephone handset.”
The US Copyright Office explained the ruling by adding: “The user is not engaging in any commercial exploitation of the firmware. At least not when the jail-breaking is done for the user’s own private use of the device.”
Apple, for its part, has sniffily responded to Cult of Mac, saying: “Apple’s goal has always been to insure that our customers have a great experience with their iPhone and we know that jailbreaking can severely degrade the experience. As we’ve said before, the vast majority of customers do not jailbreak their iPhones as this can violate the warranty and can cause the iPhone to become unstable and not work reliably.”
So what about Britain? Over here we have a far more tangled set of rules and regulations, thanks to the intervention of the European Union. The relevant EU directive essentially says that breaking “technical protection” (i.e. DRM) on software is fine, as long as you’re not doing it for the purposes of infringing copyright (i.e. playing pirated games).
But that’s Europe. In the UK, we have to ratify all of these EU directives before they become law, so the British lawmakers transposed the EU directive into British law, in the “Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003“. That says essentially the same thing — that it’s okay to break these “technical measures” for interoperability reasons, but not for the purposes of infringing copyright.
The difficult bit comes when you try and interpret “interoperability”. I spoke to Andres Guadamuz, a lecturer in IT law at the University of Edinburgh, who pointed out that there haven’t been any test cases to set any legal precedent in the UK.
While there have been two cases of a ruling against people selling the tools to hack videogame consoles, these were predicated on the basis that the primary motivation to do so is to play pirated games. A similar, more recent, ruling outlawed so-called “R4 cards” in Britain, which are frequently used to play pirated Nintendo DS games.
But while piracy can be accomplished by jailbreaking an iPhone, the majority of people don’t jailbreak for that reason. They jailbreak so they can get access to software created by third parties that Apple hasn’t, or won’t, put in its own app store. They jailbreak so they get more access to the device’s hardware, and use it in different ways. They jailbreak because they don’t want Apple’s controlling hands on everything that they do on their device.
That’s where the interoperability aspect of the law comes in. “The interoperation is between (third party) software and the iPhone’s hardware,” says Guadamuz. That’s the very argument that the US bought into when it was ruled acceptable, and while US law doesn’t set legal precedence in Britain, there have been a few cases of complex technical software law where US rulings could have been said to have influenced the result.
Guadamuz added the example of a company who reverse-engineered their competitors’ products, breaking “technical measures” in the process, being found not guilty of copyright infringement because they didn’t copy the code verbatim into their products. Unfortunately, Guadamuz said, they also copied several pages of their competitors product manuals, so they were found guilty of that instead.
So while the matter can’t be totally settled until there’s a test case — something Apple has long avoided — Guadamuz says he’d be very surprised if hacker went down for jailbreaking an iPhone. “Although you might be breaking Apple’s terms and conditions and voiding your warranty, I just can’t see how a judge would rule against it.”
(wired.co.uk)
Signs That Don’t Make Sense
Happy New Year everybody!
Thank you all for the support and the messages through Twitter – please keep them coming, as I thoroughly enjoy replying to them! 🙂
For the first post of the year, I’d like someone to please explain this sign to me.
I can’t be the only person to think that the M.E.N Arena didn’t quite think things through..
The Liebster Blog Awards
Chunkee2na has kindly nominated Thursday Night Rants for the the Liebster Blog Award.
The Liebster blog award is for websites with a following of less than 200 people, and is used to highlight to best start-up sites on the web.
The award has most definitely been accepted. I’m going to nominate three new blogs which you should all definitely check out!
1) MozBAR – An amazing blog featuring just about everything! A really good read to pass to the time. Everything is well written, detailed and entertaining.
2) Classroom as Microcosm – An educational, frequently updated blog that delves into the life of a modern English teacher. From teaching techniques to the problems teachers are forced to face; it can all be found here.
3) Ande Ke Funde – This guy’s knowledge and understanding of the world itself is amazing. For any philosophical , religious or existentialistic reads, you can’t go wrong with Ande’s blog.
Check these websites out, and feel free to comment on their posts!
Sexualisation Of Children – Who Is To Blame? (Via The Guardian)
Music, magazines or merchandise? Tell us who you think bears most responsibility for exposing children to sexualised images
Are children too exposed to overtly sexualised images? Flesh and flirting are cheap but ever more common currencies with which to try to flog anything from push-up bras to magazines. It’s an easy decision to make a quick buck, but far harder to question the ethics of feeding children’s natural curiosity for things that make them feel grown up, a curiosity that is instinctively moderated by attentive parents.
Celebrity and entertainment arguably have more responsibility than retailers for desensitising parents to the sexualisation of music, magazines, television and merchandise, and perhaps our own benchmarks have shifted as a consequence.
There is an understandable tendency to reject any attempt to restrict or impede our access to content, or even our experience of access to that content. But it is not about prudishness, English sexual inhibition orcensorship. It’s about sensitivity, restoring some level of dignity, of rationality, and a space where the images of women that children see every day are not semi-naked or prone.
In Hamley’s not so long ago I was horrified to see the role-playing toyssection: the boys’ shelf has a doctor’s kit and a builder’s kit while the girls’ shelf had what I can best describe as a Paris Hilton kit, with a tiara, mobile phone and stilettos. If we set our children up with such shallow expectations, can we really be surprised when they follow them?
The July edition of GQ is the latest of the mainstream men’s magazines to push the boundaries of acceptability with its choice of cover photo, showing a reclining Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in a slit dress that just about covers her crotch, though not without revealing the inner curve of her buttock. For adult males, that kind of titillation is so commonplace it probably doesn’t even feel like titillation anymore. But it’s not just men’s magazines; I still boycott T3 gadget magazine, which insists on putting a chick in a bikini on the cover with some token gadget. Or is that a token chick? Once when I described Page 3 as “soft porn”, a Sun editor phoned to complain.
Are magazines the biggest culprit or is it the popstars? Have you found bizarrely inappropriate clothing in children’s stores? And what about mainstream TV? Tell us all your horror stories…
ThursdayNightRants Is Back Online
At long last, TNR is finally back online after extensive infer-structural modifications. It took much longer than expected to sort out all of the bugs and technical difficulties but at long last we’re ready for posting to resume!
The updates include;-
- MAJOR updates to the website’s coding – the website will no longer crash at peak times, and all comments will post correctly
- Updated ‘comment’ boxes (like/dislike comment buttons)
- Integration with your own social networking accounts when commenting
- Integrated live chat box
- Posts can instantly be shared with FaceBook, Twitter or by Email
- ‘Like’ buttons have been implemented across the website
- Easy access to TNR’s Twitter page through designated buttons – the blue bird on the right
- Search functionality, allowing readers to browse for selected topics
- Email subscription service; simply click the box on the right-hand column and new posts will be emailed to you
- RSS 2.0 feed integration allowing the site to be accessed from your RSS feeders (accessed at the bottom-left of the website)
- New tags and categories
- Easier navigation around the website
My Twitter account has been full of requests for topics and discussion points since the website has been inactive. I hope to fill some of these over the coming days, so keep checking back for more information!
All of my comments, thoughts and post notifications are available on my Twitter, so please follow for the latest news!
Happy ranting!
GoodReads – Social Networking For Readers
Whilst scrolling through my Twitter account, I found that a blogger that I follow (@ToolsRoomKnight – MozBar) had been using a service which I never knew existed. Entitled ‘Goodreads,’ this new social networking site is the first that I’ve seen which is dedicated to literature; users are able to rate books, share their opinions and ideas, and check the reading lists of other people.
The service has a range of new features which I am already finding incredibly useful. Although I have only been using Goodreads for a few days, I have already been drawn to the recommendations section. The website offers you a selection of books that are personally catered to you, according to the books that you have already read and ‘rated’. I was impressed by the results; the literature that Goodreads recommended for me are books that my English teachers had advised me to purchase, as well as some lesser known novels that I hadn’t heard of. (..but sounded incredibly interesting!) The website’s social network integration with Twitter and Facebook allows friends to be added to a Goodread account. By doing this, you can see what books your peers have been reading, and what books they have been commenting on.
One of the main drawing points is the comments section. Unlike some other social networking sites, the comments posted are meaningful and offer insight on the topic being discussed. As an English Lit. student, I think a resource that allows people to be able to share your thoughts and interpretations on a selected book is highly beneficial.
Hopefully, by making reading ‘fun’ through social networking, more teenagers will feel inspired to delve into literature. Do you feel that a social networking environment would encourage reading and conversations regarding books? Do you feel that this ‘educational’ networking site will become used by the masses like Twitter and Facebook before it?
I’m currently working to set my profile up, and inputting the books that I’ve read in the past few months into my database. Please feel free to add me on Goodread (here), or follow me on Twitter for up to date information on reviews that I’ve published on the platform.
Source: http://www.intech-bb.com
Updates & @ThursNightRants on Twitter!
Some of you may have realised that we have had a slight alteration to the ‘About’ page;
UPDATE: 20/10/11 – As of this week, I am planning on releasing smaller issues that I find interesting throughout the week, with the main discussion topics every Thursday (as per). I hope you enjoy these extra posts! 🙂
As always, there will be information regarding new posts on our Twitter page (@ThursNightRants) which you can follow by clicking the Follow button on the right hand column. Please keep the suggestions and comments coming, as we enjoy reading them immensely!
ThursdayNightRants is to undergo maintenance work this weekend, which could cause the site to go offline for a few hours. Apologies in advance, fellow ranters!
The Thursday Night Rants 