It’s fifteen years since CERN announced that web code was in the public domain

Tim Berners-Lee has talked on the BBC news site about the way things could go in future, and I managed 4 mins on BBC Radio 5 Live talking about why the Web matters…

Pakistan is blocking YouTube because the site, a bastion of free expression, mashups, flexible attitudes to copyright and many other fine things - including me with Gu Pots on my head - contains material that is  “blasphemous” and  considered offensive to Islam.

It is yet another example of the way in which the world is dividing between those cultures and countries that are able to accept the existence of values that diverge from those they espouse and those which would like to remove all, those which are open and those which are closed.

It’s becoming clear that countries are the unit of network censorship, that the tales we told back in the 90’s about the end of the nation state were foolish dreams.

It’s also becoming clear that there is a price to pay for allowing nation states to assert their borders in cyberspace, a price that may in fact be too great.

Because soon almost all the places on the Internet where I spend my time and meet my friends will be off-limits in those countries, and I can’t help thinking that is a very bad state of affairs.

I was distraught when Drakes bike shop on Hills Road closed as I’d been buying cycles there for over twenty years, and I had always found them reliable, reassuring and efficient. Fortunately I’ve found an alternative - Blazing Saddles on Cherry Hinton Road.

And they are wonderful….last Friday I was cycling in to the railway station on my way to London when I finally accepted that the poor brakes I’d been putting up with for a few months had reached the end of the line. Since I was planning to take my bike with me - it’s the easiest way to get to and from City University - and didn’t want to end up under a bus outside King’s Cross I popped into Blazing Saddles intending to buy new brake blocks and do the repair on the train.

The owner took one look at the bike, advised me that I needed a new cable too and when I asked if there was any possibility of doing it for me took pity on me and sent me to a nearby cafe for a quick coffee while he did the job in 15 minutes. He even pumped up the tyres and refused to take extra for the job.

So I’m alive, my students are happy and I think they are wonderful. Next time you need your bike serviced, it’s the place to go.

I was pleased to be asked to speak at the launch of Demos’ new report on personal information on Friday.  The report’s authors, Peter Bradwell and Niamh Gallagher, gave a solid introduction to the issues and then Information Commissioner Richard Thomas, comedian Natalie Haynes and I got to respond.  You can download the report from the Demos website, and it’s well worth reading the whole thing.

These are the notes I spoke from, slightly tidied up.

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I have a passport again, having lost my old one somewhere between Cambridge, Leicester and Corby on a trip last month.  The old one has been cancelled, so nobody pretending to be me will be leaving the country on it - and I suspect that it’s actually somewhere completely unexpected in the house and will turn up in a year or two.

But it meant I spent nearly a month without papers, or rather without the means to leave the country, and I hadn’t realised how much it disturbed me until the new documentation arrived.

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One of the best things about working for the World Service is that you get to meet interesting and cool people from all over the world - as you might expect.

One of the nicest is Simon Morton, who was over from New Zealand and worked as a producer on Digital Planet - he was up for anything, and we even got him to have an RFID chip inserted in his arm for a piece (though we covered his bar bill for the club in Barcelona that did it to him).

He’s now back in NZ, where he presents a weekly show called This Way Up, a two-hour programme which explores the stories and issues around things we use and consume, including technology.

I’ve done bits and pieces for them before, but now we’ve started a semi-regular slot where Simon and I chat about the big tech stories of the moment - starting this weekend with a conversation that covers AllofMP3.com’s rebirth, the damage to Microsoft’s reputation done by the failure of the Windows Genuine Advantage servers and the failure of the Australian government to offer a working porn filter to its citizenry. I suspect the last one was particularly entertaining for the New Zealand audience…

The many and various efforts made to unlock the iPhone, documented around the Web - here at the BBC, over there at Ed Felten’s blog, seem to miss a crucial point. Whether or not George Hotz,  iphonesimfree  and UniquePhones manage to achieve their goal, or even  to commercialise the service in the face of  nastygrams from AT&T, there is no real point to the exercise other than a demonstration - yet again - that software locks are always breakable.

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I’m running the online presence for this year’s Cambridge Film Festival so activity here will be light until the 16th - check out the festival website, the Flickr feed and the YouTube channel for more stuff…

A couple of weeks ago I recorded an edition of ‘A Good Read’, a programme on BBC Radio 4 in which host Sue MacGregor and two guests discuss three books, one chose by each of them.   It was a lot of fun, and worked well despite the fact that I’d chosen the hardcore cyberpunk of Neuromancer while Sue picked an Anne Tyler novel and Jean Seaton, the third member of the group, had gone for Penelope Lively.

You can hear the result on the BBC website (at least for a few days) and I’ll grab an MP3 of the programme for longer-term reference.

My MacBook has died on me (update: and now it’s fixed. Logic board problem, got it back from the Apple Store in London on the 14th) I opened it up when I came downstairs on Saturday morning and it was frozen, trapped in stasis instead of downloading emails or telling me what my FaceBook friends were up to.

I rebooted, restarted email, and it froze again.

I rebooted. It froze, this time during startup.

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