Budget 2010: take 2 (IT, Co-ops and Community edition)

June 22nd, 2010 by mjray

I’ve been watching the June budget and pondering its effects on me, our co-op, co-ops in general and the wider community.

IT Taxes
I just want to flag this one up as a special interest: the telephone tax is killed off before it starts. Yippee! But now we get to wait and see how “the government will support private investment” to get universal provision of fast broadband. I’ve no problem with tax relief for the video games industry being scrapped - why should any type of software get special treatment?
VAT up 2.5% to 20% from 4 January 2011
This seems bad for everyone. It’s a bit less bad for our co-op because we have some international suppliers, whose sales tax rates won’t change, but we buy a lot from the UK too and it hurts all our workers.
Personal Taxes
The basic income tax allowance rise of £1,000 is welcome, as is restoring the pension-earnings links. More widely, the freezes in various things, increase in Capital Gains Tax and drop in cider tax all seem broadly good ideas. The housing benefit £400 maximum is a bit mixed - how bad it is may depend how lenders react when borrowers get into difficulty.
Business Taxes
At a time when a VAT increase is called “unavoidable”, it stinks a bit to cut corporation tax, extend the 10% capital gains tax allowance and raise the employers’ National Insurance threshold. Of course, our co-op pays none of those, so it also hurts us by giving our competitors an advantage.
Business Incentives
George Osborne said he wants to tackle regional economic differences, but the big change in this budget is bad for all existing businesses outside London, the South-East and East: National Insurance exemptions for new businesses. Once again, existing co-ops take it in the neck from another government obsessed with capitalism and employment instead of businesses and work. Meanwhile, increasing the Enterprise Finance Guarantee props up debt-laden business and a new Growth Capital Fund encourages capitalist businesses, while both appear useless to good co-ops at first glance. I don’t mind being ignored, but could we please elect a government which doesn’t actively hinder co-ops? Where’s the fabled “commitment to fairness”? Promises around the Green Investment Bank and Green Deal sound good, but are in the future.
Council Tax
Council Tax will be frozen for a year. I wonder if that applies to parish councils, because our village planned a cut after a one-year project-based increase last year. The Budget Document has pretty much no detail.

So, how was it for you? Have I missed some friendly changes?

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Enemies of Digital Economy Workers: the TUC

March 30th, 2010 by mjray

The Trade Union Congress’s chief executive recently came out in the crazy position of sharing a platform with the British Phonographic Industry (and why are they still relevant? What is the market share of phonographs now?) and supporting the much-hated Digital Britain guilty-without-trial “three strikes” disconnect measures.

Yes, you read that right: the TUC’s chief exec wants digital economy workers to be arbitrarily disconnectable in response to allegations of file-sharing by large competitors. If I’m being charitable, I think he was duped.

That stupid article was in response to yet another set of filesharing-will-fankle-us scare figures which carefully only included “the creative industries most impacted by piracy” (see second paragraph of introduction). See pages 12 and 14 of the full report to note that businesses that don’t depend on profit from copyright licensing were not even included!

So, these are not the creative industries. They are the KEA and WIPO definitions of copyright industries. Of course they are hurt by copyright infringement and have little to lose from over-zealous copyright laws, but they are not the creative industries.

I contacted the TUC to basically ask why they were so against digital economy workers in this way. I received an anonymous answer from “TUC Information Services” that was almost helpful:

“The current policy of the TUC on this issue was decided at our annual congress last autumn.” and directing me to Composite Motions 18 and 19 (PDF) and the verbatim report of the conference (PDF) pp. 107-9

Composite Motion 18 seems largely innocent. In fact, its call for social inclusion, a Universal Service Obligation and digital inclusion could be seen as an instruction to oppose non-judicial three-strikes, because allowing so-called “Kangkaroo” courts run by private-sector transnationals to decide who may use the internet is basically incompatible with inclusion and universal service.

The NUJ-supported Composite Motion 19 is the dangerous one and I’m alarmed that the claims around piracy are completely without evidence or justification in the verbatim report of the conference. Were references supplied, or does the TUC adopt positions based solely on reference-free argument?

How does the TUC reconcile contradictory motions for inclusion and universal service and for exclusion through private courts?

Their answer?

“The TUC does not, as a rule, enter into correspondence with individual union members [...]“

Oh great(!) You are in a maze of twisted union organisations and none of the ones which are screwing things up are accountable to you.

Thankfully, I have happier Digital Britain news from another source which I should write about soon.

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Home Access Scheme or Hope Abandoned to Scandal?

January 25th, 2010 by mjray

After its puff by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in newspapers and his podcast (mp3 file link) I’ve had a few people asking about the Home Access Scheme where families apply for a package from a closed list of six suppliers of new PCs, software and internet access. No Free and Open Source Software, no recycled PCs, no greener options, no community networking, the minimum amount of memory for the bundled software and it looks like no mix-and-match to get the best fit, as noted by Watfordgap.

Broadly, I agree with Ian Cuddy (of #ukgovoss fame) that the scheme is one in a long line that Does Not Compute and I’m very disappointed that Cooperative Party MP and Schools Minister Ed Balls is so supportive of it. It does nothing to help cooperatively-developed Free and Open Source Software. If anything, it’s a market distortion that will hinder development.

Even worse during this debt crisis, Becta ignored warnings about the costs from Mark Taylor and others who have been fighting the brave fight with ukgov FOSS adoption recently. Home laptops increase achievement (apparently) by derek.wenmoth suggests that educators are not particularly convinced that this is a good thing, either.

In reply to such criticisms, Becta’s HomeAccess homepage has one of their executive directors commenting:

“Recent evidence suggests that young people with a computer at home could get a B, rather than a D, at GCSE.”

Well yes, they could, but they could get a D rather than a B too. What’s the context for that quote? Where’s the link to the evidence? Or should we just believe him because he wears a jacket and smiles?

So, where does this leave us? There’s no funding for councils to promote the £300m #homeaccess
scheme to residents. [PDF] Can anyone rescue any crumbs of comfort from this basket case for me, please?

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Do you think Directgov Delivers?

December 15th, 2009 by mjray

Directgov is the Government’s official website for the general public. As both a member of the public and a parish councillor, I use it fairly often to look things up. Sometimes it’s surprisingly good, but much of the time, it’s a frustrating page-hunt and leaves me going around in circles, or directs me off to irrelevant pages on other ukgov websites.

Consumer Focus has done a bit of testing and produced a discussion paper posted as a blog which they’re inviting people to comment on, to sign up for possible workshops and to keep in touch with their campaign for improvement. Open source service improvement?

I think both software.coop and thephone.coop might have something to contribute, as member-led communications co-ops, so I’ll see how I can promote it to them.

I’ll also be watching with interest and see if I can find some lessons to be learned for the NSomersetLINk trying to get involved with local health and social information services.

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PDF: how can we avoid over-using Pretty Difficult Files for citizens?

November 11th, 2009 by mjray

With the more political/government side of my work for our co-op, I often send emails like this:

“Please can you resend the information as plain text, ISO OpenDocument, html, PDF or something else standardised? OpenOffice.org can load most Microsoft Office and save as ISO OpenDocument and PDFs. If you’re stuck with Microsoft Word or some other uncooperative Windows software, you can get a free and fun print-to-PDF add-on from pdfforge.org and a choice of free and fast PDF viewers from pdfreaders.org.”

I emphasise PDF because it is pretty easy to generate from lots of software, but this is very much a last resort. It’s almost always better to have the original data in a simpler format, or as a web page. At least then it has some structure beyond simple presentation.

I hadn’t realised this was a general problem with governments until I saw PDFs are bad for open government, says Sunlight Foundation in US on Free our Data blog last week. Should I change my request to emphasise the original data files?

At our village council, we’re only just starting to get files electronically instead of on paper. Is there a useful practical guide I can give to our officers and reporting members to help us get it right from the start? They’re using the spread of systems and software typical of a council with no specialist IT officer. I’ve not found a guide when I’ve been looking, so I’d appreciate any pointers.

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Betting on British Broadband Bugfixing

October 5th, 2009 by mjray

High-speed internet links are something that makes FOSS development much easier, but I’m still having reliability problems with my ADSL. A fringe benefit of moving to a more open Linux-based router is that I can see what’s going wrong in more detail. But now I have to gamble nearly two hundred pounds in order to get the service providers to continue trying to find the bug! Sorry for the length, but let me explain how bad broadband in rural England is just now…

Outside the big cities with their cable networks, Company A owns the lines, Company B provides the services and we buy those services from reseller Company C. Sometimes the same company is A and B or B and C, but never all three. Most of the companies who are B won’t be C themselves - in other words, they don’t sell retail, but they nearly always seem to have a main or preferred retail partner.

Company A is nearly always OpenReach, part of BT Group, the telephone monopoly privatised back in the 1980s but still somehow keeping its landline monopoly. Why is that allowed?

Company C has been The Phone Co-op for me for the last few years. Back in February, I changed how I bought my services, combining phone and broadband into one purchase. They’d been two purchases mainly because I switched my ADSL from Pipex to the co-op at a different time to switching my line to them. As I understand it, this change had the side effect of changing Company B from OpenReach to Opal Telecom. Opal are the provider business behind TalkTalk, hardest to use Broadband ISP 2009.

Since the change, I’ve been suffering unexplained disconnections, especially in the early evenings and at weekends. I’m pretty sure it’s Opal’s equipment to blame for two reasons:-

Firstly, this wasn’t happening until Opal became Company B, while Companies A and C are the same as before (when I had a stable but unspectacular 4Mbps connection).

Secondly, since changing my router, I can see LCP TermReq being sent by Opal’s PPP peers. Opal insist their equipment isn’t sending TermReq messages. My Netgear router disagrees, but I can’t seem to get anyone to take its pppd debug logs seriously.

So, I’ve complained to my supplier (Company C), they’ve pretty straightforwardly passed it to Company B and I’ve jumped through all the bloody silly hoops like using only wired connections to the router (yay, wires across the house), plugging the router into different phone sockets (yay, more wires across the house) and disconnecting everything from the phone sockets so Company A can run some voltage test (yay, uncontactability - just as well other software.coop workers can cover for me).

Now the next step is for some phone engineer to call. For this to happen, I have to agree that I will pay GBP 164 if a fault is found on my phone network instead of theirs. If I don’t, they will give up trying to find the fault.

I don’t really see why this is necessary: surely if there was a line fault, it would have shown itself on the old service? Also, the router says the line has no fault and the SNR and Attenuation are both fine but not great. Unlike most people, I’ve already had my house phone network tested with professional equipment (yay for network engineers in the co-op trying to avoid the painful state of British broadband bugfixing), but I’m still left betting hundreds of pounds on the phone engineers not pointing the finger at my network. What choice do I have?

I’ve read elsewhere about people giving up on ADSL and switching to mobile internet because then they have only one company to deal with. I can see some attraction in that, but I live in a village with poor mobile service and I suspect the forthcoming T-Mobile/Orange and T-Mobile/Three link-ups will soon make that less straightforward too. A confusopoly is probably more profitable to telephone companies.

Do most people bet a couple of hundred pounds to get their broadband fixed? How many broadband faults get ignored at that point? Why don’t the retail company Cs have access to enough Company B systems to lead the fault-finding instead of only being able to pass it on to people who seem to give replies that contradict the logs and won’t talk directly to customers? Is fixing this A-B-C three-companies-pass-the-buck system a necessity for Digital Britain? Why isn’t the government intervening to end the OpenReach monopoly outside the big cities?

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Avon and Somerset Police’s Worrying Approach to High-Tech Crime

August 27th, 2009 by mjray

Last week, I wondered about Green or Pirate Party Membership and got some good comments. Thanks to all for those. There seemed a slim leaning towards the Greens and a good point made that “Pirate Party” is a very bad name in a coastal area like mine. I’ve ranted before about the abuse of “piracy” to mean “unauthorised copying”.

This week, Lord Mandelson forced three-strikes up the priorities (something we avoided in parliament, except for the KangKaroo Court ISP). Please go answer the consultation if you haven’t already and make some comments against increasing the already-unfair and excessive influence of foreign media corporations on UK law enforcement.

On that theme, the BBC reported on Somerset’s own excessive filesharing arrest. Over seven hours detainment without a phone call for suspicion of breach of the Copyright and Patents Act - how is that reasonable?

One interesting phrase in the report:

“the downloading of any copyrighted item, without the owners consent, was a crimnal offence and not a civil one …first I knew of it!”

I’ve encountered everything from disbelief to outright abuse when I’ve told people about this. Did you know copyright and trademark infringements are criminal offences these days?

Finally, why is it that the Federation Against Copyright Theft (urgh, another abused word) can get Avon and Somerset Police to work for them, but when my co-op reports a high-tech crime to ASPolice, we don’t even get a reply? Wouldn’t the population prefer the police to raid spammers and attackers?

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Green or Pirate Party Membership?

August 20th, 2009 by mjray

Cooperators are spoiled for choice in the UK because all the major parties say nice things about cooperatives and there’s even the Cooperative Party, but a lot of us who take a sharing view to software (usually Free and Open Source Software) are concerned by the attitudes of the Top Three Parties towards copyright and related rights. Generally, these seem to have been hostile to sharing and the creative commonwealth, focusing on punishing people for unauthorised copying.

The Green Parties have been fantastic, as far as I’ve seen. When I spoke at the “Resisting corporate monopolies and new enclosures” workshop in the European Social Forum 2004 in London, their Laurence Vandewalle spoke in the same session, as shown in the mugshots.

One relatively new party is the Pirate Party UK, who are hoping for similar success to the similar party in Sweden that has two MEPs now.

Some have questioned their attitude to copyright and how it would affect FOSS. They’ve posted an article where rms talks to the Pirate Party UK to try to clarify it.

At the moment, I’m an independent councillor. I have no particular objection to joining a party - I just haven’t yet. I think the current protectionist pro-WIPO stance of the Big Three means I won’t join them yet. Do you think I should consider GPEW or PPUK?

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Hello world!

August 12th, 2009 by mjray

Welcome to UKGovOSS - Open Source Government Community. This is my first post. I’ll fill it out Real Soon Now

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