Both of them made mention of my paella (I note with sadness that only one was interested in the actual recipe however). Now this was a tremendous paella, there’s no doubt about that, but I suspect that there may be a few people out there that don’t want to know about my lunch and so I am going to highlight here an easy solution to the problem: separate RSS feeds.

I have the blog set up so that you can grab individual automated RSS feeds and so avoid having every post appear if you subscribe. I will stick the links below so at least people have an option. Of course, if you want to continue to know a little too much about my life, feel free to stick with the main RSS feed. I don’t mind in the slightest.

• Main blog feed
• Internet feed (includes all ICANN, IGF and Nominet stories)
• ICANN feed
• IGF feed
• Nominet feed
• iPod feed
• Journalism feed
• Oxford feed
• Photos feed
• Podcast feed
• Sex.com feed
• Technology feed
• WSIS feed

You can subscribe to as many or as few as you like.

Hy heart leapt as I started reading: “Staff at a computer store in Oxford have been accused of failing to diagnose basic computer problems and overcharging for repairs.”

The PC World branch in Botley Road misdiagnosed a computer with a loose cable as having a corrupted hard disk – and quoted £300 for a repair, according to the consumer organisation Which?

“Staff from its magazine Computing Which? anonymously visited 20 computer stores – including seven PC World stores and 13 independent outlets…”

My experiences with PC World on Botley Road have been so infuriating I actually wrote a Technobile for The Guardian about it in which I ranted: “There is one vital rule to entering such a store: never, under any circumstances, ask a question. The answer will be 30% repetition, 30% wild conjecture and 40% utter gibberish.”

To be fair to PC World in Oxford, they have been much better of late. They replaced an external hard drive for me with no fuss at all. And the technical guy was bordering on friendly. Maybe I feel better about it because I now decide before I go exactly what I want and have a rule to never attempt any more than that. Even buying printer paper can sometimes lead off into terrifying tangents.

Here’s a link to the Which? press release on the report.

Last week, Nominet announced that there were six candidates and released a statement from each. Despite the extremely tight time period (for example postal votes have to be with Nominet tomorrow (Monday)), I thought it would be a good idea to do very brief interviews with each candidate asking what I hope are the questions that Nominet members would wish to ask and then post them on the Net to help people arrive at a decision.

So far I have done and edited four of the six, and I have just received an email from Lord Erroll so will hopefully talk to him this evening and post his tonight [Update 8.30pm: Done and now up]. I have yet to hear from Andrew Bennett which is a shame, but if he wants to get in contact and get his points across, there is still time [Another update 12pm: Andrew got in touch and his interview is now also up].

You can read each candidate’s statement here [pdf], but below are MP3s of the interviews. They are slightly different in length but average at around four minutes, and I don’t believe I have given anyone an advantage one way or another, although I may have been a little more aggressive with Fay Howard due to tiredness.

Also during Angus Hanton’s interview either myself or he was called by someone else so there is “call waiting” blip at various points (just in case you were wondering). And Fay Howard was on her mobile so the very beginning is slightly garbled.

In alphabetical order:

• Andrew Bennett (mp3)

• Gordon Dick (mp3)

• Lord Erroll (mp3)

• Peter Gradwell (mp3)

• Angus Hanton (mp3)

• Fay Howard (mp3)

If anyone has any problems getting or listening to these files, please leave a comment below or email me.

Update: Yes, the MP3 player has started playing at odd speeds again. It must be the recorded bitrate, or maybe the fact it’s a variable bitrate. Anyway the files themselves work fine, so click on the MP3 link to listen while I try to sort out the problem.

Second update: No, I’ve wasted 40 minutes on it, so I’ll kill the Flash player until I can get it working without mishap.

A two-page A4 printout covering what is happening locally for the 100 or so other people in my peaceful little corner of the world, hidden from central Oxford thanks to a hideous car park on the way over, but resting neatly and comfortably on the river.

Thanks to the electricity shutdown causing my modem to commit hari-kiri, and me having to do an early morning rush to PC World and rebuild my entire home network, I have only just now got around to reading SENDRA’s September 2006 newsletter.

I get the feeling that the St Ebbe’s resident’s association is rapidly running out of control.

Inasfar as a newsletter for 100 people can run out of control. There is a new sherriff in town, one that is no stranger to residents’ associations, and you suspect there is an agenda at work here, complete with some rigid thinking.

The halycon days

The warning signs were there. When I first moved into my house, the association started up soon after and was just £1 to join. I was happy to pay, and in return got a quarterly digest of what was happening in the area. When the path by the river collapsed and the council steadfastly failed to do anything about it, SENDRA was onto our councillor (also the Mayor), the problem was soon raised, and eventually an agreement to pay for it to be fixed this summer was agreed.

Those, in retrospect, were the glory days. There was one event – a picnic – and everyone was left pretty much alone to get on with their lives.

Somewhere along the line though, there was a coup. Who knows which pleasant, carefree retired lady still bears the scars, but the cost of the new regime became immediately apparent when the demand for the next year suddenly increased to £4. I left the letter on the table for a fortnight, and the next thing I knew there was a knock at the door. It was the enforcer. I should have realised then that the line of not actually bothering me had been crossed. I coughed up because it was only £4.

But this increased budget was suddenly spent on an intelligence operation and law enforcement. Suddenly I, and everyone else, was expected to provide details of my car registration because there had been reports of strangers parking their cars and then heading into town. I didn’t believe it, but you know, best not to question authority in these matters – there was a threat and we needed new legislation to combat it – provide our boys with the tools they needed.

Except for the fact I couldn’t really be bothered to write down my car registration on a piece of paper and then post it through someone’s door when it was my parking spot, my car, and it had been there for two years. That’s when the law turned up. Honestly.

Law enforcement

St Ebbe’s very own El Duce reported the car to the police and a young copper knocked on my door asking if my car was mine. He told me it had been reported as possibly abandoned. I told him who I was, he rang it through and seemed somewhat bemused by the whole thing.

The quarterly newsletters were now monthly, and each one came with an event that you were urged to join – a trip to this museum, a trip to this college. A litter-collecting day. I think there was even a dinner. I have studiously ignored all of this, because my measure of neighbourhood is whether people say hello to you when you stroll past them on the way to the shops.

The enforcement stage is now clearly over. People know who the boss is (except I don’t – the true authority of El Duce is cleverly concealed by other committees over whom El Duce has control). And now the boss has started talking for us all, without the tedious trouble of asking anyone.

Last month’s newsletter informed us that we were all annoyed about the noise that came from the annual Gay Pride event on the large patch of grass directly opposite the river, and about the parking, and that we had complained about it. You rather suspect it wasn’t so much the noise as the people making the noise there were being complained about. The fair appears to have been tolerated.

This month’s newsletter barely contains its fury over the fact that there has been no reply to the stern letter sent to, well, whoever it was sent to. The Secretary is going to ask the Town Hall to discuss the matter, apparently.

Security and stability

There is also the issue of security. There have been two break-ins “recently”, so we are told to keep all our doors and windows locked and to inform the Committee if anything suspicious is noticed. Apparently the first stop for these issues is now the Committee rather than the police – and if you’re in any doubt as to why, the newsletter points out that “the neighbourhood policing plan seems to be on hold and we are trying to contact PC Paul Phillips for the latest news”. You just can’t trust these police, you see? Have to do it yourself.

Third on the agenda is another sub-committee – this one is apparently the Planning Group. There are five members, one of course chosen by the Committee and the others revolving. If you want to become a member, you just have to apply to the Committee and they will help decide if you are suitable.

What is most peculiar about all this though is that the two matters that most concern everyone except the Committee are the river path – which has still not been fixed and which the council is trying to back away from paying for – and the sudden appearance of a small wooden fence at the bottom of the hill leading to the bridge. The sole reason for the fence’s existence is to prevent people from taking a shortcut up the little hill. Why does that matter? No one has any idea, but clearly it is something that is bothering someone who has the ear of the council.

The newsletter finishes off with an outline of future meetings – although it is unclear what exactly what is going to be discussed.

Analogy?

So what has any of this to do with the Internet? Because it is, in effect, the story of oversight of the Internet. I’ve counted eight clear parallels.

Of course, SENDRA can serve a useful purpose – at least it will when it represents the interests of the residents – because there is a much bigger issue coming up. And that is the fact that the council is planning to renovate the entire area, including tearing up the road, adding a whole load of new houses and introducing more shops.

They call it the West End Renovation and where I live people are both excited and wary about it. This part of Oxford is in dire need of transformation, but the plans and designs for that transformation need to be carefully worked on.

And that’s also exactly where we are with the Net at the moment.

Speak leader Mel [tag]Broughton[/tag], who writes emotive and heavily biased accounts of the organisation’s various actions for its website, has been banned from entering Oxford after he was arrested in June for obstructing a highway. A request to lift restrictions on his movements within [tag]Oxford[/tag] was denied by Oxford Magistrates Court at a hearing.

The result has been Speak protesting in London, in Reading, in Melton Mowbray – using whatever tenuous link they can to Oxford University to justify it. Even though the courts have allowed the organisation to protest within Oxford, there is little appetite for it without Broughton’s gifted but frequently bitter and inaccurate oratory.

Speak has apparently held a week of protests for a monkey they have chosen to call George, who they claim was held by Oxford University and was blinded by one of the scientists at the university. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that George even exists outside Speak and Broughton’s imagination, and the details of his treatment appear to have come from the same anonymous source that has in the past provided Speak with many of its wild assertions, usually found to be wrong.

I have followed enough Speak protests so I decided only to see what happened at the one protest scheduled to take place in Oxford itself – the same street where Speak’s angry and disruptive protests last year caused the creation of the Pro-Test movement.

The plan was to meet at the church on Cornmarket St – the pedestrianised road in the centre of town – at midday on Saturday. Unfortunately, and tellingly, it was difficult for any gathering because the main spot had been taken up by some Afro-Carribbean dance troupe.

There were plenty of police though. And, I noted, two plain clothes people on talking terms with the police who are most likely from the private security firm that Oxford University has hired to keep an eye on the protestors, and who Speak complain bitterly about.

Eventually I found the Speak people because they didn’t move on the busy street. Speak claims there was 20 people, following its usual formula of doubling the real number and adding a few for good measure. I only recognised one of them from a previous protest, and the others were largely teenage girls.

They passed out leaflets for about 10 minutes and then vanished. Clearly the police was as surprised as I was because they then set off around Oxford trying to find out if there was a larger group of protestors somewhere. There wasn’t; they’d simply gone.

What was ironic was that the Speak stall, manned by two women at the end of the street, was the smallest of five such stalls. There was the usual bloke who admirably stands there every Saturday in order to educate people about the true nature of Islam. And then a Stop the War stall, plus a new Lebanon/Palestine stall and a Jehovah’s Witness one.

It turns out that the main Speak contingent had decided to set up instead in Summertown, a mile or so north of the city and out of the exclusion zone. The excuse was a company called ISIS Innovations based there that since it markets Oxford University research discoveries, is fair game to Speak.

I also see that Speak is planning another big demo on 21 October, meeting at the Ice Rink near to where I live, five minutes walk out of town. I wonder where they are planning to go from there.

Speak are certainly stubborn although you have to wonder what they hope to achieve. The chance to change minds and influence the building of the animal housing lab in Oxford was lost months ago. I wonder how long Mel Broughton’s refusal to accept he’s been beaten can keep the rest of the organisation together.

What was good though was that Oxford residents in town on Saturday weren’t bothered by the same chanting and aggression that has blighted Cornmarket and Broad Street for so long whenever the animal rights people have rode into town.

In fact, I wasn’t even reminded. I had a vague notion of there being an [tag]OII[/tag] event on [tag]Net governance[/tag] in my home town some time before the first IGF meeting in Athens in late October, but hadn’t picked up a word of it – which is extremely odd since I am only one of about four journalists in the whole world that regularly cover Internet Governance issues.

The reason I haven’t heard is the exact same reason I didn’t hear about it until the day before the last time the OII had exactly the same arrangement (that time for the upcoming Tunisia World Summit). It’s because the OII, for some reason – especially ironic considering the nature of what they cover – is incredibly sniffy.

Only in Oxford.

The OII is seen in Internet circles as a failed UK attempt to gain the kudos picked up by US academic institutions who have carried out intelligent study and review of this revolutionary new medium. Despite bringing in Jonathan [tag]Zittrain[/tag] from Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society for a six-month split shift, and doing everything it can to bring in big speakers like Tim Berners-Lee, the Institute has had absolutely no perceivable impact on Net discussions. And that is despite Nominet being just up the road, Oxford University having some great Net people working for it, and Oxford being full of Internet companies.

The reason for this is the OII’s superior attitude, something that is the antithesis of Net culture. But it continues on, convinced that the Oxford name alone will bring the mountains to Mohammed. Which is a real shame because the potential on this side of the Atlantic for a really good academic body picking apart the Net is enormous.

As it is, despite living in Oxford, having followed Net governance issues for years, and having met several of the main people at the OII, I find out the day before the event that it is happening and am now waiting to see if I am allowed to attend Friday’s session (last year, I was told I wasn’t). If this is my experience, how on earth does the OII expect to get the interaction and credibility it craves when all those people that might attend and spread the word are effectively shuttered out?

Just to check, the middle word of Oxford Internet Institute is “Internet”. The public Thursday meeting will be webcast – that uses the Internet, maybe that’s what they mean.

Update 5pm: The OII has got back to my email requesting they stick me on the list for tomorrow and requesting an invite for the Friday session. I pointed out that I have been writing about Net governance for years for The Times, The Guardian and The Register, and I have been asked to play a formal role at the IGF (what the whole meeting is about) and they should contact Markus Kummer if they want confirmation. The response:

“Thank you for registering for this event, we look forward to welcoming you to the Said Business School. If, at any point, you decide that you will be unable to attend the event please let us know so that we can offer the place to someone else.

“I am unable to confirm your attendance at the Friday event at the minute as numbers are extremely tight. I will get back to you tomorrow.”

It’s not so much the snub (I have to news edit most of tomorrow anyway), but the extraordinary pomposity. There just aren’t that many people out there interested in Net governance. I know because I have been desperately trying to get more people involved (as have many others) for years.

When will the OII learn that elitism on the Internet means irrelevancy?

Update II 10pm: I have received an invite for the Friday session, thanks to one or two people with greater clout than I who read this blog post and interceded on my behalf. Thankyou very much, you know who you are. Although this process has caused me to reflect on what I post on this blog. I’ve always viewed it as a sort of quiet, non-official outlet that may be read but not really taken too seriously.

I had been planning to ask people to get me an invite tomorrow and would have done so in far more diplomatic language than what appears above. And then there was the fact that the New York Times pulled a quote off a blog post of mine last week and stuck it in their story (I subsequently found out this was because they had got the story wrong, and were advised by ICANN’s top PR man to read my blog to get an understanding before speaking to the organisation’s official spokesman. For some reason the NYT then decided to quote me rather than the spokesman).

Maybe I need to start writing two blogs: one professional and one personal.

Anyway, I will hopefully manage to blog about the OII meeting although it is under Chatham House rules, I am told. Which, to my mind, is more fun anyway because you can meld different views into threads without having to go through the formal structure of naming and quoting.

Another update:

The public Thursday debate is available on the OII’s website. As such, I have stuck it below, although you will need a Quicktime plug-in to watch it on this screen.
[mpeg width="320" height="240"]http://webcast.oii.ox.ac.uk/download/oii/20060831_157/20060831_157_small.mp4[/mpeg]

The trip was a pressie for my birthday (12 August) last year. But last year, the weather was poor from early August on, so I intended to wait until summer this year to go. And then of course I got caught up with the book and work and had a last-minute panic when my birthday arrived this year because the voucher is only valid for a year.

Anyway, the balloons go up on the ground just on the other side of the river from my house, so I strolled over there this morning at 6am. The weather looked half-and-half: slightly cloudy but promising. The pilot said we’d be fine for rain and that there was only a slight breeze so it should be a smooth ride and landing.

I don’t have any snaps of putting the balloon up as I was grasping the side of its mouth as cold air was blasted into it to inflate it, and then hot air from the basket burner, which, I can confirm, is bloody hot.

And then take off – which was gloriously smooth. On reflection this was the most exciting part – just rising up from the ground while standing in a wicker basket. Fortunately the wind was blowing in just the right direction so we went directly over Oxford – over the colleges, Bodleian Library, Sheldonian Theatre and so on.

And then out west, almost following Headington Road – over the JR Hospital and catching a glimpse of Headington roundabout which, incredibly, wasn’t absolutely heaving. So you need to get there at 7am if you want to avoid the queues.

And then into Oxfordshire countryside. Over farms – and there are a lot of them, as well as pig, poultry and game bird farms. Past the huge aerial whose name I can’t remember, dipping down, rising up for the M40 and then coming down shortly after in a field with a big bang because we were rapidly creeping up on an oak tree.

The pilot – who had taken to talking to himself in the plural which was a bit odd but who’s to argue when he’s pulling on ropes and firing off jet engines to move us from 2,500 feet to 0 feet in a basket – put us in the ground which sadly we didn’t see as you have to crouch down in the basket and grab hold of ropes – for obvious reasons.

And then deflate the balloon, fold it up, cram it into a huge bag. Winch the basket onto the back of the following truck, add the balloon-in-a-bag, a glass of champagne and then a minibus right back to the start point. We arrived about 9am and I was back at home with a cup of tea by 9.15am.

Cracking trip. Highly recommend it. The take-off and strange calm as you ride the wind, gently drifting over towns and field is exactly as lovely as you imagine. The burners are nowhere near as hot or annoying as I thought they would be. And when they’re not firing there is a serene pleasure in floating above everything, getting a fresh perspective on things down there.

You go faster the higher you go, and tend to “turn right with height”. As you descend you tend to turn left. Pigs hate balloons. And the sheep bunch up and run away from it. We all also live far too close to one another. We must be nuts. Oh, and Oxford is beautiful.

You can book the trips through Virgin Balloon Flights, online at www.virginballoonflights.co.uk.

For the life of me I haven’t been able to figure out why more businesses don’t offer free Net access. It really is a low overhead for something that will get people into the shop and that is always the biggest challenge.

Anyway I noticed a month ago that there were two free [tag]Wi-Fi[/tag] [tag]hotspots[/tag] in [tag]Oxford[/tag] so did some research, tried em out, interviewed the MD of the company behind them and then called up The Cloud and BT and had a chat with them and wrote a story. The Guardian ran with my suggested headline: “A cornish pasty, a coffee and free Wi-Fi please“.

The printed version is cut down from my very cut down version, so I may just stick up my notes because the interview with MyCloud’s CTO was really interesting. As was the chat with Jamie Hind of [tag]Hotspot Solutions[/tag].
For just £25 a month, Hotspot Solutions will check out your property, install the equipment, tell you how to use it and supply support. And that’s it. It’s then up to each individual shop to decide how to offer access and for how long.

This is great news as it means more wireless, free wireless and so competition. I believe that wireless Net access will eventually become free, or effectively free, and that it’s just a matter of how long it takes to get there. Considering that the Internet’s effectiveness grows in direct comparison to how many people can get on it, I also think free wireless access will represent a huge advantage to all those groups, societies and countries that get it first.

So that’s why I was chuffed. Hopefully a load of shop owners will read it or be told about it and realise that there are options beyond BT and T-Mobile installed systems.

There is a report on the Oxford Encaenia ceremony where five protestors were arrested that reads as if there was a riot on Broad St. Part of it reads: “It was at this point that the police moved in attacking people. Five protesters were arrested – all have since been released, but with injuries and extensive bruising from the violence of the police attack.

“One man was attacked by about five police officers and he could be heard screaming in pain. All those arrested were seen being pushed with force against stonewalls; one of the arrested was an elderly woman over 70 years old. Despite her age, the police showed no mercy and she to was badly bruised and thrown around.”

I don’t buy any of this. I turned up outside the Sheldonian at 10.55am in order to make sure a member of the press was there. I wandered around and saw nothing. I went down Catte St, around Radcliffe Square, back up to Broad St, nothing. I then had a coffee at the end of Broad Street until 12pm, before moving down Turl St to see the ceremony, which started at 12.15 or so. Then I immediately walked back around to the Bridge of Sighs where the Speak protestors were, and were being allowed to protest without any harrassment whatsoever.

Now the facts are that five people were arrested and I didn’t see it, but I was almost certainly within hearing shot and all I heard were the usual Speak chants. If there had been a big clash like Speak claims, I’d have heard it and been there like a shot. I have to say as well that I have closely followed five protests now and while the police are certainly not friendly toward Speak, I have yet to see once violent retaliation from the police and I understand they are under orders not to do so.

I don’t buy Speak’s version of events in the slightest – but it does make you wonder why on earth they would want to exaggerate to an untenable degree the situation they were in.

But it gets worse. The next protest on 22 July will apparently be held in memory of “George”. Speak apparently has an inside source that reveals that scientists working with animals are in fact psychopaths that revel in causing pain: “SPEAK has received information from a source working in the Department of Experimental Psychology detailing yet again the appalling abuse being suffered by a primate inside Oxford University. Our source has told us that a macaque monkey was imprisoned for several years and was forced to undergo a variety of experiments that included invasive brain surgery.”

Again I don’t buy it. Speak spent six months protesting about the “Oxford Two” until they were finally told by Oxford University that the two monkeys in question had been put down nearly a decade earlier. The latest “evidence” about George is equally implausible.

“We have been told that the researcher took great satisfaction in detailing the injuries he caused to the monkey he was experimenting on. He told his audience that they had named the monkey ‘George’, and then went on to detail the types of injuries he had personally inflicted on this poor innocent creature. At one point George’s eyes had extensive injuries caused to them, creating lesions for the purpose of the experiment. The account told by the vivisector is even more obscene when one takes into account that the vivisector then started to laugh as he went on with his story…”

It’s like the worst sort of Sun reporting. And there isn’t a shred of evidence that any of it is true. Instead of facts, come wild, free-ranging assertions: “George was almost certainly a wild caught macaque. Once he would have been roaming free in the tundra of Tanzania, or on the sugar plantations of Mauritius or in the jungles of Indonesia and China. He was taken from his homeland and forced to endure the most appalling cruelty. The next time he experienced fresh air, he was blind and tethered. His life ended at the hands of someone who can only be described as a monster; there are no other words to describe such a depraved individual.”

And then more emotive invention: “Vivisectors like to talk about how much they care about the animals they torture and eventually kill. Such pronouncements are just that, these people care about nothing but themselves. George died alone, blind, afraid and imprisoned in a barren cage; a cage hardly big enough for him to stand up in – a far cry from the life he experienced in his homeland: free, jumping from tree to tree, interacting with his own kind. Death was probably the only kind act George had ever received at the hands of his human tormentors.”

How on earth can Speak expect people to take them seriously when they publish such hateful, one-sided and baseless rants and then attempt to use them to corral support for a protest? I’m really surprised. Speak has always been very emotive in its efforts to persuade people to the rightness of its course, but this is just crazy ranting. Speak is beginning to lose the plot.

The [tag]ASA[/tag] received a complaint from [tag]NICE[/tag] saying that the quote – which appears on the front of leaflets the group hands out at protests in Oxford – was taken out of context. The ASA ruled against Speak and also criticised it for its “apparent disregard” of the advertising rules (it failed to respond to the complaint).

I actually went through the Speak leaflet point-by-point [near the bottom] the first time I came across it in five months ago, and called their truncated Rawlins quote “weak” in its justification. The ASA looked further into the issue and found that when Rawlins said that “the animal testing regime… is utterly futile”, he was in fact only referring to animal testing in a very small area (if you really want to know: long-term carcinogenicity studies with known genotoxic compounds or compounds that produced hyperplasia in chronic toxicity tests).

Speak does knowingly and purposefully mislead people with its claims – something that has been widely exposed by the Pro-Test movement – but of course it is defiant, as it always is. A posting on Speak’s website said it “remains unapologetic in reproducing a quote that first appeared in a national daily newspaper and we reserve the right to use the quote in the future”.

The increasingly paranoid Speak has now added NICE and, incredibly, the ASA to its long list of organisations who are involved in some kind of ill-defined conspiracy against it. The post refers to the “tactics of NICE” and how the ASA “rubber-stamped” the complaint which was “so obviously political”.

I have been following this whole saga closely for six months now and frankly the spotlight shone on the organisation in that time has shown it up for little more than a tight-knit group of deluded individuals, fed by bitter fury and characterised by an absolute refusal to listen to reason or argument.

The ASA judgement is just one more nail in Speak’s coffin. If the organisation wishes to do what it claims it does – protect the rights of animals – it has to rethink its entire approach. And that means giving up its reliance on emotive and misleading language and ending its intimidation tactics.

I suspect though that if those elements were pulled out, there wouldn’t be very much left that its current members would want to be a part of.