NT Government Refuses To Allow Republication of Hansard

It’s sad but I’m not surprised. Not only does this reinforce that the Government does not want you republishing what they say in Parliament sessions (as per their copyright statement on their web site), but they are not even willing to grant specific rights to specific groups for specific intentions.

From http://tickets.openaustralia.org/browse/OA-237,

from Katherine Szuminska <kat[at]openaustralia.org>
to steve.stokes[at]nt.gov.au
date 6 May 2009 22:18
subject Hansard Copyright request NT
mailed-by openaustralia.org

Hi Steve

I am writing to you from OpenAustralia in your capacity as the contact for the NT Parliamentary Hansard as per http://www.nt.gov.au/lant/hansard/hansard.shtml

We are a group of volunteers who run a website, http://www.openaustralia.org which republishes the Hansard from Federal Parliament in a user friendly searchable format. We also support email alerts and rss feeds by keyword.

In future, as well as the Senate and the House of Representatives, we’re also intending to republish the State and Territory Parliament Hansards in the same format, making it even easier for all Australians to have access to their elected Representatives and be easily informed of Parliamentary proceedings at all levels.

Specifically in this case we’d like to republish the NT Parliamentary Hansard at www.openaustralia.org

—————————————————————————————————————————————-

On 27 May 2009, at 15:56, Steve Stokes wrote:

Hi Katherine,

Please note that authority has been given for you to link only to our Hansard & Legislation page or more specifically the Parliamentary Record databases on that page as per the Hansard link below. Unfortunately, authorisation has not been given to republish Northern Territory debates in another format.

Should you require any further information, please feel free to contact me.

Regards,

Steven Stokes
Table Office Manager
Chamber Support
Ph: (08) 8946 1447

Bye Bye UNSW Email

No time to discuss the ethical dilemmas or my opinion but I’ve worked out why my UNSW email stopped working. In short UNSW no longer provides students with email accounts. They mealy provide an address (@student.unsw.edu.au) that will redirect any mail to an email address of your choice. No webmail, no POP access, no IMAP access, who knows if they actually store any emails at all. An if you want to send mail from your UNSW email well you cannot if you are not at uni and I don’t even know if you can at uni. But you would need to have access to a computer with a mail program (so don’t bother with the library) and try their SMTP outgoing mail server, I haven’t tested this. Sure you can fake your mail to be sent by your unimail address but this is quite pointless.

All is not lost, CSE students get a CSE email so I can send mail from that account.

Oh and what about zmail you say? Its just a prepackaged Microsoft email thing. ie. its just like all your other service based emails like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail. You just tell the uni servers to forward your mail to Microsoft. All the outgoing and POP/IMAP servers are in the outlook.com and exchangelabs.com and hotmail.com domains (bye bye internet quota, yes the uni now has to (presumably) pay more $$$).

I don’t like this. I’ll post more after the session is over.

COMP3311 – Wk3-4 General Notes

Constraint Checking

If you use the keyword CONSTRAINT, you also need to provide a name for the constraint. However, it is permitted to omit both the keyword CONSTRAINT and the constraint name. In other words constraint definitions can be either

CONSTRAINT constraint_name CHECK ( expression )

or just

CHECK ( expression )

With respect to the expression,

x = NULL --this is always false
x IS NULL --returns true if x is null, and false otherwise

• You should add as many constraints to the database as needed for the data to make sense and is valid. Its probably bad practice to push this off to the application programming level in say PHP. There is probably a lot more to this though.

Queries

Standard paradigm for accessing DB from app.code:

-- establish connection to DBMS
db = dbConnect("dbname=X user=Y passwd=Z");
query = "select a,b from R,S where ... ";
-- invoke query and get handle to result set
results = dbQuery(db, query);
-- for each tuple in result set
while (tuple = dbNext(results)) {
-- process next tuple
process(val(tuple,'a'), val(tuple,'b'));
} dbClose(results);

• The important point here is as much as possibly you should try to grab as much data as you need from one SQL query with one call to the DB. Rather than just grabbing the whole database and getting the parts you need in the rest of your program (eg. PHP). I can see how this method would be tempting, but I can also see that its a bad approach.

Views

create view name as select ...

This makes a “virtual table” called name that you can use in your subsequent SQL queries, but the table will dissapear when the connection is closed (or at least this is when I think it dissapears).

pg_dump

pg_dump dbname > file

This will dump the whole database (in SQL format) to a file. Use -o to ommit the ownership data.

Enforcing Case

SQL is case insensitive, to enforce case use double quotes. eg. select name as “Foo” from bar;

Foreign Keys

Just because an attribute in a foreign key does not automatically imply that it is not null. It may be NULL. If  you want the attribute to never be NULL you must add NOT NULL.

A Quote from Cory Doctorow…

From Cory Doctorow and the start of Little Brother (pg 5).

Finally, let’s look at the moral case. Copying stuff is natural. It’s how we learn (copying our parents and the people around us). My first story, written when I was six, was an excited retelling of Star Wars, which I’d just seen in the theater. Now that the Internet the world’s most efficient copying machine is pretty much everywhere, our copying instinct is just going to play out more and more. There’s no way I can stop my readers, and if I tried, I’d be a hypocrite: when I was 17, I was making mixtapes, photocopying stories, and generally copying in every way I could imagine. If the Internet had been around then, I’d have been using it to copy as much as I possibly could.

There’s no way to stop it, and the people who try end up doing more harm than piracy ever did. The record industry’s ridiculous holy war against filesharers
(more than 20,000 music fans sued and counting!) exemplifies the absurdity of trying to get the foodcoloring out of the swimming pool. If the choice is between allowing copying or being a frothing bully lashing out at anything he can reach, I choose the former.

A Response to the DET Student Laptop Plan after reading the Tender

I recently wrote an article about the Government’s Draft Consultation Paper on “Digital Economy Future Directions”. The paper brought up the concept of “media literacy”. Well as I said this comes with experience and interacting with media. Today (actually a week ago because I took so long to write this post) I have myself learnt something about media literacy. You see there had been a lot of talk about the Government’s plan for laptops in schools in the media. I even commented on this in a post here. What I failed to do was investigate and make judgements properly. I read the news web sites and that was it. But now once I’ve read the governments media release and the actual tender (zip) I get a totally different view of the situation that makes a lot of my previous arguments invalid.

The tender document goes into a lot of detail and explains things a lot better that the other media outlets that I originally got my information from. The document states,

“Typically, DET takes responsibility for the lifecycle of the standard access computers in its system, rather than assigning the machines to individual users. Inevitably, this leads to higher costs, as users feel no particular responsibility for any specific machine. This cannot work for the learning device – the machine will be the responsibility of the student or teacher to whom it is provided, and therefore attractiveness and a sense of ownership are important. In turn, this will only work if the machine provides a compelling ICT experience.”

I find it hard to see how the machine can provide a compelling ICT experience when it is a) locked down in its functionality and ability to install other software (as noted in the tender), and b) DET’s internet access is severely over-regulated. The tender also says,

“For example, it is likely that the machines will need to be turned on and off many times during the school day – so “near instant on” will be a requirement. A student cannot afford to wait several minutes for the device to prepare itself for use – that is to say, DET will require a device that returns itself to a “ready state” within five seconds.”

And then it talks about user security,

“It is very important that possession of the device does not put children or other users at hazard of being a target of theft. To mitigate this risk, the device needs to be locked to the DET network, only allowing access to internet services via DET’s network infrastructure (either from within the school or from any other location). The machine will not work unless the user has a DET username and password.

Vendors are invited to propose additional features that would improve the security of the device, either in hardware or software. These might include, but not be restricted to:

• reporting the device’s identity and use to the DET network when it connects to any network
• the device may be programmed to be unusable after a certain number of off-network sessions (that is, the device needs to authenticate to a DET directory once in every, say, five sessions, with the ability to adjust the grace period for holidays or special cases)”

In my original argument this was one of my main criticisms. But I should understand that there is nothing they can do to prevent theft entirely, and even then some things do fall outside their scope. The above extract from the tender details that low risk can be possible if these measures are built into the hardware, because if not then wiping the hard drive would remove any software protection measures. However it only just occured to me that they may use solid state drives (in fact latter on in the tender it says “The device must have no removable parts, other than the battery”, and then “…DET wishes to move to a fully solid state design…”) which I’m guessing would be difficult to “flash” with new data. This will not eliminate the value of these items to criminals but it would probably decrease enough not to be a big issue.

At the end of the day they will need to provide some backdoor to flash the device. If you secure the machine so much that other operating systems cannot be installed, what if there is a virus or whatnot that renders them useless. They would be foolish to provide no means to flash the machines.

All extracts and quotes have been used in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) for the purposes of criticism, review and the reporting of news.

My Set of HSC Study Notes

This is old news but I’ve been meaning to write at least something about it.When I did my HSC back in 2007 I found that there were no comprehensive notes for my subjects that suited me. That’s no surprise to me, in fact I think most people would find that they to have not found a set of notes that already exists and suits them perfectly. So I wrote my own. I used as many different and variety of sources that I could find and I merged these together into a set of notes that I could understand and reread if I ever forgot.

I made them available here, http://andrew.harvey4.googlepages.com/.

Initially I released them as “all rights reserved”, with a disclaimer allowing reproduction for non-commercial use. Since then I’ve licensed them under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.

One thing I did when I was studying and writing my notes was to build upon the works of others. However this was difficult with the current copyright laws and the licensing of most of the material I used. So I had to change it enough to be new works that were not derivatives. Hopefully under this licensing of my notes I will save some others the trouble and allow them to take works that already exist such as my notes and change them or take extracts or add to them to produce and publish a set of study notes that suite their needs, without the need to be breaking the law and risk legal threats.

The license is one thing, but it’s still hard to add to my notes to make your own derivative version if I only supplied a PDF version. So to fix this problem I’ve released the source document (Microsoft Word, sorry but this is what I started it in) so that anyone can easily build upon my work.

Out of all the rights that the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) grants me, there are at least two that I think all copyright owners should not waiver (most of the time). Those being two moral rights from the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) (part IX, division 2-3), the right of attribution of authorship, and the right not to have authorship of a work falsely attributed. I agree these should definitely be part of the act I’m glad they were recently added.

FairPay

Many have suggested it in the past, many are currently doing this, but its really struck me now. What I’m talking about is a system where the content industry (by this I mean industries that develop products that can be distributed in digital format, which are conventionally protected by copyright laws, mainly the products, software, books, motion pictures and music.) allows consumers the freedom to legally download, redistribute, remix, share and so forth content. Say either an individual author, or songwriter/singer/band or a cooperate company that produces films, imagine if all their content was free to the world – For one this would probably open up whole new methods and technologies for distribution and staring of content, methods that aren’t always in strife with big companies and their lawyers trying to sue you.

This model would allow both the poor and the rich access to the same content giving them both the choice of how much or how little they want to pay. There would be very little piracy where a third party takes consumers money, as sane people would access content using the unregulated free, or very cheap methods of distribution that would presumably come with this model.

So how would all this be paid for? A donation. Consumers of the content could donate as little or as much money as they want to the creator. If they just watched a film but they thought it was terrible they may choose to pay nothing; if they loved it they may pay more than what the provider may have traditionally been willing to sell it for. Now wouldn’t this be a great society? It gives consumers the power and freedom, not the corporations.

One down side I see is that big corporations may abuse the system. Though allowing the payment process to be transparent when requested could help solve this.

What separates digital content, or “intellectual property”is that you are always taking copies. When you download an audio track you are not demolishing the number of audio tracks there are available to be distributed. Ignoring the distribution costs once you have produced say a film it costs you nothing to give it to the whole world, whereas its costs you more than nothing to distribute the whole world with TVs when you only have one. I say “ignoring the distribution costs” because use of P2P technologies reduce the cost to zero.

I would have no problem with giving an amount of money that I can afford and I think is reasonable to the creator. If anything it would increase the amount of money I give to content creators. For example I may want to see a particular film that is available for $30 on DVD. I think that is too much, so currently the creator gets nothing from me. If the FairPay model I’ve proposed here was in place, I would watch the film and if I liked it I would at least give more that $0 which is what they are currently getting from me.

This is not such a radical idea. The other day there was a story on a current affairs program where a restaurant is allowing customers to choose how much they wish to pay for their meal. SBS’s Insight ran a program about illegal downloading of music on Tuesday, 3 Jun 08 which gave another example of this model;

“SAM McLEAN: …One of the great models that have come out of bands is Radiohead’s model of releasing their music for free and saying, “Look, pay us what you think it’s worth,” and they made tonnes more money off that.
JENNY BROCKIE: They made a lot more money from that than anything else they’ve done.“
–http://news.sbs.com.au/insight/episode/index/id/19#transcript

Sure there are probably a lot of problems with this model that I have not thought of, I have not given it full consideration though it certainly deserves it.

I’m sure this is probably a very controversial idea. It certainly appears to be a great model for both consumers and society as a whole. So I hope in the future more and more creators explore this idea, and I hope I get a chance to try it out.

UPDATE: Just to clarify, I am in no way saying this should be compulsory. I am mealy expressing that I wish people and the majority of content creators used a method of distribution more along these lines. It is in my view a plasible solution to copyright infringment and piracy.

HSC Exam Scripts and the FOI Act

In the past week (more like a month now) or so I’ve had a few requests asking me how I got access to my exam scripts (i.e. my exam responses) and how they (having just completed their HSC) could access theirs. In light of this I thought I would explain why I think exam scripts should be accessible to the student.

About a year ago I made a request for my HSC examination scripts under the Freedom of Information Act 1989 (NSW). The process for submitting a FOI request is documented by the Board here. I was granted copies of these documents[my exam scripts]. In the past people have requested things such as raw marks, I did request those too but that was denied for me. You should note that the Board may or may not grant access to these documents in the future.

Now to why I think students should have access to their scripts, which is mainly because it makes the whole process more transparent (even US President Obama is pressing this with his recent FOIA memo). There should be nothing to hide, students should be able to check what they wrote in the exam. They should be able to publish this along with how their response was marked so that it can be scrutinised and studied by future students. I’m not convinced that this is the best study approach in the long term but that is no excuse for disallowing access to scripts. It would also be great if students could also find out how their questions were marked on a question by question basis.

However I can see reasons why the Board would not want to release exam scripts. It is time and money consuming. Even if the process is automated it still costs money and some time. For this I would accept why the Board would charge a reasonable fee for giving you your scripts.

The Board of Studies is doing the right thing here, they did allow my FOI request so I cannot argue that they are hiding them. Kudos to them for this. I hope two things to happen now, more people become aware that they can get their scripts, and the Board continuing to allow these requests.

Board of Studies NSW and their Syllabi Copyright License

In the past month or two I’ve been watching and listening some of Lawrence Lessig’s presentations and I’ve got his books on my reading list. I could do a lot of blogging on those topics but I wanted to focus on one particular thing. As I was reading Code v2 it lead me to think about a copyright issue that is close to me. It deals with the fact that the Board of Studies NSW, a government organisation copyrights (with a very restrictive license) its syllabi. These syllabi document what students should learn as part of their secondary state education HSC courses. These syllabi are material that students use as part of their study.

For the purposes of review here is the license that the syllabi are provided under,

“© 2002 Copyright Board of Studies NSW for and on behalf of the Crown in right of the State of New South Wales.

This document contains Material prepared by the Board of Studies NSW for and on behalf of the State of New South Wales. The Material is protected by Crown copyright.

All rights reserved. No part of the Material may be reproduced in Australia or in any other country by any process, electronic or otherwise, in any material form or transmitted to any other person or stored electronically in any form without the prior written permission of the Board of Studies NSW, except as permitted by the Copyright Act 1968. School students in NSW and teachers in schools in NSW may copy reasonable portions of the Material for the purposes of bona fide research or study. Teachers in schools in NSW may make multiple copies, where appropriate, of sections of the HSC papers for classroom use under the provisions of the school’s Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) licence.

When you access the Material you agree:

• to use the Material for information purposes only
• to reproduce a single copy for personal bona fide study use only and not to reproduce any major extract or the entire Material without the prior permission of the Board of Studies NSW
• to acknowledge that the Material is provided by the Board of Studies NSW
• not to make any charge for providing the Material or any part of the Material to another person or in any way make commercial use of the Material without the prior written consent of the Board of Studies NSW and payment of the appropriate copyright fee
• to include this copyright notice in any copy made
• not to modify the Material or any part of the Material without the express prior written permission of the Board of Studies NSW.”

Board of Studies NSW

In my opinion this is absurd! This is depriving students access of material that they require for their studies. This is not a private education institution, this is a government public education system. Students need to know what to study, this document tells students what to study, and as this document is not distributed to students (as in students are not provided a hard copy) the only way they can access it is to copy it, but apparently this is illegal!

The above license does give some rights to school students in NSW (“School students in NSW and teachers in schools in NSW may copy reasonable portions of the Material for the purposes of bona fide research or study.”), but why only school students in NSW, what about publishers who are providing material to help students in their studies (for example an annotated copy)? Also why limit the amount students can copy to “reasonable portions”? So basically students cannot make whole copies of this document to aid in their studies!

Also why can’t anyone remix the document adding their own annotations or commentary and then publish this? And why only for “personal” use? What if I want to provide a remixed copy to anyone who wants it? If the Board is worried that someone may change the document then republish it and someone mistakes this as an official version, then they should not worry. People are not stupid they know that if they want to ensure the reliability of the document they will go to the source. This is not a valid reason for refusing copying of the document.

These documents should be licensed more freely. They should be in-near public domain allowing anyone to do whatever they want with it. I say “near public domain” because I can understand the Board wanting attribution. But apart from that I don’t see any other legal constraint that needs to be placed on these documents. Board of Studies, please consider a license such as the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.

I welcome comments on this matter.

A Response to Terence Tao’s “An airport-inspired puzzle”

In Terence Tao’s latest post he poses three questions. Here are my solutions.

Suppose you are trying to get from one end A of a terminal to the other end B.  (For simplicity, assume the terminal is a one-dimensional line segment.)  Some portions of the terminal have moving walkways (in both directions); other portions do not.  Your walking speed is a constant v, but while on a walkway, it is boosted by the speed u of the walkway for a net speed of v+u.  (Obviously, one would only take those walkway that are going in the direction one wishes to travel in.)  Your objective is to get from A to B in the shortest time possible.

1. Suppose you need to pause for some period of time, say to tie your shoe.  Is it more efficient to do so while on a walkway, or off the walkway?  Assume the period of time required is the same in both cases.
2. Suppose you have a limited amount of energy available to run and increase your speed to a higher quantity v’ (or v’+u, if you are on a walkway).  Is it more efficient to run while on a walkway, or off the walkway?  Assume that the energy expenditure is the same in both cases.
3. Do the answers to the above questions change if one takes into account the effects of special relativity?  (This is of course an academic question rather than a practical one.)

Source: Terence Tao, http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2008/12/09/an-airport-inspired-puzzle/

Q1.

After just thinking about it without any mathematics I was not to sure so I used a mathematical approach. The first thing I did was to draw a diagram,

Admittedly, I did simplify the problem in my diagram, however I am confident that this will not affect the final answer. (How do I prove this? I don’t know.) Along with this diagram I also had to define some things in terms of variables.

As shown in the diagram, A is the starting point, B is the ending point, C is an arbitrary point in between which separates the escalator section from the non-escalator sections.

Let,
t = time it takes to tie shoe lace
v = walking speed
u = escalator speed
= time it takes to get from A to C
= time it takes to get from C to B
= time it takes to get from A to B

We also know, .

Now lets consider two scenarios. Scenario A, the person ties their shoe lace in the non-escalator section. Scenario B, the person ties their shoe lace in the escalator section.

Scenario A:

Scenario B:

Now let

I shall now make some reasonable assumptions (also formalising things a bit more),

All variables are real, and we shall assume that the person has time to tie their shoe lace while on the escalator. I.e.

I shall denote to be from scenario A and to be from scenario B. Now to see which is larger or we can examine the sign of . If it is positive then , if it is negative then .

By some algebra and as ,  . Hence . Therefore it would be more efficient pause for a moment while on an escalator walkway.\

Q2.

I will take a similar approach for Q2, examining the two cases and then comparing the resultant time.

(I’ll re-edit the post when I get around to working out the solution)