Wikileaks in England

A recent article does a good job explaining and analyzing (sorry, analysing) a court decision in England forcing the Guardian to take down documents that exposed Barclays’s (is that the right possessive form?) tax evasion techniques.  The Guardian was also not allowed to link to Wikileaks, which still had the documents posted.

By the way, my Barclays bank account is run out of the Isle of Man because I’m an “international student.”  Which is annoying – the fact that Barclays only had one processing center for thousands and thousands of international students meant that it took almost three months for my full bank account in the UK to be set up.

Getting back to the main point, this has shades of the Bank Julius Baer case from about a year ago, where a US District Court in CA tried to force Wikileaks’s domain registrar to “lock” the domain name.  After about a week, the judge turned around and lifted his injunction.  He admitted he was wrong in his preliminary decision, and also admitted that his attempt to shut down the site really only garnered a lot of publicity.

One more side note:  If I was an IP law professor at Cambridge writing an exam right now that needed a breach of confidence question on it, I would totally write one involving something like the Guardian situation.  Maybe throw in something about what happens when a commentator on an article in a different UK newspaper mentions that the documents can be found on Wikileaks (when the article presumably can’t say it itself).  Just saying…

Willey's Slide Report

On Wednesday, I went up to New Hampshire to do the Willey's Slide ice climb with Daddy. We left Westborough around 9, so by the time we were ready to start walking in it must have been around 1. On the way up, the car went over 250,000 miles. Once we actually got to the parking lot, it was pretty muddy (since it was a warm day -- the high must have been near 50), which made packing the gear difficult. It also took a while to figure out exactly which gear we would use.

We had about four harnesses with us, and only two had adjustable leg loops (which we wanted). One was normal, one was a Mammut "sitzgurt" harness from the early 90s that had an interesting buckle system. I thought I was a harness expert, but I couldn't figure it out. Subsequent online research shows that it was probably a "click buckle", but I couldn't make it feel very secure, and I also couldn't make it stay tight (even that picture doesn't really explain exactly how it should work). Daddy said that when he used the harness it would just spontaneously fall off. So I ended up just using a nonadjustable leg loop harness that kind of squeezed, but wasn't too bad.

Daddy also had to adjust my crampons to fit back on my boots.



Once we figured all that out, we started hiking in. My pack felt REALLY heavy (but Daddy had all the gear and the rope). We did it without crampons, and there were sections that were kind of icy/tricky, but it wasn't too bad. We made it to the railroad tracks about 2/3rds of the way up, and took photos ... and I made a panorama photo:





Then we made it up to the base, and started getting ready. There was one other party one the right hand side of the climb, but we were going up the more central/left hand section, so that wasn't really a problem. The first pitch, which was still in the sun, was pretty snowy and went pretty quickly, but the ice was also super slushy and so a little insecure. Daddy said there was really hard ice a few inches below the slushy stuff, but my tools never got down that far.



The second pitch was more of the same, but was a bit more icy and less snowy than the first pitch. The slush made Daddy, who was leading, nervous, and he put in three ice screws (which are a challenge fore me to get out).

By the time we started the third pitch, though, the sun had gone behind the ridge, and we were in the shade (it still wasn't that cold at the belays, though). The ice got a lot harder and more brittle, and Daddy led the crux "bulge" pitch -- but I don't think it was as tricky for him as the second pitch. I followed it without too many issues.



The fourth and final pitch was a full rope length, but not too bad. I did get some ice sort of kicked down on me by both Daddy and the other party, who were slightly ahead of us and moving to their left (the whole thing narrows at the top so we were converging), but nothing too major. I finished that one too, but on the easier sections where I was standing upright, I kept running out of breath. (In the end, I ended up crawling up quite a lot of the climb.)



So that was the end of the climb itself! We ate some M&Ms and I took pictures of the climb, and tried to do another panorama (it didn't come out that wide):





Then it was time for the actual descent, which was the hard part. The descent was a trail in the woods that ran parallel to the climb, and was pretty much at the same angle as the climb ... but you go down it unroped. It was pretty snowy, with only a few icy sections, but it was still very tough for me. So I ended up downclimbing a lot of it. Like, facing in. It took a while. But we still made it down to the packs marginally faster than we made it up. From there, the rest of the descent route (that we had already hiked up on the way in) wasn't too bad -- much less steep, and still easier, even though I was wearing a pack for this part. I strayed from the trail a few times because it was so packed down, and I was tired, which wasn't very LNT of me.

Then we went to North Conway for Daddy to pick up some stuff for his crampons he had ordered at IME. On his way out of the store, multiple old people started yelling at him -- two people he knew (Henry Barber and Alan, a guide) had seen him, and both were trying to say hi at the same time. So Daddy was befuddled.

Then we had dinner at some "brew pub" that Daddy likes to go to. I really liked my dinner: It was chicken, with some sort of teriyaki sauce, and bacon, and mango-pineapple salsa on a bulky roll. It was really good. Especially the mango-pineapple salsa. The waitress that brought us our food was a different one than who took our order, and tried to guess which one of us had which meal, and tried to give me the dainty little wrap that Daddy ordered. Wrong!

Then we had to drive to Westborough. Daddy got a phone message from Harry asking if he wanted to go to MR tonight (Harry didn't know Daddy was in NH), and Daddy did mention that we could get to MR in time for the last hour, but that wasn't happening. So we drove all the way back to Westborough.

So the day was good, I guess, but it was too much work carrying stuff up, and getting myself up the climb, and then getting myself down the climb.

English Judges

First of all, I’m not posting this at a bizarrely early/late hour of the morning.  I’m back in the US, and the blog is still on England time (to keep things relatively simple).

Second, on the way to the airport, Nick and I were listening to some BBC radio station in the car, and the DJ mentioned a recent court decision in the UK that found a cyclist in an accident was contributorily negligent for not wearing a helmet.  Or, actually, that cyclist was not negligent, but the court said that it would be possible for there to be contributory negligence in that situation.  I don’t want to get into the merits of that decision, but instead point out that the DJ then interviewed a fairly high-profile UK judge from the Court of Appeals to get his take on things:  The Right Honourable Lord Justice Jacob (I want to be a judge in England to get a name like that).

I just thought it was really interesting that this relatively high-profile judge made random radio appearances to talk about recently decided cases, and no one made a big deal about it (although this wasn’t one he decided or anything).  In the US, the high-profile judges definitely like to try and remain super cloistered, and people do make big deals when they agree to be interviewed.  So that was an interesting thing I learned about England!

Oh, and going back to an earlier post, here is Abbey Road on Street View:

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A Recap

Krissy, summarizing my blog so far:

what were you complaining about????? everything. cold, hungry, tired, plane seats, rental cars, mud, dirty pants, luggage, carry-on luggage, nick's finger getting in the way of the door, parsnips.

While I’m mentioning her, here’s a picture of Krissy and baby Mario from Sunday:

Oh, and I did Willey's Slide today … but that will be its own separate post later.

IP Enclosure

There was a good book review in the Boston Globe yesterday about a few recent books that have come out that address the increasingly heavy protections that IP law provides.  The article itself is good, and the books it mentions look interesting too.

Hmm, maybe I’d buy the books if I had a Kindle…

What are your theories?

So what do we think that this Conficker Worm is going to do?  Theories?  Apparently, it’s set to activate on April 1st.  Exciting!

Meanwhile, this is actually just the sort of thing that Jonathan Zittrain has been fussing about for years.

At the moment, though, the worst thing a virus could possibly do to me would be to mess up my music.  After spending days going down this path trying to get Windows, Windows Media Player, and iTunes to agree on how many songs I had, where they were, and whether they would play, I finally seem to have got it more-or-less lined up today.  Now WMP and iTunes are in agreement.  Windows used to be in agreement, too, but new searches are giving the wrong number of files – but I think they’re just cached from earlier.  I hope.  But this is my big accomplishment of spring break so far.

One More Thing

It pains me to write this, but if you’re having trouble viewing the Street View shots in the last post, try them in Firefox instead – that seems to be working better.  On the other hand, though, IE8 was released, like, two hours ago – I haven’t installed that yet, but maybe it will work better.

StreetView in England

It looks like Google Street View finally came out in England!  It took a while, because things had to be worked out with the “Information Commissioner’s Office,” which required blurring of faces and license plates (which Google software appears to be doing automatically).  Blurring wasn’t initially done in the US (although it is now).  I find it interesting that the UK, capital of CCTV, was one of the stroppiest countries about Street View.

Some images!:

Cambridge

Malting House:

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Darwin:

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Cambridge Market:

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World's Most Crowded Grocery Store (Sainsbury's in Cambridge):

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Oxford

WEPO Compound:

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Exeter:

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Magdalen (where we stayed for the OUMC Ball on Saturday):

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University Parks:

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Iffley and the four minute mile track:

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London

Nick's Flat in Orpington (above "Andrew Reeves"):

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Mile End (as close as you can get; blue building through the trees):

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Westway Entrance:

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Westway's climbing wall is in the puffy white marshmellow tent in the middle of the roundabout (with a fake outdoor woodie visible outside):

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Highly exciting! I'm sure if you're interested you can poke around and find all sorts of famous stuff in there yourself.

Following Up on Nerd News

So, the first thing to know is that I’m trying typing this in a new program (Windows Live Writer), so if this looks weird that’s why.

The second thing to know is that I’m back from England for three weeks.  I’m mostly around Westborough/Boston, but may be doing some ice climbing in NH and/or rock climbing at the Red River Gorge while I’m here.

Finally, I’ve seen some articles recently that relate to previous posts.  This NYT article mentions wireless power.  According to the article, wireless power is already here!  Except with kind of a huge caveat.  Devices with coils can be charged from pads with coils which are plugged into the wall.  The problem is, it appears that each device, at the moment, needs its own pad.  So instead of having a bunch of devices plugged in all over the place, you just have a bunch of pads plugged in all over the place (possibly with devices sitting on them that will be easy to knock over).  So at the moment I think we need to do some more work before wireless power starts to have a point.

Additionally, Eugene sent me this article in response to this.  The most interesting thing, I think, is going to be what happens if new gTLDs are introduced.  It may solve problems when, say, multiple users have legitimate claims to the same domain name (i.e., who should get aa.com?  American Airlines?  Automobile Association (English thing)?  Alcoholics Anonymous?), but may also lead to more cybersquatting issues and also more YouTube/Utube problems (for that story, see this JOLT article that I worked on last year).

P.S.:  For anyone who asks themselves “what sort of nitwit would possibly try to spell YouTube as Utube?” like we all did when we were working on the article, Nick is exhibit A.  He does that all the time.  Or at least he used to, before I started making fun of him for it.

Catch-22

First of all, I'm reading Catch-22.

Second, at Mile End last night, Nick and I were doing two boulder problems and trying to figure out when the volumes were on and when they weren't. On one boulder problem, it was kind of obvious from context that one of the volumes wasn't on, and on another in the same spot, it was obvious from context that the same volume was. But both routes had the same set of "instructions" that were hopelessly vague about what to do with the volumes.

So Nick said, "I decide about volumes based on the character of the problem. If using the volume is in the character of the problem, I use it. I said, "What if the character of the problem is 'bad'?"

Nick's response was that, well, if the character of the problem is "bad," and using the volume would make it better, well then, I guess you can't use the volume.

Visiting Southern Sandstone

This afternoon, Nick and I, and three of our friends, went climbing at Bowles, a sandstone rock outcrop near his house in Kent.

On the way, we stopped at Harrison's Rocks, but that was all still completely soaking wet, so after walking in and back out, we drove on to Bowles.

Bowles was interesting. The crags are at the side of a paved road that leads to a general activity center, which also has indoor swimming pools (which you can see into from the crag), ski slopes, etc. The rock is a super-soft sandstone (and sandstone is a very soft rock generally), and has been climbed on, historically, a lot -- so there are very deep rope grooves at the tops of a lot of the climbs. You can only toprope there, because any trad gear that was fallen on would definitely just break the rock around it. And you're not supposed to lower or even hang around very much to avoid making things any worse (instead, you have to top out and walk off). The rock is very sandy, too (apparently this is particularly pronounced in winter), so you get kind of a gritty feeling that somewhat decreases friction on slopers. But, at the same time, the rock itself, sans sand, is very grippy. It's like Fontainebleau rock -- without the polish from the pof. In fact, this made it clear to me exactly how bad pof is for the rock, because you could see how nice unpoffed sandstone is to climb on.

So, by the time we got to Bowles for the afternoon, we had time to climb about five routes. My favorite, by far, was an English 5a called Pig's Nose. It was a really nice arete climb with a small roof at the top. Great holds. The only issue came when it was time to top out -- that was a little tricky/beached whale-y.

We left around 5:15. There was probably still enough light to have climbed for half an hour or 45 more minutes, but it was getting cold quickly. On the way back, we passed an inn with the following sign, punctuated and emphasized in the following way:

"VILLAGE INN and food" with rooms

I was unclear on what, exactly, the quotes, capital letters, and italics were all trying to imply. But I enjoyed the sign anyways.

In other news, I'm on the waitlist for HLS housing next year. This is going to be so bad.

Printing Privileges

At Williams, we got free printing. At Oxford, we got free printing at the Williams house and pay-for printing at Exeter ... but we were given 20 pounds of print credit/term, so you had essentially free printing unless you abused it. At Harvard, we got pay-for printing ... but again we were given $50 of print credit/semester, so once again we got free printing. Not so at Cambridge. At both Darwin and the Law Faculty, there is pay-for printing, and there is no credit. I haven't had to print much yet, but because we can't use computers on our exams, I am going to need to do a major printing session at the end of the year in order to get everything I need.

Now, if this meant that everyone was highly respectful with their use of paper and printouts at Cambridge, I would find this acceptable. The thing is, though, the law faculty has committed the worst. paper. abuse. EVER! They appear to have sent out a survey soliciting feedback on the LL.M. program to all the LL.M.s. There are ~125 of us. They put all these surveys into envelopes with our name specifically on them, and sent them out to us. Now, what they wanted us to do was to fill out one page of information generally, and an additional page for each of the four classes we were taking, out of the 39 classes total. Rather than sending us each a total of 5 pages, though they sent us each a total of 40. Single-sided. They sent us pages for all 39 of the classes, rather than just the 4 we were taking. Thereby wasting ~4375 pieces of paper. And nevermind the fact that they could have easily sent this out online, cut down a lot of administration costs, probably gotten a higher rate of response, and saved another 625 sheets. As well as 250 envelopes.

And they can't give us free printing because we'd abuse our printing privileges?

Quirky England...

...and Scotland.

Yesterday I went to a slideshow that a couple people from CUMC put on. One guy talked about his experience climbing the Nose last summer. Most of it was predictable but I did learn one thing I didn't know -- apparently some people take duct tape up the climb and tape over sharp edges that might damage ropes. Sounds like Changing Corners is practically covered in "gaffa" tape. That was news to me!

But the other guy talked about his experiences climbing in the Northwest Highlands of Scotland, and the most interesting thing he spoke about, which kind of sums up the whole of climbing in the UK, was "Fuselage Gully." See, apparently, an army training plane crashed into this gully in the 1950s, and because it is so remote, they never got the fuselage out. Instead, when you do the climb, you just climb through the plane remains, Lost-style. Very British.

The other England quirk I came across was the "Listening Ears" in Kent which tried to "listen" for approaching planes before radar was invented. I suspect that future societies will find those way more confusing than Stonehenge.

Twittering as Nika

I don't have a Twitter account yet, and I'm not imminently about to set one up, but I've been noting how many people are Twittering with their real name, or at least pretty obvious iterations of it. And I recently read this, which notes how more and more people are starting to use their real names to communicate online. And so that started me thinking about situations where someone "steals" someone else's name -- particularly where the stolen name is not completely generic (like "Nick Brown") and is either pretty uncommon, or else totally unique.

If someone steals someone else's name to use for, say, a blog authorship name or a twitter account, there are three obvious things they might do.

First, they might actually use the account to pretend that they really are the person whose name they are using. For example, a girl at Nick's work shares her name with a radio DJ and opened a Twitter account last week. Meanwhile, many people have assumed she is impersonating the DJ and have sent her messages telling her not to. So, if she had actually stolen the name and purposely impersonated the DJ, that would fit into my first situation, and it would be pretty easy to stop this through legal means.

Second, they might use the account to parody or mock or just-pretend-they-are-someone-while-making-it-obvious-they're-not. Like the (now defunct) Real Steve Jobs. This is a little bit murky in some situations, but can often be at least colorable fair use. Again, there is a legal solution/legal precedent.

Third, though, they might use the account to simply sit on the name until someone comes along willing to pay for it. So, my question/wonder for this post is, does this violate cybersquatting laws? It's not actually a domain name -- and in a world of search engines, it is far, far more important than a domain name. If someone is sitting on the Twitter account with my unique name when I go to sign up, do I have any legal recourse against them? Because now that people are moving away from anonymity online, I feel like this might become a much bigger problem. With blogs from mainstream blogging services, with Twitter, etc. Thoughts?

Latest Peak District Adventures

On Saturday, Nick and I went to the Peak District with two other Cambridge students, Paul and Eddie. We were psyched, because the weather was forecast to be good, and it was looking pretty clear when we were driving out of Cambridge at 8, and even clearer by 8:30 or 9. Plus, it was forecast to have less than 40% "cloud cover" in the Peak District during the day. And 0.0mm of rain. And a "UV Index" of 4. (I asked Nick how high the UV Index went up to, and he claimed that it went up to 11. But I've never seen it above about 5 or 6, I don't think.)

When we got to Curbar, though, it was actively raining. It was very light, but enough to soak everything. So we milled for a bit, and then decided to go for a walk. It was pretty good. We walked somewhere between 4 and 6 miles, and I hardly got wet at all, because the rain was so light. The trails were kind of tricky despite being not particularly steep because they were extremely muddy. This was exacerbated by the fact that they were mountain bike trails (which is how Nick knew them). We saw a few people on mountain bikes, and Paul and Eddie had fun quizzing Nick about mountain biking generally.

By about 1, though, the rain seemed to have permanently stopped, and so we started looking at some of the rocks around us to see if they were going to dry. By about 2, it was clear that the rocks were drying. So from there, we hiked back in the general direction of the car, and got to the car by 2:30. By 3, we were back at Curbar, and we were climbing by 3:30. On the way back to the car, though, now that things were clearing, I took the opportunity to use my newfound ability to make panoramic photos to get a few more.





Once we got to the crag, the first climb we did was a Joe Brown HVS 5b called Baron's Wall. It was good, with a crux right off the ground. Nick took a couple tries to do the starting moves, but then went up relatively quickly (with just a little bit of squawking at the topout). So I was glad he was able to go right up that without a warmup. I did one false start, too, and then followed him up.

Then, we did a VS 4c called Wall Climb. This was an okay route, but wet. When I got squawky following Nick up it, Nick said "yeah, it didn't look wet from the ground." I said "This didn't look wet?!?!" and he said "I guess I didn't look very hard." I did it but I was glad I didn't lead it because of the wetness.

Then, the boondoggling started. We decided that I would try to lead Calver Wall, a VS 4b in the guidebook. It was easy climbing up to a ledge, and then no more than about 10 feet of a "perfect hand jam crack" to the top that was the business. So I went up to the ledge, put in lots of gear, and started up the crack. I thought that it wouldn't be too bad because there were also horizontals near it, so I thought it would kind of be like a Gunks-style crack. But the horizontals were slopier than the ones in the Gunks, and after I got up just a little bit, I got nervous and climbed back down to the ledge (which was kind of tricky). At that point, after lots of hemming and hawing, I decided to downclimb all the way down and have Nick lead it instead. (Don't forget I had hiked like six miles that morning!!)

So Nick led it fine. He said my gear was more-or-less good (or at least the cams were -- when he was taking up rope at the top the nuts popped out almost immediately with no help, so it wasn't a problem that I didn't have the nut tool). But he agreed that the crack actually was quite hard. He got to the same spot in it that I did, and then actually downclimbed back to the ledge because the next piece he wanted was placed at the ledge. But he agreed that the downclimb was quite tricky, and he did look sketechy on that.

I followed it fine, but I still think it was kind of hard for a VS 4b in the Peak District, and Nick agreed. So that made me feel a little bit better. At that point, our good pace was pretty much stopped, and the sun was getting a lot closer to sunset, so we headed back to the car.

Then on the way back, we stopped at a grocery store so that I could wash my hands before dinner (because I was going to mutiny if I couldn't). Meanwhile, Nick, Paul, and Eddie investigated the store, and decided that the prices for everything were much cheaper than they were back in Cambridge and Orpington. So they started buying all kinds of six-packs of Pepsi and four-packs of chocolate-covered donuts which were then dipped into chocolate sprinkles. And then Nick found the beer -- they had some kind of good beer on sale for L1/bottle (and they were large bottles). So Nick and Paul both wanted to get a 12-pack set of these, because you could buy one sort of wrapped in plastic (although you could also just buy them individually, I think). So to get at the actual 12-pack packages, all three of them had to dismantle the beer display and then reassemble it (since the wrapped packages were several layers down).

Then we ate dinner at a "chippy" -- a fish & chips shop. I got a chicken thing and "chips," and it was good, but pretty greasy. And too big; I couldn't finish it. Even though I gave Nick my tomatoes.

So that was good, and it was extra good that we did get at least a few routes in.

Today we went to Nick's parents' house for lunch, because "Auntie Bernice" was visiting. She was nice. We had roast chicken, which was good. There were issues, though, when I was serving myself vegetables because Nick's mom had put the "roast potatoes" in the same serving bowl as the parsnips, and even though they were kind of separated in the bowl, I unknowingly took a parsnip. Nick then warned me that I had a parsnip, and I went "eww." Everyone else thought it was funny that Nick warned me, but he explained that he didn't want me to make a horrible face when I went to bite it. So Auntie Bernice volunteered to take my accidental parsnip. So that was good; I took a second roast potato instead.

Then Nick and I got into the sewing I needed to do. I managed to sew a button onto my coat and a pompom onto my boot without much trouble at all -- they stuck. Meanwhile, though, the pair of pants that I had warn to the Peak District on Saturday had a growing hole in the butt (I first noticed it at Mile End). So Nick's mom and dad brought out a whole assortment of iron-on patches, and eventually found one that was big enough and managed to stick. So she attached that, and then took out the sewing machine to reinforce some seams and to make sure the patch stayed on. It came out very nice and neat (even though the pants themselves were still muddy from Friday's walk). So that was pretty good.

Nick and I made belated "Pancake Day" pancakes back in Cambridge tonight. Well, actually, Nick was fully in charge of that. But that was good too. So those were my weekend adventures.