Mixed Signals

Information wants to be free, said Stuart Brand, adding in a less well reported codicil that it also wants to be expensive.

One of the most expensive bits of free information today has been the identity and nature of a parliamentary question, to be asked in the House of Commons about gagging orders imposed by a court on the Guardian newspaper. Although the Guardian was comprehensively barred from reporting on the question in any way whatsoever - part of a trend towards ever more draconian judgements that prevent people even knowing such orders exist - it did say that the order appeared to contravene the 1689 Bill of Rights. Which is admirably curt on the subject:

"That the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament;"

As the paper put it: "The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret."

The Internet hates secrets. Fortunately, while the Guardian couldn't say anything, other people could get at the parliamentary questions and republish them - and then tell each other about what they'd found. The most notable conduit for this was Twitter, which spread the news each step of the way among its constituency of journalists, social media addicts and, lest we forget, the chap on the Clapham databus. Enough people felt angered by the whole business to push the #trafigura hashtag to the top of the trending topics, thus promoting the name of the company at the heart of the matter.

Over the past 24 hours, the news about the injunction and the injuncted material was more effectively distributed across the planet than any army of PR merchants and marketing gurus could have hoped to have achieved - a slamming wave of ire before which lawyers and judges were entirely helpless. And indeed, hours before the Guardian was due to challenge the injunction in court, the lawyers responsible for gagging Parliament caved in.

It will be a while before the implications of the Trafigura affair are fully absorbed: if nothing else, it will make litigous parties think twice before issuing the sort of absolute injunctions which have been growing in popularity even as their powers to hide from scrutiny have increased.

But there is no doubt that the events of the past day have been profoundly democratic, entirely in keeping with the Bill of Rights' sweeping away of kingly powers and its assertion of the primacy of openness among the governors of the people. In a parallel universe, attempts to muzzle parliament might be seen as treasonable - but while we'll never have libel lawyers hearing the axe being sharpened in the Tower, the end result - a chilling effect on the silencers - is just as welcome, and welcomingly just.

Welcome back my friends to the magnetic machine story that never ends, courtesy of Dublin-based perpetual motion mongers Steorn.

One of my two favourite miraculous organisations — in the company, however unfairly, of xG and its magic morphing wireless broadband — is making noises again and promising great things. In this case, it's "a public display of various Orbo systems" by the end of 2009, with a video stream so that all of us out here in Webland can watch, wonder and then buy a very reasonably priced licence to use the technology.

Ah yes, the technology. You won't be surprised to hear that there's been no further disclosure about what it is and how it works, except that it now includes a "passive magnetic bearing technology, ZeroF". In an interview in Free Energy Times, Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy said that this was necessary because ordinary bearings act as speed bumps due to the "very strong radial forces that change direction in very small angular displacements". I think that means powerful magnets wobbling around a bit, but we'll have to wait and see.

Apparently, every bit of the Orbo perpetual motion over-unity energy-from-nowhere device is explicable by standard physics "except the net result". So far, though, the 'net result' in terms of the failed demo in 2007 and the disbanding of the independent review panel this year — their conclusion: nothing doing — has been thoroughly explicable by standard physics.

Steon has also filed two patents this year, but don't get too excited. One is for measuring energy transfer from an electromagnet to a permanent magnet, and the other is for measuring the torque of a rotating device. In both cases, they're in the class of patent best described as "stark raving obvious" — the latter incredibly so, as Sean appears to have reinvented the optical encoder.

Which leaves yet another intriguing question: if that's their IP, what on earth would they license?

At last, the Amazon Kindle is to launch in the UK - and around a hundred other countries. This ebook reader has attracted a lot of attention in the US, as much for its business model as for its hardware and software (which are on a par with a rather brain-dead smartphone).

That business model has dictated a lot of limitations. Not all content sources can be accessed over the wireless network of the Kindle, which uses a protocol called Whispernet over the Sprint network in the US to support nominally free mobile access. It's only nominally free - in fact, around thirty percent of the revenue from paid content goes to the network - and so what you can do wirelessly is restricted compared to what you can get it when you plug the Kindle in via USB (there's no wi-fi) to another networked PC.

There's no equivalent to the Sprint wireless network outside the US, so the UK Kindle (actually a Kindle 2, which has to be bought from the US) and other international models will use 3G data.

Now, the commerical side of 3G data is fascinating. Which network are they using, we wonder, and how are they going to duplicate the no-subscription model? "It'll use the AT&T Global Network", the PRs assured journalists. "But AT&T doesn't have a network, global or not, in the UK", the journalists replied. "Ah... we'll get back to you on that", said the PRs. Likewise with Amazon execs, who say "You'll have to ask AT&T about that".

So how come Amazon is ready to talk about the launch of the Kindle, but unable to say which essential partners it'll be working with? Not as weird as it sounds: my bet is that it's a matter of press releases. When you're a big company doing something with another big company, you have to make a joint release - or say nothing. That's not just politeness, that's big company rules.

But all releases from big companies have to be written by marketing and approved by upper management. Upper management tend not to approve things until they've fiddled with them, because they have to prove that they're managing upperly. Then the changes go back down to marketing, who have to turn those changes back into some form of language that the rest of the world will understand, and submit the new version back upstairs for the OK. This can take a few iterations before marketing or management get bored, and you can normally tell who surrended by whether the press release makes any sense or not.

That's bad enough when you're doing it by yourself. When the process has to be synchronised between two big companies, it can turn into a rich carnival of madness. When you've got a hundred countries and goodness knows how many mobile operators (AT&T's Global Network, whatever that may be, notwithstanding), you've got a better chance of organising a bank holiday on Mars with Prince Philip and Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo.

Unless you hold a gun to everyone's head, in the nature of a unilaterally declared public deadline. Which, I think, Amazon has just done - quite possibly taking lessons from Apple in the process.

So, we'll have answers to our questions about how you can have a subscriptionless connection to 3G soon enough. And at that point, we can ask the next question. Given that Amazon has promised no roaming charges if you take your Kindle abroad, when will us paying stiffs get the same kindness?

There is one outcome that seems particularly exciting. What if all Kindles worldwide are on American AT&T sims, and the 'no roaming charges' are because all of them are roaming, all the time? There's absolutely no technical reason for that - once you get the other networks to agree to it. If that's the case, then what happens if you extract the sim from the Kindle and shove it in your own phone? A global, free, 3G data sim?

If that's the case, then there's going to be a very lively market indeed in Kindles. Or, as we will get to see them, a rather useful sim in an elaborate, disposable package.

The first international Kindles are due to ship by October 19. Can't wait.

ZDNet UK was at Microsoft's London HQ yesterday, listening to Steve Ballmer talk about Windows 7, Server 2008 R2 and matters appertaining. We weren't allowed to ask questions, although customers in the audience were. They were good questions, too: one of the best was about the complexity of Microsoft's corporate licensing and the unwelcome, inquisatorial habit of Microsoft's auditors in trying to find breaches of fine print. The question got the only spontaneous round of applause of the day, and Ballmer took it seriously.

Which is not to say he actually answered it. He seemed to be saying that simplification is unacceptable because it either increases or decreases cost: if it decreases cost, the shareholders are unhappy, if it increases cost, the customers aren't happy. One might point out that that's not a matter of simplifcation, that's a matter of cost. The questioner didn't actually say that the fine print was there as a deliberate ploy to increase revenue: Ballmer, however, seemed to admit that sometimes, it was.

Make your own mind up. We captured the question and answer on video, or you can read the transcript below.



Questioner: On the subject of licensing, particularly application virtualisation and general virtualisation, some of Microsoft licensing is full of challenging fine print which for some of us is difficult to work our way through, and if I'm brutally honest when we are audited by your esteemed colleagues occasionally they focus on trying to trip us up on the fine print, which we're not trying to do.

I would appreciate your thoughts on simplifying the licensing of applications and the licensing process.

("Hear, hear" - applause)

Ballmer: Think I'll answer after the rousing applause you got.

Let me say something. I don't anticipate a big round of simplifying our licences. I'll explain why in just a minute. It turns out that every time you simplify something, you get rid of something. Usually what we get rid of, somebody has used to keep their prices down. So, I mean this seriously The last round of simplification of licensing we did was six years ago. I can guarantee that the licence we had was simpler when we got done, but it turned out that a lot of the footnotes, a lot of the fine print, a lot of the caveats, were there because someone had used them to reduce their costs.

I'm not sure the goal is... I know that we'd all like the goal to be simplification, but I think the goal is simplification without price increase, and, and, our shareholders would also like it to be simplification without a big price decrease. So what we're really trying to do is help people use the products and use the licences the way we intend.

There may be fine print that's sometimes a gotcha that's deliberate and sometimes there's a gotcha that our people are finding and shouldn't be out hassling about. ah... specific feedback is welcome. Because any time we embark on... and we have looked at it recently. Should we simplify our licensing?

Almost always it comes back to things that people use to reduce their price. Let me give you an example. We have with our SQL server product the ability for customers to licence it per processor, or license it per server and pay CALs. The simplifying thing would be to eliminate one. Of course, why do customers like what we have? They hate what we have. We have two forms. But the customer always finds the approach on which they pay us less money. So if you run a chain of 100 small restaurants, you kinda like this server CAL thing, because it's cheaper per restaurant than the per proc thing. On the other hand, for the guy who wants to build an application that maybe 30,000 people will use in a big company, the per proc thing looks cheap.

And I'm sure we have fine print we don't need. I'm not trying to say we are saints. I am trying to say that if we're doing any kind of simplification we need to be driven by things that customers want us to do as opposed to driven by kind of, ah, the purity of the art of simplification. 'Cos last time we did that, I'd say we succeeded on simplification, and our customer satisfaction numbers plummeted for two and a half years. So. Don't want to do that again.

If people have specific things where you think it is just complicated, or we have provisions that really seem to drive cost that is unnecessary, I encourage you to send me a piece of mail. I deal with the specifics probably better than I deal with the principles, because I feel caught in a bind on the principles, as I just explained.

I'm very pleased to welcome the latest addition to the ZDNet UK stable of bloggers, Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe.

A well-established partnership in IT journalism who have been writing news and features for us for some time, their "500 Words Into The Future" blog will make good use of their experience and insight.

Their particular expertise, honed over many years interrogating senior industry executives and project leaders, lies in an in-depth understanding of the real world enterprise IT and the actual software and hardware engineering behind it. It doesn't hurt that they've been there, done that, making the technology work in practice.

They're particularly known in the industry for spending more time in Redmond, Silicon Valley and all points west than they do in their London HQ, so expect well-informed comment and analysis based on what's actually happening rather than what the marketeers would have us believe.

There may also be some atrocious puns, but Simon and Mary are under strict instructions not to cause actual pain. At least, not to ZDNet UK's readers. Any damage inflicted on vendors is, I'm afraid, regrettable but necessary.