As you know, Bletchley Park is under threat. The iconic site is crumbling and desperately needs the external funding that befits its place in British computing history.

Well, here's your chance to show your support for Bletchley's survival. There's a 10 Downing Street e-petition that needs your name on it. Whether this results in anything worthwhile is another matter, but the mass of names (nearly 8,000 at the time of writing) will definitely say something.

According to the BBC, "NASA hacker" Gary McKinnon has lost his appeal in the House of Lords against extradition to the United States, where he could very well get a life sentence for his hackery.

This is all a very strange - and possibly quite unfair - affair, but the Lords obviously think it's been above board.

Anyway, our man Colin Barker is over at the Lords now, so expect a full story on today's events soon...

UPDATE: Here's that story.

Reading about Cuil, the Google rival launched by ex-Googler Anna Patterson and her husband Tom Costello, I decided to start off my experiment with a search for my name. Call me egotistical.

The search results are very nicely laid out. However, the reference that actually pertained to me (an ICANN story I'd written) carried someone else's picture, while my picture was attached to a link for a David Meyer at, er, Central Oregon Community College. Most odd.

Now that I've written my straight news story on the BPI's imminent scare campaign against illegal filesharing, I thought I'd vent my spleen on the subject.

What's going to happen is that hundreds of thousands of letters will be sent out, threatening... not much, actually. All the letters will do is annoy people, many of whom will be innocent of the allegations being made against them.

For example, I live in a shared house. My housemate is the account holder on our broadband connection (the non-signatory Be Broadband). Let's say that Be was a signatory, and another of the housemates downloaded or uploaded an album using P2P - account holder housemate would get a letter accusing him of filesharing, despite his innocence. And then, according to the BPI, account holder housemate is supposed to make sure none of the other housemates fileshare. How, exactly?

Or let's say you have a Wi-Fi router using WEP encryption (I know that if you're reading this you're unlikely to be daft enough to rely on WEP, but let's think about the non-techie majority). A neighbour - you don't know who - hacks in and fileshares. And you get a stinky letter. It makes you angry, no?

Other signs that this whole thing has been rather poorly thought out include the following exchange between me and a BPI PR bod today:

Me: So what exactly are the letters going to threaten?

BPI guy: I don't think anyone's going to be threatened. Actually, can I withdraw that? I don't know whats going to be in the letter yet.

Also, tellingly:

BPI guy: The letter doesn't basically say 'we're going to cut you off'. That's not something the ISPs are necessarily minded to say.

So much for 'three strikes', then.

And how about BPI chief Geoff Taylor's pronouncement that "this MOU represents a significant step forward, in that all ISPs now recognise their responsibility to help deal with illegal filesharing"?

Me: That's just not true. Only six ISPs have signed the MOU.

BPI guy: That is perhaps a technical error on our part... we made a genuine mistake there.

Uh-huh. I also asked BPI guy whether customers of an MOU signatory might not just switch to another, smaller provider that had resisted. "That's not a concern from our point of view," he said.

This whole campaign is nothing more than a PR offensive to try scare the public into changing its ways. It's only going to create a massive amount of ill will towards the content industry and the ISPs. It's toothless without new legislation, and even that is a more-than-tricky proposition given the whole burden of proof issue, along with the numerous techie tricks for bypassing filters.

If ISPs do eventually agree to disconnect filesharers, those customers will simply go elsewhere. This stick really isn't going to work. Let's hope the music industry is serious about the carrot - new, saner business models that will reward rather than punish the consumer. Let's have some of those, then.

Those of you who use Facebook regularly will probably have noticed the big revamp of the site being rolled out. (If you haven't, then go to new.facebook.com).

The motivation behind the revamp seems to be a response to the plethora of third-party applications that were vomited across profiles after Zuckerberg & Co. released the APIs last year. For an example of how bad this can get, here's a screenshot of the apps summary (on the old Facebook format) for a contact of mine who shall remain nameless:



So the deal with the new format is that you get a special tab labelled "Boxes" for third-party apps. This results in a much cleaner basic profile page, but at the same time I reckon we'll see a big fall-off in apps being developed, because they're simply harder to see. Is this a good thing? Well, that depends on how much you want people to see your "Friend Hug", "What Magical Creature Are You?", etc.

Personally, I've always kept my app level low, and the apps I do have - particularly the Last.fm "Music I'm listening to" plug-in (Disclaimer: I liked and used this app way before we got bought by CBS) - I would rather like to be on my main profile page. I mean, what is the point in having a LOLcats app if no-one will see it?

Other thoughts: Profiles now display a much longer history of status updates, posted items and so on. I like this, because it really is the point of the whole endeavour. The default tabs for "Info" and "Photos" are also a good idea and help the uncluttering while giving an easy route to the important stuff.

Overall, the revamp, with its wider, cleaner pages, is a bit of a shock to the system but can fairly be called a win. Just one final thing: the ads now sit on the right side of the screen. Or rather, an ad now sits on the right side of the screen. With a "More Ads" button below it (see picture below). Who in their right mind would click that button? And what effect will that have on Facebook's revenues? I'm not complaining - I hate looking at ads and never click through - but in terms of the bigger picture I'm not so sure that's a good idea.



PS - Further thought: the Wall, as it was, is now extinct in that it's now a mix of status updates, posted items and friend comments. The old Wall - i.e. just friend comments - can still be accessed as "Posts By Others", but it's another significant shift.