It is refreshing to read a political polemic which contains useful actions the reader can take. Too many books about the social problems with technology end up being a diagnosis with no cure.

Paloma Oliveira's new book (with technical review by my friend Dawn Foster) is a deep dive into how we can all make Open Source more inclusive and equitable.

Unlike most tech books, it doesn't follow the usual pattern of restricting itself to the US hegemony. It is very focussed on the EU and the needs of people around the world. It is clear in identifying many of the problems which arise when people say they just want to focus on tech, not politics:

When projects focus purely on technical excellence without considering accessibility, they create implicit barriers. Documentation written only in English, community discussions held during North American business hours, or development environments that require high-end hardware all reflect choices that determine who can participate—though these choices often remain unexamined.

This is profoundly important. The book isn't afraid to be challenging. It links the way companies extract value from the commons to the way colonisers extracted value from the lands they "discovered".

There are a few missteps which I didn't care for. While it starts as very casually written, it quickly finds itself getting into the weeds of political philosophy. I think that's a necessary evil. But I don't know how easily people will be convinced by passages like:

Bratton notes secessionist withdrawal in traditional territories and consolidation domains in stacked hemispheric, the continuing expansions of nebular sovereignties, and the reform of conventional States into regional platforms.

Similarly, there are a few "just-so" stories which are fictional parables. I think they would have been more convincing as actual case-studies.

I did find myself skipping some of the background in order to get to the parts I found more interesting. The chapter on "Political Rhetoric and Institution Validation" felt a bit out of place and I didn't get much from it.

But, after all that theory, there is a lot of practical advice. From how to structure your README to how to communicate change to your community. Even better, all the templates and resources are on GitHub.

It is thoroughly referenced and gave me lots of new rabbit-holes to follow Rather pleasingly, it cites my 2020 blog post "Please Stop Inventing New Software Licences" as an example of the ways in which corporates often try to stifle open source.

If you want to help Open Source succeed, you owe it to yourself to grab a copy of this book.

Here's how the authors frame it:

Since a “square deal” amounts to assuming that all possible hands are dealt with the same probability, we must interpret the drawing of the above number s as a chance move, each one of the possible values s = 1, • • • , S having the same probability 1/S. Thus the game begins with two chance moves: The drawing of the number s for player 1 and for player 2, which we denote by s₁ and s₂. 19.1.2

Essentially, in two player poker, you could distribute cards labelled 1 - 100 and have people bet / bluff on whether their number is higher or lower than their opponents. That might not be a fun game - but it is a useful toy example for thinking about formal rules for a game.

It is sometimes helpful for us to reduce the complexities of the real world into simple examples. It allows us to examine our base assumptions about reality without getting bogged down in messy practicalities.

Let's take Spotify as an example. I often hear that artists complain that they get paid micro-cents per listen and that streaming is destroying their livelihood. I've no idea how much a recording artist gets every time their song is played on the radio, and I've no idea if Spotify is better or worse than the record deals generated by corrupt studio bosses.

So let's reduce Spotify to a toy example. Imagine a streaming service where people pay a fixed monthly subscription to get unlimited access to media.

This streaming service has only two users. They each pay £10 for the service. The service has no operating expenses and takes no profit. That money needs to be fairly split between the artists. We do not care about record companies, publishers, contracts, fees, taxes etc. We'll ignore copyright lengths as well. Some media is more expensive to produce than others, again ignored. We're assuming all things are equal.

So, what should happen in this scenario:

User 1 listens once to a 3 minute song by Ariana Grande. User 2 listens once to a 3 minute song by Billie Eilish.

That's all they do for that month.

I think most reasonable people would say that artists A & B would split the money evenly. All things being equal, they each get £10.

Now let's take a different scenario.

User 1 listens to 90 songs by Ariana Grande. User 2 listens to 10 songs by Billie Eilish.

How should the money be fairly split? 50:50? 90:10? Something else?

I asked this question on Mastodon:

What I find interesting is that there isn't an obviously fair split. Some people think the service should pay out proportional to total consumption across all users. But a significant minority think that the money should be split per individual customer. Both positions are reasonable and I can see the arguments for each.

Is it fair for some users to subsidise others? Is it fair if artist A gets paid less per stream than artist B? Should there be a maximum or minimum amount an artist can earn? Would people accept a logarithmic formula which decreases the profitability of an artist the more times they are streamed?

Mammals like us have an innate need for fairness. Our primitive monkey-brains can't exactly quantify what makes something unfair - but we know it when we see it.

When artists complain about fairness in streaming, they're probably right; it is unfair.

But when pundits start saying there is an obviously fairer solution, they're probably wrong.

And that's the purpose of this exercise. Even at the most reduced example, there isn't an obvious way to pay artists fairly.

Once you scale up to millions of users, in different countries, interacting with complex licencing regimes, exclusive deals, songs of varying lengths and of varying copyright, etc then it becomes unsolvable without radically reconfiguring how we approach consumerism.

I've written before about the Feynman Algorithm which is a universal method for solving any problem. It goes:

1. Write down the problem.
2. Think real hard.
3. Write down the solution.

I think step 0 needs to be a von Neumann reduction:

0. Reduce the problem to its very simplest use case.
1. Write down the problem.
2. Think real hard.
3. Write down the solution.
4. Return to step (0) and increase the complexity.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is if you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best if you can't solve a problem at its simplest level, you can't solve it at its most complex.

• Read Kim's post on the Application Modernisation Team
• For more technical posts, read the Just-Tech blog on Medium.

As I left court, I asked if there was anything they needed me to fill in or sign. They said there wasn't. I just sort of assumed that I wouldn't get any expenses back - my travel was mostly within my regular season ticket anyway.

Then this dropped on my doorstep.

A hand written envelope. Let's ignore the fact they've misspelled my name (I won't ignore this). Does this mean that every witness in the country requires someone to handwrite an envelope and stuff something in?

That's ridiculously inefficient and error prone.

Let's take a look at the contents. Again! Handwritten. Print on demand is a thing, you know!

I also need to figure out if I'm a "Ordinary" or "Professional" witness - because someone at the CPS has forgotten to tick the box.

Now, that wouldn't be so bad - send them my bank details and let them work out how much I'm owed. But it isn't that easy.

More Forms!

That was just the start - here is the rest of the form: Three more pages! Some of which simply aren't relevant to me as an "Ordinary" witness.

Why do I need to fill this out? The court knows how long I was there. They know what sort of witness I was. If I lie, they'll cross-check - so why not pre-fill this as well?

Where's the online form? I've checked on the CPS website - and there isn't even a template so I can type it up and email it over.

How Hard?

This 4 page form is, apparently, so difficult to complete that it comes with another 4 pages of guidance. Pro-tip, if your guidance is as long as your form - rethink your form design.

How Much?

The form and guidance also came with another guidance form. This 2-pager explaining how much I can claim.

So I have to read the guidance, fill in the form, then manually do maths to make sure it's worth my time claiming. And, I suppose, once the form is received, someone else needs to check all my details again to make sure I've not accidentally over-claimed or under-claimed.

Grumpy

Bad form design makes me grumpy. Non-digital forms make me grumpy. Handwriting makes me grumpy. Misspelling my name makes me grumpy.

Nothing about this experience is delightful.

Dealing with court stuff shouldn't be frivolous - but it doesn't need to be so enraging.

GRRRRR!

How I'd Improve It

• This could easily be done at court.
  • Either get the witnesses to fill out a form while waiting, get a volunteer to help them, or hand them a pre-printed form on the way out.
• If it has to be posted, at least include a covering letter saying something like:

"thank you for attending court. The justice system only works because people like you are prepared to take time out of their busy lives to act as witnesses. We realise that you may have spent money travelling to court - so we want to pay you back."

• Make a separate form for Ordinary and Professional witnesses.
• Test the form with users to make sure it's as easy to complete as possible.
• Incorporate the guidance into the form, rather than having it as a separate sheet.
• Don't handwrite envelopes - or manually stuff them.
• Put the form online.

I don't think any of these are radical solutions. They could all be easily trialled to see which were effective.

Do the hard work to make things easy

I work for a different part of the Civil Service. I'm incredibly grateful that they let me attend court as a witness without it impacting my pay. My true expenses were £3 for a tube journey I otherwise wouldn't have taken. I could also claim £2.25 in subsistence allowance.

Is it worth me bothering with this form to claim a fiver?

Regular readers will know about my recent court visit. As part of that, I had to telephone the CAB Volunteers at the court who look after witnesses.

I called, and was put on hold, then asked to leave a message. There's a popular myth that you can trick phone systems to sending your call to the operator if you hold down the zero button.

So I rang back...

"Please hold while we try to connect you..."

*presses the 0 key*

"You have... two... unread messages. To listen to your messages, press 1. To change your mailbox greeting, press 2...."

I hung up quickly. This was a service which deals with potentially vulnerable witnesses. An attacker could ring the CAB Court Volunteers, and listen to the voicemails.

This is not a theoretical attack. This is exactly how the Phone Hacking Scandal worked. Playing back voicemails without permission - thanks to a lack of PIN protection.

I eventually got through to someone at CAB to report the problem - they also gave me details of someone I could email.

2018-07-12 - I send a detailed report.

2018-08-02 - I received confirmation that it had been fixed.

On receiving your email from my colleague, I contacted [the] Operations Manager for the Witness Service, who immediately escalated this. I also called the Uxbridge Witness Service contact number and confirmed that it also allowed me to follow options and access voicemails, however I noted that the 2 voicemails did not include any actual messages, there was some background noise and at the end of the messages the phone receiver is heard clicking indicating the call had been ended, on both messages.

On the 13/07/2018, we had a nationwide action for all Team Leaders to check voicemails for the Court contact number mailboxes, to confirm that they are secure with a pin code access. This action enabled us to be sure that each mailbox was secure and accessible only via a pin code, this was recorded and shared with Management so that we could ensure that each court had been verified. Our IT team was also involved in helping check some sites remotely and assist Team Leaders where they were experiencing difficulties.

Action was taken immediately to firstly check other Court mailboxes to ensure they too were not accessible, and where it was found that the voicemails were not secure, pin codes were immediately requested from IT or set up where this was possible.

I would like to thank you for taking the time to inform us of your experience as it enabled us to take swift action and ensure that the phone mailboxes were checked and secured.

An impressively quick response. Great to know that they were able to rapidly respond and fix. I've previously reported problems to the CAB and they take this stuff seriously.

If you have a voicemail system - whether personal or for a business - please make sure that it is adequately secured.

September 2017 - I was standing by a bus stop when I noticed a man playing with his phone while driving. So I snapped a couple of photos of him and his car.

London's Metropolitan Police have an excellent, mobile friendly, web portal for reporting traffic incidents. www.met.police.uk/roadsafelondon/ I dutifully filled it in. There's no ability to add photos or videos to it though.

A couple of days later I received an email from the police - could I please send them the photos I'd taken?

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @edentThe police have asked me to delete my photo as they intend to prosecute the driver!

Distracted drivers are dangerous. pic.x.com/pj4qdwibzm

---

Email is basically secure enough for this sort of thing, right? So far, so digital.

And then nothing. Not a sausage. I assumed that was the end of the matter.

Fast forward 6 months and I received this letter in the post. Would I be willing to attend court as a witness? Why yes, yes I would. And this is where my digital journey ended.

I was asked to fill in an attached paper form and post it off. There was no Stamped Addressed Envelope included, so I tried ringing the phone number. After 10 minutes on hold I gave up. So I dropped an email to the named officer. No reply.

A few days before the court date, I tried to look up details of upcoming cases online. They simply don't exist. There's an information dead-zone around local courts. So I rung up. After a mere 15 minutes on hold I was told the case was still on!

I turned up and sauntered through the metal detector. A lovely volunteer from Citizens Advice met me and took me to the waiting room. She checked my name (but not my ID), wrote it on a bit of paper, then disappeared.

She re-appeared a few minutes later. Checked the spelling of my name, checked the details of the case, scribbled them down, then wandered off to her office.

And then reappeared! She'd found the case at last. She read me a copy of their GDPR statement and asked if I was happy to be contacted afterwards. I didn't get an electronic - or paper - copy, but I agreed anyway.

I was shown a picture of the court to help me understand where I would be sitting. I say "picture" - it was a poorly drawn diagram which had be photocopied so many times as to be gloriously indistinct. It was also incorrect; the court I was to be in had a different layout.

I waited and waited and waited. Justice takes time. But there was lots to read in the waiting room.

The prosecutor finally met me. She was sorry for the delay, but the defendant wanted to plead guilty to a lesser offence. His phone had merely fallen off the cradle and I'd caught him as he was putting it back.

"That's not what the photos show," I said.

"Oh? Really? I've only got black and white copies..." And, indeed she had. Somewhere between the Met and the CPS, my statement had been printed out and either scanned or faxed.

I showed her the full-colour and full-resolution photos on my phone.

"You can clearly see that he's holding the phone and pinch-zooming it."

Her eyes lit up. "I'm not accepting that behaviour! Wow! You can see it so clearly! I'm going to ask him about that. Are you happy showing the magistrates your phone if they ask?"

I said I was, and she dashed out of the room never to be seen again. Half an hour later, Witness Services collected me. The accused had plead guilty and I was free to go, without the trauma of testifying.

A few days later I rang the court. I wanted to know what the outcome of the case was. The friendly lady at the end of the phone line said "Oooh! I can't tell you that. Because of... errr... data protection?"

Aside - no, GDPR does not give criminals the right to have their sentences kept private.

I rang the next day and got someone competent. The driver was fined £230, had to pay £30 as a victim surcharge, and £250 costs.

Most importantly, he was instantly disqualified from driving.

So, lets recap:

• Report crime online - excellent!
• Send evidence via email - good.
• Request to be a witness via post - annoying.
• No easy way to reply digitally - inconvenient.
• Court hearing information not online - bad.
• Witness check-in all paper-based - disappointing.
• Evidence not sent digitally - very bad.
• Court case outcomes not reported online - bad.

The justice system as a whole has to do better at being digital.

He makes three pretty good points.

1. Companies only pay tax on their profits.
2. Politicians shouldn't make laws with loopholes.
3. International laws need harmonisation.

I agree with his second two points - although no-one is forcing Google to exploit the loopholes that it finds - but I am not sure I agree with the first.

Fairness, so it seems, is hardwired into our brains and our societies. People naturally get very angry when they encounter unfair situations. Even monkeys react badly when they see other monkeys being treated with favouritism.

I think that's what's happening here. As an individual, I don't get to only pay tax on my profits - I have to pay income tax and National Insurance on every penny I earn.

There are, as far as I can tell, only a few exceptions. If I donate money to charity through Payroll Giving or put money in my pension - I get a small measure of tax relief. If I receive rental income, I can offset any interest on a mortgage against it. That's pretty much it.

The tens of thousands of pounds of student loans that I owed did not count against the amount of tax I paid. It cost me £3,000 to get a train to work and that severely cuts into my "profit" but doesn't count against tax. I have to live somewhere - but mortgage relief was abolished by the Labour Government in 2000. Heating, electricity, education, food - these are all legitimate expenses which I cannot offset against the amount HMRC wants to take from me.

I'm sure you can think of dozens of other examples. Expenses which a business can use to reduce their tax liability but which ordinary people cannot. And we haven't even touched on the inability of the average citizen to stuff their loot in an off-shore tax haven!

HMRC produce a great Android app which tells you roughly how the Government spends its money. It also shows you where it gets its money. Business, so it seems, pays a rather modest share by way of corporation tax. I'm sure they pay lots of other taxes and invest in other ways but guess what so do I!

I'll leave it to the armies of lawyers to figure out of Google, Amazon, Vodafone, and the like are acting correctly. But it is undeniable that a large number of people have trouble with large scale tax avoidance not because of its legality but because it is unavailable to ordinary individuals.

Fairness is really hard to codify, it's true. But when a multi-billion pound corporation gets to pay tax only on its profits, and individuals get no such relief, that feels profoundly unfair. And, like the chattering monkeys that we are, it enrages us.

I had a suggestion from digital journalist Kevin Anderson

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Gah! The #leveson witness statements are photocopied & scanned in levesoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/?witn…
Disastrous for open justice - shkspr.mobi/blog/index.php…

---

Mr Anderson

@kevglobal

@edent Put the Leveson docs up on Google Docs. I'd be curious how their OCR could handle them. Then click 'make public'

---

Google Docs has an annoying 2MB limit for uploaded PDFs. However, I've taken the first half of Rebekah Brooks' witness statement and run them through the OCR process.

This is how Google recognises the text in the document

Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press

1 I dlT| necessarily inhibited to some extent about what I can say in reiation to some of the issues that the Inquiry has raised with me. My background

3. ijoined News International in 1989. I began my career on the News of the Worlcfs coiour supplement, Sunday magazine, whiie simultaneousiy attending ajournalism course at the London College of Printing.

4. Since then i have been either a joumeiist or an executive on both The News of the World and The Sun. For afrnc-st a decade Iwas a nationai newspaper editor. In May 2000 I became the editor of The News of the Worid and in January 2003 I became the editor of The Sun.

5. In September 2009, I was appointed Chief Executive of News lnternationaf. My responsibilities embraced ail the newspapers and digital products of the 1.... -. -

That's based on this text:

Why Is This Important

The journalist Heather Brooke has been ranting for some time about the closed nature of the British Courts. It's close to impossible to get verbatim or accurate information about course cases. This means as citizens, journalists, or archivists, we can't accurately search documents. We need access to the original digital documents.

Poor OCR is also a huge problem. As above, OCR gives us a misleading impression that documents are searchable.

Should we wish to search, say KRM-18, to see whether the MP Tom Watson is mentioned; a search for "Watson" turns up zero results. Yet he is mentioned.

The page shows: But the scanned text reads:

Had ~ debrief with 5f[ ~nd his team tm~.igl~t ttt 77~ betbre he [o~ t.o his constituency:

l-]~e is veo’ h.,qlopY~ith d~ ~va~, today" wellt mid ~s~cci~iiJ~’ ~,it[i tae ~bsoiutely’idiotie. del)&t~s led by Wtttson.urtd

Prescott.

So, it's totally impossible to rapidly search through these documents. It would be necessary to laboriously read each document manually.

How To Accomplish This

There are two ways to get this done - in the case of the Leveson Inquiry.

1. Petition the Inquiry to release the original documents.
2. Crowdsource the OCR. Taking the Google OCR as a starting point and "Wikifying" it to let anyone correct the text. A bit like Distributed Proofreaders

I will, of course, send an email to the Leveson Inquiry - but would people be interested in being part of a crowdsourcing effort to opening up these documents?