On June 1st, an Air France Airbus A330 on a routine flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. 228 people died in the worst air accident in French aviation history. The disaster was all the more shocking because one of the world's most reputable airlines had lost one of the most reliable airliners ever built. Until the crash of Air France 447, some 600 A330s had flown for sixteen years without a single fatality.  The aircraft crashed in an area of the Atlantic up to 3 kilometres deep leaving little evidence apart from a small amount of floating wreckage and some bodies.  The crucial flight recorders (often called the black boxes) now lie on the ocean floor and have not been recovered.

One month later, France's air accident authority, the Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses pour la Sécurité de l'Aviation Civile, released an interim report based on what little was known; the aircraft had hit the water intact at high speed in a steep dive and showed no sign of fire or explosion. This interim report stated:

"At this stage of the investigation, the only established facts are:

• the presence near the airplane’s planned route over the Atlantic of significant convective cells typical of the equatorial regions;
• based on the analysis of the automatic messages broadcast by the plane, there are inconsistencies between the various speeds measured."

Over a five minute period, the aircraft's computers began to report a series of equipment failures that began in the vital airspeed sensors which are necessary to keep the aircraft in stable flight.

Over a five minute period, the aircraft's computers began to report a series of equipment failures that began in the vital airspeed sensors which are necessary to keep the aircraft in stable flight.

Our knowledge of the last few minutes of the AF447 comes from automated messages radioed back to Air France's maintenance facilities using a system known as the Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS). Over a five minute period, the aircraft's computers began to report a series of equipment failures that began in the vital airspeed sensors which are necessary to keep the aircraft in stable flight. At the time, AF447 was flying through a series of intense tropical thunderstorms; it would have flown through lightning and extreme turbulence and may have also encountered freezing conditions. In themselves, these should not have caused the loss of a modern airliner. A number of other aircraft safely threaded through the same storms that night without serious incident.

In the absence of a clear cause, some reporters and bloggers have begun to blame the disaster on the use by Airbus of computerised, "fly-by-wire" technology. It has been suggested that the computers on the aircraft, if they did not actually cause the accident, may have made it impossible for the crew to avoid disaster.

How aircraft are manoeuvred
So, before we have a look at why aircraft use computers and what they do, perhaps a small diversion is in order. Airplanes manoeuvre using a combination of "control surfaces" - sometimes (incorrectly) called flaps - located on the wings and tail. You've probably seen these devices working during take-off and landing. The outer parts of the wings contain the ailerons controlling the amount of roll (or banking) used to turn the aircraft on to another heading. The horizontal surfaces in the tail are called elevators and are used to change the pitch - the nose-up or nose down attitude of the aircraft when it changes height. The vertical surface on the tail is known as the rudder and is also used to turn the aircraft, this time without the sometimes disconcerting tilt of banking. The aircraft wings also contain the flaps which are used during take-off and landing to provide additional lift or drag.

The control surfaces are driven from the cockpit. In very small aircraft this can be achieved using manual linkages not too different from the brake cables found on bicycles. When the pilot moves the joystick, it directly pulls or slackens a cable, the other end of which is attached to a control surface. However, as planes become larger and faster, the amount of force needed to move the ever-larger control surfaces becomes greater and greater, until it is not physically possible to move them at all.

During the 1950s and 1960s aircraft designers increasingly switched to hydraulic linkages similar to those found in cars. In these more modern aircraft, movements of the joystick were transferred to the control surfaces through pressurised hydraulic fluid. Pilots did not need to be especially strong, the hydraulics did all the work. The weakness of hydraulic systems is that the plane needs to be threaded with pipes which must be regularly inspected for defects; a leak could result in disaster. To reduce the risk of any one system failing, the hydraulic system was duplicated - each control surface could be moved by any one of three (sometimes four) independent hydraulic circuits; the hydraulics were said to be multiply redundant. There are only a very few cases where all of an aircraft's hydraulics have failed in-flight, and the technology continues to be used on many modern aircraft.

The weakness of hydraulics is that they are heavy and maintenance intensive. If reliance on them could be reduced, or dispensed with entirely, aircraft could carry a more useful payload and spend longer in the air - both of which make them more profitable. Fly-by-wire is the solution to this; the long, complex hydraulic links between the joystick and the control surfaces are replaced by sensors and electrical cabling. When the joystick is moved, sensors read the changes and send electrical signals to hydraulic pumps located near the control surfaces. These pumps then move the surfaces as if they were directly linked to the joystick. Fly-by-wire technology was developed in the UK and US during the 1960s for military aircraft and received its first commercial use inside the Anglo-French Concorde in 1969, but it was not especially well known until Airbus chose the technology for the A320, unveiled in 1987.

The A320 revolution
Airbus had been founded for political motives with the intention of combining the expertise of various European airspace manufacturers to build a rival to the American airline industry, dominated by Boeing and MacDonell Douglas (now part of Boeing). Although Europe, and especially Britain, had led the world in developing airliner technology throughout the 1950s and 1960s, it had been the Americans who had gone on to dominate the World market for airliners. Airbus' first airliner, the A300, had become a successful twin-engined plane but had used relatively conventional technologies; the A320 would be a huge leap into the future. It was designed to compete both with the world's best-selling airliner, the Boeing 737, and also to replace the older, thirstier, noisier 3-engined Boeing 727.

The A320 was a revolutionary aircraft, not only including fly-by-wire technology, but also being one of the first airliners to be built using substantial amounts of composite materials such as carbon fibre. Its cockpit was equally novel; there would only be two flight crew - the engineer was no longer needed, their role being taken by a highly automated "glass cockpit" that replaced switches and dials with computer screens. Aggressively marketed, the economical A320 family of jets has sold nearly 4000 aircraft, making it the second most successful airliner in the world, and is likely to be built for many years yet. The success of the A320 allowed Airbus to plan even more ambitious aircraft including the twin-engined A330, the four-engined A340 and the enormous A380 double-decked super Jumbo which entered service in late 2007. This family of aircraft has allowed Airbus to rival, and sometimes supplant, Boeing as the world's largest manufacturer of airliners - much to that company's disgust.

Interior of Airbus A340 cockpit.
[image by Storm Crypt,
some rights reserved]

As well as emphasising the comfort, reliability and economy of their aircraft, Airbus have been keen to stress their exceptional safety, made possible by computer technology. Airbus took a decision that computer technology could be used to protect the aircraft from any action by the pilots that could damage or destroy it. The safe operation of an aircraft is constrained by a "flight envelope" which describes factors such as the maximum and minimum speeds, the tightest turn it can make and so on. If an aircraft exceeds its flight envelope it can result in injury to the passengers, damage to the airframe or a complete structural failure. The flight envelope is not a simple, static object; rather it changes on a number of factors such as the altitude. In theory, a computer can ensure that the aircraft remains safely inside the envelope at all times - the aircraft is said to have "flight envelope protection". The consequence of flight envelope protection is profound; the pilot no longer has absolute control of the aircraft; the computer will veto any action that would take the aircraft outside of the flight envelope.

But, before protection can be guaranteed, it is crucial that the computers are completely reliable and accurate.

Reliable computers
The Airbus contains five main computers divided into two main roles. Three of the computers are designated the primary flight control computers and are in day-to-day control of the plane; reading the pilot's instructions, monitoring the aircraft's position, speed and attitude; making the necessary calculations to keep the aircraft safe, and sending commands to the engines and control surfaces. These are backed up by a pair of secondary flight control computers which are constantly monitoring the aircraft, but only act if one or all of the primary flight control computers become unavailable. These computers are distributed around the fuselage so that an impact or hull breach should not disable more than one machine. Likewise, multiple cables link the computers - cutting one, or some of them, will not disable the entire system

In normal use, the computers each read the data from the pilot and sensors built into the aircraft and individually calculate the appropriate response. At preset intervals the responses from each computer are compared. If the result from one computer differs from the other two, it is automatically disqualified from further operation and a backup computer is switched in to make further decisions. Likewise, if one of the computers fails to respond in time for one of these votes, it is disconnected and a replacement called in. In fact, the aircraft can be safely flown and landed using only one computer, so there is massive redundancy built into the computer systems.

The designers of the Airbus computers went to enormous trouble trying to imagine all of the possible problems that could occur. Their first problem was the certainty that computer hardware and software is almost never completely free of bugs that could cause a program to crash and the to computer become unavailable. Therefore the primary and secondary flight computers not only come from different companies, but they must contain different components - so a hardware failure should not spread between the two computer systems. This diversity is replicated inside the software; with the primary and secondary computers each running different programs coded in different languages. These programs were developed by teams with exceptional records of producing high-quality software, using special software tools that should capture bugs long before the programs are ever used in real life.

Airbus's designers then went on to consider what would happen if the aircraft hit trouble - such as some of the vital sensors became unavailable. Just like Isaac Asimov's robots, Airbus aircraft are governed by three Laws.

The designers of the Airbus computers went to enormous trouble trying to imagine all of the possible problems that could occur.

The first is called Normal Law and applies when the aircraft and its systems are healthy. The flight control computers interpret the commands from the joystick and guarantee that the aircraft remains safely within the flight envelope; they also ensure that passengers remain comfortable by reducing the rate of changes in direction or altitude.

If some of the sensors fail, the hydraulics become unreliable or more than two computers are unavailable, the computers switch to Alternate Law. Here some of the protections are removed or relaxed, the aircraft can make more extreme manoeuvres but cannot exceed its flight envelope. This might sound counter-intuitive, you may be thinking this is the sort of circumstance where the pilots need more help from the computers; but Airbus' thinking was that, if the sensors or computers could no longer be trusted to read or interpret data correctly, then it was time to pass more control to the expertise of the pilots.

Further failures would force the aircraft into Direct Law. At this point the aircraft can no longer offer flight envelope protection and the Airbus must be flown like an older generation aircraft.

In the event of a catastrophic failure resulting in the total loss of power, the Airbus has a further mechanical backup mode which could be used to make an emergency landing, but would most likely be used for a few minutes whilst the flight crew tried to recover power. This is extremely unlikely to happen as the aircraft would have to lose both engines, the auxiliary power unit in the tail, have flat batteries and not be able to deploy the ram air turbine (a wind generator which can be swung out from the underside of the aircraft).

Wheels of Boeing777.
[image by Diorama Sky,
some rights reserved]

Flight envelope protection became a huge difference in philosophy between Airbus and its rival, Boeing. The American company was reluctant to remove ultimate control from the human and could cite a number of instances where an aircraft was only saved by exceeding the flight envelope. In 1985 a China Airlines Boeing 747 flying between Taiwan and the United States suffered a relatively minor engine failure over the Pacific. The crew did not follow the proper procedures for restarting the engine and the aircraft eventually tipped into a vertical dive. Disaster was only avoided when the pilot forced the nose up using the elevators. The aircraft vastly exceeded its envelope and suffered severe damage to its control surfaces and undercarriage but it was able to land safely with only two injuries. Airbus countered that such incidents were exceptionally rare and, besides, flight envelope protection would have ensured the aircraft never entered the dive in the first place.

Did the computers have anything to do with the loss of AF447?
The ACARS data sent back to Air France during the last few minutes show that the airspeed sensors mounted on the aircraft were registering as faulty. Following incidents on other Air France A330 and A340 airliners, the company had entered into discussions with Airbus, who had determined that certain sensor designs were prone to becoming clogged with ice or water and recommended that they be replaced as part of scheduled maintenance. Although the aircraft had not received the improved sensors, it had been declared safe to fly, but it is entirely possible that the airspeed sensors had developed a fault. As soon as the computers realised the airspeed readings from the sensors could not be trusted, they switched to Alternate Law, disengaged the autopilot and switched off the automated thrust systems. The computers would continue to keep the aircraft within the flight envelope, but the crew would be in charge of steering and maintaining the correct airspeed. The very last minute of the ACARS data suggests that the problems had continued to spread through the computerised systems responsible for maintaining the aircraft's speed and orientation. The very last message warned that the Airbus had entered a steep descent. Crucially, the data does not suggest that the computers had ever entered Direct Mode or indeed failed all together. The evidence is that the computers were battling to keep the aircraft in the air until disaster was unavoidable - they were working.

Previously, in 2008, an A330 belonging to the Australian operator Qantas experienced an in-flight emergency when one of the computers used to collate sensor data developed a serious fault which resulted in unexpected violent pitching and false stall and overspeed warnings. Fortunately, the computer was deactivated, but not before 115 people on board were injured. Airbus revised their instructions to pilots on how to deal with such an incident which proved useful less than three months later when a second Qantas A330 flying in the same area encountered a similar fault with the same computer in a different aircraft; fortunately, this time, no one was injured. Airbus and the computer's manufacturer are still trying to ascertain the exact cause of the problems but pilots have blamed radio interference from a powerful naval transmitter in Western Australia. Could a similar problem have befallen AF447? It is possible, but Airbus point out that the doomed aircraft used different computer hardware and software from the Qantas jets and it is extremely unlikely a similar bug could exist in both sets of equipment.

It is not impossible, but increasingly unlikely, that AF447's flight recorders will be recovered from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. If they are found, air accident investigators will be able to examine the operation of the airliner's computers and sensors on a second-by-second basis and listen to the words of the flight crew. If they are not located, then we might never know precisely what happened on the flight. Instead, Airbus and the French authorities will have to make a reasoned judgement on what might have occurred and make recommendations to avoid their recurrence. Even before any report, Air France has replaced all of the airspeed sensors on its A330 and A340 aircraft.

The most likely explanation for the loss of AF447 lies with the failure of those airspeed sensors. If an airliner loses too much airspeed it loses the lift necessary to keep it in the air; it is said to have entered an aerodynamic stall. Stalling can also be brought about by sudden rises in the temperature of the air and by banking the wings. Pilots are trained both to recognise the potential for stalls and to recover from, them. But perhaps the crew of AF447 were overwhelmed by a series of events that began with what should have been a routine sensor failure. As they responded to the imposition of Alternate Law and their new responsibilities for maintaining the aircraft's speed, they would also have been quieting the various alerts appearing on their screens and fighting the storm. This would not have been the first time humans were unable to keep up with a computer in an emergency; the operators of the Three Mile Island nuclear power station in the United States were overwhelmed by so many alarms that they failed to identify a relatively minor problem that could have been easily fixed before it became a near disaster. Even now, Airbus will be examining how air crew are alerted to problems and determining if these might make circumstances worse rather than better.

...flying is still statistically safer than the drive to the airport.

Although much ink and vitriol has been spilled by supporters and detractors of Airbus' highly automated airliners; the accident records for aircraft with flight envelope protection are quite clear. Whilst highly automated aircraft  show improved performance and reliability and economics, they are neither more nor less likely to be involved in an accident. So perhaps it is the economic benefits that drive this technology. Even Boeing, so long a sceptic over fly-by-wire and envelope protection, is adopting it for the Boeing 777 and 787 Dreamliner airliners.

The statistics are also clear; modern aircraft are much safer than those of previous generations and flying is still statistically safer than the drive to the airport.

Find out more

Follow the unravelling of other disaster stories with forensic engineering:
Collapse at Kinzua
Silver Bridge
Tay Bridge
Concorde

Images

The images used in this blog are copyright. All are from flickr.com under the following creative commons licenses:

Airbus A330 flying overhead by Abdallahh - Attribution
Interior of Airbus A340 cockpit by Storm Crypt - Attribution/Non-Commercial/No Derivative Works
Wheels of Boeing777 by Diorama Sky - Attribution/Non-Commercial/No Derivative Works

About the author

Mike Richards joined the Open University in 1996 to help trial teaching over the Internet. Since then he has taught courses ranging from an introduction to robots to the engineering works of Leonardo da Vinci; but has spent most of his time writing about security - everything from the Enigma machines to e-shopping. He is currently working on a new course exploring the world of ubiquitous computers; imagine a world where computers so small and cheap they can be put in everyday objects - smartphones today, smartclothes tomorrow.

Subscribe to Mike Richards's posts

 

In Sweden.

For now.

Friday saw the long-awaited verdict in the trial of the founders of the Pirate Bay, one of the most famous (or indeed, infamous) sites on the Internet. A Stockholm tingsrätt (district court) had accused the Pirate Bay of aiding copyright infringements of materials such as movies, music and books. The four defendants, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström, were each sentenced to one year in prison and ordered to pay 30 million kronor (£2.4 million) in damages. The case will now go to appeal and may be overturned, but it does mark a significant point in the battle against Internet piracy.

The Pirate Bay was set up by the four Swedes in 2003 as part of Piratbyrån (The Piracy Bureau), an organisation opposed to the current implementation of intellectual property rights. The Pirate Bay became a stand-alone organisation in 2004 and quickly became one of the most important centres for pirated material. By late 2008 it was servicing over 25 million unique computers, and had more than 3.5 million registered users (and many more unregistered users).

Detached ethernet cable [image © copyright Photos.com]

The Pirate Bay had previously run foul of Swedish authorities; a police raid in 2006 temporarily took the site offline. A series of controversies not directly related to piracy followed. In one case, confidential photographs of a child murder victim were placed on the site and, despite pleas from the police and the family, were not removed; in another, one of the Pirate Bay’s original funders was revealed to have links to the Swedish far-right.

Despite these set-backs, the Pirate Bay has continued to grow until it now sits comfortably amongst the most visited sites on the Internet. It even spawned a new Swedish political party, Piratpartiet, dedicated to reforming intellectual copyright in Sweden. Although Piratpartiet has had little direct effect on Swedish politics, it can probably be credited with changing attitudes towards file sharing inside the mainstream political parties. Pirate Bay’s influence is so undeniable that its existence became something of a political embarrassment for the Swedish government, who were committed to bringing Swedish intellectual property laws into line with the rest of the EU and with the United States. Eventually, prosecutors tasked with reviewing evidence seized during the 2006 police raid filed charges against four named individuals; not for piracy, but for aiding it. Why not charge the four with piracy?

Because, believe it or not, the Pirate Bay doesn’t hold any pirated material.

The key to the Pirate Bay’s success is a method (protocol) of distributing files known as BitTorrent. Perhaps confusingly, BitTorrent is the name of the company founded by its creator, Bram Cohen, as well as the name for the protocol that is used by a large number of other programs. In this discussion we will be concerned with the workings of the general BitTorrent system.

Lady using a computer
[image © copyright Photos.com]

We’re going to need two Internet users, Alice and Bob. If Alice wishes to distribute a file through BitTorrent, she needs to create a seed file, known as a torrent. Alice uses software distributed with her BitTorrent client to break the single, large file into many smaller chunks (ranging from 64kb to 4Mb in size). The same software then uniquely labels each of the chunks, using a mathematical technique known as cryptographic hashing which allows other BitTorrent client programs to correctly recognise them.

Finally, the list of hashes, as well as other information, such as the name of the uploader, the name of the album or movie, the artists and so on, are written to a torrent file, which is itself only a few kilobytes in size and can easily be distributed using email or the Web.  Alice publishes the torrent, (she is said to "seed" it), so it can be picked up by other BitTorrent users.

When Bob wants to download Alice’s file he first obtains a copy of the torrent. This is not difficult to do. There are many sites (of which Pirate Bay is just one) dedicated to holding copies of torrent files; and most search engines will also turn up torrent files in their results. Chances are, if you look for a movie or DVD online, at least one torrent file will be listed in the results.

Man using a laptop
[image © copyright Photos.com]

Once Bob has a copy of the torrent, he loads it into his BitTorrent client program. Bob’s client extracts a complete list of all the unique identifiers for the chunks - it only needs to find the chunks themselves. Bob’s machine does this by contacting another BitTorrent client, known as the tracker. This client holds a record of the Internet addresses of all the clients currently sharing the requested file. If Bob is the first person to download the torrent, then the tracker will be on Alice’s machine along with all of the chunks. If the torrent has spread more widely, Bob’s client will receive several, even hundreds of addresses. Bob’s BitTorrent client then makes direct links to a number of these clients and begins downloading random chunks of the whole file. When it has finished downloading a chunk, Bob’s client makes a request for the addresses of further chunks and so on until it has received all the chunks; at which point it assembles the chunks back into a perfect copy of the original document.

In a BitTorrent system, Bob is not merely a downloader, his client is also uploading chunks to other users. Each time Bob downloads a chunk, his client informs the tracker of the identity of the chunk and Bob’s address and will provide it to other users in the system. As more and more users join a BitTorrent network, the average speed of sharing files increases, making it a very efficient way of sharing files. Popular files are shared more quickly, whilst even unpopular files will exist on enough computers to allow them to spread. BitTorrent is also extremely resilient. In a normal download service, if a computer fails, it can prevent anyone from accessing files. In BitTorrent, hundreds of users can go offline and the files will continue to download, albeit at a slower speed.

BitTorrent has proved to be a very controversial technology and has had a profound effect on how the internet is used. A survey, conducted in late 2007, estimated that the BitTorrent protocol consumed the largest share of internet capacity, ranging from 49 per cent of all traffic in the Middle East, to 84 per cent in Eastern Europe; rising to an astounding 95 per cent of all traffic at night! BitTorrent has become by far the most important technique for sharing pirated materials, so much so that many ISPs have started to identify BitTorrent users and to restrict their service, or terminate their connections. However, BitTorrent has many legitimate uses, including:

• software upgrades and bug fixes for online video games;
• Internet storage services that make files available to large numbers of users;
• obtaining legitimate movies and music through Bram Cohen’s BitTorrent Inc.

The Pirate Bay is a giant index of torrent files and trackers. Users only connect to the Pirate Bay to download a copy of the torrent file, or to use one of its trackers. None of the copyrighted material is actually distributed by, or passes through, the Pirate Bay servers.

So has the trial changed anything? It has clarified the law in Sweden to some extent (subject to an inevitable appeal which may drag on for years), but it certainly hasn’t put the Pirate Bay out of business. At the time of writing, the site was still working as normal, and it is unlikely to close any time soon. Following the 2006 raid, the Pirate Bay moved many of its servers away from Sweden to countries with less-stringent intellectual property right laws. But, even if the Pirate Bay were to close, it seems inevitable that other sites will spring up around the world to replace it. Piracy is a huge problem for the media industry and it can’t be resolved by ever more stringent laws, such as those proposed (and rejected) in France which would have struck downloaders off the Internet. The trial has not clarified why people pirate content.

A man's hands touching a laptop
[image © copyright Photos.com]

A few people will pirate anything, no matter how cheap the original item; there's probably nothing short of legal action that can dissuade them. A good number of people pirate material that is no longer available - either because the original has been withdrawn from sale, or was never available in their part of the world. Better distribution and back catalogues would bring these people back into the legitimate realm. Some pirate because they own a version of a title on one format and resent having to buy it again when technologies change or the original wears out. This is a more complex field as it requires governments to change the law so that copying from one form to another is legalised, and it requires media companies to unlock their content to make it possible without specialist skills.

If the media industry is to survive, it must first of all accept there will always be a certain level of piracy that cannot be eliminated; but it must make its own offerings so attractive that most people will be willing to spend money for entertainment. A good example is the Apple iTunes Store. All of the music on that site can surely be found on the Internet, but those illegal copies are of variable quality, hard to find and have a certain stigma attached to them. By making the iTunes site so easy to use, relatively cheap, and unrestricted (so far as most users are concerned), Apple and the music companies have been able to convince users to pay for more than six billion songs in five years. Other online music stores, especially those that sell unrestricted content such as Amazon, are seeing similar growth in sales.

The evidence is clear – make it cheap, make it easy, don’t upset the customer and they’ll buy your product. The music industry seems to be learning - so are the movie industry and the government ready to listen?

On the same theme

Darren Waters, Technology editor for BBC News, speaks to Digital Planet about the Pirate Bay's plans to appeal.

US judge and academic, Richard A. Posner reflects on the ethics of copyright.

About the author

Mike Richards joined the Open University in 1996 to help trial teaching over the Internet. Since then he has taught courses ranging from an introduction to robots to the engineering works of Leonardo da Vinci; but has spent most of his time writing about security - everything from the Enigma machines to e-shopping. He is currently working on a new course exploring the world of ubiquitous computers; imagine a world where computers so small and cheap they can be put in everyday objects - smartphones today, smartclothes tomorrow.

Subscribe to Mike Richards's posts

 

Ada Lovelace
[image Wikimedia]

It wouldn’t be surprising if you haven’t heard of Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, who must be considered the World’s first computer programmer – even though she died almost a century before the first computers roared into life.

Ada was born in December 1815 into a life of wealth and privilege as the only legitimate daughter of the poet Lord Byron; although he deserted his family only a year after she was born. A sickly child, Ada was not expected to survive, but despite a series of life-threatening illnesses, she continued her education, and by her teenage years was becoming recognized as a mathematical prodigy. In addition to whatever natural talent she possessed, Ada was driven to the exploration of mathematics by her mother; who saw in logic, a cure for the madness that had afflicted Lord Byron. Ada was taught by, and corresponded with many of the leading mathematicians of her day. And one of these mathematicians was perhaps the most extraordinary man of his day – Charles Babbage.

Born in 1791, Babbage was a brilliant although deeply unpleasant man. He had been a professor of mathematics at Cambridge, broken the supposedly impenetrable Vigenère autokey cipher used by every diplomatic mission in Europe and even had time to invent the cowcatcher for locomotives. But his real passion lay in the possibility of automating mathematical calculations.

The scientific and Industrial revolutions had created an insatiable demand for accurate calculations ranging from determining the orbits of the newly discovered planets Uranus and Neptune; to generating accurate maps and navigational charts needed for the expanding global economy; through to the tables of logarithms, sines and cosines used by the engineers building the machines on which European prosperity was based. Such was the demand that there were not enough mathematicians in the world to perform the calculations.

A similar problem had confronted the mathematician and engineer, Gaspard de Prony who had been commissioned to draw up new books of tables for the French government. De Prony’s task was immense; he would need to create logarithms for all of the numbers from 1 to 10,000 – accurate to nineteen decimal places, and the sines of angles to no less than twenty-five decimal places! De Prony’s solution was to create three teams of mathematicians. At the top were six of France’s leading mathematicians who would devise the calculations needed to generate each entry in the table. Below them were a similar number of less-skilled mathematicians who would decompose the complicated formulae into a series of relatively simple additions or subtractions. The lowest tier of de Prony’s scheme were eighty relatively unskilled workers who actually produced the mathematical tables. So long as they followed the list of additions and subtractions in the correct order (and got the right result), they would arrive at the right result.

Babbage saw de Prony’s monumental tables and made the next intellectual leap. If de Prony could treat people like machines in order to generate mathematical tables, then perhaps it would be possible to generate them with machines. He was not the first person to think of this, as long ago as 1623, Wilhelm Schickard had built a simple calculator; but Babbage’s machine was far more elaborate and capable of performing complex calculations. Babbage was also perhaps the first person to realise that so long as a machine was correctly constructed it would produce tables to any level of accuracy without ever tiring or making an error.

He became so excited by the possibility of mechanical intelligence that he was taken ill

An intriguing second source of inspiration for Babbage was the so-called 'Mechanical Turk’, an elaborate parlour trick that had been touring Europe from the late 18th Century. The Mechanical Turk was supposedly a machine that could play chess against a human opponent – and crucially, win. It had proved a sensation in the courts of Europe with opinion equally divided whether it was an especially clever automaton, or if it actually concealed a human player. In 1819 the Turk came to Britain where Babbage challenged it to at least two games (he won one, lost the other). Babbage was convinced (correctly as it turned out) that the Turk was a trick and operated by a human, but he began to consider the possibility that a machine was capable of playing games against humans. He became so excited by the possibility of mechanical intelligence that he was taken ill and forced to retire to the countryside in order to recuperate.

During this period he began to design the Difference Engine that was announced in1822; it was to be a man-sized machine built from steel rods and brass gears turned by hand for the express purpose of generating mathematical tables. The Difference Engine made a huge impression; and the British government agreed to fund its development with the colossal sum of £17,000 (about £1,200,000 today).

There was only one problem – and that was Charles Babbage. He simply could not settle down to the task of building his machine. The Difference Engine had triggered a creative explosion; Babbage had a new idea; one that had never occurred to anyone in the World – a machine that could perform any intellectual task. The Industrial Revolution was in full flood and it was being powered by machines – pumps, ships, locomotives, weaving frames, drills – but each of these machines served a single purpose; a steam locomotive could not weave cotton. But Babbage’s Analytical Engine could be repurposed – it could be programmed – it was a computer.

Once again Babbage’s inspiration came from France where in 1801, Joseph Jacquard had designed a loom capable of weaving intricate patterns into cloth and silk, not because of a skilled operator, but by blindly following instructions punched into cards. Rearranging the cards created new patterns in the cloth – they constituted a very simple program. A single loom, operated by unskilled labour could replace dozens of skilled workers, producing much more material at a fraction of the cost; perhaps inevitably, Jacquard's looms triggered civil unrest when they were introduced into the French weaving industry; the first of many disputes caused by automation.

Babbage’s Difference Engine stood about as high as a man and would have been operated by hand. His Analytical Engine would have been the size of a large house and powered by steam – but once you get past the awe-inspiring scale of the endeavour, the tens of thousands of jewel-like gears and bearings – it resembles a modern computer in almost every respect. The Analytical Engine had a memory (which Babbage called the ‘store’) big enough to hold one thousand numbers, each of up to fifty digits; these were to be processed in a central processor (the ‘mill’). Babbage’s mill would be able to perform all of the simple mathematical functions as well as logical comparisons (such as ‘greater than’ or ‘less than’) and calculate the square roots of numbers.

The machine would have been controlled by thousands of Jacquard’s cards that would have been fed into the Analytical Engine from automated hoppers. Each card would contain either data or instructions. The instructions formed the very first computer programming language and contained concepts such as loops (which repeat operations) and conditional statements (such as IF this is TRUE then do this…), which are familiar to all modern computer programmers.

There is no doubt; the Analytical Engine was one of the greatest ideas of the 19th Century. It should have changed the world.

And this is where we return to Ada Lovelace. She met Babbage at his London studio when she was only seventeen and had seen some of the workings of the Difference Engine. According to her companions, Ada immediately understood the workings of the machine and its potential. Throughout the 1830s conversed regularly with Babbage and the two became close friends, although there is no evidence they were ever romantically entangled. Certainly Babbage was entranced with his young protégé. In 1843 he wrote:

Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans — every thing in short but the Enchantress of Numbers.

In 1842 Ada translated Luigi Menabrea’s description of the Analytical Engine ‘Notions sur la machine analytique de Charles Babbage’ from the original French. At first she was content to perform only the translation, but at Babbage’s instigation, she began to add extensive annotations to the original text.

We discussed together the various illustrations that might be introduced: I suggested several, but the selection was entirely her own. So also was the algebraic working out of the different problems, except, indeed, that relating to the numbers of Bernoulli, which I had offered to do to save Lady Lovelace the trouble. This she sent back to me for an amendment, having detected a grave mistake which I had made in the process.

These ‘algebraic working’s are what we would now call a computer program – they were the commands that would be punched into Jacquard cards and fed into the Analytical Engine. Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace had written the world’s first computer program – and they didn’t have a computer!

The distinctive characteristic of the Analytical Engine, and that which has rendered it possible to endow mechanism with such extensive faculties as bid fair to make this engine the executive right-hand of abstract algebra, is the introduction into it of the principle which Jacquard devised for regulating, by means of punched cards, the most complicated patterns in the fabrication of brocaded stuffs. It is in this that the distinction between the two engines lies. Nothing of the sort exists in the Difference Engine. We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.

But Ada’s thoughts about the Analytical Engine went even further. Babbage had always seen his creation as a way of generating numbers, Ada saw the possibilities were unlimited; just as Babbage had once wondered that a machine might play a game of checkers, Ada saw the Analytical Engine as a creative tool.

Again, [the Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine . . . Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.

It's worth pausing for a moment - in 1843, Ada Lovelace was imagining a machine that would not only play music, but also create it.

The story does not end well for any of the players. Ada went in to long-term decline shortly after the publication of her work. She was desperately lonely, lacking friends with whom she could discuss her explorations of mathematics, and as a woman she was forbidden from joining many of the scientific institutions of the day. She is known to have become a heavy drinker and to have experimented with opium. Worse still, she became convinced she had found a perfect scheme for determining the winners of horse races; she became a gambling addict and ran up huge debts. She even became estranged from her family. In 1852 she was diagnosed with uterine cancer, which progressed rapidly. She died later that year, aged only 37. Charles Babbage remained her friend to the end.

Babbage too was a deeply troubled man. The original funding for his Difference Engine had dried up because of his inability to bring the project to a conclusion. Rather than produce a working Difference Engine, Babbage had become distracted by the possibilities of the Analytical Engine. An enraged government turned their back on the scheme, claiming it was worthless and would never have worked. It was a desperately shortsighted decision; the Difference Engine was entirely practical and would have revolutionised the World. Much later, variations of it were produced in Britain and Europe; but Charles Babbage never saw a penny. A near replica of the Difference Engine was constructed for the Science Museum in Kensington using materials and construction techniques that would have been familiar to Babbage. It works perfectly.

The Analytical Engine was never finished; only models and individual components had been completed by the time Babbage died in 1871. He had beset by financial problems and, following the self-inflicted fiasco of the Difference Engine, unable to obtain government funding. Worse still, Babbage’s own difficult personality had led him into conflict after conflict, most notably with his chief engineer Joseph Clement who had devised the ultra-high precision machine tools needed to cut the myriad components of the Analytical Engine. As if that were not bad enough, many of Babbage’s contemporaries began to denounce the project, claiming it was worthless or even impossible.

By the 1850s, it was clear that Babbage’s best work lay in the past. He became deeply embittered, writing (all too presciently):

Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple.

When he died of kidney failure in 1871, Charles Babbage was practically unknown to the public. The funeral attracted only one carriage and three mourners. He did not even receive an obituary.

Today, Babbage is regarded as the father of the modern computer and one of the most brilliant individuals of the 19th Century. Ada Lovelace is less well remembered, her most widespread monument being the computer language Ada that has been used to build some of the largest and most reliable computer systems in the World. But perhaps her best memorial is in her writings. In 1843 Ada was wondering if a machine could be intelligent:

It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency, first, to overrate what we find to be already interesting or remarkable; and, secondly, by a sort of natural reaction, to undervalue the true state of the case, when we do discover that our notions have surpassed those that were really tenable. The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.

Today, computer scientists working in artificial intelligence and science fiction authors still argue whether Ada was right.

About the author

Mike Richards joined the Open University in 1996 to help trial teaching over the Internet. Since then he has taught courses ranging from an introduction to robots to the engineering works of Leonardo da Vinci; but has spent most of his time writing about security - everything from the Enigma machines to e-shopping. He is currently working on a new course exploring the world of ubiquitous computers; imagine a world where computers so small and cheap they can be put in everyday objects - smartphones today, smartclothes tomorrow.

Subscribe to Mike Richards's posts

 

The last few years has seen a steady development of television-on-demand; the idea that individual viewers can choose what they want to watch and when rather than just watching what is being transmitted at any given time. Video-on-Demand, (VoD) is the descendent of the good old-fashioned video recorder, but rather than choosing what to watch in advance and having to remember to set the recorder (and indeed how to set the recorder), users can select programmes from a catalogue and have them delivered directly to their TV or computer when they choose. Many cable companies have been offering services for a number of years, but more recently TV companies have been investing in services that deliver content over the Internet.

Internet delivery is appealing for television companies; more and more of us are spending ever greater amounts of time in front of the computer, we're on the move and we're demanding ever greater amounts of choice. Conventional television cannot possibly hope to offer enough channels to satisfy everyone's tastes; but the Internet can. And it gets even more appealing when television companies look at their back catalogues of programmes made decades ago. There is little or no chance of ever broadcasting most of these programmes, but the Internet makes them viable (and indeed lucrative) properties. Once the programmes have been scanned into digital data there is almost no cost in storing them, costs which can be recouped when they are downloaded by users.

All of the main British television channels have invested heavily in online delivery. The BBC has its iPlayer service, launched in 2006 and made available in early 2007, which had delivered some 180 million programmes by the end of 2008. It is by far the most popular service of its type in the UK and is trailed by the ITV Player, Channel 4's 4OD and BSkyB's SkyPlayer. However, the market is badly fragmented - some issues are technological - for instance, 4OD is restricted to users of Microsoft Media Player and does not work on Apple Macintosh and Linux computers, whilsy SkyPlayer requires a monthly subscription fee.

Kangaroo was a plan to bring some order to the market. It was a collaboration between BBC Worldwide (the commercial arm of the BBC), ITV.com and 4oD to build a single portal for all on-demand content. Users would only have to go to a single Web page and could choose programming from all three organisations knowing it would work on their computer. Kangaroo was commercially attractive as it would allow media companies to offer on-demand content on a paid-for basis. Users could select programmes from the huge back catalogues, pay a small fee and watch the program or save it to disk. The project should have launched in late 2008 or early 2009 under the name SeeSaw (which I think is one of the cleverest brand names in a long time). However, in the middle of 2008, the Kangaroo Project was referred to the British government's Competition Commission on the grounds that it could distort competition within the as-yet developing VoD market. An interim report in December 2008 said:

"However, we are concerned that a loss of rivalry between BBC Worldwide, ITV and Channel 4, who are normally regarded as close competitors, could restrict existing and future competition for video on demand. Whatever benefits viewers would gain from this rivalry would clearly be lost."

Kangaroo offered concessions to try and turn the Commission in its favour; these included allowing partners in the project to set their own pricing, and a block on cross-marketing of content between partners. It was thought these concessions would introduce competition back into Kangaroo, but it appeals these were not enough. The interim finding was upheld this week much to the delight of BSkyB and Virgin Media and to the dismay of Kangaroo's backers.

In one way, the Competition Commission's report should come as no surprise, Kangaroo clearly does reduce competition in the sense that there would only be one underlying delivery technology, but it would not reduce the diversity inside the programming itself. However, there are benefits for having a single delivery mechanism; users can be sure that if they can watch one programme they can watch them all, there is a single entry point for browsing the catalogue and there are great opportunities for providing search facilities so users can look for suitable programmes across all channels.

The setback to Kangaroo has very real implications, both Channel 4 and ITV are suffering long-term declines in income from advertising which have been made worse by the current economic climate. Kangaroo would have helped offset these falls, but now this money will not be so forthcoming. Both of them are going to have to invest in their incompatible, less-successful VoD services if they are going to see any benefits from their huge archives. One long term proposal is that BBC Worldwide may actually end up merging with Channel 4 which would allow the pair of them to develop a Kangaroo for their commercial services, but that would not be integrated with the iPlayer. Meanwhile, the BBC itself is planning on offering iPlayer technology to other public-service broadcasters in an ambitious development called Project Marquee. Beyond that there is Project Canvas, a tie-up between the BBC, ITV and BT to offer on-demand public service programming, but it is still very poorly mapped out.

The report causes a potentially huge problem for VoD in the UK. There are already a number of companies offering Internet delivery of programmes from multiple channels - and they aren't British. The most well-known in Apple who already provide television and film content on their iTunes Store in the UK; but the fastest growing company, currently restricted to the US, is hulu.com. In less than a year, hulu.com has become a major VoD provider in the United States, delivering content from the major broadcasters NBC and Fox, as well as popular cable channels including Comedy Central, the Disney Channel and PBS. It is clear that hulu.com could easily move into the UK market and make agreements with individual channels to offer the same sort of cross-channel distribution it performs in the United States. if that happens, what would be the point of Kangaroo?

The competition rules for VoD appear to be somewhat arbitrarily applied, after all, so far no one has complained that Apple is unfairly dominating the paid-for VoD market in the UK and what of Google's 90%+ share of VoD through its acquisition of YouTube? But is there a darker motive behind BSkyB joining the complaints about Kangaroo? BSkyB is owned by the News International group who are co-owners of - hulu.com.

Unless a well-thought-through plan for VoD is developed by British broadcasters, Kangaroo will be eaten alive by foreign competition. Another great British invention that might-have-been.

About the author

Mike Richards joined the Open University in 1996 to help trial teaching over the Internet. Since then he has taught courses ranging from an introduction to robots to the engineering works of Leonardo da Vinci; but has spent most of his time writing about security - everything from the Enigma machines to e-shopping. He is currently working on a new course exploring the world of ubiquitous computers; imagine a world where computers so small and cheap they can be put in everyday objects - smartphones today, smartclothes tomorrow.

Subscribe to Mike Richards's posts

 

PowerBook.
[image by gomi, some rights reserved]

Mac users were bitten by High Definition Content Protection (HDCP); an industry-standard Digital Rights Management (DRM) system designed to prevent the piracy of high definition movies. Under HDCP, the player of a movie scrambles the content before transmitting it down the cable to the television set or monitor. At the other end, the display device unscrambles the signal so that it can be displayed correctly. HDCP requires that both the player and the display contain specialised circuitry perform the complex encryption / decryption process, and this is where the new Macs have had problems. Although the latest Macs all contain HDCP chips, none of Apple’s monitors (with one exception introduced last month) have them.

Apple’s solution is for users to replace almost-new monitors with those coming with HDCP. At the same time, Apple is publicising just how green the company is with low-emission displays, less packaging and reduced pollution. Clearly something doesn’t add up. HDCP is becoming increasingly common on computers; so many more people are going to be affected by this problem in the near future. Consumers are going to have to either accept restrictions on their use of their computers or pay out for even more hardware.

HDCP only exists because of something I’ve mentioned a couple of times before; copyright. To briefly recap; copyright is an 18th Century legal concept that protects an inventor or artist by giving them the exclusive right to reproduce their work for a limited period of time. At the end of the copyright period, the work passes into the public domain where it can be reproduced by anyone. Copyright was designed to balance the interests of creators and consumers alike; the creator benefits by being the only person authorised to sell their creation, society benefits because works in the public domain can be used by anyone no matter how rich or poor.

The 1710 UK law that created the concept of copyright dictated that works would be protected for 14 years from the date of publication; after which the author could apply for a copyright extension for a further 14 years. However, in no circumstances could the copyright term extend beyond 28 years. Since then, there has been an almost inexorable increase in the length of copyright. Copyright terms in the United Kingdom are almost uniquely complicated. Rather than adopt a single period of copyright, the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988) lays down a series of copyright terms for different media, depending on the type of media, the date of publication and the country of origin. Broadly, they are as follows:

• for printed materials, the term is 25 years from the date of publication;
• broadcast material (such as television or radio programmes) created in the UK are protected for 50 years from the date of first broadcast;
• audio materials are copyright for 50 years from the time they were first recorded;
• copyright for the composition of dramatic works such as movies, novels, music, literature, art or plays lasts for 70 years after the death of the author or director. If more than one person was responsible, the 70 year period extends from the time of the death of the last creator.

However, copyright terms outside the UK may differ; some works that are still under copyright in the UK are no longer copyright in the United States. This produces some interesting legal questions; Project Gutenberg is an endeavour to release out-of-copyright books in electronic formats. Based in the United States it includes many titles that are still copyright in the UK – but which can be downloaded for free by British users!

Conversely, one area where the United States has much longer copyright terms is in the field of sound and vision – reflecting American predominance of music, television and video. The most recent change in American copyright was the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998 which gave corporations the ability to protect their works for 120 years after the date they were created or 95 years after publication, whichever endpoint is earlier. The law is known to its opponents as The Mickey Mouse Protection Act because it is the second time American law has changed just as the first cartoons featuring Disney’s most famous character were about to become public property.

Mickey Mouse was made public in 1928 (although the cartoonist Hugh Harman drew some sketches as far back as 1925) and originally protected by a 56 year copyright period. In 1976, a few years before the term on these early animations expired, a new copyright act was introduced, increasing American corporate copyright to 75 years – effectively pushing Mickey’s protection into the 21st Century. Then, just as Mickey’s extended term was about to expire, the CTEA was passed ensuring the original Mickey Mouse cartoons would not enter the public domain before 2020 at the very earliest.

Mickey Mouse is almost unique in copyright history in that the character is still a significant revenue earner for Disney. The vast majority of copyrighted works make almost all of their income in the first few years after publication. However, we should not be misled into thinking that it is only copyright that protects Mickey Mouse; Disney have registered their mascot as a trademark, a legal concept which lasts forever provided it is used. Even if the early Mickey Mouse cartoons were to enter the public domain, the character itself is protected – no one apart from Disney would be able to create new Mickey Mouse cartoons.

The same applies to music; much of the pressure for copyright extension in the UK has come from artists such as Cliff Richard and Sir Paul McCartney whose biggest hits were in the 1950s and 1960s. The copyright that is about to expire on these artists is the recording copyright; not the copyright they hold as the creator of a particular piece of music. Sir Paul McCartney will hold the rights to his composition up to and beyond his death and he and his estate will continue to benefit from 'Yellow Submarine' for decades to come. It’s very hard to see any benefits for consumers in the extension of copyright; but it is clear that large publishing companies can make considerable amounts of money by protecting relatively ancient works; if only to stifle competition.

Sadly there is now pressure inside the UK to follow the American copyright extension and increase the copyright term on sound recordings. This is something of a reversal for the British government. Between 2005 and 2006, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, commissioned Sir Andrew Gowers to review the state of copyright in the United Kingdom. Somewhat against expectations, the so-called Gowers Report proved to be extremely radical. As well as proposing that British consumers should have a legal right to make recordings of purchased music (such as ripping an MP3 from a CD).

Firstly, it reported that the lower copyright term in the UK compared to that in the US did not appear to disadvantage British artists. Almost without exception, the vast majority of a title’s income was made in the first years after publication; revenues quickly tailed off into insignificance, and in time, might actually be worth less than a company spent protecting its rights. The Gowers Report estimated that the average CD makes two-thirds of its income in the first six years of its life – well within the existing term;

Secondly, the Gower’s report argued that copyright should not be altered retrospectively – that is, if copyright were to be extended, the new term should only apply to works created after the date the new law took effect.

The day after the Gowers Report was published, the music industry protested vigorously in a Financial Times advertisement signed by 4,000 performers – or at least apparently signed by 4,000 performers; several of the signatories, including Lonnie Donegan and Freddie Garrity had inconveniently died long before the Gowers report was commissioned, let alone published.

Sadly, it appears the government is back-peddling on the enlightened view of the Gowers Report and favours a future much more beneficial to the music and video industry. In part this is because of pressure from the European Union to harmonise copyright terms across the Union and in line with the American term of 95 years. The EU proposals are being opposed by some consumer groups and online advocacy groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Open Rights Group who are arguing that any further extension of copyright will affect consumers' rights and all of our rights to freedom of expression. A pan-European petition and lobbying process is targetting Members of the European Parliament in the hope of persuading them to block any increase in EU copyright terms. But even if that battle is won, it looks almost certain that the British government will try to increase copyright in this country. In a recent speech, Culture Secretary Andy Burnham told an audience of music professionals:

'There is a moral case for performers benefiting from their work throughout their entire lifetime.

'That is why I have been working with John Denham, my opposite number in the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, to consider the arguments for an extension of copyright term for performers from the current 50 years.  An extension to match more closely a performer’s expected lifetime, perhaps something like 70 years, for example, given that most people make their best work in their 20s and 30s.'

Andrew Gowers replied in an acid column in the Financial Times: 'As political speeches go, this is pretty silly. A moral case? You might just as well say sportspeople have a moral case to a pension at 30.'

It seems clear that the government has already decided that British law must be made to accommodate the views of the music industry. Certainly people in the business were delighted by Burnham’s speech. The head of UK Music, Feargal Sharkey said, ‘At this critical time of change, the creative industries have never been more vital to this nation's future prosperity. Today's announcement regarding term extension is a clear sign that Government, like everyone in our industry, is committed to ensuring that UK music retains its status as the very best in the world.’

The head of the British Phonographic Institute, Geoff Taylor said: 'Copyright is the lifeblood of our creative economy and we are delighted that the government is recognising this by supporting an extension of copyright term for British musicians and labels. Copyright stimulates investment in musical talent and encourages innovation. Thousands of recording artists, hundreds of music companies and all British music fans will benefit from fairer copyright term'.

The use of the word ‘fairer’ is very interesting. There is no way that extending copyright is fair to the customer. When pressed about copyright extension, one music industry executive said that any increase in length of protection would be matched by the companies opening up their archives and reissuing old material. It sounds good, until you realize that if copyright was left unchanged the companies would be forced to release it into the public domain where it would be free for everyone!

Mr. Taylor seems to have forgotten that copyright is a balance between the rights of the individual and wider society. Consumers can reasonably be expected to obey copyright law provided they see it as fair; but when users are faced with high prices, limited distribution, platform lock-in and crippling DRM software, who can honestly be surprised when they turn to piracy?

More from Open2

Listen to Ethics Bites on the rights and wrongs of copyright

About the author

Mike Richards joined the Open University in 1996 to help trial teaching over the Internet. Since then he has taught courses ranging from an introduction to robots to the engineering works of Leonardo da Vinci; but has spent most of his time writing about security - everything from the Enigma machines to e-shopping. He is currently working on a new course exploring the world of ubiquitous computers; imagine a world where computers so small and cheap they can be put in everyday objects - smartphones today, smartclothes tomorrow.

Subscribe to Mike Richards's posts

 

The controversy is centred on a Wikipedia page for The Scorpions, a German group from the 1980s. The article was illustrated with a picture of the album cover of Virgin Killers; featuring a photograph of a naked prepubescent girl, in what may be described as a provocative pose. The same cover art has been on the album for over twenty years and the music has been openly sold by major retailers, both on the high street and online. Until now the album had languished in uneventful obscurity. However, following a complaint by a user to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a quasi-legal UK censor, most British Internet users were barred from accessing the Scorpion’s page, and unregistered users of Wikipedia were no longer able to make edits to the encyclopedia. Days later, large retailers began removing pictures of the Scorpions albums from their websites and there was even media chatter of blocking access to the Amazon site. Had the world gone mad?

Not quite.

Those of you who've been reading these postings for some time – first of all, thank-you; secondly – you will remember that your computer's connection to the Internet is anything other than direct. When you request a page from a web site, your computer does not immediately drag data from the remote server, instead a whole series of computers owned by your Internet Service Provider (ISP) are involved. Some of these machines are devoted to turning human-readable addresses  (URLs) into unique machine readable addresses (IP numbers), others are dedicated to storing copies of frequently-requested pages; but yet more computers are devoted to filtering web pages based on content – and these computers exist to protect ISPs from legal action.

Although many long-term users of the Internet like to think of it as a place where 'anything goes', it is bound by national and international laws. ISPs were given a wakeup call in 1999 when Demon Internet (now part of Thus) were found guilty of libel after they failed to remove defamatory material from their news service. Crucially, although Demon did not publish the original article, they were found guilty of redistributing it to their users. It was clear that the days of the Internet as an unregulated frontier were numbered.

The law that directly affects the Wikipedia situation is the Protection of Children Act 1978 which was enacted following the discovery of a child pornography ring in the United States. The law has been amended a number of times since 1978 to reflect changing circumstances and technological developments. Amongst other offences, the CPA makes it an offence to manufacture, distribute and, crucially, possess material that is considered obscene.

Possession not only includes owning physical documents such as books, magazines and photographs, but also possessing computer files. The PCA is a relatively unusual law in that it places so-called 'strict liability' on anyone who is found to possess obscene material – that is they have to demonstrate there is a good reason for them to own the material, otherwise they are considered to be guilty of an offence. So, it is theoretically possible to be in breach of the CPA simply by visiting a web page containing obscene content.

With the best intent in the World, the British government has tried to limit the distribution of child pornography in the UK, but they are faced by a very real problem. The Internet poses a real problem for national law; it is supranational and constantly changing. What is considered obscene in one country may be unremarkable in another or even protected under laws guaranteeing free expression. If material cannot be removed at source, there may be another solution.

As Home Office Minister Vernon Croaker wrote in a Parliamentary answer:

Recently, it has become technically feasible for ISPs to block home users’ access to websites irrespective of where in the world they are hosted. It is clear from the various meetings that Ministers have had with the ISPs, that the industry has the will to implement solutions to block these websites. Currently, all the 3G mobile network operators block their mobile customers from accessing these sites and the biggest ISPs (who between them provide over 90 per cent. of domestic broadband connections) are either currently blocking or have plans to by the end of 2006.

We recognise the progress that has been made as a result of the industry’s commitment and investment so far. However, 90 per cent. of connections is not enough and we are setting a target that by the end of 2007, all ISPs offering broadband internet connectivity to the UK general public put in place technical measures that prevent their customers accessing websites containing illegal images of child abuse identified by the IWF. For new ISPs or services, we would expect them to put in place measures within nine months of offering the service to the public.

The government was originally interested in methods of identifying and blocking child pornography, but has continually pressured ISPs into removing equally provocative material such as adult pornography, religious extremism and terrorism. The Home Office has stated:

At present, the government does not propose to require UK ISPs to block content and our policy is to pursue a self-regulatory approach wherever possible. However, our legislation as drafted provides the flexibility to accommodate a change in Government policy should the need ever arise.

Leading ISPs agreed to set up the IWF as a charitable body with a remit to produce a constantly updated list of web sites and individual pages containing information that may breach one or more UK laws including the CPA. The process of identifying unsuitable content is not automated, instead individual Internet users can make a complaint to the IWF through their website. A single complaint is enough to ensure that an employee of the IWF will screen the material. The IWF employs four police-trained specialists who must make a quite rapid decision over whether a page should be blocked or its content removed.

The IWF has the power to demand that a page hosted on a computer in the UK is removed from the Internet, but it cannot make these demands when the image is held overseas. In these cases, although the data cannot be removed from the Internet, it can be blocked by adding its URL to BT’s CleanFeed database. As well as adding individual pages to CleanFeed, the IP number of the site hosting that page is also placed on to the database. CleanFeed is used by the six largest British ISPs (BT, Virgin Media, Orange, Tiscali, BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse) who between them are responsible for about 95% of all domestic Internet connections. Similar technology is used by the remaining ISPs. When Cleanfeed was introduced in 2004 it was reputedly blocking some 11,000 accesses to blacklisted pages every day. By 2006 this had grown to 35,000 every day. At the same time the number of complaints about suspicious images grew from about 3,500 during 2004 to more than 11,000 in 2006; the most recent information from the IWF is that they have received complaints about some 35,000 suspect pages in the last year.

If we now return to how the Internet works. When you request a page, the IP number of that page is first of all examined by a so-called ‘core router’. If the page belongs to a site listed in the CleanFeed database, it is sent to another router for further examination. If the page does not belong to a suspect site, the request is processed as normal and the page returned.

Suppose the requested page belongs to a suspect site. In that case, the page’s address is examined to see if it appears in the database as containing potentially illegal material. If the page is not found, the request for the page is granted and the data will be sent to the user. However, if the page is listed as containing illegal material, the system does not tell the user, rather their browser returns the error 404 – the page cannot be found. This misleading error, not a censor's message, greeted most British internet users when they tried to visit the Scorpions' page on Wikipedia.

The CleanFeed system  led to further problems for people attempting to edit Wikipedia pages. As you probably know, with a very few exceptions, any page on Wikipedia can be edited by any user. This makes Wikipedia a tempting target for vandalism; especially by spammers who want to put advertising on the site’s pages. Such spammers would use a computer to make many edits to hundreds of pages in a very short time. Wikipedia can detect such vandalism; because of the edits would appear to come from the same computer; and blocks the changes.

As soon as the Scorpion’s page and the Wikipedia site appeared on the CleanFeed database, all traffic to Wikipedia was being routed through one of a very small number of proxy computers. All of a sudden, almost every Wikipedia editor in Britain (which accounts for almost 25% of all Wikipedia authors), appeared to be using the same computer. Wikipedia’s own computers considered they were under attack and prevented these proxy computers from making edits – instantly blocking the vast majority of edits originating in the UK. Instead of seeing the editing page, they were greeted by:

Wikipedia has been added to a Internet Watch Foundation UK website blacklist, and your Internet service provider has decided to block part of your access. Unfortunately, this also makes it impossible for us to differentiate between different users, and block those abusing the site without blocking other innocent people as well.

What began the weekend as a technology story of interest to a few computer users had gathered into a potent storm by the beginning of the following week; even being discussed on primetime news programmes. After a couple of days, the IWF agreed to uncensor the image; and within a few hours the Wikipedia site was working normally for British users. However, before we all celebrate a return to commonsense, it is worth pointing out exactly what the IWF has decided. It has not decided the image is perfectly innocent, the IWF still considers the item "is potentially in breach of the Protection of Children Act 1978.” Which, if you remember, means you could be prosecuted for owning a copy of the image. The IWF statement then goes on to say,

However, the IWF Board has today (9 December 2008) considered these findings and the contextual issues involved in this specific case and, in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list.

If you’re confused, you’re not alone – the censor is saying the image is potentially illegal, but it is not stopping you from accessing it!

The Wikipedia controversy is already history, but it has raised a number of serious questions that must be answered, if not now, in the very near future. How these issues will be resolved is a very difficult question and we cannot leave it solely to government to make a decision on our behalf. Like almost all governments, the British administration has shown itself to need very simple solutions to extremely complex problems – and these almost never work.

The most obvious point to make is that censorship does not deter criminals. Like similar schemes in China, the CleanFeed block can be circumvented in minutes. Anyone with a small amount of technical knowledge could access the blocked page simply by substituting some characters in the URL or by using Wikipedia’s less-well-known secure address. CleanFeed defeats casual users, it cannot prevent paedophiles and terrorists from sharing distressing and illegal materials when the data is encrypted or transmitted by Internet technologies other than the World Wide Web. John Gilmore, a civil libertarian and the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation which fights for freedom of speech on the Internet once said "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

In this case, censorship actually achieved the opposite to that intended. At the height of the controversy, the number of hits on The Scorpion’s Wikipedia page rocketed from a few thousand every day to nearly one million! The image was copied and redistributed around the Internet and huge numbers of people who had never heard of the band were intrigued enough to try and find out more about what they were not allowed to see. This is a fine example of ‘The Streisand Effect’ named after Barbra Streisand who sued a photography company for millions of dollars after finding out her house was visible on commercial photographs of the California coastline. As well as losing the case, Streisand found out that the photographs were more popular than ever before. The IWF has admitted their actions had backfired:

The IWF's overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect.

So what can we learn from this fiasco?

Firstly, the IWF is not necessarily malicious, it was set up to try and fight a real horror. Its employees work with the best of intentions, but their remit is unclear and the organization is not sufficiently open. The IWF must be put under some form of external scrutiny, possibly on a statutory basis. At the moment the organization can act without any real constraints and acts as judge and jury. We are likely to see further high-profile cases in the near future as the IWF’s remit expands further. In January 2009 the British government will outlaw so-called ‘extreme pornography’ – a term which has confused the public, lawmakers and the police. At the moment, the Ministry of Justice’s official advice on what constitutes ‘extreme pornography’ is to refer the material to the IWF for their assessment.

Unlike the list of banned movies compiled by the British Board of Film Classification; the IWF’s database of blocked sites is not publically available for scrutiny. It should be – if we are going to be forced to live under censorship, then Internet users must have confidence in the IWF process. We must not only know what is on the list, but why it is there and who made the decision to add it to the CleanFeed list.

Similarly, when the IWF identifies material that may be in breach of UK legislation, it must be obligated to inform the owner of that data. At the moment, the IWF makes no attempt to do so. If material is blocked, the IWF should tell the creator what legislation it falls foul of and of their right to appeal against the decision.

There is a grave cause to worry about the power of the IWF. The Wikipedia case showed that the vast majority of Internet users could be deprived of access to information in a very short period of time with no clear explanation of what was going on. In this case it was nothing more than a half-forgotten group, but is it paranoid to worry about similar techniques being used to block more important, inconvenient information. The rise of the Internet was supposed to bring a time of unconstrained access to information, but quietly, almost without debate, Britain has developed an all-encompassing censorship system that would not look out of place in a totalitarian state. Coincidentally, the government of Australia is attempting to introduce a similar system in that country. Unlike Britain, there has been a vociferous campaign against the introduction of content filtering with thousands of people and even ISPs protesting at the scheme.

But before I sign off; a word of warning to New Labour ministers intent on imposing net censorship; current filtering technology often blocks the word ‘socialism’ because it contains the phrase ‘Cialis’, the name of an anti-impotence drug often used in spam messages. But that’s the problem with censorship, it always has unintended consequences.

About the author

Mike Richards joined the Open University in 1996 to help trial teaching over the Internet. Since then he has taught courses ranging from an introduction to robots to the engineering works of Leonardo da Vinci; but has spent most of his time writing about security - everything from the Enigma machines to e-shopping. He is currently working on a new course exploring the world of ubiquitous computers; imagine a world where computers so small and cheap they can be put in everyday objects - smartphones today, smartclothes tomorrow.

Subscribe to Mike Richards's posts

 

The key difference with the Sony Reader lies with its 6” screen. Until recently, portable devices relied on energy-gobbling liquid crystal displays (LCDs). Most PDAs, mobile phones, portable games consoles and the like use LCD technology which is capable of producing detailed, richly-coloured images at extremely high resolution. However, LCDs require a constant trickle of electricity, both to maintain the displayed image, but also to and drive a light that makes them visible. The efficiency of LCDs has gradually improved, and the replacement of fluorescent backlights with white light-emitting diodes (LEDs) have made them much more frugal; but the useful battery life of any device using an LCD is measured in hours rather than days or weeks.

The Sony Reader and its kindred us an alternative technology known as an electrophoretic display, better known as electronic paper. These displays differ from LCDs in that they do not need a constant supply of electricity; rather, they only consume power when they change. Turn off the power, and, in theory, electronic paper will retain an image for decades. Electronic paper has been a long time coming. The first practical electronic paper, called Gyricon, was developed by the Xerox Corporation in the 1990s. The Reader uses a related technology called E Ink created by the E Ink Corporation, a subsidiary of the Dutch electronics giant Philips.  E Ink displays can be thought of as a sandwich. The front of the display is a transparent sheet facing the user. It is divided into hundreds of thousands of pixels, each of which can hold an electrical charge. The back of the display is designed in a very similar way although it does not need to be transparent. The sandwich is filled with hundreds of thousands of hollow plastic capsules each about half the diameter of a human hair. The capsules are filled with a dark oily chemical and thousands of microscopic particles of titanium dioxide; a chemical so blindingly white that it is used to brighten everything from paint to toothpaste.

Crucially, titanium dioxide is attracted to a negative electrical charge. If a pixel on the front of the display is given a negative charge, the titanium dioxide in the capsules behind that pixel move towards the front of the display turning it white. If the same front pixel is given a positive charge, the titanium dioxide flees to the rear of the display revealing the dark oil and turning the pixel black. Electronic paper does not need a backlight; it relies solely on the light falling on the display; unlike an LCD that becomes increasingly hard to read in brighter conditions, electronic paper performs best in bright sunlight. (Of course, without a backlight, it is impossible to read electronic paper in darkness)

The most obvious drawback to electronic paper is that it is currently restricted to displaying black and white images (or to be strictly accurate very dark grey and very light grey images). Colour electronic paper is theoretically possible, but no practical demonstrations have yet been made. The second drawback, and the most serious, is that electronic paper is a relatively sluggish technology. It takes between half and one second to completely redraw a screen created on electronic paper – in comparison the latest LCDs can refresh an image in a few hundreds of a second. Electronic paper is not suited to displaying animated images such as movies and games, so it is unlikely to find a home on your computer or screen any time soon.

However, a screen holding an eBooks doesn’t need constant refreshing, it only needs to be changed when the reader goes to the next page. Rather than measure battery life in hours, E Ink displays measure their charge in page turns. A device the size of the Sony Reader can hold enough power to turn over 9000 pages! Which means a fully charged reader might not need recharging for weeks. If you’re like me, and liable to carry kilos of books on a trip, the prospect of replacing all that weight with one small device that doesn’t need power adaptors and cables must be very attractive. As well as Sony, E Ink has been adopted by a number of other manufacturers for devices such as the CyBook Reader and the iRex iLiad. In the UK, it is likely the Sony Reader will come to dominate the market. It is made by a well-known brand with enormous financial muscle and a tie-in to the Waterstones bookshop chain.

However, it would be unwise for Sony to be complacent as there is a superior product available in the United States. The Amazon Kindle uses the same E Ink technology as the Sony Reader, but its designers have chosen to design a stand-alone device rather than one that plugs into a PC. To accomplish this, the Kindle has a built-in wireless connection that allows the reader to connect to the Amazon online store and obtain books in a few seconds. Kindle users can buy books wherever they are without needing to spend time trying to find a computer with a network connection, web browser and necessary software.

The Kindle’s WhisperNet wireless technology is known as EVDO and runs on the older American CDMA mobile phone network that has never found favour in the UK and Europe. For this reason, the current Kindle cannot be used to buy eBooks outside the United States. However, there is no reason why a future Kindle could not support one of the more common 2G or 3G telephone networks that can be found on both sides of the Atlantic.

Even more advanced than the Kindle is a prototype device from a Cambridge start-up called Plastic Logic. Their eBook reader uses the same E Ink technology as other readers, but has sandwiched the display between two sheets of electronically conductive plastic. The change in material means that Plastic Logic’s displays are cheaper and larger than rival displays using fragile glass. Even more remarkably, there is no reason why the Plastic Logic display could not be made flexible, raising the possibility of screens that can be rolled up into cylinders or wrapped into watch bands, jewellery or clothes. Plastic Logic is promising to release their first consumer product in early 2009 and you can see a video of the extraordinarily thin device on the company’s home page.

So is the paper book doomed? Not entirely, and there are two reasons not to expect bookshops to die just yet.

The first reason is that eBooks are currently available in a multitude of formats, some of which are proprietary and restricted to certain devices. Amongst others there are the familiar TXT (plain text), RTF (a document interchange format used by many word-processors), DOC (Microsoft Word’s native format), HTML (the format used by the World Wide Web and understood by all browsers) and PDF (the Adobe Acrobat format). Less common formats are MOBI (Amazon’s MobiPocket format), LIT (for Microsoft’s Reader program), eReader (designed for Palm’s Digital Media electronic books), AZW (for the Amazon Kindle) and BBeB (Sony’s proprietary format). It is all too common to find an eBook, but to then discover you can’t read that format - a situation that has been called The Tower of eBabel! Fortunately, this situation is improving; a number of publishers and technology companies have collaborated to create the Open eBook platform; a document format that anyone is free to use. In theory any device or program that can understand Open eBook documents will be able to read any document published in that format. The format, known to users as ePub, OeBPS or IDPF is gradually gaining acceptance and may well soon come to dominate the market for eBooks.

The more serious problem lies with a topic I’ve mentioned previously – Digital Rights Management (DRM). Since eBooks are comprised of digital data, they could be copied a thousands of times in a fraction of a second and these copies distributed over the Internet for free. To protect against this, many commercial eBooks are protected by DRM that ties each book to a strictly limited number of devices. In some cases, the DRM ties are even more severe – you may be limited to the number of times you can download a book, you may be prevented from printing the book, it might even have a limited lifetime.

Compare this approach to a traditional book with which you can do almost anything; write marginal notes, tear out pages, add PostIt notes, lend it to a friend, sell it on… Current DRMed eBooks allow almost none of these – if you love a book and want someone else to enjoy it, you have to persuade them to buy their own copy. Worse still, if you upgrade your computer or have it stolen, then there’s a chance the DRM won’t allow you to read titles on your new computer. Some of the DRM schemes don’t even allow you to make backups of the titles you’ve purchased.

There’s no doubt that authors and publishers need to protect their incomes, but the current implementations of DRM do not respect paying customers. It should be mandatory that I can always download another copy of a book from a retailer; likewise I must be able to back up valuable eBooks in case of disaster. But why not go further - going back to the original paper book, if I lend a book to a friend and they like it, they may go on to buy their own copy. Even if they don’t, no sale has been lost. Why can’t I do the same with an eBook? Let me send a number of time-limited copies to friends. If they like it and buy the book, give me a discount on my next purchase; if they don’t, the book vanishes and no one is hurt.

If you want to start reading eBooks, you don’t need to buy a dedicated reader; your PC, laptop, PDA or mobile phone is almost certainly capable of running one or more eBook reader programs. You don’t even need to spend money on eBooks to get your hands on legitimate copies. A number of sites such as Project Gutenberg and feedbooks.com have huge collections of free titles made up from out-of-copyright books and those books where the author has chosen to make freely available.

So, have Sony killed the book? Not yet - eBooks and eBook readers are too expensive, too fragile and too restrictive to threaten the paperback; the technology behind them does show us what a future computer might look like - one that runs for weeks without charge, one that can be slipped into a pocket - perhaps even be part of your clothes, and one that is never out of touch with the rest of the world.

Mind you, that last point - never being out of touch with the rest of the world, makes me think of one of my favourite short stories - E.M. Forster's 1909 story 'The Machine Stops' - and coincidentally that's a free eBook!

About the author

Mike Richards joined the Open University in 1996 to help trial teaching over the Internet. Since then he has taught courses ranging from an introduction to robots to the engineering works of Leonardo da Vinci; but has spent most of his time writing about security - everything from the Enigma machines to e-shopping. He is currently working on a new course exploring the world of ubiquitous computers; imagine a world where computers so small and cheap they can be put in everyday objects - smartphones today, smartclothes tomorrow.

Subscribe to Mike Richards's posts