23
Tuesday night was a slightly reorganised Manchester Free Software, due to a small admin and booking error. It was decided to keep the talk on the 22nd as Ian Forrester had already agreed to the date. Really, the date change didn’t matter to the crowd that turned out, some interesting people from various areas, I also spotted one of the Folly guys in the crowd as well.
Ian Forrester was, up until recently, BBC Backstage, that was until a new member of staff started recently. Backstage is the “freen and open” side of the BBC, spearheading the production of open APIs, free content, and sharing within the BBC. For a media company this may be strange, but due to the “unique way the BBC is funded” we almost have a right to the production content of the BBC to be free and open to all UK license fee payers. As described by Ian, Backstage are at the forefront of new media in the BBC, keeping a eye on new “Web 2.0″ trends and trying to adapt existing data and services to acheive new levels of interaction with the mass public.
Ian described a time where anyone syndicating BBC News stories were instantly sent a C&D order. After stern warnings internally from Ashley Highfield via the Ariel magazine the BBC decided to change its ways an allow access to the services of the BBC by the general public via APIs, and Backstage was born.
Overall, Ian’s insight into the inner workings of the BBC explained alot. He mentioned the Backstage Wild West servers where anyone within the BBC is allowed to use space for any purpose, subverting the already existing Siemens infrastructure. While I was discussing this with Simon this morning he noted that it shows there are key problems within the BBC if a group has to circumvent the normal operating proceedures to carry out their work.
For all those who missed Ian on Tuesday, he’ll be speaking at Geekup Liverpool on 29th July, signup on Upcoming and check it out.
*Edit*
Ian’s video is now available on the BBC Backstage blog.
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18
Hackers have managed to circumvent the BBC’s anti-piracy systems to gain unrestricted access to the programmes on the corporation’s iPlayer internet TV service. – The Guardian
I never knew how true my previous statement would be, while i’m a little late posting a follow-up I have to comment on the media’s perspective of the “technically-able” internet users. It seems if something is hidden in plain sight and discovered by the masses it will be classed as hacking no matter how idiotic it is. The media should change it’s perspective and chastise the BBC for their inepitude.
Of course, it’s easier to blame a bunch of people with no legal department…
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9
With the launch of BBC iPlayer for iPhones it seems they’ve let slip a little extra “feature”. You can now download programs from BBC iPlayer without DRM in a well encoded MP4 format. How? Easy.
First of all, install User Agent Switch for Firefox and setup the iPhone user-agent:
- Description: iPhone
- User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)
- App Name: AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko)
- App Version: Version/3.0
- Platform: Mobile/1A542a Safari/419.3
Now browse to any BBC iPlayer program page and you’ll notice that it tries to serve up a Quicktime video, the MP4. As the URL isn’t displayed raw in the code, you can use a little Javascript wizardry to redirect you to the raw stream:
javascript:(function(){url = document.getElementById('mip-flash-player').getElementsByTagName("object")[0].childNodes[0].value; window.location = url;})()
Or if you want a simple drag and drop bookmarklet: iPlayer Download
The BBC will either pull the iPhone beta or re-engineer it with the iPhone SDK to develop a full client, either way this will not last long. Initally when I heard the iPhone was supported by iPlayer I was outraged, Why does a device with only around 100,000 users in the UK get priority over a operating system? It almost seems like Karma is against them, but no doubt this will get into the news as “hackers exploiting the system” rubbish. Only time will tell, enjoy it while you can.
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5
Today I was reading the followup to the Wifi farce that shown on Panorama a few weeks ago, the backlash by the public has been unbelivable. I read a few comments on their feedback section to come across the following post
So Prof. Sperrin & Co are happy for our children to be used as guinea pigs…just who has given him that divine right?
Cllr Sylvia Wright, S Staffordshire
Councillor? People who know me know that I have a semi-hatred for ignorant councillors so I decided to investigate further. Putting her name into Google throws up hundreds of hits all regarding mobile phones and children, I was pleased to see a few pages of her campaigning for her local area and saving of a post office. Her posts regarding mobiles and wifi just show her in bad light, another councillor mouthing off about a area they have no expertise in. Whats even worse, she seems to be lobbying the papers to make these sort of stories!
Then I spotted she’s a Lib Dem.
I support the Lib Dem, but i refuse to support people like her, bias, refusing to listen to rational arguments, and generally helping the party a bad reputation. Her online rap sheet is enough to condem her and thinking that online media wont come back to haunt you is a stupid asumption.
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