There's a new(ish) DRM scheme in town! LCP is Readium's "Licensed Content Protection". At the risk of sounding like an utter corporate stooge, I think it is a relatively inoffensive and technically interesting DRM scheme. Primarily because, once you've downloaded your DRM-infected book, you don't need to rely on an online server to unlock it. How does it work? When you buy a book, your vendor sends you a .lcpl file. This is a plain JSON file which contains some licencing information and a…
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My name is confusing. I don't mean that people constantly misspell it, but that no-one seems to know what I'm called. Let me explain. British parents have this weird habit of giving their children long formal names which are routinely shortened to a diminutive version. Alfred becomes Alf, Barbara becomes Babs, Christopher becomes Chris - all the way down to the Ts where Terence becomes Terry. And so, for most of my childhood, I was Terry to all who knew me. There was a brief dalliance in my…
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It is always nice to meet someone in a pub who says "I've written my first book!" - so, naturally, I picked up Katie's novel as my next read. I'm glad that I did as it's a cracking crime story. It starts slowly, with a brilliantly observed satire of office life. The gossip, banal slogans, venal senior managers, and work-shy grifters are all there and jump off the page. You'll have met all of them if you've ever spent a moment in a modern open-plan office. It swiftly picks up the pace with a…
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I've been thinking about fun little artistic things to do with QR codes. What if each individual pixel were a QR code? There's two fundamental problems with that idea. Firstly, a QR code needs whitespace around it in order to be scanned properly. So I focussed on the top left positional marker. There's plenty of whitespace there. Secondly, because QR codes contain a lot of white pixels inside them, scaling down the code usually results in a grey square - which is unlikely to be recognised…
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404 Ink's "Inklings" series are short books with high ideals. This is a whirlwind tour through the ramifications of the rapid digitalisation of our lives. It provides a review of recent literature and draws some interesting conclusions. It is a modern and feminist take on Seeing Like A State - and acknowledges that book as a major influence. What are the dangers of static standards which force people into uncomfortable boxes? How can data be misused and turns against us? Rather wonderfully…
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What if, with your dying breath, you sent your lover back in time in order to change the fate of a ruined Earth? What if he sent a message back to his younger self to help seduce you? What if the Government intercepted a mysterious orb full of treasures from another dimension? What if…? This is a curious mish-mash of a book. Part sci-fi and part romance. I don't read enough romance to tell if that side of it is any good - it's all longing looks, furtive glances, and "what if"s. It was charming …
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In many ways it is refreshing that Ben Elton hasn't changed his act at all over the last 44 years. Go back to any YouTube clip of his 1980s stand-up and you'll hear the same rhythm, vocal tics, and emphasis as he does today. Even his politics haven't shifted (much) with identical rants about feckless politicians and the dangers of bigotry. What's lost is the sense of topicality. Hey! Don't we all look at our phones too much?! Gosh! Isn't Daniel Craig a different James Bond to Roger Moore?!…
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Experimental and unconventional theatre is rare in the prime spots of the West End. There's a sea of jukebox musicals, film adaptations, standard Shakespeare, and Worthy Plays. Theatreland runs on bums-on-seats - doesn't matter what the critics say as long and punters keep paying outrageous prices for cramped stalls in dilapidated venues. Elektra is uncompromising. It is the sort of play the average customer might have heard of in passing, but hasn't made a significant dent in modern…
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Malcolm Croft (under the pseudonym Catherine Nappington) has produced a compendium of cat illustrations from ancient manuscripts. It's then peppered with a variety of regurgitated facts and captions of a sub-Facebook levels of humour. There are a few hundred pages of illustrations for you to flick through - but they're all devoid of context. As sumptuous as the images are, they're surround by commentary which wouldn't be out of place on a disused Tumblr blog. There's also a lot of discussion…
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Because I'm a massive nerd, I actually try to read specification documents. As I've ranted ad nauseam before, the current TOTP spec is irresponsibly obsolete. The three major implementations of the spec - Google, Apple, and Yubico - all subtly disagree on how it should be implemented. Every other MFA app has their own idiosyncratic variants. The official RFC is infuriatingly vague. That's no good for a security specification. Multiple implementations are great, multiple interpretations are…
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The Web Crypto API is, thankfully, nothing to do with scammy cryptocurrencies. Instead, it provides access to powerful cryptographic features which were previously only available in 3rd party tools. So, is it possible to build a TOTP code generator without using any external JS libraries? Yes! And it is (relatively) simple. Here's the code that I've written. It is slightly verbose and contains a lot of logging so you can see what it is doing. I've annotated it with links to the various…
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Last year, I reviewed a Four-Colour eInk Name Badge - the ManyTag HSN371. The hardware itself is perfectly fine, but the Android app isn't great. It is complicated, crash-prone, and not available in the app-store. After some back-and-forth with the manufacturer, they agreed to send me their Android SDK and documentation. Sadly, the PDF they sent me was riddled with errors and the software library is also a bit dodgy. So, with the help of Edward Toroshchyn and a hefty amount of automated…
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