Oyster Card. Good in parts, still.

I have had no response at all from Oyster/TFL regarding their overcharge error and the resulting abuse directed at my wife that I reported here:

The OpenSkills Sett: Oyster Card. Good in parts.

This morning I contacted my local council, the City of London, to ask if they could help with this matter. The person I spoke to told me that the City could not help and that there was no ombudsman for such matters. He said that I should call the GLA and speak to their transport department and not let them fob me off. I should insist on speaking to the transport department.

So I called the GLA. I was told that they did not handle complaints about TFL or Oyster (what a surprise) but that in fact there was a body that acted as an ombudsman in such cases: London Travel Watch.

So I have submitted a report to London Travel Watch. Let's see what happens next.

P.S. I have to say that, on the whole, the Oyster does work rather well for us. I can also understand that with such a complex travel network and so many distributed devices (the oyster readers) things will go wrong. What is definitely not OK are the mechanisms Oyster and TFL have in place to handle the inevitable problems.

Out of Date

The BBC are reporting on the state of the monolithic project embarked upon my the NHS (the UK National Health Service) to "upgrade" much of their IT infrastructure. Many reports have come out about this (one of the best was in Private Eye a few weeks ago) and the government response is call the information behind the report "out of date". Look out for the phrase in here:

BBC NEWS | Health | 'Action needed' on NHS computers

... and also look out for it in other government responses. It's an easy one line put down of any study. If the study is done too quickly, it is classed as superficial. If the study is prepared carefully over time, of course the data behind the study is "out of date" by the time the study is published.

In this case the irony is that the project(s) that the report note are late would be reported as being even later if the data was bang up to date. No doubt the cost overruns would be higher too.

Of course, information can be out of date. But the UK government seem be using that as an excuse to ignore many insightful observations.

Singing my song

I just wrote about my concerns regarding the use of criminal law to tackle copyright infringement. Well, it looks like the EFF have the same concerns and are getting together a petition:

EFF takes up arms against Euro copyright move | The Register

You can sign the EFF petition and read more information from the EFF on this subject here.

Copyright infringement: a crime?

First: IANAL. The following is my understanding only. I am not a legal practitioner of any kind.

Copyrights are only useful because they are protected by law. If you infringe upon a copyright you are breaking the law. But what kind of law? Civil law is between civil entities (such as people or companies) and it is up to the injured party to bring a legal action. Criminal law is between the state and a civil entity and in this case the state will prosecute the case. If you break a civil law you can expect to pay a fine. If you break a criminal law you get a visit from the police, a criminal record and can expect to spend time in jail.

Until recently copyright was protected by civil law. If you make an unauthorized copy of my work I can sue you for compensation. Recently, laws have been created that make copyright infringement a criminal offense in some circumstances. This means that the police or other government agencies can come after you. For example, the Trading Standards office in the UK have become copyright police as reported by The Register here:

Trading Standards officers become copyright enforcers | The Register

It seems that many of the laws criminalizing copyright infringement are being introduced at the behest (via expensive lobbying campaigns) of large corporations and groups of corporations. Good examples of this are the US entities the RIAA and the MPAA who get very involved with the creation of legislation in this space. The big companies prefer being protected by criminal law because it saves them the time and expense of prosecuting. They simply have to point the finger and the publicly funded agencies (e.g. the police) will do all the hard work.

I can see that for large scale systematic copyright infringement criminal law may be appropriate. I am very uneasy, though, about criminal laws introduced to make it easy for corporations to make criminals and jail residents of individuals for downloading a couple of MP3s. If the corporations have their copyrights infringed upon it is absolutely their right to sue the infringer, but making infringement a crime in such cases seems to be unreasonable.

I hope we are not losing the "for the people" bit of government and replacing it with "for the largest wallet".

City of London. The wide open spaces.

I just looked out of the window here in my office in the City of London. I'm quite lucky as I have a view of part of the magnificent St. Paul's cathedral.

The City of London has it's own police force. They have jurisdiction over the square mile which is known for banks and insurance companies, but not so much for wide open spaces.

So imagine my surprise when a City of London police 4WD just rolled down the street. What on earth do the need a 4WD for? They already have horses and bikes and the police can get around the square mile on foot pretty quickly too (it really is only a square mile). But a 4WD? To paraphrase Shrek: perhaps they are compensating for something

Support the standards, reject "Open XML"

Microsoft are engaged in another one of their Embrace, Extent, Extinguish campaigns. This time they are trying to disrupt the established and widely supported Open Document Format (ODF) standard:

Microsoft calls on UK public to raise the Office standard | The Register

Note the rather cynical spin that Microsoft put on this. It almost sounds as if they are supporting open standards when in fact they are trying their very hardest to brush open standards aside in favor of their own latest lock-in format. They even have the gall to call their format "Open".

I urge my elected representatives to oppose the Microsoft attempt to disrupt standards in a further abuse of their monopoly position. The courts have punished Microsoft for monopoly abuse in the past but unfortunately the court action has had little impact on Microsoft's behaviour. We need the national standards organisations of the UK and all other countries to stand up to Microsoft, to recognise the value of the ODF standard and to reject Microsoft's current efforts to undermine it.

Business as usual

Microsoft claimed that people should move to their latest version of the aging Windows operating environment because it was "safer". Well ...

BBC NEWS | Technology | Quick fix for Windows cursor flaw

If you really want safety use Ubuntu or OS/X.

But this is not so easy for many who have been locked in by Microsoft in various ways. For those people I suggest trending towards using standards so that in the future you have some choice when it comes time to choose your OS.

Oyster Card. Good in parts.

It seems we have hit upon a bug in the Oyster Card system. We used the Waterloo and City tube from Bank to Waterloo to catch a Eurostar train to Brussels. Unfortunately, due to a track side fire, the Eurostar service was cancelled so we had to just go back home. Using the Oyster Card for these two trips left us out of pocket and exposed us to ridicule by the TfL staff ...

All the times and amounts are direct from the "Journey History" page of my Oyster Card account page on the Oyster Card website. I started the following journeys with £13.10 on my card ...

Time	Gate Information	Amount	Balance
17:06	Bank Entry	£4.00	£9.10
17:13	Waterloo (Bkloo, Nthn, W&C Lines) Exit	£2.50	£11.60
17:40	Waterloo (Bkloo, Nthn, W&C Lines) Entry	£2.50	£9.10
17:45	Bank Exit	£4.00	£5.10

Note that there is a maximum fee of £4.00 GBP for a tube ride. The oyster system deducts the £4.00 when you start a journey and refunds the "change" when you exit (which makes sense to me). So the first trip has two entries: First I enter at Bank and get charged £4.00 GBP, then I exit at Waterloo and get £2.50GBP "change". All well and good. In total I paid £1.50 for the trip and we can see that the balance after that trip is £11.60 (£13.10 - £1.50). Perfect.

But look what happens on the return trip. I get charged £2.50 upon entry at Waterloo and another £4.00 on exit from Bank. I have been charged £6.50 for the return trip from Waterloo to Bank!

The same happened to Justina, but it was even worse for her. She had only £1.80 on her card for the return trip (which should have been enough) but she could not exit at Bank because the balance was deemed to be too low by the gate which was probably trying to take the additional £4.00 after the Waterloo gate had already taken £2.50. The really bad bit was the attitude and aggression of the staff at Bank station. Very nasty and they obviously believed that the Oyster Card was always right and hence that Justina was a fare dodger.

Looks like a serious bug in both the Oyster Card system and staff training. How good will the Oyster Card people be at fixing this? We'll see.

---

Update 1: Not a good start. The FAQ for Oyster says that in cases of overcharging the victim should call them on a number that earns them 3.5p per minute! So, Oyster rip you off on using their card and then they charge you as they (slooooowly, no doubt) try to resolve the problem by phone. I've sent in an email message instead which they promise they will get around to sometime over the next 7 working days. Thanks guys! Not.

Update 2: No response from Oyster at all. I'll send another message.

Novell on the SCO slope?

Many feel that SCO, a previously well regarded company and active participant in the FOSS community, was poisoned by Microsoft and encouraged to embark on it's failed but damaging legal campaign.

Are Novell to be poisoned in the same way? ...

Groklaw - FSF Corrects Novell's Steinman and a Request to End the Mystery

... it doesn't look good, which is a great shame. Novell have done some great work, in particular with SuSE. But as SCO fell, so can Novell.

Will SCO go bust on schedule?

Wouldn't it be convenient for companies that compete with Linux based systems if SCO went bust before it had to prove it's claims against IBM and Linux in court? ...

Groklaw - SCO's 10Q

Yes, it would be very convenient. Having spent years spouting innuendo and threats which have dampened demand for Linux based systems SCO may never be taken to task before a court. Who loses? Everyone, except perhaps those who bankrolled SCO in this big lie.