1. Getting the offer

You simply get an existing Orange PAYG customer to call up (150 or 0800 079 2000) and say they want the PAYG San Francisco deal. Orange will send the phone and a SIM with £10 (I’ll be using my existing contract on 3UK with the phone; the Orange £10 will be used for Orange Wednesdays 2for1 film or pizza promotions).

—

2. Unlocking the phone so you can use it on any network

The next step is to unlock it. You can do this for free and easily on the ZTE Blade, thankfully. Just head to http://arrtoo.x10.mx/unlockBlade.php , enter your IMEI (which you can get by turning the phone on, ignoring as much of the messages as possible, getting to the dialer, and dialing *#06#) and input the unlocking code when asked for it (after turning your phone off, inserting a SIM from a non-Orange provider, and turning it on again); you’ll get prompted for the code given out at the link above.

—

3. Flashing the ROM to update the phone

Once unlocked, it’s time to get rid of the Orange pre-loaded crap and update the phone to the very cutting edge. Orange sells these phones with Android 2.1 or 2.2. You can get it to 2.3.4 (plus a few additional fixes) through any number of the tutorials here: http://android.modaco.com/category/453/zte-blade-blade-modaco-com/ ; usual caveats apply: you’re not doing a standard operation, there’s a risk you’ll brick it, void your warranty, etc. Follow any instructions to the letter, read around the topic before you launch into it without understanding what each step does, and search for people asking the same questions you have, either on Google on in the Modaco forums linked to above. And back things up from your old phone, obviously; save your numbers somewhere safe, and save them to your SIM card so you easily move them over to your new phone.

Here’s what I recommend doing:

- determine whether the phone you were supplied with is ‘Gen 1′ or ‘Gen 2′ by installing a tiny app called Mr Pigfish: http://www.appbrain.com/app/ask-mr-pigfish/com.apedroid.pigfish

—

- if Gen 1, then download this (or another ROM; newer alternatives come up all the time, you just have to read around the Modaco forums linked to above): http://hotfile.com/dl/124709138/1d6efab/gsf-blade-b15-tpt.zip.html; place it on the SD Card (if you downloaded the file to a computer, not to the phone, then move it over by USB or Bluetooth). This is an all-in-one image for first converting your phone to Gen 2, and then flashing it up to Android 2.3.4. Here are the install instructions courtesy of the maker:

“To install: Unzip the file to the root of your SD card, it will create an ‘image’ folder. Check the integrity of the files you created using AFV (available from android market) to find the nandroid.md5 file in the image directory, then long press on it & verify nandroid backup. Turn off your phone, leave it for at least 30 seconds, then hold menu & volume (up) when you power it on. You should see some green text (may be just a blank screen) then it should reboot & you should see a big android while it is performing it’s first boot (this will take a while). Once it has successfully started up don’t forget to delete the image folder on your SD card, to prevent any accidents.”

—

- if Gen 2, then this is the file to download: http://www.filesonic.com/file/1500072091/gsf-blade-b15.zip (or another ROM; newer alternatives come up all the time, you just have to read around the Modaco forums linked to above); this file will be installed through a clever program called ClockworkMod: this can be launched before your phone boots up into the normal phone mode, for doing things like backing up, flashing new ROMs, etc.

The best instructions I’ve seen for installing ClockworkMod and then flashing the file you just downloaded onto the phone, are the instructions here: http://android.modaco.com/content/zte-blade-roms-rom-customisation/329864/22-may-guide-how-to-install-a-custom-rom-on-the-zte-blade-gen1/ - you should read it all, but the instructions you’ll need are in subsections 1 and 2. Section 2 refers to an out of date ROM file; where it says “r12-update-modacocustomrom-blade-kitchen-unsigned.zip” you should instead read “gsf-blade-b9.zip”; and where it says “cb1718841318a63775b020e6c544edfa” you should instead look for an MD5Sum reading of “174ba19a85ec96258727d12177befa66″.

—

And there you have it. A cutting edge, high performance phone, covered by warranty, nicely unrestricted, and it’ll cost you about £85, minus whatever you sell your old phone for.

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Wowzers. Patent law has just given common sense, competition, and sound principles of living a serious left hook. Lord Justice Jacob, who retired earlier this month, has left England & Wales with a stinker. To be fair to Jacob LJ, his fellow judges on the Court of Appeal bench nodded his decision through. And they were applying, as judges should, the law (through precedent cases, specifically, United Wire and Canon v Green Cartridges [1]).

Patent law prevents you from making something that is patented, unless you have the patent-owner’s permission.

This case was about what ‘making’ means. Specifically: if, without seeking permission from the patentholder, you replace bits of something you have already bought, are you making a new object? If yes, you are potentially infringing their patents, having made an unlicensed manifestation of their invention.

The invention in question is a metal cage with a plastic bottle inside. There’s a photo in the judgement. The cage is estimated to last five times as long as the bottle, so once the plastic perishes or is contaminated, you’re going to replace the bottle rather than throw the whole thing out to buy a new one. Reconditioning is as straightforward as putting new plastic bottles in, and scrapping or recycling the old ones. In this industry’s lingo, replacing the plastic bottle from the cage manufacturer (who is the rightsholder to the patent) is “re-bottling”, whilst doing it from a third party is “cross-bottling”.

The straightforward competition between cross-bottlers and re-bottlers drives the cost of repurposing these containers down for businesses in England & Wales. What do businesses do when they don’t want to engage in tiring and potentially expensive free-market competition with others, striving to be the most value for money provider on the market? They turn to intellectual property (or they engage in directly anti-competitive practices, or lobby governments into building regulatory moats around their commercial castle). Holding a patent (a state-granted monopoly) on bottles in metal cages of this design, they sued.

The verdict? Infringement.

And yet Jacob LJ recognised the result of this verdict:

“78. (…) (it) was obviously a concern of the Judge in the present case – that if there was infringement Schütz would, as a commercial matter, have a monopoly in unpatented replacement bottles for their cages.

79.  This essentially economic concern is not really an apt matter for patent law. (…)

80. Does it really matter if Schütz has a monopoly in replacing bottles for its cages?  One cannot really say whether there is any public interest in the nature of freedom of competition seriously involved. (…)”

Sadly, the Court of Appeal decided to ignore what this leads to, what the parties called the ‘re-stringing problem’. If a tennis racket is patented, does re-stringing it infringe the patent? Or even more absurdly, do I infringe a patent on a photocopier if I re-fill it with Asda-brand paper?

The Court also ignored German law’s approach to the problem, specifically, “whether ultimate consumers of the patentee’s product could, by replacing parts, prolong the life of the product.  The German approach is clearly not the same as here”.

Come on. This is the dawn of the 3D printing age: easy reconditioning of everyday items we have spent our hard-earned money on, or bought second-hand, will soon be within our grasp. We also have an ailing manufacturing sector that the efficient and competitive Germans can laugh at. It is simply not acceptable now that neither our courts nor Parliament roll up their sleeves and clip back the barbs of intellectual monopoly to within common sense, economic, environmentally friendly or competitive bounds!

For consideration of the IP implications of 3D printing, see this post over at Technollama.

[1] United Wire v Screen Repair Services [2001] RPC 24; Canon v Green Cartridge  [1997] AC 728

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Times are hard, down Lewisham way. Good to see the giving spirit is still strong.

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The acquisition as 4/5th funded by Apollo, whilst the Carlyle Group (well known to Michael Moore and his unwashed ilk for its huge presence in the US war machine and its ties to both the Bush and Bin Laden families and the UK Conservative party) stumped up $200m for the ongoing joint venture.

Since then, BPP has been aggressively expanding, and I have been part of that effort: as a Brand Manager, I’ve assisted on open days, fairs and even a marketing video. The UK Bar Standards Body, the non-governmental body which regulates education to become a UK barrister (read: attorney) had their guts for garters over a disgraceful ‘administrative error’ that led to massive oversubscription on the course, swelling class sizes and seeing people turned away at short notice before the start date of the course they’d previously been accepted to.

BPP is adding centres around the country, and increasingly shifting to online, long-distance courses. Leverage. It’s also running a very strong upselling campaign to get people in my position to ‘upgrade’ our GDL into LLB (i.e. Bachelor of Law) degrees – getting the accreditation to do so was one of the very first moves it made after Apollo took the reins.

And in very recent news, BPP also announced that it is abandoning its bases as a professional educational college, and taking the title ‘University’ – the first private university in thirty years, and fully in keeping with Apollo’s US track record.

Yet it’s worth pointing out that the tutoring and teaching I got last year was mostly really very good. I was lucky to be in a class of very bright people and mostly quite good tutors. So my concerns aren’t derived from personal experience; they came from an HR person I got talking to that was attending a BPP event I was working at. She was from a very decent City law firm.

BPP, she said, has become less selective in who it allows onto the course. People with 2:2 (i.e. third-rate) degrees from universities are now given places when before a 2:1 or better was required. Her complaint is that this has made her job harder; no longer a badge worth trusting, she has to look deeper into CVs to see if they have to be binned at first sweep through the thousands of applications they receive. Worse, the HR personnel now have to field calls from emotional mothers asking why their child is being turned down for City jobs despite the family having shelled out/indebted itself in order to pay for the most expensive GDL course on the UK market. In truth, a third-rate university degree is going to be a straight-up rejection and the HR personnel view BPP’s new practice as at best immoral, at worst, downright deceptive.

So that’s my connection. I realise that sharing it in this tripartite piece is labelling myself a profiteering hypocrite whilst simultaneously shooting myself in the foot by potentially devaluing the value of a keystone of my CV; and may perhaps come to be seen as a snobbish and irrational act from an Oxford graduate irritated at seeing the value of his further education cheapened as his degree is made more accessible to ‘the high street’. Even if this comes to be seen as a good thing, it’s an enduring truth that good things are not necessarily good ideas.

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TO: Data Controller / Legal Compliance

Facebook Ireland Ltd

Hanover Reach

5-7 Hanover Quay

Dublin 2

IRELAND

RE: Subject Access Request (Data Protection Acts)

Dear Facebook (Ireland),

I wish to make a subject access request under s4 of the Data Protection Acts 1988 and 2003 (Ireland), the Data Protection Act 1998 (UK) and all other applicable legislation reflecting the rights I am conferred as an EU citizen under EU Directive 95/46/EC.

If you are not the designated Data Controller for Facebook, please pass this to the appropriate person, bearing in mind the legal deadline. I am expecting the company’s full and frank compliance with applicable Irish and EU law and thus expect to be given this data within the stipulated 21 days. Facebook was first given notice of this request in writing (via several channels on your online communication system on the Facebook website) on 10^th May 2010.

As my (EU-based) contracting party, I am by law entitled to receive a copy of any information you keep about me, on computer or in manual form, and any information about me passed outside the EU.

I would like a full and frank disclosure of all information held. Please inform me of all information you are legally bound to withhold. Please note that I will not be satisfied by any attempted exemption of information allowing the identification of third parties where those parties are known to me (i.e. form part of the same Facebook ‘Networks’ as me).

I prefer to be sent this information digitally wherever possible, in as full a depth and breadth as possible, and additionally in such structured formats as it is accessed, processed and/or communicated by your company.

I understand that you might like me to prove my identity, so a copy of my UK passport is attached. That is to be the sole lawful purpose for that document’s use. I understand that my rights also extend to demanding the removal of information about me when it is not held for the lawful and clearly stated purpose, and thus am giving advance notice of my exercise of that right: please release and delete that document once it is no longer required to prove my identity.

Yours faithfully,

Philippe Bradley

Also included was a photocopy of my passport and my contact details, plus a link to my facebook profile.

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• - your conscious self, actively filling in your profile
• - your less conscious self, passively interacting with the site, browsing certain pages, ‘Liking’ pages around the Web (or not clicking the Like button and still telling Facebook what pages you’re on)
• - your social network, interacting with you – indeed, your social graph can be highly predictive of who you are.

But what constitutes ‘my information’ for the purposes of a Subject Access Request (SAR) under UK, Irish (indeed, Europe-wide) Data Protection legislation?

A subject access request is an order any person in the EU can send any EU-based business that collects their data. It’s an order along the lines of ‘show me what you got’.

So I sent one. Initially, and with infinitesimally little hope of a reply, through some of the Contact Us webforms on facebook.com – doubtless to join mountains of rubbish in there, despite being clearly marked ‘Legal request: please respond; subject access request under the Data Protection Acts’.

And yet I knew that an earlier brave soul had managed to use a different part of the Data Protection Act to get Facebook to properly delete his account (Facebook prefers you to ‘deactivate’ accounts so you don’t leave an information black hole in the picture they’ve built up of everyone around you.

This told me two things. One, that for some reason Facebook thought it was under DPA jurisdiction. Two, it considers your social graph to be very important data – data about you, but with wider implications than that. So it was worth pushing on.

Thanks to a good spot by eagle-eyed lawyer Andrew Sharpe (@TMT_lawyer on Twitter if you want to follow his developing thoughts on the implications of his find; and here’s me), the secret is out: unless you’re accessing Facebook from the USA, in which case you’re contracting with a business in California, under Californian law, if you’re dialling in from anywhere else you’re dealing with a business in… Ireland!

All hands to the typewriter, I boshed out a pitiful attempt at a serious sounding Subject Access Request Letter (which I will post later)(Edit: HERE) and dispatched it, airmail to be signed for on delivery, with haste.

I suppose technically Facebook’s 40 days for compliance started when I sent them my first SAR (through their website forms). That was 16 days ago. Whether I want to argue that or not probably depends how nasty I’m feeling 24 days from now. Facebook’s been under the privacy kosh recently and maybe they deserve the extra 16 days if we mutually were to consider my posted letter to be the first SAR.

Let’s see what happens now. I would love suggestions in the comments concerning what data I should insist upon receiving, and in what format.

I will also be posting a rough guide to use of European data protection legislation in the coming weeks. In the meantime, wherever you are, you can have a look at the EU pages on the subject.

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"Why do you live in a commune? Please explain…"

So asks a friend. I’ve moved. But not to a commune! To a co-op. This post aims to start explaining what it is and why living here is so desireable.

This is an especially good time to set out the basic principles, given Gordon Brown’s statement earlier this week that Ed Miliband will work with the Co-operative party to draft Labour’s forthcoming election manifesto. Gordon Brown, it is worth remembering, is the first British Prime Minister to be a member of the Co-operative Party, alongside his main party affiliation (New Labour).

This post will focus on the general legal principles behind cooperative housing, especially the one I now live in. I hope to discuss other aspects in later posts, if there’s any interest. My overarching aim is to spread some appreciation for the concept (both from self interest and in the hope that maybe readers or their acquaintances might consider helping co-ops to be set up or develop by getting involved in their financing, making gifts or provisions in their wills.

I’m a tenant, with similar basic rights and obligations as any other poor bastard grinding away in this big city, paying rent to a landlord. But in a co-op housing association, there’s a difference – my landlord is virtual; a legal fiction, a juristic ghoul created by the founders of the co-op when it was built 35 years ago, courtesy of a big change in the law in 1965.

When you sign the tenancy agreement, a token £1 payment gets you a share in the co-op society, making you a full member. Through voting  and volunteering, the members of the co-op animate this ghoulish puppet. Dear landlord – we would like to hedge against rises in gas prices and slash our CO2 output by installing woodchip-fuelled heating systems. And the landlord makes it so. Dear landlord – we would like you to please set aside some of our rent (about £51 a week – £40 for basic rent, the rest is bills, tax, insurance and service charge) to fill a room with paint, tools, flooring, lightbulbs any other consumables we need for our houses. Make it so! Dear landlord – we would like a totally noninterventionist, liberal policy concerning how we arrange the house, paint walls, put up fixings, etc. So.

The landlord is us; we hire CDS (itself a cooperative) to handle the bureaucracy. We own the land (on long lease from the council) and can do largely as we please with it. So when one resident – a designer with the very illustrious Heatherwick Studio – came up with a plan to build a huge storage cage for bikes built with Russian railway sleepers – the co-op agreed and members got together to get it built, with the money, as always, coming from our rent.

There are ~120 of us living here, in houses and apartments. We live a 20 minute cycle from Waterloo, five minutes from a Jubilee Line station, and just around the corner from Goldsmiths Art College. It’s insane how far rent can stretch, even this close to central London, when nobody’s trying to make a profit.

———- Legal detail

The governing statute for the co-op is the Industrial and Provident Societies Act 1965. Under it and the Financial Services & Markets Act 2000, the co-op is registered with the FSA (Financial Services Authority). As with most co-ops, companies (often co-ops themselves) provide co-op housing societies with management services and registration, doing the basic bureaucracy and letting the ‘hippies’ get on with actually calling the shots concerning the property.

Share structure:

Like public companies, a co-op has share capital. There are diverse ways of organising this, but where I live the share structure is par value, fully mutual: each member gets 1 share; each share costs £1; and on moving out, you get your £1 back – you can’t take it with you or sell it for more even if the property has gone up in value. Your share gives you a single vote on the rare occasions where everybody gets together to vote on something. Liability when things go wrong is usually limited to that £1. The property remains in the ownership of current occupants (members) – but any profit cannot go to them; it must, by its regulations (and probably by law*), be spent on improving the co-op. If one day the land is sold at a profit, that profit has to stay within the co-op or find another co-op (cy-pres principle) – the same with any excess from the rent. This is a form of land ownership that’s very different to most in the country – it is not owned in the hope of making a buck at the end (what this means for the mortgage provider, I’m not sure yet).

Tax:

The land is private property; my council tax is paid from my weekly £51 rent (council tax is £2.58/week at present). The co-op, if fully mutual, is normally exempt from Capital Gains Tax and Corporation Tax*; co-ops can also often classify as charities and get the vast tax benefits associated with that, too. I don’t know for sure whether my co-op is a registered society but I am going to infer it isn’t: charitable housing associations must give their members security of tenure, whereas my contract stipulates that I can be kicked out with a month’s notice (that’s also my notice period), which makes getting mortgages much easier (the lender is sure it can take exclusive repossession of the vacant property if the co-op were to default.

Tenancy:

A co-op, being run for its inhabitant’s benefit, is not an Assured Shorthold Tenancy; it is a contractual tenancy, which ends when membership is resigned or withdrawn. Things sometimes go wrong. The wrong sort of person is let in. A fully mutual status, with properly defined rules, allows the co-op to act to end a tenancy and withdraw someone’s membership; a sad but crucial control mechanism.

Financing the purchase

I’m fresh here and have little idea how the co-op was first set up, the lease acquired, or the houses built (surprisingly nice for 60s housing!). So this section is subject to the proviso that I’m talking about co-ops in general, which may or may not apply to where I live.

Primary funding for establishment will come from mortgaging the property, to the Housing Corporation and/or the bank (from my contract it seems both mortgages were entered into at the start – I have no idea what’s been paid off to date). Secondary funding is then from the members, from charities, the government. Some state funding was provided in the early 70s under Reg Freeson. Fresson was a member of the Co-operative Party and Housing Minister under the then Labour government – I suspect some of that went into this community; the timing fits. This co-op does not take council money as the council then demands the right to nominate people (e.g. the homeless) into membership – people that usually just want to get housed and don’t lift a finger for the co-op.

Most interestingly, co-ops can issue loan notes (properly called loan stock) to finance their activities. An investor will receive a fixed rate of interest back over the repayment term.

Those are the basics; I thought I’d start with the legal nitty gritty, having just come from a land law class on (of all things) leases!

*these are things I haven’t independently verified, for co-ops as a whole, and certainly not for the one I live in

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Needless to say a great deal has changed in the mean time, namely with the economy seeing some very dark days and the US undergoing regime change (or has it?).

It was a tumultuous time to be in some of these countries, too:

• Central and northern India in the grip of Islamist terror attacks that culminated in the horrifying slaughter of foreign nationals around the very spots of southern Mumbai that my friends and I had sat in just weeks before wearing the passports and speaking the language that would have got us selected and gunned down in the attack
• China in the aftermath of the hugely acclaimed Beijing Olympic Games, during National Golden Week that saw hundreds of millions of adoring and proud Chinese migrate to the capital to bask in the reflected glory and generally held optimism at China’s rising importance and respectability in the world – with just Tibet, a tainted milk scandal and a reasonably sharp regression to pre-Olympics press freedoms to sour the mood
• Japan as pressure was mounting on the latest prime minister to step down, as the world seemed to us to be gripped by Obamamania
• Thailand in the throes of political upheaval amidst a gigantic royal funerary procession for a long-dead relative of the royal family: a revered, almost godlike king thought to be on his deathbed; a judicial process that wiped out the ruling party and left the country rudderless for the few days leading up to our flight out; the main airport shut down by riotous, fascism-demanding PAD flashmobs;

By comparison, Australia, New Zealand and South America (Peru-Chile-Argentina-Brazil) all seemed to me to be rather docile!

The next few weeks will be interesting and particularly challenging for me, with work, accommodation and a general direction in life all on the “To Find” list…

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It’s not all that often that a highly anticipated destination exceeds your expectations, then desentizes you to the point where you forget just how extreme and unique an experience you’re having. Granted, it’s been a while since I was home, so customary reference points are now just loose & shifting anchors; novelty and oddity are becoming the norm on this trip (thankfully!). What’s more, passing through Beijing and Shanghai immediately beforehand may have somewhat softened the full-on experience of urban, cutting-edge Asia.

Rather than go into detail, here are some vague observations:

- Seeing a suited businessman reading a violent / saccharine-cute / pornographic comic on the metro is much more likely than seeing him unfurl a Financial Times, Economist or local equivalent

- Fashion is all-important; but from all reports, Japanese society is remarkably cliquey, at all ages. Couples rarely form outside the confines of your social circle or without an introduction from someone in it. Fashion, I guess, isn’t used to attract partners in clubs or around town, but rather for self-expression or for cementing or improving one’s identity and standing in a clique. Or it might simply be a concession to what must be astoundingly heavy social pressures, in a society that from a very young age sees naval uniforms donned by schoolboys and incredibly short skirts struggling to leave schoolgirls with any pudeur [or protection from the many lewd gazes that about on Tokyo's admirably efficient public transport system!]

- Advertising is everywhere. I imagine individual adverts must have very low impact – to the tourist they’re baffling and blinding, but the locals must surely already be banner-blind, as insanity must be the logical conclusion of the endless attention demands of Tokyo oh-so-very needy flat surfaces

- Tokyo is a vertical town. Its “malls” line roads in two dimensions (along and up) in stark contrast to the more Western approach of 3D (along, in deep, and maybe up) retail and entertainment. As bar crawling tourists we really struggled to find watering holes – it’s frankly just odd and awkward to walk down a street with the bars as much as seven floors above your head, and the crawl becomes a search for drunken revellers streaming out of the ground floor elevator followed by a quick guess as to what floor they’ve come from. The rise is of course made in the optimism that the revellers have not just left because of last orders…

Verticality is just one example of why Tokyo seems to me to be a hard town to settle down in. Without a strong pre-existing network of comperes and insiders who already know which floor of which street to head to, browsing your way to a healthy social (and possibly professional) life really isn’t an option in Tokyo. The temp, the visitor – the unchaperoned newbie – is relegated to a purely passive role, that of observer. Good thing, then, that Tokyo offers so much to the eye <

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Love to all, P

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