Then Apple pushed iPhone OS 4 – or iOS4, as it’s now called – and the trouble began. Programs on my phone kept crashing, the sound kept getting interrupted and it became glacially slow. My phone went from being a thing of beauty and a joy to use to being a clunky machine to be endured and cursed. Using Wellington’s helpful text-to-park feature became nearly impossible because the parking machine would time out in the time it took me to send it a text message. And, in what was the last straw, it started ignoring incoming calls and going straight to voicemail.

This is the story of how I fixed all that by going back to iPhone OS 3.

Many others with the same phone model are complaining. I called Apple about it and they told me to reset the phone. I had tried that already, of course. I also updated it to 4.0.2, the very latest iOS, but to no avail. I tried all the tricks to improve the speed on a 3G that I could find on the Net including turning off Spotlight but it didn’t return my phone to a usable state. So I went back to the old iPhone OS.

Apple say that it is not possible to return an iPhone 3G that has been “upgraded” to iOS4 to the previous release of the iPhone software. There are many pages on the Web telling you how to do it, so I didn’t believe them. It is possible, as I have proved for myself, but it took a fair bit of time and some nail biting moments when the phone was all black.

Before I tell you what I did, please bear in mind that Apple claims this can’t be done and I’m certainly not offering you any guarantees. It worked for me, but if it fails for you, you are on your own with Google to figure out what to do next. Also, it should go without saying that you won’t have access to the iOS4-only features if you go back. For the iPhone 3G that includes threads in the email client and the ability to put programs into folders.

I started from this How to Guide by Taimur Asad. It covers downgrading your iPhone or iPod touch to iPhone OS 3. The guide provides instructions to get back to 3.1.2 or 3.1.3. I went back to 3.1.3 because I knew it worked well on my phone. If you are keen to do this, read the guide thoroughly a couple of times and be sure that you have one of the specific models it covers.

I use a Mac for the computer that my phone syncs with, and my phone is on Telecom’s XT network. Those things affect the instructions and you need to understand what to do differently if you use Windows or a different telco. That said, the guide looks as though it would work for a Windows computer, and carrier bundles are available for most mobile carriers.

I had several false starts when trying to follow the guide. Each was slightly scary because you have to put your phone into DFU mode (I think I know what that stands for!) which makes the phone black and unresponsive. Getting back from DFU mode involves a bit of (free) software such as RecBoot which you need to install on your computer before you start. Eventually the phone comes back to life. It’s all in the guide – thanks, Taimur.

Eventually I figured out that my false starts were because I was using a USB hub. I normally sync through a hub and it works just fine, but my computer wouldn’t recognise a phone in DFU mode unless it was connected directly to it with a single USB cable. Once I had sorted that out, the restore process followed the one set out in the guide.

The actual process was relatively quick once I’d figured it out. It took about half an hour. Then I had to do a restore and a sync of what was now an empty phone. That ran overnight.

There was a problem early in the restore process. iTunes refused to let me reload a recent backup saying that the backup had been made by more recent software than now existed on the phone, which it had. I wound up restoring from a very old backup. I’ve spent a chunk of today reloading configuration detail like my wireless passwords. It would be a good idea to identify the last backup you have (iTunes makes them when you sync) from iPhone OS 3 and restoring from that when the time comes. Do bear in mind, though, that you might lose information that is embedded in programs on your iPhone if you do this.

The final step for me was to reapply the carrier bundle for XT so my phone would do 3G data, texting and tethering again.

The result – one iPhone 3G functioning as well as it ever did, which is very well indeed. I only wish Apple hadn’t put me through so much grief to get it back that way.

I gave the Committee some suggestions on how this law should work – if we have to have it at all. They are all in my submission to the Committee.

I went to observe the Commerce Select Committee hearing submissions on the Copyright Amendment (Infringing Filesharing) Bill, which is the law designed to replace the failed S92A of the Copyright Act. I saw the first three submissions, and I’ll write a little about them below.

But first I want to say that the select committee process really does seem to work. It’s a really important part of New Zealand democracy that bills (that is, draft acts of Parliament) get looked at by small teams of MPs who call for public submissions. Anyone can have their say. And the committees generally listen and do their best to balance the interests and concerns of the people submitting. As a nation, we are blessed by having such an open government process.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve been involved in select committee hearings. Last year I made a submission to this same Committee on software patents, and I wrote about it at the time. Before that I presented on the (at the time) perceived broadband monopoly of Telecom. And, quite a few years ago now, I was an official advising a select committee as it deliberated over a bill that was never implemented.

Back to my experience yesterday. I went to Bowen House at 9am. There were quite a few people gathering in the lobby outside the meeting room. (That’s why they are called lobbyists!) We were called in after half an hour or so, and sat in rows of seats facing the committee members who were seated around a U-shaped table. There was a table for people to address the committee which was across the mouth of the U. There was a screen for them to present on if they wished, but the audience couldn’t see it, I assume just because of the limitations of room design rather than a desire for secrecy.

There were 9 members of the committee present. The chair was the Hon Liane Dalziel, a former Minister of Commerce. Others who spoke included Clare Curran, Gareth Hughes and Jonathan Young. Overall, committee members appeared engaged and interested in the submitters and their points.

The first group to submit was RIANZ. They brought their barrister along – Andrew Brown QC – and he did almost all the talking for them. Brown started by saying that government had broken the contract it made with ISPs by not implementing the original S92A, which would have allowed RIANZ and others to get people’s Internet accounts terminated on the basis of allegations that they had infringed copyright. Brown said that government had given ISPs legal protections in that Act without balancing them with obligations to cut people off.

From listening to Brown it became clear to me that RIANZ and probably the other rights holder organisations see the ISPs as a major part of the problem. Rights holders see ISPs as making money off them by charging their customers for bandwidth which those customers use for unlawful downloads, which rights holders see as reducing their revenues. It’s a clear case of zero sum thinking – there’s only so much revenue to go around and ISPs are managing to take it away from the rights holders.

It hardly needs to be said that this view of ISPs is not widely held outside the “content” industries. Most people see ISPs akin to TransitNZ which provides highways that can be used to carry people and goods around the country. That’s how the Internet is designed and that’s what makes it useful. In practice, ISPs are generally fairly low margin operations in a competitive market. They are not very engaged in this debate.

Brown said that the notice regime on the Bill is flawed because it requires subsequent notices to be from the same copyright holder. He said that all allegations of infringements should count towards the “three strikes”, so that penalties could be considered after three infringements even if they weren’t agains the same rights holder.

On Internet termination for serious offenders – Brown said they wanted suspension, i.e. a cut off for a period of time. He said this was essential for the law to have teeth. (This position ignores the stiff financial penalties in the Bill.)

There were questions from the Committee members about whether such a “graduated response” scheme had been shown to reduce unlawful downloads overseas. RIANZ said it was too early to say because they hadn’t been implemented for long enough anywhere.

The next submitter was NZFACT and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). This was led by the MPAA’s managing director for Asia Pacific, Michael Ellis. He made much of the fact that he had flown from Singapore to New Zealand to talk to the Committee. Ellis tried to show a video to the Committee to explain how easy it was to download the movie “Boy”. The submission came dangerously close to farce as he repeatedly failed to make his laptop display the video. These attempts took up most of his allotted time. Eventually he managed to start the video without sound.

Ellis produced figures purporting to show that New Zealand was 2nd in unlawful downloads per capita among a group of Asia-Pacific countries. He said that they got these from watching P2P filesharing systems, although exactly how the figures were derived was not clear.

MP Clare Curran asked whether these unlawful downloads were affecting movie going. Ellis said that movie companies needed the revenues from all the releases of a film – theatres, DVD and TV – to make a profit. She then asked why movie companies don’t use the iTunes model of distribution. (Recently in the House Clare pointed out that movies are often released a lot later in NZ than elsewhere, e.g. the oscar-winning Hurt Locker came out here after it had won.) Ellis replied that the film industry needed legislation to protect while it invested in new distribution models.

The final submission of the day was from Lance Wiggs, a serial entrepreneur who is now involved with the Pacific Fibre project to bring a second transpacific cable to New Zealand. Lance expressed his frustration at the poor state of the Internet in New Zealand. He drew a parallel with Finland, which has recognised the Internet as a human right. Disconnecting someone’s Internet, he said, is disconnecting them from society and can never be acceptable. His position was that people who have done really bad things deserve to be incarcerated and taken out of society for a while, but lesser offences do not justify cutting off someone’s Internet account. He gave some examples of how cutting off the Internet might be dangerous – many people no longer have fixed telephones, using Internet-based services instead. His view was that only those illegally downloading for profit should be prosecuted.

Lance talked about how backward content distribution is in New Zealand. Overseas countries receive programmes months or years before New Zealand. There is no legal way to obtain material, he said, that the rest of the world is already talking about on the Internet. He thinks its unsurprising that many New Zealanders choose to download unlawfully rather than wait to see if the official channels decide to publish here.

In conclusion, I have to say that I found Lance a breath of fresh air compared to the other two. It’s noticeable that the big rights-holder organisations chose to bring a QC and a honcho from overseas. The average New Zealand Internet user can’t afford to do that, even if they knew what was going on. And the MPs’ questions showed to me that they know that the industry has a history of making dubious claims about the hurt they say they suffer through unlawful downloads. The US Government Accounting Office recently rubbished most of those claims, declaring then to be no basis for making public policy.

I’ll be presenting to the committee next week. Should be fun!

Incidentally, it’s really good to see a major political party actually trying to develop policy in the open on the Internet. I’d love to see them both doing it. Where are you, National?

I wrote a comment on the Red Alert blog trying to explain what I think statements like “Broadband is a Human Right” mean. Here’s an expanded and tidied up version.

Human rights are in some sense a legal fiction since there is nothing in physics or evolution which guarantees them. Rather, they are a way of agreeing a minimum set of standards to dealing with each. So arguments like “show me where Einstein, the Bible or the US Constitution says this” simply don’t address the issue.

However, human rights have shown themselves to be a good way of thinking about how we relate to each other. The UN Declaration of Human Rights (commonly thought to have been drafted by Eleanor Roosevelt) was put together in the late 40s while the world was still reflecting on the treatment of the Jews and other minority groups in Nazi Germany. (Subsequently Stalin and Mao also treated whole classes of people like this, but their nations did not sign up to the notion of human rights.) Setting human rights as a basic standard of treatment of individuals provides a benchmark by which people can measure their governments.

There is an argument that says agreeing to human rights such as freedom from unjust imprisonment is qualitatively different to saying that access to a good or service like food or broadband is also a human right. We can agree that killing people is wrong, but to some it’s a further step to say that you should feed someone who would otherwise starve.

My perspective on this is that human rights are part of the way which we mutually agree to treat each other. I don’t think it would be acceptable for people to starve or freeze to death for lack of food or shelter and I’m happy to give up a proportion of my resources to ensure that. The actual job of distributing those resources is outsourced to the state. So, to me, extending the language of human rights to the basic necessities of life is entirely appropriate.

The question we are now facing is whether access to broadband can be seen as a human right. You can certainly argue that people should have the right to participate in society and the the economy, and I can cheerfully assert that broadband will soon be essential for those things if it isn’t already. So, the question is whether participation in society and the economy is a human right.

It seems to me that these things are real human rights. We are social creatures who can’t survive without the assistance of others. Cooperation is a major distinction between us and animals. If you accept this, then refusing to guarantee access to the tools required to participate is effectively condemning some people to lives of isolation and alienation.

This is nothing to do with whether services that we think should be human rights are provided by the state or by the private sector. And it doesn’t compel providers to serve any given individual. What it does is provides a spur to government to ensure that everyone gets access. Whether government deals with that through regulation, subsidy or direct provision is up to it.

To sum up: I think there is a real case for regarding broadband access as a human right. I’m delighted to see Finland – a country with a great many similarities to New Zealand – legislating for this. Will New Zealand follow suit?

UPDATE: Lawyer and smart person Guy Burgess wrote about Internet as a human right last month. And Juha Saarinen, who speaks Finnish (of course), has commented on what the Finnish government is really doing.

Subsequently I met Anni and Michele of Digitalbrand, who were contracted by Microsoft to run the session. They had recently run something similar for Microsoft in Canberra, and a couple of New Zealand government people had gone over for it. We talked a lot about the difference between a self-organising informal unconference and a formal conference with a set agenda and speakers.

This was certainly not the first informal session to be organised around open government data in Wellington. There have been several self-organised bar camps and there will presumably be more. The government folk and the open data types are used to just rolling up their sleeves and making these things happen. So, we were slightly amused and a little nervous to see how a large corporate would approach the notion.

The day before the session I met with the organisers again, and with Julian Carver of Seradigm who had just allowed himself to be talked into chairing it. It became clear then that there was a tension between the un- and the conference, and Julian spent a lot of time working out how to manage this.

I should say at this stage that my respect for Julian, already high, has gone up hugely. It was controversial that he even accepted the job of chairing (which he did pro bono). Nevertheless he put all his formidable talents into the planning and the day itself. His performance was stellar.

And so on to the day itself – today, although it seems longer ago. There was indeed the the tension between an organised agenda and an unconference-style self-directed group. This was partly managed by calling for lists of topics before and during the session, then self-selecting into breakout groups to brainstorm these topics and report back. Of the attendees I spoke to, some seemed uncomfortable with the informal part of the day, and others with the formal part, so perhaps a balance was a reasonable thing to attempt.

Many of the formal presentations were very good. Hamish McArdle of the NZ Police, Minister Steven Joyce and the idea-per-second Glen Barnes stick in my mind. There was a panel discussion which was probably the best run of any such I have seen. (I did say that Julian was good at this.) And there weren’t any presentations coming in over Skype, video feeds or other potential technical nightmares. But, most of all – especially – there wasn’t any selling. Product and specific technology did not get mentioned. That was good for several reasons, perhaps the most trivial being that Oliver and I had an agreement in advance that he would have to supply me with a beer immediately for delivery offsite if selling occurred. I didn’t collect on that one.

The break out groups produced some interesting material, although a lot of it was reasonably anodyne. It’s clear that there is great enthusiasm to open government data – the NZGOAL framework at SSC is an example – and external encouragement isn’t needed, although welcome.

I was concerned by the output of one group which evaluated open source software as a key plank of open data – it concluded, perhaps predictably, that OSS wasn’t necessary for open data or even fit for government’s purposes. After all, who are you going to sue if it goes wrong? And do people know how much investment commercial software houses put into their products? These rather tired points have been rebuffed many times and no-one saw the point in doing so again at the meeting. That was the prompt for my acerbic tweet Microsoft unconference decides open source no good. Film at 11.

To me, the self-serving bit about the alleged unsuitability of open source was the only serious fly in the ointment on the day. The rest was at least neutral and often worth while. But, the intended beneficiaries of this day were the government folk who are opening up data as part of a move towards more open government, so I asked a few of them how they thought the day went. “Mixed” was a typical response. Like the curate’s egg, said one (hence the title of this post).

My overall conclusion here is that there was an attempt to make an elephant dance, in that Microsoft did at least try to run a session with a fluid agenda. Anything could have happened. The day was sell-free and mostly free of the kind of rancour which has poisoned Microsoft’s relationships with open source and open data people over the last few years. Politely, no one mentioned OOXML, and even when Clare Curran expressed her frustration that the Select Committee’s clear view on disallowing software patents has yet to reach some quarters, she refrained from rubbing the host’s corporate nose in its own support for software patents.

For Microsoft I suspect this was a walk on the wild side. Good on them at least for trying something. From the government’s – well, many of the government folk involved were well-used to informal bar camps. The bar campers wanted more informality and the others felt happier being lectured. From the open source, open data and general “want to help” types such as yours truly – the day gave an opportunity to spread the message wider.

To repurpose an old Data General ad: People are saying that Microsoft’s entry into open government unconferences will legitimise the field. The bastards say: welcome!

That’s what makes it strange that the film industry apparently hasn’t released the film to Australia. There are a *lot* of New Zealanders living there. And it’s not surprising, after all the promotion, that people there want to see the film however they can get it. According to a press release yesterday from the industry, they are indeed getting it, via infringing downloads on the Internet. The film apparently got to the Internet via a member of the industry itself, since the copy uploaded is a “pre-screener” available only within the industry.

What I find odd about this story is that anyone is surprised. Why would they expect New Zealanders and other folk to wait months for a well-promoted hit film? It’s not as though the technology for them to release it in other countries as a paid, legal download doesn’t exist. Why, then, leave a big market like unsatisfied with a legal product when they have alternatives?

The same industry has just claimed that unlawful downloads in New Zealand are costing it $70million. They say things like this all the time, but the truth is that no-one knows and there’s no way to calculate it. The US Government Accounting Office recently published a report saying that all such claims were totally overblown and were no basis for policy.

It’s no accident, of course, that this story blows just as Parliament is considering a Bill to fine people heavily or cut off their Internet for file sharing. The industry has obviously made a calculation about how late in the hype cycle for “Boy” it could go and still get close to the Select Committee hearings, likely to be next month.

This sort of thing has been going on for so long that I’m wondering if it is deliberate. Is it actually cheaper for the film industry to promote a film then not release it in a market, then to go after people who download it and try to seek large fines? Perhaps this is far-fetched, but I’m struggling to see any other reason.

In the meantime, congratulations to Taika Waititi. Let’s hope he gets the chance to get the film distribution industry to see some sense.

Update: Miraz Jordan has written an excellent piece on the same subject – well worth reading as well.

By the same logic, the UK owns the international postage system. The Queen should be empowered to shut that down at will.

Seriously, it’s hard to doubt that the US could completely crash the Net if it chose. But it would be an act of infamy that would damage the economies of the rest of the world far worse than the banking crisis. How much more bad press do they need?

Several themes came out from the seminar. The biggest one for me, which was mainly expounded by Nat Torkington, was that there is not a problem that needs to be solved here. Revenues for all the industries that claim to be affected by unlawful downloads are going up very healthily. They claim that their industries are being devastated by the huge volume of copyright infringements, but you would have to say that these claims are not backed up by the evidence. Even so, the so-called content industries are an order of magnitude smaller than the Internet industries they seek to control.

Another theme was the sheer inappropriateness of Internet termination as a penalty for anything. To the government’s credit, it has made termination a last resort which has to be enacted by a court, but even so it’s just not a useful thing to do. You don’t get your Internet connection cut off for far more serious offences. Why should copyright infringement be so special? We don’t cut the road to someone’s house if they have used it to move stolen goods. Just like road access, the Internet is used by everyone in a building, and by others to deliver services to the building.

The Bill sets out a regime of notices that get passed to and fro between a copyright holder and someone accused of copyright infringement, through the ISP concerned. This is mostly aimed at educating the downloader, many of whom don’t realise that they are doing something or illegal, or that they can be caught. This has always been the approach promoted by InternetNZ and it has a lot to commend it, although it was clear at the seminar that there’s still some detail to be worked out in the way it’s set out in the Bill.

Persisting in illegal downloading would lead to the Copyright Tribunal levying a fine. There was a lot of discussion on how much was reasonable. My view is that it should be set at a multiple of what it would cost to get the files legally, say three times the cost on iTunes. We would also need to figure out what to do if the file isn’t available legally in New Zealand but it is elsewhere – I’d probably suggest setting it at the cost in other markets, to provide an incentive for copyright holders to bring things to New Zealand at the same time as everywhere else. As Clare Curran pointed out in her speech in the House on this Bill, the oscar-winning movie Hurt Locker wasn’t made available in this country for months after it was released elsewhere, and not until after it had won its oscar.

The MED officials present were writing furiously for the most part. I’m hopeful that they took a lot of the very sensible points made back to the drafting process. They will probably be advising the Commerce Select Committee which is considering the Bill at the moment.

Talking of which, that committee has called for submissions by 17th June. It’s a really good idea to send them a submission. The process is straightforward – just write down clearly your arguments and what you want the committee to do with the Bill. You can look at this post for ideas. Probably the biggest point to ask the Select Committee for is to remove Internet account termination as any kind of option, because it’s disproportionate and unworkable.

It might. Email is critical to many of us on the Internet. It may be true that email is for old people, but I find it pretty much essential for a great deal of the Internet’s usefulness. I’m a heavy user, in case you hadn’t gathered. I want to be able receive and send wherever I am and I archive everything. That’s a couple of gigabytes per year.

I move around a lot, connecting to the Internet through two or three different routes every day. Getting and sending email though the day used to be a problem for me because ISPs’ email servers tend to assume that you are connecting through that ISP. In the early 2000s I went through a phase of having to reconfigure the email client on my laptop wherever I was. To get round that I tried putting all email through a server I owned – Qmail on a Mandrake box – running in my home, running on a DSL line with dynamic IP. It does work, but it cost me grief to support it that I just didn’t need. (Gmail was in its infancy and wasn’t allowing you your own domain name at the time. Besides, I don’t like my Gmail address.)

Winding the clock forward to a few years back, I found Fastmail.FM. They are a specialist email hosting provider. They offer IMAP and SMTP over SSL (SSL is important because otherwise passwords are exchanged in plaintext, which might be over public wi-fi) and an email web client. They don’t do much else, but they do provide their email service brilliantly. I’ve been very happy with Fastmail for over three years. All my machines sync to the server, I have a nice fat email archive which I can search instantly, and I send and receive email on the move wherever I am. It’s just one less thing to worry about.

Now, Fastmail is being acquired. By a company with a marginally-functional email service of its own. Hmm.

Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against Opera. They are another plucky David fighting the Goliath of Internet Explorer. They provide a credible browser which lots people like. They haven’t been as successful as Firefox, but then they haven’t had Google’s money behind them. I met their CE at the OOXML standards meeting in Geneva. He was saying some very sensible things.

But, I’m concerned that Fastmail might lose its service as a result. There are plenty of examples of companies getting acquired and effectively ruined. Will the acquisition of Fastmail cause it to lose focus in its email services? Opera says no, of course, and it’s encouraging that they say the Fastmail team will be kept on. Let’s hope that Opera means what it says and that Fastmail gets enhanced, not trashed.

In the meantime, I’m trying to figure out what it would take to move my mail archive and where I would move it to.