Thank You For Trying, Switzerland

Various bits of the TiSA (Trade in Services Agreement, yet another multilateral trade treaty) were leaked recently. On the very first page of General Provisions:

[CH propose; AU/CA/CL/TW/CO/EU/IL/JP/MX/NZ/PE oppose; MU/PK considering:
Without prejudice to the policy objectives and legislation of the Parties in areas such as the protection of intellectual property, the protection of privacy and of the confidentiality of personal and commercial data, the protection of consumers and the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions (including through public funding and assistance) and fiscal measures.]

So the Swiss said “Hey, wouldn’t it be good if we had a thing at the start that said that this treaty doesn’t stop governments protecting privacy, the confidentiality of data, consumer rights, cultural diversity or other important things like that? Wouldn’t that be neat?”

And Australia, Canada, Chile, Taiwan, Colombia, the EU, Israel, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand and Peru all said “Er, no. We want this agreement to be capable of preventing us from protecting those things, thanks. Where it speaks, it should be more important than the domestic law enacted by your elected representatives.”

Seems like that tells you a lot of what you need to know about the way such treaties are assembled. At least Mauritius and Pakistan are still thinking about it… Sheesh.

Eurovision Bingo (again)

Some people say that all Eurovision songs are the same. (And some say all blog posts on this topic are the same…) That’s probably not quite true, but there is perhaps a hint of truth in the suggestion that some themes tend to recur from year to year. Hence, I thought, Eurovision Bingo.

I wrote some code to analyse a directory full of lyrics, normally those from the previous year of the competition, and work out the frequency of occurrence of each word. It will then generate Bingo cards, with sets of words of different levels of commonness. You can then use them to play Bingo while watching this year’s competition (which is on Saturday).

There’s a Github repo, or if you want to go straight to pre-generated cards for this year, they are here.

Here’s a sample card from the 2014 lyrics:

fell cause rising gonna rain
world believe dancing hold once
every mean LOVE something chance
hey show or passed say
because light hard home heart

Have fun :-)

DNSSEC on gerv.net

My ISP, the excellent Mythic Beasts, has started offering a managed DNSSEC service for domains they control – just click one button, and you’ve got DNSSEC on your domain. I’ve just enabled it on gerv.net (which, incidentally, as of a couple of weeks ago, is also available over a secure channel thanks to MB and Let’s Encrypt).

If you have any problems accessing any resources on gerv.net, please let me know by email – gerv at mozilla dot org should be unaffected by any problems.