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MJ Ray

cooperativemagazine.co.uk/MJRay

  • he/she lives in Weston-super-Mare, England


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Today

  • 3 hours ago
    MJRay wrote Libraries, Cooperatives, OCLC and TTLLP

    Thanks to Koha, TTLLP is partly a library services worker cooperative and just now there’s a massive flame-storm about the largest library services consumer cooperative - OCLC, the Online Computer Library Center - because it just updated the terms for sharing its book data collection. OCLC seems to be treating it as a private asset that it can exploit, not the common resource that many librarians thought it was. I’ve been watching this fire with interest - because, at best, I don’t think it’s helping other cooperatives that sell to libraries - and here is my summary.

    OCLC and the Great Library Scandal is a good introduction and there’s a summary of the Talis Podcast about OCLC WorldCat Record Use Policy with Karen Clahoun and Roy Tennant which reveals some of the OCLC thinking.

    Just like CC and Open Source? Still “No” is a great illustration of how some librarians think OCLC is reaching the wrong conclusion, which then leads to asking Is OCLC truly cooperative? and What would it look like if OCLC was broken up?

    A commenter on Tom Watson: Library data asks: “Why would libraries play this game?” Well, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and this road has taken 40 years. First off, OCLC is essentially a good idea - libraries cooperating to act as a counter-weight to the large library service companies.

    However, I believe OCLC predates many recent company rule innovations (stronger common asset locks) and data licensing innovations (Share-Alike, Fiduciary Licensing and the general free and open source software movements), so there’s nothing to stop them trying to privatise the assets (library data) that the libraries have given to OCLC and it was only a matter of time before someone tried.

    I’m having a similar discussion with another organisation that has been given data by its members under vague terms and is now apparently about to exploit that data for the organisation’s benefit, to the detriment of some members. TTLLP is a member but has not contributed much data because I was suspicious of the lack of terms.

    In time, hopefully, asset locks and more awareness of data licensing will eliminate these problems, but there’s going to be a lot more people getting burnt first.

    Finally, a quick shout-out to the Open Library Environment as a possible emerging alternative to OCLC for practical services. Raw Thought: Stealing Your Library: The OCLC Powergrab covers some of its motivation (and includes a link to a petition to OCLC, if you want something to sign), but I share Stefano’s (now there’s someone I’d not read in 7 or so years) analysis of some of the challenges:

    “any grass-root approach that will get big enough to take on OCLC on the metadata collection and redistribution service that libraries need will have to incorporate under the pressure of its users (if only for legal liability protection) and will have to find an answer to the same set of problems (policy, governance, financial sustainability) that OCLC has.”

  • 4 hours ago
    MJRay wrote National Maintenance Week

    National Maintenance Week

    This week (21-28 November) is National Maintenance Week. Do a bit of maintenance on your home this week yourself and save a bit of money, as well as improving the appearance of your local community.

    National Gutters Day is next Friday (28th). After this summer’s heavy rains led to a curtain of rain falling down, I paid the window cleaners to clear our building’s gutters. Unfortunately, they didn’t clear quite close enough to the end of one gutter and it still overflowed - but I didn’t find this out until the next rainstorm. I’ve bought a long handle and a gutter-cleaning tool for about the price of one gutter-cleaning, so I can deal with it myself in future! How about you?

    The gutter-cleaning tool I’d really like are the long tongs, but I found three types in web searches and no-one sells any of them in Europe. Why not?

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Yesterday

1 activities

November 19th, 2008

1 activities

November 18th, 2008

  • 18:19
    MJRay wrote How to Check Web Shops for Basic Security

    I just had a very nice chat on the phone with a man whose first attempt at online shopping seemed to have resulted in a fraudster using his card to buy mobile phone top-ups. I don’t understand why he called us (it wasn’t one of my web shops), but I hope I did the right thing by directing him back to his credit card company’s fraud department.

    While I was talking to him, I was checking the shop he had problems with. I wouldn’t have bought from it. Here’s how I checked it:-

    1. Check the Page

    Open the front page of the site in one browser window and then use another window to get to a page that ought to be secure (the payment/checkout page is my usual one). Look at them both. Do either of them show any logos from well-known payment (Barclays, RBS, Protx, …) or security-checking services (thawte - who else?)? That’s not entirely reliable, but it’s usually a good sign because those companies attack people using their marks without permission.

    Look at the payment/checkout page - does the address in the address bar start “https”? If so, is the padlock in the browser status bar (usually bottom right) closed? That usually means it’s encrypted with a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate.

    2. Check the Certificate

    Open the certificate details. In Firefox-based browsers, double-click the padlock, then click the “View Certificate” button. Then pick “Subject” in the second list box. Usually, it looks like this:-

    screenshot

    Basic Certificate Screenshot


    in that case, as long as the “CN” (common name) is the webserver you thought you were using and the “O” (organisation) and country code (C) make sense, then there’s nothing wrong.

    Some shops now use Extended Validation certificates and give a bit more information. Here’s one from a train company:-

    screenshot

    Extended Validation Screenshot


    In addition to the CN and O, it shows Organisational Unit (OU), Location (L), State (ST) and also other address parts and company number that Firefox doesn’t display neatly. This is a bit more reassuring, but also a lot more expensive for the shop owner (around 20 times more, last I checked), so I don’t blame shops for not using them.

    3. Check the Registrations

    By this point, the payment processing and actual transaction are looking pretty good. Finally, I check the recipient. Find the business details on the web shop. Does it include a geographic address? If it contains a company registration number, look it up on the Companies House website.

    Then I find the business details on the domain names - you can use CoolWhois to look up domain names. If any of the addresses or numbers don’t match (Website, SSL Certificate, Whois), then I call them to ask why their website says they’re based in Bristol but their domain name is registered to Bolton. If they don’t answer messages, or - worse - the domain name says “Non-trading Individual” and the address has been omitted from the public listing, I give up on them and look for another shop. There’s no point securely paying someone that you can never reach if there’s a problem.

    4. Buy Stuff and Check the Statements

    All being well, I then buy stuff and check my credit card statement each month before I pay it. I think any web shop owner (or webmaster - I help some people with this sort of thing) should be taking care of the basics above. Do your shops measure up?

    Despite the above checks, I can only remember not buying something online once in the last year. A couple of times, I’ve worked through the above steps and it’s changed which shop I bought from - and I’m pretty sure it saved me from losing £400 on one purchase.

1 activities

September 11th, 2008