{"id":305,"date":"2010-06-17T23:53:33","date_gmt":"2010-06-17T23:53:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dgen.net\/blog\/?p=305"},"modified":"2012-07-04T15:16:29","modified_gmt":"2012-07-04T15:16:29","slug":"obsfuscation-as-a-method-of-closed-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/2010\/06\/17\/obsfuscation-as-a-method-of-closed-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Obsfuscation as a method of closed data"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Things wrong with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.companieshouse.gov.uk\/\">Companies House<\/a> Crown Copyright data disclosure (which allows free copying)<\/p>\n<p>Get the DVD rom of the data &#8211; SIGH<\/p>\n<p>\u00a330 for a copy of the data &#8211; PARTIAL WIN (it&#8217;s accessible)<\/p>\n<p>\u00a31200 if you want to actually save the data &#8211; FAIL<\/p>\n<p>Crown Copyright Data is in a closed format &#8211;\u00a0 FAIL (although in a trivially hackable form)<\/p>\n<p>DVD self-destructs after 6 months &#8211; WTF!<br \/>\n(not stated at the point of sale, or on the phone when I called them)<\/p>\n<p>Then it gets worse;<\/p>\n<p>Windows *only* &#8212; not stated anywhere apart from the booklet inside the DVD (e.g. not on the website, phone or on the outside of the DVD)<\/p>\n<p>Uses ActiveX wrapped into an executable &#8212; so I had to reset my default browser to IE&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Requires the DVD to be in the drive (&#8220;please insert DVD number XXX&#8221;) &#8212; so tied to that specific DVD<\/p>\n<p>Has an &#8220;Award for excellence&#8221; badge on the back of the DVD.<\/p>\n<p>My verdict: 1\/10.\u00a0 Not excellent. Not even good. I couldn&#8217;t do what I needed to with this open, Crown Copyright data. They have an XML API, but that is traffic-restricted.<\/p>\n<p>FOI request sent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Things wrong with Companies House Crown Copyright data disclosure (which allows free copying) Get the DVD rom of the data &#8211; SIGH \u00a330 for a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,29,20,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-data","category-social-change","category-stuff"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pfJFK3-4V","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":307,"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305\/revisions\/307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}