Skip to content

Category: Uncategorized

NetFlix patents the DVD library

Published June 24, 2003

So NetFlix have patented their business method; that is, subscribing to video/DVD rentals — where instead of being charged per disc, you are charged a monthly fee and can keep the rentals indefinitely without late fees. Patent here. Now, NetFlix is a very cool service, I’ve really been enjoying it. But this patent is a bit nasty.

Think about it: what’s difficult about the NetFlix setup? Is it thinking up the concept for how the business works, as described in the patent?

Or is it executing the details, setting up efficient shipping infrastructure, tracking, billing, stock management etc., efficiently enough to make a profit?

Bad news for these companies, who are now infringing:

  • GameFly, which is the NetFlix model applied to games.
  • GreenCine, a more indie- and anime-oriented DVD site.

As one commenter on the /. story noted, ‘imagine if McDonalds had patented the drive-thru’.

Hakim Bey

Published June 24, 2003

Interesting — some thinking about the net, blogs, etc. on Biroco.com meanders into a mail from Hakim Bey:

(…) I’m utterly not responsible for the plethora of Netishness that coagulates around my work. Personally I never ‘uploaded’ a word. Others do it, mostly without my permission and w/out even bothering to inform me. Some of it isn’t even mine – forgeries & often dis-info are rife. The Net is a pathology.

I not only don’t own a computer – I’ve ‘taken agin’ ’em’ & have become a cyber-curmudgeon. Basically I’m only interested in things that don’t have websites. I refuse – or rather am incapable of – compensation for the demise of the physical world (you know what I mean) by losing myself in ‘the terminal state of screenal involution’ to quote a line that came in-somnia last nite.

Joel goes on to say:

Most who have read Hakim Bey seem to imagine that he regards the web as a TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone), but in fact he doesn’t, since the physical component is missing, virtuality is not physical, at most all the web can be is an organisational mouthpiece for a TAZ but not a TAZ in itself. I agree with him, but myself, despite chucking my TV in the bin over a decade ago and Zen wanderings away from this medium, I got ensnared in the web nonetheless and do sometimes wonder whether it is indeed ‘compensation for the demise of the physical world’. We’ll see, at present I regard it as a curious assemblage project and a potential widening out of creativity.

‘The Goblin’

Published June 23, 2003

Observer: Russia’s cult video pirate rescripts Lord of the Rings as gangster film. This sounds hilarious — although I bet New World (iirc?) aren’t so happy about it…

They call him the Goblin. He is the new toast of Russia’s massive pirate video industry, his films sought all over Moscow. The trick of his silver screen success is that the Goblin redubs Hollywood movies, using his own ‘better’ Russian alternative to the script.

A former senior police investigator from St Petersburg, Dmitri Puchkov began by making fresh translations to replace the appalling subtitles on pirated films. But now his cult following has found pan-Russian appeal, with a ground-breaking rewrite of the first two parts of The Lord of the Rings.

In a move that has taken the Russian pirate disk world by storm and infuriated traditionalists and copyright lawyers, Puchkov has completely changed the script, turning the ‘good’ characters, like Frodo, into bumbling Russian cops, and the ‘bad’ Orcs into Russian gangsters.

The new, irreverent version of The Lord of the Rings is set in Russia. Frodo Baggins is renamed Frodo Sumkin (a derivative from the Russian word sumka, or bag). The Ranger, Aragorn, is called Agronom (Russian for farm worker). Legolas is renamed Logovaz, after a Russian car company famed for its Ladas. Boromir becomes Baralgin, after a Russian type of paracetemol.

Gandalf spends much of the film trying to impress others with his in-depth knowledge of Karl Marx, and Frodo is cursed with the filthy tongue of a Russian criminal.

2000 IT bosses say NO to EU software patents

Published June 23, 2003

FFII have issued a press release: ‘2000 IT bosses say NO to EU software patents, call for rejection of McCarthy software patent directive proposal’:

A ‘Petition for a Free Europe without Software Patents’ has gained more than 150000 signatures. Among the supporters are more than 2000 company owners and chief executives and 25000 developpers and engineers from all sectors of the European information and telecommunication industries, as well as more than 2000 scientists and 180 lawyers. Companies like Siemens, IBM, Alcatel and Nokia lead the list of those whose researchers and developpers want to protect programming freedom and copyright property against what they see as a ‘patent landgrab’.

Reminder: there’s only 7 days left before the plenary on June 30th, so if you’re European, write to your MEP backing FFII’s position. Full text here.

NZ flatulence tax outrages farmers

Published June 23, 2003

BBC: NZ flatulence tax outrages farmers:

New Zealand’s farmers have criticised a proposed tax on the flatulence emitted by their sheep and cattle. The move is part of the Wellington government’s action to meet its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

Scientists estimate that methane emitted by farm animals is responsible for more than half of the country’s greenhouse gases.

Flatulence from cows, sheep and other ruminants is a serious environmental problem, accounting for about 15% of worldwide emissions of methane – one of the most potent of greenhouse gases.

My Thoughts on ‘Greylisting’

Published June 22, 2003

‘Greylisting’, as described here, has received a lot of attention recently. However, I don’t think it’s a goer; here’s why:

  • Firstly, as Alan Leghart pointed out on the SpamAssassin-talk list:

    This method proposes to delay EVERY SINGLE MESSAGE until a database match is found for sending IP, FROM, and TO. So…we punish everyone in the world, and hope that a delay of one or more hours is considered ‘acceptable’?

    Read his message for a sample typical daily scenario which shows how bad this can be. Maybe some people already expect a mail to take several hours to reach a recipient. In that case, you need to fix your mail server. Even the 300Mhz SpamAssassin spamtrap server gets through mail faster than that, and it’s seeing an absurd mail load ;)

  • Secondly, many VERPing mailing lists and newsletters will need manual whitelisting. Requiring manual intervention == work == what spam filtering is trying to reduce == bad.

  • Thirdly, it assumes spammers would never introduce retries into their spam-tools if it took off. Tempfailing, what this is based on, is effective right now because spamtools don’t retry. But every proposed solution has to consider what would happen if every server admin in the world implements it, and spammers then want to subvert it.

    IMO, ‘greylisting‘ would work fine until the spamtools start retrying, then we’re back to square one — except some legit mail takes a long time to get delivered, and the bandwidth wasted by spam has doubled due to all those retrying spams.

EU Patents — heavy on the spin

Published June 21, 2003

Sounds like the pro-swpat lobby has taken an interesting tack in their PR; IDG’s Infoworld reports that:

The European Parliament is likely to support a law that permits software patents but limits their application to inventions that have a technical effect outside of just a computer program. A program could only be patented if it runs in conjunction with some sort of device such as an intelligent household appliance or a mobile phone.

But bizarrely, that’s exactly what the proposal does not suggest, and that’s exactly what the anti-swpat lobby want it to suggest! Totally, totally wierd.

Software patents update: plenary in 10 days time!

Published June 21, 2003

Despite heavy opposition from a coalition of European SMEs and the Greens/EFA faction of the European Parliament, and despite 2 committees suggesting large amendments, Arlene McCarthy’s pushed the patent ‘reform’ through the JURI committee of the European Parliament. It is now going to be debated in an EP plenary in 10 days time. It seems likely there’ll be a vote on adopting it then, too. We’re being railroaded here. :(

If you are a European and bothered by software patents, now is the time to write to (or even email) MEPs asking them to oppose this directive; it’s the ‘proposed software patentability directive as amended by JURI’ (COM(2002)92 2002/0047).

The letter should support the Eurolinux and/or Green position.

I’ve already received one reply, from Nuala Ahern, a Green MEP for Leinster, who’s happy to take the Greens/EFA line (and responded very quickly, all credit to her!). But the question is, who else among the Irish MEPs is likely to vote on this issue — and how do we effectively lobby in such a short time?

Some background links:

Anyway, if it passes it’s not the end of the world, according to Karl Lenz; I’m not sure I agree with his conclusions though ;)

Leftie TV in the US, and the GIF patent

Published June 20, 2003

So I caught Frontline on PBS last night. At last, some leftie TV that isn’t The Daily Show! ;)

It covered — in excruciating detail — something I’d been wondering about; the massive cost (to end users) of healthcare and prescription medication in the US. The program nicely demolished the ‘but all that money is needed for R&D’ line.

Bottom line: the US drug companies are making 18-22% profit, and they’re not letting go of that. (The median for the Fortune 500 is 3.3%.)

That’s pure profit — not going back into R&D or similar. The breakdown of the biggest revenue sinks averaged across the sector, at the end of the program was: 22% profit, 18% advertising and marketing (one conglomerate in particular spent more on marketing than Pepsi), a couple more aspects of the process, and then, 4th or 5th on the list, 11% of that revenue makes it to research and development.

This should be a huge issue here, but isn’t. I can’t figure it out.

Patents: Kuro5hin has a nice wrap-up of the GIF patent story, now that the patent has finally expired (excerpt: ‘Unisys does nothing’). But what’s this? It’s still extant in Europe, not expiring until a year from now? Great example of the EPO allowing software patents to be registered, even though they’re not legal in Europe.

Mind you, it’s irrelevant now, as (thankfully) Jean-Loup Gailly and Mark Adler wrote the gzip compression algorithm, and gave it to the GNU project. Since then, gzip has now spread into every tool and virtually every platform that might possibly need compression.

George Galloway Papers Were Forgeries

Published June 20, 2003

CSMonitor:

On April 25, 2003, this newspaper ran a story about documents obtained in Iraq that alleged Saddam Hussein’s regime had paid a British member of Parliament, George Galloway, $10 million over 11 years to promote its interests in the West.

An extensive Monitor investigation has subsequently determined that the six papers detailed in the April 25 piece are, in fact, almost certainly forgeries.

The CSMonitor is usually a pretty good paper I hear, and their decision to print this retraction on their front page is a nice sign. But it’s worth noting that it took 2 weeks — not until the UK’s Daily Mail retracted their story, citing that they had determined their documents were forged — before the Monitor thought to check out the letters’ credibility.

And check this out for gullibility:

Smucker recalls that it was the general who brought up George Galloway’s name first at their initial meeting. After the reporter indicated an interest, the general said he knew where those documents were, and that he could have them for Smucker in 24 hours. Smucker says Rasool told him that one of his neighbors, who left Baghdad to attend a Shiite pilgrimage in Karbala, held the documents.

Upon Smucker’s return the next day, the general showed him the Galloway documents as well as the boxes of others on various subjects. After hiring the neighbor, Smucker left with the boxes.

‘I had no knowledge that the general received any of the 800 dollars, though now that I know the documents are forgeries, I have my suspicions,’ says Smucker. ‘At the time I was operating on the premise that these were entirely authentic.’

Suuuure!

The Windows Find Setup Wizard

Published June 20, 2003

Joel writes about a canonical Windows UI mistake: ‘unequivocally the most moronic ‘wizard’ dialog in the history of the Windows operating system. This dialog is so stupid that it deserves some kind of award. A whole new category of award.’ It is, of course, the Find Setup Wizard dialog:

The first problem with this dialog is that it’s distracting. You are trying to find help in the help file. You do not, at that particular moment, give a hoot whether the database is small, big, customized, or chocolate-covered. In the meanwhile, this wicked, wicked dialog is giving you little pedantic lectures that it must create a list (or database). There are about three paragraphs there, most of which are completely confusing. There’s the painfully awkward phrase ‘your help file(s)’. You see, you may have one or more files. As if you cared at this point that there could be more than one. As if it made the slightest amount of difference. But the programmer who worked on that dialog was obviously distressed beyond belief at the possibility that there might be more than one help file(s) and it would be incorrect to say help file, now, wouldn’t it?

It’s a great article; there’s also some fantastic examples of stupid UI tricks that shouldn’t be possible, like detachable menu bars. Read it here.

Sitescooper and RSS

Published June 19, 2003

I did this a while ago, but I’ve been very busy in work and haven’t had time to mention it. But it’s worth doing some preliminary pointing at Sitescooper RSS.

Basically, I’ve added RSS output to Sitescooper, the venerable HTML-scraping script that can disassemble a news/blog/reading-material website efficiently, use a cache, log in, cope with redirects, figure out when stuff is new and when it’s old, perform diffs, confuse you with copious regular expressions, etc. etc.

Sitescooper was originally oriented entirely towards display on a Palm; then new PDAs came out that could do good text or HTML display, so they’re now supported too; and now, I’m no longer commuting and using an RSS aggregator instead for that kind of daily reading, so RSS is the natural next step.

Basically, what this means is that those annoying blogs that don’t include the full text in the item block, or those websites you like that don’t have an RSS feed — make a site file, and scrape them into your aggregator yourself!

This code is present in the current Sitescooper CVS version; the only doco is really what’s in that RSS directory on sitescooper.org.

If your interest is piqued, take a look…

Trademark craziness

Published June 19, 2003

rOD gets an email:

I found your web site, http://www.groovymother.com/archives/week_2002_10_20.html has a reference to a Clue-By-Four ™. Unfortunately, my company owns the trademark to that term, and I am in the process of bringing that product to market. My lawyers have told me that if you do not remove that reference, it dilutes my trademark.

I would much rather ask you politely to remove references to Clue-by-Four™ than have an ugly lawyerese letter sent via certified mail, etc.

WTF? Applied for in 1999, and it refers to a ‘novelty toy, namely a foam rubber two-by-four shaped board’.

Win4Lin

Published June 19, 2003

A glowing review of Win4Lin 5.0 from ‘Open for Business’.

Gotta say, I use Win4Lin regularly, and it’s totally flawless. I had a bit of difficulty getting it installed — the installer didn’t like my kernel for some reason, if I recall correctly, and I had to go grepping through the install script (!). But it’s fantastic once it’s running.

The really impressive thing is when it boots Windows (in a window on your Linux desktop) much faster than Windows boots natively on the same hardware ;) Still haven’t figured out how it does that.

It does a nice job of a virtual network interface too; easier to admin than VMWare’s fake-net-with-DHCP thing. It just insmods a new network module, with a new ethernet address, and that responds to arp requests alongside your ‘real’ Linux interface’s address. Then all the control of IP address, network etc. is under Windows control.

I haven’t found an app that doesn’t work with it yet. (Mind you I hear Direct/X isn’t supported yet fully, so most games are probably out.)

I’ve even used it to watch Quicktime movies — which is pretty impressive when you consider that they’re displaying to a (Win4Lin) framebuffer, which is then displayed to another (VNC) framebuffer, which then displays to the hardware.

IrishWAN National Conference

Published June 19, 2003

IrishWAN are holding a national conference:

IrishWAN the networking group with the goal of building a community owned and run island wide area network infrastructure, will be having a national conference in Limerick on Saturday 28th of June 2003.

There will be IrishWAN members from all across the country, with presentations about wireless technology, updates of activities in many areas, and presentations from Irish wireless suppliers.

Full text here.

Unicode

Published June 19, 2003

Oops! Looks like 2-byte Unicode — UCS-2, aka Unicode 1.0 — will be running into trouble shortly; according to this and this on debian-i18n from back in 2000, several Asian charsets will shortly require 4-byte Unicode characters, which means using either UTF-8 or UCS-4. In particular, correct display of proper nouns in Japanese apparently requires use of the 4-byte planes.

Unicode 1.0 is used widely, in MS products and Java. Expect ‘flag days’ galore when this has to change.

Unicode 2.0 introduced a concept called a ‘surrogate pair’ to fix this; it’s basically introducing multibyte characters into the supposedly fixed-width character-based UCS-2; so all those ‘length == nchars’ assumptions will break — again. Argh.

Now I know why the Linux vendors are going for UTF-8 instead…

MSN’s Google-Killer

Published June 19, 2003

Maciej, Jeremy and Dave have all been blogging about this: Microsoft have unleashed MSNBOT, a new web crawler (judging by the robots.txt string, written in COBOL) which heralds their new search service which will topple Google.

My thoughts: dream on, guys.

What makes Google cool? Fast, accurate searches, and no ads. OK, MSN could do fast searching; that’s doable, it’s just a technical matter.

But what does the latter require? IMO, it takes very strong technical leadership, willing to resist any and every business unit that fancies dropping some cruddy ads on the front page; it’s a cultural issue. This is especially tricky where ads (and money) are involved. Now go take a look at MSN.com. See what I mean? I rest my case.

Here comes the science bit – evaporate!

Published June 19, 2003

New Scientist reports that ‘cosmetics manufacturers are keen to appear cutting edge, and often blind consumers with scientific jargon. But buzzwords like nanocapsules – currently one of their favourites – could be their undoing.’

Scare stories about nanotechnology turning the world to ‘grey goo’ have led Caroline Lucas, Green Party MEP for South East England, to call for new regulations – and one of the targets she has in her sights is the cosmetics industry. Her website claims that ‘thousands of women are acting as unwitting ‘guinea pigs’ for the cosmetics industry…with many products containing ingredients manufactured by ‘nanotechnology’.’

Famous facial products, such as L’Oreal Plenitude and Lancome’s Flash Bronzer Self Tanning Face Gel, do indeed contain billions of nanoscopic capsules designed to help the skin absorb the cream’s active ingredients. Though there’s not a goo-making nanobot in sight, Lucas claims to be ‘horrified to find nanotech products sitting innocently in my bathroom cabinet’.

We wonder what she expected them to do to her. Drain the colour from her face and make it go all mushy?

more on SCO v. IBM: ‘All your base are belong to us’

Published June 17, 2003

Ben forwards a link to this Byte article, SCO: All your base are belong to us. His commentary:

One day I’ll have a blogtastic dalymount.com, but for the moment, have you seen this priceless interview, in which SCO goes over the edge into complete barking insanity?

‘We believe that UNIX System V provided the basic building blocks for all subsequent computer operating systems, and that they all tend to be derived from UNIX System V (and therefore are claimed as SCO’s intellectual property).’

His emphasis. But let’s face it, he’s emphasising the right part ;)

So they now think they are owed money by every modern OS: that includes FreeBSD, Windows, Apple, presumably QNX, etc. etc. Linux was just the easiest one to start with, since the source is available and IBM (with their deep pockets) are closely allied with it. MS have already paid up for a SCO license, although many commentators see this as a means to support SCO in their anti-UNIX lawsuits.

In more detail, SCO claim to have full IP rights to several major components of any high-spec OS:

  • JFS (Journalling File System).
  • NUMA (Non Uniform Memory Access).
  • RCU (Read-Copy Update).
  • SMP (Symmetrical Multi-Processing).

Let’s pick one there: RCU in Linux seems to have originated (at a glance) from code developed by Sequent for their DYNIX/ptx UNIX, which was an AT&T UNIX System V-based OS. Sequent ran into trouble, and were bought out by IBM. Later, patches to implement RCU were submitted by IBM from Sequent’s code.

SCO now owns the AT&T UNIX System V IP; therefore SCO owns the RCU code in Linux — even though Sequent developed it independently, on top of the System V base, as far as I can see. Hey, that’s even more ‘viral’ than the GPL — at least the GPL tells you in advance what mistakes you’d have to make for this to happen! ;)

In other words, it seems their POV is that, if any code came anywhere near other code that may have been part of the original AT&T codebase, it’s now tainted with SCO’s own ‘viral license’. Absolutely insane.

It’s unclear exactly how ‘all subsequent computer operating systems’ also infringe this viral license, but SCO reckon they do.

In the meantime, they don’t seem to have realized that these kinds of over-broad claims are not looked on favourably under EU law; while they make cartooney threats in the US, they open themselves up to all sorts of anti-trust-type claims elsewhere in the world. But then, at this stage I don’t think they plan to actually offer any products, or operate as a software company, so they probably don’t really care about that.

To really muddy the waters, an ex-SCO employee has recently made allegations that SCO copied code from the GPL’d Linux kernel into their UnixWare product.

Ah, fireworks. Anyway.

For a kinder, gentler form of total insanity, check out the guidelines for forming ‘inexplicable mobs’ in Manhattan — via bb. Totally cool.

Software patent proposal passes

Published June 17, 2003

GREENS/EFA: Patent vote fails Europe’s software programmers. Damn.

UK and German MEPs, in rejecting amendments to the report, have ignored the opinions of the Economic and Social Council, the Industry committee, the Culture committee, 140,000 people and 30 leading software scientists who signed two petitions to the Parliament, as well as the 95% of the European citizens who took part in a European Commission public consultation.

So I guess the next step is figure out who those MEPs were, and make sure they never get our votes again.

There’s still time though: Mercedes Echerer MEP (Greens – A) notes: ‘You can be sure that the report will have a very bumpy ride when it goes to plenary in September with one third of committee members in opposition.’ We can at least try to let our voices be heard by the other two-thirds…

However, in some good Euronews: the Czech republic has passed a referendum on joining the EU.

More on Software Piracy figures

Published June 17, 2003

In response to this post regarding Ireland’s piracy rate of 42%, Simon pointed out a possible flaw in the methodology on the forum;

‘Although they could be comparing high software usage to negligible software sales in Ireland. Anyone with a half decent purchasing dept will buy from the UK or US to avoid ridiculous euro pricing. Compare prices on the Macromedia Store’s shop, Studio MX in International English for $899 in the international store, $1133 in the UK store, or $1180 in the Euro store (all prices ex-taxes).’

So I took a look over the weekend. Here’s the page on the survey. In the PDF, page 12-13, they describe the methodology. my comments:

  • ‘To estimate software demand, IPR developed ratios for the amount of software installed on each PC. This was developed from market research on the U.S. market.’ Do all markets really use the same software on their PCs? e.g. Asian markets will use text-entry apps, US markets will not.

  • ‘the difference between software applications installed (demand) and software applications legally shipped (supply) equals the estimate of software applications pirated.’

  • ‘Uplift factors’ are applied to generalize software shipment data from the participating companies, first to the entire US industry, then to the world. ‘These uplift factors include estimates for open-source software. For this study, IPR has assumed that open source software is free and not pirated.’ eh, thanks ;)

    I’m not quite sure what this means, but I think it means that they make an estimate of how much of the software shipment data represents OS software, and then add that to the ‘legally shipped’ side.

  • ‘IPR believes that certain software shipments in the data collected from participating companies are reported for one country, but the software is exported and used in another country. In order to account for this and to eliminate this effect from the piracy study as much as possible, net import estimates were developed on a country-by-country basis.’

    This covers Simon’s point — but it’s not 100% clear, since those biases aren’t listed. I wonder if it takes into account Ireland’s paradoxical situation; while Ireland is (or was, at least) the world’s top exporter of software, it’s still cheaper for Irish users to import software applications from overseas ;)

Dublin: the new bridge just down the road from my house has finally been completed — in time for Bloomsday it seems, since it’s named after Joyce. Obligingly, the Dublin traffic camera operators have got a great night shot of it:

Wind Farms

Published June 16, 2003

NYTimes via jwz: dude, you can’t build a wind farm where it would mess up the view from the Kennedy Compound!

Cape Wind Associates hopes to build America’s first offshore wind farm: 130 windmills, spaced a third to a half of a mile apart, across a shoal seven miles off the coast of Hyannis. Embedded in the ocean floor, each turbine would tower higher than the top of the Statue of Liberty’s torch, its three 161-foot blades churning at 16 RPM. The wind forest promises to provide Cape Codders, on average, with 75% of their electricity, 1.8% of the total electrical needs of New England. (…)

Soon, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound was filing lawsuits, mounting political pressure in Boston and Washington and, to bolster its legal case and maximize public anxiety, generating volumes of doomsaying critiques: (…) The yacht-club set opened its checkbooks, donating money and stock to cover the 100,000-a-month bills for rent, three full-time salaries, television and radio time, two lobbyists and three law firms. (…)

I think I may be one of a small number here, but I’m a huge fan of how wind farms look. It’s a similar thing to seeing pictures of the space shuttle; gigantic technological structures are cool! Maybe that’s just me though. ;)

European Software Patent amendments contd.

Published June 13, 2003

Arlene McCarthy is the MEP proposing to amend the operations of the European patent office, and permit software patents in Europe.

Last week, the Guardian printed this story by Nick Hill and rms setting out the free software position on why software patents should be avoided.

Now, McCarthy’s response:

We have an obligation to legislate not just for one section of the software industry who seeks to impose its business model on the rest of industry, which moreover is not ‘free’, but is actually a different form of monopoly by imposing a copyright licence system on users.

No comment…

Software piracy figures – pass the salt

Published June 11, 2003

Hmm. The Irish branch of the BSA claims that the percentage of illegal software used in Ireland stood at 42 percent for 2002.

Does that mean 42 percent of all software running in Ireland is a pirate copy? I wonder if anyone ever audits this figures — qui custodiet etc. The article continues:

‘The lack of improvement on Ireland’s piracy rate can be attributed to the proliferation of Internet piracy … and a certain amount of apathy,’ said Julian McMenamin, BSA Ireland chairman. ‘But whatever the excuse, a piracy rate of 42 percent is appalling.’

Is internet piracy really that widespread in the workplace? I can imagine your typical 15-year-old firing up KaZaa or whatever, but is this really likely for your typical Irish IT staffer? I doubt it, to be honest.

And given Ireland’s broadband woes, it’d probably be cheaper to hop in the car, drive to the local Compustore, and buy it over the counter, just to avoid paying those ISDN charges. ;)

Just to contradict the ‘internet piracy’ statement, in this story, McMenamin then states that ‘a particular problem in Ireland was small and medium-sized companies purchasing a licence that is too small, or not upgrading their licence as their companies grow. An offending company might typically have a 10-user licence but allow 50 people to use the software.’

This is a hell of a lot more likely than the ‘scary internet’ bugbear, but I would still find it very hard to imagine that this is a uniquely Irish problem that could account for Ireland supposedly having nearly twice the rate of piracy of the UK (42% in Ireland vs. the UK’s 26%).

While taking a look at the BSA site, I note that their automated tool, GASP, now exposes the illegal distribution and storage of copyrighted music, apparently: ‘new features in GASP v6.5 include reports that show a complete listing of MP3 files on audited systems’.

I wonder if my collection of MP3s downloaded from eMusic.com, and ripped from albums I bought, would set off its alarms. Given that the MP3 format has no way to differentiate between pirated and non-pirated music, I would imagine so. False positives a go-go!

Patents: Eamon O’Tuathail’s call for action against software patents. The vote of the Legal Affairs Committee of the EP was yesterday, apparently. Wonder how it went…

Boca Raton’s rep gets a battering again

Published June 10, 2003

The Miami Herald: Bogus Boca: the spa for spam:

Poor Boca. It’s as if infamy has taken up permanent residence. Such a startling number of Boca Raton firms have been linked to fraudulent schemes.

The article then lists the past scams operated by Boca Raton firms; a mind-boggling list. It then notes the press Boca’s been getting in the UK:

“Golden beaches, palm tree-lined streets, manicured golf courses and giant motor yachts moored at the marinas: Boca Raton in Florida is a millionaire’s paradise. It’s also the spam capital of the world.”

(Guardian story here).

ReVirt, Patents, and Spandex

Published June 10, 2003

ReVirt is very, very cool security functionality:

ReVirt (part of the CoVirt project) is a complete Linux-on-Linux virtual machine with replay capability: you can explore the state of the entire virtual machine at any point in the past. For example, if you discover an intruder, you can ‘go back in time’ to see how they broke in, watch the exploit in progress, and discover what was compromised. The overhead of virtualization and logging is only 15-30%, even for kernel-intensive applications.

Can’t wait until this is stable…

Games: The Body Behind Vice City’s Tommy Vercetti (Escape Mag): an interview with the guy who did the motion-capture for Vice City:

What advice do you have for any readers interest in doing motion capture?

… Stuff your Spandex mo-cap suit. That’s the key.

Patents: SFGate: Inventors patent ideas to pre-empt their rivals: ‘(IP lawyer) Dennis Fernandez has come up with an idea for TV sets with built-in cameras and small screens that would let viewers talk to one another while watching a show. … Fernandez has no intention of actually building such a device. But the idea is his — and he has a certificate from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to prove it.’

And there was me thinking these things had to be non-obvious, and have novelty, to be patentable. :( What is the US PTO up to? And what’s going to happen if the European Patent Office get their way?

I’m beginning to think a pro-bono collection of freely-licensable defensive patents, filed by the FSF or similar, is the only way to work around this brokenness.

[IP] do read last Para. Time to correct the record re. the pillaged Museum in B (fwd)

Published June 10, 2003

Lost from the Baghdad museum: truth (Guardian). hmmm! It seems we’ve been had:

(In April, it was widely reported that) 100,000-plus priceless items were looted (from the Baghdad museum) either under the very noses of the Yanks, or by the Yanks themselves. And the only problem with it is that it’s nonsense. It isn’t true. It’s made up. It’s bollocks.

Incredible — it seems (a) the museum was looted — to a degree; the vast majority of ‘missing’ items had actually been moved into safe storage, and ‘most of the serious looting was an inside job’.

And (b) the academics and journalists who reported ‘170,000 items … stolen or destroyed’ had been led by the nose by Dr Donny George, the museum’s director of research. It just wasn’t true:

Over the past six weeks it has gradually become clear that most of the objects which had been on display in the museum galleries were removed before the war. Some of the most valuable went into bank vaults, where they were discovered last week. Eight thousand more have been found in 179 boxes hidden ‘in a secret vault’. And several of the larger and most remarked items seem to have been spirited away long before the Americans arrived in Baghdad.

George is now quoted as saying that that items lost could represent ‘a small percentage’ of the collection and blamed shoddy reporting for the exaggeration. ‘There was a mistake,’ he said. ‘Someone asked us what is the number of pieces in the whole collection. We said over 170,000, and they took that as the number lost. Reporters came in and saw empty shelves and reached the conclusion that all was gone. But before the war we evacuated all of the small pieces and emptied the showcases except for fragile or heavy material that was difficult to move.’

This indictment of world journalism has caused some surprise to those who listened to George and others speak at the British Museum meeting. One art historian, Dr Tom Flynn, now speaks of his ‘great bewilderment’. ‘Donny George himself had ample opportunity to clarify to the best of (his) knowledge the extent of the looting and the likely number of missing objects,’ says Flynn. ‘Is it not a little strange that quite so many journalists went away with the wrong impression, while Mr George made little or not attempt to clarify the context of the figure of 170,000 which he repeated with such regularity and gusto before, during, and after that meeting.’ To Flynn it is also odd that George didn’t seem to know that pieces had been taken into hiding or evacuated. ‘There is a queasy subtext here if you bother to seek it out,’ he suggests.

Poland, and Irish Internet round-up

Published June 10, 2003

So, Poland just joined the EU – welcome! ;)

Meanwhile, time for a trawl through IrelandOffline news.

Boards.IE have had enough of crappy internet from the telcos — they’re hoping to launch an ISP. Given one company’s continuing stranglehold over the Irish internet, they’ll need every bit of luck they can get. Good luck guys.

And, in case anyone’s swallowing that ‘there isn’t the demand’ line, check this story out:

The story goes how Old Man Kennedy was getting his shoes shined back in ’29 and the shoe-shine boy was telling him what stocks looked good and what didn’t. Old Man Kennedy knew the game was up and it was time to get out of the market.

I got my hair cut this morning and the middle-aged man beside me was telling the barber how he had downgraded his ISDN line to get DSL but the DSL failed the test and now he’s stuck with a normal line. The barber was asking him what company he applied through, told him of the others, asked how far from the exchange he was, told him where the exchange was (as he didn’t know), said ‘mmm, that’d be about 3km, as the crow flies. But it’s not as the crow flies – it’s the turns in the road and that.’

Now if my barber can give me the technical requirements for DSL and people are talking of stimulating demand, you have to realise that something fishy is going on.

Forfas delivers damning broadband report : ‘Irish DSL prices for small businesses are about five to six times higher’ than other European countries. Hmm, I wonder why the telcos are reporting a lack of demand.

IrelandOffline’s Broadband – The Next Steps for Ireland document, which was presented to the Dail’s Joint Committee on Communications last week. Conclusions:

  • Prioritise Wireless: ‘it is no longer time for trials’

  • Increase Availability of Affordable Backhaul

  • Raise Public Awareness of Alternative Technologies

And how’s about this for an Alternative Technology? Tethered balloons trialing in the North. Genius. The company is called Skylinc, and uses blimps flying at 1500m; each provides a coverage area of 80km diameter. The result is ‘fibre rate service at DSL prices’; non-contended for 30,000 customers, with 1-10 MB/s throughput. I really hope they can pull this off….

‘A land where all the children smell of petrol’

Published June 9, 2003

The Observer’s ‘state of the union’ report from Baghdad. Summary: total anarchy:

A hundred and fifty dollars or so for an AK-47, double that for a pistol because it’s easier to hide. You can buy them rather easily from the street-markets. These are patrolled hourly by US forces whose job is to check for people selling guns. The traders get round this with diabolical cunning by looking at their watches and, once an hour, hiding all the guns. The liberating forces offered a cross-Baghdad amnesty a couple of weeks ago: the grand total of guns deposited was a magnificent none. … If a silhouetted someone tries to wave you down, with a gun, in a long hot road full of heat-mirage and six-year-olds siphoning petrol, you have to choose: chances are it’s a Bad Person so you keep the foot down, but if it’s the Americans and you race past, they’ll shoot at you, lots, because they’re as scared as everyone else in this shambles of a city.

Then a classic story:

One night I visited a friend about a mile away, and foolishly stayed up talking, and ended up trying to get a late taxi home. Outside the hotel they shrugged, and then one brave young thing disappeared for a minute and came back carrying lots of guns and walked me through the blackout for 10 minutes until we came across a darkened little street party of severely scary drivers, the fat moon winking its light off a battery of gold teeth and metal teacups and, for all I’m really sure, recently bloodied scimitars. Not for 10,000 dollars, I was told. ‘Ali Baba, Ali Baba,’ they repeated. Some Iraqis get annoyed by this – the thief of the 1,001 Nights was Kuwaiti – but the verbal shorthand is fast and always works: the thieves are out, and have guns, and even though we have guns too we’re not going to risk it. Are you mad? Where are you from?

I mention Scotland, and we have one of those extremely odd late-night conversations, this time about Mel Gibson. Apparently one of the very favourite films in Baghdad is Braveheart, because Saddam used to show it repeatedly, nightly, with furious subtitles, to demonstrate just what bastards the English were. I explain that few Scots have a television because most are still running around in woad, thanks to the English. We raise a happy toast – sticky, sweet tea – to the general fog of historical propagandising and the more specific idea of ‘Freedom!’. Somewhere nearby – a mile away? A street away? – another stupid pop-pop gun battle breaks out, and they really won’t take me home, and so I say I might walk, and they raise their teacups again and say you must be either very brave or very stupid, when the truth of course is that I am neither, but something else again relatively new to them, which is very quietly drunk. I bravely wake up my friend and sleep on the sofa.

SpamAssassin in Playboy

Published June 6, 2003

Jeremy Kister on the SpamAssassin-talk mailing list notes:

In an article written by Randy Cassingham, Randy describes ‘why e-mail abuse should be a crime’ and suggests ways to stop spam. His fifth suggestion states Ensure that your ISP is taking steps to combat the problem, such as installing SpamAssassin…

This is in Playboy July 2003 pg 53 (bottom). (and no, i usually dont read it for the articles ;) )

Plus a pretty good article in Forbes, too. A good news week for SpamAssassin…

Security Issues

Published June 6, 2003

funny quote on the ‘nmap in the Matrix: Reloaded‘ thing at the Reg:

But then, the film does take place in the future. Is (security analyst Michal Zalewski) surprised to see unpatched SSH servers running in the year AD 2199? ‘It’s not that uncommon for people to run the old distribution,’ he says. ‘I know we had a bunch of boxes that were unpatched for two years.’

The Today Programme

Published June 5, 2003

The Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 has been my main news source for several months (at least since I moved to somewhere with decent broadband, and didn’t have to contemplate getting up at unearthly hours to listen to it ;) .

In the past week or two, they’ve broken a major story, the ‘sexing-up’ allegations against the UK government’s Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction dossier (yes, that’s ‘sexing-up’.)

There’s transcripts of the interviews here and on the Times website (thanks to P O’Neill for the pointer to the latter). Well worth a read, if you enjoy hearing evasive politicians getting skewered by a skillful interviewer. ;)

Nice Guys Win

Published June 5, 2003

That’s the message from Robert Sapolsky, professor of biological sciences at Stanford and neurology at Stanford’s School of Medicine, from his studies of baboon behaviour in the Serengeti:

For the humans who would like to know what it takes to be an alpha man–if I were 25 and asked that question I would certainly say competitive prowess is important–balls, translated into the more abstractly demanding social realm of humans. What’s clear to me now at 45 is, screw the alpha male stuff. Go for an alternative strategy. Go for the social affiliation, build relationships with females, don’t waste your time trying to figure out how to be the most adept socially cagy male-male competitor. Amazingly enough that’s not what pays off in that system. Go for the affiliative stuff and bypass the male crap. I could not have said that when I was 25.

A handful of (the baboons) simply walked away from it over the years. Nathaniel was one, and Joshua was another. They had the lowest stress hormone levels you’ve ever seen in male baboons, and outlived their cohorts. The fact that this alternative strategy is actually the more adaptive one is one of the good bits of news to come out of primatology in quite some time. If that’s the future of primates, this planet is going to be in great shape in a couple of million years.

A great article, and pretty funny in places — especially where he discusses the results of baboons’ lack of a developed frontal cortex:

Even though there are tremendous individual differences among the baboons, they’re still at this neurological disadvantage, compared to the apes, and thus they typically blow it at just the right time. They could be scheming these incredible coalitions, but at the last moment, one decides to slash his partner in the ass instead of the guy they’re going after, just because he can get away with it for three seconds. The whole world is three seconds long–they’re very pointillist in their emotions.

More at the Edge Magazine site.

Bumper Stickers

Published June 5, 2003

My try-out SpamAssassin bumper stickers from BumperActive just arrived, along with a hand-written note stating that they taken the liberty of trimming them down for me — nice touch ;)

The resolution isn’t great, but then the source image wasn’t either ;) Print quality, however, is a beaut. Recommended. Now to get sticking!