(Things I found interesting recently.)
WIPO DG asked to convene meeting on open and collaborative projects to create public goods:
In recent years there has been an explosion of open and collaborative projects to create public goods. These projects are extremely important, and they raise profound questions regarding appropriate intellectual property policies. They also provide evidence that one can achieve a high level of innovation in some areas of the modern economy without intellectual property protection, and indeed excessive, unbalanced, or poorly designed intellectual property protections may be counter-productive. We ask that the World Intellectual Property Organization convene a meeting in calendar year 2004 to examine these new open collaborative development models, and to discuss their relevance for public policy.
I hope this gets somewhere; it’ll be interesting to see what the World Intellectual Property Organization has to say officially about open source, the Human Genome Project, the world wide web, and other unencumbered projects of this type.
Had a very nice long weekend — big BBQ and watching the fireworks on Friday, some bodyboarding and bodysurfing on Sunday. Very relaxing. Now back to work. :(
Ben Hammersley notes ‘the All Time Perfect Daily Mail Story’: Asylum Seekers Eat Queen’s Swans:
A major investigation has been launched by Scotland Yard into claims that the Queen’s swans are being stolen in their hundreds by gangs of asylum-seekers who are cooking and eating them.
The probe comes after a group of men were caught red-handed by police in an east London park. The asylum seekers were barbecuing a duck and officers found two dead swans, ready to be roasted, concealed in bags.
A police spokesman said today: We are appealing for information over the disappearance of swans. There have been incidents of swans being killed, and it appears to be the work of eastern European gangs.
It’s a classic of the genre — combining (a) the queen, (b) cute animals (c) fear of immigrants. That covers all the bases except one. Oh, here it is, bingo! — it’s not entirely true:
Yesterday Scotland Yard stated: ‘There is no police report.’ While there is concern fuelled by a drop in the swan population, the police spokeswoman added: ‘There appears to be a perception that this may be attributable to Eastern Europeans. We stress we have no evidence of this.’
A police spokeswoman … added that, despite some efforts, they could not back up published claims that asylum-seekers had been caught in east London barbecuing a duck with dead swans concealed near by ‘ready to be roasted’. Andy Fisher, head of the wildlife investigation unit, appeared equally baffled. ‘I don’t know where they have got that from – not the Metropolitan Police.’
It’s clearly silly season time again.
Quick Iraq roundup: some photos from Baghdad from Gee, another Iraqi blogger (Gee not in the irish slang sense BTW!); MI6 chief was the BBC’s source for ‘sexing-up’ allegations (Observer).
Also, Guantanamo Bay’s military tribunals are hitting the non-US news media again, now that the death penalty has been raised as a possibility. These Observer and Guardian stories note, regarding the two British citizens who’ve been imprisoned for 18 months (one for 12 months in Bagram airbase): ‘If this treatment happened for an hour in a British police station, no evidence gathered would be admissible’.
Next, A left-wing US soldier blogs from Baghdad.
the iraqi’s who are working for the u.s….doing what ever task we throw at them…are not to upset with us…some of them have family members in the states and they hope that someday they will be able to join them…they don’t hate america at all…and they are conscious enough of what is really going on to make their own decisions…they think that we really are trying to help…they are afraid of the ‘militants’ because when ever the ‘militants’ show up and attack us in their neighborhoods we end up destroying everything…many of the guys say that they chase the ‘militants’ out with any weapons they have…they are just trying to get by…they fear that the ‘militants’ are using horrible tactics to enlist more support…they are using our retaliation against us…for every home…or car…or newsstand…or coffee shop we destroy trying to protect ourselves another ‘freedom fighter’ is born…
He talks about Chomsky, links to Michael Moore — so of course, the neo-con warbloggers reckon he doesn’t exist. ;)
Totally down with the new pronunciation of RSS BTW. Waiting for the dust to settle. ho hum.
Finally, Fergus Cassidy, Sunday Tribune tech journo, has a website. Good reading…
my mate Luke passes on this gem:
I was driving along behind a plumber’s van today. The van was emblazoned with signs saying that the plumber was a sewers and drains expert. Along the rear bumper of the van was the company’s slogan:
‘Your shit is our bread and butter’
I am not making this up.
SenderBase is a cool site which lists email traffic volumes for specific senders and organisations.
This will make for some very cool spam tests. As you can see, several of the top ten sending domains are ISPs that, shall we say, may have a few ‘issues’ with customers’ open proxies. They’re scattered in amongst the Yahoo!s and Hotmails ;) Then there’s a couple of well-known domains that, let’s say, have a habit of appearing on the SBL.
Well, not quite as practical, but useful nonetheless, is Alexa’s ‘traffic detail’ feature for the web.
Very nifty; a log-scale graph of traffic as measured by pageviews from Alexa’s toolbar, and you can pick 2 sites and compare their hitrates. For example, according to this, SpamAssassin is bigger than Jesus ;)
Thanks to ‘Mr. FoRK’ on the FoRK list for this URL…
SARS special report: Too soon to celebrate (New Scientist).
There are also suspicions that the first outbreak in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong stopped so abruptly because of the onset of summer. The SARS virus does not survive well in a hot environment, and if most transmission is due to people touching contaminated surfaces, higher temperatures would have reduced transmission.
If the season, rather than human intervention, was the main reason for the end of the outbreak, SARS could return with a vengeance in the autumn. That is what happened with the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed tens of millions. Fortunately, SARS is far less infectious (so far).
So, Ev and Cam both went looking for their spammiest spams, and posted ’em. Guess which one it was?
That’s right — ‘My Wife, Jody’. ;)
BBC: Spam peddlers hijack computers. A great article from the Beeb, following the trail of a single spam, all the way back to the person they believe to be the sender — via a hacked British Airways server!
Wired: Hackers Put ‘Bane’ in Shadowbane:
‘Then we realized that somehow an insane god had taken control of our world and was out to kill us all.’
The population of an entire Shadowbane town was forcibly moved to the bottom of the sea, where they drowned. City guards turned feral and attacked town residents. Mobs of never-before-seen superpowerful creatures, seemingly spontaneously spawned from the ether, began to prowl the streets unchecked, killing characters in the most painful way possible.
Audioscrobbler is cool. Check it out — this is its log of my xmms listening habits, neatly cross-linked and referenced. (The cheesy ‘Liberty X’ listens were Catherine, I swear.)
Anyway, AS is a bit like Napster’s ‘explore other person’s music collection’ feature, which was cool for picking up recommendations — but this one is based on actual plays, and without the link to a service that the RIAA would want to see shut down ASAP. ;)
It can come out with some pretty bizarre results — for example, ‘people who listen to Thievery Corporation also listen to Radiohead’, according to this. Mind you, that’s probably correct…
Prediction: I’ll wind up being top of the list for listening to Acen’s tunes by the end of 2 weeks. That’s the plan at least ;)
This is very cool. It’s a fully browser-based RSS aggregator, no installation required; it just runs in your Mozilla or Firebird browser window. Nifty.
Found via a referrer link on Jeremy’s blog — there are no secrets where public referrer data is involved ;)
Euro software patents vote put back to September:
Members of Parliament from all parties had complained that it was impossible to react adequately within a timeframe of 10 days.
Phew, that’s a relief. This’ll give more time for our representatives to get their heads around the (thorny) issue. Read the FFII press release for more details.
BoingBoing with a cautionary tale. When you buy a HipTop Sidekick from T-Mobile, you’re not really buying it in the way you’d imagine — instead, you get to hold it while they operate the software, as far as I can see. As of this week, T-Mobile are going to remotely erase the games that were included with the device, because they are ‘no longer supporting’ them. And tough luck to Sidekick owners.
As BB sez:
Who owns your Sidekick? T-Mobile does, apparently, even if you spent full retail on it (I dropped 250 dollars on mine). You need T-Mobile’s permission to install software on their device. T-Mobile will, from time to time, decide to erase software from your device. And when you stop subscribing to their service, T-Mobile will delete all your data forever, without giving you any mechanism for moving it off the device (and without giving you the ability to design a tool that would let you do this).
I don’t really get it — I mean, this is the reason Palm platforms won in the handheld arena for so long; the user’s control over what they can install, the developer’s freedom to write new apps for the users to install, and the (comparatively) open aspects of their SDK and protocols so that it can be sync’d to by lots of desktop apps.
Competing with all the other PDAs, based on hardware or UI alone, isn’t enough — unless you’re Apple with the iPod. Surely the Sidekick OS developers get this? (Maybe what happened is the OS developers get it — but T-Mobile don’t.)
Talking of the iPod — Gary Robinson notes that Pixo, the vendor of the OS software used on Apple’s iPods has just been bought — by Sun. It seems Pixo nowadays sells server-side Java thingies, which seems wierd for a developer of OSes for handheld platforms — until you read this article from January 2002, which reports that Apple and Pixo were at loggerheads anyway, due to contractual difficulties, and that Pixo had given up on embedded-OS work, due to a shortage of clients.
Anyway, I wonder if Apple got a licensing deal that gave them the source and allows them to update the Pixo OS themselves, if Sun decide to drop that product. (Given that Pixo themselves turned around and set the company in a totally oblique direction, I’d reckon it’s likely.)
Spam: Rod says the National Do Not Call Registry has launched. Sign up here — but wait a while first, it’s massively overloaded right now…
German euros ‘full of cocaine’ (BBC):
Almost all euro banknotes circulating in Germany contain traces of cocaine, German researchers say. … ‘Nine out of 10 banknotes show clearly measurable amounts of cocaine,’ Professor Fritz Soergel of the Institute for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research in Nuremberg was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency.
… The concentrations of cocaine on Spanish euro notes were almost a hundred times that of what was recorded in Germany; … Professor Soergel said that his team was ‘almost knocked flat’ by results of yet another recent study in Barcelona.
Tom Coates on search engine optimisation. Summary: they don’t work; smart search engines realise you’re trying to game them, and will ignore or penalise your site as a result. The correct answer is to provide interesting/good/linkworthy textual information, and keep superfluous eye candy at a sensible level. I agree with his essay, FWIW.
Personally, I reckon Google deserve a lot of credit for turning the web around, from a flashy, Flash-laden animated DHTML blinky-blink medium, back into one where text is king. Once it got recognized that Google used titles, h1 tags, and other semantic markup as key metadata, and that the gimmicky stuff is unindexable, the never-ending slide into flashy blinky-blink land was halted. Phew!
Aside: Labour MP Tom Watson has a weblog?! Wow. He’d get my vote straight away, no matter what his policies were — that’s transparency ;)
Interesting — so does Liberal Democrats MP Richard Allen. This is really amazing. He even links to SpamAssassin as part of a discussion on the All-Party Internet Group‘s spam summit to be held on July 1st!
It’s worth noting that his comment here notes that the APIG concept seems to be leaning towards prosecution of spamvertised products; advertise via spam (sent by you or by a ‘spam outsourcing’ company), and you’re liable. A very sensible approach, as long as they can avoid the danger of malicious spammers spamvertising a product without that company’s permission — a la what happens regularly to SpamCop and SpamHaus.
Play 20 questions against an AI. Very cool; it got ‘artichoke heart’ and ‘volcano’ for me, the first within 30, the second within 20. It also whinged about a few questions I’d ‘answered inconsistently’ on the first one (well, they were stupid questions ;)
Log in as an anonymous user to try it out.
Argh. Lots of ‘your_details.zip’ files flying around; it must be new Win32 virus day! Time to update the filters…
Marc Canter blogs about QuickThread, one of the new services at Steve Yost’s QuickTopic.
It’s a great concept. Want to take a thread offline, or share it as a dedicated forum of its own, without losing the concept flow? Just select all the context messages, forward as attachments by mail to the QT site, and it’ll create a new thread with that context intact. Totally simple. (see the Pictures).
Science: In this interview with Matt Ridley at edge.org, Matt notes:
… There’s another phenomenon going on too, which is equally important and which again people in these kinds of debates over human nature have missed. … behavior affects genes. It doesn’t change the code of the gene, and it doesn’t change the encoded genome … what I’m talking about is changing the expression of genes through things you do in your life.
(for example:) … When you’re under stress, the physiological result is that cortisol increases in your body and has a lot of effects. Cortisol is a transcription factor; it actually alters the expression of certain genes. It does so largely in the immune system, which results in the suppression of immune activity.
Wow. I never realised hormones could have that effect. Good article, as usual…
Incredible. The text ‘My wife, Jody’ has appeared, reliably, in spam for the last 5 years — I just got one today. (I haven’t actually seen one in my inbox for a while, though, since the chain letters that copy it generally get pretty high scores — this one hit a respectable 48.2 SpamAssassin points, no less.)
Here’s the text it appears in:
MORE TESTIMONIALS
‘My name is Mitchell. My wife, Jody and I live in Chicago. I am an accountant with a major U.S.Corporation and I make pretty good money. When I received this program I grumbled to Jody about receiving ‘junk mail’. I made fun of the whole thing, spouting my knowledge of the population and percentages involved. I ‘knew’ it wouldn’t work. Jody totally ignored my supposed intelligence and few days later she jumped in with both feet. I made merciless fun of her, and was ready to lay the old ‘I told you so’ on her when the thing didn’t work. Well, the laugh was on me! Within 3 weeks she had received 50 responses. Within the next 45 days she had received total $147,200.00 …….. all cash! I was shocked. I have joined Jody in her ‘hobby’.’
Mitchell Wolf M.D., Chicago, Illinois
It’s amazing that the chain letter is never changed, given that for the last few years they are all sent using spamware applications, so the senders must have some techie know-how.
I wonder if there’s a real Mitchell Wolf M.D. in Chicago, and what he’d think of 5 years of faked testimonials using his name?
Maciej covers some ground I’ve been wondering about, comparing his experiences with the French state system and that here. Definitely worth reading, and I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s.
Oops! NZ channel ‘TV3 has apologised after a graphic labelling US President George W. Bush a ‘professional fascist’ flashed up during its primetime news.’
Henry Farrell writes about homesickness, quoting Dante. It’s such a great quote, I’m going to just reproduce it here:
These are of course silly things to get worked up about; but it’s a universal experience for expatriates to miss the little things as much (if not more than) the greater ones. Dante, who was exiled from Florence, speaks of how
You shall leave everything you love most dearly:
this is the arrow that the bow of exile
shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste
of others’ bread, how salt it is, and know
how hard a path it is for one who goes
descending and ascending others’ stairs.He’s talking about two things here. First, as an exiled Florentine, he doesn’t like salty bread. Florentines don’t use salt when baking (the result, as far as I remember, of an extended period when the Pisans cut off their salt supplies), so that their bread tastes like blotting paper to non-natives (I lived in Florence three years: my advice to outsiders is to order pane Pugliese in the local bake shops when possible). Second, spiral staircases in Florence tend to curve around the opposite way from staircases elsewhere. Dante’s main point is unassailable; as an exile, you feel longing for the small and unexceptional parts of daily life in your home country, and a quite extraordinary degree of comfort whenever you find them again. Which is why my fridge is now stocked up with Kerrygold.
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:
As one commenter on the /. story noted, ‘imagine if McDonalds had patented the drive-thru’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
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!
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.
I’ve just copied in a new image for the blog entry on the Joyce bridge; this one’s much sharper.
Ah, hell, might as well reproduce it here again, it is very pretty after all:
Isn’t that lovely?
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…
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’.
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 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.
Patents: the SSLeay workaround
during this ongoing European software patents thing, I was reminded of a comment I heard a while back from a pro-patent guy.
He was around in the bad old days of SSLeay‘s patent woes. SSLeay, like many cryptographic products in the 80’s and 90’s before the RSA and other patents expired, was in a legal grey area due to patent issues. To quote the ‘Is This Legal?’ section of their FAQ:
Eventually, RSA relicensed their algorithms to be freely usable. Thankfully IDEA could be avoided by using alternative algorithms in the SSL transaction, so it wasn’t a biggie; most SSL users just switched it off. Finally, the RSA patent finally expired — so nowadays SSL is commonplace, and using SSL to protect security is a lot easier than it used to be.
Anyway, I’m diverging here… the relevance is this mail from Hartmut Pilch discussing the current euro-swpat proposal. He reckons even the SSLeay defense — saying ‘do not download this software in these countries unless you get these licenses’ — would not work with the current proposal: