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Justin's Linklog Posts

What’s wrong with DRM, and ‘better support’

Published June 18, 2004

Copyright: Cory Doctorow’s DRM talk presented to MS research yesterday. This is a fantastic introduction to the issues regarding DRM; if you know someone who isn’t convinced that DRM is A Bad Thing, this is the argument they need to read.

OSes: /.: France Considers Open Source. The usual arguments are going on in the comments, but some people still insist that they get better support from MS than from Linux vendors.

What planet are they on? Because it would have been handy for me to live there, on the occasions in the past where I’ve had to develop code on MS platforms, and administer networks of Windows PCs. In my experience, you do not get support from Microsoft. Instead, you do what you do with Linux — go searching on Google, read MSDN, or post in the MSDN forums.

As far as I can see, there’s zero difference between doing that with Windows, and doing exactly the same thing with Red Hat — except in the latter case, you can turn up debug logging through a documented API or switch, use the source and fix it yourself, find the original developers and post a message to their core -dev list, or even ask them personally.

Where’s this amazing support? Maybe the companies I’ve worked for just weren’t paying enough, and therefore weren’t significant blue-chip customers. Or maybe it’s because we weren’t based in the US, and so got support from less-skilled, less high-priority staff in a regional office. But I’ve certainly never experienced the support these advocates claim MS offers, which makes me think it’s FUD as usual.

Bloomsday!

Published June 16, 2004

Literature: Happy Bloomsday Centenary! Google agrees:

Google Bloomsday logo

You can have a read of Joyce’s masterpiece online at online-literature.com, although this is certainly one text that works better on paper, to be pored over and parsed slowly. But regardless of whether it’s readable on-screen or not, the legality of that copy is dubious, anyway.

As this Telegraph article notes, the copyright situation on Ulysses is, sadly, a total mess. Even 84 years after it was written, and promptly banned in the US, UK and Ireland for ‘obscenity’, Ulysses remains a thorny legal subject.

The novel was first published in 1922, and as such, fell into public domain in the UK in 1992, but was apparently ‘pulled back’ in 1996. According to this mail, due to recent copyright term extensions, the 1922 text will now remain in copyright in the EU until the end of 2011, and may not expire until 2032 in the US. And this Irish Times article notes that in Ireland, ‘copyright on Joyce’s works ran out on December 31st, 1991, 50 years after his death. However, EU regulations revived copyright from July 1995 when it extended the lifetime of copyright to 70 years.’

Reportedly, the Dail even had to pass emergency legislation last week to prevent an exhibition at Dublin’s National Library from being sued by the Joyce Estate:

The threat to the exhibition has been caused by the 2000 Copyright Act which creates a doubt about its ability to display manuscripts bought by the State because the Joyce estate still holds copyright.

Hilarious. Recent overzealous copyright extension legislation snares governments too! But they get to rewrite the laws in emergency session to fix it ;)

All very ironic, considering Ulysses’ structure was deliberately derived from The Odyssey in the first place.

Making a Bootable CD from a Floppy Image

Published June 16, 2004

Tech: Troubleshooters: Making a bootable CD from a bootable floppy image.
Making a note of this for future reference — it should be handy next time I need to do a BIOS or firmware upgrade on my Thinkpad.

I ran into the need for this recently when trying to upgrade the BIOS on my Thinkpad running Linux, so hibernation would work. IBM don’t provide BIOS upgrade tools for Linux, so you have to keep a Windows partition around. (Yes, I pay the Windows Tax — I’ve been bitten by proprietary firmware upgrades requiring it in the past, as in this case.)

Amazingly, however, even after paying the Tax, the ‘non-diskette’ BIOS upgrade (ie. the standalone Windows app) doesn’t work from Windows XP! Instead, you get a hard hang when it tries to bring the machine down from XP to a single-app mode to perform the upgrade. Running from DOS similarly fails, because the BIOS upgrade app is a WIN32 application. Clever.

Eventually, I wound up reformatting my Windows partition, installing Windows 98 (!), and running the BIOS upgrade app from that worked fine. But next time around, I should be able to save myself a few hours of MCSE imitation by using this floppy-to-CD trick… here’s hoping. ;) PCs Are Hard.

‘Precision’ bombing, and iTMS Europe

Published June 15, 2004

War: A couple of war links, I’ll keep it short. ;)

High-profile air strikes ‘killed only civilians’. ‘The American military launched some 50 air strikes designed to kill specific targets during the Iraq war, it emerged yesterday, but none of them found its mark. Instead the air strikes had a high civilian toll, according to military officials serving at the time.’ Still, it sounded good, like as if CSI were doing all the war strategification and stuff ;)

And: the
Pentagon ‘Torture Memos’ took some tips from the torture techniques used in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.

Music: Licensing row mars iTunes launch. UK indie labels report that ‘where Apple has spoken to labels the terms on offer have been commercial suicide’, and as a result, they won’t be selling their tunes via iTMS Europe.

I agree with Mark Twomey on this one — bad move. This (and the prices!) reduce the Euro-iTunes offering to about the usefulness of whatever that one is that Real.com have (you know, the one you can’t even remember the name of) — and nobody in Europe buys major-label music online anyway.

First Nobel Prizewinner forced to reverse-engineer?

Published June 15, 2004

Software: This mail contains a fantastic anecdote from The Common Thread: Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome, by John Sulston, head of the Sanger Centre, and a joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine. I’ll reproduce some bits here:

Once the first fluorescence sequencing machines arrived, it became clear that we had to take control of the software. The machines worked well, but ABI (jm: the vendor) wanted to keep control of the data analysis end by forcing their customers to use their proprietary software. …

I could not accept that we should be dependent on a commercial company for the handling and assembly of the data we were producing. The company even had ambition to take control of the analysis of the sequence, which was ridiculous. …

So, one hot summer Sunday afternoon, I sat on the lawn at home with printouts spread all around me and decrypted the ABI file that stored the trace data. … Within a very few days, Rodger and his group had written display software that showed the traces – and there we were. The St Louis team joined in, and they all went to decrypt more of the ABI files, so that we had complete freedom to design our own display and analysis systems. It transformed our productivity. Previously we’d only been able to get the traces as printouts, which we bound together in fat notebooks ….

I certainly feel that between us we did push ABI back a bit and denied to them complete control of this downstream software. It was the first experience of the kind of battle for control of information that I seem to have been fighting with commercial companies ever since: a foretaste of the much larger battles that would later surround the human genome.

Amazing. Was John Sulston the first Nobel Prize-winner to have to reverse-engineer a proprietary file format in the course of his research?

And would his actions be legal in the UK in a few years, once the IPR Enforcement Directive is transposed into law there?

LayerOne

Published June 14, 2004

Conferences: LayerOne was seriously great! Got to meet up with some really interesting people; discuss some nifty stuff; and get some new angles on the whole hacking scene.

Seriously, that was well worthwhile, especially in terms of potential new ways to deal with spam, and issues to watch out for in terms of spammer techniques in future. A great techie conf, and the boozing^Wsocialising was pretty good too ;)

I’m actually giving some thought to going to Defcon after that…

German neo-nazi UBE, and CAN-SPAM

Published June 11, 2004

Spam: Reg: German hate mail spam attack stuns experts: ‘Mailboxes in Germany and the Netherlands were flooded yesterday with spam containing German right-wing propaganda. Spammers used the Sober.G virus – a mass mailing worm that sends itself to email addresses harvested from infected computers – to spread their messages as widely as possible.’

The one good thing about this is that it might help some people realise that spam isn’t all about porn and commercial email; any kind of mail can be spam, including political speech.

However, this may be a bit late for the US, since CAN-SPAM explicitly does not regulate political spam. ah well, you live and learn, I suppose. ;)

Updating European Election voting guide for Ireland

Published June 10, 2004

Patents: Ciaran O’Riordan just posted a message to ILUG, regarding how concerned voters in Ireland can use their votes in tomorrow’s European elections to prevent legalising patenting of software ideas in Europe. Here’s the scoop:

Area Vote #1 and #2
East Avril Doyle Eoin Dubsky
South Brian Crowley Gerard Collins
North WestSean O’Neactain
Dublin Patrica McKenna Ivana Bacik

Note the main thing I got wrong — some sitting MEPs from Fianna Fail and FG actually voted the right way! So a vote for FF in this case, is a vote against software patents. (I never thought I’d be saying that, but there you go ;)

TaintBochs, and oil

Published June 9, 2004

Security: A very interesting security paper — Understanding Data Lifetime via Whole System Simulation. It combines virtual machines with data-flow tracking (a la perl’s ‘taint’ mechanism, after which this site is named ;)

By modifying the Bochs VM to support tracking ‘tainted’ data, they found several cases in popular apps (Mozilla, emacs, and MSIE) where passwords entered from the keyboard are retained in memory, and thereby wind up on disk due to swapping.

This has been a known issue for a long time — see the source for passwd.c from the ‘shadow’ package — but aside from security-naive developers, several other factors have made it more complex recently:

  • recent too-smart compilers will optimise away memset()
    • buffer-zeroing unless you’re careful (oops!)
      • Input buffers and event queues are a problem; password data from the keyboard will often persist in the kernel, window system, and application event queue buffers.
      • Abstractions cause many needless copies of tainted strings. Mozilla’s abstraction layers even include a string-copy to the heap to perform a string comparison operation, ouch ;)

In general, they suggest more use of buffer zeroing, even for low-level buffers that might not seem to require it (such as the X server’s event queue, and the kernel input buffers).

BTW, a similar system they didn’t mention is the Sidewinder firewall appliance, which uses what they call ‘Type Enforcement’ — effectively, tainting the data based on which network interface it arrived on.

Overall, a very nifty paper. I wonder if Tal Garfinkel is related to Simson? ;)

Oil: a MeFi gem: expert opinion on depletion of the oil reserves. ‘Simmons, Campbell, even the Iranian Bakhtiari agreed that the real situation of Saudi reserves is very bad. … Not a rosy picture, even for optimists.’

Patents: Transcript of the rms talk from a couple of weeks ago.

MS’ latest patent

Published June 9, 2004

Patents: Oh, come on. USPTO: task list window for use in an integrated development environment. Here’s claim 1:

  1. A computer-implemented method for managing development-related tasks, the method comprising:

    during an interactive code development session, evaluating source code to determine whether a comment token is present;

    in response to determining that the source code contains a comment token, inserting a task into a task list; and

    in response to completion of a task, modifying the task list during the interactive code development session to indicate that the task has been completed.

There’s 74 more claims that are about up to that standard, including the usual ‘an input module connected to the knee-bone’ mumbo-jumbo that means it ‘isn’t a software patent’.

This is just quite simply absurd. Are we really supposed to believe that nobody had thought of what is essentially a list of tickboxes, displaying the output of ‘grep TODO *.c’, before March 6, 2000? You have got to be kidding. This /. comment suggests that Delphi 5 (released 1999) did it.

(update: looks like there was a provisional patent application, so that may have to be Mar 5 1999.)

William Chiles, Anders Hejlsberg, Randy Kimmerly and Peter Loforte should be ashamed of themselves for filing this joke. And the USPTO examiner who granted it should be fired.

(PS: a factoid from the slashdot comments: IBM receives (note: not even ‘files for’) nearly 10 patents every day.)

Invasion of the spambots

Published June 8, 2004

Spam: Good Salon article on the new forms of spamming, such as Wiki and referrer-log spamming etc. Here’s a good quote:

‘The adult industry will likely be married to spam and its attendant distribution methods long past the evolution of man into beings of pure energy,’ jokes Domenic Merenda, vice president of business development for Edge Productions, a company that operates adult-media properties.

There’s a good deal of crossover — I’ve seen both email and referrer-log spam advertising the same porn sites.

Nigritude Ultramarine

Published June 8, 2004

Web: the June part of the contest is over, but given that there’s a July part still to go — here’s a ‘Nigritude Ultramarine‘ link to Anil Dash.

I wasn’t really bothered at all about this, until I came across this guy, whose technique involved spamming third-party Wiki sandboxes with backlinks. His excuse? ‘A Sandbox (is) a part of a system in which everybody is urged to play around freely. Usually for testing purposes. You can post headings, paragraphs, lists and links here. The content in return will be indexed by Google.’

As this forum thread points out — ‘The SandBox page is there for a purpose: to allow users of the wiki to learn to use the software. It is
not meant to be “a place where anyone can create backlinks.”‘

Sorry, that’s spam in my book.

GMail Invites

Published June 8, 2004

Mail: GMail users, check your mail; if mine was anything to go by, you should have three new invites to give out.

Irish Dating Site, and TheyWorkForYou.com

Published June 7, 2004

Web: Bernie Goldbach points to a site that’s news to me: AnotherFriend.com. It’s an Irish dating site.

I’ve had the odd discussion comparing dating culture in the US (organised ‘dating’) and Ireland and the UK (where it’s a lot more casual), and I must say, I was really convinced that the Friendster/craigslist-style organised, web-mediated dating just wouldn’t fly.

Seems I was wrong! Right now, there’s 157 people online on the site, with a good half of those being logged-in, chatting users, and about 75% of those in turn being premium, paying members. Wow, not bad.

Politics: TheyWorkForYou.com is a triumph. The most incredibly detailed, and web-aware, hypertextual database of political activity I’ve seen yet. The web-awareness — full of scraping, links, RSS and even community — is what makes it amazing; the concept of being able to read news of your representative’s latest speeches and voting record in your RSS aggregator is incredible. We need to get this out there for every country in the world.

It certainly beats Today in Parliament, that’s for sure ;)

Aside: nice choice of username for the ‘Site News’ weblog:

Some sites linking to this entry

An error occurred: Connection error: Access denied for user: ‘fawkesmt’@’localhost’ (Using password: YES)

Wierd: Incredible footage (WMV stream) of a guy who went nuts, converted a caterpillar earthmover into what is essentially a tank, and went on a GTA-style rampage through the streets of Granby, 15 miles west of Denver, Colorado. In the process, he destroys the local bank, the newspaper, and several stores, seemingly working on the basis of (several) personal grudges.

Action Replay

Published June 6, 2004

Hacking: Amazing — the Action Replay cartridge is still around!

To be honest, I’m quite surprised that the PS2 hardware platform allows any of this stuff without some mod-chip-style soldering… but then, it’s pretty clear Datel have the technology to figure these things out. Impressive.

Aside: in my teens, I wrote demos on the Commodore 64 entirely in the Action
Replay’s built-in monitor. I tried using compilers that supported such luxuries as symbolic labels, variable names, etc., but the ability to halt the entire machine and debug extensively, with a single button press, was just too nifty ;)

Irish MEP Candidates

Published June 5, 2004

Patents: lyranthe.org notes that the EU elections are coming up this Thursday, 11th June. Accordingly, here’s a single-issue roundup of the candidates, from what I’ve heard:

  • The Labour Party, sadly, haven’t yet come up with a concrete policy on the issue — but the Dublin candidate, Ivana Bacik, has (verbally) stated her opposition.
  • The Greens, however, are actively campaigning against them, their candidates clearly understand and have communicated with voters on the issue in the past, and the cross-Europe party policy is clearly stated.
  • Eoin Dubsky is an independent candidate, standing on a primarily anti-war platform. He’s stated his opposition to software patenting clearly and publically. He’s also a total techie — with RSS feeds and a Redbrick account! ;)
  • FG‘s position is totally unclear, as usual… ;)
  • And in the other corner: FF and the PDs are whole-heartedly supporting software patenting; in fact, they’re the ones running the EU Council which just pushed through software patenting law despite the democratic mandate from the European Parliament. boo.

(PS: these are my opinions, not those of my employer. ;)

(updated: I’d left out Eoin Dubsky! my bad, now fixed.)

Easy-peasy web scraping: HTTP::Recorder

Published June 5, 2004

Perl: I’ve been writing a few convenience web-scrapers recently using WWW::Mechanize, with great success.

So the latest development, HTTP::Recorder, looks very nifty too:

HTTP::Recorder is a browser-independent recorder that records interactions with web sites and produces scripts for automated playback. Recorder produces WWW::Mechanize scripts by default (see WWW::Mechanize by Andy Lester), but provides functionality to use your own custom logger.

… Simply speaking, HTTP::Recorder removes a great deal of the tedium from writing scripts for web automation. If you’re like me, you’d rather spend your time writing code that’s interesting and challenging, rather than digging through HTML files, looking for the names of forms an fields, so that you can write your automation scripts. HTTP::Recorder records what you do as you do it, so that you can focus on the things you care about.

No SSL support yet, though, as far as I can see, but for simple scraping — or as a good starting point for a more complex Mechanize script — it looks like it’ll work great.

ISPs, AUPS, and RIRs

Published June 4, 2004

Spam: Kasia raises a very interesting question. Here it is, in a nutshell:

Should the quality of an ISP’s enforcement of its Acceptable Use Policy, be a condition of their contract with their Regional Internet Registry, and therefore affect whether they can be assigned new network address space?

  • Are there that many ISPs with lax or virtually nonexistent spam-related AUP enforcement? Yes, definitely.
  • Is spam that much of a problem? Speaking personally, I would say yes, but then, I would ;)
  • who would judge whether an ISP is doing enough, or too little?

Head on over to her weblog if you have a comment on this.

Don’t look for it, and you won’t find it

Published June 3, 2004

Health: USDA orders silence on mad cow in Texas: ‘The U.S. Department of Agriculture has issued an order instructing its inspectors in Texas, where federal mad cow disease testing policies recently were violated, not to talk about the cattle disorder with outside parties … The order … was issued in the wake of the April 27 case at Lone Star Beef in San Angelo, in which a cow displaying signs of a brain disorder was not tested for mad cow disease despite a federal policy to screen all such animals.’

Great idea — if you want to avoid finding mad cow cases, just don’t bother looking for them! The beef rendering plant in question supplies beef to MacDonalds, reportedly.

Press: LWN: A look at SpamAssassin 3.0 (article is subscriber-only until next week).

OSes: Kernelthread.com: Making an Operating System Faster. Great article on some OS-level optimisations Apple used in MacOS X — including a nifty boot-time read-ahead system which reportedly more than doubles the speed of OS X reboots. nice!

Wildlife: here’s another critter we encountered last weekend — a baby Western Diamondback rattlesnake, hiding in a crevice.

Spamometer

Published June 2, 2004

Spam: The Spamometer; a 1997-vintage spamfilter along the lines of filter.plx. Interestingly, I hadn’t seen this before — who knows, if I had, SpamAssassin could have used a (0.0, 1.0) scoring system instead of the ‘5 point threshold’. ;) (Thanks, Gary!)

Going to LayerOne

Published June 2, 2004

Conferences: I’m going to LayerOne; it looks interesting, and I’ve been hoping to bump into Danny O’Brien (who’s there doing his Life Hacks talk) for a couple of drinks and a blather for quite a while. Other speakers look similarly interesting, in an ‘offbeat hacker conference’ way, so I think it’ll be fun.

Conflicts with The Streets playing the Wiltern though, but c’est la vie ;)

Desert camping, and Dr. Strangelove’s all-zeroes password

Published June 2, 2004

Life: I’ve learned one thing this weekend — humans are not designed to function in the desert. I went bush-camping in the Anza-Borrego Desert state park with a few mates, and we quite simply baked in the 45C/113F degree heat. Walking 3 miles in that heat was easily equivalent to 15 miles in normal temperatures.

We did manage to catch a good look at one of the endangered bighorn sheep that live there — the poor sheep was clearly trying to get to some water, but those damn humans kept getting in the way!

On the way back, we passed the aftermath of a forest fire near Temecula. Scorched earth.

Security: via IP — a very scary article at Bruce Blair’s Nuclear Column — apparently, the secret unlocking codes on the launch control mechanisms of Minuteman nuclear missiles were deliberately set to ‘00000000’ throughout the height of the cold war, because the Strategic Air Command ‘remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders.’

Green: A couple of good /. comments on renewable power sources: one from a wind farm designer, and some anti-FUD figures for solar panels.

Music: The full text of
The Timelords’ The Manual (How To Have a Number One the Easy Way) is online: 

        THE JUSTIFIED ANCIENTS OF MU MU
      REVEAL THEIR ZENARCHISTIC METHOD USED
        IN MAKING THE UNTHINKABLE HAPPEN.

                  KLF 009B
          1988 (YOU KNOW WHAT'S GONE)

Snippets

Published May 28, 2004

Photos: the view out to sea from Seal Beach, just south of LA. (duh. thanks Ben, I’d b0rked the link earlier.)

Patents: via the FFII Kwiki, here’s 2087 Microsoft USPTO software patents viewed roughly by subject matter. The ‘Web’ selection is particularly interesting.

Terror: The Atlantic: All you need is love — how the terrorists stopped terrorism. Amazing — marry them off!

Tourism: Pictures from Bangkok’s new ‘Sky Bar’ — open-air dining, 63 floors up, with no walls apart from 1.5-metre-high glass.

new terror indicators

Published May 28, 2004

Funny: NYPD alerts cops to ‘terror indicators’.

The NYPD has ordered its patrol force to be more vigilant about spotting and reporting possible signs of terrorism, including individuals who “express hatred for America.” …. The cards advise them to contact counterterrorism investigators when they have suspicions over anyone who is, among other things, carrying driver’s licenses from different states, videotaping utilities and tunnels or wearing fake uniforms.

Sounds like the Village People won’t be playing NYC any time soon, then ;)

Language registration: en-Spam-porn

Published May 24, 2004

Funny: via swhackit! — Language registration: en-Spam-porn:

‘One is very much tempted. It is certainly a unique orthography.’

Indeed. When I was offered “[t]ons of dwolnaoadble mvoies, pohtos and sotires”, I quickly read past “mvoies” and “pohtos”, but was stumped for a while by “sotires”. Perhaps I was blocked by interference from “satires”.

But I think that registration will fail, because there are no descriptive works provided for the Language Tag Reviewer to consult.

a new use for the ‘Terrorism Quotient’

Published May 24, 2004

Marketing: It appears that MATRIX (the Multistate Anti-TeRrorism Information EXchange) at one stage did — and may still — include a ‘terrorism quotient’ field, representing ‘a statistical likelihood of (people) being terrorists’.

Seisint, the company providing the system, is a Boca Raton, FL company founded by Hank Asher, previously of Database Technologies, the company that ‘stripped thousands of African Americans from the Florida voter rolls before the 2000 election, erroneously contending that they were felons’. Lovely.

Boca Raton, eh? Yep, there’s a spam connection — Hank Asher also, apparently, bought eDirect.com from noted Boca-based spammer Steve Hardigree (ROKSO record).

The email in the linked article goes on to note that Asher and Hardigree had ‘disagreements’ regarding ‘how eDirect should position itself in the Direct Marketing Community’, so I doubt Asher might have necessarily approved of spamming — but it does appear he had interests in Direct Marketing.

Given that, I suggest a new spin-off strategy for Seisint’s ‘terrorism quotient’ field, courtesy of my mate Luke: terrorist-targeted direct marketing!

Those turrists are in the market for lots of high-profit-margin goods:

  • AK-47s (OK, not a very big margin there)
  • chemical weapons instructions (just download from the internet! but don’t tell them that)
  • weapons-of-mass-destruction-related-program-like-activities

All Seisint have to do is SELECT Name,EmailAddress FROM MATRIX WHERE TQ > 120, do a mail run, then watch those non-consecutively-numbered US dollars roll in. Easy!

Caesar’s Palace open wifi

Published May 24, 2004

Tech: I should note this here just in case anyone finds it useful. A handy tip for anyone visiting Caesar’s Palace; their ‘Business Center’ doesn’t have wifi yet, but (cough) one of their neighbours certainly does ;)

‘Papers!’ and the Hass

Published May 24, 2004

Travel: I’ve just spent a week in the UK; much culture was imbibed, I got to see Michael Landy’s Semi-detached at the Tate, met up with some good mates including the pregnant Lean, and was a happy camper overall.

Then I had an 11-hour transatlantic flight, stuck in the middle of a 5-seat row with pointy elbows on both sides; then, best of all, arrived at US Immigration and found myself fingerprinted and had my photo taken, in accordance with their new policies under the US-VISIT program.

Apparently the biometrics equipment providers are a company called Cross Match Technologies. Fingers crossed (arf!) they have better false positive rates than their competitor, Identix.

I’m looking forward to seeing similar false-positive-prone usage of biometric data, for US visitors to other countries in response. (With hilarious results!)

Aside: I wonder how href=”http://use.perl.org/%7eMatts/journal/18915″>Matt’s cooking-related-program-activities injury will affect his biometric profile?

Also of relevance — apparently Boston are introducing random spot-checks of passenger’s papers on their metro transport.

It’s interesting that travel by train requires a passport, driver’s license, or similar heavyweight documentation — but one can zip around the country unimpeded by road. Of course, all of this is moot, seeing as the 9/11 hijackers had perfectly-in-order documentation, including driver’s licenses, and travelled extensively under their real names and passports. One wonders what exactly all this has to do with the War Against Terror, given that.

Funny: Knight Foundation, featuring a downloadable David Hasselhoff Paper Plane! Don’t forget, the song ‘Hot Shot City’ is particularly good.

The ‘as such’ loophole

Published May 21, 2004

Patents: According to Ciaran O’Riordan of IFSO, one key aspect of the EU Council’s meeting on the software patent legalisation proposal hinged on the use of the phrase ‘as such’, to effectively sneak a loophole past the Council members:

I recommend that everyone listen to the recordings of the Council’s meeting. Transcripts are also linked from there, but the tone of voice etc. is interesting.

Anyway, basically, the people in the room didn’t understand the implications of the text (that’s our fault).

Bolkenstein added an amendment: “computer programs will not be patentable as such” – this (rightly) fooled most people into thinking that software would not be patentable. Really, it just means you can’t patent software as software, you have to patent “software running on a computer”. I think the rejected part of the German amendment would have closed this loophole. …..

Anyway, the point is that the Council members were on our side, we just hadn’t told them precisely what we want …. We told them “no to software patents”, and they think they’ve done that. We should have said “no to ‘as such”‘, and similar textual lobbying rather then implication lobbying.

Yahoo! release DomainKeys

Published May 19, 2004

Spam: Yahoo!’s DomainKeys proposal for sender auth.

I’m in the UK this week, so commenting in detail isn’t too easy right now. But briefly, the big problem I foresee for DK is dealing with mailing lists and forwarders.

I did spot this oddity in the patent license, though:

Yahoo! will grant a royalty-free, worldwide, non-exclusive license under any Yahoo! patent claims that are essential to implement or use any Implementations so that licensees can make, use, sell, offer for sale, import, or yodel Implementations; provided that the licensee agrees not to assert against Yahoo!, or any other Yahoo! licensees of Implementations, any patent claims of licensee that are essential to implement or use any Implementations.

My emphasis. “Yodel”? ;)

But seriously — patents will make implementation of this tricky for open-source projects, unless those terms are extended to allow the license to be transferable and usable indefinitely.

Patents: argh. That’s all I can say for now. :(

IFSO talk update

Published May 18, 2004

Ireland: Update update! The Stallman talk is now free (-as-in-beer), apparently. No more updates, any further news will just be on their site. ;)

Compare and Contrast

Published May 17, 2004

Compare this recent statement from Minister Mary Hanafin, Minister of State with Responsibility for the Information Society, and this extract from ‘Why Microsoft Wins’ advertorial written by a Microsoft product manager, Sunday Business Post, 2004-05-02:

ILUG have already written an article in response to this pretty obvious prompting of a government minister by a commercial interest.

(thanks to ompaul at lwn.net for pointing that out.)

Stallman Speaking in Dublin

Published May 14, 2004

GNU: Hey, Dublin-based people! Richard Stallman will be giving a talk titled ‘The Dangers of Software Patents’ in Dublin on May 24, at 19:30. It’ll be in the TCD Hamilton building, right beside Pearse St. DART station. I’ve never seen him speak, but I hear it’s definitely worth attending, and his message needs to get out there, further into the Irish software industry and political circles.

Also on patents: good news via groklaw.net — Germany has stated they plan to vote against the Irish software patent legalisation plan, and some French ISVs are asking Chirac to do likewise.